Author Topic: Relying on renewable energy = disaster  (Read 3694 times)

phreak

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Re: Relying on renewable energy = disaster
« Reply #25 on: November 04, 2016, 01:58:21 AM »
Can you quantify those costs?
Nope. But neither can you, which was my point.

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I've had one blackout and about a dozen momentary outages in 14 years.  A trebling of my electric bill with a minor improvement in reliability would not be worth it.
May I assume you can count yourself lucky? Friends in Fresno and in NY State complain frequently about blackouts. To the ones in NY State it was worth the expense to have a UPS in place for their servers, negating at least a sizable chunk of the price difference.

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The US is much larger than Germany and has a much larger population. For example, California alone imports twice as much electricity as Germany produces via renewables.  Each state has numerous utilities with varying ages of equipment, so delivering power to so many over such a large area will necessarily have problems.
Is it, though? Whenever I have been reading about power distribution, the problem usually seems to be in the crowded areas, not the remote ones. A more distributed network should be more resilient to problems, because loads can be balanced easier. Would be interesting if an electrical engineer weighed in on this.

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Presuming you are in Germany, has this been resolved:

In a stunning admission, the German Government recently announced that its transition to Renewable Energy was, “On the Verge of Failure.”  This blunt statement was released by Germany’s Economic Minister and Vice Chancellor to Angela Merkel, Sigmar Gabriel at an event at SMA Solar… Germany’s leading manufacturer of Solar technology.

According to the article, Angela Merkel’s Vice Chancellor Stuns, Declares Germany’s ‘Energiewende’ To Be On The Verge Of Failure:

https://srsroccoreport.com/germany-death-of-renewable-energy-bring-on-the-dirty-coal-monsters/
Nope, Dutch. Just work in Germany often. Also quite an old link, and not without bias, as it is trying to sell me an investment strategy. Something newer and more neutral: http://www.powermag.com/germanys-energiewende-new-turning-point/?pagenum=2  Seems Germany hasn't collapsed just yet, though there are a few problems.

Primemuscle

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Re: Relying on renewable energy = disaster
« Reply #26 on: November 04, 2016, 04:10:46 AM »
Right now I'm in the land of renewable energy. There are windmills on almost every hill and some farmer's fields have been taken over by solar panels. This seems to be working for Germany as their nuclear power plants are disabled.

Necrosis

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Re: Relying on renewable energy = disaster
« Reply #27 on: December 05, 2016, 07:34:43 AM »
Once battery tech increases considerably?  Let's talk once that happens.   :-\

Why not nuclear?  It's clean, ain't it?

Ya the issue isn't panel efficiency it's storage, batteries haven't improved all that much in many years. no quantum leaps per se. I wouldn't advocate switching unless it's tenable.