We expect an increase in reliability in modern tech – unless one is a climate scold, and unless the topic in question is solar and wind power:

Wind and solar have been growing as a share of US electrical power generation over the last two decades. State and federal mandates and subsidies have driven the expansion of renewables because of their inherently and intermittent nature. But it’s clear that renewable electricity sources have a third strike: they are fragile and prone to weather damage and destruction. //

In May 2019, a massive hailstorm in West Texas destroyed 400,000 solar modules of the Midway Solar Project, about 60% of the facility. The project was only one year old. The system was rebuilt, costing insurers more than $70 million. //

This whole problem presents a doom loop of unreliable and fragile electrical generation. The climate scolds would have us believe that the weather is growing hotter/colder/more unpredictable because of human activity causing climate change. And to solve the climate change that we have supposedly solved, we must restrict further our use of reliable energy sources for unreliable and fragile "green" energy systems like solar and wind power, which clutter up the landscape and are less reliable and more expensive than the traditional source.

How Innovative Is China in Nuclear Power? | ITIF

An interesting (albeit saddening) article from the Swamp-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

• China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations.

• China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.

• China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs).

• Overall, analysts assess that China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale.

• China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation. Many fourth-generation nuclear technologies have been known for years, but China’s state-backed approach excels at fielding them.

That used to be the US’s strength – the ability to take smart ideas from anywhere around the world and actually implement them. That was before the US changed itself into a make-work program for bureaucrats & lawyers.

His latest endeavor, "Landman," centers on the oil industry and contrasts the lives of Texas-based tycoons and workers, and one clip is already going viral. Billy Bob Thorton, who plays "Tommy Norris" in the show, lays out the reality of wind turbines and the human need for fossil fuels in a way that will have you fist-pumping. //

TOMMY NORRIS: Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this ** out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? Do you want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that ***** thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Telsa battery. //

TOMMY NORRIS: And never mind the fact that if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don't have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It'd take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure. Our lives depend on it. And hell, it's in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car, including yours. It's in tennis rackets and lipstick, refrigerators and antihistamines, pretty much anything plastic, your cellphone case, artificial heart valves, any kind of clothing that's not made with animal or plant fibers, soap, hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats, you name it. Every thing, and you want to know what the kicker is? We're gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. //

I will mention that some people have questioned that last sentence which states "We're gonna run out of it before we find its replacement." Is that true? In a macro sense, sure. Humans will eventually reach a point where they can't get to what is left of the Earth's fossil fuels. With that said, past hysteria surrounding the specific timeline has proven to be false and will likely continue to be proven to be false as more reserves are discovered and newer extraction techniques are developed. //

TOMMY NORRIS: No, the thing that's gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative, and believe me, if Exxon thought them things right there were the future, they'd be putting them all over the place. Getting oil out of the ground is the most dangerous job in the world. We don't do it because we like it. We do it because we've run out of options.

For my money, this is the most important part of the clip. No one has more of an incentive to pursue and dominate the market for "renewables" than the oil companies. They also happen to have the most capital to do so.

If the oil companies thought wind turbines or solar panels were a viable alternative to fossil fuels, they'd be first in line to seize the market because, in the end, it's all about sustainability in making money for them. That they aren't is the biggest tell. Yes, Chevron and Exxon dabble in the sector, mostly for public relations reasons, but it's clear they aren't believers. //

DavidW
14 hours ago
If the wind is not blowing hard enough to get the turbines to turn, they have to use electricity (from gas/coal) to turn the blades, otherwise they will warp if they are in one position too long. In the winter they have to use electricity to keep the gear boxes unfrozen (if they are using oil-based gearboxes). AND, while the life of the turbine might be 20 years, the life of the blades are less thanks to the sandpaper effect of dust-laden wind on them. And of course ethanol isn't the miracle either - I read that it can take several gallons of "fossil" fuel (diesel or gas) to create one gallon of ethanol.

