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New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again
Lucas123 writes Solar energy installations beat both wind generated and coal-fired energy for the second year in a row, according to a new report from GTM Research. While solar only makes up about 1 percent of U.S. energy, in 2014, it added nearly as many new megawatts as natural gas, which is approaching coal as the country's primary energy source. Solar capacity grew 32 percent from 2013 to 2014 and GTM is predicting it will grow 59% YoY this year. Just two years ago, in 2012, coal represented 41% of new energy capacity and solar only 10%. Last year, coal was down to 23% of new electrical capacity. Solar capacity growth last year represents a 12-fold increase over the amounts being installed in 2009. Key to solar adoption has been falling costs across market segments and states.
Whenever I hear about all the stupid comments and grandstanding from politicians trying to pander to a scientifically illiterate (American) public I despair. However when I look at the (long predicted and now achieved) strides in solar power, a see a "ray" of hope.
Finally solar power is becoming cost competitive even with coal. Hopefully in a few more years and certainly less than a decade it will be decisively so. At that point, one hopes, renewable power will no longer be a political decision but a purely economic one.
This, of course, won't solve global warming, certainly not "over night" (ha ha). The vast build up of CO2, thermal lag and feedback loops (permafrost melting) means we will be dealing with this for generations to come. But it might slow down the buildup enough so that new carbon sequestration technologies created (again by scientists and technologists) can fix the problem for good.
Wow. From 0 to Hitler in two posts. Must be somekind of record
The summary and TFA are carefully choosing their words to make it look like a land slide sized change in energy production, when all they are really talking about is subtle rates of change. But even these twists can't disguise the fact that 23% new energy is still done with coal.
In fact, the solar and wind aren't even meeting replacement needs for coal and gas plants taken out of production due to failure to meet environmental standards, and being too costly to upgrade. Old Coal plants are more often replaced with New Coal plants than they are with wind or solar.
Missing from those figures (because they don't represent New Production), is the number of coal and gas plants upgraded to meet environmental standards.
Its not all bad news. The best wind and solar sites are being heavily developed, cherry picking the most promising sites. And the arid south west is sprouting lots f solar farms. But we need to ramp up both wind and solar many fold before we can even think of retiring coal.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Um... yeah, that North West Oregon Housing Authority (NOHA) has really been cooking the books, probably getting kickback from the corning insulation people
Wherever You Go, There You Are
What are you talking about? factcheck From factcheck: "Rep. Gary Palmer falsely claimed on a radio show that temperature data used to measure global climate change have been “falsified” and manipulated." and "Even as these claims of data manipulation have resurfaced, there is now a general consensus that 2014 was the hottest single year since temperature record keeping began. This same conclusion has been reached by NOAA and NASA, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the World Meteorological Organization. The United Kingdom’s Met Office said that 2014 was among the warmest along with 2010, but it is impossible to say for sure that 2014 was hotter. According to NASA, nine of the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2000, with 1998 the lone exception."
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
Yeah... wooo hooo Solar produces many giga watts of power, while coal continues to spread CO2, uranium and heavy metals at an increasing rate
Does it bother anybody else that nuclear isn't even mentioned in passing in the linked article?
It has been well documented that Solar has a high initial energy cost for production, suffers from spikes and lulls in availability and cannot be easily transferred across the US due to an aging and outdated power transmission system. Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Does it hurt to be as utterly stupid as you are?
Comparing capacity alone does not produce a clear picture. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel. In the real world conditions vary which causes output to vary. The capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%. The capacity factor of a coal burning plant is 63.8%. A watt of coal capacity is worth from 1.9 to 4.9 times as much as watt of PV capacity.
Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not. That make coal power more stable and valuable.
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
suffers from spikes and lulls in availability and cannot be easily transferred across the US due to an aging and outdated power transmission system.
This here, this is the line that makes me disregard the rest of your post as FUD.
Sure, it is technically correct, but the thing is that it applies to all energy sources. The ones who suffers from it are the ones that are centralized the most. It makes it impractical to have a large power plant in one location and transfer the energy across the US. Solar is on the other hand typically distributed and close to the consumer.
So you are using an argument for solar as if it were an argument against it. It would be interesting to hear your reasoning behind it.
Harvesting the energy around houses and decentralizing the grid will have an impact on the IT industry to develop technology to manage it. It seems to me that adopting wind and solar would present some really interesting challenges and opportunities for manufacturing as well.
With politicians crapping on about jobs growth but not where it is coming from it seems to me this is the elephant in the room.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Does it hurt to be as utterly stupid as you are?
Whether it's global warming or resource consumption, one thing is certain. We are fucking this planet up. The pathetic part is it will be destroyed beyond repair while mankind is too damn busy arguing over how it got fucked up.
And until we're actually around to witness the next ice age, knock it off with the idiotic comments already. I laugh over the notion that anyone can be proven right or wrong with this. There's too much damn corrupt money flying everywhere over this now. It's like trying to PROVE which group is better, Christians or Catholics. You're NOT going to get a consistent answer around the world. You NEVER will now, no matter how much "proof" is brought forward.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
Nuclear Fusion: The best method of achieving sustainable stable fusion is to get enough Hydrogen together that it collapses under it's own mass, the resulting star will be quite hot tho so it's best to keep a safe distance ~93million miles would appear to be sufficient from my experimentation, but I rather suspect it depends on how much hydrogen you can get your "hands" on to start with.
The thing that renewable requires is not another form of generation, the sun outputs and the earth captures staggering power continually, but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days, and maybe some others for months. We have these technologies (Pumped Hydro, Tidal Lagoon, Pumped Heat (PHES), flywheels, &c.) we just need to spend the money on the right development.
and that's why I (a member of the solar industry) will not step up an support the hogwash you only want to implement to line the pockets of the 0.0001%
foo
USA#1 leads the world on environmental matters despite what the ignorant critiques say. Not surprised at all.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Fusion: I honestly think it ends up being an issue of scaling. 'Double' the dimensions of your fusion chamber and you end up using 8 times the resources, but get 16 times the power. I'm afraid that by the time we get it figured out, it'll turn out that the *smallest* practical plant is something like 20GW, and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
I don't read AC A human right
US Average Electricity Generation
534 gigawatt hours
Article claims 780 mega watts newly installed capacity
Lets round up instead of the to the nearest and call it 0.2% U.S. average capacity
> Why can't the nuclear industry take care of their own stuff ?
Because they got used to the military paying the bills and generally babysitting them. It has been too cozy for them having the military as a giant revenue "vacuum cleaner" sucking up tax money and pouring it into their pockets.
Hopefully that time is ending. Hopefully.
No being stupid doesn't hurt these people like it hurts you and I. See when I do something stupid, I feel something akin to pain. When what you believed to be true, doesn't match the facts, it's painful and irritating. Enough that you quickly change your opinion to match reality. These guys are stupid insensate. They literally feel nothing when fact contradict their beliefs.
In short, you care about how your beliefs match up to reality. And you're always comparing the two looking for discrepancies. The stupid insensate, they care how their beliefs make them _feel_ facts matter not at all.
Given the massive amount of land it takes up and massive costs to build it, it only produces 1/5th the energy of single coal powered plant that takes up a fraction of the land.
Old Coal plants are more often replaced with New Coal plants than they are with wind or solar.
No, not for tUSA. Ignoring that power plants don't replace other plants on a 1-for-1 basis, no new coal plants are being built. 111(b) of the Clean Air Act prohibits new coal because its carbon emissions, roughly 2000 lbs/MWh, are more than 100% higher than the maximum allowed (950 lbs/MWh). Because 111(b) is new, coal plants already under construction were allowed to continue, but there are very few still under construction.
Hell, look at the data in the article: coal was 16% of new capacity in 2012, 10% in 2013, and less than 1% in 2014. Additionally, there were a number of retirements, and a significant number (10s of GWs of the ~300 GW coal capacity) announced to be retired by 2018.
Sure, the existing coal units may operate a few more hours a year, but the fact of the matter is that coal use peaked in 2012. The question is: will we as a society push it out more quickly or less quickly? Nevertheless, the claim that New Coal plants are replacing Old Coal plants is false, both because plants don't explicitly replace other plants and because the MW of new coal coming online is asymptotically approaching 0, so to speak.
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power? :D as they store enough heat to run a few nights without sun.
Because neither PV plants have a gap (you don't need much power at night, or do you?) nor do thermal solar plants hang behind nuclear power
Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The public largely rejected nuclear, yet reality says all those electric cars will need to plug into something.
Nuclear isn't called nuclear anymore. It is called "broad sustainable energy mix". The public will see windfarms and solar, because they take up space, and meanwhile here and there, new nuclear will quietly be built, and if by then anyone objects, they can cite urgent need to reduce emissions, given we've already built so much wind and solar and yet, oddly, we still have a ways to go to reach the targets.
There are basically two sides to the eco movement. The 70s folk who grew up reading The Ecologist and concluded humanity is a cancer on the planet. Meanwhile the other lot are basically, yeah we want better cleaner lifestyles, but we still want a lifestyle, with jobs and housing and children, with convenience and growth, with better lives for everyone.
Various planning restrictions are being eased to make windfarms possible, on the basis that the environmental targets are urgent and more important. That same workaround can be applied to nuclear. The way to get more nuclear is to never mention the word.
In the meantime, gas is there to make up for the variability in solar and wind. Once everyone wants to plug in their car to charge, everybody will want "sustainable energy".
The trend is positive. That isn't stopped. It's no different from the IPCC prediction of 0.17C per decade, statistically.
Warming continues, even today.
Installed capacity for solar includes expected efficiency and outages for an entire solar farm is practically zero whilst for gas it's significantly below 80%. So *at best* it's roughly 2/3rds gas. But gas is the most expensive plant to run apart from nuclear.
Which Global Warming? The one which stopped 18 Years ago?
No, not that Global Warming, it's another one. You can't say that it has stopped or is dead, because all you need to do is look at a graph of global temperatures to see that this is not unprecedented. The global temperature peaked in 1940 and then didn't reach that point again until 1970. Global Warming didn't stop back then, despite that lull.
In fact, that wasn't a lull, it was more of a plummet then a rise. If you look at the graphs, you will see that the global temperature repeatedly plateaus (or even falls) only to continue warming a few years later.
It is totally premature to try to call the end of a major trend while you are in the middle of it. Just look at how noisy the data is for the period that you mention (which is just one reading). Who is to say that we wont see another step up in the next year or so followed by another plateau at a higher level? It certainly fits the pattern that we have seen in the past.
Yes, you are running on pure high-grade idiot. The title of the piece. See it? What does it say? That's right, "New Solar Capacity beats Coal and Wind, Again".
New capacity.
Not currently installed capacity.
NEW capacity.
Are you expecting the entire (or only significant portion) of the US energy production system to be rebuilt each year???
So, yes marketing fud, lies, statistics and moronic directed stupidity from an anti-ecology slashdot moron poster. Not a surprise.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Whilst living on this planet the sun will provide us with all the energy we need if we can just work out how to harness it effectively. Save the Fissile materials for when we *really* need them, like if/when we get into deep space exploration.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Yes, I know, I approve of them as a waste management tool.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Fusion: you seem to have missed my joke vOv
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
Batteries are still a poor storage option due to in-out effeciencies which are at best in the 80%s, yeah some li-ion get into the 90%s but lithium isn't exactly the most common of materials.
As to your geographic comments, yeah, mankind needs to move back to the Tropics, it's where the power is. Although Iceland manages ok with geothermal.
foo
All you did with that post is tell everyone "I don't know about climate change, but I'm going to assume I do, and repeat what someone I trust told me about this, instead of acting like a rational adult and finding out for myself". Good jerb! You're so clever!
Wow. From 0 to Hitler in two posts. Must be somekind of record
Sadly, not.
Stephan
If you look at the article it does another bit of sleight of hand. They talk about how competitive solar is at $1.40 - $2.40/watt DC. Coal and gas are running around $1.00/ watt AC. So when they say competitive they mean costs 40% - 140% more and then you have to add in the cost to convert AC.
Since even less were replaced by coal, you're expecting coal power plants to have a lifetime of a thousand years.
Therefore coal is not sustainable, we should scrap it all!!!
Or you're talking bollocks.
Your call.
Many US States and countries around the world can use the vastly simpler and cheaper solar systems for heating their hot water. People stop thinking solar=PV, there are many way we can use the Sun's energy for our needs.
"suffers from spikes and lulls in availability and cannot be easily transferred across the US due to an aging and outdated power transmission system." that makes the case for solar to be on roofs so its production is for local use. Centralized power generation is for the older technologies
"Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?" - they are more likely to support power storage like batteries which is developing into a large market. Solar companies can then offer the whole package of generation and storage.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
It's pretty easy to tout big percentage increases
> Sure, it is technically correct
No it's not.
There are dozens upon dozens of reports, all easily accessible on the internet, that state in no uncertain terms that the US grid is perfectly capable of handing lots and lots of intermittent power. The last report I read, now outdated as its from 2012, said that California was able to use up to 100% embedded PV. That means you could install PV on everyone's home and office to net meter to zero and the grid would handle it just fine.
