Posts Tagged by high-voltage DC
Buckminster Fuller's Advice on Clean Energy
| January 1, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
“There is no energy crisis, just a crisis of ignorance,” the great Buckminster Fuller once wrote. I’ve been Googling this, learning more about it, and challenging myself to figure out what it truly means in our world today.
Check out this video from non-profit education/research organization GENI.org, featuring some of Fuller’s ideas — among them advanced, high-voltage, international electricity transmission, which, of course, would greatly facilitate the move to clean energy by balancing daily and seasonal loads.
Tis the season for New Years resolutions, and here’s one of mine: I want to be more diligent and open-minded to all these ideas. There are a great number of ideas in play in the world of energy — technological, economic, and political. I’m going to try to avoid the mistake — so common within the human species — of looking for evidence that supports what I already believe, thus shutting myself off from true learning. I hope you’ll try to do the same.
Power Transmission is a Real Problem for Renewable Energy
| August 24, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
I like to post articles on Renewable Energy World, as they have pretty decent traffic among people interested in a wide range of clean energy topics. Today, I commented on Stephen Lacey’s piece Is the Transmission ‘Problem’ Real? in which I indicated that he’s correct: to some degree, the argument that the grid needs to be upgraded in order to accommodate more clean energy is specious.
I go on to mention that I’m more interested in renewables on a national or continental scale. And, while I’m aware that Bill McKibben and thousands of other smart people see a future dominated by individual energy farmers, each, putting his unused electrons back onto the grid, I question whether this adequately addresses the matter of scale. With our growing population of energy-hungry consumers, utility-scale renewables appears to me to be the only way to get this done.
And this is where transmission really is an issue. As we know, renewable resources are localized: the sun shines hottest in the southwestern deserts, the wind blows hardest in the plains, the mountains have the best geothermal resources, etc. A significant upgrade to the grid — preferably to high-voltage DC — is required to make this happen.
Yet, as usual, the difficulty here is almost exclusively political. In particular, we’re being told that, for legal reasons, we can’t have a national high-voltage grid. And unfortunately, the US Supreme Court didn’t help the cause in its recent ruling, either.
I really don’t understand the problem. We have national pathways for the transportation of automobiles, railway cars, natural gas, etc. Can someone provide a reason — other than sleezy politics — that we can’t use our crystal clean eminent domain laws to get this done? There should be nothing new or scary about this.
Liquid Ammonia as Fuel – More on the Subject
| June 4, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Energy Storage |
I figured that my posts on Renewable Energy World on liquid ammonia would eventually get some response. I had been wondered how it could be possible that so few people were working on projects in this area, as it really does seem like an important idea. In particular, as a liquid energy storage medium, it has the potential to solve three tough problems simultaneously. In addition to being clean, safe, reliable, and scaleable, liquid ammonia can help in:
1) Moving large amounts of energy around a large land mass (like the lower 48 states) in a way that would compete with electrical. (Proponents point out that a great deal of this piping infrastructure is already in place.)
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More Bad News from the US Supreme Court
| January 29, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
Earlier this week I wrote a post expressing my disgust over the US Supreme Court’s announcement that it had found major provisions of campaign finance reform to be unconstitutional. This paved the way for corporate and union money to mute the voices of individual citizens like you and me.
Later in the week, the justices dealt another punch to the gut to the forces of progress. This came with the decision that rendered the federal government impotent against state and local decisions regarding rights of way — for things like power lines.
Many of us are — or were — hoping for long-distance transmission of electrical power. This would have made feasible the development of forms of renewable energy that are prevalent in certain areas of the country, e.g., solar thermal in the southwestern desert, wind energy in the plains, and geothermal in the mountains. As of this week, however, such things will require the buy-in of dozens of state and local bureaucracies.
It hasn’t been a good week of news from high court.
Renewable Energy Versus Energy Efficiency
| August 27, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
At the risk of stating the obvious, the subject of renewable energy is so much sexier than energy efficiency. I’m always amazed at all the interest on CFL bulbs, energy-efficient appliances – even hybrid electric vehicles. Every joule of energy your sending to the wheels of your Prius is coming from the chemical energy of the gas you’re putting in the tank; you’re just managing the process if bit better. Personally, I fail to see the excitement.
Energy efficiency is like dieting. You find ways to consume less, normally at the expense of some level of deprivation. What I like about renewable energy is that, once we’d gotten a handle on it, we can consume like utter pigs! Drive a Hummer with a 600 hp motor! Heat your swimming pool in February!
Again, a solar thermal farm in the shape of a square 92 miles on a side in the southwest US desert will produce more energy each day than the entire continent of North America can consume. We need this, or any of the other ways to capture and distribute 1/6000th of the energy our planet receives daily from the sun.
I’m convinced that we have the technology at our disposal. Google “solar thermal,” “molten salt,” and “high voltage DC” and see if you don’t become convinced as well.
But do we have the political will to deploy it?
