Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Yes, do let's keep this dialog going!  Just for formality's sake, since
the two weeks is up and I want to acknowledge that, I'm going to say thank
you very, very much to Peter and Randy and Phred for such a fast-paced
interesting discussion and for your reactions to a breaking story as it
happened.

You are more than welcome to continue as long as you like.
  

    
I agree with the predictions of disaster for the summer.  With only
40% of need nailed down by long term contracts, we will be as dependent
on the spot market as ever.
  

    
I appreciate everyone bearing with the windy (er, sorry) discussion here.
There has been a lot going on over the past two weeks -- a rather pivotal
time in retrospect, I think.  

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend Peter's book (Reaping the Wind, Island Press,
you know the rest!) and hope we don't have to talk about the road not taken
20 years from now.
  

    
Thanks Peter, Randy, and Fred!
  

    
<174> taking the leap to form a company to bring windpower offshore,
> where the winds are stronger and the water makes it a natural to
> produce hydrogen

You could do this now, using windpower to compress air to liquid form
(and using the liquified air and heat extracted from coastal water, or
waste heat from a conventional plant, to power an onshore generation
plant), then add electrolysis later.

You're going to need the compression and pressurized storage anyway...
  

    
        Yes, you could. But the key goal is the production of hydrogen as a
transportable fuel, in several forms and end uses.  Since the
electrolysis is such a small percentage of the electricity produced,
and the performance by going offshore is so enhanced, we might as well
use the extra free fuel to create the end product.
        The wind ships can also cable power back to shore where appropriate.
        We ask you to envision that twenty years down the road, there are
tens of thousands of these wind ships, each 12 - 15 MW, on both sides
of the Atlantic and Pacific, and potentially seas like the Carribean or
Great Lakes.
        The technology will prove to be more efficient for the production of
power on land as well, with the ability to harness stronger aloft winds
due to greater turbine height.
  

    
What about storms?
  

    
> Since the electrolysis is such a small percentage 
> of the electricity produced

Guess I'm missing something here.  Is that because you're cabling the
power back most of the time and only using surplus power to produce
hydrogen?  Or is there another way of using electrical power to produce
hydrogen from sea water besides electrolysis?

And what about energy payback?  How long will it take one of these
windships to produce enough power to build another one?
  

    
        i meant to say that the DESALINIZATION energy percentage is small,
and the rest of the energy is used for electrolysis to produce
hydrogen.
        As for storms, let 'em rip, layback angle in 120 mph winds is less
than twenty degrees.
  

    
Desalinization?  Now there's an application for the low-grade waste
heat available from the condensation coils in an air compression and
liquefaction operation.  ;-)

Sorry, don't mean to be taking the wind out of your turbines; I'm just
still enthralled with the potential for the use of liquefied air as an
energy storage medium, since it involves neither exotic materials
(unlike fuel cells) nor combustion.

I haven't done the research, but I'm sure its energy content by unit
volume (the primary factor when dealing with pressurized storage) would
be considerably lower than that of liquid hydrogen, so it's not really a
potential substitute for a lot of applications - most, probably - but it
might be preferable in some situations, like where water is scarce or
portability of the 'fuel' isn't a consideration, since compression pumps
are simpler technology than electrolytic cells, and liquid air is less
dangerous than liquid hydrogen, and probably cheaper for a given power
capacity (rate of energy storage or use).

Hydrogen requires that the energy be available in electrical form to
supply the electrolytic cells.  With air compression, you could hook the
pumps directly to your turbines and only convert to electrical form as
the liquefied air was revaporized (need a source of low-grade heat for
this!) to run the generator, and a whole windfarm could feed compressed
air to a single condenser/storage/vaporization/generation facility,
taking advantage of whatever economy of scale there might be and
affording the opportunity to save heat from the condensation for the
revaporization stage.

I realize that you and others have put a lot of effort into making
_direct_ wind-to-electric conversion economically practical, and I'm not
suggesting you start over from scratch.  Nearly all of that experience
would be applicable.  You've already done the hard part.  Inserting an
air-compression/expansion cycle between the turbines and the generator
would neatly solve the intermittent source problem, without the added
complication of electrolytic/fuel cells and dealing with a potentially
dangerous commodity.

In fact I'm not suggesting that you abandon the hydrogen economy dream
at all, just that you augment it, where appropriate, with simpler
technologies that are adequate to particular applications.
  

    
The hydrogen thing is a long-term bet that is probably pretty good looking
in the long term but has a large number of infrastructure issues to deal
with.  But someone's gotta be working on it.

Meanwhile, I'd sure like to see us in the west stay ahead of Texas in
terms of installed wind power.  And someone really ought to go take a
look at that Luz concentrated-trough solar facility in the Mojave and
roll out a bunch of that in the belt running from southern Idaho to
southeastern Oregon to eastern Nevada to Arizona and into southern Cal.
That would complete the loop of a very nice hydro-wind-solar triad to
keep renewable energy flowing in the west throughout the year, at
relatively stable production rates year round when averaged across all
three technologies.
  

    
>>>       I haven't done the research, but I'm sure its energy content by
unit volume (the primary factor when dealing with pressurized storage)
would be considerably lower than that of liquid hydrogen, so it's not
really potential substitute for a lot of applications - most, probably

        You've answered your own question.  Hydrogen in its varied forms is a
substitute for fossil fuels (and nuclear electricity), meaning we make
the transition from a society based on pollution to a clean renewable
one.
        And if the push to convert to the "long term" hydrogen economy
doesn't start today, twenty years overdue, when does it begin?  If not
now, why would all the auto manufacturers have hydrogen vehicles on the
drawing boards or under test, why would Boeing and Airbus have
hydrogen aircraft under development?
  

    
I'm not arguing against hydrogen.  It's a fine fuel and a good idea.

I'm only arguing that there are circumstances when a _fuel_ really isn't
needed, only generic energy storage, and in some of those circumstances
liquid air (combined with stored heat or a plentiful supply of low-grade
heat from the environment) would be just the thing.

(Quit arguing with me and I'll shut up... ;-)
  

    
Good morning everyone. Moving a bit slow after the B-Day extrazaganza
yesterday.

I think the hydrogen transition, whatever its exact configuration,
needs to become part of our long-term energy strategy. Hey, car
companies are talking about it. Technologies such as fuel cells can be
used in cars and as stationary power plants.

We need BIG PICTURE thinking now, and have to start thinking through
the infrastructure needs.

I agree with Phred on solar thermal for solar farms. Solar PV is best
for distributed generation, and wind farms are cheaper than solar
farms, but we should be harnessing as much renewable energy was we can.
The West has such tremendous solar and wind resources. We've really
only just begun.

Of course, dish stirling systems look better than the parabolic trough
systems on paper, but little commercialization has occurred.

What do folks make of the recent news that the power crisis has been
manufactured by the big generators like Dynegy and Duke. Do the stats
that have come out prove that we've all been hoodwinked? What about
growth in demand outside of California. Is that one of the missing
pieces in this analysis? 

How can we best harness the anger over prices spikes into concrete
political acts that will get us closer to renewable, sustainbale energy
future?
  

    
I wonder if windmills used to power a desalinization plant would be
economical all by itself?  (Remember California's other crisis that
will come back someday: drought.)
  

    
If powering a desanilization plant with electricity makes sense, then
powering the pumps directly with windmills and skipping 2 conversion of
energy seems to make even more sense.

This seems like an ideal place for a tethered ocean plant.  You'd
build a portable plant on a barge and connect it to shore through a
long flexible plastic tube.

Having a few of these scattered around the country would be good not
just for California's droughts but also for the tornadoes that disrupt
clean water supplies in the Southern states.
  

