I'm mostly a proponent of using what we have as we continue to develop more efficient, cleaner, safer options.
Always best to get what you can from what you already have, but at some point new technology becomes so much cheaper and more efficient than the old, that construction costs become no issue.
Imho, solar and wind are just not rational for large-scale production. They are better suited to remote 'off-grid' type situations, or for personal, small-scale use.
I'm no expert on wind, but at least for solar, it's exactly the opposite. Personal-scale solar makes zero sense in most of this country, there's just not enough generation capability to justify the install costs vs. product lifespan and maintenance, but utility-scale solar actually works quite well. I'd expect the same to be true for wind, but have not personally looked at that.
We have lots of coal and NG, we should continue to use that to handle fluctuations.
We do... mostly NG.
I think we need, at a minimum, enough nuclear power generation capacity to handle our current 'peak' usage. All other types are supplemental for growth and 'downtime'.
How would that work? You do know you cannot have excess generation? Generation must be throttled to near load. Basic telegrapher's equation theory, all power must be dissipated somewhere.
There is currently no technical solution for increasing nuclear generation much past minimum overnight load, from existing approved nuclear technology. The most feasible solution, from existing approved nuclear plant types, is to increase base load closer to peak demand. Hence my comment about more BEV's plugged in and charging overnight.
I think generation needs to happen all across the country, not just in rural areas. Reducing the distance from generation to use also saves energy lost during transmission.
Yes, probaby some. But it might be more feasible and safer to build large nuke plants away from population centers and closer to cooling sources.
Our grid needs to be split up into many small grids that are only interconnected as needed for an emergency. Think of it like a giant manual cartoon 'switch'. Imagine NY and NY on separate grids. NY has and emergency and needs more power, the switches get thrown to augment them with NJ (and PA, CT, etc) power.
Not really feasible. Load is a sliding scale, managing the load distribution with a binary switch is never going to work.
When looking at transmission lines that are even a fraction of a wavelength long, you have to match the impedance of source and load, to minimize reflected power, which will destroy a generator and cause massive voltage and power surges due to standing waves. This isn't simple automotive or residential-scale wiring, but actually lands in the realm of telegraphy or RF engineering, due to long distances.
This protects the various grids from catastrophic failure.
Yes, but at the cost of absolutely crippling costs in redundancy for separate grids. There are better solutions, but we are hampered by our political system. I could write pages on this, my FIL spent his whole career in utility management, but sufficient to say that the grid management and troubleshooting systems used today are not much better than we had 50 years ago. But because these systems operate across several states, funding for change must come through congress, and they have a very short attention span.
There was a proposal in the works just prior to the great northeast blackout in 2003, to use Lockheed's theater warfare system to "game out" failure scenarios in real-time, to manage exactly the type of component failures that led to that massive backout. There was initially very little political motivation to make it happen, but then the blackout occurred, and the proposal actually made it to the floor. Unfortunately, because companies like Lockheed move very slowly, they failed to get their full budget and proposal completed before the next election, and interest in the proposal had already waned before its completion.
Within each grid there needs to be ample power generation from 'always-on' sources (nukes, coal, NG, etc) to power those grids at peak+ 30%.
lol... and people complain about their energy prices doubling, today! Are you ready to pay 10x more for your power?!?
We are much too far behind in dealing with our electricity production and transmission. Streamline the regs for plants and power lines.
Agreed on this, we could do better with more investment. But again... at what cost? When are you willing to trade dollars to get past "good enough"?
Until then, encouraging/subsidizing additional EVs is foolhardy.
EV's may be foolhardy, but not with regard to electrical generation. If sold into surburban households where most charging will occur in off-peak hours overnight, they'd be more part of the solution, than the problem.
One thing to remember about all of the above: Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of very smart engineers were involved in the design and implementation of the existing system. No single person on an internet forum, particularly from outside the industry, is going to make any valid suggestion that's an actual improvement over the existing system. We didn't get here by accident, billions of dollars have gone into planning and implementing this "best compromise".
