Which is why it's a tradeoff and why government enforced monopolies often produce results that suck. For example I'm dealing with a telecommunications company that has done fuckall since 1996 because they only have to keep their network more or less in one piece for the money to keep rolling in. It's a tricky situation. Often governments have been given a lot of money to keep the situation as a monopoly and throw capitalism out the window, but the public/consumers want some sort of improvement that would normally occur with competition, and in the complete lack of competition improvement is not going to happen unless conditions for a continued monopoly are updated every now and again. What is reasonable for both parties is going to vary with the situation, but in nearly every case the customers of the monopoly get to bear the cost of any "charity handout", often with a bit of extra fat added.
Not an evasion since I've worked at four power stations that have their own mines. You can either site them next to water or next to coal, or preferably both.
So "But such a plant would occupy less land" has had it's goalposts moved to "reducing the visibility"? He shoots! He scores! He wins his little game where he doesn't even have to be correct! Congrats, it's a win merely for the sake of it and the topic does not matter.
As for coal mines, look up "open cut" instead of using that imagination.
You can't mix them with high population areas unlike a coal power plant
I did some work at a plant adjacent to a small city where a very stupid fuckup with the scrubbers overnight had resulted in weak nitric acid condensing out on every car in town which ruined the paint and cost a fortune in compensation. It's a very bad idea to put a coal fired plant of any size near a town for many reasons, including land costs for a large footprint.
It was pretty well an own goal on the part of MS - spending a lot to get to board to take Elop, kill Nokia, buy the smoking bits for far more than they were worth and meanwhile Apple got to take over the smartphone market. They already had Nokia convinced to buy the MS phone environment for some phones whether it was good or not. All MS had to do was provide enough funding to make the MS phone software more viable and they probably could have got it into a lot of people's hands, but they got greedy, wanted all or nothing from Nokia and didn't put much effort into software development. They spent a lot of money and ended up with products far worse than they could have made with a lot less expense in the long run, and as a result probably sold far less phones than if they hadn't done the corporate raid.
It's not my fault that a poster above ignorantly brought up the issue, and I who have worked at coal fired power stations corrected him. And they are OK, they are just not the best solution for everything in the energy mix. We're not ready to completely replace them with anything just yet despite the many downsides. There's a weekly global death toll from coal mining alone but nothing else is actually ready enough for bankers to provide loans to build stuff to replace it all. The less we use of it the better but it's not going away for a while.
Perhaps, but I prefer to apply observation to such situations instead of relying on imagination to produce "knowledge". Wind farms to date are bloody tiny in comparison to a coal mine or power station site, and even the largest of them are dual use unless you plan to farm giraffes.
That's the thing - you are FORCED away from building a parallel grid. Since you are impeded in that way the people who are allowed to run a grid get stuck with a few imposed conditions every now and then as the price for keeping you off their turf.
When the cost difference between generated and supplied is as enormous as it currently is in many places it does appear to be such a game as the Enron "jedi" pricing games used in California. I've never had a lot to do with tranmission - I was mostly on the generating side and now on the resources side, but still having actually done some work with transmission gear I at least known something on the issue.
Yes I did mention coal. Small coal fired power stations don't give you a lot of MW for your dollar either, as I know from taking part in recommissioning a plant with four tiny 30MW units. I could barely crawl through the top area of the boilers where the tube headers are. Such tiny things lose a lot of heat from surface area and burn a lot more coal per MW than larger boilers. So imported and more of it required. Low hanging fruit for competition.
No, because the consumer gets the choice between the retail cost or generating the power themselves. So while it may cost a lot more per MW than coal the person actually buying the power doesn't get to see the benefit from a cheaper power generation source.
Just thought I needed to point this out - if your power bill is less it is cheap. It would be nice to get off grid and future proof against bastard weasel "connection fee" and "network costs" games from energy suppliers, but savings can be made even without battery storage.
In many cases it probably is still cheaper given the blatant price gouging by electricity suppliers. Electricity from coal may be vastly cheaper per kW/h to produce, but the consumer pays a vast amount more per kW/h.
Capacity not storage - storage is very lossy. Also those intermittant power sources become far less so when they are spread all over the place. So all solar in the USA gets blocked out in summer daylight almost at once - short of Yellowstone going up and dropping pumice on Chicago that's not happening. You think they'll be a day with no wind in all of the USA? Go ask a small child to explain the nightly weather chart to you and what those pressure lines mean about moving air. These things are small widely distributed generators that are brought on one by one when base load is not enough. Thinking of them like always connected base load is silly, but a surprisingly frequent mistake here. That solar on your roof that may be selling stuff back to the grid is only doing it when it's wanted and not at all times that it's generating power.
Most people work in daylight so that's when demand is highest. Also most people on the planet live where there is plenty of sunshine and they don't need heating at night to stop their arses freezing - so solar is fine for them as a major part of the energy mix but the minority that live in colder places may want it to be less of a portion of the energy mix.
Should the power companies be FORCED
Obligations come with government granted monopolies - so if they are not going to get out of the way and let other people do things then there are some situations where they may have to be forced, just as they are forced to charge less than the monopoly market can bear.
Funny thing is Nigeria's entire electricity supply comes from a combination of using the heat from flared off well gas (instead of the fire doing nothing but produce light) and little backyard gasoline generators. In other places, such as the USA, gas turbines used for peak power generation run on fuels ranging from shale gas to kerosene.
now nighttime power is more expensive than daytime
When you are on an island with no coal, oil or gas and consumption is so low that you have to use small and inefficeint generators then it doesn't take much of a price drop for solar to be cheaper. If the place was treated as something other than a captive market they wouldn't be screaming about the threat to their bottom line from solar and probably would have imported some geothermal technology from NZ, Iceland or wherever a couple of decades ago. In Alaska burn oil, in Pittsburg burn coal, close to the equator use that sunshine or whatever else you've got. Relying on shipped energy is just one storm damage port away from a shortage.
Actually solar thermal in general is a damn good idea and is being used at one power station (Liddell) for pre-heating which has cut down on the amount of coal required. There's also industrial scale solar thermal heat pumps available and you'll start to see a few more going onto the roofs of large buildings in the next few years. With solar thernmal you have to either build something enormous (nobody wants to be first with that and wear the development costs) or have an application that does not need a massive temparature difference like the two examples I gave above.
Have you seen the size of a coal fired power station? To do it properly you need an ash dam, and often a water storage dam as well, the cooling towers are not small, the turbine hall is not small and then you have boilers (that dwarf the turbine hall), coal crushers, coal storage and the conveyors or whatever to bring in the coal. Some even have their own mine, and that can be huge. So vast amounts of space, but it's hardly relevant because you can site plants where it's not a big deal that they take up so much space. The same holds for the other things that you suggest need even more space - they don't need more and it would not matter anyway!
Ok, I'll take a look when I'm out of the workplace (middle of week long shitstorm due to the wrong person clicking on the wrong link and getting malware resulting in a lot of pissed off people) . Thanks for the link.
You could say exactly the same about Visual Basic. And yet there's plenty of VB monkeys who don't know anything else.
The good thing is every few years MS pulls the carpet out from under them and they have no choice but to learn something almost completely different apart from the name, so give it a few years and they will be flexible. VB has gone from BASIC to a sort of Pascal thing and now resembles Java for the extremely major changes, let only just syntax. A VB programmer that's done nothing but versions of VB for long enough probably wouldn't take any longer picking up Python or whatever than someone coming from a different direction. Something like C is a different story but anyone from any sort of scripting background is going to have a bit of a learning curve there.
I had things the other way around and spent a lot of time trying to make sure things didn't explode. Melting metal in a furnace with a hydrogen atmosphere is an interesting way to spend a weekend, as is putting out a small sodium fire with kerosene.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why it's a tradeoff and why government enforced monopolies often produce results that suck. For example I'm dealing with a telecommunications company that has done fuckall since 1996 because they only have to keep their network more or less in one piece for the money to keep rolling in.
It's a tricky situation. Often governments have been given a lot of money to keep the situation as a monopoly and throw capitalism out the window, but the public/consumers want some sort of improvement that would normally occur with competition, and in the complete lack of competition improvement is not going to happen unless conditions for a continued monopoly are updated every now and again. What is reasonable for both parties is going to vary with the situation, but in nearly every case the customers of the monopoly get to bear the cost of any "charity handout", often with a bit of extra fat added.
Not an evasion since I've worked at four power stations that have their own mines. You can either site them next to water or next to coal, or preferably both.
So "But such a plant would occupy less land" has had it's goalposts moved to "reducing the visibility"?
He shoots! He scores! He wins his little game where he doesn't even have to be correct! Congrats, it's a win merely for the sake of it and the topic does not matter.
I did some work at a plant adjacent to a small city where a very stupid fuckup with the scrubbers overnight had resulted in weak nitric acid condensing out on every car in town which ruined the paint and cost a fortune in compensation. It's a very bad idea to put a coal fired plant of any size near a town for many reasons, including land costs for a large footprint.
It was pretty well an own goal on the part of MS - spending a lot to get to board to take Elop, kill Nokia, buy the smoking bits for far more than they were worth and meanwhile Apple got to take over the smartphone market.
They already had Nokia convinced to buy the MS phone environment for some phones whether it was good or not. All MS had to do was provide enough funding to make the MS phone software more viable and they probably could have got it into a lot of people's hands, but they got greedy, wanted all or nothing from Nokia and didn't put much effort into software development. They spent a lot of money and ended up with products far worse than they could have made with a lot less expense in the long run, and as a result probably sold far less phones than if they hadn't done the corporate raid.
It's not my fault that a poster above ignorantly brought up the issue, and I who have worked at coal fired power stations corrected him.
And they are OK, they are just not the best solution for everything in the energy mix. We're not ready to completely replace them with anything just yet despite the many downsides. There's a weekly global death toll from coal mining alone but nothing else is actually ready enough for bankers to provide loans to build stuff to replace it all. The less we use of it the better but it's not going away for a while.
Perhaps, but I prefer to apply observation to such situations instead of relying on imagination to produce "knowledge".
