There are gearboxes, bearings, blades, axle and so forth that are subject to quite high stress. Material fatigue eventually wins. You may be able to recycle copper and other valuable materials, but you do have to essentially take the investment cost again, periodically.

As jeppen noted, any complex machinery will have an expected lifespan ... in the end, entropy wins.

What is notable is how quickly within that lifespan the wind generators tend to pay back the energy invested, so that the net EROI is quite high for a well-sited wind generator.

And I'd like to suggest the NGK Sodium-Sulfur battery as a solution, or something equivalent. I don't have any connection with NGK, nor any money invested in it, but I like the design.

• Cheap common elements;
• High power density;
• Long life - thousands of charge/discharge cycles;
• About 85% efficient;
• etc.

It would seem a near ideal complement to wind or solar generation.

Flywheel storage.

The Smart Energy Matrix™ is a design concept for multi-flywheel-based energy storage systems that would provide a long-term sustainable solution for frequency regulation on the electricity grid.

http://www.beaconpower.com/products/EnergyStorageSystems/index.htm Beacon Power Corporation

These are all fair questions, which all deserve answers. Some are not relevant today, but might be in the future

- re the overall energy of wind, I have read that the resource is several orders of magnitudes larger than what we could harvest, so this does not seem to be an issue (no sources at hand right now)

- re birds, the impact has been extensively studied, and other than the well publicized case of Altamont Pass, seems negligible

- re marine impact: studies are under way, the studies I have seen so far seem more positive than negative (wind farms offshores could even become havens for various sea species as there is no fishing).

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/66.Keith.2004.WindAndClimate.e.pdf

Wind transfers heat energy poleward from the equator. Large scale wind power build outs sucking this energy will make the equatorial areas slightly warmer and the polar regions slightly cooler. Greenhouse effect warming is expected to warm the poles more than the tropics, and the wind power climate effect is expected to be less than the climate change you would get from the fossil fuels that are replaced. To some extent this can be mitigated by site selection.

I heard recently of an experiment where the wind turbines at a farm were being shut down for a few hours on summer evenings - the most active time for bats, but relatively calm.

Undoubtedly there will be side effects, and they might be serious - I don't believe we really know yet.

You also need to factor the requirement of how far past peak oil you are. Base load is a 2008 consideration because energy is plentiful. In the future people will adapt to the time of day where energy is available because the alternative will be to do without energy at all.

We need to get these windmills out in the field as fast as we can regardless of their limitations.

If you must obsess about "baseload" power with respect to any single power generation facility, any form of renewables can supply constant output if combined with some form of energy storage.

The issue of concern is not just baseload power; It is load following in general. This concern is not an obsession. It is a question of what the real cost of renewable electricity will be in a post fossil fuel world when the cost of storage, and super grids are taken into account. Since China is still building coal fired power plants like crazy,I am assuming that the era of really cheap replacements for fossil fuels has not yet arrived. If you know of any detailed studies of renewables electricity costs from a total systems perspective (i.e. supplying power for a wide geographical area on an annual basis rather than the cost of providing summer peaking power to Southern California from the Mojave desert), please give some references.

Big Gav a smart grid is not smart enough to make the wind blow when it isn't blowing. You need power that is available all of the time, not just when the sun shine and the wind blows. It is cargo cult science to think that a smat grid will provide power when their isn't any.

I think there are very few who are saying that 'renewable energy doesn't work'. But many more that are saying that most renewables (wind included) create electricity, and the credit crisis is going to stop expansion of liquid fuels creating a larger depletion rate several years down the road. Scaling of ecosystem service renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) will require cheap or at least moderately inexpensive liquid fuels which our current infrastructure rely on - we have to be able to walk before we can run... (note - I am HUGE wind supporter - but we need reducing consumption of liquid fuels while maintaining social fabric is more important and has to be addressed first otherwise wind won't scale in time)

The Wikipedia gives a figure for Danish windmills in 1900 of:

In Denmark by 1900 there were about 2500 windmills for mechanical loads such as pumps and mills, producing an estimated combined peak power of about 30 MW

So c. 1900, that is an average of 12KW peak power per windmill (that is, a device that converts wind power to directly drive a mechanism). Circa 1980 Altamont Pass wind turbines are more like an average 120KW capacity, and modern turbines are up to 5MW (REPower) and 6MW (Enercon).

A tenfold increase in capacity over 80 years would be an annual growth rate of 2.9%.

A 50-fold increase in capacity over 30 years would be an annual growth rate of 13.9%

Given that advances on that particular dimension in less than a century before 1980 gives such a poor indication of progress after 1980, the idea of taking the rate of advance over millenia to predict the rate of advance over the next thirty years would seem to be moronic ... or, more likely, pure demagoguery, intended to give a rationalizing gloss that requires a slight bit of thought and exploration to puncture, to help opponents gloss over the real reasons for their opposition.

