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Trump's Tech Battle With China Roils Bill Gates Nuclear Venture (wsj.com)
Add Bill Gates to the list of executives whose businesses have been ensnared by the Trump administration's battle with China over technology and trade. From a report: The tech tycoon and philanthropist said in an essay posted late last week that a nuclear-energy project in China by a company he co-founded called TerraPower LLC is now unlikely to proceed because of recent changes in U.S. policy toward China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. That leaves TerraPower, which had been working on the China project for more than three years, scrambling for a new partner and uncertain where it might be able to run a pilot of the nuclear reactor it has been developing, according to company officials.
Mr. Gates, TerraPower's chairman, helped start and fund the Bellevue, Wash., company, which incorporated in 2008, in a long-term bid to make nuclear reactors smaller, less expensive and safer than current nuclear energy sources. The company has been developing something called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses depleted uranium as fuel, something that TerraPower says can improve safety and reduce costs. Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said in an interview.
Mr. Gates, TerraPower's chairman, helped start and fund the Bellevue, Wash., company, which incorporated in 2008, in a long-term bid to make nuclear reactors smaller, less expensive and safer than current nuclear energy sources. The company has been developing something called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses depleted uranium as fuel, something that TerraPower says can improve safety and reduce costs. Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said in an interview.
It's not far from Seattle. Much easier to get to than China.
The breeding of U-238 is exactly what you do when you make a modern bomb and PUREX (how you separate out the Pu-239 from the Uranium) isn't exactly a secret process as it was developed 70 years ago. It seems safer to just use 50% enriched Uranium (which still require enrichment) and make less waste or ever better use a Th-U fuel cycle as no Pu-239 is produced in that fuel cycle. Anti-proliferation folks often come from foreign policy or military backgrounds and often don't have the science background to understand all the subtleties of nuclear power. So they choose the "more power" approach and often force civilian operations to run in a far more nasty and waste producing way in an effort to ensure nobody ever reprocesses the waste to make a bomb. This is classic risk telescoping as the pollution from the waste is far more likely to endanger lives than this fantasy that couldn't even happen in a movie because the audience wouldn't buy it.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
More people should appreciate Bill Gates. He brought us crippleware computers with perpetual spyware and adware and made the masses of low-IQ users love it by having his company lie about it.
Given how the chinese treat IP; isn't this a favor?
Basically they'd build the reactor in china, and within 2 weeks the plans and technical details would be 'appropriated' by the Chinese government.
Basically all that R&D wasted. Just because they aren't shooting at us (yet) doesn't make them an ally, or even a remotely-friendly country.
Smarter like less reliable, and more expensive and less safe per gigawatt?
Who uses the word roil?
It's fundametally dangerous to transfer tech to an evil totalitarian coomunist regime that has a dictator-for-life and is trying to spread its influence globally.
These CEOs of western tech companies who have been giving China high tech as part of a trade for Chinese slave labor have been setting all the pieces in place that may eventually lead to another World War, just as businessmen both technology and materials with Japan and Germany prior to WWII provided those nations with what they needed to assert their expansionist dreams. The people who pay the price for this borderline treasonous behavior will be the middle class western workers who lost their jobs to the Chinese laborers, or the keds of the workers who paid the price.
Bill Gates got rich in America, selling products to Americans. If he had a shred of decency and loaylty, he would do his research in America with American workers.
Incidentally, if he had arisen in Canada or the UK, then I would say he should be doing his work there using those workers; my concern here is the safety and security of western civ versus fuelling the expansion of China's current evil (as opposed to a pure 'Murica! play).
Renewables are about 4% of world energy consumption. Don't know if the tech has evolved sufficiently yet to replace nuclear.
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I'm tired of hearing about how poor Bill Gates isn't getting his way.
first, not enough h1b visas
then, he wants africa to learn from china
then he didn't manage to wipe out polio
now his china stuff is messed up.
boo hoo for bill.
I guess it's back to coal for us. Trumpians like coal.
Before Trump: Slashdot and Media: We're worried about China, they don't play fair , steal our tech, and they have horrible human rights and they destroy our jobs in exchange for cheap trinkets. We should restrict ties with them. After Trump: Slashdot and Media: I LOVE CHINA: UNLIMITED OPENNESS OF ALL OUR SECRETS AND EXCHANGE OF EVERYTHING 4EVA!
Crippleware! That is really effin funny. Software so dumb it has to have dick and Jane read to it
Nuclear is the only good stopgap from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Also, the waste from used solar panels and the like is far worse than what is leftover from a nuclear reactor.
"Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad."
Sounds like he's not allowed (cost or safety) to develop this tech in the US. Why not?
Safe enough to sell abroad? Why can't we do tech dev of new tech in the US? Regulation limited.
Safe enough to sell to the masses, but must go to non-regulated Chinese Govt who has very little care for environmental regs....
So, who's right on regs? Gates or Trump?
Kind of sinister to develop tech which is not safe enough (or cost prohibitive) via US regs to sell to the masses?
Or are we over regulated?
Funny way to describe it.
I always think about the civil war in the US.
The south lost because it had little in the way of factories, compared to the north.
Now that weâ(TM)ve outsourced what seems like the majority of our production to China, saying itâ(TM)s trumps battle seems a little late
Please don't talk about shit you don't understand.
It's called a CANDU reactor Bill. Yah dumb fuck.
The Clintons surely wouldn't leave a major donor hung out like that. Especially when the thought of more suitcases full of cash got dangled in front of them. I'm sure Hill has Bill on the phone already.
The issue isn't as much regulation (which allows nuclear power) as anti-science, ignorant, anti-nuclear NIMBYs. Basically anti-vaxxers protesting against a form of energy they know nothing about.
Well in the US it's 18% and California is 32%. I'm not completely against nuclear since apparently the new reactor can use the spent fuel in the existing light-water reactors. I just think the oversight has been gutted in this country and shortcuts will inevitably be taken.
Why the fuck is US tech going to benefit China?
-Styopa
They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.
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Wait - You did read hte REASON it was being done in China was because that country has lax regulations.
Honestly, this article is quite disengenuous. What is really happening is that China was not Bill Gates' first choice. Now, because of Trump, Gates has a chance to build his reactors here - because regulations are more sane now than they were just two years ago.
They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.
The GP and you are confusing two different numbers. The GP is talking about total deployment. You are taking about how much power was actually produced. Which illustrates a great point. A 200MW wind farm doesn't equal a 200MW reactor. Solar and wind load factors are in the single digit percents. Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Precisely. Nameplate capacity is irrelevant; generation is everything. And with wind turbine lifespans at half of original claims, that means the installed base needs to be doubled beyond their original estimates. Battery storage won't get you there, pumped storage MAY do it (but that's a big no-no for most environmentalists as well)... Nuclear really is the only realistic solution for power generation outside of fossil fuels.
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And someone needed a PC excuse to cut and run. Good business acumen. Laughs about it over drinks later. Amazing how many here don't have a clue how the world works for real. Downvoting begins now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Mr. Gates isn't satisfied with forcing people to use a shoddy OS that crashes whenever it feels like, now he wants to make shoddy nuclear power plants and force those on us. No thanks! We don't need your unreliable crapola Mr. William H. Gates III. Go back to stabbing people (with vaccine needles) in Africa!
Perhaps the biggest advantages of wind and solar are that you can build them at whatever pace you like (solar even more than wind, of course). Companies don't have to take on so much risk or come up with all the money at once, they can adjust to market conditions and changing tech.
With nuclear, you have to invest a fortune now and pray that that you've correctly predicted what will be needed when it comes online in 5 or 10 years and that it will remain profitable long enough to pay for decommissioning. That's a hard sell when nobody knows what the future holds. By the time that nuclear fission plant is about to recoup all the up front costs and start to turn a profit, fusion power might undercut it.
This space intentionally left blank
Nuclear is about 4% of world energy consumption. Don't know if the tech has evolved sufficiently yet to replace renewables.
And that part of the summary is the real issue. It just doesn't fit the anti-Trump narrative the submitter wanted to highlight. Trump's China policy is not new. Many, even liberals, have called for similar policy in years past. The Trump hysterics mean that anything that Trump supports, no matter what the origin and who used to agree with it, must be evil and horrible for humanity. The Left has lost all common sense and credibility because they refuse to ever agree with a single thing from him. It's impossible to reach any compromise or consensus when it's always "no" regardless. It just polarizes everyone in the country further and further apart, creating divisions and sowing discord. Oddly enough, exactly what adversaries such as Russia want to happen. A divided nation is a weak adversary.
The fact that this technology could not be researched and developed in the US because of over regulation and fear mongering environmentalists is the issue. We need to be able to develop better energy sources. Ones that are reliable and don't depend on nature's ebbs and flows. There's also the issue of rare earth metals that do not exist in sufficient quantity to go fully solar and wind. And even if they did, the mining techniques to extract them would soon get the ire of the same environmentalists that want nothing but solar and wind.
Do you mean batteries like the ones being developed at MIT?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/techno...
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Ignorance by the people may enable the opposition, but anti-nuclear groups know better, and are deliberately engaged in a war on nuclear, funded by and benefiting fossil interests. Nuclear threatens to replace fossil energy entirely, while renewables will continue to depend on it as an increasingly expensive crutch for a family of technologies that can't stand on their own.
For the TL;DR version of that link focusing on a concise presentation of data, see the complete case for nuclear.
The last thing the United States needs to be doing is supplying China with any type of Nuclear help.
It used to be 7% or more, but with a political push to reduce it's percentage - it's now down to 4%.
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Three baby-mamas, doesn't pay his bills and loves KFC. I think the white supremacist Trump supporters may be missing the obvious here.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.
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Do you mean batteries like the ones being developed at MIT? https://www.cbc.ca/news/techno...
Molten salt only lasts about 6 hours. Malta, a Google spinoff so good they didn't invest in them is doing the same thing. BTW, MSRs use the same stuff to transfer heat from the core to the turbines. Also, those "batteries" have about a 40% efficiency so any energy that goes in, comes out 2 1/2 times more expensive. Some solution. If they do improve that efficiency, we could use that tech in a nuclear reactor though. The research is good, your conclusions about the ramifications of the research, not so much...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Ignorance by the people may enable the opposition, but anti-nuclear groups know better, and are deliberately engaged in a war on nuclear, funded by and benefiting fossil interests. Nuclear threatens to replace fossil energy entirely, while renewables will continue to depend on it as an increasingly expensive crutch for a family of technologies that can't stand on their own.
For the TL;DR version of that link focusing on a concise presentation of data, see the complete case for nuclear.
Exactly. Also the Sierra Club took funding from Natural Gas CEOs
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The problem is that grid stability is compromised by renewables. And the more you bring on-line, the more unstable it gets as you get more and more spikes and surges.
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Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.
Molten salts are not volatile and don't explode. And unless you mess up the chemistry are reasonably safe, they just run at a high temperature. You are correct about the lack of efficiency. If you want efficiency, you would use molten metal or sodium (except sodium explodes). Much better heat carrying capacity and transfer efficiencies of those coolants.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
We have the technology to replace all fossil fuels with renewable energy. We just need to build it. It's hard to justify spending $ Trillions when your existing power plants work.
The capital cost concern is valid, but can be addressed by factory manufacturing of smaller advanced reactors, which don't need extensive on-site construction work. The point about fusion distracts from the goal: producing affordable and sustainable low-carbon power. Fission will continue to do this even after fusion becomes available.
Policy shouldn't view this through the lens of short-term profit, but of long-term benefit. A nuclear plant which is paid off will continue to generate power for several more decades. The renewable plant barely lasts long enough to recover the investment, and then leaves people on the hook for a replacement. Obviously, the latter is preferable to investors, even if it screws people. Put another way, investors focus on making short-term profits by financing, rather than long-term sales of energy.
You need capacitors on the grid, like FES
You are like a retarded robot. You always post this inane dipshit garbage and you write it the same way every time. You say Trump is a traitor (which he isn't) then call people a faggot. You are such a pathetic panty waste that I can't help but derive a fair amount of amusement from your stunning stupidity. Keep it up dummie!
Dupe from a couple days ago:
As China Option Fades, Bill Gates Urges US To Take the Lead in Nuclear Power, For the Good of the Planet
Better known as 318230.
He stole from America and gave to the communists. F'ing traitor.
How big do you need for over 1 TW of installed generation capacity?
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Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
And from what would you charge the batteries?
Obviously as long as your renewable contribution to the grid is below base load, "batteries" only make sense in "strange market situations" as in mid day time, all power plants are close to the maximum, pumped storages are full, suddenly you have excess unpredicted wind power (that actually never happens) then you had use for a battery.
Sure, as Elons project in Australia shows: batteries can be used efficiently in a grid. However that project is not because of renewables ... they store excess conventional power in the batteries.
Then again, in Germany e.g., the push is towards self sustaining houses, with enough solar power and a battery. So on a small scale, independent from looking at the big scale of a grid, batteries already make sense. However for accompanying a wind farm, batteries only very rarely make sense. At the moment. But when renewable contribution to the grid reaches 50% (or what ever your base load is) it makes more and more sense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
pumped storage MAY do it (but that's a big no-no for most environmentalists as well)
Pumped storage and batteries are the same. No idea why you think one can do it and one can not.
People actually love pumped storage, as it creates artificial lakes. And that is most everywhere a bonus for wild live and nature.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The problem is that grid stability is compromised [powerengineeringint.com] by renewables.
No, it is not.
For the grid there is no difference when during super bowl at the first add pause a million people walk to the fridge, take something, close it, the fridge starts cooling a minute later versus a sudden cloud over a solar plant or a drop of wind over a wind plant. Except: there is no sudden cloud over a solar plant or a sudden drop in wind. Power plants like that are run on weather/wind/sun/cloud prognosis. The margin of error for the next 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 60 minutes in prediction of your yield is not even 1%. You can easily prepare your pumped storage or gas turbines ahead of time. Actually you prepare the whole grid ahead of time.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Regardless what you melt, the efficiency will only be around 40% or lower. (Thermodynamics ... you know, the laws no one grasps)
A fly wheel is 99% efficient ... approaching 100% slowly (General physics, law of conservation of energy ... the most important law, I wonder why no one grasps it on /. either)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Huh. So the industry magazine for the power industry is wrong. Because you think refrigerators are equivalent to 100+ MW generation sources. Got it.
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God tell folks you want to flood a valley, even a small one. Then run like crazy to avoid the invective hurled your way. Remember, many Governments (including California) consider hydro not renewable - not because of a lack of water, but because it "destroys ecosystems" when you flood them.
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Who is better?
a) An anti nuclear nimby who nows nothing about it
b) A pro nuclear idiot who knows nothing about it
???
Both vote. Some guys in the b) bracket even get hired ... and there is the problem.
From a risk management point of view: b) is the bigger risk.
Obviously there are two other groups: ... if you would not write so much nonsense about nuclear, I perhaps had put you here)
c) Anti nuclear protagonists who actually know their stuff, like Merkel
d) Pro nuclear protagonists who know their stuff (don't know/remember one in that bracket
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, you did not get it. ... 1 million times 1 thousand ... that is 1GW.
A fridge uses about 1kW when switched on and actually cooling.
1 million fridges is
1GW is 10 times your 100+ MW generation sources.
Get it now?
America has about 400 million inhabitants. No idea how many fridges you are running and how many people are actually watching the super bowl and running to the fridge at the first add ... idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
First of all, you do not need to flood a valley.
Secondly: I don't live in California.
Obviously pumped storage is not renewable ... are you mixing up pumped storage with a hoover dam?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://www.geek.com/geek-cete...
Precisely. Nameplate capacity is irrelevant; generation is everything. And with wind turbine lifespans at half of original claims, that means the installed base needs to be doubled beyond their original estimates. Battery storage won't get you there, pumped storage MAY do it (but that's a big no-no for most environmentalists as well)... Nuclear really is the only realistic solution for power generation outside of fossil fuels.
No, cost is everything and both wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear in N-Europe for example. In southern Europe Solar is also way more competitive. The problem with nuclear is and always will be the same, it is very expensive and extremely unpopular. Oh, and your source is a 6 year old article in a Tory newspaper? ... Really? At least pick some kind of tech publication next time.
They were less than 10% in 2016, I don't think we've more than tripled our generation in California. And yes, I live in California. For the US, it's closer to 5%, not 18%.
The GP and you are confusing two different numbers. The GP is talking about total deployment. You are taking about how much power was actually produced. Which illustrates a great point. A 200MW wind farm doesn't equal a 200MW reactor. Solar and wind load factors are in the single digit percents. Nuclear's is north of 90%. So our 5% deployed nuclear generates 9% of our energy, but 18% of deployed renewables generates 5% of the power. Either way the real problem is the batteries needed to handle renewable deployments of more than about 20% energy generation. Without those batteries, its nuclear or natural gas.
Load factors for Wind, Solar and Hydro in the UK in 2017 according to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics published by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
Onshore wind: 28.0%
Solar photovoltaics: 10.7%
Offshore wind: 38.9%
Hydro: 36.5%
The load factor for UK nuclear plants hovered betweeen 65 and 77% and onshore wind in particular beats UK Nuclear on energy prices quite handily, onshore wind even managed to beat Combined Cycle Gas Turbines.
Now please start talking about 'breeder reactors' I have some choice quotes from the US navy and some scientific publications on those things.
It used to be 7% or more, but with a political push to reduce it's percentage - it's now down to 4%.
Renewables are 11% according to the graph you posted.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In the world of globalization, we can't these nations which are also the 2 top economies in the world stop their trade war. As it impacts the economy of whole world instantly.
nuclear power IS THE SMARTER ALTERNATIVE. unfortunately a bunch of retards are scared of it and would rather speed exponentially more precious resources and cause far more environmental harm using other renewables.
Fuck you! Mother fucking Mother fucker!
The state is recovering from a multibillion dollar mistake from a mismanaged nuclear project. Perfect opportunity to step in.
Who is better? a) An anti nuclear nimby who nows nothing about it b) A pro nuclear idiot who knows nothing about it ???
Both vote. Some guys in the b) bracket even get hired ... and there is the problem.
From a risk management point of view: b) is the bigger risk.
Obviously there are two other groups: c) Anti nuclear protagonists who actually know their stuff, like Merkel d) Pro nuclear protagonists who know their stuff (don't know/remember one in that bracket ... if you would not write so much nonsense about nuclear, I perhaps had put you here)
Nice false dichotomy there. I would rather decisions on nuclear power be made by those that understand nuclear power. Since those folks are overwhelmingly pro-nuclear that pretty much says it all.
And Merkel doesn't qualify given the fact that both Germany's energy prices and CO2 outputs have rocketed up under her direction. Her closing of the nuclear plants will probably (indirectly) result in ending her political career. Artificially raising energy prices has all sorts of negative unintended consequences.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Anything that makes Billy upset is good
philanthropist? it's revisionist to try to rebrand him from his real philiosophy. monopolist.
I get it. You think your simplistic example is more important than the conclusions if actual power grid engineers. Enjoy!
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Yep! Now combine that somewhat predictable behavior of power consumption with completely unpredictable power production. It's one thing to have a variable load - quite another to have a variable supply!
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Do the calculations about pumped storage - anything less than a good sized valley gives you tens of minutes of power at most.
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No, they are not cheaper. Wind and solar REQUIRE a massive backup system - coal, nuclear, hydro. They cannot stand on their own. They have to bear the costs of complete backup AS WELL AS their own generation. Versus just the "cost of backup" if you went with just that.
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A lot of jurisdictions do not consider hydro to be renewable.
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Dude. It does destroy ecosystems. See: the 80,000 acre area that is now "Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake" in Washington, created by the Grand Coulee Dam. Or the 54,000 acres that makes up the Lake of the Ozarks.
I'm pretty sure any land organism that lived in those areas previously would consider their habitat destroyed, what with it being underwater and completely unlivable for anything without gills.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I suppose that would depend on your definition of "work."
If you accept that your power plants pump poison into the environment as a course of normal operation, then yeah most power plants work awesome. I'd hope that we'd go for "produce electricity without elevated cancer and respiratory disease rates for anyone that happens to be downwind" myself.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Eugenicist.
Regardless what you melt, the efficiency will only be around 40% or lower. (Thermodynamics ... you know, the laws no one grasps)
A fly wheel is 99% efficient ... approaching 100% slowly (General physics, law of conservation of energy ... the most important law, I wonder why no one grasps it on /. either)
Then there are billions in profits to be made. What the hell are you doing posting on /.? Found a company that makes grid scale flywheels and get going. Otherwise, it just talk, or perhaps there is some other reason why this doesn't work?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Trump is like the Blob. A menace that grows and destroys until we destroy it. I think they froze it to death in the movie, not a bad approach.
The 'Gina thing is a puzzle though. Trump loves him some Russian dictators, Saudi Arabian dictators, North Korean dictators, Philippine dictators, and so on. Why doesn't he love the Chinese dictator? Seriously, what did Xi ever do to get on the naughty list? Did Xi fail to send a fawning birthday card? I know, he didn't poison a dissident, in a foreign country. He didn't support death squads either.
Well, know we know the price of Trump's love. You gotta kill someone with morals and a backbone. Perhaps Trump is looking for these in the bodies of the deceased, to give himself an implant?
wow that patent for a 500-50,000 MT flywheel is amazing.
never could I imagine that it could get so big.
but what is interesting to me, that the storage of this would work in places like florida, where solar can give it a boost on startup and increase it before the big commercial demand kicks in, Texas-oklahoma could have this working in the wind zones.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
The strongest statement in the scientific paper is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." One of the key findings is that trading causes relatively huge fluctuations which occur every 15 minutes as trading occurs at this interval. So claiming that "renewables compromise grid stability" is very much exaggerated.
The actual research your linked article refers to is here:
https://www.nature.com/article...
ArXiv link is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.084...
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-...
The conclusion of the people who did this study is not what you claim is. Instead the strongest statement about renewables is "The noise amplitude tends to increase with the shares of intermittent renewables." But no claim is made that this "compromises grid stability" or even that this is the biggest source of noise in the system. Instead the key finding is that trading has a big impact:
"At first glance, a typical recording of the grid frequency
(Fig. 1) reveals that it coincides extremely well with the
nominal grid reference frequency, highlighting the efficiency
of today’s frequency control. Only rarely do we observe
large deviations from the nominal frequency. These
large disturbances often occur when a new power dispatch
has been settled on by trading (every 15 minutes),
introducing jumps and fluctuations of the frequency"
The study is here:
https://www.nature.com/article...
You also need backup for nuclear because a plant may go offline because of some fault or because it is too hot outside. The truth is that you always have a lot of reserve power plants in a grid and you have large grids to compensate for local loss of power generation. In fact, France often relies on Germany to provide power because many nuclear plants went offline. Germany with a power mix and 40% renewables never relied on electricity from elsewhere.
A lot of jurisdictions do not consider hydro to be renewable.
That sounds rather like legislating that pi is 3.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The article mentions no such thing.
It stated that the first choice was US, but too many regulations. So they built it in China. I didn't read anywhere where it said they were bringing it back to the US because of trump deregulation.
And now because of the tarifs and shit with china, Bill is worried about his pet project.
So trump isn't helping bill here. If anything he's actively sabotaging him.
CO2 is on a downward trend in Germany (at a much smaller per capita level than the US):
https://knoema.com/atlas/Germa...
For 2017 to 2018 CO2 emissions decreased by 6%. https://www.ag-energiebilanzen...
Electricity prices also didn't really increase it seems:
https://www.energy-charts.de/t...
Of course, residential electricity price are rather high.
https://www.statista.com/stati...
But the renewable surchagre is onlyl part of this:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/p...
It will go down in the future as it is mainly for old installations whose garantueed feed-in tariff will run out sooner or later while the cost of new wind and solar is much lower now. It is also important to understand that is was an intentional political decision to support renewables by a feed-in tariff which is paid directly from electricity prices. Coal and nuclear also got (and still get) a substantial amount subsidies but those are hidden in general taxes. Still, the high electricity price is a problem because it hits the poor, but one has to keep in mind that German households also consume much less electricity (due to better efficiency) than US households, so the overall energy bill is not as high as one might expect. Also the percentage of households who have trouble paying their electricity bills is still smaller than most of the rest of europe and certainly much smaller than in the US.
Finally, the exit from nuclear power had wide support in the German population:
https://www.unendlich-viel-ene...
Having said all this, shutting down nuclear plants first instead of coal plans was clearly a mistake.
Sad but true... Hydro is not a renewable resource, and there is an active movement to tear down dams and replace them with wind turbines.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You mean he's killing the Africans with Jenny McCarthy?
You’re wasting your time talking to cockhead, he’s another far right incel turd, who will lie and distort the facts to suit his tired discredited nutjob talking points. Sad.
Same reason why "Soros" is in every Republican made conspiracy theory. You thought you just had an original thought, didn't ya?
Almost invariably, there is some wild life and nature already at the place where this pumped storage creates artificial lakes. That wild life and nature gets bothered - and hence environmentalists get a reason to say no-no.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Companies selling "grid scale" fly wheels - what ever you might mean with "grid scale" - already exist.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
For many applications of pumped storage 10minutes are enough.
Also you don't need to build a big one you can build several small ones.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
CO2 did not increase under Merkel. You must be an idiot. Percentage wise, Germany is the leader in CO2 reduction world wide.
Obviously you don't know that Dr. rer. nat. Angela Merkel has a PhD in Pyhsics, idiot!
Artificially raising energy prices has all sorts of negative unintended consequences. ... no idea under what rock you live.
Energy prices rose around 2000 or something. Since then they are more or less stable and since about 3 years decreasing
Then again: energy prices, as in ELECTRICITY are completely irrelevant for a german household, as we use not much energy. Half of the energy price already is grid costs. Grid costs don't change much, regardless how you create power. And what you forget: 75% of the energy price are taxes on CO2 and VAT.
I would rather decisions on nuclear power be made by those that understand nuclear power.
Obviously. But the problem is: you believe you understand it, and hence want to be involved in the decisions. However your previous dozen posts about e.g. enriched and depleted uranium and breeding etc. p.p. show: you have no clue. So? How can we prevent people who have no clue from voting? Obviously we can't. Who will decide who has a clue and who has not? Only PhD's are allowed to decide about stuff of a certain level of severity? Who decides that level?
Your fake knowledge is based on a few bloomberg articles .... why don't you ask how much a typical german actually pays for electricity instead of waving the (wrong) 28cent number around? (I pay about â50/$60, actually a bit less - to lazy to give the correct $ value)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, my simplistic example is more important, because it is reality, and your grid handles it just fine. ... minutes ahead.
Then again the guys who simplify is not me, but the idiots the article you quote. And people like you with no common sense.
A solar farm of 100 x 100 yards has perhaps a peak yield of 30MW. If clouds come, it is not the full 30MW that get lost instantly and need to be "rebalanced". First of all it goes down slowly, secondly it does not go to zero. Thirdly, there is usually a prognosis for the plant available, that tells the grid operator when and to what extend the plant will change its yield
Then the same for a wind park: you have a 100 x 100 m grid and put 4 10MW windmills on it. If the wind changes: nothing happens. They have to big mass to directly react on the change of wind speed. However similar to the solar plant: the operators *know* in advance, minutes, if not hours, about the wind speeds. While the turbines are slowly adapting to the new wind speed, obviously a speed meter reports directly, so the grid operators know exactly in which direction the output change goes and how much it will be. Plenty of time to power up a gas plant or a pumped storage and back it up by another conventional plant later while pumped storage etc. is powered down again.
So: random activity of consumers impacts the grid 100 or 1000 times stronger than "random" (which are obviously not random, when they are predicted ahead) changes of wind and solar plants outputs.
To grasp that you do not need to be an engineer. So: no idea what they wrote in the article you quoted. Germany has a contribution by renewables of about 40%. It seems the grid runs fine ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, I know. Because a Fox and a Bunny are more "important" than a salmon and a trout. Or a crane ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah, I see that some environmentalists seem to go by the cuteness metric for "importance". We seem to more often find land animals cuter - probably because we are land animals too.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Yeah, a dam by a beaver is cute :D
A valley that has a nice lake with some islands, is cool for swimming, fishing, water sports, sailing, is not cute, because he dam is so ugly made from concrete.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The tech is there, we're not using it, instead using foolish alternatives. Nuclear has joined the ranks of coal as a foolish path. Even China has cut its 2030 target of 240 GWe of nuclear plant capacity in half to 120 or even 90 GWe, stalling new plant approvals for the last 2 years.