Wind farms to date are bloody tiny in comparison to a coal mine or power station site, and even the largest of them are dual use unless you plan to farm giraffes.
That's the thing - you are FORCED away from building a parallel grid. Since you are impeded in that way the people who are allowed to run a grid get stuck with a few imposed conditions every now and then as the price for keeping you off their turf.
When the cost difference between generated and supplied is as enormous as it currently is in many places it does appear to be such a game as the Enron "jedi" pricing games used in California.
I've never had a lot to do with tranmission - I was mostly on the generating side and now on the resources side, but still having actually done some work with transmission gear I at least known something on the issue.
Yes I did mention coal. Small coal fired power stations don't give you a lot of MW for your dollar either, as I know from taking part in recommissioning a plant with four tiny 30MW units. I could barely crawl through the top area of the boilers where the tube headers are. Such tiny things lose a lot of heat from surface area and burn a lot more coal per MW than larger boilers.
So imported and more of it required. Low hanging fruit for competition.
No, because the consumer gets the choice between the retail cost or generating the power themselves.
So while it may cost a lot more per MW than coal the person actually buying the power doesn't get to see the benefit from a cheaper power generation source.
Don't worry Comrades - we can protect those power companies from the cold winds of Capitalism :)
Just thought I needed to point this out - if your power bill is less it is cheap. It would be nice to get off grid and future proof against bastard weasel "connection fee" and "network costs" games from energy suppliers, but savings can be made even without battery storage.
There are some roof tiles and similar with integrated photovoltaics.
In many cases it probably is still cheaper given the blatant price gouging by electricity suppliers. Electricity from coal may be vastly cheaper per kW/h to produce, but the consumer pays a vast amount more per kW/h.
Capacity not storage - storage is very lossy.
Also those intermittant power sources become far less so when they are spread all over the place. So all solar in the USA gets blocked out in summer daylight almost at once - short of Yellowstone going up and dropping pumice on Chicago that's not happening. You think they'll be a day with no wind in all of the USA? Go ask a small child to explain the nightly weather chart to you and what those pressure lines mean about moving air.
These things are small widely distributed generators that are brought on one by one when base load is not enough. Thinking of them like always connected base load is silly, but a surprisingly frequent mistake here. That solar on your roof that may be selling stuff back to the grid is only doing it when it's wanted and not at all times that it's generating power.
Obligations come with government granted monopolies - so if they are not going to get out of the way and let other people do things then there are some situations where they may have to be forced, just as they are forced to charge less than the monopoly market can bear.
Funny thing is Nigeria's entire electricity supply comes from a combination of using the heat from flared off well gas (instead of the fire doing nothing but produce light) and little backyard gasoline generators.
In other places, such as the USA, gas turbines used for peak power generation run on fuels ranging from shale gas to kerosene.
When you are on an island with no coal, oil or gas and consumption is so low that you have to use small and inefficeint generators then it doesn't take much of a price drop for solar to be cheaper. If the place was treated as something other than a captive market they wouldn't be screaming about the threat to their bottom line from solar and probably would have imported some geothermal technology from NZ, Iceland or wherever a couple of decades ago. In Alaska burn oil, in Pittsburg burn coal, close to the equator use that sunshine or whatever else you've got. Relying on shipped energy is just one storm damage port away from a shortage.
Actually solar thermal in general is a damn good idea and is being used at one power station (Liddell) for pre-heating which has cut down on the amount of coal required. There's also industrial scale solar thermal heat pumps available and you'll start to see a few more going onto the roofs of large buildings in the next few years.
With solar thernmal you have to either build something enormous (nobody wants to be first with that and wear the development costs) or have an application that does not need a massive temparature difference like the two examples I gave above.
Have you seen the size of a coal fired power station? To do it properly you need an ash dam, and often a water storage dam as well, the cooling towers are not small, the turbine hall is not small and then you have boilers (that dwarf the turbine hall), coal crushers, coal storage and the conveyors or whatever to bring in the coal. Some even have their own mine, and that can be huge.
So vast amounts of space, but it's hardly relevant because you can site plants where it's not a big deal that they take up so much space. The same holds for the other things that you suggest need even more space - they don't need more and it would not matter anyway!
Right next to the telecommunication towers.
It's not exactly wilderness.
Ok, I'll take a look when I'm out of the workplace (middle of week long shitstorm due to the wrong person clicking on the wrong link and getting malware resulting in a lot of pissed off people) . Thanks for the link.
The good thing is every few years MS pulls the carpet out from under them and they have no choice but to learn something almost completely different apart from the name, so give it a few years and they will be flexible. VB has gone from BASIC to a sort of Pascal thing and now resembles Java for the extremely major changes, let only just syntax. A VB programmer that's done nothing but versions of VB for long enough probably wouldn't take any longer picking up Python or whatever than someone coming from a different direction. Something like C is a different story but anyone from any sort of scripting background is going to have a bit of a learning curve there.
I had things the other way around and spent a lot of time trying to make sure things didn't explode. Melting metal in a furnace with a hydrogen atmosphere is an interesting way to spend a weekend, as is putting out a small sodium fire with kerosene.