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BC is also being privatized and BC Hydro being run into the ground. We must meet both short and long term needs. According to this article, solar PV is now on average cheaper than nuclear. I think the price of solar PV is being distorted by Ontario's FIT system, and don't forget nuclear is still being subsidized; maybe NS can do better with their FIT system.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=historic-report-solar-e...
There are also different ways of looking at the base load question, particularly when we start looking at what energy is used for. A combination of nuclear and fossil fuels is no more sustainable in the long term than they are individually. And yes, development of renewable energy infrastructure will require a fossil fuel infrastructure, so we can't waste the fossil fuel sources in the meantime.
Recently I built myself a small greenhouse, it is not quiet operational yet. I installed a small solar PV system with it, to power some small fans and in the near future a small pump and some LED lights. The solar cells load a battery, which provides power on demand to the fans, to circulate the heat energy in the greenhouse. I was surprised how well it works. the solar cells deliver even on these short and cloudy days enough to keep the system operating.
Having nuclear power providing our base load seems a bit short sighted to me. Is it not the idea that we learn to live within what our environment can sustain? Seems to me that nuclear power is not environmentaly sustainable. Our base load is so large because of our obsession with the clock, in time delivery, an inflexible lifestyle. It is like those people that say we cannot feed the world without artificial fertilizer, we can. All we need to do is change our eating habits. The same with our base line load, you make hay when the sun shines, built furniture when the wind blows, do the laundry when the water is warm. In short, make do with what the environment supplies. To keep people in jobs with unsustainable powerplants just keeps compounding the problems for our children. Think, contaminated soil, acid oceans, destroyed biodiversity, unpredictable weather, flooding coast lines, mass migration and dislocation.
Also every nuclear powerplant we built here probably means another six that will be build elsewhere. After all, one has to keep up with the competition.
ah yes your experience with a small greenhouse will make sure that families can cook their suppers when needed. We run three large greenhouses and still we need a back up generation (the grid) to ensure we do not have crop failure. If our crops fail than we do not feed others and our farm is in serious economic trouble. This attitude is the same as small gardeners saying they know all about farming because they planted 20 potatoes last spring. Scale is important and changes things.
As I said we create 70 per cent of our energy needs on a working farm with solar and some wind. (Wind is mostly useless by the way- it is in abundance or not so there is never a stable supply and we live in the midst of several industrial wind farms that do the same thing - wish we had never invested in it.) Battery power technology doesn't exist to store enough energy on the scale we need let alone a whole province or region. Beleive me we tried and are constantly fiddling and upgrading to get more from our system and to reduce our energy needs in the first place. We had high hopes when we planned the conversion, but somewhere along the way reality set in. A reality too many refuse to look at. That missing 30 per cent in our system is essentially base load. Thats same base load needed in broader society- lathough the percentages are different.
Basevload is not that simple. Period.
By the same token, storage by a utility company for base load appications is not the same thing as your personal struggles to implement storage that would free you from the grid.
That said, storage by utilities is also in fairly early stages. And even when it gets a lot better, its never going to be the silver bullet panacea.
But it will be a big part of the solution after we have invested a lot in the applications. For the same kind of investment that expansion of nuclear requires, huge strides towards next generation of production and distribution could be made, instead of just treading water.
Figuring out how to tread water is necessary. Burning gas is far from perfect, especially as increased extraction will come from a lot of shale gas. But its less distracting from noving to the next generation, and the plants themselves have convertability potential.
All of this is going to cost- as would more nuclear. Privatized power or not, the provincial regulator has the power to force shifts, with the government changing their mandate at will and handiling the politics with the public.
The status quo simply cannot be sustained. Using how bad the status quo is and the worse places it will willy nilly lead, is a poor argument for leaning on the nuclear crutch even more.
I'm not ideologically opposed to more investment in nuclear power, nor to coal buring with sequestration [if they can make it work not just use the hope for it] for that matter.
And I think this is true for many 'aggresive environmentalists'.
But one of the criteria in investment choices for energy production has to be whether it is taking us in a direction we need to go. And if it is not, then how binding in practice will the proposed current investment be on future allocation of resources?
