A solar hybrid ro ro ship.....

This is how Renault is marketing its electric cars. 120 dollars per month battery rental...you drive to a " gas station" and replace the battery. The same concept with a container size battery could work for short haul ferries. Some areas..like the Venetian canals with its hundreds of ferries or coastal Croatia could be perfectly suited to this arrangement.

 

Hi Michael, that is indeed a very interesting concept and could work for the city dwellers. A little expensive for those ones who do not utilize their batteries to the fullest extent or are living far away from the garages who does distribute the Renault concept. For ships it will be more difficult to implement, pity. Bert

 

Its the cities who suffer from air pollution problems. Electric Seems a logical solution. Cities would also have the best infrastructure for ferry recharge or battery stations.

I think this is how the LNG ferries work..special routes from infrastructure to infrastructure... with low pollution levels on their route.

Tour boats in Natural parks also are a candidate.

 

Very valid point.
bert

 

Hi Bert,
I do not know what do you intend to say with this phrase, hope it is not the classical "1 electric kW equals XX diesel kW's". Because it would be wrong. For a propeller, 1 kW is 1 kW. He sees it coming from the shaft, and the dumb prop just doesn't know what is there on the other side of the shaft.
Cheers

 

Hi daiquiri,
Classic, I saw that juicy morsel dangling on the hook. I was full at the time and thought I would let some one else have it.

Hi Bert,
I spent a year in your beautiful country, and a few more as a tour guide travelling between Zim and Uganda. I have also lived in Oz and NZ, and am lucky enough to have visited many other countries. To be perfectly honest, my most favourite place in the whole wide world is the English countryside. A mid summer day in Leicestershire is my concept of utopia. As for your capacitor, I can not help. I think I can spot an amp from an ohm, but maybe not.

Imagine a solar powered world.
The mines are solar powered. The processing plants are solar powered. The factories are solar powered. The transport system is solar powered. The dealers are solar powered. We are all solar powered.
We are going to need alot of solar panels to manufacture one solar panel.
The whole place is going to be one big solar panel.
In the gaps in between will be piles of spare batteries so we can keep on going around in circles when it gets dark.

I think it is a dead end as a solution to the worlds problems.
Without fossil fuels and nuclear power, solar power will be impossible.
You might not have fumes coming out of your tailpipe, but somewhere else is a fleet of megawatt diesel caterpillars devouring the countryside to satisfy our "green" revolution.

Best Wishes,
Adam

 

Adam, you should do some research before spruiking off... solar energy comes in many forms not just PV, many people are working on solar thermal technology to generate base load power. The idea is that its easy to store heat (for use when the sun goes down) rather than store electricity (in batteries or capacitors etc).

All the rage seems to be in heat storage using molten salt at the moment, who knows where the buck will stop and what technology will end up main stream. But the point is, if nobody tries (does any research) than we never make any progress towards a lifestyle that doesnt destroy our planet in the process.

In a Spanish solar reasearch station, they are reported to be able to keep generating power for 15hours after the sun has gone by using the stored heat in molten salt.

One PV cell manufacturer has now acheived over 40% conversion efficiency using multilayered gallium arsenide? cells. So thats more than double what you get from a typical PV panel youd buy today.

Lifepo4 batteries are now affordable enough to consider using them in many applications where a high energy density is required, such as vehicles and boats etc. Its only just really starting to move, wait and see what the next 10 years holds... as soon as the price is right, i know ill be trading my car in so i can save money on running costs, what majority wouldnt??? money rules...

Batteries are not thrown away either (you mentioned this tasty morsel earlier in this thread) they are recycled these days...

The biggest problem holding everything back, is a lack of investment interest to really get things moving as investors dont like taking risks on unproven technology... money drives everything, so once solar becomes financially competitive and a proven technology- as i beleive its just starting to happen now - will will see much more rapid progress thanks to the investments funds starting to flow. Australian designed CFLR and steam tube technology has made breakthrough in reducing the costs of building the plant -ie. the reflectors are more efficient yet very cheap and simple to build... the project is under contruction now... once these technologies are proven, the investors will come and we will get the inevitable snowball....

 

Hi groper,
I have learned some new words today, spruik,gallium, and arsenide. Thankyou.
I do know about these things that you talk. I do not apologise that I did not list every concievable type of solar electric generator in my post.
I used to recycle lead acid batteries for a living, and also, it was not me who gave you that "tasty morsel" either.

Your concept of utopia may be towers of boiling salt surrounded by a sea of mirrors driving battery recycling plants. But mine certainly is not. To me recycling batteries was hell on earth. By the way, the lead is recycled, the acid and the casing is not. The environmental agency shut the place down because it was so toxic. Now they just ship the duds to China and make it their problem.


I have nothing to add to this fascinating thread, without repeating myself.
I look forward with pleasure to reading your further discussion.
"Over and Out"
Best Wishes,

Adam
xxx

 

What you have described is more or less what we have now. But if you want to project your considerations into the future, you will have to widen your horizons.

As Groper has mentioned, we already have 40% efficient PV cells, which means that technically we could have 35% efficient PV power-generation systems. Far from excellence, sure, but the progress is being made year by year. And already just 10% short of current fossil-fuel power plant efficiencies.

As about the storage of solar energy, some means for long-term storage are already available, though they are still not compact enough for use in transportation. One of them is hydrogen, and it's technologies are being actively researched worldwide. One well and simply written summary of various current methods for hydrogen production and storage can be found here: http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydrogen.pdf

Hydrogen is a good candidate for the conversion of solar energy into chemical one, and hence for it's long-term storage, because we already have proven technologies for the conversion of chemical energy into mechanical work. The omni-present IC engines, which could be readily converted into hydrogen-fed ones. The pure hydrogen is also a perfect fuel for fuel cells, which will allow for even more efficient conversion into mechanical work (through electric motors) and heat (through the recovery of the heat released by the fuel cell electrochemical reactions), as soon as the life span of fuel cells gets into a more practical range.

Another alternative to fossil fuels, which will become a reality in the future, is the nuclear fusion. Big money is currently being thrown into the fundamental research which will allow us to reproduce the nuclear reactions which gives life to the stars, and I am optimistic about the final outcome of this research. Perhaps not even the youngest members of this forum will arrive to see the fruits of this research during their life time, but the future generations will.
And if we ever get realize the aneutronic fusion (the one which only marginally involve neutrons) - which happens at low temperatures, allows the direct conversion to electricity and doesn't require costly and bulky thermodynamic cycles - we will perhaps arrive to have fusion-powered vehicles and ships too.

You will notice that I have never mentioned economy, money and pay-off calculations in these considerations. That's because I believe that the current economic system has been one of the main obstacles to the development of the above-mentioned technologies. As long as the social and political system is supported by an economical framework which appreciates the technologies through the criteria of short-term profit, we will have a society which is running with the wheel-breaks engaged.

Some conservative minds will find it hard to accept this fact, but the whole basis of our economical system will have to be revised pretty soon, shifting the center of gravity from the concept of monetary profit towards the concepts of social utility and energetic sustainability. In other words, the rules of the game will have to be changed. It will be a painful process, but imo also an unavoidable one too. Right now some steps are being made in that field, through the governmental actions in the form of subsidies and tax-reliefs for the energy-producers from renewable sources. But the policies currently in use are a sort of hybrids, because they want to take into account the sustainability of energy production but still have to rely on the classic economical principles and profit criteria. However, I am confident it will get better. We are slowly taking the right course, though with a big delay. Let's just hope it's not too late. This would be an argument so huge that it would require an entire forum section, so I'll stop at this point.

Cheers


P.S.
I see that Number4 has abbandoned the discussion while I was typing. Sorry, sometimes I am a bit slow at putting the thoughts together...

 

Nuclear wont be the only answer... Its simply too dangerous

Im confident that In the future , energy generation will be just like it is today. A mix of technologies .

Some cars will run on Natural gas, some on diesel, some on petrol, some on electricity..

Energy generation in Regions with plenty of sun will obviously use solar to best effect.

Regions with coal reserves will be burning coal......

No reason to think that ships wont be the same. Solar, sails , oil , Gas...or whatever new technologies arise.


Ill bet that the first solar intensive ships are cruise ships

 

You're describing the present, not the future. 300 years ago they used horses to propel the vehicles, we have gone few steps forward since then.
You're basically saying that we have arrived to the final point of the technological development, which I dare to disagree...

 

Think of nuclear. In order to make nuclear work you must have a stable government. Half the world is automatically ruled out from any Nuclear option. They may even bomb Iran for going nuclear

Technolgy is expensive. Im confident that rich countries will rapidly adopt to whatever technolgy developes. Poor countries like Chad or Niger never will adapt and will be burning cow dung or diesel fo rever

 

That is EXACTLY the economical and social (and also mental) framework which I've been talking about, and which is creating obstacles to our technical potential. It is so deeply rooted in our heads that we find it nearly impossible to imagine any different kind of social and economical order. But it will have to be changed if we, the mankind, want to see any future at all.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the Rothschilds & Co. will not allow it to happen so easily.

 

I was reading that the low price of Lith-ion batteries has made a lot of things possible, but the (artificial) low price is accomplished by China disregarding any environmental impacts that the mining, processing and manufacturing of the batteries entail. China will also sell for less than cost to capture the market, much like your friendly neighborhood crack dealer will give you free tastes because he's your friend and likes you.

Recycling will be another issue.

Recharging is not free.

Once the price aligns with the actual costs, the whole scheme may not seem so attractive.

Solar power is there and has huge potential. I mean, it runs the earth now. There seems to be two ways to do it, storing the photovoltaics and convert them into a chemical reaction like with batteries, or storing the heat and converting it into a physical reaction like molten salts-heat-steam-turbine-generator. One seems a lot cleaner than the other, but they are both needed, as one is portable and the other is not.

The biggest progress could be made by re-arranging how the world works, by slowing down and using less. Mr Natural knows what's what.

 

Sorry I expressed myself a little awkward. You try to let a diesel run at 100 rpm and engage the prop. your diesel has to run at at least 1600 rpm, thus the efficiency is not there always. I like to see more electrics used in boats, that is just my preference.
Bert