From Forbes:
Diablo Canyon Power Plant, 2009 photo from offshore. The light beige domes are the containment structures for Unit 1 and 2 reactors. The brown building is the turbine building where electricity is generated and sent to the grid. In the foreground is the Administration Building (black and white stripes). Picture: “Mike” Michael L. Baird via Wikimedia
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) issued a press release today stating that they have signed a deal with PG&E PCG +0.10%, IBEW local 1245, the Coalition of California Utility Employees, Friends of the Earth, Environment California, and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.
There is an implied quid pro quo. The groups will support PG&E’s request for an extension from the California Lands Commission of its land use permit that allows access to ocean cooling water at the Commission’s June 28 meeting. In return, PG&E will agree to withdraw its 20-year license extension application at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission . Instead, it will aim to retire the two-unit site when its current licenses expire in 2024 and 2025.
The press release claims that the electricity produced by the plant will be replaced with a combination of wind, solar, and “energy efficiency.”
“Energy efficiency and clean renewable energy from the wind and sun can replace aging nuclear plants — and this proves it. The key is taking the time to plan. Nuclear power versus fossil fuels is a false choice based on yesterday’s options,” said NRDC President Rhea Suh.
That’s a deceptive fig leaf; it is physically impossible for wind, solar and energy efficiency to replace the steady production of a nuclear power plant. Producing the same total number of kilowatt-hours each year is not the same as producing the same kilowatt-hours on a minute by minute, hour by hour or day by day basis.
Full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rodadams/2016/06/21/breaking-nrdc-announces-pge-has-agreed-to-kill-diablo-canyon/
Over at Friends of the Earth (FOE) they say:
Diablo Canyon is the nuclear plant that catalyzed the formation of Friends of the Earth in 1969. When David Brower founded Friends of the Earth the Diablo Canyon was the first issue on the organization’s agenda and Friends of the Earth has been fighting the plant ever since. This agreement is not only a milestone for renewable energy, but for Friends of the Earth as an organization.
Gosh, what will they do now? Get a new target I suppose. Maybe they’ll ask that California be the first “automobile free state” in the USA, after all, all the automotive manufacturing plants have already left California. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Bloomberg had the best headline: Losing a Nuclear Weapon Against Climate Change
Some environmentalists are thrilled at Tuesday’s announcement of the planned closing of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. They might want to reconsider: Fighting climate change requires more nuclear power, not less.
The losers in this plan, which is pending regulatory approval, are all those who will suffer the consequences of climate change. That Diablo Canyon’s two reactors could be allowed to shut down is alarming evidence that too little effort is being made to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The climate-friendly electricity that the Diablo Canyon plant generates, which amounts to about 9 percent of California’s power, would be lost.
Welcome to the darkness. You thought the Enron trading scam induced blackouts in California around 2000 were bad? Wait til 2025. Let’s all sit in the dark and chant kumabahya while we wait for wind and solar to come online again.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
energy efficiency….no one has any
The whole energy conservation argument can be boiled down to:
The answer to hunger is to eat less.
Environmental Defence & Greenpeace Canada, April 9, 2015
Their Study includes both the Canadian Tar Sands and the Canadian auto industry.
Scroll down to: The need to change all cars and trucks in Canada to EVs.
http://greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/pr/2015/04/Energy-strategy.pdf
Wrong analogy. The answer to being fat is to eat less. Many people are very wasteful of both food and energy and consume far more than is needed. 10% reduction is quite feasible without “starving “.
“The answer to hunger is to eat less.”
Almost. In the socialist metric, the answer to hunger is to reduce the amount of people who need to eat.
¿¿¿What are they thinking???
If you were to try and replace the production capacity of Diablo Canyon with Molton Salt heliostat systems like Ivanpah, it would require 70 generators. The facility would completely cover San Francisco, South San Francisco, Daily City, Millbrae, down to a line from Pacifica to San Mateo. Just remove everyone and everything south of the GG Bridge down to San Mateo and west to the coast and cover the area with Mirrors.
Or go with Wind Farms and cover 3 times that area…all the way down to San Jose, just to replace Diablo Canyon
Only one problem with Ivanpah:
They haven’t exceeded 2/3 of their necessary production estimate.
At the time of the recent fire, they had one system down for maintenance.
So that puts them at 1/9th of what they need to be able to produce.
Actually not a bad idea, paving over SF with mirrors. Make sure you have a sturdy wall around the Bay area first, though…
Then of course there’s the Topaz Solar Farm that covers 9 sq mi to produce 1/4 of final capacity so Solar PV needs 36 square miles of area to replace Diablo Canyon on 900 acres
The phrase “energy efficiency” is meaningless without cost factored in.
Costs are meaningless when you have a government that can force someone else to pay them.
Not really. Just so long as you include those costs, not try to hide them, which is what they do.
Bruce
I think ‘energy efficiency.’ means – moving all productive industry out-of-state.
To – I guess – Texas.
Auto, a Brit – but looking at CA norms . . . .
Astounding… just… wow.
Kumabahya! Yep – looks like another few years and the Californians will once again be demanding power be stripped from other areas of the country to serve their precocious and sensitive population. Although I do agree that those nuclear plants, such as Diablo Canyon, which are now over 40 years old, should be shut down. But replace them rather than simply remove them from the equation.
Power already comes from Palo Verde in Arizona… So just add a plant there…
It will be adamantly denied, but Palo Verde was designed for a total of 12 reactors in a ring around the switchyard. Any plans for further expansion beyond the 3 in progress at the time (and all that there are) were murdered after the California PRC (in mid ’80s) vowed that there would not be any new power plants (nuclear or otherwise) in California, but that it was perfectly OK to build plants in other states to service California.
Much like China building Coal Powered Plants to generate electricity for Green Europe
“Who run Bartertown?”
“Master-Blaster runs Bartertown”
“Embargo Over”
Hey! I’m over 40 years old. Should I be shut down?
Never trust anyone under 60. Now, get off my damned lawn.
I can’t wait for the rolling blackouts to start.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-california-heatwave-idUSKCN0Z62B8
could be a matter of days my friend
Ha! Started today!
I liked the fact that wind solar and energy efficiency were considered separate categories. That at least is an unintended acknowledgement that wind and solar are not energy efficient.
So-called “green” technologies are neither efficient energy converters nor efficient land consumers. Modern commercial wind and solar enterprises are notorious disruptors of the natural environment, but have remarkable lobbying organizations (e.g. environmentalists).
Watch their cost per KWH when the green subsidies expire??? Ouch
They will just import electricity from other states when the wind does not blow nor the sun shine. See the state is GHG free, everyone should follow our example.
They buy nuclear from Arizona, oil from Mexico and coal from Nevada. Oh yes they are so green. Bet me.
I also wonder what was in the deal? Does PG&E make more money from the deal than if they ran the plant with all the maintenance and retrofits that would be required?
Was not PG&E in bankruptcy not long ago? big lawsuits?
They traded something they wanted, an extension from the California Lands Commission of its land use permit that allows access to ocean cooling water, for something they were unlikely to ever get anyway, a 20-year license extension for a Nuclear power plant in Enviro crazy California that would have been 55 years old by then.
Sometimes you can’t stop people getting what they asked for. The problem is most of these people really have no idea what they have asked for and end up very surprised.
The people of South Australia,have had the experience of a power black-out through lack of power from their “Bird Mincers”last year.You see,they get power from “Dirty Coal”from Victoria when said”Bird Mincers”aren’t producing enough “Electricity”One of the Inter-connectors from Victoria blew up and the other connectors couldn’t provide enough juice to the state.California,you are NEXT.Dumb as “Dog $hit”
When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.
Since “no” is also an answer, change that to “give you what you ask for” and you’ll be good to go.
