Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest Northern Virginia is the most important data centre market on the planet, with more than a gigawatt of colocation capacity, and even more servers hidden in cloud data centres. But it has a very serious problem – almost all of the bit barns in the region are forced to buy their electricity from a single provider, Dominion Energy …
I live in SW VA, off the grid - I escaped NOVA a few decades ago. There's no question whatever Dominion are not the world's best outfit. We've fought Natgas pipelines they wanted to ruin our part of the countryside with so people in NC could aircondition the out of doors at hotels and airport drive throughs.
With a safety plan of "fly over every 6 months and see if there's a lot of dead stuff". Really! And super noisy turbine pumps every 10km in a place that's normally silent but for birds chirping or the odd tractor haying.
On the other hand, from an independence point of view, and as a pretty decent engineer, the idea of other forms of power was attractive, and the thought came to me something like "If not me, then who can or will?". So I did, back when solar panels were > $6/watt. Luckily, they last decades, and have come down quite a lot since the late '70s. They do pay in more than one way, though one benefit I have here on the homestead not available elsewhere is lower taxes.
You see, the power company is a good name for them. They also sell electricity. It's similar to the idea that Amazon is a bit-barn with a gift shop in the parking lot. Long ago, most localities delegated code enforcement to the power company - don't meet code, get building permits etc - they will only hook you up at ruinous rates (you pay for the poles, and get the industrial rates, which make progressive tax look like fun - 20c a kwh for home use amounts, it's only cheap if you're running an electric steel refinery at lower bulk rates).
Now, without all those permits - you can still meet - or in my case better the code requirements, your holdings are assessed at far lower value. Who'd want the responsibility of maintaining all this non standard crap? Think a bit about what that does for your land and personal property taxes. Most payoff calculations depend on power co power being constant price - dead wrong. They depend on short lives of solar and batteries - untrue if you take care of things. And no one takes my "tax dodge" into account at all. But these all reduce the payout time from the original 30+ years to under 5 (and it's less now!).
Panels - even with Trump's tariffs - are closer to 60c/watt than 6$....
You do need plenty of land to have room for it all - this approach is not for dense dystopias. But you can easily put data centers anywhere....
If I were Dominion or whoever - I'd say "you're the tech guys, you do the tech" and leave it at that. If they don't have enough square feet - move and dig for some fiber, you'll come out ahead financially in fairly short order. Or, being tech guys - learn to waste less power...I did. And at this second, my solar system is supporting perhaps 20 hosts on the LAN - it goes up and down as many are smart enough to shut down when not needed to help automate the homestead.
Surely the "Real experts" not just little old me who designed computer electronics down to the cpu gate level decades ago, could pull this off.
Note that I'm not super green by philosophy, but it came along for the ride. I have a super low carbon footprint (Even an electric car, a Volt, never once charged from the grid since 2011). I have a nature preserve of a lot of acres in the boonies, but it's because I bought a farm and am not a farmer, so it all grew back up and is full of wildlife. We get along, but it wasn't my goal - I just wanted privacy, but now I have lots of little buddies who have fur and feathers. Works for me.
"If I were Dominion or whoever - I'd say "you're the tech guys, you do the tech" and leave it at that."
Actually, I was thinking similar to you on reading the article, but from a different perspective. These huge tech companies seem to have billions in the bank. Why are they not building their own solar and wind farm and then sticking two fingers up at the power company?
"They can start with solar panels at the roofs of those bit barns."
They probably could. And the PR folks would love it. But would the panels do much good?
Pass me one of those cocktail napkins. The all knowing internet tells me that data centers can consume in excess of 10kw per square foot of rack space (...or more). That'd be about 100kw per square meter. My GUESS is that "rack space" is maybe 10% of the data center floor space -- the rest being emergency generators, mysterious telco equipment, a janitor's closet, and some offices for resident folk. (The manager gets the corner office). So -- the building needs maybe 10kw per square meter 24 hours a day. 10*24*X = 240KwH per square meter of roof space. A solar panel in the tropics will receive about 1kw per **SUNNY** hour of daylight. If we give the panel 20% conversion efficiency and six hours a day of usable sunshine -- allowing for clouds, low illumination at dawn/dusk, ice, snow, dust, etc. a meter of panel will generate 1.2kwhr per day. That's 100*1.2/240 = 0.5% percent of the building's power needs. (Before lighting, air conditioning, powering all that mysterious telephone company equipment, etc.?)
Seems hardly worth the trouble. But maybe I'm overlooking something.
I wouldn't mind having the arithmetic corrected by someone who actually knows something about powering data centers.
Pass me one of those cocktail napkins.
You're probably right about the math. Wind isn't much better (of course you can always dry and burn the dead birds for more fuel...)
Maybe they could at least put some of their money and space into building large battery banks? That would allow the "grid" to provide more solar power and the company then gets what they want during the day and stores some excess for later use. It'll also allow for some better load balancing if their battery bank can sell back to the grid, allowing for perhaps slower but more effecient generators to come on line (rather than having to have a spinning genny for every wind turbine (ready to provide power the instant the WT cannot a battery bank can fill the gap between when the WT stops and another generator starts).
I had initially thought maybe they could make many of their internal walls "powerwalls" but then if a fire takes hold anywhere in the DC...... All that heat and 'interesting' metals and any water used to extinguish the fire..... -->
(That'd be a GREAT idea Google! You can use it for free - 1) lots of powerwalls inside your buildings and 2) water for your sprinkler system....)
Up here in British Columbia, Canada (i.e. North of Washington State, USA,) I can get power as cheap as 8 cents per kilowatt hour at industrial rates from BC Hydro which is pretty good for our rather expensive-to-live-in province.
We did setup of a GIANT 500 000 litre propane tank farm setup that's hooked up to propane-input fuel cells for our biggest data centre on Vancouver Island which is COMPLETELY OFF-GRID but costs us 48 cents Canadian per litre of propane at pre-paid contract prices.
That works out to 7.1 Kilowatt/hours per Litre or about 6.7 Cents Canadian per Kilowatt hour which is GREAT !!! It's a tad expensive cost up front and costly for the propane storage tanks but we'll pay for them within 3.5 years at our current rates of consumption!
As a suggest for a LESS COSTLY setup, you can create wood chip or pellet stove generation capacity by buying an EPA certified super-low-emissions wood pellet and woodchip boiler to make your OWN steam which will then power an on-property electrical generator AND after that, use the venting steam as an input to a secondary heating system AND/OR condensor-based cooling/air conditioning system for about the equivalent of 9 to 15 cents U.S. per kilowatt hour depending upon your state or province's wood pellet costs.
You get BOTH electricity AND heating steam in winter and heat-exchanger-based cooling power during summer!
At around $250 US per tonne, you need about ten tonnes ($2500 US per year) to power your typical home AND your typical small server farm rack of 10 two-CPU TYAN or SuperMicro server motherboards for one year using the NEW high-efficiency pellet burners!
That's a tad expensive BUT you would be COMPLETELY OFF-GRID with NO dependency on ANY power grid supplier! With ten 2-cpu motherboards running Linux, you could EASILY host up to 1000 simultaneous users on your OWN local community gaming server!
Since your headset voice/talk channel bandwidth is typically only 64 kilobits per second and your typical mouse/keyboard/controller/positioning commands and small player/game character sprites are only about another 750 kilobits per second, giving EACH user ONE megabit of bandwidth on a Gigabit Ethernet line is enough for 1000 simultaneous users!
That could be a NICE monthly income for you! 1000 users x $5 to 10$ per month + in-game extra sales could be $5000 to $10000 or more per month minus your operating costs - taxes. That would EASILY let you have a NET INCOME of about $2500 to $6000 per month !!! That's not too shabby for an off-grid homestead!
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If you have a REALLY popular game server just increase the price to $20 per month to net you $12 000+ per month of income!
I've read about rural Quebecer (in Eastern Canada) and Northern Vermonter (north-eastern U.S.) sysops who do this from their "Digital Cabins" in the Winter-drenched backwoods parts of Canada and USA. They connect to local dark or active fibre usually running right next to the major power distribution lines and just needed to pay for the fibre run to their homes which typically cost about $10 000 to $15 000 for a few hundred metres to the local fibre connect point which TENDS to be running along on the same poles as the local power system that goes along rural roads!
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Some of them are, a little bit. Some (Google) fell for too-new tech that was too good to be true and lost a bunch of money - we all know the saying. At some point, loss of market share should get the government-supported monopolies off their behinds? Well...we can hope.
FWIW, solar shingles, peroskovites, organics, most amorphous etc - too good to be true and no lifetime.
Thus no ROI. My old Solarex panels from 1979 aren't at full spec (Solarex was owned by Amoco at the time!) - but they still put out half the ratings. If square feet are your big expense, that's bad. Here, they're still useful on an old storage building.
Most of the cost of a GOOD panel is glass, frame, the magic plastic backing that has the same tempco, all resulting in decades of weather resistance, the right glue that stays transparent in UV and doesn't react with the other stuff in there (from experience here). It's not the silicon expense ever since they figured out they didn't have to use the same stuff Intel was using for CPUs - less pure worked fine, and polycrystal worked fine. A whole lot of research got going - and continues like a public entitlement program, because of the old high cost of silicon for panels. Doesn't mean any of it is needed or even desirable other than to use up ink for those future-ist hand wavers.
I'm getting around 6kw in full sun off half a roof of a workshop building that's 16' by 32'. Obviously the 24 hour average is worse, and winter is much worse. So you roll with it - in summer, I run the mill, the lathe, weld and so on - anytime I want to...in winter, well a few computers and maybe a good book or run a backup gennie if I MUST do major machining or welding right then.
That's the reality - but it's not so bad -
As to that billions in the bank. It's kind of like that "why don't they pay taxes" situation. Marketspeak is always designed to trick you.
I could have a billion in the bank here, but owe 2.8 billion in some EU bond market, and say I have a billion in the bank. I wouldn't even be telling a lie....(this is how politicians work, if you pay close attention)
But there's omission of things not convenient.
