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Quote from: BricktopA far more sustainable and affordable future will have some wind and solar, some fossil fuels, and a LOT of nuclear power.

Nuclear is an excellent source of energy. But, I don't see electricity powering the transportation sector. I think fossils will remain and hydrogen, fuel cells will be added.

I was going to trade in my car this year, but I didn't....in 2022 for sure..



I'm still reluctant to go full electric....hybrid perhaps.

You should be reluctant to buy an electric car. I believe something will come along in the near future and make them obsolete.  I read ten minutes ago that fuel cell drivetrain combines zero-emissions mobility with the fast refueling time that's needed for long-distance driving.



Moving forward, electric vehicles will have longer ranges thanks to advances in battery technology, but the refueling time won't be competitive with that of a hydrogen-powered model. It takes about three to five minutes to top up a hydrogen tank, and then you're set to go. That's three to five minutes, compared to four to twenty hours for electric vehicles.



Fuel cells can handle our cold climate better too.

True Dope has set limits on how many internal combustion engine vehicles can be sold in Canada. Either there will be a huge demand for second vehicles or we're going broke building infrastructure to handle an electric fleet.

There's a third option: vote out the Liberals.

An electric truck in Saskatchewan in the winter. I don't think so.

Electric vehicles in the Australian desert?



Not going to happen. People will die.

Quote from: BricktopElectric vehicles in the Australian desert?



Not going to happen. People will die.

Electric vehicles are not meant for climate extremes and remote places.

The heat will deplete the battery. Vehicles will be running cooling systems and air conditioning and draining the battery even faster. They will drain in a few hours and there won't be any recharge stations out there if you run dry. Nor will anyone come along and fill your battery by the side of the road. Electric vehicles will only suit urban environments.

Quote from: BricktopThe heat will deplete the battery. Vehicles will be running cooling systems and air conditioning and draining the battery even faster. They will drain in a few hours and there won't be any recharge stations out there if you run dry. Nor will anyone come along and fill your battery by the side of the road. Electric vehicles will only suit urban environments.

AC and heat drain their batteries fast.

Quote from: BricktopThe heat will deplete the battery. Vehicles will be running cooling systems and air conditioning and draining the battery even faster. They will drain in a few hours and there won't be any recharge stations out there if you run dry. Nor will anyone come along and fill your battery by the side of the road. Electric vehicles will only suit urban environments.

Much like wind and solar themselves, electric cars are impractical. Besides that, they use a lot more finite resources than fossils.

"A halt in investment in oil and gas is misguided," OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo said in a recorded presentation to the gathering on Wednesday. Almost $12 trillion in spending is needed between now and 2045 to ensure adequate crude and gas supplies, without which the world will see "long-term scars on energy security, affecting not only producers but also consumers."

Wind and solar are old technologies and will never be anything more than expensive virtue signalling.



The Future Of Power Generation



The current consensus on energy and climate is both unserious and incoherent. Burning fossil fuels is said to be responsible for global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions. Although nuclear power is a carbon-free energy solution, much of the public seems to be more afraid of a reactor accident than extinction by the greenhouse effect.



Solar and energy conservation have been media darlings since the energy crisis of the 1970s. President Barack Obama spent $100 billion on "green energy" in just one stimulus package. Yet there is little to show for it. World energy use is projected to grow rapidly. Solar accounts for only one percent of energy production.



Although I can't agree with his conclusions, Director Jeff Gibbs did an outstanding job of skewering solar energy in 1921's Planet of the Humans. (Michael Moore is executive producer.) Ethanol, hydrogen-powered cars, solar cells, and other supposedly renewable solutions are exposed as frauds that are dependent on fossil fuel once you scratch the surface.



Brazil's forests are being converted to sugar cane and burned as part of the ethanol scam that Goldman Sachs promotes. The manufacturing process requires a great deal of electric power. There is an amusing scene in the film where a manager explains that Iowa is the perfect location for an ethanol plant because it is near coal deposits.



The closure of a coal-powered plant in Las Vegas is hailed as a victory for solar energy. But in fact, it was replaced with two natural gas-powered facilities.



"Some [solar] panels last only ten years," a solar panel salesman told Gibbs. "I don't know that it's the solution."



Solar cells are not made of sand but mined quartz and coal, which must be melted together in a high-temperature furnace. The furnace itself is likely coal-powered. Dust buildup can dramatically cut a panel's efficiency.



The fact that solar panels can produce electricity only when the sun shines means that a backup solution is required to produce energy at night and when it's cloudy. Energy professionals call this the "intermittency" problem. Unless you are willing to tolerate outages, solar energy will never allow you to turn a fossil fuel plant off.



Even a solar energy festival had to switch to the electric power grid as soon as rain started to fall, as Gibbs shows in another amusing sequence. Cycling power up and down only increases a generator's carbon footprint. So, what's the point of installing solar cells? Well, you can get a tax credit.



