Talk:Electricity generation

Pics

The image placemnt on this aratile is very weird, their are images spaning to the bottom of the page , that do not relate to the choice of the other topics --Samnon_iceman 19:56, 28/2/08 (Aus)

Co-generation

I have replaced the link from co-generation to combined heat and power as a page co-generation does not exist. --OnUrb 08:03, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I think the Cogeneration section should be farther down the page, perhaps after Environmental Concerns. Cogeneration is a subtopic of Electricity Generation, but far less prominent of a topic than Methods of generating electricity. It may even be better to add a section and group Cogeneration with other topics of a similar nature, such as a discussion of the various remediation techniques used at modern coal fired power plants. These are both sort of 'add-ons' to the idea of Electric Generation but really don't have anything to do with the actual topic. Thoughts? Alexmead (talk) 04:28, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

delivery

I wonder if generation really is part of the delivery to customers. I can see how transmission and distribution are.

What is the point of making the pie chart so small?

Daniel.Cardenas 16:16, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Fuel cells

Fuel cells should be included in the methods section. Chulleman 06:29, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe fuel cells are more like a battery rather than a source of electricity. Daniel.Cardenas 08:42, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I think fuel cells and batteries both probably deserve a slot. Tarchon 22:13, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Fuel cells are like batteries in that they convert chemical energy to electrical energy, but they are different because batteries rely on chemicals built into the cell, while fuel cells consume fuel provided by an external source. I could see fuel cells being included, because eventually they may have a role in commercial electric generation, but batteries have no potential for such use, due to their high cost. (In principle, rechargeable batteries could be used to store energy for use during times of high demand, or to replace solar and wind energy at night or when the wind is calm, but as far as I know, this is not done except in small installations that are not connected to the grid.) --Gerry Ashton 23:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

World's Largest Utility Battery System Installed in Alaska "13,670 nickel-cadmium battery cells to generate up to 40 megawatts of power for about 7 minutes, or 27 megawatts of power for 15 minutes." ie: 6.75 mW for an hour, 0.28 mW for a day. Compare that to the 0.25 megawatt fuel cell installation mentioned above it, it's hydrogen must be generated somehow and at a substantial loss in the cyclic efficiency of about 25% (H2O+electricity -> H2 -> H20+electricity) where as batteries range from 66% to 99%. Batteries have their place, but I don't consider fuel cells nor batteries electricity generation technology. They are both electricity storage technologies, one far more expensive and inefficient, that being fuel cells. --D0li0 07:17, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Sometimes fuel cell hydrogen is generated by water electrolysis, but fuel cells can and do use hydrocarbon fuels from a variety of sources. Plus, some schemes use hydrogen extracted from hydrocarbon fuels rather than from water. I think drawing a line between "storage" and "generation" is pretty artificial anyway. By the storage criterion, I could argue that coal fired power plants should be excluded because they aren't generating electricity. The energy in coal was stored by plants 200 million years ago, after all. If you can hook a voltmeter up to it and the needle moves, it's generating electricity. Tarchon 17:26, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you are right, both batteries and fuel cells do generate or produce electricity. I do consider coal, oil, and natural gas stored solar energy, so strictly speaking the stars are the only energy generators in the universe. All the more reason to use the most direct forms of solar energy (Heat, PV, Wind, Hydro). Even the heavy atoms in nuclear fuels are solar byproducts. Having been burning fossil fuels so intensively for the last century we are in effect reversing the photosynthetic processes that occurred over the past hundreds of millennium, essentially reversing the time/age/balance of the earth natural systems, which seems like a pretty dangerous experiment to me. Anyway, I'm not sure if there's a point other than if a fuel cell section is added then I would also be inclined to add a battery section. --D0li0 18:35, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

The lead paragraph of the article clearly indicates the article is about commercial electric generation, which would exclude off-grid small scale electric generation, such as generators in automobiles, batteries used in portable devices (e.g. iPods), etc. It might be useful to put links to articles about small-scale generation in the See also section, if there are any such articles.

Considering the new information about use of batteries by a utility, I suppose that could go in this article. --Gerry Ashton 18:40, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Batteries are just as commercial as power plants. Duracell isn't giving them away after all. I get the sense that the original article was intended to be about utility power generation, but if the article was supposed to be about that, that's what it should have been called. If an article has a generic title like "electricity generation," it should be about electricity generation in general, not just the particular type of electricity generation that the original contributor had in mind. When I wrote the "Other Methods" section I hadn't been thinking about fuel cells, but that doesn't necessarily imply that they shouldn't be in there. I think the important thing in the "Other Methods" is to point out that there are a lot of different technologies for generating electricity and to provide links to the various types for more information, along with some brief and broad description of their respective roles in the world. Tarchon 20:34, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Mention of batteries and fuel cells do not belong in this article. They are not methods of power generation, they are methods of chemical energy storage and transfer. Power generation is the transfer of mechanical energy to electromagnetic energy. KyuzoGator 00:19, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree. Batteries don't generate electricity, they store electricity. --Charlesreid1 (talk) 20:32, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

The Image of the Combined Cycle Gas Plant

It's a very high-resolution image of a bunch of very blurry lights at night. Really, what was the point of adding that image to the article? KyuzoGator 00:14, 7 November 2007 (UTC)Yes.of course that is very important for new generation.

