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Many smaller intermittent sources with non-correlated outages is better for availability than a single dominant source even with preplanned maintenance intermit

by dv_dt 3y ago

Many smaller intermittent sources with non-correlated outages is better for availability than a single dominant source even with preplanned maintenance intermittency. What is the emergency and disaster planning impact if the nuclear plant goes down in the middle of a summer heatwave?

Manuel_D 3y ago
Smaller intermittent sources don't really help since they're still subject to the same weather patterns and earth rotation. Distributing generation across continents would involve massive costs in energy transmission. People like to tout that intermittent sources are more distributed and less centralized. But that's negative facet of renewables, since demand is centralized in population centers, and distributed production means more transmission costs. The same criticism can be applied to any electricity source: What happens wind stops during a heatwave? Or when the sun goes down? You might say nuclear is less reliable, but the reality is nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of all generation sources: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#:~:text=The%20Capacity%20Factor&text=Nuclear%20has%20the%20highest%20capacity,and%20solar%20(24.6%25)%20plants https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....
- dv_dt 3y ago
  Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources... unlike nuclear, their costs keep going down. Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity. Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency planning...
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    > Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity. Again, peak electricity demand does not happen at noon. It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or is about to set. Unfortunately, solar's production does not match demand patterns. > Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources... Again, all the renewable sources in the same region are subject to the same weather patterns and and day/night cycles. Sure multiple solar farms gives you redundancy against some sort of mechanical failure that causes one specific solar farm to go down. But the most common failure mode in intermittent sources is cloud cover or lower-than-expected wind speeds. A backup solar plant a mile away isn't going to give you redundancy against weather patterns. This is why a lot of plans for renewable grids are contingent on thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy across continents. > Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency planning... Capacity factor describes the uptime of a power plant. Nuclear power has the highest uptime. The point is it's less likely to go down than all alternatives.
    - dv_dt 3y ago
      Cloud cover doesn't stop all production, it just reduces it. Just build more solar and more storage and it will still be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. I could answer point by point but all of your "failures" are artificially constrained.
      - Manuel_D 3y ago
        Cloud cover reduces solar production by 10-25%. If you need 10x overproduction, plus storage it's not cheaper than nuclear. That's not even counting factors like axial tilt (during winter the Earth is rotated away form the sun, reducing incoming light per M^2 of land), and the transmission infrastructure required to accommodate the decentralized nature of solar and wind [1] (which nuclear conveniently avoids since it's much more energy dense). These aren't artificially constrained issues. These are real practical barriers. Why haven't countries the world over completely to renewables if it's cheaper? Because corporations want to screw up the environment because... they're moustache-twirling evil people or something? But the reality is that intermittent sources still have significant barriers to implementation that won't go away without massive, orders-of-magnitude improvements in storage performance. Renewables are good to deploy in an opportunistic fashion, supplementing dispatchable sources during periods of production and then turning the gas back on when they're not producing. But actually producing a primarily renewable grid becomes vastly more challenging due to the intermittency. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
        dv_dt 3y ago
        Fossil fuel companies are those mustache-twirling profit optimization villains, and there is demonstrated evidence that they have run a decades long campaign against any form of energy that is not fossil fuel... 10-25% short fall doesn't require 10x over capacity, it requires a mix of overcapacity + storage + energy conservation measures.
        Manuel_D 3y ago

by dv_dt 3y ago

Manuel_D 3y ago

Smaller intermittent sources don't really help since they're still subject to the same weather patterns and earth rotation. Distributing generation across continents would involve massive costs in energy transmission. People like to tout that intermittent sources are more distributed and less centralized. But that's negative facet of renewables, since demand is centralized in population centers, and distributed production means more transmission costs. The same criticism can be applied to any electricity source: What happens wind stops during a heatwave? Or when the sun goes down? You might say nuclear is less reliable, but the reality is nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of all generation sources: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#:~:text=The%20Capacity%20Factor&text=Nuclear%20has%20the%20highest%20capacity,and%20solar%20(24.6%25)%20plants https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....

dv_dt 3y ago
Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources... unlike nuclear, their costs keep going down. Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity. Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency planning...
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  > Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity. Again, peak electricity demand does not happen at noon. It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or is about to set. Unfortunately, solar's production does not match demand patterns. > Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution lines, just build more small regional renewable sources... Again, all the renewable sources in the same region are subject to the same weather patterns and and day/night cycles. Sure multiple solar farms gives you redundancy against some sort of mechanical failure that causes one specific solar farm to go down. But the most common failure mode in intermittent sources is cloud cover or lower-than-expected wind speeds. A backup solar plant a mile away isn't going to give you redundancy against weather patterns. This is why a lot of plans for renewable grids are contingent on thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy across continents. > Capacity factor does not address reliability or emergency planning... Capacity factor describes the uptime of a power plant. Nuclear power has the highest uptime. The point is it's less likely to go down than all alternatives.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    Cloud cover doesn't stop all production, it just reduces it. Just build more solar and more storage and it will still be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. I could answer point by point but all of your "failures" are artificially constrained.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      Cloud cover reduces solar production by 10-25%. If you need 10x overproduction, plus storage it's not cheaper than nuclear. That's not even counting factors like axial tilt (during winter the Earth is rotated away form the sun, reducing incoming light per M^2 of land), and the transmission infrastructure required to accommodate the decentralized nature of solar and wind [1] (which nuclear conveniently avoids since it's much more energy dense). These aren't artificially constrained issues. These are real practical barriers. Why haven't countries the world over completely to renewables if it's cheaper? Because corporations want to screw up the environment because... they're moustache-twirling evil people or something? But the reality is that intermittent sources still have significant barriers to implementation that won't go away without massive, orders-of-magnitude improvements in storage performance. Renewables are good to deploy in an opportunistic fashion, supplementing dispatchable sources during periods of production and then turning the gas back on when they're not producing. But actually producing a primarily renewable grid becomes vastly more challenging due to the intermittency. 1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-energy-high-voltage-transmission-lines https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
      - dv_dt 3y ago
        Fossil fuel companies are those mustache-twirling profit optimization villains, and there is demonstrated evidence that they have run a decades long campaign against any form of energy that is not fossil fuel... 10-25% short fall doesn't require 10x over capacity, it requires a mix of overcapacity + storage + energy conservation measures.
        Manuel_D 3y ago