Why We Have No Wind or Solar Power

[NeilBlanchard]

Hi y'all,

Some good info from Amory Lovins:

Amory Lovins on winning the oil endgame | Video on TED.com

Winning the Oil Endgame-Homepage

[Duffman]

A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it’s competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection.

That’s all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete - so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.

How can you take anyone seriously who spouts such clearly biased rhetoric which is clearly preposterous.
"weakens electric reliability and national security"
Give me a F'n break!

[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by Duffman

The numbers I have seen are duty cycles of 30 and 20% respectively for wind and solar. The only thing reliable that you can say for either one of them is that reliably you can predict there will be no solar power during the night. There will be times when neither is worth a damn and their duty cycles suggest that it will be more times than you think.

When neither is worth a damn? Have you even though about that? Solar is perfect for the increase in day time generation. It's output profile is more or less spot on with demand during the day. Depending on location we then need to fill in the demand it cannot handle with output from a combination of other renewables, such as wind and geothermal, along with dispatchable sources just in case we do need their output such as pumped hydro and biogas.

Originally Posted by Duffman

To get it to work you need Wave and Geothermal to emulate the performance of our current thermal supply. Is there enough of both to replace our current thermal supply, because as James points out, they are small units and our big thermal plants are about 1000MW. This also speaks nothing to whether or not a particular site is a good location for either technology. Same for Hydro, really the hydro is there or it is not, Germany with less than 5% hydro was not endowed with those resources plain and simple.

We only need those wrt average baseload, solar already follows the demand profile.

Originally Posted by Duffman

We will always need peaking plants, right now they are Hydro and Gas, if you have no hydro, then you are pretty dependent on gas. Can we make enough BioGas? We know right now we can’t make enough ethanol to meet our needs, why would we think we can cover additional bases as well.

Did you watch the link? Germany made use of significant pumped hydro for dispatchable output as well as energy storage for when demand isn't up to supply. As a percentage of output, we have more hydro than germany, so odds are we'll need fewer biogas plants, however we have plenty of feedstock for biomass gassification if need be.

Originally Posted by Duffman

This is not a problem of taking 4 or so sources of electricity, summing up their W*hours and saying that it meets the avg need over a years worth of time. Supply must equal demand at every single second of the year or the system doesn’t work properly.

No one is talking about simply matching current generation MW for MW. Go check out what they've done in Germany, they were matching the grid's output compared to demand ni real time given some representative renewable mix, not just comparing the average output of renewables to conventionals.

[Concrete]

I agree with Duffman
the good arguments are lost in the preaching

look, there is only one reason nukes are dead in US

Three Mile Island

(for the rest of the world the reason more likely Chernobyl)

why would a utility not build a nuke plant that is nearly fully funded by the government?
Risk and liability due to radioactivity
one accident and you would be out of business sued by everyone in a hundred mile radius

besides there is still no place for the waste


Back to renewables
to make up for fluctuations in production you have to build over capacity or storage
which makes these alternatives even more expensive

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Concrete

look, there is only one reason nukes are dead in US

Three Mile Island

That's not even really the reason, just a symptom. The reason is a deliberately created false mythology regarding the nature & effects of nuclear radiation. Maybe the best place to see & understand it is in the movies: whenever a '50-60s B-movie producer wanted an excuse for whatever monster his special-effects department dreamed up, there were good old atomic testing & nuclear radiation, ripe for the taking. Want a dinosaur to attack Tokyo? Nuclear testing! How about giant ants in the Nevada desert? Nuclear testing! Creepy kids whose touch kills their parents? Obviously, a leak from the local nuclear plant!

So the public got indoctrinated with these false ideas about the effects of radiation, and thanks to cable television each new generation keeps on getting indoctrinated. Never mind that these fantasies have about as much connection to reality as Peter Pan and the Tooth Fairy, the memes are firmly lodged in the public consciousness.

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by roflwaffle

When neither is worth a damn? Have you even though about that?

Yes I have, you know those days when it is cloudy and/or raining, solar potential is low, all you need is low wind in combination and you are up a creek without a paddle.

Originally Posted by roflwaffle

Solar is perfect for the increase in day time generation. It's output profile is more or less spot on with demand during the day.

Ontario Wholesale Electricity Demand and Price Information
Supply and demand are similar but there is are gaping holes in supply for a few hours as well. Do you think the wind is only going to blow during those times or are you counting on your peaking supply to be as large as your solar?

Originally Posted by roflwaffle

No one is talking about simply matching current generation MW for MW. Go check out what they've done in Germany, they were matching the grid's output compared to demand ni real time given some representative renewable mix, not just comparing the average output of renewables to conventionals.

