Extreme U.S. Weather Brings Power Outages (go.com) 182
"Ninety-four million people in parts of 23 states remain under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories on Sunday as one last day of scorching temperatures hits the Midwest and East Coast," reports ABC News.
"Sunday is the last day of oppressive heat, with many places in the Upper Midwest already feeling cooler Sunday morning after heat indices of 115 to 120 on Friday and Saturday... New York City and Boston are just two of many cities that set or tied record-high minimum temperatures, with temperatures failing to drop below 80 degrees."
The high temperatures eventually caused power outages, reports the New York Daily News: Scorching heat slammed the city's power grid Sunday evening, putting more than 50,000 Con Ed customers in the dark, mostly in Brooklyn, the company said... As heat stressed the grid, Con Ed tried to keep the blackout from spreading by deliberately cutting power to 33,000 customers in Brooklyn, mostly in in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach. "The reason we did that was to prevent any further outages and also to protect the integrity of the energy system in that area," said Con Ed spokesman Sidney Alvarez.
And the weather also affected power supplies in the midwest, according to local news reports: According to DTE Energy, about 375,000 customers are without power as a result of the thunderstorms that rumbled through the region Friday and Saturday nights. The storms were marked by flashes of lightning, high winds and even in a few cases, hail...
Meanwhile Consumers Energy says the storms brought down more than 1,500 power lines. Jackson, Michigan-based Consumers said today that over 212,000 customers were affected by the storms.
ABC News reports that winds gusting 70 to 80 mph "brought down numerous tree limbs, and thousands of power lines from South Dakota to Minnesota, and in Wisconsin and Michigan."
"Sunday is the last day of oppressive heat, with many places in the Upper Midwest already feeling cooler Sunday morning after heat indices of 115 to 120 on Friday and Saturday... New York City and Boston are just two of many cities that set or tied record-high minimum temperatures, with temperatures failing to drop below 80 degrees."
The high temperatures eventually caused power outages, reports the New York Daily News: Scorching heat slammed the city's power grid Sunday evening, putting more than 50,000 Con Ed customers in the dark, mostly in Brooklyn, the company said... As heat stressed the grid, Con Ed tried to keep the blackout from spreading by deliberately cutting power to 33,000 customers in Brooklyn, mostly in in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach. "The reason we did that was to prevent any further outages and also to protect the integrity of the energy system in that area," said Con Ed spokesman Sidney Alvarez.
And the weather also affected power supplies in the midwest, according to local news reports: According to DTE Energy, about 375,000 customers are without power as a result of the thunderstorms that rumbled through the region Friday and Saturday nights. The storms were marked by flashes of lightning, high winds and even in a few cases, hail...
Meanwhile Consumers Energy says the storms brought down more than 1,500 power lines. Jackson, Michigan-based Consumers said today that over 212,000 customers were affected by the storms.
ABC News reports that winds gusting 70 to 80 mph "brought down numerous tree limbs, and thousands of power lines from South Dakota to Minnesota, and in Wisconsin and Michigan."
That's OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Y'all just go on tellin' yourselves that global warming isn't real... cue real world impacts in 5, 4,... Why did the power go off?
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A heat wave is not unco
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I'm not denying Climate Change, but these events are not uncommon and are being offset by other areas seeing cooler than normal summer weather.
Except globally: “July is shaping up to be the warmest July on record—and probably the warmest month ever measured [theatlantic.com]...”
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What might be is always in the realm of the fantastical and thus never science.
This statement might be true, in which case it is fantastical and not science and so I will dismiss it.
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What might be is always in the realm of the fantastical and thus never science.
Actual scientists might disagree; in every field they will often need to use what they currently know to predict an outcome.
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So you're saying you can stand barefoot on a red hot iron plate as long as there's a block of dry ice in the room with you to offset the temperature extreme?
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: Do not try at home!
