Slashdot Mirror
Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant
IceDiver writes "According to an article in the Toronto Star, an Ontario company has been given approval to build a 40MW solar power plant near Sarnia in Southwestern Ontario. This is enough power for about 10,000 homes. The plant will cover 365 hectares (1.4 sq. miles) and is to be operational by 2010. OptiSolar, the company building the plant, claims to have developed a way to mass produce the solar panels at a dramatically reduced cost, making the plant competitive with other forms of power generation. 'Compared to coal, nuclear power, even wind, solar's squeaky-clean image comes at a high price. OptiSolar is selling the electricity to the province under its new standard offer program, which pays a premium for electricity that comes from small-scale renewable projects. In the case of wind, it's 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar fetches 42 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly four times as much.'"
6 cents.
I was shopping for home improvement stuff today and I put my hand on a 8x3 huge sheet of granite and was amazed at how much energy and heat was in that relatively thin piece. It got me to thinking why there has never been a real push for solar energy technology. Yes, in the past it has been cost prohibitive, but I guess I am asking why there has never been a "nuclear" level push behind solar tech and why isn't there a real push now that we have the technology available? I mean, come on, it's free, endless* energy! :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Well hopefully economy of scale blah blah cheap enough for every home.
Cool. How do I get into this business of selling power to Ontario?
"to power 10,000 homes ... the plant will cover 365 hectares"
It appears the footprint per house of the solar panels is actually less than the footprint of a house by itself. Surely it should be mandatory/make sense for compulsary solar panelling on houses?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I for one welcome our new solar death ray Canadian overlords.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
If I converted to this, it would ramp my annual bill from $480 to $3200. Since we haven't had a significant nuclear accident since the Carter administration, which even then affected roughly NO ONE, I'll stick with my current supplier, thanks.
Photovoltaic is an appropriate technology for the private rooftops of wealthy environmentally-minded people. They don't mind a 20 year ROI, because they're installing the panels to feel good about making a difference. I, as a consumer of electricity, do not want to pay $0.42/kWh: that's probably one of the most expensive electricity sources in north america.
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically be expected to scale... but we know enough about conventional PV cells that we can state, with some confidence, that only a major research breakthrough is ever going to make them a viable large-scale power source.
The nearby nuclear power plant here has three reactors, each of which can generate over 1100MW (one reactor is currently off-line but is on schedule to be on-line next month, now capable of up to 1280MW). Even closer to my house is the dam that can generate over 140MW.
The question that has been bugging me for a long time is: Is it even possible for us to use only renewable energy sources? I'm almost convinced we will never get enough energy out of renewable sources. Even now there are stories in the newspapers about locals having not enough food and water because their resources are being used for the production of alcohol for car fuel. Only a tiny amount of the earth's car poulation uses alcohol as (constituent of) its fuel. What if every car on earth has to run on bio fuel? We won't have any land left for producing food. Covering the roof of your house in solar panels gives you just enough energy to power only your house, or maybe a bit more. Covering the roof of an appartment- or office building in solar panels will give nowhere near enough energy to power the building. We will have to start making energy-efficient appliances fast, and start to use our resources sparingly, or we will have big problems in the future.
-- Cheers!
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Oops -- I forgot the URL to the programs website, for the interested:
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/sop/
Yaz.
While I agree that its nice to see alternative generation being developed, you have to realize that those costs aren't what the consumer pays. Thats just the price they sell the power to the government for, its a rich subsidy for the power generators. The consumers don't pay anywhere near that, they pay the average market rate.
And for all those who mention anything along the lines of it being low production due to daylight hours, please look at a map. Sarnia is only like 30-40 miles from Detroit. So unless you also believe that the Detroit area is in total darkness 8 months a year, or are just to ignorant to care, your off on the product amount due to daylight hours.
and people turn on their lights, everyone is screwed?
i don't mind alternative powersources, but they all just end up being very unreliable for normal usage.
i however have read an article where they propose fission/fusion for use for the consumers, and other sources for the generation of hydrogen (for when fossil fuels run out). for such uses, reliability isn't such a problem, it'll even out, and a little dip is no problem.
i just can't understand why people are so keen on bringing unreliable sources into the powergrid... as if it isn't hard enough te keep everything working as it is...
Why use photovoltaic panels for a power plant? They're nice for small applications, or for homes, but if you're building a power plant, something like the Solar Energy Generating Systems in the Mojave Desert makes more sense. They make 165MW and I believe only take 1,000 acres (only slightly more than the 365 hectares of this one). They've already been in operation over 20 years, but there doesn't seem to be anyone doing something similar.
SEGS
FTA: The Sarnia solar farm will be enormous by comparison, stretching across nearly 365 hectares, the equivalent of 419 Canadian football fields.
For you metric-challenged Americans, that equates to about 25.74 Libraries of Congresses.
I sure hope that they didn't enable disasters or the space monster might take the solar plant out. Anyway, it'll fall down in exactly 10 years, so what's the point?
Well I'd say that they think getting cleaner energy is worth the price difference.
If I was solely in pursuit of the 'almighty buck' I'd have suggested coal. Coal, with minimal pollution controls would probably run $.25/watt capacity. Fuel costs would be higher, of course. With newest generation pollution control technology costs increase to the point that a minor rise in coal costs would make nuclear cheaper even in the short run.
I'd say that the difference between nuclear and solar isn't enough to justify spending eight or so times as much on it. Heck, going by the picture you'd have quite a bit of yard maintenance to do, and unless they're doing that with electric mowers it'd end up being about as carbon neutral as nuclear. Especially if, like I said, they build a breeder/IFR reactor and start using waste fuel from other plants to power the thing. That'd be like building a garbage fired power plant. Getting rid of waste while creating economic gains. Win-Win.
I don't read AC A human right
solar reminds me of the japanese business model of charging nothing for printers then raping you on the refills. they scream FREE SUN SHINE... subtitle "cost of setup wil bankrupt you". until a dramaticly cheap and cleaner to produce solar panel comes along, it's just a pipe dream
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Somebody figured out that sand is cheap!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Still, there's the little problem regarding nuclear waste. What the hell are we going to do with it?
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Not much is known about OptiSolar, though many of its private investors are Canadian. It was co-founded by Randy Goldstein and Phil Rettger, who previously founded the Calgary-based oil sands technology and project developer Opti Canada Inc.
This is interesting, as Opti is currently finishing their Long Lake facility which uses new technology for heavy oil upgrading and energy-saving in addition to the SAGD extraction method. Part of the $5 billion project is a huge oxygen plant which will help cleanly burn otherwise wasted tailings. I'm hoping that the recent cost overruns are not due to the fact that I worked on the project.
It's not really "cleaner," because it's not producing nearly as much power as the nuclear plant would.
The nuclear plant could give far, far many more homes carbon-neutral power -- the wind plant is going to give it to just a few, while the rest are still going to be stuck on highly polluting fossil fuel generation. When you factor all that fossil fuel into the "solar" column, which you need to, in order to produce the same amount of power from a finite investment in plants, it's not very clean at all.
It's nothing but a very expensive feel-good measure.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
To build nuclear bombs for use in holy/anti-"terrorism" wars?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I agree with you on the nuclear, however I don't think we should be so quick to put hydroelectric projects in the "non-polluting" column. They are actually hideously polluting, and unfortunately they create the sort of insidious pollution that's hard to get anyone to take responsibility for, and nearly impossible to reverse or clean up without demolishing the dam.
By converting a free-flowing river or stream into a pool of water, you cause the level of dissolved oxygen in it to go down; this alters the balance of organisms in it (both of the micro and macro variety), and lead to a buildup of organic pollutants which would normally be eliminated naturally. (Fertilizer runoff and industrial pollutants are the big ones, but even natural products can be toxic when they're not eliminated as they should be.)
There really is no free lunch -- while it could be argued that destroying a river is preferable than spewing toxic gasses into the atmosphere, hydropower is certainly not "clean" by any measure.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think I need to inject some common sense into the arguments here. Yes, with current technology and costs, nuclear power may be cheaper.
But think about it for a moment : in the long run (as in next 10-20 years), what form of energy is subject to the biggest reduction in costs?
Solar : You make the panels. As soon as the technology stabilizes and we finally agree on a dirt cheap, efficient form of panel (there's about 20 different methods talked about) you build a plant that makes acres of it all day long. Every piece exactly like all the others. Fully automated. You truck them to a spot in barren wasteland, and dump them. Plug them in. A simple robot washes the grit off every now and then.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a factor of TEN reduction in cost. After all, the raw materials are low grade silicon wafers and energy (which can be supplied by panels produced by the plant itself...)
As for land : I calculated that at 10% net efficiency, we would need a 200x200 mile area of Arizona to power the entire United States. That includes all the energy used for transportation, and losses used in spinning up energy accumulator devices. That land currently sits idle, and while is a lot of area, there's still plenty of Arizona left (I used google earth to check this)
Nuclear : while solar requires only a handful of educated people, and can't be screwed up catostrophically, nuclear will ALWAYS require a lot of skilled labor to handle and high liability. Even the most dummy proof pebble ped reactor design would still need all sorts of care to handle the fuel and maintainence on the plant. You can't cut corners on nuclear. You can't mass produce
the plants as easily.
