A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid

• Anything planned by the govt is not necessarily the right thing.  Central planning has proven to be the enemy of efficiency, reasons even communist countries are tending to market driven economies. What if they convert the electrical energy to chemical near the source?  They'd have no problem building lines a hundred miles or so to central area in the wind farms. At that point a plant would convert to chemical. Hydrogen is one obvious idea, electrolyzing water.  And recent advances are bumping up efficiency.  However there are other less obvious but perhaps better options:  using a carbon source plus the hydrogen liberated, convert to methanol, ethanol or other carbon compounds.  This could be fuel, gasoline, diesel using various catalysts, or even non-fuels such as bulk carbon compounds. They might even use carbon output from nearby fossil fuels plant to recycle the carbon or take the carbon out of air by liquefaction or chemical means (chemical means have been proposed separately as atmospheric scrubbers). Pipelines for liquid carbon fuels are less contentious and already weave thousands of miles across the country.   And probably safer and more efficient than trying to pipe gaseous hydrogen. One final option might be to use the excess electricity nearby to the source to reform aluminum oxide or magnesium oxide into their base metals.  These, as I've previously mentioned in other posts, can liberate hydrogen on demand in car gas tanks, fueling cars by hydrogen while only storing aluminum and water, even safer than today's cars.  Aluminum + water -> aluminum oxide plus hydrogen at room temps if certain elements are added to prevent aluminum's surface layer.  Magnesium reacts with water at elevated temps similar to today's car engines to give off hydrogen also. These metal pellets could be trucked or piped as slurry in pipelines.  coal is today piped as slurry in various pipelines around the world. Even room temp superconductors in an electric transmission line might not work or be accepted, or cost billions as the article mentions, so we may have to think up other options. Maybe someone else has ideas?

  erbium 07/14/2009 Posts:136 Avg Rating:

  • Re: Anything planned by the govt While I think exploring other options is absolutely necessary, I doubt a chemical based approach on energy distribution will turn out to be the best. One reason is the fact, that there are pretty efficient HVDC-Lines already. Those are not even fancy in terms of superconducting. Those lines can get 85% over 1000 km of distance today. (See "desertec", the European, very ambitious and risky concept for sustainable solar energy generated in the African desert.). Compared to this, hydrogen generation through electrolysis is (as of today) far less efficient. Mind you, this is only the first step. The hydrogen has to be converted back into electricity once it reaches the destined urban area, which bumps off another couple percent of your overall efficiency. Another problem might be the fact, that hydrogen or whatever chemical is used to store energy is produced from base components (water in this example). Given the huge amounts of energy generated by planned wind farms, there is most like the need to build a second pipeline to supply those base components. Energy is needed for transportation and obviously, the second pipeline costs money as well. There is one big advantage to your proposal though.Once hydrogen has been generated, it can be stored to ease the demand at peak times. Safety is a concern in this context (and for the pipeline as well) though. I am not sure, what the best approach to the energy  distribution problem is. I am excited to see, how it will be solved in the future.

    GruenSein 07/14/2009 Posts:3 Avg Rating:

  • Re: Anything planned by the govt Actually $3 million/mile is less than I would have guessed. Patchwork is not necessarily a bad word. As power transmission links are needed, new ones are built. You could almost argue it's the optimal solution. I would think the difficulties of funding, regulation, cost recovery, regulation, etc would be analogous to those in the pipelines, where you pay to reserve capacity and also pay for transportation. There's talk of expanding pipelines for newly discovered domestic natural gas. Is it cheaper to use natural gas to generate electricity and transmit the power, or transport the natural gas and generate the power near point of use? Eliminating competition between Midwest wind farms and New England wind farms should be anathema. The whole concept of deregulation is to encourage competition to keep prices in check. Smart grid proponents imply that today information about power, voltage, frequency, phase slip, reactivity, etc are not measured, monitored, or used for control. Of course it is! I am an advocate of distributed small nuclear power generators, with today's attributes of safety, carbon-free energy, low power cost, low waste, and inexhaustible fuel supply. To learn more about the liquid fluoride thorium reactor please visit http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh.

    robert.hargr... 07/14/2009 Posts:28 Avg Rating:

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