Right now, the backup for the largest nuclear unit in a system comes from several coal plants of about the same size that run at less than capacity. Since they are normally on-line and making power, the incremental cost of running them a bit harder to make up for the temporary loss of one nuclear unit for a few days is not high. However, if you have to have large units sitting around at very low loads for long periods of time, you are going to see all sorts of problems – the machinery does not want to operate at 5% load – the feedwater systems don’t work well at that power level, so you have to have specialized systems to run the plant at lower load. The turbine is operating at a different state-point, so it is less efficient. And, do any of you have any experience moving piles of coal in the winter that have been sitting in the rain/snow/ice for a long period of time?

Gas units will have the same fuel problem, but it will be worse, because gas for utilities is sold on a take-or-pay basis, now. No one wants to drill a well for gas unless they have a buyer lined up for a long-tern sale. And then you have to oversize the gas transmission system to provide for the infrequent times when the gas demand will be MUCH higher than normal, instead of for a slightly higher expected peak demand.

I have read some comments on this blog about using pumped storage or molten salt to store the energy from solar/wind units for the time when they are not running. If the society is not willing to permit new hydro facilities, it is certainly not willing to support the construction of pumped storage, which will flood large areas (or small deep (i.e., pictureque)ones. And you need to do some arithmetic about how large the molten salt facility needs to be to store the amount of energy that is needed.

Finally, I don’t think there has been much talk about electrical transmission systems that would be needed to support a diverse wind/solar economy. It would be enormous, and right now, no one want any more transmission lines erected anywhere near them. You want to bury them? Well, the price will go up accordingly – high voltage buried lines are QUITE expensive.

“That means that there has to be nuclear, coal-fired or natural gas power plants functioning fulltime as a backup to the pathetically unreliable and inefficient wind farms. Moreover, what electricity they do generate is lost to some degree in the process of transmitting it over long distances to distribution facilities.”

With respect to backup, a system will have some generators which are on and spinning with extra capacity to produce more electricity if needed. Other backups are quick-starting units. The quick-start units operate as a backup fulltime, but in this case their operation means little more than sitting around waiting. But to be clear, all electrical grids operate under these conditions now. And the amount of backups available is typically compared to the biggest plant which could fail. So if the biggest plant in the system is a 2GW nuclear reactor and there are 2GW of wind turbines available, the amount of backup scheduled and available at any time will be the same.

With respect to losses, again large amounts of generation are already far from their end users and the electricity has to be transported. I highly doubt that the losses incurred due to wind will vary substantially from what we already see.

Finally, to call wind farms “pathetically unreliable and inefficient” is to be both honest and unfair. Any grid operator with any sense can easily assess the nature of the turbines and the nature of the wind in the area and have a pretty good idea of when to count on wind turbines and for how much power.

And, BTW, there are no nuclear-power destroyers in the Navy any more. The only Navy nukes are submarines and aircraft carriers, and they load-follow a LOT, as the ship goes faster or slower. But that is a different type of fuel, designed specifically for such transients

The other problem with wind and solar is you must have reliable backup for these intermittent sources to satisfy the baseload. If a grid is delivering 50 gigs of power, of which 10 is wind, and the wind dies (as it did on my website) you must call up 10 gigs of backup power or shed load. Otherwise the entire grid will trip out. Essentially you have to double your windpower capital costs by installing a like amount of thermal backup.

Pumped storage has been suggested, but there are only about 30 in the country and it is unlikely any more will be built. You have to create an artificial lake on a mountain top or high plateau above an existing supply of water. Not likely in the current NIMBY climate.

Yikes Gore is calling for unlimited windpower and it’s being blocked by another Democrat in coastal Cape Cod.