Renewable energy is a good idea but not the total answer to energy and climate concerns. Renewable energy is intermittent, unreliable. This cannot be argued.
There are so many details that have to be considered to have what so many think is the answer to so many power problems. There are so many facets to creating and delivering power. What is most available, what is clean, what isn’t, where is it, and how can it be delivered to specified locations? Current transmission systems are not set up for the huge growing need/demand for electricity. It’s going to take a lot of time, money, difficulties to overcome, agreements to make, physics, environmental issues, health issues, safety issues, on and on to establish a hope, a dream that will not be easy to accomplish and take a long time to realize.
Power is not just produced then sent out without a huge amount of planning. Wherever the power is to be delivered, the frequency, the voltage, needs to be determined and equal with the direction and location the power is being directed.
In the case of renewable energy, the infrastructure does not have longevity. Much of the aging structures have to be replaced in a few years, creating huge landfills and hazardous waste dumps. Nothing about creating and maintaining power sources is easy, or without many difficult and complicated issues to overcome.
There’s no reason to close Diablo Canyon other than the fossil fuel industry wants the whole pie—not just a portion of the revenue for supplying power. It’s a clear dichotomy to want to shut down a proven 24/7 supply of clean energy and replace it with unclean energy, when the issue is to supply as much clean energy as possible to correct the climate concerns.
With all that said there will be more emissions created to establish this huge energy endeavor than can be avoided.
Ellie Ripley
Arroyo Grande
This article appears in Best Of SLO County 2023.
Ms. Ripley is correct. The problem is complicated and requires a lot of pragmatism. Unfortunately, like many issues, it has often been reduced to facile slogans, glib rhetoric and “belief”, instead of applying hard pragmatic consideration. This often produces curious results. For example, nuclear power has been demonized for so many years that for many opposition is instinctive, and unyielding to other concerns. Thus, we have some who purport to be concerned about carbon and climate change improbably insisting that the carbon-free source of nearly 10% of California’s power be shut down, and replaced with fossil fuel generated power. They have been conditioned for so long to their monomaniacal opposition to nuclear power, that they are unable to adapt to changing circumstances.
So, your solution is to build more nuclear power plants? That’s a mistake that even the French are beginning to admit. France is currently in the process of closing 14 nuclear plants and hopes to reduce the amount of energy they get from nuclear over the next few years by increasing renewable.
Renewable energy is the future. We need to embrace it (rather than “White Pride”), and not continue to wring our hands about how our nation will suffer if we wean ourselves off of oil. To the contrary, the elimination of oil is primary to the future health of this nation. We obviously have challenges, but these can be met if we all row in the same direction. Unfortunately, judging by your letter, that isn’t the case.
Mike: “White pride”? Really? The issue is nuclear power. Are you liberals capable of discussing ANY subject, no matter how removed from race, without calling the opposition “racists”?
Germany is regretting having shut down all of their plants, after the Ukrainian invasion and Russia having eliminated the cheap Russian gas they relied up. While they are currently have a respite due to warmer weather, things will again get pretty desperate next Fall if the war is not resolved. Japan is reopening some of the nuclear plants they shut down after the Fukishima disaster. France probably felt pretty smug last Winter having their nuclear plants still operating.
Of course renewables are the future, but we are still ruled by the limitations of science and engineering. A suitable renewable replace to fossil fuel still is not available, as solar and wind are not available 24/7, and we do not have the technology to store the immense amounts of power required for extended periods. At the moment, nuclear is the “least bad” alternative.
John, rather than arguing with you, I would point you to these resources that explode your myths that the technology is not there and that renewable is unreliable. I believe these are more than reliable resources, but probably won’t be acknowledged by Fox News where I assume you get most of your information judging by your comments to this blog.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths…
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean…
https://spectrum.ieee.org/an-energystoring…
Michael, since you are in my lane let me destroy your Yale resource. Myth#1 quote about reliability: “The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). ”
I’m sorry that measurement doesn’t apply to generation, but it is creative sophistry. SAIDI is primarily a distribution system metric at the mercy of distribution radial feeds with open back-tie reclosers or switches. SAIDI measures interruption minutes at the customer meter off a 4, 12, or 21kV circuit that can be located a half dozen substations and transformed through 4 different levels of transformers from the nearest transmission level generation source. Generators over 10MWs feed into transmission substations or switching stations (no transformers) that operate in loops with multiple feeds. So, Generator Availability is the metric used for generators. Generators can trip or schedule outages and it never affects SAIDI if the adjacent substation to the CoGen has multiple feeds and meters keep spinning.
So, once you remove the smoke of either intentional or unintentionally deception of that article you have your common sense or intuition that tells you want large rotating mass generators with inertia humming at 60Hz on the grid to survive misoperation of protection relays on out of line section faults. Additionally, you should be skeptical that crackly sounding solid-state thyristors, DC-to-AC windfarm converters, solar farm line and bus protection and transmission level batteries protection might false trip on nearby phase-to-phase transmission line faults without the large rotating mass generators (+200MW) giving stability.
What improves SAIDI? Smart grid/FLISR back-tie switching after computer fault interrogation, troubleman response time, crew response time, and crew repair time. Then, there’s a demographic component to where if you have more meters installed because of high density urban areas the troubleman patrol time is cut down dramatically per customer (if adequately staffed). Then there’s creative accounting with Major Event Days/MED where outage analysts petition the CPUC to segregate storm and PSPS minutes from a regions CAIDI which is why there is a SAIDI with MED and SAIDI without MED.
Mike, the Yale piece, with all its impressive tap dancing, facts and figures, still did not address the problem of what do we use for power during the roughly half or more of the time when the sun is not shining, and the wind is either calm or inadequate. The Yale piece mainly addressed reliability, not supply, and made only a passing reference to the storage issue. Until we develop a practical way to store the massive amounts of power needed when renewable sources are not available, we will need with nuclear or fossil fuel sources.
Ok, Scott Moore (I wonder what doctorate he holds) and John Donegan, who gets his information from Fox News, are going to dispute the scientists from Yale University, you know, that Yale, an Ivy League school, where 52 Nobel Prizes have been won.
Sure.
Gee, Mike, I know you revere the scientists at Yale, but if you had read the piece a little more thoroughly, you would have noticed that they didn’t actually address the issue of the source of renewable energy at night or in calm whether. Instead, they just prattled on and on about reliability, which wasn’t really the issue. But, I suppose your steady diet of CNN, and MSNBC cheerleading doesn’t mention details like that.
Battery storage. What else? Do you really think America is that far behind on this stuff? It is happening as we speak. It will take another 30 years, but this nation will use totally renewable energy by the middle of this century. Argue against it all you want, but 69% of Americans believe we need to transition from fossil fuels.
So we shut down Diablo and rely on fossil fuel for the next 30 or so years while workable battery storage is being invented, developed and implemented? I keep hearing that we are already at the tipping point, and need to act now, not in 30 years.
Michael, since you didn’t bother to research the bio’s and operating experience of those two Yale guys, I did. The older Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) has an emission agenda and the younger Ramana (now Princeton) is a nuclear advocate. Neither have spent 1 hour operating the electric system via SCADA or restoring customers after an outage as I have. Neither have set CAIDI metric goals for multiple departments as I have. Regional CAIDI goals are important during department management employee ranking. Yearly SAIDI attainment affects management STIP bonuses, and I can assure you when it affects your pay you know those metrics inside and out. A transmission customer is counted as 1 single customer just like your own residential account, so transmission minutes don’t add up to much compared to distribution minutes affecting multiple customers. Residential outages are usually at the fuse level with a dozen customers, the recloser/sectionalizer level with up to 1,000 customers or back at the substation feeder with up to 7,000 customers on a circuit. Whole substation outages which can contribute to excessive customer minutes but generally aren’t due to generation tripping off-line, but more a function of multiple transmission line outages. If you want to meet to assess my credentials, let me know.