Harvesting waste heat from my water heater

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Dana

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What you're talking about is called a "tempering tank". Whether it's a net energy saver for you depends (as jadnashua suggests) depends on the efficiency & cost of your space-heating, since the energy it takes to bring the tempering tank up to room temp is drawn from the room, presenting extra load to the space heating systems. In BC the heating season is typically 8 months of the year or more, depending on location, and the incoming water is a bit on the cool-side. Tempering tanks make more sense in cooling-dominated climates.

If you go with a tempering tank be sure to provide a means of catching the condensation that will surely be dripping from the sides at times during the spring/summer/fall.
 

Ballvalve

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Seems like the only place at tempering tank makes sense is in a green house, at the hottest spot. Let it water the roses.

Sunrunner used to sell a hot water tank in an insulated box with glass top to go on the roof and a shutter to close at night. Thats not hard to build and might give you all your hot water.

Want TONS of free heat? Autos are a bad joke, spewing out a day of house heating heat in a few hours running. Put the tank in your trunk with a heat exchanger and run the radiator water thru it. Not too practical.

Going off line with a tiny diesel engine that heats the house, and water and makes electricity can come close to beating the utility. Especially if you get most of the exhaust heat saved also.
 

Jadnashua

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There was a company that designed a NG fired generator that was designed to use the waste heat to make domestic hot water or for space heating. Haven't heard from them for awhile. They were from somewhere around Boston. It was a nice unit. not sure if it still exists.
 

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Climate Energy (the Boston area company) was acquired by ECR International a coupla years ago, but are still selling the kilowatt-Honda cogenerators bundled with a furnace or boiler under the name Freewatt. (The guy in the lab on the other side of my office wall is on season 4 with his hydronic Freewatt, and it's already paid for itself, but he lives in 20 cent electricity land- YMMV.) If they would decoupled the Honda from the rest of the package I could easily hack it into my existing system and it would be able to support something like 50-60% of the thermal load and 80-100% of my electricity (if net-metered.) The boilers they bundle it with are WAY oversized for my loads (even at minimum fire) so going that route would be pointless.

Inverters for going off-grid with the Honda are a cost-adder, and you only get 1.2kw peak out of the sucker which isn't enough for peak power loads, but grid attached & net-metered they're pretty straightforward li'l beasties.

In Japan there are getting onto 100,000 1-1.2kw Honda cogenerator installations, but the number of installations in the US is still quite modest.

The only other micro-cogenerator vendor in the US is Marathon Engine, selling a ~4.7KW modulating EcoPower http://www.nist.gov/el/upload/5-2-Cocking-Ecopower.pdf

The German utility LichtBlick is taking it up a notch installing large numbers (target of 100,000 by 2015) of 20kw VW-powered EcoBlue micro cogenerators, using larger thermal buffer tanks (500-1000 gallons) to optimize run-times. The units are controlled by the utility as means of grid-hardening their wind & solar resources. The fuel is paid for by the homeowner who is reimbursed at wholesale for the excess electricity, and the utility maintains the equipment and guarantees by contract that the buffer tank always has sufficient heat for the thermal loads. It would take a world class power-pig of a household to end up net-negative on the power produced, so they're essentially getting their electric bill zeroed out for a modest increase over what their gas bill would have been had they gone with a condensing gas boiler. At 100K units the utility get's a nuke's-worth of highly flexible peak-power generation capacity that's mostly capitalized by homeowners who also fuel that generator(!). If only the utility structures in the US were as creative, eh?
 

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If they'd sell the kilowatt Honda un-bundled the ROI of the grid-attached unit + 50-100gallons of thermal buffer (including indirect HW volume) would be pretty good.
The size of the buffer required for keeping run times of the Marathon reasonably long is considerable, and installed system costs are well north of $20K for "typical" systems. For big not-so-efficient homes in high electricity rates it's a slam-dunk. Max thermal output on them is nearly 2x my design-condition heat load, so I'd get roughly zero out of the ~2:1 turndown ratio of modulating the beast, and would need at least 1000gallons of high-temp buffer to keep it real.

