OT Big increase in solar electricity anticipated

[Tim Streater]

Not a lot. Most of what we have was produced just after the big bang.

[Andy Burns]

Cancelled mine after he started arriving after I'd left for work (and I'm no early bird) so it cooked on the doorstep all day ...

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

I blew one half of a pair of pliers off with a bank of 30 car batteries. I was tightening a nut which connected them to an invertor and touched both terminals.

Batteries are shit (at the moment until we develop better chemistry). Aren't we better with things like Cruachan, storing gravitational energy?

[Chris J Dixon]

I bet that if it was proposed as a new service, the Health & Safety folk would do a Risk Assessment and declare the whole idea manifestly unsound: unrefrigerated delivery vehicles, milk left on the doorstep to stew gently in the sun...

Chris

[Chris Hogg]

No question about it. Pumped storage is the only viable method of safely storing the amounts of energy necessary to smooth out renewables variability. The trouble is, in the UK we don't have much of the appropriate topography. A survey of possible sites was carried out a few decades ago (can't find the reference ATM) and they only came up with about half a dozen, several of which are now in use.

Of course, there doesn't necessarily have to be 'an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir' in the Dinorwig model. The 'lower reservoir' can be the sea, but this means the upper reservoir has to be on the coast and capable of accepting salt water, which in most UK cases would probably not be environmentally acceptable.

This is also interesting

[The Natural Philosopher]

In the limit its not the only possibility, but it is certainly the best.

The problem is the immense amount of power the nation consumes.

Storing that amount of energy for even a few hours represents an energy store that under fault conditions can be extremely dangerous.

I leave it to the reader to decide which they would rather live next to. A 1000 ft high dam containing a few million tons of water., a tank the size of a small village full of hydrogen, a flywheel the size of a football pitch spinning at enormous RPM, a reservoir of white hot salt the size of a city block, a pile of coal 300 ft high, or a kilogram of uranium stored in a water tank.

[damduck-egg]

The larger floats appear to have cooled compartments now and many are enclosed to stop theft frompassing feral kids etc . Unlike the 1950's we have things like coolboxes or small fridges which can be left by the door which can solve the problem of being out all day although there will be people who cannot do that such as flat dwellers without a secure place to put one. But you can never have a solution for all. A couple of 4pint milk containers refilled with water and put in the freezer till frozen will keep a coolbox cool enough to keep a couple more of milk cool for hours when the milkmen puts them alongside in the coolbox.

G.Harman

[Chris Hogg]

When browsing for the reference to potential PS sites in the UK, I came across mention of the use of massive weights pulled up an incline and then being allowed to descend slowly, a sort of pumped storage without water. Bearing in mind Dinorwig stores around 6 million tonnes of water with a head of some 550 ft, I can't really envisage a lump of steel of that weight being hauled up a 500 ft incline. I certainly wouldn't want to be at the bottom if the string broke!

Elastic band storage; has to be the way forward!

[The Natural Philosopher]

The point is that uranium is like an enormous battery that comes fully charged, courtesy of God/The Big Bang, and is the most energy dense form of storage there is with the exception of a hydrogen helium transition, which we cant do yet in any useful way.

Not only is it massively energy dense, its unbelievably safe. Piles of uranium have to be treated in unique and special ways involving a lot of expensive kit before they will release their energy, and as even the worst disaster of Chernobyl shows, they may get hot and burn, but they don't go bang.

Water up a hill has the absolutely worst safety record in a disaster.

It has taken te combined propaganda pf several large nations to make the public sufficuiently scared of nuclear energy to stop it wiping out all other forms of electricity generation.

[tony sayer]

In article , damduck- [e-mail] scribeth thus

As much as I miss the daily milk delivery we can now buy Six pints for £1.48 each as opposed to around 70 odd pence per pint delivered, so 3 of those meets the weekly requirement..

So its £4.44 against £12.60 no real contest....

[Tim Streater]

And neither does the China Syndrome exist. I was in the US in 1979 at the time of Three Mile Island. I was astonished at the number of intelligent people who thought that a sphere of molten uranium, which would be hot enough to melt concrete, would stay spherical as it moved downwards.

Such as the Banqiao Dam disaster.

In terms of energy density and the amount of energy that would require to be stored, the problem seems to be that most people simply have no concept of the amount of energy we're talking about, or the amount of power that is flowing through the grid at any given time. So they assume that a couple of car batteries would do the trick.

[Capitol]

Surely it doesn't have to be 1000ft up? What's wrong with down?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think its 7 Hiroshima bombs a day to keep britains toasters and kettles going

Now imagine storing a whole winters worth...in a form that could explode...

[Chris Hogg]

Nothing, in principle. But put some numbers into it. Take Dinorwig as a reference. It holds 6.7 million cubic metres of water with a average head that varies between 494 and 542 metres as the lake drains

(I incorrectly said 550 ft in an earlier post). That means the hole has to be say 550 metres deep, and the depth of water at the bottom would be 48 metres (542-494), which gives the cross sectional area of the hole as nearly 140,000 sq. metres

6700000/48), or a circle about 420 metres in diameter. It's volume would be 77 million cu. metres. That's one big hole (assuming my maths is correct, which isn't guaranteed!) requiring huge capital investment to excavate. Cheaper to look elsewhere for your power system, e.g. nuclear.

Of course, you could make it wider and shallower, or a lot wider and a lot shallower, when you'd end up with something like the tidal lagoon being proposed for Swansea Bay, except this wouldn't be tidal, but pumped.

[Chris Hogg]

PS: you could just have a (relatively) narrow shaft going down to a whacking great 6.7 million cubic metre chamber at the bottom, but still massively expensive to construct, I would think.

And I should have added that MacKay has a useful and authoritative analysis of grid energy storage systems in the pages following the one I referenced at

up to about page 200.

[bert]

In message , Chris Hogg writes

AKA Smart Grid

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Although this sounds a bit wrong ;-)

"Ed Davey, the energy secretary, said the deal would give Britain access to Norwegian green hydropower at the flick of a switch, to *****drive wind turbines***** in the UK when the wind was not blowing."

So, they're really big fans when it's not windy enough?

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Although this sounds a bit wrong ;-)

"Ed Davey, the energy secretary, said the deal would give Britain access to Norwegian green hydropower at the flick of a switch, to *****drive wind turbines***** in the UK when the wind was not blowing."

So, they're really big fans when it's not windy enough?

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Oh my god, I just noticed this too: "two way electricity cable". A what?!?

[Chris Hogg]

What do you expect from politicians and journalists? An understanding of the technicalities? YMBJ!