Solar cheaper than nuclear

Koning Betweter wrote in news:2010081115103951888-Koning@Stumpernl:

with or without subsidies?

YOU are the one pushing solar,YOU be the one to spend YOUR money and show us how it works. document your costs,savings and how often your system is not providing any usable energy.

Koning Betweter wrote in news:2010081115332791513- Koning@Stumpernl:

evidently NOT,because few people are doing it. Particularly with their own money.

form a co-op. If its so beneficial,then everyone in the building would join.

BTW,trying to generate practical,useful quantities of methane gas in a residential building might be a hazard to other occupants.(explosions) It might even be a nuisance.(odors)

Thanks, I will. The Audi is a blast to drive on the hills here.

John

That's always the problem, isn't it?

That reminds me of the great Alfred E Newman quote: "Two can live as cheaply as one, it just costs twice as much."

John

Which with a daily full charge/discharge cycle would give a life of around

The battery that came with my current notebook didn't last 2 years and cost $60 for 44Wh never mind 1.2kWh.

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In Spain some were running diesel-generators 24/7 to generate "more" solar power and cash the government funding. And maybe neighbours are exchanging grid power turning it into solar power.

Solar Energy saves our world.

Wooosh! (never mind)

I never had any to lose, but they are a fact of life. Your statement is just silly, however.

Convert, whatever...

I don't believe in solar (or wind), either.

Solar (and wind) are supported by tax and rate incentives. I don't want to pay your electric bill. Forcing me to do so is nothing more than theft.

Isn't everyone?

Good! You can pay mine too. That'll make you twice as happy.

Fine. Pay for it yourself.

I don't care what you do. I *DO* care what the solar industry does.

Sounds kinky.

Piker. I use that much every other month. Heat and AC are sorta necessary.

Human nature doesn't work that way.

It is difficult to get methane to burn, let alone explode. Methane itself is odourless, but some of the waste that can be fermented to produce methane is smelly. Any system that collected methane safely isn't going to let the malodourous contaminants leak out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

=B0F)

Fine. You've got grand-children, and you will do your little bit to make their lives more difficult. I've got grand-nieces and - nephews, and your self-satisfied ignorance will make their lives more difficult to pretty much the same extent - California and Australia are both running out of fresh water already, and the immediately predictable consequences of global warming don't include increased rainfall in either area.

The incipient mechanical collapse of the Greenland ice-cap - as reported in today's paper by a Professor Richard Alley from Pennsylvania State University who has just told the US House of Representatives the the Greenland ice-cap may go unstable in the next decade - may give us both more salt water than we really want.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

To supply the energy needs of the US, you'd need solar and wind arrays covering real estate about the size of Spain.

Thanks, Rich

And the investment in the manufacture and installation gets paid back in what, maybe 100 years, if ever?

Anything that's viable doesn't need subsidies. The nuclear energy industry would be burgeoning if the paranoid bureaucrats hadn't shackled them.

Thanks, Rich

Such predictions are no better than chance. California is running out of water mostly because we live in a desert where people insist on growing huge plots of stuff like rice and cotton.

ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/163828.pdf

We still had 10 feet of snow piled up against the side of our cabin on July 4th.

John

I can't deny, using energy cost money. Batteries are painfull for the wallet. A pure sine-wave converter is also expensive.

I hope to find a place somewhere once, without neighbours and surrounded with a lot of nature. Connecting to the grid will be very expensive. I am finding ways to do without the grid. There are a lot ways to reduce the use of electricity.

That should really be "hydrocarbon-fueled generator". Diesel engines will run on vegetable oil. Steam boilers will run on just about anything that burns (during the BSE crisis in the UK, there were serious plans for fuelling power stations with dead cows; the main obstacle was "PR" rather than anything technical).

But I'd agree with the larger point, that solar + wind + wave + tidal still isn't going to be suitable to satisfy 100% of demand. Tidal is the only one which is predictable, and that's still intermittent (unless you're going to run terawatt cables half way around the world).

But then neither is nuclear power. Nuclear is suited to constant load; although you can reduce generation when demand drops, you're really just wasting the capacity. If France increases its nuclear capacity any further, it's going to have trouble finding anyone to take the excess power off its hands at night.

And there really aren't any storage technologies that are practical at large scale. Pumped hydro is useful for dealing with short spikes (e.g. when a popular TV program finishes and a million kettles get switched on at once), but not at the scale of storing a night's worth of electrity to use during the next day.

We must have a different definition of "methane". Around here, it's CH4, and it lights easily, burns fiercely, and explodes at air concentrations between 5 and 17 per cent.

We cook and heat with the stuff. I've never found it "difficult" to light.

A consequence of the explosive properties of methane: "The use of the title "engineer" in Texas remains legally restricted to those who have been professionally certified by the state to practice engineering"

I recall a couple of residential natural gas explosions in San Francisco since I've moved here.

John

Or possibly not. Turns out there were some issues with monitoring equipment clock settings being wrong.

I mean, if you wanted to commit solar energy fraud, you'd surely go to some lengths to prevent it from being obvious, and purporting to generate solar power at night is a bit of a giveaway.

That said, there's obvious scope for fraud, and if one of your solar panels dies, and you know what you're doing, there are cheaper ways of restoring your feed-in tarrif payments than actually replacing the panel, while maintaining a pattern of generation that looks genuine.

The whole subsidisation of solar power, including feed-in tarrifs, is a flawed policy.

Sylvia.

Then who will be on their board of directors?

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It burns easily in burners that are designed to accomodate the relatively flame propagation rate. When the UK went over to natural gas, every gas cooker needed new burners.

Good engineering does involve fiding solutions that work.

It's difficult to avoid some risk of explosion with any kind of gas heating - if the gas supply leaks you can build up a considerable volume of an explosive mixture of gas and air, aka a fuel-air bomb.

There are techniques which can minimise the risk - such explosions do seem to be rarer than they used to be.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen