Posted on 03/02/2022 9:14:16 AM PST by Don@VB
Dominion Energy Virginia, deliberately ignores the fact that the state’s zero emission law does not work. Utilities are doing this around the country. They will make a fortune building useless wind and solar generation before they finally admit it does not work and have to revive the abolished “power generated when needed.”
The Virginia Clean Economy Act, which foolishly mandates zero emissions from electric power generation by 2045. Below is the executive summary of my analysis on Dominion’s VCEA compliance plan, building on the engineering realities I outlined previously.
“Reliability means designing for the likely worst case. With conventional generation this means supplying peak need, also called peak demand. When counting on solar or wind there is also the critical issue of minimum supply backed up by storage. The reliability analysis reported here looks at minimum supply with battery storage under VCEA, in two separate steps.
Step one is a simple reliability analysis for solar power. In this first step the storage requirements for reliable solar energy around the clock are derived for the period of five days of dark cloudy weather. That Virginia will see five dark days from time to time is certain.
The second step applies the step one results to Dominion’s compliance plan for VCEA. This plan is called Plan C in Dominion’s recent Integrated Resource Plan. The primary focus is on Plan C through 2036, because Dominion gives year by year generation startups and retirements for this period.
The primary step one finding is that to reliably produce just 1,000 MW of solar power, around the clock for five dark days, requires at least 6,000 MW of solar generating capacity and at least 120,000 MWh of storage capacity. This works out to around $60 billion per 1,000 MW of reliable solar power.
(Excerpt) Read more at baconsrebellion.com ...
Conservatives adjust policy to fit reality.
“Progressives” ignore reality to fit policy.
*pinches bridge of nose*
Ok, here’s the deal: With “green” ANYTHING you are not supposed to have reliable power. You’re supposed to learn how to get along without power at random intervals for unpredictable periods of time. Because reliability is evil.
#GreatReset
WTH? The nevaDUH voters have now made it into law that we are at 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Guess nobody considered how many solar panels and wind turbines that’s gonna take. Probably 95% of parts from CHi-nuh. Fidiots!
“Zero emissions” is a fool’s errand. It is a chimera that will never come into focus or achieve even the illusion of probability. The nearest thing we have so far to “zero emissions” is power produced by nuclear reactors.
But nuclear reactors, fueled by uranium fission, have had the worst press imaginable over the past fifty years or so, and the fact the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima nuclear disasters were so widely publicized as “failures”, only emphasizes the arguments of the anti-nuclear faction.
But progress in other means to harness the latent thermal energy in nuclear reactions has been made, using a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor, inherently vastly more safe than uranium-fueled light water reactors. And they do not produce plutonium, one of the most deadly poisons in terms of lethality per gram of matter, the world had ever seen. Plutonium can also be used to make “dirty” atomic bombs.
In fact, thorium-fueled molten salt atomic piles NEED a small amount of “spent” uranium fuel rod material to initiate a fission reaction, since thorium, in and of itself does not support fission until it is “ignited”. So by using thorium as fuel for nuclear plants, eventually most if not all of the waste in the form of “spent” uranium fuel rods shall by used up.
Thorium-based molten salt reactors cannot, by their very nature, go into the somewhat fictional “China Syndrome” of meltdown of the core. The molten salts would flow into a containment basin, the the nuclear reaction would quickly fall to a level below the heat generation necessary to “burn through to China”.
The problems of fabricating the fittings necessary to handle the molten salts, themselves very corrosive substances, are being solved, and it may be possible, practical, and perhaps imperative that these systems for harnessing heat energy to run power plants that can run 24/7/365 for YEARS before refueling, at flat-out full power, be put into service to cover the demands to be made in the now very near future for ever greater power supplies.
That’s their attitude. I have to believe common sense will prevail. Hopefully enough people will recognize this and support better policies.
I was about to say the same, but is much better than what I would have posted.
As to the fear of nuclear power plants, may I use the U.S. as an example. We have 93 reactors in 30 states with a capacity of 91.5 GW or 20% of our energy consumption.
https://www.power-technology.com/features/top-ten-nuclear-energy-producing-countries/
This energy is produced day or night, with wind or without, 24/7.
As for the #GreatReset, have you read the latest Imprimus from Hillsdale?
So Dominion power can have unreliable generation to go with their unreliable distribution.
Only time I’ve ever seen 4 automatic splices in a row, it was on a Dominion line...
I was amazed that Dominion could even consider going forward with this plan. It’s simply courting disaster.
My first experiences with Dominion when I moved to Virginia with my parents about 35 years ago weren’t good.
New neighborhood. The power would go out every single time it rained for at least an hour or two, which is how long it took for someone from Dominion to arrive and replace the blown fuse cut-out.
This crap went on for several years before Dominion finally “fixed” it. (I think they accidentally fixed the problem when they redid the distribution lines to feed a new neighborhood across the street—a happy accident, as Bob Ross would say.)
There have been other things, like the time my rental property was missing a 120V leg for a week because it took Dominion that long to get someone to come out to fix it, or power failures during perfectly clear weather..
I have NOVEC and the difference between them and Dominion is night and day. I rarely have power outages with NOVEC. Longest power outage I’ve ever had with NOVEC in roughly 23 years has been a few hours, and that happened once or twice. Most have been under an hour and that happens maybe once every couple years, if that.
I have family members who have Dominion and all have experienced multi-day outages.
So, based on what I’ve observed about Dominion, reliability isn’t a big concern of theirs.
3 things here:
(1) The salt drain basin is theoretical. And also has a possible major problem, which is #2.
(2) U233 is produced during thorium fission. It has more nuclear potential than plutonium, and only slightly higher critical mass.
(3) U233 may pool in a meltdown basin, and has a very real potential to produce a critical uncontrolled reaction in the basin, and become a dirty bomb. Not enough is known about this particular problem (at least that is public source that I am aware of), and U233 amount of mass present is a function of run time of the reactor’s fuel.
Not against thorium, but it also not a miracle product as it has been marketed.
The advantage of thorium is that we have more of it. But truthfully, we have enormous stockpiles of U238, which can be converted to Plutonium or other readily fissionable substances. Or just mix in a little U235 to pump it back up, and you can run it directly as traditional reactor fuel.
Finally Chernobyl’s achille’s hill was the fact it used a graphite moderator, well that and it was protected and ran by functionaries of the communist party. Chernobyl did not need water to react (not the same as “safely running”).
Even now the corium mix from Chernobyl develops little hotspots of criticality (as measured by neutron detectors around the plant).
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