I wonder how many people missed your meaning. The usual phrase is "I couldn't care less". As in I give no care at all. Saying "I could care less" is saying there is a level of care lower that my current level of care therefore I care. So many people get it wrong.
Why would I calculate an CF when I have the real data?
Say a certain technology has a CF of 20%. If I need to generate 8,760MW (1*365*24) more of power per year I would need to install at least 1/.2 = 5MW of capacity to possibly meet that demand. One can go further and look at the different CFs for the different times of the day and year and figure out the smallest plant that will meet the demand.
As I said already: power companies don't use CFs to manage their grids... you can not use a CF to manage a grid.
I never said they uses CF to manage the grid. I said they uses CF to get an idea of how much of each different type of supply would be needed to meet demand. You are looking at minute to minute output while I am looking at overall value of installing new capacity. They are different objectives. As I have shown CF is used to calculate leveled costs for different technologies. That goes into deciding which technology to build out. You are looking at grid management I am talking about construction planning. They are very different. They do not us CF to manage grids they use CFs to decide what to build and how much. It goes back to my original statement that one watt of PV installed does not equal one watt of conventional thermal installed. The difference can be shown by the CF. CF is a construction planning tool not an operations tool.
Maybe a number of Electrical Engineers have been re-designated Computer Engineers. By Computer Engineers I mean the people who design computer hardware.
If capacity factor is never used then why is it tracked? Also the following quote from this report seems to refute your idea that CF is not used in planning.
In the tables in this discussion, the levelized cost for each technology is evaluated based on the capacity factor indicated, which generally corresponds to the high end of its likely utilization range.
That is very unlikely. I suggest to use links like this one: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e... [fraunhofer.de] to figure CFs
Lets use last year's data. Installed wind capacity was 35.678 GW. Actual production was 42.6 TWh. So 35.678*365*24= 312.54 TWh possible production. 46.6/312.54 = 13.63% CF. That is using real world numbers. By the way at the end of 2013 they had 32.5 GW of wind installed. Even using that number and ignoring the capacity installed in 2014 we get a capacity factor of 14.96%
Erm, you don't get it? You use REAL DATA not a CF.
If you use real data to calculate the CF then you are using real data to make a decision.
You don't do that at all. Every technology has its well known advantages and disadvantages, you don't need a CF to figure that.
CF will give you a rough idea of how much energy from each type is needed. Say you need to produce another 10GWhs of electricity per month in an area. How much solar capacity would be needed to cover it? How much coal capacity would cover it?
Even if you only plan a small roof top solar installation or as a farmer a small wind mill, using CFs (from where ever you wanna pick them) gives you much to much margin of errors for any useful calculation of ROI.
Sure if you use a single CF number to calculate. There are daily and monthly CF that can get a much more accurate picture. We are also not talking about ROI but actual production to meet needed demand.
This vehicle may drive parts of the way but it will not drive all the way. There will be times when the driver, who has to be there by law, will take over. Autonomous cars have yet to be able to navigate parking lots. There may not even be a string of states where autonomous cars can legally drive?
Most cities at have at most less than 10 new helicopters. A new agency has to be pretty big to be able to afford a helicopter. Also helicopters have flight crews on board who are highly trained will avoid collisions at all costs. Helicopter pilots have a vested interest in not colliding as they may die. They have worked out protocols on dealing with big news stories and very few collisions occur. I had to go back to 2007 to find the last one. In the last 40 yeas there have been 43 accidents involving news helicopters gathering news. Of that, only three were mid air collisions. Considering the number of news helicopters around the world that is a very good safety record.
Compare that with the number of news agencies, magazines, bloggers, etc that can afford a drone. Take the Academy Awards red carpet event as an example. Do you really think it is safe to have a few hundred drones remotely flown by untrained pilots hovering over the crowd jockeying for position to get the best shot? So what if one drone bumps another one and causes a crash? The pilot who caused the crash is fine even though someone on the ground may be injured. It would even be dificult to prove who caused the accident. Drone pilots have no personal incentive to avoid crashes.
Sorry but helicopters vs drones is not a valid comparison.
There are too many comparisons between a person flying a single drone for recreational use and another person flying a single drone for commercial use. That is not the problem. The real problem is the difference between a few people flying a few drones for a couple of hours a week and a number of companies flying hundreds of drones for many more hours each day of the week. The expected number of accidents for commercial drones is much higher than for recreational drones. The skies can handle a few unregulated drones. Add a few hundred commercial drones to the same space and there will be collisions, crashes and injuries. Had the FAA allowed free use of commercial drones they would be the first agency blamed when someone got hurt.
Think of the commercial interests who might want to use drones; 1. Deliveries; food, medications, small package, etc. 2. News agencies 3. Paparazzi 4. Remote tourism There are many other commercial uses of drones. The difference between recreational and commercial drone use is numbers. Just look at the issue with paparazzi. Do you really want 30 or 40 drones flown by inexperienced people hovering close to crowds hoping to get a good photograph? Do you really want hundreds of drones delivering packages in urban areas?
The FAA has yet to work out how to license commercial use so they can control congestion and flight rules. They also need rules to be able to identify the owner of drones when something goes wrong. These problems are being looked into but the solutions are not as simple as some people seem to believe. Some of the simple problems have been worked out but all the issues need to be worked out before large numbers of drones can be licensed.
On the topic of Wind capacity factor, it is possible to have a 100%+ factor for short periods but for long periods the actual figures are much lower. Take a lok at these numbers. Notice the wind capacity factor for Germany based on real historical data is just under 17.5%. Capacity factor is averaged over a period of time and is inexact. Inexact is not useless as it gives an idea of what can actually be produces from a given capacity.
Everyone working in that industry simply uses the hard number of MW produced
Sorry but that is complete nonsense. No intelligent grid planner would consider solar panels installed in New Mexico the same as solar panels installed in Alaska. In Alaska capacity factors vary greatly month my month and that needs to be taken into account when calculating availability of electricity. PVs installed in rainy Seattle will produce much less electricity than ones in Arizona even though they have the same "capacity".
That is another reason why CF is a nonsense metric...as it depends for wind and solar on the place where you build the plant.
Different installations have different capacity factors. PVs installed in Alaska have different capacity factors than those installed in Arizona. There is no single capacity factor for any technology. Notice that I gave a range for CF for solar as it varies between locations.
Because to calculate that CF you actually have to know tomorrows production.
CF is an approximate number. To calculate it one uses data from similar installations in similar climates. For example, the maximum CF for PVs is 50% as it is dark and average of 50% of the time.
How would you propose to compare to different technologies when the "name plate" capacity is calculated so differently and the actual ability to produce electricity is dependant on very different parameters?
CF is a very important metric. Every watt of installed capacity does not produce 24 watt hours of electricity per day. CF is very important when comparing the impact of installing capacity from different sources into the grid.
It has nothing to do with dispatchability, plenty of wind farms have a CF far above 100% Considering that CF is the ratio of the actual electricity production vs the theoretical maximum electricity production it is impossible to have a CF of greater than 100%.
I forgot to mention that litigants go after the deep pockets. If they can't get the money from the person who used the CNC machine they will try to gt it from the company that made the CNC machine. Even if they do not succeed the company is out the litigation costs.
Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.
Turning down production on a thermal plant is quite easy. One just shunts the steam directly to the cooling towers instead of the turbines. Yes it is wasteful but this method is called standby capacity. It can be quick ramped up and down depending on where the steam is directed.
Take a look at this real world report. Look at page 213 and onward. You will see that hard coal is used to follow demand. Look at page 213 in particular. That week was quite peaky.
The artice talkes about new capacity and says nothing about closing plants.
New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row last year, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a report released today from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)
New natural gas plants are being built instead of new coal plants. Considering the glut in natural gas this seems reasonable.
I personally don't see a difference between a dispatachable coal plant that idles at less then 10% of its load over night, just to keep it warm, and peaks to 90% of its max over daytime versus a solar plant that idles during darkness at 0% and ramps up following daylight to 100% around local noon (or what ever daytime the plant owner decided to have its maximum.
There is a huge difference. Say if at 2AM another coal plant goes down for some reason. The dispatachable coalplant that is idling at 10% can be quickly boosted to provide the lost power. That can not be done with solar. See the difference? The other point is that who says the local demand peak is at noon?
Anyway, if you want to throw around with CFs learn how limited their meaning is... otherwise you shoot yourself into the foot if you build your own plant and make an idiot about yourself if you talk about big scale energy production.
Very true, All I was pointing out is that installed capacity is only a starting point and several other factors come into the equation.
Remington has an engineering and testing department and has been in business for many years. That is very different than some guy with as CNC machine producing receivers.
Comparing capacity alone does not produce a clear picture. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel. In the real world conditions vary which causes output to vary. The capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%. The capacity factor of a coal burning plant is 63.8%. A watt of coal capacity is worth from 1.9 to 4.9 times as much as watt of PV capacity.
Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not. That make coal power more stable and valuable.
Even in this case, they should provide it, at a reasonable rate with reasonable deductables and all that stuff
Rates are based on risk and usually calculated by looking at many similar companies and the claims filed against them. Being the only company in the business leaves nothing to compare to. How would you come up with a rate for a unique company in a dangerous business?
Anything else is just based on principals that do not align with the law.
It could come down to "We have no idea what to charge you and therefore will not risk it".
Prove you are not a serial murderer. If someone has the means to do something it is very difficult to prove they did not do it. That is why the burden of proof is always on the prosecutor to prove a suspect did a crime and not on the suspects to prove they did not do it.
What is new in this report is the fact that they manipulated the RAM bit flips to turn them into an exploit.
From the paper;
Left unchecked, disturbance errors can be exploited by a malicious program to breach memory protection and compromise the system. With some engineering effort, we believe we can develop Code 1a into a disturbance attack that injects errors into other programs, crashes the system, or perhaps even hijacks control of the system. We leave such research for the future since the primary objective in this work is to understand and prevent DRAM disturbance errors.
They have demonstrated the bit flip but not the exploit. An exploit would be much more difficult as you would need access to memory right next to the location you need to flip. Then flip it in just the right pattern to not crash. They have done the easy part and left the hard part to someone else.
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And meet 0% of the demand at night if they don't have storage which is very expensive.
I wonder how many people missed your meaning. The usual phrase is "I couldn't care less". As in I give no care at all. Saying "I could care less" is saying there is a level of care lower that my current level of care therefore I care. So many people get it wrong.
Why would I calculate an CF when I have the real data?
Say a certain technology has a CF of 20%. If I need to generate 8,760MW (1*365*24) more of power per year I would need to install at least 1/.2 = 5MW of capacity to possibly meet that demand. One can go further and look at the different CFs for the different times of the day and year and figure out the smallest plant that will meet the demand.
As I said already: power companies don't use CFs to manage their grids ... you can not use a CF to manage a grid.
I never said they uses CF to manage the grid. I said they uses CF to get an idea of how much of each different type of supply would be needed to meet demand. You are looking at minute to minute output while I am looking at overall value of installing new capacity. They are different objectives. As I have shown CF is used to calculate leveled costs for different technologies. That goes into deciding which technology to build out. You are looking at grid management I am talking about construction planning. They are very different.
They do not us CF to manage grids they use CFs to decide what to build and how much. It goes back to my original statement that one watt of PV installed does not equal one watt of conventional thermal installed. The difference can be shown by the CF. CF is a construction planning tool not an operations tool.
Maybe a number of Electrical Engineers have been re-designated Computer Engineers. By Computer Engineers I mean the people who design computer hardware.
If capacity factor is never used then why is it tracked? Also the following quote from this report seems to refute your idea that CF is not used in planning.
In the tables in this discussion, the levelized cost for each technology is evaluated based on the capacity factor indicated, which generally corresponds to the high end of its likely utilization range.
That is very unlikely. I suggest to use links like this one: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e... [fraunhofer.de] to figure CFs
Lets use last year's data. Installed wind capacity was 35.678 GW. Actual production was 42.6 TWh. So 35.678*365*24= 312.54 TWh possible production. 46.6/312.54 = 13.63% CF. That is using real world numbers. By the way at the end of 2013 they had 32.5 GW of wind installed. Even using that number and ignoring the capacity installed in 2014 we get a capacity factor of 14.96%
Erm, you don't get it? You use REAL DATA not a CF.
If you use real data to calculate the CF then you are using real data to make a decision.
You don't do that at all. Every technology has its well known advantages and disadvantages, you don't need a CF to figure that.
CF will give you a rough idea of how much energy from each type is needed.
Say you need to produce another 10GWhs of electricity per month in an area. How much solar capacity would be needed to cover it? How much coal capacity would cover it?
Even if you only plan a small roof top solar installation or as a farmer a small wind mill, using CFs (from where ever you wanna pick them) gives you much to much margin of errors for any useful calculation of ROI.
Sure if you use a single CF number to calculate. There are daily and monthly CF that can get a much more accurate picture. We are also not talking about ROI but actual production to meet needed demand.
So this is a long distance test of simple lane following.
This vehicle may drive parts of the way but it will not drive all the way. There will be times when the driver, who has to be there by law, will take over. Autonomous cars have yet to be able to navigate parking lots. There may not even be a string of states where autonomous cars can legally drive?
I have watched those videos. Remember that they are the highlight reels and not the bloopers.
Most cities at have at most less than 10 new helicopters. A new agency has to be pretty big to be able to afford a helicopter. Also helicopters have flight crews on board who are highly trained will avoid collisions at all costs. Helicopter pilots have a vested interest in not colliding as they may die. They have worked out protocols on dealing with big news stories and very few collisions occur. I had to go back to 2007 to find the last one. In the last 40 yeas there have been 43 accidents involving news helicopters gathering news. Of that, only three were mid air collisions. Considering the number of news helicopters around the world that is a very good safety record.
Compare that with the number of news agencies, magazines, bloggers, etc that can afford a drone. Take the Academy Awards red carpet event as an example. Do you really think it is safe to have a few hundred drones remotely flown by untrained pilots hovering over the crowd jockeying for position to get the best shot? So what if one drone bumps another one and causes a crash? The pilot who caused the crash is fine even though someone on the ground may be injured. It would even be dificult to prove who caused the accident. Drone pilots have no personal incentive to avoid crashes.
Sorry but helicopters vs drones is not a valid comparison.
There are too many comparisons between a person flying a single drone for recreational use and another person flying a single drone for commercial use. That is not the problem. The real problem is the difference between a few people flying a few drones for a couple of hours a week and a number of companies flying hundreds of drones for many more hours each day of the week. The expected number of accidents for commercial drones is much higher than for recreational drones. The skies can handle a few unregulated drones. Add a few hundred commercial drones to the same space and there will be collisions, crashes and injuries. Had the FAA allowed free use of commercial drones they would be the first agency blamed when someone got hurt.
Think of the commercial interests who might want to use drones;
1. Deliveries; food, medications, small package, etc.
2. News agencies
3. Paparazzi
4. Remote tourism
There are many other commercial uses of drones. The difference between recreational and commercial drone use is numbers. Just look at the issue with paparazzi. Do you really want 30 or 40 drones flown by inexperienced people hovering close to crowds hoping to get a good photograph? Do you really want hundreds of drones delivering packages in urban areas?
The FAA has yet to work out how to license commercial use so they can control congestion and flight rules. They also need rules to be able to identify the owner of drones when something goes wrong. These problems are being looked into but the solutions are not as simple as some people seem to believe. Some of the simple problems have been worked out but all the issues need to be worked out before large numbers of drones can be licensed.
On the topic of Wind capacity factor, it is possible to have a 100%+ factor for short periods but for long periods the actual figures are much lower. Take a lok at these numbers. Notice the wind capacity factor for Germany based on real historical data is just under 17.5%. Capacity factor is averaged over a period of time and is inexact. Inexact is not useless as it gives an idea of what can actually be produces from a given capacity.
Everyone working in that industry simply uses the hard number of MW produced
Sorry but that is complete nonsense. No intelligent grid planner would consider solar panels installed in New Mexico the same as solar panels installed in Alaska. In Alaska capacity factors vary greatly month my month and that needs to be taken into account when calculating availability of electricity. PVs installed in rainy Seattle will produce much less electricity than ones in Arizona even though they have the same "capacity".
That is another reason why CF is a nonsense metric...as it depends for wind and solar on the place where you build the plant.
Different installations have different capacity factors. PVs installed in Alaska have different capacity factors than those installed in Arizona. There is no single capacity factor for any technology. Notice that I gave a range for CF for solar as it varies between locations.
Because to calculate that CF you actually have to know tomorrows production.
CF is an approximate number. To calculate it one uses data from similar installations in similar climates. For example, the maximum CF for PVs is 50% as it is dark and average of 50% of the time.
How would you propose to compare to different technologies when the "name plate" capacity is calculated so differently and the actual ability to produce electricity is dependant on very different parameters?
Actually, CF is a nonsense metric.
CF is a very important metric. Every watt of installed capacity does not produce 24 watt hours of electricity per day. CF is very important when comparing the impact of installing capacity from different sources into the grid.
It has nothing to do with dispatchability, plenty of wind farms have a CF far above 100%
Considering that CF is the ratio of the actual electricity production vs the theoretical maximum electricity production it is impossible to have a CF of greater than 100%.
Dispatchability is a component of CF. If one can not dispatch a capacity when needed then the CF will be lower.
I forgot to mention that litigants go after the deep pockets. If they can't get the money from the person who used the CNC machine they will try to gt it from the company that made the CNC machine. Even if they do not succeed the company is out the litigation costs.
Coal is used mostly for base load. It's pretty slow to ramp up or down in respond to demand - once you shovel in a certain amount of coal to start it burning, you cannot stop it from burning. Nuclear is like that too.
Turning down production on a thermal plant is quite easy. One just shunts the steam directly to the cooling towers instead of the turbines. Yes it is wasteful but this method is called standby capacity. It can be quick ramped up and down depending on where the steam is directed.
Take a look at this real world report. Look at page 213 and onward. You will see that hard coal is used to follow demand. Look at page 213 in particular. That week was quite peaky.
The artice talkes about new capacity and says nothing about closing plants.
New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row last year, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a report released today from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)
New natural gas plants are being built instead of new coal plants. Considering the glut in natural gas this seems reasonable.
I personally don't see a difference between a dispatachable coal plant that idles at less then 10% of its load over night, just to keep it warm, and peaks to 90% of its max over daytime versus a solar plant that idles during darkness at 0% and ramps up following daylight to 100% around local noon (or what ever daytime the plant owner decided to have its maximum.
There is a huge difference. Say if at 2AM another coal plant goes down for some reason. The dispatachable coalplant that is idling at 10% can be quickly boosted to provide the lost power. That can not be done with solar. See the difference? The other point is that who says the local demand peak is at noon?
Anyway, if you want to throw around with CFs learn how limited their meaning is ... otherwise you shoot yourself into the foot if you build your own plant and make an idiot about yourself if you talk about big scale energy production.
Very true, All I was pointing out is that installed capacity is only a starting point and several other factors come into the equation.
Remington has an engineering and testing department and has been in business for many years. That is very different than some guy with as CNC machine producing receivers.
Comparing capacity alone does not produce a clear picture. It must be tempered by the capacity factor. That is the ratio of the theoretical capacity of a device to the actual output from the device. The capacity of solar panels is found by exposing the panel to a set amount of light. It is used to compare panels and is only part of calculating the actual output of the panel. In the real world conditions vary which causes output to vary. The capacity factor of PVs in the US is anywhere from 13% to 33%. The capacity factor of a coal burning plant is 63.8%. A watt of coal capacity is worth from 1.9 to 4.9 times as much as watt of PV capacity.
Then there is the fact the coal power is dispatchable while solar is not. That make coal power more stable and valuable.
Even in this case, they should provide it, at a reasonable rate with reasonable deductables and all that stuff
Rates are based on risk and usually calculated by looking at many similar companies and the claims filed against them. Being the only company in the business leaves nothing to compare to. How would you come up with a rate for a unique company in a dangerous business?
Anything else is just based on principals that do not align with the law.
It could come down to "We have no idea what to charge you and therefore will not risk it".
Should a company be able to decide to serve to because of ideology, or not?
Some ideologies are overridden by rights. There is not right to manufacture guns but there is a right to freedom of association. See the difference?
1. Fake the time stamps to look lile eastern US
2. Add a well known NSA project name to the code
3. "Leak" information about these issues.
4. Profit
Could this information be a plant to point the finger at the NSA?
Prove you are not a serial murderer. If someone has the means to do something it is very difficult to prove they did not do it. That is why the burden of proof is always on the prosecutor to prove a suspect did a crime and not on the suspects to prove they did not do it.
What is new in this report is the fact that they manipulated the RAM bit flips to turn them into an exploit.
From the paper;
Left unchecked, disturbance errors can be exploited by a malicious program to breach memory protection and compromise the system. With some engineering effort, we believe we can develop Code 1a into a disturbance attack that injects errors into other programs, crashes the system, or perhaps even hijacks control of the system. We leave such research for the future since the primary objective in this work is to understand and prevent DRAM disturbance errors.
They have demonstrated the bit flip but not the exploit. An exploit would be much more difficult as you would need access to memory right next to the location you need to flip. Then flip it in just the right pattern to not crash. They have done the easy part and left the hard part to someone else.