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Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1) 267

You're wrong. Well, calling you are wrong and then answering: you are wrong ... leads to nothing. Wrong about what btw.?
Wind turbine output is wind speed cubed. Depends how you want to say that. Ofc. it is not speed cubed. It increases with the cube of the speed, perhaps you meant that ...
So a tiny wind speed generates a much larger % in power output. No it does not.
You have "rated" speed. For easy math we can just take 10m/sec as rated speed and assume the turbine generates 1MW at that speed.
Now you double the wind speed to 20m/sec, the wind turbine will generate 8MW.
Now imagine a "square" function graph drawn, just use a simple sheet of paper, you see from 10 to 11 and 11 to 12 etc. the "square" has no real effect, it is below "linear" increase, the huge jump is at the right side of the graph.

That's fairly trivial to handle if your grid have a lot of very powerful load following sources
Actually: every grid has that, or it simply would not work at all.
but that will make wind+solar getting over 50% of your grid production pretty much impossible without very advanced energy storage, ideally a power source that can be charged/discharged very quickly.
And that is simply wrong. The solar production you can predict EXACTLY so you know how to plan in your "conventional" plants. The wind production can also be predicted easy enough to easy let your conventional plants follow to fill the "balancing" gab. Actually all countries with a high percentage of renewables do that already.
The only problem is the "mentally" problem of wasting surplus energy, because you shut down parts of your wind farm if you really produce excess energy.
Having extra storage has only one benefit/effect: if I store energy today, I can use it tomorrow instead of a conventional plant, so I safe fuel (what ever fuel I use). The grid is otherwise completely unaffected.

Neither Denmark nor Germany built any special storage the last 20 years to cope with the grows of renewables.

The question basically is only how green you want to be and how quickly you want to jump to 100% renewables and how to invest your money. As long as legislations _allow_ you to run a coal plant, you simply have to figure yourself: is it cheaper to run the coal plant and spent the fuel, and have it shut down/powered down half of the time, or is it cheaper to build up storage and replace that plant with stored surplus energy. The decision is simply monetary ... perhaps in Basil it is different ... perhaps you already are very low on storage, and can barely manage your ordinary grid properly, no idea. Germany is not low on storage.
Bottom line the idea spread here on /. that renewables need special storage or they wont work is just bullshit.

Comment Re:Cape Wind Will Die (Score 1, Insightful) 267

Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, ... That is nonsense, also you forget the 60% 80% 100% and 200% etc. do you know what that means for the grid ? it does not mean anything for the grid.
500000 washing machines switched on around the same time ... 500000 washing machines finishing their washing, around the same time: have the exact same effect.
2million toasters, coffee machines, ovens etc. jumping on in the morning around the same time, and dropping off from the grid an hoir later: have exact the same effect.

I don't get why people who have no clue always write nonsense like this.

Again: but that is the last time for today, widn plants don't need energy storage to scale. You only need to distribute the plants like e.g. Denmark, Portugal and Germany are doing it.

The grid already has enough pumped storage to compensate for _ANY_ power source. People want storage (that means certain plant owners or grid operators) because they can not stand (mentally, emotionally) all the excess power the plants are generationg, and desperately want to store it somewhere. For the raw functionallity of the grid the storage is not needed.

Comment Re:From the linked information (Score 1) 267

In 10 years Li Ion battery storage will be cheap enough that above US$ 0.20/kWh it will be cheaper to go off grid.
You forget that the price for lithium itself barely will fall, and that refining and transportation is the main reason for the battery prices.
I really wonder why americans always think the price will approach zero if you simply built enough of the items.
I have no clue what a kWh storage in lithium costs right now, but I doubt it will be ever cheaper than half the current price ... more likely it is replaced by alternative storage technologies before that.

Also regarding your storage rants again: if you are so interested in that stuff and agitated to influence the way how power production is done in your country, why don't you look for a job in that area and LEARN how grids work? First of all you could put your energy and enthusiasm into your goal, and secondly you would realize that the storage you envision makes no sense at all.

Comment Re: bad headline (shock!) (Score 3, Interesting) 267

You are wrong about offshore wind. It does not fluctuate in the same way as wind over land. Also the term 'unreliable' is completely wrong. Wind is reliable. For that you have a weather/windforecast, that is updated every 15 mins and is used to adapt the plant and the grid for the next few hours.

Storage at a plant side makes no sense at all, for that you have a grid.

Demanding storage is just utter nonsense. No one would build a renewable plant if the plant itself would be required by law to have a fall back (be it storage, magic or a nuke plant) means of energy production.

The whole point of a power grid is that many plants together are orchestrated to provide the power for that grid.
Mandatory storage would only complicate that orchestration instead of helping.

Also, get a clue about terminology: e.g. read up what base load is. Wind plants are by definition base load, as you can not 'dispatch' them. That means: they are not load following, nor are they used for balancing (peak) power, so: they are base load plants. Hint: base load does not mean what you think it means.

Comment Re:bad headline (shock!) (Score 1) 267

A hurricane destroying such a windmill would need to be at least two times stronger than the strongest hurricane we have on records ...

I really womder why the power that wind plant is generating is so expensive. Well, profits for the company, considering how high the current power price is, likely is the reason.

Production cost of wind power per kWh is in germany meanwhile around or below coal.

Comment Re:c++? (Score 1) 407

Care to explain why C++ does not fulfill "Alan Kay's definition of OO"?
It has classes, but method dispatch is tied to the class hierarchy ... I doubt Alan Kay made any statement about that. ... so if you want to really adopt an OO style you need to use multiple inheritance and pure abstract base classes,
This is complete nonsense as it has no influence on method dispatch.

Comment Re:Climate change phobia (Score 1) 341

You are an idiot.
There is no known and no imagined natural cause that can change the climate in such a rate, with that speed and impact, as we observ it right now.
So the 'low resolution' of historical data is just fine. On top of that: the resolution is not so low as you think. Sea level changes are an extremely precise measurement.

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