Our Clean Energy Future
Posted by Big Gav on August 21, 2013 - 4:22am
There are 4 obvious avenues open for dealing with peaking conventional oil production:
- Find more conventional oil
- Exploit unconventional oil sources
- Become more efficient in our use of oil
- Switch to alternatives
Over the years a lot of peak oil analysis has tended to focus on how far the first item can be pushed and what could happen once the limit is reached, with short shrift being given to the other 3 avenues (unless "powerdown" counts as "more efficient use of oil") - and even the amount of conventional oil available being somewhat underestimated (Iraq being the example I always used though as Euan pointed out recently - Brazil, West Africa, East Africa and Norway have all seen significant new discoveries in recent years).
The ability of the oil industry to expand unconventional oil production (the shale oil boom being the obvious example though production of tar sands and heavy oil deposits are also increasing) has been the key factor in pushing the date of the peak out further into the future (I liked Stuart Staniford's quip that this could possibly be characterised as a "frenzied scraping of the bottom of the barrel"). The dawning of the "gas age" has also kept fossil fuels in the picture for time being, with substantial unexploited conventional natural gas reserves being developed and unconventional gas production growing strongly.
While these developments have thus far dashed the hopes of the doomer community the fact remains that even if the whole world was made of oil, there would still be a finite supply of it - and thus at some point we will need to transition to alternative sources of energy, assuming the temperature of the planet hasn't risen to a point that makes it uninhabitable in the meantime. It's this transition to alternative energy which captured most of my attention when writing - and thus the one which I'll make the topic of this final post.
- Renewable energy - solar power, wind power, geothermal power, hydro power, ocean energy and biomass derived power (including biofuels)
- Distribution of renewable energy - energy storage and the electricity grid
- Adopting alternatives to oil and other fossil fuels - electric transport, bioplastic, alternatives to fossil fuel based fertiliser and new models for manufacturing, construction and agriculture
Renewable Energy
The graphic above shows the energy available from renewable energy sources annually compared to global energy consumption. The numbers are intended to give a rough idea of relative scale - for any given energy source a wide range of estimates can be found in the literature so the numbers are indicative.
These numbers in some ways understate the amount of energy potentially available (ignoring solar power potential at sea or in space, for example, or wind power at high altitudes or far offshore, or geothermal power deep below the surface of the earth) but still serve the demonstrate that the renewable energy available to us is orders of magnitude larger than our current global energy consumption.
The contribution made by renewable energy to our energy needs is expected to exceed that made by gas (and double that made by nuclear power) by 2016, though progress needs to be accelerated if we wish to create a sustainable energy system.
Solar power
Solar power is the largest energy source available to us, dwarfing all other sources - renewable and non-renewable. Approximately 36,000 Terawatts of power could be captured by land based solar power generation - compared to current global energy use of around 16 TW. As a result, most of the plans floated for shifting to 100% renewable energy (examples include proposals by Mark Jacobson and Stuart Staniford and local plans for countries like Germany and Australia) rely primarily on solar power.
Solar power is not only the largest energy source available to us but it is also the fastest growing energy source, with solar power generation increasing by over 58% in 2012.
There are a number of options for harnessing solar power - power generation using solar photovoltaic (PV) cells and solar thermal arrays along with passive solar techniques such as solar hot water heaters.
I have been of the view that solar thermal power generation (also known as concentrating solar power or CSP) would become our most important source of power in the longer term. This view was based on a number of advantages that solar thermal possesses - it does not require rare or expensive materials (enabling it to scale without hitting resource limits), it can be built on (and is best suited to) arid land that has few other uses, it can incorporate energy storage (thus avoiding the intermittency issue), it is compatible with the existing centralised generation model and it can be combined with traditional sources of power generation (coal or gas) in hybrid power plants that allow an easy transition using existing connections to the electricity grid.
An area of desert around 250 km by 250 km covered with solar thermal power generation could supply all the world's current electricity demand.
To my continuing dismay, this hasn't happened yet (though it was our fastest growing energy source in 2012) - primarily due to the lack of progress in pushing down costs - the LCOE (levelised cost of energy) of solar thermal still being around twice that other renewable energy options.
I retain some hope given that solar thermal technology remains relatively immature - there was a very long gap between the original plant (SEGS) built in California in the 1980s and the next generation of plants built in Spain beginning in 2007 and the south west of the US shortly afterwards.
Construction of plants is now spreading around the globe, with plants being built in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Algeria (though at this point the immense Desertec proposal has fallen off the radar), South Africa, India, China and Chile.
While there are encouraging signs for solar thermal power, by and large it has been eclipsed by solar PV in recent years, with solar panel prices plummeting and manufacturing capacity surging. While thin film solar has also become competitive it is traditional silicon based solar PV that has dominated after years of being dismissed as being too expensive.
Research into improving solar PV remains vibrant, with new materials and concentrating solar power techniques looking to push the cost of solar PV below that of coal or gas fired power (the holy grail of solar grid parity).
Wind power
Wind power is the second largest renewable energy source available to us, with the potential supply also exceeding current global energy demand.
Wind power has also seen rapid growth over the past decade, with generation increasing by over 18% in 2012 and accounting for more than half of new renewable energy supply. In Denmark it now supplies more than 28% of electricity consumption.
Wind power is now the cheapest source of renewable energy, with the LCOE being competitive with coal or gas fired power in many locations. Thanks to the merit order effect, wind power can also help lower the cost of power paid by consumers. While wind power is now a relatively mature technology, advances in turbine size and electromagnet technology along with optimisation of wind farm sites are allowing the overall efficiency of generation to increase further.
Like solar power, wind power can coexist with other uses of land - and large wind farm developments can also be located offshore.
Also like solar power, wind power is criticised for its intermittency. While geographical diversity of generation (along with diversity of energy sources and expanded grids, which will be discussed later) can help to address this, energy storage can also be built into wind turbines, a technique used in new models from GE.
Hydro power
Hydro power is the most mature source of renewable energy (the burning of wood aside) and still accounts for more electricity production than solar, wind, and geothermal combined - however it has a growth rate (around 3% in 2012) lower than most other renewables.
Hydro power current provides 16% if global power generation - the 4 largest power stations in the world are all hydro power projects.
Large scale hydro power doesn't have a lot of room for growth in the developed world, though the Himalayan region and Africa both still have significant room for growth.
Microhydro power is an alternative that is underdeveloped and often has an LCOE quoted that makes it competitive with wind power and with fossil fuels - however I've never seen any useful figures outlining the energy potential from this source (if you look at some designs you'd guess that this is something that could be deployed very widely).
Geothermal power
Geothermal energy is unusual compared to other large renewable power sources, in that it provides "baseload" power (thus placating those suffering from the "baseload fallacy") unlike other more intermittent sources like solar, wind and ocean power. The potential supply of geothermal energy is approximately equal to current global energy demand.
The first geothermal power generation plant was constructed in 1904 in Larderello, Italy, followed by Wairakei, New Zealand in the 1950's then the Geysers in California in the 1960’s. In 2012, 24 countries operated geothermal plants for electricity production, generating around 12 GW in total.
In 2012, growth in geothermal power was less than 3%, leaving it very much a niche energy source. Geothermal power generation is currently concentrated in geologically active areas - the western US, Indonesia, The Philippines, New Zealand, Iceland, Costa Rica, El Salvador and east Africa.
As well as active power generation from traditional geothermal power sources (including low temperature geothermal), ground source heat pumps can be used to provide direct heating.
The great white hope for geothermal power generation is known as "Enhanced Geothermal System" (EGS) (or sometimes Hot Dry Rock or Hot Fractured Rock) - generating power by drilling holes deep into the earth's crust to circulate water through. The energy potential for this type of geothermal energy is vast, however progress so far in terms of producing commercial power has been very disappointing.
Some early experiments were built in Switzerland but have been shut down due to concerns about earthquakes being caused by the drilling. The most promising experiment is being performed by GeoDynamics in Australia's outback - progress has been extremely slow, with numerous setbacks occurring before a 1 MW pilot plant was finally commissioned this year. On a positive note, operation of the pilot is beating expectations.
Ocean energy
Energy can be tapped from the oceans in 3 different ways - tidal power, wave power and the little known OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion).
While there is a significant potential resource in ocean energy - broadly equivalent to our current energy use - the technology for exploiting all 3 forms of energy remains immature and costly. Tidal power has been commercially generated since the 1960's, with France's 240 MW "La Rance" power station only recently being eclipsed in size by a South Korean project. South Korea is looking to greatly expand tidal power production over the next 5 years and a range of projects are proposed for the UK, Australia and the United States - however it appears unlikely that we will see large scale tidal power production in the next couple of decades.
Wave power and OTEC are even less advanced, however pilot projects are at various stages of development for both of them and interest will no doubt slowly build in size over time. Another even more exotic alternative is the generation of electricity using differences in salinity between bodies of water.
Biomass, Biogas and Biofuel
Photosynthesis provides a steady stream of material that can be used for energy - with the caveat that there are limits before this impacts on our ability to produce food and maintain a healthy environment.
There are a range of ways of harnessing organic material for energy (other than the traditional approach of burning it for heat - which the REN21 (pdf) report on renewable energy notes is still the dominant use for biomass - contributing almost 7% of global energy supply) - using biomass to generate power, producing biogas which can be used for heat, power generation or for transport, producing biofuels that can replace or supplement traditional liquid fuels and for pyrolysis which can generate biodiesel, fertiliser and biochar.
Biofuels have been the subject of widespread criticism (critics citing competition with food production and low EROI) and seem unlikely to be able to replace a significant proportion of our oil consumption. Production of ethanol and biodiesel has stagnated in recent years, with production declining by 0.4% in 2012.
Other advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol and algae based biofuels have failed to be produced in significant quantities thus far.
Biomass based power generation also has its critics, though most seem to agree that it is preferable to biofuel production. Global biomass power generation capacity was 58 GW in 2011 and is expected to grow to 86 GW by 2021. The industry seems to be suffering some headwinds, with the largest biomass power plant (Tilbury in the UK) recently being mothballed. Another large scale project in the UK (Drax) still seems to be going ahead, and generation of power from waste is booming in Europe.
Biogas is the most promising of the biomass based energy generation approaches, with far fewer criticisms being leveled at it (most importantly, there is limited competition between food production and biogas production - the two are often complementary in fact - and the net energy available from biogas far exceeds that of biofuels). It can either be extracted from landfills or produced using "digesters" that process agricultural waste (or occasionally by exploiting natural sources of biogas).
The upper limits for biogas production are not clear, though some studies claim vast amounts can potentially be produced - for example, one European study said that all of Europe's gas needs could be met with biogas. Biogas power generation apparently produced about 14.5 GW in 2012.
Biogas is not only the most environmentally friendly of the biomass based energy alternatives it is also the most versatile, with the gas being able to be used for heat, power (or a mix of both - combined heat and power) or transport.
One last use for biomass is the production of biochar. Producers of biochar take dry biomass and bake it in a kiln to produce charcoal. Biochar is the term for what is left over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment. This process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and oils are driven off the material during the process and then used to generate energy. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.
Distribution of renewable energy
Smart Meters and Smart Grids
Renewable energy (primarily solar and wind power) is often criticised for being intermittent.
In the traditional model of electricity generation and distribution, large, centralised power stations were built with sufficient capacity to handle expected peaks in demand - with significant amounts of capacity idle during non peak parts of the day / year (and brownouts occurring if demand did happen to exceed supply). Consumers were charged a regulated price that ignored fluctuations in supply and demand - instead supply was adjusted as far as was practicable to meet demand.
Adopting a more dynamic (market based) pricing mechanism would allow energy users to have an incentive to shape their energy use to the available supply, thereby enabling fluctuations in supply to be dealt with.
The keys to making this possible are to provide electricity consumers with smart meters and the ability to alter their energy usage based on market price fluctuations. Smart grids are required for electricity distributors to create a more flexible grid incorporating a much more diverse range of power generators.
Supergrids and The Global Energy Grid
As well as making the grid more dynamic, interconnections between grids need to be expanded to enable a greater diversity of suppliers to be available across a wide region - this helps further address the issue of intermittency of supply - the sun may not be shining and the wind may not be blowing in one region however this won't be true across all regions making up a greater grid.
Proposals for extending regional grids into continent wide ones (usually by building HVDC connections between existing grids) tend to be dubbed "supergrids" - examples can be found for North America, Germany and the whole of Europe and between Europe and North Africa.
Buckminster Fuller took this idea to its logical endpoint and recommended the creation of a "global energy grid" as a step towards ending our dependency on fossil fuels.
Energy Storage
The final piece of transforming the electricity grid to distribute 100% renewable energy is building in sufficient energy storage to ensure that suppliers have the ability to react to swings in demand as well as vice versa.
Traditionally energy storage has been available in greater or lesser amounts (depending on what grid you are connected to) in the form of pumped hydro storage.
A wide range of other options have been proposed and explored over the years, ranging from Compressed air energy storage to batteries to flywheels to generating hydrogen (pumped hydro even has an ocean equivalent which is one of the more promising options).
Most battery storage being implemented today involves either lithium ion batteries or flow batteries - however further cost reductions are viewed as being necessary to enable wider availability of energy storage services.
One option receiving a lot of attention recently has been a proposal by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway to build liquid metal batteries.
Adopting alternatives to oil
While it is clear that we can replace all the energy we currently get from fossil fuels with renewable energy, the problem remains that electricity is not a direct substitute for liquid fuels - and that fossil fuels have some other important uses other than providing energy.
