TWENTY NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - Fifty Percent of the nation's energy needs.

[Ichingcarpenter]

Germany Sets Solar Power Record: 50% of Electricity Demand
May 27, 2012
(Reuters)
German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour—equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity—through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.

Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation's midday electricity needs.


http://insideclimatenews.org/breaking-news/20120527/germany-sets-solar-power-record-50-electricity-demand


The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world's leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

[They_Live]

1. Misleading title/headline

The actual headline is now (has been changed to?):

Germany Sets Solar Power Record: 50% of Electricity Demand

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. K&R & ditto on the terrible title. n/t

[malaise]

3. Wonderful

Go German folks!!

[DLnyc]

4. Would be much easier in the US

Germany has relatively little sunshine (high latitude, no desert areas) and dense land-usage. US has huge areas of lower latitude, relatively low-population and low-usage land.

On the other hand, Germany has a functional social-political system whereas the US has a dysfunctional system based on unlimited power for monopoly corporations and concentrated wealth.

[Robb]

5. Yet solar produces only 4% of Germany's electricity use.

That's quite a cherrypick. And I say this as a guy with panels.

[girl gone mad]

15. A 32,000% increase in the last decade.

Expected to provide 1/3rd of Germany's electricity needs within my lifetime.

Take a dump on that.

[Robb]

17. Earth's insects weigh more than all other animals put together.

This does not mean they will get to vote.

Numbers mean things.

[Harmony Blue]

22. Not only that

but there is a real possibility that solar power may do the unthinkable. Compete with coal power, but, one step at a time. This is a good first step.

[4th law of robotics]

91. Could you clarify?

I'm not sure what this means if the article is saying 50% but you're saying 4%.

/not arguing, just not clear what you mean.

[Robb]

92. The OP's source truncated the Reuters article

....leaving out the bigger picture. See here, about the 5th paragraph: http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/news/story.html?id=6693313

Edited to add: here, I'll save you a click:

...Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four per cent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone.

[XemaSab]

6. The news is good, but it isn't that good

This amount of electricity is equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity. It provided a third of the countries [sic] energy needs during a work day on Friday, and half of its needs on Saturday when offices and factories were closed.

Critics of renewable energy have argued that it is not reliable enough and an industrialised nation can never produce enough of it to meet its needs. But German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has set out to prove that it is possible, and at the moment the country gets 20 percent of its annual overall electricity from renewables, and four percent from the sun alone.

This has been costly however, as a 2012 Environment Ministry report showed that German customers pay an extra four billion euros per year on top of their electricity bills to support solar power.

http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record/

Variable energy sources such as wind and solar require huge amounts of hydro or natural gas capacity to buffer the fluctuations in power.

[kristopher]

8. Every source of generation requires "huge amounts of backup"

Are you saying that no backup is required of nuclear plants? Tell that to the people in California right now as they scramble to replace the defective nuclear plant at San Onofre over the summer. In fact, the propasal in the UK to build ten new nuclear plants has a requirement that for each plant they need to build an ADDITIONAL MASSIVE 260 MW
natural gas plant for backup.

The grid is largely dependent on fossil fuels, and we are in the process of shaving that down solar panel by solar panel, wind turbine by wind turbine. And unlike the nuclear plants mentioned above, these solar and wind plants do NOT require additional fossil generation to be built - they shut fossil plants down since nearly every kilowatt of solar and wind power that is generated means a kilowatt of natural gas, coal or nuclear that is not bought.

Here is an authoritative explanation using wind, but it is the same for solar. I trust that as host of the EE forum it is your desire that DU is a source of accurate, up to date information regarding energy and that consequently you will refrain from repeating known right-wing misinformation in the future.

Doesn’t Wind Power Need Backup Generation? Isn’t More Fossil Fuel Burned with Wind Than Without, Due to Backup Requirements?

In a power system, it is necessary to maintain a continuous balance between production and consumption. System operators deploy controllable generation to follow the change in total demand, not the variation from a single generator or customer load. When wind is added to the system, the variability in the net load becomes the operating target for the system operator. It is not necessary and, indeed, it would be quite costly for grid operators to follow the variation in generation from a single generating plant or customer load.

“Backup” generating plants dedicated to wind plants—or to any other generation plant or load for that matter—are not required, and would actually be a poor and unnecessarily costly use of power-generation resources.

Regarding whether the addition of wind generation results in more combustion of fossil fuels, a wind-generated kilowatthour displaces a kilowatthour that would have been generated by another source—usually one that burns a fossil fuel. The wind-generated kilowatthour therefore avoids the fuel consumption and emissions associated with that fossil-fuel kilowatthour. The incremental reserves (spinning or nonspinning) required by wind’s variability and uncertainty, however, themselves consume fuel and release emissions, so the net savings are somewhat reduced. But what quantity of reserves is required? Numerous studies conducted to date—many of which have been summarized in previous wind-specific special issues of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine—have found that the reserves required by wind are only a small fraction of the aggregate wind generation and vary with the level of wind output. Generally, some of these reserves are spinning and some are nonspinning. The regulating and load-following plants could be forced to operate at a reduced level of efficiency, resulting in increased fuel consumption and increased emissions per unit of output.

A conservative example serves to illustrate the fuel-consumption and emissions impacts stemming from wind’s regulation requirements. Compare three situations: 1) a block of energy is provided by fossil-fueled plants; 2) the same block of energy is provided by wind plants that require no incremental reserves; and 3) the same block of energy is provided by wind plants that do have incremental reserve requirements. It is assumed that the average fleet fossil-fuel efficiency is unchanged between situations one and two. This might not be precisely correct, but a sophisticated operational simulation is required to address this issue quantitatively. In fact, this has been done in several studies, which bear out the general conclusions reached in this simple example.

In situation one, an amount of fuel is burned to produce the block of energy. In situation two, all of that fuel is saved and all of the associated emissions are avoided. In situation three, it is assumed that 3% of the fossil generation is needed to provide reserves, all of these reserves are spinning, and that this generation incurs a 25% efficiency penalty. The corresponding fuel consumption necessary to provide the needed reserves is then 4% of the fuel required to generate the entire block of energy. Hence, the actual fuel and emissions savings percentage in situation three relative to situation one is 96% rather than 100%. The great majority of initially estimated fuel savings does in fact occur, however, and the notion that wind’s variations would actually increase system fuel consumption does not withstand scrutiny.

Special Masters Presentation by International Electronic and Electrical Engineers

Wind Power Myths Debunked
november/december 2009 IEEE power & energy magazine
Digital Object Identifi er 10.1109/MPE.2009.934268
1540-7977/09/$26.00©2009 IEEE

By Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf



Bookmarked for future reference.

[XemaSab]

9. So on one day for one minute solar contributed almost half the electrical needs for the country

But the rest of the time it generates about 4% of the electrical needs for the country.

What type of peaker can provide that missing 46%?

Please tell us. We're all dying to know.

[kristopher]

10. What is currently providing it?

With renewables we are shaving down the carbon emissions from plants that are already there. Just at the paper from the IEEE says, your claims do not withstand scrutiny.

I mean seriously, you were just (again) provided information from the world's leading authorities on integrating variable generating sources into the grid, and instead of reading it, you ignored it and respond with childish snark. So contrary to your claims you have made it more than clear you are not "dying to know" anything that contradicts the anti-renewable narrative you insist on trying to spread.

[XemaSab]

11. I am not going to get into it with you right now

n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. But the reserve can be organised to act for the entire grid

Here's the PB Power report the 260 MW figure comes from:

http://www.pbworld.com/pdfs/regional/uk_europe/pb_ptn_report2006.pdf

That's talking about what one supplier would have to do to stick within the current 1320 MW limit the National Grid demands. But since then (in 2006), the National Grid has looked at what would be the best thing to do with multiple large generating units - it change its contracts, and take on the responsibility of organising the response and reserve capacity (as it does for up to 1320 MW already), rather than tell even new station it has to do it on its own:

(a) number of large nuclear units
The cost benefit analyses relate to a fleet of six 1650MW units, each of which pose
an 1800MW loss of power infeed risk. The main costs of response and reserve are
independent of the number of such units, since as soon as it is necessary to secure
against one 1800MW risk on the system, the security provided satisfies the
requirement for any number of 1800MW risks.
However, the main benefit of reduced carbon relates directly to the number of units
assumed. Thus it can easily be seen, that if only two large units achieve connection
to the system over 2020-2030, the cost-benefit breaks even. The benefit of two units
(e.g. carbon benefit) is balanced by the increased cost of operating (e.g. increased
response and reserve) the system. If only one unit commissions, then on the basis
of the central case of this cost-benefit operational cost would outweigh the benefit.
On the other hand, if more than six units commission, the cost-benefit is even more
favourable.

http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/EEEB8EDB-6AA5-4D44-BFDC-763ECE251E73/31739/SQSS1320Reportfinalv10_040209_.pdf

[kristopher]

16. Thank you very much for that source.

I couldn't find it and was going on a reference to it in a citibank analysis of the proposal for new nuclear in the UK (New Nuclear - the Economics Say No, 2008)

The general point is, of course, that the claim regarding renewables was false. When this particular antirenewable myth is used, it is invariably by someone that endorses large centralized thermal generation and implicit in their argument is that the requirement for a complex system to deliver reliable power is unique to renewable energy sources.

It is bunk and there is no excuse for any old timer on EE to be repeating such tripe.

Thank you again for that reference. I have spent a lot of time looking for it.

[FarCenter]

7. US generating capacity is about 1000 Gigawatts, almost all available at any time.

Not just during the midday hours.

http://205.254.135.7/electricity/capacity/

[RobertEarl]

12. hmmm

So, during the day we need 1000 gigs and less than half that at night.
So that means we are wasting more than 500 gigs every night.
Just wasting away.

Solar replaces that 500 gigs and then we can shut down 50% of our generating plants? Good plan.

20 years from now we can generate probably 90% of our needs with renewables. If we can just decide to do so. We could have been there, NOW, but Reagan and republicans stopped us.

Ain't it a bummer to hear folks repeating Reagan and republican policy?

[girl gone mad]

18. Reagan economic policy also seems popular on DU these days.

What's up with that?

[FarCenter]

19. You can probably get to about 50% solar and wind without a storage technology

Above that, you need something like grid scale storage batteries or pumped hydroelectric storage, both of which add considerably to system costs. Another possibility is using the batteries in electric vehicles to store electricity during the day. But that requires charging stations in parking lots, where many cars spend their days.

The peak load isn't necessarily during the middle of the day. Many areas have late afternoon air conditioning loads. Note also that in sunny and hot areas, the photovoltaic cells efficiency deteriorates as the temperature of the cells increases.

[RobertEarl]

20. Costs : Economics

Is it economical to pollute the air? Feed cesium to tuna?

I am so sick of hearing it is gonna cost real money to quit polluting.
That was Reagan's shtick and I am sick of it. We all are. Just quit, please.

[Harmony Blue]

23. It costs more money to clean up the mess

this is how you fight back against fiscal conservatives that toss the money argument on the table. Once you do that, they have no counter to that.

[RobertEarl]

24. Yes indeed

Problem is that too many of them don't see the problem, so they don't see why it needs to be cleaned up.

