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The US's First Offshore Wind Farm Will Cut Local Power Prices By 40%
merbs writes: The U.S. is finally getting its first offshore wind farm. Deepwater Wind has announced that its Block Island project has been fully financed, passed the permitting process, and will begin putting "steel in water" this summer. For local residents, that means a 40% drop in electricity rates. The company has secured $290 million in financing, with funding from the likes of Key Bank and France's Société Générale, in part on the strength of its long-term power purchase agreement with US utility National Grid. Block Island has thus surpassed the much-publicized Cape Wind project, long touted as "the nation's first offshore wind farm," but that has been stalled out for over a decade in Massachusetts, held up by a tangle of clean power foes, regulatory and financing woes, and Cape Cod homeowners afraid it'd ruin the view.
Deepwater Wind, eh? That name should be great, because we all have fond memories of something whose name previously began with Deepwater.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
To "preserve the view", I vote we erect the turbines, but make them look like giant penises sticking out of the ocean.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yeah right. I can't believe they are allowed to make statements like that --- "40% reduction blah blah" --- isn't that against Federal Law?
The reason they are saving money is because the project is connecting them to the grid, not because they are getting wind power. at 300$million if they sell at the local rates of ~14cents a kwh (24 in the winter) they aren't making any money by selling power to the locals because its really 14-24cents kwh for offshore wind, there is no profit margin there. Good way to appease the locals, put an eyesore in, and cover their electrical bills. In the end its money that wins, but that all depends on how the wind blows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power#mediaviewer/File:LCOE_comparison_fraunhofer_november2013.svg
Yeah, we all know the Kennedy clan is just full of Republicans. FYI: It was blocked by members of the Kennedy clan. But, I think the clan leader who protested the most died; so maybe they stopped blocking it. Tim S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power#Economics_and_benefits
The US Energy Information Agency only 5 years ago claimed offshore wind farms as the second most expensive electricity production method around...
On Block Island, it’s the Block Island Power Company, whose on-island generators run on diesel fuel, which must be shipped to the island by boat.
A 2010 Providence Journal story on the island’s power system noted that diesel fuel regularly costs $1 more per gallon on the island than on the mainland.
In fiscal 2011, according to a report by the town’s Electric Utility Task Group on the fiscal costs and benefits of the wind-farm project, the average cost of electricity on the island was 47 cents per kilowatt hour. In the rest of Rhode Island it was 14.8 cents.
Once the cable is laid and the wind farm project is on line, in 2014 or 2015, Block Island Power will be able to purchase electricity from the New England power network at much lower costs.
The task group estimated that electric rates on the island -- based on a 20-year agreement between Deepwater Wind and National Grid -- would fall to 30.7 cents per kilowatt hour, a 35.4-percent decrease from 2011 rates.
(The island’s rates would still be substantially higher than those on the mainland because its customers would be paying for a portion of the costs for installing the cable and for maintenance of the island’s power system.)
The task group’s analysis noted that current power costs on Block Island have risen to 54 cents per kilowatt hour because of the increasing diesel costs. Based on that figure, the decrease would be a 42-percent drop -- about what Deepwater said in its Tweet.
The other article doesn't mention anything about how much power and at what price the wind farm will be generating it. It sounds like the public relations department is doing all the talking.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
just as they've blocked all of the others.
Hey dummass, on Cape Cod, the NIMBYs doing the blocking are DEMOCRATS named Kennedy.
Headline is misleading. It is not the turbines, but the link to the national grid that is making power cheaper for the island.
Until now, they depended on small local diesel generators.
You can bet that the 30MW wind plant is a lot more expensive than the diesel generators were.
I'd be interested to know the economics of the plant, but supplying cheaper power to the island will be an utterly trivial component.
So much more efficient, in every sense of the word!
This is a waste.
Monumental abuse.
It isn't the Republicans, well, not ultimately. It's the power companies. They don't want cheap electricity that cuts out their operational costs and accounting schemes.
Republicans are just the current party whose votes are being bought. They'd buy any other they could.
Any information on if this project is subsidized or not? I checked the articles briefly but I didn't see anything either way. If this project is being built without subsidies, that's great, it means that technology is catching up and this kind of energy is finally becoming economically viable on a large scale.
Love sees no species.
WIndfarms are great, but don't claim magic 40% numbers
Other opponents have included Senator Ted Kennedy,[57] Sen. John Kerry, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and businessman Bill Koch,[58] who has donated $1.5 million to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10...
Lying by omission is still lying. Just saying.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
But he was a DINO, so anything he did wrong was the fault of the Republicans.
Lying by omission is still lying. Just saying.
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
As is, it seems about 50-50.
I don't read AC A human right
Turbine bird deaths are a red herring. An estimated 10000-40000 birds die each year from turbines. But, they kill the least birds of many manmade structures. About ~150 million birds each year die from powerlines. An estimated ~500 million die from hitting glass windows. Cats kill several hundred million. Pesticides: ~70 million. Cars: another ~70 million. Radio towers: 45 million. I don't see anyone calling for any of those things to be scaled back because of bird deaths. So why single out wind turbines?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm
From TFA:
Who exactly are "clean power foes"?
This seems like using an epithet to delegitimize others.
I'm sure there are people who oppose this project for stupid reasons, like "it'd ruin the view". But I am equally sure that absolutely nobody opposes this project because it is too clean.
I suppose that if you looked and looked, you could find someone who is so certain that an ice age is coming that he wants all power generated by burning stuff. But even this imaginary guy isn't really a foe of clean power, he's just a fan of carbon dioxide.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Don't count your ergs before they are generated.
Block island has a population of 1051 people and has to ship in diesel for power generation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
So currently they using just about the worst system for commercial generation, paying high fuel and operating at a scale that is barely viable to begin with. The article also doesn't mention just what they are doing for energy storage or backup.
Either way if that is what is needed to make wind viable I wouldn't hold my breath.
http://www.politifact.com/rhod...
The actual price for the power would be 30 cents/ KWHR.
> the power companies
That's a ridiculous conspiracy theory. If this was profitable, they're the ones that would be building the wind farms.
Not so hard to reduce prices 40% when you are up against a local monopoly that has been gouging it's customers by ridiculous amounts.
I wonder if in another 50 or 100 years we will have people screaming about how thoughtless this generation was in taking energy out of the earths natural winds and currents thus altering long term climate. I know it is such a tiny proportion that is extracted, but still I do wonder. nothing is free, the cost is just not as visible.
My problem with wind turbines isn't the dead birds.
