LinkedIn weirdness
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Keith Henson
Mar 3, 2026, 3:19:32 AM (4 days ago) Mar 3
to ExI chat list, extro...@googlegroups.com, Inventor's Lunch, Power Satellite Economics
I posted this on LinkedIn.
The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage.
"A Victorian gas-making technology might solve this problem. About
1860, they made gas by burning coke till it got white hot, then
shutting off the air and blowing steam through the mass of coke. This
made CO and hydrogen, which was distributed as town gas.
"For carbon, we can use municipal waste, which is 40% carbon. For
heat, renewable electricity from wind or solar. 4 MWh will vaporize a
ton of carbon in steam, making about 11 MWh of syngas. The syngas can
be stored and then burned in a combined cycle turbine, giving over 6
MWh of electricity.
"This scales to a rather large size. LA makes 100,000 tons per day, of
which 40% is carbon. Run 1/3rd of the day, the gasifiers could absorb
20 GW, producing 240 GWh of syngas. This sounds like a lot until you
realize California is putting in 13 GW over the canals."
According to LinkedIn, almost 1000 people read it, including people in
the utility industry. There were no comments except my comment,
giving my email. No emails.
Is the idea so strange that people can't understand? 75 years ago,
the US made town gas from coke at a similar scale. Is invoking
chemical reactions from the Victorian era simply rejected?
Any thoughts on the results? I am mystified.
Keith
PS March 24, I am giving a talk on this topic to the local IEEE
chapter. If it is not closed, I will let you know.
The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage.
"A Victorian gas-making technology might solve this problem. About
1860, they made gas by burning coke till it got white hot, then
shutting off the air and blowing steam through the mass of coke. This
made CO and hydrogen, which was distributed as town gas.
"For carbon, we can use municipal waste, which is 40% carbon. For
heat, renewable electricity from wind or solar. 4 MWh will vaporize a
ton of carbon in steam, making about 11 MWh of syngas. The syngas can
be stored and then burned in a combined cycle turbine, giving over 6
MWh of electricity.
"This scales to a rather large size. LA makes 100,000 tons per day, of
which 40% is carbon. Run 1/3rd of the day, the gasifiers could absorb
20 GW, producing 240 GWh of syngas. This sounds like a lot until you
realize California is putting in 13 GW over the canals."
According to LinkedIn, almost 1000 people read it, including people in
the utility industry. There were no comments except my comment,
giving my email. No emails.
Is the idea so strange that people can't understand? 75 years ago,
the US made town gas from coke at a similar scale. Is invoking
chemical reactions from the Victorian era simply rejected?
Any thoughts on the results? I am mystified.
Keith
PS March 24, I am giving a talk on this topic to the local IEEE
chapter. If it is not closed, I will let you know.
ilsa
Mar 3, 2026, 3:38:44 AM (4 days ago) Mar 3
to extro...@googlegroups.com
Most people even really intelligent people don't get it.
I made a one years old and most people don't get me at all it's very unfulfilling when nobody gets you but I get what you're you're trying to do I'm just an old lady I'm not powerful anymore but I applaud you are putting it intellectually out into the air and I hope with positive thinking and circulation you will succeed
In Harmony and generosity, ilsa bartlett
Ilsa Bartlett
http://www.google.com/profiles/ilsa.bartlett
www.hotlux.com/angel
"Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person."
-John Coltrane
www.hotlux.com/angel
"Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person."
-John Coltrane
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Keith Henson
Mar 4, 2026, 9:12:08 PM (2 days ago) Mar 4
to Robert Poor, Paul Werbos, ExI chat list, extro...@googlegroups.com, Inventor's Lunch, Power Satellite Economics
On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 8:54 PM Robert Poor <rdp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Keith:
>
> You assert that "The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage." and proceed to suggest converting municipal waste into town gas (CO + H2) as an energy source.
It is more of an energy storage method, though the carbon in waste
does contribute to the output.
> An awful lot hangs on that assertion and the suggested solution. I'll start with the assertion, and counter that the biggest problem that renewables face is obstacles to mass deployment.
If you know of another way to cope with a cloudy week with no wind, or
a way to store renewable energy for a month, let me know.
Battery-firmed renewables are already cost effective (cue Lazard's
LCOE and LCOS studies). Rather, mass deployment in the US is hindered
partly by access to the grid: there's a large and growing backlog for
interconnection requests. But a larger impediment lies in policy and
market structures. Battery storage, essential for any sane renewable
energy source, provides multiple benefits (peak shaving,
infrastructure deferrals, frequency stabilization, congestion
abatement), but is only priced for its ability to perform arbitrage.
When a solar farm generates too much energy for the grid to use, it is
curtailed while gas and coal and nuclear plants remain online since
they can't be shut down easily.
I agree with you that coal and nuclear are hard to shut down, but gas
is easy. In California, gas picks up the load when the Sun goes down.
> A more sane approach would simply to deploy more batteries to soak up the excess.
This is more like a very high-capacity battery than anything else. LA
waste will soak up as much as 20 GW. And you can get the power back
anytime you want it, even a year later. Can you do that with Lithium
batteries, or does self-discharge eat them up? I think batteries are
a good idea, but they do have limits.
> The town gas approach will face the same problems that any thermal generation technology faces: a race against time. The current backlog for utility scale turbines is about five years.
The existing gas turbines will be just as happy with syngas as they
are with natural gas.
> If you extrapolate what costs will look like in five years, it's likely that solar will have gotten a little cheaper, while batteries will have become a lot cheaper. The cost of turbines probably won't decrease at the same rate. And as someone who has studied the angles of turning waste into useful products (including energy), there's another infrastructure problem: do you site the processing plant (in this case the town gas processing plant) near the feedstock (presumably near landfill), or do you site it at the point of consumption, e.g. near a grid connection.
Put them at the landfill, that's where the trucks dump now. In the
case of LA, the largest landfill is no more than 5 miles from the 3 GW
Sylmar converter station. Gas is piped all over the place, and there
are empty gas and oil fields all over the place. If you want to store
energy for more than a few days, it would probably be best to convert
it to methane and use the gas network. (A big leak of CO would be a
bad event.)
> In either case, I posit that permitting alone will be challenging. By contrast, solar-powered battery plants are coming online at record rates: planning to going online within 18 months.
They are not without problems. Consider Moss Landing. Is there even
a date for getting that one back online?
> Another thing that sets batteries apart from other forms of generation and storage: they're multi-scale. You can build huge utility-scale systems to provide grid stabilization and alleviate congestion, or you can pool together thousands of small batteries sited in people's garages or C&I plants to deliver power where you need it and when you need it. All of this has been amply proven in South Australia.
At some scale, this is less expensive than batteries.
Keith
> - rdp
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 4:57 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Technologies interfacing with it.
>>> --
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>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to power-satellite-ec...@googlegroups.com.
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>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Power Satellite Economics" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to power-satellite-ec...@googlegroups.com.
>> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/CACLqmgfp5jhrs90tb3KwdbNj%2Bwp_5eCgcn%2BE7Kf1%2BmKvWN5YrA%40mail.gmail.com.
>
> Keith:
>
> You assert that "The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage." and proceed to suggest converting municipal waste into town gas (CO + H2) as an energy source.
It is more of an energy storage method, though the carbon in waste
does contribute to the output.
> An awful lot hangs on that assertion and the suggested solution. I'll start with the assertion, and counter that the biggest problem that renewables face is obstacles to mass deployment.
If you know of another way to cope with a cloudy week with no wind, or
a way to store renewable energy for a month, let me know.
Battery-firmed renewables are already cost effective (cue Lazard's
LCOE and LCOS studies). Rather, mass deployment in the US is hindered
partly by access to the grid: there's a large and growing backlog for
interconnection requests. But a larger impediment lies in policy and
market structures. Battery storage, essential for any sane renewable
energy source, provides multiple benefits (peak shaving,
infrastructure deferrals, frequency stabilization, congestion
abatement), but is only priced for its ability to perform arbitrage.
When a solar farm generates too much energy for the grid to use, it is
curtailed while gas and coal and nuclear plants remain online since
they can't be shut down easily.
I agree with you that coal and nuclear are hard to shut down, but gas
is easy. In California, gas picks up the load when the Sun goes down.
> A more sane approach would simply to deploy more batteries to soak up the excess.
This is more like a very high-capacity battery than anything else. LA
waste will soak up as much as 20 GW. And you can get the power back
anytime you want it, even a year later. Can you do that with Lithium
batteries, or does self-discharge eat them up? I think batteries are
a good idea, but they do have limits.
> The town gas approach will face the same problems that any thermal generation technology faces: a race against time. The current backlog for utility scale turbines is about five years.
The existing gas turbines will be just as happy with syngas as they
are with natural gas.
> If you extrapolate what costs will look like in five years, it's likely that solar will have gotten a little cheaper, while batteries will have become a lot cheaper. The cost of turbines probably won't decrease at the same rate. And as someone who has studied the angles of turning waste into useful products (including energy), there's another infrastructure problem: do you site the processing plant (in this case the town gas processing plant) near the feedstock (presumably near landfill), or do you site it at the point of consumption, e.g. near a grid connection.
Put them at the landfill, that's where the trucks dump now. In the
case of LA, the largest landfill is no more than 5 miles from the 3 GW
Sylmar converter station. Gas is piped all over the place, and there
are empty gas and oil fields all over the place. If you want to store
energy for more than a few days, it would probably be best to convert
it to methane and use the gas network. (A big leak of CO would be a
bad event.)
> In either case, I posit that permitting alone will be challenging. By contrast, solar-powered battery plants are coming online at record rates: planning to going online within 18 months.
They are not without problems. Consider Moss Landing. Is there even
a date for getting that one back online?
> Another thing that sets batteries apart from other forms of generation and storage: they're multi-scale. You can build huge utility-scale systems to provide grid stabilization and alleviate congestion, or you can pool together thousands of small batteries sited in people's garages or C&I plants to deliver power where you need it and when you need it. All of this has been amply proven in South Australia.
At some scale, this is less expensive than batteries.
Keith
> - rdp
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 4:57 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, 03:19 Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I posted this on LinkedIn.
>>>
>>> The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage.
>>
>>
>>
>> No, it is ignorance by energy decisionskers of the thermal storage technologies developed and proven in chile, and US and Persian Gulf
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, 03:19 Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I posted this on LinkedIn.
>>>
>>> The biggest problem with renewable energy is large scale, long term storage.
>>
>>
>>
>> Technologies interfacing with it.
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Power Satellite Economics" group.
>>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to power-satellite-ec...@googlegroups.com.
>>> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/CAPiwVB43NKex2mxqyO6-DH1POTVD4J_qBmOs9qxRDL0ZwS0osw%40mail.gmail.com.
>>
>> --
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