Canada may exit Kyoto pact to save $$$$$

[bit_pattern]

Cool, a definite step in the right direction.

Yup. If they're doing it beyond the point of just talking about it then good.

 

[lomiller]

And there go the goal posts...

No this is a goalpost move

It's an example of the government throwing hundreds of millions of dollars,

You cited it as proof we can't do renewables with current technology not of the existence of waste.

they thought they understood but has frustrated all efforts at implementing.

Do you have evidence for you claim that the ROEI for corn ethanol wasn't understood by the experts in the field?

 

[lomiller]

Remove licensing from the equation (or impose the same licensing fees on wind farms), and *then* we'll talk about how much steel you want for your energy solution.

non sequitur.

Nuclear requires far greater regulation, so it makes no sense to try and force equivalency on this front. You also forgot to mention the huge subsidy Nuclear gets in the form of the DOE.

You seem to be mislead about the largest source of the additional cost associated with nuclear, that's capital financing costs. With nuclear you need to spend money for up to a decade before you deliver even a single W of power, whereas a wind turbine can be installed an generating power before you even have to pay your supplier for it. This means that on projects with the same overnight cost, nuclear will end up 2X-3X more expensive due to the compounding interest you are paying before the plant is up and running.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

non sequitur.

Nuclear requires far greater regulation, so it makes no sense to try and force equivalency on this front. You also forgot to mention the huge subsidy Nuclear gets in the form of the DOE.

You seem to be mislead about the largest source of the additional cost associated with nuclear, that's capital financing costs. With nuclear you need to spend money for up to a decade before you deliver even a single W of power, whereas a wind turbine can be installed an generating power before you even have to pay your supplier for it. This means that on projects with the same overnight cost, nuclear will end up 2X-3X more expensive due to the compounding interest you are paying before the plant is up and running.

All wrong.

Dec 7th 1941, America enters WW2 with a bang.
August 6th & 9th 1945, America ends WW2 with an even bigger bang.

Sometime between these dates several nuclear reactors were built.

And then there's France again. 56 reactors in 15 years. Historical fact.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

With nuclear you need to spend money for up to a decade before you deliver even a single W of power, whereas a wind turbine can be installed an generating power before you even have to pay your supplier for it. This means that on projects with the same overnight cost, nuclear will end up 2X-3X more expensive due to the compounding interest you are paying before the plant is up and running.

Why does Ontario have only 300 MW of wind while they are constructing 4800 MW of new nuclear then?

 

[Christian Klippel]

You seem to be mislead about the largest source of the additional cost associated with nuclear, that's capital financing costs. With nuclear you need to spend money for up to a decade before you deliver even a single W of power, whereas a wind turbine can be installed an generating power before you even have to pay your supplier for it. This means that on projects with the same overnight cost, nuclear will end up 2X-3X more expensive due to the compounding interest you are paying before the plant is up and running.

But that "calculation" completely misses reality. Yes, you can build windmills rather quick, and have them produce electricity. But that is where the real problems start. Just putting up windparks isn't the solution. You also need lots of storage plus massive grid extensions and/or rebuilds.

We have exactly that problem here in Germany right now. Renewables are heavily subsidized. So people built a lot of solar and wind "plants". They happily cashed in the large sums of money due to the fixed price they get for 20 years. But virtually none of them ever had the idea to use that money to build storage and grid. That has led to the situation that windmills, if the wind is really good for them, have to be cut off from the grid because they heavily overload it. However, they still get the money for that could-have-been-fed-in electricity!

And what do they do now? They complain that the grid operators, who already have to pay them exorbitantly high sums of money for that electricity, did not extend the grid as needed. That's just stupid.

Oh, and not to mention the fact that now, where subsidies for solar are cut/reduced, people loose interrest in putting up solar panels. The solar industry is already complaining about that decline, being forced to sell their expensively made panels for cheaper and cheaper prices, because they pile up in their storages. Which goes to show that obviously the people put them up not because they care about emissions or "saving the planet", but because they can make a lot of bucks with that.

Building windparks is just the very first step. Without suitable storage and grid capacity it is pretty useless, however, if one wants to replace conventional power plants with that. And that also means that it is required to install massive excess capacity, because storage not only has losses, but storage also makes sense only if you can refill it much faster than you are draining it. Which in turn leads to the need of having to install an even more massive grid.

Greetings,

Chris

 

[lomiller]

Of course we will, we've weathered far worse climate changes in the past.

Nope. The current rate of climate change is an order of magnitude faster than climate change at the end of a glaciation.

 

[lomiller]

All wrong.

Dec 7th 1941, America enters WW2 with a bang.
August 6th & 9th 1945, America ends WW2 with an even bigger bang.

Sometime between these dates several nuclear reactors were built.

And then there's France again. 56 reactors in 15 years. Historical fact.

How is that eve remotely related to what I wrote?

Seriousness how old are you 12, because most people are able to carry on a coherent conversation by their mid teens.

 

[lomiller]

But that "calculation" completely misses reality.

Opportunity costs of money are very real. So is finance risk. these drive private investment away from nuclear to the point where it's only viable with significant direct government intervention.

We have exactly that problem here in Germany right now. Renewables are heavily subsidized. So people built a lot of solar and wind "plants". They happily cashed in the large sums of money due to the fixed price they get for 20 years. But virtually none of them ever had the idea to use that money to build storage and grid. That has led to the situation that windmills, if the wind is really good for them, have to be cut off from the grid because they heavily overload it. However, they still get the money for that could-have-been-fed-in electricity!

Note that it isn't the gas or coal plants, being take off the grid.

Why is this, even though they have fuel inputs where wind has none? It's because these other types are being given a subsidy in the form of guaranteed sales quantities that help drive down the their production costs.

In a properly designed system you would stop production at the highest fuels cost plants first. I.E. the order for bringing power generation offline would be Gas > Coal > Nuclear > Wind/Solar

 

[WildCat]

Oh yeah, when exactly? If you want to 'survive' in a cave like the way we survived the ice age then you can go off and live in a cave while the rest of us do something about trying to maintain some semblance of the stable climactic conditions that endured throughout the Holocene and in which the entire sum total of human civilisation evolved within. How do you feed 7 billion people when you change the environment in which our staple crops are adapted to? It's meaningless to say 'we' have survived anything. Our progenitors that survived the ice age were very different people to what we are today.

You were talking about survival of the species. We could lose 95% of the population and our species would still prosper. I'm speaking strictly from a biological standpoint, not from a quality of life one.

 

[WildCat]

No this is a goalpost move



You cited it as proof we can't do renewables with current technology not of the existence of waste.

I gave you an example of a renewable fuel that was such a sure thing that the government mandated the use of said fuel, only to discover that the technology to produce the fuel simply wasn't there. Governments cannot mandate the progress of technology any more than they can mandate the tides.

Do you have evidence for you claim that the ROEI for corn ethanol wasn't understood by the experts in the field?

Who do you think was telling the government that it was a good idea to make use of such fuels mandatory?

 

[WildCat]

Nope. The current rate of climate change is an order of magnitude faster than climate change at the end of a glaciation.

But the glaciation itself was far worse than any AGW projections. It's one thing to have the oceans intrude upon coastal areas, quite another to have huge chunks of the interior covered up by ice miles thick.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

How is that eve remotely related to what I wrote?

Seriousness how old are you 12, because most people are able to carry on a coherent conversation by their mid teens.

Is personal attacks how you react to being proven wrong?

There is no physical need, once a site has been selected, for a bunch of lawyers and paper pushers to twiddle their thumbs for ten years until some arbitrary and intangible conditions have been equally arbitrarily determined to have been met.

As I pointed out with the French program. They didn't tell themselves "We can't do this, there are too many regulatory hurdles!". They said "Hey, we're the bloody government! We can just legislatively declare ourselves to have cleared any hurdles!"

And that's what they did. 56 reactors in 15 years pretty much annihilates your claim that all the forms and paperwork must be completed before a single drop of concrete is poured.

 

[Christian Klippel]

Note that it isn't the gas or coal plants, being take off the grid.

Why is this, even though they have fuel inputs where wind has none? It's because these other types are being given a subsidy in the form of guaranteed sales quantities that help drive down the their production costs.

In a properly designed system you would stop production at the highest fuels cost plants first. I.E. the order for bringing power generation offline would be Gas > Coal > Nuclear > Wind/Solar

Sorry, but you are completely missing the point here, and it seems that you have little knowledge about how conventional power plants work.

