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The future of energy generation and storage

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SirRumpole said:
I've always made the case for hybrids (fossil fuel +electricity)
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If you were worried about a shortage of fossil fuels, the answer would be to stop using hybrids and go full electric, rather than try and get the liquid fuels from farming.

Our fertiliser mines are a precious resource in my opinion, especially with a growing world population, diverting potassium and phosphate resources into production of biofuels is wasteful.

Phosphate


Potassium
 
Value Collector said:
For niche applications where you are happy to waste a lot of good farming land, water and fertiliser to get a liquid fuel, but as a large scale energy source its a wasteful use of resources, and there are better options.

.
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The sugar cane industry is not going too well atm. In QLD the vast expanses of cane farmland are not much good for much else except for things like lemon grass. Residential developers are eyeing off the areas near Brisbane & Gold Coast, the only thing stopping them is the QLD development plans.
 
Tisme said:
The sugar cane industry is not going too well atm. In QLD the vast expanses of cane farmland are not much good for much else except for things like lemon grass. Residential developers are eyeing off the areas near Brisbane & Gold Coast, the only thing stopping them is the QLD development plans.
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Put some solar panels on it then.

If there is a surplus of cane farming land and we have no other option but to brew ethanol, then do as they do in Bundaberg, and sell it as rum, you will get more than $1.20 a litre then, and have a higher value export product.
 
Value Collector said:
If you were worried about a shortage of fossil fuels, the answer would be to stop using hybrids and go full electric, rather than try and get the liquid fuels from farming.
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This argument keeps going around like "there's a hole in the bucket..."

We don't have enough generating capacity to keep the lights on next summer, let alone to feed millions of electric cars. Do you know how many power stations we would need to do that ?

Solar charging MAY provide some input, but what if you get a spell of rainy or cloudy weather ?

A generation network to feed electric cars would require billions of investment in probably nuclear reactors and I don't see anyone coming up with that sort of cash any time soon.
 
Value Collector said:
Put some solar panels on it then.

If there is a surplus of cane farming land and we have no other option but to brew ethanol, then do as they do in Bundaberg, and sell it as rum, you will get more than $1.20 a litre then, and have a higher value export product.
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:) There's that I guess. The other problem is that the crushing and processing plants aren't in too good a shape with all the bandaids.
 
How does one spell lip service?

from the Australian:

Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.

AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030, as the government vows to ease the pressure on prices.

The project’s owner, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, is expanding into new solar farms across Australia after the federal government backed the first development with grants and concessional loans as well as guaranteed credits for more than a decade.

The scale of the financial aid has triggered calls to scale back the subsidies as Nationals MPs warn that jobs will be sent overseas if Australia does not find a way to drive down energy costs.

Scott Morrison challenged Labor late yesterday to drop its “coal veto” when the energy plan goes to parliament, arguing new measures will be needed to extend the life of Liddell and other power stations to bring stability to the electricity grid. The Treasurer said the government wanted a “durable” outcome in parliament on the investment rules for the energy sector but did not say this would be a clean energy target, the proposal put forward by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.
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I'm in favour of using agricultural and other suitable wastes to produce ethanol. That just makes sense to put a waste product to good use rather than burning it off in the open or burning it to produce low value base load electricity.

The problem however is that ethanol is one of those things that doesn't scale well.

As a rough indication, if we took 100% of the food eaten by Australians and turned that into ethanol then we'd have enough to run the cars in South Australia. That's cars only, not trucks, buses, railways, aircraft, factories, power stations, agricultural machinery or anything else. Just cars.

Once you factor in the fuel needed to run the farm machinery and to transport the crops from the farms to ethanol producing plants and then transport the ethanol to consumers it gets considerably worse. Estimates vary but at best we'd now only have enough for the cars in Adelaide (excluding the rest of SA) and at worst we'd have barely enough to fuel every car in Tasmania.

So it's of some use to the extent that waste materials can be used as the feedstock but beyond that it hits a wall pretty quickly.

To put it into perspective, all the food an average adult eats in a day contains the energy equivalent of 0.25 litres of petrol. Your car eats a lot more than you do, hence the problem with agricultural production as a source of automotive fuel. It can help to an extent but it's not a complete replacement for petroleum by any means. :2twocents
 
So far as vehicle engine technologies are concerned, I think we'll see a mixed approach for quite some time to come.

20 years ago there were very, very few cars on Australian roads with anything other than a petrol engine. Those that weren't petrol were LPG conversions or a very small number of diesels mostly of European origin.

Today hybrid and diesel vehicles are so common that they attract no attention and owning one isn't in any way notable. Tell someone you bought a new car and asking what sort of engine it has, and by that I mean is it petrol or something else, is a perfectly reasonable question given the options.

My local council has plans for an EV fast charger near a major shopping area. And only yesterday I noticed that the vehicle I was following just happened to be a Tesla. There aren't many but it's a far cry from not too long ago when literally the only road registered electric car in the whole state (Tas) was a converted Daihatsu which could generally be found parked next to the admin building at the Hydro workshops in Derwent Park.

Petrol, diesel, EV's and hybrids will all be around for quite some time I expect. No single technology is likely to become dominant, in the next few years at least, in the way that petrol was until not that long ago.

The one fuel I don't see getting anywhere for transport use is compressed natural gas. Gas companies have been trying to get that one off the ground in Australia since about 1980 and just about every gas network company has at some point had a go at promoting it. There have been buses running on it, gas company fleets and a few local governments and so on but but it just hasn't got anywhere as a fuel for private vehicles. Given the recent hike in the price of gas and the emergence of other alternatives to petrol that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Trucks on LNG yes, but not private cars.
 
SirRumpole said:
This argument keeps going around like "there's a hole in the bucket..."

We don't have enough generating capacity to keep the lights on next summer, let alone to feed millions of electric cars. Do you know how many power stations we would need to do that ?

Solar charging MAY provide some input, but what if you get a spell of rainy or cloudy weather ?

A generation network to feed electric cars would require billions of investment in probably nuclear reactors and I don't see anyone coming up with that sort of cash any time soon.
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The power shortage is a political one, not an engineering or investment one.

And it's an issue of peak loading, not total generating capacity.
 
Value Collector said:
Speaking of trucks, The tesla semi is due to be unveiled next month

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Electric Trucks could make transport between the east and west coast so much more energy efficient, and lower carbon emissions.

At the moment we have trucks carrying valuable goods back and forth between the two coasts, but we also have to have a fleet of trucks (and ships) delivering fuel to certain points along the route.

However with electric trucks, at certain points along the route you could have charging stations powered by a solar and battery pack installation, which would get rid of the need to have a fleet of trucks and ships delivering fuel to remote locations.

e.g. a mini version of this every 500 kms, and we wouldn't be having to pump oil, refine it, and transport it.

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Yeah, we have everything we need. Vast sparely populated sunny land girt by sea.

No need to burn anything.
 

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