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California to open five natural gas plants to avoid blackouts
- LatteLazy 5y agoNatural gas is a lot greener than everyone bhying little diesel generators for their houses i guess...
- sasfasaf 5y agoIt's a lot greener than little generators you'd buy at Costco. But don't dismiss neighborhood scale generation. It can approach efficiencies of large scale plants, while providing free heating/cooling. All whilst being very robust.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThe US got incredibly lucky that its quirky combination of land-use rights and geology enabled the natural gas boom during a transition from coal to renewables. It’s one reason for many shifts like the pull out of Afghanistan and the reduction of emissions immediately after leaving the Paris accord. If humans are smart, they won’t let natural gas delay the full transition to renewables.
- melling 5y agoRenewables can’t replace natural gas until we develop effective ways to store the energy for a baseload. Since we won’t use nuclear power, it’s going to be here for quite some time. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-nuclear-power-to-fight-climate-change.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/bill-gates-bullish-on-using-...
- grey-area 5y agoThere are lots of proven ways to store energy for fluctuations in load. Hydro storage and battery storage have both been proven at scale and battery storage in particular is dropping in price. Nuclear is very expensive in comparison.
- jcun4128 5y agoThe moving mass batteries are interesting
- WJW 5y agoInteresting technically but not really economically. Gravity is just not a very strong force compared to chemical bonds so you need humongous amounts of mass and a fairly large height difference to store an equivalent amount of energy as a few containers worth of batteries. There is a reason that even though we've had the technology to make moving mass batteries for decades, the only form of such energy storage in operation today is pumped hydro.
- melling 5y ago20% of electricity in the United States is from nuclear. How many more decades before we can replace that with a renewable option? I’ve watched people like yourself be wrong for 2 decades. I suppose in another 5 decades you might be right. In the meantime, being wrong has a price as greenhouse emissions increase
- grey-area 5y agoI'm not sure which point you think you're refuting. Renewable options are here and are being used and grid storage is a solved problem, though with the current balkanised and underfunded state of the US grid it is unsurprising there are significant ongoing problems there caused by lack of long term investment in infrastructure. IMO existing nuclear plants should be kept until they can be replaced easily, and the US may well take decades to do so as they are very slow on the uptake. Other countries are doing a lot better, some have reached 100% power from renewables already for short periods of time and are on track to do it for long periods in the coming decades. Greenhouse emissions are not rising in the US, they are gradually falling as renewable options become cheaper and are built out and EVs spread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:Greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-gas_(2).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... I'd expect them to keep falling given transport and electricity generation are the main sources.
- ben_w 5y agoOr long-distance transmission. I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre, but the losses are within the realm of at least asking if it can be done — 3.5% per 1,000 km is (0.965^20) = 0.49 ~= 51% loss for 20,000 km, and the cells themselves are cheap enough these days that it’s still often economically viable even if you need twice as many cells. (Obviously you don’t want to do antipodal HVDC until you need to, because even if the HVDC lines were free, pointless transmission losses are still pointless even if you can afford them).
- sasfasaf 5y ago". I have no idea how much a multi-gigawatt HVDC line costs per kilometre," Well there's the crux, ain't it? They're bloody expensive. Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Then consider that a 20k line must be a DC line (to avoid reflection losses). Also, why did you use 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Well 20km for your loss calculations is not nearly enough since you cannot connect two sites in a straight line. For starters the earth' topography won't allow it. But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet). To give you an idea of the added distance compare the straight line distance of Atlanta to Pittsburgh to the interstate distance (520 mi to 680 mi). Finally, the proposal of connecting two sites on opposite ends of the earth is fundamentally hegemonist. What are you going to do with the fiercely independent people that tend to live in deserts when they oppose you wallpapering their desert with panels? When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals?
- ben_w 5y ago> Also, to your 3.5% loss / 1000km line loss add in the transformation losses. Which is going to be a fixed amount regardless of distance? While I don’t have the numbers, I would expect HVDC to be a dead end already if it made a difference to my conclusion. > 20k km? Such a curious number, half the world's circumference, that I suspect you mean to propose to wrap the world in power lines to get power at midnight from noon elsewhere Indeed, though this is likely excessive: summer/winter is significantly harder for storage to deal with — and hence the mostly likely to be solved with transmission — than day/night, given most people sleep at night but nobody hibernates though winter. > But then there's the issue that you won't connect every city to every generating site, but have a hub-spoke model (like ethernet) Surely a web is the best topology? Existing grids don’t all run on hub-and-spoke models: https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S https://openinframap.org/#2/19.82/13.02/L,P,S > When the Bedouins of Algeria are blowing up the electricity needed in Japan, will the EU send storm troopers to punish the locals? While true, I’m not even going to try to play at global geopolitics; all I can say is that while deserts are a good place for PV, and while PV is the best thing I (being neither a biologist nor a geologist) know what to do with a dessert, the land area required for PV is low enough that even the UK — entirely north of the US-Canadian border — would be able to power itself in winter with no transmission and just a day/night storage system using 1% of its land area [0], so tiling the entire Sahara is unlikely: The same equations say that even if we electrify all world energy consumption, Algeria alone could supply everyone 6 times over, but you’d only do a global grid like this precisely if you didn’t want the huge storage system I’m implicitly adding to worsen the performance of my opinion and give your criticism the best possible chance. [0] illumination = (cos(51 north + plus axial tilt) / π) * 1kW/m^2 ~= 87 W/m^2; efficiency = 20% ~> 17.5 W/m^2; 35 GW / (17.5 W/m^2) ~= 2000 km^2; U.K. land area ~= 242,495 km^2. I think this is a bad idea, but economics beats aesthetics and someone would need to run the numbers that I don’t have to say which of storage and transmission is actually better. Perhaps the minima for the UK is PV in Algeria and HVDC, perhaps it is local x*PV + y*wind + z* batteries. It probably varies from any one country to the next.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoWell meaning goals resulting in hell keening outcomes.. Baseload should be handled by nuclear. Excess and spikes- should be renewable and storage.
