If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?

[barbos]

They claim amount of deaths per kwh in solar power industry is much higher than in nuclear. Of course that statistics is BS because it's mostly due to their their math in which number of people is simply lower for nukes hence number of accidents is lower.

Your understanding of statistics is BS.

Once you've scaled it per kwh (or, more reasonably, per twh) you're using the right scale. It's how many people die in making power. How many people are exposed to the risk to get that value is irrelevant to anyone but the workers in the field.

Nuke does have fewer workers, but they're also in far safer conditions. Those solar workers tend to be up on roofs that don't have industrial-level safety precautions built in--lots of falls. Also, the production of those solar cells involves some pretty nasty chemicals. We think of water as something that puts out fires--but in the semiconductor industry they routinely use a solvent that will actually burn water.

No, it's your understanding of statistics is BS. Amount of people involved in solar is significantly higher simply because there is a current boom in installations at relatively low installed base, whereas in nuclear power there is opposite of that - no installations and enormous installed base.
So calculating death rate per twh is bullshit. And even if you try to account for that bias by excluding people involved in installations it would still be a bullshit metric, because as I have mentioned a number of times you need to compare risk of death per person not per twh. What if nukes had one death per whole industry per year but the whole industry consisted of just one operator? Where would you rather go for work?
They invented that retarded metric.

 

[barbos]

Nonsense, Solar is being put on the house roofs, you can't get closer than that.
And nukes still have longer payback time than solar.

Putting solar on the roof has some big problems, though. I can't understand why it's even legal to feed power back onto the grid--it's a violation of one of the basic electrical safety rules. (Normally you must never use a wire that is not rated for at least as much current as the circuit breaker or fuse protecting it. However, grid-tied solar violates this. It's routine to see electrical feeds where the various outputs have a higher total rating than the input. Just go look in your breaker box to see this in action--add up all your small breakers and compare them to the big breaker. Now, the distribution grid works the same way, a grid segment isn't rated to deliver the maximum that the houses on it could draw. Put solar on the roofs and you can be pushing more power than the segment is rated for. So far this has been stopped by the utilities but the customers understandably hate it--"too many of your neighbors have solar, you can't have it.")

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

 

[Elixir]

A fact I just heard. All of the current nuclear waste will fit on a few football fields.

If we switch to large scale nuclear power hydro is not needed. What individual and community solar does is decentralize power generation. A small group of knowledgeable engineers could cripple our distribution system.It is not just solar voltaic. Commercial heliostats exist. They create steam that can run turbines.

A calculation I did some time ago:

The space required to store the waste from coal power for one year is greater than the space required to store the high level waste from nuclear power with the same total output forever. (The coal waste remains toxic forever, with proper reprocessing the nuke waste in time becomes harmless.)

With proper recycling through GenIV reactors, the high level 'waste' (not really, waste, it's just incompletely used fuel) can be used to produce about five times the energy it has produced already; And after that process, the remaining radioactive materials are all short-lived stuff that is less active than the ore it originally came from in less than a century. Then you can put it back in the hole it came out of, and nobody is at the slightest additional risk due to our having wrung some clean energy out of it.

About 20 years ago - long before there was even talk of GenIV reactors afaik, a theoretical physicist working at Los Ala(could spell it out but then I'd have to kill you) told me that all the nuclear waste ever generated - all inclusive - would fit within a 50' cube. Total deaths from nuclear accidents are a tiny fraction of deaths from coal mining alone. Health problems following a nuclear accident are scary and mysterious, but NOTHING like the near-guarantee of black lung disease, which has killed tens of thousands (More than 76,000 miners have died of black lung since 1968, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, and many more lives cut short by associated complications). Then there's the delightful prospect of getting entombed in a cave-in or mine collapse. But coal mining deaths are just not as SCARY as the dreaded radiation leak, and usually only effects energy production workers. So let's ignore the secondary and tertiary effects of smog, coal ash etc, no matter how widely lethal they are. Still not SCARY like radiation.
I have long opined that nuclear is our "clean" option and should be aggressively pursued for reasons that Bilby has eloquently advanced here. I still think it should form the backbone of any centralized energy distribution system. But all centralized systems are vulnerable and can effect huge numbers of people at once if they go wrong. That vulnerability could be mitigated over time by slowly increasing (whether through subsidies or by technological breakthroughs) the number and size of de-centralized energy sources. All avenues should be aggressively explored, and suitability site profiles matched to the available options. I'd have no problem paying to subsidize an ongoing move in that direction; I think the savings in public health would offset those costs in the near term, and technology will continue to gnaw away at the costs in the meanwhile... </$.02>

 

[bilby]

With proper recycling through GenIV reactors, the high level 'waste' (not really, waste, it's just incompletely used fuel) can be used to produce about five times the energy it has produced already; And after that process, the remaining radioactive materials are all short-lived stuff that is less active than the ore it originally came from in less than a century. Then you can put it back in the hole it came out of, and nobody is at the slightest additional risk due to our having wrung some clean energy out of it.

About 20 years ago - long before there was even talk of GenIV reactors afaik, a theoretical physicist working at Los Ala(could spell it out but then I'd have to kill you) told me that all the nuclear waste ever generated - all inclusive - would fit within a 50' cube. Total deaths from nuclear accidents are a tiny fraction of deaths from coal mining alone. Health problems following a nuclear accident are scary and mysterious, but NOTHING like the near-guarantee of black lung disease, which has killed tens of thousands (More than 76,000 miners have died of black lung since 1968, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, and many more lives cut short by associated complications). Then there's the delightful prospect of getting entombed in a cave-in or mine collapse. But coal mining deaths are just not as SCARY as the dreaded radiation leak, and usually only effects energy production workers. So let's ignore the secondary and tertiary effects of smog, coal ash etc, no matter how widely lethal they are. Still not SCARY like radiation.
I have long opined that nuclear is our "clean" option and should be aggressively pursued for reasons that Bilby has eloquently advanced here. I still think it should form the backbone of any centralized energy distribution system. But all centralized systems are vulnerable and can effect huge numbers of people at once if they go wrong. That vulnerability could be mitigated over time by slowly increasing (whether through subsidies or by technological breakthroughs) the number and size of de-centralized energy sources. All avenues should be aggressively explored, and suitability site profiles matched to the available options. I'd have no problem paying to subsidize an ongoing move in that direction; I think the savings in public health would offset those costs in the near term, and technology will continue to gnaw away at the costs in the meanwhile... </$.02>

Indeed.

We could also point out that despite the lack of a deep repository (due to nimbyism), the 'highly dangerous' nuclear waste that is such an insurmountable 'problem', has, in the over sixty years of the commercial nuclear power industry, caused a grand total of zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero leaks into the environment.

There's a natural nuclear reactor at Oklo in Gabon, where two billion years ago, uranium underwent fission with groundwater as the moderator. Obviously nobody was around to clean up or even contain the 'waste' this feature generated, and with no containment of any kind, the nuclear material spread out into the surrounding environment and contaminated an area of several inches around the place they first arose. Not miles, or even yards; inches.

High Level Nuclear 'waste' is essentially bits of metal. It's a solid; it doesn't 'leak' like the glowing green goo of science fiction (or The Simpsons). It stays in one place, and is basically harmless once placed in tough containers. Dry cask storage is easy, safe, and has been working for decades. Claims that 'we don't have a way to safely handle nuclear waste' are quite simply a lie.

Of course, we don't and cannot have a way to meet the demands of the anti-nuclear lobby; if the industry meets their increasingly over the top specifications, they just demand even more crazy specifications.

 

[steve_bank]

I am corrected on China's overbuilding.

I believe it was the French that came up with glassification, easing nuclear waste in glass. No leaks or leaching in the environment.

