New Record Low Solar Price in Abu Dhabi – Costs Plunging Faster Than Expected
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In the future it might also be interesting to move industries with high power demand to places with more solar power - electric arc furnaces, aluminum production, ... Some of those require a base load, but a lot of them can survive a few hours with limited power.
You are storing energy in a form (cleaned water) for later use.
Unlike a manufacturer or other businesses which can't just hire people overnight/ramp up during the day.
I do agree the reversal process is convoluted and not really chemistry.
Sell the water = money <==> energy
To get started, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable
Current long distance power transmission is most often used as a way of 'balancing' production and demand between different types of plants; it is not intended or capable of transmitting the full power needs of the recieving area.
I didn't say it's just about "connecting countries with a common grid". Switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources is much more challenging than that. However, transmitting lots of power over long distances is doable and cheaper than many people think.
Importing a whole country's power consumption is probably a bit much in terms of required infrastructure (except for the microstates which already do this), but smaller links are already present and make economic sense. I don't think the politics of energy security are an obstacle if the price is right.
While there isn't a complete grid, the UK has connections to Ireland, the Netherlands and France, enabling a bit more balancing. You can see the UK is currently running on 60% CCGT and 25% nuclear, although the 10GW solar capacity can't be shown because there's no central real-time metering for it. That's quite an impressive amount given the total (net of solar) demand is 30GW. Two and a half "Drax" worth of power, invisibly distributed around the country!
For instance, Morocco plans to put solar panels in the Sahara. The solution that is considered in order to transmit power was that the solar station would charge batteries and the batteries would be carried by trucks.
Pretty simple math, if you cable has 1 Ohm/km then the distance between the Northeastern most point in Canada to Ireland is around 3000 km (or 3x10E6m)
So suppose you have this very long extension cord, plug it on Canada (100V there to help the math) and plug a lamp on Ireland (an old incandescent 100W bulb, because it dims)
Your lamp is going to have 100 Ohms. Current is going to be 100V/(6100 ohms) = 16mA, making your lamp glow with 1.6W
Transmission costs money, but less than many believe. The cost of high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission lines is roughly 1 cents per kwh for 500 miles, or 1.5 cents per kwh for 1,000 miles transmitted. Over 1,000 miles, an HVDC line may lose 5% or so of the electricity it transmits.
I don't consider 5% per 1000 miles an "absurd" amount.
However doing it on terrain is much easier than doing it under the ocean
That's why we need big towers
When you can't use towers (on land) you have all kinds of special isolation techniques
Anyway, it's only 50 miles from Russia to Alasca making this a relatively simple connection. Hawaii would be hard to justify unless it's really cheap.
However grid storage is generally fairly cheap. Just going east to west across Eurasia also gives very good solar coverage.
There are also -- of course -- a lot of political problems with the idea of a a global electric grid. Like, what happens to your electrical system in case of an international crisis. Russia has used its gas supplies for political pressure in Europe, and other nations may do the same with electricity.
But on the ocean floor the cold water could keep the lines cool.
Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away. This might be another 20 to 30 years off, but it is inevitable. And once factories start building Stirling engines and solar facilities into their designs, the industrial power market will collapse as well. It's a good thing.
So the residential market for purchased electricity will never go away, but a significant reduction would still be a huge win.
It might, however, go away for cottages/cabins, or other rural buildings. Many people I know have generators at their cottages because the power is unreliable enough, and given the unreliability, the grid must be pretty expensive to maintain.
I think solar panels will be organized in farms and electricity will be delivered by wire, mostly, even for the residential market.
With a good automated system for calculating the net flows between people (maybe using bitcoin?) - it could develop into energy-network equivalent of internet. Only international and intercontinental links need support from big organizations and countries.
I'd like to see these more widely used. I keep an eye on http://cyclonepower.com/ (who use the Rankine cycle) but nothing ever seems to come of it.
Don't believe the hype. Modern batteries are junk.
i.e. Abu Dhabi could consume much more solar especially as a large demand for power is for cooling (storing cold water, freezing some food further is a much cheaper way of storing power than batteries as it is load shifting.)
Basically oil is out of mind for generating electrical power on an industrial scale as its way to expensive so it is not competing with that. See every small island powergrid investment over the last 5 years.
Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements.
20% worst case degradation over 20 years is an minor issue. Easily planed for in the financials of such a plant.
What exactly needs maintenance in a Stirling engine? Please be concrete.
Based on which data?
I don't doubt that Stirling systems could be cheaper, but I'm not seeing them yet. I also flatly refuse to believe that a moving-parts system can last 25 years without maintenance, even if just regular oiling, while solar panels should still have 70-80% of their output after 25 years with no maintenance. It's the inverters and batteries that require maintenance or replacement.
(There are claims that solar thermal storage + Stirling is cheaper than PV+batteries, which are much more plausible, but where are the installations, big or small?)
Specifically, I was and am referring to:
Secondly, it's a concentrator system with a two-axis tracker. That's going to require maintenance, however trivial. You can clearly see a chain-and-sprocket arrangement at about 1:20 in the video. If you have a chain technology which is maintenance-free for 25 years, I know a lot of cyclists who'd be interested.
And in my initial post, I unequivocally stated that one of the biggest problems with the integrated Stirling engine is that no residential kits are available at the local hardware store.
In a couple of decades we might also have fusion power, and this time it's probably going to work because we have much better superconductor magnets. We can make the whole reactor much smaller.
Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa).
[1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...
Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.
This comes up often, but not really. There is no good replacement as cheap as oil from plant sources. Plants require a LOT more labor, processing, and producing it requires huge amounts of space. That's why we use oil and nothing else. If it was competitive, oil would have been replaced by plants long ago for chemical use.