Can you say rolling blackouts THIS YEAR? https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-power-grid-prepares-heatwave-possible-natgas-shortage-053612470–finance.html
Given the geologic instability of coastal California, I’m not overly saddened by this news. I’m also hopeful that PG&E is foregoing permit renewal for this plant because it will be switching to a new nuclear paradigm by 2025.
I agree. The plant is quite old and was recently closed for an extended period for repairs.
Hey! I had heart surgery and was in the hospital for 19 days, just a few years ago. Should I have been measured for a coffin?
it wasn’t the earthquake that did for Fukushima. it was the flooding
Nukes can withstand a LOT of seismic activity, and worse
The big failure at Fukushima was not protecting the emergency backup generators to the same level as the control room. They put the generators in the basement…which got flooded. It was an epic management failure to do such a stupid thing.
What did in Fukushima was being run by TEPCO. They are horribly incompetent.
This has always bothered me, as a proponent of nuclear power. The Japanese, as a nation, make all sorts of engineered and manufactured products of outstanding quality. Just stand on a street anywhere other than Europe or North America and count the cars that aren’t made in Japan. So if the Japanese can’t build a nuclear power station that is proof against all predictable hazards, who can?
It was one thing to point at Chernobyl and say, that’s what you get when the Soviets build a nuke. Then compare it with Three Mile island which suffered a loss-of-coolant incident (who closed that valve and why? the question was never answered but the juxtaposition in time with a movie called the China Syndrome was a bit odd) but experienced no radiation leaks. That was good, it was one of the mainstays of arguing pro-nuclear.
Then came Fukushima. It made it a whole lot harder to argue about nuclear power with greenies, or even with regular undecided people (even here in Ontario, where without nuclear power the lights would have gone out a long time ago). Never mind the debate about how serious the radiation event was, a power station had to close down and will probably never reopen, and the cost of closing it will be beyond astronomical.
Damn. Why couldn’t the Japanese nuclear industry have acted a bit more “Japanese”?
If you’re worried about geologic instability, then you also need to question why the California Valley Solar Ranch was built a couple of miles from the San Andreas fault covering large sections of the environmentally sensitive Carrizo Plain.
No environmentalists raised a peep about that. You can see it and the fault on google earth
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3543769,-120.0227114,14254m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
Yes, all those black squares are solar panels and each one is federally subsidized.
Doonman,
It is childishly simple to draw a surface fault line on a map and then to claim that it represents a danger area for the location of a new nuclear plant.
New nuclear plants are built with very good engineering, and you can be assured that such engineering is well acquainted with the best possible view of proximity to faults.
Apart from that, earthquakes can occur virtually anywhere. Some have done so in places that defy geological explanation. But new nuclear plants are not so bothered by them.
Mr Sherrington, while your proposition is correct, that is not the point that Doonman was making. He was commenting on the stupidity of siting a solar array on a known major fault, also in an environmentally sensitive area.
To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. Defeatist!
I’m pretty sure the plant was built to the seismic code. Secondly, what crippled Fukushima plant in Japan was the tsunami, not the earthquake itself. San Andreas fault is not a subduction type, and (contrary to the “San Andreas” movie), it does not produce tsunamis.
The Tsunami wave did not harm the control room. It flooded the basement where the backup generators were. Had they put the generators adjacent to the control room with the same level of protection, none of the problems would have occurred. As it is it destroyed the entire nuclear power industry in Japan. Stupidity on top of stupidity.
The main problem at Fukushima was not at the reactors but the fuel storage ponds. The use of zirconium fuel cladding was the cause of hydrogen liberation and the explosions which destroyed the buildings. Zirconium = flashbulb metal.
“The main problem at Fukushima was not at the reactors but the fuel storage ponds”
That’s a myth!
Had the greens not blocked spent fuel rod transportation, they wouldn’t need storage ponds. Not a myth.
Yeah, but all the fuel will just sit there and cook year after year just waiting for an “event” We have a finished depository but Harry Scum Dog Reid prevented it’s use.
..It is hard to believe that in this day and age, liberals STILL cannot do simple math !!!
-Marcus
They’re getting worse!
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-solarcity-m-a-tesla-idUSKCN0Z72WP; for Marcus
It is worse than that. I live 5 miles from Diablo Canyon. Tonight on the local news as they were announcing the closing, they interviewed an environmentalist who proclaimed that closing Diablo Canyon was a huge step toward solving climate change. You just can’t make up this sort of lunacy.
The local economy will lose 1500 high paying jobs and $1 BILLION dollars from the plant closing. Diablo Canyon’s property taxes support 15% of the local school budgets. There is no plan to make up for the power deficit or the huge loss of revenue in San Luis Obispo County.
I’d love to find out how the brain dead environmentalists figures that closing a power source that does not produce CO2 is going to help solve “climate change”.
Since Nuclear produces no CO2, the closing of a Nuclear power plant, even by the standards of the Eco-Naz!s, does nothing to “solve” climate change (as if human activities can control the climate – LMFAO). And, since, even IF they were right about the science, all the “solutions” they proposed wouldn’t change a damn thing (the proposed reductions of CO2 would, IF they were right about the science, reduce the amount of warming by an amount too small to be accurately measured by a period measured in weeks a hundred years from now).
It just goes to show how clueless and/or dishonest the Eco-Naz!s are about their “cause.”
There’s no need to call them “nazis” IMO that’s just as bad as them calling us “deniers”. Comments like this are not helpful and will be snipped if repeated.
“Math is hard”
Barbie
PG&E needs to fight these bastards. Perhaps the best move would have been to say OK, we’ll shut it down today. Then put the blame where it belongs for the blackouts. Why stretch it out for years.
Or go to court and let them win, so as to firmly place the blame on the watermelons.
Who says they fought it? Maybe the plant was end of life anyway (without retrofits, etc). Maybe they won? What was in the deal $$$$?
Public utilities are guaranteed a % return on assets so if you change the asset base they lose money flows that is why they fought.
I think they basically went bankrupt trying to keep San Onofre open.
Interesting. This must also mean that the Helms Creek Power Project will be shut down as well. Its design was dependent on cheap night time excess power from Diablo Canyon to be feasible. Pump water uphill at night, release it during the day. Its gonna be a total loser without cheap power. Good luck using solar and wind at night.
Additionally, the single largest power user in the state, the Tehachapi pumps that pump water to Southern California, which also used cheap nighttime power, will become less efficient and about three times more expensive to operate without Diablo Canyon on line. Perhaps the environmentalists will all move to Bakersfield and volunteer to man bicycle generators to help out.
It is really unfortunate that the folks who will be most affected – the massive increased costs to pump the water (Tehachapi pumps), the Helms creek peaking system and its efficiencies, etc – will not have the opportunity to just say NO to the plan. If the true costs and unintended consequences were thoroughly explained and approved by those affected the plan would NOT be approved.
Isn’t there some way that we could sue the environmental loons who campaigned to close down Diablo Canyon with no plan to replace the power or the huge economical hit that the Central Coast will take when the plant closes?
isthatright June 21, 2016 at 9:42 pm
As with your earlier post perhaps a open letter in your town newspaper to the local teachers union inquiring what “they” think of the pending loss to the education budget. And what will “their” remedy be? Cut staff? Increase class size? Cut pay and benefits? Rant at the public to save them? Or perhaps vent their fury at the “greens” for damaging the economy. Hmmm, I think they’ll just stuck to the tried and untrue and blame the republicans……
michael
so pump the water uphill during the day (solar power the pumps). You might be able to put some of the panels floating on the lake behind the dam
Have you ever seen the calculations describing the height and quantity of water necessary to store even one kilowatt-hour of electricity – even disregarding the efficiency losses, Grifter?
