Re: OT Frost your nuts?

[Dave Balderstone]

Proven crude reserves are at their highest level EVER in human history.

[keithw86]

This is a good ideat, too:

> solar,

There are many but the greenies want dams torn down, not built.

*LOTS* if you include Thorium and surplus weapons Plutonium. Greenies aren't going to like this alternative much either.

What do you want from watermellons. The interest is *not* in energy, rather the opposite.

[J. Clarke]

Chris Friesen wrote:

Look, if you're going to advocate for solar at least learn how to run the numbers properly. You need a continuous 1GW to run your aluminum plant. You're going to use "mirrors" to "focus heat". Fine. Now you're going to do what with that heat? Run a heat engine? So you're getting what, 50% efficiency? (I'm being generous with that one). So you need to double that area. Now, it gets dark at night, so you need to store energy somehow. You need to generate 500W/m^2 during the day to make up for the 0 at night. So double it again--more than double for a mid-latitude installation where days are shorter than nights in the winter--for the Baie-Comeau plant for example you'd have to triple that reflector area. And your storage system isn't going to be completely efficient--if you're using batteries then you have the immense cost of replacing them every few hundred charge/discharge cycles--go out and price a gigawatt of the cheapest batteries you can find and get back to us. Or maybe you're going to electrolyze water into hydrogen. So that's happening at 80 percent. Now what are you going to do with that hydrogen, use it to run your heat engine at night or are you going to use fuel cells? If you're running your heat engine at night then you've got another 50 percent efficiency hit, so double your collector area again plus another 25 percent. Or maybe you're going to run hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells--that's more efficient (but not hugely more) but now you also have a huge bank of fuel cells to maintain. And how much added capacity do you need to provide to deal with heavy overcast? How much does rain degrade the efficiency of your reflectors? How much additional capacity do you need to provide to allow for dust and bird poop on the reflectors, or are you going to clean 16 or more square kilometers of reflector every day? And how many cleanings can they take before the surface becomes unacceptably degraded?

So, your solar collector area to power that plant in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, would be maybe 5.5-6km square, not your 1x4. The aluminum plant itself is only about .5x.5 or .25 square kilometers. So how many power plants 20 times the size of the facility they power can we afford to build? The Manic-5 dam, which actually does power that facility, using water from a lake in a gigantic meteor crater, is only about 1.2km long. The entire Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut is only about .6x.2km.

[Robatoy]

This is likely to spark a load of questions. There is a really cool saying in Dutch which translates into "one fool can ask more questions than a 1thousand wise men can answer." Apply when needed, rinse and repeat.

[Morris Dovey]

If the theory is correct, it would be a Good Thing to encourage that process to take place in more readily accessible locations...

So? Run the aluminum production facilities from some other power source.

Patient to doctor: "It hurts when I do /this/." Doctor to patient: "Well then, don't /do/ that!"

:)

[Swingman]

All discussion fosters thought on some level, whether you agree with it or not.

Only for the close minded ... and, as we see, it was your choice to either hit the NEXT key, or flap yours.

[HeyBub]

Heh! Can you imagine what it costs to cover 4 sq km with grass seed, let alone MIRRORS?

I have run the numbers. Allowing for conversion efficiency (70%), darkness (12 hours), clouds (20%), and latitude (30°N), it would take a solar collector the size of the Los Angeles basin (~1200 sq miles) to supply electricity just for California (~50Gw). The only way to reduce the size of the solar farm is to move the orbit of the earth closer to the sun.

Leaving aside the cost to construct, install, and maintain something covering 3,000 sq km, the citizens in Los Angles would have to live in perpetual darkness.

Which, when one thinks on it ....

[Larry Jaques]

On Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:50:37 -0800 (PST), the infamous Robatoy scrawled the following:

Let's apply it to Chris' comment, shall we?

[keithw86]

Now, polish that mirror.

They don't. That's the point.