The difference here ... between Sweden, eg, buying the coal to produce the electricity domestically, or importing the electricity produced with coal, is the difference between having a caterer use their own kitchen to prepare the food and dispose of the rubbish there, or having a caterer use the customer's kitchen, and dispose of the rubbish there.

Its the same rubbish, its in service of the same customer, we just allocate it to the provider in one case and the customer in the other.

On the other hand, if one is designing a way to reduce emissions by imposing a tax on carbon, why not collect the tax at the mine, or well head? That would capture the tax on fossil fuel, and avoid taxing biofuels.

If we had an international tax, yes. Absent that, we can look at national taxes. And so I would tax fossil fuels and their products the moment they came into contact with my country's economy. For Australia that would mean - when we dig up coal, when we import kerosene, when we pump out natural gas, when we fell trees, and so on.

If we found that the country we were importing from or exporting to also had a carbon tax, I would look to see if it were lower or higher than ours; if lower, I'd tax the difference, if higher, I'd leave it be and not tax it further.

I would probably tax according to how many carbon atoms were in the substance. This would encourage people to find ways to burn the stuff really thoroughly, if they burned it at all.

You can post images and resize them, like so,

[img src="http://www.example.com/table.jpg" width="500"],

replacing [] with <>.

The width is the width in pixels. TOD comment threads are 560 wide, I think.

Jerome, I always admire you work and you skill as a communicator, but I often feel that I don't get the whole story from you.

You ask why supporters of nuclear power criticize wind. First many supporter of wind are harsh critics of nuclear power, so the criticism runs both ways. Beyond that, I am more concerned about fairness and accuracy in criticism, rather than the fact that criticism is made. I am by no means uncritical of nuclear power, and make no secret of my view that the light water reactor is overly complex, expensive, waste producing and having relatively poor energy return given the potential of more advanced reactors. I have also criticized sodium cooled fast breeder reactors which I regard as dangerous, extremely expensive and being much less useful than far cheaper thorium cycle breeder reactors.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/10/is-there-point-to-sodium-cooled...

I criticize wind in relationship to nuclear for several reasons, not the least of which is that nuclear power systems turn out to be cheaper than reliable 24 hour a day reliable wind systems. For example using data on wind costs from ECOWorld:
http://ecoworld.com/blog/2008/08/18/californias-proposition-7/
I calculated the relative costs of a wind 50% wind penetration of California verses producing the same amount of electricity by using obsolescent Light Water reactors costing $8 billion a pop.

I found,

"ECOWorld estimates a capacity factor of 17.5%, a very problematic figure a wind array equal too 119 gigawatts of wind generating name plate capacity, which would cost $297 billion dollars. Too this must be added the cost of new transmission lines. grid upgrades, and massive energy storage units. ECOWorld estimates the minimum cost for wind to be $300 billion. EcoWorld calculate the cost of energy storage to be $350 Million per gWh, and calculate that 100 gWhs of storage is needed, which would run $35 billion for a total cost of $335 Billion. The 350 million per GWh for storage is probably low but I won't argue. At any rate #335 will get you ate least 42 reactors. 42 reactors with average capacity factor of .90 will produce 900 gWhs of power every day. Since we need 500 gWhs, we only need 24 reactors and that will cost $192 billion, or 57% of the cost of a wind generating system. Thus the Green premium will run 43% of nuclear system costs for wind. The Green premium for solar would be an astonishing 300% of the cost of a nuclear system".

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/10/california-green-premium-for.htm

I also looked at base load reliability for the Google energy plan. Here is what I found:

"Google wants to have 380 GWs of wind generators by 2030, how much of that if going to count as wind basic? The answer is 380 x .21 = 79.8 GWs. That seems like a very credible addition to our wind generations system until we realize that there is a serious performance fly in the ointment.

The capacity factor of wind generators drop on hot days. Really drop, and the hotter the day, the bigger the drop. This is a problem because it is hotter during the summer than during the winter. To make matter’s worse, electrical demand goes up during the summer. How bad does it get? In Texas and California on the hottest days, wind capacity factors drop to as low as .02 during periods of peak electrical demand. Thus when the system needs reliable base load capacity the most, wind base capacity is unavailable. If the .02 capacity factor for very hot days held for the entire Google 380 GW national wind system, the combined electrical output of the entire system during the hottest hours of the day would be 7.6 GWs. About the amount of electricity produced by 4 very large nuclear plants.

In order to have its desired wind generation system by 2030 we will have to build 360 Billion GWs of windmill generating capacity. This will cost about $900 billion. The same amount of money will buy 112 reactors. And those reactors will have a .9 capacity factor. Instead of the average output of 79.8 GWs of base power, you will get an average output of 101 GWs of base power from the reactors. But instead of only 7.6 GWs output during the summer peak demand periods, the reactors will and average of 109.76 GWs of output at any given time during the period of summer peak demand.

Summer wind power will never be able to compete with nuclear power as a reliable source of electricity, and any money spent on windmills would buy far more reliable power if spent on nuclear power".

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-cost-of-wind-reliability.html

There are clear cost and performance advantages to nuclear as opposed to wind generating systems. Jerome if you included an acknowledgement of this in your essays on wind i would not need to offer criticisms.

Finally, Let me make comment on your subsidies claim. First claims about Federal subsidies to the nuclear industry, usually fail to break out federal payouts that directly benefit the Civilian nuclear power industry from a broader entity "the nuclear industry, which includes research and development for a variety of projects that do not benefit civilian power producers, and cleanups up of radioactive pollution problems left over from World War II and the cold war.

When I looked at Federal subsidies of the Nuclear industry, I found:

"Only $5.8 billion, was spent on Light Water Reactors, the only civilian nuclear technology used to generate power in the United States. In contrast various research projects related to the breeder reactor received $23.78 Billion and more that $38 Billion dollars were spent on other reactor research projects that were unrelated to the light water reactor. Only Light Water Reactor research benefited the civilian nuclear power Industry, and thus could be considered a subsidy".

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/09/energy-subsidies.html

A further review of data on energy subsidies revealed an even more remarkable fact,

Most energy forms have received more money from the Federal "Government than they have paid to it. The one exception is the civilian nuclear industry, which has paid $14 billion more to the Government that it has received. The imbalance came about because the Federal Government has failed to provide waste management services to the nuclear industry, which nuclear plants owners are paying for. Thus far from receiving subsidy from the Federal Government, the civilian nuclear industry has in fact subsidized the Federal Government, and the net value of that subsidy is far greater than the value of all of the benefits that the civilian power industry has received through the Federal Government. If we subtract the $5.8 of R & D expenditures on Light Water Reactors paid by the Federal Government, we find that the Civilian Power Reactor Industry has given the government a net subsidy of $8.2 Billion. In addition unlike other energy technologies including renewables, the civilian nuclear power industry pays 100% of its tax obligations".

For cold northerly countries with many millions of people it is not just a technological stretch to talk of renewables as an alternative making nuclear unnecessary in Europe, it is totally unrealistic at anything like present population levels.

However, the question of the share of the energy budget that can be provided by sustainable renewable power sources cannot be separated from the energy budget per capita. While the US can certainly be powered on sustainable renewable power sources alone, that is not at current US rates of consumption per capita.

As a rough guide, the global footprint network estimate of EU biocapacity is 2.2 hectares per person, compared to 4.7 hectares per person in the US (and footprints of 4.8 ha/capita and 9.6 ha/capita, resp.). So if sustainable renewable energy sources are proportional to that, and the US can just cover its energy needs with sustainable, renewable power (bringing its footprint down to the neighborhood of the current European footprint), that same technology would leave the EU covering in the range of 40% and 50% of its energy needs. If the US is covering its needs with an exportable surplus of 50%, that same technology would leave the EU covering in the range of 70% to 80% of its energy needs.

Now, the world biocapacity is estimated at 1.8 hectares/capita, so "import from the relatively better resourced ROW" is a limited recourse. Obviously, nuclear is preferable to coal as a recourse to cover the balance, both in terms of CO2 emissions and in terms of net resource depletion.

DaveMart,

"On a technical note, one of the comments in this thread said that China and India had poor wind resources."
I made that statement based on the Archer and Jacobson paper in Journal of Geophysical Research vo110:D12110(2005).
In those countries Nuclear and Solar energy are much better prospects.
The fact that Germany and China are developing significant wind power but have relatively poorer resources than say the US, UK or Australia, shows the latter countries poorer commitments to replace cheaper FF.

You have quoted the MacKay book "Sustainable energy without hot air", but at least with assessing UK land based wind resources this a gross underestimate, based on average wind speeds of 6m/sec at 10m height, using a figure of 2W/m sq when in fact at 100m height wind energy is >200W/m sq and if only 10% of land area was being used the average wind speed would be considerably higher than this.
One of your points was that land based wind can not be scaled to account for a significant proportion of UK energy requirements. This could be incorrect if you are basing that only on the MacKay book.

whitis - "Another commenter has already addressed the subsidies. Only a small portion of the nuclear subsidies (about the cost of one power plant) really pertain to current light water reactor technology and some of that is probably attempting technological fixes for political problems."

OK so you would support a repeal of the Price Anderson Act and be prepared to shoulder the full risk costs of an accident? What about the loan guarantees for new plants that nuclear is asking for that drastically reduce the cost of the required money - are these not subsidies for new nuclear plants?

"Consider, for example, if you had to replace the generators (or their bearings). On a nuclear plant, you bring in one crane and do the job once."

Not really as while the bearing is being replaced perhaps a quarter of the plant is not producing anything however you are still paying costs for the whole plant all the while selling electricity only into the bottom of the market. A single wind turbine may only be 1/25th of the total and newer wind turbines have drastically lower parts counts and as they are not operating in 950 deg steam environments are far less likely to fail. Also other parts of a nuclear plant may be at ground level however as they are intensely radioactive and can be at extremely high pressures and temperatures the problems of working at 100M on a wind turbine are much easier to cope with. Also the skills required for working safely at heights is quite commonly found as many many industries are required to work at such heights. The pool of workers that can work in radioactive environments is by contrast quite small and much more expensive to obtain. As with everything people make the difference. When you can call on the large pool of riggers that routinely build 100M or more antennas and power distribution feeders the problems of replacing wind turbine bearings are much smaller than replacing parts within the pressure vessel of a nuclear power plant.

Kiashu,
Very rarely is total electricity capacity being used, usually demand is less than capacity and the most expensive sources( usually NG fired gas turbines) and hydro are dropped off first, then the less efficient coal fired generators. Jerome's point is that wind will never be dropped off because its operating cost is essentially zero, and excess capacity can be used for hydro pumped storage. This saves NG and hydro for daily peak demand. Homes can draw on X5-X10 the power they generally use, but they do not because it is expensive. Adding wind capacity reduces somewhat the need for additional coal or nuclear capacity, but more importantly its the saving of NG and coal not needed when the wind turbines are producing at high % of capacity.

If people have 100 units of coal power and then add 40 units of wind, they don't change it to 60 coal and 40 wind, they just have 100 coal and 40 wind, and enjoy their extra power.

Fair point, and I can only underline what I say very often, ie that our energy policy should focus first of all on the demand side, rahter than the supply side. But as we know on TOD, we may not have a choice in that matter in the near future, and in a constrained suply environment, being able to replace increasingly scare fossil fuels by wind will help stabilise supply.

I'm not aware of any informed person who thinks wind shouldn't be taken seriously. People may argue over whether it could meet 100%, 50%, or 25% of needs, and what exactly our "needs" are; but nobody seriously argues that it shouldn't be taken seriously.

You're lucky! I spend my time meeting people in Important Positions^TM that are stunningly dismissive of what role wind can play. Energy executives, politicians, pundits, and just informed bystanders see wind as something generally nice and useful, but not something that will make any kind of difference overall. That's the mindset i'm fighting.

It does more than move the curve, it stretches out wind so that it looks virtually flat compared to nuclear, so that we're looking at wind taking 3 or 4 times longer to reach the same point in MW, and several times longer to reach the same point in MWh.

This is simply incorrect. If you have similar exponential growth, then it only moves the curve by a few years - the difference between MWh and MW being a constant number of years. If the industry growth is 40%, then a capacity factor of one fourth simply means that MWh are 4 years behind what you see for MW. 4 years behind and 4 times longer are not quite the same thing.

Fair point on what the trend will be as penetration becomes significant. The European experience suggests that growth can continue for a while.

Re the economic life, the Garrad Hassan study I linked to above provides encouraging data wrt long term performance and costs

An obvious energy intensive industry is ammonia production for nitrogen fertilizers. This has been a focus of Stranded Wind in the US, but is an obvious resource export for Australia to pursue if it develops its substantial wind and solar resources.

Fully agree. The wind vs nuclear "infighting" is most strange to me.

Maybe, I'll use the economist's trick, and "assume" that Hansen is full of beans.

That said, however, I have real doubts that we wil, in fact, build up renewable capacity or nuclear rapidly enough to deal with our declining energy availability, for economic reasons. My own feeling is that it is no accident that peak oil and our economic crisis are occurring simultaneously, and Dmitry Orlov and others have made excellent cases why many (not all, but many) major infrastructure projects are likely to be interrupted, scaled down or never occur in the course of an economic crisis.

