Worldwide Energy Crisis

[SeaKingTacco]

Да! In Canada, CANDU does you!

Like!

 

[dapaterson]

The prairie provinces should be Canada's CoE for all things energy, not just O&G.

 

[KevinB]

The prairie provinces should be Canada's CoE for all things energy, not just O&G.

Do they vote Liberal…

 

[dapaterson]

Do they vote Liberal…

Do they help themselves? AB just blocked a bunch of renewable electricity investment.

In business you always have to be looking at the future and at replacing your own products with something better.

Governments are really bad at The Future.

 

[Kirkhill]

Go do the math on the energy required to bring 1 litre of water to a boil from 15C.

Now, multiply that by several trillion….

Now contain that water. Add a 4 MW heater - and let me know how long it takes to boil your tea.

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Uttamenergy Limited on LinkedIn: Uttamenergy has successfully delivered its first steam accumulator of⦠| 19 comments

Uttamenergy has successfully delivered its first steam accumulator of capacity 150 m³ with a shipping weight of 120 metric tons to JSW Steel Plant at Dolvi in… | 19 comments on LinkedIn

in.linkedin.com

An oil well could be capped with a wind powered immersion heater inserted and filled with sea water. The water would boil and with the well capped you end up with a tank full of super heated steam that you could tap to drive a generator. The well becomes a surge tank.

 

[Kirkhill]

The prairie provinces should be Canada's CoE for all things energy, not just O&G.

Remove radioactive dirt from ground. Boil water. Return radioactive dirt to the hole it came from.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Do they help themselves? AB just blocked a bunch of renewable electricity investment.

In business you always have to be looking at the future and at replacing your own products with something better.

Governments are really bad at The Future.

You do realize that it is a whole lot more complicated than throwing up windfarms/solar panels and calling it done? As Ontario Hydro ratepayers may/may not have discovered to their collective horror, some years ago…

 

[Brad Sallows]

You do realize that it is a whole lot more complicated than throwing up windfarms/solar panels and calling it done?

For example, renewables need backup. (Unless the general idea is to become more environmentally-friendly by using electricity only when it is available from such sources.)

 

[Good2Golf]

You do realize that it is a whole lot more complicated than throwing up windfarms/solar panels and calling it done? As Ontario Hydro ratepayers may/may not have discovered to their collective horror, some years ago…

Yup. Until there is significant storage capacity built to store all the off-peak generation through solar and wind, the variable-rate high-capacity capabilities (thankfully we didn’t FULLY gut the nuke capacity) will remain the go to’s and I’m comfortable paying to have that capability, while still not happy about the phucquery that was McGuinty and Wynne on the false-panacea windy-sunny ways power front.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

If only Canada had a organization that could build and export SMR's

 

[Kirkhill]

Yup. Until there is significant storage capacity built to store all the off-peak generation through solar and wind, the variable-rate high-capacity capabilities (thankfully we didn’t FULLY gut the nuke capacity) will remain the go to’s and I’m comfortable paying to have that capability, while still not happy about the phucquery that was McGuinty and Wynne on the false-panacea windy-sunny ways power front.

So - energy storage

Lead acid batteries are a known commodity. But dangerous, clunky and expensive
Rare Earth batteries are a developing science with pluses and minuses but not fully stabilized as a commodity - high risk

Mass storage.

Attach a pump to a windmill and fill a pond or a tank - well proven technology - used by ancient Greeks.
Drain the reservoir through a hydro turbine - low cost and reliable
Inefficient. Unless you have lots of water and place to impound it and a place to release it and don't really care about efficiency.
Actually pumped storage with wind turbines might even make sense for some Quebec, BC and Newfoundland sites. Ontario? Recirculate the Great Lakes?

Heat sinks.
Heating dirt - well known and easy but requires refrigeration-type technology to recover the heat and convert it into power - geothermal stuff.
Heating water - well known and easy but low density and requires the same type of technology as the geothermal stuff to create useful power.
Making steam - well known and easy but higher density. Technology is well known. Risks and expenses are well managed

Steam is being employed in at least one solar plant.

