Scrutable

Martin_B wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 2:14 am

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 01, 2022 8:44 pm

bjn wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 01, 2022 8:09 pm

Western Australia is now removing remote households from the grid, tearing down the power lines and installing a self contained system of solar panels and batteries. The cost of creating and maintaining the distribution infrastructure was just too much. More then 4km of lines and they break even. As the price of solar and batteries drop they are contemplating creating micro grids for remote towns as well.

Resilient too. When a cyclone hit recently, the only places that had electricity were outfitted with one of these systems.

Such a distributed system would work well in parts of the world that are sunny and have no electricity infrastructure.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/ ... /101479136

That’s brilliant. What % of Australians live remotely?

bjn wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:17 pm

Not a lot. 17 out of 24 million live in the various state capitals. I’m not going to guess as to the truly remote population.

Slight aside, it costs more just to distribute electricity to a house in Australia than the LCOE from a solar panel. That’s before you’ve paid for the actual generation of the electricity from whatever. There’s a reason that rooftop solar peaked at 42% of generation nation wide last Sunday. And it’s not even summer yet.

Western Australia has a very marked split between city and rural. Metropolitan Perth is ~80% of the population of WA and the next largest places are Bunbury (~100 km south of Metropolitan Perth) and Geraldton (~350 km north). Both are part of the Perth grid, but Geraldton has it's own power station and wind turbines.

When Cyclone Seroja (mentioned above) hit WA north of Geraldton in April last year the power companies lost a lot of the transmission lines in the area and the communities affected received solar panels, wind turbines and diesel generators which they say made power more secure for them than the power lines they'd had. This change was happening before Seroja, but has been increased since, partly because these remote communities experiences.

Technically the Perth grid does extend all the way to Kalgoorlie, 600 km east and nearly half-way to the South Australia border, but Kalgoorlie also has it's own power stations and generates more than it needs, so exports to the local communities. The biggest non-resources dominated town not on the Perth grid is Esperence, only ~10,000 people and 700 km from Perth, and that has it's own little grid with power stations and wind turbines.

These micro-grids will probably only be applicable for 5% of the WA population, and are expensive, but cheaper than 100s of km of transmission lines for populations of 10s or 100s of people, which is how some of rural WA is.

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:54 am

I listened to a podcast that covered a paper on enhanced geothermal energy. Standard geothermal is limited in than you need three things, hot rocks, natural fractures and water. However there is a lot more impermeable rock with suitable temperatures which can’t be used. To get around that you drill 2 holes into the hotness, frack the rock between them, pump water down one, steam comes out the other, use that to drive a turbine, and pump it down again.

It’s been tried experimentally a few times in the past, but was found to be difficult and uneconomic. However, fracking technology has come on a long way since, and peeps are trying it again. The paper above has modelled how you can use the fractures as an energy storage medium. Rather than running the plant as close to 100% capacity as you can, instead when energy is plentiful from other sources, you shut off the stream outlet, but keep pumping more water into the fractures. Because the rock is impermeable, your water gets heated and stays down there. When energy is scarce you open the taps and generate more than steady flow operation. This requires bigger turbines, energy to inject the water and more fracking, but a significant cost is drilling the holes in the first place, which will be the same. All in all, you get better utility from the system as you supply energy at times of expensive electricity and little or none at times of cheap energy. They estimate 60% better returns in a market with high VRE penetration. This is with 100 hours of storage.

May work in practice, it may not. If it does, it could be a significant contribution.

Even the UK sits on hot granite even if we have no geysers. There are two experimental enhanced geothermal plants in Cornwall being built, though they aren’t planning on doing the storage bit as fair as I am aware. The Redruth project seems to be fracked and partly reliant on natural fractures, so may not be suitable for storage.

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:34 am

You may get some localised quakes due to the fracking though. Which will get some NIMBY opposition.

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:34 am

You may get some localised quakes due to the fracking though. Which will get some NIMBY opposition.

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:34 am

You may get some localised quakes due to the fracking though. Which will get some NIMBY opposition.

Little waster wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:40 am

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:34 am

You may get some localised quakes due to the fracking though. Which will get some NIMBY opposition.

Don't worry, various fossil fuel shills and climate change denialists have spent considerable sums and time trying to convince the public that fracking earthquakes are fine, fine, perfectly fine.

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:54 am

I listened to a podcast that covered a paper on enhanced geothermal energy.