Energy yielding infrastructure projects might not be pursued, due to a failing of political will or ideological opposition, but in terms of real economic capacity, the current economic downturn makes it easier rather than more difficult to pursue major infrastructure projects.

as discussed above, wind turbines need regular maintenence and replacement, and the manufacture of those parts, their transport to wind sites, instillation, and backup capacity to handle that maintenence requires a long term investment that will enable us to do all these things *with minimal reserve capacity of fossil fuels* - that is, we have to be able to replace the turbine bearings 10 years down the line (more than decade past the peak) and 20 years down the line

At the very least come up with a specific example that is not silly. We do not need fossil fuel now to make bearings, we need electricity. Rail electrification is needed in any event for its energy efficiency compared to truck freight ... which covers the bulk of freight. If we are only using trucks for short distance hauling from the railhead, then either electric vehicles or biofuel powered vehicles are presently available technologies ... it is the long-haul problem where they presently come up against hard limits, but with an electrified rail grid, the long-haul problem is not a problem. Even if it is necessary to bring the nacelle down to ground level to perform a major maintenance task, running the heavy crane equipment on biodiesel or ammonia for a very small energy investment with a massive energy return is no major hurdle.

Hell, warehousing operations are already electrified, for a variety of reasons, including the problems in running combustion engines indoors.

The broad sweeping hand-waving claim is that we need fossil fuels to power our present infrastructure. But when talking about producing energy harvesting equipment with NEROI that is in excess of 300%, there's no difficulty in terms of being able to power the infrastructure required to do major maintenance or replacement, twenty or fifty years down the track.

Evidently, if an economy loses the technological capacity to reproduce the equipment ... the d00m pR0n scenario ... then that economy is in the same situation as the DRC (ex-Zaire) in the last decade of Mobutu, which had collapsed into kleptocracy and did not have the social capacity to perform major maintenance on essential equipment.

But the specific argument "our infrastructure depends on fossil fuels, we won't be able to replace this stuff in twenty five years time" argument, with respect to wind power, is a load of nonsense.

I'm a big fan of Van Jones. But, I think you want to watch out for the idea that green collar jobs are long term. We need a rapid build, and, perhaps, we might sell quite a lot of solar and wind equipment outside the US, but the jobs will not be there thirty years from now. The EROEI of renewables is really good. That is very good for society as a whole, but it also means that the energy sector can't be dominant or even close to dominant in the economy in the long run.

The US should step right into the green tech competition, but it is worth remembering that it is going to turn into trying to sell your solar panels because they come in more colors than the competition, just like cars, sooner than most might think.

Chris

Politicians cannot create jobs, they can only destroy jobs or stop destroying jobs. Sure, politicians can skew the market so that some jobs, i.e. "green collar" are created at the expense of a somewhat larger amount of blue or white collar jobs. But the value produced will surely be less, b/c the market optimizes for value, so any skew will counter that optimization.

Yes, but even assuming that batteries are not completely drained, it could easily be the difference between commuting on all-electric or half-petrol.. And if we move to all-EVs (something which I favour in principle) then it could be the difference between getting to work and not getting to work. That isn't a risk people are going to want to take.

I suspect that it would be more efficient in this case just to use gasoline generators to load balance the grid.

As I said in a previous post, if we are going to use sources which are poor at load following then we should look at building out changable demand - and there are plenty of candidates in this area. Large scale energy storage achieves little except for trying to force square pegs into round holes.

However, if you (for example) have a variable-speed waste biomnass to methanol plant - probably just by varying the electrolysis rate - soaking up 'spare' electricity, you would be both overcoming the storage problem AND making a valuable product.

Each MWh of wind replaces a MWh of gas in Europe, andthus reduces our need for Russian gas.

No. You do not understand the dynamics involved. Each energy unit of wind power in Germany will be matched by two units of natural gas power to achieve base load generation, since wind gives 33% on average.

I don't have to "understand the dynamics involved" - I can give you actual facts as provided by European network operators in their annual reports. I quoted this in this earlier story:

I note that the French grid operator, RTE, long extremely wary of wind power and its unreliability, had this to say in its latest annual report (big PDF, in French, see p.49, [my translation]):

The second point is about wind's contribution to peak demand: despite wind's intermittency, wind farms reduce the need in thermal power plants to ensure the requisite level of supply security. One can speak of substituted capacity.
The capacity substitution rate (ratio of thermal capacity replaced to installed wind capacity) is close to the average capacity factor of wind farms in winter (around 30%) for a small proportion of wind in the system (a few GW). It goes down as that proportion increases, but remains above 20% with around 15GW of wind power.

This is not me inventing facts, this is quoting the frigging network operator. Are you also going to say that the network operator does not understand the dynamics involved"?

You seem to think that wind power is built in a vacuum, with no existing power system around it. It's not. It's built into a system that exists, that has reserves that can be mobilized just as easily for lack of wind as they can be for other reasons - but in the meantime, when wind is around, you burn less gas or coal.

