Texas power prices briefly soar to $9,000/MWh as heat wave b

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:52:05 AM UTC+10, Rick C wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 9:56:53 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...

They should. The main takeaway message from the South Australia Tesla battery buy was that it was brilliant at stabilising voltage and frequency, and made back it's purchase price in little over a year in selling those services to the grid. Pumped storage isn't as quick, and when generators break down you can need an initial fast response to stop the disturbance knocking other generators off-line.

The Tesla battery in South Australia demonstrated that shortly after it was installed, where a grid disturbance took out a lot of generators in the two adjacent states, but none in South Australia. They did a bit of gloating at the time.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Thu, 15 Aug 2019 11:35:26 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

>Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

What is the actual population f Texas ? Some sources claim 29 million,
but with the southern border leaking like a sieve, the number must be
even greater.

Anyway, with 29 million, the consumption is just 2.5 kW/person. In
some countries the winter peaks are at 3 - 4.5 kW/person.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

 

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.

 

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 11:34:41 AM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 05:37:36 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Texas has a huge amount of windpower generation capacity, about 20x solar, which was facilitated years ago by Perry subsidizing the transmission system with state money. The winds dropped out during the recent heat wave and they lost about 20GW, causing overload on the non-renewable generation capacity. They probably had the backup capacity to cover it, but it couldn't react fast enough. The really big suff takes hours to spin up, and when the load fluctuates on the order of GW's per hour, they can't track it. They have so-called gas powered peaker plants that can track it, but capacity of those is limited to smaller fluctuations, few hundred MW.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-has-enough-sun-and-wind-to-quit-coal-Rice-13501700.php

Texas gets hurricanes too. Fun, mixing windmills and hurricanes.

Texas is a big state. They have most of their wind power fields in the western desert part near the New Mexico border, an area that is perpetually wind swept. And they have a bunch installed in the Gulf. If they can get the generator tower anchored in bedrock, you don't want to be around for the hurricane that knocks one of them down, it would have to be record-setting in a bad way.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.

Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

 

[Rick C]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

--

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:e1de98f4-60f7-4cee-8fe0-69e808070c77@googlegroups.com:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie
wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap
enough that some of the thermal solar systems have been
ripped out and replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big
insulated tanks of molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap
energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and
pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has
kinetic energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal
energy. Note I am not talking about using sea water in the
tanks, merely sea energy to run the pumps that slowly fill
them. Not much juice, but every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much
that it can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps,
and most of all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy
would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the
overly expensive technologies.

He is an idiot. Water tanks are cheap... even at five time the
price, which they are not.

The pump is the tidal pump. The tide make the energy to rotate the
pump. No expense there slow, high pressure pumps are easy to build
and introduce to certain shorelines. The offshore tanks would fill
no problem. Once full, they no longer need any tidal energy. They
are a kinetic capacitor.

LardyTard4 cannot grasp man's use of kinetic energy. He can barely
reach the flush handle, much less understand its physics.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 7:20:31 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world.

Where? Trader4 won't actually know.

> The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it.

The US has grown quite a few of them since Love Canal. The free market loves to exploit un-monitored externalities, but the nuclear industry grew up in a world where people had started paying attention to externalities, and imposed sensible regulations.

> The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

The fact that one technology - burning fossil carbon for fuel - has created a large scale problem that is getting steadily worse, is scarcely an argument for letting the nuclear industry cheap-skate it's way into different disaster.

The nice thing about wind energy and solar power is that they don't have the same kinds of built-in disasters. Trader4 is too stupid to have figured this out.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Rick C]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 5:20:31 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

Nuclear is only economically competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and ignore the cost of turning fairly harmless uranium ores into hazardous, radioactive waste.

Nuclear is not being built to a significant extent anywhere in the world other than possibly china. Nuclear power plants are becoming prohibitively expensive everywhere. I believe I've already posted from facts on the issues the EU has had building two new reactors if the EPR design. Both are hugely over budget and absurdly behind schedule. Even as they approached a date for final testing and starting full scale operation the schedule continued to increase by doubling the remaining time every few months. It's like a backgammon game.

Here in the US we had a reactor project go belly up taking down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it. What kind of technology takes out one of the longest lived companies promoting it because of the massive budget and schedule overruns that everyone has come to expect?

Nuclear has simply become too expensive and uncertain to plan commercially. What company is going to commit construction of new facilities when starting with any reasonable schedule and budget they can expect it to be blown by factors of 2 to 4?

Oh yeah, the utilities. They know they can always force their customers to pay for it no matter how expensive it gets, even if it never produces any power. Well... except for in South Carolina where they are requiring the utility to give back the money they've been collecting for some years to pay for the failed project. I seem to recall the result of all this was the sale of the utility to another larger utility company. They aren't taking any responsibility for the problem it appears. So there may end up being no one to pay the bills.

--

Rick C.

++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 23:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
<gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 5:20:31 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

Nuclear is only economically competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and ignore the cost of turning fairly harmless uranium ores into hazardous, radioactive waste.

Nuclear is not being built to a significant extent anywhere in the world other than possibly china.

Both two EPRs in China are now on-line. Two in Europe is expected to
be on-line next year.

Nuclear power plants are becoming prohibitively expensive everywhere. I believe I've already posted from facts on the issues the EU has had building two new reactors if the EPR design. Both are hugely over budget and absurdly behind schedule. Even as they approached a date for final testing and starting full scale operation the schedule continued to increase by doubling the remaining time every few months. It's like a backgammon game.

Here in the US we had a reactor project go belly up taking down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it. What kind of technology takes out one of the longest lived companies promoting it because of the massive budget and schedule overruns that everyone has come to expect?

Nuclear has simply become too expensive and uncertain to plan commercially. What company is going to commit construction of new facilities when starting with any reasonable schedule and budget they can expect it to be blown by factors of 2 to 4?

Things started to go bad after Tsernobyl, when a lot new reactor
projects were canceled. After this many nuclear engineers and
constructors have retired or moved to other businesses. Very few new
young engineers were interested in the business. Also the licensing
authorities were scaled down, only those remained that had to oversee
old reactors.

With the recent renewed interest in nuclear energy, the tradition of
nuclear power plant building was lost and new generation had to be
trained and mew design done. Also new licensing authorities become
more security critical and started to demand huge byrocrasy.
Especially a huge paper trail was required for everything, apparently
thinking that the paper trail itself would enhance security.

The problems of getting a project licensed and the NIMBY effect meant
that new projects could be built on old sites, where the population
supporting new projects and hence new work.

All this problems with new reactors meant that the power output from a
single unit had to made as large as possible, instead of making two
medium size units. A single very big installation is more or less a
prototype.

A better approach would be building a series of small units and then
duplicate the design. This would mean that he same red tape could be
used for each identical unit (at least in the same country and
licensing authority). Also with a series of smaller units, the first
could be in production bringing revenue, while the next one(s) are
still under construction.

The only small unit construction actually built that I know about is
the Admiral Lomonosov floating power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
with two KLT-40S nuclear icebreaker reactors. Unfortunately those
reactors are a bit small (2x35 MWe), so it usable only for low load
sites.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 9:55:00 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 7:20:31 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world.

Where? Trader4 won't actually know.

Google broken down under? There are about 50 under construction around
the world with another 50 in the planning stages.

The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it.

The US has grown quite a few of them since Love Canal. The free market loves to exploit un-monitored externalities, but the nuclear industry grew up in a world where people had started paying attention to externalities, and imposed sensible regulations.

The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

The fact that one technology - burning fossil carbon for fuel - has created a large scale problem that is getting steadily worse, is scarcely an argument for letting the nuclear industry cheap-skate it's way into different disaster.

BS. If CO2 is going to screw the world, is already creating weather
calamities like the proponents claim, them we should be going all out
on nuclear right now. Nuclear generates 20% of US power. Solar, after
all the talk and two decades of doing, generates 1.6%. Those are the facts.

 

Whoey Louie <trader4@optonline.net> wrote in
news:0447dd67-92ca-48be-ac42-75ed0ea9b54a@googlegroups.com:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 11:52:05 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 9:56:53 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie
wrote:

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no
utilities are buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious
reasons.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme
ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone
there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an
energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...

Look at what I said in context. DL was proposing water storage in
TANKS to store tidal energy. How many MW does the US generate
using that?

