When talking to some people who say things like "Hydro is the renewables solution for Australia" I instantly know I am wasting my time because we all know South Australia would love to have hydro but they dont have the water etc, they would be building hydro if they could, even tiny crappy sized ones. Renewables is so dependent on location, location, location.
But I am now starting to see Wind is similar to hydro in some ways, as Germany has built a huge about of wind-farms but because they are inland country they don't get nearly as much wind as England does as far as I have noticed.
Italy is in the same boat which is unusal because you would think they would get good wind being almost a perfect land shape for sea wind but their use of there almost 10GW installation of wind-farms is barely utilized, its generation stats are so bad its almost like Italy has secretly given up on their huge wind installation and elect to only use it on a modest level, maybe they just wear out too fast, or maybe its just not much wind as we would think.
Italy is a good country to study on how good wind-energy is because 1) its a large installation, 2) has no nuclear, 3) has hydro, its big but its not monstrous in size, (Hydro allows you to cheat on total co2 emissions, its cheating compared to how SA has to deal with things).
Italy is still on the border of France, so Italy can just import a certain amount of electricity when needed along with Hydro. Its the lack of access to Nuclear power and Hydropower which is really just cheating that makes South Australia so vulnerable to wind energy they can hide behind fossil fuels but then its easy to see they barely reduce co2 emissions at all compared to France.
When looking at the post above on the floating wind-farm where its capacity is 30MW for the construction alone of $263 million I still think about how its location is important, coal or nuclear don't care where you put them.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-18/world-s-first-floating-offshore-wind-farm-begins-operating
While capacity factor wasn't mentioned at all in the Bloomberg article that other news article twists things again claiming 60% capacity factor for a month.. If its not done in a >
annual< sense then its being deliberately misleading as any Coal or Nuclear plant can deliberately set up for the winter or summer month and be able to run at full capacity for a full month with zero down time if it wanted to and claim 100% capacity. And coal/nuclear can on top
pick that high capacity month which wind/solar never can.
And really South Australia is the same in the capacity factor mess, the only times I have ever seen impressive generation above 50% for a 24 hour period is when destructive level winds are lashing the whole southern Australian states.
I can't stress it enough, when I see snapped tree branches piled up on the ground of my local park that's the day I see great generation stats on South Australia's wind farms. And all up I have realized thats a pretty crappy requirement for needing good power, that is seeing phsyical destruction of trees in the local area.
For me now, the biggest eye-opener on wind-generation is not just how low the generation is, even if it averages out to 25% or 23% for Germany, the other big eye-opener of wind is how often you don't get the wind when you need it or even in a consistent manner as shown on this chart of Australias last 24 hour generation from all its wind-farms, its just all over the place. Murphy's law is especially strong in wind generation, you don't get the power when you want. But its all counted as useful MWh's in annual statistics and attributes to the "capacity factor" even if the number is already bad, there are just so many hidden costs to comprehend.
And the complexities obscure the whole point of wind and that is to cut co2 levels which is it barely does.
While on Electricity map South Australia or Germany are typically emitting around 8 to 13 times more co2 than France. If you went pure nuclear at 12grams of co2 equivalent per KWh produced according to the IPCC measurements that means that South Australia at 362g / 12g =
30 times more co2 produced than if France went pure nuclear dropped their tiny amount of gas/coal usage altogether.
If we're in a car sales yard and comparing efficiency/emissions on two cars and one car was emitting 10 times more co2 than the other car it would simply be considered a bad joke, but that is where we are with wind-renewables.
Its a testament to the fact that such a small state in Australia has thrown everything it can at wind and done such a crap job of actually lowing co2 emissions compared to France who when started building nuclear reactors a long time ago were not even thinking about co2 emissions, but France have completely kicked SA arse to the point where I think SAs efforts are pointless.
The low levels of co2 emitted by France for their entire country is proof of how well nuclear works vs single Australian state that only needs on average 2000MW shows that wind without cheats used by other countries like Hydro/nuclear backup shows its a far worse technology than is conceivable by almost anyone, including me.
When I look at electricity map you can see all the poorest countries in Europe do use nuclear. Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic
, Ukraine, Romania, Belarus, Bulgaria.
*Edit Add to my post, even if its just for personal notes.*
You can even see BRAND NEW nuclear power-stations being built in the poorest countries in Europe like Belarus.
https://goo.gl/maps/PASTPrdVEQw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_nuclear_power_plant#Technical_features
I guess Lithuania wouldn't be too happy to have a new nuclear power-station only 45km away from their capital city, but at least they could buy power from them at a good rate I would assume.
