The Price of Energy
Posted by Robert Rapier on January 29, 2010 - 10:41am
The price of energy has a very strong influence on the energy choices governments and individuals make. I sometimes hear people ask "Why are we still building coal-fired power plants?" or "Why don't we replace more petroleum with biomass?" One reason is that biomass is generally more difficult to use from a logistical point of view. Another is that there just isn't enough biomass to meet present energy demands. But a major factor comes down to price.
The price and convenience of energy sources are ultimately the keys to customer acceptance. Homes can be heated with wood, heating oil, natural gas, or electricity. Automobiles can be fueled with gasoline, ethanol, natural gas, diesel, electricity, and a wide variety of more unconventional fuels. If consumers have a choice and the supply is convenient, they will tend toward the cheapest energy source they can get.
(a note: Robert has been asked to contribute articles to Forbes blog, and this article is the first of his posts there.)
Below I have compiled a list of current prices for some of the more common energy options on an energy equivalent basis - the British Thermal Unit (BTU). A BTU is simply the amount of heat energy it takes to raise the temperature of one pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. Everything has been converted into U.S. dollars per million BTU (MMBTU). The sources for the data are listed below. Of course there can be very strong local variations that may change the ordering, but the ordering below is likely consistent across the majority of the U.S.
I have included the cost of electricity, although it is important to note that the efficiency of electric motors is higher than for internal combustion engines. For comparison, I have also included the cost of the federal ethanol tax credit (Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit), which is $0.45 per gallon of ethanol for 2010.
Energy Prices per Million BTU
- Coal - Powder River Basin1 - $0.56
- Coal - Northern Appalachia1 - $2.08
- Natural gas2 - $5.69
- Ethanol tax credit3 - $5.92
- Propane4 - $13.28
- Petroleum5 - $13.43
- #2 Heating oil4 - $14.74
- Jet fuel4 - $15.48
- Diesel4 - $15.59
- Wood pellets6 - $17.33
- Gasoline4 - $17.81
- Corn ethanol7 - $23.46
- Electricity8 - $26.31
- Cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs9 - $30.92
Observations
The list above illustrates why wood pellets for home heating have not had the same sort of market acceptance as they have in Europe. Wood pellets are much more expensive and generally less convenient to use than natural gas in North America. It isn't difficult then to see why wood pellets have a difficult market in North America. For people with access to natural gas, the lower price and convenience of natural gas is compelling. In Europe, a combination of taxes and supply insecurity has resulted in high natural gas prices, so wood pellets are more competitive there.
The cost of the ethanol subsidy is interesting. Taxpayers presently pay more for the subsidy than natural gas costs. However, if you consider that the subsidy is on a per gallon basis - and a large fraction of that gallon of ethanol is fossil fuel-derived, the subsidy for the renewable component is higher.
For instance, consider an energy output of 1.5 BTUs of ethanol (and by-products) per BTU of fossil fuel input (this is approximately where today's corn ethanol plants operate). In this case the renewable component per gallon is only 1/3rd of a gallon; the rest of the subsidy is essentially subsidizing the fossil fuel inputs. (An energy return of 1.5 indicates that it took 1 BTU of fossil fuel to produce 1.5 BTUs of ethanol; hence the renewable component of the ethanol in that case is 1/3rd). That means that the subsidy on simply the renewable component is actually three times as high - $17.76/MMBTU. Also bear in mind that this is only the subsidy; the consumer then has to pay $23.46/MMBTU for the ethanol itself.
Of course there are many other considerations, and government subsidies can tilt the playing field toward or away from different options. But if you ever wonder why those long railroad cars filled with coal are headed east from Wyoming, or why we tend to heat homes in North America with natural gas or heating oil, now you know.
Sources for Data
- U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Coal News and Markets Report for the Week Ending 1/15/2010. (Link).
- EIA, Natural Gas Futures Prices for 1/15/2010. (Link).
- U.S. Department of Energy, Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC). (Link).
- EIA, Spot Prices for 1/15/2010. (Link).
- EIA, World Crude Oil Prices, U.S. average price for 1/15/2010. (Link).
- WoodPelletPrice.com, typical premium wood pellet prices in New England for premium hardwood pellets on 1/15/2010. (Link).
- CME Group, Chicago Board of Trade Ethanol Futures for February 2010 Contract. (Link).
- EIA, Wholesale Day Ahead Prices at Selected Hubs for New England 12/31/09. (Link).
- POET, POET Announces Cost Reductions in Cellulosic Ethanol. (Link).
Conversion factors
- Petroleum - 138,000 BTU/gal
- Gasoline - 115,000 BTU/gal
- Diesel - 131,000 BTU/gal
- Ethanol - 76,000 BTU/gal
- Heating oil 138,000 BTU/gal
- Jet fuel - 135,000 BTU/gal
- Propane - 91,500 BTU/gal
- Northern Appalachia Coal - 13,000 BTU/lb
- Powder River Basin Coal - 8,800 BTU/lb
- Wood pellets - 7,500 BTU/lb
- Electricity - 3,412 BTU/kWh
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Very Interesting.
I must have misread TOD commentators who said oil was the most dense form of energy, and that the advantages of oil were so great on a cost basis, compared to any other fuel, that nothing came close.
I must have missed the word "liquid"
so as an absolute fuel source on a cost basis, high quality coal is the best
... now what about nuclear, solar etc to put it in context...
Of course, we never factor in the environmental costs: Radiation Levels Cloud Vermont Reactor’s Fate
Good point. What are the environmental costs of using coal for example? Of course the coal companies would be the first to claim that if we factored in those costs their business model would become uneconomical and would therefore hurt our economy. What probably doesn't elude them is the simple fact that they are getting a free ride by exploiting the commons. Why would they voluntarily give up this gravy train. Especially if the can continue to obscure the true costs by providing what they call cheap energy to the consumers. The consumers are buying it for now since they are unawares of the compounding interest they are accruing on their loan from the ecosystem. Unfortunately they will be in for quite a rude surprise when they find out that this loan has a steeply adjustable rate.
Oh yeah, AGW is a hoax perpetrated by those climate scientists who are making more money than any bankers or corporate executives, their year end bonuses make the ones given out on Wall Street look like pocket change. The top ten richest men in the world right now are all climate scientists! Coincidence? I think not. What you don't believe me?
"Good point. What are the environmental costs of using coal for example?"
The environmental costs for all intents are zero especially when you consider that they are not a cost today.
What we know for a fact is that wind is at least 2x perhaps upto 3x the price of fossil fuel electricity.
We know that solar is 10-20x more expensive.
We know that we use a hell of a lot of energy.
The west could afford to go 90% green but they would have to give up something major. In the UK for example we would need to divert all the resources and people from the NHS to a green industry.
No one would vote for that. take away “free” healthcare to give us green power at the current fossil fuel price!
Do we really? Care to back that up? Perhaps if we could look at an in depth cost analysis of the entire production chain for energy produced from coal and solar we might be able to have a more meaningful comparison. Just curious how much do you think a mountaintop ecology is worth to the commons. I can't accept that it would be a zero value.
To be honest I don't have a clue what the true costs are for producing energy from solar but that isn't really the point. The point is we don't have a full cost accounting for coal either and until we do we can't have a meaningful discussion.
Perhaps someone out there has some data that they can point us to?
The full cost of coal is in its price. To be frank most people don’t care about some mountain top in a county or province they have never heard of and will never see.
If it was so important to a population then they would outlaw it or tax the companies.
So coal/gas/oil has all their costs factored in.
Now you might be saying to you that mountain top is worth a lot but frankly you are not the world and the price for those things are in the price already.
Solar in Europe has a Feed in tarrif of about 50 euro cents per kWh. by comparison baseload electricity sells for sub 5 eurocents. Thus it costs about 10x as much.
But that’s before you consider backup costs which will be about 2 eurocents using fossil fuels and a lot more not using them.
In fact solar is so expensive and gives so little in return the biggests buyers are lowing their subsidies substantially. ie germany, france, spain, italy, etc
Wind is slightly better, producing power at 7-10p depending on location but again that’s some 3x as much as coal or gas electricity.
The simple fact is that renewables are more expensive and some are far more expensive.
So a country needs to make a choice. In the UK it may be something along the lines of
Continue using coal/gas/oil and have free healthcare or dedicate the resources of the NHS to a green industry and have the country powered by 90% green tech.
Almost no one would value a green power country over the NHS
The full cost of coal is in its price.
Total absolute nonsense! The Real Cost of Coal
And that is just a partial list of the real cost of coal. The cost of coal is not just the aesthetics lost by leveling mountain tops; it is also the real dollar cost of health care. And that of course does not include the tragedy of lower IQs in children from breathing all those pollutants.
Ron P.
That’s all fine and dandy but as a consumer you have a choice.
Let Australia mine its coal and sell it to you. If they do this freely, which they do, then they are happy.
You then burn that coal in a power station 100 miles away and create electricity for 3p/kWh.
The only other alternative is to scrap the NHS to divert the resources to a green infrastructure.
How many more babies would die without the NHS vs the coal station 100 miles away.
We live in a world with limited resources, it is NOT as simple as to go green or not.
We will need to give something big up in return. As I said in the UK it would be roughly equal to giving up the NHS.
Would we want the NHS over green power? I think a resounding NO.
Bogus: Germany has about 0.1% of their population in their wind industry and they produce close to 10 GW per year (mostly for export with profit as opposed to the UK-banking industry).
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
Regardless, the UK must be a pretty depressing country to live in, when all people are just born to treat sick people until they are getting sick too and need treatment themselves before they finally die...
Germany uses about 450GW of energy of which they derive only some 10GW from wind.
So only some 2% of Germany energy is derived from wind farms. Plus they have some of the most expensive electricity in Europe at nearly 20 eurocents. By comparison in the UK it is closer to 12 eurocents.
It makes sense for Germany to subsidise wind farms to have production in Germany so they can then sell expensive uncompetitive wind farms to the British for 5 times what they are really worth.
About 2m people work for the NHS but that is only 6% of the population. Of course indirectly maybe another 1m people work for the NHS producing drugs, research and development all sorts
My general point is simple. Renewables cost more so you need to sacrifice something in return to have a green industry. So what will you sacrifice? In the UK we would need to divert resources from the NHS or divert all the resources from primary/secondary/tertiary education and transport.
Its not good enough to say we want wind farms to replace fossil fuels. Tell us what you will sacrifice to pay for it?
And thanks for your concern but the UK is largely a nice country to live in.
Actually fact is, that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
Germany has over 25 GW of wind, 10.1 GW of hydro, 21 GW of combined heat and power, 51.8 GW of coal and 21.3 GW nuclear.
And Germany exports 83% of its wind farms with a profit. Apparently they are worth their money otherwise those 83% would not be bought from countries like Britain and produce jobs in Germany.
http://bmwi.de/BMWi/Navigation/Energie/energiestatistiken,did=180894.html
http://www.iea.org/G8/CHP/profiles/germany.pdf
And Germany has still only 0.1% of their population in their wind industry and they produce close to 10 GW per year (mostly for export with profit as opposed to the UK-banking industry).
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
So if the UK had 0.1% of their population working in their profitably exporting wind industry they had still 99.9% of their population to work inefficiently in their tax-dependent banks.
And as far as electricity prices are concerned:
And eventhough Denmark has no nuclear power and exports over 20% of its electricity, it generates 20% less CO2/per capita than Belgium and has 27% lower industrial electricity prices than Belgium it has a 41% higher GDP per capita than Belgium:
Belgium (55.1 % nuclear power):
and 13.66 t of CO2/capita
and $47,617 GDP/capita
Denmark (0% nuclear power and 20% wind power):
and 10.94 t of CO2/capita
and $67,387 GDP/capita
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/BE-npsh.html
Industrial electricity prices before tax (2007):
Denmark (20% wind power): 7.06 cents/kWh
Belgium (55% nuclear power): 9.69 cents/kWh
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-DK-07-001/EN/KS-DK-...
And besides the fact that German feed-in-tariffs only make 5% of the German electricity price:
German wind power actually does reduce German electricity prices due to the merit order effect:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/art271,2147183
http://www.ewec2008proceedings.info/statscounter.php?id=2&IDABSTRACT=521
And btw, if you don't know what you are talking about and have no facts to back your crazy talk just keep quiet. Silence is Golden.
Germany gets 50% of its domestic electricity from coal.
It gets 6.4% of its electricity from wind.
http://tiny.cc/lgfxy
It gets 6.4% of its electricity from wind.
Actually, it gets 7.58% of its electricity from wind:
http://www.wind-energie.de/de/statistiken/
Considering the fact, that only 0.017% of the German population works for the domestic wind industry and wind is currently one of the fastest growing power sources in Germany, that is pretty impressive:
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
Well I would wager that your figures are wrong because they don’t show the full requirements.
Maybe that many work building wind farms but what about the people that make the steel to make the wind farms? What about the people that transport all the materials? The people that mine the coal to make the steel?
If you look at the full breakdown you will find that it will take about 3 million people building and maintaining wind farms in Germany if Germany went 90% wind/solar.
Again you proof to be a liar.
A 3 MW wind turbine requires less than 300 tons of steel and most of that steel is needed for the tower which can also be made out of wood.
http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/docs/ProductbrochureV90_3_0_UK.pdf
http://www.timbertower.de/
So 10 GW of wind requires 0.001 billion tons of steel and the world steel production was over 1.3 billion tons in the year 2008:
http://www.worldsteel.org/?action=newsdetail&id=285
I know I have worked in the steel industry before but what I said was that if Germany went near 100% wind. Ie it built the equivalent of nearly 2,000GW of wind capacity (not your stupid 10GW figure) then it would take roughly 2-3 million people to build and importantly maintain those 1,000,000 wind turbines.
That’s roughly 2 people per big wind turbine. Do you think that is an unreasonable number?
And it isn’t just crude steel, but the workers to mine that iron ore , to transport it, to crush it, to mine the coal required to make the steel, to build and maintain the steel plant to build and maintain the coke ovens, to build and maintain the rolling mills, to build the welding equipment to weld the turbine together, to build and maintain the power lines, to build and maintain the electrical components, the people that do the buying and selling of the turbines, the people who do the surveys for the locations, all sorts of shit. Oh and ofcourse to build and maintain the pumped hydro and all the other things required.
All in your looking at 2-3 million people working to build and maintain a “green” Germany.
You need to find those 2-3m from some other government agency. Healthcare employs about that many so scrap healthcare to build and maintain wind farms!
That’s roughly 2 people per big wind turbine. Do you think that is an unreasonable number?
Apparently this figure of 2 people constantly working to support one wind turbine has been made up by cells out of thin air. Talk about propaganda BS! Cells is the kettle.
Yes, it *IS* unreasonable ! After going operational, one person per 10 to 50 wind turbines seems about right. Climb up inspect and oil them once or twice a year. Fix stuff when it breaks (rarely). Manage them (i.e sell the electricity & cash the cheques, pay the land leases & property taxes).
Alan
That’s averaged, it will take a hell of a lot more than 2 people per turbine to make the dam thing. Remember your talking about all the steps from rubble on earth to a full turbine.
Simply put if you have a product divide the price by the average wage and that’s how many people years it took.
If a laptop costs $1000 and the average wage is $50,000 then it takes 1 man week to make a laptop from scratch.
If a house costs $200,000 and the average wage is $50,000 then it takes 4 man years to make a house (remember you also making the bricks, glass, steel etc).
The cost of everything is in one way or another labour. Hence the final price over the average wage will give you a good indication of the man years to make it.
So a single 3GW capacity turbine which costs say about $6,000,000 would have taken over 100 man years to build. That is everything to make it, not just the welder to put it together but EVERYTHING.
Germany needs at least 450GW of power, say 350GW of electricity.
That means 450,000 big 3MW capacity wind turbines.
We already figured out it takes about 100 man years to build one of them. Well to build 450,000 of them would take at least 45 million man years and we haven’t even considered the electrical grid or the pumped hydro or the maintenance of nearly half a million huge turbines.
You lot are crazy if you think it will take anything less than 2 million people working constantly to build/replace/maintain a 90% wind powered Germany.
I know I have worked in the steel industry before but what I said was that if Germany went near 100% wind. Ie it built the equivalent of nearly 2,000GW of wind capacity (not your stupid 10GW figure)
Again you proof to be a liar.
1. With 2000 GW wind power one can produce over 4000 TWh of electricity per year or roughly 8 times more electricity than what Germany currently consumes.
2. 10 GW per year is already 200 GW in 20 years. Renewable energies ought to be increased gradually and definitely not replace all fossil fuels in one single year.
Look you thick bar-steward, people heat their homes and need transportation so if you want to go 90% renewables you need to go 90% electrical grid, 90% heating, 90% transport.
All in all Germany today uses some 450GW of power.
About 100 GW of that will be wasted in transforming low grade thermal into high grade electric.
So you are left with 350GW worth of electric you must supply with your wind farms to go mostly wind powered.
So yes you would need in the region of 1,500GW to 2,000GW capacity assuming 20% capacity factor.
Tell me you now understand after the tenth time I have told you, a country uses more than electricity. Say it with me “ A COUNTRYYYY USESSSS MOREEE THAN ELETRICCCC”
Look you thick bar-steward
Just because the hardcore facts clearly contradict your crazy talk, there's no reason to insult people.
So yes you would need in the region of 1,500GW to 2,000GW capacity assuming 20% capacity factor.
No you definitely do not, because electrically powered heat pumps are 3.5 to 4 times more efficient than fossil fuel heaters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Ground_source_heat_pumps
And no you definitely do not, because electric motors are several times more efficient than IC-engines.
http://www.teslamotors.com/performance/well_to_wheel.php
And no you definitely do not, because much of the hot water capacity can be covered with solar hot water capacity.
http://www.solarserver.de/solarmagazin/anlage_0308_e.html
And no you definitely do not, because heating energy and mobility energy needs are reduced because insulation standards, fuel economy standards and mass transportation keep on increasing.
And no you definitely do not, because efficiency standards for appliances are being increased.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/downloads/jrc_091130_newsrelease_electricity...
And again, nobody needs to entirely get rid of fossil fuels in one year, 10 years or even in 50 years. But even if Germany had to: Germany spends over $100 billion per year on oil- and gas-IMPORTS at 2006 price level. That is over $5000 billion in 50 years without increasing fossil fuel prices:
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/Internet/DE/Pr...
With $5000 billion one can easily purchase 3500 GW of domestic wind turbines with domestic jobs. That is more than double compared to your 1500 GW:
those things you mention are not free nor cheap. If you don’t want to power it directly with wind farms then you indirectly power it with those things but it still stands that you need a huge workforce.
As for heat pumps you be lucky to get 3-4x in the summer. Most you demand will be in the winter at 2x.
It wont be cheap installing 30 million residential and 10 million commercial heat pumps and servicing the lot.
Plus if they are not used en mass today with cheap fossil fuel electric how do you expect them to work with expensive wind?
Again for electric cars more money more people required and that assuming it is even possible to build mass fleet of electric cars at an affordable price.
Overall Germany will need about 350GWe of wind which will equal about 1,500GW capacity.
A near impossible figure!
As for heat pumps you be lucky to get 3-4x in the summer. Most you demand will be in the winter at 2x.
Again, ground source heat pumps which are generally used in Germany have a COP between 3.5 and 4 - summer AND winter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Ground_source_heat_pumps
It wont be cheap installing 30 million residential and 10 million commercial heat pumps and servicing the lot.
Fact is that heat pumps require less maintenance than fossil fuel heaters and do not require any chimney sweepers. And the fossil fuel heaters currently installed won't last another 50 years and will have to be replaced anyway.
Again for electric cars more money more people required and that assuming it is even possible to build mass fleet of electric cars at an affordable price.
We don't use the cars, aircrafts, locomotives, light bulbs, i-phones, laptops, heating systems etc. from 1960 now and we won't use them in the year 2060 either.
A near impossible figure!
Even if your ludicrous figure were true, it is still far cheaper than what Germany would have to spend on fossil fuel imports in 50 years WITHOUT increasing fossil fuel prices.
Germany spends over $100 billion per year on oil- and gas-IMPORTS alone at 2006 price level. That is over $5000 billion in 50 years WITHOUT increasing fossil fuel prices:
With $5000 billion one can easily purchase 3500 GW of domestic wind turbines with domestic jobs. That is more than double compared to your 1500 GW:
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/Internet/DE/Pr...
In the USA we have about 100 million air conditioners in service. >90% of all residences, commercial buildings etc.
Here in Halifax has given detailed reports (on TOD) on the performance of his air-to-air heat pump in Nova Scotia winters. From memory, close to 3 COP even on the coldest nights and winter average around 4.
Alan
Hi Alan,
As best I can tell, the seasonal COP of our older Friedrich falls between 2.8 and 3.0. The Sanyo that serves our lower level is roughly 1.3x more efficient, so its seasonal COP is perhaps closer to 3.8.
To view a summary of the Friedrich's performance as well as our fuel oil records to date see: http://freepdfhosting.com/d1c5875875.pdf (PDF format)
The Friedrich was installed in August 2005 and the Sanyo in December 2008. We also installed a small 1.5 kW electric water heater to pre-heat the feed supply to our indirect water heater; for eight months of the year, virtually all of our DHW is now heated electrically and during the winter months I'm guessing it's 2/3rds electric and 1/3rd oil.
Roughly speaking, our annual electrical usage is 12,600 kWh and I'm estimate our space heating portion is no more than 4,000 kWh. The two heat pumps and electric water heater have reduced our fuel oil consumption by some 1,800 litres/year and if we assume 1,600 litres can be attributed to space heating, that works out to be 14,000 kWh of heating demand (at 82% AFUE). If we divide 14,000 kWh (our home's estimated heat demand) by 4,000 kWh (our heat pump portion), that suggests the blended COP is in the order of 3.5. We pay $0.11796 per kWh and a COP of 3.5 effectively drops that to less than 3.4 cents. As of our last fill, we pay 8.65 cents per kWh(e) for oil heat, making the latter 2.5x more expensive.
Note that when we heated with oil, we kept the thermostat at 15°C whereas with the heat pumps it's set at 22°C; if we had maintained the same temperature with oil as we do now, our consumption would have been that much higher. When you take into consideration the additional heat demand due to increased thermal losses, our blended COP should be closer to 4.0.
Cheers,
Paul
Edit: Fixed incorrect link
Thanks for your detailed answer.
Well I have not been to Germany in 5 months but when I did go they used fossil fuels for more than electricity.
So unless in those 5 months they have stopped using cars and heating their homes then they use a hell of a lot more power than you suggest.
Germany uses the following
Oil: 2.5 million barrels per day (180GWt)
Gas: 82 billion cubic meters (105GWt)
Coal: 81 million tonnes oil equivalent (105GWt)
Nuclear: 34 million tonne oil equivalent (45GWt)
Hydro: 4.4 million tonne oil equivalent (equivalent to 6GWt)
Wind: 24GW capacity (this is 2008 data). Of course wind capacity is meaningless it is actual energy produced which will be about 20-25% of capacity. So that’s 6GWe or equivalent to about 15GWt.
Solar: 5.5GW capacity, so about 1.5GWe or 4GWt
So out of total consumption of more than 450GWt Germany derives about 25GWt from solar and wind and hydro. Ie about 5% of her consumption. The other 95% comes from fossil fuels!!
And I would guess your 0.1% of the German population may be correct but that is only providing 3-4% of her requirements. If you go 90% renewable it would mean 3% of her population. However only 50% of her population works as old people and children etc don’t work. That means 6% of her working population of 40m required to build and maintain a green powered county. That’s more than 2 million people!
ie she would have to divert the resources and people from her healthcare industry to pay for it!
how many people will opt for wind farms over doctors insuring mothers to be don’t die in labour?
If Germany is your model we can all laugh, not even 10% of her energy is green!
Simply wind power needs to drop in price by two thirds for it to take off on any scale. Right now it is far too expensive.
Or her auto industry, or her tourism industry, or her restaurant industry, or her film industry, or any combination of many, many industries.
Stop repeating this false choice.
The government doesn’t provide autos or tourism or restaurants.
You need to scrap a government function.
So that is their healthcare, or their schools plus military plus social security or government pensions, or…
It’s the same argument for organic food.
Why don’t we force people to buy organic food? It is better for them and the environment!
Well simply put most people couldn’t afford it, and that could would have to give something up. It may be giving up restaurants or holidays or whatever.
However they would rather have those things over organic food.
Luckily we don’t live in a communist state with people dictating their values to us like you seem to be doing.
So simple question. Why don’t we force organic food onto everyone? What would be the result of doing so?
Where I live, people buy tons of organic food without government subsidies. We have a whole supermarket chain that has built its business model on this premise. Maybe that's why your whole comment here sounds like gobbledygook to me.
I said nothing to suggest anything like that, troll.
(Don't expect anymore responses, you're not worth any more of my time.)
Well maybe where you live is more wealthy than the average for your country.
In the UK the vast majority of food is not organic as people generally speaking cannot afford it.
It doesn’t matter if the top 10% of the population can enjoy it if the other 90% can not or can not without a big sacrifice.
The same is true for green energy. We as a nation simply couldn’t afford to go 90% green at todays prices.
Cells you are poking a few gorillas here. Reality is a place where many do not want to go.
I for one understand where you are coming from, the only quibble I have is that your assumption of capitalism being a long term answer.
As quite a few have said, we are in a predicament and do not simply have a problem to solve, as the solutions also create problems and lead to further predicaments.
In chess and game theory there is a predicament called a "zugzwang" maybe that is where we are, meaning humanity.
I think many people don’t even understand what capitalism and its alternative communism really is.
In simple terms capitalism is free and fair trade to buy and sell what you like so long as you hurt no other. That is the true meaning of capitalism.
The only alternative to that is not free and fair trade, not allowed to buy and sell what you like at the price you agree but are dictated to what you can buy and sell and at what price.
In that sense how could anyone want anything other than “capitalism”?
Incorrect definition of capitalism and one alternative is social democracies. You know those poor desperate nations of Sweden, Denmark and Norway with their suffering masses.
Capitalism - an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
Alan
Whatever you want to call it
1: Would you rather we have free and fair trade and are able to buy and sell products agreed by the two parties so long as it hurts on one else
2: Or would you rather some government or dictator tell us what we can buy and sell and at what price.