Coal kills 13000 humans in the USA alone every year, 200k yearly worldwide.
I'd rather kill 20000 birds than kill 10000 humans.
I hope they make this endeavour happen. Offshore wind farms are the only type of wind farms that produce electricity with some real consistency. Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, do you know what that means for the grid ?
Without economical, large scale energy storage, wind can't scale. Right now that means pumped hydro, which is very limited depending on geography.
In the meantime, wind+solar helps take the focus away from the real problem, which is ending coal burning in the world without increasing natural gas consumption. Only nuclear can do that right now.
If you really are concerned about climate change, you should be demading solar+wind+nuclear+biomass+geothermal, aka all of the above solution.
Said the anonymous coward that cares more about bird deaths than coal killing humans.
Using wind energy to power our cities still converts electricity into heat. This heat warms the atmosphere and creates stronger winds for us to harvest. The more wind energy we use the stronger the winds, it's a vicious cycle.
A few weeks ago, the UK had about 25% of its power needs supplied by wind.
Ok, it was at 05:30 in the morning and was a very windy period but it meant that leccy provided by coal fired power stations could be throttled back considerably.
Sure wind is variable so you need a good mix of supply sources from Coal to Gas to Nuclear to Solar to Wind and even Tidal.
IMHO the US Gov needs to get off its collective ass and make renewable generation a priority through federal laws. This will mean that the power company lobby will have to be defeated but for the long term benefit of the country then this needs to happen.
Until you do that and start to catch up with a goot part of the rest of the world, the slide of the US towards becoming a 3rd world country will continue.
No longer are you No 1.
Wow, way to not link to a study, but rather a Smithsonian blog talking about a Wordpress blog talking about a study. You clearly love your primary sources!
FYI, the study is just one of many. The study itself cites others, including:
20,000 birds/yr (Sovacool, 2012)
10,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2001 and Manville, 2005)
20,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2005)
440,000 (Manville, 2009)
573,000 (Smallwood, 2013).
The latter two include lattice towers, which are largely being decommissioned as unsafe to birds.
But hey, having varied numbers clearly means that if you can find a blog linking to another blog linking to a study that shows high numbers (among many different studies), then clearly the GP is "plain wrong", right?
And yes, even if we go with your choice study's mean of 234,012 annual bird deaths, that's still orders of magnitude less than many other types of human activities.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
They want you to think that it was the wind turbines that would make electricity 40% cheaper when its the access to the mainland grid fossil/nuclear/hydroelectric powered energy, all of which the greens oppose, which will be responsible for any price cuts.
No such creature exists. It would like a expecting your aquarium fish to live in the sand in the desert.
Don't worry, it is a French company that finances the project. All the extra costs are for the French. The profit is also for the French. But if you are right, the 'brainless French' will go bankrupt in no time, and Americans can buy a finished project for a few bucks. And that's when the elektricity becomes cheap.
And indeed, you are right about the coal plants, they are a lot cheaper and more reliable. Just build a coal powered plant in your backyard. People will love you for the cheap elektricity. And the yellow smog gives a really cool and romantic effect on sunset as an extra bonus! Coal plants don't hate birds either. All life forms are equally affected by the polution, you will see an increased mortality rate in birds, insect, mammals even including humans!
Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, ... That is nonsense, also you forget the 60% 80% 100% and 200% etc. do you know what that means for the grid ? it does not mean anything for the grid. ... 500000 washing machines finishing their washing, around the same time: have the exact same effect.
500000 washing machines switched on around the same time
2million toasters, coffee machines, ovens etc. jumping on in the morning around the same time, and dropping off from the grid an hoir later: have exact the same effect.
I don't get why people who have no clue always write nonsense like this.
Again: but that is the last time for today, widn plants don't need energy storage to scale. You only need to distribute the plants like e.g. Denmark, Portugal and Germany are doing it.
The grid already has enough pumped storage to compensate for _ANY_ power source. People want storage (that means certain plant owners or grid operators) because they can not stand (mentally, emotionally) all the excess power the plants are generationg, and desperately want to store it somewhere. For the raw functionallity of the grid the storage is not needed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Coal doesn't only kill 13000 humans, they also kill a multiple of that amount of birds, mammals, insects, plants, ...
It's not just choosing between 20,000 birds vs 10,000 humans, but choosing between 20,000 birds and 200,000 life forms including birds.
By the way, nuclear isn't that green as you might think. The mining of the uranium (nuclear fuel) causes a lot of deadly pollution too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... . It might be CO2 neutral, but the pollution is still their, but the 'white' race is safe for this pollution as usual.
Simple solution to coal killing humans. Stop burning coal, replace coal plants with nuclear plants. Even if you include Chernobyl deaths in the nuclear statistics, the death rate is an order of magnitude or three better for nukes than for coal....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You're wrong. Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources, but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly.
You're just embarrasing yourself.
I have a lot of relatives and friends who work/worked in the electricity utility business. And I have some engineering background, which you don't seem to have.
When Germany electricity prices get close to France's, then we can talk about if energiewende has succeeded or not.
I'm with you.
First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes.
Then nuclear.
Then rooftop solar PV.
Then wind.
But if you study nuclear facts, you will find the US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can, to the point of making nuclear uneconomical, specially for new projects.
Germany is planning to burn a whole lot of wood for load following their wind+solar. It's an insane solution.
I'm hoping for Thor Energy solutions will enable uprating most of the current nuclear fleet around 20%, in the meantime there are some 6 molten salt reactor initiatives worldwide. But the US NRC is saying it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor for commercial operation. 20 years !
1) New infrastructure that they don't have currently rolled out means the infrastructure they're currently milking for nearly pure profit won't make as much profit
2) Other people will be able to make money off this, which to the accoutant mindset (which now includes most politicians and business owners) means that they're losing money
3) Lower prices means less money without increasing profits as a %, which means less profit even if they moved to the new generation system entirely, even if getting the generators for free.
The clue is "cut local prices by 40%".
> I don't get why people who have no clue always write nonsense like this.
Because an ad campaign funded by the Koch brothers told them that if they don't believe this they're liberals.
Like this one: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/wont-anyone-think-of-the-seniors/
Apparently, being associated with "the kids today" is far more scary for old people than anything pollution or GHG might do.
> That's fairly trivial to handle
It's fairly trivial to handle, period. And this is a statement of fact, one based on the fact that 5% of all power in the US is generated by wind, yet grid performance continues to improve.
You see, the grid operators have this magical stuff called "software" that allows them to predict the output of all of the generation assets with extremely high accuracy faster than the actual changes take place.
