I wish we would shed our night terrors of nuclear, haunted by technology & practices of our grandparents' generation.
Green/New Energy
Australia Is Quitting Coal in Record Time Thanks to Tesla
Elon Musk helped accelerate a transformation of the country's electricity grid to replace fossil fuels with clean power — now it's a testing ground for global climate action.
Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag.
South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted — on Twitter, of course — that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast.
More:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-04/how-tesla-tsla-elon-musk-are-helping-australia-quit-coal-power?leadSource=uverify%20wall (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-04/how-tesla-tsla-elon-musk-are-helping-australia-quit-coal-power?leadSource=uverify%20wall)
Well they did finally turn on a new reactor at the nuc plant near here. First one in (30?)! Years!!!
I am all for Nuclear being a base load, but the reality is Solar and Wind are cheaper to implement than Nuclear (at least for now). NG I think is cheaper than everything, which is why it got to popular so quick. It's a huge upgrade over coal as far as environmental impact as well, which is nice.
Waiting for China to blow themselves up perfecting fusion....
Quote from: SJ_GTI on April 06, 2023, 05:43:01 AM
I am all for Nuclear being a base load, but the reality is Solar and Wind are cheaper to implement than Nuclear (at least for now). NG I think is cheaper than everything, which is why it got to popular so quick. It's a huge upgrade over coal as far as environmental impact as well, which is nice.
NG is also very useful for peaker plants; they can be spun up much more quickly than coal or oil. But nowhere near as fast fast as grid-level battery storage, which I believe is pretty much instantaneous. Obviously the stored juice has to come from some other method... and that's where the arguments start.
The traditional grid equivalent of grid battery storage would be turbines on "spinning reserve". They basically sit there spinning at speed synched to the grid acting like a flywheel and then can fire up at will based off of voltage needs
Quote from: r0tor on April 06, 2023, 02:28:17 PM
The traditional grid equivalent of grid battery storage would be turbines on "spinning reserve". They basically sit there spinning at speed synched to the grid acting like a flywheel and then can fire up at will based off of voltage needs
How do you spin them in reverse? Trained birds?
Quote from: r0tor on April 06, 2023, 02:28:17 PM
The traditional grid equivalent of grid battery storage would be turbines on "spinning reserve". They basically sit there spinning at speed synched to the grid acting like a flywheel and then can fire up at will based off of voltage needs
Ope, then the wind dies. And all of California rolls into brownouts/blackouts again because they think that's how shit works.
What if California trained the birds to reverse the wind turbines blades during low demand hours and wrap a big rubber band around them so when they needed more power they would have extra speed
Quote from: giant_mtb on April 06, 2023, 03:56:11 PM
Ope, then the wind dies. And all of California rolls into brownouts/blackouts again because they think that's how shit works.
Umm gas turbines
Quote from: r0tor on April 06, 2023, 07:25:05 PM
Umm gas turbines
I think the grid storage batteries are commonly put next to solar panel farms.
Hot air from Newsom's mouth could provide some energy. But not without pollution.