First of all, those massive subsidies into renewables here causes the electricity cost on the EEX to go negative at times. That is because the grid operators are _forced_ by law to prioritize feed-in of renewable electricity. They are also forced to pay prices per kW/h that are, on average, 3-4 times higher than the what the cost of generating that power from conventional plants would be.

This has several effects: For one, most people build EE (renewable energy) more or less only because of the absurdly high, guaranteed-for-20-years feed-in tariffs. Since renewables have massive ranges of the actually produced electricity, ranging from 0 to nameplate capacity, while at the same time that real capacity is random and incalculable, no one can really know when and how much will be produced in the next few hours or days.

This leads to the grid being massively overloaded at times, so that those EE sources have to be cut off. It also means that, even without overloading, energy production is unpredictable, leading to negative prices on the EEX. In the end that means that we here have to pay _massive_ amounts of money, forced by law, to have EE produced, while at the same time having to not only give that EE away for free, but actually pay the "buyer" extra money so he takes it.

Why windmills and such are cut off instead of conventional plants? Easy: You simply can not shut down and restart things like a gas or coal plant at will. Even with nuclear this is possible only in a limited way. However, we can more or less predict how much energy will be needed in the next few days/hours, which allows the operators to ramp down/up their production capacity slowly. This is simply not possible with renewables as they are implemented right now. And this is why they are cut off first, while still getting paid money for the could-hae-produced energy.

All this so we can meet some arbitrary, nonsensical goals decided by Kyoto. Which, as i said in an earlier post, are futile to meet as long as we do not get 100% of the world to agree and implement it. Which will never happen anyways.

So, every country that gets out of that nonsense is doing the right & wise thing to do.

Oh, and the above is the reason why your "calculation" is nonsense. Conventional power plants allow us to produce energy as we need it, in a predictable and stable way. If you really want to compare that to renewables, you have to make sure that they meet the very same criteria. And that, by nature, means lots and lots of storage, plus massive grid extensions (and building of new grids). Plus massive overcapacity to handle the storage in a meaningful way. And then all the losses involved. Once you factor in all that it suddenly becomes clear that in fact it is the most expensive way to generate electricity.

Oh, and don't forget about another nifty fact of conventional electricity generation: You get heat energy as a secondary product as well, used to heat homes or to be used in the industry. With renewables you don't have that, which means you must produce even more renewable energy to make heat out of it.

Really, just saying that installing solar panels and windmills is cheap and thus a cheap way to generate electricity is plain wrong, because it neglects the cost for all the other stuff that you need for it to actually make it work.

Greetings,

Chris

 

[Roboramma]

And that's what they did. 56 reactors in 15 years pretty much annihilates your claim that all the forms and paperwork must be completed before a single drop of concrete is poured.

Well, some degree of regulation is certainly necessary. We don't want to just let anyone set up a nuclear power plant in his backyard. It is necessary for government to oversee the disposal of waste, the safety precautions of the reactor design, etc.

But none of that really takes away from your point: the french demonstrated that the level of regulation necessary is significantly less than is generally employed, and that if a more reasonable level of regulation were implemented nuclear power could be much more cheaply and efficiently brought into use.

 

[Christian Klippel]

Oh, what i forgot to mention about the efficiency of storage:

hydro is one way, about 80% efficiency. However, it needs massive amounts of space, and you need a rather big height difference between the actual storage pool and the end where the turbines are. So, implementing them on a large scale is simply not possible.

The big hype over here currently is to produce methane from hydrogen and CO2. They tout it as a great solution, claiming things like one could use the existing gas-grid for storage, etc. However, the overall efficiency of that is just miserable. Let's take wind energy as an example for an input to that system. Lets assume we want 1MW/h continuous input capacity, also that an average windmill has that nameplate capacity, and see what we get at the end.

First of all, windmills produce only roundabout 20% of the nameplate capacity on average. So to get the desired 1MW/h input we need to install 5 such windmills. Now the electricity is converted to hydrogen. let's be generous and say that has an efficiency of 60%, including transmission/conversion losses. So, 1MW/h * 0.6 = 600kW/h output. Converting the hydrogen to methane, again lets be generous and assume 60% including all transmission losses. 600kW/h * 0.6 = 360kW/h. Now the gas needs to be stored, compressed, etc. Another generous 90%. 360kW/h * 0.9 = 0.324kW/h. Converting it back with a high efficiency gas power plant is again at about 60%. 324kW/h * 0.6 = 0.1944kW/h.

So, even with an optimistic and generous calculation, the overall efficiency is a meager 20%. That means to get 1MW/h out we need to have five times as many windmills as we started with: 25. Plus a load of infrastructure and other plants for the conversion. Plus a regular, good-old gas-turbine power plant. The latter also brings a small, but in the overall absurdity already negligible problem: Since we want it for storage purposes, it will be idle most of the time. But it can't be shut off completely, otherwise it would take far too long to bring it online in case of demand. So that stand-by operation again costs energy and money to maintain the plant.

Now, keep in mind the fact that the efforts already put into reaching the Kyoto goals here in Germany has cost us loads and loads of money, while making only a marginal dent in the CO2 output. And that is without using such wasteful systems. Going further towards that Kyoto goal, however, pretty much requires the implementation of such nonsense. Which will drive energy costs way, way up (they are already very high over here), which in turn will drive industry out of the country.

But for what overall gain should this be good for? To reduce emissions by a few meager percent, which is immediately negated by emerging industries/countries, like China? Who are just starting, and surely will increase their emission manyfold, i might add?

That simply does not make any sense. Not to mention the amounts of materials required to build all those windmills/conversion-plants/etc. Plus the need for constant maintenance and replacement. After all, the average lifespan of a windmill, iirc, is something around 10-15 years. Compare that to the 40-60 years that a conventional gas/coal/nuclear power-plant is in use. Which, of course, is another factor that people like to forget or ignore: it may cost more to install 1GW/h capacity of nuclear. But during the time the NPP is running, the windmills have to be replaced 4-6 times over. Which means nothing more that the real price to get that 1GW/h capacity from windmills is also 4-6 times higher, if it is to be used for as long as a NPP would run. And needless to repeat: Plus the costs for storage, overcapacity, etc.

Greetings,

Chris

 

[bit_pattern]

Climate change threshold nears for rapid increase in wildfires in Canada

"Changes in the wildfire regime have a significant impact on a local and global scale and therefore on the climate as well. It is therefore important to understand how the mechanisms which shape these wildfires work in order to be able to make predictions on what will change in future," explained PD Dr. Volker Grimm of the UFZ in a media release.

The scientists evaluated data on fires greater than 200 hectares from the Canadian Forest Service from 1959 to 1999. The data showed that three ecozones in Canada are close to a turning point: the Hudson Plains south of the Hudson Bay, the Boreale Plains in the Mid-West, and the Boreale Shield which stretches from the Mid-West to the East coast and is therefore the largest ecozone in Canada. The Boreale Shield is the closest to the turning point.

Looking at the data for the Boreale Shield more closely, the researchers found that around 1980 the average size of the fires in this part of the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba tripled rapidly

 

[Hallo Alfie]

LOL.
A climate model is it?

Boogedy boogedy boo!

 

[bit_pattern]

You were talking about survival of the species. We could lose 95% of the population and our species would still prosper. I'm speaking strictly from a biological standpoint, not from a quality of life one.

I don't necessarily think it would. The number of people still equipped with the skills to survive without human civilisation to support them would number far fewer than 5%. Biologically, hell, all it needs is one small population group of the sort that crossed out of Africa for the species to survive. But at the same time the odds are probably greater that it wouldn't survive. How many species get through two evolutionary bottlenecks of that magnitude and go on to prosper? I don't think we necessarily would get second act. Especially when you take into account the mass extinction event we've already triggered, which in evolutionary terms has only just begun. It's fair to say the Earth has never undergone such rapid species depletion and such rapid changes to the chemistry of the atmosphere in the 4 billion years life has been on the planet. The changes we have wrought on the planet already will reverberate through future history for tens of millennia to come. It really is an unprecedented global event. We really have no idea what will pan out over the coming centuries in terms of ecological collapse.

 

[bit_pattern]

LOL.
A climate model is it?

Boogedy boogedy boo!

If it walks like a denier, if it talks like a denier, if it DENIES being a denier; chances are its a denier.