Zero, you retarded dumbfuck. It is NEW technology, dipshit.

> You making much money with all that Tesla spamming?

And you are a goddamned social retard as well.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 2:37:57 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 5:20:31 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

Nuclear is only economically competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and ignore the cost of turning fairly harmless uranium ores into hazardous, radioactive waste.

The operators of the 50 nuclear plants under construction around the world
apparently disagree.

Nuclear is not being built to a significant extent anywhere in the world other than possibly china.

That's a lie.


Nuclear power plants are becoming prohibitively expensive everywhere. I believe I've already posted from facts on the issues the EU has had building two new reactors if the EPR design. Both are hugely over budget and absurdly behind schedule. Even as they approached a date for final testing and starting full scale operation the schedule continued to increase by doubling the remaining time every few months. It's like a backgammon game.

Here in the US we had a reactor project go belly up taking down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it. What kind of technology takes out one of the longest lived companies promoting it because of the massive budget and schedule overruns that everyone has come to expect?

Nuclear has simply become too expensive and uncertain to plan commercially. What company is going to commit construction of new facilities when starting with any reasonable schedule and budget they can expect it to be blown by factors of 2 to 4?

Ask the owners of the 50 under construction right now, with another 50
in the planning stages. And right now, even with the US sitting on our
asses with nuclear for forty years, 20% of our power comes from nuclear.
AFter two decades of talk, massive subsidies, and lots of actual deployment,
how much US power comes from solar? A whopping 1.6%

Oh yeah, the utilities. They know they can always force their customers to pay for it no matter how expensive it gets,

About this, you're complaining? Without the govt forcing utilities to
pay outrageous prices for solar, without the govt handing out taxpayer
money in subsidies, there would be no solar and you think that's just wonderful.

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 11:52:05 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 9:56:53 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...

Look at what I said in context. DL was proposing water storage in TANKS
to store tidal energy. How many MW does the US generate using that?

You making much money with all that Tesla spamming?

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 9:39:31 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 9:55:00 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 7:20:31 AM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 6:12:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux....@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:615c54d5-b70a-40a6-9150-faa0cb783de8@googlegroups.com:

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough
that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and
replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of
molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems..

Yeah... I thought they should make tall water towers and pump,
slowly to fill them using tidal energy. The stored water has kinetic
energy but takes a along time to fill with free tidal energy.
Note I am not talking about using sea water in the tanks, merely sea
energy to run the pumps that slowly fill them. Not much juice, but
every penny helps.



Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world.

Where? Trader4 won't actually know.

Google broken down under? There are about 50 under construction around
the world with another 50 in the planning stages.

So post the list. It will expose the fact that you can't actually use google, and draw absurd conclusions from stuff you don't actually understand.

The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it.

The US has grown quite a few of them since Love Canal. The free market loves to exploit un-monitored externalities, but the nuclear industry grew up in a world where people had started paying attention to externalities, and imposed sensible regulations.

The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

The fact that one technology - burning fossil carbon for fuel - has created a large scale problem that is getting steadily worse, is scarcely an argument for letting the nuclear industry cheap-skate it's way into different disaster.

BS. If CO2 is going to screw the world, is already creating weather
calamities like the proponents claim, them we should be going all out
on nuclear right now.

Actually we should all be going all out on wind and solar cells - which is pretty much what is happening - because you can put up a wind farm or a solar farm a lot faster than you can put up a nuclear plant, and because there are whole lot of them working right now you can be pretty confident that all them will work.

Twenty of France's fifty nuclear reactors aren't working at the moment because they were built with steel castings that didn't turn out to be up to the job.

Nuclear generates 20% of US power. Solar, after
all the talk and two decades of doing, generates 1.6%. Those are the facts.

Actually, it is 19% and declining.

Renewables - wind and solar - are 8% and rising rapidly. Solar cells halved in price a few years ago, and suddenly became a lot more economically attractive.

If they push up from 1% to 10% of the world market, the price will almost certainly halve again, and make them even more economically attractive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png

The fact that the Koch brothers, who bought the Republican Party when they funded the Tea Party movement, make most of their money out of the business of selling fossil carbon as fuel, does seem to discourage a sensible attitude to renewable energy sources in the current government (not that the current administration has sensible attitudes to anything except staying in power, and they miss the bit about persuading people that they ought to stay in power).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 9:49:31 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 11:52:05 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 9:56:53 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...

