The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 - The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity
Posted by nate hagens on September 5, 2010 - 10:45am
Below the fold is the 3rd in a series of follow up posts providing analysis on the difficulties of maintaining our current energy paradigm with renewable energy (generally, 'the fake fire brigade'). The main authors are Hannes Kunz, President of Institute for Integrated Economic Research (IIER) and Stephen Balogh, a PhD student at SUNY-ESF and Senior Research Associate at IIER. IIER is a non-profit organization that integrates research from the financial/economic system, energy and natural resources, and human behavior with an objective of developing/initiating strategies that result in more benign trajectories after global growth ends. The authors have written an extensive follow-up to the questions raised in the original posting and I've broken into 5 pieces for readability - the 3nd installment, with a focus on electricity generation in an energy transition, is below the fold. This installment has been delayed a few weeks due to Hannes taking time off to get married....
The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity
In this third installment in this series, we want to put some emphasis on one of the most important enablers of human civilization of the 20th century: electricity. Its ubiquitous availability from every power plug is something we take for granted, despite the fact that stable electricity production is probably one of the most complex continuous endeavors of mankind, and one where many poorer countries fail.
In this post we would like to provide an overview of some of the properties of electricity, describe its nature (as a flow based system), and explain what challenges it faces in the future – especially those related to maintaining current delivery patterns once we have to increasingly rely on inputs no longer coming from fossil fuels that can be stored and burned mostly at our discretion, but from increasingly stochastic, largely uncorrelated flows such as solar or wind.
Electricity is a core topic of IIER’s research, because for us, maintaining anything that more or less resembles our current advanced economies is synonymous with uninterrupted, reliable electricity which mostly comes as a discretionary service to the user. Users, in this case, aren’t just private consumers, but also industrial and commercial applications, which are part of any advanced society.
Electric power is also the area of greatest debate, greatest hope and greatest investment, and the area where IIER thinks that societies face challenges with all their current attempts. Presently, OECD countries are targeting electricity generation as a means to meet carbon emission reduction goals, while simultaneously encouraging the development of non-fossil fuel based transportation (e.g. electric vehicles) and other moves away from coal and oil in industrial applications. They do this – so we think – without a robust plan as to how to maintain today’s delivery security. All plans aim at combining wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear, super- and smart grids into one new robust delivery system, and there seems to be general agreement that this will actually work. But after thorough and unbiased research of the characteristics of electricity delivery systems, the parameters of those new technologies and the discrepancies between assumptions and reality, we are now skeptical as to whether societies will be able to provide stable electricity at acceptable prices going forward. We realize that this statement is almost considered a sacrilege.
Below, we will try to explain our concerns step by step, and why we fear that investing hundreds of billions in an electricity system that is far more complex and far less reliable will lead us in the wrong direction, given the details of our current situation. Once again, a clarification: we are not arguing the fact that we slowly have to move away from fossil fuels and start using more renewable sources to provide our energy needs. However, we disagree with the common notion that societies can make this renewable energy transition and still receive the same services as today: stable and affordable electricity not just for private consumption, but for all uses that are part of an advanced industrialized society.
IIER’s Electricity Availability Index
In our first post, we introduced IIER’s Electricity Availability Index. It measures the availability of electricity in a country based on penetration (% of population with electricity) and reliability (outages and duration of outages per average customer).
Figure 1 – IIER Electricity availability index
Some commenters questioned the relationship between electricity and wealth (measured in purchasing-power adjusted GDP per capita). Such was the first hypothesis we tested when developing the EAI metric. The chicken-and-egg question can - as we think - be resolved quite easily, by testing in which directions we find the outliers. In case the assumption of “wealth is possible without stable electricity” is correct, there should be countries with low electricity availability that still are quite rich (measured in GDP per capita). However, these do not exist, the “richest” outlier is resource-rich Botswana (diamonds, copper, nickel) with close to $14’000 per capita and an EAI of only 21.9%. On the other hand, we do find rather poor countries with almost 90% electricity availability (such as The Philippines and Mongolia, with a per capita GDP of around $3’500), which leads to the conclusion that the correlation is unidirectional, or in other words: You don't have to be rich to have stable electricity, but your country needs stable electricity to become (or stay) rich.
The benefits of electricity
There are two discrete aspects of electricity’s importance to society: the benefit of its ubiquitous on-demand availability, and the severe side-effects of power interruptions. Let’s look at a simple illustration. Few companies in OECD countries install backup power for desktop computers, despite the risk of data loss during a power outage. The reason is economic – outages are so rare that the possible the cost for buying, maintaining and operating the backup equipment outweighs the risk of outage, which is why only servers and data centers are deemed worthy investments into power backup solutions. In emerging or developing countries, backup systems are commonplace, but only if businesses can afford them. But most local businesses cannot, which makes it primarily an option for international corporations, while local companies are at a disadvantage.
Other applications, particularly of industrial nature, can’t even operate with backups; they simply need a power guarantee. The pots of an aluminum smelter require uninterrupted power 24/7, 365 days a year. If the power is lost for more than a few hours, not only does the process stop, but after a short while the aluminum begins to congeal, with the consequence that the entire pot has to be scrapped, incurring costs of millions of dollars. Or think of a shopping mall that suddenly goes dark. No lights except for emergency lighting, no access to transaction services to process a credit or debit card, no elevators or escalators, and ultimately no sales. There are multiple studies on the cost of “reliability events” in power grids, each reporting very significant losses (a lot of research has been done at Berkeley Lab, documents can be found at: http://certs.lbl.gov/CERTS_P_Reliability.html). So while – as many people correctly say - power outages are just a nuisance to private households as long as they don’t exceed the time a fridge or freezer can hold its temperature, they are a threat to all more complex industrial and commercial activities that make our societies “advanced” and require the humming of electricity-driven machinery almost around the clock.
This now ties back to the Electricity Availability Index – many things are either impossible or economically not feasible in environments where grid stability becomes an issue. And even for applications where it is theoretically possible to ramp them up and down without efficiency or material losses based on energy availability, there are significant social costs associated with unpredictability. If there is no power, should we send all the workers home for a week, and call them again at 1am on the Sunday when supply comes back? We can certainly do this, but in reality we would probably rather cease many of those activities, because the opportunity cost of underutilized equipment and labor becomes so big that the final objective no longer makes economic sense.
What is electricity and how is it delivered
There are two ways that electricity is supplied. In smaller, poorer, or more remote areas, electrical production is achieved by a standalone solution that provides comfort or capabilities to those able to afford it. Often this is provided by diesel generators which can produce electricity as required, or by standalone hydro, coal or natural gas power plants which serve a local area or industrial activity. Increasingly, solar panels combined with batteries provide this service, or wind turbines in conjunction with oil based generators. The key characteristic of this type of delivery system usually is very high cost per delivered kWh.
In richer economies or even in urban areas almost all around the world, electricity is delivered via a centrally managed grid, which balances inputs and outputs effectively to ensure that demand is always met. In poorer countries, this often does not work out, with the consequence of regular grid breakdowns. In OECD countries, however, we are so used to the grid’s reliability that even small power outages regularly make the news headlines. Below, we will mostly focus on grid based systems, as only those are capable of delivering the basic industrial and commercial services for societies we are used to receiving.
What we get from our power sockets as “electricity” is the product of an electric current that is converted into useful work by an appliance. To make sure that those appliances work, particularly more fragile ones involving electronics, voltage and frequency must be standardized across entire regions (for example 120V/60Hz in Northern America or 230V/50Hz in Europe).
An electricity delivery system can be compared to a complex set of water pipes where water (electricity) enters at multiple points and is withdrawn at hundreds of thousands of faucets. Contrary to a water delivery systems, these electrical ‘pipes and faucets’ are so fragile that they almost immediately burst or collapse when too much or too little water is in the system. Or in other words – electricity is a fully flow based system, where inputs and outputs have to be matched at any point in time with deviations of less than 0.5% between supply and demand (see ENTSO-E manuals for more detail: https://www.entsoe.eu/index.php?id=57, particularly the one on “Emergency Procedures”) .
Figure 2: Grid based system (Source)
Currently, this system is fully supply-controlled (i.e. production is following expected and actual demand), which is why it has become so beneficial to society. It delivers seemingly unlimited and unrestricted amounts of energy to each room in our homes, offices and factories, and except for heavy loads in an industry or computing (server farms), there is no user-level planning required before flipping a switch, plugging in a heater, turning on a computer. Electricity just flows according to one’s needs. Later, we will examine demand side flexibility, but first, we want to focus on the supply side, which is where electricity systems are controlled today.
Figure 3 – schematic delivery system (current status)
To meet demand, which follows the cycles of human ecosystem patterns (days, nights, work/non-work days, heat, cold) is today matched by a combination of power sources that together form a highly flexible supply system, which also includes reserves to match unexpected demand spikes or sudden supply-side failures, for example when a power plant experiences an emergency shutdown. We will dive into the different load patterns and reserve provisions a little further down, but the key characteristic of a vast majority of inputs today is that they are fully predictable and mostly controllable. This is because inputs come from steady flows (like a running river), but by a large majority from stock based resources that can be consumed whenever there is a need, such as coal, natural gas, stored water or nuclear power (the latter could, for reasons to be discussed further down, also be seen as a steady flow). So in essence, what we have built is a highly complex system that converts steady flows and stocks into a well-managed, demand driven flow of electric current.
Figure 4 – types of inputs into electricity grids
What most OECD countries plan to do is to replace some of those steady flows or stocks on the supply side by adding more and more renewables with erratic flows. Currently, those stochastic, non-controllable flows from solar and wind power account for a maximum of 5% of total power production in each interconnected grid systems we are aware of [see Table 1 for the U.S. (combining Western and Eastern interconnection for lack of data) and for the European interconnected grid system – ENTSO-E], but by 2030, most countries in the Western world plan for 20 or 30% of electricity to be delivered from those two sources alone, accompanied by other new technologies.
Table 1: wind and solar power share in 2009/10 for major grid systems (EIA 2010, ENTSOE 2010)
In Europe, the almost 5 % of solar and wind are very irregularly distributed, with some countries totaling close to 0%, and others already experiencing up to 20% (Denmark) of those renewable sources. All those countries with high shares manage their problems with the significant help of their neighbors. Very small Denmark for example uses the comparably huge water power systems in Norway and Sweden to buffer its heavily variable wind outputs.
This grand plan – to maintain something that already now is highly complex by adding multiple layers of complexity – is something we are very concerned about. The overlying challenge is to keep a flow-based demand system working while stochastic, non-controllable flows gain a significant share of supply, and to do so without jeopardizing grid stability, and at a price which is still affordable. We believe that most people underestimate this challenge and that it actually may be insurmountable. Important: “affordable” in this case doesn’t mean it can be paid by individual households for their relatively small amount of required electricity, as they may be able to bear 20 or 25 cents for a kWh, but instead for an entire industrialized society with the need to provide all the goods and services that make it what is considered “advanced”.
Figure 5 – shift to larger amounts of stochastic flows
What is an acceptable price for electricity?
What a high cost of oil does to societies has been well researched and documented in a number of papers (see: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/ECS/IEW2005/docs/ppt/IEW2005_Maeda.ppt) . High oil prices seem to be a clear inhibitor of economic growth and early indicators of coming recessions. The reason behind this is the fact that the higher the cost for energy is, the less of our efforts can go towards discretionary spending (Hall, Powers and Schoenberg 2008). It is an inherent property of EROI: the energy and money we spend to procure and extract energy, is unavailable to spend on discretionary and non-discretionary investment and consumption.
There is no reason why the situation should be different for energy inputs other than oil, as higher energy costs always leads to this diversion away from consumption and investment. However, creating a benchmark is not easy, as electricity rates have been relatively steady during the times when oil prices fluctuated heavily, which gives us no past reference.
Using oil, where a relatively solid research base exists, we wanted to create a benchmark for “tolerable” electricity prices. Some papers suggest that oil prices that grow from 25 to 35 dollars have a negative impact of 0.3-0.5% on GDP in various countries (http://www.iea.org/papers/2004/high_oil_prices.pdf). We currently are at around $80/barrel, and are still in the middle of a bad crisis, which just looks less bad because governments have started to run up deficits at a breathtaking pace. At $150/barrel, in 2008, the current recession began with a vengeance, and many researchers suggest that high oil prices had their fair share in pricking the problem.
So based on experiences from 2008, we can probably assume that oil prices around $150 per barrel choke many economic activities, as the marginal cost becomes unbearable for many private and commercial consumers alike. Even at the current price of approximately $80/bbl, transportation and other energy-intensive sectors are under heavy pressure, and oil prices push commodity prices up. As a reminder: During the past 50 years, the median price for oil stood at about $25/bbl (inflation adjusted to current dollars). If we look at energy content in a barrel of oil (6.1 GJ or 1700 kWh), a price of $150 translates to a cost per kWh of 8.8 cents, $25 translates to 1.5 cents per kWh in oil.
The difficulty now comes in finding a meaningful comparison between oil and electricity. Oil is a high quality and high density raw energy source with excellent properties with respect to transportation, storage and processing, while electricity provides a distributed service at a comparably high quality. We assume that the same energy content in electricity is of higher value to society when compared to oil, which thus can bear a higher cost for the same amount of energy (this was also part of the Divisia index developed by Cleveland et.al.: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Net_energy_analysis).
One method of comparison would be to compare the ability to convert a specific source to heat (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat5p4.html). To produce the same amount of useful heat, about three times as much oil is required when compared to electricity. So while the lower limit would ask for a direct 1:1 comparison, a “bonus” factor of three for electricity sets the upper limit. However heat – today – is no longer the key use of oil; heat may be produced with natural gas or coal at much lower cost (at less than a third of that of oil). In the predominant applications for crude oil today, transportation fuels and chemicals, electricity is at a clear disadvantage. We therefore decided to assume a bonus for electricity in the middle of the two possible values at 200%, i.e. we attribute twice as much value to a kWh in electricity when compared to crude oil, and equally, set the threshold for economic trouble at twice that of oil.
Table 2: relative prices of electricity and oil
Under such an assumption, we see in Table 2 that electricity prices become critical at around 9 cents per kWh, equivalent to about $70/barrel of oil, and then unbearable at 15-18 cents (equivalent to 130-150$ oil). This is an average value for an entire industrial society, as wealthy private consumers can tolerate rates even higher than 20 cents per kWh.
But unfortunately, a society doesn’t just consist of consumers; it also needs to produce goods and services, and there, a cost of 15-18 cents will definitely be unacceptable. Given that Chinese manufacturers often operate with final electricity cost between 4-5 cents per kWh, even the 2008 average price paid for industrial electricity of 6.83 cents puts domestic U.S. companies at a significant disadvantage. At today’s electricity levels, highly energy-intensive applications are no longer competitive, which is already visible in industrial trends – it is not only labor-intensive work that is going abroad, energy-intensive industries such as aluminum smelting and steel manufacturing are leaving areas with high electricity cost.
Another method available to create a metric for “acceptable” electricity prices is to use the ratio of electricity cost to total GDP. At the average rate of 9.74 cents per kWh of delivered electricity, all electricity consumption costs the United States about 2.6% of U.S. GDP. If we separate out the industrial portion of GDP (2,737bn US$ in 2008), a similar portion (2.5%) is spent on electricity, at the average price of 6.83 cents. Should this price – for example – triple to 20 cents, suddenly 7.4% of total industrial cost would go towards electricity. This is far more than the profit margins of most energy-intensive industries.
For the U.S., where a large portion of heavy industry has been cut back already due to the relatively high cost of labor and energy compared to other places, such an increase may seem bearable. But what if China would operate under the same regime, replacing current low-cost electricity from coal with expensive new sources? In China, electricity alone totals to approximately 3.5% of GDP at an average cost of 5 cents/kWh, quadrupling the cost per kWh to the same 20 cents would demand that the country diverts 13.8% of its GDP to electricity. This is not feasible, as it – together with oil, coal and natural gas, would divert more than 25% of total GDP towards energy alone – representing a society-level EROI of 4:1. One of the reason why China fares so badly here is because the country provides a lot of the cheap energy Western societies no longer have, and then import it embedded in goods.
Table 3 – electricity price sensitivity U.S. and China
If we want to run a complete industrial society, looked at on a global scale, energy prices above certain levels are not sustainable, as they reduce available surpluses for consumption and investment. And unfortunately, those cost levels of 15-20 cents per kWh on average are exactly where societies are headed with the planned changes. We will cover those aspects in more detail further below, when looking at individual technologies.
Meeting demand – in more detail
In order to understand what we need and what we receive from multiple technologies, it seems important to split out the various types of load grid operators have to deal with.
Base load – defined as the long-term minimum demand expected in a region – is usually provided by technologies with relatively low cost, high reliability and limited ability to modulate output. This includes nuclear power plants, lignite coal plants and hydroelectric water mills in rivers. Those plants typically have to operate continuously at relatively stable loads, as otherwise their efficiency is reduced significantly, leading to higher cost per unit of output. Also, re-starting those power plants is relatively time-consuming and inefficient. In most countries, base load capacity is capable of covering approximately 100% of low demand (during nights and weekends).
Intermediate or cyclical load – the foreseeable portion of variety in loads over a day is provided by load-following sources that can modulate to higher or lower output levels – or almost entirely be turned off and on within a relatively short time. However, these sources usually require some lead time to grow or reduce output, for example some coal power plants. Today, natural gas is used for a significant portion of cyclical load.
Peak load – usually required within very short periods of time for a few hours a day – can be provided only from sources that can be turned on and off within minutes, this typically includes gas and small oil power plants as well as stored hydropower (dams or pumped hydro). Peak capacity can be provided by spinning reserve plants (e.g. running plants that can increase capacity quickly) or by non-spinning sources, which can be turned on within minutes.
Beyond technology limitations that make it difficult or uneconomic to ramp capacity up or down quickly, the key factor in the eligibility of a technology for the use in peak, cyclical and base load mode is the cost share between capital investment and fuel cost. The higher the fuel cost share, the more suitable a technology becomes to support peak power; the higher the investment share, the more operational hours are required to arrive at an acceptable average price per kWh. We will look at this issue further below, but this for example is the main reason why nuclear power is such a bad load-following or peak source.
Demand flexibility has a (high) cost
Another point has to do with the flexibility of electricity use, i.e. the possibility of turning something on when supply is abundant, and turning it off when power is scarce. The problem lies with the nature of most uses: many applications are simply inflexible, like those that require something to run for 24 hours a day - data centers are among them, and so are some key industrial processes. Lighting is not flexible, nor is access to heavy uses of electricity in households, such as cooking, using electronics or most kitchen appliances. We also want hot water and cool air when we need it, and usually we don’t want to schedule our laundry because someone tells us to do so, even though this is probably the easiest part. Now some applications, particularly heating (air and water) and cooling (air and goods), indeed have certain flexibility potential. We can run a freezer or air conditioner that produces ice to bridge supply gaps, or we can build a water heater which produces enough hot water to get us through the day, a very common application today in Switzerland, where night energy rates are often half of daytime rates even for households. However, such a time shift comes with tradeoffs: any application that uses storage instead of directly converting electricity into the desired quality output (heat or cold here), ultimately adds cost, for several reasons.
Making equipment flexible comes at a cost, either the cost of information transfer (for price-regulated markets) or the cost of storing the required energy for later use. France has been quite active at experimenting with contracts allowing them to regulate energy according to supply, where customers pay less for power that can be cut off at any point in time. This is especially important in France because of the inflexible nature of their generation technology mix with almost 70% coming from nuclear power. Yet the flexibility French grid operators were able to evoke from that market mechanism, despite the heavy incentives, was around 2-3% of total peak demand (according to RTE, the French grid operator). Most users obviously prefer the inconvenience of higher prices versus the inconvenience of service interruptions, even for things that are not mission-critical. This fact leaves us with approaches that actively shift energy consumption without affecting the end-user. Mostly, this translates to some kind of storage, which has a number of disadvantages.
Every piece of equipment that includes a storage mechanism is significantly more complex than one that operates without, and because of that complexity becomes more expensive, more energy-intensive in its manufacturing, and more exposed to failure. Additionally, each storage process incurs losses. If we produce hot water at night that should last through the entire day, some of the heat dissipates, dependent on how well insulated the storage tank is (again this is dependent on cost and effort, as well as space). The same is true for air-conditioners or freezers that use ice produced at night as buffer – they are less energy efficient overall. Both applications can still be economical for the end user and society as a whole if they use cheap base-load power at night and avoid using peak electricity during the day. Ice-based air-conditioning systems are quite common in office buildings in some parts of the U.S., where utilities charge different rates between night and day. But there is a caveat: all those approaches are geared at balancing two almost steady systems with fully predictable 24 hour cycles, nightly base load production and daily usage patterns with a peak or two. Thus, the maximum storage time required is 10-15 hours, which reduces system complexity as well as conversion and storage losses to acceptable levels. Now with renewable energy supplies, we are suddenly confronted with irregular patterns that can include days to weeks of over- and undersupply. In those cases, storage and conversion losses beyond a few days become almost insurmountable hurdles, as cumulative losses grow quickly over time.
So in a nutshell – there are technical solutions for many of these problems, but often the outcome no longer makes economic sense – neither for the individual user nor for a society.
Moore’s law and receding horizons
A key assumption of many forward projections for renewable energy production is that the technology will become cheaper and cheaper over time. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for many technologies, especially as fossil fuel inputs become more expensive.
One of the often cited rules in energy discussions is Moore’s law, which describes the fast advancement of capacity improvements (and price decreases) in computing power. It says that the density of calculation power can double every two years, and has been relatively consistently achieved since 1970. This has led to the fact that a smartphone today has more capacity than large mainframe computers in the early Seventies.
However, outside electronics, Moore’s law does not apply and has never applied for anything. A physical structure remains a physical structure, and does not have the multiplication potential that comes from miniaturization. We may be able to raise the efficiency for a photovoltaic panel from 18 to 20%, but not double it every two years no matter what we do, given the physical limits. The same is true for the materials used for its manufacturing; we might reduce them, but often by 10-20% and sometimes at the cost of more complex tools and purer materials (which also require energy). And erecting a modern wind turbine always requires steel, concrete and many advanced materials, which won’t change, no matter how much we optimize it.
For normal industrial goods, price curves often show an asymptotic form. When a technology is new, neither its production nor its outputs are focused on efficiency; production facilities are small and processes involve a lot of manual labor. Also, new technologies often get produced in advanced economies with higher labor and energy cost. With maturing manufacturing technologies, more efficient and scaled up factories, and the inclusion of lower cost labor and energy from – for example – China, production becomes cheaper and prices fall. Eventually, when labor and production costs become optimized, the decline in price of the product slows, until it reaches a stable retail price more dependent on the raw materials and energy required to produce and transport the good.
In many cases, the picture for raw materials and raw-material-driven products begins to look like the dotted line, despite rapidly growing output:
Figure 6 - Marginal cost curve for supply-constrained resources
During the past few years, we have seen this important reversal in this key underlying trend, which briefly visited our economies in 2008 when - with rising resource prices – everything from food to fuels became suddenly more expensive. Thanks to the economic crisis and reduced demand, this phenomenon has partially disappeared, but for some key commodities (such as copper, iron ore, coking coal and some others), we are already back to pre-crisis levels or higher. This is the “glass-half-full” trend, which applies to almost all natural resources, but first and foremost energy. Even if we – as many people correctly state – have enough of something in the ground, getting it out becomes more difficult, has to happen further away and in geopolitically riskier places etc..
This is confirmed by the cost for new power plants, where cost estimates have recently gone up based on higher input cost (for almost everything ranging from nuclear to coal to wind towers), and even for solar panels, the permanent reductions experienced in the past haven’t continued between 2003 and 2008, despite rapidly growing production. The last important cost reduction happened since around 2006, when Chinese manufacturers entered the market, bringing low-cost production energy (mostly coal-based) into the game. Not truly a sustainable model. And, in 2009, due to overcapacity and massively reduced raw material prices, costs came down again, and there might even be more room for some reductions, but this story has an end once input prices go up.
Figure 7 - Cost of solar panels ((Pdf warning)
If that core trend of higher energy cost, particularly at the historically lowest-priced end, cannot be reversed, which we doubt it can, this has implications for everything that uses those inputs, as it raises the price with the cost of the raw materials and the energy that go into them. This effect might, in turn, effectively end the trend of lower and lower prices for everything, including energy generation technology, no matter what it is.
Figure 8 - The “old” trend ............. Figure 9 - The “new” trend
Base load power – a real problem
Except for solar and wind, most of the technologies currently seen as potential future output providers deliver base load power. This is true for biomass, for geothermal, for nuclear, and to a certain extent for coal. All those generation approaches have only limited load following capabilities, for very different reasons.
Now, stochastic renewable sources (mostly wind) coming into play, often with a “right of passage”, i.e. no limits in selling into the grid at a preferred price. Whoever comes next only gets to sell when there is still demand, and – in a free electricity market like we have it in most OECD countries – that means that prices for coal, nuclear and other base load outputs without a preferred status (biomass mostly has that status), drop sharply. Some analysts have even considered this a positive phenomenon, but actually it is not. What it really does: due to the preference of wind, it pushes marginal price (but not cost) of those steady sources down and thus makes base load generation economically unattractive, because less steady demand at lower prices simply translates to an unacceptable risk for investors. Spot markets are among the key reasons why no more nuclear and hardly any coal power plants were built in Western economies during the past decade.
In a future electricity system, we will see an increasing disparity between a growing pool of inflexible (for cost or technology reasons) base load power, a mission-critical pool of peak and cyclical load capacity, and that new, unpredictable pool of sources that deliver whenever they deliver, irrespective of demand.
A new electricity mix
If we use some currently available numbers for various electricity generation techniques, we might come up with the following for generation capacity in the United States, without any subsidies:
Table 4 – cost and suitability of various generation technologies
We are aware of the fact that the above numbers are being disputed, which is why we have included broad ranges. This is not the point we are trying to make – the point is incremental replacement of fossil fuel-based plants, especially cheap coal with more expensive technologies has the potential to lead to large increases in the price of electricity.
Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For a standard grid today, which does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this might add about 2-3 cents per kWh. When looking at the cost ranges above, it becomes quite obvious that even the lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford.
Now on top of the generation cost shown in Table 4, we have to bear the cost for maintaining and operating the electricity grid, of metering, and some profit margins for the utility companies which delivers the power to homes, offices and factories. For the U.S. today, where the grid does not have to do much more than transmit electricity generated according to demand, this adds between 2 and 7 cents per kWh.
Table 5 – approximate share of final electricity cost (multiple sources, IIER calculations)
When looking at the cost ranges, it becomes quite obvious that even the new lowest cost sources already bring the total price of electricity dangerously close to what industrial users can afford.
What really matters is “useful energy”
And now comes the challenge: Only power that meets someone’s demand has a positive price. If I am asleep and someone offers me free power to light my entire house like a Christmas tree, I don’t care. On the other hand, when the food in my freezer starts to thaw, I would probably be ready to pay a very high price for the few kWh it needs to keep that device going. The same is true in aggregate. Spot electricity prices go as low as 0-3 cents during the night (or even negative, http://www.scribd.com/doc/27816762/Negative-Prices-in-Electricity-Market), and up to 12, 15, sometimes even 50 cents at peak times during the day.
Now what we need to measure in order to understand the entire delivery system is not so much about the prices paid for one kWh of electricity produced, but instead the cost of electricity delivered according to demand. We want to determine how much it costs to provide a kWh from a particular source to supply our human energy demand patterns, and if that doesn’t work in a straightforward manner, we have to estimate the extra cost required to either shift it to the right time, or to shift demand to the time of production. Only once that has been factored in, do we know how expensive a kWh of electricity from a particular source really is.
Sources with little flexibility, such as coal and nuclear or run-of-river hydro plants, mostly produce around the clock. Given their low average cost, the average prices received are profitable, despite the fact that during the night they sell below full cost, but usually above marginal (fuel) cost. The rest (power plant investments, non-flexible operations cost) are incurred irrespective of plant outputs. Thus, adjusting output to more closely meet demand would incur even higher cost (or efficiency losses, or both), put stress on the equipment and require higher operations and maintenance efforts.
If we had to run our grids with just those base load sources, electricity would be more expensive, either from those efficiency losses, from lost overproduction during the night (to still meet peak demand), or from additional measures to shift demand, such as incentives and storage (either in the network or in end-user appliances, as described above). This would add to the basic generation cost. After including these extra efforts, electricity generated in coal or nuclear plants (see section below) would have to sell at a higher price than just the generation plus distribution cost.
Other sources, mostly dammed hydro, oil, and natural gas, are generally able to deliver exactly on time. (hydro only to a limited extent, as certain minimum flows need to be maintained in order to keep ecosystems in rivers below the dam intact). In general, we can turn them up when demand rises, and cut production back as soon as less power is needed. Those sources do not require extra cost on top of their generation cost and the basic effort to operate a grid. A kWh of electricity produced from natural gas thus usually costs approximately 6-10 cents (obviously as long as natural gas prices don’t change).
