Do you support the possible use of Solar Radiation Management?

[Tuur]

As long as we're out there:

Dividing the radius of the sun by mean distance and multiplying it by how far away from the surface of the earth a satellite would be to have an orbital period of 24 hours, then multiplying the result by 2 gives us 333.843 km. That's the size required for an object at that distance to eclipse the sun.

You already see where this is going, right?

Now, we don't want a solid shade or even a translucent one. You can't adjust that. What we want are blinds.

Wait, wait, wait: hear me out.

Now let's suppose these blinds are made up of solar panels. Use the power for station keeping using ion engines. Any excess, beam to earth. If they block too much light, adjust the angle of the panels to let more through, like blinds. Too little, adjust them back. And if the entire project turns into a disaster, use the ion engines and the panels as solar sails to move it out of the neighborhood.

 

[eclipsenow]

Sure - from memory it's not blended - as that's a low radar profile military tech.
It's just double-width wing.

Radware Bot Manager Captcha

 

[eclipsenow]

As long as we're out there:

Dividing the radius of the sun by mean distance and multiplying it by how far away from the surface of the earth a satellite would be to have an orbital period of 24 hours, then multiplying the result by 2 gives us 333.843 km. That's the size required for an object at that distance to eclipse the sun.

You already see where this is going, right?

Now, we don't want a solid shade or even a translucent one. You can't adjust that. What we want are blinds.

Wait, wait, wait: hear me out.

Now let's suppose these blinds are made up of solar panels. Use the power for station keeping using ion engines. Any excess, beam to earth. If they block too much light, adjust the angle of the panels to let more through, like blinds. Too little, adjust them back. And if the entire project turns into a disaster, use the ion engines and the panels as solar sails to move it out of the neighborhood.

I'm with you - but not now. This could be built by our grand children or great grand children who have Industrialised the moon and can launch it all from there! Right now we need all the clean energy tech we can get, and BILLIONS put into Precision Fermentation so we can have climate-proof electric food.

 

[Tuur]

I'm with you - but not now. This could be built by our grand children or great grand children who have Industrialised the moon and can launch it all from there! Right now we need all the clean energy tech we can get, and BILLIONS put into Precision Fermentation so we can have climate-proof electric food.

That's nice.

I guess I should learn how to knap flint. To get ready for when we have clean energy tech, you know.

 

[Tuur]

To add more, I've spent most of my life keeping the electricity on and after seeing what passes for clean energy schemes, it all looks like it was wasted effort.

 

[eclipsenow]

That's nice.

I guess I should learn how to knap flint. To get ready for when we have clean energy tech, you know.

I'm not a scientist or engineer - but at least I understand the basics of how intermittent wind and solar can be made baseload. Do you? What are the 3 strategies? See - I supported nuclear for the last 15 years down here in Australia where it's illegal. I had compelling arguments. But about 18 months ago, all my arguments about the cost to Overbuild renewables just evaporated.

Why?

 

[Tuur]

I'm not a scientist or engineer - but at least I understand the basics of how intermittent wind and solar can be made baseload. Do you? What are the 3 strategies? See - I supported nuclear for the last 15 years down here in Australia where it's illegal. I had compelling arguments. But about 18 months ago, all my arguments about the cost to Overbuild renewables just evaporated.

Why?

Oh, wow. I don't know if I can rightly say. I've only been working at this almost forty years. I only know that you have to have capacity to support the maximum potential load and that you need energy storage to make wind and solar a replacement for constant output generation. I also only know what happens when you don't have that capacity, and helped draw up the rolling blackout plans for it.

Don't mind me. I'm just someone that should have retired around ten years ago and might go ahead and leave it to the young whippersnappers.

 

[eclipsenow]

Oh, wow. I don't know if I can rightly say. I've only been working at this almost forty years. I only know that you have to have capacity to support the maximum potential load and that you need energy storage to make wind and solar a replacement for constant output generation. I also only know what happens when you don't have that capacity, and helped draw up the rolling blackout plans for it.

Don't mind me. I'm just someone that should have retired around ten years ago and might go ahead and leave it to the young whippersnappers.

Passive aggressive tone much? Anyway, I'll ignore that and refer you to the big picture. Because I get it. I was like you. Renewables are intermittent and unreliable - so we'd have to Overbuild their capacity like crazy to even have a chance to get some kind of stability. And back when I became concerned about peak oil (20 years ago) the cost to Overbuild renewables enough was INSANE! But their cost has dropped 15 fold in that time - and now we CAN afford to Overbuild them to the point where "Geographic Smoothing" takes over.

Because renewables are now 1/4 the cost of nuclear (Unfirmed - Lazard 2023) - the grid designers talk about Overbuilding capacity across a wide area for ‘geographic smoothing’ to maximise how much LIVE renewables we can draw on at any one time. This concept is now quite old, and even entered popular culture when it hit Scientific American in 2015. By Overbuilding capacity we can reduce the most expensive part of wind and solar - the storage.

