Except you ignore the waste on the way back... And you ignore the cost of the equipment to do the roundtrip conversion. Fuel cells are crazy expensive, that's the only efficient way back. You remind me of that Supertramp song. Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no I said, "Dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer" Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no Your better off planning on getting tens of TWh worth of chemical batteries by then.
That the whole cycle will waste close to 80% of that electricity, while adding costs to get that done. Epic energy waste. You guys really don't do the math, do you ? Electrolizing water is crazy inefficient. So is producing methane from electricity. You are nuts, riverdance !
So once Solar gets even cheaper, everybody puts it on their roof, and in a nice summer at high noon you get 300% of your demand being produced by solar alone... How are you going to store that much electricity, you'd need TWhs worth of storage. Part of the plan will be exporting much of that electricity, but now add equivalent levels of solar to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, who are you going to sell to ? Unless you have a seasonal industry that can use GWs worth of electricity only when it's sunny, your project isn't going to scale, no matter how cheap solar gets.
I agree with everything you say, except for Solar PV rooftop. The rooftop is there, being wasted, let's use that to generate electricity. But that's as far as I would go, except for the sahara, northern Brazil or other places in the world that are so dry you can depend on large Solar PV to generate reliably year round with very little deviation.
Then you need to study the difference between LNT and Hormesis radiation models. Study the nature of repair mechanisms in mamals. Study how the same damage that radioactivity does to our body is also caused by simple oxidation. The whole model of risk of nuclear to our bodies is the result of fear, fear, fear, the fact that we can't subject humans to radiation levels that are know to be safe in reality but considered risky. Funding to research projects trying to prove hormesis have been cut throughout the years, there has been a sistematic effort to prevent hormesis from being proven (using rats and other acceptable subjects). Once you prove Hormesis, the whole house of cards of nuclear safety comes down. That wouldn't change the risk @ Chernobyl for the first month after the accident, but it would pretty much have prevented the evacuation of Fukushima, except perhaps for a few Km radius instead of 30 Km, radically reduced the cleanup costs, finally Fukushima was the result of a 9 point earthquake, that was never though realistic for Japan.
My challenge is to those that reject nuclear while trying to pretend they are environmentalists. With modular MSRs in the 250-300MW that are fueled with liquid fuel its a whole different type of nuclear. Those reactors could go for many, many years non stop, since the fuel is added in little batches, like an injection is given to patient, with reprocessing facilities little batches of core coolant+fuel can be removed and reprocessed to remove fission products then returned to the core. Like I said totally different deal. The way nuclear was supposed to be. Water cooled, solid fuel nuclear was seen in the 50s as a temporary kludge to win the cold war, while keeping their research funding. All Manhattan Project scientists never saw it as the solution.
Solid fuel reactors have trouble load following due to buildup of Xenon 135. In MSRs the fuel is dissolved in the core, with Helium being bubbled through the core to speedup Xenon and Krypton removal at the top of the reactor, this advantage plus the very high negative temperature coefficient makes load following a breeze for MSRs vs very hard for regular reactors.
MSRs probably won't need to be shutdown due to earthquakes, completely different way of operation, totally walk away safe, the reactor shutdowns without any intervention if it overheats in any way. Worst case, split into two 500MW sites.
MSRs are meant to be way cheaper than regular reactors, so it might end up being cheaper to overbuild them than actually maintaining fossil backups.
I completely understand the relative characteristics of current and proposed reactors. Although such reactors aren't factored in any existing nuclear planning, since they are still under design. The most far along seems to be the IMSR from Terrestrial Energy from Canada, engineering blueprints for regulatory review is being finalized.
Rooftop solar has zero O&M costs. Don't need to rent/buy land, no employees, it just runs, so it comes down to return on investment, you can't actually have a monthly loss. But putting a solar panel for a 10+ year payoff, isn't what anybody would call a rational investment. BTW, lets kill all subsidies and see if people would still be putting any solar panels in Germany or Canada.
Just look up nuclear reactor construction cost and schedule in South Korea. They are building reactors at less than a third of cost in USA and Europe. The difference is skilled, well trained labor that know what they're doing, rational nuclear regulatory, and lower labor costs. Notice they also build the reactor way faster. So they're doing the same job with far less men hours.
Yet, that insurance has never been claimed against, cause there actually is a self insured pot of money that all USA nuclear operators add to, that pot keeps growing. Tens of billions already. So while the USA govt provides the back stop, it has never been needed.
Burning wood is the worst type of biomass I can think. You're taking a good, long term carbon storage, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere, growing the wood again takes a long while. Good biomass is biomethane, and waste from harvesting vegetables (for instance sugar cane leaves lots of folliage and roots that Brazil is using for electricity production, it's stuff that would be burned or decompose anyways).
Think about this. A GE ESBWR should cost a few billion if you add up the rational costs expected. Instead its offered to a USA customer as a USD 10 billion project. Its the most economical reactors offered by North America and western Europe (Russia and India have cheaper designs, specially when they are built and installed locally). Westinghouse AP1000 are budgeted at US$ 4 billion for China installation. An ESBWR is 1.6GW, while an Areva EPR is closer to 2GW, so even at twice the GE projected cost with USA labor an ESBWR should be a third of Hinkley point ! Finally, and I can't stress that enough, Westinghouse, GE, Areva do not build the whole thing. Its not just a matter of civil engineering, lots of parts end up locally sourced, there is a sore lack of nuclear expertise in most countries, most mistakes require endless reviews from the nuclear regulatory agency. Modular GenIV reactors are supposed to be almost entirely factory built, without any critical local sourcing of anything nuclear on the plant, just civil engineering and other generic items. Like I said, we can either think we don't need nuclear, so we don't need to care, or understand why we need nuclear and choose to fight to fix the system.
Hinkley Point C is Areva EPR. If I could, I would kill that reactor from the market. The nuclear experts claim its the posterchild of doing nothing to decrease costs, rejecting any simplifications, and just adding costs with complex engineered safety instead of passive safety. Part of the problem is Areva buying that German nuclear supplier, and the engineers from both sides failing to agree on a rational solution, essentially having two solutions for everything. Insane. Post Chernobyl and Fukushima regulatory insanity is killing nuclear. Instead of only preventing accidents that will happen in the next few centuries, they're trying to prevent all possible accidents that might happen over the next millenia, something like that. Cost must matter. But the NRC doesn't care, and the other NATO countries mostly copy NRC resolutions.
BRAZIL has all the load following it needs. Its called big hydro. Brazil's peak electricity demand is around 100GW, with over 80GW of installed big hydro generation capacity. The critical aspect is water supply (reservoir status). Its what pumped hydro should be instead, an actual generation asset instead of a purely storage solution. We don't have a boatload of wind cause our govt is very inefficient to do its thing. Matter of fact in many ways I'm ashamed of being Brazilian. But we could easily add 30 GW worth of nameplate wind. We also have the big advantage of the wind being the strongest when its dry, so it compliments hydro perfectly. We also have 2GW of nuclear (2 reactors), another 1.3GW nuclear in construction, and tens of GW in various fossil plants (mostly natural gas). This storage argument is very interesting. You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. Local storage is far from sufficient. The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ? I'm not making up lies, you're the one ignoring the inconvenient facts to your side. I wish solar+wind could do the job, but it cant. The problem is the side that can't recognize that nuclear is essential to get rid of fossil fuels worldwide. China is burning more coal than the entire rest of the world combined. Still they are doing solar,wind,nuclear and hydro as fast as they can. They are adding clean electricity to their grid much faster than Europe or the USA, cause the govt doesn't care about NIMBY nonsense.
Then why don't they build a few more wind farms and go full throttle on wind ? I said a few times, prove me it works, a whole large country using at least 1/3 of its electricity from wind. But the UK has zero plans to get rid of nuclear, instead they are actually building nuclear and planning more. Hawaii very difference scenario, since wind is competing with very expensive electricity from oil, and in Hawaii all fossil generation is peaking anyways, with the fuel dominating costs, so every extra MWh not generated from fossil, the better. On shore wind might not be variable on carefully selected sites. Let remind those that might point out that Germany gets 70+% of their electricity from solar, that's not even a whole perfect summer day, that's instantaneous load for the best summer day in the year. You need 75% peak solar share to have much less than 1/3 yearly average.
Wind capacity factor 52%, that's a bold faced lie. Show me a single wind farm producing above 40%. typical is 20% - 35%. Those numbers are crazy, it a pretty report with unreliable or fabricated data.
I like rooftop solar PV. It's making good use of otherwise wasted roof space. But I don't like utility scale solar PV, way too expensive for wholesale generation. rooftop solar PV competes with retail electricity prices. grid scale solar PV competes with natural gas, nuclear,...
China is building new nuclear reactors in a little over 5 years. And its not just China, South Korea, India, Russia, are all doing nuclear at sane costs and sane schedules. That's called have a rational nuclear regulator. I'm not a nuclear professional, but after all the anti nuclear crap that hit the media after Fukushima that got me so pissed off I decided to study nuclear, and all I studied showed me nuclear is being unfairly targeted. Massive lies and miss information. Even today, the most expensive nuclear project in the world, Olkiluoto in Finland is still cheaper then energiewende, with all of its overruns. And I've heard plenty of arguments why Areva EPR is likely the most expensive reactor on the market today. GE ESBWR and Westinghouse AP1000 seems much cheaper. Yet the anti nuke types take Olkiluoto as the reference to discuss. Wind $1.25 per peak capacity Watts... If your effective capacity factor is 20%, then you're up to $ 6.25 per Watt, and then you must add the fossil backup costs. Must talk levelized costs. Then you need to account for the fact that a nuclear reactor can be built fairly close to its primary market, while wind turbines must be built where the wind is, then you must add transmission line costs, substations, lots of things the greenies conveniently ignore in their calculations. When you add all of that up, even with wind capacity factor of 30% it is more expensive even than Olkiluoto that you love to quote as poster child of nuclear too expensive. Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. The current Westinghouse reactor offering, the AP600 and AP1000 started development work before Chernobyl. It took 26 yrs from conception to certification of the AP600 cause the US NRC didn't know how to certify a passively safe reactor, so it took them 16 years to certify it. This isn't an intrinsic, unavoidable nuclear problem, but rather how the US NRC is setup to certify it, it can be improved. There is a lot of vested interest in nuclear failing, or at least not innovating and continuing to be expensive. You can either pretend we don't need it like the Germans, do nothing to help like American politicians or demand we make it more rational which will reduce nuclear costs substantially in the short term. If you listen to actual energy professionals even those that do utility scale solar and wind, the actual technical professionals admit the same problems I'm pointing out to you. It's a fact. Nuclear doesn't need GW scale to be economical. Water cooled nuclear likes GW scale plants. Gen IV reactors work just fine at 250MW scale, and they do load following, so a site with 4x 250MW reactors can reliably supply power to a market with 1GW demand without need for fossil backups while load following wind/solar if needed. But once you have a nuclear reactor, wind and solar aren't useful. It's helpful to actually learn about nuclear from factual nuclear sites, instead of from anti nuclear sites, those are not environmentalists, but rather shills paid to bash nuclear to keep coal and natural gas in power for as long as possible. I sugest: https://www.coursera.org/cours...
Yeah, 5% of the whole mix is trivial. Scale that up to 1/3 overall, with some regions above 50%, and see what happens. Above all it is too expensive. Perhaps you should learn a thing or too about reactive charges. Your talk about software shows you have no technical expertise in the area. I'm a computer infrastructure expert, and I know a thing or too about solar,wind,nuclear and the electrical grid. The problem isn't a software to switch wind off and something else on, the real problem is doing extremely agile load following. That's easy to do with hydro or fossil fuels. But most countries don't have large untapped hydro sources. And we need to get off fossil fuels. I'm not interested in a grid that will depend from fossil fuels forever. We must get rid of all coal usage for electricity and heating. We must radically reduce natural gas usage too. Can't do that with solar+wind. Need lots of nuclear. Some countries like China and Brazil still have tens of GW worth of untapped hydro, but most countries don't. Brazil was at the verge of a collapse in the past few months with very little rain leading to your hydro reservoirs close to that critical point where hydro plants must shutdown ! No wonder we have one large nuclear reactor in construction and plans for another half a dozen. At the same time we are deploying wind and solar. But we have lots of hydro to load follow solar and wind. The USA, UK, France don't.
Solar in Ontario is suicide... Above 40N, bellow 40S solar is crazy stupid, yeah, that includes you Germans. Between 30N and 30S its good specially on a country that has lots of hydro to load follow. I would imagine that wind up in Ontario would be more economical with the very strong winter winds. But I do prefer nuclear and hydro anyhow. Ontario has one of the most rational electricity mix in the world. And the greenies keep insisting nuclear is too expensive.
What I hoped to say was that with retail electricity above 20 cents / kWh energy storage will soon be cheap enough to live off grid with solar + Li Ion storage in sunny places (like 30N to 30S lattitude). That's assuming USA price structure. Solar in Brazil is too expensive due to heavy import burden and in order to do net meterid we must have an outgoing meter sending everything we produce to the grid and pay state energy taxes including electricity we generate with solar, it pushes payback for solar over 10 years.
I never said useless. Wind can surely contribute up to 1/3 of peak electricity demand with plenty of load following to match it, but it can't be the bulk of your energy supply, even solar PV performs much better than wind as far as predictability go. The cubed factor is huge. Wind oscilates, even at 50 meters at the center of a turbine blade. Gusts aren't exclusive to surface. Oh, I'm also a private pilot, although I haven't flow in a decade. Winds oscilate plenty from 0-100 meters. In some areas there is a consistent wind shear between 0 and 300 meters, which make wind turbines useless, although ground winds are pretty good.
I'm with you. First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes. Then nuclear. Then rooftop solar PV. Then wind. But if you study nuclear facts, you will find the US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can, to the point of making nuclear uneconomical, specially for new projects. Germany is planning to burn a whole lot of wood for load following their wind+solar. It's an insane solution. I'm hoping for Thor Energy solutions will enable uprating most of the current nuclear fleet around 20%, in the meantime there are some 6 molten salt reactor initiatives worldwide. But the US NRC is saying it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor for commercial operation. 20 years !
You're wrong. Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources, but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly. You're just embarrasing yourself. I have a lot of relatives and friends who work/worked in the electricity utility business. And I have some engineering background, which you don't seem to have. When Germany electricity prices get close to France's, then we can talk about if energiewende has succeeded or not.
Do you sail or do anything where you sense the wind in realtime ? Probably not. Weather forecasts give a mean wind intensity, cause that number varies. It varies in realtime, second by second. As a competitive hobbie cat sailor I know first hand. Forecast says 25km/h wind, that means 20-30km/h if the winds are well behaved. The stronger the forecast, the stronger the wind gusts are. Wind Turbine output is proportional to wind speed cubed up to around 45km/h. Wind above 45km/h is extremely rare. So even a mere 5% oscilation in wind intensity means 16% variation in output. A 10% oscilation means a 33% variation in output. Those happen in an utterly unpredictable way. If you're not used to being out a sea, then you have no idea what your talking about. Which I know, cause otherwise you wouldn't pull this weather forecast crap out of your censored. Wind IS NOT BASELOAD. BASELOAD RULES !
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Except you ignore the waste on the way back...
And you ignore the cost of the equipment to do the roundtrip conversion.
Fuel cells are crazy expensive, that's the only efficient way back.
You remind me of that Supertramp song.
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
I said, "Dreamer, you're nothing but a dreamer"
Well, can you put your hands in your head? Oh no
Your better off planning on getting tens of TWh worth of chemical batteries by then.
That the whole cycle will waste close to 80% of that electricity, while adding costs to get that done. Epic energy waste. You guys really don't do the math, do you ?
Electrolizing water is crazy inefficient. So is producing methane from electricity. You are nuts, riverdance !
So once Solar gets even cheaper, everybody puts it on their roof, and in a nice summer at high noon you get 300% of your demand being produced by solar alone... How are you going to store that much electricity, you'd need TWhs worth of storage.
Part of the plan will be exporting much of that electricity, but now add equivalent levels of solar to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, who are you going to sell to ?
Unless you have a seasonal industry that can use GWs worth of electricity only when it's sunny, your project isn't going to scale, no matter how cheap solar gets.
I agree with everything you say, except for Solar PV rooftop. The rooftop is there, being wasted, let's use that to generate electricity. But that's as far as I would go, except for the sahara, northern Brazil or other places in the world that are so dry you can depend on large Solar PV to generate reliably year round with very little deviation.
Then you need to study the difference between LNT and Hormesis radiation models.
Study the nature of repair mechanisms in mamals.
Study how the same damage that radioactivity does to our body is also caused by simple oxidation.
The whole model of risk of nuclear to our bodies is the result of fear, fear, fear, the fact that we can't subject humans to radiation levels that are know to be safe in reality but considered risky.
Funding to research projects trying to prove hormesis have been cut throughout the years, there has been a sistematic effort to prevent hormesis from being proven (using rats and other acceptable subjects).
Once you prove Hormesis, the whole house of cards of nuclear safety comes down. That wouldn't change the risk @ Chernobyl for the first month after the accident, but it would pretty much have prevented the evacuation of Fukushima, except perhaps for a few Km radius instead of 30 Km, radically reduced the cleanup costs, finally Fukushima was the result of a 9 point earthquake, that was never though realistic for Japan.
My challenge is to those that reject nuclear while trying to pretend they are environmentalists.
With modular MSRs in the 250-300MW that are fueled with liquid fuel its a whole different type of nuclear. Those reactors could go for many, many years non stop, since the fuel is added in little batches, like an injection is given to patient, with reprocessing facilities little batches of core coolant+fuel can be removed and reprocessed to remove fission products then returned to the core.
Like I said totally different deal. The way nuclear was supposed to be.
Water cooled, solid fuel nuclear was seen in the 50s as a temporary kludge to win the cold war, while keeping their research funding. All Manhattan Project scientists never saw it as the solution.
Solid fuel reactors have trouble load following due to buildup of Xenon 135.
In MSRs the fuel is dissolved in the core, with Helium being bubbled through the core to speedup Xenon and Krypton removal at the top of the reactor, this advantage plus the very high negative temperature coefficient makes load following a breeze for MSRs vs very hard for regular reactors.
MSRs probably won't need to be shutdown due to earthquakes, completely different way of operation, totally walk away safe, the reactor shutdowns without any intervention if it overheats in any way. Worst case, split into two 500MW sites.
MSRs are meant to be way cheaper than regular reactors, so it might end up being cheaper to overbuild them than actually maintaining fossil backups.
I completely understand the relative characteristics of current and proposed reactors. Although such reactors aren't factored in any existing nuclear planning, since they are still under design. The most far along seems to be the IMSR from Terrestrial Energy from Canada, engineering blueprints for regulatory review is being finalized.
Rooftop solar has zero O&M costs. Don't need to rent/buy land, no employees, it just runs, so it comes down to return on investment, you can't actually have a monthly loss. But putting a solar panel for a 10+ year payoff, isn't what anybody would call a rational investment.
BTW, lets kill all subsidies and see if people would still be putting any solar panels in Germany or Canada.
Just look up nuclear reactor construction cost and schedule in South Korea. They are building reactors at less than a third of cost in USA and Europe. The difference is skilled, well trained labor that know what they're doing, rational nuclear regulatory, and lower labor costs. Notice they also build the reactor way faster.
So they're doing the same job with far less men hours.
Yet, that insurance has never been claimed against, cause there actually is a self insured pot of money that all USA nuclear operators add to, that pot keeps growing. Tens of billions already.
So while the USA govt provides the back stop, it has never been needed.
Burning wood is the worst type of biomass I can think. You're taking a good, long term carbon storage, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere, growing the wood again takes a long while.
Good biomass is biomethane, and waste from harvesting vegetables (for instance sugar cane leaves lots of folliage and roots that Brazil is using for electricity production, it's stuff that would be burned or decompose anyways).
Think about this. A GE ESBWR should cost a few billion if you add up the rational costs expected. Instead its offered to a USA customer as a USD 10 billion project. Its the most economical reactors offered by North America and western Europe (Russia and India have cheaper designs, specially when they are built and installed locally).
Westinghouse AP1000 are budgeted at US$ 4 billion for China installation.
An ESBWR is 1.6GW, while an Areva EPR is closer to 2GW, so even at twice the GE projected cost with USA labor an ESBWR should be a third of Hinkley point !
Finally, and I can't stress that enough, Westinghouse, GE, Areva do not build the whole thing. Its not just a matter of civil engineering, lots of parts end up locally sourced, there is a sore lack of nuclear expertise in most countries, most mistakes require endless reviews from the nuclear regulatory agency.
Modular GenIV reactors are supposed to be almost entirely factory built, without any critical local sourcing of anything nuclear on the plant, just civil engineering and other generic items.
Like I said, we can either think we don't need nuclear, so we don't need to care, or understand why we need nuclear and choose to fight to fix the system.
Hinkley Point C is Areva EPR. If I could, I would kill that reactor from the market. The nuclear experts claim its the posterchild of doing nothing to decrease costs, rejecting any simplifications, and just adding costs with complex engineered safety instead of passive safety.
Part of the problem is Areva buying that German nuclear supplier, and the engineers from both sides failing to agree on a rational solution, essentially having two solutions for everything. Insane.
Post Chernobyl and Fukushima regulatory insanity is killing nuclear. Instead of only preventing accidents that will happen in the next few centuries, they're trying to prevent all possible accidents that might happen over the next millenia, something like that. Cost must matter. But the NRC doesn't care, and the other NATO countries mostly copy NRC resolutions.
BRAZIL has all the load following it needs. Its called big hydro. Brazil's peak electricity demand is around 100GW, with over 80GW of installed big hydro generation capacity. The critical aspect is water supply (reservoir status). Its what pumped hydro should be instead, an actual generation asset instead of a purely storage solution.
We don't have a boatload of wind cause our govt is very inefficient to do its thing. Matter of fact in many ways I'm ashamed of being Brazilian. But we could easily add 30 GW worth of nameplate wind. We also have the big advantage of the wind being the strongest when its dry, so it compliments hydro perfectly.
We also have 2GW of nuclear (2 reactors), another 1.3GW nuclear in construction, and tens of GW in various fossil plants (mostly natural gas).
This storage argument is very interesting. You are ignoring the fact that Denmark imports lots of hydro electricity from norway/sweden, nuclear from France, without big imports the system would break down. Local storage is far from sufficient.
The final fact is Denmark / Germany / Spain have the most expensive electricity in Europe, part of the extra cost is taxes, but even without taxes, Germany electricity is more expensive than France. If Energiewende was that cost effective, then why isn't Germany cheaper than France ?
I'm not making up lies, you're the one ignoring the inconvenient facts to your side.
I wish solar+wind could do the job, but it cant. The problem is the side that can't recognize that nuclear is essential to get rid of fossil fuels worldwide. China is burning more coal than the entire rest of the world combined. Still they are doing solar,wind,nuclear and hydro as fast as they can. They are adding clean electricity to their grid much faster than Europe or the USA, cause the govt doesn't care about NIMBY nonsense.
Then why don't they build a few more wind farms and go full throttle on wind ?
I said a few times, prove me it works, a whole large country using at least 1/3 of its electricity from wind. But the UK has zero plans to get rid of nuclear, instead they are actually building nuclear and planning more.
Hawaii very difference scenario, since wind is competing with very expensive electricity from oil, and in Hawaii all fossil generation is peaking anyways, with the fuel dominating costs, so every extra MWh not generated from fossil, the better.
On shore wind might not be variable on carefully selected sites.
Let remind those that might point out that Germany gets 70+% of their electricity from solar, that's not even a whole perfect summer day, that's instantaneous load for the best summer day in the year. You need 75% peak solar share to have much less than 1/3 yearly average.
Wind capacity factor 52%, that's a bold faced lie. Show me a single wind farm producing above 40%. typical is 20% - 35%.
Those numbers are crazy, it a pretty report with unreliable or fabricated data.
I like rooftop solar PV. It's making good use of otherwise wasted roof space. ...
But I don't like utility scale solar PV, way too expensive for wholesale generation.
rooftop solar PV competes with retail electricity prices.
grid scale solar PV competes with natural gas, nuclear,
China is building new nuclear reactors in a little over 5 years.
And its not just China, South Korea, India, Russia, are all doing nuclear at sane costs and sane schedules. That's called have a rational nuclear regulator.
I'm not a nuclear professional, but after all the anti nuclear crap that hit the media after Fukushima that got me so pissed off I decided to study nuclear, and all I studied showed me nuclear is being unfairly targeted. Massive lies and miss information.
Even today, the most expensive nuclear project in the world, Olkiluoto in Finland is still cheaper then energiewende, with all of its overruns. And I've heard plenty of arguments why Areva EPR is likely the most expensive reactor on the market today. GE ESBWR and Westinghouse AP1000 seems much cheaper. Yet the anti nuke types take Olkiluoto as the reference to discuss.
Wind $1.25 per peak capacity Watts... If your effective capacity factor is 20%, then you're up to $ 6.25 per Watt, and then you must add the fossil backup costs. Must talk levelized costs.
Then you need to account for the fact that a nuclear reactor can be built fairly close to its primary market, while wind turbines must be built where the wind is, then you must add transmission line costs, substations, lots of things the greenies conveniently ignore in their calculations. When you add all of that up, even with wind capacity factor of 30% it is more expensive even than Olkiluoto that you love to quote as poster child of nuclear too expensive.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
The current Westinghouse reactor offering, the AP600 and AP1000 started development work before Chernobyl. It took 26 yrs from conception to certification of the AP600 cause the US NRC didn't know how to certify a passively safe reactor, so it took them 16 years to certify it.
This isn't an intrinsic, unavoidable nuclear problem, but rather how the US NRC is setup to certify it, it can be improved.
There is a lot of vested interest in nuclear failing, or at least not innovating and continuing to be expensive.
You can either pretend we don't need it like the Germans, do nothing to help like American politicians or demand we make it more rational which will reduce nuclear costs substantially in the short term.
If you listen to actual energy professionals even those that do utility scale solar and wind, the actual technical professionals admit the same problems I'm pointing out to you. It's a fact.
Nuclear doesn't need GW scale to be economical.
Water cooled nuclear likes GW scale plants.
Gen IV reactors work just fine at 250MW scale, and they do load following, so a site with 4x 250MW reactors can reliably supply power to a market with 1GW demand without need for fossil backups while load following wind/solar if needed. But once you have a nuclear reactor, wind and solar aren't useful.
It's helpful to actually learn about nuclear from factual nuclear sites, instead of from anti nuclear sites, those are not environmentalists, but rather shills paid to bash nuclear to keep coal and natural gas in power for as long as possible.
I sugest:
https://www.coursera.org/cours...
Yeah, 5% of the whole mix is trivial. Scale that up to 1/3 overall, with some regions above 50%, and see what happens. Above all it is too expensive.
Perhaps you should learn a thing or too about reactive charges.
Your talk about software shows you have no technical expertise in the area. I'm a computer infrastructure expert, and I know a thing or too about solar,wind,nuclear and the electrical grid. The problem isn't a software to switch wind off and something else on, the real problem is doing extremely agile load following. That's easy to do with hydro or fossil fuels. But most countries don't have large untapped hydro sources. And we need to get off fossil fuels.
I'm not interested in a grid that will depend from fossil fuels forever.
We must get rid of all coal usage for electricity and heating.
We must radically reduce natural gas usage too.
Can't do that with solar+wind.
Need lots of nuclear. Some countries like China and Brazil still have tens of GW worth of untapped hydro, but most countries don't. Brazil was at the verge of a collapse in the past few months with very little rain leading to your hydro reservoirs close to that critical point where hydro plants must shutdown ! No wonder we have one large nuclear reactor in construction and plans for another half a dozen.
At the same time we are deploying wind and solar. But we have lots of hydro to load follow solar and wind. The USA, UK, France don't.
Solar in Ontario is suicide... Above 40N, bellow 40S solar is crazy stupid, yeah, that includes you Germans. Between 30N and 30S its good specially on a country that has lots of hydro to load follow.
I would imagine that wind up in Ontario would be more economical with the very strong winter winds.
But I do prefer nuclear and hydro anyhow. Ontario has one of the most rational electricity mix in the world. And the greenies keep insisting nuclear is too expensive.
What I hoped to say was that with retail electricity above 20 cents / kWh energy storage will soon be cheap enough to live off grid with solar + Li Ion storage in sunny places (like 30N to 30S lattitude). That's assuming USA price structure. Solar in Brazil is too expensive due to heavy import burden and in order to do net meterid we must have an outgoing meter sending everything we produce to the grid and pay state energy taxes including electricity we generate with solar, it pushes payback for solar over 10 years.
I never said useless. Wind can surely contribute up to 1/3 of peak electricity demand with plenty of load following to match it, but it can't be the bulk of your energy supply, even solar PV performs much better than wind as far as predictability go. The cubed factor is huge. Wind oscilates, even at 50 meters at the center of a turbine blade. Gusts aren't exclusive to surface. Oh, I'm also a private pilot, although I haven't flow in a decade.
Winds oscilate plenty from 0-100 meters. In some areas there is a consistent wind shear between 0 and 300 meters, which make wind turbines useless, although ground winds are pretty good.
I'm with you.
First priority for electricity is big hidro / biomass from biodigestors+other natural wastes.
Then nuclear.
Then rooftop solar PV.
Then wind.
But if you study nuclear facts, you will find the US NRC and their NATO counterparts are working really hard in making nuclear as expensive as they can, to the point of making nuclear uneconomical, specially for new projects.
Germany is planning to burn a whole lot of wood for load following their wind+solar. It's an insane solution.
I'm hoping for Thor Energy solutions will enable uprating most of the current nuclear fleet around 20%, in the meantime there are some 6 molten salt reactor initiatives worldwide. But the US NRC is saying it will take 20 years just to license the first MSR reactor for commercial operation. 20 years !
You're wrong. Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources, but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly.
You're just embarrasing yourself.
I have a lot of relatives and friends who work/worked in the electricity utility business. And I have some engineering background, which you don't seem to have.
When Germany electricity prices get close to France's, then we can talk about if energiewende has succeeded or not.
Do you sail or do anything where you sense the wind in realtime ?
Probably not. Weather forecasts give a mean wind intensity, cause that number varies. It varies in realtime, second by second. As a competitive hobbie cat sailor I know first hand. Forecast says 25km/h wind, that means 20-30km/h if the winds are well behaved. The stronger the forecast, the stronger the wind gusts are.
Wind Turbine output is proportional to wind speed cubed up to around 45km/h. Wind above 45km/h is extremely rare.
So even a mere 5% oscilation in wind intensity means 16% variation in output. A 10% oscilation means a 33% variation in output. Those happen in an utterly unpredictable way.
If you're not used to being out a sea, then you have no idea what your talking about. Which I know, cause otherwise you wouldn't pull this weather forecast crap out of your censored.
Wind IS NOT BASELOAD. BASELOAD RULES !