Confusing watts and watt-hours is a Gross Conceptual Error
It’s probably safe to say that nearly everyone who talks or writes anything about energy and power has made the mistake – perhaps only as a typographical error – of writing or saying “gigawatt” in a situation where the correct term is “gigawatt-hour”.
Those of us who have real understanding of the topic, however, will either quickly correct the typo when it is pointed out, or we will think for a minute to recognize which of those two units is correct in the situation under discussion.
For some people who like to talk about energy, however, the problem is something more than just a typographical error. They really do not quite understand that a watt (whether modified by a prefix of nano, kilo, mega, or giga) is a unit of power while a watt-second (or gigawatt-hour) is a measure of energy.
They may not even recognize that power and energy are two very different and equally important items worth measuring correctly. They may even fail to understand the importance of using the correct units in any expression of a measured parameter.
The proper reaction a reader or a listener should have to anyone sharing an opinion about energy and power who stubbornly will not correct units or who can’t tell the difference between energy and power is to stop accepting that person’s words and work.
Aside Would you give any credibility to a financial advisor who casually confuses a weekly paycheck and a bank account total or who thinks that its just a typo to list say that your dividend will be 1000 dollars when it is actually 1000 yen? End Aside.
I came across a post this morning that stimulated the above musing. Titled Lying is Not Okay, it is a lengthy defense of Mark Z. Jacobson’s decision to file a lawsuit against the National Academy of Sciences and Christopher Clack.
Clack was the lead author – with 20 co-authors – of a peer reviewed paper that provided clear refutation of Jacobson’s influential paper.
That work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. claimed to demonstrate via modeling that transitioning our energy supply system – not just our electricity supply system – from its current mix of sources to a new mix made up entirely of wind, water and solar power would be achievable at a cost that is close to or less than the cost of business as usual.
The paper’s title makes clear its ambitious intent and its conclusions Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.
A full telling of the saga surrounding Jacobson’s original work, the work to refute that work in the same academic journal that hosted the original paper, and Jacobson’s reaction to the criticism is beyond the scope of this post.
However, after reading the defense of Jacobson referenced above, I felt the need to respond. This is what I wrote.
Brandon
The issue that MikeN raised illustrates that you share a GCE about electricity and basic physics with Mark Z. Jacobson. (GCE – Navy Nuclear Power School lingo for Gross Conceptual Error.)
The difference between power (measured in watts – aka joules/second) and energy (watt-seconds – more simply just joules) is fundamental and extremely important for understanding how the systems that enable us to function actually work.
By definition, power is an instantaneous measure of a system’s output – right now – and power capacity is a system limit of the MAXIMUM that the system can produce at any instant.
If a hydropower system has a capacity of 1000 GW, it can NEVER produce more power. Even for an instant. That capacity is a function of a complete system that has pipes, valves, dams, transformers, wires, turbines, riverbeds, etc with fixed dimensions. At the rated capacity, the water is moving as fast as that system will allow and the wires are carrying as much current as they can without exceeding physical limits.
Adding capacity to a hydroelectric system is thus a completely non trivial task whether it is a traditional dam with reservoir, a run of the river turbine system, or a pumped hydro system.
If anything, the Clack et al response to Jacobson’s stubborn defense of his CGE is too respectful and deferential. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE to produce valid results from a model that includes such a fundamental error as failing to constrain output of hydroelectric systems to their rated capacity. If the demand on the system requires the hydro components to produce significantly more than their capacity for even an instant, the grid being modeled should only be able to remain operational by abruptly cutting off loads.
Failing to constrain any power source output to its rated capacity in a model purporting to balance supply and demand at all moments is such a serious modeling error that I am completely befuddled about why it took so long for the academic community to reject the work as being wrong. Many of us who are not academics and have no incentive to participate in its “peer reviewed journal article” process have been saying for years that Jacobson’s 100% renewable solutions project is fundamentally flawed.
We’ve done our best to try to convince Jacobson to revise or retract it. For whatever reason, MZJ has refused all assistance. His frequent response to criticism has been to summarily block them on Twitter.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Resume available upon request
Update: Posted November 8 at 0545
Brandon responded to my comment on his blog. Here’s what he wrote.
Brandon Shollenberger
November 7, 2017 at 7:49 am
Rod Adams, if you’re going to use rhetoric to criticize other people’s understanding of things, you should try to refrain from making simple mistakes yourself. You say:
By definition, power is an instantaneous measure of a system’s output – right now – and power capacity is a system limit of the MAXIMUM that the system can produce at any instant.
