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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: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:07PM (32 children)
Solar constant [wikipedia.org] is conservatively about 1kW/sqm
68GW at PV 10% efficiency (low) means 680 sq km or about 232 sq miles. Multiply it by 3 to amount for buffers and we are sill taking small numbers; for comparison the Mojave Dessert [ttps] "occupies 47,877 sq mi (124,000 km2)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 11 2019, @02:24PM (6 children)
And, the Mojave is a damned good place to plant a lot of photovoltaic plants. I'm sure that I must have seen a cloudy day there, at least once, but I can't recall it.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:51PM (5 children)
Yes, and all of the other deserts in that area of the US.
The problem that people keep raising is how to efficiently move the energy to far away cities. Maybe factories like steel-making could be built there.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)
Not a bad idea. They could also move a bunch of Californians in, and house them underground. Eliminating the transmission lines would save bundles of money. Put the work there, put the people there, all they need is water!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @07:26AM
Then we can cut the water and have them die. It's a win-win, they will finally be in socialist utopia they so richly desire, and we will have gotten rid of all the problems they cause.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @05:08PM
Make it aluminium [wikipedia.org] as your energy buffer: "energy density is 1300 Wh/kg (present) or 2000 Wh/kg (projected)"
See other Aluminium based chemistries [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:09PM
I think steel making uses a lot of water, and so do most other industries. It's probably easier to move the electricity.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:09AM
You don't need to. Insolation (the solar potential of a location) is pretty decent for the majority of the United States. So, most of us can generate the power we need with solar where we are.
Anyone who doubts that should read up on Germany's Energiewende. I think they got something like 23% of their power from renewables last year, and they are much further north and much more overcast than the continental US.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:28PM (24 children)
There isn't a nation on earth right now that has the resources to build that many solar panels. By the time you had mined enough raw materials, polluted the waterways with the toxins needed to etch them, and installed them all, the first half of what you installed would already be at end of life, and the bloody things can't be recycled. And one of the few things that captures solar heat better than co2 and methane is a black solar panel.
So congratulations! You've just defiled a huge swath of land, started an endless cycle of polluting the waterways with panel production, and for your trouble you've also increased the ambient temperatures to build a system that only generates power during the day much of which is lost to battery charging inefficiencies and over extended power transmission line distances (because you're too damn far away from the places that actually need the power), all because you refused to use existing technologies that have far less material and financial requirements, a vastly smaller footprint, can operate 24/7, and ultimately is cleaner for the environment.
It's about going nuclear folks. You want massive amounts of clean emissions free power you need to push nuclear. Just look at China - they account for more than half the pollution on this planet, but at least they know it and they're pushing ahead strongly with their nuclear program with the modern standardized Westinghouse AP 1000 plant design. Why can they do it and we can't? Because of the damn treehuggers who think modern nuclear power is some kind of dangerous bogeyman.
And never mind that currently nuclear has a better safety record than solar. Yep, you heard that right! More people have died from solar than nuclear. To date solar accounts for 1% of global power generation and accounts for 440 deaths/trillion kWhr whereas nuclear, which generates 20% of global power, is at... wait for it... 0.1 deaths/trillion kWhr. That means solar is 4400 times more deadly than nuclear. So tell me again why everyone is so anti nuclear? Because it's not rational that we aren't pushing hard for it in the US if you really care about the climate.
Let's stick with realistic solutions instead of this pie in the sky garbage. This is nothing more than virtue signalling and it's at great cost to our future.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:09PM (6 children)
Fukushima.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday September 11 2019, @05:08PM
Fukushima deaths were from the tsunami. There's probably an increased cancer risk that actuaries can translate into equivalent deaths, but they haven't occurred yet.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @06:10PM (4 children)
The Fukushima plant was designed in the early 1960's. Think about that and where engineering and computing was back then. And frankly, if they'd had a containment vessel like we require in the US, it would have been about the same as 3 Mile Island accident which is to say no one was harmed and the facility continues to operate even today.
You know how many people died as a result of Chernobyl, arguably the worst disaster possible? 54. Yep, Chernobyl was actually less dangerous than solar when you weigh the deaths per terawatt of power generated.