Producers

This graph has no source, it does not indicate units, and really says nothing at all. It is poorly presented, justified and it should not be here unless it is complemented with the missing items. 1, 10, 100... what? percentage, MW, GW, what..??? --Orgoca (talk) 22:39, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

If you click on the graph, you will find a reference to http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/electricitygeneration.html

The units are TWh, which are almost certainly terawatt hours. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 22:50, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps an additional explanation of the units being used would be useful information to associate with the picture. --Charlesreid1 (talk) 20:34, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Why data on this page are so outdated. They come from 2008, while latest available are from 2015. World has changed since 2008, why not show data from 1998 or 1988 it is the same stone age in electricity generation world ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.110.34.112 (talk) 19:02, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

method efficiency

what is the efficiency of each of the methoods of producing electricity? (what precentage of the power source in mentioned is converted to elecrical power?)--217.132.238.135 (talk) 12:25, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Possibly a good addition to the article but is it meaningful to compare efficiencies between disparate sources? And what do you mean by "efficiency"? What are you wanting to learn from the answer? Saying that a solar panel is about 11% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity and a combined-cycle gas-turbine plant is 59% efficient at converting natural gas to electricity looks like information, but what really does it tell you? A hydro turbine may be 95% efficent at converting energy of falling water to electricity. I think it's only useful to compare efficiencies for the same primary energy source; then there's a correlation between efficiency and capital and operating costs. But you shouldn't compare apples and oranges, let alone apples and shiny round rocks. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:50, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, just wanted to suggest updating the photovoltaic efficiency to 47% from 40%. This figure's literally in another Wikipedia article; kinda embarrassing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#/media/File:CellPVeff(rev191101).png)

Orbiting Solar Panels

In October 2007, the National Security Space Office, part of the Department of Defense, and ShareSpace Foundation and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin issued a report which said that the price of oil was now high enough for us to study putting solar panels in orbit around the Earth to collect solar energy and beam it down to earth. Shouldn't this article have a section on this or some mention of this? rumjal 20:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Someone is going to study something is encyclopedic? I don't think so. Perhaps the results of the study might be notable. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 23:01, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Attoman (talk) 01:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC) The orbiting panels are far to speculative as is the "beam down" energy transfer. A link to the "Space Ladder" is in order where such projects have resonance and are put properly into their 20 year plus perspective. Attoman (talk) 01:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia already has a Solar power satellite article. The Electricity generation article cannot cover every possible technology for generating electricity. Even the individual sub-articles such as Solar energy and Wind power get so long that we have to split them up too. However, Electricity generation could use a navigation template which would direct the reader to more details on the various technologies for generating electricity. The main drawback of solar power satellite technology is the enormous time and investment necessary before it could yield any power, when we already have plenty of unused desert land and rooftops on which to install solar collectors much more quickly, and above all incrementally, with proven technology. There is almost always a huge difference between proven and unproven technologies. With a proven technology, the costs and time requirements are knowable with high confidence. With unproven technologies, the actual costs and time requirements may differ enormously from preliminary estimates. That's why private investors greatly prefer proven technologies, whereas only governments are typically able to gamble large sums on unproven technologies. Time may become extremely important if the dire predictions of peak oil proponents bear out (see for example the Hirsch report) - e.g., once the full scale of the liquid fuel shortage becomes clear (in the worst-case scenario of petroleum depletion), civilization may lack the time and fossil energy resources necessary to mount a huge program of space power development. Only options with rapid short-term energy payback will be feasible in such a scenario. --Teratornis (talk) 20:16, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Reference in caption

I agree with the recent deletion of a statement from a caption, together with the citation, because the citation did not say anything about coal being clean and cheap. User:Daniel.Cardenas claimed in an edit summary that citations should go in the text, not the caption. I disagree with that, and if it had been the only reason for removing the statement, it would have been insufficient. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:56, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

The statement seemed to me to be not NPOV and a promo for coal. I understand why you deleted it. There might be some truth in it, though, that might be worth of preserving. If coal is a cheap source (or cheapest) it would be worth putting that back in the caption. But I'd like to see a citation for it. I never really thought about references in captions. Thinking about it now, it seems to me something to avoid if possible, but tolerable. Diderot's dreams (talk) 15:47, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Tesla's Methods

It is reported that much of Tesla's research centered around the generation or "capture" of electricity from sources existing naturally around us. Should these be added to the article? - KitchM (talk) 19:49, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

It didn't, so please cite your sources. Tesla claimed a lot about transmission, relatively little about generation. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:17, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Billion - replace with SI multiplier.

