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MtnGoat
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 9:19 am 
Because using boutique sources that are not 24/7/365 requires sources which can do so, raising the cost to include *two* power systems, one which works all the time, and one which does not. An incredible waste of money, footprint, and resources. Source A plus semisource B is not cheaper than A. It does not have a smaller footprint. It does not use less resources. It's a waste of everything involved.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 9:58 am 
RandyHiker wrote:
Here is a paper that analyzes those assumptions. Using Germany as a model for solar is good if the goal is to discourage solar development as Germany as some of the worse solar potential. http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/04/whats-the-eroi-of-solar/ Also your assertion that solar generation capacity must include storage increases the financial and energy costs, but many GW of solar and wind capacity have been added and produce useful capacity without it. Is this based on "one solution" type thinking ? E.g. any form of generation must be able to provide 24/7/365 energy independently? Why do seem to exclude using a multiple sources strategy ?
Naam has already lost the plot by the end of the first paragraph. Meaningful EROI comparisons are based on the entire system, not just on components. Of course you can put some solar panels on your roof and derive some benefit from them, and it might even be cost- and energy efficient, especially if you live in a state or country with high electricity costs. But the majority of solar energy produced in the US is already utility scale, and those installations pretty much always have natural gas backup to deal with the intermittency issue. How much intermittent generation are we going to install if we can't rely on it? Obviously not much or we wouldn't already be providing fossil-fuel backup or looking for storage options. So those energy (and $) expenditures become part of the equation for renewable-energy EROI. Otherwise just build the gas plant and forget the wind & solar.

John
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MtnGoat
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 10:03 am 
Build the gas, nukes, coal... forget the wind and solar. We left them behind for very good, truly empirical reasons.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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drm
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 10:30 am 
Parked Out wrote:
Granted, if people are willing (or can be coerced) to pay for it, you can add a fair amount of wind & solar to the grid before these problems become unmanageable, but the question is why? Intermittent energy is a dead-end road. Better to bide your time, don't squander your resources, educate the public on nuclear and end up with something that has a viable future. Barring some new green deal fiasco, the amount of wind & solar the US would install over the next decade wouldn't make any difference to the climate anyway. We'd be better off to continue the transition to natural gas.
Granted, if people are willing (or can be coerced) to pay for it, you can add a fair amount of nuclear to the grid before waste and accidents cause it to be closed down, but the question is why? Nuclear energy is a dead-end road. Better to bide your time . . . Stopping there because we have no time to bide. We are so far behind the curve responding to climate change and waiting for the next promised nuclear technology miracle just isn't in the cards. Were we to increase the number of operating nuclear plants by a factor of ten, accidents like Fukushima will become regular events. Because once we start building that many, there will be lemons in the mix that will be built badly, just like about everything else we humans do. Wind and solar have their issues to be sure, but multi-billion dollar accidents that take decades to even try and clean up isn't one of them. And in the end, that's why they will win. The various problems with wind and solar are inconveniences, not mega-disasters. Of course, for those who think that climate change either isn't happening or that the projected impacts are way overblown, I can easily see how you would have different priorities.

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MtnGoat
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 12:01 pm 
Having your standard of living devastated by use of energy sources which cannot even power their own production is more than an inconvenience.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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Randito
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 1:38 pm 
Parked Out wrote:
Otherwise just build the gas plant and forget the wind & solar.
This approach makes sense if only taking into consideration financial aspects. It seems that gas generation capacity is likely more cost effective than building battery capacity. Building solar capacity in addition allows gas consumption and emissions to be reduced. In the southern USA peak energy demands are daytime air conditioning-- which solar is well suited to providing.

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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 7:43 pm 
drm wrote:
Stopping there because we have no time to bide. We are so far behind the curve responding to climate change and waiting for the next promised nuclear technology miracle just isn't in the cards. Were we to increase the number of operating nuclear plants by a factor of ten, accidents like Fukushima will become regular events. Because once we start building that many, there will be lemons in the mix that will be built badly, just like about everything else we humans do. Wind and solar have their issues to be sure, but multi-billion dollar accidents that take decades to even try and clean up isn't one of them. And in the end, that's why they will win. The various problems with wind and solar are inconveniences, not mega-disasters.
Germany's Energiewende has the twin goals of phasing out nuclear energy and going all-in on renewables. France made a quick & efficient transition to 3rd generation nuclear. Now France has nearly the cheapest electricity in Europe and Germany the most expensive, and France's CO2 emissions per capita are half that of Germany's. You believe we have no time to waste in addressing climate change and yet you still want to follow Germany's model of decarbonization? How does that make any sense? Has there ever even been a nuclear energy related radiation injury in the US? Nuclear is far & away safer than most other energy sources but apparently still too risky to help mitigate the (supposedly) existential threat of climate change. Better to push for massive deployment of wind & solar with an EROI of 2. We already know it won't work but at least it won't mess with our ideology.

John
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Randito
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PostTue Mar 19, 2019 9:16 pm 
MtnGoat wrote:
Having your standard of living devastated
A bit of hyperbole eh?

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thunderhead
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PostWed Mar 20, 2019 9:16 am 
Quote:
Humidity can drive both enhanced convection, as with the tropical thunderstorm theory I mentioned before, and also affect the radiation budget in different ways if clouds form.
True. But cloud mass is not changing much, relative humidity remaining nearly constant. Clouds also have a mixed impact, depending on their time of day, location, altitude, etc. In combination, the cloud feedback is probably negative but almost certainly smaller than pure water vapor feedback. Perhaps "almost certainly" is a better indicator of our confidence level with that one. I do agree that the exact magnitude of the positive water vapor feedback, in its entirety, is not known.
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so does indeed allow for more absorption at lower elevations.
Thats all I was getting at. More rapid absorption at lower elevations=increased greenhouse effect. Saturation be damned.

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PostWed Mar 20, 2019 11:20 am 
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The solution to intermittency now is not storage, it is transmission. Plenty of studies show that it is blowing or shining somewhere in the USA enough to power us
Nah, you can get a wintertime high pressure that knocks down wind to most of the country while solar is useless during long nights and low-angle days. Then you are looking at nights where you are asking a couple windy scraps of terrain to power the entire nation. Even if that could happen, you'd be installing 100s of gigawatts of high end transmission across the entire continent, and you'd need to build an entire continents worth of generation in a couple small spots. This would require massive over-building to the tune of 1-2 orders of magnitude of increased cost, to maintain any sort of reliability.

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MtnGoat
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PostThu Mar 21, 2019 2:14 pm 
Claims claimed to be scientific used as the basis for massive interventions into the rights and lives of innocent citizens. But at least at the cost of trillions across decades. There is zero excuse not to expect the science claimed to be science, to stand up to scientific scrutiny at all levels. If you are actually doing real science and your arguments are real science, you will be able to defend it openly and honestly, and you will win the argument...scientifically.
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A massive coalition of environmental organizations, activists, and think-tank leaders signed a letter to President Donald Trump supporting the proposed Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS), as well as the work of Trump climate and national security adviser Dr. William Happer of Princeton University. The campaign, which comes amid fierce establishment resistance to re-examining government “climate science,” also backs an independent scientific review of the increasingly dubious claims made in federal climate reports. Analysts say this battle will be crucial in establishing the credibility of government climate science — or the lack thereof.
Actual science does not need to 'resist' detailed scrutiny. There is no downside...if you are actually following science and proper method, and adherence to basic principles involved is your goal.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
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drm
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PostThu Mar 21, 2019 6:55 pm 
Like I said, no technical issues, but it will cost a lot and be a huge political problem. I'm not suggesting we try and build that much transmission right now, but Portugal just produced 103% of it's electricity consumption using wind and hydro in March. They aren't able to do that every month. But they did so for one month. Of course the US is not Portugal, but this is not some future plan, they just did it. If a country of 10 million people can do that now for a month, who knows what we can do in a decade or two from now. Btw, you can find one of the proposals for 100% renewables here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/carbon-free-world/ I'm not going to suggest that that plan is widely accepted. It is highly controversial. I'm not going to argue the pros and cons of it because I don't have the time to dig in. I do have a few hiking trips in my plan. agree.gif My real point is that we don't know exactly what will be possible in 10 or 20 years, probably more than some people think, though.

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PostThu Mar 21, 2019 7:27 pm 
drm wrote:
Like I said, no technical issues, but it will cost a lot and be a huge political problem. I'm not suggesting we try and build that much transmission right now, but Portugal just produced 103% of it's electricity consumption using wind and hydro in March. They aren't able to do that every month. But they did so for one month. Of course the US is not Portugal, but this is not some future plan, they just did it. If a country of 10 million people can do that now for a month, who knows what we can do in a decade or two from now.
"For two 70-hour time spans during the month, all electricity was supplied by renewables, primarily from wind turbines and hydropower. The rest of the month’s energy came predominantly from renewables with fossil fuels filling in supply gaps." Hydropower isn't intermittent so it's in a completely separate class from wind & solar, and 103% is all well and good but the far more relevant number is: what's the least amount of demand that was met by Portugal's crappy intermittent renewables? Because that's where storage + additional generation or backup from a reliable source is required. And that's when you drive EROI into the low single digits, making your intermittent renewables more or less pointless, or at least so ineffective at decarbonization that you really have to question the wisdom of anyone who would advocate for such a thing.

John
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PostThu Mar 21, 2019 7:48 pm 
drm wrote:
Btw, you can find one of the proposals for 100% renewables here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/carbon-free-world/
This is largely bs and unfortunately the general quality of what we get from National Geographic these days. For some actual relevant science: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722 Back-of-the-envelope calculations for the cost of 100% wind & solar + battery backup for both California and Germany: http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries-included/

John
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Randito
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PostFri Mar 22, 2019 9:48 am 
Parked Out wrote:
drm wrote:
Btw, you can find one of the proposals for 100% renewables here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/carbon-free-world/
This is largely bs and unfortunately the general quality of what we get from National Geographic these days. For some actual relevant science: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722 Back-of-the-envelope calculations for the cost of 100% wind & solar + battery backup for both California and Germany: http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries-included/
With current battery technology going 100% is expensive. You keep hammering on the 100% option, but haven't bothered to address whether using solar and wind sources to provide electrons when available and thus reduce oil, gas and coal usage and emissions. Perhaps you don't have a good argument against that, so just avoid that issue.

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