There has been dozens of "promissing" solutions to make liquid fuels from sunlight. Dates back to G.W.Bush mandate. Celulosic ethanol enables making ethanol from grass and wood. Let the plants do it. Use genetic engineering to make diesel / jet fuel like compounds from bacteria / algae. Much like revolutionary batteries, 90% of announce techs never leads to anything commercial. Let's focus on real technology like solar PV / solar CSP / wind turbines / improving Li Ion economics / breeder nuclear reactors. Yes, I consider nuclear fusion another type of "promissing" technology that never gets anywhere. However I'm always hopeful.
Nope, that's not how ATC works. Aircraft can be re-routed. ATC almost never looses radio. And with the migration to ADS-B, while keeping the requirement for transponders, radar will have two completely independent parallel systems (the old transponder based and the new ADS-B/GPS based one). ADS-B infrastructure is a LOT cheaper than secondary radar (the stuff that talk to transponders), so having everything 100% redundant is logical. Also, secondary radar requires to be close to aircraft to allow for tight separation. ADS-B towers only need to have line of sight with aircraft to receive their signals. But should radar fail, there are procedures to cope with that. Throughput is greatly reduced, but aircraft can still land. In a busy airport should radar fail takeoffs might be greatly delayed. ADS-B also allows aircraft to self separate, they see each other without need for radar. This should one day allow for much higher traffic density even in airports without towers.
Its not by accident that flying is the safest way to go. Everything is carefully though out. And technology is helping even further. 2020 ADS-B mandate is coming. ATC will know where aircraft are within a few meters, where they are going.
I'm an actual private pilot with instrument privileges. Having a tower is useful, and there are lots of airports with too little traffic to justify an tower full time or at all. By adopting this type of remote presence it might be possible to staff airport towers full time, yielding an increase in safety instead. It might be possible to have tower services at airports that have no tower at all today. And there are plenty of airports with towers but with too little traffic to keep a single ATC professional busy most times. This new approach can be used for good or just shaving jobs. But the real problem is your ideological view that technology is always a force for irresponsible actions.
Even if we had a huge solar generation capacity, able to power 100% of North America's electricity need on a sunny summer day, that's still less than 1/3 of overall yearly electricity demands. Even if we had enough wind generating capacity to power 100% of North America's peak electricity demand on a windy winter night, that's still FAR less than 1/3 of total yearly electricity demands. That's assuming there's a massive electrical grid upgrade, enough to ship 100% of California's electricity needs from the east coast or NY state demands from the west coast. Just look at Germany's energiewende, in the best sunny day of the year, they can produce 2/3 of their instantaneous electricity demand from solar, but that's like less than 25% of yearly electricity demands. Solar+Wind creates a daunting energy storage problem. One we just don't have a solution in sight even 10-20 years from now.
That's right, cool, but uneconomical. Even the guy working the hardest to drop the cost of space launches by an order of magnitude states solar in space is a fool's errand. That's the problem with solar and wind, most of the people in favor are idiots when it comes down to economics and engineering. Even with the state of the art in affordable technology we don't have an economical solution to have solar+wind do anything over 1/3 of the world's total power demands, maybe even that is an overstatement. I'm pro solar, I'm pro wind, but I'm against the morons that think we don't need anything else in the future. Even with technology projected to be affordable 15 years from now we still don't have the solution to power even 50% of the world's total energy demands.
Chernobyl was estimated to cause millions of deaths. So far including all past and future expected deaths its down to 10 thousand. Fukushima killed 10 people (2 drowned, 8 industrial accidents in the cleanup), while the Tsunami killed 20 thousand. And most anti nuclear lunatics were sure Tokyo would be contaminated. My conclusion is even disregarding the utter lunatics, all radiation models lead to at least an order of magnitude in people affected, in the case of Chernobyl two orders of magnitude. People insist on thinking nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous, without studying one little bit about how they actually work. Its time we stopped once and for all using future probabilities but rather use past statistics to analyze nuclear safety. We've been using nuclear heavily in the world since the 80s. We know for a FACT nuclear is safe. Nuclear isn't causing cancers. Studies that try to impinge cancers on nuclear reactors are done on reactors built in chemically contaminated areas, the cancers are due to past non nuclear industrial activity rather than radiation. Coal is deadly. First get rid of COAL worldwide. Then we can talk about nuclear being safe or not. Coal is paying most professional anti nuclear interests. Most of them have ZERO interest in attacking coal. Follow the money.
$4000 a month usually buys you a Gbps dedicate link directly with a backbone provider (one of the cheapest ones). This is the first time I hear of a Gbps ISP (shared) link costing anything over US$ 500/mo in the USA.
Nukes too dangerous ? How many people died from nuclear power worldwide/US/whatever in the last 10 years, how about the last 20 years ? The numbers are positively tiny. For all the sensationalism, Fukushima killed a grand total of 10 people while the tsunami killed 20000. In the meantime, coal is killing hundreds every day (200000 yearly worldwide) and natural gas is killing about 10000 yearly worldwide. If we remove USSR nuclear accidents, nuclear power killed less people since its inception than natural gas kills yearly or coal kills every few weeks. I suggest you go take a real free online class on the subject and educate yourself on nuclear facts instead of the nuclear fiction you seem to know. The real problem with nuclear power is to make a comparison with airplanes we're still using the nuclear equivalent of large piston aircraft, rather than modern turbofans. We're using nuclear tech that was ideal for the US Navy in the 50s, and nobody wants to invest another US$ 10 billion on commercializing advanced (safer at a lower cost, much higher efficiency, quicker to build) nuclear tech. There are some limited efforts, but the US NRC regulation is so tied on outdated water cooled reactors it almost seem hopeless to design Gen IV reactors in the USA.
Care to prove anything you said ??? It's been said that Solyndra's business plan was alright until the chinese started dumping solar panels bellow cost. So its BAD when the US govt subsidizes market inovation but we don't say a thing when the Chinese do subsidies on a massive scale ? No, I don't have hard data. Solyndra was probably trying to do what Solar City is doing right now, they (Solar City) bought a USA solar panel maker, and are investing big on making their products much more efficient. Solyndra was attempting the same thing while building a new factory. If you have a big house, current solar panels aren't too bad, if you blanket just half of your roof space (the side that gets most of the solar radiation), you will produce more electricity than you can use on a yearly basis. But if you move to commercial/industrial users, even blanketing every inch available that customer will still fall far short of breaking even kWh wise. 1km2 worth of land gets 1GW of raw solar radiation at its best hours of the year. But current solar parks manage to produce 10-15% of that radiation into useable AC electricity. So at 10% net efficiency your 1km2 will produce 100MW peak. At 20% 200MW peak. If we could eventually achieve 40% net efficiency (already available on labs, perhaps 5 years away at high cost and 10-15 years away from economical prices), then every house that invests seriously on solar panels will become a large net producer of electricity. With most non vertical commercial buildings able to achieve self sufficiency on a yearly average. There are solar panels up to 35% efficiency available commercially but those are very expensive. The most affordable solar panels are under 15% efficiency. Solyndra was planning (and failed) and solar city will achieve is to increase solar panel efficiency to above 20%, perhaps enabling 20% net efficient solar farms without much of a cost premium.
Taking cheap shots are solyndra just shows how stupid you are. The Republican plan is to make renewable energy never become viable. Although I'm pro nuclear too, I hope solar can actually become a serious energy source by 2030. If we do it 100% free market, that will NEVER happen.
ALL HISTORY is WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS. The only way you get to read history by the loosing side is if they weren't decimated. Plus its very likely that the truth is neither exactly what either side will say. What we need to learn from history is lessons about how stupid powerful human beings can be. Trump is prime example of someone that could destroy the future of millions of human beings. Nope, I'm not a pacifist. I believe WWI, WWII and the first gulf war were the last bona fide justified wars (for the allied sides). But if you hear out what the Neo Nazis will say about WWII I'm sure you will hear something very different from what the Allies tell us. Military intervention is very different from an outright invasion. 2nd Gulf War was trumped up (pun intended). I was stupid enough to have believed it was justified, but it was flawed in every intent it had (getting rid of sadam was a bad idea if we thought we would get ISIS in exchange). Wise leaders must think about long term consequences of wars. I know NO modern republican politician that has that kind of Wisdom. NONE !
1 - $230/kWh is probably an upper bound for 2018 prices 2 - As the Li Ion market continues to grow aggressively, more and more Li Ion materials will be recycled from old batteries, recycling is cheaper than building with new raw materials 3 - There has been projections even lower than $200/kWh 4 - The math we should be doing is a 85kWh battery pack + a 20kW solar PV rooftop installation vs 25 years worth of gasoline + someone's electric bill, sunlight is free, the cost is the infraestructure to convert that into charge on a battery, 25 yrs worth of gasoline + 25 years worth of electric bill is typically upwards of US$ 50k By 2020 there will be an excellent market for refurbished 85D Model S, the car will cost less than what you will save in gasoline (even with today's low gasoline prices). The 85kWh pack is the upper model. There's also the 60kWh model with 200 mile range. A base 60kWh Model S can be purchased for less than $70k in some states with local incentives.
Li Ion batteries can be recycled into new batteries once worn off. Plus the raw materials in pure form inside batteries are very valuable (lithium, cobalt, and a majority of nickel). So, the only reason there would be pollution is if the owners of the batteries trash them on purpose, discarding any recycling credits. Its so much easier to separate the Lithium, Cobalt and Nickel from each other on a battery than purifying those for their respective raw ores. Everybody wins !
That's a huge lie. The military has zero involvement with civilian powerplants for decades. That's typical of the anti nuclear types, they recycle lies through the decades. This was true in the 60s and 70s, the plutonium made was given credit for its military value, regardless of no operational nuclear weapons made with reactor grade plutonium (high Pu240 content, risking fizzle and/or spontaneous detonation). Try again, this time with real data instead of made up lies.
Because the general population has been scaremongered into thinking that nuclear is inherently dangerous. Coal is dangerous. It actually kills scores of people every year. Nuclear can be dangerous in extreme scenarios. Some solar panels include lots of toxic chemicals. Don't let your children anywhere near solar panels. The cost problems related to nuclear are mostly due to nuclear regulatory ratcheting. While the anti nuclear types pretend the NRC is irresponsible, the fact is the NRC is paranoid about safety and cares very little about nuclear costs. There are plenty of examples of the NRC creating this or that nuclear regulation, estimating that regulation will cost x to implement, and when it's said and done, it actually costs 100x (two orders of magnitude more). So instead of costing 100 million to the whole US nuclear industry, it ends up costing US$ 10 billion instead. And the NRC never learns its lesson, doing it again, again, again and again. Nuclear professionals stated that a new nuclear reactor could be done at a tiny fraction of the current cost if there weren't any special nuclear regulations, and they could use normal coal/natural gas build procedures, in the end they could build a nuclear reactor for a few billion where if you order one today, the vendor will tell it it's a USD 10 billion project !
Uranium has 2 million times more energy per ton than Uranium. So when its said and done, considering that current nuclear reactor use less than 1% of mined uranium and most uranium mines have 1-2% ore concentration, you end up having to mine 0.5% uranium ore vs coal to get the same energy. Plus the nuclear industry is held to a very different safety standard and scrutiny, so it invests on safety not just on the nuclear plants, but throughout the whole supply chain, including mines. That's why there has been a single nuclear related death in the USA for over a decade, it was a uranium mining accident, a single death, compared to coal killing an estimated 13000 people yearly in the same USA, so we're comparing a single nuclear death for around 200k deaths from coal in the same period. If the coal industry were held to the same standards that nuclear is held (safety wise, radiation wise, fatality wise) the coal industry would be shutdown in a heartbeat. Big Coal used all of its influence to avoid being regulated like nuclear is.
Solar is useless in the winter, but in the winter ACs are off. But there's heating. Which is the aspect most greenies can't account into their big plans. I'm neither a greenie nor a radical pro nuclear. I want both. What matters to me is getting rid of coal, yesterday if possible. Solar and wind can help, but nuclear is actually more important than solar and wind combined. And solar really belongs on places that never get any snow/ice (due to more uniform insolation). Wind goes very well on places that have a lot of big hydro to load follow wind. My train of though is that of the PhD climatologists that stated we need the all of the above solution. Everything that doesn't emit CO2, we need a lot of it.
If all of europe would do "the same", we would not need energy storages, because the overproduction of state A in region a would be used to supply state B in region b...
How the hell do you know that when region A is overproducing there would actually be a region with a shortage ? If the core problem with intermittency, you can't pray for a supply/demand match. The only advantage of such a solution is that there would be lots of energy storage everywhere, so maybe you can export you over production to another area that is also overproducing but still has energy storage left. But there will often be times when there is over production everywhere, and times when there will be shortage everywhere, except for countries that actually have a large natural baseload reserve (aka big hydro).
There is plenty of evidence Areva EPR design was the result of lack of innovation. They designed a reactor without any major simplification, without using passive safety, just adding more and more engineered safety. With the current level of insane nuclear regulatory complexity Areva's design choices were the touch of death. Yet, I think China will manage to get their EPRs online, showing that even with all of their extra costs ariving from their design, a huge slice of the nuclear problem comes after the reactor is designed and licensed, but actual construction starts. China has a more realistic nuclear regulatory framework, like South Korea and India. In those countries reactors are being built at 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the USA or Europe.
Garbage. Coal is 10000 times more deadly than nuclear power in real numbers. Coal is a continous natural disaster. Nuclear needs a serious accident to maybe kill some people. Coal causes a lot of lung cancer, black lung disease. Coal is killing 200k people yearly worldwide. Natural gas kills every year more people than Chernobyl is projected to kill from actual radiation/cancers. Even if you add all the suicides from telling the liquidators they were going to die anyways, that's less than 3 years worth of natural gas deaths. Remember deep water horizon oil spill / explosion ? That was a natural gas explosion. The ensuing natural disaster was much worse than the actual nuclear part of Fukushima (people forget the Tsunami destroyed the houses). It gets worse. There is ample evidence low levels of chronic radiation exposure doesn't cause cancer at all. Studies to formally prove that have been sistematicly defunded / cancelled. I was exposed to radiation levels much higher than Fukushima on a monazite beach for months at end. My mom has been exposed to 10x that. It's not a secluded remote beach, its a crowded popular beach, that gets as crowded as florida's most popular beaches. Its called Guarapari in Brazil. Yes, that beach shown on Pandora's Promise. Just google: praias guarapari lotadas (Guarapari crowded beaches in Portuguese). Radiation levels are so high, one day's worth of exposure in those beaches are forbidden for nuclear workers. That's just one example of places thousands of people are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation that are considered deadly for anti nuclear radicals. Denver-CO, Salt Lake City-UT, every high altitude resort, in all of those places people are exposed to 10x more radiation than at sea level. Yet there are no studies that show that the extra radiation leads to higher cancers, but the anti nuclear types are allowed to claim no levels of radiation are safe. The whole logic breaks down every step of the way. Yet they are never convinced by facts, and their response is totally divorced from science. Green Peace has a total budget of above 200 million USD / yr. If they cared to actually prove anything, they could actually do the studies, yet they never to, always resorting to anecdotal evidence. If we're going to use anecdotal evidence, there is plenty of that pointing to "environmental" groups that attack nuclear power as being funded by coal / natural gas interests. When was the last time you heard of a "sit in" in front of a coal power plant ? But they do it all the time on nuclear stations.
If the whole nuclear regulatory framework were rolled back to just pre Chernobyl regulations, nuclear reactors would be built at half of their quoted prices, or 80% cheaper than current USA / Europe way over budget projects. Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. It is expensive not due to actual risks, but rather due to perceived risks. Chernobyl couldn't happen on any western reactor with existing regulations. The vast majority of measures taken after were precipitated, knee jerk reactions took to satisfy public hysteria. The latest US NRC annual senate hearing there were quite a few regulatory measures that were estimated to cost 1% than it actually costed the nuclear industry. Fukushima area radiation never got over slight cancer risk level, yet the public was being told a very different story by those that want nuclear to go away. If instead of reading anti nuclear paranoia websites, you go study nuclear power and radiation facts, you will see that nuclear facts are very reassuring. There are lots of ultra expensive, totally useless nuclear regulatory measures. Specially those that slow down nuclear construction and other procedures.
This whole debate is pointless cause your side is always proposing solutions without accounting for the costs, efficiency, you know, math. I would like to see an actual realistic complete plan to go 100% solar, wind, hydro and biomass in Germany. The whole cost figure.
No sites to build more nuclear reactors ? That's just pure and unadulterated garbage. Its the result of insane anti nuclear regulation that is designed to drive nuclear out of Germany, engineering and facts be damned.
In the meantime the gas pipeline from Russia has deep involvement of Gerhardt Schroeder. And Germany's coal will continue to be burned, cause keeping those jobs is more important than cleaning up the environment. That's the real reason for your anti nuclear bias. Politics and jobs. Energiewende is a huge jobs program. Don't sell it to the rest of the world as a solution. It's not.
Offshore wind is not baseload. Baseload is assured power. Offshore is intermittent power. If offshore wind was baseload, you wouldn't need to bother with weather forecasts at all. Just because it doesn't go from 0 to 100% everyday doesn't make it baseload.
Are you another merchant of doubt ? The more we dive into this discussion, the more your speech breaks down. You don't know what baseload is. You don't account for the costs of your solutions.
In the meantime Fukushima area is 95% safe to return right now. Where are the radiation deaths ? By 2025 we'll be talking about the cancers Fukushima didn't create.
Did you see the fact that UK electricity frequency standards had to be relaxed due to wind turbines, from 0.1% to 1% max oscilation ?
Do you realize I know you will never concede this debate, all I care is the opinions of others, cause you have demonstrated don't actually understand the whole system.
You can be a net exporter and still be paying more to import electricity than the exports. The electricity Denmark imports is dispatchable, the electricity Denmark exports is renewable overproduction. No point in arguing with you, you fail to see what's so clear. The system would break down if all of Europe did the same as Germany and Denmark. That's actually obvious to me and every electric grid professional.
If you use traditional load following NG plants, assuming some future plant with 40% efficiency (typical is under 35%), I think that's 24% efficiency, or you loose at least 4 parts for each part recovered !
Then you have 60% efficiency each way, or 36% efficiency round trip, and that's if you use a combined cycle gas plant, which aren't cheap, and aren't load following resources, like I said, CRAZY ! Are you paid to sell this nutty solution or just misinformed ? It is not by accident that energiewende is a lot more expensive than nuclear (yeah, even than Olkiluoto).
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There has been dozens of "promissing" solutions to make liquid fuels from sunlight.
Dates back to G.W.Bush mandate.
Celulosic ethanol enables making ethanol from grass and wood. Let the plants do it.
Use genetic engineering to make diesel / jet fuel like compounds from bacteria / algae.
Much like revolutionary batteries, 90% of announce techs never leads to anything commercial.
Let's focus on real technology like solar PV / solar CSP / wind turbines / improving Li Ion economics / breeder nuclear reactors.
Yes, I consider nuclear fusion another type of "promissing" technology that never gets anywhere.
However I'm always hopeful.
Nope, that's not how ATC works.
Aircraft can be re-routed.
ATC almost never looses radio.
And with the migration to ADS-B, while keeping the requirement for transponders, radar will have two completely independent parallel systems (the old transponder based and the new ADS-B/GPS based one).
ADS-B infrastructure is a LOT cheaper than secondary radar (the stuff that talk to transponders), so having everything 100% redundant is logical.
Also, secondary radar requires to be close to aircraft to allow for tight separation. ADS-B towers only need to have line of sight with aircraft to receive their signals.
But should radar fail, there are procedures to cope with that.
Throughput is greatly reduced, but aircraft can still land. In a busy airport should radar fail takeoffs might be greatly delayed.
ADS-B also allows aircraft to self separate, they see each other without need for radar. This should one day allow for much higher traffic density even in airports without towers.
Its not by accident that flying is the safest way to go. Everything is carefully though out. And technology is helping even further.
2020 ADS-B mandate is coming. ATC will know where aircraft are within a few meters, where they are going.
I'm an actual private pilot with instrument privileges.
Having a tower is useful, and there are lots of airports with too little traffic to justify an tower full time or at all.
By adopting this type of remote presence it might be possible to staff airport towers full time, yielding an increase in safety instead.
It might be possible to have tower services at airports that have no tower at all today.
And there are plenty of airports with towers but with too little traffic to keep a single ATC professional busy most times.
This new approach can be used for good or just shaving jobs.
But the real problem is your ideological view that technology is always a force for irresponsible actions.
Even if we had a huge solar generation capacity, able to power 100% of North America's electricity need on a sunny summer day, that's still less than 1/3 of overall yearly electricity demands.
Even if we had enough wind generating capacity to power 100% of North America's peak electricity demand on a windy winter night, that's still FAR less than 1/3 of total yearly electricity demands.
That's assuming there's a massive electrical grid upgrade, enough to ship 100% of California's electricity needs from the east coast or NY state demands from the west coast.
Just look at Germany's energiewende, in the best sunny day of the year, they can produce 2/3 of their instantaneous electricity demand from solar, but that's like less than 25% of yearly electricity demands.
Solar+Wind creates a daunting energy storage problem. One we just don't have a solution in sight even 10-20 years from now.
That's right, cool, but uneconomical.
Even the guy working the hardest to drop the cost of space launches by an order of magnitude states solar in space is a fool's errand.
That's the problem with solar and wind, most of the people in favor are idiots when it comes down to economics and engineering.
Even with the state of the art in affordable technology we don't have an economical solution to have solar+wind do anything over 1/3 of the world's total power demands, maybe even that is an overstatement.
I'm pro solar, I'm pro wind, but I'm against the morons that think we don't need anything else in the future.
Even with technology projected to be affordable 15 years from now we still don't have the solution to power even 50% of the world's total energy demands.
Chernobyl was estimated to cause millions of deaths.
So far including all past and future expected deaths its down to 10 thousand.
Fukushima killed 10 people (2 drowned, 8 industrial accidents in the cleanup), while the Tsunami killed 20 thousand. And most anti nuclear lunatics were sure Tokyo would be contaminated.
My conclusion is even disregarding the utter lunatics, all radiation models lead to at least an order of magnitude in people affected, in the case of Chernobyl two orders of magnitude.
People insist on thinking nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous, without studying one little bit about how they actually work.
Its time we stopped once and for all using future probabilities but rather use past statistics to analyze nuclear safety.
We've been using nuclear heavily in the world since the 80s. We know for a FACT nuclear is safe. Nuclear isn't causing cancers.
Studies that try to impinge cancers on nuclear reactors are done on reactors built in chemically contaminated areas, the cancers are due to past non nuclear industrial activity rather than radiation.
Coal is deadly.
First get rid of COAL worldwide.
Then we can talk about nuclear being safe or not.
Coal is paying most professional anti nuclear interests. Most of them have ZERO interest in attacking coal. Follow the money.
$4000 a month usually buys you a Gbps dedicate link directly with a backbone provider (one of the cheapest ones).
This is the first time I hear of a Gbps ISP (shared) link costing anything over US$ 500/mo in the USA.
Nukes too dangerous ?
How many people died from nuclear power worldwide/US/whatever in the last 10 years, how about the last 20 years ?
The numbers are positively tiny.
For all the sensationalism, Fukushima killed a grand total of 10 people while the tsunami killed 20000.
In the meantime, coal is killing hundreds every day (200000 yearly worldwide) and natural gas is killing about 10000 yearly worldwide.
If we remove USSR nuclear accidents, nuclear power killed less people since its inception than natural gas kills yearly or coal kills every few weeks.
I suggest you go take a real free online class on the subject and educate yourself on nuclear facts instead of the nuclear fiction you seem to know.
The real problem with nuclear power is to make a comparison with airplanes we're still using the nuclear equivalent of large piston aircraft, rather than modern turbofans. We're using nuclear tech that was ideal for the US Navy in the 50s, and nobody wants to invest another US$ 10 billion on commercializing advanced (safer at a lower cost, much higher efficiency, quicker to build) nuclear tech. There are some limited efforts, but the US NRC regulation is so tied on outdated water cooled reactors it almost seem hopeless to design Gen IV reactors in the USA.
Care to prove anything you said ???
It's been said that Solyndra's business plan was alright until the chinese started dumping solar panels bellow cost. So its BAD when the US govt subsidizes market inovation but we don't say a thing when the Chinese do subsidies on a massive scale ?
No, I don't have hard data.
Solyndra was probably trying to do what Solar City is doing right now, they (Solar City) bought a USA solar panel maker, and are investing big on making their products much more efficient. Solyndra was attempting the same thing while building a new factory.
If you have a big house, current solar panels aren't too bad, if you blanket just half of your roof space (the side that gets most of the solar radiation), you will produce more electricity than you can use on a yearly basis.
But if you move to commercial/industrial users, even blanketing every inch available that customer will still fall far short of breaking even kWh wise.
1km2 worth of land gets 1GW of raw solar radiation at its best hours of the year. But current solar parks manage to produce 10-15% of that radiation into useable AC electricity. So at 10% net efficiency your 1km2 will produce 100MW peak. At 20% 200MW peak. If we could eventually achieve 40% net efficiency (already available on labs, perhaps 5 years away at high cost and 10-15 years away from economical prices), then every house that invests seriously on solar panels will become a large net producer of electricity. With most non vertical commercial buildings able to achieve self sufficiency on a yearly average.
There are solar panels up to 35% efficiency available commercially but those are very expensive.
The most affordable solar panels are under 15% efficiency.
Solyndra was planning (and failed) and solar city will achieve is to increase solar panel efficiency to above 20%, perhaps enabling 20% net efficient solar farms without much of a cost premium.
Taking cheap shots are solyndra just shows how stupid you are.
The Republican plan is to make renewable energy never become viable.
Although I'm pro nuclear too, I hope solar can actually become a serious energy source by 2030. If we do it 100% free market, that will NEVER happen.
ALL HISTORY is WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS.
The only way you get to read history by the loosing side is if they weren't decimated.
Plus its very likely that the truth is neither exactly what either side will say.
What we need to learn from history is lessons about how stupid powerful human beings can be.
Trump is prime example of someone that could destroy the future of millions of human beings.
Nope, I'm not a pacifist. I believe WWI, WWII and the first gulf war were the last bona fide justified wars (for the allied sides).
But if you hear out what the Neo Nazis will say about WWII I'm sure you will hear something very different from what the Allies tell us.
Military intervention is very different from an outright invasion.
2nd Gulf War was trumped up (pun intended). I was stupid enough to have believed it was justified, but it was flawed in every intent it had (getting rid of sadam was a bad idea if we thought we would get ISIS in exchange).
Wise leaders must think about long term consequences of wars.
I know NO modern republican politician that has that kind of Wisdom. NONE !
1 - $230/kWh is probably an upper bound for 2018 prices
2 - As the Li Ion market continues to grow aggressively, more and more Li Ion materials will be recycled from old batteries, recycling is cheaper than building with new raw materials
3 - There has been projections even lower than $200/kWh
4 - The math we should be doing is a 85kWh battery pack + a 20kW solar PV rooftop installation vs 25 years worth of gasoline + someone's electric bill, sunlight is free, the cost is the infraestructure to convert that into charge on a battery, 25 yrs worth of gasoline + 25 years worth of electric bill is typically upwards of US$ 50k
By 2020 there will be an excellent market for refurbished 85D Model S, the car will cost less than what you will save in gasoline (even with today's low gasoline prices).
The 85kWh pack is the upper model. There's also the 60kWh model with 200 mile range. A base 60kWh Model S can be purchased for less than $70k in some states with local incentives.
Li Ion batteries can be recycled into new batteries once worn off.
Plus the raw materials in pure form inside batteries are very valuable (lithium, cobalt, and a majority of nickel).
So, the only reason there would be pollution is if the owners of the batteries trash them on purpose, discarding any recycling credits.
Its so much easier to separate the Lithium, Cobalt and Nickel from each other on a battery than purifying those for their respective raw ores. Everybody wins !
Thank god I abandoned Windows 15 years ago. No windows computers in my house.
That's a huge lie. The military has zero involvement with civilian powerplants for decades. That's typical of the anti nuclear types, they recycle lies through the decades. This was true in the 60s and 70s, the plutonium made was given credit for its military value, regardless of no operational nuclear weapons made with reactor grade plutonium (high Pu240 content, risking fizzle and/or spontaneous detonation).
Try again, this time with real data instead of made up lies.
Because the general population has been scaremongered into thinking that nuclear is inherently dangerous.
Coal is dangerous. It actually kills scores of people every year.
Nuclear can be dangerous in extreme scenarios.
Some solar panels include lots of toxic chemicals. Don't let your children anywhere near solar panels.
The cost problems related to nuclear are mostly due to nuclear regulatory ratcheting.
While the anti nuclear types pretend the NRC is irresponsible, the fact is the NRC is paranoid about safety and cares very little about nuclear costs.
There are plenty of examples of the NRC creating this or that nuclear regulation, estimating that regulation will cost x to implement, and when it's said and done, it actually costs 100x (two orders of magnitude more). So instead of costing 100 million to the whole US nuclear industry, it ends up costing US$ 10 billion instead. And the NRC never learns its lesson, doing it again, again, again and again.
Nuclear professionals stated that a new nuclear reactor could be done at a tiny fraction of the current cost if there weren't any special nuclear regulations, and they could use normal coal/natural gas build procedures, in the end they could build a nuclear reactor for a few billion where if you order one today, the vendor will tell it it's a USD 10 billion project !
Uranium has 2 million times more energy per ton than Uranium. So when its said and done, considering that current nuclear reactor use less than 1% of mined uranium and most uranium mines have 1-2% ore concentration, you end up having to mine 0.5% uranium ore vs coal to get the same energy.
Plus the nuclear industry is held to a very different safety standard and scrutiny, so it invests on safety not just on the nuclear plants, but throughout the whole supply chain, including mines. That's why there has been a single nuclear related death in the USA for over a decade, it was a uranium mining accident, a single death, compared to coal killing an estimated 13000 people yearly in the same USA, so we're comparing a single nuclear death for around 200k deaths from coal in the same period.
If the coal industry were held to the same standards that nuclear is held (safety wise, radiation wise, fatality wise) the coal industry would be shutdown in a heartbeat. Big Coal used all of its influence to avoid being regulated like nuclear is.
Solar is useless in the winter, but in the winter ACs are off.
But there's heating. Which is the aspect most greenies can't account into their big plans.
I'm neither a greenie nor a radical pro nuclear.
I want both. What matters to me is getting rid of coal, yesterday if possible.
Solar and wind can help, but nuclear is actually more important than solar and wind combined. And solar really belongs on places that never get any snow/ice (due to more uniform insolation). Wind goes very well on places that have a lot of big hydro to load follow wind.
My train of though is that of the PhD climatologists that stated we need the all of the above solution. Everything that doesn't emit CO2, we need a lot of it.
If all of europe would do "the same", we would not need energy storages, because the overproduction of state A in region a would be used to supply state B in region b ...
How the hell do you know that when region A is overproducing there would actually be a region with a shortage ? If the core problem with intermittency, you can't pray for a supply/demand match. The only advantage of such a solution is that there would be lots of energy storage everywhere, so maybe you can export you over production to another area that is also overproducing but still has energy storage left. But there will often be times when there is over production everywhere, and times when there will be shortage everywhere, except for countries that actually have a large natural baseload reserve (aka big hydro).
There is plenty of evidence Areva EPR design was the result of lack of innovation. They designed a reactor without any major simplification, without using passive safety, just adding more and more engineered safety.
With the current level of insane nuclear regulatory complexity Areva's design choices were the touch of death. Yet, I think China will manage to get their EPRs online, showing that even with all of their extra costs ariving from their design, a huge slice of the nuclear problem comes after the reactor is designed and licensed, but actual construction starts. China has a more realistic nuclear regulatory framework, like South Korea and India. In those countries reactors are being built at 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the USA or Europe.
Garbage. Coal is 10000 times more deadly than nuclear power in real numbers. Coal is a continous natural disaster. Nuclear needs a serious accident to maybe kill some people. Coal causes a lot of lung cancer, black lung disease.
Coal is killing 200k people yearly worldwide.
Natural gas kills every year more people than Chernobyl is projected to kill from actual radiation/cancers. Even if you add all the suicides from telling the liquidators they were going to die anyways, that's less than 3 years worth of natural gas deaths.
Remember deep water horizon oil spill / explosion ? That was a natural gas explosion. The ensuing natural disaster was much worse than the actual nuclear part of Fukushima (people forget the Tsunami destroyed the houses).
It gets worse. There is ample evidence low levels of chronic radiation exposure doesn't cause cancer at all. Studies to formally prove that have been sistematicly defunded / cancelled.
I was exposed to radiation levels much higher than Fukushima on a monazite beach for months at end. My mom has been exposed to 10x that. It's not a secluded remote beach, its a crowded popular beach, that gets as crowded as florida's most popular beaches. Its called Guarapari in Brazil. Yes, that beach shown on Pandora's Promise. Just google: praias guarapari lotadas (Guarapari crowded beaches in Portuguese). Radiation levels are so high, one day's worth of exposure in those beaches are forbidden for nuclear workers.
That's just one example of places thousands of people are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation that are considered deadly for anti nuclear radicals.
Denver-CO, Salt Lake City-UT, every high altitude resort, in all of those places people are exposed to 10x more radiation than at sea level. Yet there are no studies that show that the extra radiation leads to higher cancers, but the anti nuclear types are allowed to claim no levels of radiation are safe. The whole logic breaks down every step of the way. Yet they are never convinced by facts, and their response is totally divorced from science. Green Peace has a total budget of above 200 million USD / yr. If they cared to actually prove anything, they could actually do the studies, yet they never to, always resorting to anecdotal evidence.
If we're going to use anecdotal evidence, there is plenty of that pointing to "environmental" groups that attack nuclear power as being funded by coal / natural gas interests. When was the last time you heard of a "sit in" in front of a coal power plant ? But they do it all the time on nuclear stations.
If the whole nuclear regulatory framework were rolled back to just pre Chernobyl regulations, nuclear reactors would be built at half of their quoted prices, or 80% cheaper than current USA / Europe way over budget projects.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
It is expensive not due to actual risks, but rather due to perceived risks.
Chernobyl couldn't happen on any western reactor with existing regulations. The vast majority of measures taken after were precipitated, knee jerk reactions took to satisfy public hysteria.
The latest US NRC annual senate hearing there were quite a few regulatory measures that were estimated to cost 1% than it actually costed the nuclear industry.
Fukushima area radiation never got over slight cancer risk level, yet the public was being told a very different story by those that want nuclear to go away.
If instead of reading anti nuclear paranoia websites, you go study nuclear power and radiation facts, you will see that nuclear facts are very reassuring.
There are lots of ultra expensive, totally useless nuclear regulatory measures. Specially those that slow down nuclear construction and other procedures.
This whole debate is pointless cause your side is always proposing solutions without accounting for the costs, efficiency, you know, math.
I would like to see an actual realistic complete plan to go 100% solar, wind, hydro and biomass in Germany. The whole cost figure.
No sites to build more nuclear reactors ? That's just pure and unadulterated garbage. Its the result of insane anti nuclear regulation that is designed to drive nuclear out of Germany, engineering and facts be damned.
In the meantime the gas pipeline from Russia has deep involvement of Gerhardt Schroeder.
And Germany's coal will continue to be burned, cause keeping those jobs is more important than cleaning up the environment.
That's the real reason for your anti nuclear bias. Politics and jobs. Energiewende is a huge jobs program.
Don't sell it to the rest of the world as a solution. It's not.
Offshore wind is not baseload. Baseload is assured power. Offshore is intermittent power. If offshore wind was baseload, you wouldn't need to bother with weather forecasts at all. Just because it doesn't go from 0 to 100% everyday doesn't make it baseload.
Are you another merchant of doubt ? The more we dive into this discussion, the more your speech breaks down. You don't know what baseload is. You don't account for the costs of your solutions.
In the meantime Fukushima area is 95% safe to return right now. Where are the radiation deaths ? By 2025 we'll be talking about the cancers Fukushima didn't create.
Did you see the fact that UK electricity frequency standards had to be relaxed due to wind turbines, from 0.1% to 1% max oscilation ?
Do you realize I know you will never concede this debate, all I care is the opinions of others, cause you have demonstrated don't actually understand the whole system.
You can be a net exporter and still be paying more to import electricity than the exports.
The electricity Denmark imports is dispatchable, the electricity Denmark exports is renewable overproduction.
No point in arguing with you, you fail to see what's so clear. The system would break down if all of Europe did the same as Germany and Denmark. That's actually obvious to me and every electric grid professional.
If you use traditional load following NG plants, assuming some future plant with 40% efficiency (typical is under 35%), I think that's 24% efficiency, or you loose at least 4 parts for each part recovered !
Then you have 60% efficiency each way, or 36% efficiency round trip, and that's if you use a combined cycle gas plant, which aren't cheap, and aren't load following resources, like I said, CRAZY !
Are you paid to sell this nutty solution or just misinformed ?
It is not by accident that energiewende is a lot more expensive than nuclear (yeah, even than Olkiluoto).