michael hoskins:
mark-b…Sorry to disappoint you. Tire burning was tried, several times, and fails on several counts.
Yes, I am aware of some of those failures. There was a plant that tried it in Ohio, but concluded it was not feasible because the tire chunks kept falling the bottom of the boiler and smoldering. (They were injecting TDF into a pulverized coal boiler).
The same company,BTW, had a chain grate stoker, but couldn’t be bothered to burn it there.
Cement manufacturers burn tires in their kilns all day long.
A micro generator going back through an inverter (automatic paralleling) with safeties that prevent feeding an unstable line, large scale distributed generation is not that big a problem.
In any case, the utilities make their lineman work the lines hot, so it makes little difference to the lineman whether it is the utility or the consumer that is trying to kill him.
“Guys, take if from an old power house engineer, we have a do have a clue what is needed. Fuel. A fire. Somewhere, a fire.”
The power companies rely on their Stationary engineers to keep their other engineers in line, and their generators on line.
Solar and waste grease both have energy provided by fire, the sun. The proper argument against my position is that these sources are insignificant compared to coal and nuclear. But are they more effective than tire gages?
The greens are the biggest obstacle to the waste grease. The CO2! The CO2! Never mind the net removal of carbon from the atmosphere.
RWE:
“A friend says he works with someone who has photovoltaic cells on his roof that supply all the energy his house needs and feeds the excess back into the main power grid. And at night or when it is very cloudy he runs off the grid. This makes a lot more sense than putting in a battery storage system. But it basically means you need power plants just as large as if his solar system was not there. Obviously, you have to size the power plants as if his system was not there, because at night it is not and it may go down at any time. As for the cost – $20K – it will take 20 years to break even and by then I think he will need a whole new system.”
The grid is held up by two methods, base load units and peakers. The base load is the big coal plants and nukes running at 100%. Peakers are brought on and off line as needed to support the grid. Solar matches grid load as more power is used during the daytime. So solar is off when it is not being used and on when it is needed. This makes it (collectively) an automatic peaker.
BTW, the guys down at the system control center KNOW when you are making coffee,breakfast,taking showers, drying your hair, and leaving for work.
