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GE Cuts 12,000 Jobs In Response To Falling Demand For Fossil Fuel Energy (qz.com)
In response to the drop in demand for fossil fuel energy, General Electric -- the world's largest maker of gas turbines -- announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs. Quartz reports: Those cuts will mostly come from GE's power division, which makes energy-generation technologies. The reduction will account for 18% of the division's workforce and affect both professional and production employees, the company said in a statement. The majority of job losses will occur outside the U.S., Bloomberg reports. In a statement, Russell Stokes, the division's president and CEO, said disruptions to the power market were "driving significantly lower volumes in products and services." Demand for GE's power-generation equipment has stalled in part because of renewable energy growth, says Robert McCarthy, an analyst at Stifel Financial.
The move is part of a larger restructuring effort under GE's new chief executive John Flannery, who has faced immense pressure to regain the company's footing since taking the helm in June of this year. GE's stock price plunged 44% this year, the worst performer on the Dow, according to Bloomberg. The company aims to cut $3.5 billion of expenses across its divisions by the end of 2018, including a $1 billion cut from the power division.
The move is part of a larger restructuring effort under GE's new chief executive John Flannery, who has faced immense pressure to regain the company's footing since taking the helm in June of this year. GE's stock price plunged 44% this year, the worst performer on the Dow, according to Bloomberg. The company aims to cut $3.5 billion of expenses across its divisions by the end of 2018, including a $1 billion cut from the power division.
It's a Good Thing(TM) they don't pay any taxes at all, otherwise they'd be in real trouble from their own mismanagement.
A large part of General Electric's power division consists of the former power division of Alstom that was bought by GE in 2015 for € 12.4 billion. Alstom may have made a much better deal than it seemed at the time.
That would be a nice indication of progress of our society.
However, this might the "public" explanation which looks good in media.
I can think of two other reasons, which are less flattering for GE; 1) GE fails to be competitive for this type of equipment (for various reasons), or 2) the market for gas turbines shrinks, maybe due to the very high operational costs of gas turbines (they are very expensive to run, for at least electric power generation)
That's just said and not fair to the employees at all. Fossil fuel was already a risky area to jump in. They should've seen it coming.
Only $1B of the $3.5B in cuts is in the power division, so to claim it is all due to response to falling fossil demand is incorrect or disingenuous. But accuracy isn't really something slashdot has cared about it some time.
I can think of two other reasons, which are less flattering for GE; 1) GE fails to be competitive for this type of equipment (for various reasons), or 2) the market for gas turbines shrinks, maybe due to the very high operational costs of gas turbines (they are very expensive to run, for at least electric power generation)
2) is exactly what they said. The market for gas turbines is shrinking due to altpower's competitive advantages (they are less expensive to run, for at least electric power generation.) That's not an "other reason", that's the same reason. You're not contradicting them. You are not cleverer than GE.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Too bad, huh? Clinton was such a globalist, right?
Maybe they can all find work in companies working in the renewable energy sector? Like this one: https://www.gerenewableenergy....
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
They really have less orders for turbines just like Siemens. The market is shrinking because less new coal and gas power plants are build than anticipated.
The market is shrinking. Like GE, Siemens, a major competitor of GE, is also reducing their engagement. In addition Siemens is also reducing steam turbine capacities, as turbines for coal and nuclear plants are in less demand.
Maybe Asia, but solar is offline across NA, SA, Europe, Africa and Australia for most of the night, as they don't span enough of the solar footprint - especially in winter months.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
1) growth rate of demand is down. Historically, the US could rely on an average 2% growth of peak load a year. That pattern halted in 2007, thanks to the economic downturn plus energy efficiency plus load response programs. In 2017 we have only matched 2008 peak load in the US.
2) extended life of existing plants. In a regulated industry, you overhaul a couple of times and replace with new tech. With deregulation, everyone is squeezing life and extra MW out of everything
3) increased renewable. Wind and solar only make up 15% of total US generation, but that's 15% of new build that wasn't a GE or Siemens steam turbine.
4) increased efficiency. An old 7FA topped out at about 50 MW, but new designs can run up to 120 MW per turbine at lower costs.
