By 2023, Some GM Facilities In Michigan Will Run On 100 Percent Renewables (cnet.com) 120
On its way to being net-zero carbon neutral by 2050, General Motors announced today that some of its southeast Michigan facilities will be fully powered by renewable energy by 2023. CNET reports: The carmaker said on Monday it will strengthen a partnership with DTE Energy to buy another 500,000 megawatt-hours worth of energy in the next few years. That's on top of 300,000 mWh already purchased, making a total of 800,000 mWh, or enough clean energy to take C02 from 63 million gallons of gasoline burned out of the air.
Facilities first targeted for fully renewable energy include GM's downtown Detroit-based Renaissance Center headquarters and two assembly plants: Orion and Detroit-Hamtramck. The Warren Technical Center is also on the shortlist for 100% green energy in fewer than three years. Clean energy powering Orion and Detroit-Hamtramck suits the plants, too. Orion builds the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Detroit-Hamtramck will build the GMC Hummer EV along with future electric cars. GM's investment will help fund two new solar parks DTE plans to build, which the company said will create 1,500 jobs during the construction period.
Facilities first targeted for fully renewable energy include GM's downtown Detroit-based Renaissance Center headquarters and two assembly plants: Orion and Detroit-Hamtramck. The Warren Technical Center is also on the shortlist for 100% green energy in fewer than three years. Clean energy powering Orion and Detroit-Hamtramck suits the plants, too. Orion builds the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Detroit-Hamtramck will build the GMC Hummer EV along with future electric cars. GM's investment will help fund two new solar parks DTE plans to build, which the company said will create 1,500 jobs during the construction period.
DIY Solar (Score:3)
Time for some crying and denying (Score:3, Funny)
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Trump supporters will be butt-hurt about this, no doubt.
The amusing aspect of that being that many of them will be from red states where wind energy in particular is taking over the energy generation mix.
Re:Time for some crying and denying (Score:5, Insightful)
Texas is still red (for now! but that's shifting rapidly) and it is a big wind state.
But it doesn't have coal mines.
Shame is, it would be much better to retrain the coal workers on renewable projects or even give them some cash to retire early rather than mangle the energy markets with subsidies and tarriffs to protect coal. It has about 1/6th the number of jobs.
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Texas is still red (for now! but that's shifting rapidly) and it is a big wind state. But it doesn't have coal mines.
In Texas, we mine lignite and produce 5% of U.S. coal. We're the largest lignite producer in the country.
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Someone should mod you up, informative!
I was born and raised here and *never* heard about Texas coal my entire life.
Here's more...
https://www.eia.gov/coal/annua... [eia.gov]
Texas.. 1,646 surface employees (none underground).
That's out of 13,663,800 employees in a workforce of 14,160,900.
Okay that's why... they make up 0.012% of all 14,160,900 workers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
"All that wind adds up. Texas now produces one-quarter of all U.S. electricity from wind. If Texas were a country, it would rank fifth i
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I have always found it odd that the Conservative party is so against renewable energy. I know they are in bed with the fossil fuel lobbies, whose companies they represent cover a good number of the American States as their major employer (AKA Easy votes). But the traditional ideologies that the Conservative parties stand for, small government, self-reliance, freedom to pick your own path. Most of the renewable energies really support that type of model.
You can own your own wind generator, your home/busine
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Tree-hugger hippie can translate to being true Libertarian. Much more difficult to translate to what currently passes for "conservative" i.e. Trumpist Republican. "Moderate" Democrats in many ways are what used to be considered "conservatives."
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Trump supporters will be butt-hurt about this, no doubt.
Why? If GM wants to waste their money on a PR scheme then that's their choice.
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Trump supporters will be butt-hurt about this, no doubt.
Why? If GM wants to waste their money on a PR scheme then that's their choice.
Yup, and here we have the first butt-hurt Trump supporter with his two cents worth of opinion.
eating so much cake right now (Score:1)
In America we're free to run our business as we please without government interference.
Except when a minority of us don't like some liberal PC nonsense, then that business is destroying American values and must be taken over by the government.
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What's the basis of the "Funny" mods?
I used to think you had to be stupid or faking it to support Trump. Considering the latest divisive protests to "Live free and kill your mom" I think you have to add in some suicidal or homicidal tendencies.
I would like to know how buying electricity (Score:1)
"...enough clean energy to take C02 from 63 million gallons of gasoline burned out of the air. "
Are they currently getting their electricity provided by Pinto's and old Crown Vics?
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A buck is a buck (Score:2)
mWh? (Score:2)
Re:Buying renewable energy does not help (Score:5, Insightful)
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I feel like increased demand for renewable energy will result in increased supply. That's your basic grade-school economics.
Perhaps, but that increase in supply will only last as long as someone is willing to pay the higher price for this electricity for the PR benefit. There's plenty of homeowners and small businesses that don't give a shit about where their electricity comes from so long as it is cheap and reliable, and "green" energy is neither.
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That assumes the price is higher. That's not always the case any longer.
Although right now the oil stations will be seeing a benefit from the negative prices for crude oil.
Re: Buying renewable energy does not help (Score:2)
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Business likes stability.
Oil prices are very volatile right now. This makes planning your finances for the month and a quarter more difficult.
During the 2008 recession, one of the factors was a rapid rise in fuel. When fuel hit around $4.00 a gallon Americans had a hard time coping. People were trading in their 1990's SUVs for Small cars and hybrids. Ford, GM, and Crysler were focused on making big muscle cars, over the top trucks, and big SUVs. IT takes decades to design these, so when Oil prices hit over
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I guess you are still stuck in the 1990s.
I live in a rural area. And there are a lot of small businesses (some owned by Mennonites (a religious order that is a little more technical than then Amish)) are using Solar Power. Why?
1. It is cheaper. Even Accounting for the cost of buying the equipment the loan cost over the life span of the product is often less than your electric bill, especially for a business that uses more power than a home.
2. It is more reliable, With Grid Power + Solar and battery backup,
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I can hear people saying now that Oil price is negative that we should just abandon solar and wind... Except for the fact what will happen is the Oil companies will need to slow their supply, then when demand picks up again prices will go back up
This makes no sense, oil isn't used much to power the grid.
If they said that "oil is so cheap, we should switch back from electric cars" or if they said "coal is so cheap, we should switch back to coal to power the grid" those would be at least coherent.
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The more people sign on for purchasing green energy, the more green energy has to be input to the grid for those people to purchase under contract.
For example: Grid Operator starts a purchasing plan for people to pay an extra $0.02/kWh for renewable-only generation. Their customer base signs up for 140MWh of renewable energy per month at the higher rate. They damn sure better have at least 140MWh worth of renewable generation available. If they don't, they better either contract to get it from some othe
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There's plenty of homeowners and small businesses that don't give a shit about where their electricity comes from so long as it is cheap and reliable, and "green" energy is neither.
I'm genuinely curious how this argument goes with your normal peddling of nuclear powered nonsense. Though I haven't seen you say nuclear is the solution to all our problems for a while so I guess you're finally woken up to the notion that it's frigging expensive.
Also economies of scale is a thing as are the graphs showing the cost of renewables. Despite your strange world view that increase in supply will last just fine even given your selective application of electricity cost to suit your argument of the
Re:Buying renewable energy does not help (Score:5, Insightful)
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The energy market is rather more complex than that because the price fluctuates with demand during the day. Renewables are in a good position to soak up some of the highest price demand so the economics are different for then compared to other types of generation which can't easily ramp up/down.
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Well, kind of. But renewables contribute to those high ramp rates, too. Solar increases rapidly in the morning, peaks around solar noon (1 PM daylight time), then declines rapidly. Of course, it doesn't produce at night (moonlight or starlight isn't bright enough). Wind depends on the climate and location, but often falls off in the morning, picking up again in the evening (at least in California). In both cases, you need storage to flatten the peaks and extend production, or some other power source that is
Re:Buying renewable energy does not help (Score:5, Informative)
For the umpteenth time: Yes you can.
Buying renewable energy increases demand for renewable energy, making the economics of producing it better and getting more of it built. By setting a mandate to only use renewable energy it creates certainty in the market that demand will continue to grow in the coming years.
Other people won't just buy fossil electricity, they will sometimes have their own requirements for buying renewable energy and the market will increase capacity to meet demand. When that coal or nuclear plant is coming to EOL they will look at what the market wants and decide not to build another one. They will anticipate that in future more companies will do like GM and Amazon and Google and many others and decide they are only going to buy from renewable suppliers.
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Absolutely. Well said...
When 100% of renewable power is sold then there is financial justification to build more renewable energy.
And when too little non renewable power is sold, then existing plants generate less power intially and then finally close because no one wants to buy the power they are producing.
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Other people won't just buy fossil electricity, they will sometimes have their own requirements for buying renewable energy and the market will increase capacity to meet demand.
We just saw petroleum oil prices go negative for lack of demand. Do you really think that people will pass up the opportunity for cheap energy from fossil fuels?
Re:Buying renewable energy does not help (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is in regards to the oil-prices today is that it still costs the same to produce regardless for what it sells for which means the companies are operating under a net-loss.
From a short-term perspective this may increase the usage because of the glut, but it also means smaller producers will go bankrupt plus some refineries will be shutdown. The net effect of this in the long run will most likely mean that the prices will go up when the glut disappears for the simple reason that the surviving companies will want to recoup their loss somehow.
That's my take on it anyway. Opinions may differ.
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Plus, once production is shut off, it can't be turned back on at the flip of a switch. It takes months to get wells working again. When the existing supply gets worked through, and production hasn't gone back up to the rate at which refineries are consuming crude, the price is going to go stratospheric and you're going to hear all the people going out and buying big fucker SUVs and doing the happy dance about gas prices right now bitching and moaning about high gas prices and price fixing again.
Short-term
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We just saw petroleum oil prices go negative for lack of demand. Do you really think that people will pass up the opportunity for cheap energy from fossil fuels?
In the short term no, you'll see more use of oil than coal or gas. But it'll be shortlived until the end of the coronavirus outbreak. It does not provide the certainty required to commission building new power stations to run for the next 50 years, which contracts specifying renewable sources does.
Renewables are far less subject to the variable market prices because they do not require the ongoing purchase of fuel. You have a fixed setup fee and a relatively small and predictable maintenance fee. It's there
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How often do oil prices go negative? It's a one off blip and it's unlikely that someone who drives an EV will now rush out and buy a fossil car. It wouldn't work anyway because the price at the pump isn't negative.
At night sometimes I get paid to use electricity. The kWh price I pay is actually negative, it takes money off my bill. And that's renewable energy, no nuclear or fossil.
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The impact of a global pandemic is not a 'blip'.
Spanish flu was not a 'blip'.
And we've barely started with it, long way to go yet.
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When you are planning for decades the impact is a blip when you planning for just 1 - 5 years out it isn't so much a blip.
When reading world history, the 100 years war, in some text books was just an interesting footnote.
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Catch is, nobody does even modestly long-range (10 years or more), meaningful planning for anything. Even "20-year plans" as are required for transportation in the US aren't, really; they get updated every 5 years or less and only the first 5 years are significant in terms of funding and project delivery.
If a plan doesn't produce results in 1-5 years (really, 3 months to a year in most cases) it's not worth doing by a business. If it doesn't produce results within a term of office in an elected government,
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However, the fact remains that the petroleum prices at the moment are a weird anomaly, not a new normal. One way or another, by 2023 things should be well back to a reasonable market behavior. Even if this weird demand were the new normal, production would have come down in line with the demand.
Going crazy over one specific futures contract going negative under these very particular circumstances for inland oil production and acting like it means renewable energy is now pointless would be a strange position
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The EV could Rush out and buy a fossil car. That is because EV has high acceleration, so they can really rush if they feel like.
That said most EV owners seem really happy with their cars, and would probably only switch if there a practical lifestyle change that would require them to do so.
Say they really need a truck and can't wait for the Electric Pickup Truck. Or they will need to do a lot long distance driving, and the time it takes to recharge is too much.
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That's me, I would never go back to fossil unless forced to for some reason. Electric is just so much better in so many ways.
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Well I missed the memo about that being permanent. Looks like somebody's a real dumbass.
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Other people won't just buy fossil electricity, they will sometimes have their own requirements for buying renewable energy and the market will increase capacity to meet demand.
We just saw petroleum oil prices go negative for lack of demand. Do you really think that people will pass up the opportunity for cheap energy from fossil fuels?
Yes, because people plan energy generation projects long term, as in next quarter to half a century, and the fall in fossil fuel prices is a temporary phenomenon. On top of that renewable prices tend to be pretty consistent whereas fossil fuel prices are highly volatile and fluctuate wildly every time somebody cerebrates by firing an AK-47 into the air in the Middle East. A more interesting question would be: Since they need an oil price of $40-50 per barrel to be profitable, how long do you expect the US f
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The more expensive oil production, like tar sands, might never recover.
It will still be there. When it becomes profitable to produce it again, they will.
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Other people won't just buy fossil electricity, they will sometimes have their own requirements for buying renewable energy and the market will increase capacity to meet demand.
We just saw petroleum oil prices go negative for lack of demand.
Maybe we should just ask consumers where they would prefer their energy to come from? You can tick the nuclear box. I'll tick the solar and wind box.
Do you really think that people will pass up the opportunity for cheap energy from fossil fuels?
Well cheap energy isn't coming from nuclear.
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Oil companies will reduce supply to match demand.
Demand will pick up because we are not close to 100% renewable yet. There will be more demand then what they have supply for. Prices will shoot up. Then the oil companies will increase supply and then prices will stabilize barring another major problem.
Even with 100% renewable energy. We will still need Oil, just not to burn. But for lubricants, plastics, pneumatics... So oil prices won't stay below 0 it will go up again. Even with renewable energy, there
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That is accounting for a world free of fossil fuels. With a greatly reduced oil industry, with less demand, they can collect oil from cheaper sources.
For the next 20-30 years I doubt that will happen.
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Because clearly that's the direction oil will take forever.
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We just saw petroleum oil prices go negative for lack of demand.
There is no lack of demand for power. This accounting problem here provides a surplus of profit for green producers. Power won't get cheaper, fossil fuel produces will simply end up leaving the market as their investors pull out. We've already seen this happen in many countries.
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> When that coal or nuclear plant is coming to EOL
I need to call out this subtle distribution of Koolaid here. Sorry but coal isn't nearly as clean as nuclear, you don't put them on the same sentence.
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Didn't imply that they were, merely that we were interested in getting rid of both eventually.
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Sure, but the timeline is much different:
getting rid of coal: ASAP
getting rid of nuclear: ASAP after renewables can satisfy demand, without requiring a reduction in consumption.
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Ah, so in order to increase the use of renewables, companies are supposed to not buy their energy....brilliant!!! Have you told anyone else of this or is this just secret information for slashdotters?
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GM are buying in energy temporarily. With the next big thing in electric cars being readily replaceable batteries and gas stations turned into battery swap stations and the car manufacturing owning the batteries and swapping them, charging them, refurbishing them and recycling them, long term revenue on each vehicle. There are still hundreds of thousands of hectares of carparking spaces to be covered over with carports and solar panels and lots of location for wind turbines, especially out to sea. Now also
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That doesn't seem like a good model.
In an electric car world, gas stations will not bot a stop and go location.
With electricity, most of your daily commute you can charge up from home overnight. So we won't need to stop and charge up once or twice a week. That means Gas/Charging Stations on their own, will not get the traffic they would need to survive. To keep in business these Stations will need to be made to cater to people for 20-60 minutes for long-range travelers. Having services like sit-down co
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There is a company in the UK called Gridserve creating charging stations with 24 350kW chargers called the Electric Forecourt and its will house a range of facilities including a coffee shop, convenience supermarket, and airport-style lounge with high-speed internet and meeting rooms
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The high-power chargers are more like the ICE fueling model than the battery swappers. However, few EVs have the ability to accept a charge at very high rates - it requires expensive parts and doesn't do the battery a lot of good. Even the puny 32kw DC charger in a Volt isn't kind to a battery - a Level 2 is much better in the long run. I suspect that in order to do reliable fast charging the EV would need a buffer of some kind - perhaps a ultracap - to accept the very fast charge then meter it out to the b
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Fumble Fingers: Bolt not Volt
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battery swapping has been played with and tried for decades, and it doesn't work. Rapid charging is the direction the entire industry is going to for long-distance, and in-town driving is served just fine by overnight charging using existing infrastructure (a plug in your garage, the side of your house, in a parking garage, etc.)
Yes, it's a bit of an unanswered question for apartment dwellers that don't have forward-looking property owners, but massive battery swapping operations that are labor intensive a
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Odd, it's usually ACs who don't bother to read the short summaries.
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Which is perfectly sound reasoning, if you believe that the supply of renewable energy on the grid is inelastic, which it unquestionably is over the short run.
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But solar and solor+storage just keeps getting cheaper every year.
It's generation and capacity are both increasing while prices drop.
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But solar and solor+storage just keeps getting cheaper every year.
It's generation and capacity are both increasing while prices drop.
That doesn't change the EROEI. Without an EROEI above 30 then it will not work, and solar+storage has an EROEI of about 3. In other words it barely gets above the breakeven point.
If storage does get cheap enough then we will just see this storage technology used on coal, natural gas, nuclear, and perhaps other big and slow to react to changing demand power plants. Cheap storage will kill solar power, not save it.
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You haven't explained why we need an EROEI of over 30.
Re: We can't power the future on wind and solar al (Score:2)
Ask Germany. They need to buy coal and nuclear power from their neighbors. Hence why you can never be 100% renewable, when the sun doesn't shine you can't buy it. Sure you can buy futures but as OP said, that's green washing, you're just using "dirty" energy whenever it's convenient.
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Even if that were true (it's not) it doesn't explain the need for an EROEI of over 30.
The key part is the "E" which stands for "Energy". Blindseer is arguing that you need some source of energy that returns 30x the amount of energy you invest in manufacturing and running it. If it only makes back 20x as much it's no good apparently.
He loves that metric because nuclear has a very good EROEI. Unfortunately for him nobody else really cares about it because they are only interested in how much money they can ma
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Germany exported 37 TWh of electricity last year. Wind and solar are also not the only renewables. For example, Germany produced 45 TWh from biomass in 2019. Biomass you can use to balance production and there are many other ways.
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You haven't explained why we need an EROEI of over 30.
Because he can't. To do so he would need to admit that nuclear can only achieve that by switching from carbon heavy uranium mining techniques to ones that use in-situ acid leech mining. Nuclear power continues to slide backwards in terms of viability due to increasingly lower yield ores and harder rocks.
So to avoid all that they pump megalitres of sulfuric acid into the ground, which messes up water tables just as effectively as radon does from mine tailing.
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Why do I need to produce 30x the energy it takes to put solar on my roof and a box of batteries on a wall in my garage?
If it breaks even over X years, and X is less than the service lifetime of the equipment, then it has a definable ROI and is a sensible investment within a computable probability.
You are going to need to show some actual math on why anything must 30x the input energy to be worthwhile.
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Isn't it strange how on every story about energy supply one of the first posts is blindseer, always within moments of the story going live. Either they type incredibly fast or they have their post ready to copy/paste in, and a few moments later it gets an up mod.
It's almost like they are paid to just sit there waiting for these topics to come up and then paste in their pre-prepared shill for the nuclear industry on some random news aggregation site.
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Not strange at all. I simply have chronic insomnia and I tend to surf the web until I can get to sleep. Early morning or late night entries have a wide window open for me to comment before others come in to add noise to the signal. There's plenty of energy stories I missed out on commenting because my insomnia decided to take the night off.
Oh, and I do type pretty fast as well.
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Nothing like staring at a screen reading random rants and typing replies to help overcome insomnia </sarcasm>
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You really believe everything the likes of blindseer and Solandri comment on energy articles? Here's blindseer being overly optimistic [slashdot.org] about technologies that haven't even passed prototype phase. Here's Solandri getting basic facts wrong [slashdot.org] about nuclear fuel cycles. The comment at the top of this thread makes an assertion with no citation and goes from there.
Re:We can't power the future on wind and solar alo (Score:4, Interesting)
No-one gives a shit about EROEI. It's only lifetime CO2 emissions and cost. Nuclear isn't bad on CO2 but the cost is insane so it's not happening no matter how badly the people paying you to shill want it to.
EROEI is irrelevant when you have an infinite renewable supply of energy. At worst it's just a question of timescales, but even then nuclear is so incredibly slow it's still not going to win.
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Explain how EROEI directly corresponds to environmental damage. Like say I have a wind turbine and use it to generate heat for making more wind turbines.
Obviously it really depends on the form of energy conversion. If it's coal or nuclear then you have to mine the fuel, process it, consume it and then dispose of the waste, all emitting CO2. So that's not at all comparable, on pure EROEI terms, to a wind turbine which has a lower EROEI but also produces less CO2 and less other pollution.
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There's a few variables in the calculation that matter. building more stuff to collect or generate a unit of energy isn't bad, if the per-unit cost is cheap enough.
Maybe instead of hitching your argument to one favorable metric and acting like that's the whole argument, you should be looking at something normalized, such as cost per MW capacity. Extra points if you add in operations budget for 10 years.
Does your favorite option still win then? I have no idea, but it's far more relevant to people who are
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How much storage is needed? In other words, what ratio of total electrical demand is perfectly price-inelastic?
Re:We can't power the future on wind and solar alo (Score:5, Informative)
Interestingly one of the largest grid battery installations in the world, the Tesla battery in Australia, is there to support fossil fuels. Apparently they need battery back up too.
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false, it is normal for plants to have outages (even true for nuclear of course) and so other standby power is put online, which is usually fossil. They haven't "needed" battery backup for over a century, and they don't and won't in future.
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They were experiencing blackouts and other problems until the battery stabilized their grid.
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The Hornsdale battery in SA has certainly stabilised the grid, and is making fat profits, in fact the company that owns it is increasing the capacity tby 50%. That said, we weren’t having to many power outages, just one big one really, when very high winds destroyed transmission towers, and the wind farms tripped out due to bad software settings, this has now been corrected.
Grid stabilisation costs Australia wide have dropped by millions of dollars.
We have 3 big batteries so far.
One day last week rene
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The big blackout that triggered buying the battery was caused by effectively greenwashing.
South Australia built some intermittent renewable power plants (wind/solar), and mothballed most of their natural gas power plants, relying on being able to buy energy from the east coast grid (NSW/Victoria) delivered via two interconnects to Victoria. That's the greenwashing part - they importing their carbon-emitting power from other states so they appeared to be greener themselves.
When the incident happened, one of
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is there to support fossil fuels. Apparently they need battery back up too.
Well no that's not right. They support maintaining frequency. This isn't in support of fossil fuels because this is a service that existed before the battery (provided by fossil fuels). It isn't there to support fossil fuels remotely and they have no need for the battery. In fact many of the fossil fuels providers are complaining because it is *incidentally* supporting frequency correction and ancillary services in a way that is making fossil fuels companies that provided that service to go out of business.
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Give a citation for this. I want to see a proper analysis, not just an article by a pundit that mentions the number.
Freudian slip since you've cited nothing?
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Here's some sitations.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
https://rameznaam.com/2015/06/... [rameznaam.com]
https://energycentral.com/c/ec... [energycentral.com]
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It states that according to one estimate, an EROEI of 7 is req'd to support the European economy, then says it's probably wrong without saying whether they think it's too high or too low. It also has a chart with estimates of solar EROEI between just under 10 and just over 30, depending on the technology.
So where does it say we need an EROEI of over 30?
And why do you consider producing energy from a consumable fuel to not require a higher EROEI than a capital asset
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Here's some sitations.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org] https://rameznaam.com/2015/06/... [rameznaam.com] https://energycentral.com/c/ec... [energycentral.com]
The first link is dead??
.... did you even read it? It contradicts you completely about a quarter of the way down the page:
The second link
There’s a graph making rounds lately showing the comparative EROIs of different electricity production methods. (EROI is Energy Return On Investment – how much energy we get back if we spend 1 unit of energy. For solar this means – how much more energy does a solar panel generate in its lifetime than is used to create it?)
This EROI graph that is making the rounds is being used to claim that solar and wind can’t support an industrialized society like ours.
But its numbers are wildly different from the estimates produced by other peer-reviewed literature, and suffers from some rather extreme assumptions, as I’ll show.
Here’s the graph.
https://rameznaam.com/wp-conte... [rameznaam.com] <-- THE GRAPH
This graph is taken from Weißbach et al, Energy intensities, EROIs, and energy payback times of electricity generating power plants (pdf link). That paper finds an EROI of 4 for solar and 16 for wind, without storage, or 1.6 and 3.9, respectively, with storage. That is to say, it finds that for every unit of energy used to build solar panels, society ultimately gets back 4 units of energy. Solar panels, according to Weißbach, generate four times as much energy over their lifetimes as it takes to manufacture them.
Unfortunately, Weißbach also claims that an EROI of 7 is required to support a society like Europe. I find a number that high implausible for a number of reasons, but won’t address it here.
I’ll let others comment on the wind numbers. For solar, which I know better, this paper is an outlier. Looking at the bulk of the research, it’s more likely that solar panels, over their lifetime, generate 10-15 times as much energy as it takes to produce them and their associated hardware. That number may be as high as 25. And it’s rising over time.
Link 3 cites the very graph so comprehensively discredited by link 2.
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There sure are a lot of energy companies building natural gas turbines even though they don't come up to your magical number of 30 in your links. But they happen to be cheap AF to operate, and can load follow better than just about anything else because they have a spin-up time ranging in seconds rather than hours (or days for nuclear).
Maybe more than one metric is necessary to study when comparing energy generation techniques?
Re: (Score:2)
The future will be powered by a mix of onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, PV solar and, solar thermal.
FTFY
So we reduce EROEI (Score:2)
Getting onto renewables isn't just about wind and solar. It's about completely transforming our energy use. From start to finish.
FP should be earned, not abused (Score:2)
Subject: says enough. Too bad Slashdot is not capable positive growth.