World's largest offshore wind farm opens

[BURP] ("Old thread...")

These enormous wind turbines can generate enough electricity to power a house for a day with one spin:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world-la...-224544917.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=2_03

Begins:
New turbines off the coast of Liverpool are seriously putting the “power” in wind power. Now that Danish company Dong Energy has put the finishing touches on 32 turbines in Liverpool Bay, the biggest and most powerful wind turbines in the world have started spinning, generating more and more clean energy.

Each of the enormous turbines are skyscraper-sized, measuring over 640 feet, with 262-foot-long blades capable of generating 8 megawatts of power. That means that with a single revolution of these turbines’ blades, enough electricity is produced to power a house for 29 hours. Indeed, this is the first time that 8MW turbines have been applied for commercial purposes, but with efficiency like this, it seems like it may not be the last.

:shock:

Continues:
The new turbines are actually an extension of a previously built wind farm that first came into existence more than a decade ago. But apparently, these 32 turbines have more than twice the capacity of their predecessors.

... and:
The U.K. has become an ideal environment for wind farms given the government’s subsidies, amiable regulations, and history at sea. As it stands, wind turbines in the U.K. have a total capacity of 5.3GW, which represents enough energy to power 4.3 million homes. Already, eight more projects are underway, which promise to add another 50 percent to that capacity again.

Ends:
Indeed, the company thinks this is just the beginning for wind energy, with turbines as powerful as 13MW or 15MW possible in the near future (for reference, most turbines in the U.K. right now are somewhere between just 3 and 3.6MW).
 
"...Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur has selected three offshore wind projects by DONG Energy and one project by EnBW in the first auction for grid connections and funding for existing offshore wind farm projects, with at least one of the developers offering the lowest price bid of 0.00 Euro cents per kilowatt-hour..."

http://www.offshorewind.biz/2017/04/13/germany-accepts-first-subsidy-free-offshore-wind-auction-bid/

"...According to energy supplier EnBW, the wind park "He Dreiht," with a capacity of 900 megawatts - comparable with the output of a nuclear power station - will be built without any subsidy at all. The three other parks, producing some 600 megawatts, will on average receive a subsidy of 0.44 cents (.47 US cents) per kilowatt hour fed into the grid - much lower than current subsidies for solar plants and wind turbines on land..."

http://www.dw.com/en/german-offshore-wind-park-to-be-built-without-subsidies/a-38430493
 
Its funny to see this thread start 7 years ago and after 7 years Scotland only have a bit over 50 wind turbines installed. Basically because water is too deep and craggy underwater rocks push up costs to build, apparently.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-17/scotland-fights-to-keep-its-renewable-energy-dream-alive

Maybe its because the real world generated MWh is a fraction of a 1960s coal power plant or it really is just the costs.
Or maybe it was because you end up creating more radioactive waste for the total MWh created over their whole lifetime then the same MWh created in a nuclear power plant as I wrote here. Personally, I think nuclear is the elimination test for those who are truly green and those who are just about politics.
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=83416&start=25#p1261900

1000x-1.png


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
 
TheBeastie said:
Its funny to see this thread start 7 years ago and after 7 years Scotland only have a bit over 50 wind turbines installed. Basically because water is too deep and craggy underwater rocks push up costs to build, apparently.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-17/scotland-fights-to-keep-its-renewable-energy-dream-alive

Maybe its because the real world generated MWh is a fraction of a 1960s coal power plant or it really is just the costs.

Well, if you don't have many windmills they will not produce much energy. Hardly a suprise or a fault of the technology, isn't it?

Or maybe it was because you end up creating more radioactive waste for the total MWh created over their whole lifetime then the same MWh created in a nuclear power plant as I wrote here. Personally, I think nuclear is the elimination test for those who are truly green and those who are just about politics.
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=83416&start=25#p1261900

I fail to understand your numbers.

If someone talks about radioactive waste I assume that they also talk about the amount of activity, not about tons. As far as I try to understand your argument you say that 1 ton of radioactive fuel is the same as 1 ton of waste minerals produced when digging for noedymium? And this ton of uranium to fuel your nuclear power plant obviously jumps out of the ground itself, while in the end of the wind turbines lifetime the neodymium will magically disappear whle on the other hand you believe in some futere hypothetical recycling technology for spent fuel rods (and radioactive nuclear power plants)?
Fuel rod "recycling" today means (expensive) Plutonium breading and we all know what is the main motivation to get your hands on that stuff...

Btw, you can build wind generators without neodym or any other "rare earth elements".

In Germany wind offshore works quite well and we don't have as good conditions as Scotland...

http://www.offshorewind.biz/2017/04/27/german-offshore-wind-farms-shine-in-q1-2017/

But we also don't promise huge subsidues in new nuclear power plants built by Chinese. It's enough that we will have pay billions Euro of tax Money for decommissioning the old stuff and for the future nuclear waste managment.
 
Cephalotus said:
I fail to understand your numbers.
I was writing under the assumption we'd be familiar with basic real world total MWhour generation statistics and you would read the link to the post above.
For example looking at the biggest windfarm in the southern hemisphere like the Macarthur Wind Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarthur_Wind_Farm
Published real world total generation for 2015 977.9 GWh or 977,900 MWh.
977,900(MWh) / 8760(hours in a year) = 111MW average power generation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
Hazelwood 1960s era old crappy coal 1600MW powerstation in the same state of Victoria, it was hoped the wind farm above could help offset the coal power station.
But 1600MW of power, whenever you require it vs 111MW of average power via wind on a good year from the biggest wind farm in the southern hemisphere, isn't that good.

Everyone on ES with their ebikes find it quite important to have a wattmeter on their ebike but weirdly enough you will find these billion dollar projects struggle to find their wattmeter data or post it on very dubious renewable energy news websites.

I just assumed this was basic common knowledge, I have no respect for people who go to those baloney fake news renewable energy websites as there's no real world published data, Wikipedia has the real numbers on most of the biggest projects in the world, even if the Wikipedia article cherry picks the best year of its total power generation history it's still 1000 times more useful than those baloney websites.

If you're happy to produce more radioactive waste in a foreign country via wind turbine production then a nuclear power-plant and pretend its useful power generation that's fine, I would bet there are a lot of people who are happy with this arrangement even China, but don't pretend it's not happening.
While it might be more on the conspiracy theory side I think China is happy with this setup as it ensures a setup for more expensive electricity on foreign countries thus making China more economically competitive even if China stops deliberately devaluing their currency.
Having cheap electricity is more effective on having a better performance economy than even having a cheap currency Chinas government know this and have their policies in place as this is key. The core part of the game is to fool other countries into deliberately increasing electricty prices.
Countries with more expensive electricity won't even be able to compete on basic stuff like this guy making springs
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-09/soaring-energy-prices-stretch-rural-businesses-to/8341306
Or this business start up merely trying to process and export milk products
Government energy policies strangle brothers' export business

There is only one wind turbine producer that doesn't use neodymium magnets in their turbines (thus requiring a lot more gears/things that wear out) and they freely admit they require a lot more maintenance and thus openly against offshore windfarms claiming the complexity/expense of maintenance offshore makes it completely unviable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Technologies
Quote from Wikipedia Enercon does not offer or supply wind turbines to offshore projects and has at times expressed skepticism about offshore wind parks.
 
Well said Beastie :idea:
Often, promoters of Wind and solar seem to conveniently forget to mention that their output numbers are MAX potential, rather than real world data for operational feedback.
Wind doesnt always blow at optimum velocity, the sun is not always at 100% exposure, etc..Henc output is unpredictable.
Whilst a Coal/gas or Nuke generator can run at a planned output consistently.
 
My understanding was that about 2/3rds of Australian wind farms used induction rotors, not magnets. And it's still cheaper than new coal and roughly equal to new gas.

I think nuclear is a great option for countries who need it - places where its cold, not very sunny and not very hilly or wet (no hydro). In a place like Australia it would amount to the most expensive energy we've ever produced because of the massive capex and lack of engineering capacity. It would require a massive subsidy, matched only by that of defence building contracts :shock:

If a nation like Switzerland can elect to go nuclear free (because they will buy it from neighbouring nations) that's their call, but it will put pressure on those who do produce lots of nuclear electricity.
 
TheBeastie said:
I was writing under the assumption we'd be familiar with basic real world total MWhour generation statistics and you would read the link to the post above.
For example looking at the biggest windfarm in the southern hemisphere like the Macarthur Wind Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarthur_Wind_Farm
Published real world total generation for 2015 977.9 GWh or 977,900 MWh.
977,900(MWh) / 8760(hours in a year) = 111MW average power generation

obviously we are talking about different "real world numbers".

I also gave you a link.

German offshore wind capacity in 2017: 3,295MW
German offshore wind farms generated 4.8 billion kWh of electricity in the first quarter of 2017

1st Quarter of 2017 was 90 days or 2160hours

4.8 billion kWh / 2160h = 2,2GW average

Btw, this is a capacity factor of 67%, imho quite good and much higher than capacity factors of coal power plants and similar to capacity factors of nuclear power plants in UK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_Kingdom

Everyone on ES with their ebikes find it quite important to have a wattmeter on their ebike but weirdly enough you will find these billion dollar projects struggle to find their wattmeter data or post it on very dubious renewable energy news websites.

Maybe in your country. In Germany this is easily available: https://www.eex-transparency.com/

If you're happy to produce more radioactive waste in a foreign country via wind turbine production then a nuclear power-plant and pretend its useful power generation that's fine, I would bet there are a lot of people who are happy with this arrangement even China, but don't pretend it's not happening.

I still don't see where a wind power plant produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear power plant inkl uranium mining.

Having cheap electricity is more effective on having a better performance economy than even having a cheap currency Chinas government know this and have their policies in place as this is key. The core part of the game is to fool other countries into deliberately increasing electricty prices.

Countries with more expensive electricity won't even be able to compete on basic stuff like this guy making springs
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-09/soaring-energy-prices-stretch-rural-businesses-to/8341306
Or this business start up merely trying to process and export milk products

well, maybe you are into something here and this is the reason, why Germany's industry has so many troubles to export their products, especially since we stared to use significant amounts of renewable energy since 2000.

040315_Trade_Surpluses.png



There is only one wind turbine producer that doesn't use neodymium magnets in their turbines (thus requiring a lot more gears/things that wear out) and they freely admit they require a lot more maintenance and thus openly against offshore windfarms claiming the complexity/expense of maintenance offshore makes it completely unviable.

Well. It's possible to build wind power plants without neodymium (as it is possible to buld electric vehicle without it), but so far this seems to be a Chinese problem only. we are not responsible how China is using its mines.

Obviously you seem to care less about their coal or uranium mines and obviously you need to oppose electric vehicle, too, which also use their significant share in neodymium. *)

But maybe we are able to get some numbers straight:

Chinas neodymium mines seems to have produced 90,000 tonnes of thorium waste.

Let's say all of it is related to wind power plants world wide.

Can someone put a activity number on 90,000 tones of thorium in Becquarel? I can not find relibale data on that.

Can someone put on all radioactivity from uranium mines and nuclear facilities waste in Becqarel, too?

In relation to the GW capacity installed this would give at least a rough estimate

I would also like to see numbers on radioactivity released by coal power plants.

For comparison:

Tschernobyl: 4,000,000 to 6,400,000 TBq
Fukushima: 500,000 to 1,000,000 TBq
Kyschtym: 400,000 to 8,900,000 TBq

*) edit: I looked into your posting history and found out about your agenda:

TheBeastie said:
You can do whatever you like, it doesn't bother me. Increasing co2 helps plants grow. Unless the media is manipulating us everyone should know that as basic common knowledge.
Unless of course its not known then it really does highlight manipulation to help push more political power and money in someone's way.

I'm sorry, that I wasted my time doing some research for numbers :-(

Maybe they are useable for other readers.
 
Cephalotus said:
Btw, this is a capacity factor of 67%, imho quite good and much higher than capacity factors of coal power plants and similar to capacity factors of nuclear power plants in UK

And a point worth highlighting for Australian members is that despite our coal-fired power stations being capable of 1600 MW, most of the time they are running at 40-60% of capacity. If we'd have known back in the 70's when they built them that they wouldn't be running at half their rated capability, would we have built them as big? Probably not because it's better to have the extra capacity up your sleeve than it is to scrap around for more power when you need it. But despite all of the hoo-haa about power supply in Australia, none of the fossil generators increased their output despite having a huge oversupply of capability. Presumably because it was too expensive.

