New Mars Forums

tahanson43206,

In that case, Dr. Johnson, we'll have to take up this account setup business next week.

One frequently overlooked aspect of overall plant efficiency is the shaping of the heliostats.  One of the primary reasons that solar power towers have low overall efficiency than they theoretically should have is making the design of all mirrors the same.  They're flat "billboard" mirrors.  The mirrors near the tower have 80% to 90% optical efficiency, because most of the reflected photonic energy strikes the tower receiver assembly at much shorter distances, whereas the mirrors further away from the tower have efficiencies below 50%, sometimes well below, simply because all mirrors are flat.  Without any shaping applied to the more distant mirrors from the receiver assembly, a great deal of the photonic energy is flung every which way but at the molten salt cavity being heated.

Bespoke mirror designs obviously increase cost over a piece of flat glass or sheet metal, but not to the degree people would think, due to manufacturing methods.  In the case of Aluminized sheet steel, the flat stock can be "bent" or "shaped" to focus the reflected radiation, using the exact same hydroforming method used to create the complex compound curves of the ribs in an Aluminum aircraft wing.  Some of the more advanced forming machines and methods don't even require a purpose built forming die.  This also complicates assembly, as each mirror then has a specific place it belongs in the heliostat field, but this can be solved by adding laser-etched QR codes to each mirror base and mirror assembly.  If it works for aircraft manufacture, it'll work for onsite heliostat assembly as well.  Perhaps flat stock and the metal forming machine should be delivered to the assembly site, and then each mirror is "bent" onsite.

Crescent Dunes was built using onsite glass making, so why not onsite polished metal bending?

The flat stock manufacturing method I suggested using was the exact same method used to mass manufacture all modern vehicle exhaust systems behind the catalytic converter.  Thin low cost sheet steel is coated with Aluminum, not typically polished in the case of a motor vehicle exhaust system because polishing adds cost, then stamped or formed into shape using hydroforming equipment, with or without specific dies.

A coil of Aluminized sheet steel:

A polished Aluminized sheet steel exhaust tip for a car:

An Aluminized steel roofing / decking sheet:

Aluminized steel piping:

It comes in different colors:

Hydroforming can create very complex shapes to optimize stiffness and strength:

Alternative hydroforming method dispenses with bladder, and achieves 60,000psi:

This is how we'll form our bespoke / bar-coded mirrors:

Ford Motor Company hydroformed welded sheet steel automotive chassis:

We even have expansion joint hoses to connect hot / high-pressure fluid lines:

We can even do furniture for when the construction crew requires rest breaks:

Simply because they could, that's "why":

Hydroformed GM LS-7 engine exhaust header / manifold:

The metal thickness I originally proposed is well in excess of what is actually required.  2mm thick is overkill for this application, especially after I looked at the support structures backing the glass mirrors.

Heliostats used with solar power towers are dual-axis tracking machines.  Solar troughs are single-axis unless they're parabolic dishes.  Either way, there are dual axis Sun trackers, which I've provided a link to, which do not use electricity at all.  They're mechanical metal and glass machines that can be mass manufactured very cheaply and provide tremendous torque to drive the tracking gear attached to the main mirror assembly.  They do need to be individually adjusted, but once set, they're mostly "set-it-and-forget-it".

The suggestion of using hot-rolled steel was a cost optimization that went a bit too far.  America mostly, almost exclusively, makes cold rolled steel product, which is more expensive than hot-rolled steel, but has an excellent surface finish that will make the Aluminum coating and polishing job a lot easier.

As far as maintenance is concerned, all mechanical or electrical or electro-mechanical systems require maintenance, but the maintenance of an entirely mechanical system requires hand tools and perhaps hand-operated cranes to adjust and repair.  We're talking about steel and concrete here.  Every industrialized nation on this planet knows how to maintain steel and concrete, and so do most developing nations.  Simplicity and repeatability is key to global adoption.  In developing nations like Pakistan, the reason you see far more all-mechanical diesel engines, is that their people, with bare minimum tooling, can maintain and operate those machines.  You can't simply "drop off" a bunch of whiz-bang electronic equipment and expect their average mechanic to maintain it.

Sulas Industries all-mechanical dual-axis sun tracker (this was initially posted in 2013):

When I think about how this system is supposed to deliver power, it does so by minimizing rather than maximizing complexity the way photovoltaics, wind turbines, and electrochemical batteries do.  At the end of the day, if the equipment keeping your people alive requires a college degree in engineering to maintain, then there's something wrong with your design, not the average worker.  All the more sophisticated electrical and electronic devices we have over here are intended for a people who literally grew up with all the advanced technology.  This does not describe the average person alive today, who has little to no understanding about how a computer works.  Even the people who claim to have some better-than-baseline understand are largely ignorant.  That is why adoption of newer and potentially better technology has been rather slow, and will continue to be slow.

After we decided to go back to harnessing ambient energy flows over more concentrated forms like hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear fuels, we needed to be very shrewd about how we approached design, to make the end product affordable and practical for widespread adoption.  All-mechanical systems make this green energy technology accessible to people from first-world to third-world.

Simple things tend to be the most profound.  A wheel is not terribly complex from a technical or mechanical standpoint, but wheels had a profound impact on transport and every other aspect of modern life.  A rubber tire is multiple steps beyond the first wooden wheels, but we didn't go from wooden wagon wheels to airless composite and rubber "tweels", which is what our green energy enthusiasts want to do.  I feel like the people who want this green energy technology really want to live within some sort of Jetsons cartoon fantasy, with no regard to the practicality of their "lifestyle choices" for the average person.  When uptake of their favored technologies slowed, such as with EVs, they blamed everyone and everything but their own inability to accept that profound change is very hard to do, and that the average person cannot afford to roll around in a car that costs as much as a Cadillac and comes with a lot of ifs / ands / buts regarding how and when it can be operated, relative to the combustion engine vehicles they purport to replace.

I used to work with this lady from Thailand with a PhD in, IIRC, Geology or some specialization within Geology.  We'll call her "Jane", even though that is not her name.  After she'd been with the oil company we both worked for, for about 12 years in her case, only 2 in my case, she decided to leave to work at her family's restaurant, selling, of all things, Thai food.  I asked her why she would leave such a well-paying job as hers, to essentially fill orders for food and cook in a restaurant.  I said, "so Jane, what's up with you leaving the company?"  She replied with, "Well, I understand some parts of what you and I work on, but it's all horridly complex, I don't understand all of it anymore, plus it's a giant hassle that keeps me up at night and working on the weekends, and I'd rather spend time with my family and children."  At the time she had, I think, two small children, younger than mine, although I think she was only a few years younger than I was.  That was perfectly understandable to me, even if I thought she was making a mistake, but in her mind that made perfect sense, and I cannot fault her logic, in recognizing and accepting that we're spending ridiculous amounts of time and effort trying to maintain a level of sophistication in our computerized systems that goes beyond what the average educated person can understand and make use of.  Anything far beyond what is minimally necessary to accomplish a given task, and then move on to the next problem, is almost certainly a waste of effort.  That is what all these modern electronic systems have become- something to keep people busy "maintaining efficiency", but not actually accomplishing very much.

Therein lies our problem.  In our zeal to put all these green energy plans together, we've neglected that all-important human element.  The average EV owner has no clue how their vehicle works, there's literally nothing they can do to maintain it, except to put air in the tires or plug it into the wall socket.  Perhaps this is how they wish to interact with their transportation technology.  I'm not them, so I can't say what they expect, other than that it generally works.  Almost none of them could begin to actually determine if something significant was wrong with their car.  Their electronic vehicle works perfectly until it doesn't, and then their only realistic option is to throw the entire car away and buy a new one.  For many people, myself included, that is an insane idea.  It's insane to me that the entire battery pack, or perhaps the entire vehicle, simply has to be replaced because one lousy cell went bad or had a manufacturing defect.  We don' throw the entire engine away in a combustion powered vehicle because one spark plug quit working.

That said, energy generating and storage systems are incredibly expensive.  Even the simplest ones are non-trivial in their complexity.  Most of us simply cannot afford to throw them away every 10 to 25 years because some two cent electronic component burned out on a random circuit board somewhere, or one battery out of a couple thousand quit working.

So then, what is the "great object" of a thermal mechanical green energy generating and storage system?

To be simple enough that just about anyone can be trained to build and operate it, to be physically robust and user maintainable, to not require materials or technologies beyond our grasp, to not require sweeping changes to all aspects of how we presently generate or consume energy, and to become a pervasive permanent fixture of modernity that most people can get onboard with.

Those are all qualities which electronic devices lack.  There are no gears to grease, no screws to tweak just so, and no possibility of significant alterations absent a complete redesign.  The electronics will function perfectly until they don't, and then there is only complete replacement, which is no option at all.