Also worth noting, exactly one radiation death has been reported from the Fukushima disaster. The vast majority of recorded deaths (2,200!) from that event were from the unnecessary evacuation that took place. The research shows that had no one been evacuated, the worst case exposure in the area would have resulted in a loss of roughly 3 months of the populations lifespan. Once again, solar energy is more likely to cause death than even a reactor meltdown.
And even now, they're letting people move back into the prefecture. Radiation is not killer movies and fear mongers would have you believe. If it were, you would die when you went outside - ya know because you're laying under a huge thermonuclear explosion while getting that bikini tan.
We need to stop with the unfounded hysteria over nuclear. The solution to climate change is right there, we just have to stop being irrationally afraid of it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:29PM (2 children)
Radiation is also not the innocent that you would portray it as. I'll accept that only 54 people directly died at Chernobyl, but the radioactive cloud spread over much of Europe, and that has probably (proof is not available) shortened many thousands of people's lives by a year or two. IIRC that cloud contained radioactive strontium, which replaces calcium in, e.g., bone marrow.
In the Fukushima event the worrisome problem in Japan was radioactive iodine. That's a short half-live, so it didn't make it across the Pacific, and in California some people were worrying about radioactive Cesium. That can replace Potassium, but the worries were probably unreasonable, as the doses would have been quite low.
This is a real problem. The media exaggerates dramatic events to the extent where it's nearly impossible to tell how serious they are without being an expert in the field. But nuclear plants *are* dangerous, though not really in their dramatic failure, but rather in the aftermath. And I can't tell *how* dangerous, because everybody is trying for media attention. And lying.
You are only counting the direct costs, and your figures are correct in saying that by that estimate nuclear power is extremely safe. But you are relying on a combination of media and industry PR. This is clearly wrong, and it's clear that your estimates are a lowball estimate of the danger. What's not clear is what a reasonable guess would be. (And, of course, coal probably has a much worse record, but trying to get good figures on that is also an exercise in futility. It's even difficult to find out how many miners died last year.)
And solar and wind do the same thing. How do you count an installer who falls off a roof top and breaks an arm, when the roof needed to be replaced anyway?
I tend to rate nuclear as a safer choice than coal or gas, and less so than solar, largely because of the problem of spent fuel rods.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
With Fukushima and Chernobyl however, as I have previously mentioned, we were dealing with early 1960's era technology. Very primitive by todays standards. Neither plant can be held up as an example of the safety record of modern designs. Even Three Mile Island, which was designed in the 70's, proved to be safe in even the most convoluted and catastrophic of failure modes. In that instance, no one was hurt, no one was irradiated, the surrounding area was untouched. TMI-1 continued generating power and is still running today.
I don't deny that radiation from those accidents can result in a shortening of lifespan. But the studies from Fukushima at least indicate even the worst civilian exposure would result in only a loss of 3 months of lifespan for the population and even that is hard to measure statistically because so many other non nuclear related environmental factors have a much greater effect. And this was a worst case scenario. As I mentioned, TMI-2 had a meltdown and no one was exposed, no one died, the surrounding area was not contaminated.
The bottom line however is that you can't replace the 80% of the power generated by fossil fuels with solar and wind. You just can't do it. There's not enough open land or production capability to deploy enough solar to cover what fossil fuels are generating today. And it scales horribly. But nuclear scales exceptionally well, runs 24/7, and with enough national support could easily be built out to supply the hole that killing fossil fuels would leave.
I'm not saying stop deploying solar or wind or even wave. But I am saying that those will always be niche power generation programs. Only nuclear can scale up to generate the kind of electrical demand the future holds.
I would further say that the New Mexico facility for storing spent fuel is moving ahead. That will help enormously with the waste issue, though most plant designs provide enough water cooled storage for their own waste. I'm also a big fan of getting in there and solving the problems associated with LFTR's. Those have the capability of literally burning the nuclear waste of other plants while producing virtually no actinide waste of their own.