Our energy markets have driven our current energy mix and the way they are managed. And the market is a flawed, human creation...
 
jonescg said:
Cephalotus said:
Btw, this is a capacity factor of 67%, imho quite good and much higher than capacity factors of coal power plants and similar to capacity factors of nuclear power plants in UK

And a point worth highlighting for Australian members is that despite our coal-fired power stations being capable of 1600 MW, most of the time they are running at 40-60% of capacity.
Wikipedia again.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
Average net generation quote from Wikipedia url above "12,000 GWh"
12,000,000MWh / 8760_hours_in_a_year = 1,369MW for a power station 1960s piece of crap powerstation that apparently was in need of upgrades (one of the excuses from ABC news media it got shut down apparently)
1369MW average output vs 1600MW Capacity, that is about 85%

The real main reason Hazelwood shutdown (as the power station was owned by a private overseas company) was that state premier Daniel Andrews in desperate need of cash tripled the royalty charges per ton of thermal coal that the power station sits on made it too expensive and unworthwhile to bother running anymore. He honestly believed they would absorb the cost, instead there is basically no argument its going to kill the whole country town that was built around that power-station.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html

Bill Gates core promise with his next gen nuclear reactor is that it will be cheaper then coal, if you missed his claims on that among all the other claims his made on it then god help us all.
 
I was mainly referring to my own experience with Muja power station here in WA - been running at 60% most of the time.
I look forward to seeing cheaper nuclear power being installed where it can be done for less than coal. Hinkley 3 sure didn't do its sums well.
 
Coal, gas, Nuke power plants run at whatever output % they are asked up to their designed maximum, depending on demand.
Solar, wind, etc can only convert output from what ever Nature gives them on the day !
Why no data for Solar efficiency.?.... Ave output vs installed capacity ?
The way i read the above data is...
The wind farm has only supply'd 67% of its designed capacity .
The Coal plant capacity exceeds demand

I think i know which one i want my life support plugged into ! :wink:
 
Hillhater said:
Coal, gas, Nuke power plants run at whatever output % they are asked up to their designed maximum, depending on demand.
Solar, wind, etc can only convert output from what ever Nature gives them on the day !
Why no data for Solar efficiency.?.... Ave output vs installed capacity ?
The way i read the above data is...
The wind farm has only supply'd 67% of its designed capacity .
The Coal plant capacity exceeds demand

I think i know which one i want my life support plugged into ! :wink:
Yeah, because it literally is wind or sunlight "farming" the generated "yields" can vary greatly, there might be some places that do really well. Hydro, where it is high up in the mountains and rains a lot, is a no brainer and of course hydro has been utilized since the start of the 20th century. Places, where large amounts of water have built up at elevated areas are a slam dunk for guaranteed high energy delivery from heavy water being pulled down by gravity. For example the Hoover dam built in 1931 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

Traditionally Australians or at least more lefty groups have vigorously fought against creating new dams since they typically take the place of trees and wild-life.

At least in the more transparent governments/states/projects in Australia the "capacity factor" on wind vs its ideal expected production of energy is quite low.
For the Macarthur Wind-Farm the "Nameplate capacity" is an impressive ideal promise of "420 MW" vs its real world average output "111MW" (from official 2015 annual total MWh generation data).
This makes its capacity factor of 26% which from my experience looking at a lot of wind farms or solar farms I have looked at is about right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarthur_Wind_Farm
On the Wikipedia URL above the expected long-term "Capacity factor" is 34%, this is based on hopeful/expected future increase in winds which suggests that despite everything the article writers for this Wikipedia page are trying to be positively biased as possible in favor of making wind farm renewable energy look as good as possible.

The 20km2 Topaz solar farm is just under 25% capacity factor, if it was built in some where greener where its more cloudy then the capacity factor would be even lower as even in desert areas the generated power drops 50% lower then the summer months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm#Statistics
2016 July 138,059MWh vs 2016 December 56,698MWh
Most solar farms statistics I have looked at produce the most power they ever will in their first 3 years as an amount of panel depletion kicks in depending on the panel type/technology on those baby years, in my opinion its actually a good way to spot dubious statistics in solar farms when they start magically producing even more power in their later years.
Topaz Solar Farm   Wikipedia.jpg

That Hinkley C power station does look pretty shit-arsed expensive but when your producing 20-30 times more power and you get that power when you actually want it then it starts to look quite viable. Just about all nuclear reactors being built now are still based on the 1950s design essentially and the next gen stuff thats been brought on by carbon dioxide emission fears is going to complete blow away old nuclear and make wind and solar look as archaic as zeppelins vs standard aircraft on a long enough timeline.
Coal killed nuclear power innovation because the industry found you could just keep digging up more coal and continue to produce incredible amounts of power in a brutally cheap and simple method. Now that carbon dioxide is considered unacceptable for the first time ever since nuclear power was first invented in the 1950s new nuclear power design ideas are currently being worked on.

