101–110 of 182 posts
Oil and gas ("energy") companies are investing a lot into wind energy. They know they have to adopt. In the end they just want profits and they have the capital to make the right investments. I really wish the environmentalist movement saw them as just another money hungry corporation instead some evil villain out to destroy the planet. They would love to diversify their revenue stream, now is a good time to work wit…
By far the most wind turbines have been built on land and for good reason: it's much cheaper. As long as there is space/not too many people complaining it makes more sense to build on land. Not sure exactly but on land installed wind is probably ~10x the installed capacity offshore. However on land turbines are pretty much maxed out at about 7,5MW, due to logistical difficulties of getting larger blades, towers and n…
Transmission!!! A huge appeal of offshore for densely populated areas is you can put the huge turbines far off the coast of a dense area and then have very effective transmission, something which onshore is vastly limited by due to NIMBYism and lobbying and regulation.
How easy to maintain are these? Have they gotten better in the last decade? I see these things failing all the time around me but perhaps they are just shitty and better manufacturing saves the day?
> I see these things failing all the time around me You do? Where?
In fact, if they were cheaper to build, it might make sense to design them with shorter lifespans to take better advantage of the improvements in technology faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar. Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load. Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-l…
Or a lot cheaper if you continue to ignore the nuclear waste lying around for the next 100,000 years from a price perspective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trouble is, the "Renewable Energy Foundation" is really an anti-wind farm lobbying group set up by Noel Edmonds. Presumably a NIMBY reaction to some plan for a wind farm near wherever he lives. I'll need some validation of any "study" from them. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/may/18/ren...
20 years is a common number that is used for windparks and solar cells. A lot of sources cite that number. And that with capacity factors ranging between 10% to maximal 50%. Modern nuclear power plants (VVER-1200) reach 60 years of lifetime and have a capacity factor of 90%.
Depending on the tower choice up to a third of the cost of wind park is in raw metal costs. This does not lose value over all the years. Metal towers are going to be even more common in the future onland (cheaper to transport build and design) and on sea the only reasonable choice.
A VVER-1200 will see like most nuclear plants at least a major turbine renovations in a 60 year range. Which is a major historic source of failure and costs. Fuel cost is not as insignificant as we might think.
Remember, as well that for any single provider grid capacity factor is limited by the demand of such a grid. When talking whole grids you are limited to 75% max capacity for all sources combined. If you only have nuclear your 90% capacity factor will drop to 75%ish. This is why for example the UK has so much storage capacity. It's from when their nuclear energy was building out.
Also look at when construction even serial in Nuclear started to fail. In france this was the N4 generation that was designed in the 1970's. Since then costs and complications have arrived. i.e. to be safe the plants have become more complicated to build.
EPR's are terrifying in their complexity and the 11 year death march the European builds are on. The chinese build them but with closed books and unknown oversight. They are not going to build more of this model.
Westinghouse could not build it's design either.
VVER-1200 was specced to be build in under 5 years. It also took the Leningrad builds double that time. Novovoronezh-1 took 8 years, but -2 which is supposed to be faster took 10. What is up with that.
Also remember that Wind and Solar are often reported full project costs, including transmission, with repairs etc. . Nuclear is often only the reactor and transmission and other costs that are part of the project are not reported.
For wind if I have site and 10 billion, next year or the year after it's full and on schedule. For nuclear I might have something next decade.
Take a VVER-1200 at 90% capacity costing 10 billion USD 10 billion / (1200 * 0.90) => 9259259 Watney extension number, a current gen offshore 3 billion / (659 * 0.45) => 10116337
Wow you say, look nuclear is at least 10% cheaper! Yes, but your financing costs are double that for wind. Your running costs are higher, and you don't have a transmission. You can of course complain that I added 1.4 billion to the nuclear story (costs from the finish VVER-1200) project. Taking into account the finish VVER-1200 first paper work was granted in 2010 and is likely to be operational no earlier than 2028 the then year USD will easily make those numbers.
So in the best case nuclear is cheaper by 30%. Worst case it is 300% more expensive. What will you do if someone builds wind next to your nuclear powerplant? They have 8 years of profit before you turn on. Will you be able to sell your electricity? Will there be a market? i.e. you are building expecting an aluminium smelter as customer but it went bankrupt in the decade that you are building.
Nuclear, risks, risks and risks. For insignificant potential upsides on the market. Wind, known quantities, insured, guaranteed, with fixed costs and often known profit margins.
This was too long ;)
Oil and gas ("energy") companies are investing a lot into wind energy. They know they have to adopt. In the end they just want profits and they have the capital to make the right investments. I really wish the environmentalist movement saw them as just another money hungry corporation instead some evil villain out to destroy the planet. They would love to diversify their revenue stream, now is a good time to work wit…
Arguably their real talent is dealing with market volatility, which could come to renewables when strike prices and subsidy levels get reduced.
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
According to the Lazard estimate of levelized cost of energy, spending the same money on nuclear fission would produce one third of the power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t have a link handy but I’ve read somewhere that the gearboxes leak oil that then evaporates. Most likely not the cleanest stuff in there. Edit: Link 1: https://www.windpowerengineering.com/two-reasons-why-gearbox... Link 2: https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/investigation-launched-hy... Link 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-12/wind-powe...
Is this really a problem? They probably leak at the same rate as any other machine, which includes almost any other power plant. The total spillage or "evaporation" of all wind turbines is probably not more oil than even a tiny oil spill in an oil field or pipeline. Obviously we should fix a problem here if there is one, but the fact that we're discussing it in the context of larger scale issues is absurd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of the time it will refer to revenue generated on an annual basis. For example, all wind energy companies might spend $1T this year as an investment, but only bring in $10B in revenue. That would be a $10B market.
But manufacturing and installing wind turbines would be $1T/year revenue, since that's where their investment goes.
It is a large number. But it's a different large number from the headline.