Guest “No energy transition for you!” by David Middleton
SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
In 2019, 9 of the 10 highest-generating U.S. power plants were nuclear plantsAccording to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on power plant operations, 9 of the 10 U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were nuclear plants. These 10 plants generated a combined 230 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2019, accounting for 5.6% of all electricity generation in the United States. The makeup of power plants that generate the most electricity has shifted in the past 10 years from a mix of nuclear and coal plants to almost all nuclear in 2019.
In 2010, the top 10 highest-generating power plants in the United States were a mix of nuclear and coal-fired generators. In 2010, coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation was 45%, compared with 23% in 2019. Decreased cost-competitiveness relative to other power resources, especially natural gas, has made coal less economical for electricity generation. Coal plants are also run at lower levels because of tighter air emission standards, which is the primary reason coal plants fell from the top 10.
The Palo Verde, Browns Ferry, and Oconee nuclear power plants have consistently been among the 10 largest generators of electricity in the United States because they are the only nuclear plants with three reactor units, which gives them more generating capacity. A plant’s refueling and maintenance schedules may also affect annual electric power generation capacity. For example, Comanche Peak was one of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2010 but was not one in 2019 because scheduled refueling and maintenance reduced plant availability in 2019.
Electric power plants that have relatively large electricity generating capacities generally also operate at high capacity factors, or utilization rates. The capacity (the maximum amount of electricity a power plant can produce) of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019 ranged from 2,300 megawatts (MW) (Byron) to 3,937 MW (Palo Verde). Although these plants have a lower nameplate capacity than the Grand Coulee hydroelectric facility (6,809 MW of capacity) in Washington, they generate more electric power each year. Grand Coulee operated at a lower utilization rate and generated 16.6 million MWh of electricity in 2019.
Nuclear power plants have the highest capacity factor of any energy source in the United States, at 94% fleet-wide in 2019, because nuclear plants generally operate around-the-clock until they are taken offline for maintenance or refueling. Capacity factors for the nine nuclear plants in the top 10 range from 89% (Browns Ferry) to 99% (Byron and Peach Bottom). Natural gas combined-cycle units have the second-highest capacity factor in the United States, at 57% fleet-wide in 2019. The natural gas plant that was among the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019, West County Energy Center, operated at a capacity factor of 65%, slightly higher than the fleet-wide capacity factor.
Almost all of the U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were in the eastern half of the country, and they tended to be close to areas with high electricity demand such as major cities or industrial production centers.
More information about the fleet of power plants in the United States is available in the latest Annual Electric Generator Report, released on September 15, 2020.
Principal contributor: Paul McArdle
Tags: nuclear, power plants, electricity, generation
US EIA
Natural gas combined cycle power plants can actually deliver 85% or better capacity factors, but generally aren’t operated 24/7 at full capacity.
Over the same time period, renewables generation doubled in the US, due to “massive” solar and wind capacity additions. Despite this and the lack of nuclear power capacity additions…
Top Ten Power Plants 2008
Top Ten Power Plants 2018
To paraphrase The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld:
No Energy Transition for You!
Forget coal, nuclear is the way to go.
What is wrong with concentrated sunlight?
Well it does not work
Last time I used a coal fire it worked REALLY well.
Nuclear too. If just 9 plants produced more than 5% of the annual U.S. demand, then the entire U.S. requirements could be met with less than 200 similarly sized generation facilities and produce no CO2 as a byproduct
Not that I would but you could probably fit that entire fleet of generation on less acreage than a couple grid scale Solar PV Farms like Topaz Solar Farm in Santa Margarita
At least not reliably. Damned weather gets in the way!
What is not reliable with concentrated, stored sunlight – Australia still gets most of its electricity from that source.
You have to read the words carefully.
And the input of heat ends at night causing the internal liquid to begin to cool making the system less effective without natural gas heating
So…
Concentrated Solar still requires the extraction of fossil fuels to be viable…drill baby drill
Swift’s Gulliver visited the Academy at Legado where all kinds of experimentation were going on, especially extracting sunbeams from cucumbers :
http://www.literaturepage.com/read/gulliverstravels-149.html
So this green impracticality is not new – that work dates from 1726, before the industrial revolution.