Everything that comes into proximity of the reactor becomes nuclear waste. It all has to be carefully handled. There's hazardous environments, especially for a plant that does reprocessing, where hot spent fuel has to be handled and worked with.
I like nuclear power : it's complex and cool and involves all sorts of neat things. Fusion is even cooler. But realistically, for the forseeable future solar is a MUCH better prospect. I believe had a few billion been sunk into a robotic factory to manufacture solar panels, we would not even be having this debate.
(when I say forseeable...I mean it. There's actually a VASTLY more efficient way to do interplanetary, and even interstellar, travel that doesn't involve fusion or fission plants...)
It's the principle of the thing if nothing else. Canada has continually taken steps to try to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. Is it impossible to go without completely? Probably. Is it going to be a perfect solution to built one small solar field? Probably not. However it does set a precedent that a government can successfully become involved in solar electricity and encourage citizens to take action. It provides the public with a way to act instead of just having enviro-bookmarks.
Make Demonade.
So some people feel so guilty about using power, they are willing to pay 4x as much?
But without a new generation of reactors with a more complete fuel cycle or those that use thorium as fuel, the uranium will be converted to high level radioactive waste with only one one hundredth of it energy having been extracted, never mind the fraction actually converted to a electricity. Nuclear is nice, but is a stop gap, however effective and green a stop-gap it may be.
Wind, Tide, Geothermal, Solar, Fusion. These have a future. Or at least one that will out live my children's children.
Yes, Canada is just one big wasteland. Its people live in igloos and spend their time putting mayonnaise on the walruses they rely on for survival. The igloos are a perfect defense against flying hockey pucks which periodically soar across the Canadian landscape. Also, we can't trust their prescription drugs to be of the same quality as American drugs.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Self feeding cycle or some such. If no one ever stands to make a profit from the safe disposal/containment/reuse of nuclear waste and other irradiated materials, the problem of disposal will never be solved. If there is a significant need there will be some greedy sob will find a way to fill it and get filthy rich doing so.
You mad
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers. And open battery storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
My 2c worth.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Canada is probably well placed to implement nuclear power plants as it has a good supply of uranium.
Given a base level of nuclear generation of about the same as today, or a bit more, there are economically extractable supplies of uranium for about 100 years at that price (although does that price include plant creation and decomissioning costs?).
If the usage of nuclear power expands and supplies of uranium do not increase then there is the possibility that the fuel will not last 100 years (meaning decommissioning costs become a larger proportion of the generation costs, forcing them up) and that the cost of uranium increases rapidly (it has been doing so, but largely because new mining infrastructure has been delayed). Increasing costs will probably mean investment in other uranium mining, but will increase overall generation costs.
Fast breeding or thorium reactors are possible, but if the generation infrastructure is not set up for these initially then it will mean some expensive changes later on, with more capital costs to take account of in the generation costs. Fast breeding also represents the threat of nuclear weapon proliferation. It does mean reduced high level waste volumes, though (although there is still a lot of lower level waste - containment vessels and the like, and this sheer volume might present a problem in the scenario of vastly expanded nuclear generation.).
I think nuclear power has a place for the future, but like any power generation it won't be a universal panacea. I can see it being very useful for base load, or load overnight, although we might find that electricity ends up being more expensive overnight if solar provides a significant proportion of generation capacity and we might need to become more diurnal. Who knows.
In regards to solar there are two options here. One is to use solar thermal where appropriate - e.g. heat water to provide hot water in homes. That's the one that should go on roofs. The hot water provides a storage medium too for overnight use. The other is quantum dot technology. If this pans out it could boost PV efficiency to something around 40% but at much reduced cost compared to the silicon PV. The biggest problem here is making it reliable for sufficiently large areas. Even then PV will only be part of the overall solution, but if it is cheap and provides some of the load it can mean a reduction in requirements from other sources. It might also mean that you could embed it in other things so that your laptop or ipod can supplement or recharge its battery from sunlight and things of this nature. You can get things like personal FM radios that have solar panels, but the size, weight and cost of these parts could be reduced.
Negawatts are going to be the really important factor. New housing needs to be built to far better standards of insulation, for example, and it isn't rocket science, or even particularly expensive, to do so. It might be that people will need to put on a sweater in the house in winter too. It's not particularly a hardship. Built with high levels of insulation and you don't necessarily need to even do that or heat a house. The big problem will be the existing stocks of houses and how to refit them. Some forms of insulation are easy to refit, but building up walls to the sort of levels you can get from straw bale construction/insulation is much more difficult. You could also view straw bale construction as a form of carbon sequestration. A well insulated house has a more constant temperature so it might be more pleasant to live in anyway. Negawatts also encompass other resource usage - for example reduced treated water usage (e.g. shower rather than use the bath, capture rainwater in a water butt for watering the garden, use grey water to flush the toilet) means less energy required to treat water.
Negawatts (i.e. reduced consumption) make the problem of providing new generation capacity that much easier. It might mean that as time goes on there are some lifestyle changes, although the thing to aim at is a good standard, and even more so a good quality of life going on into the future. Better to plan ahead for as smooth a transition as possible.
1,000 watts per square meter of direct normal solar radiation strike the earth's surface at sea level. That's a lot of raw energy hitting roof tops. Then the issue is converting it. Solar cells have been stuck at 15% or less conversion efficiency for decades with no real breakthrough on the horizon to improve upon that. Still, an average house with perhaps 100 square meters of roof area could generate far more engergy than it needs (during the day). Problem is, solar cells are still very expensive to manufacture, with no cost breathroughs significant enough to really change the economics.
Solar concentrating power is far cheaper. For example, the system from Stirling Energy Systems http://www.stirlingenergy.com/ once in production will produce electricity that is very cost competitive with electricity from fossil fuel fired plants. The technology is quite cool. A sun-tracking parabolic dish concentrates sunlight on the heater head of a Stirling engine. Each system produces 25kW and is about the same mass, complexity and materials as a mid-size automobile - in mass production it would cost about the same as a car. Pilot installations of the systems have been running for more than a decade. It's not suitable for roof tops, however, since it is a bit large and noisy. San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison both have contracts now to build large installations using this system.
It seems strange to me that most of the attention is still on non-economical solar cell based systems when a truly viable solution is already available.
Khao Yai Land
the US has hardly used any of the giant stockpile they have, let along any other country. do we REALLY need more?
This program recognizes the higher value of peak power production and this pays a premium (in Canadian dollars) for power as it is delivered to the grid. There is also a premium for non-polluting energy here. In some places in the US (in 41 states) utlities are required to credit the extra power you produce yourself at retail rates. If there is no time-of-use metering, then there is no particular recognition of solar power's timely production profile. This way of doing things is called net metering http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/net-metering.h tml.
s -selling-solar.html.
If your father lives in a net metering state, he might be interested in an in between solution of renting the equipment rather than renting out his roof. This can be done in a way that fixes the rates for up to 25 years, has maintenance included, and does not have the big upfront cost of purchasing a system. You can learn more about this by following the links at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Isn't 1.4 square miles of land a bit ridiculous for 10,000 homes? I mean - that's a powerplant half the size of my hometown to power an area not even twice as big. Solar technology still has a long way to go in terms of energy density. At least with coal there are some options to make it really quite a clean, reliable process - and for now, it's also a good way to get the US off of foreign fuel sources (we have enough to power the entire country for the next 150 years easily). See these links:
Fischer-Tropsch Reactions
The Ohio Coal Research Center at Ohio University, and their biosequestration project (bacteria eats the SOx and NOx out of the emissions, down to the PPB level (PDF warning)
Coal Gasification plants are going in in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. - PDF Warning
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
Sure... you always start like that, and then one turn before the end you get the usual message "Cyrus of the Persian civilization has completed the Great Solar Power Plant. You cannot continue production of the Great Solar Power Plant in Ottawa. The production is converted to 256M$".
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
In the area of Greece my family is from in the Prefecture Lakonia(Peloponnese) most homes have solar thermal heaters for heating water. They are economical compared regular boilers as alot of homes have them.
Here is what one of the units looks like:
http://www.intersolar.gr/en/systems.htm
It's a huge chunk of space set up to power 10,000 homes, when it's a safe bet that the rooftops of 10,000 homes have more surface area than this power plant already. Some of them won't have a clear view of the sky, and some of them will be at lousy angles-- but I'm sure you could do it.
I suppose centralizing it makes maintenance easier, though. Things like this seem like they would make more sense in the southwestern US. I'm sure we could spare a few square miles of desert, and the power production would be much, much higher.
Solar cells and wind turbines rely on backup by conventional power plants because they cannot produce electricity on demand. Concentrating Solar Power (i.e. solar thermal electricity generation) differs fundamentally because the collected heat can be stored relatively cheaply and used to sustain production during the night. Occasionally the storage will be insufficient, in those cases a simple fossil fueled boiler can temporarily take care of the steam supply for the turbine. Large scale deployment of Concentrating Solar Power (i.e. solar thermal electricity generation) could bring the cost down to less than 6$c/kWh within 20 years. High Voltage DC technology for economical transportation of electricity over very large distances is already available. It's been said before but bears repeating that a small part of the worlds deserts can capture enough solar power to satisfy the worlds total energy demand for transport, heating as well as electricity. There is every reason to pump at least as much taxpayers money into the deployment of CSP as is now the case for other renewables. The biggest hurdle for governments and investors is the fact that in order to be economical, CSP plants must be big (in the order of 100 MW) and situated in deserts, which for most countries means outside their own borders and therefore requires close international cooperation. Ignorance of technology in general and CSP in particular of the media, politicians and the public at large is the other big problem. Most of them still think there is only one kind of solar power and in several years of lobbying for CSP I have found that you have to explain the basics two, three or even more times before the message begins to percolate through to the brain. There is plenty of solid information about CSP all over the www. If you can read Dutch, take a look at our website: www.gezen.nl
Oh-oh! Could this be a bad thing? Very cold Earth, all covered in solar panels?
The lame part about being a Canadian is I have to watch the government throw away money at these circus freaks. We already have an excellent power generation scheme: it's called Hydro! It's clean, it's cheap and we have tons of water up here. The one place they should be sticking solar panels and wind generators is the north pole with its powerful storms and illumination cycle, but the transport losses would be too great to bring all that juice down to civilization.
This OptiSolar outfit is just yet another farmer sucking on the cash cow's tit.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Nuclear power serves mainly as a red herring that people who don't want to change anything wave around to criticize environmentalists.
Quite the contrary: the high temperature heat collected by CSP systems (Concentrating Solar Power) can be stored for later use in cheap media such as gravel. Storage for upkeep of electricity production during the night is economically feasible, storage for bridging longer periods is not. It is cheaper to have a fuel-fired auxiliary boiler in the system for the occasional instances when the stored heat is exhausted.
Put it in an IFR?
Ok, so then what is going to happen in the winter? How do they protect this thing from snow? (I live in Ontario.)
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
Depends on what you call standard technology.
The Candu nuclear reactor design (primarily used in Canada, but also in a few other countries) does not require enrichment at all.
What sort of crazy measurement is that? In God-given units, that's it's 90.1934642 square furlongs or 144,309.543 square rods.
Well no shit. They're made from mayonnaise and walrus.
According to their sparse web page, they are using very thin film solar panels. No indication of which brand, but perhaps they will be purchasing nanosolar's very thin film output, which is just now ramping up production? If so, good idea, we need economies of scale manufacturing to get prices dropped. We also need to find a way around the silicon demand bottleneck, the boom in gadgets (many of them short term throw away energy consuming-only devices like subsidized cellphones, etc) using chips has held back price drops for solar to this point in time to a huge degree.
One cool thing about solar and prices is that it is much easier to do a forward projection on long term cost, because the fuel is free. You can't do that with conventional sources, *including* uranium (check prices there over last two years for example). When you consider decades long runs after initial installation, that is a nice long term "locked in" cost. In the beginning higher, sure, long term? Feeling lucky? Think all the other conventional fuel costs are going to magically stay at today's prices? What will be the cost of coal/uranium/oil/natgas be in 40 years? Heck, try FOUR years for that matter, given today's geopolitical climate. Get something like an expanded middle east war, no one has any real clue what oil prices might shoot to in the short term, $100 to $200 a barrel, possibly in a very short time frame, and as the price of oil goes, so go all the other sources of energy, they are roughly tied together.
And I don't want to hear about subsidized stuff either, you think that huge military presence in the middle east is just a COINCIDENCE with all that oil being there? Right off the bat in the US add another trillion dollars for the price of energy right now when making comparisons (that is projected cost of the iraq war run out just a few more years from now, plus what has already been spent). Now add in what conventional fuels burning has added to the climate change deal, a TON more "hidden costs" you don't see reflected in your monthly bill-yet, but that's changing fast now. That will be changing fast as the world starts addressing the mass greenhouse gas pollution caused by coal burning and oil burning etc. That is *soon* to be a lot more expensive, just from that angle, and guess who is going to pay for it? That's right, YOU. Does your local electric utility offer you a 20 year fixed price contract, once it starts costing a lot more to burn that coal? Oh ya, they DON'T, do they. With solar, right now today, you can get that. How about your local gas station, can you get a locked in multi decade price fix for a gallon of gas right now? Nope.... with solar and a switch to electric vehicles, you CAN get that. And if they design the battery bank intelligently, you can swap that out as tech advances make it cheaper and better. The electric drive train should last for decades really, the maintenance on electrics is absurdly low compared to ICE.
People and municipalities and companies who are going to solar and wind and cheap biofuels will be the big winners economically in the future, and this isn't even all that hard to see either. Staying tied to finite and quite dirty/dangerous mass energy resources that need to be dug up (and fought over) will just keep going up in cost, while the renewables will keep dropping. Again, feeling lucky? Or can you look at the real world and notice the trends? This quarter's profits, or next decade's and further out?
I'm looking at my latest hydro bill right now, it says I'm paying .055 cents per kilowatt hour & were paying this company .42 cents per kilowatt hour. Is it just me or is there something wrong with this picture?
I suppose the loss will simply be added to the Hydro One debt. Which as some of you already know is another charge we pay on our hydro bills each month, wonderful!
Can't wait for all the Smart Meters to be installed by the end of the year so I can pay all the new charges they'll be bringing. A monthly fee of between $4 & $10 for the next 5 years just to pay for them. Increased administration charge on bill of between $8 to $15 a month, needed by our local utilities to implement & run the Smart Meter program.
All so we can watch live via the web the power were consuming, guess it was to difficult to go outside & look at our meters!
I'd provide the link to the smart Meter info but Toronto hydro pulled the web page for some strange reason! I suppose it's just one of those hidden costs that they didn't want us to find out about until it's to late!
The problem I have with nuclear power is that it is woefully inefficient. Using nuclear fission to generate steam that drives a turbine to produce electricity seems wasteful to me.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission. Then I'd consider it efficient use.
IMO, Canada is the worst place to build a solar panel facility. During the winter months, it probably gets less than 10 hours of sunlight a day. Basically, they should look to other sources of energy, instead of wasting tax payers money on such projects.
One of two of our biggest problems stopping AE, is that our grid is geared to central power, focused users. Instead, we need a truely distributed grid and one that is more efficient than what we have. The other issue is that we have no storage. Hydrogen is a total joke. Super capacitors are coming along but need help (In particular, MIT's idea could use some major help). Thermal sounds like a great one.
The 2 research focuses would have the advantage of helping to encourage de-monopolizations of the power companies. In addition, it would allow for energy to be available to local areas when major plant outings occur.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Due to nonproliferation concerns, substantial increase in worldwide nuclear power use is a non-starter. It just isn't going to happen, so give it up and focus on alternative technologies. The hippies and environmentalists aren't driving this, the neocons are. If nuclear power were a viable option, we wouldn't be going batshit over Iran and its little nuclear industry.
They are going batshit over Iran because Iran has deliberately, repeatedly violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran signed the NPT of its own free will. The NPT allows signatories to develop nuclear technology, provided that they declare their activities, and submit to inspections.
Iran has deliberately violated the NPT by concealing & obfuscating its nuclear program for decades.
Now, why would a country with large petroleum reserves, and every right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes deliberately violate the NPT? There is only one answer - to make nuclear bombs.
Now, combine nuclear bombs with with the religious kooks who run Iran and a penchant for suicide bombing and you have the makings of a very bad situation.
Now imagine every other country on earth demanding to control their own nuclear infrastructure: This isn't ever going be allowed to happen.
They already control their own nuclear infrastructure. Why is it that you don't worry about Canada, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea or Italy developing nuclear bombs? They too are signatories to the NPT. But they live up to their NPT obligations, and don't have a government policy of "death to (country)", unlike Iran.
For that you need the Lunar power panels. Unfortunately those only work at night half the time. They yield even less power per acre unless they're installed on the moon directly, and then cabling becomes an issue.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is, for the next 50-100 years it's not so much a question of fission vs. solar, as it is a question of fission vs. coal. That's the near-term question that should be addressed now.
In contrast, 500 years from now is a long while off. We really shouldn't worry about it in too much detail. Sufficient for the day is its own evil, and all that.
I mean, certainly it is important not to screw things up gratuitously. But it's unreasonable to ask us to optimize the future much beyond that. A person in 1507 AD trying to project the technological and industrial concerns of the day would not get an accurate picture of what concerns us in 2007 AD.
When we use U235 now, it will be scarcer and more expensive in the future, which can be interpreted with good justification as a significant opportunity cost. But on the other hand, if we make a deliberate effort to use solar power instead to generate the same amount of electricity, there will be an increased cost in human effort, land area, etc., all of which could have been used instead in other ways, and which is also an opportunity cost. This could be a big cost to the future if innovation is impacted.
For example, if Intel, AMD, IBM, etc. have to pay higher prices for electricity, then they will probably spend less money on R&D, and processors of the future will be slower and less efficient than they otherwise could have been, etc.
gg
So what? What does a stinking piece of paper have to do with anything? The fact of the matter is, any country that has nuclear plants has the capability to start a nuclear program. The more plants, the easier it is to hide. Every country has at least some nationalists that would love to develop a nuclear capability of their own. These people often tend to gravitate towards government or military careers where they can act on their sentiments.
