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Global Wind Power Capacity Tops Nuclear Energy For First Time (japantimes.co.jp)
mdsolar writes: The capacity of wind power generation worldwide reached 432.42 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2015, up 17 percent from a year earlier and surpassing nuclear energy for the first time, according to data released by global industry bodies.
The generation capacity of wind farms newly built in 2015 was a record 63.01 GW, corresponding to about 60 nuclear reactors, according to the Global Wind Energy Council based in Brussels. The global nuclear power generation capacity was 382.55 GW as of Jan. 1, 2016, the London-based World Nuclear Association said.
The generation capacity of wind farms newly built in 2015 was a record 63.01 GW, corresponding to about 60 nuclear reactors, according to the Global Wind Energy Council based in Brussels. The global nuclear power generation capacity was 382.55 GW as of Jan. 1, 2016, the London-based World Nuclear Association said.
My car has the capacity to cover 240 km/h, but never will. I need sleep, the car needs repairs and fuel.
To actually surpass the output of nuclear power will we require a constant hurricane?
In other words, worthless bullshit article posted by our anti nuclear nut, mdsolar. His posts are so shitty I will readily admit to not reading the article. Typically it's just a waste of time.
This assumes all wind is blowing everywhere in the world to maximize the capacity of wind power. Unless that is happening, nuclear is still ahead.
Wind maximum capacity is pretty meaningless, I believe the average production is around 1/3 of rated.
Nuclear is a far superior power source, given it's low land use, lack of environmental impact (eyesores, noise, bird/bat kills for wind) and constant output. Nuclear plants should be built out to completely replace coal, at a minimum.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
These figures are for nameplate, or maximum possible output, of each turbine. First you have to triple the number of installed turbines, so that the capacity factor comes out to about the same availability as nuclear. Then we have to attach those turbines to Smart Grid, which when it exists will allow fluctuating renewables to shuttle their output across large distances (windy in Texas this morning, in South Dakota later in the day).
The first element of Smart Grid is the smart meter, which will report continuous load information to the grid and eventually be able to turn your major appliances on and off to match supply. These meters are hotly opposed by Greens because they radio their reading to the utility or as the Greens put it, "emit radiation."
This is good news indeed.
Nuclear reactors were a fad that will soon blow over.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Nuclear power capacity is almost near 100% generated energy, as we use those for baseline and very well make sure we use the investment. Wid generation energy is actually maybe at best 1/5 of the rated capacity : weather/wind condition, not baseline so used as peak compensation and is lost otherwise (mostly no storage really for energy generation) etc...etc... So when you see 500 (rounding up) Gw wind energy capacity it is at best 100 Gw energy generated. The comparison between the two is misleading anyway as nuclear is baseline capacity, whereas wind is not.
I am not saying it looks not impressive, just that the comparison is not good.
I am a big wind energy supporter, but this isn't a very meaningful milestone, although it is a sign of the rapid emergence of large scale wind power.
When wind energy production in annual gigawatt hours exceeds nuclear power, that will be something indeed. That will happen of current trends continue, but not until 2030 or so.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Wind maximum capacity is pretty meaningless, I believe the average production is around 1/3 of rated.
How does average nuclear production compare to its maximum capacity? Its almost certainly higher than for wind, but it's not like every nuclear plant is constantly running at 100% capacity.
If a maximum wind capacity to maximum nuclear capacity comparison is a bad comparison, then an average wind production to average nuclear production comparison is needed instead.
Regardless, if wind power production keeps growing this quickly (it likely will because windows power is so cheap--nuclear isn't), then its average production will probably overtake nuclear sooner rather than later. I'm not saying that's good or bad; it's just how it is.
The return to wind power is quite astonishing. We have used wind since ancient times till the 18th century, when coal took over. Now, we are dropping coal and going back to the answer that is blowing in the wind.
If only wind wouldn't require the same nominal power in stand-by plants for when there's no wind. those stand-by plants producing water vapor while there is no wind, because they cannot be easily started/stopped.
...film at 11.
Folks, it clearly says Power Capacity. Power, not energy, and capacity, not average actual output. The headline and summary are precise and correct. But if you're deprived of your usual stalking points -- people trying to report power in kWh or energy in kW -- I guess you have no choice but to accuse the authors of not really meaning Exactly. What. They. Said.
I think it would be better to use LED lamps, to change architecture of of homes in order to reduce air-conditioned/heated area and increase open space like courtyards, reduce maximum allowed weight of personal cars, etc.
In my opinion, we should keep earth in a natural state, and leave airspace to birds, tourists, RC hobbyists, aircraft, etc. More and more, wherever one looks there are communication towers, high voltage power-lines, industrial chimneys, and now also wind turbines. And they are not just standing high, but also have moving parts and emitting acoustic pollution.
Can we stop making the surface of this wonderful planet ugly?
It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare wind vs nuclear because they are used for different purposes, in a 3-way mix, but ...
> How does average nuclear production compare to its maximum capacity?
Nuclear ranges between 80%-90%, wind is 20-30%.
The benefit of wind is that it allows you to turn down your natural gas plants whenever the wind happens to be favorable.
Nuclear can't be quickly and easily throttled up and down. That's it's one actual weakness - it's reliable, etc. (There was a purely political weakness , but environmentalists are now undoing the damage they did back in 1960s, admitting it was a mistake).
So what you do, if you want clean, reliable power (rather than purely political points) is you have nuclear and hydro for the minimum load, because they are steady. You have wind and MAYBE solar to get what you can, whenever nature wants to allow it, and natural gas to make the difference. You throttle the natural gas plants up and down to meet the difference between current demand and current supply from wind + nuclear/ hydro.
Hydro is nice, in very specific locations, most of which are already in use. So it's an important source of power, but can't be increased much.
I thoght we had windmills an the 17th century already, but guess i was wrong as slashdot is always right
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity!
What is needed is to have a DIVERSIFIED energy matrix. America used to have a decent energy matrix, but then moved heavily to coal starting with reagan. The problem is, that coal was seen as being 'clean'. Now, we know that it has issues. So, America has gone from ~70% coal down to about 33% coal. Not an easy thing to do.
then we have china. They are over 85% coal and wanting to continue building new coal plants every 7-10 days.
However, if they have a decent energy matrix, they could shut down coal easily. But, they will not because they will not buy nuke reactors from the west, but instead, want to be given the tech so that they can build local and then sell to the rest of the world (and we are stupid enough to allow it).
Wind is good. Solar is good. BUT, to allow more than 33% is foolish, esp. for places that have large or super volcanos, such as yellowstone. If and when they blow, wind and solar will drop. A lot. That is why you need your energy the most.
Windbourne (moderating).
... Nuclear ranges between 80%-90%, wind is 20-30%....
There have been recent intervals when nuke capacity factor in the UK has been barely more than twice wind IIRC, and our last major (500,000-user) power-cut was induced by a single large nuke tripping off unexpectedly (followed by a large coal plant).
Note also that wind capacity factor is rising with better turbines, and in any case is already comfortably above 30% for UK offshore wind:
http://www.renewableuk.com/en/...
For onshore wind this is 25.74%
For offshore wind this is 34.88%
The load factor for all wind (onshore + offshore) is 28.42%
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
In the first place, it is hard to avoid the impression that many anti-nuclear campaigners do not have a firm grasp of the scientific facts and figures. Rather, they have a powerful feeling of impending doom: they somehow feel that radiation is unseen, deadly, and threatening, and therefore must be banned. But whatever the means of generation, power sufficient to run modern cities and nations is capable of immense harm. Consider Buncefield, for example: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5899376... Or even the danger of a relatively modest amount of fertilizer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As for the future potential of nuclear power, the WAMSR seems promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Failsafe, and uses existing nuclear waste as fuel! It's estimated that WAMSRs could provide the whole world with all the power it needs for 80 years, just using today's stocks of waste. And at the end of that time, the waste would be gone.
For the longer term, the recent German and Chinese breakthroughs in fusion are very promising. It's quite fallacious to assume that, just because people have tried to do something for many years and failed, it cannot be done. Consider for how many years men tried to fly - and then, 110 years or so ago, they succeeded.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I'm always amazed that wind and solar get all that starry-eyed looking fans every time it pops up in the news. It never seems to dawn on those people that wind and solar are *inherently stochastic*, and thus, can NEVER replace more stable forms of energy-delivery. Some little know facts: when the power of a windturbine is mentioned, it does NOT mean that it actually delivers that power. For instance, if it says "This is a 8MW windmill that can support 100000 households...that is simply a lie, in a de facto way. The vast majority only deliver ONE THIRD of their pretended maximum power (a lot even less). Thus, you need *3 times* as many just to provide the same power of an actual coal/gas/nuclear plant of 8 MW. It would be reasonable to compare the costs with the ACTUAL power being delivered, thus... but you *never* see that happen on any pro-green website or fancamp.
