Science!

[Billy's Little Trip]

You seem to be a good speaker, John. Molten salt? That's a new one for me. A couple questions.
I'm all for the use of solar for everything in place of fossil fuels, but those plants are huge for what they can supply. Similar to the windmill fields we have here.
Why not use that plant to create the power needed to create a power supply for the production of hydrogen? Instead of making electricity that goes directly to it's final destination, why not send it to a destination that multiplies it for hundreds of final destinations? It would be like telling the genie on your third wish that you want infinite wishes.

That's actually not a very efficient thing to do- you lose a lot of energy to heat. It'd be far better to get efficient long-term electricity storage (which graphene capacitors are very promising for) and just power things with the electricity directly.

Yeah, Ive read about the graphene supercapacitors. Solid state is a nice simple storage method, there's no doubt about that. But I'm talking about producing energy, then storing it. Hydrogen production is an involved process of tanks, plumbing, etc, similar to nuclear power plants, but much smaller and the end result is far less hazardous. The biggest problem is producing hydrogen in an eco-friendly method or it defeats the purpose.

John's presentation is about these huge mirror fields that can supply power to a small town. The electricity needed to supply a single family home is enough electricity to produce hydrogen to generate enough electricity to the entire neighborhood (non quotable fact, just an example). So what if the huge mirror field was supplying electricity to multiple hydrogen plants in multiple small towns? Then at that point the question of storage can be put in place. In theory, the graphene supercap sounds great from everything I've read, but you'd need something the size of a microwave oven to supply a cell phone. Whereas a hydrogen fiber cell the size of a car battery can power a car. Note, these units of measurement are not quotable and just used to make a point, lol.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I was assuming that by "hydrogen production" he meant the electrolysis of water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen.

Yes.

[JonPorobil]

Why not use that plant to create the power needed to create a power supply for the production of hydrogen? Instead of making electricity that goes directly to it's final destination, why not send it to a destination that multiplies it for hundreds of final destinations? It would be like telling the genie on your third wish that you want infinite wishes.

It sounds like you might be describing fusion energy, which is what makes the Sun shine, but it's not (the last time I checked) anywhere close to feasible here on Earth.

I was assuming that by "hydrogen production" he meant the electrolysis of water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. Also, fusion doesn't produce hydrogen, it produces helium FROM hydrogen.

Ah, but he seemed to think that it would produce more energy than it takes to cause the reaction, which threw me off.

Chris, care to explain in a little more detail what you're proposing?

[Billy's Little Trip]

I edited my post above, jon.

The electricity needed to supply a single family home is enough electricity to produce hydrogen to generate enough electricity to the entire neighborhood (non quotable fact, just an example)

Although I have an engineering mind, I'm not a scientist, nor engineer. But I have a natural born understanding of mechanics and can easily understand theories laid out in a chain of reactions and events. This makes me a really good troubleshooter.
.....and I still subscribe to both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. So yeah, I'm an expert in all things ever! (sarcasm) Just don't ask for detailed explanations, lol.

[fluffy]

The electricity needed to supply a single family home is enough electricity to produce hydrogen to generate enough electricity to the entire neighborhood (non quotable fact, just an example).

Not even remotely accurate. If you used the amount of energy that it takes to power a small house to generate hydrogen, then the energy you'd get back from the hydrogen would be enough to power about 1/10th of a small house.

This makes me a really good troublemaker.

FTFY

[JonPorobil]

"...but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

[Billy's Little Trip]

The electricity needed to supply a single family home is enough electricity to produce hydrogen to generate enough electricity to the entire neighborhood (non quotable fact, just an example).

Not even remotely accurate. If you used the amount of energy that it takes to power a small house to generate hydrogen, then the energy you'd get back from the hydrogen would be enough to power about 1/10th of a small house.

Is that an official "non quotable fact, just an example"?

[fluffy]

Pulling numbers out of your ass and saying it's "just an example" doesn't make it any less wrong or impossible.

If what you were saying was true, then you could use the power of one house to generate hydrogen that powers 100 houses, then use each of those houses' power to generate hydrogen that powers 10000 houses, and so on. It would be a flagrant violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Remember how when you were a kid you thought maybe you could pull yourself up by the shoulders REALLY HARD and then you'd be able to fly? It's sort of like that.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Remember how when you were a kid you thought maybe you could pull yourself up by the shoulders REALLY HARD and then you'd be able to fly?