Tesla sell their cells at cheapest for $500,000 for 1 MWh for their "Utility Grid Energy Storage Solutions" but lets give the benefit of the doubt and make it $400,000 per 1MWh as the sales price cells in their cars as $400_per_one_kwh x 1000kwh = $400,000 per 1 MWh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Batteries .

If you take the above solar farm and just wanted to supply a mere tiny fraction of Hazelwood-coal-power of a constant 100MW of power for 2 months through winter solar due to winter sun shortfall we would need 100MW x 1,488hours_in_2_months = 148,800MWh of needed storage.
148,800MWh x $400,000_Tesla_1MWh_Storage = $59,520,000,000 (59Billion dollars) which would need to be replaced ideally in 10 years time due to degrading lithium cell performance due to cycle usage.

You can say "oh but the 40,000 kids in Africa are going to step up their cobalt mining efforts of $2 a day and bring down the total price of lithium cell production to 50% etc", but it's still hopeless because that's still about 30billion dollars for a crappy amount of power that your going to be replacing again in 10 years time.

And if you wanted to compete with a single 1960s coal power station of an average MW output of just 1000MW for just 2 months of operation then its 1,488,000MWh x $400,000_Tesla_1MWh_Storage = $595,200,000,000 ($595 billion dollars).
This shouldn't be news or surprising to anyone, unless your news sources are just ones stuffing you with garbage news.
 
Solar PV is a fantastic option and a future core technology.

It's efficiency is around 10-100 times higher than photosynthesis on farm land and sometimes more than 1 million times higher than photosynthesis on waste land and deserts.

Solar PV can make your roof into a small power plant, you can produce more kWh per year than you actually need for electricity plus heating plus mobility, even in cloudy Germany (if you use efficient technology for heating and an electric car obviously). What else would you do with your roof? What's not to like about that?

The first 10% of solar PV in the grid is usually expensive peak load especially in regions where there is lots of air conditioning. Which countries do have more than 10% of PV production already?

What's not to like about that?

Germany now produces almost 20% of its electricity consumption from solar and wind (and some biomass and some hydro power) and our solar and wind resources are worse than in most other countries in the world. Even at 25% there is no need for significant amount of extra storage, even when most of our residual capacity is quite unflexible coal and nuclear power plants.

UK has/has significantly more natral gas power plants which would be perfect to suplement solar + wind. You can quite easily reach 70% solar+wind production if the rest is from highly flexible gas power plants. What#s not to like about it?

After than you can talk about power2x technologies and significant storage (or a very large grid like the desertec project)

our electric grid is still one of the most stable in the world: http://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-renewables-threatening-grid-stability-17082/

In 2016 we looked with great interest on a solar eclipse during summer midday which introduced solar PV power ramps that will not be reached during decades with normal grwoth rates This was a one time event (and predictable), but the grid handled it.

France on the other hand has much more problems to meet its demand. they have problems in very hot summer (when cooling of nuclear power plants becomes problematic) and they regularly have problems duricng cold winter days. Usually during that peak demand times in France Germany exports some Gigawatt to France even when there is usually no sun around...

I see no reason not to go to at least 50-60% of renewable and some flexible gas power plants. After that there are several possibilities.

Burning coal is 19th century technology.

Only global warming deniers like you would advocate for those.

---

Cheap nuclear power is a fantasy. Cheap small nuclear is not even that, It's a fairy tale.

Even the Chinese don't believe in cheap small nuclear power. quite the opposite is true, it is ultra expensive.

CNNC estimates ACP100 construction cost at 4.000-8.000 USD/kWe and we all know how optimistic those costs are in the nuclear industry. What a joke. Who in their right senses would invest in such a thing?

https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/Meetings/2015/2015-08-25-08-28-NPTDS/DAY2/2._ACP100_technical_and_economic_aspects.pdf

Maybe the military finds them interesting...


TheBeastie said:
If you take the above solar farm and just wanted to supply a mere tiny fraction of Hazelwood-coal-power of a constant 100MW of power for 2 months through winter solar due to winter sun shortfall we would need 100MW x 1,488hours_in_2_months = 148,800MWh of needed storage.
148,800MWh x $400,000_Tesla_1MWh_Storage = $59,520,000,000 (59Billion dollars) which would need to be replaced ideally in 10 years time due to degrading lithium cell performance due to cycle usage.

