Concerning 2, the heavy subsidies. That practice will have to end soon when its discovered how many billions the poor people are spenging on rich folk’s solar panels.

Concerning 3, its an important concept that people spend their money the way they want to and to heck with detailed economics. Thats why they need to be given an opportinuty to spend about $10,000 US to buy all their future nuclear energy they will need fofr the rest of their lives, so that that their bills will drop from 10 cents per kwh to about 8 cents per kwh for the T&D and admin and nuclear O&M and nuclear fuel.. Over their lifetimes (60 years) that would save them about (13 c/kwh)(.01$/c)(60 y)(15000 kwh/y) = $117,000. Wouldn’t individuals want to invest $10,000 now to save $117,000 in renewables later? These are just back of the napkin calculations, incorrectly done, but the kind of thinking a typical customer might use. But they would spend that $10,000 to save the planet, and then wouldn’t even need any cost savings analysis at all.

You rhetorically asked, “So why are we so interested in rooftop solar?” The answer has at least 3 parts:

1. the difference between retail energy prices and generating costs is about double. When I install rooftop solar with net metering, I get double the benefit as the centralized generator. I understand the net metering isn’t available everywhere, but that motivates a significant share of the current rooftop PV installations. It gets better because pricing is nonlinear, so I avoid the highest marginal rates with rooftop PV. Even with all this, my rooftop PV experiment is a financial disaster.

2. Subsidy. Especially corporate rooftop PV is heavily subsidized. The resulting tax breaks occasionally make it financially reasonable to install PV panels upside down. I’ve seen the calculations for a large installation in Mountain View CA… It makes me ill because I know I’m the one paying for it.

3. It just seems so right. Some people feel like they need to do something to reduce their carbon emissions. Buying rooftop PV is a modern form of buying an indulgence.

Note that none of these are *good* reasons, but I think these are *the actual* reasons rooftop PV is such a powerful meme.

Chris

The problem is the gallium, which is rare and expensive.(why gallium? Aluminium forms an impenetrable oxide layer in air; the most succesful attempts to get around this have used aluminium alloys with a few percent gallium)

This is a misunderstanding of some recent talk about gallium as a component in an aluminum alloy that makes the aluminum react quickly with water:

Al + 1½ H2O ---Ga---> ½ Al2O3 + 1½ H2

This process yields the aluminum’s oxidation energy in two low-value forms — low-temperature heat and hydrogen — about half and half. Of course, to access the hydrogen-borne half of the energy, oxygen must be brought in in exactly the quantity that would have been required to oxidize the aluminum directly.

Successful use of aluminum as fuel has always involved its combustion at high temperature, e.g. in solid rocket propellant such as that of the Space Shuttle’s two expendable boosters.

These propellants typically contain oxygen in a dense but not strongly bound form such as ammonium perchlorate. So as combustion propagates through them, it first unbinds the oxygen at a relatively low temperature, and the main temperature rise follows as the high-pressure gaseous oxygen reacts with finely divided aluminum.

(How fire can be domesticated)

Warren Heath; the Earth’s crust is 8% aluminium. High quality bauxite might have some limitations but lower quality ores are completely limitless.

The problem is the gallium, which is rare and expensive.(why gallium? Aluminium forms an impenetrable oxide layer in air; the most succesful attempts to get around this have used aluminium alloys with a few percent gallium)

I wonder if this is setting the scene for a NPP/desal to enable the expansion of Olympic Dam. That is 120 ML/day of fresh water and 700 Mw or so additional power for various purposes.

I watched an interesting program the other day about the discovery of a baby mammoth found intact in the frozen plains of Siberia. Turns out that 37,000 years ago the region was a temperate grassland. Methinks it will once again return to that state with or without human involvement.

Fingers crossed Climategate will be the nail in Copenhagens coffin.

Methane of course can be blended with natgas, coal seam gas and biomethane. I dislike methanol which I buy from dirt track racers. They use it in supercharged V8s but I use it in making biodiesel. If automotive fuel cells get cheap and durable enough methanol might be the fuel for them. Dimethyl ether can be handled as easily as LPG or propane and could be a future (Earth) fuel if scaled up and the price was affordable. Even at say $5/L it could be used in PHEV reserve tanks or aircraft. I think more research should go into bulk production of DME using water derived H2 and purer forms of biomass derived CO2.

