Basics of Renewable Energy
Just a quick note to let you know that our project to assemble audio/visual learning aids aimed at renewable energy is complete (for now, at least), and ready for distribution to any young people or newcomers in the subject you feel may benefit. It’s a compilation of a few short videos, in which I lay out each of the five major “flavors” of clean energy (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydro), and briefly discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each. Also included are “infographics” that further explore these technologies and the issues that surround them.
My aim, of course, is to introduce this subject to as many people as possible, in the hopes that we can drive up the number of informed discussions, so necessary to the success of the democratic process.
Please feel free to send this link to anyone in your life who you feel may benefit. Thanks.
Here’s the link: http://2greenenergy.com/renewable-energy-basic-concepts/
You continue to neglect the two biggest sources of renewable energy:
(1) The buildings themselves
(2) The air around our buildings
Nearly all of the electricity we use goes into buildings, where it is converted into heat that is mostly wasted, with the needless expenditure of yet more energy to run the air conditioning systems. We should instead be storing that waste heat and putting it to good use.
Any building heating deficiency can be met by collecting heat from the air in the summer and storing that heat temporarily in the ground for use in the winter. Any cooling deficiency can likewise be met by using the cold winter air to chill ground stores.
There are both large scale and small scale applications of seasonal thermal storage in use. It is inexpensive, clean, silent and invisible but unfortunately it is being used in only a tiny fraction of the applications for which it is suitable, primarily because it is simply being overlooked.
The basics concepts link above, must be up dated.
In Brazil, wind energy is less expensive than any other source except for hydroelectrical.
It’s true that I’ve generalized here, and used figures that are largely about the U.S., where I happen to live.
The US consumes about 500 billion kWh of electricity per year for air conditioning. On hot days AC accounts for about 40% of the power consumption, yet very few buildings make use of the obvious strategy of cooling the buildings by storing winter cold (as Toronto does for most of its largest downtown buildings).
In northern cities the storage can be done at a temperature that makes it unnecessary to use heat pumps in the buildings but even in warmer zones the employment of chilled ground stores greatly improves the heat pump efficiency so the power consumption can be radically reduced. That also reduces the peak power demand.
Much attention is being paid to methods of storing electricity but it is much more practical to store energy in the form of heat. It is just as useful to store energy in the ground in the form of heat (or cold) as it would be to store electricity, even if that were possible on the required scale.
The US consumes 1400 billion kWh of energy for residential space heating (not including large buildings or the energy used for cooling). If more homes used stored heat for space heating their use of combustible fuels would fall to zero and their use of electricity for heating would fall to a small value (Power is still needed to drive the heat pumps). At the present time only about two million homes (worldwide) make use of seasonal thermal storage.
Natural gas is the dominant energy source for space heating. The switchover to shale gas is adding a huge burden of extra GHG’s from the gas that escapes when you fracture the shale that contains it (a fact that is conspicuously missing from most reports on natural gas).
If you add together the space heating, space cooling and the energy lost via the heat produced by electrical equipment the total amounts to nearly all of the energy that is going into our buildings. Heat storage provides an affordable solution but instead of looking at better ways of using of our existing energy resources the issue has been framed almost entirely as a matter of how we can devise yet more sources of energy that will then just add to the waste.
Ron, some very good points. I live in a thermal mass home and it works quite well, however the initial cost is huge. I could not sell my house for what I’ve got in it. On the other hand it is built to last at least seven generations, a concept not understood in a society of excessively high standards with expectations of instant gratification.
Ron:
Storage makes use of free energy so the operating costs are very low. The capital costs can also be low. For example, large buildings generate an annual surplus of heat that can be stored and subsequently used to heat hundreds of surrounding homes. For high density housing you can use just two rather shallow boreholes per home to provide for both heating and cooling. Each home has its own system but physically the boreholes are part of an array that is thermally very efficient.
Ron, I built myself a thermal mass home but only the frist floor’s floor was a concrete slab two feet above grade but thermal windows and an Alaskan insulation package on all six inch thick exterior walls and an extra inch of foil faced foam panels under the t-1-11 siding but building two story was very helpful and my 5,000 square feet of home cost me only $215 monthly electric with AC set a constant 76 degrees in Tampa, Florida. My friends in a one room apartment had larger electric costs. anf the house only cost $80,000 because I acted as archetec and general contractor only subed out roofing, concrete pouring, and air-cond instalation.
Dennis:
We can use insulation, diurnal storage, etc., to reduce our dependence on conventional heating and cooling sources or alternatively we can turn to entirely different sources that can completely eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. Storage is one of those alternatives for which there is no upper supply limit. The notions that the world is running out of energy and that we must therefore reduce our demands is simply not true. It is pure propaganda from the fossil fuel industry that unfortunately is mindlessly repeated by governments and NGO’s. The cost of extra insulation, etc. is higher than the cost of switching to a storage system, which eliminates the GHG problem altogether instead of just reducing it.