If nuclear power is The Answer (tm) to the world's energy supply, then every country will eventually have to be allowed to have their own nuclear industry. The current major powers are never going to implement policies that allow that to happen, so nuclear power is not be The Answer.
Wow, there are at least eight "trustworthy" countries out of a couple of hundred. BTW, if N. Korea doesn't stop, it's not unlikely that you'll have to eventually scratch Japan off of your list.
Even if you could somehow pinpoint which countries are "trustworthy" now, political climates shift all the time. Remember, at one time we thought that Pakistan was trustworthy enough to provide them with nuclear reactors. Once India tested a nuke, that all changed in a hurry.
Actually, if we have to pay higher prices for electricity, then Intel, AMD, IBM, etc. would pay more money on R&D, making the processors more efficient. It is high prices who drive innovation, not low prices. Because if you can get it cheap, why bother making it better? That's pretty much the reason why, for example, the ancient roman empire didn't invent steam engines and all the rest, starting an industrial revolution about 200 BCE: They had slaves who did that work cheaper than it would cost to develop the technology to sufficient maturity.
The power absorbed ends up as heat. You could be either increasing or decreasing albedo when you install a solar panel. If you do it on a white roof, then less energy will be reflected to space, on a black roof, more energy will be reflected to space, but both what is absorbed in the panel and what is converted to electricity turn to heat.s -selling-solar.html
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Solar power with in installation fee: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The conclusion is that the cost of nuclear power falls in the range: "3 cents per kilowatt hour to nearly 14 cents per kilowatt hour".
Note the word "cost."
Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nope. Ontario is paying 42 cents per kWh. That does not mean that solar power generation costs 42 cents per kWh. Indeed, I highly doubt that the investors in this project would be interested if there is no room for profit.
According to this link, actual costs for solar power generation are currently 20 to 30 cents per kWh:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm
Martin
Every time you see someone denounce renewable energy systems, you know one of two things: they are either ignorant of economics, or they have a vested interest in profiting from societies willingness to pay the externalized costs of the status quo.
No, some people are intelligent and moral enough to know that even if you don't pay 4x as much today by using coal, your children and your grandchildren will be paying 10 or 20x as much in the future to clean up the fucking mess you are making ignoring the side effects of that "cheap" energy today. Economics is a well documented field of study, I suggest you look into it before calling people who are smarter than you, names. You may also want to talk to a priest or perhaps an applied ethicist (if you are an atheist) to find out why it is wrong to burden your children with paying for your exorbitant lifestyle.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000?
Your points are valid, but sometimes we need to do what makes most sense now so that we can develop what makes most sense later. I don't think we'll be using U235 fission in the year 3000. Hopefully we'll have come up with fusion, or solar cells that are efficient enough not to take 1.4 sq miles of land for a measly 40 MW.
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
It is heavily used all over the world. And for the last 50 years, it has worked wonderfully. The problem is that the world is about to lose upwards of a 1/5 of their good freshwater. Top on that the increase in evaporation lose (here in the American West, we are expected to lose about 1/10 to 1/5 of our water to evaporation), and suddenly, the costs of hydro batteries become prohibitive. And throughout S.A, Africa, and Australia, Do not even think about it. Instead, other solutions need to be found and used. As I have pointed out elsewhere, one of my favorite short-term solution is thermal. In this case, it can be used by existing plants(coal, gas, oil, and nukes) to extend their capabilities, perhaps even double it. The waste heat can be ran through a group of salt to increase their temps. From this, the sun can push it MUCH higher. This has the advantage that a little bit of sun goes a LONG ways. The nice thing is that it can even be modified so that excess electricity can heat the salts, the final way. So come summer months, the base plant is ran full out and is used to charge the salts at night. In addition, as AE is brought on-line, any excess electricy can be stored in the salts in way of heat. How cheap is it? Much cheaper than hydro ONCE it is in full production.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission. Then I'd consider it efficient use. Your grasp of physics is mind boggling. Nuclear is inefficient because it doesn't strip off electrons and feed them into the wire directly? You're completely daft. Electricity isn't a about supplying electrons, it's about moving them.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Fission uses neutrons which do have a finite life time so I suppose that with a very big plant and some magnets you could extract a current when they decay. The gamma radiation might be converted to a current as well since Compton scattering (by definition) transfers momentum to electrons. I kind of suspect you'll get more of what you want with coal http://www.sri.com/news/releases/11-11-05.html. That said, I feel that renewable energy kind of closes down options for nuclear power generation http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-renewables -displace-nukes-first.html.s -selling-solar.html
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Get solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
I see lots of arguing about the cost of the power, but isn't this a test facility? As far as I'm concerned, this is an R&D project more than it is an effort to increase electricity production in Ontario (in the short term). I don't think there are plans to open up a whole bunch of these facilities at $0.42/kWh, though I guess I could be wrong. If you're going to criticize this power station for that reason, then I think there are a lot of projects that are a lot more worth of criticism. I worked in a nuclear fusion research facility in Saskatoon for a couple of years on a Tokamak, and let me tell you that that little multi-million dollar machine has produced all of zero electricity. I have a friend who works for AECL on advanced fission fuel technology and the stuff he's working on is not intended for electricity production for years. Why not criticize these as they're also being paid for by tax payers. I think some people are being a little short sighted.
I'm just trying to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Once solar power becomes competitive with other energy sources, imagine the potential economic potential of countries around the Sahara desert. It might help to compensate for the water shortage ..
One would have to find a way to efficiently protect the solar panels from sandstorms, though.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
"I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a factor of TEN reduction in cost. After all, the raw materials are low grade silicon wafers and energy (which can be supplied by panels produced by the plant itself...)
As for land : I calculated that at 10% net efficiency, we would need a 200x200 mile area of Arizona to power the entire United States. That includes all the energy used for transportation, and losses used in spinning up energy accumulator devices. That land currently sits idle, and while is a lot of area, there's still plenty of Arizona left (I used google earth to check this)"
This is really irrelevant---200x200 miles is absolutely totally ginormous for any sort of engineered structure.
Fly over Arizona, and look out the window of the plane. Then consider that absolutely EVERYTHING you can
see in every direction must be totally covered with human-produced engineered stuff. That's totally crazy, and impossible. When you're looking out even over relatively populated areas the ratio of human-stuff to raw dirt is infinitesimal.
Consider: enormous cities built with large capital over decades to centuries (e.g. Los Angeles) aren't even that big. The huge sprawl of Phoenix is miniscule. Let's just start with getting a few solar panels on Phoenecians' homes. There are virtually none now.
With good manufacturing and breakthroughs---the marginal cost of solar will go down. But that marginal cost is computed at current or moderately increased production rates.
To satisfy these useless hypothetical computations (which really show how poor solar will be) the production would have to be so many orders of magnitude greater that you would induce huge and impossible bottlenecks that will increase the marginal cost, probably to infinity. The marginal cost per unit for intel to make 20 million microprocessors is more than making 100 million microprocessors.
Now, what is the marginal cost of making 20 quadrillion microprocessors per year, and getting there in 10 years? Smaller or larger?
Solar power will be 99% useless in doing anything to stop coal burning, which is the key villain in climate change and other nasty pollution. It's a diversion from unpleasant investment in large scale nuclear which could make a quantitative difference.
Of course, nuclear requires a small number of high-skill people and it must not be screwed up.
Boring. Lame. Buried.
Ooops - wrong site.
Honestly, this is very lame indeed: 365 Hectares? Jebus. Robert Bussard's Polywell Fusion reactor will pump out 100MW and take up the same amount of floor space as a shipping container. It'll probably be set for production about 2015 or so - making all this eco-generation utterly irrelevant.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
YES. ALL POWER COMES FROM THE STARS:
./ readers are smart so please have lots of kids so we don't devolve! I know that is asking for the impossible ;-)
Solar power stored chemically over long periods of time = OIL & COAL
Wind power caused by the sun's uneven heating of earth. Ocean currents too.
Nuclear power made from atoms created from exploding stars, limited supply.
Fusion??
MOST our wasted power is heating and cooling
Don't forget the biggest problem: overpopulation. The world can only sustain about 2 billion people comfortably. think about it.
exception:
isn't that kind of "birth racing" one reason we got overpopulated?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Your analysis is flawed in many ways, not least of which because you don't seem to understand that in the case of hydro, they are not limited to a choice between a) let water flow and generate power, or b) turn off the tap and hold it all back. They can let water flow by without power generation, and that is, in fact, the way large power grids deal with variable demand. Hydro power is the easiest to adjust to real-time demand variation so it's used as a "buffer".