As I said, current projects around the world shows that nuclear is half the cost of wind, if we compare apples to apples.

Apples to apples requires using the same discount rate. When most of your investment is upfront, and repaid over 25-40 years, this is, by far, the single most important factor driving levelised costs. Again, show me the studies, and show me the discount rates they use. At least the French government is aware of the issue, and is careful to always give the discount rate it uses when it produces studies of the cost of nuclear.

Pipelines to China and S. Korea are under construction, and they have pipelines to former Soviet republics.

No they are not (I know, I have financed a lot of Gazprom's pipelines) - they are being talked about. And even when they will be built (which is indeed likely in th next 15 years), they will use gas coming from totally different sources than the gas going to Europe - the two markets are physically distinct and will never be connected, because it makes no sense whatsoever to build the several thousand kilometers of additional pipelines this would entail.

The Georgia invasion made lots of analysts quite worried about our energy security, actually. Russia is clearly flexing its muscles and has already used gas to put pressure on former Soviet republics.

Well, I disagree with these analysts, and you can read my past 15 years of writing on the topic of Russia as a supplier of gas, it's all online.

we obviously need them more than they need us, at least in the short term.

That's true; we'll see if it lasts. It was only a few years ago that the opposite was true (just check in 1998-2000 when Poland used the "energy weapon" against Russia in totally outrageous ways, so outrageous that Germany is willing to bring back references to Nazis and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact rather than let the Poles have their hands on the pipelines, by backing the Norsstream project.

I wouldn't "Rant" about wind, simple point out to them this report on solar thermal.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/35060.pdf

The two sets of estimates, by SunLab and S&L, provide a band within which the costs can be expected to fall. The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh. The specific values will depend on total capacity of various technologies deployed and the extent of R&D program success. In the technically aggressive cases for troughs / towers, the S&L analysis found that cost reductions were due to volume production (26%/28%), plant scale-up (20%/48%), and technological advance (54%/24%).

Given thermal storage, on-peak generation, and cheap natural gas burner backup, solar thermal is far more logical than wind.

David,

Probably want to make that 333 tonne of concrete.

The towers for wind may last through many generations of turbines, so one would want to compare the useful lifetime as well.

Chris

http://www.hydroquebec.com/transenergie/en/reseau/bref.html

Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie has 18 interconnections, most of them with systems in neighboring provinces and states, providing a total export capacity of more than 7,100 MW

Its already substantial, but they'd like it to be much larger.

http://www.chercherlecourant.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/reportonbusi...

That could prove a bad omen for Hydro-Québec's export plans. Back in 1994, it was pressure from American environmental activists that led the New York Power Authority to nix a contract to buy power from Hydro-Québec's proposed (and ultimately beached) Great Whale complex.

PolR, I think what you are saying actually does qualify as "almost zero progress". 3000 MW over 10 years is very little. China builds a coal fired power plant with similar average output every two weeks or so.

Now, I'm not saying this is an insurmountable problem, but it IS a very real and serious problem nonetheless. For this reason, energy storage becomes an even more vital issue. And unless the energy storage issue is successfully addressed for not only wind but also solar power, these two renewable energy pathways will get only so far and no further.

I am tempted to challenge this assumption.

Wind and solar also happens to be the two power sources that are the most amenable to local production that can be funded with relatively little capital by local authorities and private parties. In a post peak world where capital for large centralized energy production initiatives is sparse or missing, the choice might well be solar, wind or do without energy because the availability of capital is much more of a bottleneck than the variability of power. In such conditions people have the option to just adapt their way of life to the rhythm of energy availability.

This is not an option you would consider in 2008 when energy is abundant. But circa 2030 when you have to make do with what is available, you will be happy to have this option. In hot summer days, you just dedicate the bulk of available solar energy to the heat pump that provide air conditioning, or do like our ancestors did and endure the heat.

For this reason, energy storage becomes an even more vital issue. And unless the energy storage issue is successfully addressed for not only wind but also solar power, these two renewable energy pathways will get only so far and no further.

Well this is why I support solar thermal as FAR more sensible than wind. 1) MOST electricity generated by solar happens on the same sunny days near the daily load peaks. 2) thermal storage of bulk thermal energy to enable coverage of end-of-day peaks is easy, cheap and proven (recent projects use a molten salt thermal fluid and cheap tanks of sand and gravel as thermal storage medium.) 3) unit costs of construction and cost-per-kwh produced can easily be competitive with even dirty existing coal generation given only a production rate which would achieve 8.5 GW operation by 2020.

