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


jmsaari

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8 minutes ago, rmgill said:

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

Availability would be well over 90%, I think you mean capacity factor (see above: in most of Europe 30-35% for onshore wind, 40-50% offshore, 10-15% for solar (more like 20 in the south though)

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Availability to me would seem to be when a given plant is able to be online and generate it's capacity in megawatts. A coal plant can be turned on and will have some period of time where it has to be shut down for servicing. Wind would only make power when the wind was blowing but not outside of it's high and low capacity functions of the turbine/gearbox/torque requirements. Solar would only be available to be connected to the grid for it's necessary capacity when the sun was up and not obscured by weather.Ā 

One can turn up and down a coal, NG, or nuke plant as one needs along with dictates of servicing requirements. Hydro too generally. One does NOT have that option with Solar or Wind as mother nature can decide otherwise despite what your load requirements demand.Ā 
Ā 

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2 hours ago, rmgill said:

Availability to me would seem to be when a given plant is able to be online and generate it's capacity in megawatts. A coal plant can be turned on and will have some period of time where it has to be shut down for servicing. Wind would only make power when the wind was blowing but not outside of it's high and low capacity functions of the turbine/gearbox/torque requirements. Solar would only be available to be connected to the grid for it's necessary capacity when the sun was up and not obscured by weather.Ā 

One can turn up and down a coal, NG, or nuke plant as one needs along with dictates of servicing requirements. Hydro too generally. One does NOT have that option with Solar or Wind as mother nature can decide otherwise despite what your load requirements demand.Ā 
Ā 

Well, i'm not a native english speaker so won't argue if it's good grammatical use of the words or no, but right or wrong, availability in the power industry is a operation/maintenance term, defined as a = [time unit is operational] / [time unit is operational + unscheduled outages] , so it's clearer to use terms as they are.

What you're talking about is called capacity factor which is the annual GWh's divided by nameplate power rating x 8760 h. With the VRE's that tells you also the "availability" in the sense you desribed, because the variable cost of production is basically zero and whenever the primary energy source is there, you produce power as much as you can.

Edited by jmsaari
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jmsaari's definition of availability is a reliability engineering standard definition. It would be best not to confuse matters further by overloading it to mean something else.

Here is one of several monitoring sites for UK grid mix and demand. it's not the prettiest, but it shows the numbers well enough.

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

At the time of writing, this part of the UK has good solar and decent wind. We can see that this is effective because we're exporting to France, which has been rare historically and a bit odd, given that we are running 8GW of CCGT generation and thus using natural gas.

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9 hours ago, lucklucky said:

Ā 

I was thinking about the energy crisis this weekend (3 straight days of 100F). Nuke technology continues to improve, natural gas turbines are GTG, hydro works fine but politically infeasible. The political system, however, seems determined to ensure that people suffer in winter and summer.

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1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

I was thinking about the energy crisis this weekend (3 straight days of 100F). Nuke technology continues to improve, natural gas turbines are GTG, hydro works fine but politically infeasible. The political system, however, seems determined to ensure that people suffer in winter and summer.

Tony Heller once showed one of those "picture worth a thousand words "

A coal fired power plant with the steam rising straight up, surrounded by snow encrusted solar panels and still wind turbines. So in a flash you see no wind power and no solar powerĀ  BUT they wanted to shut the only coal plant for DenverĀ 

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11 hours ago, lucklucky said:

Ā 

The long term thinking of Swedish Teenagers who get to dictate Energy policy is astonishing.Ā 

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Quote

Ā 

The Rich Worldā€™s Climate Hypocrisy

They beg for more oil and coal for themselves while telling developing lands to rely on solar and wind.

The developed worldā€™s response to the global energy crisis has put its hypocritical attitude toward fossil fuels on display. Wealthy countries admonish developing ones to use renewable energy. Last month the Group of Seven went so far as to announce they would no longerĀ fund fossil-fuel development abroad. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are begging Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, and Spain and Italy are spending big on African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the nation will more than double its exports.

The developed world became wealthy through the pervasive use of fossil fuels, which still overwhelmingly power most of its economies. Solar and wind power arenā€™t reliable, simply because there are nights, clouds and still days. Improving battery storage wonā€™t help much: There are enough batteries in the world today only to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds. Even though the supply is being scaled up rapidly, by 2030 the worldā€™s batteries would still cover less than 11 minutes. Every German winter, when solar output is at its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five daysā€”or more than 7,000 minutes.

Ā 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rich-worlds-climate-hypocrisy-energy-fossil-fuel-wind-solar-panel-india-poverty-power-battery-storage-11655654331

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Last remaining adults in the "green" kindergarten.

Edited by bojan
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9 minutes ago, bojan said:

Last remaining adults in the "green" kindergarten.

I hope, when western industrialized nations finally wake up, that the French will make a fortune selling fission plants to all the cold, shivering fools who got rid of their reliable power.

Ā 

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Just now, Ivanhoe said:

I hope, when western industrialized nations finally wake up, that the French will make a fortune selling fission plants to all the cold, shivering fools who got rid of their reliable power.

Ā 

Japan also. We in Spain still have some capability to build reactor vessels, steam generators, and the like.

China is the other supplier with a developed civilian nuclear power industry, but projects with China usually come with nasty strings attached.

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1 hour ago, sunday said:

Japan also. We in Spain still have some capability to build reactor vessels, steam generators, and the like.

China is the other supplier with a developed civilian nuclear power industry, but projects with China usually come with nasty strings attached.

At this point, it seems to me that France has the lead in experience, safety record, and less likely to abandon a customer due to cultural/political differences. Had it not been for Fukushima, Japan would be right there also; much harder to market Japanese designs unfortunately.

Note that I'd much rather live near an average nuke plant than a photovoltaic plant...

Ā 

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1 hour ago, Ivanhoe said:

...much harder to market Japanese designs unfortunately.

Especially considering their arrogance about being superior in safety culture, while track record is... not that good. Case in point, 1999 Tokaimura accident "We don't need criticality alarms* because those things don't happen in our work culture", while pouring uranyl nitrate solution into tank with aĀ  bucket previously used by the cleaning crew. :(

*Things that US and USSR considered essential in very high safety orientated period known as the early '50s :D

Edited by bojan
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5 hours ago, bojan said:

Especially considering their arrogance about being superior in safety culture, while track record is... not that good. Case in point, 1999 Tokaimura accident "We don't need criticality alarms* because those things don't happen in our work culture", while pouring uranyl nitrate solution into tank with aĀ  bucket previously used by the cleaning crew. :(

Thats some demon core stupidity there.Ā 
Ā 

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/tokaimura-criticality-accident.aspx

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2 hours ago, JWB said:

USA is still a million barrels don from 2019 peak.

Weekly U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels per Day) (eia.gov)

And yet, that million is less than 8% of that peak, and the production trend is upward. The upward trend line is slightly less steep than in previous periods, but half of the production contraction in early 2020 (what may be attributed to Biden's "war on domestic oil") has recovered.

Not entirely sure what your point is?

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23 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

I hope, when western industrialized nations finally wake up, that the French will make a fortune selling fission plants to all the cold, shivering fools who got rid of their reliable power.

The French unfortunately seem to have designed a plant that takes a decade or two of time and 10 billion EUR or so to build, so the shivering fools may need to look further to Korea for an APR, or keep shivering until the NuScales & the like start (hopefully) deliver on the promises...

There's an interesting schism developing among the greens here at least in that an increasing number of their leading politicians, bloggers and other visible figures are finally starting to lean towards pro-nuclear, while among the voters the green voters are still the most anti-nuclear.... which may have at least some part in the reasons for their slow hemorrhaging of support in the polls over the last few years.

At the same time, biomass energy use seems to become the new nuclear for the greens.

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15 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Not entirely sure what your point is?

The graph seems to suggest that if the Trump era policy had continued uninterrupted by the drop caused by Biden's alteration of policy, that US oil production might be in the range of 15 million barrels a day instead of 12 million.Ā 

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3 hours ago, jmsaari said:

The French unfortunately seem to have designed a plant that takes a decade or two of time and 10 billion EUR or so to build, so the shivering fools may need to look further to Korea for an APR, or keep shivering until the NuScales & the like start (hopefully) deliver on the promises...

There's an interesting schism developing among the greens here at least in that an increasing number of their leading politicians, bloggers and other visible figures are finally starting to lean towards pro-nuclear, while among the voters the green voters are still the most anti-nuclear.... which may have at least some part in the reasons for their slow hemorrhaging of support in the polls over the last few years.

At the same time, biomass energy use seems to become the new nuclear for the greens.

Pardon my French but what is biomass?

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