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OwlFancier posted:Yes but I don't see why that is relevant to the parts detailing the viability of large scale wind deployment? Because those parts are meaningless if they ignore the actual grid we're going to have, you dense clown. It does matter? Like especially for carbon usage and also stability, among other things natural gas is more pliant for quick startup/shutdown. It's wrong because if there's a higher amount of non-dispatchable grid power, it can severely upset attempts to handle overproduction and underproduction from wind and solar. It's also wrong because whoever made it couldn't be bothered to research planned and authorized nuclear production, so how can we trust them on anything else for the plan? Cyclopean Horror posted:Wind Vision anticipates nuclear and coal retirements in part due to low natural gas prices. There are currently 5 reactors under construction in the U.S., and four of them are plagued by "dismal cost overruns and multi-year delays," according to the Wall Street Journal. That hardly sounds like the start of a promising growth trajectory. So it anticipates something stupid, especially if liquid natural gas shipment facilities develop like they're planned to. Also having delays or cost overruns have nothing to do with "growth trajectory". It's certainly not enough to magically assume none will ever complete.
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Mar 27, 2015 03:07
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CommieGIR posted:Wind and Solar are not going to sustain the grid by themselves, and Natural Gas is just the coal/gas industry trying to stay relevant. Unless we make big leaps in energy storage or cars being plugged into the grid becomes the norm, Wind and Solar are very good supplements, but even Germany is still mostly dependent upon coal and natural gas. If you aggregate a grid over wide enough areas, shortfalls from one intermittent renewable resource can be made up for by others. Grid operators are always balancing for and assuming generation failure anyway, they keep a reserve in place to prevent blackouts. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants can fail. When they do, the grid operator has to manage the loss of 1GW+ of capacity in seconds. Wind and solar intermittency can be forecast, and the loss of capacity happens gradually in a way that is easier to manage. That said, I agree it's unlikely we'll see 100% renewable energy in the next 50 years (or more). But 35% wind isn't unrealistic.
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Mar 27, 2015 03:09
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Cyclopean Horror posted:If you aggregate a grid over wide enough areas, shortfalls from one intermittent renewable resource can be made up for by others. Grid operators are always balancing for and assuming generation failure anyway, they keep a reserve in place to prevent blackouts. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants can fail. When they do, the grid operator has to manage the loss of 1GW+ of capacity in seconds. Wind and solar intermittency can be forecast, and the loss of capacity happens gradually in a way that is easier to manage. No, 35% is not unrealistic at all. But its never going to be 'We only have wind and solar', there is going to be some on demand power generation and as far as carbon neutral, nuclear is the closest we can get: Smaller mining footprint, higher energy density, small amounts of waste.
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Mar 27, 2015 03:10
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Trabisnikof posted:The EIA actually knows what they are doing and the model they are using is particularly adjusted to the problems of renewables (http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/reeds/description.html). Also storage is an incredibly small part of the generation scenario: So what happens in their scenario when an entire state has calm weather, and 30% of your capacity disappears from noon till midnight? Do they have reserve sources that can be throttled quickly enough to respond? Or do they expect the grid to be able to share power efficiently across enormous areas, thereby smoothing out local variations in capacity (lol)? crazypenguin posted:One of the things I feel like I repeat a lot (because it surprised the hell out of me, and it's a mistake I see almost everyone else making too) is that the storage needed due to the variability of wind is NOT necessary to make up for a shortfall of power generation. It's necessary to make use of power generated when winds are HIGH. There's EXCESS power. ANIME AKBAR fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Mar 27, 2015 |
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Mar 27, 2015 03:47
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ANIME AKBAR posted:So what happens in their scenario when an entire state has calm weather, and 30% of your capacity disappears from noon till midnight? Do they have reserve sources that can be throttled quickly enough to respond? Or do they expect the grid to be able to share power efficiently across enormous areas, thereby smoothing out local variations in capacity (lol)? In this case, the absolutely massive amounts of new natural gas plants help out since they're easy to call online. Of course it'll pollute like hell.