Just drives me crazy - the answer to our power generation problem, and perhaps that of climate change, is right in front of us. The only thing stopping it from becoming a reality is the irrational fears and the lack of political backbone. The boilerplate plant designs are already done, the uranium fuel has already been mined and processed. All we need to do is build them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:18PM
OK, but 3 months loss of lifespan for how many people? If it's only 1200 that's (arguably) equivalent to 400 years of lifespan. If you guess that otherwise people would live to be 80, and that everyone affected was an infant, that's 50 deaths. (And that's using "spherical cow" figuring.)
But a lot more than 1200 people were affected, and of that number some were affected more than others, and... Basically, there's no defensible number. You can say "it's got to be more than 50" and "it's got to be less than 100,000", but defending any particular number is not defensible. (With more information I could probably whittle that "100,000" number down a lot, but how much?)
So it's somewhere between "lost in the noise" and "an immense tragedy".
OTOH, and as you said, that was old technology. But the people who are promising that the new plants are totally safe are the same (kind of) people who were saying the exact same thing about the prior generations of nuclear plants. That doesn't mean that they're wrong this time, but it means that there's little reason to believe them. This is extremely annoying, because I *want* to believe them.
This isn't all because of the nuclear industry. The media deserves at least as much blame. But look at the management practices of Tokyo Electric, shaving safety to get a slightly better return. And look at the recent US practice when operating plants nearing the end of their estimated useful life are suddenly given the go ahead to operate years (decades?) longer at higher power generation levels, and tell me why I should think that safety was why that happened.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:26AM
But, how could the fossil fuel industry continue to grow their profits if they lost their electric power generation customers? Think of all those lobbyists who wouldn't come to Washington D.C. anymore if they lost their funding!
Next thing you're going to say is that sugary soda water is bad for you and we should stop selling it in the schools, smoking tobacco increases healthcare costs and we should raise taxes on cigarettes, ban smoking in public spaces, and put tobacco farmers (like the Gore family) out of business, lead in gasoline retards intelligence and increases violence in the general population and we should DESTROY the lead industry's biggest consumer of product.
What are you, some kind of liberal nutjob? Even Greenpeace is anti-nuclear, how could you possibly take such a position?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:55PM (16 children)
[Citation needed]
Actually, I'm calling bullshit:
1. China [wikipedia.org]: "In 2017 China was the first country to pass 100 GW of cumulative installed PV capacity,[4][5] and by the end of 2018, it had 174 GW of cumulative installed solar capacity."
2. US [wikipedia.org] "As of the end of 2017, the United States had over 50 gigawatts (GW) of installed photovoltaic capacity."
[Citation needed] - show me how PV pollutes waterways.
Bullshit PV recycling [apvi.org.au]: "The technical potential of recoverable materials have a potential value of nearly $15 billion by 2050 and could provide enough raw materials to produce 2 billion new panels (630 GW). Such value embodied in end of life panels could spawn new industries or business lines"
Bullshit. My rooftop PV-es, small 4.5kW, gets me a positive net energy exported over the period of an year. Still have more than half a roof available and I'm waiting for the batteries price to go down to install a buffer.
It doesn't get closer than that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @06:18PM (2 children)
https://www.americanexperiment.org/2019/08/environmental-disaster-solar-energy/ [americanexperiment.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pav on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:43PM (1 child)
Citing a partisan thinktank [wikipedia.org]? Good one...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @07:29AM
But you are linking the equivelent of Pravda yourself.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Wednesday September 11 2019, @06:48PM (8 children)
And another important thing to point out that makes your statistics meaningless.
Totall world power production today is around 26.6 million GW/h. Your 2 billion panels would produce around 5.5 million GW/h, or only about 20% of the current energy needs, assuming the sun was shining at full intensity everywhere on earth 24 hours a day (hint - it never does). Do the math.
Solar and wind will NEVER fill the gap of fossil fuels. We currently have only ONE source of clean energy that can do that - nuclear. If you ignore it or run away from it then you may as well embrace fossil fuels because nothing else can fill that void currently. And it only gets worse as you move inevitably to electric cars.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:35PM (1 child)
(...cringe... even as a typo, GW/h is horrendous)
PV is the best solution for small producers - like put them on your roof, couple that to a battery bank and, in certain geographies (large enough to count), chances are you can live without the grid for most of the time (over 95%). Incidentally, that's the very factor that makes PV attractive to me - I can produce my own energy and limit my dependence on the power utilities; I reckon there are heaps of other people on the same mind-set.
