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Toshiba Is 'Burning Cash At An Alarming Rate' (reuters.com)
bsharma quotes a report from Reuters: Faced with the prospect of a multibillion-dollar write-down that could wipe out its shareholders' equity, Japan's Toshiba is running out of fixes: It is burning cash, cannot issue shares, and has few easy assets left to sell. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit. Toshiba says it will be weeks before it can give a final number, but a write-down of the scale expected -- as much as 500 billion yen ($4.3 billion), according to one source close to Toshiba -- would leave the group scrambling to plug the financial hole and keep up hefty investments in the competitive memory chip industry, which generates the bulk of its operating profit. "Toshiba's immediate problem is that it is burning cash at an alarming rate, and this will be more than challenging," said Ken Courtis, chairman of Starfort Investment Holdings. "I see little option but to sell a slew of non-core assets."One source in the semiconductor industry said Toshiba could revive plans to list a slice of the memory chip business, which though highly profitable burns through cash for reinvestment. "Toshiba will probably need to sell 30-40 percent of the NAND business in an IPO to secure enough cash," the source said, adding China's aggressive drive into NAND flash memory chips could make the timing reasonable. The group has already said it could reconsider the "positioning" of its nuclear business, deemed core last year, and has signaled it could trim an 87 percent stake.
Gotta love them. A momentary dip in profitability can kill a company dead as they circle like jackals. Anyone else remember when 3DFX products were flying of the shelf and they still went out of business?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
i used to really like their laptop hard drives
They make stuff relevant to slashdotters, and their future is therefore also relevant. How is your whining relevant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do we have an idea why they invested into nuclear? The technology is aging, and everyone bets on renewable now.
Nuclear has had 50 years to become profitable. It is not and will not be profitable except in countries who subsidize it as the only practcle option. There is. O nuclear renaissance because in most cases the risks do not outweigh the benefits. Same thing is true for coal now that natural gas is almost free.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They had an accounting scandal a year ago or something like this. Basically they reported they were making much more money than they actually were. Now it's catching up to them. So another one bites the dust? Let's make predictions!
Their accounting system is AKA "Tesco Superstore Accounting - Turbo Edition"
Cost overruns at a nuclear reactor business! How blind do you have to be to not see that one coming? That's an industry in which the cost overruns get overruns. The only possible thing that could shock me when it comes to building a reactor is if it's done on time and on budget.
> everyone bets on renewable now
A shitload of competition is not a good thing for a company. Much smarter, most of the time, is to set yourself so that no matter who wins the race for whatever is hot, you win your own parallel race. Think of Levi Strauss selling rugged pants during the gold rush, and people getting rich selling shovels and picks, or brokering gold, buying it from the miners and selling it. They win no matter which miner strikes gold.
Solar electricity is really great, except at night time and when the whole area is covered by clouds (check out the national weather radar - weather systems cover half the country for days). Solar electric can produce a lot more during the summer than during the winter, too. Wind power is really cool too. The power of wind is proportional to the CUBE of the velocity. In other words:
1 MPH wind: 1kw (actually zero due to friction)
10 MPH: 1000kw
20 mph 8000kw
30 mph 27000kw
So that 27000kw wind installation will only produce 1000kw quite often. That's less than 4% of it's advertised capacity, and sometimes it'll produce no power at all.
So what do you do when you have lots of cheap energy sometimes, and no energy at all other times, but your customers want a reliable electric service? The optimum setup has three parts. The wind and solar provide cheap, clean energy whenever conditions are right. Natural gas generators throttle up when the sun goes down, it's cloudy, or not very windy. Underneath that, you have a steady minimum load, and nuclear is a perfect fit for that. It's extremely reliable and steady, it can be quite cheap depending on the costs of red tape in that country. It's actually the cleanest reliable power available, despite the two accidents in history. (Other reliable power sources release radiation *on purpose*, during normal daily operation).
So when everybody else is doing wind and solar, they'll all need nuclear or another source when the forecast calls for a cloudy week. It's a good bet on that score.
