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In 15 years, "just" 99.9%, at triple current prices, with 3x overbuilding. Prices will (surely) ease, considering that both renewables are headed down (0.17c/KWh is still bad, but it's a very marked improvement over the current 0.27c/KWh of solar thermal (usual Andasol data)), but if you factor in 3x overbuilding, that's 0.51c/KWh. Plus smart grid expenses, and of course said grid will need 3x overbuilding. (3x overbuilding for 90% of the US' energy need 15 years from now, just from wind.. are we sure there's enough windy places, and that it won't create adverse effects? (3000GW in wind turbines means 300'000 10MW turbines.) It won't rob a substantial amount of land, like solar does, just the few mq for foundations and such if they are in crop fields, and we don't really care about land if they're in non-cultivable places) Problem is that the sites with good wind are limited, it's pretty strange this wasn't explicitly accounted for. Also, tell me the article isn't talking about thermal efficiency of turbines with "You burn three units of coal to get one unit of electricity."?
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Apr 17, 2013 13:22
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Aureon posted:Also, tell me the article isn't talking about thermal efficiency of turbines with "You burn three units of coal to get one unit of electricity."? It is.
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Apr 17, 2013 17:06
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GulMadred posted:
That's actually not uncommon as an amortization period for utility infrastructure for reasons relating to the time cost of money.
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Apr 17, 2013 18:13
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Boner Slam posted:I wrote my criticism of that argument. Either reply to that or don't. He did reply to your criticism of that argument. You claimed that car insurance doesn't work this way, but it most definitely does. The rest of your argument is based on a misunderstanding of how risk assessment is performed. quote:It doesn't matter and that was not the argument. There is something wrong with this methodology when doing this comparision. That was exactly the argument: CombatInformatiker posted:I've read 1.5 chapters of that book (Google didn't let me read any further), and it seems to be a little simplistic (multiplying the chance of an accident by it's severity and conclude that there's no increased danger? Come on, you can't be serious!) and clearly biased towards nuclear energy, so it's not something I'm looking for. CombatInformatiker was complaining about the way in which the book was performing risk management. The book performed risk management in the exact same way as everyone else, and there's nothing wrong with assessing risk in this way. You've suggested that there is a problem with this, but you didn't actually provide any real reasoning for it; your argument can be boiled down to "if someone did a risk management calculation in a dumb way, then their results would be inaccurate!" Small leakages and large leakages are treated as different types of risk with different severities. The barrels don't randomly explode after N years, so the probability of occurrence of a "large leakage" is close to zero In other words, your criticism of risk management is based on a misunderstanding of risk management.
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Apr 18, 2013 19:41
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What people need to understand is that a HV net needs to be at 50hz (or whatevs) almost to a point or you can forget about having anything to relieable energy. 99% may sound nice, but it really depends on when and how the power is available. It means that on the one hand you'll have huge overcapacities. On the other hand you need to have a way to get rid of energy instantaneously. Getting rid of energy is currently easy for Germany, since our EU partners usually have less regenerative energy and are far more able to regulate their net. However, prices often do go negative - IE. we pay Holland to take our energy (traditionally around Christmas this is the case). About the needed capacities: What people need to understand is that the costs of building and connecting offshore windparks is ridiculous. Building enough to replace all the power plants in the USA may (I don't know) be so much it may not even be close to an option. Germany is not a poor country, but we are right on the limit (maybe even over) off what we can afford to put into offshore or renewables in general and it is really not enough to replace base load or middle load power plants. Additionally you need a net. You need a high power HV net strewn across your gigantic country to be able to get all the energy from where is wind to where it isn't. This costs a lot. Really, it's very expensive. Do you have such a net across the USA? (I really don't know). Because Germany is small and we are just now building those capacities from the North to the South. Worst case scenario you need enough capacities to carry almost all the energy inwards. Trenching those cables across the USA must be expensive as gently caress. You have long distances in the USA. You need to transfrom AC to DC and back. A lot. Very often. Not cheap. Now, I often hear that the energy distribution net in the USA is... spotty at times. The tolerances are already low (which is why black and brownouts do happen more often in the USA)[I am not 100% informed on this]. If it is also regionalized I'd hazard the guess that this poo poo ain't going to happen. Building a couple of AC connected onshore windparks with enough subsidies to make it profitable may be one thing. Building offshore on this scale is another thing entirely. Look, I am all for connecting and diversifiying regeneratives (it's my job). But there are challenges. Technology is new. There are only a handful of companies worldwide that can do this kind of thing and build this kind of poo poo. Maybe.. two. For some actions there exists less than three ships in the world that can plop down the necessary things (right now you actually need the largest crane vessel in the world for some things, of which there is only one). So I think that paper might be a tad optimistic. Boner Slam fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Apr 18, 2013 |
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Apr 18, 2013 19:41
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For wind or solar to matter in the United States, there would need to be a massive east-west HVDC network set up, as most of the wind assets are in the west, and sensible solar assets are in the southwest. There currently is no such network. The current network will shut down entire regions of the country due to sudden spikes or dips in power supply. We have a really poo poo network, and most Americans don't spend much time thinking about this as a problem until you have things like the great New York blackout a decade ago. And then we quickly forget as a nation again, because energy policy is apparently boring/hard.
