Hephaestus Project – Energy

I met this girl named Sandy, she gave me a kiss and everything went black for a week. No power, no heat, no refrigeration, and she left me very annoyed. She came into everyone’s  lives like a Japanese arashi and left as quickly as she came. She left a trail of death, destruction, and annoyance in her wake.

If people had heeded the warnings of 20 years ago, hurricane Sandy might have never occurred,  the damage and destruction to property could have been lessened or never have happened, lives could have been saved, and the disruption to peoples lives could have been prevented.

The nature of politics, federal, state, and local regulations, the monetary goals of corporations, government support of entrenched bureaucracies, and corporate lobbying has made most current clean energy solutions expensive and time consuming to install.

Lets side step all of these issues and hit corporations in their pocket books. Lets turn energy generation into the commodity and energy into something people and corporations just have. Where energy generation and energy storage become a fixed one time cost per kilowatt and per kilowatt hour. Where if your corporation doesn’t use this technology you are at a financial disadvantage and destined to fail.

Setting the following project goals accomplishes this.

Create a device to generate clean, renewable energy 24 hours a day, with a minimum of five days of storage capacity, an LCOE (Levelised Cost of Energy) below 20 dollars per megawatt hour, a life span of over 20 years, that can be mass produced in a high speed manner using  pre-1970’s technology.

A solution along these lines does several things.

• Using older technology that is available in every nation, makes it possible for all nations, including developing nations, to become energy independent.
• It makes the ground based extraction of carbon based fuels non cost competitive.  The cheapest form of energy is Natural gas advanced combined cycle, it is  currently $65 dollars per megawatt hour. $20 dollars per megawatt hour is below the financial limit for current carbon based technologies to be cost competitive. Charging below fuel and maintenance costs is a financially losing proposition for energy suppliers.
• At below $20 dollars per megawatt hour the power grid costs more to maintain than can be made transporting the energy. Charging more to transport energy than the energy costs is not a financially viable option or a workable business plan.
• It makes the production of methane and hydrogen as a fuel a viable option as the cost of these fuels would be well below that of current fossil fuels.
• Low cost energy makes the extraction of fresh water from the sea an inexpensive workable solution. A combination of vacuum to reduce the boiling point of water, heat exchangers to reduce the energy requirements, and below 20 dollar per megawatt hour energy makes distillation cost competitive with current desalinization technologies.
• It stabilizes the cost of goods and services. No more labor day gas price spikes. No more fuel surcharges on airline tickets. No more price spikes on food due to fluctuating fuel prices.
• It substantially reduces the cost of all manufactured items. Depending on the item the energy cost are between 10 and 60 percent of the final price. This includes the energy associated with mining or recycling, transportation at each level of manufacture, factory energy usage at each level of manufacture, and the percentage of a persons salary dedicated to energy (gasoline, electricity, natural gas, heating oil, etc) that companies pay their employees. As an example of personal energy costs, my direct yearly energy expenditure is  ~$8,400, per month I pay $350 for gasoline, $200 for electricity, and $150 for LNG.