In case there weren't enough energy worries...

[fnord]

Hang on, Crossroads, how is even once-thru nuclear's energy density of needing ~ 20 t / GWyr (e) "nearly as much energy density" as coal's ~4.3 kt fuel demand for that same GWyr (e) (a factor of ~ 200 denser in once-thru nuclear's favour, even neglecting the fact < 10% of the initial fuel load is actually fissioned)?

[His Divine Shadow]

Versatility is great and I agree with it, but it's nonsense to suggest the largest potential energy source that is rapidly developing and will soon (relatively) become the most economical, practical and virtually inexhaustable source of energy for society isn't the one to bet on.

I tend to find it frusterating the amount of misinformation and ignorance on where solar power is at and where it's (very obviously when you look) going.

Then we'll build it when it's ready and up to all its claims, until then we stick to the proven and reliable nuclear for baseloads.

[fnord]

There's also another fundamental problem with solar - the hard limit imposed by the amount of solar insolation reaching the surface (~1 kW/sq m, iirc), before collection and conversion losses, let alone the crap capacity factor.

In other words, the sun doesn't shine at summer peak intensity year round. A power system's capacity factor is defined as the power actually produced over a given period, as a percentage of the power it could have produced running full-throttle for all that time.

For example, the Olmedilla PV park in Spain reported:

Peak power output: 60 MWe
Annual production: 87,500 MWh

Power that could have been produced at full-throttle: 525,960 MWh

Capacity factor: 16.6%

(I am unsure which year that production refers to, but for a baseload power plant, that is worse than abysmal.)

I'm finding reports of capacity factors for solar thermal plants in the 25-50% range, with the high end being more up at the record-setting end of things. Not sure about those claims' veracity, though.

By contrast, raw capacity factor reports to the US NRC indicate, including all coastdowns, refuelling outages, trips, impairments due to equipment failure, etc , an unweighted average capacity factor over the past 365 days of 89.6%.

To get the same MW out to the grid, you need to build 89.6/16.6 = 5.4 times as much solar PV as you do nuclear, or 2-4x as much solar thermal, before even worrying about how to deal with cloudy days, winter, and, oh, I don't know, NIGHT. And you can't really call it "clean" if you're using fossil gas-fired turbines as backup.

[Sky Captain]

In areas with mostly sunny days year round close to ekvator solar power could be used as a baseload because if you can reasonably expect every day to be sunny energy storage rquirements become much less, you only have to collect and store enough energy during day to outlast night, however some backup gas turbine stations still would be required to provide power unless you are willing to accept blackouts when freak weather event causes prolonged cloud cover.
In northern areas with frequent cloud cover like Europe, Canada solar generate next to no power during winter so you would have to have some monster energy storage scheme (likely highly expensive) that can store excess energy produced during summer for usage in winter or you have to have fossil fueled plants for winter.

[fnord]

Or, as His Divine Shadow mentioned, nuclear. Clean, reliable, and dispatchable when needed.

[Singular Intellect]

Versatility is great and I agree with it, but it's nonsense to suggest the largest potential energy source that is rapidly developing and will soon (relatively) become the most economical, practical and virtually inexhaustable source of energy for society isn't the one to bet on.

I tend to find it frusterating the amount of misinformation and ignorance on where solar power is at and where it's (very obviously when you look) going.

Then we'll build it when it's ready and up to all its claims, until then we stick to the proven and reliable nuclear for baseloads.

So where are all the new nuclear plants popping up? Where are the plans for building enough to meet energy demands?

Here's a quick link to solar projects underway, and very impressive ones too (one plant alone is planned to generate five gigawatts of power).

These kind of projects are only going to increase in numbers and scale. Solar is taking over and no amount of whining otherwise will change this fact. I'm not even going to get into the aspect of how easily solar power generation is decentralized and intregrated into existing infrastructure, since all you need is surface area.

[Darth Tanner]

So where are all the new nuclear plants popping up?

