Solar and wind produce more electricity than nuclear for first time in US

[Caribbeans]

A 200MW solar project in Texas. Image: Duke Energy.

Solar and wind produce more electricity than nuclear for first time in US

PV-Tech.org | By Jules Scully | July 7, 2022

Solar and wind installations in the US generated more electricity than the country’s nuclear power plants for the first time in April.

That is according to analysis of US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data carried out by research organisation SUN DAY Campaign, revealing that solar and wind produced 18% more electricity than nuclear in April.

During the month, renewables accounted for 29.3% of all US electrical generation – an all-time high...

...The news follows research published last week by energy major bp that showed solar and wind provided more than 10% of global power for the first time last year...more
https://www.pv-tech.org/solar-and-wind-produce-more-electricity-than-nuclear-for-first-time-in-us/

[NNadir]

1. Lest anyone think that the solar and wind scam was about anything else.

Thanks for confirming the obvious point that the scam was always and totally about phasing out the only reliable system of climate change gas free energy available to humanity and that it was always completely indifferent to climate change.

The results of this awful bout of stupidity are in:


Week beginning on June 26, 2022: 420.31 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.14 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.36 ppm
Last updated: July 7, 2022

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

The contempt for the environment that the solar/wind/gas/coal industry for the destruction of the planetary atmosphere will be recorded in history. It won't be pretty,.

[Caribbeans]

2. DU's Own Dale Carnegie!

Hard to believe Nuclear Energy isn't more popular with spokespeople like this on the case.

It's so uplifting reading these angry, arrogant, condescending screeds.

The contempt for the environment that the solar/wind/gas/coal industry for the destruction of the planetary atmosphere will be recorded in history. It won't be pretty,.

Who the F needs Russians, Chinese, Koreans or any other of the bad boys of the week when Americans hate themselves so f'n much they can't even discuss anything anymore. It's actually embarrassing beyond belief.


*For those under 65, Dale Carnegie once wrote a book around a hundred years ago called "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and it was supposedly very popular. But obviously not popular enough.

[NNadir]

4. Anyone who requires that they can only learn facts from people who are nice to them is a fool.

I have learned quite a bit from people I considered obnoxious, but I'm not quite as self-absorbed as some others. Facts are facts, and how one states them will not make them less true.

I hear this nonsense a lot, because I'm not inclined to be saccharine in inappropriate settings. I use this analogy every time I hear it. A person sees a man standing on a track with a train rushing at him and yells, "Hey you fucking asshole, get off the track! A train's coming!" and the guy on the track says, "Ask me nicely and I'll do it."

Now in the analogy, the fool is killing himself. In the broader case, people cheering for so called "renewable energy" are killing more than themselves.

The solar/wind/gas/coal/petroleum scam is killing the planet. We spent trillions of dollars on solar and wind and the rate of accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel accumulations are rising, not falling. In 2000 that rate was roughly 1.5 ppm/year. Now it's 2.45 ppm/year. For this entire century, anti-nukes advocates of so called "renewable energy" have been crowing over their "success."

I'm not inclined to indulge people cheering for this outcome with the same tiresome rhetoric and be all sweet and indulgent. I don't cheer for delusional people at all. I don't indulge Trumpers; I don't indulge anti-vaxxers and I don't indulge anti-nukes. To my way of thinking they are all equivalent.

Why am I so angry? Oh I don't know...

Maybe I give a shit that scientific journals are reporting, as I noted yesterday, Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths. The original source for that post was the prominent Journal of the AAAS, Science. I also linked the original paper in Nature Medicine. Nature published another news item recently as well: Extreme heat already claims lives in Latin American cities — and the toll is set to rise. This is going on while whiny brats carry on about Three Mile Island.

Excuse me if these unnecessary deaths don't make me all giggly and cute when I hear recycled bullshit about hydrogen buses and other bourgeois chanted bullshit.

"Renewable energy" heaven, Germany, is burning coal continuously; they don't stop; they can't get enough of that poison to burn. Oh, and they shut their nuclear plants in a paean to fear and ignorance.

I'm not a child; I'm a grown up, not someone watching cartoons and confusing them with reality.

I know what I see when I see the picture in the OP. I see a huge stretch of land squandered to produce trivial amounts of energy, as much as could be produced in a few liters of nuclear fuel. I see this energy being produced on a vast stretch of land irregularly and unreliably, with the requirement for redundant dangerous fossil fuel systems. I see a pile of semiconductors that will be electronic waste in 20 years. I see chemical reactors 5 stories high filled with silicon halides by the thousands. I see children digging cobalt in central Africa, quite possibly under extreme temperatures, to make batteries to try to put a band aid - one that won't work - on this unreliable junk. I see people dying from extreme heat when the power fails. I see toxic leachates spread all over the world because people can't think, can't understand the relationship between energy density and sustainability.

Other people, see anti-nuke heaven. I'm not going to pretend I have use for these people. I don't.

Nuclear energy saves lives; it follows that anti-nukes kill people.

The data supporting these statements can be found here: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

This highly cited and highly read paper is open sourced. Anyone can read it. The data therein is irrefutable in my view.

Now if someone wants to go off and sing Kumbaya while the fucking planet burns - and it is burning - and carry on about hydrogen filling stations for their stupid automobiles, I'm not going to be able to stop them from doing it. My experience is that people can't be talked out their fondness for ignorance and wishful thinking. If they could be, we wouldn't be looking at concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide of over 420 ppm, less than ten years after we first saw concentrations over 400 ppm. But we are seeing readings over 420 ppm. At this rate, we'll be looking at 450 ppm in 12 years.

I'll probably be dead by that time, but regrettably, I will bear in history the shame of my generation of benighted, distracted, bourgeois assholes.

Have a lovely, wonderful evening.

[Finishline42]

5. DQIIIIIIII is just a nuke pumper that refuses to acknowledge the facts about

Nuclear energy.

According to the World Energy Outlook 2021 output by nuclear was (units in EJ)

2010 30.1
2020 29.4 (slight decrease)
2030 34.0 (est of course)

Wind and Solar

2010 2.0
2020 10.4
2030 30.3 (again estimated)

I'm pretty sure the IEA have vastly under estimated the expansion of wind and solar. Check back to 2015 and see if any of their estimates are close to 10 EJ. One of the main reasons is the continued reductions in cost, economies of scale.

Another factor in the 500% increase of wind and solar from 2010 to 2020 is there are an abundant number of manufacturers of wind mills and solar panels. The can't be said for the construction of nuclear power plants - they are constantly going up in price that is if you can find a company that can finish one...

[Finishline42]

3. Remember the thread you started about our inability to complete complex projects?

Due to a number of factors - many have to do with the quality of highly technical construction firms.

What about our ability to operate highly technical power plants? Don't the same factors come into play here? Who wants to start a career in a dead-end industry???

I had a customer that was starting a machine shop whose main job was working in a power plant. He started talking about everything they had to do to balance the loads on the grid - way more complex than I had imagined. Certainly a job many levels above Homer Simpson (it was a coal fired plant BTW).

I am not anti-nuke. Don't have to be, the nuclear industry is it's own worst enemy. Shoddy construction that causes delays and billion$ in added cost.

The US nuclear fleet is mostly run by for profit utilities (TVA is non-profit). They can't make a profit so they shut them down. The protesters are background noise. Renewables didn't stop nuclear from expanding, 1st it was cheap coal then natural gas. Wind and solar just piled on.