Why should someone do are even advocate something that stupid?

obviusly you do not maka an electricity grid of 100% photovoltaics and obviously you don't use battery storage as a seasonal grid storage system? What exactly do you want to proof?

This would be like calculating the amount of coal and the cost if someone would replace the battery in a Tesla S with a steam power engine and a generator.

Obviously if you wnat to compare technologies you have to use them wisely, not for things they are not designed for.

The first 10% of PV electricity production in most countries is mostly peak demand power. You neither need any storage for them not is this the power you use coal power plants for (because they are not designed for that)

PS: PV module degradation is ca. -0.2% per year on standard c-Si cell technology in Germany. This is from 30 years experience so far. There are exceptions, but those are exceptions...
 
TheBeastie said:
That Hinkley C power station does look pretty shit-arsed expensive but when your producing 20-30 times more power and you get that power when you actually want it then it starts to look quite viable. Just about all nuclear reactors being built now are still based on the 1950s design essentially and the next gen stuff thats been brought on by carbon dioxide emission fears is going to complete blow away old nuclear and make wind and solar look as archaic as zeppelins vs standard aircraft on a long enough timeline.

Hinkley C wants/needs 11pc/kWh fed in tarif for 35 years plus inflation adjustment. Costs for decommissioning and waste treatment are not included, this unknown amount will be paid with tax payers money. Insurance is not included, because no single reinsurance company in the world will insurance a nuclear power plant against a nuclear GSA.

This fed in tarif was negotiated before(!) all those construction, timeline and cost problems that came later. Today it's not even sure if Hinkley C will be finished or if they just burnt some billions there. EDF is already near bankruptcy.

Germany last offshore wind parks want a fed in tarif of 0.0ct/kWh and let's bet that those will be online much sooner than Hinkley C.

If you think that Hinkley C is to expensive you may want to look at Olkiluoto 3 instead.

This is a 1600MW EPR reactor.

in 2005 estimated construction costs have been 3 billion Euro, last cost estimation from 2016 was 9 billion Euro.

In 2006 start of electricity production was said to be 2011. Now they talk about "late 2018". I'm sure this isn't the final word yet.

Let's say this 1600MW reactor costs 9 billion Euro and will produce electricity for 60 years (optimistic and maybe dangerous assumption) at 8,000 hours per year (480,000h in lifetime)

Lets's calculate that interest rate in energy sector is 7% (quote low estimation) and you need and average of 10 years ahead time between cost spent and production of the first kWh.

This will get you to capital costs of almost 6 ct/kWh. This is just capital costs for building that thing. All other costs for running that thing for 60 years will come on top of that. Costs for decommissioning and waste management come on top of that. Cost for insurance will not be added, but should be added.
 
Cephalotus said:
Germany now produces almost 20% of its electricity consumption from solar and wind (and some biomass and some hydro power) and our solar and wind resources are worse than in most other countries in the world. Even at 25% there is no need for significant amount of extra storage, even when most of our residual capacity is quite unflexible coal and nuclear power plants.

UK has/has significantly more natral gas power plants which would be perfect to suplement solar + wind. You can quite easily reach 70% solar+wind production if the rest is from highly flexible gas power plants. What#s not to like about it?

After than you can talk about power2x technologies and significant storage (or a very large grid like the desertec project)

our electric grid is still one of the most stable in the world: http://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-renewables-threatening-grid-stability-17082/
Reneweconomy is a baloney website, always MW this, and GW that, but almost never a single MW-Hour generated statistic, and if there is a MWh's stat its nowhere else to find on the internet anywhere, ever, I have spent time trying to find the source, never find it.

When South Australias state leader found out they were shutting down Victorias coal Hazelwood powerstation he went quietly nuts because its South Australias main source of cheap reliable power as there is an interstate grid (long power extension cord from Vic) and the increasing power bills are just beginning to kick in.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/how-german-wind-power-is-complicating-eu-unity-quicktake-q-a
I have noticed a large increase from Bloomberg with pro-renewables articles these over the last 2 years obviously because they found they get massive traffic from it because people like reading about it, but occasionally they come out with less sexy articles like a proper news site should.
Grid stability came at a price and is expected to continuously rise.
1000x-1.jpg
Fact is electricity grids are considered the largest most complex pieces of infrastructure in the world and when you introduce more intermitent power sources into already complex infrastructure you just make it multiple times more complex and more expensive, its just another part of the never ending secrets of extra costs of the renewables rabbit hole as you go deeper and deeper, its nothing like those simple facebook renewable energy memes people like to share and decide everything on.
 
It's So Windy in Britain That the Price of Electricity Went Negative
("The U.K. is producing so much power from wind turbines the electricity price went negative for the longest period in the country's history."):
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a26827/britain-price-of-electricity-negative/

Includes:
For several hours at night on June 7, electricity prices in Britain hit rock bottom, making this the longest prices have been negative in U.K. history. Back in March, electricity prices went negative twice in one day, the first that's ever happened.

The U.K. isn't alone, either. Denmark has repeatedly produced more wind power than it can consume over the past several days, and turbines are producing high amounts of energy across the continent.

8)
 
All the more reason for HVDC transmission technology....
 
Cephalotus said:
TheBeastie said:
If you take the above solar farm and just wanted to supply a mere tiny fraction of Hazelwood-coal-power of a constant 100MW of power for 2 months through winter solar due to winter sun shortfall we would need 100MW x 1,488hours_in_2_months = 148,800MWh of needed storage.
148,800MWh x $400,000_Tesla_1MWh_Storage = $59,520,000,000 (59Billion dollars) which would need to be replaced ideally in 10 years time due to degrading lithium cell performance due to cycle usage.

Why should someone do are even advocate something that stupid?

obviusly you do not maka an electricity grid of 100% photovoltaics and obviously you don't use battery storage as a seasonal grid storage system? What exactly do you want to proof?...

i believe many people would like to know exactly how you integrate a large % of solar into a utility supply without either large storage capacity or equivalent parallel generating capacity from conventional sources. ?
i do know solar is no where near economical on a domestic scale for a continuous supply, and its not feasible for much of the urban population living in high rise, dense population areas with no private roof space and even insufficient area for suitable "community" systems.
Australia has Solar farms that have been in existance for 40 years, never operated profitably, driven various owner/operators out of business, and have been decommissioned.
There is a huge amount of misinformation and false data around the Energy space currently with many different factions battling for a bigger slice of the pie .
 
Hillhater said:
i believe many people would like to know exactly how you integrate a large % of solar into a utility supply without either large storage capacity or equivalent parallel generating capacity from conventional sources. ?
Load aggregation. Real time pricing with smart agents. Distributed storage. V2G. Among other methods.
i do know solar is no where near economical on a domestic scale for a continuous supply, and its not feasible for much of the urban population living in high rise, dense population areas with no private roof space and even insufficient area for suitable "community" systems.
Correct. It is not feasible everywhere. In the Pacific northwest, for example, hydro makes a lot more sense.
 
Hillhater said:
Cephalotus said:
TheBeastie said:
If you take the above solar farm and just wanted to supply a mere tiny fraction of Hazelwood-coal-power of a constant 100MW of power for 2 months through winter solar due to winter sun shortfall we would need 100MW x 1,488hours_in_2_months = 148,800MWh of needed storage.
148,800MWh x $400,000_Tesla_1MWh_Storage = $59,520,000,000 (59Billion dollars) which would need to be replaced ideally in 10 years time due to degrading lithium cell performance due to cycle usage.

Why should someone do are even advocate something that stupid?

obviusly you do not maka an electricity grid of 100% photovoltaics and obviously you don't use battery storage as a seasonal grid storage system? What exactly do you want to proof?...

i believe many people would like to know exactly how you integrate a large % of solar into a utility supply without either large storage capacity or equivalent parallel generating capacity from conventional sources. ?
i do know solar is no where near economical on a domestic scale for a continuous supply, and its not feasible for much of the urban population living in high rise, dense population areas with no private roof space and even insufficient area for suitable "community" systems.
Australia has Solar farms that have been in existance for 40 years, never operated profitably, driven various owner/operators out of business, and have been decommissioned.
There is a huge amount of misinformation and false data around the Energy space currently with many different factions battling for a bigger slice of the pie .
Well I live in an old mixed office/residential building that was once just purely office space but the rental living market has 70% taken it over, there is a fair amount of roof space on this fat 4 level long block but no one has access to the roof, I am not even allowed to get a TV ariel mounted on the roof, its safe to say there will never be solar in my building.

