Slashdot Mirror
Wind and Solar Can Power Most of the United States, Says Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian reports of a recent paper, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, that helps explain how wind and solar energy can power most of the United States: "The authors analyzed 36 years of hourly weather data (1980-2015) in the U.S. They calculated the available wind and solar power over this time period and also included the electrical demand in the U.S. and its variation throughout the year. With this information, the researchers considered two scenarios. In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the U.S. electrical needs. In the second scenario, the installations would be over-designed; capable of providing 150% of the total U.S. electrical need. But the authors recognize that just because a solar panel or a wind turbine can provide all our energy, it doesn't mean that will happen in reality. It goes back to the prior discussion that sometimes the wind just doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun isn't shining. With these two scenarios, the authors then considered different mixes of power, from all solar to all wind. They also included the effect of aggregation area, that is, what sized regions are used to generate power. Is your power coming from wind and solar in your neighborhood, your city, your state or your region?
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
The authors found that with 100% power capacity and no mechanism to store energy, a wind-heavy portfolio is best (about 75% wind, 25% solar) and using large aggregate regions is optimal. It is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electrical needs. If the system were designed with excess capacity (the 150% case), the U.S. could meet about 90% of its needs with wind and solar power. The authors modified their study to allow up to 12 hours of US energy storage. They then found that the 100% capacity system fared even better (about 90% of the country's energy) and the optimal balance was now more solar (approximately 70% solar and 30% wind). For the over-capacity system, the authors found that virtually all the country's power needs could be met with wind, solar, and storage."
If someone else pays for it...
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy. Nicole Foss on renewables @AutomaticEarth http://bit.ly/2rzS5Pq
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Na na na... I can't hear you, na na na, Dead birds, na na na...
But seriously, the manufacture of solar collectors is not exactly environmentally friendly...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
C. M. bruns will not like this
Here is a counter-argument to that kind of stuff:
Matt Ridley quoted at Coyote Blog here:
follow the link, it only gets better:
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago. The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there. But people are still stuck on *old technology* and Fukashima and so forth when that's *NOT* the technology we would use today. The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, although a bit dated, is a good reference on how much energy we actually consume, and what can possibly be produced with renewables and others. The conclusion agrees with TFA: North America probably can live on solar, wind and enough storage. Not that easily, but it seems possible.
Yeah we can get to 80% renewable with 150-200% times solar and wind capacity, HVDC and 12 hours of storage. It will be expensive and difficult. In California if you count all of our pumped hydro storage and if you include every battery in every phone and car we have about 23 minutes of storage. 12 hours of storage will be hard to achieve.
Also due to continental weather patterns we would need weeks of storage to get to 100% renewable. 12 hours is not feasible and 14 times that will be near impossible.
Aside from the glaring issue regarding Transmission, I was surprised that 12h of storage had as much impact as it did. I had modeled an off-grid location on the leeward side in Hawaii and found I needed 72h of battery for the system to support 90% of the hours in the year with PV only, or 48h with a wind/PV mix.
It would be interesting to see exactly what the production vs consumption map looks like to see what the real impact of transmission losses and capacity would be. As the wind turbines start to exceed 7MW, wind can become a much more stable resource.
Also curious how they established "100%"-- does it build in capacity factors? Peak-day or annualized?
How may solar panels and wind turbines would it require to generate that much electricity? I remember seeing someone talk about this and if I remember correctly, it would cover an area the size of a small to medium U S. State.
On the other hand, if you're talking about concentrating solar thermal plants (like the ones described in this story) there are no hazardous materials involved in their manufacture, which is definitely environmentally friendly.
You are a fucking monster.
And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.
You are discounting how much carbon living screaming birds on fire generate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... and sometimes the sun isn't shining. Something between you and the sun (the earth [at night], a building, clouds, etc.) might be obscuring your view of the sun's rays, but the sun is always shining; ALWAYS.
