Let's say I develop a car that doesn't need fuel. Its so cheap to drive you will leave your gasoline powered car in the garage and use this one, naturally. However, the caveat is that it works randomly, not when you want it. The fuel-less car turns a lot of heads as you drive and you love that you don't have to pay fuel. The price was right so the first days its so fun to drive around. Then it happens. It stops working. Luckily, you didn't yet sell your old petrol powered car. So reluctantly, you get in the old beast, fire it up and go about your business. After work that day, you have a conversation with your wife, "Honey, I think I have to keep the old car, in case the new car stops working when we need it." The wife is saying that the argument you made to buy the new car was how much money you were going to save but now you have to keep two cars, two payments instead of just one. So even you are using less fossil fuels in your transportation needs, your costs just went up by factor two as you have to pay the loan and maintain two vehicles instead of one. Predictably the wife is not happy with this new setup and starts complaining why we have to pay the loan and maintenance costs on two cars instead of one. Where are these savings every news outlet in the world is talking about? Welcome to the brave new renewable world! Germany has the highest percentage of electricity powered by renewables and they also have the highest retail cost for power in the EU. This simple story explains why. Until we find a dispatchable power source, costs will never go down. The dream of cheap renewable energy is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Quote from Curbina

The metaphor is good in the sense that when you depend on sun, wind or even hydro power you lack much more control than when you have a fueled power source. Barring mechanical failures (which can always be minimized with proper maintenance) you have much more control (at least in a short term) when you depend on fuels.

That is incorrect. Modern weather prediction is now so good, the wind can be predicted a week in advance better than it could be a day in advance in the 1990s. For that reason, you can now know ahead of time how much power a wind farm will produce, with considerable accuracy. You can schedule maintenance for days when there will not be much wind. Alternatively, when you know there will a lot of wind, you can schedule maintenance on a fossil fuel or a nuclear plant, knowing the wind farm will substitute for the lost power.

Furthermore, wind farms produce power in blocks of ~1 MW each (one tower). When you do maintenance, you take one tower out of service at a time. With a coal gas fired plant, you have to take hundreds of megawatts off line for several days. To refuel a nuclear plant, you have to take a gigawatt off line. Not only that, but nuclear plants sometimes go down with an emergency SCRAM event without notice. That is not often a dire or life-threatening event. It is usually caused by a plumbing problem, such as a storm at sea that causes kelp to clog up the inlet water cooling pipe. But it brings down the whole nuclear plant. Bang, 1 gigawatt gone. That never happens with a wind farm. It goes off a little at a time, in ways you can predict a week in advance. From that point of view, it is actually more reliable and predictable than fossil fuel or a nuke.

Quote from JedRothwell

Alternatively, when you know there will a lot of wind, you can schedule maintenance on a fossil fuel or a nuclear plant, knowing the wind farm will substitute for the lost power.

The point I am trying to make is that every kind of generator has a degree of unreliability. Also, every type has to be deliberately turned off from time to time for maintenance. So, if you had nothing but coal plants, you would still need more generating capacity than the peak capacity, because coal plants must be turned off from time to time. With a 1 GW nuclear plant, you need 1 GW of other capacity on standby, ready to be deployed rapidly, because nuclear plants sometimes shut down abruptly with a SCRAM event. Even if that only happens once a year, you still need the 1 GW on standby.

Nuclear plants have to be refuelled every 18 to 24 months. Refuelling takes about 30 days. So, every couple of years you need 1 GW of capacity for 30 days. This is not because nuclear power is "unreliable" or "unpredictable." It is just the nature of the technology. It requires 100% standby capacity. That is not to say that if you had only 10 nuclear plants, you would need 10 others on standby. I suppose you would need 1 or 2. But most states and most power companies have only 1 on their grid, so they need ~1 GW of other capacity on standby. If nuclear plants were smaller, and came in 200 MW units, a power company might have 5 scattered around the state, instead of one big 1000 MW unit. Five of them in different geographical locations would not likely SCRAM at the same time, except in an earthquake. So you would not need as much standby capacity.

People opposed to wind power say it is not good because it needs 100% standby capacity. Actually, it doesn't, except on rare occasions, but other sources of electricity do.

Here is a graph of nuclear plant outages and refuelling:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinene…%20reactor%20is%20offline.

QUOTE:

"Electric generation capacity losses as a result of U.S. nuclear plant outages were relatively low during much of the 2018 summer, averaging 2.8 gigawatts (GW) from June through August. This year’s seasonal maintenance and refueling cycle began earlier than in recent years, and total nuclear outages averaged 14.5 GW in the last week of September. The earlier-than-expected retirement of the Oyster Creek Generating Station and a temporary plant shutdown related to Hurricane Florence also increased outages in September."

Quote from Curbina

The metaphor is good in the sense that when you depend on sun, wind or even hydro power you lack much more control than when you have a fueled power source.

Nope. Not so much anymore. Modern weather forecasting does not give you control, but it does tell you what is coming far enough in advance to plan for it. Furthermore, even with fuel there are unanticipated interruptions, and fully anticipated, unavoidable ones such as maintenance. Further furthermore, customer demand cannot be anticipated or controlled. Hot weather will increase the demand for air conditioning. In that sense, weather affects coal fired electricity in ways the power company cannot control, albeit only on the demand side, not in both supply and demand.

It happens that in many parts of the U.S., such as the southwest, solar power increases just when you need it most, for air conditioning. It automatically adjusts to demand. Wind, coal and nuclear power do not.

Most of the control problems with wind and solar can be ameliorated with massive battery storage. The problem is, that costs a ton of money. Also, it should be noted that massive battery storage also improves the performance of fossil fuel systems, but evening out demand and cutting peak demand.

Solar Screw Piles.

Off Topic but interesting Video on

the history of the Alberta Oil Sands.

Quote from sam12

the history of the Alberta Oil Sands.

Propaganda for BigOil..

Maybe the solar screwpiles can grow something on the Oilsands waste..

Nothing natural grows anymore

https://www.fortmcmurraytoday.…cent-of-communitys-energy

Quote from Alan Smith

A more modern DC supergrid would also help. The wind is always blowing and the sun always shining somewhere in the Americas.

A DC supergrid, OR superconducting cables!

Indeed the wind is always blowing somewhere. The warm air has to go somewhere. North American wind farms are spread out far enough apart that some of them will produce electricity.

The wind is always blowing somewhere around Hawaii or Japan as well, but it might be out to sea, whereas North America is so big it will be somewhere on land. In fact, it is a sure thing it will be somewhere in the middle of the continent between Texas and northern Canada. Wind distribution is not uniform. There are natural rivers of wind. See the purple areas in the map here:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl…nd-power-is-harnessed.php

Many years ago, when wind power was beginning to expand, I read a critique by a know-it-all physicist who said "the average wind speed is so low wind can never produce significant amounts of electricity at a reasonable cost." He did not realize that wind does blow on average the same everywhere. On a continental scale, it blows a great deal in some places, and hardly at all in other places. More locally, it is channeled by geographic features such as mountain ranges. There is a great deal more wind at sea than on land, which is why all ocean transportation up to around 1840 was wind powered, with sailing ships. It was powerful enough to move millions of tons of people and goods across every ocean, and to move a significant fraction of the European population to the Americas. We sometimes forget that we are now living through the second global-scale wind energy era.

The total energy in wind is the same as the total energy of solar heat that does not immediately reflect back into space. All solar heat eventually dissipates as moving air molecules. That's a lotta energy!

Quote from JedRothwell

Many years ago, when wind power was beginning to expand, I read a critique by a know-it-all physicist who said "the average wind speed is so low wind can never produce significant amounts of electricity at a reasonable cost.

Similar statement:

“There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will,” Einstein told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 29, 1934.

Quote from Peter

Einstein told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 29, 1934.

But he personally warned Truman from the nuclear bomb ...

New white for self cooling surfaces! https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsami.1c02368

Unluckily paywalled...>96% of sun light reflected. at least 4C cooler than ambient.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Unluckily paywalled.

Good old arxiv,,

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.03372

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.01161.pdf

NanoBaSO4 might be good for my roof tiles in summer.. save the aircon,,

or Nano Ag.. worth a try,

No Wind Turbines.

https://www.renewableenergywor…-to-zero-carbon-emissions

The US electric power sector is halfway to zero carbon emissions

QUOTE:

Renewable energy’s rapid growth is accelerating a national shift to a carbon-free electric power system.

So far 17 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have adopted laws or executive orders setting goals for reaching 100% clean electricity by 2050 or sooner. And 46 U.S. utilities have pledged to go carbon-free. Now the Biden administration and some members of Congress are proposing to decarbonize the power sector by 2035.

While this much change in 15 years seems ambitious, our new report, “Halfway to Zero,” looks back at the past 15 and finds that power sector emissions are half of what they were projected to be.

We analyzed the “business as usual” projection in the 2005 Annual Energy Outlook published by the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. government’s official agency for data collection and analysis. It projected that annual carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector would rise from 2,400 million to 3,000 million metric tons from 2005 to 2020.

Instead, they fell to 1,450 million metric tons – 52% below projected levels. In short, the U.S. electricity sector has managed to march halfway to zero in just 15 years. . . .

Wind and solar power dramatically outperformed expectations, delivering 13 times more generation in 2020 than projected. Emission-free nuclear generation largely held steady. . . .

These shifts have delivered many benefits. Total electric bills for consumers were 18% lower in 2020 than the Energy Information Administration had previously projected, saving households US$86 billion per year. . . .

Technical report:

Abstract

Sharply reducing carbon emissions is imperative to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Yet even in the power sector—often viewed as the lynchpin to economy-wide decarbonization, and where low-carbon solutions are increasingly plentiful and cost-effective—the pace and scale of the required transformation can be daunting. A review of historical trends, however, shows the progress the power sector has already made in reducing emissions. Fifteen years ago, many business-as-usual projections anticipated that annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power supply in the United States would reach 3,000 million metric tons (MMT) in 2020. In fact, direct power-sector CO2 emissions in 2020 were 1,450 MMT—roughly 50% below the earlier projections. By this metric, in only 15 years the country’s power sector has gone halfway to zero emissions. Other metrics also evolved differently than projected: total consumer electricity costs (i.e., bills) were 18% lower; costs to human health and the climate were 92% and 52% lower, respectively; and the number of jobs in electricity generation was 29% higher. Economic, technical, and policy factors contributed to this success, including sectoral changes, energy efficiency, wind and solar, continued operations of the nuclear fleet, and coal-to-gas fuel switching. . . .