The Economic and Political Consequences of the Last 10 Years of Renewable Energy Development
Posted by Jerome a Paris on September 5, 2013 - 9:22am
I've been privileged to be an editor of TOD over the past several years, and am glad to have been invited to do a final post as the site moves to an archive status.
When I started writing about energy on the blogs in 2003/2004, I was writing mostly about Russia, gas pipelines and gas geopolitics. There were so many conspiracy theories abounding on topics like the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline or (a bit later) Russia vs Ukraine pipeline conflicts that I felt the need to put out a different version, given that I knew the inside story on many of these issues - and that got me invited to contribute these to TOD as well. In the meantime, my job (which was, and - full disclosure - remains, to finance energy projects) slowed moved from oil&gas work to power sector transactions and, increasingly, to renewable sector deals, and I started writing about the wind business, in my mind from the perspective of a banker wanting to make sure that these projects could be paid back over periods of 15 or 20 years.
While my work is now almost exclusively focused on offshore wind in Northern Europe, I still do not consider myself a 'wind shill'... but it does give me a different perspective on the debates currently going on about energy policy in various places, and on the changes to the power sector caused (among others, by renewables) that are underpinning such debates, and I thought it would be a useful complement, together with Big Gav's overview of the clean energy sector, to the other articles more traditionally focused on the oil&gas side of things.
I'll focus on Germany, where the transformation has been most advanced (and even has brought a new word to us: the Energiewende), and where the consequences of high renewable penetration are most visible.
A lot of rather unusual things have been happening in the Germany power sector lately, from negative prices, to utilities closing down brand new power plants and, naturally, a ferocious debate as to whether to cut support for renewable energy (as has already been done in Spain).
I've long described renewable energy producers as a price takers (i.e., they don't influence market prices in the short term and have to "take" market prices as set by other factors, unless shielded by specific regulatory regimes), but we are getting to the point, in a number of places, and in Germany in particular, where the penetration of renewable energy is such that it has a real macroeconomic impact on the prices of electricity, both at the wholesale and the retail levels, and thus on the way power markets run, and on the politics surrounding them. There's the additional factor that apparent spending on renewables is targeted by governments at a time of austerity in Europe, egged on by hardly disinterested utilities.
It is worth going through what's been happening in some detail.
:: ::
In the good old days, wholesale prices of power followed the price of natural gas, as gas-fired plants are the producer of the marginal kWh most of the time. This is still the case in the USA, and it looks like this:
Retail prices tend to follow the average wholesale cost, plus a slice for distribution costs and taxes which can vary quite wildly from country to country:
But we've seen prices diverging across markets over the past two years, as shown in the following graphs:
- gas prices diverging sharply across continents (notably as a result of the gas shale developments in the US and increased demand for gas in Japan following the Fukushima disaster, while European prices remain largely indexed to oil):
- wholesale power prices diverging from gas prices:
- retail prices moving in the opposite direction to wholesale prices, and increasing:
Note: the lines above represent long term break-even prices for, from the bottom, nuclear power plants, coal-fired plants and gas-fired plants
German wholesale prices have been trending down over the past several years, despite the closure of close to half of the nuclear plants of the country, and despite the persistently high natural gas prices on the continent, while retail prices have been going up, including due to contributions to pay for guaranteed fixed prices to renewable energy producers (the "EEG" component in yellow in the last graph).
The fall in wholesale prices means that most traditional power plants are not economical at current levels, as the second graph above shows.
There are some temporary factors to the current situation. One is the general economic woes of the eurozone, which are pushing demand downwards and thus prices as well. The other is the temporary higher use of coal-fired power plants, which itself comes from a combination of short term factors:
- cheap imports from the USA (where coal use has been displaced for a while by cheap gas in power generation) made coal more profitable than gas, and
- regulatory incentives mean coal plants have (under the (the Large Combustion Plants EU directive) a limited number of hours to run and operators have every reason to use these up quickly, and especially if the plants are profitable, or less unprofitable than gas ones (UK coal plants have the additional incentive that a carbon tax will be imposed on them from April 2013).
These factors have made it possible to claim that Germany was increasing pollution and carbon emissions because of wrongheaded policies (depending on your stance: closing nuclear plants or pushing renewables), but this looks like a temporary arbitrage between coal and gas.
:: ::
The real long term story is that the power spot markets are being completely upended by the increasing penetration of renewable energy. In Germany, new renewables represent around 50% of the overall installed capacity, and already provide close to 20% of all power generation (split in 2012 in 3 almost equal parts between wind (7%), biomass (6%) and solar (5%)), up from almost nothing 15 years ago, and on many days now they provide 50% or more of total output:
This reduces demand for mid-load producers and peakers over more and more periods throughout the year. As the graphs below shows, on good days in the warm season the PV capacity almost eliminates altogether the need for intermediate load; in winter, wind takes over (in aggregate, although not with as regular a daily profile):
This was the slice of demand served by coal-fired and gas-fired plants and they are simply not being used as much as they used to, and certainly not as much as their owners expected.
And prices are being squeezed down not just for these producers, but for everybody else as well, in particular during the peak day time hours which used to be the most profitable for all power plants (because baseload plants also receive the more expensive peak hour prices even if they did not bid at such prices). This means that existing capacity is less and less profitable - not just the peakers or intermediate plants, but also the nuclear and other baseload workhorses of the system. Thus the few highly publicized plant closures, and the ongoing utility complaints about lost revenues. Moreover there currently is no business case to invest in any kind of power plant (other than renewables under specific revenue regimes), which utilities use to argue against renewable support.
But here's the thing: preventing new renewables will not eliminate the current existing capacity, which means that the economics of the sector will not recover even if no new renewables were built... The wholesale market as it was designed 20 years ago (de facto based on gas-fired plants of various efficiency targeted at different points of the merit order curve setting up the marginal price) is irreversibly broken. The system is now dominated by plants with very low marginal cost of production (but high upfront investment), which means that spot prices are systematically too low for everybody - you can't invest in plants with high upfront investments (like nukes), and you can't invest in plants with high marginal running costs (gas-fired plants) unless you are betting on persistently low gas prices into the future. That may explain the push for shale gas in Europe, but who believes that shale gas will bring low prices? Even in the US prices are trending up again (and forward prices even more so).
:: ::
In the meantime, retail prices have kept on increasing, and the fact that the contribution of the support regime (in Germany, the "EEG-Umlage") to retail prices has become visible has made it a target of lobbyists and thus a political topic, despite the fact that retail prices increases have been caused, to a large extent (and in particular until 2009) by increases in gas prices.
This leads us to an hidden truth: a large fraction of the massive increase in renewable energy production is not paid for by consumers, but by incumbent producers who see their revenues decline as the price they earn per MWh goes down. Utilities, which see their margins on the retail side increase, but have very little renewable energy production capacity of their own are caught between two conflicting trends, with their upstream business losing profitability, but their downstream business earning more. IPPS are suffering, but have less voice. Unsurprisingly, utilities are focusing public attention only on the first part, and are naturally blaming renewables - not hesitating to point fingers at their support regimes as the cause of rising power prices, in the hope that these regimes will be weakened. They claim they are victims of unfair competition from "heavily subsidized" sources which have priority over them and can dump power with no worry for consequences into the network. They use a mix of real arguments and weaker ones to push against renewables:
- one of the true arguments is that the cost of supporting solar PV has become larger than expected and faster than expected. Just 5 years ago, a number of countries had tariffs in the 500-600 EUR/MWh range, and regulators were surprised by the volumes that managed to be installed - and capture the advantageous prices levels. when they dropped the price support for new projects, they were again surprised by how fast the industry was able to match the lower prices through new technology (and a brutal price war). The result has been an amazing drop in the price of solar panels (-80% in just a few years, as shown above), bringing them close to grid parity, and a rather large (multiple GWs in Germany, Italy, Spain) stock of solar PV capacity which is entitled to very high tariffs for many years, at a visible cost to consumers;
- in some places, the regulatory regime allowed producers to capture the best of both worlds - the higher of the fixed tariff or the market price (whether wholesale or retail), thus preventing the network, and the public, from benefitting from the "cap" that a real fixed tariff would have provided;
- in Spain, retail power prices were kept artificially low for political reasons), and the the gross cost of the fixed tariffs was not absorbed into the general cost base of the network and instead explicitly imposed on utilities, which used that as an obvious argument against renewables (even though a good part of the price increases were linked to increased gas prices before the merit order effect acted on wholesale prices); the government's U-turn on tariffs, which imposed negative tariff changes on already operational projects, alienated the utilities further (as they had, contrary to what happened in Germany, become significant operators of renewable capacity and lost money in the process) and created a precedent that also scared off lenders and investors and put the sector in disrepute;
- in Germany, the renewable energy surcharge applies only to retail consumers, and large sections of industrial users (but not all) are exempted. That means that the gross costs is borne by a smaller fraction of the overall consumers, and that some industries are complaining that they are being treated unfairly. Meanwhile, those benefitting from the situation (the bug consumers who benefit from lower wholesale prices and do not pay the surcharge) are staying silent so as to avoid attracting attention (they failed - this quirk is likely to be corrected soon);
But what is not true is that wind has contributed in any meaningful way to retail price increases (most of Germany's wind capacity was installed before 2008 and the EEG component is all but invisible at that date), and not has offshore wind (which is indeed more expensive, but very little of which has been built to date). When you look at average costs, one sees that onshore wind is largely competitive on wholesale markets (and yes, that does take into account grid access and balancing costs - there is enough experience with large wind penetration in various networks to know that it can be done and that it has no meaningful impact on costs), that solar is already competitive against retail prices in many markets (the famous "grid parity"), and that other technologies are somewhere in-between. Offshore wind is still more expensive, but is expected to come down in price by the time it will reach significant capacity:
Note that these average costs of production, always include very political assumptions about the cost of money, and the future price of gas, to apply to such projects. The discount rate (at the time of investment) is the main driver of the cost of wind or nuclear whereas the cost of gas-fired power is only an estimate, based an assumptions about the cost of gas in the next 20 years. And that also means that the price of power from a wind farm or a nuclear plant is largely fixed and known once the plant is built, while the cost of power from a gas-fired plant in the future is essentially unknown. The cost of money is a fundamentally political decision (derived from investors' estimates of macro risks like inflation, of regulatory risks applying to the sector, and technology risk); the consensus on future gas price estimates is also influenced by many factors, including long term projections by public bodies like the IEA, the US EIA or private firms with their various agendas.
As an aside, the more renewables you have in the system, the less it is possible to take out the regulatory support regime, because spot prices tend to go towards zero - which makes investment in renewables (or in any other kind of power generation assets, for that matter) impossible. So "grid parity" is an illusory target, in a sense, because it is a moving target. Technologies with high variable costs (all fossil-fuel plants) cannot compete at any price when there is enough zero-marginal cost capacity in the system, and technologies with high upfront investment costs need comfort about price levels over a long period as they need such prices on a constant basis to amortize the initial investment. This is why the UK government is working on a "contract for differences" (essentially the same thing as a fixed tariff) for new nuclear plants.
:: ::
Altogether, the reality is that the consumers and the utilities is paying for a few expensive years of early solar PV technology (to the tune of a few cents per kWh, ie a few hundred euros per year and per household), and now the utilities are bearing almost in full the further impact on the system: they are no longer making (much) money on their current fleet - not on gas-fired plants, barely on their coal-fired plants, and they don't have much renewable energy capacity. They are stuck with a capital stock (including recent plants), which is increasingly uneconomic in today's markets, caught between high fuel prices and lower power prices. And that is the result of strategies over the past 10-15 years that willfully ignored policies to promote renewables pursued pretty consistently across Europe, and the likely impact they would have on power prices (the infamous "merit order effect" - which I discussed in detail at least 5 years ago, and which was already the topic of academic papers before that).
So it's not like they had no warning and no notice... In a sense, utilities have been consistent: one of their past arguments was that renewables would never reach critical mass and thus were not a serious solution to reduce carbon emissions. And they surely did not take recent investment decisions (mainly to build base-load or mid-load gas-fired plants) with the scenario of heavy renewable penetration in mind, otherwise they would not have been so surprised by the current situation...
:: ::
Utilities do make a legitimate point when they underline that the system still needs their capacity (because renewables are not available on demand, and do not provide the flexibility required in the very short term), and that this needs to be paid for (and, at some point in the future, existing capacity will need to be replaced, and they need to be able to make a business case for that, which is not possible today).
In the previous regime, where power prices were determined by gas prices, it was possible to pay for the flexibility in the form of price spikes that gave the right signal for mid-load and peaker gas-fired (or oil-fired, or hydro) plants to be used, and their frequency of use was relatively predictable over a year, allowing for a sound business model to be implemented. Now, with plenty of renewables, the price signal is completely different. There are many more periods of very low prices when renewables flood the system (and this is particularly the case in places with lots of solar, as it is available during the day, ie when demand is stronger and thus prices used to be higher). This has two consequences: gas-fired plants get much less use than in the past (and less than their business plans expected), and baseload plants like nukes or big coal-fired plants get lower prices during periods when they were cashing in more money. The latter earn less money (but still run); the former now run a lot less than expected , which has income implications but also consequences for gas consumption and storage - patterns of use become very different, moving from the usual "once a day" pattern (a few hour at peak demand times), to short bursts several times a day (as renewables drop out), or very long periods of use over multiple days when renewables are not available at all.
Given that the penetration of renewables will continue to change every year, it has become really hard to identify the business model to use for flexible plants - and even harder to know what it will be in 1, 5 or 10 years from now. These flexible plants will be needed, at least to some extent, and they need to be paid for, and that cannot really happen with today's regulatory regime (and as noted above, stopping support regimes for renewables won't change that now: the existing stock of wind and solar is already big enough in several countries to keep the current market arrangements broken). One solution, thankfully being considered in several markets, and which already exists in places like California, is to put in place a capacity market, where plants make themselves available for rapid changes in output, without actually producing anything most of the time, and get paid for that availability: ie a market for MW in addition to the market for MWh.
:: ::
The politics of this transition are messy. You can have articles saying (without any real argument) that "Too much green energy is bad for Britain at the very same time that you have record cold weather, with critical weakness in the gas supply infrastructure and wind actually coming to the rescue... (in the UK last March).
People are presenting capacity markets as another subsidy to renewables, whereas system security has always required a significant margin of unused capacity for safety: power demand varies from 1 to 2 or one to 3 every day, peaks can be more or less intense depending on weather, and even large plants can go offline on a scheduled or unscheduled basis. That safety margin was simply paid for in a different way, either by imposing capacity buffers on utilities, or through spot price peaks that were high enough to pay in a few hours for the peaker plants which are otherwise idle most of the time. There's naturally a lot of talk that policies to develop renewable have failed, being costly (only partly true, as shown above, and increasingly less so as time goes by), ineffective at reducing carbon emissions (not true, each MWh of renewable energy has, by and large, replaced a MWh generated previously by fossil fuel plants) and damaging to the system (obviously not the case). But the cat is out of the bag: once renewable energy reaches a critical mass, its impact on power systems is pretty much irreversible and no amount of lobbying by utilities is going to get them their previous business model back: wind turbines and solar panels are there and they will keep on cranking out zero-marginal-cost MWh for a very, very long time...
So utilities would be well advised to focus their lobbying on fixes to the system that actually solve problems (like capacity markets, or maybe new rules on grid access for "must-run plants), and to not cut the tree on which they are sitting (killing the support regime for offshore wind, the only sector in renewables which is "utility-scale" and where they have been able to take a leading share, and the only sector of the power sector where they can actually make money these days...)(I note here again, for full disclosure, that I work in the offshore wind sector and appreciate that this may sound rather self-interested).
The politics of power prices are rather volatile, and people have little sympathy for the big utilities, which are typically seen as profiteers anyway, so the focus on the high retail prices could end up damaging them more than it impacts renewable energy producers. Energy is a rather complex topic, not really suited for soundbites, and it is easy to confuse people or say outright lies without getting caught right away. But, by and large, Germans still support the Energiewende - both the move away from nuclear and the support for renewable energy - and are willing to pay for it. And for areas like Bremerhaven, all the manufacturing activity linked to wind and offshore wind is rather welcome.
:: ::
In summary:
- Renewable energy is reaching the scale where it has an impact on the overall system; the effects are irreversible, and highly damaging to incumbents;
- The net cost to get there has been relatively low, and largely paid for by utilities, which have constantly underestimated the ongoing changes, even as they were both (wrongly) dismissing them and (relatively ineffectively) fighting them;
- there are legitimate worries about the way to maintain the fleet of flexible plants that was required in the past and will continue to be needed in the new paradigm, but can no longer pay its way under current market arrangements; the solution is not to fight renewables (it won't make the existing fleet go away) but to ensure that the right services (MW on demand) are properly remunerated;
- the shale gas revolution will have a limited impact in this context (it had almost none in Europe, other than via some cheap coal exports from the US for a short period), and does not change the economics of gas-fired plants to the point that they can be competitive in a system dominated by renewable energy production capacity;
- more generally, the future for gas suppliers is bleaker than for gas turbine manufacturers - there will be a need for a lot of gas-fired plants but they won't be burning a lot of gas (they will be selling MW rather than MWh);
- overall, a future with high renewable penetration is not only possible but increasingly likely, and it's a good thing.
Part of the wind power series.
The Economic and Political Consequences of the Last 10 Years of Renewable Energy Development
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266 comments
The Economic and Political Consequences of the Last 10 Years of Renewable Energy Development
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266 comments
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It is worth noting that the world's first pumped storage plant in eastern Germany is off-line. It needs to be refurbished and the current economics do not support that.
This is interesting because there needs to be MUCH more pumped storage to support higher % renewables (Germany & Austria signed an agreement to explore building more pumped storage in Austria, with related transmission lines). Yet current economics cannot support refurbishing an existing plant.
IMO, there will need to be many more hours of very low cost to negative cost renewables to create the economic incentive to build the required pumped storage for a high % renewable grid.
Japan has 24% of the world's pumped storage already in place (store nuke power late at night). This will make their transition to a high % renewable grid much easier.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Germany's Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good
I don't follow your reasoning. If some renewable power puts some pumped storage plants out of business, more renewable power should put more plants out of business.
Again, capacity tariffs are an answer. Which have to be negotiated by an authority representing the consumer and demanding the level of service the consumer requires, and the suppliers of storage.
I'm not sure that follows. PV in the beginning might smooth out the apparent demand for the rest of the grid, but more PV might do the opposite, for instance.
Why negotiate? Making demand and supply meet is what the market excels at. The negotiation is done by the price mechanism.
Even in America the home of the free market, utilities are regulated.
The problem is monopoly suppliers of grid power and dispersed customers. The advantage is to the supplier. The free market only works if suppliers compete.
Domestic PV is different. Competition is possible so the price mechanism works.
Then you should fix that problem instead. Nordic countries and their electricity exchange, Nordpool, might be one model to move towards. Grid operators and electricity producers should be separate.
They should all be under one "roof" ideally. That way whatever works the best winds up being used and the cost is balanced amongst the system through diversity. It's sort of like owning a series of stores - where there might be one under-performing but you can keep it in business by propping it up with the other stores. It might still be profitable, but may not stand on its own. The "one roof" allows a better balance through the system. There would be no "excess wind" or PV - it would simply be used to offset coal usage. If the coal plants can't be idled at that time then it should be redirected to fill pumped storage until Coal capacity can be taken off line and that "excess" can then be used to off-set coal usage. It's only the lack of connectedness (read: $$) between the different players that allows this from seamlessly happening.
In the long run as PV begins to lay the smack down we should see a reversal of cost TOU structuring...where you have cheap daytime power and costly night time power because the night time power will have to be served by the remaining FF plants, remaining nukes, ??? storage systems. I can see a possibility that those pumped hydro plants will be needed at night instead of the day.
Actually late afternoon/evening. Almost everywhere has a primary or secondary weekday peak @ 6 PM. Depending on season and latitude, that can be daylight, but solar PV generation will be low.
I see solar PV being used to pump water up in the morning (and most of the day on Sunday) and storage being used as the sun gets lower (3 Pm on in the American South in the summer for example).
Alan
Actually coal is putting peaker plants (hydro, pumped storage and gas) out of business:
Since PV is covering some of the peak demand, coal can cover the rest of the higher daytime demand alone (without those peaker plants).
Unfortunately there's no CO2-tax which would make coal less competitive.
Any GIVEN pumped storage facility might need almost as much spent on it to refurb it as building a a new one, if it is very old and very run dow, and perhaps unsafe to boot.
I'm guessing this is the case with the one Alan mentioned .
Or the cost might have been inflated beyond reason for some other reason , such as the people downstream of it opposing the operation of it.
I expect it will get refurbed sooner or later, but probably for now there is enough cheap natural gas , etc, to postpone the job until it pencils out better.
I'm not totally sure , but I believe the financing problem with pumped storage is similar to the one for the rest of the renewables industries- big money up front, long lead time, small income stream almost forever.
A gas peaker can probably be built many times cheaper and several times as fast.
Otoh, sooner or later that gas is going to be unobtainium. Water recycles forever. The wind will blow forever.
Or at least until the sun goes red giant- long enough for practical purposes lol.
How many times does this renewable BS need to be debunked?
Solar power and wind power have rubbish EROEI.
The sun doesn't grow solar panels and neither does the wind build wind turbines.
ALL renewables are derivatives of fossil fuels. One barrel of oil contains the energy of 20,000+ hours of a working man's energy.
Incase you haven't noticed Brent crude is $115 and set to rise as the proxy war over resources is set to occur in Syria over natural gas. If renewables were that damn good, why is oil still north of $100 in the middle of a global economy that is barely growing?
Incase you haven't noticed CO2 levels have exceeded 400ppm. With this comes the end of the era of a stable climate. Your solar panels and wind turbines won't mean a thing as food shortages begin globally and hundreds of millions of people get displaced as climate refugees.
The world is collapsing catabolically - Central banks printing money by the trillions, dramatic youth unemployment globally, rising unrest across the world and the beginning of a new war in the Mideast.
Yaaay! But go Germany which has benefited by stealing the wealth of it's neighbours through it's nefarious Euro zone prison scheme that beggared Southern Europe through loose monetary policy and lax lending.
"Incase you haven't noticed Brent crude is $115 and set to rise as the proxy war over resources is set to occur in Syria over natural gas. If renewables were that damn good, why is oil still north of $100 in the middle of a global economy that is barely growing?"
As of right now most cars on the road are powered by oil. So as long as people keep using oil and supply of oil supply stays tight oil prices will stay high. However once the cost of fuel gets high enough that people cannot afford to use it they will switch to public transportation or electric cars and oil prices will fall. In fact one could argue that public transportation is responsible for preventing oil prices from returning to the 2009 high. Since wind and solar do not power most cars on the road today they will have no significant on the price of oil.
To calculate EROEI you need to know how long a power source will last. Most scholars assume 20 years for wind and solar. A new wind turbine will generate as much power as was used to make it in only 6 months of operation and with proper maintenance will continue to supply power for 100 years. Solar according to most studies need about 5 years to pay back the energy used to make it. However those studies are out of date, manufactures have made great strides in reducing power use and that is reflected in the rapid drop in price. Also no one knows how long solar panels will last but we know that there are some out there that are 40 years old and still generate power. The worlds oldest solar cell was invented just 50 years ago and it still works. Todays new oil fields are typically small and can only stay in production for about 20 years and the energy need to find and develop them is climbing. The EROEI for oil is getting worse with no signs of improvement, while the EROEI for wind and solar are getting better and better.
So what's an island state with little or no FF resources to do post peak? In this context island state could mean anywhere from Jamaica, to the UK, to Hawaii, to Sri Lanka. Do we just descend back into the dark ages as we are priced out of the FF markets?
At some point in this century, oil is going to go unobtainium and at that point renewable energy is going to be all we've got. At that point what are those who have coal going to be using as fuel to run the machines that extract the coal and transport it to where it is to be used. Even if all the mining and transport equipment can be powered solely by electricity, what will be used to generate the electricity?
IMHO renewables will eventually be worth every penny spent on them. Equally or even more worthwhile, will be storage solutions that do not involve batteries such as pumped storage and electricity to fuel (hydrogen, ammonia, methane). I find it difficult to wrap my head around not having electricity on demand and even more difficult to imagine not having any electricity at all. Barring barring electricity from renewable sources, I think the prospect of no electricity at all will be facing many (more) people in my lifetime.
Alan from the islands
Most mining equipment is already electric powered because of the danger of sparking a methane and/or coal dust explosion. If we are mining coal we can generate the electricity by burning coal. If we are not mining coal, we don't need mining equipment.
Assuming that man made global warming is real, this is a real conundrum, isn't it? All we will need to get more energy from coal is ...... more coal! For those with no coal resources, let them eat, whatever!
Alan from the islands
It might be worth it to look at Kodak Alaska and El Hierro Island.
Kodak set a goal to get 100% of their energy from Renewables. They were burning 1,000,000 gallons of Diesel fuel a year in addition to power they got from a Hydroelectric system. Last year they they only consumed 100,000 gallon of fuel, the reset 90% was from renewable. They did it by refurbishing the hydro facility for more capacity and better load following capability and adding 3 wind turbines. They are currently monitoring the system before making more changes but adding more wind turbines are high on their list of possible solutions to get the remaining 10%.
http://74-220-216-33.bluehost.com/business/renewable.html
ElHierro island is a small island in the Canary islands. They just install wind turbines and made a pumped hydro storage facility that will eliminate the need for diesel. The system will be finished this year. A desalination is also being added to take advantage of any excess power generated.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/10/creating-a-...
I am not aware of any very large scale all renewable systems yet. But people looking and thinking about what can be done and doing studies. One of the best examples of this that I have found is from Beyond Zero Emissions in Australia. the plan they developed would use solar thermal power plants with 24 hour thermal storage as the main power source with solar PV and Wind. Computer simulations using real weather data have shown that there will be occasional times in which the Solar thermal power plants would not be enough. To address this weakness the plan was revised to include biomass power plants. The plan is very detailed. They are now working on a renewable transportation plan.
http://bze.org.au/media/releases
The Australian 100% renewable plan has come in for some heavy (and in my view, justifiable) criticism on Brave New Climate. See:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/05/02/100pc-renew-study-needs-makeover/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/06/11/renewable-electricity-nirvana/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/07/16/new-critique-aemo-100pc-renew/
Brave New Climate just prefers nuclear. It's not clear why: he doesn't argue that it would be cheaper overall - his analysis is that nuclear would have lower capital costs, but higher operating costs.
In the links you posted he is criticizing the Australian Energy Market Operator report which based on a quick look is different than the Beyond Zero Emissions report. Power plants are in different places and AEMO includes Geothermal while BZE does not include it. And some of the criticism is specific to the AEMO report.
BNC is a political site rather than an objective analysis of energy options - it simply promotes the nuclear industry - usually really on inaccurate "facts" (especially when look at the costs of renewables vs nuclear and lots of hyperbolic opinion.
Go back and read their early coverage of the Fukushima disaster if you want a good laugh and see how wide their predictions were from reality.
Kudos to Kodiak. The city is on a pretty neat big rock of the same name. They have seen adversity there. The 9.2 magnitude 1964 earthquake that crunched big sections of Anchorage, washed away a big chunk of Valdez, set fire to the Seward waterfront and killed people as far away as Crescent City, CA destroyed Kodiak's harbor. Some communities just have the will to live.
Some communities just have the will to live
Of course in days past its fairly likely that by now someone would have googled a bit and countered my glib assertion with the fact that 80+ percent of Kodiak's 2000 odd homes heat with fuel oil and that the mainstay of its economy is the totally diesel dependent fishing fleet, but the conversation has tired and so the lights here will soon go out.
Well, what the heck - Kodiak can serve as a case study of a very small, 100% renewable grid without dealing with HVAC and the fishing boat problem.
HVAC, of course, is relatively easily dealt with (passive house, heat pumps, etc). Fishing boats are harder, but let me ask: any idea what percentage of a fishing fleet's costs come from diesel? Synthetic fuel won't cost more than about $10/gallon - if diesel is 10% of the cost of fishing, then synfuel wouldn't increase costs by more than 30%.
Passive house maybe not readily applied to Kodiak's existing stock, but ground source heat pumps are a solution crying to for a try, that big rock is plenty warm enough and more renewable juice can be brought online--I'm considering taking a gamble on that game there.
Mid depth fisheries like pollock may be more sustainable than many others. Alaska's salmon stock has rebounded significantly since statehood when we took management over from the feds. If the entire world managed its wild fisheries as well as Alaska does over fishing would not be much of an issue. Sadly changes in the ocean aren't as easy to address. But for now eat Alaska's wild fish when you get the chance, they've already been shipped to where you are and great efforts are made to make sure there will be just as many to catch far into the future if the ocean stays viable.
At least we aren't near as far down the line as 1973 scifi flick Soylent Green had us. That was set in more than packed more than run down NYC--year 2022. Somewhere in the middle of the movie the loudspeakers everpresent in the city blared 'The oceans are dead.'
When I said "passive house" I was really thinking of the whole spectrum of things they use: insulation, better windows, heat recovery, etc., many of which can be retrofitted. We added another layer of glass to all of our (pretty conventional) windows, and we don't need to turn on the heat until it gets below freezing.
Air-source heat pumps can go to pretty low temperatures, now. I wonder if they could be used in your latitude?
Kodiak sits out in the ice free North Pacific, very cold temperatures are rare there as are very warm. An analysis would be needed for cost of new generation to cost of air or ground source heat pumps. Right now the generation only cost for hydro is 6.8 cents per kWh, wind is 12 cents and diesel around 29 cents. Residential and light commercial customers are charged about 14 cents per kWh give or take a penny with large users being charged a penny of so less. Significant move from fuel oil heat to electric powered heat pumps will change the demand significantly--8700 heating degree days per year is the mean for the last forty years.
With that profile I'd say air-source heat pumps would be a no-brainer: if temps rarely go below 0 degrees F you're in pretty good shape. Ductless mini-splits are easy to retrofit, and would be far cheaper than fuel oil even if residential power went up to, say, 20 cents per kWh with increased demand. And, that price isn't likely if most additional power were to come from wind.
Likely the best way to go if its done individually, but a lot of Kodiak is compact it seems there might be economies of scale for larger ground source heat pump systems, the rock is right up top just about. But possibly the simplicity and selfcontained nature of the minisplits combined with their decent COP undermines anything more complex.
With a mean december temperature of 31F (much warmer than I expected) air source heat pumps would work. Geothermal would also work but it is expensive to to place all the needed piping underground. However that said the ocean average december temperature is 41F. So instead of using a air source or geothermal source heat pump you could go ocean source heat pump which is nothing more than a geothermal heat pump with two pipes to connect it to the ocean instead of a long loop of pipe underground. Combine that with thick well insulated walls and you would have a comfortable home.
Is this a viable option on large scale, awful lot of heat load in cities with access to that warm of ocean. Seems salt water needs high priced plumbing though.
Toronto used cold water from the depths of Lake Erie to aid in district cooling downtown. Aboit 10 MW saved.
Best Hopes for Innovation in Energy Efficiency,
Alan
Perhaps my last post - off to airport in 45 minutes.
Thanks Alan hope you had a good flight.
Alan, I know your long suit is trains and transit, but if there is anybody here who knows something about salt water heat pumps , I'll bet it is you.
I don't think any body will be upset if you post a comment about them in some thread still open, telling us a little about them.
My first guess is that they should be easy to permit- warm water in somewhat colder water out, no obvious environmental issues .
I envision a moderate sized pipe running to and from the sea, to a large building, or several smaller ones,connected to a large reservoir containing the warm sea water and the gas containing heat exchange coils needed to grab the heat. Everything from the reservoir on out could be conventional hvac stuff right off the shelf, no salt past the reservoir.
Using a reservoir would be really advantageous for two excellent reasons reasons.
If it is large enough, pumping need not be continuous, meaning intermittent wind and solar juice can be used advantageously, also off peak nuke and coal can be used to better advantage.
And with a large reservoir there would be plenty of room for a large quantity of heat exchange surface, meaning more heat could be extracted from the water by cooling it more, further reducing pumping energy consumption.
The reservoir could also be built in sections, allowing one section at a time to be drained and cleaned and serviced in the event of a refrigerant leak, etc.
Todays geothermal systems use polyethylene tubing buried underground. Polyethylene tubing is naturally very corrosion resistant. The only thing that seems to effect it is UV light. In a typical system it is completely buried underground and as a result it is not exposed to UV light. Fiberglass tubing and cement pipes are other options that can be considered.
Most ships in the ocean are made from ordinary steal and the industry has found multiple ways to address corrosion. We also have stainless steal tubing available that can withstand exposure the materials far more corrosive than salt. A stainless steal pipe carrying salt water should easily last a lifetime.
the only other issue I can see is biofouling. I stuff starts to grow in the pipe it can get clogged. There is equipment that can easily scrape off most of it. Periodic cleaning of the pipe may be needed. Another option would be to run two pipes from the heat pump and them connect them to a heat exchanger and then place the heat exchanger on the ocean floor. The heat exchanger would prevent any living thing from getting into the pipe.
my other reply--if it ever comes into view--was to you post before this edit, for some reason even simple, straightfoward comments I'm make here this morning have to wait in line, maybe its closing time on this post or maybe a big red flag has been put on my name by somebody though I can't think why.
Fuel costs are significant as are gear, salmon nets are oil based products, but if fish stocks remain viable and the economy can support the price the catch requires fuel other than oil can and will be used when it comes to that, still a little ways off with as much as getting pumped out of the earth every day right now--assuming supplies aren't interrupted by above ground factors and that the oil tanker fleet keeps leaving its wake.
Hi LukeH,
Just random grabbing by our annoying spam filter. I think it has OCD.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Best,
Kate
Solar power and wind power have rubbish EROEI.
Not true - wind EROEI is about 50:1.
Look at Cutler Cleveland's summary of the literature (in the next comment, to minimize moderation problems) which showed that wind's E-ROI was around 19. If you study his sources, you'll see that that most of the studies are quite old. If you look at the turbines analyzed in those studies, you'll see that they were much smaller than those in use today - look at Figure 2, and read the discussion. If you study that chart, you'll see a very clear correlation between turbine size and E-ROI. Given the recent very large increase in turbine size, it's perfectly clear that Vestas' claim for a current E-ROI of around 50 is entirely credible.
Also, an E-ROI of 19 is more than enough. There isn't an important difference between an E-ROI of 20 and an E-ROI of 50. It's like miles per gallon: we're confused by the fact that we're dividing output into input, when we should be doing the reverse, and thinking in terms of net energy. An E-ROI of 20 means a net energy of 95%, while an E-ROI of 50 means a net energy of 98%: there really isn't a significant difference.
Its important - especially in a society close to *monetary* (not energetic) insolvency, that the timing of the flows of that EROI are recognized. If wind is 19:1 but its competitor - natural gas - is 10:1 but returns most of its energy return within 3 years whereas wind will be returned over 25, our market system will choose natural gas everytime - because implicit in the decision is you get your money back sooner and can reinvest. If energy is recognized as our true currency this might not be the case. But our steep discount rates have a large bearing on temporal preferences for energy
And thanks Jerome, been a pleasure hanging with you on TOD listserv and meeting you in person. I appreciate having considerable disagreements and still being civil and respectful dialogue (most times...;-)
Amities....
I just re-read William Ophuls’ “Immoderate Greatness” the last couple nights and he also observes the tendency of humans to heavily discount the future. Good short read.
our market system will choose natural gas everytime
Well, we should stick with one thing at a time. VK was talking about E-ROI: we're agreed that wind has a high enough E-ROI to support society, right?
---------------------
Now, as for market costs: wind is now cheaper for utility investors than coal in the US, and only slighter more expensive than gas, right?
Nick, the market is a function of human nature, which has little to do with rationality. See Michael Shermer’s “The Mind of the Market”. Jeesh!
Hi , Nate!
It is one of my fondest hopes that you will setup a site of your own like the old Campfire.
If you are ever in my neck of the woods, I would gladly spend a couple of hours on the road to hear you make a presentation or just to meet you at a conference.
Your point about the time factor is critical.
This site got to be like drink to an alcoholic to me, so I dropped it cold turkey, in terms of commenting, but since i found out it is going down , I have felt free to go on a spree for the last few weeks.
This will be my last comment on EROEI, and maybe my longest one ever.
The actual numbers- derived from physics and engineering- can only be estimated, and we don't seem to know with any real degree of accuracy what they are, or how much they can be improved thru improved technology and economies of scale.
It IS obvious of course that physics ,engineering, economics of scale, etc, put upper limits on EROEI that can't be finessed.
You can't fool mother Nature.
But we live in a day to day messy naked ape world where the limits of EROEI are irrelevant except for academic purposes, on a practical time scale.
I have pointed this out before, but this time I am going to go into more detail since so many people don't seem to get it.
I'm using a lot of caps because yelling does get you heard above the background, sometimes, and i like to yell anyway, lol.
Planning the future is an impossibility except in the most general terms, even as a thought exercise.
There is no possible mechanism to ensure any really long term plans that might be made would ever actually be executed, excepting that old standby , government regulation and or coercion.
Governments are all to easily coopted by special interests, and they are generally too fickle to stay any tough course over any long span of time.
Economic planning isn't simply isn't possible over a time frame extending beyond a couple of decades, perhaps a little longer. Any such planning is no more , and can never be ,any more than educated guess work.
If the reader needs an example, the current mess in southern Europe should suffice.
No body (another example) seems to have anticipated the current problems, currently under discussion here right this minute ,involved in paying for building and maintaining adequate peak load backup capacity (needed to transition to renewables )-- at least nobody in a position to DO ANYTHING about it anticipated it.
We can't manage the future any more than we can manage the lives of our children after they leave home.
I doubt very seriously there will be soul left in twenty five years who will even ever remember me except in a casual conversation, as along these lines:
"Yeah- you remember the old man that I bought this place from ? He was a nut case a nut case there towards the end. Speaking of nuts,I'm damned glad he planted all these fruit and nut trees "
Our job, as Gandalf put it, is to do the best we can, with what we have to work with, now, and leave things as shipshape as we can for those who come after us.
The messy world we live in is the same world where empty skyscrapers are still lit up at night because the electrical generating industry is still too backward to properly load follow , and save untold millions of tons of fuel.
It's the same world where people routinely fly thousands of miles on a whim, where people fetch beer in 6000 pound trucks, where people live in over heated, over cooled, under uninsulated houses, , where veggies are routinely air freighted for the middle class and the rich.
Now maybe I'm a little too cynical, but I think any body who expects us to VOLUNTARILY change our wasteful ways is hopelessly naive or as they used to say in pc speak, 'intellectually challenged'.I haven't heard that one recently, so I suppose they have a new term for insufficient intellectual capacity these days.
We will change our ways , by and large, only when tightening finances begin to pinch , individually and collectively. I do recognize that there will be some mandated improvements on the margins, as for example govt. mandated energy efficiency standards for appliances and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles.
Nobody in a position of power and influence is willing to even suggest that we be seriously inconvenienced in wasting the energy saved by such modest measures by preventing us from building another golf course, or running up and down a lake waterskiing.(-something I used to really enjoy back when I was younger and could still afford it) .
IT SIMPLY DOES NOT MATTER,NOW, given so many perfectly obvious facts, whether renewables will ever be capable of fully replacing fossil fuels.
IT SIMPLY DOES NOT MATTER IF WE WASTE SOME ENERGY NOW BUILDING RENEWABLE INFRASTRUCTURE WITH A POOR OR NEGATIVE ERORI. THAT ENERGY IS GOING TO BE WASTED, IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
It will matter in thirty or forty years.
The Eroei of renewables will matter in thirty or forty years.
Whatever portion of any energy that we put into renewables NOW , which we will recover later via the output of the renewables, will be PRECIOUS in twenty or thirty years.
Imagine, if you will, being old and broke, and thinking of all the groceries you could buy with a even a tenth of the the money you spent when you were younger and well to do on eating out.
I submit that we have to get thru this thirty of forty years, and that we leave the ultimate question to our grandchildren.
Renewables can obviously replace some fossil fuels now, and do so profitably, and excepting hydro, renewable technologies are a long long way from mature.
Furthermore renewable technologies must be considered in conjunction with other technologies which in such a discussion as this one considered separately.
The debate cannot be meaningfully separated from the discussion of conservation,efficiency, and , yes, lowered expectations.
The people who argue that pv is a unsustainable, or that wind is unsustainable, on theoretical or engineering or economic grounds may be right- over the long term.
The long term matters, but only as an academic exercise for those who live and die, in plenty or in dire poverty, in the short term.
Mother nature does not do redeals.
We have no choice but to play the cards in our hands, and hope that we bring our societal ship collective into port safely, so that the next generation may again venture out on the sea of survival, and hopefully bring her into port yet again, for the generation after.
Right now, we are at sea, and we are in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Renewables will keep the ship afloat and headed toward port for some useful period of time, even if they fail to allow the continuation of business as usual.
Here's another point for renewables that seems to be overlooked for the most part.
The financial arguments against them seem to be based on static analysis in just about every case.
Static analysis of any complicated problem over a long time frame is a foolish undertaking , although it is quite commonly used by economists , bankers, politicians, and businessmen.
For instance , a a politician here in the states, most likely a democrat, will say that a tax cut will cost the treasury thus and so dollars.This is static.
A republican will argue that the tax cut will actually bring in more dollars, due to the tax curt allowing economic growth. This is dynamic.
Then the republican will argue that a given social program will cost thus and so- static analysis again.
The democrat will argue that this is not true, because the program will save us more than it costs us , by reducing future expenses , using a dynamic analysis.
Either one may be right, or wrong, depending on what actually happens. The only safe prediction is that circumstances will change so much over time that any policy may have effects diametrically opposite the hoped for effects.
Now this is a forum where it is safe to assume that just about every body is acutely aware of the historical trends of fossil fuel prices.Most of us will agree that the trend will continue to be up, for reasons I need not repeat.
Now economists come in here for some pretty heavy duty sniping, but they do know a few things, and one thing they know about is price and demand elasticity.
When the price of a service or good goes up, people consume less of it. They substitute other good and services, or do without or with less.
I have a friend who owns a front end loader- a bulldozer equipped with a bucket instead of a blade.
He has raised his rates twenty dollars an hour over the last few years simply to cover the increased cost of diesel fuel. I get by with less loader work.
Renewable electricity and electrified cars and light trucks aren't saving us very much oil,YET, but every drop counts against demand, and towards keeping the price down.
We could probably cut our oil use by close to a quarter with the next decade or two if we push hard for pure battery and plug in hybrid cars and light trucks.
I expect that in that decade or two, we will be reliant mostly on our own production, since there will not be very much oil and natural gas actually for sale on international markets, in comparison to the worlds population, and we are going to have to pay thru the nose for whatever we can buy.
Depletion and rust never sleep, and the Export Land Model "our own" guys here on TOD have developed should scare the hell out of anybody with enough common sense to think about it.
If we consider only our own production here in the states, in isolation, a twenty five percent reduction in consumption might result in anywhere from a twenty five percent reduction to a hundred percent reduction in price.The savings per barrel , in the future, could run from fifty to well over a hundred dollars per barrel in constant present day money.
(These numbers are wild ass guesses for illustrative purposes only, but I hold they are as good as any, from any economist!).
Whatever oil is available oil will still be needed worse than ever, for industrial feedstock, and for fuel for essential machinery such as heavy trucks and construction equipment and farm equipment.
(It's possible but not likely batteries will be eventually good enough, and cheap enough, to run a farm tractor or combine for 16 to 24 hours a day for days on end which is a pretty common schedule during planting and harvesting seasons. These machines are used heavily for only a small part of the year, and they cost well into six figures these days, making 24 hour operation during the rush seasons the cheapest and only way to make a profit.
A two hundred horsepower car actually needs only thirty horsepower or so to cruise at moderate speed, and for an hour or two at a time.
A two hundred horsepower tractor or combine needs 150 hp almost continuously, with the last fifty in reserve, which will be needed several hours on a typical day.
Heavy trucks and construction equipment need high horsepower engines after the same fashion. The pedal is to the metal almost as often as not.The difference in the needed capacity of the battery is a hundred fold or more , compared to a car.)
We don't even need to consider the impact on climate of burning everything we can dig up,, or the cost of maintaining a huge standing ( and deployed ) military establishment to know that renewables are a bargain.
Given the costs we will collectively avoid in future fuel bills alone, we will come out smelling like roses in respect to whatever we spend now, collectively , on renewables .
Our grand children will have to sail the ship of society as best they can, when we are gone, and most remaining fossil fuels are unusable for REASONS OF EROEI!
I'm not predicting it will come to pass, but it is not unreasonable to envision a solar array powering the pump needed to lift a few barrels of oil a day out of a stripper well in Texas even before I cash in my own few remaining chips.It's highly likely a lot of oil is being pumped already in Texas with affordable Texas wind.
Saudi Arabia may be pumping oil with solar electricity within the next five years simply because they foresee a big profit potential in selling that oil rather than burning it to run the pumps and pipelines.
Good thoughts.
It's possible but not likely batteries will be eventually good enough, and cheap enough, to run a farm tractor or combine for 16 to 24 hours a day for days on end
Two workable solutions: swappable batteries, and synthetic fuel created with renewable power (not more than $10/gallon).
it is not unreasonable to envision a solar array powering the pump needed to lift a few barrels of oil a day out of a stripper well in Texas
PV is already cheaper than diesel for this - there's substantial irrigation being done with PV.
Swapping batteries is probably going to be technically easy enough, but the issue with swapping is getting them recharged fast enough, and to and from the fields, which are often a very long way from a high capacity grid drop.
A rural farm country grid would be overloaded in a flash if this scale of swapping were tried. House and stores, etc, are very thin on the ground out in real farm country, and the grid is likewise thin on the ground too.
A commercial farmer with two or three 150 to 200 hp electric tractors or combines running almost continuously during planting and harvesting could easily need a 500 KW drop to keep them juiced up . Such high capacity service simply isn't available out in the boonies.
Another real the real killer would be utilization- these spare batteries would only be needed two or three months out of the year, and thus maybe cost prohibitive.
When tshtf, rationed conventional diesel fuel, cng,propane, biodiesel , alcohol, and synthetic diesel will all be used in greater or lesser amounts.
I think synthetic liquid fuels will eventually be widely available but probably not for a long time yet.
I also think like you that with luck, we will eventually have enough renewables capacity to use the excess production on good days to manufacture some EASILY STORED synthetic fuel- maybe quite a lot of it, but never anything like enough for bau.
Such synthetic fuel might be cheaper, eventually, than biofuels.
There are very good industrial diesels already available that will run on 90 percent or more ethanol , but they cost a lot more than a conventional diesel, and they are not available in the US due to some environmental regulations that need revision.
the issue with swapping is getting them recharged fast enough, and to and from the fields, which are often a very long way from a high capacity grid drop.
There's no need for local recharging - no reason they couldn't travel 500 miles for charging - it would be a constant cycle. On the other hand, the farm belt is wind country - Iowa has the highest percentage of power from wind of any state in the union.
l the real killer would be utilization- these spare batteries would only be needed two or three months out of the year, and thus maybe cost prohibitive.
They could be used several times in a day to amortize their cost more quickly, and used in a lot of other things the rest of the year, but let's take the worst case scenario - lead acid batteries used only 100 cycles per year, for 3 years. At $100 per kWh for 300 cycles (probably 400 cycles in deep cycle batteries @75% utilization), they'd cost $.33 per kWh. Add power at, say, $.12 per kWh, and you get $.45 per kWh. Diesel engines pull about 15kWhs from a gallon, so that's the equivalent of about $7 per gallon.
I think that's not too bad.
Nick I know you are the eternal techno optimist, but unless that 500 mile figure is a typo, I'm afraid you are getting into fantasy land.
How could you conceivably transport so many big heavy batteries, quickly, back and forth, a good part to most of of the trip over two lane rural roads ? The trucks would eat any energy savings contemplated.
Personally I believe it will be far cheaper and far more practical to run farm trucks and production machinery on liquid fuel, or compressed ng, more or less for so lang as industrial farming survives as a business.
One trip, one b class truck, and the farmer has three thousand gallons of diesel on hand, if his storage tanks will hold it;if not the driver splits the load among as many farms in the immediate area as necessary.
Really big farms with adequate roads and storage can get an even bigger load on a bigger truck.
This is the current system, and it works just fine- so long as the diesel supply holds out.
No new investment of scarce capital needed.
As for getting some economic use out of such batteries the rest of the year, I can't see it, since the farmers would have very little need of them.Crop farmers don't need a whole lot of electricity as a usual thing, and anybody else who might want such batteries would probably be very reluctant to give them up twice a year .
The farmers who do use a lot of juices are already necessarily located where they can get it from the grid, with one big exception, this being those who irrigate.
They will continue to burn diesel (mostly) since running the necessary upgraded new lines to their farms, and out into widely scattered fields is cost prohibitive.
I agree - liquid fuels are very likely the way to go.
OTOH, I think it's worth showing that there are many alternatives that would work, even is some aren't quite as good. In the case of swappable batteries, rail distribution is an obvious candidate - rail is clearly going to expand a great deal, leaving trucks (mostly electric) for short-haul deliveries. Further, that 500 was a max - most would be much closer, given that farm country is going to be a serious power exporter.
There's a decent chance that swappable batteries will be widely used - Better Place couldn't quite cut it, but Tesla is still developing them. They could be widely used by many modes of transportation (trucking, water shipping, rail, passenger EVs, etc), as well as construction, farming, homes and utilities. Farming might be a tiny, easily accomodated portion of the total - it certainly is a very small portion of current diesel consumption.
As for irrigation, isn't PV powered irrigation spreading? It's much cheaper than diesel.
Very small scale pv is cheaper than diesel , and an excellent use of pv electricity indeed.
But it doesn't pencil out on a large scale, in terms of dollars and cents and current income statements.Too big an upfront investment is needed, and the juice is not needed most of the year.
An installation large enough to do the job would require selling the juice to the local utility during the off season- most of the year-which in an ideal world would be easy, but in this one- tough.
Now the owner of a small pv setup can find plenty of use for the juice when he isn't irrigating- which is most of the time, in most cases.
Some people growing labor intensive high value crops such as assorted veggies in a dry climate irrigate more or less continuously for the entire growing season. PV should work out quite well for them if they can afford the upfront costs.
Here's some more discussion:
http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2010/08/will-farm-equipment-especially-lar...
Each gallon is roughly equivalent to 11kWh[1] in terms of the motive power it will provide, meaning that that 3,000gal is equivalent to 30,000kWh. A modern home breaker board (200 amps @ 240 volts) would take a month to supply this power (incl. charging loss).
Based on a few tractor-efficiency articles, 3,000gal is enough for 3 110hp tractors for 1 year, or about 1,000 acres of farmland. The figures amount to 240 hours per tractor per year, meaning each tractor-hour amounts to 1/720 of the total energy, or 42kWh/h. 240V @ 200A is 48kW, meaning each tractor-hour of energy would require about 1 hour of dedicated charging time (incl. charging loss).
As a result, it seems like the available power is in the right ballpark to power electric tractors. My concern is whether lines rated to deliver 48kW peak are rated to deliver 48kW sustained, so I would guess that all-electric farms would probably need their grid connections improved by perhaps 2-3x.
[1] Ballpark figure based on comparing cars getting 30mpg vs. 0.35kWh/mile, *1.1 for diesel vs. gasoline.
The problem is that tractors are used intermittently, much as cars are. The typical car runs from half an hour to a couple of hours, most days, the year around.
Farming work is highly seasonal in nature, especially on large commercial farms where grains are grown.
The figures you have come up with are in the ball bark , or close enough, on an annual basis.
In Iowa or Nebraska, those three tractors( or combines) will be running almost continuously during planting and harvest seasons, for a few weeks, and mostly sit in the equipment shed the rest of the year, running a few hours a week each, sometimes not at all.
So if the farmer has 500 hp worth of tractors in the field, he needs 500 hp plus losses plus safety margin worth of service drop.
A kilowatt is roughly equivalent to a horsepower, in practical terms, allowing for losses and margins.
So the farmer with 500 hp of electric motors in near continuos service will need a 500kw service drop.
It seems safe to assume no farmer, or anybody else, will ever be able to afford enough spare batteries of such enormous capacity to charge them up ahead of the rush seasons and let them sit around mostly unused the rest of the year, barring a miracle break thru .
Biodiesel will be cheaper by a long shot.
Note that I agree with you that biodiesel and/or synthetic diesel is probably more effective for this type of seasonal application. I'm mostly calculating the electric requirements to satisfy my own curiosity about the scale of the problem.
That being said, I do think you're significantly over-estimating the power needed. The articles I read made the following estimates, although I would be very interested to hear estimates based on your experiences:
Both of these have a significant effect on power demand.
For example, a sunrise-to-sunset workday at the end of April (14h, the high end of the averages I saw used for studies and articles) with 3 110hp tractors at an average of 50-60% of max horsepower (48kW) would draw 84kW, assuming 24-hour charging of batteries (i.e., spares to swap in). Using these figures, 500hp of tractors would require 130kW during dawn-to-dusk operation, or about 3x the power available to a typical household.
You're absolutely right that a 20-hour workday which constantly pushed each machine to its limits would draw more power. How often would taking 4 shorter days instead of 3 result in a major efficiency loss, though? A quick Google suggests delaying corn planting for a day results in a 0.3-1% loss in harvest, indicating a fairly modest tradeoff.
I wonder if you're talking about different machines: year round tractors vs seasonal combines?
Tractors do get some use year around.
Depending on the farm sometimes every day, as for instance on most dairy farms,
a small tractor may be used to clean up and distribute feed for an hour or two daily and take care of other repetitive chores.
But the critical seasons- planting and harvest- last only a few weeks on any particular farm.
The rest of the year, they mostly sit in the shed, comparatively speaking.
A grain farmer without any livestock- which is too say, most of them these days- might not have any need at all to even start a tractor for a whole month.
Hi Pitt, your reasoning is good , but your utilization figures on horsepower and hours running during the crunch times- planting and harvest - are on the low side- in my opinion- but i don't live in the part of the country where fields are a mile wide.
I do however know some farmers that do, and I talk to them occasionally.
My opinions are based on what they tell me- I know them well, ever since we were undergrads in ag school.
The primary reason reason commercially viable( read big acreage) farmers go to bigger equipment year after year is to get thru that rush season as fast as humanly possible. A little bad luck means getting started late, and more bad luck means having to finish early.
The spreadsheet says go as big as the bank will let you.
A lot of jobs certainly don't need over fifty percent of available power averaged over an hour, a day, or a year.
But when a tractor is hooked to the biggest implements it will pull, and and going as fast as possible- as during planting in open country - it's pedal to the metal for hours and hours on end.
You pull the throttle all the way down, the engine runs at maximum governed revs. Every thing is optimized for full throttle operation.
If she quits (figuratively )blowing black smoke, you shift into the next faster gear, if you have a new enough tractor, it may shift up on its own.
If on the other hand, you happen to be making hay with such a big tractor- it is way over powered sure enough.
It would be way overpowered towing a grain wagon, working in combination with a combine.
Given the amounts of money involved, operators wages are a pittance .
One percent of the gross value of a thousand acres of corn is at least ten thousand dollars , and the loss of production resulting from running late cuts into profits by a far greater percentage, because costs are still the same. Lose two weeks, you may be in big trouble at the bank.
Mother nature thinks nothing of keeping you chewing your nails for a couple of weeks.
If an operator can be found, the tractor well be running .
Operating a modern tractor in a field setting is an easy , relatively simple job-automatic transmission, power steering, nice comfy bucket seat, heat and air as often as not, soft touch controls- Such a tractor is far safer than a car in traffic, and once Daddy says what the adjustments are for the day, such as how deep the seed go, pounds of seed per acre, amount of fertilizer, etc- operating such a tractor requires less judgement and skill than driving in traffic.
Lots of wives, kids, and older retired family members take a turn.
Daylight means nothing at all to a modern day big time grain farmer during his busy seasons.
He has a well lit maintenance shop, and his equipment has lights equal to the headlights on a new car- all the way around.
Now we don't do things on such a grand scale in my neck of the woods.An eighty horsepower tractor is more than ample for our kind of farming. We get by on our place with a forty horsepower tractor, by using equipment with auxiliary engines . Our air blast orchard sprayer has its own hundred fifty horse industrial engine- basically the same engine used in many older heavy duty Ford trucks.
We do all our hauling with a four by four truck, right in to and right out of the field, but we do load and unload it with a forklift attachment on the tractor. The small amount of plowing and planting we do is not critically important to our bottom line so a day or a week doesn't really matter to us. I can plow more in a day than i care to be bothered with tending and harvesting, with my forty horsepower machine.
We're in the process of shutting down commercial operations , because we are too small to compete these days, and too old to buy more land and bigger equipment.
Farmer wannabes beware- you will not make it , commercially, competing with the big boys, unless you are perfectly situated to bypass normal wholesale channels and sell direct to stores, restaurants and the lady of the house.
Of course there are a few exceptions to this rule- but not many.
Incidentally, a new full size tractor at least 100,000 bucks and up- 200,000 is not going to anything close to top of the line. Top of the line is close to 300 grand.
Renewables WERE a bargain sixty odd years ago before the last population doubling. We added 3.5 billion people by producing cheap energy, increasing debt and stealing from the future. Seventy odd million are added to the planet every year, I hope enough electric trains are built to accomodate their claim on resources.
Now we want to save our skins by using the remaining FF's to make windmills, electric cars and trains and solar panels, (all of which never stood a chance when EROEI was high and FF cheap) just so we can maintain BAU for as long as possible or in your case OFM, BAU lite. I call it the methadone solution, more of the same but renamed, sanitised and temporarily affordable.
There are obstacles to continuing to do what we are doing and they are increasing debt, environmental degradation, global warming, declining EROEI and too many people. If you want to ignore those little obstacles by all means make all the plans for extending the burn until we pass out.
Off course cornucopians (i know you are not) deny every single one of the impediments to BAU, if they did not then their vision for future technological, engineering marvels would collapse.
Environmental degradation and global warming are alleviated by renewable energy sources. ERoEI is not a problem until the values get close to one. Even an ERoEI of 2 yields half of the energy for use while renewable energy sources have a higher value. I agree that debt and overpopulation are a product of the current system that can not be sustained, but really population is the underlying problem driving all the others.
If BAU created excessive population, then how will that get fixed? Would renewable energy sources prevent the fix?
In the short term, the existing fleet of conventional power stations is the backup for renewables. The big problem is paying for them when they are not used much. Plenty of thought is going into that, at the highest level.
As conventional plants come to the end of their useful life, the question of whether to replace them and what with becomes more acute. But we probably have twenty or thirty years before the lights go out because of not enough storage.
This presupposes that demand stays steady or declines. If it goes up, we have problems.
EDIT: Or we could go the Third World route: in the more prosperous areas it is one man, one generator. That's how they take care of the dodgy power supply.
Maybe there will be no need for utility-scale storage or FF backup.
good point , aardvark.
I should have noted that paying present day plant owners enough to remain profitable- and solvent- in the face of declining plant utilization is the the crux of the current day dilemma myself- I was thinking about more about future problems than current day ones.
If we manage to hang in there, and avoid a general economic crash, eventually renewables will be supplying the bulk of our electricity. By that time most existing ff plants will be real graybeards.
The turbine size dependency of EROI for wind is mostly an illusion. For small wind systems, as are most of those studied by Cleveland, building a bigger turbine means a bigger tower, which means you get up into higher windspeed regimes. But there is a limit to that, as most of the windspeed increase occurs down low, so once your turbine is out of the boundary layer, building taller provides not enough return for the greater expense of the tower. Further, there is an unavoidable anti-economy of scale at work with wind: the mass of the turbine and tower (hence cost) scales with the cube of the blade length, but the power available (assuming constant windspeed) scales as the square of the blade length. Thus for very large turbines, EROI declines as you go bigger.
All this means that there is a "sweet spot" of turbine size at which economy (and hence EROI) is maximized, and it seems likely that we have hit that sweet spot right now with turbines in the 1 to 3 MW range. Looking at just those studies from among Cleveland's data within the 1 to 3 MW range, the average EROI = 14, or when one clear outlier is eliminated, EROI = 16. This agrees with the latest study, using the latest embodied energy cost data, by Weissbach et. al. 2013, which also gives wind EROI = 16.
the mass of the turbine and tower (hence cost) scales with the cube of the blade length
I'd be curious to see a good analysis of that. Do you happen to have a link?
I don't see such a simple relationship: the width and depth of the blade would increase for structural strength, and that depends on design and materials, which change with time. Turbine manufacturing costs are falling, and that will shift the optimal balance of turbine cost vs other costs: site acquisition, installation, operations, etc.
NREL's Wind Turbine Design Cost and Scaling Model:
http://www.nrel.gov/wind/pdfs/40566.pdf
Weissbach 2013 EROI study:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544213000492
NREL's Wind Turbine Design Cost and Scaling Model:
http://www.nrel.gov/wind/pdfs/40566.pdf
Weissbach 2013 EROI study:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544213000492
hmm. The NREL model was published a while ago (in 2006), and is intended to be a starting point: "This model is not intended as an end result in itself, but as a starting point for a continually growing and improving tool that constantly incorporates new data as the technology grows and improves."
Do we have something more recent?
------------
Weissbach
This appears to make some silly assumptions: only 23% CF for wind, and only 11% CF for solar (from Germany); all power is buffered vis pumped storage!
Even with a German CF, Weissbach comes up with a wind payback period of about a year. With recycling, that's an E-ROI of at least 40.
Your approach is correct, however some remarks:
1) The use of different materials for the towers change the economy in favour of higher power. A typical 3 MW turbine has according to manufactureer (Enercon) an EROEI of >30, according to the Germany Windpower Association with recyling >60. Wooden towers are expected to give even more. The Enercon 7.5 MW turbine on concrete tower is not a white elephant but makes money and is in serial production. :-)
2) The manufacturing process of the turbine blades is still very unsophisticated compared to other industrial processes, i.e. a more uniform quality will lead to longer blades with the same costs and current materials. Safety margins could be much lower than today, here 20% gains are expected by producers.
3) The economy of offshore turbines is determined by other factors (transport, O&M etc.), therefore, the sweet spot is at much higher power levels.
What seems to be point of confusion for at least some of us is where a lot of these studies start and stop. For oil the path stops drill>pump>burn end of story...for turbines and PV the story doesn't end like that manufacture>install>Lifespan>De-commission>Refurbish>re-install...There might also be different things... the roads, power lines, and the towers are likely to last at least a couple of generations of turbines,and some turbines may need little work to refurbish.
So do the studies stop at the first iteration...or do they continue to calculate on down the line taking into consideration that the raw materials don't necessarily need to be re-mined, they can be re-cycled, refurbished, re-manufactured and this may represent a lower input cost with a similar return as the first iteration from virgin materials.
I participated in the calculations that Vestas did a few years ago for EROI (or LCA analysis which includes EROI as a component). Usually it stops at the first iteration and considers the current state of affairs for recycling.
For example, say some wind turbine model uses X tons of steel. Some comes from the international markets as steel plates, say mostly from China for a particular model made for that market. Then we would take the average recycled content that our suppliers were using and would calculate the energy input of that percentage accordingly (so assume 30% was recycled and required energy Y kWh, and 70% was virgin and the mining / separation / transport required Z kWh, Then Y+Z was the energy content of the steel at that point. Then there's assembly, transport, installation, decomissioning, etc, etc).
For the foundries which were part of the company there was very detailed data on recycled content, material loss in sludges, sand, etc (which was counted as input), energy in the process, etc.
So in the EROI calculations the recycled content was usually the recycled content used today. Generally all those turbines pay back their energy input between 6 - 12 months. (the big difference comes from the actual wind: a little more wind has a dramatic effect on payback, and a bad location with little wind can easily double the payback time).
source: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy
Let's assume that this is true, and that it will always be true.
Wouldn't that make a stonger case for renewables?
If you have one last barrel of oil, and your choice is tailpipe or turbine, why wouldn't you put it into the turbine?
No, it would make a stronger case for non-consumption. Period. Unless we're going to pretend that sustainability is restricted to a very short timescale.
This is an argument that I like to make. If you accept that all renewables are made from fossil fuels, and can't be made from anything else and only serve to extend fossil fuels - they if you want the utility that FFs provide - you need to build renewables because you need to extend those fossil fuels because they're running out.
So if you were to just throw out a number "we'll run out of FFs in 25 years" then you can go and say "Well - lets extend those puppies!" So what will wind give you? If you go by the notion expressed in this particular thread of 16:1 for wind then you should be able to extend the UTILITY that you get from those FFs for 16 * 25 years - 16ish... 384 years.
So you've got the option of blowing through it in 25 years...decrease your consumption by half and getting 50 years out of it... or extending it to 384 years with renewables. If in 384 years we haven't figured out how to get by without making our fossil-fuel extending renewables without using fossil fuels...
'Period' makes for an oversimplified argument, however. I would expect that the middleground before one is able to ever reach 'non-consumption' is going to be Less-consumption, at which point, you still end up choosing what kind of energy you might find affordable, accessible and acceptable.
At that point, it sees renewables making a pretty strong case for themselves, and particularly in hindsight for those who discover that they really ought to have gotten a leg up by setting up for the next scene while they were still soaking in the lavish suds of the oil age..
Actually the whole thing is just silly.
Nonetheless, as you indirectly imply, the only real sane option is to invest our one-time endowment of fossil fuels in building energy systems and an economy that can endure--innovation to radically reduce energy use plus some form of renewable energy, whether that's solar, wind, hydro, or cow manure. Rapid innovation and wise investment (much more than we've seen) is the essence of any strategy to adapt society to a new energy reality.
In my experience, most people studying or working to advance renewable energy in some way are not doing so under an illusion that renewables will REPLACE fossil fuels, especially oil. That seems to be at the heart of the disagreement among certain folks when discussing renewables and peak oil.
Still, renewables are surely and unavoidably part of the future, just as fossil fuels will continue to be, but we need to be smart as we can about how they are applied. What that actually means is a worthy discussion. Suggesting that all renewables are somehow a waste of time and money seems neither accurate nor constructive.
most people studying or working to advance renewable energy in some way are not doing so under an illusion that renewables will REPLACE fossil fuels, especially oil.
That hasn't been my experience.
I think it's a mistake to exaggerate the importance of oil & FF. We can replace it entirely, relatively easily. EVs are already as cheap (and will be cheaper) over their lifecycle; EVs are better: better handling, safer, quieter, cleaner, etc; heat pumps give a nicer experience; passiv houses are healthier; renewables are much better neighbors, much more local; etc., etc., etc.
The Exxon/Mobils of the world love it when people say that PO is TEOTWAWKI...
"Yaaay! But go Germany which has benefited by stealing the wealth of it's neighbours through it's nefarious Euro zone prison scheme that beggared Southern Europe through loose monetary policy and lax lending."
I'm sure - absolutely sure- sarc- that it must be Germany's fault that southern Europe made such a mess of their own economies. by introducing such policies as the super early retirement, super bloated govt payrolls, and insane labor law making it impossible to lay anybody off- and therefore making employers afraid to hire.
I could go on for hours.
I have many acquaintances who are drunks.
I suppose this is the fault of the state of Va where I live, because the state does what it can, within reason to curb alcoholism b y trying to educate the public about the dangers.
Southern Europeans are collectively responsible for their own problems, to the extent anyone is responsible for them.
But the real ultimate source of the problems there is overshoot- the time people can freely consume resources and live high on the hog is coming to a close, and that part of the world used up most of it's natural resources some time ago.
They failed in the race to remain competitive as exporters, of finished goods, and now they can't afford imports.
Somebody has to lose every race, except in the pc world , where every kid gets a trophy.
They are in a sense a whole flock of prodigal children, but this ain't a Bible story, and Germany ain't their Daddy, and anyway, Germany is not rich enough to bail them all out.
Germany itself is in a pretty tough spot- .Exporting manufactured goods as a survival strategy is a bad economic model , doomed to failure, eventually, in a world where the exporter has achieved a high standard of living.
Other countries, from Taiwan to South Korea to China, are willing and able now, to under cut German prices and match, or nearly match , German quality
.
It is not going to be possible for Germans to win the technological manufacturing race forever.
Look what the Chinese have done to them in the field of photovoltaics, for instance.
Chinese tech is not as good, but Chinese labor costs mean China more of less owns the industry now.
Germany can win the business back in only two possible ways- coming up with new tech to offset the Chines labor cost advantage- or paying Germans Chinese wages.
So long as capital can move from place to place, and international law permits more or less free trade, the countries living by exporting manufactured goods are trapped in a race to the bottom.
Actually we are all pretty well dead men walking, since all countries are now afflicted with the equivalent of a fatal slow growing AIDS like disease that is only beginning to show serious signs and symptoms in places like Germany and The USA.
The southern Europeans cases are more advanced.
The name of this disease is overshoot of course.
China's manufacturing wages are rising pretty fast. Inflation is a mere 2.7%, nominal wages rose 20% in 2011 and another 14% in 2012.
China is still on the way up, just recently getting industrialized, in the process dealing many a mortal wound to manufacturers in other more advanced countries.
It is to be expected that at this stage wages will be rising in China.
Once Chinese workers are earning wages high enough for businesses to flee China , for countries where wages are much lower , businesses will pack up and move, leaving thier former workers , and China , in the lurch.
Of course China is different, and they may not allow businessmen to play this game.
Given that they have an authoritarian government, and a culture based on playing "the long game" China may well force her industries to stay home-. This can be easily accomplished in large partby simply denying the businesses the right to import outsourced production into China.
Protectionism can work, if a country is big enough, strong enough, and has enough resources of it's own.
Japan for instance has played the protectionist game quite successfully for many decades, selling her cars and electronics here but using trumped up excuses to keep our fine mountain grown apples,MY APPLES, as good as any in the world, out of Japan.
BUT the game is about played out for Japan.asher has no natural resources to amount to anything, so she must import, and to import, she must export.
The Japanese had to move a large part of their auto industry here to the states to defeat our own protectionist measures, and their wage structure is such that they are losing out to Korea , etc, even now.
They haven't been able to keep cheaper Chinese goods out of the US or other markets they used to dominate.
Of course in the end, nothing works , if it depends on depleting irreplaceable resources.
Industrial civilization is not sustainable, unless we manage a the transition to renewables for energy, and learn to conserve and recycle every thing else from alpha to omega, including everything that goes down the toilet.
I have found it easy to understand what you seem to be opposed to, but I'm quite in the dark as to what you think we should be doing..
Please tell me- -in relation to the things being discussed here, what policies and technologies, etc do you endorse?
I endorse stiff taxes on carbon and other pollution, streamlined nuclear regulation and free trade. To me, that China is already becoming rich enough for the simplest manufacturing jobs to move to Bangladesh, Africa, Pakistan and such is a great thing. Renewables may or may not come to rule the day, but are not necessary due to the extreme amounts of energy available to us in the form of uranium and thorium.
Or, as I put it on TOD a few years back, "a system is only sustainable if each and every of its components are sustainable".
I expanded slightly on that comment in a blog post, Bootstrapping Sustainability.
The links in my footnotes are worth a read.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it will be more difficult than we're currently pretending.