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Apr 18, 2013 19:56
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Regeneratives challenge even the best and most centralized nets in the world. On top of this the USA is comically large for this kind of undertaking. There is really no good solution to this until we are able to store energy. edit: whoever invents a good energy storage will win all the nobel prices. It would be one of the most significant inventions ever. But then, who will?
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Apr 18, 2013 19:59
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How promising is the Sabatier Reaction for generating carbon-neutral methane? I found an article with an overview of the process and of methods for hydrogen generation: http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2010/03/the-sabatier-reaction.html. (What I don't understand is: why do they have to store the oxygen? Isn't there enough in the air?) I suppose a big advantage would be that you could reuse existing natural gas turbine power plants, and you can also use the methane to heat homes. Pander posted:For wind or solar to matter in the United States, there would need to be a massive east-west HVDC network set up
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Apr 18, 2013 21:11
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CombatInformatiker posted:Why would it have to be DC? I was under the impression that the energy loss is less for AC? HVDC is better for long-range transmission than HVAC. It's been a while since one of the BZE engineers explained it to me, but IIRC it was due to higher-order effects in the line when using HVAC making DC both cheaper and lower-loss than AC. From Wiki: quote:The most common reason for choosing HVDC over AC transmission is that HVDC is more economic than AC for transmitting large amounts of power point-to-point over long distances. A long distance, high power HVDC transmission scheme generally has lower capital costs and lower losses than an AC transmission link.
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Apr 19, 2013 16:06
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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Pander posted:For wind or solar to matter in the United States, there would need to be a massive east-west HVDC network set up, as most of the wind assets are in the west, and sensible solar assets are in the southwest. There currently is no such network. The current network will shut down entire regions of the country due to sudden spikes or dips in power supply. We have a really poo poo network, and most Americans don't spend much time thinking about this as a problem until you have things like the great New York blackout a decade ago. And then we quickly forget as a nation again, because energy policy is apparently boring/hard. That's not true at all; you could power most of the southwest US on solar and wind alone using the grid that we already have. That would "matter" a lot
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Apr 20, 2013 23:07
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Quarkjets: I agree! I also think working out some kind of massive solar field in the Sahara that could feed Europe via HVDC would be a wonderful development. However, I live in Central IL. We have a lot of wind farms here despite poor wind resources due to close access to nuke plant grids (I've toured the wind farm next to LaSalle station when I toured the station a few years back). Solar has no chance in, well, most anywhere. The land is far too valuable as cropland. We would need to be an importer of solar, and that would require fewer transmission losses. So it's cool, but the whole "99.9%" really needs the modifier "in Australia", because "In America" would be an ignorant fantasy of the blind. I was trying to highlight just one simple large-scale problem that requires an expensive engineering solution that no solar technomarvel can overcome until such time as we develop cost-effective large energey storage tech. We'll probably have to wait for GooglePower before we get a true smartgrid in the US.
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Apr 20, 2013 23:23
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Wow, great to see this charging along - Sorry I haven't been around, lucky it doesn't matter much cos plenty of people know a lot more than me, so thanks everyone for the great posts. I'm after some videos, mostly site tours of various facilities, to try and make the whole thing a bit more accessible. Basically showing us how we get energy out of these resources - what's actually involved, etc. Here's the best one I've found of a solar thermal plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSkKGuR1HKE A coal mine (could use a better soundtrack): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzt-45ePI7w Oil drilling / Roughnecking (Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC_rRRlq1lc Cheap, clean, natural gas: Earth's one good feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNdhFi3MHZQ One I found while looking for wind farm stuff: "Turbine Cowboys" (22 min show) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e76W7mg5V_M Speaking of wind, this technically counts I guess - World speed sailing record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjyusAgk8I Dancefloor generator: A bit of a gimmick, but interesting nonetheless: http://vimeo.com/58465094 Anyway that's just a start, so if anyone's got some good nuclear ones (preferably including the mining), or wave/tidal, solar PV, Geothermal, etc, that'd be much appreciated.
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Apr 21, 2013 04:11
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Natural gas is cheap and cleaner than other fossil fuels but it's still produces green house gases and other pollutants. Also, it's mostly methane which is a greenhouse gas in and of itself and at offshore rigs they just vent it into the atmosphere directly to get at the oil underneath. (At land based rigs they burn it off as to not create a fire hazard and all) I just wanted to get this off my chest because the idea of clean NG is a myth.Granted, it's way better than burning coal or oil.
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Apr 21, 2013 11:02
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But burning methane is clean if it is produced carbon-neutrally, right? SolarFuel, a German company, is building a CO2->CH4 (including H2 generation) demonstration plant with 6MW input and 54% estimated efficiency. They're also planning a commercial 20MW reactor with 60% efficiency (75% with combined heat usage), due in 2015.
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Apr 21, 2013 13:14
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CombatInformatiker posted:But burning methane is clean if it is produced carbon-neutrally, right? That's a solar power plant where all of the energy is used to convert CO2 into CH4, rather than a natural gas plant. Pander posted:Quarkjets: I agree! I also think working out some kind of massive solar field in the Sahara that could feed Europe via HVDC would be a wonderful development. I'm of the opinion that regions with poor access to renewables, such as many states in the central US, should use nuclear power. Eventually transporting renewable electricity via HVDC sounds like a great plan further down the road But yeah, Australia is in a far better position than most countries when it comes to access to renewable energy.
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Apr 21, 2013 18:40
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QuarkJets posted:I'm of the opinion that regions with poor access to renewables, such as many states in the central US, should use nuclear power. Eventually transporting renewable electricity via HVDC sounds like a great plan further down the road Btw, the upper Midwest has pretty tremendous wind power capacity (as do the Great Lakes). You wouldn't be worried feeding power into Chicago from California, and if you harassed power from Lake Eire, it wouldn't have to go very far to make it to the eastern seaboard. The South might be a bit more of a reach, and that is probably the region where nuclear power would be needed the most. (Luckily, it is the area of the country where Nuclear power is also the most popular.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Apr 21, 2013 |
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Apr 21, 2013 18:56
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QuarkJets posted:That's a solar power plant where all of the energy is used to convert CO2 into CH4, rather than a natural gas plant.  CombatInformatiker posted:[...] is building a CO2->CH4 (including H2 generation) demonstration plant [...]
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Apr 21, 2013 19:13
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CombatInformatiker posted:Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote You asked a question, and my answer was "yes" plus some words. Basically if a gas plant is only burning fuel produced by solar power plants, then really it's just a facility that consumes solar-produced energy. It's like how an electric car isn't a green energy vehicle if all of its power originally came from a coal power plant. In other words, you're right, the source of the energy is important; gas produced by solar power is green fuel.
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Apr 21, 2013 22:58
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Hobo Erotica posted:
Not sure if you realised it, but this video is from "The Onion", so not really a endorsement of Natural gas 
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Apr 22, 2013 00:41
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Wibbleman posted:Not sure if you realised it, but this video is from "The Onion", so not really a endorsement of Natural gas Hobo's frothingly pro-renewable so I think he realised that, I don't think he would have unironically posted a video he thought was pro-gas.
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Apr 22, 2013 02:58
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spankmeister posted:Natural gas is cheap and cleaner than other fossil fuels but it's still produces green house gases and other pollutants. Yes, as Wibbleman astutely pointed out above, the video was from satirical site 'the onion', and was in there in the hope of bringing a chuckle to whoever clicked it. Can't be all serious all the time. I would have thought it was pretty obvious, although as satire it does a great job of parroting the lines of the pro-gas lobby. I'm more intersted in Quantum Mechanics's stance on gas - I know BZE are vehemently anti-gas, do you see any place for it as a transition fuel, to help back up our generators until we get widespread reliable renewable deployment? Is that an acceptable compromise with the political and technological reality of our energy needs? Or should we reject it outright?
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Apr 22, 2013 05:27
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Hobo Erotica posted:I'm more intersted in Quantum Mechanics's stance on gas - I know BZE are vehemently anti-gas, do you see any place for it as a transition fuel, to help back up our generators until we get widespread reliable renewable deployment? Is that an acceptable compromise with the political and technological reality of our energy needs? Or should we reject it outright? Coal seam gas/fracking is pretty unrelentingly awful, and with the amounts of leakage the gas wells produce I'm not convinced it's actually any better re: climate change than coal power is. Given how much capital is going to need to be invested into making gas a "transition fuel" I don't personally think it's worth it, and neither do BZE or the Australian Greens.
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Apr 22, 2013 07:05
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Hobo Erotica posted:Yes, as Wibbleman astutely pointed out above, the video was from satirical site 'the onion', and was in there in the hope of bringing a chuckle to whoever clicked it. Can't be all serious all the time. Welp I didn't watch the video so 
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Apr 22, 2013 10:25
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ETH Zürich to develop new combined PV/solar thermal system Highlights:
For some reason, the German and the English articles provide different information.
CombatInformatiker fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Apr 23, 2013 |
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Apr 23, 2013 15:12
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Good luck to them? I read that as "did develop" and thought "neat". But as it stands, it's yet another future thing that may or may not happen, and kind of emblematic of the whole "solar techno-marvel" thing I referenced in my last post. Out of curiosity, what would be the major factors limiting deployment of such a device, were it to be successfully prototyped, CombatInformatiker?
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Apr 23, 2013 15:38
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80% efficiency in heat->electricity? What? Or it's "80% of the heat reflected is absorbed by water"?
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Apr 23, 2013 16:06
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My guess was that between electrical generation and water heating, 80% of absorbed energy was translated into usable heat/power.
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Apr 23, 2013 16:12
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Pander posted:Out of curiosity, what would be the major factors limiting deployment of such a device, were it to be successfully prototyped, CombatInformatiker?
Main factors limiting deployment (my own assessment; disclaimer: just a layman): you need water for cooling. According to the engineer in the video, even the prototype would melt the aluminum if the cooling system were to fail. Now imagine 25kW*(50/30) = ~42kw directed at a 10cm by 10cm spot. You'll also have to radiate this heat if you don't use it. Pros:
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Apr 23, 2013 19:15
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Yeah, concentrated solar is almost always better for efficiency but carries the huge issue that your module needs to track the sun.
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Apr 23, 2013 23:42
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Dusseldorf posted:Yeah, concentrated solar is almost always better for efficiency but carries the huge issue that your module needs to track the sun. By the way, I found a cute little program which allows you to play with a nuclear reactor: link.
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Apr 24, 2013 10:45
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Regardless of personal feelings on nuclear technology it must be pursued for simple waste management reasons. Reprocessing and transmutation of waste reduces the radioactivity by several orders of magnitude. The trade-off being the costs of construction/decommissioning of new facilities and reactors and generation of limited amounts of activation products. The pandora's box has already been opened and it will take decades, perhaps centuries, just to clean up the mess and responsibly store long-lived fission products (and U236 when a total phase out of fission reactors is desired). The sooner we get to work on it the sooner the medium-lived waste from the efforts decays to stable isotopes and we don't have to worry about it's radioactivity anymore. The question we should be asking is not whether to continue nuclear or not, but how. This must take into account current and future needs and technology advancement of fusion for transmutation. Anyone with the scientific and environmental knowledge of the problems of nuclear waste and still holds uncompromising anti-nuclear beliefs is burying their head in the sand. Germany, Italy, and other nations phase-out of nuclear power is incredibly short-sighted and irresponsible, ditto Yucca Mountain as currently envisioned. Just cramming the waste down a deep dark hole and forgetting about it is not the proper way to handle the waste considering the dramatic reduction of long-term radioactivity that can be had by tried and true methods of reprocessing.
