Why would you "bring online" some wind turbines in a period of high demand?
Because that's when you need that little bit more of extra capacity.
why wouldn't you be running them all the time and use less coal
Because demand is not a square wave and those coal units are huge. It takes many hours to bring a thermal unit online, even the tiny ones (eg. 120MW for something really old).
You're not paying for the wind
Running costs are not zero compared with idle/reserve costs. Spinning a heavy generator instead of freewheeling wears them out a lot more quickly.
There is a crossover point where it's better to bring a coal fired unit online instead of more windmills. Below that point it's cheaper to run windmills, above that point you are getting the low cost per MW that thermal generation can provide when running at full capacity. That's the real reason why wind, gas turbines etc don't run all of the time. They are used to cover peaks and better follow demand than thermal units at 500MW or so. Apart from hydro all of the base load types of generators are far more effective running 24/7 than covering peaks so all the other types of generators have to take up the slack. So all the "wind is more expensive" types are trying to bluff you by not taking real usage into consideration. It doesn't matter if wind is more expensive per MW of capacity if you need 50MW and the other choice is a 500MW coal fired unit that is cheaper than 400MW of wind. In that situation it's cheaper to bring some windmills online for 50MW of wind than 500MW of coal.
A megawatt is a unit of POWER, not ENERGY. 30 MW is about 3% the power output of a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
Yes. Since demand is not a square wave we need tiny little generators like these to fill in the gaps. Even though they cost more per MW/h they cost a lot less than building more huge units a cover a fraction of the demand those huge units can supply. Windmills compete against other tiny generators like gas turbines not against a a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant. I used to work for a power utility with almost nothing other than coal fired units. We burned a shitload of coal we didn't need to because we couldn't closely follow demand - bringing on a 500MW unit to cover about a dozen MW of extra demand is a lot more expensive than if we had windmills or similar to bring online.
So then they changed the price they charged. You really don't get this idea of selling things above cost to make a profit do you? It's called capitalism. You may not be used to it from where you are from "Comrade" but it's the way the world is working now.
Material science and strength calculation complexity was a lot less advanced in the 1920s
Not as much as you would think. Those same age-hardened aluminium alloys are in use in aircraft today and solid mechanics calculations haven't really changed since then, we can just do it a lot of calculations a lot quicker with computers. Techniques like finite element analysis are about applying those same old calculations to much simpler geometries to do a vast number of simple operations instead of a few difficult ones.
Flash and Java are on Mac, linux and all over the place but malware is almost exclusively on the MS platform. It's very clear where the blame lies. Lazy developers writing insecure shit for the MS platform. At least the days of "our application can only run as Admin" are over for 95% of application software.
There are several far more mature and stable SQL solutions on linux already and some of them have no licencing costs. Why use MS SQL on linux other than as a quick way to have something for people who know about MS SQL but have no time to learn how to use the others?
Kind of matches the platform then:) Exchange - the name says it all - swap it for a real mail transport agent and not an afterthought attached to an obfiscated and easily corrupted database that is only possible to backup without shutting down the system due to a shadow copy hack.
When you start writing scripts that make web requests that you can read the value you want without having to do clunky regular expressions, then directly updating specific cells in a spreadsheet (including with formatting) then you realise just how much easier this is with an object-based system
Sounds AWKward, or like PERL with weird syntax that doesn't work with others.
But then ya, they really slowed down and stopped improving
They sacked a lot of people to cut down on "cost centers" such as the development people designing stuff that would make them profitable in the future.
You are seriously taking that line? That's a pretty massive shift of the goalposts to get price-performance numbers to work the way you want instead of the way they are likely to be.
Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone. This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes. The Hindenberg was even bigger.
News just in - background radiation. How radioactive something is will be the important bit of information. That study into fly ash indicates that elements are present, which is not new information, but fails to describe how much. An important line is: "This means we can predict how much potential radioactivity will occur in coal ash by measuring the uranium content in the parent coal, which is easily discerned," Coal typically just has silicates in it and rarely has much of anything heavier - "sedimentary my dear Watson" to misquote, since heavy stuff is not so often on shorelines where vegetation is. Those uranium rich coals are rare. So if you want a sensible discussion instead of your "radioactive coal slurry" weirdness you should consider that. I suggest you read a bit more on the topic and you will understand why the press release from an administrator at ORNL raised so much ire when it was published in Scientific American without any bullshit checking. You'll also get an idea why I knew not to take you seriously when you wrote about "coal slurry" - as you learn about the topic you'll see what terms are used and you'll wonder why I bothered replying instead of writing you off as an ignorant idiot fooled by a novelist who spent a bit of time pushing paper at ORNL.
Outside of a coal lobbyist, I don't think anyone actually believes it's harmless
I didn't say it was harmless just that the "more radioactive than nuclear waste" thing is utter bullshit. You are getting that from the PR move to try to pretend that nuclear power station waste was nothing to worry about by comparing it with coal in a ridiculous way.
And you have to admit the Wikipedia linked info about Shakti is pretty damn thi
I heard it from elsewhere some years ago which is why I wrote "from wikipedia for what it is worth". There was a decent book on the Indian nuclear weapons program a few years back but finding an online thing to link to is a bit more difficult. However you may recall that Turkey was blocked from buying CANDU reactors because of the fear that they would use them to make weapon materials.
I've been saying that for ages. Some poor sods still have to run MS WinXP to get legacy software to work and their insecure environment (with Firefox instead of IE of course and Thunderbird instead of MS Outlook) is really not much worse than MS Win10 knee deep in the current malware swamp. The same third party antivirus software runs on both after all and the same real firewall upstream can protect them. Treat both like a pile of insecure horseshit and you'll be better off instead of trusting whatever the wild web wants you to click on. As seen with another article the obvious has happened with automated "cloud" advertising and even google advertising has become a malware vector due to no involvements of human beings - nobody is there to care about where the ad links go so a script kiddie got a cheap and trusted way to do damage.
Also, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste [scientificamerican.com].
Look at the comments on that article and about that article - it's utter fucking bullshit derived from the moonshine fiction guy. The citation is a fucking newsletter at oak ridge, circulation under a hundred. It's a lazy example of reporting by press release and Scientific American got a lot of flak for that article.
I didn't say anything about building nukes from coal slurry, so that's a strawman
The primary source of all that "radioactive coal slurry" hype (Alex Gabbard a former member of the administrative staff at Oak Ridge Labs) did. It's sand that got mixed in with the plant material before coal formation so if someone is using the radioactive hype about it is a very good lie or idiot detector.
Also, from wikipedia for what it is worth:
The 1998 Operation Shakti test series in India included one bomb of about 45 kt yield that India has publicly claimed was a hydrogen bomb. An offhand comment in the BARC publication Heavy Water — Properties, Production and Analysis appears to suggest that the tritium was extracted from the heavy water in the CANDU
if it was another debacle caused by low-cost offshore rent-a-sysadmins
A bit over five years ago IBM Australia had the majority of their sysadmins spend a couple of weeks in China to train their replacements and then laid the Australian sysadmins off.
It just seems to me that the 90% claim is overambitious
Not really - a lot of people live in cities.
And batteries are light as a feather?
Compared with what they were fifteen years ago - yes.
still not much better than what we had 30 years ago
Have some coffee or something to turn that brain on and you'll get that I did not mean anything of the sort. If you were just pretending to be an idiot to fuck with me then please stop doing so - the phrase "the solutions have just kept on improving" was placed there to stop such stupid fucking pretended stupidity games.
But a few times a year they're called on to drive 200-500 miles in a day, for things like that drive to Grandma's for Thanksgiving, weekend trip to Vegas, etc.
There seem to be a lot of people that don't do that. Those are your potential EV users. I like to get out in the countryside but most of my co-workers haven't driven outside of the city they live in for a long time. If they want to get to another city they get a plane.
90% of the people not people being able to get to only 90% of the places where they want to go. The other 10% get the offroad vehicles that you see all over city streets that have never ever been used offroad. Those 10% can actually use them for the purpose they are designed for instead of having some sort of weird trophy or penis replacement or whatever the fuck they are thinking of when they got something they will never actually use. I used to have one myself when I went to remote areas a lot but just do not see the point of all these people who have no clue how to get a bogged vehicle moving again driving offroad vehicles in places no more challenging than suburbia.
CANDU has pretty solid safeguards against weaponization
You are saying that NOW after India used it to make nuclear weapons? Seriously?
None of this is politically feasible
China and a pile of other places don't give a shit about "politically feasible" so that excuse for a lack of a golden age of magic new nukes is getting a bit old.
towns buried under radioactive coal slurry
Oh come on now, do you think the readers are really that stupid? Alex Gabbard pushed that line and the bullshit about terrorists building nukes from ash but he was getting paid to lie when he did it. It's no more real than his novels about hillbilly moonshiners. It's as radioactive as fucking sand because that's what the stuff that becomes ash was before it ended up as impurities in coal.
FFS there were pre-WW2 aircraft that pumped stuff between multiple tanks without the pilot having to deal with it. The industry has already had it since before your parents were born,
You picked a really weird "con" to justify your dislike of something you see as "green". It's just a fucking maching - don't overlay your politics and emotional bullshit on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's when you need that little bit more of extra capacity.
Because demand is not a square wave and those coal units are huge. It takes many hours to bring a thermal unit online, even the tiny ones (eg. 120MW for something really old).
Running costs are not zero compared with idle/reserve costs. Spinning a heavy generator instead of freewheeling wears them out a lot more quickly.
There is a crossover point where it's better to bring a coal fired unit online instead of more windmills. Below that point it's cheaper to run windmills, above that point you are getting the low cost per MW that thermal generation can provide when running at full capacity.
That's the real reason why wind, gas turbines etc don't run all of the time. They are used to cover peaks and better follow demand than thermal units at 500MW or so. Apart from hydro all of the base load types of generators are far more effective running 24/7 than covering peaks so all the other types of generators have to take up the slack. So all the "wind is more expensive" types are trying to bluff you by not taking real usage into consideration. It doesn't matter if wind is more expensive per MW of capacity if you need 50MW and the other choice is a 500MW coal fired unit that is cheaper than 400MW of wind. In that situation it's cheaper to bring some windmills online for 50MW of wind than 500MW of coal.
A megawatt is a unit of POWER, not ENERGY. 30 MW is about 3% the power output of a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
Yes.
Since demand is not a square wave we need tiny little generators like these to fill in the gaps. Even though they cost more per MW/h they cost a lot less than building more huge units a cover a fraction of the demand those huge units can supply.
Windmills compete against other tiny generators like gas turbines not against a a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
I used to work for a power utility with almost nothing other than coal fired units. We burned a shitload of coal we didn't need to because we couldn't closely follow demand - bringing on a 500MW unit to cover about a dozen MW of extra demand is a lot more expensive than if we had windmills or similar to bring online.
So then they changed the price they charged.
You really don't get this idea of selling things above cost to make a profit do you? It's called capitalism. You may not be used to it from where you are from "Comrade" but it's the way the world is working now.
Not as much as you would think.
Those same age-hardened aluminium alloys are in use in aircraft today and solid mechanics calculations haven't really changed since then, we can just do it a lot of calculations a lot quicker with computers. Techniques like finite element analysis are about applying those same old calculations to much simpler geometries to do a vast number of simple operations instead of a few difficult ones.
Just use Perl or Python.
This thing is just a subset of Perl with weirder syntax.
Flash and Java are on Mac, linux and all over the place but malware is almost exclusively on the MS platform.
It's very clear where the blame lies. Lazy developers writing insecure shit for the MS platform. At least the days of "our application can only run as Admin" are over for 95% of application software.
There are several far more mature and stable SQL solutions on linux already and some of them have no licencing costs.
Why use MS SQL on linux other than as a quick way to have something for people who know about MS SQL but have no time to learn how to use the others?
Kind of matches the platform then :)
Exchange - the name says it all - swap it for a real mail transport agent and not an afterthought attached to an obfiscated and easily corrupted database that is only possible to backup without shutting down the system due to a shadow copy hack.
Sounds AWKward, or like PERL with weird syntax that doesn't work with others.
They sacked a lot of people to cut down on "cost centers" such as the development people designing stuff that would make them profitable in the future.
You are seriously taking that line?
That's a pretty massive shift of the goalposts to get price-performance numbers to work the way you want instead of the way they are likely to be.
Well yes, but how much fuel will it use?
Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone.
This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes.
The Hindenberg was even bigger.
An important line is:
"This means we can predict how much potential radioactivity will occur in coal ash by measuring the uranium content in the parent coal, which is easily discerned,"
Coal typically just has silicates in it and rarely has much of anything heavier - "sedimentary my dear Watson" to misquote, since heavy stuff is not so often on shorelines where vegetation is. Those uranium rich coals are rare.
So if you want a sensible discussion instead of your "radioactive coal slurry" weirdness you should consider that.
I suggest you read a bit more on the topic and you will understand why the press release from an administrator at ORNL raised so much ire when it was published in Scientific American without any bullshit checking.
You'll also get an idea why I knew not to take you seriously when you wrote about "coal slurry" - as you learn about the topic you'll see what terms are used and you'll wonder why I bothered replying instead of writing you off as an ignorant idiot fooled by a novelist who spent a bit of time pushing paper at ORNL.
I didn't say it was harmless just that the "more radioactive than nuclear waste" thing is utter bullshit. You are getting that from the PR move to try to pretend that nuclear power station waste was nothing to worry about by comparing it with coal in a ridiculous way.
I heard it from elsewhere some years ago which is why I wrote "from wikipedia for what it is worth". There was a decent book on the Indian nuclear weapons program a few years back but finding an online thing to link to is a bit more difficult. However you may recall that Turkey was blocked from buying CANDU reactors because of the fear that they would use them to make weapon materials.
I've been saying that for ages. Some poor sods still have to run MS WinXP to get legacy software to work and their insecure environment (with Firefox instead of IE of course and Thunderbird instead of MS Outlook) is really not much worse than MS Win10 knee deep in the current malware swamp. The same third party antivirus software runs on both after all and the same real firewall upstream can protect them.
Treat both like a pile of insecure horseshit and you'll be better off instead of trusting whatever the wild web wants you to click on.
As seen with another article the obvious has happened with automated "cloud" advertising and even google advertising has become a malware vector due to no involvements of human beings - nobody is there to care about where the ad links go so a script kiddie got a cheap and trusted way to do damage.
Look at the comments on that article and about that article - it's utter fucking bullshit derived from the moonshine fiction guy. The citation is a fucking newsletter at oak ridge, circulation under a hundred. It's a lazy example of reporting by press release and Scientific American got a lot of flak for that article.
A concrete example is a lot of nothing but unfounded doubts are not?
That sounds like an emotional instead of a rational choice to me.
The primary source of all that "radioactive coal slurry" hype (Alex Gabbard a former member of the administrative staff at Oak Ridge Labs) did.
It's sand that got mixed in with the plant material before coal formation so if someone is using the radioactive hype about it is a very good lie or idiot detector.
Also, from wikipedia for what it is worth:
A bit over five years ago IBM Australia had the majority of their sysadmins spend a couple of weeks in China to train their replacements and then laid the Australian sysadmins off.
Not really - a lot of people live in cities.
Compared with what they were fifteen years ago - yes.
Have some coffee or something to turn that brain on and you'll get that I did not mean anything of the sort. If you were just pretending to be an idiot to fuck with me then please stop doing so - the phrase "the solutions have just kept on improving" was placed there to stop such stupid fucking pretended stupidity games.
There seem to be a lot of people that don't do that. Those are your potential EV users.
I like to get out in the countryside but most of my co-workers haven't driven outside of the city they live in for a long time. If they want to get to another city they get a plane.
It turns out there are not so many people like that hence the article. It's about size of niche and not total world domination.
Ever had to get an engine block out of a car :) I'll leave that as an example that "any" just doesn't quite fit.
I saw a hybrid at a mine site in 1986 - seemed to be solved for a lot of situations and the solutions have just kept on improving.
90% of the people not people being able to get to only 90% of the places where they want to go.
The other 10% get the offroad vehicles that you see all over city streets that have never ever been used offroad. Those 10% can actually use them for the purpose they are designed for instead of having some sort of weird trophy or penis replacement or whatever the fuck they are thinking of when they got something they will never actually use. I used to have one myself when I went to remote areas a lot but just do not see the point of all these people who have no clue how to get a bogged vehicle moving again driving offroad vehicles in places no more challenging than suburbia.
You are saying that NOW after India used it to make nuclear weapons? Seriously?
China and a pile of other places don't give a shit about "politically feasible" so that excuse for a lack of a golden age of magic new nukes is getting a bit old.
Oh come on now, do you think the readers are really that stupid? Alex Gabbard pushed that line and the bullshit about terrorists building nukes from ash but he was getting paid to lie when he did it. It's no more real than his novels about hillbilly moonshiners.
It's as radioactive as fucking sand because that's what the stuff that becomes ash was before it ended up as impurities in coal.
FFS there were pre-WW2 aircraft that pumped stuff between multiple tanks without the pilot having to deal with it.
The industry has already had it since before your parents were born,
You picked a really weird "con" to justify your dislike of something you see as "green". It's just a fucking maching - don't overlay your politics and emotional bullshit on it.