Everything the BBC has reported is a lie. They obviously a problem with admitting the truth about child brides in Muslim countries, so why not blame it all on global warming?
California has adopted a target of 25,000 MW of floating offshore wind generation capacity. Of course, the cost is never mentioned, so here is a rough estimate to get the ball rolling.
The estimate begins with the huge Dominion Energy (DOM) fixed wind project currently under construction off of Virginia. Because the regulated utility DOM is its own developer, we get some public numbers, so here is a crude derivation. Big numbers are rounded for simplicity and ease of memory.
A. DOM says the 2,600 MW facility will cost $10 billion to build, which is about $4 billion/GW. But financing and profit bump that to $20 billion or $8 billion/GW, which is called the “revenue requirement” or what rate payers will pay. We will use that number.
B. DOM brags that they are immune to the big cost spike that has swept the industry because their contracts predate it. The costs have increased an estimated 65% industry-wide. That pushes the fixed bottom cost to $6.6 billion/GW construction and $13.2 billion/GW total.
C. Floating wind is generally estimated to be three times fixed wind because that huge floater costs a huge amount more than the single monopile a fixed tower sits on, plus there is a lot of mooring to the sea floor. Off California, the water is around a half mile deep.
This gives a construction cost of roughly $20 billion/GW and a total of $40 billion/GW. It could be a lot more as it has never been done.
D. Thus, 25 GW of floating capacity comes to $500 billion for construction and an incredible trillion dollars with financing. Note this does not include 20 years’ worth of expensive operation, maintenance, repair, replacement and decommissioning. That makes it well over a trillion.
This is California’s trillion-dollar floating wind fantasy.
Now, let’s turn this into a possible power purchase agreement (PPA) price. A trillion dollars paid over 20 years is $50,000,000,000 a year. Assuming a 40% capacity factor, that works out to 57 cents a KWh. Given that the average wholesale price of electricity in California is just around 5 cents, this is incredibly expensive.
The floating wind startup price is almost 12 times the regular price of electricity. Floating wind is a crazy policy, even by California’s crazy standards.
Here is the basic announcement: “The West Coast Offshore Wind Transmission effort includes a Request for Information to allow individuals and organizations to submit written input about transmission topics, including siting, technology, and policy considerations. The GDO team will consider this input as they prepare West Coast recommendations. Responses must be received by October 3, 2024, and can be sent by emailing OSWTransmission@hq.doe.gov.”
DOE says the West Coast plan will be similar to the massive “ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. This Action Plan is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which is actually building the offshore wind monsters. The plan creates a massive undersea grid along the entire Atlantic coast.
The Atlantic Action Plan shows specific offshore wind projects in ever-increasing numbers by five-year increments, from 30,000 MW in 2030 to 85,000 MW in 2050. Suppose the West Coast plan is just as big as the East Coast at 85,000 MW. That is a monstrous 3.4 trillion dollars worth of floating wind, a technology that does not even exist at commercial scale.
I encourage people to send in comments objecting to this monstrous floating wind development effort. America does not need trillions of dollars worth of unreliable electricity.
The Gulf Stream system of warm ocean currents could collapse as early as 2025, a scientific study has warned.
The end of the system, which drives the Atlantic’s currents and determines western Europe’s weather, would likely lead to lower temperatures and catastrophic climate impacts.
The potential weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in response to anthropogenic forcing, suggested by climate models, is at the forefront of scientific debate. A key AMOC component, the Florida Current (FC), has been measured using submarine cables between Florida and the Bahamas at 27°N nearly continuously since 1982. A decrease in the FC strength could be indicative of the AMOC weakening. Here, we reassess motion-induced voltages measured on a submarine cable and reevaluate the overall trend in the inferred FC transport. We find that the cable record beginning in 2000 requires a correction for the secular change in the geomagnetic field. This correction removes a spurious trend in the record, revealing that the FC has remained remarkably stable. The recomputed AMOC estimates at ~26.5°N result in a significantly weaker negative trend than that which is apparent in the AMOC time series obtained with the uncorrected FC transports.
Generating power reliably around-the-clock, nuclear power has always made sense – ask the French, for starters. When compared against the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar, and their need for massive and endless subsidies, nuclear power generation wins hands down.
If anything, the disaster unfolding in places where increasing wind and solar capacity has wrecked grids and sent power prices into orbit has helped energy adults win the argument for ever-reliable nuclear, without raising a sweat.
Nuclear doesn’t depend on the weather, or where the Sun sits in the sky and it doesn’t depend on backup and batteries.
The amount of power generated from an area the size of a city block can satisfy the demands of whole countries, whereas with wind and solar … well, you know the rest.
In the piece below, Leslie Eastman provides an update on the development of Generation IV reactors, and how the Americans are playing catch up with the Chinese who are well ahead of the game in that respect.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency Approves First Generation IV Nuclear Reactor
Legal Insurrection
Leslie Eastman
2 September 2024
The last time we checked on the nation’s energy industry, the Biden-Harris administration banned drilling for gas and oil on 28 million acres of Alaska (rescinding the order signed by President Donald Trump).
However, there is better news on the nuclear energy front. This is good news given that nuclear energy is the only rival to fossil fuels in efficiency and cost-effectiveness and is worthy of supplying power on a civilization-level.
According to Interesting Engineering, the new Hermes reactor will be the first one built in the United States in 50 years that won’t be cooled by light water. Instead, it will use a system of molten fluoride salt, and a TRISO (tri-structural isotropic particle) fuel pebble bed design will power the generator.
Molten fluoride salts have “excellent chemical stability and tremendous capacity for transferring heat,” per the report, meaning it stays cooler and dissipates heat much faster than the light water that has been used for so long in American reactors.
The fuel bed consists of hundreds of millimeter-sized particles of uranium encased in multiple layers of special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel, per Ultra Safe Nuclear. The ceramic casing is stronger and more resilient than the typical zirconium alloy, meaning it can withstand higher temperatures and neutron bombardment past the failure point of other types of fuel.
On top of that, because each individual piece of fuel is so small, in the event that one fails, the ensuing burst of radiation would be significantly lessened — and less likely to cause further damage, thanks to the coolant system.
Generation IV nuclear power utilizes a system of fuel fabrication plants and reprocessing facilities that together overcome some of the shortcomings of the previous generations of nuclear power plants.
To be classified as Generation IV, a system must meet, or at least have the ability to meet, the following criteria:
(1) it is much more fuel-efficient than current plants;
(2) it is designed in such a way that severe accidents are not possible, that is, plant failure or an external event (such as an earthquake) should not result in radioactive material release to the outside world;
[3] the fuel cycle is designed in such a way that uranium and plutonium are never separated (“diverged”) but only present in a mix and with other elements. This makes it more difficult to create nuclear weapons.
Construction is underway on the new nuclear power plant in Tennessee, in the iconic city of Oak Ridge (famous for its importance in World War Two’s Manhattan Project).
Kairos Power has begun building the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, the first Gen IV reactor approved for construction by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Hermes reactor utilizes a fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor design, differing from conventional light-water reactors.
“Generation IV nuclear power plant designs are revolutionary, in that they are planned to use a very different set of technologies than the reactors we use today,” Ross Peel, a professor with King’s College London’s Centre for Science and Security Studies told Newsweek.
Unfortunately, we are behind China when it comes to the construction. It launched its construction of a Generation IV reactor late last year.
The Shidaowan nuclear power plant, which features the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, started commercial operations on December 6, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the project’s developers, said.
“China’s independently developed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor demonstrator commenced commercial operation,” CNNC said in a statement.
“It signifies that China has completed the world’s first commercially operational modular nuclear power plant with fourth-generation nuclear technology, marking the transition of fourth-generation nuclear technology from experiments to the commercial market.”
Interestingly, more and more countries are rethinking their ban on nuclear energy, likely in light of the realities of “green energy” as well as the improvements being made in the Generation IV systems. Switzerland, for example, has reversed its outright ban of nuclear.
The Swiss government said on Wednesday it plans to overturn a ban on building new power plants to strengthen local energy supply at a time of increased geopolitical tension.
Energy Minister Albert Roesti said the government would submit a proposal to amend nuclear legislation by the end of 2024 so it can be debated in parliament next year.
“Over the long term, new nuclear power plants are one possible way of making our supply more secure in a geopolitically uncertain time,” Roesti told a press conference.
Failure to retain the option could be seen as a betrayal by future generations, Roesti argued.
All of these are positive developments for those of us who enjoy the perks of civilization, such a light at night and heat during the winter. Legal Insurrection
Iowa Climate Science Education 