Electrical Power Misconceptions (Part 2)

PART 2 OF 3 PARTS

In yesterday’s post, I started to try and explain some of the misconceptions about the way we look at electrical power, and the way environmentalists are misinterpreting it, not out of malice, because they probably think they have good intentions, but because they have no concept or understanding of what it is they are talking about. So, the big headlines they get are believed by the public in general. As soon as someone tries to explain it, the stock reply from those environmentalists is the person doing the explaining has an agenda, and is basically a ‘denier’.

What I am endeavouring to do is to actually explain some of the things they just throw off.

Yesterday I dealt with the ‘smart grid’, and with this post I’ll look at perhaps the single most misunderstood part of the whole argument, and the thing that environmentalists dismiss, virtually out of hand, that being Baseload power.

BASELOAD POWER

Environmentalists would have you believe that this is just a desperate fallback for those who disagree with them, but it’s importance is the largest thing of the whole argument.



Those environmentalists tell you that ‘baseload power’ is those monstrously large power plants, and here they point directly at those coal fired plants, claiming that the burning of the coal they use emits the Carbon Dioxide supposedly imperiling us all.

They have it completely and utterly wrong.

Baseload power is NOT those large plants.

This is baseload power, and I want you all to imagine this in your own mind.

You wake up in the morning. It’s Winter now, so you are probably in a bed warmed by an electric blanket. The clock radio has woken you. You reach across and turn on the bedside light as you shrug the sleep out of your eyes. If your wife and the kids are not already up, you get out of bed, and head straight for the heating to turn it on, if it hasn’t been running all night. You go into the bathroom, turn on the light, have a wash, or perhaps even a hot shower. Breakfast is under way. If cereal, then the milk and the juice has come out of the fridge. The jug is boiled for coffee, and if you have a hot breakfast, then the cooking is under way.

After that you change into work clothes, leave the house and drive off to work. The wife has cleaned up after breakfast, loaded the dishwasher, made the kids lunches, and she then drives the kids off to school on her way to work if she does also.

Both of you drive down streets that have traffic lights to order the chaos of the traffic. She drops the kids off at school, a well lit and warm place for the kids to go through their day.

You and your wife then work all day. If it’s in a building, then that will be well lit, and also warmed, and with circulating air through it. You’ll drink water from the bubbler, make coffee a couple of times, have a hot lunch maybe, work where you do with electricity supplying everything. Then get in car and drive home through ordered streets, now probably dark, but all well lit, past shops and buildings all still lit up. All still warm, all still with air circulating through them.

At home now, you’ll turn on the heat if it hasn’t been running all day during the freezing cold, you’ll have a shower, a cold drink maybe, check the emails and log into a favourite site or two. You’ll have a hot dinner, watch some TV, and then off to bed again. Your wife will probably have done a load or two of clothes washing in the machine and will then dry them in the dryer. The dishwasher will run its course.

When you shop, you enter a supermarket well lit, and with cold storage to keep fruit, meat, dairy all cold so it’s fresh for you.

Everywhere you go, everything is connected to electrical power.

From the minute you leave home in the morning, everything you see is powered with electricity that has to be there all the time, not just for a few hours in the day, but all the time. Those places of work need to have the air on, not for your comfort, but to actually circulate fresh air into the building. They need to be lit all the time, the elevators need to work all the time, the toilets need to flush, because the water is pumped to them with electrically powered motors if you work above ground level.

All of that electrical power you take so much for granted is what is called ‘baseload power’, power that has to be there all the time, essential absolute power required all the time.

In the U.S. baseload power makes up almost two thirds and more of all the power there is. It is required all the time to keep everything going, and without it, there is just absolute chaos, and you only have to go through one blackout to realise what life is like without it.

It is not those large coal fired power plants.

It is the power that is required absolutely.

It is supplied by those coal fired plants, and that is where the environmentalists have it horribly wrong.

From when you first wake until the time you leave home, and then from when you arrive home till mid evening, this is the period called ‘peaking power’, those two spikes each day when extra power is required for residential purposes. These two spikes sit atop the baseload power average and are when power demand across the Country is at its maximum. This can sometimes be as high as 90 to 95% of all the available power in the U.S.

At these times, all those smaller power plants come on line.

Why is that?

The huge coal fired power plants and nuclear power plants hum along all day every day at around 3600 RPM. These units have huge generators with huge turbines driving them. The weight of this Turbine and generator is around 250 and up to 400 tons. To keep that motoring along at the required speed, between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of coal must be burnt EACH day. They cannot just wind down the speed of a weight like that at a moment’s notice, or speed it up. So, no matter what, they just go along all the time at that speed, for the 35 to 50 and some up to 75 years, other than for carefully planned periods for maintenance.

For those periods of peaking power, the smaller plants come on line, and the large number of these are smaller turbines running a conventional steam plant. These are in the main powered by natural gas, and are similar in nature to large jet aircraft engines. They CAN run up to speed quickly, and then back down when not needed. They are more complex than the lumbering giants of coal fired and nuclear powered units, and they supply that extra top up power when it is needed.

Solar plants and wind plants are included in this vast number of ‘peaking power’ plants. Even though they will be providing power to the grid while in operation, they just CANNOT be used in the delicate equation that goes to make up what is required for baseload power.

Go to any of those solar and wind plant websites and you will see written there boldly that they can supply peaking power. It will be couched in terms to make it look other than what might be suggested, but every one of them will say the same. There are hundreds of them, in the U.S. in Australia and in other areas all across the Planet, and NOT ONE will say it can be used as a baseload power provider.

Consequently, no matter how many of these solar and wind plants are constructed at horrendously high cost, not one of them will result in the emission of any less CO2 from those coal fired plants, because they will always just hum along at close to their absolute maximum, because the power that they provide is what is required absolutely.

The only time they will stop producing that same amount of CO2 that they always have will be when they are taken out of service. When that happens, and with nothing to come on line in its place to provide that large amount of power for the 24 hours in a day, then there will be no electric power.

No matter what the environmentalists will say, that the closing of the coal fired plant is a victory for the environment, that will need to weighed against the fact that thousands will have no work places, buildings will have to close, there will be no fresh food, chaos in everyday life on a scale not able to be imagined.

I know this sounds really emotive, but the next time you drive to work and throughout the day. Look around you and just see which areas can do without electrical power.

What you are looking at is ‘baseload power’.

Not some huge and dirty smoke belching power plant that environmentalists are always apt to show you, and scream at you in their loud shrill voices similar to Henny Penny.

Not that at all. Just everyday life.