Nuclear waste includes used fuel, structural components, and clothes as well.

Here in Washington there is a mothballed nuclear plant that was never finished. Electricity became too cheap. Trojan was decommissioned. Long them I believe there are structural problems due to radiation induced fatigue.

As to desalinization, that is another sidestep of the main issue. Population can not grow without bound.

The Saudi's have cheap energy for desalinization yet it is not enough for their small population and low industrial demands They buy water from the USA. They are planning or may have already towed icebergs.

I haven't run numbers, it seems unlikely that all of Ca water needs especially farming will be met by desalinization.

Back in the 90s Ca tried to get approval to dam a valley in North Idaho and run water down the coast.

 

[bilby]

I am corrected on China's overbuilding.

I believe it was the French that came up with glassification, easing nuclear waste in glass. No leaks or leaching in the environment.

Nuclear waste includes used fuel, structural components, and clothes as well.

Here in Washington there is a mothballed nuclear plant that was never finished. Electricity became too cheap. Trojan was decommissioned. Long them I believe there are structural problems due to radiation induced fatigue.

As to desalinization, that is another sidestep of the main issue. Population can not grow without bound.

The Saudi's have cheap energy for desalinization yet it is not enough for their small population and low industrial demands They buy water from the USA. They are planning or may have already towed icebergs.

I haven't run numbers, it seems unlikely that all of Ca water needs especially farming will be met by desalinization.

Back in the 90s Ca tried to get approval to dam a valley in North Idaho and run water down the coast.

Population isn't going to grow without bound.

Population will stabilise in about thirty years at around ten billion.

The invention of the oral contraceptive pill has defused the population bomb; its going to take about a century for the thing to become widely available, and for demographic lag to play out; but sometime around the middle of this century, population will stop growing.

You are worrying about a problem that was solved almost fifty years ago.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So calculating death rate per twh is bullshit. And even if you try to account for that bias by excluding people involved in installations it would still be a bullshit metric, because as I have mentioned a number of times you need to compare risk of death per person not per twh. What if nukes had one death per whole industry per year but the whole industry consisted of just one operator? Where would you rather go for work?
They invented that retarded metric.

That would make it a very bad idea to work in a nuclear plant. It wouldn't change the benefit to society of having such a safe source of power, though.

(And I think you could run such an industry anyway. There would be enough people who were terminally ill and willing to risk slightly shortening their life in exchange for a lot of money for their survivors.)

- - - Updated - - -

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

You need the bigger breaker anyway.

You have a 100A breaker feeding 5 20A breakers.

The wire from the 100A to the 20As needs to be #3. The wire after the 20As can be #12.

 

[barbos]

So calculating death rate per twh is bullshit. And even if you try to account for that bias by excluding people involved in installations it would still be a bullshit metric, because as I have mentioned a number of times you need to compare risk of death per person not per twh. What if nukes had one death per whole industry per year but the whole industry consisted of just one operator? Where would you rather go for work?
They invented that retarded metric.

That would make it a very bad idea to work in a nuclear plant. It wouldn't change the benefit to society of having such a safe source of power, though.

Of course it would not change your stupid metric. That's the whole point. This invented metric is just stupid.

(And I think you could run such an industry anyway. There would be enough people who were terminally ill and willing to risk slightly shortening their life in exchange for a lot of money for their survivors.)

So you are pro-coal then.

- - - Updated - - -

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

You need the bigger breaker anyway.

You have a 100A breaker feeding 5 20A breakers.

I just explained that to you.

The wire from the 100A to the 20As needs to be #3. The wire after the 20As can be #12.

Breakers are not to save just wires. They are there to save equipment too, prevent fires, etc.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course it would not change your stupid metric. That's the whole point. This invented metric is just stupid.

(And I think you could run such an industry anyway. There would be enough people who were terminally ill and willing to risk slightly shortening their life in exchange for a lot of money for their survivors.)

So you are pro-coal then.

How do you get that?

