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So my question for wind is - why is a tower and some blades and some brakes and what should be a trivially simple control system so expensive compared to a combustion machine?

It isn't, for one of them.

Have you done the math for how much power an average coal plant puts out, how much land it uses, vs. the same amount of power from wind, and how much land it uses and how many you need?

In Texas for example, an average coal plant might put out 1,500 MW of power. Compare that to an average wind farm that may put out 500 MW of power. To make that power requires about 300 wind turbines.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

^ Example of such a turbine.

Now find land for 300 of those, wire them up, install and maintain them, and there you go.

The actual cost of fuel for a coal plant is not really that big of a deal. It isn't free, but it isn't massive either.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

It takes about 1 pound of coal to make 1 KWh.

http://www.eia.gov/Energyexpla...

Coal costs about $45 per ton delivered to a power plant, or about 2.25 cents per pound, or about 2.2 cents per KWh for the fuel.

Once you have built the plant, selling the power for 3.5 cents per KWh wholesale can work, if you control your costs. It doesn't make building new coal plants very exciting for investors, which is why new coal isn't being built much, but existing coal, with existing plants, makes a lot of economic sense.

I pay 7 cents per kWh for my office power and 10 cents per kWh for my house power, both coal.

That's dirt cheap, among the cheapest in the country. In fact, it's below the average for Texas, which is 11.5 cents. And, are you sure that's the total rate? Most utilities do a tiering system where usage above certain thresholds costs more. For example where I live (Utah, which also has very cheap power, coal and hydro), I pay 8.9 cents per kWh for the first 400 kWh, 11.6 cents for the next 600 kWh and 14.5 cents above that (perhaps there are more tiers; that's as high as I've gone, even in a hot summer and with an electric car charging in the garage).

My payback period, assuming rates are unchanged, would be about 12 years. Without the government subsidies, it jumps to 15, but the system I looked at is warrantied for 25 years (equipment and labor). That unsubsidized payback is marginal, but not bad, assuming good financing and a lowish discount rate. I think it may make even more sense to install just enough solar to ensure that I never buy any power at the 14.5 cent tier, and knock out a chunk of the 11.6 cent tier.

People living on both coasts are paying closer to 20 cents per kWh, and in areas with peak/off-peak pricing it can go as high as 35 cents per kWh on-peak -- which is when the solar panels are generating the most. In those areas solar is a no-brainer even without any subsidies. Given decent financing terms, those peoples' monthly solar loan/lease payment will be lower than their monthly electric bill from day one, and after the system is paid off their power is free.

So... even unsubsidized, solar is a clear win for a huge swath of the population (most of the population lives on the coasts) right now. It's less clear for the rest of the country, but I think carefully-constructed deals can still be a win with subsidies and perhaps without. As solar prices continue dropping and efficiencies continue increasing it will soon be a clear win for almost everyone.

At that point things are going to get really interesting, because the fixed costs of operating and maintaining the grid will start to become a much more significant portion of the utility companies' costs, and all of those grid-connected solar-powered homes will become a drag on the utilities' finances. They'll have to introduce high monthly connection fees which will make solar less attractive. Maybe by then storage will be cheap enough that people will choose to disconnect from the grid, making the utilities' problems even worse, requiring even higher connection fees. State and local government may end up requiring that all residences be connected to the grid and pay the connection fees, or start collecting monies for grid maintenance as part of the property taxes or something.

The USA are an electricity hog: with only 5% of the world population the USA consume 25% of the world electricty.
More to the point, the USA are well behind on "renewals" as a source for energy production (not just electricity but energy overall) at about 11% of the total.
To provide a comparison, consider that solar and wind are much less able at producing electricity when compared to nuclear, coal and natural gas (figures for specific efficiency and load factor of these are available on the web). This might change in favor of solar and wind as technology improves...
In any case, 25 GW of solar capacity is roughly equivalent to 12 TWh/year which is a mere 0.3% of total electricity production in the USA or thereabout... see https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... for more details...

Replying as this is interesting and you posted as AC and some people might miss it.

Gasoline is subsidized (in the U.S.) by about 2 to 2.5 cents/gallon. It's estimated the oil industry receives about $4 billion in subsidies, which sounds like a lot until you realize the country uses 137 billion gallons of gasoline a year and about 40 billion gallons of transportation diesel a year. Dividing $4 billion by that gives a subsidy of a whopping 2.2 cents/gallon.

Gasoline is taxed (in the U.S.) by about 30 cents/gallon. It goes up to about 50 cents/gallon if you include other taxes on the oil industry, not just vehicle fuel taxes.

Gasoline is subsidized (in the U.S.) by about 2 to 2.5 cents/gallon. It's estimated the oil industry receives about $4 billion in subsidies, which sounds like a lot until you realize the country uses 137 billion gallons of gasoline a year and about 40 billion gallons of transportation diesel a year. Dividing $4 billion by that gives a subsidy of a whopping 2.2 cents/gallon.

Gasoline is taxed (in the U.S.) by about 30 cents/gallon. It goes up to about 50 cents/gallon if you include other taxes on the oil industry, not just vehicle fuel taxes.

I think hydro is still cheaper than gas. http://www.eia.gov/electricity...

It looks like the price has gone down in real terms, accounting for inflation: http://www.statista.com/statis...

Colorado is cheaper than average, especially for gas and considering how little renewable energy it has: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=...

Uh huh.... http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a...

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is a measure of a power source which attempts to compare different methods of electricity generation on a comparable basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime. The LCOE can also be regarded as the minimum cost at which electricity must be sold in order to break-even over the lifetime of the project.

Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2020 (as of 2015)
Power generating technology Minimum Average Maximum
NG: Advanced CC with CCS 93.3 100.2 110.8
Advanced Nuclear 91.8 95.2 101

Not to mention there is quite a bit more capacity already existing than what is added. This addition is a few percent of the total out there... Also interesting to see natural gas lumped in with solar and wind...

Right. And if you follow through the links, you'll find a statement that the leak was the equivalent of "burning 300 million gallons of gasoline." That's a nice round number, and I'd bet they rounded up.

Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476, so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles, /13476 = 445236 cars. So that was dishonestly rounded up.

Looking at it another way, the EIA says the US consumed, "In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons..." So, that leak was equivalent to less than 0.22% of US gasoline consumption. That seems to be a more honest indication of the scale.

US Energy Information Administration has data on monthly and yearly capacity factors (energy produced divided by potential capacity). https://www.eia.gov/electricit... Wind Turbines produce about 30 percent of capacity on a monthly and yearly basis. Nuclear energy produces about 90 percent of capacity. Need about 3 times as much wind power energy generating capacity as currently have to surpass current nuclear energy generating capacity. Still have a long way to go for wind.

Table 6.7.B. Capacity Factors for Utility Scale Generators Not Primarily Using Fossil Fuels, January 2013-November 2015: https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

From Jan 2013 to Nov 2015, the lowest capacity factor for nuclear power was 77.6%. Only two months were below 82.5%. The yearly averages were 89.9% and 91.7% for 2013 and 2014.

So EIA statistics refute your claim that you said was based on EIA statistics.

This is an interesting angle:

1) A historical graph of "percentage of households with air conditioning."

2) Historical obesity rates.

Could be totally a coincidental correlation, but interesting.

> Regardless, if wind power production keeps growing this quickly (it likely will because windows power is so cheap--nuclear isn't), then its average production will probably overtake nuclear sooner rather than later. I'm not saying that's good or bad; it's just how it is.

I know it's bad form to introduce facts into this kind of discussion, but here is US Net generation by source:

https://www.eia.gov/electricit... and https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

Since 2005, total US utility generation has remained roughly constant at about 4,100 TeraWatt-hours. As of the 12 months ending November 2015, Coal supplied 1,391; Natural Gas = 1,314; Nuclear = 801, Hydro = 250, Wind = 183, Wood = 42.5 and Photovoltaic = 22.6.

The change since 2005 was Nuclear +20, Hydro -20, Wind +165, and Photovoltaic +22.6. It will take a while for wind to pass nuclear, but Wind+Photovoltaic will pass Hydro in a couple of years. The really big shift in the last decade is Coal -622 and Natural Gas +553. Coal is on it's way out.

> Regardless, if wind power production keeps growing this quickly (it likely will because windows power is so cheap--nuclear isn't), then its average production will probably overtake nuclear sooner rather than later. I'm not saying that's good or bad; it's just how it is.

I know it's bad form to introduce facts into this kind of discussion, but here is US Net generation by source:

https://www.eia.gov/electricit... and https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

Since 2005, total US utility generation has remained roughly constant at about 4,100 TeraWatt-hours. As of the 12 months ending November 2015, Coal supplied 1,391; Natural Gas = 1,314; Nuclear = 801, Hydro = 250, Wind = 183, Wood = 42.5 and Photovoltaic = 22.6.

The change since 2005 was Nuclear +20, Hydro -20, Wind +165, and Photovoltaic +22.6. It will take a while for wind to pass nuclear, but Wind+Photovoltaic will pass Hydro in a couple of years. The really big shift in the last decade is Coal -622 and Natural Gas +553. Coal is on it's way out.

