The Public Utilities Commission is giving NextEra a pass on its failure to install noise-reduction technology on wind-turbine blades at its Crowned Ridge Wind Farm in Grant and Codington counties. However, that waiver granted yesterday comes with tighter conditions than NextEra wanted:
Commissioners set a September 15 deadline for NextEra to finish installing the noise reducers. Commissioners also decided that, in the meantime, NextEra must shut down 16 turbines whenever wind speed exceeds six meters per second.
NextEra had wanted to shut off four.
Commissioners further required Tuesday that a sound standard will be enforced at a lower level than what their staff’s consultant recommended. The company also agreed to conduct two more rounds of sound testing [Bob Mercer, “Regulators Give Tight Waiver for S.D. Wind Farm,” KELO-TV, 2020.01.07].
Public Utilities Commissioner Gary Hanson wouldn’t have given NextEra any waiver; he expressed the greatest concern about the complaints neighbors raised. Commissioner Kristie Fiegen offered NextEra the greatest lenience, trying to ease the new restrictions that Hanson and Commissioner Chris Nelson supported.
Not being an engineer or even playing one on television, how do you install a noise dampener on a blade that size when it’s already on the turbine? Does someone crawl out onto the blade? Do you have to take the blade off, install the new piece, and then reinstall it? Maybe you have to just pay the fine, agree to not let it happen again, and maybe get some grace from a new set Commissioners?
No, someone does not crawl out onto the blade.
Mr. Lansing, what many Scientists recommend, but not grudznick, is that NextEra needs to put directional brown noise generators on the ground, arranged in a pentagram shape around the wind turbine towers, and focus them at an angle where the brown notes intersect about 10 meters below the top of each blade as it passes upwards through 35 degrees from horizontal. This will make noise dampeners entirely unnecessary. #4Science
My thought or question right away was why were these devices not placed on at the manufacture or on site prior to installing the blades in the air. Maybe these devices have to be installed after blade installation?
Probably many different locations, many different noise restrictions. So you build one design at the plant, and then make changes as needed.
Are these “noise reducers” really serrated edges for the blades?
grudz … I have every color noise, along with dozens of other noises in an app on my phone, for relaxation. I do find the brown to be the most relaxing, stress reducing, and pleasant.
~ I think NextEra could buy triple pane windows for anyone living near the loud mouth windmills, Bose noise cancelling headphones for when residents are gardening or tending to livestock, and a case of Scotch a month for each household. And … then give strict instructions not to climb out on the blades, no matter how much they become a bother. It might be noisy but it won’t matter much.
Porter, if your solution goes into effect, I’m moving in next to one of those turbines.
How about some nice solar panels instead Porter? That would cut down on the noise ;^).
Did everyone miss the fact that the PUC gave a waiver with conditions, because the PUC would not enforce the original conditions? What about the fact that during the waiver request hearing CRW again admitted to constructing 2.7 MW turbines. If a person looks at the CRW application to the PUC no where does CRW state it will use 2.7 MW turbines. In fact in several appendix’s CRW gives the 2.3 MW turbine model. Nelson and Fiegen still voted to give the waiver making the permitting process and the contract with SD lip service.
Yes, serrated edges, like owl feathers, which also make for quieter flying. We want those wind turbines to sneak up on people….
And, Robert, it appears people do crawl out—or more likely, up—onto those turbine blades:
Michael Barone, “Survey of Techniques for Reduction of Wind Turbine Blade Trailing Edge Noise,” Sandia National Laboratories, August 2011.
On the PUC website Docket 19-003 are photo’s from CRWII of “attached” serrated edge blades.
https://puc.sd.gov/commission/dockets/electric/2019/el19-003/attach10107.pdf
Zoom in; the serrated attachment is different from GE’s LNTE blade. As a farmer with livestock, I do not see owl feathers, I see saw blades glued on. I see sections of saw blades that can fly off at 150-180 mph.
Bob … Solar panels rock. Not to be negative but the average days with sun where you live is 200. (The tourism bureau where I live emphasizes that our average is 300.) The wind blows 325 days a year in ESD. ps It blows all night, too.
Technically the Sun does shine all night ;^).
Demand is lower at night…that is one of the challenges with wind and why it would be better if we had more energy storage. But that isn’t stopping us from building more wind turbines. I guess they can curtail them overnight, but if we are not going to store it, and the demand is not there, then have a dedicated application or two that can do something useful on an intermittent basis.
If you want to avoid noise altogether, and you don’t want to do nuclear, then solar plus backup is an option. You may end up burning more natural gas though. The other option is to get yourself a big sandbox, and then pound that sand when there isn’t enough power.
You could even use the tailings from the mining of the critical elements for renewables instead of sand ;^). That would be an example of downcycling.
I stand corrected Cory! But do you want that job?
You just told a lie, Bob. You can’t call it a mistake because you’ve been told dozens of time it’s not true. That makes you a damn liar, teacher. “if we are not going to store it” Ahem, we are going to and we already are. Try again, from the top.
So you are saying that everybody can have 24-7 power whenever they want it with just wind and solar, both now and in the future? Wow….I wonder why we are not doing that then?
I have no doubt you want more energy storage. Wanting something and making it happen are two different things.
Figure out how many wind turbines and solar panels and batteries you actually need to replace fossil fuels today. Then multiply that number by 6 or 7 because you will re-power those energy farms several times over and throw those items away. Then figure out the amount of resources necessary to do that in a once-through cycle, and that will get you 100 years or so.
Then compare that number with what we mine today. Good luck!
I read what you’re saying, between the lines, Bob. You think nuclear power has come and gone but you get paid to promote it, so what the heck. Take the money and run. Good for you. They’re none the wiser, huh?
The good news is that we do have options to have more renewables while not depending on having enough energy storage to do what you want.
At the end of the day, we should want renewables, efficiency, energy storage, nuclear energy, and carbon capture to compete with one another.
I’m sorry that you feel you have to resort to accusing me of being a paid stooge, instead of being open-minded that nuclear could help renewables achieve the clean energy future that we all want.
How are you going to do the mining and recycling without emitting carbon, for example?
Doc is trolling again. Spain is getting renewable solar 24/7. Here it is again doc. Cognitive impairment is sad, but willing impairment is trolling.https://www.climatechangenews.com/2014/05/01/spains-solar-salt-opens-door-to-24-7-clean-electricity/
From your article:
“The plant is small by power station standards, producing 20 megawatts of electricity – enough for 25,000 homes, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30,000 tonnes a year.”
Moreover, the SAME ARTICLE states that an area of 185 hectares is needed for those 20 MW.
One square mile is about 259 hectares. A 1000 MW nuclear facility covers 1.3 square miles, or 337 hectares. The equivalent land area to replace the power from a 1000 MW nuclear facility with this operation is
185 hectares per power plant * (1000/20) power plants = 9,250 hectares.
Oh my goodness!!!!
Spain’s electricity consumption today is 239.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year.
A 20 MW power plant running 24-7 will generate 0.1752 billion kilowatt-hours per year. I assume 100% capacity.
That means to generate the electrical power that Spain uses, you need 1,367 power plants. That will require 252,895 hectares of land at 185 hectares per plant.
A 1000 MW nuclear plant generates 50 * 0.1752 = 8.76 billion kilowatt-hours per year running 24-7. Or you need 27.34 nuclear plants to produce all that electricity, and that will require 9,205 hectares.
So in the same land area you can either replace the power from 1 nuclear plant with 50 solar-thermal plants, or replace ALL of Spain’s electricity with 27 nuclear plants.
Amazing.
Oh your goodness indeed. Ya got’s to crawl before ye can run. This proves what you hate though doc, these projects work. Computers used to be as big as multi-storied buildings, but now, they are much smaller and more powerful. Renewable energy will soon power most of Egypt as well, with a huge solar farm that now exists and more coming. Booyah!
“Reporting from Cairo — In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world’s first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field.
World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman’s dream of replicating his “sun power plant” on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world’s dependence on coal.” https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-egypt-green-power-20180730-story.html
Remember, you need 50 of these to replace 1 nuclear plant. And you will need to re-power each of those 6-7 times before the whole thing is decommissioned.
Computers are not solar cells. Computers gained their advantages by making the components smaller. But now heat is the issue that prevents further substantial progress in making computers smaller and faster. Which is one reason quantum computers are of interest.
Solar cells that are used commercially are primarily silicon based because they are cheaper. And the efficiencies of silicon solar cells are not changing that much…there is no such Moore’s Law for commercial solar. We are finding ways to manufacture said solar cells ever more cheaply however, like with 3d-printing.
At the end of the day, 20 MW is better than 0 MW. However, 20 MW of solar-thermal and 980 MW of natural gas to replace a 1000 MW nuclear plant is not something to crow about.
Please sir, spare me. We don’t want those poison factories else we would be finishing the failed ones that are already started. At the end of the day, there is night.
But, there is a Moore’s Law in commercial solar, Bob. Why do you try to mislead the layman? It must have been easier for you to BS your way through your job before GOOGLE, huh?
-Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times this week that solar was following a Moore’s Law trajectory, promising to deliver power cheaper than fossil fuels in the relatively near future. David Crane, CEO of energy behemoth NRG, and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post made similar statements, as Eric Wesoff of Greentech Media points out.
– In computing, betting on Moore’s Law means changing your usage to appreciate that processing power and storage will be cheap. Applying Moore’s Law in solar then the safe bet in terms of behavioural reactions is not to react. Within a decade or two, energy will be socially as cheap as it is privately as cheap now. That means that changing habits for environmental austerity is not the way to go.
https://digitopoly.org/2011/11/07/moores-law-in-solar-energy/
Check this out on lithium indestructible batteries we now have,
“Lithium-ion batteries have shaped the modern world. These power pouches are at the heart of most rechargeable electronics, from cell phones and laptops to vapes and electric cars. But while they’re great at holding a charge and have a high energy density, lithium-ion batteries aren’t without their problems. Their reliance on toxic, flammable materials means the smallest defect can result in exploding gadgets.
A team of researchers led by physicists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory believed a safer battery was possible, and for the past five years they have been developing a lithium-ion battery that’s seemingly immune to failure. The rugged battery they first unveiled in 2017, working with researchers at the University of Maryland, can be cut, shot, bent, and soaked without an interruption in power. Late last year, the Johns Hopkins team pushed it further, making it fireproof and boosting its voltages to levels comparable with a commercial product. ”
Boy, doesn’t that make you wish for more science in our schools to discover stuff and just to keep up with it.
Iceland is the only country in the world that can claim to obtain 100% of its electricity and heat from renewable sources. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/apr/22/renewableenergy.alternativeenergy
We are doing cool things too, like these wind chargers and maybe some solar in Pine Ridge country. South Dakota missed the boat when they failed to elect Henry Red Cloud.
Porter — you are not doubling efficiency every so many years. So the land use issue still remains.
We have been reducing the costs of solar since 1980….in part because the environmental and labor laws in China are not the same as in the USA, in part because there have been advances in manufacturing.
Jerry — We could have similar geothermal resources. However, you guys opposed the deep borehole drilling that would be required to access those resources in South Dakota. We could have tested boreholes for geothermal, and used the drilling data to inform other purposes without any waste (nuclear or chemical) coming to the state. Oh well.
You can make lithium batteries more robust. Making them more robust probably means you can use them longer, which reduces the inputs and outputs for the lifecycle. But there has to be enough lithium to deliver the TOTAL energy storage you want.
This is not possible without extracting lithium from the earth or applying the harsh chemistry for recycling.
It is more likely that we will have a variety of batteries for different purposes, and we will have more batteries than today. Some, not all, will use lithium.
But I would not count on having all the energy storage we could ever want…. intermittent generation will still be required (as we do with natural gas, but hopefully without as much carbon in the future).
Boreholes are just a cover to store poison from nukes. A real borehole would be about 10 foot deep for geo thermal heating and cooling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ZGBhy48YI
Now, think of the beauty of a wind farm and how proud it should make us feel that we are providing not only renewable energy, but also jobs! To hamstring Nextera on a technicality sends the wrong message to developers.
“A real borehole would be about 10 foot deep for geo thermal heating and cooling.”
Wrong. That only covers heating and cooling for a house.
You need much higher temperatures to generate the steam needed for utility-scale power. Those temperatures are only available deep underground in South Dakota.
Yes…jobs where you have to crawl out on the turbine blade. Sign up everybody over 50 who is transitioning from a different profession. No problem there…
It is a good question as to why don’t they install the best noise reduction technology from the get-go instead of putting it on afterwards. It is OK if the noise level happens to be lower for a particular area than it needs to be. That would be a good message to send to developers.
Right! You get more jobs from putting geothermal in individual houses. Also, Mitchell, South Dakota teaches wind technology. So there are good paying jobs for workers.
https://www.mitchelltech.edu/programs/on-campus/energy-production-transmission/wind-turbine-technology
50 year old folks should not be disrespected because of their age. Many could transition into wind energy because they have 100% placement for jobs. A 50 year old, that is tired of whatever field he is in (including soy or corn) could take a serious look at this renewable energy field with wind. What a message to send to developers indeed. Jobs jobs jobs means money money money.
6.4 TRILLION DOLLARS on wars and military action since 9/11, just so we can have oil to pollute our water and air. We need to use a fraction of that for renewable wind and solar energy to not only stop killing people with bullets but to stop killing people with pollution.
“There are 200,000 US troops stationed at hundreds of bases in countries and territories outside of the US. Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to remove US troops from the Middle East, the number of troops in the region has increased.
Since 9/11, American taxpayers have spent $6.4 trillion on wars and military action in the Middle East and Asia, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. And according to US central command, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 US troops in the Middle East.
Glenn Carle, former CIA deputy national intelligence officer and assistant professor at Boston College, explains that some host countries pay substantial amounts to maintain a US military presence while other countries do not necessarily make the same kinds of formal contributions.”
When you factor in the private mercenaries and other private contractors, we ain’t getting much for our money.
The State of New York in particular is a hot spot (pardon the pun) for the installation of geothermal heating systems. If you want to reduce carbon emitted by natural gas from home heating, then I agree that more geothermal heating systems are in order. You will find a lot of heating oil being used instead in the Northeast, so displacing that with electricity reduces our dependence on oil.
The problem with geothermal today is the large upfront cost of the installation (either vertical or horizontal installations for the piping).
We are not using oil for making electricity. To really offset the use of oil in our economy, you have to transition us away from oil to an alternative energy source in transportation. That means operating vehicles that run on fuel cells (hydrogen), biofuel, or electricity.
