Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is fusion.
Absolutely. Fission on the other hand, proven and ready to go.
It's a shame it's an economic loser of a technology, even after generations of government pump priming.
Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
91–100 of 295 posts
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#92The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…
The cost or the price? The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted. Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.
No, where the price is negative it reflects the value of storage, which is basically missing from the market, but will not continue to be.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#93> But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Thanks Obama.
If he has such issues with how wasteful his own company did with the $60M they got, perhaps he should return some.
> yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
Given the vast growth in energy consumption, what would that number have been without solar & wind?
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#94> Nuclear plants can operate for over 80 years and run for 100 years if they are well-maintained. By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines last only about 20 years. This is theorized. There doesn't exist a nuclear power plant that is even nearly that old. The oldest still functioning reactor is the Benzau nuclear power plant in Switzerland. It started operating 53 years ago. Meanwhile the oldest operating(IIRC), g…
[deleted]
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#95Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#96The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…
Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free.
For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#97Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true. >I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited…
My quick glance impression was that the author seems to dismiss renewables based on their low fraction of total energy use (including direct use that doesn't go through electricity as an intermediate step when served by fossils, e.g. transport, metallurgy and so on) but ignores that nuclear has never substituted those energy use case either (ignoring a few aircraft carriers and subs)
Yes, a future with enough renewables to also substitute direct fossil use is quite hard to imagine. But a future with that much nuclear would be no less crazy.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#98> I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%. > I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way…
> which is itself not a democratic country and a close ally of Russia.
To be fair they've been playing their own game recently.
But still, they're within "Special Operation" distance to Russia, so under direct threat should they push their luck too much.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#99The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…
>cost per kWh of solar and wind
Are you looking at installed capacity or effective production?
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#100> But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
Can someone explain the chemistry of this ? I thought perfect combustion produces CO2 and that burning natural gas is closer to that ideal than what you get with coal (where you also get CO and probably lots of other stuff). So I would expect that producing a given amount of energy by burning natural gas would produce at least as much CO2 as that some amount produced from burning coal.