Of late, though it's now tapering off - all that "money in the bank" has been used in stock buybacks to keep the stock price up, because that's how the major executives get compensated - stock options. Doesn't matter to them if the co crashes if they get paid, and then there's that golden parachute. If granny has to eat cat food because her retirement fund invested in such...too bad.
Building and operating solar/wind farms is not exactly up the alley of an Apple or Google. If they said "we will need to expand soon, but unless energy providers in VA offer us better renewable options we will choose a different state for this expansion" maybe they could get the state government to help pressure the utility.
"Building and operating solar/wind farms is not exactly up the alley of an Apple or Google."
For AWS/Google, they have frequently run into challenges that need to be addressed in new and interesting ways. I suspect the issue in this case is they can't solve it at present in an acceptable way due to the current regulatory environment.
Apple/MS/AWS (and possibly others...) have all built facilities to generate power in other locations, but they look to feed the local grid independently of their DC requirements. Dominion Energy likely doesn't allow this model, locking out potential competitors for their own benefit.
Now that VA's power requirements to meet government/DoD requirements is so significant, that may change.
If the tech companies are that gung-ho on renewables, they are certainly free to set up their own electric infrastructure, with all the joys of establishing transmission corridors. Bunch of hypocrites, arguing for regulation of utilities (e.g. net neutrality) and wanting government to keep hands off their business.
"Why are they not building their own solar and wind farm and then sticking two fingers up at the power company?"
Because Dominion Energy has a legal monopoly on power generation and distribution in the state. Fairness is supposed to be ensured by the fact that state government approves the tariffs charged to customers (residential and industrial). Unfairness is ensured by the fact that Dominion Energy is allowed to make political donations to state politicians - and they do so with gay abandon.
https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/dominion-virginia-monopoly-democrats_n_5a7de928e4b08dfc9303d14b
"Ahhh the legalised monopoly... only in the Land of the Free. Well... and China. Soviet Russia. North Korea..."
Let's not besmirch the economies of China, Russia and North Korea with the business practices endemic in local/state government within the US.
China, Russia and North Korea have their own issues without adding monopolies/duopolies based on crony capitalism destroying consumer choice while dog whistle politics leads US consumers to believe the alternative would be "destroying the free market".
downvotes on your post. Just moved to Virginia (Norfolk Area) and will take your advice and get solar panels. Our lot backs up to a 30 mile forest preserve and we get tons of furry and feathered creatures as well.
What I would do if I was president is make it mandatory that all buildings have solar panels (even provided by the US government). I would nationalize the grid, so where ever there is extra power could be routed to areas that need it. Advances in panel construction and batteries would make this feasible and get us off hopefully coal and natural gas. Nuclear energy would be the backup attached to the national grids.
What I would do if I was president is make it mandatory that all buildings have solar panels (even provided by the US government). I would nationalize the grid, so where ever there is extra power could be routed to areas that need it. Advances in panel construction and batteries would make this feasible and get us off hopefully coal and natural gas. Nuclear energy would be the backup attached to the national grids.
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This is backwards.
The base load should be nuclear, running at a high and constant power level. Anything else is wasteful and inefficient.
The next tier should be something easy to ramp up and down, as well as reliable for 'on demand' power. Often the best for that will be hydro and/or natural gas. Or geothermal where you can get it. Or even tidal - maybe not as 'on demand', but at least predictable
You then use your unreliable energy sources or less controlled sources (wind and solar) to fill in when and where they are co-operating, to allow turning down the 'demand following' group above.
Sharing energy is limited, particularly on continental scales, by limits in long distance transmission capacity, transmission losses, grid balancing issues, and coincidence of demand - winter or a heat wave, or a work week can happen at the same time across lots of the country.
I consulted at a large chemical plant on the Wirral which had its own combined heat and power station built in thew 90's this wasn't just a couple of diesel Generators and was reputed to be able to produce enough electricity to power approximately half of Liverpool. This was a multi million pound investment but the business case stacked up as it was a plant with a very high power requirement, these's no low power way to perform some of the chemical reactions that were needed to create its products. Now the price of solar & wind has dropped so far you would have thought there would be a viable market to design and build data barn power generation and storage systems
Now the price of solar & wind has dropped so far you would have thought there would be a viable market to design and build data barn power generation and storage systems
Ah, marketing! The 'renewables' lobby keep telling people this, yet our energy bills keep rising. See for example-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48251747
The company said that warmer-than-usual weather, the falling price of gas and a cap on standard variable tariffs would affect its financial performance in the first-half of the year.
That's hot on the heels of the UK announcing it's first 'coal free' week since the Industrial Revolution. 42% came from gas, 22% from nuclear and 10% from wind. Or less, given that fundamental problem of wind being variable.
But if you're a DC operator, solutions are available. So you can have multiple feeds, stand-by generators, batteries and even cover your roof in solar panels. You may even erect a few windmills to harken back to the Age of Sail!
Problem is the cost. So you'd need a lot of batteries, gas & diesel to cope with a few days of light winds. Solutions are again available. So in EU-land, large energy consumers buy carbon credits. If they also invest in qualifying scams like PPA, they can sell their credits for decent money. See also Tesla which makes a fair chunk of it's money from selling EV credits. And you may also make extra money from the UK's STOR, so having your stand-by generators available to feed the grid. But basically a rigged market that funnels cash from consumers to the 'renewables' lobby.
In a perfect world, market forces would apply. So if the virgin bit-barns want to cover their acreage in batteries, they could.. And perhaps even turn their minds to sophisticated trading schemes to manage supply & demand across state(s). There's a couple of ex-Enron chappies freed from Federal service who may be up for some consulting. Reality is of course that there is no viable market, so greenwash is applied to try to move the costs onto someone else. Like the typical consumer, who may at some point start asking why the 'renewables' lobby has such a stranglehold over energy policy.
(Good news(?) is that as DC's get larger/more power hungry, the feasibility of using small, modular reactors to power them and sell surplus energy gets closer.. Except the 'renewables' lobby is vehemently opposed to low-carbon nuclear. And of course there's the problem with gas. There's a bit of a glut, hence price declines and why CCGTs get built instead. Especially as they do double duty of stabilising the grid & meeting demand when it's calm and dark.)
"So you'd need a lot of batteries, gas & diesel to cope with a few days of light winds."
Or a few days of high winds. When the wind gets too fast, you have to shut the wind turbines down to avoid damage from overspeed.
The problem with wind and solar is you have to build enough other capacity to carry the whole load for when they are not available, and then you have to try to operate those generators efficiently, which is also difficult, while parts of your plant stands idle whenever wind and solar come online - so your peak capacity is much higher than you need, while your reliable capacity is what you would have without wind and solar.
"20c a kwh for home use amounts"
Aproximate electricity prices in the UK
Spoiler: 12-14p per Kwh (16-18c)
So comparable then.
"Dominion seems to get 18% of its energy from coal as well, something this article should have mentioned.
That was my first thought - what's going to be the effect on Viginia's coal industry and it's employees, and who are the state government going to care about most - the likes of Goggle, or the people who vote for them?
Canada is larger area wise than the US with about 12% of the population (Winters up there tend to be on the nippy side. Oddly enough, a lot of folks prefer to live and farm in places where there isn't snow on the ground half the year). I'm having a bit of trouble finding numbers for the US, but total hydro power generation in Canada (324Twhr in 2016) looks to be in the same ballpark as here in the states. Ignoring a relatively small amount of power exported to the US, the result is that Canada is able to get a lot more power per capita from hydro than the US. More power from hydro means less from nuclear, coal and natural gas. Also, most folks in Canada live in Ontario and Quebec which are mostly far enough from the great Eastern North American coal fields to make alternative power sources attractive. (Canada does have significant coal in Alberta,BC, and the maritimes)
Ontario, in particular, did the smart thing, and has been getting most of it's hydro from nuclear plants.
Roughly 60% of the electricity comes from the nuclear plants.
Then they did something stupid, and put in a bunch of PV installations, which are producing power at seven time the cost of the nuclear plants.
The wind turbines are producing at only twice the cost of nuclear or hydro power, but tend to do it at the wrong time, which has cost the province more than a billion dollars a year to offload power we can't use to other states or provinces at a massive discount.
The best green power is natural hydro (four Great Lakes as the reservoir - about 80% of the size of the UK, and a 50m drop); and nuclear, with nuclear by far the safest among the available technologies.
While Niagra does produce a crapton of electricity, and we have lots of nuclear (still for the moment, and sometime in the near future we'll actually have a MkVII in Darlington that should roughly double our nuclear output) the big hydro producer *now* is James Bay, and I'm not sure *who* thinks we only export a *wee bit* of our electricity to the US -- We put about 25 to 30% of the NorthEastern US consumption on the wire for them.
At least here in Ontario and AFAIK Quebec and Manitoba, we've closed all our coal plants. I'm pretty sure there are two coal plants in the eastern provinces and either 4 or 5 in Alberta and BC. I'm *pretty sure* the plants in BC are being converted from coal to burning trash.
"who are the state government going to care about most - the likes of Goggle, or the people who vote for them?"
Neither really. They're going to care about the people that pay them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dominion-energys-dominion-over-virginia-goes-way-beyond-ralph-northam/2018/11/30/052e3a56-f421-11e8-99c2-cfca6fcf610c_story.html
Thta's one of the excuses the anti-wind-power lobby used in the UK, that tens of thousands of birds would be killed. When it was pointed out that their beloved pet moggies kill tens of millions, that argument went quiet...
We had that crapfest here in Kiwiland with a twit going on against cats (and quite a few of his followers now go around harming family pets (ie family members) by poisoning/shooting/trapping etc).
DOC (Department of Conservation) piped up and said the cat population was actually a good thing, because while they do kill some native birds and other creatures, they also kill rats, rabbits and ferrets who do more damage to the native wildlife than cats do - if the rats/ferrets/cute widdle bunny-wunnies had been imported without also importing cats there would be NO native wildlife left in NZ.