For sources that don’t have the characteristics described above, things become trickier. We wouldn’t be talking about smart grids, high voltage DC lines, storage in ELVs, and more, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the sources we want to add to our grid are unpredictable beyond the reach of our weather forecasts. For sources that are capable of producing everything between 0% and 100% of total nameplate capacity at any given time, irrespective of demand, we need to have very different approaches to make them work, and none come cheaply.
So overall, as with all energy sources, we have limits in electricity cost to make it bearable for people. And not for us rich people who plan future energy systems, but also for everybody, and for those industries that manufacture the stuff we all use.
To be continued...
Next week, we will go through a list of all the currently available technologies for generation, transmission and storage, and review total feasibility and cost for each including transmission and grid management, and show certain trends for the future, and, ultimately, provide our assessment as to whether these technologies will be able to deliver what we need to keep grids going.
(link to following post: The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #4 - Delivering Stable Electricity>
***************************
Previously in this series:
The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future
Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 1
Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade - Part 2 - Biomass - A Panacea?
The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 - The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity
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The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 - The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity
PDF version
515 comments
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Thanks Hannes and Stephen and Nate!
One thing you didn't mention is Jevon's paradox in reverse. Jevon's paradox going forward says that as the price of a type of energy drops, you tend to use more and more of it. In reverse, as the price goes up, you tend to use less and less of it.
There is also something that you, Hannes, have pointed out earlier. The substitution of electricity for labor, which contributed to what looks like growing efficiency, can be expected to turn around and go backward as the price of electricity goes up. You may still of course get some technological improvements, but it seems like not too far down the road, you get an effect similar to what you show in Figures 8 and 9.
So higher electricity prices are truly a huge hurdle for a complex society that has learned to depend very much on electricity. Their existence is likely to send the world into a de-growth pattern that will be a real challenge for all the debt that is currently outstanding, and for our current method of financing projects.
The author's remarks in respect to manufacturing technologies reaching maturity and falling prices of the product reaching a bottom ,then beginning to rise again as materials and energy costs rise, is something that needs to be thoroughly discussed.
This general observation seems to imply the eventual end of throwaway society, for products ranging from drinking cups to automobiles.
Personally I have been considering buying some pv for a long time, but so far I haven't because the price has been declining so fast it has proven to be good strategy to delay the purchase.
It seems fairly obvious that barring tech breakthroughs involving new designs and new materials, just about every manufactured product will demonstrate a similar price bottom, followed by ever rising prices.
Any comment from persons knowledgeable about the expected actual purchase prices of pv panels and the associated inverters, low voltage dc appliances and so forth will be greatly appreciated.
My experience has been to use solar power in a somewhat specialized environment. My wife and I retired in 1998 to live full-time in an RV (a fifth-wheel trailer) that we sometimes move around in response to the local weather. Sometimes we are "on the grid" in an RV park; sometimes we are "off-grid" in the desert. I have not upgraded my solar system for a couple of years, but I keep an eye on the cost and availability of solar. Costs are not dropping very fast.
Soon after getting into solar (circa 2000) I found an interesting effect. I did not have enough power off-grid to stay in the desert more than a few days before my batteries were drained; I had more power usage than power supply. Upon a detailed investigation I found that the primary culprit was the 12-volt house lighting. Over half of our electrical consumption was in the incandescent and fluorescent fixtures. I had thought the big users would be the TV and computers we are addicted to, but research showed I was mistaken.
By 2005 I decided I had to have LED lighting if my solar system was to survive, and looking around found nothing suitable. Everything looked and acted like I had put flashlights in my ceiling. My background is software and electronics in Silicon Valley, so I felt confident I could invent a new way of using LEDs that would meet my needs. I began to experiment -- I was not as good as I thought.
Luckily, at the 2006 show in Quartzsite I came across Kelly, a young man out of Intel in Mesa, who had just developed a prototype product to replace one of the 12-volt DC bulbs I used in my rig. I was pleasantly surprised when he demonstrated that it was fully compatible with my incandescent bulb and produced more light -- and much, much less heat. We sat down that evening and designed a replacement for my other primary bulb, a 12-volt glass wedge bulb.
I became his first dealer of RV bulbs the next day, and began to sell LED bulb replacements to other RVers, and to use my rig as the test bed for new designs of LED lighting.
I now live in an LED environment, and Kelly and I continue to work together in LED designs and marketing, especially on how to take the totally acceptable solutions we have found for the 12-volt DC environment of an RV into homes and workplaces. Since we are pushing against the establishment and convention that 120VAC is the only way to power a home or office, it is slow, but there is progress.
My reason for telling this tale is to point out with my experience that solar by itself is not always a good solution. We must also find ways to reduce our needs for electricity so the size and expense of a solar system is not out of sight. LEDs are an important ingredient to making solar power really useful.
Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer
Thanks, Sam, for the realistic portrayal of what PV will get you. Too many still believe that solar technology is going to save us. Solar is not going to give us our current civilization in any way, shape, or form, as it is barely net.
PV is not barely net. Energy payback is less than 2 years southern Europe.
http://www.ecn.nl/docs/library/report/2009/m09034.pdf
I just installed a large array and allthough I'm lucky enough to receive subsidies (1-day per yaer with a 1:5 chance to get picked this year) I calculated that grid parity is allready reached for private households. The cost of generating solar electricity is about 20ct/kWh, while the consumer electricity price in my area is roughly 22ct/kWh. Not enough difference to invoke a floodwave of private installations, but there are ever more people in the Netherlands who now install solar without any incentives!
(About the price: If you install the system yourself, save the installation fees and shop for cheap components the price may be as low as 12ct/kWh!)
If EROI for renewables is high enough you can just build massive overcapacity to overcome the problem with erratic supply?
Sure, but it wouldn't be optimal to use that as your only strategy.
It's certainly a very useful component, though. See http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6910/713977
When are people going to grasp the concept that 'civilization' in the form that it exists today is simply *NOT* even worth trying to save. It is way past time to stop thinking in these terms.
Personally I think that it may well be possible to build a a completely new form of civilization in which, what we now call alternative energy sources, such as solar have a significant role to play.
BTW I haven't checked in here at The Oil Drum lately because I'm traveling in Europe, last week I happened to be in Germany where small scale residential solar energy systems, both hot water and photovoltaics are ubiquitous.
As most of you probably know by now because of a recent post here, that the German government at least, is very peak oil aware.
What will really cause TSHTF here in Europe, and soon, is that most transportation of goods here are done via truck.
With respect to that, the entire issue of solar energy is completely moot. So say good bye to the civilization that depended on oil and start thinking outside the box, folks. BAU is dead but solar is just being born.
Some of the new LED stuff is amazing, Probably a small but genuine fireman.
Howdy OFM,
We just saw our first increase in price for a PV panel in the last 2 years or so. The price now is less than half (price per watt, different panels, different manufacturer, different quality) of what it was a few years back. This was just one make of panel, and it only went up a few cents, but it was an increase.
The least costly panels (including the one that just got a little more expensive) are selling for almost 1/2 what the 'top-quality' ones are.
Inverter prices are still going down.
Expectations? Who knows! Prices will go way down if the economy collapses but no one will be able to afford to buy anything....
Hi Gail,
I confess I'm deeply puzzled by this statement. I cannot for the life of me imagine replacing an industrial motor with human labour and expecting an equal amount of work to be done at a lower cost. In most cases, it would be physically impossible to do this work manually, and even if the task were to fall within the physical means of the individual, the economics make no sense whatsoever. For example, at what cost would dairy farmers abandon their milking machines in favour of hand milking, or the garment trade replace their electric sewing machines with ones operated by foot pedals? $1.00 per kWh? $10.00 per kWh? $100.00 per kWh? [A commercial electric sewing machine can operate at five thousand stitches per minute and when equipped with a one-quarter HP motor would perform 1.6 million stitches per kWh.]
Cheers,
Paul
Edit:
Hannes asked me to take out the links to his presentations from a year ago, since they have been updated.
We will have to ask Hannes for his current views.
Thanks, Gail, for providing links to these papers; much appreciated. I've only glanced at the section on milking so perhaps this is explained elsewhere and I've missed it to my great embarrassment, but I don't understand the difference in labour rates if you're pitting one scenario against another. In the case of manual milking, the cost per hour of labour input is set at $3.00 and under the semi-automated and automated scenarios it's fixed at $4.56 and $15.00 respectively. What accounts for the difference?
In any event, I'm still trying to gauge the impact of higher electricity prices on current and future investments, so to go back to my original question: at what point does it make sense for a dairy farmer to abandon these milking machines and revert back to using a bucket and stool?
Cheers,
Paul
Hall&Kunz's milking example is just too interesting not to comment on.
I think it was built up by
- assuming the (sale) value of the milk constant at 5400 $/yr
- assigning the left-over revenue after paying for machinery and electricity as the value of the human input, divide by hours to get the pay-off per human work hour.
(a simple spreadsheet with these assumptions reproduce the results:
)
Varying only the price of electricity, the "full auto" scenario gives the same payoff of 3$ per human-hour as the "manual" scenario when the el. price is 41 cents.
If the price of el. is tripled to 0,30$/kWh, the payoff per h-hr is 7,22$, more than twice that of manual and more than 50% better than semi-automatic.
----
A couple reflections around this:
The customary econospeak for this kind of development is "increasing labour productivity". And for many purpouses that's an entirely valid way of looking at it, but for our purposes -- figuring out the link between economy and energy -- I think it is misleading.
In the first step, we're adding ability to use extrasomatic energy; in the second step, we expand it. The "marginal cost" in e.s. e. of displacing labour increases; the semi-auto stage uses 3000 kWh to replace 900 h-hrs, for a cost of 3,33 kWh/h-hr, while the full-auto stage replaces an additional 720 h-hrs at a cost of 4000 extra kWh, for 5,55 kWh/h-hr replaced. However, the increased wealth effect of going full auto is dramatic, even if you triple the price per kWh! So as long as the price of electricity stays below the break-even point, we're likely to see the trend of increased automatization continue. It will add less wealth than before, but the trend still has a goodly ways to go before it starts adding negative wealth.
Another way of looking at it is that improved technology increases the value of electricity. (Above and apart from the familiar Jevons' "paradox", that increased efficiency increases value; here, "efficiency" is actually falling). Then we have two possible mechanisms that could explain why el. prices are increasing: One, that the (marginal) cost of producing it is increasing; two, that the value of electricity is increasing. Of course, both effects could be (and probably are) in play at the same time.
The high prices of electricity in Germany and Denmark are mentioned several places in this thread. I submit that since they are very advanced, the value of electricity is very high there, thus the price may be bid up without it necessarily reflecting increasing cost of production.
Thanks, KODE. I was sorry I hadn't read the papers more thoroughly before the links were removed as I was having difficulty understanding what was being said (and I fault myself for that more so than the authors).
Cheers,
Paul
Paul, I think there is a middle ground in this issue, where the original assertion, of labour replacing electricity, is correct.
It is obvious that human power cannot replace electric power for motive applications, even a battery electric forklift, which uses very little electricity, is worth many workers in terms of what if can lift and move - I doubt those will be replaced.
But where is see the tipping point is in complex, customised automated machinery (the milking machine is an example where the machinery has become standardised, because all cows are essentially the same) that is replacing the dexterity, not power, of people.
Consider two furniture making workshops, one large and one small. The large one (say an IKEA supplier) will have complex equipment to handle almost everything - pnuematic lifters for boards, rolling lines to move all the materials, automatic gatherer/stacking machines etc etc. This automation equipment does not use that much electricity, it is just very expensive to buy, and lends itself to doing one thing, very efficiently, so you end up with specialised factories making lots of one or two things. And, in the IKEA example, shipping those one or two things around the world.
Now, in the smaller workshop, they will still use electricity for their saws etc, maybe even a CNC cutting machine, but instead of the pnuematic handling equipment, it is far cheaper to employ a person to do it, especially if you are making numerous different things, and want to be able to introduce new products without re-tooling.
As energy costs (both oil and electricity) increase local production gains an advantage from reduced transport, and the local market is for smaller numbers of many things, so the places that can produce smaller volumes, efficiently, and multiple products, will do better.
A workshop today in, say sunny Halifax, might be considering whether to specialise in one thing, and export everywhere, or make multiple things sold locally. Which is the more risky decision? Yes, you can produce the one model chair, and take your chances that it will sell everywhere, not suddenly go out of style etc, and have a massive investment in automation to bring the unit cost down, but only at high volume, and high exposure to (increasing) transport costs Go the other way, make the chair, tables etc to sell locally, and you have more flexibility to change you product mix, bring in new products, and not be at the risk of transport costs. BUT, you can't become a mega factory, either.
In the car business, automation clearly won out, but at a cost of inertia - re-tooling for new models comes at a massive cost, and companies can find that, if the car is not a hot seller, that by the time the tooling is paid off, the model is obsolete!
Which is the better model in an energy and resource constrained world? As a factory owner, would you be willing a large up front investment in equipment that reduces your flexibility, and requires large production volume to be profitable, in a (potentially) shrinking market for whatever you produce?
Down the road from me is a family owned sawmill, that mills western red cedar (and sends some of it to the poor folks on the East coast who can't grow this beautiful wood). Their line is semi automated, it automatically cuts the logs to get the most large sized pieces possible, but they all come out on the same line, where a bunch of workers pick them and stack them onto separate stacks, according to size, and length. To replace these people with automation can be done, but is only worthwhile if the mill is prepared to have a huge increase in volume (which would exhaust the local cedar supply).
There will always be a place for machinery, but, especially if there is a shift towards more localised production, I think there will be more (not all) cases in the future, where it is better to have people operating the machines than machines to operate the machines.
Perhaps, but the kW involved here, are so tiny, as to be totally insignificant.
The impact here, is much better measured in employment, not kW;
Any Power effect is way below the noise floor.
The energy required to make all the extra robots is the main energy cost, not the energy the robots use themselves.
100,000 Transistors Now Cost Less Than a Grain of Rice
As energy costs (both oil and electricity) increase local production gains an advantage from reduced transport
Only a very small one. Water and rail use relatively little energy, and both can be electrified. Electricity costs won't increase enough to change the dynamics of long-distance trade.
See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-shipping-survive-peak-oil.html
So can trucking, at least for short distances (and never mind what T. Boone Pickens might say about whether a battery can move a truck):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1AlrG8gVU
Of course, that still leaves a need for electric freight rail lines for longer-distance hauling, and probably means less long-hauling of goods in general, but...I'm OK with that.
I'll be disappointed if I don't see electric trucks coming to pick up my trash in the next few years (assuming we don't have a serious SHTF scenario before then). Ideal for that kind of short-range, fleet-based trucking...
The UK has had milk delivered by battery powered vehicles for decades,. It is about time the concept spread.
NAOM
So can trucking, at least for short distances (and never mind what T. Boone Pickens might say about whether a battery can move a truck):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1AlrG8gVU
Of course, that still leaves a need for electric freight rail lines for longer-distance hauling, and probably means less long-hauling of goods in general, but...I'm OK with that.
I'll be disappointed if I don't see electric trucks coming to pick up my trash in the next few years (assuming we don't have a serious SHTF scenario before then). Ideal for that kind of short-range, fleet-based trucking...
One detail to keep sight of, is in the move from Truck to Rail, you cannot eliminate trucking; Rail lines clearly do not go to Supermarkets, factories etc.
So you target long haul truck freight, but only down to some mileage ceiling.
The bulk freight is likely already going by rail.
I also note, only 13% of truck freight shows as Container, in one USA study, which is the most-flip-able to rail.
You gain a fuel/tonne-km, but lose with multiple handling, typical empty trips, double-back effects... {and then there is that old chestnut quaintly called 'shrinkage'}.
I guess you have to hope, the tail-extension-time that buys, is enough to convert the local-truck fleets to alternatives, but that will be very costly.
Perhaps it needs something like a Solar-Topped Container, with Electric base, that can give traction to either Rail, or road trailer bogeys ?
Hmm - co-operation between Rail and Road ?
Best Hopes for Trolley freight,
Alan
Hi Paul,
I think the fundamental decision in this case is whether the initial capital investment in the required hardware (i.e., the purchase of machine "X") is warranted versus the continued use of manual labour. I would not expect the cost of the electricity consumed by this piece of machinery to be a significant factor in the decision making process. So my argument, very simply, is that higher electricity prices will not cause a return to manual labour, in and of itself, because manual labour will never be cost-competitive with electricity.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul, I think you are considering direct BTU for BTU comparison. Often we have the capable of using a much less energy intensive process, that requires some (or more the alternative) human labour to support. An example, in my home I have a spin dryer, which centrifugally extracts water from clothes. Using it total dryer energy input needed is reduced by 50-75%, but it requires an extra human loading/unloading step. The same thing applies if we replace a car ride with a bicycle ride. The bicyclist is not consuming a hundred horsepower in order to move, he is using much less energy, but the total human time/effort spent goes up. So often times it is using human brainpower or manual flexibility to create a process that is more efficient in terms of energy comsumption.
Hi EoS,
I'm looking at this in a very broad sense. If I understand Gail's position correctly, it's that higher electricity prices will result in the substitution of human labour for motive power ["The substitution of electricity for labor, which contributed to what looks like growing efficiency, can be expected to turn around and go backward as the price of electricity goes up."]. If anything, I would expect higher energy prices to further squeeze out labour as employee wages and benefits represent a larger portion of total overhead and there are generally greater opportunities to whittle that back through additional automation and improved process.
A semi-skilled labourer might be paid $10.00 per hour, say, and with various benefits and administrative overhead the actual number could be $15.00 or more; for our purposes, we'll assume the annual cost of that 2,000 hours of labour is $30,000.00. At an average cost of 10-cents per kWh, that one $30,000.00 employee effectively buys us 300,000 kWh/year of motive power or 150 kWh per hour at 2,000 hours/year, which translates to be 200 continuous HP. Anyway you look at it, that's a lot of motive power at a very reasonable cost.
Cheers,
Paul
It seems to me that one of the issues is that these things do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world. So, you cannot simply change electricity price and compare it to labor costs as if those costs were unchanging.
As electricity costs rise, they will crowd out other spending. The result of this will be that other areas will suffer economically. There is every possibility that you could see high structural unemployment which would accelerate what is basically an existing trend in terms of the downward pressure on labor pricing power. So you might be looking at labor willing to work at a fraction of the current rates because they need to work to eat.
Also, I believe you asked the question of when would the farmer switch from electric milking machines to human milkers. This would depend on individual farm finances of course. However, in a larger context, if electricity prices rise (along with other energy prices) the crowding out of other spending (health, food, feed, transportation fuel, etc.) and/or margins would eventually lead to the consideration of other alternatives. For some this might be the installation and maintenance of some kind of local energy system(s) (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro). However, not all farms would have sufficient renewable resources to provide adequate energy volume or to meed the needs required by a time-sensitive task like milking. In an environment of potentially increasingly available cheap labor, an obvious possibility would be to consider utilizing farm workers for milking. A likely outcome might be that large dairy farms would become impractical and that smaller-scale, local farming would eventually replace it. Whether that change would allow for existing overall production to be equaled or increased is a legitimate question. Personally, I suspect not. I suspect that overall production would be reduced as it became increasingly expensive/difficult to support the milking of the current dairy stock.
Note that this does not even get into the demand-side effects of consumers paying higher energy costs, of farmers raising prices to pass their energy costs (in part or full) down the chain, or of the crowding out of dairy demand as the prices rise. Less demand would have the impact of putting downward price pressure on the end product, squeezing margins further.
As you can see, I think that higher electricity prices could have significant economic consequences (most not real good from a BAU point of view). One of these consequences could well be (but by no means must be) the replacement of electrically powered work with human powered work.
Brian
Hi Brian,
When businesses get squeezed, it's normally the employees who feel the pinch first in terms of reduced hours and layoffs, not the motors. Wages may fall precariously, but I can't imagine they could ever fall to the point where motive power would be uncompetitive with human toil.
An individual in good physical health could sustain about 1/10th of a horsepower of manual effort, although not likely for eight continuous hours. Let's say that this individual is paid $1.00 per hour for his or her efforts, so our daily wage is $8.00. A 1/10th horsepower motor would draw approximately 75-watts, thus consuming some 0.6 kWh over this same work day. All else being equal, I would have to pay in excess of $13.00 per kWh before the services of this $1.00 per hour wage earner would be cost competitive.
Cheers,
Paul
Again, I think your barking up the wrong tree. Humans, or even animal power can't compete with our machines. I think that is true even if you have to grow plants and turn them into biofuel. So any substitution that happens will be for those cases where a little bit of human labour saves a whole lot of electricity (or fuel). Say a factory manager has a choice of two motors, one is more efficient, but requires monthly preventive maintenence. If power is cheap relative to labour he would choose the energy hog. In the reverse case, it would be a net cost savings to pay someone to do the preventative maintenence and pay lower power bills. This guy is not doing hard labour, generating lots of BTUs, he is just using brains plus dexterity to enable a more energy efficient method of production to be used. I think it is in these sorts of situations where the tradeoffs will occur.
That is kinda like, with high electricity costs, it is worthwhile hiring yourself to make changes in a business. If power was too cheap to meter, you'd be out of work.
I agree that the adoption of more efficient equipment will be driven by higher electricity prices, however, that's not the point of contention; rather, it's the claim that electric motors will be replaced by human labour because the latter will become more cost competitive as electricity prices rise.
Cheers,
Paul
Hi,Paul
I'm not sure whether Gail meant substiting labor for electric motors only or in a more general sense substiting labor for electricity in other uses including motors.
There are ways to get by with less electricity by using more labor that can save a great deal of electricity, although perhaps not enough in most cases to be considered "economic".
I could dig a ditch around a hillside to get a gravity powered flow of water to part of our farm, but it is far easier to run a pump and pump the same water uphill from a point farther down the stream.
I don't save enough in electricity to justify the labor but I line dry most of our laundry anyway.
Ditto the electric range and the hot water heater-we cook some in cold weather on a wood fired stove, since we need the heat anyway,and we heat some water for washing dishes and minor cleaning on the wood stove too.The savings are real and significant -to us-but they are not enough to be bothered with the wood range except in cold weather when we get a "twoferone".
A local furniture manufacturer in recent times has started buying lumber father in advance of need than formerly,and going to some extra expense to store the lumber in a drying yard so as to reduce the time the wood needs in the drykilns.
As I understand it, this is saving a considerable amount of electricity- enough to cover the additional expense of handling the lumber twice plus letting it sit with money tied up .
The kilns are heated with steam generated by burning the wood scraps and sawdust produced in the plant, but the four plant boilers have some five or six motors over two hundred horse power total on each boiler, plus the kilns have numerous powerful electrically driven fans to circulate the hot air.
With rising electricity costs and stagnant wages, it seems likely that numerous businesses will eventually find ways to substitute at least some labor for some electricity.
Hard up homemakers will find lots of ways to substitue labor for electricity.
I'm not too awfully hard up, but I have invested almost a grand and lots of spare minutes this summer building a solar domestic hot water system-I expect it to save up to two hundred kilowatt hours per month starting next week.
We have conserved half or more of our hot water needs since June by bathing almost every day in our swimming pool, which has been TOASTY warm all summer;I refill it with gravity fed spring water every couple of weeks, no chemicals needed..
This is a VERY pleasant way to wind up a sweaty day outside. ;)
Hi Mac,
That's a fair question and one best answered by Gail, herself. However, I should have made clear that this is author's position as summarized by Gail. For clarity, the full paragraph reads as follows:
My apologies to Gail and the other participants in this conversation for my muddled wording.
Cheers,
Paul
1/10 hp perhaps bicycling, but most people cannot do this for hours at a time. Food intake would go up by far more than savings.
Muscle power 4 to 5% efficient, electrical generation converted back to work with motor 30%.
Food takes 10 k cal fossil fuel to produce 1 k cal food. Electricity takes 3 k cal to produce 1 k cal work.
The first Newcomen steam engine was rated 80 hp but replaced a team of 500 horses.
It's all in the mitochondria, If we can genetically pack an extra 10x into the muscle cells we can do 10 times the workload. ATP ye canna beat it.
"Food takes 10 k cal fossil fuel to produce 1 k cal food."
True of industrial ag, but obviously not of all ag.
Haven't seen some of those Bulgarian weight lifters have you? But that's really my point; even if you were to find someone who possesses tremendous strength and stamina, their best efforts can be outshadowed by as little as 0.6 kWh of electricity.
Also, to be fair, I wrote: "An individual in good physical health could sustain about 1/10th of a horsepower of manual effort, although not likely for eight continuous hours".
Cheers,
Paul
not the motors. Wages may fall precariously, but I can't imagine they could ever fall to the point where motive power would be uncompetitive with human toil.
Interesting that - A tale told on TOD (or some other peak oil site) was of some metal workers and how it was cheaper to send some big container making to Russia during the collapse of their economy where the containers could be assembled and hand ground (with the sub 2kwh hand grinders) than to have machine made in the US of A.
I've pitched how a $500 150 solar panel is like having a slave who can provide a man's labor every day while the sun shines for 20 years.
Hi Eric,
I'd be curious to learn more. Was the American plant fully automated and the cost of electricity was the sole determining factor in this decision to ship production overseas or were there other considerations as well? Let's assume it takes 500 kWh of electricity to assemble a single shipping container (250 kW over two hours, say) -- at 10-cents per kWh, that cost is just $50.00. [I don't know what would be a reasonable number, but my hunch is that the time required to stamp and robot weld a shipping container can be measured in minutes as opposed to hours and that 250 kW is on the high side.]
Cheers,
Paul
You are asking me to outdo my search-fu and track down an offhand comment made over the course of 5 years that I happen to remember as it was an extreme example. I'm good at pointing to wierd-arsed things.......but not THAT good.
Hopefully by mentioning it, someone else will have details and be able to expand on the matter. If not - file it as an 'myth' and move on.
Not good enough, Eric. I need names, dates, places, ring sizes and ring tones and I need it now !
All kidding aside, whatever the real reasons may be, I suspect the cost of electricity wasn't the primary factor and probably not even a serious consideration. With a few obvious exceptions, in most cases electricity is such a small percentage of the overall budget that as another commentary here described it, it's mostly background noise.
Cheers,
Paul
And I'm happy to dig it up...when I can find the claim. Usually I remember enough of the details so I can ask the search engines to find the claim.
I'm sorry I failed you.
(takes out spork)
(starts stabbing chest)
And when you've finished with that spork, please take this whip and engage in a little further self flagellation. ;-)
If you can find something to pass along, it would be appreciated; if not, no sweat.
Cheers,
Paul
It seems to me that human labor wins when electricity is not available, rather than when it goes up in cost.
That might be true, JB, but I expect we'll do our best to keep the lights on regardless of the cost.
Cheers,
Paul
As electricity costs rise, they will crowd out other spending.
An efficient household can get down to 500 kWh/year and person. At $0.20 per kWh that's $8.3 per month.
So paying thousands of dollars for rent, health-care and income taxes is no problem, but woe betide us if those 8 bucks were to increase...
I'd say this scenario may be more likely than non-affordable electricity bills in a developed economy/society:
C'mon.
I picked a refrigerator at random and it uses more than 500KWH/year. And it is modern energy star one.
http://www.lowes.com/Attachment/energyguides/883049151021.pdf
In addition to having my food not spoil, I'd like to have some light, a washing machine, a computer, a TV. I'm not asking for much here.
500KWH/month is OK for a typical house.
This GE 18.2 cubic foot refrigerator uses 335 kWh/year.
http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeI...
http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pdfImages/8b/8b9da207-be44-48f2-bb07-e8...
Buy a MacMini computer (now 10 watts, mine is 14 watts) plus an efficient LED screen (say <35 watts actual that doubles as a small screen TV, my solution). CFL lights, perhaps coupled with motion sensors (my night lights are 0.7 watt LED motion sensors).
A Bosch Vision washing machine uses almost no electricity (yellow & black sticker is $9/year for 8 loads/week with natural gas hot water, but that $9 is for electricity and gas). Wash in cold water (I do) and use a solar clothes dryer.
"Energy Star" is just middling efficiency. VERY far from the best !
Best Hopes for Energy Efficiency,
Alan
I consider ourselves pretty thrifty and thats about as far down as we got. Double that is more typical.
While we live in a modest Apartment, we're in the mid 300 KWH's a month, with a typical array of appliances, Electric Stove, Dishwasher, Fridge, Freezer, Wash/Dry.
I think we'd all really have to look at which of our standard electrical appliances today are quite capable of being met with other means. ClothesDrying on a line is clearly one we've been able to demur for some decades now.. but when the 'Acceptable Utility Rate' starts showing the effects of PO, as I fear it must (if 'Energy' is as fungible as I suspect it is), then I also predict that we will be far less likely to use it for 'bulk energy' as we do now with Water Heating and Clothes Drying, etc.. and the average household KWH numbers will push downwards.
There are some extremely High-Value uses for electricity, lighting and communications in particular, which would do much of the lifting required to retain the 'Advances' of contemporary life with a very reasonable fraction of the overall watt/hours, while even refrigeration, and certainly heating can be considerably restructured to stop taking such bulk volumes of Electrical Supply for granted, while maintaining many of our current assets.
When I think of the people in much of Iraq or Pakistan, who have Sun 12 hours a day, but electricity and the resulting refrigeration and other work it does for sometimes as little as 1 hour a day, I'm chagrined. Even without electric service, an adsorber system can keep ice-making going, keep fridges cold using only sunlight. Enough Insulation, and the overnight isn't a dealbreaker either.. That Stochastic sunshine has become a stable supply.