Let's hope that Trump can break this cycle of stupidity and get us on the right track toward real energy independence. //

headhunt DavidW
13 hours ago
The amount of water needed to produce ethanol dwarfs what is needed from oil based product.
Huge areas of the Midwest/west have sunk well over 20' all to feed a political, ineffective, fuel additive. //

mopani Geowhiziker
a few minutes ago
Given how essential and useful they are for so many non-fuel products, people in the future will look back on this era with astonishment that we wasted hydrocarbons by burning them. //

mopani Jason A Jones
10 minutes ago
Look at the distribution of the most common elements in the universe: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are in the top 5 (H2 is #1 of course).

Assume that this same distribution existed when the earth was formed and the large amounts of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon were trapped inside our planet.

H2+O2 + heat+ pressure = water

H2 + C + heat + pressure= hydrocarbons (not fossil fuel!)

Is being squeezed out of the earth under pressure.

The fuel today with the greatest energy density is nuclear fuel; a chunk of enriched uranium the size of a thumbnail contains as much energy as one ton of coal, 120 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

So when our nearest neighbor, Canada, has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of uranium, the United States should sit up and take notice. //

Nuclear power is the energy source of the future. We can't wait for the day when fusion power becomes economically viable, either. America's energy requirements in coming decades will be increasing, not decreasing, and anyone who has looked at the data knows that wind, solar, and other "green" sources won't meet the needs. We need nuclear power, we need reliable, friendly sources of uranium to augment our own production, and we need to streamline the process for approving new reactors.

Legal Insurrection readers will recall that in my post on the United Nations climate conference in Azerbaijan this week, its president boldly declared that oil and gas were a ‘gift from God’.

The eco-activists attending the event were enraged.

The climate cultists will likely be working themselves up into even more hysteria because of another climate conference that occurred mid-November in the Czech Republic city of Prague.

The Czech division of the International Climate Intelligence Group (Clintel) organized a two-day climate conference in Prague on November 12-13, 2024, where climate scientists declared that the “climate emergency” is over. The conference concluded with a communiqué drafted by the participating scientists and researchers that targeted the climate hysteria promoted by the United Nations body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which excludes participants and published papers disagreeing with its narrative, fails to comply with its own error-reporting protocol and draws conclusions some of which are dishonest, should be forthwith dismantled.’

Moreover, the scientists at the conference declared that even if all nations moved straight to net zero emissions, by the 2050 target date the world would be only about 0.1 C cooler than with no emissions reduction.

So far, the attempts to mitigate climate change by international agreements such as the Paris Agreement have made no difference to our influence on climate, since nations such as Russia and China, India and Pakistan continue greatly to expand their combustion of coal, oil and gas.

The cost of achieving that 0.1 C reduction in global warming would be $2 quadrillion, equivalent to 20 years’ worldwide gross domestic product.

The declaration has 18 different point referencing climate science and facts that counter the narratives being pushed by the IPCC and those who want to push their green agendas. //

1 The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.

2. Foreseeable future increases in greenhouse gases in the air will probably also prove net-beneficial.
3. The rate and amplitude of global warming have been and will continue to be appreciably less than climate scientists have long predicted.
4. The Sun, and not greenhouse gases, has contributed and will continue to contribute the overwhelming majority of global temperature.
5. Geological evidence compellingly suggests that the rate and amplitude of global warming during the industrial era are neither unprecedented nor unusual. //

Though I have to say, #17 is a favorite of mine:

17. Since wind and solar power are costly, intermittent and more environmentally destructive per TWh generated than any other energy source, governments should cease to subsidize or to prioritize them, and should instead expand coal, gas and, above, all nuclear generation.

But, perhaps most importantly, the conference attendees demand the end of persecution of those researchers doing real science who struggle to share their reasonable and reliable findings whenever the data counters the political narratives.

It didn't take long for the media to run a hit piece on Chris Wright, who President-elect Donald Trump nominated as his Secretary of Energy. Wright, the founder and CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy, a fracking company, was nominated earlier this week; see NEW: Trump Taps Fracking Exec As Next Energy Secretary. Today, Reuters is on the move with a story headlined: Trump energy pick wrote ESG report hailing oil, gas, downplaying climate worry.

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the energy department believes fossil fuels are the key to ending world poverty which, he says, is a greater problem than climate change's "distant" threat, according to a report he penned as CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy.

