Reply #21: Over-capacity? [View All]

[bdf]

Back when the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board of England and Wales, later sold off by Thatcher) ran things, they had a lot of over-capacity. And they knew the thermal efficiency of each and every boiler/generator set. They always arranged things so that the most efficient of them provided base-line power. As conditions required, they'd bring up systems in efficiency order. Not for surges when the adverts were shown during soap operas and people put the kettle on, because it takes around an hour to bring conventional systems up to steam. The CEGB used the most accurate weather predictions they could get so they could bring plant on-line to cope (takes an hour, remember). They didn't run more plant than absolutely necessary.

So yes, the US may well have plenty of spare capacity but a lot of it will be inefficient. As I said in my original post, global climate change and peak oil are crises in the making—we can't really afford to throw inefficient coal/oil systems at the nuclear problem without exacerbating other problems.

You have a touching faith in our ability to get all the timing right. How many Republicans in Congress are climate change deniers? How many refuse to believe that peak oil is coming? How many are voting for economic policies that will make the current depression worse and increase unemployment whilst lying their socks off by claiming those policies will decrease unemployment? How many Republicans voted down more funding for renewable energy? How many Republicans are, even now, demanding more nuclear power (so, to my disgust, is Obama).

Time to look into the past. In 1956, Shell geologist M King Hubbert came up with the theory of peak oil and predicted that the US would switch from being a nett exporter of oil to a nett importer of oil in the mid-1970s. Other geologists in the oil industry laughed at him. As it happens, his prediction was wrong: the US hit its peak production in the early 70s which triggered a crisis when OPEC held the US to ransom. That was when geologists realized that Hubbert had been right and that global peak oil would happen around now. Did anybody do anything about it? Carter put solar panels on the white house roof and Reagan took them off.

Yet you're confident we'll have storage soon enough after we've implemented renewables? Even if you were right that we can and would do it quickly, we need storage at the same time as renewables otherwise we have to keep all the conventional plant running at night, when the sun don't shine.