Great news for renewable energy

[Chew Toy McCoy]

When Warren Buffet is invested shit will start happening at an accelerated pace. I guess he didn’t get the memo that he should start a space program instead.

 

[AG_PhamD]

When Warren Buffet is invested shit will start happening at an accelerated pace. I guess he didn’t get the memo that he should start a space program instead.

Warren Buffet has actually been invested in long distance transmission lines for a number of years. I assume the idea is it’s a consistent income earner and with the creation of more wind/solar farms far away from populated areas, the transmission lines are needed to get the power where it needs to go.

What’s more interesting in my mind is that they were able to successfully contract to have these transmission lines then through 3 states. Building these are typically very difficult due to costs, politics, property rights issues, people not wanting unsightly towers in their back yard, local regulations/politics, environmental activists, etc. It’s actually easier to build an oil pipeline from a regulatory standpoint.

The lack of transmission lines has been a problem for many years. It’s good to see more lines going up so metropolitan areas can better utilize far away renewable sources and it also provides better reliability.

Maybe someday we’ll have superconducting transmission lines to push energy even further with substantially better efficiency.

The growing problem is the insufficient amount of energy, especially in certain places. This problem will only get worse with the movement to electric cars.

Renewables are great and should be used where they can. But every expert in the power generation industury will tell you wind and solar are not reliable enough to handle our energy needs. And we have yet to have a way to practically and affordably store the amount of energy we would need to. The inertia from the enormous, continuously spinning turbines found in fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear plants are also required for frequency stability of our power grid.

The fundamental problem not everyone considers is all the different power generation technologies serve a different function. Solar and wind are good intermediate load sources and could maybe accommodate a pretty decent amount of base load- so hydro, nuclear, and fossil fuels are the other options. Solar and wind farms, given their unreliability, are obviously unfit to accommodate peak load. Typically this is handled by gas turbines since they can turn on/off extremely quickly. Batteries can supplement them though.

That’s why I think we need to really push nuclear development to turn the next generation concepts (small modular reactors, molten salt reactors, etc) into reality. It’s the only practical answer to getting the power grid’s overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. Nuclear is also the ideal choice for electrolysis production of hydrogen (which could be used to power ships and potentially commercial aircraft) and desalination of water.