Did you get to choose when the reactors were down when the heat wave prevented sufficient cooling? A mere 4GW gone, and the government talked about rationing.
EDF is effectively part of the French government. France is steadfastly refusing to implement the liberalisation of the energy market required by EU. Anything is possible when you are a government monopoly and able to extract whichever distribution fees you want. "Self-financed" just means that they had already taken the money from the consumers.
The link between vehicle emissions and heart disease is uncontroversial. The link between CO2 and global warming is even better documented. While the harm that is inflicted specifically on me from one particular car is too small to count in a court of law, nothing stops me from using democracy to handle the compensation in aggregate.
I drive a car too, so I will have to pay compensation as well of course.
The amount of harm done to you personally is a very small proportion of the total harm. But yes, you should obviously get paid that amount as a victim yourself. Reduce the compensation you have to pay accordingly.
I am not harming the economy, I am demanding rightful restitution for harm done.
Wind and solar can increase output when they are online, that is just a matter of running them at below full load. It is entirely silly to do so, just like it is silly to run nuclear power stations at less than full load -- you only do it to avoid overloading the grid when electricity prices are threatening to go negative. When wind and solar are not online they cannot increase output, but you can ask the Swedes how much they wished they could increase the output of Ringhals when it was down unscheduled for months and electricity prices once in a while spiked at €3/kWh. The Danish wind turbines saved Sweden that winter but the transmission lines had insufficient capacity to make it completely smooth.
At least with wind turbines you rarely see an entire wind farm offline at once without warning, and very rarely for an extended period.
You are right that France does get some money for their exports. They are lucky that none of their neighbors have followed their lead and attempted load-following nuclear, so the other countries can absorb some of the excess. Still, the whole thing is only viable because it is paid for by the government, it would have no chance as a new build in a free market.
You cannot fix the dent, in this case. Extracting the various exhaust gases from the air is not economically or practically viable at this point. Therefore we have to go with compensation.
It is not really different from all other cases -- victims of violence do not stop being victims when they are given compensation, the car you know in and out and kept in pristine condition does not go back to being exactly the same after a repair, and so on. We cannot make what is done undone, second law of thermodynamics.
I hope I can get support for fair compensation of victims.
It does not matter where the money goes. It is a separate problem.
If I make a dent in your car, I have to pay you what it would cost to fix the dent. Whether you choose to fix the dent or scrap the car and buy a helicopter or spend it on Christmas gifts is not my problem.
If you build it at the edge, you have a gear -- the generator and the turbine are not sharing an axle. Gears are perfectly acceptable, they just have the drawbacks I mentioned.
Fixing democracy is different from making polluters pay for the damage they do. They are two separate causes. We should not delay one just because the other one is not done yet.
Vertical axis wind turbines are even slower turning than horizontal. They are also prone to breaking and not commercially viable.
But feel free to invest your money in them if you believe they are the future. Wind turbines are an extremely competitive industry where the free market seems to be working well (there are a few patent threats, but nothing really bad yet).
It is perfectly OK for society to decide what the compensation should be used for. If that turns out to be lower taxes, then that is fine too. The will of the people and all that.
If load following nuclear is such a success, why does every country around France get free power at night from them?
Even though you can do load following with nuclear, it is an entirely stupid thing to do, because nuclear fuel is approximately free once you have built the power plant. There is no reason to save it. By the same token wind and solar can do load following, because wind turbines have brakes and solar automatically stops outputting power if there is no load.
I only checked the wind power section, but that one at least is getting a bit outdated. Denmark has increased the power generated by wind turbines by 2/3rds since 2006, yet the installed capacity only increased by 1/3rd. It is also wrong in the section about Denmark exporting wind power at a low price and then reimporting it at a higher cost when the wind is low. In fact Denmark gets paid a higher price for the exported wind power than it pays for the imported hydro power, because wind power is primarily produced in winter when energy demand is high in the Nordic countries and the hydro power stations are running low. Wind power has a stabilizing effect on the Nordic power system. Without it, Norway and Sweden would need to build power stations for the winter which would sit idle for most of the year.
The problem with induction generators is that they like quick rotations to get decent efficiency and power-to-weight ratio. Angular speed of wind turbines tend to decrease with size, and wind turbines are only getting larger. That means gears are necessary with induction generators, preferably nice, heavy, fragile multi-stage gearboxes.
In contrast, if you have high temperature steam available, you can spin a turbine at practically any speed you want. Thousands of RPM are not a problem.
The wind industry does have induction-based generators available, and it would not be the end of the industry if rare earths became unavailable. It would force quite a shift though, with companies heavily focused on gear technology gaining an advantage and other companies likely going bankrupt.
You can drive anything you want, as long as you compensate society for the harm it causes. Right now vehicles are not paying fairly for the damage they do, even in areas with more sensible taxes on fuel. I.e. right now I am paying for your choice of car, and that makes me unhappy.
As to Al Gore mentioned later, we live in a capitalistic society. That means that rich people get to do more damage to the environment and consume more resources. If you want to get away from capitalism, by all means fight for that, but fair resource allocation and mitigation of environmental damage are two distinct causes.
That is a real problem. The Raspberry is annoying in the same way, you have to recompile everything because it uses such an old ARM standard. Come on people, it really should be possible to be Pentium Pro compatible at this point.
OPEC is not sitting on a sufficient fraction of the oil market to actually have much influence anymore. If they try anything, Canada will just boil some more sand.
Remember to subtract the costs of respiratory diseases, heart diseases, and general loss of welfare caused by car emissions. Fuel is taxed for a reason, it was not picked randomly.
Diesel electric on train is done to get torque conversion. Good luck designing a gearbox that can get a 1km long freight train started. Train engines would be more efficient if you could get rid of the hybrid system.
The primary advantage of a hybrid is that it gets the petrol engine running at close to maximum load at all times. Petrol engines are horribly inefficient at partial load. Diesel engines have much less of a problem with partial load, so you gain little from adding the hybrid system. They are also large, heavy and expensive, whereas what you generally want from a range extender engine is small and light and cheap.
If anything, for some plug-in hybrids it might make more sense to have a small turbine as range extenders. Fuel efficiency might suffer a bit, but mass produced it should be smaller, lighter and cheaper than the petrol engine. Of course it is difficult for anything new to beat something which has been refined as much as petrol engines.
SUV's only protect them if they drive badly at low speed. Good luck if they have to swerve around something. Luckily cars are always fitted with basic safety systems like electronic stability control, so the car is unlikely to actually roll. Oh wait, it is the US we are talking about.
Electricity is heavily taxed in England. At least I hope it is, otherwise the prices here are completely outrageous.
Methane on the other hand is rather cheap and probably not heavily taxed, but no one is driving CNG cars. Compressing it at home seems like an obvious way of avoiding fuel taxes...
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Did you get to choose when the reactors were down when the heat wave prevented sufficient cooling? A mere 4GW gone, and the government talked about rationing.
EDF is effectively part of the French government. France is steadfastly refusing to implement the liberalisation of the energy market required by EU. Anything is possible when you are a government monopoly and able to extract whichever distribution fees you want. "Self-financed" just means that they had already taken the money from the consumers.
The link between vehicle emissions and heart disease is uncontroversial. The link between CO2 and global warming is even better documented. While the harm that is inflicted specifically on me from one particular car is too small to count in a court of law, nothing stops me from using democracy to handle the compensation in aggregate.
I drive a car too, so I will have to pay compensation as well of course.
The amount of harm done to you personally is a very small proportion of the total harm. But yes, you should obviously get paid that amount as a victim yourself. Reduce the compensation you have to pay accordingly.
I am not harming the economy, I am demanding rightful restitution for harm done.
Wind and solar can increase output when they are online, that is just a matter of running them at below full load. It is entirely silly to do so, just like it is silly to run nuclear power stations at less than full load -- you only do it to avoid overloading the grid when electricity prices are threatening to go negative. When wind and solar are not online they cannot increase output, but you can ask the Swedes how much they wished they could increase the output of Ringhals when it was down unscheduled for months and electricity prices once in a while spiked at €3/kWh. The Danish wind turbines saved Sweden that winter but the transmission lines had insufficient capacity to make it completely smooth.
At least with wind turbines you rarely see an entire wind farm offline at once without warning, and very rarely for an extended period.
You are right that France does get some money for their exports. They are lucky that none of their neighbors have followed their lead and attempted load-following nuclear, so the other countries can absorb some of the excess. Still, the whole thing is only viable because it is paid for by the government, it would have no chance as a new build in a free market.
You cannot fix the dent, in this case. Extracting the various exhaust gases from the air is not economically or practically viable at this point. Therefore we have to go with compensation.
It is not really different from all other cases -- victims of violence do not stop being victims when they are given compensation, the car you know in and out and kept in pristine condition does not go back to being exactly the same after a repair, and so on. We cannot make what is done undone, second law of thermodynamics.
I hope I can get support for fair compensation of victims.
You need permanent magnets for that. The whole discussion was about induction generators.
It does not matter where the money goes. It is a separate problem.
If I make a dent in your car, I have to pay you what it would cost to fix the dent. Whether you choose to fix the dent or scrap the car and buy a helicopter or spend it on Christmas gifts is not my problem.
If you build it at the edge, you have a gear -- the generator and the turbine are not sharing an axle. Gears are perfectly acceptable, they just have the drawbacks I mentioned.
