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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 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