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Trabisnikof posted:Only because San Diego's Nuke was shut down because when they broke it. They have 1GW+ of Natural Gas already installed...and are building more small scale peakers (9MW turbines) http://www.sdge.com/newsroom/press-releases/2011-05-23/sdge-proposes-adding-450-mw-local-%93peaking%94-power Is there a list somewhere of instances in the past 10-15 years, where nuclear has been replaced with fossil fuels? It would be a good reference to have when talking with folks who think that each plant that gets shut down is going to be replaced with solar or wind. fake edit: southern California would be the perfect place for putting in solar, what the gently caress
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Jul 15, 2014 00:34
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Baronjutter posted:How scalable is nuclear anyways? For instance why couldn't some small town have its own little nuclear plant? I remember seeing an article a few years back about, I think Mitsubishi, building some tiny tiny little reactor with the idea to mass-produce them for small or isolated communities. They'd require no staff, they'd just sit there generating power and on schedule they'd be replaced or re-fueled. I think the whole thing was about as big as a large van. The idea was to bury them under a public place like the town square or in front of city hall so there wasn't a chance anyone could steal it or tamper with it without having to dig for a day. They'd only need refueling every few years or more so you'd just bury and forget. There's a lot of issues with that you're kinda glossing on a bit. Modular reactors have a LOT of plusses, but I don't think they (nor any reactor design) would support plug-and-forget. There is a lot of ongoing operations and maintenance that necessitates a reasonable crew, and the regulatory environment (and general common sense) would necessitate experts and reactor operators on site at all times. Burial is great for a lot of reasons, but there still would likely need to be a dedicated security staff beyond that of a typical small town. Furthermore, there'd really be no profit margin for a 10MW plant by its lonesome. The point of modularity is to gather a bunch of them together after mass-producing them, so they can be under the purview of a larger operator. Except in fringe and unusual cases, it's not to ensure itty bitty towns can all have their own reactors. Hedera Helix posted:Is there a list somewhere of instances in the past 10-15 years, where nuclear has been replaced with fossil fuels? It would be a good reference to have when talking with folks who think that each plant that gets shut down is going to be replaced with solar or wind.
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Jul 15, 2014 01:03
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Hedera Helix posted:Is there a list somewhere of instances in the past 10-15 years, where nuclear has been replaced with fossil fuels? It would be a good reference to have when talking with folks who think that each plant that gets shut down is going to be replaced with solar or wind. They are also installing a ton of solar, but those projects are a county over not in San Diego, see the Bechtel plants on the NV/CA border as a prime example. (http://www.bechtel.com/ivanpah.html) Nintendo Kid posted:1 gigawatt of natural gas is massively polluting. Also, it clearly wasn't enough power for the area since it couldn't handle a gird isolation event. Actually, that wasn't the cause of the black out. It was our more common grid realiability issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout SD wasn't isolated, but it just took that long to start islanding and syncing the grid. This is more of a management caused blackout, because those plants couldn't just online willy-nilly it takes a specific order and can take a while when major interconnects trip. But they were operating outside of FERC guidelines for grid reliability and wouldn't you know, there's an outage. And those new gas plants being built are also often replacing older more polluting plants, so its still a new gain to the environment (http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/Jan/14/carlsbad-encina-power-peaker-plant-deal/) SONGS was taken offline because the operator couldn't afford their own mistakes, not due to NIMBY, new regulations, lawsuits or anything.
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Jul 15, 2014 01:55
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Trabisnikof posted:SONGS was taken offline because the operator couldn't afford their own mistakes, not due to NIMBY, new regulations, lawsuits or anything. Yes. I acknowledged that. me posted:costly upgrades/breakdowns Broken steam generator piping, which involves miles and miles of small tubes that are hugely expensive. Similar issue shut down Crystal River, cracks anywhere near the power block are just...bad. The large size and intricacy of the Gen II light water reactors provide a large portion of the risk of investment in older style nuclear, and one of the reasons to look into SMRs.
