Solving the world’s energy problems
I know the title sounds boring, but just listen up, and tell me what you think.
We’ll build the WWWoE - World Wide Web of Energy. The WWWoE would be a worldwide network of energy transfer. This is how it would work:
1. Anyone would be able to connect to the WWWoE through a service provider.
2. You’d be able to consume energy, as well as supply energy to the WWWoE. You get paid for the energy you supply, while you have to pay for the electricity you consume.
3. Electricity generated by any mode can be supplied to WWWoE. It could be solar energy, wind, or a nuclear power plant.
4. The network stretches across continents.
Lets look at the reasons why this will be successful:
1. Highly distributed - You use solar power from the other side of the globe at night, or when it is cloudy
2. Highly distributed - If the neighbourhood power plant shuts down, you still get electricity
3. Highly distributed - regions with surplus energy can sell it off to make money
4. Scalable - Anyone ranging from an individual to a government can participate - every solar panel / windmill / generator / power plant counts
5. Economically attractive - Opens up a clean new way for folks owning farmland to produce electricity and sell it off
6. Guarantee of Service - Country A cannot put country B into darkness because the system is so distributed.
In short, we’re looking at an analogy of the internet. One big issue I can think of is energy losses while tranferring it from one continent to another. How is the superconductor research coming along?
4 Responses to “Solving the world’s energy problems”
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It isn’t economically attractive. The loss during transmission will be very high. You can’t have undersea cables across oceans and seas which enable a lot of Internet. Also, unlike Internet (which in itself is concentrated in urban areas and has managed to reuse phone lines to get to rural areas), electricity will require putting up the wire to every home. The cost of putting up solar generation in every home and smart meters in every one of those etc make life very very difficult.
The fluctuations in demand means too difficult to control. Don’t forget things like latency when sending power from one part of the country to another.
We already have a solution to world’s energy problems, it’s called Nuclear power. Read this:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/
Nations already have power grids which pool energy from various sources say thermal, nuclear, renewable etc, though the power transmission and power pooling is highly decentralized. The biggest disadvantage of pooling all the power supply is that we simply would not have enough protection equipment and handling mechanisms to handle so much power. But the idea of a single universal power pricing and acquiring means is nice, provided it ensures uniform availability. aah, thinking more about it goes over my head.
Manas, how do you alone manage to come up with these sort of global ideas :)
Of course the problem as commenter no.1 said is transmission. Superconductors, yes, then there is wireless transmission too which is being talked about - demo starts at 6:30 in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1GqNN2Xe7g
One of my ideas is highly localised power generators with solar backup - burning municipal waste along with conventional methods.
almost 60 % of the energy is wasted during transportation…. we improve it by using superconductivity then international grid array is a matter of cooperation :)