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US Could Lower Carbon Emissions 78% With New National Transmission Network (smithsonianmag.com)
mdsolar writes with this story from Smithsonian magazine about how building a national transmission network could lead to a gigantic reduction in carbon emissions. From the story: "The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There's a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy. 'Our idea was if we had a national 'interstate highway for electrons' we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,' says study co-author Alexander MacDonald, who recently retired as director of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado."
'Our idea was if we had a national 'interstate highway for electrons' ...
We can barely get Congress to fund maintaining our interstate highway for cars and trucks.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
With new nuclear power generating plants.
Construction equipment doesn't run on lithium batteries.
My cordless drill does - checkmate. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
JFC, there's an entire segment of the tech industry that doesn't seem to live in the real world.
Having more things hooked up together doesn't make things more reliable, it makes them more vulnerable to both common mode failures and cascading system collapses.
5 years ago the entire county of San Diego was knocked off-line for the better part of a day because a power worker in Arizona flipped the wrong switch. The entire NE US was out a decade ago because of a single software bug, and I seem to recall another recent blackout caused by squirrels.
The fragility of our nation's power grid and the lack of cross-connects are two separate issues, but there's NO WAY that the second should even be remotely considered until the inter-reliability of the systems that ARE connected is fixed. And then maybe about 10 years after someone claims it's fixed we *perhaps* consider taking the next step.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
There's no reason that construction equipment couldn't be electric powered, the world's largest self moving coal shovel is electric because no engine could directly power it and once you get to a certain size it makes no sense to generate onboard.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's interesting in that this is a grid-based solution that helps *all* forms of electrical power, but plays into renewables' weaknesses especially well by amortizing the variability.
Less to mdsolar's liking, it also plays into centralized power production, by letting a single centralized power production facility exist in an area of relatively low demand and export the excess more efficiently -- one of the strengths of renewables is that it scales down well enough that you can get away with local production more often, whereas other sources and especially nuclear is not great at scaling down but is exceptioanlly good at scaling up.
But very much to mdsolar's liking, this means the interests of traditional production and renewables are actually aligned on the subject. Both sides of the coin benefit in different ways from improved transmission efficiencies.
O come on! That's done today and would be no different in principle. Besides did you actually read the study & ask the authors on the model they used such that you know they didn't include 'cost of right of way'?
Geez, mdsolar IS an ass but just because he submits something doesn't mean its not an interesting read.
Seriously, the article simply basis the model on the use of HVDC widely...googling the use of HVDC you find out that in fact it is being built out so as its built out it will produce other benefits, some accrue to traditional generation and centralized production models & some may make Wind & Solar economically viable.
Look, I'm a huge proponent of the use of nuclear, I figure the 'greenies' got us in to any current mess with global warming due to their combative position over the last 30 years having stunted its growth...that doesn't mean I'm automatically biased AGAINST Wind & Solar...on their face their not entirely stupid ways of generating energy & when they get reasonably cost effective & useful we should use them more.
Interconnected grids led to blackouts over huge parts of the US in the past and presumably leaves that possibility open in the future.
I think making one huge US grid is just asking for a huge failure at some point.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you are rebuilding the transmission network then you can place new lines where they will be best suited for new technologies such as solar, wind, and geothermal. The current grid is built to get electricity from the places that are good for the existing technologies to be located. Mostly these are where large amounts of water are located. Either for hydroelectric dams or for cooling (required for both nuclear and coal fired plants).
However reducing carbon emissions (not energy loss) can also be brought about by removing the zones that exist in the US electric grid to make it easier to sell electricity from one area to another. I believe that Texas has an isolated electrical grid. If a new transmission network was created then when Texas had excess electricity from wind turbines (which have already been installed) then it could easily sell it to another state which could prevent them from burning fossil fuels to meet their needs. The Pacific Northwest has abundant hydroelectric power which could be sold to a greater number of states which would offset using fossil fuels.
Also because Canada is connected into the network we would have more opportunities to sell power. Quebec sells a lot of electricity generated at their dams and Ontario has times when their nuclear plants are producing more than the province requires. BC is also a big hydroelectric producer and could sell into the US. Currently they are limited in the number of states that they can sell because of how the transmission network in the US works.