Nobody involved with electronics gave any thought to how or even if they could be maintained.  They did not concern themselves with where the materials would come from.  Recycling was an afterthought, since it requires more energy and effort than making a new one from scratch.  They tried to implement far too many sweeping changes at the same time.  In short, they were throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick, and that "wall of physics" they're throwing stuff at, happens to be made from Teflon.  The only things that stick to it are those things which are in agreement with physics.  Attempt to assert that energy density or economics doesn't matter, and both of those idea slide right off that wall.

Broad strokes, this is what we're going to do with solar thermal power:

1. We're going to entirely replace combustion, as well as electronics, for electrical power generation.  We simply do not need or want our energy generating and storage devices to require precise computer control, unless absolutely necessary.  When the power supply is continuous and can load-follow, that added bit of complexity is not necessary.  Whatever minor efficiency improvement has been made in one functional area has been lost in many others, such as ultimate sustainability and maintainability.

2. We're going to work on repowering our industrial processes, which include mining, refining, chemicals production, as well as foodstuffs and fuels synthesis.  We're doing vertical integration here, except for all of these interconnected processes.  To wit, as tahanson43206 has pointed out himself, we seem to have an increasingly desperate fresh water situation, our transportation infrastructure and electric grids are in shambles across virtually all industrialized nations, we're running out of specialty metals to economically extract, and our hydrocarbon energy supplies are now badly depleted, so we need to focus on fixing those aspects of energy and material supply.  This is a time for rebuilding, but not simply "building something" the way the Chinese built entire cities where nobody could actually live.

3. After that foundational work has been completed, then, with an energy supply as clean and free of long-term problems as we can reasonably make it, we will focus our efforts on devising more practical ways to electrify transportation using emergent technologies.  To do that, we first have to create a long-term sustainable electric energy supply suitable for doing that.  Families in California with EVs consume 2X to 4X as much electricity as they previously did, but the supply situation there is rather dire.  Band-aid fixes aren't going to cut it.

Instead of simply espousing an ideology not grounded in technological reality, we're going to follow a logical progression of technology development and implementation, similar to that applied throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as how our military goes about implementing new engine and fuel technologies.  They start with stationary power plants, and then gradually develop or adapt the technology to more demanding applications, such as aviation.  Had we followed this course of action about 20 to 40 years ago, we would have CO2-free power today, whether nuclear thermal or solar thermal, and this asinine Chinese fire drill situation we find ourselves in now wouldn't be impeding all forward progress.

SpaceNut,

Do the implications of what's printed on that map more or less indicate that photovoltaics aren't going to be feasible everywhere, and that the first task of any energy intermittent collection system, is to then store that energy for on-demand release to the electric grid?

When I think about the implications of intermittent energy, that's what I'm thinking about.  How can we store enough hours of energy, at the scale required, for the concept to be workable at the human civilization scale?  I don't fixate on what may or may not become available "in the future".  None of these electronic energy generating concepts have a prayer at being human civilization scale solutions without multiple invention miracles prior to implementation.

That was why I came to the conclusion that a solar thermal system, most of which come with 10 hours of energy storage, would deliver power cheaper than a photovoltaic / wind turbine / natural gas / electrochemical battery solution, all of which are required to ensure that electronic devices supply stable power, and that such a solution was long-term and large-scale infeasible.  That was not what I wanted to discover along the way, but that is ugly reality.  That is why, after 40+ years of continuous technology development, photovoltaics or wind turbines with electrochemical batteries remains grossly uneconomic.  It was never a solution using any known or projected future technology.

Solar thermal energy prices include 10 hours of storage, and solar thermal power plants operate over 90% of the hours in a year, which means they're every bit as reliable as nuclear reactors at actually delivering their rated power output, and recorded power production figures for the existing experimental solar thermal facilities bear this out.  My thoughts on this were not random.  There was nothing intrinsic to photovoltaics and wind turbines that I took issue with.  If it works, it works.  Aesthetics are irrelevant to an actual engineer.  All the combination of factors limiting feasibility are heavily stacked against photovoltaics / wind turbines / electrochemical batteries, making them utterly impractical large scale solutions to deliver power at affordable prices.

A solar thermal power plant is no different in actual operation than a gas turbine, coal burner, nuclear reactor, or geothermal well, with the exception of what supplies the input heat energy to spin the electric generator.  You turn it on, it gradually comes up to full output, and then as long as the Sun keeps shining, it continues to produce consistent output over time.  That is what we require.  That is real world usable power that doesn't mandate "reimagining" the way in which all extant electric power grids work, or radical changes to how we consume energy.  Solar thermal is presently the cheapest of all possible long-term sustainable options for generating reliable on-demand power for whatever purposes humanity requires.  Whether or not photovoltaics are cheaper when the Sun is high in the sky is irrelevant without equally cheap fast storage from electrochemical batteries or super capacitors or flywheels or similar high density storage systems.  No battery lasts long enough, no super capacitor or flywheel achieves electrochemical battery energy density, and none of those systems can be built at the scale required.  Energy demand doesn't stop the moment day turns into night.  All forms of fast storage are dramatically more expensive than heated salt / rock / sand / water / air.

Until someone invents a new kind of battery that lasts 75 years and stores as much energy per unit weight and volume as a gallon of gasoline or kilo of coal, in order to change that paradigm, then we should move forward with energy generation and storage systems that can and do supply the energy in the form we require, at prices we can tolerate, which implies solar thermal or geothermal or nuclear thermal solutions, dependent upon local solar insolation.

The new energy system needs to be built from the ground up, which means extraction and refinement of the required materials without burning something, transforming those materials into machines without burning something, and then providing reliable 24/7/365 electrical or thermal power output without burning something.  Partial measures won't help, nor will declarative statements about energy sources that don't match reality or vague references to future technologies or states of affairs in technology that don't presently exist.  Then and only then should we worry about what comes out of the tailpipe of some transportation machine.  As Norway already proves, with their 80%+ market penetration of EVs, has only resulted in a 10% decline in oil demand.  That means the other 90% of the hydrocarbon fuel energy consumption was where the real climate change problem was.  This is similar to California mandating that trains don't use diesel engines, when they contribute a grand total of 1% of our CO2 emissions, while moving 40% to 50% of all the freight.  I don't know about you, but I like 90% solutions much more than I like 10% or 1% solutions.  Ideologues shouldn't be in charge of energy decisions, because they're symbol-minded people with no understanding of cause and effect, let alone energy.

tahanson43206,

I want to know how close we are to answering questions about the magnetic reconnection observations that NASA and the US Air Force spent so much money on.

New theory explains mystery behind fast magnetic reconnection

Here's a page where you can get access to the data being collected:
MMS Science Data Center

Ping An Finance Center, Seoul Light DMC Tower, Shanghai Tower, Wuhan Greenland Center, Lotte World Tower, Doha Convention Center, Tianjin Chow Tai Fook Binhai Center, Pentominium, and Shanghai WFC...  All of those "buildings" are astonishingly good facsimiles of sleek ship hull designs that some architects thought would be a good idea to plant into the ground near the ocean, stern-first.  They're all set into massive steel-reinforced concrete foundations.  Why that seemed like a "good idea" when ships could be built instead, for far less money and material input, who knows?  Those buildings all took multiple years to construct, as doctoral candidate Lu Ping pointed out, and they all cost a lot more than palatially well-appointed luxury cruise liners, which are now "home" to thousands of people.  I would settle for a spartan but clean and well-equipped "seat at the table" for everyone, aboard ships so large and strong that they can only be sunk by deliberate human action.

Even the rather modest accommodations afforded to US Navy ships are far better able to sustain life than any palace of antiquity, they can and do travel millions of miles during their operational lives, and they're better protected than Fort Knox.  The US Navy threw ordnance at one of their old super carriers for a couple of weeks before accepting that deliberate scuttling was the only way she'd go under.  Megaton class nuclear weapons detonated within a few hundred yards didn't sink WWII escort carriers and battleships.  Against a ship the size of a skyscraper, you'd have to detonate a nuclear weapon inside the ship to sink it.  The larger the ship, the greater its internal compartmentalization, thus the more it takes to sink it.  To sink a super carrier, you need to flood about 70% of the compartments below the water line.  When all the hatches are battened down below the water line, that's not simple or easy to do.  Against a skyscraper-sized ship with sufficient internal compartmentalization, that's functionally impossible without deliberate action.  Titanic was a tinker toy compared to a "skyscraper ship", and she had no effective compartmentalization below her water line, in order to "save money".  Design really does matter.  Titanic was also built with rivets rather than welds.  Tearing steel apart is not as easy as fracturing a rivet.  There's no such thing as an "unsinkable ship", but there is such as thing as "cannot readily be sunk without deliberate acts carried out by those aboard to do so".  Both super carriers and properly designed skyscraper ships both fall into this category.

