Green Energy, and the German Grid, from: Kiev Is Burning

[JWB]

Solar will never be a primary source of base load power because it is available 30% of the time at best. That means it will require at least three times as many panels as well as more battery storage than the grid can carry. The price tag of all that is several times higher than what France spends to construct and operate her  nuclear power fleet.

[John T]

 

47 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

I did a bit of Google searching.  Here,

Germany’s energy consumption and power mix in charts | Clean Energy Wire

It breaks down the gigawatt capacity for the German electric grid at about 225 gigawatts in 2021.  Elsewhere, it says that Germany wants to have 8 million electric vehicles on the road on 2030.  So here,

Gallon of Diesel Oil [US] to Gigawatt Hour Converter (hextobinary.com)

It says that the gigawatt power generation of 32 million litres of gas is 304 gigawatt hours.  Am I doing this wrong?  It seems to suggest that Germany is going to have to add at least 100 gigawatts of capacity, maybe 200, to support the intended electric vehicle fleet? 

Isn't GW hours consumed per year to be divided by 24*365 to get needed Transfer capacity per hour
or something more reasonable as you do most charging during the night (like 365*8 in worst case)

 

[sunday]

30 minutes ago, John T said:

Isn't GW hours consumed per year to be divided by 24*365 to get needed Transfer capacity per hour
or something more reasonable as you do most charging during the night (like 365*8 in worst case)

Ideally, yes. In practice one needs to consider the availability factor. With a factor of 100, yes, you only need to divide by 24*365, but when the factor is 25%, you need to multiply the result of that division by 1/0.25, i.e., 4. And add some high availability energy source as a backup for when the unreliable source fails.

Nuke/coal/gas/fuel/hydro power plants tend to have an availability factor in the high 90s, supposing there is fuel/water available for the conventional ones, but the value for solar and wind is about 10-30%. 

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

Public opinion in Germany about nuclear power has always been succeptible to the impact of major events. 

You'd think one of the most anal retentive populations on the planet would like Nuclear more than the French. 🙃

 

[lucklucky]

Oops! they did say that aloud.

[BansheeOne]

10 hours ago, rmgill said:

You'd think one of the most anal retentive populations on the planet would like Nuclear more than the French. 🙃

 

Well after Chernobyl, the widely-accepted narrative was "Yeah but that was an old Soviet reactor designed, built and operated by communists - it could never happen here." Fukushima played hell with that, particularly as Japanese like Germans are supposed to be technical perfectionists. That this was also an old American design, and tsunamis are unlikely to occur on the Upper Rhine were nuances lost in the noise of the argumentative cataclysm. Not least because public debating culture had changed in the preceding decades; as we all know just looking around this forum, the internet age doesn't do nuance and unemotional discussion well.

I guess you could also say there had been an anti-nuclear groundswell since Chernobyl. In the 40:40 opinion climate around the Millenium, the Red-Green Schröder government decided to get out of nuclear power based upon total amount of energy yet to be generated by it, which would have seen an exit somewhere between 2015 and 2020. Just the year before Fukushima, the conservative-liberal Merkel II cabinet extended operation for the remaining plants by eight years for older, 14 for newer reactors. Of course after Fukushima and faced with important state elections in Baden-Württemberg against the already-strong Greens, they did a 180 in a typical Merkelian approach to steal the opposition's ammunition, and set a hard exit date for the end of 2022.

It didn't help them any obviously; people rather voted for the original, and I suspect the impact on public opinion was "well when even a CDU/FDP government says nuclear power is too dangerous, there can be no doubt". In light of the effects on energy supply accurately predicted by cooler heads and highlighted by recent events, you could say this was Germany's Brexit (Nuxit?) moment, except that it was decided top-down and a vast majority was happy with it.

[jmsaari]

4 minutes ago, BansheeOne said:

Well after Chernobyl, the widely-accepted narrative was "Yeah but that was an old Soviet reactor designed, built and operated by communists - it could never happen here." Fukushima played hell with that, particularly as Japanese like Germans are supposed to be technical perfectionists. That this was also an old American design, and tsunamis are unlikely to occur on the Upper Rhine were nuances lost in the noise of the argumentative cataclysm. Not least because public debating culture had changed in the preceding decades; as we all know just looking around this forum, the internet age doesn't do nuance and unemotional discussion well.

And perhaps the most important nuance of all, which is that there were no deaths due to radiation sickness in or around the plant, and if the same standards of radiation levels that resulted in the staggeringly expensive evacuation and cleanup operation were to be applied in Finland, we'd have some buildings built on granite moraine hills in the category of immediate evacuation, and no visiting to pick belongings until the area has cooled off... Far too many people go with the assumption that since Japan is putting that much effort into evacuation and cleanup, it must have been necessary to save lives. 

