Fwd: [ExI] Direct solar electrolysis - decentralised fuel infrastructure, is it viable?
Bryan Bishop
about when it comes to "decentralized energy infrastructures" is that
the amount of energy harvested at each point would generally have to
be enough to not only sustain that local node and its operations and
maintenance but also energy enough to get the rest of the energy "to
market" and integrated into the centralized distribution
infrastructure, or even if it's not centralized then at least routing
bits and bytes to plan out where to go deposit the energy into larger
battery caches. It may be that only in centralization there's enough
"umph" to overcome the overhead problem that develops when you
microcompartmentalize it and do it peer-to-peer ... thus the concept
of "jupiter brains" and "dyson spheres" being spherical and not some
terrible frankensteinein polygonal abomination that has
annoying-to-calculate energy dynamics (analogous to a distributed,
decentralized and self-growing energy infrastructure).
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Emlyn <emlyn...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:28 PM
Subject: [ExI] Direct solar electrolysis - decentralised fuel
infrastructure, is it viable?
To: ExI chat list <extrop...@lists.extropy.org>
Keith's evangelism of solar power satellites is very interesting, but
the extreme centralisation of the power production has to make you
nervous; at best, it's business as usual big capital monopoly on
power. I think we should probably do it, actually, but the barriers
seem so large.
On a related note, I recently watched the talk "Energy Literacy" by
Saul Griffith (http://etech.blip.tv/file/1018152/), and was of course
daunted by the scale of terrestrial plant we'd need to construct (and
the amount of land it would require) to do anything serious about
greening world energy production.
It got me to thinking, is there a way to decentralise this? Could we
think of a way that, instead of requiring mega engineering, mobilised
thousands (millions?) of "mom and pop" operations to do the work?
Also, I'm based in South Australia, one of the great early losers of
the climate change debacle. The feeder river into the state (there is
only one of any consequence), the River Murray, is just about dead,
and it's just not really raining any more. So, the northern part of
the state which is unusable for agriculture (think red desert) is
marching south at speed, the ability to provide enough water for the
state capital Adelaide is in doubt, and farmers are no longer allowed
to irrigate in many places, ie: are sooo screwed.
So what we have here is:
- Sunshine (not much ozone layer to worry about way down south here, either)
- Land (unusable)
So I think solar power is probably a go.
What we should really do here is create some godawfully huge solar
power farms, cover masses of that desert, produce massive amounts of
power, use it to run lots of desalination plants, and away we go. The
city isn't landlocked, after all. If we threw money at it on a large
enough scale, we could set up serious world leading research
facilities, boost the unis, and eventually maybe have something of
interest to export. But I digress.
I'm thinking, what can small amounts of capital do here? You could set
up a little solar farm, presumably, for thousands rather than
millions, on cheap land (you can buy ghost towns for less than a
modest house in the city), but then what? I get the impression it is
expensive to be a traditional power plant; you can just pump the
output of your small solar farm into the grid and expect that to be ok
or make you money.
Or you could make hydrogen, I'm thinking. Pump the solar generated
electricity into hydrogen electrolysis equipment, voila lots of
hydrogen. You need water, problematic potentially, but do you need
much? Anyway, suddenly you are making fuel. That fuel can now be
trucked around, or you could sell it directly if you were next to a
decent road, just put a fuel station ("gas" station) on the front of
your farm.
And that turns out already to be being done in California, apparently.
I can't find a link to anything direct about that, but apparently
there is such a station there. Can someone link something more
specific?
So... could you turn this into something commercially viable for a mom
& pop operation, such that they lay down their dollars, a solar farm +
hydrolysis equipment + storage facilities + commercial gas station is
constructed, and they then operate this, selling their gas? I don't
have numbers, and am struggling to put any together, just not my
expertise I'm afraid. With 25 year lifespan on the kinds of solar
cells you'd use, you don't have the problem of replacing cells all the
time, but it could possibly be scuttled by a poor hydrolysis
efficiency compared to centralised large facilities. Also it assumes
people actually start wanting hydrogen in the future; right now no one
wants it, certainly not at the price of electrolysis (see here:
http://www.iags.org/n032805t2.htm).
I also can't get a feel for how much land you'd need to produce a via
amount of hydrogen. I have access to a nanosolar solar cell sample
here, with peak output of about 0.33 watts for a piece about 0.01m^2 ,
so thats 33 watts for 1m^2, or 1kW for 30m^2. It's not a high
efficiency type of cell (20% I think), but flexible printed stuff,
cheap apparently, no numbers available though sorry.
--
Emlyn
http://emlynoregan.com - my home
http://point7.wordpress.com - downshifting and ranting
http://speakingoffreedom.blogspot.com - video link feed of great talks
on eCulture
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Josef Davies-Coates
http://dynamicdemand.co.uk/
Possibly relevant?
Josef.
2008/10/14 Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com>:
--
Josef Davies-Coates
07974 88 88 95
http://uniteddiversity.com
Together We Have Everything
Emlyn
to get crossposted here, cool.
Secondly, I did some commercial work on something directly related to
this, last year. The idea was to create remotely controllable devices
that could be attached to home air-conditioning units, that a utility
could use to manage peak load, by, say, only letting them run for 30
minutes out of every hour. For the record, I think that's a poor idea
probably, because A/C units that are only allowed to run half the time
will still try to get to the goal temperature they are set for, and
just work harder when they are on, most likely using more energy than
they would if you didn't interfere with them at all. IIRC, we did have
variations that instead increased the thermostat's goal temperature.
There is a bigger problem with this idea though, which is that there
is no incentive for consumers to buy such a device. The only feature
it adds is that sometimes it wont work. Windows Vista is a great
example of a system which treats its users as the attacker, which is
the mindset you have to have in designing something like this, and you
see how much people like that.
So I see the dynamic demand people are pushing for regulation to help
with that; that could work. People need to be rewarded for using this
kind of stuff.
An alternative would be for houses to cache their power supply, no?
Take power from the grid predictively when load is low, and store it?
Allow this thing to talk to energy market web services online, and
make decisions on taking power based on real time pricing. I would
think that would be more feasible than altering all the appliances to
respond to central control, it wouldn't require heavy handed
regulation to subsidise (instead the incentive would be there for
home-owners because it'd save you heaps of money), and it'd tie in to
local power production from eg: solar cells really well.
--
Emlyn
http://emlynoregan.com - my home
http://point7.wordpress.com - downshifting and ranting
http://speakingoffreedom.blogspot.com - video link feed of great talks
on eCulture
2008/10/15 Josef Davies-Coates <jo...@uniteddiversity.com>: