Nuclear can't easily throttle back to 50% output during the day, so an all-nuclear solution doesn't work either.
Actually modern operations of older PWRs and BWRs and all new-build versions of such can swing output down to 75% and back up in about thirty minutes or so. Myself I'd run them at 100% and use the surplus power to decarbonise the atmosphere and stave off the increase in global surface temperatures as it doesn't cost much more to keep the reactors running at 100% since fuel is cheap. OTOH there's usually a Solartopia next door that could import the surplus power to keep its lights on at night when the wind dies down.
Oh, and 9 hours of sun in the winter? I wish. Today in my home town sunrise was at 08:26 and sunset at 15:42 for a total of 7.5 hours, and it's not quite midwinter yet. For a lot of today the sun was low to the horizon producing little solar power even from panels that can be angled to best effect all day, assuming no cloud which in midwinter here is a rare event.
It costs money to install plenty of wind and solar. A rough thought-experiment -- a grid needs a peak capacity of 10GW (winter evening in Europe, summer A/C load in America). During low demand it needs about 5 or 6GW. Assume it's all renewables, half solar, half wind at 15% load for solar and 30% for wind that means peak load capacity (10GW) will need 30GW of solar and 15GW of wind or about 45GW of capacity in terms of hardware. That capacity also has to top up storage as well as meet the instantaneous demand. A long winter calm with little wind could cut hard into storage as well as reducing the amount of electricity to keep the lights on so building out a lot more than the 45GW of renewables would be a prudent but expensive move.
Storage costs are in the $200 million/GWh region whether battery or pumped hydro, the two real deliverable storage alternatives. Assume a 12-hour capacity for the 10GW peak demand, that's $24 billion just for storage. The bad news is that high pressure calms can sit over an area for days at a time, reducing the assumed wind power output to a few hundred MW at best (I've seen Britain's 10GW of installed grid wind generators produce as little as 50MW for half a day during a calm).
To meet that 10GW demand purely with nuclear would require 12-14GW of online capacity, maybe even less as refuelling downtimes for individual reactors can be scheduled for low periods of predictable demand throughout the year. Winter or summer, there's 10GW available. Windy or calm, 10GW available. Sun up, sun down, 10GW available. The lights always come on, the electric car always gets charged and no CO2 gets added to the atmosphere.
Storage is an extra cost, it doesn't replace generating capacity. It also presupposes extra generating capacity to be available to top up the storage while still meeting the current demand which costs even more. At the moment renewables like wind and solar free-wheel on grids with large amounts of fossil fuel electricity production, either fast-response gas turbines (usually combined-cycle these days) or slow-response coal plants. Lots of solar and wind in a grid will need lots of storage or lots of fast fossil-carbon gas turbines. Nuclear doesn't need that storage and extra capacity to cover loss of generating since it's always-on (uptime for reactors is about 80-90% and outages for refuelling, repairs, inspections, etc. are predictable).
When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine then fossil fuels are burned to make up the difference. There is some storage but not nearly enough. Storage costs money to implement and doesn't create energy in itself, it just buffers supply and demand, it wastes energy on the round-trip and requires oversupply of capacity to top it up. There is some hydro which has a storage component but it's limited by geography and rainfall patterns.
The only scaleable always-there non-fossil power is nuclear, but it's Scary!
The title said it was the "biggest" battery system which it isn't. Bait and switch at its best, poor reporting if I'm being charitable.
The NGK battery seems a better fit to the small windfarm it's attached to, it can supply 30MW for 8 hours or so from a full charge even if the turbines are becalmed. The Tesla battery will only provide its rated output of 100MW for an hour and a bit in similar circumstances, after that the lights go out.
Three times more powerful than any other battery in the world??
NGK has a sodium-sulphur battery system backing a wind farm in Rokkasho, Japan which has a capacity of 245MWh compared to the headline 129MWh of the Australian Tesla battery.
The car analogy is just that, an analogy. Upgraded 1970s reactors are a lot safer than when they were first commissioned. New-build reactors of similar design (the basic PWR and BWR) are even safer than the upgraded 1970s reactors currently running today. There are possible (and as yet unproven and not yet deployed) upgrades coming in terms of ceramic fuel pellets and fuel rod structures which withstand overheating to a greater extent than existing fuels and they should, I repeat should be a retrofit for existing reactors to further increase their safety margins in case of a meltdown.
The bad news with the 1970s reactors are the two core safety components, the reactor vessel and the containment structures. They can't be replaced easily or at all in most cases. They can be improved -- a number of reactors have had their control heads replaced, containments have had new venting and cooling systems added but they're too expensive to swap out or replace entirely. In at least one case an attempt to "fix" a containment compromised the reactor's safety sufficiently that it was shut down permanently.
By "instantaneous" I mean(t) "the demand this instant" which is remarkably predictable for a given grid, the time of the year, the time of the day, the weather conditions etc. Rapid CHANGES in demand are the purview of gas turbines, usually "combined-cycle" (CCGT) for modern builds plus maybe on-demand hydro and pumped-storage. It's more common for coal plants to idle at low output to be ready to meet sudden but expected peaks -- the classic consumption peak in Britain used to be the electric load pulse during a commercial break in an evening TV program as millions of households switched on a 2kW electric kettle on to make a pot of tea. Britain now has few coal power plants and a shitload of CCGT to generate electricity so it's less of a problem than it used to be. The increase in watch-on-demand TV and the likes of Netflix has also knocked this back a bit.
The various state organisations and power generating companies in China have plans laid out for various nuclear reactor build projects which won't start for years if not decades assuming permission is given and funding found. If you classify these as being in "late stages of approval" then they will be pouring concrete on new reactor projects in 2025 or even later although most of these planned projects still have a lot of work to be done before the first concrete is poured.
You seem to be under the impression there's a limited number of such projects in the pipeline and when they're either completed or abandoned or never started at all then that's it, China will not construct any more reactors because of Fukushima. I find that odd.
Reactors built in the 1970s have all been upgraded and improved during rebuilds, inspections etc. They all have digital controls, better pumps, new valvegear, improved safety equipment etc. Cost is no object for these upgrades, pretty much.
The dreaded car analogy -- existing 1970s reactors are like a Ferrari built in the 1970s but it's been fitted with anti-lock brakes, modern tyres, the engine's been retrofitted with an emission control computer and fuel injection, the passenger compartment has been strengthened and fitted with airbags etc. etc. From the outside it still looks like a 1970s deathtrap, in reality it's similar to a 2000-series modern design. It's not got all of the goodies like proper crumple zones in the bodyshell but generally it's a lot safer than the original design. It's one of the reasons nuclear power plants are at the bottom of the killing-people-to-generate-electricity tables.
Who's going to pay for this battery storage? It costs money on top of the cost of the solar and wind installations (typical costs are $200 million per GWHr of storage). Fuel-derived power stations such as nuclear and fossil carbon (oil, gas, coal) don't need batteries or other storage such as pumped hydro. They can meet instantaneous demand if there are enough generating plants to cover the peaks. Wind/solar plus battery might not last long enough if the weather conditions cause problems and they need to be built out beyond instantaneous demand requirements to recharge the expensive battery systems for the bad times. This costs a lot more too.
All new nuclear approvals in China were put on hold indefinitely in 2011. The only plants being built there were approved and started before 2011.
You keep saying this. I keep proving you wrong.
There was a hiatus in building existing reactor projects and approving the construction of new nuclear reactors in China after 2011. They restarted the existing builds and started commissioning new projects in late 2012. Some of the new reactors that started construction in 2013 will be online by 2019 or so.
Tianwan units 3 and 4, started construction Dec 2012 and Sep 2013, expected to be online Feb 2018, Mar 2019.
Yangjiang units 5 and 6, started Sep 2013 and Dec 2013, expected online 2018 and 2019.
And so on. The pipeline for approval, start of construction and bringing reactors online to the grid
in China should produce four or five reactors a year for the next few years.
The Chinese bought licences to use Westinghouse technology for their PWRs but they've been working to develop their own home-grown PWR design(s) which have no licence encumbrances and they're building the first of those, the Hualong-1 models which have no intellectual property limitations for resale outside China. One consortium is looking at the Hualong-1 as a possible candidate reactor design for building in Britain.
No they're not. They're building lots of classic PWRs and BWRs, upgraded and improved from the Westinghouse design of the 1970s but still the same enriched-uranium steam kettle technology at heart. They're completing five of them this year and starting to build another eight or so with a lot more planned. Thorium reactors, none today, none yesterday and none tomorrow.
They're looking at all sorts of newer reactor concepts, building some first-off units like a pebble-bed reactor (the HTR-PM) as well as a sodium-cooled breeder but thorium reactors, nope. There are some academic paper exercises on the subject but uranium reactor tech is well-proven and they need the electricity more than they need to spend time, effort and money on developing thorium as a reactor fuel.
Back in September 2011 two sequential typhoons hit the southern end of Honshu, Japan's main island and the subsequent flooding killed about 90 people. Killer typhoons hit the Japanese islands pretty much every year.
Japan is a dangerous place to live, even more dangerous than California with its earthquakes, mudslides, floods and fires. Planning to control and mitigate such disasters is a necessary part of government hence the uprating of the flood control systems already in place around Tokyo.
Corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%. Apple gets a sweetheart deal from the Irish government and pays a lot less than 12.5%. Sweetheart deals like this are banned in the EU to prevent a race to the bottom by other small states. It's OK under EU rules for them to charge less than 12.5% but that has to be the rate for all corporation tax payers in Ireland, not just Apple and other big multinationals with similar deals.
It's something Ireland agreed to on accession to the EU. If they want to leave the EU and play these sorts of games, no problem but Apple relies on Ireland's EU membership to be able to shuffle their profits from all the other EU nations frictionlessly through their Irish offices and pay less tax than anywhere else. Outside the EU Ireland is no further use as a cheap-tax-rate haven for Apple et al.
It's not Apple at fault here, it's the notoriously corrupt Irish government that has traditionally played fast and loose with such financial rules in many other circumstances. The EU has had enough. If Ireland don't collect the taxes due from Apple I'd expect various EU grants and subsidies to be cut back pro rata on the basis that the Irish government had the chance to raise those revenues properly themselves by charging the correct rate of tax in the first place.
It's about time high-end and even commodity PCs moved to supporting ECC and using it as common practice. When total RAM fit in a PC was 1 or 2GB and data rates were a few hundred MB per second at best a bit error rate of 1 per trillion reads or writes was acceptable. Now that common motherboards can accept 64GB and more and RAM access speeds have also escalated the chances of a problematic bit error occurring in code or data have shot up, especially as the RAM's die mask sizes have decreased.
As an aside I've used commodity mobos in the past that accepted and would run ECC RAM but only as regular memory, the chipset didn't implement any kind of error-correcting capability. My workhorse machines for bit-bashing all have ECC properly implemented on server-grade hardware.
I mentioned battery density and weight as it was the major factor preventing the uptake of electric vehicles in the past, before lithium-ion was able to provide sufficient energy storage in a smaller weight (and volume) of batteries. I first got interested in EVs back in the 1970s when NiCd was about the best you could get for such applications and a 100km range was considered impressive. Back then increasing the Wh/kg figure was the target to aim for. Nowadays any new or improved battery tech for vehicles needs to match or exceed Li-ion's performance in that regard before all else.
I mentioned SCiB because is is a "Biggest Breakthrough Since Breakfast" battery technology with useful capabilities that nothing else on the market matched and it's from Toshiba, the company headlining TFA that's supposedly productionising a solid-electrolyte Li-ion tech battery. SCiB shows they've got a creditable track record of getting stuff out of the lab and into the real world unlike most vapourware BBSB battery stories/PR pieces that appear on Slashdot and elsewhere.
SCiB lithium-titanate is not really suitable in its current form for most vehicle applications due to its not-very-good Wh/kg performance (about half that of Li-ion) although there are some trials going on using SCiB batteries in larger vehicles such as buses where the Wh/kg numbers are less important as well as KE-recovery systems where its repeated rapid charge and discharge characteristics are beneficial. The big thing though is that SCiB is not a lab experiment, it's got funding and development and it can be bought off-the-shelf although it's very expensive (price on request, if you need to ask you can't afford it).
No, energy density is the key issue for electric vehicles, mass as well as volume but mostly mass. Old-style electric vehicles before lithium-ion batteries of various flavours were developed used bulky and heavy lead-acid and NiMH battery systems which didn't provide sufficient range due to their physical limitations. Li-ion batteries are typically twice the Watt-hours per kilogram figure of older battery tech.
Even now a modern electric vehicle's battery pack makes up a large part of the volume and mass of the car for the range it provides. It's sufficiently small though to make them viable although the manufacturers want to improve that even more to reduce the cost of manufacture and extend the range between charges.
I'm usually very cynical about "Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast" stories but there are a few things about this one that make me sit up and take note. One is that it's Toshiba who have a track record of delivering new battery tech such as SCiB, a rapid-charge battery (zero to full in ten minutes) with very good operating life of several thousand cycles despite being fast-charged. The other is that they're working on building out production of this new battery (which might be based on SCiB) rather than announcing lab results and talking a lot about nanostructures and the like while scrabbling around for more development funding.
I'm speculating here but it's possible the new Toshiba batteries will provide a fast-charge capability since they are supposedly solid-electrolyte. Fast-charge in the tank-of-gas time range period (five minutes or so) would mitigate range anxiety to a large extent if the infrastructure is in place to provide the large amounts of power to deliver fast-charge.
The overall takeaway is that the AMD system is faster in a lot of workloads (databases being the one big notable area where it loses badly) than the Intel system and at a much lower cost.
