Back to home page

DOS ain't dead

Forum index page

Log in | Register

Search:  
Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view

Power plants (Miscellaneous)

posted by mceric, Germany, 04.03.2022, 09:42

> But you cannot rely just only on renewables. In the autumn and winter, when
> the sun is almost behind the clouds and wind may stop blow... you just have
> to kick in gas power planst or buy ele. from your east neighbours.
That is what our energy lobby also likes to say, but it reminds me of a simulation by energy experts several years ago in context of slowly shutting down coal plants. They found out that even in a year with worst case weather, they could have immediately shut down 6 GW of coal plants and simply use more gas in the few moments where there was neither enough wind nor enough sun. And by now, we do have shutdown some more coal and nuclear plants and built some more renewable ones.

Regarding grid stability, we already had claims that the sudden change in sunlight during one of the eclipses in this century would cause a horrible blackout because of all the supply fluctuations. But instead, they just needed a few more experts to be present in the control rooms to press a few more buttons than usual.

So I am not overly worried about this. However, we do have a lot of fossil fuels in heating and for warm water and we certainly cannot just tell everybody to switch to electric fan heaters and water cookers for their houses and showers.

As you already say, it would take many years to build more nuclear plants. By that time, for the same price, you can build a pile of renewable plants and even energy storage facilities. This is all not very surprising, but alas our fossil industry has, in the last decades, been able to convince politics to slow down the change.

Also, nuclear is not economically viable. The UK had to promise to pay twice the market value for electricity to make sure a new block in one of their nuclear plants got built. And right now, home owners in Germany who sell their solar energy would be paid more if they were able to trade on the free energy market than when using the government "supported" prices which were originally meant to bridge the gap between the cost for creating renewable versus fossil energies years ago when solar and wind were expensive and coal and gas were cheap.

In that context, you probably have heard that Germany has an agreement to pay companies to stop producing coal energy by 2038. I think that by that time, they would have stopped anyway, because they would not longer be able to compete. So it is ironic that we even pay them to stop "early" while they would have stopped earlier by themselves.

PS about people fighting in wars:

> they though that evil west are attacking us
Tricking people into thinking that they are fighting in a "good" war is probably a widespread problem, but it depresses me that humans love to form a mob to fight against "strangers" even without that. The we versus others hate is a part of human nature. Apparently russia also sent chechens, to get around the feeling that brothers have to fight against brothers, hoping that chechens and ukrainians feel more like strangers for each other?

---
FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

Thread locked
 

Complete thread:

Back to the forum
Board view  Mix view
22049 Postings in 2034 Threads, 396 registered users, 152 users online (0 registered, 152 guests)
DOS ain't dead | Admin contact
RSS Feed
powered by my little forum