RE: Renewable Energy: Correcting Some of the Myths
A good post that looks beyond the surface. I can't claim to understand many of the facets of either side. I do know that had it not been for Germany incorporating oil into their navy we probably would never have had the large demand we have for it today. England was unwilling to allow their naval dominance to be challenged, and of course others had to follow suit.
I do not understand the logistics involved, but I do know here in Az where I currently live it is usually sunny with little to no clouds. Solar is huge here, and I have often wondered what the logistics would be of storing the excess and transporting it elsewhere.
I am really going to expose my ignorance here with this question. Given that saturation points can be manipulated by changing pressure, is there a reason that the energy harvested from a windmill as in your example could not be applied using a change in pressure to melt the iron ore? I am sure this might be a very ignorant question, but in my limited knowledge I am unsure why this couldn't be applied somehow.
Thanks again for reading and commenting on one of my posts. I can't thank you enough for the thoughtful comments. 1st thing regarding the distribution of electricity - Many achievements on sending electricity further along power lines and through power grids have helped in recent years. This is especially true with offshore wind. However, storage of electricity still remains the biggest problem with renewables as batteries are heavy and bulky and don't perform as well as we would like. Tesla's batteries have been huge in breaking through this barrier, but we still have huge challenges in getting electricity from remote areas to populated areas. This would definitely be the case in Arizona at least to some degree.
2nd thing - This is a great question and I'm not a chemist or engineer so I can't speak to the answer 100%, but while it is possible to use electricity to smelt ore, it is highly inefficient in both energy use and cost at this point in time. This is one area where we (humanity) need some breakthroughs in technology to overcome the hurdle. The biggest drive is not in changing the fuel but changing the product to a competitive alternative. That is, that we see a lot of effort in making substitutes for steel for many products in order to reduce the demand. Of course, none of these alternatives have come along far enough to be a viable substitute for the time being.
Hope this was a good answer to your questions. Perhaps another reader will have some expertise in this arena that might be of help.
Hi to both of you @energyaddict and @practicalthought, first of all thank you for your great article with which I agree in most of the points outlined there but where I just missed something to the storage ...and yeah now in your answer to that comment you come back with this point.
And this storage thing is the key to a successful implementation of the renewables as a baseload backup. But unfortunately, storage means not only a battery system like you comment before.
There has to be a more or less complicate combination from many parts like battery systems, fuel cells, a hydrogen generator with adapted large storage units and maybe if the area is good for a water repository. With a well-balanced solution of this foresaid components there will be a huge possibility to solve a lot of this problems what is addicted to the unsteady load from the renewables.
We presented with one of our companies in 2012 on Hannover Messe in Germany a first part of this solution and now 6 years later companies will take notice on and ask for systems to implement in their own plants. There is a lot of players in the market and a lot of money, so normally this must lead to a reasonable solution.
And when this happens, we will se that in conclusion with Solar- and Wind energy it is possible to generate the needed energy (that’s possible today, when there is more plants), store it if not needed at the moment, and bring it back to the grid in less than 5 seconds with scalable units just like a normal coal-, oil- or gas fired base-load energy plant from the old economy giants.
So not only I believe that its possible there are a lot more clever people (mostly engineers) who do so, at least it will be a matter of time and will to change not of knowledge or money and we can first adopt this systems to help out and then more and more change from the old systems to those wo will work also green together with the renewables who generate the energy for the demand.
I hope my English is good enough to explain what I mean and for your understanding as I´m a native German and my English probably is not the best for this specific term.
Sunny greetings from Andalusia
Don Thomas
Thanks for your comments and yes, your English is perfectly understandable. I am extremely hopeful that we will continue to improve and implement better storage capabilities so that base-load problems can be contained. Of course, there are a great many well-funded companies (with incredibly smart people) working on these solutions. However, a transition even when these technologies come online will be difficult to come by quickly. The costs of retrofitting existing infrastructure is difficult. A great example of this is the heating systems in old European cities with "radiators" for heat. We have had the technology for 5 decades to change the system of pumping hot water into homes to keep them heated and yet these antiquated methods are still being used. Another example are phone services in the U.S., which for some reason still contain "dead zones" of cellular coverage in populated areas. Just because the technology exists doesn't mean that the transition will come quickly. Keep in mind that the U.S. is the richest country in the world and it still hasn't adopted best available technologies in many areas. It is one of the many reasons that we will NOT move away from fossil fuels in my lifetime or my children's lifetime.