IIRC LichtBlick is only nicking ratepayers a flat rate of €5000 (~$7000 USD at today's exchange rates) for VW EcoBlue systems, which means it's either at-cost, or at a somewhat subsidized rate. Given the high price of residential rate electricity in Germany the simple-return would be less than 5 years for most, under 2 for some. It's something of a no-brainer investment for many- roughly half the cost of a mod-con, with 5-10x the ROI. (When that deal comes to MA I won't hesitate! :) )

At the current cost of diesel it would take a quite substantial per-kwh rate to make running a ~15% thermally-efficient beast of an antique diesel engine to pay off, but it might if you had an endless supply of scrap fat that they paid you to take away. The soot emissions could get you into air-pollution trouble in urban/surburban areas. And extracting the last BTU out of the exhaust on a diesel (and particularly a junk-fat burner) takes more expensive materials & methods than with natural gas exhaust. If you could hit 65% efficiency as a space heater I'd be surprised, and hitting 15% as a generator for a total net of 80% system-efficiency would be the stuff of dreams. But that's the very low end of the off-the-shelf units- most hit 90%+,on average. I'll bet the noise of that Lister contraption is a lot more than that of the refrigerator-level hum of the suitcase sized kilowatt-Honda's too.
 

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Yes the Lister is loud, but remember that RED diesel is [variably much less] than un-leaded fuel with far more btu per pound. Or burn heating oil.

They make quiet diesels too if one doesnt want the antique that runs for 100 years with a handful of repair parts.

I say we put the little 'failsafe' battleship type nuclear reactors every hundred square miles. Better ROI than Joke Solyndra. Make them on a assembly line like a ford Lincoln.

The best and most intriquing Uranium mine on earth is hanging over the south rim of the grand canyon. Now the Enviro morons want it dismantled for millions, rather than making it an incredible bit of mining history. And backup for the future. But a hideous piece of amusement park glass hanging out in Grand canyon space is a work of "awe" . Pathetic priorities in America.

That 585 million dollar Solyndra handout could have saved 20,000 furniture jobs in North Carolina and kept them out of Vietnam - where their chairs made with stolen wood from Siberia fall apart reliably in 2 years.
 
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The economic of new nukes (even "the little nuke that could" types) just don't cut it in the real world, just as Solyndra didn't/couldn't.

Large in Solyndra's failure was that they didn't think the cost of silicon PV could crash as quickly as it did, and they had little hope of getting their expensive panel/cheap racking approach to market quickly & cheaply enough. The panels used to be the cost-driver of small scale PV followed in short-order by the racking systems necessary for mounting them. Solyndra had bet that getting the cost out of the racks was the quickest way to cutting the cost of the system, but that proved not to be the case, and panelized silicon-PV was destined to stay ahead of them on the cost curves.

It's doubtful given the current high cost of building nukes that they would become even REMOTELY competitive with grid-hardened PV/wind and natural gas fired micro-cogens in any reasonable time frame.

And the Solyndra deal was a loan-guarantee, not a handout. In the end it won't end up costing the taxpayer the whole 585 megabucks. That loan guarantee program as a whole had already budgeted in far more than the Solyndra costs, and other US CIGS technology solar companies with very low-production-cost panels are in high double-digit expansion mode (notably NanoSolar, another beneficiary of the loan program, who maintains the bulk of their cheap printing-process manufacturing in California.) The US bankruptcy system is a slow greedy piece o' crap compared to how it works in Canada, but despite that the lawyers won't get away with vacuuming up 100% of the asset value on this one.

But one bad bet is by no means the signature of the US solar industry as a whole. If it's not developed here we'll be buying it entirely from China (and loving it.) At the moment the solar balance of trade with China favors the US, but it's primarily due to US exports of silicon production technology. Cheap Chinese silcon PV is driving some US PV manufacturers to pick up an move production there (notably Evergreen.) There's a lot of consolidation going on in the industry as the prices race to the bottom, and not all novel approaches to cost competitiveness (like Solyndra) will succeed- count on it.

At current pricing the lifecycle cost of power generated by silicon PV is already well below 10cents/kwh even for small (1-10KW peak) systems, and with CIGS technology in large arrays it's even less. Most analysts are calculating PV kwh will be at grid-parity with the cheapest fossil plants before 2020, maybe by 2015. There's plenty of room for PV taking decent slice of the pie by 2030 despite the fact that it's only making kwh-hay while the sun shines. With electrification of the automotive fleet and with smart grids & batteries it could run the whole show by 2050, but without the policy initiative to do that nobody is making that bet just yet.

Nukes (even mini-nukes) have the ramp-up/ramp-down time problem, over and above the daunting initial up-front costs. Ain't nobody expecting sub-15-cent lifecycle kwh out of any newly constructed nukes, even if maintaining and extending the life of the existing fleet is reasonably competitive with the fossil grid. If you can't ramp it up fast, you can't crank it back overnight- most existing nukes are heat-dumping at night when there is insufficient load to be able to meet the morning load. In heavily nuclear France they can sell some of that nightly excess to Spain & Italy (at a financial loss) to avoid cooking all the fish in the rivers, but that wouldn't be the case in a high-nuke USA. (Maybe an electrified auto fleet could soak up some of that off-peak excess, if that became policy.)

Even if it were burning raw crude oil at an estimated 2015 price of $100/bbl, at ~15% efficiency the dirty-little-diesel will not be competitive on a kwh cost basis with PV by 2015. And as a heating system a mini-split with an annual average COP of 2.5 with 5-cent PV power looks pretty good relative to the 60-65% heat output of that type of cogen with 100bbl oil.

Then there's the first ~30% of end-use efficiency improvements for that are essentially cost-negative- they pay off in utility bill savings in very short years. From a grid policy point of view it's cheaper to reduce the base load by a nukes-worth of pre-1990 refrigerators with higher efficiency versions than it is to build new capacity (any source) to support the difference, and that's just the tip of the efficiency iceberg. Getting rid of the worst-efficiency incandescent lighting technology might be the frost on the tip of the efficiency iceberg. :) That's cost-negative and very cheap up front, yet people bitch about that. Imagine the hue & cry of surrounding them with mini-nukes (of any design) post-tsunami, and present them with the bill for it? The meltdown fear may be as irrational as the efficient-lighting nay-saying, but the pain in the pocketbook would be real. The nuclear industry didn't crash in the early '80s due to all of the protesters, it crashed due to the high cost, the WPPS bond failure, and the very real prospect of much cheaper efficiency & conservation cutting into demand- there was not a profitable market for the output of those projects, and it was beginning to be obvious. Building giga-projects with decade-plus construction schedules is just too financially risky with the amount of low-hanging efficiency fruit that abounds, and those factors haven't changed much in the past 3 decades.
 

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I would rather not have all of my song birds piled up in huge heaps under wind farms, the dirty secret of wind power. And even at 6 cents a KW what does Canada and points north with 6 months of night do with a solar panel? Put whale blubber in their Lister or Cummins? Where did the 15% eff. figure come from? Even in Wisconsin, with the panels buried in snow, we rarely saw sun once a week. And the cost per KW is just a start with all the controls and perhaps batteries.

And I dont want my So CAL and Nevada desert polluted with 10 billion acres of glass.

If Canada captured all its water power, it could supply America day and night. And about 40% less water over Niagara falls would still give the tourists a thrill. And keep it from moving toward the west as fast. Water power loves rain and snow and clouds, 24/7.

And the clowns in the east and even in the northeast are blasting out old, viable hydro dams for the ten Berkely grads that care, and for the Salmon that gave up that river 80 years ago.

As to small nuclear, it can be built failsafe and in small manageble units. Units small enough and flexible enough not to break up in a 8.0 quake. Costs would plummet just as with solar panels on a production line. The japanese are guilty of criminal design in those idiotic storage pools and placement of gen sets.

Yosemite national park generated ALL of its carbon free power for 60 years until some enviro boss decided it wasnt in tune with the natural enviroment. Small. invisible. efficient. Redwood penstock. THEN, they left the power house in, because a new set of nuts decided it was historical. It was a run of river scheme with no impediments to any sort of fish, of which there are none in that area anyway.

Now, Yosemite has hundreds of 40' long gensets for when the power is out predictably days and weeks at a time since the new lines run through mountains even a fox cannot traverse. A dedicated Muslim could take out the parks power for a month with a backpack acetylene torch.

