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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."
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, but a lot less hazardous materials than used in say, hydraulic fracturing. And once you've got the solar panels made, there are no hazardous emissions created as they make electricity.
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.
And, once they are manufactured, there are no emissions when they make electricity.
Regarding "all the dead birds", I remember when I lived in Texas and a group of hunters was complaining on the radio about wind turbines killing birds before they could shoot them. It is one of my defining memories of the state of Texas.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are 800 KV DC transmission lines being built in Europe and Asia that have losses of 3% per 1000 km. Very modest excess production capability can compensate for this, a mere 10% for a 3250 km run (far enough to take southwest solar energy to New England).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Fortunately on a continent with a third of a billion people and a $18 trillion dollar economy, we don't need to have just one source of electricity.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this. So where ever possible you would Not want to use it, you would want to use one of the cheaper alternatives.
So you can have a distributed system of power plants of many different types, with the cheaper ones providing most of the aggregate demand.
And basic economics dictates that the cheaper power source will be deployed overwhelmingly.
Solar/wind do fine most of the time, you can push over 80% without much difficulty.
At worst then solar power deployment stalls at that point, with natural gas peaking plants taking up the slack.
But this is a problem some 30 years in the future - they provided 7.6% of U.S. electricity in 2017, it is going to be awhile before the >80% problem is encountered.
Ways will be found by then to push costs for gap-filling power below what is currently available, pushing the reasonable cost power gap closer to 100%. Perhaps we never get to 100% but keep use natural gas for that last little bit.
Getting nuclear power plants into the picture requires altering economic decision making - imposing carbon taxes to make nuclear more cost-effective (but this does not help against wind/solar, its long term competitors), or mandating construction by legal compulsion (or have the government build them). These last two are more-or-less what France did, and China is doing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Plug in numbers here:
http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatt...
I used retail pricing here: https://sunelec.com/home/
The whole point of the article is to point out that your canard is at best hopelessly out-of-date and at worst provably wrong for the majority of the geographical region of the continental United States during the majority of the year.
We should've invested much more heavily in nuclear 50 years ago all around the world, and then we wouldn't be in the climate bind we're in today. But since this is today, frankly nuclear is an irrational investment today. That's partly because of the insane legal hoops nuclear plants have to clear which make it take decades to build a plant, but even that is partly due to their centralized giant-project nature. Wind and solar work at any scale, which makes it a lot easier to get them built.
It's important to note that the need for energy in the USA is -- for the first time since the invention of electricity -- no longer growing. That's one of the problems for nuclear, a nuclear plant has to replace a huge chunk of the local energy market at once whereas wind and solar can be added gradually as previous sources are retired.
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You just completely ignored the GP's point that "we're" stuck on old nuclear and wouldn't use that technology today but describing all the problems with old nuclear.
Try here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it. Same goes with electric cars.
That's a load of horse manure. Solar energy and Wind energy are currently cheaper than coal and are about to beat gas for electricity production. With both of these technologies and storage you can guarantee prices for decades, there are no market fluctuations in the price of the solar energy or the wind that powers them.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Solar and wind also employ more people in the US than oil, coal and gas combined:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Throw in some smart grid technology and modern grid planning and we are likely to end up with a grid in places like Germany and China (which at one point installed more wind/solar than the US had online at the time) and we are likely to end up with power mixes that are up to 70% wind/solar with the rest being always-on powerplants. Anybody who thinks there is future in natural gas, oil or (*snicker*) 'Trump digs coal' is quite frankly delusional.
Solar electricity generation is highly inefficient.
It's absolutely the opposite. Direct solar electricity generation is extremely efficient compared to all the other ways that energy can possibly get from the stars to us. Coal? Photosynthesis is worse than PV junctions, and most of the plants in the past didn't become coal in the first place, so most of the historical photosynthesis is lost to us. Oil? Ditto. Wind? Most of the heat hitting Earth doesn't become mechanical movement of wind either, as the temperature differences are too low. Nuclear? The way stars work, synthesis of heavy elements is rare, and most of those that Earth got we can't mine anyway. And of their decay heat we can's extract too much energy either, again because of the low temperature differentials. Etc. etc. But of the solar flux hitting Earth right now, every panel can convert 20% directly into electricity. I mean, it seems low until you realize how convoluted and lossy all the other pathways are. So, no, it's not "highly inefficient", at least not in the sense that we have anything better.
If it were cost effective, we'd all be doing it.
But it is already cost effective, and will be even more in the future, so you will be doing it, whether you want it or not. (Of course, you Americans with artificially inflated prices of residential solar are fucked, but it's up to you to reform your own rules, solar can't be blamed for that.)
Ezekiel 23:20
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this.
This page which references the EIA's numbers, says you're wrong.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
When it comes to wind and solar (particularly solar), using data from just a couple years ago is already well obsolete. And even then, your link (under "Projected LCOE in the U.S. by 2022 (as of 2016) ") shows "wind onshore" as some of the cheapest electricity around, and solar around the middle of the list. Your link also includes a nice graph of how badly cost predictions missed reality. E.g. in 2010, EIA was predicting that solar in 2016 would cost $396.1/MWh - nearly an order of magnitude too expensive.
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