5) government subsidies for nukes and coal. The industry was banking on the CPP killing off coal, and now states are proposing subsidies for their "jobs programs" power plants. This adds uncertainty to the future and probably reduced orders.
6) terrible investment in Alstom. They paid peak prices thinking they were going to get steam tech, when all they got was a bloated workforce protected by European labor laws
Green power can't be the cause. Trump is bringing back the coal jobs!
This is the Corporate equivalent of Darwin in Action.
There have been so many indicators of a shift away from fossil fuels that no company operating in that market sector - and certainly not a company as large or well established as GE, can have any excuse for not being aware of this fact.
The failure of GE to anticipate this market shift and adjust their corporate strategy to accommodate it would be the responsibility of John Flannery's predecessor, Jeff Immelt and the board of Directors that he led. Whilst unforgivable, it is certainly not the first time that we've witnessed such corporate hubris. Look at what happened to Kodak as a result of the "digital revolution" for example.
The most egregious aspect of this story is the one that doesn't seem to be explored properly: the fact that 12,000 people have lost their jobs because of utterly incompetent management. And what happens to those incompetent managers? In the case of Immelt, at 61 he stepped down from the CEO role and planned to continue as Chairman to the end of this year, but got pushed out of that by Flannery on October 2nd. Not a moment too soon, looking at this mess. So Immelt will cruise into retirement with a massive 401k, not to mention all the stock options he's had over the years. A shame that 12,000 families are now going to pay the price for his incompetence.
I'm sure that they are different at a detail level, but at a *scale* level there have to be parallels between the manufacture of turbine blades used in fossil fuel power generation and the technologies used for wind or hydro power generation. Why didn't GE begin a ramp-up into those emerging technologies when they had the time and revenue to carry it? This article headline should have read, "Over the last 18 months, GE have switched 12,000 Jobs from Fossil Fuel to Renewable Energy Technologies".
The fact that it doesn't should herald a managerial bloodbath, and the installation of a competent board of directors. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth...
LED lighting is killing GE. It's a double whammy. Not only did they lose their entire incandescent lighting business, but the new LED bulbs need to be replaced less often, draw less power, and result in lowered demand for electricity generation. Historically GE has benefitted from inefficient use of electricity, and hasn't been able to adapt to the current reality.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, that is cheaper to extract, burns cleaner than coal, and is plentiful, and in general requires less workers to extract than coal or oil.
I don't read AC
Solar is predictable at a grid level days in advance, at least +/- 10%. Wind isn’t, even 4 hours in advance. The only issue I can think of that might hurt GE is their turbine ramp times, because the need today is for GW or natural gas that can go from 0-100% in minutes, the same for 100-0%, all while being economical to run.
I can see how the US will get to 50% renewable energy, but going beyond that will take more than lithium batteries and pumped hydro.
When natural gas prices dropped a few years ago there was a big gas generator construction boom. The power plants are now operational and gas is being consumed as fast as it's being produced, so the demand for new turbines has dropped. Has nothing to do with "greenification".
Hello, Mr. Flannery!
Ezekiel 23:20
...not the only way to make electricity from natural gas. Nor are they the most efficient in terms of power generated from a given volume of gas
They're currently at ~62%. That's pretty damn high in my book. What is more efficient, in your opinion?
Ezekiel 23:20
GE is probably making some room in the budget for even bigger bonuses for execs.
Not paying any taxes was not leaving enough in the kitty.
No worries, however, all of those laid off can find jobs in solar, if they want to see if the PRC is willing to pick them up.
Agreed - the headline could have just as easily read: "Over the last 5 years, GE has failed to adapt to changing market conditions".
Ultimately, GE's failed to perform. They're saying something that sounds plausible, and is 'du jour', but the truth of it goes back several years when they should have started to develop alternative products. It's not like we've had any drop in energy demand, so "energy' is still a growth market.
China is building 700 new coal plants in China and around the world over the next 5 years. The technology is what GE gave them. However, in America, we stopped im-ex bank supporting building coal plants. Otoh, China doubled down on it and there is adding another 43% more coal plants than exists today.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I live near GE Territory, GE usually brings ruin to communities. Because their business isn't very predictable. So they will come in lauded as the savior of the town, bringing thousand high paying engineering jobs to the community. So the community builds new infrastructure and nice home that only these jobs can afford. Then a decade later they will close that unit, and the town is in ruin, because it still hadn't paid off it loans for the infrastructure build up, these homes are left and sold for under their value, bringing in investor to purchase the homes while they rot, abandoned.
This is GE Thing, not the Energy Market.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You focus on that little nit when even the verb tense is wrong? I think you have a problem.
I doubt GE is thinking like that. GE tends to live in these bubbles, where stresses and problems in the market don't show up to them until the last minute, then they need to do dramatic changes. Being GE wants to be #1 or #2 in the market if not they will sell and close off the unit, the people working in stressed units will manipulate as much data to show how they are #1 or #2 until it is obvious there is a problem, and fixes earlier on do not happen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
*being built
Once the plants are built, there's very little need for more equipment to be produced.
Yes. As evidenced by this dumb video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The main issue with solar and wind, the main replacements for fossil fuels, is that their output is affected by weather conditions
In the area I live in, we use a lot of wind power. Enough power that depending on demand, turbines will switch on and off to meet it or reserve their output.
And where they are, the wind is basically constant. This is along the Allegheny Front. Which has a huge influence on weather patterns. It can be a still hot day down here in the valley, but the turbines still turn.
Solar is certainly feasible, but at the moment it is more on the individual scale, which I really like. Off-gridding, and yeah, storage batteries.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Maybe Asia, but solar is offline across NA, SA, Europe, Africa and Australia for most of the night, as they don't span enough of the solar footprint - especially in winter months.
And yet they have solar installations even in Alaska, where the nights get pretty long. Obviously it isn't much use in the dark months, but they save a lot of money, and conserve their diesel fuel for the times its desperately needed.
The technical issues of utilizing solar are largely overrated, and shrinking constantly.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Solar is predictable at a grid level days in advance, at least +/- 10%. Wind isn’t, even 4 hours in advance.
Depends on where you are. Along the Allegheny front here in PA, the wind is FAIAP, constant..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You need something like a capacitor. Maybe Recouperative Compressed Air Energy Storage.
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they're cutting production of Gas turbines while Natural Gas production is exploding. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Renewables are nice and all but they're still not dominating our power grid. My guess is this is more to do with a weak global economy for the working class leading to less demand for power. The switch to LED bulbs isn't helping either, or energy efficient devices in general. Again, less demand for new power. This are either politically sensitive or long term structural things, neither of which GE is going to be keen to talk about. Just keep telling everybody that it's just because of a switch to renewables becuase hey, GE can fix this by switching themselves, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What will it do to GE when I implement my program to transition our $2Bn/year Conservation Reserve Program farm subsidies to a Conservation Reserve and Energy Production Program?
I plan to protect our reserve agricultural land--land on which we pay farmers to not farm--by placing non-permanent (no paving, no poured foundation) solar installations. Piles hammered into the ground or footed in concrete piers (removable with a shovel), metal conduit, panels mounted on the racks. We subsidize the farmers now, and I plan to push them to spend (say) 50% of that subsidy on the development of solar capacity. If their reserve land is full, then we give them only half the subsidy.
This will encourage farmers to hire tenant solar management, having generation capacity placed in sunny areas and preventing the permanent destruction of that agricultural land. The farmer profits from this generation, plus receives half the usual subsidy. The American people get something for the money they pour into this subsidy (granted it's like $13 per taxpayer per year), that being cheap renewable energy. If we need the farm land back, we can have a crew yank the poles out of the ground and store the panels and conduit--in such a crisis of farm land shortage, the government would subsidize the change back, of course.
Think of the fossil fuel market, though. With all this new capacity—a billion dollars's worth of installation per year!—we'll be competing against coal, oil, and gas combined cycle. It's under a dollar per megawatt capacity installed, so 1,000 TW or 1 petawatt of generation capacity. The US is already adding wind and retiring coal and natural gas. Our current consumption is about 4 petawatt-hours per year, less than half a TW of continuous generation.
Do you think it's enough solar?
