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

[Christian Klippel]

Wow links to websites written in German without eve a summary on your part of what they say or how they support your claim that nameplate capacity of German wind farms exceed the entire power draw of the German power grid.

I'll take that as you saying "I got nothing"

Wow, a guy who claims that another guy, who was born and lives in Germany and follows the topic for many years now, says thing that "at the very least unsupported and contradicts the facts", suddenly complains about given proof in reports comming from, well, Germany?

Ever heard of things like Google translate, Babelfish, etc?

I already gave a summary when i wrote what i wrote, which in turn you claimed was "at the very least unsupported and contradicts the facts". Go back and read it again.

And you are lying. I never said "that nameplate capacity of German wind farms exceed the entire power draw of the German power grid". Unless you can clearly show me where i said that, that makes you a liar. For everyone to see.

But hey, just for the fun of it:

Can ANYONE HERE find anything that i have written here which says "that nameplate capacity of German wind farms exceed the entire power draw of the German power grid"?

Because sure as hell i can't remember to ever have written such a thing.

Greetings,

Chris

 

[Christian Klippel]

So which is it? How can wind power overload the grid if it's nameplate power output is less than the power required by the grid?

Are you playing stupid on purpose?
Are you lying on purpose?

For a last time: Wind is unpredictable. Conventional power plants can be regulated in capacity more or less at will. Demand A is projected. Conventional plants are ramped up to meet that demand. Wind comes in, causing the windmills to produce energy. The total fed in energy now is much more than needed. Conventional plants can't be ramped down so quick. So the grid is about to overload, because the grid operators are forced by law to feed in that wind energy. Before the net finally collapses due to overload, the windmills are cut off.

Got that now, or still feeling thick?

It's also telling that you conveniently ignore all the other points i made, and bring absolutely nothing up against them. Because you can't. Instead you lie about what i have said, so that in turn you can attack that strawman of yours.

Show me where i said what you claim i said. if you can't, you lie about that. It's that simple, really.
Unless you can come up with a quote where i said what you claim i said, or until you admit that you were wrong about that claim of yours, i'm done with you.


Greetings,

Chris

 

[Roboramma]

Don't know don't care. It isn't relevant to what we are discussing. that being people proposing nuclear as a complete one size fits all solution are appealing to technologies that don't rate higher than theoretical possibilities while those supporting renewable are appealing to well understood mature technology.

Renewables are not mature technology for the task to which we want to put them: ie. supplying a large percentage of total world energy. Why? Because we don't have mature storage technology.

Personally, on top of nuclear, I think we should be putting serious money into developing that storage technology. There are a number of options available, certainly none ideal, but that do have the potential to get the job done. Of course, we are putting money into that, but not to the degree that I think we ought to (and here is where I diverge from people like SoT and Christian). But to suggest that the technology is ready to take on that role at present is simply false.

 

[Roboramma]

Your evidence for the claim that nuclear fuel is inexhaustible is that someone one extracted a small amount of it from seawater. A pound of yellow-cake is a far cry from a an inexhaustible source of energy.

What do you think will stop other people from doing the same thing using similar techniques?

It's not just that "someone extracted it once", but that they did so for a certain price, that price is higher than the current price of mining uranium (on a /kg basis), but would not affect the price of energy from nuclear power on /KWh basis.

So, what do you think will stop people from scaling up those techniques? Shouldn't such scaling up make them less expensive, not more? The Uranium is there, and it's been demonstrated that the technique works.

 

[Christian Klippel]

Of course, we are putting money into that, but not to the degree that I think we ought to (and here is where I diverge from people like SoT and Christian).

Nope, i'm completely with you there. I too think that not enough money is put into research and development of suitable, large-scale-capable storage technology. One that is affordable and does not have massive losses, i might add.

Where we might differ in our opinions is where the currently available money should go. At least here in Germany the current way is (and was) to put the majority of that into subsidizing and building solar and wind. Only now they slowly get the hint that storage is sorely missing. Which leads to the problems with having a stable, dependable grid that i spoke of.

Dunno what your opinion on that is, but in my opinion they should have spent far, far less money into subsidizing/building solar an wind, but instead first solve the problem of storage. After all it's not exactly hot news that solar, and even more wind energy is highly "unstable", i.e. basically unpredictable.

That is not to say that they never should have spent money on solar/wind unless storage is available. After all, it still makes some sense in some places in the current state it is in. But before pushing the growth of that, as they do now and did for quite some years, they should have pushed storage to actually take up all that energy once installed.

As can be seen on the EEX, the result of their strategy so far is that we put lots of money into building renewables, then put even more money into paying those way-too-high fixed feed-in tariffs, only to have to give away the generated electricity not only for free, but actually paying money for people to take it. Plus, i might add, while at the same time _still_ paying the operator of a windfarm for that. So we are paying twice to get something produced that we don't use at all.

This is where that strategy has gone horribly wrong.

Greetings,

Chris

 

[Roboramma]

Thanks for that clarification Chris, I generally agree with all that.

 

[Christian Klippel]

Thanks for that clarification Chris, I generally agree with all that.

No worries, after all, no one can read minds and so some clarifications are needed from time to time.

To bring it back on topic a little, what i wrote above is also the reason why i'm opposed to Kyoto and think it is a good idea to get out of that.

Under Kyoto they want to go back to some fraction of the CO2 emission of some decade-something ago. While in itself that is a good idea, the problem is with the way they want to "enforce" that.

For us here in Germany that means huge costs that the public is forced to pay by all sorts of extra taxes and whatnot. So far it has resulted in the absurdities i explained so far. If you were luckily among the first ones to put solar panels on their roofs, you would get about 60 Euro-Cent per kW/h that you produce and feed into the grid. And, you would get that amount for 20 years guaranteed. OK, that has droppen by now, but it still was almost 29 Cent this year, later dropped to about 24 cent this year. To compare, the "Gestehungskosten", which is what it costs to produce one kW/h of electricity, for 2010 was around 9 Cent per kW/h for lignite coal power, around 10 Cent for black coal, around 11 Cent for natural gas and 10 to 12 Cent for nuclear. Nuclear was even cheaper, but at some time they decided to put a "Brennelementesteuer", a tax of fuel rods, in place that drove up those costs. So much for the claim of heavily subsidizing nuclear...

Now keep in mind that the feed-in-tariffs for renewables are fixed for 20 years. That means that someone who would now go online with solar and get those 24 Cents, that won't change for the next 20 years!

All that was thought out to reach the climate protection goals under Kyoto. And it is forced onto the people. That just can't be right, no matter how noble the goals are.

Then we have all sorts of extra taxes on fuel etc., required changes to insulate homes, even for ones that were built some years ago. Changes in production lines to get better efficiency household appliances, at a higher price of course. The list goes on and on.

Now contrast to the emission reductions actually accomplished by that in comparison to the steadily and fast growing increase of such reductions by other, emerging and growing nations. This is not to say that we should not put efforts into reducing our emissions, but making it a "no matter what it costs" thing while only having such a miniscule overall effect? That's just plain wrong.

Oh, and regarding renewables: The proponents always claim how cheap it is, etc. But then i have to question the sanity of all these electric companies and grid operators. I mean, if it really is that cheap, and at the same time also gets so heavily subsidized, why do they still operate so many conventional power plants? Are they all too stupid to use a calculator, or what? Sure, conventional plants get some subsidies in some form as well. But hey, getting three to seven times the price for a kW/h that it normally would cost you to produce it (in case of solar, depending on when you installed it), while at the same time having a 20 year guarantee on that, _plus_ the guarantee that the grid operators must feed in that energy and pay you for it anyways, even if you don't feed it in because the grid would be overloaded then?

Are they really _that_ stupid? If it would be so cheap and so easy, why don't they do it?

Greetings,

Chris