Little waster wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:40 am

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:34 am

You may get some localised quakes due to the fracking though. Which will get some NIMBY opposition.

Don't worry, various fossil fuel shills and climate change denialists have spent considerable sums and time trying to convince the public that fracking earthquakes are fine, fine, perfectly fine.

Which is ironic

bjn wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 02, 2022 12:16 pm

Another downside is that there are lots of heavy vehicle movements to establish the fracked wells. Depending on where, that does need to be handled sensitively. Tiny country lanes with a few hundred artic movements will get the NIMBYs out for fairly good reason.

dyqik wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 11:34 am

The other thing with fracking for heat is that it's a renewable resource - you don't frack, pump that area dry, frack again, pump again like you do with oil.

So it's more like a few of earthquakes in an area while the systems are being set up than an ongoing series of them.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:20 pm

dyqik wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 11:34 am

The other thing with fracking for heat is that it's a renewable resource - you don't frack, pump that area dry, frack again, pump again like you do with oil.

So it's more like a few of earthquakes in an area while the systems are being set up than an ongoing series of them.

If you’re leaving a borehole pressurised while you’re “storing” energy, might there be some earthquakes then? Probably the pressure would be a lot lower than the pressure to frack though.

EACLucifer wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:37 pm

Grumble wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 12:20 pm

dyqik wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 11:34 am

The other thing with fracking for heat is that it's a renewable resource - you don't frack, pump that area dry, frack again, pump again like you do with oil.

So it's more like a few of earthquakes in an area while the systems are being set up than an ongoing series of them.

If you’re leaving a borehole pressurised while you’re “storing” energy, might there be some earthquakes then? Probably the pressure would be a lot lower than the pressure to frack though.

I'd be shocked if there was anything that humans could perceive unassisted.

There is a limited number of things that could actually help over the coming two winters compensate for the loss of Russian gas: energy efficiency; sourcing more gas from non-Russian sources; keeping existing nuclear plants online and bringing back those that are offline; burning more coal; and, as a last resort, demand reduction – rolling power cuts, gas rationing and the like. That’s it. The rest, when it comes to helping Ukraine, is noise.

If none of this persuades you that we are on the verge of a Great Clean Energy Acceleration, contemplate this, courtesy of Jenny Chase and the BloombergNEF solar team: global solar installations are expected to grow to 245GW this year, up 38% on last year. By 2025, existing and planned solar silicon refining capacity would be sufficient to deliver no less than 940GW of solar cells and panels annually – as much each year as has been installed over the entirety of the last two decades. The cell and panel capacity may not yet exist, but the supply chain for a solar singularity is on its way.

bjn wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 03, 2022 5:14 pm

Article by Michael Liebreich of NBEF fame on the immediate effect of the Russian imposed gas shortages and longer term trends.

Short term for Europe...

There is a limited number of things that could actually help over the coming two winters compensate for the loss of Russian gas: energy efficiency; sourcing more gas from non-Russian sources; keeping existing nuclear plants online and bringing back those that are offline; burning more coal; and, as a last resort, demand reduction – rolling power cuts, gas rationing and the like. That’s it. The rest, when it comes to helping Ukraine, is noise.

Longer term...

If none of this persuades you that we are on the verge of a Great Clean Energy Acceleration, contemplate this, courtesy of Jenny Chase and the BloombergNEF solar team: global solar installations are expected to grow to 245GW this year, up 38% on last year. By 2025, existing and planned solar silicon refining capacity would be sufficient to deliver no less than 940GW of solar cells and panels annually – as much each year as has been installed over the entirety of the last two decades. The cell and panel capacity may not yet exist, but the supply chain for a solar singularity is on its way.

Nearly a TW of solar cells per year in three years.

Siemens Gamesa’s 14-222 DD offshore wind turbine prototype has, according to the Spanish-German wind giant today, set a world record for the most power output by a single wind turbine in a 24-hour period: 359 megawatt-hours.

This would be enough energy, according to the company, for a mid-sized electric vehicle – think a Tesla Model 3 – to drive around 1.12 million miles (1.8 million km).

nekomatic wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 12, 2022 4:03 pm

Converting diesel locomotive engines to run on ammonia and hydrogen

Not that much detail that I can find, but it sounds as though the hydrogen is generated in situ from the ammonia, so the fuel distribution infrastructure should be less tricky than for hydrogen, not more.