Estevan considered for solar power

[oneoff]

Not in the least


Sask Power hasn't responded; and a second message was sent just to be sure the confirmation request got through


And powerhousesolar.ca "Live Tracker" isn't working yet either.


Evidence that neither the utility nor the equipment is reliable and "ready yet" You'd be frustrated and stressed to death at 40+ below (and howling winds) when any problem occurred.

[chuckChuck]

I haven't received a reply from Saskpower yet.

[oneoff]

THIS IS MOST PROBABLY SO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH IT UNBELIEVABLE


Quite probably they are doing some recalculations

I well remember my dad commenting about the "rural electrification" program in the early 1950's. He said that those wanting the brand new offered service had to design a route so that there would be a customer connection every half mile to make the project viable. It was up to "common" farmers to do the leg work. Can you imagine the ridicule you'd get from a utility if customers actually had any real input into designing the best that many brains could come up with.

One missing CSA tag; one intransigent stickler; one belligerent engineer; one "Trump" that tries to run the place on his terms...thats where the decision making ultimately lies. And fighting city hall will cost you more than any little victory that might be temporarily gained but quickly thwarted or punished in some other manner.

[tweety]

As long as there is lots of free energy to just release there will never be renewable energy other than for conversational sized installations just big enough to list all the reasons why it shouldn't be done.

Sorry future generations, but the oneoffs of today have far too many "reasons" why we should do nothing in the mean time watching the tank run dry.

God forbid i use the battery analogy again.

[oneoff]

DRAGGED ALL WAY DOWN TO LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR




Your claim about "free energy" is just as absurd as the the claim about "last gasps" in plants amounting to anything.

There may not be as big a next generation for specific country economies made uncompetitive because they are insignificant in the world context. They are called "third world economies"

Maybe some consideration should be given to shrinking the "tweety" family name lineage in the future; just as world population (everywhere) can't go on and on increasing as it has. That's probably the really big challenge...don't you agree?

[blackpowder]

Heiner Fassbeck

The End of the Energiewende?

Stable high-pressure winter weather has resulted in a confrontation. An Energiewende that relies mainly on wind and solar energy will not work in the long run. One cannot forgo nuclear power, eliminate fossil fuels, and tell people that electricity supplies will remain secure all the same.

We have attempted unsuccessfully to find Energiewende advocates willing to explain that inconsistency. Their silence is not easy to fathom. But maybe the events themselves have made the outcome inevitable.

With nuclear power no longer available, a capacity of at least 50 gigawatts is required by other means, despite an enormously expanded network of wind turbines and solar systems

This winter could go down in history as the event that proved the German energy transition to be unsubstantiated and incapable of becoming a success story. Electricity from wind and solar generation has been catastrophically low for several weeks. December brought new declines. A persistent winter high-pressure system with dense fog throughout Central Europe has been sufficient to unmask the fairy tale of a successful energy transition, even for me as a lay person.

This is a setback, because many people had placed high hopes in the Energiewende. I likewise never expected to see large-scale solar arrays and wind turbines, including those offshore, motionless for days on end. The data compiled by Agora Energiewende on the individual types of electricity generation have recorded the appalling results for sun and wind at the beginning of December and from the 12th to 14th:

Of power demand totaling 69.0 gigawatts (GW) at 3 pm on the 12th, for instance, just 0.7 GW was provided by solar energy, 1.0 by onshore wind power and 0.4 offshore. At noontime on the 14th of December, 70 GW were consumed, with 4 GW solar, 1 GW onshore and somewhat over 0.3 offshore wind. The Agora graphs make apparent that such wide-ranging doldrums may persist for several days.

You do not need to be a technician, an energy expert, or a scientist to perceive the underlying futility of this basic situation. You simply need common sense, shelving expectations and prognoses for a moment, while extrapolating the current result to future developments. Let us suppose that today’s wind and solar potential could be tripled by 2030, allowing almost all of the required energy to be obtained from these two sources under normal weather conditions. This is an extremely optimistic scenario and certainly not to be expected, because current policy is slowing down the expansion of renewable energy sources rather than accelerating it.

One cannot simultaneously rely on massive amounts of wind and sunshine, dispense with nuclear power plants (for very good reasons), significantly lower the supply of fossil energy, and nevertheless tell people that electricity will definitely be available in the future

If a comparable lull occurred in 2030 (stable winter high systems that recur every few years), then three times the number of solar panels and wind turbines (assuming current technologies) could logically produce only three times the amount of electricity. The deficiency of prevailing winds and sunshine will affect all of these installations, no matter how many there are. Even threefold wind and solar generation would then fulfill just 20% of requirements – again very optimistically – assuming that demand had not increased by 2030.

Redistribution effects

However, precisely the opposite can be expected, namely a massive increase in consumption due to the substitution of fossil fuels by electrically powered automobiles that require increased generation. The possibility of saving so much energy in this short time, enabling overall consumption to be decreased despite abandoning fossil fuels, can be confidently ignored. For that to happen, the price of fossil energy would have to rise dramatically, which is not to be expected, and one would have to compensate for the resulting redistribution effects that are politically even less likely.

Accordingly, Germany would end up with a catastrophic result 30 years after the start of the Energiewende. With nuclear power no longer available, a capacity of at least 50 gigawatts is required by other means, despite an enormously expanded network of wind turbines and solar systems under comparable weather conditions. Those other means according to current knowledge will be provided by coal, oil and gas.

In other words, one cannot simultaneously rely on massive amounts of wind and sunshine, dispense with nuclear power plants (for very good reasons), significantly lower the supply of fossil energy, and nevertheless tell people that electricity will definitely be available in the future. Exactly that, however, is what politics largely does almost every day. It is quite irresponsible to persuade citizens that from 2030 onwards only electrically-powered new cars may be allowed, as has recently been propagated in the highest political circles.

[blackpowder]

THE END OF GERMANY’S ENERGIEWENDE?Date: 11/01/17Energy PostThe prominent German economist Heiner Flassbeck has challenged fundamental assumptions of the Energiewende at his blog site*makroskop.eu. According to Flassbeck, the former Director of Macroeconomics and Development at the*UNCTAD in Geneva and a former State Secretary of Finance, a recent period of extremely low solar and wind power generation shows that Germany will never be able to rely on renewable energy, regardless of how much new capacity will be built.

[blackpowder]

[chuckChuck]

So Germany is getting 15-40 Gw of solar some days? That's impressive considering how bad the weather is in Germany at times.

As far as the conclusion reached by the economist, that may have some merit if they adopt alot of electric cars. But some engineers have suggested the battery systems in cars may have a dual role as a complimentary backup power supply for renewables since cars will be plugged in overnight. But I am sure if you drain the battery overnight you won't be going anaywhere!

There is no doubt we are going to have to rely on fosssil energy or maybe nuclear as well as renewables well into the future.

It would be interesting to hear from those in Germany who think renewables can be more of the solution.

[tweety]

Yes oneoff, the energy we burn, considering the cost to replace that with manual labour is almost free in comparison.

A grain auger loading a b train takes about 4liters or 4 bucks of gas. How much would it cost to do that manually?

We have become absolutely oblivious to the amount of work even a little bit of energy provides. In fact we whine its too expensive. Renewables have no chance competing whatsoever with that kind of power to cost ratio.