Most importantly for circulating cooling water.
The cooling ponds, for "used" fuel, too, have to circulate for years before the material can move into dry storage.
Which, incidentally, still isn't happening...
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
The benefit to the utility from load shedding is that it reduces the peak power production requirements. Utilities like to keep their generators running at >90% of capacity so that there's no "wasted" capacity. Ideally, if the utility can see a totally flat demand curve, they can tailor their production capacity (and investment in generation capacity) to exactly what is needed. That won't happen, but they're trying. In theory, some of the savings in not needing to upgrade generating capacity to handle peak loads is passed on the consumer.
Yep. Here's how the People's Republic of Santa Cruz did it for the city hall and police department: See photo about half way down the page. Only $2.5 million to build it.
I skimmed the results and rounded off the numbers. I didn't pass judgment as to the source of the info. It seems to me that the size and capacity of the battery has not been nailed down quite yet and will probably be offered in various sizes. See list of Tesla electric cars at:
Sounds good to me. My "Acar" app for my Android phone thing says my gas costs are $0.153/mile for my 2001 Subaru , so I would get even more benefit. However, since mid 2009, my gas consumption as only been about $7,000, which might barely cover the down payment on a new Tesla. I like a better and faster return on my investments.
Anyway, we were talking about the size of the solar array necessary to give your shiny new Tesla Model S or 3 a full charge in one day, and not the economics of the purchase. If that were the case, you should throw in the maintenance and insurance costs of your existing pickup and your prospective Tesla.
Sigh. What's the closest technology to an autonomous vehicle? It's called a train. Something similar to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which could be operated totally automatically, but isn't for various political and technical reasons. Now, project the use, abuse, politics, and infrastructure presently used for BART into an autonomous vehicle. Never mind safety as that will always be a problem. Just think about the different ways it can be abused because that is what will attract the users. Got a delivery service that currently deals with marginal drivers and sky high insurance bills? Just replace them with an autonomous delivery vehicle. Tired of waiting for other autonomous vehicles that use CSMA collision avoidance system to decide who should next lurch forward through the intersection? Just hack the control system so that you're always first. Do you expect a "fair share" algorithm when there's any type of contention? Hardly. My guess(tm) is that officials and VIP's will vote themselves a priority exception, exactly like parking exception permits and cards are currently deployed. Etc. Spend some time thinking of all the different ways you can abuse an autonomous vehicle and then try to convince yourself (and me) that the driverless utopia will be all that you expect. I'm not very optimistic.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I wonder if we could economically rocket the nuclear waste into the sun.
That makes my point. No power made the birth rate go up. When there's no sports on TV, people need something to do.
Unless you are into genocide or forced sterilization, the best way to limit the birth rate is civilization and education and electrification. Most of the advanced world now has birth rates below replacement.
NG does all that and is cheaper than using electricity.
True. When you have too many customers, raise your prices until enough go away.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Obviously, I've failed to make my point. So, I'll spell it out for you. The effort by ecologists does not seem to be to save any birds from a premature demise. Spending substantial amounts of money on saving 3500 birds per year, while ignoring the plight of 2 to 4 billion birds per year, would seem to demonstrate that adequately. So, this is not a study or crusade to save the birds. It's a public relations and sympathy attack on the Ivanpah power plant with the intent of making the plant operators look bad because they kill birds.
Hint: When you see someone micro manage some minor problem, it pays to take a step back, look at the big picture, and see what they're intentionally ignoring. It's usually something really big. Politicians are doing that in grand style this election year, by concentrating on trivial distractions, and ignoring everything of importance.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
H2 is even better. but there aren't H2 formations waiting to be fracked.
Waste disposal is a scientific non-issue. There are lots of ways to do it, including burning it again to make more energy. It's another greenie choke point.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Worse than Chernobyl? Three mile island? Fukushima?
Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of nuclear power.
Shit happens. We make estimates, calculations, prototypes, and test them. Inevitably, something ugly happens that tells us what we missed. So we investigate and fix the problem.
The NTSB is still immediately on site at every plane crash. You know that the reason is to make air transportation safer. Don't you?
Do you have a better way to prevent all accidents regardless of the technology? If we take the standpoint that some new approach/technology is dangerous in some way and refuse to continue, what does that leave us?
Maybe no central control, but certainly central oversight, and a central brokerage to make sure nothing goes wrong or awry. That's suppose to be the basis of the "smart grid".
Here's how California does it at the wholesale level:
Incidentally, you can track daily supply and demand at:
There's also an app for that:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Give that a little thought and you'll realize it isn't right. Why do you think that is? Consider statistics.
They weren't offering any lower rates.
If you can control the pulses that all converge on one power rail it works. Try to control 100,000 thermostats and the only result is some homes get colder than they would be.
A better analogy is the electrons in a wire. They are quantum, but with the huge number of carriers, current appears to be continuous.
Hardly. In the real world on a cold winter night, nearly every townhouse in the cluster which has the same underrated heat pump will be running flat out, all night long. Duty cycle that to reduce your peak consumption and homes get cold.
And meanwhile homes get cold.
Controlling some things like not running a washer or dryer on cold nights, etc would be great. But the duty cycled thermostat is a bad idea that isn't workable. The heat needs to come on when the thermostat says to or the house won't stay at the right temperature.
When I was a kid we had a second meter for the hot water. It had a timer that cut off the heater every day during peak time and we got a lower rate for that. The electric company took it out, not us. Obviously they didn't think it was a good idea anymore.
-- Rick C
I don't mind lending Tesla my money and getting it back by driving their car. I have to buy a car anyway. My real concern is waiting until late
2017 which will likely become 2018 since I didn't get in line a couple of months ago.Yes, I agree that you are not very optimistic.
-- Rick C
Not naive but rather simplistic. Despite the obvious problems with genocide, ethnic cleansing, the final solution, and tribalism, the simplistic solution seems to still be quite popular.
Sounds good, but I have a different view. What percentage of the US workforce does anything that is productive? By productive, I mean is somehow essential in the conversion of a resource into a product. I don't have a good number, but methinks it's quite small. These days, the bulk of our economy is based on a "service economy" which adds value, moves things around, and of course provides services, such as entertainment, repairs, design, inspection, etc. It's very much an inverted pyramid, with natural resources at the bottom, and the GUM (great unwashed masses) perched precariously at the top. IMNHO, we have too many people dependent on the productivity of a disproportionate few. Take away some of those from the top of the inverted pyramid, and precarious pyramid will balance a bit better.
I burn about 2 cords of firewood per year, which cost me last year about $630. I also burn some scrap, pallets, dead fall, and debris, which costs me nothing. Assuming a 9 month burn season (Sept thru May), that's $70/month. What's your approximate electric bill for the same time period?
You might be correct about the cost. I'm going to need a fancy new wood burner, with a catalytic converter, high efficiency rating, an EPA sticker, and assorted safety devices shortly. I'm also going to need a permit to cut wood, another permit to haul wood, and documented proof that the wood came from a permitted dealer or my own property. Somehow, I suspect that the county fails to appreciate residents who burn firewood. I haven't looked into the cost of propane (we don't have natural gas in the neighborhood) but I suspect it might be cheaper.
Oddly, I've never experienced that problem.
Good question. I certainly have more spare time doing repair, but my gross income is much less. However, so are my expenses, commute time, and wear on my car. Permit me to bore you with some personal history.
I didn't exactly choose to bail out of engineering and dive into repair. I had been fired or laid off (not sure which) in 1983 and decided to take a step backwards from design into repair. In 1986, my father had a stroke and was incapacitated. I was elected by the family to take over the lingerie business. I decided to commute between Santa Cruz and Smog Angeles at approximately 2-4 week intervals, trying to balance my existing repair biz while managing my fathers lingerie business. Repair was the only business that would tolerate someone appearing and disappearing at 2-4 week intervals.
After about 4 years of schizoid hell, the family sold the business, releasing me from the nightmare. However, I continued to visit Smog Angeles roughly once per month, but only for a week. That lasted a total of 9 years. No sane employer would hire an engineer with such a schedule. So, it was the repair biz, or nothing. When my father finally died, I was burnt out and 12 years behind on RF engineering. I had the choice of trying to catch up with 12 years of progress, or just staying in the repair biz. I chose to stay with repair.
During the 12 years of neglect and after, I did some engineering jobs for former employers and friends. Mostly it was damage control on projects that had gone awry, or cleanup work on projects abandoned by engineers that couldn't seem to finish a project. I didn't enjoy the work, did some of it rather badly, digressed into company politics, but made money. After Y2K, the repair biz tanked, so I started to swing back to doing RF design. However, just when I setup a proper consultancy, I ended up in hospital with a triple bypass operation. It took about 6 months to recover, during which time I could do some repair work, but design and travel wasn't possible. So, the choice was obvious and I would continue doing repair until the bitter end. The decision was emphasized by three more major surgical procedures over the next 10 years.
Somewhere around 2010, I decided to take a peek at what engineering was like and what had changed. So, I dived into sci.electronics.design in search of enlightenment. It was quite a shock when John Larkin declared that he didn't do prototypes and went directly to the finished PCB. That sealed my fate as I couldn't even visualize how that might be done. I had always built a prototype first. I was totally obsolete.
