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Post by edireland on Apr 16, 2013 21:00:24 GMT 9.5
Because if it can't sustain those figures in an isolated system it is absolutely no use for determining whether we can do this across the entire European continental landmass. It is highly likely that is what that is happening is that Portugal is exporting power to the European supergrid some of the time and then importing huge amounts of electricity during other times. ... You can't view Portugal as an isolated system. You pretty much have to treat the UK, Irish and Western European supergrids as one interconnected whole. It is not me, who wants to exclude the rest of Europe, it is you. It is obvious, that renewables like wind and solar benefit from integration into a wider grid. But even IF Portugal is forced to import nuclear or fossil fuel power from neighbour countries, it could still benefit from not having to fully backup alternative power. ("pooling" backup can save ressources) If you don't want to exclude the rest of Europe, stop quoting figures for Portugal alone. What are the renewable energy figures (listing Hydro seperately) for all of Western Europe? You don't get to go on and on about how Portugal has managed to be 50%+ renewable if you are treating the grid as whole object. And with regards to those "50,000" hydro stations in Germany.... those stations are almost entirely of power ratings in the single digit kilowatts. They are "stations" in mill ponds and other such things that are of questionable economic value, hence the need for enormous subsidies.
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Post by edireland on Apr 16, 2013 2:40:03 GMT 9.5
Now cut all the transmission lines between Portugal and Spain. See if they can sustain those figures in an isolated system. Why would you want such a handicap for renewables? Are you sure, that Portugal was not importing spanish solar power? Because if it can't sustain those figures in an isolated system it is absolutely no use for determining whether we can do this across the entire European continental landmass. It is highly likely that is what that is happening is that Portugal is exporting power to the European supergrid some of the time and then importing huge amounts of electricity during other times. hydro will increase as other renewables increase. It is not your choice, to decide, what counts as renewables and what does not. As i said above: people here will deny stuff, which is already happening. So where will these Hydro power plants go? I will let you in on a big secret about Europe.... thanks to several thousand years of technological civilisation, pretty much every hydro resource that can be tapped already has been. There was a government study in the UK a few years back that concluded that the Scottish Hydro Board had already developed >90% of the available hydro resources in Scotland during the 50s and 60s. A similar situation pervades over pretty much all of Europe excluding perhaps Norway and Iceland, and they can only manage all hydro simply because they haev such small populations. PS: notice, they also saved a lot of coal and gas. This also is in contradiction to theories brought forward here... We do not have sufficient information to determine that. The coal plants cannot start up in seconds so we cannot derive estimates for the amount of coal power capacity that is in cold storage compared to warm standby waiting for something to happen. You can't view Portugal as an isolated system. You pretty much have to treat the UK, Irish and Western European supergrids as one interconnected whole.
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Post by edireland on Apr 15, 2013 0:44:07 GMT 9.5
Now cut all the transmission lines between Portugal and Spain. See if they can sustain those figures in an isolated system. And I do note that 37% of that energy production is hydro, which is not traditionally classified with "renewables"
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Post by edireland on Apr 14, 2013 8:48:21 GMT 9.5
Is it a problem with the design or with the simulation used by the regulator? As I understand it it was with the simulation used by GE to prove that the design conformed with the requisite standards. Its not a safety critical part as I understand it, and the expectation is that the permissions will be granted some time this year, and the first US ESBWR project is still moving forward.
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Post by edireland on Apr 14, 2013 2:44:43 GMT 9.5
There are problems with the simulations of the steam driers apparently.
They are not enough to kill the project but running new numerical simulations of steam dryer behavior over the entire operating range takes a looong time.
With regards to your earlier comments: I myself I don't think the "liberalised" electricity market really exists anywhere. As you say, power plants are incredibly capital intensive and most are not built without state backing of one type or another. As low carbon technologies are capital intensive even by power station standards it is unlikely they would be built without enormous subsidies such as those being lavished on wind power and PV now.
The only solution in my opinion is state ownership, and this ties in with my belief that electricity is one of the essential goods in our civilisation that should be available to all at the lowest feasible fixed rate, in the largest possible quantities.
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Post by edireland on Apr 13, 2013 23:12:52 GMT 9.5
EDF (building EPRs) has apparently managed to obtain a price of around 20 US cents/kWh.
It has managed this since that is the price of offshore wind, the next cheapest renewable source that is practical for large scale deployment. It has nothing to do with the price of the electricity.
A public works programme building 30 or even more of the same reactor is the way to go. Once we kill natural gas anad so on we could be looking at 60 or so reactors (in the UK) if we have some decent industrial sinks for excess juice.
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Post by edireland on Apr 13, 2013 19:34:39 GMT 9.5
I have access to that through my University Library.... I will read it and crunch it.
EDIT:
The prices are all in 1991 values and represent the BN-800 projections at the time of the collapse of the USSR.
This information has already entered the general IAEA literature on fast reactors.
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Post by edireland on Apr 13, 2013 19:26:00 GMT 9.5
They are planning two or four.
Everyone else is building EPRs.
The whole thing is a mess, we forget the lesson the French taught us and go for an American style reactor zoo that doesn't deliver cost savings.
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Post by edireland on Apr 13, 2013 8:26:58 GMT 9.5
ESBWR is stuck in the last phase of the approvals process.
ABWR has already been approved in the US and can thus be expected to be fast tracked through the British process.
Additionally the cost of power that the Nuclear operators have been able to extort from the Government is so high that reducing the cost of electricity is unimportant.
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Post by edireland on Apr 12, 2013 1:34:24 GMT 9.5
Have you accounted for the significant wind power subsidy in these numbers that claim "free power"?
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Post by edireland on Apr 11, 2013 23:39:27 GMT 9.5
But I still think industrial processes that can rapidly trip out from 100% load to near 0% load will make "peaking power" meaningless. Main problem here would be capital expense, if the equipment is expensive then it'll probably make more sense to run it all the time so that kind of load would require high energy use but cheap equipment. Remember that most "peaking power" is used for rather higher capacity factor than say 10% of the very top of the merit order. You could easily keep a lot of SSAS type plants running ~70% of the time or similar, and then have things like low cost KOH electrolysers that just guzzle electricity but cost almost nothing to manufacture. I would have all these process unist owned by the utility so they could internally charge themselves the marginal cost of the electricity production. If they charge themselves more than ~1.5 cents/kWh average the grid is better off for running the processes. (SSAS type plants could have a higher accounting marginal cost to account for the higher value of the product)
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Post by edireland on Apr 11, 2013 8:50:27 GMT 9.5
Fuel costs for reactors are currently so low compared to total operating costs that you could just keep a light water reactor at full power and dump any steam that can't be consumed by the grid coupled turbogenerators to the condenser.
But I still think industrial processes that can rapidly trip out from 100% load to near 0% load will make "peaking power" meaningless.
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Post by edireland on Apr 10, 2013 2:34:19 GMT 9.5
Nuclear power is a dependency?
I might as well say solar power is just another dependency..... on sand.
Uranium is available anywhere.
Even with today's inefficient LWRs seawater extraction of uranium will be viable, as it will eventually allow uranium production anywhere with a coastline at a price approximately double the current market value. (Japanese research in this field is already well advanced)
Doubling the market value of uranium will have effectively no effect on the production price of nuclear electricity.
And this is before we assume fast reactors, at which point granite has an energy value ten times that of coal.
EDIT:
And solar is not the answer to dependency on "big power companies".... since large solar power plants are less non-viable than the small installations people often pretend a solar rollout would lead to.
Even at today's $660/kg seawater extraction price that comes out at an added cost of roughly 1.2 US cents/kWh. So its not really a deal breaker.
The only solution to "big power companies" is the nationalisation of the electricity supply, but that is a position on which I am in the minority on this board.
EDIT #2:
You could also easily store enough natural uranium to run a power plant for nearly a decade at little cost at the current uranium price of only ~$100/kg. A $16.2m gets you 160t of natural uranium which enriches to something like a years worth of ESBWR fuel. That is enough fuel to produce something like ~$1.4bn dollars.
So $972m could buy 9600t of natural uranium, which would be enough fuel to run the reactor for its entire projected 60 year lifespan.
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Post by edireland on Apr 8, 2013 5:14:45 GMT 9.5
I'm not convinced either. It is mostly a renewables enthusiast fantasy. Unfortunately most renewables people aren't too familiar with engineering and the business side of things. Hydrogen equipment is very expensive when you add it all up. I doubt even using electrolysers for intermittent off-peak electricity absorption will make sense economically. The equipment costs a lot to buy, maintain and staff, and the energy losses are big (which can be considered a further operational cost). No one will go to all that trouble with the industrial equipment and then run it 20% of the time. Not happening when you can just get cheap fossil and run the equipment 80-90% of the time. Realistically hydrogen will continue to come from natural gas, and won't be used for energy storage, but for making chemicals. Electrolysers can't compete with that, even with 2 cent per kWh electricity. Remember: the peak load would be at something on order of 10% of the time. Almost 90% of the time the peak generating capacity will be free. Solid state Ammonia Synthesis is another example of a process that could be used to soak up power. Additionally there has been some very good work on low capital cost non-membrane electrolysers (using KOH) that trade off somewhat reduced efficiency for very low capital cost. Since the electricity is very cheap this marginally reduced efficiency is not a real problem.
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Post by edireland on Apr 8, 2013 0:59:07 GMT 9.5
I am not convinced by storing hydrogen for the purposes of generating electricity.
I would think it would be better to use generated hydrogen for various industrial processes and then simply run the electrolysers to soak up any excess generation capacity available.
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Post by edireland on Apr 7, 2013 21:08:25 GMT 9.5
Even cryogenic hydrogen has a specific gravity of about 0.08.
Storage is a nightmare.
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Post by edireland on Apr 7, 2013 2:14:45 GMT 9.5
Inside that radius, there are scores of mines on diesel. There are many more mineral deposits that don't have enough power and water to run a mine. And any number of the value-adding industries that could grow up around the fresh product, if they had enough power and water. This is where you would expect nuclear to trump diesel. It would for a mine that can thus grow big and its town become permanent. However small mines need a variable 20 MWe or so, can't supply cooling water and need most of the nuke to be transported out and in as operations close and re-open. By my reading of the tea leaves, that would need the nuke to heat air (not steam) to drive the turbine, its modules would need to be small enough to be trucked in and out, and its still-hot core small enough to be helicoptered away to its next place of work. You could probably use HVDC Light to link every mine within a couple of hundred miles into a single grid and then supply electricity from a single midsize power plant. That avoids the whole mobile thing, since with appropriate lightweight posts HVDC cables could be dismantled and moved around as required. Air cooled condensers have been developed for LWR type reactors, which reduces the losses to the marginal losses from the primary steam loop. An SBWR/ESBWR type reactor could also have sufficient water stockpiled in staging tanks to cover emergency cooling use at fairly low cost.
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Post by edireland on Apr 6, 2013 20:32:37 GMT 9.5
Israel requires solar hot water equipment on pretty much all new homes I believe.
They will probably require a "warm water" tank for boiler feedwater to work properly in temperate climes though.
Looking at the price of systems in Israel, even adjusting for insolation differences you can see that systems in most of the west are very very expensive.
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Post by edireland on Apr 6, 2013 20:28:33 GMT 9.5
5kW?
We are talking charge loads in the megawatt range if these supercapacitors work.
25kWh Nissan Leaf battery charge in 90 seconds.
People don't like overnight charging because of the fact it puts a hard limit on how far they can drive during the day.
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Post by edireland on Apr 5, 2013 22:51:35 GMT 9.5
Offshore wind's capital costs have been shown to be >$10,000/kW.
I believe a project in the UK came out with a capital cost of >$25,000/kW.
And then there are the huge maintenance costs of having your plant in the middle of the sea all winter to consider.
"Exponential Increase" may be occuring, but that is because the whole industry is like an opium addict who has been put in charge of a drug dispensary. The whole thing is just a giant subsidy junkie.
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Post by edireland on Apr 5, 2013 10:28:44 GMT 9.5
It is worth noting that the Melbourne study indicates you can configure for reliable peak shaving or for maximum PV energy production, but not both.
Solar power produces most power when the solar flux is highest, which tends to occur around or shortly after midday.
Air conditioning demand scales by the integral of solar flux, which means it happens quite a lot later (around here temperature starts to peak at 3-4pm).
Which means that solar output is already falling off when air conditioning demand reaches its peak.
EDIT:
The Scottish 100% target excludes balancing. This means they just have to attract as much of possible of the mandated "renewable energy" capacity for the entire UK into Scotland.
They also appear to be close to abandoning the target.
It is possible to go for 100% renewables with internal grid balancing, but it would be insanely expensive because of the huge amounts of grid storage required.
Cover the country with pumped storage plants and battery banks.
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Post by edireland on Apr 3, 2013 22:05:13 GMT 9.5
So according some days in Melbourne, the grid will save 1200MW of conventional demand thanks to 2000MW of solar.....
But on other days there is no demand benefit at all, so assuming the Table 2 data is accurate.... you only save 807MW of plant (reduction in absolute peak demand from ~9858MW to ~9051MW).
So, lets just do some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Which is cheaper to build out and operate? 2000MW of solar, or 807MW of gas or nuclear?
