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The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

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Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#121

Post by ska »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #64
matt4077 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and fusion is just around the corner... I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now. Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of…

A new generation of students who grow up doing math in VR will solve the plasma containment geometry problem, which is one of the major fusion hurdles.

"If wishes were horses we beggars would ride."

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#122

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

crdoconnor wrote: post #115
opo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three. Citation? Unfortunately it looks like there are large proven reserves of natural gas: >...The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that as of January 1, 2014, there were about 2,474 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable resources of dry natural gas in the Uni…

"Yea, nuclear has so far been the safest form of base load power we have ever used. Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power." I thought it was telling that the only world leader who reacted to Fukushima by mandating the end of nuclear…

"I thought it was telling that the only world leader who reacted to Fukushima by mandating the end of nuclear power wasn't a hippy but a physicist."

It's worth noting that even formally qualified scientists are susceptible to bias, and politics. There are even scientists who are practising religious adherents.

Angel Merkel was previously the minister for Environment and Nuclear Safety. I'd suggest that is potentially more informative than that she has a doctorate in physical chemistry.

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#123

Post by ska »

FussyZeus wrote: post #4
arnon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.

You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again. I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.

As far as I can see everyone with half a chance for it has been conning Appalachia, or trying to, for pretty much as long as it's been recognizably a place.

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#124

Post by _0w8t »

crdoconnor wrote: post #112
matt4077 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and fusion is just around the corner... I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now. Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of…

"Yeah, and fusion is just around the corner..." Fusion probably would have been if funding for nuclear fusion research had been kept at the same level as it was in the 70s. It took a deep dive after that though for reasons which most people can probably guess.

Fusion hit a technological barrier that only until recently meant extremely huge hard to build plants to have any hope of positive energy return. Those required many billions of investments just to study physics before any considerations of practical power plants.

Fortunately recent progress allowed newer designs that are much cheaper [1]. That is the reason that we got startups investing in fusion. It is still not pocket money, but at least the scale of investments is 1e8 USD, not 1e10 as before.

[1] https://www.google.no/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/...

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#125

Post by [deleted] »

yessql wrote: post #105
WalterSear wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about the votes from coal miners. It's about what coal stands for in the minds of rural white voters.

Exactly right. Coal mining as a job has declined much more than coal as fuel. It's just easier to blame regulations and outsourcing than to admit that people can't compete with machines in energy production and manufacturing.

[deleted]

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#126

Post by adventured »

cagenut wrote: post #74
Animats wrote: post #71

Well over 40% of US electricity is still from coal. Despite all the hype, renewables other than hydroelectric are only 3% in the US. What's driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it's all gone. Britain's North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won't last forever. It's c…

Sorry if this is nitpicky but fyi, coal in 2016 was almost exactly 40%, not 'well over': https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three. In fact its just enough time to build a fleet of nuclear plants, but as you also point out, fear rules that decision far more than physic…

> But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.

Currently our known natural gas reserves will last over a century. And we're still finding vast new pockets of it:

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Massive-Natural-Gas-D...

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#127

Post by Turing_Machine »

Tade0 wrote: post #25
mirko22 wrote: post #5

More and more people are turning to Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors, like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders, If Kirk Sorensen and others are right this will revolutionize energy (and probably not just energy but mining, water desalination etc.) as we know it unlike wind or solar ever could. Natural gas and coal should die once and for all as they are as dirty as it gets. I strongly believe we are ready for truly nuclear…

There's one problem with nuclear that probably will never be overcome: it takes around 20 years from commissioning to the eventual connection of a nuclear power plant to the grid. You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years. That's 17 years of not producing electricity.

"You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years."

A nuclear power plant can crank out 5 gigawatts.

There aren't any solar or wind plants of that capacity that were constructed in any amount of time, much less three years.

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#128

Post by philipkglass »

soperj wrote: post #63
philipkglass wrote: post #54

Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don't invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resu…

I don't know if it'll be as big as you think. It takes a fair amount of power to actually refine gasoline.

I'd love it if you could point me to a source quantifying how much electrical energy from the grid refineries use. Refineries expend a lot of energy turning crude into motor fuel but AFAICT most of that is made by consuming some of the input crude itself (for hydrogen and process heat). None of the citations I've found so far for high refinery energy use quantify the electrical demand they pull from the grid. So while I'm sure that reduced oil refinery use will lower primary energy use I'm not sure how much electrical demand it will free up.

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#129

Post by Turing_Machine »

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this. The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for th…

"Coal was dead long before Trump was elected."

Coal still accounts for 28% of total world energy production (behind only oil, at 31%) and about 41% of the world's electricity production (way ahead of natural gas, at about 27%).

It's not going anywhere, dude.

Re: The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won’t Cut It

#130

Post by philipkglass »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #87
philipkglass wrote: post #54

Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don't invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resu…

I used to hear that electric vehicles would help to absorb the excess solar and wind that need to be overbuilt because that's cheaper/easier/better than burning gas or building batteries. I seem to recall reading a study that suggested that surprisingly few electric bus or delivery van fleets would be required to soak up this cheap electricity and tame demand fluctuations but more recently I heard people saying that…

I think that wind is a great fit for EV charging already. Wind power output tends to be higher in the middle of the night, when other kinds of electrical demand are lower and EVs are mostly parked and plugged in. Using EVs to absorb daytime solar peak output would require more work, like getting lots of charger ports in parking garages and parking lots.
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