- 6nf 5y agoYup, we still can't do base load on solar or wind power. Unless you're lucky geographically, nuclear is the best option.
- Retric 5y agoThat’s false. Many solar power plants already include ~“4h” of maximum output via batteries. Currently it’s used for peaking power in the evenings. However, that’s ~50% of their daily output. As grid demand is higher in the day that means at scale they could provide 100% grid power 24/7. Giant 3h system “400 MW of solar energy and store up to 1200 MWh of energy“: https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-storage/article/20973127/la-mayor-approves-largest-solar-and-battery-storage-project-in-the-us https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/energy-... Example of using that for peak demand: https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/pv-insider/giant-oregon-wind-solar-plant-use-4-hour-battery-peak-shifting https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/pv-insider/giant-or... To be clear a 4GW PV instillation would be 4GW * 4h or 16GWh. That 4GW produces ~30% of maximum output per day or 4GW * 0.3 * 24h = 28.8GWh per day. 28.8GWh - 16GWh = 12GWh after charging batteries. So for ~10h you get 1.2 GW with surplus charging batteries, and for the other ~14 you get 1.14GW.
- bamboozled 5y agoYou have ruffled many feathers…
- OneTimePetes 5y agoIf there was as supraconducting pipeline for current, could a solar receiving part of the planet, send power to a part that is already in shade?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoI think this illustrates one of the central issues in confronting climate change. Despite what politicians say about how much they prioritize climate change, when push comes to shove, they prioritize cheap, reliable power because that is what their constituents prioritize. So unless you can provide cheap, reliable power with zero carbon energy, we are not going to make much progress.
- bamboozled 5y agoIt’s sad to say, politicians don’t get elected on intellect.
- sp332 5y agoI don't know if that describes California very well. They already accelerated solar and wind projects. I don't know if they could have prevented a shortfall in hydro power with a drought like this.
- oxymoran 5y agoWould have been easier to just not shut down that nuclear power plant in the first place…
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoShut down nuclear power -> +5 virtue points. Spin up gas power plants to solve an actual problem -> -2 virtue points, less if you can deflect the blame elsewhere. See why they did it this way? Government decision making is absolutely riddled with this kind of crap.
- theevilsharpie 5y agoThe San Onofre plant was shut down because the replacement reactor that was installed was defective and unsafe to operate, and repairing it wasn't worth the expense. They didn't shut it down for funsies.
- credit_guy 5y agoThere are 14 GW of installed solar power in California as of now [1]. These new gas plants will total 150 MW, so about 1% of the solar power generation. [1] https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/solar/index_cms.php https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/renewables_data/solar/inde...
- _red 5y agoIf CA actually cared about the environment they would mandate everyone drive a 20+ yr old cars. The concept of strip-mining 100 tons of land to make a battery and then charging that battery with coal/nat gas is not environmentally friendly. If you normalize to the metric "joules of power per $1 landed" its still very hard to beat petroleum. Sadly solar is still an order-of-magnitude away. However via some magical thinking Tesla drivers will claim "the economies of scale of charging millions of batteries by a coal powered plant makes it more efficient than gas." Thats simply press-release style thinking. A 25 y/o Toyota is 10x better for the environment.
- fredestine 5y agoi got downvoted on every discussion about electrics for similar comments on HN. the lobby is strong.
- _red 5y agoYes, its for social media: When your environmental activism only needs to pass <280-char limit
- JshWright 5y agoEven if the grid were completely fossil fueled, an electric car would be more efficient thanks to the much higher efficiency of burning fossil fuels in large power generators vs tiny combustion engines.
