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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says
By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.
The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.
As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.
Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aim on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:24AM (9 children)
You're way off.
In the real world, existing constructions are very often anything but energy-efficient. It is rather normal by now to renovate in such a way as to improve that situation, leading to much less waste (heating, cooling). New constructions should be or already are (where I live) regulated to be energy efficient.
In the same context of renovation, when doing the roof, why not think about going with photovoltaics or solar heating/cooling? No need for huge PV plants, they can be installed decentrally just fine. All those roofs have a huge surface, many can efficiently be equipped with e.g. PV.
Example: my house was built in the 1950ies, and was not energy efficient. I've had important parts insultated, better windows, the heater was upgraded from a plain old natural gas heater to a condensing boiler, and water gets heated by that same boiler rather than an electric one. Energy consumption has gone way down, and the top floor rooms are much cooler in summer than they used to be. Further works applied to that house will still improve on the current state, those investments do pay off after a while. PV / solar heating is unfortunately not an option in my specific case (it would be if the house faced south), neither is a heat pump.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:42AM (5 children)
Now toss in your fancy electric car which would require a hundred or more panels and constant sunlight to maintain.
Then factor in the inefficiency of battery charging so you still have power when its dark.
Add in the maintenance of the panels and batteries which have a limited lifespan.
Not to mention the toxic materials that go into making said panels and the fact that they can't be recycled.
All this to avoid a wild guess that a couple bucks might be saved 20 years from now.
You want an electric emissions free future? There's only one way - nuclear. Meantime proven NG plants are the best bet.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:15PM
Toxic materials like ... which of them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:12PM
Nontoxic like nuclear?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @05:06PM (2 children)
yah, i would rather spend a night at a silicon panel dump site then the prestine beaches at daiichi, non?
someones nuclear shill and dumping the toxic waste specter all over green and red site.
everything "toxic" in silicon panels was toxic before it captured light and made electricity.
with nuclear fission we are producing MORE radioactif materials then were present before!
anyways, solar for the WIN however, i agree, we also need to think panel recycling NOW (especially considering itz lots of "made in china" stuff).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:07PM
Euuuh....No, but yes.
Nuclear reactors (except breeders) consume radioactive materials and convert them to electricity. The problem is that there are a lot of "waste products" that are hard to deal with. The ones that are radioactively dangerous have a relatively short half-life...but some of them tend to get entangled in biological tissue, so they need to be confined.
OTOH, "relatively short" can be as long as a couple of hundred years, or as short at a few nano-seconds. The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the product (at equivalent exposure). As for radioactive danger, most alpha radiation can't get through your skin, and beta isn't much worse. It's the gamma you need to worry about, if it's outside your body. If it gets inside, though, it's a different story, and especially if it gets built into an important molecule, because when it emits radiation it changes into a different element, and that can do all sorts of weird things. Most of the time it isn't important, but it *can* be deadly...in a slow motion fashion.
That said and admitted, this is usually not anything to worry about, unless you're exposed to massive doses. It's true that sometimes it is, and unpredictably so, but the probability is low. And this kind of danger doesn't keep people from living in Colorado, where the incident radiation is a lot higher than in, say, Texas. (Yellowstone is called yellowstone because it's a yellow Uranium ore. Generally a very poor grade ore, but it still emits radiation...of course, so does granite, but yellowstone is a lot better ore.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Wednesday September 11 2019, @10:21PM
This is incorrect.
You can make a legitimate argument that radioactive materials are concentrated from a dispersed state, but nuclear power production net consumes radioactive material.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:06AM
If you can't do a heat pump because your foundation is sitting on solid rock, they do have air source heat pumps (ASHP). They're not as efficient as ground-source heat pumps, but if you did all the insulating work you listed it could still handle things.
If you have at least 6ft. of top soil/clay/sand but no more, there are different configurations of burying the loops a ground source heat pump (GSHP) needs. Instead of one deep column, several shorter ones will do, or a trench configuration where you dig that 6' deep trench and lay the loops out horizontally. I would go with a closed-loop system though, instead of one of the open loop systems that uses groundwater--too much potential for fouling.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:51AM
Get with the times! Gas is bad, and not allowed in forward-looking construction projects.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:12AM
Oh, you mean like in Florida, the Sunshine State? Sure... except that local regulation and fees (legislation authored by the state's largest power company and rubber-stamped by the legislature) mean that it is economically infeasible to install solar roofs here, and even if you hurt yourself financially to get one, the regulations also mean that the standard code compliant, installations won't serve as a local power source for the homeowner in the case of grid failure, such as happens when the occasional hurricane passes through.
FP&L needs huge PV plants, because extracting money from power flowing between citizens' roofs and their homes is too difficult.
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