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Dameius posted:If we're talking about a decarbonized grid in the scope of climate change we need to not forget that the grid will also need to provide a 1:1 replacement including future growth of every joule of energy oil is providing for the transportation industry which is going to be significant for whatever grid mix you're proposing. Not really. Charging batteries is an extremely dispatch able demand. And so is charging a thermal battery using a heat pump. Pretty much there opposite of baseload.
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Dec 26, 2023 17:57
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), demand.
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Saukkis posted:We need two simple rules. Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system. So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same? Seems like a lot of talk but either nothing is being done or actually going backwards in the case of the Germans.
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Dec 26, 2023 18:35
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GlassEye-Boy posted:So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same? Seems like a lot of talk but either nothing is being done or actually going backwards in the case of the Germans. China is making massive state investment into all flavor of power infrastructure. Renewable, fossil, nuclear, hydro, storage, transmission. If you believe that investing into renewables are intrinsically anti-nuclear, they are anti nuclear. If believe that investing into power infrastructure is intrinsically anti-nuclear, they are anti-nuclear.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:38
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GlassEye-Boy posted:So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same? That's a great question. No, really, that's a great question.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:48
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Dameius posted:If we're talking about a decarbonized grid in the scope of climate change we need to not forget that the grid will also need to provide a 1:1 replacement including future growth of every joule of energy oil is providing for the transportation industry which is going to be significant for whatever grid mix you're proposing. So I dunno, I feel like that we can still get the global average temp going back down even if we're still burning oil for industrial processes like making plastics and lubricants as long as basically what industries we CAN switch to clean energy and like 95% of consumer and consumer civilian transportation switches over. I don't think we need to literally find every single grimy thing and greenify it, just the things that mostly form the cornerstone of a first world standard of living and as much as that supply/industrial chain as is reasonable. Son of Rodney posted:This thread also thinks nuclear is somehow, magically, against all reality a solution to climate change, so I'm a bit wary about those bring ups. Also I've mentioned it before: base load generation does not equal fossil or nuclear generators, it only means theres a necessary minimum power requirement that needs to be fulfilled. Wind can be baseload, solar can be baseload, the issue is not falling under a minimum threshold. What realities of nuclear are we talking about here and solving climate change, assuming that article is correct at face value, is beyond just australia you're aware of that right? Even if Australia can switch to 90% renewables, which would be tremendous, the rest of the world cannot. In general it'll be interesting to see if pumped hydro works out and lets Tasmania completely be free of the national grid/fossil fuel baseload power generation then that will indeed be promising but it seems like we don't have a lot of data yet to see how much this actually works to allow for near 100% renewables in practice and how it can work for the rest of Australia. Doing some googling there's some contradictory claims, the paper linked suggests the sites don't take a lot of space and there's many such spaces available across australia, but another paper claims it has many of the same problems of nuclear; high lead times and cost; and that also the actual practical sites for pumped hydro are actually scarce? Additionally it seems like the paper handwaved or minimized environmental costs on local wildlife, another paper presses the concern much more, but Idk, I kinda feel like if we want things like high speed rail and a decarbonized economy we might need to handwave some of those concerns for the good of the many outweighing the needs of the few. Idk, but it seems like there's other papers that suggest that pumped hydro isn't a miracle silver bullet. It also seems like pumped hydro is not free of controversy, such as because of the above mentioned environmental issues (which again, idk), maybe environmental groups are being astroturfed by the fossil fuel lobby? Also just like nuclear, apparently the Snowy 2.0 project has faced, you guessed it, runaway cost inflation. From 2 billion$ to 5.1bn$? And delays and so on. Tumut 3 one article I found claimed is being plagued with technical issues, and not been at full capacity for years, and so on. Maybe that article is biased; but if we're going to say "nuclear has issues and we shouldn't do it, because this other WIP unproven system is much better" we gotta consider and factor in that at least on a surface level are also plagued by many of the same issues and relying on it for ~90+% renewables in Ozland might not happen in practice, while nuclear reactors do exist and work well? Articles, I cannot ascertain their credibility, but lets consider that there is at least allegedly a controversy here: https://www.saveeungella.com.au/pos...and%20wildlife. https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/pumped-hydro-takes-time-and-stamina-which-australia-may-not-have-20230406-p5cykp https://www.sciencedirect.com/topic...r%20two%20dams. So maybe I wouldn't be so sure.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:49
