|
Zelthar posted:An ever lasting power supply will pay for itself and profit in time. Especially given there is no fuels upkeep. Maybe not fast enough for a quarterly focused corporation, but a government could handle it. Also you said it was a tech issue and now you moved on to cost. Do you have any idea what the costs are or do you just not like geothermal? A new oil well is in the millions range btw, a new power plant, coal or nuclear, is in the billions. Oil being pumped out of the ground contains orders of magnitude of BTU an hour compared to hot water. That is before you get to the transportability of oil versus hot water energy. Also, it is not everlasting, a geothermal will cool down over time and need re-drilling in a new location as the highest quality thermal gets tapped out (even if it does regenerate over time).
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 18:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 03:55 |
|
|
Deeper drilling ought to alleviate that, that's why the millimeter wave drilling tech is interesting, will allow you to drill cheaply to depths of 20km if the claims hold up.Zelthar posted:An ever lasting power supply will pay for itself and profit in time. Especially given there is no fuels upkeep. Maybe not fast enough for a quarterly focused corporation, but a government could handle it. Also you said it was a tech issue and now you moved on to cost. Do you have any idea what the costs are or do you just not like geothermal? A new oil well is in the millions range btw, a new power plant, coal or nuclear, is in the billions. Part of your post was already answered so I won't bother, but the tech issue IS the cost issue, they're the same thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 19:56
|
|
|
Zelthar posted:An ever lasting power supply will pay for itself and profit in time. Especially given there is no fuels upkeep. Maybe not fast enough for a quarterly focused corporation, but a government could handle it. Also you said it was a tech issue and now you moved on to cost. Do you have any idea what the costs are or do you just not like geothermal? A new oil well is in the millions range btw, a new power plant, coal or nuclear, is in the billions. The point of the tech is usually to reduce the cost Are we talking about building a geothermal power plant at an arbitrary location and just digging a deeper hole, or at an existing reservoir of hydrothermal energy? If it's the former, I'd like to read any sources that you happen to have
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 19:59
|
|
|
There should be serious investment into the millimeter wave drilling and other effective tech for get to 20km down. If you get this to work, you can convert existing gas/coal plants to geothermal on site.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 20:18
|
|
|
The main issue now is that most geo projects go for the shallow easy to get to trapped heat or in limited areas with thinner crust(near rift zones). Western US is great for geo since it already has a ton of easy shallow access. ~3km ,or less sometimes, drills. To expand the use to everywhere else is where the need to go deep comes in(5/6km). Like the East coast. The other main issue is they got into fracking as a method to move water from pipe to pipe vs horizontal drilling. That's not great and has diminishing effects on the well. Energy.gov says min heat needed to run geothermal power is 100c. I can toss up 5km heat maps and the such if needed. The basic plant is just a typical heat exchange and turbine. All the cost is in the drilling.Electric Wrigglies posted:Oil being pumped out of the ground contains orders of magnitude of BTU an hour compared to hot water. That is before you get to the transportability of oil versus hot water energy. Also, it is not everlasting, a geothermal will cool down over time and need re-drilling in a new location as the highest quality thermal gets tapped out (even if it does regenerate over time). That's more of an issue with capped heat plum in shallow wells as well as the use of fracking creating vacuum insulation zones limiting heat replenishment. Zelthar fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jun 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 20:35
|
|
|
Zelthar posted:The main issue now is that most geo projects go for the shallow easy to get to trapped heat or in limited areas with thinner crust(near rift zones). Western US is great for geo since it already has a ton of easy shallow access. ~3km ,or less sometimes, drills. To expand the use to everywhere else is where the need to go deep comes in(5/6km). Like the East coast. The other main issue is they got into fracking as a method to move water from pipe to pipe vs horizontal drilling. That's not great and has diminishing effects on the well. Energy.gov says min heat needed to run geothermal power is 100c. I can toss up 5km heat maps and the such if needed. The basic plant is just a typical heat exchange and turbine. All the cost is in the drilling. That's probably just the popsci "100 C is the temperature at which water boils" right, not really the reservoir temperature that you can use to transport heat to the surface from which to extract energy with a functional turbine? Could you provide a link?