Thank you for your kind reply, in addition to my comment before and your new one let me say the old Oil-league is also not coming up in just e few years it took decades to bring them where they are today.
So it´s silly to expect the renewable will do change market in a few years but actually there is a huge offer in GWh all around the globe and it´s getting more and more each day.
The only thing what has to be solved is the bottleneck in adapting smart storage solutions to existing renewable plants in the first line. In the second line there must be a transformation of the technologies in the fueling sector for cars (refers also to hydrogen).
Solutions for performing the grid online with this mentioned system are already in the market, so I and my kids believe that we will se bigger steps in this direction in the next decade and the following one´s
With sunny greetings from Andalusia
Don Thomas
In Germany, you will probably see a great deal of improvement, but you won't see the end of fossil fuels. Too much has to be done in the way of transport and manufacturing to get rid of these yet. And Germany will be in the lead because they have made it a huge priority. The rest of world will follow, but not quickly.
In Germany, you will probably see a great deal of improvement, but you won't see the end of fossil fuels. Too much has to be done in the way of transport and manufacturing to get rid of these yet. And Germany will be in the lead because they have made it a huge priority. The rest of world will follow, but not quickly.
Sorry @energyaddict22 for not responding to you, but I thought I had answered already -oops but it wasn´t so- ! Sorry again for that.
So far regarding your reply in first yes maybe the Germans will see some greater movements, but they lost a lot of their leading manpower in special mostly the heads and their teams who moved to Asian or American companies and so the had to focus for a longer timeframe since 2013 to bring up again such genius humans who help them and their think tanks to step ahead. There was a big lack of founding and educating in this high technology fields where the Germans a few years before where leading in the world, but this is history and if you won’t keep in mind that others are also hungry and get good human resources you have to start the race again if you will come back to your former position.
I agree with you that the end of the age of fossil fuels is not near in the next 10 maybe 20 years, but with more capital spend in R&D and more focusing on scaling in technologies which has a positive impact on the energy disaster.
Still I don’t believe that they can held their position in the green energy sector, I guess we had to look also to some of the southern European nations like Spain and Italy.
Spain has huge terrains where its suitable to built large plants for solar as well as wind, and they are willing to handle this, they´ve done it before from 2004 to 2009 and then made their mistake to suit the investors with breaking their own law -this will not happen again-.
Italy specially the Island of Sicily is producing more energy from the renewables than they need for their island, so the export to the mainland, and there is also a lot of space where more plants can be erected (also in both fields solar and wind).
Next there must be mentioned for sure the Asian countries like 1st China and then Japan and the next big player India they all ride for more than 10 years this wave, investing incredible amounts of money in education, technology and infrastructure. Building one after one new bigger and better production facilities for solar and wind and even for batteries and electric cars.
In 2006 we negotiate solar facilities for India with an output from 20MW, today they are building solar power plants with more than 1GW with mostly own produced modules, and the Chinese Manufacturing capacity has grown so fast that the prices dump for about three years and their quality had reached a level which is not less than that from the Germans.
And in the Industry for battery cars the Chinese and Co. (including India) are since more than 5 years the leading manufactures but nobody from the industry nations had taken notice from for long time. And if there will not be some guys like Mr. TESLA Elon Musk then these guys will dominate this sector also. They have the biggest fleet of Battery cars and bikes worldwide, they deliver complete power stations, complete wind- and solar- parks, huge battery systems and also fuel cells.
As you know, and you see from my comments there is a hard way in front of all of us and if all work continuously on this we will solve this issue for sure in the next 2 decades.
And if not we all than maybe the Asians alone will run this and get the benefits from, we will see. Oh yes the americans also are on a good way, what about the russians i only know about som solar activities at the border of the black sea.
wiht sunny greetings from Andalusia
Don Thomas