Finishline42
Finishline42's JournalIllinois Nuclear plants shutting down in Fall of 2021
I am conflicted on this. It's what I have been saying though, the cost to run a nuclear plant keeps them from running as much as they need to to keep costs down.
Wind farms contributed to only 7% of Illinois electricity in 2019 so it would seem most of this is from Nat Gas plants.
From one of the following tweets:
Together the plants employ 1,500+ full-time & another 2,000+ skilled workers during refueling outages, most from local union halls. The plants pay nearly $63 million in taxes annually to support local schools, fire, police and other services.
https://twitter.com/ExelonGen/status/1298966084385677312
Improvements in Windmills
Big changes as they improve.
https://twitter.com/jgkoomey/status/1298276106949320706
Costs going down
https://twitter.com/jgkoomey/status/1298278889614082048
Utilization going up
https://twitter.com/jgkoomey/status/1298278890561994753
Netherlands up to 25% renewable
This is posted by Kees van der Leun @Sustainable2050
In the Netherlands, ~25% of our electricity is now from renewables, up from just 10% six years ago.
And we're working on tripling that share to ~75% by 2030!
There is a graph supporting this on Twitter (I think), but it's in a language I don't read.
But the main point is Wind and Solar are a process. There are those that say it's not enough to count. They have been saying that for as long as I have been on the forum - over 12 years. But every year there are more wind and solar assets put online. It keeps building, better windmills and solar panels are developed and the cost goes down.
More than doubling in the Netherlands in just 6 years. Progress a MW at a time.
BTW, can someone show me how to post a tweet here? Everytime I do it it's just a bunch of code and not the tweet.
Weekly update - Good Climate News
Weekly update from Twitter
Good climate news of the week
1 World’s coal falls for 1st time
2 Bangladesh may close 26 or 29 planned coal plants
3 Canada’s oil-sands emissions intensity down
4 BP announces oil & gas will fall by 40%, while its #renewables will rise 20-fold
5 EU eyes higher renewable targets
Last week
1 Germany: Green power hits record 50.2% of consumption in first half of 2020
2 UK: Largest pension fund to divest from fossil fuels
3 UK: Offshore wind farms set to be the 1st in the world to pay money back to consumers
4 Deutsche Bank exits coal
From >>> @AssaadRazzouk
So this is what it takes to keep Nuclear Plants open in Ohio
Just a few bucks more for the rate payers in Ohio.
The powerful Republican speaker of the Ohio House and four associates were arrested Tuesday in a $60 million federal bribery case connected to a taxpayer-funded bailout of Ohio’s two nuclear power plants.
Hours after FBI agents raided Speaker Larry Householder’s farm, U.S. Attorney David DeVillers described the ploy as “likely the largest bribery scheme ever perpetrated against the state of Ohio.”
Gov. Mike DeWine, also a Republican, called on Householder to resign immediately, saying it would be impossible for him to be an effective legislative leader given the charges against him.
Householder was one of the driving forces behind the nuclear plants' financial rescue, which added a new fee to every electricity bill in the state and directed over $150 million a year through 2026 to the plants near Cleveland and Toledo.
snip
Previous attempts to bail out the nuclear plants had stalled in the Legislature before Householder became speaker. Months after taking over, he rolled out a new plan to subsidize the plants and eliminate renewable energy incentives. The proposal was approved a year ago despite opposition from many business leaders and the manufacturing industry.
Generation Now, a group that investigators said was controlled by Householder and successfully fought an effort to put a repeal of the bailout law on Ohio’s ballot, was charged as a corporation in the case.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/feds-detail-charges-60m-ohio-public-corruption-case-71895450
City of Sydney flicks the switch to 100% green power
Accomplished via Power Purchase Agreements.
All the City of Sydney’s operations – including street lights, pools, sports fields, depots, buildings and the historic Sydney Town Hall – will now be run on 100% renewable electricity sourced from local solar and wind projects. The switch is part of a $60 million deal with electricity retailer Flow Power, the biggest standalone green energy deal of its kind by a council in Australia.
The deal is projected to save the City up to half a million dollars a year over the next 10 years, and reduce carbon emissions by around 20,000 tonnes a year – the equivalent to the power consumption of more than 6,000 households. The City calculates that the new deal will see it reach its 2030 of reducing emissions by 70% by 2024, six years early.
snip
The power purchase agreement will see the City source renewable energy from the 120 MW Bomen Solar Farm in Wagga Wagga, the 270 MW Sapphire Wind Farm near Inverell, and the 3 MW Shoalhaven Solar Farm, a not-for profit community-owned solar scheme near Nowra on the south-east NSW coast. The deal will see three-quarters of the City’s power sourced from wind generation and one-quarter from solar.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/07/01/city-of-sydney-flicks-the-switch-to-100-green-power/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Radioactivity hike seen in northern Europe; source unknown
Haven't seen this anywhere else.
Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”
But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesman with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom., reported that the two nuclear power plans in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.
The Leningrad plant near St. Petersburg and the Kola plant near the northern city of Murmansk, “operate normally, with radiation levels being within the norm,” Tass said.
The Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish radiation and nuclear safety watchdogs said this week they’ve spotted small amounts of radioactive isotopes harmless to humans and the environment in parts of Finland, southern Scandinavia and the Arctic.
