Is Natural Gas (Mostly) Good for Global Warming? (ieee.org) 139
Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."
That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.
This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.
So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...
Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.
That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.
This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.
So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...
Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.
Are articles with question titles (mostly) real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know, are they?
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I don't know, are they?
Yes.
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It should be pretty glaring they are pushing propaganda as it, when it leaks it is methane but when you burn it as meant to, it is natural gas. It is substantially methane both fucking times, cut it out with the propaganda.
What it does mean, is more should be done to collect 'NATURAL GAS' from out sewerage systems and burn it as energy, rather than venting to atmosphere as methane, you should be burning it as :| natural gas (what could be more natural than harvesting the power of farts ;D).
Hint, it is the
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There are a few opportunities to capture natural gas from existing mines, in fact norther New Mexico has one of the largest natural gas emitting sources on the planet and Aspen has started to use captured natural gas to run a electrical generation plant.
Beyond that and biological sources, and further drilling and extraction of natural gas will increase global warming and should be avoided as standard policy
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"or are they (mostly) meant to push an agenda?"
They violate the law most often, Betteridge's law of headlines.
According to the article, it's rather bad (Score:3)
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Nuclear should be built out to support the base grid needs, with battery (all types of batteries) build out to handle peaks and troughs and even out variable sources like solar and wind.
Gas is just another fossil fuel that releases co2 and should not be pursued
Re:According to the article, it's rather bad (Score:4, Informative)
If CO2 is the issue then nuclear is no good either, it emits more than wind and solar over its lifetime per GWh generated.
The best option is to over-build renewables, particularly wind, and make some adjustments to the grid to facilitate that. Batteries only needed for smoothing, not long term storage. When there is excess energy, take advantage of it to run uneconomical processes on free electricity.
I get paid to charge my car sometimes, at night when there is excess wind energy available. 100% renewable is already the cheapest energy available in the UK, people who pay for nuclear and fossil fuel pay more.
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I'm not concerned with the price, as I can't buy another planet.
Nuclear may be good as a stopgap in some cases, or as an alternative in countries where the environmental impact of wind and solar is undesirable for other reasons.
Fossi fuel subsidies should be put into fusion research. Total fusion spending since it began is around 1% of the amount fossil fuels get EACH YEAR to remain viable. That suggests fusion would be far cheaper to develop into a mature, usable product.
I hate myself for saying this, but
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I'm not concerned with the price, as I can't buy another planet.
You have to be concerned with price as long as the world runs on capitalism. You cannot simply ignore the dominant paradigm. You have to account for cost somehow, period.
Nuclear may be good as a stopgap in some cases, or as an alternative in countries where the environmental impact of wind and solar is undesirable for other reasons.
There's literally nowhere nuclear has less environmental impact than wind and solar, except a pineapple beneath the sea. Even when it just comes to necessary modifications to sites, nuclear has more impact. Wind and solar can share other already developed sites.
Fossi fuel subsidies should be put into fusion research.
Sounds great. It's the only kind of nuclear not yet proven to be dumb for any pu
Re:According to the article, it's rather bad (Score:4, Informative)
Where are your sources that nuclear emits more CO2 than wind and solar?
Any search I tried results in nuclear being about the same as wind na solar being about 3 times worse than nuclear.
Example: https://energy.utexas.edu/news... [utexas.edu]
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It depends where you get the fuel from and where you store the waste. In the very best case it can come close to wind, in most cases it's significantly worse.
One incredulous poster asked if they were trucking in carbon, and the answer is literally yes.
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We don't have base grid needs, we have flexible power needs.
Maybe with EVs we will have base grid needs, though, as they may help even out power draw by charging at off times.
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At this point we lack a flexible grid and have to modernize and interconnect the three major grids (and Texas *shudder*).
This has been proposed for decades, with a superconducting power corridor proposed for the East Coast and a huge interconnect/battery farm in New Mexico
The problem is that this will cost money and shift power (political, not electrical) from the current regional mix of private and public power generators to centralized authorities. (i.e. no republican will support this)
Promoting nuclear p
Natural gas is temporary adjustment. (Score:2, Informative)
Fusion energy news [scitechdaily.com].
Chinese ‘artificial sun’ hits new mark in fusion energy mission. [scmp.com] May 29, 2021
"Similar endeavours are under way in the United States, Europe, Russia, South Korea"
This Reactor May Have Finally Solved Nuclear Fusion's Biggest Problem [popularmechanics.com] May 28, 2021
International Fusion Energy Gathering Opens [iaea.org]. May 10, 2021
Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustment.) (Score:2, Insightful)
Natural gas is good only until we get energy from other sources such as wind, solar cells, and fusion.
Right, because nuclear fission does not exist. No, that's not right. Nuclear fission produces less CO2 than any other energy source we know of, is safer than any other, has lower demands for land and materials. What seems to be missed by people is that nuclear fission has been doing this for the last 40 years.
Solar power on the grid is a very bad idea. We need more nuclear fission. Waiting for nuclear fusion is not an energy plan, it's an excuse to do nothing.
Maybe we get fusion power working in 50 yea
Re:Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustmen (Score:5, Informative)
We can start building working nuclear fission power plants today.
We are building a fission plant today: The Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org] is under construction on the Savannah River in Georgia.
It is a decade behind schedule and will cost over twice the original budget.
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But on the plus side, when radiation leaks cause a bunch of genetic mutations in Georgia, nobody will notice.
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It is a decade behind schedule and will cost over twice the original budget.
Your point? I'm sure I could find a solar power project under construction now that is behind schedule and over budget. Should we base the performance of the entire industry on the performance of a single example? Is that how this works?
By building more we get economy of scale. With experience in building them we learn how to stay on schedule, and even shorten the schedule. With competition we drive down costs.
So what if one nuclear power construction project is not going well? Does this mean we stop
Re:Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustmen (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point?
That, in practice, nuclear is not cost-effective and the up-front numbers are always BS.
I'm sure I could find a solar power project under construction now that is behind schedule and over budget.
I'm sure you can. But I can point to ANY nuclear project built outside China.
Should we base the performance of the entire industry on the performance of a single example?
It is not a single example. The delays and cost overruns at Hinkley Point [wikipedia.org] are even worse.
Need a third example? Olkiluoto [wikipedia.org] in Finland was finally finished for three times the original quote.
Now let's turn it around. Can you point to ANY nuclear power plant completed on-time and on-budget in the last 20 years?
With competition we drive down costs.
Really? The normal excuse for mismanaged nukes is that we need a single standardized design, such as the AP1000. Of course, that was a debacle, so hey, whatever.
Re:Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustmen (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you point to ANY nuclear power plant completed on-time and on-budget in the last 20 years?
Past performance does not dictate future performance. A lot changed in the last 20 years. A lot changed in the last 20 months.
Last August the Democrats released their new platform document, this time reversing their position on nuclear power. For the last 50 years or so they were in open opposition of nuclear power. It seems that in the last primary season they discovered that opposition to nuclear power was a good way to lose elections.
The problems with nuclear power was largely political, perhaps only political. Without the Democrats holding up nuclear power the costs on regulations and licensing will be very different. The government will now look for ways to bring nuclear power on line instead of ways to kill the projects.
For 50 years the Democrats held up new nuclear power. They at least claim on paper to not be opposed any more, and will support it. It will take some time to see how serious they are. It's also going to take some time for people that know how to build a nuclear power plant to believe the Democrats won't just pull the rug out on them and make these people lose a lot of money. I expect the Democrats will have to convince them of the seriousness of this support with loan guarantees, subsidies, and other perks. Perks that are at least as nice as what wind and solar have.
The Democrats drove the nuclear power industry into a near standstill. The people that knew how to build a nuclear power plant on time and under budget are all senile or dead. We will have to train a new generation. That means a lot more projects that exceed the budget and run behind schedule.
Given that 50 years ago we saw an average of one gigawatt of nuclear power come to the grid per month then there will be a point in which we will exceed that rate. If we don't then it will be on the Democrats to explain why CO2 emissions in the USA started to go up after so many years of being on the decline. It will be nearly trivial to get the nuclear power industry to that rate in ten years, we did it once so we can do it again. The wind and solar industry hasn't yet shown that kind of production rate. The wind power industry may have reached a rate of one gigawatt capacity per month but a wind gigawatt is not like a nuclear gigawatt. Nuclear power plants routinely get over 90% capacity factor where only the rarest of wind project get to 30% capacity factor. That means it would take three gigawatts of wind to equal just one gigawatt of nuclear in annual energy production, and it is energy production that counts.
We will make nuclear power cost effective. We will build nuclear power capacity like we've never done before. We will do this because failure means higher CO2 emissions, more air and water pollution, higher energy prices, and more people dead from accidents, pollution, "energy poverty", and greater reliance on foreign nations for energy vital to our existence as an independent nation.
Solar, wind, and storage is not an energy plan. Any viable energy plan must have new nuclear fission generation capacity included. Only the science deniers disagree.
Re:Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustmen (Score:4, Informative)
Please cite in the 2016 Democrat policies [democrats.org] where it says they were opposed to nuclear power. Or indeed in any of their prior policies.
Instead, Obama was in favour [reuters.com] of nuclear energy, and Democrats since then have co-sponsored bipartisan nuclear energy bills at Federal [senate.gov] and State [vox.com] levels.
We will make nuclear power cost effective.
Great, we're all looking forward to that. And when it happens, I don't doubt more nuclear plants will get built. But until then, expect to see much more wind and solar, as they're dramatically cheaper per MWh (not just per MW) than nuclear.
Solar, wind, and storage is not an energy plan.
The DoE's NREL disagrees [nrel.gov]. Their studies (and many others) show intermittent renewables are "more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation". The remainder could come from nuclear, if it eventually gets cheap enough, or from gas peaker plants burning natural gas in the short-medium term and "green" hydrogen in the longer term, or possibly just from more [phys.org] renewables [thesolutionsproject.org] if the current trend towards cheaper storage continues.
Where is this Democrat-free nuclear utopia? (Score:3)
Can you point to ANY nuclear power plant completed on-time and on-budget in the last 20 years?
Past performance does not dictate future performance. A lot changed in the last 20 years. A lot changed in the last 20 months.
Last August the Democrats released their new platform document, this time reversing their position on nuclear power. For the last 50 years or so they were in open opposition of nuclear power. It seems that in the last primary season they discovered that opposition to nuclear power was a good way to lose elections.
The problems with nuclear power was largely political, perhaps only political. Without the Democrats holding up nuclear power the costs on regulations and licensing will be very different. The government will now look for ways to bring nuclear power on line instead of ways to kill the projects.
For 50 years the Democrats held up new nuclear power. They at least claim on paper to not be opposed any more, and will support it. It will take some time to see how serious they are. It's also going to take some time for people that know how to build a nuclear power plant to believe the Democrats won't just pull the rug out on them and make these people lose a lot of money. I expect the Democrats will have to convince them of the seriousness of this support with loan guarantees, subsidies, and other perks. Perks that are at least as nice as what wind and solar have.
The Democrats drove the nuclear power industry into a near standstill. The people that knew how to build a nuclear power plant on time and under budget are all senile or dead. We will have to train a new generation. That means a lot more projects that exceed the budget and run behind schedule.
Then by your logic, countries without Democrats would have cheap nuclear power. Where can I find these? What is your model for success? Where are these countries that have super cheap nuclear power with no accidents?
Democrats specifically only exist in one country. And if your argument is generalized to liberals, there are many countries with nuclear technology and conservative governments. What is their cost per megawatt hour?
Yup, you don't like Democrats...that's fine. Maybe even your hatred i
Re:Fission! (Re:Natural gas is temporary adjustmen (Score:4, Informative)
Barakah (UAE): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant [wikipedia.org]
Pakistan: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Karachi-unit-2-inaugurated-by-Pakistan-PM [world-nuclear-news.org]
There are also a whole range of finished VVERs in Russia and elsewhere.
Considering that China managed to build & connect two EDF-designed EPRs to their national grid in less than 8 years time and then had the audacity to hand EDF a list of improvements that EDF used for the EPR 2 design, I'd say that the problem is that the West hasn't been building large infrastructure for a while.
This is exemplified by e.g. Germany's inability to get its new BER airport completed within budget and within deadlines, let alone its Stuttgart 21 rail station project that's still far from finished.
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Barakah (UAE): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant [wikipedia.org]
Barakah was completed 4 years late and 25% over budget.
The original quote was $20B with a 2017 startup. The final cost was $25B, and it started operating in 2021.
That is amazingly good by nuclear industry standards but still doesn't qualify as "on-time and on-budget."
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Your point? I'm sure I could find a solar power project under construction now that is behind schedule and over budget.
Find us one that is that far over time and over budget. Then you may have a lightbulb moment and realise what the GP's point was.
Should we base the performance of the entire industry on the performance of a single example? Is that how this works?
If it is completely representative then sure. And it is. Sadly, not just in the west, but these kinds of problems with nuclear are consistent in all countries of the world. The only nuclear projects which are the exception are military and of tiny scale.
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Single example? It's the only example.
What on time and on budget nuclear plant do you know of?
It does not matter if I can name one or not. It does not change the fact that if we don't start building nuclear power plants soon, and complete them at a rate faster than we decommission old nuclear fission power reactors, then the USA will be facing an energy crisis.
Just slap some windmills together and call it a day. Cheaper easier faster, and without the radiation fearmongering to worry about.
No, you can't "just" put up more windmills. We've been trying that for 50 years.
The Democrats caving in on their opposition of nuclear power after 50 years should be a sign that we will be in deep shit if we don't get more nuclear power soon
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I look forward to finally seeing them online against the background of a barren wasteland that is what is left of the planet.
More realistically we need solutions we can get online in 2-5 years, not 5 years planning phase, 5 years approval phase, 10 year construction, time slippage guaranteed, actual project estimate completely unknown, which is how 100% of all current nuclear projects are progressing.
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Fusion is estimated tonow be 10-15 years off. It would come a lot sooner if peope spent this stuff called money on it. Fusion research has come a long way on a shoestring budget.
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Reality is that nuclear fission provides 20% of the electricity in the USA, and has done so for decades.
The only thing making nuclear power "nonviable" is a bunch of octogenarian Democrats that think The China Syndrome was a documentary. They are the minority of the party now and so they can't hold up the nuclear power industry any more.
True: Better fission reactors. But consider all. (Score:2)
It seems that fusion reactor development is moving fast, but we have no idea whether it will become sensible or efficient.
The major point of my comment is to look at all the possibilities. Slashdot readers are the kind of people who may make fusion reactors possible and efficient.
The new, safer nuclear reactors that might help stop climate change [technologyreview.com] Fe
Re:True: Better fission reactors. But consider all (Score:4, Insightful)
you are just spewing the lies about fission power that have kept us dependent on fossil fuels
Fossil methane is not the obvious replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
Fossil fuels are still the most used fuel source today, but their days are numbered. The EU has announced that in its green taxonomy, nuclear power is to be promoted, whereas fossil methane ('natural gas') is to be treated as a temporary bridge solution at best. This is not the time to invest in natural gas, but to get rid of it as soon as we can.
And that's even ignoring lunacy like e.g. Belgium's plan to replace its seven nuclear plants by 2025 with 100% fossil methane plants while still selling it as 'green'. It's projected that this would make Belgium along with e.g. Germany the most polluting countries in Europe. Whether Belgium will really go through with this is still to be seen. Public opinion is against it.
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That's why China for example is developing the HTR-PM small modular reactor that can be used as a drop-in solution for coal plant boilers.
Nonsense. No nuclear power plant can be a drop-in replacement for coal boilers. Unless you want to go to RBMKs (channel-type graphite-moderated reactors) with additional nuclear steam heating. Which I personally do NOT want.
Nuclear power plants produce steam at much lower pressures and temperatures than most coal power plants. They are not as concerned with thermodynamic efficiency as coal power plants. And as a result, all the turbines and generating equipment is designed very differently.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM [wikipedia.org]
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Now imagine the same with a small graphite-cooled reactor. The coolant is lost and graphite becomes super-hot, it eventually melts through the containment walls, comes into the contact wi
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Standard solution with a pebble-bed reactor when there's a loss of coolant is to inject neutron poison, and to release the pebbles into a containment area where the chain reaction is halted.
I do not see how your comparison with 'chernobyl' makes any sense here. These reactor designs couldn't be more different, and a Chernobyl-style event (positive void coefficient, massive
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Don't you mean 'graphite-moderated'?
Yes, of course. Need to stop writing messages from my mobile phone (I did get it right here: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] ).
Standard solution with a pebble-bed reactor when there's a loss of coolant is to inject neutron poison, and to release the pebbles into a containment area where the chain reaction is halted.
The problem is the decay heat. Even after the nuclear chain reaction is stopped, the decay products continue giving off the decay heat. That's also why you can get a meltdown in a PWR.
BTW, one of the problems with an experimental pebble bed reactor was caused by pebble jams.
I do not see how your comparison with 'chernobyl' makes any sense here. These reactor designs couldn't be more different, and a Chernobyl-style event (positive void coefficient, massive reactivity spike & steam explosion) is therefore not even theoretically possible.
Chernobyl accident was that horrible because of the graphite fire that followed the initial steam and hydr
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Yep, and they still require a special control room and all the associated plumbing and wiring, so are hardly a "drop-in replacement".
Prototypes of this kind of pebble bed reactor have revealed various issues that don't seem to be solvable. For example, there is excessive dust accumulation due to pebble friction. Radioactive dust is very hard to clean up, and causes all kinds of maintenance head-aches.
The reactors themselves are high pressure devices, operating at high temperatures. So the pressure vessel ne
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They cannot. Steam turbines used in nuclear reactors are structurally built completely different from those in coal plants. Stage layout alone is fundamentally different.
The only thing in the main "boiler > turbine > generator" production chain that you can keep is the cheapest part: generator. And even that will need some adjustments. Everything else, you're throwing out entirely. Completely new boiler, completely new turbine and completely new auxiliary tech around those, built for completely differ
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France managed to go from nearly 0% nuclear power to ~75% in about a decade. Sweden took ~15 years to do about the same. Is that fast enough for you?
Indeed. We did a lot of things differently in the past. France *WAS* good at that. On the other hand France's most recent project is scheduled to complete next year while being started in 2007. Oh wait no it's not, It has had yet *another* setback of a few years, and only recently the French Court of Audit found that the project cost $3bn. ... Wait no that's the original sanctioned project cost. $19.8bn yes that's the current estimate for finishing the project, only a 6.6x overshoot, nothing serious. Oh and
If you want to go (Score:2, Insightful)
Gas is too expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are we still having these conversations? Coal and gas cost too much for electricity generation. Combined-cycle gas is 50-100% more expensive than wind power in the US (source: https://www.lazard.com/perspec... [lazard.com]). New-build solar or wind are already cheaper than continuing to operate an already-build coal plant (same source).
So what? So lots of solar and wind will continue to be built because they're the cheapest source of electricity. Lots of solar and wind will mean coal plants have to ramp at their maximum rates to keep up, which wears them out and makes them even more expensive to maintain; they're doomed and are going away. Gas plants generally can ramp faster but even they are getting stressed by the ramp rates in, e.g. Australia.
If lots of solar and wind will get built because they're cheaper, and as a side effect they drive up the prices / drive down the reliability of coal and gas, that just makes them EVEN CHEAPER by comparison, so even more will be built. Learning rates, though declining, will continue to depress prices, leading to overbuilding because they'll still be profitable even with increasing amounts of curtailment.
So what? So lots of short-duration energy storage (mostly batteries) will be built to take advantage of cheap daytime electricity. All sorts of flexible demand will shift from historically-cheaper nighttime electricity to now-cheaper daytime: EV charging, heat pump water heaters, heat pump space heaters, maybe even the electrolyzers the hydrogen-economy boosters hope for. Even with recently-cheap natural gas prices in the US, heat pump heating at my house (in Wisconsin) is cheaper than gas. It's slightly more expensive per unit of delivered energy to use electricity for heating, but not enough to make up the $20+/month cost of having gas service at all. Electric-only is cheaper year-round.
Gas plants, at best, can hope to be relegated to a peaker role: solar, wind, and hydro haven't been meeting demand for a while and batteries / pumped storage are getting low, so let's fire up some gas plants for 100 hours a year every January / February.
Fuel is storage (Re:Gas is too expensive) (Score:5, Informative)
We are having this conversation because wind and solar power are not reliable sources of energy. We need energy storage to make up for when there isn't enough wind and sun, and fuel is stored energy. Therefore we have the conversation on the type of fuel we use for this stored energy.
We could use batteries as energy stores but batteries are not free. They take materials and labor to build, and land to put them on.
Also a store of energy is water behind a dam. But the people behind the Green New Deal don't like hydroelectric power. These people can go jump in a hydroelectric dam reservoir.
We can find stored energy in uranium and thorium. With third generation nuclear power we will have energy that is reliable, safe, plentiful, low in CO2 emissions, and can be built right now with plans already approved by the NRC. There is experimentation now with fourth generation nuclear that is air cooled and can vary output quickly like a gas turbine, in large part because it shares a lot of technology with a gas turbine. This removes the need for batteries or natural gas to match electricity production to demand.
Geothermal is low in CO2 emissions, low in cost, relatively plentiful, and is something we can build right now. As it uses heat from the earth is is reliable and output can be varied to match demand.
We will need more than wind and solar. In fact offshore wind and every form of solar power costs more than nuclear fission. Your source shows rooftop solar as costing more than nuclear, and offshore wind as double the cost of onshore wind. I believe it leaves out the many options we have to lower the cost of nuclear power but even so your own source shows intermittent solar power as often more costly than reliable nuclear fission.
Why use solar power when and where nuclear fission power is safer, costs less, and is more reliable?
The safety of nuclear power over solar, and everything else really, is here: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
That's not a primary source, just a convenient place to find the studies mentioned on the web.
Solar power on the grid is a very bad idea. A large part of it being a bad idea is the need for natural gas as backup. We should just burn the natural gas without the solar power, or use reliable energy from hydro, geothermal, and nuclear fission.
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Most of what you wrote seems sound but from a homeowner and consumer standpoint, how exactly is solar panels and battery storage more dangerous then nuclear power? Perhaps the mining aspects to get the components for solar panels? The roofer that installs the panels?
Nuclear is definitely safe until it's not. I would be okay with having nuclear in my backyard but I can't recall hearing about solar killing anyone. Possibly because they don't report the deaths of the resource gathers for the panels and batteri
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How the safety of energy is determined was described in the link I gave. Here it is again: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
The short of it is that when we compare deaths to the energy produced by a given energy source as our measure of safety. When we compute the people killed in nuclear power accidents to the large amount of energy produced the safety of nuclear power is shown to be very very high.
Many of the deaths from solar power do come from people falling from rooftops while doing installations an
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Wind and solar are extremely reliable. The UK National Grid considers them MORE reliable than even nuclear, because they are highly predictable and failures only affect megawatts, not gigawatts suddenly dropping off.
We can predict wind and solar output in the near term (30 minutes) with a very high degree of certainty. For longer term you just need more of it, and lots of it offshore. The wind NEVER stops blowing offshore. Never. For that to happen the day/night cycle would have to end too, and then we woul
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The UK National Grid considers them MORE reliable than even nuclear, because they are highly predictable and failures only affect megawatts, not gigawatts suddenly dropping off.
A couple of weeks ago, when a storm was blowing across the UK the onshore and offshore wind farms were producing about 12GW of electricity from the 25GW dataplate of installed wind turbines in service. This was indeed predictable because the weather reporting services had forecast the storm would arrive and strong winds were expect
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The UK is a long long way from having enough wind, and most of what it does have is onshore which is far more variable than offshore.
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Offshore wind electricity production is about 35% of dataplate capacity on average (an offshore windfarm of two hundred 5MW turbines will generate about 350MW on average over a year). Onshore wind output is about 30% of dataplate installation.
When a lull hits the UK the electricity production of both onshore and offshore wind farms will be impacted mostly equally although this is not absolute.
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We need energy storage to make up for when there isn't enough wind and sun, and fuel is stored energy. Therefore we have the conversation on the type of fuel we use for this stored energy.
If the author had been promoting gas as an energy storage mechanism, your reply would have made sense. We can use renewable energy to manufacture methane and burn it on demand. But he wasn't. He was advocating fossil gas, extracted from under the ground, that adds carbon to the environment when burned. There's no place for that anymore. We need to move to completely carbon free energy sources as fast as we possibly can.
Energy storage is an important subject. You can store energy in batteries, or with
Wind and solar are a proxy for natural gas (Score:5, Insightful)
As more wind and solar generating capacity is added to the electrical grid there is more demand for fast acting single cycle natural gas turbines. These single cycle turbines are half as efficient as combined cycle gas turbines, or CCGT. This means twice the fuel for the same electrical energy. When pairing solar and wind to single cycle turbines the utility can see the same fuel burn rate as if they had replaced that with a CCGT.
The natural gas industry loves them some wind and solar power. They will talk big about how they want to partner with people on getting more wind and solar power to "green wash" their fossil fuel. It doesn't matter to the natural gas industry if utilities buy more windmills and solar PV panels, the natural gas producers sell the same amount of natural gas regardless.
One news article on this I found with a quick internet search, there are more like it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
To lower CO2 emissions means we need hydro, geothermal, nuclear fission, and a light touch of onshore wind because onshore wind is just too cheap to ignore. Natural gas will help in lowering CO2 emissions but it won't get us to zero. We can use natural gas as a transportation fuel to lower demand for petroleum, and therefore lower CO2 emissions. People will find BEVs a problem because of initial cost, range issues, recharge times, etc. A PHEV means people can do their daily commute on electricity and have long range for the few times it's needed. Using natural gas for transport means lower CO2 emissions but still having short refill times from a properly equipped filling station, and long range from the high energy density. Natural gas vehicles offers the benefit of refueling at home like a BEV offers recharging at home. A natural gas PHEV means one can use EV chargers where available, NGV filling stations where available, and use whichever is most convenient at home. Either offers lower CO2 emissions than gasoline or diesel fuel.
At some point we will have to develop a synthetic fuel infrastructure. We need hydrocarbon fuels to keep airplanes flying, and long haul trucks moving. We can synthesize a natural gas substitute, one that is net carbon neutral by using CO2 from the air to produce it. We can use solar power to do this but we won't. Nobody is going to invest in a fuel synthesis plant that relies on the sun to operate. Are they just supposed to send the workers home if it rains that day? No, they are going to use reliable power from hydro, geothermal, or nuclear fission.
We could use some batteries but we've seen the articles here on Slashdot on the problems of making enough batteries.
Natural gas is better for the environment than coal. Solar power is no better for the environment than natural gas, because solar power is a proxy for natural gas. To lower CO2 and pollutants into the air we need hydro, geothermal, onshore wind, and nuclear fission.
Being less bad is not being good (Score:5, Insightful)
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It isn't the answer, but if you want to migrate from A to B and the entire jump in one go is a bit too much for too many people, then maybe smaller steps are good, provided it is understood that they can't stop half way and MUST complete the journey.
Re: Being less bad is not being good (Score:2)
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Likewise a capitalism only solution is going to give you a substandard solution like in Texas where you can make even more money by charging for scarcity when it fails. Here in New Zealand we don't have to worry about such things as the systems was designed base
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People are greedy. If you want a system without greed, you need to eliminate the people.
Re: Being less bad is not being good (Score:2)
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Not enough. We need to reduce CO_2 output at least 500%.
We'd be in pretty good shape (Score:3)
We'd be in pretty good shape if natural gas replaced coal some 50 years ago. Now? Why bother! Now is the time to build hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power and skip over the the cleaner fossil fuels. Bio-gas capture on site will also be a far greener and cheaper alternative to natural gas for the niche where that is practical. We should be considering broad diversification of energy sources that complement each other and work according to the needs and circumstances for those they serve. The era of mining and drill cheap energy out of the ground is probably over, we can chalk up natural gas as a missed opportunity that went obsolete before it had a chance to make a difference.
bullshit (Score:2)
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oil companies trying to push an agenda. a reduction of only 40% cannot be called excellent. it's just mediocre. a reduction of 90+% can sanely be called excellent. Natural gas is just oil on lipstick. renewables is the only way to go if we want to survive on this planet.
You are half right. This is actually the Sierra Club's agenda (because you need gas to backup unreliable power sources). It is just that on this point, the oil and the greens have a devil's bargain against nuclear. That's because you can't de-carbonize the grid without nuclear, the math doesn't work otherwise. You can't mine enough Li, Nd and Dy to make enough batteries, generators and PV panels to touch the baseload we get from fossil fuels with just renewables. Only nuclear makes enough power to do t
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the plan is to kick the can down the road again and again. Selling one "almost there" battery after another
The grid doesn't care what kind of batteries you have behind your inverter. It can be upgraded piecemeal as the technology improves. If we spent the money currently being spent subsidizing fossil fuels on research into better batteries, panels, turbines etc. then you'd see faster improvement which takes advantage of this design.
This is an optimization problem and you don't get an optimum solution when you ignore a power source that is 100,000,000X more powerful per mole than "renewables" (which are not really renewable).
If we shifted fully to nuclear we'd just run out of nuclear fuel, creating a bunch of really nasty waste in the process, and doing a lot of environmental destruction just with the mi
I hope so because that is where we are going (Score:3)
I hope so because here in California that is the direction we are going. As we add more and more solar to the grid, the so-called baseline generation gets knocked offline. All is good during the daytime with tons of solar. But when the sun gets low and everybody is at home with the AC on, there is a major shortage. Natural gas is the only ready-made generation available that can spool up fast enough to supply the load for a few hours until demand goes down again. Ironically, we are at a point where any increase in solar generation will lead to a need for more gas-fired generation, too.
Eventually we will have grid scale batteries, but at the moment, we are adding solar panels faster than batteries, and the result is that we need more natual gas generators.
Personally, I wonder whether it might be possible to maintain a mix of carbon fuels well into the green future. Maybe we can use solar plus water plus CO2 from the air to synthesize methane or propane. For those of us in more rural areas, it is hard to believe we will every have a reliable enough grid to do without propane for heating and standby generators. At least not any time soon.
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Most likely it will be overall much more cost effective if they are in relatively large facilities and installations. They do not need to be super close to generation, though.
To me, and this may be a bit subjective, it feels like pushing the solution out to the customer premises is kind of a capitulation to the third-world-ization of the power grid in California. People who can afford batteries, or are organized enough to get subsidized installations will have reliable power. Everyone else will get used to
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The batteries are now and will continue to be everywhere.
Batteries (and their ilk) require maintenance of some kind. Some of it is replace on a long schedule, some of it is check water levels every three months, for flow batteries it's going to be check pump performance and electrolyte degradation levels, for pumped hydro storage it's all the maintenance a dam entails, etc etc. So for these reasons, centralization makes a lot of sense. Batteries and [the pieces and parts of] their substitutes alike tend to
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Missing from the discussion (Score:4, Interesting)
All of these debates ignore the elephant in the room. The current course of industrial civilization will exhaust our planet's resources and make it an uninhabitable hell. Even if we could stop AGW; even if we could reverse it; we'd still be on a collision course with a destiny where we exhaust Earth's resources while killing off so many plant and animal species that there are no ecosystems left to sustain our food chains and our souls.
On this decidedly finite planet, we've built economic and political systems predicated on unlimited growth and infinite resources. That makes the current version of humanity a cancer. Unless successfully curtailed, cancers destroy their hosts, thereby ultimately destroying themselves.
AGW is perhaps the most pressing crisis we face, but it's also a dangerous distraction. Collectively speaking, we seem to think that if we can just solve climate change, we're golden and can continue our plundering ways. Collectively speaking, we are wrong.
Are we content to continue deluding ourselves, and to merely delay our species' doom? Or can we make the difficult choices necessary to ensure mankind's future? Those questions quite literally keep me up at night, and the way my answers are trending scars me. And no, that wasn't a typo.
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Ironic claim considering you've steadfastly ignored the mountains of evidence [www.ipcc.ch] showing current levels of CO2 are already net negative for the biosphere despite the greening effect (see 4.2.2.4 and 4.3.2, and Chapter 7 in particular), and getting steadily worse not better.
I've seen your attempts to pretend climatology somehow doesn't count as a "true" science, but the field's findings are endorsed by virtually every scientific institution on the planet [wikipedia.org], and I think they know more about science than you. The d
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Typo, sorry - I meant 4.2.4.4. "Rising Carbon Dioxide".
at the end of the day it is still a guess
There's your black vs white viewpoint again; if it's not absolute certainty, it's a "guess". But in the real world there's a full spectrum between them, and every scientific field deals with error bars - particularly when estimating the future. Your question should be, how much confidence do they have in their estimates?
For example, about that greening effect; "there is high confidence that net terrestrial ecosystem productivity at the global scale has
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I don't see any hard science that shows the quantifiable, demonstrable deviation from 'natural' change to 'man-made'.
Because you keep refusing to look. How much more specific do I have to get? I already pointed you at the relevant Chapter 18, but clearly you failed to notice the pages-long list of specific effects with confidence levels, and citations to each relevant study. Just one example:
Effect: Increase in coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef and Western Australian Reefs
Detection Confidence: High
Climate Role: Major
Climate Driver: Ocean warming
Attribution Confidence: High
Citations: Sections 6.3.1.4, 6.3.1.5, and
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the gap here is the certainty of the impact of the change
The gap is only in your mind. I've already cited the science that clearly attributes the changing climate to human emissions, but you deny it.
You can sit in your Typhoon proof home
Unless you're one of the few billion people who can't afford a typhoon-proof home. Like I said, can't be a real problem until it affects you personally.
That is not how proofs work in science
And you're the definitive expert on that now, while all those thousands of scientists who accept this evidence are clearly morons.
Dr Paul R. Elrich [sic] ... Dr S. I Rasool
And what do these two have to do with anything discussed? Their claims never represented
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Yeah I'm bored now. You can redefine what "real" science is in your own mind all you like, and you can even dismiss the countless genuine scientists disagreeing with you as "arguments from authority" instead of textbook Dunning Kruger if it helps you sleep at night, but you should be aware that you simply saying so isn't particularly convincing to others. But I'm sure you'll keep pushing your straw men anyway, so have fun with that.
As a suggestion going forward, if you'd like your arguments to appear scient
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Yeah, you have a point. Sometimes I say "fuck it, I don't have kids and I don't care". And often it's not on my mind at all. I can be concerned and try to convince people to take notice, without letting it suck the joy out of life. So thanks for the reality check. ;-)
MIT study said 4% leakage is as bad as coal (Score:3)
It might have been a smidge more, but a study out of MIT a year or so ago added up those effects that are higher in the troposphere (first 20 years) than the stratosphere (next 80 years) and gave an overall verdict that burning natural gas causes 100% as much warming effect as coal, if the total leakage were about 4%.
So, Smil notes that a 2018 study found leakage was a fair bit more than industry claimed, probably about 2.3%.
So, if the CO2 is 60% as bad as coal, and the leakage of 4% filled in the remaining 40%, let's blindly assume it's about linear, that every 1% leaked causes the whole industry to be another 10% as bad as coal. So 2.3% leakage becomes 23% as bad as coal.
60% (because of CO2) + 23% (from 2.3% methane leakage) = 83% as bad as coal. A 1000-megawatt plant is as bad as an 830MW coal plant.
Not that impressive, really.
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But at least it's not leaking mercury the way coal plants do.
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It's not impressive at all. However, static friction is higher than rolling friction as far as the mind is concerned. Get the minds of people thinking about moving, then you'll have an easier time keeping them moving and ending up where you need them to be.
sunlight and hydrogen (Score:2)
Sunlight and hydrogen are the cleanest and most abundant forms of available energy.
We have our own nuclear fusion reactor which transmits it's usable energy as sunlight,
which we can easily convert to electricity to power our lives.
Water covers 71% of the earth's surface and can be easily split to H2 and O2,
then recombined, realising a practical energy source to also power our lives.
And it's all simple and clean.
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Well, the thermodynamic efficiency is pretty low with hydrogen. But it is possible. It is also possible to synthesize methane from CO2 and water and sunlight. And even liquid fuels that can take the place of gasoline or diesel or jet fuel. I don't know whether this will ever happen. But there is a certain advantage in it, in terms of not requiring a lot of infrastructure build-out, since we already have liquid and gas fuel handling facilities in place.
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Hydrogen is not an energy source if you have to make it. It's a battery. That it's chemical rather than electric doesn't make it an energy source.
The viable choices are solar, wind, fission, and, eventually, fusion. Geothermal works in restricted locales. And the same is true for tidal energy, or even wave. Some places can get small amounts of energy by working off the difference in temperature between different depths of the ocean. There are a few other minor choices.
Fossil carbon is a bad choice how
Probably don't care (Score:3)
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Not even close [wikipedia.org]. Total anthropogenic methane emissions come to 363 million tonnes, compared to permafrost melting of less than 39 million tonnes. Wetlands are a much bigger source, but still only come to 194 million tonnes.
How is this being written today? (Score:2)
If I read this headline in 2001 I'd be interested, but I'm baffled why IEEE is publishing it in 2021.
NG is already out of the money in some locations, a situation that is unlikely to change if current trends in PV and offshore wind continue.
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IEEE is publishing it now because Spectrum has gone from being a decent electronics technology magazine to a fluff rag run by artists chasing the most "now" stories.
Stop burning things for energy (Score:2)
If we're going to be serious about stopping the environmental damage being done by fossil fuels then we have to stop using them entirely and move to sources of energy that don't involve combusting things.
Solar and wind to fill in the gaps while we start building nuclear power plants again -- and before the sky-is-falling types
Netherlands is phasing out natural gas (Score:2)
Interestingly, the Netherlands is phasing out natural gas as an energy source for heating homes.
Instead everybody should transfer to using electric heat pumps. A very expensive conversion. Go figure.
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The UK too. As the plan currently stands, new-build homes won't be allowed to use gas boilers starting in 2025, and new installs of gas boilers will be prohibited in the mid-2030s.
New-build homes that can be designed around the limitations of a heat pump system should be fine. The transition of older properties starting in the 2030s could be quite painful and expensive.
Stop The #Greenwash (Score:2)
Whoever is moderating and deciding which submissions should appear please do your job.
Why leave out fission? (Re:Gas is a half measure) (Score:3, Insightful)
We need an all the above energy plan. That means including nuclear fission.
The lowest CO2 emission energy sources, and also with lowest cost, is (in no order) onshore wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear fission. As far as costs, land use, labor, materials, and CO2 emissions, we find solar doesn't make the list for on grid power. Off the grid solar is great, on the grid we have better options.
Without nuclear fission in our energy plan the lights go out. Japan had every reason to abandon nuclear fission
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>Off the grid solar is great, on the grid we have better options.
Solar is usually the only option for a house owner in possession of a roof.
Wind, geothermal, hydro and nuclear fission are not something you can put in your back yard.
Individuals don't get to compare the cost of solar against the bulk cost of the other technologies. They get to compare it against their utility bill which is the most expensive electric money can buy, since it's at the end of the chain. So with falling solar costs and shiftin
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Solar is usually the only option for a house owner in possession of a roof.
That would be an example of an off the grid use.
Individuals don't get to compare the cost of solar against the bulk cost of the other technologies.
Perhaps, but utilities have this option. If they want to offer the lowest cost electricity then they will consider the cost of solar to these other options.
They get to compare it against their utility bill which is the most expensive electric money can buy, since it's at the end of the chain. So with falling solar costs and shifting of household energy to electric for heating, cooling and charging of vehicles, on-grid solar offsetting utility electric bills looks pretty good today and will look better in the future.
Solar on one's roof and batteries as an alternative to electricity from the utility is not on the grid solar. On the grid solar is solar power generated in one location, consumed in a different location, and a utility grid connecting the two.
Utilities are aware that people have the option to go off the gr
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Solar is usually the only option for a house owner in possession of a roof.
That would be an example of an off the grid use.
That's not what I meant - home solar can be grid connected or not. Usually it is. Sometimes it's switchable so it can be used during power cuts.
If by 'on-grid' you mean 'big utility size generation'. then yes.
An interesting factoid about sunny places and solar - My employer has sites in Oregon and Arizona and the car parks have large solar arrays over the parking areas. - they get more energy out of the solar panels in Oregon than Arizona, because in Oregon, the rain cleans off the dust regularly.
Re: Why leave out fission? (Re:Gas is a half measu (Score:2)