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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24391 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Found on Twitter:

"This video on recycling old turbine blades into concrete has a funny twist at the end. Are they doing all this work to make something valuable? That people will pay for? Perhaps as aggregate for concrete? How low is the bar they claim they have cleared? Watch and find out."

The answer is they turn the blades into concrete by shredding them and then paying a concrete plant to burn it as fuel.

This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.

To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.

Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.

I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.

I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.

There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.

I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.

Listening to a recent episode of the Meateater podcast on the ecological impacts of renewable energy and thinking about it afterwards, I formulated my issue with the core premise into three-legged combination of why it doesn't seem like a great idea to build offshore wind, but that may also apply to standard wind and solar installations:

  • These seem much more complex than one might expect initially. The details of implementation when it comes to land management, environmental damage, load balancing, and so much more seem to require multidisciplinary experts and an enormous amount of planning and study. A question like, "what do we do with the rotors afterwards?" is an example of this. Alone, this isn't necessarily a big criticism, but...
  • They are quite costly. I don't actually know the numbers, but I do know that we're massively federally subsidizing these, and I wouldn't expect that to be necessary if they were actually competitive without those subsidies. If I'm wrong, and they're actually quite affordable, I would like the federal government to stop creating new handouts for companies that can compete on an open market.
  • Given the complexity and cost, they must be necessary. This is the one that I have the hardest time actually evaluating. I'm personally skeptical of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, but setting that aside, I am unclear on why I should prefer the complexity, ecological footprint, and cost of massive wind and solar installations to using the proven, small footprint nuclear power solution.

I don't claim any actual expertise and I'm pretty neutral about the whole thing, but I haven't really seen anyone addressing this head-on.

Given the complexity and cost, they must be necessary. This is the one that I have the hardest time actually evaluating. I'm personally skeptical of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, but setting that aside, I am unclear on why I should prefer the complexity, ecological footprint, and cost of massive wind and solar installations to using the proven, small footprint nuclear power solution.

I work in energy project finance. The answer to that question is that small footprint nuclear reactors are not proven. There are zero pilot plants let alone commercial plants. It’s entirely unproven to be economically viable and a quick google shows the target price for a planned pilot plant is $90/MWh. Price as is the price they would need to get for electrons to I assume be profitable. Nearly double the wholesale rate in most of the country.

Standard nuclear I suppose is proven insofar as we actually have functioning nuclear plants right now. The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.

We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.

Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:

  • The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.

  • As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.

Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.

The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.

I appreciate the reply and I don’t even dispute this (other than the statement that nuclear is good for keeping dollars onshore. Imported modules make up roughly 20-30% of total cost for a utility scale solar facility in 2024. The rest is onshore. Maybe some imported steel will get you closer to 50%. But it’s not overwhelming).

The rest of your post speaks to a theoretical world for Americans or a global nuclear industry. Citing Japan and Korea is unfortunate not relevant for the USA.

We tried 4 times in the last 20 years. Only two units were built and at great cost. Utilities and investors know the reality of the current market. We can talk about all of this theoretically. But until there is some major changes in policy and pricing, you will not see any new nuclear in the USA regardless of how good it looks on paper.

Unexpected pivot for a former pothead.

Didn't we just build Vogle in Georgia though?

The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.

We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.

If I recall, the MIT study on the matter even straight up said that it's not the cost of the nuclear portion that drives up the price, it's the general construction and horrible project management of the rest of the site.

Sure, but that’s kind of my point. Building solar panels and wind turbines is simple. Building nukes in hard. Part of this is the supply chain. There’s a well established wind and solar supply chain which keeps costs down.

Our nuclear contractors are horrible, they don’t have the experience or the volume to learn. And the manufacturing is nothing to sneeze at either. There are only so many companies in the world that can build vessels large enough for nuclear.

The contractor and site management costs are certainly relevant when deciding if a technology is viable. And I don’t see any near term or medium term way to fix this.

The US can make a 210 MW reactor, cram it in a submarine (with oodles of advanced stealth/sonar/missile technology) for about $2 billion. They can produce one such submarine every year. Or in the Nimitz class, they install two 550 MW reactors in a floating city/airbase/fortress for a grand total of $5 billion. The reactors surely can't be that much of the overall cost, 20% at most. The missiles and gadgetry are far more complicated, the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.

Small footprint nuclear reactors are proven technology, they've been made for decades. The US chooses not to administrate civilian nuclear energy competently, there's no technical problem. This is 1960s technology, at most. There's nothing all that sophisticated about nuclear energy, even breeder reactors.

the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.

Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.

In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.

Those are civilian general-purpose computers, military tech has to use hardened tech against EMPs, they need special secret software and configurations, electronic countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. Can't exactly go to Taiwan, the chips are supposed to be made in the USA for supply chain security... It's super complicated.

t. Lockheed Martin shareholder

Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.

You obviously haven't seen how effective Lockheed is at blowing up the cost of things.

Is it possible to bring in guest workers to build them from other countries that have more of an active nuke building program? Thinking of France and Korea especially. Specialization of labor!

I'd hate to see the French nuclear talent go, given how heavily we invested and how the uncertainty around the future of the branch is already killing it despite it being one of the few things saved us (and by extension Europe) from economic collapse when the oil and gas prices spiked.

It may actually work if the US tried it. There is a constant uncertainty looming over the fate of the French nuclear sector. Caused both by the flipflopping of our own politicians and the deep hatred of any energetic policy that involves France or nuclear at the EU level.

What kills me is that we spent untold amounts designing breeder reactors and other tech that makes the whole thing safe, effective and relatively waste free...and then closed Superphénix and sold the tech to the Chinese. Now the Chinese have the CEFR and we have nothing.

Your mistake is comparing it to nuclear. It's not replacing nuclear. We don't build nuclear. It's replacing burning fossil fuels. As for why we're subsidizing them, even if they were slightly more profitable to run than fossil fuel plants the upfront capital needed to build them is high and if you want to put the foot on the gas to build out more asap then offering better returns is a good way to do that.

Now one can also push nuclear. I'm in favor of it and there was some stuff in the IRA to push in that direction but it seems to have shaken out that there wasn't enough.

How does one push nuclear in the US? This is an inherently heavily-regulated sector in a country that tries its best to prevent anything from being built.

I've heard multiple energy-industry insiders say freely that most renewables such as wind exist entirely because of the subsidies and aren't even remotely defensible without them.

It’s not a scam it, like solar is overrated for large swaths of the globe simply because the weather and geography often make those solutions impractical. Solar only works in places that have a lot of sunny days. And transmission can only go so far. Wind has a similar problem— if the place isn’t windy enough, there’s no power. Add in the space requirements for either solution, and it’s a minor source of power that people overhype because they want to believe you can get free-ish energy that’s perfectly green and leaves no waste. I think it’s a step backwards simply because for most of the globe nuclear fission is so much more efficient per meter of space used and produces so little waste that anything that stops people from wanting more nuclear energy is a step away from green energy.

I used to think transmission was a big loss. It isn't nearly as lossy as I assumed, you really can build in nevada and the power to the east coast with very little loss overall.

Fun fact: Transmission and distribution losses tend to be lower in rural states like Wyoming and North Dakota. Why? Less densely populated states have more high-voltage, low-loss transmission lines and fewer lower-voltage, high-loss distribution lines.

There's basically no real need for landfills, either, if you just incinerate enough. (Of course burning is particularly useful in cold countries with common heating needs).

Where are the combustion products going?

Combatted as much as possible at the source, as regulated by local decrees in accordance with EU directives on incineration. It's a remarkably clean process, cleaner than landfills and certainly cleaner than using fossil fuels to produce the same energy for heating etc.

Interesting, I wonder if there are emissions besides nox and CO2. Probably a lot of nasty stuff in that trash, but sufficient combustion should break it down.

I'd bet you have to be more careful with what ends up in "trash": no amount of combustion is going to remove lead or mercury from the waste stream. And I'd bet it's at least possible for combustion to do gnarly things like oxidize chromium into biologically hazardous states. But I'm certainly not an expert on waste processing, although machine learning for single-stream waste sorting does seem like a potentially useful use case.

The atmosphere.

I wonder if the Suomis really thought this one through, or if the winds just usually blow east over Finland.

Finland is probably not that densely populated, so a bit of air pollution- especially if you do the common sense thing and build a trash-burning power plant in a rural area- isn’t that big of a deal. It’s not like 19th century London.

It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.

Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)

So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.

That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.

Václav Smil explains it better here.

Could you share some details? From where I sit it's hard to estimate the land requirements for electrochemical storage because there is so little market for multi-day systems. In particular, long term storage should depend on available volume, not area.

There was some flow battery grid storage projected completed in ..Korea?

I looked it up, found the dimensions and then tried extrapolating. You could probably get the ballpark by finding energy density of these cheap grid storage batteries and then doing some calculations.

depend on available volume,

We don't live in zero-gee. Building up is costly, building down even costlier.

As far as I've seen commercial storage targets shorter duration, less than a day, so I don't really have a source for how the duration scaling works. The limit is where the footprint is dictated by the storage of redox active material. Large tanks are a bit squat, but still contain enormous volumes reasonably compactly.

If you have less than a day of storage, you need back up power plants because calm winds easily last up to a week.

Non-battery based energy storage(like pumping water behind a dam) seems like it fills the niche, albeit with efficiency losses, does it not?

As the OP said, people vastly underestimate the numbers we are talking about when it comes to electricity storage. Germany consumes around 500 TWh of electricity a year. One pump-storage power plant like Goldistahl has capacity of 8.5 GWh built at the cost of EUR 600 million in late 90s and early 2000s. This capacity is consumed in around 10 minutes in Germany even without any consideration of actual potential output of the storage. If you want to have reserve for weeks of electricity generation at a time, we are talking about thousands of such pump-storage power plants with the cost of hundreds of billions of EUR - even if it is literally impossible to build more than couple of dozens in Germany due to required geological conditions, not to even talk about ecological and other problems these power plants represent. For the cost of 1,000 pump-storage power plants to cover the demand for 1 week if needed, you could literally build 54 newest Olkiluoto 3 style super expensive nuclear reactors and produce 648 TWh of stable base electricity a year - so 30% more than is needed.

Most places where pumped water would work well already have dams and reservoirs built there.

That's limited by geography.

Very few places could get days of storage that way, without NAWAPA style megaprojects.

Have you looked at the numbers for pumped storage? A kilo of gasoline stores enough energy to raise a similar kilo of water more than four thousand kilometers. The sheer volumes you'd need to lift to match the energy density of a single floating roof tank (or oil tanker) would be absurd, and you'd need to scatter pumped lakes the size of Lake Mead all over the country, and even then probably couldn't handle seasonal variation. Not to mention that reservoirs are themselves not that environmentally friendly or that there aren't many good sites to start from that aren't already used.

IMO generating hydrocarbons is the most viable storage technology (plus it works with existing supplied energy infrastructure), but even there robust, scalable chemical processes are lacking. Hydrogen is easier chemically but harder to store.

Look up what Terraform is promising. Methane synthesis from water and captured CO2

I feel like it can't be real, that the numbers don't make sense, that making and running the machinery in a cost effective manner is impossible

Why can't it be real? The Haber-Bosch process is at least as impactful of an "air + energy + water -> bulk useful material" process, and it's real and cost-effective.

Anyone who comes up with some process that

  1. Has low infrastructure costs
  2. Produces some industrially valuable product
  3. Spins up and down quickly, and tolerates long idle periods (i.e. starts producing the product as soon as you feed it power, stops when you stop feeding it power, and doesn't have issues if it doesn't start again for a long time)

has a license to print money when power costs dip to zero or below. Which they already do from time to time, and if solar power continues to be deployed more and more, that situation will happen more often.

Terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.

terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.

..there's such thing as manufacturing and maintenance costs.

You got 8 upvotes while completely neglecting that.

Terraform has some bullshit low price of $100k for a machinery that produces, without taking power into account something like $65 of natural gas per day. With solar it'd take 5 acres to power it.

So, I'm skeptical. Because industrial equipment is extremely expensive.

Look at this here. $100k for that much chemical processing?!

And does 40 tons of methane per year even get you $150k? 1 ton of methane is supposedly 14500 kWh (perverse unit to use).

1 kWh is 5 cents in the US or eastern Europe, .7 cents in Russia etc.

725$ per ton, 29k $ per year.

So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ? You can't hike price of heat up 10x like they did in western Europe and expect to not ruin any real economy. (based on production of actual stuff, not finance bullshit)

$100k for the machinery seems plausible to me -- you can see details of their proposed setup here (relevant sections are "Carbon capture", "Electrolyzer", and "Chemical reactor", the rest of that post is fluff). "Low maintenance" remains to be seen, but there's no reason in principle that it couldn't be.

But again, the viability of the entire project rests on the idea that in some places the marginal cost of power will be close to zero or even negative a substantial fraction of the time, and yet those places are accessible enough to construct one of these plants. If that's not the way the future pans out, this project winds up not being so viable.

So the answer to

So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ?

Is "It's not. But not every place is reasonable".

"handwaving infrastructure costs" strikes again, a good example of what I meant in that other subthread.

I mean, it's possible but just horribly inefficient. Even just hydrogen is really inefficient.

Why aren't these being built? Certainly this seems like the thing that governments would love to throw money at.

Most likely it's not feasible except in areas with very specific geography.

Because it’s unsexy and the governments that care the most also make it hard to build stuff.

Actually Texas-which builds stuff and has a lot of renewable energy and also has very bad geography for pumped water storage- has quite a bit of energy storage because demand on the electrical grid regularly exceeds production.

What percentage of Texas's power comes from storage? Worldwide, it is negligible.

If it were feasible, we would see it in China which unlike the United States (including Texas) is actually able to build things.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/texas-will-add-more-grid-batteries-than-any-other-state-in-2024

Texas will end 2024 with 12 GW of battery storage- I guess pumped water isn’t a factor due to geography or technical barriers. I’m not sure if this is an expansive definition of battery or if this is literally just a bunch of lithium-ions.

My rule of thumb is that anybody who solely uses the unit of power for battery storage like "12 GW" is a moron and should not be part of the discussion at all. Peak output of storage is not the hard problem, the overall capacity is.

I had to look into several sources to check what we are talking about. Here is Bellefield solar + storage that claims to have battery storage of 1 GW output for whole 4 hours for overall capacity of 4 GWh. California consumes 259 TWh of electricity per year, Texas uses 365 TWh. Even if the output of this battery was infinite, it could power California or Texas for around 8-10 minutes. You would literally need thousand of such storage sites to cover potential output loss for one week.

I mean we do have magic energy storage in the form of hydrocarbons, the trick is trying to synthesize hydrocarbons.

Methane from hydrogen is actually medium efficient -- apparently up to 80% if you use archea. Hydrogen from water is another 75% though, so together it's far worse than, say, flow cells. But in a world where power assumed to be cheap, but long term storage and transport expensive, it becomes very viable.

There's an insane startup promising to crash the methane market with solar powered methane synthesis from directly captured CO2.

There's one doing the same thing for nuclear reactors too (Valar iirc)

Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.

I suspect the answer is going to turn out to be a combination of centralized storage, personal storage and dynamically scaling industrial demand. There won't be one big battery but the same volume distributed over lots of households.

That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.

Eh, our problems are hardly an inherent aspect of green energy, but more that we did it ass-backwards.

No.

Sanity will prevail. There's going to be nuclear reactors everywhere.

Ze Germans are terrified of nuclear energy and nuclear waste. I don't think they are going to build another reactor ever.

They dont have to, the eu energy market is configured so they can just leech on their neighbours.

This. We're committed to insanity.

I swear it's like you guys are programmed to ruin Europe.

The German government has spent the last 30 years sabotaging the European nuclear industry to favor cheap Russian gas and renewable memes and now that the window on that has been closed by the Americans it'd rather commit suicide than change course.

It's just funny how it always plays out that way somehow: commit to genuinely bold choice, find out it's not a panacea, refuse all compromise, destroy all of Europe.

It's not like other European states are more good and wise, these days. For goodness sake, look at France. Generally, the bigger, the more ruinous: scale creates margin, margin creates weirdness. We just happen to be the one in a position to ruin things.

(At least, the contemporary level of ruin. WW2 was its own level.)

Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.

Imagine a lithium-ion battery fire...the size of Pittsburgh!

Sounds like a normal Wednesday, amirite?

Eh, at that scale, if you don't isolate the cells properly you deserve what happens.

Those fumes can only be great for the environment. Or so I'm told.

They’re the surest way to save the bipolar bears.

The US is the size of continental Europe and also has Canada and Mexico grid connections. If you put enough density of turbines and solar panels - chances that there won't be enough trough all of the areas are quite slim. By the time that there is peak in NY the sun is still shining in California. 6 months of the year you have very long days in northern Canada.

It is doable. Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.

Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.

Not having run the numbers I rather like this solution. We need aluminum anyway, so surplus production isn't as big an issue. Moreover Al is about as ideal a long term energy storage medium as exists -- it's abundant, extraordinarily energy dense by both weight and volume, and safe-ish to handle. Getting power out can likely use existing thermal technology on a large scale, and possibly electrochemical means on a small scale.

Extremely high voltage grids for thousand km transmission aren't cheap.

They're an eyesore to some. I love them though.

You need a lot more of them with a fluctuating grid like you're proposing.

Interregional transmission is very limited and struggles with intermittent energy. China's east-west HVDC transmission lines from interior wind generation sites have several gigawatts of coal power running in parallel to stabilize the system.

Most proposals for fixing the problems of intermittent energy handwave the infrastructure costs

Exactly. Germany itself has the same issue as they want to connect offshore wind in North Sea to industrial heartland in the the south. The cost of 700 miles long SuedLink with transmission capacity of only 4GW widely fluctuates between EUR 10 billion and EUR 24 billion and it is not even started as it is mired with thousands of municipalities waging lawfare against having high-voltage lines crisscrossing the countryside. Tell me again about political impossibility of nuclear power.

If you put enough density of turbines and solar panels - chances that there won't be enough trough all of the areas are quite slim.

It's rather high. Not only is all this in the Northern Hemisphere (so winters with weak and short sun are correlated), but we frequently get storm systems which cover massive areas of the US and Canada with clouds

Transmission is also not unlimited- it doesn’t actually help much that the sun is shining in cali at night in New York.

You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada. Burning thermite seems energy-inefficient - and that's another huge capital cost since you make a specialized power plant.

Power should be produced near where it's consumed, reliably and consistently. Breeder reactors are the way to go IMO, or we could rush towards fusion. Just one set of infrastructure with 90% capacity factor and minimal transmission cost. It's not hard to make reactors, the US has the technical chops to fit a 300 MW PWR reactor on a submarine along with sonar, torpedoes, stealth all for a total cost of $2 Billion.

It's not hard to make reactors, the US has the technical chops to fit a 300 MW PWR reactor on a submarine along with sonar, torpedoes, stealth all for a total cost of $2 Billion.

Maybe the solution is the for US to commission giant submarines with gigawatt reactors on them, where they can tap into underwater transmission cables that just barely reach out into international waters.

Wouldn't be the dumbest thing we've ever done to get around crippling regulations. Maybe.

