Soldato
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Russia played the long game and piled Gold then BTC. US is fubar if its not careful.
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When the Gpu's prices will go down ?
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Isn't there break even if fracking $80 a barrel or more?
Think wind especially onshore is cheaper than that.
yea probably for at least 1 full year maybe even 2 it's not just GPU's, car manufactures have shortages of chips they need to manufacture cars too.
the whole semi conductor industry is way behind.
intels investing 200bn in new fabs so they don't have to rely on TSM and samsung so much
one of my suppliers is sourcing semi conductors £400 more than they used to cost as the normal supplier cant meet demand
Not in reality, no. In order to create a functional supply system using wind you need to do at least two things;
(i) Have a nameplate generating capacity dozens of times higher than your maximum peak requirements because the actual generating capacity of wind power will frequently be less than 10% of the nameplate generating capacity and will sometimes be almost nothing at all.
(ii) Have the money and infrastructure constantly available to bulk buy electricity from other countries (at whatever price they decide to charge to keep your country functional) unless your own country is huge. If it is, then you need to have the infrastructure constantly available across your entire huge country to be able to move electricity in bulk from anywhere to anywhere.
Both those things are extremely expensive both in construction costs and maintainence costs. Also in environmental impact.
In the case of countries that aren't huge (such as the UK), it also leaves you dependent on other countries for power. Which is one of the causes of the current shortage, so even doing the above (if we could afford it, which we can't) wouldn't solve the problem.
The core problem is lack of control. The only control possible over wind power generation is turning some of it off. So you can turn generation down if it would be too much but you can't turn it up when it's too little. The UK is already teetering on the very edge with the current amount of "renewables" on the grid and the unreliability and instability is already a major part of the problem. It's getting worse by the day because the remaining reliable generation is being neglected (and thus becoming increasingly likely to fail), spun up and down to try to maintain the system with too little reliable generation (which is much less efficient and thus much more expensive), kept going past the time it should have been replaced (which increases maintainence and repair costs) or simply shut down entirely. At this rate it won't be long before the UK is wholly dependent on France (which has plenty of reliable and controllable electricity generation, so it doesn't have the same problem and can create a surplus to sell to the UK at a high price) and would collapse in hours without constant support from France.
Soldato
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I would hardly call 66 million people a small nation. By land mass it isnt huge but we have one of the biggest populations in Europe.. we are actually larger than France with access to lots of wind and tidal resources being an island nation.
I don't have a solution as its like you mention slightly complicated, but surely as the pandemic hit, the reality of getting these kinds of things fast-tracked through before the s hits the fan is more than obvious. In light of the fuel hikes just hit, this is very serious and we cant depend on other nations even if it will take years to implement some more resources.
I don't have a solution as its like you mention slightly complicated, but surely as the pandemic hit, the reality of getting these kinds of things fast-tracked through before the s hits the fan is more than obvious. In light of the fuel hikes just hit, this is very serious and we cant depend on other nations even if it will take years to implement some more resources.
The context is wind power. Wind power stations aren't mounted on people. Even if they were, it would still be irrelevant because people in the same area would be exposed to the same wind. In this context, one part of what is needed is a very large physical distance between wind power stations, so large that they're located in such widely different positions that they're not in the same wind conditions. Which would require a huge country to do that within the country. A country many times the size of the UK.
Also, I didn't say that the UK is a small nation. I said it wasn't a huge nation. But now I'm saying that the UK is a small nation. 78th in the world. Not tiny, but definitely small.
Which is one of the reasons why we shouldn't be pursuing a policy based on "renewables", a policy that will make us wholly dependent on other nations (mainly France due to their reliable and controllable generation and the shorter interconnections required, possibly Norway to some extent due to their unique circumstances).
The solution isn't "slightly complicated", as you put it. The solution is non-existent. There is no possible way for the UK to have a functioning independent electricity supply based on "renewables". It can't be done with any technology that exists or even any technology that might exist in the near future.
Depends on who you read some quote $40 / 45 but majority are talking $60
No more new crypto accounts and closing down the old.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...er&utm_term=210927&utm_campaign=marketseurope
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...er&utm_term=210927&utm_campaign=marketseurope
Soldato
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Having less land mass and high population concentrations surely mean you have less of a problem moving energy than the larger countries? I also mentioned tidal.
In the context of wind power (i.e. what is being referred to here) it means you have more of a problem moving energy because you have to move it from other countries rather than from another part of your own country.
Which barely exists in reality, so I ignored it. It's mostly theoretical and it's extremely expensive and nobody knows how best to do it and it blocks essential shipping lanes. On top of that, it's not controllable. Even King **** couldn't control the tides!
[EDIT: I see that OcUK forums still embrace the Scunthorpe Problem in censorship. But worse in this case, as the censored text didn't even contain a Naughty Magic Letter Sequence as a substring. I was referring to the somewhat famous story of a king of England commanding the tide to stop coming in.]
As I said before:
Having a high population density doesn't give the UK the ability to control wind. Or tides. It's not a solution. And the problem isn't merely "slightly complicated". The only even theoretically possible solution at the moment is massive overcapacity in wind and solar on a unified transnational electrical grid which is at least continent sized. Which isn't politically feasible and which isn't affordable either. Also, obviously, it would increase dependency on other countries. Which you explicitly ruled out:
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But this all started with the comment that fraking is an answer.
Yes, both wind and to a lesser extend pv are unpredictable, so storage when there is a surplus has to be part of the solution. Hydro storage dams would add a fair bit of cost, but since onshore wind has cheapest cost per mWh it seems worth investing in as it doesn't require importing fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom
As for not being politically feasible, that is a problem. It seems that NIMBY's object to onshore wind, storage hydro so that they can drive their 4x4 in the countryside they are used to.
Onshore wind can be nearly half the cost of offshore but there is very little onshore in the UK. People have convinced themselves hills without forest are natural and that hill farming and things like the Downs are somehow natural whereas most of those areas before humans came to these islands would have been forested.
Yes, both wind and to a lesser extend pv are unpredictable, so storage when there is a surplus has to be part of the solution. Hydro storage dams would add a fair bit of cost, but since onshore wind has cheapest cost per mWh it seems worth investing in as it doesn't require importing fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom
As for not being politically feasible, that is a problem. It seems that NIMBY's object to onshore wind, storage hydro so that they can drive their 4x4 in the countryside they are used to.
Onshore wind can be nearly half the cost of offshore but there is very little onshore in the UK. People have convinced themselves hills without forest are natural and that hill farming and things like the Downs are somehow natural whereas most of those areas before humans came to these islands would have been forested.
Nuclear is the answer.
The amount of energy required to sustain a country requires a lot of alternative that simply isn't viable today.
They may be one day but once oil goes empty which will happen then you need to change the society to alter their lifestyle.
Today your not willing to do that even when global warming is going to be horrible and kill people.
Prices for a gpu card will go down when mining isnt popular aka worth it.
If mining wasn't an issue (draws energy btw) then we had enough cards in shops so prices would go down.
I wait for next generation cards next year, a 128bus card and 6900xt performance seems like a nice deal and hopefully mining has drop off a bit then
Soldato
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I have mentioned this in a couple of other threads and because it goes against some narrative the debaters miss the point. We have been able to use it for ages, we even commission our own Submarines to have them (nuclear reactors)! Thing is the government has not invested properly and as others have mentioned we end up importing energy or even tendering out the work to overseas outfits.
This should have been signed off twenty years back so one or two plants were online about now. They are 'building' a plant still (Hinkley) not sure how much power its going to provide but they also need to invest heavily in renewables to prop up the nuclear and phase into green as best they can.
If our government was sensible it'd be investing in SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) which are based on nuclear submarine plants, and can be made on a production line.
We should also be investing in thorium reactor research. These are called 'LFTR' or 'Lifters' for Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors, and have the advantage that they are passively safe (any power failure and the liquid fuel drains automatically into storage tanks to cool). They can't be used to produce weapons grade isotopes, and can even be used to burn nuclear waste. Thorium is also very abundant - there's enough for centuries of use.
But the time to invest in these was 5 or 10 years ago...
We should also be investing in thorium reactor research. These are called 'LFTR' or 'Lifters' for Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors, and have the advantage that they are passively safe (any power failure and the liquid fuel drains automatically into storage tanks to cool). They can't be used to produce weapons grade isotopes, and can even be used to burn nuclear waste. Thorium is also very abundant - there's enough for centuries of use.
But the time to invest in these was 5 or 10 years ago...
One of the biggest problem with nuclear has always been that it is so tied to the military and the secret state who often saw civilian nuclear as a by-product of weapons use. (Partially why they don't believe Iran's claim to pursuing only civilian nuclear.)
So process cycles which produce none or very little weapons grade were sidelines. Theoretical Thorium cycles have been known for decades, but I can well imagine how proposals went down in the 1960s:
"We've come up with a cycle which produces far less waste and could possible even eat some the waste we already have. Isn't that great"
"Yes, brilliant! Anything else?"
"Well, it doesn't produce any weapons grade either"
"Oh, but..."