As Lu Ping noted, steel is efficient, because steel is strong.  Modern steels can be very strong- stronger than any alloy of Aluminum or Titanium by a lot, and Titanium suffers worse fatigue life than high strength steel when you make the Titanium alloy strong and hard.  The leaps and bounds improvement of a bewildering variety of steel is the only real story.  All the would-be "super alloys" are specialty products that don't see much use because there's not much they can do better than steel.  There are no 350ksi Aluminum or Titanium alloys in existence, so far as I'm aware.  In contrast, there are multiple different families of ultra high strength steels with different properties.  Now that we have welding techniques and materials to use that are as strong and hard as the base metal, but no weaker or stronger or softer or harder, which is critically important to weld joint durability, we now possess the ability to make very strong and very light mega structures that resist both corrosion and deformation under load.

The right kind of steel doesn't appreciably corrode over 25 years.  Nippon Steel NSGP-1 / NSGP-2:
Nippon Steel - NSGP-1 and NSGP-2 Corrosion Resistant Steels

Ultra-pure Iron from these new "green steel" projects, which always fail to consume less energy than traditional manufacturing methods, because energy input associated with reducing entropy is a "real concept" that is never going away, yet generally do succeed in producing measurably better end products, we have the materials we require to build with, and it happens to be the one structural metal we produce and consume more of, by a significant margin.  Extreme purity Iron also implies slower corrosion, because oxidation of the microstructures (grain boundary reinforcements from alloying elements provide) that permit below-surface level corrosion to begin are dramatically reduced.  Use of other metals like Lithium, Copper, Aluminum, and Titanium grab headlines, but steel continues to do the real work of building out a modern society.

Most elemental Sulfur production in America / China / Russia / Saudi Arabia / elsewhere comes from refining oil and natural gas.  That is another way in which hydrocarbon fuels serve multiple purposes.

Domestic elemental Sulfur production was 8,706,000,000kg in 2019, according to USGS 2021 data.

8,706,000,000kg / 1,840kg per cubic meter = 4,731,522m^3

That means we need more than 2 years of domestic Sulfur production to power California, a state that only consumes 7% of the total energy of the US.  I wish someone else besides myself or Calliban could begin to appreciate the enormous scale of the task of replacing hydrocarbon fuels, and stop pretending that some new photovoltaic or battery invention will come along to solve a problem that is entirely about production of the materials and machines required to do the work.

"Knowing" how much of what materials are required is only basic math and accounting skills.  If you don't like the numbers, then you need to come up with a new invention.  We've been working on electrochemical battery technology for more than 100 years.  We have Lead-acid, Nickel-Cadmium, Nickel Metal Hydride, Lithium-ion, and Sodium-ion.  Every rechargeable battery cell chemistry is some minor variation thereof, but none of them remotely approach the energy density of chemical oxidation reactions involving Carbon, Hydrogen, and Sulfur.

Are electrochemical batteries great bits of tech?

Sure they are.  For powering your cell phone, wristwatch, or laptop, they absolutely are.  In spite of how great they are for small portable electronic devices or cordless power tools, all of them are exceptionally poor at powering anything significantly larger and more powerful than that.  Despite all the ridiculous stunts which have attempted to make "Lead airplanes" fly, nobody with more uncommon sense than money is buying airplanes made from Lead.  The reason is not a big oil company conspiracy to prevent us from ushering in the new era of Lead airplanes.  Devices which need to be reasonably light and compact, such as all motorized transport vehicles that move at highway speeds or faster, in order to make them most useful for the widest possible range of uses, are no longer light and compact when batteries are used.  That is the real ideology-free reason that engineers pursued combustion engines over batteries for powering vehicles.  Engineers don't really care if you want them to engineer something ridiculous, either.  They'll happily take your money.  Fools and their money are easily separated from each other, and if you can do it legally, the fool will be none the wiser, but much poorer, so even within a litigious society such as America, being foolish with money still has real consequences.

US EPA - Sulfur Supply Chain - Executive Summary

Applications: waste water treatment, Sulfuric acid production, fertilizers and pesticides production, chemicals production.

Doing some simple math on what seasonal battery energy storage will cost the state of California, not the entire US, they think they need 36,300,000 MWh worth of battery energy storage to deal with seasonal demand fluctuations.  Over-building photovoltaics just means more land use and environmental destruction, more embodied energy, lower EROEI, and even higher prices paid by consumers, plus more burning of hydrocarbon fuels.

The 3,000MWh Tesla Lithium-ion battery cost built at Vistra Moss Landing cost $560M.

The State of California thinks needs 36.3 million MWh worth of Tesla's battery storage to deal with photovoltaic power fluctuation by both seasonal and diurnal cycles:

$0.18666/Wh * 36,300,000,000,000Wh of energy storage = $6,776,000,000,000

Think about where the price has to go, to best $0.18666 per Watt-hour of electrical energy storage.  Can it drop to zero?  It pretty much has to, or photovoltaics are not going to provide 70% of the energy, now or ever.