Really, though, I need to think about that. We may need to slow that down. That's a hell of a fast change-over and cutting the rug out from under that many working Americans that fast will make it difficult for them to find new jobs.
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And how many old ones are they closing? You also always forget to mention that they are all more efficient and cleaner than all the coal plants in the US. Idiots like you are surprised that growing economies have growing demand for resources, but stagnating ones like the US don't need too. All their pollution already happened, their high numbers are just accepted for some reason.
Nope I did the math wrong! At $1/watt installed utility-scale, it's a gigawatt per billion! It'll take 445 years at that rate to replace all our fossil fuel.
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62% of the lower heating value or net calorific value. Counting like that allows modern power plants to reach combined efficiencies over 100% when they do district heating as well.
However, it is still a really good value even if I think it is cheating. Only fuel cells are likely to do significantly better, and they are not really viable yet. Maybe they will never be viable.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
power stations with diesel generators
No. Just no. Diesel generators are fine for backup for a data center, they are useless for grid use. Oil is just too expensive for that kind of thing.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Interesting point. I can't find PA data, but NYISO does look steady for the last two days, varying from a peak of 923MW to a minimum of 430MW in the course of two hours.
I watch California much more closely, and they will regularly vary from 0.5GW to 5GW over the course of the day. I don't know how closely they match one-hour and 24-hour forecasts, but there is a high intra-day and inter-day variability that does make planning a challenge.
Actually found pjm; they have good historical data available which is great. Past week variability is from a peak of around 6GW to a minimum of 0.2GW. It isn't what you can build a grid around without significant storage or non-renewable sources.
We have all day an overcapacity. That is why we sell more electricity to our neighbors than they sell to us. The cause for the high price for consumers is solely based on the fact that wind and solar power get an more or less guaranteed minimum price for electricity which was well below electricity cost in the past. Unfortunately, the big coal plants did not go offline. Therefore, we have a massive overcapacity, which ruins the price, which should make it actually cheaper for the end user, but that end user has to support the guaranteed minimum price. Therefore, the price should be stable. However, for some strange reasons only the little people and companies which do not use a lot of electricity have to come up with the compensation while high energy consumers can enjoy the lowest electricity prices in history. Therefore, average Joe has to pay more.
Stop spreading FUD.
We should have compressed air energy storage facilities, but people keep trying to use existing caverns as storage tanks and finding out they're porous sandstone. Nobody wants to just build a giant tank.
Thing is we're paying to buy nothing. We're taking taxpayer money to give the farmers to hold land and do nothing with it. If we subsidize the farmers making profit off solar capacity, then the farmers get more money--and they get it in exchange for electricity, lowering the other costs the people pay. It's a bit more optimal.
We can always sell overgeneration to Canada, or use it to pull carbon out of the air and make e-diesel (Volkswagen's process) or methane.
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Look, your old fossil fuel energy is .. just plain overpriced and inefficient.
It's hard to transport without explosions.
It requires capital investments that only last a few years and then get thrown away.
Meanwhile, renewables like solar wind and biofuels tend to last 20-100 years in operation, can be easily moved, don't explode, kill far fewer animals and birds than all fossil fuels do, and don't endanger expensive urban areas with giant explosions that kill thousands and destroy billions of dollars of investments.
It's a lot simpler to plant pine and willow spinnies and reuse the same tree trunk to grow 100 percent useable biofuels every two years for 20 years than it is to dig into inaccessible and remote mountain areas for dinosaur and tree remains from the last global warming event.
Adapt. Renewables are cheaper and they work better. They power most of the Internet you use.
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There are also much more efficient refrigerators, TV sets, housing insulation and windows, moves towards more natural gas heating and cooking as well as increase in renewable electricity generation. These changes combined have likely saved more energy than that saved by newer lighting equipment.
I'm not sure, but I don't thing GE is much involved in making the generators on top of electricity generating windmills.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Most modern systems get 90% or better. Modern furnaces are 97% efficient
Apples to oranges. It makes no sense to compare a furnace to a system for converting chemical energy into electricity. What other such system makes significantly better use of the input energy?
If fossil fuels are going to survive in even a limited fashion they're going to have to catch up.
This is not even about fossil fuels. A modern gas turbine even competes with fuel cells in efficiency, but solidly beats them on price. Which is why efficient gas turbines might easily survive if we switch to massive generation of synthetic hydrogen in the future - they achieve the same goal but more cheaply.
Ezekiel 23:20
As far as I know, fuel cells are comparable...IF you start with hydrogen. But given the losses in steam conversion, fuel cells seem to be worse off at least for this application since a CCGT can use the energy directly.
Ezekiel 23:20
I plan to protect our reserve agricultural land--land on which we pay farmers to not farm--by placing non-permanent (no paving, no poured foundation) solar installations.
Have you seen what happens to farmland that gets no sun? I have, it turns to sand.
I remember growing up on the farm and Dad went to build a new machine shed. I knew nothing of how one was built as the sheds we had up until then were built before I was born. I remember that in the existing sheds there was a fine sand that made the floor, I thought that was put there so there was a clear surface for the machines. I saw the shed go up but no trucks to bring in the sand. I was confused. It didn't take long for the grass inside to die and whither away, and the black fertile soil turn to sand. I learned then where the sand came from.
That CRP land is still maintained, just no crop is taken from it. For land to "rest" means it's got a coverage of some kind of plant life but the nutrients are not removed in the form of crop and chaff.
That's another thing that comes to mind, this nonsense of "agricultural waste" for cellulosic ethanol. What do people think farmers do with the corn stalks now? Do they think it gets hauled away on big trucks to landfills? No, it does not. It's used as cattle bedding, it's spread on the ground in cattle sheds to give them a soft, warm, dry, place to stay. After they've shit on it enough it's hauled out to the fields as fertilizer and erosion control.
If you cover fertile land with solar panels the plants that hold the soil in place will die. Without those plants to block the wind, and the roots to hold the soil down, it blows away in the wind and washes away in the rain. After you take those solar panels away you'll have nothing but a rutted sandlot.
This is why central planning of an economy will never work, we'll have government know-it-alls telling farmers that have lived on the same land for 100 years on how to best manage their crop. Do you want to see another 1930s style dust bowl and economic collapse? Go let the government decide how to run things.
If the government was in charge of the Sahara Desert we'd have a shortage of sand in less than a decade.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Do you think it's enough solar?
Really, though, I need to think about that. We may need to slow that down. That's a hell of a fast change-over and cutting the rug out from under that many working Americans that fast will make it difficult for them to find new jobs.
I do hope your plan includes a shit load of storage, because that's what's missing from making renewables a truly robust replacement to conventional power sources (I'd also like to see more nuclear).
Thatâ(TM)s right. Forward thinking companies did that first. Dinosaurs died out for a reason. So do dinosaur companies.
~62% is for a combined cycle plant, not a standalone turbine.
The best you can get out of a standalone turbine is about 32%, increasing to about 35% if you add a recuperator (the advantage of a recuperator is that efficiency at part-throttle is vastly improved, making them more applicable for ships than power generation)
CCGT drives steam turbines from the heat of the exhaust stream. You could add Stirling engines to recover energy from what's left after that but cost:benefit falls away rapidly.
The only way to produce mass quantities of "synthetic" hydrogen is with a nuclear source.
At that point you may as well just go ahead and generate electricity directly, tacking on some carbon atoms to the hydrogen to make synthetic liquid fuels for applications where you need mobility and energy density beyond that which can be provided by batteries (IE: aircraft)
Yes, you could setup hydrogen pipelines or repurpose existing natural gas distribution lines, but raw hydrogen is a bitch to handle due to the embrittlement issues under pressure and its tendency to permeate straight through the container walls means that long-distance losses would be comparable to electrical transportation losses and that's without even taking the conversion losses into account at the far end or its inherent dangers over natural gas when used in most domestic/commercial applications thanks to the nasty properties mentioned above.
"Siemens is also reducing steam turbine capacities"
This is a mistake.
The long-term demand is going to be for high capacity steam or other gas turbines driven by molten salt nuclear reactors and in the meantime steam demand is likely to increase due to an increase in the conventional nuclear fleet.
Reasoning: Renewables (Wind and solar PV) are a nice scam, but at best and assuming all planning objections are overrriddden so you build everywhere you can, they can collectively only just match the electrical output of the existing non-nuclear electrical generation fleet.
Worse, the places you can site them aren't the places where the demand is, so you need to factor in transmission losses (HVDC/HVAC transmission lines top out at about 1MV thanks to corona losses and arcing) and line density requirements (you can't just string heavier lines without decreasing the tower distance and each tower affects the electrical isolation, meaning that increasing capacity of these kinds of lines usually means more parallel transmission lines)
Now factor in that once you come under intense pressure to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions (what we're currently seeing is just tinkering around the edges), you're going to see an increase of electrical demand by a factor of 6-8 - at that point the ONLY viable way forward is nuclear energy and that should be molten salt systems by preference due to the ready availability of Thorium, the fact that you don't need to spend prodigious amounts of energy to enrich it (tossing out 90% of the raw uranium in the process) and you can achieve a utilisation exceeding 95% of the input materials with relatively continuous chemical reprocessing - and that doesn't even start to address the safety issues that water moderated systems have with putting extremely hot, high pressure, acidic water in direct contact with the nuclear sources and inevitable contamination that results, with risk of leaking into the biosphere that comes with it or the difficulties inherent in packing uranium ceramics into a fuel rod and leaving it to break down for 20-30 years, then try to process the resulting mess. Conventional nuclear power is 300,000 times safer than coal, but molten salt provides an opportunity to make it a few (ten) thousand times safer whilst lowering costs dramatically. Most of the costs of conventional nuclear come from the safety systems that are inherent with having a 800-1600MW radioactive steam bomb at their core. If you can separate the steam and the radioactivity you eliminate most of the costs - and as almost all the civil nuclear accidents have revolved around water in some way or another it makes sense to eliminate it. (Chernobyl went prompt-critical and it was the resulting steam explosion which blew the roof off. Everything that followed was a result of that explosion. Snake river was also a prompt-critical incident)
Open cycle gas turbines can cover the peaks and dips but they're not efficient compared to combined cycle plants.
Conventional nuclear plants can peak-follow if you have enough of them so that you don't dip into neutron poisoning territory or can ride it out.
Molten salt nuclear plants can peak-follow trivially, because neutron poisons (primarily xenon gas) pop out of the fuel salts and can be sequestered until they break down (at that point you can reinject the products for further breakdown or store until saleable.) - and because they're both extremely hot and thermally self-limiting, you have sufficient reserve to safely peak load quickly without worrying about dips.
Compressed air falls to Boyle's law - in both directions.
What I mean by that is that when you compress gas it gets hot - and at the pressures involved for storage that can be enough to damage components/piping, so you have to toss heat overboard. You'll want to do this anyway to reduce the pressures.
When you decompress it, it gets cold, and cold gas has lower volume, so you lose out substantially on the entire pressurisation cycle (this is why compressed gas cars are a scam)
Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
Diesel generators work quite well on natural gas(*) and are more efficient than open cycle turbines, plus handle variable loading better. That's why many utilities keep their ancient creaky standby diesels maintained even though they're only run a few times per year.
(*) Dedicated gas engines are more optimised for this use but diesels can be adapted with only a slight loss of efficiency. It's cheaper to adapt than install new engines for the amount of work these engines are now doing.
Ehm no. Renewables are quite reliable. That might be in contradiction to your world view, but fortunately reality is different. However, molten salt nuclear reactors are decades away from any real application and they still have this nasty recycling problem.
Siemens and GE are for profit corporations. If they see a demand in an area they will invest and expand business there. However, business for these large turbines is going down. This includes steam and gas turbines. Therefore, they reduce capacity. Maybe they keep some, for instance for solar therm plants.
That CRP land is still maintained, just no crop is taken from it. For land to "rest" means it's got a coverage of some kind of plant life but the nutrients are not removed in the form of crop and chaff.
Yeah and I'm also a little ahead of my knowledge on this one. In school, we had government and political science classes in which they told us the USDA pays farmers to not grow crops so as to stabilize prices, otherwise we get crop oversupply; I've been researching this lately, and it's not a thing. When I got down to the USDA's actual literature, I got different explanations of the CRP than what was written on other resources: the CRP leaves those lands wild to act as environmental barriers, catching run-off and cleaning contaminants before they hit rivers and aquifers.
I want to target reserve agriculture land, not land used for environmental management. Reserve agriculture land is important, because...
This is why central planning of an economy will never work, we'll have government know-it-alls telling farmers that have lived on the same land for 100 years on how to best manage their crop.
If you cover fertile land with solar panels the plants that hold the soil in place will die.
Actually, a lot of cover crop grows in low-light conditions just fine. Sunlight reflects, and we don't create a pitch-black wasteland below our solar arrays. Panels have tilt for optimal performance, and so have space between them so no panel is in another's shadow. As a result, solar farms are full of wide open spaces and light infiltrates under them pretty readily.
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Advanced Recouperating Compressed Air Energy Storage is current-tech, but everyone keeps trying to build them in caverns instead of using storage tanks. The caverns keep turning out to be sandstone, and porous, so they leak or fail. Even a giant, underground tank would carry a fraction of the cost of battery storage.
We have a few regular CAES stations running around the world, and they're fantastically cost-efficient. Recouperating CAES stations add a thermal store (non-pressurized) to raise efficiency as high as 90%. We also have a few CAES stations that use natural gas to reheat the air in expansion, essentially extracting more energy from the burning gas and recovering much of the energy in the stored air. I'm waiting for someone to bite the bullet and build a normal CAES--with a tank, not an underground cave--adding a thermal store for recouperating CAES.
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Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
I said the same thing about electric cars.
There's a thousand-mWh adiabatic CAES plant in Germany, with around 300MW output capacity, but it's lagging: the plant was supposed to come online in 2016. It hasn't been canceled, and they still claim they're going to bring it up with about 70% efficiency (practical peak efficiency should be around 90%, with theoretical at 100%, but this plant won't do that).
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The key is in the name. Adibiatic means it's pulling/pushing heat from somewhere (presumably a river?)
Renewables are reliable collectively. The problem is production volumes.
Renewables can just about match existing carbon-sourced electricity production.
Electricity only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions.
Replacing those carbon using processes with electrical or other sources will result in a 6-8 fold increase in generation requirements.
How do you propose filling that gap?
As for the recycling problem: A conventional 800MWe nuclear plant over its 60-year lifespan produces a a lot of high level waste - enough to fill a single olympic-size swimming pool in fact (compare with the lakes of coal fly ash simmering across the USA - the two largest environmental disasters so far this century have been ash pond dam failures)
A molten salt reactor with inline reprocessing reduces that by 98% on the output side.
-But because it can eat highlevel conventional nuclear waste, it also reduces the conventional waste pile.
-And because it can eat U238, it can also reduces the _input_ waste pile of depleted uranium (enriching natural uranium to 3% U235 results in ~87% of the original uranium to be discarded during the enrichment process)
-And because they eat Thorium and convert it to U233 along the way, they have essentially limitless fuel - there are hundreds of thousands of tons of Thorium sitting in rare earth metal refining waste piles and the USA DOE buried ~30,000 tons in the Utah desert in the 1990s.
The recycling problem is largely self inflicted because of the insistence on using Uranium instead of Thorium and a focus on extracting plutonium for weapons. Molten salt reactors produce so many plutonium isotopes that attempting to make weapons from the output is difficult-to-impossible and whilst you can get U233 from the process, doing so will reduce output so much that any reactor operator doing so will be noticed.
Couple that with blind insistence that all radiation exposure is bad and you have a kneejerk fear response which prevents proper R&D. Look into the radiation exposure of aircrew sometime. They get 10-100 times the allowable dose for nuclear workers and the early death/cancer rate is no higher than the general population - which indicates that the perceived wisdom about radiation exposure is wrong. (Panic over radiation killed 1500+ people around Fukushima. Radiation didn't kill anyone and the worst injuries inflicted were some mild skin burns around the ankles of a few staff trying to stop the water leaks on the reactor vessel.)
Yeah. The standard CAES plants vent the heat; adiabatic attempt to store the heat.
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