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you can go shove your head back in the sand and continue to ignore the problem, but eventually the problem will be too great and you will have no choice but to address it before it kills us all, if it is not too late already
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, but eventually the problem will be too great and you will have no choice but to address it before it kills us all,
No, scientists don't make that claim. It's something you heard somewhere.
Global warming is not going to kill us all; not even close. You don't need to repeat falsehoods.
Re:That's OK (Score:4, Insightful)
You are both grossly distorting the truth. He's spreading FUD and you're trying to sell-comfort. The fact is that we don't know what is coming next because this situation is (as far as we can tell) unprecedented in Earth's history. We do know that Earth has never been in a position to support humanity when the co2 has been this high in the past, though, so there is substantial support for the idea that we're all gonna die. The methane clathrate gun hypothesis is still on the table. Stop acting like it's gonna be okay, act like the future is undefined. Acting like this problem is not serious is how we came to this pass.
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I don't think that we're all going to die. We, the typical slashdotter, living in the West, with rich governments and advanced militaries, may have to adjust the way we live, but we won't die.
It's all of the poor people in less advanced countries that will have water wars and mass migration are going to suffer the most. They're the poor bastards that are going to die.
Of course, in the long run, we're all dead.
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We do know that Earth has never been in a position to support humanity when the co2 has been this high in the past, though, so there is substantial support for the idea that we're all gonna die.
Because something happened that never happened before, we're all going to die? That's not scientific.
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Man, those characters you see in the movies in your basement aren't real people. Not to mention that had you put some effort into trying to grok the plot of that *really oh-so-complex* (eye-roll) film, you'd have realized that this "Agent Smith" wasn't even a human in the first place.
Why do you pin every failure of yours on the "leftists"? It is your life, just live it.
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Y'all just go on tellin' yourselves that global warming isn't real... cue real world impacts in 5, 4,... Why did the power go off?
Yep, compared to ~20 years ago, the storms this weekend were positively tame: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/... [noaa.gov]
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The goal of the climatologist is to present plausible scenarios should we act or fail to act together with probability estimates. These are then used by economists to compute the expected value of the cost of not acting and comparing to the expected cost of acting on this information. Note that the damage done by not acting on some of these scenarios, should the threat be real, is orders of magnitude more than the cost of preventing it now. This means the climatologist does not need to prove his results
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I suppose you could see some parallels to "Intelligent Design" also being the best model for explaining evolution for a long time.
However that is ignoring the fact that the alternative models like that from Charles Darwin provided a way better explanation that was based on deductive logic and could be backed up by fossil finds and observation. He didn't just poke
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Y'all just go on tellin' yourselves that global warming isn't real... cue real world impacts in 5, 4,... Why did the power go off?
Why does the power ever go off? Because there isn't enough supply available to meet demand in a geographic region.
There is not a direct relationship to power outages and global warming. There may be some indirect relationships, but power outages happen for all sorts of technical reasons from lack of maintenance, storm damage and even human error. Sometimes they happen on purpose even...
So, now that the power is back on as temperatures fall over the next few days... It doesn't mean global warming is ove
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It is not "climate change", it is anthropogenic (actually, mostly US-genic) global warming. With no quotes.
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It's both global warming and climate change. For example, increased snowfall is a form of climate change that could be the result of global warming.
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It is climate change, which is due to global warming, the latter meaning that more heat energy is trapped in the thickest layers of the atmosphere than before.
For example, the climate in the southernmost temperate zones is quickly changing into tropical, the tropical zones are now very close to what used to be equatorial climate (hot all the time), but with higher temperatures, and around the equator the Earth is slowly turning into unlivable desert with oven temperatures. It used to be that you could live
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The term 'climate change' is preferred to 'global warming' now because 'global warming' gives the misleading impression that temperatures will just go up. They will go up, on a global scale, but the effects are a lot complicated than just warmer days. Changes in air and ocean currents mean some places could get cooler. Most seriously, warmer oceans means more evaporation, and all that water has to come back down again, which means more rainfall. It also means more energy for hurricane formation. Enjoy the f
Re:Fuck your PC! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Climate change" is "preferred" because the US conservative propaganda machine has been attacking the term since it became popular.