[BansheeOne]

Well on the second anniversary, then-Green party head Claudia Roth made a Facebook post commemorating "the 16,000 victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster". Of course she got a shitstorm for conflating the tsunami dead with the effects of the meltdown, which is about all the nuance you're going to get on the net. 😁

[jmsaari]

15 hours ago, Huba said:

Ha, in Poland all the major district heating facilities are of cogenerating type, I didn't even consider pure heat. AFAIK it should be possible to have SMR that plugs right into existing infrastructure instead of the furnace. Still the economics if that must be interesting. 

It's about 50-50 here between co-generation and heat-only, in terms of capacity (but cogeneration produces around 70-80% of the energy)

I've seen NuScale and the like promoting the CHP options and it might become viable as well, eventually, but there' bigger obstacles over getting that short of thing working for city DH supply than a simple hot-water. Starting from the fact that though it's small compared to current-generation it's still 250 MWth (IIRC, or smth tehereabouts), the Rolls-Royce SMR concept is even bigger and actually not much smaller than a VVER-440, so there comes a lot of problems right there. You'll have a harder time selling the idea of safety of smth like that to both the voters and the nuclear safety authorities to be built right next to a big city, and it will need to be a big city because producing steam for turbine means pressures and temperatures that will drive up the pressure vessel costs so you need to run all that thermal power for 7000-8000 hours/year for any chance of profitability, and of course passive safety becomes harder the bigger you get. 

The concept we're trying to push around here is to put a very small well under 100 MWth PWR reactor that'd be rate for max 16 bars pressure and dug into bedrock, where secondary loop is also just hot water at something like 120 °C or bit more... a lot lighter structures and <3% fuel enrichment so should permit a lot lighter regulation as well, hopefully permitting mid-load operations and not only in the biggest cities. IIRC China has apparently done something like that already, as well.

[jmsaari]

16 hours ago, Gavin-Phillips said:

I must say that TankNet never fails to amaze me.  I was following this discussion to better understand the movements of the front lines, how Russian BTG's actually work and what overall effect NATO-supplied weapons would have but now I'm getting a brilliant education on renewable energy sources and how effective/ineffective they might be.  And no, I'm not being sarcastic either, I'm genuinely impressed here.

Without wishing the drag the discussion too far off-topic (which of course has never happened in the entire history of TankNet), I was told a few years back that one of the main reasons we have issues with biomass being used as a power source is that it was never meant to be used alone, but rather burnt alongside other fuels as well.  Is this true?  As I understand it, the plantations for the trees are being cut down and burnt much faster than they can be replaced.

We're not even at dog farts yet  

Re: the biomass combustion, there's some challenges, and as always a lot of it is "depends on x y and z"...

So basically the main problem is high-temperature corrosion in superheaters due to combination of chlorine and alkali metals (which most biomass has more than most coals), and lack of sulphur in biomass (which would counteract the corrosion a bit). Generally grassy biomass is a lot worse than woody.

You get away with burning it by a) reducing superheater temperature levels some (reduces efficiency), b) using better (=more expensive) superheater materials, or c) adding some sulphur, by say co-combustion with peat.  Traditionally you'd do bit of all three, but with peat prices here going up and talks of banning it altogether, it's more and more towards b) and perhaps d) as in just replacing the superheaters more often. With woody biomass, doing away with sulphur-containing co-combustion fuel adds a bit to the cost, but not dramatically. 

[sunday]

https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/MoveluX_2020.pdf

Quote

MoveluX stands for Mobile-Very-small reactor for Local Utility in X-mark. It is a 10- MWth class multi-purpose micro reactor that uses heat-pipes for its primary core cooling and sodium as the working coolant. The heat-pipe provides passive safety features as well as system simplification. MoveluX uses low enriched uranium fuel of less than 4.99 wt% that complies with nuclear security and non-proliferation measures. As a multi-purpose micro reactor, high temperature operation is crucial. To achieve the purpose of minimizing the core size, , calcium-hydride (CaH2) capable of operating at up to 800oC is adopted as the moderator material. The MoveluX reactor system is designed with inherent passive safety based on the natural principle, i.e. reactor shut down by moderator material property decay heat removal from the surface of the reactor vessel by natural circulation of air.

Quote

The MoveluX reactor system is designed for a small footprint of two-container size. The final heat-sink is atmospheric air, thus restrictions of site locations can be relaxed compared to that of conventional reactors. MoveluX is a multipurpose energy source that can be used to produce electricity, hydrogen and high temperature heat. Due to its small size, MoveluX can provide process heat to chemical plants and steel mills located in remote places. A MoveluX power plant can generate 3-4 MW(e) base-load electricity in off-grid location in synergy with renewable energy source.

