I can't comment much about your situation, as I don't know where you live. I can, however, say this in general.
* Intermittency is nothing new to grid operators; through the entire history of power generation, they've been having to deal with demand fluctuation and random losses of plants and lines. Hardware is, and always will be, built to the minimum needed to statistically guarantee a given level of uptime
* There have been many, many studies on the issue of high-renewables grids - here's an example covering cost analyses on wind + solar + HVDC + NG peaking (no power storage) using current technology only.
* A HVDC grid actually saves about three times more than it costs due to lower hardware (and thus capital) requirements for grid operators. While HVDC lines and conversion stations pose their own point of failure risks, overall they increase grid stability against localized failures, particularly cascading failures (AC sync failures don't cascade over HVDC). The stability benefits of HVDC links has led to the US to use a number of them even without long lines, just to connect different disjoint grids together (the lines are the cheap part, relatively - it's conversion stations that are expensive). HVDC provides baseload from Quebec hydro to the northeastern US. Europe and China both make heavy use of HVDC - Europe mainly for submarine links, China mainly for bringing power from the interior to the densely populated coast (plus some HVAC). Both have huge expansion plans.
* Large HVDC grids cause both timeshifting (aka, it's nighttime wind in on the east coast during the evening demand peak on the west and on the west coast during the morning rush in the east coast; likewise with solar shifting) and weather diversity (whenever a front is moving off the east, there's almost always a new one (or more) that has come in from the west).
* Solar and wind tend to run counter to each other. Wind peaks at night; solar in the day. High pressure zones create low winds and lots of sun; low pressure zones create high winds and little sun.
* Combined with NG peaking, these factors can provide a statistically guaranteed uptime with low power costs.
* All of this is based around there being no storage - which is a pessimistic assumption:
** Dirt cheap storage can be had by uprating hydro turbine houses, combined with the aforementioned HVDC grid. Hydro thus shifts from baseload to peaking. There's extensive hydro on both coasts that can be uprated.
** Pumped hydro - as standalone plants or as modifications to existing plants - can often be affordable, but depends entirely on local geography.
** Compressed air has gained some interest, although is not yet cost effective.
** Batteries used to be by far the most expensive option, but their prices too have been plummeting, to the point that li-ion is starting to make some grid penetration. There's not going to be some huge takeoff of it at current prices, but given that large scale production (gigafactory, etc) is expected to halve costs, that would seriously take off. There's other rival chemistries also seeking for the low cost per-Wh / per-W crown.
But, storage is not a necessity when you have peaking, source diversity, and geographic diversity with a modern, well-connected grid.
Are you picturing that solar plants have significantly non-capital costs for some reason?
It's very easy to go from the capital costs and a capacity factor figure to the cost per MWh. And yes, ~$1.60/W is very competitive with fossil fuel generation. Just a fossil plant alone (which is a small fraction of the amortized costs - by far, most of the costs are fuel) costs nearly that much. They have higher capacity factors, and the ability to ramp makes their power more valuable, but it's not that much of a difference.
Yeah, trade wars are lovely. Especially when the other side counters with retaliatory penalties.
Even if the price reduction curve slows, there's no reason to expect it to stop or reverse. A large portion of the cost of solar farms is the logistics and installation; it's not simply directly proportional to the cost of panels. All aspects of the cost of solar have been falling.
Likewise, technology is not going to just freeze. Just a dozen kilometers from my land, for example, Silicor is planning to build the world's first full-scale plant using an aluminum-based technology to produce solar silicon. Rather than using volatiles like silicon tetrachloride, it's done entirely in the liquid phase. They make a molten aluminum/silicon alloy (using aluminum from the smelter across the fjord), then cool it, causing the silicon to precipitate out as a layer on the top, with most of the impurities left in the aluminum (where they're harmless). The "waste" aluminum, now containing some silicon, is actually a more valuable alloy than the raw aluminum that they purchase, and is sold. A bit of aluminum is left on the silicon, which is dissolved (along with an additional amount of residual impurities) with hydrochloric acid, leaving polyaluminum chloride - a chemical in demand in water purification. In short, there's no waste products; everything that would be "waste" is actually value-added. And the lack of the use of volatiles makes it a comparatively green process.
It's not so simple of an issue. The colour of our skin has evolved - taking into account clothing, which we've been wearing for quite some time - relative to our environment's sun exposure. Melanin is our natural sunscreen. People in sunny locations tend to evolve darker skin because melanoma was more of a threat than vitamin D deficiency. People in dim locations tended to evolve lighter skin because vitamin D deficiency was more of a threat (high latitudes strike doubly, as people wear more clothes to stay warm).
If you're light skinned and live in a sunny location, you probably should be more concerned about melanoma than vitamin D deficiency. If you're dark skinned and live in a dim location, you should probably be more concerned about vitamin D deficiency than melanoma. At least, that's what evolution tells us.
What "people living inland away from seas, lakes and great rivers"? The reason you see populations of people near bodies of water is because water is essential for life, not because it contains fish. Ancient Egyptian civilization was by the Nile because its floods provided water and nutrients to their crops, not because some lack of fish would have transformed them into blithering idiots. Same with Mesopotamia. Same with the Indus valley. Same with the early Chinese civilizations.
It's very tricky, though. A big problem is a lot of time the water you inject just runs off. With conventional geothermal, you already have the water there; you know it's a stable reservoir. With hot dry rock, it's a risk every time.
I have seen some technologies attempt to avoid the problem. GTherm, for example, has an interesting approach: rather than pumping water into and then out of the rock, they have a single branching well that acts like a giant heat sink, cased in a thermally conductive grout. So you go 5+km down with a simple straight well, and then do a couple dozen angled branches on the order of a couple dozen to several hundred meters long each. Not only does it mean that it's geology-ambivalent (the only reason the outside rock matters is how easy it is to drill through it and how hot it is), but also that the fluid in your cooling loop is always clean and non-corrosive, and not associated with any toxic or climate-altering gases.
But as with everything else, it all comes down to, "Can it be done economically?"
Bay of Pigs: only marginally an intelligence failure (improper assessment of the willingness of Cubans to rise up). Primarily a tactics failure and a misunderstanding of how far Kennedy would go to protect the operation. Church Committee: Not an intelligence failure Iran-Contra Affair: Not an intelligence failure MKultra: Not an intelligence failure Manuals: Not an intelligence failure
I seem to recall much information from the intelligence community in the run up to Iraq II which laid out the case as to what they knew..
This seems to be the go-to talking point these days. It's also 100% wrong. The CIA's conclusion was that it could not establish solid connections (either for or against) between Iraq and al-Qaeda or Iraq and WMDs. The Bush administration's response was to create the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon to "reassess" the intelligence (basically, to make up whatever the hell they wanted). The CIA got it right; the Bush administration deliberately distorted to to pass their agenda.
That's the one that got me. Generally, almost anything that reduces aging / induces regeneration / etc is also associated with cancer. That they're not detecting an increased incidence here is a huge finding.
Hopefully the followup research will be just as promising.
Except that what the CIA is stating is that Russia broke into both the DNC and RNC, but only choose to release the info from the DNC.
You know, you guys, you very well could be the next target. And Russia isn't the only country learning whether or not they can get away with stuff like this. Do you think China would be above doing likewise? Iran? North Korea?
Did you even read the article? They're not blocking anything. They're making a "disputed" icon that appears next to the story, and a confirmation popup if you want to share it. You can still post and see whatever nonsense you want. Moon landing fake? Earth flat? Pearl Harbor false flag? Share your heart out.
No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
At the meeting, Trump introduced billionaire Wilbur Ross, his Commerce secretary pick, and Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, his choice for director of the National Economic Council. "They're going to do fair trade deals," Trump said. "They're going to make it easier for you to trade across borders, because there are a lot of restrictions, a lot of problems. If you have any ideas on that, that would be great."
I'm sure THAT's exactly what most Trump voters thought they were getting. "Hi billionaires! Here's my cabinet of billionaires and Goldman Sachs executives. They'll get rid of any pesky obstacles to globalization that you encounter for you."
Because this country of 330k people produces the sixth most geothermal power on the planet, comprising 26% of electricity production and 53% of primary energy production, including the 3rd largest geothermal plant in the world? And is pioneering new production methods?
(Tombstone is barely a thousand people, so not even close; Iceland is closer in population to, say, Anaheim... and about the area of Kentucky).
Because the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is supposed to just stop spreading?
We average a surface volcanic eruption once every year and a half, and subsurface spreading of dikes much more commonly than that. Each eruption releases energy levels measured in megatonnes. Yet eruptions represent just a fraction of the energy being unleashed by the spreading; most simply dissipates to the surface via conduction or, more commonly, through the heating of groundwater.
Our rock will continue heating beneath us. We may locally deplete a deposit, but there will always be more.
For geo, that's huge. 200-300 is typical. Some low temperature ones go down as low as 100. 600 is out of the ballpark for geo.
It's not the same thing as running a power plant or a locomotive on supercritical steam. Power plants and locomotives don't involve multi-kilometer-long cased wells channeling a fluid whose contents you have no control over.
We mainly just get quakes when doing water injection for enhanced recovery. Quakes don't propagate well here, and the plants aren't exactly in the middle of major cities.
The higher you go, the higher the figure you can harvest. Effects at the surface are generally rather minimal, although there are some small effects. It's a shame, honestly, as I think most people in windy areas (at least speaking for myself) would like more of a reduction on surface wind speeds.
How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it?
Geo is generally locally, temporarily depletable. Over broad regions or over long periods of time, it's renewable. Nuclear decay inside the earth yields an average of 0.06W per square meter heat input. While that's far less than solar (even accounting for night, angles, inefficiencies, etc), it's particularly useful because it concentrates and stores. So if you drill a well into a particular hot water reservoir, you're harnessing the heat that flows up through that entire reservoir, not just immediately at the point of the borehole. And even if you're depleting it faster than it's being added (which is generally anticipated to be the case by significant margins, although these things are surprisingly difficult to assess), there's always other areas to move into; over somewhere between dozens and thousands of years (depending on the reservoir), the old site will reheat.
Note that this isn't always the case; sometimes you have "fossil heat". For example, in some places we tap heat from old lava flows or dikes. They're hot because they represent heat from another location (deep magma sources). They're hotter than their surrounding rock, and if you take the heat from them, they're never again going to be hotter than their surrounding rock.
Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem.
Climate does not work that way. Planet surfaces very rapidly equalize to their equilibrium temperature, as radiation increases relative to the fourth power of temperature. The only way to have a meaningful difference in the surface temperature is to change the radiation balance (which can happen in a wide range of factors, affecting both incoming and outgoing radiation), and thus the equilibrium. Simply having "something hot at points on the surface" is virtually meaningless.
We've hit magma before (drilling at Krafla) - only the second time in the world that it happened. Totally by accident. The magma backed a couple dozen meters up the borehole, then stopped.
The first time anyone ever accidentally drilled into a magma chamber was in Hawaii; they immediately sealed up the borehole as a result. Here they just decided "what the heck..." and started pumping water down it to see if they could turn it into a production well. And the performance turned out to be superb.
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
Trump built a company built around repeatedly ripping people off, making significantly less money than he would have had he just put his money into a fund that tracks the S&P and then sat on the couch all day.
Let me know when Tesla uses its on-vehicle software to track where its users are going for political or personal reasons and hires private investigators to dig up dirt on critical journalists, while basing its entire business model on breaking local laws, on the premise that by the time localities go after them it's already expanded into bigger markets and can either "go legit" or simply leave the smaller markets that are cracking down.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't comment much about your situation, as I don't know where you live. I can, however, say this in general.
* Intermittency is nothing new to grid operators; through the entire history of power generation, they've been having to deal with demand fluctuation and random losses of plants and lines. Hardware is, and always will be, built to the minimum needed to statistically guarantee a given level of uptime
* There have been many, many studies on the issue of high-renewables grids - here's an example covering cost analyses on wind + solar + HVDC + NG peaking (no power storage) using current technology only.
* A HVDC grid actually saves about three times more than it costs due to lower hardware (and thus capital) requirements for grid operators. While HVDC lines and conversion stations pose their own point of failure risks, overall they increase grid stability against localized failures, particularly cascading failures (AC sync failures don't cascade over HVDC). The stability benefits of HVDC links has led to the US to use a number of them even without long lines, just to connect different disjoint grids together (the lines are the cheap part, relatively - it's conversion stations that are expensive). HVDC provides baseload from Quebec hydro to the northeastern US. Europe and China both make heavy use of HVDC - Europe mainly for submarine links, China mainly for bringing power from the interior to the densely populated coast (plus some HVAC). Both have huge expansion plans.
* Large HVDC grids cause both timeshifting (aka, it's nighttime wind in on the east coast during the evening demand peak on the west and on the west coast during the morning rush in the east coast; likewise with solar shifting) and weather diversity (whenever a front is moving off the east, there's almost always a new one (or more) that has come in from the west).
* Solar and wind tend to run counter to each other. Wind peaks at night; solar in the day. High pressure zones create low winds and lots of sun; low pressure zones create high winds and little sun.
* Combined with NG peaking, these factors can provide a statistically guaranteed uptime with low power costs.
* All of this is based around there being no storage - which is a pessimistic assumption:
** Dirt cheap storage can be had by uprating hydro turbine houses, combined with the aforementioned HVDC grid. Hydro thus shifts from baseload to peaking. There's extensive hydro on both coasts that can be uprated.
** Pumped hydro - as standalone plants or as modifications to existing plants - can often be affordable, but depends entirely on local geography.
** Compressed air has gained some interest, although is not yet cost effective.
** Batteries used to be by far the most expensive option, but their prices too have been plummeting, to the point that li-ion is starting to make some grid penetration. There's not going to be some huge takeoff of it at current prices, but given that large scale production (gigafactory, etc) is expected to halve costs, that would seriously take off. There's other rival chemistries also seeking for the low cost per-Wh / per-W crown.
But, storage is not a necessity when you have peaking, source diversity, and geographic diversity with a modern, well-connected grid.
Are you picturing that solar plants have significantly non-capital costs for some reason?
It's very easy to go from the capital costs and a capacity factor figure to the cost per MWh. And yes, ~$1.60/W is very competitive with fossil fuel generation. Just a fossil plant alone (which is a small fraction of the amortized costs - by far, most of the costs are fuel) costs nearly that much. They have higher capacity factors, and the ability to ramp makes their power more valuable, but it's not that much of a difference.
Yeah, trade wars are lovely. Especially when the other side counters with retaliatory penalties.
Even if the price reduction curve slows, there's no reason to expect it to stop or reverse. A large portion of the cost of solar farms is the logistics and installation; it's not simply directly proportional to the cost of panels. All aspects of the cost of solar have been falling.
Likewise, technology is not going to just freeze. Just a dozen kilometers from my land, for example, Silicor is planning to build the world's first full-scale plant using an aluminum-based technology to produce solar silicon. Rather than using volatiles like silicon tetrachloride, it's done entirely in the liquid phase. They make a molten aluminum/silicon alloy (using aluminum from the smelter across the fjord), then cool it, causing the silicon to precipitate out as a layer on the top, with most of the impurities left in the aluminum (where they're harmless). The "waste" aluminum, now containing some silicon, is actually a more valuable alloy than the raw aluminum that they purchase, and is sold. A bit of aluminum is left on the silicon, which is dissolved (along with an additional amount of residual impurities) with hydrochloric acid, leaving polyaluminum chloride - a chemical in demand in water purification. In short, there's no waste products; everything that would be "waste" is actually value-added. And the lack of the use of volatiles makes it a comparatively green process.
It's not so simple of an issue. The colour of our skin has evolved - taking into account clothing, which we've been wearing for quite some time - relative to our environment's sun exposure. Melanin is our natural sunscreen. People in sunny locations tend to evolve darker skin because melanoma was more of a threat than vitamin D deficiency. People in dim locations tended to evolve lighter skin because vitamin D deficiency was more of a threat (high latitudes strike doubly, as people wear more clothes to stay warm).
If you're light skinned and live in a sunny location, you probably should be more concerned about melanoma than vitamin D deficiency. If you're dark skinned and live in a dim location, you should probably be more concerned about vitamin D deficiency than melanoma. At least, that's what evolution tells us.
What "people living inland away from seas, lakes and great rivers"? The reason you see populations of people near bodies of water is because water is essential for life, not because it contains fish. Ancient Egyptian civilization was by the Nile because its floods provided water and nutrients to their crops, not because some lack of fish would have transformed them into blithering idiots. Same with Mesopotamia. Same with the Indus valley. Same with the early Chinese civilizations.
It's very tricky, though. A big problem is a lot of time the water you inject just runs off. With conventional geothermal, you already have the water there; you know it's a stable reservoir. With hot dry rock, it's a risk every time.
I have seen some technologies attempt to avoid the problem. GTherm, for example, has an interesting approach: rather than pumping water into and then out of the rock, they have a single branching well that acts like a giant heat sink, cased in a thermally conductive grout. So you go 5+km down with a simple straight well, and then do a couple dozen angled branches on the order of a couple dozen to several hundred meters long each. Not only does it mean that it's geology-ambivalent (the only reason the outside rock matters is how easy it is to drill through it and how hot it is), but also that the fluid in your cooling loop is always clean and non-corrosive, and not associated with any toxic or climate-altering gases.
But as with everything else, it all comes down to, "Can it be done economically?"
Bay of Pigs: only marginally an intelligence failure (improper assessment of the willingness of Cubans to rise up). Primarily a tactics failure and a misunderstanding of how far Kennedy would go to protect the operation.
Church Committee: Not an intelligence failure
Iran-Contra Affair: Not an intelligence failure
MKultra: Not an intelligence failure
Manuals: Not an intelligence failure
And your most recent example is 30 years old.
This seems to be the go-to talking point these days. It's also 100% wrong. The CIA's conclusion was that it could not establish solid connections (either for or against) between Iraq and al-Qaeda or Iraq and WMDs. The Bush administration's response was to create the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon to "reassess" the intelligence (basically, to make up whatever the hell they wanted). The CIA got it right; the Bush administration deliberately distorted to to pass their agenda.
That's the one that got me. Generally, almost anything that reduces aging / induces regeneration / etc is also associated with cancer. That they're not detecting an increased incidence here is a huge finding.
Hopefully the followup research will be just as promising.
Except that what the CIA is stating is that Russia broke into both the DNC and RNC, but only choose to release the info from the DNC.
You know, you guys, you very well could be the next target. And Russia isn't the only country learning whether or not they can get away with stuff like this. Do you think China would be above doing likewise? Iran? North Korea?
Did you even read the article? They're not blocking anything. They're making a "disputed" icon that appears next to the story, and a confirmation popup if you want to share it. You can still post and see whatever nonsense you want. Moon landing fake? Earth flat? Pearl Harbor false flag? Share your heart out.
No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
Swamps indeed.
I'm sure THAT's exactly what most Trump voters thought they were getting. "Hi billionaires! Here's my cabinet of billionaires and Goldman Sachs executives. They'll get rid of any pesky obstacles to globalization that you encounter for you."
Because this country of 330k people produces the sixth most geothermal power on the planet, comprising 26% of electricity production and 53% of primary energy production, including the 3rd largest geothermal plant in the world? And is pioneering new production methods?
(Tombstone is barely a thousand people, so not even close; Iceland is closer in population to, say, Anaheim... and about the area of Kentucky).
The only people I don't want to see "brought here" are racists like you.
Because the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is supposed to just stop spreading?
We average a surface volcanic eruption once every year and a half, and subsurface spreading of dikes much more commonly than that. Each eruption releases energy levels measured in megatonnes. Yet eruptions represent just a fraction of the energy being unleashed by the spreading; most simply dissipates to the surface via conduction or, more commonly, through the heating of groundwater.
Our rock will continue heating beneath us. We may locally deplete a deposit, but there will always be more.
For geo, that's huge. 200-300 is typical. Some low temperature ones go down as low as 100. 600 is out of the ballpark for geo.
It's not the same thing as running a power plant or a locomotive on supercritical steam. Power plants and locomotives don't involve multi-kilometer-long cased wells channeling a fluid whose contents you have no control over.
We mainly just get quakes when doing water injection for enhanced recovery. Quakes don't propagate well here, and the plants aren't exactly in the middle of major cities.
I assume you mean wind turbines? Here you go.
The higher you go, the higher the figure you can harvest. Effects at the surface are generally rather minimal, although there are some small effects. It's a shame, honestly, as I think most people in windy areas (at least speaking for myself) would like more of a reduction on surface wind speeds.
Geo is generally locally, temporarily depletable. Over broad regions or over long periods of time, it's renewable. Nuclear decay inside the earth yields an average of 0.06W per square meter heat input. While that's far less than solar (even accounting for night, angles, inefficiencies, etc), it's particularly useful because it concentrates and stores. So if you drill a well into a particular hot water reservoir, you're harnessing the heat that flows up through that entire reservoir, not just immediately at the point of the borehole. And even if you're depleting it faster than it's being added (which is generally anticipated to be the case by significant margins, although these things are surprisingly difficult to assess), there's always other areas to move into; over somewhere between dozens and thousands of years (depending on the reservoir), the old site will reheat.
Note that this isn't always the case; sometimes you have "fossil heat". For example, in some places we tap heat from old lava flows or dikes. They're hot because they represent heat from another location (deep magma sources). They're hotter than their surrounding rock, and if you take the heat from them, they're never again going to be hotter than their surrounding rock.
Climate does not work that way. Planet surfaces very rapidly equalize to their equilibrium temperature, as radiation increases relative to the fourth power of temperature. The only way to have a meaningful difference in the surface temperature is to change the radiation balance (which can happen in a wide range of factors, affecting both incoming and outgoing radiation), and thus the equilibrium. Simply having "something hot at points on the surface" is virtually meaningless.
We've hit magma before (drilling at Krafla) - only the second time in the world that it happened. Totally by accident. The magma backed a couple dozen meters up the borehole, then stopped.
The first time anyone ever accidentally drilled into a magma chamber was in Hawaii; they immediately sealed up the borehole as a result. Here they just decided "what the heck..." and started pumping water down it to see if they could turn it into a production well. And the performance turned out to be superb.
Fission != Nuclear decay
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a ,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
From your article:
Wow, one percent reduction in revenue - people were clearly quite ticked off....
(Given that newspapers are a declining industry to begin with, I wouldn't be surprised if that beats the industry average)
Trump built a company built around repeatedly ripping people off, making significantly less money than he would have had he just put his money into a fund that tracks the S&P and then sat on the couch all day.
On the one hand, the fox is advising us that we're spending too much on henhouse fencing.
Then again, we should probably listen to him, as he has a degree in hen studies.
Let me know when Tesla uses its on-vehicle software to track where its users are going for political or personal reasons and hires private investigators to dig up dirt on critical journalists, while basing its entire business model on breaking local laws, on the premise that by the time localities go after them it's already expanded into bigger markets and can either "go legit" or simply leave the smaller markets that are cracking down.