Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great German Energy Experiment

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 209 posts

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#111

Post by Symmetry »

onli wrote: post #89
LockeWatts wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. So what? Those accidents are miniscule in comparison to the everyday operation of a coal plant. The damage caused by the worst nuclear accidents in human history is still less than the every day operation of a coal plant. Hell, we've lost more people to coal mine cav…

1. No modern coal-plant leads to waste areas of uninhabitable land. Nuclear Plants do. 2. We do coal mines way longer. Even if the number is right, that "we've lost more people to coal mine cave ins than we have to nuclear accidents", (which is hard to agree with, cause it is statistically a hard problem to count the ones still dying from cancer years later because of Tschernobyl for example), that number would be me…

About 6,000 people die from coal mining every year in China alone. By contrast, 6,000 is the median estimate of the total number of people who would die from cancer from Chernobyl. Now, Greenpeace managed to come to an estimate of almost 100,000 by making certain unusual assumptions, but if you make those same assumptions when looking at the pollution that comes out of the stacks of coal power plants you would find at least vaguely comparable numbers of deaths from coal plants every year.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#112

Post by twoodfin »

adventureful wrote: post #28
pcrh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is, however, the rule of comparative advantage, which means that it is better to import energy than to produce the same amount domestically, if the import is cheaper. How that is balanced against the benefit for domestic producers, I wouldn't know...

Only if the calculation includes the vast benefits of domestic energy production, properly sourced, and not just the basic price of energy. Such as keeping First Solar and SunPower in business (FSLR has lost 95% of its value). The jobs created through installation, maintainence, R&D, manufacturing, and so on. For example: let's say your import cost is $250 billion, but your domestic cost is $300 billion. I'd argue th…

That doesn't make economic sense. That $250B isn't being vaporized: it's going to foreign consumers who are going to spend some fraction of it buying imported goods. Your goods are likely to be more competitive if an extra $50B worth of energy costs weren't spent making them. This is basic comparative advantage stuff.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#113

Post by onli »

ars wrote: post #108
onli wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drilling for the uranium is a whole chunk, according to http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99... . But sure, less than coal (but still, more than wind). edit: added link.

No wind uses more. You need to mine for the raw materials used to build the wind turbine. For the equivalent amount of energy wind turbines use hundreds of times as much raw materials as nuclear - even including building the nuclear power plant, not just the uranium.

Do you have a citation for that? The only source for that I found is http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/comparativeco2.html, which is most probably biased. Most other sources seem to rank wind better - but not sun (maybe you are mixing those two up?).

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#114

Post by vitaminj »

rmccue wrote: post #95
eigenvector wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

From what I gather from the Wikipedia page, it's due to the transmission cables being underwater and hence having a much larger capacitance, which is a larger loss than normal DC loss. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.) So, while AC is still more beneficial for transmission via cables in air/ground, DC appears to have less overall loss for underwater transmission.

By virtue of their tight bundling, all composite multi-core cables have high capacitances. However, onshore AC transmission is typically run on overhead lines, with large line spacings and thus capacitance isn't as much of a problem.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#115

Post by lispm »

cturner wrote: post #44
lispm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually totally different. In the past the governments and the companies gave a shit about public opinion. Government money was used to research and build the nuclear industry. The electricity companies were huge monopolies. Currently we have four huge electricity producers which nicely divide the market into four regions. Competition? Zero. Government support? Max. That brought us huge coal power plants whic…

> You can see who is the opposition: the four > huge electicity producers. And responsible-budget people. Germany is running in defecit beyond it's European treaty obligations. A factor contributing to the bottom line is expensive energy and expensive energy projects.

It doesn't. Since 2011 Germany is under the EU deficit limit.

Which is an artificial limit anyway.

The budget deficit this year is extremely low - around 0.9%.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#116

Post by WalterBright »

koide wrote: post #33
simonh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns…

I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway. In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway. Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts,…

Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years.

(The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#117

Post by revelation »

ars wrote: post #103
marvin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim about 20 years required to return the energy to produce a solar panel is false. Googling a bit after "energy returned on energy invested" (EROI) indicates that there aren't really any reliable ways to measure this number. Wikipedia quotes 1.5 for the US, which seems ridiculously low. This study ( http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf ) from 2011 indicates an average EROI for solar panels of 6.5, and…

You are misreading that number. It's not years, it's how much energy is returned compared to invested. i.e. 6.5 times as much energy returned as invested over the entire life of the device. For comparison hydrocarbon fuels have numbers in the 30 range, and nuclear is 60 and up (depending on how long the plant lasts). So 6.5 is quite poor. And they list no numbers on expected lifespan - lifespan is the number one thin…

Thats an overly useless calculation. The whole point of this exercise is: not all energy is created equal. You can waste many many millions of kWh of Norways free power and then ship the panel to Germany where it will replace energy generated through coal or nuclear. It might not make up for the energy you wasted back in Norway, but that was never the point to begin with.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#118

Post by WalterBright »

nihilocrat wrote: post #76
cturner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like…

I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported diffi…

I think you're overlooking the age of exploration, funded mostly by private interests, and things like the first transatlantic cable.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#119

Post by toemetoch »

LiamMcCalloway wrote: post #100
toemetoch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- It's not just wind (turbines) but also solar. - You don't have centralized access to all the facilities. E.g. small and medium-scale solar falls under the control of the owner AFAIK. Large scale wind also has other parties involved that don't want to miss out on income. - Control of energy production on a national or regional scale follows prediction models, not only for demand but also price of resources such as g…

As per the 2003 E.U. directive on renewable energy, renewables have priority access to the rid to offload their production. This is makes sense because it ensures full utilization of the assets and helps reduce their costs. EDIT: grammar

Both the 2003 directive [0] and the 2009 directive [1] state that member states may give priority - with notion of exceptions for security. Maybe priority was indeed the factor, but it's not mandated on a European level.

[0] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#120

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #105
onli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have not a single working endlager for the waste the nuclear plants are producing. Historically, there have been several large accidents, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile, and several more smaller ones which would almost been fatal. I know that people on HN obviously like technology, and noticed that many people who like technology like nuclear plants. Maybe because they see them as great technology and are able…

You are really lumping things together here. What do the USSR nuclear accidents say about German or US or Japanese reactors? Look at how many nuclear accidents USSR Navy ships had compared to US Navy ships. I can see an argument to 'close the old ways, we do it better now'. But 'close all of them, because I don't know the difference between them and I'm afraid of anything with the world nuclear in it' is just fear mo…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN