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angryrobots posted:I have seen single-wide trailers hitting 200 kWH/day on days where temps stay below freezing. Thats insane. My peak winter day usage was 80kWH and I'm keeping a 90kL lap pool at 30c. I can only assume these trailers are smelting aluminium as a side income.
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Oct 4, 2018 10:38
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Gasoline has a high energy density and works with existing vehicles. Gasoline made from atmospheric carbon, excess wind energy, and water would be carbon nuetral when used to power vehicles. Commercial aviation is going to require high grade kerosene for a while yet. There’s been some tinkering with downblending but I’m not aware of any real substitute close to use. Compressed hydrogen may be a solution for ground transport, particularly if cheap clean electricity is a reality.
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Dec 29, 2018 00:57
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EoRaptor posted:Jet engines tend to be very friendly about burning different fuels, so an artificial kerosene or similar fuel should be totally doable. Related to that, there are a number of companies that are in the prototype or preproduction phase for short haul electric planes, seating between 1 to 12 people. While these are aimed at the corporate jet market, if the tech could be adapted/adopted by the civil market, it would be a huge boon. AvGas is nasty, and getting rid of all the old 60's era Cessna's (etc) that are still flying would be a good cut to some of the uglier pollution we dump in the air. Agreed, my point was more that we need to have a fuel with a similar energy density and composition as avtur. Hopefully this is achievable with renewable energy inputs, soon.
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Dec 29, 2018 11:07
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Trabisnikof posted:Focusing just on this statement because I think its important to point out that you're just handwaving away a massive amount of the issues with a carbon tax. I think cap and trade mechanisms are more effective. Set a maximum number of carbon emission permits per year, allow the market to set the price. Reduce the target each year, allow offset programs to produce credits etc. For fossil fuels the intent is to make the product less attractive to the consumer (higher cost) and so steer them towards alternatives. Unfortunately it is a regressive tax though and other compensatory measures are need3d to assist vulnerable consumers. But yeah, it’s not exactly straightforward. Reportedly the carbon trading mechanism here in Australia did reduce emissions and didn’t cause the $100 lamb roasts that opponents predicted.
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Dec 7, 2020 04:18
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:To absorb excess energy generation. Until storage solutions are better, we're probably going to need to get better about shifting demand around renewable generation fluctuations. Maybe the better answer is aluminum smelting or hydrogen production, something relatively energy intensive that can be reasonably wound up or down. The biggest consumer on the Australian National Energy Market is the Tomago aluminium smelter. It’s often a quick target for load shedding but a pot line that is shut down temporarily to shed load can’t do this for another few days, at a minimum, without the line being ruined.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:03
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My experience is with the Australian National Energy Market which has a peak demand of roughly 35GW. Expected recovery from a system black condition is between 1 to 3 days depending on the restart scenario and excluding any physical damage that caused the event in the first place. Hopefully it’s closer to 1 day because after that we’d run into coordination issues as telecoms become unreliable. The big challenge is correctly matching supply and load to manage Reactive power and avoid voltage collapse. I’m not an electrical engineer so that bit is beyond me though. I do know that getting it wrong can mean tripping out units and starting again. Most of our generation is thermal coal which requires fuel oil to pre heat the boilers for a cold start. Power stations only have enough fuel oil for probably two attempts. Gas infrastructure requires electricity to pressurise the gas supply. We do have hydro for black start but it’s not anywhere near the load centers. Last time we had something like this happen was in the 1960s. Simulations are run every year but in a real event who knows what will happen.
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Feb 18, 2021 12:33
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MiddleOne posted:Why? It can't really compete with nordic wind and hydro. 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.
