Really? Sometimes the sun doesn't shine. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow.

aside from that wind turbines break down more than a ford pinto

I got it from the mouth an energy advisor to the UK government who has worked in the nuclear industry for most of his life last week. He said with the unexpected shutdowns or long periods of downtime and maintenance, nuclear capacity factor is lower than wind or solar. I can ask him tomorrow for a source if he's in, if I remember and if he's not too busy with dealing with the government worrying about Japan. [Weren't two of the reactors at the Japanese plant shut for maintenance?]


True, its expensive but that's what the government is doing. Huge wind farms in the North Sea with at least 10GW in the initial stage planned. I think thats the Airtricity section of the supergrid. Imera Power is looking for funding for undersea electricity grids in the North Sea as well.

We already have a supernode planned for 2015 linking up two windfarms connecting UK and Germany with Norwegian hydro backup.

Good job we have solar than, as when wind isn't blowing its usually sunny.


I think you underestimate the size of the European Grid planned. Its got possible solar planned all the way to North Africa and possible wind connections to Kazakhstan with its 200+GW of wind potential. Once you get to this size, regional effects such as no wind in the UK will be offset by the other wind farms elsewhere and other renewables. As large as Texas is, its not quite the same scale.

Wind can be accurately estimated up to an hour beforehand. Plenty of time to plan for biofuel to be burned at that time or release some pumped storage. If we start to store energy in dynamos in wind farms or use them to pump water for pumped storage on demand for use when the wind isn't blowing we can decrease risks of power shortages even more.

Well peak gas is in ~2030 but we've still got 200 odd years of coal left.

You get a better matter-antimatter reaction with Dilithium...

Qapla !

Me thinks you don't understand teh concept of forevars

Nuke plants do go down for maintenance. They have to refuel every year, so they are out for quite a few days while they do that, but nukes do not go down very often, at least not here, and not the ones we run. I've heard of nukes in the past being run at something silly like 50%, but they are run much better now, and when they do run they run stable and pump out a TON of power. To put it in perspective, each nuke can power approx 1 million homes.


Source needed for this.



Possible, but like I said I don't know much about it, as I concentrate on whats happening in the US.

There must be combustion turbines/gas/coal bleh whatever to cover wind generation. Wind generation is by no means guaranteed. In fact, I believe they only count 10% of all wind generation possible as "guaranteed". It has to be backed up by other fuel sources or you get an unstable grid because wind generation can fluctuate so drastically.

Pump storage isn't always available, especially during drought conditions, which happen during summer, which is the time of peak demand.

Cool story bra....

as an energy advisor I don't suppose he has any intrests in not promoting nuclear correct ????

Really? based on what? please link from where you're getting your information on coal. Where? Up against what demand curve are you getting "200 years?"

What quality of coal? Peat? lignite? Anthracite?

Combating the nuclear myth with the coal myth. Good stuff.

entropy is a bitch

Then Im sorry to tell you but you have REALLY ****ty reactors.

What if you have an awful tornado? Or maybe a war? Would be pretty easy to wipe out most of your power, eh?

... or maybe an earthquake?

3 of 6 at this plant, but (almost?) all the remaining 50 in Japan were operating just before the earthquake. >90% up.

Especially at night.

What? You want to have your renewable energy source rely on a greenhouse gas emitting technology for reliability of continuous supply?

Perhaps if you use some of the energy captured in the wind farm directly to pump water that might be worth it (like an old fashioned windmill pump). I don't now how you're going to do that in an ocean wind farm though. But converting wind to electricity used to drive a pump to push water up hill through a pipe into a reservoir from which to generate electricity at a later time by pouring water through a pipe to a turbine is so incredibly inefficient that you have to have about 5 times the generating capacity of what you want to guarantee the availablility of. Also, do you have an idea what size reservoir you'd need to reliably back up all the solar and wind on a calm dark night?

I think the long term answer for energy storage will probably have to be chemical (and that will be dangerous) or some form of geothermal storage. We're nowhere near having that technology ready for commercial use yet.

Last time I checked, a dynamo was a generating device not a storage device, so tell me more.

Yeah, let's go on killing hundreds of thousands of people each year by burning fossil fuels, not to mention the risks from global warming.

I think he was referring to the fact that wind turbines only work when the wind is blowing in a certain speed range, and solar isn't quite so productive at night as during the day. Therefore, the maximum theoretcial reliability of solar is 50%, until you get into energy storage.

If current projects on uranium fuel recovery are successful, we'll have a lot more supply by using currently available spent fuel rods.

Yes, a mix (eventually entirely from various renewables) is desireable for all sorts of reasons.

We don't yet know the environmental impacts of wind farms. There are some disturbing reports about their impacts on migratory birds. The loony fringe is claiming harmful electromagnetic fields from wind turbines.

Cite please? I'd really like to read about that.

Does that mean that it is possible to build enough wind generation such that its maximum generation capacity would equal 40% of current baseline load, or does it mean that it is possible to build enough generating capacity around the UK that there will always be enough wind blowing to deliver at least 40% of future baseline demand? Those are two very diffferent prospects. The latter would obviously require a total maximum generation capacity that is many times the future baseline demand.

Just think of the leverage the biomass and hydroelectric producers would have over the solar and wind producers.

Of the variouis methods nuclear is naturally the most inherently suited to meeting baseline demand, followed by hydroelectric. Solar and wind are the least suited. Coal is next after hydro, but, given the death toll and climate impacts of coal, it should be shut down right now, as is happening in Ontario. Natural gas, oil and bio fuel can all be used to meet baseline demand, but they are more suited to meeting peaks. Hydro can also be used this way, but it is a bit of a waste of capacity.

So will the nuclear.

But those nightmare scenarios are included (or should be) in the comparative death stats quoted upthread. So even with the disasters rolled in, nuclear is still safer.

I will note that I don't believe those nuke stats reflect what anti-nuke activisits claim is the real death toll, but, you know what? Even if you substitute in the number of deaths anti-nuclear fanatics claim, nuclear still comes out with fewer deaths per TWh.

That's a tautology.

To push nuclear deaths per TWh up to the range of oil or coal in the US there will have to be on the order of a million deaths caused by the Fukushima disaster. To get it up to the world-wide deaths per TWh for coal there will have to be on the order of 5 million deaths from Fukushima. Do you really think that is going to happen? Even if Fukushima is as deadly as fanatical nuclear critics claim Chenobyl was, nuclear will still have a track record 10 times as safe as fossil-fuel energy.

Link please. Not that I doubt you. Just want to see more of where you're getting this ratio from.

My guess is he meant a flywheel, not a dynamo.

flyingbanana, I think you may be confusing capacity factor and time down due to equipment repair/malfunction/refuel, etc. Solar is generally down due to equipment failure around .1-.5% of the time (compared to >3% for nuclear). However, due to the fact that solar can only produce when the sun is running, it's capacity factor is around 13-22% (depends on location, design, etc).

The major benefit of solar is that it's usually at its highest production when there is the highest demand on the grid. This can really help to reduce the stress on the grid (especially when the solar plants are distributed) and mitigate the need for additional peak demand only power plants.

Seems like I've taken a controversial position. I'll admit that I don't know everything and may have a few facts wrong.
I've got the capacity factor wrong, it was with the unplanned capacity losses that wind and solar do better than nuclear globally.

Srs bizniz time.

To cope with fossil fuel and nuclear large scale intermittency, you have to have a ~15-20% "reserve margin" of extra capacity.

