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Bownesian · 01-15-2020, 03:47 PM

I've been watching the Brooks plant data as well. If you look at the whole time series, you see the average wattage per day instead of hourly.

https://www.dispatcho.app/live/BSC1?r=42507300

This shows that the average daily production works out to about 5 MW in the summer months (33% of nameplate capacity) and a fair amount less than 1 MW in the winter months (>7% of capacity).

If we are to move to a non-GHG emitting energy mix (net zero being the goal), we have to contemplate replacing transportation and home heating with electrical sources as well, so the load would be highest in times like what we're in right now (I'm guessing doubling or more the 11 GW we currently use in the province).

Given that our future electrical grid needs to work hardest in the winter, the only energy source that could possibly work would be nuclear (which is fine here as we are on a geologically stable part of the earth far from tsunami and so on).

The trouble is, if we want to build out to meet our current 11 GW demand, we'd need 4 or so Darlington-scale nuke plants at a cost of $25 billion or so each in 2020 dollars ($100 billion total, and maybe double that to satisfy the demand for electrified heating).

01-15-2020, 03:47 PM	#2059
Bownesian Scoring Winger Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Bowness Exp:	I've been watching the Brooks plant data as well. If you look at the whole time series, you see the average wattage per day instead of hourly. https://www.dispatcho.app/live/BSC1?r=42507300 This shows that the average daily production works out to about 5 MW in the summer months (33% of nameplate capacity) and a fair amount less than 1 MW in the winter months (>7% of capacity). If we are to move to a non-GHG emitting energy mix (net zero being the goal), we have to contemplate replacing transportation and home heating with electrical sources as well, so the load would be highest in times like what we're in right now (I'm guessing doubling or more the 11 GW we currently use in the province). Given that our future electrical grid needs to work hardest in the winter, the only energy source that could possibly work would be nuclear (which is fine here as we are on a geologically stable part of the earth far from tsunami and so on). The trouble is, if we want to build out to meet our current 11 GW demand, we'd need 4 or so Darlington-scale nuke plants at a cost of $25 billion or so each in 2020 dollars ($100 billion total, and maybe double that to satisfy the demand for electrified heating).