Search Results for: load-following

Means, Motive and Opportunity – The Natural Gas Industry’s Price War Against the Nuclear Renaissance
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Means, Motive and Opportunity – The Natural Gas Industry’s Price War Against the Nuclear Renaissance

ByRod Adams

…ar power or how little CO2 it releases? Brian Mays “Can current designs be load following … ?” Yes. The plants were originally designed with load following capability (some better than others, of course). Remember that, back then, some people were predicting that the U.S. would have 1000 reactors by the year 2000. (It’s probably a good thing that this didn’t happen, since that many reactors would produce about twice as much electricity as we use…

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Energizing visit to UC Berkeley’s Nuclear Engineering Department

ByRod Adams

…HR with thermal energy storage (based on solar-salt) to provide economical load following in a renewable-rich grid. But as the pumped-hydro companies in Germany are finding out, it’s hard to make a profit by putting storage on the grid; fast-ramping fossil fuel powered plants are simply much more economical. The more renewables we deploy, the more we’ll need fossil fuel. The nice things about the PB-FHR’s use of fossil fuel are that it is very eff…

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Nuclear energy advocate in a nuclear nonproliferation crowd

ByRod Adams

…g parametric models to load and wind forecast errors, we estimated the net load (load minus wind) forecast error distributions as a function of the amount of forecast load and wind…. …We found that between 2100 and 5600 MW of electric grid capacity is required to balance 95% of under-forecast errors in ERCOT. The values for MISO run to between 1900 and 4500 MW. ( http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/54844 ) Hopefully I got that…

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Another day, another model “proving” capabilities of weather-dependent power

ByRod Adams

…odel site specific, whether they are allowed to load follow or not. Now, a load following hydro can work well in tandem with a wind farm, but if it is “run of river” then it looks like non-load following baseload capacity. As far as Rods comment with regard to hydro retirements, I believe most of them are smaller facilities, although some large ones may be under environmental pressures. The bigger issue is the droughts out west. Have you seen the…

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Mark Cooper is wrong about SMRs and nuclear energy

ByRod Adams

…ike NuScale would be safe, effective and able to handle the full load with load following. David @ El, “These concerns are not new to the grid, and techniques for dealing with them (and the challenges they present) are not new either.” Yes, these challenges are new to the grid as the document makes very clear. This is why they DON”T have data sets….. While they can calculate capacity factors based on historical weather patterns, they cannot predic…

The Worth-It Threshold – When gas or gas + renewables is as bad for climate as a coal plant
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The Worth-It Threshold – When gas or gas + renewables is as bad for climate as a coal plant

ByGuest Author

…ther thing that adds to the mess is the neglecting of baseload cycling for load following of intermittent sources. Many of these analyses seem to simply assume that existing baseload plants can be adapted to load following without considering the damage that does to plant systems, as well as the economic penalty for doing so. If significant baseload cycling occurs to the point of shortening the lifetime of the baseload plants, that cost should be…

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Don’t Nuke the Climate – A Response to NIRS from Rauli Partanen and Janne M. Korhonen

ByGuest Author

…The Market or a return on investment to stockholders…that they easily do load following and have for over 30 years. Yet…in the US today…due to the way nuclear is deployed and the deregulation of the grid in many areas the ability to load follow is never utilized. This means that nuclear is tied to other forms of load following generation that doesn’t have the same financial constraints, namely gas turbines. All problems with nuclear can be r…

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Maybe it’s time for the Department of Justice to investigate restraint of trade by nuclear plant operators

ByRod Adams

…ives for unpredictable sources and the generation shortfall patching (like load following) can we really expect a behavior from Entergy against their own profitability? Unless we can change those incentives we will see the Entergy dominoes fall: First Pilgrim, Next Fitzpatrick at Oswego NY on frigid Lake Ontario. Fitzpatrick will be more difficult because there is a great deal of public support, but I expect it will happen. Then Entergy’s will win…

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Ted Rockwell shared knowledge to combat Fukushima fears

ByGuest Author

…qual, due to transmission line losses the generation source closest to the load is the one sending it the most power. If I see the IP units being asked to reduce power by ISO-NY instead of running baseloaded, only then will I believe they are not able to sell their power to the region. Atomikrabbit I intend to work “planktonic holocaust” into my toast celebrating 20 more years of low-carbon generation – thanks. Roger Witherspoon Atomic when you go…

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Limitations of unreliable energy sources (aka “renewables”)

ByRod Adams

…ry relevant how much power from an installation must be used for parasitic loads. A power plant capacity is established partly based on parasitic loads as a design input. It doesn’t matter what the source of fuel or motive force. The reason for accounting for parasitic loads is to assist in establishing the payback period. It is a fairly simple concept to digest. The larger the parasitic loads, the less power to sell to consumers and therefore the…

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Smoking gun: AEC told President Kennedy why coal industry was opposed to nuclear energy

ByRod Adams

…ould use multiple designs of plants. LFTR’s are great for process heat and load following. Pebble beds are great for process heat and load follow well. Light water reactors are well know and very very safe and can produce enormous amounts of electricity. Using molten salt heat storage even Light Water Reactors can supply load following and process heat. The research reactors in many universities could be tapped for energy production as well as res…

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Talk of electric power grid demise is wrong

ByRod Adams

…stations. Still, I’m all for R&D on this kind of stuff. It wopuld make baseload nuclear even more important than it is now. Any kind of significant added load from lots of recharging isn’t going to be met with unreliables. Engineer-Poet I’m all for R&D on this kind of stuff. It wopuld make baseload nuclear even more important than it is now. Back around 2004, I calculated that a full electrification of the US vehicle fleet (from motorcycles to hea…

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