Modern solar and win are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear with technical failure rates around 1-2%. Although they are inherently variable, it can be managed by proper resource choice, siting and operation [eg. M. Grubb, En. Pol. 16(6):594-607 and 19(7):670-688]
A Stanford study showed that properly connecting just 10 windfarms can enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. [C.L. Archer & M.Z Jacobson, "Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms,"

He seems pretty anti nuclear to be honest with the current technology. He dislikes the fact we've got waste for however many thousands of years and the fact we're locally storing used fuel rods out in the open in pools.

I'm out of the loop with coal. I hear there's things going on with shale in Canada. I assumed 200 years+ wasn't a complete loony omg****** estimation. I'm due to research it for a few months time so I'll know what I'm talking about then.


I may seem very anti-nuclear, but I feel its a necessary evil for now.

"Even reliably running nuclear power plants must shut down on average for around 40 days every 17 months or so for refuelling and maintenance. That's a lot of homes left unpowered. If unlikely unexpected failures happen you're shutting off billions of watts in milliseconds, often for weeks or months as you sort out the problem. Solar and wind fail a little more gracefully. Also when they fail you can't start them up quickly. With the 2003 Northeast blackout 9 reactors were shut down. Twelve days later their average capacity loss was over 50%, and only "

They take them offline during the shoulder months. The peak seasons (winter/summer) they are scheduled to run. Outages are planned for when the prices are lowest and when demand is the least (fall/spring).

Renewables just aren't reliable. Can you get some extra power from them? Sure. Are they reliable when you NEED them? Absolutely not.

There is a demand # every day that has to be met. When that isn't met or things go unexpected blackouts happen. We do every single possible thing we can to avoid blackouts. Blackouts cause investigations. Blackout causes federal scrutiny. Blackouts cause big financial losses.

The point I'nm trying to make is that renewables are simply not as easy to implement as you think.

no matter antimatter in the future ??

Antimatter takes more energy to create than it can release. We either need to look at the laws of physics differently or find a big clump of the stuff somewhere in order to use it. Its also ridiculously dangerous in really small quantities.

As for renewables being unreliable, they are as reliable as any method of power generation provided there is a suitable energy storage to cover the times they are down and the variance in energy generation is taken into calculation - which it clearly would be. The whole "sometimes its night" or "sometimes the wind isnt blowing" is entirely missing the point.

The point I'm trying to make is that renewables have the potential to be reliable and can be implemented. They are going to be implemented anyway: look at all European government policies. The sector is already expanding at an enormous rate, especially with all the investors that were in nuclear now shunting themselves into renewables. As time goes on the technology will only mature and become cheaper and more competitive.

Of course if you only rely on only a few types of renewables you're obviously going to have blackouts and such. If there is a diverse array of different types of renewables connected to a large grid over a large area like the one Europe is planning there comes a point where its statistically really unlikely for blackouts to happen. I pointed out sources earlier where 10 wind farms alone can on average provide 30% percent of baseload electricity per year. Combine that with other renewable technologies and find yourself with not an impossible task of achieving a very high percentage of renewables with statistical certainty that the # required will be met.

Onshore and offshore wind, tidal, wave and tidal stream, hydro, solar PV, biomass, solar concentration, geothermal and even nuclear. That's a lot of independent variables with enough flexibility to meet that required number each day. Even a solution with 60% wind has been shown to work fine:
"The zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario has been successfully tested with the “Future Energy Scenario Assessment” (FESA) energy modelling software. This combines weather and demand data to test if there is enough dispatchable generation to manage the variable base supply of renewable electricity with the variable demand. "

We already have 15-20% extra "reserve capacity" of fossil and nuclear intermittency on the grid. I don't know the answer but if the above model shows that we can mange with a load of wind power, an expert can work out the reserve capacity required of a system with a lot of renewable energy incorporated to make sure the lights stay on.

With the sun doesn't shine at night comments, solar concentrators can concentrate the light on a large block of lead during the daytime to heat it up and let it cool down at night giving off large amounts of thermal energy.

again, where did you get the "200 odd years of coal" assertion from?