> Wind capacity factor is about 25%.

In the US, in 2014, it was:

Coal 61%
Natural Gas Combined Cycle 48.3%
Nuclear 91.7%
Hydro 37.3%
Wind 34.0%
Photovoltaic 25.9%
Geothermal 74%

Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricit... and https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

> Wind capacity factor is about 25%.

In the US, in 2014, it was:

Coal 61%
Natural Gas Combined Cycle 48.3%
Nuclear 91.7%
Hydro 37.3%
Wind 34.0%
Photovoltaic 25.9%
Geothermal 74%

Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricit... and https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

I don't mess with bitcoin (simply because it's a worthless scam), but 39% of electricity is produced from coal, not a majority.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

US production is a bit off its peak, but it is still at very high levels historically, and has been increasing in the last few weeks

New wells are way down, but production continues to be high and increasing. Continued low prices will eventually result in lower domestic production, but it hasn't begun to happen yet.

Gas turbine costs vary greatly depending on what kind of turbines you are talking about. Anyway, there is no reason to claim that thermonuclear heat to electricity transformation will be in any way similar to gas turbine. Why not more like coal, or even more likely like nuclear? Nuclear fuel cost are also just small fraction of nuclear plant costs but we don't have electricity too cheap to meter yet.

Wind and PV costs are going down rapidly as they scale up, as there is no heat conversion involved, and by the time thermonuclear will be ready for commercialization decades later, they will be below even simple gas turbine costs. Power-to-gas will not need heat conversion either, pilot fuel cell power plants are already built around the world with higher efficiency than any gas turbine. Thermonuclear may make commercial sense for niche applications, but I don't see much sense for widespread use of it on Earth, unless something revolutionary will be invented during these decades.

https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/...

And yet, America's emissions CONTINUE TO FALL.

False.

I'm going to agree with others - net metering doesn't scale beyond a point. Nevada has NOT hit that point by any reasonable measure, they'd still need 10X the solar installs for that.

Hawaii has hit that point. I think they're looking into time of use billing (which requires smart meters), and it's quite likely that night time power in Hawaii is going to end up more expensive than daytime due to the amount of solar. The electric company is having to adjust/update their distribution centers to allow backfeeding from them, because a few neighborhoods can actually go negative now.

Which can actually make batteries(which have been dropping cost too), and other storage solutions viable. When electricity is cheap/free, make sure your hot water tank is 'topped off'. Heck, have a cold water tank for what little AC homes there need, and chill that at that point. Etc...

Hawaii generates electricity by burning oil which has to be brought over by cargo ship. Consequently, they have the most expensive electricity in the U.S. 34 cents/kWh vs a national average of 9.84 cents/kWh.

That's what makes solar economically viable and so common there - not because solar is cheap/free, but because competing electricity sources are so expensive.

Actually, it seems that most of Nevada's electricity comes from burning natural gas, with only ~4% from hydroelectric. "Other renewables", which presumably means solar, already provide three times as much power as hydroelectric.

Subsidy Comparison
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/21/1372244/-New-data-on-energy-subsidies-from-EIA

It's funny when people mention subsidies.

This tells a BIG story. If everyone here who whines about fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies followed that link, they'd have to start whining about something else. The real money column is the last one, Subsidies per MWh. From it we learn that rate/taxpayers in 2010 contributed $935.64 for each solar MWh produced while coal received only $0.74. Any time you see two things equivalent in any way with a 'cost' ratio of 1,264:1, you need to ask, what the hell is going on.

Have a gander at Electricity generation map of the US as of October 15 [XLS]. If you're practical like me you'll have to imagine those green wind blobs are a fifth the size shown, and the yellow solar blobs a third to better judge their intermittent and actual contribution to the human race. For solar (and we are mostly talking utility scale solar I know) this triples the cost ratio to coal to ~3,792:1. And posing that solar produces at 100% for a third of the day is generous.

So in terms of subsidies, is solar worth almost four thousand times as much as coal? Would you be willing to pay 4k as much for it? In certain sense... in 2010 you were. Good thing it was someone else's money. Or was it.

Fuck subsidizing each solar or wind MWh for thousands, or even hundreds, of that same hour's subsidy of coal.

The real clear winner in 2010 was nuclear, at $3.10/MWh produced. Imagine saving the planet from CO2 and coal or weaning us off of natural gas so it can do more chemically productive things for merely 4 times the subsidy than is presently granted coal. If I quoted that same figure for solar you'd be drooling. Someone somewhere is torturing numbers to make the same claim for solar and wind, I can hear their screams.