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Jul 15, 2014 02:20
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Pander posted:Yes. I acknowledged that. Sorry that was more posted towards Hedera Helix's comment. SONGS was always a bit of a special case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsNoBMr3OHI
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Jul 15, 2014 02:29
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yeah they always were a bunch of boobs over there
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Jul 15, 2014 02:36
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Nintendo Kid posted:Transmission losses are often more than counterbalanced by increased efficency of fuel usage. That is, after all, why they exist. But in the context of solar power, there's no fuel to speak of, so cutting out transmission losses by having the solar panels on your roof instead of 100 miles away can make sense, depending on where you live. What you're talking about is the "I want a nuclear reactor in every basement" crazies who think that a bunch of diesel generators in their basement are going to be just as efficient as a natural gas power plant for some reason e: And obviously this doesn't matter for things like wind, where turbine position is key. Really, decentralization arguments only makes sense for photovoltaics QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 03:24
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QuarkJets posted:But in the context of solar power, there's no fuel to speak of, so cutting out transmission losses by having the solar panels on your roof instead of 100 miles away can make sense, depending on where you live. What you're talking about is the "I want a nuclear reactor in every basement" crazies who think that a bunch of diesel generators in their basement are going to be just as efficient as a natural gas power plant for some reason The solar panels on your roof do not provide decentralized power at least half of the time.
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Jul 15, 2014 03:38
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Nintendo Kid posted:The solar panels on your roof do not provide decentralized power at least half of the time. Half? That'd be nice. I live in Illinois. We have a lot of wind capacity because it's money for Exelon, but it's not all that great a region for wind. When we do get wind, it comes in the form of squall lines. Relying on solar would be suicidal given our winters that tend to last from October to April. There is no elevation change throughout the entire goddamn state, and damning any of our rivers is kinda impossible. No geothermal power generation possible. Renewables are neat, but it's burning stuff or nuclear here. Not making GBS threads on renwewables, just kinda agreeing that I am somewhat pessimistic about decentralized vs centralized production for a lot of the US.
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Jul 15, 2014 03:45
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Nintendo Kid posted:The solar panels on your roof do not provide decentralized power at least half of the time. Naturally, but anyone arguing for solar decentralization is going to have to include huge expensive battery systems in every home with the idea. Totally feasible, if you want to be off-grid in a sunny state and are willing to pay extra for the privilege That said, even when your solar cells aren't providing power, you're still cutting out transmission losses when they are providing power. That's a great benefit and a totally reasonable thing to mention as far as pros go.
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Jul 15, 2014 03:48
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Pander posted:Half? That'd be nice. I live in Illinois. We have a lot of wind capacity because it's money for Exelon, but it's not all that great a region for wind. When we do get wind, it comes in the form of squall lines. Relying on solar would be suicidal given our winters that tend to last from October to April. There is no elevation change throughout the entire goddamn state, and damning any of our rivers is kinda impossible. No geothermal power generation possible. Solar can work in Illinois... in the form of massive solar concentrator plants with motorized mirror systems to maximize and focus light reception. So needless to say, decidedly un-decentralized. QuarkJets posted:Naturally, but anyone arguing for solar decentralization is going to have to include huge expensive battery systems in every home with the idea. Totally feasible, if you want to be off-grid in a sunny state and are willing to pay extra for the privilege If by feasible you mean a colossal fire/even explosive hazard than sure (assuming you're still trying to live a normal lifestyle). You don't cut transmission losses at all while your panels are going, the electricity is still traveling the high tension lines and what's more there's transmission losses coming through your feed-in from the panels to the line, and then from your line out to the grid.