We do not have to wait to make that transition….but it will be expensive. People need to get new cars, and there needs to be new infrastructure for hydrogen refueling or recharging stations. The good news is that we will need nuclear to generate the total amount of energy that will be required without emitting carbon.
Whats possible…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIguTRN7Rk
All the things you can do when someone writes a big check to help buy an island.
Almost all of their grid is wind, solar, hydro….but not all. The population is pretty low too…that helps.
Helps also that they do not have heavy industry, and they do not have cars either. All of those other things, computers for example, are not made on the island.
If that island had a professor and a movie star, they could make their own computer out of coconut shells, milk and fibers plus a bra/g string for the movie star and a bowling ball for rec time.
I know where I can find a professor….
Just sayin……
Notice that they got along without electrickery just fine before they got it. Soooo, could get by with less….its possible.
Soooo, if the price would go way up on electric power to pay for storing all that nuclear waste into perpetuity and the damage done by the green house gasses people could survive.
When that is possible, great. But the amount of space on that island is not possible for everybody…soon there will be 10 billion people on earth.
Do we have the arable land just in the USA for 300 million farmers to have the same land as farmers have access to today, and/or with the same population density as on that island? I don’t think so.
With regard to nuclear waste, there used to be a surcharge on electricity for nuclear waste storage and disposal, and then the government didn’t follow through with the disposal. But there is a fund that has built up over the years which in theory could be used for such a purpose.
Furthermore, opponents of nuclear would rather have a million year issue as opposed to turning it into a couple hundred year problem. Of course, that would allow us to build more nuclear power plants to complement our renewables. No, 100% renewables wouldn’t happen, but we would have a lot more renewables than we do today.
I favor producing all our energy as clean energy, whenever we want it…instead of marching everybody into the energy desert.
It is possible to limit reproduction. Population growth has fallen before by acceptable means.
Remind me of where you were gonna get lucky with a DOE test nuke waste borehole in Eastern SD and blunder into a geothermal hotspot?? What carbon requirements will be entailed in the thousands of new nuclear reactors you will be building. Will waste be dry-stored safely at every site?
Doc, Doc, Doc…. pivot, damnit!! :)
Dr. McT said: “With regard to nuclear waste, there used to be a surcharge on electricity for nuclear waste storage and disposal, and then the government didn’t follow through with the disposal. But there is a fund that has built up over the years which in theory could be used for such a purpose.”
The fund has been nearly totally depleted at this point. The utilities have been suing the federal government because it failed to find an adequate site and build a repository by the date. The government has been paying the utilities off over a couple decades now, and using that fund to pay the utilities to store their radioactive wastes on-site. Dry cask storage is probably adequate for a while.
Leslie,
We will reach 10 billion people on the planet…even with extensive family planning. I hope you are not advocating for eliminating some of that population outside of family planning. If you are not, then ALL of those people deserve access to our standard of living (at least in regards to access to energy….what they use it for and how they use it will be different).
That will not be possible without nuclear energy and renewables together. In a world where there is hardly enough energy storage (nor the mining to support it), nor is there enough carbon capture, we need to use what we know how to do.
Therefore, the environmentalist in all of us must therefore address the waste management issues of both nuclear AND renewables. The former has more of a radioactivity issue, the latter has both a volume issue. The waste from nuclear today is contained in a ceramic pellet. Waste from renewables is not.
The borehole testing was just drilling. Opponents could have taken lots of data via environmental monitoring to show that nothing was being brought in. Opponents thought that if favorable results were found, that it would somehow be approved for waste storage.
Unfortunately, you cannot be for science if you shut down the science before it happens.
I hope you will agree that Democrats are for having more facts, not less facts.
At worst, data from the drilling could have been used to improve the deep borehole method of isolation….which could also benefit the isolation of toxic chemicals from renewable and battery wastes too.
South Dakota has some of the geothermal issues that make it less suitable for that type of deep borehole storage for the defense wastes (the wastes of interest for this technique did not include uranium or plutonium, but they were still radioactive in nature). However, those same issues make South Dakota a better candidate for geothermal energy using the same borehole technology. I’m waiting for you to pivot and support geothermal energy in South Dakota. Pivot!!!
Donald,
What the actual monies have been used for is a good question….the same could be asked regarding the monies collected for other things like social security. But in theory, if they have collected a certain amount of money, it is not outside the mainstream to expect that sum to be allocated toward a better form of waste management.
Dry cask storage is OK. But relying upon a once-through cycle and dry cask storage means we do not recover the more than 90% of the energy that remains in the spent fuel. Avoiding those kinds of processes means that the volume to be stored will be larger than it has to be, and the heat load will be larger.
Heat load is an issue for underground storage. The underground storage area must be larger because the items being stored must be further apart from one another. They must be further apart from one another to avoid generating higher temperatures. You want to avoid higher temperatures because then any ground water that may get in there could evaporate.
It is a defense-in-depth issue. If the container were to fail, steam would be one way of transporting radionuclides. If you can avoid the groundwater in the first place, that also helps to eliminate that particular pathway. That is one reason why dry areas tend to be of interest for that kind of storage.
Because we are not recycling, the radioactivity in the waste is higher, so the cost of digging out a larger underground storage area is also higher. Recycling would reduce both the volume and the radioactivity that would require isolation.
In your accounting you should therefore include the higher cost of the once through cycle for permanent storage, as well as the loss of benefits from not accessing the clean energy that remains in the waste.
Good news…we also have a once-through cycle for renewables today. There are no heat load issues, but the lifetime for chromium, lead, and cadmium to be chemically toxic is infinite (unless you bust these guys apart in a reactor or with an accelerator first). There are still good elements that could be recovered in renewable wastes instead of mining more of them as we are right now.
Dr. McT: The money in the radioactive waste fund was used to pay off the utilities, because Congress eff-ed up by choosing a site for a disposal site that was problematic, and Republicans kept insisting on continuing the screw-Nevada approach, rather than engage in the science necessary to find a better site or a better approach. I don’t agree with nuke waste recycling, because it actually creates more nuclear waste, not less. The MOX process has had massive federal subsidies, but it is vastly over budget and Congress is, I believe, giving up on it. A positive of recycling would be to drop the price of uranium and kill nearly all uranium mining. I’d rather just ban nuclear power, and then figure out how to safely dispose of the wastes we should never have generated in the first place.
Having a dedicated reactor that simply consumes more of the old waste is one option to reducing the waste issue. I note that Canada uses a reactor design that runs on natural uranium, and the percentage of uranium in spent fuel today is higher than that. The issue is the other fission by-products that remain in the spent fuel. Some of them can absorb neutrons and remove them from a future fission process. But that just requires some engineering for a different reactor.
The newer fuels that are accident tolerant will be more resistant to damage produced by heat and radiation, and could be better used flexibly with renewables (we could ramp them up and down today with today’s fuel, but that is not generally done).
Those fuels can stay in the reactor longer. Today we use the fuel for 2-3 years, then ultimately place it in dry cask storage.
If we can get to building the newer designs, they will run at higher temperatures, be more efficient, generate less waste, and will recycle much of the fuel in-house.
Because we have avoided nuclear, we have burned more coal in the last 50 years, and now we are going to burn more natural gas. That is the direct result of current policy promoted by various anti-nuclear groups.
If you are concerned about radioactivity, then I don’t know why you are happy that coal has released its naturally-occurring radioactivity (including trace amounts of uranium) into the environment along with its carbon. If you are concerned about carbon, natural gas is going to be the primary source of our carbon emissions in the next 50 years.
One option is to not do nuclear, emit a lot more carbon, and not have 24-7 access to power for all of the global population. I would rather include nuclear as a key component of our future mix. I am fine with having nuclear, renewables, energy storage, and fossil fuels with carbon capture tech compete with each other in such a mix.
I say first of all, for green house gas reduction, plant some trees!
Next, pay little people for the renewable clean power they produce the same as they pay big power producers. If there is a glut of solar power in the middle of the day and the power companies refuse to pay for it make it free to citizens of that power district. Trust me, they will find a use. Similarly, raise the price of power when there is a peak that is difficult to overcome as there may be with the increase in renewable’s.
Next. tax carbon polluting plants and those that produce nuclear waste that will have a cost into perpetuity. Those taxes would be applied to come up with better energy solutions.
Seems logical to me…..
Adding more wind and solar just means the peaks and valleys will get bigger at the same times they do today. The “solution” today is to pass along that excess somewhere else, or turn off the solar panel or wind turbine when the excess occurs. The former means that the cost you recover is less (supply is larger than the demand), and the latter means you do not get anything for the available energy.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Particularly if you want these items to pay for themselves without subsidies…..hard to do when they make less money or no money.
The better solution is finding new applications and developing manufacturing processes that are fine with intermittent energy, even with some limited storage to ameliorate the changes. We should all agree on that.
I have long advocated for secondary heating and cooling, but how about pulling carbon from the air instead of pushing the excess energy onto the grid? Nuclear could help with that too.
Shouldn’t we also be taxing renewables for the wind turbine blades that do not get recycled, or the cadmium in solar panels that remains in perpetuity? Or other elements in batteries? Or the mining of those elements when they are not recycled?
For nuclear, you are in error with regard to the perpetuity argument. First, the radionuclides will decay. Second, we could be consuming our nuclear fuel for longer before it is removed from the reactor. Third, we could be recycling the final waste product. Fourth, we could be using nuclear science (either a reactor or an accelerator) to bust apart radionuclides into daughter nuclei that have shorter half-lives (which means the radioactivity ends sooner).
And yes, I am planting trees and flowers and grasses too….don’t forget the bird and butterfly habitats.
Cut the military by 80%, Medicare for all. Now you have the funding to provide employment and the means to install energy efficient homes with their own solar power sources. Get the hell out of the Middle East to allow the people there to have their own choices on how they want to live.
McTaggart is deceptive and misleading, as usual. Pointing out his departures from the facts have never led to a change in his approach, so why bother? Anyone who’s read him knows what they’re reading, already.
Energy efficient homes with some capability for solar and/or storage is part of the solution. Things are even better if you can right-size things so that you end up pulling less from the grid (and/or do secondary heating/cooling).
Porter, must be fun throwing up one’s hands again instead of solving problems. There are items that need to be addressed for renewables regarding the beginning and the end of its life cycle. I keep showing how nuclear can help renewables in this regard…you’re welcome.
The items that need to be addressed are being addressed. You are proven wrong.
Really? Is this all the recycling that we will ever get? You mean the toxic elements in the wastes are being isolated from the biosphere?
No benefit in explaining it to you, again. Your negativity bias has clouded your reasoning ability. You’re welcome, though. Have a nice weekend. Hope it gets above freezing soon.
Well, perhaps not free during peak power production but very low cost with a higher rate during peak demand and low production periods would do a lot to even out the peaks and valleys. I can see folks charging their electric commuter vehicles at work during the peak of solar output rather than over night if they had an incentive to do so. Plenty other things that would come up as well.
Let the little folks get paid fairly for renewable power. Higher rate if they can provide more power during peak demand. I can see methane digester’s on hog buildings storing their gas for running a generator during evening peak demands. Plenty more will pop up if there is an economic incentive.
BTW, I recently looked at a chart of California’s power production. Nuclear was a straight flat line….did nothing for evening out the peaks and valleys.
I think your argument that these old turbine blades are such a environmental hazard is all wet. They are held together by a flammable compound and could be incinerated to provide heat for one process or another just as much of our garbage that is filling the land fills could. The pretty harmless glass would be all that is left over. There are ethanol plants right now that are using old pallets and corn stalk bales for process heat. Why not turbine blades?
What I’m saying, Doc, is that if there is no incentive to do anything other than what is being done we will continue the status quo.
I’m quite sure that if the federal government had not agreed to accept all nuclear waste from power plants when nuclear power was first proposed that not one power plant would have ever been built. The industry would not have been viable because of the waste issue.
Porter…..True advocates of renewables know the start and the end of the life cycles are a problem. And they want to fully address the problem, not imagine that those issues do not exist, or that we have already solved the problem.
“Nuclear was a straight flat line….did nothing for evening out the peaks and valleys.”
Clyde,
I agree that as we use more and more renewables, our use of nuclear energy needs to change. We could be using it more to boost renewables when they are not as plentiful. The newer reactors, if not the older reactors with the newer fuels, will do that load-following better.
If we continue to use nuclear in a baseload capacity (because it may be cheaper to do so with current reactors), then we should switch off to providing energy for a dedicated application when the supply/demand curve calls for it. That could be charging car batteries, providing secondary heat, generating hydrogen, desalinating water, or pulling carbon out of the air.
My argument is that backing up renewables today means more natural gas. That is the status quo. So without any changes, the carbon grows as the renewables grow. Either you do carbon capture to account for the gas (which we are not doing), you do a lot of energy storage (which is not available in bulk and faces supply issues), or you do more nuclear, or heck, why not do all three?
Burning turbine blades emits carbon. You lose your carbon savings when that happens unless you have carbon capture. That would reduce the bulk volume that is needed to be isolated, but you have a larger carbon problem. Thus, carbon capture is probably going to be necessary.
If we could do carbon capture, then I would be happy to store said carbon in wind turbine blades or other means for energy efficiency. Those would be excellent choices of what to do with that carbon. But I would be happier if the carbon capture were powered without emitting any new carbon, and nuclear can help in that regard :^).
For all the constipation surrounding the nuclear waste issue, please note that burning turbine blade waste and other e-waste simply releases the naturally-occurring radioisotopes in them into the environment. Nuclear is not allowed to do that.
If you don’t like nuclear waste, then find ways to reduce it. Wishing it away will not make the current waste disappear. If you wait a million years, it will disappear by radioactive decay, but that is not necessary.
Not having a solution to nuclear waste means that we emit more carbon from coal and gas than we have to. So I disagree about your statement that no nuclear would be approved, because at the time bulk baseload capacity that was available 24-7 at a low operational cost was desired. Solar and wind were not options at all.
It will cost more to reduce nuclear waste, and it will cost more to reduce renewable waste. But our inaction is not due to a tech issue, it is due to choices that people make…and sometimes the cost is definitely a factor.
Here ya go Clyde, solar and storage, not here though.
” A new form of combined solar power generation and storage is being developed for the UK.
It couples thin, flexible, lighter solar sheets with energy storage to power buildings or charge vehicles off-grid.
The company behind it, Solivus, plans to cover the roofs of large industrial buildings with the solar fabric.
These include supermarket warehouses and delivery company distribution centres.
But Solivus also plans to manufacture solar units or “arcs” for home use.
The aim is to create local, renewable energy, to give people and business their own power supply and help the UK towards its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50717446
Jerry: Surprising what people come up with when they have an incentive!
McT: With your reasoning I think we have some solutions. For nuclear waste lets turn the indefinite cost of storing it back over to the utility’s. Why the heck is the taxpayers stuck with this. In the pocket of big energy legislator’s dumped all these cost’s on our back. Lets dump them back on the utility’s.
The energy storage helps, but it will not be sufficient. I note that energy storage would be terrific for nuclear energy….so if it were available at the scales that you desire, it would be suitable for nuclear energy too. We could run the current reactors flat out 24-7, and send the excesses to storage. This is why there is a renewed interest in generating hydrogen for fuel cells from today’s nuclear power.
Just think what would be possible with nuclear + renewables + energy storage. There is common ground in delivering all of our energy as clean energy, and delivering cleaner air would reduce healthcare costs. There is also common ground in recycling the critical elements, which would enhance environmental sustainability.
Unfortunately, the rate at which we demand power is not the same as the rate that a battery can provide it. So you need the capacity to provide bulk power, and the capability to respond faster than the supply/demand curve does. That is not what occurs today.
Since power is not being generated in response to a demand, adding more solar will result in larger peaks and deeper valleys on the grid if we do not have a plan for addressing said excesses or said deficits.
Furthermore, we do not have the supply for either the solar cells or the energy storage at the levels you desire without significantly increasing the mining and recycling of the critical elements.
This is why I have been insisting, if not demanding, that the front end and the back end of the life cycle for renewables need to be addressed as the middle of that life cycle progresses.
“For nuclear waste lets turn the indefinite cost of storing it back over to the utility’s”
I could ask the same question regarding subsidies for renewable energy. Right now to avoid issues on the grid with too much solar, you must curtail them, or you push the electricity onto somebody else (which means you deliver the electricity for a lower price, if not pay them to take the excess). When there is no sun, the solar farm sits unused while something else provides the electricity. Today that is primarily natural gas and coal.
So essentially we pay upfront for the solar farm to sit there without generating income most of the time. We don’t have to wait for energy storage to mature to find other uses for the excesses when they occur. If homes heated by natural gas could be provided with secondary heating and cooling by excess renewable electricity, you may be able to reduce the gas that must be consumed (for example).
At the end of the day, it is better for both nuclear waste management and renewable waste management to extract as much value from each of those waste streams prior to any isolation of a final waste product. I hope everybody here will agree with that aspiration.
Clyde, making utility company’s pay for the disposal of their waste, makes perfect sense.That may be the only way forward to truly renewable energy for each home and business and it would open more jobs jobs jobs.
Jerry….the utility will simply pass along those costs to the consumer. The government said they would deal with it, so they should deal with it. Remember, the utilities already collected fees from consumers over several decades for the disposal that went unused for its intended purpose.
The costs of renewable wastes will also be passed along to the consumer, either directly in a managed plan, or in a delayed fashion…when the bills come due for dealing with large volumes of waste and the access they have to the biosphere. The latter will be accelerated if we choose to burn the waste to reduce the volume. Smoke is a great delivery system for many things.
Is there a fee being collected by the utilities to pay for the waste management of renewables? Would that not “make sense”?
These statements are misleading and distracting.
…the utility will simply pass along those costs to the consumer.
…the costs of renewable wastes will also be passed along to the consumer.
~ Facing the costs of dealing with nuclear waste, utility companies always take the better option. Shut down nuclear generators and move on to a sensible solution of diminishing natural gas dependence with a continually increasing array of renewables.
If we have our own systems, then the utility company’s can charge what they will as there will not be anyone buying.
The waste management for renewables should be paid for. Nuclear waste management should also be paid for.
If you have your own system, eventually you will replace the solar cells and the batteries. You may do that several times (including if there is hail damage). You will have to pay for that. I doubt that leaving solar cells and batteries out in back exposed to the elements will be looked upon favorably by those championing clean water.
Shutting down the nuclear plants is not the better option if you want to fight climate change. This will mean the carbon-free nuclear power gets replaced by carbon-emitting natural gas. This is because we use nuclear today in a baseload capacity (i.e. it is more or less constant). Solar and wind do not provide the baseload.
Moreover, shutting down the nuclear plants does nothing for the waste that is there. The waste has nowhere else to go, so that kind of approach really backfires. Those costs of maintaining and securing the facility do not disappear.
Actually, those costs of maintaining and securing the facility do not continue to increase.
Moscow Mitch is weeping. “The East Kentucky utilities Kentucky Utilities and Louisville Gas & Electric have applied for permission from state regulators to buy electricity from a 100-megawatt solar facility. The utilities, which ordinarily purvey power from dirty coal (80% of their generation), were pressured by Toyota and Dow, who in turn are trying to please their consumers and investors. The power of US public opinion, which has shifted dramatically in favor of renewables, is thus on display even in Moscow Mitch McConnell’s home state.:
It must be quite a world in which labor costs do not increase, health care costs do not increase, technologies do not need upgrading, supply costs stay fixed, and no repairs are ever necessary.
Plus there are other things that they could be doing on that land but cannot as long as the waste is there. And since the plant is shutdown, the city and county and state have lost a major generator of taxes in the community.
Coal will not necessarily provide the load-following that gas does, so I suspect that they also have to burn gas along with the solar. You have to be careful about these arrangements, because usually this means that the carbon is still emitted, just that there are carbon credits floating around.
If the large companies actually used solar power in their operations, that would be something. But if this is a carbon credit trading scheme, then they may not have changed a thing.
Mr. jerry, what is this “we” to which you refer? You have a mouse in your pocket, or do you mean the grudz-jerry power consortium*
* currently taking in large investments, send them to Mr. jerry, into our pilot perpetual motion harnessing energy machine, of which grudznick has a miniature version displayed on my desktop for visitors to witness
Please don’t send me any money for investing for thee or we… https://vimeo.com/370301605
Instead, you can invest directly without using your’s truly as a middleman. https://www.solovis.com/
Think of this, had you invested in Tesla, not that long ago, you would have been able to actually purchase biscuits and gravy at the Mud Hole instead of those instant potatoes.
Walt Hickey, editor of Numlock News, tells us Alberta’s profligate generosity to coal, oil and gas may finally be getting a bit tiresome:
Orphaned Wells
Canadian province Alberta is beginning to reckon with the long-lasting impacts of being home to extractive industries, one of which is orphan wells. These are oil and gas wells whose owners have gone bankrupt, and thus abandoned responsibility for ensuring they stay safe. An audit found 3,406 orphan wells in Alberta, typically on the land of rural landowners, still just a fraction of the 94,000 inactive wells that pockmark the province. These will be the responsibility of taxpayers if nobody else is responsible, and as a result they’re working on ways to prevent more wells from becoming orphaned in the first place. The total estimated cleanup cost for every oil and gas well in Alberta is $30 billion. By comparison, the Alberta Energy Regulator has $227 million in financial security.
Inayat Singh, CBC News
Why would we need nuclear power if our energy problems can be solved another way? And why not do our best to avoid a power source that has made large parts of this earth uninhabitable and is piling up a waste that is a poison to all living things for 10’s of thousands of years?
Just asking….
Electricity to kill weeds? Oh hell ya. Beats glyphosate hands down and is environmentally cool. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50711566
Wow, Jerry, that is interesting. My wife has used boiling water to get rid of weeds in her flower garden as long as I have known her….her mother did the same.
Supposedly glyphosate causes non Hodgkin lymphoma. Rate for that disease is six times the general population in farmers. Spose there is a connection? EPA went out of their way to tell the general population that glyphosate does not cause cancer…..heard it on the radio….had to be the truth.
Clyde….
You don’t have to keep nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years. You can recycle it, you can convert long-lived isotopes into shorter-lived isotopes. It should be a couple hundred year issue, not a tens of thousands of year issue. If fusion worked, the time scale would then be equivalent.
But we have that long-term issue at the moment because people do not want nuclear energy to grow to the levels necessary to actually help renewables and storage defeat climate change.
I still don’t see any reticence on your part regarding the lack of protection to the biosphere from the metals and toxic chemicals in the unisolated and unrecovered renewable waste streams. Or the naturally-occurring radionuclides that they contain. Hmmmm…..
Which is unfortunate, because there is no half-life regarding the toxicity of metals like cadmium or lithium or the rare earths. My math skills tell me that infinity is a lot longer than tens of thousands of years. Maybe Cory can check me on that one :^).
You could bust those metals apart with nuclear science. You could provide the process heat needed for recycling renewables or generating hydrogen or processing biofuels without emitting carbon with nuclear energy.
But that would mean nuclear energy would do something beneficial for renewables. And that would mean we would benefit from removing a lot of the carbon from the renewable and energy storage life cycles.
Just a few hundred years?? No big deal, let our grandchildren and their children deal with it….just like we’re doing now. Shallow thinking that has not materialized since the 1940’s. Hey, there is always Chubby Rapture, that’ll take care of it…
The last time I checked, infinity was greater than 200 years. Silly me.
My point is that you are not going to change the chemistry for the element that poses an environmental issue unless you change the number of protons in its nucleus. Otherwise you have to deal with the chemistry in some fashion.
McT, I will concede that if Thorium reactors can be made to work there MAY be a place for nuclear. Not till all other options are utilized. Of course if a Fusion reactor could ever be made to work then maybe that as well. Still saying that because of the waste issue nuclear should be the most expensive power out there. Followed by green house producing power in order of the pollution they produce. A tax structure could decide that and yes big power will try to pass it on to the consumer and the consumer, as Jerry noted, will require far less of it.
Sorry, but we have to do all things at the same time. By the time you get around to believing that nuclear is needed, we will have emitted a lot more carbon….if not too much carbon..from natural gas. Worse yet, we will not have the expertise to implement that solution.
That is like asking you to run in a marathon tomorrow. Yeah, I guess you could try….but you will have a better outcome if you have been training for several years prior to the race.
Nuclear is expensive to build and cheap to operate today. We do need to make it cheaper to build and still cheap to operate. Renewables are cheap to build and more expensive to operate.
I am not advocating for proceeding with nuclear only…and then only begrudingly try renewables and storage. I am advocating for doing renewables and storage correctly while growing nuclear to address climate change. If renewables and storage do not generate enough power when we want it, then we can and should compensate with nuclear.
Yes, silly you, from you. “It should be a couple hundred year issue, not a tens of thousands of year issue”.
Anyway, I hope we can agree that a couple hundred year problem is better than a 10 thousand year problem.
Here is an article from Iowa about the nature of the wind turbine blade waste. It is not that people don’t want to solve the waste management issue, but we’ve built them without having a full plan in place. And we are still building them without a plan in place.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2019/11/06/few-recycling-options-wind-turbine-blades-head-iowa-landfills/3942480002/
“With older wind farms getting a power face-lift, Iowa landfills are just beginning to accept unwanted blades for disposal.
Landfill operators thought the composite blades, cut in 40-foot or larger sections, could be readily crushed and compacted. “But blades are so strong — because they need to be strong to do their job — they just don’t break,” said Amie Davidson, an Iowa Department of Natural Resources solid waste supervisor. ”
“There wasn’t a plan in place to say, ‘How are we going to recycle these?’ ‘How are we going to reduce the impact on landfills?'” said Rowland, director of the Landfill of North Iowa near Clear Lake.
“One way or another, we have to deal with it as a state. They’ve been promoted. They’ve been built,” he said. “In our opinion, there needs to be a way to handle the waste that’s derived from them.”
Doc, why don’t you and your students address this Clear Lake, Iowa thingy…without trying to nuke it. Blades cannot be that strong that they cannot be cut else why would you recycle them?
Ultra-fast pyrolysis and solvolysis. Recovered products: bio-oil
Cut them into pieces and use the pieces as building materials for various projects.
Here is what I’m speaking of for your project. Clear Lake would probably send you some seed bucks to solve this for them.
“An innovative solution has also been developed to recycle blades made from glass fibre. They are crushed and mixed with other components and become an excellent solid fuel for the cement industry, replacing traditional fossil fuels, such as fuel oil as well as using the glass fibre residues within the cement matrix.” https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/industry/how-can-wind-turbine-blades-be-recycled
As South Dakota is full of Germans, the kinds of technological thinking need to pull this off, should be right up there alley. Put a McT in the lead role, and we might have something that could even rival those wacky engineers over at Mines.
Jerry … SD is full of the wrong kind of Germans, though. It’s full of Russian Germans aka Volga Germans. A particularly stubborn breed prone to negativity and refusal to think broadly. It descends from their ancestors who left Germany for Russia, left Russia when the Czar was killed and came to the Dakotas only for free land not for a place to implement their new ideas. Much different from native Germans who stayed put and invented ways to cope. *Drumpf was a German who left when times got bad and look how that family turned out.
I agree that the downcycling applications are worthwhile to pursue since they reduce the volume that gets thrown away per annum.
Moreover, we have an infrastructure crisis that will require a lot of material.
I would still like to have a carbon capture process in place if we are going to burn them.
That is the plan, Jerry!
Lets mix those blades into the cement that we need to rebuild thousands of miles of ruined South Dakota roads. Maybe it will make a stronger concrete that will stand up better to all the overloaded trucks this state allows on our roads.
Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to ban fracking.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/480777-sanders-introduces-bill-to-ban-hydraulic-fracking
This bill will generate a lot of high-fives among the Green New Dealers. This is the equivalent of Kennedy throwing his hat over the wall so we have to go get it, but without knowing how long we must wait to go over the wall, or if we could get over the wall.
It would be better to have the solution (or allow an available solution to occur) that would compete with natural gas to back-up renewables.
If one desires to go without nuclear and without natural gas without having energy storage solved (and apparently Sanders does) one must do geothermal (which would not require fracking, but would require drilling), or burn more coal.
Just think of it….Sanders and Trump, arm in arm, campaigning for coal and carbon capture. Strange.
Where is the bill to promote the building of more energy storage, or a bill to secure critical elements needed for renewables and energy storage from domestic sources (i.e. mining and recycling), or a bill regarding the waste management of those technologies?
The more nuclear energy we produce, the less natural gas must be consumed, and that would reduce the fracking. The more energy storage we can actually deliver, the less fracking is necessary as well.
Where is the bill that Tom Dashle and Tim Johnson were pushing decades ago that would allow small independent power producers to “wheel” their power to a better market?
Where is there a bill to force utility monopolies to pay independent producers the same price that big windmill farm backers get payed?
Where are their judges that will allow a small energy company to declare “Eminent Domain” to get a needed green energy project done?
If we do nothing, nothing will be done. Perhaps ending fracking will force some changes elsewhere.
BTW, recently watched a stock market guru recommend dumping fossil fuel stock’s. No where to go but down.
The more green power we allow independent power producers to to produce the less natural gas, coal, and nuclear power we will need!
Sorry, the more “green power” you put on the grid, the more backup power you will need.
Because energy storage is not ready, we burn natural gas. It would be good for nuclear too if we had the energy storage at the levels you desire. We don’t have an intermittency issue today because of the availability of natural gas.
Go without gas and you have 3 options. (1.) Don’t count on having energy when you want or need it. Good luck to those that need heating in winter and cooling in the summer. (2.) Generate more electricity from coal. (3.) Do more nuclear.
Assuming that we do not have enough energy storage and you want to avoid more nuclear, then you must get carbon capture to work along with your natural gas backup. But that would be good for coal too.
If you do not have carbon capture, then generating nuclear energy to backup renewables is the way to go.
The so-called “green power” still has issues with its mining, recycling, and waste management. It emits no carbon while generating electricity, and it will emit no carbon as long as those other issues are ignored. Start burning turbine blades to reduce the volume of waste, and you will emit carbon.
If independent producers can find a way to store energy or do something with it when it is produced, then they don’t have to send excesses onto the grid for the utility to take care of. But that is not feasible today, so they require access to the grid that the utility operates.
Wind power and solar power require more land per kilowatt of electricity generated. The land use requirements drive eminent domain issues. And the plan is to generate a lot more kilowatt-hours. That includes displacing fossil fuel in industry and transportation, and the new growth in the use of electricity on top of that. If we were to generate more electricity from nuclear, we would not be having as many eminent domain issues (both now, and increasingly in the future).
If you want to end fracking, then have the better alternative in place and ready to go, or displace the need for fracking as those alternatives improve. We do not have the capacity for generating enough biogas at the moment either.
South Dakota uses a lot of natural gas. We use natural gas for home heating. We use natural gas to power the biofuel industry, and it is likely that any future life cycle management for renewables (such as chopping up wind turbine blades) would be powered by natural gas.
Natural gas is also used in grain drying in agriculture. Propane gets used for that too, but natural gas can be a feedstock for propane and other chemicals that we use.
And we use natural gas in our present electricity mix as well.
Nuclear Fear Causes Dirty Air – If Japan had dismantled their nukes when they should have, this wouldn’t happen. – Coal in Japan: Plans for up to 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — come after the Fukushima disaster almost a decade ago forced the country to all but abandon its nuclear power program.
Lots of options on the line, Doc. A jillion new battery designs in the works. Electrolysis to hydrogen. In short, lots of ways to go before we have to resort to a big expansion of nuclear. Even fracking will not be effective much longer. We are consuming that new found energy at a prodigious rate.
BTW, drying grain is something that was un-necessary a few decades ago and something that we could go back to.
Ground source heat pump’s are the only way to go if you are building now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_3_gsgsnk
Porter,
What you mean to say is that Japan should have replaced their older nuclear plants with newer ones even before Fukushima occurred. Fukushima survived the earthquake without an issue. It was the tsunami that washed away backup power. The fear of nuclear prevented that upgrade too.
Clyde,
There is nothing stopping those technologies from taking over….other than they are not ready to take over :^). I don’t mind including a variety of things into the mix, but you do have to generate the energy that people use.
I agree we are consuming that energy at an ever increasing rate, and we want to increase that further with electric cars….that is new electricity we are not making at the moment. So there are challenges not only in the bulk production of energy with currently available renewables, but also in the intermittency without suitable backup power. This is why simply getting off of natural gas without a suitable replacement will not work.
McTaggart means to say, “Porter is the most intelligent and well educated about nuclear power that I’ve ever been lucky enough to learn from.” An earthquake and a tsunami are the same thing. A natural disaster that nuclear physicists didn’t plan for. Carry on …
Clyde, corn pickers and corn cribs making a comeback?
“BTW, drying grain is something that was un-necessary a few decades ago and something that we could go back to.”
How much CO² do corn cobs emit when burned?
Sorry, violent shaking and flooding are two different phenomena. The real issue may have been not preparing for the one-two punch.
For example….Earthquakes do not occur every day at that magnitude. Tsunami do not occur every day at that strength. The probability of both events occurring at the same location is roughly found by multiplying those low probabilities together. The Japanese spent their money on higher probability issues, when they should have considered the product of probability and impact.
Moreover, they located 5-6 reactors in a narrow region of land. Placing 5-6 reactors together is an issue…if outside power is cut to one, it is cut to all of them. So the siting, which is due to NIMBY, had an impact. The decision to not staff them properly had an impact. Spreading them around Japan would have mitigated the risk. But like I said, replacing them with better reactors would have been preferable to prevent Fukushima issues and the subsequent coal power that must occur without enough renewable energy.
After the experiment with coal, nuclear will come back. Renewables will be valuable, but they will hit a plateau just due to available places to site them. The choice will be import energy from China or do more nuclear.
Not sorry. Just wrong. The real issue was nuke people like McTaggart making really dumb decisions (like lining up six in a vulnerable area). It’ll happen again. It’s easy to predict when someone trying to sell you on an idea is notable due to their arrogance.
People want power, but not what is required to actually deliver that power. Moreover, they do not want to pay for what is necessary to deliver that power.
If you build 5-6 reactors next to each other that do not demand water cooling and are walk-away safe by design (i.e. passive heat removal), then those issues are moot. Shouldn’t progressives want progress? I mean, it is right there in the name.
You don’t get brownie points for not emitting carbon with renewables, but still emitting carbon with your fossil fuel backup when there is not enough energy storage.
Well, I guess if Buttigieg can declare victory when he didn’t win, then anything is possible I suppose.
I guess anything is possible….Buttigieg has a narrow lead over Sanders in Iowa at this time….but still too close to call.
Wrong again, Bob. Trump winning without cheating? That ain’t possible.
Energy Northwest released a study by a San Francisco consulting group that studied energy needs in the Pacific Northwest. Nuclear is key to delivering that energy at affordable prices.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/02/04/washington-state-intends-to-be-the-clean-energy-state-and-nuclear-is-key
“The E3 study emphasized that deep electric emission reductions were achievable at reasonable costs only if enough on-demand capacity, including the existing nuclear plant, is available. This is important – there has to be sufficient firm, or baseload, power to buffer the intermittency of renewables or the region could face rolling blackouts.”
“In fact, the study shows that building SMRs [small modular reactors] reduces the cost of achieving a 100% electric sector GHG reduction by nearly $8 billion per year.”
And apparently Wyoming is considering a bill that would permit small modular reactors to replace coal or gas power plants.
Tell us all about Energy Northwest, Bob.
Sure. The article states that they just announced a new 500 MW wind farm.
They do a lot of hydro, and they are growing both wind and solar. But they will need nuclear to avoid carbon while achieving grid reliability and affordable electricity. Xcel Energy has come to the same conclusion.
