SuperGrid, The Underground Energy Alternative
from the $1-Trillion-Projects dept
Plenty of people have suggested that we should reduce our dependence on oil for energy. But how many folks are scrutinizing a “SuperGrid” project? Take $1 trillion (yes that’s a trillion), spend it over a few years building windmills (or solar cells or whatnot) and an underground system of superconducting conduits that transfer electricity and liquid hydrogen, and evaluate it for any engineering snags. The good news: no engineering showstoppers. The bad news: did I mention the $1 trillion price tag?
Comments on “SuperGrid, The Underground Energy Alternative”
Sure, that's if...
consumers are willing to pay $3,000 a month for their electricity bill. And by the way, hydrogen (for the foreseeable future) can only be extracted economically from fossil fuels, so overall oil pumping will stay the same.
As your high school chemistry taught you, hydrogen molecules are very small. Thus hydrogen has a nasty tendency to leak out of any pipes or containers holding them, resulting in spectacular explosions. No engineering company in their right mind will think about having a city-sized network of liquid hydrogen, unless they want the whole city to blow up like Baghdad. So, consumers will have to deal with a $3,000/month electric system that might also make their house suddenly explode like the Hindenburg. Not facts the hydrogen lobby wants you to know.
Oh, and as for the notion that wind power is somehow environmentally friendly — wind generators are noisy, ugly, unreliable, and kill birds. Solar plants remain economically infeasible welfare projects, and each solar cell takes almost as much energy to produce as it will ever produce in its lifetime. Solar cells and superconducting materials also require rare earth metals whose mining destroys the environment of developing nations.
Re: Sure, that's if...
>resulting in spectacular explosions.
Go ahead. Post the % of H2 needed to make an explosion happen.
>Solar plants remain economically infeasible welfare projects, and each solar cell takes almost as much energy to produce as it will ever produce in its lifetime
Really? And your proof is? Oh, wait. You don’t have a clue.
Re: Re: Sure, that's if...
>Go ahead. Post the % of H2 needed to make an explosion happen.
According to http://www.ott.doe.gov/otu/field_ops/pdfs/fcm03r0.pdf,
the stoichiometric air/fuel ratio (by volume) is 2.4:1. Hydrogen can ignite in considerably leaner mixtures than gasoline.
Some hydrogen bigots will claim that it is almost impossible to ignite hydrogen as a pure gas at room temperature. What they don’t tell you is that hydrogen is a reactive, volatile substance that turn surrounding substances into high explosives. Pipes that transport hydrogen are known to become shrapnel bombs, spontaneously exploding from static electricity. People who stand near hydrogen sources absorb hydrogen through their lungs and skin, and when they light a cigarette, can explode like a hot dog in a microwave. A basement room with a hydrogen tank will pool hydrogen near the ceiling, where lighting systems exist. When someone turns on the light, the basement turns into a white-hot bunker buster.
>>Solar plants remain economically infeasible welfare projects, and each solar cell takes almost as much energy to produce as it will ever produce in its lifetime
>Really? And your proof is? Oh, wait. You don’t have a clue.
According to http://wire0.ises.org/wire/Publications/Research.nsf/H/O?Open&000135DA,
“There are, however, several indirect environmental impacts related to PV power systems that require further consideration. The production of present generation PV power systems is relatively energy intensive, involves the use of large quantities of bulk materials and (smaller) quantities of substances that are scarce and/or toxic. During operation, damaged modules or a fire may lead to the release of hazardous substances. Finally, at the end of their useful life time PV power systems have to be decommissioned, and resulting waste flows have to be managed.”
Re: Sure, that's if...
>consumers are willing to pay $3,000 a month for their electricity bill.
And you have arrived at this figure from where?
As your high school chemistry taught you, hydrogen molecules are very small. Thus hydrogen has a nasty tendency to leak out of any pipes or containers holding them, resulting in spectacular explosions. No engineering company in their right mind will think about having a city-sized network of liquid hydrogen, unless they want the whole city to blow up like Baghdad.
So you go from the imbrittlement of hydrogen on metal to whole cities exploding just like a city that US Bombers are dropping bombs on. Exactly how disconnected is your thougt process?
>So, consumers will have to deal with a $3,000/month electric system that might also make their house suddenly explode like the Hindenburg.
Now you STILL claim $3000 a month and then you claim houses ‘ suddenly explode like the Hindenburg’ What houses are made from aluminum sulphide, so they can do what you claim?
>Oh, and as for the notion that wind power is somehow environmentally friendly — wind generators are noisy, ugly, unreliable, and kill birds.
Guess what, Gas turbine and coal generation plants are noisy too.
Ugly – Gee, I think coal plants, nuke plants are ugly. Gas turbines are kinda ugly too.
Unreliable – well DUH. Any electrical generation equipment is not going to be reliable if no maintence is done.
bird kills – show data that windmills are ‘bird killers’. Compare this data to windows in homes/buildings. If oyu are SO damn concerned about birds, please work to ban windows in buildings.
