I've seen both the docudrama and the documentary. The Chernobyl disaster was a case of cascading incompetence—beginning with the design, and ending with the near lunatic fecklessness of management under a communist system…….all in the name of being willing to kill thousands as the price of keeping the party from looking bad. But, from the outset, it was an inferior design that should have never been approved for construction.philip964 wrote: ↑Thu May 06, 2021 4:34 pm Chernobyl melt down was during a safety test to see if they could safely shut down the plant using the inertia of the rotating turbine. They couldn't. If you haven't seen the HBO docudrama, I would recommend it.
They make these relatively small generators that are used only during peak demand. Apparently they are owned by investors waiting for peak demand, so they can get top dollar for the electricity. One investor here in town reported that he made $400,000 just Friday morning after the crisis was over but the PUC still kept the rate at $9 a Kwh.
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Return to “TX: all our wind turbines are obsolete”
- Thu May 06, 2021 6:12 pm
- Forum: Off-Topic
- Topic: TX: all our wind turbines are obsolete
- Replies: 24
- Views: 5981
Re: TX: all our wind turbines are obsolete
- Thu May 06, 2021 8:25 am
- Forum: Off-Topic
- Topic: TX: all our wind turbines are obsolete
- Replies: 24
- Views: 5981
Re: TX: all our wind turbines are obsolete
A few weeks ago, I ran across this video from the Practical Engineering YouTube channel, on the failure of the Texas power grid this winter. He appears to address the issue free of any particular ideology, and sticks merely to the facts of what happened and an engineering analysis of it. It’s instructive.
At 5min/25sec or so, he begins explaining the timeline and why the failure happened. At 7min/30sec, there’s a brief discussion of what percentages of Texas's power come from each type of generation source, and how various failures in delivery contributed to the total collapse. (I don’t really give a cup of warm spit about how California or Massachusetts allocate theirs.) It was instructive to me to see that only something like 4.7% of Ercot's generation is nuclear. More than 3/4 of it is from wind and natural gas, with wind providing 28.8% and natural gas 47.5% respectively of our generation capacity.
It’s true that nobody wants a nuke plant in their back yard, but decommissioning them without replacing them is extremely short sighted. If we continue to rely on what has proven to be UNreliable wind energy and natural gas delivery, then we can only continue to look forward to more future grid collapse events due to extremes of weather—particularly as our population grows with people moving in from more badly governed states.
Building nuclear plants does come with its own set of problems, but it seems to me that nuclear is the most cost efficient AND reliable energy delivery there is….and we need to exploit that.
At 5min/25sec or so, he begins explaining the timeline and why the failure happened. At 7min/30sec, there’s a brief discussion of what percentages of Texas's power come from each type of generation source, and how various failures in delivery contributed to the total collapse. (I don’t really give a cup of warm spit about how California or Massachusetts allocate theirs.) It was instructive to me to see that only something like 4.7% of Ercot's generation is nuclear. More than 3/4 of it is from wind and natural gas, with wind providing 28.8% and natural gas 47.5% respectively of our generation capacity.
It’s true that nobody wants a nuke plant in their back yard, but decommissioning them without replacing them is extremely short sighted. If we continue to rely on what has proven to be UNreliable wind energy and natural gas delivery, then we can only continue to look forward to more future grid collapse events due to extremes of weather—particularly as our population grows with people moving in from more badly governed states.
Building nuclear plants does come with its own set of problems, but it seems to me that nuclear is the most cost efficient AND reliable energy delivery there is….and we need to exploit that.