How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry

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?

The story of heat engine efficiency is great. The problem is power generation is about capital investment, distance to consumer and ownership of mines and wells. This is why coal, including brown coal, remains in use at scale. Coal plants are massive sunk cost which fills energy supply simply by existing despite what we want. You wouldn't build new ones unless you have leverage on cheap coal and don't care about the consequence. So Manchin probably wants them.

Peaking gas turbines are great compared to coal. They also can fail on the supply commitments. South Australia suffered disconnection from a national grid which forced shut-downs and then found the gas generators contracted to do black start couldn't do it for various logistical reasons. The contracted parties got sued into the ground later.

I love that Rolls Royce and Pratt&Whitney supply both this market and others from fundamentally the same technology as flight engineering. Obvious differences to mesh a power take off instead of a turbo fan but it's an RJ11 under the hood (for instance)

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.

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.