Databases are what the Big Iron servers live to support so AMD losing badly against Skylake on that front means they've lost the sales war. Web servers are databases, order processing systems are databases, pretty much everything that's computationally intensive has a database or six on the backend.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is shiny and prominent but the sales are limited and a lot of new HPC kit is based around non-CPU computation elements derived from GPUs rather than general-purpose CPUs so even good performance in that area won't save AMD in the datacentre markets.
The point is that previously a rolling mill to make 500,000 tonnes of steel wire a year would have required a lot more people to operate it and keep it running, maybe as many as a thousand people. Today it only takes a handful due to automation.
This is nothing really new, of course. In the 1970s in Britain the iron and steel industry was operating with old equipment with men shovelling oresands into open-hearth furnaces built in the 1920s while in places like Malaysia modern steel plants were being run by operators in airconditioned control rooms. In the end the old plants in Britain were shut down and 90% of the employees were laid off.
Turbogenerator sets at older large thermal power stations are typically 300MW in size so I expect (not having looked too deeply into it) that each Cordemain coal-fired "unit" is a single boiler feeding a pair of turbogenerators. The operators can produce less steam in that unit and drive only one of the turbogenerator sets producing about 300MW of electricity.
More modern thermal plant turbogenerator sets of 500MW capacity and larger are being built and installed in new-build projects (coal and nuclear) as they cost less per MW of capacity and are slightly more efficient than the older designs.
I really don't understand your idee fixe that France is secretly burning a lot of coal to feed its electricity requirements and faking the numbers to make its nuclear output look good for some reason. Most of their existing coal-fired plants have been shut down over the past five years or so and it's likely they will take all of their coal-fired plant out of operation in the next few years (some might be converted to biomass with the option to burn coal if need be). They might mothball some capacity in case of need.
You do know that a country uses during day time about 2 times the power than at night?
You do know that power consumption depends on the country you live in, don't you?
In the UK where I live electricity demand in winter peaks about 6 p.m. on weekdays when the sun has been down for a couple of hours and there is no solar electricity being generated. There is very little use of AC in summer here since the daytime temperatures rarely get above 20 deg C so the peak demand is driven by lighting in homes, cooking, heating etc. This is offset by the reduction of demand in 9-5 working premises but there are fewer and fewer of these sorts of businesses around. You do know that, don't you?
In summer British electricity demand overnight is about 25GW. Peak demand during the day is 35GW so the day/night difference is less than 50%, not 200% as it you say it is in other countries.
Cordemais isn't totally shut down so why isn't it showing up?
Explaining it one step at a time -- there are four generating plants at Coredemais which, if all are running at maximum output can produce 2.6GW. There are two coal-fired plants each capable of outputting 600MW and two oil-fired plants which can output 700MW. Not all of these plants are running at any given time -- oil is particularly expensive to burn, coal is preferred since it's cheap. The oil-burning generators are kept in working condition but aren't usually run much except in emergencies etc. Oil stores better than coal does so it's more convenient to keep a useful reserve on hand. Saying that I notice that the gridwatch site reports some oil generation at the moment.
In 2015 France generated 8.3TWh or just under 1GW on average of coal-fired electricity. Most of this output would be during winter when demand is highest. During the summer the coal generation capacity is needed less so the figure drops from its maximum 2GW or so (there's apparently one or two other smaller coal-fired power stations that can supplement the total coal-fired output of Cordemais) to the current level of 300MW or less.
A perfunctory search for details of France's coal-fired power stations on the web reveals several operational coal power plants were shut down and retired over the past few years for various reasons. A few others are kept in operation as backups and peaking plants to cover the short periods of high demand, usually seasonal or to cover emergencies such as grid failures etc. A lot of decommissioned coal generating capacity has been replaced by combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) burning cheap gas and able to quickly match fluctuations in demand.
As an aside, my home nation Britain has made the move to CCGT as well. We burn very little coal these days but use a lot of CCGT to cover winter peak loads. We actually had a day recently where we burned no coal at all for electricity generation purposes. We still have a few coal-fired plants in reserve though, just in case they're needed in an emergency.
In contrast to coal, oil, gas etc., in France and everywhere else nuclear power plants are run flat out as much as possible since the fuel costs are negligible compared to the construction and operational costs. In the winter France usually generates about 60GW of nuclear power, in the summer that output usually drops to about 40GW as plants are taken offline for scheduled refuelling.
Nuclear power plants operate at night. Solar plants only provide power at night if some of their output during the day is diverted into expensive storage, something that is never priced in to the base cost of solar installations touted in many places.
ISTR India's electricity grid has had a number of major failures due to excess demand over the past few years which is why they have been building out their coal-generating capacity to keep up with a growing population and increased per-capita demand. The few nuclear plants they have operating and plan to build are a drop in the bucket for reliable non-diurnal generating requirements, sadly.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear can't easily throttle back to 50% output during the day, so an all-nuclear solution doesn't work either.
Actually modern operations of older PWRs and BWRs and all new-build versions of such can swing output down to 75% and back up in about thirty minutes or so. Myself I'd run them at 100% and use the surplus power to decarbonise the atmosphere and stave off the increase in global surface temperatures as it doesn't cost much more to keep the reactors running at 100% since fuel is cheap. OTOH there's usually a Solartopia next door that could import the surplus power to keep its lights on at night when the wind dies down.
Oh, and 9 hours of sun in the winter? I wish. Today in my home town sunrise was at 08:26 and sunset at 15:42 for a total of 7.5 hours, and it's not quite midwinter yet. For a lot of today the sun was low to the horizon producing little solar power even from panels that can be angled to best effect all day, assuming no cloud which in midwinter here is a rare event.
It costs money to install plenty of wind and solar. A rough thought-experiment -- a grid needs a peak capacity of 10GW (winter evening in Europe, summer A/C load in America). During low demand it needs about 5 or 6GW. Assume it's all renewables, half solar, half wind at 15% load for solar and 30% for wind that means peak load capacity (10GW) will need 30GW of solar and 15GW of wind or about 45GW of capacity in terms of hardware. That capacity also has to top up storage as well as meet the instantaneous demand. A long winter calm with little wind could cut hard into storage as well as reducing the amount of electricity to keep the lights on so building out a lot more than the 45GW of renewables would be a prudent but expensive move.
Storage costs are in the $200 million/GWh region whether battery or pumped hydro, the two real deliverable storage alternatives. Assume a 12-hour capacity for the 10GW peak demand, that's $24 billion just for storage. The bad news is that high pressure calms can sit over an area for days at a time, reducing the assumed wind power output to a few hundred MW at best (I've seen Britain's 10GW of installed grid wind generators produce as little as 50MW for half a day during a calm).
To meet that 10GW demand purely with nuclear would require 12-14GW of online capacity, maybe even less as refuelling downtimes for individual reactors can be scheduled for low periods of predictable demand throughout the year. Winter or summer, there's 10GW available. Windy or calm, 10GW available. Sun up, sun down, 10GW available. The lights always come on, the electric car always gets charged and no CO2 gets added to the atmosphere.
Storage is an extra cost, it doesn't replace generating capacity. It also presupposes extra generating capacity to be available to top up the storage while still meeting the current demand which costs even more. At the moment renewables like wind and solar free-wheel on grids with large amounts of fossil fuel electricity production, either fast-response gas turbines (usually combined-cycle these days) or slow-response coal plants. Lots of solar and wind in a grid will need lots of storage or lots of fast fossil-carbon gas turbines. Nuclear doesn't need that storage and extra capacity to cover loss of generating since it's always-on (uptime for reactors is about 80-90% and outages for refuelling, repairs, inspections, etc. are predictable).
When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine then fossil fuels are burned to make up the difference. There is some storage but not nearly enough. Storage costs money to implement and doesn't create energy in itself, it just buffers supply and demand, it wastes energy on the round-trip and requires oversupply of capacity to top it up. There is some hydro which has a storage component but it's limited by geography and rainfall patterns.
The only scaleable always-there non-fossil power is nuclear, but it's Scary!
The title said it was the "biggest" battery system which it isn't. Bait and switch at its best, poor reporting if I'm being charitable.
The NGK battery seems a better fit to the small windfarm it's attached to, it can supply 30MW for 8 hours or so from a full charge even if the turbines are becalmed. The Tesla battery will only provide its rated output of 100MW for an hour and a bit in similar circumstances, after that the lights go out.
Three times more powerful than any other battery in the world??
NGK has a sodium-sulphur battery system backing a wind farm in Rokkasho, Japan which has a capacity of 245MWh compared to the headline 129MWh of the Australian Tesla battery.
https://www.ngk.co.jp/nas/case...
The car analogy is just that, an analogy. Upgraded 1970s reactors are a lot safer than when they were first commissioned. New-build reactors of similar design (the basic PWR and BWR) are even safer than the upgraded 1970s reactors currently running today. There are possible (and as yet unproven and not yet deployed) upgrades coming in terms of ceramic fuel pellets and fuel rod structures which withstand overheating to a greater extent than existing fuels and they should, I repeat should be a retrofit for existing reactors to further increase their safety margins in case of a meltdown.
The bad news with the 1970s reactors are the two core safety components, the reactor vessel and the containment structures. They can't be replaced easily or at all in most cases. They can be improved -- a number of reactors have had their control heads replaced, containments have had new venting and cooling systems added but they're too expensive to swap out or replace entirely. In at least one case an attempt to "fix" a containment compromised the reactor's safety sufficiently that it was shut down permanently.
By "instantaneous" I mean(t) "the demand this instant" which is remarkably predictable for a given grid, the time of the year, the time of the day, the weather conditions etc. Rapid CHANGES in demand are the purview of gas turbines, usually "combined-cycle" (CCGT) for modern builds plus maybe on-demand hydro and pumped-storage. It's more common for coal plants to idle at low output to be ready to meet sudden but expected peaks -- the classic consumption peak in Britain used to be the electric load pulse during a commercial break in an evening TV program as millions of households switched on a 2kW electric kettle on to make a pot of tea. Britain now has few coal power plants and a shitload of CCGT to generate electricity so it's less of a problem than it used to be. The increase in watch-on-demand TV and the likes of Netflix has also knocked this back a bit.
The various state organisations and power generating companies in China have plans laid out for various nuclear reactor build projects which won't start for years if not decades assuming permission is given and funding found. If you classify these as being in "late stages of approval" then they will be pouring concrete on new reactor projects in 2025 or even later although most of these planned projects still have a lot of work to be done before the first concrete is poured.
You seem to be under the impression there's a limited number of such projects in the pipeline and when they're either completed or abandoned or never started at all then that's it, China will not construct any more reactors because of Fukushima. I find that odd.
Reactors built in the 1970s have all been upgraded and improved during rebuilds, inspections etc. They all have digital controls, better pumps, new valvegear, improved safety equipment etc. Cost is no object for these upgrades, pretty much.
The dreaded car analogy -- existing 1970s reactors are like a Ferrari built in the 1970s but it's been fitted with anti-lock brakes, modern tyres, the engine's been retrofitted with an emission control computer and fuel injection, the passenger compartment has been strengthened and fitted with airbags etc. etc. From the outside it still looks like a 1970s deathtrap, in reality it's similar to a 2000-series modern design. It's not got all of the goodies like proper crumple zones in the bodyshell but generally it's a lot safer than the original design. It's one of the reasons nuclear power plants are at the bottom of the killing-people-to-generate-electricity tables.
Who's going to pay for this battery storage? It costs money on top of the cost of the solar and wind installations (typical costs are $200 million per GWHr of storage). Fuel-derived power stations such as nuclear and fossil carbon (oil, gas, coal) don't need batteries or other storage such as pumped hydro. They can meet instantaneous demand if there are enough generating plants to cover the peaks. Wind/solar plus battery might not last long enough if the weather conditions cause problems and they need to be built out beyond instantaneous demand requirements to recharge the expensive battery systems for the bad times. This costs a lot more too.
All new nuclear approvals in China were put on hold indefinitely in 2011. The only plants being built there were approved and started before 2011.
You keep saying this. I keep proving you wrong.
There was a hiatus in building existing reactor projects and approving the construction of new nuclear reactors in China after 2011. They restarted the existing builds and started commissioning new projects in late 2012. Some of the new reactors that started construction in 2013 will be online by 2019 or so.
Tianwan units 3 and 4, started construction Dec 2012 and Sep 2013, expected to be online Feb 2018, Mar 2019.
Yangjiang units 5 and 6, started Sep 2013 and Dec 2013, expected online 2018 and 2019.
And so on. The pipeline for approval, start of construction and bringing reactors online to the grid in China should produce four or five reactors a year for the next few years.
The Chinese bought licences to use Westinghouse technology for their PWRs but they've been working to develop their own home-grown PWR design(s) which have no licence encumbrances and they're building the first of those, the Hualong-1 models which have no intellectual property limitations for resale outside China. One consortium is looking at the Hualong-1 as a possible candidate reactor design for building in Britain.
China is also constructing Thorium reactors, btw.
No they're not. They're building lots of classic PWRs and BWRs, upgraded and improved from the Westinghouse design of the 1970s but still the same enriched-uranium steam kettle technology at heart. They're completing five of them this year and starting to build another eight or so with a lot more planned. Thorium reactors, none today, none yesterday and none tomorrow.
They're looking at all sorts of newer reactor concepts, building some first-off units like a pebble-bed reactor (the HTR-PM) as well as a sodium-cooled breeder but thorium reactors, nope. There are some academic paper exercises on the subject but uranium reactor tech is well-proven and they need the electricity more than they need to spend time, effort and money on developing thorium as a reactor fuel.
Back in September 2011 two sequential typhoons hit the southern end of Honshu, Japan's main island and the subsequent flooding killed about 90 people. Killer typhoons hit the Japanese islands pretty much every year.
Japan is a dangerous place to live, even more dangerous than California with its earthquakes, mudslides, floods and fires. Planning to control and mitigate such disasters is a necessary part of government hence the uprating of the flood control systems already in place around Tokyo.
Corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%. Apple gets a sweetheart deal from the Irish government and pays a lot less than 12.5%. Sweetheart deals like this are banned in the EU to prevent a race to the bottom by other small states. It's OK under EU rules for them to charge less than 12.5% but that has to be the rate for all corporation tax payers in Ireland, not just Apple and other big multinationals with similar deals.
It's something Ireland agreed to on accession to the EU. If they want to leave the EU and play these sorts of games, no problem but Apple relies on Ireland's EU membership to be able to shuffle their profits from all the other EU nations frictionlessly through their Irish offices and pay less tax than anywhere else. Outside the EU Ireland is no further use as a cheap-tax-rate haven for Apple et al.
It's not Apple at fault here, it's the notoriously corrupt Irish government that has traditionally played fast and loose with such financial rules in many other circumstances. The EU has had enough. If Ireland don't collect the taxes due from Apple I'd expect various EU grants and subsidies to be cut back pro rata on the basis that the Irish government had the chance to raise those revenues properly themselves by charging the correct rate of tax in the first place.
It's about time high-end and even commodity PCs moved to supporting ECC and using it as common practice. When total RAM fit in a PC was 1 or 2GB and data rates were a few hundred MB per second at best a bit error rate of 1 per trillion reads or writes was acceptable. Now that common motherboards can accept 64GB and more and RAM access speeds have also escalated the chances of a problematic bit error occurring in code or data have shot up, especially as the RAM's die mask sizes have decreased.
As an aside I've used commodity mobos in the past that accepted and would run ECC RAM but only as regular memory, the chipset didn't implement any kind of error-correcting capability. My workhorse machines for bit-bashing all have ECC properly implemented on server-grade hardware.
I mentioned battery density and weight as it was the major factor preventing the uptake of electric vehicles in the past, before lithium-ion was able to provide sufficient energy storage in a smaller weight (and volume) of batteries. I first got interested in EVs back in the 1970s when NiCd was about the best you could get for such applications and a 100km range was considered impressive. Back then increasing the Wh/kg figure was the target to aim for. Nowadays any new or improved battery tech for vehicles needs to match or exceed Li-ion's performance in that regard before all else.
I mentioned SCiB because is is a "Biggest Breakthrough Since Breakfast" battery technology with useful capabilities that nothing else on the market matched and it's from Toshiba, the company headlining TFA that's supposedly productionising a solid-electrolyte Li-ion tech battery. SCiB shows they've got a creditable track record of getting stuff out of the lab and into the real world unlike most vapourware BBSB battery stories/PR pieces that appear on Slashdot and elsewhere.
SCiB lithium-titanate is not really suitable in its current form for most vehicle applications due to its not-very-good Wh/kg performance (about half that of Li-ion) although there are some trials going on using SCiB batteries in larger vehicles such as buses where the Wh/kg numbers are less important as well as KE-recovery systems where its repeated rapid charge and discharge characteristics are beneficial. The big thing though is that SCiB is not a lab experiment, it's got funding and development and it can be bought off-the-shelf although it's very expensive (price on request, if you need to ask you can't afford it).
No, energy density is the key issue for electric vehicles, mass as well as volume but mostly mass. Old-style electric vehicles before lithium-ion batteries of various flavours were developed used bulky and heavy lead-acid and NiMH battery systems which didn't provide sufficient range due to their physical limitations. Li-ion batteries are typically twice the Watt-hours per kilogram figure of older battery tech.
Even now a modern electric vehicle's battery pack makes up a large part of the volume and mass of the car for the range it provides. It's sufficiently small though to make them viable although the manufacturers want to improve that even more to reduce the cost of manufacture and extend the range between charges.
I'm usually very cynical about "Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast" stories but there are a few things about this one that make me sit up and take note. One is that it's Toshiba who have a track record of delivering new battery tech such as SCiB, a rapid-charge battery (zero to full in ten minutes) with very good operating life of several thousand cycles despite being fast-charged. The other is that they're working on building out production of this new battery (which might be based on SCiB) rather than announcing lab results and talking a lot about nanostructures and the like while scrabbling around for more development funding.
I'm speculating here but it's possible the new Toshiba batteries will provide a fast-charge capability since they are supposedly solid-electrolyte. Fast-charge in the tank-of-gas time range period (five minutes or so) would mitigate range anxiety to a large extent if the infrastructure is in place to provide the large amounts of power to deliver fast-charge.
The overall takeaway is that the AMD system is faster in a lot of workloads (databases being the one big notable area where it loses badly) than the Intel system and at a much lower cost.
Databases are what the Big Iron servers live to support so AMD losing badly against Skylake on that front means they've lost the sales war. Web servers are databases, order processing systems are databases, pretty much everything that's computationally intensive has a database or six on the backend.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is shiny and prominent but the sales are limited and a lot of new HPC kit is based around non-CPU computation elements derived from GPUs rather than general-purpose CPUs so even good performance in that area won't save AMD in the datacentre markets.
The point is that previously a rolling mill to make 500,000 tonnes of steel wire a year would have required a lot more people to operate it and keep it running, maybe as many as a thousand people. Today it only takes a handful due to automation.
This is nothing really new, of course. In the 1970s in Britain the iron and steel industry was operating with old equipment with men shovelling oresands into open-hearth furnaces built in the 1920s while in places like Malaysia modern steel plants were being run by operators in airconditioned control rooms. In the end the old plants in Britain were shut down and 90% of the employees were laid off.
Turbogenerator sets at older large thermal power stations are typically 300MW in size so I expect (not having looked too deeply into it) that each Cordemain coal-fired "unit" is a single boiler feeding a pair of turbogenerators. The operators can produce less steam in that unit and drive only one of the turbogenerator sets producing about 300MW of electricity.
More modern thermal plant turbogenerator sets of 500MW capacity and larger are being built and installed in new-build projects (coal and nuclear) as they cost less per MW of capacity and are slightly more efficient than the older designs.
I really don't understand your idee fixe that France is secretly burning a lot of coal to feed its electricity requirements and faking the numbers to make its nuclear output look good for some reason. Most of their existing coal-fired plants have been shut down over the past five years or so and it's likely they will take all of their coal-fired plant out of operation in the next few years (some might be converted to biomass with the option to burn coal if need be). They might mothball some capacity in case of need.
You do know that a country uses during day time about 2 times the power than at night?
You do know that power consumption depends on the country you live in, don't you?
In the UK where I live electricity demand in winter peaks about 6 p.m. on weekdays when the sun has been down for a couple of hours and there is no solar electricity being generated. There is very little use of AC in summer here since the daytime temperatures rarely get above 20 deg C so the peak demand is driven by lighting in homes, cooking, heating etc. This is offset by the reduction of demand in 9-5 working premises but there are fewer and fewer of these sorts of businesses around. You do know that, don't you?
In summer British electricity demand overnight is about 25GW. Peak demand during the day is 35GW so the day/night difference is less than 50%, not 200% as it you say it is in other countries.
Cordemais isn't totally shut down so why isn't it showing up?
Explaining it one step at a time -- there are four generating plants at Coredemais which, if all are running at maximum output can produce 2.6GW. There are two coal-fired plants each capable of outputting 600MW and two oil-fired plants which can output 700MW. Not all of these plants are running at any given time -- oil is particularly expensive to burn, coal is preferred since it's cheap. The oil-burning generators are kept in working condition but aren't usually run much except in emergencies etc. Oil stores better than coal does so it's more convenient to keep a useful reserve on hand. Saying that I notice that the gridwatch site reports some oil generation at the moment.
In 2015 France generated 8.3TWh or just under 1GW on average of coal-fired electricity. Most of this output would be during winter when demand is highest. During the summer the coal generation capacity is needed less so the figure drops from its maximum 2GW or so (there's apparently one or two other smaller coal-fired power stations that can supplement the total coal-fired output of Cordemais) to the current level of 300MW or less.
A perfunctory search for details of France's coal-fired power stations on the web reveals several operational coal power plants were shut down and retired over the past few years for various reasons. A few others are kept in operation as backups and peaking plants to cover the short periods of high demand, usually seasonal or to cover emergencies such as grid failures etc. A lot of decommissioned coal generating capacity has been replaced by combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) burning cheap gas and able to quickly match fluctuations in demand.
As an aside, my home nation Britain has made the move to CCGT as well. We burn very little coal these days but use a lot of CCGT to cover winter peak loads. We actually had a day recently where we burned no coal at all for electricity generation purposes. We still have a few coal-fired plants in reserve though, just in case they're needed in an emergency.
In contrast to coal, oil, gas etc., in France and everywhere else nuclear power plants are run flat out as much as possible since the fuel costs are negligible compared to the construction and operational costs. In the winter France usually generates about 60GW of nuclear power, in the summer that output usually drops to about 40GW as plants are taken offline for scheduled refuelling.
Nuclear power plants operate at night. Solar plants only provide power at night if some of their output during the day is diverted into expensive storage, something that is never priced in to the base cost of solar installations touted in many places.
ISTR India's electricity grid has had a number of major failures due to excess demand over the past few years which is why they have been building out their coal-generating capacity to keep up with a growing population and increased per-capita demand. The few nuclear plants they have operating and plan to build are a drop in the bucket for reliable non-diurnal generating requirements, sadly.