I call the first capitalism and the second communism. The names you give them are unimportant. Under which of the above systems would humanity be better off 1 or 2?
I prefer option #3.
Alan
And I would guess your 0.1% of the German population may be correct but that is only providing 3-4% of her requirements.
Again you are a liar.
Besides that Germany got 9.5% of its energy and 15.1% of its electricity from renewable sources in the year 2008 already.
http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2008_en...
Germany exports 83% of its wind turbines with a profit. So only 0.17% of those 0.1% work for the domestic wind industry.
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
So, only 0.017% of the German population works for their domestic wind power, while the rest works for export and as opposed to the non-producing, tax-payer-dependent UK-banks DO MAKE A PROFIT.
You are wrong, germany most definitely does not derive 10% of her power from renewable.
If you want to prove me wrong, show us the figures for oil/gas/coal/wind/solar.
Don’t show me stupid capacity figures but actual power produced.
Germany uses 450GW of power. you are saying that 45GW is produced from wind/solar/hydro?
You are most definitely wrong (BTW 45GW power would mean about 180GW wind capacity, are you suggesting Germany has 180GW wind capacity a figure more than the world as a whole has?)
And as I have clearly shown it will take around 3 million people to build and maintain a 90% renewable Germany. That’s everyone not just the guy that makes the turbine but the whole thing from bottom to top.
You are wrong, germany most definitely does not derive 10% of her power from renewable.
Again you proof to be a liar.
According to the facts Germany got 9.5% of its energy and 15.1% of its electricity from renewable sources in the year 2008 already:
http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2008_en...
FACT: http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2008_en...
Fact is fact. Just because you can't read doesn't change hardcore facts.
And as I have clearly shown it will take around 3 million people to build and maintain a 90% renewable Germany.
Actually, apart from showing us that you are a big liar, who ignores all facts, you haven't showed anything at all.
Again your full of bullshit.
Firstly 9.5 isn’t 10 and the 9.5% figure is wrong
Secondly your source is lying.
Germany consumes about 450GW of primary energy.
For Germany to produce 10% of her power via wind farms it would need to generate about 45GW of power from wind farms. Because electricity is a higher form of power vs thermal power we can cut that figure in half, ie 50% electrical efficiency.
That would mean Germany would need to produce over 20GWe from its wind farms or have a installed wind capacity of about 80GWc. Germany does NOT have that many wind farms.
Germany in fact has a lot less than that.
In reality Germany derives LESS THAN 5% of her power from wind farms!
Stop quoting bullshit propaganda links and do the math yourself!
Cells denies facts when inconvenient to his ideology. Note his denial that the USA passed a law called the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and it's provisions.
Germany has hydropower, some solar PV and burns quite a bit of biomass, particularly wood. All renewable sources of energy.
Alan
the 9.5% figure is wrong
Again you proof to be a liar.
According to the facts Germany got 9.5% of its energy and 15.1% of its electricity from renewable sources in the year 2008 already: http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2008_en...
FACT: http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/ee_zahlen_2008_en...
Fact is fact. Just because you can't read doesn't change hardcore facts.
Secondly your source is lying.
No it's actually a German Federal Ministry and you are just a lying troll.
Bravo cells for speaking real. Though you will get plenty of argument about how "you can't know". Therefore if you can't know then you must assume the best.
Oh well.
Mercury is a neurotoxin more toxic than lead. The single greatest source of mercury toxicity in the average American is from mercury-silver amalgam fillings. Dental offices are not allowed to dispose of pieces of mercury fillings into dental office drains because of concerns about high levels of mercury in sewage and damage to wildlife in estuaries. Dentists were allowed to place mercury fillings in people's mouths where mercury vaporized from the fillings over time and entered the blood stream through the lungs and nasal cavity. In 2008 the FDA warned of health risks from mercury dental fillings. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25139198/
mercury amalgam fillings are not the 'single greatest source of mercury toxicity'. Note that the article quotes dentists as not believing they do any harm as well as not finding any measurable difference in human studies. Only gold fillings that are tapped in can compare with amalgam. there's most likely an anti-bacterial benefit from the noble metals like silver.
i'd guess that coal plants are the number one source of mercury, which manifests itself as mercury poisoning from fish. Coal is a great sponge for things like mercury (think activated charcoal) and burning it releases it into the environment. I think it's crazy that the EPA classifies co2 as something to regulate, but not mercury.
EEYORES,
YOUR OWN CREDIBILITY IS FAST SINKING TOWARDS ZERO.
You offer a string of False Choices.
First of all, in a country like England with its NHS, the unaccounted health costs of burning coal, oil and other pollutants are placed directly ONTO the shoulders of the NHS, and the society's funds that drive it. By reducing the health detriments of dirty energy, you are SUPPORTING the NHS, and the health of the society in general.
But beyond that, there is no reason to hold Green Energy and NHS in direct opposition to one another for those precious funds. Where else is England spending her treasure that might be diverted better into Renewables? Did the expenditures of getting boots on the ground in Iraq (also not all that highly valued by the English people, I would add, yet their money was thrown into that mess anyhow..), has this investment given you a decent ROI yet?
As far as whether people 'value' mountaintops.. this is as useful an accounting as those who offer Poll results for the public acceptance of Climate Science. You know as well as I that there is so little useful education available in the Mainstream Media, and that a great majority of families are forced to attend to their daily financial survival, that 'what the people value' mostly amounts to A)Getting through to the next paycheck, and B) The spurious non-issues that corporate "newsmakers" tell them they should be focused on.
Long term investments like Solar and Wind actually pay for themselves entirely, so their cost is ultimately Zero, and if you look beyond the payback stretch, they become a form of INCOME, while burned fuels always have to be refilled, and so will cost more and more down the road, not less and less, like renewables.
Bob
Good points, Bob. Sadly, opportunity cost and time are concepts that escape some.
I would, however, not claim that the cost of any investment is "ultimately Zero". There is always a cost.
I do have to qualify that statement. You're correct.
If you take your energy gleaned from a renewable source and used the going energy rate as a basis, then after this installation had reached a dollar for dollar payback for what you invested (with or without interest as you prefer), then any production that continues thereafter is Pure Profit, or 'Free Energy'. And there are any number of renewable systems out there that can fairly make the claim that they are producing (or harvesting) power for their owner long after payback has been achieved. As payback or ROI accounting is regularly done, I would say that this is a fair expression.
It would be just as fair to say that you simply would constantly down-grade the Price/KWH for as long as a generating system was running.. so that when your PV finally conked out, it had delivered it's lifetime performance at Xcents/KWH.
Bob
Well today lifetime costs are greater than what a free market would pay. Hence it never pays back.
If wind turbines were 75% cheaper or if fossil fuels were 5x the price then you would be correct. However today you are most definitely wrong.
You don't know what the lifetime costs of today's systems are, because none of those systems has been through its lifetime yet, so you just have guesses.
Yes they are guesses but they are educated guesses with risks factored in.
If people thought the lifetime cost of wind was cheaper than gas they would build wind without subsidy.
Simply put almost no one believes this and they are definitely not willing to put their money on it.
I guess that's why so many wind turbines are going up all over the world. PV too. Because people don't think they will work? LOL! I live well on this technology. I do it without any subsidies. Not one cent. Funny! Someone believed.
There are no major installations of solar or wind which were done unsubsidised.
I cant be bothered to check but were you the guy that said a FIT wasn’t a subsidy?
Well it most certainly is a subsidy.
You should have checked. Wasn't me. I'm actually against any form of subsidies, including fossil fuels, wars for oil, superfund cleanups, bank bailouts, ff leases, etc. Let our energy sources succeed or fail. Time can sort things out. If we turned all subsidies into carbon/pollutant taxes and environmental impact fees, I would be thrilled. I'm damn tired of subsidising 19th century thinking and breathing the results of other people's bottom line . If people of modest means like me can make the responsible choices then so can society. But no worries. Things always balance out in time.
Needless to say that the Chinese DID indeed install 14 GW of solar thermal in one single year without any subsidies whatsoever:
http://www.ren21.net/pdf/RE_GSR_2009_Update.pdf
And besides that feed-in-tariffs are no subsidies and are not paid by the tax-payers, many wind farms have been installed without subsidies all around the world:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6079
Yes solar thermal can be done unsubsidised but it isn’t common or widespread.
Plus it’s a low quality form of energy, you cant run your TV on it.
Feed in tariffs ARE a subsidy. Its like you spraying some perfume on a lump of shit and telling us it is no longer a limp of shit but a nice rose. WTF is wrong with you?
A subsidy is forcing someone to do something they would rather not do.
Why are feed in tariffs enforced by government and law if people want them? If they don’t want them then by definition it is a fixed market and a subsidy.
It is absurd to claim that any industry in a communist country is not in some way subsidized by the government. I don't know if an accurate accounting of the investment percentages is possible but since the Chinese government is a partial owner of most industry it then follows that the Chinese government made a significant investment in that power plant. In many countries the electricity systems are 100% government services which are financed by government bonds which are paid off in part by selling the electricity. Where the government is the sole owner of the electrical utility they often sell that power at a loss which means the taxpayers are subsidizing all forms of generation.
I don't know if an accurate accounting of the investment percentages is possible but since the Chinese government is a partial owner of most industry it then follows that the Chinese government made a significant investment in that power plant.
The Chinese solar collectors were mostly installed by home-owners and not by some industry.
And these installations were mostly cost driven:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/china-solar-hot-water-c...
A Chinese a solar thermal system is essential cheaper than an electric heater with a high electricity bill. (And btw an electric heater also requires a hot water tank (energy storage system) because nighttime electricity is cheaper).
Well you would not pass any accounting exams that’s for sure.
Labour and capital is a cost. The wind don’t turn itself into electricity and build a grid to take it to your home. People do that and they need paying.
Wind or solar is not free. Currently it doesn’t pay back, ever! Hence why such large subsidies are required.
Even Germany the leader of wind power is reliant for 95% of her energy requirements from oil/coal/gas/nuclear.
If they are so great why isn’t Germany going 20% or 30% or god forbid 90% wind powered?
The simple fact is Germany couldn’t afford to do it.
Instead they are conning countries like the UK to buy German wind farms at 10p/kWh instead of gas at 1p or coal at 1p.
However I do agree government should spend money more wisely. If they did that then they could perhaps afford more costly wind power. however asking government to be efficient with money is like asking a heroin addict to ration his supply so it lasts longer.
I used the NHS as an example because in the UK the figures are almost exactly the same.
Total absolute nonsense! The Real Cost of Coal
Ron, I completely agree. The social costs of coal are much higher than the price. I am reading Big Coal
by Jeff Goodell. It paints a very disturbing picture of the overall costs of using coal.
Of course I think most of you realize this, but this article isn't about externalized costs - simply the price you can go out and acquire energy for.
I am traveling at the moment and my comments here will be necessarily limited. I am in Seattle today and tomorrow, and off to Europe tomorrow afternoon. I will answer comments as time allows.
And that is where the article falls down. Perhaps that is all Forbes asked for but the result is simple minded and fallacious. The article's implicit assumption is that all BTUs are the same and that energy is energy. This is false. It is like saying that all bushels of grain are the same since a bushel is a bushel. Or that all tons of metal are the same since a ton is a ton. Totally ridiculous.
Some BTUs are renewable some are not. It matters. Some BTUs are in liquid form that can be used by the vehicle infrastructure mandate. It matters. Some BTUs can be sent over power lines at near the speed of light and used for heating in odd places and also to power electrical devices. It matters.
And some BTUs are not readily available. It matters. Should Saudi Arabia burn coal instead of oil because it is cheaper? Should China switch to burning oil because its BTUs are cleaner? Availability matters.
And RR doesn't miss the chance to take another dig at corn ethanol. Where is the analysis of oil subsidies such as the Oil Depletion Allowance? Ethanol has no soil depletion allowance. Or the subsidy in the from of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Ethanol has no Strategic Ethanol Reserve. And of course the big oil subsidy of Wars for Oil Security which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of Americans deaths and ruined lives are completely ignored even though oil is the main source of liquid fuel for transport? Instead a renewable form of energy that is only about 10 percent of liquid fuel is attacked . Why?
Supposedly because it uses some fossil fuels in its production. Left out is that that fossil fuel is mostly natural case which is now cheap and abundant. Natural gas is not easily used by the current vehicle structural mandate. There is economic gain to be had in turning corn into ethanol to replace imported oil which requires the export of resources to pay for.
All BTUs are not the same even though they contain the same amount of energy. Characteristics other than energy content matter and can not be ignored. The article may be what the simple minded readers of Forbes and its editors wanted but it sheds no light on the energy situation. It compares different forms of energy which is wrong. The implications of the article are false.
If the assumption were not "energy is energy," then "energy is not energy." Brilliant.
I guess we can't compare the sugar content (or the calories) of apples and oranges because oranges are not the same as apples and fructose is not fructose (or calories are not calories). Or we can't compare the water volume of a fire hose versus a garden hose because a garden hose is not like a fire hose and water is not water.
Because you seem not to understand that measures of volume and weight ("bushel" and "ton") are completely different beasts than units of thermal action ("the amount of heat energy it takes to raise the temperature of one pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit" --RR), then one must assume you are either confused or being disingenuous.
No one said a BTU was like a bushel--except you.
Even when you take into account the “quality of energy” renewables are far more expensive.
In simple terms electricity from coal/gas is 3p while that from wind is 10p and that from solar some 30p.
Trying to argue that renewables are cheaper is dumb to be frank.
The article's implicit assumption is that all BTUs are the same and that energy is energy. This is false.
No, it is your assertion that is false. Not only does the article not implicitly assume that, it explicitly states that this is not the case. Try reading for comprehension next time.
I am dashing off to a meeting, and will deal with the rest of your nonsense later if someone else hasn't already. But where your argument has always fallen down is that you like to pretend that no energy is fungible. That lets you pretend that your BTUs are better than those from the other guys. But at the end of the day, why does it make sense for me to take natural gas, convert it into more expensive ethanol, subsidize that and pay a much higher price - when I could just convert my fleets to natural gas? You can't answer that question, so you obfuscate and say stupid things like "Energy is abstract."
There is a difficulty with the energy cost analysis that suggests that prices per btu are static. That is, there is a set of prices today for various energy 'containers' and another set of prices tomorrow, a third set the following day, etc.
The prices are more like flows or dynamics that interact and effect each other. Increases in the cost of diesel fuel effect the price of coal more than the price of nuclear. Diesel fuel runs the mining machines and trains that process the coal, most reactor fuels are now reprocessed weapons- grade fuels purchased from Russia (at least in the US). Diesel costs aren't much of a factor with regards to nuclear fuel but will make coal more expensive.
Uncertainty over deliveries or uncertainties over cost also feed back into costs. Volatility effects price; higher prices kill demand which then leads to more volatility the other way. Since markets price fuels in currencies, the effects of currency fluctuations and currency availability effects prices as much as the availability of a fuel.
Investment dynamics also effect cost. Nuclear plants are very expensive, but many costs are to the taxpayers including fuel costs. Since most USA reactors were built a long time ago, upfront construction expenses have be repaid. What is left are maintenance and decommissioning costs. It is tough to compare infrastructure costs over a long time frame. Wind farms built twenty years ago face maintenance costs. New wind farms with mega- turbines have large upfront costs with long pay- back periods. It is hard to make cost analyses, even between new and old wind- farms because the new equipment is much larger and more expensive to build and install than that made twenty or more years ago. At the same time, the larger units give greater return on each dollar (or other currency unit) of expenditure. Because of better design and materials, they will probably also last longer and require less expensive maintenance.
If - at some point in the future - when oil is relatively scarce and the only available electric power is from a wind turbine, the users will not care so much what it costs. While the probability of this outcome is modest compared to other outcomes, the possibility makes it prudent to invest in more expensive wind and solar power.
What is then included in some of the more expensive energy containers is a probability rent (or bet). A 'bet' on wind is a bet that coal will be legislated or depleted out of business. Since coal cannot make this 'bet' against itself, it is cheaper - the bet itself costs a lot of money! The bet is wind's claim on energy production - or rent - that coal power will disappear, hence wind will gain ascendancy over a large part of coal's market. The prices difference is a kind of 'long shot probability' play on the relative success of the different energy containers over time. Remember, markets are casinos!
Another way to look at it is that once upon a time, adding machines were cheap and computers were expensive. Who buys adding machines, now??? They are cheap, right?
I have another comment somewhere over here where I examine this dynamic from another vantage point, but I'm too lazy to find it ...
:)
I agree.
BTUs of one thing are clearly not BTUs of another thing.
What do I care that the price of coal is $.56 per mmbtuh?
I can't use coal to heat my house, fuel my car or fuel my TV set. I can fuel my car only with gasoline or E10, I use natural gas for heating because they don't let you use coal(except anthracite) for heating(for obvious reasons,see China) and I only use grid electricity to fire up the boob-tube.
One serious problem with this article is that it fails to factor in the cost of CO2 on fossil fuels.
For example, $100 per tCO2 adds $1 per gallon. This raises the wholesale cost of gasoline per mmbtuh to $28.69 per gallon, about what carbon neutral cellulosic ethanol at $30; ($2.3 +$1.0) x 1000000/115000 = $28.69.
OTOH, at $100 per tCO2, the price of natural gas doubles to $11 per mmbtuh making even more as a transport fuel and diesel looks even worse as it makes10% more CO2 than gasoline on burning.
Are you purposely acting dense?
"house"--We happen to heat with (anthracite) coal here. You can use coal in some stoves.Then there's coal --> electricity --> baseboard heat.
"car"--yes: it's called "coal-to-liquids."
"TV set"--yes: "coal-fired electrical plants."
His point is that the price Robert quoted is not going to be the same if he uses coal for those things. If he lives in the US, most likely if he used coal to heat his home, he'd be doing it via electricity.
What do I care that the price of coal is $.56 per mmbtuh?
Because of what it may indicate about energy policy when depletion causes prices to skyrocket. Also, if you are working on developing alternatives to coal and oil - as I am - it is important to understand exactly what you are competing against.
One serious problem with this article is that it fails to factor in the cost of CO2 on fossil fuels.
You didn't understand the article then - despite all my caveats. This is about the price you can go out and acquire various energy types for. That may have little bearing on the societal costs of using that energy.
So you believe that $.56 per mmbtu coal is competing with ethanol or oil or electricity?
Totally ridiculous.
The price of fuels is simply not important. Price of uranium metal per kwh is tiny compared to natural gas for electricity but no nuclear power plants have been built for decades and new US coal powered plants are few.
Or your article on the huge importance of energy pricing missed the fact that energy planning without mentioning the cost of CO2 in fossil fuels is worthless.
However, such a perspective would not be welcomed at industry-friendly Forbes (which is possibly the reason you left it out?)
Really, you might thank me for raising the CO2 issue as it shows that biofuels are comparably prices to fossil fuels once the cost of carbon is included.
Should I hold my breath?
Spotty airport connection, and they are about to call my flight. So quickly:
"So you believe that $.56 per mmbtu coal is competing with ethanol or oil or electricity?"
Not what I said, but it is certainly relevant for electricity. Otherwise, we wouldn't use coal for producing electricity. There are other items in the list that are relevant for oil or ethanol.
"The price of fuels is simply not important."
Ludicrous. If not for price, we would produce a lot more renewable energy than we do. Price drives coal usage. Price helps tell you why we use coal and not wood pellets for electricity in the U.S. Price tells you why ethanol must be mandated.
"Or your article on the huge importance of energy pricing missed the fact that energy planning without mentioning the cost of CO2 in fossil fuels is worthless."
For the 4th(?) time, this is about price. When I buy a ton of coal in the U.S., I don't pay a price for the CO2 that will be emitted. I might in the future, but this is about price, not what might happen. Is this really that difficult for you to grasp? Or shall I brace for another round of strawmen and ad homs?
Hi Robert,
I always look forward to your posts and comments and regard you as a guiding light, even though I may disagree with you on a given point from time to time.
If you are anybody else can comment on the following point and put some numbers on it, taking it from the qualitative to the quantatative even in a very rough fashion, I believe this would contribute a lot to understanding the value of renewables.
My point is this.When a wind turbine or solar cell generates a kilowatt hour, the coal or natural gas is conserved-it is not mined, sold,sold, or burnt.
Now let us suppose that renewables other than hydro get up to say three percent of our electrical consumption sometime soon, which seems very likely to happen.The price of coal and natural gas must be depressed according to well accepted theory-of course the ACTUAL price may be higher, in this case without that three percent of wind and solar it would have been higher still.
So the entire economy, excepting the coal and gas industry , benefits in the form of a defacto subsidy of thier oil and gas purchases courtesy of the wind and solar industry.This is effected both thru lower prices AND lower consumption of the oil and gas.
I strongly suspect that this effect may well more than cover the costs of subsidizing wind and solar but I have not located any numbers and lack the expertise to generate my own.
Any numbers, even rough ones, will be enlightening in the extreme.
I have not considered the effect of electric or hybrid vehicles as they are not yet very common, but in the future thier adoption will also depress oil prices.New hydro should be included but I have no idea what subsidies are in effect for hydro in general.We don't have man good available sites here in the states but a heck of a lot if hydro is getting built in the rest of he world, and energy markets are global, so if anybody is knowledgeable about hydro sibsdies , I would like to read thier comments.
You are wrong, overall subsidies harm an economy and its people.
This has been proven many many many times in many different countries with many different products.
Think of food. The EU subsidises farmers so the EU overproduces food. That over farms the land and means a lot of food is wasted. On top of that the EU then dumps this food onto poor countries whos farms cannot compete which means it keeps those countries poorer.
As for energy. Bar hydro renewable is truly a drop in the ocean. Those countries like german which have invested heavily derive just 3% of their energy from wind/solar. Most other countries are a lot less.
Cells, you sound about as well educated in environmental concerns as the average creationist is in biology-but this is not necessarily your fault.I do have some personal background knowledge of your kind of thinking, having read some books advocating pure and unfettered capitalism.
It's very easy to believe that sort of stuff if you close your mind to any contrary edidence,or have never been exposed to the contrary evidence, as seems to be the case in your case.Don't expect much sympathy here.
It is perfectly obvious to anyone with even a modicum of common sense that a wind farm that will last thirty years before it needs a general overhaul and essentially forever with maintainence must save an enormous amount of coal and natural gas over the years, not to mention the associated pollution resulting from thier combustion.
Now let us suppose the wind farm gets a subsidy of fifty million dollars from Mr. Typical Taxpayer.Now if Mr Typical Consumer saves back the fifty million within a reasonable time due to his urtility not buying fifty million dollars worth of coal or ng, he breaks even.Now it happens that Mr Consumer and Mr. Taxpayer are close enough to one and the same person for purposes of this discussion.
If the sale of oil and coal declines because a local utility in Texas invests heavily in wind, I benefit in Virginia because the price of coal is set by overall consumption, like the price of any other widely traded commodity.I benefit here in Virginia and Johkul benefits in Maine and Alan benefits in New Orleans.Hacland over in England benefits, as does Airdale in Kentucky.
As I said brfore, I lack the expertise and data .to put even rough numbers on the savings but given the fact that the savings in ff consumption world wide resulting from wind power are probably now running into many tons of coal and many cubic feet of ng , the effect on coal prices and natural gas prices must be significant.
And we need to remember that this effect of holding down coal and natural gas prices is continious over the long term, whereas the subsidy for a given wind farm is generally limited to a cartain period of time, such as twenty years.
If you reply and say that you can see the logic of my argument(not mine really except for the moment, it is not original ) I will consider the possibility that you are serious-If you cannot understand this I must conclude that you are a free market fanatic rather than a serious commentator.
Again we have a good example of someone who would clearly fail a basic accounting course or even a math course.
Wind is free so wind power is free/cheap. Yeh….. but your wrong
It's as if you didn't actually read what he said...
"as if"?
Hi Harm,
A little off topic here but I DO REALIZE how frustrating it is when you try to communicate with some a superstitious idiot or a true believer of any sort-such a a fundamentalist who has read only ONE BOOK, "THE BOOK" as he will express it.
Been there and done that of course, I live daily among such people.
I bring this up to hold up our new friend cell as an example of the dictum that when people no longer believe in God the henceforth believe in Nothing.
They just allow some other intellectual meme to rush in and fill the void,as Cell has done.He is either a very skillfull troll and having a lot of fun or another world class idiot that is totally impervious to any evidence contrary to HS new religion, which is a mangy, highly soiled, and altogether common version of laisse faire capitalism.
I might seem utterly impossible that it could be true but I know at least three very bright (otherwise) college graduates who are in his camp.They are quite literate in many respects but in terms of govt policy, energy, and the environment they switch off thier brains and turn on thier blinking lights.From that point on you might as well try to communicate with a traffic light.
There are unfortunately billions of such people.The way to deal with them is to gradually educate them over a generation or two(it can't be done any faster) and gradually allow them to abandon thier errors in thier own way at thier own pace.Pointing out to them that they are ignorant and superstitious just gets thier backs up and gaurantees that they freeze in place for a few more years.
And the devil you know in the form of say protestant fundamentalism is likelyas not to be a better bet than the one you don't -perhaps National Socialism or Stalin's version of communism.
If people don't organize themselves into groups for thier own ends by means of a religion, they will simply coalesce around some other cultural phenomenon and carry own the eternal game of "Us" and "Them" under a new banner.
I'm not actually trying to support religion but rather to demonstrate that it is a natural cultural occurence and fills a void that cannot be left empty in the mind.You can work with a fundamentalist preacher easier than you can someone like Cell.
He is doing us all a great favor by demonstrating why ideas and action on the societal level are two different things altogether.People like him are alloewd to VOTE. ;)
Let me ask you a simple question
Why is Germany exporting so many wind farms and importing so much fossil fuel?
If wind is so good why don’t they keep the turbines for themselves and import less fossil fuels?
Are the Germans stupid?
Or is it the more likely fact that wind is more expensive than fossil fuels so it makes sense for them to export wind turbines and import fossil fuels?
Because they realize that they can profit from the technology at the same time they adopt it. Further, if they can promote the acceptance of this technology, they can profit more while driving their costs down. They've run the numbers and understand this transition isn't going to happen overnight, but they also understand it is neccesary. Perhaps they don't share your unbalanced focus on the bottom line, but know that they still have to finance their transition.
