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Using inverters to help steady the grid makes a lot of sense, so it's good to see wind being utilised for that as well.
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Mar 24, 2020 06:09
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I guess it beats driving, eh? 
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Apr 29, 2020 00:01
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As long as you can afford it (and they fit on the roof), I would add 2 kW to that system.
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May 18, 2020 19:33
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 Of course they're imposing limits like that, gotta protect their precious decaying grid from having to upgrade it (and spend money!), after all. Go for the largest they allow, at any rate.
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May 18, 2020 21:38
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$3.10 per watt after incentives seems high? I guess it depends on the state you're in, though.
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May 19, 2020 06:03
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Biden wants to zero out U.S. electricity sector CO2 emssions by 2035? I guess they're planning on fast-tracking a whole shitload of nuke plants then?
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Aug 21, 2020 18:40
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Without money and focus, time will be squandered and expertise won't materialise. With money and focus, time and expertise are both solvable variables. Use standardised designs, stagger the builds and rotate expertise in at each site as needed, both to perform the work and teach others, so production can be scaled. A lot of regulatory bullshit goes into site-specific approvals. That can be minimised with standard designs. Consider BWR's for district heating, refurbish and upgrade hydro plants/dams so they support pumped storage where possible, the list goes on. But first of all: tell the NIMBY's to gently caress off.
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Aug 24, 2020 23:22
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CommieGIR posted:Pumped storage is nice where possible but the environmental impact can be insane. Yeah, it's not my first choice. But a lot of hydro can be regulated quite well, and that gets you a lot of the way there.
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Aug 24, 2020 23:36
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There's a fantastic amount of poo poo info out there about nuclear power, a fair amount of which is from anti-nuke groups. On the other hand, there's also a fair amount of pro-nuke propaganda out there, so it's not exactly a simple field to read up on. My physics professor at uni spent considerable time on nuclear physics and power generation during our pre-eng year, it was really interesting stuff, but he had a PhD in nuclear physics, and was a brilliant lecturer, so I'm probably biased
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Sep 1, 2020 02:28
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Using natural gas to hold us over until we can get more renewable and nuclear capacity online is good. Touting natural gas as a replacement for both coal and nuclear is a bare-faced lie and should be treated as such. Replacing coal with natural gas will result in reduced emissions, but it's a far cry from the reductions we get from going renewable or nuclear.
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Sep 3, 2020 01:03
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Charging transit: you can setup buffer batteries to take care of peaks - also time charging so that you do the bulk of charging at night, and top up batteries when there's excess renewable production. Ships: We're already operating electrical ferries in Norway, but that's a fairly limited use case, with very frequent charging. We'll probably see a shift towards more (sustainable, maybe?) biofuels and possibly also hybrid sailing vessels to decrease fuel usage. I'm not sure I'd want a nuclear reactor on a civilian freight vessel, I've met my fair share of engineers in the merchant marine who shouldn't be let anywhere near machinery of any kind  Nuclear is definitely part of the energy mix of the future, even though there's a bunch of under-educated/misinformed idiots out there, especially politicians, who try to sabotage nuclear at every step. To our common detriment... Germany was mentioned earlier in the thread. They'd be further along if they weren't shuttering their nuclear plants, although they still have a fair amount of generating capacity left.
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Sep 5, 2020 03:44
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The biggest container ships built so far has a 11 cylinder diesel engine, weighing in at 2 200 tonnes and outputs about 75MW peak. Those ships weigh in at over 228 000 gross tonnes, so a few hundred tonnes give or take in the engineering spaces hardly matter much. To give an example, the reactor compartment on the USN nuclear cruisers (page 57) weighed in at 1400 tonnes with two D2G reactors, though power output is significantly lower (at 45 MW to the shafts). That's a fairly old military design, though. I doubt it would be extremely hard to build one of those container ships with a nuclear power plant, but steam-operated ships are passé, so that's a hurdle to pass as well.
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Sep 5, 2020 20:51
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I'll take the bait: I guess coal is better than nuclear for Greenpeace, eh?
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Sep 8, 2020 04:39
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Infinite Karma posted:Is it productive to ask "why is nuclear so expensive?" Obviously it's still a big building made of metal and concrete with machines inside, it's not magic. Is it regulatory fees and lawyers/analysts that have ballooned the cost to 10x or 100x what it used to be? Design fees, redesigns, and change orders? Finance charges? Or even worse regulatory capture stuff like utilities milking cost plus contracts and kickbacks to insiders, where they purposely waste as much money as possible? How much of the cost of nuclear power is profit margin for middlemen, and how much is the actual costs of labor and materials and real estate? These are all good questions, and something I've been wondering about as well. You'd think we would be able to curtail the regulatory costs if we used standardized designs, but that's not really materializing anytime soon by the looks of things...
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Sep 12, 2020 23:22
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It's about minimizing negative impact wherever we can, and being smart about energy production and use. There are no perfect solutions, only a choice between bad and worse. The real smart play would be to build out a lot more nuclear 30-40 years ago, but we didn't do that, so here we are...
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Oct 25, 2020 01:44
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Phanatic posted:Why do you think that stuff is placed on the roof? It's not just random. Perhaps putting it in other places would be more expensive? It's not random - but there has also generally not been any thought given to optimizing for solar either. It's possible to build things slightly different, without adding much (if any) to the costs, and "unlock" a lot more solar as a result of it. The ROI on doing that is IMO worth it. Phanatic posted:I don't think "do even more stuff that prices homes out of the reach of poor people" should go over well in any political climate. Never not gently caress people with $5/Watt solar on new construction like they do in California because the developers can get away with it.
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Oct 26, 2020 22:24
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MrYenko posted:No idea. I’d imagine it’s more expensive than Saudi Arabia just due to labor costs, since slavery is illegal in the US. I've got news for you Offshore is silly expensive, though. Almost any oil extraction on dry land will be cheaper, except maybe tar sand poo poo, though I don't remember the exact figures on that and might well be wrong.
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Nov 26, 2020 04:25
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CommieGIR posted:They are, its a funny argument that people argue they are not. They don't need to be, but it can be done. It depends on how the plant is built, but a lot of newer designs can ramp up/down quite quickly compared to older designs. There are still caveats, though. That being said - why not build multi-purpose nuclear plants? Desalination of salt water wouldn't go amiss in California, and you can even do (high-temperature) hydrogen electrolysis when you absolutely cannot find somewhere to put all that excess green power
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Dec 3, 2020 02:15
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Welcome to Australia, almost everything here will kill you, and aussie slang will make the uninitiated go  (Also don't ask for Foster's if you want good beer. They foist that poo poo on the rest of the world because no one at home will drink it.) Crazycryodude posted:Setting fossil fuels on fire to make Bitcoin/pass numbers around in a database/all the other bullshit that makes GDP a useless metric is not useful economic activity it's what's killing the planet I have friends who operate GPU mining farms, I can't find the fucks to give about it since we're almost all hydro here, but all the blockchain/crypto bullshit should be shut down for the good of the planet.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:08
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Probably a fair bit, depending on how you set it up?
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Dec 18, 2020 18:57
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A lot of O&G engineers left for shore-based industry and utilities etc after the last downturn here in  Most of them don't want to go back to O&G, and I can't blame them.
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Jan 4, 2021 00:41
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We're using oil for a SHITTON of stuff that isn't just "burning it for electricity/heat/propulsion", so it's not going away anytime soon even if we do our level best to move to electric everything
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Jan 5, 2021 22:44
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Both desalination and hydrogen electrolysis plants can be throttled reasonably quickly, if engineered to do so, with very few negative side-effects. They also don't require a lot of people to operate. As we get more residential solar and smarter controls, we're probably going to see a lot of peak-shifting of loads that are amenable to being shifted.
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Jan 18, 2021 00:01
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It's almost like the dumb atoms gives no fucks about the weather
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Feb 15, 2021 19:34
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Buried cables are fine for local medium voltage (6-22 kV) distribution, but for long-haul transmission they are often not appropriate.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:23
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, but utility poles will be back up and supplying power 100x faster than underground lines. After the big fires in Australia, they installed solar+batteries with generator backups in some locations to replace long medium voltage runs to outlying farms etc. Seems like the smart thing to do to me tbh. Relevant article
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Feb 17, 2021 18:12
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Saukkis posted:In last decade there were some wide power outages in Finland and the government's solution was to raise the compensation fees for power outages. The power companies did their calculations and this gave them incentive to start burying cables heavily. This of course concerns mainly lines that were running below tree top level. Only commies would do something like that!
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Feb 17, 2021 21:05
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:California FTFY
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May 8, 2021 04:42
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suck my woke dick posted:The solution is the government does stuff, specifically the government applies whatever pressure is necessary to force every nuclear supplier and operator to agree on one standard reactor design, build nothing else for the next two decades, and subsidise at whatever level guarantees that at least one reactor every 2 years starts construction. The first 2-3 builds will be AP1000/EPR style shitshows that go 5-10 billion dollars over budget. After that, the US will have actual nuclear construction companies with actually experienced nuclear construction workers and project managers who have encountered real world problems again, so dumb loving mistakes will decrease and economies of scale will start happening. Basically this. But that would be the smart thing to do, so it will not happen.
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May 21, 2021 01:34
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gently caress, even RBMK reactors would be preferable to more NG or coal plants. They can be operated safely
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Jun 11, 2021 00:00
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In the case of Texas, its hard to say where the sheer incompetence ends and where the malicious intent begins.
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Jun 15, 2021 00:45
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CommieGIR posted:Germany's wind and solar expansion is stalled for these exact NIMBY reasons, yup. Not to worry, they're building wind farms in instead 
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Jun 27, 2021 01:40
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MiddleOne posted:There's actual vehement political opposition to wind farms in Norway? There's a ton of local opposition because a lot of onshore wind farm licenses were issued years ago and they scaled them up a lot before actually building them, in a weird kind of bait and switch. There's also a hilarious amount of stupid poo poo going on with the electrical grid in general over here right now, like connecting offshore platforms to the main grid, with the cost being dumped on normal power subscribers, ditto with power cables to the UK and Germany that's so far only contributing to higher prices for everyone. Then there's the minor detail that we could increase our hydro power production by MORE than all the current onshore wind projects by overhauling our existing power plants with newer turbines and generators, a lot of which are getting close to their EOL anyway. But because of how the taxes work, that "doesn't make sense" financially. It's a mess, full stop. MiddleOne posted:Also, don't you ever suggest that the norwegian economy should diversify and stop pumping up all the oil that it possibly can. They're opening up for more drilling in the Barents sea, which is loving stupid. We need to scale that poo poo down, not open new (and more expensive!) oil and gas fields in the far north. At this point I don't even know what we should or could diversify to anymore. I want to focus on SMR technology and developing mature Thorium-based reactors, because we have a shitton of Thorium, but ATOMS ARE SCARY, so we can't do that. It's loving embarassing. Even running pure thermal reactors for district heating would be epic, considering we need heating about 8 months of the year.
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Jun 27, 2021 18:42
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Yeah - I would do a three-pronged approach: 1. Upgrade existing hydro 2. Introduce nuclear for base-load and district heating 3. Offshore windfarms, if they made sense in combination with 1. and 2.
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Jun 27, 2021 19:32
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CommieGIR posted:The only thing I'd fault with this is #1 is going to be less effective with increasing droughts and potable water availability becoming an issue. 
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Jun 30, 2021 16:07
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CommieGIR posted:Well that's good news at least, for Norway/Sweden. But elsewhere, Drought is going to be an issue. Yeah, and I was referring to what I wanted to do in Norway. California? Y'all are hosed.
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Jun 30, 2021 16:13
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Grouchio posted:Why is Europe phasing out nuclear for gas again? General anti-nuclear sentiments combined with gas corp ambitions? Collective broken brains from Fukushima. Yes, really.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:18
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CommieGIR posted:https://twitter.com/gary_hasty/status/1415677400717963264?s=20 Of course it was. Now lets watch them do absolutely nothing about it
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Jul 16, 2021 19:04
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Capt.Whorebags posted:I assume further integration would allow the rest of Europe to place higher bids for Nordic renewables and drive up the price for locals. If there are interconnector constraints now then the Nordic markets are somewhat insulated. This has already happened, fwiw.
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Aug 6, 2021 11:49
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Its a crime that we aren't replacing these with nuclear. 
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Aug 13, 2021 15:52
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