Britain's future power shortage could spill over on Ireland

[Civic_critic2]

Just drilling further down into this and looking at some of the cons of solar energy, the worst days of the year for solar energy at our latitude are during December. At that time we receive just 450Wh of power per square metre over an entire day. For a house with 85m2 of solar panelling with 40% efficiency that equals 180W x 85 = 15.3kW. Over 30 days that's 459kWh. That's about 25% of a household's needs. [stats available by using this tool from NASA, just give them an email address to access the tool]

There are a number of ways to deal with this shortfall. One is to cover a larger area with solar cells - the doors and walls of the house, the garden wall etc. One of the challenges would be to create a material that is as robust as tarmac but which can absorb solar energy - a solar road. Tarmac already absorbs solar power as heat so perhaps a subsurface under the tarmac which can transform heat to energy would accomplish this. If this was achieved then the entire road network including people's front driveways can be transformed into energy generators.

I did a bit of googling to see if any work is being done on this and came across one compnay that is working on solar pv road surfaces but which is still speculative and 2 other companies that are working on solar thermal roads and which have 2 working installations, one is a dutch company (their full website is here) and one is based in the UK and has installed this system on a road in Toddington. Both installations seem to be a success. Over the full summer 6.5MWh of heat energy were generated and stored from a 150m2 area of road surface. This means that in Britain 1 km of road yields 200MWh of energy over the course of a summer, equal to 1/100,000 of Ireland's total energy usage per annum. I haven't looked at their numbers but if they could increase that yield by a factor of 3 using advanced techniques and materials then Ireland would only need to pave 30,000km of our road system to equal our total energy use per year, 15,000 km will give us 50% of our annual energy usage and it is an energy which can be stored for months. In any case local installations on an ongoing basis over 20 years would have a big impact. And this is technology which is available today.

When you think about it getting solar thermal energy from a road is quite simple. In Ireland and Germany solar thermal panels work throughout the winter and are made of simple materials. If you put a latticework of pipes under a road when it is being constructed or repaired you can turn the whole road into a thermal collector without any visible impact. Imagine all those suburban estates around the country with a lattice of small pipes under the road in front of the house - I guess each house would be able to take advantage of 20-30 square metres of roadway for its heating needs.

This can be done today. Over the next 20 years refinements in the technology and better, cheaper materials mean that the possibilities are huge.

Another way to deal with the potential shortfall of pv generation during winter is to supplement it with tidal power generation, it's reliable and proven with no visual impact though perhaps it may have a bad effect on sea creatures.

So in every way it's easy to see that solar is going to be huge and that there isn't really an energy crisis at all. There seems to be some sort of oil crisis going on which may be more a strategic issue. Over the next 20 - 30 years while the solutions talked about on this thread are rolled out across all of society oil is still going to be the main power source for industry, for ships, for airplanes and for the military. If alternative energy sources are going to be used for powering these - such as for example jet fuel derived from algae farms - then it won't do so on a large-scale commercial basis for at least another 10 - 20 years. What this means is that whoever controls oil controls the ability to wage war. It is forseeable that as super strong carbon nanotube armouring becomes a reality that even tanks could be replaced by light solar powered vehicles that can do the same job but are very tough nonetheless. But that's on the further horizon.

We should remember that as we are installing all this capcity so will other countries and so the market for exportable energy will probably decline.

