if the technology was available to a peon such as i, i would live in this:



this is do-able. i'm sort of on my way to setting up something like this anyways

1/24/2012 10:23:43 AM

I like a lot of the concepts, but I don't know if you want a black thumb like me trying to keep alive a bio-wall. Also, I'm curious if such a design can be sustained in harsher climates. For example, how would this design work in a colder environment where pipes could potentially freeze and snow clog up wind turbines and cover solar panels? Not attacking, but I'm curious as to how you would need to modify the system without mucking it up; I just remember how harsh the climate was when I lived up in Western Massachusetts.

1/24/2012 11:15:30 AM

hopefully you'd have enough amps stored in the 'energy reservoir' aka battery packs to heat up the place and thaw that it out.


this:
maybe just tilt the panels enough so that snow and ice do not accumulate as much? (actually the further north you live the more angle you use pointing at the equator. so yeh this might solve itself sometimes)



i mean you could also just continue to live 'on the grid' and suffer through power outages that are beyond your control

lol

[Edited on January 24, 2012 at 11:36 AM. Reason : ,]

1/24/2012 11:31:56 AM

Quote :

"Can I ride my bike swim, boat, fish, hunt, camp, and picnic on the land occupied by the CSP plant? "

why would you want to do any of that out in the desert? these things are being built on garbage land that can't be used for anything else, not on land like Shearin Harris, Brunswick, or McGuire that could have otherwise been prime real estate.

Quote :

"The way I see it is that the largest demand for electricity is near population dense areas where land is a premium. "

the way you see it is wrong, because we can build new transmission lines cheaper than we can buy premium land and tie it up with generation facilities and new switchyards. HVDC technology has improved by leaps and bounds during the last 10 years, so pushing large amounts of power for hundreds of miles with minimal losses is more of a reality now than in the past. Combine that with the improvements in high temperature overhead conductors and XLPE underground cable technology, and you can see how we can utilize existing transmission corridors to push a lot more power. I'd much rather build a plant in an area where land is $2,000 an acre and the local govermnent is begging for the utility to bring them $15 an hour jobs as opposed to building the plant on $50,000 an acre land and employing $30 an hour jobs just to have everyone around you bitching about the project.

Quote :

"Really a combination of solar, wind, and nuclear are the best bet."

nuclear could never work with the other two, since we'll never allow load cycling on nukes in this country. you can't back up intermittent generation with generation that can't be cycled to match load changes. Natural Gas is going to become king in this country if the renewable push continues, because it's cheap, plentiful, and lends itself well to drastic load changes. Once cogeneration catches on and people figure out how to build new urban areas to utilize district heating and process steam, natural gas is going to look even better.

1/24/2012 4:39:05 PM

It is also relevant to point out that Shearin Harris had originally planned for four reactors but only built one. So go ahead and multiply its kWh/acre by four. They could build even more reactors on the available site if they chose.

1/24/2012 4:56:54 PM

Quote :

"why would you want to do any of that out in the desert? these things are being built on garbage land that can't be used for anything else, not on land like Shearin Harris, Brunswick, or McGuire that could have otherwise been prime real estate."

Hilarious. I point out that the land around the plant is multiple use and is providing a great benefit to the community and you're going to point out that the land could be used for something else "more valuable"...you mean...like...a park?

1/24/2012 7:23:02 PM

constructing three reactors would require raising the lake level another 20'. That will eliminate all of the public park land that people were claiming earlier as beneficial for hiking/camping/hunting. It would also require installing a pipeline of some sort to the Cape Fear river for an emergency backup water source for cooling should something happen to Harris Lake.

Also keep in mind that solar plants produce power during peak generation times, while nukes are used for base load. Cost-wise, power produced by solar plants is worth a lot more than nuclear produced energy.

But just to squash this stupid argument, the US used 10,000,000,000MWh of electricity in 2009. Ignoring the demand/storage issues that aren't addressed by nuclear either, you would need 28,000,000 acres of land to produce that much electricity at the efficiency level of Nevada Solar One. That's an area 210 miles square, or about five times the size of the just the coal mines in this country. It's also equivalent to less than a quarter of the land tied up by railroads in this country, of which half of their freight tonnage is just coal. If you want to talk about land usage, getting coal cars off of existing rail spurs so they could be converted to high-speed rail seems like a winner to me.

[Edited on January 24, 2012 at 7:43 PM. Reason : you do realize that park land will be gone in 5 years if the new reactors get approved, don't you?]

1/24/2012 7:42:40 PM

You aren't making an argument, apparently.

1/24/2012 8:14:44 PM

apparently you aren't either, unless your point is that it's cool to take land from other people as long as you flood it and give people a place to let their dogs shit.

1/24/2012 8:37:35 PM

Just a sidebar, I don't get it...you're employed as a surveyor. If you're that adamant about people having land "taken", then why enable it?

[Edited on January 24, 2012 at 9:06 PM. Reason : .]

1/24/2012 9:04:02 PM

But to address the stupid shit you're saying...you seem to be trying to make the point about the land efficiency (or, in your opinion lack there-of) of nuclear aynd your own fucking numbers aren't even backing up the point you are making.

SH with 1 reactor is more land efficient than your gay CSR install...oh and by the way we get to have a park in addition to the energy generation on the land. Then you try to point out that the new reactors will take out the existing park area but neglect it makes the energy/land metric look even that much more fantastic (as Lonesnark pointed out). So...you're not really making an arugment here that I can tell.

You're also talking about solar installs on "shit" land but I'm not aware of a ton of places around the Triangle where you could put a solar install...are you really suggesting transmit that power 3000 miles?

[Edited on January 24, 2012 at 9:13 PM. Reason : .]

1/24/2012 9:10:00 PM

I'm an electrical engineer, not a surveyor. Even still, I work with a lot of utility easement/property acquisitions and condemnations. It a necessary part of infrastructure work, but it's shitty for everyone involved and should be avoided as much as possible.

Since nuclear plants produce the same amount of power at all times, they create major problems at night when load drops off. When power is pushed across long distances of transmission lines under low load conditions, the high capacitance of the transmission line causes the line voltage to increase dramatically at the end of the line. In order to compensate for this, utilities are forced to install shunt reactors banks to bring the line voltage back down. These allow power to be pushed down the line again, but at the expense of taxing out the reactive power capacity of the line that is required to support voltage. FYI, it was a loss of reactive power capacity on the transmission grid that caused the big Northeast blackout. In extremely dense populations regions where any of the transmission lines are underground, this issue is many times worse due to the higher capacitance of underground cable.

Because of this, nuclear plants are predominantly located close to major load centers so that their base generation is always consumed locally, even at night. By being close to these population centers, land is more expensive and dangers to the public from an accident are increased. The other way this reactive power issue is handled is through the installation of pumped hydro facilities that pump water uphill at night and are used to generate electricity during the daytime or other peak load times. These pumped hydro facilities add extra losses to the system and tie up even more land, although they'd be useful to have regardless since they store power when it's cheap and provide it when it's expensive to generate.

Wind farms have the same issues but to an even greater extent, since they tend to be located out in bumfuck and produce most of their energy at night and very little during the daytime when it's most needed.

Solar thermal plants, producing most of their electricity during daylight hours and a couple hours past sunset, don't present these issues since they produce electricity during heavy load hours and don't create transmission stability issues. That's why you can stick them out in the desert where the land is practically worthless without causing reliability/efficiency issues.

DC transmision lines don't have problems with voltage stability under low-load conditions, but the high cost of inverter stations necessitate that transmission lines must be hundreds of miles in length before they make sense to be DC. This technology keeps improving, but it will be a while before DC lines can be justified for shorter transmission lengths.

[Edited on January 24, 2012 at 9:36 PM. Reason : yes, I'm saying transmit it 1000-3000 miles. That's what Tres Amigas is all about.]

1/24/2012 9:34:44 PM

Quote :

"Solar thermal plants, producing most of their electricity during daylight hours and a couple hours past sunset, don't present these issues since they produce electricity during heavy load hours and don't create transmission stability issues."

They also require hot backup to cover the solar plant when a cloud pops up. Did you include the thousands of acres of power plants we must keep manned and idling just so the grid doesn't collapse every time a cloud goes by?

1/24/2012 11:30:18 PM

^ seems like a job creator to me.

Or do you just love poverty and unemployment...?

1/24/2012 11:44:56 PM

I'm not sure, but I suspect creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is the definition of poverty.

The purpose of a power plant is to produce electricity. Not provide comfy jobs.

1/24/2012 11:52:32 PM

Quote :

"They also require hot backup to cover the solar plant when a cloud pops up. Did you include the thousands of acres of power plants we must keep manned and idling just so the grid doesn't collapse every time a cloud goes by? "

no they don't; you're confusing solar plants with a solar thermal plant, just like you've done in several other threads before. Solar thermal plants have incredible ridethrough capabilities due to stored heat in the steam system.

alternately, a gas fired boiler could be added to the plant with almost no additional land use requirements for additional generation capability at night or during periods of extreme cloud cover. the steam turbine generation equipment is the same.

[Edited on January 25, 2012 at 9:25 AM. Reason : .]

1/25/2012 9:16:29 AM

Quote :

"They also require hot backup to cover the solar plant when a cloud pops up. Did you include the thousands of acres of power plants we must keep manned and idling just so the grid doesn't collapse every time a cloud goes by?"

what a moron
is this idiot serious?

[Edited on January 25, 2012 at 11:21 AM. Reason : ,]

1/25/2012 11:16:58 AM

Quote :

"Solar thermal plants have incredible ridethrough capabilities due to stored heat in the steam system."

But not infinite ridethrough. You must plan for the possibility that the plant will produce nothing tomorrow. And there is no way to know how much you will be able to produce any-given day. So, yes, some hot backup is required to cover the dips, and cold backup is required for the occasional day when the plant produces nothing.

Meanwhile, for nuclear, cold backup can be scheduled years in advance when we know the reservoirs will be full.

1/25/2012 12:54:55 PM

you must have no clue as to how nuclear works in this country then. You can't cycle load on a nuke; if load picks up, nukes don't do shit to address it. If half your tranmission drops, nukes keep pushing power out wherever they can, even if it's not really needed, wrecking havoc on the rest of the G&T network. Federal regulations require them to be operated at full output nonstop so that refueling cycles are consistent.

you don't have to worry much about ridethrough capabilities in desert regions, since cloud cover is almost nonexistant. and even so, you add a gas boiler unit to the plant underneath the collector stack for when it does happen. No additional land use required.

the purpose of solar thermal plants is for peak shaving, not base load. nukes are useful for base load, but they are absolute garbage at handling load changes. Trying to compare one to the other doesn't work for a lot of reasons. Unless we have some major changes to nuclear regulation in this country, nukes will never be able to handle anything beyond base load.

The only energy renaissance you're going to see in this country in the next 100 years is the surging of natural gas and the death of coal.

1/25/2012 1:21:06 PM

eleusis, your stance is correct but your arguments are wrong.

Quote :

"you must have no clue as to how nuclear works in this country then. You can't cycle load on a nuke; if load picks up, nukes don't do shit to address it."

They don't do shit, not because they can't, but the #1 reasons is because it's a capital asset with little operating costs. Not only are the operating costs small, but they have almost no sensitivity to output. If you run a nuke plant at 70% you still pay almost the same operating costs as 100%. That's why they don't cycle, the technical difficulties are problems the company never had any interest in b/c there was no financial intensive to do so. It wouldn't save any money.

Quote :

"Federal regulations require them to be operated at full output nonstop so that refueling cycles are consistent."

The wording I've heard most often to describe this is the regulatory "culture". You could pay the NRC exorbitant costs to look into cycling of the plants. The problem is that there is no financial reason to do so.

Coal plants reduce their output to save fuel in times of low price, but there is a premium on doing so because it decreases system life. Nuclear would do the same, but the breakeven marginal price for the current fleet (I'm convinced) would be negative. But hey, it's the same with wind. Wind would never reduce output for any wholesale electricity price greater than zero.

1/25/2012 2:20:15 PM

i'm just gonna leave this here and let lonesnark ramble on about how it's impossible to survive 3 or 4 days of cloud cover.

1/25/2012 2:47:32 PM

they cycle nukes in other countries, but not in the US. Europe and Russia prefer to use their nukes as load following plants.

We don't cycle nukes in this country because the NRC strictly forbids it. It has very little to do with economics and a lot more to do with fuel cycles and preventing transmission operators and interconnect markets from having any control over nuclear plant operation. You don't want someone outside the plant making decisions on how to operate the plant for safety reasons, and they don't want to have variable refueling cycles that could cause disruptions in how refueling cycles are scheduled years in advance.

We would love to be able to cycle nukes in this country, because the fuel cost is higher than coal and nukes would provide better voltage/reactive power control than coal/natural gas plants.

1/25/2012 2:50:42 PM

France gets 80% of their electricity from nuclear, is a net electricity exporter, load follows on most of their plants, have a few they shut down entirely over the weekends, and yet they have the cheapest electricity in Europe. I'd say it's not an issue of economics on whether or not to load cycle a nuke based on their model. Brittain is similar, yet not so nuclear reliant and has limited transmission interconnects.

1/25/2012 2:59:10 PM

Quote :

"has very little to do with economics and a lot more to do with fuel cycles and preventing transmission operators and interconnect markets from having any control over nuclear plant operation"

If reducing plant output decreases the likelihood of a grid failure, then there is no valid safety argument against reducing power because a LOOP has significant weight in the safety analysis. US nuclear plants can and will reduce power when needed.

http://af.reuters.com/article/idAFN1025347020100610

It sounds like you're talking about the plant being put on automatic generation control. In that cause the plant output would be set by a control center and yes, the NRC forbids that. In any given case it's the reactor operator who pulls the lever.

So maybe you'll say "oh, but I was talking and regular cycling", but that defeats the entire point. With a national penetration of 20% of electric generation no one is interested in regular cycling. We find something to do with that power. With the addition of wind and solar (like in the northwest) the times when surplus generation threatens grid integrity are sporadic, irregular, and predictable with shorter time horizons.

1/25/2012 3:22:28 PM

you've got your cause and effect backwards there. Nuclear is hindered from being more than 20% of capacity in this country BECAUSE the NRC will not allow them to operate as load following plants, and that's not going to change for a long time. The more wind we put online, the more we hurt the nuclear industry and push natural gas development. We will not see major increases in nuclear plants in this country until the NRC changes their stance on plant operation.

The Bonneville link you posted is an extreme example, because Bonneville is a federal agency moreso than a utility. They also cut load at their plant as required by federal guidelines to keep from killing off all the fish in the Washington rivers. It's an isolated event of the EPA overruling the NRC, not a normal operating condition.

1/25/2012 6:10:50 PM

Many commercial nuclear plants reduce power to limit discharge temperatures. It's in no way unusual.

1/25/2012 6:25:37 PM

oh it's totally not normal for them to do that anywhere, because they don't have need to do it yet. But break open any 2030 wind grid integration study and you'll find that the baseload plants are required to take actions like that at a rate that we are completely unfamiliar with. It virtually never happens, and BPA (the NW federal operator) just happens to be on the very forefront because people are building wind turbines all over the place in an otherwise fairly isolated portion of the grid.