It's a huge capital investment, huge on-going maintenance, outrageously huge decommissioning costs, and the penalty for falling asleep at the wheel (i.e., hiring a few MBAs to improve 'efficiency') is catastrophe. It's also centralized and makes a nice juicy target for terrorism. Oh, and it costs more than solar or wind--once you fully account for all the actual costs. Westinghouse just went out of business (ask South Carolina).
I'm guessing the future [for most of the US] looks like solar roofs with local battery storage, connected to a grid backed by natural gas peaking/backup plants and various other forms of utility power generation and storage.
if we could stop the 8 some odd wars we're fighting. We blow 600 billion a year more or less protecting our oil interests. But sad to say folks like war. I remember a story where Trump got a momentary bump in the polls from droping a $500k bomb in Afghanistan. And lots of folks want to go war with Korea and/or Iran. We'd need a huge change in how people think and vote to get around that. It's just frustrating, since we could tell OPEC to sod off if we'd just spend the money on our infrastructure.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"Renewable" energy is good, sure. But every energy source has its drawbacks. Solar panels take up lots of real estate, both solar and wind can kill wildlife, and some consider both to be unsightly. It's better, I think, to use all kinds of sources of energy, so that the drawbacks of a single source are not so pervasive. Even oil wasn't such a bad thing when there were only a few cars on the road.
The Second Mate's name was Carter,
By God, he was a farter,
When the wind wouldn't blow and the ship wouldn't go,
We'd get Carter the farter to start her.
(to fill in the gaps between sun and wind)
H2 technology is coming along nicely and could soon be powering vehicles and be used for storage.
Go well
Foxconn buys Belkin, Linksys, and Wemo
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
https://archive.fo/0yIaF
There are other ways to store energy. As heat using a large storage tank of hot working fluid. As potential energy by pumping water up into a large tank during times of excess. Using heat storage (with sterling engine solar) would also help to minimize bird kills since the heat could be directed at the heat reservoirs instead of up to the engine itself. Hell you could use a giant flywheel on a motor that is directly solar powered using the principles of thermal expansion. Batteries arent the only thing and the batteries best suited to mobile arent good for fixed locations where weight is not a concern - Robert Murray Smith's all carbon batteries would be a better fit and 1/100th the cost.
I wondered what they assumed about transmission losses. From the paper, last paragraph of introductory section:
Perfect transmission and energy storage, with no losses or
constraints, was assumed, yielding a best-case scenario for
realizing the benefits of geographic anti-correlation of the
resources and to allow isolation of the limitations associated
purely with geophysical characteristics of wind and solar energy
resources. Specific transmission constraints, higher-resolution
resource data, energy storage inefficiencies, optimization of the
choice of generation locations to minimize their mutual correlation
as opposed to maximization of local energy production, and
operational limits and market dynamics, among other practical
considerations, will play important roles in determining the details
of system- and site-specific design and operation of an actual
electricity system of this magnitude.
Looking up transmission losses in Wikipedia . A few numbers: 160km of 765kV transmission line has losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. Transmission losses in the USA were estimated at 6.5% in 2007.
As this plan will require more transmission, losses would be higher, and you'd need to spend quite a lot to upgrade transmission lines. I think this study is a useful starting point, but should be read as "getting beyond 80% renewable is really hard" rather than "getting to 80% renewable is easy".
Here is an interesting bit from the "discussion" section:
One proposed, and modeled,
U.S.-wide transmission system consists of an estimated
34 000 km (21 000 miles; 7 lengths of the US from Los Angeles,
CA to Portland, Maine) of line with a capacity of up to 12 GW.
An installed cost of $1 MM GW^-1 km^-1 implies a capital
expenditure on the order of $410 billion, as compared to >$1
trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in
the US (mean demand is ~450 GW) assuming an installed cost
at present of $200 per kW h (pumped hydro; most other
systems (e.g. batteries, flywheels, etc.) have current costs in
excess of $500 per kW h).
So that gives some idea of the costs involved.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Every time something about green energy comes up you get the dumbass American trolls coming on here with their argument for why the United States should be allowed to keep poisoning our children with toxic fumes. Ignorant bastards who are full of their own self righteous to a point where it puts their own kids futures in jeopardy. These fine defenders love exhaling their BS over the planet.
The Guardian reports of a recent paper, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, that helps explain how wind and solar energy can power most of the United States ...
A report developed by top scientists hand-picked by Scott Pruitt, Director of the EPA, has determined that if all the sunshine and wind are used up to generate power, there won't be any left for sunny days and cool breezes and recommends, instead, an increased use of coal to generate power.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I ran the numbers a few years ago with very optimistic assumptions, and the land area required for the solar component is about 1/4 the size of New Mexico.
Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet. That doesn't make it "impossible" but it makes assuming that such a thing could be accomplished a huge leap of faith with nothing to back it up except for hope and wishful thinking. Possibly the Great Wall of China measures up in terms of man-hours and complexity but that took hundreds of years and totally-didn't-use-slave-labor, neither of which are on the table now.
Doing it in a distributed fashion only increases costs (though doing a portion of it in a distributed fashion might be the best odds for success - which is what is already happening now).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sure! Fly without a net! Why not?
1: The infrastructure just isn't there right now.
2: What happens in a midnight lull?
3: What about windstorms?
4: What about the landfill problem with EOL panels? Because right now there's no plan for recycling.
5: What about the landfill problem with EOL turbines? Because right now there's no plan for recycling.
6: What about the disruption of local ecologies from all the wind and solar?
7: Where's all the land for this going to come from? Simply tearing down coal, oil and nuclear sites and throwing up panels and turbines won't get us there. It won't even get us close. SERIOUSLY, they're simply dismissing exactly how much land use we're talking about here.
Honestly, in the end, it'd probably be cheaper to build enough nuclear capacity, plus existing geothermal and large (utility-grade) hydro to cover the country's CURRENT peak demand. Start moving towards modular, liquid fueled reactor units. A building on a concrete pad with reactor bays (basically pits in the floor) that you slot a module into. You hook up the electronics, mechanicals, etc, then cap the pit. Once the unit runs out of fuel, you shut it down, uncap it and disconnect. Send it out for refurbishing and cleanup and drop a fresh unit in to start again.
Then use renewables for future peaking and for various high-energy projects (like desalination and CO2 sequestration) and STRATEGIC storage to smooth out instant demand spikes.
Also, we'd be smart to start pushing better building science into "code minimum" building specifications.
Doing so could help cut CURRENT energy demands by 25-30%.
Honestly, one of the few things I agreed with Obama about was that "energy is going to get more expensive".
In a way, GOOD! Our country's power infrastructure needs a HUGE overhaul. And if that means delivering power from more expensive nuclear reactors? SO BE IT.
This country's spent too long running away from the power equivalent of an internal combustion engine, insisting on using hamster wheels and steam boilers.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, good luck with that. If I got my math right, that's about 5 Terawatt-hours of electricity storage.
A couple of notes from Green energy obsessed Ontario in the middle of a wind farm under construction -- these huge investments in solar and wind capture technology are bets on the stability and predictability of the weather. Any casual observer will note that this is not what we are getting. And even my backyard weather station shows that as the climate warms (a small but very visible effect) the winds are slowly dying off -- instead of being windy all the time it is calmer with more violent moments. And we have more clouds... And the many acres of solar panels in the area do have to be cleared of snow in the winter... which no one seems to want to do -- likely because there is a huge power surplus that the costs of all this stuff discourage the locals from using. So Ontario pays several US states to take the power... lucky you. We see enough in the news about the 'rare' failures of wind turbines to suspect that the service life of these things are less than advertised -- sort of like the gen II nukes that everyone rushed to deploy. And finally, the visions of a continent-wide grid taking sunlight power from Arizona and easily moving it to New England have a small flaw... the dynamic properties of a huge interconnected grid with varying levels of automation and control are still unknown when perturbed by failures or a big coronal mass ejection. The 2004 blackout report makes interesting reading. Only the sales folk think it would be easy or cheap. As for me... local standby generator is my vote of no confidence.
...when we estimate the need for future electrical energy usage by using historical electrical energy usage. Why? Electric cars. The demand for electrical energy should rise sharply if and when we get viable (cheap enough, with enough range and a short enough recharge time) electric cars. Converting all cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, and locomotives to battery power means an enormous activity in charging those batteries. We will be building wind generators to the point that absolutely every horizon in the country will look like fur, with wind generators taking the part of individual hairs. Its fortunate that they are beautiful / majestic, but still hoping to keep them off some of the notable scenic areas such as the Grand Canyon, half-dome, painted desert, etc.
I'm sure wind and solar scales just like that, not.
Tesla says their powerwall's usable capacity is 13.5 kWh. (I just wish they, and their solar panels, were cheaper.)
I like the idea of being independent of the grid as much as possible - with my solar panels or wind turbines or whatever collecting energy, and with the energy being stored in a large battery at my house. After a storm or earthquake, I don't want to be without power because the lines are down.
where will all successive generations of coal miners get black lung, bury their fathers at 30 years old, and die in holes in the ground? How will the salmon meet their daily nutritional requirement of mercury? Who will the rest of the world point to and say "if they can do it, so can we"?
#MAGA!
Unfortunately, not a single author of the study has any experience at all in electrical transmission or distribution, not to mention zero experience or background in grid management. It is simply a math exercise that ignores the many real constraints on the grid.
But those that want to hear this don't care, they'll take this and run with it.
If we start using a lot less energy. Using less is the only clean energy.
Talk about a false equivalency. Yes using less is ideal. It doesn't follow that all sources of power are equally bad however. It's clear that fossil fuels are irredeemably polluting. When you need to use energy (and we all do) then you want to use the cleanest form of power generation available to you.
In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the U.S. electrical needs
That's all they did, imagine it could happen. They may as well imaging that they can flap their arms and fly to the Moon - it's just as likely. There are a few places where wind is cost effective, maybe a couple of tropical deserts where solar isn't the worst choice. But the rest is fantasy.
It's not "kosher" to say this, but we really should have got back into nuclear 20 years ago.
It's not an unreasonable view point, just a politically impossible one. People are afraid of nuclear and you can't argue they are entirely wrong even if they aren't entirely well informed. It's somewhat a pity that they aren't as afraid of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are probably actually more dangerous.
The nuclear technology of today is cleaner and safer and more efficient than anything out there.
While I have no problem with using fission as a power source, no form of fission is safe. That's not even a debate. Most of the time it is fine but there is always a non-zero chance of a serious catastrophe. That's why there are so many regulations around it and why private insurance won't touch it without government guarnatees. When the people who have a profit motive to evaluate risk won't touch it that is the clearest possible evidence that it is not safe..
Nuclear fission is only "clean" in relation to fossil fuels. Nobody has come up with a workable plan for the spent fuel waste which is quite obviously not clean or safe. And because of the regulations and safety requirements around it, nuclear is not clearly more economically efficient than alternatives.
The simple fact is that nuclear is really the only energy technology that can reliably fill the growing need for energy.
That is clearly not true. Wind and solar have been shown to be able to fill a substantial portion of the need for clean energy. That is the whole point of the main article. Nuclear can (and should) be a piece of the portfolio but to pretend it is the only option is both untrue and unrealistic.
Electricity prices are so low currently that it is difficult to fund new or old technologies. Cheap natural gas has driven all other power sources into the red. Three Mile Island is scheduled to close due to being unable to charge enough for electricity to make enough to operate the plant. This is an established, long running nuclear plant (with one broken unit). Operating costs are not that high, but you still need to generate money. Building other new technologies is equally difficult when the break even mark keeps being pushed to the right.
Peak US energy consumption will be about 250 GW. So worst case 12h of storage is 3 TWh. Over 12h the consumption won't always be at the peak, so a good guess at what 12h US energy storage really means is about 1TWh of storage capacity and this storage must be capable of delivering 250GW peak !! Wow that I big dam with hundreds of massive turbo-generators attached.. Assuming that we need to call on that 12h of storage several times per year, say 5, that about 5TWh/yr of hydro-electric capacity
About the only storage mecanism actual capable of delivery that type of storage is hydro-electric, the question is now is that realistic. At the moment the US has 282 TWh/yr and a peak of 80 GW. About half of that 282 TW/h is probably run of the river type and so must be used immedately or risk severe local flooding. But even still 140 TWh/yr of other hydro-electric capacity is well and truly in the ball park of the author estimations, though might need bigger dams to store the water and deliver power over 12 hours rather than over shorter periods.
One remaining problem is the peak production capacity which would need to be tripled. The logistics of doing that without creating waves you could surf on in US rivers will be amusing but probably not insurmountable. In any case there would need to be a massive investment program in hydro-electric power as well.
The last problem is that last 10% of production that the authors haven't addressed. If its not wind, solar or hydro, what is it ? With current technology, about the only thing that would make sense is combined-cycle gas turbines, allowing for high efficiency and rapid deployment when the wind ain't blowing, the sun ain't shining and after you've used your 12h of energy storage. So the authors are asking the energy industry to build 250GW of production capacity that is only used 10% of the time. That's ok, but it means the infrastructure costs need to be amortized over few production hours, and the price of a MW/h from the combined-cycle generation will cost many times the current cost.
In short, yes the authors proposal seems highly possible on paper, though the US citizens must decide that they are willing to pay much more for power that they are now, and/or go without 10% of the time. Seems to me its a politico-economic choice in that case rather than a technological one. Unfortunately, recent history in the US with the massive exploitation of shale oil and reduction in cost per MW/h of power in the US is the reverse of the decision the authors are advocating, and I'm not sure that US political system has the balls to stand up tell everyone they have to pay more.
D.
If cost is no object, then yes, it is possible that we can power the country with wind and solar. However, it is not currently cost effective and will not likely be cost effective for a very long time.
Today, that is true (if you are considering the 100% case-- it is cost effective in some markets).
I don't think you have any basis to say "will not likely be cost effective for a very long time." That becomes untrue if you have efficient storage or efficient long-distance power transfer. Both of these technologies are improving rapidly.
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
No, it's pretty efficient. you can buy 20% efficient solar panels today. That's roughly the same efficiency as your car's engine. You can make 35% efficient cells, but they're expensive. You can also make 35% efficient car engines, but they're expensive, too.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it. Same goes with electric cars.
And, in fact, the world is rapidly installing solar capacity. https://octoenergy-production-...
Generally people mean "land use efficiency".
No, they don't.
Often, yes, people don't even know what they mean, but when they do mean efficiency, they mean efficiency.
Conservation could supply easily 80% of our energy needs. Almost all of the energy we use turns into heat/waste. All we need to do is stop wasting most of the energy.
It could work as long as people and machines only use power when the sun is up and the wind is blowing. Batteries are cute, but they are inefficient.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-powe.html
and
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-to-run-the-economy-on-the-weather.html
That depends upon what type of "solar collectors" you're talking about. If you're talking about photovoltaic panels, then yes there are hazardous materials used in their manufacture
No, not inherently. That's a myth. Today's solar panels are basically made of silicon and glass. There's no reason that you can't make them in an environmentally friendly, low-waste way. Silicon production uses chlorosilane, of course, but you don't release this to the environment-- you want to use it up. The main waste is actually the solvents used for cleaning, but with economy of scale it's cheaper to recycle these.
People talking about how hazardous solar panels are usually point to cadmium telluride panels, which had a -- hold on to your hats-- two-micron thick layer incorporating cadmium. But CdTe never got traction as a solar array material; silicon technology just evolved to so low a cost that CdTe (whose only selling point was low price) got priced out of the market.
but a lot less hazardous materials than used in say, hydraulic fracturing.
That's definitely true.