But never mind my arbitrary 'value' estimates. I consider any energy source that is not running at 100% 24/7 to be a grievous waste of human potential, a financial ruin and (to scale) most likely an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Proponents of micro-gridding claim that if the grid evolves into a cornucopia of local energy sources, the win will be that utility companies will need to contribute less and spend less. But what is truly less? Does that mean that if current generated capacity is roughly equal to Summer or Winter peak, they could ever really shut down a plant? Not really.

Does it mean that the economics of building plants and stringing transmission lines in the first place, which are amortized over many years based on predictable factors NOT wishful flim-flam such as some guess of consumer uptake of solar toys... will improve in any way? Nope, things will get worse.

I seem to go further than anyone else around here, honestly considering this initiative to push tiny intermittent bits of energy into the grid as a threat to our country's stability and survival because it is a distracting and ultimately useless crap-solution to serious problems. One such problem is, what will happen when a series of massive Winter storms fragments the grid, shuts rail and renders every wind turbine and solar panel it touches, useless?

Could those subsidies and money real people spent on some 'pays for itself in 10 years' go-green plan have been better spent? If you went with the grid-sucking/spitting plans that the solar leasing companies push, absolutely. If you put in some extra money to actually power your home from what you produce you might win the battle if the grid goes down for any reason. But you'll be surrounded on all sides by poor people in th

Subsidy Comparison
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/21/1372244/-New-data-on-energy-subsidies-from-EIA

It's funny when people mention subsidies.

This tells a BIG story. If everyone here who whines about fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies followed that link, they'd have to start whining about something else. The real money column is the last one, Subsidies per MWh. From it we learn that rate/taxpayers in 2010 contributed $935.64 for each solar MWh produced while coal received only $0.74. Any time you see two things equivalent in any way with a 'cost' ratio of 1,264:1, you need to ask, what the hell is going on.

Have a gander at Electricity generation map of the US as of October 15 [XLS]. If you're practical like me you'll have to imagine those green wind blobs are a fifth the size shown, and the yellow solar blobs a third to better judge their intermittent and actual contribution to the human race. For solar (and we are mostly talking utility scale solar I know) this triples the cost ratio to coal to ~3,792:1. And posing that solar produces at 100% for a third of the day is generous.

So in terms of subsidies, is solar worth almost four thousand times as much as coal? Would you be willing to pay 4k as much for it? In certain sense... in 2010 you were. Good thing it was someone else's money. Or was it.

Fuck subsidizing each solar or wind MWh for thousands, or even hundreds, of that same hour's subsidy of coal.

The real clear winner in 2010 was nuclear, at $3.10/MWh produced. Imagine saving the planet from CO2 and coal or weaning us off of natural gas so it can do more chemically productive things for merely 4 times the subsidy than is presently granted coal. If I quoted that same figure for solar you'd be drooling. Someone somewhere is torturing numbers to make the same claim for solar and wind, I can hear their screams.

But never mind my arbitrary 'value' estimates. I consider any energy source that is not running at 100% 24/7 to be a grievous waste of human potential, a financial ruin and (to scale) most likely an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Proponents of micro-gridding claim that if the grid evolves into a cornucopia of local energy sources, the win will be that utility companies will need to contribute less and spend less. But what is truly less? Does that mean that if current generated capacity is roughly equal to Summer or Winter peak, they could ever really shut down a plant? Not really.

Does it mean that the economics of building plants and stringing transmission lines in the first place, which are amortized over many years based on predictable factors NOT wishful flim-flam such as some guess of consumer uptake of solar toys... will improve in any way? Nope, things will get worse.

I seem to go further than anyone else around here, honestly considering this initiative to push tiny intermittent bits of energy into the grid as a threat to our country's stability and survival because it is a distracting and ultimately useless crap-solution to serious problems. One such problem is, what will happen when a series of massive Winter storms fragments the grid, shuts rail and renders every wind turbine and solar panel it touches, useless?

Could those subsidies and money real people spent on some 'pays for itself in 10 years' go-green plan have been better spent? If you went with the grid-sucking/spitting plans that the solar leasing companies push, absolutely. If you put in some extra money to actually power your home from what you produce you might win the battle if the grid goes down for any reason. But you'll be surrounded on all sides by poor people in th

There ARE multiple buyers and sellers of wholesale electricity: https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

On a hot summer day my power company has to make a decision. Fire up their diesel generators to supply peak power at some cost to them, or buy from someone else who has either surplus power or cheaper sources of extra power that can be turned on. They track the spot prices for electricity constantly. Maybe they even sell power sometimes to other utilities because the price is sweet enough.