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Apr 25, 2013 17:45
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The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) runs the energy market on the East coast of Australia, and they have put out a report saying that an energy supply from 100% renewable energy is possible. http://www.climatechange.gov.au/en/government/initiatives/aemo-100-per-cent-renewables.aspx There is a bit of a summary here http://larvatusprodeo.net/archives/2013/05/are-100-renewables-possible/ There is another summary here http://www.climatechange.gov.au/en/government/initiatives/aemo-100-per-cent-renewables.aspx There is another summary here, http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/05/02/100pc-renew-study-needs-makeover/#more-6110 , where the Author includes more details on including nuclear power in the mix. Yes its expensive. I understand that. Just keep in mind that its cheaper to build new solar than it is to build new coal plants, and that all our coal plants will need to be replaced by 2045 anyway.
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May 8, 2013 01:32
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The paper reinforces the main issue with renewables, that 'nameplate' (theoretical maximum) capacity has to be much higher than actual delivered capacity with renewables, then it does with fuel-based energy such as uranium or fossils. Even then, they end up using biogas to make up for shortfalls that occur at the wrong times. I'm not convinced that giving up farmland for biofuels is a good idea, in a future where arable land falls: A combination of renewable + nuclear should reduce the cost dramatically.
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May 8, 2013 16:56
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rudatron posted:The paper reinforces the main issue with renewables, that 'nameplate' (theoretical maximum) capacity has to be much higher than actual delivered capacity with renewables, then it does with fuel-based energy such as uranium or fossils. Even then, they end up using biogas to make up for shortfalls that occur at the wrong times. I'm not convinced that giving up farmland for biofuels is a good idea, in a future where arable land falls: Over-building renewable generating capacity isn't necessarily a waste of money. The excess capacity could always be used to make hydrogen from water when favorable conditions result in more generation than is needed.
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May 8, 2013 18:03
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The cost of building, operating and maintaining the fuel cells and electrolysis on such a huge industrial scale would be enormous, and that's ignoring the incredible cost in just storing large amounts of hydrogen. And that's not even why the nameplate capacity has to be so much higher than actual, delivered capacity! The whole point of intermittent sources is that they're not always there, so you need to have excess capacity to take advantage of when the energy is there. It's not that the power plants are delivering power, and that power is somehow not being used, it's that you have to build more capacity then you theoretically should need to, because you're using the environment as your power source.
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May 8, 2013 18:15
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Deteriorata posted:Over-building renewable generating capacity isn't necessarily a waste of money. The excess capacity could always be used to make hydrogen from water when favorable conditions result in more generation than is needed. Excess energy can also be put into things like Aluminum production, especially if the plants work off peak hours.
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May 8, 2013 18:43
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Dusseldorf posted:Excess energy can also be put into things like Aluminum production, especially if the plants work off peak hours. Off peak is going to be the hardest time for a heavy solar implementation. Thats when all of your energy storage systems will have to come online.
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May 8, 2013 19:05
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Dusseldorf posted:Excess energy can also be put into things like Aluminum production, especially if the plants work off peak hours.
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May 8, 2013 20:26
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Rent-A-Cop posted:You can't really start and stop a large industrial operation like a smelter to take advantage of surplus electrical capacity. You do it in the evening or overnight. But you can't stop and start production on-a-dime. It's also tricky to change power plant output quickly as well.
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May 9, 2013 01:45
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Three-Phase posted:You do it in the evening or overnight. But you can't stop and start production on-a-dime. It's also tricky to change power plant output quickly as well. I probably wouldn't plan on excess solar energy during the evening and overnight time frame.
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May 9, 2013 02:10
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