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My thoughts exactly. I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for electricity production (output is just too little) but all th
by exDM69 10y ago
My thoughts exactly.
I'm under the impression that e.g. wind power should not be built at all for electricity production (output is just too little) but all the subsidies it enjoys makes it a worthwhile business. Considering whether this is true is difficult because the facts are intentionally obscured and for example the wind power capacity is often at some nominal wind speed which is often a lot more than the average at the location. In my home country, a 1MW wind turbine was built but the nominal output is at 13 m/s while the average wind speed is around 6 m/s, yielding about an eighth of the nominal power (proportional to the speed cubed).
The same is true for photovoltaics as the raw materials need a huge volume of earth to be mined for a miniscule amount of material.
Nuclear isn't any different, it's hard to get facts from uranium mining and enrichment, especially given its military value and the surrounding secrecy.
For this reason, I usually refrain from any energy policy discussion. I can't have an opinion if I can't have the facts. Without facts, these discussions often devolve into emotional shouting contests.
- iaw 10y agoFrom what I've eked out over the years: - Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous factors, especially predicting production and storage. - Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US, etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert installation is a good example...) - Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g. Canada). - Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity exists so it's going to be hard to get away from. - Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking and they are the only feasible stopgap. - Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate. Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's likelihood of realization low. In short, we're screwed.