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| Solar Power isn't Feasible | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 30 2013, 12:31 AM (2,233 Views) | |
| Brewster | Jan 1 2014, 06:59 AM Post #101 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Yup, still working at it, Mike. We're busy converting our light bulbs to LED's - they're still expensive, so we're doing about one a month, changing the lights used the most first - My electric bill is already down abt $4-6 a month, I expect to have it drop about $15 by the time we're done. We're also considering replacing our car with a Hyundai Sonata Hybrid next year - should cut our gas consumption around town almost in half. (Wanted to get a Volt, but management on our Apartment absolutely won't consider plug-ins - says the building was never built for it.) |
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| Brewster | Jan 1 2014, 07:10 AM Post #102 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Thanks very much, and Good Wishes to you as well... My wife and I are both in very much better health than we have been for some time - I think that I'm in the best health I've been in a decade - my doctor just finished a whole battery of tests on me, and he agrees! I suspect the prayer helped... |
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| Neutral | Jan 1 2014, 07:12 AM Post #103 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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So now one doesn't know beans about solar unless they "say" they own a system? LOL |
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| Brewster | Jan 1 2014, 07:27 AM Post #104 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Congratulations on once again avoiding all facts presented, Neut. I must say, you have a real talent. You managed to reduce 11 pages of statistics, technical explanations, anecdotal evidence, strong opinions and general discussion down to a one line irrelevancy. Edited by Brewster, Jan 1 2014, 07:28 AM.
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| Neutral | Jan 1 2014, 07:30 AM Post #105 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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I saw no facts, just stories. |
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| Berton | Jan 1 2014, 08:02 AM Post #106 |
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Thunder Fan
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Mikd, that is discussed in the article. I keep wondering why you refuse to read it. Child, I call you that since you keep resorting to childish name calling, the link is the same. It is on page 3. A link you dismissed without reading it showing just how ideological and foolish you have become. "Issue 3: Displacing the wrong kinds of power You may have noticed in the daily generation chart above how wind power is throttled back when the sun comes out. Residential solar has legal right-of-way over utility-scale wind. A lot of the power generation that solar is displacing is actually other renewables. Most of the rest is displacing natural gas and nuclear power. Coal power is growing rapidly. [6,8] Here’s what the weekly generation profile is predicted to look like in 2020: [22] Notice the saw-tooth shape of the big grey “conventional” (coal/gas) category. What all this solar is doing is eating into its daytime base load generation, which seems good for displacing fossil fuels, but in the long run, it’s doing the opposite. The majority of electricity worldwide comes from coal and nuclear base load plants. They are big, efficient, and cheap. But base load generation is extremely difficult and expensive to throttle up and down every day. To simplify the issue a bit, you cannot ramp nuclear plants as fast as solar swings up and down every day. It takes several days to shut down and restart a nuclear plant, and nuclear plants outside France are not designed to be throttled back, so nuclear cannot be paired with the daily oscillations of PV solar. Supply is unable to match demand. You end up with both gaps and overages." Edited by Berton, Jan 1 2014, 08:05 AM.
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| Berton | Jan 1 2014, 11:47 AM Post #107 |
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To continue the lesson for those who wish to learn. "Most people think Germany is decommissioning its nuclear fleet because of the Fukushima accident, but the Germans didn’t really have a choice. They are being forced to stop using nuclear power by all the variability in solar output. That’s a big, big problem — Germany gets four times more electricity from nuclear than solar, so the math doesn’t add up. The generation time-profile is wrong, and the total power output from solar is too low. They have to replace nuclear plants with something else. The normal way to handle variable power demand is via natural gas “peaker” plants. But Germany has minimal domestic natural gas resources and load-following gas plants are very expensive to operate, so what they’re doing is building more coal plants, and re-opening old ones. [6,8,22] It’s expensive and inefficient, but you can run a coal plant all night and then throttle it back when the sun comes up. It has better load-following capabilities than nuclear (although worse than gas). The German Green Party has been fighting nuclear power since the 1970s, and has finally won. Nuclear is out, and coal is in. If you’re a regular follower of my writing, you’ll know what a terrible idea this is. [23] Replacing nuclear power with coal power is unquestionably the most scientifically-illiterate, ass-backwards, and deadly mistake that any group of environmentalists has ever made. It’s unbelievable how much cleaner and safer nuclear power is than coal power. The Fukushima meltdown was pretty much a “worst case scenario” — one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, the largest tsunami to ever hit Japan, seven reactor meltdowns and three hydrogen explosions — and not a single person has died from radiation poisoning. [24] The expected lifetime increase in cancer rates due to the released radiation is somewhere between zero and a number too small to measure. [25] Even spectacular nuclear disasters are barely harmful to the public. Studies are now showing that the stress from the evacuation has killed more people than would have been killed by radiation if everyone had just stayed in place. [26,27] In comparison, coal power kills about a million people per year, fills the oceans with mercury and arsenic, releases more carbon dioxide than any other human activity, and is arguably one of the greatest environmental evils of the industrialized world. [23] This is counter-intuitive, but second-order effects are enormously important. Expansion of photovoltaic solar power past 1-2% of total electricity demand means less nuclear, and more coal. The amount of damage this does completely overwhelms the environmental benefit from the solar panels themselves. You have to avoid building so much solar power that it destabilizes and eliminates other clean power sources. When you get to the “duck chart” stage, things start to get bad. Otherwise you’ll end up worse off than when you started, as Germany has found out to its dismay. So that all sucks a lot. German solar power is hurting people and the planet. But there’s more." |
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| colo_crawdad | Jan 1 2014, 12:01 PM Post #108 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Again, a direct quotation with no indication from whence it came. SOP Oh yeah, there is probably somewhere in this thread a link to some source that might be the source of that quoted material.
Edited by colo_crawdad, Jan 1 2014, 11:16 PM.
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| Neutral | Jan 1 2014, 12:05 PM Post #109 |
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/04/should-other-nations-follow-germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power/3/ Now comment on the article Colo instead of your usual games. |
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| Berton | Jan 1 2014, 12:09 PM Post #110 |
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They all know where it came from Neutral. Even Fr. Mike found it and quoted the link. |
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