If I told you that 25 years from now we would have more wind and solar than today, and we could reduce carbon significantly from today’s levels, and be able to spend money on other things, you would run around in the forest and give all the pine trees in Colorado a hug and/or a high five (whatever they prefer). But you are hopefully learning from the experience in Japan, Germany, and the USA that shutting down nuclear and avoiding nuclear only results in more KFC gravy…..I mean more carbon.
Nuclear is the best way to reduce your gravy footprint, Mr. Lansing.
Energy Northwest saying that nuclear is safe is like Seagrams saying whiskey is safe. Energy Northwest owns the only reactor in that part of the world. What else are they going to say? *I’ve learned one thing from Bob. University Professors can’t always be believed.
Then believe yourself. Japan shut down its reactors. You reported that they are going to build more coal plants. That is not going to reduce carbon.
If renewables were sufficient with storage to satisfy that energy need, they would do it.
I believe my research and I believe my analysis. I find you to be misdirecting and trying to mislead the laymen for some perceived benefit to a poor career choice you made.
I really just challenge you to see how absurd you’ll get, when you think no one is checking.
Time for some truth.
If you do not have enough energy storage, we will burn more natural gas to backup renewables.
If you want more electric cars, you will use more renewables and natural gas to provide that electricity.
The carbon emitted grows as a result. You can build all the renewables you want…but you will still emit carbon to balance supply and demand.
I agree we should work on energy storage…that is good for everybody. That will be good news for gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables.
Regardless, we can and must solve climate change whether energy storage will come to fruition, and whether or not carbon capture is viable. How are you going to solve the problem without nuclear if neither energy storage nor carbon capture are feasible?
There you go, again. ツ
Once again….no solution.
What is absurd is to keep emitting carbon (backup energy from coal and gas) in the name of not emitting carbon (more renewables).
Keep digging that hole, Porter. Keep digging.
We’ve heard this story before, Doc. How about something different and compelling that really gets the brain engaged. How about explaining string theory in intricate detail? That would be intriguing. 👍🏻
Much like the desire for a 100% renewable energy grid, string theory is a beautiful theory that appeals to many. But they are both theories in search of experimental evidence.
Graphene, Doc, I want to understand Graphene. Supposedly a newly discovered form of carbon that can change the world and make a big difference in energy use and storage. I don’t understand how it can be utilized. Enlighten me please.
Debbo, corn cobs don’t have to be burned….we never did. Good bedding and good feed. Whole ear corn has 96% of the feed value of straight shelled corn.
Clyde, please don’t bring up Graphene. Doc is very allergic to that as it dampens his ego with facts. From the February Graphene newsletter.
“New graphene-based lithium-air battery may enable longer-running electric cars
Researchers at the Korean Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) have fabricated an electrode using nickel cobalt sulphide nanoflakes on a sulfur-doped graphene, leading to a long-life battery with high discharge capacity. This improvement of lithium-air batteries’ performance may bring us a step closer to electric cars that can use oxygen to run longer before they need to recharge.
Shanmugam and his colleagues focused their research on improving the capacity of lithium-air batteries to catalyze the reactions between lithium ions and oxygen, which facilitate energy release and the recharging process. Their battery demonstrated a high discharge capacity while at the same time maintaining its battery performance for over two months without diminishing.”
Here’s a use for those bore holes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7a_LMM2_fE
The batteries that use carbon would be a good sink for us to remove our excess carbon.
Clyde, I know cobs don’t *have* to be burned. That wasn’t my question. I was wondering about their properties as an energy source.
In the days prior to combining corn, we coarsely ground or chopped corn on the cob in a hammer mill for cattle feed. We fed it to pigs whole and they did the grinding themselves.
Corn cobs helped loosen up clay type soils. We ground ear corn for cattle feed. We shelled corn and used those cobs as a base for bedding cattle in the yards and after the first of January, pretty much locked cattle out of the sheds where they would pack in like sardines and get sweated up from all the collective heat. Going back out into the cold was a good way to get pneumonia.
Once every four to five years we’d save a Roorda wagon load of cobs and elevate them into a cob shed for fuel to light the tank heater in the water tank in Winter.
Mike, we used cobs as critter bedding too. Ground them smallest to bed baby chicks in the spring.
Definitely some folks here that can relate to farming!
Dad said that his mother had her recipes down to how many cobs were needed in the cook stove. His first job as a kid was gathering just the right size and cleanliness cobs from the hog lot for her.
They could be used as an energy source but wouldn’t do anything for the green house situation. We are using 34% of the corn crop to make ethanol and trying to get a alcohol from corn cobs industry going. We could just as well be making ethanol from the whole ear.
We used corn cobs more as kindling in the tank heaters and in the evening we would stoke the heater to the gills with slit firewood and fill in the gaps with cobs to ensure complete combustion overnight.
Any ears of corn with mold or other deficiencies was cast aside and later used as fuel in the heater.
We also chopped cornstalks for cattle bedding on top of the shelled corn cobs and used the last load to bank hydrants for the winter. Those cornstalks were added to bedding piles in the Spring and hauled back onto the fields, with some of the corn cobs. The better cobs were left as a base for the next bedding pile in the Fall.
Thanks for these stories, ladies and gents. I’m learning a lot and remembering a lot. I only got to live and work on the farm in the summer, when Watertown school got out. I missed a lot.
Quadratic Equations … Solved With A New Way – https://youtu.be/ZBalWWHYFQc
From Numlock News, edited by Walt Hickey:
Blades of wind turbines cannot yet be recycled, but after years of service have to be removed or replaced to withstand the daily gusts safely. As a result, the blades end up in landfills. Europe will have about 3,800 blades removed annually through at least 2022, and in the U.S. 8,000 will be removed each of the next four years. While about 85 percent of turbine components like steel, copper wire, and other parts can be reused or recycled, the blades are fiberglass and made specifically to be immensely sturdy, thus difficult to break down into other stuff. A startup, Global Fiberglass Solutions, has developed a method to convert blades into the kind of fiber boards in flooring and walls, and can currently handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades per year. Until they get it right, the blades will go into landfills.
Chris Martin, Bloomberg
I would like to remind everyone this article was about Crowned Ridge Wind, NextEra owned, not building the wind facility as described in the application and the conditions of the PUC. CRW only constructed 8 of 87 constructed turbines with LNTE attachments, not blades as stated in the CRW application. The PUC then let CRW a proven deciver to self report on sound studies. CRW needed an extention on the Lek monitoring evaluations, just agreed they would take a settlement option (decided behind closed doors) for not complying with the PUC permit and state law on ADLS lighting. Now there is a motion to revoke for 9 alleged violations of the PUC and state law. CRW said was ever CRW thought would get a PUC permit, built 87 turbines, but touted the economic benefits of 133 turbines, CRW used 2.7 MW capable turbines while only being permitted for 2.3 MW wind turbine generators and did not build the facility even to the preconstruction compliance filing with the PUC. Still the PUC a reglatory agency of the state has not held CRW accountable, suspended or revoked the permit. How can we have any confidence in our State government when it only holds the people accountable and not corporations? It is time for change in Pierre.
Amen, Kristi, but how do we get the deaf and dumb voters to make that change. The general press won’t help and the electorate like sheep are only interested in doing what the current leadership tells them to do.