Transport
The most important use of liquid fuels is in transport. Increasing fuel efficiency of vehicles (around 3% per year) and substitution of natural gas for oil as a fuel for heavy vehicles has been constraining the growth of oil consumption for road transport in recent years, however this can only ever be a temporary solution - in the longer term we need to use either electricity or (in limited circumstances) biofuels.
Electrifying as much of the transport system as possible is the first step, with biofuels being used for those forms of transport that cannot be electrified (either liquid biofuel such as ethanol or biodiesel, or compressed biogas) such as large planes and ships.
Hybrid electric vehicles (including plug in hybrids and solar hybrids) are a maturing technology with over 5 million vehicles on the roads now.
These are providing the stepping stone to fully electric vehicles (which are already outselling plug in hybrids in the US). The journey towards fully electric cars has been a slow one with the star example so far being Tesla Motors (other promising projects such as Better Place have fallen by the wayside in recent years, though manufacturers such as Nissan are competing at the lower end of the market and a raft of car makers are building high end electric sports cars).
Three problems are holding up the transition to electric vehicles at this point - slow recharge times, "range anxiety" and the relatively high cost of electric vehicles compared to legacy internal combustion engine based vehicles. Tesla are looking to address both of the first two issues by pursuing both fast recharge technology (with various other schemes being implemented around the globe) and a battery swap system similar to that pursued by Better Place.
The IEA has set a target of 20 million electric vehicles by 2020, with further 50% increase in battery performance a key to achieving this goal, following on the 50% increase achieved in the past 3 years.
Cars aren't the only type of vehicle that requires fuel of course - heavier forms of of transport also consume oil. We are now starting to see electric trucks, electric buses and electric boats begin to appear out in the marketplace. Where heavy vehicles such as buses follow the same route on a regular basis they become candidates for recharging while in transit.
Of course, we don't have to simply substitute electric vehicles for existing liquid fuel powered ones. There is a wide range of alternatives available including:
- Walkable communities
- Cycling. Many journeys do not need to be made by car, particularly if cities are designed to enable transport by cycle (both by pedal powered bicycles and electric bikes) as well as by foot or rail transit.
- Transit oriented development
- Rail transport. Rail transport can be electrified where it isn't already and can provide both transit within cities and long distance travel as well (preferably via a high speed rail network)
- Exotic options such as Personal rapid transit and Elon Musk's proposed Hyperloop
Bioplastic
Nearly all the plastics sold today come from petroleum, accounting for up to 5% of global petroleum consumption by some estimates. Recycled plastics are a good first step towards reducing oil consumption, however they can only be recycled two to four times, and only around 25% of plastics are actually recycled.
The sustainable alternative to traditional plastic is bioplastic. The cost of producing bioplastic has been falling thanks to improved processes, requiring lower temperatures. Combining this with the increasing cost of crude oil has made bioplastic prices competitive with regular plastics.
Bioplastic production is expected to reach 1 million tons in 2015, out of total global plastics production of around 300 million tons.
Leading manufacturers include Avantium, BASF, Braskem, Cereplast, Metabolix and Natureworks. Bioplastic feedstocks include vegetable oil, corn starch, plant cellulose and mycellium.
Bioplastic doesn't necessarily need to replace all current uses of plastic - other alternatives are materials that have been replaced by plastics in recent decades, including steel, wood, aluminum, glass, cardboard and paper.
Agriculture
Agriculture obviously requires transport to grow and distribute food products, however it also requires fertiliser (at least if we continue to follow the green revolution model), which is usually produced using natural gas.
This can be addressed via a range of techniques - by being more efficient with fertiliser use (which would have many environmental and health benefits), by adopting organic farming techniques, by growing food near where we live, by generating ammonia using air, water and renewable energy - or by getting to the root of the problem and enabling plants to fix nitrogen themselves.
Another way of reducing energy consumption from agriculture is to find new ways of producing food - efforts to produce artificial meat (or "cultured beef", as it is sometimes known) have the potential to reduce the amount of energy required to produce meat by 45%.
Manufacturing and Construction
Manufacturing is a major consumer of energy and raw materials. The amount of energy and other raw materials devoted to manufacturing can be reduced by optimising for recycling - in particular by adopting "cradle to cradle" design and manufacturing techniques.
Distributed manufacturing and 3D printing also have potential for reducing the amount of energy required to distribute manufactured goods.
The construction and ongoing operation of buildings is another major consumer of energy, with "green buildings" and energy efficient devices such as LED lighting that minimise energy consumption being an important part of our clean energy future.
Conclusion
The aim of this post was to demonstrate the following (or at least provide food for thought to irredeemable skeptics) - I hope you've found it interesting.
- There is more than enough renewable energy available to meet all our needs - primarily using solar and wind power - and this can be done at a reasonable cost
- The keys to shifting to renewable energy are to expand the interconnectedness of our electricity grids, to make electricity demand more dynamic (responding to changes in electricity supply / price) and to put more energy storage in place
- That we need to be aware of the areas where we use fossil fuels and transform these to use renewable energy - to electrify our transport systems, to adopt alternatives to traditional plastics and to adapt our agricultural, manufacturing and construction processes to reduce the amount of energy required and to eliminate dependencies on fossil fuels
And now I'll close with a little trip down memory lane.
A Farewell To The Oil Drum
I started blogging (at Peak Energy) about peak oil in late 2004, having become interested in the topic over a period of years. I'd first started thinking about oil depletion when working on systems for collecting and managing large volumes of oil exploration data in the mid 1990's. Not long afterward I worked for Woodside Energy at a time when their main development project was the Laminaria / Corallina floating oil production facility in the Timor sea. A few years later production from this project had dropped below 50,000 barrels per day from an early peak of 180,000 bpd. Around the same time I came across the writing of Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes and began to consider what the global oil depletion picture looked like (the war in Iraq and the steadily rising oil price also added to the interest factor).
2004 was the year where blogging exploded in popularity and a vast range of writers emerged from obscurity. A number of these began mentioning peak oil and a loosely knit community of bloggers quickly formed around the topic. At the time the traditional observers of the topic were mostly retired geologists from the oil industry and academia following in the footsteps of M King Hubbert (such as Jean Laherrerre, Walter Youngquist and Ali Samsam Bakhtiari as well as Campbell and Deffeyes), along with some writers such as Richard Heinberg and a vibrant (albeit wildly pessimistic) online community of neo-malthusians hanging out at forums such as the "Running On Empty" groups, "Energy Resources" and "Alas Babylon" - usually heavily influenced by Jay Hanson's infamous "dieoff.org" site - and various fringe websites like Mike Ruppert's "From The Wilderness" and Mark Robinowicz's "Oil Empire". There were also 2 news aggregation sites focusing on the topic that had started up - Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org) and PeakOil.com - both of which assembled a steady stream of news on peak oil and related topics.
In 2005 The Oil Drum appeared, with Prof Goose (Kyle) and Heading Out (Dave) quickly building a large following that eclipsed that of the other sites commenting on the subject. I was pleased to be invited to join as a contributor in 2007 and spent a very enjoyable 3+ years writing for the site on a regular basis and co-editing the TOD ANZ site with Phil Hart.
After a time I found a combination of factors led me to become less active and eventually stop writing original work for TOD - in no particular order a couple of changes of job, moving house twice, getting divorced, having a couple of kids who required more of my time and a general depletion of interest caused by writing on the same broad topic for more than 5 years.
It has been disappointing to see some of the commentary about TOD's closure claiming that it indicates "fracking has killed peak oil". Personally I've been amazed TOD has lasted as long as it has, which has been a credit to the editors and staff, especially with so many contributors drifting away over the years.
If I look back to when I first started, none of the peak oil blogs around at the time are still publishing - the ones that come immediately to mind include Past Peak, Mobjectivist, Peak Energy (US), The Energy Blog, Jeff Vail's A Theory Of Power, Peak Oil Optimist, Life After The Oil Crash, Karavans and a myriad of temporary blogs created by a guy calling himself the "Flying Talking Donkey" - all of which ceased for the reasons cited by the TOD board (or due to ill health on the part of the author). This isn't a phenomenon unique to peak oil blogs - none of my favourite blogs from 2004 still exist today - the best sustainability blog of the time, WorldChanging, closed down several years ago, Bruce Sterling's "Viridian Design" did the same as did Billmon's "Whiskey Bar" and Jeff Well's "Rigorous Intuition".
So from that point of view TOD has done remarkably well to have lasted for more than eight years.
The decision to narrow the focus of the site some years back didn't help in my view, but I suspect the end result would have been the same regardless - though I tend to think allowing all of the "Limits To Growth" to be analysed may have kept the energy levels of the contributors up for longer and perhaps encouraged a wider range of contributors to participate.
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Solar thermal had always been my favorite renewable technology until recently. Recently, photovoltaics have dropped in price so rapidly that I now think they would be a better option to pursue at first.
In my opinion, the first phase of the energy transition to renewables, will be to use photovoltaics for peak shaving. PV may be intermittent but its peak times coincide with peak electricity demand (mid afternoon to early evening). Especially in the desert southwest of the USA, where a large fraction of energy use is for air conditioning in the summer.
Within 10 years, PV will be cheaper for peak shaving in the desert southwest than any other alternative, I'd guess. At that point, it will be used for that purpose based upon price alone. Of course it will take awhile for utilities there to replace their peaking power plants with PV, because utilities don't want to retire equipment early, but it will eventually happen even without subsidy.
It's hard to tell how much solar thermal will drop in price as it's more widely deployed. Some components of solar thermal (like turbines) are already highly mature technology. However, there is still scope for price reduction as the technology becomes more widely deployed.
I should also point out that prices for EVs and batteries are dropping rapidly. This trend will continue until EVs are mass-manufactured.
Once EVs are mass-manufactured and widely deployed, I think their prices will be only slightly higher than cars now, on a TCO basis. For example, I'd guess the Nissan Leaf will cost around $23,000 USD (in 2013, inflation-adjusted USD) which is more expensive than the equivalent Nissan Versa, but it costs far less to operate the Leaf since its energy costs are so much lower.
-Tom P
I agree that solar PV has a big head start now and will dominate for the next few years.
The main advantage solar thermal has as we reach higher levels of penetration for renewable energy is that it can have storage built into it (along with the ability to add it to existing coal or gas fired power stations) - the Gemasolar plant in Spain has storage built in already.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/dawn-of-baseload-solar-energy....
The economies of scale that come into play as new products are more widely adopted are all too often seriously underestimated if not overlooked or dismissed outright.
Now Old Man Bau (Business As Usual ) is no doubt getting on in years, and no longer as productive as he once was, due to having to support an ever increasing parasitic load of debt, etc, and resource shortages.
But what he is losing in physical vigor is made up for to a large extent by his ever increasing techno savvy, and barring bad luck, (war, heart attack, financial collapse) he has a few good decades left.
I am quite optimistic that HVDC transmission lines will become easily affordable, as will various promising energy storage technologies, particularly the batteries for personal cars.
In this context, i use "affordable" to mean in comparison to the alternative of doing without the relevant technology. For instance, a suburban homeowner looking at giving up his Mcmansion with lawn, pool, and garage , and losing a couple of hundred thousand or more bucks in the process, in the oft predicted demise of the suburbs, will find a way to afford a pure electric car and the personal pv system to supply most of the juice for it.
Considering the fact that such suburbanites are one of the largest potential voting blocks in the country, I expect that when oil prices get to be truly hard to bear, somebody will see the way things are headed, and get out in front of this new mob and soon have a following rivaling that of the AARP for instance.
The electric car will get to be a hell of a lot cheaper. The current ev subsidies may or may not wither away over the next few years, but in the long term, they will be back with a vengeance, and available to Joe Sixpack rather than just to his son the lawyer or his daughter the CPA.
Ditto for pv, HVDC, and other energy technologies.
Assuming Old Man Bau remains reasonably healthy and functional for another decade or so of course!!!!!!
I think the BAU model also applies to Alternative energy. If we think, by switching from fossil fuels to some other limitless alternative energy, we could keep the economies of the world expanding (which is the only way they function), keep growing more food for the ever expanding populations, and keep the Volvo driving soccer moms making their coffee stimulated excursion to the local sports field by magically switching their car from gas to electric, then I fear we are mistaken.
Sure, if we switch to a limitless supply of energy we would not constrained by peak energy but - everything we do with that energy requires the use of finite resources. The continual extraction of these resources will just hollow out the world in a different way than the oil companies currently do so now.
Unless we can find an infinite supply of everything civilization currently uses including energy, we can no longer grow and we must contract. We can choose to contract like the fellow mentioned in rural Quebec or we can continue dreaming of a technology filled BAU world unaware that reality is about to kick us in the gonads.
Dayo,
You are without a doubt right about us being mistaken if we think renewables will allow us to continue with Business As usual over the long term.
I don't think that way myself- but i do think we will come up with ways to fight off collapse for some time.
Pessimist will refer to these ways and means as kicking the can down the road.
But renewables and electric cars, etc, can certainly allow us to continue the current paradigm of bau for some time- .
It might be useful to think of renewables and electric cars, etc, as rear guard actions in a losing war against collapse .
But my logic and arithmetic are good- anybody with a job who has put it all on the line for a mcmansion in the burbs is going to minimize his losses, and preserve his lifesytle as best he can.
Fifty grand spent on pv and a bev or hybrid for commuting is a better deal than losing the house and moving into an apartment that costs as much or more per month, in the event gasoline becomes unaffordable or worse, unavailable.
People who believe in the early death of the 'burbs seem to be oblivious to the fact that desirable and affordable vacant housing in cities is damned near non existent, and of the fact that a generously sized pv syatem and a perfectly satisfactory bev suitable for commuting can both be had for far less than the cost of one new housing unit.
Banks may not want to loan money on these things, for now, but when bankers realize the choice is loaning the mortgaged borrower another fifty grand or foreclosing on another house and potentially losing a lot more, I expect they will rewrite the rule book.
The economies of scale that come into play as new products are more widely adopted are all too often seriously underestimated if not overlooked or dismissed outright.
Now Old Man Bau (Business As Usual ) is no doubt getting on in years, and no longer as productive as he once was, due to having to support an ever increasing parasitic load of debt, etc, and resource shortages.
But what he is losing in physical vigor is made up for to a large extent by his ever increasing techno savvy to a large extent, and barring bad luck, (war, heart attack, financial collapse) he has a few good decades left.
I am quite optimistic that HVDC transmission lines will become easily affordable, as will various promising energy storage technologies, particularly the batteries for personal cars.
In this context, i use "affordable" to mean in comparison to the alternative of doing without the relevant technology. For instance, a suburban homeowner looking at giving up his Mcmansion with lawn, pool, and garage , and losing a couple of hundred thousand or more bucks in the process, in the oft predicted demise of the suburbs, will find a way to afford a pure electric car and the personal pv system to supply most of the juice for it.
Considering the fact that such suburbanites are one of the largest potential voting blocks in the country, I expect that when oil prices get to be truly hard to bear, somebody will see the way things are headed, and get out in front of this new mob and soon have a following rivaling that of the AARP for instance.
The electric car will get to be a hell of a lot cheaper. The current ev subsidies may or may not wither away over the next few years, but in the long term, they will be back with a vengeance, and available to Joe Sixpack rather than just to his son the lawyer or his daughter the CPA.
Ditto for pv, HVDC, and other energy technologies.
Assuming Old Man Bau remains reasonably healthy and functional for another decade or so of course!!!!!!
It occurs to me that in lieu of storage of PV power, there is an opportunity using HVDC links, to use the Afternoon/Dinnertime offset in Peak Sun to Peak Electrical Demand for the Southwest to be selling Power to the East Coast, where they could possibly afford to undercut other generation, while not requiring storage technologies to manage the difference.
hi Jokuhl,
You are barking up the same tree- sooner or later, with the design of hvdc improving and ecomomies of scale installing more of it, and the prices of ff inevitably rising, it will be cheaper to build long distance lines than to do without them.
Now I am most emphatically not argueing that renewable electricity is going to be cheaper than ff juice, or nuclear juice , although I hope that some day it will be . Most folks living standards - or at their wasteful consumption of goods and energy- are almost certainly going to be declining for the foreseeable future .
And at some point not too far off, there will be a general economic and ecological crash due to overshoot- but my guess is that this crash is still a few decades removed from the present time.
Endless growth is an impossibility, but we waste so much energy and so many other resources that we might be alb to conserve and economize and eke out some growth for several years yet. And even in a declining economy, it will still be possible to make some investments work- such as investments in electric vehicles-so long as the decline is not too abrupt.of course in a declining economy, any investment in say for example ev's will have to come at the expense of lesser consumption of other goods and services .Reality dictates that we will learn to economize on non essentials in order to afford more expensive essential goods.
I am simply saying that we are going to be better off going to renewables , over the next few decades, than we are abandoning the gargantuan built infrastructre of suburbia - that's a sunk cost. We either use it- or we lose it.
Personally I would rather commute in an enclosed golf cart at twenty mph for a couple of hours each way than to live in town again.
When the chips are finally down, I think enough suburbanites are going to feel the same way for the highways to be chockfull of electric vehicles- from the barest bones golf cart to Teslas.
assuming Bau holds up long enough of course.
I think it's an excellent idea to use HVDC lines to transmit solar power across time zones. At least it could be done across 3 timezones in the USA: pacific, mountain, and central.
Even more important is to use HVDC lines going in the north-south direction. That way people in northern latitudes can benefit from solar power.
Solar power becomes less feasible as you get further from the equator. The reason is variability, not average insolation. During winter, daylight gets shorter, and this effect is much more pronounced the further from the equator you get. This graph demonstrates the effect nicely. At latitudes north of 60 degrees, sunlight drops to almost zero during the winter months. At the south pole, it's nighttime continuously for months during the winter. That's not good for solar power.
It's hard to store enough energy to power a city for four months. The only way to do that is to use some kind of chemical storage (ammonia synthesis?) which would have low round-trip efficiency (25% or less). That would quadruple (or more) the cost of energy delivered during winter months because 75% of the original renewable energy would be lost to storage. Such a scheme would not be cost-competitive, even with implausibly low costs for solar installations.
I'd guess it would be much cheaper to have long hvdc lines from deserts near the equator.
-Tom P
I don't understand why there's been no discussion of the peer-reviewed and most science-based and fact-based book ever published on solar photovoltaics: Pedro Prieto & Charles A.S. Hall's 2013 book "Spain's Photovoltaic Revolution" that found solar PV only had an EROI of 2.45 and EROI can never be more than 3.25, no matter how efficient PV gets, because PV is only a small part of the overall energy required to create a solar PV plant.
Below is my book review, but you really need to read the book if you have objections to see the full explanation of the methodology, detailed data, and how calculations were made.
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics
http://energyskeptic.com/2013/tilting-at-windmills-spains-solar-pv/
Book review of “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”, by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall. 2013.
Reviewed by Alice Friedemann
This is the first time an estimate of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of solar Photovoltaics (PV) has been based on real data from the sunniest European country, with accurate measures of generated energy from over 50,000 installations using several years of real-life data from optimized, efficient, multi-megawatt and well oriented facilities.
Other life cycle and energy payback time analyses used models that left out dozens of energy inputs, leading to overestimates of energy such as payback time of 1-2 years (Fthenakis), EROI 8.3 (Bankier), and EROI of 5.9 to 11.8 (Raugei et al).
Prieto and Hall added dozens of energy inputs missing from past solar PV analyses. Perhaps previous studies missed these inputs because their authors weren’t overseeing several large photovoltaic projects and signing every purchase order like author Pedro Prieto. Charles A. S. Hall is one of the foremost experts in the world on the calculation of EROI. Together they’re a formidable team with data, methodology, and expertise that will be hard to refute.
Prieto and Hall conclude that the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain’s ideal sunny climate. Germany’s EROI is probably 20 to 33% less (1.6 to 2), due to less sunlight and efficient rooftop installations.
Spain saw much good coming from promoting solar power. There’d be long-term research and development, a Spanish solar industry, and many high-tech jobs created, since the components for the solar plants would be manufactured locally. Spain imports 90% of its fossil fuels, more than any other European nation, so this would lower expensive oil imports as well.
To kick start the solar revolution, the Spanish government promised massive subsidies to solar PV providers at 5.75 times the cost of fossil fuel generated electricity for 25 years (about a 20% profit), and 4.6 times as much after that. Eventually it was hoped that solar power would be as cheap as power generated by fossil fuels.
Financial Fiasco
The gold rush to get the subsidy of 47 Euro cents per kWh began. Because the subsidy was so high, far too many solar PV plants were built quickly — more than the government could afford. This might not have happened if global banks hadn’t got involved and handed out credit like candy.
Even before the financial crash of 2008 the Spanish government began to balk at paying the full subsidies, and after the 2008 crash (which was partly brought on by this over-investment in solar PV), the government began issuing dozens of decrees lowering the subsidies and allowed profit margins. In addition, utilities were allowed to raise their electric rates by up to 20%.
The end result was a massive transfer of public wealth to private solar PV investors of about $2.33 billion euros per year, and businesses that depended on cheap electricity threatened to leave Spain.
Despite these measures, the government is still spending about $10.5 billion a year on renewable energy subsidies, and the Spanish government has had many lawsuits brought against them for lowering subsidies and profit margins.
Solar companies went bankrupt after the financial crash, including the Chinese company Suntech, which sold 40% of its product to Spain. About 44,000 of the nation’s 57,900 PV installations are almost bankrupt, and companies continue to fail (Cel Celis), or lay off many employees (Spanish photovoltaic module manufacturer T-Solar).
Nor were new jobs, research, and development created, since most of the equipment and solar panels were bought from China. But unlike China, where the government insisted PV manufacturing be supported by massive research and development (and cybertheft of intellectual property from the United States and other nations), the only “innovations” capitalists in Spain sought were the numerous financial instruments they “invented” to make money, such as “solar mutual funds”. Far more money went into promoting and selling solar investments than research and development.
Prieto and Hall believe this fiasco could have been avoided if the Spanish government had invited energy and financial analysts to flow-chart the many costs and energy inputs to have had a more realistic understanding of what the costs would be versus the extremely small amount of electricity added to Spain’s electric supply.
Solar advocates can learn from this analysis as well to design solar PV with far less dependency on fossil fuels. That can only be done by realistically looking at all of the inputs required to build a solar PV plant. Narrowing the boundaries to avoid these realities is not good science and leads to wasted money and energy that could have been better spent preparing more wisely for declining fossil fuels in the future, i.e. Heinberg’s “50 Million Farmers“.
Some energy statistics
Oil
The world burns 400 EJ of power, though after fossil fuels begin their steep decline, there’ll be 10-20 EJ less per year.
Very large oil fields provide 80% of oil, and they’re declining from 2 to 20% per year, on average at 6.7%.
The rate is expected to increase to 9% if not enough investments are made – and perhaps 9% even if they are.
Spain’s solar photovoltaic electricity
It’s the 2nd largest installation of PV on earth
Produces about 10% of the world’s PV power: 4,237 MW—equal to four large 1000 MW coal or nuclear power plants
Solar PV would have to cover 2,300 square miles to replace the energy of nuclear and fossil fuel plants. You’d also need the equivalent of 300 billion car batteries to store power for night-time consumers.
In 2009, these plants generated 2.26% of Spain’s electricity, the largest percent of any nation in the world
2009 Types of PV Installations in Spain (ASIF. July 2010 report)
63% Fixed plants
13% 1-axis trackers
24% 2-axis trackers
Types of PV Used
.6% HCPV
2.1% Thin Film
97.3% Crystalline silicon
Amount of Power generated
36% < 2 MW
20% 2-5 MW
44% > 5 MW
Where were the PV panels placed
2.2 Rooftop
97.8 On the ground (far more efficient than rooftop)
Why wasn’t as much power produced as promised?
Only 66% of the nameplate, or peak power, was actually delivered over 2009, 2010, and 2011. The expected amount was 1,717 GWh/MWn but only 1,372 GWh/MWn were produced.
Typical losses in Performance Ration (PR) analysis (see Slide 14)
% Loss is the “loss factor in % over nameplate”
% Loss Reason
0.6 Mismatch of modules. One bad apple and all the rest are reduced to the lowest common denominator — the least efficient module. Mismatches can occur from irregular shading, ice, dust, and other problems.
1.0 Dust losses can be as high as 4 to 6% if washing isn’t done often enough
1.0 Angular and Spectral loss of reflection when the PV isn’t directly aimed at the sun
5.5 Losses due to temperature
1.0 Maximum power point tracker
1.0 DC wiring
5.4 AC/DC output of inverter
0.4 AC wiring within the PV plant
2.1 Medium-voltage losses within the plant
0.0 Non-fulfillment of nominal power, Shadowing/Shading, voltage sags, swells, etc
Performance Ratio: 82
Other losses beyond the typical Performance Ratio: extended performance ratio factors
8.0 Peak versus nominal installed power factoring
2.0 Losses in the evacuation/connection line/transformers
11.4 Degradation of modules over time
Will PV modules really last for 25 years? If not, the EROI is less than 2.45
Prieto and Hall distributed the Energy Invested across 25 years, but it is not likely that PV (and other manufacturers) will honor their contracts for that long:
Many manufacturers are already out of business, and many more will go out of business as their level of technology falls behind advancements elsewhere in the world. Companies who took on lots of debt expecting higher subsidies are failing now and will continue to do so.
Events of Force Majeure, acts of god, wind, lightning, storms, floods, and hail are likely to damage facilities within the next 25 years.
The degradation of PV modules may be higher than 1%/year up to a maximum of 20% over 25 years. This figure was very hard to come by, since Solar PV manufacturers don’t like to reveal it. Prieto & Hall found out by looking at commercial contracts.
Any component that degrades or fails, not just the PV itself, will lower the overall EROI.
As fossil fuels decline, it will be hard to find the resources to maintain society. These plants will not be high priority, since dwindling diesel fuel will be diverted to agriculture, trucks, and other more essential services.
Once fossil fuels begin their steep decline, social unrest will make it hard for businesses to operate.
Low EROI: The Devil is in the Details
Most of the book explains the methodology and details of how EROI was calculated. The level of detail even extends to each of the three types of facilities (fixed, 1-axis, 2-axis) for many factors. Below is a partial summary of the Energy Invested table 6.18 in the book with the Energy Invested and money-to-energy columns missing. You can also see an older version in slide 18). Economic expenses (not shown) were converted to GWh/year energy equivalents and spread across 25 years.
