By contrast, this century, Torness nuclear power station has had a number of problems which have led to it being shut down, sometimes for months. I.e. the entire station stopped feeding power to the grid. One was a lightning strike. ANother was radiation embrittlement of big metal cooling fans leading to them breaking, then there's the problems with jellyfish* and seaweed clogging the cooling intakes.
By contrast, when one turbine breaks down, the others can keep working.
Or are you talking about the EU?
]]>It is usually cheaper to build baseload generating capacity locally hence the construction of Drax in middle England and a bunch of localised nuclear plants on the coasts with the main grid connections being used to balance loads regionally rather than moving lots of power long distances. Baseload thermal stations need fuel though.
As for smart devices they also cost money to install and maintain and they break the consumer's expectation of something working when they want it to work, not when it is permitted by some robotic overlord balancing demand to meet a variable and (hopefully temporarily) insufficient supply.
]]>As someone who already sets his washing machine to run at the dead of night to take advantage of cheap electricity, what do you think is the barrier to everyone loading their washing machine/dishwasher/dryer and specifying "do this load of washing/dishes/drying at a price point below $cash before this time, privileging time if necessary"? I don't care about what time the washing machine or dryer run at, I care about them being done by whenever I need fresh socks.
A smart grid is more complicated, but its pricing should be predictable (or be made so at the consumer end), modulo whole baseload power stations going dark accidentally.
Regards the feathering thing; thanks for pointing out the brake. The point was that the turbines can be shut down if there's overproduction, as opposed to just letting the power run to ground.
]]>You must have a cleaner life than my house. Laundry usually means 3 to 5 loads at a time. If I did it once a day I'd have to have a lot of clothes stack up waiting for a reasonable amount of similar items to go in the wash. Jeans from yard work and replacing the alternator on the car don't mix well with my lady's lace things. Ditto dress shirts, etc..
We just let it accumulate for a few days then do as much as full loads make sense.
]]>Which is fine when you need clean socks for next week, but much less good when a baby has just thrown up all over you and you don't want the house to stink of vomit.
It's also not much use if you're wanting to run something that's going to require a steady power supply for (say) twenty hours continuously. Smart grids are potentially a very good idea, but there are some problems that need consideration too.
]]>Too much choice is frequently an obstacle to effiency, not a benefit. Consider the headache of deciding what mobile phone tariff to buy; now imagine doing this whenever you have a load of laundry to run!
(Also: in my household, sometimes we run 2-3 washer/drier loads per week, at 1-3 day intervals. And then sometimes we run 2-3 loads per day for 2-3 consecutive days (if, say, we've gotten home from a month-long trip and decided to launder the bed linen). One-size-fits-all optimizations suck.)
]]>My local power company would rather tax solar panels out of existence than figure out how to solve the distributed load problem, or (at the least) they want the ability to remotely shut down your solar panels if they're connected to the grid, under the notion that, during a blackout, energy won't leak out of your solar panels to energize lines their employees think are dead. Yes, I know that some (or all) solar installations have automatic cutoffs to isolate the panels from the grid in event of a black-out. And yes, I know that any electrician worth his voltmeter isn't stupid enough to assume lines are dead without checking first. But that was their official line, at least last year.
Along with this deeply engrained culture of "we only buy electricity from isolated big power sources," there are a number of legal hurdles to overcome to make a smart grid work. For example, many people and most businesses don't own the roofs over their heads, so there's no legal option for them to put up solar panels. Similarly, a lot of building owners don't want to be in the business of selling power to their tenants. It's a lot of work for not a lot of money, and benefits tend to accrue to the tenant rather than the owner. Certainly, businesses are springing up to lease solar panels, but there's still the complexity of giving someone access to the roof and allowing them to install and maintain the leased panels. Magnify this up to the scale of a city (along with all the legal challenges of maintaining a smart grid when the thousands of generators are located on private roofs), and there's a mess of legal issues to disentangle. Everyone hopes it can be done, but very few communities want to be the first one to figure it out. I think a community in Florida is trying to work it out, and I hope they make it work.
]]>That's not entirely a cultural issue. Converting low voltage DC off a solar array to high voltage AC for the transmission grid requires some capital expense (not huge for a single site, but fairly big compared to the average customer's electric bill) and incurs some energy loss.
]]>SDG&E wants to pass that on to their customers, a plan which has been vigorously protested.
SDG&E was also partner to some, erm, inadvisable upgrades to the San Onofre nuclear power plant, resulting in the permanent closure of station and a cost of something over $4 billion in decommissioning costs.
SDG&E wants to pass their $900 million share of that cost onto their customers, a plan which has been vigorously protested.
By my accounting they're something like $1.4 billion into screwups already. I somehow doubt that changing their entire system into a distributed smart grid format would have been quite that expensive, and one study says that San Diego, unlike most places, has ample sunlight for its electrical grid. That's what culture does for you, I'm afraid.
]]>That was the 11th bombing in Birmingham that year. Local papers were printing the quip "Bombingham." Nobody panicked.
There are some things to learn from teh contrast.
]]>Assume that we are an organization like Contact (The Culture books by Iain M Banks).
We are genuinely looking for a strategy for intervening in unpleasant societies that are an affront to all decent folk.
What lessons would we learn from the interventions in Iraq,Afghanistan and Libya?
What strategy will work if we wish to improve life in N Korea ? Syria ?
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