This is one if the best articles I have read on power grids. During the last five years of my Petroleum Engineering career I worked with a 35+ year Electrical Engineer. Before I met him, I didn't know much of anything about how a power grid worked. One day I asked him about the rush to load up power grids all over the world with wind & solar. I wish I had a picture of his facial expression as I asked the question. Funniest look I have ever seen. We proceeded to have a two hour conversation. He said it would take multiple, major catastrophes to wake people up. I'm afraid we are there.
Thanks for the recommendation, I just bought the book. I gave up newspapers pre-plandemic because they had become unreadable. Hard to do when you have been reading them daily for 50+ years. Then I stumbled upon Substack. It was like finding a gold mine on the ground. You are an OUTSTANDING communicator. Keep up the "Good Fight."
Here is an interesting SOHO forum debate on this subject where Steven Koonin thoroughly dismantles (Texas A&M climate crony) Andrew Dressler.
It is an illuminating case study in why "green" energy climate hysterics will almost never debate anyone in the reality-based community (a.k.a. "deniers").
Six minutes in, after sharing the opening excerpt from a sob story in Rolling Stone about a poor lady in Phoenix paying up to $500 a month in summer for A/C, more than her rent (I lived in Phoenix 2017-2019; utility never capped at more than ~$120; this lady is getting scammed somehow), Dressler says:
"This is what climate change adaptation looks like. When people say, 'Oh, we'll deal with climate change,' this is what it looks like. And it's essentially normalizing suffering. Her liberty has been stripped from her. All she does is work to survive. She can't do anything to improve her life. And if you say, 'Oh we'll deal with climate change,' you're normalizing this---the same way we normalize a million Americans dying during Covid."
What a scum-sucking, faux-compassionate government stooge. I'm growing to detest these people.
I , too , have given up on newspaper and TV news, including Fox. I get most of my news now from Substack, War Room and Epoch Times. Call it selection bias but I seem to be the most informed of all my friends.
I echo your first sentence. Great article Gato. We have to ask ourselves, just like we have with Covid - is this sheer incompetence? Greed to pet industries? Or something more nefarious? Once again, I come to the conclusion it's all the above, and once again, the end result is more control. Plain and simple.
Just like IVM, HCQ, vitamins, and simple healthy lifestyles were and are the solutions to surviving Covid, the flu, etc., but were shut down for the magical vaccine, the simple answer here is by far "nuclear". But the biotech/politico/medical/NWO industrial complex isn't interested in any answer or option except their own. The sooner we learn this, the easier it is to tell them "NOPE".
Some of the players further down the hierarchy are just plain incompetent. But at the top (and I would never have said this three years ago), they are evil.
Agree. I swing back and forth - and the evil are also idiots and incompetent, just with the added evil sauce thrown in - but the bottom line is mass suffering. People tend to not like mass suffering and make their feelings known at some point. It's going to get ugly.
And realistically these are the same people who will be in charge of nuclear power plants. Do you really want that? I don't. I'm not sure how it would work to have a grid set up but with individual solar panels on each dwelling/garage. I have that and it works! My husband died from two forms of cancer and I had cancer with a recurrence as a result of radiation (of course, other causatives may have been in play as well though we were not overweight, exercised, and ate organic and home-grown). Other pro-nuke types call it that "radiation-thingy." Believe me, if you get cancer and watch loved ones die from it, you would not be so cavalier about radioactive waste and disposal sites.
Rooftop solar has all the problems Gato describes, plus a couple more.
(1) The grid is not designed to deliver power 'backwards.' As rooftop solar penetration increases, the problem gets worse. I could give all the technical reasons this is so (I'm an electrical engineer, Life Fellow of the IEEE and work in the power industry) but the fact is, this is a big problem without a simple solution.
(2) Rooftop solar cannot be controlled or monitored the way a central system can be. Most rooftop systems just dump excess power to the grid. Again with greater penetration of rooftop, this problem increases.
Rooftop solar can 'work' for a small part of the population, where the rest of the grid provides your needs when you are not generating the power you need. But it won't keep the lights on when the grid goes down (rolling blackouts, anyone?) -- unless you also have a battery/inverter setup which can double or triple your system cost.
And it does not solve the 'spinning reserve' issue Gato talks about. 'Spinning reserve' (that is the power industry term for it) is basically gas turbines, running at full speed and ready to take over when the sun stops shining on the panels. They don't burn very much gas when they are not generating power, just enough to overcome friction; but they can be throttled up almost instantly. Some hydro installations have this capability, too.
The bottom line, is that for a stable grid with renewables, you must have enough spinning reserve to take over if you lose all of your renewables. Sooner or later it happens, and without the reserve, you get rolling blackouts or worse.
Nuclear is not a panacea, either, though it can be an excellent foundation for a power grid. France shows that it is possible and practical to do this. One of the issues with nuclear power is that it is not 'dispatchable' as in, you can't just call up the operator and have him or her turn on the switch. It takes time to bring up a reactor (days), and time to shut it down (days to years). Nuclear fission generates something like 2/3 of its power from the fission reaction of the uranium fuel, and the rest from radioactive breakdown of the fission products. So when you 'scram' a reactor and stop the fission, you still have the last 1/3 of the power you still need to have a way to remove from the core, because you can only control the fission part of the equation. (Meltdowns happen when the reactor is stopped but there is no way to get rid of that ongoing heat. Nukes have what is called an 'emergency core cooling system' or ECCS, intended to prevent meltdown of the core in an emergency shutdown. Meltdowns happen when the ECCS fails.)
But with proper planning, nuclear based on modern, safe reactors -- I think they are up to 5th or 6th generation designs now -- can form the foundation of a carbon-free electrical grid. FWIW, the reactors at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were all 2nd generation reactors without the inherent safety features the new ones have. New designs are much safer but everyone is afraid of nukes, so the ones we have are now 50 years into their 30 year design life... making an occasional catastrophe inevitable. We need the new, safe designs. Hopefully someone in power will figure this out -- apparently not the idiots running the EU though.
I am not scientifically equipped to discuss this in this sort of depth with you. My late husband was also a Ph.D. electronics engineer. He was the person who had the solar panels installed. They've been up and functioning well for probably 7 or 8 years. He died 5 years ago. He was also an IEEE member, but I don't know what his status was. He was a group leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I would love to talk to him about this stuff, but, unfortunately, he died from cancer. It was a second cancer - multiple myeloma. Waste disposal from spent rods, etc is a problem. I worked on the Yucca Mountain project, which we jokingly referred to as the Yucky mountain project. Always political, never scientific. The WIPP disposal site in NM had to close down for 3 years because of contamination. So nuclear power plants may be the only solution, but they will eventually kill you. As I'm 80, I'll be dead by that time.
I had a similar thought.. greed to pet industries? YES. something more nefarious? YES For Sure. Sheer incompetence? .. my instinct was to say No, can't be plain ole 'innocent' incompetence. But probably I'm wrong on that, probably there is Some incompetence, like you say especially further down the hierarchy. But it's the 'something more nefarious' that scares me...
"is this sheer incompetence? Greed to pet industries? Or something more nefarious?"
Religious fanaticism. In subsidizing the Greens back in the '60s and '70s in tandem with the anti-nuclear movement, I think the KGB succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Edit: and since Europe all works on multi-party coalition politics, the various green parties have been able to wield outsize power to shape government policy.
Spot on. Worked 12 years in Energy multinationals - and Gato, you nailed it. I can’t frankly understand why the EU is committing suicide in this way, and nobody seems to move a finger. I haven’t spoken with my former energy colleagues in a while, but I suspect they’re all making the same face as your Engineer.
Within the industry, the limitations and need to supplement W+S with conventional through an efficiently connected grid are well known. We also know wind needs subsidizing, we know that power can’t be stored and transporting it = losing a good part of it because, well, physics. So of course I love clean energy, but I also know its limits. People aren’t using less energy… smart phones need constant recharging, after all. And how about our lovely electric cars? (Pro-tip: if you need to scare an eco-lunatic friend, ask him/her if they know where the electricity that powers their hybrid car comes from. Some do, some don’t.)
I’m baffled that despite the eco-obsession EU seems to be considering coal or burning wood (of all the things… how is deforestation ‘eco’-friendly?) rather than reconsidering a suicidal gas policy. The price cap genius must have banged her head badly.
Or worst.
In any case, it’s going to be an interesting winter.
My office is one of many still trying to push 'paperless' work. I wonder what the difference in energy usage is between printing a page and re-using it many times, vs displaying that page on a screen the same number of times. Even with the most power-efficient screens and computers...
Add up all the electricity cost of the networking components to make that reload happen. Print something once, use it 'for free' for many years until the paper disintegrates.
So...a full *40* years ago I attended a program in which a small business owner - the business of a software application combining email, word processing, and calculation programs - predicted the “paperless office” within <20 years‼️
I believe today he would be considered an “elite”.
the infuriating thing is there are solutions that are totally viable, in particular solar thermal with molten salt or other thermal ballasts. Most of them would require work on the grid but the tech needed 100% exists and is not prohibitively expensive. But somehow only the boneheaded useless ones (e.g. wind) make it past big energy and onto the grid
You need to provide a bit more than such a cursory flyby remark. Perhaps you might care to explain? To my mind Li-ion batteries have a place where their power density is really needed - portable devices. To use them in vehicles is misuse of a precious commodity until we can find a way to use hydrogen safely and cheaply. Other battery technology that doesn't require such energy density, perhaps Vanadium flow, need development for utility scale and home use. No point in using Li-ion for fixed installations.
How did they do their initial install ion? Wonder what their cell structures are? I know Tesla has put a lot of effort in cell matching to preserve lifetimes, quite a bit of engineering. All I know is that refurbishing Li-ion units is near impossible. We are already having issues with the device batteries.
Agree that this is one of the best articles on power grids, and also on the economic insanity in attempting to compensate for all the sequellae of failed and fallacious energy planning.
A professor at Northwestern University wrote a wonderful paper on why wind and solar cannot work due to battery storage constraints. I suggest giving it a read. If you can’t locate I will search and post. Also, accounting gimmicks make wind and solar look better when compared to nuclear. They rate the useful life if all types of “production facilities” at 50 years. Many of the nuclear plans are going on 70 years. While the first wind farms are being replaced after 25 years. Disposing of the blades is proving problematic…
Based on your comments, I am guessing you are simply replying to my post since it included the word petroleum. Every sentence you wrote indicates that you didn't read el gato malo's post. Big energy has nothing to do with the science behind operating a power grid in a rational manner. Lastly, the political effects of petroleum are clear & horrible? You should have led with that, then you would have been finished.