Unfortunately for them, they bought a nuclear power company run by liars, who cooked the books. And Fukushima happened. Obviously that scared people, regulators and auditors got busy doing their job, then politicians did their thing with pandering to fear, adding duplicative regulations and such, and all of this was expensive for the power companies.
I wonder if Apple is still looking for companies they can pick up and diversify nicely, even in the US market?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Having "6 transistors" was a selling point back then, apparently, because I remember it well. It was a pocket radio, white and brown, with a big dial for the AM band and small one for the volume. Had an ear phone, which I used to talkbox way before Frampton. He must have seen me. It would be a sad day in Mudville if it went the way of the doodoo.
You can transmit power from LA to San Francisco, and that does help. Keep in mind the idea, for many people at least, is to switch to clean *energy*. Meaning getting rid of gasoline, diesel, heating oil, the tons of coal used in industrial furnaces, etc. You don't need to generate the same electricity as all of today's power plants, you need at least four to eight times as much electricity, if you want to get rid of diesel etc. It's an enormous amount of power.
Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks "about half as bright" to our eyes is actually about 15% as bright, in terms of luminous power. A sunny day is about 120,000lux, a cloudy day about 1,000lux. Meaning when it's cloudy, the sun's power is reduced by over 99%. When the western half of the US is covered in clouds (and much of it was covered just last week), there's no way you're going to have enough solar power to provide our energy needs. We can't reasonably provide even our current *electricity* needs, and currently electricity is a small portion of our *power*.
> It's also likely that storage technologies will improve enough
People sure are trying, because storing even a few hours worth of power, to use afternon power to cook dinner, is very valuable. Yet, to store two days of power using pumped storage we'd have to flood 2/3rds of the United States. Barring a revolution in physics akin to nuclear power or something else as revolutionary as quantum physics, we're bot going to be able to store enough power to run California for a few days. It may happen 150 years from now, but no time soon.
awesome article
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* Wave
* Geothermal
* Solar on the moon
Two of those are great in certain parts of California and a few other places in the world. As to solar on the moon - Gru, is that you? California should use geothermal because they have the right geology for it in certain places, and they do use it. It's an excellent way to provide 0.02% of our energy needs.
If you want to switch to clean *energy*, replacing all of the gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc, with electricity generated in various ways, we need about 4-8 times as much electricity as we have now - and we have a lot. That's a major point that's important to understand, and some people intentionally conflate energy vs electricity in order to mislead their readers.
The traditionally "green" sources of energy can make a large contribution - possibly as much as 20%. For the *bulk* of our energy needs (replacing gas, diesel, etc), there are basically two options - natural gas is cleaner than coal and gasoline, and some leading environmentalists are now (finally) promoting the fact that nuclear is by far the cleanest base load option. There have been two significant accidents in history which combined released less radiation than a month of burning coal. The elder statesmen of the environmental movement are starting to admit that they manufactured a political problem around nuclear waste by deliberately conflating long-halflife waste (which releaes energy extremely slowly, thereby releasing negligible amounts for a long time) with short-halflife waste like iodine-131, which decays quickly, releasing dangerous levels of radiation for severall weeks. They also intentionally conflated alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Most of the strong radiation is alpha particles, which are blocked by tissue paper, an inch of air, or skin. Alpha emitters, which much nuclear waste is, are perfectly safe as long as you don't eat them (safer than bleach). Many alpha emitters also emit some beta. It takes several meters of air (or a thousand of an inch of steel) to stop beta radiation. I carry a radioactive beta emitter on my belt, not too far from my crotch, as do most police officers. My pants shield me from most of the radiation. Again, like with household cleaning products, it's not a good idea to eat it.
Toshiba has always invested a lot in research, and their products were really good. Too bad that happens to them.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
When the western half of the US is covered in clouds (and much of it was covered just last week), there's no way you're going to have enough solar power
A mix of generation will likely always be needed; even France doesn't run on 100% nuclear and a certain amount of overbuilding will be needed but the penetration of renewables at this time is low enough that's not a concern - yet.