Q: What is wrong with concentrated sunlight?
A: Night
Concentrated Sunlight requires Gas Backup to keep the system liquid at night and during sunlight blocking storms. Also Concentrated Solar is ineffective beyond certain polar latitudes
CA tried it, has to use Natgas 18-hours a day to keep the Molten Salt warm to produce power…
Concentrated sunlight ! Goodness how that takes me back . 40 years in fact when the area of materials science I was involved in (luminescent materials ) was awash with conferences on luminescent solar concentrators. The positive aspect of such conferences was that they happpened to occur in places like Greece or the sunnier provinces of France or Italy. Came to nothing of course.
Concentrated sunlight! Once in solid form, absorbs all wavelengths of visible light, generally the Earth will store it deep, but it’s best extracted and rapidly oxidized to free that concentrated energy!
Funny how many missed your sarcasm, MJD
The Earth rotates .
They are both good.
The biggest problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t produce enough CO2.
MarkW,
Just require every new nuclear plant to have two or three cement production facilities adjacent to the plant; CO2 shortage solved, easy peasy!
The only problem would be the falling prices of cement and concrete from excess supply might encourage the Unreliable Energy con-artists to try and sell more of their anti-environmental products to gullible consumers and bribable politicians!
You can’t produce cement with electricity. It’s an endothermic reaction that proceeds at 1450C.
You can find propaganda articles on the interwebs proposing an electrolytic process for converting calcium carbonate to calcium hydroxide that is further reacted to calcium silicate. (CO2 evolved would be sequestered). Probably totally impractical even if regulations prohibited CO2 emissions. Certainly far more expensive.
You can’t produce steel from iron ore using electricity either.
And electricity accounts for less than 40% of our total energy use.
Heat, thermal energy is the primary product of the usual fission reactor – harness that directly. Electricity generation is indirectly generated.
Not sure if anyone is actually doing that.
One advantage of fusion is direct electric generation from plasma. A fusion torch is something else entirely.
Right, fusion. The technology of the future. Always has been, always will be.
Even molten salt reactors (which still don’t exist commercially, despite ColMosby’s frequent claims to know operating costs) would operate around 1400C. If a conventional nuclear reactor were operating at 1450C, that would be called a meltdown disaster.
You would need to use ultra-high meltpoint salts with primary and secondary circuits in order to achieve the temperature for “burning” the limestone and I’ll be interested to hear which exotic alloys you’d plan to use for the heat exchangers. It’s not enough just to raise the input materials to 1450C, you also have to supply the heat for the endothermic reaction.
Maybe clever engineers could make it work at exorbitant cost, but it’s certainly not available technology today and of course assumes (erroneously) that CO2 emissions need to be eliminated.
Rich Davis says:
Even molten salt reactors (which still don’t exist commercially
But liquid sodium reactors do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
And what’s the relevance of that to possibly producing cement at 1450C? The boiling point of sodium metal is 883C.
When a nuclear plant is being built, it has two or more batch concrete plants operating on site.
BUT, the efficiency, reliability and safety of nuclear energy are precisely the reasons why it must be shut down, not expanded. The Greendenista goal is NO industry, NO progress, NO growth; just subsistence dibble stick serfdom for us and elitist privileged luxury for our betters.
Exactly. We’d all be living in mud huts and plowing with sticks if all of their demands were realized.
No need to forget coal.
It is the cheapest, most efficient, and environmentally-sound fuel available when used in a modern power plant
Added bonus is the extra CO2 it provides to the atmosphere.
Like
Win Win!
Nuke ’em!
“Forget coal, nuclear is the way to go”
I’m with Simon! Very sensible. 🙂
I also followed the link to the story about the former Extinction Rebellion speaker embracing nuclear. My first thought was, “And all the watermelons said, ‘Burn the heretic!'”. Then I wondered, since that was an article from June this year, if the watermelons had succeeded in burning the heretic Zion Lights yet?
