Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Denmark's "power right now" is showing 174 g CO2/kWh
Options
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
Ignored? I just told you I read it?One of about half a dozen I had previous posted and had ignored.
Apparently there is, but…Most? Not all? Are you conceding that there's something going on in Poland?
…as you allude to above, this seems to be a problem specific to Poland, which causes me to believe that the problem is the Polish grid, not German renewables.As to Germany's neighbors, much of the problem arises from the ned to send wind power from windmills in the North to heavy users in the South and in Austria, to a lesser extent Italy. Being an educated renewables advocate that's all the time banging on about European supergrids, you are probably familiar with the current situation, or you should be. Nutshell: The Czech republic has similar problems to Poland but I don't think it's quite as bad for them, the Benelux countries aren't relevant to the North-South flow, and France just has a massively better system not just because of its massive nuclear but also it has significant hydroelectricity and even some pumped hydro all of which is extremely flexible and presumably can handle the crap going on to the East. I assume, though I could be wrong, that the Poles have none of this which is why they routinely have to engage in bizarre "pushback" procedures while the French do not. You can monitor the French grid in real time here.
Seems to me the OP is more concerned with greater interconnection – that was the main point that was being made.Re read the OP, even the thread title. It's all about the power "right now".
I’ll take that as a yes. In absolute terms, Denmark’s energy sector is now producing about 40% less emissions than about twenty years ago – that’s an impressive reduction:Could well be...
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/data-viewers/greenhouse-gases-viewer
…it suits your argument to do so. The data is very scarce and conclusions are therefore difficult to reach, but you’re happy to assume that everything’s dandy.I assume the costs were affordable because…
Well that’s bizarre logic – it was built, so it must have been affordable? Funny how you don’t apply that logic to renewables, isn’t it?…obviously they were hence the presence of the reactors. I also assume this because every other large/industrialised nation was pursuing similar policies around the same time, though not to the same extent.
There are no emissions associated with uranium mining and enrichment? No emissions associated with plant construction and decommissioning? No external costs associated with long-term waste storage?When nuclear power is run correctly (which by definition excludes the Soviet Union completely and to a lesser extent TEPCO in Japan), most of its costs are internalised, or paid for by an external patron as you allege occured in France. With nuclear operations, you have a uranium mine, milling/enrichment facilities, the plant itself, and storage for spent fuels. All of these have costs which must be paid. The waste that comes out is a solid, which must be accounted for, unlike fossil fuels which dump waste gasses into the air.
Perhaps you could list some things that don’t have to be maintained after they are built? Nuclear power plants just look after themselves, do they?By the way, that crap will all have to be maintained after it is built.
Well, no, it’s because you’re not using the same criteria to evaluate their respective environmental impacts.I contend that the associated environmental costs for renewables are understated, and those of nuclear overstated, and primarily for dogmatic/ideological reasons.
The OP was making a very different point to the one you’re trying to make.So was the OP! Re-read the title of this thread! This is the second time you've accused me of something that you've given the OP a pass for doing the exact same thing.
See the graph above.How so?
No, it’s obviously the cost of capital investment, isn’t it? How many times do you need this pointed out to you?It's true that correlation does not imply causation. However, it just so happens that countries have gone down the Green rabbit hole have the highest power costs. Just a co-incidence?
I’m curious, instead of investing heavily in renewables, how much would it have cost Denmark to go nuclear?0 -
I’ll take that as a yes. In absolute terms, Denmark’s energy sector is now
producing about 40% less emissions than about twenty years ago – that’s an
impressive reduction:
[/QUOTE]
Where is the evidence that wind energy is the main factor behind this reduction??. - firstly you are selective with your data points. The reduction is a mere 20% if you look at the start of the graph rather than a brief spike in the mid-90's. Secondly the recent recession,increasing energy efficiency across business/domestic sectors and the reduction in coal burning in favour of gas during the late 90's are emission reduction factors that those who push wind energy at any cost like to ignore.
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=dk&product=gas&graph=consumption
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=dk&product=coal&graph=consumption0 -
Advertisement
-
-
Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 90,732 Mod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 88972
Where is the evidence that wind energy is the main factor behind this reduction??. - firstly you are selective with your data points. The reduction is a mere 20% if you look at the start of the graph rather than a brief spike in the mid-90's. Secondly the recent recession,increasing energy efficiency across business/domestic sectors and the reduction in coal burning in favour of gas during the late 90's are emission reduction factors that those who push wind energy at any cost like to ignore.
That graph shows TOTAL emissions not the per watt ones.
It may surprise you to know that Denmark actually uses more energy than back in 1990 !![IES_2_2_2_DNK.png?&dataset[width]=375&dataset[height]=250&dataset[visible_columns]=0&dataset[graph_title]=Net%20Energy%20Consumption%20-%20Denmark](http://www.quandl.com/EIA/IES_2_2_2_DNK.png?&dataset[width]=375&dataset[height]=250&dataset[visible_columns]=0&dataset[graph_title]=Net%20Energy%20Consumption%20-%20Denmark)
https://www.quandl.com/collections/denmark/denmark-energy-data0 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
Only mainstream environmentalists want to wind down all the nuclear programmes ...I was at an investment seminal recently and one speaker stated that the present cost of winding down the existing nuclear power program would exceed the entire GDP of the entire EU. Winding down costs included de-contamination, closure, making sure that kids don't play football on the grounds of old nuclear power plants, treatment and storage of nuclear waste etc.
Yes, it does - if you assume that renewables are anything resembling cheap. Or that deploying them on such a mass scale would be as easy said as done. Or that it would be good for the environment. Unfortunately the evidence clearly demonstrates that none of this is so.It still leaves a frightening financial legacy into the future, and it shows what an appalling investment nuclear power is. You can add to that the sunken costs of building all these power plants and maintaining them up to now.
It puts the capital cost of renewables and storage of power together with quick starting peaking generation capacity into perspective.
This infographic from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change demonstrates part of the problem clearly:
(Image from) http://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/industry_frustration_as_decc_hails_hinkley_at_expense_of_solar_and_wind
In order to generate the same power as what Hinkley Point C will hopefully generate (26TW/h per year) you would need to commit 130,000 acres to solar farms, or 250,000 acres to wind mills.
Another report indicates that to generate one sixth of the UKs energy needs, they would have to wallpaper all of Wales or an area of the same size, with windmills. That's right, the whole bloody country or an area the size of it, windmills covering the entire surface of it at maximum density.- The cost of this would be obscene.
- Running costs would also be obscene becuase all the grid would be saturated with power sources that produce only when the weather is co-operating. There would be no guarantee that supply would have any relation to demand, except in the case of Northern climates, a guarantee that energy from solar panels and wind mills would produce least when power is needed most - i.e. on calm, cold, winter times when our need for energy is the greatest. The remainder of the grid, its other producers and consumers, would have to be able to compensate for every case from massive oversupply e.g. a breezy summers day when everyone decides to go to the beach, to a windless cold winter night when everyone's at home shivering by their electric heaters becuase it's -17C in an anti-cyclone. Nations like Germany can afford these costs, but their electricity is the 2nd most expensive in Europe and in the Top 15 globally, exceeded only by Green Denmark and remote Pacific island chains where power is expected to be massively expensive because its done by bringing small quantities of fuel long distances to small and inefficient markets and generators. It also helps that Germany can dump unplanned and unusable surplusses on its neighborts in Poland and that the Poles don't mind the potential for these surges potentially overpowering and crashing their grid.
- Even if dealing with the instability could be done, the only other type of power that is flexible enough to deal with all these problems is natural gas. But the greatest sources of natural gas in the world today are the biggest and most aggressive hellholes run by the worst of despots, like Russia and Qatar. Even excluding all of that, natural gas is the form of energy that is the least renewable, that is difficult to store, and the opportunity costs of wasting natural gas in stationary power plants are second only to those of oil, because gas can be used in home heating, transport, cooking and as a feedstock in some chemical processes. Things like uranium on the other hand could only otherwise be used in things like submarines, so not so much of an opportunity cost.
- The waste of resources would be obscene because solar panels normally require rare earth elements, and windmills, modern industrial wind mills are also absolutely massive, each one is multiple times the height of Dublin Spire for example with the blades comparable in length to multiple railway carriages. So the amount of steel and concrete required to wallpaper a country with windmills would be unimaginable.
- The environmental destruction caused by committing these resources and land use to renewables would be enormous - indeed there is already evidence that extreme and irreperable harm to wildlife is happening today. While some discussion has taken place into the effects of wind mills on birds, and mass bird kills by means of bird strikes, less discussed but almost as severe if not more so is the effect wind farming is having on Western bat populations, TLDR version if you haven't looked at this is that wind mills rival only White Nose Syndrome as an existential threat to bat populations in the Western world. Contrary to claims made in some quarters, renewables and wildlife are mutually incompatible, at least where wind is concerned. For example, in just one year (2012) and in just one country (the United States) wind turbines killed an estimated 600,000 - 900,000 bats. No nation can continue to bear such losses, let alone the United States whose bat population is already in grave danger of total destruction because of White Nose Syndrome. We cannot afford to drive bats to extinction because they provide invaluable service to humanity as a natural predator of bugs like mosquitos. Given that bats have a very slow reproductive cycle, any factor that causes mass mortality among them is a matter of the gravest possible concern.
