Renewable Energy Production Surpasses Nuclear In the US 452
mdsolar writes "Renewable energy production has surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. according to the latest issue of Monthly Energy Review (PDF) published by the Energy Information Administration. ... During the first three months of 2011, energy produced from renewable energy sources (biomass/biofuels, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind) generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy equating to 11.73 percent of U.S. energy production. During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear energy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production."
That's really ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's really ironic (Score:5, Funny)
And don't forget that wind energy is blowing Earth off its orbit [theonion.com].
Re:That's really ironic (Score:4, Funny)
chemicals used in the manufacture of solar cells
Not only are they chemicals, but I hear that the chemicals are made up of protons and neutrons (also known as Alpha particle radiation) wrapped in electrons (aka Beta particle radiation). So these chemical laden solar cells house two types of radiation, and a third type (electromagnetic radiation) is used to excite the stored radiations to make them unstable (the Beta particles move). Just imagine if there were a tsunami! DiHydrogen Monoxide Everywhere!
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"Nuclear is dangerous and bad and scary!" -- the coal energy lobby
And mdsolar. Guy's a fucking idiot, just look at his submissions [slashdot.org].
Anti-nuclear crackpots are why we can't have nice things, like non-40 year old plants, and thorium reactors.
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Biggest gains in... (Score:2)
Hydro-electric!
check out all that flooding!
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Hydro.. produces more greenhouse gases than coal.
P.S. the methane produced by biomass at the bottom of the water reserve is much more effective at warming than CO2
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Think long term buddy. What causes hydro's greenhouse gases? In year 10-20 of a dam's lifetime, what causes hydro's greenhouse gases?
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Plant matter decaying, but that depends on the environment. Let me quote Wikipedia, because I'm lazy:
"In boreal reservoirs of Canada and Northern Europe, however, greenhouse gas emissions are typically only 2% to 8% of any kind of conventional fossil-fuel thermal generation. A new class of underwater logging operation that targets drowned forests can mitigate the effect of forest decay."
Of course, there's a fixed amount of plant matter that can decay; over the long term, I imagine the methane production bec
Don't confuse flood control with hydro (Score:2)
Biomass = Wood Stoves? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how much of that biomass consists of wood-burning stoves. Considering the time period of this study (first three months of this year) that could definitely be a large factor.
EDIT: A quick look at the PDF shows that biomass is the largest renewable energy source, at 1.049 quadrillion BTUs. It even beat out hydropower at 0.618 quadrillion BTUs. However, a look at 2009 and 2010 does not show a seasonal variation that you would expect from wood stoves.
Btus??? (Score:2)
Btus? Can't we just stick to standards?
Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera Watt hours in this case.
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Btus? Can't we just stick to standards?
Kilo/Mega/Giga/Tera Watt hours in this case.
Joules.
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Watt-hours is at least as much a bastardization as BTUs. It's actually worse, because it wasn't a standard prior to Joules. BTU at least has the seniority aspect going for it. Watt-hours just looks good on an electric bill.
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Watt hours aren't worse than Joules. A joule is a watt-second of energy.
What would you rather see on your electric bill, 1KW/h = $0.10 or 1J = $0.00002777777~
Have fun doing that math in your head. Only a person who loves making thing harder than they need to be would use joules for every-day power usage.
BTUs aren't any better. I got a device that uses 5 amps and runs 110v. Without using any unit conversions, how much energy is used? Who the #$%^ want to multiple 5 * 10 * 3.41214, when they can just do
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It being SI and all, what's wrong with using megajoules as God intended?
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From one fellow 'high karma' poster to another...
I think you're being a bit quick to see 'hate' in everything. I think they (Europeans, that is, which I am not BTW, but do come from a metric-only country) just want to be able to understand the summary. I have no issues with having any kind of units whatsoever in the summary but it would be nice if it was also stated in ISO/SI units as well (i.e. put it in brackets afterwards).
I admit I didn't even know there ~was~ such a unit as BTU before seeing this artic
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You know who else uses British Thermal Units? The British.
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Btus? Can't we just stick to standards?
In the United States the standard IS BTUs.
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Handy conversion fact: 1 quadrillion BTUs (the units in TFA) is almost exactly equal to 1 exajoule.
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We always called 'em pig barns but I guess hogshed works. I know you can put a shit ton of hydrogen with a bit of sulfur in a pig barn.
Hydro? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydroelectric has been a big part of the US electric grid for the better part of a century now (Roll on, Columbia roll on). I realize it's "renewable", but lumping it in with the newer renewables (biodiesel, wind, et. al.) - the electric production of which is miniscule compared to that of hydro - and then pretending it's us making strides towards a great green future is a tad misleading.
Re:Hydro? (Score:5, Informative)
Note that they are also lumping in ethanol, which has already been shown to require more fossil fuel to produce that it can replace (or close to it, depending on the way it's calculated. And ethanol is 10% of all the fuel in all the cars, and is heavily supported by subsidies, so it's not only inefficient, but can't even pay for itself.
Re:Hydro? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that no new nuclear power plants have been allowed for like 4 years, so nearly all our increased demand since then has been met by non-renewable natural gas and coal. This milestone is fucking meaningless. Wake me up when it surpasses coal.
Way to grind that axe, buddy (Score:4, Insightful)
"Notwithstanding the recent nuclear accident in Japan, among many others, and the rapid growth in energy and electricity from renewable sources, congressional Republicans continue to press for more nuclear energy funding while seeking deep cuts in renewable energy investments," said Ken Bossong, Executive Director of the SUN DAY Campaign. "One has to wonder 'what are these people thinking?'"
I have to wonder what he's thinking, because the best solution to US energy needs looking forward involves expansion of nuclear power as well as renewables. We still haven't really made a dent in the roughly half of US electricity production that comes from coal. And that huge base load need isn't going to be solved by intermittent power sources like solar or wind. Underfunding nuclear power development will only result in delays in bringing up safer newer plant designs.
Re:Way to grind that axe, buddy (Score:4, Informative)
This is mdsolar - check his comment history, and pay attention to the link in the sig. He runs a company which installs solar panels, so he's not exactly an impartial figure. I'm surprised you haven't seen him before, since he pops up in pretty much every story about nuclear with similarly misleading comments.
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You submitted a story which links to a misleading article. The article is misleading because it lumps together an old and well-established renewable energy - hydro -with developing fields such as wind and solar. This is pointless, because, on one hand, hydro accounts for vast majority of the dominance pointed out by TFA; and, on the other hand, it being so cheap (usually the cheapest option where available), and developed for so long, it's usually all used up already, and there is little to no space for fur
Re:Way to grind that axe, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obsolete information. People are largely unaware of the full gamut of renewable energy technologies. Even so, the Department of Energy did an extensive study that said that Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could supply the country's full energy needs from wind energy alone, but we're not just talking solar panels and turbines.
We could slash building energy requirements drastically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design [wikipedia.org]
Move to peer-to-peer microgrids which by the redundancy of many div
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I lived in an area with a "micro-power grid". The power to the local grid was supplied from a local business that was connected to the grid. Basically, they were a "micro-utility" of sorts, with a limited supply. This was in communist Poland about 50 years ago.
You know what happened? It worked very well, until someone down the street turned on their arc welder and there was a nice brown out throughout the neighborhood. Or someone started running a large motor. Hell, most of the time you couldn't run an electric motor because the phase was so "out of phase"!! (pun intended) Yeap, insufficient buffer on the "micro-grid" to counter lack of proper grid connection.
After the real grid was connected in the early 1980s, well, brownouts went away. People could actually use things like arc welders or electric motors without fucking up your neighbors power supply.
This is actually the reason to have a large power grid. It is called redundancy. Modern, well maintained grids don't tend to suffer from single point of failure anymore. And guess what? Renewables will require an even larger grid to counter their unpredictable intermediate tendency.
Finally, the article you linked are not "micro grids". They are regular grid with local utilization of locally generated power. Imagine that!!
Local utilization of locally generated power - on a much smaller and networked scale - is one of the main design features of a micro-grid. The other design feature is smart regulation to divert energy to where it is needed nearby intelligently. I'm not sure why you'd rather define a micro-grid by your experience of something in Poland that didn't let people run arc-welders in their homes; given the general conditions and comparatively ancient technology, it seems apples-to-oranges. Personally, if it mean
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Seriously? You're comparing 50 year old technology in a severely disadvantaged country with today's microgrid concepts? WTF?
Difficult Read... (Score:3)
Ok, wow... did I miss it, or did they completely avoid using any
real numbers, that could be tallied and put in a spreadsheet?
Everything seemed to be something of something else.
RTFA is a horrible idea. RTFPDF, well, that's up to you, it's
214 pages long.
Anyone rationalize those numbers out yet?
-AI
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The PDF linked in the summary is one page - a single table, with energy sources as columns (with tallies for fossil fuels and renewable sources), and years as rows. It doesn't get much simpler. Feel free to number-crunch at your own convenience.
Context is lacking. Intentionally so, methinks: (Score:2)
"It doesn't get much simpler."
Oh, the chart itself is simple. The problem is, it's incomplete info without much context.
You have to go to the EIA.gov web site and look at other tables than the one linked to find out that the big part of biomass used is wood.
That's been fairly steady for decades. A lot of that is paper and forestry products burning the waste wood to power their plants, and ignorant rural rednecks like me stoking up the fireplace among other things. (Gotta power those moonshine stills with so
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Mod parent up! Only a partisan would measure a nation's annual energy consumption in "quadrillion Btus". It's like measuring an oil spill in pints.
This is slashdot. Around here, you can't conflate percent of "domestic crude oil production" with "percent of U.S. energy production" (let alone consumption!) and not get called on it. Can you?
Ah, heck with it! Let's slip down to the pub for 2.98 millibarrels of domestic light sweet lager.
Great, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds like great news for renewable energy buffs, except for one thing: if you're thinking this represents a success by high tech new power sources like wind, solar, etc., you're wrong.
The two biggest components of "renewable energy" in EIA's report are hydroelectric dams and biomass -- the biomass sector is mostly industrial wood and paper plants which run on waste wood, plus people using wood-fired stoves at home. Good for them, but it's not exactly high tech.
In 1990, before the wind-and-solar revolution, things broke down this way: .09 EJ
Nuclear: 6.1 exajoules
Hydro+biomass: 5.7 EJ
Wind+solar:
In 2000:
Nuclear: 7.8 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 5.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 0.12 EJ
In 2010:
Nuclear: 8.4 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 6.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 1.03 EJ
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years now produces 1 EJ of energy per year. The nuclear power industry has managed to increase output by *twice* as much, without building a single new power plant, just running existing plants a little harder.
This isn't intended to support nuclear power or to knock renewables. My only point is that wind and solar are much less significant than people on both sides of the debate think they are, and if we intend to use them as serious industrial power sources, we're going to have to start building them in a serious industrial way. What we're doing now is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Growth in nuclear is really prior waste. (Score:2)
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I think "overcapacity" is a useless term when you're dealing with energy. Supply creates demand and vice versa, and too much is never enough. The only important question is *profitability*, but the nuclear industry is such a tangled mess of hidden government subsidies and buried external costs that figuring that out is a nightmare.
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Re:Growth in nuclear is really prior waste. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not exactly. Since TMI, domestic construction of new nuclear power plants has ground to a halt here in the US. Since building a new plant hasn't been politically feasible, operators have learned how to squeeze every joule out of the existing fleet. Steam generator upgrades and thermal power uprates have increased the fleet's output substantially. Taking fuel to higher burnups through better in-core fuel management has allowed operators to squeeze a bit more energy from the fuel bundles. But mostly, plant operators have pretty much perfected the art of running a light water reactor. Capacity factors (the percent of time that the plant is operating and generating power) averaged around 75% or so in the US back in the 1970s. Last year it was more like 91%. That's like getting a few reactors "for free."