For large setups, the concentrated solar solution offers better energy efficiency.
Look mate, I'm not saying nuke-plants don't have value, I'm saying:
1. the renewables don't lose their advantages because of nuke-plants and...
2. ... there are reasons for which one can prefer PV over all/any other way of obtain energy and this choice doesn't make the environment worse.
---
in your rush to rubbish renewables, you tend to move your goal post the way it suits you. I never said "PV is the sole solution to humanity's energy needs", all that I objected to was your position "it's impossible to add generating capacity within those x-number limits" - turns out that it is possible and others have done it.
May I remind you posting on S/N is actually a waste of time and, you if you only look/consider at alternative PoVs for the sole purpose to rubbish them, the single point you may gain in the process comes from "entertainment purposes" angle?
'Cause I guarantee you, no business in the energy sector is gonna look over your rants on S/N and change course because of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pav on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:54PM
The government was going to build a gas or coal fired powerplant for my home region (North Queensland, Australia), but given fuel transport costs etc... solar + hydroelectric [youtube.com] is the more economically safe option, even in the driest and flattest continent on earth.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:55AM (4 children)
Clean, you say.
Let's check your assertion.
You say the PV are highly toxic because of Cadmium - not all PV use Cadmium but let's say they are. Most of the cadmium is used in batteries (over 86% [wikipedia.org]) and many other purposes (Wikipedia don't even mention PVes as a major use for cadmium [wikipedia.org], but surprisingly does mention it for nuclear-fission plants). So let's say 20% goes into PV-es and those PV-es are never recycled.
Under these assumption, let's compare the "cleanness of PV" vs the "cleanness of nuclear energy" as it is at now (no ifs and buts about an uncertain future)
Under the most alarmist assumptions above, 20%*23000 mt = 4,600 metric tons of cadmium compounds, already encased in PV-es (need to break and leech them to be exposed to the toxic stuff)
the amount of HLW worldwide [wikipedia.org] is currently increasing by about 12,000 metric tons every year.
Ummm... you were saying...?
---
** we'll ignore the low and medium level waste, even if the latter is bad enough to require special storage; ya know? things like encasing in glass - pretty much the way cadmium is encased in PV-es - and then storing the stuff in deep dry mines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:19AM (3 children)
Spent fuel rods are kept on site in cooling ponds until the really "hot" actinides decay, after which they are safe to transfer to more permanent storage facilities. Currently a new storage facility in New Mexico is coming online that will have a capacity to store some 120,000 metric tons of waste - that's more than 10 years worth by your calculations. The problem is we're still running these 40 year old reactor designs, the modern Gen III designs are much more efficient and generate much less waste.
As I also mentioned, there are new liquid salt reactor designs that are being brought online in China and India that are literally capable of burning nuclear waste as fuel. All that waste currently stored can be powering your car for the next 50 years. These new designs (generative IV) operate at normal atmospheric pressure (no chance of steam explosions) and cannot "melt down" because they operate in a liquid state. In the event of a catastrophic loss of power the fuel simply drains into a holding tank and the reaction stops.
Fear is the only thing holding these technologies back. And holding these technologies back in the US is probably the one thing anyone concerned about climate change should NOT be doing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @02:22AM (2 children)
From what I'm reading about [wikipedia.org], looks like the half-life for the things that are hot enough is at least 30 years (that "Some elements, such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 have half-lives of approximately 30 years. Meanwhile, plutonium has a half-life of that can stretch to as long as 24,000 years").
Other things I can make some inferences on: "The amount of HLW worldwide is currently increasing by about 12,000 metric tons every year... In 2010, it was estimated that about 250,000 tons of nuclear HLW were stored."
I'm not say that's 100% accurate, but the things above are consistent with "the cooling of spent fuel rods doesn't take less than 20 years" (if it would be shorter, the level of HLW in storage would be lower).
The solutions for recycling PV-es are already known too - e.g. plenty of business cases and regulations in place for recycling nasty batteries and electronics.
And PV recycling will come to be just as GenII reactors and the liquid salt ones will come to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday September 12 2019, @04:09AM (1 child)
The really nasty stuff only lasts about 2 or 3 years. The rest is stuff you wouldn't want to eat, but it's perfectly safe to store. A little known fact is that virtually all of the nuclear medicine supply comes from nuclear reactors. Shut them down and you will literally be killing people.
The primary difference between solar and nuclear is that you will never be able to generate all the power needed by the US with solar, there's just no way. The latest statistics put our yearly power consumption at 3,911 TW/h. Currently only 67 TW/h of that is solar. By comparison, about ten times as much power is being generated by nuclear - roughly 20% of the nations power. So you would have to have some 60 times as much solar capacity as we have right now in order to meet the demand. For nuclear it's just a five fold increase. And while places like the Mojave are conducive to large scale production, most of the US is not. There's no way to get the power generated on the west coast over to the east coast or even into the Midwest, all areas that are sub optimal for solar generation.
We have around 100 nuclear plants in operation in the US, if we could bring an additional 400 online they would fully meet the current demand and you could say goodbye to fossil fuels and pat yourself on the back for doing your part to stop climate change. Alternatively you can try to deploy a over hundred billion solar panels and still not meet demand. And while a nuclear plant can generate as much power in California as it could in North Dakota, the same can't be said for solar. The statistics say something along the lines of best case maximums being around 74% in places like LA down to providing only 14% capacity in places like Nebraska.
Solar has an important role to play in places where it's practical as does wind. But the real powerhouse we could depend on would be nuclear. And who knows, as breakthroughs arrive in solar and battery efficiency in the next 50 years or so maybe we can start to swing things in the other direction. In the meantime though, nuclear gets us the emissions free energy we have to have while we wait.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @04:34AM
A nasty habit of tabling things without providing a citation, many of them proven false by a proper research.
As this research become a bit tiresome and time consuming to me, I hope you won't mind if I retreat from this conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:52AM
The problem with nuclear power is that not enough people get filthy rich from it - not as compared to the alternatives. The more people you make filthy rich, the more people will support that idea through government lobbying - period, end of story.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:39PM (3 children)
You are overly optimistic.
I would agree that solar panels *CAN* be recycled, but this doesn't mean that they ever are, or that there's any organization to do so. (If so I'd like to hear of it.)
There are many different varieties of solar panel, including one in a lab that's made entirely (hah!) from graphene. (That's what the new blurb said. Believe it if you want to.) Some of them are quite polluting to manufacture, others less so. Some require lots of "rare earths", others less. They also vary a lot in efficiency and required working conditions. So I don't think you can trust many generic claims.
OTOH, the US may be installing a lot of solar cells (or doing so prior to the Trump trade war), but it's not building many. So this doesn't speak to your point.
The availability of space, however, at current use of electricity isn't a problem. OTOH, don't assume that most people live in a place where they own their own roof.
As for batteries...well, I'm dubious, but we'll see. However there's also the PG&E molten salt solar plant in the Mojave desert, and that uses heat stored in the molten salt to continue generating power after dark. (Molten salt has it's own problems, of course, but they're almost certainly soluble.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:58AM (2 children)
Like it didn't mean that cadmium/mercury/other-nasty-stuff batteries were ever recycled [batteryrecycling.org.au]?
Yeah, there never was a precedent. /s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:45AM (1 child)
Sorry, that link won't open in my browser. Probably requires javascript.
The other link, the one that linked to a site saying solar panels would be valuable to recycle, didn't say that anyone was doing so.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @04:29AM
PDF - the link is http://www.batteryrecycling.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Battery-regulations-final.pdf [batteryrecycling.org.au]
Can be downloaded with wget, just confirmed that the response code is 200, no redirects.
Because there's no economic sense to do so yet, the vast majority of PV-s have an productive lifespan (80% of initial capacity or better) of at least 25 years (many of them with showing a lower degradation) and are still producing.
As a note, a 20% drop in efficiency will make a PV that was 17% efficient when new into one that is 13.6% efficient - not something that one would consider "broken".
Here [nrel.gov]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford