[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 8:59 AM, spike wrote:
>>>... The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is

>> that we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary
shortages. spike
>
>>... Shortages in *local production*.  As the report noted, storage helps 
> get around this.  So does having a transmission grid, so if (say) San 
> Jose's got clouds w/low wind but Los Angeles has sun, they can ship 
> energy up north, and vice versa when necessary.
>

>...That's right. I think Spike is conflating two different problems...

Disagree, it's the same problem.  I recognize that a cloudy still day is
likely within a few hundred km of sunshine and wind, but power lines lose a
lot of energy over those kinds of distances.  Furthermore, there are places
where wind power (especially) is seldom profitable.  In places where it is
highly effective, there are few consumers.  Proles do not like to live where
the wind blows a lot.  So we are back to sending power long distances over
power lines.  I agree we will likely end up doing some of this even if it is
inefficient.

>...The article deals with feeding power into the grid from solar and wind
sources all across the US and only using the old oil or coal stations in
emergencies... BillK

As the local natural gas peaker plant has demonstrated, it is costly to keep
all that capital around and sitting idle most of the time.  A coal plant is
particularly difficult to fire up on short notice.  Some types of coal
plants can be run that way, but they generally make poor peakers.  I
envision a combination solution: we will install a lot of solar power which
is good for peak production when it is hot, solving the energy-hungry air
conditioning problem, coupled with increased hydrocarbon-based heating
solutions and increased tolerance for reduced power availability.

Consider for instance how intolerant we are for the wall current to drop
even 20%.  If you have ever taken an electric motor apart, you will see the
squirrel cage rotor is built with an intentially angled structure as shown
in figures 1 and 2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel-cage_rotor

This allows the load to be shared across more structure as a helical cut
gear, but it also does something else: it draws cooling air thru the motor.
An AC motor is air cooled.  Actually a DC motor is too, but the point is
that if you have an AC motor underpowered and it is driving something like
an air handler but does not have enough power to start the spin, the motor
gets hot.  You can verify this at home by plugging in a fan and keeping it
from turning.  The notion is that an undervoltage increases the risk of home
fires by those applications where an electric motor doesn't quite have
enough power to get spinning.  That's what they told us when they were doing
rolling blackouts.

On the other hand, our computers will run just fine on reduced voltage,
within reason.  So now we have primarily HVAC applications which are
unforgiving of undervoltages, but the stuff that really matters is mostly
tolerant.  With increasing solar power generation, the HVAC applications
which would be power starved is the H rather than the AC part of HVAC.  So,
we compensate by having propane powered home heating.

We can do some long distance power transmission.  The California desert has
lots of sunshine in the winter, at least during the day, and plenty of wind
in the winter time.  The land out there is practically free, once you get
past the lawsuits by the environmentalists, and there are few proles out
there who would suffer from having to look at the ugly things or suffer from
the noise.  Desert tortoises could scarcely give a damn about the wind
turbines, and I can easily imagine they would really like a lot of nice
shady solar panels under which to take refuge on a blazing summer day.  It
is easy enough to imagine vast swaths of desert blanketed by both wind and
solar, and Los Angeles is close enough to receive that power somewhat
efficiently.

The basic idea of BillK's cited article is that we can afford a lot of
inefficiency given solar and wind power in sufficient quantities, which is a
notion I have been playing with for years.  Remote solar power is
inefficient, but perhaps it is OK.  We still have the night problem, but if
we become temporary undervoltage tolerant, we can deal.

spike