The climate change debate continues.

[Jerry_Atrick]

@Chris Tarran - some great developments, there.

 

Dan Andrews is looking at re-nationalising (or state-ising) power generation in Victoria and investing at least $1bn in solar and wind, as well as upgrades to the grid necessary to become net-zero by 2030. He is even looking at reviving the SEC.

 

The Age has quoted the Grattan Institute heavily in this article, stating that the cost savings are nonsense, based on both the generation and grid infrastructure investment required. I had a quick look at the Grattan Institute's website, and Tony Wood, the Energy and Climate Change director has 14 years’ experience with Origin as a snr exec: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/renewable-revolution-won-t-automatically-cut-power-bills-20221021-p5brsi.html

 

I noticed the article doesn't quote figures, but after mainly being about how it will not decrease the cost of electricity, it balances the article by saying:

'Melbourne University energy expert Dylan McConnell said the costs of building new renewables were inevitable, due to the need to refurbish the grid. “The counterfactual is not doing nothing - we have to spend a fortune on our electricity system anyway because we’ve got ageing infrastructure,” McConnell said.  We have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the electricity sector in the next couple of decades, regardless of what you think about climate change. That’s the reality.” '

 

In other words, to add a bit more balance, due to the very reason Tony Wood states we won’t get cheaper electricity through renewals (need to invest in the grid), we are in for hefty increases in electricity prices by sticking with coal (unless the price of coal falls to near zero). So, even if the introduction of renewables doesn’t save a cent in real terms of current real prices of energy, it will still save us money against sticking with coal.

However, even before reading the bit where NSW is estimating more like $32Bn to upgrade, I did think $1bn was on the low side.

 

BTW, nuclear fusion has taken a step further: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/site-of-uks-first-fusion-energy-plant-selected. But it is still a long way off - if ever.

 

@pmccarthy - you're right - time to make sure there are advanced, home-grown solutions that may well be cost effective.

Edited October 21, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[onetrack]

That new Yadnarie Solar Farm by Photon Energy, using the patented Australian RayGen Therma Hydro Solar modules looks like a winner to me. It's good to see an Australian company at the forefront of solar power development.

RayGen hold 6 patents on their neat little solar modules - which are only 10cm x 10cm in dimensions - and their towers produce 1Mw of energy plus 3Mw of heat, which heat is captured and stored.

The storage of heat is the secret of "saving" excess generated solar power, and RayGen are simply using water as the heat storage medium. They could use other mediums I guess, but water is simple and plentiful.

 

https://raygen.com/technology

 

Govts have to keep control of our energy generation, it's not only from a national security angle, it's about controlling private sector greed for massive profits. The W.A. Govt owns a very substantial percentage of the generation capacity in the State - with a few private power generation operators - and a continually increasing level of household-generated, and business-generated solar power.

 

https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/energy-policy-wa/electricity-industry

 

The constantly-increasing level of private solar power generation from rooftops is the greatest single problem that has to be addressed in the power generation matrix. The level of solar power being generated is going to overwhelm the grid stability some time in the next few years, and this is of great concern to the people planning our future energy production.

 

There is a huge need for major power storage to balance out the private and business solar power being generated during the middle of day when demand is relatively low, so that that power is available in the evenings and early mornings, when power demand is high.

So that energy storage medium has to be provided by the State Govt, no private operator should be allowed to get their finger into this pie, because they will then be able to hold the State and its people and its manufacturing to ransom. We already have this, with the giant Global gas-producing companies.

 

You can't have that ransom potential with energy and water supplies - this is a basic requirement, that these critical sectors of population life support must stay in Govt hands, for national security reasons - not to provide massive windfall profits to faceless corporations, and greed-driven CEO's whenever they see an opportunity to shaft people.

Imagine Alan Joyce being allowed to control our power generation or power storage? He'd shut it off on a whim to hold us all to ransom, so he could gain another $20M in personal bonus.

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by onetrack

[facthunter]

Joyce is typical. Wants a crazy salary and all the rules HIS way. BIG CLIVE wants YOU and ME to subsidise his raillway . That's welfare for the RICH...Nev

[Chris Tarran]

On 22/10/2022 at 2:11 AM, pmccarthy said:

Feed them to politicians.

Doesn't affect hot air output.  Only Methane.

[onetrack]

Here's what's happening in the more outlying rural areas of W.A. The local power generator has decided it's easier and more economical in the long run, to install stand-alone power systems ("SPS's") for farms in areas where there's only a few power consumers, and the transmission lines are long.

 

A few bushfires and a cyclone that came much further South than normal, recently made the rural W.A. power transmission network look decidedly unreliable, and costly to repair and maintain.

Some farmers had no power for 2 or 3 weeks last year, after Cyclone Seroja tore through the Northern Wheatbelt of W.A., causing an unprecedented level of storm damage.

 

These stand-alone power systems are simple solar/battery/genset backup arrangements, that provide more reliable power at the same cost to the farmers, as they paid for the network power.

But the power availability is higher, the power quality is better, and the maintenance levels (for Western Power, the power supplier) are much lower - and the risk of power supply destruction by storm or fire is also greatly reduced. 

One moderate-size country town in the W.A. wheatbelt was without power for a whole 3 days recently, as Western Power struggled to fix faults in the distribution network, poles and lines.

 

Western Power is wearing the reported average $150,000 cost of the SPS's, because they've calculated that over the planned 50 year lifespan, the SPS's will cost them less, than trying to maintain the huge number of poles and wires of a rural network. The advantage of heading in this direction with rural power generation is that the cost of SPS's will continue to come down.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/thousands-of-renewable-standalone-power-systems-to-be-rolled-out/101479136

 

Edited October 23, 2022 by onetrack

[Yenn]

In South Africa during the times of apartheid they put in lots of 6 packs, which were small nuclear power stations. Small being quite large really, but nowhere near the size of the power stations I worked on. I think the 6 related to 6Mw output, but i could be wrong.

[nomadpete]

Yenn, have you any idea what happened to the sixpacks afterwards?

[Jerry_Atrick]

You can find info here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/south-africa.aspx

 

Maybe the 6 refers to this:

"In August 2014 Eskom awarded a contract to Areva (now Framatome) for six new steam generators, despite protests from Westinghouse. The steam generators were made under subcontract by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Equipment Company (SENPEC) and are to be installed 2021-2022 along with upgrading the secondary turbine system by Jacobs Engineering"

 

(A mate of mine works for Jacobs in their nuclear engineering division).

 

No wonder Westinghouse objected - effectively gave access to Westinghouse tec to both Areva (the EPR designers - FFS), and Shanghai. I would be pretty peeved as well. Except, it was older tech.. I guess.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[Bruce Tuncks]

I noticed that Japan is currently making small nuclear reactors and they will soon be for sale.

[Jerry_Atrick]

As are Rolls Royce, and a couple of US manufacturers (of which my partner's company is involved in one design).

 

Most will require existing infra and replace it with the reactors.

 

[nomadpete]

In modern parlance, SMR (small modular reactor) doesn't mean portable. Google only mentions Africa having one nuclear power plant. No mention of Yenn's very small power generators, which is an interesting topic in itself.

 

[Old Koreelah]

13 hours ago, onetrack said:

Here's what's happening in the more outlying rural areas of W.A. The local power generator has decided it's easier and more economical in the long run, to install stand-alone power systems ("SPS's") for farms in areas where there's only a few power consumers, and the transmission lines are long…

At last, some common sense! Parallels with refrigeration: a century ago ice blocks were made in larger centralised refrigeration plants, then distributed to shops and private homes’ ice boxes. Nobody could image that mass production would slash the price so that every house, car, office and campervan has an inexpensive refrigeration unit. 

 

The same applies to stand-alone solar power units.

 

Eventually this trend should remove one of the main dangers to low-level aviators and the high price of copper and aluminium should ensure unused lines are quickly removed.

[kgwilson]

The building and installation of nuclear reactors even small sized ones that drive a submarine is not a problem technologically as there are enough manufacturers around the world with the capability.

 

The problem is environmental (NIMBY) and protection from waste contamination (also not a major problem these days) from a major event like earthquake, Tsunami etc or even sabotage. Most governments even if supportive of nuclear power have huge safety and environmental hoops for the proposals to have to jump through.

 

The main issue is that the infrastructure required to make it work means a large source of water for cooling and steam generation, and all the safety requirements for containment in the unlikely event of a meltdown or leak.

[facthunter]

It all gets to COST and reliability. A universal GRID is always going to be costly for LARGE distances and in some circumstances unreliable and easily sabotaged. COST can be calculated accurately. Diesel as back up is a reasonable top up because it can charge batteries at a high % of the gensets rated output which is the only time it's efficient. Solar-Battery-Diesel back up and eventually reduce & eliminate the DIESEL component with more inventive storage.  Nev

[Yenn]

The 6 packs I saw were in I think 1999, but I could be wrong, it was when SA had dropped apartheid and they were having hearings about it. I was only told that they were nuclear, but the friend who told me was no bullshitter.

[kgwilson]

Your friend may be telling you the truth but the information he was given was false.

[Jerry_Atrick]

SMRs are not portable and they are based on scaling up as needed as well as other advantages here: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/small-modular-reactor#HowDoesaSmallModularReactorWork

 

The idea behind the SMRs the company my partner works for are developing in a joint venture are basically plug and play, and interoperability with existing generation infrastructure - i.e. pull out the boilers/furnaces and stick in the reactors (not quite so simple, but you get the idea). Basically they see the advantages as being able to plug in more reactors as demand sustainably increases (although, there are implications in other plant, such as feedwater pumps, turbines, transmission stations, etc). they can be used in remote areas (although the question of security comes into that) and massively reduced refuelling times. When I worked in the industry, a typical PWR refuel would necessitate closing the unit (a station usually had at least two units), and a 30 day refuel, at a lost revenue cost of c. £1m/day. If we saved them 1 day in the refuel, it was a big deal. However, in theory, a refuel for a SMR is to close the unit for a day, pull the old module out and hook up the new module that has been sitting on a flat bed. The module should be self-contained and sealed for disposal purposes..

[onetrack]

Nuclear reactors are 60's thinking. The sole Saffie nuclear power plant (Koeberg) has already generated over 1200 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste in less than 40 years of operation.

Worldwide, there is a combined 400,000 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste in storage from the worlds operating nuclear plants.

Of that, only 30% has been reprocessed - and even with reprocessing, there is still a large quantity of nuclear waste - high-level, medium level, and low level.

 

The high level waste is a potent fuel source for more nuclear weapons - or even worse - just "dirty bombs". All of this poses a major threat to mankinds existence - particularly when you see nuclear facilities caught up in war actions - something the world has never had to face yet - but which it certainly will.

 

Meantimes, the sun provides us with a million times the power of a nuclear reactor every single day - all we need to do is harvest it and store the energy. It can be done at relatively low cost, with a relatively low carbon and land use footprint, and best of all - there is no dangerous waste that needs to be stored, guarded and kept away from evil, grubby hands.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Those reactors were 60 years ago in design onetrack. There are better designs out now which do not generate the same waste.

I reckon that onerous regulations are the cause of the big costs and we are about to see whole countries ( Poland and Japan) abandon their anti-nuke stance. If they also abandon their excessive regulations, we can expect to see some shipping-container modules get built. And they could be gas-cooled, eliminating the amount of water required.

I look forward to a fair competition between nuclear and wind/solar with storage. As Nev says, it has to get down to the cost of electricity from each.

[facthunter]

There are tendering Figures available to give good indications of prices. You'd have to add disposal cost where not mentioned.  Nev

[onetrack]

The Russians are still one of the few nations prepared to play with nuclear powerplants for power generation. Their most recent effort has been the floating nuclear power plant barge, the Akademik Lomonosov.

 

This Akademik Lomonosov barge replaces the former EGP-6 small nuclear power plant. However, the Admiral Lekonosov was supposed to cost around US$230M, but it ended up costing US$700M.

Not a particularly brilliant economic exercise, perhaps the proper pronunciation of the name is "Lemonosov".

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGP-6

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

[old man emu]

One thing about Global Warming. The rain is warm now.

[nomadpete]

Maybe the rain is warmer OME but maybe you are just getting used to it. You really should finish your bathroom reno. Then you will have even warmer showers.

[facthunter]

It's (officially ) SPRING now. SOON it will be too hot, but they reckon the rain is here till January. By then  there will be Boa Constrictors in your front Lawn.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Spring is nearly ended here and its been raining most of the day. 14 degrees and 50mm, Wow its November in a day or 2.

The global warming deniers are really happy.