You are taking a pessimistic view on the wind power side here.
In Denmark, we just completed a 400 MW offshore site which gets a non-inflation-adjusted strike price at 0.19 USD/kWh for the first 10-12 years. After that it operates on market terms. The capacity factor is expected to be around 45-55% as far as I know (other offshore sites have similar factors - the numbers are publicly available in an open catalogue of all Danish turbines). Modern turbines have much improved capacity factors compared to the old smaller ones.
Now in Denmark, 0.19 USD/kWh was considered a far too high price. The bidding round was hastened through so we only got one bidder. An earlier site received less than half of that in strike price. The latter one would be around £59 per MWh.
I don't know why you are paying so big subsidies in England, but it seems fishy.
While it is true that offshore turbines have a harsh environment, it's also true that the industry has learned from some of its early mistakes. Even if you don't believe that, you need to take into account that the foundation is the most expensive part of an offshore turbine, so even if you have to replace the generator and blades, it's going to be a lot cheaper than building a new farm.
PS: I don't think it really makes sense to quote EPR costs from China. The costs of things in China just aren't comparable to the costs in a Western country.
The Nazis were democratically elected into power. If you supported democracy, you had to support the Nazis in 1939 (prior to their invasion of Poland in September).
I just have to comment this as I see it repeated often: I am sorry, but that's not really true. It's true they got a (big) foot in the door (about 1/3 of the votes in a background of a crisis), but that's about where democracy stopped and Hitler took over. If you're interested, I suggest you read a history book on the Germany and the Weimar Republic. Here's a couple of quick links with more info:
Even if you can perhaps argue about the 1933 election, there's no doubt that by 1939 Germany was not a democracy. In 1939 you had to be a fool to think otherwise, the nazis weren't exactly quiet about their authoritarian philosophy. I live in a neighbouring country, and by 1939 a lot of people here were certainly reading the signs, nervously.
Sure, but that's not really what you want. Far from it. You want output that follows the consumption. Many existing hydro plants can do this by virtue of the storage in the dam.
On a related note, cost/kWh figures can be deceptive. For instance, say the cost is 0,20 USD/kWh 24/7. That's great - except at night consumption is low so you may not be able to sell the energy, or will have to sell at a much reduced price; you can still do that if the marginal costs of keeping the plan running are lower than competitors. But in reality, you may only have say 12 hours/day to really turn a profit, not 24 hours.
Or perhaps you could just do what any long section of text does on the web - structure things in a hierarchy so you start off by seeing the hierarchy, then visit the first node, then go back to the hierarchy, then visit the second, etc. (or see part of the hierarchy as you traverse the leaf nodes, or whatever). And color code links to stuff you've already visited.
Really, navigation should be a solved problem by now if you think just a little bit beyond the limitations of paper books.
The problem in this instance is that MATE is basically a fork of GNOME which was already in the repository. It's my understanding that a lot of stuff had to be sorted out to prevent clashes and to ensure that Debian doesn't end up with a bunch of garbage packages that will have to be maintained for the next Debian release.
His idea is obvious in hindsight, but nobody had thought of it in the 50+ years they'd been using electric fans for ventilation. It's like learning something new in school - once you'd seen it work and gotten your mind past the assumption that the blades in a fan need to be fixed, it's dirt easy to understand and replicate even if you've never seen any internal schematics. Because of poor patent protection in Asia, there were Chinese knockoffs being sold within a year.
It seems to me there are two schools of thought. One is that people have an inherent right to ideas they invent. That's the American dream - to rise from poverty and get rich.
The other is that patents are there to help society, period. In this case, it seems that without patent protection, society was better off with these Chinese knockoffs you mention - let the most competitive production facility win. If he had spent ten years and lots of development resources researching how to build this, there may be a point that society is better off granting him a patent so others aren't discouraged from investing in R&D. However, this argument only holds water in so far that this R&D wouldn't have happened anyway.
The problem with the first school of thought is that it appears the patent system in practice is actually rigged against individuals and small companies.
I personally know one inventor who was basically had no output for 10 years in order to pay off debt he'd accrued because he went out and patented a really good idea for a household appliance - and then never got anything out of it because the manufacturers found another way to build the appliance. Lawyers seem to me to be the only real winners in this game.
(a) you can't legally use GPL licensed code in a BSD project
Yes, you can. You just can't keep licensing the result as BSD, because that would circumvent the GPL license - someone could take the BSD-licensed result and put it into a proprietary code base, something that people licensing their works under the GPL are not okay with.
But I'll grant that you that these days, it would perhaps be a good idea if you could keep the result licensed under two licenses, so the GPL-part under GPL and the rest under BSD. As long as the rest of the project is under a GPL-compatible free license, I don't really see the problem.