"Are the Germans stupid?" No.
A simple question, but really not a very bright one...if you are manufacturing wind turbines, you don't care whether your customer is German or not. Probably, simply as a manufacturer, you don't care if you are German yourself. That wind turbines are manufactured in Germany and sold globally just says that they are probably very good wind turbines.
I'm against subsidies myself, and somewhat related to wind turbines; they was a fairly good industry here in the US producing them at one time. They were going pretty well, supported by a government subsidy, but if I remember right the subsidy expired twice and wasn't renewed right away, basically wreaking havoc on the balance sheets and price structures. The whole industry folded years ago, where it may have done well enough if it hadn't relied on a green energy subsidy - which here is like a political hockey puck.
Ok then why is Germany buying far more fossil fuels instead of wind turbines especially considering there is the capacity in its own country to provide a lot more?
The problem is most people seem to only consider fuel costs and not the cost to build the things.
Its like someone saying a house is free because once you build it, it will stand for 500 years.
Well if that is the case why don’t you lot go sell your houses for $0?
Wind turbines do have a cost, even if they stand for 20 years, 40 years, 100 years!
The missing part of this entire thread to this point is "quality".
BTU=BTU is a "quantity", measurable, and comparable based on BTU content.
The quality or should I say qualities of energy are very different.
Intermittent wind won't run the windmill service trucks, directly unless stored in some other form and then you get into conversion losses. Better to have fossil fuel for that.
You can run a truck on wood-gas and loose a lot of BTU to heating the atmosphere around the truck.
The "qualities" of fuel are missing in RR's paper. He's not ignorant, stupid or disingenuous, he knows this. This was left out to make it simple I assume.
Making, harvesting, and mining "energy" is only part of the total picture.
How you make energy "do things" is the part of the picture that makes "energy" more or less valuable in its usefulness.
I burn wood to heat my house. (Solar) dried wood gives of more heat and causes less issues with my chimney. I have a sunk investment in my soapstone stove, chimney, and stone hearth. I have maintenance costs with cleaning. I have cost associated with maintaining or fueling chainsaws, trailers, tractor, property taxes on my wood lot, etc. Wood lot depletion, yada yada yada
If I burned propane I would have a sunk costs in a furnace, ducting, fans, thermostats, etc. I would have maintenance issues, cleaning adjusting, tank rental, etc. Electricity to run it too.
Propane is far more convenient, works when I'm not home(!), and doesn't have spiders and moss on it.
Ignoring efficiency for the moment...
So which is worth more per BTU? It depends on what you want it to do. Are they the same per BTU - yes and very clearly no.
The "qualities" of fuel are missing in RR's paper. He's not ignorant, stupid or disingenuous, he knows this. This was left out to make it simple I assume.
Well, I tried to indicate that I understand that qualities are different. Quality is hard to quantify, but you can group similar BTUs above to see how they stand. What one should do in that list is look at fungible fuels. As I stated, electricity is a different sort of thing than ethanol or coal. It is in there just to give a feel for where it falls. I would expect - given that electricity is produced from coal - that it will be more expensive per BTU. I would expect that biomass pellets - due to the processing, etc. - will be more expensive than coal.
As I stated, the reason for doing this was that I am trying to develop fuels that compete with coal or oil. I will have to compete with Powder River coal in many cases. So just how much it costs - even if it is 2 or 3 times that once it is delivered - gives me a good idea of the ballpark I need to be in.
I like your research, it does identify those cost decisions that cannot be overlooked, as much as we might like to.
It seemed to me that quality was a missing part amongst other posters that they couldn't quite identify but knew existed.
Quality IS very hard to quantify, quantify for what end use?
Fossil fuel has many aspects that are difficult if not impossible to replicate with any renewable to do the work in society as it is currently structured, especially if one adds current consumption into the formula.
What a truly amazing time period to be alive in, to see the apex. Some people will never grasp where we are, and the problem we face, even though they have been told.
We will have "less" (in an economy built on "more").
When there is demand for wind turbines, people manufacture and sell them. German manufacturers have a good part of the global wind turbine market in part because their government considers manufacturing to be an important economic sector which they support, rather than screw up (as we in the US might do someday as well).
Germany imports fossil fuels the same as every developed country. When you need energy you go out and buy it, generally taking into account both cost and convenience. I'm not particularly pro-wind power, but I don't see the need to hammer on obvious points imagining that everyone has it wrong. Wind power does offset some fossil fuel use, which is good. That it isn't cost effective or consistent enough to offset everything is hardly an issue.
Thanks Ron, I just saw cell's comment and was about to respond, you saved me the trouble.
I have a very difficult time not going off on a rant when I come across this kind of thinking:
While I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't because something that is out of sight is certainly out of mind. It is the epitome of ignorance to assume that which you can't see has no benefit to you or can't harm you.
I wonder how cell would feel about some invisible, tasteless, odorless toxin in his drinking water that some corporation was pumping into his local water supply without his being aware of it. I guess I could honestly say I probably wouldn't care about it. *ROLLS EYES*
Well it’s a fact, that which doesn’t harm us we don’t care about and in effect the cost is zero.
Its how the world works. Your values are different from mine.
Open pit mining might be horrible to you and you put the cost of that eye sore at infinity and would not have it in your world. To you the cost of coal would hence be high.
However to most people they don’t mind and the cost to them is zero.
When you take into account the values of a nation you then have the real cost.
Why does Australia allow coal mining? Simply because its people would rather have coal mining and the jobs/prosperity it brings rather than to not have open pit mines and all the other undesirables.
It is pretty much a fact that the “external” cost of mining coal/oil/gas when looked at logically is zero
If you truly believe this is about aesthetics you've completely missed the point, or you're being deliberately disingenuous.
Well, Cell also said 'that which doesn't harm us', so he's clearly assuming that these costs that are getting dumped onto NHS and other societal balance sheets are no skin off his back.. or really thinks that the externalities, and the loss of the commons aren't really a cost.
Comforting to let someone just set a price for you, and you get to remain innocent of all the other connections and consequences .. alas! It's the beauty of Colonialism.
You are wrong I am not assuming that it costs nothing to the NHS or loss of live or loss of quality of life.
I am assuming that these things are negligible or that the vast majority of people place a low value on these things. Of course each individual will hold different values but the average is what is important.
For example I don’t like the exhaust from cars in London. It isn’t nice at all. It may even be knocking a year off Londoners lives and it definitely has a cost to the NHS and perhaps even the local economy.
However the alternative of say electric cars would mean the cost of transport for Londoners goes up considerably. Are we willing and more importantly able to pay for this? the answer today is no we are not willing and not able to pay for it. the downside of the crap air is less than the downside and sheer fact we cannot afford it.
It is just the same argument with organic food. I’m sure we would all love to have organic food instead of the normal stuff but frankly most people cant afford it. and some who can would rather have the lower quality food and spend the money on something else.
Non organic food also has a cost to the NHS and life and quality of life. Why don’t we ban all but organic food? Well simply because there would be starving children and families and most people would have to give up something big to be able to afford it.
The same is true for green energy. Sure nice to have but what will we sacrifice in return?
In the UK roughly speaking it would need to be something the size of the NHS.
Cells, since, as of 10:04 EST you've only been a member for 12 hours 34 min., you seem to have no idea about the general tone and long term outlook here (which is, to oversimplify, we're running out of fossil fuel, there are too many of us, alternative fuels are reliant on fossil fuels and not ultimately sustainable, the environmental costs of the western lifestyle are destroying the planet...).
These are big problems with unknown extents and end points. If I wanted to bury my head in the sand and say, "Well, that's it! Nothing can be done! Nosir, can't change it! Why, only a moron would think about a problem like this that's obviously insoluble!" (as you obviously do), I wouldn't come here.
I come here to read about big issues, not the cost of a cab in London and why the average bloke on the street won't stand for paying more for electric cars. We know ours is not the mainstream view. We know BAU is infinitely more attractive than reducing consumption.
That doesn't make it right, however. Our buildings and vehicles have taken hundreds of years to build. Converting to more efficient and cleaner versions of either on a national scale is a job requiring decades, strong political will, and would have to start long before the problem becomes critical. I don't care that these ideas are politically unpalatable to the vast majority; I don't care that they don't fit into your economic scheme. I don't care that they are so frightening to you that you refuse to address them. I do care about what might happen if fuel shortages mean I can't heat my house or that I can't get to work. I do care about the possibility of deflation or economic collapse. I do care about environmental disaster. I hope that the tiny contribution I make here will eventually help these ideas become mainstream.
Whereas you would rather have a large screen TV than health care for your mother (to set up a ridiculous straw man like your NHS/green power cannard.) People and governments make spending decisions every day. I'm sure a great many things (BMW's, Land Rovers, more than 600 sq ft of heated space per person, not to mention those large-screen TV's, come to mind) could go far more easily, and with less political backlash, than Public Health.
Jeeze, I've spent an hour on this... And the editor is probably going to excise the whole Cells vs. OilDrum thread anyway.
Here we have our communist brother, a man who will tell other men how to live and what to think.
Hail comrade Canuckistani
Dictating to people how to live will never work and I am very happy people of your views are limited in number because if you were more numerious we would be north korea within a few decades.
Why don’t you go and make wind/solar cheaper than fossil fuels. That way people will thank you and use them willingly. Don’t force people to take on your values, convince them that your vales are better for them.
Ok comrade Canuckistani?
Yep, usually happens that when someone is incapable of making cogent arguments they end up resorting to ad hominems.
Way to go cell! You've just managed to officially earn yourself that most coveted of titles"PATHETIC TROLL!"
Now please return to whichever bridge you have emerged from under.
Wind/Solar will probably never be cheaper than light, sweet crude oil. That is the problem, and that is why our current way of life is most likely unsustainable. Some can drive EV vehicles, but Lithium isn't exactly as common as copper and will never be cheap. In fact, China has begun limiting the exportation of lithium so unless we want cars that have a 30 mile range using more conventional batteries we'll need to write that off. Hydrogen has serious issues as well, specifically related to platinum in the catalytic converters.
Do you think you'll be driving a vehicle in 20 years? What will it run on? CNG? The problem has never been a market economy, the problem stems from the fact that substitution of oil may not be able to continue the way of life we have become accustomed to.
At the end of the day, we live in a finite world, with finite resources, and infinite growth cannot occur.
We are not after infinite growth however we do like increasing productivity. That doesn’t mean more, that actually means doing the same with LESS.
And the earth for all intents has near infinite resources.
As for oil. It is important but what is far more important is total energy. That is oil plus coal plus natural gas plus hydro plus nuclear plus every other form of energy.
We will still likely be driving fossil fuel cars in 20 years time (maybe indirectly, ie EV powered by a NG fired station).
The great thing about our fossil fuels is that they are both convertible (coal to liquids, gas to liquids) and interchangeable (gas or oil or coal fired stations and nukes. Oil or gas powered cars. gas or oil space heating or even electrical heating powered by nukes or hydro. Etc)
So if we run short of one relative to another we can substitute.
For example if oil gets short we just build more gas cars.
If gas is short we mine more coal and burn less gas in power stations and more coal.
The most important factor is if total fossil fuels are peaking and currently the indication is that both coal and natural gas have a lot of scope to be expanded.
Interesting but not likely...
You point of view has been hashed and rehashed here for years....
From my original post:
From Cells, in response:
I have to have made some kind of mistake... apparently, my intention of helping my ideas become more mainstream, like, so people would do them kind of, like, willingly, is something cells thinks I should do(apparently in my spare time, after I overcome the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Earth's resource limits.) If he thinks I should do it ... there must be something wrong with it... or maybe he doesn't read and comprehend his his own stuff either...hmmm. I'll either spend the rest of the day propagandizing ... or start an environmental commie direct action splinter cell and force my values on the proletariat! If I decide on the latter, all those interested in giving it to the man can meet me at the College and Yonge Street Tim Hortons at 4pm.
Da! Comrade Canuckistani, count me in, I'll bring the
ethanolStolichnaya!Ummmm
1.Huge discount rates.
2."Thats what my grandpappy did."
3.Kylie Minogue's arse.
4.Cricket.
5.Profound pride in, "We might be thick, but we are cool."
6."Hey man! Grab the cash and run.."
7. Mr Darwin's absence.
(Where is that man when you need him?)..Oh! Here he comes now.
So basically your saying the whole nation of Australia is thick and you know better than their collective (is it 20 million?)?
I take it you also think the same about the USA/UK/Russia/China/Canada and all the other major fossil fuel producers.
So the collective wisdom of a billion people is lesser than yours? Yes…….deluded you be.
People use fossil fuels today because it is more productive than wind/solar. However that might change one day. they don’t use it because they are thick but because it is the most productive source of energy we have today.
Cost has many meanings, from what I saw by other feedback to this.
It is my opinion humanity will always persue the lowest 'cost' way to produce energy. The thing is, the costs continue to evolve, as well as our understanding of the costs, and what costs we are willing to accept.
One cost is pollution. One cost is EROEI. Etc, etc.
I like the trend of wind and solar adoption, and hope it continues to slowly become a larger fraction of global power production.
Yes costs do change and I hope wind goes down in price by 80% because then it would boom. Likewise I hope solar drops 90% in cost so it too will be successful.
Plus forget the word cost, replace it with productivity.
Fossil fuels are more productive which is why we use them.
It only takes some 30,000 men/women to work the north sea yet it produces about 500GW of power.
To do the same with wind would require perhaps 3 million men/women.
And you are correct pollution does have a cost to our quality of life. However power stations are very clean especially considering the distance to most towns/cities. Likewise big industries are relatively clean.
I would much rather see something replace cars because we breath the fumes in daily and it probably has a much bigger impact on us than open pit mines or mountain capping or any other fossil fuel related problem.
But again, like organic food, most people couldn’t afford an electric car so we are stuck until they bring the price down.
Do you also hope that the cost of fossil fuels will rise by a similar percentage? Because it's a matter of when that will happen, not if.
No I don’t hope the cost of fossil fuels will rise. Just like I don’t hope the cost of food or homes or anything else will rise. Why would I or you want us all to be poorer?
And the price of fossil fuels will not rise by a great deal even once past peak simply because we use so much excess. At double the price (which is still very cheap and a lot cheaper than wind) people will stop wasting so much or using it on things that are not so necessary eg space heating.
In real terms I very much doubt fossil fuels (oil plus coal plus gas averaged) will go past 4p/kWh for any long length of time (ie it might spike for a day or month but not for years). oil is nearly there but gas/coal are about 75% cheaper per unit of energy.
I can buy fresh organic food at my local farmer's market every Saturday, at a price comparable to what the GM/Monsanto produced stuff is selling for at the supermarket. Come to think of it, even Safeway is now carrying lots of organic produce, often at relatively small premiums to the regular stuff (10-30% above factory farmed). Electric cars aside, how is it that organic food necessarily = unaffordable?
Well the vast majority of the country just about gets by living pay check to pay check. Lots of people in fact cant even manage that and get into lots of debt.
Having to pay 100 quid for a weekly shop instead of 60 quid isnt going to help.
In terms of fossil fuel vs renewable the price difference is about 3x or more and remember it isnt just about your electricity or gas bill but all the energy you indirectly use in the country. like transporting your food, building your buildings, maintaining your roads. everything.
The average person in the UK uses 5,000 watts continuously. Or rather the country uses a little more than 300GW and has a population of about 61m. ergo per person that is about 5kW of power.
I'm in the U.S., not UK, so can't speak from direct experience. Nonetheless, isn't "vast majority" rather overstating it? And let's parse "living pay check to pay check" a bit.
Yes, lots of people live way beyond their means in both countries, but that isn't the same thing as everyone being "too poor" to pay a small premium for organic food. People spend too much and live beyond their means, which could easily be remedied by a small change in attitudes and priorities. How much does the average American or Brit spend on booze and gambling each year? Couldn't that be considered "discretionary" spending (if not outright waste)?
The premium for organic food *might* force Joe 6pk to cut back on one of his Monday night football beers, or switch to a cheaper brand. If that much. By the same token, the local wino down the street probably pulls in more $$ from panhandling than the average school teacher in my city. Nonetheless, he always appears "broke".
To me, the health benefits (and greater nutritional density) of eating organic foods far outweighs the tiny premium it carries. But then, I readily admit I'm not your "average" American.
Actually, there are no "health benefits" to "organic" foods.
http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
Not much in the way of of real information at that page, just somebody with a bee in their bonnet doing some ranting. I would like to see some assays of organic vs conventional.
You didn't even read it, apparently.
The very lack of such assays has not prevented the "organics" movement from making extraordinary claims.
It starts out with an example of an organic food advocate dying of a heart attack. Then immediately follows up with this gem -- "Organic food is food produced by organic farming, a set of techniques based on anti-scientific beliefs, myths, and superstition". Then some FUD about bacterial contamination. There's really no need to read any further.
I'm a reader that may even agree with their premise, but the tone of the article is a put off. I visited the site in hopes of being edified, not to jump on an organic demonization bandwagon.
But there are assays, some inconclusive and some favorable for organic. Backyard organic gardeners with refractometers are consistantly showing a big difference in Total Soluble Solids between in what they grow and supermarket produce. Not sure if that's something inherent to organic, or because backyard gardeners get to do stuff not feasible on the scale of a farm. There's clearly a connection with soil fertility and health.
I haven’t been to America so I cant comment for you guys.
Buy in the UK and much of Europe and I suspect most of America the majority of people are NOT wasteful spenders. Sure there is a small portion of people who drink themselves silly or spend money on stupid things but the majority in Europe and I bet if you where honest in the USA too do not spend money wastefully nor are they overly wasteful.
The majority of people, say 50%, couldn’t afford to eat nearly all organic, another 30% could but would have to give something substantial up (say for example not take a family holiday) the remaining 20% can and some of them do eat mostly organic.
However most cannot.
Its just a simple fact of life.
The same is true for green power today. We couldn’t afford it if we wanted to go 80-90-100% green.
No major nation is more than 10% green (excluding hydro which you cant just build more of, you either have the geography or not). (of course some small countries are mostly green thanks to small population vs large hydro sources and others are so poor they live crap lives and run away from rapists but don’t use fossil fuels but I doubt anyone wants that)
Green energy needs to get cheaper before it is viable on a mass scalel.
As a holder of a US passport and lifelong resident, you are wrong. Most Americans ARE wasteful.
Just look at the obesity rates. We eat far more than we should, pigs at the trough. And the waste extends past that.
Alan
cells,
you said-
"The full cost of coal is in its price."
Many other people have already commented on this but it can not be true.
My current house has a coal bin and still has the coal shoot with door so shouldn't I go back to coal today?
However many years ago the heating system was converted to natural gas.
On a btu calculation this was a stupid move as NG is 2-10 more costly base on RR's costs. Obviously the real cost of coal is not the btu's but all the incidentals required to use it in situ for the purpose of heating the house. And in that way coal is dead last after all other heating systems today, including wood which is easier to get at price than coal.
His coal figures are incorrect.
The cost of natural gas last year was about 1p/kWh in bulk while the cost of coal was about 0.8p/kWh in bulk.
However you are a retail customer so you would pat 3p/kWh for gas and about 2.5p for coal.
You would clearly use gas as it is more efficient and easier.
A more comparable heating solution per BTU would be propane/natural gas and fuel oil.
Coal is more in power stations for electricity.
Powder River coal is about 20% the price of Appalachain coal. The power plants have installed more sulphur scrubbing capacity to prevent acid rain. China and India coal power plants did not have to scrub the sulphur like the US and more jobs are being created there. China is now the largest consumer of autos in the world.
Nicely said.
I especially like the "loan from the ecosystem" meme (which I've also used in the past), since I think it makes sense to a lot of mainstreamers who are more than passingly familiar with mortgages, credit card limits and interest, car loans, etc. Add to that image the fact that they (and all of us) are dumping this enormous debt on future generations, including their kids, and it gets really personal.
(And thanks for reminding me about the money end. Al Gore and Jim Hansen are stopping by later today so we can divide up last week's bales of 100-dollar bills before we go cruising for chicks in our gold-plated Hummers.)
Your web page pretty much says it all. You rich greedy bastard you ;-)
Hi FMagyar,
According to the Magyar Rule, it was supposed to look like this:
LOL! You're right I slipped up.
I note that the article on Vermont radiation levels from the rapidly rising levels of Tritium neglected to mention any measured quantities of radiation.
It has been almost 30 years since Petr Beckmann published The Health Hazards of not going Nuclear.
http://www.amazon.com/Health-Hazards-Not-Going-Nuclear/dp/044131970X/ref...
delete
Heating oil costs 5 cents per kWh.
An oil power plant with an efficiency of 33% requires therefore 15 cents of oil per kWh (excluding the capital costs and maintenance costs of the oil power plant).
Wind power is at less than 5 cents per kWh:
http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/EconomicsOfWind-Feb2005.pdf
Well firstly how many power stations are fired by oil these days?
Not many. Most are coal at about 40% and in some countries like the UK we have a lot of gas fired stations operating at 55-60%.
Gas last year cost 0.8 pennies per kWh while coal cost about 0.7 pennies per kWh.
Converted to electricity you get 1.4p/kWh of electricity from a gas fired station and about 1.75p/kWh from a coal station.
Our power stations sold and made a profit selling electricity for sub 3p/kWh
By comparison bulk wind power in the UK when all subsidies are taken into account cost in the region of 9-12p so some 3-400% more expensive.
Your 5 cents for wind power is probably propaganda or doesn’t inc subsidies.
A nickel/kWh and a 1.8 cents/kWh subsidy for 6.8 cents/kWh is about right for Texas or Iowa, etc. (unlike Communist UK, no gov't bureaucrats limiting licensing & siting).
Alan
A nickel/kWh and a 1.8 cents/kWh subsidy for 6.8 cents/kWh is about right for Texas
Actually it's not 5 cents per kWh it is less than 3 cents per kWh in Texas (on page 11):
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/41435.pdf
Don't forget electricity running a heat pump; I get an efficiency of over 300% with mine, and my cost of energy is lower than any you listed, except natural gas and coal.
The heat pumps are less popular in the northern states. In subfreezing temperatures the outdoor coil collects frost in the winter; blocking airflow. The unit then switches to use indoor electric heat resistance strips similar to what are used in kitchen toasters. The electric resistance heat is higher in cost.
Hi rainsong,
The minimum HSPF or heating season performance factor for heat pumps sold after January 1st, 2006 is 7.7 (Zone 5) which translates to be a seasonal COP of 2.25; prior to this date, it was 6.8. Halifax, NS is located in Zone 5 and our winters are colder than those of Buffalo, NY. The HSPF ratings on the very best units can reach as high as 12.0, so a seasonal COP of 3.5 is, in fact, possible even in our northern climate. Note, too, these HSPF ratings take into consideration the energy consumed in the supply of backup/auxiliary heat and defrosting.
Cheers,
Paul
Typo?
By definition, the energy efficiency of a process can't be more than 100%.
Definitely not a typo. A heat pump delivers several units of heat for each unit of energy it uses. That is, instead of getting 3400 BTU per KWHr, as you do with baseboard electric heaters, you will get about 10,000.
And Heat pumps can work in cold climates - size them for heating, not for cooling, and you can get significant energy delivered per KWHr.
Or: look up ground source heat pumps for details.
Okay. My mistake, should have know this. However, I think I agree with Bill that the term 'efficiency' is misleading.
Also, you should really consider the efficiency of whatever produced the electricity. That'll cut your figure down.
Think COP of 3 or EER of 10.2 instead of 300% efficiency.
A heat pump is a heat engine running in reverse, so actually it can, though the use of the term 'efficiency' can be misleading. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
A heat pump, being a reverse heat engine, decomposes work (electricity) into heat going to the respective high and low temperature reservoirs that would have used to run a heat engine. So the term "efficiency" is misleading.
One source of energy isn't mentioned here: Hemp. Hemp has a higher calorific content than coal and is renewable. Here are some sites that detail the uses and potential of this plant:
http://www.hempglobalsolutions.com/
http://www.hemcore.co.uk/logs.htm
We may not be able to sustain the exponential economic growth with hemp but neither can we do so with a finite planet.
Is there enough arable land to grow hemp or would we run into issues with it like Ethanol?
Well, maybe if we raise sirloin in the lab without the overhead of raising actual cattle we might have more land available?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34042394/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/
We quickly go though our arable land with any biofuel or biomass approach, as far as I can see. Even with the population of the 1800s in the US, there was a big problem with deforestation. We are pretty much using the arable land now. "Waste" needs to returned to the soil, or we have soil degradation problems.
Ah, but you forget that the same crop of hemp can be used for biomass, fiber, meat replacer-grade seed, and greens. I cant think of any other biomass crop that does even half that. If one were to go the biomass track, hemp is certainly the most efficient use of arable land.
In Europe (UK) the costs are roughly as follows when bought in bulk.
Where 1p = 1.6 US cents
Electricity: 3p/kWH
Natural gas: 1p/kWh (varies largely between winter and summer)
Coal: 0.8p/kWh
Oil: 3.5p/kWh
Wind: 7-10p/kWh (depends on country and if onshore or offshore)
Solar: 40p/kWh
Gas/coal backup costs for wind/solar are about 1p/kWh
Taking into account power station efficiencies, gas at 55%, coal at 38% the fuel cost of electricity from
Coal electricity = 2.1p/kWh
Gas electricity = 1.8p/kWh
So solar is more than 15x as expensive as fossil fuel electricity.
Wind is about 3x as expensive as fossil fuel electricity.
Generally speaking if a country like the UK wanted to convert to a 90% wind 10% fossil fuel powered country it would need to spend about £110B per year in subsidies. So for the UK it would be a choice of scrapping the NHS and putting all the resources and workers into developing and running the green energy sources.
Im not so sure that the people of the UK would prefer wind power over the NHS
The cost arguments are paramount to a green future. Until the cost is comparable to fossil fuels we will not convert on a large scale.
I'm not sure what kind of solar you refer to. Passive solar is free if buildings are constructed properly.
Obviously solar PV cells
Since the gist of the article was home heating, obviously PV would be a poor choice (and I'm not sure why it's even being discussed in this context). Solar thermal systems are a very viable option for home heating in many areas.