Let alone that every wished for nuclear reactor can be obviated by efficiency gains in the use of energy.
Where we have not begun to scratch the surface, know how much there is to be gained, and know where investments of resources need to go to realize those gains in use of power.
If we can advocate investing many billions in nuclear power, where is the politics of demanding serious energy efficiency investments?
of course storage and base load are not the same in technical terms. They are however the same in terms of sudden need. That is what I was trying explain and use our situation as an example.
Base load on the larger grid is for those times when demand peaks or other power generation is not available so base load is a bit of a misnomer as it is really base/peak load we are talking about.
Gas is very ineffiecent, and is the real back up plan in Ontario if you read the details. Nuclear is mostly a distraction so that people don't figure out what the Liberals are doing with gas as far as I can tell. Big investment in plants to replace coal and to back up a failed alternative energy scheme that will actually create more dangerous to human health pollution than coal. Never mind fossil fuel issues and pipeline issues.
Nuclear is moderate ineffceint in terms of providing base load. Much easier up and down than gas, but still fairly slow and requires a lot of maitenance. (ie costs)
Hydro generation is fairly effeceint, but unless we are going to destroy a lot of habitat likely not able to expand much more.
Coal is really efficeint for base load, but of course has emmissions problems. Ironically Nanicoke was getting good results in emmisions by mixing bio-fuels with coal (bio fuels like corn stalks and the like) But coal is a political issue now for a government that has broken most of its promises so actual reality about coal is not wanted or needed.
Storage of the kind of power we need for base/peak load is not there right now and not for the forseeable future. Thanks to years of neglect Ontario is reaching a generating crisis soon, and added to that a crumbling out of date grid and decisions have to be made now, not 3 decades from now.
Energy generation is never so simple as some seem to want it to be.
I do agree the first answer has to be conservation, but government doesn't seem to find that very sexy unfortunetly. As a friend of mine says the cheapest new build is to not build, but to use what we have better. That of course is the real answer.
The fundamental problem is that the are no big business profits in spreading energy conservation.
Governments abdicate to such a degree that even those with a good faith desire to change the fundamentals, they go looking for the quick fix that private investment is ready to do.
Ta-duh: nuclear reactors.
[And wind farms. Though that isnt about base load.]
But governments are not utterly hopeless on that count. Because the production and distribution of power is regulated, they are free to structure the market as they see fit. And they are not absolutely hopeless about the fear of structuring the market such that consumers will pay even more increases than they alreday are.
We've made significant progress here in Nova Scotia, and starting with the previous PC government. And progress has been made in Ontario as well [though not on demand side managemnt]. I see no reason to just surrender to the 'need' for nuclear power, when there is lots of political leverage we have yet to force.
Where did I say we should surrender to the 'need' for nuclear power. All I have said is that wind and solar can not provide base/peak load- and they can't- and that right now that leaves us with 4 options for base load. All of which have problems. Personally I think the new build natural gas plants are the worse of the lot, (high cost, high pollution, high inefficeincy) but I am not beholden to one over the other.
I live within about 35 km, downwind, of a nuclear power plant, I am aware of their many problems on a very personal level, (including a friend who lost a lot of sheep through a gas off) but they also have positives too that we on the left seem to want to ignore. My guess is that we equate nuclear power with nuclear weapons somewhere in the back of our heads.
The simple fact is that all energy production is a problem of one kind or another. But what are we going to do, shut off our computers, our refrigerators, go back to washing clothes in the local stream and heating our homes with wood and coal in a very inefficeint distribution system. The question is who pays and what are we willing to accept as saw offs for those good things.
We seem to have a different concept as to what is 'Base load'. To me the base load is the minimum power demand on the grit during the day, the minimum power that has to be there. A nuclear plant is good for that, since they basically are like a one gear car. Hard to get going and hard to change speed, good for the level ground. A hydro power plant has more or less an infinite gear box, in that you basically just have to control the flow of the water through the turbines.
Regards the green house. I have little experience with green houses. For me it is a bit of an experiment. I want to install two rows of plant boxes about two feet of the ground, and have a long insulated box underneath them filled with three to six inch rocks, as haet storage devices. To capture the excess heat from the greenhouse during the day. I too run a farm and try to cater to local clientelle that want localy produced food. To heat the greenhouse with fossil fuel from faraway makes it less 'local'.
Storage batteries are indead a weak link at the moment. At sometime, in hopefully not to distand future, I hope to be able to make use of the height differences on this farm (about 80ft), and create two ponds. One on the lower section and the other on the high ground and connect them with a four inch pipe. With a wind mill pumping the water up and a water wheel recovering the power as needed.
Base power is not just the type of power production.
For example, its easier for Ontario than Nova Scotia to say it is going to do away with coal fired power production. Even though production levels of most coal fired plants can be increased or decreased according to demand.... the coal fired plants in Nova Scotia are currently required to meet the [minimum] base load needs. Much less true in Ontario, if true at all.
I don't think either one of you really understand what base load means in the electrical grid sense. It is far more than just the minimum amount of power. Base load also refers to sudden peak needs as well. For instance if your system is using say 20,000 MW or power (a fairly common average for Ontario on any given day), but your can only get say 1000 MW from wind and say 750 MW from solar you need something (read coal, gas, nuclear, hydro) to meet your basic demand. You also must have electrical generation on standby to address peak issues that can be quickly 'geared' up and then 'geared' down when not needed. These peaks can be anything from people getting home and making supper, to a sudden cold or hot front coming through across a wide band, to everyone watching the gold medal olympic final at the same time on their energy guzzling plasma tvs.
Wind and solar are finite generators. They only generate as much as they are able to dependent on wind speed and light intensity. Whereas all of the others usually have extra capacity that can be squeezed out of them. That is why wind and solar can be so ineffcient as they will often either over produce, or worse under produce requiring fossil fuel or nuclear back up. There is just no storage capacity we can build that is feasible to provide storage for say 10,000 MW of power. And speaking of long term environmental problems trying to store that much energy would be environmentally ugly.
Nuclear does a good job -despite all of its problems of providing the background generation requirement part of base load. Hydro does as well. Nuclear is not good at fast up and fast down. Hydro can be, but expanding hydro generation would be an environmental and logistical nightmare (there is good reason that new hydro generation is not being created only old sites expanded) Gas is also very poor at quick up and quick down- but it is what the Ontario government is turning too. Coal is perfect for quick up and down, but is now the one we in Ontario apparently want eliminated despite all the problems the others create as well.
Ontario, and some of the coastal provinces might be a good place for tidal energy production, but as yet it remains in its infancy.
Yep, and while some folks hypothesize about conservation(good) , guvmint can't do much while the herd salivates only at the prospect of lower taxes...which will bring the Cons to power here next year. And that means no conservation.
They will get their privatized system yet. Big Mike only got part way. And meanwhile, the po' folks freeze their asses.
Jesus I hate gee whiz greens.
I was just hitchiking on the idea of 'minimum' when talking about base load. I still dont think it is far off. But yes, it does include typical peak spikes.
Base load is the minimum load over a given period of time. That period can be daily, weekly,based on a season or a year, what ever you fancy. When we are encouraged to switch some of our electricity use to the night time we are basicaly flattening out the daily load curve and thus in all likely hood raising our base load, the higher the base load the more pressure there will be to construct nuclear power plants. The more eratic we keep our daily power curve the more difficult it will be to justify nuclear power. Something to keep in mind.
Sorry but that is just flat out wrong about what base load means on a grid wide basis.
Don"t feel sorry. I am curious as to what your defintion of 'Base Load' is. Mine comes basically from the power section of 'Kent's mechanical engineer's handbook'. It is about forty years old, making it a bit dated, but in all the years I consulted it have not come across many errors.
I don't know about 10,000 MW, which is a ridiculously high standard of the order of the capacity of even the largest power stations, but 1000 MW is not uncommon for pumped-storage hydroelectric. Tidal energy production is not far behind advanced nuclear (generation III+), as while no standard technology has been developed, some designs are close to large scale deployment.
For me is not just the fact that nuclear power hasn't solved its waste disposal problem and isn't close to solving it, it is a centralized technology that is, like large scale hydro-electric, more vulnerable to water shortages (assuming water-cooled designs) and other threats than decentralized, smaller scale production of energy.
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." - attributed to Honest Abe Lincoln.
We've been had. Hoodwinked. Duped. Conned. Fooled. The wool over my eyes is starting to itch. The ONLY way we can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the potential devastating effects of global warming and climate change is by leaving fossil fuels right where we found them: buried underground or deep in our oceans.
Harnessing wind energy could help us achieve that goal, but ONLY if the energy produced is somehow stored so it can be used when needed; such as in a battery bank. That is not happening.
Without storing the energy produced by wind we are actually making matters worse. We are actually INCREASING our dependency on fossil fuels. That sounds pretty stupid when you first hear it, but when you look at how the electricity grid works it becomes crystal clear. Wind turbines need to be paired with fossil turbines to make it work. Supply has to match demand or the grid collapses. Only fossil fits the bill. The more wind turbines that get erected the more fossil generation we need. The hope is that "one day" we'll solve the storage issue. Problem is, if we don't, we're stuck with fossil generation because of wind energy. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.
We're sacrificing the lives of thousands of bats and birds for nothing, not to mention the human impact they are having.
This is wrong.
Check this out:
Robert F Kennedy Jr. - Solar Thermal and Utility Scale Wind are Gas Plants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcm1gmPL50s
Hi Don Coyote. You have been banned for spamming babble (i.e. posting the same thing indiscriminately again and again). If you'd like to join this forum in a more constructive and engaged manner, email me at catchfire[at]rabble.ca and we'll talk.
Rather than knotted knickers about the meaning of yet another term, is "the amount of electricity needed to keep people employed, and the workers and their families from freezing their asses" do for a definition of "base load?" Or how about..."all the electrical load that is not made up by wind, solar and "stored" energy...batteries by the billions
(oh, and of course, pumped storage and tidal, etc.0 at any given time of day or season...all other things being equal?
Wrong. Fossil fuels plants aren't even storage. Hydro resevoirs are though. A good example is the integration of the BC and Alberta grids. If the Southern Alberta wind farms are cranking, the hydro stations in BC can be shut down and the resevoirs filled. If the winds don't blow, the resevoirs can be drawn down. There are thermal (coal) plants in Alberta that are part of this grid, but they mostly supply the base load for Alberta consumption.
__________________________________
One struggle, many fronts.
And when all the glaciers are melted, it's back to the drawing board in summer (just keeping up with the " hotter summers" thesis).
No country has more nuclear power stations than the US. And yet they still require massive amounts of Canadian hydroelectric power exports. Canada is a net exporter of electrical power to corporate America. We actually have more power than we need right here at home but due to NAFTA rules, we must supply power to the world's most wasteful and most energy dependent and most unsustainable economy in the world. It makes no sense.
The Australian situation is different as no-one is going to have a problem with freezing and there is considerably more solar insolation, but the arguments are essentially the same.
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2008-09/09rp09.htm#baseload
Just got the new Home Hardware catalog in the mail, and the price of a solar panel* (max output 160w) is $1619.99 !!! What the hell - that doesn't sound affordable to me. Are there cheaper alternatives available?
*Will offset roughly half the energy a fridge uses per year
Alot of the energy producing devices, i.e. solar panels, small rooftop windmills and that kind of thing are expensive upfront for the average person. But, they pay off over the long haul.
However, if we re-directed the money going towards things like corporate tax breaks, a lot of money could be found to give breaks to ordinary folks to do these kinds of environmental retrofits on their residences and ease the upfront costs of doing this kind of thing.
So true.
That price seems high. Here is a 170w for $900:
http://www.energyalternatives.ca/shop/itemdesc.asp?ic=SH170&eq=&Tp=
You will need more than a panel though. You will need batteries and controllers etc. The best route might be to use solar only for lighting and buy high efficiency propane appliances.