But for a place like Denmark, wind power alone can sometimes supply more electricity than the country's *entire* demand and most be exported or curtailed.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
> But for a place like Denmark, wind power alone can sometimes supply more electricity than the country's *entire* demand
Denmark imports trash to burn in order to heat houses. At it's peak, on a day with perfect winds, their renewables can provide the ELECTRICITY for a few hours, while they are burning coal and trash for heat, diesel and gasoline for transportation. Normally, wind provides about 5% of their energy, due to a nasty problem called the cube law (more on that later).
Even if you ignore the trash burning heating plants and focus only on electricy, coal power provides 48.0% of Denmark's *electricity*.
Wind is really awesome in some ways, seriously. It's great when the wind is great, but the cube law is a motherfucker. The power of wind is proportional the velocity CUBED. Suppose a windmill is designed to work in winds up to 40 MPH wind. 40^3 is 64,000, so the structure is absorbing 64,000 units of power without damage. When the wind is 10 MPH, the power is 1,000; 99% less. In a structure designed for 64,000 power, 1% of the energy will be lost in big beefy bearings, etc. At 10 MPH, 1% is most of the power available - a 10 MPH wind barely overcomes friction and there's no substantial power generated. The cube law is a bitch, but it's fundamental physics.
That's not to say wind power shouldn't be used! It's great when the wind is right and you can throttle down the natural gas power plants.
Why not use molten salt for power storage? I remember that was being seriously looked into for storing wind and wave energy, you heat it with some of your excess when you are cranking out the power and then use the salt to power a generator at night or during cloudy conditions.
Its cheap, no risk of it going ka boom, you can store it underground which should keep the NIMBYs happy and its not like you are gonna "wear out" the salt no matter how you use it. There are even solar power towers already up and running using molten salt so we know that it works, sounds like a winner to me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hm does that mean that the "no matter what guarantee" by Toshiba won't cover this
> Why not use molten salt for power storage?
It IS used. Solana, a major solar plant, uses molten salt. It provides up to six hours of storage (though some energy is lost during that time) and helps the plant to generate about 38 percent of its rated capacity each year. As I said, the storage we have today (and will likely have in the next 50 years) is great for using afternoon power to cook dinner in the evening, a few hours later. That's really important. It could double the amount of solar we can use, up to 2% pf our energy from the current 1%.
Note that molten salt is used by concentrating solar power plants, NOT systems using solar-electric panels. Molten salt is for when you can create very high temperatures very efficiently. Wave power doesn't fit that description either, of course.
As mentioned, molten salt allows a plant to provide *some* of an area's *electricity* needs for a few hours. We need to provide *all* of California's *energy* needs for several days. Sometimes it's cloudy for a week. A cloudy day is about 1,000 lux, a sunny day 115,000 lux. In other words, on cloudy days your concentrated solar power plant isn't producing any significant power. Yet people will continue to drive when it's cloudy for a week, so if you want to replace diesel trucks with electric, solar isn't going to do the job - a few hours of molten salt doesn't nearly get you there.
Denmark gets 40% of the electricy from wind. Note that a lot of the Danish coal powered electricy gets exported to Sweden who claims to run 100% on renewable and nuclear, but have to import coal-power during peak hours and during entire seasons if the hydro dams are not fully "charged" with water.
Or someone on the director's board was conned into buying a turd.
Nuclear power plant designs are a course into maximizing complexity with more active security systems.
Water cooled reactors with solid fuel bars are a bad design, even its inventor thought it was a bad idea in the long term.
The fuels rods don't burn all fissile material, they get less dense as gaz byproducts accumulate and leave out a lot "waste" materials that could be turn into energy.
The water cooling has to be kept at all times, failure in cooling generates a meltdown, exposure of the fuel rods to water will generate hidrogen.
This design is a testament to the power that certification processes have to impede new designs, of course there hasn't been serious money and political power into getting new safer designs out of paper.