She’s still around.
https://twitter.com/ziontree/status/1305856306352467971
She works with Shellenberger
Let’s give her credit for at least recognizing her previous insanity
If we would just invest in nuclear energy we would be ready for the next 100 years and counting, and produce less CO2 (not that I care if we produce less CO2 but others really do). Next generation nuclear power (MSR) produce very little waste compared to current generation ones – assuming we ever build and test them out to find the best design. At this rate we will be buying them from China.
Wind farms and solar farms are a landscaping blight, soon to be a wide spread toxic waste issue.
But, but….
Griff keeps telling us that renewables are producing all the power used, and it’s much cheaper than any other energy source. This must be wrong!
/sarc (for the intelligence challenged)
I don’t keep telling you that.
I keep pointing out renewables are successfully producing ever more power, without the utter grid failure posters here think is inevitable. I keep pointing out that renewable costs have dropped and that in the last few years there are increasingly subsidy free wind and solar being installed.
I point out baseload is a thing of the past and renewables are perfectly predictable so intermittency is not the problem you seem to think it is.
I try to point out the enormous rapid development in renewable technologies taking place in the world, mostly outside the USA.
and I’m quite clear that wind turbines rapidly generate more power than they use in their entire lifetime and rapidly save more than CO2 required to produce them. And that properly sited wind turbines are no danger to birds: the data used to ‘prove’ they are is taken from exceptional sites and wrongly applied worldwide.
South Australia has a higher penetration of weather dependent generators than any other electrical network around the globe; about 60%. Total installed capacity about 3 times the average demand.
It is only able to achieve that level of penetration by using a 650MW interconnector with Victoria as a 650MW battery of infinite capacity. Without that link all the grid scale WDGs have to be curtailed and the state gas generators directed to operate.
The grid scale WDGs cannot compete with the coal generators in other states or rooftop solar in South Australia. At midday, on most days the grid scale WDGs are curtailed. They drop out of the wholesale market as soon as the price goes below MINUS $40/MWh; the current value of the subsidies. Coal plants are pricing a slab of their energy at MINUS $1000/MWh to force the grid scale WDGs out of the market place. The coal generators can recover the costs incurred through negative price swings by driving up the price during the evening peaks.
Curtailment of WDGS is now a common feature in both Queensland and South Australia:
http://nemlog.com.au/gen/region/sa/
http://nemlog.com.au/gen/region/qld/
So much so that these charts now have ‘curtailment’ estimated and plotted.
Managing this mess is becoming a nightmare. This year Sunday Lunch in SA is becoming a high risk period as grid demand falls to ZERO and the entire network is fed from rooftops. The only way those rooftops stop producing is on system overvoltage. So the grid is heading for a testing time this November and it is getting worse every year.
The fundamental issue is that there are no benefits of scale with WDGs. My rooftop can power my home in Melbourne just as affectively and cheaper than solar panels in the desert or wind turbines on the coast. As more grid scale WDGs are added, the price goes up because coal and gas need to recover their costs from reduced output. That means making your own electricity and storing becomes the lower cost option. South Australia is close to that and householders continue to cram solar panels on their roofs. That intensifies the downward spiral in demand and upward spiral in price. The seriousness of the situation in SA is masked by its link to Victoria and they are now funding a high capacity link to NSW so they can operate that state as an 850MW battery of infinite capacity.
There are a very limited number of situations where WDGs actually make economic sense. None of the present technology can produce more energy than that needed to build them and support the complex civilisation needed to produce them. Nothing about WDGs is simple and integrating them into an electrical network is an extraordinarily complex task that is now being realised by this trying to do it. The cost of managing the wholesale electricity market in Australia has doubled in the 4 years. ‘Directions’ to generators is normal rather than a rare exception.
What is an example of a weather dependent generator (WDG)?
Why do you ask ” Two Dogs”
Alan I do not understand your comment
Really no danger to birds … here is an article about legal proceedings in Australia
https://pl-pl.facebook.com/LandlineABC/videos/the-war-over-wind-turbines/891373774725851/
Not only are they a danger to birds they are a danger to everyone other thing … they are currently involved in two more inquests.