If a hydropower system has a capacity of 1000 GW, it can NEVER produce more power. Even for an instant. That capacity is a function of a complete system that has pipes, valves, dams, transformers, wires, turbines, riverbeds, etc with fixed dimensions. At the rated capacity, the water is moving as fast as that system will allow and the wires are carrying as much current as they can without exceeding physical limits
Exactly what you are thinking is a bit opaque as the phrase “power capacity” is not a term which has any common meaning that I can find. Regardless, you’re wrong on even the most basic aspect of this. You say a facility “can NEVER produce more power” than its nameplate capacity, but that’s simply untrue. Nameplate capacity is the sustained load, over a long time, the facility is rated for. Nothing prevents a facility from going over that value for a period of time, except for the costs doing so would incur in things like repairs.
Beyond the fundamentals, what you describe is false as, again, nameplate capacity is about sustained loads. Facilities which store energy such as pumped hydropower stations, can store excess energy so they can tap into it when demand gets high. One can see the same behavior with capacitors. A circuit with capacitors can store energy in the capacitors then later discharge that energy to get a surge of power far exceeding the normal levels in the circuit.
You can jump up and down, throw around rhetoric and even insult people all you want, but waving your hands around and declaring things to be impossible doesn’t make them impossible. Facilities can have instantaneous discharge rates exceeding their nameplate capacity. There is nothing which prevents that.
Failing to constrain any power source output to its rated capacity in a model purporting to balance supply and demand at all moments is such a serious modeling error that I am completely befuddled about why it took so long for the academic community to reject the work as being wrong. Many of us who are not academics and have no incentive to participate in its “peer reviewed journal article” process have been saying for years that Jacobson’s 100% renewable solutions project is fundamentally flawed.
Anyone who shares your views has no idea what they are talking about. Nameplate capacity is a measure of the long-term, sustained electrical production of a facility. It is a long-term average. The instantaneous output of a facility is not a long-term average. It is the instantaneous discharge rate. The instantaneous discharge rate is in not bounded at the long-term average, or sustained, production rate.
If you wish to continue insisting it is impossible to have an instantaneous discharge rate exceeding the installed capacity of a facility, I suggest you do more than just demand everyone accept what you say as true. A simple step would be to try a small, hypothetical example. An obvious one is the one I alluded to above – capacitors in a system with a generator. Once the generator charges the capacitors. what will happen if the capacitors are discharged?
According to Jacobson, there will be an instantaneous discharge whose numbers could go higher than the “installed capacity” of the generator. According to you theory, there wouldn’t be.
Several commenters have attempted to correct Brandon’s continuing GCE. I also responded.
Rod Adams
November 8, 2017 at 5:27 am
Brandon
I was not using “power capacity” as a term. The nameplate capacity of a system is expressed in watts because that is the units by which power is measured. A watt is a derived unit, the root unit is joule/sec (energy/time).
When a system capacity is determined, it is the limit of energy per unit time that the system can deliver. As I noted in my original comment, it is a function of a number of system components that all have finite dimensions and can allow only so much fluid to flow or current to be moved.
Capacitors are components that can be connected to a power generation system to provide the capability of storing energy – up to a fixed amount determined by the physical design of the capacitor – that can then be nearly instantaneously discharged. The output of capacitors is generally not subject to any regulation, they are either in the mode of being charged, storing energy, or being discharged immediately.
Capacitors are not normally considered to be part of a power generation system. They are separate components that MAY be connected to the output of a given system.
Here’s an example that your readers might understand, even if you stubbornly defend your conception of how energy and power are related.
A Honda Civic might be sold with a 100 horsepower engine. Translating that limit into SI units, it has a capacity of ~ 75 kw. That number is the max power it can provide which governs parameters like acceleration and maximum velocity.
It can be sold with a 10 gallon gasoline tank. Since gasoline contains 40 kilowatt-hours per gallon, the tank can store 400 kilowatt-hours of chemical energy. The gasoline (Otto cycle) engine is roughly 25% efficient in converting chemical energy to rotational energy.
Running at rated capacity, a 75 kw (output) engine consumes 300 (75 kw/0.25) kw-hrs of chemical energy each hour. The system we are talking about could burn up the stored gasoline energy in about 1.33 hours if the operator had a place to run full throttle.
If the owner of that car wasn’t satisfied with the car’s acceleration and top end velocity, she could take action to increase the engine power by altering various physical components in the system to make fuel flow faster, add additional air, etc. There is not a fixed limit on how many such alterations are possible, but anyone suggesting that there is a low cost way to increase that Civic’s power by a factor of 13 to give it a 975 kw engine would not simply be laughed out of a garage.
They would be ignored, ridiculed or tossed out of the garage.
Rod Adams
That’s just it. Jacobson’s model is obviously wrong on its face, so the real academics didn’t want to bother with it; they didn’t think anyone could take it serously. It wasn’t until it started getting traction in the political sphere that they realized they had to refute it or suffer with the gross errors in public policy that would result.