The fundamental error we're making is treating units of energy as interchangeable, as if a joule was some kind of physical currency. It's not. It matters where that joule comes from.
Track down every part of the chain where fossil fuels are used (diesel in the excavators of the iron ore, coking coal in the iron smelting, etc), and figure out how we can replace this with solar, wind, or biomass, and whether it scales.
It's a nice game pretending that fossil fuels are easily substitutable all the way along the chain, but we may be deluding ourselves.
But why are we constantly dragged back into this argument? It's said often enough by enough of us that whatever we're heading into from here WILL be different.. that reasonable voices here understand that it's not going to be 'Easily Substitutable', and that BAU and our Economic models will probably have to make some serious and uncomfortable course corrections.. so why does the argument keep going back to.. "Why does TOD still think it'll be easy to run BAU from Renewables?"
It just becomes an uninteresting debate, and a waste of the time that is now all but over for TOD.. if all we can do is try to keep reintroducing the obvious disclaimers that there are but a couple posters who are furthering that kind of belief..
It's not really that helpful to worry about 'Absolute Sustainability', either.. we know the world is imperfect, that we are mortal, that things end, systems fail and supplies run dry. We have useful tools that we know can go far in improving our lot.. so getting into rhetorical debates about euclidean ideal-states is just a cop-out for saying no, when we need to try what we can and make the best of what we've got, knowing there will be improvements and revisions coming along later.. so over-extrapolating today's plan out to some imagined impossible failure point becomes simply an exercise in semantics or something..
there are but a couple posters who are furthering that kind of belief..
After 8 years and 2 weeks, most of the "moderates" on TOD have gotten discouraged and left. In the larger world of environmental activists, the idea that PO is TEOTWAWKI is definitely a minority opinion.
I think it's a mistake to exaggerate the importance of oil & FF. We can replace it entirely, relatively easily. EVs are already as cheap (and will be cheaper) over their lifecycle; EVs are better: better handling, safer, quieter, cleaner, etc; heat pumps give a nicer experience; passiv houses are healthier; renewables are much better neighbors, much more local; etc., etc., etc.
Climate change deniers are delighted when people suggest that FF is essential to a good life.
easily
of course is a relative term.
and relatively easily
more so. Relative to what? Time frame and geo political stresses can make relatively easily feel like a heck of a tough mountain climb at the time its underway.
Hitler and Nazi Germany were removed from the the political scene relatively quickly and relatively easily compared to say the Roman Empire, but there was a fair amount of destruction, dislocation and suffering that made the process look anything but relatively easy as it was in progress.
I agree.
As a start, I'd say it will be much easier than is perceived by the rough consensus you were referring to above, (certainly much easier than is suggested by PhilR's comment).
Replacing oil with PHEVs, for instance, will be very easy, from the viewpoint of most drivers. It won't be easy from the point of view of an automotive engineer whose career is based on ICEs, from the POV of the Boeings of the world, who'll face challenges more difficult than developing the Dreamliner, or from the POV of the airlines, who'll be hurt if the Boeings screw things up. Replacing oil overall will be a long project, and it will certainly hurt oil exporting countries.
We face a lot of risks much larger than PO: climate change; natural pandemics; synthetic pandemics; non-biological pandemics ("grey goo"); nuclear war; species extinctions, etc.
The biggest problem we have with FF is too much, not too little.
[edit out, rewrote in post below while waiting for it to get through the filters]
It appears we are mostly in agreement. I didn't intend to refer to any consensus with my comment, I hadn't read those who you were replying to in days. PhilR does look to be marching in lock step with Gail's crowd. Complexity and weakness are not considered synonyms when we describe how the world of flora and fauna has evolved but for some reason many here consider complexity and weakness one and the same when describing how our modern civilization has evolved.
It's the long project part that makes things look a bit on the dicey side to me.
Pressure builds up repeatedly near major oil supply choke points. Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Putin, Obama...and that is just today! I tend to think we will see some major supply interruptions before we have weaned ourselves from the stuff in any meaningful way. But that may not be all bad if it happens in the relatively near term since there will still be lots of oil to move again when the supply lines are fully reopened.
Now that some real alternatives can be seen a couple six or eight month significant oil supply interruptions might be the stick we need to make us actually fall out of love with the foul stuff. So far the 'cleaner' carrot hasn't been near tempting enough.
Mind you I'm not cheering on getting whacked with that stick.
Complexity and weakness are not considered synonyms when we describe how the world of flora and fauna has evolved but for some reason many here consider complexity and weakness one and the same when describing how our modern civilization has evolved.
That's a very interesting thought. I've been puzzled by Catton's (or was it Diamond's?) argument about complexity for a long time, and that helps clarify it a bit.
Now that some real alternatives can be seen a couple six or eight month significant oil supply interruptions might be the stick we need to make us actually fall out of love with the foul stuff.
Yeah.
I'm truly astonished that the US (and other countries) have allowed such dependence on a such an insecure item.
Of course -- if one sees peak oil as being of only moderate importance, it's hard to stay interested in talking about it year after year.
As a result, it's to be expected that peak oil websites like TOD will be heavily skewed towards pessimists and doomers -- they're much more likely to believe it's important enough to keep talking about.
Electric motors scale very well for excavation, and coking coal is only good if we think coal is cheap - electrolysis will work, and primary smelting won't be needed for recycled steel.
FF is dirty and expensive, and only a small minority of it's uses will be relatively difficult. Aviation and water shipping, for instance, will require major redesign - those industries won't be happy about coping with change, but they'll survive just fine.
Sea freight won't be challenging either.
Absolute worst case would be using torrefied wood pellets driving steam turbines. That would be a fuel with a cost (today) of around $13/net GJ and operating at about 40% efficiency (ratio of net thermal energy to rotating kinetic energy in the propeller shaft), relative to bunker fuel costing (today) about $14/GJ and operating at around 50% efficiency. So the increase in fuel cost would be about 16%. Fuel makes up about 30% of the cost of a typical trans-ocean sea route (today) for a whole voyage charter (it's based on dry-bulk but won't be that different for containers or tankers), so the extra total voyage cost of fuel would be 5%.
OK, hands up, there will be a considerable extra capital cost and inconvenience factor in having a boiler and steam turbine on board, the fuel is less energy dense and less convenient to handle etc, and will need to be pulverised and then there is the water for the steam cycle, so in reality total shipping costs will go up by a lot more than 5% - let's call it 100%. Can we imagine a world where freight costs are double what they are today? Anybody that can remember as far back as 2007 can (it was a lot more than double!).
That is worst case anyway; I expect a reasonably cheap and cheerful liquid wood pyrolysis product suitable for a slightly modified low-speed reciprocating combustion engine to come along eventually. In the meantime the next place that the ocean fleet is going is LNG in my opinion, starting in Europe, driven by some very draconian anti-pollution restrictions that mean a lot of European shipping is effectively going to have to start using diesel unless they switch to LNG. Time frame for that is next 10 - 20 years or so IMO.
Aviation will be a lot more challenging. A decent kerosene substitute can definitely be made from plants or algae but whereas ships can use whatever cheap and cheerful fuel they can get their hands on, aviation requires a very high spec fuel which will be a lot more expensive to make from biomass than FF, and I guess eventually aviation will be more of a luxury than it is now.
A few thoughts:
I'd prefer to move away from biofuels, due to their direct and indirect ecological costs.
Do you happen to have a link of the change in shipping costs since 2007 - that sounds interesting.
I suspect in the very long run aviation will go to much higher efficiency designs (a theoretical reduction in fuel consumption of about 70% is possible), paired with synthetic fuel from renewable power and seawater.
I wonder how much PV will get built into planes, trains and ships? I suspect as much as possible. Further, windpower is very likely to return to shipping - not in the form of masts, but in the form of kites that reduce fuel consumption.
Yes, I've heard your anti-biomass message before. It's a very complicated subject which is very misunderstood. Quite a lot of very bad things happened because of bad incentives, mainly in first generation liquid biofuels which has caused a lot of people to write off biomass in its entirety. I had always vaguely planned to see if I could get a guest post about it on TOD. Too late now.
It's too big a subject, I can't even really scratch the surface on in one quick comment reply, but the top point is:
the FAO estimate there are worldwide a billion acres suitable for afforestation on degraded land. The potential annual growth is 8 - 12 billion tonnes of biomass just from that new source alone. If all of that billion acres went to forestry, all of which was then eventually used for biomass it would be around 60 - 100 EJ per year on a sustainable basis. Total transport energy use today (including land transport, which I agree is better off using electricity) is around 100 EJ. By the way, this is not land that is suitable for plastering with silicon cells, that truly would be an environmental distaster.
Of course I wouldn't propose putting all the wood to biomass, I would propose 25 - 35 year saw timber rotations producing sustainable building materials to replace steel and concrete with only the thinnings, limbs etc and small/low grade roundwood being used for energy. It would be about 50:50 timber:energy but most of the saw timber would also come back for energy use at the end of its useful life. Primary uses would be for 1. power network management (i.e. to help manage power grids that are based mainly on intermittent renewable sources) 2. industrial users of heat or hydrogen (e.g. fertiliser, chemicals etc, pulp and paper is already doing it) 3. Bio-fuel for sea freight. The other place where high density combustion fuels will be required is aviation but I am not sure if forestry is the best solution for that, it will probably have to be agri-fuel or at best algae based, which is not so much my field. Fuels produced from biomass will economically outperform fuels produced by electricity by a huge margin, although they will still be expensive and like you I expect aviatation to become much more efficient.
The additional environmental and social benefits in terms of carbon sequestration, water management, wildlife, jobs/social benefits from converting those billion acres to forest would be huge. Forestry is an amazing thing, there really are huge differences between it and agriculture.
For shipping costs, check out the Baltic Dry Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Dry_Index it's only dry bulk, but it's a similar story in containers as well.
I agree with you on a lot of things, but that particular comment really lacks credibility. Trains go through tunnels and cuttings, past shady hills and buildings, and constantly change their angle of orientation, and travel at night. It makes no sense whatsoever to put PV on board, the resulting power would be such a pitiful element of its consumption. PV needs to be installed carefully, without shading, and at the correct orientation for any given latitude - that is the best way to use it, putting it on travelling vehicles is a waste of energy.
I agree, but it will only provide about 30% of total power on an average trans-Atlantic voyage.
How would we prevent the kind of spillover we're seeing in Brazil and Indonesia, where demand for biofuels increases deforestation? For instance, AFAIK in Brazil increased farming in one area causes increased demand in another, which increases logging/clearing of the Amazon.
For shipping, wood byproducts seem likely to have high transportation costs to ports, and relatively low energy density. I agree that they'd work, but would they compete well with liquid fuels? Synthetic fuels would be priced according to the lowest cost of electricity, and there may be quite a lot of cheap power, based what we're seeing with wind & solar. If power is available for half the hours in the year for $.02/kWh, then synthetic diesel might be $3/gallon.
As for PV on commercial shipping: Diesel at $3.50 generates power at about $.20/kWh. That's easy for PV to beat, even without optimal orientation. As for shade, I suspect the percentage of time trains spend in tunnels and shaded by buildings is low. I suspect your intuition on this matter has been affected by the economics of PV on passenger vehicles, which I agree would be poor.
about 30% of total power on an average trans-Atlantic voyage.
That sounds about right. I haven't seen a recent analysis - have you happened to see one?
Hoover,
Thanks for the quick and dirty back of the envelope on biomass. No doubt far sighted forestry practices yield huge benefit.
While you are at it (as you do seem to have a facility for playing with those kinds of numbers) would you maybe care to give a quick and dirty on why large scale sea water source (or river or lake water source) heat pump systems might/might not be able to efficiently take up a significant portion of the heating/cooling load in many coastal communities. I'd never even considered the idea (nor do I recall ever reading a word on it) until Steven suggested it for Kodiak, AK up the page. OFM took the idea and ran with it some. Alan had to run but mentioned Toronto uses cold water from Lake Erie for district cooling. A few ballpark numbers on sea water source heat pumps would bring the idea into a little better focus.
[sorry about all the repost edits, I'm a sad line editor]
Luke
Wasn't hard to find sea water source heat pump material on the web (I won't include links due to spam filter). I guess Norway several hundred large installations. Wonder how many Britain has?
The Seward Sea Life Center (half of whose construction funding came thanks to Captain Joe Hazelwood letting his oil tanker get ripped open by Bligh Reef) just had their sea water source heat pump system commissioned this year. And though it had grant funding it appears it would pay for itself in ten years with savings over and above operation costs. The Seward system is replacing fuel oil heat and electricity cost about a dime a kWh.
Thanks for your faith in me, and sorry to let you down, but it is not my area so I can't help much.
I rather suspect the answer is none I'm afraid.
I seem to remember that diesel engines have been built that run on coal- although to my knowledge such an engine has never been used commercially.
But seeing as it can be done, it seems likely the engine of a large ship could be built so as to run on coal, diesel, and natural gas, depending on which is the cheapest any at given port of call.
And although they would probably not be very fuel efficient, ships could be run on old fashioned steam engines again. A new steam engine would likely be considerably more efficient than one built close to a century ago, and as ships have gotten bigger and bigger, the horsepower needed to move them, per ton, has decreased dramatically, so the loss of efficiency might not be so bad as it would appear at first glance.
delete duplicate
If renewables were that damn good, why is oil still north of $100 in the middle of a global economy that is barely growing?
Actually, renewable power production is far higher than oil power production. Not much electricity is produced with oil anymore.
But you can't really power aircrafts and ships with electricity, which makes oil still valuable.
If aircraft used 70% less fuel (theoretically possible), how much could PV contribute? If the wings were optimized to provide maximum PV-usable area?
How about ships - what if the tops of all containers were covered with PV?
I wouldn't disagree that it's technically not feasible to drastically reduce oil consumption.
(If the US would take its entire defense budget of just one year (1 year!) and purchase wind turbines with it, it could in principle cover almost the entire US electricity demand with renewable power).
The defense budget is what, $900B? That's about 450GW of windpower, at $2 per watt, peak. At 33% capacity factor, that would replace all coal!
I calculated with $1.4/W, $1.4 trillion, 3000 hours and get 3000 TWh plus the fact that the US already has renewable power in place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
http://www.windustry.org/resources/how-much-do-wind-turbines-cost
In any case it's the same ballpark figure and 100% renewable power within 10 years is neither a technical nor a financial challenge - it's mainly a political challenge.
I agree.
I like the standard cost unit of "oil wars": The Iraq war will cost at least $2T, and will help oil supply only slightly at the cost of the US' moral reputation and many deaths and shattered lives.
One "oil war" of spending on PHEVs could make the US independent of oil imports. Another could eliminate FF for power generation.
If it is that easy, why has no country done it? Why is it that countries ramp wind quickly, but stall at 15-20%?
Well, Denmark is at 28%, and they're planning on 50% wind by 2020, and zero fossil fuel by 2050. Given how small they are, that's not bad.
Who else do you have in mind?
The example of Denmark is akin to claiming that the few settlements closest to a wind farm is "self sustained in electricity". Denmark has extremely high gross imports and exports of electricity. It can have that high penetration just because it is small.
At one point this year, a grid malfunction had Denmark unable to import from Norway and Sweden. That particular day, it cost the Danes about €5 to run a washing machine once.
Because their calculations are optimistic. A full scale build-out of wind power in the U.S. would not achieve a capacity factor of 1/3 because all the best wind sites would be used requiring a shift to poorer quality wind sites. Costs would increase because power lines would have to be constructed. $1.4 / (rated watt) for PV installation compares to the current price of $4/(rated watt) in the U.S. for grid-tied residential systems. Subsidies would not exist for a complete build-out. 100% renewable electric power would require overbuilding wind and PV, constructing long distance power lines, some storage and closing existing power plants before the end of their lifetimes. The quickest transition would be 40 years.
all the best wind sites would be used requiring a shift to poorer quality wind sites.
There's more than enough high quality sites in the midwest farm corridor.
Costs would increase because power lines would have to be constructed.
The $2/Wp figure I used includes that: 1.75 for turbines, .25 for power lines.
. $1.4 / (rated watt) for PV
We're talking about wind, not solar. I agree that some solar would be a good idea, but $2 is a more realistic figure for large scale installations over a decade or more.
Subsidies would not exist for a complete build-out.
I didn't include any subsidies.
100% renewable electric power would require overbuilding wind and PV
Probably, though the current grid is overbuilt by a factor of 2.2 times (1,200GW vs 440GW average demand). On the one hand, a bit of overbuilding is a normal cost. On the other hand, we don't have to have 100%: 95% would do. On the 3rd hand, new uses would arise for excess power generation, not least of them synthetic fuels.
closing existing power plants before the end of their lifetimes.
That's a sunk cost. On the other hand - from your mouth to gods ear: we can only hope that many coal plants will be closed before the end of their design life.
If the midwest corridor is going to serve the entire US, I guess you'd need more powerlines than that - it doesn't scale linearly with penetration. Also, you'd have days without much power and days with too much. Germany has problems with keeping the frequency of the grid stable with its relatively small amount of intermittent power, and some neighboring countries are installing kill switches to be able to disconnect themselves from Germany when its intermittent power wreaks havoc.
The intersection of economics and peak resources is interesting, but it obscures the reality of declining resources and EROI.
Since systems ecology and carrying capacity aren't taught in schools from kindergarten onwards as they ought to be, and most people who go to college never learn these concepts either, I don't imagine this will change, but I am always surprised that this BAU point of view is so common on this forum.
Alternative energy discussions nearly always ignore the need for more and more natural gas peaker plants and other fossil inputs to balance the intermittent wind and solar energy, the trillions of dollars you'd need to make a large enough grid to try to spread the load out and need fewer peaker plants, etc.
So many fossil fuel inputs are needed for every alternative energy that it's absurd to think they can replace fossil fuels, or that they could possibly be economically feasible, as Prieto and Hall have just shown in their very important but ignored book that uses real data, not models to prove this: “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”. Their analysis of the financial fiasco is devastating, but their analysis of solar PV EROI puts a nail in the coffin of this as a potential source of electricity.
This is because only looking at the EROI of solar PV panels alone is absurd, because even if they were made 100% efficient, the EROI in sunny Spain would only be 3.25. In reality EROI is only 2.45, and that's a generous figure, since it assumes the panels will last for 25 years at expected performance levels, despite the many reasons they list why this isn't likely to happen. The EROI 2.45 will also be lower if there are any events of Force Majeure, acts of god, wind, lightning, storms, floods, hail, etc. And there are other similar zero figures in their calculations that will lower EROI still further as they happen.
My book review "Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar Photovoltaics" is at
http://energyskeptic.com/2013/tilting-at-windmills-spains-solar-pv/
I hope that someone will write an equally good book about wind power before the grid rusts apart or is taken out by cyberwar or EMP's so that future generations don't waste their time trying to get back to our way of life by building windmills....
Alice Friedemann
I'm not quite sure where this line of reasoning is going. Solar is a waste of time and wind is a waste of time. Surely it is not believed that oil and other FF will last forever. So, how are future generations to even dream of getting "back to our way of life"?
If the point is that, our way of life is toast and we had all better realise this and begin to transition to a different way of life, then I agree. Lets get on with it! Problem is, that is not a narrative that is to be found in the main stream of public opinion. As far as that goes, it's BAU all the way baby!
Alan from the islands
This is industrial investor-owned profit-driven solar development...no wonder it looks like shite. How much does Ghung spend each year on "Administrative expenses" and "Fairs" :)
A.F. wrote:"Alternative energy discussions nearly always ignore the need for more and more natural gas peaker plants and other fossil inputs to balance the intermittent wind and solar energy, the trillions of dollars you'd need to make a large enough grid to try to spread the load out and need fewer peaker plants, etc."
Here you simply confuse power and energy. It is perfectly possible that in a renewable scenario there is 100% backup for power by (cheap) open gas turbines. On the other hand the FLH of these turbines will be very small (<<500) or only a very small percentage of the needed energy is providexd by them.
If you checked prices for gas turbines you would realise that Germany could get for 3-4 billion EUR per year, that are peanuts, sufficient (60 GW) gas power as backup for reneables. This approach is not very elegant - there are alternatives you obviously do not see- but sets the bar for the discussion of differential costs.
The next point is, that the fuel for these power plants could be biogas or synthetic gas as long as the amount of produced electricity is small.
Pumped storage is the more elegant solution. For a 21% to 28% loss of energy, and an investment that will last centuries, one transforms excess renewable power into power on demand (with perhaps a 60 to 90 second delay).
Pumped storage can shift power around the daily cycle, and even resolve the weekend/weekday problem (renewables generate as much on Sunday as Monday, but demand is lower on Sunday).
Pumped storage cannot resolve seasonal demand vs generation issues. Solar peaks @ June 21st, wind peaks in winter (most places) and hydro peaks in spring with the snow melt (or dry season/wet season further south). Demand is either winter or summer (July/August) peaking.
Stored bio-mass can resolve some of the seasonal issues, but not all.
Further efforts at energy efficiency, and in Germany, a slightly smaller population, will make the need for new FF power plants unnecessary.
Existing (no new plants required) combined cycle NG plants can fill the seasonal deficit. And the open cycle NG turbines can go years between uses.
These objections to renewables are not logical or reasoned through.
Alan
In South Africa which has no natural gas the peaking power gas turbines run on diesel. Not sure how they do it.
An engineer could probably answer this better, but a turbine is a tribune, in essence. Jet engines run on kerosene, which is very similar to diesel, just less viscous.
I think the fuel is atomized by forcing it thru a very small nozzle at high pressure into fast moving air. This finely atomized fuel once lit burns as readily as a vapor like ng.
This explanation is based on extrapolating what i know about diesels, which atomize their fuel this way.
In Jamaica the utility actually names each unit GT x, for gas turbine number x. As far as I know, none of these "gas turbines" actually use an "gas", that is, natural gas or LPG, instead using liquid fuels, Automotive Diesel Oil (ADO) or aviation fuel (Jet A1) or possibly kerosene. Apparently re-configuring gas turbines to run on gas or liquid fuels is not impossible.
Alan from the islands
Stupid me. It's called a gas turbine because the turbine blades are turned by a gas, not because it's gas-fuelled.
Cf. steam turbines in power stations, water turbines in hydroelectric plants, and wind turbines coming to a back yard near you.
what is FlH? i can guess it has to do with utilization of the peaker plant in terms of running time as opposed to down time, but this acronym is a new one for me.
Full Load Hour. You understand there are 24 X 365 = 8760 hours in a year? So Annual production is often declared as corresponding to a number of full-load hours. A full-load hour is an hour in which a generating facility produces at full capacity.
And the OP was talking about using these gas turbines for less than 500 full load hours a year--with the renewable sources providing the rest.
I'm not sure where you are getting your EROI numbers, but NREL has numbers which are about an order of magnitude higher than yours using latest technology.
PV ENERGY ROI Tracks Efficiency Gains
The EROI for silicon PV systems (using data from 2009) is well under 2 years and for CdTe it's well under 1 year.
And as PV technology improves, the EROI will continue to get better.
The trick is that EROI estimates often have very different boundary conditions. The low estimate is for a large commercial system with a road network and staff to keep it clean, etc. The Fthenakis 2012 study appears to include only panels and mounting equipment (typical of a residential installation). It is easy to get high numbers by leaving out energy needed for labor, etc. To compare, all boundaries must match.
But coal electricity distributed to a residence may also have a < 2:1 EROI. Here is a very rough estimate:
5% lost to mining (20:1)
1% lost to coal transport
57% lost in thermal plant (using EIA coal heat rate for 2011)
1% lost to ash handling
8% lost to electric transmission and maintaining residential grid (likely a very low estimate as residential prices are much higher than industrial or commercial reflecting lots of labor and material to maintain the ends of the grid).
77% of coal energy lost before you turn on your light switch. 1.3 : 1
The low PV estimate also adds in the cost of obsoleting existing factories and plants. This is a real cost, and is likely the reason technology improvement curves flatten out over time. Eventually society cannot afford to scrap existing factories. Today they are a tiny fraction of total manufacturing. But there is no doubt that PV today is not delivering net energy. It still needs to drop quite a bit in embodied energy. But there is some hope out there with ribbon PV etc.
Dr. Michael Dale gave a good presentation on this topic at the Global Energy Systems Forum. Well worth watching.
http://glocast.com/webcasts/global_energy_systems_conference_2013/3.5_Mi...
PV growth rates will slow. And we will need to find a way to handle storage. I personally think storage may be distributed. Batteries in lamps, laptops, etc. Ice packs built into fridges. Hot ceramics and hot water stores, etc.
77% of coal energy lost before you turn on your light switch. 1.3 : 1
That appears to be an efficiency. I thought E-ROI was intended to compare the marginal energy input needed to produce a marginal output.
The low PV estimate also adds in the cost of obsoleting existing factories and plants. This is a real cost
I find that very puzzling. That's a sunk cost. I'm sure the owners of those plants would like to account for costs this way, but that's not how it works (unless those owners have a lot of political power). Buggy whip manufacturers just lose their investment...
Let me put that another way: fossil fuel is obsolete. The cost of those FF plants has already been spent, and it turns out that it was just a bad investment. The cost of early decommissioning lowers the E-ROI (and $-ROI) of those plants, not of the renewable plants that will replace them.
Hi Nick,
Yes, many times people are looking at primary energy for EROI. But that does not tell the whole story. What we really want to know is how much surplus energy do we have left after production and distribution to provide a good or service.
You have often cited electric motor efficiency as being much higher than an IC engine as an example. This is why society has been willing to waste 2/3rds of the BTUs in a ton of coal turning them into electrical power. You can often make up that loss later. EROI has tried to factor this in with Quality. But I think another strategy would be to account for the total delivery path to the good or service that people are using. In this case home lighting, fans, etc. Whole path analysis is harder to do.
Tom Murphy did an interesting example on his blog by looking at several different ways to heat water: burner, electric kettle, etc.
PV can deliver energy right at the house. It may have a low EROI, but not any lower than coal if you include needed energy delivery system. That would be running a laptop during the day.
But this does not account for night time energy use. The issue there is you either need to pay even more to support the grid used only at night, or use batteries or other storage.
The sunk cost is lost, but more losses are going to happen, and that cost has to be paid. This is one reason solar PV has a higher price than it would if it was a stable slow growing industry. As obsolescence slows and growth rate slows, prices should drop as less money is going into factory construction and you are only paying operating expenses. It takes a lot of extra energy to grow an industry. But slow growth won't catch up to fossil depletion or mitigate climate emissions.
you either need to pay even more to support the grid used only at night, or use batteries or other storage.
Maybe a little. Far better to combine wind and solar (and other sources) in a complementary system. Have you looked at the California Independent System Operator web site (caiso daht cahm) - they have a wonderful chart everyday showing how nicely complementary wind and solar are. You can download a nice app!
more losses are going to happen
I'm not sure what you're thinking of. I wouldn't think renewables should be assigned any of the sunk costs of FF plants. Similarly, if PV producers invest in PV manufacturing that becomes obsolete, they lose money and their investors lose money. But, that's not really a part of the ongoing cost of solar.
Now, if you're just thinking about high upfront capital costs, I agree that PV is capex intensive. OTOH, the fast decline of production costs is a direct result of very fast growth.
Maybe wind complements PV where you live but that isn't the norm where I live (Eastern Ontario, Canada). The more usual pattern is wind during the day and calm at night. The seasonal variation is also wrong with the strongest winds occuring in the shoulder seasons (spring, fall) whereas the greatest demand for electricity is in winter and summer. At least we do have a good amount of hydroelectric power!
What PV does complement well is our nuclear generation as peak demand is during daylight hours. Of course nuclear is the "ugly sister" that no one wants to talk about so credit for the progress towards phasing out coal generation is given to wind/PV renewables when the reality is that it has more to do with refurbishing nuclear units that had been out of service, the addition of gas powered generators and a reduced demand for electricity due to Ontario's faltering manufacturing sector.
I did an analysis of hourly wind data from Ontario - my memory is that wind was slightly stronger at night.
I agree that nuclear would work, though I think wind & solar will work a little better.
Wind and PV complement each other nicely in Germany:
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/veroeffentlichungen-...
10 units of energy to invest and turn into electricity:
(Energy Returned) * Conversion Efficiency = Ballpark Number
Coal: (10 * 80 - 10) * 0.35 = 277 units delivered
Low Coal: (10 * 40 - 10) * 0.35 = 137
Conventional Oil: (10 * 30 - 10) * 0.35 = 102
Bitumen Oil: (10 * 5 - 10) * 0.35 = 14
Wind: (10 * 16 - 10) * 1.00 = 150
PV: (10 * 11 - 10) * 1.00 = 100
10 units of energy to invest and move a vehicle:
Coal: (10 * 80 - 10) * 0.35 = 277e * 0.8 (elec eff) = 222
Low Coal: (10 * 40 - 10) * 0.35 = 137e * 0.8 = 110
Conventional Oil: (10 * 30 - 10) * 0.8 (refine/distro) * 0.35 (end use) = 81.2
Bitumen Oil: (10 * 5 - 10) * 0.8 * 0.35 = 11.2
Wind: (10 * 16 - 10) * 1.00 = 150e * 0.8 = 120
PV: (10 * 11 - 10) * 1.00 = 100e * 0.8 = 80
Discounting, of course, the pollution effects of coal and oil (which shouldn't be done). I was actually surprised by the number that came out for PV - I expected it to come out higher compared to the number I used for conventional oil. Petrol is currently about $3.50/gal, and in many places you can get 1 Watt(peak) of PV for the same. If you compare two cars of the same size, the Leaf and Versa, and what that $3.50 will take each one: With gasoline that $3.50 will go about 35 miles...with $3.50 in PV it will go about 110 miles. The electricity doesn't have any taxes...but still - something fishy.
Probably botched something - but the point is that the end use, and end efficiency use does matter. The EROEI of coal and oil will not get better. (and no amount of lipstick could pretty up the tar-sands pig)
islandboy - future generations will dream of getting back to our way of life, and assume collapse was due to evil oil & gas corporations who thwarted the building of windmills, solar PV, etc., so they could greedily line their pockets with more money. That's what most people think now, even on this forum. Clearly Heinberg's "50 million farmers" and reverse engineering of infrastructure to a wood-energy based civilization, birth control, limiting of immigration, and other measures would be a better way to prepare for the future.
I wish I hadn't brought up the NG peaker plants because that diverted the thread away from the findings of Prieto and Hall. Forget pumped storage, batteries.
Read their book, it's free at most libraries, or read my review.
http://energyskeptic.com/2013/tilting-at-windmills-spains-solar-pv/
They spend very little time on NG peaker plants -- they even give it a zero EROI because they bend over backwards to give a fair evaluation to solar PV and want to avoid this discussion. They must know it's an easy way for advocates to divert attention away from their findings. It's very clear if you read their book that 2.45 is a generous overestimate of what the actual EROI must be.
Hall believes that an EROI of at least 12 or 13 is needed to keep civilization going as we know it. I will repeat again - even 100% efficient PV (which is impossible) would only raise the EROI from 2.45 to 3.25
Drees -- Prieto and Hall cite a number of EROI studies -- and they all ignore most or all of the fossil fuel inputs. Read their book. The article you cite is a non peer-reviewed 3 page opinion piece, and mentions that studies which don't find a high ROI use "out-dated information from antiquated PV systems" -- which can hardly be used as a criticism of Prieto & Hall who use REAL data from RECENT up-to-date solar PV systems.
I'm reading a book now called "Bending Science". Some of the gobbledygook arguments that don't directly address the findings of this book remind me of tactics used by advocates use to bend research findings. No wonder we continue to waste time and money.
Sure, way down the line the high initial investment might pay off, but that's doubtful for solar PV for all the reasons mentioned in this book. And the financial issues are a showstopper in and of themselves, especially at this point in the largest credit bubble, and most highly corrupt financial cycle in fiat currency history. (I have a book list about this at http://www.amazon.com/Fraud-amp-Greed-Street-Insurance/lm/R16R1WAVOCAFGO which would have a lot more than 40 books if that weren't the limit amazon places on book lists).
There are so many issues with the electric grid that it doesn't matter if ANYTHING that generates electricity has a positive EROI. At my Electric Grid Overview
http://energyskeptic.com/2011/electric-grid-overview/
there are links to articles as well as book reviews of:
"Lights Out. The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You". Makanski.
"From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity. Munson.
“CYBER WAR. The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It”. Richard A. Clarke.
“America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare”. Joel Brenner.
The bottom line is that no EROI study can possibly discover all the oil embedded in the entire process. You might better understand this idea if you read my summary of Leonard Read's 1958 "I, Pencil My Family Tree".
http://energyskeptic.com/2012/even-a-pencil-will-be-hard-to-make-in-the-...
--Hall believes that an EROI of at least 12 or 13 is needed to keep civilization going as we know it.--
Just to keep clear, few if any on this site would argue that modern life will continue more or less the same as it has. That is the one thing most of us do agree on. But that doesn't mean that renewable energy, however much oil it may take to build, does not have a role.
A definition of sustainable energy, I reckon, would be a closed system that can replace itself and its parts--solar panels, wind turbines, or whatever indefinitely. It may require more inputs of human labor than we would like but that would just be part of the deal.
My point is, let's focus on what would work as you define it, not on reveling in what won't work. Not to keep plugging ASPO-USA's work and The Energy Xchange website we are developing (energy-x.org), but doing a better job of articulating a positive but realistic view of what IS possible is one of our key goals.
I can't see any real reason that an analysis of any given good or service using money as a metric to estimate embedded energy can't provide us with a reasonably accurate upper limit on the energy embedded in that particular good or service.
If I'm wrong, I'm eager to hear why.
Of course knowing this upper limit might not be of much theoretical or practical value.
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.
It's ignored because their analysis is deeply flawed and their calculated EROEI grossly deflated, most likely due to their underlying assumptions. It's fairly easy to show this, too:
Note that they derive that EROEI figure based on energy inputs that are for the most part estimated with a simple "1.5 euro spent = 1 kWh consumed" conversion factor. Watch what happens when you work through the math implied by that assumption:
In other words, their analysis is claiming that investors are guaranteed to not even make their money back over 25 years unless power prices are over 0.61 euro per kWh, a figure well above the highest feed-in tariff Spain ever offered.
By contrast, investors clearly believed that not only would they make their money back, but that the return would be higher than the 6% ROI they could get from (believed) low-risk government bonds. Matching a 6% ROI over 25 years requires returning 4.3x the original investment. With a FIT of 0.44 euro, returning 4.3x over 25 years requires costs of 0.10 euro per kWh, or over 80% lower than Prieto and Hall calculate.
In other words, Prieto and Hall are not only claiming that everyone else who has done an EROEI analysis is woefully wrong, they're claiming that every single company which has built a solar PV plant has been enormously and disastrously wrong in their financial analyses. They're claiming they understand economics and financing better than any of the economists or financiers who worked on these deals, or who are still making these deals.
Perhaps everybody except Prieto and Hall are idiots; however, Occam's Razor suggests that a much more likely explanation is that Prieto and Hall have made an error in their analysis.
***
Note that the above can also be used to estimate an EROEI. If we assume that financiers were correct about finances and the cost per kWh was about 0.10 euro, that requires a minimum EROEI of 0.61 / 0.10 * 2.45 = 15, with a likely higher actual EROEI due to how eagerly investors embraced the offered FIT.
Note that the EROEI implied by the financial analysis is pretty close to the EROEI calculated by NREL. When two very different ways of deriving an estimate reach similar values, that's a good sign that the estimates are likely to be reasonable.
Note also that the "1.5 euro to 1 kWh" conversion factor is the basis of Prieto and Hall's calculation. If you want to argue my calculations are wrong because I'm using that conversion factor, that's fine, but recognize that in the same breath you're saying their calculations are wrong as well.
Hi Jerome,
Thank you for a well written and clear article on a very complex topic. Utilities have often lead the world in dynamic simulations to try to understand how to invest in the future. It is humbling to see they are still struggling to predict what will happen and how to position themselves.
It is interesting to see something like Odum's pulsing paradigm at work:
A large up front investment in renewables is made. Those renewables produce power with almost no overhead cost. They drive the price below replacement cost, and normally investment would be forced to stop. This would be a construction pulse, followed by a long period of low prices where society gets its energy investment paid back. The next construction pulse would come when growth forces prices up enough to invest again, or when rising fossil fuel costs force prices up. Govt regulation is actually smoothing out the pulses. It provides steady prices, so there is a steady flow of capital, despite no return.
Something similar is happening in the US with natural gas. The mechanism is basically the same. Most capital is invested up front to drill, complete, and connect the well to the gathering network. Then the production cost is low. So there have been crazy drilling booms and busts. During high prices the companies can secure capital and they drill. Production overhead costs are low and drive prices down into a bust. Like solar PV in Germany, shale gas drillers somehow tapped into a huge source of capital (redirected oil profits?). Those funds allowed a steady increase in gas production despite lack of profitability.
This is clearly going to be a problem in any energy source that is structured with high capital cost and low operating cost. Very interesting. The difficulty in growing this kind of energy source is that you must somehow "tax" the existing economy to get the energy to invest. Generally by loaning money into existence and causing inflation. I wonder how that mechanism will work on the energy decline side of peak?
The difficulty in growing this kind of energy source is that you must somehow "tax" the existing economy to get the energy to invest. Generally by loaning money into existence and causing inflation.
It's really just an accounting problem. For instance, in the US utilities (and merchant generators) are uniformly allowed to charge their ratepayers for providing capacity, whether or not it's used.
The preferred utility solution, of course, is to allow them to charge ratepayers mostly through fixed charges, and only slightly through kWh charges. That strategy is intended to kill client-side solar, by eliminating savings.
California's rate system is intended to incentivize renewables, while reimbursing generators properly. Seems to be working...
Thanks for the status update on EU/German renewables. The significant share provided by renewables speaks for itself.
Where I live (Ontario Canada), the feed in tariff for roof-mounted solar PV went down this year from $0.55 to $0.39 (from EU0.40 to EU0.28) - it is still financially attractive.
I am advocating the use of renewable energy in my neck of the woods, which has a similar set of circumstances to the islands of Hawaii albeit considerably less isolated, being an hour away by air and a day away by ship from North and South America. States without their own fossil fuel resources are finding most of their earnings going to pay for imported fuels. In many cases, these states are not earning enough to pay for their fuel imports as well as their food imports resulting in spiralling levels of debt.
The only way I see out of this vicious cycle is to go for indigenous renewable energy sources. The problem is that the dynamics of the local electricity market are pretty much the same as almost everywhere else in the world. The installed base of generating plants is heavily fossil fuel dependent, in our case oil. Their exists a mix of base load and peaker plants all of which need to recover the cost of acquiring them or, in the case of the really old ones, the cost of refurbishing or maintaining them. At this very moment, Jamaica is in the process of deciding who gets to build own and operate some 360MW of new plant, a little more than half of current peak demand. The question is, how is the owner of his plant going to recover their investment in an era of increasing competition from renewable sources?
I think the new German focus on storage is well placed, since it will ultimately add to the dispatchable capacity available to the grid but, as Jerome rightly points out, the mechanisms to make all of the required components of a reliable electricity grid able to provide good returns on the investments made in them, are not well developed. It seems that in most cases these mechanisms have not been well thought out, if they have been attempted at all.
I am anxious to see some mechanisms being tried to provide examples that, I can show TPTB in my neck of the woods as things we might implement as we add intermittent renewable sources, like PV to our grid.
Alan from the islands
One solution, thankfully being considered in several markets, and which already exists in places like California, is to put in place a capacity market, where plants make themselves available for rapid changes in output, without actually producing anything most of the time, and get paid for that availability: ie a market for MW in addition to the market for MWh.
Haven't capacity markets existed throughout the US, for quite a while?
Giving preference to unreliable power sources is insane. Something is clearly wrong in Germany when consumers are paying extortionate amounts for electricity but justify it with strange reasoning like we see in the article. If they were true to their avowed aims they would not be building new coal plants with several more to be completed this year and next year. Weirdly both coal and nuclear output went up in Germany in the first half of 2013 which was disappointing for wind power. It is stupid to shut down steam boilers for thermal plant just because it is a sunny day when the next day could be overcast. Logically solar output should be curtailed to allow the thermal plant to run more efficiently.
The European cap-and-trade scheme is riddled with giveaways like free permits and dodgy offsets. Germany then distorts that giving fixed price feed-in tariffs to wind and solar plus a must-take requirement to use these power sources when available. I think a better approach is a much tougher carbon trading scheme coupled with time-of-use pricing. The system could then work out how much of each power source it wanted ...to stay under the cap while minimising costs. There would be no need for subsidies or capacity markets.
The backlash against mandated and subsidised renewables is well under way. Spain is to tax residential PV. Tomorrow Australia will probably elect a government that says it will repeal several clean energy measures including green loans and perhaps the 20% generation target. Germany goes to the polls Sept 22 and maybe surprises are in store. All of this yet no country with average geography has come near breaking the 50% renewables penetration barrier on a year round basis. I suggest a rethink is needed.
Logically solar output should be curtailed to allow the thermal plant to run more efficiently.
Clearly, your logic is insane and your position unsupportable. Turn down a power source with zero fuel costs so that one can burn expensive fuel - AND add to Climate Chaos.
You also clearly have no understanding about heat rates at coal plants at different loads, load following or the energy required to bring a FF plant from a cold start.
Alan
Also the new generation of coal fired power plants in Germany can ramp up from zero to 500MW in hours. They don't need to heat up like old fashioned plants.
I find all of the above baffling. Is it true or not true that, as the climate science says, we MUST stop putting carbon into the atmosphere in the immediate future or we have no future?
If it is true, and I have heard nothing compelling against it, then what? WE HAVE TO QUIT FF, that's what. End of discussion.
What we replace it with is another question.
Would someone please tell me what's wrong with this line of thinking.? Thanks.
Is it true or not true that, as the climate science says, we MUST stop putting carbon into the atmosphere in the immediate future or we have no future?... Would someone please tell me what's wrong with this line of thinking.?
It doesn't make somebody enough money right now. End of story.
And end of us?
Hey, wimbi, all the objective evidence indicates we are born to die anyway, so why sweat it?
On the human scale, we have generations of individuals, and on the biological and geological scales , we have generations of species.
We might as well laugh about it, since laughing hurts less than crying.
A hard crash is baked into the cake now, it's just a question of when it will hit us, and how hard and fast.
I do advocate pursuing policies that will soften the landing. It may be that some parts of the world pull thru more or less whole, depending on how crazy the climate gets.
if i were a young guy, I would move a long way north, well into Canada.
I always read your comments with great pleasure, and often learn something from them.
Where are you going to hang out?
Much of all the thought here is trying to save humanity from itself. It may be that the human race is nearing the end of its run, give or take a hundred years or so. Millions of other species have come and gone. Very few weep at their passing. Future sentient beings, if any, will not mourn our passing either. Some might even see our passing as good riddance as we did not care enough about our underlying environment to save it -- or ourselves.
Thanks for the kind words, OFM, ditto to you. I always read the drumbeat from bottom up, and when I come across the bottom end of a long one with some good common sense stuff in it, I usually recognize OFM
I am starting, at least, to try to understand how to interact with ASPO planetbeat, but as always, am mighty slow to see the obvious on a computer screen.
famous family joke -- I (trying the first family computer) Hey, it doesn't do ANYTHING, what gives?
Brilliant tech 13 yr old --(big sigh) Dad! ya gotta turn it on. ('nother big sigh)
The line of thinking is stupid, that's what it is pure and simple.
Spurious claims of 50:1 EROEI for wind, constructed and maintained with FF's. really I don't care if a million to one is claimed. Not one plug anywhere has been placed in the flow of oil to burn in markets world wide.
CO2 continues to increase and oil production continues at PEAK. Fracking everything in site, drilling deep, tar sands, arctic exploration. Show me what your infernal renewable machines have achieved, all you have is what they CAN achieve but of course will never happen.
The FACTS are we are burning FF's until they leave us not the reverse. And the renewable machines will have achieved what. Just an extension of time to burn more of what we should not have. Where is the plan to actively prevent the burning of fossil fuels? Of course there isn't any, rhetoric is much easier. Electric trains, electric cars, wind mills, solar panels, so what, unless an amount equivalent to the amount you would have burned is taken OFF the market then the road to destruction is assured.
Denmark's per capita carbon emissions dropped -26.5% from 2007 to 2012.
That is the example we should be following. Renewables are a major part, but only a part, of the Danish example.
Alan
Denmark funds their "green" example by selling oil. Greece may have been Denmark if they had the same gift.
The Danes were smart to get off the drug they sell. They rank 32 in world exporters.
Yes, only a part. Major parts are simply importing more electricity, as I have understood it, and by having good luck with the 2012 weather.
I agree with Bandits here. Renewables (excluding hydro) have still to prove themselves useful in a macro sense.
Thank you for this summary and review, Jerome. I was hoping you'd write a final post, and it's everything I could have wanted and more.
The PV situation I find fascinating: as you say, the problems have started with the growth of PV. Looking at that experience curve chart ("Bright spots"), by the time cumulative installed PV capacity reaches 10 TW rated, disconnected PV will likely be a more economical option than connecting to the grid for most homeowners and businesses--especially when a price uncertainty premium is added to the cost of grid connection.
I suggest that as with the telephone system, where African countries are going direct to mobile and avoiding the cost of installing a fixed line network, they will never build completely reticulated power grids either. And as with phones, where even in developed countries the majority of calls are to mobile phones, developed-country homeowners and businesses may increasingly find that the grid no longer meets their needs efficiently.
We may 'flip' quite rapidly from one equilibrium in which collective production (i.e. by utilities) and distribution is most beneficial, to another equilibrium in which it's everyone for herself. In game theory terms, it will pay to "defect" (disconnect) rather than co-operate with everyone else by remaining connected to the grid.
If this happens utilities will see demand "fall off a cliff" and they will have to shut down, and the grid with them. One consequence will be that people who cannot make the capital investment to generate their own energy suffer severe energy poverty.
Capacity markets are a way of staving all this off for a while, but it remains to be seen whether they can do so for the long run.
Edit: sp.
Bloomberg: Wind Surge Saps Bondholder Hope for Energy Future Payout
Link to article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-28/wind-surge-saps-bondholder-hope...
Thank you Jerome, for sharing your unique perspective .
Assuming I am following Jerome's arguments, and those of the members who seem to know whereof they speak, the problem of integrating renewables economically, as opposed to technically into the grid, boils down to only two truly key considerations.
One of these two is, whether renewable energy can ever be cost effective.
I read Der Spiegel regularly, but beyond what I learn there, I don't know much about day to day politics band business in Germany.
But from all I read on the net, and in the mainstream press, the impression I get is that Germany embarked on the transition to renewables for(again) two often mentioned reasons.
One was a ( continued) desire to be the leader in this new technology, which is understandable considering the export oriented nature of the German economy .
The other reason often mentioned is the admirable ambition of the country to be clean and green. Germans are among the best educated people in the world and in consequence , they take issues such as global warming and climate change very seriously, compared to most other countries.
But I believe there is a third reason the people of Germany are dedicated to going green- one that is not so often mentioned for political reasons perhaps.
The German economy is even more dependent on imports than it is on exports.
Germans aren't prone to advertise this fact, but it can never be far from the thoughts of any well informed German, given the history of the country.
( Speaking as an armchair historian, if I were a German, I would go to just about any length to avoid relying on Russia for fuel.)
Now those who are trained in economics, but ignorant of physical realities, tend to believe than all problems related to shortages of raw materials can be solved by substitution and innovation. This is true to some extent , given time enough , but overall, this belief is an extraordinarily dangerous delusion.
Given that Germany is a nation of engineers and craftsmen, as opposed to economists, I believe Germans as a whole realize they have no choice except to make the transition, no matter how disruptive and painful it may be.
Even if one disregards the export based economy , and the issue of global climate disruption, the ugly truth of fossil fuels depletion remains.
I expect thinking Germans know enough about worked out German mines to see the end game quite clearly. (hat tip to West Texas ! )
So- Germany has no choice, over the medium to long term. It's renewable energy, or the end of a prosperous Germany.
Otoh, if they make the transition successfully, and noticeably quicker than most other countries, so as to be able to export the technology , Germany will be prosperous, clean, and green perhaps indefinitely.
But the reality that renewables require fossil fuel backup, for now, and for the foreseeable future, cannot be denied.
Renewable and storage technologies, used in combination with strategies to shift demand appropriately as production fluctuates, may eventually be good enough to more or less do away with this required backup.
Long term possibilities such as this one , however, are irrelevant when short and medium term survival is at stake.
I believe that Jerome (hat tip to Jerome! ) has amply demonstrated that the current electricity marketing model is beyond repair, and must be scrapped.
But changing the marketing model is not a a science and engineering job.
This is a political and economic job, and so far as I can see, it presents no real challenges except the one big one associated with the Euro symbol.
Who's going to foot the bill?
And this brings us full circle back to the original question.
Can renewable electricity ever be cost effective?
I think that given the historical price trends of fossil fuels, growing world population, and known depletion rates, this question should be asked in a different form.
Can Germany survive and hopefully prosper without fossil fuel electricity?
I don't know, but if it can be done, Germany is probably the country likeliest to succeed, excepting some smaller countries well endowed with hydro, etc.
In the end, barring bad luck ( war, etc) I think maybe the German people will make the necessary sacrifices and pull it off.
I think there is a strong possibility they can do so in spite of those who argue that the EROEI's of wind and solar electricity iare not high enough for a simple reason.
Most of the built infrastructure we worry so much about "wearing out'" CAN BE MADE to last more or less forever.
A highway once built requires only a tiny fraction of the energy to maintain it for many decades , compared to the energy needed to construct it originally. Ditto railroads (hat tip to Alan!)
In a well managed country with a stable to falling population, a country well supplied with superb craftsmen, an existing house can be made to last for centuries- and it can export rather than import energy.
Germans will need food, water, shelter, and medical care in the future, as always. They will not need a whole lot of new highway or office buildings.
I have no problem for instance foreseeing German built battery electric vehicles lasting from fifty to a hundred years, if they choose to build them to to last that long. And then the ca vehicles will be very close to 100 % recycled.
Germans will not need a whole lot of new cars, if they choose not to need them.
Hell, even Detroit could build lifetime cars, if American engineers rather than bean counters were in charge, and we had sense enough to buy them once built.
I routinely drive a " worn out" Chevy truck that is almost 25 years old myself, and anticipate driving it another decade at least, if I am able, and I'm only a second class truck mechanic by American standards.We don't need new stuff every few years, we just need the utility derived fro old stuff made to last.
Humanity as a a whole may not be smarter than yeast, but there are some indications that Germans might be.
I would argue that energy imports is not a reason, nor is fossil depletion. First, their energy transformation was known to make them even more reliant on Russian gas, and has been done in parallel with North Stream gas project, for instance. Second, they have ample coal resources, so they need not worry about depletion for a long time.
This statement disregards the fact that France was done in the late 1980-ies, while Germany's slideware doesn't have them done until 2050. France did its energy transformation while increasing their electricity production by more than 100%. Germany's slideware depends on them shrinking the electricity production by 25%.
We cannot talk about the Germans' rationales without talking about what they primarily and preferentially are moving away from. They don't choose to get rid of coal. They are abandoning nuclear power! And this cannot be because they "are among the best educated people in the world and in consequence , they take issues such as global warming and climate change very seriously".
Also, Germany imports solar panels, so what are they going to export? Roof installation personnel?
Helpless, (nomen est omen :-)),
the undergrund coal mines in Germany are shut down, we will have only one or two 2018 in order to test and develope mining equipment. This opportunity is gone. Lignite without new surface mines, which are highly unlikely, is good for additional 40 years.
The interesting question for France, which has to replace (or at least to refit) most of her NPPs in the next 15 years, is how to maintain the structure when the kW price of a new NPP is much higher than the price of 3 kW of wind + NG for backup.
With the limited construction capacity for NPPs, the economic situation of EDF and the high prices of French reactors the developement of French nuclaer capacity will be interesting and it is my bet that around 40% of the nuclear capacity will be replaced after 2030. :-)
BTW if you to pay 5000 EUR per kW nuclaer power the replacement of French or German baseload capacity with new NPPs is very expensive. Your claim that is is cheaper than reneables is nonsense. France would have to provide at least 250 billion EUR, Germany around 300 billion. And 5000 EUR per kW would already be cheaper than the Finish reactor that (hopefully) comes on-line in 2016 and other projects. Nuclear power is economically and, therefore, politically dead as long as it is more expensive than the alternative onshore wind.
The conclusion of your statement "Each MWh of renewables has NOT replaced fossils lately. They have replaced nuclear generation! Any reduction in fossil generation in the coming few years will be temporary, as the major decommissioning of nuclear power is slated for late in this decade" is of course nonsense, you have only to check the energy prodcution of reneables and nuclear power, 75% of the new reneable production is necessary to replace NPPs until 2022, afterwards the 100% will replace fossil energy: Renewables provide at least additional 4-5 TWh with PV and 5-6 TWh with onshore wind per year, 6 TWh more with biomass and offshore wind. Nuclear is at less than 100 TWh end of 2012, hence, renewables have to substitute for more than 9 TWh per year to produce a lasting effect in respect to coal power, i.e. avoiding a substitution of nuclaer with coal. Here even the German lignite producer draw a more accurate picture than you, they assume that NG and hard coal will be hit very hard after 2022. :-)
German companies provide pure silicium, the production facilities for PV panels and most of the stuff that is used to fix the panel on your roof. Germany earns a lot with PV, even when 100% of the modules are imported. The other aspect you obviously ignore is the fact that wind power is more important and makes even more money and provide many jobs. Can you say the same for the producer of NPPs? :-)
You're saying Germany's coal is good for 40 years, and then they need to open new mines. That reinforces my statement that depletion is not an issue.
France will not opt to replace more than a little of their nuclear with wind + ng. It won't be popular to litter the landscape with wind towers and get dependent on foreign gas. The cost of 250 billion EUR sounds a bit high, since it will place the cost of EPR at 6.25 billion EUR a piece which is not very likely when you ramp production. Nevertheless, it will be preferable to wind + gas. It seems we agree that solar PV cannot compete, since you don't mention them in this context?
You claim that 75% of renewables expansion in Germany until 2022 will have to be devoted to replacing nuclear. That's actually good enough for me, as it is 75% agreement with my statement, even though you called it "nonsense". I consider the renewables integration plans to be overly optimistic, while nuclear decommissioning is set in stone, which explains the differing 25%. After 2022, Germany will likely give up renewables expansion and keep burning coal, since it will be too difficult and too expensive to do otherwise. The voters won't have the stamina to bleed that much money.
It is, frankly, ludicrious to claim that Germany "earns a lot with PV". German PV is a worse money sink than the Fukushima disaster! I agree onshore wind is more rational and produce a lot of jobs, and I agree NPPs don't produce a lot of jobs. If you look at it rationally, that is an advantage for nuclear.
Gernmany will flood almost all underground mines until 2018, then underground mining will be history in germany, no chance for a revival, sorry.
The lignite situation is, that the current surface production is good for additional 40 years. New mines would require relocation of many people, this would be a tough political problem.
I challanged your conclusion, i.e. that coal will be expanding after 2022. That is not possible as even a moderate expansion of PV and wind destroys 4% of the market for coal power per year after 2022. Wind is already chaeper than new (hard) coal power plants, that is exactly the problem of the big 4 utilities in Germany.
The other aspect is ownership of production facilities, here the big 4 had lost the war in case of onshore wind in already in 2005, the next 15% market share gains by onshore wind power owned by farmers can not be prevented.
These strategic problems of fossil power are well known in industry, you only have to read the publications of the lignite producers: Coal and NG are under severe pressure and the only question is according to them in which sequence the production will die after 2022, they bring good arguments why lignite will be the last.
On a macroeconomic scale the reneables will produce around 2030 negative differential costs with quite moderate assumption of energy prices, it would be much earlier, if externalities were included. The Energiewende makes therefore sense.
The political problem today is that the economic gains of reneables are harvested by industry, the costs are covered by consumers. However, legislation can be changed.
Why would they flood the mines until 2018? Is there a decision to that effect?
I assume that there won't be any expansion of PV and wind after 2022. The reason is that Germany now has some 11% wind and 5% solar. In 2022, if they have replaced 18% nuclear, wind+PV will stand at 34% combined. To integrate more would be very difficult.
Investment decisions are not based on what is cheap, but on the difference between production cost and selling price. The problem with wind in 2022 is that any new wind will produce well at the same time as all legacy wind. At such times, the price will be close to zero. Coal, OTOH, will be able to produce at times of high price.
If feed-in tariffs are not there for support, there will be no 15% new wind.
How can you know? And isn't that an extremely long time horizon for a politician, and fairly long even for the climate?
So far, it has been an enormous exercise in capital destruction. To me it is a bit far fetched to say that it makes sense based on hopes of declining costs more than 15 years from now.
I think the distinction is meaningless. Regardless of laws, you cannot expect industry to insulate consumers and tax-payers from costs of production. Costs will inevitably be passed on. German society as a whole has lost perhaps €200 billion by now. It will lose as much again in the coming decade, just to replace an evenly producing CO2-free source of electricity with intermittent sources.
Germany's current goal is 60 GW rated capacity of PV and ~100 GW rated capacity of wind. Their consumption is on the order of 60 GW.
Renewable energy in Germany
Maybe the market system does not work well for all energy sources. Feed-in tariffs give the renewable sources a fixed price.
If you are referring to the closing of nuclear power stations in Germany, then that is a good thing. There is value to reducing risk and pollution. Germany would lose hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, if one of their nuclear reactors melts down like in Fukushima, Japan.
It's only ambitious (read: unrealistic) in the context of renewables. With nuclear, it would be no big deal.
A fixed price when the spot price is low or negative will not benefit the consumer, to put it mildly.
The energiewende is a very certain loss that is larger than Fukushima, while a meltdown in German reactors is only a very remote possibility. Also, the energiewende gives rise to far, far more pollution than Fukushima.
For better or worse, Germans hate nuclear more than coal. There's not much point arguing about it.
I agree that Germany is a lost cause in the medium term, but it is important to put a spotlight on it, so we don't copy it.
Germany is a bit unusual, in that they don't really have very good wind or solar resources, and yet they're determined to rely on domestic wind/solar anyway.
Germany's wind & solar effort is like a dog walking upright: the lesson isn't that it does it with difficulty, it's that it can do it at all.
Energiewende is a high probability success whereas reliance on nuclear power guarantees dependance on foreign sources of fuel, leaks, contamination, meltdowns, disposal problems and externalization of costs onto victims and taxpayers. 80, 1 GW nukes for Germany replaced at 40 year intervals for 1,000 years guarantees all of those problems.
Why do you think the Energiewende has a high probability of success? I make the opposite assessment. And why do you think 80 nukes guarantee meltdowns over 1000 years? Sure, Fukushima happened after 14,000 cumulative reactor years in the world, but they were old and tsunami-unsafe. Current passive cooling designs with lessons learned have the probability down by several orders of magnitude. 80,000 reactor years should be no problem.
Also, nuclear would be at most a fourth of the cost, probably far less, than the Energiewende. The external costs of nuclear are not significant in this context.
And, the energiewende has far more foreign dependance than nuclear would.
The cost of EPR reactors should fall as experience is gained (for example the French managed to pour the foundation properly, while the Finns had to break their's up and redo). Experience from the Chinese EPRs, two more EPRs in the UK, a second French EPR and costs should be half the Finnish prototype.
I foresee the French electrical grid going from 75% towards 50% nuke over time. France has built 7+ GW of a planned 10 GW of wind - and that number can be easily raised. I see no French reaction like the irrational British reaction against wind.
After 2020, most new French buildings are to be "net zero". In practice this means solar PV installed. Costs for solar will be lower then, and the French get much more sun than the Germans :-) So French solar has a bright future.
My SWAG for the 2035 French grid would be 90% of 2012 demand, 60% nuke, 11% hydro (like today but 10% less demand), 14% wind and 20+% solar (France being an electricity exporter).
Some new EPRs and a lot of renewables. The critical issue will be life extension for the 900 MW class French nukes. Refurbish or new EPRs ? The load following capability of EPRs will be valuable in the future. Pull back on bright sunny mornings and late at night - full out (+ pumped storage) at 6 PM.
Alan
I think your SWAG, while not being impossible, probably requires both socialist governments and an improved economy in France.
"I would argue that energy imports is not a reason, nor is fossil depletion. First, their energy transformation was known to make them even more reliant on Russian gas, and has been done in parallel with North Stream gas project, for instance. Second, they have ample coal resources, so they need not worry about depletion for a long time."
I suggest you give some thought to these facts.
First off, Russia lost more citizens and soldiers,. and suffered more from WWII than any other country., except Germany.Even Germany did not lose so many people.I admire Germany as she exists today, but she started the war, and Russians have not forgotten this pertinent fact.They have long memories, and no love for Germans, I can assure you.
It is a fact that the Germans have deliberately exposed exposed themselves to the potential consequences of russia cutting off enough of their fuel supply to bring the country tho it's knees.
The reason for this is simple enough. Given the global overall available energy supply situation in general, and the European situation in particular,, they had to run this risk- temporarily- hoping to put an end to it as soon as possible.
The fact that they have taken this risk is in and of itself chilling evidence , to a person acquainted with national security questions, that the Germans realize they are already caught in the fossil fuel depletion trap.Whether they can escape it is debatable , but they are giving it the old school try.
The energy transformation is an enormous job. It will take a couple of generations longer to finish it. I admire Germany for having had the foresight, and the courage to get started soon enough that success is a real possibility.
I am caused to think that you either have not given much serious thought to what the international market for oil and natural gas might be like in thirty or forty years, or else that you know little or nothing about fossil fuel depletion.
Good governments must look to the welfare of future generations, doing what is necessary too secure that future, at any price short of short term disaster. Paying for the transformation is only a hardship- a great one, it is true.The failure to pay would be a disaster for coming generations of Germans.
I refer you to the Export Land Model so often discussed in this forum.
it is true they have substantial lignite reserves- enough to last a "long time" as you put it.
But it is also a going to take a "Long time" to construct a reliable and adequate renewable energy infrastructure.
Now as to nuclear power, and coal power :
I personally felt like a a professional heavy weight boxer hit me in the solar plexus when I heard about Fukushima. I have always known the world would have to deal with some nuclear plant disasters, but the scale of this "one blew me away" as we yankees say. Nuclear power is finished for now In Europe, and I doubt very seriously if the western European public will even discuss nukes again within the next decade, and getting even a handful built within the next two decades is in my opinion a very long shot.
In the end, despite the now demonstrated risks of meltdowns, etc, I think the risks of doing without nuclear electricity may be even greater- considering the ecological impact of burning ci coal, and the risk of war associated with depleting fossil fuel and other s reserves of now renewable minerals.
For what is it worth, after much agonized thought, i think we should be building a new generation of nuclear plants, plants designed to take into account what we have learned from the last generation.
And we should have a policy associated with the safety design based on the old Biblical building code- that if a house falls upon it's inhabitants, killing them, the builder be stoned unto death.
- Every engineer and administrator must sign off on questions involving safety margins.If a margin proves inadequate, resulting in a meltdown, in the event of an earthquake, etc, off he or she goes to jail, for the rest of his or her natural life, no if's, and's or butts.
It is impossible to guarantee there would never be a meltdown of such a plant, but the risk would be acceptable, considering the alternatives.
As for coal, the German government has no other short term choice, given Fukushima, except to rely on it, for now.
They will switch away from it again when they can.
Long term issues must yield to short term survival.
We agree that if the Germans don't dare to do nuclear, coal and gas is the only short-term choice. We agree that the energy transformation, if it can be done at all, takes generations. We agree that nuclear should be pursued, considering the alternatives.
But while you got hit in the solar plexus by Fukushima, some others, famously including George Monbiot, were reassured by Fukushima. I tend to agree with them. We had a triple meltdown and the result is 160,000 persons evacuated and projected costs in the range of 80 billion euro (will probably rise, though). Germany, OTOH, has put more than 100 billion into PV. Furthermore, they have some 300 TWh coal and at 29 or so deaths per TWh, the yearly death toll is close to 9000 persons. That has been the case since Chernobyl, for about a quarter of a million dead so far since then.
You want to punish erring nuclear engineers. But who should go to jail over these 250,000 coal related deaths? Hardly the engineers, right, since this death toll is expected during normal operation? And who will go to jail if the climate really does get destroyed while the slow renewable experiment is ongoing?
I do not want to "punish" future erring nuclear engineers. I do want them to be dead cold sober in making design decisions, knowing that their own life is on the line if they at re caught out taking shortcuts.
I have not kept t references, but i have read in reputable publications that a few engineers did indeed demonstrate the professional ethics that all engineers should hold sacred, and resign thier positions rather than sign off on the design criteria of the Fukushima nukes.
The problem with any large undertaking is that some people will out of stupidity or greed or desire for advancement be willing to take unjustified chances with the public safety.
I am simply offering a criteria for signing off that reduces this human factor to a manageable minimum.This would really be no worse than the criteria I have accepted in performing many jobs during my life, starting as a child on the farm. I could have suffered a fatal fall climbing ladders to pick apples. I took a chance with my life again just last week sawing down some big near dead rotten trees, and a chance today driving on a public road.
Unless I am mistaken, , there are stone cairns on hillsides on the Japanese coast with signage reading something to the effect " Do not build anything closer to the water than this pile of stones." Some of these cairns, so I have read, are farther up the hills than the Fukushima nukes.
A whole lot of people failed to take their professional responsibilities to heart when Fukushima was designed and built. So far as I know, none of them have been, or ever will be punished.
Now so far as coal is concerned- i see our using it the same way as I see Germany burning Russian gas- a known risk we must deal with , for now, because we have no real choice.
Only an idiot could possibly believe we could just quit coal cold turkey- there would be so many people unemployed, starving and freezing within a few months that the world would go mad max. I
Perhaps if the renewables transition is too slow, and it fails, people who believed in it may riot and murder those who hindered it.
Remember the French Revolution?!
Personally I think it would be utterly foolish to put too many eggs into the nuclear basket, but so far as i can see, we really have only two long term choices - renewables and nukes capable of burning the wastes generated by the present day generation of nukes.
I'm willing to support a new generation of nukes built to new standards and designed by people who will be held PERSONALLY responsible in the case of meltdowns .
Nobody alive to day has more than a very remote chance of living long enough to see a f fusion reactor supplying useful energy.
Of course Mother Nature might throw an unstoppable and typically fatal epidemic disease, or a good sized asteroid, our way, and reduce the population to such a point that ff depletion and climate chance associated with burning more ff is no longer a problem for a long long time.
It still seems very odd to me to punish people who deal with a power source that on failure forces people to move, but accept without punishment a power source that during everyday operation kills many more. Seems there is a lack of balance.
I think we as a society need to relearn (or perhaps learn for the first time) how to handle risk rationally. And this concerns not only energy, but terrorism, crime, transport, eating and more. Evolution didn't equip us to handle risk intuitively in a complex, modern society.
Seems there is a lack of balance.
Absolutely agreed.
But the risk is highly dispersed with coal ,and I doubt my proposal could be n made to work in respect to coal.
UnlessI am mistaken , there probably aren't any individuals people who can be easily singled out for the sins of the coal monster.
I would like to see coal phased out asap myself, but in the mean time considerable progress has been made in the industry in every major respect except air pollution in most countries.
Of course the industry was forced by regulatory pressure , mostly, to make these changes for the better.
Mining coal in the US for instance is no longer an especially dangerous job.
On the other hand, a mere handful of high ranking engineer/ executives could have either aborted Fukushima. or gotten the plant located further back, and higher up the hillside , with a better breakwater.
They chose not to do so, and instead worked from grossly inadequate assumptions regarding earthquakes and tsunamis.
It is obvious that the level of risk that can be tolerated in designing a given piece of infrastructure must be inverse to the number of people affected.
If I build a house that falls down, maybe a single family dies.
I doubt any typical family could afford a house so well built as to withstand a thousand year earthquake, or would be willing to pay for it if they could afford it.
But i think TEPCO could have afforded another few percent of construction expense, considering that millions of peoples lives were at risk.
I spoke to an engineer recently who seemed quite complacent about using 100 year criteria in designing a nuclear plant, his position being that it is the responsibility of 'someone else' to set the criteria.
As far as i am concerned, this is a cheap copout, and a craven attitude.
Engineers long ago asked for, as a group, and got, the privilege and responsibility of professional self regulation.
They should live up to that responsibility, at least to the extent of refusing to do shoddy work involving millions of people's very lives.
Engineers are the whores of capitalism.
SS officer: “I need a facility that can kill 2000 prisoners at once with gas.”
Engineer: “That is just hideous! Wait a minute, 2000 you say? Fascinating problem! If we just….”
This is why I have no respect for technology. It is always possible to find an engineer to facilitate your plans, no matter how destructive.
Sorry, but that's just too broad.. I don't deny that this picture you paint does happen out there, but it's not a complete picture.
Blaming the whole category of Engineering and Technology doesn't answer where the problem lies, in my view.. We'd have the same problems without technology, if our affairs keep forgetting the key driver of our lives..
I think we've outcast our hearts because except when being confused with sex, there's no way to put a price on love, and few useful ways outside of poetry, religion and art to understand it.. so it is left off the table where bankers and engineers try to do their work, but without the help of the only human 'organ' that really explains why we want what we want.
From the end of METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang, 1927
Technology is not the cause of problems, but it is technology that makes the problems worse in a viscous circle of each problem that is solved by technology causes more problems, more solutions solved by technology, causing greater problems, and so on and so on. See http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/B007MXBNGS/ref=sr_1_1?s=...
Oh really? Not to the degree of problems we are having. How much could we ruin the earth without the aid of our technology? Granted, it is the human condition and beliefs that drive technology to its “misuse”, but my contention is that technology cannot help but be “misused” by humans largely because we think we are so damn special and not subject to the laws of nature. Anthropocentrism will be a fatal trait. We think our love is more special, never mind that it is an instinct developed by evolution. We believe our superstitions, otherwise known as religion, give answers to the meaning of life, never mind that they are the cause of most misery and have no rational basis for belief. We can’t fail, because we are a special creation! Yeah, right.
Engineers are the whores of capitalism. Or Socialism, or Communism, or Dear Leader-ism.
As a former engineer I must agree. But the conversation could also go:
Environmentalist: "If only we could cross this river here without driving 50 miles to the ford and burning all that fuel and wasting all that time."
Engineer: "I can do you a bridge. It's gonna cost ya, though."
Which reminds me of a statement by my agriculture law professor about the Army Corps of Engineers: “they never saw a project they didn’t like”.
How are engineeers worse than anybody else? We all are highly vulnerable to following immoral orders.
And, I don't see how capitalism is any worse than slavery, feudalism, fascism or communism/socialism in that regard.
An engineer can make possible destructive ideas that can affect whole civilizations and environments. A janitor can't.
Agreed, all human organizations have the problem of human nature controlling them. Maybe I should have said "whores of the ruling class".
They should live up to that responsibility
I agree. And, we should apply the same standards to doctors, lawyers, farmers, etc.
The big professional/ethical deficit in our democracies, to my mind, lies with journalists. What they do, and don't do, poison the entire political landscape. Bad politicians and bad policies are but symptoms of the root cause: bad media. One could argue that bad media, in turn, is the inevitable answer to bad media consumers, but I don't think that's a good excuse. Journalists can and should have professional standards and talk about what's important from all valid angles.
