OT: French nuclear power

[Tim Streater]

Thass right. And that's how it will stay.

Sure. For rich bastards. What are the other 99.9% of us going to do?

Which smart devices did you have in mind?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ther ones that cut power to your TV every time nigel farage is on.

[newshound]

Not *current* smart devices, but I don't think it will be far off before domestic users can have a tariff like big industrial users, with a reduced rate if you are prepared to shed load on request.

Or perhaps more likely, one where the grid sends out a signal at times of stress saying unit cost goes up by factor of 5 for the next two hours. Then, you set up your house controller to turn off immersion heater and tumble dryer, tell washing machine and dishwasher not to heat the water while that warning applies.

That, of course, would work even without batteries. But with batteries, you could switch off the heavy loads and run the rest on the batteries. Or play whatever tunes you wanted.

That would even let ordinary customers save money, as well as reducing the need for investment for peak lopping.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Jethro_uk escribió:

although at a glance, that heats water directly to generate steam, not NaCL to heat water via a heat exchanger.

Apparently it isn't terribly efficient as a power source, though it's very good at killing birds.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , newshound escribió:

Tesla's just built a Giga battery factory: that should bring prices down.

and Musk has offered to bail out the Aussies (following power outages caused by their disastrous "green" policies) with a battery farm - it gets installed within 100 days or they can have it for free.

[The Natural Philosopher]

So naive....

[Chris Hogg]

That last is actually old news. Musk originally announced it in March. I've seen various figures as to the capacity, around 100 - 120 MWh, said to be enough to keep the lights on in South Australia for four hours. The electricity will cost $331kWh in Australian dollars.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:

Stick to the Beano, duckie. It's got words you don't need to go running to the dictionary to look up.

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

whereas you only read the polari ......corybungus pink sock

[The Other Mike]

There were quite a few in GSM who chuckled at your long winded '3500MW' exercise, especially when the exact figures are in a publicly accessible spreadsheet.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And split infinitives galore eh?

[The Natural Philosopher]

???

[Jethro_uk]

I'm not sure it is. The one I saw used molten salt to store heat energy to allow 24/7 operation (googles "molten salt solar power")

looks more like it.

Have no idea as to viability, but at least it acknowledges that solar power is of limited use without storage.

[Tim Streater]

This sort of scheme was what the Strines were on about. And their schemes had two important components: lots of waste land to build them on (deserts) and unlimited sunshine, things that we in this country are somehow lacking. The reservoir of molten salt was supposed to drive the generators at night.

I'm still waiting to hear how this proposal has got on.

[Jethro_uk]

Hmmm, so it's puffware for now ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Think a prototype was built and its all gone quiet since them, basically cos it doesnt work very well. Except as an instant roasted pheasant generator....

[Tim Streater]

Does "doesn't work very well" imply just engineering issues that might be sortable, or design issues or something else such as dust on the mirrors?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well they are in essence similar issues. I.e. you are making a faux distinction.

Contrary to popular imagination, engineering is not about making cool stuff work. Almost anything can be made to work.

Its how well it can be made to work and at what cost.

conversion from molten salt temeperatures to electricity via heat engines will seldom be at a greater efficiencty than 40% and molten salt is pretty hard to handle. Big kit, low efficeincy = high cost.

All of these cool ideas turn out to be more expensive than nuclear power by a huge margin, and pretty dangerous too.

Id rather be 5 miles awayt from a buclear power staiuon that gets an airliner dflkwon into iot than a modelt salt slor plant of e same power output and I dont want to be anywhere near a battery storage system capable of storing 2-3 hirosihima bombs worth of energy.

[Chris Hogg]

From

'A review of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants operating in the US reveals that they are costly, heavily-subsidized, generally performing below expectations and no more efficient than utility-scale PV plants. The need to jump-start them in the morning can also require the burning of substantial quantities of natural gas. And although CSP?s sole advantage over PV is that it can store energy for re-use only one of the plants considered has built-in storage capacity. As discussed in the earlier concentrated solar power in Spain post, however, it is unlikely that enough storage could be installed at a CSP plant to provide more than short-term load-following capability when the sun is not shining'.

The operators are rather cagey about the reasons for poor performance, although the poor performance at Ivanpah has been blamed on 'clouds, jet contrails and weather'. You'd have thought that someone would have looked into the significance of those factors before spending billions on the plant. The wrong sort of sunshine? A fire caused by misaligned mirrors didn't help.

It strikes me that the fact that they do no better than PV is damning. The Solana plant in Arizona is the only one with the capability of storing heat for use after dark, but it doesn't seem to have made much impact on the plant's performance.

[The Other Mike]

Oh and the line from your mate Euan about being puzzled about "scottish power stations sending electricity to England at midnight" had them rolling in the aisles. Even the wet around the ears graduates worked that one out in a few seconds.