Scale of the problem -- Nature Preserve Earth

[jabowery]

@DanielChisholm

Waste heat towers for power plants seem like a nice baseline for mental experiments… they use waste heat to power convective cooling, on a breakeven basis (zero-ish net power input/output), with relatively large (hundreds of feet) structures. Could converting that to a vortex power system work?

Here’s Michaud’s business case pdf purporting 1) 4x improvement in cooling tower cost and 2) Cooling tower elex CAPX+OPEX purports superior levelized USD/kWh, however I don’t know how to interpret the “Fixed Operating Cost” column since it is given without a time dimension as “USD/kW”.