This is Jacobson’s desperation move and I’m hoping against hope that it destroys him academically and personally.
Here’s hoping….
Another befuddling question is why did Scientific American publish his fantasies.
Although, given the full page ads from UCS in SciAm back in the late 70s, early 80s, I wonder about their influences and editorial independence.
SciAm has been a joke for many years. “Science In Pictures”, FFS?
Compare “The Amateur Scientist” (do they even still have that feature?) between the 1960’s and today.
Yes, they dumbed it down some time in the 90s, but I had hoped they would stop short of publishing absolute fantasy.
I read some of Brandon’s comments on Judith Curry’s blog. Let’s just say that … he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, and he’s somewhat of a pretentious jerk, as his comments attest. Instead of being embarrassed at being out of his league, he doubles down.
He really should be on Twitter … oh wait … he already is: “A couple days ago I came across a link on Twitter …”
And now even NASA thinks the “that a geothermal heat source called a mantle plume lies deep below Antarctica’s Marie Byrd Land, explaining some of the melting that creates lakes and rivers under the ice sheet.”
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-291
As I have said before we know more about the processes taking place inside the piston cylinder of an ICE than about CO2 in the atmosphere.
To Rod
Politely, I think it’s likely that you misunderstood that author. It seems that he believes that “nameplate power capacity” means “yearly average power production” as opposed to “maximum possible instantaneous power production”. I don’t know where he got that silly idea into his head. I found citations which clearly show that the cited value of circa 78 GW is indeed maximum possible instantaneous power production. I also gave a few other fatal objections: The existing hydro installations don’t have enough instantaneous capacity to support the model. The greatly increased flow rates on certain days for several hours from the model would be 16x greater than normal, which would destroy everything downstream, flood cities, etc.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
I’m not sure I understand your post. In slightly different words, you seem to be saying the same thing that I did – Brandon has an incorrect understanding of what capacity, energy and power mean. His misunderstanding of the terms and the units combine to give him a gross conceptual error regarding whether or not a power system can produce more than its nameplate capacity without severe physical damage.
Ok. I think I finally figured out what Brandon’s problem is, after many posts. Brandon has a gross misunderstanding of nameplate capacity, or he’s innumerate, or he has some severe reading comprehension problems. He basically says that a system with a 87 GW nameplate capacity can produce a 1300 GW output sustained for 13 hours, which is of course asinine. I’m pressing him on this point now.
Updates:
Is Brandon an active member of the Green movement? Does he have financial ties to Jacobson? Brandon seems purposefully obtuse, and I’m now questioning his honesty and integrity.
To Rod
I must admit fault. You are correct that Brandon demonstrates that he does not understand the difference between energy and power. In a recent comment-reply to his blog post, he again made the error, and said that energy can be measured in “GW”.
It seems that Jacobson
is saying I was talking about instantaneous discharge capacity.
Clack pretended I was was talking about nameplate capacity.
He knew I was talking about instantaneous discharge capacity,
so he should go to jail.
In fact, there is no real difference
which is why Clack did not bother to make the distinction
nor have to have to make the distinction.
I live a few miles upriver from Bonneville.
The original dam finished in 1938
has a nameplace capacity of 518 MW
with an overload capacity of 574 MW.
The original dam was undersized for the river flow.
In 1982 the “new” dam was added by extending
the original dam all the way across the river.
Its nameplate capacity is 532 MW; overload is 612 MW.
The current instantaneous discharge capacity
of Bonneville is 1130 MW.
When Bonneville is going all out,
the river falls like a rock,
at least a meter per day, probably 2.
And as the river drops, Bonneville puts out less power.
Unless your definition of instantaneous is something like an hour
— which makes no sense in this context —
the only way you can materially increase
the instantaneous discharge capacity is to not only install
a whole new set of turbines for which there is no room,
you must build a higher dam.
You also need to inundate both railroads,
an Interstate, and a whole series of river towns.
The original dams took the water level up to something
like the 50 year flood level.
People had responded to the floods by not building
a lot of stuff including the railroads below those levels.
Yet there were still severe dislocations
when the current dams were built.
To go higher would start a war.
In short Jacobson’s orders or magnitude increase
in instantaneous discharge capacity
is pretty much the same thing as
the same amount of nameplate capacity.
Jacobson must know this.
So if there is a liar in this mess,
it’s not Clack.
I’ve been arguing with this Brandon for several days now on his blog (linked else-page). Brandon is also making the same fundamental error. I don’t get it. This should be basic knowledge.
Rod, the error is exploited by electric energy storage advocates. I have seen many examples where they have taken to expressing battery capacity in MW, not MWh. The energy delivery rate (power) is an important number in many applications, but it is not a measure of energy storage capacity. A big car battery might have energy storage capacity of 1 kWh, but I can get 5 kW of power from it by putting a screwdriver across the terminals. I’ve seen utility companies obfuscate this way.
Somewhat off topic but this article from TNYT is refreshingly honest about so-called renewables:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/business/climate-carbon-renewables.html
Yes, it was nice to see someone finally point out that the emperor has no clothes, in a major public forum, although not in a particularly strong way.
Now if the message will just catch on.
I remain convince that much of the climate change denial out there is by folks who recognize that the proposed “solutions” are insane and have not separated the question of accepting the problem/solution package from the question of accepting the problem and looking for other solutions.
Yup, that’s definitely the case. And you have to admire the evil genius of the fossil-fuel lobby. By coupling climate change to radical Marxist ideology, they’ve poisoned it in the minds of huge numbers of people not on the far left.
You don’t need an evil cabal for that. All you need is Al Gore.
@Brian Mays
You think Gore was able to do what he did without a lot of backing from major players? Like many politicians, he’s a figurehead. Perhaps his focus on icebergs is a bit of a metaphor.
And who forked out the money that made Al Gore?
Along the same lines…
Rod linked to this video in his twitter feed:
https://unfccc.cloud.streamworld.de/webcast/james-hansen-nuclear-power-are-renewables-enough
If you don’t have the patience for the whole thing, at least watch about the last 5 minutes. Shellenberger just really lets some superstitious obstructionists have it.
Thank you. 28 minutes well spent.
Why does it seem like in all the videos I have watched, Shellenberger always gets cut off from really giving it to the idiots who question facts from the crowd?
I would love to watch hours of him just demolishing people.
It seems to be a talent of his. I enjoyed it too.
a yes, energy vs power: one of the most tenacious, recurring, and stubburn irritations of the more serious energy analyst or professional.
But one thing that should be mentioned is that the energy professionals need to take a share of the blame. BP energy overviews, IEA data reports, it doesn’t matter where you go, there is an entire unit-zoo being bandied about that can be confusing even to professionals. First these documents talk about barrels of oil (of which there are different types, obviously, to add to the confusion), then they talk about BTUs (don’t get me started on how silly this unit is) or GJs for gas, then switch to yet other units for coal, then go through kilowatt-hours for electricity… it’s a nightmare.
Just imagine if you had to do your end of year accounting, with your checkings account in US dollars, the savings account in Japanese Yen, your credit card payments in pesos and your investment account totting up in euros!!
Financial people have much more sense when it comes to units.
Really we only need 2 units, one for power, one for energy. And it is clear that we should avoid using derived units – what exactly is a thousand joules per second per hour???
Here’s my subscription: Joules and Seconds. All you need. Power is joules/second. Energy is Joules. kilo-mega-giga is not difficult for the new generations due to familiarity with computers (data storage, kilobytes, megabytes). No more BTUs, barrels, quads, therms, calories… N unit zoo.
Of course it is rather late now, with many professionals using engrained units.
Regarding this entire hydropower multi-bagger delusion. Really like the car analogy. Tweaking a car to produce a few percent more power is not difficult, but making it produce 10x more power is not possible without replacing, well just about anything in the car, including chassis, gearbox, engine, and even then likely won’t work (if for no other reason the added brunt simply doesn’t fit). Economically speaking it is prohibitively expensive to uprate cars, powerplants, or indeed anything engineered, produce 10x more power. Same with hydro dams. Can you imagine just the erosion and flow related issues of making any dam increase it’s flow capacity to 1000%. Or fitting the added turbines, and attendant costs of re-engineering, re-excavating, etc. I’m shocked anyone can even suggest this as a simple cheap solution to glue a grid of unreliables together.
” what exactly is a thousand joules per second per hour???”
Ramp rates?
No. It is called a kilowatthour.
Did you get the point?
A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy that results from one-thousand joules per second maintained over the course of an hour.
“Per” indicates division, as in “miles per hour” indicates how far an object would go, in miles, if it were to travel at the same speed for an hour. The number of miles traveled divided by the number of hours to get there will give you that number as an average.
@Cyril R
The profusion of units in the energy & power world is what it is. There are many historical and cultural reasons they evolved.
My advice to anyone who is seriously interested in participating in the field in an influential way is to add good conversion tables to your bookmarks. Use units carefully and keep track of them as you “run the numbers.” Consider the advice of the Serenity Prayer and recognize that you cannot change the confusing set of units in use today. Many have tried and failed.