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GlassEye-Boy posted:So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same? Seems like a lot of talk but either nothing is being done or actually going backwards in the case of the Germans. China is doing a very significant buildout of coal. https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-power-spree-continues-as-more-provinces-jump-on-the-bandwagon/
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Dec 26, 2023 20:02
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Phanatic posted:China is doing a very significant buildout of coal. We've covered this before, but this is a bit misleading; they're expanding coal because they literally cannot expand any other energy infrastructure fast enough to meet their needs; they're capped out on what they can support for nuclear and renewables. Whenever the share of coal vs everything graphs come up it always looks like the overall share of coal is nonetheless decreasing relative to the growth of all over greener sources which is what we care about. That the amount of coal power generation increasing in absolute terms is just a fact without a practical alternative solution for their needs but once that is likely to keep on in a positive trend overall. I think as more of their existing nuclear comes online and new modular nuclear technologies and better renewable tech comes online the absolute numbers will reach an inflection point. Also iirc a lot of that coal expansion is replacing older dirtier plants with better more modern ones that can have their coal burners swapped with greener energy production.
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Dec 26, 2023 20:13
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Raenir Salazar posted:We've covered this before, but this is a bit misleading; No, the claim that China has said "Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system" is inaccurate. China is still building a lot of coal and increasing CO2.
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Dec 26, 2023 20:17
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Phanatic posted:No, the claim that China has said "Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system" is inaccurate. China is still building a lot of coal and increasing CO2. What. No one claimed this? You've misread the conversation I feel. I think you've misunderstood that this post was aspirational in general: Saukkis posted:We need two simple rules. Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system. And like mistook it to mean it was referring to China? Edit, actually I did misread and didn't realize you were responding to GlassEyeBoy, my apologies but: GlassEye-Boy posted:So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same? Seems like a lot of talk but either nothing is being done or actually going backwards in the case of the Germans. But I still think you're reading the "pretty much" a little literally. I suspect they know from previous conversations in the thread that China has been expanding coal, but I can't speak for them so maybe they didn't; I do think that the substance of the post is that the China model is presumably still despite the coal an improvement over many other nations because they're still rolling out nuclear plants in addition to renewables. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Dec 26, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 20:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:So I dunno, I feel like that we can still get the global average temp going back down even if we're still burning oil for industrial processes like making plastics and lubricants as long as basically what industries we CAN switch to clean energy and like 95% of consumer and consumer civilian transportation switches over. Just as an aside, temperatures are going to be high for awhile. The ocean acts as a giant thermal battery for the atmosphere, with an estimated 91% of excess heat from greenhouse gases being stored in it. That's a lot of heat that needs to get exchanged.
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Dec 26, 2023 22:59
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Phanatic posted:Beep boop. Most people did take the vaccine, and you don't need unanimous consensus to build nuclear power
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Dec 27, 2023 01:59
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Phanatic posted:No, the claim that China has said "Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system" is inaccurate. Raenir Salazar posted:What. No one claimed this? Saukkis posted:We need two simple rules. Increasing CO2 is forbidden and your power plant needs to provide stable power at all times. The industry can then decide if they want to build renewables with large scale storage, nuclear, or coal plant with proven sequestration system. GlassEye-Boy posted:So pretty much what China has been doing, why aren't other nations doing the same?
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Dec 27, 2023 03:19
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You should read the rest of that post.
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Dec 27, 2023 03:21
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Raenir Salazar posted:So I dunno, I feel like that we can still get the global average temp going back down That ship sailed a long time ago, even if we brought our net carbon to zero we would still be experiencing increasing global temperature for a generation or more due to positive feedback effects. Our goal is now less of an increase
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Dec 27, 2023 03:52
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Raenir Salazar posted:You should read the rest of that post. You should read the part where it claimed something that wasn't true.
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Dec 27, 2023 04:01
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Phanatic posted:You should read the part where it claimed something that wasn't true. And I content I don't think it made the claim you think it did, and in any case it isn't very productive or helpful to focus on one minor aspect of the post and not the actual substance of it.