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/8A822C08-A56C-4674-A5D2-099E48B41160/0/LDPVPotentialReportMarch2012.pdf
> The military hardly uses plutonium
Wut? That's practically all they use.
> current price to last several hundred years
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/fusion-aint-gonna-happen
There's no lie there: new capacity is more solar than coal or wind. Again.
Not a word of a lie.
The only "lie" is that you've REDEFINED what they've said to something else that isn't correct, then called your fiction a lie.
And where's the Greens? Are you merely assuming that if it's solar power, it must be all from the Greens???
> The public largely rejected nuclear, yet reality says all those electric cars will need to plug into something.
Already taken care of:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/future-grid-energy-in-the-not-so-distance/
> The way to get more nuclear is to never mention the word
And to lower the CAPEX four times. THAT is something no one has figured out yet.
Solar can only get cost competitive with coal when it exists as a supplemental power source. It cannot take over baseline supply due to intermittency so it can only serve to shave off daytime peaks.
Storage? Sure, but that costs money and shaves off efficiency. And if you want to go full solar you need to expand the farms so they can:
1. Cover all daytime demands.
2. Produce enough surplus to charge all the battery banks to cover the sunless hours.
3. Produce even more surplus because some days are cloudy.
The topaz solar farm, peak production 550MW, is 25km^2 in area. Average production estimate is 125 MW = 1,096 GWh/year.
A baseload power plant, classic numbers, are 1000MW, 90% uptime. So 900MW average.
To replace one of those, assuming perfecft efficiency battery storage, you need 180km^2 of solar panels that produce 4GW electric at peak. This also means that battery storage needs to be colocated unless you want to build a new grid too.
US total power consumption 2008: 4,401,698GWh. That's 4016 topaz solar farms, again ignoring efficiency losses.
This is 100400km^2.
That's 1/3 of the surface area of germany.
That's a circle with the radius 180km( or diameter360km )
That's you standing on top of the world tallest building and only seeing solar panel all the way to the horizon.
In fact YOU COULD STAND ON TOP OF A BUILDING IN THE CENTER THAT'S 2400 METERS TALL (3x Burj Khalifa) AND WOULD STILL ONLY SEE SOLAR PANELS ALL THE WAY TO THE HORIZON!!!!!!
In short: The solar future doesn't look as bright once you start to scale it.
It's not cost competitive. It needs huge subsidy.
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
Most existing plants were not designed to load follow, but nuclear certainly can load follow relatively quickly. Not quite as fast as gas, but pretty quickly. The size of the plant is a factor as well.
The solar industry wants as much money as it can get, so it will villify all other sources as much as it can. Of course, they can't attack wind because they'd split their base, and they can't attack gas because new gas installations enable the grid to handle new solar. Either way, the oil and gas industry is quite OK with solar base attacks on nuclear. They happily endorse it.
because they realized that runaway global warmining is more politically acceptable than nuclear power.
I already SAID that gas was cheaper than nuclear. So your "LOOK! GAS **IS** CHEAPER!!!" is irrelevant in trying to make out I made an error.
Because they will be closed long before their stuff become harmless.
So their stuff will become a public funded problem.
-- Laurent Pointal
Structurally these utilities need massive insvestments, long build times, beset by NIMBYism. They pay off only when there is a critical mass of users. Only when the cost of investment is amortized over a very large user base, these projects are economically viable. Once the user base falls below the critical mass they get into a death spiral. Costs keep increasing for the remaining users, and as they drop out, it increases for the remaining users even more.
Electric utilities are looking at exactly the same scenario. In 1955 if someone predicted the demise of street car lines within 20 years, they would have been laughed at. But in 20 years almost all of them became moribund. Except for very high density locales like Chicago, Boston and New York it is mere shadow of its former selves.
As solar becomes cost effective, finance companies will jump in and simplify the financing and installation headaches and make direct head to head comparison possible. "All you pay for is the electricity you actually use based on the meter. All you do is to give us permission to install solar panels in your property. Compare it directly with your utility bill". As affluent customers start using more of solar and use less of the grid, the utility company will start levying "grid-connection fees". And at some point people would start cutting the grid. Then cost will start going up for the remaining users and the spiral would start.
The electric utilities are well aware of the situation. That is why they are fighting so hard.
One way out of their plight is for the utilities to start installing more and more of solar. Solar generation neatly matches the peak demand. If they can use solar for peak summer late afternoon demand and run their gas plants for base load they can survive or stretch it out for a long time. But no matter what, coal is out. Even dirty coal is costlier than gas, not much cheaper than solar. Clean coal just can't compete.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"mathmatically "
u sound smert
That is interesting. But I meant cars as something which will be an extra demand for clean electricity, at a time when people are burning coal for their home energy needs. Can you both make the air conditioning clean and your car? And that's USA where you have lots of space.
You made up the idea that coal plants have "no trouble" lasting 2-3 times as long as solar. It's a fiction.
You also tried to dodge the claim that coal would have to last over a thousand years if your claim of solar power having to last half a millennium were in any way, shape or form a valid one.
You don't even know what Dunning Kruger means. It's entirely possible for me to do maths and see that if 0.2% replacement means "half a millennium lifetime required" that a 0.1% or less replacement means "a millennium or more lifetime required". What other form of maths do you apply to make this incorrect, and where does D&K come into this on my part?
Or was that just a phrase you heard used against you where you made a claim that was bollocks, based on faked knowledge, and it appeared to work (because in your case it was true), therefore (not understanding what it was or why it worked) tried it out on me, assuming it would be sufficient?
My guess is, they are comparing peak output, i.e. peak MWs of different power sources. Which is incorrect. There are huge differencies in so called capacity factor, which is basically how much percent of a year the power plant is able to operate at 100% rated (peak) power output. For nuclear power plant, the capacity factor is around 75%, for coal fired power plant it is around 50%. For solar, it is (alas) only 10%, mainly due to simple fact, that peak power is produced only around noon and when the sky is clear. I am actually quite supportive of solar power, but let's just compare apples to apples; for solar plant, you need 5x more peak power to match a coal fired plant (and there is still the - basically unsolved - problem of energy storage for solar cells).
New coal is not running at $1 A/C. This is a pure fabrication. Ammoritized solar power in the sunbelt is $0.043/kWh. At Germany install costs its less than 4 cents. Properly sighted (read: not most) natural gas plants are cheaper. That's it. Coal isn't cheap anymore.
I live on the east coast. We are getting artic slippage. That's a new climate. It also was not the coldest anything on record which is why we got so much snow.
In short: The solar future doesn't look as bright once you start to scale it.
I think you will find that Solar thermal generation doesn't scale in the way you have assumed.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Why do so many people find economical solar energy so upsetting?
When they are measuring the "added" capacity they measure the max output at solar noon. When you measure it over say a year it is going to be less than a 3rd of that number.
Of course coal, nuclear, wind, and so on also do not produce max 24/7/365 but it is a much higher percentage than solar.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...until the cost of solor (and the cost to replace it after X years) comes down, the ROI just isn't there.
There's absolutely no reason to pay that much money for solar for the normal rank-and-file homeowner.
Even if global warming is wrong, releasing CO2 includes releasing a lot of other crap in the atmosphere. I find it hard to believe that people are so stuck on arguing if anthropological CO2 release is the cause of our current temps that they stop caring about all of the other pollution being released for the exact same reasons, which we know for a fact is extremely harmful.
I couldn't care less if we reduce pollution for the sake of "global warming" or "to stop particulates and heavy metals from being released", lets at least agree to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
Any form of your 5th point would use plutonium.
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
The biggest problem with the mining of uranium is the amount of energy required to extract the ore from the rock...
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
...and all of the new sources coming on line are all from harder ores i.e. it takes more enrgy to extract from the granite ore bodies than it does from sandstone ore bodies. This means the energetic output of your reactor is soaked up by the energy you used to get the fuel in the first place.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
Again this becomes an issue of how much energy goes into getting the uranium out of the seawater, you would probably look to extracting uranium from coal station smoke stacks or from the fly ash before turning to seawater
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Well you probably mean 'burner' reactors at that rate, and they have to acheive 20% (and then it's fuel reprocessing - but thats the integral bit) and then provided we have the materials technology to build that reactor. Sure the prototype IFR is very promising but after all the other factors are accounted for, like burn up rate (even at 20% as compared to the current 0.3%), reactor availability you are still left with a reactor that has to be decommissioned after 50 years and then you use up even more energy because you can't demolish it like any normal building.
So these other factors are also considerations when weighing up the energetic viability of the fuel cycle.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
All solar energy is area dependent and will scale linearly in a similar manner.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Whilst living on this planet the sun will provide us with all the energy we need if we can just work out how to harness it effectively. Save the Fissile materials for when we *really* need them, like if/when we get into deep space exploration.
There are enough fissile materials for 100,000 years worth of power, once you put thorium and breeders and non-traditional uranium sources into the mix. Even if this is off by an order of magnitude, a 10,000 year supply of power lasts longer than recorded human history. To me, this is a reliable enough supply (and one that can be used TODAY) that I support its use until we bridge to some form of terrestrial fusion, and/or solar energy.
Let me ask you this: If we started now and built even just enough natural gas plants in the US to replace every erg of coal power that are currently used here, what would the effect on US carbon emissions be? Don't sweat the limits of the gas supply, it's a thought exercise. And this doesn't even attempt to consider all of the other crap that coal puts into the environment.
The interesting thing about pumping more energy into a large fluid system is that it accentuates the amount of difference between the hot spots and the cold spots, making the hot spots hotter and the cold spots colder. (fsvo spot that means a moving 'lump' of fluid)
The main effect of global warming is to increase the violence and variability of the atmospheric stirring (commonly referred to as weather). Raising the temperature of 6 thousand billion tons (nb I use uk billions ie 10^12 so we're talking 6 x 10^15 here) of air by a half of a degree represents a lot of energy, that energy means more stirring, means more extremes of weather. It's hardly amazing to anyone who cares to think about it for a moment or two and who's studied a pan on the stove.
So yes, the cold winter you just experienced IS a product of global warming.
foo
You're dreaming if you believe anyone utility is going to "quietly" build a nuclear plant...certainly it won't happen in the U.S.
Just another day in Paradise
Yea, I hate how when I boil water on the stove ice cubes start forming in it which makes it take longer.
That this came from Computerworld doesn't excuse the fact that the "research" came directly from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). Not exactly an unbiased source of information. Both Computerworld and Slashdot have failed to do any validation of the data presented.
Just another day in Paradise
I think the solution to all this is to move to a system where everybody has a big battery or capacitor bank in their house. That way we can get rid of the need to ramp up the power. The power draw will be basically constant, and we will be able to make do with a much smaller capacity on the grid. It's not cost effective to do this yet, but as battery prices come down, it will become cheaper, and eventually make sense to have something like this in your house. Combine that with a couple solar panels on your roof, and you've cut down the strain on the power grid by a very large amount.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Solar's relatively low cost/km^2 could become a difficult problem if it starts attempting to compete with other power projects purely on cost. Most cost/kwh numbers floated around don't factor in the total cost of owning and operating a solar installation, and only show the theoretical cost/kwh based on the equipment cost vs. power production. Right now, the driving factor for solar power generation is clean energy and not cost. I'd love for it to get down in cost to be competitive within the decade, but I expect that when that happens, cost might have to be not just equal, but significantly lower, to account for the solar field size needed to replace a standard coal plant. Lack of land availability can also become a damper on adoption in more populated areas, the areas that need the power the most.
I really think that something will need to be done to facilitate distributed solar via rooftop in order for solar to take over as a main power source. Right now, its too dangerous to build a business model around solar leasing via home rooftops because the rules are changing so frequently and the rules are different everywhere you go.
99% of scientists disagree. We DO know that climate change is real and that it is man made. Only in the US, and only in one political party is it still up for debate! Everyone else in the world has alreafy acknowledged the science as valid.
All solar energy is area dependent and will scale linearly in a similar manner.
Indeed it is area dependant however I think you are referring to photovoltaic as opposed to Solar thermal which has line and point modes of collection. IIRC the output of point mode stations quadruple as the size of the station doubles because the higher temperatures achieved at the point.
Obviously there are limits to the largest size, however we are nowhere near that yet.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I care little how much natural gas or coal the US uses now, or ever, and do not see it as germane to the solar vs nuclear debate we are having.
You're claiming 10k year supply of nuclear, hell I'll even let you have 100k year supply.
According to this article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth-maybe/ we have approximately 7.6 x 10^9 years of solar power available to us, which mean I win by 4 powers of magnitude.
Why invest in short term solutions?
foo
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
The sun will one day burn out and not provide solar energy, eventually we will have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
"His name was James Damore."
Therefore it's something that ecologists and other anti-capitalist hippies would like, therefore allowing solar or renewables would be like letting them win. And that's why solar energy must be fought at every turn!
Seriously, that is why the rank and the file rightwing moron on the street are so upset and angry at solar and wind: it looks like the hippies were right, therefore they were wrong in attacking them. And by attacking them again here, they re-entrench their insistence, since giving up would be admitting even more error on their part and absolve the hippie of being wrong again.
