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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2519 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I wouldn't necessarily say that it's a vanity project. The mobility is huge. Being able to float it to where it's needed and not have to ship in fossil fuels?

Shipping fossil fuels is a solved problem, especially if you need just 70MW. That's 90 thousand tonnes of coal, or 900 hoppers, or 18 smallish freight trains.

One advantage kinda minimizes the other, sadly; it's cheapest to ship fossil fuels to the same places a power barge can go. A combined cycle gas power barge that could refuel directly from an LNG carrier would have much higher power-to-displacement, be massively cheaper, and give more load-following capacity to 3rd world grids in brownout-prone places like South Africa and California. Nukes aren't great at that. (Edit: Karpowerships is doing exactly this in Dakar(?) now, but with natgas diesel conversions instead of turbines)

There's already some of those on the market by Siemens, iirc. Older power barges used big multi-fuel diesels.

On the other other hand, the low cost of gas turbines makes putting them ashore absolutely trivial. It takes a place as dysfunctional as Lebanon or Dominica to make a long term power barge lease a more viable alternative. And serving those places is risky, as Karpowership discovered with their Lebanon contract going unpaid.

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