Posted on 01/01/2021 7:03:15 AM PST by DUMBGRUNT
There are even some who avoid the facts on this page.
“No batteries necessary since they feed directly to the power grid.”
Missed the point completely about batteries and no power when the wind does not blow enough. Never mind how foolish these things are and the waste of multiple power sources when we have plenty of reliable base load options without the silly subsidized and ugly toys.
And, as they found in Germany and Denmark, pollution actually increased because of the need to inefficiently keep the spinning reserves operating. Plants pollute more when they operate at low rates.
Cats are descended from a race from a galaxy far far away. They were stranded here when their ship crashed thousands of years ago. They communicate telepathically and in their cat legends are distant memories of that time long ago when their superior being ancestors landed here on earth. The memory grows dim but the knowledge that they were once superior to us in technology lives on and with that their ability make us their servants.
We will never be able to understand their cat ways.
Just like the farce of subsidized coal bed methane, there was absolutely no payout without subsidy, the insiders know the cold truth but will accept the technical challenge for what it is an make a living off the effective dole as long as they can.
The only coal bed methane that actually made a little money was either not really coal bed methane, San Juan Basin, or was an anomaly, Cedar Grove high pressure coal near Tuscaloosa. All the rest was just wishful or living on the dole.
“I don’t see why you wouldn’t remember to use it.”
“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
M. Twain
I thought that windfarms were discontinued in Germany as not economically feasible since they broke down frequently and were costly to maintain and repair such that users of conventional power were subsidizing them via additional charges on their power bills. Is this the influence peddlers at work again?
LOL, that’s a fine quote.
It is possible to build safe nuc but the sheeple don’t understand it.
In one of the mini-nuc venture web pages they said one of the few smart things I have heard and that is that managing the probability of an event is impossible and so managing the consequence is the only path to safety. It is possible to manage the consequence of a failure of mistake that will eventually happen.
Commercialization of Thorium Salt reactors seems to the the obvious solution to clean power for centuries. The chicoms and the Indians recognize this, we did too in the 60s and 70s but there was no will to commercialize the chemical separation process for spent fuel. Carter did the rest and killed the pilot plant at Oak Ridge that the rest of the world uses as a design model.
We are crippled by our diversity and freedom. Yeah, that’s right, crippled because everyone, no matter how stupid or corrupt, gets a voice and we are smothered by indecision to take bold steps. How then do we do so many stupid things like giant wind turbines? Because the inmates are running the asylum?
And that capital and operating cost of spinning reserve and their increased pollution resulting from them not operating at optimal temperatures is never factored into the rate of return for the “renewable” energy as part of a full cycle economic analysis.
Like Dave Ramsey says, “You can talk yourself into a friggin’ Bentley with that logic.” Like money forward investment economics only work if you don’t have a better place to spend the money.
It IS the way to go but is blocked by fear and stupidity.
If only I were dictator for a day a push to Thorium would be one of my edicts.
35% to 40% in a year? Wow, that much?
/s
Thank you for opening up and sharing in a very readable way why the use of gas is such a key.
_________________________
Yes.... gas is totally the ‘key’. Take a look at the ownership of wind farms....
Considering the source, surprised they didn't pump it up a bit more.
At good wind energy sites.
IIRC this a no true Scotsman fallacy.
Now about the poor energy sites and add them into the mix...
it’s good to have governments in your pocket. Lets you skip right ahead of the pesky market place.
Thank you for your reply to those who are of the same ilk as the person who retorts that errant dead birds should learn to fly somewhere else. Ignorance persists because fact interferes with hope and fantasy, because understanding facts is too hard, complicated or there is just not enough gray matter present to think long or hard enough to understand and become informed.
Too hard is also the reason full cycle economics are incomplete and have too many wishful simplifying assumptions. So long as you can create a case to sell the answer that someone wants, why bother with digging deeper or with pesky facts? You can still tell the truth when you don’t tell all you know, you know? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
If this madness persists the money will be in spinning reserve and open cycle peaking plants. The madness requires at least double capacity without batteries. Massive batteries and those will also be expensive. The nut of it all is that this fantasy of renewable power costs more, a lot more and is less reliable. Distributed anything in smaller proportions is less reliable and more costly.
Years ago, when natural gas was even cheaper than it is now I did a project to look at cavern storage near the city gate. Utilities will pay just about any price, and pass it on to the customer, to prevent gas shortage in a city. I see spinning reserve and back-up to “renewables” the same way as city gate storage. You can’t have the sheeple freezing in the dark or pilot lights flickering out then the gas coming back on and houses going boom!
