Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Largest Source of Power Capacity (ft.com) 340
The world's largest source of power capacity is now renewables, as roughly half a million solar panels were installed every single day last year. In addition, two wind turbines were erected every hour in countries such as China, according to the International Energy Agency. Financial Times reports (Editor's note: may be paywalled; alternate source): Although coal and other fossil fuels remain the largest source of electricity generation, many conventional power utilities and energy groups have been confounded by the speed at which renewables have grown and the rapid drop in costs for the technologies. Average global generation costs for new onshore wind farms fell by an estimated 30 percent between 2010 and 2015 while those for big solar panel plants fell by an even steeper two-thirds, an IEA report published on Tuesday showed. The Paris-based agency thinks costs are likely to fall even further over the next five years, by 15 percent on average for wind and by a quarter for solar power. It said an unprecedented 153 gigawatts of green electricity was installed last year, mostly wind and solar projects, which has more than the total power capacity in Canada. It was also more than the amount of conventional fossil fuel or nuclear power added in 2015, leading renewables to surpass coal's cumulative share of global power capacity -- though not electricity generation. A power plant's capacity is the maximum amount of electricity it can potentially produce. The amount of energy a plant actually generates varies according to how long it produces power over a period of time. Coal power plants supplied close to 39 percent of the world's power in 2015, while renewables, including old hydropower dams, accounted for 23 percent, IEA data show. But the agency expects renewables' share of power generation to rise to 28 percent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the U.S. and E.U. combined.
Renewables will never work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Renewables will never work (Score:3, Insightful)
"capacity"? You mean if the sun was shining on every single solar panel in the world then it hypothetically would generate as much electricity as coal actually produces. Seriously.
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And while this might sound doubly cynical, that's capacity today. What will their capacity be later on, after wear and tear?
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Why don't you simply go look? "Wear and tear" profiles on solar panels are widely available. Same with wind turbines.
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"capacity"? You mean if the sun was shining on every single solar panel in the world
Even on a mostly cloudy day my solar panels produce about a quarter(1/4) of their normal output. Enough to run the house loads (frig, freezer, PC, lights, tv, etc).
I cut household electricity CO2 footprint by another metric ton this year. Soon.my PV will be on a solar tracker, that should reduce non-food related CO2 footprint to near zero.. I will be the first person in my republican dominated city to achieve a near zero carbon footprint house. Someone's got to break the mold, and leave FF behind, I hop
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:5, Insightful)
So'eh, progress is not something to be proud of ... gotcha
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:5, Informative)
The headline is wrong, as usual. In fact even reading the summary shows you it can't be right:
Coal power plants supplied close to 39 percent of the world's power in 2015, while renewables, including old hydropower dams, accounted for 23 percent, IEA data show
So renewables are around half of what coal is. If you look at the original article, even just the sub-header, you'll see that:
153 GigaWatts of renewables make up over half the new capacity added globally.
That's "new capacity added so far this year", not "total capacity" as the headline here claims.
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Power capacity doesn't mean much for wind/solar. That's just the sum of the peak power outputs when the sun is high and the wind blows just right. There is no way we can turn up the sun to meet demand.
Compare it to fossil fuel plants or dams where the capacity factor can be controlled to some extent by choosing to burn more or less fuel or by managing the water reservoir level.
We need to compare compare energy (not power) output to get a meaningful result, and this is where the new problem for solar/wind li
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no no no no.
get with the program.
now its "only nukes can make all the electricity".
Re: Renewables will never work (Score:2)
Re:Subsidies (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they've been doing exactly that with oil for generations. The petrochemical corporations have even persuaded governments to fight wars on their behalf.
The effect on the competition has been devastating.
Re:Subsidies (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
Re:Subsidies (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a huge subsidy that doesn't get counted as a subsidy.
Nor should it, because it was NOT a subsidy. The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade. Subsidies encourage over production. The Iraq war did the exact opposite. It depressed output, and pushed up prices.
You obviously think the Iraq war was dumb, but it is also obvious that it was even dumber than you think. We paid more in excess oil prices than we spent on the war itself.
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Re:Subsidies (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Except for the Oil-Execs, that benefited hugely from all this (and the destruction of the planet they are driving forward).
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The oil companies didn't have to pay for their own security and they didn't have to pay for the true cost of oil.
It's also very expensive to maintain a naval and coast guard fleet to protect oil tankers. The oil companies should be paying for it.
If they had to pay for those things- their prices would be much higher. So their prices are subsidized by tax payers.
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>Colonialism involves colonies, where the inhabitants of the area in question are citizens of the mother country.
So according to your bizarre and unique (made up) definition - the Dutch colonies (which once spanned half the globe) were not colonies then. Since nobody in them were citizens of the mother country, the best you could hope for was 'employee of the corporation' - but most were simply 'slaves' or 'natives to be shoved aside'.
In fact, hardly any colonial power EVER granted citizens to the people
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But it is. High oil prices makes oil companies really happy - their cost is mostly fixed, so expensive oil is pure profit.
I work for the oil industry so our company felt the falling oil prices and lower profits of oil companies (and deepwater horizon, that also hurt a lot).
Re:Subsidies (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, when you say, "It depressed output, and pushed up prices." in the same sentence like that you're implying a causal relationship. You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.
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Great summary! Thanks for that.
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There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example.
Yes, because it's a subsidy for farmer's income, not for food. Calling it a food subsidy would not make sense. The problem with "oil subsidies" is people are trying to lump in multiple things.. subsidies for production and apparently also subsidies for oil company income. Now in this thread the person making the subsidy claim said "protect Oil Company interests in the middle east" so that sounds more like production than income, since the income doesn't accrue in the Middle East but at the host nation.
This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.
Got a
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You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way
You misunderstand supply and demand. If supply is halved, that doesn't mean the price doubles. It means that the price rises until people use half as much, which is WAY WAY more than doubling. Historically, if the price of oil doubles, demand falls by about 3%. So a shortfall in production of 3% is enough to double the price of oil.
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The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003
What have the profits of the oil companies been since 2003?
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You think there are no health effects within 1000m of a coal plant ? Hell the health effects of coal are far worse, over a much larger area - and of course you get it double because living anywhere within about 50-thousand meters of a coal MINE is seriously hazardous to health as well.
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That never happened. You pretend you understand something; buy a line of crap and then distort facts to fit your fantasy.
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Exactly.. We spent $2 trillion dollars and over 4,000 lives to protect Oil Company interests in the middle east.
2?
I don't know where you get your numbers but you're an order of magnitude short, it's more like 20.
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The petrochemical corporations have even persuaded governments to fight wars on their behalf.
That is still preferable to corporations waging war on their own behalf [wikipedia.org].
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Nope. If they wage their own war, at least they pay the costs.
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Batteries are in their infancy for this, getting better every year.
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And I'm still waiting for renewable to provide *any* power during a cold winter night...
Water storage. It works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Once there is enough excess daytime capacity, we'll be good to go.
That isn't today, though.
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:4, Informative)
Plus, since hydroelectric is usually considered 'renewable', water keeps flowing (usually) through dams on cold winter nights.
Canada has quite a few cold winter nights, yet "Manitoba, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and Quebec produce over 90% of their power from hydroelectricity. Quebec generates half of Canada's hydroelectric power."
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, in many places it does. The sun heating certain areas in the morning creates wind. Those areas cooling in the evening causes wind. At mid-day and mid-night, there is no heat gradient to cause strong wind.
Alternately, storms blow for days at a time, with strong winds for the whole period. And windmills are shut down so they don't break from turning past their rated rpm.
And nice way to completely leave off solar, as the article/submission mentioned how many millions of solar panels were installed last year. They sure don't produce much energy in a Northern winter.
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:4, Informative)
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Someone should invent motorized solar-panels, that can tip to 90 degrees and get rid of built-up snow.
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The majority of the world's population do live between +/- 24 degrees of the equator though, so solar is a good option for most people, most of the time.
No single source of power is going to work for every possible use case: wind is inconsistent, gas pollutes, nuclear is expensive, solar is season- and location-dependent, hydro uses a lot of land, geothermal is rare, tidal is cyclic, coal is just horrific. The sensible thing to do is to use varied mix and invest in a decent grid so that when one area (e.g.
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:5, Insightful)
What you mean like here in Ontario? Where the windmills don't turn because the government pays them not to produce electricity? Where it accounts for under 2% of the total generation but responsible for 80% of the price increase in the last decade? From at peak of 0.07kWh to 0.18kWh. Where you can have 45+ days in a row without direct sunlight for solar. Yeah, they're doing a world of good for us. 70k people have had their electricity cut in the last 2 years, 700k customers are 4 months or more in arrears right now. The largest hydro company(Ontario Hydro) has 1.3m customers for example. FYI: Electricity is called hydro here, because our primary generation source used to be hydro-electric.
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Does that help you understand the topic?
Yes hydro is about the most convenient power source available but other places are not blessed with such sites for it as Ontario.
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:5, Informative)
Windmills are there to cover peaks.
No, this is nonsense. Windmills are there to produce power when the wind is blowing. Wind is not "peaking power", that can fill in the gaps from other sources, because it is not dependable. The opposite is true: variable winds create peaks and troughs that need to be filled by on-demand sources such as gas turbines or ... hydro.
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Utility scale batteries reduce variability and allow wind farms to meet peaks in demand. They can build a few hundred MWh now, but actually 50MWh is plenty.
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Right. And where are you going to put them? Let's take a look back again to Ontario where land is at a premium not because of a lack of space, but because it's some of the best farmland in the world. How much of an area are you going to need for all those batteries to cover say 4.8 million households? Well let's cut it down to 4m, and just run from Windsor to Ottawa, not counting the businesses. Keep in mind that off peak is somewhere around 16k MW and on peak hits between 22k MW and 29k MW. 50MWh wou
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Well, thinking out loud, Not much space really, if we are looking to spread failure risk around. So first look at the ability to get the dead abandoned spaces into the grid. IE: blighted area's. Next, think in the sense of 3d stacking of the battery buildings. I'm thinking it's going to look like a container ship cell design myself.
So we got rid of some blighted area's, next we have to optimize already used space IE: parking lot's, smaller local distribution.
And 1 space that I see used somewhat in Florida,
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Do you have any idea how big these batteries are? I mean, did you at least do a Google image search?
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and that is ALWAYS, if you spread them out wide enough.
Yes, but that is a very wide spread and therefore a very big if. The ideal energy mix would be nuclear for base load, and then wind/solar with hydro available to handle variability in the renewables. But that requires geography that's hydro friendly, which most of the world isn't. CCGT will do for now in handling variable load until some kind of battery grid becomes available.
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If windmills are there to cover peak, it would never happen in Ontario. The hottest days of the year here are also the times when there is the most peak demand, and the wind is almost never blowing. Usually around then it's somewhere between 29-35C with a humidex of 35-40C. On top of that, if you're talking about in-general daytime peak, Ontario generates more electricity then it uses(and is also home to the 2nd largest nuclear power station in the world). The excess is sold to the US at between 0.02-0.
Re:Renewables will never work (Score:4, Informative)
so build some solar and wind much more south? Alabama AND Arizona for example. electricity is the cheapest form of energy to transport
Mighta missed it, but between Ontario and say Arizona there's at least 1800 miles. And between Ontario and Alabama it's around 1k miles. While the NA grid is somewhat interconnected, there are still separate network grids in case of catastrophic failure. On top of that, there isn't a big nationwide high voltage DC grid for the delivery of power from plants. And HVDC is the only way you're going to be transporting power that far while reducing the loss. AC it actually becomes very cost prohibitive very quickly over very long distances and more electricity is lost due to resistance and heat.
Ontario's best solution for electricity has always been nuclear, followed by hydro-electric to round it out. Followed by coal and natural gas for peak demands. The current government(Liberal) decided that "coal is nasty, evil and dirty" and shut them down, instead of say retrofitting them. And there were even a few leaked documents that they wanted to do the same with natural gas power plants and wanted to ban natural gas for home use, forcing everyone onto electric. The price started climbing quickly once these cheap sources were removed from the grid.
If you want to see this insanity in action, go look at the current NDP government in Alberta. Where they're pushing the same policy. The problem in Alberta is, whole lotta area and people are very spread out. Coal is plentiful, and in turn small out of the nowhere places where it's cost prohibitive to build NG, impossible to build nuclear, and where solar or wind is also prohibitive. They're now scrambling to build thousands of KM of power lines. Small towns and cities like Grande Prairie and Grande Cache rely on small scale coal plants to keep people from freezing to death in the winter when there are grid failures for example. The winter I spent in Grande Cache, the nighttime lows hit -48C with a windchill of -55C. The daytime highs were between -25C and -38C not counting windchills. We had 3 days with no power due to high winds, the mall, fire dept, and all government buildings had power though. So people who didn't have wood as a backup, could safely stay somewhere.
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Yes peak pricing models SUCK and governments should have stopped that Enron shit being inflicted on people just so some speculators could get rich. There should be sensible caps related to generation costs instead of a fucking casino where a scarcity event leads to someone getting an enormous jackpot win.
It's not the generation method, it's the fake market game, since gas fired generators
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That was federal, not provincial and had to do with replacing a 1st gen medical reactor, which is still in use. Just a FYI. I think you're talking about the hundred million on a "natural gas" generating station, that was cancelled because the NIMBY's in Mississauga threw a hissyfit. That's the same NG plant, that the current government is under 2 investigations for relating to the destruction of documents.
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Re: Renewables will never work (Score:4, Informative)
The world would have to stop spinning (so the solar panels were always lot and at a perfect angle with zero clouds) with all the panels moved to the equator, while the wind would have to be a constant gale at all wind locations..
Nope. The capacity of an installed solar panel is the sum or average of expected generation over a day/month/year, so it takes generation time and location into account.
And the wind around here is a yearly average as the given power level, and at least here, wind generates more than all the petrochemicals in the same grid. But then, I'm not in the US.
The proof renewables work is all the lies told by those who hate them. If they didn't work, then they wouldn't need to lie so much to make them look bad.
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No, it is not. In the case of solar panels the capacity has nothing to do with real life performance, it is measured as output generated with 1000 W / m2 illumination (that is the amount of sun it wold receive on a sunny sommer's noon).
The same with all other generators: capacity is nameplate capacity and in the case of wind and solar, it is
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The small fraction in that case would be 23%, not 2/3. Because nuclear, while not a fossil fuel, isn't a renewable either, and that's what the op was talking about.
That said I actually think 23% is a pretty impressive - at least until you remember that electricty is only a smallish proportion of total energy use. I found this diagram helpful in showing the way things are:
http://www.iea.org/Sankey/#?c=... [iea.org]
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Let me know when ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... they overtake coal for amount generated per unit time.
Renewables may have higher total peak, but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7, while sun is only about a third of the day and wind varies with the weather - at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.
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The peaks are huge and we need to cover them.
Plus who ever said we need to get rid of base load completely? That's a very stupid argument and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting up such idiocy to deliberately mislead.
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Doesn't matter.
The peaks are huge and we need to cover them.
Plus who ever said we need to get rid of base load completely? That's a very stupid argument and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting up such idiocy to deliberately mislead.
As long as all the base load is nuclear and we aren't digging carbon out of the ground and burning it, we'll be ok.
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A few years back the French had to take all their nuclear generating plants offline for a few weeks to fix a fault that they all had in common. Exactly the same thing could have happened with coal fired or gas fired plants of the similar age to each other, so it's not a problem with nuclear itself it's just to point out that there is no "one true energy", and all eggs in one basket only helps the seller not the consumer.
If you have a weapons program you can shift some o
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My issue is with digging carbon out of the ground and burning it.
As for the constipation, no, it doesn't work like that. It is time for a new sig though. That one is ancient.
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... they overtake coal for amount generated per unit time.
Renewables may have higher total peak, but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7, while sun is only about a third of the day and wind varies with the weather - at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed.
There are some issues there, perhaps you don't know about them. A turbine generator hates a widely varying load, and designing one for peak power is uneconomical. So many power generation facilities have a method of evening out the load. At night time, when the demand load tends to be much lower, they pump water into reservoirs to be released during the daytime when demand is much higher, running other generators. There is not one reason that a method used for a proper coal fired plant cannot be used for th
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"at a power output proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed"
Basically true, but in respect to modern wind turbines its a bit off(1) due to pitch control.
This does not take into account that you can pitch the blade angle out of the wind when reaching the nominal windspeed of the turbine (which every pitch controlled turbine does). Meaning when the nominal wind speed has been reached the power output will remain mostly steady.
Todays turbine development is going into the direction of increased rotorsize(look
Re:Let me know when ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The power can be stored,
The issue is not that the power can be stored.
The issue is that power capacity comparisons overstate the total amount of energy you get out of the renewable generation equipment over the long haul because coal generation can run near capacity all the time and renewables (excluding water power) only a small part of the time.
I'm quite supportive of renewable energy. (I'm a major participant on one of the renewable energy tech discussion boards, too.) But while it's very GOOD that renewable power has passed coal in power capacity, even with near-ideal load-levelling storage, it will take about another factor of three before it surpasses coal in providing usable energy to the loads.
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The power can be stored,
The issue is not that the power can be stored.
Yes, it very much is that the power can be stored. Storing power is a present day technology that is in use right now. It is not something that we have to think out because it's a huge technological solar and wind power killing problem. It's been solved, and quite some time ago, because power leveling is a big problem with all formas of electrical generation.
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I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.
He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem. I can build a wind turbine with the capacity for so many megawatts, but if it's only windy on Thursdays and idle on the other 6 days, my output is only 1/7th my capacity. Wind and solar have a certain maximum expected capacity, but they rarely hit that except at peak times -- either when wind picks up at certain times of d
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I think you missed the point. Whoosh. GP is agreeing storage is not an issue.
He's saying capacity and actual output are apples and oranges, and it's not storage that's the problem.
Oh, so he's saying that it is impossible to make enough capacity?
Total capacity and total storage are rather simple problems, perhaps that's the source of my confusion.
Let's take my simple radio station powering scheme. A couple solar panels, charge regulator and a few deep discharge batteries as well as a removable gel-cel bank for portable use.
Wildly varying load - on receive, less than a watt, and several hundred every transmit cycle. Duty cycle is such that I use a few amps charging current, and
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That reasoning doesn't really work. Since the load is variable you need at least one power source that can react immediately to variations. Hydroelectric is excellent at that. Thermal based power sources like coal and nuclear are pretty bad at it and solar and wind sort of just generates what they do.
Coal and nuc don't ramp up well, and a big problem is if the load suddenly goes way down. Nasty things happen to the turbines as they spin way past design rpms. There is a bank of big resistors to dump that load into.
Wind power and solar means that on windy and sunny days you don't spend as much energy stored in the dam. Sure, you can use coal and nuclear instead of wind and solar, but none of them are capable of handling load variation.
Here's the idea for folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
All of this is to say, we've been using hybrid sources for years.
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The power can be stored
And it can be generated too. But much like generated power that's not being generated, stored power that's not being stored isn't a good counter argument.
First build a storage plant, then tell us what we can and can't do with it.
Re:Let me know when ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Moving the goal posts.
Nope. The article's author apparently thought the offence's 35 yard line was the goal post. I was just pointing out where they ACTUALLY are. B-)
We need about another seven first-downs to get there. But we ARE on our way.
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The football analogy is stupid. Reaching the 35 yard line has no value in itself, indeed neither does reaching the 0 yard line. The only thing that goes up on the score board is getting into the end zone.
Generating, say, half of your energy from renewables is more like reaching the half-way point in your quest to earn a million dollars; the half-mil in your pocket has utility right now. What's more since non-renewables aren't going away overnight, reducing their use is immediately useful in reducing carbon
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but coal plants have level output and can run 24/7,
Are you actually asserting that demand is level 24 hours a day?
By the way, what he is asserting for his preferred form of electrical generation is pretty true. Coal powered plants simply love to run at one particular power level. Which means that they have issues with the peak demand. and the same solutions exist for proper coal, and wind and solar.
This is a big problem with renewable deniers, they don't always get the technology of either the existing or new technology.
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Are you actually asserting that demand is level 24 hours a day?
It can come very close.
In California, for example, a very large part of the demand is pumping water through aquaducts. By placing reservoirs along the way and doing most of the pumping during times of low electrical demand, California electrical utilities used to be able to keep the power demand nearly constant - and can still keep it much more level than in many other places.
Also: Coal plants can provide baseload, while wind and solar togethe
Hydroelectric (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we know how much of the produced renewable energy is from hydroelectric stations (water dams)? I would suspect that it's still more than 70%.
The article mentions mostly wind and solar power, perhaps they're the main growth factory.
By the way, do they count burning wood as renewable energy? Renewable and green should not be confused.
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Coal's not cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
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subsidies are a red herring. the market isn't fair, and new technologies, particularly those like power generation that are inherently dependent on expanding or new infrastructure, cannot always stand by themselves because the already entrenched systems benefit from systemic bias cause by their mere older existence.
ie, the existing infrastructure is already there, already entrenched.
the new tech needs to build out new infrastructure.
subsidies thus serve two purposes: 1) help to overcome the inherent economi
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You can talk about that when wind and solar no longer need endless, catastrophically-indebting levels of State subsidies.
But fossil fuels are already getting endless state aid in the form of tax breaks and access to public lands. If you want to set the bar there, I'm all for ending that aid as well.
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... Title is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Its not saying renewables produce more power but that more renewable capacity was added this year than non-renewable capacity. But the bulk of capacity remains non-renewable.
It said right here:
""
But the agency expects renewablesâ(TM) share of power generation to rise to 28 per cent by 2021, when it predicts they will supply the equivalent of all the electricity generated today in the US and EU combined.
""
So by 2021, they hope it will be up to 28 percent of total capacity. Thus... no, renewables are not the majority of power generation and the title is wrong.
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No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It also limits its predictions to the US and Europe mostly... Not the world.
Look, you want to play pretend with statistics, go play make believe. I'm not entertained by that sort of thing. It doesn't keep the lights on.
I'm confused (Score:2)
Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Largest Source of Power Capacity
Although coal and other fossil fuels remain the largest source of electricity generation
So, renewables are the largest source of power... except for the fact that coal and fossil fuels are the largest source of electricity generation? WTH? Is there a difference between power capacity and electricity generation?
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It's OK, the headline is wrong, see the other replies that have pointed this out.
Positive side: You've demonstrated reading comprehension, which is better than the editors here have done.
Making America Great again - with wind power! (Score:3)
The U.S. were once pioneers of wind power(4) in size not only in space but in wind turbines (you might think that the danes were the only pioneers?).
You need to take a look at the good old west. Water pumps powered by wind turbines. Offgrid farms getting their first electricity from wind turbines.
Wind power plants are indeed smaller production unit than a big coal or even a nuclear power plant, that needed to be manufactured as well as their parts (also done in the US). While manufacturing solar panels got outsourced like chip manufacturing.
Meaning! you can employ more people with wind power than with coal power, coal power and nuclear power destroys much more jobs that it generates!
It is different with wind turbines, they need good old american craftsmanship to build a solid turbine that sustains harsh conditions.
Some american wind power history:
1941
American visionary Palmer Putnam built a 1.25 Megawatt! turbine(1) in 1941.
Indeed after some time it threw a blade. But before that it produced more energy and ran longer than the german multi million dollar 1980s disaster called Growian.
Whiners fall down and never try again. Pioneers stand up shake the dust off, don't mind their bruises and climb that horse again, and again till they succeed.
1982-1988 ..
MOD-2 a 2.5 Megawatt turbine with 91m (~275 ft.) diameter rotor. (2) and so on
Pioneers can and will fail, but as Kennedy said, that you don't go to the moon because its easy, but because its hard! And generating power from wind is hard but in the recent 30 years we got quite a good understanding how to do it and how to size up the turbines!
Can you feel the changing wind right now? Do you got faith of the heart or fraid of the trump? (3)
This is what made america great, having faith of the heart and this is what can make america great again.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The hell? (Score:2, Informative)
I saw the title of this submission, and it immediately set off my bullshit detector.
The thing you need to recognise is just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. It's insane. We use 2% of our natural gas production to produce ammonia, for example, but to do the same thing using renewables would take 30% of the world's entire renewable and nuclear power capacity. Then there's steel production. Then there's concrete production.
The only way this submission is accurate is if you define your terms in such a
Re: (Score:2)
The capacity of new renewable installations, overtook the capacity of new coal power stations and since nobody is building any new coal power stations, someone could cook up a headline.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
A large part of coal's demise is... (Score:2)
Cheap natural gas, made possible by tracking.
Definitions and Context (Score:2)
With that in mind, know that wind and solar, the big newer, flashier energy sources in the media, are not the major sources of renewable energy. Hydroelectric (falling water) accounts for over 70% of renewable energy. Wind is at 15%. Solar is at 4%.
Percentage-wise, solar and wind have grown very quickly, but in the grand scheme of total energy production, wind and solar are still sma
Re:Power != energy (Score:4, Informative)
That you think the Financial Times is part of the "green left" shows that you've got no business pointing out anything to anybody.
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It takes a special kind of idiot to believe the Financial Times is part of anything liberal or "left".
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That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.
I'm not left. I do understand that unless you ascribe to the abiotic energy production theory, there is not an infinity of energy sources out there that enrich the coal industry.
Now grow up, your insults are lame and silly, and in true low Information denialist fashion, attempt to paint anyone who isn't in lockstep with you as your favorite hate target.
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That this still needs to be pointed out shows just how dangerous and naive the green left still is.
energy = power * time
Guess what? Smart people, on the left and the right, understand this.
What you understand is something I leave to speculate by the others on this thread.
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I'm just disappointed that nobody has worked out how to make an ultra effective solar panel out of coal.
Now that would alter both the demand and competition for coal production.
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Fly ash is almost all silica.
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