It all started here:
Sadly, in the UK almost no buildings are constructed properly (some in my village are >600 years old!) so passive solar isn't free at all, and because adequate solar PV is so expensive at our lattitude we likely will have no alternative to using more and more wind - so what does that mean for the NHS (health service)? - or our cars, they run on petrol not electricity?
Think it through UK citizens, and plan accordingly!
Hi cells, have you got a source link to your general info?
>> But in particular your solar and wind claims would be interesting.Cheers.
To Mr Rapier:
Thanks again for an informative and awakening essay. Your energy-digging is never ending, so you probably have some sort of (unregistered) world record in this field. Kudos for helping me understand these matters better..
Yes look at the feed in tariffs for solar in Europe. About 50 euro cents per kWh. just type solar feed in tariff into google news.
Look at the subsidies for wind, I have uk info and we get about 3.5 to 7p/kWh subsidy on top of spot price which is about 3p/kWh. on top of that they get an indirect subsidy of about 1-2p in the form of gas backup.
In total wind electricity in the UK costs (at the grid point) 9.5 to 12p when all costs are factored in.
In comparison coal/gas electricity is 3p/kWh
Actually in Germany the feed-in-tariffs are between 22.76 cents and 39.14 cents per kWh and the German government will lower these feed in tariffs by 15% to 25% starting on April 1st 2010.
http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/media/archive/17479.pdf
http://www.bmu.de/erneuerbare/energien/doc/45543.php
40 euro cents is still a considerably amount more than the 5 euro cents the nukes/coal fired and gas fired stations pop out a kWh of electricity.
Plus the subsidy doesn’t take into account the indirect subsidy of fossil fuel backup which by most accounts is about 2 euro cents/kWh at small scale and a lot more if used on a large scale.
the 5 euro cents the nukes/coal fired and gas fired stations pop out a kWh of electricity.
Old power plants are always cheaper than new power plants, but the feed in tariffs for wind are between 5 and 9 cents and actually significantly lower than costs of new nuclear:
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/67392/politics-key-to-russia-turkey-nu...
I cant comment on nuclear because I have no experience of it being built in a free market.
However NEW gas and coal is very cheap. A new gas station is built and run at a profit popping out electricity for 3-4p/kWh which is less than 5 euro cents.
In comparison wind in Europe costs once you take into account the direct and indirect subsidies some 9-12p/kWh. So wind is at least 3x as expensive as new coal or new gas.
Now I understand my posts may seem anti renewables. Let me assure you I am not.
I would love wind to be competitive with coal or gas unsubsidised because if it were then we would see a TRUE energy revolution. We would see western countries deriving 30-50% maybe more from wind. Instead the best countries like Germany currently derive less than 3% of primary energy from wind!
Just to add my view on nuclear: personally I’m not pro nuclear but I am a realist. From my calculations I believe a subsidy of 1.0p/kWh of nuclear would make them competitive with gas and coal.
If my assumption is correct it would mean we could build 7x as much nuclear as we could do wind for the same sum of money.
However NEW gas and coal is very cheap.
The capital costs for a new gas power plant is relatively low but the gas prices compared to free wind are not and are actually fluctuating quite heavily:
And the capital costs for a new coal power plant are considerably higher than for new wind power:
http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Coal-Plan...
If my assumption is correct it would mean we could build 7x as much nuclear as we could do wind for the same sum of money.
Your assumption is completely wrong and you can build about 5x as much wind as nuclear for the same sum of money according to the facts:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/EconomicsOfWind-Feb2005.pdf
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
Florida Power and Light estimates its two new plants will cost as much as $24 billion.
That could probably buy enough off grid PV solar to eliminate the need for FPL entirely ;-)
Hey, guvonuh, Charlie Crist, yo! Howdja like to be the life long benevolent dictator of the newly formed Republic of The Sunshine?! I have this Idea I'd like to discuss with ya...
Well I use real life data and info rather than propaganda filled articles.
Lets take some facts. Again I will use the UK as our example as I know it better than most other nations.
1: bulk electricity into the grid is sold in the uk most of the time for sub 3p/kWh
2: gas fired stations are being built and have been built freely in a relatively free electricity market. (that tells us that a gas station will be producing electricity for sub 3p/kWh and that makes sense as in the UK last year gas cost about 0.7p on average and the gas station will be converting that at 55 to 60% efficient.
3: utilities are salivating at the prospect of building coal fired stations in the UK. Hence that too tells us it can be done profitably for 3p/kWh
4: Most big users will be on fixed contracts which will be lower than average spot.
what we also know:
4: no nukes have been built in the UK in a free market and the companies seem to want guarantees so we cannot accurately price them in the UK. However I suspect a 1p/kWh subsidy for 20 years would entice them enough to be built. That is about 7x less of a subsidy compared to wind. However this is only my calculations and my assumptions so I don’t stand 100% behind this prediction.
5: no one is building wind farms unsubsidised (so they are clearly more costly than coal or gas). Even Germany a lover of wind derives less than 5% of its total power from wind.
6: natural gas and coal may be volatile but they are dirt cheap. Natural gas would have to go to about 6p/kWh and coal to about 4-5p before wind is as competitive as a gas fired station. It is EXTREMELY unlikely natural gas or coal will go up that much. The simple reason is that at those prices lots of demand destruction would happen. People would stop heating their homes and wear more suitable clothing.
So it is highly unlikely fossil fuels will go up to make wind competitive. Wind has to come down in price.
I apologize for thinking you were a right-wing kook. I now see you are just a doomer.
;-)
Lets take some facts.
But you don't, you ignore hardcore facts given by the actual industry and come up with your own completely ridiculous assumptions.
No I use raw data that I know is not corrupt. Most other seems to post that wind is cheap citing a study done by a wind turbine manufacturer.
Follow the money. Wind is 3-4x as expensive as coal/gas today.
Solar is more than 10x as expensive.
And that’s for electricity. For space heating the figures are worse.
Nuclear requires MUCH MORE subsidies than wind.
Proof: US Energy Policy Act of 2005. It gave new nukes the same subsidy as wind PLUS billions more in subsidies PLUS 80% guaranteed gov't financing for 30 to 54 years (thus reducing the cost of capital).
Result to date (5 years later), some semi-serious paper shuffling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
My additions in [ ]
Best Hopes for 80% gov't loans for wind plus free insurance plus regulatory delay compensation plus ...,
Alan
I would wager that those subsidies are not correct.
Simply put France would not have been able to go 80% nuclear if it cost so much to subsidise.
I have yet to see a major country go 80% wind.
I have no data on nukes built post electricity deregulation so I cant be 100% sure but logically it makes sense that nukes require little or no subsidy. As I said I would cite France, she could not be deriving 80% of her electric from nukes if it cost as much as wind or more in subsidies.
You lost your wager. But facts apparently cannot get in the way of your prejudices.
I quoted the Wikipedia entry that I linked. The same facts were reported in the press at the time. I quoted the FACTS !
President George W. Bush signed the bill into law almost 5 years ago (and the general outlines of the bill were clear to lobbyists, etc. months before that).
Some preliminary applications have been made to date, but not one serious commitment to build a new nuke in the USA (except TVA to finish the multi-decade delayed Watts Bar 2 nuke).
France is not a capitalist nation. EdF is state owned and does what it is told to do by bureaucrats & POLITICIANS.
Alan
No you quote wikipidia and the mass media both of which are known to be inaccurate and full of propaganda especially when it comes to things like energy.
What I have quoted and stated is real life.
If it cost so much to build and subsidise nuclear then France would be bust and the French would be poor.
EDF is partly owned by the state but if nukes were so costly they would go bankrupt or the government would have to keep injecting cash into it which isnt the case.
No major country has even gone 10% wind power (not electricity but total power) and the reason is that the subsidies are real and very high.
I am not an advocate of nuclear but I suspect most the negativity and figures through around are propaganda and plain wrong.
Come back when a major country is producing more than 50% of its electricity from wind. We know many countries produce 20-30-40-50% of their electricity from nukes. Some even produce 60-70-80% of their electric from nukes.
You deny facts.
What I quoted was a fair report of the law. Not contraversial at all.
You are a troll that is simply immune to facts.
I will not waste time on a troll that will simply deny any new link that I make to the US "Energy Policy Act of 2005". Others are free to Google away.
Alan
BTW, EdF was 100% owned by the Republic of France# until 2006 (i.e when it built all of those nukes) and is still 85% state owned.
# Just like the electric utility in North Korea is 100% owned by the People's Republic of Korea. However, I think deGaulle was the last "Dear Leader" of France.
Bingo. Beyond the very real issue of the well documented costs that coal, especially, and hydrocarbons in general impose on the economy, this is the other matter that lacking-in-brain-cells misses.
Moreover, people with sufficient brains cells for minimally complicated computing will consider the very probable increase in cost for coal and other hydrocarbons as resource accessibility continues to get more difficult and quality continues to decline.
Thanks, but I didn't find any public links to actual operational tariff, like for instance UK_governmental feed in tariff as of today. Any source ?
The UK government doesn’t operate a feed in tarrif but one is expected before april this year.
I hope they don’t do it as it is the worst way to encourage renewable energy.
The UK government currently operates something they called the “renewable obligation certificate or ROC for short”.
Its too long to go into here so google it if you interested.
In short utilities have to buy a ROC off the wind generators. So the wind farm sells at spot and sells a ROC for every MWH it generates. Currently the ROC trade for about 3.5p. onshore wind farms get 1ROC and offsore 2 AFAIK.
But on top of this there is an indirect subsidy from the coal/gas stations having to back off. That is in the range of 1.5p by my calculations.
I hope they don’t do it as it is the worst way to encourage renewable energy.
Bogus.
Besides the fact that German feed-in-tariffs only make 5% of the German electricity price,
German wind power actually does reduce German electricity prices due to the merit order effect:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/art271,2147183
http://www.ewec2008proceedings.info/statscounter.php?id=2&IDABSTRACT=521
The profit-making wind industry exports 83% of its wind turbines with a profit (as opposed to the tax-payer-dependent UK-banks) is a result of those very effective feed-in-tariffs and is the reason while the UK failed to come up with an exporting wind industry despite having better wind resources than Germany. (And again: ONLY 0.017% of the German population work for the domestic wind power industry.)
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
A number of years ago I constructed a graph on 1 mm grid paper with $ per 100,000 BTU on the vertical scale and on the horizontal scale I put all of the energy sources cost per purchasing unit. Each of the energy sources wound up as a straight line on the graph, but I found it very interesting to be able to look at the various energy sources at different prices to see which energy sources would be the lowest cost per 100,000 BTU (including lines for the energy sources at 100% utilization and also at realistic utilization - ie 70% for wood pellets and 50% for most cord wood stoves, etc..).
Based upon my chart, for this year, propane is cheaper than wood pellets or corn for home heating. Cord wood purchased by the "pickup load" which I averaged to about 800# per load proved to be the most expensive by a long way. The cheapest home heat proved to be geothermal heatpump by a bunch - even without the special prices where they can shut you off any time they want to. I replaced my aging gas furnace with a geothermal heatpump this last year. If prices for propane stay below the current approximate $1.50 (actual this year contract $1.32 gallon) I will never make back the money I paid for the geo unit. If prices go back to $2.32 gallon like a year ago - or more - the geo unit will pay for itself within my expected lifetime. I gambled that prices are going to rise?
I am really amazed at how little understanding most people have of what the real cost per unit of heat most of their options cost at the varying retail prices per unit of purchase.
It would be nice if they could mandate that all energy has to be sold in $ per hundred thousand or million BTU or metric equivalent. That one change would make a huge difference in how people see "energy costs".
Doubtful, as wind is around 3 cents per kWh in Texas:
http://eetd.lbl.gov/EA/emp/reports/lbnl-275e.pdf
And you need to compare the costs of a new coal power plant with a new wind power plant and you receive a much different result.
http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Coal-Plan...
Even the capital costs of PV-modules are already lower than of new coal power plants:
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/271523839/Photovoltaic_Panel.html
And you need to factor in that the costs of solar thermal are lower than of PV.
There's a reason why China installs over 80% of all the solar collectors in the world and it is not because the Chinese are orders of magnitudes wealthier than the British:
http://www.ren21.net/pdf/RE_GSR_2009_Update.pdf
And you need to factor in that efficiency is cheaper and delivers a fast return on investment compared to a new coal power plant:
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/profitable_dat.html
So you are saying that pretty much all the people in the UK either work in a hospital or in a bank or sit on a couch and there is nothing else they could possibly do with their life's?
In that case, I'm certainly not surprised that Germany is far more economically successful and exports over 83% of its wind turbines with a profit:
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
Interesting also - the financial crisis cost $11,900 billion:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/277282
With $11,900 billion one can purchase solar PV factories which produce over 63 TW in 10 years:
http://www.oerlikon.com/ecomaXL/index.php?site=SOLAR_EN_press_releases_d...
63,000 coal power plants that is...
So if you think renewables are cheaper, which they are not, why don’t you go and build them unsubsidised and make a profit?
Why are solar companies crying over the decrease in subsidies announced by Germany /France /Spain?
Hell even after the decrease it is a HUGE subsidy.
Don’t get me wrong I would rather have green power but I am realistic enough to know it ant gona happen until the price is comparable.
About 2 million people work in the UK NHS. The money, people and resources used on the NHS would have to be diverted to build and maintain a green energy infrastructure.
And no the UK economy doesn’t have any spare capacity because if it did they would be utilised. Of course we do misallocate capital and resources but it is easier said than done to use those more efficiently.
Grow up and stop pretending renewables TODAY are price competitive with fossil fuels (bar perhaps hydro)
Besides that feed in tariffs are no subsidy. Wind is number one in the US new power capacity despite not getting any more governmental support than fossil fuel do.
And the German wind industry exports 83% of its wind turbines with a profit as opposed to the UK-banking industry which loses mostly...
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
Bogus: Germany has about 0.1% of their population in their wind industry and they produce close to 10 GW (mostly export with Profit) per year.
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
Of course there are absolutely no unemployed in the UK...and all the work force is needed in the non-producing banking and sales industry.
Once people fail to deliver facts they come up with insults.
Actually, if you compare new plants with new plants many are. Otherwise renewable options would not be built in places where there is no support whatsoever:
http://www.ren21.net/pdf/RE_GSR_2009_Update.pdf
Cells,
Renewables aren't cost competitive, but that is beside the point for the UK, FF are going away very quickly, we have no choice.
Depletion of our domestic sources will likely be such that we will produce a small fraction of our needs by 2020, maybe less than 10% - Gordon Brown has committed us to ~34% reduction by then, it should be easy, probably nobody sensible will lend us the money to import what we need to live beyond our means, even if due to ELM any is actually available for import.
Great .
Eye-balling the 3 categories of UK fossil fuels production over the last 10 years : All 3 are cut in half. just like that. The blue wedges will afterall (at some stage) taper off and 'curve further into the future'- imposed by nature.
The other nations in EU have almost no raw fossil sources per-capita themselves, but when we read about upcoming energy predicaments for Europe......... well it's always the UK that steals the headlines - the largest and most self sufficient of them all - per definition.
Strange, IMHO, I would assume there must be a lot of EU-countries that are much worse off than the UK, in say 2020. (?)
Hmmmm .... Only for coal I expect, the gas and oil are under salt water, a very costly, corrosive, place to be - the structures have a limited profitable life and there isn't a prospect of nodding donkeys slowly pumping oily brine for years and years. For quite a bit of the oil and gas it's likely to be just too costly to extract all the resource like you would on land.
I fear you may be wasting your breath Xeroid.
Cells is notorious on a number of websites in the UK with his cornucopian views on how the UK's energy balance of trade is irrelevant and everything is rosy.
You may notice his habit of comparing coal at the pithead cost with retail price of renewable electricity - a rather unfair way of comparing the two.
I am comparing bulk price for all not at the pithead but to a large buyer.
Yes but we have the choice of importing gas for 1p/kWh or importing German wind farms for 10p/kWh
Energy is a global market, it doesn’t matter so much what the production of one country is doing.
Plus the UK is about 70% energy efficient while France is nearly none and Germany is about 30% and Japan is also very low.
The UK is in a good position compared to most western nations.
Its like the argument of organic food VS standard food.
Sure everyone would like the better quality organic food but most people just wouldn’t be able to afford it.
The same is true for renewables vs fossil fuels at todays prices.
And as a scientist I can tell you it is going to be very hard achieving the reductions Europe is talking about past 2020
No, it will be very easy as there won't be enough exports to go round due to the 'Export Land' effect - what will be difficult to achieve is 'business as usual' growth - without that essential growth our financial system won't/isn't work properly and we as a nation won't be able to borrow money from other nations as growth is required to pay back the debt + interest.
So what?
I agree the UK is in a better position than many European countries, but actually we are not in a good position at all, check the UK FF production graphs since ~2000, we have started to import more and more of our primary energy, we have managed to do this by borrowing more and more money from other western nations that are running a surplus, we are living well beyond our collective means and it is not a sustainable policy. We have run a deficit for so long that we are now close to our borrowing limits - in the long run it is impossible to borrow your way to wealth as you have to pay back the debt with interest.
The UK will do fine as long as it keeps decent capitalist laws.
Natural resources make up a small part of a western countries economies.
Look at Russia, a country with 140m people, LOTS AND LOTS of land, lots and lots of energy and all sorts of other mineral wealth. Yet it is relatively poor.
Look at Japan, very little domestic energy and minerals yet the worlds second richest nation.
Quite clearly natural resources don’t define wealth in themselves.
You clearly don't understand how the world works - the UK has done fine because by a stroke of luck we were floating on coal, gas, oil and minerals not because of our laws. The past is not a guide to the future!
No, you look at Japan, it is the world's second most indebted nation if you look at debt/GDP - number 1 is Zimbabwe! An indebted person is NOT necessarily a wealthy person, but could be living beyond their means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
There is plenty of fresh water in the world but it isn't evenly spread so in some places it is too boggy to grow food and in others it is a desert. Oil is the same and the UK will soon be in a desert for oil - and the rest of the oil exporting world WILL NOT HAVE AN ADEQUATE AMOUNT OF OIL to sell us even if we had an adequate amount of something to exchange for it, which we don't. Our current way of living is not sustainable!
The financial system is too complicated a topic to go into here but simply put would you rather live in resource poor Japan or hugely resource rich Russia?
Laws dictate perhaps 90% of a nations wealth.
The other perhaps 10% are natural resources.
Talk about cherry picking! Japan vs. Russia. Why not America vs. Haiti? Canada vs. India? Norway vs. Sudan?
Yes, rule of law is very important in promoting the wealth of a nation, but by itself is not enough and hardly determines 90% of the outcome. The greatest determinants of a decent standard of living would likely be the following (not necessarily in order):
1. favorable ratio of natural resources to population
2. low birth rate
3. high literacy & education level (esp. for women)
4. economic and political freedeoms for women
5. equitable distribution of wealth (low GINI coefficient)
6. low corruption index
7. policies favoring development of intellectual capital & new technology
8. respect for individual civil liberties
9. government based on democratic and/or representative principles
Japan and Russia are perfect examples.
Russia a very land and resource rich country with a poor legal system. It is overall not a very rich country.
Japan, a very poor land/resource country but with a good legal system and free trade. It is overall a very rich country.
You can live ontop of one of the worlds biggest oil reserves but it is worthless if you cant do business or have free and fair trade. Think Iran or Iraq or even Russia. On the other hand you can be extremely resource poor but still be rich if you have fair free trade and a good legal system. Japan, Germany, France come to mind.
Resources are only a small part of a nations wealth as the real world clearly shows us. As long as we keep decent laws and free fair trade we will do fine even with near zero domestic fossil fuels a la france or japan.
Natural resources only don't matter when you can freely and cheaply import them from your neighbors. Once you can't, it's amazing how much they suddenly "matter" (as Japan found out when the U.S. threatened to restrict oil exports, ultimately leading to Pearl Harbor).
I agree it's not the only determinant, but it's an important one.
Didn't you write this, Harm?
You can't take a rational approach, you'd have to take an influence approach. Or give up.
Cell let me give another example of a country that fits your criteria for a country poor in resources and a good democratic legal system. That country is Denmark cheap energy has never been the main criterion since they nearly got wiped out in the oil price hike in the early seventies when they were nearly 99% dependent on oil. Your capitalist idea that the market knows best and you always chose the cheapest alternative is what is wiping out my country England and with it Britain. Do you think that Britain will be able to pay for the import of energy when it goes bankrupt. Sometimes subsidy is the best alternative.
Let us take Denmark who have seriously meddled with the capitalist idea of the market and compare it with my country Britain who have slavishly followed it. The Danes have seriously subsidized the renewable market energy saving and energy efficiency and see where it has lead them and how it has benefited. The Danes began by starting a serious project into wind power by erecting different types of windmills in the grounds of the Atomic research institute at Risø near Roskilde. I used to ride past every day on my way too University. They instigated a feed in tariff, in 1978 Vesta erected its first commercial windmill and many other firms were started. They are now I think the second largest producer of windmills in the world and have installed enough capacity to provide electricity for a country the size of Spain. The industry employs over 30,000 people if we had done the same we would have now an industry employing 360,000 people in well paid jobs and not on the Dole most of its production goes in exports which brings in millions for the exchequer. When I was living there during the 70s they got most of there electricity from 12 large generating plants now they get it from more than 200 multi fuel plants mainly with co generation which has brought has brought energy utilization up to nearly 80% the waste heat is pump round the different cities to keep the building warm. Imagine how much that has saved the country in not having to import all that extra fuel for heating building. They aggressively raised building and insulation standards. Rockwool is a Danish multinational firm which has expanded due mainly to supplying the insulation for the higher building standards. Guess where the profits come back too. Gaming the market with subsidies to pay for the heavy front end investment had a cost. These subsidizes have certainly been expensive over the last 30 odd years I have read that it cost the Danish taxpayer approximately 60 kroner a month, but what has it brought them. Because of more energy effieciency there per capita production costs in energy is approximately half of what it is in the U.K. Which means that there industry is more competitive. There balance of payments is much better than what it used to be because it has reduced energy imports and built up an export industry, renewables that is set to grow even faster in the coming years.
Now let us take Britain during the last 30 years and see what has happened to my country. Attila the Hen ( Maggie Thatcher ) destroyed our mining industry, I should bloody well know. Because coal was not competitive or that was her excuse. The pure market theology which you like Maggie subscribe too of let the market decide, has all but destroyed my country with its stupidity. The oil and gas industry was sold off to the highest bidder who exploited it for there own ends, What the country received was spent on bribing the electorate. There is no sovereign wealth fund. The whole lot has been spent. We spent our capital as income. British industry was hollowed out because of the high pound. Now what do we have after 25 years, a manufacturing industry that is not big enough to export enough to pay for our imports, now that the city has gone tits up, and had to be bailed out (subsidized) by the British taxpayer by a promissory note that my grandchildren will be paying off. I could go on but I will leave it here you sir are an idiot and like all market purist know the price of every thing (the market knows best) and the value of nothing. Economics is much more than a simplistic mantra.
Wow this is a lot to address but ill give it a go
Firstly lets look at Denmark:
Population 5.5 million (UK is 11.2x the population)
Landmass 43k sq km (About twice as much land as the UK per person)
Oil consumption: 190k barrels a day (24% more per person than the UK)
Gas consumption: 4.6 billion cubic meters (45% less per person than the UK)
Coal consumption: 4.1 million tonne oil equivalent (30% more coal consumption per person than the UK)
Nuclear: none
Hydro: negligible (by comparison the UK has 1.1 million tone oil equivalent of hydro)
Wind 2008: 3.1GW installed capacity (by comparison the UK had 3.3GW installed capacity and Germany had 24GW installed capacity)
Overall:
Denmark: 6GW gas, 13.5GW oil, 5.5GW coal (and 3.1GW wind capacity equivalent to about 3GW fossil fuels).
Only 11% of demarks power is from wind. The other 89% is from fossil fuels. Mostly oil then gas then coal.
Is that a surprise to you? Perhaps you need to revaluate your divine view of Denmark?
And guess what? Overall demark per person uses MORE energy than the UK by about 5%.
Now have you ever asked yourself why demark might be relatively affluent? Might it have anything to do with fossil fuels?
Over the last 10 years RELATIVE TO ITS POPULATION SIZE demark has been a BIG exporter of (remember relative to its population size) of both oil and gas.
A net exporter of 130k barrels per day over the last 10 years. now that doesn’t sound like a lot but for Denmark it is a huge amount!! It would be the equivalent of the UK exporting 1.5 million barrels per day.
A net exporter of 4 billion cubic meters of natural gas over the last 10 years.
Again that doesn’t sound like a lot but it is huge for demark. It would be the equivlant of the UK exporting 45 billion cubic meters of gas.
By comparision over the last 10 years the UK has been a net exporter of oil by about 0.2 million barrels (net importer today) and it has been a net importer of gas.
So Denmark is rich due to a fossil fuel bonanza not silly wind farms!
If the UK had a spare 1.5 million barrels a day and 45 billion cubic meters of gas to sell then I am sure the UK would be better off than it is.
Now tell me you fell silly!
Cell let me give another example of a country that fits your criteria for a country poor in resources and a good democratic legal system. That country is Denmark
Denmark is very rich in oil and gas you yorkshiremen.
And as a scientist I can tell you it is going to be very hard achieving the reductions Europe is talking about past 2020
But you are clearly no scientist as you stubbornly ignore all facts and are undoubtedly incapable to deliver any data and references.
We don't treat all fossil fuels the same when it comes to cost. Why insist on doing this with renewables. This generalised dismissiveness of renewables is dogma, not science. It would be just as accurate for me to say "all british people are drunken, limey slouches".
What?
Can you explain that again?
I think he meant to say it would be like saying that all Brits were inebriated, citrusy slackers...
You got it, FM.
I found figure 15 in your link, which seemed to indicate on small wind producer in Texas claimed a cost (after subsidies?) of 3 cents per kWh. I don't think I would take this as representative. Why did T Boone Pickens cancel his plans to use wind turbines in Texas and say:
No one puts in wind turbines where they have to compete with coal. Even with subsidies, wind needs a price at least as high as $6 per million Btus, according to Pickens.
T Bone figures are a bit off for Europe and I suspect the US.
Here gas would have to cost more than £13 per btu (about $20-22) for wind to be competitive unsubsidised.
I hope gas doesn’t get that expensive but that wind falls in price.
Robert's price for gas is almost that high. Pickens is talking about gas.
And, since only a little over half of the energy in nat gas is converted to electricity, it would seem you have to multiply the price of natural gas by nearly 2 to find the price at which it is competitive with wind, at least in the context like that of the Pickens quote where you're talking about electricity production. Taking Robert's figure for gas, wind ought to be competitive at a price of around $10 per million btu for wind, compared to natural gas for electricity production.
Unless I'm misreading the meaning of Robert's figures...it's frustrating not to have this stuff spelled out more explicitly. Of course Robert seems to be focusing on home heating, but then, hardly anyone in the US uses coal directly for home heating these days.
Pickens is talking about subsidised wind.
Unsubsidised wind power costs about 10p/kWh.
A modern gas fired station operates at 60% electrical efficiency and has overheads of about 1.5p
So that’s 10p minus 1.5p gives 8.5p.
Times that by 0.6 and you get 5.1p/kWh
That is to say gas would have to be 5.1p/kWh for wind to be competitive unsubsidised.
There are roughly 300kWh in a mbtu so that is about 1500p per mbtu
That’s roughly equal to $24 for a million BTU.
That is to say wind is competitive with gas when gas hits about $24 per million BTU
Those are the figures for the UK. Of course it will be slightly different in the US due to tax rates, different costs etc however it wont be greatly different.
What is for 100% sure is that wind is NOT competitive with gas at $6 per million BTU.
You also need to keep in mind, that Pickens is in the natural gas business too and more wind has a damping effect on the price of natural gas.
After all Texas has already close to 10 GW installed:
http://awea.org/newsroom/releases/01-26-10_AWEA_Q4_and_Year-End_Report_R...
I think the issue is that even if people would like to pay more for the higher priced forms of energy, their pocketbooks do not really permit this, without recession and/or defaults on loans taking place. (Exceptions--a few high income people can afford the cost, so there may be some limited penetration, or governments can hide the cost for a while, but eventually have to raise taxes, and this results in the same effect as the higher direct cost)
What happens is that people end up paying more for oil or electricity and for things that use a lot of oil or electricity in their production. These products tend to be necessities (food, gasoline, home heating). The result is less money left over for everything else. Consumers cut back on non-necessities, or they default on their loans. The result looks pretty much like the situation we have been seeing recently.
You keep on repeating this.
But have you actually ever compared the costs of your rent/mortgage and your healthcare-costs with your electricity bill?
And have you ever considered reducing your electricity bill with simple efficiency measures?
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/profitable_dat.html
I am just saying what happens in the aggregate. I will grant you that some people will take part of their savings or discretionary income, and pay for insulation, and thus reduce their heating bills. This improvement is helpful, but down the road, if costs go up again, the customer must find a new way to cut back.
And all of these increases in costs operate more broadly than just a person's electricity bill. Healthcare is a big user or electricity, for example. When increases in costs are oil related, they tend to affect food and all types of goods that are transports.
If savings are not available for increased home insulation, people could try dressing appropriatedly for the season.
lol
Just for the sake of some numbers, the cost breakdown for my household (a current winter month):
Mortgage: 52%
Misc fixed (insurance, phone, garbage, etc) 6%
Heat & Power 7%
Water 3%
Groceries 25%
There's not a lot of slack in there, and insulation and conservation have already cut the energy usage in half over two years ago. I'm inclined to agree with Gail: in my case (and probably very many others) if energy costs rise, there is a slim margin of discretionary funds, but basically its the groceries that would take a hit. I haven't any debt except the mortgage, but I've got a short enough time left on that that I don't want to mess it up.
At least in the US, I do not think the problem is that energy costs are so high that people have no money left to spend on efficiency measures.
Rather I think energy is so cheap that no one really bothers to conserve it, even low-income people. Walk around a low-income housing project and you will see lights turned on everywhere, doors and windows open leaking heat, TVs turned on, cars idling,etc. Of course the situation is similar in all income brackets.
Your idea of an economy where everyone is so strapped that they have no resources to divert to efficiency and renewable conversion looks nothing like the US I live in.
Some statistics indicating there just might be a little fat available for diversion in the US economy.
"Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99
Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24
Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66
Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes
Percentage of Americans that regularly watch television while eating dinner: 66
Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
Value of that time assuming an average wage of S5/hour: S1.25 trillion
Percentage of Americans who pay for cable TV: 56
Number of videos rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million"
So maybe some of those US households with 3 or more TVs could sell or at least turn off their extra TVs and use the time and money saved to weatherstrip their doors/windows or insulate their attics. I understand that many (most) will not choose to, but the arguement that the resources are not available denies reality.
40% of US vehicles are SUVs or pickup trucks, (from wikipedia), and I would guess that less than 5% of those "utility" vehicles are needed or even used for "utility" purposes. (I am usually carrying more on my bicycle than the pickups stopped at the light next to me). So, again, simply downsizing to reasonable vehicles would provide a huge source of funds for renewable/efficiency conversion.
Many efficiency measures are low-cost/no-cost anyway, such as turning off lights, turning down thermostats, closing curtains.
I agree that right now electricity is so cheap it's hard to get people to pay any attention to it on the basis of price alone. In my experience of working with people to reduce their energy consumption, some who are motivated by green issues (worry about climate change and the horrific future their children are increasingly likely to endure) will be conscientious about making changes. But in general, when I recommend avoiding vampire power loss by plugging TV, stereo and computer equipment in power strips and turning them off when the equipment is not in use (exceptions can be made for Tivo, etc.) and mention this will save $8 or so dollars a month, approx $100 a year, easily paying for the investment in the power strips, people cannot believe I am even suggesting this as worth their time. $8 a month! That's two lattes. Why should they go to the trouble of buying a power strip for such petty change? Who cares if they burn through 3 extra kilowatt-hrs a day that does absolutely no good for them or anybody else?
And weatherstripping their front and back doors--well that would mean calling a handyman and paying a couple hundred dollars. Sure it might save a couple hundred dollars over the course of each winter, but it really is easier just to turn up the thermostat. The insulation level in their attic is of no interest--maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't. Frontload washers are beginning to be fashionable, but second and third refrigerators that chill a six pack of beer and a liter of soda and their entire collection of white wine are obviously essential, it doesn't matter if they use another 3-6 Kwh a day. Water is so cheap, people hose down their driveways when sweeping with a broom is just as quick. Gas is so cheap, people drive around in 5000 lb cars to deliver their single 60lb child to school, and then keep their cars idling for fifteen minutes when waiting in line to pick said child back up.
When we get to the point that the majority of Americans do not flagrantly and extravagantly waste energy without a thought, then we will know that energy is priced correctly.
Okay, sorry for the rant. Due to the utterly dysfunctional state government in California that requires a 60% majority to get anything done, funds for public transit have been raided (how about stolen?) to pay for happy things like prisons and over-priced bureaucrats. This in turn is causing draconian cuts in public transit in San Francisco, very possibly the most short-sighted thing our government could choose to do. So I'm in a bad mood. Thanks for listening.
How can you as an American wish to control prices considering that bedrock of communism is price controls?
Government dictating your life and what you can buy and spend is not a good thing, if you want that go to North Korea.
If you want Americans to go green then invent and produce green energy cheaper than gas/coal/oil. Don’t fix prices to manipulate Americans and their lives.
Having said that, wow you lot use a huge amount. Nearly twice as much as us in the UK and we use plenty!
Now you're Red-baiting, on top of it all? You've done a lot of typing today!
She didn't say 'use price controls'.. she just said energy and water were so cheap, people have not had to work hard to use them carefully.. that they don't pay attention to the wastefulness. Didn't you say that 'Subsidies hurt the economy' up there someplace? Would that include the terrific work our govt's have done to keep Gas cheap? We do this at our peril, and the costs are borne by the taxpayer. In fact, it's also a centralized form of 'price controls', and didn't even come from communists! But these wars we've bled our fortunes out over to keep the oil flowing have been very useful at tilting the field away from the renewables.. you want a fair playing field? I have to wonder..
Good lord...that's like a quote right from US talk radio. Which, btw, is one of the greatest proponents of using huge amounts, no matter the foreign entanglements, wars, and massive expenses that are required to ensure access to energy supplies.
Tommy;
Your points about TV remind me of an assumption that regularly skews these discussions as well.
Cells (Welcome to your first day at The Oil Drum!!) has made a few economic points with the implication that consumer choices are essentially rational and informed.. that they are actually 'Choices'.. like buying and watching TV.
And yet, a massive part of our consumer economic model is based on 'Selling people things they don't need'.. Getting people addicted is a terrific tool for accomplishing this goal. TV is clearly an addiction, as are so many of the cheap food and snack options that people grow into unthinking habits of spending their money on, and as even George Bush said right out in the open 'We are Addicted to Oil (Energy?) in the US.'
The money is not moving through rational channels, and as such is not going to have rational self-corrections.
Bob
And after snarking on the following line for a few years now, I only just thought yesterday to make its opposite into a T-Shirt.
"DisObey your thirst!"
Robert,
This is a very helpful article and short enough for even "A" types to digest. I'm curious why we see rather large variations in BTUs for gasoline (115k-125k).
Debbie,
Gasoline does in fact have a range of BTU distributions depending on whether it is summer or winter, as well as the specific blending components that went into the blend. What I tried to do here is simply take the conservative end so nobody could accuse me of painting gasoline in a more flattering light with regard to price per BTU.
My thanks as well, Robert. as ever!
The BTU number I would like to see is some standard for Solar Heating, the unsexiest heat source we've got.. of course, it's hard to do it neatly, because it's really just dividing a system cost over the number of years it is going to run. It does remind me that with all of these other sources, the equipment costs are actually unrepresented in the figure, just the fuel.. so in that sense, the Solar is Free. (But I'd never get away with that one.. even while my current Solar Hot Air Panel and PV combo cost me less than 1/10 the cost of the furnace! 24degrees in Portland, and it's been blowing 100 degree air all day!!) http://s831.photobucket.com/albums/zz240/Ingto83/
Bob Fiske
Perhaps one of the reasons why wood pellets are more popular in Europe than in the US is because the average house size is much smaller --> fewer BTUs are needed to heat it, so the occupant has to haul fewer bags.
Just a WAG.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I think by popular he means in the US it might be 1% of homes and in Europe it might be 2% of homes.
Wood pellets don’t make up any significant space heating in Europe.
Over the last year I have only seen wood used in one hotel and that was more for effect. I haven’t come across it in any homes yet and I have lived in Europe for over 20 years.
natural gas is what is mostly used
My random oberservations of pelletheating in Europe are probably irrelevant, but this article
http://www.biomassmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=2408&q=&page=all
seems to hint that pellet / biomass as a fuel is on the upswing in Europe.
I don't have specific data though :-(
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Yes biomass power stations are increasing in the UK so overall consumption is perhaps growing fast.
But it probably represents a fraction of 1% of total energy used.
It is most definitely not a popular way to heat your home. I have only come across a single home using wood heating in my 20 years in the UK. Its nearly all NG and to a smaller extent electric/fuel oil/propane.
"Leading pellet producing countries in the EU are Sweden (1.7 million tonnes), Germany (900,000 tonnes) and Austria (800,000 tonnes). Both Sweden and Austria have been leading pellet countries since the earliest days of market development in Europe, in the 1990s. Growing production capacities can also be found, for example, in France, Spain, Latvia, Estonia and Poland. Meanwhile, Russia has significantly increased its production capacities – from 50,000 tonnes in 2005 to 550,000 tonnes in 2007 – nearly all of it for export. Canada’s plants produced about 1.3 million tonnes in 2008.
In terms of pellet consumption, Sweden, Germany and Austria lead the way in Europe, closely followed by France, where rapid market development has taken place in recent years. Italy has become one of the most important pellet consumers due to the increasing number of installed pellet stoves (about 800,000 stoves to date). Total annual pellet consumption in Europe presently amounts to about 6 million tonnes. On the North American market, about 2.3 million tonnes of pellets were consumed in 2008, with about 2 million tonnes of this in the USA." http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/03/burning-iss...
Pellet stoves in individual homes are growing in popularity, but I expect that a little research will reveal that district heating systems using pellets as a primary fuel account for even more space heating.
I think by popular he means in the US it might be 1% of homes and in Europe it might be 2% of homes.
The roots of this essay came from a recent presentation I saw. It showed projected biomass flows around the world, and showed a very strong flow from North America to Europe. I thought "That doesn't make any sense from an efficiency standpoint. We should use that biomass locally." Then I started looking at prices, and said "Aha!"
Robert,
Thanks for a very enlightning summary of energy sources/costs.
Technically, isn't electricity an energy carrier rather than an energy source? I understand that in a way solar, wind and hydro may be viewed as sources of electricity, though that is really an engineering choice:
-Solar can be used for thermal rather than PV
-Wind is/was used for mechanical purposes like grinding grain, pumping water
-Hydro also was used to power mills (mechanical energy) in addition to generating electricity.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I think one should eliminate those uses that are so small as to be irrelevant, like hydro or wind milling grain.
Alan
By comparing prices per British Thermal Units (BTU) Robert has produced comparisons that are most meaningful for pure heating uses. As such, the comparison sheds light on choices that consumers will make for their home heating. If we were to compare prices for sources of electricity, the price comparisons would have to be different.
Quite a good article for the Forbes audience.
We have far overshot the limits of our own habitat, and have been a significant cause of the Sixth Great Die Off the planet has seen.
Those of us born after the mid-1950's will most likely die a violent death as we humans fight for diminishing resources and as the consequences of habitat destruction make the real situation that we live in more obvious.
Catton notes that we humans have always behaved based on our "definition of the situation" -- an important term for sociologists.
I suppose those who read Forbes and The Economist and such have a far different definition of our situation than I do.
Is it possible to get these specialized folks to read outside of their comfort zone?
Catton also notes that the specialization of our complex culture have created a culture of "pick pockets" where the executives and scientists are encouraged to not think about anything other than how their work can extract money from others.
Maximize dollar profit and minimize exposure to dollar loss -- even if it means breaking the law and every moral code humanity knows about.
Why doesn't Forbes ask scientists -- like Hansen, Catton, Flannery and others -- to clue them in on the scenarios we are creating right now, and ask how to make things better?
RR -- would you be willing to write such a "big picture" article, and if so what might it look like?
RR -- would you be willing to write such a "big picture" article, and if so what might it look like?
Big picture on peak oil/overshoot? I will almost certainly write some things along those lines, but the early essays for Forbes will tend toward the non-controversial.
Very cool -- I am glad to hear that you have some interest in writing along those lines.
My daughter is in college now. She has worked very hard by the way, and got into what many people consider to be a superb university.
At a gathering of faculty and parents, I mentioned as few of the books I've been reading about environmental topics. I noted that in my opinion population overshoot and naive over-consumption, along with habitat destruction and resource shortages will radically alter our lives over the next 20 years, and will dominate the lives of these students.
And yet I noted that much of university curriculum seems to assume a continuation of conventional thought and business-as-usual into the future without end.
The facilitator noted that one of the goals of the institution is to teach students to read, study with passion and come up with these kinds of questions. One of the science faculty responded by essentially saying she shared this concern. She spoke with enthusiasm about an elective she teaches each fall on environmental studies. Even so this is one class each year -- and vague allusions to the environment in other courses.
Forbes, The Economist, WSJ, and similar publications seem to lack the imagination needed to understand that the our economic thought and action has terribly damaged the larger creation upon which it depends, and so by beginning with a severely flawed "definition of the situation" are leading us into a very uncomfortable and rapid die-off.
Our cultural institutions are unable to develop awareness of the changes in our environment and then to adapt to the changes. This will make the future even m ore bleak.
One Dr. Walter Brueggemann wrote an excellent book entitled "The Prophetic Imagination" that speaks to Catton's notion of the importance of "the definition of the situation." Brueggemann notes that complex cultures develop ideas and institutions that assume a continuation of the present into the future. This "Imperial" self-assurance prevents cultures (that is us right now) from seeing things the way they really are. The difference between the made-up reality and the real deal can be -- often is -- fatal.
Brueggeman speaks of the "Imperial Imagination" as being dulled, distracted, and bound by complacency and pride.
In contrast, the "Prophetic Imagination" continually and radically critiques its own "definition of the situation" and adapts to new information and analysis.
The Prophetic Imagination actually sounds like good scientific method.
William Catton argues that over-specialization actually unglues society in another way, even as "Imperial Imagination" is securely to falsehood. Over-specialization means that we are rewarded for not thinking about the real situation, and indeed are rewarded for committing fraud for profit. Catton calls this the "Pick Pocket Culture."
I submit that we have an Imperial Imagination bound to ideologies and superstitions which trap us in an economic Pick Pocket paradigm at a time when we definitely need the Prophetic Imagination.
E. O. Wilson, Tim Flannery, James Hanson, William Catton seem to have the Prophetic Imagination . Hanson states clearly that the role of money in politics binds us from making any meaningful change in response to the life-or-death demands of our real situation.
Can some of this be communicated to the folks who read the business press?
Thanks!!!
Great comment!
As they say, you can lead the horse to water but you can't force it to drink.
Hi Beggar,
Good thoughts - and, I've only got a chapter or two left to read in Bottleneck - excellent book.
We need a reading list for citizens. Couple this with discussion groups to help process information and analysis.
Adlai Stevenson gave a talk at Princeton in 1954 called "The Educated Citizen." Here is an excerpt:
"The political organization that goes by the name of the United States of America consists of no fewer than 155,000 governing units, school boards, conservation districts, municipalities, states, the nation, etc. It is operated by some one million elected officials, ranging from mosquito district trustee to President, and by some six million full-time employees. Our government is so large and so complicated that few understand it well and others barely understand it at all. Yet we must try to understand it and to make it function better.
For the power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decisions which it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership which it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world.
All this is to say that your power is virtually beyond measurement. For it is to you, to your enlightened attention, that American government must look for the sources of its power. You dare not, if I may say so, withhold your attention. For if you do, if those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability, America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls. "
Education in our world is lifelong, formal and informal. We have abandoned actual education at every step of the way, however. We now have a citizenry more suited to monarchy or dictatorship than to a democratic republic.
Lifelong education is nearly non-existent, while citizenship has shrunk to diverting the energy of the people into engagement with a public discourse that has little relation to the acts of the government.
The so-called democracy we see is a rather thin veil. It sure confuses many of the people who pour themselves into contemporary politics only to be rejected and abused by the very politicians they have supported. This is because, as Jim Hansen notes in his new book, politics will not bring about change until the role of money is taken out of politics.
Hmm, I'm willing to wager a rather large sum of money that he has many more executives than scientists in his circle of personal acquaintances.
Probably not, coming from academia and science himself, and the interviews I have viewed, his surroundings seem modest.
Capitalism demands one to be delusional and superstition based to work, and Catton abhors this, while executives need to be ignorant, or they could not do their jobs
Of course, I could be wrong, as I have no primary information.
very interesting article on the problems in Greece and what they could mean for the broader markets, oil, gold, and the economy: http://www.goldalert.com/stories/Gold-Price-Bull-Market-Intact-Greece-Ba...
The place to discuss this is over in Drumbeat.
sorry, won't happen again
I buy wind/ small hydro electricity in NYS and it costs a premium of +1 something cents a KWh. Wind only generated electricity cost a premium of 2.5 cent a KWh (last I looked). There is also a fee for NYSERDA which is a subsidy for "alternatives" that all of us pay on our electric bill in NYS. NYS has a fair amount of "big project" hydro as well and some nuke.
I couldn't install enough solar PV on my lot to make enough electricity to heat with if I filled up the whole yard with the array.
I heat our home with natural gas as most my neighbors do. For me to convert to heating this building with electricity would cost a substatial amount of up front cost and it's debatable if it would save me operating costs. Especially with the premium electrc cost. I looked into GS water heat pump.
I don't know how you could convince folks to make that investment for "carbon credit" without subsidy when they can't make the mortgage.
I don't think you could convert very many homes of the development to passive solar at all. Mine included. If you build new "solar" home are the old ones still in use?
Seams to me quite a task to "change out" the infrastruct we have.
Dave,
There are still a lot of retrofits that are useful for older housing stock. South Wall heating panels, Skylights, Solariums with whole-house fans.
This little Hot Air panel on my roof would need 5 to 10 partners up there to be producing a truly significant chunk of my heating needs, and it's a prototype and not so pretty at this point.. but it really works every time the sun is out.
http://s831.photobucket.com/albums/zz240/Ingto83/?action=view¤t=IM...
You're right, you wouldn't want to use Solar Electric for heating.. but direct Solar Heat provides a good number of KCals, and a decent return on investment, and there are Solar PV setups that actually grab heat from the panels and use that for preheating domestic water. (Look up Ascendant Energy in Maine) Of course Air source Heatpumps and Geothermal really deserve some looking into as well.
Bob
Hi Dave,
I purchase low-impact power from Bullfrog Power (http://www.bullfrogpower.com/) and the cost premium is just 2-cents per kWh -- $22.00 CDN/month more than offsets all our household needs, including space heating and DHW. I use to spend four times that on satellite TV which I seldom watched and, frankly, I derive far more satisfaction from the former than I ever did the latter.
Cheers,
Paul
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The big downside to coal, besides all the externalized health costs/GCC costs, is that it's not very energy dense. At 500 ton*miles/gallon, coal costs an additional 1.7c/mile per mmbtu to transport. After ~25 miles, the price of PRB coal doubles.
One suggestion that has been made is to burn the coal in Wyoming (or wherever), and only transport the electricity. If this is done, most of the transport costs can be saved, and the pollution is concentrated in a fairly unpopulated state. If transmission lines were built, coal fired electricity imported from Wyoming to the East Coast would be quite a bit cheaper than wind electricity (also transported long-distance by transmission lines).
Water?
the parents of the little buckaroos may have a problem with that. further, any pollution in wyoming will be dispersed by the almost always windy big wonderful wyoming.
wyoming has a lot of potential for co2 eor, and with co2 in short supply, what is needed is a new generation of coal fired plants.
It's still going to be dumping Mercury and other junk on the rest of the Downwind part of the Country. I'm soaking in it.
Coal is simply unacceptable.
It is easy to say if you don’t think of the consequences of it.
Its like saying non organic food is unacceptable. Well sure it would be better but most people simply couldn’t afford it.
You're thinking of some economic consequenses that have workarounds, while glibly ignoring the health and environmental consequences.
We can't eat the fish from our rivers here in pristine Maine, because of the Mercury raining onto our watersheds from these 'affordable' midwest coal power plants. What those energy customers are 'affording', is the destruction of MY ecosystems up here, as an unbilled cost for running Their lights, facilitated by energy companies who have been allowed to sell power without charging the full costs of doing this business. Eating fish in inland Maine is not some preferential fad diet (and Neither is Organic food really, but to stick with the point..) many communities lived off of these rivers, and now have to eat at McDonalds.
But it's not best compared to someone choosing Organic Foods, it is comparable to selling Lead Paint. It is direct poisoning, and one with only a brief time delay before it starts flowing downstream and hitting us right back with our own selfish shortsightedness. YOUR proudly trumpeted selfish shortsightedness.
People can't afford it because they've been manipulated, cheated and poisoned to the edge of bankruptcy by most of the same corporations to whom they send their obedient monthly subscription, premium and utility checks.
is mercury particularly difficult to remove from a co2/water/fly ash effluent ? i dont know, i'm just asking.
I don't know either.
I just know they don't and Bush & Co cancelled the court appointments for all the offending companies who were in violations over emissions.
Gail, you're wrong about saving the transportation cost, at least at today's prices. Energy costs for diesel locomotives hauling coal are about half that of the electrical energy that would lost in transmission, not to mention releasing 5 times less CO2. You've never actually done any calculations on this, have you?
I had to search for a bit to find it, but you can read my previous response to this suggestion of yours here, from nearly a year ago.
I read an analysis of HV DC alternatives for a "foothills of the Andes" hydropower plant to urban Brazil. The range of line losses for the various voltages and wire diameters was 1.8 to 1 from least to most efficient.
The economic cost of the lost hydropower was in the range of $15/MWh and they went with the option towards the efficient end.
Make electricity valuable (say a carbon tax on coal fired electricity) and significantly more efficient transmission will happen.
Alan
Thanks for the feedback Alan...
For what distance? You need to know this to make comparisons. I'm mean, looking at the map of Brazil I suspect over a 1000 miles, but you still need to be specific.
Not exactly a fair comparison to coal, since you can't put hydro electricity on a train and move it closer to the point of consumption. (And what was the cost of the more efficient option compared to the less efficient? Really a whole different ball o' wax regarding cost comparison.)
I take your point in as far as my numbers were back-of-the-envelope, and showed roughly comparable costs, so a relatively small swing in prices tips the balance of the outcome. Still, what bugs me is that Gail makes an sweeping assertion ("save most of the transportation cost") which doesn't seem very supportable at first glance. It really sounds like she heard this idea somewhere, and jumped to conclusions in assuming it's practical.
They already do that. California gets coal by wire. The east coast is asynchronous with the west tho so they'd need an HVDC wire to go east.
Can anyone recommend an up-to-date study on North American biomass production potential? I am looking for a non-biased analysis that includes all the energy and nutrient inputs required for sustainable production.
This article is of little value. What matters is not the wholesale cost of the energy, but the cost to the energy user. First there are the distribution costs. I would challenge anyone here to post the local retail cost of coal (I can't because it isn't available). But if it is available I would guess it would be 10 times the wholesale prices quoted (massive transportation cost...). Other types of energy are going to have different markups (nothing anywhere near as high as the retail coal markup). Second there are the conversion costs. End users can only use energy in particular forms: heating, lighting, running motors... So if you heat with electricity 100% of the energy is converted to heat. If you heat with coal, propane, natural gas part of the energy is going to go up the chimney.
What matters is not the wholesale cost of the energy, but the cost to the energy user.
It all depends upon what you are trying to understand. One of the things I want to know - as a developer of alternatives to oil and gas - is what I am competing against. The wholesale price is what I have to ultimately compete against. The cost to the user can be greatly distorted by government policies - which are fickle. If I point out that in Venezuela gasoline is ten cents a gallon (or whatever their subsidized price is) then that doesn't necessarily help me understand what the future might look like because government policies can change all the time. I am trying to get the taxes out of this to understand the underlying price.
I would challenge anyone here to post the local retail cost of coal (I can't because it isn't available). But if it is available I would guess it would be 10 times the wholesale prices quoted
Well, you would be wrong. Those who think there are massive transportation costs that add an order of magnitude to the price can simply try to do a bit of research prior to jumping to conclusions:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/acr/table34.html
That Powder River basin coal that wholesales for $10/short ton gets delivered to utilities in neighboring states for $13-$15/ton, and it can get into the Okla/Tex. region for $20-25. So instead of $0.50/MMBTU, you may be up to $1.50. Does that substantially change the picture for you?
What this tells me is that there will be great financial pressure to turn to coal, especially during times of energy shortages. The retail price wouldn't necessarily help me understand that because it may have been highly distorted by policies that government can change when they want to.
I think it is of great value. A couple of years ago I tried to sit down and calculate something similar to answer the question of how various energy sources stacked up. I didn't get far; too many decisions as to where in the stream to pluck cost, how to place different types of energy, etc. For instance, you can go out and cut down a tree and burn it for heat, or you can mine coal, smelt steel, build a wind turbine, generate electricity, and run it through a baseboard heater. How to compare the two?
The more you think about it the more sense it makes to just look at cost, and to convert values to a standard measure like Btu's or joules. As Robert says, it depends on what you are trying to understand, but you have to have some stable way of breaking things down.
I think its also very useful in the EROEI calculation. Anyone who's struggled with that would say the first problem is any energy product you look at has a basic energy in/energy out formula, but inherently the types of energy are different. To get anything sensible, you can convert both sides of the equation to Btu's or joules, or in more difficult situations simply to cost. There are always choices and qualifications based on what you are trying to understand that put some burden on the reader, but that's just the nature of things; nothing simpler is available that I know of.
Hi daxr,
I very much agree. A while back, when the Pickens Plan was a hot topic, I was trying to equate NG to oil - at just this BTU starting point.
However, I am puzzled about one part of this:
•Petroleum - 138,000 BTU/gal
•Gasoline - 115,000 BTU/gal
•Diesel - 131,000 BTU/gal
•Natural gas2 - $5.69
•Petroleum5 - $13.43
•Diesel4 - $15.59
•Gasoline4 - $17.81
I was under the impression (I think from some comment on TOD) that to convert the stand unit of measure for pricing NG - MMBtu ($5.13 today) to barrel of oil ($72.89 today) in terms of the BTUs contained in each measure - that the ratio was about 6:1. The point of this being that $6.00 NG would be about equal to $36 bbl of oil just on the raw BTUs available.
So, at 42 gal per bbl we have about 5,796,000 BTU in a barrel and NG is measured at 1,000,000. Therefore it seems that the 6:1 is in the ball park. Is this thinking correct?
If 6:1 is about right, then it seems like one of you guys with lots more smarts than I have about this stuff, could come up with some kind of ballpark figure for the premium that would have to be added to NG to compete with oil for transportation purposes. For purposes of this question, I would temporarily ignore the cost of building a NG infrastructure for widespread transportation. I was mostly wondering about the comparison of refining oil into gasoline versus doing whatever to get NG to a endpoint where it is capable of powering a car/bus/truck. A future comparison could be about the capital cost of refineries, tankers, gas stations, etc versus whatever for NG.
What I'm most interested in is a practical conversion factor like saying it takes X% more effort/time/resources to use NG in a car than gasoline. From there one could think about the cost differential between NG and oil for transportation.
The context of my original question had to do mostly with promoting mass transportation - would it really make sense to push for a greatly expanded network of NG powered buses versus light rail? Given that buses could be deployed much faster that rail. Of course, in my way of thinking, private autos would have governors with a top speed of 40 mph and be taxed at the full rate they impact the "commons". That would certainly encourage bikes and buses.
A little help on this please!
Use standard units where you can. A standard unit in energy is the kWh.
A million BTU is about 300kWh
A barrel of oil contains about 1700kWh
So converting one to the other is about 5.7x (or your 6 if you want to round up)
So with gas at $6 per million BTU that is equivalent to oil at $6 times 5.7 = $34 a barrel
However gas last year was not $6 but closer to $4.
The problem with gas transport as far as I am aware is that gas internal combustion engines are less efficient than petrol/diesel versions. This will probably be largely down to the fact that we have spent many billions and resources refining petrol/diesel engines while we have spent little refining gas IC engines.
So although natural gas may be half the price per BTU it wont be half the price to fill up because the efficiency of the engine will be lower. I don’t have accurate data on the efficiency of petrol vs gas engines so I cant say at this moment.
The problem with converting lots of cars to NG is that we don’t have a great surplus of it. Plus it seems a waste to burn NG in cars at 20% efficiency when it can be used at 60% efficiency in a NG fired power station.
Stoker coal mined nearby was ninety five dollars a ton in western Virginia by the eighteen ton truck load a month ago.I'm not sure if you have to buy more than one load at a time to get it at that price-a local factory pays that by the truck load.Smaller quantities would probably be at least ten dollars a ton more to cover the trucking costs.
I've recently done a similar analysis, and include a chart on this on my blog, http://michaelaucott.blogspot.com. One source of energy you did not include is nuclear fuel. I've estimated this cost based on data from USDOE/EIA on quantities of nuclear fuel purchased and the power produced by these plants. It's about $0.30 per million Btu. This explains why utilities try to run their nuclear plants at maximum capacity.
Actually since 1 Million Btu is about 0.3 MWh. Nuclear fuel costs are 2.1$ per Million Btu and could actually go up considerably if uranium mining production continues to not meet demand:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
http://www.stockinterview.com/News/06082007/nuclear-fuel-conference-uran...
First on energy density I think MJ/kg is the best unit for comparison. Weight rather than volume allows for different API liquids or gas compressed at different pressures. A megajoule is about 1000 BTU. From the above table gasoline is 115,000 BTU/US gall which is roughly 115 MJ per 3.3 kg or 35 MJ/kg. Metric is invariably simpler and units like bushels, yards and so on are just confusing.
A bigger issue is that of price effects of carbon taxes vs. output targets. Suppose there are no carbon taxes but 20% of the grid electrical output has to be renewable. Since that is difficult to achieve the average (unsubsidised) price of electricity will go up. Therefore that target will have a carbon price equivalent effect. Which is better, carbon taxes or targets, is hard to say. Weird stuff will emerge like the fact gas fired electricity is 50% lower carbon than coal but still not renewable. A mishmash of carbon rules and renewable rules will create problems. For example in Australia heat pump water heaters are treated as solar energy even though they have nothing to do with sunlight. An overall auctioned CO2 cap is probably the best approach and I think it would work if politicians didn't create so many loopholes.
How about instead of distorting the market and imposing soviet type quotas and limits and price controls we work to get wind/solar cheaper than fossil fuels?
The green revolution, more like the soviet rebirth.
That will never happen.
Fossil fuels are pre-concentrated by nature over millions of years. In this way, they are a once off cheat.
Solar & wind are diffuse energy by their nature. It's the cost of concentrating them to usable density that means they will be more expensive in any foreseeable future.
Actually it is happening. When NG prices spiked, wind was cheaper than NG for generating electricity in most markets.
Alan
Thanks Alan, for pointing out me poor phrasing.
The statement should have been provisoed with, 'this side of the peak oil crisis'.
The fact that this happens even for a short period signifies that a third and likely ultimate oil stock has started. The cheat is starting to run out.
Do note it was a spike in NG, not a plunge in the renewables market. Still can't foresee anything driving renewables cost of production down sharply. If anything, ongoing upward pressure in fossil fuels should increase the upward pressure on renewables costs too.
I still say 'get[ting] wind/solar [significantly] cheaper' isn't on.
If solar thermal collectors weren't competitive, Chinese people wouldn't have installed 14 GWth in the year 2007 alone:
http://www.ren21.net/pdf/RE_GSR_2009_Update.pdf
And besides that PV has already lower capital costs than new coal. PV competes at household prices and coal and natural gas does not:
http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Coal-Plan...
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/first-solar-claims-1-a-watt...
And obviously efficient appliances have already been competitive for years.
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/profitable_dat.html
If you've ever visited a developing country you might have noticed that efficient light bulbs are more popular than in the developed world. The electricity costs are actually considerable if one lives on a lower income and people find ways to lower their electricity bill. (Just because they are poor doesn't mean they can't do math.)
There are many reason people do things. Price is just the most important one.
Problems with reliability of service is a great motivator for people to make spend extra on systems redundancy and duel mode systems.
Population density is a factor. If you can share capital cost between many people, it makes big spends to achieve scale doable. A house in a remote rural setting will have solar because too much of the normally shared network costs, can't be shared. This decision is made not because of the generation costs, but because of the distribution costs.
People in poor countries may by doing expensive small systems because it's the best available. That could be the density issue we just talked about above or that the wider society hasn't done electrification well enough that people feel they can rely on it alone.
There is also regulation and subsidies. The use of solar thermal collectors in China was government driven. Done to curb local air pollution issues and leave cheap coal generated electricity available for industry. The largely state owned and state influenced industrial sector then used this cheap power for that nation's pre-GFC export drive.
Still not sure what light bulb efficiency has to do with the cost structures of fossil fuel, solar and wind.
There is more to decision making than just maths.
My comment that solar and wind has a fundamental disadvantage of having to do concentration where fossil fuels don't still holds.
The use of solar thermal collectors in China was government driven.
No it wasn't. It was actually cost driven:
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/china-solar-hot-water-c...
A Chinese a solar thermal system is essential cheaper than an electric heater with a high electricity bill. (And btw an electric heater also requires a hot water tank (energy storage system) because nighttime electricity is cheaper).
Still not sure what light bulb efficiency has to do with the cost structures of fossil fuel, solar and wind.
It's cheaper for an individual to save electricity than to buy electricity even if that individual needs to spend a few more bucks on an efficient light bulb.
And it is also cheaper for a society to save electricity by investing in efficient appliances than to waste electricity by investing in new coal power plants.
That’s not true. Gas would have to go past $20-25 per million BTU for wind to be the same price unsubsidised.
Gas in todays money will not go past $25 per million BTU bar perhaps a spike for a day or month but not for a long time.
It was true in, among other markets, Austin Texas.
At $10 MMBTU, NG generated electricity is more expensive than unsubsidized wind (the US subsidy is just 1.8 cents/kWh).
Alan
That’s very surprising. In the UK it would be in the $20-25 range.
I suspect your $10 figure is wrong because it indicates wind generates unsubsidised at 6-7 US cents. Here in the UK unsubsidised it generates electricity at about 15 US cents. That’s too big a difference. Generally taxes in the US are lower so that might account for a bit of it but it wont be that big a difference.
I am pretty confident at least in Europe we need a gas price of over $20 for wind to work unsubsidised. I suspect it is a similar figure in the US.
That's true in Canada as well.
However, the UK does not have vast areas of windswept prairie to put the wind generators on. It's not a very big country, it's heavily populated, and the countryside is like one big garden. If you tried to supply the entire English market with wind turbines, you'd have to blanket the entire country with windmills, which would upset people. Hence the interest in offshore wind generation.
The UK has numerous high quality wind sites on teh coast, but which the government/NIMBYs will not allow them to build.
Northern coastal Scotland is one of the prime wind spots in the world. Perhaps not enough prime spots to run the nation, but the UK is not even building out their prime spots.
Alan
The UK requires 300,000,000,000 watts of energy.
An average wind farm gives about 2 watts per sq meter.
Go calculate how much of the UK we would need to cover to produce the 300GW we require.
I don’t know, if wind turbines dropped in price by 60-70% they would be cost competitive with coal and gas.
60-70% fall isn’t impossible. That like a $1m turbine going to $300-400k
Solar PV is the one truly distributed green source. Currently it is very very expensive. However if it dropped in price 90% that too would be cheaper than coal/gas for electricity. However a 90% drop is a LOT.
Solar space heating is close. I think with some investment it could be done. So that would be cheaper than oil/gas/wood pellet heating.
Its not an impossible task.
I understand you're a new member here, but I imagine you have been a reader for some time. Its hardly my place to say, but you might note that simple name calling and the old childish and inflammatory nazi/communist/stalinist/maoist/whatever else guilt by resemblance-type remarks are blessedly rare here.
In the US "informative debate" is very rare, which is one of the reasons TOD is so valued. I wouldn't like to see it turned into a talk-radio style personality battle and opinion-fest.
Gaming the market by taxing, quotas which raise the price of fossil fuel, and force utilities to use renewable s is what has got the the green market up and running in countries such as German Spain and Denmark.
It also got you the millennium dome, 3 million on the “sick”, the NHS IT system, ID cards, how many million unmarried women with children from multiple fathers?
subsidies are great......
BTW denmark gets about 89% of its power from fossil fuels. Germany about 90%.
Robert, your list really is a bit strange. On the one hand, you've included electricity, without comparing different electricity sources such as coal, wind, solar, etc. I noted on the Forbes site that you say wind is irrelevant, since it's included in the average cost of electricity. But then why include coal, when pretty much no one in the US uses coal for heating?
There's more than one way to do price a comparison. It would be nice to have a little clarification on what you think this particular price comparison is good for, and what it isn't.
After reading Robert's article, I must agree. Robert reported the cost for pellets which was taken from a web site which listed retail prices on a per ton basis, as I understand it. But, the price of coal appears to be mine mouth prices. The same sort of distortion appears in the gasoline and propane listings in that the consumer prices are larger for both. Locally, gasoline costs around $2.75 a gallon and propane is even more since one must also pay for delivery and the price may include rental of the storage tank for the propane. Around here, small quantities of kerosene sell for the same at the pump as diesel, since kerosene can be used in a diesel engine, even though the kerosene is not supposed to be used as motor fuel. Here's data from the EIA which shows that propane costs the retail consumer about $1.25 a gallon more than the wholesale price and the retail price of heating oil is almost $0,80 more than wholesale.
The choice as to which primary energy source is used often comes down the the final consumer. Comparing the price of electricity and the price of coal misses the fact that most electricity is generated by coal. Perhaps it would be better if the price of coal should be stated in $ per kWh generated and compared with natural gas generated electricity. Then, the cost of alternatives, such as wind or PV generated electricity might be better understood.
E. Swanson
The wholesale prices are minus taxes. Add in all the taxes and you can get a very distorted picture of how these energy sources really rank in the market. A government in one area can put a very high tax or tax credit on any of these, distorting the picture immensely. So what I tried to do was use wholesale pricing wherever possible. For wood pellets, I don't have wholesale, but I do have bulk and that is minus the sales taxes. So I think it is a pretty reasonable comparison.
I noted on the Forbes site that you say wind is irrelevant, since it's included in the average cost of electricity. But then why include coal, when pretty much no one in the US uses coal for heating?
That's not what I said. I said show me where I can buy just wind power (or wind) and I will include it. I can buy coal. I can buy natural gas. I can buy diesel. I can use all for generating electricity (or heat).
It would be nice to have a little clarification on what you think this particular price comparison is good for, and what it isn't.
The original investigation was to try to understand why the pellet market was forecast out of the U.S. and into Europe. So I started looking at how many BTUs you could get for your dollar. Some of the others are just thrown in (and I explained this about electricity) just to get a feel for where they stand.
The bottom line is that I am working on developing alternatives to oil and coal. I need to know what kind of competition I am up against, and thus I think $/MMBTU is a good metric to measure against. If I develop a coal replacement that is 10 times the price of coal, I won't be able to compete with coal unless I have heavy government support - which is not something I will build a business model on.
You neglected to include any provision for transportation to market. About half the cost of Western coal in Texas (a not too distant market) is transportation (data 20 years old).
Apparently your electricity cost includes transportation costs up to the socket.
So a hidden bias in the #s.
I can understand the limitations of the format but your own view should be broader.
Still a useful primer.
Alan
On further reading, I see that you came to roughly the same #s. $10 to $20/25 after transportation to OK/Texas.
Thanks for the reply.
I think the clarification that this comparison is most useful for looking at a market for heating energy (i.e. pellets) is not trivial. It's actually inherent in your use of BTU as a comparison point. Coal and natural gas technologies have different btu/kwh conversion rates. One can not sensibly use the numbers in your article to compare the relatively economy of these same sources to produce electricity. They'd need to be converted somehow.
I am surprised by the number of people who seem to be opposed to cheaper wind/solar!
We know they are not currently cost competitive so hopefully they will go down in price to be cost competitive and then provide a good portion of our power instead of a percent or two.
Goodnight
Cells - The basic problem between any comparison of wind and fossil fired power generation is that the costs and benefits have different distributions in time. If you take a conventional NPV calculation of a wind farm and a coal plant (let’s ignore external environmental costs for the time being), then yes, wind comes about twice as expensive (full cost of 80ish€/MWh compared to 40ish€/MWh for coal – exact numbers depend on all sorts of project specific factors). However, if you measure the lifetime EROEI of wind power against coal then the positions are reversed - it is around 18:1 for wind and 8:1 for coal (http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/site/Kubiszewski_2009_wind%20EROI.pdf). The reason for this is that the cost of wind is front loaded (typically over 80% of total lifetime cost is capex), whereas the benefits stretch over twenty five years. Coal, in contrast, has a much lower initial capital expenditure as a proportion of total lifetime cost. This, in turn, means that the money cost of wind power is incredibly sensitive to the discount rate used – much more so than coal. Given that the whole theory of discounting is built on sand, the money cost comparison of different electricity production systems is of marginally less value than useless. But we carry on using it regardless, which is exactly why we are in this mess in the first place.
You are correct but the same applies to nuclear and dams.
The discount rate today is tiny, about 4-5% which is fair. If rates were 20% you may have an argument.
Either way its about productivity. It takes less men and less resources to dig up a given quantity of coal and burn it in a power station than it does to build a wind farm and derive the electric from that.
Cells - you are simply wrong. It does not take fewer men and resources to generate electricity from coal - that is my whole point. Indeed, that is why the EROEI of wind is better than coal. The difference between the two technologies is that the resources consumed by each are distributed differently in time and that is why wind appears to be more expensive. Go and do a basic NPV calculation of a wind farm and a coal plant and you will see that at zero discount rate wind is a bit cheaper than coal/MWh (they are not far apart with wind a bit cheaper). This means, by definition, that a wind farm consumes fewer resources over its lifetime. When the notion of discounting is introduced, however, and short term costs have a much higher weighting than longer term costs, wind starts to look more expensive. And this brings us to the key question: what is the right discount rate to use? You say 4-5% is tiny and fair; and I say no it isn’t, it is very high and very far from fair. So who is right? There is no objective right answer to this question: it is about ethics and values, and strategic choices that people alive today have to make on behalf of the people of tomorrow. So when you do your cost analysis, just remember that you have already built in an arbitrary assumption which has no sound theoretical basis. I suggest you read Colin Price’s ‘Time, Discounting and Value’ (Blackstone 1993) for a devastating critique of why discounting the future with a negative uniform exponential function cannot be justified.
A discount value of zero means it take no capital to build things which is stupid.
Do you work for free?
Was your house built for free? Do people rent homes and business for zero in your country as your mythical discount rate is zero?
Your being very very very silly.
Nukes with a discount rate of zero would be producing power for less than 1 cent/kWh but it takes a lot of materials, effort, time, resources to build the nuke. That is a cost. The same is true for wind turbines.
This is the first time I have come across this argument. It is so silly!
BTW for anyone who doesn’t know what he is talking about he is saying we should use a figure of 0% on interest rates when deciding what to build. But no one is going to give you capital or work for you for 0%.
You live in la la land!
One year CDs are currently paying 0.5% interest in the USA. Lets use that discount rate.
Alan
You intend to fund a 20-30-40 year investment by rolling over 1 year US treasuries?
Realistically you can use the 20-30 year t-bond rate at best which is about 4-5%.
Accounting tricks wont help build wind farms.
We need the price to go down where wind farms compete on their own with coal/gas stations. Then they will take off. Until then they will be drops in oceans.
You say 4-5% is tiny and fair; and I say no it isn’t, it is very high and very far from fair. So who is right? There is no objective right answer to this question: it is about ethics and values
Neither of us are right. The discount rate is what the market sets.
What you and I and governments and your nabour and his friend and everyone else sets.
Do you deposit your money in a bank for 0% over 50 years? Will you? Why not?
Would you lend me money on 0% interest rates? Why not?
Your argument is very silly Because your basically saying people will and should lend and work for 0%!
Cells - you fail to distinguish between the real world of physical resources and the fantasy world of fiat money where your market set interest rates exist. Please try and think a bit more deeply about this issue. Also, don't try to ridicule people who dont agree with you, it demeans you. You have much to learn. You really have no idea of what you are talking about.
Someone might lend you money at 0% interest because Jesus said not to charge interest. People do things for lots of reasons beyond our imaginations.
My sister, although not a Mennonite, once belonged to a credit union in a Mennonite community. The Mennonites refused to accept interest on their bank accounts. They just deposited money at zero interest and never borrowed anything. They also painted their car bumpers black to show their lack of ostentation, but they bought Cadillacs because they could pay cash for them.
She said she'd never had such good service. Getting a loan involved having tea and cookies with the loan officer. The credit union gave her a car loan at two points below prime.
Jaggedben and RockyMtnGuy - those are good examples of different ethical perspectives which lead to completely different choices about the future. I was not actually suggesting that we use zero interest rates to discount the future - cells misunderstood my point - I was just trying to show that from a timeless perspective wind consumes fewer resources than coal, and it is only when we introduce discounting that it looks like it consumes more resources. I know all of the conventional arguments for why we discount the future, but it still doesn't feel right to me to use a uniform negative exponential to dicount the future, not least because people don't, as a matter of fact, behave as if the discount the future using a uniform negative exponential. Indeed, people's discount rates (as evidenced by their behaviours) tend to fall the further into the future they think. This is why it is essential for Government's to 'subsise' wind energy - they are correcting for the fact that the way we value investments today is somehow not suited for the the really big choices we as societies have to make. Capitalist idealogues will never accept this point because they simply do not accept that there is anything wrong with exponential discounting, even when their own behaviour flatly contradicts the theory. I personally use all sorts of tricks to prevent my short term (high discount rate) self from overriding my own long term goals, which require me to take a low discount rate long term perspective to defer short term gratification. This is exactly what Government's are doing when they subsidise wind.
Wind uses less resources than FF
Well that the thing it doesn’t. Labour and time is a resource, it isn’t free. Hence wind uses more resources which is why it is more expensive.
Simply put it takes less resources (inc hours worked) to mine coal and burn it in a power station than it does to build wind farms install them and maintain them.
Cells – Why don’t you go and do the calculation before you pass judgment? I have - you simply add up all lifetime costs of both wind power and coal fired power stations, without taking account of when those costs occur in time (this includes the total lifetime capex and opex – labour, consumables, etc etc). You then divide it the lifetime MWh of production. On this basis wind comes out slightly cheaper: 20-25€/MWh for a new wind farm built today compared to 25-30€/MWh for a new coal plant. This means it consumes fewer resources for every MWh of production. Ths point is the large cost discrepancy we get in a conventional valuation disappears when you take a timeless perspective. The question now becomes, how do you value these different distributions of cost over time? You think it is as simple as using a uniform negative exponential function - I don’t. Try reading the following article for a concise analysis of the issue. David Pearce, Ben Groom, Cameron J. Hepburn, and Phoebe Koundouri. "Valuing the future: recent advances in social discounting" World Economics 4.2 (2003): 121-141.
Well I am more than happy to look at your figures but you haven’t posted it, unless I have missed it over the 350 posts.
If you’re willing please do the following and be as honest as possible.
Building a gas fired station operating at 60% base load efficiency being fed natural gas running for 40 years.
Now we need to make some assumptions here and this is where the whole process gets fuzzy because we don’t know what the price of natural gas over the next 40 years will be.
However we do know what roughly speaking the production cost will be. The UK will be producing enough natural gas to feed at least 1 power station from now to 40 years.
In the UK it costs our government/companies roughly speaking 0.5p/kWh to produce this natural gas (actually it is less but we are rounding up to make the math simpler and more straight forward).
So in todays money this 1GWe gas fired station will cost.
£1.75B in natural gas
£0.5B to build the plant
£3.5B to run the plant and maintain it (roughly 1p/kWh overhead costs)
Total cost = £5.75B over 40 years in todays money or £16.50 per MWh
Now lets look at wind:
Installed capacity apparently costs 1,300 euros per MW (according to wiki) that is equal to about £1500 per MW.
Now say £1500 per MW installed capacity and that 25% of capacity is average production.
So we get a cost of £6,000 per MW or it would take £6B to build a 1GWe wind farm.
Maintenance cost of that huge wind farm which will not be zero. I don’t know the figure but lets say it is 50% less than a gas plant. That would be £1.75B to maintain the wind farm over 40 years
Backup costs to back up the power when the wind isn’t blowing. This will be in the region of 1p/kWh which will add £3.5B over 40 years!
The interest on the huge capital to build the £6B wind farm rather than the £0.5B gas station. I know that some of you think people should work and lend for free but that isn’t reality unless you plan to enslave people.
But ill be generous and we can take a real interest rate of only 2%
That’s an interest cost of £7.25B
So the total cost for the wind farm is £18.5B over 40 years
As I suspected more than 3x as expensive.
Now you will still have a wind turbine after 40 years. Lets say in todays money you get half your £6B back (ie major overall required).
That would be roughly speaking
Gas fired station = a little less than £6B
Wind farm = about £16B
Your lifetime gas cost looks way too low and your opex looks way too high, but I would not argue with the overall number. However, if I multiply 40x365x24x0,6 I get total lifetime production of 210240 hours which when divided into 5.75billion gives 27.35 per MWh - so I dont know where you got the 16.50/MWh from. Also this does not include the cost of CO2 under the ETS which would add another 5/MWh.
Your capex for wind is a bit high (1300 is about right) and your opex is a shade too high (1.5bn is right). Your load factor is also too low - a good modern windfarm should achieve 30-35% (although this is obviously highly site specific). Using these numbers I get 23.81/MWh for wind.
An electricity grid is run as an integrated system so I dont see why you include back up for wind - all systems require back up capacity, even a 100% gas system would require some back up capacity so that should be included as well if you want to make a fair comparison. Also, the cost for back up you have is way too high - it should be about 3/MWh, which makes the total 26/MWh for wind against 27/MWh for a CCGT. By the way, this includes human labour.
Interest is not relevant to this calculation, that is the whole point I am making, as it does not represent resource consumption (the capital investment represents that) - it represents a transfer of value from the user of the capital to the owner of that capital for the right to use the capital but no resources are consumed in this transaction.
Interest is me doing work for you today for you to do work for me in the future.
That has a cost because I don’t know if you will honour it or if the work we do will be successful or if you die before payment, all sorts of risk.
Hence having a positive rate of interest is the way the world works and the way it should logically work.
Saying don’t take into account interest is stupid. Would you lend my business interest at 0% for 40 years with the risk that I don’t pay you back?
We need to consider the real world and how it works not la la land.
Yes gas stations will need backup too. However its available capacity will be very high. On top of my head I know the US nuclear capacity is 91.1% which means it is only down and not producing at full for less than 9% of the time. I don’t know what the gas fired station availability is but it will be similar perhaps even better than the nuclear availability.
More importantly you can choose when to take down the nuke or gas station for refuelling or maintenance, ie at low demand months.
With wind it highly varies from near 0% to near 100% and at all times of the day. Hence it needs near 100% backup vs perhaps 5% backup for a gas fired station.
The cost of backup will be at least 1p/kWh which is basically the overhead cost of a coal/gas fired station.
Any other form, ie pumped storage, will likely be far more expensive (plus efficency losses)
Lets do the math again for avoidance of doubt. [do correct errors and highlight bad assumptions if you believe there are any]
1GWe Nat Gas fired station over 40 years as 60% EE.
£500m cost to build and £1,100m interest over 40 years at 3% real rate.
£6B for each 1p/kWh gas costs (ie £12B if gas is 2p/kWh or £3B if gas is 0.5p/kWh) (I think I used the electricity figure last time instead of the gas figure which was an error)
£3.5B running costs inc maintenance and repair (1p/kWhe is about right)
Total cost = £5.1 billion plus £6B for every penny on the cost of Nat Gas.
Now we don’t know the cost of Nat Gas but if it is 1p/kWh total cost = £11.1B if it is 2p/kWh total cost is 17.1B.
That gives a range of £31/MWh to £49/MWh [however note, this includes profit for the operator which I forget to mention earlier. That profit is within the 1p/kWhe maintenance and repair]. We must also take in the possibility that NAT GAS stays cheap at 0.5p/kWh on long-ish contracts as they are now in which case the cost is £23/MWh
For the wind farm.
Assuming 25% capacity which is reasonable for most of Europe, Germany is closer to 20% UK 30% (no idea where you got 35% remember no cherry picking)
£6B to build (inc power lines to the wind farm) plus 22.8B in interest over 40 years at 4% (I have chosen 4% instead of 3% to take into account that you want a profit to build the wind farm. 1% profit is more than reasonable for this calculation. Most businesses wouldn’t work to 1% but I’m being generous here and remember we are talking real interest rates not nominal)
We don’t know the maintenance and repair costs. What I do know is that the maintenance and repair costs of a gas fired station are very low. I can imagine the maintenance and repair costs of 1,000 wind turbines being less than the gas station??? However lets say 0.5p/kWh which is half the figure we gave to the gas fired station.
That adds £1.75B to maintenance and repair
£3.5B backup cost (1p/kWhe)
Total cost about £34B
However lets assume the base of the tower is still fine in 40 years and with a major repair you can get it up and running for another 40 years. Lets say the cost is half, that is to say you get £3B back.
Total cost now about £31B or £89/MWH [not surprisingly I said unsubsidised wind cost 9-12p, we are using a very low rate of interest on this calculation which is probably why it is at the lower range of my estimate]
So we have natural gas in the range of £23 to £49 with a likely cost somewhere in the upper middle, say £35/MWh VS wind at £89/MWh so wind is still more than twice nearly 3 times as expensive as NAT gas and this is considering a very generous 4% rate of real interest inc a profit margin. With a more realistic 8%-10% the figures would be horrible for wind!
Also take into account a gas-fired station can be put right where there is demand. Say in or very close to London hence low losses. A wind farm will not be as close and may be all the way up in Scotland. So the wind farm might need 5% more turbines to make up for the losses which increases its costs but lets ignore that for now.
No matter how you look at it wind power today costs more and is likely to cost more than gas fired stations.
Business are not stupid, they do all these costing. After all they are out to earn an honest buck, if wind did that they would build wind.
Wind turbines need to go down in price 75% before they work unsubsidised and we need them to work unsubsidised for them to be rolled out en mass.
To correct myself.
Wind costs about £90/MWh taking into account its lifetime cost.
Gas fired station may cost between £23 to 49/MWh (0.5 to 2p/kWh gas price) with a likely price in the region of £40/MWh
To have 0% interest rates people need to lend at below 0% due to return OF capital risk.
I reckon your looking at –3% interest rates to have 0% for lending.
So who is going to lend you –3% over 40 years?
Ie give you a million dollars today to collect $300k in 40 years time?
Know anyone that crazy?
Cells – thanks for the lesson in corporate finance, but can put down your MBA manual for a few minutes try reading what I actually said in my earlier post. I do not advocate using a discount rate of zero, I simply pointed out that from a timeless perspective wind consumes fewer resources than coal.
And I said even with a timeless perspective wind uses more resources than coal. The thing is you don’t seem to think human labour is a resource but it most definitely is a resource. When you include human labour as a resource wind uses more resources even assuming a timeline of infinity.
And if you want to put a figure on it. Roughly speaking the resource of human labour per hour = 100kg of coal.
If you add all the resources and human labour to build, maintain and run a wind farm converting the figure into kg of coal, and you do the same for building and running a coal fired station you will see it takes less “coal (remember the conversion of 1 hour human labour = 100kg coal too)” to run the power station.
Human labour is included in the capex and opex - or do the manufactures and operators of plant not pay their workers?
Rainmaker. Stop. You're just encouraging him.
"And I said even with a timeless perspective wind uses more resources than coal."
How can you keep trying with this lunacy?
I did for a while too, but he's in LALA land. AND is now wasting our time and energy. What a sad upshot to RR's article.
You foolishly assume that human labour is not a resource where it is in fact the one and only true resource we have. You think coal mines itself, wind turbines miraculously appear?
Everything is human labour in one form or another.
It takes more human labour to derive a unit of energy from wind turbines today than it does to derive a unit of electricity from gas or coal and yes that is taking into account an infinite timeframe.
If you don’t understand that you are too thick to debate anything.
Drats, more jobs.
No less jobs because of less productivity.
Its like saying you will dig a hole in your garden using a tea spoon instead of a shovel because it will take more hours and create a job for you.
We are more wealthy when we spend less time doing the same thing, that is to say doing things more productively.
It is the reason we left peasant farming for it to be replaced by big farms and combine harvesters but I’m sure you will argue we would be better off as peasants.
[think about it, would subsistence farming create more jobs and be a good thing?]
Some helpful ideas for your activities.
jokuhl - Sorry, sincere apologies. I got carried away. It stops now.
Yes I know, it is the reason wind is more costly than fossil fuels.
If humans worked for free or we had slaves (ie value human labour at zero) then wind power would be cheaper because it uses “less resources” but human labour is a resource too roughly equalling 1 hour human labour = 100kg coal.
When you consider that, which anyone living in this reality must do, then you find that wind uses more resources than coal or gas fired stations.
Now that might not always be the case but it is unlikely fossil fuels will increase in price by 400% in real terms so if you want wind hope the manufacturers find a way to reduce prices by 75%.
Rainmaker is right, there are two worlds. The 'real world of physical resources' and the 'fantasy world of fiat money'. Just to make things more complex, there are two real worlds too. The pre 1750 real world based of harvesting the flows of the solar powered biosphere and the post 1750 real world of raiding the geology.
The pre 1750 world was a world of sub 2% growth, with matching expectations for what interest rates should be. When Britain first start raiding the geology, it learnt to grow at 2% on an ongoing basis. On that 2%, we built an empire. I think that a 1% or 1.5% (tops) cash rate is what you should be working with.
It's the raiding of the geology that make that hyperactive 4%-5% look 'tiny' and 'fair'.
I think you need to simplify your outlook because the world is too complicated for you to understand by the looks of it.
Interest is simply me doing work for you today in return for a little bit more work some time down the line.
Would you do me a job, say build me a house and in return I build you a house and a garage in 40 years time?
Would you take that risk? Work your arse off for a year and spend you money to make me a house and in return I build you a similar house plus a garage in 40 years time (0.5% interest)?
What if I die before the 40 years? What if I just don’t honour it? what if I go bankrupt and wipe your liability out? what if we don’t live in houses in 40 years? What if the location we agreed is a ghetto by then?
No one, including you will work for zero and zero interest rates. Not even for 1-2% considering the risk involved.
As for fiat currency, it helps wind farms. How the hell can governments force us to subsidise wind farms without fiat decree?
On top of that the real rate of interest is negative “thanks” to fiat money. So that is an advantage to wind not a disadvantage.
Hi all-
This discussion reminds me of an old online discussion group saying, one which surely dates me as
antiquatedold skool. It is, very simply DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS. Gosh, a lot of you folks have been around the block a few times, I'd have thought you already knew this. There is a point at which viewpoints are so far apart, and rational discussion impossible, such that engagement leads to circular discussions that just waste everyone's time. Trolls thrive on this, and the quality of the discussion goes down from everyone else's perspective. No names were mentioned in the making of this post.Thanks for your time and attention, all.
Bruce aka Energyscholar at gmail dot com
Point taken.
Hard to resist red meat.
Very true.
Hi Bruce,
Well said, 100% agree. Cells (to mention a name) clearly does not understand the premise of TOD. As I mentioned in the comment below, he may have served some small useful purpose in demonstrating an all too common POV that is unaware of the problems facing the planet.
Going forward, I promise to ignore this person. In the interest of reducing clutter I hope others here feel the same.
How many miles per gallon can you get from corn cob cellulosic ethanol fuel, how much does it cost, and how many super tankers can be filled with existing corn cob production?
People were furious when gasoline reached $4.00 a gallon and Congress held hearings. How will they treat people if the cellulosic ethanol fuel mandates must be subsidized and cost over $5.00 a gallon retail before the corn cob refinery employees are paid and the CEO gets a raise on inflated earnings statements excluding one time expensed items and the shareholders get no dividends because the employees and government must be paid instead? New technology unlocks more oil production and the government looks down the long barrel of a gun and asks us to pay more, as if we owe them for all the money they borrowed, expecting a trillion dollars spent today might equal two trillion in savings tomorrow. Am not sure about their investment acumen.
The projected deficit this year is about 1.4 trillion dollars. If emergencies occur the government might go over budget. Obama may have stated he had identified two trillion dollars in spending cuts in his state of the union speech. What was not said was that these projected savings might not cover projected expenses.
General comment about cells
I notice from his/her bio that he joined TOD a few hours ago. And, obviously, he is on a mission to represent a POV that is both challenging and annoying to most of the regulars. He certainly annoys me. But, he does remind me of the project team member that voiced objections that I could ignore at my own peril.
Perhaps he is providing a valid service. I think he illustrates the point I've made repeatedly that the vast majority of people in western countries simply do not understand the problem. Ideally, all of his arguments should be categorized and countered systematically - it would make a good primer for helping the average person understand the problems facing humanity and all of our planet.
Cells sounds just like 90% of my neighbors. He is the type of person that we need to turn around (well, he personally, is probably a lost cause) if there is any hope of mitigating the coming "Bottleneck" with a decent "Powerdown" scenario.
If you look at some of his main arguments they run along these lines:
Like most people, he thinks in terms of paper (fiat) money and current prices as a primary indicator of value - free market kind of thinking. He is pretty much insensitive to environmental issue that affect other people (like downstream from that mountain) and fairly unaware of the more subtle affects (acid rain, mercury, etc) that might affect him.
He equates the depletion of FF with some one's choice of a banana - as if the world we are leaving for future generations is like some kind of yuppie lifestyle choice.
His thinking is that of an accountant who has not let learned about the cost associated with the "commons". But, this is exactly the same thinking as 95% of all US Corporations.
Like many people I know, he is quick to bring up the socialism/communism scarecrows without any consideration for what value these forms of governance may or may not have as we face impending problems.
And then we have his crown jewel: he is a "realist" that only wants people to understand that the price of wind/solar is the obstacle to a better world without those nasty automobile tailpipes that he does not like.
From my POV, cell fails to appreciate a few things: the nature of the problems facing the planet, the causes of these problems, the kind of goals we need, and the type of solutions that might have some chance of mitigating the consequences of our behaviour - both for us and especially for future generations.
He does not account for the fact that conventional energy supplies are unsustainable for the human population of the planet. He seems unaware that of the damage already done to the oceans and the life therein. Apparently, the rate of species extinction is not a concern. Global warming from the burning of FF seems to escape him. The increase in deserts and decrease in forests does not seem to factor into his thinking. The dramatic increase in autoimmune diseases from toxins in our environment. The starvation and misery already being inflicted upon other countries due to our refusal to consider stop using FF and the attendant CC consequences. I could go on.
The bottom line is that cell's thinking represents what most people think - so it is not very useful to shoot the messenger. He is a reminder for us TOD folks that have moved beyond his mindset some time ago.
What cell lacks is the notion of vision and leadership. If an asteroid is approaching earth and we have some means to deflect it, we would not get into his cost accounting mode - we would do whatever was necessary if it was possibly within our means. Our planet is in drastic overshoot in many ways (not much different than the asteroid threat) and we should try to convince the "cell mentality" about this threat. Only when this awareness is achieved do we have even the slightest chance of implementing all the great solutions debated here on a daily basis.
If I am wrong why is no country trying to go 80-90% wind? Why is no major country >10% wind powered?
And we are not talking electricity but total power
The price is simply too expensive today
New Zealand is looking at going 40% wind, 10% geothermal and 50% hydro.
Just wait a few years and the some will go >10%. The Republic of Texas is a likely candidate BTW.
Alan
Small lucky countries do not count.
For example Sweden is a very green country. Its population size is small relative to the hydro potential they have. As a result most of their electricity and heating is fossil fuel free.
However we can’t dictate to geography to form us hydro potential.
Give me an example of a country with say more than 20m people who are more than 10% renewable (not inc hydro as you either have hydro or you don’t, you cant just add to it).
BTW new Zealand may be looking to go green but today it uses about 26GW of power of which over 70% is fossil fuel and most of the 30% that is not fossil fuel is hydro.
BTW 10% wind/solar would not impress me. >30% would impress me but according to some we are going to run out soon so we need >80 or 90%
You have already impressed me, negatively. I care not what "impresses" you. I just want you to not have a negative impact on any 3rd party reading this. To discredit your arguments for any open mind.
Best Hopes for not wasting time & energy on the hopeless,
Alan
Impress you? Is that the goal here?
Wind and solar have only been around for two decades.
Nuclear has been around for 4 decades.
You omit hydro because it actually is a major producer of electricity having been around for a century. There was a time when hydro was considered uneconomical back in the 1930s when the TVA was being built.
So what will be economical when fossil fuels run out and CO2 is taxed?
This is the situation in Europe today and they are turning to wind, solar in a big way.
well if there is a CO2 tax it will have little impact unless the whole world implements it which is highly unlikely to happen.
say Europe and the US implemented a CO2 tax, that would just mean fossil fuels are cheaper for china/india/others and they will use the FF we don’t.
also Europe is not, i repeat NOT embracing wind or solar in a big way. no EU country has even 10% of its power derived from wind or solar.
Overall Europe doesn’t even derive 2% of its power from wind and solar PV.
Europe would much rather find another north sea FF deposit than to build wind farms i can guarantee you that!
as for when fossil fuels run out, that is a stupid argument because we don’t know when that will be other than the fact it isnt going to be very soon.
following your logic we would have gone 80% wind back in the 80s using crap expensive wind technology.
likewise if we went wind power today it will be with crap technology relative to what we will have in 20 years time.
it makes no sense to implement crap technology today for a problem that might occur in 30-40-50-60years perhaps longer.
for all you know 2 decades from now some smart scientist may have found a way to derive lots of power ultra cheaply and cleanly. in your world we would be sitting with ultra expensive wind farms to build and maintain while everyone else used this new source of power.
However I am all for personal choice. If you want solar PV or wind please go out and buy and install it with your own wallet not mine or someone else’s via subsidies or FITs.
European countries power from renewables.
You already forgot $147 a barrel oil, cell.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warning-oil-supplies-are-runni...
You have a lot of strong opinions but no knowledge of energy.
Frankly, I don't think you can absorb the knowledge at this site and I think you'd be happier at the WSJ.
For total power used these countries come out on top regarding wind power.
Denmark 7.5% of total power derived from wind
Spain 5%
Germany 3.5%
Ireland 3%
Hungary 1.8%
Greece 1.5%
Netherlands 1.1%
India 1%
Sweden 1%
Italy 1%
New Zealand 0.75%
UK 0.7%
France 0.65%
Australia 0.6%
USA 0.5%
Canada 0.3%
Do I need go on?
Wind doesn’t provide even 10% of any country even in Europe.
Of the Big European nations Germany and Spain do well at 3.5% and 5%.
However they still derive more than 90% of their power from non renewables!
Like I said, wind is a drop in the ocean and will remain so until prices fall considerably.
Denmark 7.5% of total power derived from wind Spain 5%
Liar.
Denmark is at 19.7% wind power share (2007).
http://193.88.185.141/Graphics/UK_Facts_Figures/Statistics/yearly_statis...
Spain got 17.1% of its electricity from wind (14.3 %) and solar alone last year (while Spanish coal power plants only produced 12.7%):
http://www.lavanguardia.es/ciudadanos/noticias/20100102/53859888780/la-p...
And Spain has far less natural resources than the US. But then again, the US also needs to spend far more on bankers than Spain...
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_...
OH FFS READ DAMMIT READDDDD
POWER NOT ELETRIC. POWERRRTRRRRRRRR
The UK uses about 45GW of ELETRIC but about 300GW of fossil fuel POWER
Denmark does not produce nearly 20% of its power from wind, it may product 20% of its electric from wind. It produces only 7.5% of its POWER from wind. The rest is largely fossil fuels!
You think I’m a liar but I know you’re a moron that doesn’t know how to read.
In the dialect of English spoken by the largest number of native speakers (i.e. not the Queens), power is often synonymous with electricity. A large number of utilities
on this side of the pond) were named [City, State or Region] Power & Light. And all they sold was electricity. No natural gas, coal or oil.
Energy is the term most often used for broader definitions.
Best Hopes for The British learning proper English >;-P
Alan
Waste of time - we are talking
topast someone who persistantly calls everyone thick because they have moved beyond 'Janet and John do right wing economics' yet keeps using 'Electric' when they mean 'Electricity' - either a troll or a twit but who cares. Mods isn't it time for a ban?BTW Alan in WWII at least we had the ministry of fuel and power in the UK and I think the usage of power was indeed electricity with fuel being everything else.
Actually, Spain already got 17.1% of its electricity from wind and solar alone last year (while Spanish coal power plants only produced 12.7%):
http://www.lavanguardia.es/ciudadanos/noticias/20100102/53859888780/la-p...
And Spain has far less natural resources than the US. But then again, the US also needs to spend far more on bankers than Spain...
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_...
Perhaps you could name a Country which has chosen to rely on one fuel source for 80-90% of it's needs.
Remember small Countries don't count;-)
Brazil & Venezuela are about 80% hydro for electricity when the rains fall normally.
Vz might be called a small nation, but not Brazil.
Alan
Hi Alan
I was replying in essence to Cells who continually (some of him know him from other forums) dismisses wind power on the basis it can't practically provide 80-90% of all energy requirements.
France gets 80-85% of its electricity from Nuclear although ironically seems to be importing 2GW flat out from the Uk at present!
I don’t dismiss wind. I dismiss wind at todays prices.
It “could” even provide 80-90% of our power requirements if it was cheap enough.
France is a net exporter of about 5GWe of nuclear power.
It is importing power to us but re-exporting it to germany/italy/spain/etc
What is clear is that nuclear can and does produce >75% of an electrical grid. Wind has not surpassed even 15% of any major grid let alone got to 75%.
And how much of their total power is derived from that source? Electricity is usually only 30% of a countries power requirements. What about transport and heating? Do they power their cars and heat their homes with hydro?
Plus with hydro you either have it or you don’t. What you going to do, pray to the geography god to create the valleys and streams required for hydro power?
If I am wrong why is no country trying to go 80-90% wind? Why is no major country >10% wind powered?
And we are not talking electricity but total power
The price is simply too expensive today
Cell Denmark produces 19% of its electricity from wind and is planing 30% in 2020. A comission is reporting this year too the Danish Parliament this year on how they can become 100% renewable. They are on the right track.
Yes you are right the price is simply too expensive today but I can assure you that it will seem very cheap indeed when we run out of fossil fuels, which we are doing. Markets only give you the price now not in the future, and they are no good at supplying substitute which have a long lead in time. To do that you have to distort the markets to get the new renewable s up and running so they can take up the slack as fossil fuel disappear. This is what Germany Denmark and Spain are doing. When making economic decisions for the future more factors have to be taken into account than just being able to read accounts and making your decision on whether the figures at the bottom are coloured red or black.
Denmark can potentially do it because they have a very large windfall (relative to its population size) of both oil and gas. ie the oil and gas excess can pay for it
For all other countries which do not have this windfall gain from fossil fuels it will be very costly.
Even demark currently gets about 90% of its energy from fossil fuels, Germany is the same!
Stop looking at electricity because we use fossil fuels for more than just electricity.
And I believe you are wrong. fossil fuels will be relatively cheap for a long time to come. I suspect at least 2 decades.
What we need is wind farms to go down in price by 70% not for fossil fuels to go up by 400%. when wind farms go down in price by 70% then we can and will install lots but not until that happens
Reality does not always provide "what we need". And the UK had a MUCH greater windfall from oil, and the free market squandered it.
Denmark cut their oil use in half, and their peak production was about = to their 1973 consumption. All sorts of communist directions have helped keep Denmark as an oil exporter, unlike Thatcher's Britain.
Two decades is about the minimum time required to transition from FF and that assumes all sorts of war time urgency and communist directions and minimal free market response. Figure a half century for free markets to transition (and the 2060 free markets may look a bit like medieval town markets).
Alan
Demarks windfall per person from oil/gas is far greater than that of the UK as I have pointed out.
I don’t have figures going back to the 70s but over the last 10 years their own usage has not fallen much.
More importantly today they use MORE oil than the UK per person as well as more coal!!!
Denmark might be a nicer place, but it doesn’t use less fossil fuels per person and is a big exporter of the stuff relative to its population size. It has a big windfall that still continues today.
The UK is a relatively well run country so stop your moaning. It could be better run but it is definitely one of the top countries. We are probably within the top 10% on earth.
It's interesting to compare the supply response to rising oil prices in two periods, first from 2002-2005 and then from 2005-2008. IMO, most developed OECD oil importing countries can look forward to consuming a declining share of a declining volume of global net oil exports, with developing non-OECD oil importing countries consuming an increasing share of a declining volume of global net oil exports.
Global Cumulative Crude Oil Production Versus US Oil Prices
2002-2005 & 2005-2008
Here are the average total global crude oil production numbers per day by year, versus average annual US spot crude oil prices (EIA, crude + condensate):
2002: 67.16 mbpd & $26
2003: 69.43 mbpd & $31
2004: 72.48 mbpd & $42
2005: 73.72 mbpd & $57
2006: 73.46 mbpd & $66
2007: 73.00 mbpd & $72
2008: 73.71 mbpd & $100
Relative to the 2002 production level of 67.16 mbpd, in the following three period, 2003-2005 inclusive, the cumulative three year increase in production was 5,164 mb, versus a three year increase in oil prices of $31. So, for every dollar increase in oil prices, three year cumulative global crude oil production increased at 167 mb per dollar, again relative to the 2002 rate.
But then we have the 2006-2008 data.
Relative to the 2005 production rate of 73.72 mbpd, in the following three year period, 2006-2008 inclusive, the cumulative three year decline in production was 632 mb, versus a three increase in oil prices of $43. So, for every dollar increase in oil prices, three year cumulative global crude oil production fell at 15 mb per dollar, again relative to the 2005 rate.
Saudi Cumulative Net Oil Exports Versus US Oil Prices
2002-2005 & 2005-2008
One of the primary contributors to the 2002-2005 increase in production, followed by the 2006-2008 decline was Saudi Arabia, but let’s look at Saudi net oil exports, which are defined in terms of total liquids, inclusive of natural gas liquids and refined products.
Here are the average Saudi net oil export numbers per day by year, versus average annual US spot crude oil prices (EIA, Total Liquids):
2002: 7.1 mbpd & $26
2003: 8.3 mbpd & $31
2004: 8.6 mbpd & $42
2005: 9.1 mbpd & $57
2006: 8.4 mbpd & $66
2007: 8.0 mbpd & $72
2008: 8.4 mbpd & $100
Relative to the 2002 net export rate of 7.1 mbpd, in the following three period, 2003-2005 inclusive, the cumulative three year increase in net exports was 1,716 mb, versus a three year increase in oil prices of $31. So, for every dollar increase in oil prices, three year Saudi cumulative net oil exports increased at 55 mb per dollar, again relative to the 2002 rate.
But then we have the 2006-2008 data.
Relative to the 2005 net export rate of 9.1 mbpd, in the following three year period, 2006-2008 inclusive, the cumulative three year decline in net oil exports was 841 mb, versus a three increase in oil prices of $43. So, for every dollar increase in oil prices, three year Saudi cumulative net oil exports fell at 20 mb per dollar, again relative to the 2005 rate.
Note that in early 2004, the Saudis reiterated their support for the stated OPEC policy of maintaining an oil price band of $22 to $28, and they made good on their promises to support lower prices as they significantly increased net oil exports in the 2003-2005 time frame, but then in early 2006, they started complaining about problems finding buyers for all of their oil, “Even their light/sweet oil,” even as oil prices continued to increase. Apparently no one thought to ask them in early 2006, as oil prices traded over $60 per barrel, why they didn’t offer to sell another two mbpd of oil for $28 per barrel.
Yes, that is an important insight. We should not be complacent in thinking that our view point has much import when confronting the accepted view of the majority. Frustrating as that may be.
I read these posts tonight with great anticipation, as the subject is why we are here. I am dismayed at the tone of the replies and how people allowed cells to bait them to reply.
Build it and they will come, ignore them and they will leave. It isn't what was said today, it is how it was expressed.
When the cost of energy is such that wind/solar is equal to fossil, it will be too late to build the alternatives with a capitalist mindset. The first exploration of discovery for 'the new world' was subsidized. All collective efforts are subsidized in one sense or another. Thank God, for subsidies. Where would we be without our subsidized research, education, transportation, whatever? Big business already runs the show. It isn't always about money or cost benefit analysis.
Would you be in favor of a subsidy for a marginal stripper well that enabled an operator to profit from a well that used more energy to produce a small amount of oil than could be ultimately obtained from the oil produced?
Why even ask that?
You see the subsidies that he championed. They are an intentional skewing to push our priorities PAST a short term perspective that the markets are limited to. They do have to look way down the road and help us get ourselves where we want to be.
One of the places that "we have wanted to be" is with more production of domestic oil. Stripper well subsidies have been controversial for half a century, as far back as WWII but particularly during the 70's. On occasion they may operate at a net energy loss while still making a small dollar profit.
"..[where] "we have wanted to be" is with more production of domestic oil. "
I don't belong to the same 'we' I guess.
We subsidize education because of the long-term payback it promises. No less would be the benefits of Proper Insulation and Solar Home Heating, for example. But throwing societal resources into a dead end well (if I read your description correctly) which is a loser both near term AND far, and so does nothing to promote energy or financial stability for the USA, does it? If that's the case, then what would justify a subsidy for it?
We don’t really subsidise education though.
What your saying is that government pays for it, but that is not the same as a subsidy.
A subsidy is propping up an industry or sector people don’t want or don’t want in the quantity you are propping it up in.
If a government stopped state schools and cut taxes accordingly people would still get an education but it would be paid for privately.
If government cut green taxes and laws almost nobody would choose it freely over gas/coal at todays prices.
Guys -- Clue me in: I've been doing this for 34 years and I've never seen an operator of stripper oil wells receive a subsidy. What have I missed?
BTW -- A stripper well isn't a "dead well". It's a low volume producer that nets positive cash flow. Also remember: the average rate (less than 10 bopd) of all U.S. oil wells is below stripper level. Thus without our "dead wells" the U.S. would be importing closer to 100% of our needs instead of the current 60%
Oil Depletion Allowance = 15% off income.
Nottingham Energy Partnership gives these (pence per kwh equivalent) UK consumer fuel/energy costs as at 25th August 2009:
Electricity online 11.4
Mains Gas 4.3
Heating Oil 3.38
LPG 6.19
Seasoned Wood 3.83
Wood Pellets 6.02
Smokeless Fuel 7.78
Coal 4.16
GSHP 3.57
ASHP 4.56
Since August heating oil has risen sharply, seasoned wood less so but it is reacting to increased demand. The wood price increase seems to have been a response to a greater installed base of stoves following the 2008 oil price spike.
In cities heating is usually by mains gas, in rural areas it is mainly oil supplemented by wood burning stoves. But with the UK having to import increasing amnounts of fossil fuels, AND having accepted climate change as fact, the plan is to make a substantial move to renewables, up 5 fold in 10 years from 6% to 31%. This alongside a major programme of energy conservation. Windpower will form a massive part of the renewables increase, which is likely to increase further as a percentage of generation with methane from digesters (from agricultutral, farm and domestic waste) linked into the gas grid and coal power stations being equipped to burn miscanthus and short rotation coppice willow, though land may be too scarce to allow a major switch to biomass. Expect more hydro and wave power as well, plus a rebuild of nuclear generation.
The sense that energy is no longer taken for granted is possible best exemplified by the fact that Tesco (the UKs biggest supermarket chain)is currently offering low cost cavity wall and loft insulation installation. Also in the next few days the UK govt will announce feed in tariffs for energy generation.
I'd tend to go along with the premise that cost is the primary influence for consumers, but consider that UK govt is being strongly influenced by environmental impact and long term security of supply. What price dollars if the fuel isnt available and/or you've trashed the environment?
Governments don’t have infinite pockets either, they too are influenced by price.
Hence the reason for the recent outcry from solar providers that their biggest markets, Germany, Spain, France, Italy are cutting their feed in tariffs.
Currently it makes no sense to import Germany wind farms at 10p/kWh instead of importing gas at 1p/kWh
The UK wont even be producing 10% of her power this decade from wind/solar so don’t hold your breath. Germany isn’t even 10% green and look how hard they have pressed to go green. They have something like 10x the wind turbines we do.
Mazarine
Are those figures for kWh delivered to the home or per useful kW? Based on what I pay for electricity, gas and wood I would think they they are the former - if so everything except electricity and the two heat pumps needs to be divided by the efficiency of burning to get the actual cost per useful kW giving something like (efficiencies for the wood burners are a guess, low end of wood and coal is for open fires - not uncommon where I live):
Electricity online 11.4
Mains Gas 4.3 ---> 4.8 - 7.2 (90% - 60% efficiency)
Heating Oil 3.38 ---> 3.7 - 5.6 (90% - 60% efficiency)
LPG 6.19 ---> 6.9 - 10.3 (90% - 60% efficiency)
Seasoned Wood 3.83 ---> 5.1 - 15.3 (75% - 25% efficiency)
Wood Pellets 6.02 ---> 8.0 - 15.05 (75% - 40% efficiency)
Smokeless Fuel 7.78 ---> 10.4 - 19.5 (75% - 40% efficiency)
Coal 4.16 ---> 5.5 - 16.6 (75% - 25% efficiency)
GSHP 3.57
ASHP 4.56
This looks about right compared to what I estimated for replacing my current mains gas with wood to top up with an ASHP with wood and some resistive heating - a cost reduction compared to my present (assumed 70% or less efficient 1985 vintage) gas boiler, about break even with a new condensing one but as my present boiler is a back boiler and cannot be replaced like for like the capital cost of an ASHP is actually lower and installation much less disruptive.
Bingleybong,
The figures are adjusted for boiler/stove efficiencies to give "true" comparisons between heating using different fuels. e.g. the seasoned wood assumes boiler/stove efficiency of 85%, which is what I'm supposed to be getting with my woodburner! Oil boiler efficiency is assumed at 90%, better than my non-condensing 85% but worse than modern condensing boilers of c95%.
So its based on useful kwh.
see their website for more detail http://www.nottenergy.com/energy-costs-comparison3
Thanks, for others (will teach me not to follow up sources) the assumed efficiencies in the table are all for modern appliances so at around 90% for most things. The real world fuel consumption given that these are long lived appliances (a friend just bought a house with a 1935 coal boiler still working) could be quite a bit worse than the original list but not as bad as I thought (I think I'm paying rather more for gas than they say though).
I'm surprised wood burners go as high as 85%, not practicable for me to measure but I doubt my simple cast iron cylinder gets even 50%.
deleted double post
Hats off to all of those knowledgeable posters on here who have attempted to engage intelligently with the poster Cells.
However, I have also had the misfortune to have engaged in "debate" with this ideologically driven ignoramus many times on another forum and can reliably inform you it is a complete waste of your time.
Let's see if I get this all, ummm:
Communism, baaad. Organic foods, baaad. Price of fossil fuels will never go up.
We'll never run out of FF. Oh, communism, baaad, again.
Wind power, too expensive and baaad.
Solar power, too expensive and baaad.
We can have energy or Health care, but not both...
Unbridled unregulated kindly Capitalism, goood.
Total reliance on FF, goood.
Having no plans for depletion, goood.
Non-organic, GMO foods, goood.
Oh, and once again, communism, baaad.
Is that it, or did I miss anything about communism and organic foods?
Good summary but I think there is one more a in baaaad
I don't think so freepress. As you've now been re-educated go forth and propogate.
How do you know it is the same person, its not like the oil drum checks people identities.
I would recognise your inane drivel anywhere Mr Cells....
Charming as always
Steve,
you have to remember that Cells economic theory is faith based, he worships at the alter of his profit Adam Smith.
My economic theory?
My theory is simply that I and you and everybody else should be able to buy/sell at a price you and I agree on rather than a price someone dictates to us. If you like being dictated to I’m sure you can find many a dictator who will oblige.
I am a regular poster on Housepricecrash.co.uk and can report that his latest brainwave is for us to chuck a few fusion bombs on the moon such that it will light up at night, thus saving earthlings the energy cost of using night lights.
I kid you not.
Seriously, though, I do worry that the full EROEI of renewable energy is not fully factored in when calculating cradle to grave. However, assuming the EROEI is still positive (which I would not question), there is the problem of speed of flow given our biblical levels of energy consumption from the top to the bottom of our global civilization
It seems to me that we have built our entire industrial world on the basis of perpetual access to an incredibly dense and portable energy form. This, in turn has allowed the human population to explode over the last century or so. Maintained, as it is, by indirect and tortuous supply chains of every good and service imaginable.
Renewable energy and, even, nuclear seem at best to be merely forestalling the day when we are forced to address the real elephant in the room. Namely that there are just too damn many of us and until our population drops back to a sustainable level our civilization is at perpetual risk of collapse.
In the end, of course, renewables are the only long term sustainable solution to mankind's energy needs if we want to hold onto the best of the industrial age.
Just not for 6.5 billion and rising.....
why don’t you link the post you lying thick commie (is there any other kind?)
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=135711&st=30
Thank you so much for the suggestion I'm a commie by the way even if untrue.
Alas, I am far too selfish for that....
all very true, but make that 6.799 billion and rising:
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
Thanks for the link
I just did a few refreshes of the page over the course of a minute.
We're b*ggered, basically.....
There are not too many people. The world can sustain 7B perfectly fine.
If you want an example look at India and china. Combined they had a population of 1.1B back in 1960.
Back then they consumed a combined 0.3 million barrels per day of oil
http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb1110.html
natural gas consumption was negligible and the coal used by those 1.1B was also very low.
It goes to show you fossil fuels and population are not strongly linked!
Those two countries fed 1.1B people fine with near zero fossil fuels and neither are particularly large countries relative to their population size.
Total worldwide wind turbines: about 150GW capacity producing about 35GW of electricity.
Total worldwide natural gas production: about 4,000GW. If burnt in a modern 60% efficient gas fired station that would give 2,400GW of electricity.
Total worldwide wind today hence is equivalent to about 1.5% of total worldwide gas production!
Overall considering coal gas and oil, wind power is equal to about 0.5% of fossil fuels.
Nuclear and hydro are each equal to about 5% of fossil fuel.
Wind power is unlikely to surpass nuclear or hydro for many decades if ever.
Wind may well be small now reltive to gas but it is in reality an industry that is 10-15 years old. Turbines built before then are typically small and experimental.
The various tax rebates and other incentives have helped the industry overcome many of the economic obstacles and brought prices down considerably.
Lets see where wind is in 20-30 years time.
It is hard to push wind past 30% of a grid so assume every country in the world has 30% wind for electric.
Well that would be about 600GWe. That would be equal to about 1,000GWt of natural gas out of 4,000GWt of natural gas production.
Wind would have to make up roughly 100% of electricity to match the power we get from just natural gas.
Do you know any major grid which is more than 20% let alone 100% wind?
Just for comparison.
Hydro provides about 450GWe
Nuclear about 400GWe
Wind today about 35GWe
If we burnt all our natural gas in power stations it would give about 2,200GWe
Wind is unlikely to surpass hydro or nuclear let alone natural gas even in 20-30 years.
Wind in 2030 is quite likely (unless people like yourself gain too much influence) to be > hydro or nuke of 2010. China in particular is doing massive expansions of hydro (82 GW) and nuke as well as wind.
Alan
wind may be a lot but only if the price goes down 75% but even then it will only be comparable to nuke/hydro of 2010
assuming prices don’t go down 75% wind come 2030 will not be more than nukes come 2030 and perhaps not even as much as hydro come 2030.
What is for certain is that we will be using more fossil fuels come 2020 than we do today and likely more come 2030 than we do today. I would be surprised if by 2040-50 we use less than we did in 2000 (This is of course assuming governments don’t do something crazy like ban coal)
Sorry, I can't resist...
"It's the year 1900.
Total worldwide automobiles: 5000
Total worldwide animal drawn transports: 500000000
Total worldwide electric trams: 20000
Automobiles make up only about .01% of worldwide transportation vehicles!
Automobiles will never surpass electric trams for many decades if ever!"
(Yes, I made up the numbers, but you get the point.)
Its not comparable because an automobile had many advantages over a horse and cart.
If a technology is more useful and or cheaper than it will succeed.
If a technology provides nothing more and does it at a higher price then it will not succeed.
Having said that, wind provides the same thing as coal/gas (ie electricity)
So if it is able to do it cheaper than coal/gas it will boom.
For that to happen wind would have to go down to about 2p/kWh or down in price by 80%.
I hope wind does go down in price by 80% but that may not happen (if it does it may overtake natural gas or coal as a power source)
Wind has two major advantages over coal and gas.
Wind does not help boil the planet and create (among other side effects) hundreds of trillions in damages that Climate Change will bring (see England without the warm ocean currents, not only can you grow almost nothing, the heating requirements would skyrocket, but even worse, Middle Easterners would dump their London real estate !)
Wind does not depend upon a depleting resource.
Good Net Present Value economics discounts to almost zero anything 31 years or more in the future. Unfortunately, many of us and quite a few of our children will still be here in 31, 32 and even more years. One problem with "capitalism".
Alan
Well apart from the fact that claim it change will not boil anywhere (only a few degrees increase) and will have little NET negative impacts. Plus the fact that a lot of places will actually benefit from claim it change which is often not told you need to consider the simple fact that we can not go 90-100% wind/solar even if we wanted to do it!
Wind may not depend on a depleting resource but that helps us how if we cannot afford wind?
It may be the only choice one day but today we can afford fossil fuels so we use that.
As for net present value no it doesn’t mean nothing over 30 years gets built.
Firstly our long term interest rates are about 5% and our long time inflation rate is 3-4% so the real rate of interest is actually about 1-2%.
What that says is an infrastructure project should bring a real return of 1-2% per year or you are better off spending the money on something else. So it isn’t a matter of using the money to build a wind farm or not but it is a matter of using it to build a wind farm or some other infrastructure or some other purpose (education, healthcare, parks, whatever)
Cells again misrepresents the argument.
NPV assigns almost no value to anything that lasts over 30 years. That is why new construction in the USA is such trash. Only the requirements of building codes (COMMUNISM !) result in any durability at all. I have had a professor of architecture tell me that residential construction is designed to last 20 years (down from 30) before major repairs except where cose requires more expensive materials, building techniques, etc.
Non-capitalist construction (government, churches, private schools) do build better.
During the GWB administration I am trying to think of ANYTHING built for profit that would last (beyond what is required by code) and cannot think of a thing except some railroads adding double track. Although RR construction is also controlled by communist standards (the communists do not like trains derailing, etc.)
Alan
You clearly don’t understand money and accounting
Interest rates don’t mean things that don’t last long don’t get built. The only thing it means is that we try to allocate capital to things that return more than 2% pa in real terms.
If a bridge brings in 2% real return pa we will build it to last a thousand years.
You seem to think ignorantly that 100%/2% = 50 years so anything beyond that isn’t build.
No it means anything bringing in a return less than 2% doesn’t get built.
Instead we use the money on something that does bring in 2%.
We don’t live in an infinite resource world as you know. That 2% return is derived from what we have.
The labour and capital we have is enough to build and make things that return 2% or more.
If we had more labour or more capital or more productivity that 2% would reduce.
Like I said you clearly don’t understand what your talking about.
I understand NPV *VERY* well. I do pro forma's for tax shelters in a prior life as a CPA (chartered accountant to you). I saw how little value was placed on "salvage value" at the end of the term (15 to 20 years were typical).
Bridges are built only by communists (i.e. gov'ts) with longer term POVs than capitalists.
You apparently pulled 2% out of ... after quoting 5% earlier.
Oh well, you are beyond logical argument and facts, I just want to keep others from being mislead by you.
This string is near death.
So long,
Alan
To give you guys an idea of the challenge this is roughly the power output we get from various sources today.
Oil: 6,000GW
Coal: 4,500GW
Gas: 4,000GW
Hydro: 450GWe (equal to about 900GW of FF)
Nuclear: 400GWe (equal to about 800GW of FF)
Wind: 35GW (equal to about 70GW of FF)
More importantly the worlds demand will grow by about 5,000GW within the next 15 years. It is assumed most of this will come from coal/gas and some from oil/nuclear/hydro/wind.
Wind is unlikely to surpass hydro or nuclear let alone challenge oil/gas/coal at todays prices.
If wind power goes down in price by 80% then we could see wind produce a lot of power. until then it will be a tiny portion. Wind today provides only 0.5% of worldwide power. It is unlikely to provide more than 5-10% for decades.
More importantly the worlds demand will grow by about 5,000GW within the next 15 years
An invalid assumption.
BTW, China has 82 GW of new hydro, massive new wind and quite a bit of solar heat and some solar PV (just ordered 2 GW) in their plans. You forgot to mention this.
Alan
Alan my dear child. Worldwide demand and production will grow by at least another 5,00GWt over the next 20 years of which china will likely add 2-3,000GWt.
I take it you know that over the last 10 years worldwide demand and production went up by about 3,500GW???
Oil was up by about 800GW, coal and gas each by about 1,300GW
We will likely see an increase of 2,000GWt of both coal and gas production and 1,000GWt total equivalent in oil/nuclear/hydro/wind.
You are correct china has a lot of hydro and plans to build a lot of wind and nuclear and even a little solar.
However it plans to add more FF than all of the above combined many times over!
Just for you.
China(2008 data): 93% fossil fuel and nuclear powered, 6.7% hydro powered, 0.3% wind.
Coal: 2100GWt
Oil: 550GWt
Gas: 110GWt
FF total: 2,760
Nuclear: 25GWt
Hydro: 200GWt equivalent
Wind: 8GWt equivalent
US (2008 data): 97% fossil fuel and nuclear powered, 2.5% hydro plus 0.5% wind.
Oil: 1,330GWt
Gas: 900GW
Coal: 850GW
FF total: 3,080GW
Nuclear: 290GW equivalent
Hydro: 85GWt equivalent
Wind: 17GWt equivlant.
Total non FF non nuke: 102GWt equivalent
Don't worry Alan. In Cells World resource depletion doesn't exist.
Cells standard response to resource depletion is - 'Look at History we have increased gas production by 30% in the last decade and therefore we shall increase by another 30% over the next decade'
I am surprised he is posting here - usually he posts in locations with a receptive audience who lap up his 'claim it change' and 'CO2 terrorist molecule' catch phrases.
Most resources are for all intents infinite because we don’t destroy them we just move them about. Take steel as an example. We mine iron ore and turn it into steel. a few hundred years down the line that steel rusts back into iron ore. ie it is recycled. That is the case for most the resources we use.
The only thing that I can say where it doesn’t hold are Fossil fuels. However we have plenty of other energy sources. Most notably that big ball of fire in the sky. I’m sure one day we will be deriving the majority of our power directly from the sun.
However unlike presumably most on this site I don’t think we are close to getting near exhausting the worlds FF supply nor do I believe we are near peak fossil fuels (ie coal plus gas plus oil). We probably have decades of FF remaining and we will likely be burning more of the stuff come 2050 than we did in 2000 (excluding politically influenced decisions like banning coal mining)
Cells
You appear to have a major issue with wind on cost grounds.
Do you not appreciate that the predominant measure by which cost is lowered is through economies of scale? The cost of wind per KW of capacity is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago.
A good comparision is with CFL's. £10 plus in the mid 1990's. Now due primarily to mass production they can be retailed profitable at less than £1.
Well I have said wind will do fine if costs go down by some 75%
I didn’t say this wouldn’t happen I am just saying until it does it wont provide much of the worlds power requirements.
If it went down in price by 90% it could potentially replace 70-80% of fossil fuels
I can't believe you guys are still debating this bafoon (going into a third day). He may set a new TOD record for persistant hubris, but his lack of depth and systematic understanding of these issues are telling. CELL has outlived his usefulness. Give it up.
Point taken
Everyone repeat after me
I must not feed the trolls
I must not feed the trolls
I must not feed the trolls
.
.
.
x 100 times
Bafoon:
1. Fool, idiot, one who pretends to know something but does not.
2. A cross between a baboon and a babbling idiot.
3. Alternate spelling of buffoon, which is synonymous with jackass
Mea culpa maximus
Mea culpa maxima
Why don’t you disprove what I have stated instead of whining like a child?
1: Wind power today is expensive and we could not afford to have a mass wind rollout today.
2: No significant country produces more than 15% of their power requirements from wind
3: It would require gas at > $20/mBTU in Europe for wind to be competitive unsubsidised (or for wind farms to drop in price by 75%)
4: Wind is highly unlikely to produce >10% of worldwide power requirements this or even next decade (bar a DRAMATIC fall in price)
(With my apologies to Robert)
cell, you said (above)
I suppose it depends on your definition of "big way":
http://www.ewea.org/index.php?id=60&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1441&tx_ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=8c4bf8b777
http://www.ewea.org/index.php?id=60&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1784&tx_ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=3abdb42e1e
buffoon (see definition upthread)
Needless to say that Spain got 17.1% of its electricity from wind and solar last year (while Spanish coal power plants only produced 12.7%):
http://www.lavanguardia.es/ciudadanos/noticias/20100102/53859888780/la-p...
And Spain has actually far less natural resources than the US.
You keep quoting electricity, we use fossil fuels for a lot more than electricity.
Wind provided only 5% of Spains POWER, solar 1%, hydro 2.3%, fossil fuels plus nuclear provided 88.5% of her energy requirements!
Even if we install 50GW of wind capacity per year, which is a lot, it would take 190 years at that rate just to replace our Natural gas consumption!
If you want the math
50GW capacity = 12.5GWe production (25% capacity factor).
12.5 / 0.6 = about 21GW.
That is to say 50GW capacity of wind turbines would displace 21GW of natural gas in a modern gas fired station.
We produce and consume about 4,000 GW of natural gas
4,000 / 21 = 190 years
And that’s before you even consider replacing coal and oil.
We would need to build nearly 250GW capacity per year ever year to replace natural gas by the year 2050.
I don’t see us producing 250GW per year any time soon if ever.
And to replace oil and gas and coal and take into account higher demand from china and India your probably looking at near 1,000GW capacity every year for the next 40 years to replace oil/gas/coal by 2050.
That is a near impossible figure unless wind gets cheaper (which is another way of saying unless we get better at making wind farms)
A number of interesting comments here, though ultimately I think that (at least for a few people) the point about these figures is lost - the bulk of the non-renewable FFs are still cheap compared to the alternative, but given the dynamic of PO, may not be for much longer. Solar pV is expensive in part because it is ascending a technology development curve - 3rd generation pV is about 50% more efficient than 2nd generation pV, and there are indications that some of the 4th generation pV (now just on the horizon) may very well surpass the 32-33% conversion rate that for many years has been seen as the "maximum allowable" efficiency for pV. Similarly wind is expensive because we've not put 100+ years of investment into its development, but next generation turbines are proving to be considerably more efficient at conversion (though access to rare earths, such as molybdenum, may be a limiting factor there). Space based microwave pV stations also look to be increasing overall efficiency of conversion.
The importance of all of these, as well as other renewables, is the very fact that they their energy consumption is an up front cost, and much of that cost is R&D. Once those costs are met, the only costs are maintenance ones. Oil, NG, coal on the other hand have lower startup costs (though keep in mind that much of this is because the R&D costs were effectively paid for over the course of the last century) but then you become reliant upon the suppliers of these fuels as well as upon the resources being available; you also have to incorporate the remediation cost of the environment, something that has become a critical issue now precisely because this accounting was deferred to the public sector (i.e., ignored).
Renewables right now make up a small percentage of total power production (though keep in mind that the push towards renewables has also only been in effect for less than a decade to any significant degree) but to a great extent these are also pilot projects. Denmark's been brought up repeatedly in discussion here, so it's worth looking at why a country that is rich in oil and NG is spending so much money on renewables. The answer, of course, is that the Danes recognize that a time may come in the not too distant future when those resources will decline, either because of the effects of climatic change or because of the North Sea oil and natural gas resources ultimately running out. Thus, the renewables are an insurance policy, a way of insuring that disruptions to their energy supply is minimal.
A second factor in all of these equations is the mutability of energy sources. The US has a heavy reliance upon oil for transportation, and even with a fairly high availability of natural gas, the conversion over to an economy that could run on NG or LNG would be expensive, especially for the agricultural and transportation sectors. That cost would have to be borne primarily by taxpayers, and it would take a while to make happen. That's why BTU costs alone don't tell the whole story.
One final note - keep in mind that consumers in most places have relatively little say about what kinds of power they have available to them. Much of the say is essentially dependent upon both business and government investment into the infrastructures necessary to bring this power to those consumers, and that, in turn is largely a matter of policy. Significantly, when an alternative is offered, especially one that can amortize the increase in costs over a period of time, consumers generally have preferred to go with renewable vs. non-renewable sources for energy generation.
I think the bulk of this argument is about time. Markets are very good at responding to real time conditions of the moment. Markets do not anticipate the future. Free market capitalism (such as it has been) has worked reasonably well in the US during the periods of bountiful resources. When the price of whale oil or wood rose over a significant period of time, we found substitutes. Current prices of various energy sources/carriers reflect well on current motivations. Cells is correct that we are doing what we are doing because of price. This is Robert's point exactly. However, taking the Titanic on the Northern route because it's cheapest and most efficient at the moment may not take us where we need to go. There is a huge iceberg ahead, with most of its body under water, invisible. Markets are not responsive enough to turn the ship away from the iceberg in a timely manner. The Titanic is at the bottom of the ocean I believe.
The antithesis of market capitalism is planning and is odious to free marketeers because planning has usually mucked things up at some point. However, because we have gotten much better at seeing icebergs ahead, it makes sense to plan rather than crash, even if it distorts the markets. We are running out of viable substitutes; we can't simply substitute something for petroleum and coal, yet the economic price does not reflect the possible catastrophic price of continuing on as usual.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fc38db6c-0a1a-11df-8b23-00144feabdc0.html
Looks like Gas fired stations will be around for a long while to come