Project makani fantastic new wind power concept from google

pop_gun

patman99 wrote: »

Give it another 10 years and we may well have thorium reactors up and running.
That's the tech the Chinese are going for.

Thorium is a no go. The idea has been around for 60 odd years and no one has managed to make it work in that time. Not even close to it.
America and Russia threw in the towel a while ago.

cells

8115510 wrote:

Thorium is a no go. The idea has been around for 60 odd years and no one has managed to make it work in that time. Not even close to it.
America and Russia threw in the towel a while ago.

It doesn't really offer anything substantial above and beyond a uranium LWR

The main problem with nukes is that they are big powerful and most nations build just a few and as such they end up expensive very expensive.

These drone-kites can be manufactured like cars in factories and driven to a location. A couple of factories could supply the whole world.

Toyota is building a 200,000 cars a year plant in mexico. If instead they built a 200,000 a year drone-kite factory in mexico (or where ever) that ONE factory output would be equal to 700 nukes per decade.


Literally one factory of these could change the energy world
these drones weigh about the same as a car and could be built in the same type of way


I truly think google has its hands in a fantastic tech here.

cells

These are meant to weigh about the same as a car.
I don't think its unreasonable to say one of these could be built for the price of an expensive car.

with just a 10 year life they should generate 30,000 MWh of electricity

an expensive car is $150,000
That gets you a price of $5/MWh


If that could be achieved it would be amazing.
marginal coal/gas costs are closer to $25/MWh and thats at plants that have been paid off

jamesd

cells wrote: »

At a distance you wouldn't see the teather or the ground structure so it would look like a circling bird.

Here's a picture of a small scale prototype. Doesn't look much like a circling bird to me. More like a circling container ship.

cells wrote: »

also its about 1/10th the size of a similar output wind turbine

Look directly below the small scale prototype and you will see an ocean-going container ship and container port cranes. Notice how much bigger even the prototype is than the ship's width or height? That's the 30kW prototype of the 600kW production version.

cells wrote: »

The main problem with nukes is that they are big powerful and most nations build just a few and as such they end up expensive very expensive.

Make that cheapest, in the UK, at £81/MW/h for the first reactor of a type, except for combined cycle gas turbine generation at £80/MW/h. Helped by capital costs that are lower than solar, onshore or offshore wind and operating costs including fuel that are also lower. Coal is cheapest by far at £66/MW/h if it's not penalised with £56/MW/h of carbon costs.

cells wrote: »

I don't think its unreasonable to say one of these could be built for the price of an expensive car. with just a 10 year life they should generate 30,000 MWh of electricity

an expensive car is $150,000
That gets you a price of $5/MWh

If that could be achieved it would be amazing.

Operating cost are likely to be significant. Even for fixed solar they are estimated at £26/MW/h in the UK, with onshore and offshore wind at £20 and £37.

You're right that 30,000 MWh over 10 years would be amazing. Google says that maximum capacity at optimal wind speed is 600kW which is 5.2MW/h per year. And of course the wind is not going to blow at maximum output level all the time or anything close to it. Do you really think that even the ground station could be built for as little as $150,000? To safely support a kite on the ground or in the air with a long wing size in high winds? Have you even seen just how big the wing on the 30kW prototype is in their photos? The 600kW model would be huge compared to a car, even the prototype is more like a couple of buses in size.

Even the Makani claim is only that the power cost will be half the price of offshore or onshore wind. Onshore UK cost is around £93/MW/h vis £134/MW/h.

It's easy to make something look good by overstating power output, under-stating construction costs and ignoring operating costs.

Martyn1981

jamesd wrote: »

Make that cheapest, in the UK, at £81/MW/h for the first reactor of a type, except for combined cycle gas turbine generation at £80/MW/h. Helped by capital costs that are lower than solar, onshore or offshore wind and operating costs including fuel that are also lower. Coal is cheapest by far at £66/MW/h if it's not penalised with £56/MW/h of carbon costs.

That link is dated just before the UK announced the real contract for difference strike price for nuclear which is actually £92.50. This may happen as soon as 2025, and be paid for 35 years.

This doesn't compare too favourably with the 15yr CfD's for wind and solar. In the recent CfD auction for years 2015/16 through 2017/18 PV and on-shore wind came in at below £80/MWh. Though admittedly the 2018/19 winning bids were for £82.50/MWh.

Off-shore wind are higher at around £115-£120/MWh, but still falling and with around 8 years to go, are looking good to get under the nuclear figure.


Can I ask where you got this information:

jamesd wrote: »

Operating cost are likely to be significant. Even for fixed solar they are estimated at £26/MW/h in the UK, with onshore and offshore wind at £20 and £37.

I've always argued that operating costs for large scale solar must be significant (small, but significant) considering annual land, insurance and security costs. Whereas for smaller scale rooftop PV, OPEX should be close to zero as none of these costs really apply.

Mart.

jamesd

The operating costs are from the same page on the same paper, page 9, table 1.

I think you're wrong about operating costs for small scale solar and wind. They are likely to be higher due to lots of extra overhead for travel and administration as well as lots of disparate systems to support. Where they can have a significant advantage is in reduced transmission costs, though there are some potential issues there when demand varies rapidly due to changes in micro-generation within a city. Of course if it is an individual generating the power they are saving their purchase price, not the generation price, so the financial reward per kWh generated is higher than for bulk generation.

The CfD strike price isn't the cost of generating the power, it's an agreed buying price. Neither subsidies or potential subsidies via CfD or selective higher taxes on carbon change the underlying cost of power generation types. They do change which it's economic to build, though. It's also worth noting that the paper gave first of a type costs for nuclear while the CfD cost is for all plants of a type, with the later ones expected to have cheaper generation cost but the same selling price.

The wind CfD prices are outrageously high compared to the nuclear one. They are for unreliable variable power while the nuclear price is for reliable power being supplied at peak demand. Which means that the wind power CfDs don't factor in the cost of ensuring that something else is providing the power they are supposed to be generating at peak demand times if they fail to deliver it. That something has to be extra gas fired power plants built on spec to be used only when wind fails to deliver. Or other rapid response generation or power cutting. By comparison nuclear and other systems generally just schedule unavailability at low demand parts of the year and can be relied upon to be there at peak demand.

To get to more sensible pricing we'd need to be setting prices for 95%+ guaranteed power delivery at peak demand times. Which would force the unreliable sources to include the cost of the alternative power supplies that they need to produce reliable power. There are some moves for plants to do that using batteries (See the SCE battery in California) or molten salt power storage, though I don't know of one in the UK. Though it doesn't have to be on a per-plant/field level, it could be via more centralised generating arrangements shared by many plants to reduce costs by probabilistically working out the percentage of power likely to be unavailable from the whole set of plants and providing generation just for that shortfall.

At the moment the biggest battery I know of for power storage is the Fairbanks one that provides 40MW for 7 minutes to cover the time between the power line to Fairbanks going down and diesel generation being started. That's only around 12,00 US homes worth for only seven minutes so it's way below what we'd need to make wind reliable or to stabilise solar output during it's known availability times. At the moment the biggest I know of in Europe is the 6MW / 10MWh one in Leighton Buzzard. Lower total capacity but the 27,000 homes for an hour that's one of its ratings is the sort of thing we'd need for topping up generation shortfalls. The 400MWh SCE one is much more grid-scale than just 40MW, though the substation location has its uses for places with unreliable grid connections and maybe for improving overall grid reliability by building in tolerance for grid failures.

Martyn1981

jamesd wrote: »

The operating costs are from the same page on the same paper, page 9, table 1.

I think you're wrong about operating costs for small scale solar and wind. They are likely to be higher due to lots of extra overhead for travel and administration as well as lots of disparate systems to support. Where they can have a significant advantage is in reduced transmission costs, though there are some potential issues there when demand varies rapidly due to changes in micro-generation within a city. Of course if it is an individual generating the power they are saving their purchase price, not the generation price, so the financial reward per kWh generated is higher than for bulk generation.

The CfD strike price isn't the cost of generating the power, it's an agreed buying price. Neither subsidies or potential subsidies via CfD or selective higher taxes on carbon change the underlying cost of power generation types. They do change which it's economic to build, though. It's also worth noting that the paper gave first of a type costs for nuclear while the CfD cost is for all plants of a type, with the later ones expected to have cheaper generation cost but the same selling price.

Apologies, once I saw the date I didn't bother reading any further as so much has changed since then.

Crucially, we now have 'real' CfD prices. Real in the sense that providers have bid for contracts to supply electricity. That means that rather than refer to estimates of costs, we can see what the actual cost will be if we want somebody to build that source of generation.

As I stated, the recent CfD's for on-shore wind and PV are already lower than the planned CfD for nuclear in 2025(?). I appreciate that the costs may fall, but I think the price of nuclear only drops to £87/MWh if more reactors are contracted. On-shore wind and PV are already below that price and falling.

