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Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy
Posted by Gail the Actuary on August 19, 2010 - 10:35am
This is a guest post by David Fridley, known on The Oil Drum as Sparaxis. See end of post for more information.
The scramble for alternatives is on. High oil prices, growing concerns over energy security, and the threat of climate change have all stimulated investment in the development of alternatives to conventional oil. In this post (which is an excerpted chapter from The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch), I give an overview of some of the issues I see, including nine challenges of alternative energy.
“Alternative energy” generally falls into two categories:
- Substitutes for existing petroleum liquids (ethanol, biodiesel, biobutanol, dimethyl ether, coal-to-liquids, tar sands, oil shale), both from biomass and fossil feedstocks.
- Alternatives for the generation of electric power, including power-storage technologies (wind, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, tidal, biomass, fuel cells, batteries).
The technology pathways to these alternatives vary widely, from distillation and gasification to bioreactors of algae and high-tech manufacturing of photonabsorbing silicon panels. Many are considered “green” or “clean,” although some, such as coal-to-liquids and tar sands, are “dirtier” than the petroleum they are replacing. Others, such as biofuels, have concomitant environmental impacts that offset potential carbon savings.
Unlike conventional fossil fuels, where nature provided energy over millions of years to convert biomass into energy-dense solids, liquids, and gases—requiring only extraction and transportation technology for us to mobilize them—alternative energy depends heavily on specially engineered equipment and infrastructure for capture or conversion, essentially making it a high-tech manufacturing process. However, the full supply chain for alternative energy, from raw materials to manufacturing, is still very dependent on fossil-fuel energy for mining, transport, and materials production. Alternative energy faces the challenge of how to supplant a fossil-fuel-based supply chain with one driven by alternative energy forms themselves in order to break their reliance on a fossil-fuel foundation.
The public discussion about alternative energy is often reduced to an assessment of its monetary costs versus those of traditional fossil fuels, often in comparison to their carbon footprints. This kind of reductionism to a simple monetary metric obscures the complex issues surrounding the potential viability, scalability, feasibility, and suitability of pursuing specific alternative technology paths. Although money is necessary to develop alternative energy, money is simply a token for mobilizing a range of resources used to produce energy. At the level of physical requirements, assessing the potential for alternative energy development becomes much more complex since it involves issues of end-use energy requirements, resource-use trade-offs (including water and land), and material scarcity.
Similarly, it is often assumed that alternative energy will seamlessly substitute for the oil, gas, or coal it is designed to supplant—but this is rarely the case. Integration of alternatives into our current energy system will require enormous investment in both new equipment and new infrastructure—along with the resource consumption required for their manufacture—at a time when capital to make such investments has become harder to secure. This raises the question of the suitability of moving toward an alternative energy future with an assumption that the structure of our current large-scale, centralized energy system should be maintained. Since alternative energy resources vary greatly by location, it may be necessary to consider different forms of energy for different localities.
It is not possible to single out one metric by which to assess the promise of a particular alternative energy form. The issue is complex and multifaceted, and its discussion is complicated by political biases, ignorance of basic science, and a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of the problem. Many factors come into play, of which nine are discussed here.
1. Scalability and Timing
For the promise of an alternative energy source to be achieved, it must be supplied in the time frame needed, in the volume needed, and at a reasonable cost. Many alternatives have been successfully demonstrated at the small scale (algae-based diesel, cellulosic ethanol, biobutanol, thin-film solar) but demonstration scale does not provide an indication of the potential for large-scale production. Similarly, because alternative energy relies on engineering and construction of equipment and manufacturing processes for its production, output grows in a stepwise function only as new capacity comes online, which in turn is reliant on timely procurement of the input energy and other required input materials. This difference between “production” of alternative energy and “extraction” of fossil fuels can result in marked constraints on the ability to increase the production of an alternative energy source as it is needed.
For example, the tar sands of Canada (although often excluded as an “alternative” energy, tar sands are subject to the same constraints because the production of oil from the tar sands deposits is essentially a mining and manufacturing operation) have already achieved a fully commercial scale of production, and because of the immense reserves indicated in Alberta, tar sands are looked to be a backstop to declining conventional crude oil production. In 2008, production of oil from the tar sands reached 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd), less than 2 percent of global production of conventional crude oil. By 2020, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers projects that production will increase by 2.1 million bpd to a total of 3.3 million bpd.1 But the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the global decline rate from conventional-oil fields is 6.4 percent, or about 4.8 million bpd per year.2 Thus by 2020, the new oil coming from tar-sands production will not even make up half of what is being lost from ongoing depletion of existing conventional-oil fields. Even with a “crash” production program, it is estimated that tar-sands production in 2020 could not exceed 4.0 million bpd, an increase still less than the annual rate of conventional crude oil depletion.3
Scale also matters in comparing projected production of an alternative energy form against expected demand growth. In 2007, the U.S. Energy Policy Act established a target for the production of ethanol in 2022 at 36 billion gallons, of which 15 billion gallons were to be sourced from corn and the remainder from cellulosic sources. In terms of gasoline equivalency, this target is equal to 890,000 bpd of additional supply. In 2008, however, the U.S. Department of Energy, in its Annual Energy Outlook, forecast demand for gasoline would grow by 930,000 bpd by 2022,4 more than offsetting projected supply growth from ethanol and leaving gross oil dependency unchanged.
This lack of the kind of scalability needed given the magnitude and time frame of conventional-oil depletion and in the face of continued demand growth is found as well in other biofuels, coal-to-liquids, and alternative liquids for transportation. Also of concern is the difficulty of scaling up alternative energy quickly enough to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets.
2. Commercialization
Closely related to the issue of scalability and timing is commercialization, or the question of how far away a proposed alternative energy source stands from being fully commercialized. Often, newspaper reports of a scientific laboratory breakthrough are accompanied by suggestions that such a breakthrough represents a possible “solution” to our energy challenges.
In reality, the average time frame between laboratory demonstration of feasibility and full large-scale commercialization is twenty to twenty-five years. Processes need to be perfected and optimized, patents developed, demonstration tests performed, pilot plants built and evaluated, environmental impacts assessed, and engineering, design, siting, financing, economic, and other studies undertaken. In other words, technologies that are proved feasible on the benchtop today will likely have little impact until the 2030s. This reality is reflected in the key message of the now-famous Hirsch Report, which noted that to properly mitigate the economic impacts of peak oil, we would have needed to start fundamentally redesigning our national energy infrastructure twenty years in advance of the peak.5
3. Substitutability
Ideally, an alternative energy form would integrate directly into the current energy system as a “drop-in” substitute for an existing form without requiring further infrastructure changes. This is rarely the case, and the lack of substitutability is particularly pronounced in the case of the electrification of transportation, such as with electric vehicles. Although it is possible to generate the electricity needed for electrified transportation from wind or solar power, the prerequisites to achieving this are extensive. Electric-car development would require extensive infrastructure changes, including:
- Retooling of factories to produce the vehicles
- Development of a large-scale battery industry
- Development of recharging facilities
- Deployment of instruments for the maintenance and repair of such vehicles
- A spare-parts industry
- “Smart-grid” monitoring and control software and equipment
- Even more generation and transmission facilities to supply the additional electricity demand
The development of wind and solar-power electricity also requires additional infrastructure; wind and solar electricity must be generated where the best resources exist, which is often far from population centers. Thus, extensive investment in transmission infrastructure to bring it to consumption centers is required. Today, ethanol can be blended with gasoline and used directly, but its propensity to absorb water and its high oxygen content make it unsuitable for transport in existing pipeline systems,6 and an alternative pipeline system to enable its widespread use would be materially and financially intensive. While alternative energy forms may provide the same energy services as another form, they rarely substitute directly, and these additional material costs need to be considered.
4. Material Input Requirements
Unlike what is generally assumed, the input to an alternative energy process is not money per se: It is resources and energy, and the type and volume of the resources and energy needed may in turn limit the scalability and affect the cost and feasibility of an alternative. This is particularly notable in processes that rely on advanced technologies manufactured with rare-earth elements. Fuel cells, for example, require platinum, palladium, and rare-earth elements. Solar-photovoltaic technology requires gallium, and in some forms, indium. Advanced batteries rely on lithium. Even technology designed to save energy, such as light-emitting diode (LED) or organic LED (OLED) lighting, requires rare earths, indium, and gallium. Expressing the costs of alternative energy only in monetary terms obscures potential limits arising from the requirements for resources and energy inputs.
Because alternative energy today constitutes only a small fraction of total energy production, the volume of resources and energy demanded for its production has so far been easily accommodated. This will not necessarily be the case with large-scale expansion. For example, thin-film solar has been promoted as a much lower-cost, more flexible, and more widely applicable solar-conversion technology compared to traditional silicon panels. Thin-film solar currently uses indium because of its versatile properties, but indium is also widely used as a component of flat-screen monitors. Reserves of indium are limited, and a 2007 study found that at current rates of consumption, known reserves of indium would last just thirteen years.7
Can greatly increased demand for these resources be accommodated? As shown in table 18.1, successful deployment to 2030 of a range of new energy technologies (and some non-energy advanced technologies) would substantially raise demand for a range of metals beyond the level of world production today. In the case of gallium, demand from emerging technologies would substantially raise demand for a range of metals beyond the level of world production today. In the case of gallium, demand from emerging technologies would be expected to reach six times today’s total global production by 2030; for indium, more than three times today’s production—compared to just fractional increases in the demand for ruthenium and selenium.
Although alternative metals and materials exist for certain technologies (albeit often with performance trade-offs), embarking on a particular technology deployment path without consideration of long-term availability of material inputs can substantially raise risks. These risks are not limited to physical availability and price; they include potential supply disruptions as a consequence of the uneven geographical distribution of production and reserves. Currently, China is the dominant world source (over 95 percent) of the rare-earth element neodymium, a key input in the production of permanent magnets used in hybrid-vehicle motors and windmill turbines. In 2009, the Chinese government announced restrictions on the export of rare earths, ostensibly to encourage investment within China of industries using the metals. Whether for the rare earths themselves or for final products made from them, import dependency in the face of such a high concentration of production would do little to alleviate energy security concerns now seen in terms of import dependency on the Middle East for oil.
Alternative energy production is reliant not only on a range of resource inputs, but also on fossil fuels for the mining of raw materials, transport, manufacturing, construction, maintenance, and decommissioning. Currently, no alternative energy exists without fossil-fuel inputs, and no alternative energy process can reproduce itself—that is, manufacture the equipment needed for its own production—without the use of fossil fuels. In this regard, alternative energy serves as a supplement to the fossil-fuel base, and its input requirements may constrain its development in cases of either material or energy scarcity.
5. Intermittency
Modern societies expect that electrons will flow when a switch is flipped, that gas will flow when a knob is turned, and that liquids will flow when the pump handle is squeezed. This system of continuous supply is possible because of our exploitation of large stores of fossil fuels, which are the result of millions of years of intermittent sunlight concentrated into a continuously extractable source of energy. Alternative energies such as solar and wind power, in contrast, produce only intermittently as the wind blows or the sun shines, and even biomass-based fuels depend on seasonal harvests of crops. Integration of these energy forms into our current system creates challenges of balancing availability and demand, and it remains doubtful that these intermittent energy forms can provide a majority of our future energy needs in the same way that we expect energy to be available today.
One indication of intermittency challenges in electric power generation is the capacity factor, or the average percentage of time in a year that a power plant is producing at full rated capacity. As shown in table 18.2, photovoltaic systems produce at full capacity only 12 to 19 percent of the time over the course of a year, compared to an average of 30 percent for wind systems. In contrast, a coal-thermal plant will typically run at full capacity 70 to 90 percent of the time, while nuclear power operates at over a 90 percent capacity factor in the United States.
Our current electricity system is dominated by large baseload coal- and nuclear-power generation. The integration of intermittent energy forms such as solar and wind is increasingly seen as a matter of expanding transmission capacity and grid interconnections to extend the area over which these variations are felt, as well as implementing more complex operations controls. This approach in effect relies on strengthening and expanding the large centralized energy production and distribution model that has characterized the fossil-fuel era, but may not necessarily be suitable for a future of renewable energy generation.
The key to evening out the impact of intermittency is storage; that is, the development of technologies and approaches that can store energy generated during periods of good wind and sun for use at other times. Many approaches have been proposed and tested, including compressed-air storage, batteries, and the use of molten salts in solar-thermal plants. The major drawbacks of all these approaches include the losses involved in energy storage and release, and the limited energy density that these storage technologies can achieve.
6. Energy Density
Energy density refers to the amount of energy that is contained in a unit of an energy form. It can be expressed in the amount of energy per unit of mass (weight) or in the amount of energy per unit of volume. In everyday life, it is common to consider energy density when considering food choices. Food labeling in the United States requires that both numbers needed for calculating energy density be provided: the number of food calories per serving and the weight or volume of the serving (expressed in grams or liters, respectively). Potatoes, for example, have an energy density of 200 food calories per 100 grams, or, expressed in units common in energy discussions, 8.4 megajoules8 (MJ) per kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Cheese is more energy dense than potatoes, containing about 13 MJ per kilogram.
Energy density has also influenced our choice of fuels. Aside from alleviating a growing wood shortage, the conversion to the use of coal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was welcomed because coal provided twice as much energy as wood for the same weight of material. Similarly, the shift from coal- to petroleum-powered ships in the early twentieth century was driven by the fact that petroleum possesses nearly twice the energy density of coal, allowing ships to go farther without having to stop for refueling. Even when used in a motor vehicle’s inefficient internal combustion engine, a kilogram of highly energy-dense gasoline—about 6 cups—allows us to move 3,000 pounds of metal about 11 miles.
The consequence of low energy density is that larger amounts of material or resources are needed to provide the same amount of energy as a denser material or fuel. Many alternative energies and storage technologies are characterized by low energy densities, and their deployment will result in higher levels of resource consumption. As shown in figure 18.1, the main alternatives under development to supplant gasoline use in cars are dramatically lower in energy density than gasoline itself. Lithium-ion batteries—the focus of current research for electric vehicles—contain only 0.5 MJ per kilogram of battery compared to 46 MJ per kilogram for gasoline.
Advances in battery technology are being announced regularly, but they all come up against the theoretical limit of battery density of only 3 MJ per kilogram. Low energy density will present a significant challenge to the electrification of the car fleet and will raise challenges of adequate material supply: Today, the advanced Tesla Roadster has a lithium-ion battery pack weighing 900 pounds, which delivers just 190 MJ of energy. In contrast, a 10-gallon tank of gasoline weighs 62 pounds and delivers 1,200 MJ of energy. To provide the equivalent energy to a typical gasoline car, an electric-car battery pack would need to consume resources weighing 5,700 pounds, nearly the weight of the last Hummer model.
The more dense an energy form is, the less land is needed for its deployment. Because many alternative energies are far less energy dense than fossil fuels, large-scale deployment will incur considerable land costs. For example, a single 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant requires 1 to 4 square kilometers (km2) of land, not counting the land required to mine and transport the coal. In contrast, 20–50 km2, or the size of a small city, would be required to generate the equivalent amount of energy from a photovoltaic array or from a solar-thermal system. For wind, 50–150 km2 would be needed; for biomass, 4,000–6,000 km2 of land would be needed. The sprawling city of Los Angeles, in comparison, covers 1,200 km2. The land-use issue is thus a problem not only of biofuels production; siting of alternative energy projects will likely be a constant challenge because of the inherent high land footprint.
7. Water
Water ranks with energy as a potential source of conflict among peoples and nations, but a number of alternative energy sources, primarily biomass-based energy, are large water consumers critically dependent on a dependable water supply. As seen in figure 18.2, the “full-cycle” water requirement (including water for growing and processing biofuels) for key ethanol and biodiesel feedstocks is in some cases hundreds or even many thousand times higher than for the refining of gasoline. In well-watered regions with regular and adequate rainfall, much of this water can be provided through rain; in a region such as California, where no rain falls during the summer growing season because of its Mediterranean climate, irrigation is an absolute necessity for growing commercial biomass feedstocks. However, all of California’s water resources have already been allocated, so existing uses for other crops would have to be reallocated to support biomass farming—raising the issue of "food versus fuel" from yet a different angle. The water problems, however, promise only to intensify with global warming as California’s winter snowpack fades and runoff to support summer agriculture declines.
Considering just the processing stage, biomass and unconventional fossil-fuel energy also often require much greater water usage than the 2.5 gallons of water required per gallon of gasoline produced. Coal-to-liquids production consumes 8 to 11 gallons of water per gallon of output, corn ethanol requires 4 to 6 gallons, and cellulosic ethanol needs 11 gallons. In the United States, Montana has looked into becoming a leader in coal-to-liquids production, yet Montana’s dry climate suggests that water could be a limiting factor.
8. The Law of Receding Horizons9
An often-cited metric of the viability of alternatives is the expected break-even cost of the alternative with oil, or the price that crude oil would have to be to make the alternative cost competitive. Underlying this calculation, however, is an assumption that the input costs to alternative energy production would remain static as oil prices rise, thereby providing the economic incentive to development. This assumption, however, has not always proved to be the case, particularly for those alternatives for which energy itself is a major input. Because of price linkages in the energy (and now energy and biomass) markets, rising oil prices tend to push up the price of natural gas as well as coal; for processes that are heavily dependent on these fuels, higher oil prices also bring higher production costs.
A good example of this phenomenon is the assessment of the economics of production from oil shale (kerogen-rich marlstone), found in vast quantities in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. In the early 1970s, shale oil was expected to flood the market if the price of crude oil were to rise above $2 per barrel. When world oil prices had shot up to $35 per barrel by 1979, oil-shale production still required federal government assistance, and when oil prices fell in the mid-1980s, development and production were abandoned. Fast-forward to 2008 when oil prices moved above $100 per barrel—oil shale was then expected to be economic at $80 to $90 per barrel, and the U.S. government again provided incentives to explore production in the area. This ratcheting up of oil-shale economics with the price of oil reflects in part the high energy-input requirement to the production process.
Similarly, the corn ethanol industry has recently been subject to the same dynamic step-up in costs as the price of oil has risen. Two major input costs to the industry are the processing fuel (usually natural gas) and the corn feedstock itself. Rising oil prices after 2004 pulled natural-gas prices up as well, increasing the processing energy costs for ethanol. At the same time, higher fuel prices made cultivating corn more expensive; this, together with the additional demand for corn created by the growing ethanol industry, helped push corn prices up even further. So, although the record-high oil prices of 2008 increased demand for ethanol, some ethanol producers were operating with minimal or no profit because they had to pay more for both their processing fuel and their corn feedstock.
Ultimately, the “law of receding horizons” is a phenomenon reflective of the general orientation toward financial and economic accounting to gauge project viability and prospects. Physical accounting—that is, analyzing the material and energy inputs to a process—would help in better understanding the degree to which an alternative energy production process is vulnerable to the rise in energy costs.
9. Energy Return on Investment10
The complexity of our economy and society is a function of the amount of net energy we have available. “Net energy” is, simply, the amount of energy remaining after we consume energy to produce energy. Consuming energy to produce energy is unavoidable, but only that which is not consumed to produce energy is available to sustain our industrial, transport, residential, commercial, agricultural, and military activities. The ratio of the amount of energy we put into energy production and the amount of energy we produce is called “energy return on investment” (EROI).
This concept differs from “conversion efficiency,” which compares the amount of energy provided as a feedstock to a conversion process (such as an electric power plant or petroleum refinery) with the amount remaining after conversion. Physics dictates that this figure is always less than 100 percent. In contrast, EROI can be very high (e.g., 100:1, or 100 units of energy produced for every 1 unit used to produce it—an “energy source”) or low (0.8:1, or only 0.8 unit of energy produced for every 1 unit used in production—an “energy sink”). Society requires energy sources, not energy sinks, and the magnitude of EROI for an energy source is a key indicator of its contribution to maintenance of social and economic complexity.
Net-energy availability has varied tremendously over time and in different societies. In the last advanced societies that relied only on solar power (sun, water power, biomass, and the animals that depended on biomass), in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the amount of net energy available was low and dependent largely on the food surpluses provided by farmers. At that time, only 10 to 15 percent of the population was not involved in energy production. As extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, society was increasingly able to substitute the energy from fossil fuels for manual or animal labor, thereby freeing an even larger proportion of society from direct involvement in energy production. In 1870, 70 percent of the U.S. population were farmers; today the figure is less than 2 percent, and every aspect of agricultural production now relies heavily on petroleum or natural gas. The same is true in other energy sectors: Currently, less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. labor force (about 710,000 people) is directly involved in coal mining, oil and gas extraction, petroleum refining, pipeline transport, and power generation, transmission, and distribution.
The challenge of a transition to alternative energy, then, is whether such energy surpluses can be sustained, and thus whether the type of social and economic specialization we enjoy today can be maintained. Indeed, one study estimates that the minimum EROI for the maintenance of industrial society is 5:1, suggesting that no more than 20 percent of social and economic resources can be dedicated to the production of energy without undermining the structure of industrial society.11
In general, most alternative energy sources have low EROI values (see figure 18.3). Because of their high energy-input requirements, biofuels produce very little or no energy surplus.12 Similarly, tar sands provide less than 3 units of energy for each unit consumed. In contrast, wind energy shows a high return on energy investment, but it is subject to the problems of intermittency and siting issues.
A high EROI is not sufficient to ensure that the structure of modern society and economies can be maintained, but it is a prerequisite. Unfortunately, EROI is not well understood or routinely used in energy analyses by government or industry, despite the insights it can provide. Because of the enormous investment in resources and energy that any alternative energy pathway will require, it is important that we look beyond simple financial payback, particularly in a future of rising energy prices, declining fossil-fuel resources, and increasing danger of climate catastrophe.
How Will Society Evolve in a Post-Carbon World?
Alternative energy forms are crucial for a global transition away from fossil fuels, despite the myriad challenges of their development, scaling, and integration. In face of the peaking of global oil production—to be followed by peaks in natural gas and coal extraction—and of the need to reverse trajectory in carbon emissions, alternative energy sources will need to form the backbone of a future energy system.
That system, however, will not be a facsimile of the system we have today based on continuous uninterrupted supply growing to meet whatever demand is placed on it. As we move away from the energy bounty provided by fossil fuels, we will become increasingly reliant on tapping the current flow of energy from the sun (wind, solar) and on new energy manufacturing processes that will require ever larger consumption of resources (biofuels, other manufactured liquids, batteries). What kind of society we can build on this foundation is unclear, but it will most likely require us to pay more attention to controls on energy demand to accommodate the limitations of our future energy supply. Moreover, the modern focus on centralized production and distribution may be hard to maintain, since local conditions will become increasingly important in determining the feasibility of alternative energy production.
Notes:
1Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Crude Oil: Forecast, Markets & Pipeline Expansions, June 2009, http://www.capp.ca/.
2International Energy Association, World Energy Outlook 2008, http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/.
3Bengt Söderberg et al., “A Crash Program Scenario for the Canadian Oil Sands Industry,” Energy Policy 35, no. 3 (March 2007), 1931–1947.
4U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2008 (First Release), DOE/EIA-0383 (2008), January 2008. Note that subsequent revisions of Annual Energy Outlook 2008 changed the cited figures for gasoline demand.
5Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek, and Robert Wendling, Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management, U.S. Department of Energy report, February 2005, http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/oil_peaking_netl.pdf.
6John Whims, “Pipeline Considerations for Ethanol,” Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, http://www.agmrc.org/media/cms/ksupipelineethl_8BA5CDF1FD179.pdf.
7David Cohen, "Earth's Natural Wealth: An Audit," New Scientist 23 (May 2007), 34–41.
8A megajoule equals 239 food calories; a typical adult male requires 10 MJ of food energy per day.
9As coined by user HeIsSoFly, comment on “Drumbeat,” The Oil Drum, March 7, 2007, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2344.
10For a more in-depth discussion of energy return on investment, see Richard Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society (San Francisco: Post Carbon Institute/International Forum on Globalization, 2009). Note that EROI is sometimes also referred to as "energy returned on energy invested" (EROEI).
11Charles A. S. Hall, Robert Powers, and William Schoenberg, “Peak Oil, EROI, Investments and the Economy in an Uncertain Future,” in Biofuels, Solar and Wind as Renewable Energy Systems: Benefits and Risks, David Pimentel, ed. (New York: Springer, 2008), 109–132.
12The often-cited 8:1 return on Brazilian ethanol and the high return estimated for cellulosic ethanol are not energy calculations; in these studies, the energy provided from biomass combustion is ignored. See, for example, Suani Teixeira Coelho et al., “Brazilian Sugarcane Ethanol: Lessons Learned,” Energy for Sustainable Development 10, no. 2 (June 2006), 26–39.
David Fridley has been a staff scientist at the Energy Analysis Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California since 1995. He has nearly thirty years of experience working and living in China in the energy sector and is a fluent Mandarin speaker. He spent twelve years working in the petroleum industry both as a consultant on downstream oil markets and as business development manager for Caltex China. He has written and spoken extensively on the energy and ecological limits of biofuels. Fridley is a Fellow of Post Carbon Institute.
This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010). For other book excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit http://www.postcarbonreader.com.
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Thanks, David, for a very interesting post.
I am sure regular readers will find a lot of things in this post they have seen before. But putting them all together is helpful too.
I think your issue 1, Scalability and Timing, is too often overlooked. Even when coal was substituted for wood, and oil was substituted for coal, and nuclear was substituted for oil (in some electric generation), the changeover took many years. The changeover to renewables will likely take longer--and since they are all dependent on fossil fuels, it cannot be a very complete changeover.
Rembrandt had a post on Vaclav Smil's new book, "Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects" recently. This book is by someone who does not accept that peak oil is a problem in the near future, but yet the author concludes that there will need to be a big scale-back in energy use to transition to renewables, because of the long time-period for transition required.
Another thing that is consistently overlooked is the idiotic assumption made in these articles, time and time again, that money is a meaningless metric.
Money is the synthesis of all these metrics talked about above, and more, as determined by people "in the field". Can we at least agree that, in the absence of negative externalities, "renewable" energies must beat conventional energy in cost. Otherwise, simple and plainly, you've missed something. Something that makes the source involved not renewable at all. Could be labor, could be base-load replacement batteries, could be transport, could be land use, could be ... but you've missed something.
Note also, of course, that I'm talking about end-user cost PLUS subsidies. Not theoretical projected cost, but proven cost.
Is there any "renewable" source that even comes close in at least a few UNSUBSIDIZED practical examples ?
Hydroelectrics, Goethermal and burning Biomass for heat can compete. Unfortunately their availability is limited by geographical constraints, and scaling them to replace fossil fuels is unlikely to be feasible.
Nuclear is not renewable, but is a non-fossil energy source which is competitive in some markets ( depending on who you ask for the numbers). To be sustainable it would require the use of breeder reactors, and they are presently not economically competitive.
My bet is still on the breeder reactors. Hopefully more economical solutions than the ones based on molten metals or fluoride salts will be developed.
The key to beating the geographical constraint issue is to transform mechanical energy on site into 1. Compressed Air, 2. Hydrogen, 3. ORCA (oxygen rich compressed air. Using pipes to carry enormous amounts of these new green fuels, we can easily set up shop anywhere to make the fuels. Put them in the pipe, and off they go. There is no line drop as with electricity of course.
Offshore wind and wave and tidal power are easily converted to Compressed air and Hydrogen. The sea provides the compressor. When air is taken down to depth, it compresses nicely. Doing that saves on piston rings and elaborate old style compressor machinery. Offshore is the place to compress air on a grand scale. Compressed air augments all fossil fuel systems.
Since we're going to plumb for the new fuels, we can also carry other things in the pipe bundles called Tripe, short for Track-Pipe. Broadband, water, sewage, natural gas to name a few. Super strong energy pipes can also form a new transit system. One pipe could carry a mono-rail. Two large pipes that straddle the old rails can take a larger car, making train based tourism a big deal.
Assuming we could build large windmills out on the continental shelf of the eastern seaboard, how would we ship the power? Could we run extension cords in? Not really, because we'd still need the same old infrastructures to cover for when the wind dies down, not to mention the line drop. Could we use batteries for the electricity? I don't think so. Could we use pumped storage of water? Not offshore too easily. What is the best way to ship and store offshore wind energy? I think it is using compressed air, hydrogen, and orca.
What is the main objection to compressed air vehicles? It is the short fuel up turn around. But if air is everywhere,carried by the new rail systems infrastructure, that's not a factor, get your orca or compressed air, or hydrogen anywhere. Take a look at this at www.environmentalfisherman.com I am on Facebook too with a civil rights petition. Thanks
Using pipes to carry enormous amounts of these new green fuels, we can easily set up shop anywhere to make the fuels. Put them in the pipe, and off they go. There is no line drop as with electricity of course.
And pipes don't leak? (leaking is an expression of loss as is line drop WRT electricity) The Q value of the pipe isn't a 'loss' to the system?
Not only leak but pipes also suffer from pumping (friction) losses. The energy the pumps need to force the fluids through the pipes could be considered equivalent to line losses in electricity networks.
(friction) losses.
As I remember from plumbing and fire protection and my time in the fluid hydraulics - Q. A number for the pipe loss.
