[HN Gopher] How the gas turbine conquered the electric power ind...
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How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry
Author : jseliger
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-11-17 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| taylodl wrote:
| 1. Hydraulic fracking made the pricing of natural gas at pennies
| per cubic mile
|
| 2. A gas turbine can be up and running in days
|
| 3. Green washing - it's "clean" energy for some definition of
| clean, certainly compared to coal
|
| I'm exaggerating a bit on points 1 and 2, but the fuel costs are
| cheap and you can setup a gas turbine plant comparatively quickly
| compared to a coal or a nuclear power plant. Most people don't
| care about a gas turbine plant in their backyard, but a coal or
| nuclear power plant? You're facing a multi-year legal battle
| that's going to cost you millions of dollars. You have to do
| environmental impact studies that are going to cost you tens of
| millions of dollars. There's a lot of complications for how to
| handle the waste (not just nuclear: coal has SOX, NOX, fly ash
| and pot ash wastes that you must manage) that cost tens of
| millions of dollars. A gas turbine is quick, cheap, and easy.
| Guess which form of electrical power generation is proliferating?
| philipkglass wrote:
| The article has a lot of interesting details about the history
| of the gas turbine and its incorporation in electrical power
| generation. Gas turbines first became common in the late 1980s
| and the US built hundreds of gigawatts of gas turbine
| generating capacity between 1990 and 2005. This was back when
| shale gas production was less than 5% of its current rate [1]
| and gas was a more expensive fuel.
|
| Fast construction speed was an advantage even 30 years ago, and
| so is the lower number of full time employees needed to operate
| a CCGT plant vs. equivalent capacity from a nuclear or coal
| plant. But note that the turbine revolution arrived back when
| the US was still building coal and nuclear plants. They weren't
| built just for "green washing" reasons or for avoiding legal
| battles.
|
| [1]
| https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/res_epg0_r5302_nus_bcfa.htm
| flavius29663 wrote:
| from the article:
|
| > By comparison, France's much-vaunted nuclear power construction
| spree accounted for roughly 60 gigawatts of capacity between 1975
| and 1990, and China built about 400 gigawatts of solar PV
| capacity between 2007 and 2022, though today China is building
| about 100 gigawatts of solar a year.
|
| This does not capture the sheer size+speed of the PV revolution.
| We're at 800GW production of PV panels EACH YEAR. This will
| increase to 1TW by the end of 2024. For comparison, the whole
| world fossil fuel electricity capacity is around 5TW. Accounting
| for a lower capacity factor, solar could provide almost all of
| the electricity in just 15 years. This is shorter than the life
| expectancy of solar panels, so prepare yourself for some major
| disruption.
|
| Panels will be cheap as dirt, we'll install them as fences,
| roofs, sidings, you name it. Electricity during daytime will be
| free. We'll see some changes to the structure of electrical
| companies: they will charge a higher subscription to connect to
| the grid, and much less per KWh. Net metering is obviously going
| away.
| anoxor wrote:
| > Electricity during the daytime will be free
|
| > Panels will be cheap as dirt
|
| If you don't consider the capital of a panel then sure free /
| cheap as dirt.
|
| Then the sun goes down and the wind doesn't happen to blow, so
| you fire up your gas turbine.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > If you don't consider the capital of a panel then sure free
| / cheap as dirt.
|
| That's what I meant, the capital cost is already so low that
| you could use them as fence panels. They will only get lower
| with the looming supply glut.
|
| Look at this monocrystaline (higher eff) panel in china: 15
| cents per watt. There are cheaper ones too:
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Haitai-Solar-Panel-
| Pr...
|
| A 400W panel will cost 60 dollars and has a size of
| 1.8mx1.8m. Per square meter that is $18.52
|
| A generic plastic fence panel from lowe's 6ft by 8ft costs
| $120 https://www.lowes.com/pd/Freedom-Actual-6-ft-x-7-82-ft-
| Ready...
|
| price per square meter: $26.87
| jandrese wrote:
| Plus inverter costs, plus interconnection costs, plus
| mounting hardware, plus permitting costs, plus installation
| labor costs, plus disconnect hardware, etc...
|
| You're glossing over the inherent danger of solar panels in
| that they are relatively high voltage devices that can't be
| turned off easily. This means they get saddled with
| expensive safety regulations. The glorious utopia where you
| buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket
| change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into
| some logistical hurdles.
| timerol wrote:
| Your math is off a bit. The panel you linked is 1.722m by
| 1.134m, or $34 per square meter. It's wild that it's in the
| same ballpark as a fence panel, though
| epistasis wrote:
| With battery prices like this, and days to a week of a
| household's electricity needs parked in the garage?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304405
|
| Add in the large number of storage options that are coming to
| market besides lithium ion, from sodium to iron to straight
| up thermal storage, and we may still have gas turbines on the
| grid in 20 years but it's unlikely they will generate more
| than a few percent of a year's electricity.
|
| We are seeing the first disruption of the electricity
| industry in a loooong time and it's going to upset all other
| energy processes too, as electrical sources of process heat
| become cheaper than burning gas or anything else.
|
| Looking at where prices are today misses the picture, look at
| where they will be in five years or ten years in order to
| understand our future.
| jandrese wrote:
| Even today the cost of installing solar is dominated by the
| labor costs, not the panel costs. The panel costs have been
| collapsing for years now, but full system costs have been
| steady or even rising.
|
| Some of this is people (usually required to by the installers)
| choosing expensive solutions like microinverters or optimizers
| that add a high fixed cost to each panel, even though both
| technologies offer very little utility to the customer. The old
| talks about how one shaded panel would take an entire array out
| are out of date and just plain wrong these days. The other is
| that some of the costs like permitting and interconnection are
| just as hard or even harder as they always were, especially as
| power companies get nervous about the number of people
| installing solar panels.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Nit pick:
|
| The article explains why many years have passed from the
| development of efficient steam turbines until the development of
| efficient gas turbines, due to the differences between the
| Rankine Cycle and the Brayton cycle.
|
| Even if the Americans like to name the Joule cycle as the Brayton
| cycle, the American name does not have any justification.
|
| While George B. Brayton has patented his engine in 1872, James
| Prescott Joule has published already in 1851, 21 years earlier, a
| scientific paper ("On the Air-Engine") describing what is named
| now as the Joule cycle, a.k.a. the Brayton cycle.
|
| While the Brayton patent contained very little information, the
| paper published by Joule was very important and it described in
| great detail how to design an engine using this thermodynamic
| cycle and why this is useful.
|
| Moreover, in 1859, 13 years before Brayton, William John Macquorn
| Rankine has published a very influential manual ("A Manual of the
| Steam Engine and other Prime Movers"), where all the
| thermodynamic cycles used in engines known at that time were
| classified, and he already referred to this cycle as Joule's
| cycle.
|
| Therefore there is no doubt about the priority of the term "Joule
| cycle" over "Brayton cycle".
|
| An interesting fact that is usually not mentioned in most manuals
| is that at equal maximum temperature and maximum pressure (which
| are typically limited by the materials used for the engine), the
| Joule cycle is more efficient than either the Atkinson cycle or
| the Otto cycle, so the fact that it is the easiest thermodynamic
| cycle to approximate in a gas turbine is favorable for its
| efficiency.
| p1mrx wrote:
| We already named an SI unit after Joule. His legacy will be
| fine.
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