It cost nature one million dollars in energy and time to make one gallon of diesel fuel. (burial, weight, accumulation of animal matter and its energy useage) We sell it for 3 bucks. In 100 years to 200 years if Asia electrifies to our standard, we will be out of all oil. In 10,000 years out of all coal. In about 1000 years out of all kerogens (oil shale.) In 10,000 years out of all hydrogen from the sea bed. (We can go to Borax which is a good efficient fuel, but it will run out too.) We cannot generate electricity to produce hydrogen, as we get that electricity now from coil and oil. It will be back to wind, water, sun and hopefully safer but less efficient nukes or fusion power. It would pay to thihk ahead but man is not a conserving animal. He is a greedy animal.
The cascading power losses could be prevented by having sufficient flow through power/battery storage to shunt up to 20 percent of the power to reserve. Flow through is water, battery, air, tidal. It cannot of course cope with tranmission overload or substation transformer burn out, but it can handle having reserve generation if load is near peak. You generate over your capacity. Flow through power goes on fast. It can cheaply generate with no, or low losses more power than is being drawn. (The water is going to flow anyway unless you are building head for reserve capacity.) It does not require heat up plant time too etc.. The other part of it is to have a TRUE grid, not a half grid like we do now. Quebec can only shunt south, not east. If they were ON the grid then their water would have bailed us out in faster start up. What happened was complex. They took the nuclear down, (with a three day built in start up), because it had nowhere to dump to when the transmission was shut down. So we could not then start up into near the same load at all. (The other part of it was we would not have wanted to BUY power off Quebec for extended periods as it would be too expensive. But we could not have anyway!!!) So we went to gradual turn on as we did not have the capacity to turn on quickly into the same load. Starting back up slowly guarantees the load will not overpower the capacity.
We have no reserve generating capacity. That much is known. We have old equipment that is likely to burn or fail otherwise. It cannot handle the strain of peak loads. It was a system waiting to fail.
This should start a few water, coal and co-gen projects or nothing else will. We should back off our anti-coal prejudice as the only thing dirty about coal is it has fly ash and soot. That can be dealt with. Otherwise it has no more CO2 than gas, or diesel.
EC<:-} |