There are over 60 being built at the moment, linky
Each generates more than all the solar capacity produced in a year. Also more importantly they produce it at a cheaper rate and are far more reliable in doing so.

no amount of whining otherwise will change this fact.

A bit of cloud or a northern climate would however. Or night!

I'm not even going to get into the aspect of how easily solar power generation is decentralized and intregrated into existing infrastructure, since all you need is surface area.

Lol, because land is free and readily available in locations of high electricity demand! It’s also a pity our current grids are designed around moving power from concentrated high output power stations to the concentrated demand points rather than a decentralised network of very low level generators.

[folti78]

Give us a ring when they'll manage to deliver what they promised.

Now back to solar panels. Some question about their alleged greenness.

• How much resources and energy needed for their manufacturing?
• How much pollution the manufacturing process generates, which have to be dealt with. Or you just use the proven capitalist globalist method of moving the production to some 3rd/2nd world shithole with lax environmental controls far away enough that the average greentard don't give a shit about it when they are crowing about the nice "clean" solar panels?
• Are the panels hardened against weather? For example high winds, sandstorms and hailstones for example?

[His Divine Shadow]

You know what strikes me here is that those big numbers being touted... It's gonna be just like with those 2 megawatt windpower turbines, that in reality produce a tiny faction of the stated capacity. I just don't understand how some people can tout these numbers and not realize they are hot air. How is this supposed to endear any trust in solar power? And this is without addressing any of the hard limits and problems that other posters in this thread have brought up. So far all I'm seeing is hype, inflated numbers and handwaving.

Seems to me you have to have some pretty damn selective math to think solar is gonna be anything other than a fringe player.

[Simon_Jester]

Over the long run, I think it could become a major player- will probably need to, since in the extreme long term there's such a thing as peak uranium, and fusion is going to be bloody expensive.

But it's not going to grow to dominate the energy market in the next twenty years, and I doubt it will for the next fifty. I wouldn't count it out entirely, simply because rising energy costs make a lot of things more palatable than rolling blackouts, but no, not a panacea.

[mr friendly guy]

My solar panels have been pretty good for me, since my last power bill the utility owes me money due to feed in tariffs. I can see solar power being a player if more households could be convinced to um, install them like here. * However I can't see this going well if the government mandated households had to install solar hot water systems and solar panels etc. I am going to therefore suspect that nuclear has the potential to do much more than solar would. That being said, I do favour a multi prong approach, however I am just realistic that some prongs are going to contribute more than others.

* Based on the fact that a 1.5 kW system more than covers my total electricity bill for a household of one who is reasonably frugal, ie turns off lights to rooms which I am not going into etc, use energy efficient appliances etc. A 3 kW system most likely covers most "wasteful" Australian families. Obviously solar doesn't power the house at night and I draw energy from the grid, however I produce more energy than I use. Not sure if it saves enough carbon to offset my car use and make me carbon neutral, but I would love to hold that even higher moral ground.

[Bakustra]

There's also another fundamental problem with solar - the hard limit imposed by the amount of solar insolation reaching the surface (~1 kW/sq m, iirc), before collection and conversion losses, let alone the crap capacity factor.

In other words, the sun doesn't shine at summer peak intensity year round. A power system's capacity factor is defined as the power actually produced over a given period, as a percentage of the power it could have produced running full-throttle for all that time.

For example, the Olmedilla PV park in Spain reported:

Peak power output: 60 MWe
Annual production: 87,500 MWh

Power that could have been produced at full-throttle: 525,960 MWh

Capacity factor: 16.6%

(I am unsure which year that production refers to, but for a baseload power plant, that is worse than abysmal.)

I'm finding reports of capacity factors for solar thermal plants in the 25-50% range, with the high end being more up at the record-setting end of things. Not sure about those claims' veracity, though.

By contrast, raw capacity factor reports to the US NRC indicate, including all coastdowns, refuelling outages, trips, impairments due to equipment failure, etc , an unweighted average capacity factor over the past 365 days of 89.6%.