Sorry, I'm not going to trust a Renewable Energy Shill as a source. Here's some real numbers... Levelized Cost of Electricity for new generation sources entering service in 2020: Advanced Nuclear: $95.2/MWh Solar PV: $125.3/MWh Solar Thermal: $239.7/MWh source: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/... And this is ONLY cost, it doesn't factor in that Solar is restricted to sunlight hours, is variable and unpredictable, and therefore it's not a reliable source.

But consider, the power generation for a city is already massive. I'm trying to find a useful example and it's hard, but look at 2013 Rhode Island electricity use in 2013, http://www.eia.gov/electricity... - 7.8 million MWh purchased (if I'm reading the page correctly). That's for about a million state residents.

So to pick a nuclear power plant at relatively random, the Braidwood nuclear plant in Illinois generates about 20 million MWh per year at a construction cost of $5.2 billion. To generate the electricity needs for Rhode Island, you need about 40% of its production capacity. That would cost 40% of the $5.2 billion, or about $2 billion. To pick a coal power plant at random, the colossal W.H. Sammis power plant also generates about 20 million MWh per year, and I couldn't find a construction cost but a recent retrofit cost $1.5 billion.

$1.5 billion or $2 billion buys an awful lot of kites, and an awful lot of land to fly them over.

No, you've misunderstood. Our net electricity consumption stays steady but our gross energy consumption falls. http://www.eia.gov/electricity... Natural gas is more effecient than coal.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...

https://www.ovoenergy.com/guid...

Both have base rates in the high teens, plus taxes, to net at 35-40 cents per kWh retail. The US levelized costs also include these costs (about a third of Denmark or Germany retail costs).

This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.

So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?

Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards. More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,

"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."

Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,

"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."

Looks like natural gas pulls ahead of coal. http://www.eia.gov/electricity...

Show me examples. The only ones I know of are when there is a major grid failure and the plant is shut down as a safety measure. Capacity factor is the ratio of actual production vs theoretical production. Notice how the capacity factor of nuclear is usually very high. That means it does not go down very often.

Right, so about 56 times less CO2 per kilowatt hour than coal-fired plants. -PCP

Assuming it's pure methane, that would be ~23k BTU/lb, or about 2.5B BTU/hour.

At around $1.80 per Million BTU, that's about $4,500 worth of gas leaking out per hour. About $3.2M/month.

Not good, by any means, but I think dollars puts it into better scale.

My references are for natural gas, but some of the same logic will apply for oil. US natural gas storage numbers have been very high, leading to low prices. US producers want prices to go up to justify the costs involved in drilling. An export market will increase demand for their product, increasing the price. There will be increased production at the higher price as well, but I expect new rig counts to be quite price sensitive.

So US producers are pushing for this change to improve their profitability. Other countries will benefit from an additional source of LNG, considering Russia is currently a main natural gas supplier for Europe and the political ramifications that entails.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1,507 MW of new coal plants were added in 2013. However, in the same year 6,861 MW of natural gas and 2,959 of solar was added. For the math challenged that means almost twice as much new solar was added compared to new coal (and over 4 times as much natural gas). There was also 1,032 MW of new wind added. Sure it was only 2/3rd of coal in 2013 (partly because of a subsidy deadline for end of 2012 where 10x the amount of solar was completed in 2012 compared to 2013), but I would bet that new wind projects will continue growing while new coal projects continue to disappear.

While I won't argue the trend, saying twice as much solar as coal was installed in 2013 is a bit disingenuous. That's nameplate capacity, taking capacity factors into account those dead technology coal plants (~60%) will generate more energy then the solar ones will (~25%).

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1,507 MW of new coal plants were added in 2013. However, in the same year 6,861 MW of natural gas and 2,959 of solar was added. For the math challenged that means almost twice as much new solar was added compared to new coal (and over 4 times as much natural gas). There was also 1,032 MW of new wind added.

Please stop! You're giving the Fox News "Germany is sunnier than the US" crowd a cognitive dissonance headache!

People, companies and investors chase dollars. There's a reason people are STILL building those large polluting pieces of shit.

Is it because they're Chinese? Because in the United States, 170 coal power plants have been cancelled over the last 15 years, with only 40 completed, and are 20 still in development and 17 whose current status is unknown. There's also 12 "abandoned" plants but I'm not sure what the difference between abandoned and cancelled is. All of this is according to SourceWatch. If those numbers are accurate it means that Americans aren't really building many new coal plants, and the even the ones they did plan to build, two thirds of them have been cancelled.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1,507 MW of new coal plants were added in 2013. However, in the same year 6,861 MW of natural gas and 2,959 of solar was added. For the math challenged that means almost twice as much new solar was added compared to new coal (and over 4 times as much natural gas). There was also 1,032 MW of new wind added. Sure it was only 2/3rd of coal in 2013 (partly because of a subsidy deadline for end of 2012 where 10x the amount of solar was completed in 2012 compared to 2013), but I would bet that new wind projects will continue growing while new coal projects continue to disappear.