"Big energy has nothing to do with the science behind operating a power grid"
True, but it has *everything * to do with the politics of operating a power grid, and that's the limiting factor as everyone know.
Regarding political effects of Petro dependence I can't tell what you mean, but only people who think Saudi Arabia is a wonderful country and Yemen no biggie can possibly avoid noticing how bad petro and extractive industry generally are for the world
The leadership of Europe has brainwashed their citizens into believing that green energy is feasible when they know full well it is not. Additionally, they've convinced their population that if they do not act by shutting these power plants down, climate change is going to kill them all.
So they're brainwashing their own countrymen to manifest conditions that will kill them, while promising them salvation for doing so.
This is the end result of a corporate media echo chamber that acts as propagandists for approved narratives to a naive population. I've been so frustrated talking about this topic with others because they have absolutely no idea about the basics of physics and power generation that gato so nicely captured. Instead, I'm told nonsense replies about magical "green energy" and the "climate crisis". The only true crisis is a lack of critical thinking.
At 2019 rates of mining (pre-Covid) it would take 9,920 years to obtain enough lithium, and 7,100 years to obtain enough vanadium to build ONE generation (20-25 years worth) of wind and solar to replace all fossil fuels. Both of those numbers exceed the known reserves of those metals.
GREEN NET ZERO = INTELLECTUAL ZERO DEGREES KELVIN.
1) THEY'RE DOING IT ON PURPOSE. These shit heads have plenty of people on payroll as good at math as EGM. None of this should be revelatory to anyone with a degree in physics.
2) As lefties are fond of saying, the cruelty is the point.
The assumption is that Our Betters want the abundant energy we had pre-2020.
They want abundant energy for themselves.
For the rest of us? Not so much.
They want us to die. But they can't tell us they want us to die, because we have gunz and could get all uppity. So they have do to it secretly and pretend they want things to get better while making them worse. First CV. Then the CV19. Then Ukraine war.
Coming soon: a winter of food and energy shortages. All by design.
We must die so Klaus, Bill Gates and Prince, I mean "King" Charles can realize their depoluation, I mean "genocidal" dreams.
The silver lining is that "King" Charles, the preeminent depopulationist that he is, is notoriously dumb. He is legitimately stupid. He will screw things up badly. It will happen.
Bingo. As long as you see human flourishing and quality of life as just another set of levers to pull up and down, a whole lot of options appear more attractive and viable.
Any idea why nobody seems interested in Thorium molten salt reactors (LFTR)? Practically unlimited amounts of the stuff and the reactor designs are inherently safe and can use most of the waste we've already made and stored as fuel. Flibe Energy reckon they could build a working reactor for $2billion which is peanuts. Seems to me like they're deliberately throttling access to cheap, reliable energy that could easily be accessed if there was a will to do so. https://flibe-energy.com/lftr/
Even advanced uranium reactors were denied research funding in favor of designs related to military reactors. The smaller reactors proposed for modular factory builds are just now arriving. Those reactors could work for smaller areas interconnected by a smarter grid.
I can see the logic of developing the uranium, rather than the thorium, cycle back in the 60s but why not now? They throw money at all kinds of pipe dream energy projects but not LFTRs . I don't think they're interested in a viable energy solution. Cheap, reliable and limitless energy for all removes a point of leverage for the "Elites".
Nuclear does not come without its problems. The first thorium reactor (using steam) exploded with lots of nuclear garbage in the 1960s. Some of the isotopes were released last year due to forest fires. So it takes some real investments to make a safe and fully working reactor.
But due to Chernobyl the governments and people started shifting away from nuclear. If not for the heroes, most of Europe would still be unlivable. The radioactive isotopes still poison some of the wild mushrooms. Japan's Fuk-ushima might have killed a lot of sealife (like 90% of the sea floor life), but we don't know exactly because a lot is kept secret.
All those disasters do not make people very eager to start with any nuclear technology.
I see some promising solutions in electrical driven fusion techniques. Like focus fusion, and the safire project. 2 very different technologies. They show that clean energy is very easy to obtain and very safe.
But the astronomers are mad about it, Their astronomy theory models are very broken, but they do not want to admit it, and push backwards on these new & promising technologies.
They started shifting away long before Chernobyl in the US. "The China Syndrome" and the Three Mile Island incident (with its death toll of 0) effectively ended most interest in nuclear here. There have not been any nuclear power plants commissioned since that era.
There have been some high profile accidents, but Chernobyl should not be an example to anyone in the west. It was built with cavalier disregard for safety and known best practices (at several levels, not the least of which being the lack of a containment structure) that can only come from centralized state planning and a complete lack of concern for the safety of individuals. The lesson of Chernobyl is not "nuclear is bad." It's "socialism is bad."
Fukushima was a natural disaster of a "once in several lifetimes" severity. Earthquakes into the 9s on the moment magnitude scale are close to the maximum possible (the elasticity of the crustal rocks being the limiting factor). Even so, the reactor survived the initial shock, properly SCRAMming as it was designed, only to succumb to the tsunami-related flooding a bit later. Key lesson: Don't put the backup generators in a place that will be flooded during a tsunami if you are in a tsunami zone. Should have been obvious, but somehow it was not. It is now!
As in aviation, each accident teaches us something and makes the whole industry safer. What would life look like if we took the 'oh no, something bad happened, let's shut down the entire industry forever' standard was applied? All forms of travel that don't involve feet would be gone. There have been horrific accidents by boat/ship, train, road vehicle, and air. We certainly would not have electric power to our homes (so I guess the warmists would be happy).
As a child of the 60s I see now that I was indoctrinated into anti-nuclear attitudes. I remember when I was younger I thought nuclear was obviously a good solution. Younger as in mid-teens. But then Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome…
Now I'm struggling to overcome these lifelong biases and look at everything afresh. I appreciate these discussions and especially references to further information.
Of the many alarming parts of Fukushima, while building the project the engineers on the ground were concerned and warned about the location of the backup generators; too close to sea level in the event of a tsunami. They were overruled by higher ups.
A design with Thorium and molten salt can be made pretty safe. Even in areas where earthquakes are possible.
I work a lot in safety. It is the most ignored subject. The disasters were a result of nuclear reactors. Not because of socialism or natural causes. Safety is always limited due to costs and political pressure. We knew that earthquakes were possible in Japan, but they built them anyway. And always all accidents could have been prevented. If real scientists were deciding things, we would not even have the plandemic and side-effects.
Today with the great reset and economic collapse, I do not see that safety will given any priority. Maybe we will see nuclear disasters in Ukraine or due to the sinking of some nuclear ships. Some nuclear powered air-craft carrier is likely to be targeted in a war and could explode.
Maybe in what you do, safety might be somewhat dismissed. From my experience, nuclear in the US has perhaps an excess of safety. Working toward 5 9's event seems to be the target and that is expensive. The Russians never had a safety culture like the US. And the Japanese event remains nearly a 5 9 event. No matter how careful, there always will be some risk but more people have died from conventional power production faults than nuclear power production in terms of instances per operation.
Pure bull. TMI did zip. The radiation release was trivial and insignificant outside the plant. There is still a lot of suspicions that TMI-2 was deliberate sabotage. There is this thing called Cause-And-Effect you know. Measurements? Check out:
"...Galen Winsor makes a startling statement; he claims that the Three Mile Island event was no accident. He states that the GE three of Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale G. Bridenbaugh wrote the script.
This would sound incredibly far fetched without the almost impossibly coincidental timing of "The China Syndrome" still playing in movie theaters at the time of the accident, the unbelievable coincidence of a line in the movie about contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania (the same state where TMI is located), and the still troubling unknown regarding how the feed pump isolation valves on the back-up feed water pump just happened to be shut (supposedly due to a "maintenance error") when the primary pump tripped off line..."
"..first thorium reactor (using steam) exploded with lots of nuclear garbage in the 1960..."
No. You made that up.
"...due to Chernobyl the governments and people started shifting away from nuclear..."
Nonsense. The Nuclear Blockade started well before Chernobyl (1986) already in the early 70's due to the fact it was rapidly devastating fossil electricity generation. Rockefeller big money was heavily involved in the Nuclear Fear Porn industry. Partnered up with a gang of Malthusian anti-human types who saw nuclear as saving industrial civilization which they despise.
".. Japan's Fuk-ushima might have killed a lot of sealife (like 90% of the sea floor life)..."
That's utter nonsense. Spreading made up Fear Porn like that is disgusting. The Truth:
"....The total effective dose commitment from ingestion of radionuclides in fish, shellfish and seaweed caught in coastal waters off Fukushima was estimated to be 0.6 ± 0.4 mSv/y. The individual effective dose commitment from consumption of radioactive-contaminated fish caught in the open Pacific Ocean was estimated to be 0.07 ± 0.05 mSv/y. These doses are comparable or much lower than doses delivered from the consumption of natural 210Po in fish and in shellfish (0.7 mSv/y). The estimated individual doses have been below the levels when any health damage of the Japanese and world population could be expected....."
Not intending to argue, but I'd like to point out that your final claim of Fear Porn is a very categorical statement, yet your final paragraph supporting that is composed of estimates and assumptions. Are there any actual counts of the sea life that remained?
There is a thing called cause and effect. If the radiation (that's the only Fuku contamination) mainly from Cs-137 (beta & gamma) is lower than the stronger more dangerous radiation from natural Po-210 (alpha & gamma) and K-40 (stronger beta and gamma) etc than by what mechanism can anybody claim sea life was harmed?
Even if what you say is true – I don't know enough to argue about it – I find it surprising that astronomers have enough clout to make any sort of impression on the energy industry. I don't expect you to elaborate here, but if you could point me to some reading material I would be grateful.
Astronomy is related to how most people think about the sun. So our nuclear fusion reactors are trying to replicate the inner part of the sun, with false knowledge about the sun.
Um, no. I'm aware of no nuclear fusion proposals for p-p fusion to deuterium. They mine deuterium from water. And some aneutronic proposals contemplate no use of deuterium at all.
Ever studied where these powerful magnetic fields come from? Because it is a high temperature environment, it must be electrical currents. You can even see the currents in the moving plasma.
Yet astronomy does not like electrical currents, so they have invented all kinds of impossible "physics" to try to compensate for that. Really impossible. Like magnetic field lines bumping into each other. Which is as stupid as radio-waves bumping into each other.
Yet, with the electrical currents all the magnetic fields become obvious and they clearly predict how the plasma moves and reacts. The magnetic fields is also strong near the plasma-currents, so it is also obvious in that sense.
I tried to write some articles to astronomers, but it is an anti-science cult.
Interesting, thank you! I loved Astronomy as a kid, but when I tried to study it in college it was all so theoretical I lost interest. And then stuff like dark matter which "must" be there or else our models are wrong... (maybe your models ARE wrong?) It seems unlikely to me that we have "figured it all out." That would be a first for mankind, wouldn't it?
What accounts for their bias against electrical currents?
The logic now is simple: we aren't allowed to use anything that works, because that might mean catabolic collapse of Western civilization is averted. Death cult is as death cult does.
No surprise there. Car and gas manufacturers killed the trolly systems after the war. Even my small 20,000 population town had a trolley system—until it didn’t. I read about that somewhere 🤔 😉👵🏻 That link looks interesting.
Because the goal is not cheap and plentiful energy for the people, but for the elites and their holdings.
To put it more poetically:
The goal is control. Mastery. The machine needs you to labour and produce wealth for its owners, and then it needs you to die when your consumtion quota outpaces your production results.
The Machine doesn't care if your are woman or man or black or white or jew or hindu. All are equal before the Machine, save the its owners and Masters.
The LFTR concept is pretty much dead. My understanding is Kirk Sorenson is working on fast SMRs now. The fundamental problem with LFTR is nobody has found a way to start them up except with weapons grade U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. Can be done in China or Russia but it is a deal breaker for Western reactors. Even China which has had the most R&D on LFTR has opted to build a Molten Salt thorium slow breeder reactor which will startup with 20% enriched uranium and 20% thorium energy working up eventually to 80% thorium energy. You will still have to burn some enriched uranium to keep it running, unlike a true LFTR which once started, a 1GWe reactor can run continuously with 1 tonne of Thorium metal added each year, the size of two milk crates.
I would add that you can burn Thorium in CANDUs as a fraction of their natural uranium fuel, as I recall it is about 20%. India has a program of running their nuclear entirely on thorium of which they have vast quantities by breeding it in Liquid Sodium Fast reactors and further burning the separated fuel in PHWR or Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors = CANDUs.
Molten salt (Natrium), but still seems to be based on Uranium.
"Since it was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries, TerraPower has emerged as an incubator and developer of ideas and technologies that offer energy independence, environmental sustainability, medical advancement and other cutting-edge opportunities." - Oh great.. :-/
My bad. But it's my understanding that molten salt reactors can use uranium for a fuel much more efficiently than standard high pressure water cooled reactors so does the fuel source actually matter?
I just had a look at this. I think it is just a small, conventional uranium fuelled reactor linked to a reservoir of molten salt to act like a "heat battery" which can be drawn on to generate electricity to balance the grid. It is basically designed to replace the gas fired power stations currently being used to back stop wind and solar. Not a bad idea but a little disappointing...
It is proposed to be 'sodium-cooled', so not exactly conventional. Sodium cooling means it can operate at a higher temperature and lower pressure than a pressurized water reactor. High pressure systems (water & steam) will be outside of the reactor circuit, though necessarily, the sodium/water heat exchanger (boiler) will be high pressure on the water side in order to produce the high pressure steam for the steam turbine/generator.
There is reference to re-using the existing cooling water supply of the fossil/coal facility. This would be water used for the steam condenser at the discharge of the steam turbine, not heat transfer water for the reactor itself. This cooling water (and cooling towers, for recirculating systems) are required regardless of the fuel source.
That's a liquid sodium fast reactor. Uranium fueled but could burn thorium also. The big thing would be to have online pyroprocessing of fuel which is what the IFR was supposed to do. The highly successful project was killed by Climate Change Czar John Kerry. With the IFR, 1oz of natural uranium, depleted uranium or spent nuclear fuel would supply one American's lifetime share of US primary energy, TPES x80yrs/per capita. And generate 0.17oz of waste which only needs to be contained for 300yrs. Drop it down a borehole. Easy-peesy. Read all about it here: "Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011. IFR free book download:
NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) won't let anything be built except Pressurized Water Reactors and even that only if you go through mountains of paperwork and 10's of $million in expenditure:
How to liberate nuclear energy, with Robert Zubrin
It's not a true LFTR, but similar. However it can only achieve max 80% thorium fuel energy. It still needs added enriched uranium to continue operation.
I have come to the realization that the Green movement is ultimately anti-human. What they really decry is not "warming" or "climate change" it is "impact." They will decry the cutting down of trees for firewood as equally bad as driving an internal combustion engine automobile because of... wait for it... the IMPACT.
The logical conclusion of this thought process is that the only way to reduce human impact is to reduce human life.
So pointing out physical realities and limitations of Green technologies is nice, but they will ignore it just the same. That is because the point isn't to enable green technologies, the aim is to minimize impact (i.e. human life). Furthermore, when we point out that many people will freeze this winter without adequate natural gas, the Greens don't care. They actually want that outcome for the reasons already described.
You may be onto something. They have tried so hard to reduce human population with wars but none of them caught fire to do the kind of damage the greens want so now they are turning to injected poisons and murderous energy policies.
"The logical conclusion of this thought process is that the only way to reduce human impact is to reduce human life." That as Frank Zappa would say, "Is the crux of the biscuit"😎
The whole green energy thing is a joke. As usual, it is just a ploy to give money to cronies, who in turn give it back to the politicians. Clearly green energy isn't green. In the Florida and Georgia areas of the US, as you drive down the interstate you see thousands of acres of land filled with nothing but solar energy panels. Think how many trees were removed in order to put these in. News flash...trees get rid of CO2 and put out oxygen. If the goal is to reduce CO2, why hasn't anyone done an analysis to show how much CO2 is being reduced per acre of solar cells as opposed to how much is reduced per acre of woodland? And that doesn't even get into the whole battery storage, solar panel creation, disposal issues.
The funniest thing I heard recently from the greeners is using your EV battery as back up power for the house.
So we're going to charge the car's battery with the associated energy loss up to 25%, and then we're going to supply that charge back to the house so can we can incur another energy loss to recharge the battery later. When energy is scarce, this seems incredibly wasteful.
If the car batteries work anything like the cell phone batteries, with x number of total charges before it goes bad, then that also means end-of-life comes sooner with the resulting energy costs to mine the rare materials it takes to create a replacement battery. (Not that there's enough materials to produce the number of batteries already projected to be needed if everyone drives an EV.)
Basic concepts like efficiency are way too inconvenient for them. They can't understand that each time you transfer energy from one form to another, there are losses. Significant losses. Nuclear is by far the most efficient. Battery storage is a joke. Unicorn storage tho, now that is something.
"Basic concepts like efficiency are way too inconvenient for them. They can't understand that each time you transfer energy from one form to another, there are losses."
Remember that America was built by people who said "how can I"
It was not built by people who's motto is "I can't"
The people who created much of what we take for granted were constantly laughed at by the people who said "you fool, it cannot be done"
Solutions are tailored to the need they seek to solve.
The point of vehicle to home is its intended to get you through the edge cases, not be utilized on a daily basis.
When you design a solar PV at home system, getting to say 95-97% reliability would cost you $X
Getting to 100% reliability costs significantly more than $X because batteries are your reserve capacity and they are the most expensive components.
The idea then is to find cheap ways you can get the last 3-5% without sacrificing convenience.
Using the EV battery is a cheap option(if you have an EV) because an EV battery typically has enough capacity to run a house for 2-3 days. Efficiency is less important in this case than reliability as this method is not supposed to be used daily.
Would it reduce the lifespan of the vehicle battery? Yes, but over a 15-20 year lifespan of a vehicle's battery it would do so negligibly.
In the 1970s they said there was not enough oil to run the world in 2000, yet its 2022 and the oil is flowing in greater volume than when the day these claims were made.
I rather suspect claims of 'not enough materials for everyone to have an EV' will have a similar outcome over the long term.
* Mandates (government gun to the head) and subsidies(theft) are evil. Just have to make that clear.
The team concluded that a V2G step twice a day increased battery capacity loss by 75% and resistance by 10%. This step once a day accelerated capacity loss by 33% and resistance by 5%. Forecasts based on the measurement results indicated that V2G implementation would decrease the lifetime of the battery packs to under 5 years.
Some homeowners might hope to use their vehicle for what utility planners call “peak shaving” – drawing household power from their EV during the day instead of relying on the grid, thus reducing their electricity purchases during peak demand hours. To do this, they might need to install special metering equipment that can control both the discharging of the vehicle battery and the flow of power from the grid to the home.
Peak shaving makes the most sense in areas where utilities have time-of-use electric pricing, which makes power from the grid much more expensive during the day than at night. A peak-shaving household would use cheap electricity at night to charge the EV battery and then store that electricity to use during the day, avoiding high electricity prices.
What these people describe is more of a centralized, stabilize the grid thing, and yes the usage profile that is described would be harder on the battery because its frequent, deeper cycling.
It would also make the car harder to use.
I think this is wishful thinking, much like Elon's idea of people letting their Tesla vehicles out as a robo-taxi when the owner isn't using it.
I'm thinking in terms of decentralized, exclusively home based systems.
Reducing our reliance on, or even to break free of, the centralized systems that have been built up to control us is a patriotic action.
When you install your own solar, the bastards cannot "your social credit score is too low, we are reducing your electricity ration by 20%"
In the short term, freedom does cost more though.
The usage scenario for car to be backup that I envision is:
Lets say I've got a solar PV in the home and I built it with 2 days of reserve.
My EV can give me up to about 3 more reserve days and so I can have 'normal' life for 5 days if we have a long stretch of foul weather.
Using my EV to help run my home those few days is basically like driving it 250 miles so its impact on battery lifespan is minimal.
This is something I'd think I'd have to do 2 to 10 times a year.
Thinking through this situation gave me another thought on how to take off-grid solar from 97% to 100%.
Most home backup generators are 8kW+ if you want to run everything in the home as though the grid was up.
A home with inverters, and batteries can utilize a smaller, less costly generator because it doesn't need to run peak loads, only the average load
A 2kw generator running 24hrs would output about 30kWh over the day.
Yes it means gasoline or propane use on occasion.
A small generator like that is also portable so it can have more utility for me than the permanently installed 8kW generator.
Alas my roof is 100% shaded so at the moment, PV in my own home is still a future plan.
All the same psyop mental programming 'two weeks to flatten the curve' on energy demand and snitching on your neighbor will be deployed on Europeans this winter. People don't like being cold and the Cabal can't risk peoples Wifi being turned off so this will be a very interesting.
Indeed. When sis in Ireland goes silent on this issue I’ll know something is going on. I’ve heard hints. Rest of us siblings have talked about getting her back to USA. She’s partially disabled and depends on friends. Stubborn though. She won’t come without her cat but I’m willing to house it.
Right on, hermano. Should add that this was part of the US plan all along: Provoke RF into defending the LDNR from NATO-driven Ukronazi massacre while cutting Germany off from the one commodity that made its export economy function, namely, Russian gas, while using the so-called Green morons to drive the EU into economic suicide. Then, private equity comes in an picks up the now distressed German and EU companies at pennies on the dollar, thus permanently knee-capping a potential economic rival. Now, if you think this is shit I'm making up. Here's our friends at RAND laying this all out in its horrible, disaster capitalism reality: https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/bombshell-classified-rand-corporation
Then there's also the other US intent, which isn't going to the neocon plan at all, which is that the not-so-shock-and-awe sanctions were supposed to bring regime change in Russia, allowing a Yeltsin 2.0 dipshit to come in and let the Chicago boys come back in and rape the place, only this time with no Putin to stop and reverse it. Ultimate goal to break up RF into harmless, warring fiefdoms on the happy road to global techno-neo-feudalism. Well, the good thing is our so-called technocratic elites are as drunk on their own ideology as they are incompetent and horribly degenerate and democidal.
Ya but they use teams of unicorns to deliver the wind turbines, lithium ion battery banks and solar array to their locations. The G. Thunberg leprechauns magically assemble and raise it all into place and Fairy godmothers crochet all the transmission lines.
The real problem in the USA is we are blindly following Europe's Bilderberg Back Broke plan because we know we can do it betterer. Yeesh!
Clearly, you do not have a degree in Germanic studies, or critical race theory, or queer sociology. Because, then you would understand better that nothing real exists except words and societal power wielded by cis Hetero white patriarchs who are evil polluters and hurting bipocs with their fossil fuel fetishism and general meanie nastiness. And let's not forget the dirty cops too. Once we transform the world into a sustainable, equitable, diverse and inclusive paradise by driving out the non-bipoc cis hetero oppressors, well then all problems will cease to exist. Now put on your damn mask and touch up your hair, the blue and pink dye is barely noticeable at the moment. When you're done, we can go out for cricket vegan tacos to plot our next instagram mobbing event.
Once again, this is all deliberate. The problem is waking people up to what is going on. There is such a psychological gap between the average upper middle class citizen and the psychopaths at the top that the former simply cannot conceive that this is being done on purpose.
The UMC tends to think that the oligarchs are like them, just a little smarter, luckier, or harder working. Perhaps all three came into play but I think psychopathy / sociopathy is the main element that distinguishes the UMC from the WEF crowd. But realizing that is tough for a successful non psychopath to do.
NO ONE OF AVERAGE ADULT INTELLIGENCE BELIEVES ANY OF THESE POLICIES ARE ANY GOOD FOR ANY ONE of us in the general population.
ALL OF THESE POLICIES ARE OBVIOUSLY 🙄 SELF EVIDENT in their destruction to the basic functioning of the first world, previously free countries.
ALL OF THIS IS OBVIOUSLY more INTENTIONALLY GENOCIDAL efforts by the globalist filth & their minions in their oft stated endeavor
to murder over 7 billion people - world wide…
BEGINNING WITH U.S. & our Allied nations in the previously free first world.
THIS IS “The Great Reset” oft cited by the WEF
They justify their genocidal endeavors with their heavily promoted contrived narrative of “man caused planetary ‘climate crisis’” IT IS A LIE
But as no one has forced them to tell the truth about their climate crisis lies or about any of their other lies or about any of the horrendous crimes of treason, murder, mass murder, tyranny & overwhelming corruption lo these many years, now?
There are vast herds of idiots in all of the western countries who know nothing but the self destructive lies we have allowed the globalist filth and their bootlickers in the media to perpetrate.
Any one who questions the lies of the globalist filth?
are relegated to the professional & social maligning with the “Conspiracy Theory”
labels.
IN SPITE OF THE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE PROVING THE CORRUPTION & CRIMES they call ‘conspiracies’
It is NOT “a theory” that all of the globalist filth want the New World Order aka NWO
They all write books about it
That’s virtually all the Nazi Thugs ever talk about:
The New World Order
The Great Reset
The last World Economic Forum they just held saw everyone giving speeches: Klaus schwab, bill gates, Yuval Harari, etc… ALL OF THEM made similar statements during said speeches to the self appointed elites sitting in those WEF audiences
about how they were really excited to report that it looked like they’d finally be able
to “…REDUCE WORLD POPULATION BY HALF BY 2023 UTILIZING MODERN MEDICINE ESPECIALLY VACCINES 💉”
& the genocidal audience always applauded when they each said such horrendous things.
Almost 8 billion of us “useless eaters” here… reducing the world’s population by half?
by next year?
MEANS THAT almost 4 BILLION PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE over the next 15 months.
THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING just as
Lenin never intended the Russian Kulaks to survive Siberia in February &
Hitler never intended the developmentally disabled, Jews, gypsies, blacks, political opponents, etc… of his ‘work camps’ to survive the holocaust &
Ole ‘uncle Joe’ Joseph Stalin never intended the Ukrainians to survive the Holodomore
THE GLOBALIST FILTH & their minions controlling every country in the entire previously free western world
THEY DO NOT EXPECT U.S. OR OUR ALLIED NATION’S citizens to survive these policies, either.
‘Surviving’ is specifically NOT INTENDED FOR 7 Billion of U.S. “useless eaters”
For 7+Billion people 👉🏼GENOCIDE IS THE INTENTION of the tyrannical Nazi thugs that comprise the globalist filth & their minions & their bootlickers in the media
4 Billion first world citizens dead by 2024 & the other 3+Billion quickly to follow…
Leaving a total of 500,000,000 human beings on earth whom they (globalist filth) will choose for to facilitate and service them (globalist filth)
It is not a theory it is not hidden IT IS obvious & it is SELF EVIDENT
THEY HAVE CONFESSED IN PUBLIC SPEECHES FOR YEARS most are still on YouTube & can be watched
THEY HAVE CONFESSED IN WRITING & you’d all know that, too, if you’d
This is AWESOME. Thank you for writing it. It is also frightening as hell. How is it that so many people who should know better can be so silent or even complicit as we careen toward catastrophe???
Those who understand energy science who’ve failed to stand up to this nonsense remind me of the cowards in mental health who complied with lockdowns and masks and pretended that it wouldn’t matter in child development or affect mental health. Cowards all. 😔. God help us.
This is one if the best articles I have read on power grids. During the last five years of my Petroleum Engineering career I worked with a 35+ year Electrical Engineer. Before I met him, I didn't know much of anything about how a power grid worked. One day I asked him about the rush to load up power grids all over the world with wind & solar. I wish I had a picture of his facial expression as I asked the question. Funniest look I have ever seen. We proceeded to have a two hour conversation. He said it would take multiple, major catastrophes to wake people up. I'm afraid we are there.
https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electric-ebook/dp/B08KZ51SDP
if you have not read meredith angwin's wonderful book "shorting the grid" on this topic, i highly recommend it.
Thanks for the recommendation, I just bought the book. I gave up newspapers pre-plandemic because they had become unreadable. Hard to do when you have been reading them daily for 50+ years. Then I stumbled upon Substack. It was like finding a gold mine on the ground. You are an OUTSTANDING communicator. Keep up the "Good Fight."
Same here, Karloff! I gave up news media six or seven years ago and am grateful to have discovered Substack. Surely there are many like us!
Here is an interesting SOHO forum debate on this subject where Steven Koonin thoroughly dismantles (Texas A&M climate crony) Andrew Dressler.
It is an illuminating case study in why "green" energy climate hysterics will almost never debate anyone in the reality-based community (a.k.a. "deniers").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gICW2VL434
Thanks for the link.
Six minutes in, after sharing the opening excerpt from a sob story in Rolling Stone about a poor lady in Phoenix paying up to $500 a month in summer for A/C, more than her rent (I lived in Phoenix 2017-2019; utility never capped at more than ~$120; this lady is getting scammed somehow), Dressler says:
"This is what climate change adaptation looks like. When people say, 'Oh, we'll deal with climate change,' this is what it looks like. And it's essentially normalizing suffering. Her liberty has been stripped from her. All she does is work to survive. She can't do anything to improve her life. And if you say, 'Oh we'll deal with climate change,' you're normalizing this---the same way we normalize a million Americans dying during Covid."
What a scum-sucking, faux-compassionate government stooge. I'm growing to detest these people.
I've had Long-Detestation since the swine flu bovine excrement. Will never get over it.
I , too , have given up on newspaper and TV news, including Fox. I get most of my news now from Substack, War Room and Epoch Times. Call it selection bias but I seem to be the most informed of all my friends.
Ditto
Same here.
Did you perchance notice the byline on hon'ble Karloff's profile? Here it is ↓
🗨 So many books, so little time.....
😁
The staff at Electric Power Research (EPRI) know their stuff. Pity the authorities choose to ignore the engineers.
I echo your first sentence. Great article Gato. We have to ask ourselves, just like we have with Covid - is this sheer incompetence? Greed to pet industries? Or something more nefarious? Once again, I come to the conclusion it's all the above, and once again, the end result is more control. Plain and simple.
Just like IVM, HCQ, vitamins, and simple healthy lifestyles were and are the solutions to surviving Covid, the flu, etc., but were shut down for the magical vaccine, the simple answer here is by far "nuclear". But the biotech/politico/medical/NWO industrial complex isn't interested in any answer or option except their own. The sooner we learn this, the easier it is to tell them "NOPE".
Some of the players further down the hierarchy are just plain incompetent. But at the top (and I would never have said this three years ago), they are evil.
Agree. I swing back and forth - and the evil are also idiots and incompetent, just with the added evil sauce thrown in - but the bottom line is mass suffering. People tend to not like mass suffering and make their feelings known at some point. It's going to get ugly.
And realistically these are the same people who will be in charge of nuclear power plants. Do you really want that? I don't. I'm not sure how it would work to have a grid set up but with individual solar panels on each dwelling/garage. I have that and it works! My husband died from two forms of cancer and I had cancer with a recurrence as a result of radiation (of course, other causatives may have been in play as well though we were not overweight, exercised, and ate organic and home-grown). Other pro-nuke types call it that "radiation-thingy." Believe me, if you get cancer and watch loved ones die from it, you would not be so cavalier about radioactive waste and disposal sites.
Rooftop solar has all the problems Gato describes, plus a couple more.
(1) The grid is not designed to deliver power 'backwards.' As rooftop solar penetration increases, the problem gets worse. I could give all the technical reasons this is so (I'm an electrical engineer, Life Fellow of the IEEE and work in the power industry) but the fact is, this is a big problem without a simple solution.
(2) Rooftop solar cannot be controlled or monitored the way a central system can be. Most rooftop systems just dump excess power to the grid. Again with greater penetration of rooftop, this problem increases.
Rooftop solar can 'work' for a small part of the population, where the rest of the grid provides your needs when you are not generating the power you need. But it won't keep the lights on when the grid goes down (rolling blackouts, anyone?) -- unless you also have a battery/inverter setup which can double or triple your system cost.
And it does not solve the 'spinning reserve' issue Gato talks about. 'Spinning reserve' (that is the power industry term for it) is basically gas turbines, running at full speed and ready to take over when the sun stops shining on the panels. They don't burn very much gas when they are not generating power, just enough to overcome friction; but they can be throttled up almost instantly. Some hydro installations have this capability, too.
The bottom line, is that for a stable grid with renewables, you must have enough spinning reserve to take over if you lose all of your renewables. Sooner or later it happens, and without the reserve, you get rolling blackouts or worse.
Nuclear is not a panacea, either, though it can be an excellent foundation for a power grid. France shows that it is possible and practical to do this. One of the issues with nuclear power is that it is not 'dispatchable' as in, you can't just call up the operator and have him or her turn on the switch. It takes time to bring up a reactor (days), and time to shut it down (days to years). Nuclear fission generates something like 2/3 of its power from the fission reaction of the uranium fuel, and the rest from radioactive breakdown of the fission products. So when you 'scram' a reactor and stop the fission, you still have the last 1/3 of the power you still need to have a way to remove from the core, because you can only control the fission part of the equation. (Meltdowns happen when the reactor is stopped but there is no way to get rid of that ongoing heat. Nukes have what is called an 'emergency core cooling system' or ECCS, intended to prevent meltdown of the core in an emergency shutdown. Meltdowns happen when the ECCS fails.)
But with proper planning, nuclear based on modern, safe reactors -- I think they are up to 5th or 6th generation designs now -- can form the foundation of a carbon-free electrical grid. FWIW, the reactors at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were all 2nd generation reactors without the inherent safety features the new ones have. New designs are much safer but everyone is afraid of nukes, so the ones we have are now 50 years into their 30 year design life... making an occasional catastrophe inevitable. We need the new, safe designs. Hopefully someone in power will figure this out -- apparently not the idiots running the EU though.
I am not scientifically equipped to discuss this in this sort of depth with you. My late husband was also a Ph.D. electronics engineer. He was the person who had the solar panels installed. They've been up and functioning well for probably 7 or 8 years. He died 5 years ago. He was also an IEEE member, but I don't know what his status was. He was a group leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I would love to talk to him about this stuff, but, unfortunately, he died from cancer. It was a second cancer - multiple myeloma. Waste disposal from spent rods, etc is a problem. I worked on the Yucca Mountain project, which we jokingly referred to as the Yucky mountain project. Always political, never scientific. The WIPP disposal site in NM had to close down for 3 years because of contamination. So nuclear power plants may be the only solution, but they will eventually kill you. As I'm 80, I'll be dead by that time.
incompetent + evil + power/authority = ?
Dystopia
I had a similar thought.. greed to pet industries? YES. something more nefarious? YES For Sure. Sheer incompetence? .. my instinct was to say No, can't be plain ole 'innocent' incompetence. But probably I'm wrong on that, probably there is Some incompetence, like you say especially further down the hierarchy. But it's the 'something more nefarious' that scares me...
My conclusion as well.
I think it is as simple as massive grift and fraud from subsidies, with all the horrendous costs hidden in other countries.
Related is a desire to keep cheap unlimited power out of the hands of the masses.
Of course predicated on evil people at the top.
"is this sheer incompetence? Greed to pet industries? Or something more nefarious?"
Religious fanaticism. In subsidizing the Greens back in the '60s and '70s in tandem with the anti-nuclear movement, I think the KGB succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Edit: and since Europe all works on multi-party coalition politics, the various green parties have been able to wield outsize power to shape government policy.
Green terrorists.. big, fat bullies
Their competence is gaining and keeping power. The issues are merely the tools for doing that.
I agree, more control and excuses to control.
Spot on. Worked 12 years in Energy multinationals - and Gato, you nailed it. I can’t frankly understand why the EU is committing suicide in this way, and nobody seems to move a finger. I haven’t spoken with my former energy colleagues in a while, but I suspect they’re all making the same face as your Engineer.
Within the industry, the limitations and need to supplement W+S with conventional through an efficiently connected grid are well known. We also know wind needs subsidizing, we know that power can’t be stored and transporting it = losing a good part of it because, well, physics. So of course I love clean energy, but I also know its limits. People aren’t using less energy… smart phones need constant recharging, after all. And how about our lovely electric cars? (Pro-tip: if you need to scare an eco-lunatic friend, ask him/her if they know where the electricity that powers their hybrid car comes from. Some do, some don’t.)
I’m baffled that despite the eco-obsession EU seems to be considering coal or burning wood (of all the things… how is deforestation ‘eco’-friendly?) rather than reconsidering a suicidal gas policy. The price cap genius must have banged her head badly.
Or worst.
In any case, it’s going to be an interesting winter.
My office is one of many still trying to push 'paperless' work. I wonder what the difference in energy usage is between printing a page and re-using it many times, vs displaying that page on a screen the same number of times. Even with the most power-efficient screens and computers...
Add up all the electricity cost of the networking components to make that reload happen. Print something once, use it 'for free' for many years until the paper disintegrates.
So...a full *40* years ago I attended a program in which a small business owner - the business of a software application combining email, word processing, and calculation programs - predicted the “paperless office” within <20 years‼️
I believe today he would be considered an “elite”.
SMDH
And paper, if you preserve it, is not hackable evidence against the elite authoritarians.
the infuriating thing is there are solutions that are totally viable, in particular solar thermal with molten salt or other thermal ballasts. Most of them would require work on the grid but the tech needed 100% exists and is not prohibitively expensive. But somehow only the boneheaded useless ones (e.g. wind) make it past big energy and onto the grid
it's been tried and has been epic failure.
the babble in this article about LiPo as ballast is pretty much a flashing neon sign that author is out to mislead you on this issue
You need to provide a bit more than such a cursory flyby remark. Perhaps you might care to explain? To my mind Li-ion batteries have a place where their power density is really needed - portable devices. To use them in vehicles is misuse of a precious commodity until we can find a way to use hydrogen safely and cheaply. Other battery technology that doesn't require such energy density, perhaps Vanadium flow, need development for utility scale and home use. No point in using Li-ion for fixed installations.
sure LiPo for devices but using as utility ballast is barking mad, so much so seems like straw man against ballast in general. But OP dug up this:
https://www.ksby.com/news/local-news/worlds-largest-energy-storage-system-proposed-in-morro-bay?_amp=true
so I guess I have to shut up because their's an infinite supply of stupidity, it's like hydrogen
How did they do their initial install ion? Wonder what their cell structures are? I know Tesla has put a lot of effort in cell matching to preserve lifetimes, quite a bit of engineering. All I know is that refurbishing Li-ion units is near impossible. We are already having issues with the device batteries.
Agree that this is one of the best articles on power grids, and also on the economic insanity in attempting to compensate for all the sequellae of failed and fallacious energy planning.
China isn't the only country to "save face" these days. It's infected every bleeping "Western" country.
A professor at Northwestern University wrote a wonderful paper on why wind and solar cannot work due to battery storage constraints. I suggest giving it a read. If you can’t locate I will search and post. Also, accounting gimmicks make wind and solar look better when compared to nuclear. They rate the useful life if all types of “production facilities” at 50 years. Many of the nuclear plans are going on 70 years. While the first wind farms are being replaced after 25 years. Disposing of the blades is proving problematic…
I agree that wind is garbage. In fact it's so garbage that attacking it or even lumping it in with attacks on e.g. solar thermal amounts to straw man
yeah yeah the grid is always the excuse. but it *could* be fixed if big energy let it, all the tech exists. Then solar thermal would be 100% viable
stop being a hooker and get out of petroleum. Even if you don't believe in the environmental concerns the political effects are clear and horrible
solar thermal has been one of the greatest boondoggles and epic fails in the entire green grift.
it set billions upon billions of public funds on fire and then completely failed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/americas-concentrated-solar-power-companies-have-all-but-disappeared
stop being a dupe and trying to take public funds to fund junk science fraud.
Based on your comments, I am guessing you are simply replying to my post since it included the word petroleum. Every sentence you wrote indicates that you didn't read el gato malo's post. Big energy has nothing to do with the science behind operating a power grid in a rational manner. Lastly, the political effects of petroleum are clear & horrible? You should have led with that, then you would have been finished.
nope, I read it. and your comment too.
"Big energy has nothing to do with the science behind operating a power grid"
True, but it has *everything * to do with the politics of operating a power grid, and that's the limiting factor as everyone know.
Regarding political effects of Petro dependence I can't tell what you mean, but only people who think Saudi Arabia is a wonderful country and Yemen no biggie can possibly avoid noticing how bad petro and extractive industry generally are for the world
The leadership of Europe has brainwashed their citizens into believing that green energy is feasible when they know full well it is not. Additionally, they've convinced their population that if they do not act by shutting these power plants down, climate change is going to kill them all.
So they're brainwashing their own countrymen to manifest conditions that will kill them, while promising them salvation for doing so.
https://tritorch.com/suicide
Terrific article, thank you.
Europe is toast, and their unelected politicians at the EU HQ are the ones who stuffed them into the toaster. And this was no accident...
This is the end result of a corporate media echo chamber that acts as propagandists for approved narratives to a naive population. I've been so frustrated talking about this topic with others because they have absolutely no idea about the basics of physics and power generation that gato so nicely captured. Instead, I'm told nonsense replies about magical "green energy" and the "climate crisis". The only true crisis is a lack of critical thinking.
At 2019 rates of mining (pre-Covid) it would take 9,920 years to obtain enough lithium, and 7,100 years to obtain enough vanadium to build ONE generation (20-25 years worth) of wind and solar to replace all fossil fuels. Both of those numbers exceed the known reserves of those metals.
GREEN NET ZERO = INTELLECTUAL ZERO DEGREES KELVIN.
1) THEY'RE DOING IT ON PURPOSE. These shit heads have plenty of people on payroll as good at math as EGM. None of this should be revelatory to anyone with a degree in physics.
2) As lefties are fond of saying, the cruelty is the point.
The assumption is that Our Betters want the abundant energy we had pre-2020.
They want abundant energy for themselves.
For the rest of us? Not so much.
They want us to die. But they can't tell us they want us to die, because we have gunz and could get all uppity. So they have do to it secretly and pretend they want things to get better while making them worse. First CV. Then the CV19. Then Ukraine war.
Coming soon: a winter of food and energy shortages. All by design.
We must die so Klaus, Bill Gates and Prince, I mean "King" Charles can realize their depoluation, I mean "genocidal" dreams.
The silver lining is that "King" Charles, the preeminent depopulationist that he is, is notoriously dumb. He is legitimately stupid. He will screw things up badly. It will happen.
quadruple vaxxed, or so I've heard claimed. Lets hope so...
For example read this from the New Yorker in 2017 - heh.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/where-prince-charles-went-wrong
Bingo. As long as you see human flourishing and quality of life as just another set of levers to pull up and down, a whole lot of options appear more attractive and viable.
"Why won't the data points on my spreadsheet do what they're supposed to be doing"
no degree in physics needed, this is high school level physics. except maybe for those that went to a gov't run school.
Any idea why nobody seems interested in Thorium molten salt reactors (LFTR)? Practically unlimited amounts of the stuff and the reactor designs are inherently safe and can use most of the waste we've already made and stored as fuel. Flibe Energy reckon they could build a working reactor for $2billion which is peanuts. Seems to me like they're deliberately throttling access to cheap, reliable energy that could easily be accessed if there was a will to do so. https://flibe-energy.com/lftr/
Governments never invested in Thorium, because you can not make nuclear bombs with it.
Bingo. Uranium reactors were bomb material refineries with electrical power generation as a happy side benefit.
Even advanced uranium reactors were denied research funding in favor of designs related to military reactors. The smaller reactors proposed for modular factory builds are just now arriving. Those reactors could work for smaller areas interconnected by a smarter grid.
Geeeez JC, I never thought of it from that angle. Thanks.
Yes, you assume the State has your interests in mind. I had that problem once too. Don't beat yourself up for it.
Now that you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Yes it's deeply unsettling once your eyes open, but Id rather know, so that I can be prepared (to be unco-operative)
I can see the logic of developing the uranium, rather than the thorium, cycle back in the 60s but why not now? They throw money at all kinds of pipe dream energy projects but not LFTRs . I don't think they're interested in a viable energy solution. Cheap, reliable and limitless energy for all removes a point of leverage for the "Elites".
Nuclear does not come without its problems. The first thorium reactor (using steam) exploded with lots of nuclear garbage in the 1960s. Some of the isotopes were released last year due to forest fires. So it takes some real investments to make a safe and fully working reactor.
But due to Chernobyl the governments and people started shifting away from nuclear. If not for the heroes, most of Europe would still be unlivable. The radioactive isotopes still poison some of the wild mushrooms. Japan's Fuk-ushima might have killed a lot of sealife (like 90% of the sea floor life), but we don't know exactly because a lot is kept secret.
All those disasters do not make people very eager to start with any nuclear technology.
I see some promising solutions in electrical driven fusion techniques. Like focus fusion, and the safire project. 2 very different technologies. They show that clean energy is very easy to obtain and very safe.
But the astronomers are mad about it, Their astronomy theory models are very broken, but they do not want to admit it, and push backwards on these new & promising technologies.
They started shifting away long before Chernobyl in the US. "The China Syndrome" and the Three Mile Island incident (with its death toll of 0) effectively ended most interest in nuclear here. There have not been any nuclear power plants commissioned since that era.
There have been some high profile accidents, but Chernobyl should not be an example to anyone in the west. It was built with cavalier disregard for safety and known best practices (at several levels, not the least of which being the lack of a containment structure) that can only come from centralized state planning and a complete lack of concern for the safety of individuals. The lesson of Chernobyl is not "nuclear is bad." It's "socialism is bad."
Fukushima was a natural disaster of a "once in several lifetimes" severity. Earthquakes into the 9s on the moment magnitude scale are close to the maximum possible (the elasticity of the crustal rocks being the limiting factor). Even so, the reactor survived the initial shock, properly SCRAMming as it was designed, only to succumb to the tsunami-related flooding a bit later. Key lesson: Don't put the backup generators in a place that will be flooded during a tsunami if you are in a tsunami zone. Should have been obvious, but somehow it was not. It is now!
As in aviation, each accident teaches us something and makes the whole industry safer. What would life look like if we took the 'oh no, something bad happened, let's shut down the entire industry forever' standard was applied? All forms of travel that don't involve feet would be gone. There have been horrific accidents by boat/ship, train, road vehicle, and air. We certainly would not have electric power to our homes (so I guess the warmists would be happy).
As a child of the 60s I see now that I was indoctrinated into anti-nuclear attitudes. I remember when I was younger I thought nuclear was obviously a good solution. Younger as in mid-teens. But then Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome…
Now I'm struggling to overcome these lifelong biases and look at everything afresh. I appreciate these discussions and especially references to further information.
Of the many alarming parts of Fukushima, while building the project the engineers on the ground were concerned and warned about the location of the backup generators; too close to sea level in the event of a tsunami. They were overruled by higher ups.
Same as the Challenger shuttle failure. The engineers warned but management overruled.
The earthquakes into the 9s are more properly called undersea thermonuclear explosions.
A design with Thorium and molten salt can be made pretty safe. Even in areas where earthquakes are possible.
I work a lot in safety. It is the most ignored subject. The disasters were a result of nuclear reactors. Not because of socialism or natural causes. Safety is always limited due to costs and political pressure. We knew that earthquakes were possible in Japan, but they built them anyway. And always all accidents could have been prevented. If real scientists were deciding things, we would not even have the plandemic and side-effects.
Today with the great reset and economic collapse, I do not see that safety will given any priority. Maybe we will see nuclear disasters in Ukraine or due to the sinking of some nuclear ships. Some nuclear powered air-craft carrier is likely to be targeted in a war and could explode.
Maybe in what you do, safety might be somewhat dismissed. From my experience, nuclear in the US has perhaps an excess of safety. Working toward 5 9's event seems to be the target and that is expensive. The Russians never had a safety culture like the US. And the Japanese event remains nearly a 5 9 event. No matter how careful, there always will be some risk but more people have died from conventional power production faults than nuclear power production in terms of instances per operation.
Pure bull. TMI did zip. The radiation release was trivial and insignificant outside the plant. There is still a lot of suspicions that TMI-2 was deliberate sabotage. There is this thing called Cause-And-Effect you know. Measurements? Check out:
Was TMI a movie script? Galen Winsor:
youtube.com/watch?v=q5uXzM_azWI
"...Galen Winsor makes a startling statement; he claims that the Three Mile Island event was no accident. He states that the GE three of Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale G. Bridenbaugh wrote the script.
This would sound incredibly far fetched without the almost impossibly coincidental timing of "The China Syndrome" still playing in movie theaters at the time of the accident, the unbelievable coincidence of a line in the movie about contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania (the same state where TMI is located), and the still troubling unknown regarding how the feed pump isolation valves on the back-up feed water pump just happened to be shut (supposedly due to a "maintenance error") when the primary pump tripped off line..."
"..first thorium reactor (using steam) exploded with lots of nuclear garbage in the 1960..."
No. You made that up.
"...due to Chernobyl the governments and people started shifting away from nuclear..."
Nonsense. The Nuclear Blockade started well before Chernobyl (1986) already in the early 70's due to the fact it was rapidly devastating fossil electricity generation. Rockefeller big money was heavily involved in the Nuclear Fear Porn industry. Partnered up with a gang of Malthusian anti-human types who saw nuclear as saving industrial civilization which they despise.
".. Japan's Fuk-ushima might have killed a lot of sealife (like 90% of the sea floor life)..."
That's utter nonsense. Spreading made up Fear Porn like that is disgusting. The Truth:
"....The total effective dose commitment from ingestion of radionuclides in fish, shellfish and seaweed caught in coastal waters off Fukushima was estimated to be 0.6 ± 0.4 mSv/y. The individual effective dose commitment from consumption of radioactive-contaminated fish caught in the open Pacific Ocean was estimated to be 0.07 ± 0.05 mSv/y. These doses are comparable or much lower than doses delivered from the consumption of natural 210Po in fish and in shellfish (0.7 mSv/y). The estimated individual doses have been below the levels when any health damage of the Japanese and world population could be expected....."
Not intending to argue, but I'd like to point out that your final claim of Fear Porn is a very categorical statement, yet your final paragraph supporting that is composed of estimates and assumptions. Are there any actual counts of the sea life that remained?
There is a thing called cause and effect. If the radiation (that's the only Fuku contamination) mainly from Cs-137 (beta & gamma) is lower than the stronger more dangerous radiation from natural Po-210 (alpha & gamma) and K-40 (stronger beta and gamma) etc than by what mechanism can anybody claim sea life was harmed?
Even if what you say is true – I don't know enough to argue about it – I find it surprising that astronomers have enough clout to make any sort of impression on the energy industry. I don't expect you to elaborate here, but if you could point me to some reading material I would be grateful.
Astronomy is related to how most people think about the sun. So our nuclear fusion reactors are trying to replicate the inner part of the sun, with false knowledge about the sun.
I wrote a long list of problems with mainstream astronomy. - https://www.reddit.com/r/plasmacosmology/wiki/index
Fusion with magnetic field: https://www.youtube.com/c/LPPFusion
Transmutation with electrical field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GFFfmBGb5U (different from fusion, and still being researched)
Um, no. I'm aware of no nuclear fusion proposals for p-p fusion to deuterium. They mine deuterium from water. And some aneutronic proposals contemplate no use of deuterium at all.
