Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Largest Source of Power Capacity (ft.com)

The world's largest source of power capacity is now renewables, as roughly half a million solar panels were installed every single day last year. In addition, two wind turbines were erected every hour in countries such as China, according to the International Energy Agency. Financial Times reports (Editor's note: may be paywalled; alternate source): Although coal and other fossil fuels remain the largest source of electricity generation, many conventional power utilities and energy groups have been confounded by the speed at which renewables have grown and the rapid drop in costs for the technologies. Average global generation costs for new onshore wind farms fell by an estimated 30 percent between 2010 and 2015 while those for big solar panel plants fell by an even steeper two-thirds, an IEA report published on Tuesday showed. The Paris-based agency thinks costs are likely to fall even further over the next five years, by 15 percent on average for wind and by a quarter for solar power. It said an unprecedented 153 gigawatts of green electricity was installed last year, mostly wind and solar projects, which has more than the total power capacity in Canada. It was also more than the amount of conventional fossil fuel or nuclear power added in 2015, leading renewables to surpass coal's cumulative share of global power capacity -- though not electricity generation. A power plant's capacity is the maximum amount of electricity it can potentially produce. The amount of energy a plant actually generates varies according to how long it produces power over a period of time. Coal power plants supplied close to 39 percent of the world's power in 2015, while renewables, including old hydropower dams, accounted for 23 percent, IEA data show. But the agency expects renewables' share of power generation to rise to 28 percent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the U.S. and E.U. combined.

Comments

Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

So, is it time to go back to all the nay sayers who have over the past 10 years asserted this point was impossible, and say "I told you so"? Or will they just continue to assert that the numbers are all lies, and only coal can make electricity?

Re: Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

"capacity"? You mean if the sun was shining on every single solar panel in the world then it hypothetically would generate as much electricity as coal actually produces. Seriously.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe when renewables actually PRODUCE as much power as coal, that might be a better day to beat your chest.

Re:Renewables will never work

[hawguy]

Plus, since hydroelectric is usually considered 'renewable', water keeps flowing (usually) through dams on cold winter nights.

Canada has quite a few cold winter nights, yet "Manitoba, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and Quebec produce over 90% of their power from hydroelectricity. Quebec generates half of Canada's hydroelectric power."

Re:Renewables will never work

[I'm New Around Here]

Actually, in many places it does. The sun heating certain areas in the morning creates wind. Those areas cooling in the evening causes wind. At mid-day and mid-night, there is no heat gradient to cause strong wind.

Alternately, storms blow for days at a time, with strong winds for the whole period. And windmills are shut down so they don't break from turning past their rated rpm.

And nice way to completely leave off solar, as the article/submission mentioned how many millions of solar panels were installed last year. They sure don't produce much energy in a Northern winter.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

What you mean like here in Ontario? Where the windmills don't turn because the government pays them not to produce electricity? Where it accounts for under 2% of the total generation but responsible for 80% of the price increase in the last decade? From at peak of 0.07kWh to 0.18kWh. Where you can have 45+ days in a row without direct sunlight for solar. Yeah, they're doing a world of good for us. 70k people have had their electricity cut in the last 2 years, 700k customers are 4 months or more in arrears right now. The largest hydro company(Ontario Hydro) has 1.3m customers for example. FYI: Electricity is called hydro here, because our primary generation source used to be hydro-electric.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Windmills are there to cover peaks. Why take hours to fire up 550MW of coal when you can bring on spinning reserve within seconds in 2MW chunks?
Does that help you understand the topic?

Yes hydro is about the most convenient power source available but other places are not blessed with such sites for it as Ontario.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Where it accounts for under 2% of the total generation but responsible for 80% of the price increase in the last decade?

Yes peak pricing models SUCK and governments should have stopped that Enron shit being inflicted on people just so some speculators could get rich. There should be sensible caps related to generation costs instead of a fucking casino where a scarcity event leads to someone getting an enormous jackpot win.
It's not the generation method, it's the fake market game, since gas fired generators have hit that jackpot at times as well as windmill operators.

It's exactly the situation you'd get if every taxi was an Uber and half the ones needed are available once a day.

Re:Renewables will never work

[x0ra]

and certainly not when covered with snow, as we get plenty of here in Canada...

Re:Renewables will never work

[arglebargle_xiv]

The headline is wrong, as usual. In fact even reading the summary shows you it can't be right:

Coal power plants supplied close to 39 percent of the world's power in 2015, while renewables, including old hydropower dams, accounted for 23 percent, IEA data show

So renewables are around half of what coal is. If you look at the original article, even just the sub-header, you'll see that:

153 GigaWatts of renewables make up over half the new capacity added globally.

That's "new capacity added so far this year", not "total capacity" as the headline here claims.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ShanghaiBill]

Windmills are there to cover peaks.

No, this is nonsense. Windmills are there to produce power when the wind is blowing. Wind is not "peaking power", that can fill in the gaps from other sources, because it is not dependable. The opposite is true: variable winds create peaks and troughs that need to be filled by on-demand sources such as gas turbines or ... hydro.

Re: Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

That was federal, not provincial and had to do with replacing a 1st gen medical reactor, which is still in use. Just a FYI. I think you're talking about the hundred million on a "natural gas" generating station, that was cancelled because the NIMBY's in Mississauga threw a hissyfit. That's the same NG plant, that the current government is under 2 investigations for relating to the destruction of documents.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

If windmills are there to cover peak, it would never happen in Ontario. The hottest days of the year here are also the times when there is the most peak demand, and the wind is almost never blowing. Usually around then it's somewhere between 29-35C with a humidex of 35-40C. On top of that, if you're talking about in-general daytime peak, Ontario generates more electricity then it uses(and is also home to the 2nd largest nuclear power station in the world). The excess is sold to the US at between 0.02-0.05kWh, something which the people of Ontario never see anymore.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

All the oil pumped out of the ground in Alaska is a "gift" from Alaska to the oil companies (though the free gift is then taxed). When you count the trillions of dollars of petrochemical subsidies, the few millions on renewables isn't even a rounding error.

Re: Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

The world would have to stop spinning (so the solar panels were always lot and at a perfect angle with zero clouds) with all the panels moved to the equator, while the wind would have to be a constant gale at all wind locations..

Nope. The capacity of an installed solar panel is the sum or average of expected generation over a day/month/year, so it takes generation time and location into account.

And the wind around here is a yearly average as the given power level, and at least here, wind generates more than all the petrochemicals in the same grid. But then, I'm not in the US.

The proof renewables work is all the lies told by those who hate them. If they didn't work, then they wouldn't need to lie so much to make them look bad.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Sique]

The "small fraction" was put to numbers in the arcticle: 39% of all generated electical energy is fossil, 23% is renewables. So the small fraction is actually more close to 2/3. For sufficiently large values for "small", your argument holds.

Re: Renewables will never work

[Bongo]

And while this might sound doubly cynical, that's capacity today. What will their capacity be later on, after wear and tear?

Re:Renewables will never work

[Jon Peterson]

and that is ALWAYS, if you spread them out wide enough.

Yes, but that is a very wide spread and therefore a very big if. The ideal energy mix would be nuclear for base load, and then wind/solar with hydro available to handle variability in the renewables. But that requires geography that's hydro friendly, which most of the world isn't. CCGT will do for now in handling variable load until some kind of battery grid becomes available.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Jon Peterson]

The small fraction in that case would be 23%, not 2/3. Because nuclear, while not a fossil fuel, isn't a renewable either, and that's what the op was talking about.

That said I actually think 23% is a pretty impressive - at least until you remember that electricty is only a smallish proportion of total energy use. I found this diagram helpful in showing the way things are:

http://www.iea.org/Sankey/#?c=...

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

Wind, hydro, and geothermal provide at least part of my electricity on the darkest hour of the coldest night.

Re:Renewables will never work

[K. S. Kyosuke]

This "small fraction" is a bounded factor, which only means that the actual generation will be passed somewhat later, but sooner or later, it will happen.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

so build some solar and wind much more south? Alabama AND Arizona for example. electricity is the cheapest form of energy to transport

Mighta missed it, but between Ontario and say Arizona there's at least 1800 miles. And between Ontario and Alabama it's around 1k miles. While the NA grid is somewhat interconnected, there are still separate network grids in case of catastrophic failure. On top of that, there isn't a big nationwide high voltage DC grid for the delivery of power from plants. And HVDC is the only way you're going to be transporting power that far while reducing the loss. AC it actually becomes very cost prohibitive very quickly over very long distances and more electricity is lost due to resistance and heat.

Ontario's best solution for electricity has always been nuclear, followed by hydro-electric to round it out. Followed by coal and natural gas for peak demands. The current government(Liberal) decided that "coal is nasty, evil and dirty" and shut them down, instead of say retrofitting them. And there were even a few leaked documents that they wanted to do the same with natural gas power plants and wanted to ban natural gas for home use, forcing everyone onto electric. The price started climbing quickly once these cheap sources were removed from the grid.

If you want to see this insanity in action, go look at the current NDP government in Alberta. Where they're pushing the same policy. The problem in Alberta is, whole lotta area and people are very spread out. Coal is plentiful, and in turn small out of the nowhere places where it's cost prohibitive to build NG, impossible to build nuclear, and where solar or wind is also prohibitive. They're now scrambling to build thousands of KM of power lines. Small towns and cities like Grande Prairie and Grande Cache rely on small scale coal plants to keep people from freezing to death in the winter when there are grid failures for example. The winter I spent in Grande Cache, the nighttime lows hit -48C with a windchill of -55C. The daytime highs were between -25C and -38C not counting windchills. We had 3 days with no power due to high winds, the mall, fire dept, and all government buildings had power though. So people who didn't have wood as a backup, could safely stay somewhere.

Re: Renewables will never work

[hyades1]

Why don't you simply go look? "Wear and tear" profiles on solar panels are widely available. Same with wind turbines.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

But that requires geography that's hydro friendly, which most of the world isn't.

Hydro is basically gravitational potential energy accumulator which is replenished by precipitation, unless it is reversible hydro, which is exactly what you need for handling variability of other power sources. You can do the same by making a large circular dam in the middle of a lake, e.g. lake Ontario, and mounting a hydro turbine in a tunnel connecting the inside of the dam with outer lake. When you need to accumulate energy, pump the water out, into the lake. When it is time to use the collected energy up, open the gate and run the lake water through turbine back into the inner reservoir. If you don't have a lake, dig a large hole in the ground and cover it with a layer of clay, the rain will fill it.

Re:Renewables will never work

[GuB-42]

Power capacity doesn't mean much for wind/solar. That's just the sum of the peak power outputs when the sun is high and the wind blows just right. There is no way we can turn up the sun to meet demand.
Compare it to fossil fuel plants or dams where the capacity factor can be controlled to some extent by choosing to burn more or less fuel or by managing the water reservoir level.

We need to compare compare energy (not power) output to get a meaningful result, and this is where the new problem for solar/wind lies. When these uncontrollable power sources take up a large fraction of the global power output, it becomes harder to meet demand. Germany, for instance, is building new, more adjustable coal plants to complement their renewables. They also turned off their nukes, which makes sense since nukes are best suited for base load rather than to absorb the variations of wind/solar.

Re: Renewables will never work

[dabadab]

Nope. The capacity of an installed solar panel is the sum or average of expected generation over a day/month/year, so it takes generation time and location into account.

No, it is not. In the case of solar panels the capacity has nothing to do with real life performance, it is measured as output generated with 1000 W / m2 illumination (that is the amount of sun it wold receive on a sunny sommer's noon).