Apart from that, stochastic systems are inherently bad for giving you a stable energy source. That's why - another little detail most of the pro-camp seem to forget - is that for every windmill park, there NEEDS to be a classical plant (on gas, oil or coal) to provide backup, for all those times the demand and what's been asked for is not in accordance with eachother. (aka, to level out the peaks and valleys of energy-demand and delivery). THIS in turn means, such plants need to be always on (since wind and solar are inherently stochastic) with all the consequences of CO2 pollution, since those plants pollute. Even worse: they pollute *more* than they usually do, because they're running inefficiently most of the time: they always have to keep 'running', because they need to be able to shift gears and provide energy on short notice, but at times when the wind is giving enough, they're just running idle, which gives very bad combustion/burning up, and thus their CO2 emissions are far worse than when they're burning at full power. That's also why research has demonstrated the actual gains of reducing CO2 thanks to windmills is *far* less than what is claimed, if one looks at reality, instead of theoretical computations that act as if these backups aren't there. And they never seem to be there in any calculation of claim I've seen on a green site.
Now, it's not that I have inherently something against 'green solutions', but only if they're viable and make economical sense, and DO give us stable energy which is needed for a modern society. You can't well say to companies in your country: "ah, sorry, wind is a bit down today, so no electricity". And yes, I know the theory the greens always come up with, aka the super-smart all-encompassing grid, where every windmill is connected to everything else, and electricity flows from one end of the continent to the other. But frankly, that's just a pipedream. And it also makes no economic sense, since it would mean that, if, say, a major part of Europe needed energy but the wind wasn't blowing strong enough, it would need to get the electricity from the other half of the EU where is *was* blowing. However, that would mean you'd need DOUBLE as much windmills, since you always need to be able to safeguard energy delivery for the other part of the EU, then. But most of the time, that would mean you have a HUGE surplus (when the wind is blowing hard enough in about the whole of the EU). So that means half of your windmill park would have to stand by idle (or at least, electricity would have to be sold very, very cheap) most of the time. That's economic suicide.
All those things, you never see mentioned anywhere in the pro-camp, and that's what I find the most annoying. It's not a realistic picture one portrays, but an ideologically coloured one, where reality has to step aside for dogmatic reasoning. I find it highly annoying. How can one make an informed decision, if one actually hides, ignores or outright lies about all these aspects?
The truth is, if one REALLY wants to get a stable alternative, one is better off with geothermal and water(dam) and maybe tidal-wave derived energy sources. At least t
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
This is like bragging your son is now taller than you, when in fact you just had your legs amputated.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And let us not forget the one other small detail about wind power -- it derives energy from the wind (atmospheric circulation) by slowing it down and altering mixing. Downwind climate conditions are both warmer and drier. But the impact of wind power on the climate is little considered and even less studied. People shot passenger pigeons because there were so many of them... and what does burning coal matter, its just a little fire and the atmosphere is huge. Just that as we enthusiastically cover the landscape with these things we should not forget that nothing is free -- we just may be too dumb and self-absorbed to notice.
Yes, that terrible, evil Renewables lobby, which buys politicians and pundits, hires think tanks, and pays internet trolls... oh wait, that's what the nuclear and fossil fuel industries do. The rest of us just want a less polluted world. So spare me your talk of "agendas".
I noticed this effect a couple of summers ago, when I hiked across the northern UK, starting at the Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant. At every little town across Cumbria and Yorkshire there was a drawn-out NIMBY battle going on over the siting of wind turbines. It struck me that if they had thought to add a couple of gigawatts of generating capacity at Windscale, which is already written off as an Evil Nuclear Site, all of these villages could enjoy both a pristine view and a more reliable power supply. If they built it as big as the one we have hereabouts, they could also retire that coal-fired hellmouth at Drax, and the whole region would have cleaner air.
If that is your own personal rationalization for excusing intentionally misleading information, so be it.
From TFA, it sounds like they are comparing nameplate capacity. Last I looked, wind turbines actual generated about 30% of their nameplate rating. That makes the comparison a bit misleading. Debating whether this is deliberate is left as an exercise.
I won't even mention that a nuke plant (or coal, for that matter) runs just fine on a calm day.
All this nuclear pollution is killing atoms!
> There have been recent intervals
If you measure short enough intervals, capacity factor can be as low as -5% or as high as 90%+, for one-minute intervals.
If you measure by the week or month and don't cherry-pick specific areas at specific times to try to convince yourself that you're pre-conceived political position was correct, it's pretty consistently between 20%-30% for wind, 80%-90% for nuclear.
It really irks me how much energy has been politicized. We know how to have reliable, affordable, fairly clean energy ; and we've known this for 50 years. Yet we've been doing it mostly wrong for 50 years because Al Gore et al can score a few more votes by playing a false dichotomy.
Let's do some math, because math is fun.
I see that in the USA we consume about 4000 billion kilowatt hours per year. Average that out to get a rate of energy production and it comes out to roughly 470 gigawatts. Let's assume a windmill has a operational lifespan of forty years. Forty years times 12 months and we get 480 months. Since we are using approximate numbers here I'll just round that out to one gigawatt of capacity we'd have to build every month.
Let's assume we get another nice round number of one megawatt of electrical output capacity per windmill. That means to keep the lights on with the current electric demand we'd need to build 1000 windmills per month in the USA. We have 30 days in a month, 24 hours per day, gives us 720 hours. That means we'd have to build at least one windmill per hour in the USA and do that day and night from now until the lights go out.
Is that rate of windmill production something we can do in the USA? I can hear it now, "Yes we can!"
I'll leave as an exercise for the reader on how much aluminum we'd have to mine to build all those windmills. Sure, we can recycle the old windmills but there are going to be losses in the process, account for that as you wish. Now each windmill is going to need a concrete pedestal on which to sit. We'd need to mine limestone and sand for that, again you may account for recycling as you wish. There would need to also be steel, copper, fuel for the trucks, rare earths for the magnets, etc. Add all of that into the manufacturing requirements as you wish.
What do you get? I'll wait.
In the mean time I think I'll compute the steel, concrete, aluminum, and so forth required to build the one nuclear reactor per month (again I'm assuming a 40 year operational life span) we'd need to build to keep the lights on. Let me know when you've completed your calculations and we'll compare notes. Then we shall see who has the greatest environmental impact, nuclear or wind.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Or you throttle demand up and down to meet current supply from wind + nuclear/hydro. Smart meters help with this.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Everybody, please post this article all over the web. Do you know how many people think that wind power amounts to nothing and is just a popular phase that an ignorant public supports?
The rest of us just want a less polluted world. So spare me your talk of "agendas".
If that was true, many environmentalists would be the first ones lining up for waste-to-energy facilities instead of protesting them being built, and instead of wanting to ship their garbage to the middle of no-where, they'd want it being handled locally.
Om, nomnomnom...
Not wishing to puncture the bubble, but where exactly does Japan fit into that
statistic? the nuclear capacity here is about 5% right now and has been for several
years. As I'm sure you are aware that is because they're almost all shut down.
And yes, that's purely a political problem, but so are a lot of things. Doesnt change
the facts. Nuclear is a dismal failure for a whole bunch of reasons, many of which
have little to do with the purely engineering side of it. It's the most expensive common
form of electricity generation and only getting more expensive not less. That's a bad
situation to be in after all the decades it's been around. The implicit insurance provided
by the government isn't even included in the costing either, so basically it's just a money
pit from beginning to end.
Solar, for all its faults, is just getting cheaper and cheaper with no end in site. It will not
be too long before the equipment becomes so damn cheap it will be a no-brainer to have
it included by default in every new house built. It will become ubiquitous. Its daily power
generation curve matches the demand curve to some extent, so if anything a medium
amount of solar can improve the reliability. For high levels you do need storage or other
power sources obviously, no one is denying that. Hawaii is a good example of what
happens when you dont do that.
Wind (the thrust of the article) is also a useful source. But is more problematic than
solar because it's curve doesnt match anything that well. Without cheaper storage, it's
hard to see it going much over 10% of the total generated.
Other sources like Hydro, Geothermal etc all have their place too. The USA should be using
a heck of lot more Geothermal for example. The world's largest known resources..!
