Pursuing an energy source that is dangerous, more expensive than green renewables, and simply not needed.

I for one would like to stop global warming BEFORE the year 2100.

Yet you know, as well as anybody else, that simply isn't the case. It has been shown time and again that green renewables can indeed shoulder the energy load for this country. There is no need for either nuclear or coal. So please, give this false choice a rest.

The reality is that we need new large scale generation if we're going to retire coal within the next 50 years. That means using nuclear too.

But that doesn't mean that green renewables can't shoulder the burden. In fact, a Stanford study found that the biggest two barriers to implementing an entirely green energy structure were social and political. The technology is there, all that needs to be done is for those invested in dinosaur energy production processes to stop spewing bullshit and get on board with green renewables.

The power grid is not ready for large scale integration of renewables. It's late and I don't feel inclined to write a disertation about grid stability, but the reality is that without economical. reliable large scale storage, our ability to integrate massive new wind or solar generators is very limited.

On a power grid. energy production and energy usage need to be balanced in real time. With conventional generation, that is is done by regulating generation in response to changes in load. Renewable generation, e.g. wind and solar, cannot be managed that way, hence new technology is needed. It's being developed, but we're nowhere near ready to deal with load that cannot be controlled supplied by generaion that cannot be controlled either.

We'll get there, but anyone that says we're ready now is seriously misinformed

The NREL claims that it would be possible for the Western power grid to draw 35% of its electricity from wind and solar energy sources by 2017.

Doing so would require no additional infrastructure, only operational changes. I believe those operational changes are mainly selling power in 15 minute blocks rather than one hour blocks.

http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/news/news_detail.cfm/news_id=16041

As I recall the Eastern power grid could accept 20% to 25% of its power from wind and solar and the Hawaii grid could handle 35%.

Oh, and adding a bunch of EVs to the grid would make it possible for the percentages to go considerably higher....

The western grid is backstopped by massive hydroelectric generation. Washington State gets about 75% of it's power from hydro right now. What do you back up solar and wind with in states that have no serious hydro capability, if you take coal and nuclear off the table?

Natural Gas? Oh boy.

The NW had to dump hydro production rather than sending it other places this last year. Due to contracts, the excess we had could not economically be used, because someone else would have had to stop burning coal or gas or whatever.

Im betting that if we had better sharing in place, we could make some small but significant cuts in the more harmful methods of power production immediately.

My understanding is that coal and gas were curtailed.

Hydro was not 'dumped'. Wind was curtailed, hydro was put to the head of the queue.

that we had excess hydroelectric production at several points over the last year or two in the NW, with supply exceeding demand. However, we could not share that bounty with our southern or eastern neighbors, because the contracts made it so that we would have literally had to pay them to give them the electricity.

Its possible that I was misinformed, but I am inclined to trust the person who told me this.

that the price literally drops into the negative numbers, and they pay people to take excess power off the grid.

Also breached two dams for environmental reasons. If we wasted some hydro output, that speaks to a need to upgrade the grid, and/or review contracts with neighboring states.

And we are bringing enormous quantities of wind turbines online. Now that the coal plants are gone, it would be nice to knock down some of the natural gas plants.

That still doesn't mean we should reject nuclear outright! Our most important goal is getting off oil!

What we should do is to figure out how to supply the power we need for the least amount of money, use the fastest to implement systems in order to get fossil fuels off our grid quickly, and pick the methods which create the least danger to us and those who follow us.

Nuclear is the most expensive new generation method.

Nuclear takes the longest to bring on line of any generation method.

Nuclear creates both melt down and hazardous waste safety issues.

Nuclear fails all three tests.

Let's install the cheapest, fastest and safest.

should be getting off coal to generate electrical power without recourse to nuclear power and greatly reducing oil consumption to drive transportation. This was all doable 40 years ago, and the same arguments against it were used then as now by the same industry lobbies and their PR flacks.

at current rates of construction.

Big enough?

Perhaps you are unaware of the new megabatteries being built by Duke Energy. Wind generated electricity goes in as produced, and goes out as needed.

Presidio, Texas has already installed one to back up the entire needs of the city in case their one incoming line goes down.

All this from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Are they misinformed?

Nuclear is the most dangerous, dirtiest, most waste-producing, most expensive way to boil water ever designed. Without the massive subsidies from the government and a pass on real waste disposal, it could never have existed to begin.

And Yes, I am aggravated because a large new nuke dump is built 30 minutes from my house, and when it leaks, as they all have, the groundwater here will be ruined, and the area will be depopulated.

No loss to you, perhaps, but my family has been here for 110 years, and all they built will be nothing.

You take an example well out of context (the concern was that the UK grid doesn't currently support single generation sources over about 1200 MWs while an EPR produces 1650) and apply it to "this is just how much reserve reactors need"

???

Do you think that makes sense to anyone but you?

And have you by any chance looked up how good a source "PB Power" is?

Yes, I think that makes sense to others. Lots of sense.

And a shameless overt "attack the messenger" Mr. Baggins? You really must be at a loss for a meaningful response.

There isn't any reason to believe that it is.

And a shameless overt "attack the messenger" Mr. Baggins?

Nope. Just asking you what you thought the source's credibility was. Right now this just hearsay. Missaplied even if it were true (because the author most certainly does not say that all reactors require a particular amount of spinning reserve)... and little reason to believe that it was true.

Let's put it this way. If some single nuclear proponent without renewables experience were to claim something about the reliability of a solar thermal plant... would you accept it as an authoritative source?

Investment reports are considered one of the more reliable sources available for this type of analysis.

You on the other hand?
Not so much.

The largest battery in the world (up until a couple years ago) backed up 12,000 people...

... For seven minutes.

No battery system provides the power necessary to do what you're suggesting. Those Duke batteries help deal with the momentary fluctuations inherent some renewable generation schemes (and that's VERY important), but we can't overstate their value. If you have an uncommonly calm day where the turbines stand (or lose the transmission line)... The battery doesn't do much good for the town.

It's in the news.

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/state&id=7507795

Perhaps you have no appreciation for the size of Texas or of the wind conditions here. If you drive from Atlanta to LA, 1/3 of your trip will be in Texas. If you drive from Brownsville to Canada, 1/2 your trip will be in Texas.

The trees here in my hometown grow at a 10-15 degree angle from south to north, the wind is so constant. And last winter, when record cold froze the incoming water lines to 24 nuclear, coal, oil, and gas plants, wind supplied 25% of the entire state's power needs. We never missed a beat here.

AND love that 6.6 cents per kwh rate I get, compared with 20 cents + for the old oil-gas-nuke-coal combo rate.

Let me repeat: nuclear power has never made a dime on its own. Without huge subsidies and a pass on environmental damage and cleanup, it is the most expensive, risky, filthy way ever devised to boil water.

Wind is here in Texas. It's only going to get bigger. Several thousand existing turbines are shutdown because their output exceeds the ability of the grid to carry it. Those new lines will be finished in early 2013, and immediately, Texas wind output will increase 25% from the turbines already built and in place.

Texas Tech has the first degree in wind energy in the US. It won't be the last - our local junior college has a two year program that is paid for by Duke to train workers. Duke covers the entire cost of their education, and then hires the grads at around $43,000 a year. Not bad for a 20 year old with an associate's degree. Several of my former students have already gone through it, and several are enrolled right now.

A battery the size of what was reported could only handle maybe 1-2 thousand homes for that amount of time.

And that's comparable to the largest batteries every built. Storage systems for renewables need very different technologies to handle actual cities.

Amazing. You cannot handle being completely wrong about something, such as the suggestion that a battery was only for momentary fluctuations or for just a few minutes.

The idea that technology has not only moved on, but is commercially feasible, is anathema to you. Whatever ax you have to grind, you at least could read the information supplied, or provide evidence to the contrary. You have done neither.

You have called names, you have insulted, you have now disputed whether an incorporated town of 4,000 people even counts as a city. So I will wish you and your little helpers the holiday you deserve, as well as my sincere wish that you get everything you deserve in life, and quickly.

Meanwhile, I believe that I'll just enjoy my 6.6 cents electrical rate of wind generated power and let those who wish to pay triple and swim in their own waste.

Merry Christmas.

You talked about a battery that was backing up a city. I know of one such city (population about 300,000) that actually is backed up by a bettery... for a few minutes.

4,000 people are nothing to you?

Oh please. It has nothing to do with how important individual people are. You were talking about another poster must be unaware of the new super batteries that will back up wind generation and gave it as an example. It's only slightly more relevant than if you said that you have a sailboat with a battery that backs up the solar panel for a couple days.

It's a question of scale.

You have called names, you have insulted

Sorry. I've done neither. If being corrected insults you... you should try harder to be right more often.

you have now disputed whether an incorporated town of 4,000 people even counts as a city.

Nope. I've just pointed out that it was wrong to give the impression that their experience means that we've now solved the intermittency problem inherent in high penetration of some renewable energy.

So I will wish you and your little helpers the holiday you deserve, as well as my sincere wish that you get everything you deserve in life, and quickly.

Lol! And you get your knickers in a wad over your perceived "calling names"? Luckily... I have a thicker skin... and wish you happy holidays.

Talk about diffusing a tactic

The current generation potential already exists and can be used to provide that "grid stability". But then they would have to pay people to be there ready to make it work at need, while also paying to build and maintain the new generation. And they don't have to cover the cost of the environmental impacts of what they use now, so there's no advantage to them in making the switch.

Plus the people who control the energy resources at the moment would take a financial hit, which is unacceptable to anyone making the rules.

and producing power locally.
If each house had a windmill, solar panels, or small scale hydro, it could replace the need for large scale plants, with the exception of factories, of which there are few in the US any more.

We can and should reduce the number of central plants, but eliminating them based on current and foreseen technologies is fantasy at this point for any number of practical reasons.

The less spinning reserve we need.

At this point we could minimize the number of new central plants we need to build by installing more rooftop/parking lot solar, wind, etc.

As we increase the amount of battery storage on line and the amount of dispatchable load available we can turn off the spinning reserve and push it into deep backup roles.

Upthread the goal was to shrink the grid. Your goal is a variety of inputs. Those are not compatible. You need a larger, widespread grid to connect a wide enough variety of inputs.

Also, battery technology is utterly and completely incapable of doing what you propose. The largest battery systems in the world are many orders of magnitude too small for this task. So you're either talking about millions of the largest batteries in the world, which is extremely impractical, or new technologies that have not been invented yet.

capacitors for short term power storage.

You don't have a proper grasp of the way the machine it refers to functions.

In fact, I think we need to expand the grid. It's time to tie the three US grids together and connect them to the Canadian and Mexican grids. We have the ability to create a system like Europe's Desertec in which we harvest energy where it is the cheapest to harvest and move it to the places where we want to use it.

Creating as much 'local' generation as possible gives us more reliability and cuts our needs for transmission. It's a matter of balancing out the best of all.

Of course we'll need lots of storage. Storage of cheap wind and solar electricity is going to be cheaper than nuclear generation.

We need no new technologies. (I'm assuming we're just about 'there' with batteries. Zinc-air and sodium-ion batteries are looking very promising.) We just need to build a lot with the technology we have at hand and continue to improve our technology as we go along.

and AEP is installing 1000 MW of battery backup in the East

so sorry

yp

I think the concept of "load following" is easy enough to understand. It simply refers to the ability of the generating system to keep up with the load imposed on it by the system's users. If all the system's users decided to either turn on or turn off their air-conditioners at about the same time the system must be able to react with the appropriate increase or decrease in available power. If there is anything that a solar collector is not good at its load following.

You recognize the system's capability to follow a variable load.

There is no functional difference between following a variable load and accounting for the variability of wind as a portion of your generation.

As quakerboy wrote in 105 the parts of the system now dedicated to flexible generation have to work around the static nature of largescale centralized thermal to follow variations in demand and they can continue to perform that same function when the system is all renewable. Storage will be an economic choice to replace some natural gas, biofuels (mostly methane) will replaces some, and biomass will replace some.

What happens when a nuclear plant has a short-circuit in one of its backup safety systems and shuts down instantly and stays shut down for 3 days, or a week, or a month or even several years? That is a real contingency that you have to be prepared for, so what do you do?

Or a switchyard feeding a large scale wind plant into the grid goes down, etc.

A couple of hundred MW vs 1000MW is quite a difference if you ask me.

A short fluctuation as wind moves from one wind farm to the next is nothing like a 1GW nuclear plant having an emergency shutdown that lasts for 3 years.

It isn't the same and the difference is a strong negative for nuclear.

Though, I agree, a 3 year shutdown is unlikely for that sort of infrastructure.

Shepard Flats will run about 850wm, but being on-shore, easy to connect to the grid in many locations. Offshore wind farms will typically have fewer tie-ins, if we ever get around to building any at all..

Geysers Geothermal is running at about 750mw

SEGS is the largest concentrating solar plant for now, at 350mw.


These are not trivial numbers. The disparity between the potential downtimes of these various systems is heavily weighted toward nuclear, for long-term outages, or even never even returning to service. But on the 'loss' of a large block of generating capacity, the gap is narrowing significantly, and will continue to do so. There's nothing wrong with that at all.

China will produce double-digit percentages of electricity from solar in the next 8 years.

Scale is not an issue with renewables

yup

China? LOL. Wait and see.

and will soon be the leader in installed solar capacity.

yup

wind passed the 3% mark this year.

In 2010 non-hydro renewables (Wind, Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic, Wood and Wood Derived Fuels, Geothermal, and Other Biomass) provided 4.1% of our electricity. Hydro provided 6.3%.

We can install wind, solar, geothermal and tidal much faster than we can build nuclear reactors. And produce electricity at a lower cost.

1) Small scale hydro
2) Tidal
3) Wind
4) Solar

Also, if the "grid" was decentralized, there would be little need to upgrade it. People should be generating power on smaller scales, for their communities, not large scale.

