The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[sendler]

The London Array wind farm is actually more competitive with nuclear. It did 2500GWh in 2015. which is an average of .285 GW. So a little more than 1/4 of an AP1000. The installed price is stated as $2.5B. So adding a days storage and scaling up to match puts it at $11B. So just 1.5 times the price of nuclear. But a footprint of 500km^2.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Array
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[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by sendler

Why solar needs storage to replace fossil fuel or nuclear fired electriclal generation: The Topaz solar farm has been running for a few years now so there is some good long term data. It is operating at 25% of it's rated capacity because solar by nature will be either weak or off most of the time as the sun goes over.
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But electrical grids have to be stable. So if solar and wind want to replace fossil fuel, they have to have enough storage to make up for the down times. I like heavy rail/ gravity storage.
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Conversion efficiency of different methods was never brought up. The 25% factor of Topaz is the on/ off time. It would be like saying a gas or nuclear plant was broken 75% of the time
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Coal fired and natural gas plants operate at 47% capacity on average

Does that mean they need storage?

Oil fired plants are only up 8% of the time, do they need storage?

Base load plants are increasingly becoming unprofitable because they make electricity when none is required

The old idea of making baseload plants that supply 100% of needs 100% of the time is a failing logic.

It is costly and wasteful to idle a plant all night when it's not designed to quickly ramp on or off.

Ideally solar, wind, hydro + natural gas should make up the gap between the base load and the increasingly sporadic peaks and valleys of the real load.

As people's behavior changes the peak demand window becomes more chaotic and incompatible with the old baseload idea.

In my mind MSR would be great but solar should be advanced as should wind, but we need to use common sense, don't underestimate regulatory inefficiency causing grid inefficiency.

Further that half of every large scale power plants energy is wasted, that heat could warm most everyone's home and business for the cost of piping water.

We are drowning in waste at every turn of our power grid.

For me, in another 5 years I will be off grid due to nissans e bio fuel cell coming to market.
I have all my energy needs mapped and with solar in the mix I can go off grid profitably, if I can do so at a lower cost per kwhr in Wisconsin of all places it just shows how piss poor we are at managing resources, not that the tech is invalid.

[sendler]

If coal and gas plants are off 50% it is because they are being controlled off by demand. Not because they were incapable of supplying the output as is the case for intermittents like solar and wind.
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Keep in mind that the electrical consumption of your house is just a tiny fraction of the energy that you are consuming as a person on Earth. Just because you can unplug your house does not prove that solar can replace 17TW of world energy.

[ThermionicScott]

Originally Posted by freebeard

The first victim of Political Correctness is humor. The frame was Hegelian Conflict Resolution. And it should have been 'Carbon-based life forms.'

Ah, didn't catch the reference. I assure you my sense of humor is otherwise intact.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by rmay635703

For me, in another 5 years I will be off grid due to nissans e bio fuel cell coming to market.

Five years is a long time:
prweb: Coal as Renewable Clean Energy. 'By turning coal to graphite, which can collect and store heat from the sun, one can produce electricity.' M - Power Corp.

CVMR® has been able to convert natural coal to graphite flakes, powders and graphite blocks at much lower cost than the current methods in use. They have simultaneously managed to produce graphene from methane gas.
....
‘The Graphite Power Generators, or GPGs, that are being developed at MPower® can be as small as two mobile phones put together. They could, for example, be placed on top of a soldier’s knapsack allowing him or her [them?] to have all the electricity he or she [they?] need[s] in the field, day and night. They can be built into much bigger panels on top of a house, hospital, an apartment or office building...

600-1000° in a backpack? Gender equal mayhem?

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by sendler

If coal and gas plants are off 50% it is because they are being controlled off by demand. Not because they were incapable of supplying the output as is the case for intermittents like solar and wind.
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Keep in mind that the electrical consumption of your house is just a tiny fraction of the energy that you are consuming as a person on Earth. Just because you can unplug your house does not prove that solar can replace 17TW of world energy.