It's difficult to give a number to the losses as it's dependent on a lot of variables, among which:
- fluid viscosity and velocity
- pipe diameter and inner wall surface smoothness
- the number, radiance and angle of turns in the pipe
Dear Styno, and Eric. Pipes don't leak? With the Tripe System main lines, which are mostly extrusions with junction, or expansion boxes, I really don't expect too much leakage, but it should be factored in. (famous last words) I have mostly extremely heavy duty composites designed, but with multiple conduits, connections, and if natural gas or hydrogen leaks, that could be meaningful let's say. So, Yes to leaks. Some shipyard pressure washers use water pressures and slurries that are 25-30,000 PSI. I am guessing the main charge of compressed air, coming from deep sea compressors, could be in the 3 to 8,000 PSI range, But if you two guys designed the system right, they you would probably come up with better ranges. Stepping down from 8,000 PSI would be a good idea before we brought the compressed air in to run the washing machine. I have been a firefighter, but I was a ladder guy. The students of fluid dynamics and even just plumbers will out shine me when re-designing this system. Of this fact alone, I am certain.
So, assuming we wanted to get the offshore wind energy inshore, and we wanted to try pipes with the three new fuels: Hydrogen, Compressed Air, and ORCA (oxygen rich compressed air: Where in the name of Goodness would we put all these pipes, to take all this new energy to where we need it? This is the Question.
Could we run pipes under the roads? Ya Sure You Betcha. We all love the traffic tie ups.
Could we run pipes on the telephone poles , sort of like pipe wires? Yes and No. For a small feed line yes, for major energy transport no.
Could we use the High Tension Line easements? I would think so, and we could add some mono-rail lines along the pipes too.
Could we run pipes down the median strips of our divided highways. Yes, and they would carry either mono or dual rails of energy. Handy.
Could we use the railroad line easements to piggy back some plumbing and sort of morph the pipes with the rails? My favorite: But the mix of uses inclusive of gondola systems that go over wetlands and around steep mountains, simple mono-rails for city and country and suburbia. That's the ticket a mixed bag of (very leaky very dangerous pipes in your mind? .... Really? Sure we can't plumb? I thought you two out ranked me?? ) conduits for energy, utilities, transportation, filled with all manner of nutty things from broad band (people don't need computers) to natural gas, to pelletized plastics. Life will be good for us if we only try the tripe. Thanks. Steve
I'm sorry but you should read Eric's and my comments again. We acknowledged that pipes leak alright but were actually discussing another cause of 'energy loss' in pipelines: friction.
OK, sorry . Tripe system pipes are like the water system of a town reaching an equilibrium. Inputs come from many offshore lines inshore, then into a tied together system of track pipes, along the railroad easements and other venues. The more inputs to a central system, multitudes of pipe, the better. The Texas plateau, and the Aleutian chain, and the Great Lakes Region could all produce input, Compressed Air, ORCA (oxygen rich Compressed Air) and Hydrogen. The multiples of track pipe would be a factor. The huge cost of all of this plumbing would be borne by the cash flows from the energy, transportation, utility, broadband, sewage treatment, water etc. The Tripe is a versatile bundle. The more pipe to spread the transportation and storage load the less friction loss. If there were any problem with friction loss in so many multiples of two foot diameter pipes, at say 4000 psi, I would be surprised. I'm not so sure about the hydrogen lines though because they are smaller and more protected, but also more numerous. But the calculations would be based on use, and from where I am, no one is even talking about that. This is a central grid design. The higher the pressure, probably the more efficient, within reason. If you look at the rail maps, that would be the Tripe System Grid. So looking at that, the demand in one area would be fed by all directions. The main point source users would not be for automobiles, as that use would be spread out. It would be for power plants, using the air to boost the steam, as in a turbo-charge.
The nature of the project is massive, if it were feasible in theory. My strength is not in design of pipes, it is in designs for windmills and wave gens. Many many track pipes would be at work. These pipes would be storage and transport vessels. Probably a geothermal plant could be a major producer of hydrogen, CA, Orca. So it would not be a one source bottleneck situation. Compressed Air would be a commodity item. It is not now that. Hydrogen is not in broad use, so I guess it's hard to see it. And the orca, is just 02 added to air for the purpose of a better burn, probably in a hybrid gasoline and Compressed Air car or truck.
If you think the whole thing is silly, you probably have not read the 11 page report on www.environmentalfisherman.com. I think it's one of the best complex systems designs that I've ever come up with. Thanks Steven J. Scannell
On another topic. Not my area, but ... A coal plant could burn coal under pressure, and then the carbon could be pumped underground while still pressurized to a great degree. I guess one of the main issues with the dream of carbon sequestration is that the CO2 etc would have to be pressurized before pumping down to hide it away. The tripe lines would carry the effluent from a plant to a location, under pressure. It's a tall order. I don't know how feasible this all would be.
First, what I'm looking for is some acknowledgement that this Tripe system would mean a new base line in our thinking. Second we could do it if we wanted to. Third, it would be affordable.
Obviously I think you all should be open to a new idea. Picking away at pipe leaks and pipe friction is ridiculous, since the gas industry ships gas under high pressures all the time. And I believe they even generate electricity when they step down the pressure. Even the report by Sparaxis totally failed to mention the possibilities of going to a different grid mode, that is other than electricity. Collectively this is your problem. You are not open minded. You have too many set in cement notions, based on how things are. Im asking you all to look at a machine, not change your religion. I love electricity too, and that's what the hydrogen does for us. It is the frozen electricity we've always wanted ... electricity on tap. I think there are some severe deficits here and some mental blockages (not the mental illness sort) about exactly what a grid can be. There are insurmountable hang ups in the thinking about how we can see an energy grid. Loosen up please.
Please somebody say it. Power grids must be electricity based. That's not true at all. The base of energy shipment does not have to be wires. Energy can be shipped just fine through pipes. And there are probably many things we can run in the house with compressed air. Probably the refrigerator, the washing machine, partially the dryer. Those are some big electricity drains. Stop thinking about electricity for just a minute. It's hanging up your thinking..... Look. Steve
The missing factor is one that should be ignored (or the sign reversed), the time value of money. And land leases for wind.
Build a wind turbine and 90+% of the costs# are spent before the first economic good is produced. For the next 20 to 25 years, the economic good produced will be about the same.
Frac a gas shale well and you will get at least half of the economic good within 30 months or so.
Since we are entering a time of increased energy scarcity, we should value and "stock up" with energy production that requires almost no additional input.
A clear way to visualize the idiocy is the following truth.
If a wind turbine manufacturer produced a new line of WTs that would last 50% longer (i.e. produce 50% more energy over their lifetimes) but cost 10% more (beefier gears, stronger blades, etc.), investors would not be interested.
The Net Present Value of income 26 to 38 years in the future is very small with their required IRR.
OTOH, the value to society of almost free energy in 2040 and 2050 will be substantial.
Best Hopes for the Ants vs. the Grasshoppers (another creature with a high discount rate),
Alan
# except for the transfer payment to the land owner, almost a net zero cost for society
Another way to see the problem with the high discount rates (currently about 6% per year greater than inflation in the electric utility industry) is to contrast them with the implicit discount rates in our behavior towards our families. Parents will spend all kinds of money up front to provide long-term benefits for their children, or even just the chance of such benefits. (College!) The implicit discount rates are close to zero, or even negative. We can take a multi-decade point of view when thinking about our families, but fail to do so when thinking about our societies.
It's an interesting thought.
If the government could push discount rates down, it would automatically push up the desirability (and investment) in long term prospects. With one little lever it could shift behavioural patterns across the piece.
Of course, there is an issue how how you implement that small change, but what with 'accounting standards' and requirements for how companies report to investors, it ought to be possible to make such a change.
Anyone know of this being pushed, or stopped, in the past?
Alan -- I've always had a problem with valuations of oil fields using NPV. But there's another way for folks to look at it. The wind farms may be more like an old oil field with a slow production rate but a long life...25 to 30 years. The revenue after year 8 or 9 is worth almost nothing in a NPV calculation. But there's the trick. Take a shale gas well that recovers all its value in 5 years. NPV at year one might be $20 million. And NPV at year 5 is zero, of course. Now look at that big oil field with its slow production rate (and equally very low decline rate). NPV in year one is $20 million. But now run your economic analysis ahead 5 years. What's the NPV of that field then? Ta da: it about $20 million. It's about the same because that first 5 years of production are replaced by the next 5 years production. IOW I can pay the NPV for such an oil field and then in 5 years I can sell it for about the same. Think about your wind farm. It take X years to reach payout with what looks like an unimpressive rate of return. But what can you sell that wind farm for at that time? You should be able to sell it for what it cost you to build it (as long as long as you kept maintenance up). The wind farm model isn't exactly like my old oil field but close enough I think. I've pissed off more than one potential buyer of such an old field. Told him that since he wasn't giving the field any value beyond year 10 that we'll just write the contract so as the ownership of the field reverts to me after 10 years. Guess what...no one ever took the offer.
What will be the NPV of an energy asset in ten years time?
Its not so simple. If it is a slowly depleting oilfield and oil truly becomes scare and very pricy, it might be higher than the NPV calculated today.
For something like a WT or solar array, I think it is more questionable. You could continue to operate it for the value of the power. But you could also scrap it, and replace it with a more modern version of the same. My guess is especially in the WT case, that the site, and permission to use it for wind might be more valuable, i.e. tear down your 1MW WT, sell the scrap, and replace it with a shiny new 4MW turbine. Thats one of the problems with rapidly advancing technology. Will you get your investment back before progress has made it obsolete? With static technology you need not consider the lost opportunity to invest your original sum, plus interest in the latest and greatest.
EOS -- Good point. One of the basic weaknesses of oil/NG NPV is the pricing assumptions. After the late 70's boom companies became very foolish with absurdly optimistic price forecasts and invested accordingly. Thus when oil hit $10/bbl in 1986 instead of the $90/bbl many companies had used the industry went into collective cardiac arrest. As a result even today companies tend to be realistic/pessimistic with pricing forecast. Some use current pricing with little or no escalation. And when oil was reaching $100/bbl a while back I saw no company using that as a starting price. Most were down in the $60 - $70/bbl range.
To this, you should also add the falling price curves on WT & Solar, which adds a benefit to delay first deployment.
That's why early-adopter incentives are needed, but they need to be less reflex and more planned.
What this 'booster finance' does, is pull forward the build-times, and that drives the necessary R&D and economies of scale, that pushes down the future prices...
Of course, in WT & Solar, there is always a lifetime maintenance trade off, and a 'live' choice to replace any components with improved models, or run to EOL.
In WT & Solar this is MUCH easier to do, than bulk generators - because WT & Solar are intra-site-granular, you can replace something like 5% at a time, for low outage, and low finance costs.
So you can continually refresh your plant, over time. No 'Brick walls'.
Indeed, with Solar PV, the Solar cell costs are now ~76c/w(Factory cost), whilst the inverter costs are ~39c/w (invoice) (falling too, but more slowly), so these are becoming a smaller fraction of the initial commissioned cost.
Serious:
The NPV of wind looks very much like a long bond. Or more like a stream of coupons, because after 25 years turbine is just a core. So buy a turbine, get 25 years of payments. Government controls the "interest" - amount of subsidy to the price. For example Ontario offers feed-in rates for 20 years: 13 cents (canadian) per kWh for wind, EIGHTY for roof mounted solar PV and 50-60 cents/kWh for ground mounted PV. At current system prices payback is advertised as below 10 years.
Half joking.
So if it looks like a bond, someone will issue a wind bond. And then a smart investment banker might package them like mortgage backed securities and then collateralize and then.......
A stream of coupons is an annuity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annuity_(finance_theory)
The value of the stream of cash flows over the following ten year periods have the following values, as a percentage of their nominal values at a 10% discount rate.
Years 0-10: 61.45%
11-20: 23.69%
21-30: 9.13%
31-40: 3.52%
41-50: 1.36%
51-60: 0.52%
So while cash flows after year ten are worth a lot less, they are not worth nothing.
Me non-native speaker English bad ;-)
60 years is too much (unless you are an old brit and still have some perpetual war bonds :-). 20-25 max. just like a long bond of electrical utility,
10% is too much, maybe 1-2% over 'regular' electric utility long bond, so payments would be worth more..
Well, this is one of the reasons why we should really be going crazy with building green energy projects now. The Fed is almost literally giving free money away with their zero to 1/4 point interest rate. With money so cheap, the guaranteed return of electricity should mean that there is no better time to build lots of long-return-time green energy projects.
Banks are hesitant to lend money . . . with good reason. People's credit ratings are shot. Houses are not holding value. Commercial real estate is even worse. But a wind turbine or a solar panel that is guaranteed to supply energy for the next 30 years . . . that should be a no-brainer. I guess we have to wait for coal supplies to become more scarce. :-/
Please post detailed instructions as to how to borrow money at these interest rates!
Well it certainly is used as a metric in our current civilization's economic paradigm but if perchance this civilization might collapse then other paradigms in which it is indeed meaningless are certainly possible.
Just curious which group of venture capitalists or group of banks put up the money to finance the building of the pyramids or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? And yes, I understand that the individual craftsmen were compensated for their labor...
mmm not so sure!
Give me a bunch of these:
and one of these:
...and I will build you anything you want for free! But do we really want to resurrect that pretty awful episode of history as we slide down the peak-oil slope?
Even slaves require an input of food, clothing, and shelter. Either the owner buys these things or slave labor is diverted from whatever project you are building. Either way there is a cost of labor involved. In addition there are overseers to be paid.
Slavery ended when the industrial revolution made using machines cheaper than using slaves. The steam engine more than any moral considerations is what ended slavery. We still use steam engines for producing a majority of our electricity. It is the best way of turning coal and uranium into electricity.
If oil sands and CTL are considered alternative fuels why not uranium and thorium?
Hacland, I'm not sure about the hanging gardens but there is ample evidence that the people who actually built the pyramids were not slaves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/11/great-pyramid-tombs-slaves-e...
I suspect that with the feast or famine nature of the Nile valley that the Pharaohs just taxed the heck out of everyone during the harvest and even more during good seasons and then stored the grain to use later during poor harvests or maybe even just off season. The Pharaohs then returned the grain to the people in the form of payment for work. "If you want to eat, you can work for me and build something interesting."
This helped the people by making sure there was food all year long and farmers are idle for much of the year so productivity from farming would not be hampered by monument building. I wonder if there is a way to see if the monuments were built year round or seasonally? If there were gaps in construction then that would do much to back my theory but it might be that certain family members were on year round work duty to build credit for the off-seasons.
What event marked the beginning of recorded history? Writing of course, and I bet the idea of credit was invented the next day. It seems that the idea of interest took a couple thousand more years to come up with.
I read somewhere that a consistent distinguishing feature of a pre-collapse civilisation is a flurry of Monument building. (sorry, no link)
It is as though we unconsciously understand our fate and wish to leave some mark of our existence.
This is a point to ponder when we look at the monuments that are being erected in Dubai.
There may be others but I think the reference you may be thinking of is from Jarad Diamond´s ¨Collapse¨.
But do we really want to resurrect that pretty awful episode of history
(That? As in just one episode? Ha!)
I believe there is a quote from a popular book on the topic:
So yea, the book says its ok, so its gonna be ok.
To be fair, you have to both eliminate subsidies for existing sources and compensate for externalities (Gulf shore damage, nuclear waste, dead bats, etc.), and do the math with expected cost shifts over time.
Solar and wind will get cheaper, and oil will get more expensive. Both are good investments in terms of power produced, even if they are nominally more expensive today.
Really, the question isn't whether a new source can compete with oil today, but when will it compete with a lack of oil?
Correct; All energy sources are on price-curves, with some going in different directions.
Because the drivers of those curves include volume, there is some early-adopter push needed to encourage the volume. This push can decline as the inverse of volume, and once cross-over is reached, the 'Push' might even need to 'flip' to cushion the decline of the suddenly uneconomic energies.
There are signs of this effect already on Nuclear; Societies may prefer NOT to use Nuclear, but they also will need to be careful to avoid too rapid a decline in Nuclear.
Even on current volume ramp-rates, the mode-change from 'Grow as fast as possible' to 'match (Saturate) production to ~10 year phase-over', is not far away - for most, it is even inside the next decade.
That means factory-build decisions, soon need to keep an eye on this mode-change.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to overlook money, so long as you realize the limits that places on the analysis. In particular, you need to realize that money limits may make a technology *more* difficult than an energetic analysis would predict, but it won't make it *easier*.
Money limits are more or less important depending on how a society is structured. In a capitalist system, "will this pay?" matters a lot, but in a monarchy or socialist state it might be less relevant. But while in the financial realm you can give subsidies, offer tax breaks, do deficit spending, print more money, steal it from elsewhere, or just force people to work without pay, nobody, no matter how autocratic, can violate the laws of conservation of energy.
So look at these EROI analyses as a ceiling on what's possible. It may be the case that Renewable System A has a fantastic EROI, but is too cost-effective to use. But if Renewable System B has an EROI below 1.0, it will never be a solution to an energy crisis, now matter how cheap it is.
One thing lacking in energy storage is the best available technology; pumped storage. Cycle efficiency as high as 81%, useful life of multi-centuries, and the best solution for matching supply to demand over daily and weekly cycles.
And not that much pumped storage is required if renewables are slightly over built and a 5% or so wastage (or low priority use like pumping water) is accepted.
Alan
i suspect you havent done any calculation regarding pumped storage. i have. assuming a modern house with 2 people living in it, and all normal electrical appliances, and assuming a PV system able to daily produce the energy required by the house during 24 hours, you would need a tank of 200,000 litres at 10 meters height.
you would of course also need the 200 cubic meters of water. which happens to be quite a lot of water. where i live, that alone would cost 600 dollars.
then of course if sky stays cloudy for more than one day, you have no energy.
heating, cooking and aircon are not considered in the calculation, otherwise tank size would be even larger.
of course then if you assume that one must hand wash clothes, eliminate the fridge, and get rid of all electric appliances commonly found in a house energy requirements would be much lower, but quality of life would become that of a 3rd world country. except for the fancy PV and pumps of course. all things that, by the way, require expensive spares and maintenance and overall a modern, rich, and advanced society, something that would cease to exist immediately after energy becomes scarce and expensive.
I was talking of utility scale pumped storage, with heads of hundreds of meters.
Alan
well i guess you invented a device to materialize mountains and lots of water from thin air?
pumped storage water, land and heigh requirements are MASSIVE and unpractical to say the least. costs are staggering and add to the already staggering costs of renewables.
even countries with massive hydro resources have pumped storage for few hours at most.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/
The cost is quite reasonable. The costs are in Australian $, up significantly to 90 cents US (I can remember much lower values).
9 GW would be the largest pumped storage in the world. If Australia went to a much higher % renewable, I would be tempted to do the project with one tunnel instead of three (one 14.5 m diameter instead of three 12.7 m) and a total of 4 GW installed. And likely have two power stations, one a pressure reduction station <500 m head. Overall, perhaps half the cost.
4 GW would give make the 27 GWh last longer, almost 7 hours. Enough to balance, say, 2.5 GW of solar PV, 6 GW of solar thermal and 10 GW of diversified wind in the Eastern Australian grid.
Alan
I have no idea,really, how many suitable pumped storage sites are available, but my guess is that there are a lot more than anybody thinks, based on current assumptions-if the generators, pumps, and associated other equipment can be scaled down, and environmentalists resistence to building the impoundments can be overcome.
We don't have a very good wind resource locally, but within a couple of hundred miles, the resource is good, and there are many small to medium sized streams and rivers flowing thru deep ravines that would appear to be ideal small pumped reservoir sites.
There are many such sites locally, including one belonging to an acquaintance that could be used to to build a reservoir of a hundred acres or more with an average depth of sixty feet or so-and the dam would only need to be about two hundred feet across.
If withdrawals were limited to ten feet or so except in emergencies, such a reservoir could also serve as a small town water supply and possibly as a recreational lake too.
The environmental price of building such reservoirs would be high-but it might be less than the price of the alternatives in a world of practical politics and hard choices.
If anybody has links to articles about such small scale pumped hydro, please post them.
And don't forget the good fishin'!
What's even more reasonable are the costs from the table of real-world costs listed in the article's sources.
I took the largest group that had data in every column (US installations), and trimmed the obvious outlier (153 hours of storage, which would have brought the average cost way down). I looked at (inflation-adjusted) price per kW and per kWh.
Overall average cost was $1,200/kW, or $100/kWh of storage, with 15 hours of storage. One installation was an outlier (3x as expensive as next-highest); removing the most and least expensive installations, average cost was $1000/kW or $80/kWh of storage (14 hours). Costs appeared to be driven overwhelmingly by the peak output capacity, suggesting that apportioning the costs between output and storage would result in roughly $800/kW plus $15/kWh.
As modeling based on real-world data has shown (methodology here), reliable supply for wind+solar can be achieved with about 2 days worth of pumped storage.
US demand is roughly 3900B kWh/yr = 11B kWh/day, meaning two days of US-wide pumped storage would cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $160B. US peak demand is about 750M kW, so generating equipment for that storage would cost 750M*$800 = $600B. Total cost would be in the ballpark of $760B, or about 5% of US GDP.
For context, the US currently spends about $100B/yr on coal&NG for electricity generation, suggesting that the cost of developing pumped storage is not outside the realm of current expenditure levels on electricity generation.
(Note that this analysis uses US data, largely due to availability, but should roughly apply to most large developed regions.)
"The cost is quite reasonable."
Somebody seems to think so. A list of pumped storage facilities worldwide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_...
Sub-1000mw facilities listed under "Regional" at bottom of page.
I would find everything about the Australian boondoggle questionable since they are saying that a Francis wheel is perfect for high heads. My experience is that they are used for low heads20-30-feet. The high head of 875 meters cries out for a Pelton wheel.
Regardless , it's a perpetual motion scheme.
So there have been at least 60 of your "perpetual motion schemes" over 1000MW built globally, many more under 1000MW. Such a waste.
I've worked on high head dams with Francis wheels - they are extremely robust and are what I would want if I desired extreme longevity, reliability and resistance to damage. They can eat a lot of foreign objects without a hickup. I don't know the reasoning of the high head projects that use them, but it is certainly there. There are other considerations than efficiency.
I submitted a business plan here in Esperance WA for recovering the potential energy of the iron ore trains as they drop 120 meters down to the port. (13000 tonnes @ 120m, 8 times a day)
I proposed pumped storage back up the escarpment. Excess wind energy could also be piggy backed on the proposal.
Result....
Nada... Nothing..Nihil.
Why bother? We've got plenty of gas.
What's wrong with this?
http://drupal.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/node/440
This is the hard working (but well looked after) donkey at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, UK. He performs for the tourists every hour. And all he needs is a paddock, a few oats and a scratch behind the ears once in a while and he would be happy to pump the water to the header tank. Oh, he also needs company. Recently his long term companion died and since then he has been a bit mopey. Donkeys need other donkeys.
How many pounds of oats per kwh does that donkey provide when averaged over a year? Before the 19th century roughly 1/3 of all farmland went to animal feed.
thomas, I know, but I still like donkeys.
Today a whole bunch of land goes towards fattening animals up for the dinner plate too. We only got so much land and yet we want to do too much with it. A recipe for disaster, imho.
Rock on the Donkeys.
Donkey's are great. Just read a story about one by Apuleus called "Metamorphosis, or The Golden Ass," generally considered the second novel ever written, after Petronius's "Satyricon." It's about a guy who gets turned into a donkey and has various adventures before being returned to his form by eating a rose during a procession of Isis and Osiris.
For water pumping, you can also go back to the old windmills that directly pump water with no electrical intermediary. Since there is no change in type of power, I would expect that these could be made to operate very efficiently. This direct mechanical use of alternative energy sources seems to have been left out of the main article.
A few more points about intermittency:
First, the main article helped me realize that ALL sources of power are intermittent to some extent. All plants have to be closed down occasionally for maintenance or because of accidents...It is not a black-and-white contrast between conventional=no intermittency vs. alternative=high intermittency. It is more like a scale of intermittency along which all sources lie. So we have always had to deal with it--it's nothing new to alternatives. It's just a different scale of intermittency that has to be dealt with.
Another thing that I found odd is that the author seemed to see storage as the only approach for intermittency. On the prairie, and many other places, the wind is always blowing somewhere. It is only at particular locations that intermittency is a problem. Improve transmission and much of the problem goes away.
The other thing is that solar, wind and hydro tend to have different intermittency patterns that generally complement each other. It is a rare day when the damn is dried up, the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing all at once. Just giving the raw numbers for each overlooks this, but when it is included, the backup storage necessary becomes much less (especially with the transmission mentioned above). (And of course while we still use natural gas, these plants can be fired up quickly and fill in when a peak of energy use is reached.)
Finally, why not just accept that for many of our functions, we don't need to have the power on all the time. Why not do the laundry when the wind is blowing or the sun shining? People traditionally didn't think it was an insurmountable problem that their clothes didn't dry on the line while it was raining. Why not have a bit more of a connection to the natural rhythms of the planet? Obviously for some functions, such as hospitals, you need to have reliable access to some energy all the time. But hospitals already have such backup systems, since even our old "reliable" ff-generated energy is sometimes "intermittent" '-) In any case, there are already various programs for non-essential electrical users to scale back when peak demand is reached. Such programs could be expanded and used when there are lulls in alternative energy production.
Mostly, we just have to learn to make do with much, much less energy for everything and use what we do much much more efficiently. Europe uses half the energy the US does for an arguably better lifestyle. Other relatively advanced countries get by on about a quarter of our energy use. So we should be able to get there quite rapidly and with little sacrifice.
We need to set goals of dropping our energy use by half in the next two years, another half in the following, then aim for another halving in the following five years. Yes, the last halving may involve some greater inconveniences and sacrifice, and Americans lost the belly for sacrifice in the go go years. But the go go years are over. Time to start living with some sense of limits. Thinking we can do BAU just replacing conventional with alternative energy sources is clearly a non-starter--can we finally move on from such ridiculous assumptions.
(Sorry to ramble. And, yes, I know it's all "politically impossible." Time to change politics?)
Agree with all that. Glad to see good talk on my favorite storage-pumped hydro. I will now repeat again my little song thereon.
Pumped hydro can be near 100% efficient. Think of lifting a bucket of water on a rope with a pulley on a pole. You do work to get the water up to the top of the pole, then you let it down. How much work can you get back out compared to what you put in? Sure, you guessed it- almost all of what you put in, minus some bearing friction, which can be near nothing.
We humans have known this for thousands of years. Look at water wheels, they do that, even the very old ones did. Modern big water turbines do it too.
Then, where am I gonna site this huge water pump I need to store huge amounts of energy? Well, where there is water, and energy, that's where. My favorite places are the gulf of california, and the red sea. Both places have intense sunlight almost all the time, and they have the whole ocean to pump up and down nearby hills.
Then you shoot those electrons thru HVDC to the gloomy parts of the planet.
Ugly? Hey, use some imagination. Put a floating pleasure palace, or a dozen of them, on each big storage lake. Advertise the thrill of riding up and down as you look out your palace window at the lovely sand dunes stretching to infinity, filled with camera crews filming end of world epics.
You could have theme lakes. Gambling, sex, survival (great whites eat you if you slip) tennis, griping about how awful things are now, and so on and on. TOD in there somewhere.
PS. Gotta be something wrong with net present value. Doesn't that presuppose that I am the only guy who counts? Better to think, when contemplating wind, solar nuclear, and so on- which of these will end up making the world a better place. NPV is not it. Else why would geezers plant fruit trees?
wimbi, great post. Very creative ideas about the floating tourist attractions, because that would be a major plus in cash flow. Water front real estate is big money, even if the water is man made. If we compare and contrast CAES (compressed air energy storage) with storage-pumped hydro, the differences are:
1 There are physical requirements of height for conventional systems of pumped hydro. Apparently large scale systems do need a high reservoir.
CA storage to me does (ca production) also have a need for a height differential, But the catch is to a depth under water. Artificial water depth can work with my systems inshore, land-side. Systems to convey air to depth (mine) are much more efficient than the conventional and expensive standard machine compressors. A company called Sustainx is getting Gov. $ for R&D with hydraulic air compression and hydraulic power take off from the CA. The best CA systems on my boards have graduated compression using modified conveyor belts to bring air to depth, which varies with locations. The Gulf Stream runs to the South of the Continental shelf (running to the NE), and these forces of "tide" (actually current, but I'm a fisherman) can be harnessed to drag enormous volumes of air to depth. So this would be totally green compressed air: LOTS of it. When a Nor' Easter Blows it blows against this tide set to the NE, So there are enormous very steep seas fetched over miles, and there too is massive energy, right here, a gift, easily converted to CA. World wide these particular waves are second to none, even those of the Southern Atlantic by Cape Horne. Great wave gen designs from my board will take these forces for hydrogen production and compressed air production. So compressed air is a location specific bonanza, as can be the pumped hydro. Pumped hydro and pumped down compressed air to depth are to me first cousins.
2. Pumped hydro is limited to X miles within a radius of the reservoir.
CA is only limited by plumbing, and with the Tripe system www.environmentalfisherman.com covers a multi use aspect for the transmission of CA, which will allow multi cash flows making these system inputs viable.
3. Versatility of input applications for pumped hydro, are many and practical. Pump water with wind. Pump water with spare power plant output. It's great. It works. It's efficient, and we will use it more, bringing stability to the electrical needs.
CA compression machinery is diverse. Geothermal, Solar-Coal, Wind, Wave all work. Mechanical energy is easily converted on these sites. By far the most efficient systems will be at sea. Hydrogen production and CA production can run from some of the same basic machines. However the uses of highly charged compressed air dovetail well with the burning of gas, coal, gasoline in autos, even augmentation of nuclear heat to steam is increased with CA. Hands down the efficiencies lost to the elasticity of CA are more than gained back with their versatile range of machineries, of both the input and output natures. In home, in auto, in coal plants, the pumped hydro can't compare, and of course it's not asking to.
4. Cost comparisons of CA to pumped hydro, perhaps CA loses, perhaps not. Your pumped hydro is proven and also up and coming too. While the CA technologies are way down the tracks, not here yet, but I say picking up a good head of steam. CA thinking as an energy source, or rather medium of energy exchange, is in it's infancy. I am on the cutting edge of this new technology with my off-shore machinery CA and Hydrogen production designs.
5. Points for green energy production for pumped hydro are high especially if perhaps many wind mills pump to a good height, and wind needs height anyway, but pumped into a manifold and up to man made reservoirs, probably stepped up incrementally, seems to me to be inherently practical in principle. The water, as in a water level, seeks to flow, and using good plumbing I can see some grand opportunities there. Less green, but still great using the coal plants or nukes spare resources. I'm all for that. And these systems don't seem to degrade. And as you say create opportunity, I totally agree, and perhaps aquaculture, or bio treatments can synergistically combine to make it doubly doable.
The mix of Compressed Air, Hydrogen, and ORCA (oxygen rich compressed air) gets the trophy for sustainability and: provided the construction costs and methods don't send the earth spinning out of orbit, looks very good to me. The energy grid system to beat is the Tripe System. It uses pipes to transport and store energy. The pipes double for many utility uses, and for a new transportation system re-design, for the next two hundred years. Our current rail system started in 1830. So in twenty years that will be the rail bi-centenial, and these have served well, we can keep our rolling stock, and redesign for multi purpose infrastructure needs. Try to think of Compressed air as a portable cousin to the pumped hydro. Great post. Steve
It is obvious that those who currently hold political power in all its forms do not understand that everything they hold to be true for the maintenance of their own power is based on flawed premises.
So yes politics will change in drastic ways whether they want it to or not.
That which is unsustainable can not and by definition will not be sustained. Exactly what that change will look like remains to be seen.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2lfz3_bob-dylan-times-they-are-achangi...
My advice to TPTB, you can either step up to the plate and lead, follow or get the fu@k out the way!
Maybe what you really need is a recipe for old, worn-out donkeys?
Paleocon,
You are an evil, evil man/woman/random web-entity !
I like a nice juicy steak the same as the next bloke, but leave the donkeys in their paddocks if you please. Christ, I ain't French!!
;)
Glue...
A bit of hyperbole, don't you think? The clothes can be washed during the day. Modern fregs don't use that much juice. We wouldn't have BAU modern American wasteful style, but we could get along quite nicely. Smart grid, means the ability to time those usages which can be done when power is most available.
And is everyone in the third world much more miserable than everyone in the US?
No. There are actually a lot of rich people in the third world, and some happy poor people too. But broadly speaking being poor sucks. It may looks quaint, or be politically correct to pretend that poverty is authentic, but it's just not true. The poor have their land stolen from them, have sons in jail, no treatment for mediacal problems etc.
Most in the third world would trade for the first world in a second. Few in the first world would trade for the third. Both are right.
I used to think poor, traditional life was romantic, until I saw it first hand.
Tell me how much money has been used to promote each lifestyle, then tell me which has been more romanticized.
Above about a $10,000 income level, happiness levels increase only very marginally. Include good services such as free health care and education and the numbers are even stronger that greater wealth does not bring proportionally greater happiness above a certain level.
How much should the future have to pay for diminishing returns of marginal utility of all that wealth?
Add some loss for modest-distance grid traversal, and all sorts of options should abound. The wind-fields of Kansas are only a few hundred miles from the mountains of Colorado. 1000' vertical would seem pretty easy to get there.
The places most suitable for pumped storage tend to be beautiful attractive places to live and recreate. That is why more people live in and around the Rocky Mountains than in Kansas. Do you really think the locals will standby while these beautiful places are turned into ugly industrial facilities behind chain link fences? Not a chance.
By the way, hydro power consumes more water by evaporation than a conventional or nuclear plant with a cooling tower.
Why would water be any uglier than the mines of today and yesteryear?
Try getting a permit to open a new mine on the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
The old mines still do some damage with their drainage, but most are not an obvious eyesore and most are not fenced in. pumped storage facilities take up a lot of land area, the water level changes rapidly over a large range making them unsuitable for recreation or anything else. They are ugly when less than full, ring around the bathtub look.
Environmentalism for aesthetic purposes (as in don't put that wind farm offshore of the Kennedy compound because it will ruin the view) is a luxury consumer good. We will shortly find out that it is unaffordable. We will also find out that in an emergency, federal power trumps state and local power.
Just tax the heck out of their "view"! You want it? Then pay for it.
Um, that is more or less nonsense. With the exception of Colorado, the Rocky mountain states are generally no more populous than Kansas. And your theory certainly doesn't explain why so many more people live in Illinois and Ohio.
Congratulations, you have created a straw man and knocked it over. Nothing you said contradicts the comment you quoted.
Show me some ugly unpopulated land suitable for pumped storage near a large population center.
Perhaps you should go back and read what you wrote. It's false. I don't see how it creates a strawman to correct facts.
Ugliness is subjective, but there are quite a few candidates here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_...
Show me some ugly unpopulated land suitable for pumped storage near a large population center.
Switzerland is 250 times smaller than the US and has a 6 times higher population density than the US and more than 50 hydro storage lakes:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Speicherseen_in_der_Schweiz
Some are currently getting pumps in order to be able to import more excess nuclear power from France (which they basically have to sell for free). These pumps are underground so nobody can see them anyway.
And yes these lakes are ugly especially in spring time, because Europe does unfortunately not have enough wind power to fill them up (or prevent them from emptying) during winter time, but somehow tourists don't care and still visit Switzerland...
Lungern storage lake in summer time:
Lungern storage lake in spring time:
Besides: Heating sector will need to be electrified and in most developed countries more heat energy is needed than electric energy (for heating, hot water, cooling etc). And heat pumps do not require electricity on demand. They just use it, when there is a surplus of electricity.
Lots of relatively small pumped storage lakes could be built in ther mountians of the southeastern US without unduly distrubing the beauty of the area-and if operated to load balance wind on a daily or two or three day cycle without drawing them down too far, we could make good use of them as recreational waters.
Many could be placed so they would be hard or impossible to see except from a nearby ridge top- most likely privately owned with only jeep road type access.
Of course building the reservoir would change that-a road would have tio be built at least to the dam site.
I believe we're not experimenting enough with synergies. To my mind wind efficiency is a factor of height, to a great extent. My wind systems for offshore are large scale, and combine with wave generator equipment, and of course designed in artificial reefs too. These are synergies. I would say offhand that heavier systems would be better. We seem stuck on the stick with the three blades, toys to me. With Venturi scoops more or less like jet engine turbine technologies, the wind pressure and velocities are increased, but then so too the structures need to be beefier. We should be experimenting with (modeling and prototypes) very large and tall (800') Venturi mills with built in water tanks. The weight is a good thing. These mills can also make use of Compressed Air to boost the power, effectively increasing the head, of the tanked water. Many of my conventional Wind Mill designs use tied together systems, and the Venturi's could also use these. For agricultural use some of my mills have green houses built in, designed in, which is always good to have extra free space for local crops. Often the synergies lend themselves, and if we can find them, then the economics fare much better. Food for thought. Steve (try the tripe!)
I have a comment about the comparison of batteries to liquid fuels for cars and trucks that I think is very important.
It is true that the best batteries on the market have far, far lower energy density than gasoline or diesel fuel. I very often see the caloric content of a Li-Ion battery compared side-by-side to the caloric content of motor fuels, and the point is made that batteries are nowhere near replacing motor fuels for transportation due to the huge density disparity.
But there's a problem with this. It's a naive analysis. The problem is that it fails to take into account conversion efficiency.
The thermal efficiency of automobile engines is very poor. The typical gasoline engine is between 20% and 30% efficient. Some are worse than 20%, such as big "muscle car" engines optimized for torque and acceleration at the expense of efficiency. A few are better, such as Atkinson-cycle hybrid engines. So let's take 25% as a rough estimate.
So that means that the electric drive train in an electric vehicle must only replace 25% of the actual *work* extracted from the fuel in a liquid fueled vehicle. Electric drive trains are far more efficient than internal combustion engines. Electric motors usually get upwards of 90% efficiency. Including loss from battery discharge and solid state energy conversion, let's estimate that about 80% of the energy in the battery ends up at the wheels.
I looked up Li-Ion batteries and gasoline to get comparable numbers. Gasoline is about 35 mJ/L, while good Li-Ion cells can be around 1.2 mJ/L. But multiplying by conversion efficiencies, we get gasoline at about 8.75 mJ/L (the rest heats the air as you drive by!) vs 0.96 mJ/L.
This sounds right to me. The Nissan Leaf has a decent size battery pack and gets 100 miles per charge, while a gasoline engine can get upwards of 500 miles per tank. Factor in regenerative braking and reduced weight due to fewer heavy metal parts, and then make the batteries a little larger (or a little more dense... batteries are still getting better) and you've got something that is competitive for about 90% of driving needs.
This also affects calculations of how much generating capacity would be needed to electrify the roadways. I've seen those calculations too, and I've never seen them include the difference in thermal efficiency. You don't have to pump the entire caloric content of equivalent motor fuel into the power grid. You just have to replace 20-30% of it.
some time ago i was listening to a radio program, and the liberalprogressive host was rhetorically asking, why car manufacturers dont build electric cars? implying that it must be due to some big oil conspiracy.
pity i couldnt phone in to give the simple answer: they dont build them because nobody would buy them.
electric cars dont work. they have ridicolously low ranges, not to mention that range varies wildly with temperature, charge state, health state of the pack, and how the car is used ( hills or speed can reduce the range by 70%, most ranges are calculated at VERY low speed, where friction losses are LOW, but we dont always drive at 20mph no?)
recharging takes too long, and batteries are dangerous. lemme tell ya, you dont want to be in an accident in a battery powered car.
then of course no heating, no aircon, no power steering and such, all things people take for granted.
at any rate, all efficiency calculations are as usual made cherry picking data.
yes is true, burning stuff in an engine is only 20% efficient.
but an electric car is not that efficient either, if the electricity is produced burning stuff. a modern coal fired plant runs at 50% efficiency, factor in distribution losses, charging losses etc and efficiency is very similar, with the difference that is much simpler to transport fuel than to transport elecricity stored in delicate, heavy, expensive batteries.
so all the pie-in-the-sky dreams of conversion to electric in the transportation system are just that, dreams. transportation will be the last thing to be converted to electric. if ever.
electric or hybrid cars are just fancy toys, used by rich progressives to show the rest of the world how environmental they are. thats of course their 3rd or 5th car, because except to go for shopping or to pick up the kids from school, they are useless.
and without state subsidies, are a dead end. in fact toyota loses money with every prius sold.
besides this, there is no generation capacity to supply power to even a modest amount of electric cars, so massive increases of generation capacity and distributiion would be required to have any decent number of electric cars around, but we all know that new plants is a no-no, environmentalists cant allow that. in fact, all occidental countries grids would collapse if people started to buy electric cars on a even modest scale.
a combination of a lot of renewables like wind and solar, plus widespread use of electric cars (which i expect sooner or later will be mandated by law by some more stupid than others government) will catastrophically collapse any electric grid. which is of course what many environmentalists want, to go back to middle ages, or even better, to a virgin planet without humans.
there is a much better solution for transportation, which is to work from home for all those who can. lots of people, in our economies that have outsourced productins to china.
but thats too obvious and doesnt bring votes and visibility, so governments prefer to subsidize silly toys that nobody want if not subsidized like wind turbines or electric cars.
It depends on the Urban Built form.
> but we dont always drive at 20mph no?)
Yes (well 25 to 35 mph). Speed limits on New Orleans streets are 25 mph unless divided, then 35 mph.
Most weeks, I stay within a 3 mile radius of home, most months a 5 mile radius. Absent trips to the airport to pick someone up (12 miles, build a rail line there !), I can go years within a 9 mile radius.
Areas with lots of Republicans in them are pretty boring and there is no need to go there.
Best Hopes for Fewer Suburbs,
Alan
"Areas with lots of Republicans in them are pretty boring and there is no need to go there."
A friend in LA once said: "The really distant suburbs like OC and the inland empire are where frightened white people go to get away from culture." The interesting stuff in LA is actually pretty compact, and the Nissan Leaf could take you all around that for many errands all day long.
Well, the actual comment is that you CAN create a workable EV with enough energy density to provide for every day transportation. The ratio seems to be 9:1 compared to 15:1 based just on gasoline vs battery energy density. So you can add a battery pack twice as large as your gasoline storage (or about as large as an extra person) and get around 20% of the previous range.
Now imagine you have solar cells on your house roof, a PHEV (plugin hybrid) with an efficient ICE engine, solar panels on the car roof and recharging every time you hit on the brakes or go downhill. It would certainly cost more but you would basically get almost free every day transportation.
I have a car design for you. The frame is carbon fiber, and it is a tube frame, which carries both compressed air and hydrogen. The hydrogen is internal to the compressed air. It is a pipe in a pipe-frame. The car is a mid sized car, (or scale up to a tractor trailer for me). It has a diesel that sips fuel because it is a 4 horse motor. But the diesel is turbo charged with compressed air, or not when at idle. Let the computer optimize system inputs. The diesel drives the alt. to elec. drive motor. The hydrogen goes into a small fuel cell, which feeds a bank of batteries. As your car, so too the brakes "fuel up" the batteries, as do the roof panels.
So that's it. We all need a new hydrogen/diesel/Compressed Air/Solar/Electric Acronyms Annon. have at it. Thanks Steven J. Scannell
Compressed Air Solar Hydrogen Electric Diesel aka 'CASHED' for short....
which is also what the early adopters will need to be: Well Cashed!!
OK, OK, I'm sold sign me up for two of the Cashed cars, one a convertable, and put it on my tab. Bravo JG Steve
"there is a much better solution for transportation, which is to work from home for all those who can."
Very good idea. And for those who insist on driving, car pooling is a wonderful thing. Since most cars have one passenger in them but could hold 4-6, we could reduce by about 1/4 the amount of fuel used by cars by coordinating trips a bit. And of course we now have all sorts of wonderful technology to do that with.
If your main point is that cars of any sort aren't the answer, I'm right there with you.
But I must point out that your main gripe about EVs is that they have limits--Well, duh. We live in a world with limits, and it's time to start living as if we did.
Many of these limits are not as debilitating as you seem to suggest. Most people do not go more than 20 miles a day in their cars, and that is well within the range of all EVs. For cold days, heating units can be used to keep the batteries warm. More wind power and solar on every roof along with greater efficiencies elsewhere will make renewable energy more available. And of course the batteries in EV's can go some ways in addressing the storage/intermittency issue mentioned above. EVs should be made much much lighter than conventional vehicles, since much of the waste is lugging around thousands of pounds of metal to move (usually) one individual.
So yes the government SHOULD ban purchase of any more non-electric personal vehicles, but also it must do everything it can to encourage non-car transport and, as you stay, non-travel work work and play.
PS--ALL cars are "silly toys"--not just EVs.
There have been any number of well-to-wheel (or mine-to-wheel in the case of coal) studies comparing gasoline ICE vehicles and electric ones. Considered as a group, they point to a roughly 2:1 advantage for electrics on average. When you work through the details, the comparison is dominated by the thermal efficiency of the two approaches: 15-20% for the typical ICE and 30-40% for the present fleet of electric power plants.
There are all sorts of complicating factors that can be added. Climate control is a bigger deal for electrics than for ICEs. Diesels can be much more efficient than gasoline engines. The thermal efficiency of nukes, if you include them, is terrible. Thermal efficiency is a moot question for hydro or wind (and in some parts of the country, wind is, or soon will be, a significant fraction of the mix). Overall, though, 2:1 seems like an entirely reasonable starting point.
Personally, I think the biggest perceptual problem for electrics is Americans' belief that a single vehicle should be able to meet all needs: short errands, commuting, the long drive to Grandma's. ICEs with liquid fuels excel at that. It seems entirely feasible, though, to design a workable electric system that combines short-range electric, light rail, semi-public shared vehicles, and add-on range extenders (think fifth-wheel 20 kW generator). It might not be the right answer everywhere, but it could be the right answer in particular regions.
"Personally, I think the biggest perceptual problem for electrics is Americans' belief that a single vehicle should be able to meet all needs: short errands, commuting, the long drive to Grandma's."
Excellent point. If you have a reliable, cheap EV that can get you 90% of the places you need to go 90% of the time, what is the problem. Most households have more than one car anyway, so you can save your ICE car for those other occasional trips. Or you can ditch the ICE and rely on various car sharing or renting strategies. Of course the best is to get rid of all cars, but for those not ready for that, a cheap, light, reliable neighborhood EV could be a useful transition vehicle. But the majors don't want to make these because they can't make enough money on them. And marketing cars that have limits would go against the grain of everything else they do.
It would help the transition if insurance companies covered drivers instead of cars, and if taxes were paid on gas instead of tags. Once gas gets expensive enough, it'll likely make sense for most to switch to an EV and rent a gas/diesel ICE for long trips. Ditto for trucks and vans.
Part of the energy investment is in the car itself. I wonder if we should be thinking of a bicycle as our other vehicle.
Use the right tool for the job. If I need to go <50 miles I can use my ICE car. For short trips I can use an EV. Most families now have two cars , so why not have one that has no range? If both workers need +50 mile to get to work , then maybe the family should move?
Just wanted to share this somewhere:
I could go about 15 miles per charge on my electric bicycle (24V 12 Amp-hr batteries). That works out to about 1750 miles on the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline. There is probably a lot of useful discussion about system efficiency, but I found my basic calculation compelling anyway.
Jeff Barton
The people with those conspiracy theories are idiots. But your comments are pretty much just as bad. EV's don't work? Of course they work. The only real issue is price but with oil prices going up due to scarcity and battery technology getting better, that issue will be resolved. Most of the issues you are whining about only are a problem because they try to keep the costs down by keeping the batteries small.
And you have blatant falsities. Batteries are dangerous? How so? Modern Automotive Li-Ions are non-toxic. And they don't have the thermal run-away issues that the lithium-cobalt laptop batteries have. Compare that to a gasoline engine . . . yeah, it is just great to be in an accident where gas leaks and then ignites. I'll take the EV over that! No heating n& no AC? Where do you get this crap?
Earlier EV attempts were indeed too early. The late 90's attempt at a EV revival was noble but it really wasn't practical for two reasons:
1) The batteries were not good enough. Lead-acid is too heavy. NiMH is much better but also too heavy, has a 'memory-effect', and is toxic. And the Li-Ions at the time were too expensive & not-ready. Modern automotive Li-Ions are still too expensive and could be better. But they do the job.
2) Gasoline was dirt cheap back then. Oil has gone from ~$20/barrel then to ~$80/barrel now. And oil prices will go higher in the coming years. Faster than inflation.
So drop the outdated misinformation. EVs are coming. Sure, we would all like big V8s and $1/gallon gasoline. But those days are gone and will never return. When gas costs $10/gallon, that 100 mile range PHEV is going to look damn good.
Guess you didn't see the movie Who Killed the Electric Car.
A couple of thousand people in the LA area wanted them (to lease, buying wasn't an option), and were on the list that Chelsea Sexton had when GM's management said "don't put anyone else on the list", and GM's spokesperson said "nobody wants them". People were risking arrest to try and buy the EV1s.
As of March 10, 2010 - Nisson reports 56,000 people on it's list for the Leaf.
Nissan's plant in the US will produce enough batteries for 200,000 vehicles/year.
500,000 vehicles per year planned worldwide production in 2012.
GM increases Volt production due to high interest.
"nobody wants them" is the delusion of mid-life crisis afflicted white-bread suburbanite effete over-paid marketing "gurus" and ass-kissing executives1 obsessed with smoking tires every time they leave a stoplight to distract themselves from their growing beer-bellies and shrinking hairlines.
The paper in this recent Drumbeat post has a meta-point about the delusion of the "rational market".
So many corporate execs are so removed from reality that truly rational decision making seems nearly impossible (a problem of "overreach" of those "mini" empires, eh?)
Like, for instance, accepting and dealing with peak oil and ecological carrying constraints.
1 like the emperor's syncophants in the "The Emperor's New Clothes", telling the boss only what is politically correct and pleasant and "safe". Please don't rock the boat until it's clear to everyone that catastrophe is at hand, then people will be so distracted they can't blame you for not saying anything.
ok so my question is: why people (except a few rich environmentalists) keep buying conventional SUV or trucks instead of more sensible EV or hybrids? actualy, why people keep buying cars when a bicycle and public transport would cover probably 90% of requirements?
i really see that one-way thinking is so deeply rooted here that i am wasting my time
i keep reading this nonsense that money is irrelevant and that wind will become cheaper and oil more expensive
to produce money (wealth) energy is required. lots of it. if oil becomes more expensive, there will be less money (and energy) to build PV and WT. so wind and solar will become more expensive as oil becomes more expensive. a solar/wind based economy wont generate the wealth necessary to build these expensive toys. how many conventional power stations have been eliminated by the hundreds of thousands of wind turbines installed in the world? zero. how much fuel has been saved? zero, or almost, and at staggering cost.
i really cannot believe you folk cannot see this? who the hell is going to build wind turbines if nobody has the money to pay for them? are you really planning to reintroduce slavery? which, btw, wont work anyway.
and pumping storage is not "reasonable", is VERY expensive and justified not by its use to cover the shortcomings of wind and solar, but to fill the peak requests of a grid without having to use the costly short notice dispatchable energy of turbogas.
wind/solar and pumped storage will make the energy cost 30 cents/kwh. but i see that most here think this is good and not bad.
i am wasting my time, again.
luckily you are a minority.
They keep buying Gas Cars because
1) That's what they know.
2) Gas is still cheap.
3) ICE Cars have the cost benefit of massive scale of production still.
Who's going to build Wind Turbines, you say? They're building them as we speak. Yes, money is very tight and getting worse, and still I will argue that a system of Wind Turbines is a good use of some of that money. Private investors seem to agree with me on this.
EV's are also a good investment. They are technically very simple. You can convert a regular car to electric (short range, 20-50 miles) for $10,000 US, or a bike for $1-3000 US. Minimal Maintenance, and there are several battery types around, if one isn't working, you don't have to rebuild the entire vehicle to change Battery Types. They can also be charged from a range of sources.. the Grid, the Roof, the Wind, Small Hydro .. and you have in that battery bank a way to do all sorts of other work from the same power. Pete Seeger has an Electric Pickup Truck conversion that he'd use to gather firewood in his steep hilly land in NY State, and plug the chainsaw into the batteries to do the cutting.. all charged from PV on the Barn Roof.
What's wrong with being a minority? Will you be happier joining the comfortable and safe majority?
Bob
I sort of think that argument is totally missing the mark. To me the point of EVs is not so much to save energy as to enable us to diversify its source.
Of course, I am in the camp that thinks that we really don't have an energy problem. We have a fossil fuel problem, which is primarily an oil (and soon gas) problem, which is really an energy storage and distribution problem. (We also have a related carbon dioxide problem too, but that's a parallel issue... but they both have the same solution!)
The reason oil is so hard to replace is not that it contains a lot of energy. It's that it contains a lot of very easily portable energy.
There is tons of energy in the wind, the sun, the rivers, and in the uranium and thorium in the Earth's crust. The uranium already in storage contains more energy than was ever contained in the Saudi Ghawar supergiant oil field. But the problem is that none of those sources are portable. You can't put them under the hood of a car and drive them around, or in an airplane and fly them around.
So we could find ourselves with a serious energy collapse on our hands even though, from a pure physics point of view, we have plenty of energy.
I completely agree that people are going to have to commute less, live closer together, telecommute, etc. The exurbs are dead, and the suburbs are either going to be slums or are going to have to link up to transit. I envision the following classes of transportation in the future:
1) Electric trains. I don't own a car myself, and use them every day. Nice reliable 100 year old technology. I looked up where my electricity comes from, and it turns out that I'm already doing my daily commute on largely nuclear energy.
2) Small lower-cost electric cars, probably with around 60-100 mile range. Think an electric SmartCar or the Nissan Leaf. These will be your "Honda Civic." This is completely adequate for 90% of peoples' driving needs unless you want to live in ridiculous sprawl.
3) Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and/or EVs with bigger or more exotic batteries at a higher price point. (Think Tesla's vehicles.) These will be luxury vehicles.
4) Fully liquid fueled vehicles. These will be trucks, utility vehicles, and some still for the luxury market for customers who can afford to fuel them at $10+ a gallon.
5) Air travel will be more expensive (I'm imagining double to triple the cost), and eventually will be fueled by biofuels. It will be a rare thing for most people. Business travel will go away for the most part, replaced by tele-presence.
Classes 3 and 4 will also be available for rent via ZipCar and similar services. You could rent a liquid fueled car to, say, go camping for a weekend or commute to a distant spot every once in a while.
I already live exactly like this, so I know it's possible. I actually like not personally owning a car or hassling with it every day. I consider a car to be a recreational vehicle, and I consider not having to own one a luxury.
I know some people will miss the sprawl, but I don't. Personally you could not pay me to live in the land of morbid obesity and Fox News zombies. You could give me a free car and free gas. No thanks.
"I completely agree that people are going to
have to... live closer together"
No, only the well-off will be able to afford
new housing; everyone else will live in already
built housing.
It is true that the final energy intensity of an electric vehicle is lower than that of an ICE, but the point of the density disparities is to highlight the impact on resource consumption. Although lithium is not particularly scarce, the better reserves are concentrated in just a few countries, so it can create the same potential geopolitical supply risks as we see with petroleum (Bolivia, after all, nationalized its oil and gas companies, so I don't imagine they will allow multinational control of their lithium reserves either).
China's first generation EVs do attain about a 0.5 MJ/km energy intensity, compared with 2.6 MJ/km for their ICEs, since their typical new car is already quite efficient. But if you then factor in that China's electricity is 80% coal with an average conversion efficiency of 35%, the in terms of primary energy, the disparity is not very big, and in terms of emissions, almost a wash.
The point is that you can move from coal to non-ff sources of electricity.
You can't do that with gasoline (and attempts to do so--AKA corn-based ethanol--have been fantastic disasters).
But again, China and the rest of us should mostly be going back to bikes, walking and public transit. Gridlock with millions of EV's is no more fun than gridlock with ICE vehicles.
The point is
We are in an energy transition
The transition is to a lower net energy (and therefore more expensive energy) future
The transition will be non linear (and therefore possibly chaotic)
Therefore Energy Decline (less total net energy & less energy per person) and higher energy costs are absolutely guaranteed
All hotshot new energy applications (electric cars, PV, electrified public transport and freight etc) will leave you with only three options
i) pay more or ii) use less energy or iii) pay more AND use less energy
Get ready to take your pick.
It would be a lot quieter and less smelly.
I look forward to passing them on my bicycle in the near future.
Which makes me wonder. Why does no-one ever talk about electric motor bikes? Considering the weight reduction compared to a car you would think they would make excellent 'to work and back' type vehicles.
They have been discussed here. One Oil Drum poster in the Southwest has one.
Go to EV Album and you can see some conversions.
http://www.evalbum.com/
The first page has six E-Bikes and Motor-E-bikes on it.
Scooters, Trikes and Velos all also seem like good Get-to-work or light-delivery options to me.
Gail and David:
Excellent article, much appreciated.
AdamI:
You may be right technically, but not socially, financially or even culturally.
If some people drive electric cars, surely more oil would be available for others. This makes them more or less dead on arrival, since they don't perform a function which is fundamentally different from ICE cars. It's not like a city where some people take the subway, some the train, some taxis or buses, some walk, some bike, and some drive their own vehicle. These are each completely different modalities of getting around, suited, as it were, to particularities of distance/cost/utility etc.
If somebody previously used to fill up a tank and drive 500 miles, but can now only fill up half a tank and drive 250 miles (due to cost or shortages) then they will do so. It makes no economic sense to buy an electric car for the "privilege" of driving a shorter distance. Makes much more sense to just keep your current car until it just can't run any longer.
In sum, an electric car only makes sense if there is no more oil available, or if there is so little oil that an ICE car can only take you 50 miles and an electric one can take you 100.
Which means the electric car will fail unless the government forces everybody to switch to one. How popular is that going to be?
Which opens up the pandoras box of politics, finance and debt growth, population, etc. Even if we did start to use electric cars, what then? 500 million Americans? Build more strip malls? More guys going to Wall Street to make billions of Bernanke bucks?
Our whole system is so f-cked up that electric cars are like a lone surfer against a massive tidal wave. Sure there's beauty there but he's still going to come crashing against the shore.
Although I appreciate your analysis and and the technology of electric cars, it bothers me to no end how naive and narrow minded the optimists are these days.
Filet mignon tastes better than hamburger; yet
more people buy hamburger instead. Why? Because
hamburger is a lot cheaper. If gasoline gets
sufficiently expensive people will switch to
electric vehicles at the point that electric
vehicles have a lower overall cost. (it is
certainly not at that point now.)
That is really terrible analysis. You assume a zero sum game of cars . . . no, there are more cars every year. Buying an electric car doesn't make a gas car vanish somewhere.
I can't even make sense of the distance thing you are talking about. It has nothing to do with distance . . . it is cost per mile. If the cars cost the same amount, but a gas car costs 12 cents a mile (which they do) and an electric car costs 2 cents a mile (which they do) then which one do you think people will buy? Even if the EV has a 100 mile limit, people will buy it and use a gas car when they need to go long distances.
The problem remains the cost since the cars do not cost the same amount. But battery prices are dropping which reduces the price differential in buying the car and gas prices are going up which increases the already big differential in price per mile.
How can you generalize and say it costs 12 cents a mile to drive a car?
How are you sure that electric cars cost 2 cents a mile? Has this ever been put into practice?
You are so off it's not funny. You miss the entire point of my post, which was to point out that regardless of the cost/benefit analysis of electric cars (which is dubious to begin with), they do nothing to address the very serious problems we have with politics/infrastructure/finance/population growth.
Keep living in your little dream world.
How can you generalize and say it costs 12 cents a mile to drive a car?
Easy - just check with the IRS for the lowest level of operating expense deduction.
How are you sure that electric cars cost 2 cents a mile? Has this ever been put into practice?
Many millions of times. EVs are 100 years old. Only highway-legal EVs are a novelty.
Are you really questioning if EVs are cheaper to drive than gas cars? That is just the facts. Go look it up if you don't believe me.
And with regards to politics/infrastructure/finance/population growth, no they don't solve every problem. Did you think they would? They will allow much of our existing investment in suburban housing to not be just wasted assets. We've built what we've built and we can't run public transportation everywhere. EVs will allow the existing single family homes to remain useful.
And I don't subscribe to the DEFCON 1 view of peak oil. There will still be plenty of oil for many years . . . it will just become more expensive. It will be allocated the most important uses due to the increase in price. For example, everyone needs food and will pay higher prices for food since it is a necessity. Thus, oil will continue to be available for agriculture. It will be things like inefficient commuting in 4000lbs SUVs that will stop. And that is where the EV comes in.
I do agree population growth is a problem but that is beyond this article.
"Thus, oil will continue to be available for agriculture. It will be things like inefficient commuting in 4000lbs SUVs that will stop. And that is where the EV comes in."
I wouldn't be so sure about this. I would say that there is a non-zero possibility that there will be a highly uneven distribution of fuel, so that some drive Hummers while others starve. Just look at the 3rd world.
I am working on an article on the benefits of electrified railroads.
Since old Ben Franklin said "A BTU saved is a BTU produced", I have looked into the ESoEI (energy saved on energy invested") and come up with ratios above 1,000.
So let me apply your other 8 criteria.
1. Scalability and Timing - No issues with scalability (Switzerland 100% electrified, Trans-Siberian electrified) and the 36,000 miles of "main lines" can be electrified in 6 years (7, maybe 8 with the assistance of Mr. Murphy) if we applied the same effort to electrification that we do to boiling tar out of sand.
2. Commercialization - Over 100,000 km in service today
3. Substitution - With additional investment and changes in operations, I believe that 85+% of today's inter-city freight can be shifted to electrified rail, plus most trips of <400 miles.
4. Materials Required - Steel, ties of concrete, recycled plastic or wood, copper and aluminum. Only copper is a very minor issue (for the trolley wire) but 3rd rail or other alternatives exist.
5. Intermittency - Today, labor costs vs. energy costs do not make that an option. But in the future, trainloads of wheat, lumber, aluminum ingots, etc. could be put on a siding till the wind blows or the sun shines.
6. Energy Density - The energy saved per unit of energy invested is quite high. Copper and aluminum wires are good energy conduits. Almost NA.
7. Water - None
8. The Law of Receding Horizons - The lower the traffic density, the less sense it makes to electrify. A 12 mile spur to an Iowa grain elevator that sees 11 trains/year will likely never be electrified. A couple of old diesel-electric locos or a battery loco will do the 11 times/year haul.
Likewise warehouses and factories are as likely to move to a rail spur as having a rail spur built to them.
The French have made it a national goal to be 100% electrified by 2025, but the last few % (15% ? SWAG) are not going to be economic except in the sense that there is economic efficiency in not having a dual fuel fleet of locomotives.
Best Hopes for Ben Franklin :-)
Alan
i have a question: if public transport is such a great business, why private enterprise wont touch it?
i live i switzerland so im very familiar with its rail system. have you ever seen the prices of tickets, which are on average subsidized at 50%?
the swiss rail system runs at full capacity, and only around 11% of all swiss commuters use trains. and even that 11% if they had to pay full cost would use a car.
trains are good if you look from a very narrow perspective. overall, unless you force people to live in large cities and abandon countryside and villages, they are inefficient and expensive, in fact people prefer to use personal transport if they just can, and without subsidies trains would all but disappear.
so another question: i originally come from an island with no rails. why did i have to pay taxes that ended up subsidizing public transport in large cities and in the mainland even though i never took a train in 30 years?
Just make EVERY road a toll road, that pays property taxes, and close down EVERY road that cannot pay for itself, including property taxes.
Soon no one will be living in small villages and farms (except those on major roads), so problem solved !
Roads are MUCH more socialized than rail. And the space and cost required for roads to take everybody in Switzerland by car are simply NOT THERE ! And soon the oil will not be there either.
PS: Your 11% figure is I believe wrong. SBB says 32% of passenger-km were by rail.
BTW, SBB turned a profit of 368.9 million Swiss francs last year.
http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/konzern_kennzahlen
Alan
Alan
Although to be fair Alan, any thing can turn a 'profit' with enough subsidies and no direct competition.
Every day, over 300,000 passengers already use Zurich’s main station – the Hauptbahnhof (HB) is the lynchpin of Switzerland’s rail system. By 2020 it is anticipated that over half a million passengers and passers-by will be using the HB every day.
http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/infra-dienstleistungen/infra-bau/infra-grosspro...
Imagine 300,000 (or 500,000) Swiss & tourists, etc. driving into Zurich every day. The roads required (they could only be road tunnels, and unlike rail tunnels, MUCH bigger and requiring massive ventilation), the oil required, the pollution, the hospitals full of accident victims, etc.
Most commuters would be forced to move into Zurich (already quite expensive).
Switzerland would simply cease to function without SBB !
Alan
PS: HB is not the only Zurich rail station, although by far the biggest.
HB is not the only Zurich rail station, although by far the biggest.
You probably know this, but that's because the Hbf is the central train station for a city. You will find a Hauptbahnhof in most major cities in German-speaking European countries.
Why should I have the least bit of trouble imagining 300,000 people driving into a metropolitan area of two million? That's nothing. Furthermore, Zürich doesn't even seem terribly hemmed in by the mountains - not only does it have an extensive ring road five or six miles out, but there's also an enormous patch of necessarily flat land devoted to an airport. If they've got so much land that they can afford an airport, what's the issue? If they don't want more roads, that's their affair, but what is this nonsense about the impossibility of road construction? Oh, and while road accidents do happen, why would I expect to find your wildly exaggerated "hospitals full of accident victims" from a commute of only a mere 300,000? Are the Swiss really, really, really, really, really, really bad drivers?
Imagine 300,000 (or 500,000) Swiss & tourists, etc. driving into Zurich every day. The roads required (they could only be road tunnels, and unlike rail tunnels, MUCH bigger and requiring massive ventilation), the oil required, the pollution, the hospitals full of accident victims, etc.
Thanks to the well developed public transport system, traffic jams are indeed less common in Switzerland compared to for example Massachusetts (both have a similar population density).
I remember talking to person who works in Boston and lives in a town North of Boston: "He told me that in order to avoid traffic he has to get up so early that he doesn't have a jet-lag whenever he travels to Europe."
Broke States Should Save Themselves By Selling Off Roads, Colleges, And Other Assets, Says Altucher
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/broke-states-should-save-themselves-by-selling-off-roads-colleges-and-other-assets-says-altucher-535345.html?tickers=stra,apol,^gspsc,^dji,spy
Many of the assets in question are relatively worthless without the ongoing state subsidies. Two examples:
I wouldn't pay you anything for the assets of the public college system in most states unless there was an agreement to continue state subsidies to the students (eg, the state makes up the difference between what I would need to charge for tuition as a private school, and what I can charge that keeps the student body intact). Oh, there's salvage value in the land, some of the buildings, some of the equipment; but the value as a college is very low unless the subsidies keep coming.
Similarly, I wouldn't pay a dime for most of the highway lane miles in most states. They're rural highways that can't possibly generate sufficient revenue to cover the cost of operating them. One of the important things that states do with uniform gas taxes is to transfer money from urban taxpayers to rural infrastructure. This is broadly true: there are implicit or explicit subsidies of much large rural infrastructure, such as the electric grid, the phone network, river control structures, etc.
I payed for these things with my taxes, if they sell them I will pay for them again. That is a kind of taxation without representation?
The thing is, in keeping with what you just implied, people have been needing roads (or roadlike objects) for millennia for general access, construction access, freight access, and more recently for access for fire engines, ambulances, construction equipment, and the like. This obviously long predates fossil fuels and we can expect it to long postdate them as well. So it's not as though, even if we tax people so much as to estrange them from Grandma, roads are all going to disappear into outer space. And the marginal cost imposed by running a car (light vehicle) down one of them (needed and existing whether you run the car or not) to Grandma's, or to the grocery store, is essentially nil.
However, that we're stuck with roads doesn't automatically mean that we should also stick ourselves with expensive railroads and their insanely costly ludicrous union featherbedding (Apparently, to this day, if the electrician discovers a need to open an unanticipated breaker box, everyone sits around twiddling their thumbs roasting in the heat or freezing in the cold until the sheet-metal guy can be found and brought back in to turn the latch; I heard a new story about that just within the last month. I honestly don't understand how they ever get a single pound of freight moved a single inch.) Perhaps we should indeed saddle ourselves with yet more of this ridiculous nonsense, but that's not proved by the existence of roads.
The real conundrum is that both roads and rail involve heavy fixed costs*, but low-ish marginal costs (for rail, and heavy vehicles on roads) or virtually-zero marginal costs (for light vehicles on roads). The competitive game in such cases is to spin the allocation of the fixed costs according to one's own arbitrary political taste, and perhaps also to see to it that someone else - neither you nor me, but that guy behind the tree - should be saddled with them. That seems like a perpetual game, one that can never be played or argued to any sort of conclusion, but can only continue inconclusively forever.
* The roughly 80 mile line from Madison to Milwaukee, fraudulently labeled "high speed" but really just 110mph - 1930s hi-tech but 2010s rubbish - is currently listed at around $880 million (of which 810 Federal), or $2083 per foot, and that's not for new construction, just for fixing up existing freight tracks (maybe the new rails are to be made of solid silver, but that seems a poor metallurgical choice.) Between such vast expense for next to nothing on the one hand, and the totally out-of-control featherbedding on the other, US railroading seems to be a stinking cesspit of sloth, incompetence, corruption, and ineptitude, fit only to be thoroughly destroyed (hmmm... reminds me a bit of public bus systems: corrupt, lazy, inept administration good only at feathering its own nest; uncontrolled union shiftlessness and sloth; with the result that they never seem to be able to cope with the deep mysteries of getting the noon bus underway when the big hand and little hand are both on the twelve. And airlines aren't any better. We seem to have an intractable problem with transportation in this sorry country.) Despite wishful thinking, do these rail projects have, in such a hopelessly defective environment, the potential to become anything but an utter waste of money?
Your statements lead me to believe that your main objection to all of this is that it does not fit your narrow and outdated political biases. Unions are far from what is the trouble with the US.
I agree that there is corruption in these industries, but that does not differentiate them from nearly any other industry.
If perceive that the banking and mortgage industry is also "a stinking cesspit of sloth, incompetence, corruption, and ineptitude, fit only to be thoroughly destroyed" we may have some points of agreement.
Well, of course, when you have no cogent argument, change the subject.
The banking and mortgage industry, which is way off-topic, continues even now after the debacle, to enjoy the perception that it's the road to Something For Nothing for those whose services are fundamentally worthless. Such as the guy who gets called in just to turn the latch while everybody else twiddles their thumbs. Or, worse, the shiftless moron who refuses to tackle the deep and abiding mystery of the big and little hands.
Who, in the light of that perception, and in this day of tendentious Political Correctness, would have dared to call b---s---? To rein Banking and Mortgages in would have been, would still be, the very epitome of "unfairness", unconscionably depriving Mr. and Ms. Big and Little Hands and their ilk of the riches they so truly deserve merely in return for sitting around and eating food and breathing air. No, Banking and Mortgages simply lie beyond criticism. Even now we've got Timothy Geithner and company still trying to prop up the unaffordable price of houses.
Without the perception of Something For Nothing things might not have gone as far out of hand as they did. Without the mortgage deduction - yet another aspect of the very same Something For Nothing mentality - to shove things along, the problem might never even have arisen on a significant scale. But then again, neither could such vast numbers of Mr. and Ms. Big and Little Hands have enjoyed the use of huge houses, at least for a time. In the end, everything seems to have its price.
Interesting point. But someone needs to run the numbers to really figure it out. People complain about public transport since they are tax-dollar funded . . . but I guess roads are too. People just ignore all that land use of roads. Gas taxes to go to pay for a lot of roads but I guess only somewhat . . . most of the new roads are probably paid for with tax dollars.
This is very interesting. It really turns the "you progressives with your public transport are a bunch of communists" argument on its head. And perhaps the Libertarians have a good point with their toll roads idea . . . although I doubt most of them understand the implications that you point out.
There is no guessing about it: roads are built and maintained not only gasoline taxes but from general fund dollars at the local, state, and federal levels.
Roads are a public good.
If every road was turned into a toll road (and general fund taxes and gasoline taxes were eliminated in kind), the toll required would be so egregious as to put people off of driving and incite rebellion.
Keep in mind that the toll would have to cover ALL costs, including the costs of collecting and enforcing the tolls.
Don't forget about the 10% or more profit margin and huge overhead costs, since I am sure that this kind of operation would be outsourced to private industry in the name of the free market and the promised efficiencies thereof.
Kind of how we like to outsource medical coverage of Americans to private insurers who impose overhead costs up to ~ 30% on the dollar, compared with up to 5% for Medicare. I mean, really, we can't deny all those 'health care' giants the right to make their CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and spend out money on advertising costs and so forth. And we have the nerve to wonder why we pay way more per capita for health care than the 26 countries in the World who scored higher than the U.S. in health care outcomes per person.
Yes, let's privatize all health care, prisons, the military, formerly public roads, and social security...and pay for it with taxpayer funds to boot!
But I imagine you might get some swell coupons for a free coffee or hash browns at Mickey D's at the toll booth, or in the (e)email.
If every road was turned into a toll road (and general fund taxes and gasoline taxes were eliminated in kind), the toll required would be so egregious as to put people off of driving and incite rebellion.
Could you provide your math?
I think gas taxes are about $.35 per gallon, or about 1.5 cents per mile. Do you have data on general fund expenditures?
i live i switzerland so im very familiar with its rail system. have you ever seen the prices of tickets, which are on average subsidized at 50%?
The General Abonnement that allows you to use any train, tram, bus, boat and even some cable cars in Switzerland for an entire year without extra charge is still cheaper than owning a car in Switzerland:
http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/reisemarkt/abos-billette/abonnemente/ga/general...
And public support of the SBB is 34%:
http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/en/konzern_unternehmen/konzern_kennzahlen/konzern_...
And talking about subsidies: Making it difficult/costly for Swiss to import cars from abroad directly is also a hidden-subsidy to "official" car importers. Have you ever noticed how expensive cars are in Switzerland and that many Swiss car importers are billionaires even-though they don't even produce anything and just sell cars to 0.1% of the world's population...
(Somehow paying taxes for public transport is evil but having to pay almost 100% more on a Japanese car in Switzerland than on the same car in the US is good:
http://de.toyota.ch/cars/new_cars/prius/pricelist.aspx
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/
Oh, and these non-producing car importers then help funding ad-campaigns such as these http://www.volksbefragung.ch/wie-viel-auslaenderkriminalitaet-wollen-sie... telling people that their party is against criminal foreigners (as if other parties somehow welcome criminals) to get more of their ironically-free-market-blocking right-wing-politicians elected who continue to prevent Swiss people to receive imported goods for a fair price...)
Making it difficult/costly for Swiss to import cars from abroad directly is also a hidden-subsidy to "official" car importers.
That makes it a tax on car buyers, and in effect a subsidy for mass transit, right? A 100% tax on new cars makes a cost comparison between cars and mass transit pretty tough...
That makes it a tax on car buyers
Actually money that only flows into the pockets a few non-producing car-importers and therefore does not flow into the treasury and therefore doesn't reduce the general tax burden is not considered a tax.
A 100% tax on new cars makes a cost comparison between cars and mass transit pretty tough...
Besides the fact that the tax on new cars in Switzerland is 7.6% - (again the profit of a car-sales-person is not a tax) -
Which cost comparison? Or are you seriously suggesting cars can compete with mass transit on a cost basis if only mass transit wouldn't get public support? And do you believe most people in the US don't use mass transit because it's cheaper to own and drive an SUV instead of taking the bus?
Oh and I do own a car, even though it may not be competitive with mass transit on a cost basis...
Let me ask a basic question: why do cars in Europe cost much more than in the US? My understanding was that this was caused by simple excise taxes on new cars. There is no federal tax in the US on new cars, and state sales taxes vary from 0 to 9.75%.
As far as the costs of car travel vs mass transit, I'd love to see a good comparison, with all out-of-pocket costs included. It's not at all clear to me that mass transit is cheaper, unless you include a high cost for externalities for oil supply security.
Let me ask a basic question: why do cars in Europe cost much more than in the US?
This is not always the case. (The Swiss example is probably an exception in Europe.)
My understanding was that this was caused by simple excise taxes on new cars.
This is only true for some European countries.
As far as the costs of car travel vs mass transit, I'd love to see a good comparison, with all out-of-pocket costs included.
Well, who knows - but the trolley bus I usually take has a capacity of 192 passengers runs the entire day and probably carries close to 100 passengers on average. Cars on the other hand may carry 1.2 passengers on average and are parked most of the day. So, I doubt that 80 inefficient cars with 80 costly parking spots can compete with a single trolley bus running efficiently on relatively cheap electricity on a cost basis.
I wonder if anyone has seen a general discussion of car prices and excise taxes in Europe. My impression is that they're generally highly taxed. Certainly, VAT rebates make imports very hard, and indirectly subsidize domestic production and penalize US imports.
the trolley bus I usually take has a capacity of 192 passengers runs the entire day and probably carries close to 100 passengers on average.
I think you're impression is probably too high. How late does it run? Does it carry 100 passengers after 9 PM? In both directions?
Cars are self-service, while transit systems require operators. If your trolley bus carries an average of 100 passengers and travels 20 km per hour, and the operator's pay and benefits cost $40/hour, then the operator cost is only 2 cents per pax-km. OTOH, the ratio of pax-km to operator is much, much lower for most systems.
The Chicago US system (the 2nd largest in the US by trip volume) cost 65 cents per passenger mile to operate, and 70% of that is labor. That doesn't include capital/infrastructure costs.
OTOH, a personal vehicle costs much less than that to operate. Including the capital cost of the vehicle, cost per mile is still well below that level.
Or maybe 800 with the assistance of Mr. Nimby. I wonder how the irrational fear of power lines would play into this...
That would have to be pretty irrational. Much of the rail that Alan proposes to electrify runs through rural areas. The track that already exists is the main disruption and danger. In many cases there are already aerial power lines paralleling the roadbed.
If electrification of railways is so easy and practical then explain the Milwaukee Road, Great Northern , Virginian, and Pennsylvania Railroad's abandonment of electricity. The facts are that it is not practical even on such lines as the UPs Sunset and BNSF Transcon where traffic is 60 or more trains /day.
Electrify in 8 years? You couldn't even get environmental impact statements in that time.
Your are insane if you think 3rd rail is an option for freight railways in open country. The liabilities are mind boggling. They would be uninsurable. They would in most states be illegal as at least "reckless endangerment".
Your post shows that you have no knowledge of commerce in general. Trains of wheat sitting waiting on wind or sun? They have delivery dates. Trains of Aluminum ingots? Aluminum in any form rarely moves by rail. Ingots are a temporary phenomenon, they are mostly consumed where they are produced.
You are living in a dictatorial fantasy land where energy will be saved by factories and warehouses moving to your electrified rail and masses of people moving to the few toll roads you have granted them.
There is no comparison between European railways and the U.S. U.S. rail traffic is much heavier. An empty U.S. car could easily outweigh a loaded European car. Traffic here is commonly unit trains with rigid delivery times/dates. They can't sit waiting for wind or sun.
'Waiting for the wind or sun..' ???? Classic!
Just because we could have those sources feeding the grid, doesn't mean you'd have a bunch of Reefer Cars out there sweating it out with Luffing Sails until a Zephyr graced it into motion again.
What does weight have to do with it? They're already being pulled with Electric Traction Motors as it is.. (Hybrid with Diesel GenSets..)
I rike you.. you make me raff.
How will your trains run once the diesel runs short? Why do you think power availability would be an issue, given a reasonable grid, storage, and priority scheme?
That . . . is pretty clever. I do wonder about the amount of power you need though . . . the 'third rail' for subways, light-rail, BART, The T, etc. doesn't have to be that big because those are small trains. But a massive freight train with many many cars? That is some massive power you'll need.
Should be doable. A quick google suggests that typical diesel-electric freight locomotives run around 3000 horsepower, which is 2.2 megawatts. That's the sort of power level handled by your average neighborhood power line: running it as a catenary cable over the track shouldn't be a big problem.
Of course, the big long-distance freight trains use 5 or 10 locomotives, which increases the peak power load. But you should still be able to do that with a catenary: I don't think you need serious high-tension power systems until you get up into the 100 MW - 1 GW range.
And if you really *do* need ultra-high power, you might be able to build high-tension towers *over* the railway right-of-way, with occasional substations providing low-voltage power to a catenary strung just above the train.
My memory is a bit vague, but the assumption is that at 25 kV AC (Bart is 1 kV DC), transforming substations (from HV AC) are needed every 12 to 15 miles for 25 kV on heavy freight lines. Further apart on lighter lines.
Alan
Alan you just shot down your idea of putting a pantograph on the diesel electric and feeding the traction motors. If you are supplying 25 kV to the catenary then your locomotive will need a huge transformer and rectifiers. This why the electric locos of the past like the GG1 and Little Joe were so powerful. They had an enormous weight to put on the driven axles.
My Idea ? Please link to where I said that.
I have talked with the chief engineer of a locomotive manufacturer about the issues.
Modern electric locos use a lot of power electronics; 1 phase AC from trolley wire > DC > 3 phase AC > motor. It is the most efficient design. In a conversion, he would like to strip the old loco to the deck, reuse the motor and transmission/driveline and rebuild.
OTOH, in an emergency, or for occasional use, he could put some of the stuff (pantograph, transformer, etc.) in a car behind the locos and make some minimal changes in the locos themselves.
Several different paths to convert.
Alan
25 kv on the catenary is pretty common on passenger rail lines, actually, and the locomotives have no trouble carrying appropriate sized transformers and rectifiers. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHP-8
is an 8000 hp (6 MW) locomotive that runs on a variety of voltages, from 11 kv to 25 kv.
Alan: Ok it appears that that that idea came from "enemy of state". It is hard to keep you Greeniacs straight, you all sound the same. You are right in the concept of a separate car for the transformer, rectifier and pantograph. The fact remains that it will be expensive. Today's trains use distributed power and will require a minimum of 2 of these "conversion cars".
"I have talked with the chief engineer of a locomotive manufacturer about the issues.
Modern electric locos use a lot of power electronics; 1 phase AC from trolley wire > DC > 3 phase AC > motor. It is the most efficient design. In a conversion, he would like to strip the old loco to the deck, reuse the motor and transmission/driveline and rebuild."
WHAT? generate single phase, convert to DC, convert to 3 phase? If the idea here is to save energy then this a looser from the getgo. Every time you make a change in energy , be it voltage, phase, electrical to mechanical, whatever, there are losses and they ARE significant. Why would you ever want to generate single phase? And what is this transmission/driveline? If it is just the traction motor then there will be serious problems with weight/axle. Again this is why most of the older electrics had 8 driving axles,often 8 out of ten. You are returning to the steam days philosophy of purpose built locomotives, built for a particular territory and in some cases 1 piece of track, ie; Union Pacific's Big Boy and the Ogden to Wasatch run, particularly Sherman Hill.
You have repeatedly mentioned the Trans Siberian Railway. Are you overlooking the fact that for almost half the year temperatures there can turn Diesel fuel, particularly the ultra premium Russian grade , to Jello? Chinese electrification? could it be that their lack of oil reserves means direct conversion from coal fired steam locomotives to coal produced electricity? Yes they built their last mainline steam locomotives 20 years ago and still hold some in reserve. They will make you a good deal on them, just ask Iowa Interstate.
goodmanj:
"Should be doable. A quick google suggests that typical diesel-electric freight locomotives run around 3000 horsepower, which is 2.2 megawatts. That's the sort of power level handled by your average neighborhood power line"
Learn the difference between a kilowatt and a megawatt. Obviously you are not qualified to speak on things electrical.
WHAT? generate single phase, convert to DC, convert to 3 phase?
Why AC->DC->AC? Because the rotation rate of an AC generator or 3-phase AC motor is exactly equal to the AC frequency. If you want the diesel to be running at peak power output while the train is going slowly, you're going to need to change the frequency. Best way to that is to rectify to DC and then invert back to AC. There are other ways to do it, I'm sure, but modern power electronics is *very* efficient.
http://www.railway-technical.com/tract-02.shtml
goodmanj:
"Should be doable. A quick google suggests that typical diesel-electric freight locomotives run around 3000 horsepower, which is 2.2 megawatts. That's the sort of power level handled by your average neighborhood power line"
Learn the difference between a kilowatt and a megawatt.
1 horsepower = 745 watts.
3000 horsepower = 3000*745 = 2.2 million watts = 2.2 megawatts.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3000+horsepower+in+MW
Or do you object to "your average neighborhood power line"? Your typical urban neighborhood might have a thousand households, each drawing around a kilowatt. Megawatt-class substation transformers are as common as McDonalds'.
Obviously you are not qualified to speak on things electrical.
Right back at ya.
You appear to know something about railroads, but not about engineering. To quote yourself, Obviously you are not qualified to speak on things electrical.
Transforming and power electronics each take about a 1% loss for each change. The locos for SBB, DB and SNCF are as described "1 phase AC > DC > 3 phase AC > motor". I was a bit surprised when I first found this out a decade ago. However, I suspect that these companies know what they are doing.
http://www.railway-technical.com/elec-loco-bloc.shtml#Modern-AC-Electric...
The Russians operated on diesel for a half century, so any problems with gelling were solved.
The Chinese are displacing diesel-electric locos with their massive electrification efforts.
Alan
For others, SBB, DB and SNCF are Swiss, German and French national railways.
Do freight trains with electric motors fed by diesel engines also carry batteries to buffer the diesel engine output?
Minimal batteries is the rule. Enough to keep signals, communications, etc. going for a couple of days and then restart in cold weather is my understanding. Never heard about buffering although an intriguing idea.
Alan
Ah, so currently batteries aren't really in the drivetrain?
Batteries are the obvious solution to cover short lengths of ROW that aren't electrified.
Also, you'd have a pretty good ROI if you placed a battery powerful enough to power the train for several hours, and charged it whenever it was easy: in a station, etc.
You could charge overnight at cheap rates, then recharge several times during the day, maximizing the value of the battery and minimizing the length of the track that required wiring.
Heck, wire only 25% of the length of the track, and charge at 4x the watts 25% of the time.
Plus, you could add a small onboard diesel generator for backup.
I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet, but I guess it has to do with the high cost per charge/discharge cycle of conventional batteries: the newest li-ion batteries have a much, much smaller cost per cycle.
A few megawatts times a few hours is a lot of battery capacity. Admittedly a train car is big, but who wants to wire up a million AA's? :)
If you're going this way a flow battery might be the way to go, with tanker-cars filled with the liquids. Then you could drop dead batteries and pick up new, or string them together, a few thousand gallons of electrolyte at a pop. Even so, you'd need a massive core for multi-megawatt output -- just 25Kw is the size of a fridge, IIRC.
Containerized flow batteries is an interesting concept though -- you could use the same thing for server-farm backup, or industrial sites.
Really, though, just running the grid and supporting flow to and from using aerials is probably more sensible. That works already today.
I know that some switchers (specifically Germany) are battery operated. Shuttle some cars around a factory or refinery, that type of thing.
Alan
The Port of LA is going to big electric trucks for intra-port movements.
Any links ? Performance specs ?
Thanks,
Alan
I recalled this from some time back as well. Old news, but still good:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/25/business/fi-electric-truck25
http://www.cleanvehicleexpo.com/presentations/081014Tuesday/B_Samra_EXPO...
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/02/balqon-begins-p.html
Nick, I'm skeptical about this approach...but I think you know more about batteries than I do. How much battery weight and volume would be required to supply 4400 HP (a typical modern locomotive) for, say, an hour? Locomotives are not like automobiles...they have to pull hundreds of times their own weight.
If you want to quadruple the power, you're probably going to have to go above 50kV for US trains. You're now no longer in the territory of proven technology. It seems to me (logistically, among other things) that it would make better sense to just electrify whole lines.
OTOH, I've been a believer for some time that battery tenders could be used to store energy from dynamic brakes. Currently when diesel electric locos use the traction motors for braking the energy is not stored. Kind of incredible to think of all that energy being deliberately turned into heat. Seems to me that (especially in mountain areas), battery tenders could be added behind locomotives to store some of that energy and give it back when needed.
GE has produced a 'hybrid' demo model with a few onboard batteries. I would imagine that hooking such a loco up to a battery tender would be relatively straightforward. (And indeed, the tender may transform such a locomotive from a novelty to a breakthrough.) All of this could of course be done without electrifying lines at all.
How much battery weight and volume would be required to supply 4400 HP (a typical modern locomotive) for, say, an hour?
4,400 HP is about 3.3MW, so that's 3.3MWhrs. You might get about .12kWh per kilogram, so that's about 28 metric tons. About right for one car?
The logical approach would be to electrify the uphill track to charge the battery while climbing the hill, on downhill track charge batteries or feed power into the grid and use battery power on flat segments, probably requiring less than 10% of rated power.
Long flat segments could be broken up with short electrified charging/acceleration segments.
100% electrification (over 100,000 km in service) is the consistent choice vs. on/off electrification.
In simple installations, $2.5 million/mile for double track.
"problem areas (old tunnels & bridges) may benefit from a gap in electrication, but switching to 3rd rail seems a better solution.
Alan
One car could actually do at least 4 times that weight. What about volume though?
I think we could expect to get at least .25kWh per liter, so that would be 13.2 cubic meters. That's a small % of one car.
What you'd do first, is target the 'Easy Energy', and 'Peak Smoothing', so rather than your arbitrary 1 hour, you would match battery capacity to usefully capture regenerative braking. [Which might even include braking-generator-carriages]
This also provides a good chunk of the acceleration energy, and now your Diesel unit can drop in size.
In another post, I linked to an excellent paper :
http://leiwww.epfl.ch/publications/destraz_barrade_rufer_speedam_04.pdf
NOW here's a man with an idea, or at least the beginnings of one. A locomotives generation capacity could burn up its traction motors in a long grade at max load. But what if we take this "battery tender" and put traction motors under it? Charge it downhill and get the boost up hill. Very much like steam locomotives had booster engines on tender trucks for starting, this would be a booster for running. It would require some serious wiring and controls but that is not so hard today. The make or break here is , could it eliminate a powered locomotive on the trip?
Agreed. Although the railroads don't seem to be using helper sets as much as they used to, my thought was that these battery locomotives would be used as helper units. Thus they could eliminate powered units that would otherwise be added (i.e. traditional helpers).
Or, put another way, strip an existing locomotive of the prime mover and radiator (not the dynamic brake) and pack as much battery as possible into the vacated space. Keep the cab as a control unit. (If you'll have helper sets of more than 2 units, make both 'A' and 'B' units.) I like this general approach; it doesn't involve retrofitting existing locomotives to enable energy transfer to a battery tender, which is a potential deal-breaker for Class I railroads with thousands of units.
I would imagine that someone in the business has already done the math on this idea (although battery options are constantly evolving). If it is indeed practical, I see the scenario where it actually gets used as being one where the price of diesel has suddenly gone up and caught the railroads in a bind, before they had a chance to electrify. Could happen.
A purpose built battery unit and a converted existing locomotive are six of one and half dozen of the other. The conversion has a couple of pluses: 1. railroads have a long history of reusing and updating their equipment. Today's "Green Goat" battery switch engines and the array of so called "gen set" locomotives are all built on existing locomotives. So the conversion is not at all an alien idea.
2. Emission laws are limiting the rebuilding of locomotives in kind, rebuilds must meet the same standards as new.
An "A" unit will be a waste, no matter where it is in the train there must be a powered unit for the dynamic braking and DP controls.
To make this fly now give credit for the emissions, allow depreciation as if new, and a tax credit to equip existing power units for the dynamic braking/charging. It could essentially be a road slug if needed, and a full power unit in recovery mode. It certainly seems possible that 2 could replace one powered unit. The key will be a low maintainance battery capable of high charge and discharge rates. To make it compatible with existing mu connections perhaps it could be radio controlled as the dp units are or it could be controlled automatically based on traction motor demand/output. If it can be made to work with minimal alterations to existing power units and eliminate one in mountainous districts I think it could fly. Certainly much more "way out" schemes have been tried; ie, UP's turbines.
Actually, it is coming out of the labs right now :) see :
http://www.ge.com/battery/plugin.html
I also found an excellent paper here, on Peak/Average Energies in Locomotives.
http://leiwww.epfl.ch/publications/destraz_barrade_rufer_speedam_04.pdf
This shows quite large ratios (> 10:1), between peak, and average, and shows how local electric storage (which, of course can also leverage regen braking), can make HUGE differences to
* Size/weight of required on-board diesel power unit [Diesel Electric]
or
* Weight/cost of overhead Electric power infrastructure. [Electric]
and also opens up hybrid system use : Overhead electric inside cities, and Diesel outside.
The report states:
"Plus, you could add a small onboard diesel generator for backup."
"Actually, it is coming out of the labs right now :) see :
http://www.ge.com/battery/plugin.html"
GE is late to the game, search "Green Goat" , a battery switch engine with a small diesel charging unit.
"http://leiwww.epfl.ch/publications/destraz_barrade_rufer_speedam_04.pdf"
I think this is a case of apples and oranges. The Italian "train" which corresponds to a commuter train here is requiring 54.366 Hp/ ton. A U.S. freight train in mountainous territory has about maybe 3 hp/ton.If you look at the power demand chart they have numerous short spikes of demand. Here we would be looking fewer but long uphill stretches.
Found some more info: the technology mentioned above (diesel-electric locomotives that can also run off external power) already exists.
New York City forbids diesel locomotives in its stations, so Amtrak needs to run electric-only into Grand Central and Penn Station. However, outside the NYC metro area, the rails aren't electrified. So what do you do?
You use a dual-mode locomotive like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Genesis#P32AC-DM
It runs off either an internal diesel generator, or an external third rail at 650 VDC, with a power of 3200 hp (2.4 MW).
It's comparable in power to a typical diesel-electric freight locomotive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Dash_9-44CW
at 4400 hp (3.3 MW).
And finally, let's throw in a common electric-only passenger locomotive into the mix:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHP-8
8000 hp (6 MW), runs on a variety of AC voltages up to 25 KV. This is more powerful than the freight train above,
The stats on these locos run counter to several assumptions in this thread:
* Freight locos are *not* more powerful than passenger locos: they exert more force, but run at lower speeds.
* Passenger locos do have lower traction force than freight locos, but you can fix that with a reduction gearset.
* Pure electric locos can use voltages up to 25 KV, and still carry their transformers and inverters on board with no weight problems. After all, they don't need to carry a gigantic diesel engine or fuel tanks!
* You don't need a 25 kv line to push a 2 MW train: you can get by with a 750 VDC third rail if you need to, though HVAC would be preferred for long-distance freight lines.
The dual mode locos you cite are peculiar to that application. 650 V catenary is horribly inefficient.
Passenger locomotives have always had more power than freight locomotives for one reason: acceleration. They cannot turn it into tractive effort, that requires weight. Any diesel electric can spin it's wheels. Wheel slip control is either by skill or complex electronics. Today's typical freight locomotive has 6 axles compared to the four of your passenger loco. With 6 axles and 4000 HP it could slip until it cut the rail. A reduction gear would make this problem worse.
Pure electrics commonly run on 25kv. The transition is the problem that we are talking about here. You will have a hard time selling the idea of replacing every locomotive overnite or running two systems at once.
No you cannot EVER use 3rd rail. The idea of an exposed conductor 18 inches above the ground is not only impractical (shorted by wildlife, vegetation, or weather) but stupid (kids touching it).
No you cannot EVER use 3rd rail. The idea of an exposed conductor 18 inches above the ground is not only impractical (shorted by wildlife, vegetation, or weather) but stupid (kids touching it).
Full size at
http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?105222
About 1 million people ride the LIRR every workday.
Alan
PS: Some interesting stories about drunks urinating on the third rail.
Diesel-electrics kill about 600 people/year, trucks about 6,000. Railroads and highways are not safe places for children to wander around in regardless of electrification.
Alan I have been in the North east and all 3rd rail I saw was fenced or confined by elevation or tunnel. We are not talking here about a few miles of urban railroad. Would YOU insure 33,000 miles of open right of way where people have never seen a 3rd rail system? Remember this is only 600-750 VDC. Not at all practical for freight requirements of 10,000 hp or more. How would you protect it?
Check Mythbusters or any electrical engineer for the piss on the rail debunk.
"Diesel-electrics kill about 600 people"
Bullshit!!! driving in front of a train is not being killed by one, it's being killed by stupidity. Just proof positive of Darwin's theory.
Would YOU insure 33,000 miles of open right of way where people have never seen a 3rd rail system?
Meh. The nuke industry has the Federal Gov provide insurance via Price-Anderson. What makes you think that yet another private industry would not get access to the public feeding trough?
all 3rd rail I saw was fenced or confined by elevation or tunnel.
I have seen at grade crossings on Long Island. A gap in the third rail to let cars pass (one end or other of EMUs in contact) but a few feet (5' ? from visual memory) to either side of the road shoulder is the 3rd rail. Pedestrians walk nearby.
The linked picture did not appear to have fencing. My impression is some LIRR ROW has fencing and some does not. Anyone that lives there ?
Your "33,000 miles of 3rd rail" is a straw man.
Overhead trolley wire# for at least 32,975 miles and 3rd rail is an option for specific problems areas (mainly old bridges and tunnels where it is expensive to adapt to electrification).
Alan
# Kind of like what is in place from Scotland, across the width of Europe and then across the width of Siberia. And from one end of Chile to the other, and networked all over India, China, etc.
GM threatened to blackball any railroad that electrified or expanded electrification during the phase-out of steam. The Penn Line is still electrified as Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. Now extended from New Haven to Boston.
The Trans-Siberian was electrified in 2002, to Murmansk (Arctic port) in 2005. The Chinese are going to electrify 20,000 km this decade. No major technical issues.
The USA forces RRs to pay property taxes on infrastructure. Not an issue elsewhere.
Alan
Maybe you should explain why just about every country in Europe and Asia relies heavily on electricity for rail transport. The longest railway in the world (Trans-Siberian) is electrified, you know.
I'd say the Milwaukee Road's problem was that they were competing with three or four other railroads that had grabbed the better right-of-ways first. I don't think it's too accurate to say they abandoned electricity...it's more accurate to say that their Western Lines weren't profitable enough in the 70's with any type of motive power. and by the way, the lines in question operated on electricity for six decades.
The Great Northern electrified one tunnel. It's a meaningless example in this debate along with a dozen others.
The Virginian operated its electrified line for three decades, and never abandoned it while it was independent. It's understandable that the N&W didn't want to maintain a separate equipment roster after the merger, but that isn't an indictment of electrified rail transport.
Many parts of the former Pennsylvania that were electrified still are electrified. Like the Milwaukee Road, the source of the Pennsylvania's problems lay elsewhere.
Why not?
Rolling stock weight has nothing to do with the issue, and I daresay you know that. It really doesn't matter from a freight car's perspective if the traction motors on the locomotives receive their electricity from an onboard diesel engine or an overhead wire.
The facts are that it is not practical even on such lines as the UPs Sunset and BNSF Transcon where traffic is 60 or more trains /day
Wait 18 months.
Warren Buffett is not stupid.
Alan
Perhaps I wasn't clear. Rolling stock weight does have nothing or little to do with it. My point is that European freight operations are small scale, not much more than package express. In the US unit coal trains MUST arrive daily at power plants or there is a penalty. And all those steamship containers bound for Europe on land bridge operations have penalties of as much as $150.00 each if late. Power must be there when it's needed.
That power cannot be delivered at traction motor voltages. 20,000 hp at 600 volts would require conductors of enormous size and weight.
Here's where the weight of rolling stock and total train weight make a big difference. Where trains here are commonly 12,00 tons a European freight would not likely be over 1,000. The conductors would be streetcar size in Europe.
You do not know what you are talking about.
BTW, the standards for Germany/Switzerland/Austria is 16.7 Hz @ 15 kV
Most modern electrification is at 50 Hz, 25 kV
Speculation is that West of the Mississippi River & Canada would electrify railroads at 60 Hz, 50 kV and East at 60 Hz, 25 kV.
Your loadings are off as well.
Alan
Which is why you don't deliver the power at 600 volts. Trains over 10,000 tons have been run by South Africa's Orex using electric locomotives. It's perfectly possible to do.
. 20,000 hp at 600 volts would require conductors of enormous size and weight.
And that's why 15-25 kV is used.
Jagged and Eric: you are not paying attention. The discussion is about using existing Diesel Electric locomotives as electrics. There is no room and no weight capability for the transformation on these machines.
There have been plenty of third rail electric railways running though open country in the south of England (from Kent as fasr west as Weymouth) since the 1930's without any more than the occasional case of someone accidentally eletrocuting themselves. Admittedly all railways in the UK are fenced, which I understand is not the case in the United Statse, though obviously they could be. Newly eletrified lines nowadays, other than for subways,use overhead eletrification, but I am not aware of any moves to replace the extensive system of third rail lines that we already have.
There have been plenty of third rail electric railways running though open country in the south of England (from Kent as fasr west as Weymouth) since the 1930's without any more than the occasional case of someone accidentally eletrocuting themselves. Admittedly all railways in the UK are fenced, which I understand is not the case in the United Statse, though obviously they could be. Newly eletrified lines nowadays, other than for subways,use overhead eletrification, but I am not aware of any moves to replace the extensive system of third rail lines that we already have.
I'm still licking my wounds for being kicked off of railroad.net. One question I have about rail transport would be this: IF we had track-pipe lines with the rail system, again, using our existing rolling stock, and those lines contained hydrogen, COULD this theory prove well using hydrogen fuel cells to electrify the rails? And IF we had fuel cells close to the rails could this system also dovetail into the standard electric grid. The hydrogen would ostensibly be produced off-shore, or geothermal, nuke, other, and be piped in ( Tripe System Report 11 pages, illustrated www.environmentalfisherman.com ) along rail easements, and the 4 foot diameter multi use pipe rails would straddle the standard or modified steel rails, also of a new 200 year design.
I would suppose mag-lev trains could use the same general easements, and share some infrastructure. Does your study include this? The Tripe lends itself to large and light trains, using the same basic rights of way as the steel tracks, again, sort of futuristic, but If modeled, then prototyped, perhaps a possibility.
I don't have strong opinions about how a train should be driven, as I'm a fisherman, a wind mill designer, looking for ways to ship my off-shore wind and wave energy. Your system looks very efficient: Seems to be the trend too.
This country must put people to work improving infrastructure efficiencies, and I do think you have a good handle on that.
Thanks, (Please read the 11 page report) Try the Tripe! Steven J. Scannell
How about this?
Solar powered airships.
(If you mention the Hindenburg you will get a lecture, so please don't).
Granted, they are not so good at going to the corner shop for a pint of milk, but neither is the Space Shuttle.
However they offer greater comfort than pushing a wheelbarrow across the desert and they don't need roads.
I have been designing them in my head for 30 years and I think that I have optimised them.
They would be offered on a lease to buy basis and be capable of moving a container load. A couple would enter into an arrangement with the manufacturer and pay it off over 20 years by living aboard and moving mass around the world under instruction of automated Internet agents.
A home, honest work and pollution free travel.
Whats not to like?
Oh yes.
The Hindenburg.
Painted with a mixture of Aluminum and Iron oxide. IE Thermite.
The same stuff that is used in the Space Shuttle's rocket booster
Thermite and static electricity=30% casualty rate plus a lot of hyperbole from the peanut gallery.
Glad you mentioned the Hindenburg (and the correct details of its demise). I would much rather have a well protected Hydrogen Tank in the car who's main priority (that is the Hydrogen), is to escape upwards and away from a possible accident scene as quickly as possible, rather than Gasoline which has a marked tendency to pool under you and ensure that you are "well done"...
In the interest of increased efficiency of say Hummer H3s, perhaps a "Thermite paint job" could be useful. That or using the yellow ones to transport kids to school. All you'd have to add is "School Bus" on the front and back and add a "STOP" light...
The "correct details" of the Hindenburg's demise will not likely ever be known. However you might look at the television show "Mythbusters" for an answer. While certainly appealing to a crowd who loves to blow stuff up they do have some fairly decent research. The paint mixture was not in the correct proportions to support combustion. And if it had been the Hindenburg would have been too heavy to fly.
Utah company develops powdered biofuel
By Erin Voegele
Posted August 18, 2010, at 4:30 p.m. CST
Compact Contractors of America LLC, a Utah-based company developing dry algae aviation fuels, recently announced it has sold samples of its powdered algae-based jet fuel to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. According to Robert Fulton, CCA’s chief technologist and founder, the laboratory will conduct testing and evaluation on the fuel for use as a solid propellant for aviation rocket use.
CCA’s technology involves drying biobased feedstock at a specific temperature over a specific period of time, said Fulton. “We use a spray dryer [which is] commercial technology that is currently available,” he continued. “I discovered…that under certain conditions you can actually draw the oils to the surface of the cells while you are removing the moisture from [the feedstock].” The resulting powdered fuel is very conducive to simultaneous combustion, Fulton said, meaning that the sugars, plant material, cellulose and proteins all tend to fire at once. “It does not caramelize and it does not gel, which makes it a good jet fuel,” he continued.
While CCA’s research is currently focused on using algae as a primary feedstock, Fulton said that there potential to use other feedstocks, such as camelina in the future. While the process can utilize a wide variety of algae strains, Fulton noted that the oil content of the feedstock affects the grade of the fuel. While high-grade fuels are needed for aviation use, Fulton said lower grades may be used to fuel stationary applications on the ground, such as turbine engines that produce electricity.
Can anyone point me to a book/paper/text that discusses the exact relationship between (fiat) money/energy and resources. This is a source of constant confusion for me. I would agree that money is a token to mobilize resources but I would like to find some more formal analysis of this and how the role of money will be affected if total energy availability shrinks in our society.
cheers (have been reading for a year or so my first post)
Welcome, Mark.
This is the usual go to for a quick and easy intro to those concepts.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse
I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but I think he gets most of the essentials right.
Here are some other links
economic dynamics George Mobus http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2009/12/econom...
An Interview with Stoneleigh http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5917
Our very own Gail on Delusions of Finance http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6191
Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5245
World Finance & Peak Oil http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6542
And the Great Dennis Meadows on
economics & Limits to Growth http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6094
Hope this helps some of these articles link energy and fiat money
Cheers
Interesting comparison of energy density in Mj/kg.
Theoretical optimum battery… 3.5
Ethanol….. 24
Gasoline….. 46
But you left out the elephant in the room.
Uranium / thorium…. 78,000,000
The sun will run out of hydrogen before the earth runs out of uranium and thorium. Fission is more renewable than wind and solar.
The ERCOT grid has “9,700 megawatts (of installed windpower). (That’s nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.) Texas residential ratepayers are now paying about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state’s urban centers.”
“On Aug. 4, at about 5 p.m., electricity demand in Texas hit a record: 63,594 megawatts. But according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s wind turbines provided only about 500 megawatts of power when demand was peaking and the value of electricity was at its highest.
Put another way, only about 5 percent of the state’s installed wind capacity was available when Texans needed it most.”
http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/news/2010/only-about-5-percent-of-the...
"Uranium / thorium…. 78,000,000"
And what is the figure when you include the energy and resources for:
prospecting
mining
processing the ore
shipping the ore
purifying the uranium
building the nuclear plants
decommissioning the nuclear plants
storing the waste for ever
treating people with illnesses from accidents and exposure
compensating those killed from accidents and exposure
.
.
.
On the other point, if TX had also invested in solar, it would have been available exactly when they needed it most.
But you want to see things in one way and one way only, so don't let me get in the way of your delusions.
And what is the figure when you include the energy and resources for:…
That would not be a fair comparison since the other figures are not calculated that way. To be conservative we could use a factor of 10 resulting in a net gain of 7,800,000.
But if we factor in an energy equivalent for all the damage prevented and lives saved by replacing coal combustion we might end up multiplying by 10, so 780,000,000.
On the other point, if TX had also invested in solar, it would have been available exactly when they needed it most.
Had you taken the time to actually read the link you would know that the peak occurred at 5PM when solar is fading, and high demand extends several hours into the evening.
Wind depends on the existing fossil plants for backup, but those plants are aging and will require decommissioning at an increasing rate as time goes on. When we build a GW of wind power we need to build 900 MW of fossil power to back it up. The cost and emissions of those backup plants should be included in the wind cost estimate, but it never is.
Or, you could not build the plants, cool the houses during the day when the sun shined, and not when the wind didn't blow.
If you made peak usage cover the peaking plants, I imagine a lot of people would quickly determine they could live more frugally.
The trouble with a lot of potential 'solutions' is each piece-part is passed over because it doesn't fit the mold of an existing part which was designed and evolved to fit a system that solved a different problem.
The proper mindset is to envision solar and wind, and other renewables, and think through what an optimized society based on those would look like. Then go build that where we can -- not in one step, but realizing that some sub-optimal near-term solutions will lead to a more optimal future.
At least Tx has a lot of wind and a lot of sun -- that's an asset many places won't have.
"But if we factor in an energy equivalent for all the damage prevented and lives saved by replacing coal combustion we might end up multiplying by 10, so 780,000,000."
Had to reach pretty far into absurdity to grasp that straw, didn't you.
Nothing like falling back on the old false dichotomy--as if nukes are the only possible alternative to coal.
The fact is that, unlike oil, uranium does not come out of the ground in a concentrated state. No, you need to extract huge quantities of oar (at great energy expense), extract from that large quantity a small amount of concentrated stuff (again at a huge expense in energy), then process it so it is of just the right quality for fission.
And no other alternative to coal creates wastes that must be safely stored for ever.
Look, you are obviously a true believer and I am not going to, nor do I intend to. "convert" you. But stats often lie, and claims of nukes great eroei are among the most manipulated stats around.
"Back up" and redundancy issues have been addressed above.
But stats often lie, and claims of nukes great eroei are among the most manipulated stats around.
OK, lets put your claims to the test.
you need to extract huge quantities of oar (at great energy expense), extract from that large quantity a small amount of concentrated stuff (again at a huge expense in energy), then process it so it is of just the right quality for fission.
Today’s primitive pre model T reactors need 8.9 kg of u3o8 to produce 360,000 kWh of electricity, .025 gm/kWh. If the ore concentration is 1:1,000 that would be 25 gms ore / kWh.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
Uranium costs about $115 / kg, so the uranium cost / kWh is 0.03 cents / kWh. If you are correct that it takes “huge expense in energy” to mine uranium, how do they make money selling uranium so cheap? How do they make money selling other minerals, like coal, so cheap?
Breeder reactors will need 100 times less uranium.
And no other alternative to coal creates wastes that must be safely stored for ever.
Earth is about 5 billion years old and will probably exist another 3-6 billion years. Spent fuel becomes less radioactive than ore in about on fourth of one thousandth of one billion years. But spent fuel contains unfissioned heavy atoms with enormous energy potential, so it should not be buried, it should be saved to fuel advanced, post model T reactors.
Fission products become less radioactive than uranium ore in one third of one onethousandth of one onethousandth of one billion years. Converting uranium into fission products will make earth less radioactive than it would have been if man never evolved, for the vast majority of its remaining years.
Look, you are obviously a true believer and I am not going to, nor do I intend to. "convert" you. But stats usually tell the truth, and claims that nukes have low eroei and that waste is toxic forever are among the most manipulated stats around (Just kidding, there are no stats to back those claims up).
Too bad fission breeders don't work so good.
Try fusion, which has far less radioactivity than products of fission from breeders. 58500 tons of water(125ft x 125ft x 125ft) contains 1 ton of deuterium, enough to power the entire US grid for 5 days. 58500 tons of water contain 0.176 tons of uranium which in a breeder reactor is enough energy to power the US grid for 3 hours.
Forget about those silly junk breeders.
To infinity, and beyond.
Even your 300 years is a long time for a country that's only been around less than that.
I'm not anti-nuke, but I certainly don't see nuke power as a panacea. Nor wind and solar either, but solar I can put on my house, and I promise I won't complain when it's dark and my power goes out and the grid has failed. I'm not sure I'd park your Model T nuke in my garage.
Even your 300 years is a long time for a country that's only been around less than that.
If the country goes belly up who will protect the world from all the uranium, beryllium, arsenic, lead and cadmium in the earths crust?
If all our electricity came from fission we would produce 6 ounces per lifetime. Just bury it under the seabed.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
If the country goes belly up who will protect the world from all the uranium, beryllium, arsenic, lead and cadmium in the earths crust?
*bends over*
*pulls weed grass seed head out*
*sticks sweet white end in mouth and begins chewing*
Seems Mother Nature has been protecting the people on the surface pretty well by keeping that stuff in the crust for years.
Long before ideas of country.
*walks up close, begins chest poking*
You the kind of man who'd be dissing Mother?
Just a comment on the uranium cost.
The cost today is influenced by military sources. Yes there are mines that still survive, so roughly
they make a profit at the best locations at that price. But I am not sure that the price would be as
low without the military sources. Could become significantly higher, and would then reflect more of a
"true cost" for average locations.
Do you mean 0.03 CENTS per kWh or isnt that a typo and you mean 0.03 DOLLAR per kWh? Otherwise I misunderstood your data.
Cheers.
Do you mean 0.03 CENTS per kWh or isnt that a typo and you mean 0.03 DOLLAR per kWh? Otherwise I misunderstood your data.
Thanks for the correction. 8.9 kg U3O8 produces 360,000 kWh. So at $115/kg uranium cost is 0.284 cents/kWh.
The U.S. is consuming a lot of weapons sourced uranium, but uranium is a world market and weapons account for a small fraction of world supply.
My first choice for the next generation reactor is the simplest molten salt reactor, often called the denatured MSR. It is not a breeder but requires only 1/5 the uranium per kWh as today’s reactors.
http://www.google.com/search?q=denatured+MSR+leblanc&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&a...
When you build any type of power plant you need
to have backup facilities as none of them operate
100% of the time (maintenance...)
I work on and in nuclear power plants. They have an availability of 85-90%. Compare that to your windmills at less than 35% and solar,50% at best.
It takes nukes well over a decade of operations to reach that level, and some never do.
The cost per MW of new wind is MUCH less than for new US nukes.
The ONLY new nukes that appear to be going forward, Georgia Power, require the rate payers of Georgia to pay for them as they are being built PLUS MASSIVE Gov't subsidies (what wind gets per kWh and MUCH more besides).
I support those massive subsidies for new nukes, but realize that new nukes are the much slower, secondary, clean-up. fill-in-the-gaps solution to Wind + Solar + Pumped Storage (high % nukes need pumped storage too).
Best Hopes for a Rush to Wind and a slow, economic build-out of new nukes,
Alan
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nuclearpower.html
Do you really think that lessons of the past 50 years in the nuclear generation business will be forgotten if we build one new one?
I work in them and coal fired plants and the maintenance downtime comparable, if not less.
Do you really think that lessons of the past 50 years in the nuclear generation business will be forgotten if we build one new one?
The lessons of crooked contractors, cost overruns and failure of things like sleeping guards will not be forgotten and continue to be embraced.
Build 9 GW of nuclear capacity and they will not all shutdown at once when a big high pressure dome moves in during a heat wave.
France did shut down about 9 GW of nukes in a heat wave a few years.
And they have been short of power recently becasue of issues with their nuke fleet.
And the French are diversifying beyond nukes. First a hydro building boom in 1960s and 1970s and now 5 GW of wind (to help with their winter peak) and more later. An EdF spokesperson noted that they could build wind much faster than more nukes (two under construction ATM).
Best Hopes for a Rush to Wind & Pumped Storage# and a slow economic build-out of nukes,
Alan
# Nukes need pumped storage too. But since you are against them that limits nukes as well.
" # Nukes need pumped storage too. But since you are against them that limits nukes as well. "
Actually I like pumped storage. My point is that there are not enough suitable locations to store a substantial fraction of our total consumption, it is a niche technology.
I hope some sort of affordable mass reproducible storage technology becomes practical. If it happens nuclear plants will make more effective use of it than intermittent energy sources will.
BH,
Speaking as a realist and a person reasonably well informed on environmental and energy matters, I think you are missing the PRIMARY point in respect to wind and solar power.
We're running out of gas and oil and coal too;every cubic meter, every gallon, every ton saved will keep the existing plants running a little longer before the lights go out.
In the end , we will be damn glad that all those wind farms produce at 35 % of name plate on average, and we will adapt to the intermittency of the power because that's easier than adapting to doing without.
Incidentally , I am all in favor of building new nukes and refurbing our old ones;we're going to need every kilowatt we can scrounge before too much longer as the price of oil and gas and coal continue to go up.
By the way, the existing ff plants and nukes kept the lights on in Texas, right?
And when the wind blows, Texas has more gas to sell rather than burn.
In the end,the existing plants, excepting the nukes, may prove to be all we need.
The oil industry quit building refineries a long time ago here in the US, citing various reasons which I never found convincing;the real reason is becoming increasingly obvious-nothing to refine in new refineries.
I stronly suspect we aren't going to have a hell of a lot to burn in new ff fired electrical generating plants within a few more years.
In the end , we will be damn glad that all those wind farms produce at 35 % of name plate on average, and we will adapt to the intermittency of the power because that's easier than adapting to doing without.
Mac, my contention is that the cost of adapting to intermittency is never accurately calculated. Everyone talks about how they can time shift doing the laundry or cooking, or AC, but home consumption of electricity accounts for only 1/3 of the electricity that supports our lives.
What happens at the oil refinery, aluminum smelter, Solar silicon chip factory, windmill glass factory, pharmaceutical factory etc when the voltage and frequency is no longer reliable? Intermittent unreliable undispatchable kWh's are worth a small fraction of what reliable dispatchable kWh's are worth, but we pay more for them with feed in tariffs and mandates.
In the end, the existing plants, excepting the nukes, may prove to be all we need.