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Aug 6, 2021 10:59
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Saukkis posted:The article and report doesn't make it clear if these plants are excessively inefficient or just unusually large coal plants. The report talks about the intensity, but it's relative to other fossil fuel plants and coal plants probably are more intensive compared to oil and natural gas plants. But if the top-10 are just operating at the average coal plant efficiency, then it doesn't really matter whether you decommission one of them or 10 smaller coal plants, except for the people living nearby who have to deal with most of the non-CO2 emissions. It may be easier to solve the regulatory, NIMBY, project management, waste storage, grid tie etc for one big nuclear plant than for ten smaller ones. Ideally you could build nuke next to the existing coal plant and sell it as “we’re going to replace this dirty smog machine with this shiny new nuclear plant” and the locals would accept it, plus the grid infrastructure is already there as well as cooling water supply. Except for the issue of replacing perhaps 1000s of jobs with fewer higher skilled jobs.
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Aug 14, 2021 00:15
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Infinite Karma posted:Coal is a minuscule amount of jobs, they're just extremely loud, and in small states to boot. Either way, solar has a shitload of jobs that honestly need very little training, and even better, solar is needed all over the place so it's not geographically limited like mining jobs are. I’m in furious agreement with you but I’m cognisant of the resistance that will be pushed. Here in Australia there is constant talk about mining jobs being under threat from green programs, you would think that every second person was employed in mining. The reality is that mining is a small part of our employment figures and the majors have been throwing every dollar into automation, from extraction all the way through to loading the ships. Rio Tinto runs entire mining operations from control rooms in Perth with a handful of staff yet billionaires have been very successful in convincing communities that resource taxes will destroy their livelihoods.
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Aug 14, 2021 01:03
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Option 1 isn’t available here in Australia so a mix of 2/3 is where we are headed. We are looking at other potential storage solutions including new pumped storage hydro (I.e. not based on existing rivers) and hydrogen storage. Community batteries, V2G, dispatchable demand (such as desal) also get talked about. Granted, our grid is orders of magnitude smaller, but general feeling is that we’ll get there with renewables. Of course our govt is throwing money at fossil fuels including “clean gas”.
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Aug 28, 2021 04:52
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I agree that fossil fuels should be priced out of the market, but the flip side is that high prices encourages exploitation of marginal fossil fuel sources such as tar sands etc. Low prices for fossil fuels should result in a lot of wells, mines, conversion etc being uneconomical and that carbon remaining out of the atmosphere. High taxes on fossil fuels to ensure the externalities are costed in? That's worth pursuing. I'm sure I've been overly simplistic here so happy to be educated.
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Sep 28, 2021 09:44
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suck my woke dick posted:boris johnson had a case of galaxy brain and wants a galactic britain, flying british spaceships from british spaceports located on the british isles. britain is a place famously well-situated to serve all major launch markets and not just the like two polar orbit launches every year that can also be done from a normal launch site by using a bigger rocket. They could use Diego Garcia but then you'd have all the expense of setting up a remote space port and shipping to it, when you could just buy access elsewhere. So unless it's a sovereign capability play, it's probably not feasible.
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Oct 1, 2021 12:25
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silence_kit posted:Oh yeah, it is an old idea. It was probably a more attractive idea back when it was expensive to produce solar panels. People were really more into ideas like this and engineering solar concentrators back then. If you point a solar cell at a more concentrated resource, you don't need to manufacture as many to get the same power output. Is there substantial difference between manufacturing a solar cell for space as opposed to one for Earth? I recall that they were more expensive because you wanted to maximise longevity and efficiency due to the cost of shifting weight to orbit, so precious metals were a more prominent component. I would think that placing consumer grade solar cells in space would result in a much shorter lifespan due to solar radiation that isn't present on the surface of the Earth and usually doesn't play well with semiconductors.
