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The time has finally come for geothermal energy

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Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#191

Post by kragen »

yawaramin wrote: post #49
Spooky23 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is great, but it does require wheelbarrows of cash, and we don’t have a solution for waste products.

Things are more expensive when we keep reinventing the wheel and trying to do new things instead of just reusing proven designs. Remember that solar power also used to cost wheelbarrows of cash back in the day. When you do something repeatedly, it becomes less expensive over time. Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when t…

Solar panels do not become useless in 25 years and need to be discarded, do not leach toxic chemicals, and do not contain cadmium. They do contain small amounts of lead, but leaching metallic lead out of landfills is very difficult and probably does not ever happen unintentionally.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#192

Post by kragen »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #72
thinkcontext wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money. China is having success but even they are not projected to have nuclear account for more than single digit percentages of their generation. Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.

The US Navy consistently builds reactors on-time and in-budget

The US and Russian Navies deciding to remain mostly petroleum-fueled is one of the strongest arguments against nuclear becoming very cheap: surely they would do it if it wasn't ruinously expensive, because it eliminates the national security risk of a petroleum blockade and simplifies at-sea logistics immediately.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#193

Post by kragen »

quacked wrote: post #24
1970-01-01 wrote: post #4

It always has been. Our problem is switching over existing infrastructure without asinine complainers ruining the revolution. We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent. The war to have solar plants over more coal is falling back to coal thanks mostly to AI. Pushback on geothermal will arrive, I guarantee it.

> We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent. The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings. My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available…

In many cases you can break one of the resistors off the LED bulb's printed-circuit board and run them at two-thirds of the power so they last forever. In other cases the surgery required is a little more involved than just snapping a surface-mount resistor off with pliers.

None of this will change the CRI.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#194

Post by kragen »

Melatonic wrote: post #143
quickthrowman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings. LED lamps work just fine, you just need to pay more attention when you’re buying them. Philips makes decent LED lamps. Make sure you’re buying lamps with 90+ CRI, that will…

Yup - CRI is most important. Indoor house plants also like high CRI lights much more as well!

I think houseplants will like horticultural LEDs much more than high-CRI lights.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#195

Post by mcswell »

dwa3592 wrote: post #52

The problem is how do you remove the incumbents. Oil lobby is pretty strong. Imagine what would happen to car lobby once we have teleportation.

There are scifi stories that have that kind of premise. Here's one, about electric power: "Damned if you don't" by Randall Garrett (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24064/pg24064-images.ht...). I think there was also one about teleportation, although I can't remember where I read it.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#196

Post by fulafel »

XorNot wrote: post #79
bryanlarsen wrote: post #57

Baseload generation is useless in 2025. It's in the name; it's called "base load", not "base generation". Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plan…

In 2025 the power consumption of my state (NSW, Australia) on any given day will be greater then 5 GW. https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-... This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks). It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later thi…

> my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.

I think this abstraction is missing the elasticity of demand that can by unlocked by end-to-end dynamic pricing. Probably if the production was cut in half for some day, and hourly price hiked up until demand matches production, customers would still choose to keep most of the lighting while postponing some more energy intensive loads.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#197

Post by marcosdumay »

parineum wrote: post #181
marcosdumay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do energy generation topics bring people out of the woodworks who cite some very idiosycratic one-off and use it to make out-of-proportion declarations about the utility of a given technology? They either have only read propaganda pieces from fossil fuel producers or are trying to create some of those. I would expect the number of people that honestly don't know anything but propaganda to be way higher than the…

I brought up the mirror plant because the molten salt crucible is an example of an attempt to make solar work after hours. It wasn't viable. Solar+storage is not a solved problem. The storage problem gets continually hand waived away in the conversations about how cheap solar is. As I said in a sibling comment, I don't think the people running energy companies are stupid. If solar really was cheaper as a baseline pow…

> If solar really was cheaper as a baseline power supply, what it needs to be to replace fossil fuels, they'd be doing it.

So, you haven't looked at what energy companies are doing for the last 3 years...

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#198

Post by zdragnar »

mr_toad wrote: post #129
hluska wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a part of the world that is far below freezing for a significant portion of the year. Thus a large portion of my annual energy usage goes into not freezing to death. When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my…

A IC car’s heating system normally taps into the engine’s cooling system, so that heat is mostly free. In a pinch you can actually turn the heater on full to help cool the radiator.

I had to do that when my radiator sprang a leak on the freeway and the engine heat kept creeping up. Unfortunately it was late summer and not at all pleasant.

I managed to get to a gas station with some stop leak in stock... If they didn't, I was ready to crack an egg in it.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#199

Post by zdragnar »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #163
hluska wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a part of the world that is far below freezing for a significant portion of the year. Thus a large portion of my annual energy usage goes into not freezing to death. When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my…

Do you live out in Siberia or something? Seems like a rough environment for most tech. Sounds like a very unique experience :)

Not OP, but upper Midwest US and Canada experience this every year, though where I'm at usually only hits -40 if you include the wind chill.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#200

Post by icehawk »

iso1631 wrote: post #106
bryanlarsen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inverters and batteries (or any other DC source) are also very good at doing this.

Not grid following inverters, or "any DC source", as we saw in Spain in Summer

From what I saw: In Spain, inverters are not allowed to provide voltage control, and what we saw in Spain, was a voltage spike that caused generators to drop offline, which then caused frequency issues.
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