Next time get something from ASUS. IIRC Apple manufactures at least some of their laptops at Pegatron. Guess where ASUS manufactures their laptops... In their Pegatron division.
Because its bullshit. If I have a baseload power plant I don't need to run two power plants to generate the same power. You need a standing reserve and most likely pay additional money for that which isn't reflected in the capacity factor. I know this, I'm in a country which actually generates a substantial fraction of power using wind and we pay the natural gas power plants just for being there even if they don't generate anything.
While I don't care to look up the numbers yet again, the last time I was in such a debate I did; in the real world, in Californa, NG peakers get about 80% the average efficiency of a NG baseload plant. So if the peaker is run less than 80% of the time of a baseload plant, it saves gas. If it's only running 80% as much as a baseload plant it's not a peaker, it's a load follower at the worst; peakers run at very low capacity factors. So your comment pretending that you don't save gas with renewables and NG peaking is - to quote you - "disingenuous to say the least".
I just told you the numbers for modern generator efficiency. In the particular case of California I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the natural gas power plants are old designs which don't use the combined cycle which would make the efficiency numbers seem better than they would be with modern tech. So basically its a choice between doing low capital expenditures upfront in windmills to have higher electricity costs in the long run (more waste natural gas and more maintenance costs) or upgrading the power plants to combined cycle tech.
You know, the study was linked right in the post you're replying to. It wouldn't kill you to read it before asserting that a study in the world's most prestigious scientific journal is wrong.
It's behind a paywall and I won't use resources from the research lab I work at to read it either. Try to use open access sources. Might as well not exist.
Pure nonsense. Coal plants are in the rough ballpark of $1/W, give or take depending on the design. Nuclear plants in the western world average nearly $10/W nowadays.
I said it before use Whr or don't bother. Use energy metrics not power metrics. I might as well use some other pointless metric like MWt and magically the numbers for nuclear and coal would double...
You typically have to pay for the wind/solar, the backup peaking power plant generated power, and a subsidy to the peaking power plant (otherwise the cash from the generated power won't cover the costs of running the power plant) plus a wind/solar subsidy. Not to mention a more complex energy grid. So no it isn't cheaper.
It's literally the worst non-intermittent option available. Natural gas is the best.
No it isn't. The best is pumped storage hydro. Over 90% efficient. A natural gas fired power plant which is run in a peaking scenario, with constant spooling up and down, won't be able to take advantage of combined cycle operation so it could be like 34% efficient. While if it was run at a constant level, i.e. in baseload mode, using combined cycle the same natural gas power plant would be like 50-60% efficient. So the idea that you can 'save natural gas' by using variable load wind, is uh, disingenuous to say the least.
penetrations of ~70-80% are reasonable
Only in an ideal scenario in a country which has a lot of hydropower capacity, with pumped storage, and a good wind or solar resource.
Nuclear plants are absurdly expensive per watt
No, it's about as expensive as coal, which is the cheapest form of power generation, unless the coal power plant is very close to the coal mines, like in the same state, in which case the coal will be cheaper.
Keep your fingers crossed for the stellarator. Fission ain't making a comeback.
Bwahaha. Stellarators... Might as well hope for pink unicorn dust. Last I heard none of the actual nuclear fission reactors under construction around the world have been cancelled, even with all the hot air around Fukushima, China alone should have several more reactors come online next year.
Of course. If you stop building something for 2-3 decades and only then you restart production, a lot of institutional knowledge is lost, production lines need to be restarted, and it will take longer than it used to. As for Olkiluoto its a basket case. The EPR was considered too complicated a design by many when it came out and to a large degree many of the issues are also due to different standards.
Fukushima was irrelevant vs the rest of the costs of the tsunami. I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to shut down the nuclear reactors after the accident cost more than any of the supposed cleanup costs. Most of the costs that make reactors more expensive are indeed additional regulations and devices that didn't use to be required. Because its so hard to get a license to build one, the tendency is to make the reactors increasingly larger which also makes them more expensive per unit. The fuel enrichment process has got a lot cheaper though. With gas centrifuge technology its orders of magnitude cheaper and once SILEX becomes available it will become cheaper still.
A nuclear power plant takes 5-6 years to build. A hydro power plant takes significantly longer to build and I've never seen anyone call them uneconomic unless they're greenie enviroidiots. I say idiots because its idiocy like yours that's led us to continue burning coal to this day, many people dead, instead of switching to cleaner energy sources.
Fusion is a pipe dream and shouldn't even be considered into any actually usable roadmap.
It had little to do with Microsoft. NVIDIA had integrated 2D/3D graphics on the same chip. So you only had to buy a single card instead of two. It was much cheaper. You also didn't have image quality issues or the hassle of using a pass-through cable. In addition NVIDIA had a fully OpenGL compliant card at the time 3dfx was rather universally derided for its crap OpenGL support. They basically had what they called a MiniGL driver which was only good for Quake and little else. NVIDIA's cards, at least starting with the Riva TNT, supported pretty much the entire OpenGL spec. That was when I got my first NVIDIA card.
The hardware T&L was just the icing on the cake. It made possible to support games with a lot more complex geometry. But to a large degree the issues of 3dfx were related to hardware problems (no 2D graphics on the Voodoo 1/2, anemic performance on the Voodoo Rush, Banshee, external power brick on the Voodoo 5). The Voodoo 3 was probably the only half decent chip they had after post Voodoo 2 but it was too little too late and the Voodoo 4/5 took too long to come out and like I said the 5 needed an external power brick.
There are more arguments for nuclear depending on where you are. Energy independence can be one. The fuel market is a lot less volatile than the oil market and it's trivial to stockpile fuel.
All I've heard about nuclear so far is that it typically repays the cost to build it in 5 years. Which rather curiously is about as long as it takes to build a reactor.
So amusing. Actually Mercedes cars are, or used to, be well known for their easy maintenance and low part cost compared with other cars in the same segment. While Apple just glues shit together.
I wouldn't call on-orbit tests of a low powered version "using it". Besides it wouldn't be the first time "the other side" picked up an ignored Western invention and took off with it. An example would be the Christie tank in WWII.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet in practice all the countries which use renewables have the most expensive electricity to the consumer in the whole world. Fancy that.
Given that my first computer was a C64 yep I would have gotten one without Apple.
Next time get something from ASUS. IIRC Apple manufactures at least some of their laptops at Pegatron. Guess where ASUS manufactures their laptops... In their Pegatron division.
I can only see Chinese or Middle Eastern investors interested at the moment and it would be sold way below its value....
We also pay for wind power once its generated, nevermind if its used or even if there are transmission lines to take it to the final consumer...
Because its bullshit. If I have a baseload power plant I don't need to run two power plants to generate the same power. You need a standing reserve and most likely pay additional money for that which isn't reflected in the capacity factor. I know this, I'm in a country which actually generates a substantial fraction of power using wind and we pay the natural gas power plants just for being there even if they don't generate anything.
While I don't care to look up the numbers yet again, the last time I was in such a debate I did; in the real world, in Californa, NG peakers get about 80% the average efficiency of a NG baseload plant. So if the peaker is run less than 80% of the time of a baseload plant, it saves gas. If it's only running 80% as much as a baseload plant it's not a peaker, it's a load follower at the worst; peakers run at very low capacity factors. So your comment pretending that you don't save gas with renewables and NG peaking is - to quote you - "disingenuous to say the least".
I just told you the numbers for modern generator efficiency. In the particular case of California I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the natural gas power plants are old designs which don't use the combined cycle which would make the efficiency numbers seem better than they would be with modern tech. So basically its a choice between doing low capital expenditures upfront in windmills to have higher electricity costs in the long run (more waste natural gas and more maintenance costs) or upgrading the power plants to combined cycle tech.
You know, the study was linked right in the post you're replying to. It wouldn't kill you to read it before asserting that a study in the world's most prestigious scientific journal is wrong.
It's behind a paywall and I won't use resources from the research lab I work at to read it either. Try to use open access sources. Might as well not exist.
Pure nonsense. Coal plants are in the rough ballpark of $1/W, give or take depending on the design. Nuclear plants in the western world average nearly $10/W nowadays.
I said it before use Whr or don't bother. Use energy metrics not power metrics. I might as well use some other pointless metric like MWt and magically the numbers for nuclear and coal would double...
You typically have to pay for the wind/solar, the backup peaking power plant generated power, and a subsidy to the peaking power plant (otherwise the cash from the generated power won't cover the costs of running the power plant) plus a wind/solar subsidy. Not to mention a more complex energy grid. So no it isn't cheaper.
How about measuring Whrs instead of Ws? You know like actual generated power instead of peak power?
It's literally the worst non-intermittent option available. Natural gas is the best.
No it isn't. The best is pumped storage hydro. Over 90% efficient. A natural gas fired power plant which is run in a peaking scenario, with constant spooling up and down, won't be able to take advantage of combined cycle operation so it could be like 34% efficient. While if it was run at a constant level, i.e. in baseload mode, using combined cycle the same natural gas power plant would be like 50-60% efficient. So the idea that you can 'save natural gas' by using variable load wind, is uh, disingenuous to say the least.
penetrations of ~70-80% are reasonable
Only in an ideal scenario in a country which has a lot of hydropower capacity, with pumped storage, and a good wind or solar resource.
Nuclear plants are absurdly expensive per watt
No, it's about as expensive as coal, which is the cheapest form of power generation, unless the coal power plant is very close to the coal mines, like in the same state, in which case the coal will be cheaper.
Keep your fingers crossed for the stellarator. Fission ain't making a comeback.
Bwahaha. Stellarators... Might as well hope for pink unicorn dust. Last I heard none of the actual nuclear fission reactors under construction around the world have been cancelled, even with all the hot air around Fukushima, China alone should have several more reactors come online next year.
Let me guess, peak power (GW), instead of actually generated power (GWh). More lies again.
Of course. If you stop building something for 2-3 decades and only then you restart production, a lot of institutional knowledge is lost, production lines need to be restarted, and it will take longer than it used to. As for Olkiluoto its a basket case. The EPR was considered too complicated a design by many when it came out and to a large degree many of the issues are also due to different standards.
Fukushima was irrelevant vs the rest of the costs of the tsunami. I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to shut down the nuclear reactors after the accident cost more than any of the supposed cleanup costs. Most of the costs that make reactors more expensive are indeed additional regulations and devices that didn't use to be required. Because its so hard to get a license to build one, the tendency is to make the reactors increasingly larger which also makes them more expensive per unit. The fuel enrichment process has got a lot cheaper though. With gas centrifuge technology its orders of magnitude cheaper and once SILEX becomes available it will become cheaper still.
A nuclear power plant takes 5-6 years to build. A hydro power plant takes significantly longer to build and I've never seen anyone call them uneconomic unless they're greenie enviroidiots. I say idiots because its idiocy like yours that's led us to continue burning coal to this day, many people dead, instead of switching to cleaner energy sources.
Fusion is a pipe dream and shouldn't even be considered into any actually usable roadmap.
Not that it matters much today. 3dfx was basically bought by NVIDIA. Most of the 3dfx engineers work there now.
It had little to do with Microsoft. NVIDIA had integrated 2D/3D graphics on the same chip. So you only had to buy a single card instead of two. It was much cheaper. You also didn't have image quality issues or the hassle of using a pass-through cable. In addition NVIDIA had a fully OpenGL compliant card at the time 3dfx was rather universally derided for its crap OpenGL support. They basically had what they called a MiniGL driver which was only good for Quake and little else. NVIDIA's cards, at least starting with the Riva TNT, supported pretty much the entire OpenGL spec. That was when I got my first NVIDIA card.
The hardware T&L was just the icing on the cake. It made possible to support games with a lot more complex geometry. But to a large degree the issues of 3dfx were related to hardware problems (no 2D graphics on the Voodoo 1/2, anemic performance on the Voodoo Rush, Banshee, external power brick on the Voodoo 5). The Voodoo 3 was probably the only half decent chip they had after post Voodoo 2 but it was too little too late and the Voodoo 4/5 took too long to come out and like I said the 5 needed an external power brick.
RLY? I thought it was owned, or at least founded by the Rothschilds. So calling it Australian would be a bit of a stretch.
I think they still manufacture Flash and hard disks.
A CANDU reactor can be refueled without being put offline.
Did you bother reading the article? The chart title is "Fuel Prices in Heat Production".
http://www.stat.fi/til/ehi/201...
Do you even know the difference between MWt and MWe?
There are more arguments for nuclear depending on where you are. Energy independence can be one. The fuel market is a lot less volatile than the oil market and it's trivial to stockpile fuel.
All I've heard about nuclear so far is that it typically repays the cost to build it in 5 years. Which rather curiously is about as long as it takes to build a reactor.
So amusing. Actually Mercedes cars are, or used to, be well known for their easy maintenance and low part cost compared with other cars in the same segment. While Apple just glues shit together.
"YouTube's $1 Billion Royalties Are Not Enough, Says Music Industry"
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Yet they keep bitching for more...
Actually burning wood is a lot worse than burning high grade coal. It's dirty as heck. It's even worse than burning lignite.
I wouldn't call on-orbit tests of a low powered version "using it". Besides it wouldn't be the first time "the other side" picked up an ignored Western invention and took off with it. An example would be the Christie tank in WWII.