Open Thread 7

Hmmm. I’ve been trying to post a comment in the nuclear energy thread on Quiggin’s blog, but the comment simply will not post. I hit submit, and the page reloads… but without my comment.

I wonder if there’s something I’m missing?

Surely they wouldn’t be so blatant as to simply ban me from posting, would they?

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JQ is using WordPress, too, as far as I can tell.

I did notice that I had a similar failure before, when I tried to post a comment here.

I wonder why it would suddenly do that when there have been no problems previously?

Unless some twit has flagged my email address onto the WordPress list of known spammers?

I do have two email addresses that I sometimes alternate between on posts on WordPress blogs, but they should both work fine, on many different blogs.

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I believe there is a snowball’s chance in hell that Hazelwood power station will be replaced by gas. No politically survivable level of carbon pricing will overcome the cheapness of brown coal at $6 a tonne. This poses the question when will gas run out for the south eastern States SA, Vic and Tas? Despite suitably large numbers of tcf’s quoted for the southern gas basins behaviour suggests otherwise. For example Adelaide’s 1.3 GW gas baseload plant has supply pipes from two of the basins, Cooper and Otway. Another hint was that Santos said it had plenty of empty space to store sequestered CO2 piped in from NSW coal stations.

Now I see connectors are being replicated from Qld’s Surat Basin the major source of coal seam gas. This links outlines plans coming onstream now
http://pipeliner.com.au/news/pipelines09_the_year_in_review/008220/
Conceivably flow could be reversed eg so that Surat CSG flows to Adelaide then to Victoria and then to the Hazelwood replacement. Which won’t happen.

Of course Surat Basin CSG will soon be liquefied at Gladstone and sent overseas in cryogenic ships. We evidently won’t need the gas in the south east since we have perfectly lovely coal. Once again I call on Minister Ferguson to explain where this is all heading and incidentally how to replace a million barrels of oil a day.

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okay, speaking of caldicott, I was teaching her chapter 3 on radiation (np is not the answer), and in rereading the horrific chapter, I came upon the following comment. Speaking of TMI, she notes toward the end of her ludicrous narrative that in 1990, “2.3 million gallons of radioactive water containing tritium were PURPOSEFULLY evaporated from the damaged reactor building, exposing many people in the vicinity to DANGEROUS radioactive elements.” [I highlight the scare words].

Charpak and Garwin, in Megawatts and Megatons, discuss the same event, indicating that “General Public Utility Nuclear…between 1991 and 1993 evaporated 2.2 million gallons of radioactive water, USING FILTERS TO RETAIN THE RADIOACTIVITY.” (175)

The second highlight indicates what Caldicott managed to OMIT, thus allowing her to use the scare words, with connotations of conspiracy (PURPOSEFULLY).

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If Ted Trainer is dismissive of nuclear it could be over the issue of timing rather than the huge over-capitalisation he identifies for renewables. I believe his prescription is to get used to hard times. Even Barry seems pessimistic about 10,000 NPPs ever getting built.

I was working on a roof the other day and I started sliding backwards. I was saved by the gutter. That tale seems to encapsulate the Trainer thesis.

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John: shit, I should be more precise. T does not “dismiss” nuclear exactly. He says it will not produce significant quantities of energy.

8 EJ out of 469 EJ or 627 EJs (if renewables power hydrogen conversion for transport–section 2.1.13).

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Luke: your comments elicited a bizarre response. ernestine sees you as producing obfuscatory spin because of the way your comments come out on that blog (formatting quirks).

I’m disarmed by this type of response. the argument that nuclear plants produce a tiny fraction of the radiation that characterizes natural variation convinced me that radiation was not a worry. that and the underwhelming evidence for LNT.

I can’t wrap my mind around not being convinced by this argument. you have to turn nuclear power plants into malevolent, demonic entities and radiation from power plants into special forces for evil.

It seems to me that the radiophobia borders on attributing nearly all cancer to nuclear power plants, and the less evidence, the more sinister the invisible force.

on the other hand, the barriers to agreement here are no greater than those around climate change.

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John Newlands – I don’t know how old you are, but any baby boomer will tell you the the words ‘atomic’ and ‘nuclear’ were terms of real fear during the Cold War. There were drills at school, there were regular tests of the civil defense sirens, and the emergency broadcasting network, both with terrifying sounds that went on for minutes.

People were digging fallout shelters in their back yards, or hardening rooms in their basements, and laying in emergency supplies. Magazines were full of ‘after the attack’ advice, and there were no end of TV dramas that dwelt on the subject. And of course everyone had read On the Beach, or seen the movie.

We were kids, and we were having the shit scared out of us, on an almost daily bases, half convinced that we were not going to make it to adults.

That is what is at the root of fear of radiation, and all things nuclear.

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Of course the situation was not improved by our parents, for whom global warfare was a vivid memory. They gave the nuclear Armageddon scenarios a great deal of credibility, unlike say, vampires, and zombies, that would be dismissed as nonsense.

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It’s going to take three kinds of storage placed at key locations on the grid to utilize renewables and become energy secure. Looking at the possibilities with current technology we see that these are:

Grid scale storage that is located on the major transmission corridors to prevent curtailment, congestion, and stabilize intermittent resources. If power is cheap enough to produce, yet has a high price in a particular market, this can be accomplished with large scale NaS batteries, Vanadium Redox systems, and of course, pumped hydro, if available. For sure there are some markets where this is cost effective, and several working installations are in service.

The next storage need is area management, best controlled with fly wheel technology, superconducting magnet energy storage (SMES) systems and banks of supercapacitors with a voltage-source IGBT converter. This level is rather well developed and several installations are operating offering an ancillary service called Reliability Must-Run (RMR) Contracts. However in most cases this can be accomplished less expensively by gas fired turbine generators, the more exotic technology used where very, very rapid response is required.

The final storage realm needed is to control utility side variability. This last is the real stinker, cost wise, and is the regime where the the vehicle-to-grid schemes are supposed to make a difference. The fact is that the costs here are very high, and not economic for a utility to install. Basically a large battery (a one cubic meter unit, if we are talking NaS) would have to be installed with about the same frequency as distribution (pole) transformers, throughout the network. This is the big killer in any integrated grid storage plan.

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It would be strange if the public objected to molten sodium in IFRs but not in electrical substation batteries. It seems to me dense forms of energy storage are prone to violent failures. The PV charged lead acid battery in my garden shed has lasted 6 years so far I guess because it is clunky and operates on a shallow cycle. Note the wind charged vanadium redox battery that fills a big shed on King Island has not been copied much elsewhere. Too big too costly.

e.n. parts of Australia are looking at imminent coal shortages eg SA’s Leigh Ck field. However Vic’s Latrobe Valley could last all century and beyond. It will power the big new desal despite the public being told that wind farms are doing all the work. Perhaps the worksite spies could report on that instead. That is why I’d bet London to a brick that some pathetic ruse will be used to keep the brown coal stations going for another 20 years. For example the stations could work towards being ‘carbon capture ready’. Or they could get not offsets but ‘legitimate’ carbon tax deductions for planting trees in school playgrounds. Any kind of lame excuse to maintain cheap electricity.

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That’s true of course Luke but the reason the 60cent tariff was abandoned was precisely because the state couldn’t afford to pay it if fully subscribed.

When solarPV units were a lot more expensive, this acted as a constraint, but as soon as they dropped, the state had a problem.

Even at 20cents it is doubtful if this is sustainable. Bear in mind that we are haggling over whether an interim carbon price of $23 per tonne is reasonable. The implied price of 20cents per kWh prices CO2 at roughly 8.6 times that price and the one they abandoned at 3 times that. This made it about 50% more expensive than cash-for clunkers which was rightly abandoned.

Really, at $23 per tonne, assuming we get it, the feed in tariff shouldn’t be more than about 2.3 cents per kWh. Then again, why impose one at all?

If solarPV were a cost-effective way to abate CO2, wouldn’t you think the generators themselves would lease people’s rooves from them, install PV and pay them according to the net value of the output? Why would the state need to become involved at all?

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I believe there are two sources of ammonia in that area. The OneSteel coke ovens at Whyalla produce ammonia from Newcastle coal and Olympic Dam produces ammonium sulphate byproduct for sale as a fertiliser. Not sure where OD gets raw ammonia.

When I last looked the Whyalla ammonia CSP project was a joint venture between the Uni of SA and ANU. I’ve hung around both those august institutions as well staying with rellies in Whyalla a few times yet I’m not confident. To my knowledge the basic concept of thermally dissociating ammonia then recombining to release heat has not yet been proved on a megawatt scale. The whole project could disappoint. I don’t mean to be uncharitable but if it was a goer it would have been done long ago.

If so the list keeps getting longer.. hot fusion, cold fusion, hydrogen cars, hot rocks etc etc then perhaps ammonia CSP. There must be a point at which we proceed with proven technology rather than hold out for new technology breakthroughs. BTW if Spencer Gulf was to supply cooling water for a serious thermal plant it should be either well south of Whyalla or on the opposite side. Electric cable could be laid under the gulf as there are already gas and water pipes.

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… the basic concept of thermally dissociating ammonia then recombining to release heat …

… requires enormous amounts of hydrogen to be stored per unit energy: about seven times more than if it would be combined with oxygen.

… has not yet been proved on a megawatt scale

Partial deoxidation of magnetite would produce ferrous oxide, a much less awkward energy-storing substance. The linked document talks about using it to produce hydrogen, but that is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, It can simply be reoxidized.

(How fire can be domesticated)

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Fran, mW is milliwatt (one thousandth of a watt) – granted the context makes it pretty obvious whether its supposed to be mega or milli, but units matter!

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I thought people might find this amusing. I love the “new paradigm” metaphor. makes a dumbass idea sound like Galileo or Einstein, and if overwhelming objections and refutations are offered, that just shows we folk trapped in the “old paradigm” lack imagination.

Peter Lang (don’t leave us: a little discipline from BWB never hurt anybody) has a response on the climate spectator site.

Is baseload power necessary?

Giles Parkinson

For years, David Mills, the eminent solar energy technology developer, has dreamed of creating a new model for an energy system that does away with the conventional design of massive baseload infrastructure.

Next week the newly-retired founder of solar thermal technology company Ausra (now owned by French nuclear giant Areva), and a former leading researcher at UNSW, will present that model.
Using hourly data for energy use of the entire United States economy in 2006, Mills will demonstrate how it could have been powered almost exclusively by wind and solar (with storage and the help of biofuels for aircraft and some biomass capacity for certain smelting operations).

The details of his findings, including capacity and costing estimations, will be released when he addresses the Australian Solar Energy Society’s annual conference in Canberra next week. But in an exclusive interview with Climate Spectator, Mills gave a broad outline of his conclusions and suggested there was a surprisingly small difference in costs.

“Everyone says that you need flatline baseload capacity (such as coal or nuclear, or in some countries hydro) and build on that platform, and use load-following gas turbines,” Mills said.
“They assume that being baseload makes it cheaper, and all other things are more expensive.”
“What we are suggesting is a new paradigm. The traditional paradigm of flatline baseload does not exist in this scenario, but you need to understand that the replacement for baseload power is not another baseload, it’s a system of flexible and inflexible energy mechanisms based around wind and solar and other sources.”

The study is an extension of an idea that Mills has held dear for some time. In 2005 he presented a talk in Canberra suggesting that solar plans with a “primitive” storage model could run the electricity grid in eastern Australia.

Two years later, he did a similar study for California concluding that, based on hourly data for energy usage in 2006, solar could have carried well over 90 per cent of the electricity load.
The latest study – completed with a former R&D specialist at Ausra, Wei Li Cheng, and a US Department of Energy analyst Phil Larochelle – looks at how solar and wind could handle the entire electricity needs for the US in the same year, and also looks at whether it could handle the entire energy needs for the country, including transport.
Interestingly, wind and solar account for around 50 per cent each of the electricity supplies to handle summer demand and peaks, while more wind was used in winter. Such a system would require a capacity redundancy above peak demand, but would in fact be less than current systems.
Mills says the study looked to test a number of different premises. The first premise was that there was enough solar and wind that, in combination, could run the US economy. There was.
The second was that solar and wind would be connected with a new electricity transmission system, using high voltage direct current lines for the spine of the network, which will allow more flows and result in considerably reduced transmission losses.

These are the sort of networks being contemplated by the Desertec consortium founded by a group of large European industrial giants that are looking to source solar power from north Africa to provide some of Europe’s energy needs.

Mills says China is installing more HVDC lines than any other country in the world – looking to link coal plants with the Three Gorges dam and wind and solar from the north and west of the country. “It very clear to see what they are doing and that it is a very good thing to do,” he said.

Mills says the data used for his study came from 2006, and was based around technology that might be used in 2050, but exists now – even though its lack of scale makes current deployment expensive. “Its not technology that we don’t have now. I didn’t want people saying that it’s future technology.”
He says the model would need to be refined to be implemented, but it provides food for thought. He says it could easily apply to the Chinese and Australian economies, which also benefit from a population largely based on the eastern seaboard, western deserts (which can provide power later into the evening to the eastern consumers), and strong wind resources.

The Mills model will add to the considerable debate about the role of renewables – whether they are a “worthy” but annoying addition to the current network systems, or if they can assume a prominent role in powering economies.

Mills notes the work of the Beyond Zero Emissions group, which outlined a highly contentious study into how Australia could go 100 per cent renewable by 2020 – not so much to suggest it should be done, but that it could be done.

The German industrial giant Siemens has also produced a report entitled “Picture the Future”, which suggested renewable energy could, by 2030, provide 70 per cent of Australia’s electricity needs, with half coming from solar – augmented by storage and a suite of installation across different time zones – and the rest made up of an equal share of wind and geothermal.

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greg meyerson – I don’t want to leave your post unanswered. This, ‘we don’t need baseload’ meme is simply one of the worst lies being told by the renewable side, and one of the most dangerous.

The problem is that numbers work out, BUT only if one is prepared to radically change the way energy is used. It must change so radically, in fact, that it would require a total overhaul of modern civilization, and the cultures that inhabit it. Bluntly, the arguments seem to be of the same general flavor as the arguments for a single global language that were popular at the turn of the previous century – and about as practical.

Like the latter, Mills considers the problem superficially, conceding that there need be changes only in the transition and distribution infrastructure, ignoring the massive legacy we have in technology that depends on the availability of baseload power. The expense of converting both plants and processes to work with this system would be staggering. In many cases it would mean the end of certain industries, or at least their concentration into areas with existing hydro. Even then it is doubtful that capacity could be maintained at current levels.

We have seen this sort of reasoning before, both in energy and in other domains. I’m reminded of statements to the effect that Canada need not burn a drop of heating oil, if we all lived in R100 homes and heated with electricity. True, as far as it goes, but the cost of the R100 conversions to every building in Canada would have been several time the gross domestic product for the country. Therefore, so what? It may be true but it is unobtainable.

At any rate Mills’ scheme is clearly a case of putting the cart before the horse – energy supplies should be tailored to the need, not the other way around. And this brings up the final nail to be driven into the coffin of this idea: there is no real path for growth in this plan. It is not just the total energy use across the globe will rise as more want to obtain a decent standard of living, but per capita use will go up as well as dealing with things, like climate change, makes more demands on energy supplies. Renewables cannot meet future needs.