It's not that operators in the 1970s were incompetent, it's that we've been continuously raising the performance bar. Par for the course is 90%+ capacity factors these days -- totally unheard of, and deemed impossible back then.
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The two biggest components of "renewable energy" in EIA's report are hydroelectric dams and biomass -- the biomass sector is mostly industrial wood and paper plants which run on waste wood, plus people using wood-fired stoves at home. Good for them, but it's not exactly high tech.
And not always "renewable" either. If you don't replant the woods, or use chemicals from non-renewable sources or burn coal to create ethanol from maize, it's not really renewable except in the eyes of politicians and the producers who bought them.
Then there's the whole CO2 question - you get less emissions from gasoline than from US maize based ethanol. But you get more votes from farmers and more contributions from Monsanto [opensecrets.org] by choosing maize over real renewable energy.
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Read the table in TFA. Wind outproduces solar by a factor of 10.
The fact that you find this surprising is my point: you're thinking of solar and wind on a residential neighborhood level, but you're not thinking big enough. So far, our only practical, cost-effective wind and solar energy is produced in gigantic industrial wind farms with hundreds of turbines. And even *that's* a drop in the bucket, compared to fossil energy. Those hundreds of turbines need to become tens of thousands, stretching from the
Conflicting numbers (Score:2)
According to every source on the internet the US produces [grist.org]
~20% of it's energy from nuclear [mapawatt.com]. My own power company says it is 33% with 8% renewable (mostly wood burning).
So why does the linked article show US nuclear at 8%? Something is amiss here.
My guess is that we shut down a bunch of nuclear plants for upgrades as a result of Fukushima just long enough for a statistician to claim we reached some meaningless milestone.
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mdsolar has it right. Nuclear is 20% of electricity generation, and electricity is about 40% of total energy use, so ... do the math.
For more details, see here:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2009/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png [llnl.gov]
Wait (Score:2)
Meaningless comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
Why are they comparing the production of ethanol (48% of "renewables") with nuclear? That doesn't make any sense. Nuclear is for electricity. Ethanol fuels cars. And what happens when they factor in all the petroleum used to produce all that ethanol. Last I checked, ethanol barely breaks even. Woops! And what would it even say if the comparison was meaningful? That people are scared of nuclear? No surprise there.
And then they go to compare "renewables" with domestic crude oil. First, why just domestic crude? Why not talk about ALL the crude consumed in the US? Why include anything but ethanol in that comparison? What sense does it make to compare hydropower with domestic crude oil? They're totally different markets.
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Most of it sources papers by David Pimentel [springerlink.com] who seems to have a real axe to grind against ethanol. There are a lot [anl.gov]
Deceptive article (Score:3)
The reason that talk about BTUs is that they are talking about all types of energy consumption even the burning of wood in home stoves. Wood is renewable but produces carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. Just because it is renewable does not make it green. Take a look at this http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_5.pdf [eia.gov]
For three months in 2010 Neuclear produced 202,449 Million Kilowatthours. Hydro produced 63,295 MKwhrs. Solar, wind and geothermal combined produced 25,288 MKwhrs.
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It is green if you plant more trees to suck that CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
Location, location, location (Score:3)
I really have to wonder if it's even practical to move to an all renewable energy source infrastructure?
Wind and solar take a LOT of space. As it is, bird people, environmentalists and "I don't want to see it but I want the benefits from it" people don't want wind and solar stuff all over the landscape. Geothermal energy is one usually of opportunity and while technically it's everywhere, tectonically, it's not quite as available everywhere. And hydro electric? Do we have enough rivers?
And here's a thing -- even if we shut everything down now, we're already past the point of no return where global warming is concerned. We are going to see a continuation of a change in global weather patterns which mean rain, wind and water will all continue to change movement patterns which will transform where farming is done and more. What is a good location today, will not likely be a good location tomorrow and we don't really know yet where the good locations of tomorrow will be.
We don't need figures saying what we can and are doing today, we need to know if it's even possible to do what we wish for. Can we get 100% clean? If so, how can we do it? Is it sustainable? I'd really like to know.
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
It just includes installed hydroelectric.
There ain't more big rivers.
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Re:Cost? - Actuall the growing bit is corn ethanol (Score:4, Informative)
Ironically the troll at the top of the comment tree is correct.
The growth in renewable is actually primarily in biofuels, the majority of which is corn ethanol, which is produced, as Paul Gigot pointed out, by combining corn and taxpayer dollars.
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that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
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that would be costs after interest, this is costs before. Although with interest at ~1% for bonds the difference might be quite small for the short term.
Besides, a lot of the infrastructure involved (for example hydro electric) was built some time ago, as was the nuclear, but nuclear is being phased out gradually (whether part of a broader strategy or not), whereas renewables aren't.
Well, it's certainly part of SOMEBODY's strategy.
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Actually, the hard numbers, available in the second link, are in BTUs, not percentage points. comma
also, Renewable Energy(a)
a Most data are estimates. See Tables 10.1-10.2c for notes on series
components and estimation; and see Note, "Renewable Energy Production and
Consumption," at end of Section 10
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Percentages don't mean anything. Numbers can be skewed so many ways its not even funny.
Just because some greeny stuck a hose up his ass and lit his farts to make sear his tofu doesn't make it renewable energy.
For example, this article [reuters.com] says that coal power is cooling the earth...
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Not really, this has been an extremely productive year for hydroelectric dams, hardly a typical year, we'll be lucky not to have a year this productive for quite some time. Now, if this were a normal year or the figures weren't so skewed from hydroelectric dams having to top out their capacity, this might suggest just that.
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considering the only reason why the figures are what they are because of the increase in biomass aka ETHANOL I would say yes, nuclear is still the only viable alternative. Hydro is maxed out, wind blows (ha!) and solar is the promise which never lives up to the hype.
Re:So then. (Score:5, Insightful)
We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?
Of course it works. The open question is, "can it scale?"
Good luck tripling the amount of hydro or getting woodstoves into cities.
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No, of course it can't scale. Neither can oil, or any other option. Not a single one of them will be workable when our population reaches a quintillion.
Can it scale? (Score:2)
Re:Can it scale? (Score:5, Interesting)
No one will let nuclear power scale. We haven't actually built a new nuclear plant in 30 years. With old ones simply wearing out means nuclear is on a decline that just can't be stopped without new plants.
That said, most of the US energy supply still comes from coal and gas (in that order), with 'renewables' as a group taking a distant third, and nuclear still chugging along in a close fourth. We don't seem to really be decreasing coal and gas use, which are real problem areas and instead focus on the perfectly adequate nuclear as what needs to go away.
I'd really rather they replace some of those craptastic coal and gas power plants that make up the bulk of our energy production.
Re:So then. (Score:5, Interesting)
PROTIP: Operation DESERTEC [wikipedia.org].
Yes, it does scale. And with 400 km^2 of CSP [concentrat...rpower.com] we can power the entire world. (Including nighttime through hydroelectric pumped-storage and winters.)
(Connected with high-voltage DC lines to minimize losses btw.)
To be honest, I think this project is awesome. Cheap, simple, elegant, easy to repair, only made of abundant and recyclable materials, never (well, not in any imaginable time frame) running out energy source... It's hard to imagine a better solution.
And the best part: The mirrors allow water from the air to condense on them, moisturizing the ground below, which creates a whole flora and fauna thriving on it. So it's not only neutral to nature, but has a positive effect.
P.S.: I have nothing against nuclear power, and know pretty well how it works. I don't think it's bad. I just think this is so much better! :)
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Then the advantage of hydro is that you need hydro if you want wind. Wind power is fairly cheap, but unreliable. Hydro is great for occasionally filling the gaps left by unreliable sources.
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No one has ever said that it doesn't generate power, just that it's cost ineffective, and requires traditionally generated power in any event to even out the peaks and valleys.
Re:So then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Admittedly more effort would need to be put into load and supply management with a large proportion of renewable power. Hydro power is a good candidate for filling gaps in supply. It can operate around the clock and it can be brought on line quickly. It can also be used to store energy with reasonable efficiency.
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Hydro is great if you happen to be somewhere where a hydro plant already exists. Dams are very hard to build now (at least in the U.S.) because of environmental restrictions. Dams have a tendency to drown things upstream.
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Hydro plants don't have to use reservoirs. We've got an almost 2GW hydro plant in Quebec that is a run-of-the-river type.
In terms of scale, I'd note that Canada, with 10% the population, generates 1.47x more hydro power than the entire US. HydroQuébec alone (36.8 GW) has ~5.4 GW of additional capacity and upgrades under construction.
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They're called capacitors, and they've been around for a while now.
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Dunno, I once chucked an electrolytic cap into a fire. Not sure I want to see that happen with a capacitor which can power a state for an hour. Maybe nuclear power is preferred over that.
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It is possible to store energy, you know. A bunch of mirrors can collect sunlight to melt salt by day, and that salt doesn't magically become cold the moment the sun goes down.
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Re:So then. (Score:5, Informative)
It also requires a massive amount of salt. Sodium thiosulfate, one of the favored salts for thermal energy storage due to low cost, practical melting point, high heat of fusion, and low toxicity, takes over one ton to store the energy required by the average household for one day. You can reuse it each day, of course, but that's still a buttload of salt for just one city.
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over one ton to store the energy required by the average household for one day. You can reuse it each day, of course, but that's still a buttload of salt
Dude, you need to see a proctologist if you can get that much crammed up there!
Tons of lumber? (Score:2)
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There is no more waste heat than would otherwise be there from the sun hitting the earth and heating that up, instead of the energy being focused onto a mass of salt.
Wate heat management? (Score:2)
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The solar plants actually have a different albedo than the earth as a whole (and generally as the earth replaced by the solar plant), but it's a really trivial amount.
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I think that salt thermal-storage collectors are a great idea. The problem I have with non-PV collectors in general is:
1 - They tend to use large arrays of mirrors
2 - They are usually located in the desert
3 - Mirrors don't last long in the desert
I've yet to see a cost breakdown on replacement of these huge mirror arrays.
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a solar panel on a starlit night probably can't even light a fart.
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We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?
Problem is we ran out of rivers to dam, and that's where most of this is coming from.
Not even close (Score:2)
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Actually, if you read the table in TFA, you'll see that hydroelectric has been *declining* for the past decade or two, due to dam closures and environmental restrictions on river flow. Most of the increase in the past decade has been an increase in biomass energy -- mostly paper and lumber plants using their wood waste for fuel, plus more homes using wood and pellet stoves.
Wind power has grown from "utterly insignificant" to "barely worth mentioning", and solar power is still at the "cheap parlor trick" st
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"We can basically say renewable energy fsckin works, now ?"
You can say whatever you want.
I can put lipstick on a pig and say it's Lindsay Lohan but I don't think I'd get many takers. ;)
Renewable energy certainly works. On some scales, in some markets, and in some applications.
The chemistry and chem engineering departments I work in do boatloads of work trying to make it and other energy technologies cheaper, better and more efficient. Better batteries, fuel cells, materials for solar cells, biofuels, etc. W
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More importantly, the question is what is the trend, Look here [eia.gov] You will see that coal use rose through the time until 2005. Then it started falling. Now, part of that COULD be the neo-con's recession. But it is not. Look at the other energy sources. THey all rose except for one year with AE.
Coal is withering. Heck, here in Colorado, we are going to tear down something like 5 coal plants and replace them with natural gas and AE.
You've got that backwards (Score:3)
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Easy, go look elsewhere for a dose of reality (Score:3)
Because