When a power plant is totally tied into to national security, it takes on a life of its own. Any objections become a matter of national security. And accident are then covered up on grounds of national security. Civilian nuclear was not well served with its close ties to military nuclear.
Obviously there are technical issues with nuclear too and the scale is crazy. (I rather like that wind or solar can be decentralised.)
Nuclear fusion is whats needed as the holy grail in a limitless supply of clean energy but unfortunately it always seems to be 30 years away.
Yeah. Can’t wait for them to crack this one. Will solve a lot of problems. We will have lots of cheap electricity and can start transitioning into heat pump technology in our homes, hell even AC’s.
But it's entirely about wind power. Also, fracking is an answer. Unlike wind power, fracking could be made to work. So in terms of providing electricity it's a less bad answer than wind power, which can't be made to work.
Which would be fine if storage on a large enough scale was possible, but it isn't. Not even close. Not even within a couple of orders of magnitude and even that's only if the budget is unlimited and any degree of environmental destruction and human death is allowed.
In the region of £500M per minute of storage. At best. On paper. Maybe. And that's just construction costs, not lifetime maintainence and repair and decommissioning costs and the costs of the electricity wasted due to the inherent inefficiencies of pumped hydro storage (~70% efficiency, so ~30% of the electricity is wasted).
But that's only the start of the problem. There isn't enough space to do it anyway, whatever the cost, and it would kill a fair few people. When dams fail the destruction is severe. Since the whole point of pumped hydro storage is that the upper reservoir is elevated as much as possible, those dam failures would be even worse than normal dam failures. Billions of tonnes of water at the top of a large hill will devastate a large area when the dam fails. If we had hundreds of very big ones (which would be needed to even begin approaching a workable system), there would be millions of people in the danger zones. A single failure would kill at least thousands of people. As has happened in the past, repeatedly. The worst power station disaster ever wasn't Chernobyl. Not by a long way. It was the Banqaio dam failure. ~250,000 killed, ~11,000,000 homeless.
But it doesn't have the cheapest cost per MWh in reality. A minor problem with the costing in the image you showed is that the cost for nuclear power is based on the amount the government agreed to pay as an bribe/incentive to the company building it, not the price it actually costs. The major problem with the costing in the image you showed is that the cost for wind power (onshore or offshore) is based on perfect weather conditions existing all day and all night every day and every night in every location. Which, obviously, isn't reality. If you want to reliably have x amount of generating capacity from wind, you have to build at least 10x (probably a lot more - I'm being very generous to wind power with that number) nameplate generating capacity and have it distributed over a large geographical area. Much larger than the UK.
We can't have a renewables grid. It's not a lack of will or a lack of caring. It's simply not possible. There needs to be a large proportion of electricity generation that's reliable, predictable and controllable. Renewables are none of those things with the exception of geothermal (which strictly speaking isn't really a renewable anyway) in the very limited geological conditions where it works well. Which don't exist in the UK. Some parts of Iceland are the nearest places for that.
If we're going to have an electricity generating system that doesn't include burning carbon-based fuels, the only functioning option with existing technology is nuclear fission. If we're going to do that, we're already long overdue. We should have started at least 10 years ago. Ideally, research into various types of fission reactor (e.g. thorium cycle) should have been ramped up with major funding decades ago. But it's too late for that. We have to go with something known to work and we have to do it now and urgently.
Nuclear fusion would be better, obviously, but we need to use something known to work as a power station and nuclear fusion isn't that. Maybe it will be at some point in the future, but it definitely isn't now and we need something now. The situation is quite urgent.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use wind or solar at all. They have a place as part of the mix of generating methods. But only a part. And not a very large part because of the lack of control. We're currently right on the edge of what's possible. The UK grid is now far, far more unstable than anyone with a clue is comfortable with and that's because of the percentage of wind and solar in it. It's too high a percentage.
EDIT: I missed a bit in my reply:
That wasn't what I was referring to. I was referring to the political implausibility of doing what would be part of what would be required for a renewables grid - continent-sized unified single electrical grids.
To make it work, even on paper, you'd need to be moving electricity around between areas with widely different weather conditions. That requires a very large area, much larger than all but the very largest countries. e.g. when wind in the UK isn't enough electricity from solar in Morocco is moved to the UK...when solar in Tunisia isn't enough electricity from wind in Poland is moved to Tunisia...when wind in Sweden isn't enough electricity from wind in Spain is moved to Sweden...etc, etc. That's possible with existing technology, but it's not politically plausible. And the cost would be staggering. But it is possible with existing technology, which is better than many ideas.
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