*Add* here is the basic numbers been floating in my head..
Renewable energy subsidies in Australia are about $2.8billion a year http://www.afr.com/news/politics/renewable-energy-subsidies-to-top-28b-a-year-up-to-2030-20170313-guwo3t
The money going into the current Australian renewable subsidies rules are set to go to 2030 so thats $33.6billion dollars.
Some articles claim $3billion a year if you include local state addon subsidies, so could argue we got a budget of $36billion for this stuff.
So for $10billion according to that Wikipedia page you get a 2.4GW/2400MW nuclear reactor like in Belarus. Comparatively all the power that was generated from South Australia's windfarms for the WHOLE of 2017 was 4,343 GWh or just under 500MW average.
So 4,343 GWh/8760_hours_annual = 0.495GW or just 495MW average power from wind-farms, and as usual, the wind-power came when it wasn't wanted, its just crap. SA 2017 Generation numbers here https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Planning_and_Forecasting/SA_Advisory/2017/South-Australian-Renewable-Energy-Report-2017.pdf
If we could build x2.8 Belarus power stations for the $2.8billion a year over ten years $28billion dollars than ideally we could have 2.8x 2400MW = 6720MW or 6.72GW nuclear power-station roughly.
If we could get 6000MW average power out of it that is 12 times more power that what we are getting from renewables roughly, and getting the power when we want and massively cutting co2 emissions.
The thing is I am pretty sure if Australian voters knew just how crap wind energy is in actual co2 reduction vs nuclear and faced with the fact that Nuclear isn't expensive compared to wind BECAUSE
SOUTH AUSTRALIA HAVE THE MOST EXPENSIVE ELECTRICITY IN THE >WORLD<, I am willing to bet that most Australians would either support nuclear or more likely not give a stuff about co2 emissions all because they never really cared about it anyway other than using it as a political whacking stick for their favorite political team, because people are selfish insane idiots.
I am fine with coal or standard regular HELE coal which filters out everything but pure co2 and does it 25% more efficiently than a standard coal power-station, but I am also happy to go nuclear so all the politics and corruption over renewable energy subsidy money is completely destroyed, its all just evil cancer. So much money is being spent on wind-renewables stuff that doesn't even effectively reduce co2.
My calculations suggest if the money that goes into renewables in Australia annually over a 10-15 year period instead was just saved/spent on nuclear you could have a nuclear reactor producing about
15 times more electricity than what renewables does and have the electricity when you actually want it. And have a truly massive co2 reduction like France.
The other main thing that holds back nuclear in Australia is you can't undo the bad information done by established mainstream media (or at least its near impossible) that has told them the radiation from Fukushima is directly to blame on countless deaths/cancer when the official statistics show Zero people died or received cancer from the radiation leaked from Fukushima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Fukushima_disaster
I just can't believe how little people know about this stuff, like the fact that the only really well-confirmed cancer-causing radiation released from a nuclear power-station explosion/meltdown is only active in the first few days of the meltdown because its the highest energy emitting radiation, and because its high energy emitting it dies away/runs out of energy very quickly.
Australia is one of the most geological stable countries in the world, especially in the area between SA and Victoria.
And Yes we all know Fukushima has a big cleanup bill but thats what you get when you run a 1960s era reactor in a tsunami and earthquake zone. I have no doubt Japanese engineers knew the risks from the beginning and decided it was worth the risk in the long run anyway as insane as that may sound.
All up its the bad information thats the biggest cancer effect on this problem, and I blame traditional media as the chief cause. The faster mainstream-media is moved onto the "internet only" so that even pro-renewables sites like "electricitymap.org" have
even-access to peoples TV-screens/eyes as ABC-news does, then the world/Australia will be much a better place, moving on to better things and not being stuck in corrupted cancerous situations like this.
I was really happy to see that the new finalized 5G mobile standard can use the currently used digital TV spectrum so that there is a future plan cemented in to wipe away traditional media bad cancer on the world, and that already in the USA a lot of TV spectrum has already been sold to mobile carriers for 5G usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_reallocation#Broadcast_incentive_auction
There has been a lot of speculation in Australia that all the TV stations want to sell their TV spectrum for a billion $ each and just become streaming only content providers, this is what I want to see, as this forces people to engage in the internet only as habit and thus more possible to engage in real information on the world even if its just electricitymap.org
I know I may be straying from the problem here on energy but not really, bad information is the core cancer to the energy problem, politicians don't decide energy policy, ultimately its the voters that decide but they decide with crap cancerous information.