This is a pure case of misdirection, right out of stage magic, everyone looks at the detailed calculations he made, and thinks the reasoning is sound. No one looks at costs of making it come about.

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@DV8
Be fair, Miles is taking the existing demand data, admittedly only at hourly resolution, and creating a system to meet it. No major behavioural change or smart grid impositions. The approach doesn’t look THAT different from Barry’s OzEA project, except that he’s overbuilding the renewables rather than burning gas to cover shortfalls. The problem will be the cost, how much overbuild and transmission infrastructure is it going to need, and how often will you still need to burn gas? It will be too expensive for China and India to afford, therefore it doesn’t solve the problem.

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I’m glad you chimed in, DV.

i agree the idea is dangerous, not because it would really happen but because it stops the nuclear build.

it won’t really happen. ironic to cite China for its HVDC lines connecting coal to wind given both their continued building of coal plants and their big nuclear build planned. I’m sure China will take Mills advice and stop the coal and nuke build.

you say that the numbers work out. what do you mean by this? the article states that overbuild would only be slight, “a capacity redundancy above peak demand,” but no more and less than we have now.

where are numbers for this that don’t amount to a just-so-story?

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central tendency leaves out the fluctuations, right? so you’d have power outages left and right unless you had a “genius” grid.

even so, I just don’t understand the minimum overbuild claim. capacity factor alone rules this out.

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Mark Duffet, thanks for posting that link to Phil Sawyer’s letter to Greg Combet. This strikes me as a really important document – a considered political strategy for the ALP to switch its position on NP (as opposed to an energy strategy, or a climate response strategy).

We can’t expect people, or parties, to act against their own interests. Phil Sawyer’s argument is important because it clearly articulates how changing policy on NP aligns with the ALP’s current political interests, and makes the case in the terms of a positive party political outcome.

I await Combet’s response.

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phil sawyer says:

People like the doyen of alarmists, James Hansen, and the Gaia Guru Lovelock, are very influential, and pro-nuclear to boot, as you would know, and could be expected to suitably laud our new approach. Closer to home, Bob Carr and people like Professor Barry Brook come to mind, not to mention Ziggy, as folk who ostensibly believe in AGW, but who see nuclear energy as the only rational response to the challenge at hand. It is rumoured that such people even inhabit the cabinet room!

yes, I guess barry ostensibly believes in AGW.

do these folks look at evidence and argument or do they just react to what “sounds extreme,” especially if it implies having to change things up significantly?

to me, this letter, welcoming as it is to people who want nuclear power, engages in more guilt by association. if you think our institutions need “transformation,” you are a “fundo,” an “alarmist,” etc. etc.

even though this blog has made clear how serious the challenge is confronting the world, it’s nice to think that little centrist shiftings of alliances will make all okay.

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I have a new essay on my blog concerning uranium enrichment. Criticism sought:

http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-is-uranium-enrichment.html

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Finrod – I left some remarks in the comments over there, for you.

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Fran Barlow,

Providing the storage could lift the capacity credit to something like the baseload plant used to compare it with.

So if a 1.6GW plant like Hazelwood is 85%available, you’d have to show that a wind plant could produce pro-rata, 1GW of wind would produce 1GW 20 hours per day 7days per week or equivalent at a similar price.

I think you are on the right track. You may have missed this comment https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/#comment-86108
which I think will answer the question you are addressing about the cost of hydro to back up for wind power;

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“… but these compressed balloons are only about $1 thousand per mWh!”

Is this before or after the thermal penalties. That’s the problem with all CASE schemes, PV=nRT keeps getting in the way

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@eclipsenow – When one compresses any gas, like air, it heats up. In fact as the pressure increases much of the energy being used to compress the gas is turned to heat. Much of this heat is lost to the surroundings, in this case the body of water the balloons are siting in.

When the gas is expanded, to do work, that heat must be returned, and it has to come from somewhere. Mostly this is solved in most CASE schemes, by using the compressed air as a high pressure feed to a methane burning turbine generator. The burning natural gas is needed to return the lost heat from compression.

This is a consequence of the fundamental thermodynamic properties of compressed air, and cannot be ignored or brushed off as irrelevant, it is the major source of loss in these systems, and the losses are substantial.

Therefore I would like to know if this estimate on the cost of energy storage is taking this loss into account.

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I would like see just how they intend to expand the air isothermally, and still make it do work. Look this is hand waving around the thermodynamic issues that plague all CASE systems. When you calculate the amount of heat involved it turns out to be huge.

This is the other issue, trafficking in large amounts of heat is not trivial, it has to be dumped out in the compression stage, which means some sort of cooling, and it has to be added back during expansion very quickly, and in huge volumes. One way or the other that is going to involve burning natural gas, or some other fuel. There is no other way around this problem.

Thus this idea is just another way renewables are being used as a Trojan horse for natural gas.

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eclipsenow, let me try and provide some scale for the issue DV82XL is describing.

When you compress a gas it gets hot. You might have noticed this pumping up a bike tyre. If you let a compressed gas expand it cools. You might have noticed this spraying an aerosol can.

If this submerged bladder thing compresses the air from 1 atmosphere (101 kPa) and 25 C to 7.5 MPa, and the heat is not dissipated, the compression will heat the air to 730 C, if I did my sums right.

But the heat apparently is dissipated, lost into the ocean I assume. Thats what Garvey means by isothermal – the temperature stays the same, because you’re throwing away this heat.

When you go to recover the stored energy, the air expands and the temperature drops. Suppose the temperature at 750 m deep is 10 C (I’m just guessing). If you forced it to expand till it reaches atmospheric pressure again, without heating, the temperature would drop to -190 C. But at that temperature its only a quarter of its original volume, so its not blowing very hard.

This is what DV82XL was referring to when he said: “I would like see just how they intend to expand the air isothermally, and still make it do work.” The same issue applies to schemes to store compressed air in underground caverns (perhaps to a lesser extent due to better thermal insulation, but probably with other losses from pumping into porous rocks, and leakage).

So if you’re storing, say, wind energy, on the round trip you through away the energy that would heat the air to ~750 C on the compression cycle, and then burn fossil carbon to effectively heat the air from -190 C to ambient on the expansion cycle. This is on top of the other usual losses, such as friction, viscous losses, and transforming mechanical energy to electrical and back a few times.

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bryen that article The Great Wind Rush provides plenty of food for thought. In a roundabout way it says that Australia’s nameplate wind capacity must increase from 1.9 GW to 18 GW in just 10 years. No way Jose, yet a sizeable segment of Australia’s political elite doesn’t question it.

It also mentions that the REC system will be split between large and small generators with coal burners having to buy certificates from the large renewables sector, presumably excluding hydro built in the 20th century. The effect of this will have to be analysed. Suffice to say it would be a lot simpler if generators were told they could have an average carbon intensity of x% and no more.

Perhaps a simpler way to explain the poor CO2 savings from wind would be to point out that gas burning in 75% working mode + 25% standby mode isn’t much less than 100% working mode. I like the notion that wind turbines have become the new form of religious icon.

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Kaj, I don’t believe so. At what temperature would you store this heat? 750 C? In that case this large underwater air storage system needs to be thermally insulated, and made of materials that work at this high temperature.

Would you store it at something less than 750 C? Say 400 C in some hot body? Then you through away a lot of energy in the Carnot cycle. And you still need high temperature materials and excellent thermal insulation. But now you also need heat exchangers and other elements of the storage and regeneration. This is a long way away from the simplicity of the original idea, and no doubt very expensive.

Or would you store it at lower temperatures, say, 80 C, where materials are less of a problem and maybe thermal loss rates slower. Well, then the recoverable energy is stuff all, due to Carnot cycle losses.

I can’t see how thermal regeneration could work with this storage concept.

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Pisarenko & Rodkin
Heavy-Tailed Distributions in Disaster Analysis
Springer, 2010.

Emphasis on earthquakes, but considers other distributions of extreme events as well. Relevaant to power gird planning.

Castronuovo, ed.
Optimization Advances in Electric Power Systems
Nova Sci. Publ., 2010

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Jim Green wrote a post on nuclear safeguards. Michael Goggin wrote a pro wind post. Those are the ‘dissenting’ opinions I recall posted here.

There was also Barry’s posts on his debate with Diesendorf and others, here, which you might be thinking of.

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John Newlands, on 29 November 2010 at 8:31 AM said:
“Back in 2004 when I lived in southern NSW I was thinking of moving to a bush block in the Gunning-Jerrawa area but I moved to Tas instead. I see a few Sydney connected VIPs have moved to that area and they want to keep it pristine.”

I am not sure what you mean by this comment John. The wind farm issue is upsetting the locals in South West Slopes and surrounding regions, and has has been for a long time! Ever since they put up the useless Crookwell 1.

Have a read of this article on the Yass Valley WF and the comments by the Mayor of Harden ->

http://www.spacountryguardians.org.au/viewnews.php?id=671

“Wind farm consultation under fire”

begin excerpt ->

Harden’s Mayor Chris Manchester is frustrated.

They are fast tracking a lot of this major development, he said.

Its taken out of the hands of local government and we have no say or no control over what does happen, they are rushing through.

Harden council has told the Planning Department the area of the proposed wind farm is steep, inaccessible in wet weather, bushfire prone and susceptible to soil erosion.

Councillor Manchester says locals are apprehensive.

Its a major concern. The Copabella one, there was very little consultation of the community. It just happened and the next minute it¡¯s on sold to Origin Energy,¡± he said.

Origin Energy says it is currently responding to public submissions about the Copabella wind farm and once that is done a development application will be lodged with the State Government.

Cr Manchester says the new development would significantly impact on Jugiong and Bookham.

He says the State Government has not done enough community consultation.

Its creating problems within the local community, with the local landholders because they’re unsure where it’s going and what’s happening and what they’re going to get out of it, if anything, he said.

What’s going to happen with the local community?

—– end excerpt —–

The wind farm Coppabella, is part of the Yass Valley WF proposal (215 turbines), which will stretch 30 km along the Hume, and encompass the villages of Binalong & Bookham. This new application for Jugiong will add another 80.

To get an idea of whats planned in the Goulburn to Gundagai area this article gives a good idea ->

http://www.goulburnpost.com.au/news/local/news/general/windfarms-738-and-counting/2013173.aspx?storypage=0

although the number is getting nearer to 1000 proposed turbines already. Imagine all that lot going offline at once, instead of just Capital & Cullerin as it is at the moment. There are also many other wind monitoring masts owned by wind prospectors that will be putting in apps in the next couple of years.

These are the most recent NSW Dept planning apps ->

Birrema (80, turbines this is the one near Jugiong mentioned above) ->

http://majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/page/project-sectors/transport–communications–energy—water/generation-of-electricity-or-heat-or-co-generation/?action=view_job&job_id=4101

Collector (60 to 80) ->

http://majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/page/project-sectors/transport–communications–energy—water/generation-of-electricity-or-heat-or-co-generation/?action=view_job&job_id=3778

Rugby / Boorowra (90 turbines ) ->

http://majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/page/project-sectors/transport–communications–energy—water/generation-of-electricity-or-heat-or-co-generation/?action=view_job&job_id=4316

Adjungbilly (26 turbines )->

http://majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/page/project-sectors/transport–communications–energy—water/generation-of-electricity-or-heat-or-co-generation/?action=view_job&job_id=3837

**** This is clearly not planning for geographical diversity and smoothing! I wonder why….

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Hmmm… John Quiggin’s nuclear thread is closed.

So, that’s it then, no more discussion of nuclear energy is acceptable for Quiggin?

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