To get the same MW out to the grid, you need to build 89.6/16.6 = 5.4 times as much solar PV as you do nuclear, or 2-4x as much solar thermal, before even worrying about how to deal with cloudy days, winter, and, oh, I don't know, NIGHT. And you can't really call it "clean" if you're using fossil gas-fired turbines as backup.

You're being quite disingenuous here. Olmedilla is a working power plant that already takes seasonal variations, clouds, and night into consideration when providing power. Pretending that the 16.6% efficiency is a theoretical upper limit rather than a practical outcome is distorting solar power to make it look horrendously inefficient. Why exactly should anyone believe you if you're not willing to give honest assessments of the capacities of solar power? There's also faults with your cost-benefit analysis of nuclear contra solar, but that is probably sheer handwaving to ignore that goddamned public, all suspicious after years of misinformation about nuclear power.

Secondarily, you snidely assume that anybody advocating renewable energy is mentally handicapped- at least, that's the most charitable explanation I can find for "hur hur you'd have to use fossil fuels as backup". I'd ask you to justify that, but no doubt you'd repeat yourself. But advocates for renewable energy, curiously enough, have suggested restructuring electrical power grids (especially in the USA) to handle power plants with highly variable loads, and then building excess capacity into the system. The advantages of solar and wind power are that they can be placed in a wide array of locations without the problems faced by nuclear power, meaning that you can reasonably incorporate power production throughout a city or rural area, such that the thousands of square miles needed to power the entire world using solely photovoltaic cells don't have to be entirely field upon field of solar panels, but can be incorporated into the thousands of square miles that cities already take up. Windmills can also be incorporated into agricultural regions, or suburbs, or a similar array of locations, because they both have much smaller footprints than nuclear and much less stringent requirements for construction.

Of course, we have complaints about land, but for all the people that talk about how the "idiots" (read: populace of their home countries) don't/shouldn't make decisions when it comes to nuclear, they think that apparently they should when it comes to government mandates, let alone eminent domain, as applied to renewable energy.

[aerius]

How much pollution the manufacturing process generates, which have to be dealt with. Or you just use the proven capitalist globalist method of moving the production to some 3rd/2nd world shithole with lax environmental controls far away enough that the average greentard don't give a shit about it when they are crowing about the nice "clean" solar panels?

A lot. You need tons of really nasty chemicals for making solar cells of any sort. Lots of heavy metals, arsenic compounds, dioxins, various acids, organochlorines & fluorines and a ton of other stuff that I can't pronouce. It is seriously bad stuff. It gets even more fun since making some of these chemicals is a pretty dirty process in itself.

[Crossroads Inc.]

See thats why, when it comes to "solar" power, I am a big fan of just using the suns heat to boil water for electricity. Electric Solar panels I think are better used on a small scal, you put them on peoples houses, on the top of buildings and such, so each building is making a good junk of its own power during the day, and switches to grid at night.

Now for more large scale power, I recommend something like a Solar Tower Which is already being used in places. In this case the heat is used to creat intense winds which power wind turbines. No exotic chemicals needed here.

And going to be using a mix of power, echoing on something said earlier, people need to get away from a "one size fits all" approach. Wind and Solar are good for small and Rural areas while Nuclear is best for large cities (located of course a resonable distance away).

[Iroscato]

See thats why, when it comes to "solar" power, I am a big fan of just using the suns heat to boil water for electricity. Electric Solar panels I think are better used on a small scal, you put them on peoples houses, on the top of buildings and such, so each building is making a good junk of its own power during the day, and switches to grid at night.

Now for more large scale power, I recommend something like a Solar Tower Which is already being used in places. In this case the heat is used to creat intense winds which power wind turbines. No exotic chemicals needed here.

And going to be using a mix of power, echoing on something said earlier, people need to get away from a "one size fits all" approach. Wind and Solar are good for small and Rural areas while Nuclear is best for large cities (located of course a resonable distance away).

Why not install solar panels for the day, then wind turbines for at night? Also, isn't there some way of storing the power generated by solar panels for use later?