While at first glance it might sound like adding too much renewable energy could destabilize the delicate balance of the electric grid, it turns out that renewable energy actually becomes more predictable as the number of renewable generators connected to the grid increases thanks to the effect of geographic diversity and the Law of Large Numbers.​

​

The Law of Large Numbers is a probability theorem, which states that the aggregate result of a large number of uncertain processes becomes more predictable as the total number of processes increases. Applied to renewable energy, the Law of Large Numbers dictates that the combined output of every wind turbine and solar panel connected to the grid is far less volatile than the output of an individual generator.​

​

Because the grid operator is only concerned with balancing the total amount of renewable generation with the rest of the grid, the Law of Large Numbers causes the amount of reserve capacity required to balance renewables with the grid on a second-by-second basis to be a lot less than intuition suggests. In a study commissioned by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, General Electric calculated how much new reserve capacity will be required as Texas increases the amount of wind energy installed. The report found that an additional 15,000 megawatts of installed wind energy only requires an additional 18 megawatts of new flexible reserve capacity to maintain the stability of the grid. In other words, the spare capacity of one fast-ramping natural gas power plant can compensate for the variability introduced by 5,000 new average-sized wind turbines.​

​

The Power of Prediction​

​

While the law of large numbers and the effect of geographic diversity causes renewable energy to smooth out its own fluctuations on a second-by-second basis, it can still be difficult to predict the expected level of renewable generation during the next hour or two of the day.​

​

Fortunately, experience has shown that it is possible to effectively model and predict the aggregate renewable power available to the grid. Both wind and solar depend on natural systems that can be modeled and forecasted with reasonable accuracy. Today, wind energy makes up over 10 percent of Texas’s annual electricity supply, thanks in part to effective wind generation forecasts. This is especially significant because Texas has a unique isolated grid, with no way to access extra conventional electricity generation from outside the state...​

Renewable Energy Intermittency Explained: Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities

Critics of renewable energy often cite the fact that technologies like wind and solar only produce energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

blogs.scientificamerican.com

So 15 GW of wind only requires 18 MW of fast-acting storage. That’s 1.2 MW storage per GW of wind – easy and affordable with a few hours of grid-battery and few days of Pumped Hydro. And my pumped hydro link shows that the world has 100 TIMES the potential sites we need for OFF-river closed loop pumped hydro storage.

 

[Tuur]

Passive aggressive tone much?

Old and ticked off. Being told that what you've done for almost four decades means nothing in a discussion concerning the industry where you've made a career tends to do that. But by all means, go sit in the dark. I used to care about such things but just don't anymore.

 

[eclipsenow]

Old and ticked off. Being told that what you've done for almost four decades means nothing in a discussion concerning the industry where you've made a career tends to do that.

You admitted you've been out for 10 years.
Do you know how much the price of renewables have dropped in the last 10 years?
I am saying exactly that - what you've done for decades is now as irrelevant as some old software coder that's replaced by more efficient modern mechanisms. It's an Ecclesiastes moment for sure! Life is 'Hebel' - vapour - (sometimes translated as "Vanity vanity all is vanity"). What we thought we knew was solid and unchanging is now evaporating away like the morning dew.

But by all means, go sit in the dark. I used to care about such things but just don't anymore.

I noticed. But you need to change my opinion with real world modern data - not just huffing.

The papers I'm seeing from experts in the field are saying intermittent unreliable wind and solar can and will do the job - at least in the "Sunshine Belt" on earth where most of the human race lives!

Australian Professor Andrew Blakers & his team won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (like the Nobel Prize for engineers!) for inventing the PERC solar cell which is now in 90% of solar cells. He now models renewable plans. In the following podcast he said if individual Australian states tried to build their own renewable grids, it would cost us 5 TIMES MORE for storage. And storage is one of the more expensive parts of all this. Just connecting states up so they can ‘cover’ each other when there’s too much over here and too little over there creates geographic smoothing. Solar’s stunning journey from lab curiosity to global juggernaut wiping out fossil fuels

Blakers modelled Australia with off-river pumped hydro as the main storage and found it was cheaper than coal in 2017 prices. Imagine today?http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217309568

He modelled that each city can have just 2 DAYS storage from OFF-river pumped hydro. On river has limited sites and destroys fragile valley ecosystems. OFF-river avoids this and the world has 100 TIMES more than we need. Refit the turbine room every 50 years and the dams will give you centuries of storage. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

Batteries are needed for the first hour or two to give you instant response. Fortunately sodium batteries can be made from sea-salt, and are about 30% cheaper than lithium, operate in a greater temperature range, and are thermally stable. (Don’t burst into flames.)

WHAT ABOUT THE 1/4 OF PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE SUNSHINE BELT? Overbuilding super-grids becomes even more important! Tony Seba explains the surprising BENEFITS of Overbuilding more in this presentation.

He models some places that might need to Overbuild 4 or 5 or 6 times their grid capacity - just to get through winter. But that’s fine because we are Electrifying Everything, and a lot of that excess electricity will go to NEW electricity markets that replace oil in transport and coal in industrial heating, etc. Page 10 https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEnergy2020-2030-LRR.pdf

Modern HVDC powerlines are so efficient they only lose 1.6% of their power over 1000 km. Hypothetically that means the Sahara in Africa could power a base at the North Pole 10,000 km away for just a 16% loss! Mexico City to Alaska is only 11%.