What's fueling renewables are the laws and incentives to install them. But electrical energy demand in the US is almost flat, under 1% growth annually (pg 24 of http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... ). So even if growth of renewables is "exponential", there's simply not a requirement for a lot of them -- unless laws mandate that they replace existing generating capacity. Still, natural gas is expected to provide the bulk of any new electric power generating capacity.

Where are you getting $0.10 per KWH?

http://www.eia.gov/electricity...

The other poster gave some enlightening information on boosters and propellants please give us more details.

I was not addressing boosters or propellants. I was addressing a single point, that "the shear amount of energy" is the problem. There are indeed reasons that getting into orbit is expensive. But the amount of energy, in itself, is not a major cost.

The point would be that the single best thing you could possibly do for the environment in the short to medium term would be to tax gasoline.

Higher gas prices have almost no effect on gas usage: http://www.eia.gov/todayinener...

Furthermore, personal automobiles are only a small percentage of overall carbon emissions, so even if we reduced them to zero, it wouldn't have a big effect, and that is assuming that carbon emissions are even an environmental problem.

In addition, switching from driving to public transit does not actually reduce carbon emissions much.

I call bullshit on that one. 20 Seconds on Google would provide you the evidence [wikipedia.org] that your statement is wrong

What I said is correct, you are just again proving to be a sloppy reader. The Wikipedia page you point to supports my statement.

FALSE. You are correct that to reduce auto use you would have to tax fuel more and that it wouldn't be popular. But you are wrong that everybody becomes poorer. [...] Europe taxes gasoline much much more than the US does and yet their standard of living is pretty similar.

Again, you need to read what I actually said. What I said is not that "taxing gasoline makes people poorer". What I said is that the only way to decrease car usage is to tax people so much (that can be income tax, sales tax, etc.) that their overall disposable income becomes small enough that many of them can't afford cars anymore.

As for your other comparisons with Europe, they are meaningless and naive. There is no such thing as a "European standard of living", nor any kind of common European transportation policy.

Long term we have to find a way to hugely reduce our use of fossil fuels. We are literally and figuratively playing with fire by burning them for power.

You're talking like a Soviet central planner. "We" don't ever find ways. Entrepreneurs and inventors find ways. And since fossil fuels are expensive, entrepreneurs and inventors have been working for more than a century to figure out how to use fossil fuels more efficiently and replace them. These people have all the incentive they need, and there is nothing that government intervention, subsidies, or taxes can do to speed up the process.

In fact, the single best thing government could do to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is to stop blocking the construction of efficient nuclear reactors.

One of the worst things to do is what you suggest, namely massive crony capitalism to create a public transit infrastructure that couldn't possibly result in any substantial reductions in fossil fuel usage.

Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in progress [2013].

Note that NERC's Compliance and Enforcement process is voluntary. This means no one's going to jail for failure to implement these measures... and there are many in the industry who prefer it that way. We have witnessed the growth of the Department of Homeland Security way past its original mandate. Indeed there is a slow motion power grab in progress.

If you distrust large corporations and the consortiums they form then you're already suspicious. But few can argue that the grid is not resilient or well designed. In most cases frequency and voltage give operators all the feedback they need. But it has not ever been shut off completely, and the electrical equivalent of post-9/11 'ground stop' is neither practical nor possible to test black start capability... NERC does do regular computer simulations of country-wide restarts.

So if you are fortunate to live near one of the ~7,304 operational power plants in the United States (for example) and know some people who work there, you might pose these questions:

Has your plant participated in EOP-005 drills?
Has there ever been a country or region-wide drill where procedures are acted out in real time?
Do you feel the time presently devoted to this scenario is adequate, and plans are in place?
Do you have confidence that the grid could be restarted successfully?
Are there any 'old school' approaches to this problem you feel are not addressed or trained adequately?
To what extent are these black start procedures reliant on computers and functional computer networks?
What kinds of grid-wide inter-plant communications are in place for coordination when the grid is down?
Would any coordination efforts rely on carrier networks (telephone, cell, Internet) being up?

The very first BBC episode of Connections The Trigger Effect explores how we have become reliant on modern technology without needing to understand its intricacies, and uses the Northeast Blackout on November 9, 1965 and peoples' reactions to illustrate this.