I’ve joked before we should mass produce aircraft carriers.

Can solve energy and housing problems with one stone.

Just get rid of the regulations! It's insane. In Australia, nuclear power is illegal - we're actually trying to buy US nuclear submarines because they're superior to conventional subs in range. But no, we can't have nuclear energy for civilians despite having by far the biggest uranium reserves on earth. Our geography is stable and technology is quite advanced. We have a research reactor. We should be a nuclear energy superpower, mining and enriching and building reactors.

Stalin blamed Soviet economic problems on 'wreckers', workers deliberately sabotaging machinery, undermining morale, giving false orders. Ironically the wrecking came from the top down, in incentives, laws and institutions that undermined performance. That's the problem the West faces - industry taking body blows from regulators on housing, energy, production and so on.

You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada.

Surely something like Texas would make more sense than California here? There's a lot of empty land in the South.

That would be better, but not significantly enough so to solve the underlying problem.

This is a bit old (2007), but the fundamental challenges and dynamics are still valid, and material sciences involved in transmission haven't change that much.

In a nutshell, at a relatively normal transmission line cost/load, you can stand to lose about 8% of generated per 1000 miles. (This is very rough- it can be notably better, or considerably worse.) That means you have to push more (to get what you need at the end), and you're paying for what is required to be generated, as opposed to what is consumed. This assumes away any disruptions to the transmission paths, such as any sort of natural disaster / malign actor effort to disrupt the transmission medium. (Hope you don't have any strategic rivals who can afford cyber-attacks / drones.)

It makes far, far more sense from just about any planning context other than ideology- whether financial or reliability or safety or resiliency to hostile interests- to just generate the power considerably closer to the consumer. Given that the overwhelming most important aspect of an electrical grid at scale is baseline power- the ability to meet the need you have as you need it- it doesn't really make sense to invest in mass-renewable, short or long distance, if you're just going to need a redundant power generation capability anyways.

Aren't the British trying to run a cable from Iceland for geothermal?

You are probably thinking of the Icelink proposal.

This was a proposal as opposed to a project, and more or less died in the later 2010s at the Feasibility study level. There are probably three main reasons for that. One, cost-benefit on a technical level, as Icelink was more of an environmental proposal for UK governments to boast green credentials than an actual way to most efficiently use green energy in industry (as you could just invest the energy consumption infrastructure in Iceland). Two, related to cost and benefit, was Brexit, on top of the internal budget disruption to the UK governmental also put the UK and Iceland on opposite sides of the EU single market wall at a time when UK and EU relations at the regulatory and policy level were, shall we say, uninterested in major investments to the UK benefit. Third was the point that any UK investment in Icelink would land in territories with significant risk of separating from the UK over the medium/long term, as the cables would either naturally land in Scotland- where the SNP was having a strong period and polling near-majorities in hypothetical separation referendums- or in Northern Ireland- which the post-Brexit EU policy was to have economically segregated from the rest of the UK economic-legal architecture. A major, UK-level investment which would provide EU baseload power to territories with significant political interests who would rather be a part of the EU than UK would be a territorial integrity risk.

So, don't expect it to go through.

Which is a shame, because when it is available at economically viable rates, geothermal is one of the 'better' green power systems because it meets the baseload power requirements of predictable, non-swingy power. The economic viability is dependent on geography that isn't necessarily where you want it, but that's actually why long-range transmission makes sense in that context because you can't simply build a closer geothermal plant, but geothermal is good baseload generation and if you do build it, you don't have to build duplicative generation capacity like with intermittant green sources.

Meanwhile the Germans are planning to run a cable from Morocco for that sweet sweet solar power.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/britain-risks-losing-germany-16bn-155135780.html

Not really what your article shows, which doesn't actually indicate a German government role. Rather, it's a threat by the company that wants to be paid to build the project in order to pressure the UK to provide more money, with the threat to build to Germany instead. However, the article doesn't claim that Germany is interested in this, and the underlying context is that the company (XLinks) is in the capital/financing accumulation phase (trying to identify investor governments), of which the UK was the primary interested investor.

Xlinks garnered initial UK interest, in the 'UK is sending civil servants to study this in depth if it actually makes sense' sort, because it claimed the project would be profitable for it if it was guaranteed a solar energy cost floor (minimal price) of 48 pounds per MegaWatt Hour (GBP/MWh), when the UK cost is generally higher. The route was intended to be a shallow-water cable basically bypassing Spain to go direct to the UK, meaning it wasn't to enter the EU energy market (which would risk/compromise the viability of the project for the UK for multiple reasons).

But that's kind of where the project has stalled. It's unclear if the UK found other information indicating it's not viable, whether the costs are higher than initially advertised, or what. But implicitly the project is under negotiation. And this article isn't the Germans saying they want in, but rather the company involved threatening to go ask the Germans to see if they want to replace the UK as the recipient... but naturally if the UK isn't delivered to, it's not going to be a load-carrying investor, and as for the Germans...

Well, there are a couple problems for that. One being that it have to enter the European energy grid, unlike the sea transmission route to the UK, and the French have typically opposed solar transmission network proposals (such as from Spain) linking solar producers to their consumers... surely unrelated to France's own substantial electricity exports to Germany, and its desire to expand its nuclear energy exports to its European neighbors.

But there's also the point that the Xlinks Morocco project started being pushed in 2021, and the Ukraine War kicked off in 2022. Germany energy policy since has been about (re)building natural gas import capacity, as natural gas is not only critical for stable baseload power generation, but specifically as an input for many of Germany's industrial processes as a resoruce separate from the electricity. As a result, Germany's energy investment priority has been on scaling up its import capacity / storage for gas as it fights to keep as much industrial capacity as it can.

It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.

Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.

California has outlawed home generators, which means New York will be next, and then the country. So it's darkness for everyone.

Yes, the blue states will be crushed by their contradictions any day now, just as the dialectic predicts.

No, the victims of blue state policies will be crushed, and the perpetrators will profit.

Nybbler is wrong: California has outlawed portable generators, but exempted the $40,000+ full-mansion backup generators like the Obamas have at their estates.

What's the profit in banning generators again?

Lots. Employing regulators and enforcers from your party, using the law to prevent competition from better products, exploiting the pain your policies caused to generate demand for relief and subsidies... Which your party will control and profit from.

That all of this is negative sum wrecking and looting doesn't stop it being extremely profitable for the perpetrators.

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This surprised me, are you sure it's true? I seem to be able to buy quote-unquote CARB-compliant generators online, or at least generators that have a sticker claiming it, and the price premium for extra emissions controls appears to be small. There are also provisions to run a non-compliant generator in declared emergencies.

It phases in over the next four years to boil the frog slowly. The lawn equipment ban started this year, and the full "zero emission" rule for generators in '28.

Looks like it takes effect in 2028. I think it was supposed to be this year.

Which means home generators for the rich

It means Tesla power walls, you mean, and in the United States that means quite middle class people- I have salesmen coming to my door offering power walls and solar for less than the cost of a typical car payment.

I think he was obliquely referencing Obama's 2,500 gallon propane tank and whole house generator at his oceanfront estate in Martha's Vineyard.

No I don’t know what you are talking about.

But I lived in poor countries with expensive and intermittent electricity. So I was just referring to what happens in such places.

And good luck with middle class installing Tesla walls when the Chinese stop subsidising your consumption in exchange for all your industrial capacity.

It's probably fine in the US specifically for the coming three decades or so given the abundance of cheap NG, which of course is the actual plan, just like cheap Russian NG was in Germany.

New NG hookups are banned in many blue states now, and in my area they're pushing the utilities to abandon existing pipelines. My whole county never got gas access because of these policies.

Natural gas in homes, yes, blue states are banning that for whatever reason. Natural gas power plants are no harder to build than anything else.

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