Germany, Denmark, the UK, etc. are very “exceptional”…
As an addition to RickWill’s comment, if you add South Australia’s electricity cost at US 0.30 to David’s table, it’s one of the most expensive in the world. That’s what happens when you try to supply the majority of your power from Wind farms.
Wind can work… Where it works, when it works… in Texas… And very few other places.
Griff,
Why don’t you tell us how you transmite in real time from your planet to ours ?
Wind turbines only “rapidly save more… CO2” than coal…
griff,
“I point out baseload is a thing of the past and renewables are perfectly predictable so intermittency is not the problem you seem to think it is.”
Do you spend *all* your time in a basement somewhere? Go outside and see if you can predict wind speed from minute to minute. Go outside and see if you can predict cloud cover from minute to minute. Then try to do day to day or week to week. The *weatherman* can’t accurately predict either the wind or the sun day to day or week to week. And not even minute to minute!
Even more important – what if you *can* predict renewables? How does that allow you to reliably generate base load? If I accurately predict for tomorrow that wind speed will be consistently over 20mph with solid overcast just how does that help unreliables like wind and solar generate a baseload?
The UK National Grid assure me they can predict UK wind availability to 94% up to 24 hours in advance.
You didn’t answer the question! WHAT IF THEY PREDICT NO WIND AND NO SUN TOMORROW?
How does that keep wind and solar from being unreliable? How does it help wind and solar to be base load generators?
You can’t do large scale manufacture under that situation they move to another country. Doesn’t concern Griff because he is still paid to troll.
” …. I point out baseload is a thing of the past …. ”
All you are pointing out is your total disconnection with reality.
Baseload on the Australian grid is 18,000 mw at 4:00 am. Most other places with any kind of prosperity will be similar. There is nothing in your renewable fantasy that is capable of providing that. Refrigeration, air-conditioning of residential tower blocks, street lights, traffic lights, electric rail transportation, hospitals, the few remaining industrial processes that cannot easily be turned on and off.
Griff,
I try to be respectful in comments, but I must say that if you believe “baseload is a thing of the past,” then you cannot possibly know what baseload is.
The baseload is simply the minimum amount of electrical demand that the grid experiences during the day. It’s a load that never goes away. It’s a load that has to be supplied at all times.
Because of this, it makes good economic sense to supply the basedload with the cheapest, sturdiest, most reliable generators available — usually nuclear plants and fossil-fueled plants, but sometimes hydro plants, as in the northwest.
Supplying the baseload with intermittent sources like windmills and solar panels invites disaster. If the wind dies down, the grid can collapse.
Your other comments show a lack of understanding in other areas. The reason intermittent sources challenge grid stability is not merely because they are intermittent, but also because they don’t always manage reactive load properly. Windmills in particular are almost always induction machines which require the presence of an “infinite bus” in order to generate anything at all. If the country plugs in enough windmills to start affecting grid frequency, every windmill in the country will suddenly become multi-million dollar a boat anchor. The same is true of the inverter systems driving solar panel production.
Do yourself a favor and consult some people with electrical engineering knowledge specific to the power industry.
I mean that having a lot of coal/gas plants permanently on including spinning reserve is a thing of the past…
Because the wind is predictable and there are things like pumped storage, demand response and increasingly grid scale batteries to cover the ramp up/down of power when wind supplied power changes.
That is how it works with natural gas power plant scheduled to come up as wind dies down in the UK… and with other resource as gas also declines.
I suggest you look up how turbines interact with grid frequency these days.
griff,
1. There are *NO* grid scale batteries today. There are none actually on the horizon. This is a pipedream!
2. If you have to have natural gas plants available and already on-line to cover for unreliable wind and solar then why have wind and solar? Just to with the natural gas plant! Hell of a lot cheaper!
3. Wind and solar introduce frequency instability on the grid due to momentary power flucuations and little to no inertia. Not even gas powered plants can cope with this.
