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coffee_rules

By coffee_rules
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Tillu Grand Master

Tillu

Posted
Posted

TIL that

 

A thermal power plant using coal always need to run at a 55% base load capacity because it takes 13-15 hours to switch off and restart it again.

 

That's why Andhra is losing a lot of Solar energy which could meet most of our factory and domestic energy needs during the day time.

 

Solar plants are useless at night as battery storage is inadequate and we need coal power to keep the electricity running at night and we can't shut off coal power plants during day time because it needs 13-15 hours to turn it on again.

 

To avoid this loss, human ingenuity comes to the rescue once again. Now the excess solar energy is being used to run various projects like pumped hydro, green hydrogen and green ammonia.

 

Pumped hydro : Andhra and Maharashtra are the ideal locations to run these projects due to having eastern and western ghats.

 

They use the excess solar energy during the day time, to pump water from a downstream reservoir, to an elevated reservoir upstream nearly 2 km away and release that water to the reservoir downstream, during nights running turbines to generate hydro electricity.

 

This way you can meet your night time energy needs as well without running coal power plants. Andhra has nearly 30 locations like this to run pumped hydro projects. Adani and a few companies want to build these projects and are awaiting environmental clearance.

 

China generates nearly 60GW electricity through this method which is bigger than all the other countries combined.

 

Green Hydrogen : Same process, use the excess solar energy during day time to separate hydrogen from water using electrolysis which can be stored and used for running hydrogen trains and steel plants.

 

Steel plants currently use Coking coal to fire the blast furnace which releases a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. Green hydrogen is clean and releases water as a residue. It also saves forex money for us as we import most of our Coking coal from Australia and Indonesia. Australia earns nearly $100 billion from exporting coking coal to other countries.

 

Green Ammonia : Using the current process of running coal plants, for every 1 ton of Ammonia we release 1.8 tonnes of CO2. Using green hydrogen we could generate clean Ammonia.

 

Adani in AP and Reliance in Gujarat are currently undertaking these projects. Once carbon tax comes into effect these green technologies will become highly feasible.

 

 

 

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