Progress there is slow. But it explains why they want to get rid of EPA and why we are going Global Warming.

[jeff47]

33. It's not only money

We also have to invent some new technologies.

For example, grid-scale batteries aren't feasible with current battery technologies. Not due to price, but because we'd have to use a very large portion of all of the world's raw materials to make enough batteries.

Using pumped hydro for grid-scale storage runs into the problem of not having enough space in places with sufficient elevation difference to power the entire grid.

And this is ignoring the problems in transferring the power from the sunny parts of the country to the cloudy parts of the country - you need a lot more capacity in the sunny parts to overcome the resistance in 2,000-mile long wires...unless we invent warm superconductors.

None of these are easy problems to solve, where simply throwing more money at scientists will quickly result in new inventions.

[RobertEarl]

34. Hate coal

But i hate nukes even more. Since we have not built a nuke plant in the US in 30 years that is sort of a won battle. Now we need to end coal, right?

Well, if we piss and moan like you are doing we never will. So you can pretty much blame yourself for our present predicament. And Reagan. You and Reagan. Bad company.

[jeff47]

37. Cheerleading isn't going to invent anything

Being realistic about our current situation does not mean we can not improve that situation.

Throwing more money at battery scientists has produced marginally better batteries. We need a few quantum leaps.

Throwing more money at fusion scientists has produced barely net-positive plants. We need a few quantum leaps.

We can either start working on greenhouse gasses now, or we can roast the planet while we wait for new inventions to save us.

[Sea-Dog]

55. they do not need direct sun light to work and they do work in cloudy weather.

Last edited Tue May 29, 2012, 02:08 PM - Edit history (1)

furthermore

"sunniness doesn’t correspond exactly to the amount of solar energy you get out of a PV system. The best solar panels on the market today are only around 18% efficient under good conditions. At high temperatures for example, solar panels become less efficient. If the temperature of the solar panels increases by 20oC, they will only produce around 90% of the energy they would at room temperature. This means that on a clear but cold day in London, solar panels could produce more energy than a hot and sunny day in Spain.

Another factor is the difference between clear days and cloudy days. In the UK we get a lot of cloudy weather which blocks the sun and leads to ‘diffuse’ sunlight (meaning from all directions) rather than ‘direct’ sunlight. The four sunniest months of the year in the UK (May-August) deliver 5 times as much solar energy as the four winter months of the year (Nov-Feb). Solar panels can still turn diffuse light into electricity though, and there is evidence to suggest that some types of solar panels are better at collecting it than others. This means we may be able to improve the difference between London and Barcelona by using different technologies."

It isn't outside the realms of possibility to make ones that work better depending on the climate.

To summarise;
Technologies that can work by turning diffused sun light into electricity can overcome any shortcomings negating any need to transfer power. Needless to say the level of sun light that hits the UK is 50 times that it uses. A cloudy climate if there is ever one.

[jeff47]

68. They work, but poorly

Meaning you need a very, very, large array to handle generating power in heavy clouds using currently-available technology.

And that still doesn't deal with night.

My point is we're causing climate change right now. Abandoning nuclear and hoping that someone will invent new diffuse-light solar panels and grid-scale batteries soon means dumping a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere. Because until those inventions appear, we'll do a lot more fracking and burn a lot more coal and gas.

[Sea-Dog]

79. Really. ‘Absolute Black’ Solar Panels Absorb Almost All Sunlight

It ain't that far away.

"“One of the ways this matters,” said Chuck Provini, the company’s CEO, “is that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the electricity you get on a sunny day vs. a cloudy day. Diffused light won’t matter that much.”

29th May 2012.

Source http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/03/absolute-black-solar-panels-absorb-almost-all-sunlight/

Nuclear risks having to decontaminate areas the size of Luxembourg and a 50-mile radius evacuation policy in the US. No wonder countries are moving away from nuclear.

Enter your zip code
See how close your home is to one.
http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/nuclear_power_plants_locations/index.html

[jeff47]

81. "Ain't that far away" is still not available today

And anything "not available today" is going to take a long time to become cheap enough to become common.

Nuclear risks having to decontaminate areas the size of Luxembourg and a 50-mile radius evacuation policy in the US.

What's the evacuation policy for climate change?

I fully understand that a nuclear accident is a very bad thing(tm). What I find odd is people who in one thread will bemoan climate change, and in another thread demand we make climate change worse. Which is why I try to have this discussion, but that invariably breaks down to people calling me an industry shill.

[Sea-Dog]

95. This is today's technology getting cheaper all the time. In the market before the first brick on

any new nuclear power is built to great costs.

What's the evacuation policy for climate change?

In case you forgot it was extreme weather which lead to Fukushima's ills. Throwing buckets of water must be the closest thing to the saying of 'pissing against the wind' It would have made a great Benny Hill script, if it wasn't so tragic for all involved. Due to increased extreme weather nuclear is no longer safe.

[jeff47]

96. Not talking about new nuclear plants, I'm talking about the push to close the old ones.

In case you forgot it was extreme weather which lead to Fukushima's ills

Uh....no.

Sea level has not changed that much, yet. The tsunami after the earthquake would have been equally destructive to the plant without climate change.

And no, it isn't "today's technology" when you link and article talking about new research. The fact that it may be cheap in 10 years isn't a reason to pump tons more CO2 today.

[Sea-Dog]

98. What do you not get about developed.. it is todays.

Even a picture of one in the mans hand.



Climate change brought about the demise of Fukushima. Climate change is bad enough without nuclear.

[jeff47]

99. Producing a lab prototype is not the same as a product cheap enough to slap on everyone's house

It's promising. It will be nice when they can actually roll it out as a real product. It will be even nicer when they can make them cheaply. But we aren't past that first "promising" part yet.

To dump millions of tons of additional CO2 because of a promising technology is monumentally dumb. We've seen lots of promising renewable tech that did not pan out as a viable commercial product. There's been an awful lot of "magic bullets" that were developed that haven't ended up installed in a ton of places, which is what you need to replace coal and gas.

Plus, even with these panels you still have to solve the "night" problem on a grid-scale.

Climate change brought about the demise of Fukushima.

How, exactly?

How did climate change cause an earthquake? What about the earthquake-induced tsunami was worse due to climate change?

The worst claims I've found for sea level rise is 17cm and those are just asserted. Actual measured numbers are an order of magnitude lower. The tsunami was 14m (~46ft) at Fukushima, which was protected by "only" a 5m (~16ft) sea wall. A 13.83m (~45.4ft) tsunami would still devastate the plant. And that's using the questionable number for sea level rise.

[kristopher]

27. What happens if your "air conditioner" is actually part of a home energy storage system?

Ditto for home heating. Or that both those systems have the need for electricity reduced to a fraction of what it is now because the home is (by today's standards) more than 90% proof against heat transfer and the heating cooling system is a home geothermal system?

And the batteries in cars - that's a huge resource that can not only charge during the day while people are at work, but also at night from wind, hydro or geothermal. In fact, cars sit on average about 23 hours per day so with a "smart grid" built around small distributed power plants, the owners of cars can take advantage of whatever electricity is cheapest and sell the excess in their "tank" back to the grid when the prices are highest.

The role of storage is going to be largely defined not by the down periods of wind or solar - because stepping in quickly is something that hydro, biomass, biofuels, geothermal, wave, river current and tidal will all be competing to at least cost. No, the role of storage will be largely defined by the need capture power generated by wind and solar that is in excess of demand.

[FarCenter]

29. These things are possible, but they require huge amounts of capital to implement

Heat pumps have become reasonably efficient and can be used with the outdoors exchanger either making use of air or buried in the earth, depending on the climate. In the coldest regions, either resistive heating or heating with a fossil fuel furnace is needed on the coldest days, so there is a backup problem there.

Hydro could be developed further, but there is huge environmental resistance to new dams. The "smart grid" is not simple, and to use the batteries in electric cars is not simple. Hybrids do not have much capacity and it is unclear whether/when all electric cars with larger batteries will be economic for wide use. The lithium batteries in all electrics have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles, so vehicle owners have to also be compensated for the depreciation of the very expensive batteries. There are a variety of other battery chemistries that are better for large scale/grid level storage and may be a better battery solution, given the complexity of both the electrical controls and the financial accounting needed for storage in cars.

Hydro is good for load following. Natural gas combined cycle plants are also good. The other technologies you name are not proven to be economical and some of them, e.g. tidal, also produce energy in uncertain or cyclical patterns. Pumped hydro is probably the most proven and economical way to store electricity on a large scale. The Swiss are implementing some large projects.

[kristopher]

30. Here's the difference

Last edited Tue May 29, 2012, 01:09 PM - Edit history (1)

What I'm describing for you is how the system is going to work. Your nitpicking isn't going to change that.

"..a huge amount of capital" is spent every day - it is called economic activity. We're talking about a process of change that is going to occur over nearly 100 years as every day people make purchasing decisions. The move away from centralized thermal will develop a different economic structure for energy related choices for consumers and just as now when the most popular choices are the ones that "just make sense" so to will the ones I describe above be the ones that "just make sense".

There is a great deal of small hydro available to be developed in existing dams. It is "distributed" and matches the configuration of a "distributed grid" wonderfully.

The smart grid is coming no matter what and integrating electric vehicles into it is already being done in several places.

Of course the battery owners need to be compensated. That's the point. The power from distributed batteries is of a kind that is very valuable to the grid as it works great to smooth out the very small variations in flow. Again, an idea already being tested in several locations. With modern technology the "financial accounting" is even silly to bring up.

Don't believe any of it if that suits you, that's fine. It is still going to happen.

ETA:

[FarCenter]

65. There is huge resistance to hydro among environmentalists

Do you really think that ID, WA, and OR want to dam more rivers in order to export more power to CA?

[jeff47]

35. Hydro is pretty much tapped out in the US

We've already built giant hydro plants at the good locations for hydro. We're not gonna get much more power from "Hoover dam-style" hydro. Plus, flooding vast swaths of land is kinda unpopular these days.

There's some folks working on hydro using lower volumes of water, which would increase the number of useful sites. But this suffers from the fact that there's a lot less energy to recover from the water. It's not clear that we'll be able to get much power from that.

While pumped hydro is great for the Swiss, it isn't gonna work for the vast majority of this country. Folks near the Rockies could use it, for example. But most of the country is too flat. The tiny "mountains" near here would require vast reservoirs to store any significant energy, and "vast reservoir" and "mountain" are not easily combined.

[FarCenter]

39. That's pretty much what I thought

There are a number of things that can be done. For example, you can stop sending some water over Niagra Falls and send it all through the turbines. You can also dam small rivers. On the East Coast, almost every feasible low head location was once dammed for waterwheels. However, there was a lot of silting, dams have been removed, and various river restoration projects pursued.

I'm not sure what existing low head dams are not generating power, but most would be reservoirs for water supplies. So emptying them faster during high power months is probably not attractive.

[jeff47]

43. We can already "turn off" Niagra Falls.

The plants near Niagra Falls can already suck in so much water that the falls would stop. To maintain the tourism, they leave just enough water to keep the Falls looking good. And that isn't an awful lot of power lost.

Small rivers don't have enough energy. Sure, you can run a water wheel, but that's not a lot of power. Back in the day, the alternative to a water wheel was a horse or two on a treadmill. That should give you an idea of the amount of energy that could be recovered.

The low head dams you talk about simply don't have enough energy - low head means low pressure, so they'd have to go high volume to produce any significant energy. They just don't have the volume to sustain that, even ignoring their role as drinking water supplies.

[kristopher]

54. So you think 30gigawatts of easy to develop hydro is nothing?

It is getting to the point where you need hip-waders to get through the rightwing-sourced antirenewable talking points on DU lately. You do realize that it is right wing think tanks that are creating the misinformation you are spreading, don't you?

[jeff47]

63. If I dam 30 small rivers, I can produce a lot of power

The problem is I'm producing the same power as one "good" river.

I've also thrown a lot of people out of their homes, which are now in lakes instead of being next to a river. There's also a large number of people upset at the ecosystems I've destroyed.

Your cited studies fail to deal with such "externalities".

You've got two options....either there's a vast conspiracy out to prevent the exploitation of all this cheap, easy-to-get and highly profitable electricity, or it's not quite as rosy a situation as supporters claim.

[kristopher]

70. 30 GW of distributed is 30 GW. You haven't read the studies.

What worked in a centralized thermal grid (nuclear and coal) isn't a benchmark for what works in a distributed grid.

No, sorry to say but you are unquestionably just the pushing rightwing antirenewable campaign.

Still waiting for those sources. Show us the sources you rely on for information. Like I said, we like adding new ones to our list.


Right wing stepping up attacks on renewable energy
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama's energy agenda.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112714465


ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets
Two leading conservative political organizations say they are stepping up coordinated efforts to repeal state-level renewable energy targets.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112715562

[jeff47]

72. 30 GW is 0 GW when you can't get the dam built.

I could produce tons of power by leveling Tuscon and building a giant photovoltaic array there. So clearly I can use that as evidence of a practical energy source right? What, you mean someone would be upset if I seized all of Tuscon and destroyed all the houses? So what! There's a ton of power there!!

Btw, other than a very poorly-labeled chart, you've yet to provide your sources.

[girl gone mad]

84. I am enjoying watching the business majors try to argue with a physicist.

Interesting that they always have to resort to those dumb RW mantras.

[XemaSab]

87. Who in this discussion are the business majors and who is the physicist?

[XemaSab]

57. In California pretty much every drop is already spoken for

The fish need water and so do the farmers.

There are a few places like Shasta/Keswick where there's a main reservoir and a reregulating facility downstream, but Shasta is already used as a peaker. Maybe more turbines could be put in there.

I don't see many more facilities being built in California other than the pumped hydro facility that the Turlock Irrigation district is planning down by Moccasin and maybe Sites.

[kristopher]

60. Post 54: DOE study says your claim isn't close to being accurate

Again.

[XemaSab]

61. You're right, I don't know what I am talking about

I am just parroting what my bosses and co-workers have told me over the years.

You know, people who actually plan large projects and guide them through the environmental review process.

[kristopher]

62. At least you admit it.

That's the first step towards solving any problem. Now go read the information at DOE's website:
http://hydropower.inel.gov/resourceassessment/

[XemaSab]

64. Is there a key for reading the assessment?

I know at least one of the projects listed on here has been taken out.

Dams (at least in the north state) are coming out and not going in.

[XemaSab]

69. I'm digging through the report

Fifty-one percent of the undeveloped
hydropower potential in the State of California
is contained within three major river basins:
American, Feather, and Stanislaus River basins.

The North Fork of the American River is Wild and Scenic.

The Middle Fork of the Feather River is Wild and Scenic. The North Fork of the Feather River currently has some gnarly problems with water temperature and fish. The relicensing of the dam at Lake Almanor is stalled out until they can install a thermal curtain to force cold water from the bottom of the reservoir into the river.

I notice that in the report they also say that there's a lot of potential on the Klamath, and that is seriously not going to happen.

Note well that there are loads of sites with PESFs of 0.1.

It appears that increasing and installing power generation capacity at existing sites would give us a lot more power, but that 843 MW for new sites is a will-o-the-wisp.

[kristopher]

73. Google Map - Massive Geothermal Potential Nationwide, “Effectively an Unlimited Supply” Says Chu

There is plenty of hydro.

There is also plenty of geothermal - 100GW well distributed. Remember, we aren't looking for a replacement for coal or nuclear here; we are getting our bulk power from wind and solar with these dispatchable sources being used to fill in the gaps.

You really should stop spreading false information xema. This isn't a case where it is a difference of opinion; you are attempting to make false claims about established facts.

Google Map Reveals Massive Geothermal Potential Nationwide, “Effectively an Unlimited Supply” Says Chu



http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/11/06/359699/google-geothermal-supply-chu/?mobile=nc

[XemaSab]

74. Why are you changing the subject to geothermal?

Also, you often accuse me of spouting right-wing talking points, when I am merely repeating office gossip.

Speaking of office gossip, apparently PG&E has withdrawn proposals for a lot of large-scale wind farms because the cost of natural gas is so low.

[FarCenter]

78. The only problem with those 250 degree centigrade rocks is that they are 21,000 feet down.

Good luck with the business case for drilling those wells and producing the heat.

Hopefully, you won't have an earthquake problem with fracking the rocks and pumping the high pressure water into the cracks.

[jeff47]

31. No.

So, during the day we need 1000 gigs and less than half that at night.
So that means we are wasting more than 500 gigs every night.
Just wasting away.

No.

There's two reasons we burn so much natural gas for electricity:
1) We have a lot of it, making it cheap.
2) You can turn the plant on and off relatively quickly and easily.

The gas plants turn off when demand drops. Difficult-to-ramp technologies like coal provide our overnight power.

[RobertEarl]

32. Nukes are the most difficult

Coal can be fired up in a matter of hours. Nukes take weeks.

Why do you hate solar power? And why do you love nukes?

I've seen you on here protecting nukes. Why?

[jeff47]

36. Because I a more concerned about climate change than nuclear accidents.

Solar is great. I thought it would be the future when I lived in the southwest. Now I live in upstate NY. Happens to have the fewest sunny days in the entire US. Solar looks a lot less like a magic bullet from over here.

At this particular point in time, we have three options:
1) Dark (or more realistically stated, greatly reduce demand)
2) More Fossil Fuels
3) More Nukes

1 isn't acceptable to most people.
2 accelerates climate change.

Leaves me with option 3 as the least-bad option. Note that isn't "good". It's least-bad.

I'd love for there to be more options on that list. But we'll need to invent some new technologies first before we can put intermittent sources like solar and wind on there. Or the people working on fusion have recently gotten themselves net-positive on power, so maybe they'll become practical sometime.

But for the moment, our base load is gonna come from burning fossil fuels, or splitting atoms. Burning more fossil fuels is a guaranteed global disaster. The nuke track record is 1 natural disaster (Fukushima) and 1 intentionally blown plant (Chernobyl). We're better off with rare, localized disasters instead of guaranteed global disaster.

[RobertEarl]

38. Nuke waste

What will you do with the waste from nukes?

I tell you what you will do with it. You will ignore it. And let it cause problems for your children and their children and all children for 1000's of years.

And your pissing and moaning is doing nothing more than creating more nuke waste. Are you proud of that? If not, then just stop.

[jeff47]

40. No, I'd reprocess it.

I'd reprocess the waste back into fuel in a breeder reactor.

This has the disadvantage of producing nuclear-weapons-grade material. If we're talking about the US, that really doesn't matter since we're already nuclear-armed. To deal with non-nuclear-armed countries, I'd ship the spent fuel to a nuclear-armed country, reprocess it and then mix it with other materials to get the fuel down to where it won't work in a nuclear warhead.

Btw, how thrilled will those children be with the global climate change we're leaving them? Thank god we're burning so much more coal instead of those evil nuclear plants!!!

[RobertEarl]

42. Talk about cheerleading

There you go again, cheerleading for nukes. Just like Reagan.

Instead, Carter was a real leader for alternatives. I know who I am company with.

[jeff47]

45. The difference is I'm talking about technologies that already exist

The DOE already built breeder reactors, for example.

So just how much CO2 should we dump into the atmosphere to avoid using nuclear power?

[RobertEarl]

47. I'm done with you

There is no sense trying to convince nuclear cheerleaders. They are so far gone over the edge they are in a sense radioactive.

Have a nice day.

[jeff47]

48. You don't get to be done.

You don't get to be "done" because your fear of spectacular but rare events is destroying our climate. We are all going to suffer if we follow your course, so no, you don't get to be done.

So how much CO2 should we dump into the atmosphere to avoid using nuclear plants? Where's your cut off? 5 degrees C in 20 years? 10 degrees C in 10 years?

[jeff47]

51. No, I'm asking questions. You are avoiding thinking about them

So how much CO2 should we dump into the atmosphere to avoid using nuclear plants? Where's your cut off? 5 degrees C in 20 years? 10 degrees C in 10 years?

[RobertEarl]

52. Troll this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=740050

[kristopher]

59. In the time it takes to build one nuclear plant

And with a minor fraction of the resources need to build a single nuclear plant we can build either solar or wind turbine manufacturing capacity. For our example let's go with 2.5GW worth of 2.5MW wind turbines/year.

I selected 10 years for this example because this is the average time it would take to complete one nuclear plant project if it doesn't suffer delays - and they almost always do.

With this plan, at the end of ten years we should have produced and installed about 10,000 turbines, or 25 GWe of nameplate wind capacity.

I estimated the total amount of electricity produced as the turbines come online over time and at the end of that 10 years, operating at 33% capacity, they would have provided a cumulative total of approximately 389.7 TWh.

A 1GW nuclear plant actually produces about 7 TWh each year.

So, in the time it takes to plan and build one nuclear plant, the turbines produced and installed will have produced 54 reactor-years worth of electricity. Their aggregate annual output will equal that of 10 nuclear reactors.

Key point: 10 year total electricity generated by bringing the generators on line as the factory turns them out - 390TWh = 54 years worth of generation from the nuclear plant - almost its entire projected lifetime.



Now we are ready to bring the nuclear plant on line as scheduled and the picture is this; by devoting approximately the same resources to each technology we have, at the end of 10 years:

- 10,000 wind turbines producing 72 TWhs of electricity per year plus the 54 years worth of production from the nuclear plant that the wind turbines have already cranked out, or

- One nuclear plant ready to begin to producing 7TWh per year.


Key point: If your goal is REALLY to address climate change rather than cheerlead for a given industry, the preferred choice is obvious.



Given the standard 20 year life span for the turbines and assuming the plant continued production of the same product, this factory will max out it's contribution to growth of wind power at 50GWe when it hits the 20 year mark and starts to build replacements for those wearing out.

That 50GW of turbines should actually produce approximately 144 TWh of electricity every year.

50GW faceplate capacity X .33 capacity factor = 16.5GW of production

That 16.5GW equals approximately twenty (20) 1GW nuclear reactors operating at the international average capacity factor of about 80%.



Key point: Going forward the disparity in favor of wind only increases. and we have to repeat that IF your goal is REALLY to address climate change rather than cheerlead for a given industry, the preferred choice is obvious.

[jeff47]

71. That would be relevant if we were talking about building more nuclear plants.

Or if we had a reasonable process to build more nuclear plants. We don't, thanks to activists in the 1970s.

What we do have is a lot of people, such as yourself and RobertEarl, demanding we shut down all nuclear plants. Right now.

Which means more CO2 as we frack and burn. Right now.

In the future, we will probably invent some new technologies that will make renewables work for base-load. We aren't living in the future. We are living in now.

Abandoning new nuclear plants has produced lots of natural gas plants, releasing tons of CO2. We can't go back and point this out to people blocking new nuclear plants in the 1970s.

What we can do is avoid making the situation worse by replacing nuclear plants with more gas plants while we hope someone invents a technology to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

[kristopher]

75. Don't throw your straw man arguments at me.

I'm not Robert Earl. We should shut down nuclear plants as they come to the end of their designed lifecycle - 40 years. We should consider shutting down the BWRs (about 24 of them) sooner. No extensions should be granted nor new plants built.

What are you sources? Nuclear Energy Institute? American Petroleum Institute?

Where are you getting your "facts"?

[jeff47]

76. The posts are right there, until you delete them.

So how much CO2 should we pump into the atmosphere to avoid extending the lives of the existing nuclear plants?

And no matter how much shit you try to fling at me, it doesn't change your non-answer to that question.

[XemaSab]

77. So how is this different from my perspective on nuclear, exactly?

[kristopher]

56. You clearly do not have a clue about this topic

It looks like all you are doing is pushing right wing talking points, so do us all a favor - provide a source for the claptrap claims you are making. Show us a resource assessment that says renewable energy resources in your area are not adequate and that the only options are
1) Dark
2) More Fossil Fuels
3) More Nukes

I have great confidence that you will not be able to produce such an assessment. It would be great, therefore if you had the nerve to post the websites that you visit to educate yourself on energy issues. You know, the ones agree with the things you are posting here? We are always looking to identify the astroturf sites the righties are using.

[jeff47]

66. So...you'd like me to more-or-less provide my home address so that I can

prove the laws of physics still apply?

How 'bout I'll provide that right after you provide yours. And if you're dumb enough to do that, you should be prepared for the onslaught of junk mail and other crap from the actual right-wing trolls.

If you want to prove me wrong, all you have to do is show how you can provide power during a calm, cloudy day when it's been calm and cloudy for a week using currently-available technology deployed in a remotely feasible manner (no 800 million gallon pumped hydro, for example). Calm and cloudy for a week does happen regularly here, so it's a situation that has to be handled.

The best solar thermal plants at the moment store enough heat for about 24 hours of non-sunny operation. Even with limited reheating during the cloudy days, they can't go a week.
Photovoltaic would require a massively large array to deal with the reduced solar input, and can't deal with night using currently-available battery technology.
Wind is out because it's calm, or again will require massive overbuilding of turbines.
Tidal is out, because I'm inland.
Biomass - don't have required farmland. And trucking that in isn't gonna exactly be 'renewable'.
Bring it in from the grid over a very long connection? Well, there's a reason I'm not getting any power from Hoover Dam at the moment. Plus the locals recently blocked a grid interconnect in the area so getting those lines strung isn't going to be politically easy.

So, how do you provide me reliable, renewable power using currently-available technology?

And how much CO2 should we dump into the atmosphere so we can shut down nuclear plants while we wait for the inventions we need for reliable renewable baseload?

[kristopher]

80. How is providing a resource assessment going to identify an address?

I've heard some lame ass excuses before but you take the cake. Here let me show you how it's done; you said upper New York, right?

http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/40899.html

From theRenewable Energy Assessment of the 2009 State Energy Plan




You obviously do not know what you are talking about.

[jeff47]

82. I hope you'll someday notice the part in all my posts where I talk about base load.

The fact that I can generate a shitload of power at noon from photovoltaic doesn't help at midnight.

So how do you provide reliable, renewable base-load in the scenario I mentioned?

Or are you going to point to noon again in your reply?

[FarCenter]

85. Much of that hydro is Niagra, which has been in operation since the dawn of electricity

Where are the permitted sites for all that wind power?

The rural folks hate wind turbines. The conservationists want to keep them out of national/state forests and parks. I don't think I've seen anything about permits in the Atlantic or Long Island Sound.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

13. Selling electricity generated by the Sun can make money

who needs the pigs on a pig farm when you can generate solar electricity?

[SidDithers]

21. Third thread I'll copy this into...

The biggest problem with Solar is the capacity factor...

Last edited Sun May 27, 2012, 07:33 PM USA/ET - Edit history (3)

At those moments on Friday and Saturday at midday, Germany produced 22 GW per hour. But what about when it's dark?

An update of a post I made last year:

A better measure is the total annual power output, which is the Capacity x capacity factor x total hours in a year, expressed in GWh.


In total, Germany has 25 GW of total solar capacity, but the actual power output in 2011 was 18 TWh. This means that in 2011, their solar plants operated at a capacity factor of only ~ 8% (source wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany )

25 GW x 24hours x 365 days x 8% capacity factor = 18,000 GWh of power output in a year


By comparison, Darlington Nuclear Generating Station outside of Toronto has a capacity of 3.512 GW but in 2011 operated at a capacity factor of 95%. (http://www.opg.com/power/nuclear/) Total power output from Darlington is:

3.512 GW x 24hours x 365 days x 95% capacity factor = 29,229 GWh of power output in a year

So, a single reactor complex, with 4 avg sized reactors, produced 62% more power in a 2011 than all of the solar in Germany.

Where did Germany get the other 96 or 97% of it's electricity in 2011?

Comparing German solar generating to 20 nuclear power plants is misleading. A more accurate comparison would be to 2 or 3 avg sized nuclear reactors.

Sid

[RobertEarl]

25. Why do you hate solar?

Why even mess around with nukes when they can be replaced?