I *know* how turbines interact with grid frequency. Wind and solar are *not* turbines. This argument is a non sequitur of massive proportions.
Renewables are predictably unreliable and expensive, as the recent experience in California and ISOs perpetual complaints about the “duck curve” demonstrate to anyone who will listen (i.e., not California Democrats).
My guess is Griff wouldn’t understand what the duck curve is if you told him.
Griff,
your comment :- I keep pointing out renewables are successfully producing ever more power, without the utter grid failure posters here think is inevitable. I keep pointing out that renewable costs have dropped and that in the last few years there are increasingly subsidy free wind and solar being installed. ”
If you are looking at the U.K., this is not really true. There has due to Corona a reduction in demand and as renewables always run flat out (such as it is ) they appear to have a bigger share. The balancing generators, have had less load to fulfill. Capcity is increasing in the wind sector but when the capacity factor is used to see the increase it is relatively small.
How can you run a grid on predictability rather than demand? Rationing, or the new fashionalble term demand response is not a good idea as it is largely out of the control of the grid operator and is bad for the consumer. You must be aware of the talk of smart meters being used to load shed?
Do you understand what baseload is? It is simply a term for the minimum demandand met by generators most suited for that job, nuclear being one
Subsidy free, come on, pull the other one.
Wind generation is disruptive, the last few years has seen fequency incidents double in the last few years as wind has increased it’ share of the load. (frequency incidents are where the frequency changes + or- 0.2 Hz) There will be more grid trips if we continue this trend and they will take longer to restore as renewables don’t do black starts.
Don’t be complacent in the belief that we can keep adding wind and solar to the grid, it will end in tears sooner or later.
“I keep pointing out renewables are successfully producing ever more power, without the utter grid failure posters here think is inevitable.”
Yeah, we haven’t gotten to “utter grid failure” yet. Just give it a little more time, Griff.
griff posts on the Guardian climate change section where they all worship the evidence free parables of a retired geography teacher called rockyrex.
Absolutely Griff,
Solar successfully produces power 22% of the time and wind successfully produces power 30% of the time
Speaking facts to truth in a time of em-pathetic appeals, conflation of logical domains, and renewable debt holdings, is extraordinary.
“…And so you see, the War on Coal had absolutely nothing to do with the demise of coal. And they all lived happily forever and ever in rainbowland. The end”
The war on coal in the UK is coming to an end: just 2% of electricity from coal in 2019, just 4 coal power plants left, all with close dates by 2024.
and I note that Spain shut half its coal plant this year and Austria and Sweden closed their last coal plant.
One would have to be either a liar or just plain retarded to believe that getting rid of plentiful, cheap, and reliable coal power is a good thing. Or maybe both?
Spain electricity production from coal is 1.5% … oh that is a massive cut 🙂
Coal is used for more than just producing electricity.
Did you forget, griff?
Just imagine, without coal mining the U.K. will be back to making WEAK STEEL and non-functional SOLAR PANELS so…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemy4TD4I3A
Turbines will fail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cftpZuHCrso
Towers will fold
Solar farms will be dependant on CHINA and Chinese Junk panels as they won’t be able to produce their own silicon for Solar cells or any other electronic applications
The reasons coal has gone out of use are simple.
1) Combined cycle gas turbine is cheaper to run and build.
2) We no longer have any domestic coal production
3) Government pricing policy means generators using coal get the lowest price per kilowatt
4) Most coal plants are over 45 years old.
I worked in the UK power industry in the 80s and remember the dash for gas after privatision.
Obama openly stated he needed electricity rates to “skyrocket” simply to make renewables pay off handsomely for his Green Slime donors to the Democrats. That unholy alliance between “Bolsheviks and Billionaires” thing that people like Laura Ingraham at FoxNews are just waking up to. We’ve known that here at WUWT for at least 8 years now.
Yep, he had a war on coal that wreaked havoc across the US. His EPA lawyers did quite well.