[Civic_critic2]

Looking at that number for solar thermal again, 1km of road yields 200MWh of energy. That's based on a road 5m wide. A lot of our roads are 10m wide, so 1km would yield 400MWh or 1/50,000th of our annual energy use. If they could treble the efficiency that would be 1.2GWh per kilometre of road or 1/17,000th of our annual energy usage. Put another way if we were to lay this system down along 5000km of roadway it would provide us with 30% of our power needs. I don't know how much of our electricity usage is down to heating but whatever it is that could be significantly dealt with with a commitment to building such a road infrastructure. As things stand today it could supply us with 10% of our overall energy, in 10 years with more research and money thrown at it I could see it supplying 30% of our total energy with simple and relatively cheap installation. A company in Holland is already manufacturing and installing smart roads which feature the ability to incorporate piping (these roads use what is called a 'modieslab', the brochure is here, PDF).. These roads have the ability to heat the road during winter to prevent ice and snow from remaining on it. It doesn't take a genius to see that combining the technology in development at Toddington with the already in-service pre-fabricated modieslabs would achieve the solar thermal road. It is evident that this could be done in 10 years, or even today.

And on the subject of 3D solar panels, how about a spherical silicon solar cell? They have achieved 19% efficiency.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzt25TfkWLg&feature=PlayList&p=6E4C75EB11C ADC69&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=40]YouTube - Solar Revolution - Sphelar : Spherical Solar Cell : DigInfo[/ame]

[Civic_critic2]

Or how about this, you don't even need solar panels spead out along a railway line to generate electricity, you just need sheets of glass or plastic with a coating of a common car paint to focus the light on solar cells located at the edges, resulting in a 40%- 50% gain in effiency for even the panels available today:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyMKzyPrWU]YouTube - Mark Baldo discusses MIT's solar concentrator[/ame]

There's a good video which explains how this solar concentrator works in simple terms here. And that problem about storage? Hydrogen storage is very expensive and energy hungry is it not? Well no actually, not any more:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-M9VU_36NQ]YouTube - MIT TechTV - Tiny Bubbles[/ame]

[Civic_critic2]

So people are only interested in energy problems not energy solutions? Remarkable the lack of interest in solar in Ireland. Remarkable too the ignorance on the topic by so-called 'tecnologists' who are, from what i hear, driving forces behind a scheme to build several large dams across the state, a new Hoover Dam or should that be Hoover Rock Wall?

And of course the Irish government are keen and welcoming of this idea - it's about construction after all and land zoning, the things they understand. I've just spoken to someone who works in nanotechnology here who tells me that nanotech in Ireland is, to use his word, crap.

[Civic_critic2]

How about this for a way to produce power - I came across this guardian article from last year which stikes me as insane, fantastical and apparently true: Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

[...] 'They will cost approximately $25m [£16m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.'

For $2500 you'll get electricity for 7-10 years. The company, Hyperion, will begin delivery in 2013. We have quite a decent amount of uranium in this country by all acounts, the waste from which can be used to drive fusion reactors, which themselves are almost on the verge of becoming a reality. A clean, closed, safe nuclear cycle.

Energy crisis - What energy crisis? Scare stories about power shortages and such like are simply ignorant nonsense designed to sell papers.

[fiannafailure]

[quote=Civic_critic2;1971404]

So people are only interested in energy problems not energy solutions? Remarkable the lack of interest in solar in Ireland. Remarkable too the ignorance on the topic by so-called 'tecnologists' who are, from what i hear, driving forces behind a scheme to build several large dams across the state, a new Hoover Dam or should that be Hoover Rock Wall?

I assume you refer to me, sorry I have left you to debate with yourself for the last few days, I was taking a few days off with my family.

And of course the Irish government are keen and welcoming of this idea - it's about construction after all and land zoning, the things they understand. I've just spoken to someone who works in nanotechnology here who tells me that nanotech in Ireland is, to use his word, crap.

Not alone nanotech, there is a complete myopia about how tech and energy can solve Irelands problems. I will respond to your points over the next day or so.

[Civic_critic2]

Fair enough. I have nothing against pumped storage I just wonder if we as a country will rush headlong into an impressive engineering project which belongs in the 20th century when 21st century advances render it largely irrelevant. The capacity of Irish leaders to be backward - their commitment to being backward one might almost say, as a means of retaining their vision of control of the nation at the expense of the advance of the nation - makes me very sceptical of any decision-making by these people. I would much prefer my country to be wise and ahead in these things than led blindly by a bunch of land-zoning donkeys. Their deliberate inhibition of broadband rollout, one suspects for political reasons, is a case in point.

In terms of storage, thermal banks are at least one solution. Vertical insulated piles of earth or purified graphite can store heat from solar thermal sources for months. If the technology for flat plate solar concentrators shown above can be adapted for solar thermal then we've cracked the problem to a signifcant degree of energy storage and both heating and electricity production.
The main man leading the team working on the flat plate concentrator gave a talk about his work which includes practicalities like how solar power will be integrated into the grid system and what kind of economic issues need to be addressed for widescale adoption of solar technology. See here:
Luminescent Solar Concentrators Explained | MIT World

[fiannafailure]

Civic_critic

But solar concentrators alone don’t signal the start of a new solar age. Baldo addresses the considerable uncertainty around the broad deployment of solar power. Installation costs for single homes appear formidably high, perhaps 2/3rd the cost of the entire system. Colossal solar fields that might replace fossil fuel burning plants must ship their energy across vast distances, losing electricity along the way. And right now the national power grid isn’t set up to handle the fluctuations in energy that large-scale intermittent energy sources such as solar or wind present. Clouds are a “big pain” for grid operators, says Baldo.

The above extract is where we are now, the point you are failing to see is that all renewable technologies including solar are intermittent. This places a huge strain on the grid and actually reduces the economic value of the energy, as so called spinning reserve must run in the background to mask this uncertainty and that spinning reserve must be paid for.

Storage of electricity is also not the only reason for large scale storage facilities. All electrical appliances are designed to work at specific voltages and frequencies and this is another problem that storage solves, as the energy is supplied by a few large generators as opposed to many smaller ones with the consequent complexity of sychronisation.

Spirit of Ireland have chosen wind to fill our proposed reservoirs only because it is the most developed tech available in this country at present, as new ways of generating electricity come online they can also feed the hydro unit.

There is one more major reason for storage, it has the ability to timeshift the supply of energy from off peak to peak times which gives the generator more profit and the grid more reliability. Or it can be used by government to hold prices low for economic reasons without affecting the profitability of the generators, they make a smaller profit continuously as opposed to a large profit fitfully

[wombat]

Spirit of Ireland have chosen wind to fill our proposed reservoirs only because it is the most developed tech available in this country at present, as new ways of generating electricity come online they can also feed the hydro unit.

We probably have about 7 years until the price of gas starts to rise rapidly again, so we need to use the breathing space to at least get an alternative under development. SoI are right to base their plans on mature technology, other ideas may come along but we need to address an immediate problem.

[Civic_critic2]

By all means invest in wind, just be aware it's likely to have a 10 year lifetime after which it will be superceded. Also be aware that the market for exportable energy that you think hydro-storage will bring you is likely to be a fraction of what you're proposing, if there at all.

60%-70% of all the electricity generated gets lost in transmission, we only actually consume 1/3rd of the electricity produced. Of that 1/3rd, 20% is used for lighting alone. That can be cut by a fifth simply by using CFL lightbulbs and OLED will cut that in half again and produce much better light. Local electricity production will reduce power loss via transmission as well as place lower demand overall on the system.

Baldo in his lecture talks about grid synchronisation as an issue that will arise when solar production reaches between 5% - 15% of overall total production. He mentions it as a practicality he is aware of having worked in a power plant. He addresses it as an engineering issue that will have to be dealt with, not as an insuperable problem. It is mentioned again and again by solar engineers who speak of the need for a 'smart grid'.

I'm just telling you what will happen over the next 20 years. Government in Ireland should be investing in solar R&D today specific to the issues that will arise in its use in our country. Failure to do so and to go running off on white elephant 20th century engineering projects would be foolish. That is not to say hydro-storage will not be viable, it just must be costed and set beside the other storage, transmission and electrical generation methods that are almost reaching full development and commercial viability.