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Dec 27, 2023 04:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:And I content I don't think it made the claim you think it did, and in any case it isn't very productive or helpful to focus on one minor aspect of the post and not the actual substance of it. I think the claim that China has told electricity generators they're not allowed to produce more CO2 is a pretty significant claim and one worth pointing out the inaccuracy of.
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Dec 27, 2023 05:45
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Phanatic posted:I think the claim that China has told electricity generators they're not allowed to produce more CO2 is a pretty significant claim and one worth pointing out the inaccuracy of. GlassEye-Boy can clarify their position but I think the idea that they were making a "pretty significant claim" is a bit at odds with their actual word choice of "pretty much" which sounds more like a figurative turn of phrase.
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Dec 27, 2023 06:14
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Raenir Salazar posted:GlassEye-Boy can clarify their position but I think the idea that they were making a "pretty significant claim" is a bit at odds with their actual word choice of "pretty much" which sounds more like a figurative turn of phrase. Where do you think "pretty much" falls on the scale? 
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Dec 27, 2023 07:11
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I like the person who clearly answered wrong deliberately but wasn't removed from the dataset outliers.
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Dec 27, 2023 16:10
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Flappy Bert posted:Where do you think "pretty much" falls on the scale? Hahaha I love this chart. My assumption is what they "meant" is like, "China is doing something along these lines, to an extent that significantly speaking they are doing it more/better than most other countries" because of the rest of the post in question: quote:why aren't other nations doing the same? Seems like a lot of talk but either nothing is being done or actually going backwards in the case of the Germans. I read it as GEB mainly talking in terms to what they perceive, the constructive response instead of nitpicking the fact about China's increase of coal energy generation, is to dig deeper into what "other countries are doing" or not doing. I have a vague sense that under Biden the US has actually been doing quite a lot, and despite the Trump years some states like California, went ahead and did things with effects on the rest of the country; Canada I get the sense that switching to greener energy and production methods seem like a thing that's being promoted but I'm not otherwise familiar with what they're doing past that. France has a lot of nuclear power but also had problems where they had to take some of it offline, I don't know if they're working on capitalizing on it further; Finland brought a new nuclear plant online with district heating I think? I'm unclear on what Japan is doing or any other country, and I think this is what we should be focusing on because its very interesting and I'd like to know more.
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Dec 27, 2023 16:54
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M_Gargantua posted:I like the person who clearly answered wrong deliberately but wasn't removed from the dataset outliers. Behold the power of the box and whisker plot
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Dec 27, 2023 18:56
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Wibla posted:Traditional baseload generation is inherently very "stiff" because it's based on coal / nuclear / hydro generation that use huge synchronous generators that have a ton of rotational inertia*. This means they will absorb load fluctuation quite well without affecting the system frequency much (if at all). The graph in that first article is very misleading as it is not of a large solar power plant. 8MW is not much larger than a couple community solar gardens here in the US and doesn’t represent what a 600MW plants output will look like. That example plant also seems to have little dc or ac overbuild. The impact of clouds is highly dependent on the overbuild and control scheme set points of the plant - that example could be fixed easily by adjusting the ramp rate of the inverters to something sane. Utility scale plants usually have around 1.3-1.5x dc power to ac interconnection limits will see much less variability except under extreme cases. Irradiance tends to change much slower when averaged out over a few square miles. I also wouldn’t call synchronous sources stiff as (depending on the topology of the power system) they can require control systems that operate in fractions of a second for fault conditions external to the generator. They also are much slower to respond to step changes in load conditions. Synchronous generation sources can take minutes if not hours to go from 0-100% while an inverter based resource which change from 0-100% in a few seconds. IBRs can also ride though a fault condition practically indefinitely. Calling certain synchronous machines stiff really only makes sense in the context of comparing different types of synchronous machines (hydro vs steam vs combustion turbine or reciprocating engine). As for inverters that can help stabilize the grid the work has already been completed on grid forming inverters, they have been around and deployed in smaller installations (typically micro grid apps) for a few years now. Larger scale deployment isn’t done mostly due to regulations not requiring that type of control method or outright banning it and institutional inertia dragging their feet on updating requirements until it actually becomes a problem. The only issue (and it is a big one) that deploying wind and solar have today is the requirement that electricity shall always be available which is something wind and solar cannot do without a lot of overbuild, storage, and new transmission line infrastructure. Grid stability is more or less a solved problem with IBRs as long as you make the assumption that there is enough power available.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:46
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freezepops posted:The impact of clouds is highly dependent on the overbuild and control scheme set points of the plant - that example could be fixed easily by adjusting the ramp rate of the inverters to something sane. Utility scale plants usually have around 1.3-1.5x dc power to ac interconnection limits will see much less variability except under extreme cases. I deal with the smaller side of plants, usually around 5MW, and DC overbuild being for continuity of power vice inverter losses was something I had not known about before entering the field. Inverters are crazy efficient nowadays, a fun fact I got to drop on my older engineering relatives. Also, DC overbuild is something smaller sites sometimes miss during design. I ran into one that had only a 1.05x overbuild and I live in the not so sunny north. That place is never, ever going to hit nameplate. Maybe during the summer solstice.
