Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, CSIRO report finds

Maybe a more appropriate question is how much of their fossil fuels baseload has been retired and dismantled due to their wind capacity.

 

The people you have to convince is the energy industry itself and some big oil shill on the internet is not going to do that.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01...jor-expansion-of-clean-energy-plans/103311650

Andres “Twiggy” Forrest is one of the richest men in Australia and he is convinced wind is the way to go

 

Sorry you didn't get the sarcasm.

 

They can create as much as they want, but their grids aren't stable without fossil fuel back-up.

 

So, you're saying that 2/3 wind is the limit?

 

They are on board.

U.S. Oil Production Forecast to Reach Records
McCormick & Smyth, FT

Global Demand for LNG Is 'Off the Charts'
CNBC Television

 

I have no idea what the limit is.

 

Aren't you the person that raised the issue of nuclear batteries? I think I did relate them directly to the issue of homes becoming independent of the grid...

As for wind, I've had the conversation regarding grid regulation many times but I'm willing to have it again.

Do you know why California had 8.3% of their hours at negative energy prices in 2017? Do you know why they have rotating outages now?

 

Yes, you had a narrow view of what a battery is.

I'm fine with that. I don't believe it will make any difference in what solutions are chosen.

 

Both sides use propaganda that strains the truth. Clean for example...

2/3? Where did you find this figure?

Here I find 53% for electricity production using some type of "renewable" (another propaganda word) energy source. That's closer to half than two thirds.
https://www.eia.gov/state/data.php?sid=IA

How are they surviving? Well. Let's look at the rest of their data on that site.

1 W is equal to 3.41 BTU/h So the electrical generation equates to less than one percent of their total energy usage. This means the energy they use for electrical production, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, heating & cooling, etc is supported primarily by non renewable, clean or green sources.

959 trillion BTU per year is 2.6 trillion BTU per day.
5,410 GWh (They are using thousand MWh as a unit which is stupid so I changed it) per year is 14.8 GWh per day. This means the average grid power is 617MW at any given moment.

A tesla power wall can store about 13.5kWh and can supply 5.8 kW continuous. Meaning a fully charged power wall at full load will be depleted in less than three hours. So on a single day with no wind (or too much wind) you need about 850,000 fully charged Tesla power walls to cover the average daily electrical usage if your entire grid is supplied by wind. This means just about every household in Iowa would need a powerwall sized battery that would need to be replaced every 4000 charge cycles just to ensure the grid remains stable. That's a lot of Li Ion, my friend.

Of course demand through the day fluctuates to much higher than 617MW at times so you'd need capacity to match that. If currently wind accounts for 53% of the 5410 GWh, then they are producing 2867 GWh per year or 8GWh per day. If we completely dump fossil fuels, you'd have to double the number of your wind facilities to meet demand, and then you'd still have to account for how to produce the excess to charge the residential power walls on a still day. Maybe we do that with solar? Iowa has 4.3 peak solar hours per day. That means the vast majority of the energy collection for solar happens in just 4.3 hours.

The sun produces 15W per square foot. Solar panels are about 20% efficient, so they can collect about 3W per square foot when the sun is directly above them. We'll need 4.9 billion square feet of solar to collect that much energy. That's about 176 square miles to charge the power walls with solar while the windmills are spinning to cover grid demand. That's a lot of land. You can't use the land the windmills are on because the shadows from the mills would drastically reduce panel efficiency. And that's not including the land needed to connect all this new production infrastructure to wherever we installed the power walls.

But creates another problem. Now we have double the energy production capacity than we're actually using per day to account for the reliability problems in our energy sources... Who's paying for all this extra infrastructure needed to produce a reliable grid?

It's a big engineering problem. How can we create an infrastructure that can produce & store the vast amount of energy that is currently being used without failing to meet demand or wasting what we produced because we don't actually need it.

This is especially difficult when a substantial amount of energy is used in transportation (meaning you have to bring your energy with you on the trip.) Let's look at energy density.

https://chemistry.beloit.edu/edetc/SlideShow/slides/energy/density.html

Li Ion has about 200 Wh/L
Diesel fuel has 10,700 Wh/L

The biggest challenge is replacing fossil fuels in transportation use. Let's say the Li Ion is 100% efficient, and the diesel is 30% efficient. You still need 17X more Li Ion to carry the same amount of energy with you. That means you use at least 17X as much energy just moving your energy. Clearly our electrical storage devices are not nearly as energy dense as our conventional fuel sources. This means your electrical capacity for production of supply, and capacity for storage are going to need to grow exponentially just to meet current transportation demand. What does an exponential increase in power facilities, battery production facilities, power facility waste & battery disposal waste mean for the environment?

https://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/greatworks/pdf_sum10/WK8_Layton_EnergyDensities.ashx[/QUOTE]

 

https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IA#:~:text=In 2022, nearly two-thirds,wind power producer, after Texas.