I like the idea that we stop using natgas (80% methane) for electrical generation and save it for a smooth transition to meth..something powered transport. Alas it looks like Australia’s convoluted ETS will see more gas going to the stationary sector.

50% efficiency is not bad, comparable to H20 -> H2 & H20 + CO2 -> CH4OH (methanol production).

Mars Society is claiming 96% efficiency converting CO2 + H2 -> CH4 + O2, with its nuclear powered reactor.

“…. Dr. Robert Zubrin’s team created a unit that demonstrated efficiency rates as high as 94% within 3 months. Additional funding by JSC and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory allowed for further improvements, with a resulting unit that operated at 96% efficiency for 10 days straight with no outside intervention, generating 400 kilograms of propellant on 300 watts; ..”

With a 100 kw Nuclear Reactor, and H2 transported from Earth, CO2 from the Martian atmosphere, they are claiming, in 10 months they can produce 24 tonnes CH4 plus 48 tonnes of O2, and an additional 36 tonnes of O2, by direct dissociation of CO2. That would be 290MWh of CH4 energy for 72 MWh of Nuclear electricity.

So Aluminum certainly looks like an effective storage medium, for transportable energy. Certainly far superior to H2, as usual, it’s the devil-in-the-details. Is there enough Aluminum available to do the task?

Still, unless the numbers are that much better, Methanol is a fuel easily made in huge quantities from NG, and it will burn in standard ICEngines, with improved efficiency & emissions and also existing NG turbines can readily be converted to Methanol burning. Also Methanol fuel cells. I suspect diesel or propane furnaces can also be easily converted to Methanol. And is easily transportable using existing pipelines & storage facilities. Not a severe task to convert over from a Diesel/Gasoline Fuel infrastructure to a Methanol one

Where theres smoke theres fire !

Quite right. John Lott wants the world to burn and his folk are assiduously attempting to conjure a fire on non-combustible emails.

It’s worth noting that where there is smoke, people find it hard to distinguish safety from danger. Little wonder Gordon, that you are so pleased at the smoke billowing from this in the more unhinged partys of the blogosphere.

Looks like another scandal is breaking

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/11/24/john-lott-climate-change-emails-copenhagen/

Where theres smoke theres fire !

G.R.L. Cowan, you’ll have to show us the numbers on that, in order to evaluate its viability. Capital Cost? Storage space? Round trip efficiency? Peak power output?

Sorry, I don’t know the capital cost of the thing, or the few hundred things, that would burn the aluminum. Storage space for the 4234 tonnes of aluminum before it is burned is looking to be about 0.37 hectares, for a conical heap whose sides slope at 30°. The oxide will have more volume, so towards the end of the 3.3 years the storage would perhaps increase to 1 hectare.

My point is that it makes more sense to try to develop aluminum burners, possibly single-household ones, and support millions of such burners from single multi-gigawatt nuclear aluminum deoxidation plants, than to try to develop village-scale fission power plants, or village-scale carbon-free power plants of any sort.

For aluminum and its oxide, if the devices that turn the former into the latter can be scaled down to single households, the intra-village grid needn’t be a grid; it could be people walking with gallon pails.

(How fire can be domesticated)

I really don’t want to test the patience of the other readers of this thread detailing every one of the systems and providing links, but if you write me at dv82xl@gmail.com I will provide you with the appropriate references should you need them.

What you’re talking about, I would call, CHP or Co-generation. Also I’m referring to NWT & Nunavut and all NCPC has declared is one site in Inuvik which heats the community centre with a Capstone NG turbine.

“…it is a completely inaccurate editorial in a tiny local paper. (Hanna Herald?)…”

Not true. The same numbers were published in a number of publications, including the CBC.

Here, the illustrious Globe and Mail gives even worse numbers or $761 per tonne.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/on-a-cost-basis-carbon-capture-projects-are-madness/article1329825/

Your source is ommitting the Federal contribution, and is very vague about what cost for how much. A more reliable statement is here:

http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/10/08/edmonton-money-announced-shell-quest-carbon-capture.html

Which quotes one of the projects (the Shell upgrader) at $1.35B for 1.2M tonnes/yr. Which is $98 per tonne, financed at 5% over 17 yrs. or 9.5 cents/kwh. Does that include operating costs? I doubt it.