The article uses the multiplier "billion". Unfortunately this is not a standard multiplier and may be confusing since the US and the UK have used different values for the multiplier billion. It would be good if the multipliers were replaced with unambiguous SI multipliers such as Giga or Tera.

Worryingly the article seems to be using the old British value of 10^12 for Billion and not the currently accepted 10^9 which has I understand always been used in the US and is now I believe the most widely accepted in the UK.

I would change it myself however the figures that use the Billion multiplier are not sourced and I cannot be sure what the true values are and I am not a subject expert.

Threebs (talk) 22:00, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

energy production

hi, If we agree that the low of conservation of energy is correct then the terminology of 'generation' for energy might be misleading. After all nobody generates energy, only changes its form from one type to another. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tzachi Bar (talk • contribs) 09:44, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

If you want to create a campaign to make the English language consistent with the theories of physics, go ahead. Once you have accomplished your goal, report back here and we will edit our articles to reflect the new version of English. But Wikipedia follows the existing English language, it doesn't try to change it. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:16, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Principles of Electricity Formation

There is no sign of the principle of electricity formation being represented on the page.

Freely moving positive or negative subatomic particles are termed to be electric charges. A group of Electric charges is an Electric current, often referred to as Electricity. Basically electricity itself is a group of electric charges free from their atoms. Anything with an electric or magnetic effect when coming in contact with a Conducting material attracts charge of opposite type towards it and thus forms electricity or electric charge. Anodes, Cathodes, Magnets, and other magnetic or objects carrying free electric charge form electricity when in physical contact or premises form electricity.

The above mentioned description of the principles behind the formation must be according to me displayed on the article.

Requested move 11 January 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Not moved. There is no consensus to rename this per the request. (closed by non-admin page mover) -- Dane ^talk 07:27, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

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Electricity generation → Electric power generation – Electricity has a wide range of definitions and is not the topic of this article. Instead the topic is electric power generation. This is a subtle point because electricity is often used interchangeably with electric power. Brian Everlasting (talk) 11:07, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Article currently focused on electric power generation, so the change seems reasonable. What outcome is intended for the original title? Redirect? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:35, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes redirect and tweak the article a bit to reflect the title change. Brian Everlasting (talk) 13:06, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, as the article includes a section on "static electricity" that nom did not mention. Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment the phrase 'electricity generation' is widely used and means the same as 'electric power generation'. The Noms reason seems therefore to be invalid. Still, the fact that they mean the same, means it could be changed. OTOH, I'm unable to find good evidence that EPG is more common to change it per WP:COMMON, they seem to be used about the same amount.GliderMaven (talk) 03:54, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. I can see nom's point, but English is not that logical... if it were we'd call it Electrical energy generation rather than power as proposed. We use English even when not 100% logical. Andrewa (talk) 03:48, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Merger proposal

I propose merging Centralised generation into Electricity generation because then it will be less work to keep them up to date as there will be less duplication. Chidgk1 (talk) 16:24, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support there is no need for a separate article. --Ita140188 (talk) 16:46, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

• Support Looks good. Massive duplication. GliderMaven (talk) 17:09, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
• Support per Chidgk1 nomination. —RCraig09 (talk) 19:21, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Merged - will do some basic tidying but leave plenty for you guys Chidgk1 (talk) 16:14, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Audition

I added the following sentence to lead, mostly as an audition:

There are also exotic and speculative methods to recover energy, such as proposed fusion reactor designs which aim to directly extract energy from intense magnetic fields generated by fast-moving charged particles generated by the fusion reaction (see magnetohydrodynamics).

Given the global stakes involved for the current and future generation, I don't think this is a lead that should ruthlessly prioritize thinking inside the box, solely in terms of long established technologies.

There's a certain innate tendency of encyclopedias to be backward looking (all the better to cite you with) and this form of authority is often warranted.

However, in this case, the future mode of electric power generation on planet Earth is the Wild West right now (or should be), and so perhaps we should keep the open box front and center, even if it's so far but a tender, unlikely shoot sired by a DeLorean and raisin-eating porcupines.

Just a thought. — MaxEnt 14:42, 4 October 2022 (UTC)