So, the question is not which is better, but which I am now able to do.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
John Larkin thinks that we don't have a problem, because he believes the gu ff on the denialist web-sites telling him that anthropogenic global warming isn't real, or - if it were real - not a problem.
He's wrong. We may have gobs of cheap natural gas, and it makes sense to bu rn that, rather than coal, until we build enough renewable energy generator s to take over pretty much all of our energy supply.
George Monbiot worked it all out in "Heat"
We can't even afford hydrocarbon fueled tourist flights if we are going to keep our CO2 emissions per head below the 0.5 tons per year that we need to get to.
No. The perceived problem is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and we've pushed up the concentration in the atmosphere from the 270ppm characteristic of t his = and every previous interglacial - before 1750 to it's current 400pp m, and we are pushing it up progressively more rapidly.
Natural gas is less carbon per kilowatt hour, not zero - and certainly not low enough to allow the CO2 level in the atmosphere to stop rising.
Nuclear power plants have their own emission, and we still haven't got a pr operly worked out plan to deal with the radioactive waste produced by power reactors, even though they've been around for half a century now.
And they aren't all that cheap. Wind power is now cheaper than power genera ted by burning fossil carbon (which is going to get progressively more expe nsive as the more easily accessible deposits of fossil carbon are exhausted ). Solar power is close, and simply building enough solar generation capaci ty to generate most of our energy would more than halve the price per kilow att hour, based on the well-known rule of thumb, that a ten-fold increase i n production volume halves the until cost of whatever is being produced.
The ecologically conscious aren't in the least crazy - nowhere near a gulli ble denialists like John Larkin - and they are perfectly happy to see loads of energy generated, provided that the generators doing the work aren't cr eating long term problems (even when the long term problems are too long te rm for John Larkin to pay attention to).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Krw outdoes himself. Mainstream environmentalist don't hate energy - merely energy sources that degrade the environment. They are perfectly happy with any kind of power generation that doesn't create long term problems, and I 've never seen any evidence they've been worried about who it gets sold to.
The process of getting solar arrays built in large enough volume to trigger the next round of economies of scale has been driven by subsidies in the p ast.
The production volumes are now too high to make that a viable option, but t he capital cost of a solar cell is now low enough that we could afford to g et all our power from them, if we could work out a cheap way to store the e nergy overnight.
Krw got the "subsidy" mantra embedded in his brain back when he could absor b new information, and he now trots it out when anybody posts something tha t contradicts the permanently programmed nonsense he "knows" to be true.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Before the sun goes dark, it get get bright enough to fry the earth - it's now emitting 30% more heat than it did a couple of billion years ago, and in couple more billions years it will be emitting more than the earth can cope with.
Whoever is looking after the planet then may move it further from the sun.
In 5.4 billion years the sun will move into it's red giant phase, and expand out to occupy the earth's current orbit.
Krw doesn't need to lose any sleep over the prospect of the sun going dark - it getting brighter is a more immediate threat, though none too immediate.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Actually, they could, if worked like that. Secondary school education for women is what really reduces the birth rate, and that does correlate with increased energy us.
John Larkin seems to have ideas about greenies - people who are environmentally conscious, which he clearly isn't - which are as divorced from everyday reality as his ideas about anthropogenic global warming.
Since he gets his ideas about anthropogenic global warming from denialist propaganda published in the right wing media, it seems likely that he gets his ideas about "greenies" from the same misleading source.
He does seems to be an equal-opportunity sucker - uniformly gullible in a variety of areas.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
These people are doing it now at the domestic level:
In the UK, the big supermarkets do this too. If you run your HVAC chiller or freezer maybe a degree colder than it otherwise needs to be, then you can cut the power for a long time before there is any need to turn it back on. You can get paid during that time.
With mains connected solar panels, this shouldn't be an issue. You just need a mains socket at the parking lot.
How many users drive such distances on a _daily_ basis ?
With average daily distances, the whole battery charge is not depleted daily, so you just need to top up the charge on a daily basis, requiring considerably smaller solar panels.
Not a problem, it is called district cooling. The simplest case would be dumping A/C heat into cold sea water.
A more complex system uses power plant excessive heat to cool the water even further (as in gas powered absorbtion fridge).
waste is not all spent fuel. radioactive machine parts, and fuel rod casings don't have much fuel value
-- \_(?)_
It doesn't make sense to decelerate it into the sun, requiring 30 km/s delta-v. Shooting it out of the solar system only requires 13 km/s delta-v and even less, if going via Jupiter, remember Voyagers.
However, but getting first out of the Earth's gravitational well requires 11.2 km/s delta-v.
Anyway, sending it out to space is a stupid idea.
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