| 7/9/2008 3:42:10 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
onelife2live
Janesville, WI
age: 44
| I was pretty impressed with the message of T Boone's ads and hope he means it. Is he posturing for a political position or just a worried American like the rest of us? He is a life long oil man and wants us to get off oil..oxymoron or truth?
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| 7/9/2008 3:46:59 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
jrbogie
Red Bluff, CA
age: 59
| t boone is a life long brilliant business man. he just happened to live in texas and oil was there for the "pickins" pardon the pun. we could do worse than boone in the oval office.
[Edited 7/9/2008 3:47:33 PM]
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| 7/9/2008 3:56:30 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
onelife2live
Janesville, WI
age: 44
| He sounds sincere, but I was thinking he wants to be head of the energy dept or such a position...but as a billionaire, he can probably get more done outside of politics...maybe he is just a rich, worried and good American citizen.
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| 7/9/2008 4:09:54 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
nocatch2
Fort Sill, OK
age: 53
| Pikens motives are probably good for him and the country but I think it misplaces the resources. 90% of the power we generate is lost in transmission through the power lines and wires in buildings. The most effective way and highest yield would be development of superconductors or at least improved conductors. The devolopement of room temprature superconductors would be equivalent to the industrial revolution in terms of cheap energy.
With fusion reactors the world would be catapulted into 21st century. The technical problems are great but the research money would be well spent. Just consider what power transmission at 50% loss would mean in terms of reducing oil dependency.
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| 7/9/2008 4:11:52 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
onelife2live
Janesville, WI
age: 44
| Not to be off topic, but the huge underground atom smasher is finally ready to roll, any energy inovations to come of this?
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| 7/9/2008 4:40:27 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
nocatch2
Fort Sill, OK
age: 53
| Probably not right away but any knowledge gained about particle physics brings us closer to what I was talking about with fusion reactions. The beauty of fusion is that there is much less atomic waste to deal with and much higher output per reactor.
BTW superconductors transmit energy at near zero loss but currently only work at a couple of hundred degrees below zero. Many physicists believe that they could do much better if they had the money to research and develope. Google it.
[Edited 7/9/2008 4:46:46 PM]
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| 7/9/2008 4:51:36 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
sdcentaur
Sioux Falls, SD
age: 48
| Pikens motives are probably good for him and the country but I think it misplaces the resources. 90% of the power we generate is lost in transmission through the power lines and wires in buildings. The most effective way and highest yield would be development of superconductors or at least improved conductors. The devolopement of room temprature superconductors would be equivalent to the industrial revolution in terms of cheap energy.
With fusion reactors the world would be catapulted into 21st century. The technical problems are great but the research money would be well spent. Just consider what power transmission at 50% loss would mean in terms of reducing oil dependency.
90% loss? Mind telling me where you get that figure? I used to work in the windpower/electric utility industry and it's a lot closer to 9% than 90%.
The technologies of superconductors and fusion are a long way off, there's more to both than most people realize.
Even the "high temperature" superconductors work at liquid nitrogen temps ( -320F) and are made of ceramics so they're also very brittle. Even though there has been continuing research and money being focused on superconductors there hasn't been any significant progress in the last 25 years or so. So far except for short distances and stationary applications they just aren't practical, it takes more energy to keep them cold than the energy savings they might have, plus it would be hell expensive to build in the first place.
So far nobody has yet managed to achieve break even energy production with fusion let alone produce power from it. Nothing significant has come out of the research there in the recent past either, maybe in 50 years or so.....
An oilman?
He's heavily invested in wind and natural gas, odd that his proposed plan relies heavily on both. Things that make you go "Hmmmm" http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus9-2008jul09,0,7890733.column
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| 7/9/2008 5:28:48 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
stargazzer
Creighton, NE
age: 60
| Pikens will exploet wind & solar and Transmision lines in to more billions for himself is his plan and he knows he is realy the 1st to do so!! This is the American way!! and It would make sence that it should help. I think we need coal and Nuckular in the mix allso. But he is spending money to make money is his plan so if you belive in him your money will follow him & his plan.? It's called takeing a risk.
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| 7/9/2008 6:00:17 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
nocatch2
Fort Sill, OK
age: 53
| Sorry I did not mean to imply that all of the loss was in high voltage lines. That percentage includes generation, high voltage transmission, step down transformer losses and low voltage transmission. You will need to check different sites to get percentages for each but just generation and high voltage transmission account for about 80%. The 90% figure is just a ballpark figure.
Main article: Electricity distribution
Long distance electric power transmission results in energy loss, through electrical resistance, heat generation, electromagnetic induction and less-than-perfect electrical insulation.[102] Generation of power in power stations is subject to conversion losses, which can range up to 70% in US coal-fired power stations [103]. Energy generation and distribution is more efficient the closer it is to the point of use, if conducted in a high-efficiency generator, such as a CHP. In the generation and delivery of electrical power, system losses along the delivery chain are pronounced. Of five units of energy going into most large power plants, only about one unit of energy is delivered to the consumer in a usable form. [104] A similar situation exists in gas transport, where compressor stations along pipelines use energy to keep the gas moving, or where gas liquefaction/cooling/regasification in the liquiefied natural gas supply chain uses a substantial amount of energy, even though the scale of the loss is not as pronounced as it is in electricity.