When I referred to OPEX I did say smaller scale PV (not wind), as roof mounted PV has almost no operating costs, other than replacement inverters when needed. That's why, when combined with your point that the income streams are not the same (supply side PV has to compete with the leccy generation price, whilst demand side PV competes with the leccy supply price (or a combination of the two)) that I believe demand side, rooftop mounted PV has an economic advantage over large scale supply side PV.

Yes, I agree that the true cost of generation should involve all factors such as reliability, but this works against nuclear too, since it needs to run all the time to be most economic. So much of its costs are fixed that varying generation will only mean a net loss of income. So artificial demand such as E7 is needed to maximise its profitability. But I was actually answering your point about the cost of generating a MWh of leccy, and to show that nuclear is far more expensive (comparatively too) than once thought.

A further point is that the recent CfD auction did have PV coming in at £50/MWh for the 2015/16 year. With average market prices at around that figure now, that would effectively mean no subsidy. But, personally, I can't see those PV farms being built, or if they are, then I can't see them run at a profit. I suspect the bidders took a gamble and hoped that there would be higher winning bids in that year.*

[* CfD rates within a category, for that year, are all paid at the highest winning bid.]

Mart.

cells

jamesd wrote: »

Here's a picture of a small scale prototype. Doesn't look much like a circling bird to me. More like a circling container ship.

Look directly below the small scale prototype and you will see an ocean-going container ship and container port cranes. Notice how much bigger even the prototype is than the ship's width or height? That's the 30kW prototype of the 600kW production version.

Make that cheapest, in the UK, at £81/MW/h for the first reactor of a type, except for combined cycle gas turbine generation at £80/MW/h. Helped by capital costs that are lower than solar, onshore or offshore wind and operating costs including fuel that are also lower. Coal is cheapest by far at £66/MW/h if it's not penalised with £56/MW/h of carbon costs.

Operating cost are likely to be significant. Even for fixed solar they are estimated at £26/MW/h in the UK, with onshore and offshore wind at £20 and £37.

You're right that 30,000 MWh over 10 years would be amazing. Google says that maximum capacity at optimal wind speed is 600kW which is 5.2MW/h per year. And of course the wind is not going to blow at maximum output level all the time or anything close to it. Do you really think that even the ground station could be built for as little as $150,000? To safely support a kite on the ground or in the air with a long wing size in high winds? Have you even seen just how big the wing on the 30kW prototype is in their photos? The 600kW model would be huge compared to a car, even the prototype is more like a couple of buses in size.

Even the Makani claim is only that the power cost will be half the price of offshore or onshore wind. Onshore UK cost is around £93/MW/h vis £134/MW/h.

It's easy to make something look good by overstating power output, under-stating construction costs and ignoring operating costs.

The 600KW version at a decent site is meant to operate at 60% CF which works out to 0.6MW x 60% x 24 hours x 365 days x10 years = 31,536 MWh over ten years. I rounded down to 30,000 MWh


and yes I do believe a 1 ton (mass of the 600KW drone) flying drone can be built for $150k or even less. I understand its bigger than a car but the mass is about the same and you can build a car for $15k. A car is in many ways more complicated than an electric motor drone. Why do you think it would be an impossible price. Place ten cars back to back and you have a contraption two the size if the drone and ten cars can be built for $150k so why nit one drone

also have a look at sports aircraft. One man seater sports planes cost less than $150k and these drones are imo simpler than a maned sports plane




So yes its possible to nake something look bad when you talk poop

PasturesNew

That would have farqued up the police helicopter hovering over my house the other week in the dark.

jamesd

cells wrote: »

The 600KW version at a decent site is meant to operate at 60% CF which works out to 0.6MW x 60% x 24 hours x 365 days x10 years = 31,536 MWh over ten years. I rounded down to 30,000 MWh

That's with an optimistic site, not typical, and is a vendor claim not observed fact.

cells wrote: »

Why do you think it would be an impossible price. Place ten cars back to back and you have a contraption two the size if the drone and ten cars can be built for $150k so why nit one drone

Cars aren't normally built of carbon fibre and don't normally have long tethers to the ground station that has to handle large wind loadings. Nor do they need permanent connections to a power grid to be built.

We also know that the vendor's own claimed cost per megawatt of generation is far higher than the numbers you're suggesting would produce and that vendors can be relied on to understate the real costs.