There is an attempt to get fast breeders, but these have proven to be bigger disasters in the making by using reactive metals, like sodium, as coolant.
The nuclear industry has painted itself into a corner.
This is incorrect.
1) You don't need baseload with intermittent renewables, you need peaking or storage. Nuclear makes for terrible peaking. It's literally the worst non-intermittent option available. Natural gas is the best.
2) With peaking and/or storage and/or a HVDC grid, intermittent renewables can make up the lion's share of the grid. The exact level of penetration depends on the details of the options chosen, but can in some cases even approach 100%. With current tech and current prices, penetrations of ~70-80% are reasonable - and very low carbon.
3) Renewables + peaking is already cheap. Renewables + storage is looking to be heading in that direction.
4) The problem with nuclear is the cost, not the waste. Nuclear plants are absurdly expensive per watt, even ignoring that they get their catastrophic liability coverage provided for free by the federal government.
5) Alpha radiation in free space is harmless, but alpha emitters are exceedingly dangerous. Ingested/inhaled alpha emitters are an order of magnitude more destructive to tissue than neutron, beta and gamma emitters. The fact that they can be inhaled or ingested if leaked into the environment (airborne dust, soil contamination, groundwater contamination) is precisely the reason that you have to contain them. Aka like the reason they've had to spend a fortune cleaning up Hanford Site (estimated ~115B remaining). Without proper containment and disposal procedures, every site would be a Hanford Site.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Tell it to Nature that it doesn't work. In the above paper (you can download it on SciHub if you don't have access) they model the creation of an optimal HVDC grid and cross-country solar, wind, and NG peaking plants (as well as one scenario with coal) and end up with reliable, low carbon power at lower costs than current grid rates - with no use of storage and no assumption of improved technologies.
Wind and solar tend to run counter to each other. Wind is strongest at night; solar only generates during the day. Wind is associated with low pressure zones; clear skies with high pressure zones. And while one system is moving off the US east coast, another one (or more) is moving in from the west. A HVDC grid also timeshifts loads - aka, the sun is still shining out west after sundown in the east, and so forth. It also spreads out peaking capabilities across the country. The grid costs about 0.3 cents per kWh to build/maintain but saves about 1.1 cents per kWh in generation hardware costs.
By adding in storage or allowing for tech improvements, the figures only get better. Indeed, the figures they use for solar pricing are already pessimistic. And they make no use of uprating existing hydro for storage (very cheap). Or no pumped hydro storage, which is already cheap in certain areas. No use of battery storage, which although marginal currently due to cost is expected to become vastly cheaper over the next decade. Etc.
New nuclear plants, with their high price tags, have no place. It's nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than renewables per kWh generated, and it sucks for use as peaking (even if you use a plant which can ramp quickly - most can't - you fundamentally (by the nature of peaking) would cut the capacity factor severalfold, which directly corresponds to a severalfold increase in construction / operating / decommissioning costs per kWh generated.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
You're confused; you seem to think that wind turbines are designed to bear and generate from the maximum force winds that they experience. They don't. At high wind speeds they're feathered and/or braked. The nameplate capacity is met at about 25mph for a typical turbine. At very high speeds (for example, over 55mph) they outright shut off and don't generate anything, but between that range they generate at their nameplate capacity. At under the base speed (for example, below 25mph) they produce less - but not according to a cubic curve, but slightly steeper than that, as there's a base-level constant drag, which keeps them from turning at very low windspeeds. It's also important to realize that wind turbines experience wind at altitude, not surface winds; they're higher and steadier.
Average capacity factor for wind in the US is over 30% every year. You really do get a large chunk of the nameplate in terms of actual generation.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
New nuclear plants, with their high price tags, have no place.
That's like breaking someone's legs and then saying it's their fault that they can't walk. If renewables endured what the nuclear industry has for the past several decades too, then they would be much more expensive too.