The point here is that most states are a long way from needing fossil fuel as a backup. The idea that renewable energy is limited by intermittency is true, but no state today is close to hitting that as a barrier. In fact, there is another more important barrier, as current grid design makes addition of wind power to the grid relatively difficult, as it is designed for major point source generation. Thus, there is an increasing number of wind and solar projects that await connection.

There is plenty of room for a significant shift away from fossil fuel, and that is especially true in the central regions from Texas to the Canadian border.


With EVs, let's remember that battery design and production is being hugely spurred by demand.

Today, there are 90 EV manufacturers in China, and China has been leading the world in battery technology.

Tesla is still a big deal in China. But, it is being overtaken there.

The Nio ET7 is a sedan type car that has 650 miles of range - of course, not available in the USA. This is NOT the only EV that beats US manufacturers, including Tesla, in range.

China EVs are moving into Europe and other markets today. Some of these models are made in China by Chinese manufacturing and sold under the names of corporations whose names we know.
https://evplugchargers.com/the-50-best-selling-ev-in-europe/


By not having our car market exposed to world competition, we plug along with a legacy auto manufacturing industry that is falling behind.

Auto manufacturing IS a big deal, and it would be good if we at least compared our manufacturing to world manufacturing on paper, even if we choose protectionism to attempt to keep our manufacturing alive.

 

I don't know what to tell you. I used the data from the same site in the link I offered. Their data says 53%.

Their summary says 2/3rds. Can you figure out how to square that circle? I can't.

I don't think you took the time to actually look at the figures I presented. 8 GWh per day of electricity from renewables doesn't even appear as a blip on the radar when total daily energy usage is 2.6 trillion BTU per day. It's a fraction of a percental of their energy usage. You're off by a factor of 10^3. If you intend to shift all the energy usage to renewable sources there's going to have to be 1000X more renewable energy production. Then that factor is going to have to be increased by whatever backup margin you think is required. I suggested double. Maybe it's less than that. Maybe it's more. Iowa gets about 35" of snow a year. How well do solar and wind work during a blizzard?


You also seem to have missed the point about grid regulating storage. I used the known values of Tesla power walls as an example of the current limitations of our technology. I said there was a need for 800k of them. The first powerwall was installed in 2015. In July of last year they released a press release that they had installed 500k of them. While they might be able to increase production, while they might be able to improve capacity, do you understand what sort of increase would be required to implement 1 day worth of storage (14.8 GWh) in Iowa? How long would it take to manufacture enough for the other 50 states? How much fossil energy will we need to burn through in order to cause that increase in production? Does that amount of lithium even exist on Earth?

California already hit that barrier. That was why energy price was negative in 2017. There were too many solar installations dumping energy into the grid causing suppliers to choose between pulling their base load generators offline or paying other regions to take their surplus. By 2020 the suppliers were no longer willing to pay for someone to take the energy they typically sell so they pulled their base load generators offline and California started experiencing rolling blackouts. The state stepped in and cut the price of off peak grid solar (which is all grid solar) and tried to regulate those solar installations off the grid.

They also lead the world in pollution. Coincidence?

 

As I pointed out, Iowa is about 2/3 renewable energy, with the majority being supplied by wind, which the EIA points out has room for expansion.

That supports my argument.

I pointed to individual home solutions as a way to become independent or significantly less dependent on the grid, thus reducing the growth in need for energy.

Tesla is not the only "power wall" manufacturer. We hear about Tesla due to its name prevalence and the fact that it is turning itself into an energy company.

The USA has the 4th largest lithium reserves, more than China.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/six-largest-lithium-reserves-world/

California has strong programs for encouraging home solar and storage. There are places where new homes are required to have solar - which pays off, as when the homeowner cost is added to the mortgage, the homeowner is an instant winner.

I moved to CA 3 or 4 years ago and have not witnessed any issues with power.

No, it's not a coincidence.

A primary motivator for electric power is that pollution you mention.

The result is that there are disincentives for buying ICE vehicles (taxes and registration fees) as well as law on emissions that many ICE manufacturers can not meet.

China had set last year as the end of selling ICEs with previous emission standards.

Many ICE manufacturers ignored that and then begged their government to allow more time. This new year was the end of the additional time that was allowed.

