81–90 of 204 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the future arrives, lots of people will be amazed at how little of the solution to this "issue" ended up being storage as such and how much turned out to be demand management and reasonable system architecture.
When the future arrives, we will build enough nuclear reactors.
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.
Are you talking about natural gas? 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 Win…
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…
The fact that gas saw a big cost cut around the same time is just accelerating the inevitable. But getting off carbon will require that wind/solar become significantly cheaper than gas as well as coal/nuclear. Which may be what happens over the next couple of decades.
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.…
Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.
What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed.
Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about natural gas? 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 Win…
What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?
Earthquakes -- there is some causality
Destruction of fish habitat -- salmon in Columbia river
In general, making water go slow when it used to go fast has a lot more negative consequence for the environment than one might expect.
I find this episode of 99 percent invisible to be really informative -- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/
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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e...
Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
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.…
Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towar…