Refuting bullshit

Nuclear is nice. Until it isn’t.

Where did those figures come from?

1 Like

Thanks, I have a subscription to Forbes but missed that article. My personal life cycle cost for solar is about $.06/kwh. Works for me. Net metering pays back a little but that is not even figured into my life cycle cost. I did not have to finance which is a big part of utility figures. The money boys that produce nothing but usury cost alot. Were a federal energy bank as mentioned in the article to be established it would help. At one time the USA and some states were giving tax breaks to those who installed solar. Florida was one but the electric companies through their lobbyists got that stopped as they saw the potential revenues going down. It’s all about the profits for those guys.

1 Like

And I just learned something today. . . .

I reckon back when 99% of all electric clocks used synchronous motors tied to line frequency this would have been solved a lot sooner.

Very much so. Back then, Tito was around to keep the Serbs and Croats from acting up, and I very much doubt he would have been tolerant of this kind of silliness.

1 Like

Back then nobody would have dreamed of letting it slide – they always kept the grid within one second of cumulative correct time.

New Zealand is not badly placed for renewables. Most of our power is hydroelectric with geothermal and a growing wind generating segment. Wind generation makes sense because we are a long skinny country lying across the roaring forties and the frantic fifties and nothing beats keeping water in the dam until you need it for peak load.
I keep explaining to people that wind generation has an ongoing cost, the wind generator and a shipboard crane are in many ways similar in construction. Solar power has its place where the load is during the day such as schools etc.

Tito may have had his faults, but he was largely a benevolent dictator, and did keep the Muslims and Christians from killing each other during his tenure. . . .

Many years ago, I worked a salvage job in a very small village on the southern tip of the Yucatan called Xcalak. For my first trips there, there wasn’t even a paved road to it. At one time, it was a fairly thriving community, but a strong hurricane wiped it off of the map, along with the local powerplant and any infrastructure connecting it to the Mexican grid. Most homes had natural gas refrigerators. There were one or two wind turbines that worked variably to supply the local grid, but the rest of the inhabitants had either small personal wind turbines or small solar arrays. Most houses and businesses would not use any electricity during the day so as to allow the batteries to charge up. For there, it worked. Most buildings were open air to allow the sea breezes to move through. Hot? Yup. Humid? Yup. . . but most dealt with it. There was/is(?) a community of US expats that lived there, too. Not sure the rest of the world is willing to live like that, though.

3 Likes

A GWH of electricity generated by renewables is a GWH of fossil fuel saved which can be used as a raw material for making plastics and lubricants. So on the face of it a good thing.

The only grit in the oil is that renewables are unreliable so that one needs huge surplus generating capacity from a number of alternative sources to have a reasonable chance one may be able to delver when needed. Which in turn means a massive waste of investment in machines that don’t do anything for most of the time.That in itself is an environmentally wasteful approach.

1 Like

That sounds like the offshore oil drilling business off and on for the last 30 years.

1 Like