Solyndra could have moved into a shuttered woodworking plant for FREE, wired and ready to go. But flush with cash built a new, now empty cave.
 

Dana

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Nobody is suggesting putting all the eggs in a single basket, and that one solution works everywhere- it's clearly not the case.

Most of the population of Canada is well below the 50th parallel though, and solar PV is a highly subsidized & growing part of the grid in Ontario & Quebec, but those provinces also have extensive & cheap hydroelectric power as well. Much of Canada is on the natural gas grid too, making the mini & micro cogeneration a worthy approach to distributed power ala LichtBlick. I suspect the feed-in tariff for micro-PV in Ontario is even a bit TOO generous, given the current cost (IIRC they're paying ~65cents/kwh for ground mounted <10KW PV these days. that's a heluva subsidy, given that it's nearly an order of magnitude higher than the residential-retail price.)

Even in Wisconsin the snow doesn't dwell on PV panels for weeks on end- the mounting angles are above the avalanche threshold- it'll all slough, and the solar heating of the exposed section helps it along in short order after then initial sough. "Buried in snow" could only happen if the implementation were optimally bad. It's more of a problem with evacuated-tube solar thermal panels, where the insulation of the evacuated glass drastically reduces the rate of the solar-melt.

For reference:

It takes merely ~7% of the total existing residential & commercial roof area in the US to provide 100% of the electric power used, assuming 15% efficient panels. That consumes 0% extra real estate. You don't need to glaze Nevada & SoCal to get there. Only if you feel a need to maintain a remote centralized-production grid model would the mega projects in the desert make sense, but PV is infinitely scalable (down to a few hundred peak watts).

By comparison some of the bio-diesel folks got all excited earlier this year when somebody figured out that 17% of the oil imports could be offset with an algae-farm "only" the size of South Carolina. I only wish they were joking, but they seemed to be thinking that was good news.

The mini-nuke is still a non-starter, even if some of the reasons aren't purely rational, and it's doubtful that even if they were mass-produced they could hit grid-parity with cheap fossil plants. A lot of really smart people have looked at that very carefully, and nobody is holding out even fantasy-numbers that low. The opportunity-window for the mini-nukes was already starting to be closed 40 years ago, and there's no making up for a 4 decade hiatus in product development. Standardized nuke design construction is on the fast track in China, but even there costs are high (not that hard numbers are easy to come by.)

The plant design in Fukushima was done primarily by US contractors (General Electric), and even when some of the risks were pointed out by GE engineers as early as 1975 that was soft-pedaled by the suits, causing some engineers to quit in protest. If there was criminal negligence involved, it can't all be laid at the feet of the plant operators in Japan.

The bird death issues with wind power have been highly overstated, with the worst data based primarily on 30-year old projects in CA. In Europe that issue has been studied to death, and it appears that the bird deaths from collisions with windmill blades are fewer per mill and much fewer per megawatt-hour output when the size of the tower and mill are larger. In Scandanavia and the Netherlands siting of wind farms (they call them wind-parks there) for optimal bird population health has more to do with keeping nesting areas from being disturbed by construction & development than the bird-blender aspects of megawatt-class turbines.

I have no knowledge of any particular real-estate options Solyndra had as of 2008, but ready adaptability (and expandability) of an existing woodworking plant into a PV panel manufacturing facility isn't necessarily a slam-dunk, even if it might have been cheaper than new construction. To be sure the powers that be at Solyndra weren't the best at interpreting the crystal ball, nor were they dumb-lucky.
 

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Ge didnt put the plant on a beach in a KNOWN tsunami and earthquake hot zone. And the Japanese put the poison on the roof to save buying some non-existent or expensive real estate.

If GE had any part in the infrastructure design, which as you know the Japanese are too proud to allow, it at least would not have put the gensets in a hole or in front of the plant. It was the spent fuel that should have been in the sealed hole, and the gen sets on the roof.

And these are the engineers that we all bow down in front of a Subaru for?

In any case all of our present power gen systems will loook like wooden sewer pipe in a museum in 40 years.

What will bring particular laughs is a gasoline engine that could heat a Walmart, pushing one old frail lady to the Winn-Dixie, in 6,000# of Iron.