The average age of a U.S. coal plant is 42 years. In the end, existing plants will not exist.
In 1875 cars were rare, expensive, impractical toys of the super rich. If someone predicted that cars would become the primary means of transportation for average citizens they would have been resoundly ridiculed.
Our energy policy and money should be focused on one goal. Develop a clean safe reliable source of energy that is cheaper than burning coal. Spending huge amounts of money reproducing expensive intermittent energy systems is a waste of money.
We have yet to design the Model T of nuclear power plants.
"oil refinery, aluminum smelter, Solar silicon chip factory, windmill glass factory, pharmaceutical factory"
All perfect examples of processes that don't have to be running 24/7/365. We can predict fairly well out a week to 10 days when and where and how much the wind will be blowing. Plenty of time to plan production...
And of course we will/already are doing much less oil refining and aluminum smelting.
These may be capable of throttling back production and power requirements, but generally serious damage would ensue if you turn them completely off. Many industrial plants have MOL (minimum operating levels) below which expensive repairs -or lost batches of product would ensue. So we need a mix of guaranteed baseline power, and of one or more grades of interruptable power. The more interruptable the power, the cheaper its market price.
Thanks for the correction. I should have said that they don't have to be running at full throttle all the time.
In my estimation the cost of running out of fuel at less than astronomical prices is also severely underestimated.
I realize lots of plants are old and will need to be rebuilt, either totally or peicemeal, a boiler and a turbine and a generator at a time.
What I meant was that given peak fossil fuels,combined with the effects of conservation,plus what may turn out to be permanently crippled up economy, there may well NO NEED to build ADDITIONAL plants.
You make a good point about intermittent power and critical industrial production, but such industries can perhaps be givn preference when allocating the remaining coal and ng fired juice.
So far as I can see nukes, wind, and solar are our only real options for getting away from oil, ng, and coal.ust what your point is about nukes and model t's I'm no sure, pro or con.Tidal , geothermal,and a few other technologies may become significant niche players.
Biofuels are the broad smooth highway to hell the preachers like to talk about-nonstarters (except for niche applications) except at the price of the destruction of what remains of the environment.
Certainly we need a good standardized fleet of nukes to lower the costs of construction, maintainence, and training.
I believe we can have such a standardized fleet in the next round of building if the people with common sense managerial attitudes prevail in th dogfights with the egotistical engineers and construction companies, each determined to go its own way;ditto the regulators who seem unable to make up thier minds what is and is not a good design;midsrteam change orders are budget and schedule killers.
Nobody has commented on the link to the paper about peak coal yet.
Let's run something up the flagpole: Why couldn't we have the U.S. Navy own, operate, and contract for 45 nuclear plants? We could build 45 plants, all the same. With the economy of scale, 45 plants would seem more efficient, and I would be comforted with the Navy running the plants. What say ye Farmer? I sure hope this doesn't make me a communist. I'm a republican. Don't tell the big easy. Steve.
Pardon my cornucopian knee-capper here, but what do you mean by "We" kimosabie?
There's you.
And then there is me.
Which of us is going to be designing and building this "clean, safe, reliable source of [neutron bombardment based, form of] energy?
Have you been hiding from us the formulation for the magic metal that does not become brittle and broken when exposed to persistent neutron bombardment? Have you been hiding from us the formulation for clean, safe, and economic waste disposal?
Boy are "we" stupid --and by that I mean all the rest of us/ "we"/ us / "we"/ (? it gets confusing when "we" don't know who us is) who haven't figured out some 65 years after Big Boy detonated how to do it.
Which of us is going to be designing and building this "clean, safe, reliable source of [neutron bombardment based, form of] energy?
The way things are going now it will probably be India, China, Russia or South Korea. U.S. children recently placed 20 something in math and science. What a shame.
Have you been hiding from us the formulation for the magic metal that does not become brittle and broken when exposed to persistent neutron bombardment? Have you been hiding from us the formulation for clean, safe, and economic waste disposal?
No. neutron effects are well understood, as demonstrated by the existing reactor fleet. Waste was covered here.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
The military "reactor fleet" operates under a zero-liability, bottomless refurbishment money pit model with all procurements under top secret, you'll never know seal.
But how is that technophiliac hopey-changey thing working out for you on the land-based reactor "fleet"?
Word has it that those utilities are making money hand over fist and building new reactors like crazy every day because it's such a technically trivial, economic wonderlust story.
Russia? Are you serious? Does the word, Chernobyl not ring any bells?
Reports are that China is betting big on renewables and not on the neutron bombs away model.
You really ought to educate yourself a bit about commercial fission power, instead of making snide and ignorant comments. Try googling "nuclear power france", and consult reputable info from those who do it for their day job, such as http://www.world-nuclear.org .
Yep, Chernobyl rings a bell. Killed about 40 people directly, back in 1986. (Subsequent reductions of life span from fallout are uncertain.) Reactor did not even have a containment vessel and was intrinsically unstable. No such reactors are being built today.
Does Xingdong No.2 Mine, Henan ring any bells with you? It's a Chinese coal mine, in which 46 people died in a mining accident. Date: 21 June 2010.
May 14 2010, over 20 workers were killed in mine blast in Guizhou province.
2009 - 2631 killed altogether in China's coal mines.
2008, 3215 people were killed in China's coal mines.
Improvement on 2004 when 6027 died.
And yet, there's no screaming that Evil Coal Generation be immediately shut down. (Perhaps there ought to be.)
You have to admit, nuclear power dangers are hysterically overrated.
China is also betting big on both Gen3+ and Gen4 nuclear; the energy generated by nuclear will dwarf its wind turbine contributions.
Influence of radiation on material properties
http://books.google.com/books?id=H91TY989cugC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=neutro...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ductility#Nuclear_power_plant_reactor_press...
Step Back, there are many things that affect material properties, heat, cold, vibration, age, UV light, neutrons, protons, corrosive environments, the diffusion of impurities etc.
Good engineering selects and applies materials in such a way that they are always operating within their engineering limits throughout the life of the product. You have presented no evidence that this requirement is being violated in nuclear power plants.
1… How many accidents have been caused by neutron damage?
2…. How many people have died as a result of neutron induced material property changes?
3… How many people have died from the routine burning of fossil fuel?
You are grasping at a nonexistent straw to scare people against nuclear power. It is irresponsible and unethical.
__________________
Caption: Trust us. Them O-rings are within their engineering limits
Subcaption: That last bid is too high. Can't we find an engineering firm that will bid even lower? The market always delivers.
Project managers decided to operate the O rings outside their limits despite prior evidence of failure and against advice of engineers.
You have presented no evidence that material limits are being violated in nuclear power plants.
1… How many accidents have been caused by neutron damage?
2…. How many people have died as a result of neutron induced property changes?
Are you serious with that open-ended question?
Have you heard of DNA and how it can be turned cancerous with with addition of just a lill ole' bit of that ionizing radiation?
NRC finds apparent violations at 13 VA hospitals
COMANCHE PEAK NUCLEAR POWER PLANT - Multiple NRC Violations - Includes Inadequate Procedure
NRC finalizes ‘white' violation ...Friday, Aug. 13, 2010
... do you need a longer list? Google "NRC violations" for starters.
2…. How many people have died as a result of neutron induced material property changes?
You copied the question and never answered it. It looks like you are trying to change the subject.
How many people have died as a result of neutron induced material property changes?
Playing devil's advocate for a second, you could say that Chernobyl occurred because neutrons changed the material properties of the graphite to "on fire".
(This is my way of agreeing with you.)
You copied the question and never answered it. It looks like you are trying to change the subject.
I believe you were asked how close you have moved to Chernobyl given your feeling fission power is safe.
If you are gonna complain about others not answering questions - why do you feel you can not answer questions?
I'm not arguing with you that burning of coal and other "clean mean green carbon commodities" is bad.
Hint: You had me at 'hello' on that one
Did we forget to include "best offer by lowest bidder"?
The market always delivers.
You are grasping at a nonexistent straw to scare people against nuclear power.
I just asked another directly about their life in the 30 mile exclusion zone 'round Chernobyl.
Would you show us on Google Maps where you are now living in the 30 mile no-go zone 'round Chernobyl?
It is irresponsible and unethical.
VS what. Saying 'other people are trying to scare you' and yet you don't live by example and have your home in the 30 mile exclusion zone?
eric,
When I run into a person such as Mr. Hannahan,
one of the first thoughts that flash through my mind are:
I get the feeling that Mr. Hannahan has good intentions.
And that like all too many of us, he does not know the things that he knows not of.
And that his position is exactly like a position which a younger (and more naive) version of me probably clung to with 101% conviction.
It is only after having stumbled by chance across TheOilDrum (TOD) and across other pieces of information that my faith in the 'higher ups' (TPTB, the wizards of our Oz) was shaken
And only after that could I come to question whether our floating "reactor fleet" is not "being all that it could be"
And to question whether our land-based "reactor fleet" is not the epitome of what this, "the Greatest Country on Pandora ('s Box)" can do
And to blasphemously question the wisdom of The Invisible Hand
_________________________
(Maybe if I click my heels three times, they will magically return me to the blissful ignorance that used to be mine?)
Mr. Back - Mr. Hannahan provides good references for his information and has repeatedly backed up his statements with good sources for quite some time on TOD. I assure you, he does not suffer from 'a little bit of knowledge'. He has time and again taken the time to respond to emotional attacks against nuclear power with good information and good documentation. He has more patience than I. I feel that sometimes facts don't help much when the other party is essentially making a faith based, in some sense religious argument against nuclear power.
With our top heavy population and carbon emission problems nuclear power may be eventually turn out to be the straw that saved the camel's back re climate. A lot of coal has been displaced, a lot more will be. Have you any idea the misery potential of climate change? Ever tried to grow your own food at a scale that will support you for a year? I've experimented with it - have a few hundred pounds of potatoes in the ground, a buncha stuff canned - and know it is not viable for the majority or for every year. And that's in today's climate.
If we tip into an alternative stable state re climate, an immense amount of people will suffer and die (Some work coming out re what that state will look like, not pretty - drought here, extreme wet bulb temps there).
I think people like Bill are the most likely to save the necks of our descendants, actually.
I have no problem with Hannahan's support for nuke, or his mostly-reasoned responses to a host of varying comments. My issue with him is the notion that nukes somehow trump wind and/or solar. We need both, and tearing down wind does not build nukes.
Nukes have massive sociological, gov't regulation, and financing issues to take of, and wind helps buy that time. Unless the goal is to make things worse faster in order to raise the sense of urgency, stopping wind makes little sense.
A better grid will help nukes, too. They do go down for relatively long periods for maintenance today, and likely will for another generation or two (until they get small enough to spare a unit). By the time another generation or two get built, we could have many, many turbines installed.
Agreed there is yet a lot of room for wind to expand.
Agreed a better grid is in everybody's best interest.
My issue is with repeated anti civilian nuclear power appeals to emotion that play loose with the data. It ultimately benefits the coal lobby, but not the public.
I understand that there is a lot of distrust of the powers that be,that all industry has failures, and that people have a dream of another kind of life. Our population is utterly dependent on technology for food and power however. We need to change it to something sustainable is all.
I wish our public was better able to understand some of the detail. EG that there are many very different kinds of nuclear reactors. That Soviet RBMKS (Chernobyl)were a design optimized for the ability to produce plutonium if necessary for their military, and for the ability to run on unenriched fuel, at the expense of safety (void coefficient wrong - the design gained power as coolant disappeared). That there are many very different kinds of radiation, some of which are harmless. That intrinsic safe design can be bullet proof if you take the time to understand the physical principals involved.That fuel does not glow green. That nuclear power is not an evil bogeyman. Really. I could live with dry casks of spent fuel on my property. So many accepted risks are so much higher.
We need in our minds to separate military nuclear applications from legitimate civilian designs. I think that is a part of the problem.
My issue is with repeated anti civilian nuclear power appeals to emotion that play loose with the data
As opposed to the pro-nukers out right lies about nuclear power safety?
That there are many very different kinds of radiation, some of which are harmless.
And somehow I don't think anyone is talking about the harmless effects.
That intrinsic safe design can be bullet proof if you take the time to understand the physical principals involved.
Like the Canadian medical isotope reactor they designed to run with a negative feedback loop, but is has a positive one?
I could live with dry casks of spent fuel on my property.
I'll put the challenge to you that I put to others - how close are you living to Pripyat?
Nukes have massive sociological, gov't regulation, and financing issues to take of
Crooked contractors cutting corners to put more money in their own pockets, being targets for war/terror attacks, sleeping security guards, dumping the material from the nuclear power cycle on fields as 'fertilizer' - which class of 'issues' are these?
The terror attack is a documented reach with the 15 or so who attacked a nuclear facility in Africa - but all the others I have provided references in the past. How long will it be before people look at the promise of the Peaceful Atom and declare it a failure?
I think people like Bill are the most likely to save the necks of our descendants, actually.
I think people like Bill are the likely to destroy our descendants, actually.
They are the ones who killed the new nuke business in the USA. Bill Hannahan is the person responsible for why we do not have 320 nukes producing 45% of our power today in the USA. He, and his ilk, and not the evil environmentalists are the reason that TVA canceled 11 nukes in one day. Why five WHOOPS reactors were started and one finished. Why Zimmer was completed and never given an operating license.
Over promises, trying to build too many, too fast, overly aggressive and grandiose plans. Not understanding technology risks.
Bill Hannahan killed the nuke building industry once, I do NOT want him to do it again !
I have had several long debates with him and I think it is fair to say that I won.
My position is that DoE says we can build a maximum of 8 new nukes in a decade. Moribund supply chain, minimal experience left. DoE does not account for Murphy.
I would like to see 5 to 7 new nukes built in the USA by 2021 despite the MASSIVE subsidies required to do so. Two or three Gen 3 designs (EPR, AP-1000, ABWR, etc.) so we do not have all of our eggs in one basket (the risk of a common design flaws, it has happened several times with nukes). No one Model T, but a standardized Lincoln, a Chrysler and a Packard.
Meanwhile, push wind towards 40% of our generation, HV DC, pumped storage, some solar PV & thermal, geothermal, biomass, etc.
Of course, Bill would kill these on a promise of a dream, some idealized Gen 4 reactor, totally devoid of problems. Notice his attacks even on a nukes best friend, pumped storage !
Then build a dozen more nukes by 2029, and speed up from there. Build one prototype Gen 4 around 2026.
Best Hopes for Reality, and not dream, based planning,
Alan
Then try
That's a remarkably low number.
Contrast that with USA wind, which added 9.92GW, in 2009, on a "five-year average annual growth rate for the industry is now 39%, up from 32% between 2003 and 2008"
So, even if we relax that down to +30%, that gives:
2009 = +9.92GW
2010 = +12.89
2011 = +16.76
2012 = +21.79
2013 = +28.33
2014 = +36.839
2015 = +47.891
2016 = +62.259
2017 = +80.936
2018 = +105.21 Total 417.905GW
we are still 3 years short of 2021, and WAY ahead on the [+5-7 Nukes by 2021] added-GW yardstick, even with capacity-factors added. (and ignoring the area under the curve, from earlier-start-dates)
So, from a CO2 displaced balance, it is something of a no-contest ?
Indeed, sometime within the next decade, wind is going to need to transition from the 30+% growth, to a more capped 'replacement balance' number.
-ie there is little sense in over-ramping production, once it gets in the ballpark of 5-10% of annual consumption.
Storage is going to need to ramp inside that time-frame, and might be a better target for R&D dollars.
JG - don't forget to include natural gas burned to load balance the wind.
418 GW x .30 CF = 125 GW
NG used to balance 125 GW wind = a lot (as it now stands).
CO2 released = a lot.
CO2 released by 10 GW nuclear = very little.
solution = ramp up nuclear as if our life depended on it, as well as ramping up storage.
A little pumped storage will dramatically reduce the NG required.
And since nukes cannot load follow (not even in France), more nukes will still require lots of NG.
We can put lots of wind on-line next year. We cannot do even 25 GW of new nukes in 15 years.
If nuke is our only hope, then we have no hope.
Alan
Agreed.
The NG numbers quoted by Seagatherer, also presume New wind, needs New something else - which is not quite what happens.
What wind does immediately, is DISPLACE other generation, and right now, Coal by far dominates USA power.
In 2008, total MWh were slightly down on 2007, and the ramp in wind, translated directly into a FALL in Coal & Petroleum usage.
Wind most naturally displaces the most expensive alternatives first, so Petroleum is the first to fall, now ~1/3 of peak usage.
In 2008, the MWh of wind was ~4.17% of Nuclear, the run-rate right now (Mid2010), is already close to 10% (9.47%) of Nuclear. (this is 12 month MWh, not peaks, so already includes capacity factors), and the ramping rates are very significant, so wind could exceed Nuclear MWh inside a decade (based on current rates).
Of course, it is important Nuclear levels should not be allowed to decline too fast, and I can see some 17 of 104 listed USA reactors, with License Expiration Dates inside the next 10-12 years.
Please reread my post re my presumptions(its short).
Wind will need considerable fossil fuel load balancing due to its intermittent nature for quite some time. Better alternatives require a better grid.
Yes, you need load balancing, but wind is REMOVING fossil fuel usage, NOT adding it.
That's why the area under the curve matters, and note Wind is displacing the most expensive fossil fuels first.
In the last 12 months, Wind delivered 76,373 Thousand Megawatthours, which is a LOT of saved CO2 and $$, - given it displaced mainly Petroleum.
Agreed that wind will displace some fossil fuels, and appears on its face better than nothing. It is more complex than that though.
Consider the following:
1. In the absence of sufficient storage capacity and concomitant grid capacity to transfer said storage the highly intermittent nature of wind requires load balancing by, most often, gas fired peak generation. Due to the speed this gas fired peak generation must come on line, it is gas generation of a less efficient sort (ie not combined cycle gas).
2. Given a 30% CF for wind, and given (1.)above re grid and storage capacity, it follows that the less efficient, fast spooling capacity gas generators, which have a carbon impact approximately 1/2 that of coal, will be running a lot. Perhaps that gas would be of better use as a transportation fuel, displacing heavy crude or bitumin, and reducing carbon output per unit hauled.
3. Assuming a utility needs 1GW new generation. right now it looks like you can have wind with fast spooling gas,lets say with a carbon emission about equal to 1/3 that of 1 GW coal. Or a 90+% CF nuclear plant with a more efficient combined cycle gas generator for the planned outages every 18 months. Carbon emission less than 1/10 that of 1GW coal. And the gas can be used to drop the carbon intensity of transportation fuels as we work to electrify the transportation system. Remember also a reliable grid can be powered by a nuclear plant without the use of peak capacity gas so long as excess power is dumped - now no coal equivalent.
Everything is better with pumped storage, but will enough be installed?
I feel we have a time limit - if we do not address Winds storage issue, it may in some circumstances be worse than nothing, ie if exhuberance re wind delays good nuclear projects and we swing towards a point of no return.
1. With a geographically diverse wind generation, load following CCGT and coal plants balance wind. Wind requires almost no spinning reserve while nukes require massive quantities of spinning reserve. Not all nuke outages are planned. The carbon emissions for spinning reserve to support nukes is not mentioned by supporters.
Load following before wind reacted to one fairly predictable variable, demand. Now it will need to respond to two fairly predictable variables, demand and wind. More variability, but doable IMO.
Note: Wind in some areas (Great Plains) is not that variable but more variable in other areas.
2. 35% to 38% CF is closer for new wind.
3. Utility needs for new capacity are for less than 1.2 GW (AP-1000). Ideally new nukes will simply allow old coal plants to be scrapped and total US demand will drop.
As for the political issues, I will likely be working closely with the national staff member in charge of Climate Change at a "well known environmental group". Most of my work will be expanding the model we used here
http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/resources/elibrary/papers/Transportat...
to incorporate other strategies. I will mention my views on the need to develop the capacity to build nukes by building a handful. They have read my work and discussed details in other areas enough to trust me.
Best Hopes,
Alan
There is MUCH that can be done on the demand side for all FF. A generally ignored priority that can implemented within the same time frame or less.
Alan
Agreed.
Wind will need considerable fossil fuel load balancing due to its intermittent nature for quite some time.
Or one can vary the demand.
Various processes can be started and stopped without much effect.
Freight trains moving dried goods and pumping air into compost piles/lakes are a couple of simple examples.
Pumped storage will greatly benefit wind and allow nuclear power to displace more carbon. It needs to be ramped up as soon as possible.
"And since nukes cannot load follow (not even in France), more nukes will still require lots of NG."
What makes you think that a nuclear heated plant can't adjust it's load? Remember that the only difference between a nuclear plant and a coal fired plant is the source of heat. Of course the turbines in nuclear plants have governors and throttle valves. How else would you keep them from overspeed? They run at full capacity because they are the cheapest source. So you cut your peak down at the gas turbines, then the combined cycles, then the coal, and last the nukes. Do you really think they should shut down the cheapest first?
You know Alan it is very hard to ave a discussion with people who have a reverse thought process. You are determined that your pie in the sky crap is best and you work back from there. Facts be damned. You are convinced hat a whole group of impractical ideas are the solution so you can't see the forest for the trees.
If we are going to reduce the oil and gas consumption of this country it will require more than Mother Earth News fantasies and rearranging energy like your pumped BS. We need to get serious and save a LOT of oil and we need to do it NOW. Nuclear energy is the only significant opponent of fossil fuels. Why can't you see that?
Nuclear fission creates fission byproducts, most of which are radioactive. Many of these isotopes have half-lives in hours and days and they produce heat as they decay. Once created, they will continue to make heat. They cannot be throttled or stopped.
Also, metal expands and contracts as it heats and cools. This can create fatigue in the metal at the temperatures of nukes. Temperature cycling ages a reactor and will shorten it's life.
And in service nukes were simply not designed for load following and partial load operation. I am not sure that I want a nuke operated in a way for which it was not designed.
It is hard to have a discussion with people like you that did not form their opinions from facts but from their emotions.
Simple question. You state:
We need to get serious and save a LOT of oil and we need to do it NOW.
How will more nukes reduce oil consumption ?
And everyone agrees more new US nukes cannot be operational now, or by 2015. So what is your definition of "NOW" ?
In 2006, 1.6% of all the oil consumed in the US was for generating electricity. Mainly Hawaii, Puerto Rico and some peaking. Due to required evacuation plans, nukes cannot be built on islands. So what oil will be saved by nukes ?
OTOH, I have practical ideas based on mature technology that will displace 5 million or so barrels/day of oil.
Alan
"Nuclear fission creates fission byproducts, most of which are radioactive. Many of these isotopes have half-lives in hours and days and they produce heat as they decay. Once created, they will continue to make heat. They cannot be throttled or stopped."
If their half lives are in hours or days then they are used up in that time. They make their second hand contribution as designed. What's wrong with that?
"Also, metal expands and contracts as it heats and cools. This can create fatigue in the metal at the temperatures of nukes. Temperature cycling ages a reactor and will shorten it's life."
According to you a nuke cannot be throttled so it must heat up and cool down once every two years or so for it's scheduled outage for refueling. And while it's down for that, I will not call names, but the one I go to on the first of Sept. will also get the high pressure turbine, the stop and throttle vales and feed pump turbines "IRANed";ie: ( inspect and repair as necessary) . Since according to you it cannot vary load it will be hot for the next two years.
And in service nukes were simply not designed for load following and partial load operation. I am not sure that I want a nuke operated in a way for which it was not designed.
"It is hard to have a discussion with people like you that did not form their opinions from facts but from their emotions."
Yeah, I think I said that.
"Simple question. You state:
"We need to get serious and save a LOT of oil and we need to do it NOW.
How will more nukes reduce oil consumption ?""
Maybe I should have emphasized "save" instead of "lot". Your "pumped storage is just rearranging the furniture. Wind turbines, if the energy to manufacture and maintain them is considered, are probably a looser like corn ethanol.
Anything that reduces hydrocarbon consumption saves oil. If reducing natural gas generation makes a surplus of natural gas, then it will be more attractive to transportation and other oil consumers.
"And everyone agrees more new US nukes cannot be operational now, or by 2015. So what is your definition of "NOW" ?"
Easy. It means ASAP. And it does NOT mean compromising the safety culture that has prevented a Chernobyl in this country.The nuclear industry has , even if it required a red hot poker at their butts, shown that this safety culture can and does work. This is a milestone in modern industrial thought and must be the hallmark of all industry, not just the nuke culture, because when you are dead or injured it does not matter how or where. We have proven that this culture can work in nuclear power plants and it can work anywhere, even on deep water oil drilling rigs. This is what appalls me the most about the Deepwater Horizon incident. It did not have to happen. While we will see that it was caused by a series of actions and omissions, we will see that at any point it could have been stopped and prevented. All it would have taken is one man who did not have to fear for his job speaking out.
"In 2006, 1.6% of all the oil consumed in the US was for generating electricity. Mainly Hawaii, Puerto Rico and some peaking. Due to required evacuation plans, nukes cannot be built on islands. So what oil will be saved by nukes ?"
These might be a perfect scenario for coal fired generation. I would not put a nuke in Puerto Rico where terrorist abound but of I would be infavor of cutting the whole deal loose and on their own. Hawaii would be perfect for coal. Limited demand would insure that the emission problem would be limited and the cost of caol and marine transport would make continued habitation practical
OTOH, I have practical ideas based on mature technology that will displace 5 million or so barrels/day of oil.
We are waiting.
Anything that reduces hydrocarbon consumption saves oil.
Not to any significant degree.
New nuclear power plants will, thankfully, almost entirely supplant coal fired base load plants. Nuclear power, since it cannot load follow, is base load power. The only natural gas fired base load left that I am aware of is in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana (possibly California) and it is a minor share of base load there.
Since steam locomotives are passe', and NOT coming back, there is no economic and environmentally acceptable way to transform the reduced coal use from new nukes into transportation with our current system. We will just have to leave the coal in the ground, under those mountain tops :-)
The reason to support more nukes is to reduce carbon (and mercury) emissions. That is the *ONLY* valid reason to build more nukes. That is the ONLY reason I support MASSIVE subsidies to build at least a handful of new nukes by 2021.
New Nukes in the USA are simply *NOT*, repeat *NOT* economic ! New nukes get, as a start, the same subsidies as wind. And then they get much, much, much more subsidies (I have posted the list before). Despite this, the only two new nukes recently announced, are at Georgia Power. And the Southern Company (owner of GA Power) will only build them because Georgia rate payers will pay for them as they are being built ! (Plus federal cost overrun guaranties, federal loans, federal subsidies for licensing, federal insurance, etc.)
New nukes will save almost no oil, directly or indirectly. Using those nuke federal subsidies to build more subways and light rail lines instead will save MANY more barrels of oil.
So the ONLY reason to build more nukes is for environmental reasons :-) Those "Greeniacs" you despise are the only valid supporters for more nukes.
Corn ethanol has an Energy Return on Energy Invested of less than 2. Wind turbines are between 20 and 40. Quite a few posts here on TOD about ERoEI. So your uneducated guess that wind was as bad as ethanol was just plain wrong. Wind is one of the best energy investments.
BTW, I said that nukes could not load follow. I did not say that nukes could not vary in output. Load Following is being 100% generation at peak (say 3 PM or 6 PM, depending on the time of year) and at 25% at 3 AM with half hourly adjustments throughout the day.
Now France shuts some nukes down in the Spring and Fall, for months at a time (Ontario once did too) becasue the demand is just not there then. But the French continue using their hydro (10% of French generation), pumped storage (17 GW available !), coal and natural gas plants to load follow in the Spring and Fall as the nukes sit cold. And since France is a winter peaking demand, they are adding 5 GW of wind (also winter peaking generation) and much more to come.
In context, France has 63 GW of nukes. The pumped storage is to store surplus nuke power (EdF sells it almost for free on the wholesale market at 3 AM) for resale at peak. As I noted earlier, pumped storage is a nuke's best friend (but also wind's best friend).
Best Hopes for learning something on TOD,
Alan
That is why I see a secondary and later role for new nuclear, although generation in 2040 or 2045 may see more nuke MWh than wind MWh.
Alan
That's a long way off, in price-curve terms.
Besides wind, the other source, (just a few years behind wind in GW terms), that has a steep price curve, is Solar PV (and to a lesser extend Solar Thermal)
One example: - claims of 76c/watt, (factory cost)
http://www.pv-tech.org/images/uploads/first_solar/FSLR_costperwatt_2q10_...
and even here, Sunpower are claiming ~25% declines in expected $/watt, from 2009-2011
http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=498134
(as a reference point, Solar Inverters are ~40c/Watt, and falling more slowly)
These guys are claiming grid-parity is already here (which may be a little creative, but the price-curves are fundamental, they say 'when', not 'if')
http://thephoenixsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Solar-Nuclear-costs.gif
All of this means, the simple dollars may make the decision for us.
Giga-Watt PV factories, are now common place.
Sunpower mention a 1,4GW Malaysia facility, and FirstSolar predict they will break 2GW/yr over 4 Fab locations.
The other important detail re PV factory 'nameplate' values, is that output is added to the installed base, EVERY year.
A good reply - I do not agree with it but you may have a part of the picture. The causation to the stagnation of our nuclear industry has some decidedly odd elements to it, there are facts left out of the books. I am sure the original industry supporters), while overoptimistic re some things, construction schedules, costs and such, did not stray far from what is real in a science or engineering sense when presenting their case. They didn't think they had to.
The decline of nuclear power in the US has much to do, in my estimation, with the vulnerability of industry supporters to industry opponents for whom a goal was more important than careful consideration of data. More important than truth in fact. The engineering and science types didn't adapt well to that, or to the politics of manipulation of the public.