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Dec 28, 2023 00:51
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In other news (good for a change), SunZia is moving forward...which is pretty atypical for such a big new transmission project in the US. quote:$11 billion SunZia clean energy project — biggest in history — starts construction
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Dec 28, 2023 06:18
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Have we done any HVDC transmission in the US before? I remember hearing about it before for the EU but was not aware of us rolling it out in the U.S. Glad to see they were able to get the ball rolling on this though.
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Dec 28, 2023 06:39
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Senor P. posted:Have we done any HVDC transmission in the US before? Yes, lots. The Pacific DC intertie is 1300 kilometers of HVDC.
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Dec 28, 2023 06:43
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Speaking of HDVC, Viking Link Just came online! quote:The world’s longest land and subsea interconnector just came online
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Dec 30, 2023 10:44
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40% of US electricity is now emissions-free Good news as natural gas, coal, and solar see the biggest changes. Just before the holiday break, the US Energy Information Agency released data on the country's electrical generation. Because of delays in reporting, the monthly data runs through October, so it doesn't provide a complete picture of the changes we've seen in 2023. But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production. (...) quote:Hydroelectric production has dropped by about six percent since last year, causing it to slip from 6.1 percent to 5.8 percent of the total production. Depending on the next couple of months, that may allow solar to pass hydro on the list of renewables. I don't get how natural gas is such a good thing..they are not going to destroy all those power stations and lines in a decade, they are building to last.
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Dec 30, 2023 14:40
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Dante80 posted:40% of US electricity is now emissions-free Natural gas fills some gaps that are difficult to cover with renewables, at least until storage starts being built at scale. I'll use Texas as my example, since that's where I'm from. Texas has equal or greater renewable capacity than any other state in the US. We faced record heat this past summer, and solar and wind both performed very well. The problem, as always, is when the sun isn't shining and there's no wind. Fortunately that's not a common occurrence, but it does occur. Similarly, NG can be spun up very rapidly if necessary. It's expensive to do so, but it can fill in for peak demand and surges. Ideally we'd be firing up new nuclear to provide a stable baseline, but for reasons that have been pointed out, it's politically unpopular, and economically disastrous. Until someone comes up with a truly modular reactor that can be built and deployed rapidly (and is politically feasible), we're going to need some combination of excess capacity and a lot of storage to cover the gaps when generation slows.
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Dec 30, 2023 15:01
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Dante80 posted:40% of US electricity is now emissions-free The plan at several of the new gas plants I've been to was to start blending in H2 to the gas mixture in the future, ideally the H2 would be generated with surplus renewable electricity. They never really explained the timeline on that but designed the plants to burn a mixture in the turbines.
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Dec 30, 2023 15:50
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Dante80 posted:40% of US electricity is now emissions-free At least in Europe, a lot of the new gas plants coming online are intended to be around for a very long time. They will either be mothballed and only reactivated shortly during rare dunkelflaute weather events that only happen every 2-3 years or so(doesn't make economic sense to have a storage solution for something so rare) or intended to be switched over to hydrogen at some point.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:02
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Dante80 posted:40% of US electricity is now emissions-free all the latest and greatest fancy modeling, for california and australia, says you need to maintain 30 - 40% gas *capacity* to get through the 10 worst days of the winter in a "what if we just massively rolled out wind and solar" scenario. a lot of other colder places it could be 100 days. even in a highly optimistic scenario LFP & Na+ storage they'll never get us more than 2 of those days. there arent enough rivers to dam to get us the remaining days, and geothermal continues to be a science project. so even if we had perfect policy (nationalize the gas plants and use them only as a supplier-of-last-resort) we still need roughly this amount of gas turbine generation capacity. we just need to fix the 'economics' (policy) of them to only run them on those 10 - 100 days, instead of year round. keep in mind *we already* store about a one year buffer supply of natural gas underground: https://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html essentially we can just think of that as the emergency-winter-reserve battery, like an SPR but for the grid. keep in mind the usual d&d goon answer of NUKULAR is much worse here because the idle-capital-cost of gas plants is like a full order of magnitude lower than than a fission plant.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:15
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Why does cost matter when trying to decarbonize the grid? How is it worse? Is it worse for the tax payer? Worse for emissions? Seems to me that the CO2 emissions of nuclear is about an order of magnitude lower than natural gas so maybe the premium is worth it?
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Dec 30, 2023 16:30
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Thanks for the replies friends. I hadn't thought about hydrogen really (actually forgot about it to be exact). Also, I remember reading that EGS can/will be used for collocation or converting said plants.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:Why does cost matter when trying to decarbonize the grid? How is it worse? Is it worse for the tax payer? Worse for emissions? Seems to me that the CO2 emissions of nuclear is about an order of magnitude lower than natural gas so maybe the premium is worth it? Costs matter because energy prices factor into most modern human economic activity (we have seen this recently with the massive spike in inflation due to the Ukraine invasion price shock on the natural gas markets). It has nothing to do with the way an economy is organized (market oriented or centrally planned) and is just fundamental to current modern society. A fully renewable grid with storage and mothballed backup green hydrogen gas plants is not significantly more or less carbon intensive than one that still has 10-20% nuclear in it. Right now it looks like there are only going to be disadvantages to keeping nuclear plants online once we reach that point. This might of course still change with technological development like cheap modular reactors, etc.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:23
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SpeedFreek posted:The plan at several of the new gas plants I've been to was to start blending in H2 to the gas mixture in the future, ideally the H2 would be generated with surplus renewable electricity. They never really explained the timeline on that but designed the plants to burn a mixture in the turbines.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:24
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H2 seems like future tech without some kind of storage improvement. I would prefer the new plants built to be nuclear but whats getting built is replacing coal and that's better than carrying on as we have been.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:43
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GABA ghoul posted:Costs matter because energy prices factor into most modern human economic activity (we have seen this recently with the massive spike in inflation due to the Ukraine invasion price shock on the natural gas markets). It has nothing to do with the way an economy is organized (market oriented or centrally planned) and is just fundamental to current modern society. Yes costs matter but MightyBigMinus's phrasing here: quote:keep in mind the usual d&d goon answer of NUKULAR is much worse here because the idle-capital-cost of gas plants is like a full order of magnitude lower than than a fission plant. Needs scrutiny. The relative expenses and costs of nuclear don't necessarily translate to higher costs to the average electricity consumer once built and running; so nuclear being the "worse" choice as presented her is as I like say, an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence. Also we don't have a fully renewable grid, nor do we have afaik, full hydrogen gas plants capable of replacing natural gas plants, so this seems like an odd comparison? A quick google suggests that the only operational hydrogen plants are natgas who use a blend. That's better than coal but not better than nuclear as of now. And also well no, nuclear power plants provide all sorts of other benefits than power, for medical devices, research, materials, and possible supply of reactor fuel for fusion plants if that technology does continue to progress, so even in this hypothetical scenario you still want to keep the existing fission reactors going and to replace them with newer designs as they're developed.
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Dec 30, 2023 18:18
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MightyBigMinus posted:keep in mind the usual d&d goon answer of NUKULAR is much worse here because the idle-capital-cost of gas plants is like a full order of magnitude lower than than a fission plant.* * if we decide to say "gently caress it, climate change is fine"
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Dec 31, 2023 00:01
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