Wind energy

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, farmerben said:

 

 

This will keep you alive

 

 

 

Keep a window cracked and run a CO alarm though 

[Terwin]

3 hours ago, farmerben said:

This will keep you alive

How quickly can you get > 3 million of these heater/tank units to New York during a power outage?

How long will those tanks last when most of those users have little idea how this thing works?

And those will do nothing to prevent pipes from bursting unless you have one for every kitchen and bathroom in the city in addition to the > 3M needed for 1/residence

[RCgothic]

And how does a heater help when it's 40deg C and 100% humidity?

Edited February 15 by RCgothic

[Nuke]

8 hours ago, farmerben said:

 

 

This will keep you alive

 

 

 

if you can get one. there are plenty of horror stories about people who brought generators to sell in disaster areas only to have them confiscated by authorities for profiteering. then they sit in an evidence locker when people will pay 3x the going rate to charge their phone. whatever supply will not be sufficient. same goes with wood stoves. companies sell them, but the demand inst universal, so the available stock cant cover everyone.

Edited February 15 by Nuke

[RCgothic]

And if you do have something your neighbours need to survive... Good luck.

[farmerben]

Is there any nuclear reactor which would complement solar by being throttleable?

 

From what I can see every large solar project needs to be matched by reciprocating gas engines to match supply and demand.  These are less efficient and way more maintenance than a large steam plant.  

[Terwin]

Most nuclear plants are much more rapidly cycle able than coal or nat gas, you just dump the steam.(Coal can often do this as well but the fuel cost is sufficiently higher that it is rarely done)

But you do not save much, if anything on fuel by doing so, so it is ultimately cheaper to just run the nuke plant and save money by not building the solar capacity.

[RCgothic]

8 hours ago, farmerben said:

Is there any nuclear reactor which would complement solar by being throttleable?

 

From what I can see every large solar project needs to be matched by reciprocating gas engines to match supply and demand.  These are less efficient and way more maintenance than a large steam plant.  

No and yes.

No, there's no combination of clean baseload power and random non-dispatchable weather sources that complement each other. See my first post in this thread, just replace "wind" with "solar". Any such system will always be more expensive than the sum of its parts.

Yes, nuclear plants are very throttleable, because the nuclear core basically remains the same temperature when going off-load. This is unlike combustion-fired plants which experience enormous temperature swings when they stop burning, which is an incredible thermal shock and highly fatiguing unless very carefully managed.

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Throttling a nuclear plant doesn't save fuel though, because they need to be reloaded on or close to a planned calendar. If they don't, different plants get out of sync and end up needing refuelling at once. This leads to:

1) Concentrations of plants going offline at once, so more overcapacity ($$$) is needed to service demand when this happens.

2) The roving team that provides a surge of staff to a plant to do reloading activities services plants in turn. If they end up being needed in more than one place at once, then they either can't do this or more teams need to be hired. Those extra teams then do nothing when all the plants go back online (or get fired and rehired later). People don't like to be employed like that. 

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Additionally, if the fuel isn't burnt a set amount by the time the core gets reloaded, then as typically only 1/3 of the fuel is replaced each reload, if there's too much energy remaining in the remaining fuel then the next power cycle will be overloaded and unbalanced. 

So the nuclear fuel needs to be fissioned the expected amount whether or not that results in electricity generated it not (which can be done by running the reactor at power and venting the stream to no useful effect).

If the amount of throttling is predictable (such as daily demand variation), then the reloading calendar can plan for that.

If the throttling is due to shoring up the vagaries of weather power, then that cannot be planned for.

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Basically, if there's nuclear fuel available to use, you might as well use it, as it doesn't really cost any extra to, and that then improves the load factor of the plant making it more economical.

So why pay more to build solar in order to make the nuclear plant less competitive? It'll only have the effect of raising prices 

If you have clean baseload power, just use clean baseload power.

Adding wind or solar to that just wrecks the economics of everything.