There is a river in NYC, which runs reliably at 4.5 knots peak every six hours. If NYC properly harnessed this, like I proposed THIRTY FIVE YEARS AGO, there would be no need for Indian Point, for one. Back then, they rejected my proposal. They even called it nutty. They wanted the nuke plant to keep running, rather than run a means of power with little cost, and little environmental impact. The nuclear industry keeps up their propaganda, even though they know it's costly and hazardous.


Oh, and one question for you. What do you do with the waste from the nuclear plant?

logic fail

yup

But IMHO there are some ancient nuclear power plants around that should have been replaced by modern designs long ago.

Fukushima tells us of the danger of such old plants. The reactors were built in the 60s and 70s using technology developed in the 50s -- very early in the development of nuclear power. There have been so many lessons learned since then.

do you not realize the ends do not justify the means in this case because the danger of killing so many is always a potential with this technology? Does it not matter to you?

They are going to ignore you. ...........

I'm glad I ave one.

TO.

While some toss around number of what renewable might produce some day, the reality is that in the northern part of the US, there is not enough wind/solar energy practically available to heat homes, provide transportation, support employers, etc. Some non-renewable sources are going to be needed for quite some time. What kind to go with is a discussion with points on both sides. The Europeans are finding this out as well.

What alternatives do you suggest...abandon the Michigan and Detroit for sun belt locations?

I suggest that we ship the power generated by states like Kansas to places that don't get so much wind. Amazing technology that, the same power shipping technology that Enron employed to make money, we can apply to providing cheap, green power to the NE.

But you are also forgetting the vast reserve of wind power off the coast of the NE, not to mention tidal and water power.

The states that will be crossed will fight these new transmission lines tooth and nail.

And *gasp* I think that there are more than enough for that kind of power transmission.

Not even close.

I know several people in the electrical biz who would disagree with you. Hmm, who to believe, people who make their living in the field in question, or an anonymous internet poster

How about you list their names and we the anonymous internet posters can go search what mental home they are locked up in. Seriously. You are wrong on this - give up while you can.

Why does the NE need wind from the midwest, they have more than enough of their own. The same goes for solar, biomass, the range of hydro sources and geothermal.

It is completely possible and practical to power the world, and all areas of the US with renewable energy. Building more nuclear is a waste of money and time.

I know. I live here.

The Northeast wind resources are every bit as good as the MidWest.

I'll let your comment stand. It's a near DUzy.

How large would the wind resource need to be for you to change your mind?

I won't do it for you

nope

If you were there full time, you might of been aware of that

Yup

But since you don't live here - you don't know that.

yup

It also does nothing for the rest of NE

yup

Lets see what is actually produced.

The motorcycle I ride daily is quite capable of 180MPH, but I normally do not run it quite that fast.

yup

Regardless of the 2000MW capacity, how much energy is actually being produced?

Maine has 325 MW of wind capacity installed today - and maybe twice that under construction. When the EIA gets around to compiling the data, they will publish how many MWh are produced in Maine each year.

Last edited Mon Dec 26, 2011, 09:12 PM - Edit history (2)

Hell, they won't even release the actual numbers to us, but they are far far lower that what anyone was led to believe. Until we get offshore wind running, wind power is a no go in the northeast.

Original installation and maintenance of the infrastructure is much more expensive than shore based. Its also a mature technology that is not going to get dramatically cheaper.

Given that the rate payers in the end will have to cover the costs, is NYC willing to pay that much more for power?

Wind power is working just fine in Maine - and better than expected at some sites.

Wind power is expanding rapidly in Maine and contributing to the decrease in electricity prices.

Why?

Cuz it can out-compete natural gas-fired electricity when wind generation is high.

The more wind power we have in Maine the better off we will be economically.

yup

And maintenance of the infrastructure and the generators will be much more expensive. That has to be figured into the cost per watt.

In the end local rate payers will have to cover the costs of transition to renewable sources. With the decline of oil, we will return to all electric homes, and in areas where heating is required, the costs will make the users scream. If a modern central plant (regardless of fuel type) is lower monthly cost to them, what do you think they will support?

is it higher than the cost of getting rid of spent nuclear fuel?

Those are the kind of trades that will need to studied and analyzed. Cost is going to be one of the primary drivers, not greeness.

Its pretty clear that importing power from the Midwest is going to be prohibitive.

If power is created in a green manner, there would less cost overall, in the costs related to future healthcare costs of people exposed to air pollution, or with nuclear, radiation. (Figure one major nuclear "accident" every thirty years)

Nuclear fuel disposal or other definable cost that would have to be borne by the utility would be. Health costs not so much since the utility would not be paying them. This would not matter if its a private or publicly owned utility.