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Oct 2, 2021 02:22
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silence_kit posted:How much of the cost of running a natural gas plant is the fuel cost? It's a complicated question (that I don't have the answer to), due to many factors. If we assume the marginal cost of running the plant is only fuel (i.e. the fixed costs of building etc are already paid), this still depends on the per MJ or cubic metre (foot?) price of natural gas. It is unlikely that a heavy user such as a power plant would pay the spot price of gas, they would likely have locked in contractual prices on gas futures. Then of course the fixed costs as a proportion of running a plant vary on how often you run a plant for. A peaker that runs for say 100 hours a year would see the fixed costs as an extremely high proportion of overall costs. If that plant ran for 4 hours a day, fixed costs would be a fraction of total costs. Then throw in complicating factors such as maintenance, other consumables such as lubricants, staff changes between idle and running etc. Fun fact: it dawned on planners here in Oz that relying on natural gas plants for a black start scenario (entire grid outage) may not be a great idea as the gas pipelines require electricity to stay pressurized. e: another lucrative revenue source for gas peakers is filling system reliability contracts. Being paid to have the ability to rapidly spin up to support frequency/voltage etc without having to actually generate. Large scale battery storage such as the Tesla install in South Australia has cannibalized this somewhat. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 23:52
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Wibla posted:ITT: people alternatively beating a dead horse and engaging with people just barely (if that) on the right side of outright trolling I'm not advocating carbon based power sources, however I do think there is a difference between burning carbon that was laid down millennia ago (fossil fuels) and burning carbon that was removed/sequestered from the biosphere in the last 50 years (biomass, plantation forestry). In theory there are renewable carbon sources, but you have to rely on that mythical beast Homo Economicus Rationalisii. There is clearly a lot of love for nuclear power in this forum and it's feasible in some jurisdictions and not others. The reality is that decarbonising the global grid is going to require trade-offs all over the planet, some will be greenwashing, some will be attempting to gain popular acceptance, some will be economic reality.
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Oct 12, 2021 23:12
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CommieGIR posted:The problem was everything Germany did was largely predictable, including their deal with Russia supplying Natural Gas to go south. Fast. The reality is, which climate change as bad as it is, we cannot afford to release any more carbon and need to sequester as much of it as we can, which means not burning forests. And even then, its not a 1:1 relationship, you release more carbon from burning the wood than will likely be captured. The accounting is not balanced and its always a huge stretch to call it carbon neutral. Yeah it's not great, it's what it is. Like the new gas peaking plant being built in the Hunter Valley, Australia. It can run on 15% hydrogen blend, so that's nice but it's still 85% LNG and the hydrogen will probably be blue hydrogen (which is such a bullshit name like clean coal) anyway. We'd be better off not building it, but that was a political decision to save votes in a coal mining electorate, so it's going to happen and I'll take the 15% over not taking it. Incrementalism is better than nothing and certainly better than going backwards, but it's probably worse than everything else and won't stop the planet from cooking. e: as a sign of goodwill, here's a picture of a little girl who asked for a Transformer Halloween costume. 
Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 23:30
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Potato Salad posted:"But it grows again, it's renewwwwaaabbllleee" Yeah it is contingent on re-planting. Managed forestry here in Oz uses Radiata Pine which tends to have a 20-25 year cycle and seems to be OK, although of course the companies "accidentally" log old growth from time to time.
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Oct 12, 2021 23:52
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One of our Green party politicians recently referred to nuclear powered submarines as "floating Chernobyls" so you can see how much fact is in the debate, at least here down-under. The greens party platform also opposes the reactor based manufacture of radioisotopes. My understanding is that the early greens movement had a large contingent of nuclear disarmament types so anything nuclear is considered a no-no.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:47
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QuarkJets posted:No but seriously, nuclear power is the greenest and safest energy source that we are currently able to build, and efforts to move away from nuclear power are largely buoyed by the fossil fuel industry. "Currently able to build" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If there isn't a political will, public mandate, or financial case to build it, then it doesn't matter how green it is. I'm also genuinely surprised that nuclear is considered greener than wind and solar, I assume this is just a pure energy density and capacity factor thing?