SCEPTICS like to cherry-pick rare studies into a hypothetically isolated German grid. But if it’s important for Australia in the Sunshine Belt to link up with other states, how much more important for tiny little Germany - which is 21 TIMES smaller than Australia AND outside the Sunshine Belt? These isolated German studies are rare these days. The EU may even Federalise soon and become a country called Europe. The Europeans have been studying this. EG: Alexander Roth, et al 2023 concluded that just linking up the core 12 European countries would reduce storage 30%. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223011513

Germany is part of the ENTSO-E super-grid anyway! ENTSO-E Vision: A Power System for a Carbon Neutral Europe They have a 100% renewables plan for all 35 countries with 532 MILLION customers spread across an area a third larger than Australia! Talk about a “Law of large numbers”.

Youtuber “Real Engineering” – 2020 explains the EU will save $12 to $40 BILLION annually by integrating their super-grid.

More on super-grids. Super grid - Wikipedia

There are even plans for a GLOBAL GRID with just 9 horizontal and vertical HVDC lines. I don’t think renewables NEED this to function the regional super-grids will do the job for now. But the next generation can build this if it works out even cheaper! https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/69/e3sconf_energy-212020_01002.pdf

 

[Ophiolite]

@Tuur and @eclipsenow. I think you both broadly agree there is a problem. If that is accurate, do you think slagging each other off is doing anything to help resolve that problem?

 

[eclipsenow]

"slagging each other off"

I wouldn't put it that strongly. I'm being genuine about the whole time passing and industry changing nature of this revolution.

Remember - I really was a nuclear advocate for probably exactly the same reasons he had to be sceptical about renewables.
I did this for 15 years in a country where nuclear power is currently illegal. About 18 months ago I was forced to change my mind by the overwhelming drop in costs.

What was once the bug is now the feature.

For if you Overbuild renewables to get through winter and / or other intermittency - what do you do with all this 'free' power once you're in good seasons the rest of the year? It might allow us to kick start heaps of other industries.

As for his current scepticism? I just put it down to the culture wars.

 

[Tuur]

Me? I've given up. I have worked at it for nearly forty years. You know what? People don't listen to the older heads. All our experience? Not worth zip. Twice now I've seen utilities purge older heads in the name of cost savings. Call it early retirement. I've already worked at this nearly twice as long as some older head who retired in some other companies, and apparently that was a mistake. Not because of eclipsenow, but because no one listens to those who've been there and done that, so why bother with what nobody wants?

This isn't rocket science: If you don't have generation capacity, you sit in the dark, Have seen that before when a scheme that was going to provide power didn't one hot summer day. And if generation capacity is unreliable, you sit in the dark. It really is that simple.

Most of this was originally going to go to a what's on your mind topic, because what's on my mind right now is going to work and retiring. Likely won't but I can't see much point staying on.

 

[eclipsenow]

This isn't rocket science: If you don't have generation capacity, you sit in the dark, Have seen that before when a scheme that was going to provide power didn't one hot summer day. And if generation capacity is unreliable, you sit in the dark. It really is that simple.

Who said we will not have capacity? That was the whole point of the Scientific American article I sent you.
Of Professor Andrew Blakers.
Of engineer David Osmond.
You overbuild for geographic smoothing.
I'm not that technical - and have a Social Sciences background.
But even I get what they're saying.
You build SO much wind and solar that if only half of them are running across your country, you still have close to 100% capacity.

And Australia is VERY different to the USA. We don't get the northern 66% of our country snowed in for winter.
We don't get Dunkelflaute.
We're in the Sunshine Belt. Along with 75% of the rest of the human race.
Over 40 YEARS of weather data show we never need more than half the grid backed up in storage. So why store it? With renewables about 1/4 the cost of nuclear - just Overbuild the renewables and we're almost done!

With a grid of renewables that's at about 170% capacity.
A near 100 per cent renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage
David reworked the numbers - and got Australia's storage down to 5 hours!
A near 100pct renewable grid for Australia is feasible and affordable, with just a few hours of storage

So unreliable power? Not when you have enough.
And even in rare patches that might need storage - use Sodium batteries for 2 hours.
And off-river pumped hydro for 2 days.
Done.
Not sitting in the dark.

 

[Estrid]

"slagging each other off"

I wouldn't put it that strongly. I'm being genuine about the whole time passing and industry changing nature of this revolution.

Remember - I really was a nuclear advocate for probably exactly the same reasons he had to be sceptical about renewables.
I did this for 15 years in a country where nuclear power is currently illegal. About 18 months ago I was forced to change my mind by the overwhelming drop in costs.

What was once the bug is now the feature.

For if you Overbuild renewables to get through winter and / or other intermittency - what do you do with all this 'free' power once you're in good seasons the rest of the year? It might allow us to kick start heaps of other industries.
View attachment 347512


As for his current scepticism? I just put it down to the culture wars.

What else so passionately right about now
only to later find you didn't know so much after all.