Yes actually they are talking about replacing coal and nuke. That means MW for MW, I agree we need to reduce our consumption but I frequent a few other boards than this one and I see no indication that your avg Canadian or American is willing to change yet. Again Germany is running on 85% conventional power, when their 15% eco-power runs silent they dont see disruptions because their baseload is probably only running at 80% on an avg day anyway and has room to meet the shortfall.

[NeilBlanchard]

Hello,

For the days without wind and with clouds, they will still get some power from PV (it doesn't go to zero in cloudy conditions) -- and they still have the biogas plants and the hydro plant. They could also have wave and/or tidal power, and/or geothermal.

[jamesqf]

[QUOTE=NeilBlanchard;66413]For the days without wind and with clouds, they will still get some power from PV (it doesn't go to zero in cloudy conditions)...[\QUOTE]

Damn close. Get a photocell, and put an ammeter on it. And remember that the human eye has a very non-linear response to light.

...and they still have the biogas plants and the hydro plant. They could also have wave and/or tidal power, and/or geothermal.

Wave, tidal, & geothermal aren't really storable. Build say a 100 MWatt geothermal plant, and it's going to produce that 100 MWatts pretty much 24/7 - you can't produce 50 today, and then 150 tomorrow when the sun's not shining. If you do produce just 50 one day, that's money lost.

It all goes back to the amount & nature of the throttable generation you have on the system. If your hydro plant can vary its water flow (which is constrained by lots of things besides generation need), then you can put some solar or wind on, and operate in concert. If you have natural gas peaking plants, much of the operating cost is fuel, so you the system operator will be happy to throttle them back when cheaper solar or wind is available. But that generating capacity HAS to be there to match the solar & wind, or the system will crash.

The power grid doesn't operate on wishful thinking. It takes engineering.

[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by Duffman

Yes I have, you know those days when it is cloudy and/or raining, solar potential is low, all you need is low wind in combination and you are up a creek without a paddle.

Guess what happens when a storm system moves in? The winds tend to pick up... Granted, forecasting isn't 100% accurate, which is why we have dispatchable power from biogas and pumped hydro in sufficient quantity to account for the potential shortfall in production. This isn't anything new, it's already ben demonstrated. All we need is the appropriate mix of renewable energy.

Originally Posted by Duffman

Ontario Wholesale Electricity Demand and Price Information
Supply and demand are similar but there is are gaping holes in supply for a few hours as well. Do you think the wind is only going to blow during those times or are you counting on your peaking supply to be as large as your solar?

That's why, along with wind and solar, we also have geothermal and wave for baseload, pumped hydro for storage as well as dispatchable power, and biogas for dispatchable power. What's done is forecasting and implementation of a resource mix that can provide the energy needs of a given area, along with enough dispatchable power so that any drop in output can be handled. It's not like the wind will stop blowing, the sun will stop shining, the water will stop moving, and the Earth will grow cold, all at once over thousands of square miles. And if that happens, I'm pretty sure we'll have bigger fish to fry than worrying about electricity.

Originally Posted by Duffman

Yes actually they are talking about replacing coal and nuke. That means MW for MW

It's not just MW for MW, it's MW for MW over the same time period, and they've successfully demonstrated they can follow demand with renewables just like coal and nukes follow demand.

Originally Posted by Duffman

I agree we need to reduce our consumption but I frequent a few other boards than this one and I see no indication that your avg Canadian or American is willing to change yet.

So far in California they have been. IIRC the cheapest MW was the one not produced, at something like 2-5c/kWh. In other words, it's cheaper to offer rebates on energy efficient stuff and encourage residents to save power than it is to add additional infrastructure, at least it has been for the past few years.

Originally Posted by Duffman

Again Germany is running on 85% conventional power, when their 15% eco-power runs silent they dont see disruptions because their baseload is probably only running at 80% on an avg day anyway and has room to meet the shortfall.

As I've said before, the project was using their demand profile with proportionally smaller renweables. Clearly they can't do that for all demand right now since they don't have the requisite infrastructure, however, as they have shown, given a mix of renewables, they can keep up with demand, so all they need to do in order to implement the system is scale up the renewable mix.

[Big Dave]

Y'know I'm all for more T&D infrastructure. That has been as neglected as much as anything else in the US. A couple thousand miles of T&D would be A-OK with me.

But if you tried it there would be at least ten years of red tape and litigation before the first tower was built.

If Cape Wind and Altamont Pass have been tangled up in litigation for years, do you not think this battle has to refought again and again?

The only sites I can see for pumped storage are in the Appalachians. In the West water is for fightin' over and in beteen it is too flat.