Specialized blogs and forums such as this makes a big difference in the media landscape compared to 15 years ago, so I feel there is long term hope.
It's a sad fact that there are always people around who will play loose with the rules- if there are any rules- and put other people and the environment at risk.
The best professional regulatory system , and really so far as I know r the only one that has worked even passably well, is the one we use in most western countries now.
In a nutshell, this system requires university level training in an accredited setting, the candidate passing a professional examination when he finishes his sties, and the issuance of a license to practice by either a state or maybe in some cases the federal govt.
The profession itself, as a whole , maintains a code of ethics and sets various standards to be met in practice. There is usually a state or federally sanctioned and appointed body, composed mostly of professionals in the field, with the power to examine the conduct and performance of any individual working in the field.
Such bodies of regulators usually have the power y to suspend or revoke the license to practice , thereby in effect barring a an incompetent or unethical individual from the profession.
Practicing without a license is generally a criminal offense punishable by fine and jail.
But as good as this system looks, on paper, it fails quite frequently in real life.
Sadly, the primary regulatory pressure on professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) in the US comes from the tort system.
Self-regulation is very, very poor.
Yes, self regulation works poorly, because the people, businesses, and organizations supposedly regulated eventually manage to capture the regulatory apparatus and subvert it to their own ends.
. Hence lawyers manage to get ever more laws passed, increasing the need for lawyers. Most of what they do is unnecessary at best and highly counterproductive at other times,
In my state, hairdressers got a law passed that requires two years of training to cut and style hair. You can get an registered nurses professional license in two years!
This sort of thing is a large part of the reasoning behind my being a conservative.
Govt is necessary, and as times change, the need for govt intervention changes too.
But in the end, the price of freedom is self reliance and or eternal vigilance.
We need Obama care now, no doubt about it.
But we would have been fine without it, if it weren't for the lack of a true free market in health care, the tax burden imposed on the people in the field, the desire of too many people to get something for nothing thru so
called free employment insurance, lawsuits, and the insatiable appetite of govt for more money, more control.
Medical care in the end is the sort of monster that in the hands of govt has the potential to destroy a society .
I am now at the age where it is to my advantage, personally, to advocate for unlimited free care- a million dollars worth , or five millions worth, since I no longer work.
And as the technology continues to advance, it will become common place for the well to do to so spend several times that much , routinely, personally In twenty years it may be possible to buy a new custom grown heart, or liver, a perfect match,..Being somewhat egalitarian by disposition, I want my million too...........even if it bankrupts my younger relatives............
I shouldn't forget that bankers captured the existing regulatory apparatus intended to protect our own economy and workers and made it possible to send enough of our economic base overseas to create the final increment of need that has resulted in the passage of this new law.
The cost of Fukishima is *FAR* greater than 80 billion euros that you compare to the German 100 billion investment in solar. That number is so low as to be lie.
First, the DIRECT costs of the disaster are estimated to be 80 billion euros. That is clearly far too low - a political number that will rise & rise, and then rise some more, as the generations of Japanese working on cleaning up the site pass one to the other.
There is the cost to build and operate the six nukes, That is tens of billions there.
There is the cost to properly decommission the three nukes that did not explode - in a "less than optimum" environment.
There is the cost of waste disposal. Since humanity has never quite actually properly disposed of nuclear waste, we do not know how much it costs. And the other wastes were from properly operating nukes - Fukishima nuke waste is a completely scrambled mess !
There is the cost of the land taken out of human use for centuries.
There is the cost of radiation in the ocean (zero cost except inedible fish by your calculations).
And there is the immense toll in human suffering that you discount to zero (except maybe temporary housing costs). Just the impact on human lives to date (not over yet) is a greater than an 80 billion euro cost !
Germany will get over a century of clean electricity from their 100 billion euros in solar As far as I know, the installation of solar in Germany did not displace one German (vs. more than 160,000 in Japan).
What will Japan get from Fukishima besides a small % of their electricity in the past and generations of clean-up in the future ?
Germany has the *MUCH* better deal !
Nukes are better than coal - yes - but MUCH worse than renewables. See EdF for the cost of new British nukes (£93 to £97/MWh, inflation adjusted).
Efficiency, renewables and pumped storage should be installed as the first, second and third choice. Then nukes, with all their problems, as a last reluctant choice.
Best Hopes for Better Choices,
Alan
However given our propensity for making industrial messes, the total amount of uncontained mess generated by the world's nuclear power plants is small when compared to amount of electricity nuclear has generated. This is no small consideration.
The tech will move forward and will remain a major contributor to our basket of power sources. It's not either or when it comes to nukes and renewables, not by a long shot. There is a whole big, huge mountain of fossil fuel use that needs to be displaced and we've yet to start on that in any meaningful way.
Could you explain further? 160,000 displaced, and you say €80 billion is too low a figure. Let's divide - it's €500,000 each. I and my family (of four) would move to an adjacent town in a heartbeat if given €2 million.
I don't agree. 4.7 GW aged 30-40 years. Ten billions, ok, but not more.
I agree that the number is political and will rise, but the actual costs will be even more political: they will become whatever is needed to get the media posses off the politicians backs. And I don't think you give the Japanese enough credit. I suspect they will have greenfielded the site within 20 years.
That cost, whatever it is, is nothing but a regulatory construct. We'll pay what we think we can afford. Safety-wise, it doesn't matter. (Diminishing returns on safety.)
Only the actual reactor site will be out for that long.
I guess you meant to say "decade"? Also, the solar expansion is bundled with new coal plants, so it is not very clean.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is: How many new homes would €100 billion build? I'd say some 500,000. That's the loss to Germans.
Fukushima net generation was almost 900 TWh. At 29 lives saved/TWh compared to coal, I'd say the plant saved 26,000 lives. But I think we should view Fukushima not isolated, but in the context of (at least!) all of Japan's nuclear plants. Nuclear power in Japan produced about 260 TWh/year. Germany's PV produced less than 30 TWh in 2012. So it's obvious that Japan's deal is far better.
Did you forget that Hoover just told you that this is just a negotiation offer, and that wind gets a significantly higher strike price? (Also, EdF is the most expensive act in town.)
Sadly, as long as we tell ourselves that, the CO2 levels will keep rising at meteoric rates.
You have some good points, but unfortunately, I am packing to leave for a Climate Change conference.
£500,000 per person for compensation is about right. Close to $1 million for the terror, the radiation exposure, the loss of community (in a society that highly values that), the associated mental illness & stress, the loss of all that they own (is that included in the $80 billion clean-up ?) - the things that greatly increase mortality among refugees.
You and your family might have a choice as to whether to move or not for $XX - they did not. It was forced on them under very bad conditions. And they had little choice in where to go as well from reports. A massive human tragedy caused by nuclear power.
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You underestimate the time it takes for one of (from memory) one of the cesium isotopes to decay. Like Chernobyl, it will be over a century until new people can settle close to Fukishima.
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Renewables take MUCH less time to build than new nukes, and their cost overruns are trivial in comparison. Just ask the Finns :-) And EdF costs are in-line with the risks of nuclear power and no one is rushing in with a better offer for new nukes. So the Brits, given their perverse aversion to on-shore wind, will either pay or go dark. EdF holds the cards I think.
And, yes, nukes are better than coal - but that is very faint praise indeed.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Good luck on the CCC!
I guess you're fairly rich. To me, €500K is massive amounts of money. But I do agree that it is far better to be given a choice.
Regarding cesium, it halves in 30 years. The original zone is approximately a half circle of 30 km radius, or 1400 km^2 (500 square miles). After 30 years, only 700 km^2 should remain, after 60 years, 350 km^2, after 90 years 175 km^2, after 120 years, 88 km^2 and so on.
If you consider that time is money, and money is time, renewables are far slower than nuclear power.
Sorry, I don't understand that statement.
It seems others are knocking on the door, actually. Russians and others. However, the Brits original requests were fairly peculiar, so EdF was the only taker at that particular moment in time. In other parts of the world, Koreans, Russians, American and Japanese sells reactors.
Despite the fact that China pumps more subsidies in nuclear than any other country in the world, Chinese Wind power production already surpassed Chinese nuclear power production: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/758511.shtml
And China has had nuclear power for longer than wind power.
According to the taxpayer payed IAEA only one new nuclear power plant has been connected to the grid this year, while 4 nuclear power plants have already been shut down. Apparently despite being heavily subsidized for many decades, nuclear is not really taking off.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/nuclear-socialism_508830.html
I'm not sure it is meaningful to talk of subsidies with regards to China. It produces nuclear power very cheaply, though, and according to their plans, the higher wind generation is temporary.
Calculations of subsidies, such as the one you present, usually mostly consists of imaginary insurance and damage costs, unrelated military costs, tax breaks that the whole economy is given and so on. I agree nuclear is not taking off, but the reason is heavy-handed regulation and cheap fossils (and to some extent extreme subsidies to renewables).
The text you present seems unreasonable. How can a 7.5 billion loan guarantee (with a fee of 0.88 billion attached) transfer 14.8 billion!?
Der Speigel has a revealing piece on the German experiment, and how it disproportionally affect the poor.
Calculations of subsidies, such as the one you present, usually mostly consists of imaginary insurance and damage costs, unrelated military costs, tax breaks
I'm sorry to crush your nuclear unicorn and rainbow dreams, but you are simply wrong:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/nuclear-socialism_508830.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
Not to mention the subsidizes decommissioning of old nuclear power plants and nuclear waste repositories:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/23/britain-nuclear-atomi...
Not to mention the decade long nuclear energy research subsidies:
Not to mention that IAEA, Euratom and nuclear regulatory bodies are also paid by the international taxpayers.
I asked how a 7.5 billion loan guarantee (with a big fee attached) could result in a transfer of 14.8 billion. I pointed out that these calculations of nuclear subsidies always were unreasonable. You respond with mere repetition of your claims and links. May I humbly ask why?
It is not nuclear power's fault that the electricity market is very strangely rigged. Actually, the law you point out, just as many other "subsidies", is due to lawmakers acknowledging and trying to fix that their pre-existing regulation gives unreasonable effects.
Providing enormous amounts of power at a low cost and without any significant environmental impact. They will produce about as much electricity per year, for 60 years, that the first $130 billion of German PV will during its 20 year life time. So the PV costs about (60/20)*(130/24) = 16 times as much money. Isn't that a bit more eye-popping?
This is usually military related and due to very old research. Civilian nuclear power is in most countries required to set aside funds for such things. Also, I have to ask - if errors were made in the nuclear arena in the 40-ies to 70-ies, does that motivate the extreme handouts to solar power and off-shore wind today? Does two wrongs make a right?
(I won't go into how cleanup and decommissioning costs are inflated by at least an order of magnitude, probably two, due to excessive regulation.)
Again, a lot is military related. Also, I think it is reasonable to put a lot of research money into the most compact and clean energy source we have, one that is cheap and proven at that. Renewables has nowhere near the potential when it comes to low resource use and footprint, low costs, stable or load following operation, scale and so on.
In most countries, that money is dwarfed by the arbitrary taxes that governments are milking off the nuclear operators, not to mention the extreme benefits to consumers that low-cost, low-environmental footprint electricity provides.
While I have no interest in arguing against nuclear, it's worth pointing out that your calculation is deeply misleading, as it ignores the current and expected future costs of solar PV despite talking about future costs.
The nuclear plants in question are expected to generate somewhere around 3GW starting in ~5 years, for a current cost of $24B. Generating that same amount of power in Florida via solar PV would require roughly 18GWp of solar cells (17% capacity factor); at $2/W, that's $36B.
Operations and maintenance would be substantially higher for nuclear, but grid-related costs (e.g., storage) much higher for solar. Overall levelized cost of energy is probably higher for solar, but likely not by more than a factor of 2 or so.
That's close enough, in my opinion, that reasonable arguments can be made for either energy source.
There are certainly different ways to look at this. Perhaps starting the nuclear industry in the US again should be compared to starting the PV industry in Germany? That was my thinking, anyway. And if you look at the cost estimates of nuclear plants, the second reactor in a pair is always substantially cheaper.
If I believed each reactor, for ever and ever, would cost $12 billion, I wouldn't recommend nuclear either. But, for instance, the UAE deal put Korean reactors at $5 billion a piece. China has just sold two reactors to Pakistan for under $5 billion, which is its first international contract, and I expect China to rapidly sell more, as they are reportedly building at home for $2/W.
I don't agree that operation and maintenance would be substantially higher for nuclear. Inverter breakdown alone probably makes it the other way around. I would put solar at more like 5 times nuclear in the US, and more than 10 times in China.
Nuclear O&M in the US is 1.9 cents per kWh, right? How do you calculate inverter repair costs?
The number of forced evacuees is a bit low because Japan was being cheap and only evacuated people within 30 km of the NPP whereas they should have evacuated everyone within a distance of 80 km. It really sucks to be in that area where people should have evacuated but neither the government or TEPCO would pay. Externalize costs....
€500,000 per person to cover the loss of homes, possessions, businesses, farms and government infrastructure is a skewed average. A homeowner would get quite a bit less.
A semicircle with a radius of 30 km. contains 1.4 Gm2. €80 billion means Japan paid €57 / m2. If a house is on a lot measuring 25 m x 30 m, Japan paid €42,800 for the house, property, possessions, job loss and relocation by that metric. Would €42,800 be enough for you to gleefully move?
Costs and Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster, Steven Starr, Physicians for Social Responsibility, 19 November 2012
Germany spends €2000 billion on fuel imports within 20 years.
And those fuel imports do not generate local jobs which pay taxes and reduce the unemployment rate and they also don't keep producing power after 20 years as opposed to a PV-roof...
PV doesn't displace much fuel imports, and the jobs it generates (i.e. destroys) is a drag on the economy.
Actually, besides the fact that PV displaces fossil fuel generation, renewable energies which boost the local economy have already reduced fossil fuel imports by €6.4 billion in the year 2009 (when oil prices were low). In addition, German companies exported €12 billion in renewable technologies in the same year:
http://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/uploads/media/DurchblickKostenNutze...
While Germany is export world champion, France has a record unemployment rate. Apparently the massive French subsidies for nuclear power haven't really paid out so far.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business...
http://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/konjunktur/deutschlands-aussenhandelsu...
Yes, perhaps PV has displaced NG and coal has displaced nuclear. The net result, however, is clearly that CO2 emissions rise alongside PV generation!
I'm sorry to have to object again, but this is the broken window fallacy in a new shape. One cannot spend €200 billion on virtually nothing and claim it boosts the economy. The spending is what's seen. You disregard what's not seen, i.e. alternative uses of money.
Of course they have. The size of the German economy and of the French economy is likely not affected very much by their choice of power generation. However, what those sizes of economies buys the two countries differ. While Germans have shiny black stuff on their roofs, the French families have a new car. (And if the Germans have more or newer cars, it is despite wasting money on shiny black stuff, not because of it.)
Or, in other words, the Germans can devote part of their GDP to PV and they will be as rich in a GDP per capita measurement, but they will actually have a lower standard of living than they otherwise would.
One cannot spend €200 billion on virtually nothing
You keep on throwing around false numbers.
Feed in tariffs for PV in Germany are between 10.06 cents/kWh and 14.54 cents/kWh:
http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/cln_1912/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitaetund...
For comparison: Based on the current gasoline price Americans, pay about 4 times more per kWh for the mechanical energy to move their cars around.
PV production in the year 2012 was 27.9 billion kWh. That's €6 billion for actually produced electricity (unlike the billions subsidies for new nuclear power plants which haven't even been built and therefore haven't even produced a single kWh):
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromprodu...
Greater job creation doesn't mean higher costs: it means lower average salaries (so more jobs per buck) and more local expenditures with a greater multiplier.
Hi Jerome,
Thanks for your last column, and also thanks for being the unwitting connection to my past six happy years on TOD. :-) I followed one of your posts from Daily Kos that led to here. Since those six years ago, I've been one of the folks busy developing community sail transport in the Puget Sound. Please follow us if you'd like on Facebook or Twitter. Fair winds!
The post has a lot of interesting information but also have major faults:
* The cost is NOT "relatively low". It has been in excess of 130 billion euros, or 6500 euros per family of four, just for the generation capacity. Significant additional money has been put into strengthened grids, backup solutions and such.
* The result of these investments is abysmal. The same money would easily have replaced all Germany's coal generation, if put into nuclear power.
* To imply that the costs are being borne by incumbent utilities is misleading. The major costs lie in the EEG surcharge that consumers pay and will continue to pay for many years to come. It is furthermore meaningless to try to separate costs to companies from costs to people, because companies are owned by people (sometimes as in government owned) and also, company profits are heavily taxed.
* I wouldn't assume these changes are irreversible. Fairly long lived might be a better description. As power prices are fairly low in the summer and in daytime due to PV generation, PV owners whose feed-in-tariffs have expired might opt not to replace broken inverters and such. Also, PV panels have limited life and the recent cost cutting by Chinese manufacturers put the quality of the panels in doubt.
* The German electricity market is extremely artificial, but there still is no good reason making it even more artificial by capacity markets and such. This should be sorted out by the least profitable plants going out of business until what remains get high enough spot prices to turn a healthy profit even at lower capacity factors. This is how markets works and should work. The reason for capacity markets is purely political, to try to hide the real costs of renewables by additional subsidies and regulations.
* Each MWh of renewables has NOT replaced fossils lately. They have replaced nuclear generation! Any reduction in fossil generation in the coming few years will be temporary, as the major decommissioning of nuclear power is slated for late in this decade.
Thanks for your detailed answer, and let me react in turn
Such a number is meaningless - it is a gross cost that does not include the value of the kWh already produced (which would have had a cost from whatever other sources) and, more importantly, includes the cost of the MWh to be produced over many years, given that wind turbines and solar panels already installed can generate power with very low running costs.
I am generally sympathetic to nuclear power, if done right (which I consider to be - have it state-owned (to capture the upside given that the public bears the downside risks anyway) and, more specifically, state-financed (to take advantage of lower funding costs and longer horizons). France did that right 30 years ago, but seems unable to replicate it today (in particular due to EU rules which prevent state funding, but also due to a loss of competence, and the growing complexity of the new plants) and it's not so obvious that nuclear kWh are cheaper than alternatives today. But I generally agree that a lots-of-nukes policy is a possible alternative.
The EEG component is visible in the graphs above, so people can decide for themselves if it is the major cost or not. I also disagree that the fact that companies doe not pay the EEG is irrelevant. It is highly relevant to how that cost was shared.
yes, agree, the impact will last for as long as the existing renewable capacity will remain. But that's long enough to have an impact on investment decisions for quite a while, which is sufficient for our purposes here.
That would rule our nukes, and all plants other than fossil fuel plants.
Just in the past 2 years, yes. I agree that Germany should have gotten rid of its coal plants before its nuclear plants. But as noted, the coal power surge was also the result of temporary factors, and I expect the long term trend of coal plants being replaced by gas plants, and both being replaced by renewables, to continue.
Thanks for your reply. Some thoughts:
I agree, but we all have additional knowledge that combines with this to make it meaningful. We all know that the major money has gone into PV, with feed-in-tariffs many times higher than, for instance, on-shore wind. We know that the current PV generating capacity is only worth a tenth or less of the money put into it. So the gross cost is approximately the net cost.
We need to keep in mind that while the EEG component is minor, the generation it supports is also minor.
First, I hope Germany and the EU raise the CO2 taxes and make coal pay for its other types of pollution as well. Second, I don't want to get into any deep argument about nuclear here, but it is possible to do it fairly cheaply. It depends on the regulatory burden you decide to put on it, and on whether you're willing to take the initial costs of a ramping phase, after which economies of scale sets in.
I expect Germans to decommission their nuclear and then not making any more progress with renewables. I really hope I'm wrong, though.
I don't see any way around capacity markets if you want the same quality of electricity as today. By "quality" I mean as much power as you want, when you want it, at a predictable price.
If you are prepared to accept intermittent power then you can have electricity too cheap to meter -- you merely pay the capital cost of the panels, turbines, and grid, plus a percentage towards profit.
If you want anything above this minimum, you must pay for plant and fuel to fill in the gaps. Plant which might stand idle much of the time, but which needs stockpiles of coal or stored gas to be available.
The alternative is to pay a demand-related premium price to get the other guy's renewable power diverted to you. And accepting there might not be enough power at any price.
It seems you think either we have fossil capacity markets or no fossils? If so, I don't agree. If we subsidize renewables, and allow fossils, and they coexist on an otherwise free market, then fossils will come to enjoy a demand-related premium price that will make them profitable at a low capacity factor. And we will have an as even electricity supply as we are prepared to pay for.
as even electricity supply as we are prepared to pay for
There's the problem. To keep fossil plants profitable if they are only generating for a few hours a month, tariffs have to be extremely high during those periods. This is politically unacceptable, and not possible to do if the required meters are not installed.
The danger point is when it pays utility investors to cut their losses and sell their plants off for scrap.
"Grid stability." I don't know what that means, but obviously there are technical reasons why generating stations in excess of immediate requirements are needed.
So renewables are politically unacceptable if costs are not hidden? With some sadness, I have to agree.
* The cost is NOT "relatively low". It has been in excess of 130 billion euros, or 6500 euros per family of four, just for the generation capacity. Significant additional money has been put into strengthened grids, backup solutions and such.
This is complete bogus.
1. This is over a time frame of 20 years!
Germany spends €2000 billion on fuel imports in 20 years. So with your false math that's €100,000 per family of four which they give to your oil sheik instead of the tax-paying German PV-installer.
2. German families obviously don't pay for the energy needed to produce an exported BMW. That's you or the American family.
Btw, Germany is export world champion: http://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/konjunktur/deutschlands-aussenhandelsu...
No, it has been installed over the last five, and the costs were take at installation time, if not before.
For oil. What has that got to do with PV?
They mostly give the money to the Chinese manufacturers.
No, that's not true, the costs are taken by the German families. The price they fetch for the BMW is unrelated to the costs of energy. Also, please have a look at the Der Speigel link I posted in a comment above.
And was even before it embarked on this enormous capital destruction scheme.
Your comparison of installation costs between PV and nuclear are heavily bias on behalf of nuclear because operating costs of PV are nearly zero while operating and disposal costs of nuclear exceed the cost of installation. With wind and PV one must spend most of the money initially but with nuke and fossil fuels, one pays through out the lifetime of the plants. Amortize it.
I'm sorry, but most in the know agrees that PV and wind has just as high costs in O&M, and that nuclear costs are also very dominated by the initial investment.
helpless, a member for 5 days and 17 hours, the last nuclear shill at The Oil Drum. hehe
"Shill" - you're a hell of a lot more kind than I would be. Downthread he suggests that the decommissioning costs of Wind and Nukes are roughly the same. Apparently he's unaware of a thing called "radiation" and the need to store the spent fuel for 50,000 years or so until it cools off. My guess is, should that particular cost be taken into consideration things wouldn't look quite so rosy for nuclear. Then there's the explosions and evacuations and cancers. As long as nuclear plants are operated they will continue to explode - it's a non-zero probability event, and given enough time non-zero probabilities occur. This means more Chernobyls, more Fukushimas, more Harrisburgs, more Sellafields. It's simply not a technology that flaw-ridden humans are capable of harnessing and the failure mode is just beyond human comprehension.
It's debt in its worst form - kicking the true cost to the people in the future who get none of the benefits of the power they produce and have to live with all of the toxic, radioactive waste they leave behind. And Yahweh/God/Allah/Zeus/Athena/Þor/Odin help us if we have another Carrington Event because every single reactor on Earth will go critical and blow.
Hi, thanks for a great article. There was a lot that I agreed with, but on the subject of offshore wind, there is quite a different perspective from here in the UK where we are, surprisingly for us, the leaders in deployment of this technology (we were not the first, but we have built the most so far).
