Does California Need A More Decentralized Energy System? (vox.com) 198
"California's electricity system is failing," argues Vox, in an article shared by Slashdot reader nickwinlund77.
But they're proposing a way "to make California's electricity system cleaner, more reliable, and more resilient."
In a nutshell, it is accelerating the evolution from a centralized, top-down, long-distance, one-way energy system to a more decentralized, bottom-up, local, networked system. In the energy world, this is summed up as a more distributed energy system. It puts more power, both electrical and political, in local hands. Though it is still in early days, and only hints of what's to come are yet visible, the evolution to a more distributed system is inevitable...
Solar+storage+smart inverter systems work better and more seamlessly [than diesel generators] during a blackout. What's more, when they are connected together into a microgrid, their collective generation and consumption can be balanced out, maximizing backup power... The knock on microgrids has traditionally been that they're expensive, but they are already reaching cost parity with California grid power in some places. And while it is true that, on an upfront-capital basis, they are more expensive than diesel generators, they are not more expensive on a lifetime basis because clean distributed-energy resources, unlike diesel generators, can provide useful services even when there's no blackout... As Public Safety Power Shutoff events continue, emergency-backup benefits will be enough to kick-start a decent microgrid market. It's already happening, especially around Tier 1 loads. And customers are herding to solar+storage systems, as Tesla and other companies eye big growth...
The core problem with California's electricity system is that its millions of customers are overwhelmingly dependent on power generated by large, remote power plants and carried over long distances on overhead power lines, often through hilly, mountainous, and/or forested territory becoming dryer and more fire-prone by the year... [U]tilities are still operating with a 20th-century hangover, a model that forces them to prefer big investments in big grid infrastructure.
The article also notes "vehicle-to-grid" technology which will offer electric cars bidirectional energy-storage and demand-shifting capabilities, and argues that a network of distributed-energy resources can ultimately be installed quickly and will lower the need for long-distance power transmission lines.
But it argues the transition won't happen until the state's government makes a more ambitious push.
Solar+storage+smart inverter systems work better and more seamlessly [than diesel generators] during a blackout. What's more, when they are connected together into a microgrid, their collective generation and consumption can be balanced out, maximizing backup power... The knock on microgrids has traditionally been that they're expensive, but they are already reaching cost parity with California grid power in some places. And while it is true that, on an upfront-capital basis, they are more expensive than diesel generators, they are not more expensive on a lifetime basis because clean distributed-energy resources, unlike diesel generators, can provide useful services even when there's no blackout... As Public Safety Power Shutoff events continue, emergency-backup benefits will be enough to kick-start a decent microgrid market. It's already happening, especially around Tier 1 loads. And customers are herding to solar+storage systems, as Tesla and other companies eye big growth...
The core problem with California's electricity system is that its millions of customers are overwhelmingly dependent on power generated by large, remote power plants and carried over long distances on overhead power lines, often through hilly, mountainous, and/or forested territory becoming dryer and more fire-prone by the year... [U]tilities are still operating with a 20th-century hangover, a model that forces them to prefer big investments in big grid infrastructure.
The article also notes "vehicle-to-grid" technology which will offer electric cars bidirectional energy-storage and demand-shifting capabilities, and argues that a network of distributed-energy resources can ultimately be installed quickly and will lower the need for long-distance power transmission lines.
But it argues the transition won't happen until the state's government makes a more ambitious push.
Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Wood burning electric generators... (Score:3, Interesting)
What is really needed are wood burning electric generators. The irony of California's situation is that they are awash with WAY TOO MUCH STORED ENERGY, but unfortunately, it's in the form of overgrown, dead, and dying trees.
If we had a way to turn all that unwanted wood into electricity, we wouldn't need solar panels, big ass batteries, or PG&E. Wood is carbon neutral, renewable, green, and overly abundant.
As the world continues to burn fossil fuels and increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere, trees are o
Re: Wood burning electric generators... (Score:2)
...unless we can find a use for all that dead wood.
Do you know how carbon dioxide is sequestered,i> at least on land?? Plant matter* falls to the forest floor. Sure, it eventually gets released again... but as long as the average rate of release is less than the rate of accumulation, everything's good.
Yes, fires accelerate that release in arid areas; the key word is "average"
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What is really needed are wood burning electric generators. The irony of California's situation is that they are awash with WAY TOO MUCH STORED ENERGY, but unfortunately, it's in the form of overgrown, dead, and dying trees.
Here in rural northern AZ, the forestry students at Northern Arizona University thin the public forests as class practice. This reduces the need for prescribed burning, the "natural" way of thinning forests and perennially unpopular because of the smoke it creates. Even if all of the wood taken were to be burned for energy, the smoke can be minimized by modern boiler tech.
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I honestly couldn't tell whether this was an expert troll, or the dumbest thing I've ever read.
Burning wood is extremely polluting. Not just CO2 but also particulates, green house gasses and toxic chemicals:
>Wood smoke pollutants include fine particulates, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, dioxins, and furans. Breathing air containing wood smoke can cause a number of serious respiratory and cardiovascular health problems.
So your solution to California's energy c
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
You're dissing California for no reason here. Other states have similar problems. California is essentially an arid reason with periods of droughts, it has recently had several insect problems leaving a lot of dead trees, and so we have serious fire risks which you can't fix by raking pine needles. We have a growing population and it's impossible to just kick people out. We need more energy than we can reasonably create. We also have a partially deregulated power industry thanks to some politicians in the past.
Sustainable energy is needed, it's not a libral plot to steal your gas. You can't just build 3 times the number of dams if you want to keep the natural wilderness, you can't build more coal plants since coal is dead, and no way can you build enough nuclear plants for the whole state in short order (or find safe places for them). The solution to lose weight here is to eat less and exercise more; ie, use less electricity and fuel and be smarter about how we obtain it.
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and no way can you build enough nuclear plants for the whole state in short order (or find safe places for them).
No, that one you can do. Its just the lawyers who prevent it.
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Where are you going to put nuclear power plants that's close to people but not near a fault line? For that matter, pick a red state, the deepest red state you can find, and find out how hard it is for them to put up 10 more nuclear plants in short order.
We don't need nuclear... (Score:3, Insightful)
SMH. Guys, we don't need nuclear power plants. Building nuclear power plants might make more electricity, but it won't solve our fire hazard problem.
What we need to do is build a few biomass power plants. Our state is overflowing with too much dead wood. We need to convert that stored energy into useful electricity and clean up our state of this huge fire hazard. Cut the old dead and/or dying trees down. Plant new trees in their place if it's not near a power line. Burn the old trees for electricity. This i
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California has so much flammable matter on the ground because of droughts. What makes you think the new trees will be able to grow when climate change is going to be making the droughts even worse.
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...Our state is overflowing with too much dead wood.
Most of it in Sacramento.
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It's smack on top of a fault line too...
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Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant uses 12 acres, and provides 9% of California's electricity. If we could find 120 acres somewhere in the State, we could do 10 more plants - and have excess nuclear power capacity for 100% of our electricity needs. Nuclear IS the solution.
This sounds great in theory, however what you have to know is that electricity demand is intermittent and not always predictable. Unfortunately nuclear power plants can only generate power at a more or less continuous level. If you have to suddenly want to stop delivering power you have to do an emergency shutdown that takes weeks to recover from. At all other times you simply have to deliver electricity to get rid of the excess heat from the reactor core. This means that maximum nuclear output is limit
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Not exactly directly related, better use of energy has it's economic benefits.
The obvious example is computers which are more energy efficient than ever before. Going from CRT to LCD screens saved a bunch of energy solid state v spinning hard drives , smaller scale processors far more efficient than the cpus we used 20 years ago.
Comparing my car with my bosses electric car it costs me around 50 euro to travel the same distance as his car does for 20 euro. His electric motors are far more energy efficient
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California is not alone in having problems here. Plenty of other states, including red states, have very similar problems. Feces on the streets is from homelessness. But you know that, you're just laughing because a couple of years ago a meme started that feces are on the streets everywhere, but the joke is old and it's false. you have homelessness in red states, and feces on the streets in red states. A few spots in San Francisco is not the entirely of California; we have a really large conservative ba
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
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If PG&E had the money but they are prevented from increasing the electricity bills by the state. The problems isn't really the energy sources, so ignore the "sustainable energy" concerns - the generated electricity isn't more dangerous just because it's from a windmill.
Chapter 9 for PG&E coming?
In any case - there are many things that can be done to make the risks lower and the reliability higher.
- Building density and foliage around houses shall be in a way that limits the spread of fire. K
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Re: Priorities (Score:2)
No it isn't.
Wrong.
Re: Priorities (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the long term cost it's a lot cheaper. Considering the improved reliability the society will experience fewer and shorter electrical outages too.
Current system with poles requires a lot of maintenance, and that's expensive.
Adding a new subscriber only requires adding a buried line from the distribution point on the street, which is a relatively small effort equal to a gas line.
A temporary outlet can be added to the distribution point if needed.
This is already done in more progressive parts of the world.
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Considering that towns already install gas pipes in many places under ground the problem is already solved there.
And the problem with bedrock isn't unique for California so it has been solved already.
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Current system with poles requires a lot of maintenance, and that's expensive.
It seems you think that underground power infrastructure doesn't require maintenance, that couldn't be further from the truth. The wonderful thing with above ground lines is that maintenance is cheap.
This is already done in more progressive parts of the world.
Very few progressive parts of the world relocate cables underground. To be clear most of then will new build cables underground, but the cost benefit is not there for existing installations. Those parts of the world where this is done are the same that are criticised for their skyrocketting energy cost.
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And who's fault is that? (Score:2)
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It doesn't rain much in California.
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That's a problem specific to certain locations. California is for the most part dry, which is why there is sucha problem with overhead distribution.
No. (Score:3, Informative)
California needs more nuclear reactors of modern, safe design. Newer hydroelectric plants at existing dams as well, designed for pumped storage as well as generation. Solar and wind are nice, but their output tends to vary too much to be useful without some kind of large-scale storage and base-load plants.
California needs power lines that are actually maintained and ideally underground.
A battery in every home or town is a nice idea, but would be immensely wasteful -- both in duplication of electricity production capacity and in production of waste from battery production (lithium batteries have environmental costs to produce). A grid is an amazing thing -- it can move power from where it's produced to where it's needed seamlessly and with > 90% efficiency.
Going back to a 1920s model of isolated grids and farm power plants would be a giant step backwards...
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but with a caveat. Returning to local control over the grid and its management would fix a lot of what's wrong with PG&E — a giant corporate behemoth that, because of its size and centralization, is not responsible to the needs of the local community. So decentralizing some aspects of the power infrastructure would be a good thing... just not the aspects that these folks are talking about. :-)
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Re 'Going back to a 1920s model of isolated grids and farm power plants would be a giant step backwards"
Some sort of coop for wealthy walled communities? pay for power and upgrades only? All profits go back into the power coop?
The rest of "poor" CA is left to the old grid that stays off for more of the year?
Re "A grid is an amazing thing"
All CA needs is the experts to work on the grid and keep the gird working.
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Variable power is fine, there's enough wind to power constantly, maybe not to the same degree but we only have to deal with peak power. Solar is great for peak power in summer, everyone's greedy and soft with their A/C on at noon, much less demand at night. Sometimes additional sources may be needed but it should not be dismissed outright merely because it's not an instant demand source like coal. A mixture of power sources is necessary, and that includes wind, solar, and others.
Modern reactors and pumped storage (Score:3, Informative)
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60s nuclear designs are insanely unsafe. They rely on a janky, complex system to safely shut down the reactor. There are multiple failure modes leading to meltdown, hydrogen explosion or other serious incidents.
They are also designed for on-site fuel storage, on the assumption that someone will eventually come along and solve that problem. In the last 60 years no-one solved it.
Storage operators like to save their storage for the most lucrative peak times. As more storage enters the grid they won't be able t
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And yet...
Chernobyl + Fukushima combined resulted in fewer deaths than have died on the highways this morning.
So, "insanely unsafe" nuclear power has a death rate less than 0.004% that of routine traffic.
And that's if you assume deaths resulting from Chernobyl and Fukushima were the wildly pessimistic guesses that were put out in the news at the time. If you use the deaths from later analysis (after people actually started dying - you did read the news last year m
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Yeah but wind has a death rate lower than the number of people who die on the toilet in Turkey every 3.14 lunar cycles.
If 60s designs were safe they would still be in use. Instead they have been replaced or heavily upgraded to make them safe.
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The point was that you can cherry pick a stat like deaths per kWh that make nuclear look good, but that doesn't mean they are a good idea. It's just an emotional response driven by the need to win the argument.
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So, how is it "insanely unsafe"? If Los Angeles had as few traffic deaths in any given month as nuclear power has caused in all of history, it would make front page news (in Los Angeles)....
It's unsafe because we have waste sitting around in pools where it will be a problem if it simply dries out (in a state facing a water crisis) and in dry casks which can be counted upon to leak eventually. Which is why we're not using our waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, whose integrity depends on our waste storage sub-units not leaking. Vitrification turned out to be much more expensive and dangerous than it was supposed to be (like nuclear power itself) so it's a non-starter at these prices. So s
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Breeder reactors are also not cost-effective, so forget fuel reprocessing as well â" and don't forget that the process also results in a small quantity of even more hazardous waste, which still has to be managed and stored.
Nuclear waste reprocessing eliminates the "nuclear waste laying around" problem.
If only you had the reading comprehension skills of a juniior high school student...
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1.5% of nuclear electricity generating reactors have melted down.
Extensive discussion and citations: https://skeptics.stackexchange... [stackexchange.com]
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I think we have discussed this over and over. I see no reason to continue to waste time on it.
We can go forward with these fact. Modern nuclear reactors are safe. They would be much safer if antinuclear kooks had not interfered and let development continue. There can be no real movement on climate change issues with out including nuclear in the equation. There are more but those are the big three.
Sorry, that I have to dictate these facts to you but sometimes people just have to be told how it rea
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Batteries are "immensely wasteful"? They're over 90% efficient. Are there any coal, natural gas, diesel, or nuclear power plants that achieve even 50% thermal efficiency?
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I really like nuclear, but as implemented its extremely expensive, several times higher per yearly energy output than wind or solar .. There is work by private organizations to reduce the cost, but I don't think anyone has build a low cost reactor yet.
Cars or Batteries (Score:2)
You can use your car as a battery or you can use it as a car but probably not both.
CA and other states (Score:3)
Need underground power lines.
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They have the experts who can keep the power on for more of the year.
They did not all invest in underground upgrades.
They just work hard everyday outside CA to keep the power working for people who pay for the power.
Re:CA and other states (Score:5, Insightful)
Utilities in other states, whether corporate, public or co-op, all work through the same issues with weather and utility boards and service requirements that exist here in California. It is just that PG&E managed to destroy an entire city with their failures and is now trying to blackmail the state into letting them get away with it.
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People say that, but it's not simple. The cost is immense. What state has all their transmission power lines underground? None. Distribution lines, ya a lot are underground. Places in Calilfornia that are prone to fires are also especially difficult to dig deep trenches in for high voltage lines).
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While this is true, it's also a cost that has to be taken into account, because neither "causing massively-destructive wildfires" nor "allowing the power to go out" are acceptable costs. The costs of burial of lines should be factored in, and where decentralization will be cheaper (answer: probably in most cases), it should be chosen instead.
California is such an obvious case for decentralized solar. Up to the point where solar is meeting all of their peak daytime consumption - and likely well beyond that,
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28k miles of cable @ $3million per mile. Sure.
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Versus the cost of how many wildfires burning down how many homes and towns plus the cost of shutting down the power to parts of the state.
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That's $84b. Let me ask google how much the wildfires cost:
In 2018, California suffered $400 billion in damage, according to Accuweather. It cost the California fire department $1 billion. Both are new records. In 2017, the U.S. Forest Service spent almost $2.9 billion to put out fires nationwide.
Looks like it would be a good investment, especially over a few decades.
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No (Score:2)
No. California needs total deregulation (Score:2)
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That just leads to a natural monopoly. The same problem you end up with for internet access, or any other utility: Once one company has invested the money to lay down cables serving a particular neighbourhood, there's no reason for any other company: They'd have to invest just as much for their own cables, but they'd be competing with another company who already has 100% of the customers. The free market would mean you have the choice of any company that serves your area, but that would almost always mean j
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That just leads to a natural monopoly.
(To channel Mike Munger, the answer to every economics question is "barriers to entry" and "transaction costs.")
That's the standard story we all learn when growing up. My understanding is the current research shows very few natural monopolies ever actually arise and if they do, they only persist for a short while. Even the classic monopolies we all heard about, like Standard Oil in the 1880s, are turning out to be much less harmful than people made out at the time. Much of the griping came from competitors
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Q: Why did the Libertarian cross the road?
A: None of your damn business. Am I being detained?
Q: Why did the libertarian cross the road
A: He didn’t. Because roads are paid with taxes and taxation is theft.
redundant SMRs (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it weird that so many have rejected nuclear as an option. Old reactor designs are very centralized because they generate a huge amount of power but the newer, smaller Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generate enough power for a city and are designed to be failsafe, modular, inexpensive while requiring minimal oversight. If you really want to make sure the power never goes down then you can have multiple SMRs just outside the cities and use the extra power to suck carbon out the city air (cities are drowning in CO2). Current designs are for uranium breeder reactors but since it only takes a few trucks to haul off a reactor, you can swap in a new type (e.g. LFTR) after it's developed.
Whatever is used, it's a good idea to decentralize power systems for security purposes and naturally, do not connect it to the internet.
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Oh, California already uses nuclear power, they just import it from neighboring States [eia.gov] over long distance power lines. For some reason that makes them feel better about electricity being generated in ways their State government doesn't already approve.
In the meantime, if they'd kick the extreme environmentalists out of power, maybe they could properly manage their public lands instead of letting them go up in flames and damage other people's property and endanger lives decade after decade when the regular a
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There's one active nuclear complex in California, Diablo Canyon. There's one in Arizona, Palo Verde. No other state adjacent to California has nuclear power plants. And even if California was importing a meaningful fraction of Palo Verde's output, it's too far south to be relevant to the wildfire discussion at hand.
Nuclear reactors are point sources of power. E.g. the sort of sources that require significant transmission infrastructure, vs. distributed solar and wind near the point of consumption. The wh
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New nuclear plants don't make financial sense.
The nuclear industries own modelling shows that it costs about 5x as much to build compared to wind power on a per kw basis.
Recent nuclear construction projects have all blown out their projected costs, the South Carolina plant blew out from $10B to $25B before it was completed. We will never know if it would have blown out further as they cancelled the project, Westinghouse went into bankruptcy, South Carolina still had to pay $9B but only got a fancy concrete
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Olkiluoto is a bit further north than France.
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The primary cost of nuclear reactors in the US is regulation and lawsuits.
Every time there's a lawsuit, the building gets delayed, parts need to be redesigned, the type of steel needs to be changed (then changed back), the cooling water outflow needs to be redirected, etc, etc. This increases costs and causes delays... and every delay means more costs (interest on loans, taxes, salaries, and so on).
These past decades, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been run by people dedicated to destroying nuclear
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The nuclear industries own modelling shows that it costs about 5x as much to build compared to wind power on a per kw basis.
This fails to account for the cost of battery storage and the losses induced by using.
Advocating for them is great, but I feel advocates should be upfront as to why it is worth spending billions extra for a fungible product.
Because we'll never generate enough power to clean up the atmosphere without it.
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People don't tend to fall for the same trick more than a few times. They heard all the promises of these new reactors being cheaper, cleaner and safer before, and they were all broken.
Now there is a good alternative that has proven itself to be cheaper, cleaner and safer they are investing in that. Remember that building a nuclear plant is really an exercise in convincing people to give you billions of dollars for a return decades later - it's not an easy sell given the competition.
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Wikipedia tells me that there are no SMRs in operation yet. How long until the first one is built?
In the meantime they might as well spend money on solar, wind, etc, now, surely? All stuff that will still be useful when, or if, these SMRs start existing in the future.
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The Wikipedia article also states that the economics of the reactors will most likely be the same unless a factory can be built to produce 40-70 of them, which is unlikely. The only thing that will be less expensive is the shell. I'm guess that is because the vessel for the SMR handles all of the containment requirements. However after 9/11 the shell will still most likely need to be secured against threats such as airplanes flown into the building and attacks from the ground as all other nuclear reactors d
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I'm even fairly convinced that if and when the Earth is so thoroug
Bury The Power Lines (Score:5, Interesting)
That is done lots of places. Too expensive? There are 25,000 miles of high tension power lines in California. Not all them will need to be buried, as not all of them present any sort of fire risk. Lets say 40% need to be buries, a pretty good share. The cost of burying a power line is quotes in the press at $3 million a mile. So this $30 billion. Do it over 10 years, starting with the highest risk locations first, and that is $3 billion a year. Quite doable, what with a 3 trillion dollar state economy, and a $150 billion state budget. The total economic cost of the 2018 fires was $40 billion. This is a no-brainer.
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Out of curiosity, was that cost to bury cable for California—an earthquake-prone area—or anywhere?
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A rational, thought-out argument on here. What is /. coming to!
Re:Bury The Power Lines (Score:4, Insightful)
Environmentalist types would lose their shit if you told them you were going to bury powerlines through a forest, because you'd have to tear out some of the trees to do it, tear up the ground, and seriously disturb the entire ecosystem to do it. I'm not even one of the rabid environmentalist types and I can see that. Also there are places where it was hard enough to plant towers for powerlines, let alone get in there with major earthmoving equipment to dig deep trenches to put powerlines into. It's not like you just go out there with shovels and dig down a foot or two and put a wire in the ground. There's infrastructure that has to go in place, too, to protect the lines. It would be a massive undertaking if done state-wide, it would be massively expensive, and it would take decades. It would also in some ways make maintenance of the grid more difficult and expensive, because now if there's a problem somewhere you have to go back in and dig things up; meanwhile if it's been years since they were installed things will have grown up over and around all of it, and all that would have to be disturbed or torn out to get to where you need to do the work. There's reasons why this all wasn't done in the first place and those reasons are still valid.
I'm not saying that underground powerlines aren't a good idea, but I am saying it's not a practical idea. Really, there's no good solution to this problem.
Decentralizing power generation is probably the only way around it, and that's not going to be cheap or quick either, and it won't be without it's own set of problems.
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Apples and oranges - "High Voltage" is technically anything over 600V. The lines to move power around towns and neighborhoods are typically 4-16kv That can be done for ~$3M/mi. Additional power transmission cost/math here - https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Fire is natural (Score:4, Insightful)
Forest fires are nature's way of clearing out dried brush and dead trees. When you prevent nature from doing her job, you have to do it yourself. However, that isn't being done. Between PG&E skimping on doing and environmentalists blocking it in our courts, that brush just keeps building up until you have a dangerous level of fuel just waiting for a spark. Combine that with the normal high winds and you get massive forest fires across the state.
Clearing the brush around the power lines requires fire roads. The environmentalists don't want those roads, so it doesn't get done, so when the power lines spark (and they will), you get fire. Environmentalists are our forest's worst enemy.
Re:Fire is natural (Score:4, Insightful)
Forest fires are nature's way of clearing out dried brush and dead trees. When you prevent nature from doing her job, you have to do it yourself. However, that isn't being done. Between PG&E skimping on doing and environmentalists blocking it in our courts, that brush just keeps building up until you have a dangerous level of fuel just waiting for a spark.
Zero of these fires have been caused in places where PG&E hasn't been permitted to cut trees. If they had, you can be sure that PG&E would have jumped on it and pointed that out, but in truth we already know that's not the case.
The majority of the forests in California are "managed" by the federal government, through the inauspicious auspices of the bureau of land management. Remember the Mendo complex fire? That occurred almost completely on federal lands. Presumably this is why Trump has shut up about raking forests... it's the feds who aren't doing the "raking".
The laws prohibiting setting fire to the forests were some of the first in California. The natives set them alight literally every year, as they walked to different seasonal habitations along the coast. Those laws were created before environmentalism was even a thing, for completely conservative reasons: "This land is my land, and fuck you!"
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The blame game (Score:4, Interesting)
But people (especially lawyers and politicians, most of whom are lawyers) don't seem to want to understand this distinction between causing something and triggering something. You cause a camel's back to break by loading it with more than it can carry. When the camel is already loaded with almost enough to break its back, and you add a straw which takes it just over the threshold, the straw triggers the camel's back to break. But the straw is not wholly responsible for breaking the camel's back. It only contributed a tiny amount to breaking the back.
But the lawyers want to hear none of this. And they made PG&E wholly responsible for the financial losses of the fire. That misstep in logic by greedy lawyers who want someone to pay for a fire which was 99.9999% natural is what's bankrupting the power company, making it unable to afford to maintain and improve the power infrastructure.
Never fear Gavin Newsom is here (Score:2, Troll)
Just my 2 cents
This will be routed around (Score:2)
The peasants will need to connect with and learn to enjoy their new rolling black out world. After all, it is for the children!
Would be interesting during these rolling blackouts to see where the lights don't go out.
Just my 2 cents
Yes, of course. But how much more? (Score:2)
A more decentralized power system is desirable in a variety of ways. But it also comes with real drawbacks. At one extreme you have residential solar systems. If you put batteries in them, then those batteries have to be maintained, collected and recycled at the end of their lifespan, and also prevented from causing fires. Lithium batteries have become popular for small scale solar systems, and they are flammable. It's not common for them to catch fire, but it's far from unheard of, and the fires are very d
Northern California (Score:2)
The down side: Same tree-huggers will whine when someone wants to cut trees that are shading their PV panels.
If the California PUC remains incompetent... (Score:2)
....and the rest of the state government more so, then splintered island grids may result in more uptime and reliability for larger portions of California ratepayers. It'll result in more carbon emissions, too, because the batteries required to make a reliable electricity supply out of wind and solar farms don't exist. If you want to strip-mine all of Canada for the Lithium, maybe you can have them in 30 years.
Fact is that reliable grid operation is not a priority for the people in power in California, so t
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CA is not unique in its power troubles. The same companies own both the high power transmission lines as well as the local distribution lines. The transmission lines are part of a *national* grid. Wildfires are a problem in the west in general, red or blue states. The problems in California have very little to do with green politics, and more to do with the demographics, weather, greedy corporations, and deregulation.
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That's an oversimplification. California's politicians do not try to serve Californians. Green politics is only one of the reasons. Other reasons: identity politics, labor union politics, and politics in general.
When you talk to voters about how you plan to fight the other team, you are not talking to voters about how you plan to accomplish the day to day business of directing a government to serve the people. Same goes for when you're fighting some environmental bogeyman or some business bogeyman.
No ti
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When you talk to voters about how you plan to fight the other team, you are not talking to voters about how you plan to accomplish the day to day business of directing a government to serve the people
That's especially true in California, where there is only one team.
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The power grid is owned and operated by PG&E, who has been more interested in profits and share buybacks than maintenance over the past decades.
I was just chatting with a buddy of mine who works for a regulated utility in California. He points out that all (CA at least) utilities basically have two budgets: the capital budget, paid for by investors and profits, and the operations budget, paid for by shareholders and in theory running as a non-profit. His impression is both budgets are basically determined in a huge negotiation between PG&E and the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). My impression is the PUC basically dictates the budget so they'
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Smokey the Bear is the problem. (And no, this is not sarcasm--I'm agreeing with WSTY.)