Raffy.Roma
Rome (Italy)
Dozens dying in India as water disappears. Trucks driving around aimlessly spraying to cool people off.
This is the situation now in India. I invite all TMC Members to watch the reported video.
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Prediction: Coal has fallen. Nuclear is next then Oil.
- Thread starter nwdiver
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Dozens dying in India as water disappears. Trucks driving around aimlessly spraying to cool people off.
This is the situation now in India. I invite all TMC Members to watch the reported video.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
Congress Just Passed The Biggest Clean-Energy Bill Since Biden's Climate Law
It's all on nuclear.
The Senate voted nearly unanimously Tuesday evening to pass major legislation designed to reverse the American nuclear industry’s decades-long decline and launch a reactor-building spree to meet surging demand for green electricity at home and to catch up with booming rivals overseas. The bill slashes the fees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission charges developers, speeds up the process for licensing new reactors and hiring key staff, and directs the agency to work with foreign regulators to open doors for U.S. exports. The NRC is also tasked with rewriting its mission statement to avoid unnecessarily limiting the “benefits of nuclear energy technology to society,” essentially reinterpreting its raison d’être to include protecting the public against the dangers of not using atomic power in addition to whatever safety threat reactors themselves pose.
Critics of the bill say it risks exporting poorer safety practices. “Make no mistake: This is not about making the reactor licensing process more efficient, but about weakening safety and security oversight across the board, a longstanding industry goal,” Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the watchdog Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “Passage of this legislation will only increase the danger to people already living downwind of nuclear facilities from a severe accident or terrorist attack, and it will make it even more difficult for communities to prevent risky, experimental reactors from being sited in their midst.”
At the same American Nuclear Society conference in Las Vegas, Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack, whose utility giant built the two new reactors in Georgia, warned that any future projects still depend on the federal government providing more money and financial backing. “What I hear you saying, Chris, is there needs to be more than what we’re putting on the table, and that’s hard to hear because we’ve just put billions and billions and billions on the table,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a fellow panelist, said in response. “I don’t know what the delta is between what you think is necessary and what it would actually take to build up.”
mspohr
Well-Known Member
The important part.
At the same American Nuclear Society conference in Las Vegas, Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack, whose utility giant built the two new reactors in Georgia, warned that any future projects still depend on the federal government providing more money and financial backing. “What I hear you saying, Chris, is there needs to be more than what we’re putting on the table, and that’s hard to hear because we’ve just put billions and billions and billions on the table,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a fellow panelist, said in response. “I don’t know what the delta is between what you think is necessary and what it would actually take to build up.”
At the same American Nuclear Society conference in Las Vegas, Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack, whose utility giant built the two new reactors in Georgia, warned that any future projects still depend on the federal government providing more money and financial backing. “What I hear you saying, Chris, is there needs to be more than what we’re putting on the table, and that’s hard to hear because we’ve just put billions and billions and billions on the table,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a fellow panelist, said in response. “I don’t know what the delta is between what you think is necessary and what it would actually take to build up.”
Seattle
Member
The un is not going to intervene (whatever that means) in energy production, much less in a big country like India. Maybe the world should be helping them to spend money to move away from coal power production, and eventually away from all fossil fuels. Even in a rich country like the US, where we can afford to do things that are expensive, we can only manage to reduce fossil fuels when it's a financial savings.
Raffy.Roma
Rome (Italy)
My opinion is that, the Climate Change issue being a matter of Global Security, the UN have to intervene. We cannot afford that India keeps emitting CO2 without any control like is doing now.
As it's been mentioned, seasonal shifting of solar power is the next big challenge to solve, but proper wind power mitigates this to a large degree.
Solar generation, even here in sunny California, varies from about 2-4x in output by month comparing the darkest month and sunniest month with your typical solar system. But depending on where you live with heating loads in the winter, you might be short quite a bit in terms of total energy production in the winter. For my particular house and usage patterns, my seasonal shortage in the winter if my system was sized to meet loads in the summer, is about 2.5x. So that would mean oversizing my system about 2.5x to maintain net-zero in the winter without seasonal storage. This ratio would be worse in areas that need more heating in the winter and that have worse solar generation.
But a combination of wind and transmission lines should solve this to a large degree.
And $0.20 / W solar makes it worthwhile to oversize your system to the point where having tons of excess solar isn't a problem - it's a feature!
I still don't buy into the hydrogen storage hype. Everything hydrogen related so far has been a boondoggle given the difficulties of safely handling hydrogen, and even the benefits of blending hydrogen remains to be seen. And it's still far cheaper to generate hydrogen with gas instead of electrolyzers, and that remains true for the foreseeable future. The fact that hydrogen is pushed by all the fossil fuel companies tells me enough to know that we should remain highly skeptical.Gas Turbines can run on H2. Or you can make CH4 out of H2.
Electrolysis is going to be far cheaper for seasonal storage than running nuclear for ~half the year. And even the ~half of the year nuclear will be more useful you're still not going to need it ~most days.
It's a fairly simple progression.