Energy storage[edit]​

The PS10 solar power tower stores heat in tanks as superheated and pressurized water at 50 bar and 285 °C. The water evaporates and flashes back to steam, releasing energy and reducing the pressure. Storage is for 30 minutes.[7] It is suggested that longer storage is possible, but that has not been proven in an existing power plant. However, there are many considerations for using molten salt as an energy storage medium due to the great capability of storing energy for long periods without substantial losses (see Concentrated solar power). Another possibility is to use a phase-change material as thermal storage where latent heat is used to store energy.

PS10 solar power plant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That would be defined as an accumulator but 30 minutes surge capacity seems kind of short to me given that the sky is dark for half the day.
I would be looking for at least 24 hours of storage.

I looked at British Offshore Windfarms

List of offshore wind farms in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They have a capacity factor of about 40% apparently which is quite good, especially compared to onshore farms which I believe, even on the prairies are closer to 25%. But still, that wind is variable and 60% of the time it doesn't blow effectively.

So I propose that an accumulator capacity would have to look more like a week than an hour.

Played with numbers and came up with these.

Every 5 MW turbine would require a 2,000,000 liter, or 2000 m3 vessel holding 1,000,000 liters or 1,000 m3 of water at 50 barg and 265 C to supply an average of 2 MW of power on a consistent basis.

Above grade that would look like 4 to 8 silos of the types found in dairies and breweries but much more expensive being pressure vessels.
Below grade that could be a low pressure well with a 24" casing pushed to 2 km. No sense of how much that would cost.

OR.

The alternative solution.

You can rent a 2 MW package natural gas boiler in a truck and have it delivered to your site and operational within days.

Rentals

Boiler system rentals from the boiler system experts. Discover why Cleaver-Brooks is the best resource for rental. Cleaver-Brooks can equip you with any boiler, any size, any time.

cleaverbrooks.com

The Earth is storing energy for us as natural gas.... and stuff.

 

[Good2Golf]

So - energy storage

Lead acid batteries are a known commodity. But dangerous, clunky and expensive
Rare Earth batteries are a developing science with pluses and minuses but not fully stabilized as a commodity - high risk

Mass storage.

Attach a pump to a windmill and fill a pond or a tank - well proven technology - used by ancient Greeks.
Drain the reservoir through a hydro turbine - low cost and reliable
Inefficient. Unless you have lots of water and place to impound it and a place to release it and don't really care about efficiency.
Actually pumped storage with wind turbines might even make sense for some Quebec, BC and Newfoundland sites. Ontario? Recirculate the Great Lakes?

Heat sinks.
Heating dirt - well known and easy but requires refrigeration-type technology to recover the heat and convert it into power - geothermal stuff.
Heating water - well known and easy but low density and requires the same type of technology as the geothermal stuff to create useful power.
Making steam - well known and easy but higher density. Technology is well known. Risks and expenses are well managed

Steam is being employed in at least one solar plant.

PS10 solar power plant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That would be defined as an accumulator but 30 minutes surge capacity seems kind of short to me given that the sky is dark for half the day.
I would be looking for at least 24 hours of storage.

I looked at British Offshore Windfarms

List of offshore wind farms in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They have a capacity factor of about 40% apparently which is quite good, especially compared to onshore farms which I believe, even on the prairies are closer to 25%. But still, that wind is variable and 60% of the time it doesn't blow effectively.

So I propose that an accumulator capacity would have to look more like a week than an hour.

Played with numbers and came up with these.

Every 5 MW turbine would require a 2,000,000 liter, or 2000 m3 vessel holding 1,000,000 liters or 1,000 m3 of water at 50 barg and 265 C to supply an average of 2 MW of power on a consistent basis.

Above grade that would look like 4 to 8 silos of the types found in dairies and breweries but much more expensive being pressure vessels.
Below grade that could be a low pressure well with a 24" casing pushed to 2 km. No sense of how much that would cost.

OR.

The alternative solution.

You can rent a 2 MW package natural gas boiler in a truck and have it delivered to your site and operational within days.

Rentals

Boiler system rentals from the boiler system experts. Discover why Cleaver-Brooks is the best resource for rental. Cleaver-Brooks can equip you with any boiler, any size, any time.

cleaverbrooks.com

The Earth is storing energy for us as natural gas.... and stuff.

Which reinforces current positioning of wind/solar energy as a ‘catch as catch can’ real-time top-up for production in supply of large user population centers. Where hydro energy storage isn’t feasible, I do think geothermal has potential, but the cost to store MW-level feeds compared to facilities cost of nuclear and hydro, for example, remains a potential black hole of money. Interesting scaling is that 1500-2000 wind turbines (~av. 3-5 MW each) are required to equate to a single nuclear power plant like Bruce, and that’s assuming that the turbine is turning at max tatted output 24/7/365. That doesn’t happen at all, closer to something like net ~20-25% duty cycle output, which would out a wind turbine fleet size requirement at 6,000 to 10,000 wind turbines to equate to Bruce Power Plant alone…and Ontario currently has approx 2,700 wind turbines (just under 1/2 of all Canada’s) in that 3-5MW class. So, until we have more, a lot more wind (and solar) generation and associated storage schemes, we’re nowhere close to buttoning up existing power generation modes any time soon.

 

[Kirkhill]

Which reinforces current positioning of wind/solar energy as a ‘catch as catch can’ real-time top-up for production in supply of large user population centers. Where hydro energy storage isn’t feasible, I do think geothermal has potential, but the cost to store MW-level feeds compared to facilities cost of nuclear and hydro, for example, remains a potential black hole of money. Interesting scaling is that 1500-2000 wind turbines (~av. 3-5 MW each) are required to equate to a single nuclear power plant like Bruce, and that’s assuming that the turbine is turning at max tatted output 24/7/365. That doesn’t happen at all, closer to something like net ~20-25% duty cycle output, which would out a wind turbine fleet size requirement at 6,000 to 10,000 wind turbines to equate to Bruce Power Plant alone…and Ontario currently has approx 2,700 wind turbines (just under 1/2 of all Canada’s) in that 3-5MW class. So, until we have more, a lot more wind (and solar) generation and associated storage schemes, we’re nowhere close to buttoning up existing power generation modes any time soon.

But that top-up still requires a leveling or surge facility, even if it looks more like a capacitor than a battery.

 

[YZT580]

Which reinforces current positioning of wind/solar energy as a ‘catch as catch can’ real-time top-up for production in supply of large user population centers. Where hydro energy storage isn’t feasible, I do think geothermal has potential, but the cost to store MW-level feeds compared to facilities cost of nuclear and hydro, for example, remains a potential black hole of money. Interesting scaling is that 1500-2000 wind turbines (~av. 3-5 MW each) are required to equate to a single nuclear power plant like Bruce, and that’s assuming that the turbine is turning at max tatted output 24/7/365. That doesn’t happen at all, closer to something like net ~20-25% duty cycle output, which would out a wind turbine fleet size requirement at 6,000 to 10,000 wind turbines to equate to Bruce Power Plant alone…and Ontario currently has approx 2,700 wind turbines (just under 1/2 of all Canada’s) in that 3-5MW class. So, until we have more, a lot more wind (and solar) generation and associated storage schemes, we’re nowhere close to buttoning up existing power generation modes any time soon.

and each turbine takes 2 acres out of production and requires a set back from housing. So to equal Bruce you need 20000 acres. But they can't put them close together so it is probably more like 100000 acres. That is 156 square miles of farmland taken out of both production and unusable for housing: two more pressing needs. My figures are probably on the low side. And what do we accomplish? Still need petroleum fueled back up 60% of the time so you are more than doubling your costs and none of it will prevent the temperatures from going up and down as they have for thousands of years. Great drugs you are all on

 

[Good2Golf]

But that top-up still requires a leveling or surge facility, even if it looks more like a capacitor than a battery.

No, it doesn’t at current production ratios…only if one tries to push towards wind/solar/unicorns on treadmills replacing (at least in the majority proportion) all others (nuke, hydro, NG). Production sources just need to have sufficient total peak capacity of the stacked power ‘sand chart’ when the wind isn’t blown and sun isn’t shining (and unicorns aren’t treadmilling).

 

[Kirkhill]

The 20 MW pump filling your gas tank.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills discusses in a recent paper, “Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream,” transitioning automotive energy derived from molecules to electrons has enormous implications for the grid and local distribution networks.