$6,776,000,000,000 / $850,000,000,000 (FY2024 US military budget) = 7.97 years of America's FY2024 military budget

In 10 years when the Tesla battery croaks, we'll need another $6.776 trillion dollars to replace it

If you can't see why we're never going to do this "electronic-everything" insanity, it's because you're a magical thinker, so no amount of explaining will help you understand.

Crescent Dunes sold power at $0.135/kWh, and included 10 hours of storage, which means it stored enough power to actually produce it's nameplate capacity 91.4% of the time, which was also built for the State of California.

If Crescent Dunes was "too expensive" or "not profitable", then nothing involving sufficient electrochemical battery energy storage will fit that description for many decades to come.

What happened with Crescent Dunes?

The failures at the plant had zero to do with the plant not working, and almost everything to do with the people building the plant not following the instructions of Aerojet-Rocketdyne, the people who designed the plant, who did actually know what they were doing.

What was the moral of the story?

Never accept a pennywise pound foolish design or operating concept.

What are photovoltaics and electrochemical batteries?

A pennywise pound foolish design concept that is never going to scale-up to the degree required, unless electrochemical batteries become 6X cheaper than they already are.  Since 70% to 80% of the cost of all photovoltaics and electrochemical batteries is now the raw materials used, that's a really good indicator that such a thing is highly unlikely to ever happen- unless the prices of photovoltaics and battery making materials alone continues to fall while all other prices increase.  Over the past 5 years, we've seen the opposite happen.  All prices have increased, to include the price of Lithium, Copper, and Silicon, because that's how market economics works when demand grossly exceeds supply.

The batteries will be replaced 2.5X during the life of the photovoltaics and the photovoltaics will be replaced 3X as often as a solar thermal power plant.  All of that costs money.  The costs won't be "miracled away" by ridiculous beliefs about things only continuing to get cheaper into perpetuity.  That clearly isn't happening right now, and the assertions that they will happen in the future require that costs only run in one direction over time.  Scarcity and depletion ensure that won't happen.

A solar sulphur cycle to make unlimited thermal energy storage

Are Lithium-ion batteries ever going to cost $0.018/kg, while storing 12.5MJ/kg?

Current Lithium-ion batteries store perhaps 1MJ/kg when they're brand new.  Either a miracle is going to happen to increase battery energy density by 10X, as well as cycle life and durability, or far more likely, no such thing will happen during our lifetimes, so we're stuck with a pennywise pound foolish "solution" that solves nothing at the scale of the problem of attempting to replace hydrocarbon fuels.

tahanson43206 asked for more info about the costs of solar thermal power during our last weekly meeting, so here's some of that:

Profitability and break-even points, ROI with CSP alone and TES, spinning reserve capacity credits, etc (from 2010):
The Value of Concentrating Solar Power and Thermal Energy Storage

The part I like is that a backcasting statistical model for CSP can predict profitability with 87% accuracy / fidelity to actual.  They said that TES cannot be justified on economics alone, but neither can photovoltaics with batteries.  That said, if you want a 70% wind and solar powered electric grid, then that can only be done profitably using a dirt-cheap energy storage medium.  No kind of electrochemical battery is anywhere close to the price of dirt, unlike Sulfur, which is $18 per 1,000kg, and it stores 12.5X more energy than any kind of battery, and it can be recycled endlessly, and it can be stored outside on the ground like dirt or coal, and it never "loses capacity" as it ages (because Sulfur is Sulfur forever), and it requires no additional mining activities to provide a supply sufficient to meet global energy storage requirements.  The "pit of crushed rock" idea from MIT is even cheaper, at $2 to $4 per kWh.

NREL - Concentrating Solar Power Economics Assessment - 2023 Annual Technology Baseline - CAPEX / OPEX / LCOE

Much like fusion, cheap / reliable / long-lasting electrochemical batteries are only 5 to 10 years away.  Just like fusion, they always will be.

Much like ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), and ceramic metal matrix composites (CMMCs), high entropy alloys (HEAs) like the Nb45Ta25Ti15Hf15 alloy investigated in the article that tahanson43206 provided a link to, are the next generation of metal alloys for extreme high and low temperature performance.

The CMCs and CMMCs are either heat shielding materials for hypersonic vehicles or extreme temperature components within the hot sections of jet and rocket engines, especially combustor cans, afterburner components, convergent-divergent nozzle components, and uncooled rocket engine nozzle extensions.  CMCs and CMMCs exhibit extreme resistance to oxidation at high temperatures.  HEAs are interesting for sCO2 turbines and RamGen engines (supersonic inlet velocity gas turbines for Mach 2 to Mach 3 operation), as well as the cooled portions of rocket engine nozzles, turbopump components, main injector plates, injector pintles, hot section expansion turbine blades, engine casings, and fasteners in jet engines, etc.  The nozzles and combustor cans don't require extreme tensile strength, but they do require extreme thermal shock and oxidation resistance.

Initial testing of the aforementioned HEA indicates good creep strength, which is mandatory for sCO2 gas turbine components operating at both high temperature and pressure, but I want to see the results of other basic tests such as oxidation resistance, stress-corrosion cracking, resistance to chemical attacks, etc.  There are a myriad of different test results we require before judging these novel materials as suitable for aerospace applications.  The issues associated with the use of D6AC high strength steel in the F-111 wing boxes and fuselage immediately comes to mind about what can happen if you assume too much and know too little.  There was nothing intrinsically wrong with using D6AC, but forging, heat treatment, and corrosion control all mattered greatly, but were little understood and little appreciated until they became real problems during both manufacture and long-term service.

Calliban already indicated what can go wrong with high strength steels.  I have no way of knowing how well made his rapier was, but heat treatment is critical to high strength steels.  The stronger and therefore harder the steel, the lower its impact resistance.  A rapier's blade is subjected to repeated sharp impacts over a very small surface area, analogous to a lifetime of impact strength tests, so perhaps not the best application for a very hard steel.  1095 and other low alloy plain carbon steels, with appropriate heat treatments, are more typical for such blades.  Steels like 1095 and 5160 are not as hard or strong, but much tougher and more ductile.  This is why Mangalloy found use in forging hammers, rock crushers, and tank tracks.  More recently, with the development of appropriate welding techniques, Mangalloy is now used for LNG transport and storage, because it remains tough and ductile at very low temperatures.  While aircraft landing gear are a well known application of maraging steels, and also subjected to repeated extreme force impacts, those impacts occur over much larger bearing surface areas, oleos increase the length of time over which load transfer occurs upon landing, and extreme process control is applied to every aspect of their manufacture and maintenance.  Knicking or cutting ("notching") high strength / high hardness steels can and does lead to fractures.  Titanium alloy parts like landing gear legs or oleos and aircraft shear bolts common for engine mounting in high performance jet aircraft, behave in a similar manner when knicked or "notched".

Every so often someone within the homebuilt aircraft community has the bright idea of using Titanium alloy to reduce the weight of engine mounts, bolts, and the firewall.  The smart ones who listen to others are advised against it, not because it won't work, as it absolutely will work if all the welding and handling precautions not to knick the metal anywhere are followed correctly, but mistakes do happen.  The simple reason is that 4130 chrome-moly tubing is so thoroughly proven to work, even when the welding or handling of the components are less than perfect.  Messing up 4130 takes real effort, even though it can be done.  Other countries require that the welder be aerospace certified to weld an engine mount or gear leg.  That's why you see so few tube and fabric aircraft in other countries, but lots of them in America.  Here in America, we don't have any such requirement for welding.  Since 4130 is the most frequently used material, even homebuilders with limited experience encounter very few weld failures where amateur welders are involved.  Most have the good sense to practice their technique, try to break the weld, and to seek out advice for how to do it properly.  Welding takes a few weeks to learn to do well.  Riveting takes a day or two, which is why American WWII aircraft were mostly riveted Aluminum.  Welding difficulties aside, the people who make the Titanium Cessna landing gear will tell you that any scratches or knicks to the gear legs must be buffed out.  Their product is primarily intended to reduce the weight of the gear for bush planes, to partially compensate for the heavier tires and brakes.  That's all perfectly logical, but the propellers for bush planes frequently throw small rocks when landing in river beds, some of which will inevitably strike the gear legs, amongst other parts of the airframe.  A pair of Cessna main gear legs cost $2K to $5K.  Titanium costs over $30K.  That's quite a lot of money to drop 50lbs or so over steel.  The weight savings of Titanium over 4130 are real and meaningful, but so are the increased manufacturing costs and maintenance requirements to avoid landing gear fractures in a place you may not easily get out of, such as the Alaskan backcountry.

When the Navy switched from HY-80 to HY-100 / HY-110 / HY-120 for submarine hulls and now the Ford class aircraft carrier hulls, the corollary was increased welding costs, increased weld rejection or failure rates, and increased inspection an maintenance requirements.  The stronger steel was used in the more modern Sea Wolf and Virginia classes to increase dive depth.  The Ford class uses the stronger steel to avoid significant weight increases related to its much larger flight deck area and heavy EMALS catapult equipment.  HY-110 allows the Ford class to retain the same basic super carrier hull design as the Forrestal / Kitty Hawk / Enterprise / Nimitz classes.  All of the super carrier hulls, from Forrestal to Ford, are based upon the Forrestal class hull design, with minor increases to beam width to accommodate increasingly greater weight of installed equipment / fuel / aircraft.  The Ford class is "maxing out" the Forrestal class hull design.  Any further weight increase would require a hull redesign.  HY-100 / 110 / 120 avoided the need to do that.  Forrestal class ships started at 80,000t at full load, Kitty Hawk and JFK were heavier, Enterprise significantly heavier, Nimitz modestly heavier than Enterprise due to reactor improvements, whereas the new Ford class is now at about 110,000t with a full load.  Any "heavier-than-Ford" super carrier design would require a lengthened hull with an internal redesign for weight and balance purposes as well as that all-important optimal hull form to attain 30 knots for launching jet aircraft.  The Forrestal class was the fastest of all the super carrier designs- faster than all the nuclear powered carriers.  Internet folklore aside, every super carrier since Forrestal has increased beam and draft, but the same installed geared steam turbine engine power, which means they've become progressively slower, with the Ford class being the slowest of all the super carriers.  Ford is the slowest because it has to shove more water out of the way as the beam width crept up.  You'll notice that the later Nimitz and the new Ford classes have bulbous bows to delay the bow wave riding up and slowing them down.  Earlier carriers didn't have them, because length-to-beam and installed engine power alone was sufficient with their more slender hull forms and reduced draft.

In general, the more sophisticated a material is, or the more extreme the performance requirements become, the tighter the process control involved in manufacture, maintenance, and the more lengthy the list of caveats regarding appropriate uses and problems to be aware of.  That said, there are ideal applications for all of these materials.  These new HEAs are showing great promise for our next generation engine components to make more power while minimizing weight, thus improving overall efficiency of energy usage.

Eurka Alert - News Release 23-Sep-2021 - Chinese scientists report starch synthesis from CO2 - Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

Well,

At least we know how Norway financed all of their green energy:

Norway expects to earn record $131 bln from oil and gas in 2023

Maybe Google thinks electricity is the only kind of energy consumed by Norway.  People who are less ideologically motivated, or slightly more inquisitive, know otherwise.

The government's revenues

Green is indeed the color of money, but not energy.  Hydrogen has no color at all.

SpaceNut,

Every power generating system is an engineered solution.  You can buy a photovoltaic panel or wind turbine, but you can't buy an "off the shelf" photovoltaic or wind turbine farm, because no such animal exists.  Every site is unique.  The requirement for steel and concrete will be unique to the firmness of the ground that equipment is mounted on.  You decide whether or not you want power, you pay money to an engineering firm, and then they figure out what parts they can buy or design and fabricate themselves.

You know what part of an electric power grid is a bespoke solution?

All the step-up and step-down power transformers fit that description.  I'm not talking about the ones you see on power lines, I'm talking about the ones you see at step-up or step-down stations, as well as the power inverters if on-panel inverters are not used.  When you pay for a photovoltaic farm, the people purchasing the power pay for all the non-standard equipment unique to the massive power fluctuations produced by photovoltaics and wind turbines, so that power surges and drops don't crash the entire grid.  All that equipment costs real money, none of it is an off the shelf solution, and all of it must be paid by the consumer for the privilege of having unreliable intermittent energy on the grid, because a reliable grid doesn't require such equipment.  This is engineering reality vs glossy sales brochure fantasy.

These thermal engineering solutions are going to start providing more than just power.  They're going to collect and supply CO2, Argon, Xenon, Neon, Krypton, Sulfur, and other saleable industrial products so that those products don't have to be produced from scratch by burning something like natural gas or coal, solely to obtain that industrial product.  Neon is required to make microchips.  Argon is required for welding.  Sulfur is required to make Sulfuric acid.  The multiple revenue streams mean that the electric power consumer doesn't have to pay for the full cost of the plant, and consumers of the industrial products don't have to pay for specialty plants that burn fuel just to produce something that would otherwise be a natural byproduct of burning fuel.

If you use Google just a little bit, you'll also find that Saudi Arabia and India have their own sCO2 pilot projects underway, and that the CSIRO was one of the initial investors into sCO2 technology.