5 ms·

> No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable That isn't enough, unless you are happy with 18 days of no power per year. Of cours

> No. Wind with approximately three hours of storage is about 95% reliable That isn't enough, unless you are happy with 18 days of no power per year. Of course you could maintain traditional power plans to provide power for those 18 days, but then you've doubled or tripled your power costs because you have purchased two systems for providing power. An intermittent system and a second system with the same capacity that is unused 95% of the time but must be available at a moments notice. And of course you have to maintain a viable supply chain for fuel, repairs, maintenance, labor, etc.

robomartin 4y ago
> That isn't enough > you have purchased two systems for providing power. Precisely! Correct! Therein lies the problem of renewables few people seem to understand, talk about and want to talk about. Solar and wind require 100% backup for the period of time during which they are not locally available. BTW, a good deal of what I have been saying is supported with data from this paper [0]. It analyzes 39 years of data from 42 different countries. It does a good job of displaying the difficult relationships between various mixes and solar, wind and storage. Figure 2 is excellent. It takes a bit of study to internalize. After studying these charts almost everyone should have serious questions about solar. This is where the 95% figure for wind comes from. And, BTW, figure 2 also shows that without overbuilding capacity both technologies are challenging. There are ways to look at using distant solar and wind to provide for power holes. For example, have wind power brought in from 500 to 1000 miles away. The idea is you know there's a seriously good probability for the weather being different enough that you cover the power holes at location A using power from location B. That's great. The question then becomes: How do residents of location B deal with their issues when you are sucking-up their power from location A. No simple answers to this other than to say that both solar and wind have to be overbuilt and require 100% backup --of some form, I don't care what type-- for when they cannot deliver. And so your question is perfectly valid and one that really needs to be on the table, front and center. I have asked it before. It is usually met with attacks and insults. It can take many forms, the most basic being: If you need full 100% reliable backup available at a moments' notice, 24/7/365, are these truly the best technologies for the job? I have argued that nuclear is a solid solution with 100% availability and the power density to deliver our needs. That is met with even more violent attacks and insults. Apparently I am somewhere between a really stupid person and a criminal for suggesting any of this. Having devoted a significant effort towards understanding the many intricacies surrounding these issues, my thinking has morphed over time. I used to think we had to consider deploying a massive amount of nuclear power (somewhere beyond 1000 new power plants) for a full transition to electric vehicles and homes. That, of course, is as close to impossible as one can get. I think a sensible path might be to focus on the 95% reliability of wind (which is far better than anything solar can achieve) and provide that 5% backup with regionally shared nuclear power and other power sources. We would still need hundreds of nuclear power plants built over the next, say, 30 to 50 years. Difficult, yes. Here's the shocking reality of a transition to full electrification (homes and transportation): We have to, at a minimum, TRIPLE our power generation and transport capacity. Why triple? Well, if we are going to go clean, you have to replace all of our existing power generation with 100% reliable clean alternatives. That means we need to build 1200 GW of new clean power generation. As we do this, we shut down what we don't want (if we can). Next, we need another 1200 GW --at a minimum-- to power a full fleet of electric ground vehicles. If we start talking cargo ships and aircraft, we are likely at another 1000 GW or far more. The task, then, is to build somewhere around 3000 to 4000 GW of new clean power generation sources. They have to be 100% reliable, or you need to grossly overbuild to compensate for that. The, question, then: Can we do this? In 25 years? No way. How about 50 years? Maybe? Tough to say. It sure a hell isn't happening in ten or fifteen, which makes the dramatic claims being made by politicians and their supporters nothing less than ridiculous. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2023/03/22/home-charging-challenges/ https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2023/03/22/home-charging-challe... EVs just charge whenever. Very few people use them like ICEs with regard to fuelling. The only thing needed to make them fit easily in the existing max output envelope is L1 chargers where they spend the day and TOU aware charging (and tarriffs). Most of the energy for charging them will never even hit the grid. And what little does will be mostly during the times of minimum usage. Fast chargers will have battery buffers anyway because no sane operator will want to pay the peak capacity rates for drawing 30MW during peak demand when their competitor next door can outcompete them by 50c/kWh by using a buffer. You have the right order of magnitude of 3TW nameplate (you're quoting nameplate for the existing capacity which is absolutely not the same thing as CF weighted power, but you know this and you're trying to intentionally conflate the two) for solar + wind and about 3TW peak including storage and energy-limited dispatch lime hydro and w2e, but you really went off the rails with the rest. You also know that a mix of wind and solar has a higher uptime than either alone. Maybe you should consider for half a second that the real engineers who actually think about this might have come to a different conclusion to your half-assed fermi estimate for good reasons?
  - robomartin 4y ago
    > your half-assed fermi estimate You continue to chase me around HN to insult me any time I participate in a discussion about energy. In the past I have asked @dang to let you carry on with these insults so you could show the world exactly who you are. My reasoning included such things as letting you "get it out of your system". You have done enough of that. This is now abusive. Please. Stop.