The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority said Tuesday that “it is not possible now to confirm what could be the source of the increased levels” of radioactivity or from where a cloud, or clouds, containing radioactive isotopes that has allegedly been blowing over the skies of northern Europe originated. Its Finnish and Norwegian counterparts also haven’t speculated about a potential source.
But the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands said Friday it analyzed the Nordic data and “these calculations show that the radionuclides (radioactive isotopes) come from the direction of Western Russia.”
“The radionuclides are artificial, that is to say they are man-made. The composition of the nuclides may indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant,” the Dutch agency said, adding that ”a specific source location cannot be identified due to the limited number of measurements.”
https://apnews.com/16ce7ced2b5b98974e0cc4437b14bf44
I want to share some info RE: V2G - I have some questions
It's an investment advisory on Tesla but I was wondering if it's realistic or he's just a dreamer.
First question relates to this >>>
The Tesla tri-motor Cyber Truck can hold enough electrical energy to power a home for more than one week. And if you run out, you could drive the truck down to a local supercharger, fill up with electrons, drive home and have power for another week of the utility being shut down. In fire country the tri-motor Cyber Truck will sell like hotcakes once V2G is enabled.
Power a home for more than a week? Is this real? I know it depends on how big a house, etc but scale-wise is it even realistic?
2nd Question >>>
To connect existing cars to the grid, Tesla will need to tell customers that when their battery capacity drops to around 75%, they can simply have the battery pack swapped out for a new million-mile battery pack. The money to be made from V2G is so huge for Tesla that I expect Tesla will tell customers this battery swap will be very low cost or even free of charge.
This I completely doubt. Everything I have heard is that it's very difficult to replace the battery pack on a Tesla - but maybe the Cyber-truck is designed differently?
3rd Q >>>
I also expect this is why J.B. Straubel is opening Redwood Materials to recycle lithium ion batteries. Today, there aren't enough batteries to recycle so opening this company makes no sense (to me). But if Tesla opens V2G to all Tesla vehicles, it will begin to generate a lot of batteries in need of recycling. I think they are building the recycling facility they will soon need, in advance of needing it.
This has always been the down the road reality. One of the main points detractors of EV's has been what to do with all the batteries. And the answer is always if there are enough of them somebody will built a business on recycling them.
4th and last Q >>>
It remains to be learned how much income individuals will be given out of the funds derived from the utilities. A friend with 54kWh of Tesla Power Wall batteries said he is supposed to receive around $100/mo for grid services. This means the Tesla Model Y and 3 would earn around $100 per month, the 100kWh Cyber truck will earn around $200/mo and the tri-motor Cyber Truck will earn around $400/mo.
Again I doubt these are real numbers but if they were I doubt that you could count on them staying this high for the life of the vehicle.
Although if you have a Tesla with a million mile battery, it would make it worth keeping long after if was drivable.
link to article.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4355640-tesla-v2g-technology-dramatically-increase-demand-and-sales-of-all-models?utm_medium=email&utm_source=seeking_alpha#alt1&mail_subject=tsla-tesla-v2g-technology-could-dramatically-increase-demand-and-sales-of-all-models&utm_campaign=rta-stock-article&utm_content=link-2
In the 1st Quarter Ireland Produced almost 50% of elect from Wind
4 new wind farms were brought on line. Wind produced more electricity for 1st time than Natgas.
[link:<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Historic first quarter for Irish wind energy - Wind provided almost half of Ire power in the first quarter & for the 1st time, beat gas into 2nd place as Ire main source of electricity. And 4 new farms, with a combined capacity of 81 MW, were connected. <a href="https://t.co/wOcxnBhqmI">https://t.co/wOcxnBhqmI</a> <a href="https://t.co/AxppedmMMr">pic.twitter.com/AxppedmMMr</a></p>— IWEA - Wind Energy (@IWEA) <a href="https://twitter.com/IWEA/status/1273939592958312449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 19, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>|
Southern Indiana Utility company - Vectren - announced plan to go from 78% to 12% coal powered
By mid-decade.
The electric utility serving southern Indiana's coal country yesterday announced a plan to transition swiftly from coal to renewable energy as part of a strategy it said would save consumers more than $300 million and slash carbon emissions.
The plan, announced by Vectren Corp., would reduce the utility's reliance on coal from 78% this year to just 12% by middecade.
Vectren, a unit of Houston-based CenterPoint Energy Inc., is the second Indiana utility to announce a massive shift away from coal in the past two years and comes in spite of intense lobbying by Indiana's coal industry to slow the retirement of aging plants.
In late 2018, Northern Indiana Public Service Co. announced a plan to shut its coal fleet within a decade — most of it by 2023 — and replace much of the capacity with renewables.
Vectren's announcement is similar. Under a "preferred portfolio" that's the core of a 20-year integrated resource plan (IRP), the utility would shutter most of its coal-fired generation by 2023 and add more than 1,000 megawatts of wind energy and solar, some of which would be paired with battery storage.
snip
The plan does call for adding 460 MW of combustion gas turbines in 2024 and continuing to operate the 270-MW Culley 3 coal unit.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063396059
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