eleusis
All American
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| Quote : | | "And I'm not sure about your use of "thermal"; sometimes, individuals use it to mean "passive" solar." |
then do some research. solar thermal refers to systems that use either parabolic troughs that heat oil in a pipe or large fields of flat mirrors that concentrate the sun at a large heat tower. The heat generates steam that turns steam turbines and generates electricity using equipment very similar to what is currently used at cogeneration plants. They can even pump the steam into big salt reservoirs that store the heat and allow you to continuously generate power through the night. The systems have incredible intermittent ride-through time compared to other renewables out there, excluding hydro. Spain has a ton of them, and they are building more in California, Arizona, and New Mexico currently. They can be upwards of 30% efficient, which is close to what some older coal plants run at. More importantly, they only require mirrors and currently available plumbing and turbine equipment; no need for rare earth metals.
Someone commented earlier about how much space they take up. When you consider how much land goes into the mining/drilling/processing operations for natural gas and coal, solar is comparable. The land being used by solar doesn't suffer from long term economic damage like that caused by coal mining and hydraulic fracturing.
| Quote : | | "Current projections show that we should reach the power output equivalent of about six new nuclear power plants by 2035" |
At 1,000MW per reactor, thats 6,000MW. China built one dam that will make 22,000MW. We almost make that much electricity from 2 coal plants in NC. 6,000MW won't even cover a fraction of our load growth between now and 2035, which means nuclear will account for an even smaller portion of our energy supply in the future than it does now. Nuclear also has the nasty side effect of requiring you to store energy, and we've built about as many pumped hydro facilities as we can get away with. Unless the federal regulatory bodies will allow utilities to cycle load on nukes and randomize their refueling schedules, we're not going to get around this problem. Due to national security issues, I don't see this changing anytime soon. 9/21/2010 6:38:27 PM
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