If Black Start should fail or become delayed indefinitely, National Geographic: American Blackout is a documentary that dramatically explores effects of an extended grid outage. It is a tame outage -- no Winter freeze or volcanic ash --- with cyberattack as its rather specious scenario. At present the operational controls of power plants are diverse and there is a great deal of manual control, and a coordinated attack could only target the grid monitoring systems and communications between plants.

As I understand it the US has about 18GW of solar PV installed capacity with about a 28% capacity factor - so roughly 5 GW of actual power generation.

PV solar capacity factor for the U.S. is about 14.5%, about 18.5% for the desert southwest for fixed-mount panels. This is a physical limitation imposed by geometry, the movement of the sun, and typical weather conditions.

The 28% capacity factor the EIA gives for PV solar is for utility-scale PV solar installations. These generally track the sun and/or use concentrators (for some odd reason, capacity factor for PV with concentrators is calculated based on the panel's max generation without a concentrator - i.e. they can theoretically exceed 100% capacity factor).

Power generation for PV solar in the U.S. for 2015 (Jan-Jul) has been 13,841 GWh. Divide that by the 5113.5 hours in 7 months and you get 2.7 GW average production. That's missing the fall and winter months for the latter half of the year so the average generation by December will be slightly lower than that. Doubling the Jan-Jun production yields an annual average of 2.6 GW. If you divide 2.6 GW by the 18 GW of installed capacity, you get a 14.4% capacity factor as expected.

These two new reactors will generate 77% as much power as all of the country's installed PV solar.

Gas and renewables are the future. Coal is dying. There have been a rash of nuclear plants that are asking for bailouts or shutting down.

On the battery front there is very good news as well:

The Southwest commercial story is particularly interesting: Our original analysis did not indicate that solar-plus-battery systems would be cost effective in the Southwest for several decades. However, as illustrated above, the Tesla announcement enables cost-effective deployment of systems for commercial customers throughout the Southwest in the near term.

Bottom line: Thanks to Tesla’s announcement, in the Northeast and Southwest, an additional 60 million annual customer megawatt-hours cost-effectively can defect from the grid to solar-plus-battery systems more or less immediately, resulting in an additional $12.5 billion in annual utility revenue erosion.

Another factor to consider, which was not included in this comparison, is what might happen should solar prices drop faster than expected. Current prices and updated forecasts are coming in lower than what we modeled as well, meaning the economics could further accelerate.

Where'd you get those numbers? The average U.S. household uses 10,908 kWh/yr.

To better explain, the issue with hydrogen is compressing and cooling a tank to keep hydrogen liquid is very heavy, that is why storing hydrogen in Magnesium hydride is attractive, first because it is non-volatile in that form, and you can store lot without a lot of weight. http://www.eia.gov/todayinener...

An off shore wind plant has a capacity factor between 80% to 130%.

That makes no mathematical sense; the capacity factor is the ratio of average power generated to peak power capability, it's always less than 100%.

No I would not ... because I would buy and resell power from other sources to my customers. ... I contract out 70% of that expected power production (about half of the expected 130% in total). The variation above that 70% I sell on the spot market, undercutting your fossile fuel plant all the time. In the rare case where my production drops below the "expected 70%" I buy the missing power.

Yes, and the prices in the spot market respond to supply and demand. The more people generate wind power, the more you will pay for the "missing power" and the less you will get paid for your surplus power, reflecting exactly the cost to other producers to have power reserves available as a backup for you.

Now you will come and tell me that my wind park will have no wind at some time. Yes, and? My other park has wind. And my third and fourth and all up to my 11th ...

You are right that the market can even out statistical variations between different sites. However, ultimately what matters for power generation is what the minimum of power generated at any one time from all plants within a market is, and for wind and solar, that is near zero for a market like Germany. (If we had lossless transmission, unlimited capacity, and a global electricity market, things could average out better, but alas, we don't.)

Physically impossible. Gas turbines are the most expensive power generation plants. Owners avoid as hell to even use them.

Gas turbines have the highest fuel costs, but they have low capital costs and quick startup. That makes them one of the best complements to wind power and a best case scenario for comparisons, and wind power still isn't competitive.

The nice thing about off shore wind parks is: they have wind 99.99% all the time.

You're mixing up onshore and offshore wind farms. Onshore wind farms are getting to be competitive per MWh with fossil fuel plants if you ignore the investment needed for backup power. Offshore wind farms are not competitive at any time; they are one of the most expensive per MWh technologies, even according to optimistic estimates in favor of green energy, like http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a...

How do you think the market works in Europe? Why is no wind power producer bancrupt?

Europeans made the political decision that they want "green energy", and so they regulated the energy market to keep otherwise uncompetitive producers in business. This is mainly done by regulation distributing the extra costs of wind power (including the cost of providing backup power) across customers. The end result is that Europeans pay for what I originally said, namely the cost of the wind farm itself, plus the cost of the necessary backup capacity.

If that's the political decision Europeans want to make, that's fine. But the European data does not support the idea that wind energy is competitive or that wind farms don't need backup capacity to be built and priced in. If it were competitive, two things would happen simultaneously: it would quickly take over the market without the need for further government support and energy prices in Europe would be below US energy prices. Obviously, that is not the case.

In the U.S., coal-fired power plants operate at around 60% capacity factor, and nuclear plants at nearly 90% (Source.)

The CF for nuclear is much more complex when compared to other sources. The article he refers to only talks about the Capacity Factor whilst it is operating which is dependent on its 'Availability' and 'Utilization' of the power source over it's life time. If it has a capacity factor of 90% and an availability of 50% over its lifetime, as people like to point out in solar's case, then Nuclear's Total Capacity Factor is only 45%. They mention refueling, but for maintenance I've heard of some terrible availability numbers for Nuclear of around 38%.

I'm not sure if that is what you are referring to, however I do know it is typical of the kind of intellectual dis-honesty we see from the nuclear industry's PR machine to 'not mention that bit'. I did a search on nuclear reactor availability and 'utilization' which produced nothing. I'm not saying it isn't there, but it is not as easy to find as 'Capacity Factor'.

The whole 'Capacity Factor' measure used there not only bypasses that the maintenance on some reactor plants can take them offline for years but also fails to point out that the plant becomes a net consumer of electricity to maintain cooling of spent fuel and other things, effectively a negative CF when it is offline.

From my understanding though it goes beyond the refueling cycle, maintenance and, a reactor's availability. It's CF cannot be assessed as simply as other sources because it's it is impacted by its energetic inputs. You have to include and measure energetic inputs such as mining, processing and enriching the ore however you will not have a complete idea of how much energy you have spent on it until after the reactor has been decommissioned, it cools, it is disassembled and, stowed so that the active and activated radio-isotopes don't end up bio-accumulating in the environment.

I think the true measure is Net energy return because it's measuring all of the inputs and outputs. That would be a comparison worth seeing. I think some people can't seem to accept that these losses are a tangible part of the 'Total Lifetime Capacity Factor' of Nuclear energy because they get so fixated on the reactor and none of the supporting technology it requires.

It's great news for Wind power which Investors prefer over Nuclear because wind is a lower risk, more scale-able than nuclear and can have frequent technology improvements over it's life time.

In the U.S., coal-fired power plants operate at around 60% capacity factor, and nuclear plants at nearly 90% (Source.)

The CF for nuclear is much more complex when compared to other sources. The article he refers to only talks about the Capacity Factor whilst it is operating which is dependent on its 'Availability' and 'Utilization' of the power source over it's life time. If it has a capacity factor of 90% and an availability of 50% over its lifetime, as people like to point out in solar's case, then Nuclear's Total Capacity Factor is only 45%. They mention refueling, but for maintenance I've heard of some terrible availability numbers for Nuclear of around 38%.

I'm not sure if that is what you are referring to, however I do know it is typical of the kind of intellectual dis-honesty we see from the nuclear industry's PR machine to 'not mention that bit'. I did a search on nuclear reactor availability and 'utilization' which produced nothing. I'm not saying it isn't there, but it is not as easy to find as 'Capacity Factor'.

The whole 'Capacity Factor' measure used there not only bypasses that the maintenance on some reactor plants can take them offline for years but also fails to point out that the plant becomes a net consumer of electricity to maintain cooling of spent fuel and other things, effectively a negative CF when it is offline.

From my understanding though it goes beyond the refueling cycle, maintenance and, a reactor's availability. It's CF cannot be assessed as simply as other sources because it's it is impacted by its energetic inputs. You have to include and measure energetic inputs such as mining, processing and enriching the ore however you will not have a complete idea of how much energy you have spent on it until after the reactor has been decommissioned, it cools, it is disassembled and, stowed so that the active and activated radio-isotopes don't end up bio-accumulating in the environment.

I think the true measure is Net energy return because it's measuring all of the inputs and outputs. That would be a comparison worth seeing. I think some people can't seem to accept that these losses are a tangible part of the 'Total Lifetime Capacity Factor' of Nuclear energy because they get so fixated on the reactor and none of the supporting technology it requires.

It's great news for Wind power which Investors prefer over Nuclear because wind is a lower risk, more scale-able than nuclear and can have frequent technology improvements over it's life time.