Billionaire Elon Musk said this month that while the development of AI had been “chip constrained” last year, the latest bottleneck to the cutting-edge technology was “electricity supply.” Those comments followed a warning by Amazon chief Andy Jassy this year that there was “not enough energy right now” to run new generative AI services. //

“One of the limitations of deploying [chips] in the new AI economy is going to be ... where do we build the data centers and how do we get the power,” said Daniel Golding, chief technology officer at Appleby Strategy Group and a former data center executive at Google. “At some point the reality of the [electricity] grid is going to get in the way of AI.” //

Such growth would require huge amounts of electricity, even if systems become more efficient. According to the International Energy Agency, the electricity consumed by data centers globally will more than double by 2026 to more than 1,000 terawatt hours, an amount roughly equivalent to what Japan consumes annually.

In 2023, China really knocked the wind out of the sails (hah) of the renewable-energy crowd. In that year, China built some new coal-fired electrical generation facilities. In fact, they built a lot of coal-fired electrical plants — as in...more than twice that of the rest of the world combined.

China ramped up coal power capacity last year, according to new analysis, despite a pledge to "strictly control" the dirtiest fossil fuel.

The country added 47.4 Gigawatts (GW) of new coal power in 2023, more than double the amount added by the rest of the world combined.

The 23 million-acre petroleum reserve on the North Slope was set aside as an emergency oil supply, originally for the U.S. Navy, by President Warren Harding.

In 1976, in accordance with the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, administration of the reserve was transferred to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and renamed the NPR-A.

President Joe Biden is on the verge of locking down half of it, making it unavailable for oil and gas development. He intends to do so with a new rule that is proposed by the Biden Administration through the Bureau of Land Management, a division of the Department of Interior.

Glistening in the dry expanses of the Nevada desert is an unusual kind of power plant that harnesses energy not from the sun or wind, but from the Earth itself.

Known as Project Red, it pumps water [8000] feet into the ground, down where rocks are hot enough to roast a turkey [380F]. Around the clock, the plant sucks the heated water back up to power generators [3.5 MW]. Since last November, this carbon-free, Earth-borne power has been flowing onto a local grid in Nevada. //

But geothermal enthusiasts have dreamed of sourcing Earth power in places without such specific geological conditions—like Project Red’s Nevada site, developed by energy startup Fervo Energy.

Such next-generation geothermal systems have been in the works for decades, but they’ve proved expensive and technologically difficult, and have sometimes even triggered earthquakes. Some experts hope that newer efforts like Project Red may now, finally, signal a turning point, by leveraging techniques that were honed in oil and gas extraction to improve reliability and cost-efficiency.

The advances have garnered hopes that with enough time and money, geothermal power—which currently generates less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, and 0.4 percent of electricity in the United States—could become a mainstream energy source. Some posit that geothermal could be a valuable tool in transitioning the energy system off of fossil fuels, because it can provide a continuous backup to intermittent energy sources like solar and wind.

A new energy bill passed by the Florida legislature, which DeSantis is certain to sign, bans offshore wind turbines and prioritizes reliable, affordable electricity over utopian renewable fantasies. According to experts at the Energy Research Institute, this bold move represents a reasoned pushback against the climate activist agenda that has destabilized power grids across America. //

Institute for Energy Research
@IERenergy
·
Follow
Texas and California produce more renewable energy than all other states, but they also lead the nation in power outages.
instituteforenergyresearch.org
https://t.co/2c8kn8dGX8
As Renewable Energy Increases in the Generation Mix, Power Outages Grow
3:10 PM · Mar 25, 2024

A microgrid is a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. It can connect and disconnect from the grid to operate in grid-connected or island mode. Microgrids can improve customer reliability and resilience to grid disturbances.

Advanced microgrids enable local power generation assets—including traditional generators, renewables, and storage—to keep the local grid running even when the larger grid experiences interruptions or, for remote areas, where there is no connection to the larger grid. In addition, advanced microgrids allow local assets to work together to save costs, extend duration of energy supplies, and produce revenue via market participation.

RNC Research @RNCResearch
·
In 2022, Biden claimed he had "a plan to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve" after draining it to its lowest level in four decades.

Today, they cancelled that plan because oil is too expensive.

10:51 AM · Apr 3, 2024 //

Not only are they paying more after they drained it, but they left it at its lowest point in 40 years, endangering our security for political reasons. It currently holds about 363 million barrels, down almost 600 million from the beginning of 2022. //

Brianna Lyman @briannalyman2
·
Donald Trump wanted to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in March of 2020 when oil was $24 a barrel.

Schumer called it a big oil bailout.

Biden will now pay about TRIPLE to fill the reserves after draining them to keep gas prices artificially ‘low’ for votes.

5:06 PM · Oct 19, 2022 //

//

Viscount Montgomery of Arkansi
10 hours ago
“Nearly 1 million barrels of oil from the most recent sale, which was announced on June 14 2022, went to Unipec America, Inc. Unipec is a Houston-based subsidiary of Sinopec, an oil company owned by the Chinese government.”

DonR Viscount Montgomery of Arkansi
10 hours ago
Virtually 100% of the oil they bought wound up in China's SPR, because they understand why having a bunch of oil handy is a good idea. As far as why, well 10% for the big guy comes to mind.

Gordian Knot News is now up to 100 some posts. They range in importance from fundamental to trivial; in writing quality from pretty good to tech manualese. But it is impossible to figure out either importance or readability from the title.

So I've prepared a list of links, which groups the posts by subject and gives them a grade. The same post can show up multiple times.

A means you must read this to stay in the choir.

B means you should read the piece.

C means read this if you have nothing better to do.

D means don't waste your time.

In many cases, there is a very similar PDF on the Flop Book site, in which case I have also included a link to display that file.

Fear campaigns have led to tight regulation of nuclear power plants and nuclear waste, which means that to see dry fuel casks you have to jump through hoops with security clearance, over-the-top security checks, supervised visits and so on.

I think we should normalise nuclear waste by putting it in public places that allow people to see it. In the Netherlands, COVRA (The Central Organisation For Radioactive Waste) stores all of the country’s high-level waste and is also a public museum and art gallery that hosts many exhibitions.
Inside COVRA: the art of preservation

On a panel in Paris last year, I called nuclear power plants national monuments, and I believe that they are, because they represent clean air, good jobs, and high-quality lifestyles. I think we should decorate nuclear power stations like the mural on the Cruas-Meysse cooling tower in France. We should celebrate what humankind can achieve with clean energy: a high quality of life for everybody, without the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Ryan Maue
@RyanMaue
·
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Wow. Guyana's president tells the climatists to shove it.
Anas Alhajji
@anasalhajji
A must watch!

This is my hero!

He is Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of Guyana.

#Oil #Guyana
Embedded video https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1773813984015127005
4:46 PM · Mar 29, 2024 //

BBC host Stephen Sackur essentially asked him during an interview isn't it a bad thing for you guys to extract $150 billion of oil and gas off your coast because of the carbon emissions that would ultimately be released into the atmosphere?

Ali's response is just pure gold. He stops Sackur cold and then just rips him a new one. //

First, Ali tells him they have a huge forest in Guyana that basically makes them carbon neutral because of how large it is, "a forest we have kept alive."

Sackur says, "Does that give you the right to release all of this carbon...."

Ali interrupts him, "Does that give you right to lecture us on climate change?"

"I will lecture YOU on climate change!" he said, pointing his finger at Sackur. Then he ripped him to pieces, using their own terms on him.

"Because we have kept this forest alive, that stores 90.5 gigatons of carbon. That you enjoy. That the world enjoys. That you don't pay us for...That you don't see a value in...Guess what? We have the lowest deforestation rate in the world." He said even with the greatest amount they could extract, they would still be "net zero." //

There was a little bit more that didn't make the above clip, where Ali explained the importance of paying for the development of the country.

Sackur complained that Greenpeace said the world needs to keep the majority of the world’s remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

But Ali was not having it.

“You just said that we are 6-feet below sea level. Who is going to pay for the infrastructure? Who is going to pay for the drainage and irrigation? Who is going to pay for the development and advancement of our country?” The President questioned. //

anon-pabn
a minute ago
That is perfect. We need to shame these climate alarmist, hypocrites. Set aside the current arguments, they are telling little Guyana not to drill after the rest of the world has drilled and prospered because of it. What balz! Drill, Baby, Drill. And congrats on your forest....better than any other countries efforts

Nika4h @nikit2h
·
Replying to @crit_architect
A hailstorm this month has damaged thousands of solar panels at the 350-MW Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, “Golf ball”-sized hail fell in the area on March 15, and aerial footage captured from a helicopter offered a glimpse at the extent of the damage
11:05 PM · Mar 26, 2024 //

Corey Thompson @Roughneck2real
·
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.

Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?

Or you the taxpayer?

3:06 PM · Mar 25, 2024 //

Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy watchdog group Power the Future, was even more emphatic about the need to proceed carefully with solar power:

"There's this enormous shell game happening by the Biden administration, by the environmental left, presenting wind and solar as perfectly green, clean, and carbon-neutral," Turner told Fox News Digital. "They use all of these buzzwords. But they're none of that and they also have enormous drawbacks. And it's doing the American people a great disservice to obfuscate these very obvious shortcomings."