    
        I haven't looked at desalinization directly so i can't comment,
though i'm aware of some site-specific studies.  The reason it's
economical for wind ships is that we're going offshore to combine the
extra available windpower with the plentiful seawater to make currently
more valuable transportable fuels.
  

    
Your best desalination technology is commercially deployed today in Israel,
which has an abundance of sun and engineers and a lack of potable water.
Luz grew up in that environment but branched off into electricity generation.

I don't have high hopes for the large-scale concentrator technologies
in solar (the Stirling engine, which is sort of like a really big
steerable telescope except you want it pointed at the sun all the time,
rather than never; the other technology is the molten-salt power tower
thing like they have at Barstow with a field of steerable mirrors).
Both of these are engineering kludges, frankly, even if they are highly
efficient in theory.  The Luz technology has the advantage of being
thoroughly low-tech and reliable even though it has a lower conversion
efficiency.
  

    
Here's a press release from Green Mountain power with a nice pic of the
Luz solar field in the Mojave, along with one of the burning questions
of the moment, which is why SCE has moved so relentless to shut down
their payment stream:

http://www.greenmountain.com/learnmore/ens/2001/1/22/2001GM-01-22-05.html
  

    
My bad, that's an Environment News Service piece picked up from a
Green Mountain Energy Company site (GMEC is the former subsidiary of
Green Mountain Power, the Vermont utility; GMEC is now controlled by
wacko Texas billionaire Sam Wyly, the guy who ran attack ads on John
McCain for being not pro-solar enough during the New York Republican
primary last year...)
  

    
In other windmill news, US Fish and Wildlife has ordered that condors
not be released near Altamont out of fear of the Cuisinart effect. 
They claim that 1025 birds were killed by windmills between 1992 and
1998 and they don't want to take that risk with the endangered condors.
  

    
> I don't have high hopes for the large-scale concentrator technologies
> in solar

Again, storage is key.  Without it your generation capacity drops off
every time a cloud passes between you and the sun, and ends abruptly at
sundown.  With it you can cruise through a partly cloudy day without a
blip and continue generation into the evening.

And water makes a great storage medium, given the wherewithal to build
large pressure vessels, able to handle the high end of a useful work
range of pressures - at least a few hundred psi, I would think.

Say you had a million gallons and a working range of 500-600 psi, and
could maintain 600 psi with your generator running full bore through a
day of 50% of potential insolation.  How many kilowatt hours could you
generate before the pressure dropped below 500 psi?

(A million gallons might be way short of what would be needed for a
plant of any size, but it's a nice ballpark figure for the purpose of
discussion.)
  

    
Getting back to the bird and condor issues, folks may want to check
out p. 218 through 220 in my book. The Condor issue has long plagued
the wind industry -- but there is a lot more to this issue than it
migth appear on the surface. Large real estate developers, as well as
nuclear advocates, have long used the bird mortality issue to frustrate
wind power development.

I love the idea of moving Condor populations to the Pinnacles, where I
used to go on a annual spring hike because a friend lived nearby.
Condors will only add to the splendor of that place. 

Bird kills in the Altamont is the focus of my appendix. A lot of birds
are killed out at the Altamont, but we still don't know whetehr
long-term populations of golden eagles are in jeopardy. What about the
Native Americans who rely upon the feathers of golden eagles for their
magical rituals? Randy, do you want to talk about some of the material
cut from my book regarding your experiences with Native elders and the
issue of bird kills at the Altamont?

Do we close airports because they kill birds? Do we stop building
glass skyscrapers because they killbirds?
  

    
I posted that here because I know you guys are up on the issue and
that you could provide a lot of good info.
  

    
Pete West from the Renewable Northwest Project (who's in the book) told
me yesterday that Audubon, up here in Oregon anyway, is being more
reasonable about this issue now.  One of the things is to get people
away from generic claims on this and focus on the specifics of a given
site.  If that means more employment for field biologists, hey, I'm
all for that.