This will be a thing the instant that Wind/Solar become the prime money mover.
Wind and solar can power most of the US at 150% the cost of coal and natural gas. Fixed that for you. Enjoy paying 50% more. Its no big thing for consumers if their electric bill goes from $120 to $180 a month or whatever. Americans are rich enough that $60 a month wont bankrupt anyone, but if you're a manufacturer and your electric bill is $250,000 a month that 50% is a lot of money. It will undermine cost competitiveness of US manufacturing a hell of a lot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My understanding is: they have tried this in Germany, and it has turned out to be astronomically expensive. Energy costs have gone through the roof.
There was a massive push to replace incandescent bulbs with CFL bulbs, an arguably far inferior lighting technology. It had to be done within a few years or global warming would kill us all. LED bulbs that have mostly taken over the market are a far superior technology. One can make the case that the CFL bulb industry was trying to recoup their development costs and eventual losses by getting politicians to help them out before it was too late. The LED writing was on the wall. One can make the same case with wind and solar power. They are inferior power generation methods compared to nuclear, natural gas, and more importantly, fusion power. What better way to make a killing quickly before a superior technology borks your industry than to fake your data.
If only we could figure it how to make it work....
I know, let's use Tony Starks magic power plant instead. That's even cooler.
Wind & solar today still depend on fossil fuels in its life cycle.
So what? That doesn't mean they will continue to do so in perpetuity. Once solar and wind are a sufficient percentage of the supply to the grid (which seems almost inevitable) your argument vanishes in a puff of logic.
There are efficiency losses throughout that entire conversion cycle. The only clean way to minimize those efficiency losses is to use less energy.
We're going to utilize energy. Your argument is null and void if you pretend otherwise. Yes using less is optimal but not realistic with a growing and economically advancing civilization. Your argument is akin to a company trying to endlessly cut expenses to become profitable. It works to a point but then it becomes counterproductive. We're not going to all go back to living in caves with no electricity, no plumbing, and no transportation. If you want to go off grid and live in the woods knock yourself out. The rest of us will be living here in the real world where we have an optimization problem.
This has been reported back in the early 2000's... I can pinpoint the time because I was out of work due to dot-bubble. I remember listening to a radio program and a investor saying a 95x95 mile square grid in the sunnier, warmer states in the US could fully power the US with heat/steam generated by solar mirrors. Everyone at the time was dismissing it as quack science, never work, nuclear is the future, blah blah blah.
Here we are now nearly 2 decades later only now to be taken seriously.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It'll work, under conditions that don't and never have existed in the real world.
Wind and solar -never- operate at 100% of capacity. Not even close.
Nuclear professional here for full disclosure. I am not shilling, I just think you don't know what you're talking about.
"Oh, and it costs more than solar or wind--once you fully account for all the actual costs."
Citation? Here is a nice projection for 2020 even which says that statement is not true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:Projected_LCOE_in_the_U.S._by_2020_(as_of_2015).png
"Westinghouse just went out of business (ask South Carolina)."
Westinghouse DID NOT go out of business. Chapter 11 doesn't mean "going out of business". I work with them all the time, and we still have contracts with them.
"hiring a few MBAs to improve 'efficiency' is catastrophe."
Exaggerate much? In fact, my plant is trying to make cost cutting measures at the moment to compete with gas, yet NOBODY is considering jeopardizing nuclear safety. Stuff may break more often, but it's not like every component here is essential to keep the fuel safe.
"It's also centralized and makes a nice juicy target for terrorism."
No. It is a juicy target for military conflicts maybe, but not terrorism. The security at these places and the difficulty to actually cause damage that would cause a release of contamination make them not so attractive. How many terrorist attacks have caused a release? Any?
The usual /. rant supporting nuclear has to be thorium nuclear, specifically. It's what all the cool kids want to do!
