Thursday, August 31, 2023
New Nukes
Gradually replacing coal plants with new nuclear facilities will save hundreds of billions of dollars compared to attempting to replace them with wind, solar, and battery storage and provide a superior reliability value to North Carolinians.
Xcel Energy should be taking Duke’s approach in Minnesota, but the company is foolishly planning to shut down Sherco 2, a 680 MW coal-fired power plant in Becker, at the end of this year. Instead of planning to replace this capacity with new nuclear, Xcel hopes to replace it with solar panels and expensive battery pilot projects.
Duke Energy should be applauded for coming to its senses on nuclear power. Hopefully, Minnesota utilities will wise up soon.
Via John Hinderaker.
War on Math
It is an inconvenient truth that various ethnic groups do not, on average, perform equally well on objective measures of intellectual accomplishment. Mathematics is particularly problematic, in that results are hard to fudge–basically, answers are either right or wrong.And,
Liberals have responded to this conundrum by dumbing down one discipline after another. Their theory is that if they lower standards far enough, they will arrive at a point where racial and ethnic differences disappear. I doubt that this strategy can ever actually work, but the result in mathematics is especially embarrassing, as the inevitable decline in performance is hard to hide.
Mathematics “plays a role” in “power structures and privileges” because ethnic groups do not, on the average, perform equally. How those discrepancies might relate to the number of hours spent doing math homework is a forbidden field of inquiry.
Power Density
You’ve no doubt heard them: renewables are cheap and getting cheaper, wind and solar energy are the future, and the main reason that conservatives and knuckle-dragging rural landowners are opposing massive renewable projects all across America is that they don’t understand “science.”
That’s the spin. Here’s the reality: the conspiracy against wind and solar is one of basic math and simple physics. It’s not conservatives who are wrong on “science,” it’s liberals like Krugman and his myriad allies in the climate claque who refuse to recognize (or even discuss) the physical limits on our energy and power networks.
The shape and size of our energy systems are not being determined by political beliefs about climate change. Instead, those systems are ruled by the Iron Law of Power Density which says: the lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity. This can easily be seen in the graphic above. It includes a screen grab from a 2021 International Energy Agency report on the mineral intensity of various methods of electricity generation. The mineral intensity of offshore wind, including huge amounts of copper and zinc, is shocking: roughly 15,400 kilograms per megawatt of generation capacity. That is roughly 13 times more than the amount needed for natural gas-fired generation (1,148 kg) and six times more than what’s needed for a coal plant (2,479 kg).
The Iron Law of Power Density explains why Siemens Energy just reported a $2.4 billion loss on its wind business in the latest quarter. It explains why offshore wind projects here in the U.S. and in Europe, are being canceled left and right. It also explains why, all around the world, rural communities and landowners are fighting back against the landscape-blighting encroachment of massive wind and solar projects.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Power density is perhaps the most important, and least understood, metric in physics. Power density is the essential metric for understanding our energy and power systems. Indeed, the global history of energy over the last 250 years, from the steam engines designed by Newcomen and Watt to the latest nuclear reactor designs and computer chips, can be grasped by seeing them through the lens of power density.
Via John Hinderaker.
We're Losing
China installs core module of world's first commercial small nuclear reactor.
Imagine — using truly helpful and innovative technology strategically — we used to be good at that, didn’t we? Now the United States focus is on demanding rainbow flags and solar panels on African huts while allowing climate cultists and social justice warriors to turn our own country into a Third World nation.
Gosh, who do you pick? The dumpy gnome lady with a check and a homily, who requires you to give up your fertilizer, farm tractor and the one lightbulb you have in order to cash it, so you can buy food instead of grow it?
Or the friendly looking Winnie-the-Pooh fellow, who comes in and builds a small nuclear reactor so you can have 6 lightbulbs, a computer, cable TV, and recharge your cellphone, spares you the moral lectures, and doesn’t seem to ask for much at all in return?
California's Grid is in Good Hands
Does anyone see the problem here? California’s power grid is destabilizing for a number of reasons, mainly from nonsensical and hypocritical public policies. Chief among those are (a) a refusal to use scalable power sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear) for demand at current levels, and (b) forcing Californians to transfer their vehicles to the grid rather than use gasoline for independent power, thus escalating demand on the grid dramatically.
This proposal doesn’t solve either of those problems. It instead creates a kind of three-card Monty with the grid — shifting power to the vehicles, and then pulling it back when the state decides to apply it elsewhere. It’s only an illusion of a solution; no additional power gets created. PG&E and the state would simply confiscate that power for their own uses as they see fit. Technically, the grid would operate more efficiently if it never charged the EVs at all, considering the inevitable power losses that would take place in regional “bidirectional charging.”
Also,
This proposal would cost consumers more, shorten the lives of their already-too-expensive vehicles, with the only benefit to consumers being a refund for power they bought to charge the car the first time — which they would have to spend again to charge it after PG&E drains it. I’d bet that consumers won’t even get a full refund for that power use, and that PG&E ends up profiting from the charge/discharge/recharge cycle. Amazingly, neither Bloomberg nor ABC7 even thinks about that issue, let alone investigates it to any extent at all. Bloomberg just passes along the happy talk about A Billion Dollars In Savings!! without wondering how consumers will use their cars without buying the same power twice with those “savings” — and likely more.
The EPA Wants to Kill You
I wrote here about the EPA’s proposed new CO2 regulations on power plants that would devastate the electrical grid. This public comment, drafted by American Experiment’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling and filed on Tuesday, explains why the rule is so destructive. It will mandate a grid that is heavily dependent on solar and wind installations, and therefore subject to devastating blackouts. If the EPA set out to disrupt our economy and make our lives miserable, and sometimes dangerous—if the rule goes into effect, people will die—it could hardly do a better job.
Appalling Delusion
In 2016, shortly before his death, at age 46 from cancer, David J.C. MacKay, a physics professor at the University of Cambridge, said wind turbines are “a waste of money.” Eight years earlier, MacKay had published Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, a remarkable book that hammered home the land-use impacts of renewables. (It’s available for free download.) MacKay, who recognized nuclear must be part of any effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, calculated that wind energy needs about 700 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as a fracking site. In the same 2016 interview, MacKay called the idea of relying solely on renewables an “appalling delusion.” He continued, “There’s so much delusion and I think it’s so dangerous for humanity that people allow themselves to have these delusions that they’re willing to not think carefully about the numbers and the realities, and the laws of physics and the realities of engineering... humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic, and the laws of physics.”
Via John Hinderaker.
Roadblock
The alleged transition to “green” energy is destined to crash and burn. A modern society can’t meet its needs for electricity with wind and solar sources that produce nothing a large majority of the time, supplemented by wholly notional “batteries.” The race to disaster is being accelerated by government-mandated use of electric vehicles, which will put impossible burdens on an already-inadequate grid. So it becomes a question of where the “green” dream will break down first.
EVs may turn out to be the green Waterloo.
Fantasyland is Powered by Slave Labor
We would all love to live in a world with plentiful, reliable, and inexpensive energy produced by the sun, charging our nearly silent and comfortable electric vehicles that go 600 miles per charge and recharge in 7 minutes, but the fact is that we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where we have to make difficult choices between suboptimal choices. We try to maximize benefits, minimize costs, and ensure that we don’t sacrifice morality and ethics while doing so.
The only way to make these choices rationally is through an honest evaluation of all the variables, not overhyped rhetoric that exaggerates and diminishes facts in order to create a false narrative.
That is the MO of the carbon-free fanatics.
The push for maximizing solar and wind power is being pushed by fanatics who, often, benefit from producing solar and wind power infrastructure. More nuclear and hydropower, backed up by natural gas peaking power plants is the most rational generating system we can build right now. Keeping coal plants open while we get there and in the places where it makes the most sense is also rational, although I am less enthusiastic about the long-term future of coal than many of my friends.
We need to stop the hype and focus on practicalities. Unfortunately, the Left and the rest of us have competing and incompatible goals. The Left is pushing “degrowth,” and less power production is actually a goal of theirs. Fewer people, less consumption. Most of us want an expanding economy and technological progress.
Closing reliable power plants makes sense if you want degrowth, and “renewable” energy is a good way to convince people you are replacing that power-generating capacity without really doing so. It creates an incremental but inevitable reduction in total production.
In the meantime, though, the Uighurs are paying a high price for the “moral” principles of the envirocommunists.
It's All About Behavior
In May 2020, the world was turned upside down when a massively-overdosed George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street while waiting for an ambulance that could have saved his life. The narrative that Minnesota’s criminal justice system was biased against blacks immediately took hold, encouraged by Minnesota’s own state and local officials.
In response to that narrative, states and local jurisdictions across America, and even around the world, enacted “reforms” that handcuffed law enforcement and favored criminals. “Defund the police” became a mantra, and Black Lives Matter, the source of many claims of law enforcement’s discrimination against blacks, raked in tens of millions from corporate donors.
But was the narrative of racial discrimination true? Liberals supported it by comparing the percentage of blacks in the general population of states like Minnesota against the percentage who are caught up in the criminal justice system through arrest, prosecution, conviction and ultimately incarceration. The fact that blacks are over-represented in the system—indisputably true—was taken as irrefutable evidence that our criminal justice system is racist.
There is, of course, another obvious possibility—that blacks are over-represented as criminal defendants and prison inmates precisely because they are over-represented as perpetrators of serious crimes. Over the years, Heather Mac Donald has been especially prominent in pointing out this inconvenient truth.
Tuesday, August 01, 2023
Nuke News
New nuclear reactor enters commercial operation, first in US in 30 years.
David Strom:
I am convinced that most environmentalists have stood in the way of deploying nuclear power not because they fear it—coal plants and coal production kills more people in a year than nuclear power ever has—but because they oppose energy abundance. Degrowth is the watchword—fewer people consuming less is the goal, not cleaner growth with abundance.
That’s why you see power plants getting closed and replaced with less generation produced by unreliable energy. The electric car future is more about eliminating most cars themselves—obviously so given that the environmentalists oppose expanding generation to meet electricity demands. And forget about putting in anything like enough transmission to “electrify everything.”
America should have gone nuclear decades ago, but alarmists have slowed both the construction of existing designs and slowed the development of better and cheaper designs. We will be paying a price for this for decades to come.