GWh/year Factors
ENERGY USED ON-SITE
56.6 Foundations, canals, fences, accesses
4.7 Evacuation lines and right of way
11.2 Module washing and cleaning
28.2 Self consumption in plants
138.6 Security and surveillance
ENERGY USED OFF-SITE TO MANUFACTURE INGOTS/WAFERS/CELLS/ MODULES AND SOME EQUIPMENT
608 Modules, inverters, trackers, metallic infrastructure (labor not included)
OTHER ENERGY EXPENDED ON & OFF-SITE
96 Transportation (locally in Spain, international (i.e. China)
148.4 Premature phase out of unamortized manufacturing and other equipment
0 Energy costs of injection of intermittent loads; massive storage systems
(i.e. pump-up costs)
19.9 Insurance
26.4 Fairs, exhibitions, promotions, conferences
34.3 Administrative expenses
14 Municipal taxes etc (2-4% of total project)
8.7 Land cost (to rent or own)
16 Indirect labor (consultants, notary publics, civil servants, legal costs, etc)
6 Market or Agent representative
11.9 Equipment theft and vandalism
0 Pre-inscription, inscription, registration, bonds & fees
178 Electrical network / power line restructuring
39.6 Faulty modules, inverters, trackers
198 Associated energy costs to injection of intermittent loads; network stabilization associated costs (combined cycles)
0 Force majeure: Acts of God, wind, storms, lightning, storms, floods, hail
The 2,065.3 GWe of the above energy inputs used annually to generate electricity is 40.8% of all the electricity generated by the solar PV plants of Spain, resulting in an EROI of 2.45 (1/.408).
Most life-cycle analyses only consider the 608 GWe of the modules, inverters, etc. They also usually ignore some or all of the Balance of System energy expenses (energy used on-site) and the remaining factors.
I can’t resist a few examples to give you an idea of how complex a solar PV plant is. Every factor had complications and nuances that made this book very interesting and entertaining to read.
The access roads from the main highway to the plant, which across all the PV plants in Spain added up to about 300 km (186 miles), used 450,000 m3 or 900,000 tons of gravel. That takes 90,000 truckloads of 10 tons each traveling an average of 60 km round-trip, or 5,400,000 km (3,355,400 miles) at .31 of diesel per km or 1,620,000 liters of diesel. At 10.7 KWh/liter, that’s 17.3 GWh of fuel. Then you need to add the energy used by other equipment, such as road rollers, shovels, pickups, and cars for personnel, and the energy to grind, mix, and prepare the gravel and the machinery required.
There are also service roads onsite to inverters, transformers, and distributed station housings, the control center, and corridors between rows of modules. There are foundations and canals. A total of 1,572,340 tons of concrete was used, requiring 489.3 GWh of energy.
Surrounding all these facilities are fences 2 meters high that used 3,350 tons of galvanized steel, and another 3,350 tons of steel posts, or 385 GWh of energy.
Washing and cleaning. Solar plants tend to be in desert-like surroundings with little water. Spain is so short on water they’ve got the 4th largest desalinization capacity in the world. Solar PV can’t be washed with tap or well water because they leave calcium and mineralized salts which degrade the PV performance, and can even scratch them. So the water has to be de-mineralized, decalcified, and sometimes even de-ionized. Washing might take place on average four times per year, but that’s not nearly enough – dust storms and dust from agriculture plowing can happen any time of the year, perhaps even right after they’ve been washed.
Critics of this book will say cheaper and more efficient PV cells are on the way. But as Prieto and Hall point out, the most effect an improved solar PV could have on the overall EROI is a maximum of 1/3 because of all the other factors. Plus EROI goes down every time the oil price goes up, because that causes all of the other factors to increase. Press releases of solar PV breakthroughs can be very exciting, but keep in mind that none of these past improvements could replace fossil fuels: thin-film, nanotechnology PV, cadmium telluride cells, organic cells, flexible cells, rollable sheets of PV for rooftops, slate modules, multi-junction cells, back-junction cells with 20-40% efficiency, PV grapheme, etc.
These improvements have costs, that’s part of what’s meant by the “premature phase out” factor. Solar businesses and PV plants go bankrupt when out-competed if they can’t afford to make expensive alterations and retrofits.
Spain PV plants 20 MW and 22 MW 2-axisTwo axis tracking PV Plants of 20 MWn and 22.1 MWp. Slide 25 states that to replace a nuclear plant 1/3 that of Fukushima with solar PV, you’d need to expand the area above 430 times to 190 square miles. Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87892847@N03
Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI)
EROI = Energy returned to society / Energy invested to get that energy
Hall and Prieto believe that solar is a low EROI technology. Solar has too many energy costs and dependencies on fossil fuels throughout the life cycle to produce much energy. It’s more of a “fossil-fuel extender” because PV can’t replicate itself, let alone provide energy beyond that to human society.
Nor is solar PV carbon neutral. Too many of the inputs require fossil fuels.
Solar PV doesn’t come close to providing the 12 or 13 EROI needed to run a complex civilization like ours.
In the introduction, the authors say that “we recognize that some of our inputs will be controversial. We leave it to the reader and to future analysts to make their own decisions about inclusivity and methods in general for a comprehensive analysis of EROI. Whatever your opinion, this study should really open your eyes to the degree to which fossil fuels underlie everything we do in our technological society.”
But I would argue the boundaries can’t possible capture all the oil-based antecedents. Fossil fuels are so embedded in every aspect of our life that we can’t see them. Think about solar PV when you read my summary of Leonard Read’s antecedents of a pencil.
Endnote: This book was only available online at the University of California. It’s a shame libraries are putting many journals and books into electronic versions only. Especially this book. Microchips, motherboards, and computers will be among the first casualties of declining fossil fuels, because they have the most complex supply chains with many single points of failure, dependence on rare metals, and so on (see Peak Resources and the Preservation of Knowledge for details). I encourage you to get your (university) library to buy a hard copy of this book, so that future scientists and historians will understand why our society didn’t replace fossil fuels with “renewables” even though we knew oil couldn’t last forever.
References
Bankier, C.; Gale, S. Energy payback of roof mounted photovoltaic cells. The Env. Eng. 2006, 7, 11-14.
Colthorpe, Andy. 18 July 2013. Solar Shakeout: Spain’s Cel Celis begins insolvency proceedings PVTech.
Fthenakis, V.H.C. et al. 2011. Life cycle inventories and life cycle assessment of photovoltaic systems. International Energy US Energy Investment Agency (IEA) PVPS Task 12, Report T12-02:2011. Accessed 19 Sep 2012.
Nikiforuk,Andrew. 1 May 2013. Solar Dreams, Spanish Realities. TheTyee.ca
Parnell, John. 22 July 2013. Spain’s government accused of killing solar market. PVtech.
Parnell, John. 23 July 2013. Spanish government facing court action over cuts to solar support. PVTech.
Raugei M., et al., “The energy return on energy investment (EROI) of photovoltaics: Methodology and comparisons with fossil fuel life cycles.” Energy Policy (2012), published on line doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2012.03.00897. See more at: http://www.todaysengineer.org/2013/Jun/book-review.asp#sthash.YsRjuI9R.dpuf
Prieto & Hall, 15 Apr 2011. How Much Net Energy does Spain’s solar PV program deliver? A Case Study. State University of New York 3rd Biophysical Economics Conference. Data sources for Energy Generated and Energy Invested slide 10, How monetary costs were converted to energy units. Slide 12, How the embodied energy costs and boundaries were determined Slides 17, and much more.
Spanish solar energy: A model for the future? Phys.org
An EROI of only 2.45 in Spain? I can remember getting shit on in TOD after quoting David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" of an EROI of only 4 for PV in Central Northern Europe. A high feed in tarif did provide benefits in Germany as it stimulated research and the development of a PV industry. It should have been obvious that by the time countries such as Spain introduced a high feed in tarif that the only benefits would be the short term work to install PV plants at the long term cost of paying the contracted feed in tarif.
Some of the costs you cite are only applicable to large scale PV installations. Roof top or small rural installations don't require road construction or security fences. The need to wash PV panels periodically is also only a requirement in extremely dry locales such as Spain. PV should be a useful source of energy, especially as it provides power during the peak demand period of the day. Where I live, Ontario, Canada, we're still saddled with a ridiculously high feed in tarif for PV. I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about PV if the feed in tarif was more reflective of the actual cost of installing PV.
I feel that they are using inputs that seem particularly stacked against PV, yet even if their work bears out, I think there are very strong cases for the high value of PV, and these might be much more apparent when the FF actually does become more sporadic, costly, whatever.
I find the argument a bit agitating, as !Cassandra has put it in a 'Solar PV can't do it alone' framework, and that monolith isn't really the end of the issue. There are numerous other ways to capture natural energy flows, and there are essential improvements we could be making in our use of energy, such that production and consumption will have a chance to meet 'somewhere in-between'..
There are also countless processes in the MFG and installation of Renewable energy tools that could be done without oil, such as the aforementioned ditch-digging and roadbuilding.. so the argument about 'fossil fuel extenders' gets a little weary as we continue skipping over all the other changes that could be involved in the design and the surrounding effects, while Hall et al. have counted the Trucks and the loads of Concrete, and we get numbers that then imply that these are not optional elements in the PV game.
I think they're confused about the purpose of EROEI. They included overhead with monetary costs but little if any marginal energy inputs. For instance, the items below: land and municipal government will exist in any case - there is no marginal energy input associated with land cost, and very little with government.
"34.3 Administrative expenses
14 Municipal taxes etc (2-4% of total project)
8.7 Land cost (to rent or own)
16 Indirect labor (consultants, notary publics, civil servants, legal costs, etc)"
If you extend the boundary of inputs to include everything, EROEI will always be 1:1....
There is an obvious bias here towards pessimism. Note the use of words like "will", not "may be", the hard assumption of catastrophic decline, and the puzzling assumption that existing energy generation will be neglected during a period of declining energy availability.
"As fossil fuels decline, it will be hard to find the resources to maintain society. These plants will not be high priority, since dwindling diesel fuel will be diverted to agriculture, trucks, and other more essential services. Once fossil fuels begin their steep decline, social unrest will make it hard for businesses to operate."
There is a serious lack of thinking outside the fossil fuel box. For instance, the following: "this study should really open your eyes to the degree to which fossil fuels underlie everything we do in our technological society.”
Well, there isn't anything they describe that can't be done without fossil fuel, and far more efficiently: truck engines are at best 40% as efficient as electric engines. The authors appear to reduce everything to watt-hours, without mentioning that one joule of fossil fuel primary energy is about 1/3 as valuable as a joule of electrical energy: it takes 2-5 joules of thermal FF to produce one joule of electricity, and a heat pump can convert 1 joule of electricity into 3-5 joules of heat.
This could be a huge problem with their study. The cost of rooftop PV has plummeted in the last 3 years. PV panels are now retailing for 80 cents a watt.
I installed a PV system 10 years ago but it was mostly has a hobby/learning experience. It was a 2.5KW system and it cost some $21K in parts. The local utility paid half that amount.
I am now finishing up my 6.12KW system (PV panels arrive tomorrow!) and it cost around $12K in parts. So around twice the size for half the price! And this is for a system that uses slightly more expensive microinverters (so I can deal with shading issues) and is much more professionally done (because the codes have made it harder and I wanted the system to look better.)
Damn grounding is expensive . . . I'm putting one on every PV panel and every individual rail (even though they are spliced together) and it is costing $250 just for grounding lugs, $250 for that spool of #8 AWG Grounding wire, and another $30 or so for grounding the various boxes.
Interesting stuff, Big Gav. I had read that Bloomberg expected the renewables becoming cheaper than coal power in Australia, but I thought that this news agency had guessed this by rule of thumb. However your graphs rather look like as if they'd done a dedicated study about it. If this is so, can you post a weblink to this study? Thanks a lot!
Hi drillo - glad you enjoyed it.
If you click on the graphs you mention they'll take you to this article - http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/bugger-the-utilities-wind-and-solar-will...
The graphs were taken from a presentation by Kobad Bhavnagri, the Australia head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), at the Australian Clean Energy Week conference in mid july.
I had a look around but the conference schedule doesn't seem to link to the presentations - http://www.cleanenergyweek.com.au/program/CEW/CEW-Day-One.html
He's on Twitter though - try asking him for the source there perhaps : https://twitter.com/kobadb
Or otherwise trawl through the BNEF site : http://about.bnef.com/
Excellent article Big Gav. Great summation.
regarding:
"To my continuing dismay, this hasn't happened yet (though it was our fastest growing energy source in 2012) - primarily due to the lack of progress in pushing down costs - the LCOE (levelised cost of energy) of solar thermal still being around twice that other renewable energy options."
Let's see, hmmm, Solar Thermal, no pollution, and no limits to growth at only twice the cost is exciting to imagine. The 2X cost might ensure a different kind of society that consumes less and rediscovers other facets of being human...reflection and deliberate living are two things that come to mind. We won't find these options in any big box isle, though.
Your article provides hope. My fear is that we wait until it is too late to fully develop these resources, blindly trying to make FF work forever and our crumbling economic structures limit us before we can begin wide spread implementation. It reminds me of trying to reach for the top cupboard and the chair kicks out just as our fingers grasp the... Oh well, I remain optimistic but continue on with our personal plans for adaptation to a lower energy world.
Paulo
Thanks Paulo.
I didn't put a lot of effort into discussing energy efficiency or adapting to simply using less energy in future - but I think there are plenty of lifestyle reasons for doing so and I have a lot of respect for people who choose that particular path - I just don't think everyone has to do it.
One anecdote which I almost put into the post comes to mind. During my first year of blogging I got an email from a guy in the backwoods of Quebec who had been motivated to change his life and move from the city to the countryside - apparently due to my writing. His email included photos of his barn and the draught-horses he had bought and an invitation to come and join him and his family once the world had run out of oil. It was one of a number of events which made made me decide to be a lot more careful about who I was quoting and what topics I concentrated on !
" ...though I tend to think allowing all of the "Limits To Growth" to be analysed may have kept the energy levels of the contributors up for longer and perhaps encouraged a wider range of contributors to participate."
As one who has had some success transitioning my family's personal energy use to renewable sources, mainly solar, I can attest to the fact that it takes commitment, resources, and sacrificing one's sense of entitlement to a certain (high) level of on-demand, uninterrupted energy. I've also tried to play my small part in dragging the rest of society, often kicking and screaming, into a renewable future. One thing I overestimated was the level of economic wiggle room societies have (declining, over time) as profit-driven debt-based economies compete for resources, in an increasingly resource constrained world.
As a generalist who at least tries to think systemically, I began to realize that our energy conundrum was only one of many 'limits to growth' that humanity faces, and that growth itself must be held in check. If renewables are intended to be a vehicle of continued growth in both population and resource extraction, the adoption of renewables is, indeed, progress we can no longer afford. It's tantamount to a drug addict switching to a new, more benign drug without changing his behavior or world view. Energy is the great enabler, enabling growth and the extraction of other resources. We, collectively, need to focus on changing our wants-based ways of life to a less extractive, needs-based meme, and reduce our population, or the whole energy transition seems pointless.
In this sense, I came to see the consequences of peak oil as a good thing; the great enabler becomes the great teacher, as the process of my personal transition to renewables has taught me so much more than that it is possible to live well largely on a solar budget; that limits are a good, important thing.
Alas, humanity wants its cake, and to eat it as well, to create and consume a surplus where there really isn't one. We may have a surplus of available solar energy, but not the wisdom to use it wisely. This is where any discussion of peak anything should ultimately lead us.
I did note that we need to transform our agriculture and manufacturing systems as well.
Cradle to Cradle manufacturing, for example, would dramatically decrease the need to extract resources (hopefully the need would tend towards zero over time).
Assuming we did this do you still see shifting to clean energy as a problem ?
I don't see an increasing transition to cleaner energy as a problem, per se. I actually see it as a mandate, dictated by reality. The problem, of course, is us. An analogy would be the bailouts of our banking systems, necessary, perhaps, but I've seen little progress made in changing the behavior that caused the problems in the first place; little realization that it's not ok. History shows us that we, collectively, are doomed to repeat our mistakes, whatever our energy source du jour is. While cleaner energy may, or may not, limit the damage we do, it may also be a case of extend-and-pretend.
'Cradle-to-grave' is, of course, desirable and necessary, unless your goal is short-term profit or survival. As this seems to be our collective default behavior, I expect that a great deal of involuntary forcing will be required. It's how societies, and their stories, change. My goal is, and has always been, to show that alternatives are there, to both our behavior and our stories. Unfortunately, BAU has some powerful stories of its own to tell, offering gain with little pain. Those in need care little where their next meal comes from or how they heat their homes; only that it's the most available/affordable/convenient source of what they need. Those riding high on the wave of resource extraction have little incentive to change. It's an old story.
I stopped by a relative's house a few weeks back and she asked me to help put their recycling out on the street. They were in a hurry to get to the airport to catch their flight to Miami; taking their motor yacht to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks. I'm just not sure what it'll take to overcome that sort of mindset. That said, I'll keep pushing for more sense in our collective nonsense. What alternative is there for those of us who've made transitioning our defacto religion? Perhaps we're only planting seeds for whatever comes, after the gold rush.
"The problem is of course us" You nailed it right there Ghung.
Insufficient money to pay for the holiday.
You sum it up quite nicely, Ghung.
"Find more conventional oil
Exploit unconventional oil sources
Become more efficient in our use of oil
Switch to alternatives"
You left out;
Go to war over remaining resources.
Slowly (but increasingly) sink into deflationary depression with accelerating die off.
or,
both of the above.
You listed lots of renewable energy, but why leave out Geothermal Heat Pumps? (i.e. thermal energy in shallow earth, not hot rocks) GHP systems are essentially energy multipliers since they run at up to 400% to 500% efficiency. They also work as storage since the heat from hot summer days is stored in the ground to make for warm winter nights.
A 2010 ORNL report estimates that converting just the US single-family homes to Geothermal Heat Pumps would:
Solar, wind, hydro, etc. are "necessary," but they aren't "sufficient." Even if all our light bulbs, computers and cars were powered by clean renewable energy, we'd still have millions of homes burning fossil fuels for heat and wasting energy with less efficient cooling systems.
Hi Bob - I didn't leave them out - the section on geothermal energy says "As well as active power generation from traditional geothermal power sources (including low temperature geothermal), ground source heat pumps can be used to provide direct heating." - I agree they are part of the solution.
On liquid fuels, we have more than biofuels - synthetic fuel will do just fine for the small percentage of liquid fuel that would still be convenient for aviation, long distance water shipping, seasonal agriculture, etc. The hydrogen could be electrolyzed from seawater, and the carbon could also be pulled from seawater.
Hydrogen from electricity: Wholesale wind power at 6 cents per kWh; 75% efficient electrolysis of hydrogen from water would require 50 kWhs to produce a kilo of hydrogen. That is $3 for hydrogen with 37.5kWh, or an energy equivalent to 1.05 gallons of gasoline.
We could react CO or CO2 with hydrogen to make methanol (the Lurgi process, in which one CO2 and three dihydrogens exothermically become one methanol and one water) at 80% efficiency (Methanol synthesis from syngas is actually highly efficient, in the order of 80-90%. Catalysis of CO2 into CO + 1/2 O2 is probably about as efficient as H20 into H2 + 1/2 O2 since that's the same entropy balance).
If the overall conversion is 60% efficient, you'd have $5 for the methanol equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. Now, that’s just input costs. If the capital cost of the H2O electrolysers is $1 per gallon, you're at $6 per gallon. That doesn't seem bad.
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It's very likely that a world powered by wind and solar will have large amounts of cheap power available during periods of peak production. The sensible thing to do is turn some of that power into synthetic hydrocarbons. Given that the power input will be cheap, synthetic liquid fuel could easily cost in the range of $3.5/gallon. That would cap oil at about $140 per barrel (before the cost of refining).
Let's say wind provided 50% of the kWhs needed by the grid, and wind was overbuilt by 50% to reduce the frequency of lulls. That would create surplus power to the tune of about 25% of demand. That might be sold to synthetic fuel producers for, say, 2 cents per kWh.
Diesel has about 40 kWhs, so at 40% efficiency the energy input would cost about $2. The hardware might get 50% utilization if we're using surplus power, and that might raise capital costs to around $1 per gallon. Operating costs might get us in the range of $3.50 per gallon, which seems pretty feasible. Not quite competitive right now, but awfully useful in the long range.
And, of course, if there's a lot of surplus power you might get it for $.01 per kWh. Actually, this demand source would probably set the price for surplus power.
All of the tech needed for this exists right now, even if it's not quite competitive with the current moderate price of "rock oil" (petr-oleum).
Any discussion of using intermittent renewable power for chemical synthesis of fertilizers, liquid fuels, smelting and rolling metals, etc,always leaves me wondering about a question I not easily answered.
How tough a job will it be to build chemical manufacturing and processing facilities capable of running intermittently?
So far as I know, no large scale facilities of this sort have yet been built.
I have been in and around a dozen or more chemical plants as I worked as a "shut down" welder and mechanic from time to time for many years.. All of them them were designed to run continuously for extended periods of time, several days at least.
I suppose such facilities could be built anyplace a gas peaking plant or other source of backup juice is available to help control stoppages .
I have had a hand in cleaning a plastic extrusion machine that failed while running- it took a week to disassemble it, clean out the plastic which hardened like concrete in the guts of it , and reassemble it.
I'm hoping for some input here from the engineers !!!
Good question. A couple of thoughts:
Wind output is seasonal, meaning that there would be long periods (months and weeks) of pretty consistently high output, and there likely would be a period of several months of below average output in which operation was shut down. During the marginal months of average output, some periods of surplus wind production would last for weeks - some backup would be economic for occasional brief lulls in wind output, to allow continuous operation during those marginal periods.
There's a difference between "cruising speed", in which large energy inputs are needed for chemical conversions, and minimum stand-by operation, in which minimum temperature levels are maintained to keep things fluid, etc. For example, iron and aluminium smelters and steel furnaces are designed to take advantage of cheap night and seasonal power - aluminium smelting takes 20x as much power as just keeping the various components at a minimum temperature.
Manufacturers can install their own energy production and backup systems; pass the costs on, sell any surplus. Many already have generators for outages, especially in developing nations. Batteries, fuel cells, thermal storage, all are available now, and having industry adopt more of these things will help drive the technology forward.
I was once at a large gas processing plant when the commercial power failed. All the lights went off, the computers died, and there I was in the dark listening to the silence. I was two hours into a four-hour software upgrade, and it meant I would have to start over from the beginning so I was more than a little annoyed.
So, I went outside to watch the show. First, there was silence. Then horns, sirens, and bells started going off everywhere on the plant site. People in coveralls started running as fast as they could in all different directions. Then there was a sound like a missile taking off as the process gas went up the flare stack, and *BOOM!* there was a second sun in the sky. I went back inside because the heat from the gas flare was unbearable outside.
The commercial power came back on after a few minutes, but for the next couple of hours, there was the most gawdawful smell in the air, like burning sulfur mixed with burning oil, as they tried to get the plant stabilized and running properly again.
It could cost $100,000+ to just restart a gas plant like that, nevermind the lost gas sales, so power fails were not popular with accounting. Many of the plants would disconnect from the grid during the summer lightning season and run on their own generators because they didn't want to risk the cost of a power fail due to lightning strike.
Why would the plants use grid power when they could generate all their own electricity? Well, because the plants managed to negotiate a very low, sometimes NEGATIVE power rate with the electricity companies. Why?
1. Coal burning power plants needed a base load overnight, and the gas plants ran 24/7. You can't just turn a coal plant on and off like a light switch. They need 24 hours to shut down, and another 24 hours to start up again. They had to do something with the electricity while they were running.
2. The gas plants could live with interruptible power, given a bit of notice. It took about a minute to bring their backup gas turbines up to speed. Interruptible is much cheaper than guaranteed power.
3. In the event of a major power failure, the gas plants agreed to shut down their sales gas lines, fire up their rows and rows of 30,000 hp gas turbines, and dump power back into the grid. The gas plants could satisfy their customers thousands of miles away from line pack (the gas already in the pipelines) for several days before they ran short, but the power plants had no such flexibility.
Lately, I've noticed that most of the old gas plants I worked at north of Calgary seem to have brand-new gas-fired power plants right next door. They are gas turbine peaking units supplying the city with power, and balancing the wind turbines in the south of Alberta. At peak times or when the wind stops blowing in Southern Alberta (hard to imagine, but it does happen) they fire up and supply the city with power.
Non-interruptible power is very important to many consumers. When you need to have it you need to have it. Most industrial processes need to have it.
It would be interesting to quantify - my sense is that very many of the most power hungry industrial processes are very willing to schedule their consumption (or be curtailed with just a little notice) to reduce their costs, just as your employer was.
With smart meters, Demand Side Management will expand a lot for Industrial/Commercial as well as residential.
No, they weren't willing to schedule their consumption - they needed to run 24/7 with no shutdowns. That's why they had 100% backup power of their own - in case the commercial power went down.
Most businesses have a low tolerance for power outages. A power failure puts the company down, and they can't afford that - they have customers to supply and workers to pay.
The gas plants main advantage was that they had a more-or-less unlimited supply of fuel from their gas wells to power their turbines, which is something most industries don't have. The reason they were buying commercial power was that it was cheaper than generating their own power, and their core business was selling natural gas to consumers, not burning it themselves.
In the current scenario (Canadian NG production peaked in 2001 and is now declining), many of those plants have either been shut down, or converted to NG storage facilities. It is quite secure to have a NG power station right next to a NG storage facility. And, as I mentioned before, the NG power plants are peaking units, needed to offset the outages caused by no wind at the wind farms. Wind power is intermittent so you need backup for it, and the coal-burning plants can't provide that.
they weren't willing to schedule their consumption
They were willing to schedule their consumption of *utility* power. As are many organizations that have to have internal backup - hospitals, etc.
Companies that rely on very high quality power tend to have internal backup. Companies for whom power is a major expense - iron & aluminium smelters, steel furnaces, etc, are generally delighted to reduce their power bill by scheduling consumption and/or accepting occasional curtailment.
Wind power is intermittent so you need backup for it
So is everything else - there is no form of power that doesn't require backup, per standard ISO requirements. Yes, windpower has more variance than other power sources, but there are a wide variety of ways to deal with it: windpower is roughly as variable as consumer demand, for whose "intermittency" a variety of strategies have been developed: pooling of a number of units, Demand Side Management, overbuilding (see the discussion below), long distance transmission (for wider pooling), diversity of sources, forecasting (variance isn't the same thing as unpredictability), etc.
Backup is relatively expensive, so an optimal system will use other things first. Backup has a place, but we shouldn't exaggerate it - it's not really the primary strategy (unless, of course, you're a regulated utility with guaranteed capital ROI, in which case you may well build generation way past the optimal point....).
They were willing (and able to afford) to schedule their consumption of *utility* power.
Big difference!
Companies for whom power is a major expense - iron & aluminium smelters, steel furnaces, etc, are generally delighted to reduce their power bill by scheduling consumption and/or accepting occasional curtailment.
You do understand that "interruptable" power rates come with a notice period of something like 20 minutes or 1 hour, don't you? How long does it take to shut down that smelter, furnace, etc.? Not anything close to 1 hour! Even your handwaving doesn't shorten that period!