The same with all other generators: capacity is nameplate capacity and in the case of wind and solar, it is seldom reached.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AmiMoJo]

Utility scale batteries reduce variability and allow wind farms to meet peaks in demand. They can build a few hundred MWh now, but actually 50MWh is plenty.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mashiki]

Right. And where are you going to put them? Let's take a look back again to Ontario where land is at a premium not because of a lack of space, but because it's some of the best farmland in the world. How much of an area are you going to need for all those batteries to cover say 4.8 million households? Well let's cut it down to 4m, and just run from Windsor to Ottawa, not counting the businesses. Keep in mind that off peak is somewhere around 16k MW and on peak hits between 22k MW and 29k MW. 50MWh wouldn't even scratch the surface of a standard swing in non-peak to peak usage and would lead to a massive brownout or parts of the grid being dropped off. So now we're getting into multiple sites, multiple storage, multiple redundency. BESS for example provides 15min(23MWh) of power to a city of ~30k, and requires storage in what's basically a giant warehouse. So now we're looking at underground storage as a possibility right? Well luckily a lot of southern ontario is sitting on limestone.

Re: Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

The capacity of an installed solar panel is the sum or average of expected generation over a day/month/year, so it takes generation time and location into account.

Wrong. See:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=101&t=3
http://exploringgreentechnology.com/glossary/installed-capacity-definition/
https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-when-a-solar-panel-has-a-capacity-of-say-100kW

The proof renewables work is all the lies told by those who hate them. If they didn't work, then they wouldn't need to lie so much to make them look bad.

By this logic, should I conclude that renewables don't work, because you're lying to make them look good?

Re:Renewables will never work

[DirkDaring]

Batteries are in their infancy for this, getting better every year.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dywolf]

no no no no.
get with the program.
now its "only nukes can make all the electricity".

Re:Renewables will never work

[onepoint]

Well, thinking out loud, Not much space really, if we are looking to spread failure risk around. So first look at the ability to get the dead abandoned spaces into the grid. IE: blighted area's. Next, think in the sense of 3d stacking of the battery buildings. I'm thinking it's going to look like a container ship cell design myself.

So we got rid of some blighted area's, next we have to optimize already used space IE: parking lot's, smaller local distribution.

And 1 space that I see used somewhat in Florida, under the massive powerlines ( the real thick big ones ) that's a lot of acre's

Re:Renewables will never work

[GNious]

Someone should invent motorized solar-panels, that can tip to 90 degrees and get rid of built-up snow.

Re:Renewables will never work

[GNious]

So'eh, progress is not something to be proud of ... gotcha

Re: Renewables will never work

[johnsmithperson123]

Eh... Not so good in the long run. Frankly, I would drop wind altogether. Expensive, with a short lifetime, wildly unpredictable and also eyesores. Solar looks pretty good, with a 20 year + lifetime. A sane renewable policy has to be based on primarily nuclear and hydro, both high yield and with infrastructure lifetimes of over 75 years, even though they have a slightly higher initial cost for construction.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Aqualung812]

And I'm still waiting for renewable to provide *any* power during a cold winter night...

Water storage. It works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Once there is enough excess daytime capacity, we'll be good to go.

That isn't today, though.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AmiMoJo]

Do you have any idea how big these batteries are? I mean, did you at least do a Google image search?

Re:Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority of the world's population do live between +/- 24 degrees of the equator though, so solar is a good option for most people, most of the time.

No single source of power is going to work for every possible use case: wind is inconsistent, gas pollutes, nuclear is expensive, solar is season- and location-dependent, hydro uses a lot of land, geothermal is rare, tidal is cyclic, coal is just horrific. The sensible thing to do is to use varied mix and invest in a decent grid so that when one area (e.g. southern solar) has excess power, it can shift/sell it to somewhere that needs it (e.g. northern winter) efficiently.

Re: Renewables will never work

[FirstOne]

"capacity"? You mean if the sun was shining on every single solar panel in the world

Even on a mostly cloudy day my solar panels produce about a quarter(1/4) of their normal output. Enough to run the house loads (frig, freezer, PC, lights, tv, etc).

I cut household electricity CO2 footprint by another metric ton this year. Soon.my PV will be on a solar tracker, that should reduce non-food related CO2 footprint to near zero.. I will be the first person in my republican dominated city to achieve a near zero carbon footprint house. Someone's got to break the mold, and leave FF behind, I hope many others will follow.

P.S. My residence along with the city and most of South Florida will be underwater one hundred years from now. (unstoppable sea level increase). You would think they would sit up and take notice as the bi-annual king tides are now flooding the streets in front of million$+ houses, might give them a clue. But no, blinders on, full speed ahead, buy that big ass SUV, Yacht, waste energy, burn those fossil fuels unending (And seal a watery fate.)

Re:Renewables will never work

[Ol Olsoc]

That's because you're a fucking retarded sack of shit.

.

Meth is a powerful drug.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ShanghaiBill]

Right. And where are you going to put them?

Most people put them in their garage. Endpoint storage is generally better than centralized storage, because transmission losses are lower. The batteries can be arranged vertically, like the Tesla Powerwall, so they take up little space.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

We'll just distribute the power through the worldwide superconductor grid. You know the one, built at a cost of 75 quadrillion dollars and requiring a constant supply of liquid nitrogen through the worldwide liquid nitrogen pipeline.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

Do what Tesla Motors did early on, just use a lot of small batteries. I believe Samsung has some available at really good prices.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

And snow never has partial melts that form rock-like sheets.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

The oil revenue is a "gift" (at gunpoint) from the oil companies to Alaska. The government of Alaska didn't drill those wells. The general population didn't, and neither did the Eskimos. Oil companies found, drilled for, pumped, and piped the oil, paid for the infrastructure, maintained and run it.

Re: Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think that windmills look graceful and attractive, although the relentless "hwoof" sound within about a half mile is long-term annoying. Solar panels are butt-ugly, but fortunately they needn't stick up very far.

Re:Renewables will never work

[ChrisMaple]

Money is a good proxy for energy. If an energy source is dollar-profitable without subsidies, it should also be energy-profitable by a wider margin.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Khashishi]

Doesn't everybody in Canada have a snow shovel?

Re:Renewables will never work

[HornWumpus]

The most expensive 'generation' available is curtailment of industries that really don't like to shut down mid process.

Price caps have to be higher than the highest cost generation in the pool.

You also need price caps high enough to draw in new capital. Otherwise you just stay underbuilt, running obsolete inefficient generators, like under rate base.

You don't appear to understand how power pools work. Everybody gets the price of the highest bid (bids can be assumed to be marginal cost) unit run for the period.

Re:Renewables will never work

[HornWumpus]

Heated panels in areas with low solar radiance?

It wouldn't take long before you're a net power consumer.

Re:Renewables will never work

[angel'o'sphere]

They sure don't produce much energy in a Northern winter.
First of all, most of the north (in europe) has no winters anymore.
Secondly, it depends how far north you go ... germany e.g. does not have a polar night if you are thinking about that.
From the second point follows: solar panels that are aiming due south, only miss the fraction of sunlight in early morning and late afternoon that they would get in summer. In other words, the middle part of the power curve is nearly the same. Unless the sky is cloudy, obviously.

The record day where most power was produced by renewables in Germany (around 50%) was a sunny and windy early January day. I believe a 6th (church holiday). Percentage of renewables was around 50% ... but because of the holiday and vacations etc. the industry was offline.

Re:Renewables will never work

[angel'o'sphere]

(*facepalm*)
AC it actually becomes very cost prohibitive very quickly over very long distances
That is wrong. 1.8k miles is not a long distance. The rest of the world has far longer transport lines and copes well with them.
and more electricity is lost due to resistance and heat.
That is wrong, too. Fatally wrong actually. AC lines lose less power than DC lines due to heat and resistance.
However AC lines lose more power in total, because of: radiation. AC lines induce power magnetically into surrounding "things" and that is the reason why they have a relatively high loss in relation to similar high voltage DC lines.
And if we talk about AC versus DC we are talking about very very high voltages starting at about 1 million volts.
All of Europe is interconnected with 380kV lines from the north sea till east siberia. And Siberia and 3rd world countries like Kasachstan have 1.1MV AC lines for interconnection/transport. Kasachstan e.g. is about 6000km wide from east to west and 3000km hight from north to south. That is roughly a quarter or a third of the USA. And that is a country you look down on ...

Re:Renewables will never work

[knightghost]

Nope. The story is about Production - not Consumption. What happens when the sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow? Or when it's too much? Energy storage doesn't economically exist and transmission hasn't been rebuilt to handle massive fluctuations.

It comes down to, locally, renewables costing 60 cents/kw while coal/gas/hydro costs 9 cents/kw. Spending that 51 extra cents/kw not only is an economic waste, but environmental waste back up the supply chain.

Expensive Green = Brown

Re: Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a yacht is handy when the sea level increases . . .

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Windmills are there to cover peaks.

No, this is nonsense. Windmills are there to produce power when the wind is blowing. Wind is not "peaking power", that can fill in the gaps from other sources, because it is not dependable. The opposite is true: variable winds create peaks and troughs that need to be filled by on-demand sources such as gas turbines or ... hydro.

DBill spreads that nonsense all the time, yet in most place the grid is required to accept all wind generation and run back other sources. Like you said, its intermittent, so you can't use it for peaking because its not necessarily available during the peaks. Wind charts for Germany show no correlation at all between wind output and usage peaks. Its the same everywhere. Wind is only curtailed in very rare circumstances.

He hates when people use the well established industry measure of Capacity Factor because it shows the weakness of solar and wind. He hates it so much he fabricates usage scenarios that don't exist.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Anonymous Coward]

How stupid are you? HVDC lines typically have lower losses because they run at higher voltages and don't have induced impedances.

Name one singular transmission line longer than 1.8K Mi that isn't really a collection of networked lines, and tell us how much it cost? You say crap you can't back up.

Re:Renewables will never work

[erapert]

Yeah, awesome, so right when the solar panels are covered up and don't generate power we should expend a whole lot of it to melt the ice...

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Who said it was impossible for renewables to generate 40% less electricity than coal when you include hydro and biomass (actual generation in GWH, not 'capacity' which is meaningless). Call me when wind gets to 10% of coal generation, and solar gets to 4%. Those are the two everyone says will solve our problems.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

The accomplishment is that renewables produce about 60% as much electrical energy as coal. Most of that from hydro and biomass. A bit from wind, almost negligible from solar.

Is still laugh when folks talk about solar and wind as the solution, but take credit for hydro and biomass when cheering progress.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

Yet, I've seen it in operation. Funny how everything "impossible" and fucking stupid has been done and works much better in reality than the nay-sayers say.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

You put them in the mountains in west Canada, and build a national grid to move the power where it's needed.

Re:Renewables will never work

[CCarrot]

What that means is that the total MWs of installed capacity for renewables is higher than the that of coal. That doesn't mean that renewables will generate more MWhs than coal however, because coal tends to have a higher capacity factor than renewables.

Not to mention that it's physically impossible to have optimal sun conditions over every solar panel in the world simultaneously.

Coal don't care about the time of day, it burns as sweetly at midnight as it does at noon...in any time zone.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

Nope. The "infrastructure" was paid for by the state. The oil companies refused to drill until the State of Alaska built the pipeline. Of course, The State of Alaska paid the cost of building it, but sold it to a private company (Alyeska). Your lies are lies.