But even if we build gobs and gobs of wind that doesn't mean we'll have to cycle our nuclear plants very often in the future. Sporadic times when an area's wind+baseload exceed the load should be one of the easiest problems for smart grid solutions to solve. Just turn on the water heaters. But the wind industry is already adding (usually by mandate) all kinds of ride through and load rejection capabilities.

The real way that wind shifts the balance is to create a larger niche for power plants operating in load follow mode. No one wants to build a nuclear plant to operate at anything less than 90% capacity factor on the basis of simple economics and the variability of wind creates more of that need.

[Edited on January 25, 2012 at 6:32 PM. Reason : ]

1/25/2012 6:30:58 PM

once again, EPA overruling NRC. it has absolutely nothing to do with load management.

[Edited on January 25, 2012 at 6:39 PM. Reason : and it's still an isolated event caused by extremes in weather.]

1/25/2012 6:33:34 PM

Quote :

"oh it's totally not normal for them to do that anywhere, because they don't have need to do it yet."

Uh, yeah it is normal. Every summer, plants around the country are reducing power to maintain discharge temperatures below their permits. They're not reducing power to 40-50% a la Columbia (though it's not uncommon to reduce power like this for online maintenance/repairs), but they're nonetheless operating at less than 100% for significant periods of time.

1/25/2012 6:36:46 PM

it's not an every summer event; it's just happened the last two summers due to extremely hot weather and drought conditions. I'm only aware of that happening at a few plants on TVA and Southern Company's system.

1/25/2012 6:42:16 PM

There's more than TVA and Southern Company.

I know of one plant that adjusts power throughout the day for a large portion of the year due to diurnal variations in water temperatures.

1/25/2012 6:56:11 PM

I don't know where you got 40-50% from, but it's probably not even feeding steam to turbine at that power.

1/25/2012 7:06:09 PM

This is what I love about tdub. Three separate arguments that should be based in fact. How can this even be? At least 2 and possibly all of you are wrong or don't have your facts straight.

1/25/2012 7:15:55 PM

^^ Huh?

Then what was Columbia doing in the link you posted? Sitting at 50% power for shits and giggles for weeks on end?

1/25/2012 7:20:45 PM

Quote :

"Sitting at 50% power for shits and giggles for weeks on end?"

Let me be clear, the only nuclear plants in the world that run at 50% for any significant stretch of time are those with dual turbines. Yes, literally they have 2, and they shut one off to run at 50% power. And there are not many of those.

Generally, below 70% is an uncomfortable proposition for the plant management. Steam turbines do not like to operate at partial power, and least of all at nuclear plants. You have things like partial arc admission that help it operate at partial power, but it helps marginally. The basic reality is that synchronous generators (which is the only real design choice) with wet steam turbines greatly limit the flexibility due to the simple fact that the flow path is designed for one single speed. Low powers are damaging to the equipment.

1/25/2012 9:22:01 PM

I'm sorry, but you are wrong.

Certainly the plant is not as efficient at 50% power, but it is more than capable of running at 50% power.

In the case of Columbia, they have one turbine* and one generator. In 2010, Columbia ran at 55% power June 4 through June 8; 40% power June 9 through June 11, and 25% power June 12 through June 14. Columbia then operated at 85% power through July 8 and returned to 100% power on July 9. Over a month at reduced power.

From a technical standpoint, there is very little preventing existing nuclear plants from operating as load followers. In fact, several plants currently operating in the US were originally designed and built as load followers; as pointed out by eleusis, they were never licensed as such.

Whether or not current plants should be operated as load followers is a different story.

You can check the powers here:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/2010/

* One HP turbine and two LP turbines, on a common shaft, operated as a single turbine with a single throttle.

1/25/2012 9:54:52 PM

they'd have to kill one of the LP turbines, or else condensation on the turbine blades at half throttle would beat it to death. I'm sure that kills the efficiency rating too; it's probably putting out half rated output but still running the reactor closer to 70%.

1/25/2012 10:10:54 PM

Steam runs through all the turbines when operating.

1/25/2012 10:18:10 PM

G&T companies in this country would love to be able to load follow with their nukes, since it would improve grid reliability and reduce operating costs at coal plants. We'd love to have the ability to cycle our nukes and our coal plants down simultaneously instead of just having to throttle back harder on the coal plants. We'd have better load response if more units were at partial throttle as opposed to some at full thottle, some at partial throttle, and some shut off. We'd also eliminate a lot of startup and shutdown fuel costs.

If load following with nukes was an option, we probably would have seen the other 4 reactors installed at Shearon Harris 20 years ago. It would have eliminated the need for many of the gas peaking plants that got installed recently.

[Edited on January 25, 2012 at 10:28 PM. Reason : how do they battle steam condensation on the blades then?]

1/25/2012 10:21:00 PM

Quote :

"how do they battle steam condensation on the blades then?"

The steam is passed through a moisture separator/reheater between the HP and LP turbines.

1/25/2012 10:37:15 PM

that's how it's combatted at 100% load. How do they mitigate it at partial load?

1/25/2012 10:49:42 PM

Why would MSRs not work at reduced loads...?

1/25/2012 11:06:05 PM

Quote :

"We'd love to have the ability to cycle our nukes and our coal plants down simultaneously instead of just having to throttle back harder on the coal plants. "

Well this is a good argument. What you're really talking about though, is splitting the ramp rate. So say you were going to ramp down steam plant A 5% per minute but instead you do both A&B at 2.5% each. You'd have some metric for plant damage for which it would be reasonable to think f(5%) > 2 f(2.5%), making it economic to use both. I have not seen this specifically mentioned before, but power companies love to put everything in a big optimization algorithm and I wouldn't be surprised if it was already in there.

It is true that no technical issues keep nuclear units from load following. It's done in France and even in Ontario. From my reading they tend to reduce from like 100% to 70% fairly quickly and then keep it there, for the night for instance. Well, that's for the Ontario plants, the plants in France supposedly are actually put on margin and actively follow load. But generally, from a systems perspective you don't really need to take any plant out of a 70-100% range even if they're on margin because there are so many other things you have to use to balance at the same time, like other plants going online and offline in sequence.

Quote :

"In the case of Columbia, they have one turbine* and one generator. In 2010, Columbia ran at 55% power June 4 through June 8; 40% power June 9 through June 11, and 25% power June 12 through June 14. Columbia then operated at 85% power through July 8 and returned to 100% power on July 9. Over a month at reduced power."

I think you're reading the reports wrong. The NRC only reports reactor power. And that very page notes it takes power reading from between 4am and 8am. It's not a daily average. It does say economic dispatch so it did reduce due to external factors, which we already knew, and the most likely time for it to be in that state is the early morning when demand is low. Any of these could have been running at 100% again that same day. It doesn't make sense to do anything else because the load profile follows about the same cycle every day.

Quote :

"Steam runs through all the turbines when operating"

That is something I would like to know more about. They do have butterfly stop and control valves for each LP turbine. Do they use them? I don't know. Oh, but to be clear, one set of valves is for one casing (one LP turb), and each casing has 2 flows - 4 flows total.

1/26/2012 12:28:26 AM

eleusis, I said nothing about load following a nuke. So I have no idea why you spawned an entire discussion that has nothing to do with this thread's topic. All nuclear reactors must be shut-down periodically for maintenance, requiring the grid to find energy elsewhere, and event which is scheduled months or even years in advance.

You are right, solar thermal (day load) and nuclear (base load) do serve different markets. But you yourself has said they don't have too. Even if we pretend they do, there is plenty base-load coal left to be displaced, some of which is being shut-down by the EPA as we speak with no available replacement, requiring natural gas to play a base-load role in many markets, which seems absurd to me.

pack_bryan, a pack of batteries is, by definition, hot backup for an unreliable energy source. So I don't know why you addressed that picture to me, except as justification for my position of solar/wind requiring hot backups.

