Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Hillhater said:
considering the discussion was about power production in northern climates,

I also would choose electricity and heat of any sort as opposed to a week straight of -25C temps with no heat. Such a complete disruption of electric for a week would be potentially deadly to many of the weaker and less resourceful in that type of weather.
 
Hillhater said:
Did I ?..considering the discussion was about power production in northern climates, i thought it was an apropriate answer.
But to your rephrased question,...i dont want to breath any of those
Good! So you are against coal, then.
,..but i will still chose the (modern) coal plant as those emmissions can be minimised to safe levels
Yet they still kill thousands every year - thus are NOT at safe levels.
and i still need power all day/night,.....not just 6 hours,
That's right. And note New England is having no problems keeping the lights on, but is running low on fuel to do so. Wind power mitigates this problem, especially during storms when wind power is at its strongest.
 
billvon said:
,..but i will still chose the (modern) coal plant as those emmissions can be minimised to safe levels
Yet they still kill thousands every year - thus are NOT at safe levels.
. I guess you missed the "modern" prefix in that sentence ?

and i still need power all day/night,.....not just 6 hours,
That's right. And note New England is having no problems keeping the lights on, but is running low on fuel to do so. Wind power mitigates this problem, especially during storms when wind power is at its strongest.
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New England now? :roll: ...i was specificly told i should be considering Australia ,...presumeably because Punxor accepted that the Northern areas didnt have enough sunshine for solar
But for NH..?? How many lights would wind power keep on , for how long ? (NE has <10% RE )
They may keep some of the state lights going for a while, but they will never supply all the demand, even during the strongest storm.....and what do they do when the wind dies down ?
Running low on fuel ?..how does that happen with a Nuclear plant ?,.. And what happened to those simple gas pipes ? ..maybe not enough storm water for the hydro ?
If they lose power, maybe they will consider the wisdom of not maintaining more Nuclear plants !
 
sendler2112 said:
Hillhater said:
I dont think anyone is using LiCo 18650s for commercial power storage ?, certainly not Tesla.
Because of the compression requirements, and to maximize the economies of scale with the machinery. I do believe Tesla has continued to shun pouch cells or prisms in cans even for grid scale storage and is using banks of 18650 and then the newer 2170 cell size even for the banks of grid scale batteries. Just with an alternate (to the NCA that is in the cars) NMC chemistry.
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http://fortune.com/2015/05/18/tesla-grid-batteries-chemistry/
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Yes, Tesla changed to 21700 cells for grid scale "PowerPacks" over 12 months ago, and have always used NMC chemistry for those large packs.
Tesla have never used LiCo chemistry in any mass commercial products...and i doubt any reputable supplier of utility support battery packs would consider them either.
 
The surprise is that they persist with the small format cells for the grid scale installations but this allows them to spit them out of the same machines as what they want for the cars.
 
Hillhater said:
New England now? :roll: ...i was specificly told i should be considering Australia ,...presumeably because Punxor accepted that the Northern areas didnt have enough sunshine for solar

I just said Australia because you live there and I was asking for your personal preference.

I remain sceptical about "clean" coal. It's a lot of flue gas to process and trying to do so without harming efficiency.
 
Hillhater said:
I guess you missed the "modern" prefix in that sentence ?
Nope. Here's what modern coal power plants emit every year:
45,676 lbs of mercury
3,100,000 lbs of sulfur dioxide
1,500,000 lbs of nitrous oxides
82,400 lbs of lead
400,000,000 lbs of PM10 particulates
9,332 pounds of cadmium
77,108 pounds of arsenic

And that's much cleaner than things were 20 years ago. That's been accomplished by shutting down old power plants that were gross polluters (i.e. the Salem and Brayton plants, which alone caused hundreds of deaths every year) by refurbishing existing plants and by the slow reduction in coal power usage.

Now, I can hear your next objection. "No, I mean FUTURE plants that are much much cleaner!" Well, plants that meet the 2011 EPA requirements for power plants (which are slowly being phased in) are indeed much cleaner. However, they don't solve the problem. For example, the amount of mercury allowed to be emitted is being reduced by 90% - and they've already made about half of those improvements in existing plants. Which means that the amount of mercury will be reduced to "only" 20,000 lbs a year.

And I have a feeling that you wouldn't want even a pound of that stuff going into your (and your family's) lungs.
New England now? :roll: ...i was specificly told i should be considering Australia ,...
You just said "the discussion was about power production in northern climates." New England is in a Northern climate.
But for NH..?? How many lights would wind power keep on , for how long ?
All of them. Indeed, the more wind power you have, the less natural gas you need to burn and the more margin you have against shortages.

No one is proposing only wind (or only solar) to replace existing generation overnight. That is a straw man - a false claim that you try to argue against, since it is easier for you to win an argument against the false claim than the real one.
Running low on fuel ?..how does that happen with a Nuclear plant ?
Are you unaware of the need to refuel nuclear power plants? They do indeed need periodic refueling. Supplementing such plants with renewables extends the time they can run between refuelings.
.. And what happened to those simple gas pipes ?
Nothing at all.
 
Bill, ..why do you think i said.... "modern" ? It wasnt just a casual adjective thrown in to extend the sentence. !
This is a hyperthetical discussion using loose parameters (not set by me either ) of a solar or coal power plant.
It was a simple .."either / or" question, not offering some combination of options like gas or wind or back up batterys
....dispite Punxor shifting the goalposts from Northern climates to Aus ( trying to give solar a chance ?) ...and you choosing the dirtyest coal option, and introducing wind as a distraction, i still prefer to have a continuous , reliable , serious power supply, rather than an expensive, intermittent, one only as reliable as the weather.
No one said it had to be a 1950s coal plant, so i chose my words carefully, as i am well aware of what is possible with todays technology (not even 2011 regulation)

Are you now seriously saying that NE Nuk plants are running out of fuel rods !
And those gas pipes,....,( yes that are so much better than a 90 day coal stock) , maybe you begin to see some of the issues with gas ? Just when demand goes up, supply gets stressed (everybody wants it at once) and the pipes become a bottleneck at various points from the wells, with serious possibility of shortages.
Its hard to store 90 days of gas supply next to a power plant.
 
Hillhater said:
Bill, ..why do you think i said.... "modern" ?
Modern means current; state of the art. The current state of the art, on average, is fairly dirty.
....dispite Punxor shifting the goalposts from Northern climates to Aus ( trying to give solar a chance ?) ...and you choosing the dirtyest coal option
I am not choosing the "dirtyest" option. I am using the option that exists RIGHT NOW. Those numbers weren't from 1950; they were from 2016.
and introducing wind as a distraction, i still prefer to have a continuous , reliable , serious power supply, rather than an expensive, intermittent, one only as reliable as the weather.
There's a nuclear power plant just down the beach from me. Over the past five years or so, my solar power system has been far more reliable than that plant, and has produced more power.

In the future, nuclear power will be PART of a continuous, reliable, serious power supply. Nuclear cannot do so on its own. It will rely on other technologies - gas fast-ramp plants, coal plants, solar and wind, storage, geothermal and hydro - to make up for its deficiencies. Just as solar, wind, hydro, storage and natural gas will be part of the formula in the future, and will support/be supported by other forms of energy.

As we progress, the same trends we see now - increases in solar and wind, decreases in coal - will continue, until coal is phased out. Political correctness and massive subsidies may slow that process down, but it cannot stop it due to basic economics. Utilities want to pay less for power, not more.
Are you now seriously saying that NE Nuk plants are running out of fuel rods !
Nope. Re-read your own sentence to see what I was replying to.
And those gas pipes,....,( yes that are so much better than a 90 day coal stock) , maybe you begin to see some of the issues with gas ? Just when demand goes up, supply gets stressed (everybody wants it at once) and the pipes become a bottleneck at various points from the wells, with serious possibility of shortages.
An excellent point! So they build natural gas storage facilities, often right next to the plant itself. And if those aren't large enough, then solar and wind reduce the need for such storage.
 
NY state has 141300 km^2 total land area.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_(state)
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We need to get busy beyond busy so we can build more than more RE. Using 1 Watt/ meter^2 for wind it takes 3/4 of the total land area of NY state to find places for 100GW of wind. Even using the 2.5W/ meter^2 from MacKay for wind, it takes 1/3 of the total land area of NY covered in wind farms to average the winter electrical consumption at 25% capacity factor which is common for 6 m/s wind that we have.
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Scale. Just for electricity. Then how to come up with another 4X to replace all energy?
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Things will be much smaller and simpler after fossil fuels.
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sendler2112 said:
billvon said:
a wiser solution would be to rely on a range of renewable technologies. .