"Endured" getting their catastrophic liability insurance provided to them for free by the federal government? What private company would insure against cleanups that can run into the hundreds of billions of dollars? Let alone with affordable premiums?
Nuclear has always had far more support on K Street than Wall Street. The cost overruns that have happened to the recent generation of nuclear plants have been overwhelmingly fabrication related, with the next highest portion of overruns being to address since-discovered safety issues.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
overboard. Sell what you can sell. And burn what ever is burning cash that you can't sell.
> You're confused; you seem to think that wind turbines are designed to bear and generate from the maximum force winds that they experience. They don't. At high wind speeds they're feathered and/or braked. ... At very high speeds (for example, over 55mph) they outright shut off and don't generate anything,
I'm well aware that they also don't work at high wind speeds, that's yet another problem with wind turbines that I didn't want get into; my post was already long enough.
Completely off-topic, I notice that you made good use of the semicolon there. People don't use that enough. :)
I've been in the photocopier business for over 35 years. In the last 25, I've mainly been associated with Toshiba, Konica/Minolta, Samsung. In the past 10 years, the Toshiba machines have become CHEAPER. Less metal, more plastic. On a machine with a lot of moving parts, when you take away strength in the frame, things start to shift around. Plastic just doesn't hold together well. Yeah, a lot of the machines have less metal, but, when you pick up a Toshiba, then pick up a Konica/Minolta or Samsung, of similar spec, you KNOW which one is the Toshiba.
I stopped caring about Toshiba when they declared that installing Linux on a laptop invalidated its warranty.
Thanks :)
My point however was that you give the wrong impression. You painted a picture of a steady cubic curve, when in reality it's a cubic curve only at low to moderate speeds, followed by a long plateau at moderate to high speeds, followed by a sudden dropoff to zero. You made it sound like turbines would yield a tiny capacity factor, when in reality they average over 30% of nameplate. I wanted to make sure people had the right impression. :)
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Dunno. In my mind Toshiba used to be "house hold" gear, like waterpump and fans and even robots?
It would be sad to lose such a well-known brand.
however i was a bit perplexed when they entered/bought into the nuclear business.
japan is (was?) very pro-nuclear. since japanese are a very tight-knot people they
have something like a 3-years plan a-kind to what the Udssr had: the central government
would dictate goals and industry would follow.
nuclear was (is) a big ambition for the japanese government. it is unknown if this
is genuine fascination with the technology or if "Mc big brother" is keeping
the interest propped up.
following "wishes" of the central government would always give an inside track.
doing the nuclear "wish"would surely be looked upon favorably by the government if the company
invested should get into hot water in some other areas? a reason to keep being invested then?
anyways, nuclear sucks but like technology development, manufacturing isn't a pet project. .. if they don't want to become a "lost brand"?
if there's no requirement for a certain manufacturing process it isn't just "invented for fun".
in Europe they call it CERN, which doesn't cure cancer or provides unlimited energy but
it is a driver for new manufacturing processes.
in the USA it probably is called NASA. same, it doesn't cure cancer or make unlimited
energy but it drives new technology AND HOW TO MAKE THEM.
For nuclear, massively sized and wickedly strong metal parts are required and
without a use, as in a reactor pressure vessel, this manufacturing process would be
"lost" because it isn't required anywhere else?
so, it think, companies that haven't been on the forefront of the nuclear technology birth but have
"bought in" later should find another use for the manufacturing processes that are required to
produce a nuclear reactor
in the end, nuclear is: (world-)government, geo-politics, military, under the table dealings (-aka- non-proliferation),
information management (-aka- "nuclear is safe propaganda) and a lot of "special" knowledge but is it worth all this?
Simply sell a portion of the nuclear business to raise cash. It is the problem, make it the solution.
Enduring a rarefied research environment -- what little research is canceled after it makes promising advancements, and then the findings go on a shelf in a storage closet to rot while the researches retire and die. It's like making a prototype transistor, but then being told the project is canceled and to throw away your work. It's like landing a man on the moon, and then losing the film.