TVA canceled 11 nukes in one day. If these had been completed (one was, about 25 years later, a second will be), US nuke generation would have been about 13% higher than it is. I think they also stopped repairs on burned out Browns Ferry 1 on that day.
According to the Chairman of the Board of TVA, it was a strictly a business case. MASSIVE cost overruns and multi-year delays were too much. Scrapping partially completed reactors and paying penalty clauses was cheaper than finishing them.
Other utility execs said Zimmer had as much negative impact as TMI on them. Massive cost over-runs, multi-year delays and then a 99% complete reactor was NOT given an operating permit because of low quality construction.
When the never completed and early retired reactors (Trojan, Ft. St. Vrain, etc.) are included, nuclear power is quite expensive.
None the less, we need to start building a few soon. And show that they can be built not more than 25% over budget and not more than a year late.
Best Hopes for New Nukes,
Alan
Yes - bureaucratic inefficiency, government and legal system dysfunction were very prominent re inflating construction costs in my opinion. The plants that were finished went on to be and are profitable and important assets, almost in spite of the government environment within which they were built.
Alan much of what you write I agree with and appreciate. You illustrate and focus on what is possible - the perspective is enlightening at times and appreciated. I am not optimistic though re worldwide carbon emissions - I think expedited development of modular, factory assembled nuclear power which can be exported and can eg serve as drop in replacements of coal boilers is of vital importance both to support our people and give us the best shot at averting a shift to an alternative stable state in our climate. A fast development and build out may be possible, if government policy supports it. I really feel time is our enemy here.
You overlook the greatest villain in the failure of the US nuke building industry, the US nuke building industry.
A shortage of experienced managers, engineers and craftsmen lead to all sorts of problems, cost overruns and delays.
One example. After the fire and near disaster at Browns Ferry 1 (VERY close to total loss of control of a reactor), an audit of all nukes was ordered by the NRC to look for redundant, independent control wires all run in the same conduit & bad firestops. From old memory, operating nukes has relatively few problems but quite a few under construction nukes did and had to be rewired.
Also a concrete pour, no tests run, lots of stuff built on concrete, audit shows no tests run. Tests show bad concrete. Tear it all out. Or bad design creates impossible or unsafe combination of systems (wires are not supposed to be in areas affected by steam leaks, too many wires for size conduit run, etc.) and more tear out. Bad storage and handling of materials (acceptable for FF, not for nukes). And on and on.
Palo Verde was the last major nuke started. They had the pick of people coming off other nukes. No supply shortages since industry was winding down. Built with no problems, almost on budget and on-time. People make a difference.
Due to lower pressures and temperatures of nuke steam vs. coal steam, drop-in will not work. All nukes I know of are 4 pole generators (lower rpms in steam turbine) and coal is 2 pole.
Conservation and wind are the two big "quick solutions" and nukes should be mop-up.
Best Hopes for a Rush to Wind and a slow, economic and safe build-out of nukes,
Alan
Off topic, but worthy of note, this story in today's NYTimes:
Nuclear Plant’s Use of River Water Prompts $1.1 Billion Debate With State
Yes - bureaucratic inefficiency, government and legal system dysfunction were very prominent re inflating construction costs in my opinion
Crooked contractors had nothing to do with it eh?
Sir Seagatherer,
I have no doubt that Hannahan has references for his version of the total truth.
I have little doubt that he is well intentioned.
I would love it if his version of the total truth were totally true.
Alas it is not.
The history of the nuclear power industry in the USA and Russia leaves much to worry about.
First and foremost, nuclear power plants are large, complex, expensive structures with high operating costs and tight profit margins.
The temptations to cut corners and take risks is high.
Human nature being what it is, we are all corruptible and corruption eventually finds a way to snake into the system just like corrosive chemicals find a way to leach in through whatever seals and overcoatings we throw in their path.
As the number of nuke plants goes up, so does the probability of catastrophic failure; no matter what we do. Government is finite and cannot diligently oversee them all. By catastrophic failure, I do not mean a mushroom cloud. I mean that we cannot afford anymore Chernobyls. You can be very glib if it is not your relatives dying from thyroid cancer, if it is not your house sitting in green glow territory.
Ours is a small and finite blue pebble in the inhospitable vastness of space. We're not going to be getting second chances after f***ing it up the first time.
There is no game reset button.
The 4 major gas pipelines I've worked on each killed someone. It is an accepted risk in the fossil fuel industry. I saw one of them. Another time I saw a blasting accident during pipeline construction - a hoe hit a nitrogelatin cartridge with the detonator in it while clearing shot rock(the blasters didn't want to use det cord for some reason). The victim was blinded & had the skin on his face peeled back by rock dust. He lived. I worked demo at a nuclear plant once - a larger project than any of the pipelines - nobody killed. I've done other nuclear work - nobody killed. There was an extraordinary difference between the safety culture of the two environments.
I have lost several family members to cancers - cigarettes, sunlight,PAH's from fossil fuels, nitrosamines from food, and perhaps dioxins from the local paper mill are largely responsible. (Lung, colon, skin & kidney cancers).
Now, to extend my personal experience a bit -
Epidemiologically very little thyroid cancer worldwide can be attributed to civilian nuclear power. Easy to Google this, not hard to get the info.
Statistically civilian nuclear power has been shown to be far safer than coal or even eg wind power. It is safer than oil or gas - (eg oil rigs are far, far more dangerous than nuclear plants for the workers).Mr. Hannahan's past posts provide documentatation, as do a couple of mine, as do, amply and recently, Atomicrod's.
Every single industry may suffer catastrophic failure. Consequences differ though. Compare the total worldwide death toll from civilian nuclear power with any other power source of consequence. It is trivial to show that it has indeed saved a very many lives via displacement of coal. The civilian nuclear power safety culture in the US is superb. It has been that way for a long time & as it evolves it appears to be getting more effective if anything.
You are right,we cannot afford to make bad choices at this time - the stakes are very high.
Two wrongs make a right.
That's your basic argument.
When one steps back and reviews your arguments from bird's eye height, it boils down to this:
Yeah, nukes are bad, but they are no more bad than any other industry.
That argument does make anyone forget that spent nuke fuel rods remain radioactive for 10,000 years and that Yucca Mountain is empty.
In other words, despite all the chest pounding talk about energy too cheap to meter and how those brilliant scientists will surely solve the spent fuel problem, none of that has happened. On the other hand, the anti-nukers predicted an eventual Chernobyl and that did happen. The civilian nuclear power safety culture in the US is superb only so long as the politicians in power fully fund and support the NRC. All you need is a string of "free marketers" and "get government out of my way" nuts in the White House and we will have our own Chernobyl or two right here in 3rd World USA. Add to the that the idea that any amateur terrorist wanna-be who wants to carve his name into the history books might do the insane thing (dirty bomb in Times Square) and you get an awful lot to be rationally worried about.
Once again, no one is debating with you the notion that "clean coal cream" is horrible too and unleashes radioactive materials into the air, and poisons, etc. One bad does not make the other bad a good.
All you need is a string of "free marketers" and "get government out of my way" nuts in the White House and we will have our own Chernobyl or two right here in 3rd World USA. We've already had that string - an American Chernobyl hasn't happened because our technology is very different and intrinsically much safer, and our safety culture persisted.
Add to the that the idea that any amateur terrorist wanna-be who wants to carve his name into the history books might do the insane thing (dirty bomb in Times Square) and you get an awful lot to be rationally worried about. proliferation is the issue - many sources of radioactive material are much more accessible than material from the civilian fuel cycle, thus that is where it will come from if it happens.
Yeah, nukes are bad, but they are no more bad than any other industry. No civilian nuclear power isn't bad. It is the best way to ameliorate, in a manner timely enough to make any sort of sense, the extraordinary risk created by our collective decision to support ourselves by converting our planet's fossil fuels to CO2.
That said - there is no easy answer. I believe PV panels will be an important technology in rural areas like my own as they are dropping in price, are long lived, have low carbon impact and don't rely on the existence of a grid. Wind will continue to expand up to a point, after which it will be increasingly problematic.
, and our safety culture persisted.
Would that be the safety culture of sleeping security guards?
The guards no one in the industry did anything about until, after months of reporting internally, videos were posted to Youtube - those 'safety guards'?
Would that be the leaks of tritium for years - noted by staffers from the sinkholes on the property - that 'attention to safety'?
Would that ..... (goes on for pages)
Epidemiologically very little thyroid cancer worldwide can be attributed to civilian nuclear power
LEt me guess - its just Communism that does this, not civilian nuclear power?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCdKYsU3JdY
civilian nuclear power has been shown to be far safer than coal or even eg wind power.
So far the only non-fission power industrial accident that is making a large area a no-go for biological life is BP's oil leak into the gulf.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52552
Every nuke plant is a many thousand mile exclusion zone waiting to happen.
(The desertification, the dead zones from ag runoff, mass dieoff of natives from ag are being excluded Inclusion of them supports the 'do nothing' arguments that are posted on TOD)
" its just Communism that does this, not civilian nuclear power? "
Are you saying there were no sick children before nuclear power, or no sick children before Chernobyl?
" Every nuke plant is a many thousand mile exclusion zone waiting to happen. "
The Chernobyl reactor had two major design flaws. 1… A positive coolant void coefficient of reactivity that made it possible for the reactor to go quickly to a power level 100 times rated power. 2… No containment building.
Industry journals noted these deficiencies before the Chernobyl reactor was built, and raised the possibility of a large scale release. That was the basis of the antinuclear predictions.
1… Link to industry journal articles explaining how next generation reactors can eject 1/3 of their core into the atmosphere.
2… Provide the step by step sequence of events by which a next generation nuclear power plant can eject 1/3 of its core into the atmosphere.
" First and foremost, nuclear power plants are large, complex, expensive structures with high operating costs and tight profit margins. "
Wrong! Capital costs for hand built pre Model T reactors are high, but once capital costs are paid off (typically 15-20 years) they become cash cows. the total Operation & Maintenance cost is very low.
Nuclear 2.1 cents per kWh.
Coal 3.6 cents per kWh.
Gas 7.0 cents per kWh.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html
Most U.S. plant licences have already been extended to 60 years, so they will pay for themselves many times over. By the way, notice that the nuclear plants spend about twice as much on maintenance as fossil plants to maintain their high standards.
" By catastrophic failure, I do not mean a mushroom cloud. I mean that we cannot afford anymore Chernobyls…"
The Chernobyl reactor had two major design flaws. 1… A positive coolant void coefficient of reactivity that made it possible for the reactor to go quickly to a power level 100 times rated power. 2… No containment building.
Industry journals noted these deficiencies before the Chernobyl reactor was built, and raised the possibility of a large scale release. That was the basis of the antinuclear predictions.
1… Link to industry journal articles explaining how next generation reactors can eject 1/3 of their core into the atmosphere.
2… Provide the step by step sequence of events by which a next generation nuclear power plant can eject 1/3 of its core into the atmosphere.
.. of COURSE there's screaming that Coal-based Generation must be shut down.
Wild Boars in Germany are showing up with high radiation that is directly attributed to Chernobyl, the resulting cancers and defects from that accident are going to be coming in for generations, which is the problem with Fission. "Oh, but that was just a poor design!" , "That was just a fluke" ..
The health effects of fission's crap-piles is going to be a malingering nightmare for centuries.
Chernobyl rings a bell. Killed about 40 people directly, back in 1986.
And I remember the pro-nuke pimping crowd here on TOD saying there were no deaths.
Now who's fibbing?
No such reactors are being built today.
And yet - governments and industries not telling the truth happened back then (and at Three Mile Island) and happen today:
http://www.truth-out.org/out-sight-out-mind-even-when-its-not-out-sight6...
Somehow, in the Fission powered world you envision, are governments and plant operators honest and tell the effected populations the truth to what is going on? How do you manage such a feat?
You have to admit, nuclear power dangers are hysterically overrated.
Say, who's your internet provider in that 30 mile no-go zone around Chernobyl?
As the danger is overrated - you must control vast tracts of land 'round there, living where the scared, superstitious people fled the bogey-man of nuclear power danger.
I'd hate to think you aren't living what you are preaching.
Oh and in your next missive from the 30 mile zone - do explain why the Russian Government felt it was necessary to conceal the events of Chernobyl if the event was 'hysterically overrated'.
Brilliant long-distance mind-reading there eric. You deduce thoughts, actions, utterances, motives, suspicions and airy-fairy nothingness that I'm completely unaware of myself.
Of course there was cover-up. That was the Soviet government's normal modus operandi. Using it to diss commercial fission power is simply a red herring.
I stand by my statement that nuclear power dangers are hysterically overrated. Your using the Chernobyl disaster to attempt to refute this is simply a rhetorical device. Take the statement "commercial air travel is the safest method of transport that exists today". You could "refute" this in the same way by saying "look at Lockerbie in 1989! 270 dead! Look at Tenerife in 1977. 583 dead! Air travel is EVIL!!!"
[edited twice]
Of course there was cover-up. That was the Soviet government's normal modus operandi.
Right - because outside of the Soviet Union there are no coverups.
Shell Thornton, Maralinga in Australia, Sellafield, even the reports of 'no problems' at Three Mile island - so not to 'panic' anyone....yup - covering up is JUST the modus operandi of the Soviet Government.
I stand by my statement that nuclear power dangers are hysterically overrated.
So then when did you move to Pripyat - ya know, as a way to show you live your life in public defiance to the 'chicken little’s'?
Sorry eric, the statistics on commercial nuclear power fatalities versus fatalities from other sources don't support you.
You don't refute arguments with cheap rhetoric, but with facts and logic.
But how is that technophiliac hopey-changey thing working out for you on the land-based reactor "fleet"?
Very well, thank you. Over half the U.S. reactor fleet has already received license extensions to 60 years. They may eventually go to 80 years. So what is this terrible problem with neutrons? Technical references please.
Russia? Are you serious? Does the word, Chernobyl not ring any bells?
Yes. My first choice would be for the U.S. to take the lead in R&D. Russia has a fast breeder reactor that has run well for several years and they are building a second generation breeder. They are also building floating nuclear plants.
Reports are that China is betting big on renewables and not on the neutron bombs away model.
Read more reports. “China, the world’s second-biggest energy user, approved the construction of 28 more nuclear power reactors under a revised target for 2020 to meet rising demand for clean energy and accelerate development of the industry.
Each of the one-gigawatt reactors will cost as much as 14 billion yuan ($2.1 billion)…
Under the original plan announced in 2005, China was to spend 400 billion yuan to add 40 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2020 to help reduce reliance on more polluting coal and oil. The capacity will exceed 70 gigawatts by then under the revised plan,”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-23/china-to-build-28-more-nucle...
Mac, my contention is that the cost of adapting to intermittency is never accurately calculated.
How about you go one better than contention and SHOW the accurate cost?
We have yet to design the Model T of nuclear power plants.
By model T you mean a comparison to the Ford Model T?
A machine that broke down quite often and is often photographed being stuck in the mud?
So nice you advocate a model of reactors that break down often - but are sold to owners who are willing to tinker with and fix them.
Our energy policy and money should be focused on one goal. Develop a clean safe reliable source of energy that is cheaper than burning coal.
Yea. It was tried. Turns out "The Peaceful Atom" isn't working. Same with "electrical power too cheap to meter".
Fission power had years to "get it right" and instead they bring us sleeping security guards as an example of their ability to manage the plants.
What happens at the ... windmill glass factory
Oh, I don't know.....they make windmills outta glass in your world?
By model T you mean a comparison to the Ford Model T?
Right. The Model T was more reliable, easier to maintain and far more affordable than previous hand built cars.
Our energy policy and money should be focused on one goal. Develop a clean safe reliable source of energy that is cheaper than burning coal.
My recommendation is to spend $100 billion pushing all possible forms of energy production. If something better than fission develops that would be great.
http://www.theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/60501
Oh, I don't know.....they make windmills outta glass in your world?
The blades are largely glass fiber by mass.
Bill Hannahan - "“On Aug. 4, at about 5 p.m., electricity demand in Texas hit a record: 63,594 megawatts. But according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s wind turbines provided only about 500 megawatts of power when demand was peaking and the value of electricity was at its highest."
And if Texas had 63,594 MW of nuclear power available what would this massive investment be doing for the 99% of the year when demand is not this high? Are you suggesting that Texas should invest the 600 billion dollars required to build nuclear plants to handle 1% of demand? Having nuclear would have made absolutely no difference as this is PEAKING demand. Nuclear power stations, at least then ones in the US, are BASELOAD only. They would have been chugging away giving the 40% or so baseload, as you cannot change their output, in response to peak demand like this. So in a way they are just as limited as wind and are non-despatchable just like wind.
France is the only place that has load following nukes and there peaking load are often met from pumped hydro from Sweden.
Wind has its limitations and that is why solar thermal power with storage and gas backup, if it had been available, would have covered this shortfall. Alternatively Texas could spend some money improving the interconnectors to allow more power to be shifted from one region to another.
Or as some commenters have suggested a smart grid can turn off loads that can be turned off to reduce the reserve margins required. Remember that this is exactly what happens now in Texas all the time even without a smart grid. Intelligent controller will only extend this concept to household and industrial devices that collectively represent a massive demand.
And if Texas had 63,594 MW of nuclear power available what would this massive investment be doing for the 99% of the year when demand is not this high? Are you suggesting that Texas should invest the 600 billion dollars required to build nuclear plants to handle 1% of demand?
No.
Having nuclear would have made absolutely no difference as this is PEAKING demand. Nuclear power stations, at least then ones in the US, are BASELOAD only.
Texans have paid a lot of money to build 9,700 megawatts of wind power and associated power lines and backup plants. They continue to pay feed in tariffs and tax breaks for wind. They could have used that money to build 2-3 GW of nuclear power. That would have saved 1.5-2.5 GW of fossil fuel generation from their dirtiest plants on the day in question, and many other days of the year.
They would have been chugging away giving the 40% or so baseload, as you cannot change their output, in response to peak demand like this. So in a way they are just as limited as wind and are non-despatchable just like wind.
Baseload plants are all you need until nuclear capacity exceeds baseload needs, 40% now, and by the time that happens nighttime demand for charging vehicles and smart grid technology will have ramped baseload to about 80% of average demand. By that time factory mass produced modular reactors will be able to load follow economically.
The most important points are that we should be spending massively ($100 billion / yr) on R&D to create sources of energy that are cheaper than burning coal, and we have yet to design the Model T of nuclear power plants.
Bill Hannahan - " They could have used that money to build 2-3 GW of nuclear power. That would have saved 1.5-2.5 GW of fossil fuel generation from their dirtiest plants on the day in question, and many other days of the year."
However would have done absolutely nothing to assist this event. The wind that they have installed for far less than a nuclear power plant and operating NOW on the other days of the year, instead of 10 years time, will save a lot more emissions than the 2-3GW of nuclear.
"Baseload plants are all you need until nuclear capacity exceeds baseload needs, 40% now, and by the time that happens nighttime demand for charging vehicles and smart grid technology will have ramped baseload to about 80% of average demand. By that time factory mass produced modular reactors will be able to load follow economically."
Really? So your solution is to INCREASE our power demand to fit in with inflexible dinosaurs that are nuclear power plants. Smart grids are all about getting rid of dumb timed off-peak and replacing it with intelligent controllers that can tell for themselves when there is an energy surplus and turn on then rather than the 1900s ideas of timed. With more flexible generation replacing baseload there will be no more dumb off peak so this will not rise to 80% of demand. It will be a flexible thing, not fixed as it is now. And there you go invoking non-existent technology to cover for the limitations of nuclear.
"The most important points are that we should be spending massively ($100 billion / yr) on R&D to create sources of energy that are cheaper than burning coal, and we have yet to design the Model T of nuclear power plants."
The most important point is that billions and billions of dollars, both civilian and military, have already been spent on the nuclear boondoggle and STILL it is not really competitive. Surely after 50 years of massive civilian and military funding, because it is primarily a weapon of war with a useful civilian side use, if the Model T has not appeared yet it is never going to. Why throw more money down the nuclear rathole when there are other technologies such as wave, tidal wind, smart grids and solar that are at the beginnings of their development?
The wind that they have installed for far less than a nuclear power plant and operating NOW on the other days of the year, instead of 10 years time, will save a lot more emissions than the 2-3GW of nuclear.
9.7 GW of wind at a .35 capacity factor over a 20 year life will produce 68 GW years of energy. 3 GW of nuclear at .9 capacity factor over a 60 year life will produce 162 GW years of energy.
With more flexible generation replacing baseload there will be no more dumb off peak so this will not rise to 80% of demand. It will be a flexible thing, not fixed
So you think that unreliable, undispatchable intermittent kWh's that are lowest during the summer peak are more valuable than reliable dispatchable power. You should be a grid manager.
The most important point is that billions and billions of dollars, both civilian and military, have already been spent on the nuclear boondoggle and STILL it is not really competitive. …Why throw more money down the nuclear rathole when there are other technologies such as wave, tidal wind, smart grids and solar that are at the beginnings of their development?
There are many ways to split uranium and thorium atoms that have gone untested even though they would make much better commercial power plants than steroidal submarine reactors. The U.S. has not built an experimental power reactor since 1973.
The money spent on R&D for commercial nuclear power is a small fraction of the taxes and fees paid to government entities by commercial nuclear power.
Windmills have been around over 300 years and operate near maximum theoretical efficiency. Why do they still need huge tax breaks, mandates and feed in tariffs, things nuclear does not get?
A correction: France does use the pumped storage in SWITZERLAND for its excess nuclear elec (for a cost).
But DANMARK uses power from Norway and SWEDEN (and others I presume) when not sufficient wind power.
France alos has 4 GW of pumped storage at home and 1 GW in Luxembourg.
I think the Spanish are missing a bet by not building some on their side of the Pyrenees.
Alan
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1579694720080415
But you left out the elephant in the room.
Solar Thermal?
Fission is more renewable than wind and solar.
And when man can build machines without failures, then building fission plants will be worth doing. Would be nice if man got along with his fellow man so that fission plants won't be a target.
The cost of failure for wind/solar isn't a 30 mile no-human use zone. (Yet, when you show a 30 mile no-go zone the fission pimpers scream 'you are just scared'. Wonder if the pimp'ers could cut a deal to move to Russia to live in that 30-mile zone - to show us how to man-up....)
Attacking a Wind/solar plant during war/with terrorism will have little damage from the wind/solar energy production bits. Such isn't the case with a fission plant....perhaps one day THAT failure mode will go from theoretical to actual. (Yet, if such moves from theoretical to actual I'm betting the same rah-rah fission supporters will keep rah-rahing.)
If fission is so safe, why do fission operators BEG Congress to keep the Government as the Insurer of last resort? (Oh yea...the 'you are just scared' answer.)
http://www.youtube.com/v/lCdKYsU3JdY (2 mins of pictures of how people are psychosomatic and 'just scared' - nothing wrong with a bit of radiation and heavy metals)
And when man can build machines without failures, then building fission plants will be worth doing.
If we could build machines without failure nuclear plants could be built at half the cost in half the time. No containment building, no triple redundant emergency high pressure cooling pumps, no triple redundant emergency low pressure cooling pumps, no triple redundant, emergency generators, no triple redundant instrumentation system etc.
Modern nuclear plants are not perfect, they are designed to fail without hurting people.
It is interesting that you demand perfection in nuclear, is that universal? Union Carbide killed many more people in Bhopal India than Chernobyl, and they did it in only 3 days. Have you given up the use of chemicals?
Would be nice if man got along with his fellow man so that fission plants won't be a target.
Another good point about nuclear plants, they might lure terrorists away from softer targets, reducing the death toll from an attack.
The cost of failure for wind/solar isn't a 30 mile no-human use zone.
Attacking a Wind/solar plant during war/with terrorism will have little damage from the wind/solar energy production bits.
Scientific American published The Grand Solar Plan, which proposed powering the entire U.S. with solar installations in the southwest. Terrorists would never attack those installations. They would simply drop the transmission lines crossing the Mississippi river during a severe cold spell or heat wave and kill millions of Americans.
If fission is so safe, why do fission operators BEG Congress to keep the Government as the Insurer of last resort? (Oh yea...the 'you are just scared' answer.)
I think Price Anderson should be eliminated.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877#comment-335609
Modern nuclear plants are not perfect, they are designed to fail without hurting people.
And yet, when they fail they fail so impressively that the contamination is being noted in Germany. And the closest borders are Ukraine and Belarus - not Germany.
Union Carbide killed many more people in Bhopal India than Chernobyl, and they did it in only 3 days. Have you given up the use of chemicals?
And the no-go zone is how big at Union Carbine? How about Love Canal - how much of that land is 'you can not go there'?
Another good point about nuclear plants, they might lure terrorists away from softer targets, reducing the death toll from an attack.
Might? That's the best you have - might?
Would the "might" be prevented via the documented sleeping guards?
They would simply drop the transmission lines crossing the Mississippi river during a severe cold spell or heat wave and kill millions of Americans.
And somehow that issue would be solved via fission power? Or is that what you mean by ModelT - everyone have a reactor in their basement and therefore do not need transmission lines?
I think Price Anderson should be eliminated.
Well, well. You are one of the 1st who's pimping fission power who's said that.
Next up - should Iran be able to have fission power plants in their nation? If not - why?
" And somehow that issue would be solved via fission power? "
Yes. Nuclear plants are generally located near large citys they supply with power. Their kWh's do not travel thousands of miles nor do most nuclear kWh's cross large rivers. If the country were supplied by 400 – 500 widely distributed interconnected nuclear plants terrorists could not drop enough lines, and keep them down long enough, to do a similar level of damage.
" Would the "might" be prevented via the documented sleeping guards? "
Were the guards sleeping at the World Trade Center? Would they have stopped the attack if only they were awake?
I cannot think of a better place for guards to be sleeping than a nuclear plant. They can be awakened before terrorists can do harm to the public.
If you got inside a nuclear plant undetected, what would you do to eject a substantial portion of the core outside the plant boundary?
" Next up - should Iran be able to have fission power plants in their nation? If not - why? "
Yes.
Uranium enrichment capacity is one of the two easy paths to nuclear weapons, the other being the chemical reprocessing of low burnup reactor fuel to produce plutonium 239.
Enrichment capacity and reprocessing should be limited to the large stable nations that already have nuclear weapons, France, China, Britain, U.S. and Russia, under the unfettered inspection of the IAEA. The other steps in the fuel fabrication process are not sensitive and can happen anywhere.
Any nation that cannot obtain enrichment service from at least one of these countries probably should not have that capability.
Enrichment accounts for a small fraction of the cost of nuclear power, less than ¼ cent per kWh, so this limitation is not a hardship on a nation interested only in peaceful uses of fission.
If you got inside a nuclear plant undetected, what would you do to eject a substantial portion of the core outside the plant boundary?
I would put some explosive in the spent fuel pools to crack the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods and get all the spent U, Pu, etc. to fall into a pile at the bottom of the pool. "Hopefully" enough to restart a chain reaction.
If calculations showed that a chain reaction was unlikely, I would have volunteers transfer some rods from one pool to another. Probably a good idea in any case. One big pile would be "better" than several small ones. Not sure if I should add some graphite while I am at it. Moderate chain reaction at first and thermal dispersion later.
And blow the roof off as I leave (or stay as a martyr, keeping the infidels away till too late).
Alan
" I would put some explosive in the spent fuel pools to crack the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods and get all the spent U, Pu, etc. to fall into a pile at the bottom of the pool. "Hopefully" enough to restart a chain reaction. "
Total Nonsense. The reason that fuel is in the spent fuel pool is because it is unable to support a chain reaction when assembled in the optimum geometry in the reactor where 2/3 of the surrounding fuel is of lower burnup. Also the water is loaded with boron, a strong neutron absorber.
Even new fuel will not support a chain reaction without water to slow the fast neutrons. This is one of the reasons these reactors cannot repeat the Chernobyl type accident.
" Not sure if I should add some graphite while I am at it. "
How many truckloads will you need to sneak into the plant? It will have to be large blocks drilled to the optimum dimensions. You will have to disassemble the fuel assemblies and insert the rods by hand.
1… How do you avoid being killed by the radiation from the spent fuel?
2… How do you avoid being killed by the radiation from the low level criticality?
3… How do you cause a large burst of energy instead of a slow low level criticality accident?
4… How do you eject a large quantity of spent fuel from a hardened building?
5... If you got inside a nuclear plant undetected, what would you do to eject a substantial portion of the core outside the plant boundary?
Nonsense to you !
I would have a dozen cores to work with. I do not have to produce 3,000 MW of thermal energy, just a couple of MW. There is plenty of reactivity left in "spent fuel rods". In a very few cases when new fuel was unavailable in a timely fashion or the grid could not accept a refueling outage (outside USA), reactors can keep going but at slightly reduced generation for months.
If there was a forced outage of a few months, US utilities will typically refuel on schedule. Manpower scheduled for outage maintenance, refueling is selected for spring or fall (lower grid demand), no extra NRC permission required are the reasons why. Thus fuel has even fewer neutron poisons and more fissile material.
Much of that minimal heat required, and perhaps all of it, could come from radioactive decay heat. Just insulate a broken pile of spent fuel rods until the temperature rose enough to let volatile radioisotopes (Cs137 is a good one) out and/or insulate the pile and wait for a mild steam explosion.
The issue is not to get the U238 (still the bulk of the fuel) out but to get the nastiest parts out. Basically CS137, Sr90, Kr85 and Sm151 in spent fuel. Any Pu added would be a nice bonus.
