According to through the meter best hour performance as viewed through EPE website, the Hatch Power Plant made a best hour at 4005KW today. This is the best figure I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s only down 195KW from the better figures unofficially reported at 4200KW.
What does it mean? It means that there’s been a very serious effort to fix problems in the power plant, the amount of labor hours and parts it took makes me curious, but I’ll say this, there are some techs out there serious about keeping stuff on line…. so I think…
Todays’ performance looks very close to the cheaper and less complex, likely easier to maintain Road Runner.
GB
I see the Belgium’s think they have cracked the renewable storage issue. “Has Belgium Cracked the Problem of Storing Wind Power Electricity?” http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Wind-Power/Has-Belgium-Cracked-the-Problem-of-Storing-Wind-Power-Electricity.html
My guess, the greenies here and there will kabosh any practical way to solve the achilles heal of renewable energy – storage. Sorry to see Belgium’s turn on nuc energy.
This is a great concept Belgium has Jack. I can imagine that soon some genius will come along with the suggestion that nature might help fill the man made vessel with evaporation/condensation in the form of rain fall! For those who know the very basics of hydro power, it’s all about head, and when you have low head, you have lower energy density. This generally causes man to build very expensive machines per MWH of production over hydro systems that make use of higher heads. Here in Washinton State, we have one of the better hydro systems built by man, an incredible storage system and hydro turbines that can be used as pumps to irrigate lands that feed millions! But here we have a lot of people who would tear it all down because it’s a problem for the fish! Quizz them about solar, many have the idea that a two square meters of solar panels could run an entire factory.
As we know, the energy in water is all about volume, times feet per second, times head. There’s a rather huge difference when head is increased. Even really dumb ideas can be recognized by Governments, check out hydrovolts… do the basic math..
As for Amonix, does the operator have any other play than to try and meet the PPA even at much higher maintenance cost that the less complex solar power plants? We need consider their options before we attempt to predict waht they will do, if they bad mouth what they own, I imagine a buyer will be harder to find as well. If it’s really good stuff, they’ll build another 30MW power plant I susupect.. but don’t hold your breath.
As per Germany, as long as they still ‘make stuff’ they’ll need energy, Japan too. That old Nuke design they were running at FUK.. it exceeded every design expectation, and it was ready for retirement. If people want more perfomance, they need raise the bar, maybe the new plants can be designed to take a direct hit from a nuke war head? If that’s a concern, address it up front BEFORE it’s engineered and built. We need consider when these plants were designed, and how some of them (FUK) were really designs borrowed from marine applications, and could have been built to survive what hit them had it been part of the design criteria.
I’m afraid uninformed voters are driving energy policies. If it were only their children that suffered. Next time you hear a ‘gang greenie’ talking about how you shoud go solar.. ask him what a BTU is? Rarely can they answer, and generally they’ll go on to tell you about that simple device that’ll double the energy you put in!
I still have a stack of solar panels in the barn – just can’t figure out a project for them as long as the Salish/Kootenai keep selling me hydro-power at 6 cents a kWh.
The present Administration is working hard to change that, they’d like to see you paying at least 18 cents a KWH. And they are also working hard to ruin the image of hydro, it’s not the right shade of green 🙂 Meanwhile Belguim attempts to sell an insanely more expensive hydro idea as just the right shade of green 🙂 Instead of using nature to fill the storage device, they insert a far more expensive man made element full of cost and ongoing maintenance. It’s pure genius!
If only Cleisthenes were here to observe what man hasn’t learned since his time.
All the riches of his time, And… what did we do with our wealth? We watched our elected officials trade it for favors…
Do you have a webaddress for the EPE page cited ? Love to be able to watch the power produced.
Jefe,
http://www.epelectric.com/renewable-energy/NX01
The site has a few bugs, and you’ll soon learn to click the small yellow print in the page to take you back to the selection of Solar power plants, and their meters.
I have mentioned this all before on other pages, but the weather underground is worth referencing WHEN you see interesting data, like a big hole of zero KWH production in the middle of the day. Look for wind gusts, or cloud cover, and then compare to other sites. Of course, we’d all love to have the raw data. Including the maintenace hours and parts to keep these technologies on line.
Until we get that data, we must rely on the norms of human behavior.. if it were really good news, it would be on the front page of every gang greenie WEBsite..
If the public purse helped built it, it should all be public information less it’s DOD or classified for good reason.. .. .. If it’s all private investment, it’s none of our business..