Howdy Steve,
UM, er....that palnt was SUPPOSED to be built in Texas, Illinois stole it from us!
My brother-in-law was telling me about that. He has been in power generation for the last 25 years (20 of those on ships in the Navy). I worry about sequestering anything in salt domes that is a gas or a liquid. About once every ten years or so one of those salt domes full of LPG, LNG or other stuff decides to explode, when it does, its impressive. I've seen (and/or felt) two such. I wonder if the CO2 will stay put once its there. I know it won;t explode, but a lot of CO2 let out of somewhere at once can kill folks, lots of them. It happened in Cameroon many years ago.
I've seen ideas about sequestering CO2 in deep ocean basins. One such naturally occuring basin already exists, hundreds of square miles of liquid CO2 under a few miles of ocean water. The temperature and pressure keeps the CO2 liquid and in place.
I saw the coal gasification plant in Florida. They gasify the coal, burn it in a gas turbine, then use the turbine exhaust to operate a steam turbine. They are not sequestering the CO2, but they do get all the energy possible in the two part process.
Still, nothing has impressed me like the wind turbines up in Central Texas. Zero emissions. I was told the installation cost is a million bucks a megawatt, which figures to a buck a watt ($1000 per kilowatt). Which looks to be currently much cheaper than solar and still competitive if the solar technology improves dramatically as predicted. Payoff is about three years at average production rates. Warranty is five years, and expected life is 25 years per installation. All parts of the installation are easily recycled. Less than one bird in ten thousand is at risk from the wind turbines. If you want to save birds, leave the turbines alone and kill housecats, they get more birds than anything else.
I don;t know that much about it, but my BIL says that solar produces DC power that must be converted to AC or the house must have DC powered appliances. Apparenty its not that difficult to convert to AC if solar installations are contributing to the grid.
I am not able to run my generator in a way to contribute to the grid, I must manually bring it on and offline. The engine technology I'm using is over 100 years old. Lister/Petter style engines adapt really well to vegetable oil as fuel. Modern diesels must have to oil converted to bio-diesel, a somewhat difficult and energy consumptive process.
I also try and use as effecient of equipmetn as I can get. A lot of my big stuff is three phase.
The wind blows plenty here at the coast and I've looked at wind turbines, but at a small size (say 15 KW), the cost is prohibitive.
I pay 14.1 centes per KHW, the highest rate of any fish farmer or other farmer that I know of.
Brett
01-02-2008
Quote: 
. Just a matter of time.
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