Edited Thursday at 10:19 PM by RCgothic

[StrandedonEarth]

I see solar as complementing baseload on hot summer days, using the excess solar to power air conditioners. But I suppose it would be little help in the evening and none at night, without some form of storage. I suppose a liquid-based hvac system could pre-cool a tank during the day when solar is plentiful, to be circulated at night to keep things cool. Sort of the opposite of concentrated solar-thermal power, which heats molten salts enough to keep generating power at night, but that only really works in areas with few overcast days. 

Modern photovoltaics still work on overcast (especially lightly overcast) days, when it doesn’t even really matter which way the panels are pointed. 

[RCgothic]

There's actually a plant design called "Natrium" that uses nuclear power to heat a large insulated thermal mass, which can later be converted into power. It's like a form of deferred energy generation, and it's more efficient than storing electricity already generated.

But again this is an attempt to balance nuclear and weather power by effectively creating energy storage as heat instead of electrical potential. 

But this is just trying to patch the fact that weather power has broken the system.

Edited Thursday at 10:23 PM by RCgothic

[darthgently]

On 2/15/2025 at 3:53 PM, RCgothic said:

And if you do have something your neighbours need to survive... Good luck.

One of the best approaches is to get together as a neighborhood and form your own local “FEMA”.  Everyone is prepared.  And everyone knows the price of not carrying their weight.  Like an HOA, each member is expected to have made certain preparations for emergencies.  A genset and fuel, x weeks of food for all household members etc.

10 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

There's actually a plant design called "Natrium" that uses nuclear power to heat a large insulated thermal mass, which can later be converted into power. It's like a form of deferred energy generation, and it's more efficient than storing electricity already generated.

But again this is an attempt to balance nuclear and weather power by effectively creating energy storage as heat instead of electrical potential. 

But this is just trying to patch the fact that weather power has broken the system.

Storing concentrated solar heat as molten salt, or even just in sand, in a huge insulated underground chamber has been tossed around.  That way solar balances solar.  Not a portable solution but interesting.

[RCgothic]

8 minutes ago, darthgently said:

One of the best approaches is to get together as a neighborhood and form your own local “FEMA”.  Everyone is prepared.  And everyone knows the price of not carrying their weight.  Like an HOA, each member is expected to have made certain preparations for emergencies.  A genset and fuel, x weeks of food for all household members etc.

And if you get a big enough group together you can employ people to do the management for you so that those who are bad at this sort of thing can focus on their strengths and those with lesser means are still provided for.

Something something socialism something something government.

[FleshJeb]

You could have levels of increasingly smaller administrative districts to deal with more localized issues, and provide some levels of redundancy and scaling in case of major events. They might even have different means and methods of approaching  similar issues, resulting in a broad base of practical knowledge and experience. Interestingly, that framework could be applied to any complex system, such as power generation. Of course, it's not perfectly efficient, but it's much more robust and resistant to disruption than any one-size-fits-all solution.

Someone mentioned wind turbine blades in landfills. I happen to know that they're now using a lot of fiber in concrete mixes, far in excess of all the blades that could ever be recycled. So I went looking:

https://www.specifyconcrete.org/blog/wind-turbine-blade-recycling-for-the-concrete-industry

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-makes-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-and-upcycling-reality-support

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-makes-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-and-upcycling-reality-support

https://www.lmwindpower.com/en/sustainability/blade-recycling

https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2024/nrel-advances-method-for-recyclable-wind-turbine-blades.html

I know the shallow FUD-wanking really entertains some people and makes them feel special, but some of us are not that bored with life and are solutions-oriented.

EDIT: LOL, I just found out why this thread exists: 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/

• President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.

Cowardly hoes.

Some of the critiques were quite good, thank you for those.

On the topic of fossil fuel companies diversifying: Their capabilities and skillsets are perfect for Enhanced Geothermal / Deep-Well Geothermal, but I suppose that's currently less profitable than pure extraction.

https://geysers.com/untapped

(I'm slightly biased because I knew one of the lead engineers on the EGS pilot project, and I can see the steam plumes from my house.)

Edited yesterday at 05:06 AM by FleshJeb

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, RCgothic said:

And if you get a big enough group together you can employ people to do the management for you so that those who are bad at this sort of thing can focus on their strengths and those with lesser means are still provided for.

Something something socialism something something government.

Wot?

