Wagathon — What about the billions in dollars from the same DOE Loan Guarantee program for Nuclear (Vogtle Units 3&4)?
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest
↧
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by matthewrmarler
aplanningengineer:That might be acceptable in some cases (reverse flows are small compared to high overall usage, likely timing of reverse flow is beneficial, low levels of penetration, more complicated monitoring is costly, improve learning curve).
I meant to ask whether you oppose all net metering and feed-in tariffs.
Where I live (San Diego County), I am billed separately for the electricity I use (at $0.17/kwh) and my connection. If I installed PV panels, my surplus electricity would flow into my neighbors’ homes, and SDG&E would collect for those kwhs that they did not supply, as well as collecting for the grid connections. It would seem to me to be a step toward fairness for SDG&E to pay me somewhere between $0.06 and $0.12 that is transferred from my house to my neighbors’ houses.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by matthewrmarler
a planning engineer, thank you for that answer. I actually phrased my question incorrectly.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by sciguy54
I will suggest one additional US Federal research project: have the NIH fund a long-term look at the number of injuries and deaths associated with PV installations in the state of California. Require health-care providers to add a question about accident causation to admittance forms if not already in place.
As millions of homeowners install, maintain, clean and generally fiddle with PV installations on their rooftops I would predict that these numbers will climb steadily over the next decade or so, and might far exceed deaths and disabilities due to coal mining, for instance.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer
Barnes-I think if you had solar with a high coincidence and expected availability with the system peak in a summer peaking entity the combined generation, transmission and distribution benefits, particularly if it delayed new construction could benefit all and may not end up being a subsidy at all. In other cases it might involve small subsidies. I don’t want to take a political stand on whether subsidies are right or wrong, but I will comment if they have the risk or probability of becoming so high and causing significant distortion such that they are not sustainable and cause harm.
↧
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by matthewrmarler
franktoo: I suspect the negative externalities associated with roof-top solar will turn out to be much larger than those associated with fossil fuels.
“Much” larger? Why, and what do you suspect them to be?
Many details vary geographically: here in SoCal peak and trough demand are highly predictable, both as to timing and amount. Installations of roof-mounted solar should not cause any more problems than installations of high-consuming appliances like hot tubs and microwave ovens, which elicit no objection from the electric companies or grid managers. The most important externalities I can think of not already covered in other posts is that the other generating equipment will last longer and take longer to pay off the initial investment. I don’t see those as worse than mercury and coal ash.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer
Arc furnaces are the most challenging loads a I know of. It would be extremely costly, wasteful difficult for those to be powered by renewables unless it was stored in pumped hydro.
↧
Comment on Week in review – energy, water & food edition by Danny Thomas
Thought some might find this of interest: http://www.bidnessetc.com/44028-how-exxon-mobil-corporation-xom-shareholders-voted-on-climate-change/
↧
Comment on Week in review – science edition by rovingbroker
More on LaCour and Green (2014)
The graduate student at the center of a scandal over a newly retracted study that has shaken trust in the conduct of social science apologized for lying about aspects of the study, including who paid for it and its methodology, but he said Friday in his first interview since the scandal broke that he stands by its finding that gay canvassers can influence voters’ attitudes on same-sex marriage.
↧
↧
Comment on Week in review – science edition by Jim D
They use a “feeling thermometer” in their study. Perhaps that makes it relevant here :-)
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Barnes
Stephen – did you read the comment by rogerknights above where he provided a link to an article about Spain’s venture into Solar?
http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/05/01/Solar-Dreams/
From the article, near the end:
“But the big issue for solar is simply scaling up the enterprise to capture enough of the sun’s rays to retire just a fraction of fossil fuels. Prieto calculates, for example, that to replace all electricity made by nuclear and fossil fuels in Spain would take a solar module complex covering 6,000 sq. km of the country at the cost the entire Spanish budget (1.2 billion Euros in 2007). It would also require the equivalent of 300 billion car batteries to store the energy for night-time use.
Prieto is not alone in reaching such sobering conclusions. A 2013 Stanford University report, for example, calculated that global photovoltaic industry now requires more electricity to make silicon wafers and solar troughs than it actually produces in return. Since 2000 the industry consumed 75 per cent more energy than it put onto the grid and all during its manufacturing and installation process.
Moreover it won’t pay off this energy debt or energy consumed in its construction until 2016. As a consequence, ramping up of industrial solar production produces more greenhouse gases than it saves for nearly a decade. The study also recommended that reducing the fossil fuel inputs for a next generation of photovoltaic systems be a key priority.
What are your thoughts on Spain’s experience?
Also, I have posted here before the following link:
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2012/10/renewable-energy-the-vision-and-a-dose-of-reality/
Based on info like this along with info on Energiewende, it looks to me like solar and wind simply are not ready for prime time.
Se also http://www.aweo.org/windconsumption.html
If the information in this link is accurate, then wind turbine technology is not just net harmful, but egregiously so.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Mark Silbert
I checked a couple of newer desal plants (Israel and Carlsbad Ca.) and from what I can tell they both purchase their electricity from the local power companies.
