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Post by edireland on Mar 31, 2013 0:59:27 GMT 9.5
The kind of world implied by smart meters is not one I want to live in.
The poor are forced to live their lives at different times to save money on lighting, heating and the like. Having to get up at 5am because they can't afford to put the kettle on to make tea at 7/8am because the price of electricity is so high.
Electricity is a public good and should be available on a pre defined pricing schedule (like Economy 7 is).
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Post by edireland on Mar 31, 2013 0:56:07 GMT 9.5
European grids don't tend to have that many pole mounted transformers, as our higher end voltage permits greater distance between the house's main breaker and the transformer, allowing them to be fitted in actual substations for the most part. (In the countryside you see pole mounted transformers but nowhere near as many as apparently exist in the US).
Either way.... it would probably become necessary to give houses three phase supplies as standard, even if no increase in delivered voltage is feasible. Otherwise there will be too many large unbalanced loads from staggered car charging.
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Post by edireland on Mar 30, 2013 0:00:19 GMT 9.5
We will correct the point.
"Solar is a rip-off except in a scenario where the price of electricity has been driven absurdly high by incredibly poor energy policy, using an electricity tariff designed to rip people off as the alternative energy source, in a location that is uniquely suited for solar power"
99.99999% of the time Solar is still a ripoff.
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Post by edireland on Mar 29, 2013 23:05:50 GMT 9.5
.... His electricity price goes up to ~92 cents per kWh.
That is price gouging thanks to him being stupid enough to get a smart meter.
He brought it upon himself.
EDIT:
A petrol or non-road diesel powered generator would beat 92 cents kWh.
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Post by edireland on Mar 29, 2013 13:02:13 GMT 9.5
The four grids in the USA and Canada are far from tree-like at the transmission level. At the distribution level ordinarily tree-like but there are exceptions. Indeed, there is a mesh in the top couple of levels but towards the bottom, which is where the majority of transmission losses take place, the system traditionally switches to the tree. For instance the cost of the transport of electricity on the UK's top level 132/400kV 'National Grid' comes to about ~1 US cent/kWh. Transmission losses tend to occur in the ~400/230V segment in the UK, and to a lesser extent in the 11kV distribution system. (This does lead to an interesting argument for increasing the effective house supply voltage, especially if EV charging becomes widespread)
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Post by edireland on Mar 28, 2013 12:30:20 GMT 9.5
A traditional electricity grid is "tree-like"
These are far easier to design and make efficient than the "mesh-like" smart grid required for distributed generation.
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Post by edireland on Mar 26, 2013 19:32:45 GMT 9.5
Biomass stoves and the like are unsustainable with our current global population. So we will need electric cooking and LED lighting in any case.
And probably refrigeration/freezer power if we want to maintain any semblance of a first world standard of living, TVs/Computers power consumption can be made negligible however.
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Post by edireland on Mar 26, 2013 18:12:12 GMT 9.5
There is no real "rural niche" anywhere that consumes large amounts of electricity.
Advances in power transport technologies have seen to that.
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Post by edireland on Mar 26, 2013 18:10:41 GMT 9.5
EPR is a disaster.
It should not be used as an example for anything apart from what happens when everything falls apart.
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Post by edireland on Mar 26, 2013 0:31:04 GMT 9.5
Capacitors? There has just got to be breakthroughs ahead. A capacitor stores energy by separating charges in a dielectric material. If we could separate the outermost electron just an extra 1% of its distance (say 100 pm) from its nucleus, we would store ~14 kJ/mole of atoms, according to my scribbling with Couloumb's Law. If it's hydrogen, that's about 14 MJ/kg, barely in the same ballpark as diesel fuel at ~40 MJ/kg, and more practical materials would be less. But there is still plenty of room for improvement compared to modern capacitors at ~2 kJ/kg. I guess the current limitation is the breakdown voltage, when a conductive path opens and a current discharges the material. Supercapacitors are not simple faradaic devices. Graphene Supercapacitors are supposedly capable of energy densities comparable to Lithium Ion batteries. They have apparently been demonstrated at ~306kJ/kg (~85Wh/kg). That is comparable to the performance of the battery pack of the Nissan Leaf.