It will be interesting to watch what happens in China, though it will be incremental, as the more polluting vehicles have already been pulled from the market.

Notice US and Japanese auto sales in China.

 

The image I posted is from the same site. It's the data your site presented! Where does the 2/3 claim come from? 53% != 2/3.

You can focus on home usage, but according to your same site households represent only 13% of consumption. The vast majority of energy is used by industry and transportation. The vast majority of that energy is not sourced from Iowa's wind supplied electricity.

That's not the point. The point is to illustrate the scale of a shift to all electric energy consumption.

So? Again this is about scale. I feel like you're being baffled by statistics. Having the fourth largest reserve in the world does not mean you have enough to increase lithium battery production at the scale necessary to make this shift. I don't even think you have a good understanding of what that scale is.

California burned themselves with their strong programs and just recently changed them to try to shift solar off grid. This pissed off quite a few solar owners that had budgeted based on previous regulations and now are being forced figure out to how afford local storage. They are not happy.

 

Grid solar started messing with base load generation in 2017. At that point in time Californians were paying about 17 cents per kWh. The people who bought their arrays were probably paying less than that when they purchased their installations a few years earlier. Today the average is 30 cents per kWh. I'm reading a post right now from a guy in San Diego that pays 66 cents during summer peak. His array pays 10 cents for grid supply under NEM 3.0. Do you think he feels he made a good investment?

 

The issue concerns moving toward renewable energy. Wind is the major component of their energy, and is a limit on the claim that fossil fuel backup is required.

If you want to make an argument against that point, then go for it.

This is a sidelight. Using less energy, any form of conservation, etc. all contribute to the picture of how much energy is required.

But, the main point remains that renewable energy is nowhere near being gated by need for fossil fuel backup.

There has been no discussion of this new objective you propose.

The idea that we're going to run out of lithium is simply lame.

This doesn't sound like it pertains to the issue of how much wind power Iowa can install before fossil fuel backup is required.

My point is that Iowa demonstrates an energy policy that is MAJORLY weighed toward renewable energy, especially wind, which they are growing. That is a resource especially available from Texas to the Canadian border. Also, it is compatible with agriculture, such that it is providing a dependable profit stream that is helping our agriculture segment. Beyond that, it is drawing various industries toward the central area where that is an important change.

I don't know this new topic concerning CA and solar power.
Please cite.

 

This is WILDLY off topic.

But, it is interesting. Not to be repetitive, but I'd like a cite on this that expresses the details of your concern for solar farms in CA.

 

I wouldn't call a thousandth of total energy consumption a major component of anyone's energy.

That's my argument. Even if 66% of Iowa's electrical generation was supplied by wind, that's still just a fraction of the energy used by transportation and industry.

The scale of the shift you're suggesting requires a monumental amount of production that is currently provided through non renewable energy sources. This is the paradox of your argument.

 

It would be like me saying I know I use a total of 120kWh a day between traveling to work, running the forge at work, heating my home, running my appliances, and communication devices; but I just installed a 100W generator in the stream behind my house and eventually we can shift all my energy consumption to that.

 

Sure - that's easy.

First, the possibility of moving to 2/3 renewable energy, as demonstrated by Iowa, shows the potential for reducing consumption of fossil fuel.

Next, you switched from energy generation to energy consumption. And, that is an economic analysis by consumers, and can change.

For example, 2/3 of our total oil consumption is for transportation. What EVs do is move oil out of transportation.

Also, industry may choose different energy sources based on cost and with consideration given to on-site sources.

 

This idea of shifting all of ANYTHING to one source is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Iowa's win didn't come from shifting all of anything anywhere.

And, a 100W water driven generator would cost less than $200. Pretending that scale has anything to do with our energy issues is silly.

Home solar panels produce about 1.5KWH per day. Most homes can run on about 20 such panels. Or, they can feed electricity to the grid when excess is produced, thus lowering total electric bills. Or, they can add home batteries if that pencils out.

Your idea of adding the consumption of the forge you use at work as a method of denying the value of home energy production is disgusting. Let's keep this on the up and up.

 

What do you do for the 10-14 hours when the sun doesn't shine, or even worse, when days of cloudy weather negates solar panel out put.

 

Lols and Indonesia is about to enter the EV market big time!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-15/how-indonesia-plans-to-increase-ev-uptake/103227192

 

You put vanadium batteries into the grid. If at home it depends as WRM said batteries don’t have to be lithium. Hell! Just about every RV out there has solar panels and deep cycle batteries

 

And when you have multi-day foul weather as our central and north-central states just went through?