This is beside the point though. Your entire argument is based upon the presumption that, in the future, growth of "free" renewable power generation will result in a huge surplus in generation capacity, thus requiring one portion of the generating infrastructure to be shut down. Now which gets shut down first? You approach it from a (flawed) technical analysis. In real life, the selection will be made mostly on price. The nuclear plants, at 4-6 cent per Kw-H, aren't going to be it. Cheap solar (and wind) is going to be competing with cheaper solar (and wind), because solar panels and windmills aren't free, nor is the labor to install, maintain, and operate them. As TFA says, we're looking at 43 freakin' cents per Kw-H for solar right now. It has a long way to go before it can knock nukes offline.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
this meager generating capacity will power how many homes during overcast days and during the night (which lasts more than 18 hours in wintertime) ?
As long as no suitable backing energy storage exists, solar and wind have the nefarious effect of displacing carbon neutral nuclear power generation with cheap plants burning coal and gas.
Rule of thumb: be as wary of advocates expressing power generating capacity in 'number of homes' as of engineers that express data rates in LOC/s or volume in VW Beetles. In my experience, 'number of homes' is always used to elicit an emotional response, not unlike 'Homeland Security'.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment.....in the US. In Ontario we have CANDU reactors which use natural (ie. 0.7% U235) Uranium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu). Granted there is one reactor up here that has a few channels fueled with slightly enriched (1% U235) fuel, as part of a demonstration intended to increase safety margins (http://www.brucepower.com/pagecontent.aspx?navuid =1221). But, for the most part, there is no enriching of fuel here. CANDUs could even be reconfigured to use spent fuel from lightwater reactors elsewhere (http://www.thestar.com/article/180615) or even weapons grade plutonium (http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/mox.htm) although transporting that stuff around is perhaps not the best idea I've ever heard.
The price of electricity by burning fossil fuels is rising and will rise faster. The price for nuclear power is less clear, in a breeder economy it should be stable. The price for solar power doesn't rise.
No, it's not.
(1) Nuclear power is non-renewable. The biggest problem with oil isn't really the pollution - enough people seem to think global warming is a myth - but the fact that it's a finite resource. The US peak of oil production in the 70s led to shortages. The global peak of oil production is due pretty soon if the OPEC countries haven't been lying about their reserves, and has already passed if they have been lying. Uranium is also a finite resource and will have its own peak production followed by shortages. Other fissionable material is possible (eg, thorium) but they are also finite resources. Trading one non-renewable (oil) for another non-renewable (uranium) isn't a long-term solution.
(2) There are close links between the technology in nuclear power plants and the technology required to make nuclear weapons. Nuclear power plants aren't "allowed" to be owned by "evil" countries such as Iran and North Korea because it scares the bajeezus out of the rich white men in the US and UK. The last US administration was slightly more forward-thinking and even helped North Korea establish nuclear power plants that were not weapons capable. Look how that played out, with the opposing party at the time calling the administration traitorous, and the current administration working to dismantle those power plants in North Korea. Nuclear power is only an option for the rich and powerful countries that don't answer to anybody else. Nuclear power isn't a global solution.
(3) Waste management. It doesn't matter how much something costs if it's filthy. You could save $300 a year by not washing your clothes, not taking showers, and never vacuuming the floor. But would you do that? It isn't sensible to pollute your environment. It certainly isn't justified by the cost-savings. Similarly for nuclear power, you're talking about a fairly miniscule cost saving over solar - 12c compared to 40c sounds like a huge difference but energy costs are a tiny fraction of your yearly budget, so it's not that big a deal - but the waste produced by nuclear power is significantly worse than that produced by solar. Wind power is "clean" within 3 years, solar within 5 years, nuclear within 10,000 years. Reducing waste is desirable despite the cost.
(4) Incidents at nuclear power plants are catastrophic. The explosion at Chernobyl was more catastrophic than some people realise; if rain hadn't washed down the radioactive cloud - and storm clouds were apparently seeded by the USSR military to induce rain - then huge areas of land would now have unsafe levels of radioactivity. Newer power plant designs such as pebble-beds are supposedly safer. They said Chernobyl was safe too, and they lied. The Chinese are forging ahead with 6 new pebble-bed reactors because they realise they don't have much choice - they need power fast and nuclear power is the only known solution - but I'm entirely skeptical of the safety claims. Too many vested interests for the truth to come out, and nobody here has the credentials to properly evaluate the safety of pebble-bed.
(5) Cost. The figures bandied about by the nuclear industry are almost certainly bogus. Nobody knows how much it really costs to safely store radioactive waste for 10s of 1000s of years. One of the scares after the collapse of the USSR was all of the radioactive waste that went missing from storage. It was thought that the waste might be used by terrorists to create dirty bombs. That was after less than 50 years of storage; only 9,950 to go! So what was the actual cost of storing that waste? It's far more than the initial outlay of the chain-wire fence and some steel barrels.
(6) Centralisation. Nuclear power puts all the production in a few small locations. The transmission losses alone are staggering. There is also the potential of critical damage from terrorists, war, or natural catastrophe. Distributed energy production is more resilient. If every rooftop in t
> If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several
> hundred years.
Twenty years--lets look at that the number carefully. The current mineral inventory of uranium, coupled with current enrichment technology and usage gives you about 70 years. If one projects that number of reactors triples, then we can get the twenty years that you quote.
Let me present the following, albeit rough, argument. The historical trading range for U3O8 has been about $10 in "current year" dollars--in 2006 dollars, the prices has traded in the $10 - $80 range. The two excursions has been in the 70's and 2004+. From 1980 until 2004, the global demand has been low and the HEU blend down program with Russia introduced a cheap source of U3O8 into the market. Thus, investment in uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment has been low. When one factors in loan financing and depreciation, there is little incentive to invest when there is over 30+ years of inventory available.
Lets adopt the 20 year inventory as factual. The assay of U235 in the tailings from enrichment is typically around 0.3% (vice 0.711% in natural uranium)--the amount varies due to the price of uranium feed versus the cost in enrichment. Depending on how many SWU's one uses, current enrichment technology can produce natural uranium feed equal to about 10% - 25% of the mass of the DU feed. If one uses a more efficient enrichment technology, for example atomic vapor laser isotope seperation (AVLIS), even more natural uranium could be produced. Another option is to recover uranium from the oceans.
So depending on what the projected trend is on the price of uranium and the rate of new uranium ore discovery, the economics of tailings enrichment or new enrichment techologies may become viable. If one then factors in reprocessing of spent fuel, the viability of the uranium fuel cycle goes far beyond twenty years.
The biggest problem with solar power is that only 1366 W/m^2 reaches the upper atomosphere of the Earth. Thus to generate 1GW, you would need a 700000 m^2 (0.73 km^2) at 100% effiiciency. If you didn't want to build an orbiting power station, then the solar fluence becomes much less. Lets say half makes it to the surface in the mid latitudes (in North America the range is 125 - 375 W/m^2) and you can make solar cells that are 50% efficient (current cells are 15%) you will need 2.9 km^2 to generate 1 GW. The net generating capacity of the United States is 978 GW, thus one would need 2900 km^2. Of course, one needs sunshine for solar collectors to work, so lets assume in the summer you have a 50% split between day and night and that you get full power for the 12 hours of sunlight. Lets further assume that the night time power consumption in the summer is 20% of the daytime power consumption. Lets further assume that there is some magical energy storage system that is 100% efficient, you would then need 3500 km^2, which is 10 times the size of New York city. If one assumes you can site the collectors with a 50% density (e.g. 1 m^2 collector requires 2 m^2 of real estate), then you need 7000 km^2 (20 times the size of NYC or twice the size of Rhode Island).
For a point of comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant generates 3800 MW and the plant is sited on 16 km^2, thus it generates 0.24 GW/km^2. My widely optimistic solar power plant generates 978 GW in 7000 km^2, which is 0.14 GW/km^2. This does not factor in the "off site" requirements (uranium mines, enrichment, solar panel manufacturing, etc.) but does provide a rough comparison of the two technologies. The Palo Verde generates electricity at 1.33 cents/KWH. A
This is just a pilot plant, really, in the larger scheme of things. 40MW? 400MW is a "medium-size" plant these days.
A bout+Greenmax.htm
... the minimum point on the yearly usage graph that is what you always need in the grid, 365x24.
Solar has to compete not just with coal that sequesters the carbon (more expensive than allowing CO2 into the atmosphere, but may prove still cheaper than anything else clean), with Nuclear (which is probably still cheaper than clean-coal, even budgeting realistic sums for its own waste disposal issues and plant decommissioning), and with Wind, which is just as green.
Wind is getting quite realistic for commercial use, Alberta (home of the tar sands and a lot of gas & oil) also has a lot of windpower building up. My Calgary household verges on carbon-free because I do all my commuting either by bike or by our "C-Train" that is notionally powered by wind turbines, paying a surplus for its power to subsidize the wind farm. Our own electric bill is only about 15% higher for our whole household electric bill to be also "green". ($12.50/mo to join the "GreenMax" program, when average bill is still under $100/mo)
http://www.enmax.com/Energy/Residential/Greenmax/
But wind shares a problem with solar: it's not reliable. The sun don't shine every day and the wind don't blow every day.
Coal & Nukes are beloved for producing "base load"
One spot Solar is perfectly matched to is the insanely-growing US Southwest, where new residents are pouring into sunny Arizona and Nevada at bewildering rates. And using air conditioners, MOSTLY WHEN THE SUN IS BEATING DOWN. Unlike, say, Toronto, or Georgia, or even most of Texas, which can be "muggy" and require air conditioning even at midnight, the temperature goes right down again quickly even before sunset in the desert. There, 9AM to 6PM are when you get a power-consumption spike above that base load, and the one time you can count on a solar plant to be at maximum output.
If these guys are not just doing some kind of stock-pumping scam, and really, truly do have a way to make solar cells cheaper, say under 20 cents/kWh on even optimal days, then they could go straight to building a GW plant on the very cheap desert land outside Las Vegas, and start up some kind of "GreenMax" plan that charges them 20 cents for every kWh during the hours of 9AM-6PM that is above their winter-evening consumption level, they could proudly put a "carbon free" sticker on their giant air conditioners and not have to choose between comfort and virtue.
Although it is worth remembering that the price per solar watt has been falling year after year after year. According to QCells (who have a vested interest, of course) the cost of a cell falls by c. 15% a year (assuming raw material prices stay constant). This is achieved through rising efficiency rates (now in the mid teens), and through thinner substates (meaning less silicon cost).
There are numerous techniques that are being used to drive down cost: there is thin film (depositing a layer of silicon a few microns thick onto a glass substate - see CSG Solar and Sharp), there is monocrsytalline wih all the conducting "wires" on the back of the cell (see SolarWorld).
It doesn't take that many years of 15% annual price declines before solar becomes more cost efficient - at least in Arizona, California, Greece and the like.
--- My dad's political betting
The government takes these risks and absorbs them. The nuclear power industry never incorporates them into their costs.
Once you factor in the real insurance cost nuclear power's cost becomes considerably greater and it ceases to be, without a huge government subsidy of free insurance, commercially viable.
Imagine a Victorian era toilet washer trying to describe the difference between a computer and an astrolabe. That's how stupid your argument sounds.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I know it's about moving electrons. What I'm saying is that if you added electrons to the mix there'd be a push.
Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May. Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. avg.
1.89 2.67 3.30 4.21 4.92 5.16 5.19 4.85 4.21 3.18 1.97 1.60 3.60
The SHPEGS project is an open renewable design project that is attempting to take advantage of the Canadian climate that has high summer solar insolation and cold winter temperatures and provide base-load renewable electricity and thermal storage from a direct/indirect hybrid solar collection system built with common materials.
Forty-three cents (Canadian) per kWh is what is on offer to pay rather than what was on offer to sell. And you'll see that it is a fixed duration contract so the power must be bought. You can't really compete with that even if you are cheaper solar.
h tml systems, the utility basically has to accept the power, if they don't then they are penalizing
the customer and net metering laws don't allow that. At some point that also means that the utility will have to sell the power rather than just buying
less from the commercial sources on the grid. I think that by then time of use rates will be pretty common and I'd expect they'll cut rates by a lot to
keep from going broke. That is: charging less for retail than for wholesale whenever net metering systems are covering more than the utility's customers
are using. Their non-net metering customers will get very low retail rates (during that period) but the utility will only have to pay that much as well so they'll
cover costs with their wholesale transactions. Since they control what the net metering systems get paid, they'll be able to undercut any other price on the wholesale market.
This is why I'm writing the blog, to try to get my mind around the changes that abundant renewable energy brings. I think you are correct that price will be a factor, but some aspects of the way renewable energy works now would go against that. For net metering http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/03/net-metering.
Now, with an energy glut, commercial wind and solar will certainly be cutting prices and perhaps nuclear will follow, but as soon as this leads to deferred maintenance, (hopefully) the NRC will be all over them. The NTSB and FAA watch for the effects of price wars on aviation safety to some extent, as an example. So, nuclear power has a hard time cutting prices to compete.
The point is, renewable energy really is free to produce once the investment is made while non-renewable energy has fuel costs and thus operating costs. You have to pay highly trained people to keep them going. A wind farm in bankruptcy may lose a few turbines in a year but the recievers will insist it keep producing with what's left. A nuclear plant in bankruptcy will cut payroll and shut down. All of this is modulo power storage, which is another market for extra renewable energy, but once you have this, you'll have covered what used to be called base load. But base load is what nuclear plants are for. I think that most likely, the decommissioning of nuclear plants will happen before base load is fully replaced by energy storage though.
Just as a FYI, the CANDU reactors used in Canada don't use enriched uranium in the reactors due to the heavy water moderator.
This also helps with reducing nuclear weapons proliferation, too. Yay!
Still, there's the little problem regarding massive holes in the earth from mining and megatonnes of industrial waste from the production of thousands of square miles of solar panels. What the hell are we going to do with it?
It's been a long time.
Apparently. For the first time in a generation, George W. Bush has put money towards the development of new bombs in the nuclear arsenal.
I'm so glad Americans keep voting him in. He just makes me feel so SAFE.
It's been a long time.
Actually, there's a way to deal with nuclear waste which turns it into new nuclear fuel, but regulatory agencies are afraid of it because it results in the creation of nuclear fuel which could be used in bombs.
People are morons. Just about anything in industry could kill a million or two people. The only thing stopping it from happening is that it's not that easy to walk away with some of the most important products in a plant.
It's been a long time.
Shipping hydrocarbons from Titan and firing carbon sinks into space would be a pretty good way of creating an essentially carbon-free method of running the world. The only issue there is there's a HUGE time lag involved with getting that first shipment. Firing the rain forest into space should be quick though.
It's been a long time.
The problem I have with nuclear power is that it is woefully inefficient. Using nuclear fission to generate steam that drives a turbine to produce electricity seems wasteful to me.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission.
Speaking as an employee of the nuclear power industry, this is the stupidest thing I've read all day. Amazingly, according to your posting history, you're not even a troll, so here's what I'm going to do:
I'm going to rape you.
Yes, I'm going to rape you. I'm not even gay, but I'm still going to rape you. And, you know what? I'm not even going to enjoy it sexually. What difference does that make to you, the rape-ee? Well, it'll last longer--my raping you.
When people start dying from exposure walking from their driveway to their front door in Cornwall, I would expect power consumption to start going up.
I'm laughing with you, but I have to admit that I'd love to see widespread use of RTGs for various things. I mean, imagine having an object that you know will be self-powered until you retire. Imagine if we had RTGs for use as automobile power supplies, so you'd have a car you could drive, day in and day out, for 30 years, and hook into the electrical grid at night?
I know, it's slightly off topic, but concerning what that guy was talking about, it reminded me of RTGs, which use the thermocouple effect to extract electrical potential from a piece of radioactive material with a relatively short half-life.
And as another aside, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I recall that when I was reading about the discovery of the process which enables nuclear fission, but I remember the unit which resulted in the end was an electron volt. Obviously, fission creates enough to cause a scary energy release, but I wonder if the grandparent wasn't correct, that there'd be some way to harness that potential directly, rather than using it to heat the fissionable material, which would heat a liquid, which would heat water, which would drive a turbine, which would create electricity?
It's been a long time.
You really -- REALLY ---- REAAAAAALLY should have defined Negawatts in the FIRST paragraph you mentioned the term in, rather than the second. I figured out from context what you meant, but I figured you just misspelled Megawatts, and took your entire message with less respect than if I had known you were using a different term in the first place.
It's been a long time.
Who has thirty 100W bulbs in their house?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Environmentalists criticize themselves, they don't need help. I mean, who else in the universe would knock hydroelectricity, a limitless, virtually emmissions free source of gigawatts of electricity whose infastructure can last for centuries with relatively little maintenence, because it drains a lake bed and causes a bit of terrain to get flooded?
Environmentalists, that's who.
It's been a long time.
It's odd that you mention all those countries, becuase the US has pulled out of it's non proliferation treaty commitments so it can develop the first new nuclear weapons in half a century. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? I know that Iran is the country I'm worrying about. I mean, they're the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in wartime over a civilian population, right?
Right?
It's been a long time.
Canada has developed it's own nuclear power plants, but does not have a nuclear weapons program.
I don't disagree, but I just felt like a counterpoint was useful.
It's been a long time.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission.
I am astonished by the number of physical misunderstandings you must have that would cause you to write such a sentence.That's no damn reason to say that nuclear power isn't a good option. Just because humanity is a pathetic mess doesn't change the fact that nuclear power could provide for our energy needs a hundred times over, for thousands of years. The flaw is in HUMANITY, not nuclear power.
Plus solar absorbs some of the incoming radiation, on a large enough scale this could make an impact.
No problem putting them near cities (No transportation costs on the elec), expandable (Better for private industry), More flexible (new business models galore, portable (in case of urban sprawl and also the radiation absorbing properties can help lower temperatures in our overheating urban centres).
I've heard substantiatially longer durations for Nuclear power (5000 years with breeders) and I think you'll find that your estimates might be based on already discovered and exploited uranium deposits (People went pretty nuts on finding Uranium after Hiroshima) most of the Uranium is in Russia Africa and Canada (With south and North America making up a significant amount of the rest). Divided neatly along the political lines that already exist.
I like nuclear I think producing a whole lot of 3cKW's will lead to energy inefficient but better designed energy dispersion markets. (Like municipal Wi-Fi, not free but cheaper when paid for up front Think recharging at traffic lights).
In fusion reactor you can take some of the energy from the plasma directly to generate power (hint: induction). Regardless, still most of it would be from heating of the Li blanket with the neutron flux. One can't really get the neutrons into an electric field directly :)
We will spend at least two trillion on securing Iraq's oil. We spent a small fortune on Kuwait. We subsidize coal plant and oil companies with enormous tax breaks and military deployment to protect their assets. Why, then, do we let solar technology seek a market price based on cost accounting we don't use for our fossil fuel companies?
If we can give up civil liberties and tolerate torture for national security reasons, is not subsidizing solar panel production one hell of a lot more sensible -- and cost effective -- for our future? Isn't it a fact that every problem we have, environmental and international, goes back to our oil consumption?
Spend hundreds of billions, spend trillions, on developing solar cell factories. Call it a war. Just build the factories, and the unit cost will drop naturally from economies of scale alone. Pump out the panels, however inefficient, by the millions. Build farms in Nevada and Utah, ship the power around the country. Once the solar power plants are built, it's just maintenance cost from that point on, and the unit cost will constantly drop and the efficiency of the technology will constantly increase. Cost accounting per every itty bit of manufacturing efficiency has strangled the solar industry for decades. This is a national emergency, and we are try to use apple-cart accounting on the only thing that can save us, while slathering trillions on the oil industry.
U does not require enrichment per say. You can just use the CANDU reactors without enriched Uranium. Very safe - lose containment and reaction stops. CANDU also burns Pt so not very useful to get nukes.
Beside that, the only complain I have is your "guess" (I hope it was) that with breeders there is a 100 year supply of Uranium!! Without enrichment there is a 100 year supply of known Uranium. And there was no exploration of Uranium for many decades. Only recently did Uranium get profitable for exploration.
Anyway, the known supplies of Uranium with maximum use of reprocessing and breeders would get *thousands* not hundreds of years of supply for fission reactors. That's at today's energy consumption. Now, if we were to move to 100% nuclear for cars, heating, etc. (ie. Hydrogen economy, where power plants are used to create Hydrogen fuel), then yes, probably a hundred or two hundred years of known reserves of Uranium exists. Not a big deal - by that time fusion reactors will roll in. Much more power!! And much safer!
Solar will not work on our planet for much unless we have superconducting, global power grid so power from Sahara can be moved to N. Am. and vice-versa without loss. Solar is also perfect for space since Sun shines there ALL the time (eg. areas near moon poles), but one needs nuclear after Jupiter orbit...
Aside from nuclear and solar, there is geothermal. Dig holes 10km or 20km deep almost anywhere and you have all the power you want. And no problems.
"Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections."
First, every time I heard someone spout this old canard, I like to ask them to demonstrate that their pet project will create MORE jobs than the alternatives. I have no idea whether the solar plant or a coal mine or a nuclear plant will create more jobs, and neither do you.
Even more importantly, creating jobs is not a good thing. Our labor is not an end itself, it is the fruits of that labor that should be our goal. Imagine I want to build a bridge. Doing it one way requires ten people. Doing it a different way requires twenty people. Would any rational person say that we should use the 20-person route, just to "create jobs"? Of course not. We should be trying to create as possible in all our endeavors, leaving people free to do other things.
Back here in the real world, the limitations of HUMANITY put bounds on most everything else we do. Why would nuclear power be any different?
The point is, the ways of humanity can be changed. The laws of physics cannot. So this problem is not necessarily hopeless.
"(1) Nuclear power is non-renewable."
Solar power is not renewable either, the sun only has a finite amount of Hydrogen and Helium.
- The 40MW press release would be the largest Solar PV plant, but the Solar Thermal at Kramer Junction is 354MW and has been operating for over 20 years along with the other SEGS style systems. Nevada Solar One is 64MW and will be completed soon.
- Solar Thermal Electric Generation was not included in the $0.42/kWh (only Solar PV), any solar thermal or hybrid installations under this program would only be eligible for the $0.11/kWh and the rules have several wordings around hybrid systems that make it unclear whether a solar thermal/geothermal hybrid would even qualify at all
- After some more looking and reading the rules, they have blatantly advertised 40MW to claim "The Biggest" and get mediots to post their press release and create hype for their company, but the rules are clear on a 10MW limit.
- OptiSolar doesn't actually have a commercial thin film PV product yet, but they have been hiring.
See Open Source for Renewable Systems Reasoning for why Open Source will succeed in renewables...but Bucky Fuller said it best:
I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive.- R. Buckminster Fuller GRUNCH of Giants, 1983
I cannot believe you are serious. There are so many misconceptions in that single statement that I'm not sure where to start.
Do you also boil your water by pushing the water molecules really really fast using your hands?
Second the "clean" thing is just a sign of ignorance and swallowing advertising hype. The fuel comes from a rock mined out of the ground and the water in the tailings dams needs to be carefully controlled, people get sick when it ends up in the towns water supply (Jabiru, Australia 2006) - not "clean" by any measure. Then the processing involves uranium hexaflouride gas - doesn't appear to be very "clean" either. Lots of heat is required for this so you have to burn something - not "clean" either. The one thing this fuel does have going for it is a lot less CO2 is generated than using the next best choice - natural gas turbines, however the liars are not even happy with this and talk about "zero emissions".
It's true that comparing solar and 24 hour thermal electricity generation methods is stupid and so it is used for other applications - but the "Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power" comment shows ignorance of projects such as Superphoenix which did not perform as well as a huge array of 1970s photovoltaics would have done. Photovoltaics give you an additive effect - double the area and you only get double the power while thermal solutions can do a lot better when they are large - but for small scale plants it can make sense for a variety of infrastructure reasons. Remember they are only talking about 40MW - there is no nuclear solution that you would bother to build for civilian purposes of such a small size - the capital cost is going to be large for even a small plant so you do a lot better making something big for not a lot more.
Don't play stupid. Thorium breeders will last way longer than needed to see ITER's fusion offspring in operation.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I suggest that you read up on the price-anderson act. Nuclear power plants actually have $300 million in private insurance, $10 billion in a collective insurance pool
Another little fact: The government hasn't paid out yet for the catastrophic clause, and would intercede far sooner for something like a chemical disaster.
From wiki:
Over the first 43 years of the Price-Anderson Act to 2000, the secondary insurance was not required. A total of $151 million was paid to cover claims (including legal expenses), all from primary insurance, including $70 million for Three Mile Island. Additionally, the Department of Energy paid about $65 million to cover claims under liability for its own nuclear operations in the same period.
This is actually pretty standard in the insurance world. For example, my car insurance policy is capped at $250k per person for medical, with a $500k cap per incident. If, god forbid, I were to cause a major enough accident, for example, causing a man to become parapalegic, his continuing care would quickly exceed the $250k cap. He then comes after me, I have another $100k of personal liability protection. After than, I'm finished. You're down to raiding my retirement funds for a few $k and garnishing my wages. That's not going to cover much, not in comparison with the insurance. Medicare is likely to take over at that point.
You want to know what's scary? Most people in my area have a $100k/300k policy. I have what's considered a large amount of insurance.
I challange you to name for me a chemical facility with more than 10 billion in insurance, or even $300 million. There are plenty of chemical plants out there that with a catastrophic leak could cause damage comparable with a nuclear meltdown.
I don't read AC A human right
Canada has continually taken steps to try to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.
Canada has done nothing of the sort! Canada has done a great deal to reduce dependency on FOREIGN oil. We've been quite successful in that respect..now we're completely dependent on oil from ALBERTA, but at least that is within our own country. If Alberta were to secede from Canada, then Canada would be completely screwed (Saskatchewan and Newfoundland have fairly fast reserves but they are much less developed).
The truth is that the US has done significantly more than Canada to increase efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption, even with GW Bush and his oil buddies in power! Canada's consumption--and corresponding CO2 emissions--have increased by all measures (both absolute numbers and based on "intensity" figures such as per-capita or as a proportion of GDP). OTOH, while US consumption has gone up, it has not gone up as fast as Canada's and "intensity" emissions figures have gone down. It is Canada's own "inconvenient truth".
Canada's government is only NOW making any meaningful efforts towards reducing fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. In 13 years, the "caring, sharing Kyoto-loving" Liberals instituted no regulations, no major technology development programmes, no NOTHING. Instead, they hosted conferences, made funny TV ads urging people to save energy and drive less. Now, we have a "cold-hearted" PM from oil-rich Alberta presiding over a gov't instituting regulations that might actually be effective (effective enough? Many would say not. Motivation? Probably a cynical ploy to stay in power in the next election...Gore came up here and scared us all I guess..the "principle" involved is questionable).
Seting up solar power in Sarnia is pretty ironic but maybe appropriate--the area is notorious for being the home of a couple of the continents dirtiest refineries (worse than any single facility in Alberta in fact). Hope enough sun can get through the smog. However I think too much is being made of this, perhaps because of the novelty of having solar power in Canada.
A far more successful programme involving renewable power involves a large wind-power complex in southern Alberta. The City of Calgary purchases enough power from this facility to run the electric light-rail mass transit system as well as contribute to the energy needs of its municipal buildings. The company also supplies wind-power to the largest shopping centre in the city as well. Calgary--"Houston of the North" of all places--is the first (and I believe only) city government in Canada that has actually met Kyoto emissions reductions targets, largely because of its wind power programme (as well as benefiting from increased use of natural gas over coal for its power needs as well).
Solar just seems like the wrong approach to me--wind and water has been more effective in terms of cost. Geothermal energy could be tapped more. There is also a compelling argument for creating a "distributed generation" system using fuel-cell technology. Hydrogen from natural gas, already pumped into most houses here for heating, can be used in fuel cellsto generate more than enough power required to run a house, and the waste heat can be used for heating water and homes themselves. Essentially, you could get your heat AND power for almost no more gas consumption as it would take for heat alone.
This wikipedia article seems to indicate between 10,000 and 5 billion years worth of uranium 238 for conversion into plutonium 239 (coupled with reprocessing), and up to 150 billion years worth of deuterium from seawater for use in proposed advanced-fuel fusion reactors.
p ment#Nuclear_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_energy_develo
There is a blog that describes using a superconductor device as a electrical generator. What about this?
http://overunityenergy.blogspot.com/
What is so totally ridiculous about this is that all the talk about megawatts boils down to a straight lie when it comes to wind and solar power. A 3000 MW nuclear power plant will deliver an average of more than 90 % of 3000 MW, that is, 2700 MW at least.
A 40 MW solar power plant will deliver an average of about 15 % of 40 MW at best, so we're talking about effectively 6 MW, thus only 10,000 households.
Besides, at night, when there is no sun and fewer wind, in a 100% renewable energy scenario, ALL power would come from reservoir power stations like the Hoover Dam, meaning that, as most of the water that goes down a dam has to be previously pumped up, the overall efficiency goes down to less than 50% of what could be achieved with theoretical day-and-night wind and solar power stations (because pumping it up costs a lot more than releasing it produces).
So, strictly speaking, we're talking of maybe a 3.5 MW power plant here. Great. How much will it cost, you say?
Well, according to wikipedia, worldwide Energy use is about 477 000 Peta Joules per year. Thats about 0.5 Zetta Joules per year.
With breeder reactors, the full amount of Nuclear Fuel in the world is about 2500 Zetta Joules.
An enormous amount, although we may not be able to reclaim all the energy. 100 years would be (very) conservative, although never underestimate the power of the exponential function in describing our increasing needs for energy, which is why I am only suggesting it will b e good for a 100 years or so.
If you look at how much energy would be available for standard (one pass) nuclear fission, from the same article, the figure is a miserly 17 ZetaJoules. Which is 34 years of world energy use, assuming that use stays constant, which it wont (just ask China and India). Obviously not all energy use would come from uranium, but 87% of energy currently comes from fossil fuels in some form.
So depending on how you measure your energy reserves, we have very little or very much energy available from Uranium. If we just build conventional one pass reactors, we aren't going to have much time before it all runs out.
If we go for breeder technology, we have enough for our, and our childrens lifetimes. I'm not so sure about the grandchildren.
But my main argument was cost - and the price of nuclear energy is based on a technology that isn't going to cut it for the whole world. The cost of breeder reactor electricity is not well quantified to me, but is more than conventional nuclear power at the moment.
Its clear that our research dollars should go for breeders where we spend it on nuclear research.
However, we could also meet all our energy needs from 0.02% of solar energy falling on the planet. Which is alot of surface area, but still manageable, especially as some forms of supply tap the sun indirectly (eg wind and hydro) so we don't have to set up solar collectors everywhere.
So my vote still mostly goes for the renewables. If we want to survive as a species, it is where we will most likely end up anyway. No problem with Uranium as a bridging technology, as long as everyone understands its just that.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Ok, so solar power is still expensive..WELL, here's the thing.. We REALLY need to start using clean re-newable sources of energy so GO AHEAD and charge consumers over 40 cents per kWh (FOR NOW!!!) That's the key phrase...FOR NOW....because, once the panels, equipment, etc have been paid for, the power companies SHOULD NOT continue to gouge consumers...They should lower the rate to a competitive rate (8 cents per kWh or whatever is good.) The high price of solar power should only be temporary.
And, do you wanna know the really cool thing about solar power??
You know those really hot summer days when energy usage becomes a problem because everyone is using their air conditioners??? Well, when you have a field of solar panels providing the power, it's not the worry!! It's those blazingly hot sunny days that solar panels put out the MOST amount of power!! So, go ahead, everyone, and run your A/C all day!!
Recycle it.
One 40MW peak solar plant is SMALL by comparison to Nanticoke's 8 Parsons 500MW turbines, but that isn't really the point. Is Nanticoke operating Ontario Power brand steam turbines? No. OptiSolar is building it to be operated by the OptiSolar Farms Canada subsidiary. This is a manufacturer testing its thin film PV solar and doing so in a manner that will generate it publicity and showcase their product. The strength of PV solar is small sites distributed near the demand. You eliminate significant distribution losses, increase reliability and you are using a generation method that is extremely low maintenance. By comparison, Nanticoke Station has about 600 personnel on staff. PV systems will never have failures due to Shaft cracking, rotor blade loss or balancing changes - problems Nanticoke experienced at one time or another. You can put solar on your roof and you don't need to hire a stationary engineer. I'm not saying that solar power is a cure all for the worlds energy issues. However, I say Kudos to OptiSolar for doing their part in driving solar costs down and thank you to Ontario for having the vision to back this green energy project.
Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity
This seems off to me. Doesn't 1G=1000M?
So 40MW * 10=400MW
400MW / (1GW/1000MW) = 0.4GW, not even a gigawatt
Well, some major factors are temperature and sunlight (which can often be related). See temperature for Western Canada, Eastern Canada, and England
For the lazy, your average yearly temperatures, shown against January (winter lows) and August (summer highs) are:
W-Canada:3.6 c (-10.0/16.4)
E-Canada:7.3 c (-6.4/20.7)
England: 9.6 c (3.8/16.5)
Canada has a higher temperature spread, and definitely gets colder in the winter. This means more air-conditioning in the summer, and more heating in winter (which may be gas or electric, but I know that my power bills go up just due to running the fans on the heaters in winter).
You can also throw that together with population density. Driving in Canada Vs most other countries quickly shows in many cases that there is a lot of distance between urban centres. This means more consumption of gas, and more consumption of all sorts of other things in terms of maintaining the road, lighting distant stretches of highway, and getting power/gas/etc to remote areas (remember, power lines do suffer loss over distance).
I'm not at all surprised that Canada would use more power than the UK. There's a much lower temperature in winter, higher temperature-spread overall (between summer and winter) and a huge amount of distance to travel. Do those power calculations factor in line-loss? That could be a big factor in itself. Whatever you might say population-wise, Canada is a big country, and to make our resources travel the distance costs resources to do so...
Nuclear power the way to go?
Depends where you are and what you have to support.
Sailors use wind- and solar-power. Not only to move, but also to run freezers, fridges, radios and more.
I bought my new solar-panels 3 years ago. 2 panels each 80 watts for about 600 US$. The solar-panels never break down and are silent. IMO 600 dollars, 10 years, 160 watt for 8 hours a day is not expensive.
The weak link is the storage. Lead-cell batteries are still the most common solution.
As a native of the region and living now in obnoxiously-sunny southern California, I can only dream of how much better use those panels would be put to in the empty deserts of Nevada or Arizona. Instead, more prime southern Ontario farmland will be sitting under solar panels that wait for the weak sun to peak out half the year, and Ontario tax-payers will foot the bill, indirectly through subsidy, for this inefficiency.
This money would be better spent harvesting the cold, strong winds Ontario has in abundance.
My old nookular power station was designed in the 1950s. It used natural uranium, and due to some unforseen problems with oxidation and neutron embrittlement, it was de-rated to a measely 246MW in the late 1970's. It was originally designed to do 300-330MW.
It was on an 80+ acre site. 70+ acres of that were empty fields. In the 1990's they were looking for ideas to make more money. I said, "Wind turbines are 330kW each, 3 per acre. Let's build on the 70 acres and make about 60MW extra electricity."
Derisive laughs all round. "We can't do that. ${MANY_STUPID_REASONS_WHY_NOT}"
In 2002 they closed it down and announced plans to build a wind farm...
I now work in software.
Stick Men
On-site power production is a wonderful thing. It is wonderful in countries without reasonable power supply. It is wonderful in regions far off main power lines in vast countries like Australia, Canada, or the USA. It is totally pointless, on the other hand, in densly populated while highly developed countries like Germany or France, where there are main power lines everywhere.
As soon as a town grows to a certain size in a country like Canada or Australia, it will most certainly be connected to the power grid, as this option starts to pay off quite soon. On site power production, thus, is for wells, observatories, farms, etc. in mostly unpopulated areas.
But as soon as, say, two thousand people live at a place, the power grid, always a source of much more affordable energy, will replace any previous attemps of on-site production.
Unless, of course, such plants are highly subsidized, which is a necessary precondition for their erection anyway, and a perpetual premise for their persistance. Subsidization cancelled, any solar plant in competition with the grid will be shut down.