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

You need the bigger breaker anyway.

You have a 100A breaker feeding 5 20A breakers.

I just explained that to you.

The wire from the 100A to the 20As needs to be #3. The wire after the 20As can be #12.

Breakers are not to save just wires. They are there to save equipment too, prevent fires, etc.

The issue with an undersize wire in a situation like this is that it can start a fire.

 

[steve_bank]

I am corrected on China's overbuilding.

I believe it was the French that came up with glassification, easing nuclear waste in glass. No leaks or leaching in the environment.

Nuclear waste includes used fuel, structural components, and clothes as well.

Here in Washington there is a mothballed nuclear plant that was never finished. Electricity became too cheap. Trojan was decommissioned. Long them I believe there are structural problems due to radiation induced fatigue.

As to desalinization, that is another sidestep of the main issue. Population can not grow without bound.

The Saudi's have cheap energy for desalinization yet it is not enough for their small population and low industrial demands They buy water from the USA. They are planning or may have already towed icebergs.

I haven't run numbers, it seems unlikely that all of Ca water needs especially farming will be met by desalinization.

Back in the 90s Ca tried to get approval to dam a valley in North Idaho and run water down the coast.

Population isn't going to grow without bound.

Population will stabilise in about thirty years at around ten billion.

The invention of the oral contraceptive pill has defused the population bomb; its going to take about a century for the thing to become widely available, and for demographic lag to play out; but sometime around the middle of this century, population will stop growing.

You are worrying about a problem that was solved almost fifty years ago.

Population will not grow without bound, exactly right.

The question is whether or not there will a smooth reasoned tradition or catastrophic failures with nature limiting growth.

 

[steve_bank]

It is easy to come up with supporting metrics to make an industry compare unfavorably.

Solar voltaic below 48VDC are considered relatively safe. In the National Electric Code above that it gets increasingly more regulated as to safety. Properly done nuclear power is far safer for humans than coal fired plants. The newer intrinsically safe concepts can not have a Three Mile Island event.

There have been a number of catastrophic industrial explosions and release of toxic gas in the southwest. Toxic spills occur every several years.

Compared to all of human casualties and risk from industrial large scale accidents since the nuclear power age, nuclear power in the US has been pretty safe.

 

[steve_bank]

Nonsense, Solar is being put on the house roofs, you can't get closer than that.
And nukes still have longer payback time than solar.

Putting solar on the roof has some big problems, though. I can't understand why it's even legal to feed power back onto the grid--it's a violation of one of the basic electrical safety rules. (Normally you must never use a wire that is not rated for at least as much current as the circuit breaker or fuse protecting it. However, grid-tied solar violates this. It's routine to see electrical feeds where the various outputs have a higher total rating than the input. Just go look in your breaker box to see this in action--add up all your small breakers and compare them to the big breaker. Now, the distribution grid works the same way, a grid segment isn't rated to deliver the maximum that the houses on it could draw. Put solar on the roofs and you can be pushing more power than the segment is rated for. So far this has been stopped by the utilities but the customers understandably hate it--"too many of your neighbors have solar, you can't have it.")

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

Huh? There are commercial off the shelf DC to AC inverters that can connect to the grid and are certified to meet safety requirements.

The issues are synchronizing to the grid, maintaining amplitude, and providing a low distortion sine wave. It is mature technology.

Overload protection is not the main issue. The biggest safety issues are surge protection against lightning and switching transients.

 

[bilby]

I am corrected on China's overbuilding.

I believe it was the French that came up with glassification, easing nuclear waste in glass. No leaks or leaching in the environment.

Nuclear waste includes used fuel, structural components, and clothes as well.

Here in Washington there is a mothballed nuclear plant that was never finished. Electricity became too cheap. Trojan was decommissioned. Long them I believe there are structural problems due to radiation induced fatigue.

As to desalinization, that is another sidestep of the main issue. Population can not grow without bound.