And yes, the "Eskimos" [sic] did. The natives did mine oil, using it for heat, before the white man showed them how to pump it out in large amounts. That's how the white man found the oil. They saw the natives using it, then looked around where they were getting it from.

If you are curious, the "AK" in my username is the state abbreviation for Alaska. No, that wasn't a coincidence. But feel free to lecture me on Alaska. It's like when my 5 year old sees me playing a video game and proceeds to describe the plot and controls. Though it's cuter when it's a 5 year old being condescending to someone who knows more than they do.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Ol Olsoc]

So, is it time to go back to all the nay sayers who have over the past 10 years asserted this point was impossible, and say "I told you so"? Or will they just continue to assert that the numbers are all lies, and only coal can make electricity?

Truth no longer matters. You see the craziest shit put out by the deniers. Even to the point of their lack of understanding the entire power generation physics We still have people who think they are scoring points by pointing out that the sun goes down at night, so you can't use solar.

The Truth is often a troll. I've been told several times in here that solar power will never work because the sun doesn't shine at night. Dead deriously told that.

Has Slashdot been taken over by the alt-right?

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Price caps have to be higher than the highest cost generation in the pool.

But not hundreds of times higher.

You don't appear to understand how power pools work

Indeed I do, but I have noticed some that do not work very well at all where the well documented Enron bullshit has been ignored and still happens from time to time. When there is "self-regulation" and/or governments get a major cut of profits most of those checks and balances you think of as being essential to a market just do not exist - it may as well be a monopoly or a tight-knit cartel.
Yes I know how it is "supposed" to work - I had that shoved down my throat in hours of boring meetings in the late 1990s, but how much actually matches that ideal?
The debacle in South Australia where some gas fired generators pretended to not be able to get gas until the price was bumped up to a ridiculous level is a recent example of such a system being gamed. Without sensible caps it's a fucking casino and does not resemble the ideal you have spent so much time working on.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Yes, but that is a very wide spread and therefore a very big if

Your grid is the size of a fucking continent.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

HVDC is already in use with very long runs in many places and not so far from that ideal. Wikipedia has a fine article.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

DBill spreads that nonsense all the time

As do scientific journals - I'm not making this stuff up just enlightening people who have worked in places outside of the electricity industry.

He hates when people use the well established industry measure of Capacity Factor

I hate it when people who do not know what it means use it as an excuse to attack something - how about looking it up before doing so? You may have to learn about the difference between peak load and base load to understand implications. By definition something turned on to only cover peaks has a low Capacity Factor just because of the way you use it. Base load units have a high Capacity Factor because they are always on - that simple. Misusing the term to push "one true energy" over others is the mark of fools or scoundrels.

yet in most place the grid is required to accept all wind generation and run back other sources

Utter bullshit. Please quote the law that enforces that where you are. You cant? It doesn't happen where you are but in "most places" elsewhere? Then list a couple of those "most places" and evidence of a rule being enforced instead of just playing the game of mythical things happening in the mythical Kingdom of Prester John.


These idiots suggesting that coal fired units are powered on and off several times a day to give way to wind have fooled you. Use your own head instead of drinking in their shit and then spraying it back all over this site.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

I see you can't show otherwise, Typical. Things are how they are, not how you dream them to be.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Its all right here for anyone to see. Germany has practiced priority dispatch of wind and solar for quite some time. This means you must first purchase any available wind and solar before you can use other sources.

http://renews.biz/104349/germa...

China does it aggressively as well;

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

California practices it as well, as do other states;

http://www.martinot.info/renew...

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

So where is your proof of base load units being shut down when some wind comes on line? It isn't in any of those links you spammed me with.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Priority over gas turbines and other peak load sources is a very different thing to what you have been claiming.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

So, hydro isn't "renewable" when it doesn't fit your narrative? coal/gas is cheap when you don't consider the pollution expelled. When you account for that, renewables are closer in price (cheaper here than coal, but apparently not where you are).

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Do you have any idea how big these batteries are?

Quite a bit smaller than your local power substation that distributes power to your town/suburb.

Re:Renewables will never work

[silentcoder]

After eating curry my pants can be fartless for several minutes at a time.

Germany is a seriously tiny country. Yes, yes I know it looks big on the map- that's the mercator projection for you, Iceland looks bigger than France on that same map and the actual place can down in Lake Michigan. So can Germany by the way.

Re:Renewables will never work

[silentcoder]

Of course - you aren't counting the millions of people NOT getting serious respiratory diseases from coal (which kills at every step of production - indeed it is the deadliest form of energy by a huge margin and has by far the highest rate of death for people not directly involved anywhere in the production chain) which you no longer have to pay for.
Considering that Canada has single payer healthcare - EVERYBODY who does NOT get sick from coal is money in YOUR pocket.

But sure, let's keep coal going, we'll just make the market far - that doesn't just mean gettting rid of all subsidies - it means the costs they've been outsourcing onto the rest of society, they have to pay - and charge their customers. So you have to have a ZERO emision plant, and you'll just have to pay for those scrubbers and (for disposing of the used filters in a sustainable manner) by charging more. It means ZERO coal dust mining operations - we don't even HAVE the tech for that so they'll have to invest in some serious R&D - which they'll be charging back to customers. Most people suggest dealing with this stuff by taxing them- but this is a more efficient way and nobody gets to argue the tax is out of line with the actual cost of the impact (either too low or too high) and there is zero risk that the tax will end up being lost to corrupt politicians or anything BUT cleaning up the mess. So, I favour just forcing them not to outsource their costs. Which is against every principle of a free market anyway as it forces people to bear the costs of a transaction they are not party to and have not consented to.

Now sure, we'll also let solar and wind and hydro pay for whatever costs they impose, by forcing them NOT to impose those costs.

You may find that coal power will cost a shitload more than those - because it's harm factors are so incredibly high.

But unless THAT Is what you're comparing, you are not comparing apples to apples and your argument is bullshit intended to push your personal ideology and not based on any real facts or economics.

Coal ALWAYS costs MUCH more than any other power source - its just that most of the money you spend on it you don't KNOW you're spending on it. Con artistry is not savings.

Re:Renewables will never work

[silentcoder]

>Coal don't care about the time of day, it slaughters as many people at midnight as it does at noon...in any time zone.

FTFY

Re:Renewables will never work

[david_thornley]

The costs of coal never seem to include the health effects and its contribution to global warming. If the externalities were to be internalized, coal would cost a lot more.

Re:Renewables will never work

[david_thornley]

Whose grid? Last I checked, the US had three grids: eastern, western, and (of course) Texas.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

That's not what the articles say. They take priority over every other source. Its quite clear, and even when its limited to maintain grid stability it is quite the opposite of peaking, which only brings source on when demand required, that is very different, practically the opposite, of priority dispatch.

This is a typical interaction with you. I provide sources to back up my statements. You provide nothing, just response's that basically say "your wrong' but have nothing wrt backup. That's just trolling, its what you do.

Re:Renewables will never work

[AK Marc]

It takes a lot of power to melt snow off a roof. Off elevated panels that have snow building up on them? Almost none. LED stoplights have small heaters (5W or so), with a re-designed shroud to stay snow-free. Though vertical, on a slant, there wouldn't need to be much power at all to melt the first 1/10th mm for the rest to slide off.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Priority over gas turbines and other peak load sources is a very different thing to what you have been claiming.

Every kilowatt-hour generated from a renewable electricity facility receives a confirmed technology-specific feed-in tariff for 20 years. Grid operators are required to preferentially dispatch this electricity over electricity from conventional sources like nuclear power, coal, and gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yet another source that fully backs my point. And I'll await your response saying its not true or claiming it means something other than what those words clearly say. Cause that's what you do.

Re:Renewables will never work

[HornWumpus]

S Australian pools don't have sticky prices. Once they got fuel, the market clearing price returned to normal range (a hour later), right?

It's been a long time sense I worked on Australian data. S Australia was gas pipeline constrained back then. You have to schedule gas delivery days ahead, like Florida in the USA.

In Florida they use oil in the CTs and combined cycles when the weather forecaster gets things really wrong, leading to short gas deliveries. Can't really store useful quantities of gas.

Re:Renewables will never work

[CCarrot]

Solar panels don't care if there's a coolant leak, or that a turbine has failed, or that coal isn't available.

Funny, you know all the disadvantages and caveats of solar, but seem completely clueless on the problems of coal.

Ah, but you see, even without the boilers or any supporting equipment, that coal will still burn. Those dark, beautiful nuggets will continue to oxidize at a rapid enough pace to induce a useful exothermic reaction, whether or not there is anything nearby to actually make use of it.

Burn baby burn...

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

That's not what the articles say.

I read them - they are content free expressions of intentions.
If you want to learn something go looking for an example of base load generators halted in the middle of the day to make way for windmills and solar. You won't find any and that will show you that you are just spreading a rather stupid lie.
Maybe you already know that since you seem to push hard for ideology over reality. Anything "green" whether it's a good idea or not gets attacked by you.
Machines don't have politics you goose.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Read what I wrote again and answer the actual question instead of a mistake or a deliberate evasion via pretending to be stupid.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Look up "interconnection" or remember what happened a few years ago with a cascading failure that started in Canada.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

With the greatest possible respect they had the fuel at the time for but pretended not to for pricing purposes. You know quite a bit about the topic - how about filling in those gaps instead of just winging it and then inflicting those guesses from nowhere on people?

S Australia was gas pipeline constrained back then

There is a vast amount more available than even five years ago so that is most definitely not the case.
The Australian system is a gross perversion of the sort of market you think it is. I had the misfortune of seeing it implemented in the 1990s and jumped ship into the resource sector via academia.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Just as I predicted. Nothing but talk, no sources, no facts,, nothing.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Isn't it amazing how somebody can insist so intently that reality isn't true.

Re:Renewables will never work

[david_thornley]

Where did that Canadian failure go? I remember offhand one that hit a large part of the East.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

See folks. No meat on DBIIIs bone.

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Isn't it amazing how somebody can insist so intently that reality isn't true.

Indeed. You appall me. All this impotent charging at windmills. If you were a little bit older you'd see solar as something amazing on spacecraft and wind as something useful to pump water on the farm instead of this hate driven by the empty ideology of "I've got mine".

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

Yes - a failure on the "Canadian Grid" led to a blackout of a lot of the "Eastern Grid".
So apply that to what you think you know and you may be able to get what I was writing about above and how the three grids you mentioned have not been independent things for decades. Consider timezones and peak usage times and you'll get a bit of an idea of how much is saved by having such a vast east-west grid.

Re:Renewables will never work

[Mr D from 63]

Not charging at anything, just presenting facts and backing them up.

Re:Renewables will never work

[xtronics]

You seem confused - I've never promoted coal.

My point is that wind replacing other power is a false narrative - solar is also a false narrative for now (until the installed cost is $.025/kWh..)

Battery storage is also a false narrative. ( Misses by magnitudes )

The fact that people die in coal mines doesn't make false narratives true.

There is a measure of the cost in kWh/life-lost - Solar and wind are not at the top.

I don't think it is that hard a concept to understand that you need a source of power generation for nights when the wind doesn't blow...

Did you intend to provide an example of a bed of Procrustes?

Re:Renewables will never work

[dbIII]

One of the reasons you make me laugh so much is that I reread Don Quixote last year.

