Posted on 06/22/2021 4:30:30 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Anyone who thinks we can go 100% renewable is an idiot. I’m guessing 4-10% is closer to the truth and even that would be in a a high estimate at present levels of solar and wind capabilities!!!
What you say makes sense, but the main power source these days is natural gas. The thing is gas plants are pretty cheap to build and keep running, but fuel costs are high.
A plant that costs $500 million to build can burn a $1 billion in fuel per year.
It can make a lot of sense to spend $500 million on the gas plant and $500 million on wind turbines next door. The wind will be intermittent, but if it defers only half the fuel cost you’ve broken even in a year.
Seems like nobody ever calculates in the costs of manufacture, shipping, installation, and ultimately disposal of the devices at the end of their lives.
The total amount of energy needed for all that would, in all likelihood, exceed the amount of energy they actually produce in their lives, as opposed to the amount of energy they theoretically can produce.
Good análisis !
What all the world needs now and for centuries to come, is cheap and plentiful energy. “Fossil fuels” (and that is a misnomer) provide a bridge until such time as a much safer form of nuclear power is made available. The older form, uranium-fueled light water reactors, has a number of rather severe limitations, one of which is that the “spent” fuel which cannot any longer produce sufficient energy to supply the reactions necessary to maintain the nuclear chain reaction, and are contaminated with plutonium, a deadly and long-lived isotope which can be used to make dirty nuclear bombs.
But technology has gone far to update and replace the uranium-fueled plants, using a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor that is inherently much safer, and also cheaper to set up and run. The fuel, thorium, is both more plentiful and much safer to handle than uranium, and it is not capable of runaway “China syndrome” overheating and meltdown. And one of the more important advantages, it NEEDS a small amount of a “spent” uranium fuel rod to initiate and sustain a nuclear reaction in the molten salt solution, so eventually the stockpiles of “spent” uranium fuel rods will be used up. There is a small amount of atomic “ash” left over when thorium reactors are recharged, but its volume is both much smaller, and composed of relatively short-lived atomic isotopes, in contrast to the uranium fuel rods.
These thorium-fueled molten salt reactors generate an enormous amount of heat, which could be used not only for electric power generation, but the heat could be used to drive a number of other processes, including the distillation of brackish water to make fresh potable water, and to power any number of industrial level formulation applications, like the thermal depolymerization of organic wastes, to make a very good grade of kerogen, the feedstock from which “fossil fuels” are fractionated.
A new age is dawning upon the world, if only some long-standing superstitions and taboos can be put aside.
Before we experience such outages, we have to find a way never to allow such to have their hands on any buttons or switches of responsibility. To include food, energy, transportation, government, etc.
That may just be a pipe dream as we seem to have reached that point already.
What’s the “environmental” cost of building double the infrastructure to back up “intermittent” sources? We all know the answer.
It’s staggering how many people oppose this. They’d rather fill up landfills and then complain about how many landfills there are than do something that actually works and produces electricity at the same time.
Point being humans didn’t have any impact on that at all though did they :0)
What’s the “environmental” cost of building double the infrastructure to back up “intermittent” sources? We all know the answer.
Indeed we do, but there are some deaf ears not listening.
It can make a lot of sense to spend $500 million on the gas plant and $500 million on wind turbines next door. The wind will be intermittent, but if it defers only half the fuel cost you’ve broken even in a year.
If instead one built a coal or nuc plant, you wouldn’t have the problem of fluctuating gas prices to begin with.
Energy suppliers have been hamstrung for decades by environmental actions that have resulted in the destruction of the coal industry and coal fired power plants in the idiotic pursuit of man is harming the planet BS. The very reliability of the electric grid is now being compromised by such “thinking”.
We know what works, and if we refuse to stick with it, we will be the ones suffering in the cold. God provides and only man can screw it up with brainless “thinking”.
At this moment coal really doesn’t make sense. It a more expensive fuel that NG, and plants are more expensive to maintain.
Instead of a $500 million dollar NG plant burning a $1 billion in fuel per year, for coal you will need a $2 billion plant that burns $1.5 billion in fuel each year. Everything about it is more expensive than NG.
That may change, cheap gas can’t last forever, but right now the fuel costs are enough higher than NG that the costly conversion of a coal plant to NG will break even in only a few years.
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