Look at what I said in context. DL was proposing water storage in TANKS
to store tidal energy. How many MW does the US generate using that?

That wasn't what I was talking about.

> You making much money with all that Tesla spamming?

Elon Musk saw chance to get some cheap publicity by bunging together a bunch of his car batteries. It worked, and seems to have earned a lot of money. There are better solutions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

The largest installed and working example is about half the size of the Tesla battery in South Australia.

A 200MW 800MW.hour example should have started working in China by now, which would have twice the power and store six times as much energy.

https://www.tdworld.com/energy-storage/influence-storage

Tesla is just one of the competitors - the fact that one their batteries are working in South Australia is obvious to people who live in Australia, so it does get more publicity than it might deserve.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 10:01:15 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 2:37:57 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 5:20:31 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 2:13:19 PM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 1:49:45 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Every penny doesn't help if the power it produces costs so much that it
can't compete. What do you think all those tanks, pumps, and most of
all the infrastructure to harness the tide energy would cost?

You mean like nuclear? Yeah, I agree. We need to phase out the overly expensive technologies.

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

Nuclear is only economically competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and ignore the cost of turning fairly harmless uranium ores into hazardous, radioactive waste.

The operators of the 50 nuclear plants under construction around the world
apparently disagree.

It the plants are under construction, they don't have operators.

There may be fifty projected nuclear plants around the world, but it's more likely that Trader4 has seen the same projected plant mentioned in fifty different contexts. He's not the most discriminating reader.

Nuclear is not being built to a significant extent anywhere in the world other than possibly china.

That's a lie.

Trader4 thinks that each one of his delusions is an indisputable fact, so anybody who points out that he's got something wrong has to be lying. Krw makes the same mistake.

Nuclear power plants are becoming prohibitively expensive everywhere. I believe I've already posted from facts on the issues the EU has had building two new reactors if the EPR design. Both are hugely over budget and absurdly behind schedule. Even as they approached a date for final testing and starting full scale operation the schedule continued to increase by doubling the remaining time every few months. It's like a backgammon game.

Here in the US we had a reactor project go belly up taking down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it. What kind of technology takes out one of the longest lived companies promoting it because of the massive budget and schedule overruns that everyone has come to expect?

Nuclear has simply become too expensive and uncertain to plan commercially. What company is going to commit construction of new facilities when starting with any reasonable schedule and budget they can expect it to be blown by factors of 2 to 4?

Ask the owners of the 50 under construction right now, with another 50
in the planning stages.

Granting Trader4's intellectual competence, this is most likely fifty references to the same project, with fifty more referring to it's planning stage..

He isn't going to post any links to these reactors under construction, because he thinks he can get away with making the bald assertion.

And right now, even with the US sitting on our
asses with nuclear for forty years, 20% of our power comes from nuclear.
After two decades of talk, massive subsidies, and lots of actual deployment,
how much US power comes from solar? A whopping 1.6%

Actually, 19% of US electricity generation comes from nuclear plants and the proportion is dropping. Renewables - wind and solar are currently 8% and rising rapidly.

China started manufacturing solar cells on ten times the previous scale a few years ago, which halved the unit price, making them economically competitive in lot of places.

When they generate 10% of the world electricity, as opposed to current 1%, they will manufactured in even higher volume, most likely at half the current price.

Oh yeah, the utilities. They know they can always force their customers to pay for it no matter how expensive it gets,

About this, you're complaining? Without the govt forcing utilities to

pay outrageous prices for solar, without the govt handing out taxpayer
money in subsidies, there would be no solar and you think that's just wonderful.

That stopped happening a few years ago when China upped the scale of manufacture and halved the unit price. The current Australian government wants to keep the miners (that paid for its election campaign) happy, but no amount of arm twisting will persuade the electricity generators to invest in anything but wind and solar. Coal-fired stations are getting shut down all over the place and nobody is building new ones.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 9:26:23 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

Nuclear generates 20% of US power. Solar, after
all the talk and two decades of doing, generates 1.6%. Those are the facts.