Well, smelters/furnaces tend to go for scheduling. They'll often do most of their work at night, to get cheap rates. OTOH, you don't have to shut down a smelter or furnace to weather curtailment - as I mentioned somewhere in this thread, aluminium needs only 5% as much power to maintain temperatures, while waiting for full power to resume.
You do know that industrial curtailment is very common, right? A little googling goes a long way in these debates...
What's better than mere googling is having worked at an electric utility that had interruptable rates available for our industrial customers. I know how common it is and that there are industrial processes that are OK with it and others that aren't. Your examples aren't.
Well, I gave some examples of scheduling "and/or" curtailment (interruptible). As I said, smelters/furnaces tend to go for the scheduling option. I thought it didn't need to be said that these were just a few examples, and that there are other categories of customers for which curtailment is the preferred option.
Heck, if you want to add to the discussion with more info, please do.
If you want to discuss from the utility perspective the perverse incentives utilites have to overbuild generation, instead of pursing lower cost alternatives like DSM/DR, that would be helpful, too.
Why do you edit your posts 4-5 times, never adding any new content? Is it to make sure that you refresh the {new} label?
I like to give a quick response if I can, and when I notice things that need to be edited, I edit them. Sometimes they're hard to see, like spelling or punctuation.
Aug, I realize it can be frustrating when people disagree with you. On the other hand, judgmental and angry comments really don't convince anyone. They just reduce your credibility (because it looks like an attempt at bullying, which is only necessary when people really don't have a convincing argument), and make it unenjoyable for others to read.
Nick, what's really frustrating is when someone is completely blind to the real world out there and insists that their dream fantasy can happen in spite of all the evidence. I don't know why I got dragged into attempting to communicate with you again, like others I swore I wouldn't again. At least TOD going away will help me there.
Well, you're not being very specific. If you're basically feeling discouraged by Climate Change, then I would say that I agree with you - the current trends are discouraging. OTOH, there's no point in giving up. It's worth pointing out that we have all the tech we need to address CC right now - the problem is political (a small minority blocking change because they would be hurt).
So...if you want, give details, and we'll nail things down.
Huh? A small minority? I don't see how we have the tech to address CC unless we either significantly raise energy prices or significantly raise taxes.
Windpower isn't more expensive than new coal. Yes, if we aggressively installed windpower and eliminated old coal, it might raise power prices slightly - maybe 10%. Of course, we'd save a lot of lives from pollution and oil wars - the cost per life saved is probably a lot cheaper than many things we do for improved safety.
Hybrids and PHEVs are as cheap as ICEs, over the life of the vehicle.
OTOH, I think raising energy prices in the form of taxation of fossil fuels is pretty much essential. The revenue should be recycled to the poor, via a per capita rebate. That would make their life better, overall. And, of course, fewer poor people fighting oil wars would be all to the good.
I don't see the raising taxes as a solution to energy consumption. Kinda like saying we should eliminate sugar to save on health care costs. The public just won't buy into that. Now giving a tax break for not having children might be a better approach. In the end population drives consumption. But alas, as the US shows in our immigration debate, our leaders are going the other direction.
The public just won't buy into that.
The public has been the victim of a very long propaganda campaign against taxes in general, and carbon/fuel taxes in particular, financed by the oil industry (in part in the form of the Koch brothers). Change the message from the media (and other leaders: religious, political, etc), and in time the public would see it differently.
In the end population drives consumption.
Per capita consumption is far more important: it can be changed *far* more quickly, and in the end can completely solve the problem of pollution, climate change, species extinction, while population change wouldn't convert unsustainable practices to being sustainable.
"If you're basically feeling discouraged by Climate Change ... there's no point in giving up."
Actually there is all the point in the world.
The question I have is as to how much energy will it take to do that deed (move to alternate 'clean' power sources) and are there the allied resources available to do it, also what 'price' will be paid in added pollution?
Myself I think it is better to run out of currently economically useful FF than to add more fuel to the mix, increasing the amount of FF that will then be economic to extract.
Of course, if you have something other than BAU for energy use in mind, I might be interested.
how much energy, pollution will it take to do that deed (move to alternate 'clean' power sources
Very little. Windpower has an EROEI of about 50, meaning that you get your investment back in about 6 months. After 6 months, each year that windpower can replace the power needed to build two "children".
The Hall-Heroult process can't be just turned on and off. Although obviously smelting operations have (scheduled) downtime they tend to operate 24/7 for a number of reasons. They don't work on a 12hr cycle.
When you are dealing with large masses (both for the quantity smelted as well as the equipment) there are significant lags in thermal response so continues operation generally makes the most sense.
Curtailment is common but not for refining type of operations. if you have a factory which makes fabric or something like that, sure, you can shut down with relatively little issues but in a number of bulk transformation processes that doesn't work.
Take a look at some of the aluminum smelters located up north. Their maintenance periods are in the summer when hydro scarcer than in other seasons.
Rgds
WP
hmmm. Yes, looks like the kind of minimum temperature operation I had in mind is unusual for alumimium. Night smelting/furnace operation is more iron & steel.
How tough a job will it be to build chemical manufacturing and processing facilities capable of running intermittently?
Depends on the reactions. Some can be stopped in their tracks by lowering temperature. If the reaction is happening in banks of these new microcells (and somehow you have industrial quantities of whatever coming out of nanometer things more power to ya) then just stopping the flow should put an end to production.
But something as simple as papermaking wants the big metal tube rotating because it is so massive and the tolerances are so tight if it stops spinning it warps and needs to be re-trued.
In your example the grid consumes X kWh, the wind capacity is 1.5X and the capacity factor is 1/3 to generate .5X on average. Under this scenario there will be many lulls in which the wind power is less than .5X/day. The plant probably needs to turn on whenever the wind power is above .25X/day to minimize the idle or off time judging from Fraunhofer's data.
German wind capacity was 29.440 GW in 2012, and their wind energy produced 45.9 TWh which gives a capacity factor of 17.7%. To minimize the lulls the power used needs to be around 2.5 GW or an overbuild of 12 times, approximately the reciprocal of the capacity factor times 2. Any system designed to use peak wind power when the actual power is above the capacity factor times the capacity would spend most of its time in the idle or off state.
If you add photovoltaic power to your scenario, then the variations would be smoothed some. Because wind power is quite variable by itself, the overbuild has to be rather large.
The alternative is the supergrid, so you can transmit electricity all over the country. On a countrywide basis the wind is going to even out significantly.
Exactly - rather than looking at power from one energy source at a particular point, you diversify both across multiple sources (which is why I didn't look at solar or wind power alone but included all the renewable options) and across geography - spreading your grid wider and wider - interconnecting across regions, then across countries, then across continents and then (in the fullness time, as per Bucky's vision) across continents...
I think we're agreeing here - in my example, wind capacity would be 2.25X (with 1/3 capacity factor), to produce 150% of the average windpower output target. That means that production will be more than the targeted grid consumption figure perhaps 80% of the time.
The US grid is currently overbuilt, with capacity of about 225% of average consumption.
Yes, pairing wind with many other sources, principally solar (at perhaps 25% of average grid consumption), would optimize the system.
Yes, a little bit of over-capacity in wind/solar generation can lead to a large amount of stable power potential.
Looking at real-world, hour-by-hour electricity demand for an entire year, and real-world, hour-by-hour wind generation and solar insolation figures, you can solve for how much overcapacity you'll need given a specific amount of storage and reliability requirement. (For that location -- the data I used was from North America, and perhaps Germany has poorer wind resources.)
Based on the modeling I've done and talked about on theoildrum.com (e.g., 5 years ago), 50% overcapacity and a day of pumped storage gives about the same reliability of generation as a coal plant (max of 12 interruptions per year for less than 240 hours total).
Putting current prices into the simulator indicates that 25% overcapacity with 3.7 days of storage gives year-round load-following generation with zero interruptions in supply over the course of the year's worth of hourly data, at a generation cost of 10c/kWh (assuming a 5% yearly rate of return on the initial investment over a 30-year time horizon).
(Interestingly, price changes over the last five years have shifted the optimal system from 20% solar to 60% solar.)
Is your model in a spreadsheet? I would be much obliged if I could get a copy!
I developed a similar model a while back, using Ontario hourly wind and consumption data, but it didn't include solar - it would be interesting to see.
I'd like to see the model too if you are sharing it...
It's a clunky Perl program, but it should be possible to put a basic version of it into a spreadsheet. I'll see if I can make time to do that.
Fundamentally, though, it's just doing basic addition. For a fixed quantity of wind and PV installed, step through each hour of the year:
1) Add the amount of electricity generated from wind.
2) Add the amount of electricity generated from PV.
3) Subtract the amount of electricity consumed.
4a) If there is leftover electricity, add it to pumped storage (at 90% efficiency).
4b) If there is not enough electricity, take it from pumped storage (at 90% efficiency).
5) Keep track of the maximum amount of pumped storage required.
6) Keep track of the highest single-hour draw from pumped storage.
After a year's worth of hours, you have five numbers:
1) Installed wind
2) Installed PV
3) Energy surplus over the year
4) MWh of pumped storage needed
5) MW of pumped storage turbines needed
If there's no energy surplus, the result is discarded as non-viable. Otherwise, you can simply add up the total capital costs. The most recent high-volume costs I found were:
Wind: $1.8M per MWp, 28% capacity factor --> ~$6.5M per MW
PV: $2.4M per MWp, 21% capacity factor --> ~$12M per MW
Storage: $14k per MWh
Turbines: $1M per MW
Use whatever rate of return on capital is expected, add appropriate operations&maintenance, divide by kWh/year, and you get the result.
All my program does is do the addition with a bunch of different settings for installed wind/PV and report on the lowest-cost combination. With the input data copied into a spreadsheet, one could change those numbers by hand and come up with the same result.
FWIW, with the above values, charging 6% of initial capital cost per year in ROI and O&M, the lowest-cost combination for the dataset I have is:
Need: 1MW-sized chunk of reliable power
-- follows demand, so ranges from ~0.7MW to 1.3MW, with an overall average of 1.0MW
Required:
-- Wind: 0.47MW (1.7MWp,$3.0M)
-- PV: 0.78MW (3.7MWp, $8.9M)
-- Storage: 88MWh ($1.2M)
-- Turbines: 1.3MW ($1.3M)
-- Surplus power: 965MWh/year (11%)
Capital cost: $14.4M
-- Assumed ROI and O&M of 6% --> $864,000
-- Ignoring surplus power as having no value, this is $0.10 per KWh.
The benefit of the program is that it's easy to change any of the assumptions I've made and then re-solve for the lowest-cost setup. Finding the best setup with a non-macro spreadsheet will be a little more manual, but I'll see what I can do.
(Note: wind and demand data are from Ontario Hydro, solar insolation is from the NREL solar research lab. Both were freely available on the web 6 years ago when I pulled together this data.)
I looked at the NREL site a little while ago, and couldn't find the hourly solar data. Do you happen to remember where you found it?
Finding the best setup with a non-macro spreadsheet will be a little more manual, but I'll see what I can do.
I set my spreadsheet up with a row of formulas, with a simple panel for input values - that works well.
I'm thinking of adding hydrogen in underground storage to my model - it should be much more cost effective than pumped storage for seasonal lulls.
Is this it?
NREL: Dynamic Maps, GIS Data, and Analysis Tools - Solar Data
I've emailed the spreadsheet to the addresses listed in your profiles.
It's rudimentary, but lets you explore the effects of parameter changes (cost, mix, capacity factor, baseload vs. load-following, etc.) based on real-world data.
My experience has been that there's a fairly broad base to the distribution -- many configurations are within 10-20% cost of the optimal -- and as a result relatively small changes in parameters like cost can shift the optimal configuration substantially. As a result, the spreadsheet is probably less useful for finding optimal configurations and more useful for seeing the effects of different settings.
Let me know if my model might be helpful - if so, I'll take a little time to clean it up.
Yes - I'd like to see it.
It would be nice to see some of these models published on the web with links to the data sources (hopefully to data sets that get updated over time so the model results remain current).
For comparison, Eskom aims to have a fleet that can produce peak load plus 18% with their mostly coal-fired power stations.
The 18% is to allow for scheduled maintenance, unexpected faults, and the gap till the next power station is built.
ATM they only have peak plus about 3%. The whole country holds thumbs in winter; we don't want a repeat of the rolling blackouts of a few years ago.
Big Gav, Keep it lit.
Thanks WHT - you too...
I think the BAU model also applies to Alternative energy. If we think, by switching from fossil fuels to some other limitless alternative energy, we could keep the economies of the world expanding (which is the only way they function), keep growing more food for the ever expanding populations, and keep the Volvo driving soccer moms making their coffee stimulated excursion to the local sports field by magically switching their car from gas to electric, then I fear we are mistaken.
Sure, if we switch to a limitless supply of energy we would not constrained by peak energy but - everything we do with that energy requires the use of finite resources. The continual extraction of these resources will just hollow out the world in a different way than the oil companies currently do so now.
Unless we can find an infinite supply of everything civilization currently uses including energy, we can no longer grow and we must contract. We can choose to contract like the fellow mentioned in rural Quebec or we can continue dreaming of a technology filled BAU world unaware that reality is about to kick us in the gonads.
With unlimited cheap energy one can concentrate increasingly rarefied deposits, recycle everything, synthesize elements and clean up pollution. With infinite space and unlimited cheap energy perpetual exponential growth is possible.
...At least until humanity becomes a ball of flesh expanding at the speed of light - at that point, exponential growth is possible no more. ;-p
I am thinking time dilation would compensate for those on the surface of the ball expanding at a rate forever approaching the speed of light. They would be moving into the future faster and faster giving them the time to continue to reproduce. Unlimited, free energy works wonders.