Thanks!
Astronomy theory is broken? Pray tell!
Just start with the first star. Our Sun.
Ever studied where these powerful magnetic fields come from? Because it is a high temperature environment, it must be electrical currents. You can even see the currents in the moving plasma.
Yet astronomy does not like electrical currents, so they have invented all kinds of impossible "physics" to try to compensate for that. Really impossible. Like magnetic field lines bumping into each other. Which is as stupid as radio-waves bumping into each other.
Yet, with the electrical currents all the magnetic fields become obvious and they clearly predict how the plasma moves and reacts. The magnetic fields is also strong near the plasma-currents, so it is also obvious in that sense.
I tried to write some articles to astronomers, but it is an anti-science cult.
Interesting, thank you! I loved Astronomy as a kid, but when I tried to study it in college it was all so theoretical I lost interest. And then stuff like dark matter which "must" be there or else our models are wrong... (maybe your models ARE wrong?) It seems unlikely to me that we have "figured it all out." That would be a first for mankind, wouldn't it?
What accounts for their bias against electrical currents?
The logic now is simple: we aren't allowed to use anything that works, because that might mean catabolic collapse of Western civilization is averted. Death cult is as death cult does.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/useless-eaters
No surprise there. Car and gas manufacturers killed the trolly systems after the war. Even my small 20,000 population town had a trolley system—until it didn’t. I read about that somewhere 🤔 😉👵🏻 That link looks interesting.
Because the goal is not cheap and plentiful energy for the people, but for the elites and their holdings.
To put it more poetically:
The goal is control. Mastery. The machine needs you to labour and produce wealth for its owners, and then it needs you to die when your consumtion quota outpaces your production results.
The Machine doesn't care if your are woman or man or black or white or jew or hindu. All are equal before the Machine, save the its owners and Masters.
The LFTR concept is pretty much dead. My understanding is Kirk Sorenson is working on fast SMRs now. The fundamental problem with LFTR is nobody has found a way to start them up except with weapons grade U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. Can be done in China or Russia but it is a deal breaker for Western reactors. Even China which has had the most R&D on LFTR has opted to build a Molten Salt thorium slow breeder reactor which will startup with 20% enriched uranium and 20% thorium energy working up eventually to 80% thorium energy. You will still have to burn some enriched uranium to keep it running, unlike a true LFTR which once started, a 1GWe reactor can run continuously with 1 tonne of Thorium metal added each year, the size of two milk crates.
I would add that you can burn Thorium in CANDUs as a fraction of their natural uranium fuel, as I recall it is about 20%. India has a program of running their nuclear entirely on thorium of which they have vast quantities by breeding it in Liquid Sodium Fast reactors and further burning the separated fuel in PHWR or Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors = CANDUs.
A LFTR plant is being built in Wyoming, supposed to be online in 2028.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/next-gen-nuclear-plant-and-jobs-are-coming-wyoming
Molten salt (Natrium), but still seems to be based on Uranium.
"Since it was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries, TerraPower has emerged as an incubator and developer of ideas and technologies that offer energy independence, environmental sustainability, medical advancement and other cutting-edge opportunities." - Oh great.. :-/
My bad. But it's my understanding that molten salt reactors can use uranium for a fuel much more efficiently than standard high pressure water cooled reactors so does the fuel source actually matter?
I just had a look at this. I think it is just a small, conventional uranium fuelled reactor linked to a reservoir of molten salt to act like a "heat battery" which can be drawn on to generate electricity to balance the grid. It is basically designed to replace the gas fired power stations currently being used to back stop wind and solar. Not a bad idea but a little disappointing...
It is proposed to be 'sodium-cooled', so not exactly conventional. Sodium cooling means it can operate at a higher temperature and lower pressure than a pressurized water reactor. High pressure systems (water & steam) will be outside of the reactor circuit, though necessarily, the sodium/water heat exchanger (boiler) will be high pressure on the water side in order to produce the high pressure steam for the steam turbine/generator.
There is reference to re-using the existing cooling water supply of the fossil/coal facility. This would be water used for the steam condenser at the discharge of the steam turbine, not heat transfer water for the reactor itself. This cooling water (and cooling towers, for recirculating systems) are required regardless of the fuel source.
Well shit, that is disappointing. But at least it's a new reactor which certainly bucks the trend.
That's a liquid sodium fast reactor. Uranium fueled but could burn thorium also. The big thing would be to have online pyroprocessing of fuel which is what the IFR was supposed to do. The highly successful project was killed by Climate Change Czar John Kerry. With the IFR, 1oz of natural uranium, depleted uranium or spent nuclear fuel would supply one American's lifetime share of US primary energy, TPES x80yrs/per capita. And generate 0.17oz of waste which only needs to be contained for 300yrs. Drop it down a borehole. Easy-peesy. Read all about it here: "Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011. IFR free book download:
thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf
And the Malthusian Jimmy Carter ordered fuel processing be illegal in America.
Thanks for the info.
I hate what these people are doing to our country. I can't tell if it's stupidity or avarice.
Wow, Kemmerer. Close to my old stomping grounds.
That's not LFTR, but another kind of molten salt reactor.
Chicken and egg problem. NRC won't let anyone build LFTR without approved design, LFTR developers can't get approval without building a LFTR.
Gonna be another country that will build/commercialize the tech the US developed and sell it back to us -- if they allow it (China is big on LFTR).
NRC (Nuclear Rejection Commission) won't let anything be built except Pressurized Water Reactors and even that only if you go through mountains of paperwork and 10's of $million in expenditure:
How to liberate nuclear energy, with Robert Zubrin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQtgkT8nqgc
https://www.humanprogress.org/robert-zubrin-the-human-progress-podcast-ep-30-transcript/
Even now, thorium reactors are not included in the U.S. Advanced Reactor Development program.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-advanced-reactor-development
China starting an experimental one up:-
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschina-approves-launch-of-liquid-salt-thorium-reactor-9920912
It's not a true LFTR, but similar. However it can only achieve max 80% thorium fuel energy. It still needs added enriched uranium to continue operation.
I have come to the realization that the Green movement is ultimately anti-human. What they really decry is not "warming" or "climate change" it is "impact." They will decry the cutting down of trees for firewood as equally bad as driving an internal combustion engine automobile because of... wait for it... the IMPACT.
The logical conclusion of this thought process is that the only way to reduce human impact is to reduce human life.
So pointing out physical realities and limitations of Green technologies is nice, but they will ignore it just the same. That is because the point isn't to enable green technologies, the aim is to minimize impact (i.e. human life). Furthermore, when we point out that many people will freeze this winter without adequate natural gas, the Greens don't care. They actually want that outcome for the reasons already described.
> I have come to the realization that the Green movement is ultimately anti-human.
Anti-natalism. Some of them explictly state this.
And yet they don't all kill themselves.
Doesn’t that show some of their true intent?
Yes.
No, just us deplorables.
Lol! It would help, yes?
You are the carbon they want to reduce.
The Malthusian project is alive and well.
When this conversation comes up, which isn't often, I scream this from the rooftops! They just look at me like I'm crazy!
I keep forgetting that I am carbon based. Thanks for the reminder.
You may be onto something. They have tried so hard to reduce human population with wars but none of them caught fire to do the kind of damage the greens want so now they are turning to injected poisons and murderous energy policies.
"The logical conclusion of this thought process is that the only way to reduce human impact is to reduce human life." That as Frank Zappa would say, "Is the crux of the biscuit"😎
"Come to the realization"? With all due respect, weren't the earliest writings from the Club of Rome enough to convince you of that?
It's another "Mass Formation." To "save" the world we will destroy it first!
The whole green energy thing is a joke. As usual, it is just a ploy to give money to cronies, who in turn give it back to the politicians. Clearly green energy isn't green. In the Florida and Georgia areas of the US, as you drive down the interstate you see thousands of acres of land filled with nothing but solar energy panels. Think how many trees were removed in order to put these in. News flash...trees get rid of CO2 and put out oxygen. If the goal is to reduce CO2, why hasn't anyone done an analysis to show how much CO2 is being reduced per acre of solar cells as opposed to how much is reduced per acre of woodland? And that doesn't even get into the whole battery storage, solar panel creation, disposal issues.
The funniest thing I heard recently from the greeners is using your EV battery as back up power for the house.
So we're going to charge the car's battery with the associated energy loss up to 25%, and then we're going to supply that charge back to the house so can we can incur another energy loss to recharge the battery later. When energy is scarce, this seems incredibly wasteful.
If the car batteries work anything like the cell phone batteries, with x number of total charges before it goes bad, then that also means end-of-life comes sooner with the resulting energy costs to mine the rare materials it takes to create a replacement battery. (Not that there's enough materials to produce the number of batteries already projected to be needed if everyone drives an EV.)
Basic concepts like efficiency are way too inconvenient for them. They can't understand that each time you transfer energy from one form to another, there are losses. Significant losses. Nuclear is by far the most efficient. Battery storage is a joke. Unicorn storage tho, now that is something.
"Basic concepts like efficiency are way too inconvenient for them. They can't understand that each time you transfer energy from one form to another, there are losses."
I was taught this in 8th grade.
Greeners are not the smartest critters on the planet. To much "koolaid" and not enough "real" education.
Remember that America was built by people who said "how can I"
It was not built by people who's motto is "I can't"
The people who created much of what we take for granted were constantly laughed at by the people who said "you fool, it cannot be done"
Solutions are tailored to the need they seek to solve.
The point of vehicle to home is its intended to get you through the edge cases, not be utilized on a daily basis.
When you design a solar PV at home system, getting to say 95-97% reliability would cost you $X
Getting to 100% reliability costs significantly more than $X because batteries are your reserve capacity and they are the most expensive components.
The idea then is to find cheap ways you can get the last 3-5% without sacrificing convenience.
Using the EV battery is a cheap option(if you have an EV) because an EV battery typically has enough capacity to run a house for 2-3 days. Efficiency is less important in this case than reliability as this method is not supposed to be used daily.
Would it reduce the lifespan of the vehicle battery? Yes, but over a 15-20 year lifespan of a vehicle's battery it would do so negligibly.
In the 1970s they said there was not enough oil to run the world in 2000, yet its 2022 and the oil is flowing in greater volume than when the day these claims were made.
I rather suspect claims of 'not enough materials for everyone to have an EV' will have a similar outcome over the long term.
* Mandates (government gun to the head) and subsidies(theft) are evil. Just have to make that clear.
I guess we'll have to see. This article makes it sounds like the drain isn't negligible.
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-study-finds-v2g-discharging-harmful-to-ev-batteries/
The team concluded that a V2G step twice a day increased battery capacity loss by 75% and resistance by 10%. This step once a day accelerated capacity loss by 33% and resistance by 5%. Forecasts based on the measurement results indicated that V2G implementation would decrease the lifetime of the battery packs to under 5 years.
Follow up here: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/understanding_degradation_battery_life_key_successful_v2g_523na1_en.pdf
And there's several articles like this that sure sounds like daily usage:
https://www.route-fifty.com/tech-data/2022/03/can-my-electric-car-power-my-house-not-yet-most-drivers-vehicle-home-charging-coming/363776/
Some homeowners might hope to use their vehicle for what utility planners call “peak shaving” – drawing household power from their EV during the day instead of relying on the grid, thus reducing their electricity purchases during peak demand hours. To do this, they might need to install special metering equipment that can control both the discharging of the vehicle battery and the flow of power from the grid to the home.
Peak shaving makes the most sense in areas where utilities have time-of-use electric pricing, which makes power from the grid much more expensive during the day than at night. A peak-shaving household would use cheap electricity at night to charge the EV battery and then store that electricity to use during the day, avoiding high electricity prices.
What these people describe is more of a centralized, stabilize the grid thing, and yes the usage profile that is described would be harder on the battery because its frequent, deeper cycling.
It would also make the car harder to use.
I think this is wishful thinking, much like Elon's idea of people letting their Tesla vehicles out as a robo-taxi when the owner isn't using it.
I'm thinking in terms of decentralized, exclusively home based systems.
Reducing our reliance on, or even to break free of, the centralized systems that have been built up to control us is a patriotic action.
When you install your own solar, the bastards cannot "your social credit score is too low, we are reducing your electricity ration by 20%"
In the short term, freedom does cost more though.
The usage scenario for car to be backup that I envision is:
Lets say I've got a solar PV in the home and I built it with 2 days of reserve.
My EV can give me up to about 3 more reserve days and so I can have 'normal' life for 5 days if we have a long stretch of foul weather.
Using my EV to help run my home those few days is basically like driving it 250 miles so its impact on battery lifespan is minimal.
This is something I'd think I'd have to do 2 to 10 times a year.
Thinking through this situation gave me another thought on how to take off-grid solar from 97% to 100%.
Most home backup generators are 8kW+ if you want to run everything in the home as though the grid was up.
A home with inverters, and batteries can utilize a smaller, less costly generator because it doesn't need to run peak loads, only the average load
A 2kw generator running 24hrs would output about 30kWh over the day.
Yes it means gasoline or propane use on occasion.
A small generator like that is also portable so it can have more utility for me than the permanently installed 8kW generator.
Alas my roof is 100% shaded so at the moment, PV in my own home is still a future plan.
All the same psyop mental programming 'two weeks to flatten the curve' on energy demand and snitching on your neighbor will be deployed on Europeans this winter. People don't like being cold and the Cabal can't risk peoples Wifi being turned off so this will be a very interesting.
Indeed. When sis in Ireland goes silent on this issue I’ll know something is going on. I’ve heard hints. Rest of us siblings have talked about getting her back to USA. She’s partially disabled and depends on friends. Stubborn though. She won’t come without her cat but I’m willing to house it.
I wouldn't leave without my Gato either🐱
Right on, hermano. Should add that this was part of the US plan all along: Provoke RF into defending the LDNR from NATO-driven Ukronazi massacre while cutting Germany off from the one commodity that made its export economy function, namely, Russian gas, while using the so-called Green morons to drive the EU into economic suicide. Then, private equity comes in an picks up the now distressed German and EU companies at pennies on the dollar, thus permanently knee-capping a potential economic rival. Now, if you think this is shit I'm making up. Here's our friends at RAND laying this all out in its horrible, disaster capitalism reality: https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/bombshell-classified-rand-corporation
That, I'm afraid, sounds most plausible in the current regime
Then there's also the other US intent, which isn't going to the neocon plan at all, which is that the not-so-shock-and-awe sanctions were supposed to bring regime change in Russia, allowing a Yeltsin 2.0 dipshit to come in and let the Chicago boys come back in and rape the place, only this time with no Putin to stop and reverse it. Ultimate goal to break up RF into harmless, warring fiefdoms on the happy road to global techno-neo-feudalism. Well, the good thing is our so-called technocratic elites are as drunk on their own ideology as they are incompetent and horribly degenerate and democidal.
Ya but they use teams of unicorns to deliver the wind turbines, lithium ion battery banks and solar array to their locations. The G. Thunberg leprechauns magically assemble and raise it all into place and Fairy godmothers crochet all the transmission lines.
The real problem in the USA is we are blindly following Europe's Bilderberg Back Broke plan because we know we can do it betterer. Yeesh!
Clearly, you do not have a degree in Germanic studies, or critical race theory, or queer sociology. Because, then you would understand better that nothing real exists except words and societal power wielded by cis Hetero white patriarchs who are evil polluters and hurting bipocs with their fossil fuel fetishism and general meanie nastiness. And let's not forget the dirty cops too. Once we transform the world into a sustainable, equitable, diverse and inclusive paradise by driving out the non-bipoc cis hetero oppressors, well then all problems will cease to exist. Now put on your damn mask and touch up your hair, the blue and pink dye is barely noticeable at the moment. When you're done, we can go out for cricket vegan tacos to plot our next instagram mobbing event.
I view this nonsense and the covid debacle as a way for We The People to flip the script and Reset our country as we see fit.
Call it the Great Culling of the state.
Here's hoping.
Not sure it will be possible to do it peacefully at this point, though, if I'm being realistic.
Once again, this is all deliberate. The problem is waking people up to what is going on. There is such a psychological gap between the average upper middle class citizen and the psychopaths at the top that the former simply cannot conceive that this is being done on purpose.
The UMC tends to think that the oligarchs are like them, just a little smarter, luckier, or harder working. Perhaps all three came into play but I think psychopathy / sociopathy is the main element that distinguishes the UMC from the WEF crowd. But realizing that is tough for a successful non psychopath to do.
No one pushing these genocidal policies believes they are doing so
FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH
much less for the “common good”
These EU policies?
are identical if not in practice certainly in intention to:
the U.S. Obama administration policies
the U.S. Biden administration policies
the ama, nih, cdc, who, Covid lockdowns, masking, 🥕 mandates policies, etc…
NO ONE OF AVERAGE ADULT INTELLIGENCE BELIEVES ANY OF THESE POLICIES ARE ANY GOOD FOR ANY ONE of us in the general population.
ALL OF THESE POLICIES ARE OBVIOUSLY 🙄 SELF EVIDENT in their destruction to the basic functioning of the first world, previously free countries.
ALL OF THIS IS OBVIOUSLY more INTENTIONALLY GENOCIDAL efforts by the globalist filth & their minions in their oft stated endeavor
to murder over 7 billion people - world wide…
BEGINNING WITH U.S. & our Allied nations in the previously free first world.
THIS IS “The Great Reset” oft cited by the WEF
They justify their genocidal endeavors with their heavily promoted contrived narrative of “man caused planetary ‘climate crisis’” IT IS A LIE
But as no one has forced them to tell the truth about their climate crisis lies or about any of their other lies or about any of the horrendous crimes of treason, murder, mass murder, tyranny & overwhelming corruption lo these many years, now?
There are vast herds of idiots in all of the western countries who know nothing but the self destructive lies we have allowed the globalist filth and their bootlickers in the media to perpetrate.
Any one who questions the lies of the globalist filth?
are relegated to the professional & social maligning with the “Conspiracy Theory”
labels.
IN SPITE OF THE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE PROVING THE CORRUPTION & CRIMES they call ‘conspiracies’
It is NOT “a theory” that all of the globalist filth want the New World Order aka NWO
They all write books about it
That’s virtually all the Nazi Thugs ever talk about:
The New World Order
The Great Reset
The last World Economic Forum they just held saw everyone giving speeches: Klaus schwab, bill gates, Yuval Harari, etc… ALL OF THEM made similar statements during said speeches to the self appointed elites sitting in those WEF audiences
about how they were really excited to report that it looked like they’d finally be able
to “…REDUCE WORLD POPULATION BY HALF BY 2023 UTILIZING MODERN MEDICINE ESPECIALLY VACCINES 💉”
& the genocidal audience always applauded when they each said such horrendous things.
Almost 8 billion of us “useless eaters” here… reducing the world’s population by half?
by next year?
MEANS THAT almost 4 BILLION PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE over the next 15 months.
THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING just as
Lenin never intended the Russian Kulaks to survive Siberia in February &
Hitler never intended the developmentally disabled, Jews, gypsies, blacks, political opponents, etc… of his ‘work camps’ to survive the holocaust &
Ole ‘uncle Joe’ Joseph Stalin never intended the Ukrainians to survive the Holodomore
THE GLOBALIST FILTH & their minions controlling every country in the entire previously free western world
THEY DO NOT EXPECT U.S. OR OUR ALLIED NATION’S citizens to survive these policies, either.
‘Surviving’ is specifically NOT INTENDED FOR 7 Billion of U.S. “useless eaters”
For 7+Billion people 👉🏼GENOCIDE IS THE INTENTION of the tyrannical Nazi thugs that comprise the globalist filth & their minions & their bootlickers in the media
4 Billion first world citizens dead by 2024 & the other 3+Billion quickly to follow…
Leaving a total of 500,000,000 human beings on earth whom they (globalist filth) will choose for to facilitate and service them (globalist filth)
It is not a theory it is not hidden IT IS obvious & it is SELF EVIDENT
THEY HAVE CONFESSED IN PUBLIC SPEECHES FOR YEARS most are still on YouTube & can be watched
THEY HAVE CONFESSED IN WRITING & you’d all know that, too, if you’d
read their damn books 📚
"sorry, but if you are anti CO2 and not pro nuclear, you’re anti-physics"
With all due respect, it could instead mean that you are anti-human-survival.
This is AWESOME. Thank you for writing it. It is also frightening as hell. How is it that so many people who should know better can be so silent or even complicit as we careen toward catastrophe???
Those who understand energy science who’ve failed to stand up to this nonsense remind me of the cowards in mental health who complied with lockdowns and masks and pretended that it wouldn’t matter in child development or affect mental health. Cowards all. 😔. God help us.