This "software" thus allows them to switch from one power source to another faster than the rise and fall in production. And this "software" doesn't just work for wind, but any source at all.
You might want to look up this "software" thing, I hear it's going to be big.
> First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes.
> Then nuclear.
> Then rooftop solar PV.
> Then wind.
[snip]
> it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor
So, is your argument that we should do nothing for 20 years? No, I know, I'm being silly. But the point in there is valid: nuclear is too slow to fix the problem.
> US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can
This tired old bromide. *sigh*
Regulatory load, the favourite bugaboo of nuclear supporters, accounts for 5 to 10% of system cost. It has no real effect, as one can see by the fact that regulatory load has fallen from as much as 20% to 5% over the last 30 years yet the number of reactor projects plummeted.
The actual problem, as it has been well known for decades, is size. Economic efficiency scales with reactor and plant size, which means the sweet spot is somewhere around 900 to 1100 MW per reactor, and 2 to 4 reactors per plant. This means that building costs alone push the price into the $30 billion range. And when you turn on such a system, supply and demand drops your spot price and your profit margins. Everyone's known this for decades, which is why there were efforts like CANDU6 and SMRs, but none of these exactly took the world by storm because their economic performance sucked.
This year the average price for new nuclear is $7.50/W and wind is $1.25/W. The cost of integrating wind is actually lower than nuclear, contrary to other bromides. Even scaling for CF, wind is at least 1/2 the price of nuclear on a kWh basis. That is everything you need to know about the state of the nuclear industry right there.
Ask the Apollo 13 crew why they needed a CO2 scrubber.
PS don't link to a set of links to a PR scam site run by nonscientists.
Wind energy is a scam. They don't run on wind, they run on taxpayers money.
If wind farms elsewhere are any indication, then that $290M will do nothing to build a decent size wind farm. In comparison, the Gemini wind farm park in the North Sea costs €2.8 Billion to build, for just 150 turbines. On top of that, this farm needs to be subsidized with €4.4 Billion in the next 15 years to become 'profitable'. See: http://geminiwindfarm.com/
So with 150 turbines for €7 Billion, how many turbines will that get you for $290M?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
One is taken to wondering how power prices can drop 40% when there are tons of new infrastructure being bought and labor being paid to install it. Wind power isn't *THAT* much cheaper to run. I have a funny feeling there are significant tax breaks being given to the companies installing the stuff and tax increases being levied on citizens to make this 40% drop happen...which, if true, means it's not really 40% cheaper, it's just those savings are being offset by higher costs elsewhere.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I've love the sight of an eco-friendly windmill on my horizon, don't understand why people complain so much about it.
The sound would be unacceptable though, if that's still a problem.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
There are now quite a few 50MWh class utility scale battery installations at wind farms around the world. Japan has the most, but there are some in Hawaii as well I believe. They are sodium sulphur based and smooth the output of the wind farm to make it easier on the grid.
Having said that, offshore wind doesn't vary as much as 20% within minutes. In fact even on-shore wind ins't that variable. The UK national grid actually considers large wind farms to be more reliable than coal or nuclear plants, because where generation is distributed over many turbines a single failure won't knock 500MW+ off the grid instantly. They use a 15 minute time scale to predict output and with a number of geographically distributed turbines output doesn't vary quickly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You're wrong. Well, calling you are wrong and then answering: you are wrong ... leads to nothing. Wrong about what btw.? ...
Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. Depends how you want to say that. Ofc. it is not speed cubed. It increases with the cube of the speed, perhaps you meant that
So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. No it does not.
You have "rated" speed. For easy math we can just take 10m/sec as rated speed and assume the turbine generates 1MW at that speed.
Now you double the wind speed to 20m/sec, the wind turbine will generate 8MW.
Now imagine a "square" function graph drawn, just use a simple sheet of paper, you see from 10 to 11 and 11 to 12 etc. the "square" has no real effect, it is below "linear" increase, the huge jump is at the right side of the graph.
That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources
Actually: every grid has that, or it simply would not work at all.
but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly.
And that is simply wrong. The solar production you can predict EXACTLY so you know how to plan in your "conventional" plants. The wind production can also be predicted easy enough to easy let your conventional plants follow to fill the "balancing" gab. Actually all countries with a high percentage of renewables do that already.
The only problem is the "mentally" problem of wasting surplus energy, because you shut down parts of your wind farm if you really produce excess energy.
Having extra storage has only one benefit/effect: if I store energy today, I can use it tomorrow instead of a conventional plant, so I safe fuel (what ever fuel I use). The grid is otherwise completely unaffected.
Neither Denmark nor Germany built any special storage the last 20 years to cope with the grows of renewables.
The question basically is only how green you want to be and how quickly you want to jump to 100% renewables and how to invest your money. As long as legislations _allow_ you to run a coal plant, you simply have to figure yourself: is it cheaper to run the coal plant and spent the fuel, and have it shut down/powered down half of the time, or is it cheaper to build up storage and replace that plant with stored surplus energy. The decision is simply monetary ... perhaps in Basil it is different ... perhaps you already are very low on storage, and can barely manage your ordinary grid properly, no idea. Germany is not low on storage. /. that renewables need special storage or they wont work is just bullshit.
Bottom line the idea spread here on
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wow, so using "software" I can continue downloading electrons from my power company? Does the same software help me recycle the used electrons? I have enough stuff in the house, trying to clean up around here...
No it won't. Simple as that.
Yeah, 5% of the whole mix is trivial. Scale that up to 1/3 overall, with some regions above 50%, and see what happens. Above all it is too expensive.
Perhaps you should learn a thing or too about reactive charges.
Your talk about software shows you have no technical expertise in the area. I'm a computer infrastructure expert, and I know a thing or too about solar,wind,nuclear and the electrical grid. The problem isn't a software to switch wind off and something else on, the real problem is doing extremely agile load following. That's easy to do with hydro or fossil fuels. But most countries don't have large untapped hydro sources. And we need to get off fossil fuels.
I'm not interested in a grid that will depend from fossil fuels forever.
We must get rid of all coal usage for electricity and heating.
We must radically reduce natural gas usage too.
Can't do that with solar+wind.
Need lots of nuclear. Some countries like China and Brazil still have tens of GW worth of untapped hydro, but most countries don't. Brazil was at the verge of a collapse in the past few months with very little rain leading to your hydro reservoirs close to that critical point where hydro plants must shutdown ! No wonder we have one large nuclear reactor in construction and plans for another half a dozen.
At the same time we are deploying wind and solar. But we have lots of hydro to load follow solar and wind. The USA, UK, France don't.
