Scottish Power To Build Vast Battery To Improve Wind Energy Supply (theguardian.com) 228
Scottish Power is to undertake the most ambitious battery power project in Europe in an attempt to unlock the potential of the UK's wind and solar farms. From a report: The company will connect an industrial-scale battery, the size of half a football pitch, to the Whitelee onshore windfarm early next year to capture more power from its 215 turbines. The first major onshore wind power storage project will lead the way for a string of similar projects across at least six of Scottish Power's largest renewable energy sites over the following 18 months. It claims the 50MW battery systems promise a "significant step" on the road towards renewable energy, providing baseload, or continuous electricity supply, for the UK energy system. The battery has more than double the power capacity of any existing battery in the UK. It would take an hour to fully charge and could release enough electricity over an hour to fully charge 806 Nissan Leaf vehicles over a total of 182,000 miles, according to a spokesman for Scottish Power.
Odd headline? (Score:2)
Sounds like they want to use the batteries to power big fans to supply the wind..
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Sounds like they want to use the batteries to power big fans to supply the wind..
No, Ivan, supply in that sentence follows the word "energy," not the word "wind." Wind is merely an adjective telling you what category the supplied energy is in.
Even if you take "wind energy" as a compound noun, it still describes a type of energy, not an energy source. And "supply" is talking about distribution, not origin.
When you "supply" something, you're providing it, not originating it.
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It works on night lights.
Nissan Leaf - New Unit Measurement? (Score:5, Insightful)
182,000 miles / 806 Leafs = 225 Miles on a single charge.
I don't know how useful that way of measuring energy is - it's like saying a school of piranha can skeletonize a cow in two minutes.
Personally, I would think standardizing on 10kWh per house per day would be more reasonable. If this is a 50MWh system, then this means that the turbines and battery could power 5,000 houses a day.
Which seems like a more easily understood way of describing how much power is being generated.
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Brings its own issues though - not all countries have the same power use per house. I know that the US uses a lot more power per house than the UK, because of the widespread installation of domestic air conditioning. You don't find many air-conditioned houses in Scotland.
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10 kwhr/day is about right for American homes, but British homes average less than half as much.
British homes are smaller, and rarely have air conditioners.
Household electricity use around the world [shrinkthatfootprint.com]
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But a house in Europe does not consume 10kWh per day ... that would be a quite generous "standard".
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Do we have a Leaf to Tesla conversion chart somewhere?
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Here you go:
1 kWh == 1kWh.
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While we are nit picking the posting, did any else notice the mixed unit usage of "football pitches" and miles?
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If you're pitching a football, you're still not going to throw it past the backstop. It seems like the same distance as if you just pitched a baseball?
Maybe they should go back to measuring using football or soccer fields.
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I rather they just go with kWH, MWH, or standard units.
Powering "x" amount of Nissan Leafs as a unit of measurement is about as pointless as powering "x" number of houses. Those numbers can vary easily. Even using a beer as a unit of a temporal measurement ("This is a three beer job.") is more accurate than measuring via homes/Leafs.
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Quantifying a battery by how many homes it can power or how far it could take a car isn't a very useful metric. Batteries are not there to supply power, they are there to smooth output from wind farms and to respond to sudden surges in demand that are traditionally very expensive.
Unfortunately they don't give a figure for the output of the wind turbines it is connected to.
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When it comes to battery design, which is smarter, to install at smaller battery at every home, so they can add in wind solar and for example gas turbine electricity (considering a gas heater, would use the same gas as a gas turbine and as a turbine, add in a generator and free electricity with your heat) or a big battery in a rural location. Which is more efficient in delivery over the long run, which provides localised back up energy, of the highest possible quality (the grid could be disrupted locking of
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What they did actually makes sense... only the brand of car selected was arbitrary. The key here is that this is a 1C battery bank, meaning it can "fully" discharge in 1 hour, and also that a Fast-DC charge session with a top-up also lasts in the area of an hour, depending greatly on the model of car as each manufacturer babies their batteries differently. (Though this makes back-of-the-napkin sense it ignores that Fast-DC charges have a front-heavy curve.)
Getting reporters to understand the difference be
Surprised they're using Battieries (Score:2)
There should be no shortage of pumped hydro solutions, Scotland has plenty of rain and gradients to take advantage of.
Re:Surprised they're using Battieries (Score:5, Informative)
Pumped hydro is slow. It is a good choice for base-load. Batteries are very fast. They are a good choice to improve grid stability.