A quick bar napkin analysis showing Leftists are completely insane:
20% of US power is from about 100 nuclear power plants, the largest nuclear power plant is Palo Verde at a cost of $5.9 billion in 1986, or $14 billion in today’s terms adjusted for inflation…
If we built 400 more Palo-Verde sized nukes @ $14 billion/unit, 100% of our power could be from nukes at a cost of “just” $5.6 trillion with zero CO2 emissions.
Leftists’ insane Green New Deal was projected to cost $93 trillion…ergo, Leftists are completely insane…
The $93tr v $5.6tr is not the whole story. Nuclear plants are built to incredibly high engineering standards with a highly controlled operating environment. Wind turbines are built to a price, operating in an uncontrolled natural environment.
Nuclear plant will achieve maybe 3 times the life of the wind plants and about 6 times the life of current batteries so the comparison is
$93tr + $47tr + $93tr + $47tr +$93tr + $47tr v $5.6tr.
Insanity does not quite convey the mind numbing idiocy.
Rickwill-san:
Obviously, Leftists’ main objective in this whole CAGW scam is to steal as much money as possible form US taxpayers by choosing the most expensive and inefficient forms of alt-en (solar/ wind), and to impose a plethora of tyrannical rules, regulations and mandates under the cloak of CAGW to control every aspect of US citizen’s lives…
Leftist aren’t only mind numbingly stupid and aggressively ignorant, they are immoral, unethical and evil..
That’s just paranoid fantasy.
Look outside the USA: there are multiple centrist/rightist states investing heavily in renewable energy, without any tyrannical outcome.
And the cost of their electricity compared to ours is what?
Depends on where you live. Our electricity rates are about 1/2 the UK’s… Except for Hawaii, Alaska, California and the New England states, where it’s about the same as the UK. Hawaii and Alaska have legitimate excuses.
And as RickWill and others have pointed out, any state such as South Australia and California with the highest percentages of renewables in their country also have the highest domestic energy costs and more reliability issues than other states. Surely you cannot ignore this simple fact.
It’s griff, he routinely ignores 7 inconvenient facts before breakfast
When I was a kid in the 1960s, I believed that by now nuclear power would have taken over, cheap power would provide many things and people would choose BEVs of their own free will, not Gov’t coercion.
They’ve stolen my present – how dare they!
We were supposed to get flying cars and rocket packs too!
Flying cars are just around a corner
https://moller.com
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=shlZySkGq6g
And for those Jetsons fans
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I7dqFXq8Kfg
It was said (in the early 60s) that with nuclear power, it would be so cheap that there would be no need for electric meters. Then envirowacos and lawyers got involved. So much for that.
Now that we have “smart” meters, why is California doing rolling blackouts? Why not shut power off to the individual households of the politicians and regulators, as well as the corporate interests that have created this mess?
Or, in general, if registered Green, 1st tier, Socialist, 2nd tier, then Democrat 3rd tier.
Then Right thinkers will not suffer from the Griff type thinkers folly.
That is to prevent just anyone from hacking the system and shutting of random meters
“Over the same time period, renewables generation doubled in the US, due to “massive” solar and wind capacity additions.”
Where to place hydro?
On the one hand hydro is categorized as renewable and added as part of the renewable generators together with WDGs.
On the other hand hydro is not within the Green concepts and gradually outlawed as “changing” the “wild” nature and forcing fish to swim down and up dedicated staircases.
I find it unfair to hydro, that it is compared to WDGs. Hydro can mostly deliver high quality electricity on demand, without the insane overhead of Chinese inverter electronics. Further hydro is fast response on demand.
WDG is like going to a state owned filling station where you can occasionally fill up cheaply, the rest of the bill is put on your tax return, independent on You taking advance of the occasional offers.
Hydroelectric is generally categorized as a renewable; but usually listed separately from non-hydroelectric renewables. Due to the seasonality of availability, it’s often listed as non-dispatchable.
On the other hand hydro is not within the Green concepts and gradually outlawed as “changing” the “wild” nature and forcing fish to swim down and up dedicated staircases.