Distributed generation is a means of reducing transmission losses.
[edit]
The research would be an investment in the future no doubt but had we gotten serious 25 years ago that day would be much closer at hand and would be a proactive measure instead of the typical reactive. Call me an idealist but the future can hold great promise if you reach for it.
[Edited 7/9/2008 6:01:52 PM]
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| 7/9/2008 6:05:44 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
nocatch2
Fort Sill, OK
age: 53
| Oh BTW the research has moved well beyond just the ceramics.
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| 7/9/2008 6:17:22 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
swiftfalcon
The Colony, TX
age: 50
| He is a good man and a fine American. From what I know of him his heart is in the right place. We can only hope that more successful business people will step up with ideas and their own money to get some of these alternate energy ideas in work. This country is in dire need of leadership.
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| 7/9/2008 6:43:10 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
sdcentaur
Sioux Falls, SD
age: 48
| You still didn't tell me where you got those figures.
Total average delivered Wattage is around 90% of the electricity generated, of the 10% loss 90% of that is probably in the high voltage long distance transmission lines.
That's 9% total, not 90%......
I've seen the actual generation and total delivered figures from the wind farm, if someone is claiming that 90% of produced energy is "lost" they're smoking something. The wind farm I worked at sent the electricity to a substation over 50 miles away with negligible losses.
Superconductors, they may be an actual limit to the temperature of the materials since they rely on electron pairing to work vibration and stray energy from a warmer object would break the pair bonding and it would no longer super conduct. Be nice if it weren't so but there are actual limits imposed by Physics on them. Could be there's nowhere to go. There are some Tin and Nickel alloy based superconductors now but they don't operate and any significantly higher temps. and they're still very brittle at those temps.
Older coal plants are inefficient but the newer designs do much better, fluidized bed combustion and other technologies have already made great improvements in that area. Natural gas fired Combined cycle plants are even more efficient but there again, this pesky "Second Law of Thermodynamics" limits any combustion based generation to around 40% efficiency, or 60% loss....
Distributed generation is also inefficient. One of the reasons the coal and natural gas fired generators are so big is the economy of scale. Any gains made by building several small plants instead of one large one would be lost through their inefficiency.
Wind makes the most sense for widely distributed generation but they take a LOT of extra infrastructure.
I'm not saying room temperature superconductors are impossible or that we won't see fusion in the near future but I do understand the basic physics involved and unless there's a Manhattan Project type effort going on that's hidden from the public I highly doubt it.
Photovoltaic (solar cell) technology is already approaching the theoretical limits for electrical production, any improvements there will be in making them cheaper, not more efficient by any significant measure.
I'm sure Pickens' plan would include a lot of new transmission lines and gas fired plants but using existing technology. We can't wait for the next generation of alternative, we have to work with what we have now, not wish for what we don't.
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| 7/9/2008 7:02:13 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
nocatch2
Fort Sill, OK
age: 53
| That excerpt is from wickopedia and is definitely referring to fossil fuel power generation and transmission as I was, although I did not express myself correctly. I have never seen power company figures as you have but this magnitude of loss in energy from generation (fossil fuel) to the end user has been discussed for many years and was one of the selling points for nuclear energy many years ago.
As far as wishing, I wasn't. I plainly stated that there are great technical problems and that it was the future that I want to invest in and more agressively seek a solution to the energy problems of the world that can have a long lasting effect. Most everything of a technical nature driving the economy of today was born of the completely illogical drive to go to the moon. Scientific research and development will always payoff in the long run.
Our problems of today are not as dire as many would have you think with the exception of education.
[Edited 7/9/2008 7:21:20 PM]
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| 7/9/2008 7:06:09 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
onelife2live
Janesville, WI
age: 44
| I agree, it seems to take a lot of energy to produce energy......
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| 7/9/2008 7:30:12 PM | T Boone Pickens Energy Plan. Real deal or Not | |
sdcentaur
Sioux Falls, SD
age: 48
| That excerpt is from wickopedia and is definitely referring to fossil fuel power generation and transmission as I was, although I did not express myself correctly. I have never seen power company figures as you have but this magnitude of loss in energy from generation (fossil fuel) to the end user has been discussed for many years and was one of the selling points for nuclear energy many years ago.
Nuclear is actually less thermally efficient than coal. It's just the energy concentration and relative low cost of the fuel that makes it financially efficient.
Depending on who does the "study" and does the Math the figures can vary wildly.
By the way, a wind turbine has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 50%, the ones I worked on were older (1995 models) and they ran at about 33%, newer ones are up near 40%.
The percentage of "loss" in generation is misleading if it's calculated as:
energy output/energy input
Using that formula gives the 33% efficiency number to the turbines I worked on.
A more realistic way of calculating actual efficiency is:
Extractable energy input/energy output
Since it's only possible to get 50% of the energy out of the wind (I hope you'll take my word on that or do your own websearch, the Math gets pretty hairy) the percentage of extractable energy that goes into production becomes 66% rather than 33%.
When dealing with combustion processes it gets more complex and the way the figures are calculated can give a lot of variation so it's become a standard to just use the first formula since it's not "fudgeable"
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