[LaCroix]

I don't know why people push solar power so much.

1. It's anything than clean if you look at the production process
2. It works only some time per day.
3. Only reliable in certain areas.
4. Very complicated and new technology with low efficiency
5. Nearly impossible to repair if damaged.

In comparison, wind energy:
1. Relatively clean to produce.
2. Wind also exists at night and when clouds.
3. There are not many areas customer-sized wind-wheels on roofs won't work. You can produce them for a wide variety of wind speeds, using different gears.
4. Proven, reliable technology with high efficiency (generators)
5. Can be repaired easily and even built by book-wise laymen in Africa (although not very sophisticated ones)

[aerius]

Also, isn't there some way of storing the power generated by solar panels for use later?

It only works on a smaller scale. For instance, let's look at the power backup system for banks since I've actually seen them. The HQ buildings for the banks have an entire floor filled floor to ceiling with batteries to provide backup power in case of a power failure. It gives them only a few hours of power, and basically it's only there so that they'll have enough time to fire up their giant diesel generators.

If you want to store massive amounts of energy the only reasonable way to do it these days is pumped water storage. You pump a few billion gallons of water uphill into a giant reservoir and let it run downhill through the turbines when you need the power. Problem is there's only so many places where you can build these things, and most of them likely aren't located near the solar plants.

[Iroscato]

It only works on a smaller scale. For instance, let's look at the power backup system for banks since I've actually seen them. The HQ buildings for the banks have an entire floor filled floor to ceiling with batteries to provide backup power in case of a power failure. It gives them only a few hours of power, and basically it's only there so that they'll have enough time to fire up their giant diesel generators.

Oh. Well that...sucks. What's the efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines in percentage, does anyone know?

[Crossroads Inc.]

It just all goes back to using a little of everything and not one source for power. people LOVE solar power because there is the love of 'Solar is a TRUE endless power source!" After all its the sun! It's free! It's forever*!

But as others state it is far from perfect and has a very limited role despite being so 'free and abundant".

For me, I would focus more on a system that constantly makes power rather then storing it. You can store fuel, you can store other resources, but electricty is hard to store on a massive scale.

The main thing to keep in mind about energy is to think small for most things. If you were about to make every personal home in America largerly energy free via solar and wind, that by itself would go a massive amount to freeing up our energy needs. Equip homes with solar cell roofs and small wind turbines would do a lot of this. The downside is it can't work everywhere. Northren places don't get a lot of sun, but they may get a lot of wind.

But yeah, the infatuation with solar as this magical all powerful endless source of energy is really over done. It IS a good source of energy, but only in conjunction with many other items.








*(or for the next several billion years)

[folti78]

I don't know why people push solar power so much.

1. It's anything than clean if you look at the production process
2. It works only some time per day.
3. Only reliable in certain areas.
4. Very complicated and new technology with low efficiency
5. Nearly impossible to repair if damaged.

In comparison, wind energy:
1. Relatively clean to produce.
2. Wind also exists at night and when clouds.
3. There are not many areas customer-sized wind-wheels on roofs won't work. You can produce them for a wide variety of wind speeds, using different gears.
4. Proven, reliable technology with high efficiency (generators)
5. Can be repaired easily and even built by book-wise laymen in Africa (although not very sophisticated ones)

1. Because solar is more futuristic and space agey than wind, which you saw in some spaghetti western decades ago.
2. They are silent, unlike wind turbines, which can be noisy, especially in large numbers.
3. Larger ones don't kill birds and bats by swatting them out of the sky.
4. they also not suspected to trigger epilepsic seizures.

[folti78]

And going to be using a mix of power, echoing on something said earlier, people need to get away from a "one size fits all" approach. Wind and Solar are good for small and Rural areas while Nuclear is best for large cities (located of course a resonable distance away).

Yup, nuke plants have the total lack of flexibility problem. They are either off or operate at 100% capacity, regardless of the current demand. They are not something you can turn on or off at the moment's notice(see the mess at Fukushima). You'll always need other, more flexible energy sources on grid to ride out the peaks in demand.

The main thing to keep in mind about energy is to think small for most things. If you were about to make every personal home in America largerly energy free via solar and wind, that by itself would go a massive amount to freeing up our energy needs. Equip homes with solar cell roofs and small wind turbines would do a lot of this. The downside is it can't work everywhere. Northren places don't get a lot of sun, but they may get a lot of wind.

Producing that lot of photovoltaics to cover the houses just in the US will have it's own environmental impact. The grid itself need a major overhaul too, because one thing it hates is major fluctuations of demand.

[Simon_Jester]

A random thought:

If you have a combination of power sources, some of which are "too reliable" in that they can't be turned off (nuclear), and some of which are "unreliable" in that they can't be turned on all the time (solar)...

...You're going to need massive power storage for the 'unreliable' sources- the "pump water up a hill" option was mentioned. You could, as far as I can tell, use the same system to store surplus power generated from the "too reliable" sources during periods of low demand.

If your power storage infrastructure is robust enough and can hold sufficient energy, you might be able to dispense with 'flexible' sources almost entirely, scaling them down a small fraction of the overall grid.

The 'flexible' source capacity, in a renewable-energy context, might be taken up by hydroelectric dams, where you can always let water through the spillways rather than the turbines. Or wind, where you can presumably lock down the turbines if need be- I'd expect that capacity to be vital for maintenance, since otherwise it'd be impossible to work on the turbines when there's a breeze blowing.

[aerius]

Yup, nuke plants have the total lack of flexibility problem. They are either off or operate at 100% capacity, regardless of the current demand. They are not something you can turn on or off at the moment's notice(see the mess at Fukushima). You'll always need other, more flexible energy sources on grid to ride out the peaks in demand.

Actually current CANDU plants can vary their output a bit, the next generation CANDU reactors will be able to perform load following and go all the way down to half power and back to full power. We can actually do this already with our newest nuke plant at Darlington, it was designed & built to cycle from 60%-100% power but it isn't licensed to do so. Bruce & Darlington NGS can also be connected or disconnected from the grid on a moment's notice, the reactors can be run at reduced power for some time while the plant is disconnected and that's what they did during the big blackout in 2003. As soon as the grid problem is fixed they connected the plants and ramped them back to full power.

[fnord]

Sorry, I didn't realise I was being disingenuous.

[Korvan]

A random thought:

If you have a combination of power sources, some of which are "too reliable" in that they can't be turned off (nuclear), and some of which are "unreliable" in that they can't be turned on all the time (solar)...

...You're going to need massive power storage for the 'unreliable' sources- the "pump water up a hill" option was mentioned. You could, as far as I can tell, use the same system to store surplus power generated from the "too reliable" sources during periods of low demand.

If your power storage infrastructure is robust enough and can hold sufficient energy, you might be able to dispense with 'flexible' sources almost entirely, scaling them down a small fraction of the overall grid.

The 'flexible' source capacity, in a renewable-energy context, might be taken up by hydroelectric dams, where you can always let water through the spillways rather than the turbines. Or wind, where you can presumably lock down the turbines if need be- I'd expect that capacity to be vital for maintenance, since otherwise it'd be impossible to work on the turbines when there's a breeze blowing.

For the 2000 Hanover world fair, I worked on a project to program an interactive kiosk that had you manage various power sources in order to meet power demands over a simulated 24 hour period. You had nuclear which you could only turn on or off, but it would provide a huge amount of power, you had a coal power plant that could be adjusted and you had variable power input from solar and wind.

It was actually quite challenging as power demands varies a huge amount of the day with peak demand (dinner hour) being a lot higher than the average demand. In our simulation, you could only do it with the adjustability of the coal power plant without falling short or having too much power.

Of course, our simulation was grossly simplified, we were looking at the power grid of an isolated city. In the real world, your grid can spread over several time zones and power can be bought and sold.