The Saudi's have cheap energy for desalinization yet it is not enough for their small population and low industrial demands They buy water from the USA. They are planning or may have already towed icebergs.

I haven't run numbers, it seems unlikely that all of Ca water needs especially farming will be met by desalinization.

Back in the 90s Ca tried to get approval to dam a valley in North Idaho and run water down the coast.

Population isn't going to grow without bound.

Population will stabilise in about thirty years at around ten billion.

The invention of the oral contraceptive pill has defused the population bomb; its going to take about a century for the thing to become widely available, and for demographic lag to play out; but sometime around the middle of this century, population will stop growing.

You are worrying about a problem that was solved almost fifty years ago.

Population will not grow without bound, exactly right.

The question is whether or not there will a smooth reasoned tradition or catastrophic failures with nature limiting growth.

And the answer is as I gave above.

 

[barbos]

How do you get that?

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

You need the bigger breaker anyway.

You have a 100A breaker feeding 5 20A breakers.

The wire from the 100A to the 20As needs to be #3. The wire after the 20As can be #12.

Breakers are not to save just wires. They are there to save equipment too, prevent fires, etc.

The issue with an undersize wire in a situation like this is that it can start a fire.

They are not undersize.

- - - Updated - - -

If sum of the smaller breakers were not higher than the big breaker then you would not have the need for bigger breaker.
So yeah, they hope people don't do the laundry all at the same time.
You're welcome, any more questions?

Huh? There are commercial off the shelf DC to AC inverters that can connect to the grid and are certified to meet safety requirements.

The issues are synchronizing to the grid, maintaining amplitude, and providing a low distortion sine wave. It is mature technology.

Overload protection is not the main issue. The biggest safety issues are surge protection against lightning and switching transients.

mmmm OK, how is that relevant to my post?

 

[barbos]

It is easy to come up with supporting metrics to make an industry compare unfavorably.

Solar voltaic below 48VDC are considered relatively safe. In the National Electric Code above that it gets increasingly more regulated as to safety. Properly done nuclear power is far safer for humans than coal fired plants. The newer intrinsically safe concepts can not have a Three Mile Island event.

There have been a number of catastrophic industrial explosions and release of toxic gas in the southwest. Toxic spills occur every several years.

Compared to all of human casualties and risk from industrial large scale accidents since the nuclear power age, nuclear power in the US has been pretty safe.

I don't doubt that. But the claim was that statistics show that it is safer than anything now (in death/twh metric anyway)
As I explained such statistics is both misleading and ridiculous.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Population will not grow without bound, exactly right.

The question is whether or not there will a smooth reasoned tradition or catastrophic failures with nature limiting growth.

Population will not grow without bound. The only question is if the control will be by us lowering births or nature raising deaths.

 

[bilby]

Population will not grow without bound, exactly right.

The question is whether or not there will a smooth reasoned tradition or catastrophic failures with nature limiting growth.

Population will not grow without bound. The only question is if the control will be by us lowering births or nature raising deaths.

And the answer is as I gave above.

 

[Bomb#20]

I haven't run numbers, it seems unlikely that all of Ca water needs especially farming will be met by desalinization.

Well, that would be one of the most expensive available solutions to the problem, so if history is any guide, that's what will be adopted. The sane solution would be for the government to end the subsidies that incentivize farmers to use water inefficiently.

Federal Dollars Are Financing the Water Crisis in the West

 

[barbos]

Speaking of solar:

California to require solar panels on most new homes

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/06/california-to-require-solar-panels-on-most-new-homes/

 

[steve_bank]

Stirling Cycle Engines are an alternative. I read on the net is has been set back by low cost Chinese solar panels. Ca had a project but it was canceled.

http://power.eecs.berkeley.edu/publications/he_design_stirling_engine.pdf

When it comes down to it in the lomg run it will be water not energy. Ca irrigation wells are now so far dowm they are being contaminated by salt water.

The mid west aquifers are drawing down, in some places the ground has sunk.