 |
| Typical Rube Goldberg machine with its many attendant assumptions and potential failure nodes |
 |
| Proposed coast-to-coast HVDC super-grid with its many attendant assumptions and potential failure nodes |
Would a continent-sized super HVDC grid be a Rube Goldberg machine writ large?
Back in the day, you would have been hard-pressed to find an article on the internet critical of biofuels. We should all be driving biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol powered cars by now. Politicians at the Federal level from both sides of the aisle saw this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; buy votes from the farm belt, implement a permanent farm subsidy. So, in the end all we have left is the government mandated consumption of corn ethanol. Ethanol made out of corn now replaces roughly 10% of gasoline use. Not quite what everyone was hoping for. Governors and mayors also jumped on the bandwagon with similar dismal results.
Because Seattle is too small to grow its own biodiesel, the goal was to at least source it from Washington State, but for economic reasons, it ended up coming from Canada. So, in the end, there was a transfer of wealth going on from Seattle to Canada for its canola-based biodiesel, which is why all of the biodiesel stations have since disappeared. A similar situation arises with the generation of electricity.
Dozens of studies and white papers supporting biofuels were being pumped out (no pun intended) at the height of the craze. I see all of this as a potential analogy for what we're witnessing today with wind and solar.
The latest low carbon energy system research seems to have given up on storing excess wind and solar generated electricity in a form that will be used to create electricity later (minus the 20%-30% lost from storing and retrieving it) when there is demand for it.