Solar thermal is a no-brainer immediately and has no limits on percentage of grid capacity given large ratios of collectors to generators, large cheap thermal storage tanks, and a backup natural gas burner to heat the fluid during extended cloudy periods, whereas wind has some insurmountable problems. For Europe, in places where solar resources MAY be completely unusable, then transmission from the Sahara STILL makes more sense economically than HIGH GRID PERCENTAGES of wind generation.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/35060.pdf

Sargent & Lundy 2004 engineering study of then-state of CSP technology concludes

The two sets of estimates, by SunLab and S&L, provide a band within which the costs can be expected to fall. The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh. The specific values will depend on total capacity of various technologies deployed and the extent of R&D program success. In the technically aggressive cases for troughs / towers, the S&L analysis found that cost reductions were due to volume production (26%/28%), plant scale-up (20%/48%), and technological advance (54%/24%).

(Note: the "eventually" referenced is 2020, southwest USA)

By recycling presently held waste in Britain several reactors could be run for 60 years:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilitie...
Fuel costs for nuclear are also a trivial proportion of costs, and the price of the resource could multiply several fold without significantly affecting total prices.

I have nothing against developing more resources as rapidly as possible, but due note should be taken of how long lead times are in the energy industry, and at the present time the Seagen turbines and others of the same ilk are in very early stages of development, and have many hurdles to overcome, so should not be thought of in terms of supplying substantial amounts of energy anytime within the medium future.

We probably know the most about building a Severn barrage of any of the projects on offer other than wind, but it should be noted that although the less intermittent nature of the tides is better than the capriciousness of wind, it is erroneous to equate a twice a day periodicity with reliable provision of baseload - you may not have power when you most need it, and would need to have a substantial gas burn to make up for it.

I don't think Canada and Australia will turn their back on the Mother Country.

Regarding uranium in the UK:

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/downloads/comm_profile_uranium.pdf

Several hundred tonnes have actually been produced; although Uranium occurance is sub-economic in the UK, if we decided to produce our own (in association with Tin, Lead, Copper and other minerals) in order to provide energy security and jobs for the deprived areas where Uranium occurs, we could, and given the quantities involved it wouldn't break the bank, especially with a high-burn/breeder approach.

I can't find anything about Thorium resources but given the geological diversity of the UK I would expect some to be present.

You can get CO from biofuels. There are whole webpages on BTL (biofuel to liquids). If I read my R^2 blog right, the main problem with BTL is the capital cost of the plant. Also finding tons of biofuel per day in close proximity because you don't want to truck around megatons of low value biowaste. None of this requires electricity so we are getting far away from what to do with stranded wind. Iowafarmer, whatever his name is, advocates making ammonia from hydrogen from stranded wind.

Ideally, you use waste carbohydrates (paper, wood, cardboard, etc), and the reaction is

(CH2O) + H2 -> CH3OH

You woulnd't get as much methanol as we currently use petrol, but assuming you have a large scale EV rollout as well, you are just looking at Methanol to replace petrol/diesel in trucking and air transport.

As I've mentioned before, if the H2 input to the above is derived from grid balancing - effectively removing the intermittancy problem - then it's probably a pretty efficient process.

Neil1947, wind supplements fossil fuels, it does not replace them. If the goal is to somewhat decrease the use of fossil fuels, then wind works ok. If the goal is to stop burning fossil fuels to produce electrical energy, then investing in wind is counter productive. This is the quarrel I have with Jerome and other wind advocates. Massive investments in wind will make us dependent on coal and gas for a long time, no matter what atmospheric scientists tell us about AGW.

As I understand it, Italy just committed itself to a 50 Billion euro investment in nuclear power, and the UK plans a very substantial investment.

Jerome, As I explained already, I don't regard this as a wind verses nuclear issue, I also criticized some forms of nuclear power as well. It strikes me that your complaint is a ploy to avoid justifiable criticisms of wind. Nuclear advocates have some Idea about the cost, benefits and disadvantages of nuclear power, and we can compare them to the costs benefits and disadvantages of renewables. When we make comparisons between nuclear and wind, nuclear turns out to be cost competitive and while wind has significant disadvantages. Your view is that advocates of nuclear power should avoid saying anything negative about wind. How does our silence help society make informed choices. Are we here to hype nuclear and wind and scratch each others back, or our we here to judiciously determine facts?

What I don't understand is why you see my own article as hostile to nuclear.

In public opinion in many countries, nuclear is considered as a last resort. You choose it if you think nothing else can work. I mean, just imagine that each region of a country were asked to choose what power generator they'd like in their region:- wind, wave, hydro, geothermal, solar PV, solar thermal, biomass, coal, oil, gas, nuclear or nothing. Imagine they had to rank them. Nuclear would come in the bottom half at best in most places, and usually last.