robomartin 4y ago

> That isn't enough > you have purchased two systems for providing power. Precisely! Correct! Therein lies the problem of renewables few people seem to understand, talk about and want to talk about. Solar and wind require 100% backup for the period of time during which they are not locally available. BTW, a good deal of what I have been saying is supported with data from this paper [0]. It analyzes 39 years of data from 42 different countries. It does a good job of displaying the difficult relationships between various mixes and solar, wind and storage. Figure 2 is excellent. It takes a bit of study to internalize. After studying these charts almost everyone should have serious questions about solar. This is where the 95% figure for wind comes from. And, BTW, figure 2 also shows that without overbuilding capacity both technologies are challenging. There are ways to look at using distant solar and wind to provide for power holes. For example, have wind power brought in from 500 to 1000 miles away. The idea is you know there's a seriously good probability for the weather being different enough that you cover the power holes at location A using power from location B. That's great. The question then becomes: How do residents of location B deal with their issues when you are sucking-up their power from location A. No simple answers to this other than to say that both solar and wind have to be overbuilt and require 100% backup --of some form, I don't care what type-- for when they cannot deliver. And so your question is perfectly valid and one that really needs to be on the table, front and center. I have asked it before. It is usually met with attacks and insults. It can take many forms, the most basic being: If you need full 100% reliable backup available at a moments' notice, 24/7/365, are these truly the best technologies for the job? I have argued that nuclear is a solid solution with 100% availability and the power density to deliver our needs. That is met with even more violent attacks and insults. Apparently I am somewhere between a really stupid person and a criminal for suggesting any of this. Having devoted a significant effort towards understanding the many intricacies surrounding these issues, my thinking has morphed over time. I used to think we had to consider deploying a massive amount of nuclear power (somewhere beyond 1000 new power plants) for a full transition to electric vehicles and homes. That, of course, is as close to impossible as one can get. I think a sensible path might be to focus on the 95% reliability of wind (which is far better than anything solar can achieve) and provide that 5% backup with regionally shared nuclear power and other power sources. We would still need hundreds of nuclear power plants built over the next, say, 30 to 50 years. Difficult, yes. Here's the shocking reality of a transition to full electrification (homes and transportation): We have to, at a minimum, TRIPLE our power generation and transport capacity. Why triple? Well, if we are going to go clean, you have to replace all of our existing power generation with 100% reliable clean alternatives. That means we need to build 1200 GW of new clean power generation. As we do this, we shut down what we don't want (if we can). Next, we need another 1200 GW --at a minimum-- to power a full fleet of electric ground vehicles. If we start talking cargo ships and aircraft, we are likely at another 1000 GW or far more. The task, then, is to build somewhere around 3000 to 4000 GW of new clean power generation sources. They have to be 100% reliable, or you need to grossly overbuild to compensate for that. The, question, then: Can we do this? In 25 years? No way. How about 50 years? Maybe? Tough to say. It sure a hell isn't happening in ten or fifteen, which makes the dramatic claims being made by politicians and their supporters nothing less than ridiculous. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Schroedingersat 4y ago
https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2023/03/22/home-charging-challenges/ https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2023/03/22/home-charging-challe... EVs just charge whenever. Very few people use them like ICEs with regard to fuelling. The only thing needed to make them fit easily in the existing max output envelope is L1 chargers where they spend the day and TOU aware charging (and tarriffs). Most of the energy for charging them will never even hit the grid. And what little does will be mostly during the times of minimum usage. Fast chargers will have battery buffers anyway because no sane operator will want to pay the peak capacity rates for drawing 30MW during peak demand when their competitor next door can outcompete them by 50c/kWh by using a buffer. You have the right order of magnitude of 3TW nameplate (you're quoting nameplate for the existing capacity which is absolutely not the same thing as CF weighted power, but you know this and you're trying to intentionally conflate the two) for solar + wind and about 3TW peak including storage and energy-limited dispatch lime hydro and w2e, but you really went off the rails with the rest. You also know that a mix of wind and solar has a higher uptime than either alone. Maybe you should consider for half a second that the real engineers who actually think about this might have come to a different conclusion to your half-assed fermi estimate for good reasons?
- robomartin 4y ago
  > your half-assed fermi estimate You continue to chase me around HN to insult me any time I participate in a discussion about energy. In the past I have asked @dang to let you carry on with these insults so you could show the world exactly who you are. My reasoning included such things as letting you "get it out of your system". You have done enough of that. This is now abusive. Please. Stop.