Pepe's energy thread.

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http://joannenova.com.au/2019/10/oopsie ... thousands/

Seems like the perfect time to reiterate what I said last time. Solar and Wind is a total waste of time and resources, it's solely about politicians appeasing low information green voters. Battery technology is not there yet and probably never will be, you have to have fossil fuel backups for a solar/wind grid. If you want to go green it's nuclear or bust. And even if you don't care about clean power, nuclear is awesome.

Zing.

I wish the politics could be taken out of the issue,
And pragmatism and common sense prevailed.

From my position here in Oz,
There is so much virtue signalling involved which doesn't solve anything.
To the contrary,
It gets in the way of practical solutions.

BTW,
I am totally in favour of nuclear energy,
Until something goes wrong.


https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/720 ... 797983.jpg

Looks purdy, though.

Sure this looks like a hole, but does not mean it is infeasible. A large enough power network to make use of empty space, to make more than normally needed and store a large amount, would have covered this situation. Eventually better and better technology will be made that will stop this situation.

Although, I too am of the belief that Australia should have a transition away from fossil fuels and into nuclear power, at least as an interim before entirely renewable technology can be implemented and catch up to the desired amount. It also makes economic sense with our large amount of empty spaces and lack of things like earthquakes.

I'm afraid it really is infeasible on so many levels. With current technology it is quite impossible to create enough energy storage to make a fully renewable grid work, You would either have to flood every single valley in the land, and then dig out many more for hydro storage. Or to create Li-ion battery storage you would need to mine 2-3 other planets to get the necessary materials. If you overbuild the production infrastructure you would need more land than is realistically available and even then you would see the same reliability issues.



This is not a sure thing by any means. Battery technology may actually have come as far as it ever will. As energy density increases, the more volatile (explosively unreliable) a storage medium becomes. For an electrical grid you would need some fairly stable batteries. Even lithium batteries are a bit dodgy for this kind of thing. I'm sure everyone has seen that burning electric car, or laptops and phones suddenly combusting. Imagine that kind of thing on the scale of a battery attached to an electricity grid.



Well that's somewhat sensible. Thing is, if you are going to do nuclear properly... you don't really need solar or wind or tidal. It's just pointless effort, wasted land
and electrical infrastructure.

If we only went by established technology limitations, computers would take up a room, communication would be limited to wires , or maybe everything would be steam powered. The only way to improve things like better energy sources, that will not eventually be used up as we burn the limited source, is if we innovate, and that will only happen with a demand of it trying to reach such a future. Progress never came from simply being happy with the status quo and accepting things as impossible.

It's more a suspected limitation of physics than a failure of imagination. I suppose it is possible some amazing new material might come along that defies the general rule of energy density, but it's reasonable to say that it is an unlikely future development. Li-ion is likely as good a trade-off as we can get between useful capacity and volatility.

While it's ok for phones, laptops, maybe even cars it's probably still not good enough for an electrical grid - even if building lithium on that scale was doable, which it isn't

We may eventually be able to reverse the act of creating nuclear power with enough energy, essentially turning atoms into batteries. That would be a crazy thing in the future, but no steps go forward if we just go "alright, we got power now, lets never think about it again". I am no expert on the subject, but I know a lot now would be magic 50 years ago, science fiction. Smart phones are kind of insane.

People thought humans being able to fly would be impossible, but others did no stop despite the failures and seeming dead ends.

I'm not really sure where you are going with this. I've said solar and wind just isn't going to work without fossil fuel back ups - (and those moneyed interests know this). Somehow you've taken this as a call to stop trying to improve energy generation altogether. You can't engineer something on dreams, and these continual failures of solar and wind aren't going to make green policies any more popular.

I am saying that renewable energy should not be given up on. If it so far inefficient, then have the mass need covered by nuclear power that is done so safely, at least in Australia that has a lot of space. And then continue to have imposed requirements to make cleaner energy sources as to push innovation, for more efficient solar, energy efficient devices, and batteries that can hold more power of clean energy.

I am an accountant, I am familiar with meeting goals as not an all or nothing scenario. You can assign money value to things like lower carbon footprint, to infrastructure that is more efficient, and to R&D that may have a payoff in the future. Creating a Goodwill for future generations to inherit that via R&D, even into clean energy, from a system that calculated carbon footprint, is the dream.

Ah I see. Perhaps I should clarify. I used an analogy in the other thread (not my best) for a mixed nuclear/renewable grid. It would be like creating an entire fleet of green, clean highly efficient supertrucks that can haul 25 tons a piece while simultaneously investing billions and billions in hamster powered tricycles that can manage 100kg each, because hamsters are really popular. It should make more sense, especially to an accountant, to forego Project Hamster and just build another truck or two.

As an aside solar is really really dirty compared to nuclear.

It can still have its places to implement renewable energy. For instance, Australia is really big, and there can be very long stretches between major communities, and this is why I thought it was pretty smart that emergency phones that I saw in the middle of nowhere had a solar panel above them to power it. Remove the need to have power lines to things in remote locations, it is the more efficient choice.

And as it stands we consider a lot spaces where a renewable energy source is not implemented as being wasted. Perhaps quicker to just implement a nuclear power plant, but making use of land that is only really just empty deserts could save on having to wait for the very long time that it takes for nuclear waste to become less dangerous, especially if everything can become more energy efficient. There logically should not be any power used for lights that could not be covered by renewable energy.

Also, from what I can see, sources of that article may not be without bias, I think I saw BP in there somewhere, and not sure if it is taking into count actual nuclear waste that takes a very long time to not be incredible toxic.

Hey!
You two!
Get a room!

In the UK, new wind is much cheaper than new nuclear. In most countries, new solar is much cheaper than new nuclear. And yes that’s in unit of power terms not generator terms.

The economic case for renewables is probably the most compelling reason to invest in them. The other one that comes close is the practical element. We don’t have a scooby how to actually build enough plants and our best bet is “get the Chinese to do it for us”.

Current UK plan is that in 2030 the power generation mix will be equally split between wind/solar, nuclear, and gas with CCUS. All of those components present challenges but the mix mitigates against those to an extent.

This is debateable. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... expensive/

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;
24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;
over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?

One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.

But, again, that’s not what happened.

The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.

The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.

Funny, here in Australia we mostly use fossil fuels like coal, and our price of electricity went up in the last several years. That there have even been calls to have the government get involved.