The comment I need to dispute is this:
Followers of peak oil are very familiar with the concept of the best (and cheapest) resources being developed first with each subsequent site (roughly) less attractive than the last. There is a race in the opposite direction for technology improvements to try to outstrip the worsening site conditions.
In the UK, which has far more coastline per head of population, and far more wind resource than Germany, that race has unfortunately so far been comprehensively lost at every stage. Dramatic improvements in technology have indeed been made, especially in respect of foundations and scale (both turbines and projects). Yet our offshore wind gets more expensive, and more expensive, and more expensive.
Unfortunately there are a mash of different subsidy structures that make it hard to compare like with like, but using some rough modelling, we can trace the evolution of the subsidy structure like this (the units are "ROCs" which is a UK Green Energy Certificate that is index linked and worth about £42/MWh today):
2002 - 2008:
Subsidy: 1 ROC/MWh plus capital grants
Levelised subsidy: 1.4 - 1.6 ROCs/MWh
Projects: several "Round 1" 90MW projects built
2008:
Subsidy: 1.5 ROCs/MWh
Levelised subsidy: 1.5 ROCs/MWh
Projects: Zero
2009:
Subsidy: 2 ROCs/MWh
Levelised subsidy: 2 ROCs/MWh
Projects: Several "Round 2"(300 - 750 MW) projects built
2012:
Subsidy: 1.9 ROCs/MWh for projects commissioning in 2015, 1.8 ROCs/MWh for projects commissioning in 2016
Levelised: 1.9, 1.8 ROCs/MWh
Projects: Zero
2013:
Subsidy: Flat rate "CFD" (index linked) of £155/MWh
Levelised: About 2.6 ROCs/MWh
Projects: All undeveloped live "round 2" projects expected to be delivered, mostly in the 500 MW range.
The Future:
??
I was at a developer meeting about 1 month ago with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (the UK energy ministry), where a policy wonk gave a presentation about how the CFD prices had been calculated. An offshore wind developer stood up in Q&A (he was red faced and slightly angry) and asked whether the basis for calculating the offshore wind rate was "Round 2" or the next generation "Round 3" sites. The wonk blushed and said "Round 2". The audience (or at least those not from offshore wind) sniggered. Everyone knew what it meant - both government and developers know the rate is not high enough for the next series of offshore UK sites to be financed and constructed. Yet higher subsidies still must be provided.
I am not saying this to be clever or prove you wrong. In the UK there is a genuine failure to understand and accept that although offshore wind energy potential here is massive, each new step further offshore or into deeper water increases the cost by far more than incremental technology improvements can offset at the moment. UK policy is completely in denial about this fundamental dynamic and it is leading us down a very dangerous path as we urgently re-configure our energy system. I hope for Germany either to avoid the same mistakes or (preferably) change the script - but this will take a major step change in technology that does not today appear to be on the table. Good luck!
What is needed is some technical perspective on what aspects of offshore are contributing to the high costs, and an assessment of how those costs can be reduced via R&D or scaling. Offshore has a very short history compared with onshore and the cost per unit energy of onshore has dropped approx. exponentially over the past 30 years, so it is not unreasonable to expect future drops in the cost of offshore.
hello, Hoover
I understand that your country is in a 'damned if we do' situation in respect to paying for offshore wind. Germany is in a similar situation overall.
I will hazard a remark to the effect that paying for off shore wind now is only a hardship- a great one, no doubt, but one that the Uk will survive.
I doubt the country can survive another fifty years without a substantial renewable energy infrastructure, except as an impoverished backwater.
People are all too quick to forget how fast things change.
I used to have friends (American soldiers who fought there now dead of old age )who vividly described to me the ox cart and mud path economy of South korea in the early fifties, although granted the country was even then well started towards industrialization. Korea today is an industrial giant , small though she is, physically.
Any country reliant on exports to pay for essential imports, as the UK is for food and energy, is at substantial risk of economic collapse over the long term- other countries will work cheaper rather than not work at all, creating a race to the bottom. The only way to win- temporarily- is to maintain a strong technological edge.
My thinking in terms of supporting renewables is evolving towards thinking of them as strategic defense assets.
All countries that amount to a hill of beans, excepting a few small potatoes that shelter under the wings of powerful allies, maintain a standing military establishment at enormous current expense, on the chance it will be desperately needed in a hurry at some point- at which time, the cost of it will be forgotten . Countries that have failed to maintain such a deterrent force are usually short lived, it's a darwinian world after all.
I don't think i will have much more to add to this debate, but here is a link describing the current situation in Germany. it's well worth a read, but like everything else in the MSM, the reader should keep it in mind that the picture presented is one sided and geared somewhat to selling advertising in the publication, etc, rather tan informing the reader in a balanced fashion of both sides of the story.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-ger...
It's past time we started thinking of renewable energy as a strategic asset, like oil in the ground and good farmland. My country has already spent more than enough treasure, and a goodly amount of blood, for no other real purpose than maintaining access to foreign oil, to have built a robust renewable energy infrastructure of our own- one perhaps even robust enough to allow us to convert our natural gas too liquid motor fuels, thereby freeing us from dependence on foreign oil for decades .
And in a few more decades, there may well be damned little oil for sale at any price in international markets.
Hi OldFarmerMac, generally I do agree with you about renewables in the UK, in fact I have rather staked my career on it!
BUT - the path of deployment is also very important and the type of deployment. For instance the UK government wants to build 30 GW of new offshore wind by 2020, and this pushes us way too fast along the (bad) increasing site cost curve while giving no time for the (good) technology curve to catch up. For instance most of that 30 GW is in very deep water, and is being developed with no thought at all to floating turbines. That is not currently a financeable technology at commercial scale, but it is only in the early testing phase, with time it will catch up but if we build all 30 GW now without it, it will be too late.
I suppose this will all be considered a detail in the very long run, but for now I think it matters a lot.
P.S. Germany and Japan are two of the most excellent countries in the world but with little or no military standing and very few energy resources of their own.
The UK also has excellent ONSHORE wind resources, potentially low cost but undeveloped because of a uniquely British NIMBY attitude towards wind.
That attitude will cost Britain dearly, perhaps VERY dearly, in the future.
Alan
Yes, I agree, although it is a complex issue. There are lots of appropriate sites but transmission is the main problem. We are a long thin country and power flows heavily from north to south already. All the best sites (you do need a certain distance from people) are in Northern England and Scotland (and Northern Wales). Transmission capacity is getting upgraded slowly but it's a GW or two here or there - not game changing stuff. What is shocking is seeing offshore wind farms getting put in around Scotland and Northern England and taking up transmission capacity that should go to much cheaper onshore wind - that makes me very angry when I think about it.
Yes, Germany and Japan today owe their existence as free and prosperous countries to their sheltering under the wings of the American military empire. Otherwise, they would have has to support an extensive standing military establishment of their own.
They aren't small potatoes except in the sense of their current military establishments, and they have done a lot to back us yankees up in international affairs.
i should have made note of them in my original comment.
They might have succeeded in remaining free, but at a great cost, thereby reducing their living standards considerably.
The world is a very dangerous place, and it will remain so.
One of the paradoxes of history is that the atom bomb has prevented direct hot war between all the major world powers ever since WWII. neither country has a snowball's chance on a red hot stove of defending itself, at this very moment, from attack by a major power intent on expansion.
Fortunately, there are no major powers, other than us yankees, able to to attack either of them - for now. We aren't going to attack either of them, for many reasons.
The one you mention is sufficient in and of itself.They have nothing worth stealing that we need.
In thirty years or forty, the situation may be entirely different.
It's past time we started thinking of renewable energy as a strategic asset
Good point. If you have depleting fossil fuels you must use them to build the energy supplies you will need once they run out. Which will be nuclear or renewable -- yer pays yer money and makes yer choice.
But it seems the large reserves of coal and gas push their peaks beyond the economic lifetime of solar and wind installations. I think the pollution is a better reason to get off coal and gas.
Any reason that convinces somebody currently opposed to renewable energy to change their mind- and their vote- is a good one.
If some reasons are not valid, I fear the backlash.
Mac, I greatly appreciate your posts and usually agree with you, particularly about Germany (having married a German). However, this comment immediately led me to remember something old Nietzsche wrote: Es gibt keine perfidere Art, einer Sache zu schaden, als sie absichtlich mit fehlerhaften Gründen zu verteidigen. (There is no more perfidious way to harm a cause than to defend it intentionally with false arguments. Sorry for the inadequate translation.) It comes back to haunt one.
Hi Barbara,
In general, I must agree with you in respect to the quote you have provided.
I plead guilty to painting too fast with too broad a brush!
I usually take a few minutes to think my comments over, but this time I forgot to do so.
In times of great crisis, it may be that exceptions to the policy of truth are justified if the liar is convinced survival is at stake. Of course this is a question of judgement- and scoundrels are always in plentiful supply.
I find it hard to trust any body in a position of power these days.
We better stick to the truth, and hope the public everywhere comes to understand that in the end, it is either renewables or collapse back to a preindustrial society- - and that's the bright side of collapse.
It's past time we started thinking of renewable energy as a strategic asset
It's past time we start a renewable strategic energy reserve similar to that for oil. Set up a TVA/BPA style agency to create a floor for energy prices and provide a more stable market for excess energy. I imagine large scale pumped hydro projects funded by the state and policies to buy excess power generation at a low floor level (i.e. a constant bid price at some low floor level). When prices hit that level excess power is purchased and used for pumped hydro (or any other large scale storage options). Once the bid is hit the entity would buy power back up to a higher range but still a depressed rate. Once it exceeds the higher range buying stops until it goes back to the low rate again.
A similar scheme would be used to sell power out of the reserve but from high rates down. Why not set up a strategic energy reserve to provide some peaking capacity on the highs and the lows? Wouldn't this be a better approach then current feed-in tariffs and other subsidies as renewables start to transition to a disruptive energy producer as noted in the post.
EdF, according to reports, will get £93 to £97 per MWh, inflation adjusted, for 40 years for power from two EPRs.
Why not give wind comparable ?
Also, my plan for importing Icelandic power into Scotland would be economic at such rates.
http://island-export-energy.blogspot.com/
Best Hopes for Rational Gov't Policies,
Alan
Well - that is what EDF is asking for, the UK government is holding out for mid to high £70s per MWh. We'll see who blinks first.
Anyway, under the same "CFD" subsidy scheme, onshore wind gets £100/MWh and offshore wind gets £155/MWh. The tariffs are, in theory, supposed to digress over time for later projects to £95 and £135/MWh respectively, but frankly no one believes that for wind (solar PV - yes). It's all under public consultation at the moment and will be confirmed in December.
The nuclear price is a case by case agreement following negotiation with the developers/investors.
Re: Iceland, I don't think anyone really knows what a link like that would cost. Periodically they study a link to Norway for the cheap hydro. It always turns out that it was going to cost a lot more than they thought and the project gets shelved.
Hoover,
I would not like to lose contact with you. I have worked for Landsvirkjun in the past and still have some contacts.
Since you do not have contact info in your profiel, could you send me an eMail ?
Thanks,
Alan
Done, and profile updated.
An Iceland-Scotland power link is technically feasible, but:-
Very expensive - I would guess £5 to £10 billion
High political/international risk
High commercial risk - very few manufacturers could build the cables, and very few subsea contractors could install them.
I happen to work for one of the subsea contractors that could do it, but I wouldn't like to be the project manager responsible for steering this one to a successful conclusion!
I fail to see the political/international risk.
Iceland bested the Royal Navy in both Cod Wars and things have been pretty peaceful since. Some of the proposed Norwegian HV DC lines are about as long and the undersea typography is a bit more challenging off the coast of Norway. I do propose landfall in the Faeroe Islands, which reduces the uninterrupted length of the undersea sections.
I would like to discuss this further, but you have no contact information in your profile. Please send me an eMail if you would.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Hoover,
This is not really true - the cost of the early projects looks cheaper than it really was because the contractors underbid and had to swallow rather consequent losses - so the full cost was not paid by the investors, but by others. Over the past few years, project costs have been relatively stable (at around or below 3M£/MW) despite increasingly challenging locations (ie further form the coast and in deeper waters), suggesting that costs were being brought down, or economies of scale were made on the more difficult project.
Germany is already at the edge of what will be done (40m waters, 100km distances to coast or more) and costs are known for that (around or slightly above 4M€/MW), and will slowly be trending down. Round 3 projects are no harder than the current German projects, technically.
UK projects tend to be more expensive than German ones because the regulatory system was focused on market mechanism, with price risk, which are harder for investors to assess and thus they required a higher risk premium - and with the cost of money the single biggest drive of costs, this matters.
.. and apart from that, ( Jerome I don't know if you will buy this or not..) I don't think it's out of the question that there can arise one of these other wind power techniques that could make the offshore playing field change directions quite substantially.. such as the potential for the floating turbines or the Kite-based systems which involve primarily onshore manufacturing, and then far less to almost no field installation compared to tower construction.. and such systems also have a portability and maintenance opportunities that could drastically improve their operating numbers.. so I don't think it's at all a given that we can just expect offshore wind to be stuck following the same general path that it's been on in the past.
Hi Jokuhl, I absolutely acknowledge the role that technology improvements COULD play, floating turbines are probably a long way off but there are a lot of other foundation designs that could reduce costs in deep water.
The problem is, the UK is not hanging around for any of that, we intend to develop our full offshore capacity at the highest conceivable cost and now Germany looks like going the same way.
Almost all of our deployment so far has been based on a simple monopile - the obvious benefit being: only one pile (albeit an expensive one)! The clue is in the name.
The next sites are all in deep water (“Round 3”) - monopiles will not work, they cannot bear the loading, and the main alternative being considered is a jacket foundation - this will require 3 or 4 piles! Foundation costs on monopiles are already 30% of total cost of an offshore wind farm ... you do the maths.
Of course jacket foundations don't HAVE to be piled, you could use gravitation bases or suction anchors. Those things will come with time but again they are many years from being "bankable" technology. Instead of working our way gradually towards that point the current plan is to build the whole lot based on pre-cast piles in 45 meters of water.
Hi Jerome, thanks for responding, but I can’t agree with you on either point.
1. With regards to supply/construction under-bidding, if anything that situation got worse not better. It is only in the last couple of years that contractors reached the point of sanity, during which time no brand-new-build projects have been financed in the UK. Fluor took a truly miserable beating at Greater Gabbard - a Round 2 project that only finished(ish) late last year. The various legal suits and counter-suits will probably last longer than the construction project did. (I know the UK power team at Fluor very well, but my comments are public knowledge).
2. Your point about the risk premium under the RO simply cannot be borne out by events. True, PPAs were hard to get for any renewable project because PPA offtakers had to take a lot of risk in 3 areas:
a. Power price floor - required by lending banks to guarantee a minimum black power income. This is effectively a massive put option, a very expensive instrument to write
b. Especially in the case of wind farms - imbalance risk and price/timing risk (i.e. risk that in the long run power prices are low when it is very windy as in Germany now)
c. Regulatory-related risks that could heavily impact the value of ROCs
of those risks c) was stupid and pointless, a) is a risk that should be socialised in order to bring capacity forward - and I agree with your analysis, there are real benefits to society of doing so. (b) intermittency is a true risk and cost on the system that should never be socialised, and doing so has created big problems in Germany and Denmark that could have been much better and more cheaply mitigated if it had stayed with the owners of those risks/costs.
ANYWAY, risks a and c will now be fully removed (or socialised) under the CFD regime, risk b will be half socialised and half not, in that an hourly reference price will be used (removing any market price effect of surplus wind generation) but imbalance risk will - thank goodness - remain with the generator or will have to be managed at a cost by a PPA.
But, now that all these risks will be removed under the CFD, far from reducing the cost to the consumer, the subsidy has been increased yet again. Comparison is complicated because the tenure has gone down from 20 years to 15 years, but the last 5 years generally do not have a massive NPV impact. Aside from that, the subsidy has moved from a roughly levelised £130/MWh to £160/MWh (LECs included in both numbers) - so readers can judge for themselves whether costs have been reduced by removing market risks. AND, that is only for Round 2 projects. As I said before, Round 3 is still waiting for a FURTHER increase in subsidies to actually get going.
In my view we should massively slow down the rate of deployment of offshore wind, and massively increase the effort to innovate in order to reduce costs. ALL new projects should be required to demonstrate a significant cost-reducing (or performance enhancing) innovation over and above the previous project to get a CFD - there are promising signs on this by the way. What is happening now in the UK cannot be justified to consumers in the long run, we are just building capacity for the sake of it instead of focusing on long term gains.
EDIT UPDATE: I have just been forwarded the following highly relevent press release:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/10296527/Offshore...
A comment in the article makes a telling point:
Right, which means the focus should be on technological innovation to bring down costs, not deploying massive amounts helter skelter regardless.
£1.2 billion in subsidies for an average wind power of 75 MW over 20 years is £.091 / kWh of electricity.
A nuke plant can not run constantly for 20 years because it must be shut down periodically for refueling and maintenance. One would need two 1 GW nuke plants to have a reasonable chance of providing 1 GW constantly for 20 years.
If a 1 GW French nuke costs £1.2 billion to construct, then, assuming an 87% capacity factor, over 20 years it costs £.0079 / kWh of electricity generated. The cost of construction completely ignores the greater operational and disposal costs incurred by nuclear than wind. The government subsidies for nuclear research are not included.
The True Costs of French Nuclear Power states "Flamanville is now expected to produce electricity in 2016, four years later than planned, and 2.7 billion euros over budget." 2.7 billion euros = £2.3 billion which, just the overrun for construction, is higher than his estimated cost.
Nuclear power in France
The retail price suggests France's nuclear power is not reducing the price nearly to the degree that he implies.
"If a 1 GW French nuke costs £1.2 billion to construct, then, assuming an 87% capacity factor, over 20 years it costs £.0079 / kWh of electricity generated."
We only have to change the if-clause a little bit to make it at least a useful conjunctivus irrealis. :-)
Reality check: All reactors of the last (French) design have a good chance to come to more than 4000 Euro/kW, and this with commissining delayed by many years. Capacity factor of the French NPPs is 80%. Capital costs are assumed to be 8%. Therefore, it is more realistic when we assume that 8%*4000 EUR/ 7500 kWh = 4.3 cent/ kWh is the absolute minimum for these reactors without O&M and other costs and with zero profit. In this economic context the NPPs are killed by on-shore wind.
Nukes are generally refuelled when seasonal demand is low. Wind is AFAIK as expensive to operate and decommission as nuclear power.
Let's agree that the EPRs in Finland and France doesn't go well, but that is but two of some 60 ongoing reactor projects. If I carefully choose the worst three percent of all wind projects, I guess I get pretty horrible figures for wind as well.
A new article in today's SPIEGEL (unfortunately only in German, but you can run it through google translate):
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energieautarke-staedte-sind-ei...
Please don't shut down TOD... the story of peak oil will be the subtext and driving force of the whole 21st Century. Oil at $110 today and the drama will be riveting.
The EIA's levelized cost numbers are often used by many (including here), but they fail in one important respect: they assume that all power plant types have the same lifetime, by assuming a 30-year loan payback time for all powerplants. This artificially inflates the cost of long-lived power plants like hydro and nuclear, while at the same time artificially deflates the cost of rapidly degrading powerplants like PV and wind. NREL, for example, uses a 20-year lifetime when computing LCOE for wind.
"degrading powerplants like PV"
PV is going to have the longest lifetime, with typical output degradation of ~0.5%/year. Wind also has a long lifetime with refurbishment of mechanical systems (which nuclear also needs).
Other parts of the PV system will likely give out sooner, and it is not clear that they will survive for long on average. If you don't get subsidies anymore, is it even worth it to replace the inverter when it breaks down after 20 years? If you want to redo your roof, will you scrap the PV (and possibly buy a new one), or will you pay someone to carefully take it apart and assemble it again?
?
The inverter is ~15% of the balance of system costs, compared with a loss of 10% of output over 20 years, it would not make any sense not to replace it. And it not the case that nuclear has no repair costs.
Your are not doing yourself any favors making these weird arguments.
Helpless: TOD member for 5 days 15 hours
Helpless, you are a little late to the show. And I imagine trying to persuade you to change your mind on your perceived benefits of nuclear (or the lack of benefits of renewables) would be, well, helpless.
We've had a few nuclear advocates here on TOD over the years but reading your posts is somehow deja vu all over again. It's a big debate.
My personal opinion is that humans and nuclear don't mix. And that nuclear is dead without government support, subsidies and otherwise unobtainable insurance. And too expensive. And a security hazard.
You may be right about Germany but my hope is that it will lead the way in showing that a transition to renewables is both possible and economic. We shall see :)
The whole world is watching the German energy experiment. Whether it succeeds or fails it will influence policies in other countries. For example if Germany fails to phase out nukes by 2022 as promised the consensus view may be that truly low carbon cannot be achieved without nuclear. Current reporting on the German experiment is laced with caveats. See for example this article in The Energy Collective Germany Sets Another Record: 5.1 Terawatt-Hours of Solar Energy in July. Despite the headline it also points out the 11% increase in coal burning.
We need a high traffic web forum to discuss these issues as they unfold. That's why I hope a successor to TOD emerges. The conclusion on the German energy experiment is a decade away but today's Australian election is partly a referendum on the idea of CO2 pricing. How that works out in practice will emerge over coming weeks and months and I guess other countries will be interested to hear about it.
Can anyone tell me what is the real story about Syria? Or is it slight of hand going on...I don't think that they have much in the way of oil. Is it the Kensyian war economy or is it a power play for more oil...
Its not directly about oil - though it is a convenient route for piping oil (and gas) from Iraq, Iran and the gulf states to Europe rather than having it head east.
There is a lot of speculation floating around about gas pipelines being the driver of the current instability.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/is-syrian-war-about-gas-pipeli...
When do we declare failure, really?
1. When all hope has been abandoned even by the most optimistic greens?
2. When support by the political majority is no more?
3. When progress in renewable penetration stalls?
4. When progress in CO2 emissions stalls?
5. When cumulative costs and carbon emissions are N times as high as with a nuclear based alternative?
I think (1) will never happen. I think (2) will happen at the latest two elections from now (2023?). Probably (3) will happen much earlier. Arguably, it has already happened since solar expansion has slowed considerably. (4) and (5) has already happened.
Great post as always Jerome - thanks for taking the time to explain the impact of the merit order effect so clearly.
Will you still be posting at Eurotrib or Daily Kos in future ?
Thanks Jerome; good reading as ever.
Rgds
Damon
Today Germany, tommorow the world.
http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities...
Wonderful summary, taking us into a new world. I do have one question; I'm not seeing any discussion of demand adaptation to a varying price regime. Some of this would be human behavior, some technological improvements.
For example, I can envision a heat pump hot water heater with oversized storage. Usage would be tied to a variable price structure that is tied to the vagaries of the energy market discussed above. Imagine this multiplied by the millions across the country. This would be a much better match with renewable generation, but would certainly doom the utilities if they remain stuck in their present pattern.
But first we need to get TOU pricing to the consumer, then that market will adapt.
Good thought.
EVs (and PHEVs and EREVs) work beautifully for that too. When 20% of kWh consumption is from EVs, demand adaptation will be a very big factor.
While Nick was writing his comment, I was discussing this debate on the phone with a buddy of mine. Towards the end of the conversation we were discussing ways that abundant mid day power from PV could be used, in a way increasing demand to prop up wholesale electricity prices.
The idea popped into my head that a fleet of battery powered public transit vehicles that, do most of their work during the morning and evening rush hours, could be used to modulate demand. These vehicles could be set up to charge during the mid day PV peak absorbing some of that peak production and to charge after the late evening peak demand period to make up for the loss in demand. Basically making the same argument as Nick, with specific reference to public transit BEVs.
This is relevant to me right now, since I am in the middle of putting together an update to an article on Electric Commercial Vehicles that, was posted on TOD back in 2009.
Alan from the islands