Re:Renewables will never work

[j-beda]

We'll just distribute the power through the worldwide superconductor grid. You know the one, built at a cost of 75 quadrillion dollars and requiring a constant supply of liquid nitrogen through the worldwide liquid nitrogen pipeline.

I fainly recall seeing a proposal for using liquid hydrogen for the cooling and delivering that to the end user to fill their H2 automobile tanks.

Let me know when ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... they overtake coal for amount generated per unit time.

Renewables may have higher total peak, but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7, while sun is only about a third of the day and wind varies with the weather - at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The power can be stored,

The issue is not that the power can be stored.

The issue is that power capacity comparisons overstate the total amount of energy you get out of the renewable generation equipment over the long haul because coal generation can run near capacity all the time and renewables (excluding water power) only a small part of the time.

I'm quite supportive of renewable energy. (I'm a major participant on one of the renewable energy tech discussion boards, too.) But while it's very GOOD that renewable power has passed coal in power capacity, even with near-ideal load-levelling storage, it will take about another factor of three before it surpasses coal in providing usable energy to the loads.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Moving the goal posts.

Nope. The article's author apparently thought the offence's 35 yard line was the goal post. I was just pointing out where they ACTUALLY are. B-)

We need about another seven first-downs to get there. But we ARE on our way.

Re:Let me know when ...

[x0ra]

and here goes your carbon neutrality, because hydro-electric artificial lake reject methane from anaerobic fermentation of the local flooded flora

Re:Let me know when ...

[dbIII]

Doesn't matter.
The peaks are huge and we need to cover them.

Plus who ever said we need to get rid of base load completely? That's a very stupid argument and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting up such idiocy to deliberately mislead.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

... they overtake coal for amount generated per unit time.

Renewables may have higher total peak, but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7, while sun is only about a third of the day and wind varies with the weather - at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.

There are some issues there, perhaps you don't know about them. A turbine generator hates a widely varying load, and designing one for peak power is uneconomical. So many power generation facilities have a method of evening out the load. At night time, when the demand load tends to be much lower, they pump water into reservoirs to be released during the daytime when demand is much higher, running other generators. There is not one reason that a method used for a proper coal fired plant cannot be used for the spawn of the devil solar and wind power. It's already in place in many areas.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

The power can be stored,

The issue is not that the power can be stored.

Yes, it very much is that the power can be stored. Storing power is a present day technology that is in use right now. It is not something that we have to think out because it's a huge technological solar and wind power killing problem. It's been solved, and quite some time ago, because power leveling is a big problem with all formas of electrical generation.

Re:Let me know when ...

[TechyImmigrant]

Doesn't matter.
The peaks are huge and we need to cover them.

Plus who ever said we need to get rid of base load completely? That's a very stupid argument and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting up such idiocy to deliberately mislead.

As long as all the base load is nuclear and we aren't digging carbon out of the ground and burning it, we'll be ok.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ramze]

I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.

He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem. I can build a wind turbine with the capacity for so many megawatts, but if it's only windy on Thursdays and idle on the other 6 days, my output is only 1/7th my capacity. Wind and solar have a certain maximum expected capacity, but they rarely hit that except at peak times -- either when wind picks up at certain times of day or when the sun is perfectly overhead on a sunny day.

Capacity does not equal output for those renewables while a coal or nuclear plant can be worked at full capacity so that its capacity = its output constantly if that were desirable. (In the real world, most plants have more than one reactor/furnace and will fire up and shut down according to need and wouldn't necessarily run at full capacity either, though.)

Re:Let me know when ...

[dbIII]

Monocultures suck even with nuclear.
A few years back the French had to take all their nuclear generating plants offline for a few weeks to fix a fault that they all had in common. Exactly the same thing could have happened with coal fired or gas fired plants of the similar age to each other, so it's not a problem with nuclear itself it's just to point out that there is no "one true energy", and all eggs in one basket only helps the seller not the consumer.

If you have a weapons program you can shift some of the infrastructure costs for nuclear power into the military budget (especially since there is some shared infrastructure). If you don't it's still an incredibly expensive way to boil water so you need another excuse to justify it - such as a government enforced restriction on coal.
So if you are a fan of "Big Government" telling you what to do then cheer on the nukes, because currently you need a government with tight control like China or it's not happening. Maybe that will change. I hope so.

As for your sig - WTF? Constipation fucking city. Those "smarter" people are having a joke at your expense and I'm not sure why you want to advertise that you have been conned. Diet fads do at least show that human beings are incredible hard to kill.

Re:Let me know when ...

[TechyImmigrant]

My issue is with digging carbon out of the ground and burning it.

As for the constipation, no, it doesn't work like that. It is time for a new sig though. That one is ancient.

Re:Let me know when ...

[bloodhawk]

way to completely miss the point. renewables like solar generate at peak capacity for around 1/3 of a day. a coal plant operating at half the capacity will still outgenerate it on a daily basis.

Re:Let me know when ...

[burni2]

"at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed"

Basically true, but in respect to modern wind turbines its a bit off(1) due to pitch control.

This does not take into account that you can pitch the blade angle out of the wind when reaching the nominal windspeed of the turbine (which every pitch controlled turbine does). Meaning when the nominal wind speed has been reached the power output will remain mostly steady.

Todays turbine development is going into the direction of increased rotorsize(look at the formula at (1) thats quadratic ) to reach the nominal wind speed much earlier.

But generally speaking that control can be configured to pitch their blades much earlier - this is done for certain sound reduction modes, not using as much energy as would be availible much earlier would give you a usable power reserve.

but: more power = more load = more material = more cost

http://www.wind-power-program....

Re:Let me know when ...

[thegarbz]

The power can be stored

And it can be generated too. But much like generated power that's not being generated, stored power that's not being stored isn't a good counter argument.

First build a storage plant, then tell us what we can and can't do with it.

Re:Let me know when ...

[hey!]

The football analogy is stupid. Reaching the 35 yard line has no value in itself, indeed neither does reaching the 0 yard line. The only thing that goes up on the score board is getting into the end zone.

Generating, say, half of your energy from renewables is more like reaching the half-way point in your quest to earn a million dollars; the half-mil in your pocket has utility right now. What's more since non-renewables aren't going away overnight, reducing their use is immediately useful in reducing carbon emissions and other pollution.

The economics of renewables are considerably different than non-renewables, which means we have to adjust our thinking (and engineering). To maximize the impact of renewables, we need a much better electricity grid, which will help us smooth over local variations in supply. We'll also need to work on storage at some point. Storage for renewables doesn't have to be as physically efficient as it would be for non-renewables, but it has to be cheap to build and operate.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.

He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem.

Oh, so he's saying that it is impossible to make enough capacity?

Total capacity and total storage are rather simple problems, perhaps that's the source of my confusion.

Let's take my simple radio station powering scheme. A couple solar panels, charge regulator and a few deep discharge batteries as well as a removable gel-cel bank for portable use.

Wildly varying load - on receive, less than a watt, and several hundred every transmit cycle. Duty cycle is such that I use a few amps charging current, and that takes care of the hotel load. The overnight hours, the station relies on battery power alone, then starts again the next day with charging via the panel. Energy input and storage are well matched.

And it works.

Now this isn't a method to power a large scale system, it's an example of the simplicity of working out the capacity and loading of a system.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

That reasoning doesn't really work. Since the load is variable you need at least one power source that can react immediately to variations. Hydroelectric is excellent at that. Thermal based power sources like coal and nuclear are pretty bad at it and solar and wind sort of just generates what they do.

Coal and nuc don't ramp up well, and a big problem is if the load suddenly goes way down. Nasty things happen to the turbines as they spin way past design rpms. There is a bank of big resistors to dump that load into.

Wind power and solar means that on windy and sunny days you don't spend as much energy stored in the dam. Sure, you can use coal and nuclear instead of wind and solar, but none of them are capable of handling load variation.

Here's the idea for folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All of this is to say, we've been using hybrid sources for years.

Re:Let me know when ...

[LynnwoodRooster]

They haven't moved - the goalpost of actual energy produced when needed is all that matters. If you don't hit that goalpost - you have brownouts/blackouts and not enough power for modern society.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

way to completely miss the point. renewables like solar generate at peak capacity for around 1/3 of a day. a coal plant operating at half the capacity will still outgenerate it on a daily basis.

So all we need is coal, forever and ever, world without end, amen, right?

Here's the thing. Coal might allow men to achieve multiple orgasms, grow an extra 5 inches on our dicks, and women to all become Sophia Vergara just by inhaling the fumes given off, as well as cure all diseases.

But dear friend, it isn't renewable, so what do we do? Dig up all of the coal in the ground, then fuck off and die because there is no more? It was a good run, but now that the last clinker of coal is burned, we just committ mass suicide, eh?

I get much. You get what is 5 minutes in the future.

Your great umbrage over solar and wind also declares that it is already maxxed out, with no gains to be had in the future. I surely don't get much, and you have all of the knowledge as to how the past present and future shall be. I'm not so certain about that.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

Absolutely true. It will produce almost infinitely more mercury, sulphur dioxide, sooth particles etc. Clearly a the better alternative!

Radioactivity as well. Coal power generation releases much more radioactivity than a nuc plant http://science.sciencemag.org/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'd much rather live beside a nuc power plant than a coal fired one.

Re:Let me know when ...

[R3d M3rcury]

Reaching the 35 yard line has no value in itself [...]

Unless you have a decent field goal kicker.

But, from the look of last weekend's games, that seems to be becoming a rarity.

Re:Let me know when ...

[hey!]

Still has no value in itself. It only has utility in achieving something else of value -- either a TD for field goal. Of course a 35 yard field goal should be pretty easy. But that's straining the analogy, which was bad in the first place.

Re:Let me know when ...

[angel'o'sphere]

The issue is that power capacity comparisons overstate the total amount of energy you get out of the renewable generation equipment over the long haul because coal generation c^Ha^Hn^H could run near capacity all the time and renewables (excluding water power) only a s^Hm^Ha^Hl^Hl^H some part of the time.

Cough cough fixing that for you:
most coal power is load following. So over night it is near to zero, just enough to keep the plant warm, not even generating electricity. In the morning around 6:00 the first plants slowly get ramped up and in half an hour gaps the other plants follow till all load following/balancing/peak plants are around 80% around 12:00 and hold that plateau till perhaps 18:00. Then the reverse process is starting, gradually, the most expensive plants first power down so that till roughly 2:00 at night all coal plants are sleeping again.

So, unless you have a coal base load plant, its CF is no big difference than a solar plant or wind plant. Only difference is: it is dispatchable.

Re:Let me know when ...

[angel'o'sphere]

Wind is exceeding its "capacity" regularly.

Re:Let me know when ...

[bloodhawk]

of course not, don't be a retard. Pointing out the fallacy of those posting and how the headlines etc is blatantly WRONG, does not equal support for coal. Coal needs to die the sooner the better, it is poisoning the planet and people, unfortunately the best alternative is Nuclear which while clean and relatively safe has so much stigma and misinformation associated with it that it is currently cost prohibitive in many circumstances.

Re: Let me know when ...

[dbIII]

It was a different problem due to a shared reactor design that meant they all had the same fault that had to be corrected ASAP to avoid a major failure in the future. It's just an "all eggs in one basket" problem.
The heat problem you mention only really matters in a small number of sites worldwide. Holding dams before river discharge solve it. Distributing the outlets over a wide area solves it. Adding in another cooling tower solves it.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

of course not, don't be a retard. Pointing out the fallacy of those posting and how the headlines etc is blatantly WRONG, does not equal support for coal. Coal needs to die the sooner the better, it is poisoning the planet and people, unfortunately the best alternative is Nuclear which while clean and relatively safe has so much stigma and misinformation associated with it that it is currently cost prohibitive in many circumstances.

I'm not so certain - then again, I am a retard as you so intelligently pointed out.

Unfortunately, I know all too many people who believe that solar and wind are liberal lies and impossible technologies, and that believe it or not, coal is being made as we write these words. That there will almost certainly never be another coal age is beyond them, but hey! I'm a retard, so what do I know.

Re:Let me know when ...

[silentcoder]

As somebody who has done both - it is MUCH nicer to live near a nuclear plant.

Re:Let me know when ...

[silentcoder]

Lets be fair though - nuclear is only cleanish on the generation part, the supply is a disaster. There is no more destructive form of mining than uranium mining. It even makes coal mines look like nice places to live.

Re:Let me know when ...

[Ol Olsoc]

As somebody who has done both - it is MUCH nicer to live near a nuclear plant.

And how! As long as they keep that genie in the bottle, nuc power is spooky unobtrusive.

Hydroelectric

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we know how much of the produced renewable energy is from hydroelectric stations (water dams)? I would suspect that it's still more than 70%.
The article mentions mostly wind and solar power, perhaps they're the main growth factory.

By the way, do they count burning wood as renewable energy? Renewable and green should not be confused.

Re:Hydroelectric

[x0ra]

Hydro isn't green either...

Re:Hydroelectric

[Anonymous Coward]

Because NOTHING is green compared to coal! Coal is the saviour of the world! Death to the infidels!

(OMG. The stupidity going on here...)

Re:Hydroelectric

[silentcoder]

Green is a bit of a flexible term - many things are green in some ways and not in others. By some measures plastics are green - deforestation would be a LOT further along if plastics hadn't provided a cheaper replacement for wood, on the other hand it is very not green because it isn't biodegradable and kills animals.

In the case of woodburning generators - they are green from a climate change perspective as they are carbon neutral, the carbon they burn are already part of the short-term carbon cycle and if you didn't burn it the bacteria that ate the wood after it died would have released the same amount of CO2, which is exactly balanced with the O2 the tree produced in it's lifetime.
It is less green in some other respects (like particulate polution) - though it is much, much greener than coal in those regards.

Re:Power != energy

[PopeRatzo]

That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.

That you think the Financial Times is part of the "green left" shows that you've got no business pointing out anything to anybody.

Re:Title is misleading...

[LesFerg]

I'm just disappointed that nobody has worked out how to make an ultra effective solar panel out of coal.
Now that would alter both the demand and competition for coal production.

Re:Power != energy

[hyades1]

It takes a special kind of idiot to believe the Financial Times is part of anything liberal or "left".

Re:Title is misleading...

[Billy the Mountain]

Yeah, you wouldn't need to change much environmentally if you had a rapid rise in elevation and used a piped pelton wheel. You could also use a simple archimedes screw to raise the water because it doesn't rely on suction so it can rise the water to any elevation. Also when you are done 'charging' you just lock it and when you want to charge again you just pick up where you left off.

Re:Title is misleading...

[dbIII]

Has been done.
Fly ash is almost all silica.

Re:Subsidies

[hyades1]

Yes, they've been doing exactly that with oil for generations. The petrochemical corporations have even persuaded governments to fight wars on their behalf.

The effect on the competition has been devastating.

Coal's not cheap

[rsilvergun]

when you can't externalize the environmental costs.

Re:Coal's not cheap

[dywolf]

subsidies are a red herring. the market isn't fair, and new technologies, particularly those like power generation that are inherently dependent on expanding or new infrastructure, cannot always stand by themselves because the already entrenched systems benefit from systemic bias cause by their mere older existence.

ie, the existing infrastructure is already there, already entrenched.
the new tech needs to build out new infrastructure.

subsidies thus serve two purposes: 1) help to overcome the inherent economic inertial bias of the current systems, and 2) to encourage the switch to newer more desirable tech that in the long run would be more beneficial.

coal, gas, etc, all already receive tremendous amounts in subsidies and systemic market advantages that are often overlooked or ignored.

Re:Coal's not cheap

[drinkypoo]

You can talk about that when wind and solar no longer need endless, catastrophically-indebting levels of State subsidies.

But fossil fuels are already getting endless state aid in the form of tax breaks and access to public lands. If you want to set the bar there, I'm all for ending that aid as well.

Re:Coal's not cheap

[LynnwoodRooster]

Fossil fuel tax breaks? And access to public lands that they have to pay for? Where oh where do those windmills and solar plants go?

Re:Coal's not cheap

[hawkfish]

Fossil fuel tax breaks? And access to public lands that they have to pay for? Where oh where do those windmills and solar plants go?

On domestic land. Unlike the oil being pumped out of the ground in the ME that requires wars, half our carrier fleet and the blood of our soldiers and their civilians. Not to mention the short term price spikes the wars cause when they reduce supply (HT to a comment above).

Re:Coal's not cheap

[LynnwoodRooster]

Fully agree we shouldn't fight for ME oil (given that we get precious little of it in the US - domestic production, Canada, Venezuela, and Mexico are where we get our oil). I hope we don't vote in the one Presidential candidate who voted for those idiotic wars in the Middle East (and has shown a tendency to keep FUBARing the region)...

As far as "on domestic land", you mean public land? Like the GP complained about?

Re:where is your brain?

[Ol Olsoc]

but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7,

Are you actually asserting that demand is level 24 hours a day?

By the way, what he is asserting for his preferred form of electrical generation is pretty true. Coal powered plants simply love to run at one particular power level. Which means that they have issues with the peak demand. and the same solutions exist for proper coal, and wind and solar.

This is a big problem with renewable deniers, they don't always get the technology of either the existing or new technology.

Re:where is your brain?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Are you actually asserting that demand is level 24 hours a day?

It can come very close.

In California, for example, a very large part of the demand is pumping water through aquaducts. By placing reservoirs along the way and doing most of the pumping during times of low electrical demand, California electrical utilities used to be able to keep the power demand nearly constant - and can still keep it much more level than in many other places.

Also: Coal plants can provide baseload, while wind and solar together do a great job of shaving peaks: Higher wind corresponds to higher HVAC load as well as higher generation. Solar not only tracks the air conditioning requirements but also comes close to tracking the daily load peaking - and solar plus wind tracks it even better, since the lake effect makes an afternoon-through-evening hump in wind generation.

at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.

is this relevant somehow?

Yes, very. The steeply up-bending curve means that wind generators that are able to make use of high winds - which only happen for a tiny fraction of the time - have a peak power rating far above the average power they are able to produce in normal winds. So the peak power vastly overstates their average contribution.

Re:Power != energy

[Ol Olsoc]

That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.

I'm not left. I do understand that unless you ascribe to the abiotic energy production theory, there is not an infinity of energy sources out there that enrich the coal industry.

Now grow up, your insults are lame and silly, and in true low Information denialist fashion, attempt to paint anyone who isn't in lockstep with you as your favorite hate target.

Re: Power != energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual electricity produced is what matters. Not some theoretical capacity.

Re:Power != energy

[ClickOnThis]

That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.

energy = power * time

Guess what? Smart people, on the left and the right, understand this.

What you understand is something I leave to speculate by the others on this thread.

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.

That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.

... Title is wrong

[Karmashock]

Its not saying renewables produce more power but that more renewable capacity was added this year than non-renewable capacity. But the bulk of capacity remains non-renewable.

It said right here:
""
But the agency expects renewablesâ(TM) share of power generation to rise to 28 per cent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the US and EU combined.
""
So by 2021, they hope it will be up to 28 percent of total capacity. Thus... no, renewables are not the majority of power generation and the title is wrong.

Re:... Title is wrong

[Karmashock]

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It also limits its predictions to the US and Europe mostly... Not the world.

Look, you want to play pretend with statistics, go play make believe. I'm not entertained by that sort of thing. It doesn't keep the lights on.

I'm confused

[superdave80]

Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Largest Source of Power Capacity

Although coal and other fossil fuels remain the largest source of electricity generation

So, renewables are the largest source of power... except for the fact that coal and fossil fuels are the largest source of electricity generation? WTH? Is there a difference between power capacity and electricity generation?

Re:I'm confused

[arglebargle_xiv]

It's OK, the headline is wrong, see the other replies that have pointed this out.

Positive side: You've demonstrated reading comprehension, which is better than the editors here have done.

Re:Subsidies

[ShanghaiBill]

The petrochemical corporations have even persuaded governments to fight wars on their behalf.

That is still preferable to corporations waging war on their own behalf.

Re:Subsidies

[ShanghaiBill]

That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.

Nor should it, because it was NOT a subsidy. The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade. Subsidies encourage over production. The Iraq war did the exact opposite. It depressed output, and pushed up prices.

You obviously think the Iraq war was dumb, but it is also obvious that it was even dumber than you think. We paid more in excess oil prices than we spent on the war itself.

One word

[Anonymous Coward]

DISPATCHABLE. Wind and solar are not dispatchable.

Re:Subsidies

[hackwrench]

This would have been a prime time for you to point out what you think it should be counted as, but you stopped short at arguing he had simply misfiled it under subsidy.

Re:Subsidies

[hackwrench]

Why is it preferable to companies waging war on their own behalf? From what little I can tell it it preferable that companies wage war on their own behalf... from what little I can tell.

Re:Subsidies

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the Iraq war and the wars against Syria and Libya, saber rattling against Russia and Iran. And the economic attacks on Venezuela. Is not to control the price of oil or the profit, but to control the 'flow' of oil. Which is the US deep state uses oil and capital to hold the rest of the free world hostage. Need oil? Yes you do. And you need to buy it in US dollars. Using heavy equipment and facilities underwritten in US dollars.

Re:Subsidies

[someone1234]

Nope. If they wage their own war, at least they pay the costs.

Re:Subsidies

[gweihir]

Yep. Except for the Oil-Execs, that benefited hugely from all this (and the destruction of the planet they are driving forward).

Making America Great again - with wind power!

[burni2]

The U.S. were once pioneers of wind power(4) in size not only in space but in wind turbines (you might think that the danes were the only pioneers?).

You need to take a look at the good old west. Water pumps powered by wind turbines. Offgrid farms getting their first electricity from wind turbines.

Wind power plants are indeed smaller production unit than a big coal or even a nuclear power plant, that needed to be manufactured as well as their parts (also done in the US). While manufacturing solar panels got outsourced like chip manufacturing.

Meaning! you can employ more people with wind power than with coal power, coal power and nuclear power destroys much more jobs that it generates!

It is different with wind turbines, they need good old american craftsmanship to build a solid turbine that sustains harsh conditions.

Some american wind power history:

1941
American visionary Palmer Putnam built a 1.25 Megawatt! turbine(1) in 1941.

Indeed after some time it threw a blade. But before that it produced more energy and ran longer than the german multi million dollar 1980s disaster called Growian.

Whiners fall down and never try again. Pioneers stand up shake the dust off, don't mind their bruises and climb that horse again, and again till they succeed.

1982-1988
MOD-2 a 2.5 Megawatt turbine with 91m (~275 ft.) diameter rotor. (2) and so on ..

Pioneers can and will fail, but as Kennedy said, that you don't go to the moon because its easy, but because its hard! And generating power from wind is hard but in the recent 30 years we got quite a good understanding how to do it and how to size up the turbines!

Can you feel the changing wind right now? Do you got faith of the heart or fraid of the trump? (3)

This is what made america great, having faith of the heart and this is what can make america great again.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Making America Great again - with wind power!

[R3d M3rcury]

The U.S. were once pioneers of wind power(4) in size not only in space [...]

I would think that wind turbines wouldn't work very well in space...

Thanks for the footnote explaining it.

Re:Making America Great again - with wind power!

[angel'o'sphere]

But before that it produced more energy and ran longer than the german multi million dollar 1980s disaster called Growian.
Seems you are bad in history.
First of all, Growian was not a disaster. It was a research project.
Secondly, its result is what powers now Germany. The big wind mills we have in our days are based on that research.

Re:Making America Great again - with wind power!

[burni2]

sorry to correct you in this point ... and even so late ..

(me: working in that industry in germany, and I'm working hands-on as well as at the desk - offshore/onshore - development & fixing).

Growian
The Growian was a pitch regulated, 100m rotor diameter, two blade, downwind turbine with steel body fiber glas reinforced profile rotor blades and an asynchronous generator.
The growian had only 420 productive hrs.

Smith-Putnam:
pitch & cone regulated, single profile steel only blades - downwind - asynchronous generator
The smith putnam had 1000 productive hrs.

The german wind turbine development took their ideas mostly from the danish designs of the 80s - many turbines were build under OEM contracts

The "modern" wind turbine of the revolution:
Three blades - stall regulated - asynchronous generator - up wind type - with "tip brake" - fiber glass reinforced blades

the blades tip could be rotated 90Â by a spring loaded mechanism triggered by the turbine control system.

the historic main companies active in Germany
- Nordtank (later part of Vestas) (DK)
- Micon (later part of Vestas) (DK)
- later NEG Micon (later part of Vestas) (DK)
- AN Bonus (DK) (now Siemens(DE))
- Nordex (DE)
- Adler/Koester (DE)
- Jacobs (later part of REpower) (DE)
- HSW (later part of REpower) (DE)
- Aerodyn (DE)
- Lagerwey (NL)

And some even had a wind driven yawing system like the AeroMANn a two blade upwind turbine .. with a mere 33 kW.

The "current" motern wind turbine:
pitch regulated - Doubly fed generator or full converter - three blade - upwind windturbine with fiber glass reinforced blades - 100+ m rotor diameter - 2-3 Megawatt.

conclusion:
The current three blade state of the art turbine has much more in common with the danes simple turbines than with the Growian.

Growian and Smith-Putnam are quite well comparable as they share certain similar design features as well as their structural mode of failiure- just that Growian was shutdown before it would've thrown a blade.

But when you'd want to take a look at the history of the small steps you can read the "Windkraftanlagen - Grundlagen, Technik, Einsatz, Wirtschaftlichkeit"
from Erich Hau.

You will then realize that virtually no research from the Growian could be used on that small step path.

(Remark: we do not mill with these turbines, we just visit the "Windmuehle" or the "Muehle" which does not mill - normally)

AeroMAN
http://www.wind-turbine-models...

Re:Making America Great again - with wind power!

[angel'o'sphere]

Nevertheless I would growian not call a failure.

Also I'm not sure I understand what you want to imply with the various turning/pitching blade types :D

That we are now 40 years after Growian and Riesenhuber is not a question.

But nice informations, thank you.

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

The oil companies didn't have to pay for their own security and they didn't have to pay for the true cost of oil.

It's also very expensive to maintain a naval and coast guard fleet to protect oil tankers. The oil companies should be paying for it.

If they had to pay for those things- their prices would be much higher. So their prices are subsidized by tax payers.

The hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the title of this submission, and it immediately set off my bullshit detector.

The thing you need to recognise is just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. It's insane. We use 2% of our natural gas production to produce ammonia, for example, but to do the same thing using renewables would take 30% of the world's entire renewable and nuclear power capacity. Then there's steel production. Then there's concrete production.

The only way this submission is accurate is if you define your terms in such a way that you are specifically trying to get a certain result.

Re:The hell?

[flyingfsck]

Yes, it is a total Bullshit headline.

The capacity of new renewable installations, overtook the capacity of new coal power stations and since nobody is building any new coal power stations, someone could cook up a headline.

Re:The hell?

[ChrisMaple]

Just think of all the skyscrapers made from natural stone and renewable wood.

Re:Subsidies

[dunkelfalke]

But it is. High oil prices makes oil companies really happy - their cost is mostly fixed, so expensive oil is pure profit.
I work for the oil industry so our company felt the falling oil prices and lower profits of oil companies (and deepwater horizon, that also hurt a lot).

Re:Subsidies

[guises]

Subsidies don't always encourage overproduction, that's too simplistic. Subsidies are about promoting something, certainly, but how the subsidy is crafted depends on what it's trying to encourage. There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example. That's the opposite of overproduction.

Also, when you say, "It depressed output, and pushed up prices." in the same sentence like that you're implying a causal relationship. You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.

Re:Subsidies

[hyades1]

Great summary! Thanks for that.

Catastrophe for birds

[gregraven]

So this is why China has so few birds.

Re:Catastrophe for birds

[TheEden]

Not just birds. Technically there are no renewable sources of enegry. Wind may appear renewable, but its just that consequences of abusing wind energy is not as apparent as, say, coal or nuclear. But they still there. Wind does not pass turbine unchanged, affecting wind will in the end affect entire ecosystem. Build enough turbines in one place and given enough time you'll see.

Same goes for solar - there is only so much space on earth where you can install panels. You still need that space for other means - crops, housing, industry. One may think that installing them in some desert is a way to go, but that too will have consequences of its own - plants and wildlife need sunlight. Not to mention that panels themselves are not too efficient. I'ts a good idea in some rural area, yes. But big city consumes much more energy, than solar panels on the same space can produce.

I'd say we're stuck with nuclear/coal for a good while. Properly maintained and operated nuclear plant produces crapton of energy, considering the amount of fuel and space it takes...

Re:Catastrophe for birds

[FirstOne]

By the time one reaches anywhere near the maximum solar usage threshold, attempting to use any combination of fossil/nuclear energy would burn the planet to a crisp.

FF/nuclear Waste heat(50-70%) to match solar flux levels would make AGW(Added CO2 = + 1%), look like a picnic.
Yes, their is energy consumption limit/(ultimately converted to heat) at which humanity must leave the planet.

Re:Catastrophe for birds

[khallow]

Wind may appear renewable

Renewable doesn't mean that you can pull an infinite amount of wind power from Kansas. It means that you can keep using the resource without using it up. For example, wind is renewable because there's no danger that we can use up all the wind for good. As long as the Sun shines and the Earth has an atmosphere, there will be wind.

Re:Subsidies

[stdarg]

There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example.

Yes, because it's a subsidy for farmer's income, not for food. Calling it a food subsidy would not make sense. The problem with "oil subsidies" is people are trying to lump in multiple things.. subsidies for production and apparently also subsidies for oil company income. Now in this thread the person making the subsidy claim said "protect Oil Company interests in the middle east" so that sounds more like production than income, since the income doesn't accrue in the Middle East but at the host nation.

This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.

Got a source for that? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic.

Re:Subsidies

[GLMDesigns]

Do you really believe that? Why wouldn't US companies continue to buy from Saddam? What difference would it make to them who they paid for the oil? If you were correct in your assertion - which you're not - then why didn't the US seize the oil; why isn't the oil being pumped by US companies and brought to the US?

That never happened. You pretend you understand something; buy a line of crap and then distort facts to fit your fantasy.

Re:Subsidies

[Joce640k]

Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.

2?

I don't know where you get your numbers but you're an order of magnitude short, it's more like 20.

Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[zerofoo]

How many carbon based power plants were taken off-line and replaced by renewable generation capacity last year?

After much research, I haven't found a single instance of that happening - ever.

Have renewables caused a moratorium on all new carbon based power plants? I don't think so. Asia (as of last year) was opening more than one coal power plant PER DAY:

http://climatechangedispatch.c...

Renewables have two mathematically inescapable problems:

1. Renewable's land requirements per kWh are far too high.
2. Renewable's storage requirements to meet base load demand simply do not exist - presumably because storage costs are also very high.

I ran the numbers on a very small 2kW self-installed system - it would take me over 10 years in a best case scenario to recoup the costs at current utility rates.

Until renewables become far cheaper, generate more kWh per square-foot, and solve the storage problem - they will never reduce or replace carbon based generation.

Re:Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I ran the numbers on a very small 2kW self-installed system - it would take me over 10 years in a best case scenario to recoup the costs at current utility rates.

Actually, 10 years is a pretty good payoff time. Perhaps not for you, but for utility companies running on an industrial scale, 10 years is quite short.

Re:Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[Zibodiz]

You clearly have much lower utility rates than we do in the rural Western United States. For me, it was a matter of months. Our electricity when we lived in town was about $100-$150/month. Now that we've built a home in the country, we're completely off-grid (other than that pesky Internet fiber); we have about $3,000 invested into our solar array, battery bank, pure sine inverters, all wiring, and charge controllers. It provides enough electricity that we run a large refrigerator and a chest freezer, and we even use an electric water heater and range. We occasionally supplement with a small $200 gasoline generator when there are multiple cloudy days, but that's getting pretty rare, and probably costs less than $100/year.
My total payoff time for this system was about 24 months; 2 years. And since I have electric cooking and a wood stove for heat, I also save another $25-150/month (monthly average gas bill was about $45), and the cost for the wood stove & accessories was less than the cost of a gas or electric furnace. If we add that into the mix, it brings our payoff down to 18 months.

Re:Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[hawkfish]

Until renewables become far cheaper, generate more kWh per square-foot, and solve the storage problem - they will never reduce or replace carbon based generation.

Did you include in the externalised costs?

If we include the coal externalities, it increases the levelized costs to approximately 28 cents per kWh, which is more than hydroelectric, wind (onshore and offshore), geothermal, biomass, nuclear, natural gas, solar photovoltaic, and on par with solar thermal (whose costs are falling rapidly).

I have some sympathy for the density argument, but I hope we can agree that using more land (or building nukes) is mostly a political choice, not a technical barrier.

Re:Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[Ichijo]

2. Renewable's storage requirements to meet base load demand simply do not exist - presumably because storage costs are also very high.

I wouldn't worry about that because the perfectly inelastic portion of base load demand is quite low and therefore requires very little energy storage.

Re:Did renewables replace any carbon based plants?

[thewiltog]

Well, a few miles up the M62 from me, Ferrybridge power station closed earlier this year. The UK hasn't been building new coal fired power stations, and the latest nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point won't be producing power any time soon.

Also according to Wikipedia the following fossil-fuel power stations have closed since 2010:-
Ferrybridge C, Littlebrook D, Ironbridge, Teesside, Fawley, Didcot A, Tilbury B, Roosecote B, Grain, Kingsnorth A and one ( a small gas turbine) has opened.
The power stations that closed produced 13.7 Gigawatts. Wind power in the UK now has a total installed capacity of 14 Gigawatts - peak production obviously, but it's pretty windy here.

There's also just under 10 Gigawatt of installed solar power and it's not always foggy here.

Re: Subsidies

[Anonymous Coward]

Only when those same companies actually pay US taxes.

Re:Subsidies

[0100010001010011]

The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003

What have the profits of the oil companies been since 2003?

A large part of coal's demise is...

[dcavanaugh]

Cheap natural gas, made possible by tracking.

Definitions and Context

[eepok]

The title is correct, but then we have to define "renewables". It includes solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric.

With that in mind, know that wind and solar, the big newer, flashier energy sources in the media, are not the major sources of renewable energy. Hydroelectric (falling water) accounts for over 70% of renewable energy. Wind is at 15%. Solar is at 4%.

Percentage-wise, solar and wind have grown very quickly, but in the grand scheme of total energy production, wind and solar are still small potatoes.

Disclaimer: I'm not writing this post as a nay-sayer. I actually work in sustainability. I WANT more solar and wind power. I'm just trying to make sure that people don't accept hype-ish headlines as implying certain things. Within sustainability, we always have to manage the expectations of the hype. Everyone thinks we can "just put up some solar panels" and make free electricity for EV charging stations when FREE is never reality.

Re:Subsidies

[dj245]

Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.

That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.

I agree that some part of the middle east wars were about oil, but there is a lot more going on also. I think it is important to realize that due to the hydraulic fracturing innovation and resulting boom, the US has more natural gas than we know what to do with, and oil prices remain very low. This may be part of a strategy to destabilize some other powers (Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc) since a large part of their national budget is related to oil income. If the cost of oil is 1/2 or 1/3 what it used to be, those countries are most certainly either feeling a heavy pinch now or are concerned about how long their savings will last.

On the issue of terrorism, we have created a location in the world where the people who want to fight about their religion can go fight. That location is really far away from the USA. The number of people who have died of terrorism in the US since 2000 is incredibly low compared to the amount of angst that the US government has generated. Probably because there is a 3500 mile wide ocean in between. Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting their proxy religious war in their own backyard, relatively out in the open. That's not a great outcome, but it might be the best of a lot of potentially worse outcomes.

I'm not saying any of this is good, or that I agree. But saying that these conflicts are based on oil is a very narrow viewpoint. There's a lot of things to consider. In my opinion the oil issue only a small part of the chessboard.

Re:Subsidies

[ChrisMaple]

Colonialism involves colonies, where the inhabitants of the area in question are citizens of the mother country. Are you serious in claiming that the inhabitants of various middle-eastern countries are U.S. citizens?

Re:Subsidies

[ChrisMaple]

Protecting the freedom of the seas benefits all countries engaged in seafaring. Piracy should be tolerated by no one.

Re:Subsidies

[ShanghaiBill]

You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way

You misunderstand supply and demand. If supply is halved, that doesn't mean the price doubles. It means that the price rises until people use half as much, which is WAY WAY more than doubling. Historically, if the price of oil doubles, demand falls by about 3%. So a shortfall in production of 3% is enough to double the price of oil.

Re:Subsidies

[ChrisMaple]

Even if your assertion is true, it does not account for the price of the alternative, the severely reduced availability of oil in the US. How much would even higher oil prices cost US people and businesses? How many people would have died from a lack of heating oil?

Re:Power != energy

[R3d M3rcury]

Remember that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Re:Subsidies

[ShanghaiBill]

The oil companies didn't have to pay for their own security and they didn't have to pay for the true cost of oil.

Except the Iraq War did NOT make the transport of oil more secure, and did NOT lower the "true cost" of oil in anyway. It did the exact opposite.

It's also very expensive to maintain a naval and coast guard fleet to protect oil tankers.

It is unlikely that America's navy makes the Persian Gulf more secure. If America withdrew, the nations of the region would have a huge incentive to cooperate on security. They don't do that now because they know their immature squabbling will have no consequences.

 

I didn't include external costs...

[zerofoo]

Which I admit are significant. I love the idea of renewable energy. I have a Tesla Model 3 reserved, and I love the idea of generating my own electricity in a carbon free manner.

Politically, generating your own electricity without pushing external costs on others squares nicely with my Libertarian views.

Unfortunately, the finances matter. In the 3rd world, they matter even more.

Right now the external costs of carbon based generation are being borne by pretty much everyone. It's unfair, but that's the way it is. I don't have faith that government can equitably fix the external cost problem - so renewables have yet another hill to climb.

I'm an optimist here though - I think the engineers will get the cost of renewables down and fix the storage problem - I do not have the same optimism that governments can fix the carbon external cost problem - so it's up to the engineers to make renewables so cost efficient that the external costs of carbon become almost irrelevant. If renewables are productive enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough - they will win.

I'm hoping my kids see that in their lifetimes.

Meaningless PR

[rechtco]

Capacity in solar and wind energy production is misleading since neither can produce as much power per unit of capacity as fossil fuel plants can. The US EIA, https://www.eia.gov/electricit... ,lists capacity factors for non-fossil fuel energy production. It also lists capacity factors for coal and fossil fuel energy production, https://www.eia.gov/electricit... . The tables show that each unit of coal and fossil fuel energy capacity produces approximately twice as much energy over a year as the same amount of capacity of solar and wind. Until wind and solar have twice the capacity of coal, they have not overtaken coal in energy production. Even capacity factors overstate solar and wind energy production since neither wind nor solar can produce continuously power over a 24 hour day as coal and fossil fuel plants can.

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

Aye! And a glut of as little as 3% is enough to absolutely destroy the price of oil per barrel.

There is a strong feedback loop between alternative energy and traditional energy.

As electric cars grow more popular, gasoline will become cheaper (and impair the value proposition of owning an electric car).

Of course at the same time, unprofitable oil leads to less production which eventually leads to a shortage.

Pay later...short term thinking wins

[bussdriver]

There are solar panels which produce power (70%?) that were made in the 1970s. So you may pay upfront costs of 10 years worth of power but you get DECADES of power after that point. Then it's basically free. Just being simplistic that is a good deal if you have the money and it's a great loan situation too. We all know that utility rates will go up over the next 10 years.

Storage is the big problem and expense we need to be investing in solutions for. So maybe then we end up with 30 years upfront costs... then it becomes a bigger loan situation. Obviously this is impossible because we never had to factor in our energy costs into trying to afford the biggest most bloated house we can afford.

Re:Subsidies

[HornWumpus]

'We' are not europeans. Check where Iraqi oil actually goes.

Of course oil is fungible.

Re:Capacity Factor

[HornWumpus]

Define 'capacity factor' (moron check)?

Re:Subsidies

[angel'o'sphere]

There are two kinds of colonies.
a) I sent a troop of settlers to a different island/land and they found a city and consider themselves still citizens or at least of the same nation than me. Example would be the greek settlements all over the Mediterranean
b) I sent even more troops and conquer another nation and call that a colony. Like India being a colony of the english empire or Cameroon and Namibia being colonies of germany.

In case of b) the local natives never where citizens of the empire occupying and controlling them.

So your parent was completely right, but perhaps he should have chosen imperialism instead of colonialism.

Perhaps you should visit one of the oil harbors under US or European "control"? Nothing goes there if it is not sanctioned or is even initiated by the big oil bosses. Corrupt governments, lack of democracy, that is what the oil companies want and use/abuse.

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

I've dug into it pretty deeply and previously even the most extreme source (which was disproven) said 3 trillion.

So... got a link? Sure it's hard cash and not some funny business?

Re:where is your brain?

[angel'o'sphere]

So the peak power vastly overstates their average contribution.
That is nonsense as the peak power production of wind mills is usually no where stated.
The nameplate on the windmill: is the power it produces at a certain wind speed. And if that wind speed happens to be common, rare or or often exceeded is a question of the place where the wind mill is placed.

BALTIC I and BALTIC II, the two research wind plants in the baltic sea of http://www.enbw.com/ e.g. have capacity factors of over 100%. Because typical wind speed is over the course of t a year 50% of the time significantly above the rated wind speed of the turbines.

So you got your CUBE argument completely wrong. Nameplate capacities are usually underrated because they are for low wind speeds and kinda a "guarantee" of the manufactor. In RL a wind mill placed at the right spot will always have CFs above 80% and up to 400%.

Re:Subsidies

[AK Marc]

The decrease in stability increased price/profit. This was a subsidy because it was an expense by the government to generate profit for a private corporation. Much like the $0 cost loan guarantees were called "subsidies". Oil company profits were up, the price doesn't matter to whether it was a subsidy.

Re:Subsidies

[Mr D from 63]

Most of this renewable power this article is cheering about is hydro and biomass. Wind and solar, the two sources that everyone wants to claim will solve all our problems, are only actually generating a very small percentage of global electricity, and that's mostly wind. Solar barely registers on the scale of GWH generation globally.

Re:Subsidies

[AK Marc]

Nope. Protecting the people is. Business interests aren't people. Though you've hit on the good reason why the taxes need to be higher on the rich. Tax 90% of all income over $5M a year (gross, not AGI) would be a good place to start. The rich benefit from wars. The poor never do. If China invaded the US and won, the homeless guy in San Fran might see a change in the uniform of the person who orders him to not sleep on the park bench, but no other change to his life. But Bill Gates and such would see a huge difference when MS is nationalized.

The (current) military exists solely to protect the profits of the 1%, and serves no other purpose. Taxing the middle class for that is absurd.

Re:Subsidies

[erapert]

(and the destruction of the planet they are driving forward)

virtue += 10;

Re:Subsidies

[AK Marc]

The English Colonies in North America didn't grant English citizenship to the locals. So I guess the "colonies" weren't colonies. The definitions of "colonies" I found didn't require the definition you gave. The colonists are generally linked to the home country (the US military occupiers are US citizens), but the natives are undefined, and often not citizens, as we see today in the Middle East.

Re:Subsidies

[silentcoder]

> The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade.
That was pretty good for the oil companies.

You're assuming there are only one kind of subsidy. Subsidies can be tailored to reduce the price you pay for a product - or just to give money to those who produce it so they keep doing so. Just because it wasn't the former kind, doesn't mean it wasn't the latter kind.

Farm subsidies fit almost entirely in the latter category as well - they actually make food more expensive world-wide because farm subsidies in Europe and America make it impossible for farmers in other countries (which have more suitable climates) to actually compete despite their cost of production being lower. That actually means that, eventually those unsubsidized farmer start going out of business - forcing their countries to become food importers rather than exporters, which raises prices even in the countries that used to supply their own food with exports to spare. Nobody wins.

In fact- farm subsidies are so bad that, every year, farmers in Europe and America burn crops because the subsidies are contingent on keeping supply below a certain level - they burn so much produce every year that just the food burned could feed every hungry person on the planet. Nobody in the world needs to be hungry- we produce enough food to feed everybody on earth twice over but we burn so much that huge numbers of people still starve and a massive percentage of the global population have no food security - they may get enough food over time to survive but they never know if they will eat today.

Subsidies don't always bring prices down - many are DESIGNED to keep prices high. Some oil subsidies are in that category as well.

Re:Subsidies

[silentcoder]

>Colonialism involves colonies, where the inhabitants of the area in question are citizens of the mother country.

So according to your bizarre and unique (made up) definition - the Dutch colonies (which once spanned half the globe) were not colonies then. Since nobody in them were citizens of the mother country, the best you could hope for was 'employee of the corporation' - but most were simply 'slaves' or 'natives to be shoved aside'.

In fact, hardly any colonial power EVER granted citizens to the people of the colonies - that would mean you have to give those people RIGHTS and no colonial government wanted to do that. Citizens of the motherland who went to live in the colonies usually retained their citizenship - but the people being taken over never gained it.
In the aftermath of colonialism a lot of colonial powers gave a path to citizenship for their former non-citizen subjects - which usually only consisted of some rules to make emigrating to the land that once ruled you a little easier than it is for other people. The levels of that vary greatly even within a single colonial power. For example citizens of former British colonies can get automatic citizenship in Britain - but not ALL former colonies. It does not apply to South Africans for example.

Re:Subsidies

[silentcoder]

>Except the Iraq War did NOT make the transport of oil more secure, and did NOT lower the "true cost" of oil in anyway. It did the exact opposite.
Failing at the goal doesn't mean you subsequently get to pretend that wasn't the goal. Just because the execution was terrible doesn't mean the plan wasn't bad as well.

Re: Subsidies

[silentcoder]

You think there are no health effects within 1000m of a coal plant ? Hell the health effects of coal are far worse, over a much larger area - and of course you get it double because living anywhere within about 50-thousand meters of a coal MINE is seriously hazardous to health as well.

Re:Title is misleading...

[silentcoder]

>Renewables are still mostly more costly than coal,

This is not even generally true anymore. Here in South Africa we have two big coal plants being built (both now several years late and way over budget), and the government is trying hard to get a 15-Billion rand nuclear deal passed (because the president's son owns the biggest local uranium mine - and that's just the start of the corruption). If it goes ahead- that will be 15 years minimum to get any power from, and likely far more overbudget (nuclear always is).

There was a study done here - which compared the cost per kw/h of those plants with wind and solar (our climate is among the best for solar with well over 300 sunny days a year and lots of coastal wind too). At the original quoted prices - with the expected costs of coal/uranium factored in the coal plants came in at around R1.20 per kw/h over their lifetime. Nuclear at about R1.90 - Solar - 75c, wind slightly worse at 95c. Oh and a solar plant with the same capacity as those coal plants can be up in 2 years, to match the nuclear you only need to add another 3 months - and they are usually under-budget.

We don't have much hydro possibility and we're already using what we can (mostly imported from our neighbours), the area is completely geologically dead (so no geothermal) and our tides are tiny (so tidal isn't practical) but we should be investing in what we can do.

But let's assume that solar and wind wouldn't be reliable enough to supply our industrial needs without excessive investment in additional storage tech (and the nicest one - hydro-pumps aren't an option). That still leaves the obvious answer which I wish government would take: give people serious incentives for home solar. Lets get every house off the grid, we distribute the cost (and it's been shown that solar is so economical here that if you BORROW the money to do solar you will still profit because the savings exceed the the interest rates, you can pay back the loan with the savings and have money left over - and that's assuming a worst case scenario where the batteries have to be replaced in just 5 years and the panels in 7 - they've both been way beyond that for some time). If we get all the residential demand off-grid, then the grid ONLY has to worry about supplying industry - which means we no longer need to have shortfalls (coal which provides nearly all our power at the moment can't keep up. We have one active nuclear plant but that only supplies one city). And by distributing the cost so widely the price per taxpayer is hugely reduced and you can optimise the process to build high-demand first.

Then your need for the grid-plants is lower, so you can get rid of half of them and use the savings to upgrade and maintain the other half.

The idea that solar and wind is more expensive is simply not true. Now it may be MORE true in Europe and the USA where, presumably, the climate mandates a greater investment in storage - but it isn't true globally. The real market where they lose is the market for bribing politicians. Big Russian government-owned nuclear companies (whose track record includes the worst nuclear disaster of all time) can afford much bigger bribes than solar companies can.

World wide HVDC

[ai4px]

It strikes me that at approximately every 120 degrees around the earth we have a huge desert. The American SW, Australia and northern Africa. Wouldn't it be great if we could put a metric shitton of photovoltaics in those three locations and tie it all together with a HVDC distribution system? Think of all the people we could employ to keep them wiped clean! And the sun would always be shining on one or two of the locations.

The second graph shows reality

[dbIII]

Take a look at the second graph to get a good dose of reality over ideology:
http://www.theenergycollective...
All it took was a very quick google image search.

If you spend anywhere near the amount of time you write about this stuff on actually learning about it we wouldn't need to have these discussions where I try hard to not write as if I am looking down on an idiot.

Re:The second graph shows reality

[Mr D from 63]

That's not a graph of actual usage. And even if it was, it doesn't show wind varying with the peaks, it shows a steady wind output which is not reality as we all know wind is not steady. You could easily move that wind line to the bottom in that chart and the line would be straight. What kind of idiot are you? Try again with real world data.

Re:The second graph shows reality

[dbIII]

Wind USAGE isn't steady you goose - base load is. I pointed you at that graph so you could learn something even if reading words is beyond you. There are words written on the graph to tell you which "real world data" it is based on.

BASE LOAD DOESN'T GET TURNED OFF TO MAKE WAY FOR WIND and your politically motivated lies to pretend it does are extremely annoying.
Nukes run all day and all night all year no matter what the wind is doing.

Re:The second graph shows reality

[Mr D from 63]

Peaking power gets ramped up and down to meet the peaks in demand, which result from varying load and these days the intermittance gaps from wind and solar.

Re:The second graph shows reality

[dbIII]

You are starting to learn grasshopper but have still made a major mistake.
Now consider that wind and solar are currently occupying the niche above base load almost everywhere other than in people's dreams - or in you case, nightmares.
Get a grip!

Re:Subsidies

[Maxo-Texas]

If we have sufficient alternative energy and good enough electric vehicles, we don't NEED THE OIL or the WARS in the first place.

You can use natural gas for heating but also, heating oil isn't going to drive the price of oil to $130 per barrel alone. We may be in an oil glut for another 10 years. With smart subsidies for alternative energy and electric vehicles, and conservation (LED bulbs are cheap and pay for themselves in about 2 months now and pure profit for the consumer after that), we may never see the end of the oil glut. We may finally be at the beginning of the end of oil driven engines.

Re:Subsidies

[VisceralLogic]

Nope. Protecting the people is. Business interests aren't people. Though you've hit on the good reason why the taxes need to be higher on the rich. Tax 90% of all income over $5M a year (gross, not AGI) would be a good place to start. The rich benefit from wars. The poor never do. If China invaded the US and won, the homeless guy in San Fran might see a change in the uniform of the person who orders him to not sleep on the park bench, but no other change to his life. But Bill Gates and such would see a huge difference when MS is nationalized. The (current) military exists solely to protect the profits of the 1%, and serves no other purpose. Taxing the middle class for that is absurd.

Why $5M? You don't think the folks making $30k/yr would see a change if China took over? Maybe they should pay a 90% gross income tax, too.

Re:Subsidies

[AK Marc]

There wouldn't be that much in change for them, either. If everything you own is nationalized, for most people under $30k, they'd see a net benefit. Wipe out their student loans (nationalized), wipe out their mortgage (then let them rent it back at market rates), and such, being invaded by the communists would improve the lives of most Americans.

Re:Subsidies

[VisceralLogic]

I very much doubt that. Not that "ideal" Communism couldn't improve the lives of the working poor, but I don't think the average Chinese citizen is better off than the average US citizen.

I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[dbIII]

You may not be stupid but you appear to pretend to be very frequently - the above line is missing an "only", which should be obvious but you are bound to jump on it as if it was not.
Consider that wind and solar are currently ONLY occupying the niche above base load almost everywhere other than in people's dreams.

Your charging at windmills is pointless - the "green" stuff you hate so much is just another collection of useful tools to add to the energy mix.

Re:I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[Mr D from 63]

You keep saying the same stupid, pointless things. Where you draw them on a chart doesn't matter.

Re:I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[dbIII]

They happen to be true unlike your ideological attacks on any machinery that can possibly be painted green.
How about learning about this topic instead of just attacking blindly like an idiot? I am sure you are nowhere near as dumb as you appear.

Re:I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[Mr D from 63]

Still no backup I see.

Re:I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[dbIII]

Are you suggesting I should cite myself to prove that I have an opinion? What a loser.

Re:I'd better add in a clarification for the dim

[Mr D from 63]

And as I've shown, that's all it is.

Re:Capacity Factor

[MrKaos]

Define 'capacity factor'?

The ratio of the available capacity (the amount of electrical power actually produced by a generating unit) to the theoretical capacity (the amount of electrical power that could theoretically have been produced if the generating unit had operated continuously at full power) during a given time period.

Define 'capacity factor'(gross)?

The ratio of the gross electricity generated, for the time considered, to the energy that could have been generated at continuous full-power operation during the same period.

Define 'capacity factor'(net)?

The ratio of the net electricity generated, for the time considered, to the energy that could have been generated at continuous full-power operation during the same period.

Define 'capacity factor' (moron check)?

Well the way the morons are using it, the time period is left out. The way a sentence that includes Capacity Factor as a measure should be 'Palo Verde Unit 1' achieved a CF of 90% over a one year period or to put it in a moronic car analogy that car did 180Kmh for 1 hour.

They also leave out that CF applies to a 'generating unit' not 'The entire nuclear industry has a CF of 90%', it's like saying 'all cars do 180Kmh', see how moronic it is?

Define 'Utilization' (moron check)?

The moronic thing about CF is that people like to cite 'hey nuclear power has a CF of 90%'. No. An operating period that did not any any outages was used to produce that figure because the 'Utilization' is masked. And utilization is a issue for the nuclear industry. Do the morons realize that the reactor doesn't reach it's full output? Any ideas?

Define 'Availability Factor' (moron check)?

Of course, most morons probably don't even know what this is. Was the plant even available to produce power? This is the problem with the way morons use CF, they ignore or are unaware of Availability.

If you move the window of time that you examined Palo Verde and shrank it around the record breaking refueling for the reactor of 28 days, you would have a Capacity Factor of 0% for the same reactor. That doesn't mean the entire nuclear industries CF went to 0% it means CF is a variable figure for a generating unit.

Same as if I measured the CF for Davis Besse for the year or whatever it was it was down to fix the reactor head, for that time Davis Besse unit something had a CF of 0%.

Examine the Capacity Factor of Palo Verde for a 12 month window that included the 'record breaking refuelling' then it is now 84%.

So if you wanted to use CF accurately it would be a conglomerate of information like 'Palo Verde 12:90%' might say Palo Verde reached 90% CF for 12 months or 'Palo Verde AF93%:CF84%' Palo Verde was Available for 93% of the time and achieved 84% CF.

Instead the morons put it down to one simple and wrong answer because it is a number that fits their confirmation bias.

But wait...

(moron check)

What about taking into account:

• The energetic cost of spent fuel storage
• The energetic cost of infrastructure to move spent fuel to it
• The energetic cost of DU storage
• The energetic cost of demolishing the reactor
• The variability of ore grades and the energetic extraction costs
• The energetic cost of cleaning up mine tailings from mine sites
• The ongoing energetic costs for accident clean-ups from Fukushima and Chernobyl

How can CF factor these things into it, especially when a lot of these costs occur decades *after* the end of the service life of the reactor?

It is *exactly* the same as the coal industry getting benefit by externalizing the cost of the carbon, only the nuclear industry does it with radionuclides and pushes the cost and consequences far far into the future.

Where is the energetic cost of c

Re:Capacity Factor

[MrKaos]

Every power source has a negative environmental impact,

Generalization, minimization. Some produce more environmental impact than others.

so you are implying it makes sense to intentionally lower capacity factors of all sources.

No

Of course that is as stupid and your contention, as when one plant is not producing, you use another.

Well, it's your stupid idea.

Maybe you thought you were just being clever, but it comes accross as pathetic rationalization, just like DBIII

Another possibility is you are just being a dick and have nothing other than empty words to add to the conversation.