41–50 of 66 posts
Seriously people? Many places are throwing away energy at this time. This is like a participation award.
> The power grid that supplies a corridor stretching from Montana to the Texas Panhandle was getting 52.1 percent of its power from wind at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool Inc. said in a statement Monday.
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But your car is also a battery and you could charge it using excess home solar. I personally think the answer is to expand nuclear power. Current and next generation plants are way safer than the designs used for Cherynobl, Three Miles or Fukushima .
Nuclear power seems cleaner, but when you take under consideration things like waste fuel storage it simply does not make much sense.. Yes, it's a great short term solution, but what if in 500 years there is nobody to take care of all of the spent fuel, and clean up all of the nuclear power plant sites?
The runaway favorite in wind energy is Denmark, where wind turbines, predominantly offshore-based, produced 44% of the total energy production in 2016. https://apps.axibase.com/slider/energinet-2016/?slide=2 However, wind energy production is remarkably volatile with the minimum and maximum average hourly production per day being two orders of magnitude apart: 912.7 MWh (min) vs 102.6 GWh (max). https://apps.axibase.…
Hydro + Wind + Solar is a powerfull mix. Hydro tends to have fixed power per year, and a lot of flexibility when you release that power. Solar matches the daily demand in most areas, though Denmark is very far north to produce solar they can import solar from the south. Wind is really cheap and provides some power 24/7 but does not match the demand curve. So even then you still needs some backup power either from pum…
That's because there's not much load in that area. America's best wind power belt is north from the Texas panhandle up to Canada.[1] But there are no big cities in that region. The US thus needs more long DC power lines. The technology is already in use in China. The Zhundong-Sichuan power line goes 2600km. It's a DC line at 1.1 megavolts carrying 10 gigawatts. That technology could easily carry power from the wind b…
Don't diminish this achievement by claiming it's a low populated area. The Midwest alone accounts for 1/5 of the population of the U.S. [1]. 1. https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...
It amazes me how humans constantly have sheer lack of will power to solve some global issues. For example, according to this pie [1], electric car is still a car indirectly running on fossil fuels. For fun, let's think for a second how much solar panels does it take to power planet Earth. After rough calculation it's about 496805 km2, which is approximately an area of Spain. This calculation is based on consumption p…
the change isn't going to happen overnight. Even if the car still runs on fossil fuels, it's more efficient to produce them at scale, where you can have better exhaust management, and (usually) exhaust produced out of the city. Charging will usually happen nightly, which is good for balancing the load on the grid. In some plants, carbon can be captured, and at the very least exhausts are scrubbed better than what comes out a car's exhaust pipe. So even when an electric car runs on a LNG or coal plant, there's still efficiency gained.
People are selfish, we have more than we need, and all the pleasures and luxuries to satiate every desire we could possibly have. It's (sadly) not surprising that protecting the earth isn't high on many people's agenda.
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Yeah that sounds like the perfect mix of generation technologies. Only thing missing is pumped hydro storage for some of those GWh days.
Pumped hydro requires very specific geography to make it viable, which is why it's present in so few places. That's why so many people are investigating other storage systems: batteries, compressed air, flywheels, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that sounds like the perfect mix of generation technologies. Only thing missing is pumped hydro storage for some of those GWh days.
Pumped hydro requires very specific geography to make it viable, which is why it's present in so few places. That's why so many people are investigating other storage systems: batteries, compressed air, flywheels, etc.
4:30 a.m. on Sunday Seriously people? Many places are throwing away energy at this time. This is like a participation award. > The power grid that supplies a corridor stretching from Montana to the Texas Panhandle was getting 52.1 percent of its power from wind at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool Inc. said in a statement Monday.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pumped hydro requires very specific geography to make it viable, which is why it's present in so few places. That's why so many people are investigating other storage systems: batteries, compressed air, flywheels, etc.
Compressed air is probably one of the worst possible ways to store energy, because you cannot achieve more than a low-single digit percent efficiency. Thermodynamics is not your friend when compressing and decompressing air.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pumped hydro requires very specific geography to make it viable, which is why it's present in so few places. That's why so many people are investigating other storage systems: batteries, compressed air, flywheels, etc.
You can shift electricity a thousand+ miles with minimal losses. Outside of small islands the real limitation is political borders. You can easily used pumped hydro on any major landmass, but ideal locations are often across a border which very closely ties your infrastructure with another country. PS: The Rio Madeira transmission link in Brazil, with an overhead length of 2,385km, is the world's longest power transm…