Earth Hour headache for power suppliers

The CO2 isn't relevant, that scam is old news, has had its day and is close to dead in the water.

Shifting loads to off peak has to help increase the efficiency of the existing power stations. It also has to help prevent the costs needed in building new ones.

If we need them we need them then let's build them. If we want to remain somewhere in the first world & have any sort of living standards, cheap electricity is vital.

That's true to a point, in the sense that it allows stations that were not built as baseload stations to run for more of the time, and therefore more efficiently use their capital. Thought there's a limit to that, because they're not usually designed to run 24/7.

It defers it to some degree, but the more you run what were designed as non-baseload plants, the faster they wear out.

A more signficant reason for shifting loads to off-peak times is that it reduces the transmission infrastructure required - though that is largely dictated by airconditioning loads on hot days. Of course, it helps if people aren't running their pool pumps at the same time.

If people don't want coal, then we should cut to the chase and build nuclear.

The problem is that the Greenies keep feeding the disinformation line to the effect that baseload power can be supplied by solar and windfarms, which it can't, quite apart from the cost.

Sylvia.

Actually solar, wind, tidal, geothermal etc *are* base load power, just not very reliable ones! You need FAR more standby generation like gas generators to cope with periods where solar, wind, tidal etc, are going against you. Geothermal is more reliable however and used fairly extensively in NZ.

MrT.

**No Sylvia, that's YOUR disinformation. Keep sprouting the bullshit though. There are other non-polluting (zero CO2 emission) systems available that can easily do base load capacity. You've been informed of this in the past (many times). Do you think that we've forgotten already?

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Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au

Exactly. We should be eking out every last watt from the existing base load generators to reduce the total CO2 per watt, 'most' is not the best practise.

Our economy is driven by price, ask anyone if they want to pay more for electricity for some dubious CO2 benefit and see how far you get !

It is ludicrous to increase investment in expensive peak-load generators when simply shifting demand to off-peak increases existing plant efficiency.

Anyway, are you proposing nuclear power instead of coal to replace the base load generators ?

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Global warming Greenie freezes to death !

Doubly ironic that the report came from Punta Arenas, where global warming has been in reverse gear for the last 100 years.

Look at the graph !!! I wonder how the AGW faithfull can explain how Punta Arenas shows a clear cooling trend for the last 100 years... Download the station data (.txt file) and plot the trend with Excel if you don't believe me!

Not much of a "clear cooling trend" from that graph, but certainly does not support GW!

MrT.

Oh great, so we can just jump on to another peak-oil like gravy train that will eventually end! How long do you think the cheap nuke fuel is going to last? It'll be cheap for you, but not your grandkids. Where are they going to put the waste long-term?, and how much is that going to cost? (Hint, no one's actually figured that one out yet)

Renewable is the only sensible way to go.

There are other forms of renewable energy too you know. Invest properly in more research and then combine them all and it's quite possible to tranistion fully to renewable over time.

Dave.

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