OT: Solar power - reality check

Nuclear, obviously. I'm surprised you need to ask. Or perhaps I'm not.

How do you propose to do that, exactly? The equivalent of tankers full of batteries? The energy density of electricity in 'tankers' vs liquefied gas or crude oil in tankers would mean it would be impractical. A cat's cradle of power lines? Does the world have enough copper reserves to supply it, and would the environment survive the damage that mining it would cause? Then there's the vulnerability of such power lines to terrorist sabotage, especially as the 'countries where the sun shines all day' are pretty unstable, politically. Good luck with that, then!

It doesnt alter the facts. Something has toi fiill in the gaps and it it burns more gas/coal/oil filling in the gaps than it would have done to run the stations 24x7 its a f****ng waste of time and money.

I do my own calculations. I dont just cite paid-for-by-renewable-company 'experts'

You don't need to do calculations beyond noting that the retail price of electricity is now 5 times the wholesale cost of coal or nuclear power to know that a lot of extra cash - and that means energy - goes into riding the renewable profit waggon.

Or to note that with the biggest amount of renewable energy in Europe, Germany is the largest emitter of CO2 by country, per capita, and per MWh generated.

And has the most expensive electricity.

Oh, but renewable energy is so cheap, they keep telling us, so it must be true! /sarc

Don't mention the war :-)

Indeed. My money is on hydrogen, in the long run. The conversion efficiencies are not great, but once you have built the infrastructure it's quite a flexible energy resource. I reckon we'll be using oil (and perhaps coal) for the forseeable future as the feedstock for plastics, that's going to be cheaper and more efficient than carbon capture (and I'm sure plastics will be around for the forseeable future).

As an aside, does anyone remember a poster from the late 70's with the strap line "Coal: it will never cost the earth". It was clearly aimed at the nuclear industry because the image was a hybrid of a sunrise (or sunset) and a mushroom cloud, and the organisation responsible was not very evident. I complained to the ASA about it and eventually got a reply saying it had not been produced by the NCB but some vague lobbying organisation, and that they had stopped using it. I wish I had kept a copy, and the correspondance. I have not managed to find it by Googling although presumably it is still out there, somewhere.

I think for ?not great? you mean ?terrible?.

Flexible and very expensive. Volvo/Scania have decided to ditch hydrogen after fairly extensive trials. The flexibility just didn?t offset the massive fuel cost and have decided the BEVs are the way forward.

Carbon capture isn't looking very promising at the moment!

I'm a nuke man myself, although I am not totally sure they will survive public opinion. We shall see.

But what I was talking about here was the portable and storable heat source, and I don't think batteries will completely cover that. And one merit of hydrogen is that it is (relatively) easily made from solar or wind, and the plant required is not too fussy about intermittency (although obviously that affects the economics).

Of course your perspective is a bit different when it's 100 miles to the nearest pub :-)

(not really disagreeing though)

Answer is simple. synthetic diesel. Made with nuclear power.

It is.

The United States works by contract. A wind vendor promises to deliver

The current contract rates are better than nuclear. And the rates are quite attractive. Attractive enough in fact, to squelch attempts to add other items to the energy basket.

The numbers are there.

The letting of these contracts, is occasionally mentioned in arstechnica articles.

The operator accepting these contracts and adding wind to the grid, can only do so, up to the stability limit. Which is calculated in advance. They don't connect the s*it, and then revel at the failure it caused later.

You can think of wind power as:

"mix X megawatts of wind, with Y megawatts of nuclear power"

It's the blended rate of today, you compare to the blended rate of yesterday, to determine whether you're ahead or not.

If the current grid does not have the stability of the old grid, that means that now, it is not an apples to apples comparison. Anybody can run a s***ty grid, that generates power for buttons a kilowatt. But what good is electricity that is going off every five minutes ? That's why we don't do it that way. This is not Mumbai. We don't force all the citizens to run their houses off personal UPS boxes.

If you want to run your society that way, you can, but it better not be cold outside...

What I marvel at, is the power companies that generate the power, they have a planning web page, that shows "current percent wind", "max percent wind", and the max percent wind is how much additional room they have for wind farms on the grid. That number isn't always that big, percentage wise.

Now, how many *government* planning web pages will you find, that state "We need the power companies to provide an additional

I can't tell whether my government here, is even aware of BEVs yet. The "party" was smart enough, to remove the subsidy for BEVs. Which gives you some idea where their heads are. Now, when the s*it hits the fan and people buy BEVs despite the government, will they be awake enough to expand grid capacity ? I can give you a good guess, it'll be like a trip to the dentist to have teeth pulled. I fully expect, that maybe in a decade, the power will be going off here (load shedding), for hours at a time. Because I'm not hearing anything to the contrary. No plan.

Paul

Are they promising to deliver 500MW full stop or are they promising to deliver

We don't know what the terms are.

Just that the rates are damned attractive.

That's why they write these up, to note the fact the rate offered, is pretty good.

But the real cost, at the system level, of blending them in, we cannot easily know that.

You can't make electricity if the wind dies, you cannot extract blood from a stone. A solar farm would not be a backup on a dark night. Batteries would be too expensive. Not enough pumped hydro, to make a difference.

They're not afraid of the ocean, either. List of 12 projects at the bottom.

Paul

Only a fool would give them a contract that allowed them excuses as to why they couldn't deliver. They should be expected to deliver the full whack 7x24. If the wind doesn't blow, that's not my problem, it should be theirs.

Oddly, here we seem to be letting them get away with it.

Force the windmill owners to supply when people *want* the energy, if it turns out they can't meet demand, make them pay a penalty, then the onus is on *them* to buy battery banks etc ...

Who can blame them? ?

Wow, a tsunami in the Baltic in 1760 ...and in 1640 in the Roer valley...

yes, Germany had a tsunami on 21st January 1760.....

Yes, shocking isn't it. I better build a 20ft wall around the house toot sweet. Never know what might hit here atop the North Downs.

Of course, a Chicxulub event hitting mid-Atlantic and all bets are off. Tsunami could well be 3000 feet high.