Well even at the low low prices being reported for large scale installations (so hardly the "democratisation of power" hailed by solar advocates) of $2200/kW, this would give an installation price of $4.4bn US dollars.
Which means the price of the nuclear build, assuming a 900MW unit, would have to be below $4880/kW in order to be even on capital cost grounds. That would be challenging in the first world if you are only going to build a single unit or a small fleet of them (you should easily be able to beat that in the west if you go all out for nuclear rollout).
But there is something that is not mentioned in these comparisons, while solar would have no fuel costs and nuclear does have manning costs of about 1cent/kWh (US), the plant will be able to turn out power at 1-2cents/kWh all night and for significant portions of daylight hours.
This power could be used to run a large desalination plant during off peak hours, water being something you will probably need relatively soon in Australia and large parts of India. As the cost of the nuclear plant has been defrayed the electricity is so cheap that the relatively low capacity factor (~70%) for the desalination equipment becomes effectively meaningless.
So no, nuclear has solar beaten in this application as well.
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Post by edireland on Apr 3, 2013 6:31:11 GMT 9.5
" Government support and ample solar resources have also helped to increase solar adoption, but perhaps the biggest factor has been need. India, "as a growing economy with a surging middle class, is now facing a severe electricity deficit that often runs between 10 and 13 percent of daily need"" That is the telling statement. The only reason solar is making any progress is the fact that the Indian economy is still in the geometric energy use increase phase of development. The amount of solar added is simply because nothing else is available and there is a glut of solar panels caused by the collapse in demand for them everywhere else. In the long term it is probably no more viable than it is in Southern Europe. And what happens to the power demand during the Monsoon?
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Post by edireland on Apr 3, 2013 4:08:28 GMT 9.5
You may not have noticed, but most of the areas where Solar PV could Potentially be considered a working solution..... has very few people in it.
Nevada or most of Australia is a desert for a reason. The fraction of the world's population living in appropriate areas is tiny.
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Post by edireland on Apr 2, 2013 22:01:47 GMT 9.5
In britain, during winter, the demand spike starts before sunrise, let alone the sun clearing trees/buildings.
So the demand would spike and then drop again leaving us with an OCGT suited peak in the morning and again in the evening.
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Post by edireland on Apr 2, 2013 7:03:07 GMT 9.5
The fact they still need a subsidy of 30p/kWh or more in Britain is rather telling.
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Post by edireland on Apr 2, 2013 4:23:58 GMT 9.5
On the whole though I think we'd be better off if we realised that Daylight Savings Time was a joke, not something that should actually be implemented and if you're worried about children going to school in the dark just start school later rather than screw around with the clocks. But then what do you do with the children before they go to school, after the parents have gone to work? They still have to transit somewhere in the dark because if you wait till 10am or whatever, the parents will already be in work. And you still run into trouble during the depths of winter because if you are not careful because they will be coming back from school in the dark instead. Even in Edinburgh (so south of Scotland)... the day in the depths of winter is only ~7hrs long.
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Post by edireland on Apr 2, 2013 0:11:53 GMT 9.5
Daylight Saving Time in the UK is primarily because otherwise we could end up with children in the north of the country going to school in the dark in Winter otherwise.
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Post by edireland on Mar 31, 2013 20:48:23 GMT 9.5
We don't have a "Utility rate commission" in the United Kingdom.
Any significant control of pricing was abandoned upon the privatisation of the Central Electricity Generating Board in the 80s.
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Post by edireland on Mar 31, 2013 12:00:27 GMT 9.5
Electricity is a public good and should be available on a pre defined pricing schedule (like Economy 7 is). Please explain "Economy 7" for us internationals. Our various jurisdictions may have similar implementations of a right to cheap power. Oops sorry. In the United Kingdom, you can choose to go onto either: 1. A flat rate tariff where you are charged a flat rate for each unit used 2. A two tier tariff with more expensive daytime electricity and cheaper nighttime electricity. There are variations on the second option, in some cases the times of some tariffs are entirely fixed whilst in others the meters are changed over by a digital command embedded into the Radio 4 Long-wave signal. However in the latter case there have to be at-least a set number of hours of "low price" electricity in each 24 hour period, and the prices are still fixed, you merely switch between them. Contrast this with a smart meter, where the price varies from one minute to the next and can jump to extreme values with little warning in certain circumstances. The term "Economy 7" comes from the fact that the scheme was originally developed such that you would receive seven hours of "low rate" electricity every night. This has led to it being fairly common to run things like washing machines and the like overnight using timer functions built into them.
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