When all the rats, ferrets, possums, rabbits etc etc are all gone, then we can get rid of the mutts and when the last mongrel dog has left, then we can feed the cats on the imported birds. Only when the last non-native things are gone (after all deforestation for sheep/cattle also wiped out a lot of natives!) can we get rid of cats as well.
If you want an idea of whether or not the issue with wind farms killing birds is real, go to your nearest wind farm and look at the amount of local birdlife. If you find thriving populations around these things then the lobby was wrong. If you find almost no birds around these things then the lobby was right. Don't expect to find many birds dead on the ground though, unless the farm is in a migration path during a migration season when you visit. Either the birds avoid them and live, or generations have been dying in them and the local population has been gone for years.
Also take note of the noise, flashing light/shadow etc of these things. That's before we get into the visual pollution side of them, the destruction of land (and further habitat destruction!) , the massive amounts of pollution in creating their sites (how much carbon[1] from just the foundation of each tower?), the roads for the transportation of the towers as well as the diesel pollution from the trucks that transported them - and the backup power stations needed to supply power the instant the wind stops (and by instant I mean instant - another power source has to be "up to speed" for each wind tower - although with improvements in battery technology and "grid storage batteries" starting to be developed that won't be such an issue).
Even if you don't care about the bird life, wind power is a terrible idea most of the time. It would be best used for moving water between lower/upper hydro lakes or large-scale water storage for town/cities (ie wind power is used to move water to high storage tanks which gravity-feed into the town, and runs the treatment plant that stores enough water for several days).
[1]CO2 is actually good for the environment - it's one of the key ingredients in making plants and if we want a greener earth we need more CO2 in the atmosphere! Less CO2=less plant food=less plants=less green!
When Google, et al look at where to build their latest bit barns, the headline is often what tax breaks they'll get from the state. Why don't Google, et al, also stipulate that the location has to have a high percentage of renewable energy?
If having these bit barns are so important for the local economy, arm twisting the energy company surely has to be on the cards.
Why don't Google, et al, also stipulate that the location has to have a high percentage of renewable energy?
For the simple reason it is too expensive and destabilises the grid.
Any more than about 5 to 6% unreliable renewables and you need an equal amount of reliable power backup. Germany has fallen into that trap and has some of the most expensive electricity available in the world because they have to backup for when the wind doesn't blow, or blows too much and they still haven't solved the problem of getting the sun to shine at night.
The other thing that must be considered is the output of the windmills is only about 30% of the nameplate value while that of coal or nuclear is 75+%. Also the windmills require a lot of space - too close together and the output can drop to less than 15%.
We should also remember the good possibility of spices extinction with the number of bird and insects destroyed by the blades.
If they really wanted renewable power that reduces CO2 rather than virtue signalling they would be pushing for nuclear power generation.
If they really wanted renewable power that reduces CO2 rather than virtue signalling they would be pushing for nuclear power generation.
Nuclear power It has two desirable properties. The volume of fuel needed per megawatt of electricity is pretty low, and the pollution produced is easier to collect and put into deep storage than CO2.
However, it is not a renewable energy source. It takes a source fuel, converts it into a waste fuel, and produces pollution - not really the definition of renewable.
@Ptol: not necessarily. New 4th gen reactors include breeding cycle types. Effectively the amount of available fuel is close enough to millennia if not more. Even the old high temp breeders generated far more fuel than they used. Old breeders could be potentially risky. Learning to use liquid metals as coolants took time and engineering. ie a pump that ran 20,000 amps at about 1 volt. Fun stuff, sodium. The new designs are fail safe.
Nuclear power does not produce measurable amounts of pollution.
It does produce spent fuel rods, which will, eventually, be re-used as fuel in more advanced reactors.
Projected burn-up for liquid metal reactors looks like about 98%, two orders of magnitude better than BWR/PWR types now in wide use.
As well, the CANDU design allows for mixed fuel loads, or for using the reactor to 'burn up' radioactive waste via induced fission. That includes reprocessed spent fuel in as fuel, or un-reprocessed spent fuel as a target for burnup... which may well generate additional useful energy.
With identified fuel deposits at over 7,000 years worth, this will take us easily to the point where we can switch from fission to fusion.
"Renewable" doesn't have to be unreliable. Germany in particular has colossal amounts of straw waste from arable production (which can be burned as biomass), and plenty of undeveloped potential for geothermal power. Both of these can be every bit as reliable as coal or nuclear.
Germany in particular has colossal amounts of straw waste from arable production (which can be burned as biomass), ...
It has and it can. And, to an extent, it does. That does not necessarily make residual biomass a viable large-scale energy source: it needs to be collected and dried out before being burned. Both require non-trivial energy expenditure: just the transportation bit means that the straw cannot travel more than 200 kilometers (by road, not as a crow flies) - or the energy balance of the entire operation will be negative. This severely limits the posible economies of scale.
This is the same problem encountered by most biofuel projects in temperate climes: the energy conversion efficiency of the whole system is quite low, and achieving the net energy gain is often non-trivial.
