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Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies. (Read 19278 times)
freediver
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #135 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:40pm
 
Have I found another question you cannot possibly give a straight answer to?

What percentage of the demand side would you say needs true baseload power?
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Gnads
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #136 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:49pm
 
DonDeeHippy wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 8:39am:
Gnads wrote on Jun 14th, 2018 at 6:03pm:
DonDeeHippy wrote on Jun 14th, 2018 at 2:47pm:
Gnads wrote on Jun 14th, 2018 at 2:24pm:
The bigger money spinner is the bloody wind farms.

Cost a fortune, made from materials from mining & petroleum products, are as reliable as solar & turn the landscape into an environmental eyesore.

coal power stations are so pretty, specially if your downwind..... Wink Wink
once they r built how much does it cost for the ongoing wind they use....
hmmm how about coal for a coal station ? Wink Wink


Modern ones have virtually no smell ... nothing like an aluminium refinery & it's corrosive lung busting air pollution as well as its massive tailings dams.

As for the ongoing wind costs ... totally the point .... the fact that can't be 100 % reliable ... in fact for any reasonable constant requirement they are very unreliable.

Believe it or not when the wind don't blow da windmill don't go. And that stuffs reliability big time.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/how-reliable-is-wind-power/

and how many of these "clean" coal stations r in Australia ? Wink Wink


None ... but we can build them ... the Japanese are.

Technology changes for all industry. Why would you discount more efficient/less polluting technology being able to be applied to coal fired power stations? 
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Gnads
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #137 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:59pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 11:34am:
Quote:
All intermittent power requires base load power (Coal & gas) to be on line just in case


Not true, for several reasons:

batteries (of various sorts, including pumped hydro)
peaking suppliers (intermittent hydro, gas fired plants)
demand-side arrangements

On the third point, there is no actual baseload in demand. For the most part it was a response to the historical use of coal fired plants for the majority of the supply. This lead to significant periods in each day where power was very cheap, and a lot of industries evolved to take advantage. Those industries will evolve in exactly the same way to more volatile supplies. Likewise, retail customers became psychologically accustomed to fixed prices regardless of wholesale costs, but again there is nothing fundamental there. We now have the technology cheaply available to manage retail pricing the same way as wholesale pricing. This used to be managed by, for example, having your hot water system on off-peak power, but that's a pretty crude adaptation.

If prices were more rationally matched to supply and demand, there would be all sorts of retail and industrial consumers willing to cease consumption based on the spot price. At the moment this is largely driven by politics and legacy hard investments.


Pumped hydro... ok how does the initial (salt water) get pumped up to the top dam dam? Surely not by electricity generated by coal fired power stations?

And "gas fired" power is still burning fossil fuels ... much of which would be extracted by hydraulic fracturing coal seams ... a process totally devoid of being clean or green or any other smacking colour of the rainbow.
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Gnads
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #138 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 7:05pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 12:41pm:
You realise that hospitals have backup generators, don't you? That was literally the stupidest example you could have thought of.


If we had reliable electricity supply the backup system would rarely be used .... with wind, solar it would be used more often .... & what does the back up system run on?

Petrol/diesel?  Roll Eyes
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Gnads
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #139 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 7:07pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 1:31pm:
Baseload is a crude misrepresentation of both the supply and the demand side of our electricity industry that has been latched onto by climate change deniers and turned from a historical accident into an imaginary necessity.

All power stations are intermittent to some extent. All electricity users can tolerate breaks in supply and variations in supply price, because the few that absolutely 'need' continuous power have some kind of backup already.


In this debate you are way off beam. Roll Eyes
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Gnads
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #140 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 7:09pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 2:12pm:
Quote:
So tens thousands of diesel generators all over the country instead of base-load, fkk brilliant idea and fkk cheap too.


We already have them. Plus, millions of diesel vehicles on our streets (because they are cheap). You are the one who insisted hospitals would go dark if the power went out, not me. Not everyone is going to get a diesel generator, because the vast majority of consumers do not actually need it. My only point is that baseload is a meaningless concept. No electricity supply is 100% reliable. No consumer is 100% predictable or consistent. It just looks that way because the government has historically set the price, and both consumers and suppliers responded to the money. Electricity will respond to supply and demand pressures in the same way the potato trade does, and it is only the simple minded misrepresentations of climate change deniers that imagine it is fundamentally different.


Diesel vehicles on our streets have absolutely nothing to do with the capacity to produce consistent base load power to all areas of our society.

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lee
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #141 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 7:13pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:40pm:
Have I found another question you cannot possibly give a straight answer to?



Well you have found one. Why don't you tell us how much "true" baseload power is needed? Is that diffeent to "skewed" baseload power, whatever that is?

Can it be you don't know? Quelle horreur. Wink
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freediver
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #142 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 8:59pm
 
Gnads wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:59pm:
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 11:34am:
Quote:
All intermittent power requires base load power (Coal & gas) to be on line just in case


Not true, for several reasons:

batteries (of various sorts, including pumped hydro)
peaking suppliers (intermittent hydro, gas fired plants)
demand-side arrangements

On the third point, there is no actual baseload in demand. For the most part it was a response to the historical use of coal fired plants for the majority of the supply. This lead to significant periods in each day where power was very cheap, and a lot of industries evolved to take advantage. Those industries will evolve in exactly the same way to more volatile supplies. Likewise, retail customers became psychologically accustomed to fixed prices regardless of wholesale costs, but again there is nothing fundamental there. We now have the technology cheaply available to manage retail pricing the same way as wholesale pricing. This used to be managed by, for example, having your hot water system on off-peak power, but that's a pretty crude adaptation.

If prices were more rationally matched to supply and demand, there would be all sorts of retail and industrial consumers willing to cease consumption based on the spot price. At the moment this is largely driven by politics and legacy hard investments.


Pumped hydro... ok how does the initial (salt water) get pumped up to the top dam dam? Surely not by electricity generated by coal fired power stations?

And "gas fired" power is still burning fossil fuels ... much of which would be extracted by hydraulic fracturing coal seams ... a process totally devoid of being clean or green or any other smacking colour of the rainbow.


They are typically fresh water, and yes you use electricity. It's a battery, not a net source. But you can get the energy from anywhere - most likely renewables, as they have a higher tendency to temporarily over-supply.

Gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal.

Quote:
If we had reliable electricity supply the backup system would rarely be used .... with wind, solar it would be used more often .... & what does the back up system run on?

Petrol/diesel?


There are plenty of options.

Quote:
Well you have found one. Why don't you tell us how much "true" baseload power is needed? Is that diffeent to "skewed" baseload power, whatever that is?


Like I keep telling you, it is a meaningless concept, invented by people struggling emotionally with the changes to the electricity industry. People who actually need an ininterruptable power supply buy one instead of relying on an imaginary network baseload.

What percentage of the demand side would you say needs true baseload power from the network? Do you agree with me that it is 0%?

Am I also correct that you do not know what you yourself mean when you say a "large" state?

That is two questions that seem to turn a climate change denier into a blubbering mess.
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Setanta
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #143 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:08pm
 
Gnads wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 6:59pm:
Pumped hydro... ok how does the initial (salt water) get pumped up to the top dam dam? Surely not by electricity generated by coal fired power stations?



I believe the way it supposed to work on existing hydro plants is that excess electricity provided in daylight wind/solar/hydro pumps enough water back up the hill to provide power when the sun is not shining. No idea what you mean by salt water. Night time is not a real user of power hence why we have off peak pricing for it.

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lee
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #144 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:22pm
 
The problem with pumped storage is you have to have 2 dams, one above the other.

As anybody knows building a dam means drowning some land. For pumped storage that is 2 sections of drowned land. The greenies won't allow that.
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #145 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:28pm
 
lee wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:22pm:
The problem with pumped storage is you have to have 2 dams, one above the other.

As anybody knows building a dam means drowning some land. For pumped storage that is 2 sections of drowned land. The greenies won't allow that.


Why do you need two dams? I can't see that necessity. You pick up water where it is at the bottom of it's fall and send it back to the top. It requires a supply of water, not a dam. You don't have to reclaim all of it.

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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #146 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:49pm
 
Two dams is normally how they do it, though generally at least one of those dams is there primarily for another purpose. We have plenty of dams already for our water supply, for example, with far more water than a pumped storage facility could need. Or, you could use the ocean as someone suggested, though I have not seen this done.

You don't want to be relying on a waterfall that might run dry. Plus, waterfalls are generally pretty areas that people are emotionally attached to.

The lower dam is typically the one that floods the prime agricultural plain - but that is the dam that already exists for our water supply. The second dam is higher than that and is usually in a low value area - up in the hills - the sort of land that typically ends up in national park because the farmers and developers never touched it. They also tend to be far smaller than water storage dams.

If you are in an existing waterfall scenario, there is typically no need to add a reverse pumping capability, because the river or creek will refill the dam for you. These ones often run at full power all the time. If you have enough storage on the uphill side and enough generation capacity relative to the water supply, you could turn them on and off in response to demand changes and achieve the same thing without needing to pump uphill.
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #147 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 10:23pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 9:49pm:
Two dams is normally how they do it, though generally at least one of those dams is there primarily for another purpose. We have plenty of dams already for our water supply, for example, with far more water than a pumped storage facility could need. Or, you could use the ocean as someone suggested, though I have not seen this done.

You don't want to be relying on a waterfall that might run dry. Plus, waterfalls are generally pretty areas that people are emotionally attached to.

The lower dam is typically the one that floods the prime agricultural plain - but that is the dam that already exists for our water supply. The second dam is higher than that and is usually in a low value area - up in the hills - the sort of land that typically ends up in national park because the farmers and developers never touched it. They also tend to be far smaller than water storage dams.

If you are in an existing waterfall scenario, there is typically no need to add a reverse pumping capability, because the river or creek will refill the dam for you. These ones often run at full power all the time. If you have enough storage on the uphill side and enough generation capacity relative to the water supply, you could turn them on and off in response to demand changes and achieve the same thing without needing to pump uphill.


How it has been proposed for the Snowy is not like that. It's picking up "used water" at the bottom of the generators and sending it back to the top using daytime solar wind or excess hydro power. This would make one presume that the catchment could not keep up with the flow required, hence the topping up by pumping.
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #148 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 10:30pm
 
Can they run the existing generators backwards, or do they need to build a whole new infrastructure?

It would also require them to have the storage capacity at the top that is not already being used regularly, and that the existing generators are over designed for the available flows - not how the old systems were generally built.
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Re: Dying coal industry, not so fast there, ladies.
Reply #149 - Jun 16th, 2018 at 10:41pm
 
freediver wrote on Jun 16th, 2018 at 10:30pm:
Can they run the existing generators backwards, or do they need to build a whole new infrastructure?

It would also require them to have the storage capacity at the top that is not already being used regularly, and that the existing generators are over designed for the available flows - not how the old systems were generally built.


Huh?

It's simply using excess power generation to pump water back where it can generate electricity again in the future. Passed back through the turbines when more power is needed. I'm not sure all the turbines are run at 100% capacity as it is. We could build a couple more turbines to generate baseload and use excess to put water back where it came from. Wind, solar and Hydro are cheap. Using the excess of those to make sure there is water needed for all turbines to produce as much as possible when they need to is not a bad idea.
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