FYI, an R&D sort of activity in wind is to put floating systems up high into the trade winds, which have less variability. But that’s just an FYI, since it is R&D stage at this point.

There are many kinds of CSP with corresponding varying degrees of history. For example, SEGS goes back to the 1980s. http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems
Low energy prices put off further deployment after these were built, but that’s not a problem now, and we even have RPS and stuff. This has an overview of the types:
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy

Stirling dishes systems have a fairly long history. Most types of CSP (Stirling dish, parabolic trough, CLFR, and power tower) have seen recent commitments from utilities for 100s of MW (totaling in the 1000s). I suggest the utilities think CSP is “here”. They like it because it displaces expensive peaking power.

On your V2G comments: remember that the most important grid balancing that EVs can do is to simply vary their charge times in response to power availability (since they are parked 95% of the time, and only 5% of the time to charge, they are extremely flexible). Actual reverse flows would likely be only dozens of times a year, and we are not talking about deep discharge, which is the most cycle count affecting. For batteries with cycle counts of 5000, we’re talking about 6% of cycles. Individual drivers would decide whether the money received from V2G was worth it or not.

As I have shown in my analysis earlier, a LFTR is, for all intents and purposes, a power source that does NOT deplete over very large timescales. The same cannot be said for wind and solar. Wind depends on good wind locations. In Germany for example those are already becoming scarce on land and the capacity factor of new wind farms is falling there. The reason they are building coal plants there like crazy is because of the wind variability. They DO need 80% of their capacity running as spinning reserve.
Solar also requires suitable locations. I do not like paving over our last unspoiled land, the deserts, with solar panels or mirror farms. Besides of which, solar PV does require some pretty rare elements today. And that also with a capacity factor of 20-25%. No large enough scale storage exists to make up for that capacity factor.
Forget biofuels. Even at just a few % of just gasoline consumption today. the push to bio-fuels is already causing food riots in countries depending on US corn production. Even cellulosic ethanol does not scale enough. After all, the sunlight to bio-fuel efficiency is only a few % at most. Far less than solar PV.
Natural gas, proposed to make up the thermodynamic loss in CAES for solar, is also a limited resource, and is far less benign than ordinarily believed. Although it produces only 40% of the CO2 of coal per energy unit without the additional nasties, the leakage rate in extraction, transport and use in the US is believed to be about 3.5% in the US according to a greenpeace analysis. As natural gas is mainly methane, and methane has 30-70 times the greenhouse gas potential of CO2, the leakages cause it to have as much or more greenhouse gas potential than burning coal.

I agree that the great thing about wind is that it is finally here. You can pay money and get it in a year or so. The $0.02/kWh production tax credit would cost $77 billion/year, for a few years, if the wind power folks took over the entire U.S. electric production. That doesn’t seem like an outrageous price for switching to a completely domestic and largely CO2 neutral energy source. For one thing, it really would drive electricity costs into the ground and help move some industry back over here.

Another nice thing about wind is that it appears that a $0.02/kWh production tax credit is sufficient to drive a lot of private investment. The wind power industry is ramping up fast, it seems like the right thing to do is not change the rules on them for about a decade, at which point they’ll be closing in on 20% or 30% of domestic production… and the problems with distribution that happen at that level. They may also bump into other problems, like limits to the supply of fiberglass, or resin, or gear cutting equipment, or land on which people will tolerate turbines.

I know less about concentrated solar power. In particular, I have not read that these plants have demonstrated long-term reliability or cost effectiveness. I have a feeling that CSP is not “here” yet.

Frankly, the notion of using electric vehicles to balance the grid seems farfetched. My understanding was that batteries have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles that they can tolerate, and they definitely have a finite amount of charge able to be stored. If the grid storage costs are not simply added to the cost of the vehicle, there has to be some sort of anticorrelation between anticipated vehicle travel demand and grid demand. Beyond charge at night / drive during the day, I don’t see what they have.

The limit to wind power will likely be geographic redistribution costs, and getting those costs down requires higher voltage HVDC lines. I did an analysis which showed that at +/- 500 kV, electricity transported over 4000 miles doubles in price. I don’t know over how much range we will need to transport wind power, but I do know that any price margin wind has over coal is pretty thin.

If we double the voltage, we double the range associated with a cost multiplier. So a +/- 1000 kV HVDC line might move electricity 2000 miles while adding 20% to the cost. I’m guessing that 2000-3000 miles is the kind of range that will be necessary.

(I have not done the spreadsheet you requested, as I know almost nothing about the inputs.)

Your claim of electrical power plant efficiency is simplistic. Coal plants are typically 30-44% efficient. Baseload NGCC plants are typically 50-60% efficient. CSP plants are 30% efficient, but the input is sunlight, not fossil fuel.

You write “I do not doubt that batteries in a car today can perform average commuter duty. But they cannot serve long distance duty.” First of all, plug-in hybrids can trivially handle long-distance. (I use “plug-in” to mean a PHEV or BEV.) Since the long-distance operation might be only a few days a year, the liquid fuel consumption is probably minimal (and it could be a biofuel or even a GreenFreedom fuel). Second, a pure EV can handle long-distance with fast charging. In May 2007, recharging a 150-mile range EV in 10 minutes was demonstrated using Li4Ti5O12 batteries. These batteries have never been put into real production, so their price is very high (at least twice that of LiFePO4), and you’re not likely to see them in EVs in the next few years, but you might in the longer term. Also, if you watch battery research results, you’ll see that all sorts of advances are being made which may yield batteries even better in this regard than Li4Ti5O12 (see for example, Yi Cui’s work). PHEVs today, and BEVs likely in the future, will be able to do long-distance.

I don’t propose to debate LFTR vs. CSP for powering GreenFreedom. I believe the question is what to do with the power output of the LFTR or CSP. Feeding it to GreenFreedom is wasting that power, and that power has a cost. Such waste might be worth doing for specific applications in a limited way. For example, as I alluded to above, to produce liquid backup fuel for PHEVs that 90% of their miles from electricity, or for producing aviation fuel. (It is possible though that both applications might be better served by diesel-like fuels instead of gasoline-like fuels.) I was concentrating on cars, not trucking, ships, and aircraft. My concern is that GreenFreedom produces the wrong fuel for these applications. Also, most freight transport needs to move to rail in the future, since that is so much more efficient, and rail should be moving to electricity as well.

Finally, since the 50kWh/kgH2 I mentioned before already represents 78% efficiency relative to the HHV of H2, it is unclear what advantages pure thermal production of H2 has unless the efficiency is pretty high compared to 78% times the electrical efficiency. If this method becomes useful, there is no reason that it cannot be matched in a solar furnace (3000°C).

Plug-in cars are about 3-4x more efficient than H2 cars today. If various goals for electrolysis and fuel cell efficiency (e.g. an electrolysis goal of 50kWh/kgH2 and the FreedomCar goal of 20kWh/kgH2), then H2 cars would manage to get to half the efficiency of plug-in cars.

Your analysis of why plug-in cars are not possible is clearly wrong. My family has been driving a plug-in car for six years made by Toyota using 1990s technology and it works great. It has 77,000 miles on it, and the batteries continue to perform great. Others have over 100,000 miles, and the fleet data suggests 150,000 miles is reasonable to expect. Moreover, the price of suitable batteries is declining, not increasing as your guesswork would suggest.

Moreover, a GreenFreedom powered car would still create smog and otherwise foul our air.

I disagree that GreenFreedom makes the cost of the primary energy irrelevant. The factor of five in either land area, plant investment, or supernova remnants will not disappear and powering a plug-in from electricity is equally benign in terms of electricity.

I think you are being rather optimistic if you think we can build 700 reactors/GreenFreedom pairs in just the US “in the short term”.

If we make 2 assumptions:

1. The price (and energy needed) of the extracted Thorium rises inversely proportional to the concentration
2. The extraction of Thorium from low grade sources uses the same technology and cost relationship as that currently used for Uranium

Then, using this example of Uranium at $25 / pound:
http://findarticles.com/ p/ articles/ mi_m0EIN/ is_2005_July_29/ ai_n14837028
This mine, according to the provided tables, is profitable with Uranium at 750ppm and the cutoff concentration (unprofitability limit) is 250ppm ore grade.
This means that Thorium mined at $521 / pound from ordinary rock would be break-even profitable for the mine.
For a 500 MW thorium reactor that requires 400kg of Thorium per year, this mean then the fuel costs are $463,000 per year. At an electricity price of 10 cents/kWh for the mine, and assuming ALL the costs of the extracted Thorium are energy costs, then the extraction of Thorium from 12ppm ore requires ~0.1% of the power output of the reactor to mine his own fuel. To get to 1% of the power output, the mine must be able to buy the electricity at 1 cent/kWh.
Just these quick “back-of-the-envelope” calculations show, that EROEI on the fuel supply is not a problem for a LFTR even when using ordinary granite (at 12ppm) as source material. Even then it seems it has a far more favourable EROEI than any alternative energy source (gasoline, as a comparison, requires about 20% of the energy contained for extraction, transport and refining).

I may be wrong, but I suspect a large fraction of the transport costs are for diesel.

Even though coal is cheap, it’s still more than half the cost of running a coal plant. So that means that a significant cost of coal plant is imported petroleum. It is not an entirely domestic energy source.