The wikipedia page linked to has been deleted, as has been the "base load theory" page.
Maybe it is not such a fallacious theory after all.
That's odd.
I've fixed the link to point to a different article.
On future renewables being as cheap as coal I think you'll find that assumes a hefty CO2 penalty if I recall about $40 per tonne in 2020. For Australia google these strange looking acronyms BREE + aeta. That means that the big coal fired power stations will still be with us 15-20 years from now. The bugbears of wind and solar are subsidy dependence and the need for fossil fuel backup. PV is already cheap enough what we need now is safe, compact and cheap home batteries. If every home could store 10 kwh of daytime solar electricity that could make a huge difference to the centralised grid model.
As for other energy sources since I 'went bush' in 2005 I've made thousands of litres of biodiesel and gathered maybe 20 tonnes of free firewood out in the forest. With bio think of the nauseating smell of rancid waste vegetable oil. For free firewood think of leeches and slipping on wet logs carrying an idling chainsaw. Both are non options in my opinion for the mass of people in the suburbs. I'm helping build a nearby microhydro (nearly half a megawatt) which should fully power the town in a non-drought year.
My surprising conclusion is that the best model is centralised generation of reliable low cost low carbon electricity. In other words what France is doing. To some that makes me a turncoat to the renewables cause. However I think I'm seeing the future more clearly.
If you look at the BNEF graphs included in the article you'll see that your statements are not true.
Wind is already cheaper than coal even without a carbon tax (there is a reason the only new power generation in Australia over the past 12 months is wind and solar).
Solar PV does need the carbon tax to be cost competitive for now (though the peak shaving advantage it conveys is not accounted for in those calculations) but even there it is expected to be cheaper than coal - without subsidies - in well under a decade.
I believe the carbon tax will be gone when the new politicians come in after the election.
True (regardless of who wins) - but there's also the MRET which specifies something which currently equates to about 24% of electricity come from renewables by 2020 - at which point both wind and solar PV will be cheaper than coal...
I think the key word is 'new' coal, that is coal fired power stations that may be built in the future. According to the This is Power website the average wholesale electricity price in Australia is about $55 per Mwh or 5.5c per kwh. According to the Grattan Institute new onshore wind is expected to cost $90-$120 per Mwh. To the wholesale price I believe we should add the LGC subsidy currently $28 per Mwh. Coal and gas fired generation are also likely to run higher at capacity factor with existing transmission. As pointed out the carbon price is certain to fall. Therefore Bloomberg should have emphasised various caveats on the wind as cheap as coal statement.
The big problem is going to be replacing the baseload coal stations 10-20 years from now. For example over 6 GW of brown coal fired generation in Victoria's Latrobe Valley. There are centuries of brown coal left each tonne costing $6 or so. With low or no CO2 penalties the question is what can replace those plants. I don't believe any combination of local wind and solar can do the job.
I wonder what turbines are costing in Australia?
In the US, onshore wind is costing less than $2 per peak watt ($1.75 for turbines and installation, $.25 for connecting transmission), which gives you about 7 cents per kWh (33% capacity factor, 25 year life, 7% interest, plus 1 cent operating cost).
That's cheaper than new coal, and not very much above old coal, including at least basic pollution controls.
A levelised cost calculation needs to include organisation and management costs (O&M), cost of capital (loan repayments, stock dividends) and depreciation for wear and tear. In the US the production tax credit is worth 2.2c per kwh I believe. Some like to add grid integration costs of $10-$20 per Mwh or 1 or 2c per kwh. The latter includes spinning reserve of standby thermal plant, voltage and frequency regulation. Therefore wind power has a few hidden extras.
Other calculations give the cost of saving a tonne of CO2 by using gas boosted wind power as opposed to using 100% gas fired generation. Some calcs give costs over $200 per tonne of CO2 saved. The Australian carbon tax, possibly to be axed Sept 7 (post TOD) is currently $24 per tonne of CO2.
Bottom line; when windpower doesn't involve
- fossil fuel backup
- PTCs, green certificates and mandates
- loss of property values when towers are built nearby
I might change my opinion.
I am also a firm advocate for Renewable energy sources, though many have issues such as intermittency, distance from population centers, etc.
But to say "here is a limited list of options" is still short sighted. check out this link to the American Security Project Proposal. Mankind's harnessing of Hydrogen Fusion energy is inevitable. Hydrogen Fusion relies on inexpensive fuel and limited radiation issues compared to Nuclear Energy. This is game changing technology that can change our energy outlook for generations.
Having said that, renewables would still be needed to capture energy from the environment. Fusion will still release wasted energy as heat. Mankind has to grow up and realize a global society needs to limit its impact on our global ecosystem.
I'm not sure my list of options could be described as "limited".
When someone produces a working fusion reactor prototype I'll happily include it here - in the meantime its out there with space based solar power and free energy devices...
Big Gav,
My issue on options starts with your statement:
Solutions to the problem of peak oil (and many of the other Limits to Growth) can be divided into 3 groups :
----
Obviously Hydrogen Fusion doesn't fit within your list, yet is a as much as viable solution (possibly more so) than some of the engineering programs you included. There are many labs around the world working on Fusion Energy including MIT, ITER, and other organizations like these in New Jersey, California, British Columbia, and Wisconsin. Even Lockheed Martin is joining the mix.
Fusion is a Technology that has been underfunded since 1976 and continues to get their budgets slashed in the US, and Europe. If we invested in fusion research decades ago, we would have had fusion by now.
Many of these examples are further advanced in development than the renewable projects you listed, and would be just as effective in solving the solution of peak oil. What disappoints me is how the "pro-renewable" arguments also reject out-of-hand alternative approaches... just as much as the "pro-carbon" arguments dismiss other energy sources (i.e., drill, baby drill).
Hopefully this is food for thought.
Hi Frank - I'm well aware there is research into fusion - its just that I doesn't seem likely to result in any form of commercial power generation in the next 3 - 5 decades.
So I didn't think it worthy of inclusion (like space based solar power, for example).
I also give minimal attention to advanced biofuels, wave power and OTEC - and these technologies do have working pilot plants out there and will likely be operating on commercial scales within the next decade.
Hi Frank - I'm well aware there is research into fusion - its just that it doesn't seem likely to result in any form of commercial power generation in the next 3 - 5 decades.
So I didn't think it worthy of inclusion (like space based solar power, for example).
I also give minimal attention to advanced biofuels, wave power and OTEC - and these technologies do have working pilot plants out there and will likely be operating on commercial scales within the next decade.
Big Gav has the odds on his side by a mile when it comes to workable fusion power..
There are some inescapable sad conclusions about the likelihood of it coming to pass within a foreseeable time frame which are easily derived by the application of elementary probability theory.
There are literally hundreds of tough nut problems to be solved in the research lab before there is any hope of actually building a fusion power plant , starting with one so obvious it blinds fusion power advocates.
One of the biggest and most expensive and best staffed research efforts in history has not yet succeeded in the fusion equivalent of building a simple campfire -demonstrating a controlled sustainable reaction. After decades of work, they are still at the banging the rocks together stage, maybe getting a few temporary flare ups and sparks now and then.
If you don't get it, think of the difference between a campfire and an automobile engine, which is essentially no more than a machine for turning the heat of a fire into useful rotary motion. A laboratory crammed full of ultra expensive machinery , a lab as big as a stadium, manned by hundreds of elite professionals, can't build a fire after half a century of research. If they do eventually succeed in controlling the reaction for more than milliseconds ,they are still going to be as far from a working fusion plant as a kid with a campfire is from a truck engine.
They are telling us they are going to build a what is essentially a fusion engine, but they can't even build a fusion fire, except in the form of a bomb- which may be of some use if needed to threaten other countries, perhaps, but otherwise worthless.(Now if they could solve the radiation problem, lol, such bombs would be very useful indeed for building canals and clearing out slums and leveling mountains to get at the coal under them while making room for more subdivisions, sarc on.)
The materials needed for a number of steps in the potential controlled fusion process don't even exist- There is no assurance they can be invented, and if they are invented, there is no assurance they can be manufactured in useful quantities .
If the basic problem of controlling the reaction is solved, and these materials are invented and then manufactured, then a demo plant, or several of them will have to be built.Then the bugs will have to be worked out, and funding found to build the plants.
It will take at least a decade just to solve the problems associated with permitting the technology and siting such a plant.
Then it will take several more years to build it.
Probability theory, which is a firmly established branch of mathematics, cannot be argued with. In Feymann's (iIrc) words, it's part of that same Mother Nature that can't be fooled.
The probability of a given event which is dependent on a number of other independent events is the product of the probabilities of the other events.
When the string of events under consideration stretches into the hundreds and thousands, and a solution must be found in sequence for many of these events, it is instantly obvious that all of them coming to pass within a given time frame of say forty years is pretty dxxned close to zero.
Even when the probability of success is ninety percent in every individual case, a string of only a couple of dozen events puts final success into the long shot category, the winning a lottery category.
I believe in the Invisible Hand, but it's not omnipotent.
Progress can come pretty fast once any given product, process , or industry is up and running and self supporting- because the people involved are then able to plow back some of the profits or surplus created into making lots of incremental improvements, and investing in large scale manufacture and distribution. Flicking a Bic is a whole lot easier than banging two rocks together, for sure- so long as an existing infrasturcture is available to keep us supplied with Bic's.
There is little to no incentive, excepting continued govt funding and the love of knowledge, to work on most of the tough nut problems associated with fusion power, because there are no immediate applications waiting for the solutions . The problems involved are as much or more engineering problems as they are physics problems , and engineers must be paid based on the expectation of their succeeding within a reasonable time frame.Nobody in his right mind, considering the human life span, is welling to bet very much on so unlikely a a payoff so far down the road.
Spinoffs are possible and to be hoped for of course, but no adult reading this site in this final week of it's life is ever going to turn on a light powered by a fusion power plant
The people actively involved in fusion power are just people- people capable as capable as the run of humanity of fooling them selves.
Here is an interesting article:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-22/homegrown-green-energy-i...
and that is coming from the producers.....
Rgds
WP
I am also a firm advocate for Renewable energy sources, though many have issues such as intermittency, distance from population centers, etc.
But to say "here is a limited list of options" is still short sighted. check out this link to the American Security Project Proposal. Mankind's harnessing of Hydrogen Fusion energy is inevitable. Hydrogen Fusion relies on inexpensive fuel and limited radiation issues compared to Nuclear Energy. This is game changing technology that can change our energy outlook for generations.
Having said that, renewables would still be needed to capture energy from the environment. Fusion will still release wasted energy as heat. Mankind has to grow up and realize a global society needs to limit its impact on our global ecosystem.
Big Gav's long list of peak oil related websites that have disappeared in the last few years looks impressive. But that does not mean that the issue of peak oil has disappeared as well. Nor does it mean that nothing needs to be done in order to tackle the issue – and especially to raise the public awareness about what has been found out about Peak Oil during the last few years. This is why I am about to launch a new website. And hopefully, this website will replace this vast number of peak oil related blogs and news aggregators that have disappeared by something more advanced – and perhaps it will become The Oildrum 2.0.
I think that a major problem why there is so little public awareness about PO (and even less political action in order to cope with it) compared to other sustainability issues (like e. g. climate change) and why most people still stick to the „official“ supply outlooks (i. e. from the IEA or the EIA) is that – perhaps due to its grassroots provenience – most information about peak oil (and the related issues) is dispersed about a vast multitude of studies, blog articles and comments, which also reflect quite a large array of expected scenarios. In contrast to the well-known energy reports from the IEA or the EIA or the IPPC reports about climate change, which form the central basis for all sorts of studies and government plans so far there is no such thing like a unified and regularly updated report about peak oil. Whereas diverging findings are something normal for scientists, among the general public the lack of a unified mes-sage may be considered as doubts about the peak oil theory as such.
So I think that something is needed that as far as possible joins the knowledge about peak oil that has been developed so far and that connects the dots between the maze of information that has been published. This knowledge compendium shall facilitate a transparent discussion about different scenarios and on the long run hopefully result in a narrowed down range of possibilities. It may serve as a textbook and knowledge database about peak oil (and the topics related to it) and also provide a one-stop-shop with ready-to-use arguments for future discussions about energy.
This sounds like a huge task and for a long time I made up my mind how this could be achieved. Finally, I determined that the best way is to use an cooperative approach and using an online wiki (a more detailed explanation can be found here). And this is why I have begun to create a new website. At present it is still in its very beginning, but those who are interested may already have a look and are encouraged to participate.
The site is called WikiPeaks.
The problem with getting to a clean energy future is finding an economically acceptable path in the real world. The bulk of CO2 emissions are now from the developing world, and most future CO2 growth is also from the developing world, so what the US or Europe do is of diminishing importance. Energy is mostly from fossil fuels, and projected to stay increasingly from fossil fuels. A political solution in the form of a world agreement or even a collection bilateral agreements to limit limit CO2 seems very unlikely. The only realistic path that seems likely to alter the behavior of the world as a whole is a cheap clean energy source that confers a competitive economic advantage over fossil fuels.
No current such cheap clean energy source exists. If it did it would be being adopted wholesale. As Big Gav pointed out very well, solar energy is clean, abundant and ubiquitous. If PV can continue to grow in volume, its pretty predictable cost reduction path may make it cost effective for electricity in a decade or two. Optimists think it can be sooner, but markets are hard taskmasters, and to displace fossil fuels on a global scale is going to take a much lower price than the widely touted $1/W.
So what if there were a way for PV to suddenly be three times as effective, not be indeterminate, and be local? You still have day/night and seasonal variation, but you have taken away three big problems. To put that in dollar terms, local electricity from PV today would cost about $0.05-$0.06/kWh. That's not sufficiently cheap to displace fossil fuels, but it is cheap enough to make PV competitive without subsidy in most electricity markets. If because of this competitiveness PV volume increased and its cost decreased, in a few years electricity could reduce to $0.02/kWh and now we can start competing with most fossil fuels.
Fairy tales and make believe? probably....but maybe not? check out http://www.stratosolar.com It's not as science fiction as first appears.
$1/Wp gives you $.05 per kWh, right? Assume 7% interest, a 30 year life, and 20% capacity factor, plug it into an xcel payment formula, and you'll get 4.6 cents per kWh.
If you do a Levelized Cost of Electricity(LCOE) analysis at $1/Wp capital cost, 20% solar utilization, 7% working average cost of capital(WACC), 30 year financing, that accounts for inverter and wiring efficiency (85%), O&M including insurance ($30,000/MW) and yearly degradation (.5%) the LCOE is about $0.08/kWh.
20% solar utilization near population centers is rare. A population weighted world average is less than 15%. At 15% solar utilization, LCOE is about $0.11/kWh.
7% WACC is optimistic. At 8.5% WACC and 15% solar utilization, LCOE is about $0.12/kWh.
These numbers don't account for all the cost factors a utility PV power plant developer includes. Clearly at these electricity costs, PV electricity will compete in some markets. It won't compete with coal in developing markets at less than $0.06/kWh and that is where the bulk of world CO2 emissions increase is coming from. Also we are still some distance from getting to $1/Wp.
As you might expect, I'm all for PV. It will be cost effective eventually. I would like it to be in my lifetime.
The Oil Drum has been a great, mostly fact and data driven site. I'm sad to see it go.
O&M including insurance ($30,000/MW)
That would be 3 cents per watt. Is it per watt, per year? What does it include besides insurance, and what kind of insurance is it?
yearly degradation (.5%)
My assumption has been that the actual life is rather greater than 30 years, and that the residual value at 30 years roughly compensates for the degradation. Make sense?
If I add the 15% loss factor but not an annual opex, the cost per kWh goes up to 5.4 cents per kWh.
20% solar utilization near population centers is rare.
About 50% of the US has that value, per the NREL. About 10% in the Southwest gets more than 25%. A very large portion of Australia, Spain, MENA and Africa will exceed 20%.
A population weighted world average is less than 15%.
I don't think the average is helpful, here. If 15% of the world population has reached or exceeded grid parity, then solar has reached a "takeoff" transitional point, where sales will grow quickly, and economies of scale and manufacturing cost reductions will continue to reduce costs significantly.
7% WACC is optimistic.
Certainly, a lot of residential owners have access to capital at that rate, or rather lower. If we expect electricity rates to increase at least as quickly as inflation, that improves returns that much more.
It won't compete with coal in developing markets at less than $0.06/kWh
We're certainly at $2/Wp - I get 11 cents per kWh. That cost will put a very large number of residential owners at grid parity.
Very nice review.
One area which is not mentioned is solar fuels: generating fuels like H2 from water and sunlight with catalysts and membranes (for separation at source). This is doable, but needs a lot of research breakthroughs. There are catalysts that can split water using just sunlight, but they require expensive metals like Platinum.
Our NSF funded center - CCI Solar Fuels http://www.ccisolar.caltech.edu/ - has 19 investigators from 12 universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, U. Wisconsin Madison, UC Davis, Penn State, U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U. Texas Austin (among others) working on aspects of catalyst discovery for the two half reactions - water to O2 and protons; and protons and electrons to H2 - on light absorbers for covering most of the solar spectrum, and membranes for embedding the system and separating the H2 from O2. We have had several small breakthroughs, and one prototype demonstration of the Artificial Leaf - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J556uXwrjII
Department of Energy has funded a HUB at Caltech - Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis - http://solarfuelshub.org/ - which is working on the engineering and design aspects of this problem, along with the basic science, and also looking at atmospheric CO2 as the feedstock in addition to water. They expect to do prototype demonstrations in the next 2-3 years. While their initial prototype will NOT be ready for adoption, it will be important milestone on the way to industrialization.
Other nations are also getting into the act - European Union, South Korea, and in smaller efforts Italy, UK, Ireland, Holland, etc.
It is a long way from having this available, but I think in the long run, it will be one important source of our energy solution, and splitting water is C-independent, while splitting CO2 is C-neutral, both important for the future of our planet.
Thanks for the comment.
Yes - I should have included this in the energy storage section - time got away from me.
There is a graphic on Wikipedia for their energy storage page which terms various forms of chemical energy storage as "power to gas".
As per usual, an article that has "Our clean energy future" in the title, quickly morphs to changes in electricity production. Most of the highlights of the article are about the percentage of renewables in electricity production.
Of course this completely misses two of the greatest needs of energy, being transport and heating. The world, yes the world, currently uses about 157,000 Twh of primary energy a year. This is growing at the rate of 2% a year as the many billions in developing countries desperately try to catch up with the developed countries.
To develop a purely renewable energy supply over a decade or two, is not possible, yet that is what is needed to avoid the twin disasters of peak oil and climate change. Just working out the materials needed and the energy needed to perform such a buildout over a decade or two shows how impossible the task is.
Of course those numbers, the real numbers, are not what is ever looked at, people look at price and point at how it is becoming cheaper, therefore all will be OK. An ounce of understanding of economics will quickly show that a 10 fold or 20 increase in demand for solar panels that now use 6% of the available silver, will increase that component markedly, likewise for other components. I for one expect the price of PV to get more expensive in the future as the market grows.
The trend in solar is not the glossy headlined "cheaper than whatever". In fact the growth rate of solar has stalled. There was 30.4 Gw installed in 2011 yet only 31.1 Gw in 2012. In Europe the installation rate fell 23% from 2011 to 2012.
With wind, the additions to worldwide capacity in the last 3 years have been 381 Gw, 40.3 Gw and 44.4 Gw. While these numbers show growth, it is stalling form the growth rates from prior to the GFC. In fact the growth rates of both solar and wind have been stalling while the price of oil has remained high.
The current production of all solar and wind at capacity factors of 15% and 22% respectively (the real world actual numbers) amounts to 676 Twh. Remember world primary energy use is ~157,000 Twh.
If both solar and wind could add 10 times current additions per year, every year for the next 20 years, they would still only produce 25,132 Twh of electrical energy, 1/6 of current primary energy use.
It is a sad indictment of TOD about how close to correct the oil situation is, yet how inaccurate the renewable energy situation is as the wrong nubmers are discussed.
Hide, why are you arguing with primary energy? In a reenweable scenario we have to replace "only" final energy.
The next point is that most of the current demand for heating could easily be avoided with better insulation of buildings and the rest evenm more with heat pumps. So 20%-30 of primary energy substituted with renewables is fine for me after checking the German data.
Electricity gets a lot of attention, because electric transportation is the sensible direction.
Silver isn't necessary for PV. As far as I can tell, it's being phased out in order to reduce costs.
EVs are far more efficient: 180watt hours per km, vs 900 for US ICEs and probably 600 for the rest of the world.
Replacing 90% of coal generation with wind over 20 years, and reducing vehicle oil consumption by 50% over 15 years, would be very affordable. We're not planning to do that at the moment, but we could.
Yes, wind and solar aren't growing as fast as we need, due to ferocious political resistance by the FF industry. I think there's a chance solar will break out on the consumer side (if utilities don't manage to block it). It's fascinating to watch consumer installations of PV in leading edge places like Australia and Hawaii.
Ulen,
Primary energy is what the world uses to create the final energy. The proponents of renewables as replacements seem to think that just the final energy created is what we need to reproduce. However the next breath is spoken about building out twice as much wind or solar to account for the quiet times. Then there is storage and the building of such, whether it be batteries or pumped, plus the losses in changing from one form to another and back again.
If the sun shone for 24 hours a day (in the one place), or the wind blew 24 hours a day, every day, then there wouldn't be a need to build more than final energy.
Nick,
Please join the real world...
From industry sources....
"Silver paste is used in 90 percent of all crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells"
"Because silver is the best conductor, solar panel manufacturers have little choice but to rely on the metal"
I don't particularly want a second rate panel that didn't use silver, I suspect the long term life of the panel will be compromised.
So Nick, keep plugging away with the story of solar becomming cheaper and cheaper as well as the life lasting just as long as the panels that use expensive inputs.
You also keep harping on about how little power an EV can use, yet people today pay for gas guzzlers, not just ICE cars that run on the smell of an oily rag. The story will be the same with EVs. There will be inefficient monsters of the road, if we ever get there.
As I stated earlier, no-one is working out the numbers on what resources we need to make the electric future in a BAU case. The reason being that the real numbers show how impossible it is. The numbers are in terms of tonnes of glass, aluminium, steel, silicon, concrete, copper, silver etc and of course the energy to do it in bbls of oil or kwh.
The proponents of renewables as replacements seem to think that just the final energy created is what we need to reproduce.
That's kind've obvious, isn't it? Both renewables and FF generation produce electricity...
the next breath is spoken about building out twice as much wind or solar to account for the quiet times.
That's a different issue: overbuilding is one of several ways to deal with seasonal/diurnal variation. It's a pretty good one, and it's one that FF generation also uses: the US grid is 225% as large as average generation would require. In contrast, simulations suggest perhaps 50% overbuilding would work well for windpower.
Some of the "surplus" power is likely to be very useful for other things.
Then there is storage and the building of such, whether it be batteries or pumped, plus the losses in changing from one form to another and back again.
Well, that's what overbuilding would help with. 1st, it would reduce the need for storage, 2nd the surplus power could be stored. Because it would be cheap surplus power, efficiency would be a secondary concern.
Silver paste is used in 90 percent of all crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells
Demonstrating, of course, that 10% didn't use silver.
Because silver is the best conductor, solar panel manufacturers have little choice but to rely on the metal
The difference in impedance is pretty small. Silver is expensive, and *all* PV is coming down in price dramatically - reductions in silver use must be part of it.
I suspect the long term life of the panel will be compromised.
Well, obviously, we're both guessing a little here. It would be interesting to get really good, up to date info.
people today pay for gas guzzlers
Well, they pay for power and size. OTOH, look at the Tesla: more powerful than many ICEs that cost 2x as much. I recently read a rave reviewer by an ex-Ferrarri owner, who was saving $5k per year in gas.
no-one is working out the numbers on what resources we need to make the electric future in a BAU case
Sure, they are. Wind is as cheap as new coal, and has a much higher EROEI. Glass is made with silicon - we're not going to run out.
Hide, sorry, I still do not get your arguments:
1) We have to replace final energy, renewables replace final energy at a 1:1 ratio. The conversion losses from primary energy to final energy are nor interesting in a renewable scenario. In addition, the official energy book- keeping omits gains from passive solar, IIRC gains from heat pumps etc., sources that could substitute for final energy from fossil sources.
2) Overbuilding POWER with a low capacity factor does not mean we produce much more energy than we need.
A low capacity factor does not imply correlated production, therefore, better distribution of the turbines leads to more uncorrelated production, i.e. more constant output.
The cheapest solution, if the capacity factor could not be improved further, still is the increase of cross border transmission capacity in order to increase uncorrelated production. The next step is more storage.
A scenario with 40-80% of the energy production from renewables require no or only a moderate amount of storage capacity in Germany according to studies of the VDE, one of the largest European techical-scientific associations, which is BTW very conservative. According to them the pump storage capacity under construction is sufficient until 2030 in Austria, Switerland and Germany. 2030 Germany will produce around 50-60% of her electricity with reneables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verband_der_Elektrotechnik,_Elektronik_und_...
No, that's all wrong. Even a "ballpark estimate" shows that what you're saying is wrong.
Let's take concentrating solar power as an example. CSP plants are made out of glass, concrete, and steel (or aluminum) which in turn are made out of super-abundant elements (silicon, calcium, iron, aluminum) that together constitute about 90% of the earth's crust. If we assume that the mirrors are 6 in thick, that we can mine 1 mile deep, and that we must cover 0.1% of the terrestrial surface of the earth in CSP panels to generate all the power we get today, then it would take ~0.000000001% of the silicate rock, cement (mostly silicate rock and some calcium), and iron available to us. We would never face the prospect of using lower-quality ores because silicate rock is more than 40% of the mass of the crust in almost every region. Furthermore, we are not "using up" the silicate rock at any rate since it can be recycled when the mirrors are degraded from abrasion.
With regard to energy. Solar thermal plants have an energy "payback time" of less than a year, for a 30-year lifespan. That seems to imply that 3% of our energy budget would be needed to construct the plants, which is similar to what we expend for coal-burning plants etc now.
Where are the numbers that show it's not possible? How did you determine that?
Where did you get this figure? I quickly went to the wikipedia article about "solar power" (just because it would take no more than 5 seconds to do so) and it shows a table constructed from the BP review of energy, indicating the solar power deployment increased by over 60% in 2012 alone.
Could you show us the "real" numbers you refer to, and where you got them?
Is your concern here that EVs will be cheap enough (and energy plentiful enough) that people will buy energy-guzzling, massive EVs?
The question isn't whether you "want" it or not. I might "want" solar panels with my initials inlaid with gold leaf around the edges. The question is whether it is possible to use materials other than silver for PV as silver becomes more expensive.
-Tom P