From a friend: Nuclear is great, but until wind is killed it will not be viable bc of dispatch protocols. When wind is on it takes priority in the queue because it's cheaper in marginal terms, but the integration costs of wind are not factored in. These costs include backing down other resources, such as gas, coal, and nuclear. These technologies are not designed to operate this way; hence there are operational and financial issues arising from this dispatch protocol. The real costs are never seen, but they do exist.
The other issue with wind is the production tax credit (PTC. The PTC allows wind developers to actually bid negative prices. PTCs are a cancer and are destroying the reliability of the grid. Exelon bought the John Deere wind assets realized this too late. They brought this up with AWEA and were voted out of the organization at the behest of NextEra. NextEra is the largest renewable provider in the US and its holding company partner is Florida Power & Light (FP&L). There are very few renewables in Florida bc FP&L won't allow it. Corporate hypocrisy at its finest.
Hydro power works for sure. But, are environmentalists and "green energy" people willing to make the trade offs. See the dustup on salmon and the Columbia River as one example.
The climate change/global warming predictions are based on models. Models. Any possibility that a model attempting to replicate an infinitely complex and ever changing system and then predict what that system will do in the future could be off? completely wrong? by how much?
I think you have to model. There are all kinds of models. The key is to be very transparent about the assumptions that go into the variables on the models. It's also key to really drill down into the variance on the predictions. My guess is honest climate modeling would have a very high degree of variance, and the R2 number would be high (for non-stats people that is the number used to show how well the actual distribution fit into a normal distribution). My friends that are PhD's in stats and econ tell me the early stats (I am talking 2001-2010) were cooked, pun intended. They were manipulated and that's not cool.
Had an Illini acquaintance 10 years ago or so, who had a NSF grant to take physical measurements in the Arctic to compare to the projected temperatures and satellite 'measurements' up there.
They kept coming back with less 'global warming' IRL than projected.
There are numerous analyses floating around, including some by high-profile investment banks, that purport to show that wind/solar are now cheaper than gas, or even coal. The way these analyses are done is to calculate the capital and operating costs of the generation facility, including some analysis for cost of capital, and divide it by total kwh generated over the facility's lifetime, giving a cost per kwh. The problem is, this method doesn't include the reality that a kwh generated at one time is not the same thing as a kwh generated at some other time. Electricity doesn't store well, and this seems to be difficult for people to grasp.
What happens as 'renewable' generation increases is that fossil capacity largely still has to be there, for reliability, but has a smaller output to prorate its costs against, since it won't run when the conditions are favorable for the wind and / or solar, which has no incremental fuel cost. The whole system becomes considerably more capital-intensive.
From a friend: Nuclear is great, but until wind is killed it will not be viable bc of dispatch protocols. When wind is on it takes priority in the queue because it's cheaper in marginal terms, but the integration costs of wind are not factored in. These costs include backing down other resources, such as gas, coal, and nuclear. These technologies are not designed to operate this way; hence there are operational and financial issues arising from this dispatch protocol. The real costs are never seen, but they do exist.
The other issue with wind is the production tax credit (PTC. The PTC allows wind developers to actually bid negative prices. PTCs are a cancer and are destroying the reliability of the grid. Exelon bought the John Deere wind assets realized this too late. They brought this up with AWEA and were voted out of the organization at the behest of NextEra. NextEra is the largest renewable provider in the US and its holding company partner is Florida Power & Light (FP&L). There are very few renewables in Florida bc FP&L won't allow it. Corporate hypocrisy at its finest.
Let's not forget the environmentally unpopular yet consistent hydro power in your back yard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam
Hydro power works for sure. But, are environmentalists and "green energy" people willing to make the trade offs. See the dustup on salmon and the Columbia River as one example.
The climate change/global warming predictions are based on models. Models. Any possibility that a model attempting to replicate an infinitely complex and ever changing system and then predict what that system will do in the future could be off? completely wrong? by how much?
I think you have to model. There are all kinds of models. The key is to be very transparent about the assumptions that go into the variables on the models. It's also key to really drill down into the variance on the predictions. My guess is honest climate modeling would have a very high degree of variance, and the R2 number would be high (for non-stats people that is the number used to show how well the actual distribution fit into a normal distribution). My friends that are PhD's in stats and econ tell me the early stats (I am talking 2001-2010) were cooked, pun intended. They were manipulated and that's not cool.
Had an Illini acquaintance 10 years ago or so, who had a NSF grant to take physical measurements in the Arctic to compare to the projected temperatures and satellite 'measurements' up there.
They kept coming back with less 'global warming' IRL than projected.
He lost his funding.
Gee, I wonder why?
There are numerous analyses floating around, including some by high-profile investment banks, that purport to show that wind/solar are now cheaper than gas, or even coal. The way these analyses are done is to calculate the capital and operating costs of the generation facility, including some analysis for cost of capital, and divide it by total kwh generated over the facility's lifetime, giving a cost per kwh. The problem is, this method doesn't include the reality that a kwh generated at one time is not the same thing as a kwh generated at some other time. Electricity doesn't store well, and this seems to be difficult for people to grasp.
What happens as 'renewable' generation increases is that fossil capacity largely still has to be there, for reliability, but has a smaller output to prorate its costs against, since it won't run when the conditions are favorable for the wind and / or solar, which has no incremental fuel cost. The whole system becomes considerably more capital-intensive.