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Post by edireland on Mar 25, 2013 12:19:27 GMT 9.5
If carbon nanotube/graphene supercapacitors actually arrive then we end up with another problem.
Handling the enormous peak loads from people ultra rapidly charging cars (by which I mean at megawatts of power transfer). (As you will be able to make power storage modules that have the volumetric and mass efficiency of lithium-ion batteries, but can recharge orders of magnitude faster)
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Post by edireland on Mar 24, 2013 22:28:54 GMT 9.5
Note that the article specifically states that this is only viable because of absurd subsidies for renewable power inflating that the entire cost of electricity in California..... And because of smart metering, it says more about the evils of smart metering and renewable power subsidies than anything else. It is also obviously true, that a small addition of solar and wind will not harm the grid, so such an addition makes sense. (as both are cheaper than all other sources by now) Then why are people demanding enormous subsidies that are often several times the net value of the electricity generated to install such systems? If they really are so cheap then everyone would be installing them. There would be solar power systems appearing all over the place. But let us get back on topic: Does anyone have a link to the full report? Her is my definition of a bad grid: It is a grid, that depends on a few power stations at few locations, which can be easily knocked out by a single catastrophic event. The full results of my investigation will be in my full report, but so far i can already tell you, that nuclear is doing at least 10 times worse than solar is, under that definition... Any reasonable grid will not be disabled by a single "catastrophic" event, unless this is something capable of disabling multiple turbine sets at multiple sites. Spinning Reserve in the form of pumped storage or quickly tripping industrial loads can make up for any reasonable fault condition. Meanwhile you don't have to pay enormous amounts of money for this benefit, unlike with solar power.
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Post by edireland on Mar 24, 2013 20:47:36 GMT 9.5
Sodium-Sulphur batteries are hardly new.
But having batteries full of tonnes of molten sodium is probably asking for trouble.
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Post by edireland on Mar 24, 2013 11:36:42 GMT 9.5
Other than in China it takes US$4--5/W or even more. In any case, Gen III NPPs can only ramp at 5%/min while a proper battery does very much better. Furthermore, batteries are available in 1--2 MW sizes and NPPs are much larger. The capital costs of the reactor make up the bulk of the operating costs though, leaving you with a reactor operating cost of ~1.5-2c/kWh including staffing and fuel. Which means its relatively cheap to run the reactor continuously and use the electricity for some industrial task.... like solid state ammonia synthesis (the electricity is the bulk of the projected cost of that process, which is going to very low in this model) Then when your power demand increases to the point where you would ordinarily need to run the battery you just shut down the plant. Therefore the reactor's effective throttling speed is the speed at which whatever your standby load can throttle, not what the reactor's actual throttling speed is (as the reactor runs flat out at all times). And the large cost of reactor construction is primarily an artefact of the insane amounts of legal wrangling that relates to fighting endless anti nuclear attempts to stop it, as well as the newly "free market" utilities in the west failing to use efficiencies of scale as EDF did in the 70s. As to the grid sizes... in the vast majority of the world having such small batteries is pointless. HVDC Light and similar will make such small installations pointless as almost everywhere can be practically connected to larger grids.
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Post by edireland on Mar 23, 2013 23:42:07 GMT 9.5
Correct me if I'm wrong... but isn't $3000/kW similar in price (atleast in order of magnitude) to a whole nuclear power plant?
Surely that would mean it would be cheaper to simply overbuild reactors.
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Post by edireland on Mar 23, 2013 6:54:09 GMT 9.5
I also wonder, how a Fukushima type accident and the following loss of all nuclear power is factored into their calculations?!? The Fukushima accident only destroyed 60% of the generating capacity of the plant. Reactors 5 and 6 could be expected to be returned to service if not for political interference and these make up about 40% of the plants nameplate capacity. If you mean "on the day" losses... how will your magical fields of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels survive the huge wall of water that did in the cooling pumps at the reactors?
