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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

#241

Post by rldjbpin »

cbmuser wrote: post #110
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…

Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh. https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

does it matter much when in the end pricing is decided by merit-order system [1]? i.e. when you are dependent on other sources or neighbouring markets with very different composition.

not to say it is remains costlier than conventional sources, albeit not accounting for externalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#242

Post by adrianN »

cycomanic wrote: post #226
psunavy03 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand that waste management of fission reactors is a Very Big Deal. But I still stand behind the argument that opposing nuclear power in the 70s and onward is possibly the biggest own goal the environmental movement has ever achieved. At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll o…

The problem with that argument is that nowhere did environmentalists in the 70s or 80s prevent nuclear power plants from being build. Nuclear has received much more subsidies than solar or wind ever did (even if we ignore the indirect military->civil subsidies) and it still never became economical. Back in the 70s and 80s coal was much cheaper, and now solar and wind are so much cheaper it doesn't make any sense to i…

I’m relatively sure that at least in Germany the environmental movement had a lot of influence preventing the aggressive pursuit of nuclear power. Your point about subsidies still stands of course, but economics of power generation notoriously ignore the costs of climate change.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#243

Post by adrianN »

kragen wrote: post #187
dns_snek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places on Earth it's somewhere around 40 mW/m2 (i.e. accounting for conversion losses you need to capture heat from ~500 m2 to renewably power one LED light bulb!) Ground-source heat pumps extract about 1000 times more power from ground loops, where does the difference come from?

Ground-source heat pumps are irrelevant to geothermal energy sources, and it's unfortunate that the article mentioned them. Ground-source heat pumps are just storing heat from the air during the summer and retrieving it during the winter.

If it can be used to heat houses in winter it’s not irrelevant.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#244

Post by adrianN »

cbmuser wrote: post #114
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough renewables are deployed annually to replace the global nuclear fission fleet, year after year, even when accounting for capacity factor derating (to make a like for like comparison). The race is over, and renewables (with batteries) won. If you can find someone unsophisticated to invest in a fission reactor that takes billions of dollars and 10-15 years to build, more power to you. There will be no need for it…

»Enough renewables are deployed annually to replace the global nuclear fission fleet, year after year, even when accounting for capacity factor derating (to make a like for like comparison).« Wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants and never will. Heck, Germany tried that on the small island of Pellworm and failed and yet some people think this will work out for the whole country. It does not work.

Pellworm is something like 95% renewable without storage. That really doesn’t sound like failure to me.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#245

Post by cassepipe »

Archelaos wrote: post #240
cassepipe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but a very small amount and it is nothing we don't know how to manage. > the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high Except this is false, you are just spreading misinformation. I suggest you confront your current knowledge to different sources and listen to the arguments of the proponents of nuclear energy before you make up your mind. Don't just repeat what you have heard.

In what world are you living that you not have heard about nuclear accidents? Here is a reading list for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident With regard to nuclear waste. Here is an example, how it can went quickly out of control: https://en.w…

Yes I have and you clearly know nothing about those incidents else you wouldn't give a laundry list of wikipedia article you haven't even read.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#246

Post by cassepipe »

8bitsrule wrote: post #237
cassepipe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but a very small amount and it is nothing we don't know how to manage. > the risk that something gets out of control are extemly high Except this is false, you are just spreading misinformation. I suggest you confront your current knowledge to different sources and listen to the arguments of the proponents of nuclear energy before you make up your mind. Don't just repeat what you have heard.

"At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.… This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe." — C. G. Suits, Director of Research, General Electric, who was operating the Hanford reactors, 1951. Safe, clean, too cheap to meter? Some things never change.

I am not sure what your point exactly is

The C.G suits were right as long as the digging operation is not too costly (the more shallow and concentrated the better)

Fossil fuels are nothing short of a miracle because they are so energy dense, but it's a slow poison and has high addictive power.

As long as we didn't (want to) know about negative externalities (chief among them CO2 and CH4) whose cost was borne by humanity, it was ok. Dirty but everyone seemed to think it was worth it.

The advantages of nuclear is not that it would be too cheap to meter (even though that becomes true with time because most of the price is upfront investment).

- It is that you can get energy independence even if you don't have uranium because it is so energy dense that you can just stockpile it. For example France could run its plants for 2 years with its current stockpile of uranium, and it only recycles around 10% of its fuel. Compare that with its oil needs, the oil stockpile would only last 3 months, probably less.

- It is CO2 free

Bonus: Nuclear industry is required to take of its waste products (which are only waste products insofar are we are too lazy/cheap to recycle them, else they are just more fuel)

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#247

Post by kragen »

adrianN wrote: post #243
kragen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ground-source heat pumps are irrelevant to geothermal energy sources, and it's unfortunate that the article mentioned them. Ground-source heat pumps are just storing heat from the air during the summer and retrieving it during the winter.

If it can be used to heat houses in winter it’s not irrelevant.

Insulation, adobe construction, and vigorous exercise can all "heat houses in winter" in the same way as ground-source heat pumps, but none of them can be meaningfully compared with hydroelectric or nuclear power except in a specific situation. How much insulation is enough to charge your cellphone or run a load of laundry? The question is nonsense.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#248

Post by amanaplanacanal »

iso1631 wrote: post #115
roadside_picnic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a holy grail of energy production Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production? It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%). I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a…

At home I use 15,000kWh of oil for heating each year (about 10kWh per litre, 1500 litres), and 8,000kWh of electricity (we use a lot more than the average household). For driving that's another 5000kWh a year if at 4 miles per kWh. So even in a residential context, electricity is only about 1/4 of the demand. Across the whole country it's less than 300TWh out of 1500TWh, under 20%. That excludes "imported energy" tho…

The heating and driving could theoretically be electrified, though it might or might not make economic sense.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#249

Post by amanaplanacanal »

yawaramin wrote: post #19

It's nuclear fission. It's always been nuclear fission (well, at least since the '50s) and it will continue to be until we commercialize fusion reactors. Everything else is nice to have but it's like NIH syndrome.

That could possibly be true, if fission is cheaper than solar, wind, and batteries.

The renewables are so cheap and quick to provision it's hard to see how fission can compete.

Re: The time has finally come for geothermal energy

#250

Post by amanaplanacanal »

yawaramin wrote: post #68
toomuchtodo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla's former CTO) has already established a supply chain to ingest and recycle EV and stationary storage batteries at scale. The problem is that the hardware is lasting longer than expected, and meaningful recycling volume does not yet exist. Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent s…

> Solar panels are recycled at almost 100% of total materials. That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling > Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defe…

I dunno. Even China, which has built a lot of nuclear, is building way more renewables. Do you think they have it wrong somehow?
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