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For instance, Madrid's M40 ring road is an 80km roundtrip, and I have done that on occasion when I have driven to work, then in the evening picked up my girlfriend from work because we wanted to do some errand or other elsewhere. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
I'm open to nukes as part of the solution - I strongly suspect that if they're necessary their lack will kill more people than the safety issues ever will - but it's not clear that they are necessary.
French electric demand right now is around 500 TWh. So we're talking an increase by 20% only, a lot of it which can take place at night, as you mentioned. But a smoothing out of demand will actually make the integration of renewables easier, as the capacity to deal with intra-day changes will still be there and will be just as easily able to deal with intermittent renewable generation - it's just that gas-fired plants may work at night, to replace solar, than during the day, as a top up to nukes... Wind power
Nope, it won't (at least in the system used in the U.S.). The thermal time constants of the transformers supplying residential power is quite long, a day or so. During the day, when demand is high, they heat up. Part of designing the distribution system is to balance the heat generated during the day with the cooling available at night. If the night-time load goes up, then there's not enough cooling time, and the transformers catch on fire.
It takes a lot of coal to make gasoline Quick draw critics of the electric car often (miss their target) criticize EV's because in their words "Electric cars simply replace a tail pipe with a smokestack" The gist of their argument is that the emissions still occur, not at the tail pipe but at the electric power plant. That great observation is usually followed by the statement that 45% of our grid electricity is coal and coal is dirty thus the EV provides no net gain. (...) It is a simple fact that just the refining of gasoline requires approximately 6 kwh of electricity per gallon of gasoline. In fact electricity and natural gas cost are estimated to be 43% of the US oil refineries total expenses. If you tack on the energy required to extract and transport the oil to the refinery and then to the gas stations as well as the energy cost of the gas station, I'm sure that number jumps a few more kwh per gallon. So let's be conservative and cut the oil guys a break and say it takes 8kwh to extract, ship, refine and transport each gallon of gas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Drum roll....... It takes more electricity to drive the average gasoline car 100 miles, than it does to drive an electric car 100 miles. A gas car at the US fleet average of 21mpg will consume approximately five gallons of gasoline which took 40kwh (5 times 8)of electricity to make, to drive 100 miles. An electric car will use approximately 30 kwh of electricity (3.3 miles per kwh) to drive the same 100 miles.
Quick draw critics of the electric car often (miss their target) criticize EV's because in their words "Electric cars simply replace a tail pipe with a smokestack" The gist of their argument is that the emissions still occur, not at the tail pipe but at the electric power plant. That great observation is usually followed by the statement that 45% of our grid electricity is coal and coal is dirty thus the EV provides no net gain.
(...)
It is a simple fact that just the refining of gasoline requires approximately 6 kwh of electricity per gallon of gasoline. In fact electricity and natural gas cost are estimated to be 43% of the US oil refineries total expenses. If you tack on the energy required to extract and transport the oil to the refinery and then to the gas stations as well as the energy cost of the gas station, I'm sure that number jumps a few more kwh per gallon.
So let's be conservative and cut the oil guys a break and say it takes 8kwh to extract, ship, refine and transport each gallon of gas.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Drum roll.......
It takes more electricity to drive the average gasoline car 100 miles, than it does to drive an electric car 100 miles. A gas car at the US fleet average of 21mpg will consume approximately five gallons of gasoline which took 40kwh (5 times 8)of electricity to make, to drive 100 miles. An electric car will use approximately 30 kwh of electricity (3.3 miles per kwh) to drive the same 100 miles.
This is California and power uses may be different elsewhere, but this is still an impressive comparison... Wind power
Not specifically nukes. Any power source without huge seasonal or day-to-day variability will do. But we are going to need a lot of it.
But nukes has a somewhat unpredictable security variation which forces them to quickly go off line from time to time.
However, what matters is not the variability of the individual plant, but of the system as a whole. So lots of wind over a large area - say Europe - should do the trick, and so should lots of nukes over Europe, or lots of wind and nuke over Europe. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
so if you leave your battery disconnected after charging, it lasts longer, but you're leaching without seeding.
unless you're paid for the seeding part, or the batteries are owned by the utility...
how to work around that inconvenient truth? 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
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