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 21:02
|
|
|
Don't you want it to boil so you get water vapor coming up for free due to pressure/buoyancy?
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 21:23
|
|
|
Practically speaking, it needs to be quite a bit more than 100C. The higher pressure boiling temps deep down help with that though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 23:25
|
|
|
https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/geothermal-faqs (Question 11 for temp range) Water isn't the only thing we can boil as turbine generators are just pressure differential. Obviously the hotter the better and we shouldn't be shooting for mins. Ideally we are looking for 150c+. https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/Departments/Earth-Sciences/Research/GeothermalLab/DataMaps/TemperatureMaps (list of temps at depths) As expected the deeper the hotter and generally around 5km is when you start to see ideal temps for the east coast.
|
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 23:42
|
|
|
Innocent_Bystander posted:Don't you want it to boil so you get water vapor coming up for free due to pressure/buoyancy? Good thought, but no. Boiling introduces voids and vortices, dramatically reduces mass flow. More, the collapse of any steam bubbles under pressure is liable to result in cavitation erosion of the bore. These need to be pumped, pressurized systems that do not boil, such that as much mass flow and thus heat can be squeezed through the kabillion-dollar bore as possible. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 18, 2023 23:52
|
|
|
Zelthar posted:The main issue now is that most geo projects go for the shallow easy to get to trapped heat or in limited areas with thinner crust(near rift zones). Western US is great for geo since it already has a ton of easy shallow access. ~3km ,or less sometimes, drills. To expand the use to everywhere else is where the need to go deep comes in(5/6km). Like the East coast. The other main issue is they got into fracking as a method to move water from pipe to pipe vs horizontal drilling. That's not great and has diminishing effects on the well. Energy.gov says min heat needed to run geothermal power is 100c. I can toss up 5km heat maps and the such if needed. The basic plant is just a typical heat exchange and turbine. All the cost is in the drilling. You want more than 100c. More like > 374 °C to create very high pressure steam (supercritical). Hence 20km.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2023 06:31
|
|
|
His Divine Shadow posted:OK still doesn't change the point I was making about the importance of reliable baseload. 1000 reliable megawatts of production are worth more than 10,000 intermittent megawatts of production (this number was made up). For renewables to work, we absolutely need to expand nuclear as fast as possible as well. Just expanding renewables just means there's gonna be a lot of excess production that can't get to where it's needed and that there will be times when despite massive incredible surpluses, the opposite will happen. Particularly since research posted in this thread shows all of europe can often be windless. Reliable baseload is often misunderstood in that it's not a stable level of output that needs to be produced at any moment, but a minimum load that needs to be available for the grid to work. It's usually at night since that is traditionally when the least amount of energy is needed. You don't need base load power plants, if this base load can be provided otherwise. The scenario of over- and underproduction you mentioned is usually concidered in any serious renewable grid scenario, the missing capacity is supposed to be provided by peaker plants such as hydro, bio and regular gas, or niche methods such as hydrogen or methane/methanol. Those are the reliable base load. This means it's not entirely renewable, though the emissions from fossils would be quite low overall since the windless and sunless times where they'd be needed are statistically much lower than you'd assume. I'd also like to point out that nuclear and renewables are a horrible fit, they don't work well together. Nuclear does need to run at capacity for it to be profitable, which leads to it cannibalizing renewables which need to be shut off when those could run at full capacity. This also increases costs for renewables, grid management, and so on. It's been discussed itt that french nukes do load following and that plants are capable to some extent, but what I've found in the meantime points to this being limited and not very desireable since it reduces profitability. It appears like you can either go mostly nuclear, or mostly renewable. Concidering a nuke plant needs around 10 to 15 years lead-time plus another 10 years+ to recoup its front loaded emissions, as well as being vastly more expensive, it seems like transforming fossil grids to renewables is the sensible approach.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:27
|
|
|
Nuclear does not need to run at full capacity to be profitable. Private nuclear wants to run at full capacity to be maximally profitable. The plants themselves can run load following without issue.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:35
|
|
|
Besides E-Fuels what are some things you can blow a massive overproduction of electricity on? We could set up massive electrical corona discharges to create a crapton of ozone.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:47
|
|
|
Okay, then imagine I said economically preferable, which considering a production cost of upwards of 10c/kWh for nukes still means full-load as often as possible.breadshaped posted:Besides E-Fuels what are some things you can blow a massive overproduction of electricity on? Heat. No joke, people are increasingly trying to use overproduction for residential heat, and heat storage is also possible. Electricity to heat is one of the easiest and most efficient transformations, and since you can predict available overproductions for a few days ahead it's not as difficult to implement in load planning as some other conversions. Though you'd either need spot market coupled electricity tarifs or heat pumps for personal use or a heat grid that's designed for district heating. Not as crazy or complicated as it sounds tho. I can see this becoming more popular. Son of Rodney fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jun 20, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:51
|
|
|
breadshaped posted:Besides E-Fuels what are some things you can blow a massive overproduction of electricity on? Desalination and Aluminum Refining are two big ones. Son of Rodney posted:Okay, then imagine I said economically preferable, which considering a production cost of upwards of 10c/kWh for nukes still means full-load as often as possible. If you build out Gen IV plants in quantity that cost will come down.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:51
|
|
|
M_Gargantua posted:Desalination and Aluminum Refining are two big ones. “The first commercial Gen IV plants are not expected before 2040–2050” Fission has finally caught up to fusion’s “20 years away” capability.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 14:57
|
|
|
I don't think also that cost really should matter, the government should be subsidizing the decarbonization of our economy in a way that doesn't impact growth and the only way to do that is with nuclear.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 16:28
|
|
|
Son of Rodney posted:Reliable baseload is often misunderstood in that it's not a stable level of output that needs to be produced at any moment, but a minimum load that needs to be available for the grid to work. It's usually at night since that is traditionally when the least amount of energy is needed. You don't need base load power plants, if this base load can be provided otherwise. The scenario of over- and underproduction you mentioned is usually concidered in any serious renewable grid scenario, the missing capacity is supposed to be provided by peaker plants such as hydro, bio and regular gas, or niche methods such as hydrogen or methane/methanol. Those are the reliable base load. This means it's not entirely renewable, though the emissions from fossils would be quite low overall since the windless and sunless times where they'd be needed are statistically much lower than you'd assume. In reality we need such a huge amount of baseload, and so much of it is still supplied by fossil fuel plants running at full capacity, that it doesn't make any sense to pit nuclear against renewables like you're doing here
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 17:36
|
|
|
Son of Rodney posted:I'd also like to point out that nuclear and renewables are a horrible fit, they don't work well together. Nuclear does need to run at capacity for it to be profitable, which leads to it cannibalizing renewables which need to be shut off when those could run at full capacity. This also increases costs for renewables, grid management, and so on. It's been discussed itt that french nukes do load following and that plants are capable to some extent, but what I've found in the meantime points to this being limited and not very desireable since it reduces profitability. It appears like you can either go mostly nuclear, or mostly renewable. Concidering a nuke plant needs around 10 to 15 years lead-time plus another 10 years+ to recoup its front loaded emissions, as well as being vastly more expensive, it seems like transforming fossil grids to renewables is the sensible approach. The same want to fully utilise production (ie not be curtailed) exists for every generation method (well except overbuilt hydro I guess). Renewables hasn't really come up against it as due to instantaneous cost and sometimes law, renewables are operated in preference to other sources. Once you overbuild wind by three to four times and don't have other sources to cut back, it stands to reason that your windfarm will have a capacity factor of say 60% and a utilisation of 25% meaning the capex costs are diluted over far less production (which is the issue you say is for nuclear). Nuclear works very well with solar in a lot of the world (especially warmer parts) as demand increases with the sun and solar neatly provides for that most of the time so the nuclear can be sized for the overnight requirement instead of the top of the duck curve. Wind doesn't work with anything great except bulk surplus hydro (which ideally should go the way of the dodo unless it is reusing previously disturbed ground such as old minesites as discussed previously) and peaker plants (which if they are using hydrocarbon, is not very good). Nuclear also supplements hydro very well, allowing it to be used hydro to be used as a peaking plant rather than base load supply. The other method people want to use with renewables is dumping otherwise curtailed energy into demand on demand (RO plants, rainy day thermal heating of the ground for future area heating, alumina plants the more fanciful suggestion) but this is an area again that nuclear performs ok because the production is so predictable. Power hungry tasks often don't take kindly to being utilised in an up and down or unpredictable manner and generally want to be utilised as much as possible (I work with multiple facilities and our least utilised facility is at maximum draw over 94% of the time). Using wind is both somewhat unpredictable but definitely variable consumption for the rest of the grid plus the much more unpredictable and variable wind generation complicating sizing and operation of the plant you wish to consume excess power with.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 18:15
|
|
|
If nuclear and renewables are such a horrible fit. I would choose to focus efforts on nuclear then, the time scale of nuclear isn't that big a deal since renewable expansion would require such a massive expansion of the grid that it might well take longer than nuclear build out, and there are pathways for reducing nuclear build times. Of course they incompatible aren't for reasons given. The idea that renewables with storage could work as a reliable baseload is tenuous at best. Best to rely on nuclear for baseload and renewables to supplement while also giving renewables more time to develop & scale more reliable storage solutions.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 18:17
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:In reality we need such a huge amount of baseload, and so much of it is still supplied by fossil fuel plants running at full capacity, that it doesn't make any sense to pit nuclear against renewables like you're doing here This argument has always bothered me, we should be doing as much as possible to avoid burning stuff for power. Do both, not the current solution of peaker gas turbines to run all night. Also there is a difference between efficient, profitable, and very profitable.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 18:32
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:In reality we need such a huge amount of baseload, and so much of it is still supplied by fossil fuel plants running at full capacity, that it doesn't make any sense to pit nuclear against renewables like you're doing here Only one of these options can quickly and cheaply fill that gap tho. Electric Wrigglies posted:The same want to fully utilise production (ie not be curtailed) exists for every generation method (well except overbuilt hydro I guess). Renewables hasn't really come up against it as due to instantaneous cost and sometimes law, renewables are operated in preference to other sources. Once you overbuild wind by three to four times and don't have other sources to cut back, it stands to reason that your windfarm will have a capacity factor of say 60% and a utilisation of 25% meaning the capex costs are diluted over far less production (which is the issue you say is for nuclear). Renewables are definitly already facing it, though not yet at a prohibitive rate (around 3% per year so far in germany). The idea regarding overbuilt capacity is to use it for flexible load requirements, which are set to grow regardless of underlying power production. EV, heat pumps, hydrogen and other conversion storage or batteries can be utilized very flexibly, which would increase overall utilisation. Seeing as renewables are about 1/3 the cost of nuclear you could overbuild them regardless and end up with the same overall cost. There's also quite a bit of play for making a sensible mix, solar is way more productive in the summer while wind is in winter, I'd estimate a more or less even split would be viable. Electric Wrigglies posted:Nuclear works very well with solar in a lot of the world (especially warmer parts) as demand increases with the sun and solar neatly provides for that most of the time so the nuclear can be sized for the overnight requirement instead of the top of the duck curve. Wind doesn't work with anything great except bulk surplus hydro (which ideally should go the way of the dodo unless it is reusing previously disturbed ground such as old minesites as discussed previously) and peaker plants (which if they are using hydrocarbon, is not very good). Nuclear also supplements hydro very well, allowing it to be used hydro to be used as a peaking plant rather than base load supply. The point with solar is a good one but if you only focus on solar for a majority of the peak load demand you have issues during darker days, and would need to compensate with hydrocarbons yourself, or have other renewables available which again leads to grid crowding. In specific countries with near constant and reliable solar emissions that's a good solution though, I have to admit. Kinda wondering which countries you mean specifically since the ones I'm thinking of that have very constant solar also don't have abundant fresh water for nuclear cooling, and I'm assuming the need for that would be pretty big in a hypothetical nuclear + solar combination grid. And there's not a lot of ways around using limited peaker plants anyway, even france is producting 9% of it's electricity production with gas, a mostly renewable grid would not need more, possibly less. Electric Wrigglies posted:The other method people want to use with renewables is dumping otherwise curtailed energy into demand on demand (RO plants, rainy day thermal heating of the ground for future area heating, alumina plants the more fanciful suggestion) but this is an area again that nuclear performs ok because the production is so predictable. Power hungry tasks often don't take kindly to being utilised in an up and down or unpredictable manner and generally want to be utilised as much as possible (I work with multiple facilities and our least utilised facility is at maximum draw over 94% of the time). Using wind is both somewhat unpredictable but definitely variable consumption for the rest of the grid plus the much more unpredictable and variable wind generation complicating sizing and operation of the plant you wish to consume excess power with. Yeah this is a fair point, but these kind of sites wouldn't really be included in flexible load management in the first place would they? They'd fall under base load. What kind of fascilities do you work with? Sounds interesting. SpeedFreek posted:This argument has always bothered me, we should be doing as much as possible to avoid burning stuff for power. Do both, not the current solution of peaker gas turbines to run all night. Building nuclear now leads to baseload and peaker gas turbines running anyway until the plant is done in 15-20 years. As long as its not on the grid you need to provide that energy anway. Doing as much as possible would mean doing it as fast as possible, which nuclear is not able to or not ready to in the case of these hypothetical gen IV plants.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 21:17
|
|
|
England and a lot of Europe is terrible for solar because of how consistently and widespread the cloud is - completely predictable that no solar for days anyway is going to happen. But Africa, the Americas, large tracts of Asia from Armenia to China, Philippines and Indonesia has access to sufficient water and lots of sun, especially on a dispersed grid in the same way that wind benefits from being geographically spread out. RO plants and displaced heating I can definitely see being ramped up and down as a dispatchable demand - there is a limit though. Alumina refineries however not because if they get turned off suddenly, it is not a good result. I work in mineral processing across West Africa, often where there is no local grid - means I am also involved with multiple power stations (HFO/LFO for now but with two solar grids motivated and keen that the local grids where we use them get less carbon intensive). Ghana for instance could do with a bucketload of solar to pair up with its overstreatched hydro resources (end of dry season means rationed power across a lot of West Africa). Another point I would like to make is that wind definitely has pace of rollout on its side as it is less along the "rollout slowed through local resistance and mature legislation" than nuclear is but that is changing, Taking best part of half a decade to break ground on wind projects where they would be started the same year previously. That will continue to extend if nothing changes to be 10 year permitting timelines to start. That will ramp up the costs and in the case of RCR Tomilson in Australia, it bankrupted an otherwise successful diversified company when two renewable projects weren't permitted to connect to the grid until well after the cost of capital sank 'em. Growth in compliance costs is a thing (just ask AI projects in Europe now haha).
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 21:45
|
|
|
It doesn’t matter how much solar capacity is installed in the Sahara or Andalusia to supply Europe. Base load or enormous storage capacity is still required, because the Sun goes down at about the same time in the Sahara as it does in Europe. Trans-oceanic power lines might have some legs though. I doubt it would be cheap, but none of this is and it’s worth looking at. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jun 20, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 22:05
|
|
|
oh I agree Europe has it harder than other places, but Europe is only a small and declining fraction of the world's population and manufacturing. Renewable energy for all of Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria, India and China would dwarf Europe's efforts (Brazil is already strong in renewables for grid power already, just need to take on way more of the worlds manufacturing work to leverage it). Incidentally, there was fairly serious look at reticulating solar power from Africa to Europe but sovereign risk is just too big a hurdle to get over. Also, you could probably plonk down enough solar in Spain to get a long way there with a lot of nuclear in the center and hydro/offshore wind in the north. There is a project looking at sending solar power from Northern Australia to Singapore (who are unlikely to ever have nuclear on their own land while local solar, hydro, wind are all non-starters). Seems a bit fanciful but a billionaire has made it his pet project and HVDC is getting better.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 22:24
|
|
|
I would just use the excess nuclear power to spin the wind turbines in the opposite direction. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 22:38
|
|
|
You build nuclear plants and other renewable now. Whilst also removing any and all subsidies that exist for oil/natural gas/"clean coal"/coal etc to get these industries and utilities to reinvest in greener energy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 23:32
|
|
|
breadshaped posted:Besides E-Fuels what are some things you can blow a massive overproduction of electricity on? Elastic compute? Pass the pricing all the way through to the end customer so it makes sense to spin up extra processing nodes when electricity is abundant, and wind back when it's expensive. I assume though that data centre operators lock in fixed contracts years in advance and don't offer any TOU pricing to their customers, but it seems that hyperscale computing is the big electricity consuming industry in many places and the tech part is trivial as cloud computing done well (yeah I know it's rare) is already designed to scale in response to external signals.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 23:58
|
|
|
Capt.Whorebags posted:Elastic compute? Pass the pricing all the way through to the end customer so it makes sense to spin up extra processing nodes when electricity is abundant, and wind back when it's expensive. That's a really good idea. Although I think data centers are already placed where there is cheap electricity now (generally meaning lots of hydro) like aluminum smelters. As it is in the cloud, it probably means the computing is not throttled overall but directed to the part of the world with the currently cheapest power. Would not surprise me if it is already in place as long term contracts often have an on peak and off peak time (and can get a cheaper rate if you opt to be shed on demand which in the case of cloud computing means another server elsewhere in the world would pick up the slack).
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 07:57
|
|
|
Son of Rodney posted:Only one of these options can quickly and cheaply fill that gap tho. Neither option can meet the baseload power demands of the US cheaply
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 08:31
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:oh I agree Europe has it harder than other places, but Europe is only a small and declining fraction of the world's population and manufacturing. Renewable energy for all of Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria, India and China would dwarf Europe's efforts (Brazil is already strong in renewables for grid power already, just need to take on way more of the worlds manufacturing work to leverage it). Incidentally, there was fairly serious look at reticulating solar power from Africa to Europe but sovereign risk is just too big a hurdle to get over. Also, you could probably plonk down enough solar in Spain to get a long way there with a lot of nuclear in the center and hydro/offshore wind in the north.   A lot of developing countries just burn whatever they can get their hand on at the lowest price. In The Gambia I saw this powership just parked right outside the capital  " The 36 MW Karadeniz Powership Koray Bey will supply uninterrupted and reliable electricity at one of the lowest prices for thermal power generation. The Powership will use low Sulphur Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) to generate electricity but thanks to its hybrid operational ability, it can convert to natural gas when available, ensuring cost savings for The Gambia." https://standard.gm/turkish-power-ship-begins-operations-in-gambia/ Of course 36MW is nothing and overall their carbon footprint is negligible but I do think we could help invest in power and transportation infrastructure in developing countries to help minimize climate change and other health impacts. Also in other news, lol Texas: quote:ERCOT operates the grid for more than 26 million customers representing about 90% of the state's power load. The grid operator issued a "Watch" for what it called a "projected reserve capacity shortage with no market solution available for Tuesday" from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time, which could push ERCOT to take more actions to maintain reliability. Although controlled outages are one of the most extreme actions a grid operator could take to maintain reliability, ERCOT said "controlled outages are not needed at this time."