- Solar is cheap => flood the grid with solar. Make solar fences, put solar on walls, put solar ~everywhere. That will ensure >100% daytime coverage even in winter. And really most solar additions should be ~vertical. Latitude facing solar mostly increases curtailment while vertical increases morning, evening and winter generation. Solar fences!
- When there's sufficient curtailment deploy storage. It's just a question of economics. If Solar is ~$20/MWh and adding capacity increases curtailment by ~50% the adjusted cost is ~$40/MWh. If the cycle life cost of storage is < $40/MWh... add storage... if it's >$40/MWh... keep adding solar until curtailment increases.
- When there's regular daily curtailment even with batteries start splitting water.
Gas turbines will provide 24/7/365 on demand power to ensure reliability. Always. First with CH4 and gradually H2. This is basically how the grid operates now. Because it's cheap and it works.
I'd love for someone to explain how spending $15B for a GW then ~$300M/yr to operate that GW adds any value here....
Hydrogen has its share of problems but it's not optional. We NEED to make Hydrogen. 100% the use of hydrogen should be minimized to the greatest extent possible and as I mentioned it would be beyond insane to use Hydrogen in any application that Methane can be used if we're still producing Hydrogen from Methane.
But once we've displaced gray/blue H2 with green H2 economies of scale will kick in and there's no reason H2 can't be used to fill in any remaining generation gaps. Once we get to that point the grid would be >80% wind, solar and storage. Basically once we've displaced all the H2 coming from CH4 THEN we can start using H2 to displace CH4.
The problem is once you start using it, the drug dealers starts working to keep us addicted, even at our disadvantage. The latest talk is to look for hydrogen deposits and tap that instead of converting NG or even electrolyzing. Just as with fossil fuels, since it's just there in the ground, the 'production' cost can be very low... Low until we run out. And that's always the problem with these fossil fuel types looking for free handout from Mother Earth. I am just surprised that humans were able to move on from living in caves... because building a shelter is hard and expensive. LOL
Seattle
Member
Correct. Green H at any commercial scale is just a future fantasy. Maybe vast extra solar power will be available to split water, so why not just put it in car batteries directly? I know there are cases where hydrogen can make sense like heavy vehicles, trains, boats. But it's hard to work with, and it's completely pushed by the fossil fuel industry in extremely misleading ways (Hydrogen can be green people, just like soylent green) and not because they have good intentions.
So we stop adding solar once we have enough to charge cars? Why?
H2 isn't optional. Why not keep adding solar so we can get H2 from H2O instead of CH4?
Seattle
Member
Thanks for that polite reply. You are supposed to savagely attack me! ;-) I'm sure we'll keep adding solar. Power will be getting cheaper, assuming we have storage of some kind, and there's every reason we will figure that out. So cheap power, then what. I like that picture. Maybe naively I think the low end of that can just be electricity - except long distance boats and trains, maybe that will make sense for h. I don't know much about fertilizer, but a quick search doesn't show me the requirement for hydrogen, other than maybe a power source, seems to require N, P, K.
Section C - vintage and muscle cars seems kind of silly to list. I guess steel via hydrogen reduction (can't electric arc furnaces make it work?) is one possibility. I'm still skeptical. But I'm also sure that we will have that abundant power from solar, assuming we don't destroy ourselves in war. So that will enable green H at that time regardless of what random people in Seattle say.
So we move from Tier 0.1 civilization to Tier 0.01 civilization. Volcans continue to ignore Earth when the pass by on survey missions. LOL
Seattle
Member
I think advanced civilizations will have figured out lower power lighting just as we eventually did. I'm sure we'll have further advancements. And in that star trek world, it was the use of the prototype warp drive that attracted the attention of the vulcans.
So we move from Tier 0.1 civilization to Tier 0.01 civilization. Volcans continue to ignore Earth when the pass by on survey missions. LOL
So we move from Tier 0.1 civilization to Tier 0.01 civilization. Volcans continue to ignore Earth when the pass by on survey missions. LOL
And where does burning minerals or boiling water to spin a turbine fall on that scale?
It's not about the amount of energy consumed it's about the time to transition away from fools fuel. Using primary energy as a metric makes it appear like it will take ~2-3x longer than what's actually needed.
We don't need ~1000GWh/yr from solar to replace ~1000GWh/yr from oil. EVs use ~70% less energy/mile. We only need ~300GWh/yr.
We don't need ~1000GWh/yr from solar to replace 1000GWh/yr from coal. PV doesn't dump ~70% of the energy it harvests like thermal plants do. We only need ~300GWh/yr.
We could be using ~2x more energy than we use now in 2100 but consuming less. That's the primary energy fallacy.
Seattle
Member
We’re easily on track to handle air conditioning.
A real seasonality hurdle will be in winter where heat pumps will also be a large part of the solution. The larger dilemma will be significantly less solar radiance and significantly more electricity demand then for heating compared with summer. Yet the tools to solve that too are outlined today in this thread; we have time to solve it if not wasted.
A real seasonality hurdle will be in winter where heat pumps will also be a large part of the solution. The larger dilemma will be significantly less solar radiance and significantly more electricity demand then for heating compared with summer. Yet the tools to solve that too are outlined today in this thread; we have time to solve it if not wasted.
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