Actually, it is 19% and declining.

19% vs what I said, 20%. What a nit to pick, stupid lib. It would be 40% if all the tree huggers got out of the way. That's why there are 50 nuclear plants under construction around the world, but only 2 here. BTW, have you figured out how to use Google yet?

Renewables - wind and solar - are 8% and rising rapidly. Solar cells halved in price a few years ago, and suddenly became a lot more economically attractive.

If they push up from 1% to 10% of the world market, the price will almost certainly halve again, and make them even more economically attractive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png

The fact that the Koch brothers, who bought the Republican Party when they funded the Tea Party movement,

Another lie and I don't see you bitching about George Soros or Tom Steyer using their money to "buy" the Democratic Party.

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, August 18, 2019 at 4:38:24 AM UTC-4, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Sat, 17 Aug 2019 23:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Rick C
gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 5:20:31 PM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Nuclear is competitive and viable, which is why plants continue to be built around the world. The US is unique, because we let radical obstructionists block it. The same obstructionists who say the world is being doomed by CO2. How hypocritical and stupid is that?

Nuclear is only economically competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and ignore the cost of turning fairly harmless uranium ores into hazardous, radioactive waste.

Nuclear is not being built to a significant extent anywhere in the world other than possibly china.

Both two EPRs in China are now on-line. Two in Europe is expected to
be on-line next year.

Yes, you seem to be helping make my point. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world. You are pointing out there are two new ones and will be two more.. we just don't know when. Clearly nuclear is not what anyone would call "competitive and viable". I guess it's like saying flip phones are "competitive and viable". Yeah, someone, somewhere still makes them, but they are few and far between.

Nuclear power plants are becoming prohibitively expensive everywhere. I believe I've already posted from facts on the issues the EU has had building two new reactors if the EPR design. Both are hugely over budget and absurdly behind schedule. Even as they approached a date for final testing and starting full scale operation the schedule continued to increase by doubling the remaining time every few months. It's like a backgammon game.

Here in the US we had a reactor project go belly up taking down the Westinghouse nuclear company with it. What kind of technology takes out one of the longest lived companies promoting it because of the massive budget and schedule overruns that everyone has come to expect?

Nuclear has simply become too expensive and uncertain to plan commercially. What company is going to commit construction of new facilities when starting with any reasonable schedule and budget they can expect it to be blown by factors of 2 to 4?

Things started to go bad after Tsernobyl, when a lot new reactor
projects were canceled. After this many nuclear engineers and
constructors have retired or moved to other businesses. Very few new
young engineers were interested in the business. Also the licensing
authorities were scaled down, only those remained that had to oversee
old reactors.

Again, you seem to be helping prove my point.

With the recent renewed interest in nuclear energy, the tradition of
nuclear power plant building was lost and new generation had to be
trained and mew design done. Also new licensing authorities become
more security critical and started to demand huge byrocrasy.
Especially a huge paper trail was required for everything, apparently
thinking that the paper trail itself would enhance security.

Still more support for my point even though it isn't really valid, rather a figment of your fertile imagination.

The problems of getting a project licensed and the NIMBY effect meant
that new projects could be built on old sites, where the population
supporting new projects and hence new work.

All this problems with new reactors meant that the power output from a
single unit had to made as large as possible, instead of making two
medium size units. A single very big installation is more or less a
prototype.

Still more support for my statement.

A better approach would be building a series of small units and then
duplicate the design. This would mean that he same red tape could be
used for each identical unit (at least in the same country and
licensing authority). Also with a series of smaller units, the first
could be in production bringing revenue, while the next one(s) are
still under construction.

You talk like every rector is a total start from scratch regarding approvals. It's not. That is why very few are considering thorium molten salt reactors, they WOULD be a start from scratch and cost billions to get through the approval process.

The only small unit construction actually built that I know about is
the Admiral Lomonosov floating power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
with two KLT-40S nuclear icebreaker reactors. Unfortunately those
reactors are a bit small (2x35 MWe), so it usable only for low load
sites.

Great idea, but it doesn't matter what you think. It matters what the builders of nuke plants think.

Mostly they think it's too expensive and risky to get the plants built in a safe manner and are building other types of power plants.

--

Rick C.

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