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Now We're WAY Behind
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First, Spain's electrical grid has apparently suffered some sort of collapse. There is not, as I pen this, an explanation of what happened other than that it originated in their very-high-voltage transmission system, but there is a fundamental problem with nearly all "green" energy -- it lacks a flywheel.
A steam generator is a flywheel -- the turbine is very heavy and its spinning, so it has a lot of rotational momentum. This in turn means it resists rapidly changing speed; the stored energy in that flywheel is immense, so when there are momentary disruptions (e.g. a short, a very heavy but very short-term spike in demand, etc.) the flywheel contains enough energy, along with all the others, to prevent it from going seriously out-of-sync with everything else.
If the system goes out of synchronization protective relays open automatically because if they didn't the consequence would be destruction of lots of very expensive equipment -- and now you don't have a blackout that can be picked back up as you have to replacement the equipment first (if you have it.)
Solar of course has no flywheel at all; the only option a solar system has when under excessive stress is to either disconnect or the electronics will be destroyed if it goes out of sync. Windmills have some, but they will trip as well as while they're quite heavy they don't have anywhere near the rotational momentum of a traditional steam-driven generator -- and if they trip then their rotational momentum addition they do have is lost.
And just before it occurred most of their power was coming from no-flywheel sources -- a risky bet that there will be no disruptions such as heavy loads or shorts, either of which can force a protective disconnect that then overloads the rest and causes a cascade failure -- which is exactly what happened.
You can add flywheels, of course, to the system to replace that which used to be there inherently and are there if you run steam turbine generators, whether powered by coal, nuclear or natural gas -- but since adding a powered flywheel with a motor/generator (so it can stabilize the grid) to make up for the lack of same produces no power and does consume some, they add quite a lot of cost and also add losses to the system as a whole.
We'll see what we find out as to why Spain had this problem -- but from what I can find thus far that's almost-certainly what caused it.
But in other news as I predicted would happen if we did not take steps to go after an OBVIOUS and workable answer to the energy problem ourselves nearly 15 years ago China has done exactly that while we've sat around and played nice-nice to those screaming about "green energy" while ignoring the elephant in the room.
In the remote expanse of the Gobi desert stands the first thorium (Th) reactor ever built. Last year, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that this two-megawatt reactor could power up and operate without a glitch, and they have now achieved another first—successfully reloading it while it was still running.
We figured out how to do this in the 1950s and 60s, then abandoned it because the technology does not make convenient bomb-making materials. That was stupid and no Administration has addressed it since.
China has continued to move forward and now has demonstrated online refueling, which we had not mastered at Oak Ridge. Next up is online reprocessing which reduces the waste output that leaves the site by a factor of 100 and its danger by a factor of 1,000, having waste only dangerous for a few hundred years that ultimately leaves instead of waste that is dangerous for 100,000 years.
The next thing they will realize is what I wrote of in 2011 which is that you can turn coal into synthetic diesel and gasoline using the process heat as the temperature required is compatible with the primary molten salt operating temperature, leaving plenty of energy available for conventional steam turbine electrical generation, and the technology to do this was mastered by the Germans in WWII and in fact was their source of fuel for planes and tanks during that time. They will probably also realize that coal has Thorium in it, its quite-easy to extract because its both heavy and a metal and thus mining the coal gives you the nuclear fuel which returns more energy the coal has (by a factor of about 13:1.)
China has a lot of coal.
Our failure to go at this over the last 15 years is a critical one as behind every unit of economic output is a unit of energy.
While China was working on this we spent our time on other very foolish things -- like offshoring jobs, trying to ban combustion engines in vehicles, windmills and solar panels and more instead of securing the energy needs of the nation for the next FIVE HUNDRED years in a way that is both clean AND respects the laws of thermodynamics.
Now we're critically behind. |