You can and should improve the things that are within your control.
In my case im reducing my home to as close to net zero as is reasonable.
If my EV becomes solar powered that reduces my impact further.
My yearly consumption of leaks, radishes, chives, raspberries, blackberries, wintergreen, parsley and coriander (which is higher than average) is delivered without water seed or any non human effort, i don't even need to plant it, all seed themselves as a kid all non meat foods were grown organically on the lot without fuel or any inputs, meat was harvested from my fathers annual take of deer, partridge and fish that the end of our block. I never ate purchased foods because my folks were too broke to buy food.
So I am very aware of externalities, I have been working to reduce shipped foods, last summer I ate a lot of organ meats from elk grown locally, I've been trying to minimize trash (best form of recycling is to not create it in the first place) and eat foods locally sourced.

My biggest use of energy is when I'm at work, but you never know, my work is slowly adding energy initiatives, its possible my footprint there might shrink, I might even get motivated enough to minimize my food packaging at work too.


So I guess I refer to Frank Lees previous statement

[sendler]

So here is another example of a vastly underperforming high tech solar farm. The Solar Star farm is using high efficiency crystaline panels on trackers with an automated cleaning system and is one of the newest and largest in the world. The nameplate capacity is stated as 597MW ac. The 2016 totals were stated as 1.447 GWh which is only an average of 165.2 MW.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star
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I can't find any report on the cost of construction but a Warren Buffet group purchased the project in Jan, 2013 for $2B. I would really like to see the actual expense of the project if anyone can find out. I would have to expect that he wouldn't buy it unless it was in distress and came cheaper than what he could just start his own new project. Even using this price the cost was $12/ Watt and has no storage. The AP1000 was bid at $7/ Watt. Isn't a new gas plant even cheaper? How does all of the media spin keep telling us that solar and wind are at grid parity?

[oil pan 4]

That's not surprising since the lightest of cloud cover can cut the output of a PV panel down to 1/3 of its ImP even here in sunny new Mexico.

The main stream media knows if you repeat a lie enough times it will become truth, these days they are all pushing nothing but lies and someone else's agenda.

The only way the lie that "Solar panels are cheapest" could be remotely true is if you only look at PV panel name plate watts and divide that by only panel cost and look at nothing else.
Kind of like how they how they invented man made global warming.
Only look at the numbers that agree with you and ignore everything else.

[NeilBlanchard]

This is an engineered plan for getting 100% of our electricity from multiple renewable sources. Each state, and country have a blueprint mix of doing this. And it pays for itself in short order.

Clean Energy - The Solutions Project

The sun energy that strikes the earth in one day could power ALL human needs for 27 years.

Think about that for a moment, please.

We could use more storage for today's grid. Storage is already here - we just need to build more.

When renewable energy is distributed over a wide area, and there are 3 or more sources, then the output is MORE dependable than what we have now.

Now, generation systems break with no predictability. Nuclear plants not only break unexpectedly, but they must be shut down to refuel and to be maintained. When this happens, we lose all the power production. When a few wind turbines out of thousands stop working or are stopped for maintenance - the rest all continue to work. When a cloud shadows a solar PV array, it does reduce the output, but all the other arrays continue to work.

When we also have biogas, and/or tidal, and/or wave, and/or large storage capacity - then we can easily produce all the power we need.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

This is an engineered plan for getting 100% of our electricity from multiple renewable sources. Each state, and country have a blueprint mix of doing this. And it pays for itself in short order.

Clean Energy - The Solutions Project
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Am I missing something? How does that site show anything of substance?
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Don't the actual numbers coming in from Solar Star and Topaz cause you to pause? Solar Star is state of the art and I'll guarentee you it cost much more than the $2B that Buffet paid to take it over which still puts it at 1.7 times per Watt of a new Nuclear plant. And it is intermittent. I wish I could get some good third party numbers on some USA wind farms but they seem to be well hidden. The UK numbers look promising at 1.4 times but the stated project costs seem suspiciously low.