All that bullshit is just Reaganesque bullshit. Carter was leading us on a course where we would have had clean air, maybe no Fukushima and solar electricity too cheap to meter. Why dick around and make yourself look like a throwback to the Reagan era?

[SidDithers]

28. ...

Sid

[Angelshare1]

83. Dyson Spheres are the answer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

The problem with solar is that 99.99997% of the energy is just lost in space with a tiny amount hitting the earth.

[cbrer]

100. How feasible are PV panels in space?

Experiments in the 70's proved that transmission is possible. Surely losses have been shaved by now. 24 hours X 7 days. No storage requirements.

*Edit* Dyson sphere now defined...

[kristopher]

26. Not so. What is misleading is to make "capacity factor" seem more important than it is.

The solar installations put out an amount of power that would have required 20 nuclear plants - period. You could not have done it with 2-3 nuclear plants no matter how hard you ran them; and talking about capacity factor doesn't change that. The observation in the op is accurate.

Clear enough?

What you are trying to reframe is called "the baseload myth" which proposes (with absolutely no proof) that the most effective, least expensive way to deliver energy to the end user is by building large centralized units that run as much as possible.

It simply isn't true. It is the system we presently have, but that system is an artifact of decisions made when external costs of energy were not considered and fossil fuels were thought to be a great boon to humankind. The ability to run 80% of the time isn't a technical necessity, it is an economic characteristic that forms the backbone of one possible grid configuration. The alternative is a distributed renewable grid; in the long run the change will provide us a cheaper, safer, more dependable and more sustainable energy system.

If we wanted to use nuclear plants to deliver the same power the solar panels delivered, the cost would be astronomical. Already, electricity from nuclear nuclear plants is some of the most expensive on the market, and that is with the plants predicted to operate more than 80% of the time and a payback period of 40-60 years. If we cut that operating time to 20% then the electricity would be upwards of $1/kwh. (average in US is $0.10/kwh and averge in Germany is $0.30/kwh.

We can and will replace the centralized thermal grids with distributed renewables; that is established by the limits of resources.

[jeff47]

46. Uh....

how, exactly, does your distributed renewable grid work on a calm night?

Or where I live, where we have the least number of sunny days in the US, so even solar thermal isn't practical. It's not particularly windy, and many calm days in a row are common. We're inland so we don't have tidal. We also don't have tons of fallow farmland, so biomass is problematic.

If we aren't supposed to get power from a large national grid, and we aren't supposed to get power from fossil fuels, what exactly do you propose we do?

[Selatius]

53. Energy storage is a problem with solar power.

If there were a cheap, safe way to store up excess solar energy generated during the day to be used at night, it could go a long way towards answering that problem.

[jeff47]

67. And if the guys working on fusion were further along, that could solve the problem too

But we can't design an electrical system on hopes and dreams.

Battery technology has very slowly improved over the last 80 years, with no major revolutions in energy density. We shouldn't design our electrical system on the assumption that a major revolution will happen soon.

[girl gone mad]

86. Hopes and dreams?

Please, educate yourself. Real, tangible progress has been made in this field. We are not sitting around dreaming and hoping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

If I lived to be 1000 years old, I don't think I would ever understand the conservative "can't do" brain.

[jeff47]

93. Did you not read the first sentence in the linked article?

The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a large, laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, USA.

I underlined the important part.

My entire point is we need to start working on climate change NOW. Thus abandoning nuclear plants for promising research is a bad idea. Because in the meantime, we'll be burning lots more coal and gas to replace the lost nuclear capacity.

It has nothing to do with "can't do". It's "need to start now". If their fusion research pans out, fantastic. It would be a great help. But it's not a problem we can put off until they work fusion out. After all, Tokamaks were supposed to get us commercial fusion power, and they are barely net-positive.

[Selatius]

89. No, but earth would dictate we would have to design one without gas and coal sooner than later.

Because those sources are being depleted faster than they're being replenished. I'm not saying solar power is the only answer to the energy problem. Likely, it is a gunshot approach, a mixed basket of different sources of energy or perhaps a diversified energy source portfolio coupled with a program of energy conservation/cutbacks, and in Germany's case, that mixed basket won't include nuclear energy. Different countries are going to try different approaches. France, for instance, generates roughly 70% of its total energy output through nothing but nuclear power; in fact, so much so that it routinely sells excess power to neighbors like Germany.

[XemaSab]

97. Word

n/t

[FarCenter]

41. German Power Grids Increasingly Strained

Some observations are possible from the charts above and other evidence:
•Wind power peaks seem not to be simultaneous with PV peaks. This means that PV does not add its full peak capacity to the grid problems during high wind periods.
•The main part of the German wind power is installed in the northern part of the country while the main part of the PV capacity is installed in Bavaria. The nuclear moratorium has created the most serious supply problems in the southern part of Germany. This observation suggests additional PV generation to relieve the supply problems.
•PV generation cannot reduce the need for peak capacity. The reason is that there is no PV generation during the evening peak load.
•The regulating work which must be made by controllable power sources grows considerably with the growth of wind power and PV. TenneT is one of Germany’s 4 main grid operators. In the TenneT area a calculation for April 2011 has shown that wind power alone would extend the regulating range by more than 50%, while the actual combination of wind power and PV has doubled the regulating range.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9205

[Trillo]

44. Germany needs to be applauded for that.

[spanone]

50. k&r...

[kristopher]

88. ROFLMAO

A review of the posts on this thread tells us one thing definitively; the OP scared the bejeebers out of the "Yeah Nukes" crowd.

[fascisthunter]

90. Great News! (nt)

[lonestarnot]

94. Should we buy a clue for $5.00 Alec?