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Jul 15, 2014 03:54
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blowfish posted:Let's build glorious above-ground Pumpspeicherwerks in hypothetical 100%-wind Germany. So one of the reasons I'm optimistic about grid storage is that it's hugely synergistic with nuclear baseload. For a variety of reasons but one of them is just your risk model. To give you a rough demonstration of this, I hacked together a lovely little python simulation of storage/nuclear/wind generation to show you what I mean:  A red dot means that single simulation had a power shortfall in a 5 year sim. A blue means it did not. The next paragraph can be skipped unless you want to know what assumptions went into this. Don't put too much stock in the particular numbers. The simulation uses a Weibull distribution for wind, using the k parameter I found On The Internet(tm). It assumes demand is constant at 90% of average power generation (which is why at 0 storage it goes blue at 90% nuclear on the bottom there.) Which corresponds to an 11% overproduction of power, on average. The unit "days of grid storage" is in terms of demand, not adjusted by nuclear baseload percentage (e.g. 5 days at 50% nuclear means the system could go for 10 days of 0 wind, from a full charge. I chose this unit just to abstract away from a particular value in TWh.) Ignore the white square, I just didn't simulate those values. Oh, and I assumed storage efficiency of 70%. But it shows that even moderate baseload power (i.e. nuclear, or hydro/geothermal in some places) means we're actually able to hit a reliable part of the graph, while at low baseload values, it's incredibly difficult. (Again, this is at only 11% overproduction. See below for some graphs at 5% and 17%.) Anyway, the point is, if you've got even a little bit of reliable baseload, the storage (and overproduction) requirements get a lot more modest. (If people are interested, I might find time later this week to clean things up and post this simulation code. It's not that interesting, but it was about 2 hours of googling, most of which because I've never used scipy/numpy/matplotlib before.) Here's the graphs for 5% and 17% overproduction.   This sim is missing demand variability, which is another thing in storage's favor (smaller overproduction necessary.) I'd need to find a statistical distribution for that, and I just haven't yet done that. (Anyone got a RSD for that around?) I think all it'd do is add a roughly constant bit of red to the bottom of each graph, less for the graphs at larger overproduction. Anyway, this was a whole lot of words just to say that adding baseload is non-linearly beneficial to the amount of storage needed to accommodate wind. I got a bit carried away with trying to validate that claim. 
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Jul 15, 2014 03:54
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Nintendo Kid posted:If by feasible you mean a colossal fire/even explosive hazard than sure (assuming you're still trying to live a normal lifestyle). Are you being intentionally obtuse? Yes, pushing your solar power to the grid is going to have the same transmission losses as any other energy source. But we're talking about off-grid homes, as referenced by your comments about a bank of batteries posing a fire hazard, in the context of crazy libertarians who want to be off-grid, as in no grid. I'm not saying that there are no losses when the electricity travels from your panels to your appliances, but the losses are much less than receiving power over the grid. You're probably looking at 10% losses vs 1% losses (source: my rear end), which is significant e: God drat fishmech, I thought you maybe had an undeserved bad rap but this is ridiculous QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 08:49
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QuarkJets posted:Are you being intentionally obtuse? Yes, pushing your solar power to the grid is going to have the same transmission losses as any other energy source. But we're talking about off-grid homes, as referenced by your comments about a bank of batteries posing a fire hazard, in the context of crazy libertarians who want to be off-grid, as in no grid. No, you're just being an rear end. You literally just said "anyone arguing for solar decentralization will need a ton of batteries" did you forget that text that I quoted? So I pointed out the problem with having the batteries. No, the losses aren't much less because you experience none of the long distance power transmission losses to begin with, as a customer. The losses still exist on the grid whether your special home is using electricity or not, because the grid's serving everyone else, and at that residential is a very small portion of electrical usage. So no losses are saved by decentralizing.
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Jul 16, 2014 04:59
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, you're just being an rear end. You literally just said "anyone arguing for solar decentralization will need a ton of batteries" did you forget that text that I quoted? So I pointed out the problem with having the batteries. Wouldn't avoiding transforming or converting up and down from 23kV while transporting over 100s of miles save some transmission losses for decentralizations?