Nukes don't vary output well. Thus storage is needed in a nukes only system.
This is a common misconception based on old nuclear designs that were designed specifically to be base-load-only. Fukushima was one. Nuclear power is extremely flexible and has minimal constraints due to technological reasons. France is 75% nuclear and has load-following generation III reactors capable of daily load cycling of 50%-100% capacity at a ramp rate of 3-5%/minute.
The new AP-1000 is a gen III+ reactor rated to change from 30%-100% at a response time similar to coal or gas turbines. There are many other different and smaller reactor designs that could easily be used to supplement the large reactors, as a complete power solution.
There are many valid arguments against nuclear, but this isn't one of the stronger ones.
Nuclear scales fine. Conventional LWRs however are a different story; they worked fine in a submarine, but it was foolish to scale them so large. The inventors of the technology (Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wigner) argued against it, and proposed the molten salt reactor as a safer alternative for civilian nuclear power. Unfortunately, politics won over safety, and the rest is history. Decay heat removal in an LWR is extremely difficult at a large scale, and accidents have and can still happen. (However, it is important to note that all accidents combined to date have resulted in very little loss of human life or damage to the environment; certainly far less than the alternatives, solar and wind included.)
Molten salt reactors however, can be scaled up and down, and even load follow. They can be placed near the load using existing transmission infrastructure, and do not require an enormously expensive nation-wide renewable-friendly grid to be constructed. Ironically, small regional grids with reactors already provide a distributed and reliable energy system that the proposed super-grid of renewables is fundamentally incapable of.
MSRs would be sized for flexibility and series manufacturing. (typically < 250MWe) They can be sited virtually anywhere, allowing rapid replacement of existing fossil plants with no other change in transmission infrastructure. In addition to producing safe power, they also solve the "waste" problem, and minimize mining and other environmental impacts.
OK, so new nuclear costs $0.14/kwh assuming 90% capacity factor. Now you want to switch to 60% capacity factor. That raises the cost to $0.19/kwh? Maybe the batteries would be cheaper.
The load following of french plants is actually not as easy as you make it look. It is an complex orchestrated plan which plant is regulated down over night and followed by which next.
The point is not ordinary load following, the problem is a plant is regulated down, it either hast to be regulated up pretty soon again, less the something like 20 mins, or you can not power it up again for the next aprox. 6h as to many neutron capturing decay products (mainly Boron) are accumulating.
So your reaction times only work if a plant is constantly changing load up and down. And compared to an modern coal plant: that is incredible slow.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Wrong on all counts.
CA gets only 3% of electricity from coal. (Down 50% in past 10 years)
Solar and wind have increased 300% in past ten years.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
6.4% coal as of 2014.
5.5% large hydro.
8.5% Nuclear
44.5% Natural Gas
20.1% Renewables(Wind, geothermal, Solar, Biomass, small hydro).
15% unspecified.
I don't read AC A human right
And MSR's finally also provide everyone with a pony.
We've all heard this before. 60 years ago people said the exact same thing about LWRs and PWRs. Frankly, the nuclear industry has promised the moon so many times before, and failed us so many times on an organisational level, that they have not a lot of credibility left.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
You missed the point. The idea is to move electricity that has been generated with 0 carbon emission, wind and solar, to places where it is needed. Even if 25% of the electricity is wasted in transmission there would be no increase in carbon emissions.
The second point is that they propose HVDC lines would would lose much less electricity.
One of the problems with the "solution" is that HVDC does not step up/down voltage or convert into AC efficiently. Another is the cost of building an HVDC grid and grafting it into the existing AC grid. It will not be cheap.
The very fact that you use phrases like "alternative" and "traditional" to describe energy sources destroys any credibility your argument may have had. Energy sources are a matter of engineering - tradition has no place in the discussion except as something to avoid like the plague. Engineering is an excercise in progress - literally the thing that "tradition" exists to impede.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Molten Salt did ultimately find a place though - just not in nuclear, the best tech we have for large scale centralized solar is molten-salt towers.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *