> even if we had another chernobyl or two Nuclear would still retain the title of safest and cleanest energy source
Perhaps, but not "least expensive", which is the real problem. Consider
The cleanup for Fukushima is currently budgeted at $80 billion, and TEPCO says another 35 are needed at this point. Third party estimates suggest the all-in will be about $250 billion. This is the vast majority of the total $300 billion estimated cost for the tsunami. For Chernobyl, estimates are around $500 billion over 30 years.
So that's maybe $750 billion for two accidents. There are about 400 operational reactors in the world, with a nameplate around 370 GWe. So that's basically $2/W, on top of plants who's overnights are maybe $4 to $5. It's a 50% increase in system cost *for two accidents*.
If the industry had to pay this insurance, the number of reactors in the world would be somewhere very close to zero. But they don't. The taxpayer takes on the insurance for these plants. When this happened to the financial industry everyone cried fowl. It's not clear to me why this should be different.
And that's why so few plants are being built today. No one is willing to take the financial risk. Not with the price of other sources plummeting - wait and see is a *very* safe attitude. The exception, of course, is China, who's sitting on a $trillion US. Apparently the US public is willing to fund China's nuclear buildout by buying salad shooters and barbie dolls, and everyone's happy!
> Yeah, covering thousands of square miles with solar panels would provide a significant amount of power > - from 11AM to 2PM. For the other 21 hours per day, the choices are coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear.
Or hydro, or geothermal, or wind, or lots of other things.
> If you sell solar on its actual capabilities, it can reduce fossil fuel use by 5%
> Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
Isn't where? It's reach parity for about half the planet, and the other half's maybe 5 years out.
> But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone
For very specific roles. Unlike PV, solar thermal is effectively a heat engine, and therefore is dependant on the energy difference between the input and the output (sink). In the case of concentrators, this means they only really work in bright direct sunlight. So if they're in the desert they are very competitive, but anywhere else they have serious problems with capacity factors.
> Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell?
Yes.
> The amount of silver?
Is tiny. There's about 10 billion ounces mined every year, of which about 100 million is used in cells. What is used in cells is easily recycled.
> Nuclear is almost totally nurtral
Glad to hear it.
> Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion
I think it has a lot more to do with the overnight costs and the fact that we're still mired in what he UK calls "the credit crunch".
But posts like this, from the "deluded [snip] religious zealots", is one of the other big problems for the nuclear industry. They've been overpromising and underdelivering for 50 years. The costs of the plants on an inflation-adjusted basis has gone up about 6 times since the 1960s, which has decimated the LCoE in spite of excellent capacity factors. And that's about that. Do you think Morgan Stanley cares about the hippies? They don't. All they care about is the ROI, and that's where nuclear has fallen flat.
> if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells
Well let's see
1) where do you live 2) what are the dimensions of the part of your roof that's "the most south pointing".
I'll be happy to run the numbers for you at that point, or you can do it yourself following these basic instructions:
> Can't you "disperse" the concentrated light on more panels
Sure, but if you're going to shine 1 sun worth of light on the panels, why not just let the sun do it?
> Another way might be to avoid photovoltaic panels and use the concentrated light to boil water
Heat engines of this sort normally max out at about 40%, but given all the losses in this system that's likely not bad at all. There must be something I'm missing about using mirrors, I'll have to look into it more.
> The Japanese don't have a Nevada to put vast solar arrays into
It is important to note that the safely limits for microwave radiation is about 10 mW/cm^2. It is widely assumed that this number would be increased for a SPS system, and the baseline figure is 23 mW/cm^2. That compares to about 90 to 110 mW/cm^2 for "bright direct sunlight" under AM1.5 to AM1 conditions.
Let's examine the numbers. The article speaks of a collector "3 kilometres long". Let's assume, for the math, that this is the diameter of a circular collector, so that would be pi x 1500^2, or about 7 million square meters. In Japan, which is just about exactly AM1.5, that's 900 W/m^2, so that's 6.3 GW of power falling in that area. If covered with conventional panels with an arial efficiency of 16%, which is common these days, then this array using ground-mounted panels would generate 1.8 GW of power.
Now how much power is their design supposed to generate? 1 GW.
So you see the problem Now admittedly the *daily* energy produced would be about 24 GWh for the SPS and about 10 to 16 GWh for the solar panels (the upper limit assumes trackers). But I think you will agree that the small increase in size needed to cover that gap in total production, assuming you even want that (no one wants power at night, we're sleeping) is never ever ever ever going to cost less than the satellite. Even in Tokyo!
> but the energy received from the sun in space is stronger before it is weakened by passing through the atmosphere
About 25%, which is mostly reflection and scattering. Some of that you get back as diffuse blue-sky radiation. Overall it's much smaller than you might think - you can see the sun after all, think about what that actually means. Offsetting this is the drop in efficiency of the cells due to the spectrum, which is from 16 to 14%. This makes up a good chunk of what's left. In the end, it's pretty much a wash, maybe a few percent, at best.
> Your Insolation numbers seem to indicate a 6 hour day on earth with a 24 hour day in space
Those numbers include EVERYTHING. And I mean EVERYTHING, I mean everything from direct sunlight to diffuse sunlight to reflections off snow to dust on the panels to clouds in the sky to whether or not its cloudier in the morning or afternoon where you live to losses in the wiring to reflections off the glass on the front. If you can think of a loss mechanism, its accounted for in there.
> the mirrors wouldn't degrade at the rate the panels do
Go read the wiki article on space debris (which I basically wrote) and look at some of the images. Are you still so sure?
Trust me, I've looked at this issue six ways to Sunday. It cannot possibly work.
> Nah, we can transmit down from the sat using a different part of the spectrum that the atmosphere is more transparent to.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that you're more efficiently transmitting a tiny amount of the available power, instead of less efficiently transmitting *all of it*. Unless you propose covering a patch of the sky the same area as the surface of the Earth facing the sun, it is unlikely you will be able to change this.
> Which allows you to use the land under the receptor (if you put it, say, ten feet off the ground) in pretty > much any way you desire - grow wheat, corn, cows, etc
Which we do all the time with solar panels already. It's called "solar crop sharing" or "solar cropping". Actually, there's a good article on this in the sidebar of the JAXA article that is the basis for this post.
> Base load is cheap because it uses coal or nuclear
Or wind, or hydro, or pumped storage, or tidal power or natural gas or geothermal or lots of things. Fallacy of the excluded middle.
Last night demand in Ontario dropped to 12.3 GW. That is less than the minimum amount of power the grid can generate. So in order to get rid of that power, they sold it for, literally, zero cents.
No one is going to build a device who's only selling point is that it produces more of this stuff.
> Space is theoretically more efficient. Period
The band gap of silicon solar cells is in the near IR, which means any light above that frequency is increasingly inefficient in capture. They capture less than 1/2 of the power from blue light, for instance. By down converting some of the light from higher frequencies, the atmosphere increases photocurrent. Typical cell designs are about 14% efficient in space and 16% on the surface.
> You don’t have an atmosphere absorbing the sunlight
> Oops my badi should have RTFA...i saw the pic and thought they'd be reflecting light
No, you're right, that's definitely what the image implies.
As to the concept of using mirrors, some points
One is that conventional cells max out at about 1.1 "suns", meaning that if you shine more than another 10% light on them you flatline the power. It has to do with the speed of the charge carriers, they can only move so fast and after you get to some point where the incoming photo creates an electron that immediately hits a hole from the last photon.
But that said, you can still double the total production because you can get sunlight at night. Actually it's more like 4 times because you can dispense with the "trackers" on the ground and use fixed-mount panels, which saves a whole lot of money and space. So personally, I'm more than a little surprised this isn't the path people are exploring.
> First, you don’t have to worry about your power going out at night
But that's not a problem we actually have. Baseload power is currently selling for 2 to 3 cents, peak power is up into the 20's. No one is going to build a space-o device to provide something we have trouble giving away.
> cells in space should be more efficient then cells buried underneath the atmosphere
Actually, the opposite is true. Cells, silicon ones anyway, are more efficient under the air. It has to do with their band gap.
> Beaming power to remote locations could be more efficient then hauling fuel
The problem is that all you're doing is replacing the array of solar panels with an array of dipoles. The increase in energy density is about 50%, so you need a field that's almost as big as normal PV. There's really no advantage here.
> why not just collect it from the ground in the first place?
Exactly.
> What's going to make collecting energy on the ground from a satellite more efficient than collecting it from the sun?
In theory you don't have night, so you get twice as much hours of sunlight. Add "cosine error" and the lack of weather, and you're up to five times.
But then you have to throw away half on the way down to the earth. And then the panels last half as long in space. So in the end it's a *very* small *theoretical* advantage.
Which is, of course, utterly wiped out by the cost of launch. And everyone knows this. But the guys proposing these things are not power companies, but space companies. As is the case here, it's JAXA, the Japanese space agency. Everyone outside the space field is completely aware of the fact that this is an utterly ridiculous idea.
> nuclear energy sector which is the largest(providing about 68% of our power
More like 55%, but I quibble.
> they would be in at 18c/KwH, not 64.8c/KwH
You start by complaining everyone should "get paid at the same levelled costs as anyone else", but then fail to mention any of the externalities in this case. You know, like:
1) As a result of cost over-runs, the Ontario government had to accept about $23 billion in bad debt, which ads a 0.7 c/kWh rider to your bill. You can see it right there under you "Debt Retirement Charge". $23 billion is enough to buy a whole additional Darlington, and the 0.7 cents when applied to just the nuclear is 1.5 cents/kWh.
2) The nuclear plants have a special deal where both their bad debts and insurance are capped and covered by the taxpayer. The former we've already been bitten by, and the later, thankfully, we haven't (really thankfully, because I'm inside the exclusion zone of both Pickering and Darlington, so I'm sunk no matter which way the wind is blowing).
If the plants had to take on their risk, both financial and physical, they wouldn't have been built in the first place. The price of Darlington B started around $13 billion until the bidding process was changed so the bids had to include risk mitigation in the price. Then it inflated to $24, just like that. That's over $8 a Watt, which prices it out of the market. And that's precisely why none are being built today.
> they would be in at 18c/KwH, not 64.8c/KwH
Note for other people reading this: he's picked a price that hasn't been in effect for several years, and was publicly announced as a teaser rate that would (and did) change once the program was up and running. Here's the current rates:
As you can see, the highest tariff, for small rooftop systems, is under 40 cents. And before you complain about that, keep in mind that peak power generation in Ontario is about 25 cents from NG peakers.
Actually, PV in the Toronto area now has an LCoE of 12 to 15 cents, so if we did pay 18 I'd be perfectly happy with that. But don't take my word for it, do the math yourself:
And if you applied your logic, none of the nukes would have been built, and you'd be sitting in the dark.
>I would end the policy of selling energy at less than what it costs to the US, than what residents of Ontario can buy it for.
You know we also sell it to them for *more* than what we buy it for too, right?
And that the net balance is massively positive and generates hundreds of millions in income every year?
What, you *didn't* hear that part of the story from your favourite anti-green web site or National Post article? Color me surprised.
> You're right and so far the Liberal party
Maybe if your argument is going to boil down to your hatred for particular political groups, you should just lay off the tech and avoid making yourself play the goat?
> Most backed electricity is wasted because control systems designed to balance
>the grid cannot cope with thousands of variable intermittent sources
Nah, they've had software for this for years. You should google the IBM page on this they track clouds as they move by their effect on output on panels and they project that forward in real-time to forecast production over long periods.
> causes negative electricity prices where the power company pays users to waste excess electricity
Another tired old canard. The power company also makes money by selling power at a profit, and in every single example I have ever seen, the balance is *always* positive. And yes, I work in the industry.
> I'm sure you see it as being about defending the jobs of people like me that are paid by > coal mining companies - if so fuck off - we don't need liars making us look bad
And we most certainly don't need asshats who shout down any contrary viewpoint with bigoted arguments that assume they can read minds.
> With solar installs, they still need 100% of the capacity per house they needed before
Given that most homes in North America have 240V/200A, and use an average of perhaps 10 to 15A of that, this is a moot point. There is so much overcapacity at the bottom end of the network that the only real issues are at the HV side of things, precisely what will be helped by any sort of load offset.
That said, there is the practical problem that many of the older transforms at the bottom levels of the hierarchy are not really meant for backfeeding efficiently. But that's a relatively low-cost upgrade that can take place slowly.
> There's many possible solutions: Charge a static connection fee based on maximum amps/watts needed
Agreed. And an additional rider if you want the option to backfeed. It's probably money-positive for the utility at around $5 a month, which I suspect is about the paperwork costs. I also suspect most people putting up solar would be happy paying $10 a month for the backfeed option, I know I would.
> 10kwh in excess during the day, but only 9kwh of that makes it to the consumer
As you later noted this is closer to 7% on average, but in fact it's just about 0% for the case we're considering. If that power doesn't go back through the closest transformer, then the losses are zero, or depending on the way you want to count it, negative.
That's because the offset means you don't have to import that amount of power from further up the grid, where the actual losses take place. Lowering the amount of "flow" reduces losses. There's probably a percent or two of efficiency here, meaning if we all went PV the grid would improve to 95%.
That said, this does become an issue when you start getting to significant deployments, because then you will see uploading through the hierarchy, and as I mentioned, most transformers aren't designed for that and get kinda crappy efficiency going uphill. There are many solutions to this, including newer transformers and some non-linear ones like distributed storage at the transformer sites (don't upload, wait for the peak).
In any event, we're *way* far from that being an issue in most places that have any sort of PV buildout.
> and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow
Bologna.
You can also sell products at a steep profit and then give that profit back to the shareholders as dividends. In fact, that was the primary way of generating stock market value in the past, up until the 1990s. Methods like Dogs of the Dow and the Foolish 4 were based entirely on two concepts: people want stocks that pay dividends, and stock prices tend towards the mean.
Starting around 2000 this strategy was seen as old fashioned, and investors started switching en-masse to riskier growth-based strategies. When these petered out they started inventing new vehicles with higher and higher risk. We've been living in this environment for about 15 years now, and, frankly, the results are not entirely encouraging.
So please don't repeat this statement as if it were fact. It's not, and the opposite was true for the majority of the history of public stock companies. You're simply regurgitating the current fad.
> CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources
Sure they are, they just have lower capacity factors. Right now the Ontario wind fleet is running at about 30% CF, while the CANDUs are around 85. That means you need to build three times as many wind turbines and nukes. Thing is, wind turbines cost about 1/3rd of nukes, so economically it's a wash.
What would be really nice would be a storage system that can outlast any possible wind outage. You know, like this:
> Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
Infrastructure engineers can plan for wind and solar just fine, thanks for asking. After all, those are the two fastest growing power sources in the world.
What engineers, and everyone else, finds very difficult indeed is figuring out which of these technologies will be the "winners" 12 years from now. That's about how long it takes to start up a new nuclear plant, end to end, a period of time during which wind power declined in price about 2 times, and PV about 5. Given this, a wait-and-see attitude seems very much warranted, which is precisely what we're seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
> even if we had another chernobyl or two Nuclear would still retain the title of safest and cleanest energy source
Perhaps, but not "least expensive", which is the real problem. Consider
The cleanup for Fukushima is currently budgeted at $80 billion, and TEPCO says another 35 are needed at this point. Third party estimates suggest the all-in will be about $250 billion. This is the vast majority of the total $300 billion estimated cost for the tsunami. For Chernobyl, estimates are around $500 billion over 30 years.
So that's maybe $750 billion for two accidents. There are about 400 operational reactors in the world, with a nameplate around 370 GWe. So that's basically $2/W, on top of plants who's overnights are maybe $4 to $5. It's a 50% increase in system cost *for two accidents*.
If the industry had to pay this insurance, the number of reactors in the world would be somewhere very close to zero. But they don't. The taxpayer takes on the insurance for these plants. When this happened to the financial industry everyone cried fowl. It's not clear to me why this should be different.
And that's why so few plants are being built today. No one is willing to take the financial risk. Not with the price of other sources plummeting - wait and see is a *very* safe attitude. The exception, of course, is China, who's sitting on a $trillion US. Apparently the US public is willing to fund China's nuclear buildout by buying salad shooters and barbie dolls, and everyone's happy!
I found two dead birds on my lawn this spring, so apparently my house is about one thousands times deadlier on an area-adjusted basis.
Ban lawns!
> Yeah, covering thousands of square miles with solar panels would provide a significant amount of power
> - from 11AM to 2PM. For the other 21 hours per day, the choices are coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear.
Or hydro, or geothermal, or wind, or lots of other things.
> If you sell solar on its actual capabilities, it can reduce fossil fuel use by 5%
References, please.
> Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
Isn't where? It's reach parity for about half the planet, and the other half's maybe 5 years out.
> But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone
For very specific roles. Unlike PV, solar thermal is effectively a heat engine, and therefore is dependant on the energy difference between the input and the output (sink). In the case of concentrators, this means they only really work in bright direct sunlight. So if they're in the desert they are very competitive, but anywhere else they have serious problems with capacity factors.
> Solar power people
I've never met anyone that's solar powered.
> Ever looked up what it takes to produce a solar cell?
Yes.
> The amount of silver?
Is tiny. There's about 10 billion ounces mined every year, of which about 100 million is used in cells. What is used in cells is easily recycled.
> Nuclear is almost totally nurtral
Glad to hear it.
> Because people like you drag your misinformed hippy mother earth religion
I think it has a lot more to do with the overnight costs and the fact that we're still mired in what he UK calls "the credit crunch".
But posts like this, from the "deluded [snip] religious zealots", is one of the other big problems for the nuclear industry. They've been overpromising and underdelivering for 50 years. The costs of the plants on an inflation-adjusted basis has gone up about 6 times since the 1960s, which has decimated the LCoE in spite of excellent capacity factors. And that's about that. Do you think Morgan Stanley cares about the hippies? They don't. All they care about is the ROI, and that's where nuclear has fallen flat.
> if solar worked my roof would be covered with solar cells
Well let's see
1) where do you live
2) what are the dimensions of the part of your roof that's "the most south pointing".
I'll be happy to run the numbers for you at that point, or you can do it yourself following these basic instructions:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/grid-parity-in-ontario/
> Think about games you've played that have a story. How much do you actually remember?
Quite a bit, typically.
> You can probably name the protagonist and antagonist, but do you really know what they were fighting about
Actually, I rarely remember the names, while the backstory is trivial to recall.
Consider Marathon.
> fission and fusion
Meh, fusion's just as bad.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
> the transmission losses seem a bit high for the wireless transmission
Friis transmission equation. I put the actual numbers in one of the other articles.
> I may be an anonymous coward but at least my opinion isn't click bait
Mine's math. Try it some time.
> Can't you "disperse" the concentrated light on more panels
Sure, but if you're going to shine 1 sun worth of light on the panels, why not just let the sun do it?
> Another way might be to avoid photovoltaic panels and use the concentrated light to boil water
Heat engines of this sort normally max out at about 40%, but given all the losses in this system that's likely not bad at all. There must be something I'm missing about using mirrors, I'll have to look into it more.
> The Japanese don't have a Nevada to put vast solar arrays into
It is important to note that the safely limits for microwave radiation is about 10 mW/cm^2. It is widely assumed that this number would be increased for a SPS system, and the baseline figure is 23 mW/cm^2. That compares to about 90 to 110 mW/cm^2 for "bright direct sunlight" under AM1.5 to AM1 conditions.
Let's examine the numbers. The article speaks of a collector "3 kilometres long". Let's assume, for the math, that this is the diameter of a circular collector, so that would be pi x 1500^2, or about 7 million square meters. In Japan, which is just about exactly AM1.5, that's 900 W/m^2, so that's 6.3 GW of power falling in that area. If covered with conventional panels with an arial efficiency of 16%, which is common these days, then this array using ground-mounted panels would generate 1.8 GW of power.
Now how much power is their design supposed to generate? 1 GW.
So you see the problem Now admittedly the *daily* energy produced would be about 24 GWh for the SPS and about 10 to 16 GWh for the solar panels (the upper limit assumes trackers). But I think you will agree that the small increase in size needed to cover that gap in total production, assuming you even want that (no one wants power at night, we're sleeping) is never ever ever ever going to cost less than the satellite. Even in Tokyo!
> but the energy received from the sun in space is stronger before it is weakened by passing through the atmosphere
About 25%, which is mostly reflection and scattering. Some of that you get back as diffuse blue-sky radiation. Overall it's much smaller than you might think - you can see the sun after all, think about what that actually means. Offsetting this is the drop in efficiency of the cells due to the spectrum, which is from 16 to 14%. This makes up a good chunk of what's left. In the end, it's pretty much a wash, maybe a few percent, at best.
> Your Insolation numbers seem to indicate a 6 hour day on earth with a 24 hour day in space
Those numbers include EVERYTHING. And I mean EVERYTHING, I mean everything from direct sunlight to diffuse sunlight to reflections off snow to dust on the panels to clouds in the sky to whether or not its cloudier in the morning or afternoon where you live to losses in the wiring to reflections off the glass on the front. If you can think of a loss mechanism, its accounted for in there.
> the mirrors wouldn't degrade at the rate the panels do
Go read the wiki article on space debris (which I basically wrote) and look at some of the images. Are you still so sure?
Trust me, I've looked at this issue six ways to Sunday. It cannot possibly work.
> Nah, we can transmit down from the sat using a different part of the spectrum that the atmosphere is more transparent to.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that you're more efficiently transmitting a tiny amount of the available power, instead of less efficiently transmitting *all of it*. Unless you propose covering a patch of the sky the same area as the surface of the Earth facing the sun, it is unlikely you will be able to change this.
> Which allows you to use the land under the receptor (if you put it, say, ten feet off the ground) in pretty
> much any way you desire - grow wheat, corn, cows, etc
Which we do all the time with solar panels already. It's called "solar crop sharing" or "solar cropping". Actually, there's a good article on this in the sidebar of the JAXA article that is the basis for this post.
> Base load is cheap because it uses coal or nuclear
Or wind, or hydro, or pumped storage, or tidal power or natural gas or geothermal or lots of things. Fallacy of the excluded middle.
Last night demand in Ontario dropped to 12.3 GW. That is less than the minimum amount of power the grid can generate. So in order to get rid of that power, they sold it for, literally, zero cents.
No one is going to build a device who's only selling point is that it produces more of this stuff.
> Space is theoretically more efficient. Period
The band gap of silicon solar cells is in the near IR, which means any light above that frequency is increasingly inefficient in capture. They capture less than 1/2 of the power from blue light, for instance. By down converting some of the light from higher frequencies, the atmosphere increases photocurrent. Typical cell designs are about 14% efficient in space and 16% on the surface.
> You don’t have an atmosphere absorbing the sunlight
That's not efficiency, that's photocurrent.
> Oops my badi should have RTFA...i saw the pic and thought they'd be reflecting light
No, you're right, that's definitely what the image implies.
As to the concept of using mirrors, some points
One is that conventional cells max out at about 1.1 "suns", meaning that if you shine more than another 10% light on them you flatline the power. It has to do with the speed of the charge carriers, they can only move so fast and after you get to some point where the incoming photo creates an electron that immediately hits a hole from the last photon.
But that said, you can still double the total production because you can get sunlight at night. Actually it's more like 4 times because you can dispense with the "trackers" on the ground and use fixed-mount panels, which saves a whole lot of money and space. So personally, I'm more than a little surprised this isn't the path people are exploring.
> First, you don’t have to worry about your power going out at night
But that's not a problem we actually have. Baseload power is currently selling for 2 to 3 cents, peak power is up into the 20's. No one is going to build a space-o device to provide something we have trouble giving away.
> cells in space should be more efficient then cells buried underneath the atmosphere
Actually, the opposite is true. Cells, silicon ones anyway, are more efficient under the air. It has to do with their band gap.
> Beaming power to remote locations could be more efficient then hauling fuel
The problem is that all you're doing is replacing the array of solar panels with an array of dipoles. The increase in energy density is about 50%, so you need a field that's almost as big as normal PV. There's really no advantage here.
> why not just collect it from the ground in the first place?
Exactly.
> What's going to make collecting energy on the ground from a satellite more efficient than collecting it from the sun?
In theory you don't have night, so you get twice as much hours of sunlight. Add "cosine error" and the lack of weather, and you're up to five times.
But then you have to throw away half on the way down to the earth. And then the panels last half as long in space. So in the end it's a *very* small *theoretical* advantage.
Which is, of course, utterly wiped out by the cost of launch. And everyone knows this. But the guys proposing these things are not power companies, but space companies. As is the case here, it's JAXA, the Japanese space agency. Everyone outside the space field is completely aware of the fact that this is an utterly ridiculous idea.
The numbers don't work. Period.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/conceptualize-this-gm-unveils-yet-another-concept-car.html
> Apple doesn't know what they want.
Ummm, OK.
> This is Apple's core audience, the people who cant pick what they want.
Whereas Samsung's is giving people who can't pick what they want a lower cost option?
Or is there some part of the Samsung system I'm missing here? How do I replace the camera, for instance?
> every restaurant would be a tarted up McDonalds
This is already true. The most visited resteraunt with table service is Applebees, followed by Olive Garden and Chili's
Complain all you want, but this is precisely what people want.
> nuclear energy sector which is the largest(providing about 68% of our power
More like 55%, but I quibble.
> they would be in at 18c/KwH, not 64.8c/KwH
You start by complaining everyone should "get paid at the same levelled costs as anyone else", but then fail to mention any of the externalities in this case. You know, like:
1) As a result of cost over-runs, the Ontario government had to accept about $23 billion in bad debt, which ads a 0.7 c/kWh rider to your bill. You can see it right there under you "Debt Retirement Charge". $23 billion is enough to buy a whole additional Darlington, and the 0.7 cents when applied to just the nuclear is 1.5 cents/kWh.
2) The nuclear plants have a special deal where both their bad debts and insurance are capped and covered by the taxpayer. The former we've already been bitten by, and the later, thankfully, we haven't (really thankfully, because I'm inside the exclusion zone of both Pickering and Darlington, so I'm sunk no matter which way the wind is blowing).
If the plants had to take on their risk, both financial and physical, they wouldn't have been built in the first place. The price of Darlington B started around $13 billion until the bidding process was changed so the bids had to include risk mitigation in the price. Then it inflated to $24, just like that. That's over $8 a Watt, which prices it out of the market. And that's precisely why none are being built today.
> they would be in at 18c/KwH, not 64.8c/KwH
Note for other people reading this: he's picked a price that hasn't been in effect for several years, and was publicly announced as a teaser rate that would (and did) change once the program was up and running. Here's the current rates:
http://microfit.powerauthority.on.ca/sites/default/files/page/2014%20FIT%20Price%20Schedule_Final_20131107.pdf
As you can see, the highest tariff, for small rooftop systems, is under 40 cents. And before you complain about that, keep in mind that peak power generation in Ontario is about 25 cents from NG peakers.
Actually, PV in the Toronto area now has an LCoE of 12 to 15 cents, so if we did pay 18 I'd be perfectly happy with that. But don't take my word for it, do the math yourself:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/widespread-grid-parity-is-here/
> Niagara Generation, it would be 2.4c/KwH
And if you applied your logic, none of the nukes would have been built, and you'd be sitting in the dark.
>I would end the policy of selling energy at less than what it costs to the US, than what residents of Ontario can buy it for.
You know we also sell it to them for *more* than what we buy it for too, right?
And that the net balance is massively positive and generates hundreds of millions in income every year?
What, you *didn't* hear that part of the story from your favourite anti-green web site or National Post article? Color me surprised.
> You're right and so far the Liberal party
Maybe if your argument is going to boil down to your hatred for particular political groups, you should just lay off the tech and avoid making yourself play the goat?