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Jul 16, 2014 05:11
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Pander posted:What? Your house's measly couple kilowatts of usage at peak are a drop in the bucket to the power going through the grid, you are not saving anyone much of anything in terms of transmission loss by having some solar panels. Like you get that if just a few thousand people stay home from work, it won't alleviate rush hour traffic right? Same principle. That factory outside town that requires a couple megawatt feed invokes so much power load that it overwhelms the rest of the usage locally. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Jul 16, 2014 |
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Jul 16, 2014 05:45
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Nintendo Kid posted:Your house's measly couple kilowatts of usage at peak are a drop in the bucket to the power going through the grid, you are not saving anyone much of anything in terms of transmission loss by having some solar panels. Come on, you're both right. Decentralization would indeed save on transmission losses, it's just very unlikely that those savings would actually make any difference.
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Jul 16, 2014 05:54
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Nintendo Kid posted:Your house's measly couple kilowatts of usage at peak are a drop in the bucket to the power going through the grid, you are not saving anyone much of anything in terms of transmission loss by having some solar panels. I kinda think I know what you're arguing, I just don't think you're looking at the problem in the right way. If you're getting a few kilowatts from your own personal panels, and everyone else in your region is too, you don't need as much peaking supply to begin with, so you have less transmission losses by virtue of less power transmitted. Again, unless I'm missing something here.
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Jul 16, 2014 05:55
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Nintendo Kid posted:Your house's measly couple kilowatts of usage at peak are a drop in the bucket to the power going through the grid, you are not saving anyone much of anything in terms of transmission loss by having some solar panels.
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Jul 16, 2014 05:58
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Pander posted:If you wanna use metaphors, a few people driving Priuses a decade ago didn't really do much to adjust mileage. Nowadays hybrids are commonplace, and it's increasing. There'll still be stretch SUV limos, but that doesn't mean there aren't advantages to distributed local generation. The advantages won't be in less losses, because if everybody's using very local production, there's losses in transmitting excess power to the network from various people's homes, and if they're all overproducing than that has to be fed back to the larger grid with more transmission losses. Essentially, you just shuffle around transmission and DC-AC conversion losses to different places.
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Jul 16, 2014 06:02
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Ah. I was projecting excess production would be funneled into local intermittent services (battery charging, desalinization, pumps). Yes, sending it other communities would likely require some insane grid upgrades to be efficient.
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Jul 16, 2014 06:07
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Pander posted:Ah. I was projecting excess production would be funneled into local intermittent services (battery charging, desalinization, pumps). Yes, sending it other communities would likely require some insane grid upgrades to be efficient. Those local intermittent services are nice, but they'll have a hard time trying to reach the efficiency of a larger and therefore probably centralised solution. Having local everything might make sense if you're a big city in the middle of nowhere that can afford to run expensive pieces of infrastructure, but Las Vegas is not exactly your average backwoods town. Doing the same for Bumfuck, Iowa will needlessly increase land use and duplicate equipment if nothing else. It is also unlikely we'll be able to avoid sending electricity around between places even with local intermittent consumption because variability of wind/solar is necessarily larger on a local level than nationally. Either overbuild local intermittent stuff, or accept either sending electricity back into the larger grid or having to actively waste it to avoid overloading your local grid. crazypenguin posted:(If people are interested, I might find time later this week to clean things up and post this simulation code. It's not that interesting, but it was about 2 hours of googling, most of which because I've never used scipy/numpy/matplotlib before.)
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Jul 16, 2014 09:00
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Pander posted:I thought the argument was "hey, here's a 50 person town in a desert that's powered by wind, solar, batteries, and a little bit of burning poo poo, all local. They don't have transmission losses that sending power 150 miles over high-voltage AC lines would have." High voltage AC transmission line losses are on the order of 2%/1000km. I'm not exactly sure that thats a good idea for the town to have its own power with those numbers.
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Jul 16, 2014 15:43
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A bigger problem is it's basically impossible to build more transmission lines (in the US at least) because of the property rights necessary to get right-of-way for them.
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Jul 16, 2014 15:49
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hobbesmaster posted:High voltage AC transmission line losses are on the order of 2%/1000km. I'm not exactly sure that thats a good idea for the town to have its own power with those numbers. Does that account for transforming?
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Jul 16, 2014 16:29
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Pander posted:Does that account for transforming? No, so knock it up to 3% then (high voltage transformers are well over 99% efficient - if they weren't they'd melt pretty drat fast)
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Jul 16, 2014 16:33
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Wikipedia says overall transmission loss is 6%-ish on average in the US.
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Jul 16, 2014 16:33
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Nintendo Kid posted:The advantages won't be in less losses, because if everybody's using very local production, there's losses in transmitting excess power to the network from various people's homes, and if they're all overproducing than that has to be fed back to the larger grid with more transmission losses. But the power that's not in excess, the power that never has to be transmitted over any significant distance, does not experience losses. I mean you keep dancing around this idea without addressing it, but you understand it, right? If a community produced 300 kWh/day and consumed 200 kWh/day (producing an excess 100 kWh/day), then at 6% transmission losses a system of local production and consumption like this one would save 6 kWh/day.
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Jul 16, 2014 19:09
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QuarkJets posted:But the power that's not in excess, the power that never has to be transmitted over any significant distance, does not experience losses. I mean you keep dancing around this idea without addressing it, but you understand it, right? If a community produced 300 kWh/day and consumed 200 kWh/day (producing an excess 100 kWh/day), then at 6% transmission losses a system of local production and consumption like this one would save 6 kWh/day. No, it still experiences losses, because you're not the reason for the massive cross-country feeds in the first place. That community would still be creating internal transmission losses, that's the point! There'd be losses sending that 100 kW/day to anywhere else! There'd be losses sending it to local things to attempt to soak up spare electricity! There'd be losses just getitng the electricity out of Bob's house and into the grid to get to Tim's house! And you also already have losses going DC to AC for solar panels at the least. All you're doing is changing where transmission and conversion losses are experienced, not eliminating them - and in the case of this you'd be putting a decent amount of energy through the most lossy components of the network.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:40
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Do you think that the argument is that solar power is lossless? That's not the argument. The argument is only that transmitting power over 100 km incurs greater losses than transmitting over a distance of tens of meters
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Jul 17, 2014 08:35
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QuarkJets posted:Do you think that the argument is that solar power is lossless? That's not the argument. The argument is only that transmitting power over 100 km incurs greater losses than transmitting over a distance of tens of meters It doesn't, as solar panels are pretty inefficent for conversion from their real outputs to standard AC, and any advantage at all goes away once you're feeding back to the grid or have to go on the grid for power at all.
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Jul 17, 2014 14:23
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One of the problems with the whole decentralized generation thing is simply that if you're going to go around to a whole bunch of people and try and convince them to do something everyone would be much better off if you convinced them to put in better insulation or more efficient boilers or other power-saving technologies, rather than things like decentralized generation. These things have better returns on investment than solar in most places, and create more consistent reductions in grid load. I know there's room for more than one campaign at a time etc... but the low hanging fruit really is efficiency and not decentralized generation.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:26
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Nintendo Kid posted:It doesn't, as solar panels are pretty inefficent for conversion from their real outputs to standard AC, and any advantage at all goes away once you're feeding back to the grid or have to go on the grid for power at all. Don't forget they want batteries too, so the full process for power you want to use at night is: Solar cell -> inverter -> rectifier -> battery ->inverter -> house.
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Jul 17, 2014 20:54
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thekeeshman posted:One of the problems with the whole decentralized generation thing is simply that if you're going to go around to a whole bunch of people and try and convince them to do something everyone would be much better off if you convinced them to put in better insulation or more efficient boilers or other power-saving technologies, rather than things like decentralized generation. These things have better returns on investment than solar in most places, and create more consistent reductions in grid load. On that note, BZE (the group who's stationary energy plan was the impetus for all this), is pushing this very idea with their Energy Freedom inititaive. 9 steps for households to acheive energy freedom.: http://energyfreedom.com.au/ Nine actions to get energy freedom Insulation Fully insulating your home can cut your heating use by 80%. High performance technologies are available to retrofit all types of Australian Homes. Rooftop SolarYour home can be a solar power station! Rooftop solar gives you the power to generate your own energy. Prices and options for battery storage are improving every month. Lighting LED downlights save 80% of the energy used by halogens. LEDs provide quality, dimmable light and are easy to install. LEDs are covered under the VEET scheme and can pay for themselves in under a year. Efficient appliances By installing the most efficient appliances available, you can save 50% on energy use compared to mid-range products. Heat pump hot water systems These use 80% less energy than gas and standard electric-based hot water systems. They will save you money each year compared to an electric system and costs the same as a new gas system. In home displays Gives you real time monitoring of energy use in your home. In Home Displays can save you 9-15% on your energy bill. Available under VEET scheme and pays for itself in under a year. Heating and Cooling This is the most efficient heater and cooler you can have in your home. Save 60% on your heating bill compared to ducted gas heating! Cooking Cooking with induction cooktops provides the same performance as a gas cooktop but uses half the energy. Induction cooktops are safer than gas and avoid dangerous indoor air pollution. Double glazing You can save 9% on your energy use by replacing single glazed windows with double glazing. DIY, retrofit options are available to double glaze many existing window types.   I mean it all seems like pretty obvious stuff, but it does need pushing. It's all come out of their "Buildings Plan", and fleshed out with plenty of data and modelling if anyone wants to take a look: http://bze.org.au/node/1440
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Jul 18, 2014 01:06
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Is lack of insulation really a problem in Australia? I mean there's plenty of older houses in the US that only have lovely older insulation, but you rarely see anything new without insulation, or anything newer than the second world war without any insulation at all.
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Jul 18, 2014 01:20
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A lot of newer houses have bad insulation.
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Jul 18, 2014 01:29
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Nintendo Kid posted:Is lack of insulation really a problem in Australia? I mean there's plenty of older houses in the US that only have lovely older insulation, but you rarely see anything new without insulation, or anything newer than the second world war without any insulation at all. Yeah I guess. I mean we need air con in summer and heating in winter, so can always do better with insulation. Heating and cooling still make up the biggest section of household energy use I think. Actually a few years ago there was a bit of a scandal, the government was promoting a home insulation scheme that involved "pink batts", and some of the installers died. The other party has never let them hear the end of it. So now any time the government tries to do anything to do with sustainability or improving efficiency its "OH REMEMBER THE PINK BATTS HAH YEAH THAT'S RIGHT LET'S NEVER TRY TO DO ANYTHING AGAIN"
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Jul 18, 2014 01:36
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Hobo Erotica posted:Yeah I guess. I mean we need air con in summer and heating in winter, so can always do better with insulation. Heating and cooling still make up the biggest section of household energy use I think. So reading up on this... four people killed themselves in easily preventable accidents due to improper supervision and failure to follow basic electrical safety standards (in one case, directly contradicting them). In the states (especially Texas) we call that "Friday"
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Jul 18, 2014 01:45
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Hobo Erotica posted:Yeah I guess. I mean we need air con in summer and heating in winter, so can always do better with insulation. Heating and cooling still make up the biggest section of household energy use I think. Er what I mean is, is there really a lot of Australian housing stock out there with no insulation at all or only very minimal insulation? The proposal seems to imply that there is.
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Jul 18, 2014 02:08
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Nintendo Kid posted:Er what I mean is, is there really a lot of Australian housing stock out there with no insulation at all or only very minimal insulation? The proposal seems to imply that there is. Oh ok, good question then. So I just dug through the report (page 60 of the printed version): 41% of houses are brick veneer - poorest thermal performance of all construction types 69% of houses have some form of insulation, but only 18% have wall insulation 47% have window coverings designed to stop heat or cold 32% have outside awnings and shutters 2.6% have double glazing Australian homes are also apparently 2-4 times as 'draughty'as those in north America and Europe So, enough room to improve I suppose.
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Jul 18, 2014 02:23
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