Have they figured in the need for limited resources, like rare earths, the impact on solar panel prices when the demand exceeds supply by so much, high power semiconductors, etc. Solar needs nighttime storage so those systems need to be accounted for, as do windless and sunless days. And, very importantly, wind and solar are very much dependent on semiconductors which are subject to EMP damage, natural or nuclear. So backups of nearly everything electronic needs to be stocked in protected warehouses.
The only way this is true is if you live in fantasy-land. Scientists involved in this travesty should be stripped of any credentials they may possess and be fired.
Are you deliberately trying to be difficult?
No. Are you deliberately trying to be stupid?
"High efficiency"
Efficiency I can define. "Awesome" I can't.
How high "high efficiency" is will be a judgement call. I had pointed out that the efficiency of photovoltaic panels is roughly the same as efficiency of the gasoline engine in your car, so if conversion efficiency is actually your criterion, actually, photovoltaics are not terribly bad compared to other engines. They're slightly lower in efficiency than the chemical-to-electrical-energy conversion efficiency of coal-fired power plants, but that's only the generating efficiency-- add in the fact that the coal has to be mined and transported to the plant, and the electricity has transformer and transmission losses, and they are comparable to on-site solar efficiencies. However, if (as the original topic proposes) the PV energy is to be distributed over long distances to smooth out geographical variations in power production, or stored, then transforming and transmission and storage losses have to be added to PV, too. As with many things, efficiency depends on application, and assumptions.
In general, though, "efficiency" is not the same as "awesome," and neither one is the same as "cost effective for a particular market."
commentator K. S. Kyosuke above had an interesting calculation of efficiency starting with the solar photons, pointing out that fossil fuel is actually just solar energy that was absorbed millions of years ago. Interesting, and in some ways insightful to trace the energy back to the source... but not terribly relevant.
In the US, back in 2010, it was obvious that the grid was sustaining demand (barely). Now the Grid owners that don't want to shell out infrastructure, unless the Govt. pays for it, saw the wave of rising demand coming. So, as a result, even the electric company is saying switch to gas! As a society, we have spent a fair amount more on LED bulbs, and high efficiency everything, this has helped the grid grow some margin, a nice place to be for free. The wave is the Ecar load that is coming on gradually, gotta charge them batteries! Sure, there are a few pushing the carbon tax, another money scheme. I cracks me up when the solar panel companies call us, I tell them to look up our house on google earth, 5 prime acres of woods, old and new, you know, the ones that create oxygen from our garbage air. Their proposal it to cut down the trees and put a small sized solar farm in our back yard! This solar growth isn't people thinking about the outcome, all they are thinking about is their wallets.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
Just because something "can" doesn't mean it "ought."
All of this is moot. The intense power of the catalytic reactions in the corona of the sun can now be captured. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh1rOoYnZS0
The world will have energy at $0.05kw with $100/kw install cost. If you are accredited AND not a tried and true skeptic locked in your logic box, reach out zh@hydrino.33mail.com for info
All the energy we need is here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh1rOoYnZS0
This has been known for a while.
But that isn't enough by a long shot and here's why:
Electricity generation only accounts for about 30-40% of carbon emissions.
When you factor in replacing carbon used in domestic heating, transportation and industrial processes, electrical demands are set to rise by a factor of 6-8
Come back when solar and wind can fiil that gap. The problem is that they simply can't and the only way forward is nuclear - preferably Molten Salt as these can load-follow and virtually every commercial nuclear incident has been caused or exacerbated by water.
Here is a QUICK shoot down of it
What happens if Yellowstone blows? Keep in mind that our grid is supposed to work 100% of the time. That is ESP. true during emergencies. More importantly, if we are moving to EVs, then during emergencies we need that grid.
And yet, with just wind/solar, it would not work.
I would also be curious about the economics of this. I will bet again, that this will go up in price quite a bit. CA's has. So has Germany and Portugal.
OTOH, Sweden, Iceland, Costa Rica, all have CHEAP or relatively cheap energy. Why? Because they use a MIX.
We need to add in Geo-thermal and Nuclear. The idea of depending on JUST wind/Solar is about as stupid as you can be.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.