While it is often assumed that adding a megawatt of renewable power means that we will need a megawatt less of coal power, a peer-reviewed international comparison study by Richard York of the University of Oregon found that there was very little substitution of this type. For example, adding solar power to an electric grid reduces the need for fossil fuel by about one-tenth of the amount added.



No country emphasizes solar and renewables more than Germany. Yet only 1.5 percent of Germany's energy is from solar and only 3.1 percent from wind, according to Gibbs.



When politicians talk about "green jobs," what they mean is that solar and renewables are more labor-intensive than other energy sources. This is not an advantage! Lower energy prices are a far better way to generate jobs.



After Gibbs has exposed one eco-scam after another, the viewer begins to wonder if any environmental initiative is actually about improving the environment. Unlike Gibbs, I don't think that the alternative to the solar energy fraud is human extinction. So, I am going to talk about nuclear power.



Nuclear power produces 20 percent of U.S. electricity, even though politics has stalled the industry's growth since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.



The 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the Soviet Union killed 51 people. Without a containment structure, all the radioactivity in the core was leaked out. Although the HBO Chernobyl drama is filled with scare talk about how it could all have been much worse, this represents a worst-case meltdown scenario.



The U.S Department of Energy recently awarded a $1.27 billion contract to X-energy to build the first of a next-generation reactor scheduled to begin operation in 2027.



X-energy's Xe-100 will be a small modular reactor powered by tristructural isotropic, or triso, particles. These particles are 0.5 mm in diameter. There are three layers of casing to protect the enriched uranium kernel from the high temperature of a reactor core. A layer of silicon carbide is sandwiched between two layers of pyrolytic carbon.



The elaborate system of rods and water cooling found in light-water reactors is dispensed with. Molten salt circulates in the core as a coolant. The use of salt allows a reactor to function at atmospheric pressure. An LWR is under 100 times atmospheric pressure. As there is no danger of a triso reactor melting down, a containment structure is not necessary.



Triso fuel is being manufactured at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and by BWX Technologies in Lynchburg, Virginia.



China is operating a 200 MWe demonstration triso reactor at Shidao Bay in Shangdong Province. This is a modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (MHTGR).



This is not the first time the Department of Energy has attempted to revive the U.S. nuclear industry by introducing an advanced reactor design. Westinghouse contracted to build two AP1000 pressurized-water reactors in Georgia in 2008. These reactors were subject to a series of delays and cost overruns. The 2011 Fukushima accident undercut support for the project. Work stalled in 2017 when Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy.



Both reactors are nonetheless scheduled to open in 2022. While these 1,100-MWe reactors implement economies of scale, the watchwords this time around are modularity and standardization.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_future_of_power_generation.html

Besides being a lot more sustainable, natural gas is a lot more able to get the job done in extreme weather.



How did Alberta survive wicked cold snap? Thanks for nothing, solar power



How close would a solar and wind-dependent power grid have come to giving us the electricity we needed during the three-week freeze in Alberta where the average temperature was -22 C from Dec. 15 to Jan. 9?



Alberta sleuth Ian Mackay, an oilfield information technology specialist in Lacombe, has the answer. Mackay scrapes data from the website of the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), a not-for-profit organization that manages and works with industry to operate the provincial power grid.



Alberta needs a supply of about 10,500 MW (megawatts) on average, said Mackay. If they are running at maximum capacity, solar can provide 736 MW and wind 2,269 MW.



Sounds impressive, right? That's about 30 per cent of Alberta's electrical power needs. But during Alberta's recent biting cold days, solar ran at just 2.64 per cent of maximum capacity, the amount each panel would produce if it operated at full efficiency around the clock each day.



As for wind, it ran at 29.5 per cent of maximum capacity.



If we had been reliant on far more solar and wind, how would we have done?



"You'd have to start with rolling blackouts or brownouts," Mackay said. "If we lost the bulk of our generation, there'd be a lot of people dying."



But, of course, good, old reliable fossil fuels came to the rescue. Alberta's gas generators, which have the capacity to produce 10,166 MW, operated at 71 per cent. Coal, which can now produce a maximum of 1,729 MW, operated at 87.5 per cent.



In total, during the three bitter weeks, gas provided 69.7 per cent of our power, coal 18.7 per cent, wind 6.4 per cent, biomass 2.7 per cent, hydro 1.6 per cent, dual fuel (coal-gas co-generation) 0.7 per cent, and solar just 0.1 per cent.



Thanks for nothing, solar power.



Mackay is a fan of solar power for some applications, just not when it comes to providing base load power, the kind needed to power a modern, prosperous consumer and industrial economy.



"I think solar is great for a lot of things," he said, mentioning its utility for camping and cabins. "I just don't think it's great for powering a province."



Mackay started to scrape power data about eight years ago to better understand how wind power impacted the power grid. Five years ago, he created a Twitter account, @ReliableAB , to publish the numbers every hour, with the tweets generated automatically.

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/david-staples-how-did-alberta-survive-wicked-cold-snap-thanks-for-nothing-solar-power

https://twitter.com/ReliableAB/status/1481772306309468160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1481772306309468160%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fedmontonjournal.com%2Fnews%2Flocal-news%2Fdavid-staples-how-did-alberta-survive-wicked-cold-snap-thanks-for-nothing-solar-power



Old school green activists like Canada's new Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault fantasize about a world powered by solar and wind energy.



But just how would that utopian green vision play out during the coldest days of the Canadian winter?



For example, how close would a solar and wind-dependent power grid have come to giving us the electricity we needed during the three-week freeze in Alberta where the average temperature was -22 C from Dec. 15 to Jan. 9?



Alberta sleuth Ian Mackay, an oilfield information technology specialist in Lacombe, has the answer. Mackay scrapes data from the website of the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), a not-for-profit organization that manages and works with industry to operate the provincial power grid.



Alberta needs a supply of about 10,500 MW (megawatts) on average, said Mackay. If they are running at maximum capacity, solar can provide 736 MW and wind 2,269 MW.



Sounds impressive, right? That's about 30 per cent of Alberta's electrical power needs. But during Alberta's recent biting cold days, solar ran at just 2.64 per cent of maximum capacity, the amount each panel would produce if it operated at full efficiency around the clock each day.



As for wind, it ran at 29.5 per cent of maximum capacity.



If we had been reliant on far more solar and wind, how would we have done?



"You'd have to start with rolling blackouts or brownouts," Mackay said. "If we lost the bulk of our generation, there'd be a lot of people dying."



But, of course, good, old reliable fossil fuels came to the rescue. Alberta's gas generators, which have the capacity to produce 10,166 MW, operated at 71 per cent. Coal, which can now produce a maximum of 1,729 MW, operated at 87.5 per cent.



In total, during the three bitter weeks, gas provided 69.7 per cent of our power, coal 18.7 per cent, wind 6.4 per cent, biomass 2.7 per cent, hydro 1.6 per cent, dual fuel (coal-gas co-generation) 0.7 per cent, and solar just 0.1 per cent.



Thanks for nothing, solar power.



Mackay is a fan of solar power for some applications, just not when it comes to providing base load power, the kind needed to power a modern, prosperous consumer and industrial economy.



"I think solar is great for a lot of things," he said, mentioning its utility for camping and cabins. "I just don't think it's great for powering a province."



Mackay started to scrape power data about eight years ago to better understand how wind power impacted the power grid. Five years ago, he created a Twitter account, @ReliableAB , to publish the numbers every hour, with the tweets generated automatically.



Government seems more attuned to what people want to hear, rather than going on facts, Mackay said, so his goal is to present a constant flow of facts for people. "They can make up their own mind and conduct some critical thinking.



"Hopefully we will get more honesty from government that way. Everything seems so lop-sided to me. We constantly hear that Alberta has the greatest opportunity for solar generation because we have as much sun here as some places in Florida. But that's obviously not true when you look at generation charts over the course of the winter. It just doesn't happen."



Wind usually averages about 38 per cent of maximum capacity, while solar averages 15 to 18 per cent, Mackay said.



Coal and gas averages fluctuate as their plants are powered up and down to make up for the unreliability of the wind blowing and the sun shining.

Quote from: seoulbroAlthough I can't agree with his conclusions, Director Jeff Gibbs did an outstanding job of skewering solar energy in 1921's Planet of the Humans.

I saw that docco. (I think it was released in 2021. Michael wasn't alive in 1921. :001_tongue: ).



It absolutely smeared renewables.



My favourite part was the massive solar farm built near an American town. When asked how many homes it would provide energy for, the town functionary said with a straight face "Around 40. Maybe."



He also went to the unveiling of a new electric car that would change the world. When the obvious question about the source of its electricity would come from, the salesman's answer was "out of your normal power outlet, of course".



Electric cars are a dead end unless and until they can travel 1000km and can recharge in around 5 minutes...preferable less.



That does not appear likely.

The only thing we know for certain about wind and solar is that they will raise the price of electricity as more corporate welfare is given to them.

I always wonder why Australia hasn't embraced solar as its core energy source.



We have vast uninhabitable desert areas that could house millions of solar panels with no impact on the ecology. Ostensibly.



So, I ponder, why hasn't our governments embraced this massive source of energy that promises so many benefits. Millions of square kilometres of arid, useless terrain soaked in sunshine 95% of the year during daylight hours. Cloud is rarely seen in that vast wasteland.



But to the best of my knowledge, there is no solar facilities anywhere in that desolate landscape.

Quote from: BricktopI always wonder why Australia hasn't embraced solar as its core energy source.



We have vast uninhabitable desert areas that could house millions of solar panels with no impact on the ecology. Ostensibly.



So, I ponder, why hasn't our governments embraced this massive source of energy that promises so many benefits. Millions of square kilometres of arid, useless terrain soaked in sunshine 95% of the year during daylight hours. Cloud is rarely seen in that vast wasteland.



But to the best of my knowledge, there is no solar facilities anywhere in that desolate landscape.

Watch this Bricktop.