You can resolve that you will not add to the problem by inventing new units of your own. You should also refuse to use undefined “units” like banana dose equivalent or electricity to serve X households.
I wish I could claim to have invented Joules and Seconds. That’d make me famous.
Of course, it’d also be almost as silly as you claiming joules and seconds are “new” units and therefore shouldn’t be used.
As for cultural and historic reasons… yes I am aware of them hence my point (re engrained). And no it is not a valid argument to defend absurd units, much less a zoo of such units.
If such line of argument were valid, we should not argue for more nuclear plants, or any change in sentiments on nuclear; after all, there are many historic and cultural reasons why nuclear power is antagonized….
@Cyril R
I’m sorry if I did not express myself clearly. Of course I know that joules and seconds are not new units. They have existed for centuries in the case of joules and millennia in the case of seconds.
They are full and useful members of the currently existing system that I do not believe has a chance of being changed.
The new units I strongly advise against are those used to supposedly make measuring systems more approachable. I provided examples of bananas and houses. Neither are useful as units because they are not precisely or consistently defined.
Joules and seconds are not bananas or houses. They are classroom examples of well defined units.
Kilowatt hour is one Thousand Joules per second per 3600 seconds. Does that sound like a sensible unit? Are you really suprised that people misunderstand this silly unit?
You think people can’t switch to using units that make sense but you do expect people can change their minds about nuclear power?
To Cyril
I think you should read again. I’m pretty sure that you and Rod have pretty broad agreement.
To Cyril.
When you said “Kilowatt hour is one Thousand Joules per second per 3600 seconds”, I’m sure you actually meant “one Thousand Joules per secondfor 3600 seconds”. *Multiply* by the number of seconds, in other words, rather than again dividing by the number of seconds, as “per” would imply. This then cancels out the original seconds in the Joules-per-second, leaving us with the dimensions of energy, which kWh is a unit of.
Just further confirms the whole point of the article, how easy it is to slip on this particular banana skin.
They are in violent agreement. 🙂
Reading Brandon’s defense and reply, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. It reminded me of my first university physics course, in which a few individuals (who were not the sharpest knives in the drawer) had trouble with this same distinction.
Sometimes I wonder: are individuals like this Brandon obfuscating, are they faking their credentials, or do they actually expect to be believed?
Also – suppose for simplicity you get a 1 mS dose of radiation via one particular type of particle. Does it make a difference whether that dose comes from alpha particles, a specific type of beta particle, gamma rays, etc?
I know this rarely happens in reality; it’s just that I want to learn more. Are there any good textbooks on this subject that would be accessible to me as a late undergraduate student?
You might find this a good place to start:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Equivalent_dose
To Travis
I’m still flabbergasted that Brandon is still insisting that nameplate capacity and installed capacity as terms of art are not (approximate) measures of maximum possible power output over a short period of time (usually hours, or at most a day). It’s truly bizarre. I am questioning his honesty.
Another thing –
Why not hook a generator up to a wet cask and get some electricity from that relatively fresh spent fuel pool? I realize this wouldn’t produce much power – I would guess a fresh batch of fuel rods would only produce 0.1% of the power that they did in the reactor – but something’s better than nothing. And those rods are releasing decay heat anyway.
I believe MSRs are wholistically than solid-fuel reactors (I find Flibe’s LFTR very interesting). But these wet casks are readily available resources that we are presently ignoring.
Frankly, it’s not worth the effort. The power density just isn’t enough to justify the investment in the equipment required.
Its probably worth it if all the nation’s spent fuel were stored in one location.
Revenues from power or process heat sales could cover the costs of storage.
I’ve always said I would take and store a cask in my backyard if I could figure out a way to pump the decay heat into my house. Place some patio furniture on top…..and just imagine the talking piece during parties!!
@ Bonds 25
I just assumed a dry cask could be buried underground and the decay heat could be used by a geothermal heat pump. Pulling numbers from WNA reveals that there are 2463 casks as of end of 2016, representing 40% of the spent fuel. The nuclear waste fund kicks out $1 billion a year in interest or about $160,000 per cask. I wonder how long there would be a ‘waste problem’ if the DOE offered land owners 50k a year to store it temporally?
And I just assumed you would pump the decay heat directly from the vent ports.
No patio furniture if it’s buried underground. I would take $150,000 worth easily, as long as the security measures are “go ahead, pop the top on the cask and take the fuel, terrorists…..good luck!!”
Many nuclear plants have operated higher than their name plate maximum capacity for numerous reason. It is not legal…but it happens. How about the industry wide nuclear plant uprates. Some plants have changed their name plate maximum capacity by 20% or more. Basically no change in the primary system or core. How about instrumentation accuracy recapture programs. The increase the accuracy of instrumentation, then they are allowed to increase nameplate capacity!
