Stung By Scandal, South Korea Weighs Up Cost of Curbing Nuclear Power 200
mdsolar writes in about an ongoing scandal in South Korea that has rocked their nuclear power program. "It started with a few bogus safety certificates for cables shutting a handful of South Korean nuclear reactors. Now, the scandal has snowballed, with 100 people indicted and Seoul under pressure to rethink its reliance on nuclear power. A shift away from nuclear, which generates a third of South Korea's electricity, could cost tens of billions of dollars a year by boosting imports of liquefied natural gas, oil or coal. Although helping calm safety concerns, it would also push the government into a politically sensitive debate over whether state utilities could pass on sharply higher power bills to households and companies. Gas, which makes up half of South Korea's energy bill while accounting for only a fifth of its power, would likely be the main substitute for nuclear, as it is considered cleaner than coal and plants can be built more easily near cities."
Why are they rethinking nuclear? (Score:3)
As far as I can tell, the problem is that nuclear plants were closed in the interests of safety while they await safety recertification - which seems like the straightforward thing to do in any case where safety requirements are found to be in violation.
Is it simply a matter of failure modes? That is, because the worst-case scenario for a fission plant is worse than that of a coal plant?
Re:Why are they rethinking nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get it either. This is a problem of corruption, not technology.
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Because ....
"Politicians at a congressional hearing on Monday estimated the recent nuclear scandals have cost operator KHNP nearly 3 trillion won ($2.8 billion) in cable replacement, loss of power sales and payment to KEPCO to replace nuclear power with electricity from other fuels. "
In other words: the fuel may be cheap, the total costs of nuclear might be much higher. And you cannot simply solve corruption. If that is possible with a reasonable cost, it would be solved now.
Simply reducing the problem to o
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True, you can't solve corruption. You can uncover it with the appropriate oversight and processes in place. And the costs associated with not getting away with it can be a big deterrent for some period of time. Its also a cultural thing, some places the controls are harder to implement effectively.
It cost the company $2.8bn to dig up cables, check them, replace them, and during that time have the reactor shut down. Let's say that doing the job properly in the first place and getting correct safety certificates would have cost $100mil additional, so there was $2.7bn in damages.
What about everyone involved in causing the damage to go to jail for just one month per million dollar damages. Up to the CEO of the company starting it all. Guess what his replacement CEO will do if anyone comes up with the
And where will they get the natural gas??? RUSSIA! (Score:5, Informative)
Yep.
I wouldn't be surprised if Russia is wetting themselves as more and more countries are abandoning nuclear power and switching to natural gas, which Russia has a monopoly over in Asia.
Re: And where will they get the natural gas??? RUS (Score:2)
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So they drank 2 Liters before they passed out and pissed themselves. Doesn't change the outcome.
Let's go BACKWARDS! (Score:5, Insightful)
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What evidence do you have that the government will do a better job or be less corrupt than the private companies? Or is government a default solution to every problem regardless of its own (numerous) problems?
Re:Let's go BACKWARDS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Publicly owned utilities have no incentive to cut costs in an effort to boost profit margins. They can run with a zero margin and no shareholders exist to whine and bitch.
It's a possible course of action when private industry rears its corrupt, incompetent head.
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They can run with a zero margin
They can run with huge losses too which is usually the case (see USPS, every form of government run public transport, most public utilities) and no shareholders exist to whine and bitch, only voters who have no direct way to hold the management accountable the way shareholders do and plenty of conflicting interests from industry, unions etc competing for management (i.e. government) favors through "donations, lobbying and election time favors (union busing etc). Euro
Re:Let's go BACKWARDS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Who are running a loss because they've been forced to via poor legislation. They were running with a surplus until they were forced to fund retirements 75 years into the future.
Ah yes, "voting doesn't matter." The cry of the cynic harkens again. Certainly a self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one.
And yet while the London Underground may run losses, I suspect the overall return in the economy is positive. That's one thing most people who complain about government run things running at a loss virtually always miss.
I don't see NASA having turned a profit ever yet only the most blind and anti-government can seriously argue that nothing of value has come from it. Same for projects like CERN, which I doubt a corporation would ever undertake.
Therefore what? What's the point you're trying to make? You can't seriously say that government is bad and we should privatize it all because it can be easily shown that privatization is no better and potentially even worse.
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With mail rate trends being what they are, it would be insane not to have the postal service fund it's employee retirements.
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Yeah, and how much profit does the fire department make?
They are called PUBLIC utilities because they are there to serve the public. See also: roads, sanitation, education...
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It's not about turning a profit, it is about efficient operations. In case of private companies there is an obvious incentive to run a tight ship. In public companies the only incentive for the bureaucrat in charge is not to screw up in a particularly public way that might cost him his job, while cashing in his power in a variety of ways through the deals with suppliers, unions, and a million other ways.
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Publicly owned utilities have no incentive to cut costs in an effort to boost profit margins. They can run with a zero margin and no shareholders exist to whine and bitch.
Or is government a default solution to every problem regardless of its own (numerous) problems?
It's a possible course of action when private industry rears its corrupt, incompetent head.
O,RLY? Well let me introduce you to our local Austin Energy [wikipedia.org], which despite being public utility does not run a "zero" margin. In fact the city of Austin steals $100Mil/year from it to dump into the city's general fund (things absolutely unrelated to power generation - it is effectively taxing people on their utility bills without all the annoyances of passing an actual "tax"). I can guarantee you if our local corrupt, incompetent city leaders could steal anything else out of it they absolutely would. Yo
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There are small municipal power companies created by voters. However they're mostly stuck buy power from the national grid just like everyone else.
As far as another competent private entity B, do they exist? That is, is there any evidence of a competent and non-corrupt and fully ethical private entity in the power industry (or any industry for that matter)? Oh sure, we can put some checks and balances into place by writing some regulations, and then let the private entities create the regulations for us
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What evidence do you have that the government will do a better job or be less corrupt than the private companies?
Chernobyl was government owned and operated, and it worked fine for years before it caught fire and exploded.
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Fox News has arrived, I see.
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Points deducted for not mentioning Koch brothers though.
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We can't trust governments to do this as they're proven to be inept and corrupt. We also can not trust private industry to do this because they are inept and corrupt. Basically human beings are right out. So let's get power from the extraterrestrials.
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(If it wasn't readily apparent, this comment is entirely sarcastic)
Nuclear safety is different (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nuclear safety is different (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]
Well coal certainly didn't do anything for their property values...
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Why does every debate on energy quickly turn to "which is the worst"?
Leaving renewables aside modern coal, as a stop-gap measure, isn't actually that bad. Full carbon and emission capture is possible. It costs more, but not as much as nuclear or gas in most countries. Having said that I'd probably still object to building such plants because they are only a stop-gap until we have something better, but would inevitably turn into the long term plan.
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Problem is, it wouldn't be a "stop-gap" measure. Unless you have a different definition of "stop-gap" from mine.
Given the costs if construction and maintenance, whatever you built will be used until the cost of maintaining it outstrips the cost of building something else, just like with the nuclear plant now. Better to just transition straight to something that already IS better, even if it costs more now, and be done with it.
=Smidge=
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Yeah, let's build more fossil generation "until the current crisis is over."
Funny how we're always in a crisis...
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You mean exactly like hydro does as a matter of design? [wikipedia.org] From the wiki: "However, the dam flooded archaeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people, and is causing significant ecological changes, including an increased risk of landslides."
Just build the nuclear plants in remote locations with an unpopulated safety buffer ar
Re:Nuclear safety is different (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear safety is different (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure thing. We'll just build a few coal plants instead. They're privately insurable despite killing people and destroying the environment when operating normally, since unlike nuclear no one expects them to pay for their externalities. Or we could build a hundred large solar plants, which together equal about one reactor as long as sun shines from cloudless skies. That shouldn't require any subsidies, and if it does, it's okay because it's not nuclear. Of course, they'll still need those coal plants for backup, but that's okay because dying from microparticle-induced cancer is a lot better than dying from radiation-induced cancer, amirite?
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Ok, that's fine - but only if we stop letting all the Coal Plants dump their pollution into the atmosphere for free....
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Re:Nuclear safety is different (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you're going to "do" nuclear, at least do it in a sensible way. IE: Do NOT use solid-fuel LWR technology, that is just f**king stupid. If you use a liquid coolant that naturally turns to a gas at BELOW the working temperature of your reactor, you have a stupid f**king design. An "average" LWR has to operate at 100+ atmospheres of pressure, just to keep the coolant (water) in liquid phase. This invites a host of engineering challenges that would be completely unnecessary with a design (such as LFTR [wikipedia.org]) that
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Long term, until fusion is sustainable for production energy, the ideal would be a coal/gas plant as the starter (nuclear plants require power on the grind to come online after a grid outage), then have the general power be primarily nuclear.
With better batteries and solar, that will do a lot to ease peak consumption. If we can get batteries that are within an order of magnitude of gasoline that can store power overnight, this would significantly ease the load from the power grid.
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other energy sources are already cheaper [than nuclear]
That depends on how you account for the strip mining, fracking, CO2 and things like radiation (from coal plants) spewing into the atmosphere (which we all share). There aren't low carbon sources that are both cheaper than nuclear and suitable for base load.
safety is still somewhat lacking (accidents, like Fukushima, still happen)
And for perspective, coal plants emit more radiation when working normally, 24x7.
Safer and cheaper nuclear reactors should be possible.
Are possible, and much safer technology (than was in place at any of the high-profile incidents) exists today.
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Indeed nuclear plants are best left into the hands of Government which has nothing to gain not respecting the letter of the law rules regulations and contracts where private interests will ALWAYS try to shortchange , use sub spec materials , cut here and there till the stations are nothing but ticking time bombs.Nuclear in private hands is nothing but trouble worldwide.
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Indeed nuclear plants are best left into the hands of Government which has nothing to gain not respecting the letter of the law rules regulations and contracts where private interests will ALWAYS try to shortchange , use sub spec materials , cut here and there till the stations are nothing but ticking time bombs.Nuclear in private hands is nothing but trouble worldwide.
In which we learn that herbertrich has never actually seen a government contract up close.
So corruption... (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Where the hell are you picking up that assumption?
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The unthinkable solution (Score:4, Funny)
Or you could, I dunno, provide competent and effective _oversight_ to ensure the nuclear plants are being operated safely? I know - that's just crazy talk.
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First we have to solve the revolving door between government and industry...
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Or you could, I dunno, provide competent and effective _oversight_ to ensure the nuclear plants are being operated safely? I know - that's just crazy talk.
I like that this is modded "Funny." The funny part being that there's such a thing as "competent and effective oversight." In reality, government regulators are usually very cozy in bed with those they are supposedly regulating. Sometimes literally.
We're just gonna have to wait. (Score:2, Funny)
Nuclear power and a culture based on money can not work safely.
Humans are just too shortsighted, greedy, and unwise for nuclear power yet.
Evolve dammit.
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I've got some bad news for you about the selection pressure.
All those ill-gotten gains from graft and corruption only serve to increase the number of reproductive opportunities for the holder. Especially if that person has no inclination toward monogamy.
Slashdotted? Exaggerated? (Score:2)
The article never loaded for me. Try this one: Stung by Scandal [voanews.com]
Also, they aren't eliminating nuclear power. The article says:
The study recommended nuclear power capacity be kept between 22 and 29 percent of the total by 2035, well below existing plans to grow the sector to 41 percent in less than 20 years.
Although if they have a scandal going on, don't think that switching the power source will eliminate the underhanded behavior.
natural gas... (Score:2)
natural gas, killing people every day
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24702806 [bbc.co.uk]
(and somehow people have the idea that nuclear is dangerous)
If they're doing it on nuclear certs... (Score:2)
... they're doing it on everything.
It is arguably more dangerous to cut corners on, say, a natural gas pipeline than anything at a nuclear plant, because nuclear facilities have a lot more redundancy in their safety systems.
Consider that it is debatable whether the events at Fukushima nuclear plants killed anyone at all, whereas natural gas explosions kill and injure people on a regular basis - Google-searching for "natural gas explosion" turns up three distinct events in the US on the first page, one of wh
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This is like a drunk-walk of angry complaining. Jumping from topic to related topic you're outraged about seemingly at random.
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It is South Korea. If you have a culture that will fuck up safety certificates at nuclear plants, do you think they are suddenly going to be better with natural gas plants?
Fix the fucking culture and kill the corruption. The technology was never the problem.
Do you think they have a monopoly on that culture? Witness our very own government owned and operated Tennessee Valley Authority [knoxnews.com] and they falsified readings of wells around the coal slurry dam. Oh, they do it with nuclear too [knoxnews.com].
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A walk through Seoul demonstrates ordinary building codes enforcement is pretty casual. My favorite example was a small paint store where the proprietor and wife lived among the stock. It reeked of solvent and would likely have gone up if a smoker walked into the place. You could smell it from the street.
Fixing the culture will be like fixing the SAME indifferent-to-safety culture we had in the US. Give it a couple or three generations.
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You can't see me making the "jerk off" motion with my hand, but I'm doing it.
There have been zero safety issues with American nuclear plants for 30 years.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Informative)
'On March 5, 2002, maintenance workers discovered that corrosion had eaten a football-sized hole into the reactor vessel head of the Davis-Besse plant. Although the corrosion did not lead to an accident, this was considered to be a serious nuclear safety incident.[65][66] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission kept Davis-Besse shut down until March 2004, so that FirstEnergy was able to perform all the necessary maintenance for safe operations. The NRC imposed its largest fine ever—more than $5 million—against FirstEnergy for the actions that led to the corrosion. The company paid an additional $28 million in fines under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.[65]'
You can't see me making the 'dick head' motion with my hand, but I'm making it.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the system worked exactly as intended and no humans were ever at risk.
Typically, people cite examples that support their argument, not the other guy's. But I like your unconventional style.
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Now the plant is closing taking the jobs and the property values with it.
This is a pretty poor complaint, if you are complaining about the plant or the company which runs it. I doubt there is a single person at Entergy who wants to see the plant shut down.
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Non-nuclear [guim.co.uk]
Have you been in Vermont recently? I'd love to live there, if there were any jobs.
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There have been zero safety issues with American nuclear plants for 30 years.
Nope [wikipedia.org].
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The same could be said about the USA, where money equals law and justice is make-believe for kids stories.
Yea, we should put government in charge of it from start to finish, That will take all of the incentive to cheat out of it. TVA never does anything like this. No, never at all. [knoxnews.com]
Re: Who gives a shit? (Score:2)
Also luckily, nuclear fission reactors cant and dont detonate. Modern designs cant even meltdown.
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Dunno about rivaling a nuclear explosion...but it sure looked huge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_propane_explosion [wikipedia.org]
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It does look huge. It only directly caused one death (plant employee) and the second death was from a fire fighter having cardiac arrest at the scene. I would say that this doesn't even come close to justifying the hyperbole of "One LNG storage facility exploding could rival a nuclear weapon detonation". The cleanup cost was only 1.8 million CAD and about a day's worth of inconvenience to the surrounding community.
Re:Who gives a shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still more deaths than Fukushima though.
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So far
Take it far enough, we might find that the diagnosis of just being alive comes with a 100% morality rate.
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The one you are looking for is Mexico City. 1970s IIRC.
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Also, the gas itself slowly destroys the integrity of the pipes that carry it. The older they get, the more likely there will be an incident. (There are e
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Sorry, but that's a welding problem and not a room temperature one.
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The political right wants nuclear, but gave up fighting environmentalists over it long ago.
Re:Antinuclear bias stops global climate change fi (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so sure the right wants nuclear. They've been letting the left crush it by proxy for decades.
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The right wants cheap power. Nuclear used to be the way to make that happen, but with all the problems with environmentalists gas is starting to look like a much better option.
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I'm not sure they want cheap power inasmuch as they want profitable power. Nuclear may actually be too cheap.
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Cheap power is profitable power for the guys that own factories, foundries, datacenters, etc.
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The left is not monolithic.
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In other words, they don't seem to realize that their uncompromising attitude is marginalizing them all while making the situation worse.
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Ah, the scientifically illiterate nukefan. Always focusing on single, small ideas and unable to see the bigger picture, or understand how we have already solved these problems.
Installing renewable capacity isn't just about building wind, wave, hyro, solar thermal, geothermal and biomass plants, or installing solar PV on buildings. It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
It's actually cheaper to save energy
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Conservation?
The developing third world will eat you.
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How much does it cost to save a unit of energy of a certain type (heat, electricity, fuel)? How much does it cost to produce a unit of energy of the same type?
Don't be surprised if there's an order of magnitude difference in cost, and not in the direction that you might expect.
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It's about reducing energy consumption by making buildings more efficient and building a smart grid that can manage the load and store energy.
That would be fine if the smart grid advocates ever got beyond a hand-wave "smart grid magically fixes intermittency" statement. Exactly *how* is this supposed to happen? We already have mechanisms for spreading the load (off-peak tariffs and so forth). The only technology that is even vaguely economic for storage is pumped storage hydro, which is limited in where you can put it and costs money. And building insulation isn't going to help with electicity as electricity generally isn't used for building heat
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Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes. There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting. Al
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Well, it's not that hard to understand, and it's not really my fault if you can't be bothered to find out about it. A smart grid is able to react to changing power availability and demands quickly. Say there is a momentary spike in usage, the smart grid can ask devices with a lot of thermal mass to back off a little if it won't cause them any problems, e.g. a fridge gaining 0.1C over ten minutes.
Momentary spikes in usage aren't the problem though - the existing grid can cope with these already. The problem is variation in supply - e.g. if the wind dies down for hours or days, or solar being unavailable at night or in the winter months. How will it help with this?
There is also the ability to much more accurately predict demand and supply through monitoring and reporting.
We're already good at accurate demand prediction - it's important in order to plan & control the output of current power stations.
All that means you need less standby capacity
How? This hasn't been shown.Turning fridges off for 15 minutes isn't going to help with the timescales tha
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You are right that we try to balance load, but we are not very good at it. For example electricity is cheap at night but most people's hot water heaters come on during the day just before they need to use it. A well insulated storage tank can easily use cheap off-peak electricity and store that energy for later, especially if the grid itself can tell it when it is best to turn the heater on. At 2AM there might be a little drop in the local wind capacity, but we know it will pick up by 4AM, so the heater can just wait.
OK, but this isn't much "smarter" than the current off-peak system, and I very much doubt that anyone with an off peak tariff and an electric storage heater will run the heater at peak times unless the stored water runs out. That defeats the whole point of storage heating. Not to mention that using electric heating instead of gas just so you have somewhere to dump excess production is quite spectacularly inefficient and costly.
Water heaters will be partially replaced by solar anyway. Solar thermal heating is incredibly efficient and works even on heavily overcast days. Even when the sky is cloudy about 80% of the sun's energy still reaches the surface of the earth, and solar thermal can be 75% efficient.
Forgot to mention - according to this link [energysavingtrust.org.uk], a typical solar water heating system
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Am I the only one who thinks that something must be fundamentally wrong with the system if burning power in order to later generate power makes good sense. There are two mechanical loss stages in that process. It's basically a perpetual motion machine where the only input is some money.
Why aren't the biggest consumers flat demand 24/7? All the big industries that surround me are, I'm sure.
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You're sure? Absolutely sure?
Idiot. Not all large industrial processes are continuous.
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Idiot. Not all countries are the country you live in.
Wind power is helping to shut down nuclear (Score:2)
In 2013 Q1-3, solar is the second leading source of new generating capacity. http://solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.13358 [solarindustrymag.com]
You seem to have assumptions that are misleading you.
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Can you read? From your second link: "The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) Office of Energy Projects reports new natural gas dominated the first three quarters of the year with 5.85 GW, representing 54.6% of new capacity."
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Methane produced from hydrolysis and the Sabatier reaction will be cheaper than gas from the ground. The infrastructure will be re-purposed to renewable energy.
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When solar gets that low you install more natgas. There's this daily event called "sunset" that renders panels useless. It also means you have to install 2x to 3x capacity to get the same generation ability as baseline generators.
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The fear is stoked by activists, and those activists are by and large from the left.
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It's not like they'd be hooking up extraction and capture devices to the back ends of people.... that'd be Japan.
Or, The Matrix: Couch Potato Edition.