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112

So for NY state 33 GW average electrical consumption summer and 24 GW winter we need 100GW of wind operating at 25% to get us through the winter weeks of Zero sun and another 60GW of solar PV when it will work at 25% in the summer for the increased consumption and decreased wind.
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We have adequate wind. On shore at the East end of Lake Erie and the Tug Hill Platue East of Lake Ontario and near shore off of Long Island.
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We can then use Lake Erie as hydro storage to fill in demand via Niagara Falls when we need it.
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How much land does this take? Modern Turbines at 30% are about 1 Watt/ meter^2.
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http://www.energyadvocate.com/fw84.htm
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100,000 km^2. Which is a square that is 182 km on a side for each of the three wind areas
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How much money?
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The biggest (cheapest) turbines are somewhere around $1.50/ Watt.
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$150 Billion
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Solar farms are still way over $2/ Watt installed in my area. And another 400km^2 land for the panels.
So another $120 Billion for the solar pv.
How do we do this. Private development of wind and solar has very few takers in NY even with 55% combined rebates and a $0.03 feed in tariff.
 
billvon said:
....In the future, nuclear power will be PART of a continuous, reliable, serious power supply. Nuclear cannot do so on its own. It will rely on other technologies - gas fast-ramp plants, coal plants, solar and wind, storage, geothermal and hydro - to make up for its deficiencies. Just as solar, wind, hydro, storage and natural gas will be part of the formula in the future, and will support/be supported by other forms of energy.

As we progress, the same trends we see now - increases in solar and wind, decreases in coal - will continue, until coal is phased out. Political correctness and massive subsidies may slow that process down, but it cannot stop it due to basic economics. Utilities want to pay less for power, not more.
bill, ...what you describe above is almost exactly where Germany and our South Australia states are right now.
but if you read any of the previous posted information on those, you will see that what they have achieved as a direct consequence is a dramatically HIGHER power cost,
... because for every GW of RE, they have to maintain a GW of fossil power, but heavily compromised on its utilisation ( basicly on "Standby")
 
billvon said:
Are you now seriously saying that NE Nuk plants are running out of fuel rods !
Nope. Re-read your own sentence to see what I was replying to.
And those gas pipes,....,( yes that are so much better than a 90 day coal stock) , maybe you begin to see some of the issues with gas ? Just when demand goes up, supply gets stressed (everybody wants it at once) and the pipes become a bottleneck at various points from the wells, with serious possibility of shortages.
An excellent point! So they build natural gas storage facilities, often right next to the plant itself. And if those aren't large enough, then solar and wind reduce the need for such storage.
you said NE was running out of fuel.. "to do so". ( keep the lights on)
As NE is mostly powered by Nuclear and gas, i figured it was one or both of those that was the issue. ? so if its not either of those, what exactly is running out of fuel ?
PS.. its a known issue that very few of the Gas generator plants have any significant fuel storage capacity, and many have inadequate supply pipes for maximum sustained output.
 
I didn't realise you disliked gas plants in preference to coal, I thought it was just fossil fuel over RE...

It was a very simple question, intended to see if your preference for coal was based on not having to personally suffer its immediate externality of air pollution. You obfuscated rather than answer, though.

I don't understand the problem with gas or why you need a 90 store of fuel for a power plant. The UK has switched to generating most of its energy from coal to gas and the electric supply is very reliable (and has become much more so over the last 10-20 years). Within a handful of miles of me are also several small-medium solar and wind farms.
 
A nice video on a front to back installation of a wind farm.
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https://youtu.be/ZxeQeJ4jW-4
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But the lack of comments shows me that you guys disbelieve the numbers or are in denial of the scale of our consumption. Wind turbine spacing to prevent dominoe cascading damage upon blade breakage requires at least 2.5 diameters between turbines. Vortex shadowing cuts power up to 50% at 2.5D in successive rows so that 7D spacing in the prevailing wind direction is recommended.
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https://youtu.be/btbgpGsZOKU
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NY state uses 33 GW Summer and 25GW in Winter when solar panels are completely ineffective. Turbines will average 25% of their rated capacity and have a best case density of 2.5W/ meter^2. It takes at least 1/3 of the total land area of NY state covered in wind turbines to replace our winter electrical needs. It takes tons of concrete, steel, and diesel fuel running through giant machines to build this. Can we do it? Does it add up? How long can we maintain these behemouths after 100 years from now when liquid fuel, steel, and concrete, is 5X the current price or more because of increasing energy scarcity?
 
Hillhater said:
??? Rewind a few pages Chalo and get some of the facts on Germany.
They have over 30GW of solar installed compared to a average demand load of 60 GW.....
...but at best in summer they only average approx 3 GW from the solar. ( over 24 hrs )
In winter the output is trivial...averaging less than 1 GW...

You and your "facts" about Germany...

3GW in summer and (less than) 1GW in winter would be an average of around 2GW multplied with 8760h per year this would be a PV generation of around 16TWh per year.

Real Fact: In 2017 PV production was 38.29 TWh in Germany, more than twice as much as you tell us. And it wasn't a sunny year.

https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm?source=conventional&period=annual&year=all

On sunny days like May 27th electricity Generation from PV has been around 260 GWh, over 24 hours this is an average of more than 10GW. Evene better, that higher electricity production from PV is somehow in line with higher demand during those days.

Some other "facts" about Germany:

Overall electricity production with renewable energies was 38,5% in 2017:

https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share_de.htm?source=ren-share&period=annual&year=all

(numbers depends on how you calculate Import/exports, other sources quote 36.x %)

Btw: During the night of January 1st 2018 renewable energy production for the first time was as high as demand in Germany, mainly because of low demand and lots of wind. There where negative prices, but no technical grid problems.
 
Punx0r said:
The reduction in nuclear in Germany certainly partially politically-driven.

Sure. We realised that nothing would stop a nuclear meltdown in our old reactors if active cooling is compromised. So we shut those down.

In the UK nuclear is politically popular, if anything, but despite a government and industry push to build new plants, plans to do so have floundered for years because compared to the alternatives it is technically difficult, expensive and carries large future liabilities.

Hinkley C will hardly work as an advertisment for "cheap nuclear".

Those reactor half made by the Chinese will receive feed in tarifs of roughly 12 USct/kWh for 35 years plus inflation compensation, so it is significantly more expensive than power from solar or wind.

In October 2016 it was leaked that UK government pomissed to cover exceeding cost for rebuilding the nuke and waste managment which the public hand will have to pay.

France is king when it comes to nuclear power. Currently it accounts for 75% of its energy mix! But they are not marching forth building new ones. In fact they aim to reduce this to 50% by 2025 in favour of RE: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

Main Problem for French nuclear reactors is that EDF is haevily in dept and there is no significant amount of Money available to rebuild those reactors which will cost several Billion USD for each raector (not even counting waste storage).

So it is most likely that many of those nukes will run "forever" until the first one explodes. I hope that there will be no wind from the west when this happens...

The next meltdown of a nuclear power plant is not a question about "if" but about "when" and "where".
 
Hillhater said:
A noted German Economist has studied the progress of "energiewende" and comments on future posibilities.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/12/22/major-blow-to-energiewende-as-top-german-economist-shows-plan-can-never-work/#sthash.V47ddSl4.tJ46Tqoq.dpbs

Sinn is an economist, he doesn't have much clue about energy at all. He just wants to stay in the media as he has been as an economist.
 
Cephalotus said:
Sinn is an economist, he doesn't have much clue about energy at all. He just wants to stay in the media as he has been as an economist.

The important point he, and others like Mackay, are trying to make is that when you say that Germany has made ABC% of "energy" from renewables, you have misspoken. What you mean to say is that Germany has made ABC% of ELECTRICITY from renewables. He is reminding us that total energy consumption is 3-4 times electrical consumption and must also be converted and replaced somehow before fossil fuel gets too expensive.
 
Not 100% true. This 4x statement ignores compost gasses and many other solid form renewable's now currently being used as direct heat sources and not being wasted in lower efficiency conversion methods to make / store / transmit electric power. If heat is what your after, why waste the fuel making electric power when you can easily get very efficient conversion directly.
 
This is the newest graphic I have for Germany from 2014. Does 3 years make a big difference to the tiny amount of solar and wind? Maybe someone has a newer one showing total energy production by source. Triple the "effective" worth of electricity vs thermal content if you like and solar and wind were at 9% of total energy.
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23231632_1494813147264459_575666585406819312_n.jpg

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Hillhater said:
bill, ...what you describe above is almost exactly where Germany and our South Australia states are right now. but if you read any of the previous posted information on those, you will see that what they have achieved as a direct consequence is a dramatically HIGHER power cost,... because for every GW of RE, they have to maintain a GW of fossil power, but heavily compromised on its utilisation ( basicly on "Standby")
That is one of the most common lies used by people who oppose renewables - that for every megawatt of renewable (and unreliable) generation, a megawatt of fossil fuel power needs to be available but idle. It simply doesn't work like that, as has been demonstrated by grids from Germany to the US.
you said NE was running out of fuel.. "to do so". ( keep the lights on)
No, I didn't. I said they were running low on LOCAL fuel, since delivery of that fuel is not instantaneous. That is the problem solved by solar/wind etc.
PS.. its a known issue that very few of the Gas generator plants have any significant fuel storage capacity, and many have inadequate supply pipes for maximum sustained output.
Right - the utility provides the storage off-plant. New York alone, for example, stores about 120 billion cubic feet, enough to run 100 1GW gas plants for over a week. This is starting to fall behind demand as utilities build more and more gas power plants. The two options there are:

1) build more storage (to store more gas)
2) build more renewables (to eliminate the need for more gas)

Utilities are finding renewables the cheaper of the two options.
 
sendler2112 said:
The important point he, and others like Mackay, are trying to make is that when you say that Germany has made ABC% of "energy" from renewables, you have misspoken. What you mean to say is that Germany has made ABC% of ELECTRICITY from renewables. He is reminding us that total energy consumption is 3-4 times electrical consumption and must also be converted and replaced somehow before fossil fuel gets too expensive.

There is no debate about that. But I question his "problems" and "solutions". Sinn simply does not understand how new energy technologies work if he claims that we need huge battery capacities because sun and wind will not provide electricty for some days/weeks and for that reason an energy transition is stupid. This is bullshit.

But we are talking about coal/nukes vs solar+wind

All of them are used to produce electricty and not much else.

The transport sector will see much higher electrification rates soon with the advancement of electric cars. Give them 10 years.

Home and industrial heat is dominated by very cheap natural gas and oil and this will not change as long as this stuff remaians as cheap as it is now. You most likely need a global CO2 tax on them of you want to change that.
I you spend only 500 USD a year for heating your home for one year using natural gas, why should you change that? If your energy costs are around 1-2% of your overall anual balance (typical number for around 90% of Germanys industry, there are a few exceptions), why waste much thinking about that? Just keep it running with fossil fuels...

Peak oil will not "safe" us, the first limit is not the amount of carbon based fossil fuels available to humankind but the amount of CO2 atmosphere (and ozeans) will be able to absorb durung the next centuries (without making large parts of the world unhabitable to Homo sapiens)

We have enough oil, gas and coal available to make the planet maybe +10K warmer (exakt temperature is unknown, because nobody knows the effects that will happen beyond +4K)
 
Cephalotus said:
Peak oil will not "safe" us.

The point I keep trying to help everyone understand is that we have a much bigger problem than climate and environmental change due to continued use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enabled this entire modern 7.5 Billion human civilization and the numbers for replacing fossil fuels for total energy as it begins to inevitably slip away with solar and wind just do not come close to adding up. The future will be much smaller and simpler.
 
sendler2112 said:
This is the newest graphic I have for Germany from 2014. Does 3 years make a big difference to the tiny amount of solar and wind?

I provided you data with an accuracity of 15 minutes that is perfectly up to date, available in about any Format that you wish and with data backwards for some years.

You just need to look at it.
 
sendler2112 said:
The point I keep trying to help everyone understand is that we have a much bigger problem than climate and environmental change due to continued use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enabled this entire modern 7.5 Billion human civilization and the numbers for replacing fossil fuels for total energy as it begins to inevitably slip away with solar and wind just do not come close to adding up. The future will be much smaller and simpler.

I do not agree. Imho CO2 is the much bigger problem than lack of C to burn.

http://www.nature.com/articles/517150a
 
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