Obviously not…
Bucket brigades
They have been fighting it since 1969! Why? What horrible outcomes has this plant resulted in? Seems like they have been wasting their time. Now they feel they have succeeded at something when in fact the only result is quite negative. Would someone from FOE reading this please explain their motivation just so I can understand?
After 55 years in operation, the nuclear power plant will be shut down. As originally planed.
Clearly a great victory for FOE. :p
There were indeed rolling blackouts today. It was all over the Business News Network. When the politicians are held responsible for it, they run like hell from the enviro whackos.
The greens will blame global warming and the fires . .
Just curious Anthony. Do you have storage on your solar? Net metering?
TIA
And the constant rolling blackouts in southern California will commence in 2024.
The cost of an average house in California is $440k. It’s pretty easy to justify adding another $10k or $20k of solar with battery and maybe a NG generator.
But what about renters who have to pay their own utility bills? They’ll be stuck with much higher rates. Don’t wait for the headlines, “Rich Liberal Activists Declare Victory; Poor Hit Hardest”.
I live in a $700k house. $20k is still a big ticket item for me. I have many other things on my priority list ahead of that to spend that amount of money on.
Greg,
While large solar subsidies exist for rooftop solar, are you not bludging on your mates who cannot get it because their roof is wrong, they are in a tall apartment with a tiny roof for example, or they cannot afford the extra, or even if your mates calculate that it is not a cost effective way to spend their money and decline?
Apologies to Anthony or anyone who has special needs, but the main reason I never went rooftop is that I don’t want to force others to help subsidise me. It is not a fair thing. It is like stealing from your friends.
Drop all the subsidies and it is a different story.
Average cost of a house in California is $440K? What are people who work for a living and are looking to buy a house supposed to do? I think house prices are distorted upwards by policies that become laws, which come into place because there are more homeowners than prospective 1st-time homeowners, and this problem is not confined to California.
“I think house prices are distorted upwards by policies that become laws, which come into place because there are more homeowners than prospective 1st-time homeowners, and this problem is not confined to California.”
The cause is simple: Severe restrictions on the availability of land that can be built on. By the greens of course. It is called “smart growth”; “new urbanism”. Sireea Klub web site has a section on the advantages of “smart growth”. They fail to mention that housing prices skyrocket and traffic congestion becomes intolerable.
Google Wendell Cox, Randal O’Toole, See http://www.debunkingportland.com/housing.html
I have solar panels on my house which should equal the our electrical usage on an annual basis. The problem is that there is both a diurnal as well as a seasonal offset. The largest power usage daily is in the evening while the maximum solar production is between Noon and 1:00 PM. Seasonally, the largest electrical usage is in the Winter when solar production is minimal. I have no idea how renewable energy is going to compensate for the closing of Diablo Canyon.
You bring a very valid point to the conversation: does anyone know of a single solar plant that has produced the design capacity for daily, monthly and annually?
All that I have read about can not even maintain 50% of design output?
I love the way leftists just assume that adding to other people’s costs can easily be borne by them.
isthatright: In the green religion, repeating something often enough makes it come true.
I live off grid on solar. Works well because my electrical usage is less than 100kwh per month and a third of that is used by the system. Most Americans use around 900 kwh a month.
profitup10: In 2015, all wind energy in California only produced 12 billion kWhs. The two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors produce 17 billion kWhs every year according to Jim Conca.
There are a number of reasons why I left CA in 1999, and this is definitely one of them. The EcoNuts will win a hollow victory here and cause a lot of pain and suffering in the process.
Congrats on your “Escape From Alcatraz,” as it were. ;-D
As for the People’s Republic of Kalifornia, it should be unplugged from the grid at its borders, and let’s see how they like their new energy generation mix THEN. Let them actually reap what they’ve sown, so that it might actually sink in.
Again, if CO2 increase will cause enough global warming to cause flooding of coastal cities, extinction of vast species of plant/animal life, etc. Why has the USA shut down five nuclear power plants in the last five years an is planning on shutting down as many as twenty more (that I know of) over the next ten years? These actions completely negate Obama’s CCP and actually increase the CO2 emissions by the end of the CCP end date.
These actions tell me that CO2 AGW is a scam. If your house is on fire why do you throw gasoline on it?
Here is an alternative if we think outside the e=green box.
A BOLD NEW ENERGY POLICY TO SAVE THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!!!
We put millions of skilled workers on manufacturing jobs building 500 to 1,000 Nuclear power plant of a low cost standard design. This will provide all the energy to accomplish a full restoration of our industrial base. How will this happen you ask?
First we “MINE” the oceans for gold, silver, copper, uranium, methane, manganese and other valuable minerals and metals. It has been estimated that it will be profitable to mine gold from the seas at around $ 3,000 per ounce. Second we use cheap nuclear power to extract these metals which could make a profit to pay off the national debt. Third we use the byproduct “WATER” to farm the huge vacant dry south west feeding the entire planet with low cost food.
Finally we use the cheap nuclear power to build factories to manufacture everything the entire planet needs and we return to zero unemployment and can pay good wages because we have free energy that makes a profit in it’s creation.The money generated can payoff all debts, build nuclear reprocessing plants, research and develop a system to render nuclear waste harmless.
Just think, full employment, no energy crisis ever, gold to make money valuable, make the dollar the strongest currency on earth, end inflation, end government debt. Just imagine “AMERICA REBORN AND THE DREAM FULFILLED!!!
Well said. But you must understand the modern Eco-Naz!s are against ALL useful power plants, not just those that produce CO2. This exposes the anti-human underpinnings of the whole rotten-to-the-core (no pun intended) “cause” – the destruction of western industrialized economies and mass starvation that will follow being their actual goal, not “saving the planet” – that’s just a useful sound bite.
No worries … A 5 kW diesel genset per household would mitigate the lunacy.
They are pretty dirty. I don’t believe you can get a permit to put one in around Los Angeles. Also they burn around half a gallon per hour and the built-in tanks aren’t that big so you start to spend your life shuttling fuel to it.
Natural Gas gensets are ok and you can get permits for those.
Solar with some batteries and a genset for when you need more works well.
The dirtiness sits with the government. There is no law forbidding portable gen-sets, no matter what they run on. I have one with my RV, totally legal.
Mixed emotions. Diabolo Canyon is two gen 2 Westinghouse PWR. The original license for 40 years was because that was thought to be practical safe plant life. (Neutron embrittlement, corrosion,…). Fukushima Daichi was a gen 1 40 year license extended for 10 years that did not end well. The plant economics paid for itself over those 40 years.
IMO, PGE simoly decided the legal costs of a 15 year extension, plus the increased maintenance, wasn’t worth the life extension. All the rest is political noise.
How PGE will replace this baseload remains to be seen. My guess is CCGT, after California experiences major blackouts due to its warmunist silliness. Essay California Dreaming has some further observations.
You’re probably right with your analysis ristvan but in any case the owners probably figure it’s not worth fighting over now. Better to wait for 2024-2025 and see what the politics of energy is like until then and make their investment decisions accordingly. What they will know for sure is if power shortages and blackouts become rampant any time before then, the politicians will be falling all over themselves to rubber stamp and subsidise anything they need in order to continue producing base-load power. When the punters are freezing in the dark you’re in a much better negotiating position, particularly if you know your energy market inside out and the FOEs are off with the fairies.
Well, the PG&E people may be crazy like a fox.
After a Trump election and 3 years of La Nina (not to mention a bunch of rolling blackouts) the political climate may look different.
A “clean energy” subsidy for nuclear or higher natural gas prices may pull the planned closure off the table.
Right now Diablo Canyon probably isn’t profitable enough for all the hassle of keeping it open.
Apparently these tree hugging dolts will never understand the simple fact that wind and solar will never supply enough power. I call that insanity. they would have the world revert to the Middle Ages or further back, to save their god Earth.
More importantly they will never supply it when you need it.
Haven’t you read recent Sierra Club manifestos? Too many humans is the now root problem. If reverting to a pre-industrial existence kills off a few billion people, well, at least Mother Earth will be healthier. And isn’t that what *really* matters?
In California, it is pretty easy, and not even terribly expensive, to switch over to LED lighting, put Solar panels on the roof, one of Telsa’s battery banks in the garage, and keep the lights on. However you’ll have a little more trouble running the air conditioning and charging your electric vehicle, although that’s possible too.
Industry is who will really be impacted as they generally don’t have the roof area to generate what they need. What you’ll see is the rest of manufacturing (that is, what is left….) relocate to where cheap wind power is available (the wind belt) and put in gas peaking plants for when the wind isn’t blowing.
The power companies seem to be divesting themselves of the power plants and keeping the distribution facilities. I think they’ve known for a long time that trying to build new plants gets them too much bad press so they are getting out of the business. But so is everyone else! It’s going to get interesting!
Better install enough solar to at least run your LED lights, your refrigerator, and your furnace!
Greg, you live in a fantasy world. Do you realize how much a Tesla battery costs? And you are still dreaming of a mass electric vehicles usage in an energy deprived environment? I suggest you crunch some numbers, as to what electricity generating capacity is required to replace all gasoline burnt. Unless you want people to give up personal cars.
Furthermore, excuse my curiosity, but how many electric cars are you driving, and how many Tesla batteries (banks??) and solar panels do you have in your home?
That’s the sound of crickets, Dirk.
However you’ll have a little more trouble running the air conditioning
=========
ya think! send us a report after you’ve switched your AC over to solar panels.
The devil is always in the details. Solar could make sense under the right circumstances. 🙂
Like most environmentalists, Greg doesn’t believe that YOU need AC. Him on the other hand. He’s special.
Greg June 21, 2016 at 4:56 pm
You never ever want a power outage in a modern machine shop. Worst brown outs. Or sudden stops and starts. First the machining centers are CNC controlled and tend to be large and expensive. You interrupt the CNC program and you don’t what the machine will try to do once the power snaps back on. Just a second of power outage and whole lines of code go bye bye. ANY time threr is a power interruption I and other CNC machinist would run from machine to machine and “hit” E-Stops and flip breakers. Then we would assess the damage. Oh and regular old fashion machines, read what happens to multi-phase electrical motors.
I’m intrigued by what will happen to electrical charging units for cars in the event of multiple power surges and interruptions .
michael
As a technician familiar with power supplies of multiple varieties, I can tell you what happens.
They die.
If you are lucky, they don’t kill the machinery they are attached to, but you are still going to have significant downtime while things are repaired.
UK car plants – 8 of them at least -have solar roofs, getting 10% of their power from them.
I’d have thought in California you’d get a lot more than that from a factory roof.
(And your factories are bigger than ours, right? As everything in Claifornia is bigger!)
Wrong state Griff. That would be everything is bigger in Texas and everything is buggered in California.
Griff June 22, 2016 at 2:00 am
UK car plants – 8 of them at least -have solar roofs, getting 10% of their power from them.
But Griff the UK builds only one or two cars a year…..
And just what did happen to their steel industry?
michaeel
need more coffee, bad morning when I typo my own name. I know its this new keyboard..
michael
Lighting is less than 5% of total power consumption and most lights presently are not incandescent.
If every bulb in the country switched to LED, the total drop in power consumption would be at most 2 to 3%.
As to batteries, which bedroom should people have to give up in order to house all them.
Should we eliminate rules on child labor? Because everyone down to the toddlers are going to have to start working to pay for your schemes.
Well, at least CA Greens can sleep better at night knowing there’ll be one less Godzilla out there.
Of course, they might sleep better because their alarm clock might not have any power. When they wake up?
They have no use for alarm clocks.
But their parents do, and somebody will have to get up and go to work or a tleast make subsidy applications to pay for all that retro-fitting.