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Oct 23, 2021 00:33
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Kaal posted:I mean to be fair that article author has a point, if you're looking at the issue from the perspective of "which power sources are actually cleaning up their waste cycle", then really you're only talking about nuclear, hydro, and thermal. I'm not anti-wind / solar by any means, but their photo-cells and battery systems do need regular replacement, and are basically just getting dumped right now. Electronic waste might not have the wow factor of coal plumes, gas flares, or radiation leaks, but it's massive and certainly toxic. Yeah OK that makes sense, in that nuclear does have a solution for the whole life cycle. Even if part of that life cycle is thousands of years, the footprint is tiny. RE Hydro, I thought common thinking now was that it is in no way green because of the ecological impact to the immediate ecosystem. Much greener than fossil, but flooding valleys and disrupting/starving rivers was now recognised as a huge ecological problem. But yeah, the marginal impact of generating a megawatt-hour is negligible.
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Oct 23, 2021 02:01
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QuarkJets posted:unpredictability is a problem that nuclear power tends not to have As a contrast, it's the large "baseload" fossil plants in Australia that are having the predictability issue. Increasingly hot days tend to trip out units, and a sudden drop in 400 - 600MW can be a significant problem in a grid our size. This is a factor of the age of our fossil fuel plants, minimising maintenance downtime, and not being designed as intermittent power sources - they just can't outbid solar/wind which have next to zero run costs and so aren't generating as much as they were designed for. Of course the coal lobby answer is "build newer plants". Solar and wind forecasting is becoming increasingly accurate, but obviously more effective in certain climates than others. Our government research arm (CSIRO) has been putting a lot of effort into this space and we're seeing more proposals for onsite storage to ride out the "single cloud in the sky" dip in output. Thanks for the insights, we have a very different situation here due to different grid size, available technologies (no nuclear), and politics. In fact one of our problems now is the accelerating rate of renewable development: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-23/solar-farm-overload-heats-up-the-national-grid/100561218
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Oct 23, 2021 08:36
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Kaal posted:Well hydro certainly disrupts the local environment, and it can cause issues with a variety of wildlife, but it's definitely a matter of relativity. Fossil fuels are a huge ecological problem - they're breaking the entire planet. Mineral mining is a big ecological problem too - they devastate forests and poison entire regions. Hydro is comparatively quite green, and most of the ecological drawbacks involved happened decades ago when those rivers were dammed in the first place. Salmon aren't being threatened by challenges in navigating the fish ladders - it's because fossil fuels and deforestation are warming the rivers beyond livability. Australian rivers are far more intermittent than the ones in the USA and Europe, so we have ecosystems that rely on varying levels of flooding, rather than a big stonking river constantly flowing. Placing dams across the rivers was considered great back in the 40s and 50s as flood mitigation, but it's stuffed the ecosystems that rely on the annual floods and periodic huge floods to "clean out the system". The Snowy Hydro Scheme is a case in point that has been an unmitigated disaster for the river systems, but it is dual use hydro power and irrigation, so a lot of that damage has been diverting water inland for crops.