But when there is an ideological agenda, there can be a lot of confirmation bias.
Start with the title, "New Solar Capacity Beats Coal and Wind, Again." Is this an objective, nerd-centric assessment of scientific fact? Or is it a victory-lap "Eat stuff all of you doubters and deniers"?
The concern is that Renewable is not quite ready for Prime Time and being jammed down our throats.
> Sure, it is technically correct
No it's not.
There are dozens upon dozens of reports, all easily accessible on the internet, that state in no uncertain terms that the US grid is perfectly capable of handing lots and lots of intermittent power. The last report I read, now outdated as its from 2012, said that California was able to use up to 100% embedded PV. That means you could install PV on everyone's home and office to net meter to zero and the grid would handle it just fine.
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/8A822C08-A56C-4674-A5D2-099E48B41160/0/LDPVPotentialReportMarch2012.pdf
I don't much care how much you protest, night time is gonna be wanting for power if that's your install base. Either that, or somebody is gonna be spending a lot of money storing the solar energy generated during the day for use overnight. THAT cost is certainly excluded in current solar price listings.
The grid and generation needs to become non-profit, preferably publicly owned. Like roads and other basic infrastructure it isn't something that should be used for profit, especially as the economics are going to cause the power companies to start damaging society and the economy just to maintain their margins.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
The sun will one day burn out and not provide solar energy, eventually we will have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Because when the sun burns out we need to find a new home anyway. It's also 4 orders of magnitude further away than the best projections for fissile fuel on earth.
There's also the argument that as we have the sun here and now, we can save the other energy resources for when we don't have the sun, because we can't do that the other way round.
foo
Lead Acid batteries are tricky to maintain and if not maintained well then their in-out efficiency falls ~50% pretty quickly.
Li-ion is better on both fronts, but Lithium is scarce.
There are other storage technologies, Pumped Hydro http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm being the most tried and tested one, but Pumped Heat http://www.isentropic.co.uk is being developed now, and there's Tidal lagoons, and hot salt, however none of these are domestic in scale.
I think in general economies of scale and effciencies of scale mean the storage will be done on the grid and not in the house, much like Gasometers http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/London-Bristol-gasometer-2.jpg for the gas grid.
foo
It's like trying to PROVE which group is better, Christians or Catholics.
Which is better, Los Angelenos or Californians? Americans or North Americans? Asians or Earthlings?
Evangelicals or Christians? Sunnis or Muslims? Shia or Muslims?
You do understand set theory, don't you? Perhaps you missed the class on Venn diagrams ;-)
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
So Solar means we can't actually eliminate fossil fuels and carbon emmissions... (unless you find the perfect loss-less battery for storing energy when its cloudy or at night) I'd say that is a significant gap in the ability of Solar power to ever serve as a solution for eliminating carbon emissions. But only being 1% of the solution now means it has a ways to grow before you hit that wall and realize that solar can only ever reduce carbon emissions by some percentage.
It does very much seam like Solar power subsidies are a way to throw environmentalists a political bone rather than a find a serious solution. Solar as it is conceived now would barely make a dent in carbon emissions if you assume population rise and economic development of Africa will offset any reductions in emissions from Solar. Current science says that treading water on carbon emissions is not enough to really forestall some very large sea level rises in the coming centuries and some serious climate shifts. If you want to get serious you need to go nuclear also.
Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
Just need a big power cable and we will be all set.
* whoosh *
The cold winter you're experiencing (in the eastern US) is the result of changed weather patterns around the North Pole... which can be attributed to global warming, and the dip in the jetstream was seen in models from 2011-2012.
The headline is pretty misleading, and the illogical nature of it is revealed in the opening sentences of the "article." How in the world can you say solar "beats coal and wind" when it is responsible for roughly 1% of overall generation? Sure, it *added* more capacity by percentage this year than other power generation types, but so what? If I generated zero watts last year via hamster wheel generation and added one watt this year, my percentage increase is...well...infinity! Haha! I beat everything on the planet! But my actual generation is laughable.
I'm not trying to talk down solar, or wind, or anything. I'm just sick of the sensational headlines full of hyperbole picking relatively useless metrics to claim something like this is really amazing when, in fact, it's quite pedestrian.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Solar is a magical device that you place in your backyard and it turns sunlight into money. The payoff period can be even as good as a windmill turbine too but with less maintenance so it's a better long term investment. If everyone adopted bitcoin mining and that's sometimes a 1.5 year payoff period, why aren't there more solar investments being put up by rich investors? This is safer bet than bitcoins!
*facepalm*
You really don't understand the difference between global and local climate, do you? A 4 degree C change in local climate doesn't mean that much. A 4 degree C change in the global average is a catastrophe.
Finally solar power is becoming cost competitive even with coal.
Capacity =/= generation. Generation is generally 20% of capacity due to solar's awful capacity factor, which is why its NOT competitive with coal (really, nothing is). I would love for this to be true, because as a tech solar seems like the elegant solution we need-- you make the panel, it magically makes energy, win win! Except thats not the reality. Things like latitude (germany is pretty far north, for example, which affects their generation), the fact that panels dont last forever (need replacement after 15-30 years), their high cost to make, and their low efficiency conspire to kill "the dream". Enough soapboaxing-- lets look at actual figures.
(Sources from wikipedia, and from thence many other sites)
A chart of energy prices by source, Germany. Note how coal is generally 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of solar.
US DOE estimates for 2019 (scroll down for chart). The fun facts--Total system costs (per mWh):
* Coal (various types): 95 - 147
* Natural gas (various types): 66 - 128
* Advanced Nuclear: 96
* Solar, Thermal: 243
* Solar, PV: 130
Note the first column, which is where solar really gets thrashed. Your installed solar capacity may be 1000MWh, but your average output over the year will generally be 200MWh because your capacity factor sucks. Go towards the poles, it will be far worse (as Germany is discovering). Take a look here, you can see that while Germany has a boatload of solar capacity (beating out everything else), its actual generation lags behind everything except gas and hydro.
Im not cherry-picking these, either; one of those links youll note appears to be to a "green" site. Im just grabbing the first links I see, which mesh with every other piece of info I've seen on the subject. The TL;DR is that solar is crazy expensive and not really a great pick for northern countries. Maybe Im wrong and Germany will hit 100% of its generation year round eventually-- but I seriously doubt it. Solar is great as long as you dont expect it to carry the full weight of your country's energy needs; its really not made for that.
The real tragedy to me is that Germany is scaling down its nuclear, with the upshot that its still having to rely heavily on coal. If we did live in a world driven by science and rationality, we would see solar / wind / nuclear on an upswing and coal on a downswing. Thats not happening because many "green" types will worry about the nuclear boogeyman, and claim that if we work for 100 years we can possibly get solar to be cost competitive and efficient enough to actually generate a country's energy.
Then cost will start going up for the remaining users and the spiral would start.
You just described Hawaii and to some extent Arizona.
"Key to solar adoption has been falling costs across market segments and states." The key is the units of gov't. that refuse to grant permits for new or expansions of existing coal and natural gas plants. If electricity was 1 cent/KWh, nobody would be buying PV or windmills. Businesses also see a tax advantage to adding the solar and wind generators. Take away the corporate "welfare", and solar will be reduced to architectural lighting around the house. BTW, I never see any reports on the relatively short lifespan of PV cell panels. They lose their effectiveness largely after 5 years of exposure. I wonder what will become of them after 30 years of use.
Why bother with Li-ion or lead acid when there are batteries that can really stand up to abuse that have been around for over a century. Granted a nickel-iron battery isn't as energy dense as the other 2 but in a stationary install that is not a big concern. Add to it that they can be refreshed fairly easily after a multi-decade initial lifespan and they become a good enough solution. If one were to look for a better technology to install at the substation level there is always the sodium-sulfur batteries but those would be something I would want to keep out of the hands to the general public since I could see some dumb ass working on their home putting a nail through it with catastrophic results.
Time to offend someone
Why does it have to be loss-less storage? Have both solar generation and a storage be cheap enough and it becomes a non issue.
Time to offend someone
Man's laws and rules often battle nature no matter what we try to do. Humans have a concept of supply and demand. If demand for coal drops there will be an excess of supply which means coal should become cheaper and that might lead to more use of coal. Obviously solar, wind and tide are the best answers available but by creating concepts and systems like capitalism we may have doomed ourselves. Society has a love - hate relationship with change and reason and logic have little to do with any of it. Dogma infests just about everything. Canada has a notion that it is best not to have a bunch of sick people walking about without medical care. The US seems to fight like crazy to insure that a portion of the public remains sick, disabled or even contagious by restricting health care or quality of health care. Meanwhile vice rules as in the US powerful groups bribe congress to avoid single payer health care which is the best answer to the problem. My God! What will we do if the poor get as good health care as the wealthy? Oh, imagine the horror of that!
It's not even all of that one political party. Just a vocal section of it.
It's pretty sad when CHINA can agree on this, but the radical right wing cannot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I had not heard of nickel-iron batteries before this[0], but they don't look promising:
"Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications" The poor charge retention seems to suggest that the in-out efficiency will be low as well.
There are other chemical batteries that would be better, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery springs to mind, and the sodium sulfur, you mention also has potential, but none of these seem to be as good as pumped hydro or pumped heat, tho maybe being a Mechanical thermodynamic/fluids guy biases me unfairly against the chemical storage.
Having said all that, my initial point was one of economies/effciencies of scale and I do not think your suggestions deny that, the best storage technology has yet to be developed, but storage technology is where it's at regardless of what power source you wish to use, even Nuclear could do with buffers to smooth out the lumps in the demand curve.
[0] My chemistry is good enough to know that you can make a battery out of any two dissimilar metals and an electrolyte, I'd just not specifically heard of Ni-Fe ones.
foo
Collect the power stations currently producing that power and you'll see the power stations stretching to the horizon.
So power can't be generated for the USA!
Note: ignoring the mines and spill tips and refineries and pipelines and other paraphenalia of power production by fossil fuels. Solar power doesn't have to be delivered. It delivers itself. It doesn't need refining. Both need manufacturing plants, add it in if you like: it won't stop fossil power being "just as wrong" as solar.
This is an incredibly logical stance, and one that I find myself drawn to. I don't know if climate change is being caused by human industrialization or not - I haven't seen all the data, and I'm not a climatologist with the proper training to interpret that data.
I do know that turning chunks of carbon found under a mountain into plumes of shit in the atmosphere isn't very good for the lungs that happen to be downwind. The science is pretty clear on that. Therefore, if we can find ways to stop doing that without sacrificing societal progress, I'm all for it. Thus, I work for a solar energy company, and have no problem with them trumpeting the environmental good that the 4GWh we produced yesterday is doing.
It's that many lumps of mountain that aren't turned into shit in the air people have to breathe.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Doesn't have to be completely loss-less, but it does have to be some combination of cheap enough and higher efficiency because even if solar panels are cheap most land or roof space isn't. And I like trees.
I'd imagine the reason that nuclear wasn't mentioned in the linked article, is because there is a 0% rise in nuclear generation capacity, and thus doesn't show up as a data point.
In fact, except for NRC-licensed uprating of existing reactors, there hasn't been any increase in nuclear generation capacity in the US in over 30 years. If they complete that plant in Georgia, then we'll probably see it in the future versions of this article.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What is the functional life expectancy of a solar panel? The source may be permanent, but the power generator is not even close to it.
When I saw hope is when I saw both the far left and far right agreeing on the technology, especially when the Tea Party hopped on board the solar bandwagon.
There is one thing solar has, which very few conventional energy generation technologies have (wind and hydro are too limited), and that is that solar doesn't need a large external energy grid to be usable. Since both sides dislike the government, having self-sufficiency (be it a hippie commune or a gun range single's night [1]) is important.
Other than air conditioning [1] and heating where wood isn't available, it doesn't take that much solar to run most appliances. RV-ers run microwaves and kitchen appliances from 200-400 ampere-setups all the time, and Advanced RV has vans that can go up to 1200 amp-hours in battery capacity. There are YouTube vids of people completely off-grid, but still able to do everything one can do on mains power.
In an urban house, even one 250 watt panel attached to a POS China PWM controller from eBay for $8, a pair of 6 volt golf cart batteries in series, and a decent PSW inverter can be made into a circuit that would handle all the small parasitic devices in a house, mainly laptop/smartphone/tablet chargers. Add another panel, and a better charger controller, and one can run a computer from that setup.
I personally have gotten a cast off PV panel, the above $8 charge controller, a used 12 volt deep cycle battery, a USB charger that hooks to 12 volts... and with a few five volt, Sunjack bulbs with 340 lumens each, have quite usable light for an outbuilding on a friend's farm.
Because solar installs can be made from the ground up in geographically disparate locations without long distance wiring, it is no surprise that it winds up getting widespread use.
I just hope distributed solar gains as much traction in the US in urban and suburban settings as it does in Germany.
[1]: Wish there were some way that one can create a usable A/C method that works in humid climates (where swamp coolers won't work), and doesn't need massive engineering in passive stone. Until then, looks like a grid hookup is still mandatory.
Ah yes, climatedepot. The ombudsman of the 4th Estate's Eco-Reporting. Aren't you the only guys left that still have a hard on for that Willie Soon character? Aren't you jokers still citing his peer reviewed" paper?
You should go post somewhere else if you hope to convince anyone of anything. Somewhere a little less scientifically literate.
It's not as much land as you imagine, I think.
From http://www.withouthotair.com/c25/page_178.shtml
So the correct statement about power from the Sahara is that today’s consumption could be provided by a 1000 km by 1000 km square in the desert, completely filled with concentrating solar power.
That's about 1/10th of the area of the Sahara, and there's not many trees there.
Of course it would be insane to generate all the power there, and there are other renewable sources which are more viable in areas far from sunny places, and we're horrible wastrels of power because it's cheap.
Having said all that, I agree, the storage solution needs to be 90%+ in-out efficiency.
foo
I fully support solar. However, it bothers me that the solar fanatics don't talk about the pollution caused by the production of solar cells and panels. It's easy to ignore and not inform the consumer because the pollution is destroying a country a few thousand miles away. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist.
It is like someone in the 1% coming along and said how economical it was for them to drive their Tesla to the country club... why are people so upset. I think there is reason to be critical of this on all sides. We are being told that it is great news that 1% of energy production is Solar and somehow this proves that Solar is the future and all we need is more Solar. Solar baby solar. It is a tragic farce. Solar has a long long way to go and can't conceivably make a dent in Global Climate change and CO2 emissions without some real and somewhat illusory technology improvements that make it much more economical. Worse it distracts from other energy sources like Nuclear that we need to be aggressively expanding in order to actually address CO2 emissions in the lifetime of people that are alive today. Time matters and Solar, Wind and Hydro aren't going to get us where we need to go before some major sea level rise and climate dislocations are locked in. Millions of people are going to be dislocated which will cause decades of wars. Ostensibly we are already seeing this in the Middle East as scarcity caused by lack of water resources, population rise and ability to migrate freely gives rise to mass violence. For people that take climate change and the real negative affects for future generations seriously, people should be upset about this nonsense.
1. Heavily regulate coal, increasing costs.
2. Force plants to close, decreasing generating capacity.
3. Crow about the fact that Solar out generated coal and is cost competitive.
Solar hasn't improved. Coal has been artificially handicapped.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
All of those are valid (if pointless) questions, so what it your point?
The subset of Christians who are called Catholics could be better or worse than the entire set of Christians.
Just like the subset of humans who are 3 years old have an average height shorter than that the set of all humans.
All you did with that post is tell everyone "I don't know about climate change, but I'm going to assume I do, and repeat what someone I trust told me about this, instead of acting like a rational adult and finding out for myself". Good jerb! You're so clever!
Gee Dave, you must be a rational adult, so what results are you getting from your fleet of temperature-measuring satellites that you put into orbit? Of course you designed, built, and launched them all yourself, because otherwise you'd just be "relying on what someone you trust told you" about global temperatures, and that would be childish.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Really? You're saying that because there's only a couple thousand years of our current energy needs sitting there, we shouldn't use it at all because it's only a couple thousand years? It's better to continue burning chunks of mountain and turning them into clouds of shit that kills people because we don't have a permanent lasts-longer-than-civilization-has-been-here energy source?
You are fucking cracked. Turn off your computer and never use it again - it's powered by a temporary energy source that we will eventually have to stop using. And it too, will not last forever - you're going to need a new one of those someday so just don't use it, because no good can come from using something that is only temporary, but way better than what came before.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What I mean is that solar irradiance is at 1000W/m^2 give or take depending on sky quality time of day and so and combined with turbine efficiency means that you can never exceed 600W/m^2 peak no matter what the scaling modifiers are presented as.
Why invest in short term solutions?
Because you don't go directly from the Wright Brothers to the Space Shuttle in one step. There are intermediary steps involved, because that's how technology progresses.
Waiting for the perfect technology instead of using incrementally improved solutions has you getting nowhere at all.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What is the functional life expectancy of a solar panel? The source may be permanent, but the power generator is not even close to it.
Current PV degrades at approx 1% of output per year. Thus people claim it has a 20year lifetime, as after 20 years it only produces 80% of the peak output it did when it was new. I have no idea why this 20year/80% figure is chosen as the point at which it stops being useful, but that's the figure people quote.
Having said that all sorts of power stations have parts that need replacing, it's called maintenance.
foo
You mean climate change. Global warming is so 20th century.
If space isn't a problem, why not NiFe batteries? Those don't damage themselves if they drop below 50% SoC, and unlike lithium batteries, don't lose most of their capacity in 2-3 years.
Another energy storage medium would be flywheels.
I do like the idea of a battery bank at residences, because this is an ideal whole-house UPS.
The lingering arctic front brought below freezing temperatures and constant snow storms across much of the U.S this winter. Even if you solve the "sun is not shinning at night" problem with temporary storage, exactly what is it that you do when much of the countries solar panels are under frozen snow for days if not weeks at a time?
NiFe batteries (i.e. Iron Edison) models are starting to get a foothold in the solar storage battery market. Their main selling point is the fact that they have a very long usable life and are very stable. They have a relatively poor energy density in volume compared to lithium variants, but for storage battery installations, this isn't as big an issue as in a smartphone.
Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.
And things like Solar, Wind, and Wave wave aren't usable as baseline "brown" power. Because their generation sources are not stable and dependable. BUT, they can be used, alongside existing hydro and geothermal to offset demand spikes.
In other words, you don't use nuclear power to "fill in". You use nuclear as your baseline. You use everything else to fill in.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why invest in short term solutions?
Yes, why do anything ever if there is something better eventually behind it? You are starting to skirt the edge of stupidly fanatical. If we have a technology NOW that allows us to effectively halt our contribution to climate change, we do that. While we are doing the thing that we know how to do, we're also researching how to do the thing that we'd like to be doing - solar in the near term (100 years), fusion out past that.
My point about coal & natural gas is made to illustrate the huge gains to be made in divorcing ourselves from coal as rapidly as possible. Almost anything is better. "Better" is what we're all supposed to be working towards - my better is a drastic reduction in dispersed pollutants from energy production (mercury, ash, atmospheric uranium, CO2, etc.). What's yours? Solar isn't worth doing just for solar's sake, there needs to be a reason.
Because nuclear is extremely expensive.
Because when the sun burns out we need to find a new home anyway. It's also 4 orders of magnitude further away than the best projections for fissile fuel on earth.
50,000-100,000 years or so is still a long time. I don't see the point of this concern especially since there's fissionables elsewhere in the Solar System (and a vast amount of them on Earth in addition to the amount we can get currently).
I think the solution to all this is to move to a system where everybody has a big battery or capacitor bank in their house
https://youtu.be/7-xPHopebiE
Watch that, THEN tell me about how everyone should have a nice big, TOXIC battery in their house.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.
We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Not even close. The only way it's becoming "competitive" is through massive subsidies.
What's there to "solve"?
Well, you certainly are a representative of the scientifically illiterate subset.
Because they are so heavily regulated that they can't do anything on their own. It takes decades to get permits for a new nuclear power plant, all the efficient nuclear reactions are illegal (supposedly because of "proliferation concerns"), and the reactions that are legal produce so much waste that they are effectively undeployable.
Nighttime power use is a lot lower than the 3pm-7pm peak daily usage block when residential and commercial is at it's highest. People are generally watching TV on their couch and commercial properties aren't being lit/climate controlled as much. This isn't a major , unsolvable problem.
moox. for a new generation.
They aren't politically powerful enough. They lost the big battles with the Democrats in the 1970s early 1980s both over non-excessive safety standards, liability, and enrichment. We know they can't take care of their own stuff. I'm not sure what this has to do with solar so I don't agree with GP either but they lost.
Uranium would only last us a century with current nuclear power plants; that's because current nuclear power plants only extract about 1% of the energy and produce lots of high level waste. We already know how to do better: breeder reactors. They are politically unwanted; technically, there is no problem. In addition, Thorium is common and would last us a long time.
Furthermore, oil and gas are not scarce at all. Limited-growth-types have predicted that we're running out of oil (and food and what not) since Malthus, and have always turned out to be wrong. That's why the attack on oil and gas usage has now shifted to global warming. If oil and gas were scarce, global warming wouldn't be an issue.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Really? You're saying that because there's only a couple thousand years of our current energy needs sitting there, we shouldn't use it at all because it's only a couple thousand years? It's better to continue burning chunks of mountain and turning them into clouds of shit that kills people because we don't have a permanent lasts-longer-than-civilization-has-been-here energy source?
No, I'm saying we have 2 options, both of which seem viable. One is develop a renewables + storage energy solution which will potentially last until the sun expires and the other involves adding nuclear to the mix. The nuclear portion will only be usable, for at best 0.0001% of the time we'll be using the other option and will cost significant resources and effort to implement and safely decommission, that would, in the big scheme of things seem to be a waste of those resources.
Of course if you have a more short term view then you may draw different conclusions. I admit that it probably counts as hopeless optimism that we'll live long enough for these things to matter, but planning for ones own demise seems needlessly depressive.
I do not now and will never advocate coal. I agree nuclear is better than coal, but neither stacks up against renewables + storage well.
foo
Why bother starting? Because nuclear fission can give us an order or two more energy than we're producing right now for centuries to come at least. That's enough to bootstrap an interplanetary civilization and start mining the asteroid belt and beyond. Once we have that, we have vast new energy sources available.
That's how human civilization has always worked. We have never lived sustainably. We have constantly used finite resources to bootstrap technology and growth that let us tap greater finite resources. There is no rational reason to stop that process now and limit ourselves to sustainable living on earth. In fact, if we tried, civilization would probably die within a few thousand years.
Because they are a lot cheaper and a lot easier and faster to deploy.
And the long term future of humanity isn't solar cells on suburban roofs for the next billion years, as you seem to fantasize about, it is space-based power and space-based civilization, hopefully starting to take off within a few decades.
It doesn'tmean that the same exact comparison of "put all the generation in one place and you would see from horizon to horizon only generation!" Fossil fuel generation doesn't look so rosy now.
That is the PROOF of your complaint being bollocks: it applies to power generation for a large country NO MATTER WHAT IT IS.
So if your argument is that solar power is not to be used for that reason, then coal, nuclear, gas, etc power should not be used for that self same reason.
But with your head up your ass, I bet you can't read too well in the dark...
Pumped hydro is around 80% efficient as currently implemented. That only means an extra 100 km on a side for your giant collector in the Sahara. Molten salt might be even more efficient, particularly if you also used it to provide heat directly.
Solar can be installed locally per house for cheaper than the cost of grid power. General rule of thumb is you need 60% of your roof covered in Solar to meet 100% of your daytime residential needs. Solar doesn't need to be centrally located in giant farms, it can be distributed in urban areas with overlap on existing structures with no problem.
moox. for a new generation.
Anything can be attributed to global warming. It doesn't mean that it actually is due to global warming. And increased frequency of extremely cold weather is one of those things that I just don't buy coming from global warming.
I agree politicians tend to be stupid, current administration and Pres included, but that doesn't mean scientist can not be equal as stupid or just as biased.
I'd also like to point out that this company has a vested interest in clean technology (i.e. money), I'm going to treat them just as suspected as any other source that has a huge biased.
Everyone else in the world has already acknowledged the science as valid.
Perhaps, and yet places like Germany are moving from Nuclear back to Coal. Apparently the rest of the world has their own share of irrational people.
FTFA:
SEIA CEO Rhone Resch said that without question the federal government's solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) has helped fuel "remarkable growth."
In other words, solar isn't cheap.
The energy from the Sun just doesn't magically turn into electricity, it requires the extraction of minerals and elements to produce the physical panels, batteries, controllers, inverters, etc, etc, etc. If you're going to reject Nuclear since we only have 10,000 of years of Uranium, will you also reject Solar as we may only have 10,000 years worth of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium to build panels out of? Plus if we look to the solar system, Earth is not the only place to find Uranium (hey if you can put your fusion reactor in space, why can't I get my uranium from space too)
All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data.
The age of the Earth is totally irrelevant in this discussion. What you need to look at is the time constant of the relevant physical phenomena. Suppose an evil alien race injects a ray into our sun that makes it 10% weaker. How long do you think it takes for us to notice clear effects ?
I live in an apartment.
Also what about your not-daytime needs and industry?
Sure there's a place for solar energy but it's vastly overhyped as society changing when it's really just a form of middle-class luxury for folks in sunny places.
The text claims wind power was only 3% of new generation in 2014 but the figure give 23% with coal apparently not providing any new capacity. I suspect the figure is correct on this. http://breakingenergy.com/2015...
Or sodium-sulfur batteries. They work pretty well, and the materials are cheap and abundant. In Canada, they have huge sulfur mountains they get from cleaning up the tar sands. They'll probably pay you to take the sulfur.
Coal added very little new generation. http://breakingenergy.com/2015... The 23% appears to be wind, not coal as claimed in TFA. Look at the figure.
