Most of the world is not blessed with good wind resources. How realistic will it be for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), nuclear, and Geo-thermal to make renewable liquid fuels using your RFTS process in places like India, China, Africa, and Iceland?
Glad you asked. CSP and enhanced geo-thermal still have a long ways to go before it will be practical for them to compete with wind in a Class-4 (or better) wind site, but progress is being made. We’ve recently shown that a 50% improvement in thermal conversion efficiency will be possible where both good geo-thermal and CSP resources are available fairly close together – within about 20 miles of each other. More details on this can be found in our DORC ASME paper. There is another possibility, called dry reforming, for making liquid fuels using CO2, methane, and high-temperature CSP. Our analysis shows it won’t compete with WindFuels in North America, but it might eventually make sense in some countries. Nuclear energy can be used if nuclear power plants can be made at affordable prices. Energy from new nuclear power plants in the U.S. will be 2-6 times more expensive than off-peak wind for at least the next decade. Read more.
Glad you asked. CSP and enhanced geo-thermal still have a long ways to go before it will be practical for them to compete with wind in a Class-4 (or better) wind site, but progress is being made. We’ve shown that a 50% improvement in thermal conversion efficiency will be possible where both good geo-thermal and CSP resources are available fairly close together – within about 20 miles of each other. More details on this can be found in our DORC ASME paper. There is another possibility, called dry reforming, for making liquid fuels using CO2, methane, and high-temperature CSP. Our analysis shows it won’t compete with WindFuels in North America, but it might eventually make sense in some countries. Nuclear energy can be used if nuclear power plants can be built at affordable prices. Energy from new nuclear power plants in the U.S. will be 2-6 times more expensive than off-peak wind for at least the next decade. Read more.
Related Questions
- Most of the world is not blessed with good wind resources. How realistic will it be for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), nuclear, and Geo-thermal to make renewable liquid fuels using your RFTS process in places like India, China, Africa, and Iceland?
- Are there good wind resources in the United States?
- How does a concentrated solar power plant (CSP) work?