"Germany in particular has colossal amounts of straw waste"
IIRC after Germany found unexpected cracks in a reactor vessel and decided to shut down their entire nuclear fleet forever, they had to start importing a shitload of electricity from Poland. Much of which is (or at least was then) generated from "brown" coal, ie the shittiest, dirtiest, most polluting kind.
Part of the reason for shutting the entire nuclear fleet down was because of the anti-nuclear green lobby. So they got their wish at the cost exporting way more pollution than they started with, at least some of which probably blows their way.
turbines killing birds: The RSPB has stated that the downside of turbines killing birds is less of an issue than the downside of climate change and they are happy for turbines to be built, not in known migration routes though.
"Any more than about 5 to 6% unreliable renewables and you need an equal amount of reliable power backup": Id be happy for there to be backup for the odd occasion that there is insufficient wind/solar. A bit like having a fire service, there when you need them and happy to pay for them to be there.
If, in the UK, the grid and generation was state owned then you could have Govt built renewables and fossil backup. Renewable generation being effectively free would generate the money to pay for the (mostly) idle backup.
"turbines killing birds: The RSPB has stated that the downside of turbines killing birds is less of an issue than the downside of climate change and they are happy for turbines to be built, not in known migration routes though."
Not to mention - don't birds not managing to avoid a gigantic and clearly visible hunk of metal deserve a Darwin award?
"turbines killing birds: The RSPB has stated that the downside of turbines killing birds is less of an issue than the downside of climate change and they are happy for turbines to be built, not in known migration routes though."
Not to mention - don't birds not managing to avoid a gigantic and clearly visible hunk of metal deserve a Darwin award?
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Killing birds may be less of an issue than killing bats.
The bats are killed by abruptly entering low pressure zones which causes barotrauma to their lungs, which is fatal.
The low pressure volumes behind the turbines are neither visible nor detectable by sonar.
Most backup systems, gas and hydro apart, don’t ramp up quickly and/or don’t like being idled.
also check out how much seasonal variation there can be. California as example, no idea how UK lines up *
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/
* it probably was in the highly recommended “Sustainable energy without the hot air” which is very much UK-centric.
Most backup systems, gas and hydro apart, don’t ramp up quickly ...
Not all hydro stations can ramp up quickly - this is a function of the turbine design. One of the worst hydro powerplant accidents happened because the design of the turbine in question allowed a limited number of transitions between the low- and high-power regimes. When the turbine was instead operated in a quick-pickup regime for years, the bearings finally gave out, causing the turbine case to break and flooding the entire turbine hall - killing nearly hundred people who worked there at the time.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano–Shushenskaya_power_station_accident
* it probably was in the highly recommended “Sustainable energy without the hot air” which is very much UK-centric.
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Unfortunately so.
A lot of the conclusions are unreasonably optimistic for renewable alternatives due to the small size of the UK, the compact nature of their population, an apparent bias toward a low energy economy (mining and smelting ore, then making the steel or other output product takes rather more energy than tracking insurance accounts and buying or selling investment vehicles), and the mild climate.
I'm sure someone out there is going to be tempted to claim the winters in the UK are cold... get back to me if you can find a largish area where the average high in January is -20. The estimates for both transportation and heating requirements is SEWTHA are way low for such an environment, before you take into the account that major cities are often 400 to 600 km apart.
In particular, the range of electric vehicles in those conditions drops to 1/3 what it is at 20 degrees, or even less. When the average low for a month is -30, you can expect an even greater drop in performance at night. I've kept to temperatures in the southern areas, as fewer people live up where it hits -50 at night... but there are a number of cities where the temperature goes below -10 for 150 days or more each year.
Barring detours or other problems, the nearest provincial capital to the eat is 800 km away, and the one to the west is 2200 km. Given that the longest range Tesla would probably need to be recharged every 150 km in the winter, that's not really helpful... nor does it leave much, if any, reserve for emergencies.
Particularly for the westward trip, not all of the route has cell coverage, and in winter, getting stuck is always possible. Prudent drivers will operate 'on the top half of the tank', giving a backup range of 400 to 500 km. at the planned refueling point for my vehicle... or a considerable period of intermittent heating if stuck or waiting for the highway to re-open, or both.
And yes, if on such a drive, there will always be a considerable emergency kit, with food, water, spare clothing, blankets, candles, emergency flares and lights, etc... but especially if you have been out clearing snow off your vehicle to keep it visible to snow plows you may want a bit more heat to warm and dry off.
I expect there is no 'one size fits all' energy strategy, but warm weather/small country solutions may not work for colder and or larger countries.
"And, of course, you could store that reactor waste in your yard, right?"
Of course not. It's far too valuable.
You want it to be easily retrieved so that rare isotopes can be separated out after they have had time to accumulate, and then you can feed the rest back into a breeder or liquid metal reactor to create more fuel, or to use up the fissionable material in a more complete reaction.
And, of course, you could store that reactor waste in your yard, right?
Given the engineering that goes into containment vessels? Yeah sure, happy to. You will have to pay some rent for the land, but I am quite happy to store reactor waste until such time as it can be re-processed/burnt in another reaction.
I'll even buy land next to the nuclear power plant if I have the money at the time, so you can store your 'waste' handily close by.
Seriously, nuclear is the cleanest power source we have at present.
Regarding the earlier mention of Google, the company website doesn't list any datacenters in Virginia: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html
That raises the question of why the other tech giants built there in the first place. If there are important regional features like access to undersea cables, then why isn't Google there also? And if not, why build there in the first place? Maybe it was for the then-cheap coal power...
Regarding the relative significance of hydro power in Canada and the USA, keep in mind that the comparison would be quite different if plans to dam some of the major canyons in the US Southwest hadn't been blocked over environmental concerns*. Does anyone know how Canada was able to build that much capacity per capita without running into the same opposition?
*Some of the best hikes and camping trips I've ever taken were in those canyons, so don't interpret that as a lament. I'd just like to remind other environmentalists that there are costs and trade-offs to each policy.
Regarding the relative significance of hydro power in Canada and the USA, keep in mind that the comparison would be quite different if plans to dam some of the major canyons in the US Southwest hadn't been blocked over environmental concerns*. Does anyone know how Canada was able to build that much capacity per capita without running into the same opposition?
Population density (much lower) and ease of access (much harder). Take a look at where the large hydro projects in Canada are located (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generating_stations_in_Canada). These are mostly very remote locations, with no significant population centres nearby and no easy all-season road access. Some of these areas were important to the First Nations people - but their opinions and their needs have always carried (and still carry) a lot less weight with Canadian governments than that of the non-indigenous population. Which, in turn, did not know there was anything to protect and save - and so by and large didn't care.
I have a memory from right back when I were a lad in the 1970s, of a protest song, whose memorable line was "we will save Kalix Älv". The Kalix river, in the far north of Sweden, is about as remote as anywhere in the developed world. The protest was against proposals to build a dam for hydro power, as had happened on some of Sweden's great rivers.
Of course, hydro power in the arctic would be seasonal. At this time of year the melt will have started and there'll be lots of water flowing, at least at the lower altitudes.
"That raises the question of why the other tech giants built there in the first place."
Places like Langley, Arlington, Fairfax, Fort Meade, Quantico should give you a pretty good hint why. I'm sure there are more.
"then why isn't Google there also"
They are - they are based in Reston, Virginia (https://technical.ly/dc/2019/02/19/google-set-to-double-its-footprint-in-reston-as-part-of-a-larger-expansion-plan-report/) and have a number of leased facilities rather than running their own data centers. The US Geological Survey department is also in Reston, but it is believed Google predominantly works with the NGA and NSA based on leaked e-mails.
@AC "They are - they are based in Reston, Virginia (https://technical.ly/dc/2019/02/19/google-set-to-double-its-footprint-in-reston-as-part-of-a-larger-expansion-plan-report/) and have a number of leased facilities rather than running their own data centers. The US Geological Survey department is also in Reston, but it is believed Google predominantly works with the NGA and NSA based on leaked e-mails."
Thanks. That makes more sense.
"Places like Langley, Arlington, Fairfax, Fort Meade, Quantico should give you a pretty good hint why. I'm sure there are more."
Between my old job and having an immediate relative who flies to Bethesda regularly on federal business, that crossed my mind immediately. But the NSA does a lot of its data-warehousing in Utah. So presumably the work close to D.C. is high-bandwidth, low-latency. Most of the work that comes to mind is sensitive enough that I didn't expect it to be handled by a private contractor, unless they're just routing encrypted data around from one agency to another.
The Utah DC is newish. Based on reports (check out some of the news footage on YouTube, the Utah facility is HUUUGGGGEEEE) and location, I suspect it is intended to supplement and consolidate smaller facilities in the western United States, where historically, there have been less cables/lower bandwidths to monitor compared to the East coast..
Depending on what you believe, Utah's also used for monitoring communications within the US, but given it's location away from traditional US Internet eXchanges (Dallas, Chicago, New York City, San Jose, Los Angeles) unless ISP's are expected to deliver information to Utah which would require a lot of people to be aware of it versus big pipes into relatively few IX's, I'd leave you to judge that.
I suspect most of the Virginian capacity is focussed on real time compute/data feeds vs data warehousing, but that's just more speculation. My basis for the speculation is that if you can put a 1+ GW's of data centre anywhere in the US, putting it all so close to key military targets is probably unwise unless latency is a major issue. Continuing my wild speculation, I would assume Virginia/Maryland aren't places you want to live if people start getting itchy nuclear trigger fingers.
Solar isn't anywhere near as good for the environment as its sold: the panels contain toxins like cadmium and arsenic that can leach into the groundwater in the event of damage or improper disposal and the production process produces yet more noxious chemicals. Amazon, Google et al are simply upset this makes it harder to greenwash their image, not about the actual environmental impact.
"Solar isn't anywhere near as good for the environment as its sold: the panels contain toxins like cadmium and arsenic that can leach into the groundwater in the event of damage or improper disposal and the production process produces yet more noxious chemicals. "
Make that 'will leach into the groundwater in the event of improper disposal'.
Even now I'm seeing fairly large, apparently abandoned PV arrays on random farms and beside or atop rural and semi-rural buildings. I suspect the people who put them in were not told that they contained dangerous heavy metals... and if the current owner is not the one who got the subsidy to put them in, they almost certainly were never told.
Well... in the southeast we have probably millions of acres of trees, much of it in tree farms. Dominion could buy some of the wood and use it to fire wood burning electrical generators. After all, it's "green" and certainly renewable.
It's also a lot of bovine excrement. Sure, those companies want to seem "green", but the bottom line is the bottom line. One of the reasons they are there is because of the price of electricity. If Dominion were to put up a bunch of windmills and cover acres of what could be good farm land with solar panels the price of electricity would go up, and the companies wouldn't like that at all.
If you burn it, you are voiding the carbon capture the trees or cowshit represents.
Better to dispose of it otherwise.
Even collecting it to move to power plants, taking the ash back to spread around, and planting new trees will generate CO2... probably more than to move an equivalent amount of oil or gas through a pipeline, and way more than to transport an equal amount of energy as fuel rods.
Other than the hot air blowing from the capitol, wind power is pretty minimal. Perhaps there is a play on biomass... The amount of bullshit the Pentagon produces per day is staggering, and the source is close to the point of load.
Seriously though, coal mining is not really a huge deal in Virginia. Now in West Virginia, that's a different story; just about the whole state is economically disadvantaged. Land is not particularly arable, terrain is just rugged enough to make infrastructure hard to build, no decent hydro to do something like a Tennessee Valley Authority play.
Virginia has two major nuclear power plants producing a fair percentage of base load. I think nucs are a little over 20pct of the installed generation but over 40pct of net generation. There is a 2+ GW pumped storage plant that significantly levels diurnal demand. ISTR Dominion wanted to expand one or both nuclear stations with new, safer capacity but backed off due to $ and opposition. So instead we will burn more coal, natural gas (*), and life extend much older reactors.
(*) Natl gas is a fine vehicle fuel, feels almost like a crime to burn it for stationary power
@Chairman of the Bored "There is a 2+ GW pumped storage plant that significantly levels diurnal demand."
That's an interesting tidbit. Thanks :)
"Natl gas is a fine vehicle fuel, feels almost like a crime to burn it for stationary power"
Related to that: BMW estimated that the lifecycle CO2 footprint of their i3 would be 30% lower than a similar diesel car when charged from a typical European power mix, and 50% lower when charged with '100% renewable' sources*. Conventional cars running on compressed natural gas likely match the first of those two figures**, and the range is competitive with electric cars.
So if a car company pulls out all of the stops and makes an entire chassis out of a graphite-epoxy composite, pyrolyses the PAN precursor in-house with 100% hydro-power from a nearby dam, uses recycled aluminum, and tweaks the entire supply chain, the outcome is similar to converting a typical internal combustion engine to CNG. And only in some regions. And it doesn't win until much of the grid has been switched over to solar and wind.
*https://jalopnik.com/the-bmw-i3-is-officially-much-greener-than-almost-every-1462999376
**It's necessary to account for somewhat lower fuel efficiency and the fact that not all of the lifecycle emissions are from running the vehicle.
Thanks for the numbers and references. I didn't realize just how well the CNG can work, and I will look up the BMW report. In my part of the US much is made of hydrogen, but by and large that's made from NG.
Here is the Wikipedia page for the pumped storage facility. I try to get my brain wrapped around visualizing what it's like to move 850m^3 of water per second up or down a 380m head, but it's difficult
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
Thanks for the link :)
There are also diesels that can run on pure CNG or mix it with diesel fuel in various ratios, but I don't know much about them.
One caveat about the numbers for the i3 is that the Moses Lake dam is old; so using it for a new factory would have displaced existing users of 'renewable' power, most of whom would have switched to natural gas, nuclear or coal*.
The other thing to watch out for is Jevons's Paradox.
*http://planwashington.org/blog/archive/how-clean-is-washington-states-electric-grid/
Real estate is expensive here in Northern Virginia and yes Dominion Electric has a virtual monopoly on power generation within the state. Even more so, Dominion seems to have the state legislation in their pocket. There are no tax break, credits, or incentives for residential or commercial alternative energy. I have looked at installing solar on the roof of my house. My break even was greater than 15 years, so I was waiting for: efficiency to improve, the State and/or Federal Government a provide a better tax credit, and electrical storage costs to decrease. Dominion Electric charges a premium to permit excess electric back onto their grid. It is not revenue neutral in that they charge less to deliver electricity than receive it.
On the other side, the grid infrastructure is having difficulty handling not just the load from the data centers but all those McMansions and their Tesla's. Periodically Dominion Resources goes cap in hand asking for rate increases to cover infrastructure and power distribution improvements. At the same time, there are periodic outages from storm damage (sometimes week long) since much of the lines are still run on overhead poles. There does not seem to be any strategy to bury lines to prevent future outages.
If you are a Dominion Electric stock holder, however, this should be music in your ears, since the stock price has doubled (with dividends reinvested) over the last 8 years. In other words it is about making money not about helping the big data centers or the data centers biggest customer, the US Government (and indirectly the taxpayers).
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