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Post by edireland on Mar 23, 2013 6:32:29 GMT 9.5
The CANDU reactors are Bruce NPP were kept running at 60% reactor load for hours during a massive power cut by the simple expedient of dumping steam directly to the condensors instead of through the turbines. This tends to get expensive though as it reduces capacity factor, and since a nuclear power plants costs are basically all capital and staffing (which must retained no matter what the plant is actually doing) they do not reduce in line with produced energy output being cut. Load Following is going to be a lot less important in the future if we get intot things like Solid State Ammonia Synthesis or hydrogen production that will be able to reliably consume huge amounts of off peak electricity. Nuclear power plants build today need near perfect load following capabilities. the whole fleet needs to go close to zero during high winds or summer afternoons... and this needs to be economically feasible. good luck! Why? It would be cheaper to simply not build the wind or solar installations and keep the nuclear plants running 24/7. Once you have a staffed nuclear power plant the cost of additional generating capacity up to max capacity is ~1cent/kWh.
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Post by edireland on Mar 21, 2013 11:40:50 GMT 9.5
A rat chewed through some power cables.
There was never any danger of significant radiation release.
Really non-news.
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Post by edireland on Mar 18, 2013 12:52:20 GMT 9.5
But the country is not covered by wind masts and solar projects. The artcile is overestimating the problems by far. The WWF got it right. I am sorry! Using known figures for average UK annual insolation and the known efficiency of monocrystalline silicon solar panels (the only ones that will ever be available in sufficient quantities to provide significant maounts of power at the grid scale), an estimate of the area of photovoltaics required to produce the average energy demand of the United Kingdom can be derived. Current average grid load over the year is about 40GWe. This can easily be expected to double if natural gas is phased out and with our expanding economy, giving us ~80GWe. MacKay (who I don't agree with on many points related to nuclear fuel availability) has derived an estimate for an entirely electrically powered UK vehicle fleet that shows a requirement of roughly ~26GWe. This takes us to somewhere in the vicinity of 105GWe. The average annual insolation in the United Kingdom is ~900kWh/m 2. This translates to an average power of roughly 0.1kW/m 2. Which means, even if storage is perfect and has no losses, with ~15% efficient solar panels (used in the WWF solar "Atlas") you would only generate roughly 15MW for every square kilometre of solar panels. This means you would have to cover something approaching 7000 square kilometres with solar panels. Assuming the entire area of the site is a continuous sheet of solar panels. Once a 20% derating factor (again lifted from the WWF Solar "Atlas") has been included to account for access roads and shading avoidance this figure rises to 8400 square kilometres. That is roughly 3.5% of the United Kingdom's entire land surface. On the face of it that doesn't sound too bad, until you realise that is approximately 15% of all the United Kingdom's arable land. If you attempt to put all these solar panels on rooftops this area will increase to be greater than the entire developed area of the country as it stands today. If you attempt to move the solar panels to areas not intensively used for arable crops you will end up with an average insolation figure that could be 15% or more lower than the one I have used and still displace animal husbandry related farming activities. Either way you intend to consume rather large amounts of valuable farmland. This is just absurd, and you can't use wind power as a getout for this because the amount of wind turbines you would require to provide this power would lead to the average number of turbines visible from any point in the UK being something over a hundred. In comparison to generate 105GWe of average load using modern ESBWR type reactors you would need roughly 115GWe of installed plant, which is roughly 75 reactors. That is approximately 12 Gravelines NPP equivalents (the reators are larger but the plant would have a similar footprint overall as the reactor and turbine hall is only a small part of the plant's area). This would translate to six square kilometres. Which is probably far less area than would be covered by the concrete supports for all those wind turbines or solar farms.
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Post by edireland on Mar 18, 2013 12:31:45 GMT 9.5
When these constructions end in a decade, they will be up against fierce competition with cheaper renewables. These nuclear power plants will have trouble selling power during summer daytime at all! Only because solar and wind turbine operators have managed to obtain a "must take" priveledge that requires any power they have at any time to be purchased no matter the operational issues. Firstly "3.3GWe of capacity in 2012" equates to about 330MWe average capacity. This means Solar has been built with a capacity equal to constructing one ESBWR every 5 years. This is not really that impressive. Additionally if you actually read that article about the Corps of Engineers solar farm, you woudl note that the electricity is only cheaper than grid power because of the tax credit they recieved for building it. In other words the Department of Energy budget is being used to reduce the expenditure of the Department of Defence.
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Post by edireland on Mar 18, 2013 12:26:56 GMT 9.5
It seems to be suggesting that "row crop" agriculture be replaced with grassland grazing.
This has serious problems that I hope are obvious.
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Post by edireland on Mar 16, 2013 15:56:31 GMT 9.5
This handy PDF helps with EREOI calculations for LWRs. With fast reactors you can assume stockpiled uranium is used or the uranium is obtained from the sea adjacent ot the plant by one of those new passive uranium capture rigs the Japanese are working on. The dominant energy consumption then comes from plant construction. (The amount of fuel that has to be handled in the fuel fabrication facility consumes essentially no energy compared to plant production) EROEI has problems because it doesn't explain what you consider as a "modular" process. For instance is the energy required to run the reactor cooling pumps counted as energy "in" or just removed from the energy "out" figure. When you are at EROEIs of 50:1 or similar then single megawatt draws can make major differences in figures.
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Post by edireland on Mar 16, 2013 6:10:58 GMT 9.5
I tried to calculate the EROEI for an IFR a while back.... Came out at 16000:1 I think I made a mistake. Barry, solar uses X area of land for as long as you want thousands of years but nuclear uses Y area for 50+ years and the land is lost for almost all time and uses another Y area for the next 50+ years that is lost for all must ever so at some time you will use much more land then solar and it will be useless for all most ever. A rather large portion of the area of a nuclear power plant is stuff other than the reactor itself. Even if you are forced to leave the reactor containment standing indefinitely you can dismantle the turbine hall or even repurpose it to use another primary containment constructed next to the previous one. A 900MWe reactor like the ones at Gravelines in northern France has a main containment building roughly 40m in diameter. That is an area of roughly 1260 square metres. A 1260 square metre solar farm would produce roughly ~38kWe average, compared to potentially ~810MWe for the LWR (90% lifetime capacity factor). Which means that to produce the same amount of energy as the LWR did during its 60 year life, the solar plant would have to be in place roughly 21315 times as long. That is approximately 1.28 million years. I think the reactor vessel would be safe to cut open and dismantle loooong before then.
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Post by edireland on Mar 15, 2013 23:31:56 GMT 9.5
Edireland has unwittingly produced a proposed "solution" which actually demonstrates just how far from a solution we really are. Goodness knows how many folk live less than 6 metres above the high water mark of the world's coastlines, nor how much food is currently produced there, or how many species rely on the mangroves, estuaries and swamps. The numbers would be enormous. This is why we have to protect them from being drowned under 6m of seawater, like the Dutch have done with the polders we must do with most of the world's coastline. My rough guess is that about half of the world's food and half its population would be adversely affected by the engineering works needed to hold back 6 metres of ocean. Given the choice between "adversely affecting" those population centres and food production facilities, and leaving them under water, I believe there is only one choice, and that involves dykes the likes of which the world has never seen. Then what? Do humans continue till all ice has melted and 6 metres becomes 10? Then 15? Then 20? We have no other choice, unless you seriously propose abandoning that ground to the sea? Get real. Engineered solutions must address the causes, not the effects if they are to be reliable, affordable and sustainable. As in the health industry, prevention is much better than cure. Engineering prevention at this point is almost impossible. The "Green" movement has succesfully daemonised the only technologies that could hope to do the job in time. We will just have to live with 6m of sea level rise and hope we can adapt and possibly reverse it before it gets to its full extent.
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Post by edireland on Mar 12, 2013 13:08:39 GMT 9.5
edireland: You may be right. Anyone done a study? If you look at the Island of Manhattan it appears to be rising right off the surface of the water. A wall around it and all of the other coastal cities of the world? I feel a lot less sanguine about that than you. Presumably rather than attempting to dam off the shores of iconic places like Manhattan Island, you would: 1. Install a dam across the Arthur Kill in the vicinity of Perth Amboy. 2. Install another dam across the East River between City Island and King's Point in Long Island (and obviously over the small channel between City Island and the mainland) 3. Construct a third dam across the Verrazano Narrows at roughly the same position as the bridge. 4. Install pumping stations. At full flow the Hudson River can dump more than 6800 cubic metres of water into the bay every second, lifting that 6 metres consumes only 400MWe. Average flow is roughly a tenth this. It would be prudent to overbuild capacity and distribute it across all three barrages to give redundancy. 5. Finally, install locks in atleast one of the barrages to enable ships to still reach the bay, river and the container ports, presumably building them in the Arthur Kill and East River barrages would be most efficient. Ship lifts could be provided for smaller vessels. This would completely seal the New York Bay, and it would enclose such a large area behind the barrages (it has to be 150 square kilometres of water easily as the river is still Tidal as far north as Troy) that even if all pumping stations failed wiith the Hudson at its maximum seasonal flow it would only cause sea level rise of approximately 17cm per hour. Which would give some time to get the pumps operational again. This would also turn the bay into a brackish water environment although it is unlikely to become completely fresh as it would still recieve injections of seawater from the working of the locks in the barrages. If the ports eventually close in favour of ones outside the barrages then the locks can be partially retired. It would be very expensive but still cheaper than building 6m high sea defences across all the coastlines that fall behind these proposed barrages.
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Post by edireland on Mar 11, 2013 9:51:34 GMT 9.5
6m sea level rise is not going to be catastrophic if it is spread over a century.
A small proportion of global GDP would cover the cost Dutch style flood defences for everyone.
(You might even bea ble to completely close areas such as the Irish Sea or what not with barrages, removing the need to build flood defences along those coasts).
It is probably the climatic issues with the intensification of the water cycle that will causet he problem.
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Post by edireland on Mar 10, 2013 23:47:40 GMT 9.5
The only contingency that really ought to be prepared for is the production of multiple 600 tonne ingot, 15000t force forging presses.
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Post by edireland on Mar 5, 2013 10:46:50 GMT 9.5
SMA provides pretty accurate data of power provided by solar systems in Germany. you can scroll back a few days, if you want to take a look at january/february. www.sma.de/unternehmen/pv-leistung-in-deutschland.htmlBut you should also look at today (04. march) and you would see that for several hours (10 am to 3 pm?) solar provided more power than the remaining nuclear power plants... One would hope so, considering the absolutely absurd amount of money that has been expended on them, and the fact taht the vast majority of the German reactor fleet is already gone. PV expenditure has probably been an order of magnitude higher than the cost of building nuclear plant equal in capacity to the whole remaining German reactor park.
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Post by edireland on Mar 5, 2013 10:43:10 GMT 9.5
You can have very hot and humid conditions under a rather dull sky.....
And in Ibiza I recall air conditioning loads being rather significant 24 hours a day during the summer, and solar is not available during the night.
India's grid is almost nonexistant on a national scale with huge fractions of thepopulation having no grid access, it is hardly representative of the western world.
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Post by edireland on Feb 26, 2013 4:12:51 GMT 9.5
Magnox certainly has on power refueling..... as does the AGR (although AGR has to operate at reduced power during the changeover to prevent vibration issues causing problems for the equipment).
At the time the engineers who designed Magnox thought that any commercial nuclear reactor would need on power refueling to be economically viable, even if they didn't need to use it to make WG plutonium (which they obviously did in the case of Magnox).
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