It’s not solely about the relative costs of electricity versus liquid hydrocarbons. (Electricity is much more expensive before taxes, a net zero fiscal hole Labor also needs to address.) According to Mills, transporting a unit of electrical energy using wires and transformers is about 20-fold more expensive than transporting the same quantity of energy as oil in pipelines and tankers. When you fill up your tank with gasoline, the same amount of energy per second is going into your car as being generated by four 5-megawatt wind turbines.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/09/21/rishi_sunak_speaks_sense_on_net_zero_981146.html

Years ago I visited the Pickering power plant. I remember one of their displays saying that only 10% of the energy in their reactors actually ended up in the socket in the house - thermal inefficiency and transmission losses accounted for much of the loss. The reactor and steam generators were only about 30% efficient and because Ontario was so big and transmission lines so long another 15% or so could be lost in transmission.

Of course I could be misremembering that.

 

[Kirkhill]

Referencing my previous - one of the reasons for the abysmal efficiency of the nuclear plants was NIMBY. If nuclear power plants were built in back yards then they could be used as Combined Heat and Power plants and their transmission losses would approach zero. They efficiency would rise towards the 90% plus levels.

If thorium in the back yard is too much for you then making your own power on site from natural gas and a 1-2 kW CHP would get you pretty much to the same levels of efficiency. And gas supply is much more stable than electrical supply when the weather turns nasty.

And, when all else fails, you can always get into your gasoline or diesel powered truck to keep warm and stay informed with the radio or drive to some place warm and safe.

None of that applies if you are relying on a bureaucrat to manage the maintenance schedule of a centralized power grid.


Meanwhile some additional thoughts on electric cars...

How a growing ‘Energy Gap’ threatens Britain’s future​

Our continued dependence on unreliable energy risks a catastrophic societal breakdown
ANDREW ORLOWSKI25 September 2023 • 11:00am


Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's new net zero targets will be irrelevant if there's not enough energy CREDIT: POOL/via REUTERS
Two cheers for Rishi Sunak for having the courage to push back on some climate deadlines last week. But the dates he juggles are almost irrelevant. A cliff edge is approaching, and beyond it, a chasm that will devour whoever is in power. This is Britain’s Energy Gap, which is already here, and is getting wider every day.
The Gap is easy to understand – it’s the difference between supply and demand. Western societies have committed themselves to the electrification of transport and heating, but without actually providing sufficient electricity to achieve this goal. The size of the gap is contentious. It will be twice as much electricity by 2050 than we make or use today, according to the British Energy Security Strategy.
But nobody believes that number is realistic: in reality, we’ll need much more. Electrifying home heating, transport, and industry and commerce, requires around “four times” more power than we make and use today, a minister acknowledged in January 2022.
The Energy Gap is more than a cost or an inconvenience, but an existential threat to our national security and social stability. The more we depend on unreliable energy, the higher the risk of a catastrophic societal breakdown if the grid fails us.

When demand exceeds supply, the electricity grid collapses, and the consequences of that are very serious indeed. Food can’t reach the supermarkets, because petrol stations can’t pump diesel – let alone charge an EV. People freeze in their homes. Thousands of water pumping stations have no backup power. Without clean water, disease can break out. And don’t expect Britain’s creaking water infrastructure to keep working when it can’t cope with a heavy rain shower today.
This nightmare will most likely happen in deepest midwinter, during those beautiful, clear, calm lulls that the Germans have a word for – a dunkelflaute. That’s when an anticyclone settles upon us, and the wind doesn’t blow.
Last winter, one such a spell lasted over a fortnight, during which time the British mainland saw almost no wattage returned from its costly investments in onshore wind: the wind didn’t move the air fast enough to turn their blades. Not many more of our offshore facilities reached the required speed, either, although a few did.
The Gap is here today, the National Grid confirms. Today, we need over 60GW of electricity at peak demand, with much of our home heating and transportation using dependable hydrocarbons instead. But even so, the Grid acknowledges we can’t meet demand as it is.
The Grid then has to fall back on what it calls “operational tools”, of which “Demand Flexibility Service” is the most ominous. We already rely on other countries to sell us their surplus, at a pretty price, via interconnectors. Now imagine what happens when the anticyclone becalms Europe. Then no country could afford to export energy, and the entire continent grinds to a halt.