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 10:01
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:Neither option can meet the baseload power demands of the US cheaply So why not use the one that's faster to rollout
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 10:39
|
|
|
Son of Rodney posted:So why not use the one that's faster to rollout we are both agreed that nuclear is the obvious choice then. Because storage for solar/wind hasn't been invented yet so it goes from "just do it" if you assume storage will be solved tomorrow to "never" if it is unsolvable. In reality, solar/wind in the short term with gas peaker plants that will be used indefinitely until when and if storage is solved is the path chosen by the likes of Germany and Australia. mobby_6kl posted:Europe and power ships Yeah, I really meant further European efforts, as you say, between French nuclear, Spainish ideal renewable location, north sea wind and bucketloads of hydro in the north, Europe has done a lot. The power ship I assume is probably producing power for 10 to 15 c/kwhr. We have to truck HFO 1,000 inland from a port and achieve 16-20c in similar sized power plants (running marine engines basically. MAK, Wartsila, Catapiller, etc).
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 11:06
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:we are both agreed that nuclear is the obvious choice then. Nuclear is neither fast nor is building the necessary capacity in any way realistic, and also depends on peaker plants and storage, why do people keep pretending it doesn't 
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 14:28
|
|
|
Son of Rodney posted:Nuclear is neither fast nor is building the necessary capacity in any way realistic, and also depends on peaker plants and storage, why do people keep pretending it doesn't It is faster than something that has not been invented yet (multi day storage that is not hydro). Nuclear has no need for storage or peaker plants. You just build so that you expect 70% utilisation or something to account for maintenance cycles and a bit of redundancy. E) just to be clear, it is much better to have a mix, before you take my post as an argument for 100% nuclear is the only way strawman. Electric Wrigglies fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Jun 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 14:33
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:It is faster than something that has not been invented yet (multi day storage that is not hydro). Building more renewables will lower carbon impact most quickly in most places of the world. There are a few exception who already have enough renewable generation that we would be better of investing in transmission, load shaping, storage, and nuclear power. But, while I live in one and you imply you live in one, we are not representative of most of the world. I personally think we should invest enough money in combating climate change such that all those options can be done at the same time.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 15:07
|
|
|
Yeah, this should not be about "cheap." Nuclear plants can be built fast. We've built them fast in the past, and China is building them fast now. We know it's possible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 15:14
|
|
|
Electric Wrigglies posted:It is faster than something that has not been invented yet (multi day storage that is not hydro). You do not need multiple day storage until the very end tail of a mostly renewable grid transformation, until then gas peaker plants, hydro or exisiting storage capacities can take care of that. You don't actually need that many peakers as one would think for dark and windless days anyway, depending on location. And of course a nuclear grid needs peakers unless you overbuild to a degree that makes them even less economically viable. France utilizes around 9% gas plants and another 9% hydro on average, and I doubt that'll change much. And unforeseen maintenance issues also need to be able to be compensated. cat botherer posted:Yeah, this should not be about "cheap." Nuclear plants can be built fast. We've built them fast in the past, and China is building them fast now. We know it's possible. Of course it should be about "cheap", it's one of the major factors in energy financing. What else would you base those decisions on? Ideology? Fliiping a coin? Potential for painting racing strips on the cooling tower to make it run faster? Even china is building vastly more renewables in any case. Nuclear is not a bad option, all things concidered, it's just not a good option right now for the issues we are facing *right now*. You can theorize about building nuclear plants fully "unleashed" in as little as 5 to 10 years, but under those conditions you could build wind or solar plants in under a year.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 17:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 03:55 |
|
|
I thought our concern was what decarbonizes without forcing any deindustrialization or stopping the development of the global south so we can stop climate change and still have a modern technological civilization?
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2023 18:08
|
|