Kr85 is an inert gas. Just break the fuel open and crumble it and it escapes. Chernobyl let out 5 million curies, I should be able to do 100 million or better with a dozen used cores.
CS137 is a liquid at spent fuel temperatures. And very high yield in spent fuel (6% of fission byproducts). Very reactive with air and water. CsOH is corrosive which makes its form interesting. A modest steam explosion should send it on it's way.
Sr90 also reacts strongly with water and air (nitrides formed if burned). A weak steam explosion should get it out. Good source of cancer once out.
Sm151 is smaller % of total and will form SmOH with warm water.
Yes, the boron treated water would have to removed to start a chain reaction. However, a nuke has plenty of water sources (including fresh water used to make up evaporation from the pools). Or add a chemical that could precipitate out the boron from the pool water (not enough of a chemist, but should be simple).
Another strategy instead of graphite would be to add deuterium. An oil or grease made up of carbon & deuterium (actually easy to fabricate) would moderate the neutrons on a plane (floating n water) or coat the fuel rods before putting them into the master pool. Or dump a few hundred or thousand gallons of "heavy grease" on the center of the pile of broken fuel rods before adding plain water. I would have to do some calcs.
Getting a minimal chain reaction going (1 or 2 MW although more is "better", and not 3,000 MW) with tons of spent fuel is not as difficult as you imagine.
And the spent fuel pool is not as robust as you imagine (I have been in one under construction). Just blow the roof off once the pool is bubbling.
I would have a crew of martyrs. Useful till they fell over puking from radiation sickness. Lead aprons and tongs should add minutes and maybe hours to their work time.
Alan
" There is plenty of reactivity left in "spent fuel rods "
Spent fuel has lots of potential energy left in the heavy atoms it contains. Reactivity is a characteristic of an assembly of material in a specific geometry that indicates how close it is to a configuration that would sustain a chain reaction. Even a new fuel assembly, by itself, has almost no reactivity. An infinite array of new fuel assemblies, without water, has very little reactivity, much to low to support a chain reaction.
" when new fuel was unavailable in a timely fashion or the grid could not accept a refueling outage (outside USA), reactors can keep going but at slightly reduced generation for months. "
One third of the fuel is replaced at each refueling. The newest fuel has a high concentration of fissile atoms and a low concentration of fission products, some of which are significant neutron absorbers. The oldest fuel has a low concentration of fissile atoms and a high concentration of fission products. If you loaded the entire core with spent fuel it would not support a chain reaction.
" Just insulate a broken pile of spent fuel rods until the temperature rose enough to let volatile radioisotopes (Cs137 is a good one) out and/or insulate the pile and wait for a mild steam explosion. "
Most of the heat comes from short half life fission products that decay rapidly. Most of the fuel in spent fuel pools is very old and produces a low heat rate. That is why it can go into dry cask storage eventually. That is partly why the meltdown at TMI could be terminated before it melted through the vessel. Anti nukes claimed that once started a meltdown could not be stopped.
Explain in detail how low level decay heat can produce a mild steam explosion.
" Kr85 is an inert gas. "
Right, that is why it does not become trapped in the body, and therefore is not much of a hazard.
" Just break the fuel open and crumble it and it escapes. Chernobyl let out 5 million curies, I should be able to do 100 million or better with a dozen used cores. "
Not really. It would take 54 years to accumulate a dozen cores, but the half life is only 10 years. In the future most of those old fuel rods will go into dry cask storage or be reprocessed in which case the inert gasses are vented into the atmosphere because they are really not a significant hazard.
" Or dump a few hundred or thousand gallons of "heavy grease" on the center of the pile of broken fuel rods before adding plain water. I would have to do some calcs. "
Yes, please do some calcs. And good luck sneaking in millions of pounds of heavy grease, would that be in your backpack?
" Getting a minimal chain reaction going (1 or 2 MW although more is "better", and not 3,000 MW) with tons of spent fuel is not as difficult as you imagine. "
How difficult is it? Calcs please.
" And the spent fuel pool is not as robust as you imagine (I have been in one under construction). Just blow the roof off once the pool is bubbling. "
New plants will have very hard spent fuel facilities. How will you blow the roof off, in detail?
Your response to valid arguments to to ask for more detail than I am willing to make. Simply add weight and effort required to the opponent while doing nothing yourself is your strategy.
Why ?
Because I have more important projects to work on and I know from the past that you will refuse to accept engineering reality no matter what in any case. I believe you earlier mentioned your father's work and your emotional ties via your father to nuclear power.
All that is needed to raise the temperature of used fuel rods is insulate them. A variety of techniques.
You do have a good point on the Kr half life. Perhaps only 10 or 20 million curies (remember Chernobyl fuel was not all used and the rods in the pool will have more Kr than Chernobyl rods did.
And there is a terror aspect to releasing that much radioactivity. CS137 & Sr90 would be the biggest problem from a public health POV.
And your claim that terrorists could take over a nuke plant and do no serious damage is simply nonsense.
My aim is not to convert you via logic and engineering analysis, but to refute and discredit your extreme statements for the other readers.
Alan
How out of touch with reality you are shows with your claim that releasing billions of curies is no big deal. inert gasses are vented into the atmosphere because they are really not a significant hazard.
No consideration of the direct local effect or the radioactive daughters from Kr85. But then you believe that radiation is good for you theory as well.
PS: I clearly support more nuclear power, but advocates like you make me reconsider this. You are not the only nuclear advocate, some working in the field, that cannot make reasonable risk assessments. Advocates like you, that refuse to see real problems with nuclear power, are why we do not have 3 times as much nuclear power operating the in the USA today.
" I know from the past that you will refuse to accept engineering reality no matter what in any case. "
Quite the opposite. Years ago I took a course in nuclear engineering to get the facts to support my anti nuclear leanings. I learned that I was all wrong. You can change my mind by pointing out my errors in facts and logic, and by presenting better facts and logic.
You are frustrated because you are arguing nuclear engineering with a nuclear engineer. You should take some classes or get a book on the introduction to nuclear engineering and work the problems at the end of each chapter. I recommend Dr. Ronald Knief.
" I believe you earlier mentioned your father's work and your emotional ties via your father to nuclear power. "
You have me confused with Charles Barton.
" All that is needed to raise the temperature of used fuel rods is insulate them. A variety of techniques. "
Yes they will get hot, may melt in several days but will solidify when insulation fails, so what, how do you eject a large fraction from hardened facility? How do you hold off security for several days? They can figure out a way to inject water without entering the room.
" You do have a good point on the Kr half life. Perhaps only 10 or 20 million curies (remember Chernobyl fuel was not all used and the rods in the pool will have more Kr than Chernobyl rods did. "
Reprocessing plants release large amounts routinely. It is not a significant problem. Do the calculations for actual risk and find out.
" And there is a terror aspect to releasing that much radioactivity. CS137 & Sr90 would be the biggest problem from a public health POV. "
For the fourth or fifth time. 4… How do you eject a large quantity of spent fuel from a hardened building?
" And your claim that terrorists could take over a nuke plant and do no serious damage is simply nonsense. "
Not my claim. They could do very serious damage, but they cannot eject a large fraction of the core, and the level of effort required to do serious damage could be much more effective on softer targets.
" My aim is not to convert you via logic and engineering analysis, but to refute and discredit your extreme statements for the other readers. "
Get educated first.
" But then you believe that radiation is good for you theory as well. "
Life evolved in a much more radioactive world. There is growing evidence that the optimal level of radiation is above today’s background. Clearly low level radiation is at worst a very small risk factor.
http://www.google.com/search?q=radiation+hormesis&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t...
Plutonium production reactors released 19,000,000 curies of Kr 85 as a result of routine operations, yet Krypton is not a serious risk factor. Iodine 131 is the most significant risk factor, yet you never mentioned it. Probably because of the 8 day half life; there is very little I 131 in the spent fuel pool.
Where is the sterile lunar landscape exclusion zone around the Hanford complex?
http://www.doh.wa.gov/hanford/publications/history/release.html#Green
Compare these releases with the amount of radon released from the earth naturally.
Uranium enrichment capacity is one of the two easy paths to nuclear weapons, the other being the chemical reprocessing of low burnup reactor fuel to produce plutonium 239. Enrichment capacity and reprocessing should be limited to the large stable nations that already have nuclear weapons, France, China, Britain, U.S. and Russia, under the unfettered inspection of the IAEA.
What does this have to do with the real world? Heck, we're promoting nuclear power in new, small countries like Jordan without any restriction on enrichment!!!
The world could have been much more "interesting".
The Shah of Iran planned to build 23 nuclear reactors by 2000, with the first two ordered, construction started and scheduled for completion by 1981. When work stopped in January, 1979, one reactor was 85% complete and the other 50% complete.
At the same time Iran had a 10% share in a EU uranium enrichment program. All blessed by the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#1970s
Alan
This is the main reason I feel much more comfortable with wind, solar, geothermal, etc.
This is amazingly misleading and borders on anti-EV propaganda without clarifying the situation. Yes, gasoline is amazingly energy dense. But that is not nearly as great as it sounds because gasoline engines are MASSIVELY INEFFICIENT compared to electric motors. Gas engines are ~20% efficient whereas electric motors are ~90% efficient. That massively changes the equation. And this is one of the massive advantages of EVs . . . electric motors are so efficient that you can go MUCH farther on far less energy.
And energy-volume density (energy/volume) is also a problem . . . but again, the situation is not exactly what it seems. A gasoline car requires a big engine, an exhaust system, a radiator, a transmission, and a gas tank. An electric car only requires the battery, a controller (just some chips & components), and a relatively small electric motor. So even though the gas itself is dense, the gas car requires all sorts of other machinery in order to use the gasoline that takes up a lot of volume. And worse, lots of that machinery is mechanical or exhaust . . . things that are prone to breaking down & requiring maintenance.
But I view myself as an honest EV advocate. Even with the above, the EVs do still suffer a little bit from an energy density issue. But it is not insurmountable. It can be addressed with series-hybrids like the GM Volt, battery swapping systems (See Better Place), and future improved batteries. Energy density is really not a problem . . . the problem continues to be cost.
Hi Sparaxis, I only read and write posts, <1000 words:-)
You're obviously very bright. So you win a banana (I was going to say Nobel Prize, but bright folks don't win that any more) for spotting the flaw in your logic when you say:
Cmon - get real. Something to Chew on.
Hi Euan, I think I am going to miss my dose of potassium since I'm not sure I get the flaw. The sentence as written leaves a lot out (the chapter was limited to 5000 words), but the intent is to say that we should use our fossil resources today to prepare for how we will be getting our energy tomorrow. The unspoken subtext (the target of this book not being only the energy afficianados at TOD) is that the profound differences in living off current solar flux (solar, wind, water, etc) compared to fossil energy means that the way we live is going to have to change to adapt to the nature of the energy we have, and not the other way around, as it has been in the last century. What was your meaning?
This sentence implies without question that ALL forms of solar PV technology require gallium. This is false. The vast majority of solar panels being sold are silicon technology (mono- or poly- crystalline) which don't require gallium, and which require nothing more exotic than boron.
I've never been clear about this. Some use of rare materials may be embedded, say because using rare element XXX gives you transparent electrodes, or allows better efficiency. So there are couple questions:
(1) For existing silicon solar processes, do we have material scaling issues with rare materials?
(2) If the answer to (1) is yes, can we substitute something else and still retain acceptable cost/performance?
Got a source for that, or are you just guessing? My understanding is that Sunpower's better efficiency (for example) is achieved through much higher standards for materials purity, and not the use of any rare elements.
I think that the answer to the first question is pretty close to "no". At least, nothing as serious as would be involved in relying on gallium or tellurium.
The only thing I'm aware of is that some manufacturers use palladium in the solder overlays. AFAIK, silver can be used instead. If you're looking for a "Liebig's minimum" for high performance silicon solar cell technology, my best guess is that it lies with silver. For the balance of system (e.g. inverters), there may be other issues.
Steven J. Scannell essay and critique of
Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy by David Fridley (Spraxis of theoildrum August 19, 2010) Thanks to Gail the Actuary
Scannell is author of the Tripe System Report at www.environmentalfisherman.com
Even though the scramble is on to make alternatives work for us, I believe the proper approach may more efficaciously be framed first as: “How can we interface alternative forms of energy with our existing energy infrastructures?” And also, “How should we perform the capital reformations in an energy systems transformation from the old systems to the new green systems?” Simply put: How must we engineer the old and new energy systems genres to get along and play nice? Beware an overly competitive sapping of strength from a fight between green capital and utilities (etc.) capital. Or: Let’s not start a fight, where reason may prevail for all concerned.
Yes we’re a bit terrified of the future. Our climate is over revving. Finite supply is nagging us. We actually don’t have a silver bullet fix, but there are some interesting lists of possibilities. The Tripe System is one alternative. It is the only true system alternative in which both the old and new systems plug in well together, into one holistic system. I think it is our best alternative, and furthermore I state that this system potentially could solve the energy crisis, and global climate change. Tripe, or Track Pipe is a simple energy storage and delivery system, that just happens to use the rail easements, and a comprehensive transportation re-design to achieve an energy systems common denominator. With the Tripe the old and new systems neatly interface. CAES, Hydrogen, Natural Gas, water, waste products, broadband, and a long list of things are bundled into the track pipes, which again are doubly useful for a railroad system up-grade that is designed to last for two hundred years. Please: No crank critiques without a requisite study of the 11 page illustrated report. And if you don’t understand CAES please Google that, as well the new compressed air vehicles.
The real problem with a listing of alternative energy systems may in fact be: We are having more of a struggle to transport and store energy, and less of a problem producing it at its varied sources such as wind, wave, solar, and geothermal sites.
Secondly there seems to be no standard qualitative judge of what exactly is green, and what isn’t so green, of course degrees or shades of green. For subsidy and investment purposes we should have more authoritative references. This is a tall order, but there are hopes, new breakthroughs, which allow us a broader pallet from which to mix and match. Any systems proposal whether large scale or small, really should be measured by the economics of a cost to benefit analysis, so that emotions don’t prevail in systems comparisons. This work is important. And, last but not least: let us not let any self-interest rule inappropriately, as we’re all in this “mother of all challenges” together.
Hear! Hear! Well done. But we may have left out a vital national discussion on the hidden sciences. They need to start to be integrated in to every discussion of national energy polices. What are the hidden sciences?
Regarding our energy plan and alternative energy, I accept the courageous and epic discussions by Dr. Paul A. LaViolette, Phd-Physics, as seminally centered on the real world, real physics, and reality based. He usher’s in a new era to ancient knowledge nurtured back from near extinction as the rest of the world drives along in blissful disinterest, true heretical fear of the on-going mainstream, scientific purification economically more punishing than the Spanish Inquisition. One soon concludes mainstream science cages humanity in a needless bifurcated world of ignorance, and its herd logic of safety-in-numbers resisting, blocking, condemning and to our shame, blacklisting any straying heart engaged in honest discussion of exopolitics, subquantim kinetics, etheric flux, genic energy, electrogravitic gravity gradients, and microwave phase conjugate solition beams, and Galactic Superwaves. I on the other hand eat it up, verify facts where possible, and go back for seconds.
The first breakthrough of the secret world of science “accidentally” placed on-line was through an Israel arms developer: “Trophy”, which claims to stop inbound kinetic weapons (www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jzAupr044&feature=player_embedded)
The video does not state that it will stop dumb-bullets. All the inbound kinetic weapons appear to include some sort of trigger device which would include electronic circuitry. Trophy would seem to set up a strong magnetic spherical protective shield that gives a false target-contact signal to the weapon’s triggering mechanism, which in turn detonates the device prematurely, rendering the incoming weapon’s armor piercing kinetics useless.
But even still, the statement that the device REDUCES PLATFORM WEIGHT is quite profound and would seem to represent the first time a defense contractor promotes such a anti-gravity marketing disclosure in the general public. It would appear, after reading Dr. LaViolette, that Trophy works off of a high energy microwave generator which a tank is large enough to mount and carry.
The spherical beam could be referred to as simply a sensing probe. It’s radius is far greater than shown in order to pick up incoming kinetic warheads. The killing beam radius on the other hand is probably of critical importance, with the distance chosen as a trade-off among several priorities with a controlling aspect being that Trophy’s defensive killing radius is an exact harmonic multiple of the high powered microwave probe beam (time-reversed beam). The return probe beam is formed into a phase-conjugate mircrowave beam off the reflected probe. The defensive killing beam is amplified instantly to a high powered beam which strikes an immediate cord of resonance (a solition beam in an altered state often referred to as “coherence”) which has some awesome effects ranging from anti-gravity, to force amplifier … like blowing a tone with your lips on an empty jug causing a surprisingly strong vibration that seems to generate more power than you blow into the jug, but at 10¹ºººth power level stronger.
BRIEF SIDE NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: “Coherence” is also a term used often in spirituality discussions of consciousness and in relation to photosynthesis and quantum physics. Dr. Bruce Fleming at the University of California, Berkeley and his team in 2007 first discovered a 660 femtosecond period when a photon of energy enters a plant for metabolism, a wave like motion resonates in a state Fleming’s team calls “coherence” where there is no loss of energy whatsoever and the wave patterns are transferring information to the photon from the plant as to where it should not send its photon of energy as well as where it should send its photon of energy. It searches every possible route (without loss of energy during this “660 femtosecond moment of coherence) to search, determine, and use the most efficient path for the photon of energy to transmit through a process Fleming refers to as quantum-mechanical, pumped onward in a rhythmic resonance (coherence) of the power of the vibrating atom without loss or expenditure of measurable energy. This is a profound discovery with huge implications for science and energy development. Any state of work with no loss of energy is considered a “unitary” state of perfection. Some of Dr. LaViolette’s research on the other hand discusses “over-unity” production, or more energy coming out than energy going in, in other words, a perpetual energy source.
“Lafforgue’s approach*, which presumably was arrived at through experience gained from experimental observation, is accord with the theoretical approach of subquantum kinetics, which views the electric-field potential as being seated in the ether and able to act on a capacitor independent of the capacitor’s reference frame and thereby cause it to be displaced. Subquantum kinetics, though, goes into much greater detail to explain how the electrostatic potential field is generated and how it exerts its force on a charge without any countering reaction force”
…. “a 50-kilogram thruster measure 38.5 centimeters high, 8.3 centimeters wide, and 33 centimeters long, using a 4,000-K dielectric and charged to 100 kilovolts, is computed to develop a phenomenally high thrust of 0.68 ton. …Thirty of these thrusters would be capable of lifting a 20-ton vehicle. Forward movement could be obtained simply by vectoring the direction of one of the thrusters.” (Pg 377 ff, Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion, by LaViolette).
“Subquantum kinetics (SK)reintroduces ancient physics into a new modern day replacement science paradigm of scientific thought. The energy which emits from the sub-quantum ether is referred to as genic energy. Since genic energy can not be directly measured, mainstream science will not entertain its theories. Black-Ops military scientists have no such reservations as they tend to go with what works regardless. The Lafforgue Field Propulsion Thruster works in a complete vacuum…”which views (under subquantum kinetics) the electric-field potential as being seated in the ether and able to act on a capacitor independent of the capacitor’s reference frame and thereby cause it to be displaced.”– LaViolette
Lafforgue Thruster For Power Generation
“In his patent, Lafforgue notes that in addition to its use for air transport, his thruster could be used for power generation” rotating a generator. “Output power would exceed input power by a factor of 125.” (Pg 370 ff, Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion, by LaViolette).
More Secret science:
The B-2 is not flying under just these gravity gradient forces and the passengers do indeed feel directional changes and G-Forces (although it is arguable that G-Forces in some flying states are modified from ambient gravity fields). The B-2 wings provide lift, the GE engines provide both normal jet thrust and ion flame thrusting power augmentation (gravity field gradient propulsion). The B-2 “probably” has the capability, once it’s moving at some fast threshold airspeed to conserve power and enter its gravity gradient differential propulsion separate from normal jet thrust which could then be powered back to conserve aviation fuel. The B-2 may have the capability to exit earth atmosphere under its own propulsion, even as it would appear to be designed for earth missions. The key point however is the passengers feel G-forces during powered flight. In order for a craft to protect its passengers at all times from G-forces, the craft would have to be powered at all times fully by gravity gradient forces that encompassed the craft (and thus the passengers) for lift and vectoring.
There is one rumored flight condition in a reported craft used against Al Qaeda that “might” place the passengers in a zero-G condition depending on the engine type used. A large craft has been reported as not appearing to be a helicopter and hovering then firing at ground targets with beam weapons. This is either misinformation or let’s assume for discussion sake it’s true. If the craft is hovering through a field gradient, the passengers and craft would both be experiencing an uncomfortable zero-G condition during a hovering manuver, which pilots do not enjoy. Pilots prefer to feel a G-force of at least 1-G or more because anything less than 1-G is somewhat distracting when using your weapon systems. It just feels unnatural as a result of several million years of human preconditioning. 99 to 1 odds that even if the craft were designed for an outside loop at high-negative-G maneuvering, the pilot ordered to shoot a target, would roll his craft over from a negative-G attitude to first experience positive G’s as nature intended while chasing his target, before pulling the trigger. Old habits die hard; Zero-G is fine for the aircraft, it’s the pilot who gains a sense of security when he feels normal G-force weight.
On the other hand, if the craft where able to hover and vector around at slow speeds on microwave solition beams (similar to the description of Trophy above, except the force is focused downward), the craft is supported and vectored on the beams and the passengers should then feel G-forces, or at least 1-G in a hover-weapons firing position.
Perhaps we will learn more as additional scientists simply elect to breach their oaths of secrecy in this changing world and step forward in the greater interest of humankind, at great personal costs to themselves in a self-sacrificing act of heroic compassion for the welfare of humankind. I recall Dr. Edward Teller finally saying, “Secrets could no longer be kept. The nation has secrets within secrets, within secrets. The world would be better off without them.” Dr. Teller, of course, was referring to secrets between governments. I of course translate the jest of his comment naively as an endorsement for full disclosure, even while my country seems to currently be pressing in just the opposite direction over the governed, where arrogance reigns supreme and we seem to be risking the loss of our Republic. Yet some star light is visible through the fog. Tea anyone?
Summary of Alternative Power:
A national power plan has to first become forthcoming, fully disclosed and the great advancements kept under lock and key by military cabals and made financially transparent.
LaViolette explains in simple layman language multiple alternative energy devices which show great promise and all of which are ignored by science and industry in our civilian markets (arguably through economic intimidation and incentive, i.e. the fabled military-industrial complex syndrome). Scientific arrogance and its ruthless demands to work within the box of acceptable thinking or be ostracized by the peer group together further enforces the mindset which has militarized these technologies.
Current events such as the BP Gulf Oil Spill, an historic world changing event is creating a healthy debate within the black-ops community where some factions believe full disclosure is essential in the interests of humankind to begin our shift away from such heavy dependence on fossil fuels. Some of those scientists are finding the great personal courage to come forward and go public on these subjects. The idea being to develop better replacement technologies in our industrialized society and not to become cave dwellers in a pre-industrial existence. Think positive because it seems to really matter.
LateToTheThearapySession,
Thanks for the laughs!
I especially howled at the B-2A ion flame anti-gravity sub-orbital engine mode!
I guess that capability is described in the super-duper-above-top-secret TO 1B-2A-AREA51-MJ12
Live long and prosper, IDIC, Peace-out!
:)
(ponders why LTTTS doesn't get a note from Darwinian about drinking with Theories O'Conspiracy down at the pub)
Allow me to knock these down.
1) * Retooling of factories to produce the vehicles
The Leaf & Volt factories are up & running. The retooling is not a big deal. They are just cars with a different drivetrain. I mean jeez, they retool every time they create gas cars too.
2) * Development of a large-scale battery industry
Have you been watching what the DoE did with the stimulus funds. Many many companies were given loans/grants to build up the battery industry. In fact there are many articles out there now that talks about there being an EV "battery glut". Google it.
3) * Development of recharging facilities
This really isn't needed. Just ask people that drive EVs. You charge at home and wake up to a full battery every morning. Granted apartment dwellers need to some charging infrastructure. But there are 100 million plus homes out there which just need a charger in the garage.
4) * Deployment of instruments for the maintenance and repair of such vehicles
* A spare-parts industry
You are really reaching now. This is an advantage of EVs. Car dealerships & car parts places are worried about EVs since they have less maintenance issues.
EVs are very low-maintenance . . . there just are not many parts to break down since there are very few moving parts. And you can make the maintenance simple. Battery bad? replace the battery. Electric motor bad? Replace the motor & send old one to factor for refurbish. Controller bad? Replace the controller and send the old one back to factory for refurbish.
5) * “Smart-grid” monitoring and control software and equipment
Yes, that will take a while. But it is NOT necessary at all. It is just a really cool benefit that will come once there are lots of EVs out there. Wind Turbines & solar facilities that generate excess powers will be able to use EVs to store power . . . and perhaps provide power at times of peak demand. But that is all down the road and completely unnecessary now.
6) * Even more generation and transmission facilities to supply the additional electricity demand
Completely wrong. The DoE look at this . . . if we could magically turn gas cars to EVs, we could change 73% of the gas cars to EVs overnight and be fine with electrical generation as long as they are charged at night when we have a massive amount of over-capacity. Check it out:
http://energytech.pnl.gov/publications/pdf/PHEV_Feasibility_Analysis_Par...
EVs are really close to being accepted . . . and they will be accepted very soon. Just a little more cost reduction in batteries and a little higher gas prices due to oil price increases and the EV age begins.
EROI is economics masquerading as thermodynamics.
It's proponents like the poster state that the minimum EROI is 5.
First of all the basic law of business(totally unknown at the Post-carbon Institute) is that you make a profit, not that you have a certain return on investment. That is Sales- Investment = Profit. This is the accounting equation. In energy terms, Energy output - Energy Invested = Net Energy.
So what is PCI really up to with Energy output/Energy Invested > 5?
It's an inequality so we must 'fix' their equation.
Embodied Energy + Energy input= 5 x Energy invested =Energy output. Or Embodied Energy is more than 4 times the energy input.
How can this be? A 20 mpg, 20 year life span car has 165 GJ of embodied energy which is equal to 29 boe. That car will use 9000 gallons of gasoline or 1125 boe. This
vastly overestimates the amounts of embodied energy was also reflected in the Suzhou analysis in the author's last article.
http://www.ibiketo.ca/blog/2009/07/13/embodied-energy-our-vehicles
It doesn't even make sense with respect to US data. Most US oil refineries, coal plants, nukes, etc. were build long ago, so the embodied energy contribution is even smaller.
Another fallacy is that 'ROI ratio' means something. In a profit oriented economy where there are many alternatives for investing
you can do NPV or IRR calculations based on the cost of capital which is the return on government bonds plus the return on stocks times the 'beta'. Today US treasuries are 2% and falling and the stocks return 2-3% so the cost of capital is ~5% with a not so greedy beta of 1.
Are US bond or stock market returns a thermodynamic concept? Does one have the choice of letting your energy sit in the bank gaining interest?
No.
Another problem is that with IRR as a measure of yield for example the longer an asset is productive the greater is the IRR, but for EROI time is not used.
There is nothing theoretically to keep bonds from going to 0% and a negative stock average returns.
However, a company not making at least small profit(net energy returned) will not survive.
Thank you to David/spraxis,
Will David be on hand at any point to answer questions?
My first question is:
re: "However, the full supply chain for alternative energy, from raw materials to manufacturing, is still very dependent on fossil-fuel energy for mining, transport, and materials production. Alternative energy faces the challenge of how to supplant a fossil-fuel-based supply chain with one driven by alternative energy forms themselves in order to break their reliance on a fossil-fuel foundation."
Is there any person or group of persons currently doing what might be called a "top-level analysis" regarding:
1) The "fossil-fuel-based supply chain" transformation to "alternative energy" - driven supply chain?
2) Is there a predicted shortfall in the FF-based supply, and if so,
A) what are the characteristics of this shortfall and
B)what are the resulting implications for this (proposed/presumed)transformation or "supplant" project (so to speak)?
I often use the phrase "interdependency loops" when speaking about the supply chain issues.
I am a relatively new lurker but we have had two new local stories about tidal power in the Pentland Firth on the North East Coast of Scotland and i am unaware of any reaction. Are these and interesting developments or not?
I am a relatively new lurker but we have had two new local stories about tidal power in the Pentland Firth on the North East Coast of Scotland and i am unaware of any reaction. Are these http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-10942856 and http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/National/article/3996/technology-to-mak... interesting developments or not?
Pict,
Yes, it's interesting and relevant, Thanks.
Drop these links in at the Drumbeat today, and you'll probably get some reaction.
I posted an article about a new successful Test of a Tide-power system in Maine (USA) yesterday, and Paul in Nova Scotia (As opposed to Paleo-Scotia, I suppose) had some similar stories brewing..
Bob Fiske
Well we can all start drinking more whiskey. Scottish scientists develop whiskey biofuel http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/17/whisky-biobuel-scotland
Interesting example, I've always thought the Brewing/Distilling industries could
provide a good lead into a 'continuous fermentation' or similar biofuel production.
Missing from the link, was just how many Fuel litres they can 'graft onto' Whisky by products ?
Construction problems at Finland's new nuke
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aFh1ySJ.lYQc&refe...
Read it all and understand why experience is necessary.
Alan
Alan,
Thanks for the link
The pro-Nuke cornucopians should read it to understand that even the basics of getting concrete done right is a complex and problem fraught enterprise
I have never been a fan of the Ariva design. It is too complex. We should be building Fords, not Mercedes.