>Solar plants remain economically infeasible welfare projects, and each solar cell takes almost as much energy to produce as it will ever produce in its lifetime
That’s not what is said here:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy01osti/30280.pdf
>People who stand near hydrogen sources absorb hydrogen through their lungs and skin, and when they light a cigarette, can explode like a hot dog in a microwave.
Proof?
>The production of present generation PV power systems is relatively energy intensive, involves the use of large quantities of bulk materials and (smaller) quantities of substances that are scarce and/or toxic
http://www.energyinnovations.com/
Ohhh! Evil plastic!
If you are so worried about evil chemicals with energy intensive and poisonous produtcs, then by all means start by turniong off your computer.
OK, lets be reasonable here
The trillion-dollar cost is a bit to bite off, but let’s not get hysterical here.
If you charged each of the 117,824,134 (7/01 estimate) households in the United States $3,000 per month, you pay off the capital cost in 2.82 months. I’ve never seen anything paid back quite that fast. If you paid for it over decades (as the article suggests) the cost drops to $20-$30, assuming no subsidies, foreign investments, increases in the number of households, or improvements in technologies as construction progresses. Also the $20-$30 is in current dollars, not adjusted for 30 to 40 years of inflation.
The most economical hydrogen extration is from hydrocarbons (oil), but I’ve never seen any calculations to indicate that the amount needed from an extraction standpoint would go up, down, or stay the same if you wanted the hydrogen for electricity generation as opposed to any other compound in the crude.
Hydrogen can be tricky to deal with, but I think a company like Praxair will disagree with the assertion that it can’t be handled safely, they’ve been doing it for years. The problem here is one of scale, and thus primarily an engineering issue.
Wind generators can be noisy, they can also be nearly silent, as was the one (80-ft diameter)I stood next to in Moorhead, MN a few months ago. Reliability can be an issue, but again this is largely an engineering problem not an insurmountale theoretical barrier. I don’t have any knowledge of the bird lethality of wind generator vs. any other generation technology.
Finally, not all solar power is photovoltaic. Photovoltaic cells are really a niche-application, where you need lightweight, solid state generation of relatively small amounts of power. They work great for communications satellites and recharging camcorder batteries in the Amazon rainforest, but due to thier conversion efficiency, don’t make great large-scale powerplants. However, you can use reflected sunlight from polished aluminum panels to drive a boiler-turbine system in desert areas and generate much larger quantities of electricity than with solar cells.
All of this will take development to make economically feasible (as opposed to technically possible), but there’s nothing so wrong with the concept that dismissing it out of hand is a good idea.
Re: OK, lets be reasonable here
>If you paid for it over decades (as the article suggests) the cost drops to $20-$30, assuming no subsidies, foreign investments, increases in the number of households, or improvements in technologies as construction progresses. Also the $20-$30 is in current dollars, not adjusted for 30 to 40 years of inflation.
President Carter tried something like that via “synergy” in the 1970s, which turned into a complete disaster. Convincing people to pay an extra $30 for a new power system that could blow up their house like the Hindenburg will be a tough sell.
>However, you can use reflected sunlight from polished aluminum panels to drive a boiler-turbine system in desert areas and generate much larger quantities of electricity than with solar cells.
They built a few of those toy power plants in the 70s and 80s. Polished aluminum panels have a way of getting dirty, so you’ll have to hire a million Mexicans with oven mitts to keep them clean.
Re: Re: OK, lets be reasonable here
Actually, recent research has shown that the primary fuel of the Hindenburg fire was the outer skin’s coating of the blimp was aluminum sulphide — a substance that NASA uses today in Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters as fuel.
Re: Re: Re: OK, lets be reasonable here
I’ve heard that claim made by hydrogen lobbyists, but hydrogen still played a part in accelerating the flames. If you put a blowtorch to a balloon filled with hydrogen, it will make a louder bang than a balloon filled with air. The rubber does the burning, but hydrogen increases the bang. So it goes with a basement full of hydrogen — the paint on the walls, the objects in the room will burn, but hydrogen will help turn it as hot as Saddam’s basement.
this article is silly
The superconducting stuff is already being implemented because it saves the electric companies money and the hydrogen is, pardon the pun, a pipe dream that will never happen.
Fuel cells will run on methanol and ethanol, because it’s easy to deal with, relatively non-toxic, and the technology exists. Dealing with raw hydrogen is asinine.
hydrogen vs ?
My feeling is that, at least as a rough approximation, all energy sources with the same potential to deliver useful energy on demand, will have roughly the same potential for catastrophy if something goes horribly wrong. That goes for anything: hydrogen, CNG, LNG, petroleum, solar, batteries, flywheels, compressed air, … The safety differences in current systems are mostly a matter of engineering rather than basic science. So I think that any of the safety arguments are, in the long run, moot.