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Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?
My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal, nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and running at 100% all the time. Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have…
I think the "with storage systems" part is crucial here.
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don't teach science any more in public schools. If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.
I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Wind.
I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…
> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1].
By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further.
In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.)
[1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
Hydro can act as a giant battery and the reservoirs already exist in much of the US and Europe.
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.