For comparison, the Braidwood Nuclear Generation Facility (2 reactors, 2,242 MW total output). With its cooling pond, it sits on a site 7x the size of a solar concentration site and outputs roughly 22x the power
So, nuclear is only 3x as efficient ? Are you sure that calculation is correct ?
Pumped Hydro has the advantage that there very little leakage loss from the store, and in fact if you put the top lake in a place where it rains a lot the store gets topped up for free.
I don't know of another storage technology that has this advantage.
Having said that maybe 80% in-out is good enough, and a mix of storage technologies is probably a good idea at this time, so, to be clear, it's not that I'm against batteries in houses, just that I don't think that will answer all of the issues required to be solved to produce the renewables + storage solution I'm looking for, and other, more centralised stores will be required.
I've heard of a Canadian housing development that uses solar thermal (water in black pipes on the roof) to heat up a big underground gravel store to keep the heat until winter when it's used to provide a district heating system, which probably isn't that efficient but it's effective enough and reasonably cheap, and very maintainable.
foo
Solar still works just fine in urban spaces too, it does not scale as well there due to population densities, obviously, but urban spaces take up a tiny proportion of available land. I will give you that solar does not work for the minority use case of nighttime industrial solar, but given the tiny portion of the energy market that represents I don't see it being a major issue. As solar power continues to drop, nighttime industrial may simply vanish as solar continues to drop in price. I don't see the point of arguing this, solar will be cheaper than coal by the end of the decade even without subsidies. You will need nighttime generation capacity but long term the writing is already on the wall, business will opt for the cheaper solution.
moox. for a new generation.
which is why its NOT competitive with coal (really, nothing is).
If nothing is competitive with coal then why are all the coal plants in the US being retrofitted to run off Natural Gas?
It's because the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe. This makes the jet stream wavier, and that causes localized cold weather:
http://www.weather.com/science...
The reason for the extra Arctic warming has several reasons. One being that the air is dry, which means that increasing CO2 blocks a larger portion of IR. Secondly, the reduced sea ice area exposes more dark water to the sun.
Ain't that rich? A technology that is subsidized more by just about any, if not every, other form of electricity production per kWh and you're wondering why nuclear can't take care of itself? Wow. Just wow.
The whole global warming arguments gets old. There are plenty of other arguments that can be used to encourage changes towards greener solutions. Solar power is free and space on roofs is also free to be used. It's free energy and considering our peek usage is during day light (overall usage, not residential) it seems like an ideal solution.
Solar panels were expensive and the reason is because they weren't being researched due to a lacking interest (double edge sword). Since many solar energy programs have been put in place by government, the solar cell output increased and the cost has dropped by more than half..
Regulatory hurdles have made new nuclear plants all but impossible. It's sad because we have new (and old) reactor designs that are incredibly safe. Unfortunately the NIMBY principle prevails over science.
> The military hardly uses plutonium
Wut? That's practically all they use.
In weapons yes, however all military reactors use highly enriched uranium (sub reactors even use super-grade uranium which has higher U-235 concentration than what is typically used in weapons)
> current price to last several hundred years
At the currently tiny fraction of worldwide production. If you are arguing for some sort of fission economy, then there's not nearly enough of the stuff.
If there is a fission economy than new sources will be found and developed. Then there are breeder reactors, thorium, sea water extraction, and ultimately the rest of the solar system. People always seem to compare what Solar will be in 10 years to what nuclear was 30 years ago. Or can we abandon Solar because if we go "full solar" we'll run out of Indium or Lithium
> and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
It doesn't make a difference, the non-nuclear side is already too expensive to build:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/fusion-aint-gonna-happen
Oh, no... someone wrote a blog. His argument assumes that the ITER approach is the only one that will work and that costs will never come down, he also assumes that if Fusion were perfected and became widespread we somehow couldn't build additional fission reactors, or build specialized fusion reactors to produce tritium (I guess we've lost the ability to build CANDU reactors), Darlington itself has been approved to build 2-4 new reactors if required. Plus we don't know if Pollywell fusion will pan out, or if Lockheed Martin will somehow live up to their claims. However it's perfectly fine for Solar advocates to assume that breakthroughs in battery technology will solve all of its issues
If that same time came to solar today the industry would nearly bleed to death. Let's not be hypocrites about it.
Nuclear's inability to ramp up and down quickly is a design choice, not a law of a nature.
I have natural gas pumped into my house. If I cut the gas line, it could easily explode and destroy the house.
People pump gasoline in their cars using an open hose that carries 1 megajoule per second.
Since accidents are sufficiently rare, this is typically not considered a big deal. With a well designed battery, you'd probably have much smaller rates of accidents.
Bullshit
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
Rather than saying anything can be attributed to global warming it would be more accurate to say everything occurs against the background of global warming and is affected by it.
Has there actually been an increased frequency of extremely cold weather? Have you gone through the weather records to quantify that? Without doing that you're just making a subjective judgement. It's true that the last two years have seen some extremely cold weather in Eastern North America. Global warming may be a factor in that the Arctic is warming faster than the more temperate areas further south. This reduces the temperature differential that drives the jet stream causing it to slow down. When a fluid stream slows down it tends to meander more and it is large meanders and slowing in the jet stream that are pulling the Arctic air further south and not clearing it as fast. That's probably not the whole story but it may well be a factor.
Check your math! That is clearly wrong simply by taking the number of people on the planet and dividing up 3.6m miles between them, 1 average person obviously only needs a fraction of roof space to supply their power.
Math done, 3.6m miles = 1331 square meters per person, that's orders of magnitude wrong.
You need to go back to school, Solar power doesn't generate heat it collects heat/energy, big difference.
Absurd statement because of lack of quantity / perspective, have you blackened out your windows to prevent bird deaths? Destroying the desert, sounds like a massive exaggeration to me.
So solar only requires 3x the ground space of nuclear if you exclude mines, processing plants and nuclear storage. That sounds pretty good to me.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No it isn't a catastrophe and in fact there is plenty of evidence that if there was more CO2 in the atmosphere the desert belts would recede.
The central science in studying climate is physics.
Actually if you look at what happened in both Germany and France nuclear is subsidizing green power. They're taxing nuclear generated electricity to give guaranteed profits on green electricity which is bought at a guaranteed price much higher than the price you can buy nuclear power.
The wind power construction drive is one of the big reasons why the EU is stuck in a quagmire of debt right now. The other was the housing construction binge.
What does it say about some solar advocates' faith in the viability of solar power that they feel a need to make solar appear better by reporting utility solar installations in terms of gigawatts (hugely misleading, as a few others have pointed out) rather than gigawatt-hours of energy production?
Because the of the external costs of retrofitting the plant with GHG emissions capture is less reliable and more expensive than simply switching to natural gas.
Yes, solar power doesn't have the highest power density of our power sources. 1000 W/m^2 isn't that bad, though, if one could actually sustain that. For comparison, the world's highest-output coal power plant at Taichung has a surface area of 1.3e6 m^2 and and an installed capacity of 5.5 GW, which gives 4300 W/m^2.
But the coal needs to be mined too. Taichung uses about 15 million tonnes of coal per year. Assuming the Haerwusu coal mine is representative, and that it can pump out coal forever, then with its yearly production of 20 million tons, it can supply 1.3 Taichungs continuously. So the effective surface area of Taichung's power production is 67 square km / 1.3 = 50 square km. That gives Taichung a power density of 110 W/m^2. Huh, that's surprisingly low. If one had installed solar panels over that area instead (though of course, solar panels aren't free), then even with a yearly average efficiency factor of 10% they would rival Taichung.
That's just to say that currently popular power sources can be quite area-demanding too.
I can't be bothered to read a word. A study comes out, which after about 5 seconds of research tells me that the GTM is "Green Tech Media" who partnered with the Solar industry association, to produce a study about how positive solar power is... news at 11.
It might be true, but you couldn't get your news from a more biased source if you tried.
I'm sure if the Coal industry association hired mining tech media group to do a study about the benefits of coal usage, it would be just as positive.
Garbage.
Not if you drop it down a very deep hole.
I know. And Nuclear is in second place for the amount of land rendered uninhabitable too!
Coal wins that, rendering multiple cities uninhabitable and with multiple Chernobyl sized areas rendered uninhabitable by coal seam fires plus ongoing smoke pollution covering huge areas.
Nuke plants- great in theory.
Nuke plants + Human Operators- an accident waiting to happen. The current average appears to be one major accident per decade.
We need to use smaller nukes with modern designs. And we need to back those up with a few reactors which will consume their waste and reduce it to much smaller quantities.
But when anyone solves the battery problem- nukes are dead dead dead and alternative energy of all kinds makes much more sense.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Two years ago my neighbor woke me up because the gas line broke where it entered my house. Quarter inch think steel pipe. 70 years of flexing with the climate. Could have been a huge explosion when I turned off the fluorescent light (apparently that could have caused a spark. fyi!).
And there have been some large neighborhood scale explosions over the last few years (I notice them now on the news after my incident).
The problem with gas is the same with nuclear is not the same with solar.
an aging solar power solution will simply fail to work.
an aging gas or nuclear solution (with designs in place- not the new designs) can fail spectacularly.
If they use the new smaller nuke designs which automatically fail quietly in combination with solar, it might work.
A problem with solar and nuke- is heat pollution. You are taking energy from one area and moving it to another area. The amounts are small compared to the larger climate- but .1degrees is small but can be the difference between water boiling or freezing. There are some signs that wind is having slight effects on climate too. It's extracting energy and moving it elsewhere. That seems similar to a tall forest growing in the same location tho.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are currently 4 (or 5) nuclear reactors being built in the SE US that you don't hear much about. It will be interesting to see how they work out when they finally come online in a few years.
Sometimes it's just stealing.
See Timbaland copying and pasting Acidjazzed Evening directly into one of his songs with embedded audio "watermarks" still in-place.
With heat pollution. You sort of have to weigh the effects of chosen power type against the effects of the CO2 output over a given period.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In terms of overall land use? Yes. It might be even more efficient if there were another method used for storing the cooling reservoir. But that's just how Braidwood is built out.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
actively collecting cats and making sure all cats get fixed would have a greater reduction of bird deaths by orders of magnitude.
cats kill BILLIONS of birds a year in the united states alone.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So perhaps each power plant could fund an animal patrol officers in large cities they serve.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does it bother anybody else that nuclear isn't even mentioned in passing in the linked article?
It massively ticks me off. If the people who are most visibly going on and on about global warming believed it themselves, they'd be front and center advocating replacing coal with nuclear. (Which we ought to have been doing for the past 40 years for more reasons than just CO2.) Instead, all we get from the vast majority is arithmetic denialism.
Check your math!
What math? The Sahara desert is approximately 3.6 million square miles.
Yes, I understand worldwide power consumption could be sated with a fraction of that.
I'm simply saying that, were we to do regional-scale deployment of solar concentration type tech, what soft of environmental impacts will be had from generating intense hot spots over large swaths of land?
You need to go back to school, Solar power doesn't generate heat it collects heat/energy, big difference.
Take a look at Solar Thermal Energy on Wikipedia jackass.
You essentially have a large mirror array concentrating sunlight on a tower with a molten payload.
It's heat collection. But it's high-temperature heat collection. As noted, a liquid fluoride system can operate at temps between 700-800 degrees Centigrade.
Again, while average temps on and above a desert range in the 40-50 degree Centigrade range, what starts happening in the region if we start introducing an 800 degree hot point every square mile?
As soon as you can give me a definitive answer on this, then, maybe, I'll go back to school.
Absurd statement because of lack of quantity / perspective,
I believe the lack of perspective is yours my friend.
have you blackened out your windows to prevent bird deaths?
As I'm not living in a high rise or in the concentrator tower of a solar thermal facility. No. Why should I? Please, strawman elsewhere.
Destroying the desert, sounds like a massive exaggeration to me.
Sure it does. Because you're operating on a bias here. "Your" anointed "solution" is "perfect".
Never mind that you don't simply stick poles into the ground to hold the mirrors. You put in concrete foundations. Destroying habitat for plants/creatures that live on or under the desert floor.
So solar only requires 3x the ground space of nuclear if you exclude mines, processing plants and nuclear storage. That sounds pretty good to me.
Hey. Maybe YOU have no problem living in a field of such nuclear solar plants.
I prefer more compact solutions.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There's an important variable that you're forgetting: time to implement.
We have nuclear generation technology now, and decades of operation experience. The energy storage technology you're talking about doesn't exist or barely exists, and has not been proven in nearly the exhaustive manner as nuclear.
We can use nuclear as a bridge to get away from coal *today*, and then as the technology for a larger share of renewables to take over matures, we can get there eventually. The idea of not going with what we know is better today in favor of what may be better at some point is ludicrous, because while you're waiting for that to come, you're still spewing amazingly toxic crap into the air killing 50k+ people per year in the US alone.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I really enjoy how articles like this play with how they represent numbers to deceive the reader. It's easy to increase "12 fold" when you start with a piddly small amount. Im sure there are many small companies that have increased "12 fold" since 2009, but Microsoft could never achieve that goal in the same timeframe.
And they compare it with "new energy capacity". What was the total "new energy capacity" for the last 6 years broken up on a per-year basis? Did it increase the same amount each year? If it barely increased at all last year then the solar energy cheerleaders dont have any real foundation to stand on.
You realize the CA PUC are a bunch of busybodies who don't understand electric power generation?
Political appointees with liberal arts degrees. Air thieves, everyone.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've seen the 1% per year factor before. But I've never seen it in practice or seen reports of actual panels losing that much.
They degrade faster than 1% on orbit or when subject to concentrated light (high heat).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
what starts happening in the region if we start introducing an 800 degree hot point every square mile?
Fried chicken? What the fuck are you worried about? Do you think these things would set the atmosphere on fire or sumpthin? The fact is these "hot points" as you call them pose absolutely no risk or hazard to anyone or anything, other than flying creatures.
(please don't tell me you think that the concentration towers actually add heat to the earth)
I think the recent trend to try and move away from nuclear is a reactionary thing, due to what happened in Fukushima - so, in a way it's understandable. However, you rightly point out that it's an irrational move, because coal kills many more people than nuclear. It's just not as quick and spectacular. The only two big nuclear disasters we had (Chernobyl and Fukushima) were because of pretty fundamental design flaws - in the Japanese case, compare Fukushima with Okinawa; it all came down to looking at past recorded tsunami wave heights in the area and building an appropriate-height wall (the engineer who pushed for that in Okinawa is a hero).
Actual numbers are here (and many other places): coal = 15-100 deaths per TWh, nuclear = 0.04 deaths per TWh (lower even than hydro, wind, or solar).
As much as I don't like to say it (I'm from New Zealand, which is famously anti-nuclear), nuclear is probably the best option (by almost every metric) we have until we can get large-scale solar going - which is probably still decades away. What we should be doing though is looking at safer nuclear, like pebble bed reactors, using fast breeders not light water reactors (less waste*), and probably thorium (thorium molten-salt reactors could be one of the safest and cleanest options available) - and replacing and upgrading old, dangerous reactors (but no one wants to build new ones, so we have to keep the old unsafe ones going...)
I do wonder though: how much is people being irrational, and how much is people being uninformed? The media makes a big deal about nuclear power risks, but I would hazard that most people wouldn't have a clue about the actual numbers. How much different would public opinion be if everyone knew the truth? (I know, not much different... sigh).
* Yeah, I know, breeders are more weaponisable too...
Exactly that. I think the argument is best put by this video. (TL;DR: either climate change is real or it's not, and either we do something to stop it or we don't; the consequences of getting our reaction wrong are far, far worse if climate change is real and we do nothing than if it's not and we do something. But go watch the video, it's much more eloquent).
I'm simply saying that, were we to do regional-scale deployment of solar concentration type tech, what soft of environmental impacts will be had from generating intense hot spots over large swaths of land?
The hot spots are hot from solar energy that would have otherwise heated the ground instead of being reflected to the salt in the tower, you moron.
You're kidding right?
A liquid fluoride solar thermal plant can generate temps in excess of 800 degrees Centigrade.
Yes? over the entire area of collection ? no...
All of our power generation will involve adding heat to the overall (global) system - it's basic thermodynamics. Nuclear is probably the biggest "exotic-source" heat (heat that wouldn't enter the system normally on those timescales)... unless you count fossil fuels of course: those add gigantic amount of heat. Arguably, solar might slightly reduce localised heat, due to some of the solar energy being transferred off in a different form.
It is a question I have wondered about though: if we had a magic, free, abundant energy source*, we could solve nearly all of our current problems**, but eventually we would end up with global heat issues as we're adding more energy to the system. No solution is perfect.
Also, you're slightly wrong with the 0.1 degree change being the difference between water boiling or not: while that is technically true, the 0.1 degree from 99.95 to 100.05 is actually a LOT of energy (latent heat of vaporisation).
*Protip: such an energy source is never going to happen. Always be skeptical of someone who says they know how.
**Clean water: check, wastewater treatment: check, waste reduction: check, wars over location-specific resources (water, energy): check...
I understand that some nuclear plants can ramp up and down, but in general the fossil fuel plants will do that, as long as we have them.
Fossil fuels are relatively expensive per joule compared to uranium. This means that, if you've got a nuclear plant and a natural gas plant operating at equal capacity, and you need to reduce output by a quarter, using half the natural gas is cheaper (and better in other ways) than reducing the load on the nuke.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A smart move is to position solar panels (for a northern-hemisphere use) facing West, not South. This gives less output overall, but it's peak is much more closely-aligned with peak demand.
However, we can reduce the need to burn fossil fuels during the day, if we use solar, and when the wind is right if we use wind power. Sun and wind aren't going to eliminate the need for fossil fuels by themselves, but they can cut into it a lot. We don't need one big solution right now. A partial solution can be very useful in coming up with a real solution, or in delaying the time when we need a real solution.
Your second paragraph is incoherent. It may be that the development of Africa will require as much extra energy as Solar would provide. In that case, without solar power we'd be using even more fossil fuels, right?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Nuclear has a gigantic upfront capital cost. Here's the deal:
You start investing hundreds of millions of dollars per year in planning and construction, starting today. The plant comes online 15 years from now and starts to make money back at a fairly low rate. That is, unless gas, solar or some other technology has managed to cut costs in which case you make nothing.
Any takers?
Ten thousand years is a short-term solution? By then we'll have either destroyed civilization permanently or have technology we can barely think of now, and we'll get power out of some incredibly arcane process involving scientific principles we don't know about yet. Meanwhile, you're seriously overestimating the time we have to use solar power on Earth, since in a mere billion years the planet will be far too hot to be usable, unless we do something in the meantime that looks utterly impossible (which is a possibility, I guess).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We have a problem now. We have two promising approaches, nuclear and renewable. By using both of them, we make extra progress on our immediate problem. If we only take a partial solution because the other one will run out after a period far longer than recorded history, we'll mess up the planet bad long before we would have run out of nuclear fuel.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Prof Al Bartlett might disagree with you. While supplies at current rates give us probably something approaching your 100,000-year figure (this was the best I could find with a quick search, and about backs that up), that's assuming current rates of use. If our usage increases exponentially (we have always done this in the past with energy), then that 100k years, at a 10% growth rate per annum (probably a bit big, but gets the point across), drops to less than 144 years. We don't often understand exponentials.
We all want the same thing, clean free energy and perfect San Diego CA style weather all year round. I'm sorry, but wishing for that is unicorn and butterfly crap if you are expecting no negative impact! At certain larger solar facilities the poor birds are being turned into streamers which results in an agonizing death. Where are the people demanding that we put pink bicycle helmets with my little pony stickers on the Birds, or perhaps a tin foil hat!
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
At 50 square kilometers that's two topaz solar farms which would produce 2192 GWh/year.
Compared to the coal that at 5.5GW and 90% capcity factor nets in at 43362GWh/year: approximately 20 times more.
But climate change is so 1950s.
Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.
Well, it depends on where your "local" is. A 4c change in the Arctic is probably not going to end well, and there are many places where a notable change would propagate into global or large-region weather pattern changes.
I think your advice is valid in both hemispheres.
moox. for a new generation.
As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Then surely this just backs up my point, which was that you can't use the current performance as a guarantee of future results. What I was using the past performance for was as proof of that exact point; not that past warming was proof of future warming but that the current pattern cannot be used as proof of the lack of future warming.
I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970.
Of course it didn't go back a long way. It was a graph showing more detail of the most recent temperatures to demonstrate how noisy the data is that you can't use a short term phenomenon as a predictor of long term trends. It was not the graph that I was referring to throughout the rest of my post about the previous lulls and drops in temperature not being harbingers of the end of global warming. I was looking at a PDF of a graph while I was writing, but I had intended to link to an online version in my post. Rather than me choose one that you might take issue with, why don't you do a Google search and find one yourself. Whichever you choose they demonstrate my point.
The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes.
We have a pretty good picture of temperatures dating back thousands of years from various sources like tree growth patterns and ice core samples. So do you really think that scientists suddenly get all stupid about interpreting the measurements made a hundred years ago? That they can't (or didn't think to) correlate between the various measuring stations at the time and factor equipment problems and local environmental changes?
It is no coincidence that temperature graphs for modern times all start in the mid to late 1800s. That is the time that scientists agree is when accurate enough records began. You might like to say that it is only the last 45 years that we have accurate measurements, but the scientific community would beg to differ on that assertion.
We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. ... It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.
Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footprint to a level that we had in the past, when obviously we didn't all die out back then - either literally or economically. And they say the AGW proponents are alarmists!!
But if you are right and we really don't know enough about the environment, surely the most sensible approach would be to not keep pumping the atmosphere with substances that we don't know what effect it will have on our climate. Stop doing that until we know more. How can you possibly defend doing otherwise? Surely those children who haven't mastered basic arithmetic shouldn't be trying to build nuclear power plants.
Wow, that's a bit underwhelming. That works out to be an average of 5 W/m^2, doesn't it? Where is all the energy lost? Starting from 1000 W/m^2, which already takes into account atmospheric losses, we divide by 3 to take the day/night cycle into account, by 2 for bad weather and by 10 for solar cell efficiency (10% seems to be mid-of-the-range commercial cell efficiency), and we still get 16 W/m^2. That's pretty bad, but it's still 3 times better than Topaz.
The number I used for solar previously corresponds to an efficiency of 33% with perfect weather at the equator, which is doable with research cells, I think. But I'm far from an expert on this, as you can see.
Do you know why the topaz solar farm gets such poor efficiency?
Do we know they injected this ray into our sun? The problem is, unless we have context surrounding the event (be it increased global temperatures, decreased solar output, etc), we're left with an incomplete understanding of what's driving it. We do know that there are cycles of solar activity, climate on Earth, etc. Some of those cycles we understand pretty well, like the changing of the seasons. We can observe it taking place, it happens at short, regular intervals, and it fits within our understanding of astrophysics. Other cycles are far less understood because there are so many complex interconnected variables at play and cycles sometimes interact with one another in very confusing ways. For instance, there may be a ten year cycle for solar activity in which activity decreases by X amount. There may be a thousand year cycle wherein said activity decreases, suddenly, by 10X amount due to a convergence of internal conditions. Even if we understand the ten year cycle, what are we to make of it when that thousand year cycle suddenly lands? Was it the aliens and their ray beams? A stray strand of negative energy?
You don't need the full 4.5 Billion year history of the Earth to gain a sufficient understanding of the inner workings of the climate and all its myriad cycles to work out what's normal and what's new, but to think you can do it with ~45 years of just-okay data is ludicrous.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
So the number of new installations is higher. Gee whiz, what a surprise... to a tweenie baby perhaps.
> Of course I could be nitpicking and point out that the sun actually is a huge nuclear reactor.
We live near an unshielded gravitational confinement fusion reactor, that floods the entire Solar System with several kinds of lethal radiation. We only survive here on Earth because we have a strong magnetic field *and* a thick atmosphere to protect us. Even so, the Sun causes over 100,000 cases of malignant skin cancer every year, and lots of other causes of death. It would never have passed safety review if we treated it like we do new power sources.
Then surely this just backs up my point, which was that you can't use the current performance as a guarantee of future results. What I was using the past performance for was as proof of that exact point; not that past warming was proof of future warming but that the current pattern cannot be used as proof of the lack of future warming.
My point is that it goes both ways. An apparent 'pause' in warming doesn't predict warmer or cooler (or stable) temperatures tomorrow, next year, or over the next decade. A few decades of observed warming do not - themselves - predict future warming either.
Of course it didn't go back a long way. It was a graph showing more detail of the most recent temperatures to demonstrate how noisy the data is that you can't use a short term phenomenon as a predictor of long term trends. It was not the graph that I was referring to throughout the rest of my post about the previous lulls and drops in temperature not being harbingers of the end of global warming. I was looking at a PDF of a graph while I was writing, but I had intended to link to an online version in my post. Rather than me choose one that you might take issue with, why don't you do a Google search and find one yourself. Whichever you choose they demonstrate my point.
That wasn't really my point; my point was merely that we've only just very, very recently had satellite data added to the mix. And that data, though more complete than anything before it, is still subject to measurement issues. It marks an improvement in our toolbox, but that improvement has only provided an incredibly small amount of new data and we need a whole lot more.
We have a pretty good picture of temperatures dating back thousands of years from various sources like tree growth patterns and ice core samples. So do you really think that scientists suddenly get all stupid about interpreting the measurements made a hundred years ago? That they can't (or didn't think to) correlate between the various measuring stations at the time and factor equipment problems and local environmental changes?
It is no coincidence that temperature graphs for modern times all start in the mid to late 1800s. That is the time that scientists agree is when accurate enough records began. You might like to say that it is only the last 45 years that we have accurate measurements, but the scientific community would beg to differ on that assertion.
Until around the 1930s (in some places, the 1920s, but in vanishingly few places prior thereto), most places where temperature measurements were taken were not scientific labs. They were simple weather stations where the person doing the measuring simply looked at an old mercury thermometer located randomly (sometimes near a heat source). There was little to no training for that person for taking the measurements in a standard way, the equipment used was crude and uncalibrated (not that it would help considering the level of precision available with common thermometers at the time), there was no standard time of day for measurement taking, no verification of measurements, etc. Statistical smoothing (like the kind applied to the surface temperature reconstructions done for data collected prior to about the 1930s) can help weed out a few bad measurements here in there in a largely accurate and precise data set. What it cannot do is take hugely incomplete, inaccurate, imprecise data measured in non-standard ways with crude instruments and numerous unknown outside variables and turn that into something useful enough to demonstrate a fraction of a degree difference in temperature.
All that taken together, the margin of error for surface measurements taken between the early 1800s and the 1930s should be around 1-2C. It just isn't scientifically significant data in a discussion about temperature changes of
Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footpr
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Even IF humanity on earth could totally power itself with solar and wind in the future (which I don't think it can completely, especially in northern latitudes), when we start looking to colonizing other planets, solar energy will be much less favorable. Powering future spaceships with solar power isn't a good idea either, for that reason. Sure, solar sails can push something along, but I don't imagine it would be nearly as quick as a nuclear reactors thrust output.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Because it'll get us off coal(for the most part, some use for making steel and such will still exist), saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year while we 'work out' how to harness the sun or something else.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Somehow didn't see that. So my 'not answering' wasn't dodging the accusation, it was a reading error on my part. To wit, I wrote the part about the military, went back up, and started reading after the line about decommissioning. I'll answer now.
We know fission is a power source because, during it's lifetime, the amount of power generated by nuclear power stations is quite enormous. If you took the energy generated by a nuclear power plant and compressed it into, say, a day, you would melt and/or vaporize the whole plant. I'm talking lava here.
You're also wrong on no plant ever having been 'successfully' fully decommissioned. There are 11 sites in the USA alone. Big Rock Point, Fort St. Vrain, Haddam Neck, Maine Yankee, Pathfinder, Rancho Seco, Saxton, Shippingport, Shoreham, Trojan, and Yankee Rowe.
Lithium isn't 'the most common' of materials, but it's nearly everywhere, with an estimated 230 Billion tons dissolved in seawater alone...
If we're mining seawater for uranium and thorium for nuclear reactors, we might as well pull the lithium out as well.
I don't read AC A human right
at a 10% growth rate per annum (probably a bit big, but gets the point across)
You're assuming that the exponential growth will hold true for extended periods. Meanwhile, in developed countries energy use per person is dropping, as has breeding/replacement for population growth.
Once China/India and such catch up with the 'developed world', we'll see peak energy usage.
I don't read AC A human right
Any form of your 5th point would use plutonium.
So? Breeder reactors MAKE plutonium.
The biggest problem with the mining of uranium is the amount of energy required to extract the ore from the rock...
Not much of a problem then. It takes more energy to mine a kwh worth of coal than it does to mine and refine a kwh worth of Uranium.
Again this becomes an issue of how much energy goes into getting the uranium out of the seawater, you would probably look to extracting uranium from coal station smoke stacks or from the fly ash before turning to seawater
??? The energy that goes into extracting the Uranium from seawater is factored into it's cost. We know it would take X kWh to get 1 Kg of it.
Trick is, while you get 8 kWh worth of heat* per kg of coal, you get 24M kWh from 1 kg of Uranium.
I'm not disputing recovering Uranium and other nuclear materials from smoke stacks and ash deposits before we start filtering seawater, heck, building breeder reactors probably** makes more sense by that point, but the point is that it can be done, and yes, it'd be energy positive.
even more energy because you can't demolish it like any normal building.
24M kWh per kg of Uranium, and a reactor will go through tons and tons of the stuff through it's lifetime.... By the way, there's lots of issues currently with coal ash. Because we produce billions of tons of it a year. Coal power plants often end up being superfund sites due to contamination by trace amounts(in the coal) of lead, mercury, and other nasty elements.
Also, decommissioned after 50 years? We're looking at operating much of the current plants for 80+, why would we only be able to operate(at least most) of their replacements for only 50?
Again, nuclear power is so dense that we could settle on having a nuclear power plant site eternally(well, next 10k years or so) having 1 reactor set in operation, 1 reactor set 'decommissioned' waiting for the radioactivity to die down before being demolished, and 1 set being demolished/rebuilt to replace the current operators.
*Not electricity, multiply by around .3-.5 to get electricity.
**Nothing in life is sure...
I don't read AC A human right
what starts happening in the region if we start introducing an 800 degree hot point every square mile?
What the fuck are you worried about?
I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
Do you think these things would set the atmosphere on fire or sumpthin?
Terrible spelling aside, mostly "or something". We basically created (and enlarged) multiple holes in our ozone layer through over-use of various chemicals.
I'd like to know what region-scale introduction of a grid of super-hot points will do to a local ecology and climate.
The fact is these "hot points" as you call them pose absolutely no risk or hazard to anyone or anything, other than flying creatures.
And you, Mr. Internet Expert, know this...how? You can handwave it if you like. Until you can actually point me at real research on the subject, I'm going to continue asking the question.
(please don't tell me you think that the concentration towers actually add heat to the earth)
No. As I said earlier, I want to know what the introduction of these hot points (and the thermal plumes they engender) will do to the local ecology and climate.
I'd like to see actual research, as opposed to some fanboy who THINKS they know the technology rah-rah'ing it in response to a legitimate question.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What would it look like if we put all the the coal farms in the world in one place? Or all the football fields on earth? Or every single ant standing on each other's head? Your argument is equally as ridiculous. I have enough solar panels on my roof to supply my needs. Assuming everyone else does too, and we have a method to distribute this power, then the problem it not a crazy as you make it sound.
you moron
Low IQ AC mouth-breathers in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
The ground absorbs and returns heat to the atmosphere at a given rate.
A concentrator tower is roughly 14-16x as hot. And likely produces a prodigious, and very active, thermal plume.
What I want to know is, how does this concentration of energy, and the resultant shift in temperatures and location affect local ecology and climate.
Look at the weather in Canada and the US this year. Disruptions in normal weather patterns in the Arctic have pushed various fronts down into Canada and the US.
Are you trying to tell me that you've got evidence for a paper that shows that introducing a series of hot spots in a uniform pattern across several thousand square miles has zero effect on local or worldwide climate?
Please. Point me at the research.
Until then, I don't have time for you. Go back to trolling your MLP boards.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The grid and generation needs to become non-profit, preferably publicly owned. Like roads and other basic infrastructure it isn't something that should be used for profit, especially as the economics are going to cause the power companies to start damaging society and the economy just to maintain their margins.
That's just un-American!
The American way is to let corporations run things for profit, even if it does damage society & the economy. (How else will those corporate campaign donations keep rolling in.)
[In other words: yes, I agree, but I'm worried that once again our political system will prevent what should happen from happening. ]
The only sane way of comparing power generation technologies is to compare the EROIs (Energy Returned On energy Invested), and Solar PV is not good enough. Replace enough Coal/Oil/Nuclear with this and your society will be crippled with the costs, as Germany and Denmark are gradually finding out.
This doc says Solar PV EROI
"the equivalent primary energy that is virtually 'returned' to society (i.e.preserved for alternative uses) when one chooses to invest a given amount of primary energy to build and operate a PV system is actually marginally higher (EROI = 19 – 38, mean = 28.5) than the average energy delivered by oil itself, were one to invest the same amount of primary energy at hand in extracting and delivering that oil (EROI = 10 – 30, mean = 20). Coal, as a fuel, is instead characterized by a more favourable energy return on energy investment (EROIF = 40 – 80, mean = 60);"
[I'm not sure why the EROI values here are all very high, it may be it excludes some factors in the cost calculations]
http://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/241_Raugei_EROI_EP_revised_II_2012-03_VMF.pdf
This commenter on the book "Spain's Photovoltaic Revolution: The Energy Return on Investment" summarises it's findings:
"Prieto and Hall conclude that the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain's ideal sunny climate. Germany's EROI is probably 20 to 33% less (1.6 to 2), due to less sunlight and efficient rooftop installations."
http://www.amazon.com/review/R12KKP3ZSLOIAY/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=144199436X
This article also helps, including buffered storage to show total EROI for solar PV not good:
"Adding storage greatly reduces the EROEI (the “buffered” values in the figure). Wind “firmed” with storage, with an EROEI of 3.9, joins solar PV and biomass as an unviable energy source"
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Actually its not. The TFA makes the same comparison so many do with solar. That is per watt installed. Which is total bullshit. That watt of installed power will only produce 1 watt, for about 30min on just one perfectly fine day in the summer, if its in space. I like to call them brochure watts. Since real installations are probably never ever going to get that claimed watt in any real life conditions.
The average power you get out of 1GW of solar panels is at best 32% of the peak (in practice it is quite a bit lower, like 25%), and only in summer. It is much lower in the winter months, and you will often need to "time shift" all that energy.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
But they need to be about 200C to work. This is not very good for domestic applications.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Pump storage can't be built everywhere. And the capacity needed is insane for a a 100% renewable grid.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
The US nuclear lobby ate it's own children back in Clinton's day by campaigning against research into thorium reactors which snowballed into an effective halt of all civilian nuclear reactor research in the US. Nuclear is no longer relevant as an option for the US power industry to construct and will remain so unless India, China or Russia develop something that's economically impressive and offer to built some in the USA. Some late 1970s tech from Westinghouse painted green is not enough to get a bank or a government to offer a loan and no US utility has enough cash to consider building a nuke otherwise.
So maybe in 20 years if some effort start now, but currently it's not worth mentioning.
Except you don't want to load follow with nuclear because that seriously reduces the life of the turbines and a pile of pipework. Thus they are base load instead of doing what they could do in theory.
Thanks to the industrial revolution we already have a shitload of "hot spots".
I really don't know why you decided to run with that idea before thinking it out, but I suppose an office worker perspective versus someone who has also worked in heavy industry and power generation has a bit to do with it.
I suggest considering this issue in physical terms instead of wrapping it up in politics. Solar is mainstream these days in the residential sector where practicality has trumped politics.
Not as such, but it's convenient and can use unused base load power at night to do the pumping.
Ditch the invented 80%. It's counterproductive and will get you called out over a situation where it's useful despite being lossy.
This again? Why do people persist with this *today* bullshit when it would be a huge task spanning a couple of decades to build a couple of dozen reactors? Do you think the workforce is just sitting there waiting? Do you think the manufacturers are just sitting there waiting to fabricate everything? If the answer is yes to those, what background gives you such delusions?
I'm sorry, but I find this assumption that we are naive enough to swallow this *today* bullshit incredibly insulting. What do you have against engineers and scientists that makes you want to insult the intelligence of all of them on this site?
The plan is for AP1000 reactors, a Westinghouse thing that's a variant of stuff built in the 1970s, and there's one that must be pretty close to running if it's not already in China. So not long to wait and not that much different to the ones already running (or even the distantly related things in Japan that Westinghouse bought the technology from but it could be too soon to mention those).
My thought is some energy that would have reflected back into space is captured and emitted as heat that can't escape as easily.
It's small now but I don't know how significant a factor it could become if solar became ubiquitous.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Panels can be recycled. Uranium, not so much.
There is a difference between trusting some talking head or newspaper article on a subject, and believing what the entire field of climatology has produced. If that's the only argument you have, you really are pathetic. Utterly pathetic. "Danger to future generations" pathetic.
I really don't know why you decided to run with that idea before thinking it out...
Solar is mainstream these days in the residential sector where practicality has trumped politics.
Because I'm NOT talking about residential low-temperature solar thermal heating.
I'm also NOT talking about residential (or even industrial) solar panels.
I'm talking about high temperature molten salt solar thermal installs. Where you basically have a 1 square mile facility concentrating sunlight on a central structure containing substances that can absorb and retain vast quantities of energy.
Also, where, during the industrial revolution, were we generating hot spots in open air, several dozen/hundred feet above the desert floor.
You keep acting as if I'm trying to be political about this. Yet you apparently misread (or did not read) my original posts, otherwise you wouldn't be trying to talk about urban solar panels when they have nothing to do with the question posed. So, who's trying to be political here?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Probably because the topaz area is calculated as a square more or less and the actual panel distribution inside is patchy.
The Desert sunlight solar farm is also 550MW and covers 16 km2.
The W/m^2 number are low because panels needs to be accessible for service and whatnot. And given the cost of land compared to the rest of the farm there's no real need to maximize panel density.
The main selling point of the Ni-Fe batteries is their ability to take abuse and neglect and still function. This is what becomes critical for installs in individual homes where one could assume that the home owner will just ignore them for extended periods of time. They may be more expensive up front for a given capacity but their lifetime cost should be much less given that they have a lifetime measured in decades instead of single digit years. Yes they do have a higher self discharge rate higher than other batteries but in an application where they are not being used for long term storage that should be of less concern. The low energy density is also not a big deal in stationary installations since they aren't being moved.
