That needs to be put into your calculations too.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Then you moved the goalposts rather far from supplying electricity to the Ruhr area industry :-)

electrifying nearly all energy use

As JakeS said, such electrifying can improve energy efficiency greatly, lowering the generating capacity needed. I add that solar thermal (which is spreading rapidly in Germany) and geothermal (which I see as significant by 2030) can give heat energy without electrifying.

Yield per-square-of panel is not the same as yield per - square of plant.

Correct, you need North-South separation (for Sun-following plants, East-West too). However, just because that, not all the surface you contemplated is 'covered'. For rooftop plants, separation is provided by North-facing roof sides, courtyards, gardens and streets (the latter also for plants installed on highway noise barriers).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

How is this different from using petrochemicals where the price varies day by day? People have seldom known how much their car is going to cost.

When demand is high you increase the cost to discourage unnecesary usage. What is the problem?

If people are dumb enough to use cars for bulk transport in an all-electric grid, then I really have a hard time taking their whining about price risk seriously. Cars are specialised vehicles with a sharply limited sphere of use within which they make economic and engineering sense. Bulk transportation is not one of them.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Demand management is just fancy words for "The price of a kwh hour will depend on the wind, sun and phase of the moon, have fun figuring out what your electric car will cost you this month!"

The price of per kwh right now here in Sweden depends on freezing cold, nuclear plants offline, low rain levels last summer and mothballed oil plants coming online. Yet my price stays the same, as I - like most swedish consumers - has a fixed price level. Big industry may run with variable prices and exchange the highs for the lows (and adopt usage) but for a consumer a fixed price contract is more sensible. This does not change with the number of appliances I plug in, so I see no reason it would change if I got an electric scooter.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

Using gas for peak power is much less CO2 than using coal for both peak and baseload. You burn the hydrogen, too. In addition, the bulk of the gas is used for heating today anyway, so combined plants mean increased efficiency and again less CO2. Either way, it is an improvement relative to as-is, and phasing them out by 2050 is still phasing them out.

Others dealt with your strange views on prices, but this:

The French and Swedish experience demonstrates that the nuclear path can fully replace carbon based generation of electricity in 15 years

1. No, Sweden relies on hydro, and France is no isolated system as it relies on exports to Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
   
2. The past success of two countries in doing it in 15 years is not scalable to the entire world, neither power plant nor mining facility construction would be able to keep up with the explosive increase you foresee, not even just to replace baseload electricity production world-wide. You won't get that by 2030, nor 2050, and later only if breeders would become reality, but that is a big "if" just like for fusion power or pebble bed reactors. And that's just baseload.
   
3. Even with the research discussed in my latest diary, nuclear supply of peak load looks unrealistic.
   
4. You want to replace the entire primary energy production with nuclear, which is then even less realistic.

yes, no one is arguing for that here, you do realise, yes?

No you cannot place a solar panel in a field.

have you ever seen them on rotating columns? they're not vertical, but they aren't flat either, unless on rooves.

Nothing can grow where it is deployed.

obviously putting panels under shade trees is inefficient, but in the areas of europe most begging for them, shade is a plus. there's no reason why they can't be designed into beautiful landscaping or gardening projects, unless you're talking about huge mega arrays, for light industry.

you make it sound like nature will be paved over with cement and silicon. this is emotive reasoning, to carry your point further by imbuing PV tech with some anti-green vibe. planet-hating folks, those solar fanboys.

Net Negawatts will not happen in any society that is seriously trying to combat global warming. Vast amounts of power can, and will be saved by superior design of electronics, the substitution of heat pumps for furnaces and so on. I can easily see a world where our total energy consumption goes down, a lot, through increased efficiency. Our electricity consumption, however, will rise. A lot. The more seriously we take global warming as a problem, the higher its going to go.

i apologise for not being more precise. by 'negawatts' i intended to refer to the negation of the need for so many watts used, whether by your excellent points about heat pumps, electronics, and i'd definitely add better insulation and passive solar architecture being mandated, not a diminuition of watts productively used.

the waste right now is staggering, light bulbs and standby are the least of it, but as symbols of how tiny household changes, scaled up to countries and unions of countries, they make a tidy little example of 'small is beautiful'.

reducing the waste in all energy dynamics, and scaling down our concepts of what is 'normal' energy use, so to be less extravagant in relation to the poorer 4/5ths of the world, will cut our carbon footprint so significantly that we will be able to phase through to a non fossil fuel economy by 2050, globally.

i expect some large industries will relocate, not for cheap labour so much any more, as for cheap energy, so i'd expect more desert projects, and in europe more use of the scrubbety southern zones, where there isn't enough soil or conditions for much flora anyway. with the deserts growing, i doubt too many will complain too bitterly about some acres of solar panels helping them avoid more oil wars, or 3 mile island episodes.

i have no problem with upping electricity use by a third, or even more, as long as it's distributed more fairly to the poor countries, who get much more bang for the solar buck with small installations anyway, than us with our BMW lifestyles. plenty of sunshine to be 'used', as you put it, though i see it more as 'transformed'.

i note you haven't addressed the social repression angle, unless i missed it.

do you really think the public will go along cheerfully with these nuclear tidings of great joy?

the last time i was looked at as if i were slime, was by a uniformed thug, the kind whose numbers i would expect to blossom like vile weeds around nuclear installations, the transport routes for materiel, the 'disposal' arrangements etc. are those costs factored in, or will they be more of the famous 'externalities', so easy to forget during the planning phase?

because when i mention the word 'cost', the economics of all those 'security' services is the tip of the iceberg. what about the paranoia, the jackboot, the reconditioning of social fabric. are they airbrushed out of your vision? france has avoided the worst of this, but can you really believe other countries will hold to that kind of standard, especially seeing recent events in germany and finland regarding the engineering?

public trust is important, who do you think the public trusts to tell us the truth more, the nuclear industry or the crazy horse gang?

i think the nuke biz had its day in the sun, and that era proved we as humans are not up to the challenge of controlling such a nasty beast with any real consistency, and that was when the public was still very innocent and believed the 'too cheap to meter' propaganda unconditionally.

so we agree to disagree, we both sense the other's position as unwise and dangerous. time will tell. thanks for playing.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

And as good spies have always known, the risk of a security penetration goes up faster than linearly with the number of people in the loop.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.