"john" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote in message news:...
"john" wrote in message
news:3sadnWG6lrfCDe7UnZ2dnUVZ_hmdnZ2d@giganews. com...
snip
This one nuke plant dwarfs the output of all the windmill generation
systems in the whole country.
19,046,000 megawatt-hour facility vs 26.6 billion kWh per year
http://www.pplweb.com/ppl+generation...fact+sheet.htm
Uh, John, you've got generating capacity rates and Watt-hours a bit mixed
up. The PPL Susquehanna nuke plant is a 2.4 MW facility. The installed
wind power capacity in the US is 22.0 MW -- almost ten times as much as
PPL's nuke. PPL produces 19.0 terawatt-hours of energy per year from that
plant. Wind energy produced in the US is 48 TWh per year -- 2-1/2 times
as much as PPL's nuke, and roughly 2,000 times as much as you state
above.
Ugh. I hate this giga, mega, tera business. Anyway. all of those
*relationships* are accurate as I stated them, but the second and third
sentences should read: " The PPL Susquehanna nuke plant is a 2.4 GW
facility. The installed wind power capacity in the US is 22.0 GW --
almost ten times as much as PPL's nuke."
There. The rest of the numbers should be right.
Itotally agree with your numnbers, thanks again.
the key word is capacity. The nuke plant can put out the capacity day
after day. Thw windmills can achieve their capacity only if the
weatherman lets them. 
according to power company in Wisconson that
has a windfarm, the expected energy delivery from a farm is only 30 to 35
% of capacity which actually still makes its output more than the PPL
plant, but then looking further into it the output comes when it's mostly
not needed, at night and this fluxuation screws up the orderly flow of
power in the grid.
Load-leveling is a problem with wind and solar, but the people who have
studied it conclude that it can supply a significant amount of power, the
amount depending on how it's implemented.
And the range of those conclusions appears to be pretty wide. Without doing
a real study of it, it appears to me that the small projects now in the
works, which generally are aimed at 5% or so of local capacity, are no
problem. Projecting into the future, they point to some systems that run
pretty well at close to 20%, where there is a good grid to work with. And
there is that study of the "wind belt" up the center of the US, which says
that if we had real long-distance distribution and a smart grid, combined
with very spread-out geographic dispersal, the system should be able to run
at 50% of the system load.
And then there is pumped storage, which seems to be mostly of use in
mountainous areas, where it's possible to work with a large head and fairly
efficient water turbines. That changes the entire equation.
All in all, my sense of it is that it's doable in the relatively modest
system percentages (maybe 5% - 20%, including solar) that are likely to
happen. So they should be implemented, IMO. Wind can be installed in a
minute fraction of the time it takes to build a nuke and get everything
running. And that renewable capacity, however small, will be a benefit to us
for a long time to come if it's economical.
None of this suggests that it's going to replace the majority of base-load
capacity. For that, the best candidate looks like nuclear fission. And I
think we should be going full-speed on those, too, with the first priority
being the development of a universal design and a streamlined approval
process. Otherwise, the up-front costs will be prohibitive, and the
implementation will be unnecessarily slow.
--
Ed Huntress