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This discussion relates to Technology Review's article A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid.

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  erbium
  

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  07/14/2009 12:40 AM

  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?

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  • 
    GruenSein
    

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    07/14/2009 05:16 AM

    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.

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  • 
    robert.hargraves
    

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    07/14/2009 07:21 AM

    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.

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    mkogrady
    

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    07/14/2009 10:20 AM

    Re: Anything planned by the govt

    Perhaps a decentralization of electric power may be better suited to the consumers and taxpayers. The governement could drive new power systems by acting as a major buyer of Solar and mass power storage and use their leverage to order millions of solar panels and flow cell batteries sized for home use ( example 8kva systems with 12 hour power reserve storage). The critical mass needed to make this more cost effective can only be generated by the government being a major purchaser.
    
    As for Grid upgrades, they would be smaller due to the decentalization aspect. The costs ($60 Billion) should be a heck of a lot less.

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  • 
    DarkRobot
    

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    07/18/2009 02:45 AM

    Re: Anything planned by the govt

    It's about the cost of 6-10 nuclear plants, but provides much greater grid redundancy than just a regional grid approach or local microgeneration.  Unless, of course, there are some dramatic breakthroughs in microgeneration or efficiency technologies.

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  • 
    tulcak
    

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    08/05/2009 12:41 AM

    Re: Anything planned by the govt

    A costly but necessary New Electricity Grid:  To use solar and wind power, decentralization of our existing grid is necessary.  Right now, we use large coal powered plants for the most part to generate electricity to send over our existing grid.  To send electricity produced by solar and wind technologies we must rebuild our grid to allow for a de-centralized method of providing electricity.  To imply that our existing grid is adequate is to embrace the status quo of continuing to use the burning of fossil fuels as our primary source of electricity.  This is not sustainable because we will either eventually run out of fossil fuels or the effects of global warming will be strengthened to the point that civilization as we know it will end.

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  • 
    tulcak
    

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    08/05/2009 01:33 AM

    Re: Anything planned by the govt

    and by the way, central planning has proven to be highly successful...  that is why so many organizations and nations have done it throughout history.  I sense that you have a certain political slant or ideology that pre-conceives your argument.

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  pseudowilliams
  

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  07/14/2009 07:45 AM

  Is this all about keeping coal plants alive?

  Behind all the negatives towards upgrading our national grid which has been developed in a haphazard way over the last century I see an attempt to justify keeping coal fired plants alive at the expense of developing clean renewables. Carbon sequestering doesn't help our eastern ecosystem from continuing to die over acid rain. Yes we will have off shore wind farms here in Massachusetts, but a strong national grid will stabilize our supply with our demand.

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  mdeschane
  

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  07/14/2009 10:24 AM

  Renewables

  The wind farm guys should hook up with this guy http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/06/22/synthetic.tree.climate.change.ccs/index.html
  and put the synthetic trees at the wind farms. They would still need to invest in pipeline infrastructure to get the sequestered CO2 to its destination. Their profit would come from selling the carbon credits.
  
  Whether or not CSS is a worthwhile pursuit seems up in the air yet. David McKay has something to say about that http://www.withouthotair.com/, it's a good read so far.
  
  I don't know if we need, or want, a national electric grid, but we *do* have a national highway system and it does appear to provide a benefit.

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  lasertekk
  

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  07/14/2009 10:33 AM

  Other news sources

  This topic was already covered indirectly by one of the news outlets (maybe CNN) last week.  It seems the plans for new power distribution lines line up with existing or planned coal plants.  Can you say special interest interference?  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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