Too hard and not able to understand are the reasons why, if we had honest and able leaders, the public don’t need a say in some things. They just are not able to grasp all of the big things necessary to make a sound decision. It is the same reason we used to let Generals and Admirals run wars and not manage them by popular vote or opinion any more than absolutely necessary.
bump
It is the same in anything that is incentivized. I saw coal bed methane developed in some of the very poorest locations available just to get the tax credits.
I led a team for a major energy company to scour the world for resources of at least 1 TCF that might be converted to reserves profitably. My opening to the board was essentially this:
I put up one slide with only one word on it, “NO” and a lump of coal pictured.
“The short answer to the mission we were given is that there is no profitability in coal bed methane without the tax credits anywhere in the world. If you are still interested we have prepared a presentation to tell you why. If you are not interested we want to thank you for providing this opportunity to the team. We learned a lot and had a very good time doing it.”
The board wanted to see the presentation and then agreed with our analysis and thanked us for our work. Then we had tea or something.
I still have the files for thousands of sites across the globe that we evaluated.
“it’s good to have governments in your pocket.”
The very reason my massively scaled up Drinking Bird generator has not performed well in the marketplace!
Just add water and keep the trunnions lubed, it will produce free electricity.
Like Gandhi’s spinning wheel movement.
If everyone had one or two powering their home/ apartment... the greedy power companies would be on their knees!
According to e.g. this
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181004112553.htm#:~:text=%22Wind%20turbines%20generate%20electricity%20but,the%20atmosphere%2C%20which%20impacts%20climate.
Windmills alter air flow and cause warming!
According to this article, in short term the windmills actually cause more warming than the cooling from saved Co2!
But in long term!!!
You have to think like 100 years from now!
See my post before, the winds are very important to the Earth climate, major Windmills are disturbing it!
Good comments...thanks for passing those along. I’ve had many discussions about this topic over the years and at some point early on when some assertion or other has been made, I end up saying something along the lines of “well... that all depends on where you want to draw the box around this issue. What’s in and what’s out?” Your response highlights exactly that.... since it’s complicated if the full picture is examined, it will almost always be the case that those who have been persuaded by the benefits of wind power, don’t look any further than the IWT itself.... and sheesh, they don’t even look that far or they’d have to face the fact that these things really are bird and bat choppers!
When one takes a look at the big picture of wind and solar and draw that box large enough that it needs to address all the upstream, downstream and sideways considerations, it becomes quite apparent just how bad IWTs and solar are as an electrical generator for grid level projects. If ever there was a case where one thing can have impact on an endless number of other things (even the seemingly unrelated things), it’s wind and solar. Here’s one example.... a typical 3 MW IWT has a concrete base under it that in most areas will need to be in the range of 1,000 tons. For every pound of cement, approximately one pound of CO2 is released into the environment. If the IWT is being sold as a CO2 displacing energy source, how long does it need to be displacing coal or natural gas to ‘payback’ just the amount of CO2 released during the manufacturing process for the cement that was used for its base? That’s not that hard a calculation .... but do unintended consequences like this ever get raised by the wild eyed advocates who have drawn their box so tight that this is excluded from the discussion? It’s because of this myopic thinking that the issue of gas turbine efficiency (which is crucial to the whole discussion of wind and solar) is never remotely on the radar.
I’m oft reminded of an endless number of things from my youth that are examples of cases where the initial decision and cost for it have nothing to do with the impact or the cost of maintaining that thing.... It’s like having no job but being given a free truck that only gets 5 miles per gallon. In the end, it doesn’t work....More recently, I was asked to evaluate a process that wanted to make a change that would have involved a horrid amount of compressed air. Early on, I asked the question of whether anyone had bothered to calculate for comparative purposes, the cost of generating the compressed air and how efficient that was compared to what they were doing now? And did the plant even have an electrical system that could handle the capacity of an additional 10,000 kW? At that point, things went quite silent....
The same sorts of questions arise when folks talk about the ‘electrification of cities’ and the use of electric cars in cities to reduce smog and so they can be ‘green’.... well, that electricity has to be generated somewhere.... so how is that going to happen and what is the big picture impact of that for the environment and people where it happens and everywhere in between where the electricity is generated and where it’s used? The first thing I tell people is we’re going to make that box big enough that it takes in the whole universe and then we’ll keep reducing the size of it so that decisions can be made at each step of that reduction process of how important that thing is that no one wants to include and more importantly, for whom?
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