@Mike Mulligan
Marginal power uprates are possible for most standard power systems. 13x uprates at a nominal cost are not.
In the past, instruments were less accurate, so to guarantee safety, additional margins were included. Read: the fuel and equipment was operated at reduced power. With modern instrumentation and simulation technology, higher accuracy is possible so the margins have become obsolete. So you can get more power… actually you just go closer to what the fuel and equipment was designed for in the first place.
Replacing steam generators, turbines, condensers and such with modern, more efficient models is another way to go. These don’t increase thermal power but get more electricity out of the same reactor power.
Plants are often rated in terms of summer output. In winter the heat sink is more effective so is similar to having higher efficiency as described above. So winter output is higher than summer output.
Nothing scary or illegal about these things.
It’s quite a difference from summer to winter…..more than I would have thought if I didn’t permanently work at a Nuclear Power Plant and didn’t receive BWR systems training.
Somebody here said over and over again you can’t materially exceed the nameplate max capacity. I just wanted to straighten this out.
What is really scary here is the once every hundred year financial storm overcoming the nuclear industry industry (natural gas). The pittance from the gov welfare check to the nuclear plants aren’t nearly enough to make them profitable…
To Mike
I’ve been trying to use the words “approximate” or “rough”. I know you can exceed nameplate capacity, but you’re never going to exceed nameplate capacity by a factor of 16 for hydro for 13 hours, which is what Jacobson’s paper says.
Basically in summer heat sink temperature (water) rises…this make the condenser less efficient. So they got to limit heat to the main condenser to keep vacuum with limits. Most of the year these guys operate at nameplate power. They never intentionally exceed nameplate max power, but often are forced to derate power for broken equipment issues.
To operate the cooling tower fans and the cooling tower booster pumps cost my plant 40 to 60 megawatts.
I believe our house load is ~50 megawatts. Crazy amount of power.
Sounds like a lot. Wouldn’t slightly smaller pumps and fans net higher output, despite a cut in the thermal efficiency? Interesting optimization curve to work on…
Technically…..even changing the parking lot lights from halogen to LED increases our net, or an engineer shutting the light off in his office when he leaves a night.
LEDs can save kilowatts, but BOP optimization can save megawatts… in a gigawatt power station you gotta know the difference!
Fixing leaks in steam systems seems to be the best way for us to optimize our power potential.
A couple months ago we furmanited a valve in our heater bay at 75% Reactor Power that engineering evaluated as costing us 2 megawatts.
Reduced Reactor Power from 100% to 75% for 3 hours to save 200 mrem. While I’m not sure exactly how much $$ in production was lost….I do KNOW it certainly was worth MUCH more than 200 mrem. ALARA is another issue that while it’s also my job, I have an incredibly hard time accepting loss of production to save workers from receiving a very little amount of exposure.
@Bonds 25
Your station produces 1100 MWe. Ignoring the ramps up and down, reducing power from 100% to 75% for three hours reduces the energy production of the facility by 3 hours x (1100 MW – 825 MW) = 825 MWhr.
The lost sales effect varies depending on the wholesale price of electricity at the time chosen for the power reduction and job completion. In your service territory, there may be times when the wholesale price approaches 0. I’m not sure if it is allowed to go negative in your area; not all ISO/RTOs allow negative pricing. A properly planned job done when power prices are low due to low demand might not affect revenue generation at all.
On the other hand, if wholesale prices are $50 / MWhr, the revenue lost during the job would be $41,250. Those would be some mighty expensive mrem but the manager that claimed credit for saving them might fail to mention their cost when he is trying to meet INPO-established man-rem improvement plan goals.
I wonder how a new plant would handle it? They varied the booster pump discharge valve and cycled fans to keep discharge temps within environmental temps. It ate up a lot of control room resources.
$41,000: is that just the monthly bar tab of the CEO? That amount is mere pennies on the scale of things at a power plant. What does fulminating and leaking valves in the heater bay really represent? Is it a mindset? The slippery slope? It is mindless penny pinching? It almost turns into an addiction leading to wide spread maintenance problem at the plant leading to a Pilgrim or ANO. What happens if you get into a disgruntled employee with events ongoing, and he gives me a call? I got a tip from an employee at River Bend. It lead me into looking at their LERs. I notice once a plant tripped, usually they became isolated from the Mcond. They were tripping all the time. Through a host of maintenance issues, tripping feed pumps on high level, bad feed pump breaker, leaking feed regs valves and a poorly modeled simulator on reactor level control. Then I called the senior resident at the plant having an hour discussion about “banging around” reactor level control. Banging around vessel water level is a professional term. It cascades into a special inspection, plus the scrutiny leads to two more special inspections. Now you are talking about my scale of money. Millions and tens of millions of dollars worth of investigations and corrective actions. They tagged me as the guy with the demise Pilgrim. I set up all that intense NRC scrutiny over my predicted failure of the safety relief valve failures.
So what happens if you get a loser like me with a little casha? The NRC thinks this babbling idiot has been right before we knew about it a few times. You keep track of the Vogtle new build in the next month.
http://steamshovel2002.blogspot.com/2017/11/voglte-non-professional-engineers.html
http://steamshovel2002.blogspot.com/2017/11/nrc-offical-allegation-to-me-and.html
What do you call a major reactor accident in these uncertain political times and unprecedented industry financial problems? Nuclear industry suicide.
As of this very second, our house load is 32 megawatts.
Brandon is clearly a bright guy who understands the difference between energy and power. You guys are just splitting hairs over terms and units. Brandon’s thesis (if I can call it that) is that Clack et al. were informed about and acknowledged Jacobson’s stupid, ridiculous, ad hoc, completely idiotic hydro turbine (or “low cost” equivalent) buildout and omitted it in their paper, thereby maliciously lying and defaming him.
Brandon’s problem seems to go down into deep psychological needs; it otherwise wouldn’t be this hard to educate someone on mere technical matters.
To Canman
This is points not in evidence. Brandon has made numerous mistakes in the course of several days regarding units (watts vs watt-hours), and – being extremely generous – Brandon used the word “rate” when he meant “total”. Given that this is a recurring theme, it’s a much deeper problem where Brandon seemingly doesn’t have a firm grasp on the mathematics of change, i.e. calculus 101, derivatives and integrals.
Several people have asked him, multiple times, whether he’s ever taken a chemistry or physics course.
He has refused to answer.
This proves that the answer is “no”. He’s brighter than average (especially in the po-mo “there are no facts, only competing narratives” circles he had to have been in in school) but he is clueless about the actual calculations and appears to be so ideologically attached to Greenism that he won’t learn if learning threatens his beloved bucolic vision.
You want to know which nuclear plant in the USA has the worst capacity for the last few years.
Lasalle….Perry?
I mean big time, Grand Gulf. Remember the fuel not used in a shutdown is thrown in the trash can.
Just Checked. Amazing. Down to 90% today.
See, I have been fixated on Grand Gulf for the last few years. I know their patterns and can predict how they will behave. If I had big money and had a market to bet on Grand Gulf, I could make a lot of money on them. They recently went down maybe 1% for a few days, then yesterday went down 10%. I was trying to demonstrate here my knowledge of Grand Gulf behavior. A higher brain function anticipation and prediction. Might have had some sort of inside tip. I wouldn’t rule that out either. I actually spent a lot of time talking to the senior resident at the site over the years. Him and I are buddies. I bet yesterday with discussing this here, on a up coming big plant down power event. I felt it was coming. So the plant is down to 50% today. These huge plants are not designed for this. There has been a tremendous numbers of scrams, shutdowns and big down powers in the last few years. They have had big dogs all over industry coming in and out of the plant trying to figure out what is wrong and correct it. Nothing has worked. It is just amazing. Will a new kind of event/ accident emerge out of this kind of behavior? This is well out of the worn path of the design of the plant and the any considerations of the history of the NRC.
Boilers can drop to 50% pretty easily actually. We drop to 65% during high spring melts for “economic dispatch”. BWR load following if you will.
Also, your comments and the way they are phrased is hurting my brain.
Bonds: I Know what troubled plant you hail from. Economic dispatch. The spring season run off with dams running full tilt. You are really a government employee.
“I Know what troubled plant you hail from”
Excuse me…..troubled?
“You are really a government employee”
No….not really.
The guy with Rad Waste shipping problems?
While the issue we HAD with shipping a liner filled with Tri-Nuke filters and severed control rod blade velocity limiters (10 miles down a road used only by DOE Hanford) that had dose rates a little above the limits for the shipping cask (Type A instead of Type B) has definitely caused some issues for the plant from a spent resin liner storage point, it in noway deserves the label “troubled”.
Our shipping privileges have been returned, procedure enhancements are in place and we are a safe, well performing plant.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1710/ML17100A499.pdf
Well, nine NRC violations over this. You had troubles with procedures and you weren’t following them. I think this was the worst (special inspection) report in the nation ever concerning rad waste transportation in history. How you even get a white finding over rad waste considering risk? Looks like a shot across the bow by the NRC to me?
Yep, it wasn’t pretty. It all started with Techs making a simple mistake of putting dose rates as “on contact” instead of correctly documenting the dose rates as using a 6″ stand off. You send those surveys off to a company for dose characterization and since 6″ of water is an amazing shield your dose characterization will be flawed……and not in a conservative way.
We had already sent many shipments down the road during the spent fuel pool clean up project that were much hotter than this one (cut up control rod blades, stellite CRB roller balls) without incident using Type “B” shipping casks. To save money (which obviously ended up costing A LOT more) management decided to ship the last liner in a Type “A” cask because the dose rates should be prudent via the dose characterization from an offsite vendor. The above paragraph explains why this didn’t workout very well for us.
9 violations because the NRC is INSANE with their issuance of violations. For a Federal regulating institute, they are all over the place in the interpretations of their own regulations. Region 4 will give you a violation if you have a 2ft tool box within 3ft of a 8ft LHRA fence……Region 1,2 & 3 wouldn’t even consider this an issue less a violation.
Man, I had a feeling. Grand Gulf is shutdown today. I suppose with all their excess U235, they wouldn’t need a coast down. Slim possibility of a refueling. Nothing mentioned in the NRC daily event report?
So the shutdown was not a refueling outage. I don’t know why it shutdown. But upon the startup and in the intermediate range, two IR detectors failed for different reasons. This cause them to manually scram.
So if I read this right the underlying concept is … ahem
we have to alter our energy usage to match the availability of wind and solar energy,
fair enough i suggest we throw the authors of this paper on a desolate scottish island and let them do it for a year or two with no backup generators or fuel to burn
a modest proposal
Someone here or in a similar discussion made some very salient points on the load management issue. They pointed out that you might be able to cut off residential users, but that just won’t fly for industry. What are you going to do, send all your workers home when the wind isn’t blowing. Call them in at 3 AM because the wind started back up?
Lunacy is revealed with the simplest of examinations.
Between subsidizing the nukes and the greenies, especially the greenies with hiding their prices sold to grid…the whole deal shows how corrupt our nation has become.
Typically in a system like this with two big elements of the market constantly at war with each other…they will exhaust each other. This kind of corruption is really inefficient and the players figure out a way to take more out of market. Cooperation wins over a constant start of warfare. Cooperation usually mean they carve out market share for each other. The legal system calls it collusion…
@Mike Mulligan
Actually, in the power industry, our nation used to call it rate regulated monopolies with an obligation to serve.
That model worked to provide the world’s most reliable electricity at an ever falling cost through the 1960s. People in the power industry were healthy, happy, productive and saw themselves as dedicated public servants.
Because my father was a supervising engineer at the local power company – and spent his entire post-college working career there – a fair portion of the adults in my life when I was growing up were power company employees. None, including the CEO, were all that rich, but they were comfortably secure and respected members of the community.
My dad, a child of the Depression from a family that scratched out a subsistence living on a Georgia dirt farm, was a steady thrift plan participant throughout his career. Financial advisors today would be appalled at the notion of investing a high portion of your retirement savings into your employer, but Dad worked for a firm that was considered to be a good investment for “widows and orphans.”
Some say those days are gone forever, but I’m not so defeatist.
Actually this is the Indonesian system. Industry is regarded as interruptable. So when the grid gets overloaded, factories get shut down, cant deliver products on time or price, so the business goes to China or wherever, factories lose money, cant hire, the country cant afford more power and the everything spirals downhill. Fortunately for us our grandfathers and great grandfathers had a lot more sense than we do. We can afford to coast (for a while).
A great portion of the planet cannot.
“Some say those days are gone forever, but I’m not so defeatist.”
For most of us, unless we make some big changes, those days are gone forever. I hope you’re able to catalyze those changes. It was a better way to live and a better way to run things.
https://steamshovel2002.blogspot.com/2017/11/millstone-and-seabrook-are-walking-dead.html
These guys say the NEISO are over priced by 20%. We are in the most expensive market in the USA. Wholesale markets prices have been startling low for the last 3 years or so. Not yet really translated into home prices. A starting corrupt market!!!
Power and energy units are confusing to a lot of people. It’s funny to watch the commenters at the Climate Denial Crock of the Week blog struggle with them:
https://climatecrocks.com/2017/04/19/in-germany-renewables-plus-batteries-free-electricity/#comment-92088
Well, I am see it I got booted?
@Mike Mulligan
You did not get “booted”, but your comments must have included some words that tripped the filters that send some comments to a moderation queue. Some days, I have other tasks to perform or personal business to attend to. This is a one man shop; please be patient.
Sorry, I got that wrong. I am too inpatient.
There are none harder to convince than he whose livelihood depends on his not understanding.
For other audiences, I suggest this analogy: The difference between energy and power is the difference between a lake and a waterfall.
(I admit this analogy does not facilitate a discussion of maximum power ratings.)