When gaming out various ideas for renewable energy I have come across other weird problems that I have never mentioned and I think most folks don't think about. For example sure you could build a 300km2 solar farm + just 13hours of 1500MW of storage (ideal minimum but still pure-non-conventional energy) that could deliver an expected 1500MWs of power for winter/night time and get charged up everyday to the batterys storage full capacity, the excessive size of the solar farm would generate as much as 3300MWs average during summer average months.
Rember that even in the desert the MWh's halves during the winter as seen in the statistics so you have to build a solar farm that can deal with that or build even bigger battery storage which we are doing everything in this scenario to avoid as solar panels+land are cheaper then battery storage.

But the problem I see here is that it takes on average 3-4 years to build a solar farm around 20km2 and the cleaner/compact the panel array build has been done the longer it takes.
So if a mere single coal power-station is replaced with a 250-300km2 solar farm if it was built at the same build rate as existing solar farms that are around 20km2 that took 3-4 years then we can expect it to take 30-40 years to build our solar farm, on top of building 13hour x1500MW battery pack.

For example check out the "Desert Sunlight Solar Farm" I think this one really is as good as it gets, its built as compactly as possible (which causes the longer build times) and its built in one of the driest parts of the USA, it quite literally looks like a photo of Mars in some respects except the lack of orange hue color.. But it was close to 4 years of building..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm#Statistics
If you take its best year of operation 2016 its 1,346,282MWh / 8760_hours_in_year = 153MW average power out
I think the Topaz is a better "average desert" solar farm to reference from (but I wont) as it was built a tiny bit faster and is more realistic of what the average continous untouched lumps of desert land look like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm#Statistics
So to build one 10 times bigger to compete with a standard 1500MW coal power-station are we looking at 35years build time for the solar panel array and then build the storage? To me everything points to a yes.. As all the biggest solar farms have taken this amount of time to build for 1/10 of the power output of a single standard sized 1500MW coal-power station.
https://goo.gl/maps/TbtXWAyhJ8Q2

Tesla produce their cells at about $200 per KWh but sell them at around $400 KWh in their cars and at cheapest sales price $500KWh for the utility grade storage solutions, (and as we all know from Tesla stock market financials they lose money every year).
So if we build the absolute minimal solar storage to replace a coal power-station to just provide power over night time and get charged up by a mega solar farm every day its $400 KWh x 1000 = $400,000 for 1MWh. 13hours x 1500MW = 19,500MWh x $400,000 = $7,800,000,000 (7.8billion dollars)
So to summarize lets say we get the solar farm panels and labor for free but it still takes 30-40 years to build and the minimal storage solution from Tesla is $7.8billon dollars.

And thats when I am reminded of games like sim-city and Command & Conquour etc where when you build crazy amounts of power-stations to support your city/defense systems you end up putting so much resources/money into keeping it maintained you go broke.
If 100KWh cars become entry level of power and 1MWh trucks become entry level standard everything suggests we are going to be building solar farms and wind forever and never keeping up and the costs just keep getting multiplied on top of each other.

When I watch National Geographic wild channel with episodes about all the wild-life living in the Desert its stunning, while a lot of the wild-life are little creepy-crawlies and critters that live in the sand I still can't help but think a 200KM2 solar farm is going to wiping their little lives out. I just don't really see it that green at all.
And without looking I have come across articles from real world wild-life groups that do complain about solar farms killing wild-life and aren't impressed by them at all https://www.npca.org/articles/105-responsible-solar-power
 
[Burp] ^^ "Well I live in an old mixed office/residential building that was once just purely office space but the rental living market has 70% taken it over, there is a fair amount of roof space on this fat 4 level long block but no one has access to the roof, I am not even allowed to get a TV ariel mounted on the roof, its safe to say there will never be solar in my building."

Somebuddy should invent thin film solar...

303px-Thin_Film_Flexible_Solar_PV_Installation_2.JPG


Dunno if the property owner might like to save money 1) by generating their own electricity, and 2) shielding the roof to save air conditioning costs.

Ya think... maybe?
 
LockH said:
[Burp] ^^

Dunno if the property owner might like to save money 1) by generating their own electricity, and 2) shielding the roof to save air conditioning costs.

Ya think... maybe?

Maybe not !
The property owner has nothing to gain.
The rental tennants pay for the electricity, and air con costs, not the building owner.
..Even assuming there is enough roof space for enough PV to supply all the multi story demand.
 
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