Soviet reactors go to 11! Oh wait...
It's more like 99%, 99%, 99%, 99%, 11,000%, 0%, 0%, 0%...
Checking the timeline... you're actually pretty close on that 11,000% figure... but it was really 12,000%.
I'm sure Spinal Tap would be puzzled by the coincidence...
19860425 01:00:00 [100%] test begins
19860425 13:05:00 [60%] turbine #2 switched off
19860425 14:00:00 [50%]
19860426 00:26:00 [1%] after rods withdrawn. Too low! Weird! Akimov wants to abort.
19860426 01:00:00 [6%] power should be higher! They do not realize extent of Xe poisoning
19860426 01:19:00 [7%] rose a measly 1% after removing all but 6 rods? They're in deep shit now.
19860426 01:21:00 [7%] 350kg graphite blocks jumping in their sockets. Cavitation, irreparable damage to rod channels.
19860426 01:21:50 [7%]? pressure loss. Irreparable damage to cooling system.
19860426 01:23:40 [7%]? SCRAM! AZ-5 button pushed. Rods jam in channels at ~2.5m instead of descending full 7m.
19860426 01:23:44 [12000%] jammed rod tips cause reactor to surge to 120x full power! BOOM! [steam] then BOOM! [hydrogen]
19860426 01:23:45 [0%] for all practical purposes
After this point one could argue that the reactor actually stayed at '12' for quite a while but we'll give it a rest.
So... in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl #4 went to... 12. Let's not do that again.
information source, 100%=3200MWt
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
US Energy Information Administration has data on monthly and yearly capacity factors (energy produced divided by potential capacity). https://www.eia.gov/electricit... Wind Turbines produce about 30 percent of capacity on a monthly and yearly basis. Nuclear energy produces about 90 percent of capacity. Need about 3 times as much wind power energy generating capacity as currently have to surpass current nuclear energy generating capacity. Still have a long way to go for wind.
Nuclear is still more environmentally friendly than wind, more cost effective, and does so without massive subsidies. The term "renewables" is a joke, the maintenance costs on wind and solar are always under estimated and you can't have a system be sustainable in cost that requires subsidies forever. Nuclear is by far the way to go.
> hydro geothermal etc have their place too
Their place, yes, literally. They work in very specific geographical places. Where they work well, they should be used, and they are. We're not going to see much growth in either, because of the physics involved.
> will not
be too long before the equipment becomes so damn cheap it will be a no-brainer to
have it included by default in every new house built.
MdSOLAR and friends have been saying that for at least 50 years. If that happens some day, great. Until then, we need to work with the actual facts as they are today.
Most examples i've read about such protests aren't even by environmentalists, but rather by unions upset with how the facility will be staffed, or locals concerned about pathogens. But if environmentalists do protest them, judging by what you've said, it must simply be due to their derangement rather than legitimate concerns, huh.
The derangement must be pretty wide-spread. A few examples: In Oxford County(Ontario, Canada), they have 3 open limestone quarries that are nearly exhausted that the county was considering to make into landfills(the area is roughly 21sq km, and 400-900m deep -- they've been digging limestone out of there since the early 1800's for cement). Environmentalists protest it, which is fine. But don't offer any solutions, and when someone suggests Waste-to-energy, they go even more insane. And would rather the garbage trucked to far northern ontario to shutdown open-pit granite and iron quarries. It's not any different with pipelines, read up on the general insanity on Line-9(Ontario). Been used for decades, suddenly it's a problem because they've changed the flow direction...
Om, nomnomnom...
Make sense that the production capacity for wind is growing. The wind is free - once you pay the fixed costs, there is virtually no variable costs. Nuclear and coal on the other hand have to pay for the fuel and also have to deal with the waste. Same is valid for solar. Once we have reliable storage options, the renewables will explode.
Nuclear fission reactors located near geologically unstable fault lines and within 100 year storm surges and tsunamis (which happen every 2-3 years nowadays due to climate change pumping more energy into the system) have the capacity to irradiate millions of hectares and kill millions of people.
Isn't that and their tax-subsidized building and operation more important, given how large the contractor kickbacks to politicians are for nuclear?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, the renewables lobby does do those things too (except probably paying internet trolls - although I haven't seen any evidence that nuclear or fossil fuel industries actually do that either, but a lot of stupid accusations abound).
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.