> Most backed electricity is wasted because control systems designed to balance
>the grid cannot cope with thousands of variable intermittent sources
Nah, they've had software for this for years. You should google the IBM page on this they track clouds as they move by their effect on output on panels and they project that forward in real-time to forecast production over long periods.
> causes negative electricity prices where the power company pays users to waste excess electricity
Another tired old canard. The power company also makes money by selling power at a profit, and in every single example I have ever seen, the balance is *always* positive. And yes, I work in the industry.
> I'm sure you see it as being about defending the jobs of people like me that are paid by
> coal mining companies - if so fuck off - we don't need liars making us look bad
And we most certainly don't need asshats who shout down any contrary viewpoint with bigoted arguments that assume they can read minds.
> With solar installs, they still need 100% of the capacity per house they needed before
Given that most homes in North America have 240V/200A, and use an average of perhaps 10 to 15A of that, this is a moot point. There is so much overcapacity at the bottom end of the network that the only real issues are at the HV side of things, precisely what will be helped by any sort of load offset.
That said, there is the practical problem that many of the older transforms at the bottom levels of the hierarchy are not really meant for backfeeding efficiently. But that's a relatively low-cost upgrade that can take place slowly.
> There's many possible solutions: Charge a static connection fee based on maximum amps/watts needed
Agreed. And an additional rider if you want the option to backfeed. It's probably money-positive for the utility at around $5 a month, which I suspect is about the paperwork costs. I also suspect most people putting up solar would be happy paying $10 a month for the backfeed option, I know I would.
> 10kwh in excess during the day, but only 9kwh of that makes it to the consumer
As you later noted this is closer to 7% on average, but in fact it's just about 0% for the case we're considering. If that power doesn't go back through the closest transformer, then the losses are zero, or depending on the way you want to count it, negative.
That's because the offset means you don't have to import that amount of power from further up the grid, where the actual losses take place. Lowering the amount of "flow" reduces losses. There's probably a percent or two of efficiency here, meaning if we all went PV the grid would improve to 95%.
That said, this does become an issue when you start getting to significant deployments, because then you will see uploading through the hierarchy, and as I mentioned, most transformers aren't designed for that and get kinda crappy efficiency going uphill. There are many solutions to this, including newer transformers and some non-linear ones like distributed storage at the transformer sites (don't upload, wait for the peak).
In any event, we're *way* far from that being an issue in most places that have any sort of PV buildout.
> and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow
Bologna.
You can also sell products at a steep profit and then give that profit back to the shareholders as dividends. In fact, that was the primary way of generating stock market value in the past, up until the 1990s. Methods like Dogs of the Dow and the Foolish 4 were based entirely on two concepts: people want stocks that pay dividends, and stock prices tend towards the mean.
Starting around 2000 this strategy was seen as old fashioned, and investors started switching en-masse to riskier growth-based strategies. When these petered out they started inventing new vehicles with higher and higher risk. We've been living in this environment for about 15 years now, and, frankly, the results are not entirely encouraging.
So please don't repeat this statement as if it were fact. It's not, and the opposite was true for the majority of the history of public stock companies. You're simply regurgitating the current fad.
> CANNOT use solar OR wind power as your baseline power source. They aren't dependable sources
Sure they are, they just have lower capacity factors. Right now the Ontario wind fleet is running at about 30% CF, while the CANDUs are around 85. That means you need to build three times as many wind turbines and nukes. Thing is, wind turbines cost about 1/3rd of nukes, so economically it's a wash.
What would be really nice would be a storage system that can outlast any possible wind outage. You know, like this:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/the-energy-storage-myth/
> Nuclear IS a dependable, steady source that infrastructure engineers can PLAN for.
Infrastructure engineers can plan for wind and solar just fine, thanks for asking. After all, those are the two fastest growing power sources in the world.
What engineers, and everyone else, finds very difficult indeed is figuring out which of these technologies will be the "winners" 12 years from now. That's about how long it takes to start up a new nuclear plant, end to end, a period of time during which wind power declined in price about 2 times, and PV about 5. Given this, a wait-and-see attitude seems very much warranted, which is precisely what we're seeing.