Other Toshiba designs

[bojan]

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

...particularly as Japanese like Germans are supposed to be technical perfectionists...

One only needs to read on 1997 Tokaimura incident to know how foolish that idea is. Barely trained personal, improper equipment, no criticality alarms installed* (something that US and Soviets considered essential in the 1950s! FFS), botched reaction etc.

*"Because those things do not happen to us because we are technical perfectionists" was a line of thinking.

 

[Ssnake]

Which is why I've become a skeptic of nuclear power over the years. The technology itself may be sufficiently advanced. But powerplants are managed and operated by people, so you invariably get people problems with it.

You can't engineer against stupidity, laziness, greed, and negligence.

[jmsaari]

11 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Which is why I've become a skeptic of nuclear power over the years. The technology itself may be sufficiently advanced. But powerplants are managed and operated by people, so you invariably get people problems with it.

You can't engineer against stupidity, laziness, greed, and negligence.

Well you can, up to a point anyway... but unfortunately there's absolutely zero engineering solutions to political overreactions.

[sunday]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Which is why I've become a skeptic of nuclear power over the years. The technology itself may be sufficiently advanced. But powerplants are managed and operated by people, so you invariably get people problems with it.

You can't engineer against stupidity, laziness, greed, and negligence.

Hyman Rickover would disagree with that.

[glenn239]

19 hours ago, John T said:

 

Isn't GW hours consumed per year to be divided by 24*365 to get needed Transfer capacity per hour
or something more reasonable as you do most charging during the night (like 365*8 in worst case)

 

Assuming 8 million vehicles drive 12,000km per year and get 10km to the litre, divided by 365 and then again by 24, that's about 10.5 GW hours.  So maybe with 5g technology for staggered recharging fanciness and planning they can get away with an increase of 30 gw, (/365*8) as you suggest.

According to the website the German power grid in 2021 is divided into power generation they want to expand, and generation they want to get rid of - 

Expand (Solar, Wind, Hydro, Biomass)  = 136gw

Phase out (Oil, Gas, Coal, Lugnite, Nuclear) = 86.8gw

The German grid looks naturally like it requires a 7.5gw increase per year.  Add 4gw for cars and maybe another 4gw to replace sources they're phasing out, and they need about 15gw a year in new power each year.  Currently, their Solar and Wind are expanding by about 5.5gw per year, so they have to maybe about triple their rate of solar/wind expansion?  Does that seem about ballpark?

[Ssnake]

Doesn't sound entirely unreasonable to me. Not going to happen, of course.

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

Well after Chernobyl, the widely-accepted narrative was "Yeah but that was an old Soviet reactor designed, built and operated by communists - it could never happen here." Fukushima played hell with that, particularly as Japanese like Germans are supposed to be technical perfectionists. That this was also an old American design, and tsunamis are unlikely to occur on the Upper Rhine were nuances lost in the noise of the argumentative cataclysm.

Has there been a surge of tsunami warning systems in the baltic? 🤔

 

Quote

Not least because public debating culture had changed in the preceding decades; as we all know just looking around this forum, the internet age doesn't do nuance and unemotional discussion well.

Does Germany need a USAID shipment of irony and sarcasm with injectable doeses of reality? 🙃

Edited June 16, 2022 by rmgill

[rmgill]

2 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Which is why I've become a skeptic of nuclear power over the years. The technology itself may be sufficiently advanced. But powerplants are managed and operated by people, so you invariably get people problems with it.

You can't engineer against stupidity, laziness, greed, and negligence.

That's where the inherently safe reactor designs come into play. 

[lucklucky]

1 hour ago, glenn239 said:

Currently, their Solar and Wind are expanding by about 5.5gw per year

How much of that is usable?

[rmgill]

23 minutes ago, lucklucky said:

How much of that is usable?

At what load availability? 

[Quang]

I saw this article on the US micro reactor being developed at the Idaho National Lab. They claim the first one could be ready as early as next year. Inside the U.S. government project to create tiny nuclear reactors like batteries (msn.com)

[jmsaari]

52 minutes ago, lucklucky said:

How much of that is usable?

You mean capacity factor? New onshore wind comes these days around 30-35%, offshore 40-50%, on average. But varies year to year, place to place, of course.

Solar, more like bit over 10-15% in GER...

Edited June 16, 2022 by jmsaari

[sunday]

1 hour ago, lucklucky said:

How much of that is usable?

None during not windy, or too windy, nights.

[rmgill]

I was looking for a percentage availability factor... 10% 30% 5%?