This is yet more American exceptionalism as to why it can't possibly be done in America when other countries manage it fine.
Here's a double-height electrified freight corridor in India. It runs about 1000 miles with trains up to 15,000 tonnes.
The efficiencies of electric traction vs diesel traction make it a winner economically in the long run, but it requires up front investment that the private owners in the US don't want to commit.
At this point, anyone using excel for anything db related and critical deserves whatever they get.
It's been DECADES dealing with that clusterfuck nightmare. I have no sympathy.
As I said in another comment, it isn't that they're choosing to use excel, it's that the data is circulated in csv format, double clicking on a csv file in Windows will open in excel by default, modify one or two values, save, close, and now you have a silently corrupted csv file.
Why would you use excel for such data in a first place? There are so many other methods doing that better. Even CSV seems to me like a better option, not to mention something like HDF5.
It isn't that they're choosing to use excel, it's that the data is circulated in csv format, double clicking on a csv file in Windows will open in excel by default, modify one or two values, save, close, and now you have a silently corrupted csv file.
The thing is, you're both right. Energy, in all its forms, is 49.1% oil and gas from yor own figures (36.3% oil and 12.8% gas). Electricity, aka "power", is of course much greener.
This basically goes to show how unbelieveably addicted we are to fossil fuels as a planet.
Even a country with an electricity grid as green as Switzerland's still has at least half of its energy coming from fossil fuels (I'm not sure what's in the 17% of "Other").
The planet doesn't care whether this was imported, produced domestically, burned in a car, or burned in a power station. It's all the same carbon dioxide.
Peak is much closer to 50GW than 40GW. The templar site has daily averages over the last year. Gridwatch is better for peaks.
Peaks in recent years were:
Lots of your assumptions about past installations matching future installations aren't accurate. Newer installations use higher-power turbines, which are taller and have higher capacity factors. You suggest 50GW (nameplate) would be 20,000 turbines. This is only 2.5MW/turbine, but newer turbines are far larger. Hornsea Two, currently under construction, is using 165 x 8MW turbines, with turbines up to 12MW being propsed for Hornsea 3. This could be as few as 4-6 thousand turbines, not a huge increase over the already installed 11,000 that you cite.
I appreciate that there are significant challenges in the market, but it's nowhere near as impossible as you seem to be making it out.
Which produce somewhere between 5% and 10% total consumption
It's about 40% so far in 2022 (source), rising year on year.
and made their grid far less stable
Germany has the second most stable grid in Europe, with an average of 12 minutes of outage per year (source), and is improving in stability over time. Compare that with the US, for example, with nearly 6 hours of outage per year (source).
Althout there are addons like i-don't-care-about-cookies or similar (mentioned by other commenters), these just accepts cookies - hardly an ideal position from a privacy stand-point.
Much better is the Consent-O-Matic addon (also available for Chrome I think). It allows you to customise which categories you want to accept or reject and tries to apply that to standard cookie layouts that are common across multiple sites.
It's maintained by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and until there's an industry-wide mandated API I think it's the best we'll get.
A nice follow-on calculation is cost per kWh.
Assuming a capacity factor of 0.9 over the 60 year plant lifetime, this is:
£35bn / (60 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 470MW * 0.9) = £0.157/kWh
In comparison, the strike price agreed for the new nuclear power station currently under construction in the UK (Hinkley C), was £89.50/MWh, or £0.0895/kWh.
This makes the SMRs almost twice the price, assuming all the earlier assumptions about cost-overruns hold true. If Rolls Royce produce the reactors for the price quoted, the ultimate price is £0.04/kWh. This is much more competitive.
If validated, the test could enable cancer patients to be identified earlier, when they are more likely to respond to treatment, and help flag up who could benefit from early access to drugs designed to tackle metastatic cancer.
I'm not sure why you converted a cord into litres
Because it's a volume and I don't understand imperial units. Volumes are measured in litres (at least for me), and this can immediately be converted to other units in my head e.g. 3500 litres is 3.5 cubic metres = 3.5m x 1m x 1m. I'm sure you're very familiar with all your imperial units - just don't expect those outside the USA to keep up!
Definitely true. New houses are typically a minimum of 100 sq.m with 1-2 bed homes being as small as 50 sq.m (reference). This is considerably below the ONS average size I quoted above. Admittedly though, new houses aren't built with chimneys so storage of wood is unlikely to be an issue!
Granted, this takes up a bit of space, but not as much as you might think
Some perspective from a UK point of view. I had to look up cord, but for reference for others, it's just over 3,500 litres. If you're storing up to 3 cords, that's around 10,000 litres. That's an enormous volume of stuff to keep about a UK house.
With an average garden size of 188 square metres, the average person would have to dedicate over 5% of their land to the stacking and storing of wood - and that's just for "the nasty evenings in winter"!
Here's a chart showing the UK's coal use. It's 9 months out of date, but it's super pretty: https://www.reddit.com/r/datai...
And here's the original of that figure, It's made by Niko Kommenda who does graphical work for the Guardian. It's live so shows all the up-to-date developments.
It's surprising how much power is used by a nuclear plant's systems. The status page for the UK's nuclear fleet gives some indications.
In summary, a planned shutdown (i.e. minimum requirement for a reactor) is about 14-16MW, and unplanned shutdowns (e.g. some types of trip) can have consumptions up to 30-40MW. I'd be suprised if this can be generated on-site without dedicated generators - something that would be uneconomical for all plants to have, even in a more heavily regulated system like the UK's.
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.