Re:Fuck your PC! (Score:5, Insightful)
It can withstand scrutiny alright. Withstanding a smear campaign from illiterate, but noisy cretins is something completely different.
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If a scientific argument cannot withstand scrutiny........
It withstands scrutiny just fine, but we live in an era where let our wishful thinking deny reality, and we trust political politicians and talk radio and TV blowhards over teachers and scientists.
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Yes, but that's other people's money, so it doesn't count.
Overhead lines are sensitive to storms. (Score:2)
The problem is that the American utilities are unwilling to invest in digging down the cables.
Where I come from almost all overhead lines have been replaced with cables, the only exception is 400kV and higher.
Americans would claim that it is not possible to dig down all cables due to the size of the country (Size is irrelevant), or due to the lower population density (Valid argument).
Even the 10kV and 400V overhead lines running on my parents farm in the middle of nowhere, have been digged down 25 years ago
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There are other considerations with buried electrical service. Heat dissipation is poor, having your cable inches (or less) from earth ground can be problematic, and it is more difficult, in most cases, to repair/replace underground service lines.
For instance, though you're better insulated from some aspects of storm damage like lightning and tree fall, flooding tends to wreak hazard on underground service lines.
Buried cables are expensive (Score:2)
The problem is that the American utilities are unwilling to invest in digging down the cables.
It's not the utilities who are unwilling - it's the people paying the electric bills. It is substantially more expensive to bury cables. It's something like 5-8X the cost [cnn.com] of stringing the lines above ground. And while the lines are protected, they also are harder to service when things do go wrong.
Also bear in mind that the utilities don't bear the cost for anything. Any costs they incur are passed along to the customers. Utilities wouldn't really care as long as the cost is being paid. It's really u
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The problem is that the American utilities are unwilling to invest in digging down the cables.
My observation is that Americans as a group under invest in infrastructure. It's true regardless of area or political affiliation.
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Size is very relevant. Overhead power lines are 1/3 to 1/10 the cost of underground power lines. PG&E estimates it would cost about $3 million per mile [pgecurrents.com] to move power lines underground. The U.S. has https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-smart-grid/5.5 million miles of power lines. So moving them underground would cost $16.5 trillion. Hurricane Sandy cost an estima
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Size is very relevant. Overhead power lines are 1/3 to 1/10 the cost of underground power lines.
So moving them underground would cost $16.5 trillion. Hurricane Sandy cost an estimated $65 billion, so the cost of such an endeavor would be equivalent to 250 similarly devastating hurricanes.
While it's not impossible, it would be prohibitively expensive for a country the size of the U.S. Most Europeans don't seem to grok just how large the U.S. is. It's about the same size as all of Europe. Denmark is tiny by comparison, roughly the same size as the Los Angeles-San Diego area.
Size alone is irrelevant, what matters is how many consumers PG&E have to share the cost of $3 million pr. mile. PG&E have more customers than a Danish utility.
Higher population density = more persons to pay each mile of cable.
Greenland (Denmark) is 0.08 persons pr. km^2
Falkland islands is 0.21 persons pr. km^2
US (inc. AL) is 34 persons pr. km^2
EU is 116 persons pr. km^2
DK (Continental) is 136 persons pr. km^2
Falkland islands and Greenland have vastly different size, but both have problems with inf
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Non-native speaker, and mildly dyslexic.
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The state of Michigan(255,000kmsq) is larger then Denmark(42,900kmsq)
But if you can bury the cables underground in an area the size of Denmark, you can do it just as well in an area that's 6x bigger.
Driving across the US (Score:3)
It takes 3 days to drive from Michigan to Florida.
No it does not unless you are seriously taking it slow. It's a 16 hour drive from Detroit to Orlando. I've done it personally in a single day trip several times. I've done it countless times where I stopped overnight in Tennessee just to break the trip into two parts but I didn't actually have to - it's just more pleasant that way.
From Washington DC to San Francisco it's around 5 days.
People only do it that slowly if they are vacationing and taking it slow. It's about 40 hours of driving and most people I know doing a long trip like that don't just drive 8
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Particularly in the western US, a several hour car ride is considered routine.
Indeed, it takes that long just to get out of LA during rush hour.
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It's not possible, size is relevant..
It's not about size, population density matters, i.e. how many consumers are there to pay for an amount of infrastructure.
There is a high correlation between grid reliability, and amount of cable underground. Soil composition, rocks, earth quakes etc. have an influence on the feasibility of underground cables. Finland, Sweden, Norway, also have large areas with low population density, and rocky underground. This is a likely reason for significant higher SAIDI numbers compared with Denmark. (100 to 150 minut
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It's not about size, population density matters, i.e. how many consumers are there to pay for an amount of infrastructure.
No it's about size. Otherwise cities like Toronto, London or Ottawa would be doing the same. They're not. This is the same reason why there is no cell service in the majority of area in Canada.
You simply have no grasp how big this place is.
Going by the areas you've quoted, no, you really don't have an idea.
Here is help (Score:3)
just tell yourself every five minutes:
There is no global warming! All the scientists are liars.
That really helps!
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So I am in no way a denier, but I will point out every time it's extra cold for a week and people say "where's your global warming now!" the response is that GW/Climate Change is big picture trends, not single events.
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Yeah, I am aware of that, my original posting basically was just a mockery on those people. The issue is that it does not become hotter suddenly but the frequency of extreme weather conditions rises relatively quickly.
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Only a shower at least once per year, helps, are you french?
More hydro, wind, and nuclear power please (Score:1)
Why more nuclear power when nuclear power has to lower their output when temperatures rise? Because not all nuclear power plants need to lower output when the temperatures rise.
https://www.tri-cityherald.com... [tri-cityherald.com]
The Columbia Generating station uses cooling towers as the heat sink, which is immune to outside temperature rise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When a nuclear power plant uses river water as the heat sink then they may have to lower output or shutdown completely to avoid damage to the ecosystem.
ht [wikipedia.org]
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We aren't building more hydro because almost every place that's good for hydro already has a dam on it.
There are not infinite Hoover Dam sites on the planet.
LESS WIND/SOLAR, more coal & nuke (Score:2)
more wind, more HVDC (Score:2)
You can run modern wind turbines in pretty amazingly high winds, because they can pitch the blades to any useful angle. And if you improve grid capacity, you can pipe in power from neighboring states to cover regional outages.
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What neighbors to Hawaii are there to pipe power to and from?
Hawaii isn't a reasonable place to expect the modern world to behave like you want it to, because it's just a bunch of volcanoes, and a tiny smidge of dirt.
Israel has neighbors, do you think that they'd be willing to share an electrical grid willingly?
Nope. They kicked the Jews out of that region, and then we reinstalled them by force. One expects such actions to have consequences. Luckily, Israel gets more than enough sun and wind to meet their power needs.
To get this grid you describe would require a very large area, and everyone in this area to get along with each other.
They'd better learn how to manage that sooner than later, because without massive worldwide cooperation on the climate crisis, few human institut
Only, it's BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Highest temperatures in all US states [wikipedia.org]
Only five record breaking temperature this century. Could it be that heat waves are just a normal part of summer? And that this one is nothing special?
Might it also be the case that a glance at a list of major power outages [wikipedia.org] would show that summer outages are a pretty normal thing?
Could it be that click-bait headlines are always looking for some tie-in to global warming, because OMG eleventy!!!
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Could it be that click-bait headlines are always looking for some tie-in to global warming, because OMG eleventy!!!
Neither the headline nor the article itself connect these events to global warming.
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Several records have been broken at the same time in a fairly wide area. I think that qualifies as "extreme"
Re:Only, it's BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugh..this again. String together the hottest weeks or months, and it's another story. A single-day extreme weather event like you link to is not what we're talking about, there's a bigger pattern at work. Even in this example, it's not 'one' hot day, it's an extreme number of them. For fuck's sake you deniers are stupid.
Keep telling yourself this, but when we're all fucked, at least we can continue to be entertained with your gross ignorance and denial as oceanside cities are washed away and morons like you continue to insist that we have nothing to do with it. That's about all we'll have left to laugh about.
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Let's look a little closer at the data. Do you see how so many of the records that still stand were made in 1936? This was the 1936 North American heat wave [wikipedia.org] which was a result of two ocean hot spots [sciencedaily.com] that have not coincided since that time. Someday it will happen again, and when it does, with all the heat we've added to the oceans in the last 80 years, it will be much more severe.
We are prepared! (Score:2)
That's what they said last week.
Is it okay if I don't care at all? (Score:2)
Chickens... (Score:2)
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Let's see...
Florida that has had these "extreme" temperatures every summer as a normal way of life,
vs places with radically larger effects from climate change which until recently did not require measures to deal with higher temperatures.
Hmmm... I see a pattern, but it isn't "Republican/Democrat" but more like "effects of rising temperatures and changing climate".
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Funny, cause Florida that has had these "extreme" temperatures every summer as a normal way of life, does not have these rolling black out problems.
Why bother actually acquainting yourself with the issue when you can just thoughtlessly post a political screed that has nothing to do with the matter at hand? Here are a few clues: which state do you think gets more rain? Which do you think has higher humidity? Do you think that a change in rainfall and a change in temperature would have anything to do with dry conditions?
Power grid != power station (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps get a basic grasp of how electricity systems have worked for the last century before posting stupid comments.
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Both distribution and generation facilities suffer when temperatures rise.
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Is it that the infrastructure up north is in worse shape, or the people up there just kind of freaking out?
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I suppose you could characterize it as infrastructure, but not necessarily in a bad way. Because these sorts of temps/conditions are hardly normative, the infrastructure doesn't need to be there to manage extended periods of heat. Living in the southwest, everything is built around it being hot, more days than not, for many many days on end.
It's like living with snow in the upper-Midwest. We routinely get inches of snow, sometimes for days on end. Aside from slower traffic, you don't give it a second tho
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Neither was "SuperStorm" Sandy.....was just a Cat 1.
Actually, the levees had been neglected for those 30+ years, but it wasn't money misused. There just wasn't really money for it, and they didn't keep a careful eye on them in order to know they needed more resources
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got pocketed by corrupt local leftist politicians
Try not to be too fucking stupid, okay?? There should always be a threshold.
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The northeast where the power is going out has been lefty run the last few decades.
More than the last few decades. Hell, saying "the last few generations" would even be an understatement. Lets not forget Flint Michigan, also run by lefties since forever.
Connecticut is completely broke again and it wasnt so long ago that it was completely broke before. Last time they elected an Independent as governor (actually a Republican, but didnt get the nomination, so ran indie and won) to get the State back in line. This time they didn't. Now everything is being eyeballed as a possible new tax so
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Power grid != power station
Ah, so the conclusion that the "reliable" power generators are reliable but useless unless you live on their premises.
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Power grid != power station
Ah, so the conclusion that the "reliable" power generators are reliable but useless unless you live on their premises.
It's worth making a distinction between grid and station, since the usual crack against renewables is on the power station generator side. They will still have all the same advantages and drawbacks of the grid that energy from non-newables feed into, except when we talk about roof-top solar that actually powers a house (which is a very small percent of rooftop solar installations).
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Re:I thought only renewables were unreliable!!! (Score:5, Informative)
First, the summary mentions the grid, that is, the distribution network as the reason for the outage. One of the problems is the load from all those airconditioners and it would have been a problem even if the transmitted power was all renewables. The other is lines being damaged by thunderstorms, which is also, like, totally unrelated to the manner the electricity they carry was produced.
Second, every power plant that uses heat to do work requires two things - a heat source and a coolant reservoir to operate, just like your car. The efficiency of the power plant is, if losses from imperfect engineering are ignored, a function of the difference between the high and low temperatures of the heat source and heat dump that are available to the plant.
If temperatures of the environment, which is your heat dump, go up, the efficiency of every energy source you use will go down, and eventually it may become so that it is impossible or stupid to operate.
Nothing comes free in this world, you know, even education.
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One of the problems is the load from all those airconditioners and it would have been a problem even if the transmitted power was all renewables.
Unless you're talking about, say, rooftop solar, since then the air conditioning demand and on-site power output decreasing the grid load would match rather nicely.
If temperatures of the environment, which is your heat dump, go up, the efficiency of every energy source you use will go down, and eventually it may become so that it is impossible or stupid to operate.
Well, in reality, the decrease in efficiency is insubstantial compared to the violation of environmental limits.
Re: I thought only renewables were unreliable!!! (Score:1)
You need to get out more!
I have 10 kW of PV on my roof which provides more than 1,100 kWh/mo., rendering my home net-zero. The PV footprint is only half of the available high-production roofline. IOW, there is enough space on my very typical roof to power both my neighbors and my own home.
Oh, and that production covers not only my house but my EV as well, all 16k/mi per year.
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Note that "net zero" still means you're dependent on power coming in from the grid, and a downed power line will still affect you. Get back to me when your system doesn't require a hookup to the grid at all....
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I have yet to see a "rooftop solar" that can provide more than a small fraction of the power for the space under the said roof, so unless it is a very inconsequential unit in some very rare circumstances this is just an academic pedantry.
For my roof, I've estimated that covering it to the reasonably practical extent with solar panels would generate 150% of my actual annual needs. This is in a solar-unfriendly region, and the greatest issue is seasonal variation. When it comes to offsetting AC consumption, it would be more than adequate even in significant heat waves. Not quite sure if this is "a very rare circumstance" since the whole region is physically similar in this respect.
Not in nuclear. Again, nice pedantry.
Yes, in nuclear. A 10 K increase in cold end temperature in th
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I have yet to see a "rooftop solar" that can provide more than a small fraction of the power for the space under the said roof
What the fuck are you talking about?? These aren't your grandpa's panels, dumbass; the tech's changed a bit since the 70's.
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I'm talking about a thing called "reality", cretin.
Then you should inspect more actual installations. My rooftop panel setup covers 100% of my electrical usage, and I'm not exactly easy on the electricity. Then again, I don't have AC either.
Re:I thought only renewables were unreliable!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Second, every power plant that uses heat to do work requires two things - a heat source and a coolant reservoir to operate, just like your car. The efficiency of the power plant is, if losses from imperfect engineering are ignored, a function of the difference between the high and low temperatures of the heat source and heat dump that are available to the plant.
If temperatures of the environment, which is your heat dump, go up, the efficiency of every energy source you use will go down, and eventually it may become so that it is impossible or stupid to operate.
Nothing comes free in this world, you know, even education.
Um.. Not so much..
A steam power plant is but a heat engine and yea you need a place to dump heat... However... Usually the heat sinks are only indirectly affected by high ambient temperatures and efficiency is not majorly effected by the rise in air temperature.
Usually, the cooling happens in large lagoons of water, heating existing ground water or evaporation towers. The major factor in this is not air temperature, but dew point. But, even then, you are talking about a condenser temperature as close to 212 degrees F as you can manage. The difference between 70 degree heat sink and 110 degree heat sink is only 40 degrees. The temperature differential is still greater than 100 degrees F between the condensing steam (at as low of a pressure as you can practically create) and there is NO benefit in cooling the liquid below 212 degrees F so what really happens is they vary the flow rate of cooling water, to get a liquid temperature exiting the condenser to be put into the makeup tank as high as possible without it being steam. So the efficiency question is the cost of running the pumps at a higher rate and that's about it. However, you are only really trying to dump the vaporization heat, which is a constant at any specific power setting, so you are going to be pushing about 1/3rd more water to absorb the heat if your heat sink water rises from 70 to 110 degrees. Not a huge efficiency problem.
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One of the problems is the load from all those airconditioners...
I don't imagine it helps much that the hotter states are generally the fatter states...
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One of the problems is the load from all those airconditioners and it would have been a problem even if the transmitted power was all renewables.
That's much of the value of residential solar... It's ideal for that specific situation.
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sounds like something someone who has neither heard of transformers nor DC-DC converters would say. Or in other words, sounds like someone talking out of their ass.
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renewable all produce far lower voltage
We need a "+1: Entertaining Fool" mod...
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We need a "+1: Entertaining Fool" mod...
After reading that drivel, I am wondering what those cans on the telephones poles transform, since clearly its not voltage given the comment!
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Hence a grid to share electricity from areas where the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
We are discussing reliability and you are discussing supply.. They are very different things.
The post you are responding to clearly indicates that we *already* have issues with our transmission systems when the weather gets outside of normal limits. I think it would be logical to assume that renewables are only going to make that problem more acute unless we address the transmission capacity and efficiency problems we already have.
So your "just share electricity" idea is fine, but we all need to admit th
Re:I thought only renewables were unreliable!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Air cooled nuclear doesn't care about the temperatures. The nuclear power plants in Europe that had to shutdown were cooled by river water. Even then the plants could often run just fine but it could have killed the fish or cause other damage to the environment. River cooling is cheaper than air cooling, that's why it's used more often. The cooling towers on air cooled power plants still need water to make up for evaporation losses.
There's research being done on forth generation nuclear that doesn't need any water for cooling, the air is the heat sink without any water in the middle to carry the heat.
I suspect coal could be cooled without water also but I've seen no proposals to build such a plant.
This is assuming that the failure was in production and not distribution. Nuclear power won't help there.
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Nuclear does quite well during heat waves. Occasionally a unit or two across a fleet has to reduce output, but overall the nuclear fleet runs straight through our hottest heat waves at a very high capacity factor. Meanwhile, wind really struggles as most heat wave have low wind conditions, particularly during the middle days of the event. Wind was almost nothing over all of Germany for the hottest days of the most recent heat wave, while they had all of their available nuclear running, they even started one
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Fortunately they can import power from nuclear heavy France as needed.
Germany exported in 2018 seven times as much power (around 70 TWh) to other countries than what it imported from France (around 10 TWh). It's hardly an issue of need.
Re: (Score:3)
Air cooled nuclear doesn't care about the temperatures. The nuclear power plants in Europe that had to shutdown were cooled by river water. Even then the plants could often run just fine but it could have killed the fish or cause other damage to the environment. River cooling is cheaper than air cooling, that's why it's used more often. The cooling towers on air cooled power plants still need water to make up for evaporation losses.
A quick check: A nearby 1 GW nuclear unit evaporates around 820 liters of water per second. Per day, that's around 71400 cubic meters. That's the average domestic water consumption of around eight hundred thousand people around here. However, this unit would provide residential electricity to five million people, as per our latest figures. Which means that using this electricity for residential purposes increases average residential water use per capita from 90 liters per day to 105 liters per day. I don't
Re: (Score:2)
I thought all those nuke, gas and coal stations were 100% reliable and wouldn't fail you when the sun was not shining or the wind not blowing, but now you're having power outages?? How can that possibly happen with "reliable" coal and nukes???
Making the power isn't the problem.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
This great piece of software I developed works fine on my computer, can't be it fails on yours.
It has been very cold this winter, quite impossible temperatures in Australia are high.
I cannot hear the noise from that concert on this side of the city, why are the people who live next to it complaining?
And other "smart" opinions by our bright conservative anonymous coward.
Re: I thought only renewables were unreliable!!! (Score:1)
Its fearmongering. No recorda were shattered. The heatwave lasted like 2 days. Blame it on shitty utilities ran by Democrat infested states.