The Ergosphere
Thursday, May 25, 2017
 

Schooling an idiot

Some wag once wrote to the effect of "Never argue with an idiot; people may not be able to tell which is which."  On the other hand, if nobody bothers to school idiots publicly the public may begin to take their nonsense seriously.  And on that note....

Over at The Energy Collective a clown calling himself Joe Deely says that the exercise of analyzing California's daily load and generation curves to determine what can actually decarbonize its grid is a fantasy scenario.  This has some very strong suggestions that "political reality" is immutable, and physical reality is the fantasy.

With that in mind, let us take the example handed us:  the CAISO RE generation and net demand curves for May 19, 2017.  Solar, wind and hydro are not broken out separately but the latter two are a fairly small part of the peak and total generation for the day, and are obviously 10-15% of the minimum load at most.  Solar is the big kahuna in Commiefornia.

With that in mind, I first did a graphical analysis of the daily load curve.  I erased the grid lines below the load curve and filled the white space with green:



Per The Gimp's histogram function, 316923 pixels were green.  Given the delta of 48 to 915 on the X axis (hour 0-24) and 10 to 464 on the Y axis (32,000 MW to 0), a total consumption of 768,000 MWh would correspond to 393,618 pixels.  Given vagaries of the width of lines vs. their centers, this suggests that the consumption for the day was roughly 768000 * (316923 / 393618) = 618358 MWh.

Given the X width of 863 pixels and the variance from 172 (~20,000 MW) to 464 (0 MW) on the Y axis (Δ=292 px), the area of base load is 251,966 px or 491,677 MWh.  If the total minimum 24-hr demand was served by 24/7 carbon-free power such as nuclear, the total electric generation would be 79.5% carbon-free.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!  Nuclear is supposedly hard to ramp down, but that's the characteristic of light-water reactors, not electric output!  Nuclear-heated steam, being carbon-free, can be dumped to secondary uses or or waste heat without adding any pollutant emissions whatsoever.  So, let us suppose that 20% of peak nuclear power can be dumped and peak nuclear power is 25000 MW (with no carbon-emitting capacity being started until demand rises beyond that).  This yields a graph where 291,990 px of area are colored green out of a total of 316923 px of demand, or 92.1%.

California is supposedly striving for 50% or 60% "renewable" power by some year, but with nuclear base load it could already have reached 79.5% emission-free; with a bit of dumping it could have achieved 92.1% emission-free on the specified day.  Yes, "renewables" could have eaten into the remaining 7.9%, but would they actually have been important enough to tout?  Not really; the existing solar contribution of perhaps 12,000 MW is already twice what appears to be actually required.

If you "blew up" that day's RE contributions so the peak was roughly equal to the demand peak, how much demand would you have left?  After some fiddling with images, I was able to paste the expanded RE curve over the demand curve and color in the un-met demand areas in blue:


If I'm doing my pixel-counting correctly, 112148 pixels have zero green component (the green, gray and white will not); this comes to 28.5% of demand un-meetable by unreliable RE even on the record day.  Even assuming that the overnight RE generation is also scaled up by a substantial factor, this falls well short of the all-nuclear baseload scenario at just 20.5% of demand un-met by carbon-free sources.

Failing to plan to meet the evening and overnight demand with carbon-free generation is planning to fail.  It cannot be done with "renewables", period; physical reality says no.  It is physically possible to achieve this with nuclear power, whether the political reality allows it or not.

"Renewables" in California, as elsewhere, are greenwashing.  If the so-called "environmental" organizations (and eveyone else) actually cared about CO2 emissions, they would be pushing nuclear energy as hard as they could.  Anyone who is anti-nuclear is anti-environment.

 
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
 

I just gave up on Energy For Humanity

I went through their website.  (I had it on my personal blog list for a while.)  When I came across things that bothered me, I dug for contact information...

and THERE ISN'T ANY.

These people neither expect nor want feedback.  Not even on their site design (why the HELL wouldn't they put timestamps on their main-page items, so you can see what's new and what's not?).

If they refuse to interact with me, I will neither read nor recommend them.  Eff U, E4H.  If you really care for humanity, you'll pay attention to what humanity says back to you.  Especially about the things that make your site painful or painless to use.

Evolve or die.
 
Talk largely about energy and work, but also politics and other random thoughts


Mail Engineer-Poet

(If you're mailing a question, is it already in the FAQ?)

Important links

The FAQ
Glossary
The Reference Library

Blogchild of

Armed and Dangerous

Blogparent of

R-Squared




The best prospect for our energy future:
Flibe Energy

ARCHIVES
January 1990 / February 2004 / March 2004 / June 2004 / July 2004 / August 2004 / September 2004 / October 2004 / November 2004 / December 2004 / January 2005 / February 2005 / March 2005 / April 2005 / May 2005 / June 2005 / July 2005 / August 2005 / September 2005 / October 2005 / November 2005 / December 2005 / January 2006 / February 2006 / March 2006 / April 2006 / May 2006 / June 2006 / July 2006 / August 2006 / September 2006 / October 2006 / November 2006 / December 2006 / January 2007 / February 2007 / March 2007 / April 2007 / December 2007 / January 2008 / May 2008 / June 2008 / August 2008 / October 2008 / November 2008 / December 2008 / February 2009 / March 2009 / April 2009 / May 2009 / June 2009 / July 2009 / August 2009 / September 2009 / October 2009 / November 2009 / December 2009 / January 2010 / April 2010 / May 2010 / June 2010 / July 2010 / August 2010 / September 2010 / October 2010 / November 2010 / December 2010 / January 2011 / February 2011 / March 2011 / April 2011 / May 2011 / July 2011 / August 2011 / September 2011 / October 2011 / April 2013 / November 2013 / December 2013 / January 2014 / February 2014 / March 2014 / April 2014 / July 2014 / August 2014 / September 2014 / October 2014 / November 2014 / February 2015 / April 2015 / October 2015 / March 2016 / April 2016 / May 2016 / June 2016 / July 2016 / November 2016 / December 2016 / February 2017 / May 2017 / June 2017 / September 2017 / October 2017 / November 2017 / March 2018 / May 2018 / June 2018 / October 2018 / December 2018 / January 2019 / March 2019 / June 2019 / October 2019 / November 2019 / March 2020 / June 2020 / December 2020 / March 2021 / April 2021 / May 2021 / July 2021 / January 2022 / February 2022 /


Powered by Blogger

RSS feed

Visits since 2006/05/11: