Various Rants on Energy Happenings
Tue Feb 26, 2008 at 09:19:52 PM PDT
Various Rants on Energy Happenings.
I usually don't rant, but I feel like ranting, for the good, the bad and the ugly:
#The Chinese broke ground on their first ever Generation III Nuclear Power Plant. They expect the new Westinghouse (A JAPANESE COMPANY FOLKS!) AP1000 to come in around $2500/KW installed. It'll be the 1200 MWs model. Of course they have to build tons more to effectively slow down coal production...but this will be worth about 3 coal plants the WON'T build (the Chinese build smaller 400 MWs coal plants it seems, but scads of them).
The US has about 4 AP1000s in the planning stage. Of course it takes the NRC to go almost 3 ½ years to get through all the stupid paper work even AFTER they approved the design AND the site for the plants.
BTW...the Japanese and Koreans brought in their 3 ABWRs for under budget and on schedule. The answer to why they were able to do it is because these were the first non-French built modularly designed and manufactured nuclear power plants and Greenpeace and other "nuclear-is-worse-than-coal" fundentalists are fortunatly very weak there.
#They started building Nevada Solar One. $266 million dollars for 64 MWs. That's about $4100/KW installed for nameplate capacity. You'all know what "Name plate capacity" is don't ya'? It means the amount of power it could produce if everything was perfect, the planets were aligned and God looked sweetly down on his Creation. That's what "name plate capacity" is. In other words, for about 6 hours a day, assuming the weather is good, no clouds, in the middle of the summer, you might get 64 MWs. Maybe.
So we're not getting 64 MW HOURS, we're getting a "definite maybe". If you work out the costs for getting actual 64 MW/hrs, it's like something closer to $17,000 KW installed. Yoouuzzaaa! About the same, maybe less, unofficially, that the larger Spanish solar thermal plant cost. But this is supposed to better than nuclear. OK, next....
#HVDC. We see this thrown around a lot. As if it's gonna save wind and solar's butts. People really don't know what it is, but is sounds good. Say it: "H-V-D-C". They are actually building the very first HVDC line across the street from the power plant where I work in San Francisco's south side. The so-called environmentalists are pushing it because it means they can shutdown the fossil plants in San Francisco and bring in other fossil generated power from the East Bay. That's "OK" because it's not in our back yard. Get it?
HVDC is touted as the way to bring wind power and solar power from the remote areas of the US to the area of the actual load. What people don't know is that for anything under about 50 miles, it's not worth it. Plus, you still have to connect to it at a central hub where the expensive part of the whole HVDC set up is installed: the rectifier which takes the AC and turns into DC. At the end of the cable you need another one, an inverter, to take the power from DC and turn it into usable AC. This is bucko bucks. But for cross-regional wheeling of thousands of MWs it makes total sense. For example, a cluster of 4 EPR nukes, at 1600 MWs each, can be built in bum-f*ck nowhere, like central Utah, and wheeled across the US.
In fact, there is a utility consortium that is building an Extra High Voltage line from Virginia into Ohio for purposes of moving vast amounts of power this way and that, overlaid over the existing regional grid. Cool huh? This actually makes a more centralized power generating BETTER than the current fancy of "decentralized" power touted but you-know-who.
--END OF RANT--
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