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Oct 23, 2021 08:40
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QuarkJets posted:On the contrary, governments are not beholden to economics. There's nothing economical about going to the moon or, as you pointed out already, building nuclear submarines. We need nationalized nuclear power infrastructure. It’s arguing semantics at this point but the purpose of economics (besides making people miserable) is allocating limited resources to unlimited wants. This is not the same as “positive economic return” or “economically prudent” or any of the other things that is assumed to be the case when labelling something economic. The Apollo program was a case of the US allocating resources to achieve an outcome, which was not financial but strategic. Same with Manhattan Project, it wasn’t designed to make money, it was designed to achieve a military victory (originally beat the Nazis) and it would be an interesting theoretical exercise to figure out if the Manhattan Project saved money by avoiding an invasion of Japan. So yes, governments are beholden to economics in that they have limited resources (ultimately their GDP, natural resources, or ability to borrow money / direct labour) and have to decide how to allocate those resources because they can’t do everything that everyone wants them to do. But in the usual sense of the word economics, yes, the US government could direct some kind of Apollo or Manhattan style project to build 1000 reactors by the end of the decade. You would need to convince the population that continuing to burn fossil fuels poses the same (in reality much greater) existential threat than the Soviets winning the space race, or the prospect of losing WWII. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Oct 24, 2021 |
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Oct 24, 2021 02:57
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radmonger posted:For nuclear to prosper, the required innovation would be mostly financial or political, not a matter of engineering. Is there any feasible scenario where nuclear generated power becomes substantially cheaper, whilst maintaining/improving actual (not regulatory) safety standards? Say, 50% cheaper? I don't have the knowledge to decipher all the new GenIV/V/+ pebble bed, thorium cycle etc etc. Is there anything in the less than 20 year pipeline where this happens?
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Oct 26, 2021 11:59
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radmonger posted:All of those are engineering ideas, none of which would address the actual problem; the inherent cheapness of the generated electricity, and the consequent lack of a market-based means of recovering the high fixed costs of construction. Most would make it worse, e.g. thorium would presumably further reduce fuel and security costs. But isn't this the same economic model that solar and wind has? All the costs are all upfront capital build costs, marginal cost per MWh to generate is almost zero. Sure solar build costs aren't the same as nuclear but neither is output. A solar farm with 100MW nameplate still costs hundreds of millions to build, and has a much lower nameplate output and capacity factor than a modern nuclear plant. Sounds like my original question has been answered, which is that developments in nuclear tend to be towards inherent safety features, addressing proliferation concerns, or opening up alternative fuel cycles. None of which appear to be addressing build costs. I was hoping that the "small modular reactors" that are talked about would result in lower overall capital costs. I agree that solving climate change shouldn't be left in the hands of the market, or economists, but in the absence of some large government mandated effort, the only way it will be addressed is if someone can make a buck out of it. Kaal posted:There's already been a fair amount of discussion about how nuclear power is hamstrung by countless environmental studies and safety surveys that are conducted as if no one has ever built a fission power plant before. But there's also all the money required to be set aside for future hypothetical radiation disaster remediation - almost $50 billion in the United States. No other power source needs to set aside money like this, or even consider cleaning up after themselves, and that's one of the many reasons that they artificially appear to be so cheap. Certainly coal is not so economical if producers have to pay to recover all the soot, radiation, and GHGs they emit into the atmosphere. The much maligned carbon taxes are one step to begin remediating this issue of externalized cost and risk. Would be great if there was a similar indemnity clause that operates for vaccine development in that the government acknowledges the public benefit of a heavily regulated system and provides a common insurance pool against rare but highly costly future negative outcomes. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 21:49
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karthun posted:Isn't that what the CICP and VICP are? No idea, never heard of them (I'm not American). e: but if individual companies still have to provide a guarantee against future highly unlikely but very costly outcomes, then surely this is something that could be collectivised (ruh-roh, communism!). Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 22:41
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Kalman posted:Yeah, that’s exactly the function they serve. Ah, poor wording on my part... I knew there was an indemnity program for vaccines in the US and was saying something similar should exist for energy.
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Oct 27, 2021 03:30
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Andrew Forrest (first time I've ever seen him referred to as Dr Forrest) is from a Western Australian wealth & politics dynasty. Being into resource extraction he has a spotty record on taxation and interactions with Indigenous people. On the latter, he does put a lot into Indigenous work initiatives and philanthropy but has been accused of divide & conquer techniques when it comes to getting endorsement from traditional owners. The last 5 years or so has seen him move into philanthropy in a big way (along with his wife) and recently he has appeared to be genuine on moving to a sustainable mining and power industry, of course through the prism of continued wealth generation. As said, one of the biggest positive outcomes is calling blue hydrogen complete bullshit, just another ploy to continue extracting fossil fuels. Hydrogen is touted as making a big impact to the energy landscape in Australia, probably because it can be seen as a genuine storage medium for actual green energy by environmentalists; and as a new market for natural gas expansion by the cretins that have made their money from fossil fuels. I'm curious to see how the hydrogen generation technology copes with intermittent power and can ramp up and down with solar/wind output. I don't know enough about industrial scale electrolysis, including any potentially limited resources such as catalysts, anodes/cathodes etc to see how big this can ramp up. But if it does show promise, then shipping liquified hydrogen could be a great way to export the abundance of clean energy resources (read: lots of sun soaked land) to high power users in Asia. e: just had a quick look at wiki and he actually has a genuine Ph.D that he gained in 2019 after working for four years on a dissertation in marine science. I thought the Dr would be an honorary award like a lot of wealthy people. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 21:26
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Harold Fjord posted:I'm not sure how far removed this is in reality from them just having staff. I get why you wouldn't want staff members casting the actual votes on their behalf but they seem to already do a lot of the other things. Replace "staff" with "lobbyists". The entrenched lobbying firms will draft bills for consideration, put staff in with the Congressman's office to "assist" with a particular initiative, provide advice on how to vote.
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Nov 4, 2021 21:36
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VideoGameVet posted:I’ve been seeing videos touting the success of South Australia’s renewable/storage implementation and the lower electrical rates achieved. If it was a nation it would be 2nd to Denmark in renewable %. It's not without its challenges. The South Australian grid has issues maintaining grid inertia on negative demand days and has to maintain about 200MW of spinning metal - natural gas turbines - to ensure stability. This requires SA to be an exporter of power, and loss of the interconnector would have to result in load shedding. The SA grid is long and "thin", so stability can be difficult to maintain on the best of days. It's not a reason to avoid renewables, it's a challenge in how grid stability will be maintained when most of the generation is non-synchronous. Inverter tech and batteries can rapidly respond to fluctuations in voltage, reactive power, and frequency requirements however it's still early days in co-ordinating this across a whole geographical area. I'd like to see some of the existing turbines maintained as synchronous condensers but I don't know if this is practical or economical.
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Nov 9, 2021 23:36
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Is there a reason radioisotope reactors put into use are all such a low wattage? Is it that their applications historically didn't need a lot of power, or is it an inherent limitation of the technology? You need a high neutron flux and the ability to move target materials in/out easily. So I think this is why open pool reactors are common for this kind of work, which being an unpressurized pool makes it difficult to have a high thermal output.
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Nov 10, 2021 04:39
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:But this is only a requirement for generating electricity directly from such a reactor, right? If you're only interested in using thermal energy directly (eg, to heat water) does that allow for scaling this sort of power generation? I thought you were referring to reactors used to create radioisotopes, e.g. radiopharmaceuticals. AFAIK RTGs aren't fission reactors, they're using radioactive decay to generate heat.
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Nov 10, 2021 06:16
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Reactor seems to be the wrong word, but I'm not finding a name for an RTG type system that is used to generate heat without also using thermocouples to generate electricity. Nuclear battery appears to be the more generic term? RTGs have issues with efficiency, cost to produce the isotopes, and security of the material which could be used as a "dirty bomb". They have been used for some very niche applications, providing power and I think heat for communications relays and navigation lights in the Russian Arctic but some of those have also resulted in radiological accidents. It might be theoretically possible, and I'm not a physicist so the quantities required for district heating may not actually be possible, but there's no doubt far better ways to provide heat in just about every location. I think even NASA has had supply issues with their RTGs and their demand can't be that big. e: there's also no way to control the production of heat. It will produce a steadily decreasing amount of heat whether you need it or not. So you have to use it, store it, reject it to the surrounds, or absorb it in the device itself. Capt.Whorebags fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 08:25
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Is nuclear in its current guise, or even reasonably achievable in the next five years, able to act as an intermittent power source? My very limited knowledge of nuclear power plants tells me that they don't like being ramped up/down, and so will always have to fill the "baseload" part of the energy mix. Coal plants aren't coping will in Australia with the intermittent generation of renewables, but whilst I think some of that is the technology, a lot of it is the economics. Coal owners are writing down plants even the newest one and I don't think we'll see another one built anytime soon. Even gas is going out of favour with the newest plant basically being a vote buying exercise funded by the federal government although they are claiming it's necessary to fill dispatch shortfalls as renewables rise.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:05
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Thanks for the info. I figured that immediate frequency and load response was possible, as it's still a steam turbine that can be controlled to a fair extent (although you end up having to dump unused heat out of the primary loop), but was wondering about the ability to bid into the generation pool and operate for 12 hours on Monday, 8 hours Tuesday, 16 hours Wednesday depending on the going price. Sounds like it's technically no big challenge, but problematic if someone insists on maximising the financial return.
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Nov 14, 2021 05:38
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Aethernet posted:The problem with integrating nukes into a power system isn't whether they can technically ramp but whether it's economic to do so, as poster upthread pointed out. High capex plant like nuclear are always more cost effective when run flat out, as lower load factors mean you have to smear the same fixed costs over fewer running hours. The UK's System Operator assumes no more than about 20-30% of load from nuclear in 2050. Enact real legislative change to limit fossil fuels and promote nukes. When nuclear plants are your best option for reliable overnight power the market will price it accordingly and two things would hopefully happen: demand follows the cheap power into daytime renewable generation; nuclear plants become economically viable generating primarily overnight. They could also generate during the day for extra gravy, but wouldn't need to run 24/7 to be viable.
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Nov 14, 2021 22:20
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mobby_6kl posted:But... why wouldn't you run them 24/7 if you have enough capacity? Solar isn't free in financial terms but also all those panes take resources and energy to build. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it would make sense to idle them for 8-12 hours every day. If there is zero marginal cost of generation then sure, why not run them 24/7. Solar/wind have an extremely low generation cost and can probably outbid any other source. So it comes down to build costs and the returns you can get on those which is high for renewables but not negligible for nuclear either. If renewables bid into the market at $1/MWh, can nuclear outbid? I'm not advocating decommissioning nuclear, I think you need more of them, lots more. But they'll make most of their money at night when few other generators can (assuming a forced decline of fossil fuels). It'll be interesting to see if we really do get "too cheap to meter" power during the day or if some ideological bent stops it from happening. Use that sweet, sweet, solar generated electron flow during the day to pump water uphill, charge batteries, desal water, generate hydrogen etc.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:11
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VideoGameVet posted:So, the South Australia energy figures. Is that all their electrical generation? Did they get electricity from other states? Total generation. They do go completely renewable for increasing periods of time. But as I stated upthread, conditions apply. They have to export some of that renewable energy to be able to run about 200MW of gas generation to maintain system inertia. If the tie to Victoria fails then they have to load shed renewables. Hopefully the market operator / grid service providers will get comfortable soon with co-ordinated synthetic inertia and that requirement will go.
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Nov 15, 2021 00:17
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I’m struggling to think of what the actual terrorist scenario is for nuclear plants. I can’t imagine you can easily remove active or used fuel without seriously endangering your health in a very rapid way, so is the concern that terrorists can somehow manufacture a meltdown or venting of materials?
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Nov 21, 2021 09:22
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aniviron posted:It's so hard not to be cynical, but I am asking genuinely: is there reason to believe that SPARC or any of the multitude of new fusion startups will actually achieve success and net energy gain in 10-15 years? If so, why? What are they doing differently from ITER and all the traditional fusion research, what suggests that they are on a path to success instead of infinite delays? Exactly the same as before, but now with BLOCKCHAIN.
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Dec 2, 2021 10:11
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