I hate to be pedantic, but the things in the picture are windmills... you know giant whirly things that are powered by wind... kind of very different from things that lie around and absorb sunlight.
Thanks, now we've established you have no argument apart from a straw man and the realization that most people are wrong about the need for new nuclear. You can run along now.
The argument is one of efficiency and load distribution. Base load power plants are capable of greater efficiency than variable ones. This is down to optimisations made around specific output levels and the infrastructure required to support said loads. For example if you know the characteristics of your power output and that of the grid you can build a transformer or switch mode power supply to bridge that specific gap. This outperforms variable input transformers in every case.
There is an argument that low efficiency doesn't matter if the source is renewable, but this fails to take into consideration the embodied energy cost of producing renewable generators, not to mention the increased cost. An inefficient system may not produce enough energy over the course of its lifetime compared to the energy it cost to make.
Finally, most sources of renewables are intermittent and are not necessarily related to the population's power consumption. This makes the storing of energy necessary in order to regulate supply. Storage of energy is a large source of inefficiency and one of the key areas that is being focused on. Base load plant is absolutely necessary to minimise this inefficiency as much as possible.
Maybe I missed some points by skimming, but the arguments made in that article are that:
1 Australian researcher agrees with his stance
a region had 22% of its power produced by wind at one point
I guess the claim "it can be argued" is technically proven true, but the majority opinion I keep hearing from the electrical grid engineers in the news is the opposite
And, well, sometimes it just simply is night, and sometimes the wind doesn't blow. We don't have the battery tech to run from storage alone
But, honestly why wouldn't we use nuclear? It's the one power source we have without any real downsides untill ITER finally brings positive results
And, well, sometimes it just simply is night, and sometimes the wind doesn’t blow.
Do you really think this isn't already taken into account?
We don’t have the battery tech to run from storage alone
Nobody is making that argument, as far as I'm aware. There are plenty of ways of storing energy, e.g. pumped hydro, that would work in conjunction with battery storage.
But, honestly why wouldn’t we use nuclear?
The obvious one. It's wildly expensive when compared to renewables, and that's before the usual nuclear build issues of cost and schedule overruns.
This footage also showed how the latest iteration of Phoenix was trained using teleoperation by a human “trainer.” Using this data, the robot’s Carbon AI software could learn and replicate the process independently.
I wish they went into more detail on the training process. Can it learn just by watching, or do some action still need to be coded manually?
In a potential future conflict, high-value GPS satellites risk being hit or interfered with. If this happens, the loss of GPS could have severe consequences for communication, navigation, and banking systems in the United States.
The worry isn't that HFT stops working. It's that it causes a failure state that brings down the legitimate parts of the financial sector.
Like how we're not worried about AI pilots malfunctioning and being grounded, the same way we'd worry about AI pilots malfunctioning and bombing humans.
I worked in a place where the machine room had a network time device that connected to an attena getting gps reading to give time to all the other hosts. Im pretty sure any ntp server a host has configured is only a hop or two away from a device like this.
Once these get advanced enough and the human cost of starting a conflict goes to zero (because they most likely will be able to scale these to whatever kind of conflict is wanted) why wouldn't countries be more likely to start a war.
Or if most regular military battles only become an economic problem then why wouldn't an enemy turn towards more terrorist like attacks like happened in Russia with ISIS.
America’s second-highest ranking military officer, Gen. Paul Selva, advocated Tuesday for “keeping the ethical rules of war in place lest we unleash on humanity a set of robots that we don’t know how to control.”
While I agree that China pushing renewables is good, shaming them for a genocide doesn’t seem like an appropriate response.
If some guy in your high school beats the crap out of every disabled kid he sees, but on the weekends he hands out soup at a soup kitchen, should that person be celebrated?
Imagine if every time something inside the United States got discussed someone popped in to say "remember how we have the most enslaved people of any developed country on the planet"?
I'd be fine with it personally. But if you think that would be annoying, maybe you should stop doing the same thing.
I wouldn’t find it annoying. I think it is important to remind the populace of the abhorrent things governments do, ESPECIALLY when they continue to do these things. The camps are still operational. So I’ll be happy to shut up when they shut them down.
I agree on the Palestine genocide and it’s terrible the U.S. requires an ally in the Middle East so bad they are willing to overlook and contribute to what is happening. But everyone is funding China because everyone buys their products. I have tried hard to stop buying their products. It is challenging, and sometimes impossible, but I do my best. Anyway, I’ll stop derailing the conversation in an energy forum. Thanks for your patience and not deleting my posts, mods.
Are there particular pros and cons to the scale of each individual turbine? I think this is the first time I've seen that figure reported as opposed to the capacity of the wind farm as a whole
With larger turbines you need fewer for the same capacity. This means less manufacturing, easier maintenance, they are taller, which means more stable and stronger wind, and a lower price of construction. However larger turbines also lead to greater stresses on the system, so that can again increase maintenance and large blades are hard to transport on land.
So it is a compromise. Up to now offshore wind turbine manufacturers always built bigger turbines with newer generations. However the engineering challenges increases, so many have stopped going for bigger then 14-16MW and instead go for increased numbers of turbines with higher reliability.
Over a large range of sizes for many physical reasons larger turbines can be more efficient per space and per cost. For example there is less ground effects for larger turbines and the rotor area scales quadratically with hub height.
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