JohannYoddler on Nostr: Good Night Nostr, I come before you Outraged. I cound not vent my spleen because ...
Good Night Nostr, I come before you Outraged. I cound not vent my spleen because their comments section is guarded by facebook, and I no longer have my account from that university to confirm the real lifedness of me. So I shall do it here. Here is the artical, worth a read. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
Here is what peaked my ire.
" He believes we need base load power because it is what we use when we turn a light on at 2:00 in the morning. He’s wrong. But unfortunately, a lot of people understand things the way he does, and they are holding the energy transition back."
"The load-following power plants could provide 100% of our electricity, if we were willing to pay the price."
"And long-range transmission lines can bring power in from other parts of the country."
"And we should also note that the electricity from new natural gas and new nuclear plants is very expensive, by comparison."
"By contrast, the batteries used for near-firm renewable resources can adjust to changes in power demand almost instantly, assuring a far higher quality of electricity than we have had from the base load paradigm. And also, the cost of batteries has dropped to the point that the cost of the ‘solar adder’ is roughly 0.5¢/kWh. Clearly, near-firm renewables are superior."
Let me start by saying , he would be correct if all we were worried about is residential. I could stretch that to commercial like Walmart and home depot with expensive upgrades. I would also like to say all energy is welcome to me. I follow Doombergs postulate, every means of energy will be consumed by somebody. Standards of living are at stake.
Now to the deboneing of this piece.
People are wrong and holding the energy transition back. Nope, the truth is we have limited construction and human capital for large projects and we have limited money. Money is not really the problem either, we can create it at will with credit from the banks, they have the ten percent required for deposits in the repomarket if they wished to put the capital to use and the government could barrow unlimited funds with the money printer for the green revolution. But money doesn't mean we can build the increase in electrical steal required for the long haul cables necessary. Money is not an issue for what stops gigawatts from going on the grid. Regulations, they are very picky what roads you build, what meadows you plow, what forests you cut into. They are very picky about who can be on their grid and the wait list to inspect your project is years. Years where most projects die. Liberals your energy transition is stopped by your bureaucrats.
Government cant create and when they do they take and inflate the money so your project is more expensive, that money than goes to the big corporations with government connections and wealth inequality grows larger. And because the government can't create only lubricate and speed up money flow, the increased supply of money has a negative effect, your steel and labor are more expensive.
Load following renewable can supply a hundred percent. No 50 percent , 80 percent at increased cost, but 100 percent is the great wall of china that will collapse society. You can get residential as low hanging fruit. Commercial can bump it up to 80 percent with a ton of storage. District heating so we aren't wasting electricity on heat. Mountains of insulation. Solar thermal so we aren't wasting expensive 4 $.04/kw hour on hot water. 8kwh batterys would get homes night time energy done , pop in your 10 circut auto backup panel and connect your 8kwh delta pro battery packs and we are good. $10k per house isn't cheap but doable. governments already promised us $8k on our taxes. If your not renting.
We will have a famine if we don't produce our fertilizer. The process requires a natural gas feed at kiln tempatures and no o2 for 3 days straight to make that fertilizer and we cant feed ourselves much less the world without it. Lithium can't do that. The only thing that can is a small nuke, or a natural gas plant. The new heat battery by that one company that build that one pilot plant could maybe be a battery storage for that. It uses electricity to melt tin ,pump it around graphite, with an impressive ceramic pump, to heat the graphite until it glows at 2500 degs. They then use the light and heat to create electric in a solar cell designed for that purpose. 80 percent efficient. My hats off to them. Again how fast can we scale with regulations that will put the first pilot battery plant on grid in 2027. Did I mention we still need to mine all this crap preferably without the environmental destruction from using Chinese mines. Expletive that. We still need all our base-load for a long time.
Every industry factory in the country will need a similar flow battery , liquid tin battery, a small mountain to store the district heating battery to make this work. Lithium can do sedans and houses and grid frequency.
Oh I forgot the transmission lines, sorry it's been a long rant. What did he say. Oh here it is : "And long-range transmission lines can bring power in from other parts of the country." Those are being sued into oblivion, just read an article about the 4 billion dollar wind farm in new mexico where it is wind. It is on hold because the tribes are suing for the environmental damage the road to build the lines to LA are going to cause. See no one offered them royalties and an improved life so it's sacred land. (cynical but they absolutely deserve it, and to be asked.) With out the lines the millions in EPA hoop jumping spent for the last 5 years is all gone. This is one project where the benefits out way the negatives but oh well. Don't be an entrepreneur in the US in the clean energy sector. Some government is going to screw you only after you have spent millions. There is no where in the US where protected lands are not in the way to get wind from the center of the country to the coasts.
We need fission plants, walk away safe fission plants that the anti nuke NRC can't slow do. Breeders , burners, fuel recycler plants that are small (for walk away safe) and by the hundreds factory produce, higher quality than our F-35 factory , if you want anything like carbon reduced world.
Author of the Article, Nice try but you know Nothing! And your statement about the cost are flat out wrong. Levelised Cost of Lifetime enegry (LCOE) just doesn't cover the government. And no generation that I can see does, except natural gas while it is $2 per unit. That is the waste cost because we can't build piplines. And it is a by product of Oil so if there is a downturn and oil prices fall and it production falls, it will go up. Energy is going to be very expensive soon. Especially with the data centers in Virgina onboarding 1000s of AI chips. 9 times increase I heard in energy I heard. Every drop of oil and natural gas will be burned for the needed energy or if we are to high minded it will be sold to India. That's is just economic life. And it's all the environmental advocates fault because they are shortsighted. Wish I could take pleasure in that but I like solar and wind and SMR reactors. I will not get it in my generation. I could have used that energy to improve my economy and families life so much that I could have avoided this next recession and retired. Mining a expletive coin or bitcoin could have done this. Of course those coins might not have ever been introduced if we had a balance budget in the US.
Here is what peaked my ire.
" He believes we need base load power because it is what we use when we turn a light on at 2:00 in the morning. He’s wrong. But unfortunately, a lot of people understand things the way he does, and they are holding the energy transition back."
"The load-following power plants could provide 100% of our electricity, if we were willing to pay the price."
"And long-range transmission lines can bring power in from other parts of the country."
"And we should also note that the electricity from new natural gas and new nuclear plants is very expensive, by comparison."
"By contrast, the batteries used for near-firm renewable resources can adjust to changes in power demand almost instantly, assuring a far higher quality of electricity than we have had from the base load paradigm. And also, the cost of batteries has dropped to the point that the cost of the ‘solar adder’ is roughly 0.5¢/kWh. Clearly, near-firm renewables are superior."
Let me start by saying , he would be correct if all we were worried about is residential. I could stretch that to commercial like Walmart and home depot with expensive upgrades. I would also like to say all energy is welcome to me. I follow Doombergs postulate, every means of energy will be consumed by somebody. Standards of living are at stake.
Now to the deboneing of this piece.
People are wrong and holding the energy transition back. Nope, the truth is we have limited construction and human capital for large projects and we have limited money. Money is not really the problem either, we can create it at will with credit from the banks, they have the ten percent required for deposits in the repomarket if they wished to put the capital to use and the government could barrow unlimited funds with the money printer for the green revolution. But money doesn't mean we can build the increase in electrical steal required for the long haul cables necessary. Money is not an issue for what stops gigawatts from going on the grid. Regulations, they are very picky what roads you build, what meadows you plow, what forests you cut into. They are very picky about who can be on their grid and the wait list to inspect your project is years. Years where most projects die. Liberals your energy transition is stopped by your bureaucrats.
Government cant create and when they do they take and inflate the money so your project is more expensive, that money than goes to the big corporations with government connections and wealth inequality grows larger. And because the government can't create only lubricate and speed up money flow, the increased supply of money has a negative effect, your steel and labor are more expensive.
Load following renewable can supply a hundred percent. No 50 percent , 80 percent at increased cost, but 100 percent is the great wall of china that will collapse society. You can get residential as low hanging fruit. Commercial can bump it up to 80 percent with a ton of storage. District heating so we aren't wasting electricity on heat. Mountains of insulation. Solar thermal so we aren't wasting expensive 4 $.04/kw hour on hot water. 8kwh batterys would get homes night time energy done , pop in your 10 circut auto backup panel and connect your 8kwh delta pro battery packs and we are good. $10k per house isn't cheap but doable. governments already promised us $8k on our taxes. If your not renting.
We will have a famine if we don't produce our fertilizer. The process requires a natural gas feed at kiln tempatures and no o2 for 3 days straight to make that fertilizer and we cant feed ourselves much less the world without it. Lithium can't do that. The only thing that can is a small nuke, or a natural gas plant. The new heat battery by that one company that build that one pilot plant could maybe be a battery storage for that. It uses electricity to melt tin ,pump it around graphite, with an impressive ceramic pump, to heat the graphite until it glows at 2500 degs. They then use the light and heat to create electric in a solar cell designed for that purpose. 80 percent efficient. My hats off to them. Again how fast can we scale with regulations that will put the first pilot battery plant on grid in 2027. Did I mention we still need to mine all this crap preferably without the environmental destruction from using Chinese mines. Expletive that. We still need all our base-load for a long time.
Every industry factory in the country will need a similar flow battery , liquid tin battery, a small mountain to store the district heating battery to make this work. Lithium can do sedans and houses and grid frequency.
Oh I forgot the transmission lines, sorry it's been a long rant. What did he say. Oh here it is : "And long-range transmission lines can bring power in from other parts of the country." Those are being sued into oblivion, just read an article about the 4 billion dollar wind farm in new mexico where it is wind. It is on hold because the tribes are suing for the environmental damage the road to build the lines to LA are going to cause. See no one offered them royalties and an improved life so it's sacred land. (cynical but they absolutely deserve it, and to be asked.) With out the lines the millions in EPA hoop jumping spent for the last 5 years is all gone. This is one project where the benefits out way the negatives but oh well. Don't be an entrepreneur in the US in the clean energy sector. Some government is going to screw you only after you have spent millions. There is no where in the US where protected lands are not in the way to get wind from the center of the country to the coasts.
We need fission plants, walk away safe fission plants that the anti nuke NRC can't slow do. Breeders , burners, fuel recycler plants that are small (for walk away safe) and by the hundreds factory produce, higher quality than our F-35 factory , if you want anything like carbon reduced world.
Author of the Article, Nice try but you know Nothing! And your statement about the cost are flat out wrong. Levelised Cost of Lifetime enegry (LCOE) just doesn't cover the government. And no generation that I can see does, except natural gas while it is $2 per unit. That is the waste cost because we can't build piplines. And it is a by product of Oil so if there is a downturn and oil prices fall and it production falls, it will go up. Energy is going to be very expensive soon. Especially with the data centers in Virgina onboarding 1000s of AI chips. 9 times increase I heard in energy I heard. Every drop of oil and natural gas will be burned for the needed energy or if we are to high minded it will be sold to India. That's is just economic life. And it's all the environmental advocates fault because they are shortsighted. Wish I could take pleasure in that but I like solar and wind and SMR reactors. I will not get it in my generation. I could have used that energy to improve my economy and families life so much that I could have avoided this next recession and retired. Mining a expletive coin or bitcoin could have done this. Of course those coins might not have ever been introduced if we had a balance budget in the US.