- All of the above damage would be compounded by the enormous expansion in the power grid that would be required to carry all this intermittent and remotely generated power to its markets. This would also require electricity pylons comparable in scale to the Dublin Spire, and consume enormous quantites of steel to build and maintain the towers and wires. Again, the impact on the landscape and the quality of life of the people surrounded by the wiring would be obscene. Again, the effects on biodiversity could be severe. There are people out there that want to wallpaper Europe with such construction so as to help deal with the problems introduced by renewables.
Nuclear safety is also literally unparalelled, because when you compare how many people are killed by pollution and accidents per terawatt/hour produced, nuclear power is consistently at the bottom of the table.
But to be clear, nuclear fission is not a great option, just the best of a bad lot, and my support for it is conditional upon that fact. If someone does actually solve the energy question with something better, like this guy with plans for artificial photosynthesis, storing energy from sunlight into chemical fuels similar to petroleum, the game changes. If it is possible, for example, to cheaply make dense, liquid fuel from renewable sources like sunlight/artifical photosynthesis, then it would be feasible to generate energy in Greece in the summer time and use it in Ireland in the dead of winter to run home heating systems, cars etc, or in the U.S. to make vast quanties of petroleum-like fuels somewhere like Arizona and ship them to Alaska for all of the above and also for small scale electricity generators in small and remote settlements. If the equipment was cheap enough, it could also be used in remote but sunny places like certain Pacific islands, other small islands like Jamacia and the like where current power costs approach $1 per kwh.
The instant something that is actually better comes along, support for expanded atomic power becomes indefensible. But we don't have anything better yet, and it doesn't look like we're going to any time soon unless someone comes up with something seriously kick-ass like that guy from Cal-Tech above.
Well, you said it yourself. In 1995 the British spent £2.3 billion on a power plant that has spent the last 20 years putting over 1GW onto the grid without much fuss, and in all weathers. And they fit all the necessary turbines into a single turbine hall.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »http://smartgriddashboard.eirgrid.com/#roi/wind
MAX WIND OUTPUT ALL TIME
2,132 MW 28 JANUARY 2016, 22:00 (ROI)
2,683 MW 28 JANUARY 2016, 21:45 (All Island)
On the subject of Nuclear the costs for Hinkley C are just insane.
Even when you take into account that Hinkley produces more power than Sizewell, there's still a huge jump in cost. And nuclear doesn't have a habit of on-time , on budget, and that's before you factor in the costs of incomplete projects.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36160368
You keep telling us how awful and horrible the EPR is and how expensive Hinkley C is, and how all the EPRs are a decade late and counting, yet have never explained why the French were able to roll out enough power plants to power a large country at reasonable cost and in a relatively rapid time frame (from seeing trouble in the oil crises of the 1970s to being almost entirely non-fossil powered by the late 1980s.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
Clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with the technology, only at worst there has been some bad implementations.
Your comparison of Sizewell B to the problems at Hinkley C raises the same questions. What was working in 1995 with Sizewell B that isn't working today with the EPR?0 -
-
-
-
-
-
Some news recently: Ireland's PSO levy on electricity users is going up again, this time by 35%. This is on top of Ireland's already near Europe leading electricity costs. Again, guess what's responsible? Green energy, and the need to provide "capacity" (i.e. backup for wind mills).
http://www.businesspost.ie/consumers-face-hikes-in-electricity-bills-due-to-higher-green-energy-levy/
This is on top of an 85% increase last year.
You start out with a fallacy "Argumentum Ad Populum" a.k.a. the Bandwagon fallacy. Nice.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »20,984,110 mainstream environmentalists voted in a referendum against nuclear power in Italy.
Sheep? Yeah, because no-one else would want to live or do anything near the monstrosities - the visual impact of which is magnified by the need to put them on mountaintops - if they can avoid it. Seriously, what do you think wallpapering a country will do to a country's tourism sector, bat population, human quality of life etc?You still refuse to admit that wind turbines only take up a tiny fraction of the land upon which they stand ? Sheeps can still graze 'neath them
Great. They can cause even more visual pollution, cause even more messed up air pressure over a wider area to kill more bats, and cause even more variability in electricity supply. Yippee-ki-freakin-yay :rolleyes:the book quoted was from 2008 , turbines have gotten taller and so can harvest more wind from higher up , that is to say harvesting more power per acre.
