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Originally Posted by Duffman
It is unfortunate; I thought I was engaging in a debate with people who were fairly well versed in this technology. You clearly do not understand what the power capacity factor or duty cycle is. If a wind turbine has a generous PCF of 40% that means it either generates 40% of peak 100% of the time or 100% peak for 40% of the time, because wind is intermittent it really isn’t either but a summation of values in between. Another simple concept is cost, if I have to keep a natural gas plant as backup reserve for wind it has a cost. Even if I never turn it on, it still has employees waiting to turn it on, people doing maintenance, the capital cost is sunk as well, backup capacity always has a cost. Now if you have 10X overcapacity in wind as you suggest, when wind is giving you 100% of rated capacity all you can do is turn the machines off. Since there is zero fuel cost you have saved nothing, you are still stuck with maintenance costs and winds huge capital investment which is every bit as much as nuclears. When wind is 10% of your grid, you never turn it off, you turn your fueled generation off, when the bulk of your grid is fuelless your cost per kWh rises a lot faster when you turn the supply off.
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Again with the confounding factors. If you wanna claim we'll build 10X demand that'll all be used at the same time, then not at all, that's fine, but that's not what a
distributed renewable grid is about. Notice the distributed part...
If we build a distributed renewable grid, we won't have 10x demand at once, unless we really screwed it up or constructed it to fail. Look at what the Germans did. They built enough wind/solar in different areas such that it along w/ biogas and pumped hydro provided enough energy for demand, and when wind/solar was over what demand required, they used it to refill, so to speak, the pumped hydro storage. They didn't build every single wind turbine in one spot so they would all provide peak power at the same time. Assuming they would is a total straw men. And again, like I said before, cost is still just cost. If they design it properly, which they already have, unlike building it all in one place, they won't need much in the way of backup gas powered generation. Yes, it'd be incredibly costly if we built all of our wind power in one location and it pumped out 10X demand for only a few hours after which we had to rely on natural gas, but that's not a
distributed renewable grid d00d.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
How So?
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The longer the transmission distance the greater the area is for renewables. One ~2000 mile HVDC line along w/ a few hundred miles worth of connections from the American southwest/Texas to the ERCOT/WECC/etc interconnects would provide access to wind from Wyoming and Texas to name a few, as well as sun from the southwest deserts, w/ less worry about intermittent operation than Germany has w/ a much smaller area. If we actually have a bonafide renewable HVDC grid we're talking about millions of miles of area, and provided it's setup right, i.e. we don't build
all of our wind power in Texas then complain when it goes over demand by a factor of ten, and doesn't meet demand at other times, in other words build a
distributed renewable grid, then local weather variability becomes even less of a problem. If Germany can do it w/ over ~140,000 square miles w/ less pumped storage, the U.S. can do it over 25 times more area w/ more pumped storage.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
Is that really being done for long high capacity lines anywhere? Why is that?
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Yup, it's done for riskier areas like underwater AFAIK, and maybe in some cases for aesthetics, although I'm not sure if that's been done yet.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
Get real, north America is already full of Arabs, remember all of those Arabs wanting to take pilot training years ago, getting into the country is the easiest part, they come in legally.
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Full of Arabs? And not every "Arab" who every wanted to take flight training is a terrorist, just the actual terrorists, and not wanting to learn how to land was a pretty big give away... Jeez, comments like that, even if you didn't mean for it to sound the way it does, are freakin' racist.
That said, even the FBI knew about the Al-Qaeda operatives taking lessons, they just dropped the ball. I doubt that'll happen again any time soon, or that they'll target transmission infrastructure considering how pathetic that would be. Why would they go from killing thousands and causing massive property damage to cutting power lines and inconviencing the public? C'mon... Even they wouldn't waste their assets on that.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
If you don’t think there are consequences to cutting the power off clearly you have not been in a situation where you have been without it for an extended period of time. Do a search on the “Quebec Ice storm”, this **** happens. When you put 100 million peoples power supply dependent on a few cross country lines then you definitely have a target and real consequences when it fails.
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The problems from the ice storm were the result of T&D failures, which, ironically enough, wouldn't have happened w/ HVDC that's on the ground/buried. It has nothing to do with renewable generation, just flakey transmission and nasty weather.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
While I am not a meteorologist (by the way are you?) I do understand math and when I see a PCF of 20% or 30% or 40% I know that that is not a reliable supply.
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Yes, great, it's not relaible if we build it all in the same place according to what you stated, but guess what, that ain't a
distributed renewable grid. This is...
Notice at ~2:30 there are different sources w/ different capacity factors, that all combine to meet demand over a hundred thousand miles. Even if the installed capacity factor is 20X what peak demand is, those sources are not always active, and believe it or not, are
distributed to meet demand over the course of the day. Granted, the U.S. probably has more in the way of biogas feedstocks, but w/ more hydro as a percentage of generating capacity we also have less need for it.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
It’s like you clearly ignored everything I said in post 78.
Also if you got links then provide them, I'm not doing your research for you.
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The NREL link is in my last post, and I hadn't seen your earlier stuff so that's my bad. Going off of the first link in your post (78), the 4.8c/kWh figure assumes a 34% capacity factor, which isn't far off from the ~30% capacity factor seen in the real world. Now the drop in capacity factor probably comes from using wind sites that aren't as favorable in terms of utilization, but provide power at peak demand, which they can charge more for. The
EIA has operating costs at 1.8c/kWh for nuclear, as of 2002, w/ fuel costs at less tha .5c/kWh, lets say .4c/kWh, before Uranium prices went from $10/lb to ~$70/lb. Not to mention captial costs are wayyy higher and require much longer loans for the ~70-80 year amortization. Going off a
current example, over a 75 year lifespan w/ no cost run-ups, capital costs are ~1.4c/kWh. Assuming Ur settles at $50/lb we'll see ~2c/kWh in operating costs, and ~1.4c/kWh in other operating costs for a total of ~4.8c/kWh. Now, those are both (NREL/EIA) government estimates, so saying either is biased w/o proof is highly suspect IMO.
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Originally Posted by Duffman
I apologise if my tone has worsened. I expect people to return the courtesy and to carefully read my posts and if not taking the posts at their word then opening up the links provided. I don’t feel this is happening.
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That's fair enough, and I feel the same way. Just like I missed your sources earlier, which I've gone over again and apologized for, I feel that you've grossly over-simplified the idea of a distributed renewable grid. We wouldn't build it so that everything would be making 10X peak or little to nothing. We would have distributed resources that made different amounts of power at different times, such that we could meet demand effectively, even if the nameplate capacity was 10X peak demand. Also the Arab/pilot thing was downright racist IMO. I was probably a dick about pointing it out, but that **** doesn't fly here AFAIK