No! That would be ridiculous.

My thought isn't thinking that you generate hydrogen that goes directly to hundreds of houses. My thought is to create hydrogen that is stored in very high capacity fuel cells. Then those cells run generators that supply electricity hundreds of homes.

Think of it like a town's water tower that supplies water to hundreds of homes. That water tower took a long to to fill, but once it's filled, it can supply hundreds of homes and a level can be maintained because usages change from night to day, seasonally, etc. But there is always a surplus. It gets low during peak usage and is replenished during off peak usage.

...and before you say it, I know the purpose of a water tower. The hypothesis here is production, storage, supply and replenishment.

[Caravan Ray]

You seem to be a good speaker, John. Molten salt? That's a new one for me. A couple questions.
I'm all for the use of solar for everything in place of fossil fuels, but those plants are huge for what they can supply. Similar to the windmill fields we have here.
Why not use that plant to create the power needed to create a power supply for the production of hydrogen? Instead of making electricity that goes directly to it's final destination, why not send it to a destination that multiplies it for hundreds of final destinations? It would be like telling the genie on your third wish that you want infinite wishes.

I don't know much about hydrogen fuel cells, but as Fluffy has said - you don't get something for nothing. Any conversion from one form of energy to another always leads to a lot of energy being lost.

But the main point of the presentation was not to talk about things that may work in the future - but to highlight technologies that are ready to use now, are being used now and can be constructed and operated using technology available now.

It is essentially to answer the response often heard that renewable technologies are too expensive, or unreliable or not mature enough to replace fossil fuels now - those ideas are simply wrong.

It seems that the draw back to hydrogen power, from things I've read, is that it still needs a an energy source to produce it that is run from fossil fuels, etc. It seem like a solar plant like you are explaining would be a great power supply for hydrogen production, which then can be stored in thousands of storage cells.

Or - you can just use the heat collected to generate electricity directly, rather than wasting most of it by converting it to something else.

Keep it simple.

[Caravan Ray]

John's presentation is about these huge mirror fields that can supply power to a small town.

No. It was about these huge mirror fields that in concert with wind power, increased efficiency and an upgraded national grid can supply power to a modern industrial nation of 20 million people.

[Caravan Ray]

Remember how when you were a kid you thought maybe you could pull yourself up by the shoulders REALLY HARD and then you'd be able to fly?

No! That would be ridiculous.

My thought isn't thinking that you generate hydrogen that goes directly to hundreds of houses. My thought is to create hydrogen that is stored in very high capacity fuel cells. Then those cells run generators that supply electricity hundreds of homes.

Think of it like a town's water tower that supplies water to hundreds of homes. That water tower took a long to to fill, but once it's filled, it can supply hundreds of homes and a level can be maintained because usages change from night to day, seasonally, etc. But there is always a surplus. It gets low during peak usage and is replenished during off peak usage.

...and before you say it, I know the purpose of a water tower. The hypothesis here is production, storage, supply and replenishment.

The idea is sort of right - but you are taking one step too many.

Why use heat energy to produce hydrogen to store, when you can just store the heat?

Generating electricity isn't rocket science. You just need to spin a turbine to turn a rotor in a generator. And using water - either by raising it to a height and letting it fall, or heating it to make steam are the easiest ways of doing it.

[Caravan Ray]

I'm all for the use of solar for everything in place of fossil fuels, but those plants are huge for what they can supply.

They are not really that huge when you do a comparison with coal powered plants.

Here in QLD, one of our largest power plants is at Milmerran - about 100 km west of where I live,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millmerran_Power_Station

It is a 850 MW station built next to a coal mine. When you take into account the area of land needed for the mine, the plant, tailings, stockpiles etc. - 8 x 110MW solar thermal plants the size of that being built now in Nevada would not occupy much more area.

More significant is the fact that Millmerran was built where the coal is. Which just happens to be on the Darling Downs, Australia's most productive agricultural land. The threat to agriculture from coal and gas mining on the Downs is a big issue here. The thing about solar thermal is that it works best where it is hot and sunny and hardly ever rains. Those places are not productive agricultural land. And we have a lot of those types of places here.

To see how much land a coal plant actually uses (and degrades) - use googlemaps find the towns of Singleton and Muswellbrook in NSW, north of Sydney. Look at the land between them on the aerial photos. The scarred land you will see is not much good for anything anymore. Again - this is one of the richest agricultural areas in the country (wine drinkers may have heard of the Hunter Valley). But the coal powers the massive powerstations that supply Sydney and Newcastle. Seems like a terrible waste.

I am sure there are even better examples of this is the USA's coal mining areas.

[fluffy]

Also it's funny-but-sad how people are so afraid of nuclear power based on it being radioactive, when the annual radiation output from any given coal plant is, as I understand it, higher than the sum total of all radiation ever released by nuclear plants, including meltdowns. (Similarly, you get a bigger dose of radiation from eating a banana than from living next door to a nuclear power plant.)

Not that nuclear is particularly sustainable, of course; there's only so much uranium in the planet's crust, after all, and strip-mining for uranium is every bit as bad as strip-mining for coal (or any other non-renewable resource, for that matter).

[Caravan Ray]

strip-mining for uranium is every bit as bad as strip-mining for coal .

Worse really. Coal just leaves behind a hole in the ground and maybe acid mine drainage. Uranium, or any other heavy metal leaves behind tonnes of toxic and often radioactive tailings. Rum Jungle in the NT closed in 1971. It has still never been cleaned up:

In 2003, a government survey of the tailings piles at Rum Jungle found that capping which was supposed to help contain this radioactive waste for at least 100 years, had failed in less than 20 years. [4] The Territory and Federal Governments continue to argue over responsibility for funding rehabilitation on the polluted East Finniss River [5] Contamination of local groundwater has yet to be addressed. [6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Jungle ... _Territory

[Billy's Little Trip]

Thanks for putting it all in perspective, John. And yes, I have a terrible habit of making things harder than they need to be.

I vacation often in Laughlin Nevada because it's on the Colorado river and Lake Mohave and I'm a boater. It's great because it's like a mini Las Vegas with great casinos hotels, but full of boaters, wakeboarders, water sport people, etc.
One thing that you couldn't miss was the smoke stack for the coal burning Mohave power station. They finally shut it down and started to dismantle it a couple years ago. The only thing left on the 2500 acres where the plant was is the switching station that is still in use.

I never understood why they even had that power station because within eye shot of it is the Davis Dam on the Colorado river, which is a hydroelectric power station. I may be wrong, but that sounds like a very clean method of making electricity. At least I hope so, because we wakeboard and tube float down river from the dam and have for most of my life. We often ride our waverunners to the base of the dam because it's an amazing thing to see from that angle. It's water release times are precise and it's pretty cool to time it so you are floating as close as allowed to the dam and the river rises very quickly and it feels like the horizon is sinking as you look around. Almost makes you dizzy.

[fluffy]

Hydro is clean as long as you ignore the massive environmental damage caused by the dam itself (which effectively converts a huge amount of wetlands into a lake). Although you can argue that we're not doing any worse than beavers in that regard.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I figure this is a good place to put this. I really like Anthony Bourdan, the chef that now travels around the world trying different dishes from different cultures.
But now I found out he has a very unlike friend, Josh Homme from QotSA. And happy to find out he is not only in an episode of Bourdan's "no reservations", but wrote the theme song for Bourdan's new show "Parts Unknown" on CNN with collaborating friend Mark Lanegan from the Screaming Trees.

Anyway, here is why I picked the science thread. Science? Foil Hat? Just a cool acoustic dome? Who cares, it's Josh Homme and Anthony Bourdan, lol.



The teaser clip. I laugh every time I hear Hommes say eEEeee..

[ken]

Is that like how Mario Batale and Gwenyth Paltrow had that show together?

[fluffy]

No, he actually spelled "Josh Homme" right. Well, sometimes.

[Billy's Little Trip]

No, because Anthony and Josh don't suck, lol. Kidding, I heart Ms Pepper Pots. Mario is a blow hard that wears clogs.

[Billy's Little Trip]

No, he actually spelled "Josh Homme" right. Well, sometimes.

*long look at fluf*..............................ANnnyway, just thought I'd share.