Also, pumped hydro needs pretty stable power to pump. Batteries can easily take in highly fluctuation power.
Any other questions?
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Pumped storage is not slow.
It reacts in 10th of a second.
No idea if you belong to the crowd who does not know what base load is, but a pumped storage plant is either balancing power or reserve power, and not base load.
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Pumping the water back up to the upper reservoir is slow, however.
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but a pumped storage plant is either balancing power or reserve power, and not base load.
That's today, when they're few and far between. If there's many more of them, they might ultimately contribute to base load if necessary.
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When we have that situation (in germany we are approaching it) the term "base load" will be obsolet.
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When we have that situation (in germany we are approaching it) the term "base load" will be obsolet.
And more clueless nonsense. What will instead happen is that things will shift in the time-dimension and the terms will be kept.
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No, the term will not be kept.
The term is only relevant when you actually have "base load plants" that run 365/24 with close to macimum capacity. As we are losing most of those plants already and are replacing them with wind, the term is useless. At least regarding grid management.
It of course will stay to be a "mark" on a graph, perhaps for educational purpose or reference. E.g. base load in France is close to 70% of peak. In Germany it is more around the 45% - 50% mark.
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Thanks. And that is the idea. As soon as you are putting this into the context of not always available primary power, the slow storage (and pumped is that in comparison to batteries) becomes the base load supplier.
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South Australia uses batteries, but not for storag (Score:3)
The South Australian use is to stabilize the gird on a minute by minute basis. Things like keeping it all in phase. It works well and is profitable. But it is NOT for any substantial energy storage.
Batteries are ridiculously expensive for any longer term storage. They would have to halve and halve again to be remotely viable.
Pumped hydro is an old and proven technology. Not sexy, but it just works. Provided you are willing to have dam up a hill somewhere.
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Batteries are a new technology. There is still a lot of room for improvement. Also keep in mind that these are basically car batteries, i.e. optimized for size and weight, both of which are pretty immaterial in grid applications. That these are viable in any role at all in the grid is quite impressive.
One source of batteries for longer-term storage (probably still intra-day) is used car batteries. There are not enough of those around today, but if made with a bit of foresight, while these batteries become n
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You continue to be full of it and clueless. Pathetic. Here is an actual source, refer to Table 1:
http://www.ucdenver.edu/facult... [ucdenver.edu]
Pumped storage is fast compared to the other options, but it is still in the minute range for load-changes. Heavy spinning parts with mass, you know. I assume you have heard of the concept?
Of course, the load types are grossly simplified for the purpose of the answer. Quite obviously. And you are either terminally stupid, or you s
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That brings in the need for a battery.
Pumped hydro works well but the wind and solar changed the energy use.
A big battery is now needed to hide what wind and solar did.
When the wind changes. The sun is not up as expected.
The battery will then make it all seem ok again.
With the new power prices to pay back that battery upgrade.
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The Dinorwig [wikipedia.org] pumped storage station can go from standstill to supplying 1.8 GW in 75 seconds. If the turbines are spun up beforehand using compressed air, it can be done in 16 seconds. That's not quite instantaneous, but a lot faster than 5 minutes. All you need to do is adjust one valve (albeit a large one), so the 3-5 minutes from the study seem on the high side. Unfortunately I can't find the source for the table in the study you linked: it's missing from the list of references.
Re: Surprised they're using Battieries (Score:2)
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Even if it were, changes in wind or sun averaged across Scotland are not fast.
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Batteries also tend to release energy (total Wh) as a fraction of amperage placed on them. The lower the amperage the more they will release. So high spikes will only be able to extract part of charge that a lower constant load would.
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You need more than rain and gradients. You need a catchment at the top.
Just look at a topo map of the highlands. You'd need the world's largest dam, twice, just to build a single small hydro power station. And the more rain you have, the less you would benefit from pumping.
For pumped hydro you want a valley with a large volume and a small opening at one end. You certainly don't want the Scottish highlands with a long skinny valley that gets wider at both ends.
If you want to take advantage of those gradients
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The use of wind and solar bring rapid changes to how power is used.
The advantage of wind and solar is that someone can now sell a big battery.
Works well with solar/wind/tidal (Score:2)
You don't need a lot of excess capacity, as the combination of solar, wind, and tidal in Scotland gives you a fairly decent energy profile, so you don't need nearly as much shaping that gas used to provide, and as we all know, you can literally recharge even Lithium batteries in about 80 percent of the alkaline lakes, for much lower costs than price spike surges in salts.
