From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2014 9:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Climate models
On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]>
wrote:
Solar PV has been here for 60 years and THOUSANDS of times more money has
been spent developing it than has been spent on LFTR R&D, and yet solar PV
is still just a rounding error in our total energy budget.
Haha - if you call the almost 150 GW of currently installed solar PV
capacity a rounding error
I do indeed call 1.5*10^11 watt-hours a rounding error! Human technology
uses 1.5*10^17 watt-hours worldwide, so by your own figures photovoltaics
provides .0001% of that, assuming that the weather is always cloudless and
it never gets dark at night. And it wouldn't be even that big if governments
didn't bribe people with tax breaks to do things that would otherwise make
no economic sense.
Haha John you really don't get energy metrics do you. By looking at your
above calculation it is clear that you do not understand the what the term
"Capacity" actually measures. Capacity DOES NOT measure total annual output,
but rather the "capacity" of the unit to produce. Thus a 1GW Capacity
nuclear power plant for example does not generate 1GW of electric power in
the course of a year.
A second ratio called "Capacity Factor" multiplied by the number of hours in
a year is applied to the Capacity to get a rough yardstick of how much power
the unit will actually generate over the course of a year. To use the
nuclear power plant example. Typically nuclear power plants operate at 80%
capacity so 1 GW * 8670 (hours in a year) * 80% = Annual expected output =
6936 GW hours / year
Now to help you understand how off your numbers where let's do the same
exercise for Solar PV capacity = 150GW The most widely used capacity factor
for solar PV is 20%, which is to say that if you have a 1Kw solar panel on
average (24X7X365) it will be producing 200 watts. Please understand that
this is the smoothed out average rate of production and a 20% capacity
factor takes into account the fact that the sun don't shine at night and it
is cloudy sometimes. That is why it is just 20% and not the 80% capacity
factor for a nuclear power plant.
Shall we do the math now. 150GW * 8670 (hours/year) * 20% (capacity factor)
= 260TW of annual electric output. This yields: 0.0017. A number that is
2,000 times larger than the number you erroneously produced.
And this is the number after the 20% capacity factor has been applied - so
no coming back with the sun don't shine at night rebuttal (becauce that has
already been factored in)
Now that I have helped you understand how Solar PV contribution to our total
energy needs is actually 2000 times greater than what you believed it to be
will you reconsider your position.
I doubt it because in you it seems to be ideologically driven - and thus is
not open to being changed by reason.
> solar PV has also been doubling every two or so years for quite a while
now and is projected to surpass 300GW of globally installed PV capacity by
2017.
Big deal, then by 2017 PV would supply .0002% of our worldwide energy needs,
assuming that the weather is always cloudless and it never gets dark at
night. And it's easy to see why you picked 2017, Germany has been more
aggressive in pushing photovoltaics with tax breaks and it got the highest
electrical bills in Europe as a reward, but even the Germans are getting fed
up with this nonsense and will pull the plug on solar subsidies in 2018, so
expect a crash then.
Again terribly off the mark math. The actual figure is 0.4% of total global
energy consumption.
John keep doubling that every 2.5 years - of course multiply it by 2,000
times to correct for your bad math based on your self-manifested poor grasp
of energy terms. Project ahead by fifteen years, which is five doublings and
we get 12.8% -- of ALL energy needs by 2033
Then things really start mushrooming. Another 2.5 years and that becomes
more than a quarter of all energy production.
The real question is how long can the doubling every 2.5 years (and it has
actually been growing at a faster rate than that, but I am being
conservative) - how long can this rate of geometric growth last. Well so far
it has been doing that for four or five decades and there are no signs of it
slowing down.
> Compare this capacity with the current capacity of LFTR which is 0 watts.
And by a curious coincidence zero is also the amount of money spent on LFTR
R&D over the last 40 years.
Yes I know. It is a dead technology. For whatever reason.
>> I want to know if I really understand you correctly, are you saying that
a major problem (or even a minor problem) with using Thorium for energy is
that there isn't enough of it? Is that really your position?
> No it is not my position and never has been
Good, then let's stop all this idiotic talk about recoverable Thorium
reserves.
Only if you stop the idiotic talk of counting the Thorium in your garden
dirt as being part of some hypothetical future Thorium reserve.
> The big issues with LFTR are that it simply does not exist
True.
> and in order to bring it into existence would require a large scale
concerted multi-decadal effort.
A keen grasp of the obvious. A changeover of the way human civilization is
powered from fossil fuel to ANYTHING elsewould require a large scale
concerted multi-decade effort.
Brilliant deduction Sherlock
>>> the world is facing a recoverable uranium peak that will be reached
within a decade or two (at current extraction rates, if nuclear is ramped up
peak uranium will be reached that much sooner).
>> Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in 8 years.
> So?
So Economics 101 would say there is a contradiction between "a recoverable
uranium peak will be reached within a decade or two" and "Uranium prices are
the lowest they've been in 8 years".
How many new nuclear power plants have come online? How many have been
brought off line. Have more power plants come on line or has the total
number of producing power plants decreased? Perhaps you should take
economics 101 John. Look around at the age of the world's nuclear power
plants most of them are either already operating past their engineered
operational life or are nearing that. The situation for nuclear is looking
very much like it is in its sunset. Economics 101 will help you understand
how this impacts current market prices for uranium; I suggest you take it.
>>> I do not inhabit the same magical thinking universe you seem to live in.
>> How nice for you, therefore by accepting my bet you can make an easy
$1000.
> Nice polemic. what assurances do I even have that you would actually pay.
The same assurance that I have that you would actually pay.
John K Clark
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