He noted that, because solar panels are largely manufactured in China, the destruction of solar farms could be leveraged in geopolitical disputes between the U.S. and China.

"Why would we expect them to race to our aid when our grid is down nationwide, and they are the ones holding the goods that we need to get back up?" Turner said.

The 4,000-acre solar farm called Fighting J's near [Needville, Texas] took a beating during hailstorms on March 16.

"My concern is the hail damage that came through and busted these panels we now have some highly toxic chemicals that could be potentially leaking into our water tables," said Kaminski

"There's numerous makeup in the chemicals on this thing," Fugua said. "The majority of them are cancer-causing."

Consider uranium: the underrated element of awe //

Back to energy density: uranium metal really packs a punch. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead, and 1 kilogram of uranium-235 contains 2 to 3 million times the energy equivalent of 1 kg of oil or coal. This means that a relatively small quantity of nuclear fuel can produce significant amounts of energy through fission. How does uranium compare to other fuels? Calculations vary a little, but through fission, 1 kg of enriched uranium corresponds to roughly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal. That’s a lot of raw material that can be left in the ground. //

A single nuclear fuel pellet in a typical reactor creates about the same amount of energy as one tonne of coal. //

nuclear energy stands its ground. It’s reliable and dependable, with the highest capacity factor of all energy sources, which means that power plants produce maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s almost twice as much as natural gas and coal and nearly three times more than wind and solar farms.

Since less raw material is needed to create the same amount of power, nuclear energy also has a very small land footprint compared to the alternatives. More land is required to mine the coal and dig the metals and minerals used in wind turbines and solar panels out of the ground, and for the sites they are built on, which makes it the most land-efficient source of energy. //

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Cyril R says:
March 3, 2024 at 7:34 AM

A good writeup Michael. A couple of poimts though.

Actually water without precise chemistry control is very corrosive. All reactors require good chemistry control (there’s no such thing as pure helium). Davis Besse shows that borated water isn’t too nice either. And 155 bar borated water at 320C doesn’t qualify as “no hazard”.

Fluoride salts are stable, don’t generate hydrogen, and corrosion control rests on having the salt reducing toward the structural alloy rather than the passivation layer required with water. Fluoride salts also do not cause stress corrosion. So it ends up a simple matter of allowance thicknesses.

I like LWRs. Much better than coal plants. But they are basically glass cannons. The power goes out, the core melts down, generating explosive hydrogen in the process that detonates the containment and spreads radionuclides all over the country. Or someone thinks there is water in the core when there isn’t and the core melts down. A glass cannon like that just begs for military grade bureacracy not unlike a nuclear missile silo. Said bureaucracy is very expensive and results in all manner of bloat that inflated prices and build times. With advanced reactors focussing on inherent safety you at least have a case for a more rational regulatory approach.

A 3000 MWt LWR gets you 1000 MWe. An advanced reactor of 3000 MWt gets you 1500 MWe. That’s a quarter billion bucks a year more revenue.

By the way, 3 outages in 10 years is very good. Solar power stations have 365 outages a year.

During the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) earliest years, the General Advisory Committee was sometimes viewed as a source of discouraging, delaying advice. Made up of selected members of the scientific establishment, the group habitually sought more studies and inserted costly delays aimed at making the perfect next step instead of taking steps that were good enough to support practical learning.

A March 8, 1952 New York Times article titled “Atomic Delay Laid to A.E.C. Advisers: Even Dr. Conant Should Yield to Men With Faith in Goal, Coast Chemists are Told,” provides a well-positioned person’s insights into the disappointingly slow process of developing power reactors. //

Pitzer gave the AEC a backhanded slap by calling it “reasonably efficient by general governmental standards,” and stated that its monopoly in atomic energy had delayed atomic reactor development.

He described how material production reactors, with their complex chemical processing systems, had been built in less than three years during wartime. During that time of rapid progress, he said, if there was a disagreement about which of two courses of action were best, both of them were followed.

In the succeeding years, following either route needed to be preceded by an “exhaustive series of preliminary studies” that added layers of cost to the project. Salaries, overhead and other cost components always accumulate during delays.

He noted how it took six years from the end of the war to build anything that could generate electricity, and even then it was a tiny reactor that produced just 100 kilowatts of power in December, 1951.

“The slowness,” Dr. Pitzer declared, “did not arise from a lack of designs for power reactors which reputable scientists and engineers were willing to build and test. It came rather from an unwillingness of the commission to proceed with any one of these designs until all of the advisers agreed that this was the best design.”

The speaker likened the present setup, with a multitude of committees advising the Atomic Energy Commission, to an automobile equipped with a separate brake lever for every passenger.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed new energy efficiency standards for distribution transformers. Almost all transformers produced under the new standard would feature amorphous steel cores that are, according to the DOE, significantly more energy efficient than those made of traditional, grain-oriented electrical steel. //

Portland General Electric has two critical points in its response to the delusional DOE.

First, Mandating a complete overhaul of transformer production during a severe shortage is basically insane. //

Second, the amorphous core transformers are significantly larger, leading to a host of technical issues that would jack up energy costs even more. //

An example for size comparison is that a 25KVA pole mounted amorphous core transformer is roughly the size of a 50KVA steel core transformer. This illustrates how much larger the new amorphous core transformers would need to be.

…This triggers a host of related issues that utilities would need to address. //

There is only one Grain-Oriented Electrical Steel (GOES) core maker in the United States (Butler Works, owned by Cleveland-Cliffs). That plant says that the rule is placing its operation in jeopardy.

The height of each colored block represents the average electric power consumption per capita. The width is proportional to the regional population, so the area represents regional average electric power generated and used. If citizens of developing countries use as much power as Europeans, electricity demand would rise by about 3,318 GW. Plot courtesy of Geoff Russell.

World electric power use averages 3000 gigawatts (GW).

The height of each colored block represents the average electric power consumption per capita. The width is proportional to the regional population, so the area represents regional average electric power generated and used. If citizens of developing countries use as much power as Europeans, electricity demand would rise by about 3,318 GW. Plot courtesy of Geoff Russell.

We need over 600 GW of new power plants for 2030 electricity demands.

New and growing demands for electric power require more power plants. A large power plant can deliver one GW. The examples below are based on full-time average power demand to meet just these specific new needs, which add up to over 600 GW. Population growth and economic development will add even more demand.

Connecting a billion poor to power: +100 GW

Connecting one billion powerless people with just 100 watts of power — a tenth of US and EU average electricity use.

Desalination: +62 GW

Desalination of 87 million cubic meters of water per year is growing at 8% annually, demanding 3 kWh per cubic meter.

Electric vehicles: +42 GW

Electric vehicle charging

By 2030, 122 million more electric vehicles travel 12,000 miles per year at 4 miles/kWh.

Air conditioning: +100 GW

By 2030 air conditioning demand will be 50% higher than in 2017.

Information technology: +300 GW

Data centers, the internet, and consumer electronics will demand 300 GW more by 2030.

Random US Citizen
7 hours ago edited
I hope the loons win. Because CA deserves it.

On the other hand, maybe Diablo can claim it identifies as a solar plant and ask CA politicians to pay for energy reassignment surgery?

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Green energy policies hold back the developing world, creating a gulf in energy consumption between the West and nations such as Kenya. //

Since most Kenyans rely on physical exertion to accomplish work, rather than machines, it’s useful to understand that an average person at rest produces 100 watts of energy, with most of that going to operate the brain, heart, and other vital organs. Heavy labor for several minutes can be sustained while generating 300-400 watts, while a professional athlete might produce 2,000 watts for short periods of time.

Thus, a person working in a field to tend crops over an 8.5-hour day might generate 2.1 kWh of power — a little less than the energy in one cup of crude oil. So, when thinking of the energy used by the DeVore family in a day, 6.9 gallons of crude oil, that’s the equivalent energy output of about 120 people doing physical labor in a day. //

There’s not a lot of time in the Machogu family’s day to watch Netflix or play video games, assuming they even had the electricity to do so. And there are no private jets or Dubai resorts for either family. The elites flying in to discuss the fate of energy consumers are perfectly willing for the poor to make sacrifices to their political whims. But they have no idea how the rest of us live — or do, and don’t care. //

The UN wants to fight climate change by taxing Americans and Europeans to send the cash to corrupt Third World leaders, while building a few trophy wind and solar projects to provide unreliable electricity to the masses. This will neither change global temperature (whatever that means) nor lift the 6.2 billion people of the planet’s 8.1 billion who live in developing nations up from poverty.

Americans use a lot of energy. It supports our high productivity. We make a lot of stuff, and we provide a lot of services with energy underpinning that productivity. The average American produced about $69.70 worth of goods and services every working hour with the aid of machines and energy in 2023 (in 2017 PPP dollars). //

The average Kenyan consumes 1/44 the energy an American does. This results in a per capita output of about $4.90 for every hour worked, about 1/14 of that in America, after adjusting for Kenya’s lower cost of living.