Surely all the clever people in charge have thought of all this? If only. Simple calculations, using existing official utilisation figures and assuming no population growth, suggest that switching cars over to batteries will require over 80GW of additional electricity. That’s assuming the size of the nation’s fleet remains the same.
Add in around 50GW more to keep HGVs and large vans moving. (I haven’t counted small vans, which make more journeys than ever). On top of that, UCL researchers reckon an additional 70GW will be needed at peak times to get us through a cold winter like 2010 using heat pumps.
Alas, we’re closing nuclear power stations faster than we‘re building them. So the paltry “24 GW [more] by 2050” that the Security Strategy blithely predicts falls short by about 90 per cent. What about batteries, you wonder – surely there must be a Plan B? Alas, our largest battery backup facility can power 300,000 households for just two hours. That’s not much use for Britain’s other 28 million homes.

What’s remarkable about the Energy Gap is how so many people in authority have been able to ignore it for so long – either by fudging reality, or pretending it doesn’t exist at all. In July, the Grid published its latest Future Energy Scenarios (FES), which made an attempt to square the circle.
It does so by predicting we will use much less energy than we do today: up to 52 per cent less. As energy expert and blogger David Turver points out, no Western society has achieved this or would want to. Nor does the Grid doesn’t explain how this will be achieved.
I’m not the first to warn about the looming societal breakdown, or even write about it. Researcher James McSweeney raised it in The Critic, suggesting it will arrive in 2035. It may be even sooner than that.
“No one has the courage to look people in the eye and explain what that involves,” said Rishi Sunak in his speech last week. I fear that as a storyteller, he has barely begun on such a journey.
But he should take heart that both Germany and Sweden have embarked on emergency expansions of hydrocarbons and nuclear – while still swearing loyalty to net zero targets. Those pledges, like those sacred targets, don’t mean anything any more.

 

[lenaitch]

^^ At megawatts of output, that's a lot of back yards to be near.

 

[KJK]

Do they help themselves? AB just blocked a bunch of renewable electricity investment.

In business you always have to be looking at the future and at replacing your own products with something better.

Governments are really bad at The Future.

This is incorrect. The government absolutely did the right thing here. The main reasons they paused were lack of transmission capacity and frequency issues.

If you look at the AESO website for the last few weeks you will see the cost of constraint on some days was well over $100,000 to either pay the already heavily subsidized wind and solar producers not to produce or pay for transmission line losses. These charges get added to all electric bills. This is because the so called 'renewables' are mostly built in the southern part of the province and on days when there is significant wind and solar production the transmission lines to the middle part of the province can't handle the power.

Also noted on the AESO website - frequency excursion issues are becoming more common due increased wind power production. One of the windmill's little secrets is they produce very dirty, erratic power. Any time there is more than 10% wind power in the grid the grid controllers start having issues. Gaining or loosing .5Hz on a 60 Hz system doesn't sound like much but it can have really bad consequences. When you have significant frequency issues you start to run the risk of tripping the steam, cogen and combined cycle plants. If you were to trip a couple of them it would likely cascade to a large number of the other plants leading to rolling brownouts/blackouts and that wouldn't be good. The customers would be very upset.

As for replacing existing products with something better the so called renewables are garbage power. If it wasn't for subsidies no one would build this unreliable trash and no one in their right mind would try to replace solid reliable coal/nat gas/nuclear with it unless of course the goal was to have no reliable power at all. Maybe you are ok with unreliable power, I and most of the rest of AB are not.

 

[Eaglelord17]

My cousin works as a windfarm mechanic. One of the issues they don’t tell the public is the windmills don’t have a particularly long lifespan (average 15-20 years).

They are miserable to maintain, require maintenance at least every 6 months, and decommissioning costs are high just as construction costs are high.

Its like electric cars, everyone believes they are ‘green’ because they have been told they are. In reality what is ‘green’ about them? The batteries? The electricity used to power them?

Your average car has a 180,000 mile lifespan. Your average electric car when you do a cradle to grave study on it only beats the gas car after 120,000 miles for being more ‘green’. This is due to the much higher environmental impact of making a electric car, specifically the batteries. If you have to change out the battery once in the life span of that electric car it no longer is more environmentally friendly and is now a net negative.

So why do we push them so hard if we can prove they aren’t as effective unless there is underlying political reasons? Just some food for thought.