And yet Wind (bird Choppers) and Solar (bird fryers) and their acres and acres of destroyed and despoiled habitat aren’t considered “changing” the “wild” nature?
…. so with all this super unreliable and intermittent power generation, and with all the climate change initiatives there have been from Kyoto to Paris, and the dawn of the digital age, with all this effort to reduce CO² in the atmosphere can anyone please point out on the graph the moment it started to make a difference to the number of ppm of CO² in the atmosphere.
None of it, literally none of it has halted or even stabilised CO² in the atmosphere…… why?
Meanwhile, this from HawaiiNewsNow:
Then there’s this tease from Honolulu Star Advertiser:
There is probably no place in the US better suited to solar power than Hawaii. Any kind of fuel needs to be shipped 2,500 miles or more, adding significantly to the cost of anything requiring energy (gasoline costs $3.30/gal in Hilo, where the ships come in and $3.60 on the other side of the island in Kailua Kona). At least the western sides of the main islands get a lot of sunshine and at roughly 20° above the equator, they get it year-round. If you’re talking about large commercial solar, there are a lot of old lava flows not being used for anything else that could be turned into solar parks.
And yet, despite all these advantages, one of the largest rooftop installer in the state went bankrupt. Note that the bankruptcy was filed in early February or January, long before any effects from the COVID-19 lockdowns could be felt. I don’t recall the name Sunetric, but commercials for solar companies are common on Hawaii TV stations.
And hardly a whisper about the expansion at Plant Vogtle, which was the subject of a flurry of news articles last year when all the investors had to agree to increased funding to cover cost overruns. I can only conclude the project is on schedule to complete Unit 3 in May 2021 and Unit 4 in May 2022. This expansion will just under double the plant’s total output from 2,458 MW to 4,692 MW.
This article from earlier this month states the project is still on schedule, but tries to make it sound like bad news anyway.
When the expansion completes, Vogtle should consistently rank #1 in annual output.
Back in the day I worked for a consulting engineers doing electric power planning.
Nuclear and coal typically were “base load,” turned on and pretty well kept on, except for scheduled outages for maintenance. These plants were typically not capable of being turned on and off at will. But that made their power less valuable.
Hydro had a “firm power” capacity, that would be available through a 3-year drought cycle, and a secondary power capacity available in wet years. Secondary power was much cheaper: thus aluminum plants liked to site right next to hydro plants. Also Google server farms, because they have to have backup power anyway.
Natural gas is the most flexible: you can ramp them up and down pretty quickly in response to load requirements. Thus you can charge more…
I suspect that combined-cycle natural gas, where you use the natural gas exhaust to make steam and drive a steam turbine, is not as flexible as a pure natural gas driven generator.
Solar and wind are, obviously the least valuable, because they aren’t always available. You can’t call up a solar plant and say: gimme megawatts, pal. Cos sometimes the sun don’t shine.
Base load power is plenty valuable, it’s just that you want a good balance of base load and easily-ramped up or down to meet demand. Solar and wind do more harm to the grid than good. They need to be abolished.
Important (?) aside: The 2008 nuclear plant #10 top performer in Byron IL is being closed in 2021for economic reasons. One of two in Illinois next year. Exelon. I expect Illinois to force closure of all of its nuclear plants – not by direct fiat, but by strangling them in production, price, costs and favoritism for “green.” BTW, one of two US nuke makers is bankrupt and there is no support for that arm of business at GE. (And don’t tell me we’ve won the urgent and imminent AGW debate when the politicians and greens are not stopping.)
Diversity is good. The more efficient energy, the better. Coal, natural gas, nuclear with lesser supporting roles by wind and solar.
Nothing you have to pay for is renewable.
End of story.
How do you know if someone is lying? If someone says that the ship that you are on is sinking and you offer them a seat in a life boat and they don’t take it what would you think? You might think that they don’t really believe that the ship is sinking. What if they said they didn’t want the lifeboat because it is not a long term solution? Still lying or really stupid. Take the lifeboat and sort out the long term solutions later. Greens don’t really believe that the world faces a climate emergency. If they did they would take the (nuclear) life boat.