Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy reform in decades”

Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by scythe on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @11:28AM (#30933193)

One major category of such processes is calcination, both for cement (CaCO3 >> CaO) and alumina (Al(OH)3 >> Al2O3). This can be done with concentrated solar heating:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/gc/c7gc0058...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X1...

But building enough plants to actually do this at scale could take a while. Supposedly there was an anode developed for electrolytic iron reduction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134

but there have been problems with scaling it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349905

Between calcination, smelting and heating, you've addressed a pretty big chunk of fuel-burning processes. The question is whether we can get these kinds of technologies online in time without Manhattan-Project levels of government support, since that does not seem to be forthcoming.

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Re:Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy ref... by namibj on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @09:00PM (#30939413)

Calcination can also use low-duty-cycle electric kilns that soak up spare solar panel electricity (from overprovisioning), at least once you have 2-3 days of storage to level solar fluctuations and day/night (big, cheap ovens take a while to heat up).

In general, they are quite amenable to using electrically heated air in place of methane/air combustion exhaust.

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