Of course, that could quickly turn into a mess. May not be workable in practice.
It's probably not going to be cheap, not in our lifetime, and it produces radioactive material comparable to a fission plant (although of course with some differences) so I'm not sure how it qualifies as safe either.
The truth is that we already have access to close to limitless energy in renewable sources. And the tech for harvesting it is falling in price year by year.
This cost analysis does not consider the number of times they would need to be replaced during the 40-60 year operating life of a nuclear plant, or the cost of spinning reserve required to back up the wind generators.
That's a bit one-sided. The nuclear power plant is going to need repairs and upgrades too, and it also needs backup. The latter should be self-evident given the current situation.
Currently wind turbines are sold with 20-25 years guarantees, but nobody really knows how long they're going to last.
Offshore wind has about a 0.3-0.4 capacity factor.
In Denmark it's about 0.45-0.55. You can't really compare the costs of 3 prototype units with a full-scale rollout.
As for the total price, the nuclear plant you're comparing it to would probably be pretty expensive to build today too. In the UK, they're tossing 25 billion USD in Hinkley Point C at 3200 MW nameplate as far as I can tell.
True, but these are prototypes. So of course you don't put 2000 of them up at once, it's not like it's in Denmark where there are currently about 500 offshore non-floating wind turbines.
The power plants you describe are more expensive to operate and maintain.
That's not true. It's more expensive to build them, but they are far cheaper to operate. It's really hard to beat something that runs on sun or air or rain in operating costs.
Or perhaps the people you read here complaining are so full of themselves that the one time they've ever been reverted stuck with them for life.
I occasionally fix spelling mistakes and similar and have never experienced a revert. Of course, with something the size of Wikipedia, some pricks will be around. That's to be expected. Doesn't mean it doesn't work on average.
From what I understand, you can expect a MTBF of 10-20 years or something like that and then they are garbage.
Where did you get that idea from? The inverter needs replacing in that time frame, but most guestimates I've seen of PV panels are that they will stlll be good for most of their energy output after 40 years. E.g. this page: http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar-PV-panels
The warranty conditions for PV panels typically guarantee that panels can still produce at least 80% of their initial rated peak output after 20 (or sometimes 25) years. So manufactures expect that their panels last at least 20 years, and that the efficiency decreases by no more than 1% per year.
The promise of fusion is really low cost energy without limits.
The same can be said of fission plants. Only here, we actually have commercially available plants so people can see the price tag and see through the bullshit.
Large-scale fusion is never going to work in practice unless it can compete economically with new fission plants (the actual fuel for fission is only a small part of the overall cost). That is a loooooong way off.
And even if that happens, it will also have to compete with renewables that are currently falling (exponentially as far as I know) in price. So you may never get the choice between the two.
Given that everything we do and everything we aspire to requires more and more energy
What are you thinking of here? Apart from transport (where a certain guy recently proposed a system where the land use of the tubes themselves would be enough to power the system), energy usage is expected to stay more or less constant or only growing slightly in most developed countries, as far as I know.
The popular web frameworks these days have a little bit of wrapper code which maps DB values to native values. So for instance it's impossible to insert an incorrect date as it would not be possible to construct it with the API you have to go through. So in practice, it's not really an issue for new systems.
Also, while it's lame if MySQL doesn't catch those and I've certainly seen enough legacy DB systems to appreciate the RDBMS-consistency-rules-as-last-iine-of-defence idea, I do think that these days, if you actually encounter such a date in a new system, you've got bigger issues than just data consistency.
The natural gas boom is putting these older-gen reactors out of business. When the cost goes back up and nuclear becomes profitable again, we'll get the chance to actually implement the newer designs.
That's true, but it will probably only happen if the capital costs of new reactors falls - a lot. Meanwhile, various renewables are falling in price. And while those generally have high capital expenditures too, the marginal costs are usually really low. So it's going to be a tough market for new reactors.
Capacity factors are a well-understood phenomenon in energy production, although, may I add, not really sufficient to understand that much about the energy source anyway as reality in a grid with varying consumption rates is much more complicated. Many journalists don't really understand it, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You are taking a pessimistic view on the wind power side here.
In Denmark, we just completed a 400 MW offshore site which gets a non-inflation-adjusted strike price at 0.19 USD/kWh for the first 10-12 years. After that it operates on market terms. The capacity factor is expected to be around 45-55% as far as I know (other offshore sites have similar factors - the numbers are publicly available in an open catalogue of all Danish turbines). Modern turbines have much improved capacity factors compared to the old smaller ones.
Now in Denmark, 0.19 USD/kWh was considered a far too high price. The bidding round was hastened through so we only got one bidder. An earlier site received less than half of that in strike price. The latter one would be around £59 per MWh.
I don't know why you are paying so big subsidies in England, but it seems fishy.
While it is true that offshore turbines have a harsh environment, it's also true that the industry has learned from some of its early mistakes. Even if you don't believe that, you need to take into account that the foundation is the most expensive part of an offshore turbine, so even if you have to replace the generator and blades, it's going to be a lot cheaper than building a new farm.
PS: I don't think it really makes sense to quote EPR costs from China. The costs of things in China just aren't comparable to the costs in a Western country.
No. They are lower. At least for modern wind farms.
The Nazis were democratically elected into power. If you supported democracy, you had to support the Nazis in 1939 (prior to their invasion of Poland in September).
I just have to comment this as I see it repeated often: I am sorry, but that's not really true. It's true they got a (big) foot in the door (about 1/3 of the votes in a background of a crisis), but that's about where democracy stopped and Hitler took over. If you're interested, I suggest you read a history book on the Germany and the Weimar Republic. Here's a couple of quick links with more info:
http://www.lobelog.com/no-hitler-did-not-come-to-power-democratically/
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-the-claim-that-hitler-came-to-power-democratically-justified
Even if you can perhaps argue about the 1933 election, there's no doubt that by 1939 Germany was not a democracy. In 1939 you had to be a fool to think otherwise, the nazis weren't exactly quiet about their authoritarian philosophy. I live in a neighbouring country, and by 1939 a lot of people here were certainly reading the signs, nervously.
Sure, but that's not really what you want. Far from it. You want output that follows the consumption. Many existing hydro plants can do this by virtue of the storage in the dam.
On a related note, cost/kWh figures can be deceptive. For instance, say the cost is 0,20 USD/kWh 24/7. That's great - except at night consumption is low so you may not be able to sell the energy, or will have to sell at a much reduced price; you can still do that if the marginal costs of keeping the plan running are lower than competitors. But in reality, you may only have say 12 hours/day to really turn a profit, not 24 hours.
Or perhaps you could just do what any long section of text does on the web - structure things in a hierarchy so you start off by seeing the hierarchy, then visit the first node, then go back to the hierarchy, then visit the second, etc. (or see part of the hierarchy as you traverse the leaf nodes, or whatever). And color code links to stuff you've already visited.
Really, navigation should be a solved problem by now if you think just a little bit beyond the limitations of paper books.
Watch the QuakeCon talks he gave this year and in 2012. He's been involved in the development of the Rift from the beginning one way or another.
The problem in this instance is that MATE is basically a fork of GNOME which was already in the repository. It's my understanding that a lot of stuff had to be sorted out to prevent clashes and to ensure that Debian doesn't end up with a bunch of garbage packages that will have to be maintained for the next Debian release.
His idea is obvious in hindsight, but nobody had thought of it in the 50+ years they'd been using electric fans for ventilation. It's like learning something new in school - once you'd seen it work and gotten your mind past the assumption that the blades in a fan need to be fixed, it's dirt easy to understand and replicate even if you've never seen any internal schematics. Because of poor patent protection in Asia, there were Chinese knockoffs being sold within a year.
It seems to me there are two schools of thought. One is that people have an inherent right to ideas they invent. That's the American dream - to rise from poverty and get rich.
The other is that patents are there to help society, period. In this case, it seems that without patent protection, society was better off with these Chinese knockoffs you mention - let the most competitive production facility win. If he had spent ten years and lots of development resources researching how to build this, there may be a point that society is better off granting him a patent so others aren't discouraged from investing in R&D. However, this argument only holds water in so far that this R&D wouldn't have happened anyway.
The problem with the first school of thought is that it appears the patent system in practice is actually rigged against individuals and small companies.
I personally know one inventor who was basically had no output for 10 years in order to pay off debt he'd accrued because he went out and patented a really good idea for a household appliance - and then never got anything out of it because the manufacturers found another way to build the appliance. Lawyers seem to me to be the only real winners in this game.
I was waiting for the moment you would suggest to strap the old CRT onto your head for the Only True VR Experience.
(a) you can't legally use GPL licensed code in a BSD project
Yes, you can. You just can't keep licensing the result as BSD, because that would circumvent the GPL license - someone could take the BSD-licensed result and put it into a proprietary code base, something that people licensing their works under the GPL are not okay with.
But I'll grant that you that these days, it would perhaps be a good idea if you could keep the result licensed under two licenses, so the GPL-part under GPL and the rest under BSD. As long as the rest of the project is under a GPL-compatible free license, I don't really see the problem.
Of course, that could quickly turn into a mess. May not be workable in practice.
From the photos, the platform doesn't look like a WindFloat.
Mitsubishi and Vestas recently announced a joint venture in offshore turbines, though.
Cheap, safe, abundant, and limitless electricity
It's probably not going to be cheap, not in our lifetime, and it produces radioactive material comparable to a fission plant (although of course with some differences) so I'm not sure how it qualifies as safe either.
The truth is that we already have access to close to limitless energy in renewable sources. And the tech for harvesting it is falling in price year by year.
This cost analysis does not consider the number of times they would need to be replaced during the 40-60 year operating life of a nuclear plant, or the cost of spinning reserve required to back up the wind generators.
That's a bit one-sided. The nuclear power plant is going to need repairs and upgrades too, and it also needs backup. The latter should be self-evident given the current situation.
Currently wind turbines are sold with 20-25 years guarantees, but nobody really knows how long they're going to last.
Offshore wind has about a 0.3-0.4 capacity factor.
In Denmark it's about 0.45-0.55. You can't really compare the costs of 3 prototype units with a full-scale rollout.
As for the total price, the nuclear plant you're comparing it to would probably be pretty expensive to build today too. In the UK, they're tossing 25 billion USD in Hinkley Point C at 3200 MW nameplate as far as I can tell.
True, but these are prototypes. So of course you don't put 2000 of them up at once, it's not like it's in Denmark where there are currently about 500 offshore non-floating wind turbines.
The power plants you describe are more expensive to operate and maintain.
That's not true. It's more expensive to build them, but they are far cheaper to operate. It's really hard to beat something that runs on sun or air or rain in operating costs.
Or perhaps the people you read here complaining are so full of themselves that the one time they've ever been reverted stuck with them for life.
I occasionally fix spelling mistakes and similar and have never experienced a revert. Of course, with something the size of Wikipedia, some pricks will be around. That's to be expected. Doesn't mean it doesn't work on average.
From what I understand, you can expect a MTBF of 10-20 years or something like that and then they are garbage.
Where did you get that idea from? The inverter needs replacing in that time frame, but most guestimates I've seen of PV panels are that they will stlll be good for most of their energy output after 40 years. E.g. this page: http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar-PV-panels
The warranty conditions for PV panels typically guarantee that panels can still produce at least 80% of their initial rated peak output after 20 (or sometimes 25) years. So manufactures expect that their panels last at least 20 years, and that the efficiency decreases by no more than 1% per year.
The promise of fusion is really low cost energy without limits.
The same can be said of fission plants. Only here, we actually have commercially available plants so people can see the price tag and see through the bullshit.
Large-scale fusion is never going to work in practice unless it can compete economically with new fission plants (the actual fuel for fission is only a small part of the overall cost). That is a loooooong way off.
And even if that happens, it will also have to compete with renewables that are currently falling (exponentially as far as I know) in price. So you may never get the choice between the two.
Given that everything we do and everything we aspire to requires more and more energy
What are you thinking of here? Apart from transport (where a certain guy recently proposed a system where the land use of the tubes themselves would be enough to power the system), energy usage is expected to stay more or less constant or only growing slightly in most developed countries, as far as I know.
It is a pretty amazing fact. Definitely one you could spend a lot of interesting biology study time on.
I hope that they someday find a solution for batteries in Nordic climes, so it's a viable car here as well.
Are you aware that one of their biggest market at the moment is Norway? I believe your battery information is outdated.
The popular web frameworks these days have a little bit of wrapper code which maps DB values to native values. So for instance it's impossible to insert an incorrect date as it would not be possible to construct it with the API you have to go through. So in practice, it's not really an issue for new systems.
Also, while it's lame if MySQL doesn't catch those and I've certainly seen enough legacy DB systems to appreciate the RDBMS-consistency-rules-as-last-iine-of-defence idea, I do think that these days, if you actually encounter such a date in a new system, you've got bigger issues than just data consistency.
The natural gas boom is putting these older-gen reactors out of business. When the cost goes back up and nuclear becomes profitable again, we'll get the chance to actually implement the newer designs.
That's true, but it will probably only happen if the capital costs of new reactors falls - a lot. Meanwhile, various renewables are falling in price. And while those generally have high capital expenditures too, the marginal costs are usually really low. So it's going to be a tough market for new reactors.
In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.
I'm from Denmark, and no, we're not. You are quoting figures with a tax that has nothing to do with production of electricity from renewables.
Breakdown here for all of Europe.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
Hey, dude. Read up on capacity factors as opposed to peak capacity. There's no conspiracy.
Capacity factors are a well-understood phenomenon in energy production, although, may I add, not really sufficient to understand that much about the energy source anyway as reality in a grid with varying consumption rates is much more complicated. Many journalists don't really understand it, though.