Enduring a pervasive regulatory structure designed around 1960's technology, essentially preventing all improvements except small refinements of the status quo from coming to market. Imagine if computers were exactingly regulated based on vacuum tube technology, where deviations towards using transistors and integrated circuits was surrounded with so much red tape and corresponding FUD that they were never developed. Do you think today we'd have smartphones that fit in our pocket?
That the government subsidizes the electric bill of these voracious room-sized beasts is the least they can do after preventing the development of their modern replacement.
Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks "about half as bright" to our eyes is actually about 15% as bright, in terms of luminous power. A sunny day is about 120,000lux, a cloudy day about 1,000lux. Meaning when it's cloudy, the sun's power is reduced by over 99%
So whether or not you meant to do so, this does illustrate what a catastrophically bad unit of measure the candela is. A fundamental unit that is weighted by a model of human vision is, well, not terribly fundamental, wouldn't you say? But I am sure you're not meaning to say that solar panels have the exact absorption characteristics as human eyes do. Maybe you would like to rethink your conclusions there slightly.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It's literally the worst non-intermittent option available. Natural gas is the best.
No it isn't. The best is pumped storage hydro. Over 90% efficient. A natural gas fired power plant which is run in a peaking scenario, with constant spooling up and down, won't be able to take advantage of combined cycle operation so it could be like 34% efficient. While if it was run at a constant level, i.e. in baseload mode, using combined cycle the same natural gas power plant would be like 50-60% efficient. So the idea that you can 'save natural gas' by using variable load wind, is uh, disingenuous to say the least.
penetrations of ~70-80% are reasonable
Only in an ideal scenario in a country which has a lot of hydropower capacity, with pumped storage, and a good wind or solar resource.
Nuclear plants are absurdly expensive per watt
No, it's about as expensive as coal, which is the cheapest form of power generation, unless the coal power plant is very close to the coal mines, like in the same state, in which case the coal will be cheaper.
Except that pumped hydro can't be built anywhere affordably - only in specific locations. A NG peaker is a general purpose solution. If we're going to consider "location limited" options, then even better than pumped hydro is simply uprating existing large hydro turbine houses. Very cheap versus how much peaking capacity it gives you.
While I don't care to look up the numbers yet again, the last time I was in such a debate I did; in the real world, in Californa, NG peakers get about 80% the average efficiency of a NG baseload plant. So if the peaker is run less than 80% of the time of a baseload plant, it saves gas. If it's only running 80% as much as a baseload plant it's not a peaker, it's a load follower at the worst; peakers run at very low capacity factors. So your comment pretending that you don't save gas with renewables and NG peaking is - to quote you - "disingenuous to say the least".
Or don't take my word for it; read the Nature study, which covers the CO2 emissions on a renewables + NG grid.
You know, the study was linked right in the post you're replying to. It wouldn't kill you to read it before asserting that a study in the world's most prestigious scientific journal is wrong.
Pure nonsense. Coal plants are in the rough ballpark of $1/W, give or take depending on the design. Nuclear plants in the western world average nearly $10/W nowadays.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
You quoted it, did you not read it? "Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks 'about half as bright' to our eyes ... the sun's power is reduced by over 99%".
The point is that although it appears, to your eye, to maybe half as much energy, or maybe 70% less, it's actually 99% less. So yes, lux, the intensity of light visible to the eye (not ultraviolet or infrared) is the right unit of measure.
> I am sure you're not meaning to say that solar panels have the exact absorption characteristics as human eyes do.
Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close. It wouldn't matter, though, so long as the wavelength wasn't so far different that it was unaffected by clouds.
Oh, I'm sorry that after spending hundreds of billions of federal dollars on nuclear research over the past century that every last project under the sun doesn't get multi-billion-dollar prototype plants built at government expense. That poor mistreated industry.