Another approach is the use of flywheels for dock cranes for ocean vessel loading and unloading.
An Hour? (Score:2)
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Quickly ballancing out demand changes. Instead of using a gas turbine, you use the battery.
Has nothing to do with storing for the time "when there is no wind".
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The battery only lasts a short time to cover for the problem.
Then an actual way to generate power is needed.
The battery covers for the loss of wind/solar.
The real power generation starts.
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That would be a good point, but only if you ignore that it is rarely non-windy everywhere. Dispersal of turbines makes a difference...unless your view of turbines are those quaint windmills powering well-pumps on the Great Plains.
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When the sun stops been as sunny as expected.
The wind gets too fast/slow/stops.
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what's cheaper (Score:2)
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That is what we are doing in Germany (as research projects, not life yet), it is called "smart grid". Or "demand chaping".
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That's what the zombies are doing, except it wasn't their car they siphoned the gas out of.
Watch out metric system, now using vehicle (Score:2)
I guess if the Nissian Leaf is the new international standard the USA will go it alone and use the Tesla Model 3 as their standard for energy measurement?
Re:Watch out metric system, now using vehicle (Score:5, Funny)
I tried to convert 182,000 miles to Libraries of Congress, but when I realized I had to calculate the circumference of 4 different buildings I wussed out.
Cruachan Reservoir Power Station (Score:4, Interesting)
On the A85 road to Oban, in Scotland, you can pull over at Cruachan [google.co.uk] and visit the Cruachan Power Station [wikipedia.org] which has a visitors centre.
Built between 1959 and 1965 it "uses cheap off-peak electricity generated at night to pump water to the higher reservoir, which can then be released during the day to provide power as necessary".
It's a hydro power station that pumps the water back up into the reservoir to store power. 440MW of it.
It cost £24.5million (then) and 36 lives to construct.
So a football pitch sized warehouse full of batteries sounds like progress to me, even if only 50MW.
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Check your units. FTFA .......has a capacity of 7.1 GWh.
And the big battery has a capacity of 0.05GWh
So Cruachan Dam is 142 TIMES more capacity
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I did. You obviously didn't. The Guardian article only states the power (50MW) so for comparison I only quoted Cruachan's power, not energy, of 440MW.
Cruachan has an energy capacity of 7.1GWh.
Here's a good article [energylens.com] to help you understand the difference @SteveAstro
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To cover for that problem a big betters is needed.
When the wind stops. The wind is too fast. The wind is too slow.
The sun is not working as well as expected for solar.
Hydro that can pump worked for decades.
Wind and solar is now an added complex new problem that needs a big battery to make work.
FDT (Score:2)
Battery the size of half a football pitch? (Score:2)
What's that in yards/meters?
“could release enough electricity over an hour to fully charge 806 Nissan Leaf vehicles over a total of 182,000 miles”
What's that in amp-hours?
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50 MW, but how many MW-hours, or what we care about , energy>
Charging up 806 electric vehicles sounds pretty small for the biggest battery.
No mention of the cost. Renewable proponents always say solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fueled electricity, but they never factor in the huge cost of overcoming the intermittent power's biggest weakness. You still need the fossil fuel plants as back-up for when the wind does not blow or at night, and no little battery is going to power a grid that is transmitting giga-Watts (one nuc plant's worth)
Well, the best solution to renewable's weakness is diversity. Don't make it all wind farms, don't make it all solar, have a mix of both, and throw in hydro-electric, wave farms and geothermal to balance it out.
Convert Nuclear plants to Natural Gas (Score:2)
A Nuclear Power Plant can be converted into a natural gas facility and be profitable long after the nuclear plant has been de-fueled. This is just fact.
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So, go from a zero carbon power plant to a non-zero carbon power plant? That'll really help to deal with AGW!
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You don't need 'bavk up'. .... you sound like we built a back up plant for every renewable plant we built ... moronic mind set.
Fossile plants already exist, but with support from renewables, they have less running hours and produce less CO2.
A no brainer
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You don't need 'bavk up'.
Maybe not, but http://bavk.org/ [bavk.org] sure does.
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How much CO2 will be emitted building this massive battery?
Wrong question. Try: "How much CO2 will be saved by this battery on the construction of the next battery?"
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Ssh. Don't pop his bubble. He wants to believe that, and after all, we are living in a post-truth era.
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I think he means that he can't figure out why these new greener, more efficient motors like from Dyson company mix a traditional synchronous brushless DC design with a reluctance motor design.
But if you just hook the controller up to a oscilloscope and look at the waveforms it becomes obvious.
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Re: How much CO2 will be emitted? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way that "green" technologies are truly green is if they can be fully constructed without the use of any fossil fuels at all steps of the process.
What a great way handicap renewables. Must have been thought up in some oil company board room.
No, we are not going to put our purist dunce caps on. Technologies will be evaluated on an even playing field.
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Since cleaner ongoing energy production can't be built 100% cleanly, it's useless!
As if it were somehow clean to build new fossil capacity, having none of the ongoing cleanliness that makes all future production and manufacturing cleaner.
What concerns me, is you have to be a pretty fucking dim human to make such a shallow analysis, so they're either regurgitating shit they don't understand, and are too lazy to understand, or they're truly that stupid, in which case, I worry t
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If nuclear was the answer, it would have been 40 years ago. Give it up.
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Re: Excellent, just what is needed. (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out that solar power has developed considerably in the last 40 years, and so has nuclear power.
Solar power improved in cost by a factor of 100 [twimg.com], whereas nuclear power "improved" in cost by a factor of 0.5 [els-cdn.com].
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Even though nuclear power prices have increased recently it's still cheaper than solar in most cases.
You've misread that chart. Projected $/MWh for advanced nuclear: 96.2. Projected $/MWh for solar photovoltaic: 73.7
Interestingly, as the text points out, the cost of solar and wind sources has been dropping so rapidly that the EIA has been consistently overestimating those costs. You can see that the chart, from 2016, gives solar PV as 73.7, but the graph, from 2015, gives solar PV as 125. And this is one of the reasons to avoid going to nuclear right now: it's a commitment.
A nuclear plant is a big ex
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Even though nuclear power prices have increased recently it's still cheaper than solar in most cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just imagine how cheap we could make nuclear power now if Democrats hadn't nailed it's balls to the floor by holding up nuclear power at every opportunity for the last 50 years.
Republicans voted for the destruction of Gen IV and V reactor technology with the passage of the 2005 US Energy Policy Act under Bush. SEC. 635 IIRC. Nuclear has massive support under that act, some of it hasn't even been used.
They funded Yucca Mountain to get built, because that meant jobs in a Democrat dominant state, but failed to fund any efforts to get it licensed and have waste stored there.
No. Idaho moved for amendments to the Atomic Energy act to make storage facilities in crystalline rock illegal and forced the facility onto Nevada.
Nuclear power will get cheaper once the Democrats get out of the way.
Nothing can make nuclear power cheaper because of the amount of concrete required to build it. Massive input costs and decades long bui
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it's still cheaper than solar in most cases.
That's because "most cases" are already amortized plants.
Just imagine how cheap we could make nuclear power now if Democrats hadn't nailed it's balls to the floor by holding up nuclear power at every opportunity for the last 50 years.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that "Democrats" are responsible for even France, the poster child for nuclear rollout, witnessing significant escalating costs instead of positive learning.
Re: Excellent, just what is needed. (Score:5, Interesting)
I read that it takes more energy to fab the silicon, build the frame, ship the solar panel, and install it than it will ever recover in its useful lifetime. Same with wind generators. Is that still true?
If this was ever true, then definitely not in this century. I mean, even just thinking about it in terms of first principles should give you a pause: since the manufacturing of solar panels mostly requires electricity (for example, look up the Siemens process), this would basically mean that solar panel manufacturers are willing to sell you their products below manufacturing costs, because what the panel generates is surely more than what you're willing to pay for it, and if manufacturing energy input were even larger than the panel's lifetime output you're purchasing, they'd *have* to sell it below manufacturing costs. Yet the business is booming, so the premise can't be true.
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Well, I did say "first principles". But let's dissect this.
We know from Sweden [psu.edu] that lifetime of 25 years is achievable without degradation. A 300 W panel in that location would generate around 7000 kWh in that period. I can purchase such a panel in one of our local shops for the equivalent of $115, pre-tax. So the manufacturer must receive strictly less than that, at least after accounting for reseller's expenses and transportation costs. So by your logic, someone out there is either generating large amount
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...it won't produce much net energy after subtracting those costs.
Yawn. Come back to me with some hard data. BTW, we *do* pay a recycling surcharge where I live.
