Look, you can debate how deep a recession would have been without any particular set of policies. But this isn't an "up for debate" issue. The move was planned. There is no ground whatsoever to take credit for it.
No; apparently you didn't notice the MW capacities on those bars. The vast majority are on the upper end. See Figure 8 to see the averages for each year (DNI). The 2012 average was 7.4.
Believe it or not, people tend to build the most solar capacity in the brightest areas.
Because inverters aren't always sized to the maximum physically possible for the panels to deliver; it's not always worth sizing it to the maximum physically possible generation.
At the close of 2013, at least 64 utility-scale PV projects totaling 1,532 MWAC had been operating for at least 1 full year (and for as many as 6 full years), thereby enabling the calculation of capacity factors.
What about that do you object to? Do you want them to include plants that haven't been run for a full year? Furthermore, the study was clearly conducted in 2014 because that's when the newest reference is (even though the PDF date is 2015). So exactly where's the problem? Do you think there's been some sort of collapse in capacity factor figures in the past several years, reversing the previous trend? If so, why? Lastly, on what grounds do you want to reject those that use tracking when ones that use tracking are being built? The difference between tracking and non-tracking is not that great regardless in high-solar resource areas, aka the areas where the vast majority of plant capacity has been deployed (see figure 7)
Indeed. Up to a certain point adding more solar actually makes load following easier. Also, wind and solar tend to run opposite each other: solar peaks in the day, while wind peaks at night; high pressure systems bring low wind and high sun, while low pressure systems bring high wind and low sun; etc.
Solar and wind both benefit greatly however from a HVDC grid, to allow for timeshifting - aka, people using power after the sun's gone down from a place where the sun is still up, and vice versa. The last study I read on the topic (in Nature) calculated the cost of the grid for the US at 0.3 cents per kilowatt hour, but saving 1.1 cents per kWh in peaking costs.
Nuclear makes terrible peaking or load-following. The economics of nuclear is already disastrous, even with the government picking up the liability for catastrophic coverage (which no private company would insure - what insurance company would take on, say, the $200B Fukushima liability?). Capital costs of $10/W or more are common - not counting operations and decommissioning. But these economics figures are based around the concept of 85-90% capacity factor. If you start running it as load following, or worse peaking, then your capacity factor plummets, and your price per watt correspondingly skyrockets.
Peaking plants are generally fossil plants because the plant isn't very expensive, maybe $1 a watt or so. Most of the costs of a fossil plant are in the fuel. Hydro also functions well as peaking and load following.
Boy, gee, your counter of a peer reviewed study with "flat assertion from Mr D from 63" sure is convincing!
Figure 8 supports this hypothesis by breaking out the average cumulative net capacity factor by project vintage across the sample of projects built in 2010, 2011, or 2012 (and by noting the relevant average project parameters within each vintage). As shown, the average capacity factor does not differ much on average between 2010- and 2011-vintage projects, which makes sense given the lack of significant change in average ILR across vintages, in conjunction with the opposing influences of a lower DNI and a higher proportion (in capacity terms) of projects using tracking among 2011-vintage projects. Projects built in 2012, however, have a notably higher capacity factor on average (almost 30%), driven by a significant increase in both the average ILR and the average DNI.
DNI = Intensity of the solar resource IRL = DC capacity of the array vs. the AC inverter rating
They have graphs breaking down the different plant types and solar resources vs. their capacity factors.
Right, trust a random person's blog, not the EIA? Yeah, I'll stick with the EIA, thank you. The blog's "well, if we eliminate the plants we don't like and then assume that half of the power that grid operators add will be poor home installs... " stuff is stretching to say the least.
Except that's not how it works. The nameplate capacity of a solar plant is based around how much power it produces in ideal lighting conditions. If you use more efficient panels, then you've upped the nameplate capacity, not the capacity factor. The capacity factor is average actual generation over nameplate.
"They just have to be!" - a last desperate grasp at dying technologies.
Don't get me wrong, they will continue to have a use on the grid - just not the same use. Until storage becomes cheaper than peaking**, fossil fuels will continue to be used as peaking. Natural gas in particular makes an excellent peaking fuel. But their days as baseload are at an end. Renewables have gotten too cheap over the past decade. These $1.50/W renewables plants - sometimes even closer to $1/W - are just insanely cheap compared to alternatives, even taking into account the capacity factor and need for peaking or storage. The Trump administration could slow the replacement of fossil fuels by revoking the PTC and the ITC, but they're not that big; it will only slow the fossil fuel phaseout, not prevent it. If they wanted to prevent it, they'd have to actively penalize renewables relative to fossil fuels.
** Hydro plant uprating is currently cheaper than peaking. But without a nationwide HVDC grid, it only provides localized peaking. Li-ion prices may well make storage a cheaper option than fossil fuel peaking if some of the current price forecasts are met (price halving due to some of the large production scaleups in development, like the Gigafactory and others) - but are more expensive than fossil fuel peaking today. Compressed air storage is also generally more expensive than fossil fuel peaking. Solar thermal storage likewise. Sometimes industrial loadshifting is cheaper than peaking. Pumped hydro can be cheaper than peaking, but it requires the right geography, and again, without a long-distance high power grid, only provides localized peaking support.
Otherwise he'll get run into massive amounts of cost and delays due to existing underground infrastructure - of which some old elements may not be marked accurately (or even at all) on any map.
I can only guess that he feels he has some alternative design for a tunnel boring machine that could be cheaper than today's designs and more tolerant to problematic geology. A thought that may or may not be accurate.
The discussion was not about EM drive. And nobody has done what you're describing, they've just been pouring huge amounts of power into the thing inside vacuum chambers and measuring "thrust" near lower bounds of their measurement equipment's sensitivity. XKCD said it best.
Furthermore, let's stop obscuring it behind the name "EM drive" and call it for what it is: "Shawyer's Fantastical Perpetual Motion Machine". Because that's literally what's being proposed: a violation of the laws of physics that would allow for perpetual motion. Versus the obvious answer of measurement error / mass loss / etc, I'm going to have to side with the latter.
As a general rule, the experiments can't be "verified, confirmed and reproduced". That's a large part of the reason why this ended up as fringe science.
The most logical explanation is that measuring precise energy/heat flows over long periods of time and measuring miniscule quantities of isotopes without them being overwhelmed by contamination is difficult to do without error.
I wouldn't be willing to categorically rule that out because you don't have to have such an effect uniform across the entire electrode; it could be concentrated at field peaks, such as the tips of dendrites, and thus only affect, for example, a fraction of a millionth of the mass.
But I agree, it does not sound likely. And that gamma explanation sounds extremely dodgy, if that's what they're arguing.
Elemental transmutation is standard nuclear physics - particularly neutron capture. The issue is that you go through a lot of of nuclear reactions and a lot of energy for a very small amount of transmutation. So what might possibly be economical for energy production is totally uneconomical for producing, say, gold. Not to mention that you have to isolate the targeted substance afterward.
The only transmutation of commercial value is for production of specific isotopes, such as for medical, industrial, or space uses.
The theory that they're plugging in this article is that in some situations you can "dress" an electron with extra mass in a LENR cell via electromagnetic fluctuations, enabling election capture and the emission of a neutrino and a low energy neutron, which is readily captured.
The Widom-Larsen theory offers a plausible explanation—localized conversion of gamma radiation to infrared radiation.
Huh? Now how is that supposed to happen?
Looking up the theory I found this article, where they describe the theory: intense electromagnetic fields at the surface dress electrons with extra mass, which allows electron capture to form a cold neutron and a neutrino. Cold neutrons are pretty much immediately captured causing a transmutation reaction. That's all pretty basic physics, if you accept the premise that you're getting heavy electrons from intense electromagnetic field effects (which they argue for). But what about the gamma? No explanation there.
I see this page tries to offer a plain-english description of the theory for the gamma:
W-L alleges that gamma emissions are anisotropic and selective in their directionality. Meaning they, for some mysterious reason, direct themselves toward the heavy electron SPP patches. These transient SPP patches are also imagined to have precisely tuned, energy specific absorptivity capabilities which seems like a stretch as well. Also the persistence of gamma absorption during the "life after death" phase is equally perplexing, as the SPP shields are thought to disappear during this phase. Not to mention delayed gammas caused by neutron absorption also create issues for this heavy electron gamma shield hypothesis
You mean the one behind a pay wall? I'm not willing to pay for something that I believe has no real value.
I've told you what it says. You could also pirate it if you're not willing to pay for it. The fact however that you're indifferent to research published in Earth's most prestigious science journal says enough.
So relying on gas pipelines from Russia is a-okay but relying on power lines to other countries is terrible?
No, it's not. Relying on another nation for something as vital to your survival as food, energy, clothing, and shelter is a very bad idea. Any nation that lacks the resources to feed, shelter, and clothe itself is not a free nation.
Good. Then let's vastly reduce Europe's natural gas needs with renewables.
Also, "cheap" is relative. There are some nations that lack sufficient domestic supply of natural gas to provide heating and electricity. Those that rely on imports to keep it "cheap" are now at the mercy of a foreign nation.
And cease to be at the mercy of a foreign nation for a high-renewables grid, as NG needs for peaking are below local production capacity. So cheer.
Hydro is the only technology that exists right now for grid level storage
False.
the others you list are still too expensive to deploy
False. They are being deployed as we speak. In Europe in particular, which has high energy prices, they're not particularly imposing. However, it's cheaper to just interconnect diverse grids with different sources, ala the Nature article.
Like the "cheap" comment above the comment on "nearby" is relative. Across a large land mass means one could run a relatively inexpensive high voltage line. If the hydro dam or other storage is across a body of water then the costs to link the storage to the demand becomes prohibitive.
HVDC lines are cheap per km, it's the substations that are expensive. And a HVDC grid is not a single line, it's a grid. If you draw a line across, say, the US or Europe on a full-scale high-renewables grid you'll cross half a dozen or so HVDC lines.
Pay wall, didn't read.
Just write "Ignorant and proud of it", and we can let this drop.
Then perhaps you should leave the energy policy analysis to people who pass peer review in Nature, don't you think?
What? People can't speak their mind here?
"Proudly ignorant" is not something that people here welcome, as a general rule.
Interesting. You say that it is impossible for nuclear to become cheaper than wind and solar.
Barring some radical and massive reversal of 7-decade-long trends, on a technology that often takes over a decade just to build a plant just to test it out and can take decades to discover problems (aka, incredibly slow moving). For the foreseeable future, the answer is simply "No".
That's fine, we can go back to 400 BC for the theory of nuclear power. People have been using wind to propel ships and pump water for much longer.
Exactly my point: an argument based on when a technology was first researched is idiotic. What matters is the trends for commercial-scale power generation over the past decade.
My point is that wind power has been getting preferential treatment by the government for decades
This is absurd. Wind was largely just research projects from the 70s to the 80s, and not huge ones - and the PTC does not represent a large amount of money, and even without it out wind + peaking is vastly cheaper than nuclear. Meanwhile, you know how many commercial nuclear plants there would be if they had to pay for
China has a much greater population density, and to get from the interior to the coast you have to pass the infamously rugged Taihang Mountains.
Europe HVDC extensively too, and largely undersea, which is much harder than building overland lines.
Overland HVDC lines are a fraction of the challenge of building an overland AC grid, namely because you use far fewer total lines (they're just much higher power), and thus don't need to acquire and permit nearly as much land. The cost per km of installed HVDC grid is surprisingly low. It's the substations that are expensive.
The problem with HVDC is that single lines are point to point, not networked, and substation equipment is tremendously expensive. Though the cost of the actual materials for the lines themselves is relatively cheap, the cost of the dream of the many hundreds of HVDC lines required to partially mitigate intermittancy is super high because of land acquisition. That includes purchase, legal battles galore, and the cost of uncertainty from those battles. Its a tremendous cost nobody wants to talk about. Its simple to say just build a shitload of lines.
Or we could consider a clean energy strategy that maximizes use of the investments already made in the existing grid, which is serving us well every day.
The cost of the HVDC grid was a major point of the paper linked above. The answer, 0,3 cents per kilowatt hour, but saving 1,1 cents per kilowatt hour in reduced generation/peaking hardware capital costs. And yes, it's a grid of long lines with two endpoints, not a replacement for AC grids. It's for moving bulk power long distance, not between local substations.
. Its simple to say just build a shitload of lines.
Because simply saying "build a shitload of lines" gets you an article in Nature?
HVDC is not some hypothetically-might-be-good technology, it's increasingly forming the backbone of industrialized nations. The US is falling behind everyone else on this front. Even China is making the US look bad.
Explaining why it will not work would require a post much longer than yours
You mean, like a peer-reviewed article in Nature? Like the one I linked, making precise case I did?
A big problem with wind and solar is that the energy production curves do not match well with demand curves.
Solar actually matches very well. Not for 100% of the demand, but most of it. Wind tends to match for that which solar does not.
Claiming diversity in location and source, through the use of long power lines, will fix this is overly optimistic
Peer-reviewed studies in Nature are not "optimism", they're what's colloquially known as "science".
To obtain this diversity requires large land masses that many nations do not have
Like?
Virtually all of Earth's population lives on large land masses.
If there is an international grid then this brings in politics that many people in Europe which rely on Russian natural gas would be familiar with
So relying on gas pipelines from Russia is a-okay but relying on power lines to other countries is terrible?
Using natural gas, or other fossil fuel back up, to maintain stability on the electricity grid means relying on cheap natural gas
If you'd actually read the Nature article you would have seen that they analyzed various natural gas price scenarios. Furthermore, when the fuel is only used for peaking, its cost becomes relatively minor compared to the cost of the plant. It's NG baseload that suffers from expensive NG, not peaking.
As you admit storage of energy is dependent on having a hydro electric dam nearby,
You have a strange definition of "dependent", given that I listed multiple different technologies, and pointed out multiple times that as per the Nature study, it's not needed as all. And then to top it off you added the word "nearby" into there, in a discuss in entirely premised on a high power long distance HVDC grid.
which is almost always the case, then people will burn natural gas
Which was, as was mentioned many times, the premise of the Nature article.
I'm no expert in energy policy
Then perhaps you should leave the energy policy analysis to people who pass peer review in Nature, don't you think?
What I've found is that any future energy plan that does not include nuclear power is always going to be lacking in some way.
Which is the sort of thing you would believe as a person who's no expert in energy policy.
The reality is that it's common these days for nuclear plants to cost over $10W in capital costs alone. The price is just plain absurd. Nuclear has always been much more popular on K Street than Wall Street. And it's one of the few industries on Earth that's shown a negative learning curve - costs growing over time rather than decreasing.
The "nuclear renaissance" has died. They made claims that they could make it safer and cheaper. The former claim is untested, but the latter case turned out to be very much not true.
People will dispute my claims on nuclear power being cheap
Yes, people tend to dispute false statements.
then I must ask, how much is this "smart" grid, energy storage, HVDC transmission, and so forth going to cost?
1) The study included no smart grid 2) The study included no energy storage. 3) HVDC was about 0.3 cents per kWh, but saved about 1.1 cents per kWh in capital investment by being able to better utilize generation hardware.
Nuclear power is only expensive now because we forgot how to do it.
This person was making this same nonsense claim the last time the topic came up on Slashdot. I wrote a huge, long rebuttal. And here they are again, making the same ridiculous claim.
The short summary: UV is inefficiently used by solar panels and makes up only a few percent of solar radiation (and a fair chunk of it does get blocked by clouds, even if part of it makes it through); near-IR is readily blocked by clouds and is useless to solar panels; the temperature effect is small (as you note); and (again as you note) there's nearly a direct correlation between cloud cover and actual measured generation. Also countering the temperature effect is the concentration effect; for a given temperature, a panel has higher efficiency when there is more light shining on it. The most efficient solar cells use built-in fresnel concentrators to take advantage of this (as well as other tricks such as frequency splitting so that each subcell is optimal for the frequencies of photons falling on them).
I don't understand this. I've stood right underneath one on a windy day and it wasn't that much louder than the wind. Is the appearance the problem? I'd love some in my valley if they'd actually do something to reduce our extreme surface winds. Too bad they don't have as much of a reduction as one would like.
I've long been tempted to try to implement a low cost windbreak-turbine hybrid system, so that when you build a windbreak, you also get power from it - without it costing much more than traditional windbreak solutions. Basically, think posts with holes to feed cables through at regular heights and low abrasion bushings or coatings at the holes. Nothing particularly special. Push them into the ground as usual. Run a high tension metal wire through each holes, so that you now have a wire fence. Take a reel of spiraled metal or durable plastic, like a collapsible vertical axis wind turbine and cut it at a length to pass between each set of posts. The material should have enough give and be dull at the edges so that it does not injure people or livestock when spinning. Tightly clip the spiral around the wire so that it will exert a rotational torque on it when there's wind, turning each wire into something like a vertical axis wind turbine on its side. As for the wires, at regular intervals, rather than passing through a post, terminate them at a mini generator (bolted through the hole, with an anchor for the next wire to start on the far side). Declare one wire in the windbreak to be the "live wire". All mini-generators need to be rectified and voltage converted, then chained in series (upping the voltage) up to the live wire. Connections across the live wire are chained in parallel (upping the current). The beginning and ends of the live wire are routed into a breaker box for usage, after first passing through an inverter.
Seems like it should work. A challenge might be that performance would probably be pretty sensitive to wire tension, so if you want long runs (to reduce the number of generators / increase generator size), you'd need some combination of very good anchoring and/or an automatic tensioner. Also, being at ground level, you'd need to make sure that your materials are fatigue resistant, since turbulence is highest near the surface. There are certainly cheaper ways to make wind power, but if what you actually need is a windbreak and would like to get some power along with it...
Slashdot Mirror
Look, you can debate how deep a recession would have been without any particular set of policies. But this isn't an "up for debate" issue. The move was planned. There is no ground whatsoever to take credit for it.
Taking credit for a move that had already been planned for over a year makes you happy?
No; apparently you didn't notice the MW capacities on those bars. The vast majority are on the upper end. See Figure 8 to see the averages for each year (DNI). The 2012 average was 7.4.
Believe it or not, people tend to build the most solar capacity in the brightest areas.
Because inverters aren't always sized to the maximum physically possible for the panels to deliver; it's not always worth sizing it to the maximum physically possible generation.
The paper defines the sample:
What about that do you object to? Do you want them to include plants that haven't been run for a full year? Furthermore, the study was clearly conducted in 2014 because that's when the newest reference is (even though the PDF date is 2015). So exactly where's the problem? Do you think there's been some sort of collapse in capacity factor figures in the past several years, reversing the previous trend? If so, why? Lastly, on what grounds do you want to reject those that use tracking when ones that use tracking are being built? The difference between tracking and non-tracking is not that great regardless in high-solar resource areas, aka the areas where the vast majority of plant capacity has been deployed (see figure 7)
They still haven't fixed it here in Iceland.
It's strange, I would have thought that their algorithm would be location-indifferent. Perhaps that was just naive of me.
You don't back up intermittency with baseload, you back it up with peaking (or load following for slower changes).
Just like has always been done to handle changes in demand or loss of production capacity due to sudden outages or scheduled maintenance.
Indeed. Up to a certain point adding more solar actually makes load following easier. Also, wind and solar tend to run opposite each other: solar peaks in the day, while wind peaks at night; high pressure systems bring low wind and high sun, while low pressure systems bring high wind and low sun; etc.
Solar and wind both benefit greatly however from a HVDC grid, to allow for timeshifting - aka, people using power after the sun's gone down from a place where the sun is still up, and vice versa. The last study I read on the topic (in Nature) calculated the cost of the grid for the US at 0.3 cents per kilowatt hour, but saving 1.1 cents per kWh in peaking costs.
Nuclear makes terrible peaking or load-following. The economics of nuclear is already disastrous, even with the government picking up the liability for catastrophic coverage (which no private company would insure - what insurance company would take on, say, the $200B Fukushima liability?). Capital costs of $10/W or more are common - not counting operations and decommissioning. But these economics figures are based around the concept of 85-90% capacity factor. If you start running it as load following, or worse peaking, then your capacity factor plummets, and your price per watt correspondingly skyrockets.
Peaking plants are generally fossil plants because the plant isn't very expensive, maybe $1 a watt or so. Most of the costs of a fossil plant are in the fuel. Hydro also functions well as peaking and load following.
Boy, gee, your counter of a peer reviewed study with "flat assertion from Mr D from 63" sure is convincing!
DNI = Intensity of the solar resource
IRL = DC capacity of the array vs. the AC inverter rating
They have graphs breaking down the different plant types and solar resources vs. their capacity factors.
Right, trust a random person's blog, not the EIA? Yeah, I'll stick with the EIA, thank you. The blog's "well, if we eliminate the plants we don't like and then assume that half of the power that grid operators add will be poor home installs... " stuff is stretching to say the least.
Except that's not how it works. The nameplate capacity of a solar plant is based around how much power it produces in ideal lighting conditions. If you use more efficient panels, then you've upped the nameplate capacity, not the capacity factor. The capacity factor is average actual generation over nameplate.
"They just have to be!" - a last desperate grasp at dying technologies.
Don't get me wrong, they will continue to have a use on the grid - just not the same use. Until storage becomes cheaper than peaking**, fossil fuels will continue to be used as peaking. Natural gas in particular makes an excellent peaking fuel. But their days as baseload are at an end. Renewables have gotten too cheap over the past decade. These $1.50/W renewables plants - sometimes even closer to $1/W - are just insanely cheap compared to alternatives, even taking into account the capacity factor and need for peaking or storage. The Trump administration could slow the replacement of fossil fuels by revoking the PTC and the ITC, but they're not that big; it will only slow the fossil fuel phaseout, not prevent it. If they wanted to prevent it, they'd have to actively penalize renewables relative to fossil fuels.
** Hydro plant uprating is currently cheaper than peaking. But without a nationwide HVDC grid, it only provides localized peaking. Li-ion prices may well make storage a cheaper option than fossil fuel peaking if some of the current price forecasts are met (price halving due to some of the large production scaleups in development, like the Gigafactory and others) - but are more expensive than fossil fuel peaking today. Compressed air storage is also generally more expensive than fossil fuel peaking. Solar thermal storage likewise. Sometimes industrial loadshifting is cheaper than peaking. Pumped hydro can be cheaper than peaking, but it requires the right geography, and again, without a long-distance high power grid, only provides localized peaking support.
Otherwise he'll get run into massive amounts of cost and delays due to existing underground infrastructure - of which some old elements may not be marked accurately (or even at all) on any map.
I can only guess that he feels he has some alternative design for a tunnel boring machine that could be cheaper than today's designs and more tolerant to problematic geology. A thought that may or may not be accurate.
The discussion was not about EM drive. And nobody has done what you're describing, they've just been pouring huge amounts of power into the thing inside vacuum chambers and measuring "thrust" near lower bounds of their measurement equipment's sensitivity. XKCD said it best.
Furthermore, let's stop obscuring it behind the name "EM drive" and call it for what it is: "Shawyer's Fantastical Perpetual Motion Machine". Because that's literally what's being proposed: a violation of the laws of physics that would allow for perpetual motion. Versus the obvious answer of measurement error / mass loss / etc, I'm going to have to side with the latter.
As a general rule, the experiments can't be "verified, confirmed and reproduced". That's a large part of the reason why this ended up as fringe science.
The most logical explanation is that measuring precise energy/heat flows over long periods of time and measuring miniscule quantities of isotopes without them being overwhelmed by contamination is difficult to do without error.
I wouldn't be willing to categorically rule that out because you don't have to have such an effect uniform across the entire electrode; it could be concentrated at field peaks, such as the tips of dendrites, and thus only affect, for example, a fraction of a millionth of the mass.
But I agree, it does not sound likely. And that gamma explanation sounds extremely dodgy, if that's what they're arguing.
Elemental transmutation is standard nuclear physics - particularly neutron capture. The issue is that you go through a lot of of nuclear reactions and a lot of energy for a very small amount of transmutation. So what might possibly be economical for energy production is totally uneconomical for producing, say, gold. Not to mention that you have to isolate the targeted substance afterward.
The only transmutation of commercial value is for production of specific isotopes, such as for medical, industrial, or space uses.
The theory that they're plugging in this article is that in some situations you can "dress" an electron with extra mass in a LENR cell via electromagnetic fluctuations, enabling election capture and the emission of a neutrino and a low energy neutron, which is readily captured.
My thoughts too.
This in particular got me:
Huh? Now how is that supposed to happen?
Looking up the theory I found this article, where they describe the theory: intense electromagnetic fields at the surface dress electrons with extra mass, which allows electron capture to form a cold neutron and a neutrino. Cold neutrons are pretty much immediately captured causing a transmutation reaction. That's all pretty basic physics, if you accept the premise that you're getting heavy electrons from intense electromagnetic field effects (which they argue for). But what about the gamma? No explanation there.
I see this page tries to offer a plain-english description of the theory for the gamma:
If that's accurate, that's very weak indeed...
I've told you what it says. You could also pirate it if you're not willing to pay for it. The fact however that you're indifferent to research published in Earth's most prestigious science journal says enough.
Good. Then let's vastly reduce Europe's natural gas needs with renewables.
And cease to be at the mercy of a foreign nation for a high-renewables grid, as NG needs for peaking are below local production capacity. So cheer.
False.
False. They are being deployed as we speak. In Europe in particular, which has high energy prices, they're not particularly imposing. However, it's cheaper to just interconnect diverse grids with different sources, ala the Nature article.
HVDC lines are cheap per km, it's the substations that are expensive. And a HVDC grid is not a single line, it's a grid. If you draw a line across, say, the US or Europe on a full-scale high-renewables grid you'll cross half a dozen or so HVDC lines.
Just write "Ignorant and proud of it", and we can let this drop.
"Proudly ignorant" is not something that people here welcome, as a general rule.
Barring some radical and massive reversal of 7-decade-long trends, on a technology that often takes over a decade just to build a plant just to test it out and can take decades to discover problems (aka, incredibly slow moving). For the foreseeable future, the answer is simply "No".
Exactly my point: an argument based on when a technology was first researched is idiotic. What matters is the trends for commercial-scale power generation over the past decade.
This is absurd. Wind was largely just research projects from the 70s to the 80s, and not huge ones - and the PTC does not represent a large amount of money, and even without it out wind + peaking is vastly cheaper than nuclear. Meanwhile, you know how many commercial nuclear plants there would be if they had to pay for
China has a much greater population density, and to get from the interior to the coast you have to pass the infamously rugged Taihang Mountains.
Europe HVDC extensively too, and largely undersea, which is much harder than building overland lines.
Overland HVDC lines are a fraction of the challenge of building an overland AC grid, namely because you use far fewer total lines (they're just much higher power), and thus don't need to acquire and permit nearly as much land. The cost per km of installed HVDC grid is surprisingly low. It's the substations that are expensive.
The cost of the HVDC grid was a major point of the paper linked above. The answer, 0,3 cents per kilowatt hour, but saving 1,1 cents per kilowatt hour in reduced generation/peaking hardware capital costs. And yes, it's a grid of long lines with two endpoints, not a replacement for AC grids. It's for moving bulk power long distance, not between local substations.
Because simply saying "build a shitload of lines" gets you an article in Nature?
HVDC is not some hypothetically-might-be-good technology, it's increasingly forming the backbone of industrialized nations. The US is falling behind everyone else on this front. Even China is making the US look bad.
You mean, like a peer-reviewed article in Nature? Like the one I linked, making precise case I did?
Solar actually matches very well. Not for 100% of the demand, but most of it. Wind tends to match for that which solar does not.
Peer-reviewed studies in Nature are not "optimism", they're what's colloquially known as "science".
Like?
Virtually all of Earth's population lives on large land masses.
So relying on gas pipelines from Russia is a-okay but relying on power lines to other countries is terrible?
If you'd actually read the Nature article you would have seen that they analyzed various natural gas price scenarios. Furthermore, when the fuel is only used for peaking, its cost becomes relatively minor compared to the cost of the plant. It's NG baseload that suffers from expensive NG, not peaking.
You have a strange definition of "dependent", given that I listed multiple different technologies, and pointed out multiple times that as per the Nature study, it's not needed as all. And then to top it off you added the word "nearby" into there, in a discuss in entirely premised on a high power long distance HVDC grid.
Which was, as was mentioned many times, the premise of the Nature article.
Then perhaps you should leave the energy policy analysis to people who pass peer review in Nature, don't you think?
Which is the sort of thing you would believe as a person who's no expert in energy policy.
The reality is that it's common these days for nuclear plants to cost over $10W in capital costs alone. The price is just plain absurd. Nuclear has always been much more popular on K Street than Wall Street. And it's one of the few industries on Earth that's shown a negative learning curve - costs growing over time rather than decreasing.
The "nuclear renaissance" has died. They made claims that they could make it safer and cheaper. The former claim is untested, but the latter case turned out to be very much not true.
Yes, people tend to dispute false statements.
1) The study included no smart grid
2) The study included no energy storage.
3) HVDC was about 0.3 cents per kWh, but saved about 1.1 cents per kWh in capital investment by being able to better utilize generation hardware.
**smacks head*
This person was making this same nonsense claim the last time the topic came up on Slashdot. I wrote a huge, long rebuttal. And here they are again, making the same ridiculous claim.
The short summary: UV is inefficiently used by solar panels and makes up only a few percent of solar radiation (and a fair chunk of it does get blocked by clouds, even if part of it makes it through); near-IR is readily blocked by clouds and is useless to solar panels; the temperature effect is small (as you note); and (again as you note) there's nearly a direct correlation between cloud cover and actual measured generation. Also countering the temperature effect is the concentration effect; for a given temperature, a panel has higher efficiency when there is more light shining on it. The most efficient solar cells use built-in fresnel concentrators to take advantage of this (as well as other tricks such as frequency splitting so that each subcell is optimal for the frequencies of photons falling on them).
I don't understand this. I've stood right underneath one on a windy day and it wasn't that much louder than the wind. Is the appearance the problem? I'd love some in my valley if they'd actually do something to reduce our extreme surface winds. Too bad they don't have as much of a reduction as one would like.
I've long been tempted to try to implement a low cost windbreak-turbine hybrid system, so that when you build a windbreak, you also get power from it - without it costing much more than traditional windbreak solutions. Basically, think posts with holes to feed cables through at regular heights and low abrasion bushings or coatings at the holes. Nothing particularly special. Push them into the ground as usual. Run a high tension metal wire through each holes, so that you now have a wire fence. Take a reel of spiraled metal or durable plastic, like a collapsible vertical axis wind turbine and cut it at a length to pass between each set of posts. The material should have enough give and be dull at the edges so that it does not injure people or livestock when spinning. Tightly clip the spiral around the wire so that it will exert a rotational torque on it when there's wind, turning each wire into something like a vertical axis wind turbine on its side. As for the wires, at regular intervals, rather than passing through a post, terminate them at a mini generator (bolted through the hole, with an anchor for the next wire to start on the far side). Declare one wire in the windbreak to be the "live wire". All mini-generators need to be rectified and voltage converted, then chained in series (upping the voltage) up to the live wire. Connections across the live wire are chained in parallel (upping the current). The beginning and ends of the live wire are routed into a breaker box for usage, after first passing through an inverter.
Seems like it should work. A challenge might be that performance would probably be pretty sensitive to wire tension, so if you want long runs (to reduce the number of generators / increase generator size), you'd need some combination of very good anchoring and/or an automatic tensioner. Also, being at ground level, you'd need to make sure that your materials are fatigue resistant, since turbulence is highest near the surface. There are certainly cheaper ways to make wind power, but if what you actually need is a windbreak and would like to get some power along with it...
Didn't try "silicor process", eh? ;)