Doesn't matter if they make them a bajillion percent efficient. They won't produce power after sunset, and they won't produce power when a cold climate like ours needs it most - in the winter. In fact, no matter how you make a solar panel, it will always produce the most power when it is least needed and produce the least power when it is most needed. Without storage, it's useless.Now the boffins in Oz have magicked up new non-concentrated solar panels that are 34.5% efficient. No they haven't been commercialised yet.
But while the plant works, it provides massive amounts of power, on a predictable basis, and regardless of the weather. BTW are you seriously suggesting that wallpapering a small country with solar panels, massive windmills, ruinous over-expansion of the power grid to facilitate all of this would be less resource intensive than building a glorified industrial plant on < 100 acres?Compare that to nuclear power plants. HUGE inputs of concrete and steel for years and years before you get a single watt of power. And that's before the extra resources for fixing design flaws and building sea walls and decommissioning.
My evidence of France's switch to nuclear power inthe 70s and 80s, not to mention the evidence you provided relating to Sizewell B, suggest that this is true, or at the absolute minimum was true in the 20th century.I put it to you that the nuclear industry still has a mantra of "Trust us we know what we are doing"
The only people using the mantra "Trust us we know what we are doing" is the mainstream environmental movement, who wants to wallpaper the 1st world with power lines, bat killing, bird chomping, subsidy guzzling monstrosities they call wind farms, and solar panels that may be useful in regions where air-conditioning is the biggest source of electricity demand but are useless everywhere else ...
I'm not advocating EPRs. Not in Ireland, not anywhere if it can't be done right. A few more Sizewell Bs on the other hand ...EDF have had 0 EPR's implemented.
Your article doesn't even say how big the plant being inaugurated is in terms of MWs, and certainly does not say anything about the cost per kwh necessary to make it financially viable. I'm also willing to speculate that these types of plants could cause the same kind of ecological destruction in the waters near our coastlines and windmills cause to birds and bats in the air. One obvious question - how do you stop the things from killing aquatic life?BTW France is looking into tidal turbines on their path to reducing nuclear to 50% or less. http://www.power-technology.com/news/newssecond-tidal-turbine-edf-paimpol-brhat-project-inaugurated-4895125
Wonderful. How many German coal power plants were taken offline during this near 100% burst of supply? How far into unsustainable negative territory did this burst push wholesale prices? We know that other plants would have had to remain online because they could have been needed at any time and are not flexible enough to start and stop in tune with weather based renewables.
I would also wonder how much extra CO2 was emitted by the Polish grid, because as I showed previously, when Germany over-produces electricity (as they do routinely), they dump it on the Poles who then have to (counter-intuitively) ramp up their own power plants to push back the unsuable surplus.
The message in all this should be clear - producing too much power is as bad as producing too little. Power sources that are literally out of control are a hinderance, not a help, to a well functioning grid.
The original author laid out the facts. Another party noticed that the facts didn't support the narritive. Pointed it out. Original author cried "mis-representation". End of story.You and I obviously have very different definitions of “misrepresented”.
What a strange charge - you accusing me of citing a report to back up my argument?Which is presumably why you cited it.
If you can afford something, it is by definition affordable. You disputed my claim that the original French nuclear program was affordable, despite the fact that it was clearly afforded. I recognise of course that by this logic, the current green insanity is also affordable, but would counter by questioning whether it is wise to continue.Strawman - nobody has claimed that France could not afford anything.
You do realise that the Hanford Site was primarily used for nuclear WEAPONS research? Another thing I am not advocating.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »The clean up cost for the Hanford site in the US had dropped to $107.7 billion.
This doesn't include the $19Bn they have already spent on the storage tanks. Great value when you consider they haven't treated any of the stuff and it's still leaking.
Sources? And what precisely do you mean by "isotope separation" the USA does not use nuclear fuel reprocessing. Also, is this work flexible, e.g. could it be during, oh, say, periods of negative wholesale energy prices?At one point 7% of the electricity produced in the USA was used in isotope separation.
One last question - since it has been admitted that the current green energy plan requires a European supergrid, how would you prevent a repeat of the 2006 continent-wide blackouts? These were caused by a PLANNED outage of a single power line. Given that you would have greater imbalances between production and demand in virtually all regions, what would prevent a failure of the supergrid from causing a cascading failure of electricity supply continent wide? How, for example would you protect all this new infrastructure from terrorism, which is a greater threat now than it was in previous decades and will only get worse?0 -
-
Advertisement
-
Advertisement