So they built Solyndra without taking a tube to Wisconsin in the winter? Sounds like Fukastupidity.

I dont care how your panels shed snow when you have a week of fog and clouds. Which is why our deserts may soon look like down town New York.

The French, being so goofy in most things except food, managed to build out most all of their fossil fuel with nuclear. Why does it work for them?
 
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Dana

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where to begin...

The French nuke system was paid for with a huge subsidy pushed on the backs of the French taxpayer, and contrary to popular opinion in some quarters doesn't really work very well for them at all. During sustained high air conditioning load conditions they run out of cooling capacity and have to either get a waiver to allow them cook all the fish in the rivers, or import power from Spain & Italy (if they have any spare capacity to trade) at peak-prices. In order to avoid falling short for the AM demand ramp they have to run them all night in power-dumping mode. Fortunately for them they can usually sell off-peak power to Spain & Italy (usually at a financial loss) otherwise something like half the power would have to be sent out the cooling systems. While the net balance of megawatt hours traded to their neighbors is in France's favor, the balance of cash value of those megawatts traded is not. They sell at loss during off-peak just to keep revenue for those plants they need to keep going all night non-zero, and buy only peak-power back.

The French system was pitched to the taxpayer back in the 1970s and early 1980s as a means of reducing oil imports, despite the fact that oil was never a big player on electricity production in France, and their transportation sector was then and is now largely fossil-fired. Wherever French nuclear designs have been exported, the contract price is high, and even then no project to date has come in on-budget. They've gotten away with it in France, but it's not exactly a model of efficient or economic grid operation, rather it's a model of a government picking a winner and sticking by it even when proven to be a loser. Were it not for the huge capital investment already put up they'd be better off decommissioning 30-50% of them off and doing something more flexible. France more than any other country needs electric cars and smart-chargers, just to have a load for buffer their copious excess off-peak and baseload power of their overbuilt nuke fleet, but it will still be more expensive electricity than PV circa 2020.

And GE surely did TOO put the plant on the beach in Japan, who are you kidding? If GE engineers had issues with where & how the customer wanted to configure and site the equipment, it didn't stop them from commissioning the plant, eh? Nukes aren't packed up in a box and dropped on the pier with a "some assembly required" instruction packet. If site plans were not consistent with GE's best-practices guides, they didn't let it get in the way of the sale. Japanese law may leave them largely off the hook, but it's a stretch to say that any egregious oversights were solely on the part of the Japanese operators.

And SFAIK no automotive engineers from Subaru were involved in the design or siting of the Fukushima plant.)

I have no idea as to whether Solyndra had snow-country field testing of their designs or not, but since they're not insulated evacuated tubes I'd be surprised if they had a long snow-melt situation the way some thermal-tube panels can. As long as their tubes were mounted on racks taller than the anticipated snow depths the sides of the tubes would shed snow pretty readily, and the solar gain would then raise the temp of the glass to clear the rest. I was never convinced that they could build their panels sufficiently cheaply that their cheap racking system would make them viable, but they had a lot of people convinced that it could work when silicon flat panels were over $6 per peak-watt. At $3 peak-watt and falling there's simply no way. There is definitely an industry shake-out in progress as growth in PV soars at the lower price point. On my daily commute (in a snowier climate than WI) I pass something like a dozen small scale solar installations, both PV and thermal- snow burial is not a problem- the only system than hangs onto snow for more than 24 hours after the sun returns is the evacuated tube thermal system on the roof of the Aka Bistro in Lincoln MA. In 3 days it's usually clear, even if the temps stay sub-20F.

All generating power needs backup, including (especially?) nukes, which need to be periodically shut down for days or weeks on end for maintenance or refueling. With solar the regional output is predictable with the weather, and the degree of grid-hardening something that can be calculated. The wintertime and nighttime reduction in output in cold places can be nicely offset by the relatively increases in output of micro-cogenerators as part of the grid-mix even without smart-grids. But to achieve a very high level requires smarter systems to be sure. Over wider regions wind power functions remarkably well as base generators, and the average wind power output is predictable days in advance by weather. Unlike large centralized power systems, taking small scale local generation offline for repair has no impact on the grid operation as a whole- fixing a 1-5kwh home-scale cogenerator does not need to be scheduled with the grid operator any more than testing a 5 ton air conditioning compressor does.

Oversized desert development of solar power are hampered by grid infrastructure costs and loss of efficiency of PV at high temps. It's cheaper & more efficient to use solar-thermal boilers as the heat source for more conventional turbines in the desert than PV, but if you need to build a huge transmission line to hook it up the point becomes moot. Maybe Las Vegas and Phoenix could get a substantial amount of power that way, but the costs of the infrastructure for shipping that power to LA & Orange county are ridiculous, especially compared to how cheap it is to do on-site PV nearer those loads. And smartening up the local grids to better balance capacity to load and going aggressively after efficiency are still far more cost effective than any new source generation. The efficiency well is deep & cheap- too cheap to be able to rationalize building a whole new fleet of nukes.
 

Jadnashua

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FWIW, regarding Niagra Falls, at night, they keep enough water going over them to keep the tourists happy. There are some really significant tunnels that run the water to a reservoir that have the capacity to actually stop the flow at the falls. They run out of the reservoir for the most part during the day for power generation, and adjust how fast it is refilled, based on the available flow and system load.
 

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When Chinese submarines start a Blitzkrieg, the French will be very happy to have their expensive power.

And they have some nice mountains in France, no reason not to pump water uphill at night.

As to infrastructure from Utah to LA, I understand LA gets a huge amount of its power from coal plants in Arizona and Utah, and even Hoover dam. Those towers you drive under on the way to vegas from LA make your hair stand on end, and could stop a pacemaker. I know that power is not going east.

Tehachapi has problems getting its wind power 'out', but the hideous mess of wind turbines around Palm Springs ties into the existing import grid.

Japan keeps a tight lid on its designs and locations, by cultural nuance, so I hardly believe that GE did anything without a gaggle of japanese engineers modifying and approving it. Looks like they NEEDED a review by a Subaru engineer, or perhaps a good mechanic or fisherman to tell them their plan was patently absurd.

Fuel rods on a ROOF on a beachfront property perfectly known for a future monster earthquake? Now thats a useful class action suit. Gensets that my mother could figure were in a ridiculous location?

We are not much better brainwise with a perfect billion dollar hole in Nevada sitting empty. Perhaps we could at least move the national archives there along with the backrooms of the Smithsonian.
 
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I'm sure there are places to site large PV or solar-thermal turbine generation along existing transmission lines. But there's very little reason to do so with PV- there isn't really much economy of scale, and the transmission losses over the long-haul lines and multiple transformers between generator & load cut into any increase in solar output from the same panels by siting them in AZ or UT instead of on rooftops in L.A. or Orange County next to the loads. With remote generation & large transmission lines the grid is less stable, more susceptible to disruption compared to a widely distributed model to. It's a model that only makes sense if there ARE great economies of scale.

Somehow foggy-dew northern latitude Germany is making huge headway on making distributed PV a nice slice o' pie. It was at quite a cost intially, but still cost-competitive with nukes, if not untaxed coal. At current PV pricing and German feed-in tariff it's a no-brainer investment for anybody with an unshaded roof or yard. Unlike nuclear projects, it's dead-easy to get private capital to finance PV these days.

When the Chinese subs start a blitzkrieg we're all screwed (even the French, eh? ;-) )

If the transmission lines to Spain & Italy are cut, the French are screwed, since they would have to throttle back to something like 1/4 capacity on the nukes overnight, and they don't just wake up when the alarm clock rings- they'd be short daytime capacity. If they had stopped at only 1/4 of their power from nukes they would have been fine, but circa 1980 projections of the total grid load circa Y2K proved to be wildly overstated. Prediction of future demand is a huge risk factor when building decade-long giga-projects, but once they break ground it's nearly impossible to halt the project in the face of newer-better projections, due to all sorts of political ramifications (unions, unemployment payout, contractual obligations to the builders etc.) Only a major financial crash like the WPPS fiasco seems to be able to stop a nuke once the project begins, regardless of how outlandish the cost overruns are. In the French case the construction was entirely a government run project- none of the administrations (of any party or coalition) had the political gravitas to be able to pull the plug on any of them after the initial sales-job, but it was pretty obvious by the '90s that things were out of hand.

If pumping water uphill were economic in France, they'd be doing it already rather than taking the financial hit from power dumping and selling off-peak at a loss to their neighbors. It's theoretically possible, sure, but I suspect there are better grid investments that they could be making (and I suspect they already ARE.) Their ability to export their nukes within Europe and build 'em on-budget has proved to be an international fiasco.
 

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They can sell to Germany that is closing all its nuclear decades prior to reasonable re-evaluation.

Or Germany can sell its soul to the devil Russia and use its gas until they get in a bad mood and shut it off.

Huge controversy in California about applications for MEGA PV farms in BLM - public lands areas, Which is about 1/3 of the state..

They are out collecting desert tortoises just now for relocation on a monster PV farm.

Unless China goes to about .9 births per couple, you can expect the lemmings to come over the cliff at some country. Best we keep our thermo-nuclear arsenal polished up.

I did tons of copper roofs at $1.65 a pound, now I get $3.85 for my SCRAP. Welcome to India, Asia and China with satellite TV.
 

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They can only sell to Germany if they're buying, but maybe. The majority of new-generation capacity in Germany is renewables. Germany has quite a bit of untapped coal seam gas, if things turn dicey in the east.

Mega PV farms make no real economic sense, since the economies of scale of megasystems don't give it a cost advantage over 100KW locally sited (and no much over 10KW rooftop installations). It's no surprise that building monster systems on public lands is controversial.

Yes, "the rise of the rest" does indeed impact resource economics of the already-developed world. Raw materials costs will continue to rise along with the standard of living in the developing world. When it's no longer economic, copper roofs and pipes will become rarer than they already are, but the developed world will still have roofs & pipes. Copper wire may be a more critical issue, since there are few good substitutes.

The annual net annual emigration rate of China is between -0.25 and -0.5 persons per 1000 per year. That is controlled by their own national policies- they make it difficult to leave. If things get out of hand internally they can easily increase that by an order of magnitude or more, which is perhaps a bigger risk to the west than wars over resources. At the moment it's tough for them because a large fraction of the emigre's are the educated (particularly the foreign-educated), and the wealthy, representing a brain and cash drain for the nation as a whole. They work hard at attracting those on the fence, and even those already out of the country back in, with some modicum of success. (Most of large Chinese PV companies have of former ex-pats at the helm and in the engineering & management.)

FWIW: I have a nephew who married a Chinese national who was working on her PhD in the US (and continues to live & work here after earning the degree.) Before they married he went with her to meet the 'rents and get their approval, but getting her back out of the country became a real project of it's own taking several weeks. China had invested a lot in her education, and someone clearly did NOT approve of her marriage & emigration plan. But as China become richer, attracting more foreign investors, these policies are likely to change.
 

Ballvalve

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But the Chinese are masters at sending their kids to our universities, to harvest a century of our knowledge without controls, and happily wave them off to China to build the new missile and spacecraft.

The Chinese recenly stole some incredible code for our wind machines that will set us back decades in any advantage. Wall street journal - all the rest of the news is about sports on TV.

We have taken freedom to a new level of self destruction. And I assure you a gaggle of Soviet scientists at 500$ an hour are working the centrifuges for the next piece of global warming between Israel and Iran.

Soviet engineers in Russia get paid in Vodka.
 

Dana

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Theft of intellectual property (as happened recently & blatantly with American Superconductor's special-sauce on wind turbine components) is a problem with more than just Chinese competitors, but it's a relatively new concept for their legal system, and it's (slowly) changing. Evergreen Solar just headed to China with their ribbon-growth silicon crystal technology, which is going to be ever more difficult for them to protect, I'm sure. It's a problem for both China and the rest of the developed world.

Educating the foreign-born has been more of a benefit to the US than a problem. The US economy has managed to skim a big slice of the best & brightest that way (and I'm not just talking about my nephew's wife), reaping the advantage of some of the best-educated people in the world, and mostly paid-for by their home countries/families. Without European-educated ex-pats we'd have taken decades longer to develop nuclear technology and rockets, there simply wouldn't have been a space program anything like the 1960s. It's not all invented here, and it's not all "stolen" from here.
 
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