Going back a post or two, an astute reader, and maybe even astute blogger other than myself might have noticed that there is a dearth of power lines crossing the country. Going back to my college days; I believe my Powers professor mentioned there are only 5 lines that can carry the cross country load links. This is a problem in its own right...but this isn't a doomsday blog post, so enough about that.
So why does this matter? Simple, this infrastructure issue prevents the adoption of alternative energy technologies, you can't easily transfer solar energy across the country as light(even though it's being researched) and canned wind only works in cartoons, or if its air from Paris. You could build massive power transmission lines..but that's probably not cost effective, at $3-5 million/mile, or a pipeline of something that stores the energy(whatever that would be is TBD but efficiency would probably be low due to thermal loss. The 'solution' a lot of people in academia and Energy research have reached, and one I personally advocate is the idea of a Hydrogen Infrastructure.
What this does mean though is the abundant Green energy resources surrounding the Rocky Mountains, such as wind, hydro power and solar, cannot easily transmit the generated power to the more populated coastal regions, thus relegating power generation to Natural Gas, Coal or Nuclear sources which have natural resources co-located, or easily transportable by rail or pipeline. Utilizing trucks is just not cost effective for long hauls only short distribution, similar to the spoke and hub model of air travel, no matter how frustrating it is.
So why does this matter? Simple, this infrastructure issue prevents the adoption of alternative energy technologies, you can't easily transfer solar energy across the country as light(even though it's being researched) and canned wind only works in cartoons, or if its air from Paris. You could build massive power transmission lines..but that's probably not cost effective, at $3-5 million/mile, or a pipeline of something that stores the energy(whatever that would be is TBD but efficiency would probably be low due to thermal loss. The 'solution' a lot of people in academia and Energy research have reached, and one I personally advocate is the idea of a Hydrogen Infrastructure.
The reason for a Hydrogen infrastructure is that it is a near ideal energy carrier, and can be used for combustion, electrochemical reactions or raw chemistry to increase the energy value of a secondary fuel, ie refining crude to gasoline. The other reason is that Hydrogen is highly compressible and can be easily generated via various means, albeit inefficiently at this time, or transferred via pipeline. Wikipedia has a short blurb on this concept, but i personally believe that the use of a pipeline is missing the point, specifically that Hydrogen can be made as long as you have electricity and water. Some technologies such as Photoelectrochemical (PEC) splitting even utilize light to convert hydrogen directly, without the need to generate electricity, and other methods such as biological utilize algae and decay, so why restrict to a pipeline based system? I'll get into side thoughts later but as always, a hybrid electrical grid increase and pipeline coupled with existing systems will probably be the best solution...or at least for the sake of my grad project I hope it does.
Pipes work, but if we're going to come up with a whole new energy infrastructure why would we repeat the mistakes made in the past by restricting to a hub based system which inherently has a single point of failure, that always fails at the worst time or on purpose. Examples of the former are Hurricane Sandy and the single pipeline to NYC and the latter is Russia's control over the Gazprom line that can shut the flow off to the Ukraine at will, but again just a thought exercise, and a lead in to the next post on PEC advances...who wants to generate H2 on your roof?
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