In a corporate report released in February called 'Bettering Human Lives,' Chris Wright said that the energy transition has not begun and that climate change, while a challenge, is not the greatest threat to humans.

Poverty is a bigger threat that can be alleviated with access to hydrocarbons, said Wright, who started a foundation aimed at expanding propane cook stoves in developing countries. //

Wright wrote "the wealthy world has gone beyond over-optimism surrounding the breadth and scalability of a narrow slice of alternative energy and, unfortunately, has rushed head-long into outright obstruction of hydrocarbon infrastructure and production." //

Wright places the welfare of people and communities above scientific grift. He supports what works and is critical of what doesn't and can't work...looking at you, wind and solar. He understands that energy production is inextricably linked to our freedom and prosperity. This bill of indictment against Wright should be read into the Congressional Record ...

david says:
January 20, 2015 at 1:50 PM

There’s a big difference in what we’re told about climate change versus the effects of radiation.

Decades ago people subjected test animals to “large” amounts of radiation, and extrapolated their results to “small” amounts of radiation. The assumption was that as the amount of radiation decreased, then so did the effects of the radiation linearly. This implies that even at low doses of radiation there would be some damage. (ie. 1/10th the radiation = 1/10th the damage, 1/100th the radiation = 1/100th the damage..)

However, that’s not how science works. They had an hypothesis, but where were the experiments to prove it true?

Eventually it was found that the LNT model didn’t hold to be true. The expected cancers from Chernobyl didn’t match what was expected. Different parts of the world have different background levels of radiation, yet those changes don’t seem to correspond with the LNT hypothesis. There were accident where people were subjected to radiation, yet once again no correlation with cancer rates as suggested by the LNT hypothesis; in fact, in such cases it sometimes appeared that low doses of radiation could decrease cancer rates.

The LNT hypothesis is dead, or at least it should be. But there are people who benefit from keeping it alive, and rather than going back to the labs to try to figure out the proper relationship between radiation at low levels, and genetic damage, they try to muddy the waters.

Climate change might have its fear-mongers, much like the supporters of the LNT hypothesis do, but it has yet to be proven wrong. We know that greenhouse gases do affect the Earth’s climate, though to what degree our meddling will affect it is open to some debate, as is how harshly those changes will affect us humans. But, since the Earth isn’t a frozen wasteland, we “know” that greenhouse gases do affect the climate.

In short:
———-

Low doses of radiation:
-> has fear mongers
-> those fear mongers have been proven wrong.
-> end of story, (or it should be.)

Climate Change:
-> has fear mongers, and also
-> has those who benefit from denying it.
-> greenhouse gases affect climate, else the Earth would be a lot colder.
-> end of story, including how bad it will be, is yet to be written.

Given we don’t know the full story, we should research, and act, because the worse case scenario is disaster for us human. Replacing coal with nuclear is a no brainer. If there is room for some small release of greenhouse gases by us humans, it won’t include the use of coal to generate electricity. That’s one of the lower-hanging branches that we should be eliminating now.

Wayne SW says:
January 13, 2015 at 11:09 PM

Well, you identified a major part of the problem. Those wind farms don’t harvest wind so much as they harvest subsidies. And governments are the ones who put those subsidies in place. In my state (Ohio), the state government is mulling removing the state portion of those subsidies, and the unreliable energy lobbyists are raising holy hell. They say they won’t proceed with any new projects without those subsidies. That right there tells me how they are making their money. And of course they also lobby for high-priced PPAs, while you have travelling anti-nuclear activists decrying PPAs for any company with nuclear plants (they say it shows the nukes need “subsidies”).

Brian Mays says:
January 12, 2015 at 8:05 PM

“The question arises: Were the decisions concerning this enormous funding for global warming research taken out of genuine concern that the climate is allegedly changing as a result of CO2 industrial emissions, or do some other undisclosed ideas stand behind this money, IPCC activity, Kyoto, and all the gruesome catastrophic propaganda the world is now exposed to? If this concern is genuine, then why do we not see a storm of enthusiastic environmentalists and United Nations officials demanding to replace all fossil-fuel plants with nuclear plants, which have zero emission of greenhouse gases, are environmentally friendly, more economical, and much safer for plant workers and much safer for the general population than other sources of energy?”

– Zbigniew Jaworowski

On day one of Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency, he canceled the Keystone Pipeline. Since then, he’s waged a war on drilling and energy and has tried to shove a green agenda down our throats. It’s one of the many reasons a Democrat won’t be in the White House come January.

On Thursday, he made a strange but somewhat conciliatory speech where he promised a smooth transition of power to President-elect Donald Trump.

Yet it was only hours before he made a move to defy the GOP nominee and former president INCOMING PRESIDENT and further limited drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. //

But in 2017, Trump signed a tax bill mandating at least two lease sales in the refuge’s 1.6 million-acre coastal plain by the end of 2024. //

Trump reinstated the drilling program in a 2017 tax cut law enacted by congressional Republicans. Even so, no drilling has occurred in the refuge. //

USGS estimates there’s somewhere between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the coastal plain. Those are huge numbers. For comparison, Alaska’s second biggest oil field, Kuparuk, holds about 2.5 billion barrels.

Meanwhile, several studies have found that cleaner, clearer air due to falling pollution from China and lower sulfur marine fuels made only a small contribution to last year’s temperatures. One study, submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, found that declining pollution could raise global temperatures by 0.03°C over the next 20 years, with the strongest effect not occurring until later this decade. It’s not nothing, says study co-author Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at Scripps, but far too little to explain last year. Taken together, says Mika Rantanen, a climate scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the results are “a good reminder that it was indeed El Niño that was the major player.” //

None of the data justifies making energy more expensive. None of the data justify covering thousands of square miles of open ground, including vital wildlife habitat, with windmills and solar panels.

Forget what Kamala Harris is saying. Look at who she's hiring — in this case, someone who is an unrepentant climate scold, a fanatical anti-child, anti-energy, anti-modern lifestyle (except for herself, we feel sure) lunatic. //

Key campaign workers like this frequently go on to take related positions in the staff of election winners when they assume office. There can be little doubt that a Harris administration would include Camila Thorndike, almost certainly in some position having to do with energy and climate policy. She would be pushing policies that would make energy more expensive, and in so doing make everything more expensive; she would be pushing policies that would damage, if not destroy, our modern technological lifestyle.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft dive into costly deals that aren't generating anything yet. //

Nuclear power contracts signed by hyperscalers show they're desperate for reliable "clean and green" energy sources to feed their ever-expanding datacenter footprints, however, investment bank Jefferies warns that these tech giants are likely to end up paying over the odds to get it.

johnwalker 13 Jan

nagle:
Two islands with four chargers each can charge eight cars. Charging stations may be able to replace gas stations on the same real estate.

Current standards for electric vehicle charging stations have the following maximum power delivery:

• SAE J1772 DC Level 2 — 400 kW
• IEC 61851-1 — 80 kW
• Tesla NACS — 250 kW
  (Again, these are maxima under the standards: many installed charging stations are lower power. A typical Tesla V2 Supercharger provides 120 kW.)

Plans for future higher power charging standards include the Megawatt Charging System 1 (MCS) with a rating of 3.75 megawatts (3000 amperes at 1250 volt DC).

Let’s compare this to a gasoline pump. A typical filling station pump in the developed world delivers around 50 litres per minute (38 l/min in Safetyland), and gasoline has an energy content of around 7500 kcal/litre depending on its formulation (around 5000 kcal/litre for pure ethanol and 8600 for #2 diesel). Plugging these into Units Calculator, we get:

 (50 litres/minute) * (7500 kcal / litre) = 26.15 megawatt

so even the proposed MCS (which is primarily intended for large commercial vehicles and buses) delivers only around 1/7 the power of a gasoline pump.

Now, even getting installation of five megawatt electrical service is a pretty big thing in most places (that is the consumption of a very large office building), so it looks like building out an infrastructure which will allow electrical vehicle charging times competitive with gasoline filling will require very substantial upgrades to the power grid and local distribution facilities.

Three things could produce an African Renaissance: liberty, capitalism, and energy. The Western world can't do much about the first two; that's something the people of the various nations of Africa will have to work out for themselves. The one thing the West could help with is energy development. But American and European climate scolds seem determined to prevent any energy development. It is, in effect, a re-colonizing of Africa.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/10/17/climate-colonialisms-stranglehold-on-africas-energy-starved/

In 2024, it is unconscionable that over 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 28% of healthcare facilities have reliable electricity. More than 900 million people cook with traditional biomass like wood and animal dung, inhaling toxic fumes that claim over 600,000 African lives each year. Clean water remains a luxury for vast swaths of the population.

Atterus
Ars Tribunus Militum
6y
1,830
Wednesday at 1:02 PM
#8
Gee... it seems like nuclear can actually provide a ton of clean power for high demand applications.... maybe we can, i dunno, build larger ones for general load? Had that been done before? Derp?

Oh, and the crazy costs are always government red tape and activists almost requiring a plant to be built three times with nutty reqs as regs are arbitrarily changed repeatedly and facilities are fined for stuff the govt is supposed to handle (Yucca). Always lots of pointing out the "uneconomical" costs and totally ignoring other advanced nations are reliant on it and seem to have solved the base load issue...

One of those was laughing at Russias/OPECs death grip on energy costs, btw. Oh, also found a ton of the animosity against nuclear is fanned by hostile revanchist nations afraid of everyone cutting them loose. Again, gee, imagine China pushing solar! Imagine Russia pushing wind and solar! Both suppressing nuclear abroad while pursuing it themselves. Wowsers! Whodathunk? (The nuclear sector for the past 40 years)

If other nations can be powered largely by nuclear, so can we. Any other argument is hypocrisy for sustainability and pandering to lobbyists afraid their "green" stock or fossil stocks will crater as a result. Interesting as soon as nuclear gains headway, the lobbyists do everything they can to stall it...

For the record, we need a mix, but nuclear IS the solution overall. It's goofy seeing real world examples work for cost and people get all sticker shocked at govt inflated prices but are okay blowing trillions on pipe dreams... that still don't match nuclear...

Edit: correction, reference to Russias pushing for Europe to adopt solar and wind power pre Ukraine war to control their reactions when base load couldn't be met with those sources and control them via gas prices as a result, for a while.

Electrical engineers must learn to navigate industry codes and standards while designing battery energy storage systems (BESS)

In 2022, Florida was third in the nation, after California and Texas, in total solar power generating capacity, and solar energy accounted for more than 5% of Florida’s total net generation. About four-fifths of the state’s solar generation came from utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) facilities. //

The Lake Placid Solar Power Plant is located in Highlands County, Fla., and suffered damage during Hurricane Milton. The facility opened in December 2019 and is 45 megawatts, which is enough to power more than 12,000 homes at peak production. //

The frequency of major storms and the costs associated with repair from them must be an essential part of any calculation when deciding if a new power facility is right for the region. It appears that green energy activists aren’t providing this data, but rather their visions of would should be based on their beliefs.

Theology is no way to power a civilization. //

rebelgirl in reply to CommoChief. | October 15, 2024 at 8:26 am
My son is a commercial electrician who works on residential and commercial solar installations. He says he would never have it.
They install the panels on roofs where no one takes into account the problems involved with reaching the source of a potential attic fire. //

Joe-dallas in reply to CommoChief. | October 15, 2024 at 5:01 pm
Correct – the capacity factor for solar during summer is around 35%
The capacity factor in the winter is around 6%

The texas freeze fiasco of Feb 2021,
Solar was producing around 12% capacity factor across the entire nation and a DROP of 60% – 70% wind production across the entire NORTH AMERICAN Continent for 7 DAYS

New Google agreement could boost development of small modular reactors—if they work.

He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.

But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.

I think that this is all wrong, that the world will remain much more dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future than a lot of progressives want to admit, that there are a bunch of difficult and outstanding problems that need to be solved, and that nuclear policy may provide important solutions to some of those problems. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly what the future of any technology may hold. But I think nuclear fission remains extremely promising if — and it’s a big if — we change Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules to allow for more innovation.