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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by timg56

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This matches my understanding of nuclear plant capabilities. I recall our load following ability to have been excellent.


Comment on Cognitive bias – how petroleum scientists deal with it by stevepostrel

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I was interested to see that there was no mention made of blinding data to prevent cognitive bias. The particle physics people are so worried about fooling themselves with seemingly innocuous data tweaks and cutoffs and outlier removals that they routinely hide from themselves what each putative event means until the very end of the process.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by poitsplace

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Assome nations push to lower their carbon footprint with renewables, they forget that generation of electricity isn’t the only issue. During the winter when renewables will be at their lowest output, demand will be at its highest. Energy loads that would have been carried by on-site burning of fossil fuels (heating) would be shifted to the grid, as would charging of electric vehicles. The peak load would likely be over twice as high as it is now.

Since there is no practical storage system capable of storing seasonal energy shortfalls, there would need to a much higher installed capacity. During the summer energy prices would crash to near (and likely below) zero, providing no return on investment for equipment. During the winter prices of reliable power would skyrocket.

Even placing that new load (heating/”fuel”) on the grid would require massive upgrades to electrical infrastructure. The “smart grid” people blabber on about for renewable energy sounds like a good fix on the surface. However, such a grid would require at least 3-5X that already massive capacity…the ability to shunt regional loads across whole continents is not cheap or easy.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Doug Badgero

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What are now fashionably called micro grids have always made sense for some applications. They are far from making economic sense for all applications.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Planning Engineer

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I don’t have an easy answer. Maybe someone else does. Not all problems have solutions.

Detailed modelling might help. To me it seems obvious though that if you model a conventional system with more certainty as to resource location and availability and more inertial mass that system will do better than the system with more wind and solar and regards cascading outages, voltage drop and stability. If over many years you don’t observe that to be the case, then I’d question the assumptions.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Doug Badgero

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Mark Silbert

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Just read “California Dreaming” this afternoon.

Your new book, “Blowing Smoke” is a real gem.

It’s truly astounding how awful energy policy is. Especially on the left coast.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by jim2

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That’s true for the large nuclear plants. For smaller one, however, they can be designed to automatically load follow.


Comment on Week in review by D o u g  

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In reply to Matthew Marler (Nov 5: 5:24om) I use the standard statements of the Second Law which describe the process involved whereby entropy increases to a maximum wherein there is a state of thermodynamic equilibrium with no unbalanced energy potentials. I quantify the temperature gradient in that state of thermodynamic equilibrium (also allowing for the role of inter-molecular radiation) and from that I can calculate quite accurately temperatures such as that at the base of the nominal troposphere of Uranus. The fact that my calculations agree with reality throughout the Solar System, and such calculations show why and by how much water vapour cools, as I confirm with an empirical study, is sufficient for me.

Whenever a molecule moves with a component of vertical motion its KE alters, keeping the sum (KE+PE)=constant. Roderich Graeff detected small temperature differences in his sealed insulated cylinders in nearly every one of over 800 experiments this century. But the “killer” is the Ranque Hilsch vortex tube which develops very significant temperature differences in a centrifugal force field. If the gravito-thermal effect did not exist then an Earth paved with asphalt and receiving just 163W/m^2 of direct solar radiation would have a mean temperature around -35C. It is “heat creep” which supplies the rest of the required energy, and to understand this downward convection you need to understand how it is restoring thermodynamic equilibrium, just as the Second Law says will happen..

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by jim2

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Planning Engineer – thanks for another great post. What is your view on the “smart” grid? Personally, I don’t want a smart grid, a smart car, or a smart house – if these things are connected to the internet. They will get hacked.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang

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Jim2,

I understand the 1600 MW EPR is designed to operate between 25% and 100% of capacity and ramp rate is 5% of capacity per minute between 50% and 100% power. That’s 80 MW per minute ramp rate.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Doug Badgero

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It is an issue of economics not design. Is it possible that the levelized capital costs could be reduced? Sure, but until they are it makes little sense to build a nuclear plant to load follow.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by ROM

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Today’s civilisation is an entirely energy based civilisation, the first such energy based civilisation in mankind’s history.

Humanity needs three essentials to survive.
We need water.
We need food
We need shelter.

The fourth essential that defines us as Human as distinct from animals is the use and control of Energy.

With control of energy we have proven that we can generate clean drinkable water
Using and controlling vast amounts of cheap, reliable, always there energy we can both produce enough high quality food and have by using energy, been able to distribute food from areas of sufficiency or excess to areas of shortage and have thus created the ability to feed all of mankind’s growing numbers where ever they might reside on Earth.

We have created and have maintained cities and all the supporting energy needs both private and industrial, transport, sewerage, water supplies, food distribution and etc for cities of of tens of millions of humans through the use of immense amounts of energy.

By contrast Rome in it’s most powerful phase, the then largest city on Earth and only having access to human and animal labour for it’s energy needs probably reached a maximum population of about one million, just a large sized town or very small city by today’s standards for city population sizes.

It was only with the advent of wide scale coal mining and therefore the beginning of the cheap energy revolution that the British Industrial Revolution starting with the increasing technological advances in the steam engines in the latter half of the 1700’s, allowed cities to grow in size and numbers and created the essential services needed to maintain a large fixed in place human population along with industries and all that entailed to employ the growing population. All of which led to a situation where the global population started to grow and expand from it’s very slow historical growth rate and population levels of perhaps 700 millions in the late 1770’s to today’s 7.3 billions.

http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php

The so called Renewable Energy technologies such as Wind and Solar even if further refined and made more efficient,sought after efficiency increases that are now running into the problems of ever diminishing returns for the investments needed to raise those levels of efficiency, are now just one of the limiting factors in the hope of the so called Renewable Energy systems ever replacing today’s base load coal, gas, oil, nuclear powered generators.

An excellent insight into the major flaws in the renewable energy technologies and their complete inability to ever power our civilisation to any significant degree due entirely to their unpredictability and their intermittency and therefore their requirements for major energy storage facilities to cover the generation gaps.
All of which lead to unsustainably low and poor  levels of Energy Return On Investment [ EROI ] leaving almost nothing left over in energy availability to power our civilisation after the energy costs of both building the wind and solar generator systems plus the energy storage systems to smooth out the intermittency of these wind and solar systems is given in an article in the “Brave New Climate” blog.
_________________________
“The Catch 22 of Energy Storage”
By Prof; John Morgan.
[ http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/#more-6460 ]

[ selected quotes form the above article ]

Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.

The problem is analysed in an important paper by Weißbach et al.1 in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that was required to build it. It takes energy to make a power plant – to manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on. The power plant needs to make at least this much energy to break even. A break-even powerplant has an EROEI of 1. But such a plant would pointless, as there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.

There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded.
&
For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al. estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7. An energy source with lower EROEI cannot sustain a society at those levels of complexity, structured along similar lines. If we are to transform our energy system, in particular to one without climate impacts, we need to pay close attention to the EROEI of the end result.

The EROEI values for various electrical power plants are summarized in the figure. The fossil fuel power sources we’re most accustomed to have a high EROEI of about 30, well above the minimum requirement. Wind power at 16, and concentrating solar power (CSP, or solar thermal power) at 19, are lower, but the energy surplus is still sufficient, in principle, to sustain a developed industrial society. Biomass, and solar photovoltaic (at least in Germany), however, cannot. With an EROEI of only 3.9 and 3.5 respectively, these power sources cannot support with their energy alone both their own fabrication and the societal services we use energy for in a first world country
&
This is a rather unsettling conclusion if we are looking to renewable energy for a transition to a low carbon energy system: we cannot use energy storage to overcome the variability of solar and wind power.

In particular, we can’t use batteries or chemical energy storage systems, as they would lead to much worse figures than those presented by Weißbach et al. Hydroelectricity is the only renewable power source that is unambiguously viable. However, hydroelectric capacity is not readily scaled up as it is restricted by suitable geography, a constraint that also applies to pumped hydro storage.
[ more ]
_______________
We would be far better off socially and economically due to the mal-distribution of wealth and resources from the poorest to the still very heavily subsidised wealthy renewable energy investors even after thirty years of subsidised developments if all attempts to create viable self sustaining renewable energy generating systems were completely abandoned and the political and economic concentration was on developing new versions and new types of nuclear generators.
Plus Fusion technologies of various types if at all possible and feasible.

Fusion power generation will happen as the rewards are so high for success as fusion is the key to providing energy for our civilisation into the far future.
For with energy, always there, always on, cheap readily available energy in abundance there is little to limit mankind’s dreams for the future.
For even today let alone the future with abundant and cheap energy there is little of practical benefit to our race that is still outside of our abilities to create.

Comment on Week in review by D o u g  

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Replying to Jim D Nov 4, 7.29pm

No, the Earth’s surface temperature would not be 255K in the absence of GHG. You have assumed an incorrect amount of solar radiation to the surface that is only about half what it would be without clouds and atmospheric absorption by GHG, and you have assumed surface emissivity of 1.000 which is also too high.

Comment on Week in review by D o u g  

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Replying to Jim D Nov 5, 5:11am

Water vapour makes up between 1% and 4% of the lower troposphere. Carbon dioxide is about 0.04%. So there is 25 to 100 times as much water vapour at any time, and it doesn’t matter one iota if it is different water vapour two days later – it’s still 1% to 4% of the lower troposphere and it’s busy radiating energy out of the atmosphere. The energy acquired by nitrogen and oxygen molecules by conduction from the surface (and other air molecules) is mostly transferred to water vapour which does far more cooling radiating per molecule than does carbon dioxide with its very limited number of spectral lines.


Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by ROM

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And another question I have asked before on various blogs when discussion comes up on wind and solar renewable energy supplanting fossil fuel power generators.
If wind and solar are so damn good for energy generation then why the hell did those old British industrialists of the 1700’s with their spinning and weaving mills and other developing industrial technologies get the hell out of the 3000 thousand year old technologies of wind and water power just as fast as they could as soon as steam power, crude and dangerous as it was in those very early days, became even remotely reliable?

The French in fact tried to emulate the British by buying a complete British designed and built spinning mill along with the expert personnel to run it.
They set the whole thing up in France. It was bankrupt within a couple of years.
The reason; the French used water wheels as the power source for the mill, not a steam engine that the British used and those spinning and weaving machines had been designed for a steady continuous source of power to operate satisfactorily, something that a water wheel was incapable of ever providing.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang

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Planning Engineer,

Lastly renewables could be supported with batteries, other stored energy resources and technologies allowing advanced control of load demand. This may well be the grid of the future, but would have extremely high costs based on today’s projections.

It seems to me renewables with energy storage is not sustainable. It seems the energy return on energy invested (ERoEI) in renewable energy and energy storage is not sufficient to supply the energy needs of a modern society. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/.

The EROEI needs to be at least 14 to support modern society. So, only fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear can do it.

Below are some ERoEI figures for various electricity generation technologies. These include buffering – i.e. energy storage so the unreliable, non dispatchable renewables are properly comparable with the dispatchable technologies.

Solar PV = 1.6
Biomass = 3.5
Wind = 3.9
Solar CSP (desert) = 9
Gas (CCGT) = 28
Coal = 30
Hydro = 35
Nuclear = 75
Source: http://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf

ERoEI has been extensively debated in the litterature and is very sensitive to assumptions inputs and methodology. However, this seems to be an authoritative and widely cited source.

It seems to me, if this is correct, renewables are not sustainable.

I’d like to hear what PE and others have to say on this subject.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by bob droege

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That’s one of the reason’s I like the boiling water reactor design, yeah the reactor vessel is larger but you have no steam generators and no pressurizer, and all that extra water in the downcomers is useful in emergencies.

Clinton had a plan to run 50% power at night and 100% during the day but I cant remember if they actually did that.

A 5 billion plant ran at 100% with 18 month refuel cycles or a load following one with a 2 year cycle, doesn’t much matter IMHO, the most important thing affecting cost is that you operate safely and manage to follow your plan. Unplanned outages and NRC forced shutdowns being big drivers to the bottom line.

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by johanna

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Outstanding post, PE. Like many long time observers of the debate about energy policy, I had a vague grasp of the fact that renewables on any large scale disrupt the grid, but you have filled in a lot of the blanks in admirably clear and concise prose for a lay audience.

More, please!

Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by k scott denison

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Ludington cost 315M in 1970 or roughly 2B today.

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