Guest opinion by Viv Forbes
Solar power only works while the sun shines – it is part-time power.
Wind power only works when suitable winds blows – also part-time power.
Batteries only work when charged – part-time power again.
Hydro fails in droughts – more part-time power.
And using full-time power like natural gas to fill the inevitable supply gaps from part-time power forces backup gas to operate like part-time power.
Moreover, on sunny windy days, wind and solar generators spew out electricity at little extra cost. These erratic surges of part-time power drive electricity prices so low that even low-cost full-time producers like coal cannot operate profitably at those times. They are throttled back and forced to operate as yet another part-time power plant.
24/7 electricity users such as hospitals, trains, factories, refineries, fuel and water pumps, cash registers, infrastructure and mines cannot operate on part-time electricity.
Moreover, every part-time power producer (using sun, wind, batteries, hydro, gas or coal) consumes money full-time for operations, standby, maintenance and replacement. Each also has to fund its own specialised generators, transmission lines, access roads and workforce. Electricity becomes both unreliable and expensive, and consumers suffer.
Using taxes, subsidies, dictates and mandates to replace a full-time power producer like coal with up to five part-time power producers only makes sense in the part-time minds that inhabit Greentopia.
Government cannot improve any of this with more laws and regulations – they must REPEAL all the legislation, regulations, subsidies and taxes that created the mess in the first place. State governments too should repeal their silly energy laws, and stop shutting and destroying power stations. More laws and regulations can only make things worse.
Viv Forbes is director of The Carbon Sense Coalition
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I depends on which timescale you use.
In a longer timscale you may say that fossil fuel only works as long as the reserves last.
More part-time power.
In year 3000 they will look back on our time and consider fossil fuel age as a very short time of our civilization.
Renewables last forever and are therefore full-time power
Jan
It depends on… A “t” is missing
No it doesn’t. Electrical enrgy must be generated and used in real time and reneables don’t dothat, collect woefully inadequate enrgy sources, denying the engineering reality is hardly what this forum is about. Nuclear fission alone can lasts for the expected lifetime of the human race, given we get fast fission into general use over the next 100 years or so – as long as it rains and there are oceans. Renewable energy levels support only 3rd World economies. Apart from Norway.
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No Jan, that would make fossil fuels temporary, but full time. Renewables may be permanent, but they’re still only part time; hopefully we’ll find a way to make them full time, but we’re not even close now.
Recent BEIS DUKES stats for the UK: Solar PV a waste of time at 50 degrees North, what there s is not there when needed, when its dark and cold, solar water heating still useful (non real time enrgy integrator.
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On a related topic, the continued hard-sell of windturbines is governments is on the strength of claims that battery tech will soon be available to deal with the intermittency. A quick calculation shows that to provide backup for a week without wind in the UK with Tesla Powerwalls would cost well over a trillion USD. Yet, outages can be much longer than that. That is a crazy amount of money. It would pay for the ITER fusion test about 50 times over.
Thing is, if the money wasted on this green tech had been put into fusion or thorium LFTR we’d have had the whole issue solved by now. A fact I’m keen to point out to the naysayers is that wind turbines have been in development for 40 years -nearly as long as fusion- and have had many times more money poured into them, with little useful result. It’s time to stop flogging the dead horse of wind energy.
Ian. turbines are currently producing electricity. someday I hope fusion will too. I don’t understand your argument.
Intermittently and consistently below nameplate capacity.
how’s fusion doing?
Trillion dollars just builds the thing.
Then there is ongoing maintenance, and then you have to replace 5 to 10% of your batteries every year as they wear out.
A trillion to build it, 50 to 100 billion per year to keep it running.
There is a simple way to end this debate and allow renewables to compete with fossil fuel technologies on an even basis. Simply require any generation facility to offer electricity by contract specifying the steady amount and the duration. Any batteries or other storage facility needed to provide power according to the contract thus becomes the responsibility of each generation facility, not the grid operator. Because renewables are inherently intermittent and electrical storage is currently expensive, that means at the present time renewables could only compete on the spot market and for relatively brief periods (i.e. 12 hours or less). As storage technology improves and the cost per megawatt hour declines, renewables would become more competitive for larger contracts.
I don’t know how power contracts are currently written, but I suspect renewables could also bid on a load-balancing contract which specifies a variable output between 0 and some maximum with guaranteed ramp-up and ramp-down rates. In that role they would be competing against single cycle gas plants and hydro.
In either role, intermittent technologies will require storage to provide the contracted power output. The amount of storage relative to the nameplate capacity will determine the size of the contract they can bid on.
This falls short of the quality standard for articles here. Batteries only work when they’re charged? Now apply the same logic to fossil fuel systems: they only work when they’re refueled, therefore they only work part time.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it is subject to obsolescence. Imagine someone taking the same attitude about Watt’s steam engine. Actually, you dont have to imagine it because this is exactly the kind of charge people used to level against those ridiculously quaint ideas about a generation before they became commonplace.
I love this logic.
People once ridiculed a technology, and now it’s common place.
Ergo, the technology that I support will one day be common place as well.
Like the “new age” sciences that attach prefix “quantum” to their theories. In quantum physiscs strange and unexpected things are happening so….”quantum” makes everything work!
MSR will be economical in ten years, and always will be.
producing will never be economical Vs using already produced goods.
Fossil fuel is already there, ready to be used. Producing new fuel will be competitive only when fossil fuel will start missing, in 200y in worst case scenario (exponential growth, no new finding). This leave humanity a century to figure out what to do next: we better use it, instead of pretending we already need to apply current days solution to next century’s problem
Wasting resources on solutions that don’t work means that much less to spend on looking for solutions that might work.
you’re right, i should had written “current days not working solution to next century’s problem”
If “green” energy was as good as those who advocate it claim it would need no subsidy and would be the go to source of energy all the time.
Far as I am concerned it’s all part time power.
Coal, oil, uranium and gas will last as long it dug out of the ground.
Wind, sun, water will as long it’s blows, shines and rains.
We néed system that will provide base load power at cheapest rate without it crashing.
Wrong re uranium. Uranium can be sustainable in human terms. Available at a very low fuel cost from seawater for as long as there is rain to erode rocks, nuclear binding enrgy intensity versus molecular binding enrgy of combustion means we don’t need much Uranium. Cost from SEawater is <$200/lb, which equates t increasing fuel rod cost frm 5% to 15% of OPEX now, with thermal fission, but will be c. 0.15% of fast fission reactor costs. Life will have bigger problems when the rain stops.
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Russians already have Gen 4 on the grid, which is fast Uranium fission BTW, not Thorium Salt. Plenty of time to develop that, problems are maerials tech with the coolant involved. We understand high pressure steam a lot better. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Russia-connects-BN800-fast-reactor-to-grid-11121501.html
Toshiba claims battery breakthrough:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/toshibas-breakthrough-battery-can-charge-in-six-minutes/ar-AAtYTDa?OCID=ansmsnnews11