Fixing democracy is different from making polluters pay for the damage they do. They are two separate causes. We should not delay one just because the other one is not done yet.
Vertical axis wind turbines are even slower turning than horizontal. They are also prone to breaking and not commercially viable.
But feel free to invest your money in them if you believe they are the future. Wind turbines are an extremely competitive industry where the free market seems to be working well (there are a few patent threats, but nothing really bad yet).
It is perfectly OK for society to decide what the compensation should be used for. If that turns out to be lower taxes, then that is fine too. The will of the people and all that.
If load following nuclear is such a success, why does every country around France get free power at night from them?
Even though you can do load following with nuclear, it is an entirely stupid thing to do, because nuclear fuel is approximately free once you have built the power plant. There is no reason to save it. By the same token wind and solar can do load following, because wind turbines have brakes and solar automatically stops outputting power if there is no load.
In some areas you can pretty much set your clock by the wind changing. Like at the north end at the Garda Lake in Italy.
I only checked the wind power section, but that one at least is getting a bit outdated. Denmark has increased the power generated by wind turbines by 2/3rds since 2006, yet the installed capacity only increased by 1/3rd. It is also wrong in the section about Denmark exporting wind power at a low price and then reimporting it at a higher cost when the wind is low. In fact Denmark gets paid a higher price for the exported wind power than it pays for the imported hydro power, because wind power is primarily produced in winter when energy demand is high in the Nordic countries and the hydro power stations are running low. Wind power has a stabilizing effect on the Nordic power system. Without it, Norway and Sweden would need to build power stations for the winter which would sit idle for most of the year.
The problem with induction generators is that they like quick rotations to get decent efficiency and power-to-weight ratio. Angular speed of wind turbines tend to decrease with size, and wind turbines are only getting larger. That means gears are necessary with induction generators, preferably nice, heavy, fragile multi-stage gearboxes.
In contrast, if you have high temperature steam available, you can spin a turbine at practically any speed you want. Thousands of RPM are not a problem.
The wind industry does have induction-based generators available, and it would not be the end of the industry if rare earths became unavailable. It would force quite a shift though, with companies heavily focused on gear technology gaining an advantage and other companies likely going bankrupt.
Why should the USPS be funded that way, and not the entire budget?
And how often do you hear of a power plant , regardless of its fuel , going completely unplanned offline?
http://umm.nordpoolspot.com/
It happens daily.
You can drive anything you want, as long as you compensate society for the harm it causes. Right now vehicles are not paying fairly for the damage they do, even in areas with more sensible taxes on fuel. I.e. right now I am paying for your choice of car, and that makes me unhappy.
As to Al Gore mentioned later, we live in a capitalistic society. That means that rich people get to do more damage to the environment and consume more resources. If you want to get away from capitalism, by all means fight for that, but fair resource allocation and mitigation of environmental damage are two distinct causes.
That is a real problem. The Raspberry is annoying in the same way, you have to recompile everything because it uses such an old ARM standard. Come on people, it really should be possible to be Pentium Pro compatible at this point.
It has useful I/O, i.e. actual ethernet and SATA and non-broken USB.
OPEC is not sitting on a sufficient fraction of the oil market to actually have much influence anymore. If they try anything, Canada will just boil some more sand.
Remember to subtract the costs of respiratory diseases, heart diseases, and general loss of welfare caused by car emissions. Fuel is taxed for a reason, it was not picked randomly.
Diesel electric on train is done to get torque conversion. Good luck designing a gearbox that can get a 1km long freight train started. Train engines would be more efficient if you could get rid of the hybrid system.
The primary advantage of a hybrid is that it gets the petrol engine running at close to maximum load at all times. Petrol engines are horribly inefficient at partial load. Diesel engines have much less of a problem with partial load, so you gain little from adding the hybrid system. They are also large, heavy and expensive, whereas what you generally want from a range extender engine is small and light and cheap.
If anything, for some plug-in hybrids it might make more sense to have a small turbine as range extenders. Fuel efficiency might suffer a bit, but mass produced it should be smaller, lighter and cheaper than the petrol engine. Of course it is difficult for anything new to beat something which has been refined as much as petrol engines.
SUV's only protect them if they drive badly at low speed. Good luck if they have to swerve around something. Luckily cars are always fitted with basic safety systems like electronic stability control, so the car is unlikely to actually roll. Oh wait, it is the US we are talking about.
Electricity is heavily taxed in England. At least I hope it is, otherwise the prices here are completely outrageous.
Methane on the other hand is rather cheap and probably not heavily taxed, but no one is driving CNG cars. Compressing it at home seems like an obvious way of avoiding fuel taxes...