Thus, if you present anything else as working, you make them worry that nuclear will never get chosen.

Nuclear's just too unpopular across most of the world. Thus praise of anything else is taken by nuclear proponents as an insult to nuclear.

Your .485 cents doesn't include was expenses as I said and the demand for uranium has been low for 15 years due to a surplus of uranium on account of a moratorium on nuke plants.

On 60 years nuke plant life, again you're just making things up; 40 years is the design life.

Your phoney calculations of $108 per pound are too silly for words; just a year ago uranium cost $95 a pound for yellowcake-unrefined uranium oxide.
http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_Prices.aspx

Breeder reactors? Where? Why not fusion reactors? Or better still floating fusion reactors ?

Burial under deep sea bed mud would be the best option for spent fuel because the dense mud is excellent for retaining waste and the ocean has vastly greater quantities of radioactive material from natural sources. It would be very inexpensive.

It'd be even less expensive to store it in dry storage casks in a parking lot for the next couple of centuries rather than attempting to treat it as pure evil that must be thrown into the heart of Mount Doom.

India is abandoning their 40 year commitment to CANDUs and wants LWRs. That should tell you something.
Stop daydreaming about CANDUs.

http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/20/stories/2008092060161200.htm

Why should spent fuel be treated as this special evil in the first place? Just seal it up in concrete and steel casks on site and be done with it.

Total nonsense. Provide a reputable source that shows nuclear plants cannot follow load.

Nuclear plants are run at 100% because they have the lowest fuel cost.

While I don't disagree in principle that nuclear power plants can load follow, the notion is entirely ridiculous. It would be cheaper to build surplus capacity and dump excess power into resistor banks than to try to save fuel on load following. Given we allready have ample dispatchable power capacity allready we dont need to do this of course...

Bill Hannahan - "France is 80% now. Nuclear ships are 100%"

Perhaps you should check your facts. Yes France's generating capacity is ~80% nuclear however this does not mean that 80% of France's demand is serviced by nuclear. This link provides the facts:

http://www.industrie.gouv.fr/energie/anglais/politique-energetique.htm

If you go down the pie chart shows that France's energy demand is satisfied only 41% from nuclear the rest is exported. If there was not a Europe wide grid this surplus energy would be result in plants being shut down. France's nuclear plants are just as reliant on a wider grid of peaking plants and energy markets as wind as one commenter here said:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2007/05/double-checking-nuclear-numb...

"Anonymous said...

78% of French total generation (549.4 TWH's) comes from nuclear (426 TWH's). But, 76 nuclear TWH's are exported (net exports are 68 TWH's, but that includes a subtraction of 8 TWH's by imports), so 350 nuclear TWH's are consumed by the French, comprising 72.5% of French electrical consumption (482 TWH's).

Further, the average capacity factor for French nuclear is about 77%, with exports. Without exports that factor would be about 63%. Without imports it would be even lower, in order to handle the daytime peak, perhaps around 60%.

French nuclear power becomes much more economical if it's part of a larger system, which can help match it's output to demand. In that way nuclear is quite similar to wind power.
May 7, 2007 4:22 PM "

"Total nonsense. Provide a reputable source that shows nuclear plants cannot follow load."

How about you provide one nuclear plant that is operating in load following mode. I can imagine a nuclear operator really wanting the plant idle most of the time and only delivering power for one or two hours per day.

"Nuclear plants are run at 100% because they have the lowest fuel cost."

No they run this way because it is uneconomic to run them any other way.

"Wind and solar buffs think that a good battery will allow them to be more cost effective, but the truth is reactors can make much better use of storage technology by using the full capacity every night, as opposed to a few times per week."

However if you have storage it makes more sense to fill them from sources that have zero fuel costs.

"No. Even if it were true it would not change the fact that sea water uranium is cheaper than coal per kWh."

If you can make money from uranium from seawater then I suggest you start with gold and see how you go. As there is nobody extracting even platinum from seawater my uneducated guess is that it is crap economics.

Panels are typically expected to survive 120 mph winds but very large hail can be damaging. I would say though that if you are worried about tree branches, then you've probably got the wrong roof for solar. In my opinion, with broad adoption of solar, we should just let the pollen wash off with the rain and the leaves blow off with the wind. It does not make sense to have people up on their roof to bother with this. Solar will be adopted broadly when it is as cheap as coal, about $3.50/watt, and at that point missing a little performance in the interest of convenience and safety will not be a big issue. Right now, it still costs too much and people will push for the last electron because they had to be pretty enthusiastic to get the system in the first place. But, there is no reason not to use solar in the Southeast. The resource is pretty good.

Chris