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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Coal power can’t really be used for on-demand scenarios, as coal fired power plants have massive startup costs and also time. Compared to a gas-turbine that can do a cold boot up to maximum production in 15 minutes. Coal needs about 4-5 hours to come to full power and that is with the best expensive technology we have not necessarily technology that is in use. Also coal plants take about 2 hours to shutdown and about 20 hours to be ready to be fired again. It’s just a limitation that we can’t overcome from complications due to coal being a solid fuel.

    So whatever coal China has it must be using for baseload, they must have more alternatives if their coal fired capacity is decreasing.

    EDIT: adding more context, so I have been hearing this coal as peak load instrument for a while now, so I decided to dig deeper on who is claiming this and why? So there are two claims in this space out there 1st being that for larger plants that can operate at sub 20% capacity can scale between sub20% to 100% in minutes making them useful for peak load, and that is just stupid argument as whatever minimum they are running it is still baseload.

    Other argument is actual redisgn of plants that allow for quick cycling, but technology is new and they can cycle even 4x in a day, but they operate at relatively less efficiency and also since they don’t ever go cold they start plants semi hot, they can’t clean the boiler with forced draft, leading to increased maintenance cost during full cleanup shutdown significantly and also they deal with thermal stress a lot more leading to increased cost of wear and tear. Seems like only CGS has been able to operate using this model and their gen capacity is only 480mW so seems like a proof of concept idea than actual possi ility of turning coal into peak load.

    But at least it looks possible with some research, contrary to my previous opinion that it’s not possible at all, but seems to be still years before it can reach baseload efficiency and last thing we want to do is run coal at worse efficiency.










  • India is not distancing itself from West, but geopolitics are different for India. West has not been a reliable trading partner in last 8 decades, last decade West has been reliable but that’s mostly because now they want to counter China. USSR/Russia has been more reliable.

    But if you take a subset of defense trading partner, West has been very unreliable period. If you look at all the corruption scandals in Indian Defense history you’d realise almost all are with the west, France, Sweden, Italy.

    Now going back to broader business and economic development, your argument is probably valid, but from the point of view of India, it is in position of most relative strength in geopolitics than it has ever been, if India can play both sides, it will and it must.

    If any dealings with Russia were followed by sanction from the west, I think that’s when you’d see who does India favor more. But west won’t do it, because West needs India to be strong to counter China and if the cost is delayed fall of Putin, I think west is willing to take that risk, since Russia is no longer the threat it was to the west 3 decades ago.

    So, from Indian’s point of view if it can both have a cake and eat it too, why would it not?




  • Not really no, some nordinc countries with geothermal and tidal options on top of wind and solar maybe, anything larger than an island nation, cannot reach net zero without some form of carbon capture, even if electricity is fully renewable we will still need steel, cement, we’ll still have to refine metals for electronics and batters all of which emit GHG, so everyone has to use offset carbon somehow.

    One way Iceland claims carbon neutrality is because they don’t produce a lot of steel, but if you look from a consumption point of view, how much steel Iceland consumes, I guarantee you, it will look worse.