Why...
a DC transmission line?
Greenpeace rejoices after getting huge renewable powerplant cancelled
Greenpeace activists are celebrating today, after their protests led to the halting of plans to build a massive renewable powerplant which would have supplied clean, green, low-carbon electricity in huge quantities. "Today, we celebrate," Greenpeace chief Matías Asún told reporters, following a decision to withdraw government …
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Thursday 12th June 2014 10:03 GMT Adam 1
Re: Why...
Why a down vote for a reasonable question?
Often you have A/C grids in different cities which are not synchronised. This makes interconnects complex and can allow failures in one grid to take down the connected grid.
Coupled with the "you can transport more power without building bigger pylons to hold thicker wires" (read: cheaper) and you lose less power along the trip (read: increased range) makes it a bit of a no brainer.
The following link is pretty good.
http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/advantages-of-hvdc-over-hvac-transmission
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Thursday 12th June 2014 08:31 GMT xperroni
Re: It's looking more and more...
And I'm only half-paranoid!
Time to stop doing it halfway?
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Thursday 12th June 2014 14:53 GMT paulf
Re: It's looking more and more...
I became convinced the enviro-hippy movements aren't interested in The Earth/Being Green (tm) and are really determined to get us all back living in caves* ASAP when I saw a comment from one in a Tory-Graph** article about airport expansion that said (in not so many words):
"If people need to fly to see their friends they should make friends closer to home".
*Can someone come up with a good joke about coming down from the trees being a mistake?
**Yeah I know the Tory-Graph, hey ho.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 20:39 GMT Charles Manning
"Make friends closer to home"
Probably a direct quote of someone who had just flown in to an enviro-summit at Cancun.
One of our NZ politicains was telling people to reduce their carbon footprint - interviewed while on a week's holiday in Greece!
The "do as we say, not as we do" nature of these people is gobsmacking.
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Friday 13th June 2014 15:26 GMT jelabarre59
Re: It's looking more and more...
For all these pseudo-environmentalists who claim to be so concerned about everyone's carbon-footprints: they are hereby welcome to remove their own carbon footprints from the planet.
(I say "pseudo-environmentalists" because anyone who would actively defeat and then cheer the defeat of a project that positively moves towards reducing pollution, etc. is *not* really trying to *solve* the problems, and is really more interested in flogging their own power-craze).
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Friday 13th June 2014 00:12 GMT Daniel B.
Re: It's looking more and more...
It's a bit more complex than just GreenCheese getting mad at this. The project was going to cause irreversible damage to natural reserves in the area, and it was opposed by a whopping 74% of the population. It was basically Piñera's pet project, a right-winger, and given that his party was ousted in the last general election it was pretty much a given that Hidroaysén would be axed.
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Friday 13th June 2014 09:54 GMT Psyx
Re: It's looking more and more...
For a slightly less biased version: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-27788286
The plan was turned down by the government, not only on environmental grounds [and tourism, I suspect, judging by the type of vista that'd be getting trashed] but also because the people building it appear not to have given a crap about the people they'd be displacing.
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Friday 13th June 2014 15:22 GMT MR J
Re: It's looking more and more...
Actually your wong, these type of projects usually harm the poorer nations as the funding ends up coming with strict terms from Europe and USA. These debts are so costly that they never end up getting repaid, think pay-day lenders or legal loan sharks.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZsqK-9Kon0UJ:patagoniasenzadighe.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Financing-of-HidroAys%25C3%25A9n-IR-080919-PROFUNDO1.doc+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
Personally speaking... I don't think these projects are that good for the consumer, they are not good for the local ecosystems, and they are not good for the governments deploying them. The big winner is huge Euro/American firms.
If this was government infrastructure then I would likely support it, despite the huge amount of damage that these Hydro projects can do.
Probably the bigger (short term) loss here was the fact that a big provider was moving to HVDC, something that we haven't seen done enough for the world to move to it yet.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 08:54 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
There's got to be a cost in methane production. Although does all the methane bubble through the water and reach the atmosphere, or how much of it gets trapped in the sludge on the bottom?
Anyway, I can't believe those figures. You could chop down a bunch of the vegetation if it's that bad. But the methane cost is a one-off. Once you've built a hydro-electric dam you've basically got carbon free electricity for ever. Sure you may have to keep repairing the dam, and buy new generators and impellors, but that's never going to have the same cost in methane.
So that argument sounds like the kind of bollocks that the anti-fun anti-modern economy type campaigners go for. Where nuclear isn't green, because it uses lots of concrete, hydro isn't green because methane - so either move to a mud hut or kill yourself for Gaia.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 10:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
" but there is an incredibly large amount of concrete in dams with the associated CO2 emissions."
But that's largely irrelevant unless the alternative is sitting in the dark shivering. All infrastructure uses lots of concrete. Hydro is admittedly worst at perhaps 3,000 tonnes per MW, next worst is that old hippy favourite, crappy, expensive intermittent wind power, at around 300-500 tonnes per MW. The best is CCGT at around 20.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 10:55 GMT Grikath
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
Given that the CO2 from the concrete is released at ground level it will be consumed rather expediently by the local plant life, methinks. It's a slow-release process, not a carbon bomb..
As far as the methane argument goes.. as far as I can tell, most of the Amazon flood plain ( for starters, any natural flood plain works like this..) is one huge methane factory by the same "logic". Yet I do not hear the Hippies about canalising and controlling that to "reduce methane emissions".
The Hippies used to have a point, but they've degenerated into a rabid political tool.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 13:01 GMT John Hughes
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
"Given that the CO2 from the concrete is released at ground level it will be consumed rather expediently by the local plant life, methinks. It's a slow-release process, not a carbon bomb.."
And your research that supports this "interesting" theory is published where?
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Thursday 12th June 2014 12:13 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
"..but there is an incredibly large amount of concrete in dams with the associated CO2 emissions."
Only during production. Once it's installed, concrete *absorbs* CO2 making calcium carbonate. Check out what happened to Biosphere 2, where not realising this created a few problems.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 12:44 GMT Avatar of They
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
True, Windfarms can have upto 1000 tons of concrete for the big uns, and all that is usually carted on a truck to some top of the mountain place on roads that also get built, and it all costs in CO2, some windmills save a fraction of that in their lifetime against the cost of their manufacture and placement.
But we all go, yay windmills.
But in this case I think stupid greenpeace.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 09:59 GMT rh587
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
"Anyway, I can't believe those figures. You could chop down a bunch of the vegetation if it's that bad. But the methane cost is a one-off. Once you've built a hydro-electric dam you've basically got carbon free electricity for ever. Sure you may have to keep repairing the dam, and buy new generators and impellors, but that's never going to have the same cost in methane."
It's not quite one-off. Due to seasonal changes in water level plant life can encroach on areas of the reservoir bed which are then re-flooded in winter. How bad this is varies from project to project - if you're flooding a deep rock-sided fjord or steep valley with a small surface area, then not very. If your reservoir is relatively shallow and wide, then a drop of a few metres can uncover hundreds/thousands of acres of land which can harbour plant life through the summer before being inundated again.
However, a lot of the statistics also only count the first 10 years of a reservoir's life, which is indeed bollocks when a well placed and constructed dam could easily serve duty for over a century, which will easily outstrip a fossil-plant unless it's exceptionally shallow and seasonal, in which case don't bother.
In this case, methane/CO2 arguments aside, this project was managing to hit pretty much every sore spot as (according to Wikipedia), it was liable to impact six national parks, eleven national reserves and twenty-six conservation priority sites, which is a stonking good effort by anyone's reckoning.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 11:18 GMT The Axe
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
Methane is a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny amount of the atmosphere. 0.00017%. CO2 is a bit more but still less than 1% at 0.039%.
So the hippies are up in arms about tiny little things. No wonder they are against drilling for gas. The fractures created are tiny micrometer sized cracks. But I don't see the hippies protesting outside coal mines clamouring for the huge multi-meter sized holes to be closed down.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 12:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
" But I don't see the hippies protesting outside coal mines clamouring for the huge multi-meter sized holes to be closed down."
In western Europe that's because they've already won that battle, by virtue of persuading the EC and European Parliament to introduce emissions controls that most coal plant can't meet. The ever creeping standards for these things means that DECC expect there will be no active coal power plant in the UK power market by 2025 or thereabouts.
You did vote for that, didn't you?
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Thursday 12th June 2014 22:32 GMT mmeier
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
Oh I saw them do that. Even ON the premise of a mine. Until the activists had a run in with the 6:00-14:00 shift coming out of the mine and where "persuaded" not to come back in a not so gentle but easily understood way
Police tried to get a description. But "was wearing standard miners clothing and had a black face"(1) didn't help
(1) German miners get their work cloth from the company so they all "look the same"
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Thursday 12th June 2014 12:49 GMT Paul Shirley
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
Suricou Raven:"Methane doesn't last long in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide hangs around until a plant gets rid of it"
...but that methane degrades into CO2 + water vapour. So you get the direct methane hit then the long lasting CO2 *as well*. And water vapour is itself a potent greenhouse gas, especially high in the atmosphere.
Flooding is so damaging because it converts carbon to methane instead of CO2, trickles it out over a long time and doesn't convert just the surface vegetation you could have burnt straight to CO2 but also the trapped carbon in waterlogged soils.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 13:45 GMT James Micallef
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
So, build the dam, and cut down and truck out the vegetation in the soon-to-be-flooded area. Like this, no (or a lot less) methane produced, and some timber company gets a nice source of raw material (so it could be done at zero cost to the dam project).
In any case, hydroelectric is by far the best non-carbon energy source we have, it can scale up huge and is more-or-less on-demand, PLUS when grid-connected it can be used as a pumped storage to buffer the intermittency of other non-carbon sources.
Greenpeace being against this makes as much sense as them being against nuclear.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 16:22 GMT tom dial
Re: Lower CO2 emissions maybe
In my experience, admittedly a bit limited, only a tiny fraction of "progressives" are able to understand, let alone actually handle, mathematics above the elementary school level. Coupled with the inability of nearly everyone to analyze and evaluate risks rationally, that leads to idiotic actions such as the article describes.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 08:48 GMT Neil Barnes
And who will not be happy
until we're all living in caves, killing our own sausages.
I'd like to take each and every member of the 'environmentalist' lobby, strip them naked, and dump them in some nice hospitable location: a rain forest, a desert, the north Yorkshire moors or similar - and see how long it takes them to learn that:
a) man modifies his environment. It's what he's evolved to do, and
b) even environmentalists are amazingly dependent on modern technology and infrastructure.
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Thursday 12th June 2014 08:58 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: And who will not be happy
Neil Barnes,
From the openining sentence of your post, I thought you were going to go in a different dirction there. So when you say that "I'd like to take each and every member of the 'environmentalist' lobby, strip them naked," - I thougtht you were going to continue: And turn them into sausages.
Didn't you do the live below the line £1 a day eating challenge this year? Were you really missing meat that badly? I guess anyone could, with sufficient provocation, decide that human meat can be both free range, and free. Leaving your £5 to spend on veg and rice.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