- _red 5y ago"we lose money on each sale but plan to make it up on volume...." ok
- sasfasaf 5y agoThat's not obvious to me. Sure, using the numbers and technology we all learned about in thermo class 20 years ago (best ICE efficiency of a car is 20% usually gets much worse), I agree. But the hybrid drivetrain throws all the assumptions of that common wisdom in the air. Namely: - Throttle can be open all the way when power is needed, the engine turned off otherwise - Engine can be made for efficiency, not power density - Engine can be sized to average power, not worst case scenario over the lifetime of the car On top of that, in the last 20 years, the power electronics revolution has made recovery of the energy in the exhaust stream possible (see F1). I'd love to have an ICE expert tell me why ICE efficiency can't be double what common wisdom tells me what it is. I suspect it's environmental laws regulating NOx emissions (thus putting a hard upper bound on compression ratios). I really doubt an electric car can beat the carbon emissions of a natural gas powered ICE that achieves 40% efficiency. Not with our current energy mix anyway
- danielovichdk 5y agoWhat is all the power being used for ? Why the shortage ?
- theevilsharpie 5y agoA substantial amount of the power generation in California comes from solar, whose output peaks at noon and drops off substantially in the evening. This leads to a situation in the 4-10 PM range where power usage is still at peak levels, but power generation has fallen off due to the drop in solar output. Natural gas peaker plants are used to fill that shortfall. The California ISO publishes near real-time statistics on the grid where you can see this effect: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
- spodek 5y agoNot a word about reducing consumption? Americans consume more power than almost anyone and it's not improving our lives. Most of us can reduce our consumption 75% just on simple life improvements, at home and business. Nothing pollutes less than leaving the fuel in the ground. (Source: I'm not special and reduced mine about 90% and going. My latest electric bill was $4 and change (plus fixed line fees). In the spring I hit $1.40, as I wrote up in https://joshuaspodek.com/i-used-2-5-the-average-americans-electric-power-last-month https://joshuaspodek.com/i-used-2-5-the-average-americans-el... and https://joshuaspodek.com/12-sustainability-leadership-lessons-unplugging-my-fridge-for-6-5-months-taught-me https://joshuaspodek.com/12-sustainability-leadership-lesson...). It's a question of values and which ones we want to live by. Stewardship, family, community, resilience, enjoying what we have, humility toward nature, meaning, and purpose are always available but we have to choose them.
- tsjq 5y agonot just Americans, almost nobody can reduce consumption on such a large scale.
- himinlomax 5y agoYou can reduce electricity consumption easily by banning electric vehicles! Or less flippantly: trying to reduce electricity use is very likely to result in increased fossil fuel use. And not just vehicles.
- bildung 5y agoEVs are a tiny market in the US, smaller than e.g. the EV market in Germany (which has <20% of the US population) - I can't imagine this to be a big source of new grid load. IMO a huge win-win situation would be enforcement of modern building techniques (proper insulation and/or thermal mass, double or triple glazed windows etc). That would enlarge qualitiy of living for the inhabitants, massively reduce energy consumption due to much less need for AC both in summer and winter. And buildings would probably last longer. If enforced by law, this wouldn't even increase TCO of new buildings due to scale. That this isn't currently available in the US is essentially market failure: Small scale for modern construction means much higher prices than elsewhere, and better building quality currently is too esoteric to proportionally raise resale value.
- darepublic 5y agoI just see endless back and forth between nuclear vs solar and wind. And I feel like these should all be gathered up and forced to properly address each other's arguments so we can get a better picture of the true pros and cons. I am somehow reminded of the Simpsons episode where the kids race rolling fruit to the front of the bus. Like Ralf I want to proclaim Go Banana and place my bet on fusion
- cascom 5y agoIt’s not an A vs B problem, it’s mix optimization problem, because we need baseload, dispatchable, and peaking power sources. So you have to talk about the entire portfolio not sub one for another.
- ben_w 5y agoMostly agree, but I’d say the “Go banana!” option is trying to power the world purely with greater energy efficiency.
- mechagodzilla 5y agoSince nobody bothered to read the article: They're installing five 30MW gas generators, which will probably be run a handful of times a year. This provides 1/15 the capacity of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and a tiny fraction of california's solar capacity. It's a tiny amount of power/greenhouse gas/whatever, no matter how you look at it.
- roody15 5y agoNuclear is the best option on paper but a serious look at Fukushima needs to occur and be addressed first. In all discussions about pros and cons Fukushima is conveniently left out of the discussion or drastically minimized. Fukushima happened. We still do not contain the technology to fully stop the melted reactors. The price tag is in the billions and continues to rise in containment. The geographic loss of land use is massive. Even Chernobyl reactor continues to spew radiation and make the land inhabitable. Until we can build reactors that can be fully shutdown and contained I think nuclear is still a no go (IMO)
- redis_mlc 5y agoNote that Japan couldn't deal with Fukushima on their own. American nuclear experts stepped in and prioritized solving the two main emergencies, the plant failures and the less obvious storage ponds rapidly evaporating into more explosions. American experts used drones ASAP, and then relayed their analysis to the Japanese operators. (I believe the US used their military relationship to inject themselves into the crisis without the usual diplomatic process. The Japanese PM was directly involved (he forbid a suggested plant evacuation), so it could have been via him.)