The greenies fought against Carlsbad so maybe that precluded government subsidies for a solar installation. Kind of real world data saying solar doesn’t compete.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Peter Lang
Jacobress, the utilities and regulators are already preparing to charge solar PV owners to use the grid. That is fair, because they are not paying their fair share.
↧
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest
Don Monfort — Remembering all the Electric Utility financial carnage in the 1980’s over nuclear power is not developing a Straw-man argument.
I disagree with you that Georgia Power pushed hard to get a DOE Loan Guarantee “just to get some basis points reduction in a loan rate“. They did it to protect Georgia Power & The Southern Company of something catastrophic happening with construction and technology risk that could place them in severe financial jeopardy.
Citing what has happened in Finland is certainly not a Straw-man example. Personally, I never thought that something like this could happen — especially from the French.
It’s interesting that you want to focus on Solyndra and just shrug off the Finland story as an example of things that can go very bad at Vogtle.
As to your’s and other’s rantings over President Obama — you have conveniently forgotten that he tried not once, but twice to get Congress to approve building ~13 new nuclear power projects (like Vogtle) using the DOE Loan Program.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3
Stephen, the EPR thing could be interesting. The pressure vessel issue is 0.3 % carbon versus <0.22 % carbon in an area of the construction. The hook is "how could Areva install the component with such a glaring mistake." There is also the standard cracks in concrete and less than perfect welds.
There could be some serious issues or it could be anti-nuke interference. China though has stepped up to defend their two reactors by buying into the French companies. That could end up being very interesting.
Anyway, this highlights one of the hidden costs of nuclear, the specifications are so tight it is almost impossible to avoid so issues some where. .
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Mike Flynn
The cost of power generation is whatever you are prepared to forego in lieu.
Opportunity cost and all that.
The Sun is free. Oil is free. Coal is free.
You cut your suit according to your cloth
The devil’s in the detail.
The maintenance will get you.
I know people who are off grid, in some cases where grid power is available, for a cost.
What is your income? What are you prepared to forego? What is your personal preference?
Do you prefer to amble on foot, enjoying Nature, or travel by Tesla, or perhaps Maserati?
I use the grid. I don’t have to, but I like the built in capacity to use air-conditioning, an electric welder or electric oven, stove, kettle or griller.
Others don’t. If the situation changes, so wilI I, I guess.
I hope for something like personal fusion – hot, cold, I don’t care, as long as it’s more cost effective than what I’ve got. Greedy, I know, but that’s how it is.
Solar grid parity? Not so far, but who knows? Certainly not me!
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3
If this pdf is correct, the forge over-built the pressure vessel dome, ~330 mm thick versus 230 mm thick which should offset the carbon content issue. Welding foot thick steel is probably a bit challenging.
Perhaps there are some nuke guys that can weigh in on this.
↧
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer
Barnes – good article, good question to show what I don’t know. From the article:
A 2013 Stanford University report, for example, calculated that global photovoltaic industry now requires more electricity to make silicon wafers and solar troughs than it actually produces in return.
That sound likely true at this time. We can have a good idea of what something costs us. It becomes more complicated to take out the subsidies and more complicated to figure in the externalities. Among those, how much energy does it take to produce solar power? Optimistic estimates and projections say one to four years. (Note if you want to go down that road, there are more worms in the can-often dirty coal energy is producing in China to offset cleaner US usages.) But you also have the installation, shipping and other costs as well as that the units might not receive optimal sun, so as with all externality studies you can come up with a wide range of estimates depending on your biases.
If you just use four (or less years) when you see that solar installations are doubling every couple years it seems inescapably obvious that we are spending more to create renewable resources then we are getting out of them in the near term. That is crushing news if you believe we are at/near/past a tipping point, the renewables rush is getting us there and beyond more quickly. Naïve and uniformed “environmentalists” who want to suggest that we are seeing emission based improvement based on what has been done with renewables so far are mistaken. (The same deal happens with autos. It takes a while to receive a net benefit from retiring a functioning automobile to replace it with a more efficient new automobile.)
The expectation is that we will benefit over the life of these facilities as the rate that we build them slows down so the benefit of what is installed will exceed the usage of what is being manufactured. That may have problems if those assuming that renewable technology will continue to get better and better are correct. If that’s the case we are working to put maximal amounts of inferior technology in the most desirable locations for renewables. This means that better technology will not have an opportunity to be as fully employed or that we will not get the assumed life out of today’s technology.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by David Wojick
According to EIA numbers, the first nukes came in costing less than a coal plant. Then over-regulation drove the price through the roof, as it is now doing for coal.
↧
Comment on Solar grid parity? by Barnes
To do a full cost/benefit analysis including externalities, you would need to come up with a list of positive and negative externalities for all energy sources, and factor in all subsidies and the various other tax treatments. Your comment on the negative externalities of coal implies that you think there are no, or negligible, negative externalities for renewables compared to coal. As you noted, greens grossly exaggerate the negative externalities of fossil fuels in general, and coal especially, while totally ignoring the benefits, and also ignoring that the “green” solutions they advocate for could not be built and maintained without fossil fuels, and, they can not reliably provide sufficient energy to power our growing electrical requirements – other sources of energy – most often fossil fuels – are needed to back up wind and solar.
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
