Fun With Balloons - Correction

Correction. My last blog post was quite excited about Cool Earth's new inflatable solar concentration technology, which lowered the cost per Watt for solar to $0.20, and I found the idea too good to be true. Well, I did some further research and found a CNET article with the following quote:

"Cummings [Cool Earth's founder and CTO] envisions that these balloons will be cabled together above farmland and would be replaced every year"

Darn. I was hoping the balloons could stick around for at least a few years. If they have to be replaced every year, the cost per kWh becomes a bit higher. But what's interesting is that it's still cheaper than oil, getting close to natural gas, while still quite a bit more pricey than coal. But if they could make those balloons last four years, the price per kWh is about what coal costs!

Here are my rough calculations (I'm not a commodities trader, so I apologize if the prices aren't up to the minute):



I, for one, am rooting for them to make those balloons a little more durable.

Fun With Balloons!

As I say in my introduction above, I'm interested in solutions that will be real, achievable, and market-driven. So with that last part in mind, let's see if we can have some fun with balloons and make some money in the process.

Cool Earth claims to have technology, called Inflatable Solar Concentration, that will reduce the price for solar energy to roughly $0.20 per Watt within three years (for comparison purposes, check out my posts below for the solar stations that are producing it at $2 to $3.20 per Watt). Wow.

So let's say you had a really big back yard and you wanted to buy some balloons and create your own power plant. Could you make money? Let's run the numbers:



So we raised $200k, bought 2,000 balloons, strung them together, and we're cranking out a Megawatt. Assuming they capture energy 9 hours a day, we're selling 3.3 M kWh back to the grid. At 7 cents per kWh, we make our money back plus a profit in year one. And each successive year is pure profit.

Is it just me or does this sound too good to be true? I'm going to give these guys a call and see if I can buy some balloons.

Solar calculations - part 2

OK, I did a bit more research into the cost of solar power by looking into the Victorville, CA Solar Power station. The plant plans to build 20,000 Stirling generators, producing 25 kW each. The cost at such production levels is estimated to be $50-80,000 per generator, which is a cost per watt between $2 and $3.20, a bit lower than the Nevada One figures I mentioned in my post below.

So this stuff is realistic.

What's even more interesting is that the plant will earn back its cost in 15 years by selling power at ~7 cents/kWh, and after that it's going to "mint money," as this Business Week article puts it.

So this stuff is profitable. My question is, what's the holdup?

Solar calculations - part 1

This article is an interesting exercise in figuring out the scale of the solution. But I can simplify the math. He's basically saying the Nevada Solar One project cost $240M and puts out 64 MW of energy. That's $3.75 per watt. So he could have just skipped all his intermediate steps and said: $68 B (what Bush is asking for the Iraq war right now) buys you 18 GW. The U.S. needs ~300 GW for all our electricity needs. So $68 B buys 6% of our electricity. Amazing. Another way to think of it: with 300 million Americans, the cost to you is $227. That's it?? I'll see your $227 and happily pay my share of $3,750 to go 100% solar.

So why is this Economist article so pessimistic that solar won't amount to more than 1% of our energy needs in the next decade? There must be production limitations (i.e. we can only make so many panels per year currently). Because in that article they talk about costs of $1.40 per watt from cadmium telluride-based solar panels, which makes the cost per citizen to go 100% solar only $1,400.

Am I missing something?

Introduction to Energy Crunch

Welcome to Energy Crunch. As this is my first post, I think I'll lay out why I'm blogging here, why I'm focusing on energy.

Simply put, we are facing an Energy Crunch. Energy is going to be the #1 issue facing our country in the coming 50 to 100 years. Our economy has been built on the back of cheap energy. But getting that cheap energy out of oil has caused lots of problems. And lots of indicators show that we may not be able to get that energy out of the ground so cheaply anymore. Alternative energy sources will be needed, and fast. I say that energy is the #1 issue because working to solve the energy issue means that you're simultaneously working to solve other major issues, such as global warming, peak oil, and terrorism.

Global warming. We need to stop producing CO2. Renewable energy sources (which I will argue need to be re-branded as "free" energy sources, which is what they are... a post is almost certainly forthcoming on the re-branding of energy as the front line of the energy war) don't produce CO2, or produce a lot less of it. That case is pretty clear.

Peak oil is happening, in that oil production has already begun its decline year-to-year. Some will debate whether we're just seeing the effects of various geopolitical situations, which, when cleared up, will see us back to producing more and more oil for the foreseeable future. I think, though, the most reasonable assumption is that peak oil is here, and that we need to start thinking about what's going to replace all that oil. I'll do a post on that in the very near future.

Terrorism is linked to the oil problem, but this will be a lesser focus of my blog. Suffice to say for now that the U.S. needs massive amounts of oil, and this has meant dealing with the Middle East. It may be oversimplified to say our thirst for oil causes or funds terrorism, but not by much.

So what am I going to do? I'm on a mission of exploration. I'll be looking, and re-looking, at a lot of the potential solutions for what I see as the Energy Crunch problem. I'll spend some time discussing the problem itself (i.e., what is peak oil, have we hit it yet, etc), but I want to focus more on the solutions. What are the viable alternative energy sources out there? What new breakthroughs are popping up? How do those impact that technology as a viable source of energy in the future? How should individuals and governments act and react to these changes?

Let the energy exploration begin.