Show me the 40% reduction and I'll believe it. For now I think it will be a 40% INCREASE.
I think Germany is also going for power-to-gas. (And they better had some regular pumped storage built in the years to come, since they're seriously lagging behind.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Because all of those fat evil capitalists with their big cigars and suits are sitting around a table plotting against clean energy! Those bastards! The Koch Brothers(tm) are probably involved too!
The rates may go down for the tiny island of Block Island, but the rates for the rest of Rhode Island will double and meanwhile the wholesale price of electricity that these bandits buy had dropped 50%. It is a huge, expensive scam that Rhode Island's corrupt politicians pushed through that will hang like an albatross around the neck of the state for 2 decades.
China is building new nuclear reactors in a little over 5 years.
And its not just China, South Korea, India, Russia, are all doing nuclear at sane costs and sane schedules. That's called have a rational nuclear regulator.
I'm not a nuclear professional, but after all the anti nuclear crap that hit the media after Fukushima that got me so pissed off I decided to study nuclear, and all I studied showed me nuclear is being unfairly targeted. Massive lies and miss information.
Even today, the most expensive nuclear project in the world, Olkiluoto in Finland is still cheaper then energiewende, with all of its overruns. And I've heard plenty of arguments why Areva EPR is likely the most expensive reactor on the market today. GE ESBWR and Westinghouse AP1000 seems much cheaper. Yet the anti nuke types take Olkiluoto as the reference to discuss.
Wind $1.25 per peak capacity Watts... If your effective capacity factor is 20%, then you're up to $ 6.25 per Watt, and then you must add the fossil backup costs. Must talk levelized costs.
Then you need to account for the fact that a nuclear reactor can be built fairly close to its primary market, while wind turbines must be built where the wind is, then you must add transmission line costs, substations, lots of things the greenies conveniently ignore in their calculations. When you add all of that up, even with wind capacity factor of 30% it is more expensive even than Olkiluoto that you love to quote as poster child of nuclear too expensive.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
The current Westinghouse reactor offering, the AP600 and AP1000 started development work before Chernobyl. It took 26 yrs from conception to certification of the AP600 cause the US NRC didn't know how to certify a passively safe reactor, so it took them 16 years to certify it.
This isn't an intrinsic, unavoidable nuclear problem, but rather how the US NRC is setup to certify it, it can be improved.
There is a lot of vested interest in nuclear failing, or at least not innovating and continuing to be expensive.
You can either pretend we don't need it like the Germans, do nothing to help like American politicians or demand we make it more rational which will reduce nuclear costs substantially in the short term.
If you listen to actual energy professionals even those that do utility scale solar and wind, the actual technical professionals admit the same problems I'm pointing out to you. It's a fact.
Nuclear doesn't need GW scale to be economical.
Water cooled nuclear likes GW scale plants.
Gen IV reactors work just fine at 250MW scale, and they do load following, so a site with 4x 250MW reactors can reliably supply power to a market with 1GW demand without need for fossil backups while load following wind/solar if needed. But once you have a nuclear reactor, wind and solar aren't useful.
It's helpful to actually learn about nuclear from factual nuclear sites, instead of from anti nuclear sites, those are not environmentalists, but rather shills paid to bash nuclear to keep coal and natural gas in power for as long as possible.
I sugest:
https://www.coursera.org/cours...
As opposed to how current electricity is managed? You still get rolling black outs today. The notion that it doesn't happen today is willful ignorance.
Then why don't they build a few more wind farms and go full throttle on wind ?
I said a few times, prove me it works, a whole large country using at least 1/3 of its electricity from wind. But the UK has zero plans to get rid of nuclear, instead they are actually building nuclear and planning more.
Hawaii very difference scenario, since wind is competing with very expensive electricity from oil, and in Hawaii all fossil generation is peaking anyways, with the fuel dominating costs, so every extra MWh not generated from fossil, the better.
On shore wind might not be variable on carefully selected sites.
Let remind those that might point out that Germany gets 70+% of their electricity from solar, that's not even a whole perfect summer day, that's instantaneous load for the best summer day in the year. You need 75% peak solar share to have much less than 1/3 yearly average.
BRAZIL has all the load following it needs. Its called big hydro. Brazil's peak electricity demand is around 100GW, with over 80GW of installed big hydro generation capacity. The critical aspect is water supply (reservoir status). Its what pumped hydro should be instead, an actual generation asset instead of a purely storage solution.
We don't have a boatload of wind cause our govt is very inefficient to do its thing. Matter of fact in many ways I'm ashamed of being Brazilian. But we could easily add 30 GW worth of nameplate wind. We also have the big advantage of the wind being the strongest when its dry, so it compliments hydro perfectly.
We also have 2GW of nuclear (2 reactors), another 1.3GW nuclear in construction, and tens of GW in various fossil plants (mostly natural gas).
This storage argument is very interesting. You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. Local storage is far from sufficient.
The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
I'm not making up lies, you're the one ignoring the inconvenient facts to your side.
I wish solar+wind could do the job, but it cant. The problem is the side that can't recognize that nuclear is essential to get rid of fossil fuels worldwide. China is burning more coal than the entire rest of the world combined. Still they are doing solar,wind,nuclear and hydro as fast as they can. They are adding clean electricity to their grid much faster than Europe or the USA, cause the govt doesn't care about NIMBY nonsense.
I live in South Eastern MA. I have a notice from National Grid that our rates our going up! They already went up and are going up even higher when the Brayton Point Power Plant goes offline. Our natural gas bill is also hiked up because the local power plants are now predominantly burning natural gas. Pilgrim Nuclear has had issues and will be going permanently offline soon. The windfarm won't power all of southeastern ma and ri. So much for buying an electric or plug-in hybrid car. I think we need to generate our own power... by sun, wind, propane, lng, etc.
Burning wood is pretty good, isn't it? It's as close to load-following carbon neutral as one can have with such a low cost of implementation.
wind farms or frack drills.
Fuck it, you're getting both. One'll be a hundred foot white elephant every 200 feet, the other'll fuck up your water supply but you won't be able to sue anyone because your local government has already taken the backhander for the immunity.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I would not say it is trivial. Only someone that has never worked on software that must be very reliable would call it trivial.
workable yes.
A fool thinks everything they do not know how to do is trivial.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I wonder what the results would be of some electrical glitch putting 30 megawatts of electricity into the sea surrounding the wind turbines.
Can any EE guys weigh in on the physics of this?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
WIth Nuclear, Hydro, gas and coal you generate the amount of electricity that you expect the demand to be. The only time I ever had a problem with this type of power in Toronto is when a grid failure shut down the nuclear reactors and they had to do a cold restart. A once in a lifetime event. Rolling blackouts like what you mentioned often come from the lack of investment in generating supplies for the growth in usage (in addition to peak demand due to heat waves etc.). That type of blackout does not happen except when you have mismanagement in the grid or if you make it impossible to build new generating capacity. When you talk about things like solar or wind -- your generation is not driven by demand.... you could have even a constant demand but if you have days without wind or a drop of 50%, or you need power at night when the sun goes down..... You still need generation capacity to fill that lack of power. People don't just cut back when the wind drops, they don't shut off all the lights at night..... they need a predictable amount of power. Solar and wind cannot produce that. You can build banks and banks of very expensive battery backup for when the grid fails (in my case locally it shuts off for 5 minutes every few days) if you are a company, but usually that is a stopgap measure that then for prolonged power outages switches over to gas generating backup generators (or some other fuel like that). This is the type of backup generating capacity for wind and solar - but no-one ever mentions it because it is a dirty little secret. They have mandates to buy power from home solar setups, they have to buy it whether there is a demand or not..... but there is no penalty if that same house which is on the grid fails to deliver power when people need it.... so there is a hidden subsidy of the grid supplier to buy backup power to supply both you and that house when the sun doesn't shine.
Burning wood is the worst type of biomass I can think. You're taking a good, long term carbon storage, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere, growing the wood again takes a long while.
Good biomass is biomethane, and waste from harvesting vegetables (for instance sugar cane leaves lots of folliage and roots that Brazil is using for electricity production, it's stuff that would be burned or decompose anyways).
From TFA:
In fiscal 2011, according to a report by the town’s Electric Utility Task Group on the fiscal costs and benefits of the wind-farm project, the average cost of electricity on the island was 47 cents per kilowatt hour. In the rest of Rhode Island it was 14.8 cents.
So at a 40% savings, the island will still pay DOUBLE the rate of the rest of New England. Can we get back to reality on how much "green" energy really costs and stop with the misleading headlines?
I have yet to see the citation where a cat kills a bald eagle or a golden eagle. You sir are a shill and full of shit.
Even for this?
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
It what bizarro world are those two not conservatives?
the same amount switching over to gasoline generators.
Wind turbine speed doesn't change nearly as fast as you think it does. Wind turbines have a very large amount of mass so every random gust does not create a sudden huge surge of electrical energy production.
How do you explain Germany not having serious issues when during the summer renewable production regularly reaches the 50% level? Surely if the problems were as bad as you think they are every few minutes voltage would spike and blow up everyone's washing machines and televisions, yet that doesn't seem to happen. Can you figure out why?
For large installations 50+MWh batteries are already deployed at multiple sites world wide for output smoothing. Not because they are necessary, but because the energy companies use them to shift some of the output to peak times when they get paid more for it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Considering you claim to have studied nuclear power it's incredible how many times you are wrong. For example, you say that 4x250MW reactors don't need backups because they can load follow. Ignore the fact that nuclear is particularly unsuited to load following for a moment, what happens when one or more of your reactors is forced to shut down unexpectedly? It happens all the time for a variety of reasons - simple failed components that are quickly replaced, seismic activity, faulty sensors etc. Look at the average availability for a modern nuclear plant - those things have multiple unexpected shut-downs every year.
The UK National Grid considers distributed wind to require less fossil fuel back-up than nuclear. Wind energy output doesn't vary very quickly and is predictable. The failure of a single turbine doesn't instantly knock 500+MW off the grid. There is plenty of time to spool up other sources when the wind is dropping. Nuclear, on the other hand, requires a constant back-up supply to be available and switched in at a moment's notice, so you have to run that fossil fuel plant 24/7 even if it is mostly just wasting fuel.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nuclear power is in the billions to build a plant. We have 2 in the USA that are not coming cheap. It NEVER includes all the free or really cheap government services that nuclear power gets and needs. You complain about wind but nuclear burns money and costs more than solar; graft is always included for both. Thing is, with big massive centralized power generation you have a few powerful players who's political pull is greater than smaller more distributed alternatives (unless the smaller players can unite.)
I've read many times that no nuclear power station in the USA has ever made a profit. ever. not without accounting games shifting the cost onto tax payers. It's a game of stealing as much money as possible; not making legitimate profit. I know in my area they will build stations with lots of bonuses/incentives and low interest loans etc-- then years later get even more taken off if not chucking the remainder of the debt plus expansions of tax-free periods etc. (in the name of jobs, but really these new jobs are being subsidized.) Maybe 30 years later it gets even but the debt and incentives are not repaid. But to be fair, power generation is infrastructure that helps the local economy in ways you can't directly measure... like roads. but it would be better if it were handled like the roads... which have less overhead and work just as well.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The mining of the uranium (nuclear fuel) causes a lot of deadly pollution too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org] .
That is why reprocessing is the answer.
but the 'white' race is safe for this pollution as usual.
Funny, cause I thought Australia looked pretty white, maybe I am wrong.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The problem with your statement is that it is quite silly. Why would you run a large percentage of your power off of any source? You should be using a mix of many sources to balance each other out. Nuclear is good, hydro is good, solar is good, geothermal is good, tidal etc. Saying that because no one runs 1/3 of their power from wind, therefore it is bad is missing the big picture. Wind is one of many different power sources, and of course shouldn't be used as the sole power source.
Nuclear is a great power source, but it shouldn't be used as the sole power source, it scales too slowly and during maintenance, a large portion of your power is offline. Therefore no one should ever use nuclear as it can't provide 100% of the power!
Do you see how silly you sound?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Solid fuel reactors have trouble load following due to buildup of Xenon 135.
In MSRs the fuel is dissolved in the core, with Helium being bubbled through the core to speedup Xenon and Krypton removal at the top of the reactor, this advantage plus the very high negative temperature coefficient makes load following a breeze for MSRs vs very hard for regular reactors.
MSRs probably won't need to be shutdown due to earthquakes, completely different way of operation, totally walk away safe, the reactor shutdowns without any intervention if it overheats in any way. Worst case, split into two 500MW sites.
MSRs are meant to be way cheaper than regular reactors, so it might end up being cheaper to overbuild them than actually maintaining fossil backups.
I completely understand the relative characteristics of current and proposed reactors. Although such reactors aren't factored in any existing nuclear planning, since they are still under design. The most far along seems to be the IMSR from Terrestrial Energy from Canada, engineering blueprints for regulatory review is being finalized.
In the case of Cape Wind, the real reason for the opposition to it is that the power from it would be MORE expensive than from other sources so electric rates on Cape Cod and ISO New England areas receiving its generation would go up. That is even with all the tax payer subsidies thrown in.
Environmental impact is certainly another factor including damage to fishing grounds, potential oil leaks from the turbines and from maintenance activities and possible damage to the tourism industry (which is the main industry in the area). When electric rates on Cape Cod and in New England are already about the highest in the country - we don't need our taxes going up to subsidize this and also have our electric rates going up more. Hydro power from Canada can be imported more cheaply to increase the renewable energy mix. What New England critically needs is to increase gas pipeline capacity from the mid-west to support power generation as well as home and industrial use. Right now at certain times gas power generation needs to be curtailed due to lack of gas supply. Solid fossil fuel base load capacity is needed regardless of what is done with wind power since the wind isn't always blowing, or ironically, is sometimes blowing too hard causing the wind turbines to be shutdown to prevent damage.
Nuclear is dead - it is going to keep withering away and critical mass to support the fuel and spare parts production cost effectively will be lost. The new plant designs are still riddled with cost overruns and the high staffing costs which are causing many existing plants to become money losers. They also don't sufficiently address the risks of existing plants as underscored by Fukishima. Maybe if someone created a brand new design from a blank slate something viable would emerge, but the new GE and Westinghouse plants are just updates to the designs that date back to the '60's. Maybe smaller, modular, factory built power units would work but they are still focused on large scale centralized plants. Current available designs just need too many employees to operate to be cost competitive with gas turbine/combined cycle plants. You might have 150-200 employees at a large gas plant but the nuke will have 600-800 or more. Also the gas plant is more fully covering all of its costs of operation, nuclear does not and only exists due a 1950's era law that indemnifies plant operators from liability if there is an accident. If more of the true costs were placed on the nuke plant operators as they are with other forms of power generation none of them would have ever been build. That doesn't even account for the still open issue of what to do with the spent fuel rods building up at the existing plants or the cost of dealing with them.
To keep a competitive market, a good mix of plant types needs to be kept available (even if on standby) including gas, oil, coal, hydro, wind and solar otherwise one type of fuel supplier will realize they can charge whatever they want. Wind and solar projects need to be able to provide power cost competitive with other sources - something that Cape Wind will not do if it is built.
Pilot, sailor, engineer. Lol, no let me guess the next one, you're a Dr. too arn't ya?
This wind farm makes no financial sense. If they are going to run an undersea cable to connect the island to the mainland grid, just stop there. Pay for that capex of the line and decommission the generators. There is no financial sense in building the wind farm. The high cost of the island is because it is not connected to the mainland. Once connected, the energy costs will be the same as the mainland (once the undersea cable is paid for).
Ah yes, the great Democrats Mitt Romney and Bill Koch. How could we possibly have forgotten those great Democrats?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
>But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.
A major reason Germany can cope with large amounts of renewables, are because its grid is tightly tied to numerous neighbouring countries. Effectively, the whole of continental Western Europe is tightly interconnected and synchronised.
This allows Germany to use imports/exports to help absorb fluctuations in wind supply outturn. Germany have also been shutting down slow responsing nuclear plants and replacing them with coal and gas turbine plants which are faster to respond.
However, the UK has had significant problems with grid stability after the establishment of a large amount of wind energy. National grid have already increased the maximum allowable "rate of change of frequency" (ROCOF) to 1 Hz/s, because their previous operational limit of 0.1 Hz/s was being continually exceeded due to wind variability. For interconnected systems which depend on ROCOF to detect grid failure (e.g. small scale generation - combined heat power schemes, rooftop solar PV, small scale wind), the previous operational limit was being exceeded frequently enough to result in various "chain reaction" type events. For example, a thermal power plant trips out, causing frequency to fall at a significant but not critical rate - at the same time a random variation in wind output results in a temporary loss of output. Together, this is sufficient to trigger ROCOF protection on embedded generators, causing them to trip off, suddenly withdrawing supply to a grid which already has an excess of demand. Some of these events have been severe enough to trigger emergency load shedding with up to 50k homes disconnected due to low frequency.
They are big government progressives.
It what bizarro world are those two not conservatives?
I'm a member of a board where I'm considered a raging liberal...
While they correctly identify(in my opinion) that there's not actually that much difference between Obama and Romney, that's because they consider BOTH unacceptably liberal, with Obama about half a step further.
Meanwhile, most 'liberals' consider Obama a DINO, a rather conservative individual.
I don't read AC A human right
Are you suggesting that non-libertarians can't be conservatives? Even as a libertarian I find that silly.
> Wind turbine speed doesn't change nearly as fast as you think it does.
Agreed. A single wind turbine has flywheel inertia in the blades, so it doesn't instantly stop and start. A whole wind farm changes even more slowly, because the turbines are typically spaced about 400 meters apart, and average wind speed is ~6 m/s, thus about a minute between turbines. Across many turbines in a wind farm, you are talking about ~10 minutes. Across a grid with multiple wind farms, the reaction time is even longer for a change in wind speed to propagate.
The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
Firstly because France is largely nuclear, which has historically been very cheap on a large scale, so a comparison to France would be tough for many countries, and secondly because it's a long-term project. The fact that it's not as cheap now doesn't mean it will stay so. But you can't build new infrastructure on a whim. For example, PV module cost is steadily going down. So when they get, say, three times cheaper in the next two decades (UMG cells, packaging improvement, manufacturing improvement...), if people at that point in time suddenly start putting them onto their roofs like crazy without some infrastructure investments done now, what's going to happen? Something nasty, I'd bet.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm waiting for the day when water electrolysis and methanation plants will become widespread. That would give you facilities that can really be shut down very quickly to cope with demand changes.
"You're taking a good, long term carbon storage"
Wood in itself is long term carbon storage, but European forests aren't, even without burning them. Maybe jungles are different, but this isn't Brazil.
Ezekiel 23:20
My challenge is to those that reject nuclear while trying to pretend they are environmentalists.
With modular MSRs in the 250-300MW that are fueled with liquid fuel its a whole different type of nuclear. Those reactors could go for many, many years non stop, since the fuel is added in little batches, like an injection is given to patient, with reprocessing facilities little batches of core coolant+fuel can be removed and reprocessed to remove fission products then returned to the core.
Like I said totally different deal. The way nuclear was supposed to be.
Water cooled, solid fuel nuclear was seen in the 50s as a temporary kludge to win the cold war, while keeping their research funding. All Manhattan Project scientists never saw it as the solution.
So once Solar gets even cheaper, everybody puts it on their roof, and in a nice summer at high noon you get 300% of your demand being produced by solar alone... How are you going to store that much electricity, you'd need TWhs worth of storage.
Part of the plan will be exporting much of that electricity, but now add equivalent levels of solar to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, who are you going to sell to ?
Unless you have a seasonal industry that can use GWs worth of electricity only when it's sunny, your project isn't going to scale, no matter how cheap solar gets.
That assumes he knew about Romney and Koch, while considering Koch and Romney conservatives(not all do).
It what bizarro world are those two not conservatives?
Well, considering we have a faction in this country who would make Mussolini look like a radical leftist, i suppose it's the anti-intellectual, anti-education bizarro world we're stuck in in the US currently; Sinclair was right about the whole wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible thing.
What i find most amusing is when the idiots trot out that Lincoln was a republican, therefor all the ills of the world are because of democrats... their lack of education and common sense really divorces them from the reality that Lincoln would be considered radical left in todays politics; although to be fair, so would Reagan.... 11 tax increases, amnesty for illegals, gun control.... Reagan's damn near Marx's twin!!!111!!1.
Ultimately it's not so much a bizarro world that thinks Koch and Romney aren't conservative, it's a bunch of loud and whiny complete fucking imbeciles.... they simply yell their stupidity really loud in hopes that reality doesn't get a good enough grip on them to pull their heads out of their ass. Personally i give them a lot more credit than that... their heads are so firmly planted up their 6 that nothing will ever get them popped free.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
How are you going to store that much electricity, you'd need TWhs worth of storage.
You electrolyze water and then methanate the resulting hydrogen using a nickel catalyst. The product you inject into the regular natural gas grid. While doing so, you also lift your middle finger in the general direction of Putin.
Ezekiel 23:20
That the whole cycle will waste close to 80% of that electricity, while adding costs to get that done. Epic energy waste. You guys really don't do the math, do you ?
Electrolizing water is crazy inefficient. So is producing methane from electricity. You are nuts, riverdance !
What are you talking about? 80% waste is highly unlikely. Electrolysis efficiency is solidly 60%+, often more. And it's pointless to argue about waste if we're talking about power peaks that you have to offload somewhere. Solar cells are "crazy inefficient", but that doesn't matter because sunlight comes for free. Immediate electricity peaks with no outlets are of much lower value than storable hydrocarbons, so some level of waste is acceptable (just like electricity is of higher value than the coal being burned in the boiler, that's why we're burning the coal in an expensive power plant instead of in a cheap stove in the first place!). All that assuming that technology progresses and Swanson's law holds at least for the next two decades, but there isn't any reason why it shouldn't.
Ezekiel 23:20
Except you ignore the waste on the way back...
And you ignore the cost of the equipment to do the roundtrip conversion.
Fuel cells are crazy expensive, that's the only efficient way back.
You remind me of that Supertramp song.
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
I said, "Dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer"
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
Your better off planning on getting tens of TWh worth of chemical batteries by then.
Why would you go for fuel cells when there's an entire industry running on methane? Domestic appliances, gas turbine plants, CNG vehicles, huge natural gas storage tanks... Germany alone has 250 TWh worth of gas storage. Sounds like a pretty large "chemical battery" to me. And they already have it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Then you have 60% efficiency each way, or 36% efficiency round trip, and that's if you use a combined cycle gas plant, which aren't cheap, and aren't load following resources, like I said, CRAZY !
Are you paid to sell this nutty solution or just misinformed ?
It is not by accident that energiewende is a lot more expensive than nuclear (yeah, even than Olkiluoto).
If you use traditional load following NG plants, assuming some future plant with 40% efficiency (typical is under 35%), I think that's 24% efficiency, or you loose at least 4 parts for each part recovered !
I think you missed the part where PV cells, being solid-state devices, kind of tend to be maintenance-free. When a Swedish insular PV plant from the mid-80's was recently decommissioned, they found that one (1!) of the twenty panels provided degraded output because of a failure of one of its cells, and the remaining nineteen provided their factory-rated output (!) 25 years (!!) after having been put in place. And those were ancient modules, not the modern ones. Back then, they didn't even have a 25 years warranty like today, only had a 10 year one or something like that. At that point, who the hell cares if you lose 60% in stored energy? Especially if only a part of the output gets stored and the rest is simply used as is. If you don't have to pamper them the way mechanical parts need to be pampered, just use twice as many panels and stop caring. Duh!
Ezekiel 23:20
40% cheaper? Mmmm!! good luck with that it's proving anything but cheaper in the UK and they have to shut the things down if it gets a lititle too windy - don't throw your candles out yet
On top of the normal maintenance etc., the problem with the current crop of "renewable" energy is you cannot count on them producing enough energy when you actually need it. You may be able to count on a mean or average amount, but consumption is more of a constant. You have to have backup power (non-renewable) or very expensive storage systems to provide power when the wind dies down (or sun goes down, etc.) or you end up with rolling or regional blackouts when you don't have the power available. Those backup sources require maintenance and upkeep as well as the renewable energy. When you hear puffery about how much the renewable energy will save - they tend to omit those backup plants etc. My father was given the option of "paying for" wind power in a coastal area or just the grid power.... when I mentioned that the electricity goes on the same grid and you don't get what you pay for (someone else might) and the cost of having someone else use the power that you are paying more for.... he opted for the normal power grid power. Without subsidies, it was more expensive.
Consumption is a constant? Midsummer afternoon AC load isn't a problem, even in the northern states? There isn't excess capacity at night, that the electric companies are dying to sell to you as recharging time for your car?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
> First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes. > Then nuclear. > Then rooftop solar PV. > Then wind. [snip] > it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor
So, is your argument that we should do nothing for 20 years? No, I know, I'm being silly. But the point in there is valid: nuclear is too slow to fix the problem.
> US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can
This tired old bromide. *sigh*
Regulatory load, the favourite bugaboo of nuclear supporters, accounts for 5 to 10% of system cost. It has no real effect, as one can see by the fact that regulatory load has fallen from as much as 20% to 5% over the last 30 years yet the number of reactor projects plummeted.
The actual problem, as it has been well known for decades, is size. Economic efficiency scales with reactor and plant size, which means the sweet spot is somewhere around 900 to 1100 MW per reactor, and 2 to 4 reactors per plant. This means that building costs alone push the price into the $30 billion range. And when you turn on such a system, supply and demand drops your spot price and your profit margins. Everyone's known this for decades, which is why there were efforts like CANDU6 and SMRs, but none of these exactly took the world by storm because their economic performance sucked.
This year the average price for new nuclear is $7.50/W and wind is $1.25/W. The cost of integrating wind is actually lower than nuclear, contrary to other bromides. Even scaling for CF, wind is at least 1/2 the price of nuclear on a kWh basis. That is everything you need to know about the state of the nuclear industry right there.
True. The only role for nuclear in the foreseeable future would be to extend the lifespan of existing plants that are nearing their planned end of life. As unpalatable that is, it might be better than new coal fired. As for new nuke plants, by the time they come on line it'll be a decade from now and they'll all be underwater.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
No problem with the article, but the title should read:
"Subsidies extorted from taxpayers will lower local power prices by 40%"
A more interesting subject would be who paid off which politicians to permit the robbery.
You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. ;D because it is wrong. The energy Denmark is importing is neglectible. They are a net exporter.
No, I'm not ignoring this
E.g. see this: http://energytransition.de/201...
Or google for more ...
If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ? Because:
a) in France energy is subsidized
b) French households bottom line use much more electricity than germans (heating of water and house heating e.g.)
c) the Energiewende is not finished yet, however prices are already dropping
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sigh, there is no waste.
The waste is: I shut down my wind mills because I produce to much energy. That is _waste_
Instead of that I pipe H2 in a low percentage into the natural gas grid. So I can use 80% of the surplus electric energy (or create methane, as the parent suggested).
The natural gas plants you already have!! So using them and the gas grid as _storage_ makes sense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Gas plants are load following resources.
Actually they are the second fastest load followers reacting in the 10 seconds range to load changes.
And as the parent already pointed out (no idea why you don't listen or grasp it) the gas grid is already there, the gas plants are already there :D
You don't know if the Energiewende would be more expensive than nuclear. (Assuming you mean Germany) Especially as Germany has no viable places left where we could built additional reactors.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You can be a net exporter and still be paying more to import electricity than the exports.
The electricity Denmark imports is dispatchable, the electricity Denmark exports is renewable overproduction.
No point in arguing with you, you fail to see what's so clear. The system would break down if all of Europe did the same as Germany and Denmark. That's actually obvious to me and every electric grid professional.
This whole debate is pointless cause your side is always proposing solutions without accounting for the costs, efficiency, you know, math.
I would like to see an actual realistic complete plan to go 100% solar, wind, hydro and biomass in Germany. The whole cost figure.
No sites to build more nuclear reactors ? That's just pure and unadulterated garbage. Its the result of insane anti nuclear regulation that is designed to drive nuclear out of Germany, engineering and facts be damned.
In the meantime the gas pipeline from Russia has deep involvement of Gerhardt Schroeder.
And Germany's coal will continue to be burned, cause keeping those jobs is more important than cleaning up the environment.
That's the real reason for your anti nuclear bias. Politics and jobs. Energiewende is a huge jobs program.
Don't sell it to the rest of the world as a solution. It's not.
Offshore wind is not baseload. Baseload is assured power. Offshore is intermittent power. If offshore wind was baseload, you wouldn't need to bother with weather forecasts at all. Just because it doesn't go from 0 to 100% everyday doesn't make it baseload.
Are you another merchant of doubt ? The more we dive into this discussion, the more your speech breaks down. You don't know what baseload is. You don't account for the costs of your solutions.
In the meantime Fukushima area is 95% safe to return right now. Where are the radiation deaths ? By 2025 we'll be talking about the cancers Fukushima didn't create.
Did you see the fact that UK electricity frequency standards had to be relaxed due to wind turbines, from 0.1% to 1% max oscilation ?
Do you realize I know you will never concede this debate, all I care is the opinions of others, cause you have demonstrated don't actually understand the whole system.
Baseload is assured power
No, it is not. Base load is the "percentage" of power (in relation to peak) that you always feed into the grid, regardless of demand. Hence the name "base load".
E.g. in germany base load is about 40% (of peak) and in France close to 60%.
Regardless of demand means: at night between ~1:30 and ~4:00 you feed more into the grid than the people/industry need, as you fill up pumped storages.
That is usually done with plants that run continuously at roughly 90% max load.
cause you have demonstrated don't actually understand the whole system. :D
And you don't even know what base load is/means
No sites to build more nuclear reactors
Why don't you look on a map of germany? Germany is not as big as Brazil, I assume the smallest federal state in Brazil is already bigger than germany.
Energiewende is a huge jobs program.
Of course it is!!! What is your problem with that? Should we feed the unemployed instead???
In the meantime Fukushima area is 95% safe to return right now.
How do you come to that retarded idea?
By 2025 we'll be talking about the cancers Fukushima didn't create.
Well, as the area is evacuated, hopefully not many cancer cases will be caused by it. So again: what is your point?
In a bad mood today?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You can be a net exporter and still be paying more to import electricity than the exports. ... so, why are you claiming that all the time?
Which Denmark does not do
The system would break down if all of Europe did the same ... ...
If all of europe would do "the same", we would not need energy storages, because the overproduction of state A in region a would be used to supply state B in region b
That's actually obvious to me and every electric grid professional.
Actually, I'm a grid professional. A bit more biased to the production and trading side, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If all of europe would do "the same", we would not need energy storages, because the overproduction of state A in region a would be used to supply state B in region b ...
How the hell do you know that when region A is overproducing there would actually be a region with a shortage ? If the core problem with intermittency, you can't pray for a supply/demand match. The only advantage of such a solution is that there would be lots of energy storage everywhere, so maybe you can export you over production to another area that is also overproducing but still has energy storage left. But there will often be times when there is over production everywhere, and times when there will be shortage everywhere, except for countries that actually have a large natural baseload reserve (aka big hydro).
and times when there will be shortage everywhere, ... that is the point of the "Energiewende". Germany alone is to big to have shortages when we are fully converted to 100% renewables.
No there were not. Europe is to big to have "shortage" everywhere when we are full renewable. Sigh
except for countries that actually have a large natural baseload reserve (aka big hydro).
This is a meaningless sentence. Base load and reserve are mutual exclusive, but I already explained to you what "base load" actually means a few posts back.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The electricity Denmark imports is dispatchable, the electricity Denmark exports is renewable overproduction.
And whenever it gets exported to Norway, Norwegians get to save water in their reservoirs and thus get to increase average net generation of desirable (for the seller) "dispatchable" electricity. The one you say is expensive. So it's a win-win for both parties!
Ezekiel 23:20