Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, CSIRO report finds

There were three segments to the US grid: East, West, Texas.

 

Then that is a problem with your system not green energy

 

The cost of back-up is routinely omitted from renewable energy cost estimates everywhere.

 

Everything I have read on Carrington events (CME’s) suggest they are not only more common than we previously knew (look up Miyake event) but have been worse than the Carrington event and would seriously impact our grids if we could not power down. The answer that has been proposed is encouragement of decentralisation by incentivising people to put battery back up in homes creating local grids can be easily isolated

 

Everywhere???

 

If the cost of back-up is included then the claim of cheapest energy cannot be made.

 

How often though, is back up required and what is that cost on the end consumer?

 

I guarantee it’s not more reliable. Nuclear Fusion will be the future.

 

I've asked several times. You folks have never answered. Until I hear differently, I assume it hasn't happened.

And the power grid isn't my area of expertise. Maybe someone like @Fangbeer knows better than me.

 

The back-up system must run constantly to be available.

 

It's also a security problem.

The current grids are expensive to ship electricity and are vulnerable to attacks of various kinds.

Plus, there is no federal office for electricity distribution, thus improvements to the infrastructure require walking across each district and state, attempting to sell them on the idea - which they need no reason to decline.

The result is that we have a grid that is expensive to ship electricity, is not designed to allow adding new generation easily, is vulnerable and is organized such that improvement is essentially impossible.

And, that is also NOT a security asset.

Security is one of the serious issues of infrastructure improvement that congress has struggled with.

I didn't mean this to be about the grids. But, our overall electrification needs improvement.

 

You keep saying that.

But, you have no evidence.

 

Already presented many times.

 

I don't believe so.

Iowa has for a number of years followed a successful plan of ~50% wind, ~25% coal, and most of the rest being renewable energy.

My argument has been that other states could approximate that division.

I've seen nothing that you have presented that this is problematic for Iowa's strategy for electricity.

 

I don't care what is Iowa's strategy for electricity. I care that true costs are reported.

 

@Bowerbird stated "If basepower is down in one state it should feed in from another"

I understand what she means, but she's using incorrect terminology. Beyond that, the "should" part is a technical nightmare. The regulatory problem with the grid is that supply has to exactly match demand. You can't have extra or everyone is harmed. You can't have too little or everyone is harmed.

The strategy to solve this problem of instant supply and instant demand is to break the grid energy into 3 categories. Base, Intermediate, and Peak. The base load is the amount of energy necessary to satisfy the minimum amount of demand. It's the amount of energy the supply never has to dip below. Since that's the case, the energy providers use systems that are most efficient when delivering a constant rate of energy. A coal fired plant for example is very well suited for this. There's a big heap of coal burning to heat a boiler to a constant temperature and pressure that drives a turbine generator. This type of plant is not good at modulating its output. It takes time for the furnace to heat the boiler to the right temperature and pressure; days sometimes. Once at operating conditions it takes time to turn a coal fired plant back off. You can't just put out the coal and save all the energy you dumped into the boiler for later as an example. They are typically ramped down over a long period while another generator is ramped up so that the energy isn't wasted when something like maintenance is required.

Intermediate loads would be the base amount of energy you would expect during different times of the day. In the morning, power demand increases as people wake up, take showers, make breakfast, and head off to work. At noon, power demand decreases while people are all huddled together in their cubicles at work. Demand goes back up again at night as people are coming back home from work, making dinner, heating their homes, and playing Fortnite. The intermediate calculation has to do with the minimum amount of change you would expect in the grid over the course of a typical day. Intermediate generators are the type that can be more rapidly turned on and off at expected times of day. Wind works for this. You can start spinning them up before the expected intermediate load and connect them in at specific times of day.

The peak load is about the instantaneous change in grid demand. If someone flips on a light switch in Topeka, there's a peaking generator modulating its output in response. These types of generators have to instantaneously react to changes in demand. Hydro dams are good for this since you can easily regulate the speed of your turbine. But in most places without dams peak generation is done with reciprocating gas engines, and single-cycle gas turbines (jet engines). These types of supplies can be easily regulated to instantly supply the instantaneous demand created by a few hundred thousands people switching their electric devices on and off at random points in time.

If one state's base power "goes down" that's not something that could be instantly supplied by base energy from a different state. The other state's baseload generators are already loaded with that state's base demand. It would be another state's peaking, and eventually intermediate generators that would have to be ramped up handle this depending on the duration of the grid fault. But we do already do that. Much of this regulation is currently automated which is why our power reliability is so good these days. I remember plenty of brownouts & surges during my youth which I don't see to a substantial degree today.

So the American grid is already interconnected the way she suggests, but it's also compartmentalized (for good reasons) in ways that make this automation challenging. There are regulatory bodies that help the power companies coordinate the distribution of power generation so that they can do things like turn off a base load generator for maintenance, or react to an unexpected demand with supplemental peak generation. Coordination of events that are planned in advance are easy. Coordination of supply because a cloud went over a solar array in a county 300 miles away is much more difficult. For one, if a large amount of supply suddenly drops out in one area of the grid, it's not exactly good for the grid to push the extra energy over a long distance to where it's needed. The grid has an energy capacity just like a highway. If one highway goes down, shifting everyone to a different highway can create a lot of headaches for the folks on that other highway. The compartmentalization helps with this. It allows them to isolate problem areas so that the load can be distributed more evenly among many peaking generators.

 

For reference..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

 

Iowa is a premier example. You can't ignore their success with wind as the central element of their electricity strategy.

 

What's your point?

This 20 year old problem came from the need for humans to monitor warning lights and having a bug in software, right?

The systems we rely on in such serious ways have to be more robust than that.

As you may note, the problem was quickly resolved.

 

Not sure with whom you are arguing.

 

Back to betavoltaics a second..

 

I'm saying that when you claim that wind needs to be charged for fossil fuel plants on the grid, you need to give specifics.

For example, you could cite the cost you are referring to in the case of Iowa.

Everyone agrees that there IS a limit on how much a state could depend on wind alone.

But, the question you omit is any kind of examination of when that might be - in other words, how much the USA could increase wind production without ever hitting some limit.

Iowa says that more than 50% wind is fine.

 

You don't understand the issue. I don't care about how much power is generated by wind. My point is that intermittent wind must always be backed by fossil or nuclear, and the cost of that back-up is part of the cost of wind power.

 

Yes, we certainly send power to other grids when it’s needed. I’m in central Nebraska and we fired up a mothballed coal plant when Texas had their big freeze in ‘21. I would not want to see a nationwide fully integrated grid under one control.

 

I know that's what you said.

BUT, you say that as if it is a problem.

Then I point out that Iowa is showing that having way more wind than most is NOT a problem.

THEN, you once against come along and tell me it is a problem, but have NO data to back up your argument in the case of Iowa.

Please respond when you have an argument.