Pumped hydro may be more efficient but there you need the space and geography to support it and it would be good for large scale storage. For more local storage, using better batteries like sodium-sulfur batteries at the substation level to smooth things out..
Time to offend someone
And likely produces a prodigious, and very active, thermal plume.
Are you trying to tell me that you've got evidence for a paper that shows that molten salt at the top of a heat collection tower produces a prodigious, and very active, thermal plume!? And that such plumes create hazardous conditions?!?
Please. Point me at the research.
What the fuck are you worried about?
I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
The fact is, you don't even have a reasonable theoretical basis for your unsubstantiated fear of "hot points". It reminds me of the Victorian "scientists" who thought bad things would happen to the human body if it moved above certain speeds during the railroad days.
It is a question I have wondered about though: if we had a magic, free, abundant energy source*, we could solve nearly all of our current problems**, but eventually we would end up with global heat issues as we're adding more energy to the system.
Aurthur C Clarke in his Space Odyssey notes had noted just that. As part of the setup for the series, he postulated that "zero point" energy use was made practical. Which led to a heat crisis as humans brought in a whole lot of waste heat that wouldn't ordinarily have been here.
Assuming the first statement happens, yes, we would be dealing with a lot of extra heat.
I just wish he would have expanded upon that, but it wasn't the thrust of the series, just background.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Having said all that, I agree, the storage solution needs to be 90%+ in-out efficiency.
What do you figure the efficiency of the present power grid is? Thousands of miles of transmission lines, and wouldn't it be great to have a rtransformer station at 90+% efficiency?
That's one of the issues I never see addressed, which is the losses in our present semi centralized power delivery systems.
Then again, going over a week without electricity a number of times recently has me thinking about going off grid entirely.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Because its cleaner and (according to the chart I posted) "decent" forms of coal are a bit more expensive than "decent" types of natural gas.
But if you find charts that include truly dirty forms of coal, you will find that is the cheapest. Scroll down in that DOE link to the 2013 germany estimate, and note how stupidly cheap brown coal is.
I used the word "industrial" for a reason so you wouldn't just jump to the conclusion that I misunderstand, and to try to get you to consider your statements above without being insulting. I'm not calling you stupid like the above poster, however you are arguing contrary to what is observed.
Try to think on the large scale you have mentioned and you'll remember that gas fired turbine a few miles away is pretty damned hot but the heat gets away. That coal fired power station some way along may not have as high an exhaust temperature but it makes up with it for volume. What about a blast furnace? A lot of salt at 800C that comes from solar heating that was going to warm something up anyway doesn't really rate versus a coal fired unit stack does it?
The context there was to show solar is mainstream and no longer a Donkey versus Elephant issue.
From thousands of existing examples of industrial stacks, not a lot really since air is very mobile stuff.
Makes it even easier to spread out doesn't it? Remember what happens with smoke instead of imagining that something you don't understand is happening.
You already know the answers to your questions are not what you suggest but are being blinkered by something - hence me suggesting you are taking a political view instead of an evidence based view.
It's funny, I've worked with coal and oil for more than twenty years and here I am trying to point out that solar thermal is just another industrial thing and not some evil liberal plot.
"Renewables need to be jammed down the throats of every American until they vomit blood because we've ceded leadership in what will be the world's biggest industry to China. " With Manichean language like that, this explains where the push-back is coming from.
Construction of the Vogtle units 3 & 4 started in 2013 and they've proceeded to construction of the containment vessel at unit 3.
Construction has also started on units 2 & 3 at the Virgil C Summer station.
They are all expected to be on line in the 2017-2018 time frame.
The issue is not that Solar isn't useful in helping cut CO2 emissions and mitigating Global Climate Change. Solar is a useful part of the technology mix and can help. The problem is that activists and environmentalists are content that Solar is going to give us the technology we need or as you essentially say it will allow us to kick the can down the road and wait for better technology to provide a real longer term solution.
I believe based on the projections and climate modeling that the threat is more urgent than waiting a decade or two before actively pursuing contingencies based on existing technology. We need to cut CO2 emissions now. Not merely cut the growth of CO2 emissions.
I see it as incredibly dangerous for the world to tinker and hope that new technology will provide a real solution down the road when we have no idea when it could be available or how long it could take to implement.
We have a real solution that is low risk with minimal environmental impact right now in nuclear power which would give us hundreds of years to figure out longer term solutions with new technology before fuel sources became more scarce. And we are literally risking the fate of civilization because on one side people can't figure out how to make enough money from it like they do selling oil and gas and on the other side people have been fooled into thinking it is more dangerous than it really is.
I don't see much difference between denying the science of greenhouse gases causing climate change and denying the science that we need to cut our CO2 emissions significantly more than Solar alone can reasonably expected to do. Unless you cut CO2 emissions by a sufficient amount to really begin to stabilize CO2 levels in the next 20 to 30 years and forestall Global climate change then policy simply does not matter and you might as well just focus on shorter term issues and adapt as best you can when climate change occurs as it will inevitably.
At this point the easy, cheap solar is what we are doing first. The adoption curve isn't going to get easier. Solar alone just can't get us where we need to be and we can't just hope it will give us time to come up with something better when the science and economics says otherwise.
Saying Solar adoption will let us kick the can down the road makes you just as much of a climate denier as those chanting "drill baby drill". We can't afford to just let the next generation figure it out or die trying. There is nothing good about that level of ignorance. Great Solar, now how do we actually save civilization?
I stand corrected and had out of date information.
Because the general population has been scaremongered into thinking that nuclear is inherently dangerous.
Coal is dangerous. It actually kills scores of people every year.
Nuclear can be dangerous in extreme scenarios.
Some solar panels include lots of toxic chemicals. Don't let your children anywhere near solar panels.
The cost problems related to nuclear are mostly due to nuclear regulatory ratcheting.
While the anti nuclear types pretend the NRC is irresponsible, the fact is the NRC is paranoid about safety and cares very little about nuclear costs.
There are plenty of examples of the NRC creating this or that nuclear regulation, estimating that regulation will cost x to implement, and when it's said and done, it actually costs 100x (two orders of magnitude more). So instead of costing 100 million to the whole US nuclear industry, it ends up costing US$ 10 billion instead. And the NRC never learns its lesson, doing it again, again, again and again.
Nuclear professionals stated that a new nuclear reactor could be done at a tiny fraction of the current cost if there weren't any special nuclear regulations, and they could use normal coal/natural gas build procedures, in the end they could build a nuclear reactor for a few billion where if you order one today, the vendor will tell it it's a USD 10 billion project !
That's a huge lie. The military has zero involvement with civilian powerplants for decades. That's typical of the anti nuclear types, they recycle lies through the decades. This was true in the 60s and 70s, the plutonium made was given credit for its military value, regardless of no operational nuclear weapons made with reactor grade plutonium (high Pu240 content, risking fizzle and/or spontaneous detonation).
Try again, this time with real data instead of made up lies.
I miss Slashdot for a day, and am playing catchup.
one article (newer) claims windpower is providing the biggest chunk of renewable energy and has the biggest upcoming capacity jump
this one makes the same about SOLAR.
which one is it?
Or does it depend on whether it's Musk's Solar City or Buffet's wind interests getting the big government subsidy this week?
Government Intervention: Too Proud To (Admit) Fail(ure)"
The implication that because renewables can't do everything (and currently they can't) means the aren't worth having is just silly..
We should continue, and even accelerate the expansion of solar and wind power...
natural gas is ultimately still a carbon source, and far from "clean", but its a HUGE net positive for the environment compared to coal.. inasmuch as it contributes to the displacement of coal plants it is a good thing. It also has the benefit of being highly variable to provide balance to the ebb and flow of renewables.
1. China, after many years cranking out scientific papers on solar and wind, has ended new coal use (which is actually down) and is focussed on new solar, new wind, and converting older coal to more efficient coal hybrids that use waste heat and have scrubbers (if near water).
2. India continues to be efficient and is using solar and ending fossil fuel subsidies.
3. The 20 US States and 5 Canadian Provinces that have most of the growth in GDP are requiring between 5 and 20 percent of all new energy plants are solar, wind, geothermal, or biomass. So all the US/Canada growth in energy demand is going partially into solar.
4. Australia, US, and Canadian consumers, especially poor people, are buying their own cheap solar panels and installing them, as they can sell the power cheaper than it costs to buy it from a polluting energy industry.
5. Change is Now.
Fossil Fuels are over, kidlings. Time to realize that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...and Obama Care is going to cost less and you can keep your doctor.
Right.
Coal is a treasure and people are too stupid to understand it. The only thing for which I would give up coal would be breeder reactors but no one is interested in the facts, only how they 'feel.'
Heck, a hyperflywheel is amazingly efficient and can be installed in an explosionproof container for domestic use.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Lithium Solar Generators
http://www.bepreparedsolar.com...
Casteism
Volcanic activity in the higher latitudes likely contributed to the cooler weather in those higher latitudes. 10 years ago the climate conversion was a barf bag, I must admit its much better today, but I have my own ideas about how the climate works and I believe very very few people could relate to the geologic time scale that the climate is apart of. When people or scientists try to isolate a single source for the cause of climate change you can dismiss them as fools. This cusp period between ages is likely unspectacular other then the fact that we humans are aware of the changes and are attempting to mitigate where we believe we can.
Volcanic activity in the higher latitudes likely contributed to the cooler weather in those higher latitudes. 10 years ago the climate conversion was a barf bag, I must admit its much better today, but I have my own ideas about how the climate works and I believe very very few people could relate to the geologic time scale that the climate is apart of. When people or scientists try to isolate a single source for the cause of climate change you can dismiss them as fools. This cusp period between ages is likely unspectacular other then the fact that we humans are aware of the changes and are attempting to mitigate where we believe we can. was not found on this server.
Since utilities are usually required by law to buy solar or renewable production before other sources including nuclear, the renewable sources which cannot be used for base-load also make the sources which can be used for base-load less economical because they have to operate at less than full capacity. This especially helps make nuclear power uneconomical. Continue with this trend and no baseline production will be economical.
You're correct. I was only putting that in as an example, but such things do tend to more follow an S-curve than a pure exponential - though often the steep part of the S-curve is still quite a bit bigger than we would first expect. There's the efficiency paradox too - we tend to be more wasteful when something (energy) is abundant (rising energy cost might be part of why developed nations have plateaued). Peak energy is a very real prospect (maybe not until the other end of the century though), but we are in for some serious wake-up calls before then, as I think we'll have exhausted fossil and easily-extractable uranium well before that point.
I think we'll have exhausted fossil and easily-extractable uranium well before that point.
Personally, I think that 'easily extractable uranium' will continue for quite some time even if we massively increase usage of it because we haven't done the survey work for it like we have oil. In other words - as the price of it starts rising, we'll start exploring more, and find more deposits. At some point we'll start seriously using breeder reactors and thorium as well.
Extracting it from seawater would be about 10X as costly as current methods(but I think that was when the US & Russia were selling off their weapon stockpiles...), but it's so relatively cheap against the cost of the power plant that even 10X as expensive uranium only raises your power costs by something like 1 cent a kWh.
That being said, I WANT more power conservation and renewable energy use, but I hate coal more, and see nuclear as a better 'short term' replacement for it.
I don't read AC A human right
I believe Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) wrote of such a thing . .
And don't forget:
Force the taxpayers to indemnify the project, because no private underwriters will.
"Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications" The poor charge retention seems to suggest that the in-out efficiency will be low as well.
Two thirds of that is FUD. Low specific energy is the only valid reason in that list, and "low" is very much a relative thing. A bank of nickel-iron batteries big enough to power your house still takes up a small corner in that house. It's not like you have to fill your basement with racks and racks of them.
"High cost of manufacture" is blatant bullshit. It's nickel and iron and a case and some water and some potassium. The process can be 100% automated and involves forming materials as complex as... nickel-plated steel tubes (*gasp*). They're expensive because there has been no mass production for decades, because they work too well. They're a lifetime battery with only a tiny amount of care, and can retain 40% of their rated capacity for a century even if they're abused (there are original manufacture Edison Company nameplate nickel-iron batteries still in operation today).
Charge efficiency is a little poor in the original Edison cell design, at 65%. Discharge efficiency is 85%.
Do you want a nickel-iron battery in your cell phone? Definitely not. Charge density is the only thing that matters in that form factor. Do you want nickel-iron in your car? Still no, because again, density is really important. Do you want nickel-iron batteries in your basement? Oh hell yes. 100% non-toxic materials, the potassium-hydroxide electrolyte isn't nearly as hazardous as sulfuric acid, a float charge all day long doesn't hurt them at all (unlike every other chemistry), and most importantly, you buy them ONCE, install them, and use them, for decade after decade after decade, without substantial charge capacity loss.
The biggest failing of nickel-iron batteries is they are incompatible with capitalism. No constant revenue stream for replacements.
It seems people can get very huffy about something deemed irrelevant?
It seems someone can get quite imperious about an enterprise that garners pushback for being heavyhanded?
It seems the word "conversation" really mean "shut up and hang your head in shame while I explain to you what you should think?"