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If you don't understand that commercial nuclear reactors don't use plutonium, you really shouldn't say anything that draws attention to your complete ignorance....
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Russia operates two commercial breeder reactors: Check out its BN series. BN-800 started operating a year or two ago and is burning up Pu from decommissioned weapons.
And like meglon said you should just STFU because a breeder that burns pu isn't a breeder, it's a burner. The BN series is a breeder and it is cooled by sodium. That's going to be fun when air starts leaking into the system.
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coming online daily to replace REE batteries.
You mean NiMH batteries? Those have already been largely replaced.
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I think he meant "Rare Earth Element". Which lithium is not, and neither is nickel. But there is something to be said for the environmental impact of their production nonetheless.
Really the fact that we do not have better stationary mass-storage battery technology than we do in the transport and portable sector, and that we're using transport/portable sector battery tech for stationary purposes is a somewhat perverse outcome... technically a battery that can be arbitrarily big and heavy and only has to su
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Is it a lithium battery? Could be low temperature sodium sulphate. Sodium is very low environmental impact and low cost, and those batteries are used for this kind of application.
Re: Excellent, just what is needed. (Score:2)
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Li-ion isn't an especially simple technology, it's just more well developed, with years of volume production and commercial application under its belt.
Where redox batteries shine is in high capacity, low rate storage... banks that take several hours to charge/discharge. The power market apparently has a more pressing need for higher rate capacity, with frequency regulation piggybacking on top of that. Once that need has been addressed by Li-ion, a niche might emerge for redox.
However, redox is not the onl
Re:You don't know what you're talking about. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see why not. The battery can smooth out demand fluctuation just as well as supply fluctuation. Now whether you could build a battery that big is another issue, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
I could also see electric car owners being rewarded for dampening supply or demand fluctuation - maybe the car charge controllers could have a feature whereby they don't just charge as fast as possible when plugged in, but if they know they are being left connected for some appreciable time, negotiate their charging requirements with the utility
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This already happens on a macro scale. Most EV charging happens at night, when electricity rates are lower.
Re:You don't know what you're talking about. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear power is artificially expensive. Done right with a reactor design that isn't from the 1950s, it is the most ecologically friendly of all power sources, and can be used for things like thermal depolymerization or desalination plants, allowing waste plastic to be turned back into usable oil, and for areas that are becoming arid like Africa and California to have fresh water again.
But it seems we can't have good things. Already, the philosophy of, "clean water and clean air doesn't pay my bills" or "I rather have a new BMW than a clean river" has taken hold in most of the world, so we are going back to the most polluting energy sources... because they are cheap, low tech, need zero R&D, and give an immediate reward.
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You really should try to read more before you try to make this about Joe Biden, lol. You don't seem to understand the fundamentals here.
The "fundamentals" here is that we've had Democrats holding up nuclear power advancement since the Carter Administration. Now that there is a major candidate in that party speaking in favor of nuclear power it's quite likely for more to follow. Biden doesn't lead, he follows. Someone somewhere gave him permission (or cover, or whatever) to speak in favor of nuclear power. Anyone in the Democrat party that speaks out against nuclear power now is in opposition to the front runner for POTUS.
Biden is just a
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Joe Biden is blown to and fro wherever the wind blows next.
Why does that sound [theintercept.com] so familiar [imgur.com]?
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If Biden is your answer, then the question is wrong. Joe Biden is blown to and fro wherever the wind blows next. Joe Biden is so desperate, he's flip flopping on age old stances just to try to be relevant to the outrage mob. If Joe Biden doesn't know what he stands for, then neither does anyone else. How can anyone vote for someone who doesn't have any stances? He's DOA and he hasn't even arrived.
You are correct that Biden goes where the wind takes him. Where the wind is taking him is in support of nuclear power.
Biden likely saw some poll showing that people are supporting nuclear power. He's supporting nuclear power because he thinks that will get him elected. What will be very interesting is seeing Biden defend this position in debates when the Democrat Party platform hasn't even mentioned nuclear power for decades.
I do believe he is unelectable. What his support shows, as a leading Democrat P
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If we have half the Democrat party supporting it, and more than half of the Republican party supporting it, then who is against it any more?
The Oil and Coal industry.
Re:Environment impact assessment (Score:4, Insightful)
Then the battery has to be replaced after a lot of use.
Re: Environment impact assessment - well, DO IT. (Score:2)
No facts. No party.
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