 I’m not talking about a replacement for civilization, just a very local community ready to deal with a flood or hurricane or whatever until the larger apparatus at county and state level get spun up.  I’m responding to the comment about neighbors taking your stuff: not a  worry if they have their own stuff. There is no rule against neighbors helping less fortunate neighbors find good deals on stuff or on sharing stuff.  Keep it real

Edited yesterday at 01:18 AM by darthgently

[FleshJeb]

Careful, they put Peter Kropotkin in prison for that kind of naughty talk. 

[farmerben]

It seems like a scam to put weather energy on the grid.  There is a case for it in stand alone applications.  Otherwise your wind energy needs to be scaled to pumped hydro.  And you need thousands of acre-feet to be significant.  Solar has to scaled to a throttleable backup source like gas.  But the gas generators which are easy to turn on and off are much more expensive especially on maintenance than simple boilers and turbines.  Nuclear simply runs at 100% thermal output, you can control steam to the turbine.  A fuel boiler lets you control water and steam flow plus the oxidation rate, but they are not designed to fluctuate with daily pulses of solar.  The problem with big solar farms is you still require 100% in the form of fuel energy.   Solar just gives you the luxury of shutting off gas while the sun is shining, but it's not free by any means, the total system costs quite a bit more.  You might be better off designing a stand alone desalination plant or something like that to plug directly into solar power, rather than design the whole grid around it.

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, farmerben said:

It seems like a scam to put weather energy on the grid.  There is a case for it in stand alone applications.  Otherwise your wind energy needs to be scaled to pumped hydro.  And you need thousands of acre-feet to be significant.  Solar has to scaled to a throttleable backup source like gas.  But the gas generators which are easy to turn on and off are much more expensive especially on maintenance than simple boilers and turbines.  Nuclear simply runs at 100% thermal output, you can control steam to the turbine.  A fuel boiler lets you control water and steam flow plus the oxidation rate, but they are not designed to fluctuate with daily pulses of solar.  The problem with big solar farms is you still require 100% in the form of fuel energy.   Solar just gives you the luxury of shutting off gas while the sun is shining, but it's not free by any means, the total system costs quite a bit more.  You might be better off designing a stand alone desalination plant or something like that to plug directly into solar power, rather than design the whole grid around it.

If each home or local area has decentralized weather energy and perhaps even some storage, mostly with robustness during emergencies in mind, combined with a centralized throttling nuke base load then it could be a good setup for everyone involved

[RCgothic]

I'm not clear what the home installations contribute compared to well-planned and financed nuclear baseload other than cost to the homeowners installing it.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 minute ago, RCgothic said:

I'm not clear what the home installations contribute compared to well-planned and financed nuclear baseload other than cost to the homeowners installing it.

The biggest  advantage I see  to home PV installations is redundancy in case of disasters disrupting the utility supply, if a major storm destroys transmission towers, for instance. Available power may be limited in such cases, but it’s better than having the contents of fridges and freezers spoiling during a lengthy outage, or having to find fuel for generators. Of course, no solution is perfect. 

[darthgently]

55 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

The biggest  advantage I see  to home PV installations is redundancy in case of disasters disrupting the utility supply, if a major storm destroys transmission towers, for instance. Available power may be limited in such cases, but it’s better than having the contents of fridges and freezers spoiling during a lengthy outage, or having to find fuel for generators. Of course, no solution is perfect. 

Any where in tornado alley, the gulf or East coast hurricane zones, New England and upper Midwest harsh winters bring down many power lines.  During hurricanes they often bring the power down intentionally to mitigate problems.  We were without power for 3 weeks at one time.  Gasoline genset kept freezer and fridge going and charging cell phones.  House solar with a powerwall would have been nice

Edited 17 hours ago by darthgently

[Terwin]

Moving the cost-burden of storage to the homeowner does not make a storage solution more affordable, if anything it will only increase total costs due to the need for so much redundant hardware and smaller scales.

At best it just provides more options for those that can already afford alternate power sources when the grid goes down.

 

[RCgothic]

I'll concede that disaster resilience is a valid use case, but a diesel generator (with biogas if we're being green) is probably a lot more economical and flexibly deployable.