Solar thermal is a smarter option

Australians warm to nuclear power
IAN MUNRO AND GEOFF STRONG – theage.com.au

…Federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson restated the Government’s opposition to nuclear power as a way of meeting Australia’s future greenhouse commitments.

However, he also cast doubt on the effectiveness of photovoltaic solar power, one of the technologies championed as a possible future renewable energy resource. Mr Ferguson told The Age he doubted that photovoltaic would ever make a significant contribution to Australia’s energy needs.

But he believed solar thermal technology, which uses the sun’s heat to boil liquids such as water to power a generating turbine, was more likely to be the answer.

Mr Ferguson said the main problem with renewables was the inability to store energy. He said the renewable sector kept insisting it was an alternative to coal as baseload power and this was not the case.

”So if we are going to make progress on the solar front you are thinking about similar energy outcomes, that’s why storage is the issue,” Mr Ferguson said…

via Australians warm to nuclear power. theage.com.au

Yes, I agree. Energy storage is the main issue. Coordinating energy storage and renewable sources with a Smart Grid AT SCALE will eventually be an alternative to coal. It isn’t yet. But the pieces are being put together to enable this alternative. By the time any new nuclear power station would be built it would be used as a bulk energy supply source into a Smart Grid and a network of energy storage. A distributed network of renewable sources and gas turbines could supply a future Smart Grid just as well, much more cheaply, and with a higher reliability (if you consider the effect of shutting down a nuclear power station for whatever reason compared to shutting down a number of renewable energy power stations in a distributed network. Even an earth tremor could shut down a nuclear power station until it was cleared to restart.)

Solar thermal power stations might be quite quick to set up once you have a production line for the components sorted out. You might think of solar thermal power stations with linear Fresnel reflector arrays as something of a ‘disposable’ renewable power station – they could in time be cheap and quick to install and they may have an operational life of a decade or so, and they can be quite quickly decommissioned as well. They might not be the most efficient since the range in temperatures for the heat engines might not be that great, but with a well planned production and installation process you could make up for the inefficiency with a high number of installed units. You could also site them to take advantage of complementary sources of renewable energy such as biogas. The initial design stage may take some time and be involved, but a mass production and installation process may prove to be very cost effective per unit overall. With solar thermal you could plan for a large quantity of installations rather than for fewer higher quality units as you have with PV solar.