1/26/2012 1:06:27 AM

Quote :

"I think you're reading the reports wrong. The NRC only reports reactor power. And that very page notes it takes power reading from between 4am and 8am. It's not a daily average. It does say economic dispatch so it did reduce due to external factors, which we already knew, and the most likely time for it to be in that state is the early morning when demand is low. Any of these could have been running at 100% again that same day. It doesn't make sense to do anything else because the load profile follows about the same cycle every day."

Sure, it lists power at some point in time between 4 AM and 8 AM. However, as we're discussing, US nuclear plants don't load follow and don't typically change power levels significantly or frequently over the course of a day. Unless the plant is transiting between power levels (something noted in the NRC daily reports), the power between 4 AM and 8 AM is likely the same power they've been operating at all day and the same power they'll continue to operate at all day.

In any event, none of what you said addresses my point that nuclear power plants are quite capable of operating at--and frequently do operate at-- power levels other than 100%. None of what you said is even really representative of typical US nuclear plant operation.

1/26/2012 1:55:25 AM

Quote :

"power between 4 AM and 8 AM is likely the same power they've been operating at all day and the same power they'll continue to operate at all day."

again, I don't think this is the case, but I guess I'm not willing to look for more links to back that up

Quote :

"requiring natural gas to play a base-load role in many markets, which seems absurd to me. "

The majority of the NG capacity being added right now is combined cycle. Of course, that implies that the vast majority of the future generation of those plants is combined cycle. Those can achieve up to 60% efficiency (Siemens was proud that they hit 60.2% or something lately). To the extent that technology is available to efficiently re-purpose NG for baseload, then why not?

1/26/2012 8:21:44 AM

Quote :

"eleusis, I said nothing about load following a nuke. So I have no idea why you spawned an entire discussion that has nothing to do with this thread's topic. "

That's because you don't have enough understanding of what's being discussed here to participate in the discussion. You're so worried about intermittent generation, yet you don't even understand why constant output generation is just as bad for the grid. The whole point of this thread was comparing solar to nukes, so it has everything to do with this thread.

Quote :

"there is plenty base-load coal left to be displaced, some of which is being shut-down by the EPA as we speak with no available replacement, requiring natural gas to play a base-load role in many markets, which seems absurd to me. "

Natural gas is cheaper during spring, summer, and fall months than coal, and the price keeps dropping. Utilities across the northeast are retrofitting coal plants with natural gas boilers and combined cycle facilities. The fuel is cheap, you don't have to run scrubbers, and you don't have to worry about fly ash disposal. Efficiency levels are higher for combined cycle gas than for coal, and maintenance is lower. It also allows them to reduce their CO2 emission to a third of what coal makes and not produce heaping piles of heavy metal contaminated water.

1/26/2012 10:01:21 AM

^^ Because coal is cheaper and more plentiful. And natural gas will not always be as cheap as it is right now, given how natural gas can be reformed into common liquid fuels such as gasoline.

Quote :

"You're so worried about intermittent generation, yet you don't even understand why constant output generation is just as bad for the grid."

You are confusing the issue to say constant output generation is just as bad for the grid. The problem is not the constant production, but the unpredictable nature of consumer demand which must be managed. Now we are injected even more uncertainty. Now, whatever plants we are using to load follow must not only be able to cut back if demand slumps, but be able to surge if both demand jumps and their fellow wind/solar plants begin to dip. If you are right that unpredictable consumer demand is just as bad as intermittent generation, then having both on the grid doubles the required operating range of load following plants. Which was my point.

[Edited on January 26, 2012 at 10:28 AM. Reason : .,.]

1/26/2012 10:02:10 AM

http://mazamascience.com/Market/Futures/

Anything below 6 is highly competitive.

1/26/2012 10:05:58 AM

coal is not cheaper outside of three months in the winter, and natural gas will continue to get cheaper as the Marcellus shale continues to get developed. quit talking out of your ass.

1/26/2012 10:07:24 AM