711–720 of 784 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using natural gas means climate change still progresses. Not to mention you'll be paying all of the overhead cost of maintaining natural gas plants, but only use them for a fraction of the time. So net cost per watt hour will be very high.
And it will still be cheaper than any other alternative.
But some of us are trying to stop, not merely delay, climate change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ghost cities have attracted residents over time, but they're still mostly empty. Constructing buildings that sit vacant for a decade or more is not very efficient - and the buildings depreciate with age whether they are occupied or not. Gluts and shortages are endemic to centralized economic planning.
You’ve moved the goal post/claims from “completely vacant” to being vacant for a long while and depreciating.
There's nothing efficient about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do have devolved powers, so Scotland and Wales* have functioning Regional Governments, with devolved funding from a formula that gives them substantially more money than they collect in tax. So they should be doing great right? Wrong. They massively struggle and yet live in a "best of both worlds" scenario, they can run the health service, transport, taxation policy and all things that affect regular people withou…
Then when you need to buy a house you have to leave. Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27 There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o
Not that many.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's usually the types of birds that are affected that upset people. Many ideal locations for windmills (in particular mountainous regions, dunno about offshore) happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors. Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales. It'd be nice to know that…
> Many ideal locations for windmills...happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors. The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument. > there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see…
Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general, not a limited critique of quantity harmed. I do think the distinction remains important, hence why I made my post.
> Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts?
Given that the ships are itinerant and their turbines are much smaller, I do believe the type of noise pollution they generate is qualitatively less harmful. I imagine the scale is something along the lines of:
1. windmills
2. sonar
3. marine vehicle engine and turbine noise
Sonar gets the second for the extreme volume some ships (esp. military) are capable of producing, though there are far fewer of them.
Marine vehicles come last. There's a greater danger of animals being hit by fast moving boats (for example, manatees) than discombobulation from engine and turbine noise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because fuel costs only matter so much. You will still need exactly the same number of natural gas (or similar) plants with 12 hours of battery vs. 1 hour to cover seasonal events in most places on the planet. Until your battery backup can supply a week or more worth of power you have simply created an inevitable disaster in the making. No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of…
> No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs. Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a shar…
Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently.
I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand. It can be considered a cost of doing business to have such a plant be useful for "black starts" - but that's all a single plant will ever be useful for. If it's ever being used for such a purpose you've already lost the game.
The scale is what matters. A single power plant that is 1% of your grid capacity being utilized 5% of the time is an expense that can probably be justified. Hundreds of power plants that match 100% (or close to it) of your grid capacity used 5% of the time would be an economically unjustifiable expense as you've effectively built your entire generation capacity twice.
Right now that's what we would be talking about building since every regional grid seems to experience week (or longer) periods where intermittent power generation is extremely unreliable due to weather events. It's not 100%, but it's close to it. You need to plan for the 1000 year event for something as critical as a national grid or folks literally start dying and the economic impact is astronomical.
I don't know what the exact capacity factor you'd need to have for a reasonable intermittent:dispatchable ratio, but it's certainly quite a lot higher than most would seemingly believe. Once batteries get to the point of backing the entire grid for a single night while the wind doesn't blow there might be signs of change. In most markets in the US where batteries are considered huge successes they have only recently (in the past year or two) transitioned from providing ancillary services to actual energy production for regular daily usage during the duck curve.
This can all be solved in time and in theory with a number of technologies and additional grid interconnection. But the trends simply are not as positive as one would like to see when you start delving into primary sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incentive is to sell all 100 units for £infinity. The incentive for the seller to sell at a high price isn't relevant. They don't have the ability to act on it. If they did, they wouldn't stop at £10,000. I'd pick numbers like £1,000,000,000,000 at a minimum if I was a seller and could truly set my own price based on my incentives.
That’s the beauty. The same company owns both the cheap cost one and can limit the supply just enough to keep the profit maximised. There isn’t an ideal free market in electricity generation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs. Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a shar…
> Serious question: why do you think that’s true? Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently. I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting…
Maybe, but the UK has 4, and is building another 5 in the next 5 years.
Average grid consumption is somewhere around 30GW, the existing facilities have around 30GWh of storage. The additional 5 should bring around another 100GWh.
So we’re already at 1 hour’s worth of grid capacity stored, by 2030 we’ll be at 4 hours, and that’s assuming absolutely zero energy from other sources (wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, other countries), although to be fair the existing facilities can only deliver at around 3GW, and the new facilities will only bring that up to 6GW.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the UK, but a whole week without either sun or wind seems a bit unlikely, especially when half of the UKs wind comes from offshore wind farms.
Stick in a few more of these, and keep a couple of the existing fossil fuel plants around in case of emergencies, and I can definitely see how this continues to be just a “cost of doing business”.
I appreciate the situation in the US may be worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the beauty. The same company owns both the cheap cost one and can limit the supply just enough to keep the profit maximised. There isn’t an ideal free market in electricity generation.
If the UK has banned all companies except one from supplying electricity then they will without doubt see eye watering prices. But that has nearly nothing to do with the pricing scheme they use and a lot to do with the one company part of the picture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not low for the average person, but not that expensive either I think this is very high for the average person.
But not for someone thinking their £2m house will “lose value” There are a lot of rich people in the U.K.
£5k for someone with £2m in assets and fears losing £200k due to the “blight” of a power plant is not a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common theme in EU parliament seems to be that people send politicians who shit the bed on national level for an expensive vacation to do next to nothing. Or being a celebrity in an unrelated field.
This is still better than the British system , where wealthy politicians who get voted out by their own constituents then get put in the House of Lords. It's then almost impossible to remove them. See Zac Goldsmith for a recent example.
But my biggest gripe with EU institutions is not EU parliament. Commission is much much worse. Especially with how special positions are assigned. It does not matter what is elected into EU parliament, each country sends someone. And that process is usually murky AF. And person being sent seems to not even know area-of-work in many cases. How EC speaker is „elected“ is yet another story. And then stories start to bubble up how this under-the-table formed EC is lobbying EP, all on our own tax money :D It'd be funny to watch if I wasn't a citizen of a member of this mess.