4 ms·
> that takes up 100-1000x the land Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like. > always has a few % of its installed capacity down for mainten
by jhgb 4y ago
> that takes up 100-1000x the land
Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like.
> always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance
That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing).
> and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium
Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium?
BTW in my country, $10B are close to providing 1 GW in average solar PV power output -- that is, capacity-factor-adjusted -- and it would have been more than 1 GW of average output if it weren't for our terrible PV capacity factor, so other countries fare much better. But even that would be on par with your 1 GW reactor (since that is slightly below 1 GW on average due to its own capacity factor). Yet PV costs keep decreasing year by year while reactor costs are increasing. The future will be very interesting...
- mdp2021 4y ago> Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like No. Very many Countries have very dense territories, and not much land naturally destinable to that kind of degradation.
- jhgb 4y agoAnd many do not. So? Considering that you want to build very large grids to smooth over your generation (my country is a part of a synchronous grid supplying almost half a billion people with electricity), it's very hard to argue with "but where will we put these things?", because in almost all cases you will find a place.
- mdp2021 4y agoYou have stated that land use is «practically irrelevant» with the exception of «Singapore or the like». It is not.
- jhgb 4y agoIt is practically irrelevant in the sense that you can virtually always find an acceptable place to put a wind turbine in in a several hundred kilometer radius. While there are places with very densely populated territories, there are no places with territories that are very densely populated over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.
- inglor_cz 4y ago"an acceptable place" Look at the situation in Germany. "An" acceptable place, yes, but given how many of the Windräder you need, finding enough such places is a different task, because many less populated places are wildlife refuges. And yes, German wind power is expanding into old growth forests and mountains, which provokes embittered fights with classical nature protectionists who do not want to allow such damage to the last remnants of preserved landscape. The entire "do we need to protect local vulnerable species or do we have to sacrifice them to reduce global climate change by 0.1 per cent" debate is very bitter and as the Green party leans towards the latter, it may yet lead to emergence of an anti-Green pro-Naturschutz movement, which, in all likelihood, would be co-opted by the far right.
- jhgb 4y agoGermany has more problems with north-south transmission lines than with places to put wind turbines in. Their windy coast would serve them perfectly well if they managed to push those transmission projects through.
- mdp2021 4y ago> Their windy coast In fact, it remains a good idea to place wind farms at least far away at sea, unless you have the comfort of hosting deserts.
- nebalee 4y agoThere are no 'last remnants of preserved landscape' in Germany. 97% of all forests in Germany are Wirtschaftswald i.e. commercially used forests.
- trashtester 4y agoNorway is one of the most sparsely populated areas of Europe, still, land based windmills are extremely unpopular in rural areas. And sea based ones in the Norwegian trench are not exactly cheap to build, due to rough seas and the depth of the water.
- webmaven 4y ago> Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium? I think the idea is to ameliorate the unpredictability of wind capacity by storing excess off-peak power for low-generation periods. There are better solutions, but they are mostly less generic and often better implemented close to the point of use.
- jhgb 4y ago> There are better solutions That's a good euphemism for "this solution is a spectacularly bad one". Storing electricity in lithium batteries is the last thing you want to do when balancing the grid. You want to start with demand response, then continue with overgeneration, then continue with pumped hydro. In the future (when we will have replaced natural gas by synthetic hydrogen as part of the demand response) then possibly continue with expending stored synthetic gas in a CCGT plant (this would be especially suitable for the "dunkelflaute" events). Grid storage lithium batteries for large-scale storage (not things like frequency regulation) are somewhere at the end of the cost scale and it's not something you really want to do since you need those batteries primarily for mobile applications. Even if you wanted lots of stationary batteries, there might be better candidates -- I still want to see some company to cut their teeth on advanced NiFe batteries, for example. One thing you could do as part of the demand response step, however, is modulating the charging rate of BEVs. But personally I consider this to be more a part of the transportation sector than energy generation as such.
- webmaven 4y ago> You want to start with demand response, then continue with overgeneration, then continue with pumped hydro. Pumped hydro is in the class of solutions I had in mind. An example would be a refrigerated warehouse using off-peak power to freeze large blocks of ice to be used later as heat sinks. > Even if you wanted lots of stationary batteries, there might be better candidates For some applications (an orbital LINAC/railgun, for example) you would want large banks of capacitors rather than batteries.