They are not "structure designed around 1960's technology, essentially preventing all improvements except small refinements of the status quo", they're on generation 3, working on generation 4 reactors. It's purely financial factors that are keeping nuclear from being jumped at by investors. Whether you like it or not, nuclear power is damned expensive. You have a core of amazingly toxic materials, operating at high temperatures and pressures, creating literally every corrosive element known to man in every isotopic form, while heavily bombarding and weakening everything around it with an intense neutron flux, in a form that will stay hot for a good period of time even when you shut down all fission due to daughter products. Nuclear is very difficult to do right, and this equals expense and liability. Lots and lots of expense plus lots and lots of liabiltiy (even though the government lets them cheat on the worst of the latter).
Again, look at actual cost overruns in actual plants. They're not due to some sort of regulatory bullshit, they're due to people trying and failing to build very large, complicated, precision-demanding things correctly and on time.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.
Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close
As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.
This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
While I don't care to look up the numbers yet again, the last time I was in such a debate I did; in the real world, in Californa, NG peakers get about 80% the average efficiency of a NG baseload plant. So if the peaker is run less than 80% of the time of a baseload plant, it saves gas. If it's only running 80% as much as a baseload plant it's not a peaker, it's a load follower at the worst; peakers run at very low capacity factors. So your comment pretending that you don't save gas with renewables and NG peaking is - to quote you - "disingenuous to say the least".
I just told you the numbers for modern generator efficiency. In the particular case of California I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the natural gas power plants are old designs which don't use the combined cycle which would make the efficiency numbers seem better than they would be with modern tech. So basically its a choice between doing low capital expenditures upfront in windmills to have higher electricity costs in the long run (more waste natural gas and more maintenance costs) or upgrading the power plants to combined cycle tech.
You know, the study was linked right in the post you're replying to. It wouldn't kill you to read it before asserting that a study in the world's most prestigious scientific journal is wrong.
It's behind a paywall and I won't use resources from the research lab I work at to read it either. Try to use open access sources. Might as well not exist.
Pure nonsense. Coal plants are in the rough ballpark of $1/W, give or take depending on the design. Nuclear plants in the western world average nearly $10/W nowadays.
I said it before use Whr or don't bother. Use energy metrics not power metrics. I might as well use some other pointless metric like MWt and magically the numbers for nuclear and coal would double...
And I just told you the average difference in the real world. I don't give a rat's arse what the maximum theoretical efficiency of the latest top of the line pricey combined cycle NG baseload plant gets verses the crappiest old NG peaking plant you want to cite; I looked up what the actual running averages they're getting in California, and the peakers were running at about 80% the efficiency of the baseload plants.
Then use SciHub, or just take my word for what it says. I'll sum up: using only solar, wind, NG peaking, and a HVDC grid - current technology, no storage - power is produced with guaranteed reliability at rates similar to today's but with vastly lower carbon.
Please tell me that you're not so stupid as to be unable to divide $/Wh by capacity factor.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Average capacity factor for wind in the US is over 30% every year [eia.gov]
A substantial amount of progress in improving wind turbine capacity factors has been made in recent years.
Wikipedia charts on wind turbines shows 2.5GW nameplate in 2000 with 5.6 GWhs generated or a capacity factor of 25.6%
In 2010, there was a total of 40GW generating 94,650 GWh, a capacity factor of 27%, so not much average improvement
But if you remove all those turbines & their generation from succeeding years, what do you get?
For 2013, that would be 20 GW generating 71,500 GWh or 41% capacity factor
For 2014, that would be 26 GW generating 87000 GWh or 38% capacity factor
These numbers are approximate and would be affected by when during the year a wind farm comes online and when its power generation starts getting counted but I think a solid case can be made for upgrading or replacing any tower that's 10 or more years old.
If the 3 infamous farms in California are still using any of those old turbines from the 1980s, that's a inefficient, shameful display of outdated tech
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Wikipedia charts on wind turbines shows 2.5GW nameplate in 2000 with 5.6 GWhs generated or a capacity factor of 25.6%
That should be 5,600 GWh, not 5.6. See charts under National Trends at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body