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Mar 27, 2015 03:51
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Well that's what Germany did, but that chart seems to imply something else, since fossil fuel capacity goes down overall. But yeah lol at phasing out nuclear and letting fossil fuels keep half of actual generation, gently caress all of that.
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Mar 27, 2015 03:58
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Nintendo Kid posted:you dense clown
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Mar 27, 2015 07:31
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CombatInformatiker posted:There's no need for name-calling. If you feel that the other side just doesn't get your arguments, then insulting them won't change their position – more likely it'll have the opposite effect. If being nice to the ignorant worked, we wouldn't have to deal with global warming by now.
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Mar 27, 2015 07:40
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ANIME AKBAR posted:So what happens in their scenario when an entire state has calm weather, and 30% of your capacity disappears from noon till midnight? Do they have reserve sources that can be throttled quickly enough to respond? Or do they expect the grid to be able to share power efficiently across enormous areas, thereby smoothing out local variations in capacity (lol)? I'm just going to quote from a relevant part of the report, I may be missing a better quote, but this should do to explain the non-storage options that higher priorities: quote:The variable, uncertain, and location-dependent nature of wind energy introduces grid integration challenges associated with the Wind Vision. And to the concerns about operating with large percentages of wind, we're already doing it. Sometimes wind is even more resilient than fossil fuels: quote:In regions with wind power contributions up to 20% of annual electrical demand in 2013, electric power systems operated reliably without added storage and with little or no increase in generation reserves [7]. Wind has also been proven to increase system reliability during some severe weather events. For example, in February 2011, cold weather disabled 152 power plants in Texas, mostly coal and natural gas. Wind generation produced approximately 3,500 MW of output during this event, helping to avoid outages [135]. Experience with wind generation confirms that opportunities exist to increase grid operating effi- ciency and reduce costs by increasing flexibility.
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Mar 27, 2015 08:37
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm just going to quote from a relevant part of the report, I may be missing a better quote, but this should do to explain the non-storage options that higher priorities: Wow 3.5GVA! Thats like, uh, 6 turbines!
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Mar 27, 2015 16:55
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hobbesmaster posted:Wow 3.5GVA! Thats like, uh, 6 turbines! The whole point is that if 150+ of your natural gas and coal power plants all shut down simultaneously due to low temps, it doesn't really matter how few shut-down turbines could generate the electricity. Most of them are of course older and smaller than the new GE unit you linked, but I doubt you're arguing we should build more coal and gas power plants.
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Mar 27, 2015 19:55
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Trabisnikof posted:The whole point is that if 150+ of your natural gas and coal power plants all shut down simultaneously due to low temps, it doesn't really matter how few shut-down turbines could generate the electricity. Most of them are of course older and smaller than the new GE unit you linked, but I doubt you're arguing we should build more coal and gas power plants. None of Texas' nuclear power shut down though.  Also Texas' wind and solar plants combined generate about 10% of its electricity, well below national averages.Natural gas and coal combined provide 77% of Texas power so clearly 150 natural gas and coal plants down left an awful lot more still running.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:03
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Trabisnikof posted:And to the concerns about operating with large percentages of wind, we're already doing it. Sometimes wind is even more resilient than fossil fuels: Nuclear plants, however, kept operating 
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Mar 27, 2015 20:04
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Nintendo Kid posted:Also Texas' wind and solar plants combined generate about 10% of its electricity, well below national averages. Actually, the national average for wind alone is 4% and for wind in Texas it is 10%....
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Mar 27, 2015 20:06
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This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. A few days ago I read about a magic wristwatch that was capable of generating and storing energy from a mostly mechanical response to the changes in temperature. Is there any particular reason why that concept is not applied on larger scales? I mean, if you stuck a machine on your roof that was constantly generating some kind of energy when the temperature increased or decreased by, say, 0.5% of 1 degree fahrenheit, and found a way to store that energy in some kind of DC battery, and then convert that to AC, wouldn't that make more sense than some of our current energy gathering strategies? That would probably be horribly inefficient and expensive, though.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:47
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Jakcson posted:This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. Ask yourself this question: where does the energy for temperature changes on Earth come from? That said there is research into harnessing thermoclines.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:53
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Jakcson posted:This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. Didn't you just answer your own question? It'd be horribly inefficient and expensive, so no, it would not make more sense than some of our current energy gathering strategies.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:55
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Jakcson posted:This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. I don't know how your watch works but that sounds like it might be a low temperature difference engine? And I think that technology actually is viable on a large scale as part of HVAC units, to cut down their power usage. Not as an energy producer, generally but as an efficient heat gradient producer if run in reverse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_the_Stirling_engine#Low_temperature_difference_engines Stirling engines are weird and can be used for all sorts of stuff depending on what you input into them. Putting power into them produces a heat gradient, and putting a heat gradient into them produces power.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:58
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Jakcson posted:This is a little off-topic, but I hope I don't get flamed too much for posting this. Watches need very small amounts of power. As such the fact that these things only generate a very small amount of power doesn't matter. For example, a typical digital watch uses just 4 to 7 microamps of current, and analog quartz watches can use as little as 1.5 microamps, since they don't need to run an LCD display, just tick the watch gears forward. Since they're typically at 1.5 volts, that means 0.00000225 watts to 0.0000105 watts. So one of the self charging watches? Let's assume it generates double the power that it needs to run the watch, in order to recharge the battery so it'll still run for a while when off the wrist. You'd need to scale the power generation thing in that watch to something like 1,904,762 times as large for your system to power a 40 watt light bulb.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:59
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Someone posted this again in I loving Love Science: I love how you can ignore the laws of physics and electricity when convenient.
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Apr 20, 2015 18:53
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CommieGIR posted:Someone posted this again in I loving Love Science: My nuclear engineering adviser taught a class about wind and solar power, and that was a slide in there. He said it was a matter of when, not if. Throw down some cells, build some HVDC lines, boom done. Another nuclear engineering professor's fusion course included a discussion about how he was certain there'd be a fusion reactor on Mars within 50 years. Smart people can have very interesting blinders put on sometimes.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:55
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CommieGIR posted:Someone posted this again in I loving Love Science: Or you know, the law of Nighttime Exists In The Sahara Like The Rest Of The World.
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Apr 20, 2015 21:03
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When I told my father that even if you filled the Sahara desert with solar panels and ignored all the infrastructure and ecological problems, you'd still need to get the energy to where it's needed. He said they should fill oil tankers with hydrogen and ship it if they can't build power lines  He also says I should explain my support for nuclear power to the people in Fukushima, trying to shut down my argument.
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Apr 20, 2015 21:13
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How is Japan doing? The most recent semi-related thing I read about Japan was from a definitely not bias hippy granola website about how some German not-dumbass was selling "Fukushima water" for a billion $ as a statement about the cost of atoms. Also my friend said something about sky-rocketing stomach rates.
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Apr 20, 2015 21:41
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I think the rate of stomachs in Japan is still about 100 per capita.
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Apr 20, 2015 21:42
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PhazonLink posted:How is Japan doing? Basically nothing has happened since evacuations started way before anything important happened, often because of that whole tsunami thing that wrecked the coast. Claims of high stomach cancer rates are interesting because there's a 2006 study that showed that for some reason Japan had 4x the stomach cancer rate of the UK: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1860129/ And well, that was 5 years before anything happened with Fukushima.
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Apr 20, 2015 21:44
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Pander posted:My nuclear engineering adviser taught a class about wind and solar power, and that was a slide in there. He said it was a matter of when, not if. Throw down some cells, build some HVDC lines, boom done. You figure he'd add a desert full of nuclear power plants to that list of shitthstwonthappen.txt Lurking Haro posted:When I told my father that even if you filled the Sahara desert with solar panels and ignored all the infrastructure and ecological problems, you'd still need to get the energy to where it's needed. Not to mention that you'd never even capture 25% of that energy, and even then transmission losses would be phenomenal, and you'd have to pave over the desert to even ger anywhere near even half of the worlds consumption. Its so disgustingly ignorant of physics and energy laws. It hurts. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 22:12
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CommieGIR posted:Someone posted this again in I loving Love Science: I wonder what the total land area looks like when you put solar plants distributed around the world in reasonable places that are not quite as sunny.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:34
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There's so much bad math out there, specially related to "green" energy. I'm constantly seeing poo poo on my facebook about how people "do the math" and find we can solve all our energy needs with X or Y and it would cost pennies to the dollar compared to all other power sources but BIG ENERGY won't let it happen. And what the do is they'll take the absolute highest costs including all externalities for what they don't like, like coal or nuclear, then compare that to the base price for a solar panel, not include installation or infrastructure, then do the math based on the peak theoretical output of solar or wind. And it's not just fwfwfwfwfw local mom solves energy problem, it's people who should know better. People involved in environmental or climate science coming up with or parroting this poo poo. I wish we could cut through all the bullshit and talk about energy like grownups but it's so heavily politicized and everyone seems to have some huge bias. I'm pretty pro-nuclear but I still don't know if that's based on facts or just good lies I've read here and other places. If even educated scientists can't spot the shills or not be grossly biased what hope do I have?
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Apr 20, 2015 22:34
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How well do solar farms stand up to inclement weather? Very high winds (80+ mph), hail, flooding, dust storms?
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Apr 20, 2015 22:36
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Pander posted:How well do solar farms stand up to inclement weather? Very high winds (80+ mph), hail, flooding, dust storms? It really depends on the panel and how it's made. Some are very tough and same will fall apart if you look at them wrong. I assume solar farms use pretty durable ones.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:43
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Baronjutter posted:I think the rate of stomachs in Japan is still about 100 per capita. In Japan everyone's 99 problems is how many extra stomachs they have.
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Apr 20, 2015 22:52
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Nintendo Kid posted:Because those parts are meaningless if they ignore the actual grid we're going to have, you dense clown. It isn't stupid to anticipate plant retirements, for whatever reason. Nor is it stupid to be pessimistic about the ability to expand nuclear capacity at any kind of decent rate. It is a historical fact that plants close more frequently than they are built, are not-infrequently shut down before the end of their usable lifetime for cost or other reasons, and that new reactor projects almost invariably run into extreme delays and cost overruns, often being aborted before completion. Most of these problems stem from the extremely high cost of designing, approving, constructing, and maintaining them. The cost and complexity are simply leagues beyond what are required for other forms of generation, with the possible (and irrelevant) exception of hydro superprojects. You can argue that this is not an intrinsic property of nuclear power, but a result of inefficiencies in the way we design, regulate, and operate nuclear power plants. You would probably be at least partially correct. But the bottom line is investors routinely pull out of both planned and existing nuclear enterprises for cost reasons, and correcting that would probably require government intervention on a fantastic scale. You can make whatever arguments you want about how we should do whatever is necessary to mitigate these issues and that if we did X, Y, and Z we could expand nuclear capacity and a significant rate. But we aren't and we can't, so you can't blame people for not placing their bets on your side.
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Apr 28, 2015 00:52
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Morbus posted:It isn't stupid to anticipate plant retirements, for whatever reason. Nor is it stupid to be pessimistic about the ability to expand nuclear capacity at any kind of decent rate. It is a historical fact that plants close more frequently than they are built, are not-infrequently shut down before the end of their usable lifetime for cost or other reasons, and that new reactor projects almost invariably run into extreme delays and cost overruns, often being aborted before completion. Dude, the report actively ignores several nuclear plants currently in construction that have been in construction for the past couple years. It is in no way reasonable to not count them at all, or to assume that magically as soon as they go online exactly as much capacity will go offline at other facilities. It's not a realistic projection. Unless you have some inside information that Southern Company's plants are going to be suddenly halted half built? In which case, let's short the hell out of their stock and get rich, you and me.
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Apr 28, 2015 02:26
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Nintendo Kid posted:Dude, the report actively ignores several nuclear plants currently in construction that have been in construction for the past couple years. It is in no way reasonable to not count them at all, or to assume that magically as soon as they go online exactly as much capacity will go offline at other facilities. It's not a realistic projection. Don't blame Wind Visions for not being opimistic about the future of nuclear, blame the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook, which is where Wind Visions gets their numbers on forecasted nuclear generation. quote:The AEO was the source for fossil and nuclear technology cost and performance projections, as well as the source for fuel prices and electricity load growth projections http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/ Do you have a better source on future nuclear power generation than that? (Especially for the timescale of Wind Visions, 2040)
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Apr 28, 2015 02:50
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Trabisnikof posted:Don't blame Wind Visions for not being opimistic about the future of nuclear, blame the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook, which is where Wind Visions gets their numbers on forecasted nuclear generation. The fact that Southern Company among others are in the process of building new plants right now and there are no on file plans to shut down reactors (something you need to have before you start the long process) that would add up to enough to counteract the new capacity. Also read your own link, it clearly shows that Nuclear capacity is projected to increase every year up to the 2040 horizon, for an average of 0.2% increase yearly! That directly contradicts "wind visions" which shows Nuclear declining a hefty amount by 2040. Are you that bad at reading simple figures? 
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Apr 28, 2015 03:10
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Nintendo Kid posted:The fact that Southern Company among others are in the process of building new plants right now and there are no on file plans to shut down reactors (something you need to have before you start the long process) that would add up to enough to counteract the new capacity. They are 100% in agreement on baseline scenarios. If you'd actually had read Wind Visions you'd see that. Heck, Wind Visions was written before SONGS shut down, so actually it assumes there is slightly more nuclear than there actually is. But why would I have assumed you would have even searched the report? What is spooking you is the graph from the study scenario where, it is modeling what would happen we invest in wind as much as we can. That would be a different world than current reality and thus, yes would have different investments than is predicted by the BAU model. Honestly, DoE reports tend to be overly optimistic about nuclear. What exactly would have to happen to meet that .2% growth rate by 2020? An uprating I guess... Besides, when was the last time a nuclear plant was licensed in the US for a new site? Sure, the under construction plants will eventually be finished, but there are no units are in the licensing pipeline.
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Apr 28, 2015 04:41
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Trabisnikof posted:They are 100% in agreement on baseline scenarios. They do not. The report clearly states an expectation of slow growth in Nuclear to 2040, while the wind visions garbage shows a severe decline. Trabisnikof posted:What exactly would have to happen to meet that .2% growth rate by 2020? Southern Company's two new reactors at the Vogtle site are expected to go online between 2017 and 2020. That's 2.2 gigawatts of net new power generation. Seriously are you loving blind?
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Apr 28, 2015 05:04
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Nintendo Kid posted:Southern Company's two new reactors at the Vogtle site are expected to go online between 2017 and 2020. That's 2.2 gigawatts of net new power generation. Meanwhile SONGS, Crystal River and Vermont Yankee have all been taken out of service in the last couple of years. That's 3.7 GW of net power generation lost. I can't believe someone honestly thinks the nuclear renaissance is actually happening. Haven't you read this thread? Everyone is grumpy because we aren't building new nukes.
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Apr 28, 2015 06:10
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Trabisnikof posted:Meanwhile SONGS, Crystal River and Vermont Yankee have all been taken out of service in the last couple of years. That's 3.7 GW of net power generation lost. And your point is? The data source you claimed supported declining nuclear input to electrical utilities clearly shows increasing production historically since 2012 and expected modest increases all the way to 2040. Plus Crystal River shut down in 2009, and the other plants you mentioned are also already shut down, so what kind of stuff are you smoking to expect them to further decrease nuclear output in the future? You think they're going to input massively negative electricity? We are literally building new nukes right at this very minute. You can go to Georgia and see them. Again: the report you claimed agrees that nuclear power will decline clearly shows a 5.5% total output growth from 2013 to 2040, with none of the intermediate years having an overall decrease. Edit: upon further review the 2014, 2013 and 2012 reports ALSO project increased nuclear usage. Edit 2: 2011 and 2010 reports also project increased nuclear energy usage. So far I can't find any of these reports that actually project less nuclear energy generation in the future. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 06:33
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