Maybe places like that are examples of a collapse scenario.
With all that solar daylight, PV, even small 1kw PV system for a dwelling could keep a fridge, or small window ac going during daily peak load times.
Yet the price for small PV seems to be very prohibitive as compared to earnings in those regions.
'Compared to Earnings..'
Instead it should be compared to the amount of aid that has been sent to rebuild the (Iraqi) grid, in this case, which gets torn apart or abandoned as incomplete often soon after installation. Send in the same amount's worth of small PV, direct-tied to Fridges and Small Lighting, phone and radio charging, and you've got levels of social capacity that are constantly getting tossed back into the dirt today.
Yes, it's a collapse scenario, but not from Peak Oil.. from invasion and mismanagement.
(and one can argue well that this is tied to PO, but has happened when other options, like what I've described, were clearly available alternatives.)
Exactly. There are so many factors though. For example if you use an electric stove, electric dryer, electric hot water, or (gulp) electric heat then you'll certainly have higher needs. Or if you live where you need AC, you'll need that power-sucking AC.
But there is usually a lot people can do to save in ways that really don't change their life. Like put all those vampires on a power strip. Switch to natural gas for all heat systems. CFLs, LEDs, etc.
I consider ourselves pretty thrifty and thats about as far down as we got. Double that is more typical.
Holy molly talking about gross misinterpretation: We are at 33kWh per month and person and could easily get below 25kWh per month and person with a better fridge. (Granted we use the dryer rarely but other than this I can't think of any appliances we could possibly use to waste more electricity).
500KWH/month is OK for a typical house.
Actually we are at 33kWh/month and person in our household and I'm pretty sure we could get below 25kWh/month with a better fridge.
I picked a refrigerator at random and it uses more than 500KWH/year.
I picked an efficient European fridge at random and it consumes 113 kWh per year:
http://www.miele.de/de/haushalt/produkte/1278_26776.htm (That's 4.7 kWh per month and person in a 2 person household.)
Just because US-fridges suck, doesn't mean that the entire world doesn't and won't use electricity more efficiently.
500KWH/month is OK for a typical house.
Actually this is simply insane! A co-worker is at 170 kWh/month and powers an entire house with it: Including electrically heated water, electric heating, electric stove and even cooling (all with a ground source heat pump and to cool the house he just circulates the liquid in the ground sourced loop without running the heat pump).
Just because US-buildings are badly insulated (and ironically often still have higher rents), doesn't mean the entire world cannot and won't build more efficient buildings and houses.
In the USA freezers are standard and optional in Europe. Your Miele example is just a refrigerator, no freezer.
And US models are typically larger (Americans drive to the grocery store, Germans more typically walk). Germans shop multiple times/week, typical Americans once or twice.
Americans eat more ice cream (see obesity rates from driving & diet).
I considered a freezerless refrigerator and rejected it. When my roommate bakes bread, I encourage him to bake a lot (more energy efficient) and freeze some. I have 20 lbs of blue berries from the Farmers & Fishers Market in the freezer that I am S*l*o*w*l*y depleting (will it last 10.5 months ??). Frozen vegetables are the best choice in the winter.
For me, the freezer is worth 200+ kWh/year.
Best Hopes for total system energy efficiency,
Alan
In the USA freezers are standard and optional in Europe. Your Miele example is just a refrigerator, no freezer.
Freezers are usually not optional, I just picked the wrong example. (Only companies/people with a separate drink/wine/beer fridge sometimes buy a freezerless fridge.)
Anyway, here's one with a freezer and it consumes 168 kWh/year:
http://www.baur.de/topfreezer-aeg-electrolux-santo-60240-dt4-a%2B%2B/pre...
And this 'airstreamed-fridge' is at 193 kWh/year:
http://www.hshop.ch/Shop/TabID/56/List/1/Level/a/CategoryID/534/ProductI...
This website is all about the most energy efficient appliances:
http://www.spargeraete.de/
Or use this PDF summary:
http://www.zab-energie.de/files/documents/Broschuere__energiesparsame_Ha...
For example there's a AEG laundry machine that has two water intakes: One for cold water and one to be connected to a solar hot water heater. If the solar hot water heater produces hot enough water, this machine can do a full load at 60C (that's about 150F I think) for only 0,18kWh.
Wait. This is not comparison of efficiencies but ways of life. The AEG is a 7 cu. ft. device. which can freeze 6.5 pounds per day. Kinda beer cooler in the basement here in NA :-) If you scale the size of your fridge to our 16-19 cu.ft. sizes, you will get the same power use, because R value of the shell is the same everywhere and our fridges are bigger. So the question really is do we need big fridges?
BTW. AEG stands for Auspacken, Einpacken, Garantie :-)
About house insulation. First forget about Passive house. just normal residential. In North Eastern USA and Canada, winter is a lot colder than in Europe, and the summer in most of NA is hotter/more humid than in Europe. It would take time for find degree heating/cooling days data, so just a general thought.
So everything else equal, we will use more energy per capita because we have more extreme climate and we use more space.
On the positive side, large savings can be achieved by changes in the lifestyle in USA/Canada.
On a America vs. Europe poking match: 20% of Danish electricity comes from wind. Load balances with Scandinavian hydro. Where does 80% come from...
... Coal :-)
So everything else equal, we will use more energy per capita because we have more extreme climate and we use more space.
Ok, but this is only partially true: I did live in NA for some time and remember having to buy plastic films at the Home Depot to seal all my windows during winter time and I remember buying an electric blanket to keep the heating/gas bill somewhat in order. These are problems you do not need to deal with if you live in a house in central Europe.
There is a government scheme, in Mexico, for changing out fridges with modern ones. I think they needto be 10 years old so mine doesn't qualify till next year then I will look into this. Mine is currently a big one for the freezer space but a replacement will be mostly fridge and I will add a chest freezer. The two will probably use less electricity than my current fridge, especially after 1 or 2 mods :)
NAOM
The ad you linked to says "0,13 kWh in 24 Stunden".
I understand that to mean .13kWh per day, or 47kWh per year.
Yes 47 kWh per year and 100 liter of net capacity (and 113 kWh per year to cool the capacity of this fridge).
This discussion of milking machines seems to be pretty strange, but I have a question.
How does the amount of electric energy used in the dairy industry for running milking machines compare to the amount of electric energy used in refrigeration?
Generally, electricity use for temperature control tends to be very intensive. I think that for the dairy industry, refrigeration throughout the supply chain right to home refrigeration is critical. If there is no refrigeration, there is no dairy industry.
Not much milk is produced in the hottest months, since the farmer has to work in the fields cutting hay with a scythe and stacking it with forks and a horse-drawn hay wagon.
In the cooler months, the milk cans can be kept in a spring house, well pit, or in a wooden tank pumped full (by hand) of cold well water. Evalporation through the wood tends to cool somewhat.
Most milk is made into butter and cheese, except for that produced on farms immediately adjacent to a town or city, where it is delivered in reusable glass bottles by horse-drawn milk wagons.
Before considering giving up milking machines, have a try at milking 15 cows twice a day for a couple of weeks. It will improve your grip.
Farmers used gas engines to run the milking machine's vacuum pumps before they had electricity. Some farms had gas powered generators and battery systems that were hooked to electric motor driven milking machines and other devices.
I haven't looked into dairy regs for a long time, but you can't sell milk for fresh consumption unless it is continiuosly refrigerated and pastuerized, both of which are very energy intensive;a milking machine probably pulls less than two hundred watts per cow, and is needed only a few minutes twice daily per cow.
Milk intended strictly for processing can be handled with less care, but afaIk, not many "Grade B" dairies are still in operation in this country;I have no idea about other countries.
With the possible exception of some hard core back to the land types with a mere handful of cows at most, nobody is putting up hay by hand in any advanced country, unless there is some humongous subsidy involved.Such subsidies are not unheard of, and there may be one for hay in some places;for example some years back, Switzerland was putting a lot of money into keeping hand operated farms in business-which was/is very good for the tourist business-without the farms, there would be only mountians with forest scenery, as opposed to the picturesque mountian farms.Swiss grown porkchops were as I remember it were only a couple of times more expensive more than lobster.
Production on American dairies typically peaks in the spring, when the pasture grass grows fastest and feed costs are lowest;dairy farmers mostly breed thier cows to calve at this season ;as the season advances,(supplemental)feed costs tend to rise with the thermometer and the arrival of typically drier summer weather.Feed costs peak in in winter when the cows are almost entirely supported on hay and grain;milk production falls off from shortly after a calf is born right straight thru autumn into the winter, as bred cows are "dried up" during the latter stages of pregnancy.
Things may have changed somewhat recently insofar as dairy management is concerned;I'm definitely out of touch with the dairy scene.The last local dairy farmer went broke some years ago.
I doubt that milk squeezed by hand into an open pail held under a cow would be saleable in any case. Any milk stripped by hand after machine milking went to the cats, the dog, a calf, etc.
How quickly we forget the most basic lessons from history.
I believe that the two main vectors for transmission of typhoid fever were contaminated water wells and unpasteurized un-refrigerated milk. Without pasteurization and refrigeration there would be no fresh milk industry. Period. Full stop.
There is no way that society would accept widespread typhoid epidemics.
Do you have references to support your claims? Where did these take place?
You make it sound like milk was not ever distributed before refrigeration and pasteurization, and we all know better than that.
Yes, but thousands of people died from it every year. Diphtheria, salmonella, brucellosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis - they can all get into the milk supply and kill people. The reason we no longer have massive epidemics of these diseases is that we pasteurize our milk and chlorinate our water supply.
In third world countries, of course, they still have massive epidemics of these diseases which still kill millions of people every year.
Here is one reference: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/15/jhmas.jrq010
and another: http://milkfacts.info/Milk%20Processing/Heat%20Treatments%20and%20Pasteu...
There are probably hundreds of sources available without much looking.
Milk was distributed prior to refrigeration and pasteurization, but the distribution channels tended to be short and disease was well known. Essentially, the best way of ensuring milk is safe without these modern conveniences is to have your own cow. A strategy that is almost as good is to get your milk from a close neighbor who has his own cow. For small towns, it was possible to have milk delivery routes that didn't take very long to cover.
When this system was applied to larger centers such as Victorian London disease started to break out and refrigeration and pasteurization were introduced.
The suggestion is made that fresh foods were eaten when available (this especially applies to dairy products) and basically not eaten at all at other time in this reference.
http://www.history-magazine.com/refrig.html
I think that point I was making is that there are many uses of energy in the dairy industry. Electric milking machines are probably a fairly small proportion of total energy used in this industry.
I think one of the lessons we'll be relearning from the 20th century is that you shouldn't compromise a person's and a society's immune system to the point that they can't fight off average bacteria.
Hi Johkul,
Your point about the compromising of our immune systems is one seldom mentioned in polite conversations but extraordinarily important.
It's considered not only morally reprehensioble but also politically incorrect to even consider the possibility of allowing anybody to die these days from natural causes other than extreme age if it can be prevented.
I can't say that I disagree with this policy;I could never look a mother in the eye and tell her that her child should be allowed to die because it is genetically unfit and unable to fight off an infection, if a course of antibiotics will save the child's life.
But the simple , in controvertible truth is that we are just animals, and so very much like other animals that physiological differences are very much the exception rather than the rule.
The rules are pretty much the same for all the mammals and other so called higher plants and animals;the health of the species is maintained under "natural" conditions by constant, relentless, totally impartial, disinterested, remorseless(these words mean different things to different people, but all help put the idea across) Darwinian culling.
If and when we so called civilized folks find ourselves again trying to live and reproduce under primitive conditions,or the sort of "civilized" conditions that prevailed in most places as little as a couple of hundred years ago, we and our children are going to die like flies as a result of having had the culling pressure off for the last century and half, more or less-which is about the length of time that we have has basic public health measures in place -in some places at least.
I'm sure most of the regulars here are acquainted with the history of European disease outbreaks in the native population of the New world, and the stories of how fast the Europeans fell victim to tropical disease during the last few centuries of colonialism...
Any older farmer-or dog or horse breeder- who has raised livestock or crops and taken care of his own problems with respect to the health of his crops and livestock is fully aware of what I'm talking about.Of course the newer generation relies on the same sort of measures in maintaining animal health -meaning the vet and his drugs-that are used for people-and hybrid seed, leaving the seed company to take care of the breeding problems.
An animal science major can pass the examinations given to doctors and nurses at the end of thier courses in public health measures with satisfactory scores-it's all the same except for the details of given diseases and drugs and so forth.
If I were thrown into into a primitive world situation- -say after WWIII and had the choice of selecting a rather plain but sturdy illiterate peasant woman or a nubile educated California Barbie as my mate, I would take the peasant woman if I were smart enough to listen to my intellect.
She wouldn't be more than maybe twenty five or so percent as likely to die on me-not to mention actually knowing how to work at something useful under the circumstances.
Her children would be far more likely to live and look after thier old daddy in his dotage.
I have been trying to think through how higher priced electricity might work. What I said earlier about electricity costs being high relative to labor costs resulting in a shift back to more labor was based on Hannes's calculations. I am now less convinced of that issue (especially since he seems to be stepping back from what he said before).
I think, instead, the big downward push in electricity use will be from recessionary impacts, that will happen with high electricity prices, just as they do with high oil prices. High electricity prices will mean people will cut back in things which are not necessary (restaurant meals, vacations, magazine subscriptions) or will default on their debt. If a dishwasher breaks, some will not replace it. Some will end up moving in with relatives.
Electricity use will drop because with fewer houses occupied, it will take less heat, light, and air conditioning. Electricity use will also drop as restaurants close, and factories for non-essential goods close. With the lower electricity use, electrical prices will drop back, close to the level they were previously.
With lower electricity prices (and lower electricity sales in total), utilities will find it difficult to pay for grid upgrades, high priced renewables, and new infrastructure. Governments will find it harder and harder to pay subsidies, because of the continued recession, and lower tax revenue. Some of the higher priced sources of electricity may go bankrupt.
Eventually, lack of maintenance and lack of new construction may cause additional cutback in electrical power because the grid will be no longer working well enough. As a result, there may be just plain outages in some areas, forcing electricity use to zero in some areas, even if theoretically, electricity use would be very beneficial.
Where electrical power remains, buyers may temporarily bid prices of electricity higher, but as the price starts going up, there will likely be more recessionary impacts, so the cycle may start again.
Thanks, Gail, for the opportunity to explore this one point a little further.
If electricity demand stalls/contracts in the face of higher prices, there will likely be some savings with respect to O&M and fuel costs, and capital spending on new plant and T&D upgrades can be curtailed, so the decline in revenues can be offset in part by a corresponding drop in spending. The relationship between the two won't necessarily be perfect, but it should help lessen the need to raise rates and thus the risk of triggering a downward death spiral. Strategic alliances may be formed and there may be further consolidation in the industry as weaker players get taken over by their stronger counterparts; this in turn could result in reduced overhead and a more efficient sharing of assets. If the decline in sales is relatively gradual, then the situation is more likely to be manageable; a sharp reduction, and the potential repercussions become that much more troublesome.
Cheers,
Paul
Hi Gail,
re: "recessionary impacts" and
re: "Eventually, lack of maintenance and lack of new construction may cause additional cutback in electrical power because the grid will be no longer working well enough."
Cliff Wirth covered these topics in his (2007) paper (free download) at http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html
"(3) States governments will lack funds for maintaining the Interstate Highway System, including snow plowing, bridge repair, surface repair, cleaning of culverts (necessary to avoid road washouts), and clearing of rock slides. A failure in one section of the Interstate highway will cut off transportation for that highway and everything it carries: food, emergency supplies, medicine, medical equipment, and spare parts necessary for energy production." (p. 46).
These summary sections also relate:
"Non-Fungibility of Energies
Efforts to manage the Peak Oil crisis will be limited by the difficulty in substituting one form of energy for another (without making expensive and time-consuming modifications). Shortages of one type of energy cannot be filled by other types." (p.38)
"Interdependence in the Production of Energy
The production of each type of energy is highly dependent on other types of energy. Shortages or high energy prices for one type of energy will limit the production of other energies." (p. 39)
I think, instead, the big downward push in electricity use will be from recessionary impacts, that will happen with high electricity prices, just as they do with high oil prices.
That's exactly what happened when they built the Hoover dam: Right in the middle of the great depression they had this crazy notion to build a gigantic dam and increasing the tax burden/electricity prices without getting anything in return for at least another 5 years and increasing recessionary impacts on the country which we know now finally lead to the complete downfall of America (if only Gail were there to warn them)...
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/damfaqs.html
Oh and btw, this dam is still adding value today as opposed to these things (which rather deducted a lot of value as opposed to adding anything):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
Not to mention the Manhattan project and the costs of the Cold War that followed after:
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/index.htm
+10
We could certainly benefit from re-allocating a significant portion (say, 50%) from military spending to negawatts (efficiency) spending, wind, solar, and nuclear power, with the attendant grid improvements.
If the US used only 10% of its military budget to build US Wind farms during the next 25 years, it could build a wind farm capacity of 1170 GW which produce close to 80% of the current US electricity demand (not only creating jobs which actually do add value but also reducing the dependence on limited fossil fuels).
Where do you get those figures? Are you talking about nameplate capacity or what?
Total nameplate capacity of wind farms, 30% capacity factor and $1.5/W :
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/41435.pdf (Figure 16 shows project costs per W).
(Offshore wind turbines have higher capacity factors and wind turbines with larger rotors (same generator size) have higher capacity factors. So 30% average capacity factor in the far future is a fair assumption)
Recent Texas installations are running @ 38% capacity factor (from memory).
Alan
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/renewable/wind.php
10%? That's gonna cut into the portfolios of the elected officials and we can't have that.
Dishwasher
Here in Europe it is more energy efficient to use a dishwasher than do the job by hand, so without a dishwasher your energy bill increases, because you need more warm water.
Electricity unaffordable?
In the half century after Edison began selling the stuff, we didn't sell a single kilowatt-hour in the U.S. that was cheaper (in 1992 dollars) than 25 cents.
That's right: between 1895 and 1945, the average cost of electricity in the U.S. was about what pricey solar power costs today.
And during that period we clearly industrialized.
I don't think people fully understand how much energy is in a kilowatt-hour. 2.6 million foot-pounds, enough to lift 90 pounds from sea level to the summit of Mt. Everest.
Call them "sherpa-weeks" and you could jack the price.
Enough energy to lift a full size pickup truck 500 feet in the air. As much work as a
stud muffin, the strongest player on the high school football team, can do in one day.
So, whether it's 8 cents or 25 cents it's affordable. Indeed, it's arguably the world's greatest bargain. Industrial users, yes, require cheaper stuff, and typically get it through various price scheme adjustments.
But the idea that all this "stochastic" power will yield a fatally expensive flawed grid is just not proven out in real life. A number of U.S. states are already getting 10% of their power from wind already, including Iowa. If the redneck cornhuskers there can figure out how to preserve grid-stability, then I'm optimistic "smart" people living on the coasts can too. Here in Colorado Xcel manages wind with fast reaction Watsila engines, and their young engineers regard load balancing the stuff as a challenge not as an insurmountable hurdle.
Wind is the worse case. As for the stochastic properties of solar, this is pretty much going to be a trivial issue, since you won't see the kind of very rapid ups/downs you sometimes get with wind.
rudall
Those are great points to balance the theme presented here.
Another part of the Variability of Wind and Sun that constantly gets the shrug, is that pumped storage exists in a few forms already, and has a string of not-too complicated cousins nearby in theory and partial practise, like Flywheels, Ocean-Pond Storage and variants on CAES.. Yes, storage comes with a price, but as you've said, the arguments for how much fatal, societal damage an increase in KWH pricing will affect- have been fairly unconvincing, considering both the Power and the extreme Flexibility of electrical energy.
Solar Heat Storage is another piece to allow for more of a consistent and smooth input from these principle Renewable Sources.
Bob
The first Edison commercial power station built in Manhattan in 1882 produced electricity at 24 cents per kWh - in 1882 value currency. The real cost of electricity fell continuously from that point until about 1960 or 1970 - a period of 80 or 90 years.
Low energy costs were the driver of a lot of the expansion in American industry in the first half of the 20th century, through two world wars. The fact that they could count on electricity costs falling continuously was a big incentive for companies to install lots of energy-intensive machinery, particularly in big cities which had the best availability of electricity.
After electricity prices began to rise around 1970 the economics became a lot less favorable for American companies, and they began to move production to rural areas in the South, and other countries, which while they may not have had cheaper electricity, did have cheaper labor.
The cost of electricity was, I suspect, only a minor part of the unfavourable economics for US manufacturers.
When GM went bankrupt and was bailed out, I never heard anything about electricity costs, it was all about things like labour, benefits, and, particularly, health care. After all, the joke had been for some time that GM was a health care fund with a car making problem - how true that was, in every sense!
If you look at this graph of OECD health care costs, you can see that private spending on health care, at around 8% of GDP, is more than double the total electricity spending. For any company weighing up the cost of manufacturing in the US, and particularly in places like California, the health care costs the employer has to pay make even 50c/kWh electricity look good. Of course, it makes putting your factory somewhere else look even better.
An expert on economics may correct me here, but it would seem that this excessive spending on health care (for no more benefit than many other OECD countries) is a far bigger drain on the US economy and discretionary spending, than even a trebling of electricity prices would be.
Light blue is private spending (incl employer funded health plans, dark blue is govt spending)
Healthcare is a great example of the successive transformations of lower-grade energy into higher quality forms with more embodied energy. Healthcare is very high grade quality information that is the result of successive transformations, and thus extremely dependent on high grade energy (electricity). Your idea is shown visually in the image below from one of Tom Abel's powerpoints, and quantitatively in a transformity table, also from Tom. Healthcare would be over at the far right extreme portion of the figure. Healthcare in the US, especially, is in an entropic, blowoff top, just like everything else, with waste heat masquerading as treatment.
A while back, TODer Nick made the assertion that the medical imaging industry is now using less energy because of the change from using silver-halide-based photographs for image capture, storage and retrieval (CSR for my purposes here), to using digital imaging (please correct me if I’m wrong as to the assertion, Nick). I find this assertion to be bordering on the absurd. I think Iaato’s post applies to medical imaging ‘in spades.’
In doing some research on the subject of cost of medical imaging, several things became immediately apparent:
1. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find data on embodied energy in medical imaging equipment. Nevertheless, one can use price proxies and sheer numbers of systems to get a general idea of energy use.
2. The development of digital image CSR enabled the development of many types of imaging that didn’t exist before because it just wasn’t practical. It was, what I call a case of “Jevon’s Paradox on Steroids” because of the massive growth of the medical imaging industry both in types of imaging and sheer number of systems in use.
3. The CRS of a given type of imaging equipment is likely to be a small part of the overall energy use of that equipment.
4. The energy requirements of the whole digital imaging part of a given type of imaging equipment is likely to be higher, possibly very much higher, than that of a comparable piece (if, indeed one exists) of equipment that used old style photographic plates.
Addressing #2 as to the massive growth of the medical imaging industry:
U.S. Demand for Medical Imaging Products to Reach $21.4 Billion in 2010
http://www.advancedimagingpro.com/web/online/Industry-News/US-Demand-for-Medical-Imaging-Products-to-Reach-214-Billion-in-2010/3$3766
U.S. demand for medical imaging products is projected to increase 6.0 percent annually to $21.4 billion in 2010.
These links give some cost figures for MRI equipment and show some images of the equipment being installed. It doesn’t take much reasoning to understand that there is massive embodied energy in this equipment. Also, the energy to run and maintain the equipment must be very significant. Cryogenic cooling of parts of the equipment must be energetically expensive. And keep in mind that there are many (probably an order of magnitude) more imaging systems in use now vs 20 years ago.
There is a timeline of imaging development at
http://www.google.com/search?q=MRI+scan+history+digital&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-...
Like I anticipated, the digitally-based imaging really takes off around 1990, even though there were partly digitally-based systems as far back as 1980.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging
MRI equipment is expensive. 1.5 tesla scanners often cost between $1 million and $1.5 million USD. 3.0 tesla scanners often cost between $2 million and $2.3 million USD. Construction of MRI suites can cost up to $500,000 USD, or more, depending on project scope.
An MRI unit is a rather large item, typically requiring heavy equipment (such as cranes) to move the unit to its final location. Once the MRI unit is in place, the room that houses it is usually "built up" around the unit itself. See this page for an example of the complexity involved in installing an MRI unit in a clinical setting.
Addressing #4 as to the energy requirements of the digital CSR, irrespective of the energy requirements of the rest of the equipment:
My educated guess is that there are probably no more than half a dozen software vendors that supply the specialized software for digital CSR in the medical industry. Even so, these vendors all have staffs of programmers working full-time on the creation and maintenance of the software used at these facilities. I would also anticipate that every major hospital would have at least one programmer/technician on their staff to keep the equipment running correctly. A photographic plate system as on old style X-rays would require little more than a file clerk for maintaining the storage and retrieval and an X-ray technician for the equipment itself. (BTW, I spent 3 years of my 18 years of software programming working on imaging software).
One of these links mentions the digital storage required for MRI scans. A full-body scan takes about 40 gigabytes, so we might deduce that, say, a brain scan would take maybe 5 gigabytes. Multiply this a couple of times for 2 backup copies and you have 15 gigabytes. Multiply this by 1000 per month and you are running into server-farms worth of storage, only for MRIs never mind the several other imaging systems. Server farms take a significant amount of energy. I am not going to waste my time trying to get exact figures on this as the volume of this business is overwhelming.
My overall impression is that the medical imaging industry as a whole takes at least an order of magnitude more energy now than pre 1990 when imaging was largely photographic-plate based as far as the CSR portion.
If anyone is asserting that the medical imaging industry uses less energy now than in pre-digital days, I believe the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate this assertion.
I also agree with Iaato that healthcare is an ‘entropic blow-off top.’
My dentist uses a Dexis digital X-ray system. It seems much more efficient than film X-rays. There is a small imager that goes in your mouth on a holder where the film once went. It is attached by a cord to the dentist's laptop. The process is much quicker than film, and the technician can immediately review the pictures to see the result. The laptop software also lets the dentist zoom the picture so that any questionable areas can be examined in detail.
Nothing requires cryogenic cooling, significant computer power, gobs of digital storage, etc. I believe that it uses a shorter X-ray pulse, which might save a tiny bit of energy.
The savings in time per patient probably translate into less HVAC energy per patient that outweighs the energy used by the laptop.
And, of course, less radiation is a good thing health-wise.
Did you know that mammography raises the lifetime risk of breast cancer by 1%? Each time it's done?
Digital imaging generally takes substantially less radiation than film.
please correct me if I’m wrong as to the assertion, Nick).
I forget whether we were discussing energy consumption, or overall cost. In either case, electronic imaging is far, far more efficient.
I find this assertion to be bordering on the absurd. I think Iaato’s post applies to medical imaging ‘in spades.’
I hesitated to say something about Iaato's post, but I find the idea that we can simplify the whole of society into an energy hierarchy is very puzzling. For one thing, human energy and extrasomatic energy really aren't fungible. IOW, you can't plug a person into a power outlet and increase their brain power.
embodied energy in medical imaging equipment
Is almost certainly far, far less than the energy of operations.
The development of digital image CSR enabled the development of many types of imaging that didn’t exist before because it just wasn’t practical.
This is a good thing. And, it certainly suggests that digital imaging is indeed far more efficient.
The CRS of a given type of imaging equipment is likely to be a small part of the overall energy use of that equipment.
I thought CSR was the whole purpose of imaging equipment??
The energy requirements of the whole digital imaging part of a given type of imaging equipment is likely to be higher, possibly very much higher, than that of a comparable piece (if, indeed one exists) of equipment that used old style photographic plates.
Digital imaging is far, far cheaper, far faster, far more sustainable. Film has to be chemically processed (with lots of chemicals, heat, mechanical movement of film), transported, filed into a paper jacket, handled, filed again, refiled, transported again, purged and microfilmed, and, if we're lucky, recycled to capture the silver. Digital images are simply shown on a screen: no filing, transportation, etc.
More importantly, it requires far less labor. If you ever worked in a hospital with film radiology, you'd have seen squads of clerks, and vast filerooms of films. It took a lot of energy and labor to mess with that.
Film takes an enormous amount of work to handle: every time it's referred to it takes that whole cycle of referring to an index, pulling the film jacket, sorting, transportation, placement on a light box, refiling and resorting in the exam room, transportation back to the file room, resorting in the file room, and finally filing there. It makes me tired just to think of it.
MRI, of course, isn't comparable: it just wasn't possible with film. The closest we came to CT or MRI with film was analog tomography, in which cameras whipped about on arms and produced images that were slightly more focused on the area of interest. Not comparable in any way. Digital imaging is, of course, enormously valuable, and far more energy and labor efficient than alternatives like exploratory surgery.
Well, you have a piece of equipment that takes a given amount of power to run, irrespective of the type of CSR that is done.
Well, if you were talking about only X-ray technology, it might be more efficient on a unit by unit basis, but maybe not-you haven't offered any data, but we still have a substantial increase in raw numbers of X-ray units operating, probably swamping any gains in efficiency for each unit. Jevon's paradox again.
My distinct impression of your earlier assertion was that the entire medical imaging industry is now using less energy than before the development of digital imaging. I still maintain that this is bordering on absurd. You have offered not even the most rudimentary figures to back it up.
you have a piece of equipment that takes a given amount of power to run, irrespective of the type of CSR that is done.
No, if you're not taking images you're not using much power. It's certainly possible that things are left on, and that their standby mode is power hungry, but I seriously doubt that's important. In any case, a well run hospital will keep equipment reasonably well utilized. BTW, chemical film processors have to be kept on and warm while waiting for use.
if you were talking about only X-ray technology, it might be more efficient on a unit by unit basis
It's far more efficient on a unit basis.
but maybe not-you haven't offered any data
No, but I've explained the process: chemical processing which very likely takes more energy than the whole digital imaging process, and then endless amounts of physical handling: pulling, sorting, filing, transportation, resorting, refiling, transportation back, etc, etc, etc.
My distinct impression of your earlier assertion was that the entire medical imaging industry is now using less energy than before the development of digital imaging.
No, I wouldn't argue that: imaging has indeed grown quite a lot, so it's conceivable that volume has exceeded efficiency.
And don't forget the massive requirements for education, training, and retraining as the equipment changes faster and faster. Here are four health topics from the past month or two illustrating some of the embodied energy requirements, positive feedback loops, dangers of corporate medicine, too many specialists, and the hazard of technology run amuck.
First, one new bell and whistle update too often on a CT brain perfusion scan algorithm:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/health/01radiation.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&...
Second, build it and they will come. How snaking a long tube up your colon became standard operating procedure for health prevention, big business, and new revenue producer for Gastroenterology:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/08/18/pm-should-the-...
Third, prevention or cure?
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/727881
Fourth, meds as big business, emphasizing the lack of ecological understanding in medicine, with the fairly toxic statins as an example, with recent proposals to pop Lipitor with your Big Mac, or in chewable form to feed it to your child, or that everyone should take it. Are we insane?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/the-cholesterol-myth-that_b_676...
http://food.change.org/blog/view/scientist_suggests_super-size_meals_wit...
Anyone headed into the healthcare system these days needs to go with the brakes on and a knowledgeable advocate close by.
And even more so in terms of industrial competitiveness. In most of these OECD countries, the decision to hire someone doen't entail taking on their healthcare costs, it is a function of government. Sure taxes must be paid to fund the health system, but the employers marginal cost increase from hiring an extra worker is not effected. And that is what drives the MBA decision process on whether to and where to hire.
In 1992 dollars, Edison's first electricity sold for nearly 3 dollars
per kilowatt. That's right. Nearly 3 bucks.
And he had many willing buyers.
There's a great graph of the real cost of electricity in Richard Hirsh's book
Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry.
The cost fell steadily until 1950, but as late as 1940 the average price of
electricity in the U.S. still far exceeded 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, again in
1992 dollars.
Industrial users, yes, require cheaper stuff
They like cheap power, but they don't need cheap power. Of course, if one country has very cheap power and another has very expensive power it might make a competitive difference.
But, if everyone has $.20 per kWh, industry would manage just fine. As I noted elsewhere, if electricity prices were to triple, industrial costs would rise by only 5%. A large share of that rise would be mitigated by increased efficiency, some would be handled with cost reductions elsewhere, and industrial product prices would go up by perhaps 2%. Profit margins would be pretty much unaffected.
The historical price of electricity in 1992 $ is on page 8 (actual document page, not pdf).
http://www.iea.org/work/2004/eewp/ayres-paper1.pdf
It pays to reality check this sort of claim, by looking at actual Electricity prices around the globe.
Doing this shows USA power is actually relatively cheap and can double, and still come in at around the EU levels, and close to Japan.
So, you need to quantify 'higher', before you really can claim 'are truly a huge hurdle'. The stats show USA power can double, and not deliver much competitive disadvantage.
Germany, which exceeds USA in exports now, pays 1.365x USA @ industrial, and
1.911x USA at Retail levels for their Electricity.
It does sound that the USA issues are more related to deliberate 'run-down', and that less self-interest in the details, is the main fix needed.
I think Gail has this one mostly right. Higher electricity rates will act in a way similar to a selective tax increase.
If taxes are increased on energy intensive activities, we will see less and less of those activities taking place. In the US, there is a very large number variety and scale of activities that are energy intensive. If these activities all stop or are significantly reduced, we will see a recession.
In addition, these energy intensive activities were also used to value investments throughout the US (energy inefficient housing and retail developments throughout the US are good examples). If energy prices rise, the calculus of how valuable these investments are changes and the value of these investments goes down. This revaluation process will cause a worse recession.
In addition, if we used large amounts of leverage based on the value of these energy inefficient investment we will get a financial crisis that will make the recession even deeper and more long lasting.
Eventually, the economy should adjust to using less energy intensive methods of doing things and products. This transition can easily lead to a permanent, lower level of economic activity.
Perhaps I shouldn't be using the future tense in this comment. Perhaps the future is now.
There are a few things to keep in mind:
1. The US is dealing with fairly different built inventory of homes and businesses than Europe and the rest of the world. If you start with small homes and small businesses, you are ahead of the game. If you are dealing with 4,000 square foot homes, and a huge amount of business buildings, you have a huge amount of shrinkage to get to European levels or electricity use, especially if these buildings need heating and cooling. If people moved in with their friends and neighbors, and occupied many fewer homes, it would be a lot easier to get to European levels of use than with our current homes.
2. The US has quite a bit bigger heating and cooling load than most of Europe, because of a difference in climate. Quite a bit of this is done with electricity.
3. European prices include some taxes, I have been told. The total amount of expenditures really needs to be on an "apples to apples" basis. The fact that these taxes are paid reduces taxes elsewhere, or reduces health care expenditures. The amount of discretionary income left to the person relating to a particular purchase of electricity may not be as different as a comparison of electricity rates would seem to suggest.
Gail,
Your three points make perfect sense, but are not complete.
4. Development patterns in North America are far less dense than in Europe. This lack of density means that houses are more spread out. Travel distances are longer and transit is impractical in most suburban areas.
5. Energy use in North America tends to be a bit more wasteful than in Europe. Vehicles are bigger and less fuel efficient (a particularly nasty combination with longer travel distances). Valuation of energy is often inappropriate -- electric rates still go down with usage in some locations, power use is rolled into the rent for many apartments, appliances are bigger and less energy efficient. The list could easily be bigger.
6. I believe that the split between freight that is moved via truck versus rail tilts more toward truck in North America.
Finally, in terms of the effects on the economy, the valuation of capital assets (or should I say the mis-valuation) and the effects of high levels of leverage certainly make any recession worse.
In Europe, freight mostly goes by truck, while the majority goes by rail in the US.
Agreed. I was thinking more of the differences that would primarily affect electricity, rather than gasoline or diesel.
While you are quite correct that the current demand side can't be time shifted it seems to me that if we are going to add renewables to the mix what we have to do is create new demand that in fact can be made time variable.
To me this would be electric cars coupled with a smart grid and smart recharging points. When you park your car you plug it into the system (in a perfect world that would be automatic) the software then decides whether to charge based on the cost of electricity offered.
It seems to me that we are either too ambitious or not ambitious enough when we think of renewables.
Please bear with us until next week, when we are going to look at it all, including cars.
From my amatuer pov, it seems that time shifting enough demand to accomodate quite a lot of renewables should not be too hard to do, as it could be accomplished with variable pricing and by coercive regulation if necessary.
For instance there is a furniture manufacturing plant near where I live that runs mostly from 7am to 2am;I am on a nodding acquaintance basis with the engineer, who says he would love to run from 2 to 7am , but management says the headaches involved are to many and too painful.
There were numerous plants running a single eight hour daytime shift profitably a few years ago.With the right incentives, such plants as are still running could easily be run at night.
How much extra should it cost to build a refrigerator with a dedicated ice reservoir such that it can operate as a simple icebox most of the time , only running when it gets a grid signal that the wind is blowing?Such a refrigerator will come in a big cardboard box-no contractor will be needed to install it.
Ditto electric water heaters-if bigger ones with larger reservoir tanks are installed and they are very well insulated,they neded only actually draw current at fairly long intervals, so that they should function mostly on wind power-or at night drawing from cheap baseload , preferably nuclear or hydro.
I am not trying to minimize the importance of the load shifting problem , but simply pointing out that for probably the next decade or so (wag) there are lots of ways we can shift significant loads at reasonable costs and with little disruption or changes in infrastructure.After that the amount of available renewables might be big enough to present a real problem-the sort of problem we should be glad to have!
Time shifting is - as we try to describe in the post - a very difficult thing to do, particularly if we not only talk about shifting from day to night and back, but instead about (unpredictably), from May to June, or from August to September. Idling equipment doesn't justify the investment, nor does idling workforce justify employment.
The same is true for your refrigerator. If it only has to hold its temperature for a short period of time, that is feasible (even though probably ice isn't the right solution there, but rather very good isolation), but if the gap is more than just a few hours, things become more challenging, equally for air conditioners. It's always very simple: The longer the idle time in between, the higher the cost (both in energy losses due to the difference to ambient temperature, and in initial investment to provide the extra capacity/technology). Storage always comes at a cost.
How about varying loads, then--refrigerators that can better handle brown outs...
Mostly, we need to down size. Refrigerators can have a huge amount of insulation and open from the top so they don't loose much cool when opened if you don't require vast volumes of storage inside.
On the up slope of energy availability, convenience, style and other features generally trumped efficiency. That formula should be reversed sooner than later.
For AC, it would seem to me that we should soon see DC air conditioning directly hooked up to PV on the roof. It could even be that people will sleep more during hot days (think siestas) in these PV powered cool rooms, since the coolth won't be as available at night.
It seems to me that the US electrical grid is in significantly worse shape than most other OECD electrical grids, as I explained in this post.
At a symposium I was at last week, Kurt Yeager, past president of the Electric Power Research Institute, explained why our electrical system is so bad. It still relies on analog electro-mechnaical control, which is very slow. He says that there have been no fundamental advancements in the US electrical grid in 50 years. There has been no standardization of standards in electricity--there are 47 different systems, each with its own standards. Kurt claimed that we are now a "world follower" in electricity, with almost everyone else having more reliable electric service.
I know where I live, one electrical outage a week is about what we expect. We have backup batteries on computers, and I expect the majority of heavy computer users do also.
In my opinion, making changes to the US grid is very difficult, partly because of organizational issues and partly because of funding issues. Getting out of this situation is likely to be a huge problem unless the government nationalizes the grid and throws a huge amount of money at it--something I don't see happening.
Two questions:
In the US, the requirement for reporting outages is only if they last 2 or 3 minutes or more, according to Kurt Yeager, past president of the Electric Power Institute. Most of our outages are shorter than that (but still annoying), so would never go into reports.
One of the problems in the Atlanta area is a combination that is bad: 1. Wires that are mostly above ground, 2. Very frequent electrical storms, and 3. Many tall trees. This means that there are a lot of falling limbs, every time there is an electrical storm, and many power outages.
I know when I was commuting to Buckhead every day, if there had been a recent rain storm, you could almost count on some of the traffic lights being out. Quite often, people would come to work, complaining that their electricity had been off since the night before, because of a storm.
The US system was set up on a city by city basis, with limited connections between cities, intended only to supply power in unusual circumstances. But this system started to be used for long-distance transport of electricity as well, even though it was never intended for this purpose.
Now, thanks to deregulation and new types of power producers, the electrical system is much more fragmented, with many buyers and sellers of electricity. This makes it harder to make changes to the grid than it was previously, since many are involved, and theoretically should pay part of the cost.
Agreed.
I think this is much more a problem in the East than in the West, simply because of the much tighter spacing of cities in the East. That is, neighboring cities could tie their (relatively) small grids together earlier on to deal with some of those unusual situations, and eventually there was sufficient connectivity that it was feasible to effectively transfer power over long distances. Consider the complexity of the PJM transmission market as one indicator of the density of interconnects.
In the West, as a general rule, the distances are too great to do those connections except as part of a plan. For example, the big coal-fired plants built in Wyoming that sell power into California were not ever going to be able to move significant amounts over the largely rural networks between the two states: too few links, and too small. Doesn't make the West immune to large-scale events; there were two large-scale outages in 1996.
If I recall correctly, you live in or near Atlanta, GA?
Do you experience significant thunderstorms and the attendant lightning strikes?
In six years in Albuquerque I have only lost power at my home (or at work) once, and that was about two weeks ago for about 3.5 hours, during a pretty intense period of lightning strikes (even had some rain!).
But, lightning activity at that intensity is pretty rare around here.
Are a significant portion of your power outages due to lightning strikes?
Gail: If you have outage events on 50 days per year or more, even if most are momentary, you have worse reliability than any customer whose reliability I have ever investigated, in 12 years as a electrical distribution engineer. My ~5M customer meter utility company's has a mean of about 2.5 outages per year including momentaries. The distribution is definitely not uniform, more than half our customers have fewer than 1 outage per year. Significant if minor fractions of customers have more than 5 outages per year. Very, very few (generally rural) customers have more than one outage per month, and I guarantee fewer than 1% of our customers have half the outage rate you claim.
Perhaps I am extrapolating too much from the summer months, when we have a lot of afternoon thunderstorms - 2 or 3 times a week is not unusual.
I am not sure what may be contributing to the flickers we get. I have noticed that trees don't seem to be cut back away from power lines on a consistent basis in the subdivision. Also, we are next to a university where there is a lot of construction, and perhaps that contributes.
Yikes. That's not good.
We sometimes complain about the cost of electricity and the bureaucratic inertia of provincial utility corporations in Canada, but to be quite frank, I don't recall a single non-weather related outage in years.
Electricity is the juice that keeps everything else going. Weekly outages are an outrage.
"Kurt Yeager, past president of the Electric Power Research Institute, explained why our electrical system is so bad. It still relies on analog electro-mechnaical control, which is very slow."
Gail,
I think Yeager is deeply mistaken. For the first century of electrical grid systems. The electromechanical controls were quite adequate to control the electromechanical generators which are the proximate cause of real electric power even today. What has changed to the policy of market management of the grid, as opposed to the older rational engineering management (the intellectual basis for which was established in the late 1800s).
There is no rational basis for believing that any grid system can be managed effectively if electric power sources are controlled by independent suppliers who are free to enter or leave the market at their whim, and with a view to maximizing their economic profit. Profit is always maximized by 'cornering' some scarce resource, or by bankrupting some other participant through sharp practices.
Enron was an innovative manipulator of the elctric power market in California. Their proformance gave the lie to proposals for "smart grid" without central control. All that is needed for the old way to continue to work is to disallow attachment to the grid of any power device whose transient behavior is not under the control a unitary logical entity. i.e. no markets, no internal economics, no gaming the system.
Does this make biofuels useless in addressing our future? I think we will have to 'think outside the box' of fresh-water economics.
Kurt Yeager explained that when the devices that were driven were also analog devices, like electric clocks, analog electro-mechanical control was good enough. But now that we have a lot of digital devices, the current method of control causes a lot of problems, especially for high tech industry.
I think you may have a point about the difficulty of managing the grid, when with an ever-changing playing field of businesses interested in maximizing their own profit. But this doesn't mean that Kurt is wrong. Do you have any background in all of this? What you are saying sounds to me like mostly your own conjecture.
My point is that the problem with the modern grid is not what he says it is. This doesn't make it wrong, per se, just mistaken as an explanation of the nature of the problem. The things that need controlling are electro-mechanical devices called generators not clocks. If the grid were uncontrolable because of electronic clocks, which it is not, then the correct engineering solution would be to disallow clocks. In fact it is a trivial piece of modern engineering to provide an interface to an electronic clock such that the behavior of the clock plus interface is identical to that of an traditional electro-mechanical device. Only if the owner of the clock seeks some business advantage, by virtue of having a clock that violates the system design rules, is there a problem. Thus his statement is 'deeply mistaken', IMHO.
Similarly, we also have a problem with electronic trading of financial instruments. Some members of the trading community were able to cause a sudden crash in prices of some traded instruments recently. The investigators of the incident remain uncertain as to how it was done, but the people who caused the 'glitch' know how they did it and they are not bragging about their knowledge.
I think you have misunderstood what he meant a little.
'Control of the Grid' means many things, over different time domains.
Measured in minutes, you balance generation with demand, and that also has to be within supply bids.
Besides the GWh, you also need to balance Frequency and Voltage, and with multiple generators, phase as well.
Doing this is clearly possible, as it works for a very high percentage of the time right now.
Where the fish-hooks arrive, is when a sudden disturbance needs correction.
Then, you can require sub-second response, in an interconnected system that lacks that ability.
Get it wrong, and you can have domino effects, as history shows.
Kurt Yeager explained that when the devices that were driven were also analog devices, like electric clocks, analog electro-mechanical control was good enough. But now that we have a lot of digital devices, the current method of control causes a lot of problems, especially for high tech industry.
There is a simple fix for the digital age - and Bell Corp had it for the last 50 years.
-48vDC power system. Run your hi-tech gear off of a battery bank.
And elsewhere I pointed out that Mr. Yeager's comments about the analog nature of the grid does not take into account the tax structure that keeps the old analog EQ in service not to mention high power high voltage silicon switching is "new" - in the 1970's is when you started to see silicon in the High Voltage section of TVs (15+KVs) and designs like the Sonly Triniton needed you to buy special balanced 'transistors'. I can't get a silicon light switch for as cheap as a mechanical one. A manual 200 amp switch - sub $200. $50 a mechanical relay. I'm not even sure where to find a 200 amp solid state relay. (Seagate Controls has 100 amp units)
The reason AC was chosen over DC is because every 50 or 60 times a second your voltage and current is (in theory) 0 and you can then break a connection without switch destroying arcing.
Want solar PV, solar hot water and small wind to become part of the backbone running a business in the US of A? Allow them to be a part of a 179 write down.
Gail, you make an important point here about the increasing importance of transferring energy into maintenance rather than growth as the system matures and energy inputs decline. These issues are not considered in many calculations.
The sentence that stands out for me in the OP author's discussion is this: On the other hand, we do find rather poor countries with almost 90% electricity availability (such as The Philippines and Mongolia, with a per capita GDP of around $3’500), which leads to the conclusion that the correlation is unidirectional, or in other words: You don't have to be rich to have stable electricity, but your country needs stable electricity to become (or stay) rich. The inference here is that there is more that goes into the development of energy processing technologies than currency (fiat). Limiting the discussion here to a money basis thus fails to address the successive transformities developed over time in complex societies based on presence of natural resources, that are required for the development of advanced power technologies such as electricity?
A simple solution to what ails our grid
Reduce demand on the grid. Just -10% will solve many of the problems. and if some remain, then reduce demand by -12%, -15% or -20%.
California is down -11% from it's peak. The formerly critical bottleneck of Path 15 is almost a non-issue now.
Much of the reduced demand is conservation and efficiency gains. Some is recession and some is solar PV. Yes, solar PV significantly reduces the demand on the grid during summer peak. It makes a "bad" grid good.
The electrical engineers that design and worry about the grid are trained to think of ever increasing electrical demand from central power plants. Reduce that demand, year after year, with efficiency & conservation and solar PV, and their concerns evaporate.
Best Hopes for Energy Efficiency,
Alan
PS: Gail, your problems are *NOT* related to "the grid". It sounds like you have some distribution wiring problems from your local substation. Tree trimming is the easiest solution.
Wiring in a loop, or feed two substations into your local distribution wiring (so a break in any one place will not bring down everything downstream) are more capital intensive solutions to your local problem.
They do make medium voltage distribution wiring that is better insulated against tree & squirrel caused shorts. Some $, but after they installed it in the Lower Garden District, nuisance flickers disappeared.
PPS: The billions you suppose are not as great as you think. Texas (ERCOT), which uses >10% of US electricity, is upgrading for MUCH more wind for just below $5 billion. They are also resolving *ALL* of the inter-city and inter-regional weak points while they are at it.
If the rest of Texas would just follow the lead of Austin, they will be left with a massively over-built grid and too many power plants.
I like your flow-based analysis, especially as expressed in Fig 4. Extracting energy from the existing flow in our environment is usually like drinking from a fog. Today, however, I have the opportunity to drink from a firehose by windsurfing in 25 knots.
The joys of renewables--variable, local, specific uses, with occasional great joy. You sip from the firehose, and whiz back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Fun, but only useful for work if "forth" is the place you need to go. Have fun, Cyclemotor!
Peak Energy?
I posted this question at the end of another thread but it got swamped...
It seems that Peak Oil has already occurred, but the people who predicted Armageddon the moment we reach the peak are wrong. Is this because the effects of Peak Oil will actually be gradual, or because the actual peak that matters--Peak Energy--has not yet been reached?
This series of articles argue that alternative energy sources won't be able to step up to the plate in place of oil, so I suppose that means that after Peak Oil, the declines in oil production will someday eclipse the increases in alternative energy production, and we will reach Peak Energy, at which time the real S will HTF...
Where can I find historical plots of total energy produced worldwide and projections on Peak Energy?
And BTW, are all comments on TOD attached to stories? I seem to have heard somewhere that there is a separate place for general non-topical discussion on peak oil.
It's called the Drumbeat, which is where this comment should go.
Where did the replies go?
Gail the Actuary had replied to my post with some very useful data. Where did that post go? If this post is off-topic, why was his post moved while mine stayed where it is? And I don't see it in the drumbeat thread.
Sorry, this is all just too puzzling to me :( :( :( I really really want to see his post back pleeease :( :( :(
Maybe I can copy it over to Drumbeat. It was a little off topic for here.
I don't know anyone who predicted any such thing. Of course I am sure there are one or two who did but they, to my knowledge, have never posted on The Oil Drum. Anyone who would predict Armageddon the moment we reach peak oil would likely be too stupid to write.
Ron P.
Come on, Ron.
There are dire doom predictions on a steady basis.
'Game Over'
'Fast Crash Doomer'
'JHK' ..
Don't start getting out the Dictionary Definition of 'Armageddon' on me now. You know what he's saying.
Jokuhl, I know what you are saying. Predicting Armageddon the moment we reach peak oil is not what you are saying, it is not what I am saying and it is not what anyone I know was saying. But that definitely what Joe0Bloggs was saying some of us were saying.
That was my point of contention, and it had nothing to do with the correct definition of Armageddon. I, and everyone else, knew that was a metaphor.
We are not blooming idiots. Nothing happened, or will happen, the moment we reach peak oil. It will be literally years after before anything dramatic happens. Or it could happen early but only if we have a sudden and dramatic drop in oil production. Only a catastrophe like an international event could cause that to happen. At any rate nothing, absolutely nothing, will happen the moment, the day, the week or even the year we reach peak oil.
After all, how the hell will anyone know it is, or was, the peak until long after the event.
Ron P.
Edit: Sorry if I am a little touchy but I feel that people should not slam peak oilers so damn much. Most of us are doomers but we are not fanatics about it. Most of us make no hard and fast predictions. Everything is interconnected, everything affects everything else so nothing can be predicted very far into the future. All I am saying is "Give us a break". We are all predicting that things will fall apart in the future but we are not predicting it will happen tomorrow and certainly not the day or even year we hit peak oil.
Hi Ron;
I do think we hear a lot of that kind of "Game Over" talk, but I was also trying to read his 'The Moment we Peak' with a fair shot at what he MEANS.. I mean look, 'The Moment' of the 2008 Peak Price was pretty well aligned with the start of the official 'Financial Crisis', given a month or so lagtime.. so when he asks 'Why didn't we get armageddon right at the peak' (whenever that might actually turn out to be).. I am already half expecting that Financial Turn to become the point when our Ship finally was pointed bow-forward right towards the Waterfall, in which case, it may turn out to have given us our 'Die is Cast' moment, even if the view that month didn't change much for anyone not looking out for it. Even with that metaphor, however, I don't think I envision the same kind of consequence as others do, or at least I think it will be a wildly varied outcome, dependent on region, culture and luck, and so it doesn't automatically mean 'Human Extinction', which we've heard INNUMERABLE times here, and any number of other wretched horsemen that might visit upon our sorry lot. Some of that, sure.. and many other things and silver linings, too.
I don't think this is being 'tough on Peak Oilers' as a whole crowd, but I do think it makes sense to call out when some of our voices have come out with cries that DO go to such dire extremes, and can frequently do so claiming a high degree of certainty to them.
We're in a time when there are all these groups who have some extreme voices, be they Religious Denominations, Political Parties or us. Are we supposed to take on our own extremists, or should someone else do it for us? If we don't, then yes, the whole group gets tarred with the brush colored by the loudest and most obnoxious of the lot.
Bob
Are we supposed to take on our own extremists, or should someone else do it for us? If we don't, then yes, the whole group gets tarred with the brush colored by the loudest and most obnoxious of the lot.
Excellent commentary and question.
At what point does interest in a topic, resource depletion, cross over into random crackpottery, and when one is used randomly as a causal event in relation to the other, how do you stop it?
We are not blooming idiots. Nothing happened, or will happen, the moment we reach peak oil.
I listed it before to refute this statement, but everyone wants to pretend like it wasn't written. Such is the power of revisionism.
http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2005/culture-change/lundber...
jokuhl,
I've had an account at TOD for a little over three years. When I joined, and as I recall for about a year following, there was a lot of discussion of a thing called Hubbert Linearization, which was purported to show the moment of the peak with some precision, but ... It has gone out or style. Even when it was popular, I don't think any of its proponents claimed the wheels would fall off of human society at the moment of the peak. It seemed obvious to me that the proponents viewed the peak as a turning point in human history. After the peak would be a period of decline just as surely as the period before the peak was a period of almost un-interrupted growth. It seemed to me analogous to a Christian view of human history that focussed on the singular event of the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Of course, things were not so bad during the first few minutes and hours after the expulsion from Eden, but from the moment of the expulsion, forever after, things have never gotten any better than they were just prior to the Fall.
I recall a long post that I have been unable to re-discover in the archives. In it the author engaged in an extended study of Hubbert Linearization, and came to the conclusion that it was much too sensitive to noise in the data and should not be used as the basis for making numerical statements about the future. This is about as damaging an indictment of a predictive tool as I can imagine being made.
But I don't think there is any basis for your mis-remembering of history:
"...but the people who predicted Armageddon the moment we reach the peak are wrong."
Sure, there were predictions of Armageddon, but not the moment we reach the peak.
Loved your post Geek, but with all due respect it was Joe Bloggs who made that statement, not Jokuhl.
Ron P.
You are correct. HL is demonstrably a hack, as Rapier showed and I can easily back up. It is useful in only one context (symmetric peak showing a logistic) which might not occur.
There was also a post last week, which was a summary of an academic paper by Adam Brandt, that pretty much said that the broad brush indications of curve fitting techniques like HL were probably OK, but you can't count on it for any precision, like predicting the precise year of peak.
These techniques tell you that production will turn down sometime, but the accuracy of the guidance they give you as to when, and by how much, is not very good.
This is a fairly good overview of some electricity technologies. The article seems solely aimed at saying how renewables can't possibly continue BAU, though this theme sometimes seems couched in any use of renewables in the future, regardless of adjustments by electricity consumers.
On that note, there are some assumptions that are not well-founded or supported;
A key assumption of many forward projections for renewable energy production is that the technology will become cheaper and cheaper over time. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for many technologies, especially as fossil fuel inputs become more expensive.
Not much support for this statement, and ignores the greater cost attractiveness of renewables as the cost of fossil fuel prices rise.
And unfortunately, Demand Side Management is undeservedly cast aside;
The problem lies with the nature of most uses: many applications are simply inflexible, like those that require something to run for 24 hours a day - data centers are among them, and so are some key industrial processes.
Lighting is not flexible
? If spot pricing is employed, and a homeowner sees that the cost of electricity is high at any one point in time, then they can most certainly shut off lights that they do not need. Commercial buildings can turn off lights during the daytime in windowed offices.
nor is access to heavy uses of electricity in households, such as cooking, using electronics or most kitchen appliances.
? And why not? You mean the energy hog TV can't be turned off? One can't choose to grill or hibachi dinner? Or hand-knead that loaf of bread instead of using the electric mixer?
We also want hot water and cool air when we need it, and usually we don’t want to schedule our laundry because someone tells us to do so, even though this is probably the easiest part.
You are mixing "wants" with "can'ts". If someone has an electric water heater, they can set their smarthouse appliance to set the hot water temperature lower during high electricity prices times.
Likewise, they can set their A/C thermostat to a higher temperature during high electricity times.
Again, don't confuse "can't" with "won't because of whims". BAU electricity use needs to be carefully distinguished from emerging efficient smart grid and smart appliance use.
Now some applications, particularly heating (air and water) and cooling (air and goods), indeed have certain flexibility potential. We can run a freezer or air conditioner that produces ice to bridge supply gaps, or we can build a water heater which produces enough hot water to get us through the day, a very common application today in Switzerland, where night energy rates are often half of daytime rates even for households. However, such a time shift comes with tradeoffs: any application that uses storage instead of directly converting electricity into the desired quality output (heat or cold here), ultimately adds cost, for several reasons.
Yes, but as you say, it's already being commonly done in some areas, so I don't understand your reasoning behind rejecting this.
Well, of course all energy use is flexible, that is not the key question: the question is at what "cost" this happens. And cost here does not simply mean money, but societal effort. What you describe isn't "business as usual", but a society where the use of something that has been ubiquitous so far becomes a great source of planning and headache.
And for water heaters and air conditioners: I think that our post explains the problem. If we only look at gaps of a few hours (what we currently do with night/day patterns), there is not much of a problem, but if we suddenly talk about gaps of multiple days or even weeks, there is no storage.
P.S. We will look at "smart grids" in more detail in next week's follow-up.
I'll note that you are not including external costs in fossil fuel electricity production, which include air pollution, water pollution (to include heavy metals e.g., mercury), mountaintop destruction, slag disposal, resource depletion, and so forth. These cannot be handwaved away.
What you describe isn't "business as usual", but a society where the use of something that has been ubiquitous so far becomes a great source of planning and headache.
We can't expect everyone to be up to speed on the latest in smart appliance management, so I'll try to explain it briefly;
- There isn't a great deal of planning or headache; one simply sets the preferred levels for appliances such as hot water heaters and HVAC based on pricing parameters. For other items, simply note the projected prices and choose to spend the extra money on higher rates or not.
There was a time when people did not bank online, fill up their own gas tank, check out their groceries themselves, etc, etc. Making smart use of their electricity dollars will be in the same mindset.
Here's a couple of examples of smart appliance software;
GE's Tendril
Google PowerMeter
More Google PowerMeter
Demand Side Management is an area that you seem to be completely ignoring, which is quite puzzling. There are a large number of DSM (or Demand Response) efforts in effect throughout the world. Do you need references for these?
And when we talk about DSM, it really encompasses three areas;
· Load shedding or load curtailment that simply shuts off a device during peak events, typically fewer than 10 times per year.
· Load shifting, a more sophisticated technique that moves loads away from the peaks, sometimes by preheating or precooling, other times by delaying an activity (pool pumps, defrost cycles, dishwashers, etc.).
· Load shaping, which constantly fine-tunes demand in real time to adjust to fluctuations, such as those caused by intermittent renewables.
These demand side management scenario analyses should be of significant value to you;
eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-1598e.pdf
http://www.ecofys.com/com/publications/documents/DSM_AIGS_final_vs1031March09.pdf
Hannes, I think we need to consider the concept of minimum operating level in order to obtain a greater share of "flexible" demand. For instance your aluminum smelter would incur unacceptable loses if required to go cold turkey. But, can it be operated at reduced capacity during an emergency without experiencing damages (apart from some loss of production)? If it can be run at say half power during emergency situations, then there is a source of
demand flexibility which a simple binary on/off analysis would dismiss. Likewise for lighting. I may prefer my home/workplace have XX lumens per square meter, but I may be willing to accept it sometimes being reduced to half that level, if I am reimburesed with either a bonus, or reduced rates. Data centers, again, they could be configured to opertae at reduced clock rate, for a small reduction in throughput. Again there is a tradeoff between some lost production/satisfaction, versus reduced cost.
Your argument that industry cannot afford say a five percent increase in energy cost, assumes that endproduct prices cannot be raised. If the increases in energy input costs are global, then the loss of competitiveness vanishes. But, of course society will still ultimately have to do with less stuff. But fivepercent more cost per energy, should be translatable into five percent less new stuff overall, not the end of the capability to invest. Obviously our economic system needs some tweaking to realize this, but it is not a law of nature that higher energy costs mean everything must winddown because there would be no excess wealth available for investment. Note I am largely assuming that industrial output is largely generating new goods, as opposed to simply maintaining what we have. Most of us could go five percent longer between major purchases of luxuries, and make say cars last five percent longer before scrappage. That is quite different from say a fivepercent reduction in income with high fixed costs (such as a mortgage and healthcare). Obviously not BAU. But, we could still have a lifestyle nearly as rich as we enjoy today.
Of course, there is always a possibility to consider these options. For aluminum, I am skeptical, as this is about a minimum temperature. For light, this is theoretically possible, but maybe a little more complex than anticipated, as it requires a very large amount of effort to establish a system that automatically dims lights.
We will try to answer those questions in next week's post on individual technologies.
Building-level and utility-level load shedding systems are widespread;
Load Shedding Leads to Major Savings
Load Shedding Lighting Technology
Light Control and Energy Management Software
For aluminum, consider a potline with 200 pots in series, 4 volts per pot, and 180,000 amperes current. A single such potline would operate at 144 Megawatts. A plant would typically have multiple potlines.
You probably make special arrangements for this much power, and don't just plug into the local grid.
Not probably, definitely. Aluminum production is often coupled with hydro electricity.
The energy is used for two things. One is to maintain the temperature. The other is to perform the electrochemical reduction of the feedstock. The question is is the design such that only at nameplate capacity/power can the temperature be maintained? If insulation could be added during power conserving mode, perhaps the minimum operating level (to prevent the electrolyte freezing) could be significantly lower than the normal operating level. Perhaps such a change cannot be retrofitted, but must be a design goal early on. Assuming we have a couple of decades to transition towards significant load shedding capability, we ought to be able to find more solutions than are immediately obvious (like when the plant manager gets a letter offering to cut his power costs, if he will accept interruptable power, and he simply rejects it because it is not in the operating manual). For replacement systems, it could be.
In the future, it will also be possible to use low gap photovoltaics to convert the IR radiant energy from the melt back to electricity, thereby significantly increasing the efficiency of the process. The same is true for glass.
Or we could just use an aluminum sheet to reflect the IR back to the melt so it isn't lost from the system. Unless the goal if to cool it, then you need to do the heat exchanger thing to use the heat to heat up raw input materials for the next batch. All fairly low tech.
How far down the spectrum do you think these low gap PV can go? Unless it is cloudy we always have IR being transfered in the near earth environment, usually from the ground to the sky. So on a clear night, there is a net upward IR flux, that in principle could be tapped for power gen.
Or we could just use less aluminum in favor of less energy efficient materials.
This would be a harsh adjustment for the aluminum industry.
Again, given the recent results from Alcoa, perhaps the future tense is inappropriate.
Once it has been smelted the first time, aluminium is about as energy efficient a metal as you can get. It is one of the easiest to recycle, and when you do, you only use 5% of the energy needed in the first place. It does not corrode away to nothing like steel, ie easy to cut. crush etc.
The way aluminium smelting works it is simply not possible to do it half electricity demand. The cell temperatures are up to 900C and no matter how well you insulate, you cannot keep it that hot, for hours/days without energy input.
There is a large energy investment in aluminium, but if used, and re-used properly, it is well worth it. Japan recycles 80% of its aluminium, the US recycling rate is about 30% - having any aluminium go into a landfill is literally burying electricity!
If that recycling rate went to 80% the amount of electricity saved (and aluminium not imported) would be enormous.
And if there is a large source of otherwise stranded electricity, such as Icelandic hydro and geothermal the aluminum can be smelted there, and transported elsewhere. It is a way to export power when a transmission line would be prohibitively expensive.
It does not corrode away to nothing like steel
It actually corrodes faster than steel. But, once it has the clear oxide coating that stops further corrosion under normal atmospheric conditions. Introduce something like soil or a cleaner that is a strong acid or base and the corrosion can continue.
I've had tin in contact with the soil last longer than Al in similar situations.
The energy is used for two things. One is to maintain the temperature. The other is to perform the electrochemical reduction of the feedstock.
The electrochemical reduction of the feedstock consumes far, far more energy than maintenance of temperature. At least 10x as much, and probably more.
When talking about "Smart Grids" and "Smart Meters" you need to be very careful about WHO is doing the selling.
Supply companies have a strong vested interest in bottom lines, and are not above some illusion marketing fluff, to maintain that.
So, if you are talking about national energy security of supply, that can be off the radar of supply companies, and indeed they will only feign interest in efficiency.
Let's take a good local example:
A power company had a nice product, that was metered power, which showed also the daily balance, and the actual energy usage, on a LCD display.
This worked very well, consumers KNEW what they were using, and when they needed a top-up. This also resulted in direct-feedback savings. Even teenagers got involved.
So what did they do ?
They redesigned it, to REMOVE the consumer information!!
Seems someone in middle management figured that consumers using LESS, was not 'good business' at all.
Moral of the story, is beware of letting the fox run the hen-house.
What the supplier spins as a 'Smart meter', or 'smart grid', might not be in the Consumers' interest, and not so smart after all..
That's extremely important.
Utilities have been regulated with Return on Investment as the measure of allowed profits, so you can only make more money if you build. As a result, we have far more generating capacity than we need, and far less Demand Response and efficiency than we need.
In other words we have yet another "failure of the market" here.
How many such failures does it take for us to realize the whole "free market" thing is a crock?
Well, this example is a failure of regulation.
Free markets, properly regulated, are very powerful tools.
Free markets, properly regulated, are very powerful tools.
If you have a regulated market it is not a free market.
Words and ideas being powerful tools and all.
All markets are regulated - all that varies is the form and degree.
The most primitive markets are self-regulated by the participants.
Regulation prevents or punishes theft, fraud and defects.
Perhaps it would be best if utilities were publicly owned.
Seattle City Light has a Conservation 5-year Action Plan for (2008-2012) which lays out strategies for meeting future demand largely through conservation:
When benefit to customers is the primary measure of success, conservation initiatives start looking cost effective.
Best Hopes for a less capitalist, more socialist model for our utilities.
Jon
Hi Jon,
Alternatively, you could allow those filthy, stink'n capitalists to earn a higher rate of return on their DSM spending. Dangle the gold carrots and see how they dance. ;-)
Congrat's to Seattle City Light and best wishes for every success.
Cheers,
Paul
Will, we're mostly on the same page. Yet I'm also mostly on the page with Hannes et al.
Since I've been writing on this site (and Sunday was my 5 year anniversary (scary in numerous ways), I've believed that technogy and renewable energy are important but ONLY if business as usual is changed first. If BAU continues, then the technology/smart grid etc buildout will end up being disastrous, because it will be planned with a whole different future/objective in mind.
So, I think, that the underlying message of these posts isn't that renewables are bad, or that electricity isn't possible in the future, but that what societies look like (both in their GINI coefficients, their work schedules, their goals of 'more', their wastage of resources on wants rather than needs, etc.) is going to change quite dramatically - in my experience the vast majority (excluding yourself and some others) of people working in renewable energy seem to believe in a seamless transition away from fossil fuels.
The energy quality shift that will greet us will require restructuring of social, built and political infrastructures. Most people reading this post (not long time TODers, but new people coming here) aren't aware of this yet, and analyses such as this one start to point out that 'affordable for some' on a micro scale doesn't work on a macro scale.
If BAU continues, then the technology/smart grid etc buildout will end up being disastrous, because it will be planned with a whole different future/objective in mind.
There won't be a current BAU if the smart grid is built out, our whole way of generating, delivering, load-balancing, and consuming electricity will be different, just like the way people now trade stocks, bank online, checkout their own groceries, select news feeds, etc.
Let's have a common understanding of the term smart grid to refer to NIST's definition, which includes technology at;
- Generation (all forms)
- Bulk Transmission (long distance HVDC, advanced monitoring/switching)
- Distribution (advanced monitoring/switching)
- Point of Consumption (residential, commercial, industrial)
- Financial Markets (realtime pricing, forecasting)
- Operations (ISO/RTO management, leveling, planning)
- Regulatory Agencies (pricing validation)
Hence, BAU is obviated when the above is implemented. People will have control over their electricity cost destiny when they have smart plugs/thermostats/appliances and occasionally log in to see how the cost settings they made are working. They would get pricing forecasts and alerts via their smartphone.
Of course, all the above goes away in the event of a collapse, but then again so does just about everything else. If the intent of the series is to focus on those technologies and lifestyles that are going to be appropriate in the event of a collapse, then that is another subject entirely.
Selected sections from the German Peak Oil draft report;
• Banks lose their business base. Cannot pay interest on deposits, because they can not find creditworthy companies.
• loss of confidence in currencies. The belief in the value-preserving function of money is lost. It only comes to hyper inflation and black markets, then to a barter economy at the local level.
• collapse of value chains. Labor processes are based on the possibility of trade in precursors. The processing of the necessary transactions without money is extremely difficult.
• Unbound monetary collapse. If currencies lose their value in their country of origin, they are no longer exchangeable for foreign currency. International value chains collapse as well.
• Mass unemployment. Modern societies are organized labor and have throughout their history ever differentiated (specialized). Many professions have to deal only with the management of this high degree of complexity and nothing more with the direct production of consumer goods. The suggested here to reduce complexity of economies would in all modern societies, a dramatic increase in unemployment.
• State bankruptcies. In the situation described State Revenue break away. The possibilities of more debt are limited.
• collapse of critical infrastructure. Neither the physical nor the financial resources for the maintenance of adequate infrastructures. The problem is compounded by the interdependence between infrastructure and with different subsystems.
• famines. Ultimately, it will provide a challenge-to produce food in sufficient quantity and distributed.
interesting stuff...
seems costly in time management for the consumer?
there is a layer of administration thrown onto the end user that may impact productivity of consumers in other fields?
The little time investment comes mostly in deciding what temperatures you want the HVAC and hot water tank to be at during specific times and/or electricity spot prices. Shouldn't take more than half and hour.
If one wants to track spot prices high points, they can look at their smartphone to see what the forecasted prices are for the day/night. We spend orders of magnitude more time on TOD and the rest of our surfing...
there is a layer of administration thrown onto the end user that may impact productivity of consumers in other fields?
I don't understand this question. There are layers of administration dealing with a wide range of things dealing with everything from home ownership, car ownership, and personal finances to when to charge one's cell phone. Most people these days are technology competent, or know someone who is who can help them.
Heck, most things will be set once and never looked at again.
Buy your EREV, sit down at the dealer and decide at what price point you want your vehicle to charge in the middle of the night, and forget it.
Some things will come from the factory with default settings that will never change. For instance, a freezer temp might reduce it's temp by 10 degrees when prices are lower, and go another few degrees lower just before prices are scheduled to go up for the daytime peak.
yeah smart defaults that track automatically seem invisible enough.. which is what these systems will have to do to have the desired impact.
I can not see the majority of the population tracking spot prices on their smart phone or any other device. Most people are not of the same ilk as readers of TOD or people who have a strong grasp of their own finances in the first place.
Yes, the average person won't want anything more complicated than the simple time-of-day price bands they get with cell phones.
Dynamic pricing and energy consumption will be automated. The Volt and Leaf, for instance, will have this.
Hi Will,
I'd like to suggest something: check out a handy summary of topics, covered Cliff Wirth's essay, (excerpts posted above), with a particular view toward the topics of "Non-fungibility of energies" (as he puts it, I'd phrase it in a slightly different way myself) and "Interdependence in the production of energy." (http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html).
Why?
re: When you say: "Of course, all the above goes away in the event of a collapse, but then again so does just about everything else. If the intent of the series is to focus on those technologies and lifestyles that are going to be appropriate in the event of a collapse, then that is another subject entirely."
As far as I understand your underlying argument, as you say it here, you are saying that a "smart grid" can serve to modify BAU, and thus prevent collapse? Is this what you are saying? (The word "collapse" meaning a breakdown of systems, as described by the list you quote from the German peak oil report.)
To me, it seems like you're making an either/or argument that doesn't really apply.
Let me propose a counter-argument:
1) We are facing "remorseless decline," (of oil), to quote Colin Campbell.
This means, zero, and/or: zero for all practical purposes, and/or, according to the famous "Export Land Model" and it's offspring, zero for some - followed by zero for many and/or, sooner or later - all.
2) Conclusion: The BAU trajectory *is* one of collapse.
The fundamental reason for this is the intersection of growth (in general, i.e., consumption in it's two major aspects: consumption and population growth) and a finite resource base, coupled with the need of the human-created "machine species" to eat.
3) Therefore, the central question is not: "If the intent of the series is to focus on those technologies and lifestyles that are going to be appropriate in the event of a collapse"
Because "collapse" is not here (quite) yet. Although, it's arguably all-too-real for millions of humans, as it is.
The question is, or should be:
1. What is the reality of our current situation?
2. What are constructive ways to analyze this situation (let's call it species overshoot)?
3. What are constructive ways to deal with this situation?
4. Can we muster the courage, compassion, etc. (as Kenneth Boulding described in the 1982 NAS energy report) to deal with what we might call the objective or scientific reality of this unending decline?
It may well be the case, for example, that modification of current "lifestyle," in very specific ways, would serve to have a "best case" energy-input-decline experience.
To attempt to reply directly to your argument: Some of these "lifestyle modifications" might apply to both projects, namely, working towards the "best case" of energy decline, while, *at the same time*, preserving the best aspects of global industrial civilization *and* at the same time, surviving (and/or, to preserve the possibility of the best case, thriving) in a collapse environment.
In fact, it seems that any paths through our current situation need to consider both.
Hi Nate,
Thanks.
I'd like to make a couple of fine distinctions in wording, if I may, because of Will's line of argument here.
BAU is premised on overall, and general, growth. This is what underlies the main difference between what you say and Will's argument, if I read it correctly.
1) Nate says: re: "or that electricity isn't possible in the future"
Yes, the message is *not* that electricity *isn't* possible.
However, I'd say that outcome - "electricity is not possible" - is a distinct possibility. (In fact, to me, an objective look at the finite nature of the oil resource - and other related issues discussed here on TOD - renders this a highly likely scenario.)
So, I'd modify the first part of your sentence to read as follows:
Aniya's version of Nate's sentence: "So, I think, that the underlying message of these posts isn't that renewables are bad, or that electricity isn't possible in the future, although objective analysis may show both of these general statements to be largely true."
In other words, without a very clear and objective look at exactly the picture of oil dependence in it's entirety, we cannot eliminate the conclusion some have reached and most of us wish to avoid:
any funds or energy or effort directed towards so-called renewables is a waste of resources.
In other words, without a change in BAU (as you put it) first, as you rightly point out, - or, I'd say, at least coinciding with - means renewables, seeing as how they comprise a set of end-users in their own right - (requiring some energy input, maintenance, etc. in order to function) - must be able to be supplied in their entirety (lifetime plus replacement) by non-oil dependent support (both in terms of energy-input and material input).
re: "The energy quality shift that will greet us will require restructuring of social, built and political infrastructures."
I'd say *does* require. Requires, like, now.
re: "analyses such as this one start to point out that 'affordable for some' on a micro scale doesn't work on a macro scale."
In fact, given the interdependence of micro and macro, after a while, "affordable," as in feasible and doable, doesn't work on a micro scale, either. Distinct possibility, is what I'm saying.
Hi Will,
Thanks for posting this for reference.
I notice there are no roads (for vehicular traffic, esp. heavy equipment) in this diagram. Roads that lead to the wind farms and to the physical components of the grid itself.
Not in the diagram, maybe this is why so many are unable to understand,
I believe that it is easier to understand this if you start from the structural framework and work in developing validity instead of starting at the individual components and getting lost in the infinitude/incomplete details.
Hi ryeguy,
Thanks for your post.
My comment is aimed to give further explanation to the points of argumentation I offer above.
re: "...so many are unable to understand"
Are you saying I am one of these who do not understand? If so, (or even, on behalf of the "many") what is it you believe I don't understand?
My point is that the diagram shows physical structures that the author wishes to show as currently existing or proposed to exist in the physical and material world.
Second point: these structures will need maintenance, and replacement, and also, initial installation, plus the moving of persons and equipment in order to assist with these functions.
Third: Moving material things, such as wind turbines, such as pylons for supporting transformers, such as the "grid" wires themselves, requires something to do the moving. Normally, machines. For example, one might move pylons on a large flat-bed truck of some kind, etc.
Fourth: This movement requires roads, or, off-road vehicles.
Fifth: The roads themselves also need to be maintained, using heavy equipment.
6: As far as I understand it, only diesel is the current fuel for heavy equipment, bulldozers (to maintain roads when large boulders or other blockages occur, etc.)
Therefore, it seems there is a distinct oil and/or liquid transportation fuel use required in order to actually deal with the real physical structures presented in the diagram.
I'm not "getting lost in the details."
If we wish to think about systems such as the one presented in the diagram, we need to do so in the context of ever-diminishing supplies of oil.
So, I do not see this - the fact and reality we discuss here WRT to "peak oil" - accounted for in the scheme or "structural framework" presented.
So, I wonder how we can, then, further the discussion?
Aniya
Sorry I was not clear, I think you get it and I was supporting you statement. My point about the advantages of working within a modeling perspective is that you focus on the forest not the trees.
only diesel is the current fuel for heavy equipment, bulldozers (to maintain roads when large boulders or other blockages occur, etc.)
Heavy equipment like this is very often electric. See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html
Nick
When looking at a sick forest it is good to notice what looks to be a few healthy trees. Taking this to imply that the forest is healed is far from a given.
The big question is do we have the resources to build out an BAU alternate energy infrastructure and if so is this even sustainable. The answer, no and no.
The available flow rate is simply too limited for our grandiose life style. The forest can only grow so many trees, harvesting above that rate destroys the forest.
The big question is do we have the resources to build out an BAU alternate energy infrastructure and if so is this even sustainable.
Sure we do.
First, EVs don't require significantly more energy than ICEs to manufacture. Wind turbines have a very high E-ROI.
2nd, even if PO reduces the energy we have available, we currently have such a large surplus (used for single-commuter SUVs, for example) that we have plenty of leeway to reduce consumption in some places to free up the oil needed for such an investment.
Hi Nick,
Just a quick reply, and thank you for your comments.
It seems to me, as it does to many (I hope!) - this is a critical question.
It also seems, we first need a common framework for the analysis.
We need to outline how to approach this.
For example, You say "EVs don't require significantly more energy than ICEs to manufacture."
Well, we need to lay out the details of this. Is it more, how much more? Can we quantify this?
If we are talking about replacing the transportation fleet, then...what would be some likely scenarios for doing this?
When you talk about "single-commuter" SUVs, for example, can you go into detail?
Would you say, for example, ban the sale of SUVs? Or, how would you go about eliminating single commuter trips in SUVs? how many of these would you have to eliminate to save how much for what investment?
re: Wind turbines. I'm still back to my original set of questions about this. I'd like to see you, if you have the time, to go over them one by one and develop an analysis, or see what others have said.
Hi Aniya;
I'm eager to see harder numbers on the EV mfg process as well.. but generally speaking they 'can' be far less involved than an ICE car, and I've seen countless EV owners attesting to the fact that they almost NEVER have to get any servicing done any more. Oil Changes, Sparks, Carb and Timing, Fuel Lines, Pumps, Filters, Leaking Seals, Blown Rings, Blue smoke or White Smoke, Mufflers and Rusting Tailpipes, Leaking Radiator fluid. An Electric Motor, one moving part, almost no oscillation/vibration- they can be rated for a Million miles of road service.
An EV with Regenerative Braking might have disk brakes installed as well, but these may never get worn down in the lifetime of an EV. Rust might be their biggest issue.
Beyond all that, is the ease with which people have been turning old Gas cars into EV's .. Motor, Controller, Batteries .. revise some electrical parts, interface the Motor with the Driveshaft Spline.. and there you have a car that is already built, and ready for a second life, with a drive-chain that is unlikely to shake and vibrate it to pieces as a new Gas Motor could..
(EDIT: It's not 'nothing' to do such a conversion. Mounting the Heavier batteries has to be done right, and properly running High-Amperage Wire is also a critical safety matter.. but many are out there.. and if someone had to use Lead Batts for starters, converting to Lithiums when the opportunity arises is not going to be complicated.. just a serious investment.)
Bob
After much looking, I found a source for the energy inputs for batteries. It turns out they're mighty small - small enough to show that those who worry about the additional energy needed to manufacture batteries for HEV/EREV/PHEVs don't need to worry any more.
109,700 joules per KM for Volt battery manufacture
44,500 for Prius
or in watt-hours:
Volt: 30.5
Prius: 12.4
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/HV/458.pdf page 17
That's much, much smaller than the energy needed either for liquid fuel, or for electricity to power EVs.
From correspondence with the Center for Transportation Research, Argonne National Laboratory, the correct way to calculate the embodied energy of the battery is to multiply the 109.7 KJ per km (30 watt-hours per km) by lifetime range of about 250K km. That gives 27.4 GJ.
Now, the average US vehicle would use about 859 GJ, and a Volt would use about 190GJ (82 gas, and 108 from electricity), so the battery represents about 3% of an ICE and 15% of a Volt's lifetime consumption.
------------------
"A team from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) compiled a detailed lifecycle inventory of a Li-ion battery and produced a rough lifecycle analysis (LCA) of battery-electric vehicle mobility. Their study, published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, showed that the environmental burdens of mobility are dominated by the operation phase regardless of whether a gasoline-fueled ICEV or a European electricity-fueled BEV is used.
...
The share of the total environmental impact of E-mobility caused by the battery (measured in Ecoindicator 99 points) is 15%. The impact caused by the extraction of lithium for the components of the Li-ion battery is less than 2.3% (Ecoindicator 99 points). "
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/08/notter-20100810.html
-----------------------------------
When you talk about "single-commuter" SUVs, for example, can you go into detail?
I'm thinking of 1 person in a Chevy Tahoe using 5x as much gas as a Prius. Put 4 people in a Prius, and the people in the Prius use 5% as much per passenger!
Would you say, for example, ban the sale of SUVs? Or, how would you go about eliminating single commuter trips in SUVs? how many of these would you have to eliminate to save how much for what investment?
Double CAFE, add $3 to gas taxes, apply stiff taxes to large engines.
http://www.energy.eu/#industrial
If we look at current industrial electricity prices in Europe, many countries are operating perfectly well with the prices you claim are "unacceptable" and "unbearable". If Cyprus can bear Euro Cents 0.142 kWh (US 19 cents/kWh) and Germany can bear Eur/Cents 0.147 KWh (US 19 cents/kWh) and Denmark can bear 0.132 EuCents/kWh, how can those prices be honestly labeled "unbearable". Factually, most of the countries currently paying prices in the range you call "unacceptable" are showing economic performance superior to the US with our current ~8 cents/kWh.
Realistically, when prices increase consumption decreases. Every hotel I visited in France had motion-sensor or timer lights in the halls. If much ofEurope operates quite successfully today with the electricity rates you consider "unbearable", it is reasonable to assume that "an entire industrial society" can and will operate successfully with much higher rates, after a period of technical and behavioral adaptation.
You are right, Europe has a much higher cost of electricity.
First things first: Neither Cyprus nor Denmark have any significant industrial production, which is what we are talking about.
And even in Germany, where industrial electricity prices for large users are still in the range of around 8-11 US$ cents per kWh, and even less for specific heavy users which are exempt from energy taxes, most heavy uses of electricity have disappeared during the past decade or two.
This is exactly what we are talking about.
A significant portion of the US's manufacturing base has disappeared without a rise in electricity prices, so this is a complex, multi-variate issue that cannot be reduced to one cause->effect. Germany's entry in the the EU (open cross-border market where lower labor prices in other countries pull manufacturing away), reunification, and the WTO are just some of the other variables at play here.
Using Germany as an example actually works against your thesis; Germany is now up to over 16% of its electricity generation from renewables, so the strongest European economy is also a leader in renewable energy markets. By your implications, this can't be.
Sorry, but the above statement is simply incorrect.
from
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Denmark-ECONOMIC-SEC...
"The sophisticated technology of much of Denmark's industrial sector has meant that high or increasing productivity does not always correspond with high or increasing employment. Over the past decade, the percentage of the workforce employed in manufacturing has remained fairly constant at around 25 percent."
Denmark has also been a world leader in wind turbine manufacture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
"The Danish wind turbine industry is the world's largest. Around 90% of the national output is exported, and Danish companies accounted for 38% of the world turbine market in 2003, when the industry employed some 20,000 people and had a turnover of around 3 billion euro.[2]"
The above is "significant industrial production" by any reasonable measure.
I think there is a significant misconception about what "industry" means. The manufacturing and assembly of high-tech goods isn't what we are talking about. What we are talking about is the part that comes before, the extraction and refinement of raw materials, the production of key inputs (like concrete, steel, aluminum), which ends up in those products Denmark still produces. If Denmark was to also manufacture the inputs, the wind turbines would simply be unaffordable.
I see no reason to discount value-added manufacturing of high technology equipment such as wind turbines as not being 'industrial production'.
If Denmark was to also manufacture the inputs, the wind turbines would simply be unaffordable.
Only if other countries 'cheated' by using old, polluting technologies like coal-burning electricity to refine the raw materials. Yes, they do that now, but that is precisely what is under negotiation.
I think there is a significant misconception about what "industry" means.
I should say so: you're using a definition very different from everybody else.
If Denmark was to also manufacture the inputs, the wind turbines would simply be unaffordable.
That's a very odd statement. I don't know to what extent Denmark happens to have specialized in concrete, steel and aluminum, but those things are certainly manufactured cost-effectively in countries very similar to Denmark.
Concrete is primarily composed of water, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate and cement.
Electricity is not a significant fraction of the energy inputs associated with making (or placing) concrete.
He meant cement, of course.
OK, so omit aggregate mining/transport and focus on cement and the same is true. The major energy component of cement production is linked to the combustion of some fossil fuel in a kiln. There is a mining/transport component that precedes this (liquid fuel) along with a crushing step (electric?).
IMO, there are WAY too many points where the primary authors (and responses) wave their hands over a point and say it's so. Why? I picked just this one as an example of an error in the supporting argument for an apparent point being made about the magnitude/components of heavy industrial production and it's energetic reliance on electricity. Other posters have certainlyl pointed out many other more significant inconsistencies.
In a similar vein, thanks for your question above regarding the reliability of electricity supply in Atlanta. The initial comment on this also triggered my internal reasonableness radar.
BK
While my direct knowledge on this point is limited to the fact that cement plants are some of my biggest customers of electricity, googling reveals that primary energy consumption for electricity makes up on the order of 1/3rd of cement plant energy consumption for a plant with an efficient modern kiln. Conveyors, crushers, grinders, mixers, dryers, air compressors, etc are non-trivial uses of electricity, just not as big a use as kiln fuel.
So, let's go back to the claim in the original post.
If their electricity costs were to double (and their competitors had the same problem), how much would their overall costs rise? I'm guessing 5% or less, which would certainly not endanger their business.
If Denmark was to also manufacture the inputs, the wind turbines would simply be unaffordable.
Wind turbines require basic materials just like pretty much any other machinery, stadiums, shopping-malls, banks, tunnels, bridges, ships, trucks, cars, appliances, toys, etc. By your reasoning nothing would have ever been affordable by anyone.
By the way: A wind turbine has an EROI of 20:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_%28EROI%29_fo...
The energy requirements for a wind turbine are thus 2.2 kWh/W at a capacity factor of 25%.
That's 33 cents/W even at 15 cents per kWh input energy costs (wind turbine currently cost $1.5-$2/W). 15 cents per kWh corresponds to an oil price of $240 per barrel. And steel production (main material of wind turbine) requires mainly coal and not expensive oil.
Needless to say that the materials a wind turbine consist of is mostly recyclable with less energy input to build new wind turbines.
It leaves me to wonder how great the ratio from Wealthiest to Poorest in given industries is in Europe as opposed to the US. Our wealth disparity in the US at least might be what is so unsupportable with higher industrial electricity rates.
No significant industry, eh?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
They're the largest producers of wind turbines, actually. There seems to be a lot of straw men in this argument. While I agree about general shakiness in power production (I'm a PhD student - in power engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) I think your conclusions about renewables and storage need a lot more technical grounding in engineering. I'm not denigrating the importance of economics or policy here, but I don't think these technical conclusions are shown to be sound.
For example, one paper -
C. Archer; M. Jacobson. “Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by
Interconnecting Wind Farms” (2007, February 6). Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Journal of, Vol. 46, November 2006. [Online] Available: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
describes how over a larger geographical area, wind is nearly constant (at 33% of rating.) As we increase the covered area the statistical likelihood of an event that's not at that power decreases dramatically (other studies show that averaging the entire eastern US drives variability very close to 0). Make the area large enough (and yes, we're talking bigger than Denmark) and you're dealing with variations that are more or less seasonal and balanced with industrial solar thermal often come out to a rough balance.
Ramping events also become less and less of an issue as you increase your interconnected area, and can be buffered with storage that is not prohibitive. So the idea that nuclear can't take be brought on line makes a lot less sense. Now sure, this all presupposes a huge investment in HVDC or something like it to make Denmark or Scotland not the only area being averaged - but compared to the problems you're describing the investment is... if not trivial, at least manageable. As you mentioned, the investment in wind is uneven in Europe at this time.
For example, HVDC lines are currently being run underwater from capital district of New York State to NYC - which eliminated a whole bunch of issues in grid connected power storage that I was working on (NYC has major problems with transmission system congestion, even absent a general supply problem.)
I recently did a study for NYSERDA (which being from NY State you'll be familiar with) on storage technologies, and some of our conclusions were that New York State in general and New York City in particular had a very strong ability to avoid peak loads. We in fact looked at the sodium sulfate storage done by the the New York Power Authority for the MTA at a bus terminal in Long Island, which used storage for load shifting, and is economically feasible currently. This pattern is replicated by Verizon in New York, which has significant storage and is increasing it to participate in load avoidance programs.
So another counter point - in the long run, storage is doable - many of the techologies are heavy on the investment side, and as one person on NYPA put it, "we've got 3 sites, but we can't get any more right now for pumped storage because no one currently thinks storage is worth more flooded towns" [Referencing Gilboa-Blenheim.] This is not because those areas don't exist... and plentifully in New York State. It's because the problem has not become bad enough yet to encourage people to think about it seriously.
LiFePo also seems to be falling in price rapidly, projections going to $.50/Wh stored for upwards of 7000 cycles within the next 3 years (currently it's at $1.00). LiIon is a pretty bad way to store power on a large scale... but, for fun, your 96 million cars for a 100% wind powered grid - let's just run the numbers as if that's true. 1* 100 million * 40 kwh is $4 trillion of the UK, or $2 trillion if current cost estimates for 2012 hold. That storage would last for 10-20 years (with decreasing depth of charge over time)... that's say $150B/yr for the UK. Let's say that scales to $750B for the US.(In fact we'd probably use sodium sulfide, compressed air, pumped hydro, and various other flow battery types over LiIon). That's an Iraq war or two, a Bush tax cut and a farm subsidy bill. Expensive? With the worst possible case, sure. Existential threat? No. Actually it's quite close to our annual defense budget... hmmm....
Let's say at 10k/person(6k is typical for an entire house) of solar PV (again, picking a bad technology and assuming we're covering your office and your home), at $2.50 watt, we put in $9T worth of solar... lasting for conservatively 20 years... that's say $450B a year for total energy independence. Throw in another $100B for the vehicle fleet. I think this part is covered by our current spending on oil. If that's your cost for BAU, I don't think you've proven that the future in unsustainable. This is disregarding any other averaging or load avoidance. It's also ignoring better technologies.
If residential PV solar was used with storage (as I've just installed myself) the increased cost is about 25% of system cost, and sure, it won't cover me for the lowest peak of solar production in December, but then we know a few days in advance that the winter solstice is coming, and it is possible to ready a nuke plant in that time... even if it was 100% idle, and even if it was the type of nuke plant that works that way. Or I can turn off some loads. I won't need to idle my refrigerator though.
Likewise, I'm not sure what the graph about investment in renewables is supposed to prove. Our interest in them is superficial and fickle, especially in the U.S.? Well as a former solar installer, I'd say that's pretty obvious (I did mention that I went back to grad school). We got whipsawed by the credit crisis and then a sudden cut to the subsidies for installing. And that put lots of us out of business. But that was... well, just a lack of interest. The problem wasn't bad enough yet to care. Where people do care, you get things like 5 million PV powered homes in Germany.
Sure, aluminum smelting has its issues. The reason Boeing is in Seattle is because of proximity to hydro power. Alcoa just built in Iceland for access to power. But aluminum is not a typical business of any kind, and is not even typical of industrial applications - as one of my professors put it, aluminum is basically solidified electricity. There are very, very few industries where energy is close to that level of percentage of final cost, thanks largely to conservation efforts since the 70's. And as for decreasing power use in Germany... are we talking about mothballing Soviet era industrial facilities? That might get you a pretty rapid decrease in power use, all right, but it doesn't show an industrial decline driven by energy costs. I wonder if you'd care to compare industrial decline in the US vs Germany over the same period...?
So would 100% renewables be preferable? Sure. And I think we'll get there, and I'd agree the infrastructure for that is not well thought out yet. But when you say that 30-50% penetration is unmanageable, that is not proven by this data.
Thanks for taking the time to write an informative post. And very well written!
Neither Cyprus nor Denmark have any significant industrial production, which is what we are talking about.
This is just pure crazy-talk.
In fact Denmark has been exporting more Wind turbines, which produce significantly more electricity than what Denmark will ever be able to consume in electricity and this with a workforce which only accounts for 0.5% of the Danish population!
http://www.windpower.org/en/news/news.html#606
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_turbine_manufacturers
This implies a fundamental change of the main economic challenge that modern industrial economies have faced since the 1920's and the start of the Era of Oil, which was how to general sufficient demand to provide a market for the explosive increase in productive potential.
The challenge proposed here is far easier to cope with than the one we have been accustomed to coping with, since its aiming at a far more stable target than the explosively growing production capacity of the past ninety years.
Providing the finance for the labor and up front costs of systems with greater energy efficiency and/or flexibility is straightforward. If someone can finance a conventional refrigerator/freezer on their own or refrigerator/freezer drawer units that can draw their power flexibly over a 24 hour period through Connie Mae finance, large numbers will take up the energy efficient and flexible option. If someone can finance a conventional AC unit on their own, or solar-assisted dehumidifier and geothermal assist air cooler through Connie Mae finance, the shift will be ongoing.
When Connie Mae finance is extended into the industrial arena, the opportunities to mine energy inefficiencies due to the present extreme under-pricing of energy are substantial, as are the opportunities to create far greater energy flexibility than we have had any reason to have during the period of breakneck expansion of productivity capacity and the need to continually invent new means to drive up effective demand at an equally breakneck pace.
However, this post also highlights the focus that engineer poet has placed on Direct Carbon Fuel Cells, since improving the load following capacities of biocoal is an essential part of the mix. It also highlights the focus that StrandedWind has placed on more capital efficient means of generating ammonia from electricity, which can generate an important load following demand from a process that is presently a capital intensive, energy intensive process that is strongly biased toward 24/7 production schedules.
One of the challenges for the EU and one of the benefits of the US is that the load firming required for a substantial share of energy supply of wind and solar to function as baseload is much smaller over a subcontinental geographic scale than over a local geographic scale ... for a wind resource such as the Texas Panhandle, spreading into NM, CO, OK and KS, if drawing energy from the entire resource 2% of total wind supply in firming supply can allow 1/4 of the resource to be treated as baseload, and the required firming supply drops further if distinct wind resources are connected.
Excellent read!
I am glad this is mentioned because people point out all the time that Denmark has been able to reach a wind production capacity of 20% of total electricity production. But this is only viable as long as their neighbors are able to provide cheap and high quality stored hydro power, that can fill the void in case of no wind power production (which may happen over the entire landmass of Denmark simultaneously - small area and homogeneous typography). Very important detail.
Actually, Denmark could quite practically do pumped storage using sea water, berms, and impoundments, so no dependence on neighbors is required for Denmark to have a high renewables percentage. But as long as modulating hydro-power in Norway, or wheeling power to the rest of the EU is cheaper, of course, Denmark will take the cost-effective alternative.
Indeed, distribution via grids will probably always be cheaper than storage, but when grid-wheeling opportunities are exhausted then system operators will turn to storage, whether local or remote.
The next post will cover storage options.
More info on why, the physics of, high density direct electric storage, batteries, is so difficult would be nice.
thanks
And where in Denmark are you going to find the high mountain lakes to use as pumped-storage reservoirs? The highest mountain in Denmark is only 127 metres above sea level - and it has no lakes.
Ideally, if you are going to use pumped storage, you need large volume lakes with lots of vertical drop to the turbines to provide the storage capacity. Denmark has none, but Norway and Sweden have lots of them. Denmark's wind power system would not work without Norway and Sweden to provide backup hydro power for when the wind does not blow.
The result is that Denmark ends up selling its surplus wind power to Norway and Sweden at very low (sometimes negative) prices when the wind is blowing, and Norway and Sweden sell their hydroelectric power back to Denmark at very high prices when the wind fails. They don't particularly need Denmark's power, so they aren't going to pay very much money for it.
Pumped storage needs either large drops or large volumes to store significant energy. Of course the ocean offers huge volumes, and vertical drops are available both above and below the surface of the ocean. The idea that high mountain lakes are required for pumped storage is simply wrong.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2007/09/dutch-compa...
"Burlington, Massachusetts [RenewableEnergyAccess.com] KEMA, in partnership with the civil engineering firm Bureau Lievense and technology illustrators Rudolph and Robert Das, has developed an "Energy Island" concept to store power generated from an offshore wind farm. The concept design is the initial result of an on-going feasibility study being conducted for Dutch energy companies.
The Energy Island concept is an important step forward in demonstrating the role of large-scale energy storage in enhancing the reliability of the power supply, stabilizing the cost of electricity, and reducing CO2 emissions.
The Energy Island designed by KEMA, Lievense and the Das brothers incorporates a new concept in pumped hydro storage — an inverse offshore pump accumulation station (IOPAC).
On the Energy Island when there is a surplus of wind energy, the excess energy is used to pump seawater out of the interior "subsurface-lake" into the surrounding sea. When there is a shortage of wind power, seawater is allowed to flow back into the interior "lake" through commercially available generators to produce energy.
The IOPAC is unique from conventional pumped hydro storage systems in that it would be stationed on an artificial island off the Dutch coast in the North Sea and comprised of a ring of dikes surrounding a 50-meter deep reservoir. The island itself would be built from materials dredged to deepen the interior reservoir.
KEMA analysis estimates that the proposed Energy Island storage system would have a maximum generation capacity of 1,500 megawatts, depending on the water level. It also would have an annual storage capacity of more than 20 gigawatts — enough energy to offset 500 to 840 kilotons of CO2 emissions.
The Energy Island concept is an important step forward in demonstrating the role of large-scale energy storage in enhancing the reliability of the power supply, stabilizing the cost of electricity, and reducing CO2 emissions."
Regardless of whatever energy storage scheme the Danes use, it would be far more expensive than simply pumping water back uphill into existing hydroelectric storage reservoirs in Norway and Denmark. The existing wind-generating system is only made viable by using the much larger Norwegian and Swedish hydroelectric power systems as a backup.
Trying to put the backup storage systems into far smaller, flatter, and more heavily populated Denmark would be a technical challenge and very expensive. The size of the storage facilities would also upset the local residents, as will the size of the wind farms.
I can only suspect you did not actually read my post above.
The proposal is to put the storage off-shore in the huge areas of shallow sea that surround Denmark, probably directly interspersed with off-shore wind. Of course this would be more expensive, but it directly contradicts the false claim that Denmark's high renewables percentage would not be possible without storage in neighboring countries.
You apparently are not very good at reading other people's comments, either. I didn't say it would be impossible, I said it would be more expensive. I also said it wouldn't be popular with the local residents who would have to look at the vast structures that would have to be built.
There's a big difference between "uneconomic" and "impossible". A lot of things are done for political reasons that make no economic sense whatsoever. Of course, whether it happens or not depends on the Danish voters. It's their money. Nobody else is going to pay for it.
People here persistently read things into my comments that I didn't say. I think it's because they don't like what I say, but they don't have a good comeback, so they respond to some other argument I didn't make. It's known as the "straw man" logical fallacy.
I responded to exactly what you said, quoting "Trying to put the backup storage systems into far smaller, flatter, and more heavily populated Denmark would be a technical challenge and very expensive. The size of the storage facilities would also upset the local residents, as will the size of the wind farms."
None of these concerns above apply to offshore pumped storage, the proposal is NOT to put storage into "smaller, flatter, and more heavily populated Denmark", but into the vast offshore mudflats, which are uninhabited by humans and have no neighbors and in many cases will not be visible from dry land. Public support for windpower in Denmark is strong and many citizens own shares in wind co-ops. Realistically, future wind power development in Denmark will be almost all offshore, so local residents are unlikely to be "upset" but are likely to appreciate the employment and positive economic impacts.
I simply cannot imagine a more expensive place to try to build a water impoundment of any size, type , or purpose than an in or on a "vast offshore mudflat".Such an impoundment would have to be very tall,very thick and enclose the impounded water on all sides with a circular dam.
It would cost an ungodly amount to build a reservoir in such a place and install the relevant associated infrastructure.The bill for rip rap (coarse broken stone)alone would probably be enough to buy a shiny new nuke!
Think salt water proof water bridges at many tens of millions of dollars per mile;that's just to get to the jobsite!
The highlands of East Iceland (nearest sheep farm 30 km away, uninhabitable) are probably worse :-)
The only way to make this economic is to make it BIG !
Circumference increases with radius. Area increases with radius squared.
Cost is proportional to circumference, Benefit is proportional to area.
Just keep increasing the radius till Benefit > Cost.
Practical ? I have my doubts. LOTS of eggs in one basket.
Alan
Of course, the United States is substantially bigger than Denmark, and has substantially more mountainous terrain to work with, much of which by accident of geography does lie along natural transmission paths from wind resource areas to major consuming areas.
"it would be far more expensive than simply pumping water back uphill i into existing hydroelectric storage reservoirs in Norway and Denmark"
Rocky, You've missed the point. If you have a hydro-power as part of your mix of power generation you DO NOT NEED pumped storage. When the wind is blowing you simply stop producing from your hydro-power plants and they gradually fill up. To the best of my knowledge there is virtually no pumped storage in Norway or Sweden. Remember - The great advantage of hydro-power is that it can be regulated on a minute by minute basis.
If you have a hydro-power as part of your mix of power generation you DO NOT NEED pumped storage.
Wind power can in fact be very useful in a drought when hydropower reserves are down:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1579694720080415
I agree entirely. My point was exactly that: Wind power and hydro power are complimentary.
The result is that Denmark ends up selling its surplus wind power to Norway and Sweden at very low (sometimes negative)
No, in fact, Denmark is exporting its power mainly to Germany and Germany has compared to its size hardly any pump storage and not much hydropower either:
And since Germany doesn't have any means to store Danish wind power it's highly doubtful that it's being sold at negative prices.
Needless to say that there is more electricity trade between Norway and Sweden (both countries with plenty of hydro power and no storage issues) than between Denmark and any of those countries.
I'd venture that Denmark is to small and too flat to store any meaningful amount of hydro, and add with a tongue in cheek that remaining 80% of their electricity comes from coal...
Hi Canuck,
You don't need to venture, the data is there to prove you wrong ;) (page 11). The mix is actually a bit more diversified for electricity generation in Denmark:
48% Coal, 27% renewable (wind, biomass, waste, biogas), 19% Nat Gas, 3%oil, 2% non-renewable waste (plastic burning).
Denmark also has the world's second most efficient coal fired plant (burn coal, but less of it). 45% efficient (vs. 32-33% normal for USA).
Alan
The chicken-and-egg question can - as we think - be resolved quite easily, by testing in which directions we find the outliers.
This analysis doesn't follow, for 2 reasons.
First, we know that reliable electricity is very strongly desired by both businesses and individuals. If countries have the means to achieve reliability, they will do so. Countries that are wealthy have the means to achieve reliability, therefore they will do so. QED. So...electricity may cause wealth, but the fact that all wealthy countries have reliable electricity doesn't prove it.
Second, does the IIER reliability index differentiate between planned and unplanned outages? if not, your anlysis doesn't tell us anything about Demand Response/Demand Side Management in a modern economy.
Nick,
So you are suggesting that it would be possible to accomplish a high output per capita without stable electricity? If so, how?
And: There is no such thing as planned outages within a "modern economy" these days, so that probably doesn't matter (yet).
So you are suggesting that it would be possible to accomplish a high output per capita without stable electricity?
Not in the sense that people in Baghdad experience outages, no (see below). I'm just pointing out that your proof doesn't hold. You'll have to be content with making an appeal to common sense, as you did with me.
There is no such thing as planned outages within a "modern economy" these days
That's very much not true. Demand Response (aka Demand Side Management) is exactly a planned outage. DR works extremely well. It has a long history of working well, and it's very cheap and well accepted by industry and end-consumers alike.
Nick,
May I suggest that the fact that many things are impossible with unreliable electricity seem to support our interpretation that stable electricity is probably a prerequisite and not a consequence?
And: In the EAI we are not talking about "demand side management", we are talking about outages. No more power. Darkness. Unplanned.
May I suggest that the fact that many things are impossible with unreliable electricity seem to support our interpretation that stable electricity is probably a prerequisite and not a consequence?
Proving that argument requires a good quantification of how many things are impossible with unreliable electricity. If 40% of power demand has to be reliable, then power can vary by up to -60%. As I note in later comment, aluminum smelting requires a relatively small amount of power (perhaps 10%) to keep the materials at the minimum temperature necessary to prevent damage. So, aluminum smelters can and do participate in Demand Response programs where their power can be reduced. In fact, both aluminum and steel smelters vary their demand based on daily price signals: it's very common for steel plants to operate only at night, when power is cheapest.
In the EAI we are not talking about "demand side management", we are talking about outages. No more power. Darkness. Unplanned.
Then you would agree that an analysis using the EAI can't predict the success of Demand Reponse strategies?
I think you are creating an unneccesary dichotomy. Either power is reliable and I can have as much as I want whenever I want, or it is unreliable, and presents a huge challenge to industry. I don't envisage any factory wanting 100% of its power in the unreliable category. But having say 70% quaranteed reliable, and 30% interruptable with a varying degree of prenotification could be perfectly acceptable. That way they get a price break for being partially a swing consumer, but are not threatened with being forced below MOL levels of power.
Same for my home. I don't want the grid operator to be able to shut off my AC all day. But for a price I might let him tweak my thermostat up or down a couple of degrees. With computers getting ever cheaper and smarter, these sorts of things should be possible.
It is possible - what you describe (both for industry and residential) is being done right now by every utility, effectively and cheaply.
Thats good as it is, but I would hazard my reputation that it is currently only done at a small scale. We need to scale up the percentage of flexible power manyfold. So I think it will still be a serious challenge. Especially if we let the can't do attitude (which is being pushed by the fossil fuel companies) prevail. So IIER is right, that a BAU attitide probably won't get you where you need to go. But, everyone on TOD already accepts that. What we worry about is that well meaning analysis about shortcomings of the current path such as we see here, will be misused by the enemies of sustainability/fossil fuel interests to delay the renewables buildout.
it is currently only done at a small scale.
Kind've. Only a small % of residential customers participate currently. OTOH, a very large number of large industrial/commercial customers participate, and it could be expanded fairly quickly if needed. Much of this is old, well known stuff.
The important metric is how large the percentage of demand can be throttled back at will by these methods. I doubt that with the current systems/customers that that is more than single digit percentages. We will have to work hard to get that percentage way up.
I doubt that with the current systems/customers that that is more than single digit percentages.
It depends on the area and the utility, and how hard they've pushed it. Some can do well more than single digit: large industrial clients use a lot of power, and so a small % of customers can provide a lot of curtailment.
Current tech can do a lot: simple and cheap improvements can do a lot. For instance, if all personal transportation was electric, it would represent about 20% of average overall kWhs: almost all of that could be dynamically scheduled using price signals.
I agree completely. See my comment below.
Yes, we're saying the same thing.
I also agree about the title - it's terrible. Robert Rapier is too polite to tell them that they're misusing the idea - he used it for things that were completely non-viable, like cellulosic ethanol.
While skimming through this posting and comments (all of which are very interesting and which I'll spend more time reading this weekend), I noticed a conspicuous absence of any mention of conservation (aka energy efficiency) which in the electricity industry is viewed as a resource. How important is this resource? Well, in the Pacific Northwest, for example, energy efficiency over the past 20 years has met practically all of the region's electrical load growth, thereby averting the construction of new generation power plants (e.g., natural gas). More info about the role of conservation can be gleaned from the region's 20-year Power Plan (the 6th Power Plan, updated every five years) posted at www.nwcouncil.org . In that study, conservation is considered the most cost-effective resource for many years to come.
Hear hear. I would predict (counter-evidence welcome!) that 90% of our domestic needs could be met by 10% of our electricity consumption. The rest is powering crap - 'better' cellphones that need charging every day rather than every week, TVs so big that things are larger than actual size, enormous redundancy of lighting, 'stand-by' modes, etc. The problem is one of psychology - the bill arrives quarterly with no association between a particular device and its usage. Smart meters are part of the solution but currently a bit technical. Who will manufacture a 10-pence plastic widget that clips onto a cable and changes colour according to electrical flow?
BM
The Pacific Northwest is different than almost everywhere else in that they have the Bonneville Power Authority, a large federally-operated generator providing about a third of the electricity in the area where it operates, and operating almost 75% of the high-voltage long-distance transmission. While it has to charge enough to cover its costs, promoting energy efficiency is one of its public service responsibilities.
For most of the rest of the country, the effective separation of vertically integrated utilities broke the main conduit for funding efficiency improvements. Prior to the separation, many states allowed utilities to include expenses associated with demand-side efficiency in their rate base -- they could buy CFLs instead of building another power plant. Such programs have been significantly reduced since none of the players in a separated system have a financial incentive to spend on efficiency.
Aren't there also heavy users like aluminum smelters, who had very cheap rates on long term contract? Haven't they been able to shut in the smelters and resell the electrical power on very profitable terms?
Yes, and yes.
Austin Energy (City of Austin) has had a successful program for decades now.
Peak demand 2010, 2,628 MW. Formal program reduced that by almost 1,000 MW and informal "side effects" (greater local knowledge & awareness) almost as much. Meanwhile, most of the rest of Texas just uses more and more electricity. Over 10% of US total.
The plan is to reduce another 800 MW by 2020.
The ability to conserve significant amounts of electricity (and Austin is *FAR* from saturated) at quite reasonable costs makes nonsense of Hannes assertion that 15 to 18 cents/kWh is somehow "unbearable".
Double the price, cut the total demand by half (some sectors more than others) and the net economic impact is the cost of reducing demand (typically long lived infrastructure). QUITE bearable.
If the cost of aluminum goes up, demand will go down and substitutes will be found (washable returnable bottles for Al cans ?), steel cans, and the % of aluminum that will be recycled will increase (a VERY easy way to "save electricity").
Conservation takes time (decades in Austin), which is why things like a phased in carbon tax make great sense.
Yes, 15 cents average retail price for electricity in 2012 will cause a recession. The sudden shock effect (see also oil). But a pro-active approach (see Cash for Appliances, 30% tax credit, mandates for new construction and rental housing as it is sold) and a more or less steady increase will work just fine.
I have no problem with US rates of 20 cents/kWh (2010 $) in 2025. And per capita demand half to 60% of what it is today.
Best Hopes for higher, MUCH higher, electric rates,
Alan
PS: I was a certified energy auditor for Austin Energy.
I think that was poorly stated. I think you mean peak demand was brought down to 2,628, your lanquage implies that was the starting not the end point. The important point is the percentage decrease, which sounds like it is probably in the 40% range. I suspect the determinant is that Austin is liberal and green, and most of the rest of Texas prides itself as being opposed to that sort of stuff.
Yes, poorly stated. And the per capita trends to total Texas demand implies a delta of around 33% to 40% since 1970/1982.
The Austin program emphasizes peak demand and not total MWh. So night lighting is completely ignored and electrical heating is de-emphasized although the recent City Council directive to have no growth in carbon emissions, even as the population grows, may change that.
Best Hopes for the Rest of Texas following Austin,
Alan
Why ? A quick look at other countries easily proves that 'forecast' is false.
Germany has much higher retail price, and their GDP grows, (at least from 2000-2008) and they exceed the USA in exports.
Price shock.
It is *NOT*, as Hannes supposes, the absolute price level but rather the rate of change in prices.
Electricity is 39 cents/kWh in Hawaii, and has been >30 cents for some time. No big deal. Gasoline in Norway & Sweden also goes for $6 to $7/gallon and has for quite some time. No big deal. But a sudden change in price upwards *IS* a "Big Deal".
If ANY major non-discretionary expense suddenly increases, without corresponding income increases, it can trigger a recession.
Best Hopes for smooth, relatively slow price increases,
Alan
Hi Alan,
As you may recall, a couple years ago, an avalanche knocked out the Snettisham transmission line feeding Juneau and rates increased virtually five fold overnight as the city switched on its backup diesel generators. Now, that's rate shock !
Consumers (residential, commercial and industrial) responded by cutting their electricity consumption by more than one-third, year over year, with presumably little capital investment. With more time to get the necessary investments in place and with a more structured approach, the adjustments would have been no doubt less painful. Perhaps Alaskans are cut from a different cloth, but I think the events in Juneau suggest we may be a little more resilient and resourceful than most people realize.
Cheers,
Paul
Yes, I recall that. But it slipped from my memory as an example of price shock conservation.
Retail business did slip a bit as well in Juneau. It would be interesting to look at sales tax returns, except Alaska has no sales taxes (oil pays all).
I moved to Austin in 1974, just after a 50+% hike in electricity due to a natural gas price spike. Austin conservation got started with that and see the results to date :-)
Alan
The City of Austin can be rightfully proud of their accomplishments. A tip of the ten gallon [39 litre] hat for blazing a path that others can follow.
Cheers,
Paul
Hmmm. Maybe. It is I think more a question of the ability of the economy to recirculate income. The economy won't go into a recession if the agent who is on the receiving end of the increased expenditure is willing and able to recirculate his/hers/its windfall by increased spending/investment. Which is not to say that a lot of people won't suffer a loss of jobs/income. All the more reason for the state to be prepared to grab a chunk of the windfall and deposit it in the bank accounts of those most likely to be affected. This latter measure has occurred on a regular basis and has been undertaken by business and labour oriented governments.
Best hopes for not having to resort to the sale of military hardware to speed the circulation of money.
Do you have any links for this ?
Google got close, but nothing that matched ?
The cumulative total from 1982 to 2008 was 837 MW.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:F-nNoLhr_0YJ:www.epa.gov/slcli...
add another year and a half (at an accelerated rate) and add the efforts from 1974 to 1982 (no calculation of savings from earlier program) and I believe that "almost 1,000 MW" from the formal program and almost as much from the side effects are justified.
All conservation incentives, and auditors, etc. are paid from the rate base. Higher prices per kWh, lower average bills.
Alan
One number in that report stands out :
then our energy efficiency program per kW is about $450.
So it makes sound economic sense, from a motivated supplier (most are much more bean-counter based, and want to !sell-more!)
Savings mentioned on peak, amount to ~26%, someone else quoted an Avalanch and an eye-watering price spike that : responded by cutting their electricity consumption by more than one-third, year over year
So it seems, yes, there is Elasticity, (as you'd expect), but that Elasticity is also finite: even with a 500% hike impulse, usage fell only one third.
Elasticity depends strongly on the length of time allowed for adjustment. In Juneau's case it was known/expected that prices would return to normal after a few months. So buying for instance a high efficiency refrigerator for a few months of expensive power doesn't make sense, but if the expectation is that the price increase is permanent the purchase makes sense. So you have some near instantaneous elasticity. But given enough time, other modes of energy savings kick in.
Higher rates suck for consumers, but they are sure nice for getting people to conserve and for making renewables viable. If electricity were $0.20/KWH, I'd be filing plans with the building department for a PV array. Lately I've been dragging my feet wondering if prices will go down further. And wondering if I need to massively increase my electrical usage in order to qualify for a bigger rebate. (I think they limit the rebate based on your usage but I want to install a large system in order to charge an EV.)
but instead for an entire industrialized society with the need to provide all the goods and services that make it what is considered “advanced”.
THAT is the essential issue.
What is *considered* advanced.
Reduce what is considered advanced, and you reduce the need for energy.
Similar to the Artificial Intelligence idiocy. You don't make machines intelligent - you just lower the bar on what we call "intelligent". Like a "smart" grid.
Conversely, if machines become "people like" then people become "machine like".
So too, the energy question - it's not that the energy produced by the grid is sufficient to make you "Advanced", it is that you have a grid that transmits power at all that makes you "Advanced". you could ration people to 10kwh per day per household, or 5k - whatever - the point is you're getting electricity. That makes you advanced.
It comes to a point where the quantity is less important than the capability.
The point about the aluminium pots is not to be underestimated...
Thanks Stuart,
re: "You don't make machines intelligent - you just lower the bar on what we call "intelligent"."
My first smile of this TOD session!
re: "Reduce what is considered advanced, and you reduce the need for energy."
Can we vote? :) Some candidates:
Out: Invasions, wars, human trafficking, new bombs, new roads, new airports, unintelligent behavior (esp. violence toward women and children)(and men getting in fights), and, dare I say it, internet porn. Trauma is costly.
In: Libraries, electrification of rail, sock hops, enlightened parenting, compassionate communication (examples: see www.cnvc.org), bicycles, tri-cycles, CERT training, and Nicole Foss and co. to replace certain holders of current key finance-related government (and non-government) positions.
The pots of an aluminum smelter require uninterrupted power 24/7, 365 days a year. If the power is lost for more than a few hours, not only does the process stop, but after a short while the aluminum begins to congeal, with the consequence that the entire pot has to be scrapped, incurring costs of millions of dollars.
This is superficially true, but it's misleading. Aluminum requires a relatively small amount of power (perhaps 10%) to keep the materials at the minimum temperature necessary to prevent damage. So, aluminum smelters can and do participate in Demand Response programs where their power can be reduced. In fact, both aluminum and steel smelters vary their demand based on daily price signals: it's very common for steel plants to operate only at night, when power is cheapest.
So, a very large % of industrial demand can be varied to match with supply.
even for applications where it is theoretically possible to ramp them up and down without efficiency or material losses based on energy availability, there are significant social costs associated with unpredictability.
This varies depending on length and frequency of interruptions. As noted, refrigeration can be interrupted for hours at zero cost. A/C can be interrupted for minutes at zero cost. Very occasional planned interruptions do not have a large cost, and often have not cost at all - for instance, many facilities need to test their backup power at least 2x per year, so that participation in Demand Response programs is essentially zero-cost. These facilities alone provide a very large amount of variable demand, perhaps 15% of the grid's capacity.
In the predominant applications for crude oil today, transportation fuels and chemicals, electricity is at a clear disadvantage. We therefore decided to assume a bonus for electricity in the middle of the two possible values at 200%
Transportation is much more important than chemicals, so we should concentrate the analysis there (in fact, I would think that biomass would be the obvious source for chemical feedstock).
Electricity's advantage is even greater for transportation: ICE motors range in efficiency from 15% to 50%, and in the US personal transportation, which accounts for 45% of oil consumption, efficiency is about 15%.
The average vehicle in the US gets about 22MPG. The 35kWh in a gallon of gasoline will propel a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt 140 miles (including charging and drivetrain losses - that's power at the wall-plug): that's a ratio of about 6.4:1!
Maybe we shouldn't forget in this calculation that this electricity also requires storage to move that car. That alters things quite significantly. But that's something for next week.
Battery production uses far less energy than is used in the operation of the vehicle. Operating energy requirements are the important factor, not embodied energy.
One question I have is with respect to your back-up for the statement:
I hadn't really thought this through. I thought a big reason that new baseload capacity hadn't been built was because a lot of substitute for new capacity has been squeezed out by working coal and nuclear plants a greater percentage of available hours. With all of this new baseload (just from running plants more hours) not too much base load capacity was needed.
But I suppose part of the demand for new baseload could be evolving to new peaking demand, especially as more wind was added. Also, natural gas fired plants could take advantage of temporarily high spot prices, and make money even if they ran only a few hours a year.
I know that there has been a huge amount of gas capacity added in recent years. It is hard for me to believe that everyone is making money, with the low gas fired power plant utilization rates.
In some areas, where the amount of gas that can be produced exceeds local demand for "normal" uses and the pipeline capacity for moving it elsewhere, we are now seeing gas-fired baseload generation. Parts of Texas and the Mountain West fall into this category. The generating companies can buy gas under long-term interruptable-service contracts at surprisingly low and stable rates.
The interruptable service part can create some problems. A few years back, a severe cold snap in the Denver area caused gas to stop flowing when moisture in the collection pipelines froze up (bad maintenance practices, the water wasn't supposed to be there). The local gas utility couldn't meet both the residential demand for heating fuel and the demand from the electricity generators. Denver had rolling 45-minute blackouts for a few hours until sunshine warmed things up enough to thaw out the pipelines.
I have heard of problems in New England, too, when the weather was cold. (In fact, I think Heading Out had a story a while back.) The total gas supply isn't all that high in New England. When it gets cold, the amount being drawn for gas fired heating goes up. But that is the same time that it is needed most for electricity (which is also used for heat). IIRC, the solution one time was to close a big school, to reduce gas use sufficiently so that there was enough for both gas heat and for more gas-fired electricity.
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After living off grid with renewables almost all of my adult life (I'm 62), I feel qualified to say that there is a great deal of elasticity in electricity consumption at the household level. My wife and I raised two kids in a home that most developed-world folks would see as very conventional; microwave, stereo, big TV, computer, washer and dryer, CFL lighting etc. Our 3 kWh/day consumption was about one sixth of our grid connected neighbors. My neighborhood has at least a dozen off-grid homes, all living the same way. Our cost per kWh is near $1.00. Huge amounts of electricity are simply wasted because it is so inexpensive. Modest efforts at conservation will allow almost every retail consumer to adapt to the higher cost of renewables with no appreciable change in the benefits derived from electricity. Transportation is another story.....
Regarding reliable electrical grids with high inputs of renewables: Not much attention has been paid to storing the variable output of renewables only because their grid penetration has been so low, at least in North America and most of Europe. There are a number of technologies that will become more and more prominent as concentrating solar power becomes a big player in grid supply, among them are molten salt storage and pebble bed storage. Both of these are sensible heat storage systems. Pebble bed has the potential to store huge quantities of high grade heat at very low cost. These beds can be simply giant insulated piles of rock. It will allow solar to become as reliable as a coal plant.
We will cover those storage options in much detail in our next post. And again: There is no doubt that we can individually live off grid. But who will produce the tools and toys we need to do so if no industrial society is feasible with the cost of that electricity?
You make it sound as if it has to be all wind or solar. Hydro is renewable, and there are smelter plants that rely on hydro power.
The ideal energy mix I see for the next 50 years would be roughly;
20% wind
20% solar
15% nuclear
20% gas
10% geothermal
15% hydro
That's 65% renewable, and nuclear produces next to no GHG emissions.
Why *couldn't* we produce what we needed from such an energy mix?
we will look into this kind of energy mix in much more detail in the next round.
Isn't hydro pretty much tapped out? As in we already built damns just about everywhere it made sense to do so?
Geothermal is also pretty limited as well since you can only do it in certain places where you don't have to go down too far before you hit some hot stuff.
I'd put more in wind and nuclear. I think Solar is great too but it remains expensive. But I still think it really has some nice advantages in that residential solar is generated right where it is used to there are little to no transmission costs and it generates the most power when it is most needed . . . it is a natural 'peak' generation source.
Isn't hydro pretty much tapped out? As in we already built damns just about everywhere it made sense to do so?
As far as power increase it is not tapped out at all.
You can easily triple the power output of an existing hydro power plant without producing more energy:
http://www.axpo.ch/axpo/en/hydroenergie/wissen/kraftwerksprojekte/ausbau...
And you don't need more energy since luckily the sun shines and the wind blows on a regular basis: E.g. if a wind power plant has a capacity factor of 25% doesn't mean that it produces 100% of power from November to January and 0% from January to November.
A pump storage lake can actually produce lots of power when necessary without generating any net-energy at all...
The question is not what is the energy share of hydro but is hydro capable to deliver the power for a certain time period.
I think Solar is great too but it remains expensive
Thinfilm photovoltaics is at $0.76/W module costs:
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/_a/manufacturing_cost_per_watt_at_first_sola...
New nuclear at $7.4/W :
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
Government regulations actively work against small hydro (<10 MW) in the USA. Colorado and California have recently signed deals to simply rules in their states.
In theory, 27 GW of small hydro in the USA. Practical perhaps 9 GW.
Also. old hydro can be renovated for more total energy with higher efficiency (and more MW plus add more turbines). Hoover up 7% for example.
Alan
The largest cumulative deficit in the 20% wind scenario of 64TWH for UK that the authors provided in their first Fire Brigade post was 4TWH or about 6.25% of annual wind energy production posited, or about 1.25% of annual electricity production posited. I'm having a hard time as a utility engineer understanding why that was considered a problem at all. It did admittedly occur over about a 2 month period, so we could think of it as driving 6 times 1.25% or an additional 7.5% generation capacity reserve requirement (after displacing the need for 20% of existing generation this doesn't seem like a big problem somehow).
Doing pumped storage add ons to existing hydro, is usually the only place where they make economic sense, but keep in mind that you are actually losing energy along the way - round trip efficiency is 85% at best. And not all places are suitable - people get upset if the river/creek starts flowing backwards! (has happened). That said, yes there is lots of potential for it.
As for solar, in Germany the average capacity factor for solar is 11%, so your cost per delivered kW is 0.76/0.11=$6.90 - just as expensive as nuclear and still not dispactchable.
Of course, in Arizona, your capacity factor will be higher.
The real advantage with solar, as I see it, is that it can be generated at the point of use, so it actually reduces loads on the transmission system, rather than increasing them (as every centralised storage/demand system does). So then it shows up to the utility as load reductions - though still of an unpredictable nature.
Ultimately, solar and wind can produce kWh, but for meeting the demand peaks, you must always have enough dispatchable generation on hand. That means either reducing current total demand, so the coal fired stations can be retired, or adding storage to wind and solar, which makes both of them uneconomic, at current prices.
I much prefer the first way, but with a few exceptions such as the Austin one, this is not happening - load is continuing to grow, and coal fired stations are continuing to be built.
Doing pumped storage add ons to existing hydro,
Actually they also do just increase the turbine power. There's no reason to pump when you can just as well turn off the turbine (no efficiency loss there - assuming the dam doesn't leak).
Keep in mind:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1579694720080415
So then it shows up to the utility as load reductions - though still of an unpredictable nature.
No weather forecasts in America? And can you show me a photovoltaic system which produces power at night when there's is always little demand?
Ultimately, solar and wind can produce kWh, but for meeting the demand peaks, you must always have enough dispatchable generation on hand.
The US already has already 622 GW of flexible capacity installed:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html
And fossil fuel use in hot water, heating and transportation will gradually need to be replaced by electricity. This generates plenty of dispatchable demand - further increasing grid flexibility.
No weather forecasts in America?
Sure there are, and what, exactly is the reliability of weather prediction?
But the point is, there will be hot, humid, cloudy days when pV production is down, but AC use is up. Same days may well have no wind, either.
You don;t know exactly when they are going to happen, so, for example, you could make sure backup plants are not down for scheduled maintenance.
Fortunately, PV uses is such a small drop in the bucket that it doesn;t matter. Wind getting up to the 20% mark is a more immediate issue to be be dealt with.
As you more electric heat, hot water (and eventually, EV's) you are going to increase peak demand too - some of them will end up running at peak times. I don;t think they will be dispatchable demand, except for some large industrial/commercial cases. People are not going to cede control of their heat and HW to the power company. They will hopefully take adavantage of time of day pricing etc, and flatten the load curve, but to be dispatchable, the grid operator needs to be able to turn it on or off at his discretion, and this just ain't so.
People respond to prices.
As you more electric heat, hot water (and eventually, EV's) you are going to increase peak demand too
Not if you price properly.
I don;t think they will be dispatchable demand, except for some large industrial/commercial cases.
Again, just price dynamically, and have software adjust charging rates. It's being done right now.
People are not going to cede control of their heat and HW to the power company.
Sure, they are. It's being done by many utilities right now. OTOH, there are alternatives: just sent price signals to the home, and have systems choose when to operate.
Sure there are, and what, exactly is the reliability of weather prediction?
Hydro and gas power plants can adjust their power within minutes. Are you saying the weather poeple don't know where the sun is going to be and what the approximate cloud coverage will be over a wide region in a few hours from now?
But the point is, there will be hot, humid, cloudy days when pV production is down, but AC use is up. Same days may well have no wind, either.
Again the point is, that the current grid is perfectly capable to deal with varying demand, so it will also be able to deal with a reduced varying demand since PV would take at least some of the load on all summer days just like in Germany:
http://www.sma.de/en/news-information/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany...
(If you look at several different days you'll notice that the total PV power production in Germany never has abrupt power changes - as opposed to a 1.6 GW nuclear power plant during an emergency shut down).
PV module production costs are irrelevant (and even if they were relevant, you should multiply the cost with five to account for the <20% availability). Complete solar installations are prohibitively expensive. The solar insolation is very diffuse, so you need to ship a lot of panels and do a lot of mounting, use a large area that you have to prepare, install lots of wiring and so on.
What new nuclear costs you mainly determine yourselves. The Chinese opt to do it for $1/W. The Americans seems to opt for $5-7/W. UAE recently closed a deal for $4/W with reactors from South Korea.
PV module production costs are irrelevant
They usually make up for the major costs of a PV system.
you need to ship a lot of panels and do a lot of mounting, use a large area that you have to prepare, install lots of wiring and so on.
Actually when a new house is built, a PV system can substitute the tiles (weather protection is required anyway) and wiring is also needed in any case. Besides it helps the local job market.
The Chinese opt to do it for $1/W.
Well given your discount price, it's at least somewhat surprising that 98% of the Chinese power is not generated by nuclear. (Last time I checked Greenpeace has certainly less say in China than in France with 24% non-nuclear power generation.)
And new nuclear plants in the US appear to be more expensive than your $5-$7/W.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
Needless to say that they still have long construction times, depend on uranium imports, have high decommissioning costs, require costly waste handling and require cooling water.
That something generates jobs is a tell-tale sign of something not being economically viable.
They are ramping as fast as they can. 24 under construction, 33 planned and 120 proposed, according to the latest figures. If the US doesn't get going, they might easily have two times your nuclear capacity twenty years from now.
As I said, it's your choice. If you want it to cost $10, it will.
Again, you choose. You could build fast, produce your own uranium, have low decommissioning costs, have cheap waste handling and have cooling towers.
Also, please realise that construction time for a plant does not equal speed in a big picture sense. If nuclear costs are lower than wind costs, you can build more nuclear with the same money, which translates to a higher maximum buildout-speed. Regardless of whether a single wind plant is built faster than a nuclear plant or not.
You are wrong on several points.
The Chinese are asking for foreign help in inspecting nukes. Their QA/QC would not pass US or EU standards in any case. And they are likely to run into the same problems that killed the US nuke building industry.
Your costs are "unrealistic" to say the least. Just ask the Finns.
The US does not have that much Uranium, except in our bombs.
And the US can only build a maximum of 8 new nukes in the next decade. A major build-out is 20 years away.
Best Hopes for a Rush to Wind and a slow, safe, economic build-out of new nukes,
Alan
They rationally employ less "quality". The US and Europe overdo safety, which leads to death by coal.
No, they're not. They won't do nuclear meltdowns and they are doing standardized designs.
They chose to have high costs. You do too. Others do not.
Proven reserves worth 23 years, at $100 per pound. You could look for more. You could stomach higher prices which would greatly increase reserves. And you could reenrich tails, reprocess spent fuel and so on. If you like. If you don't, then don't do it.
If you wish it to be so, then it is so. China is currently building 24.
It is all in you hands.
You have a future with BP !!
Don't waste any money on unnecessary safety.
What killed the US nuke building industry was not TMI, but the US nuke building industry. Bottlenecks, a shortage of skilled & experienced people lead to multi-year delays and massive cost over-runs.
Today, China has a larger cadre of experienced people and supply chain to draw upon. that the USA. In the last 20 years, the US has rebuilt burned out Brown's Ferry 1, finished Watts Bar 1 and working on Watts B2, done uprates and maintenance and nothing else.
If the USA builds 7 new nukes by 2021, we will be in the position of China today.
Your attitude towards safety will kill nuclear power.
Alan
As I said, if you yanks think it is so, then it is so. For you.
Btw, is there such a thing as overdone safety to you?
Reality, not your unsupported hopes/dreams.
The "maximum of 8 new US nukes in a decade" came from an exhaustive study by the Department of Energy. I read the study and found it too optimistic. 6 or 7 would be more reasonable.
When the results of failure are catastrophic, very high levels of safety are required. Nukes (except in China) are supposed to be built to the same QA/QC standards as commercial aircraft.
You must have worked on the Zimmer nuclear power plant. Poor quality construction, such as you advocate, resulted in a 99% complete nuke being denied an operating license.
Make a job application at BP, they want people like you !
Alan
Perhaps that's effective rhetoric among your peers, but I find it a bit shallow and unnecessarily polarizing. I don't advocate poor quality construction - I advocate that the level of safety regulation and safety-related design is right. Not too much, not too little. Since the US nuke industry has been standing still for decades, it has obviously been too much, especially since coal is known to be much, much worse, and can be exchanged for nukes.
Probabilistic risk assessment studies estimate core damage frequencies for the current US fleet to around 2*10^-5 per year and reactor. The AP-1000 and EPR are estimated around 5*10^-7. Then a core damage isn't supposed to give catastrophic nuclear releases outside of the containment structures - the risk of that combination is orders of magnitude lower still.
So, the question is - how much is different safety levels worth? When the NRC requires the AP-1000 design to be strengthened to withstand impacts from large aircraft, is the related cost motivated, for instance considering there will remain old designs which can be targeted by airborne terrorists for 30 years?
What calculation supports that 2*10^-5 (times containment failure probability) is not right, but 5*10^-7 is? If we do something in between and don't go overboard on the containment structures and NRC bureaucracy, nuclear could outcompete coal quite soon. It could already have. You can blame the nuclear industry all you want, but the fact is that a constructive approach from governments would have kept nuclear growth going. The nuclear growth trajectory resembled that of wind, but more than 35 years earlier. Even if wind is the shit, which it isn't, we have lost 35 years and hundreds of thousands of lives to coal.
the fact is that a constructive approach from governments would have kept nuclear growth going
Five WHOOPS nukes were started, one was completed. TVA canceled 11 nukes, at various stages of completion (four >50%) in one day. I think they stopped repairs on burned out nuke Browns Ferry 1 that day as well, but I am unsure if it was that day or another day.
WHOOPS and TVA are both governmental utilities. The massive cost overruns and multi-year delays made it financially impossible for them to continue.
Rumor is that TVA was told that two incomplete reactors were like Zimmer, too low quality to get an operating license.
Should the Federal government have just given these two gov't utilities $10 billion and told them to come back for more if they needed it ?
Probabilistic risk assessment studies are hardly worth the paper they are printed on.
Brown's Ferry came VERY close to being an operating nuclear reactor with no controls. Multiple independent control wires were in a common conduit. Add fire. Someone forgot to install all the fire blocks.
ALL British reactors (save the very last one) used common carbon nuts & bolts in high radiation areas. They all should have been shut down, but that was impossible, so instead they were derated.
How do Probabilistic risk assessment studies evaluate poor quality design and construction ?
What is "constructive approach from government" BTW ? Hundreds of billions for R&D ? Free unlimited liability insurance ? Loan guarantees ? Same subsidies as wind plus many more nuke only subsidies (cost overrun, licensing, etc.) ?
The only all new nuke in the USA has all this PLUS the ratepayers pay for the nukes as they are built with NO guarantees.
Alan
PS: If old nukes have inadequate containment structures, perhaps we should not extend their lives ? You excuse one fault with claims for another. In 2035 or so, almost every nuke will have an adequate containment structure. You would throw away that safety feature to save a bit of money.
As I said, you have a future with BP.
Your characterization of the nuclear cancellations is biased. I'd say they were due to a flurry of new regulation after TMI and the realization that the nukes wouldn't get licences in a reasonable amount of time even though they were as good as or better than the already licensed nukes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_risk_assessment
A streamlined regulatory environment and a reasonable approach to safety. Also, a federal deregulated electricity market and internalization of external coal costs.
Yes, please, into innovative breeder tech.
Oh no, businesses would actually be allowed to use revenue streams to pay for investments? The horror!
That's the question. So your answer is that the aircraft terrorism risk motivates the decommissioning of functioning nukes? I find it irrational - the money would be much more efficiently spent on police, road safety or medicine, for instance. Do you understand that type of argument, or do you view nuclear in isolation?
A bit of money? Are we concerned with doom here or not? With coal, there is doom by AGW or peak coal. With renewables only, there is doom by inadequate energy availability. With prohibitively expensive nuclear, there is coal or renewables, and so doom.
And I said what I thought about that rhetoric. It would be much more interesting if you could reason a bit about whether new and old designs have adequate safety, how this should be determined and whether you feel that there is some point at which it is reasonable to consider spending the money on other stuff.
My characterization is correct. The last nuke started in the USA, Palo Verde, had the pick of experienced personnel coming off other completed and incomplete nukes. Result: minor cost and time overruns in construction (a few months, a few %).
The nuke building industry killed the nuke building industry. Denial means that past errors may be repeated, no lessons learned.
Rates will be increased in Georgia as soon as construction starts so ratepayers pay extra in 2011 for a reactor that will start generating in 20??.
EVERY step of civilian nuke has had MASSIVE gov't R&D Subsidies ! Every reactor operating today in the US & even world has had MASSIVE R&D subsidies, going back to the 1950s. AECL in Canada for the Candu.
Proper safety measures are a worthwhile cost. That includes reducing the risk of terrorists.
Proper safety standards ? A bit higher than today. More imagination in what could go wrong and preventing it.
Every new generation of nukes should see at least an order of magnitude increase in safety. TMI and Browns Ferry were obviously NOT safe enough. They demonstrated that our regulation was inadequate.
And building hordes of marginally safe nukes is *NOT* the answer to coal use. A false dichotomy.
Alan
So? The operator should be allowed to charge whatever they want for electricity, just as in Sweden and other reasonable countries.
Nuclear power is likely the least subsidised form of energy per kWh, if you factor both direct subsidies and external costs of pollution. Anyway, past subsidies are irrelevant. You don't throw away the gold you found, even if it was expensive to find it. To put nuclear on an equal footing today would require lots of subsidies.
How much is that worth, then, considering alternative uses of that money?
Than today's new or old designs? New, I guess? Ok, then. The coal death will go on for you.
At what cost?
What is false is you characterization of "marginally safe". I advocate safety where the cost/benefit ratio is comparable to other uses of resources.
The operator should be allowed to charge whatever they want for electricity
A *VERY* NICE private, for profit business ! A monopoly for an essential good that can charge whatever it wants !
Natural gas combined cycle is less subsidized than nukes, and likely hydro as well.
The best (including quickest) alternative is a massive "Rush for Wind", HV DC & pumped storage coupled with a safe, economic build-out of new nukes.
Alan
Strange that electricity spot markets work in socialist Europe, but not in the U.S. What's your problem?
If grid owners and electricity producers are entangled, then separate them. If the grids aren't interconnected enough, then connect them. If electricity can't be sold from far away through arbitrary grids, then legislate that it can. If U.S. electricity producers are too few, then break them apart.
Solve the problems instead of being daft about it. There is no reason you can't have a well functioning electricity market! Regulated prices is one of the most destructive forces there is, anywhere.
Yeah, do rush for wind. I guess you won't understand until you have done that journey.
There is no reason you can't have a well functioning electricity market
There is no reason you can't have a well functioning financial market, low taxes, full employment, perfectly functioning infrastructure, cheap health-care, being at peace with the entire world, oil-spill free country ... - you just need to choose it :)
I guess you won't understand until you have done that journey.
And you do because you have done that journey...
Yes.
No. I understand because I have done the thinking without bias for renewables or "best hopes" for what doesn't really help. Others may need more concrete and immediate evidence. Others still won't even accept that.
I understand because I have done the thinking without bias for renewables
Well, you also need to take facts into account and not just think with a bias for nuclear.
I have no bias for nuclear. I'd much rather have wind and solar, if they could provide similarly. Alas, they can't.
You do not understand the problems and issues with nuclear power.
Alan
I do. But you don't understand the issues with alternatives.
Based on your claims and statements, you clearly do not understand the reality of nuclear power.
Alan
It varies by state. Texas and California are the two largest unregulated markets. See Enron & California (Gooogle if you do not know).
Texas is adding massive amounts of wind (I expect Texas wind to = German wind within a decade). Several nukes proposed for Texas, but nukes cannot compete in an unregulated market. Only regulated Georgia, where ratepayers pay years in advance, has new nukes ready to build.
Alan
If the Texas market is unregulated, I guess the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no say there?
You two should get a room!
That something generates jobs is a tell-tale sign of something not being economically viable.
Actually, the German wind industry not only generated over 90,000 sustainable, tax-paying jobs and Germany exports over 80% of its wind-turbines with a tax-paying profit, German wind power (which has not been exported) actually does lower electricity prices in Germany:
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/art271,2147183
On the other hand the nuclear power industry is apparently not such a big export-hit despite having benefited from generous subsidies for decades and tax-payer paid promoting agencies (IAEA, Euratom etc.):
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-23/areva-sees-first-half-operat...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2001/fig-htm/frasf6-h.htm
They are ramping as fast as they can. 24 under construction,
Since 2008 China had brought 1.6 GW new nuclear capacity online.
It can't even beat solar thermal installations (14 GWth solar thermal in China in one year alone): http://www.unep.fr/shared/docs/publications/RE_GSR_2009_Update.pdf
Not to mention 13 GW of wind power which China installed just last year:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Resource-Wars/2010/06/15/China-to-domina...
In order to reach the French nuclear power share any time soon, China will have to bring order of magnitudes more nuclear power plants online and stop all conventional and renewable power plant construction immediately.
Anyway, if Chinese nuclear is apparently so cheap why can it not even beat solar thermal installations?
Again, you choose.
I would probably simply choose cheaper wind power.
I know that stat is old, but it still seems woefully inefficient spending.
If Nuclear really spent US$159B, in claimed R&D, they delivered very little.
It sounds more like tax breaks might flow to R&D, and so Nuclear allocates some % under the 'R&D' umbrella. {Bean counters R&D ?}
I did find this, slightly newer 1996 Dollars USA numbers :
Department of Energy Civilian Energy Supply R&D Funding
FY 1978-81, FY 1982-90, FY 1991-95
(in millions of constant 1996 dollars)
Oil Crisis Years Defense Build-up Years Post-Cold War Years
FY 1978-81 4yav, % FY 1982-90 9yrav,% Y 1991-95 5yrav %
Clean coal _ _ _ _ _ _ 0 0 0 1,482 165 6 2,210 442 20
Energy efficiency ** _ 2,382 596 _ 9 _ 1,785 198 8 1,713 343 16
Fossil fuels _ _ _ _ _6,153 1,538 24 3,712 412 16 2,414 483 22
Nuclear fission *** _ _8,649 2,162 34 8,825 981 38 1,760 352 16
Nuclear fusion _ _ _ _ 2,862 716 _ 11 4,902 545 21 1,745 349 16
Renewables _ _ _ _ _ _ 5,159 1,290 20 2,279 253 10 1,047 209 10
TOTAL _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _25,202 6,301 _ _22,985_ _2,554_ _ 10,889 2,178
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/energy/doe.cfm [Table IV.2.2]
Which shows a dramatic decline in Fission spend, (from 34% of a $25B pie, to 16% of a $10B pie), to be close to Fusion.
2010 renewables are likely to be a lot higher, and I wonder where 'Clean Coal' now fits in this mix ?
At least according to this, fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables seem to be getting all about the same direct funding this year:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
(Any tax breaks, contributions to IAEA, DoD nuclear power research etc. are not part of the energy budget).
Then it exports losses. Wind power produce the same amount of energy with more people involved. That is bad, m'kay?
Yes, of course. Massive subsidies often do that.
I agree. AP1000 seems to have a head start, and the EPR seems to lose out.
Tired western research is mostly about waste management, I guess, beating a dead horse over and over again. However, wind and solar gets much more per kWh, and much more in relation to the promise of the technologies. Nuclear can actually save us. Wind can only serve as an alibi to keep coal burning online.
Since the end of 2008, yes, and in the same 18 month period, it started construction of 14 new nukes.
Hot water is nice, but I was talking about electricity. As I said, China is ramping nuclear. If you consider the last 12 months, initial construction starts is about 1 GWe per month.
Yes, if you choose it to be cheaper, then it is. But it still doesn't scale, so you'll still do coal and gas in great quantities.
Yes, of course. Massive subsidies often do that.
Actually, the Feed-in tariffs the German wind farms received (those 17% turbines which were not exported with a profit) were lower than the electricity price reduction they generated:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/art271,2147183
The massive subsidies to the nuclear power industry has not affected the costs of electricity of new nuclear power plants:
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/67392/politics-key-to-russia-turkey-nu...
Hot water is nice, but I was talking about electricity.
France uses nuclear power to heat water, China uses the sun to heat water. At the end of the day, it's the same: Hot water.
If you consider the last 12 months, initial construction starts is about 1 GWe per month.
Even if it were true, your 90 TWh of your Chinese new nuclear addition per year would not even cover a third of the raising electricity demand in China. Not to mention displacing any fossil fuel electricity, which is certainly surprising considering Chinese nuclear power is according to you available at a discount rate of only $1/W...
Not surprising either, since alternatives, except for Russian gas, is blocked, and electricity demand is rather inelastic.
Your link does not support your statement. Also, nuclear power has had no net subsidies. All over the world, arbitrary and large extra taxation of nuclear power is the norm.
Still, I was talking about electricity. Sorry.
"Not even"? To me, a third is enormous. And still ramping.
They are reporting $2.5 with AP-1000. They are aiming for $1 with their indigenous variant. That's what they choose. They may not reach the target, but I expect them to be close.
Also, nuclear power has had no net subsidies
BS !!
* Extends the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act through 2025;
* Authorizes cost-overrun support of up to $2 billion total for up to six new nuclear power plants
* Authorizes a production tax credit of up to $125 million total per year, estimated at 1.8 US¢/kWh during the first eight years of operation for the first 6.000 MW of capacity; consistent with renewables;
* Authorizes loan guarantees of up to 80% of project cost to be repaid within 30 years or 90% of the project's life;
* Authorizes $2.95 billion for R&D and the building of an advanced hydrogen cogeneration reactor at Idaho National Laboratory;
* Authorizes 'standby support' for new reactor delays that offset the financial impact of delays beyond the industry's control for the first six reactors, including 100% coverage of the first two plants with up to $500 million each and 50% of the cost of delays for plants three through six with up to $350 million each for;
* Updates tax treatment of decommissioning funds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#General_provisions
Add to this hundreds of billions in R&D subsidies.
What "special taxes" do US nukes pay ?
Alan
Most of what you claim amounts to nothing at all - no expenses, no subsidies. Much is patches for unreasonable regulatory government burdens or unfair advantages given to other tech.
I don't know the US nuke tax policies. Perhaps you are so afraid of taxes that you do the inferior price regulation instead, just as you'd choose the inferior cap-and-trade to carbon taxes? However, in the European countries, arbitrary and high nuke taxes are common.
New nukes get the same subsidy per kWh as wind *PLUS* all the extras listed.
Wind would cost less with 90% federal loan guarantees. And delay compensation, screw-up insurance and so much more. Maybe a "below forecast winds" benefit as well ?
Giving wind what nukes have would truly lower the risk, (and cost of capital) and hence costs of wind.
No nuke specific taxes I am aware of.
Your statement is quite clearly wrong.
Isn't there state add-ons, and I seem to remember a subsidy alternative for wind as well? No matter.
I was talking about the world. Perhaps you have regulated prices instead, which amounts to the same thing, but a bit worse.
Also, nuclear power has had no net subsidies.
Actually the contrary is the case.
"Not even"? To me, a third is enormous. And still ramping.
If it can't even keep up with the raising electricity production (not even a third) it obviously failed to deliver your cheap electricity dream.
That's what they choose.
Well, if they can choose whatever they want, they may just choose wind for $0.1/W instead.
Sorry, I can't take you seriously. I never do, actually, but this was particularly stupid and offensive.
They just might.
Sorry, I can't take you seriously.
I don't think many can take you seriously.
I never do, actually, but this was particularly stupid and offensive.
Actually it is just a simple fact - nothing else.
Wow, really ? Tell that to the sector making billions building them!!! rofl.
Oh no!! the Sky is falling. - and yet, in spite of your arm-waving, Solar builds continue at significant pace.
Solar continues to pass many milestones, and large factories continue to be built.
Since 2006, solar has added MORE GW, than Nuclear.
Yes, that's peak, but in the right locations, peak is actually what matters, and solar peaks right when you need AirCon.
No surprise, those areas are where Solar is most active.
2009 was not a great year for Nuclear, more was taken off-line than added!!, so Solar easily wins even the capacity factor ratios there...
2008 was a small positive for Nuclear, but Solar was WAY ahead.
2010 is going to be closer, Nuclear may actually add more than 1GW
2011 ? At current rates, even the capacity factor race going to be tough.
So, the smart money is voting with its feet, and the trend lines are not good for Nuclear. It has become a third world solution.
Your comparisons doesn't make sense - how much old nuke capacity that is decommissioned is not relevant when comparing additions of solar vs. nukes.
Wind is an semi-plausible contender at low penetrations, but solar PV is so outrageously expensive it is merely a luxury toy. It is not even interesting. Let's hear from you again when solar feed-in tariffs approach those of wind.
Jeppen,
I think we may be getting distracted from the main question at hand. The authors of the Original Post claimed:
However, we disagree with the common notion that societies can make this renewable energy transition and still receive the same services as today: stable and affordable electricity not just for private consumption, but for all uses that are part of an advanced industrialized society.
You'd disagree with this, right?
No, I'd agree we can't make that transition.
Let me clarify what I meant:
What if we include nuclear in the definition of "renewable energy"?
Then the transition is fully possible.
Only you struggle with the numbers: Anyone planning a National Grid, certainly WILL include decommissioned plant, in their maths.
The Nuclear industry itself, considers decommissioned plant important enough, to list right alongside newly commissioned plant!!
They easily understand that Power you can no longer get, has to be replaced by something else.
In the big picture, whatever your grasp is, matters not; The smart money has spoken. People all over the planet, are deciding how to spend their Energy funds.
The results are showing in today's production statistics.
Ten, fifty, a hundred years from now, wind capacity will reach a peak, whether local in time or global. Any energy technology then that makes net additions, will be better in your view, than wind, since wind doesn't make net additions?
To me, net additions matter not in comparisons between energy sources. Only gross additions matters in this context - what nuclear did in the 60-ies and 70-ies are irrelevant to comparisons of buildouts today.
I think you're in minority in calling politically motivated subsidies and the lack of polluter pays principles as "smart".
But you choose to ignore today's construction statistics, as the nuclear ramping doesn't fit your agenda.
I just quoted stats for the last 4 years, that's as 'today' as the stats get!
- so you need to do better than that.
I have no 'agenda', I merely report the numbers: it is the GW added, that determine the power mix we will have in a decades time. Simple enough, for most to follow.
They show Nuclear is moving to be a 3rd world solution, and rather slowly at that.
:)
Sorry to be boorish, but smileys doesn't really help you. You focus on net additions per technology is illogical, and your refusal to acknowledge construction stats will make you realize in 2015 what others realize today.
At the same time older nuclear power plants will be shut down...
And not for cheap:
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=55119
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4859980.stm
I guess you understood what I meant by him being illogical, but try to provoke me for the fun of it, yeah? Or did you do the same mistake unwittingly?
Illogical ? Nope, not at all. It is school-boy maths simple. Get a spread sheet, and learn about the area under a curve. Find a kid to help.
I focus on the real world, of actual reported GW added.
When any tech adds GW, I'll include that as well.
LOTS of power tech have ramping plans, the numbers easily show GW and $.
It's a simple enough concept for most, but I have only limited patience, and my bemusement threshold has been reached,
Come back to us in 2015 - you are getting scant traction here. :)
The math you employ is simple, but your logic is flawed. Why don't you answer my simple question: "Ten, fifty, a hundred years from now, wind capacity will reach a peak, whether local in time or global. Any energy technology then that makes net additions, will be better in your view, than wind, since wind doesn't make net additions?"
So, in your book, a half-built nuke has no physical reality? It is not something that could be included in your "smart money has spoken", because you think a half-built nuke doesn't represent a commitment of money?
I think you should speak for yourself.
The United States has several dozen partially built nukes, all but Bellefonte and Watts Bar are abandoned.
A wasted investment that nuclear proponents do not include.
Alan
Include where?
In the economic returns of nuclear power, and the expected life of those investments.
In nuclear power as a solution to our energy problems (an abandoned half finished plant certainly consumes resources, but gives nothing in return but scrap).
Alan
While history may sometimes help us predict the future, costs already taken are irrelevant when you choose among new investments. If you yanks are afraid you'll collectively go nuts again and abandon nukes, then by all means do add a risk premium to nuclear investments. It may even be wise. But you WILL watch China soar past you.
Nice-looking mix.
I might suggest:
20% wind
20% solar
35% nuclear
10% gas
5% geothermal
10% hydro
I do this not from any hard data, but my question of whether hydro and geo can provide as much as you say, and a desire to conserve the CH4.
I assume this is all for electricity production. What is unstated here is the opportunity to substitute a certain amount of home space and water heating with solar/home geo heat pumps, district heating, and better insulation/efficiency.
It would be nice to think that wind and solar could be pushed to provide somewhat more than 20% each, but I honestly think the big shock absorber would be nuclear power.
I also think that there could be room for 5-10% contribution from highly efficient coal plants if the other players in the mix cannot live up to our desired estimates...CCS would be desirable.
Are you talking about the US or the entire world? If the US, then you have 7% hydro and 20% nuclear today. Why would you want to destroy more rivers to phase out 5% nuclear? You have next to no geothermal and solar today - what makes you think it would make economic sense to install it? (It won't.)
This is a more reasonable mix:
73% nuclear
20% gas
7% hydro
While doing the build-out, make an effort to R&D more load-following nuclear power.
Not much attention has been paid to storing the variable output of renewables only because their grid penetration has been so low, at least in North America and most of Europe.
By the way, grid penetration of Wind and decentralized solar PV (over 4 Hoover-dams on a sunny day!) is already significant in Germany:
http://www.sma.de/en/news-information/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany...
http://www.transpower.de/pages/tso_de/Transparenz/Veroeffentlichungen/Ne...
http://reisi.iset.uni-kassel.de/pls/w3reisiwebdad/www_reisi_page_new.sho...
In Spain wind power already provided 54% of the electricity demand at one time:
http://www.lavanguardia.es/ciudadanos/noticias/20100102/53859888780/la-p...
And in Portugal wind power even provided 71% of the electricity demand at one time:
http://current.com/technology/91736537_portuguese-wind-reaches-record-71...
And yet not much attention has been paid to storing the variable output of those renewables, because the grid can already cope with very variable consumers. (Besides nuclear and coal power is already being stored with pumped storage, which Germany doesn't even have lots of and pumped storage doesn't care where the power comes from). And luckily there's no PV at night when there's little demand and luckily there's always more wind in the winter season when there's more heating demand.
That wind power provided 71% of demand in Portugal at one time illustrates part of the problem. 15% of Portugal's average electricity production is from wind. If that were to be raised to 30%, on that "optimal" day, wind power would supply 142% of electricity demand. That's lots of excess power, and on that optimal day and lots of other days, spot prices would be zero or negative. Most wind energy produced in such a high-penetration scenario, actually, would not generate income except from the generous feed-in tariffs.
It's not a problem, it's an opportunity. Just because it doesn't fit your preconceived notions of the way things should perfectly work doesn't make it unworkable.
Is it an opportunity that wind destroys its own spot market price by working intermittently in tandem? Or is it an opportunity that wind resources start getting stranded at 20% penetration? Please elaborate.
Please elaborate.
He's talking about your 'lets all build nukes' and therefore anything else is a problem vision.
He called you out buckko and U were sk00led.
Sorry, if you were being cool in some strange American sense, I didn't get it. But if it makes you feel good, please do go on.
Actually since lots of wind power at low demand is a rare scenario, it's not a problem as wind farms can simply reduce their output at this rare instant and still hardly affecting their capacity factor.
Besides: Currently there is no demand management in Portugal (such as in Switzerland) - e.g. turning on electric powered water heaters at low demand and high wind power output would take care of these rare instants.
Of course you can just turn off some wind-mills when the energy is stranded, and sure, at 20% penetration, this doesn't hurt the capacity factor much. But it hurts revenues a lot, since you don't get paid much, if anything at all, precisely at the time when you produce the most.
And yes, DSM can help a little bit, but not that much.
But it hurts revenues a lot, since you don't get paid much, if anything at all, precisely at the time when you produce the most.
You mean like French nuclear power plants which export their surplus nuclear power for free because it's cheaper than shut them down for a night or a weekend? At least wind power plants can be shut down and turned on within seconds without any issues.
And more importantly: Wind power plants produce more power during the winter season, when there is generally more demand anyway and therefore as opposed to many French nuclear power plants don't need to be shut down during the summer season.
Sorry, you're just sticking your head in the sand. A child should understand that it's much worse for wind. A nuke get the average spot price, obviously, or a little more as it can schedule maintenance to low-demand periods. Wind at high penetrations get much, much less than average.
Nuclear in France at 80% has the problems wind will have at 20%. Wind at 40% is unthinkable.
40% wind is very "thinkable". HV DC to take Peak Wind to areas with less than Peak, plus pumped storage and a few hours time shift. Add some DSM (water pumping is an overlooked possibility, for municipal, irrigation and even sewage treatment).
Sure, a few % of wind generated will be spilled even then, or use to hydrolysis water into hydrogen.
Alan
Needless to say that Denmark gets 20% from 3 GW of Wind.
In order for it to have 40% wind, it would just have to increase to 6 GW and still have almost 5 times less wind power capacity than what Norway (smaller population) has hydro power capacity.
Moreover: Denmark is currently trading significantly more electricity with Germany (which has very little hydro power and even less pumped storage) than with Norway.
At least in this case there are no pumps or electrolysis needed. Besides Denmark doesn't even have any significant electric heating which could take care of any surplus wind energy.
Yes, and the area in close proximity to a wind farm might easily have 1000% wind, in a sense. Totally meaningless information.
No way that will take wind to 40%. Sorry, won't happen.
You don't provide any support to your claim. On the other hand, wind to 35% has the support of a recent major study, which could be increased using the abovementioned DSM.
You are always going to be able to find studies which support whatever you wish. But I don't believe 25%+ for an entire grid until I see it.
It's not clear what point you are trying to make here ?.
Wind has already gone well past 25% for some hours, within one country, so you must be meaning average ?
Over what ? days/months/years ? What exactly is an 'entire grid' ?
Grids are getting larger and more power crosses borders, which is exactly the point :
That allows distributed power, and complementary power use.
Grids also have large Peak:Average ratios already, some over 2:1 - so there is growing discretionary choice, as to WHAT is used to generate power.
So, there is many GW of plant, not running at full capacity, and that will trend upwards, as more discretionary choice is built into grids.
It comes down to simple area under the curve maths: you extend the lifetime of finite fuels, by shrinking the portion of time they are utilized.
Of course, I'm talking about average over a year. What exactly is an entire grid? Sorry, I don't have an exact definition, but I mean a large geographical area where less than X% of electrical energy produced/consumed within its boundaries are consumed/produced outside them, and where X is low, like 10. Denmark is at 30%. Germany is somewhat above 10%. UK is at 3%.
That's nice, but this extension is small, due to Jevons, subsidies and wind's limitation to around 20%.
A study of the New Zealand grid found that they could absorb 45% wind without modification *IF* the wind was geographically diverse.
Alan
Yes, as did a study on the east coast USA.
Larger grids actually HELP the case for wind - it is not rocket science.
Such builds are going on right now, around the globe.
Solar Thermal with storage is also expanding, as is Solar PV.
Solar PV is ideally matched to handle AirCon loads, and so save capital spends on peak grid from a distant alternative. Happening right now.
Currently, big Solar PV uses tracking, but cheaper panel prices will open up direct building deployment, and domestic systems rarely use tracking.
We may even see combined Solar Thermal, and Solar PV, to use more of the Solar spectrum.
Domestic (and Automotive) systems will benefit from both efficiency and cost gains, as they both tend to have area constraints.
You are always going to be able to find studies which support whatever you wish.
Well, then show us your studies that supports whatever you wish.
By the way, how's your nuclear aircraft coming along? 'Need some more subsidies?
4 German federal states are already above 38% wind power on average:
http://www.dewi.de/dewi/fileadmin/pdf/publications/Magazin_36/05.pdf
The area close to big wind power farms are often over 1000%. So?
The area close to big nuclear power are often over 1000%. So?
*sigh* You know all this, so why are you pretending to be stupid? It's the penetration in the entire enclosing grid (that can be described as well interconnected) that matters. States are irrelevant.
Nuclear in France at 80% has the problems wind will have at 20%.
Well, France has to turn off nuclear power plants in the summer, because there is simply not enough demand despite all the French electricity export.
Denmark on the other hand has never had to turn off one single wind turbine for even a week - despite not having any hydro power and pumped storage.
"Well, France has to turn off nuclear power plants in the summer, because there is simply not enough demand despite all the French electricity export."
But still, nuclear in France at 80% has the problems wind will have at 20%.
(And let Denmark rest, please. Everybody knows it couldn't do it without its neighbours.)
The French are adding 5 GW of wind (Phase I) for precisely that reason. Extra winter GWh saves on imported gas & coal. Pumped storage (4 GW France, 1 GW Luxembourg, soon 12 GW Swiss) helps deliver it to the minute it is precisely needed.
I think EdF is winter peaking.
Alan
Portugal Pumped Storage
1.2 GW Pumped storage PLUS new hydro for 3% of Portuguese demand. Article alos notes improved grid connections between Spain & Portugal.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/02/iberdrola-p...
435 MW Pumped Storage to be added to new hydro project (Stage 3)
http://www.hydroworld.com/index/display/article-display/5766907568/artic...
I remember another pumped storage project as well in Portugal.
Best Hopes for wind, solar and pumped storage in Portugal,
Alan
NREL Study Shows Power Grid can Accommodate Large Increase in Wind and Solar Generation
we have spent a lot of time with the NREL models and projections, and will cover the suggested approach next week in much more detail.
And the NREL study doesn't even include significant Demand Response.
The industrial and commercial sectors use 56% of electricity produced in the US and residential consumers use the other 44%. Electricity is about 40% of primary energy consumption. This means that industrial electrical use is about 13% of all energy use.
I suspect that the embedded energy in industrial products roughly follows the distribution in society as a whole, and energy is only part of the cost of any industrial product. This means that electricity accounts for a fairly small fraction of the value of industrial products.
Even if electricity prices were to double or triple, factory plant managers would still worry more about material and other energy costs than electricity. I am not saying that a dramatic energy crunch is not coming, only that we can adapt to higher electricity costs much more easily than to higher liquid fuel and natural gas costs.
The real 'fake firebrigade' is fossil fuels which are running out.
Fossil fuels which is stored energy are best viewed as a means to build a renewable future and not in an end in themselves.
This simple idea hasn't occured to the freakonomists at IIER.
Think...how can renewables replace coal or nuclear?
That these sources are considered ideal despite the waste they produce shows blind spot in the author's thought process.
Straight coal is usually inefficiently burnt in large boilers with emissions equipment.
We know that renewables can be backed up with diesel IC, natural gas turbines or hydrogen fuel cells.
It would seem that converting coal into diesel, natural gas or hydrogen stored energy would allow us to use a lot more wind or solar.
The conversion rates for coal range from 50%-65% with an efficiency of from 40% to 70% with CAES and certain fuel cells.
This transition will vastly increase the amount of wind and solar. At a certain threshold hydrogen gas can be produced from renewable electricity and stored and burnt in fuel cells to provide convenient electricity;
simple enough if we have adequate time and fossil reserves.
How long would it take to produce 18TW? of wind and solar electricity from .18TW today. That corresponds to a 4.8% growth per year for 100 years, not beyond beyond belief or beyond our fossil reserves.
Another flaw in the author's reasoning is the idea that we have to build renewables up to our current orgy of energy waste--rather we need to reduce consumption.
Once we admit the delusion of endless fossil fuels we can get down to the hard business of change.
Unfortunately the authors haven't done that yet.
your just agreeing with them and the rest of us really
your are right, I think, to point out there basically is no other choice but then go on to add that this new renewable economy will not be BAU because electrical substitution by renewables will not be able to match the current "energy orgy" (good term btw).
we are all pretty much on the same page
nice comment thou
Another way to re-envision the titling issues with this series is perhaps the thought that, "Losing BAU is a Fake Fire."
.. Not that it doesn't present real challenges.. but that it is a necessary change coming towards us, like it or not.
As it stands, the Present Title might leave one with the thought that Renewables should not be pursued, because they are 'Fake'.. and some other course must be followed to save BAU.
Ultimately, it is our current lifestyle (or BAU) which is fake.. held together by a diminishing trust-fund which still seeks to promise us a land of (Synthetic) Milk and Honey.
Bob
Not a bit of it.
We're in a race with resource depletion but people don't get it. The less dependent we are on items we are not deleting, especially renewable energy the more time we have to adapt.
Those who reject 'false firemen' make our survival less possible, especially on the basis of EROI/efficiency.
We can adapt to a slower, less efficient more broadly based energy system over time if we start early.
The IIER folks are full of junk economic yardsticks--we need another path entirely based on renewable resources.
I think the point is that people need to see the energy economy that comes out the other end is not the same animal.. you make the point yourself
I don't think this makes sense. You'd sacrifice more coal energy than you'd gain in renewable energy. Fuel cells aren't economically viable for this either.
Whats interesting is the author makes the connection between GDP and electricity but does not consider what the GDP would be in his non-BAU case. I think its clear that if the author is correct then we would struggle to have a GDP similar to todays. And of course fossil fuels are for transportation so rising fossil fuel costs even as we develop a renewable grid again suggest a lower GDP. Not only no growth but shrinkage.
Or financial system esp its liabilities are based on the assumption of long term growth.
If this does not happen then these liabilities simply cannot be paid.
Thus its my conclusion that renewables cannot solve or financial issues and probably won't have a huge impact vs simply letting the economy wind down on fossil fuel products.
By this I mean the difference between the economy of a nation facing declining fossil fuel inputs vs one aggressively trying to expand renewable energy is simply one of relative decline rates in GDP. For the financial world this is a non-solution.
Only positive expansion works.
This is important because in the end its investment that matters and neither scenario gives the financial community incentive to do long term investment. Better to speculate short term and get what you can.
The investment community would only be interested once its clear they have no choice but to right off practically all their existing debts and start over. This of course requires a financial crash of some magnitude which then finally makes growing renewables one of the few growth areas. Also of course the extreme reduction in the GDP following a financial crash makes growth in the form of some rebound viable.
Certainly very wealthy farsighted investors will leverage their wealth short term if the expect to be investing after the crash. Ownership of assets is ownership as long as property laws are obeyed changing the monetary system does not change the intrinsic value.
Of course gold as money would be really useful in such a scenario thus if the financial world recognizes its own demise one would expect serious pressure on the price of gold right now. Other than that speculative pressure will come and go in all markets with effectively zero capitol investments outside of some "post" crash scenarios.
So in the end I just don't see any significant investment from the financial community in any future scenario that cannot provide growth at or beyond todays levels as they simply don't pencil out except as owned assets post crash with intrinsic value.
Far more likely is that the leaders of finance will be focused on transferring wealth directly into their personal pockets and thens buying personal assets. Stripping the economy they control and transferring as much as possible to their personal fortunes.
If so one would expect some insane bonus payouts esp in the financial industry.
Of course this looting could easily become large enough to force the system to crash in itself as capitol by the billions is transferred first into personal bank accounts and thence into assets that would have value after a financial crash but are not necessarily productive assets. Gold again is obvious but there are many others land another obvious one. Indeed the large land holdings near cities of the major builders could perhaps explain why their stock prices have remained high. In a crashed economy this land can be quite valuable for agricultural use esp post peak oil. In preservation of wealth and value if you have immense amounts of money that will soon have no value these companies are cheap.
Any relationship between these conjectures and real life is pure coincidence.
Memmel: "This is important because in the end its investment that matters and neither scenario gives the financial community incentive to do long term investment. Better to speculate short term and get what you can."
My understanding:
The founding generations of a civilization invest.
The next generations live on the interest made from this investment.
The next spend the capitol itself: the work of the initial investment.
The last gamble away whatever remains.
See: http://www.dylan.org.uk/greer_on_collapse.pdf
I find your analysis most convincing in the sad light of history.
Kalimanku Denku is beautiful for this moment... sung by Yanka Rupkina... as is Keranka.
John
A number of factual errors. I have limited time (and spent too much time earlier with the author on fruitless exchanges).
#1 of many errors.
Coal is certainly not constant output. TVA finds it economic to operate pumped storage, with a cycle efficiency loss, just to operate it's coal fired plants at higher thermodynamic efficiency. Coal plants routinely, around the world, load follow.
Run-of-the-river hydro often has the capacity to store a few hours worth of water when flow is short of maximum. This is due to economic pressure (3 AM power often sells for half of 7 AM power). So often a small forebay or very low dam, that stays within natural fluctuation levels, is included in the design. Storing just 8 hours of water at, say, half maximum generation, significantly improves the economics of run-of-the-river schemes. Ontario's half of Niagara, over 2 GW, is an example.
And the new EPR nuke (Finland, France, China and proposed USA @ Calvert Cliffs)
http://www.areva.com/EN/global-offer-419/epr-reactor-one-of-the-most-pow...
This is a unique feature of the EPR not shared by it's competitors. But it can be designed in if need be.
So the load following argument for coal is nonsense today, a majority of coal fired plants operating this minute are load following. It is only partially true for run-of-river plants and is only partially true for new nukes.
Alan
My goal is to reduce the electrical and gas demand at my 1938 home my 75% to 80% over the previous owner.
75% is clearly doable, with an investment. 80% will require some push and perhaps innovation. All with greater and not less comfort.
The minimum and fixed charges will become a large part of my utility bill.
Best Hopes for Energy Efficiency,
Alan
Solar PV production is the very antithesis of a mature industry !
What nonsense to assume that the cost structure for, say, even 2020 is known today ?
What technology will dominate in 2020 ? No one knows !
What will be the energy and material inputs required in 2020 ? No one knows !
What new processes will be invented to produce, say, high purity silicon ? No one knows (although some research into agricultural waste as a source shows promise).
Will older solar cells be recycled for their materials one day ? Probably. What is the energy savings by doing this ? No body knows.
Will solar water heating and solar PV be sold as integrated units, with costs savings for both ? Almost certainly !
At least Hannes does not assume a shortage of silicon.
Best Hopes for Realistic Assumptions,
Alan
I don't think it is that immature. PV cells have been known for a century now. And they've been working pretty seriously on them for the last two decades. I'm kinda skeptical of any big breakthrough although there will continue to be improvements.
But I really think that incentives for installing systems really helps development. Just having the technology in the lab doesn't provide the sense of urgency (and the large reward) as millions of real installations.
But, it is precisely that promise of high revenue and profits which draws the real R&D spending. It is less about how long people have been researching them, and more about the total man years of R&D that have ocurred. If R&D expenditures grow exponentially, than total accumulated R&D does also. So the first fifty or so years of R&D probably accounts for very little. Incentives and grants can help to kickstart the process.
Hydroelectric turbines are mature. Railroads are mature. Bicycles are mature. We have been doing them in large volumes for several lifecycles. Some new tricks, but few uncertainties remain and we are WAY down the learning curve.
Not so for solar PV.
Alan
It is a 'Known and established Technology', but Alan was saying 'A Mature Industry', which is a different animal.
It has relied upon Subsidies due to the tilted playing field of absurdly cheap Petroleum products, and this has kept countless Solar businesses on perpetually unsteady footing for decade after decade.
As Harrison Ford allegedly Improvised in Indiana Jones, "It ain't the years, honey, it's the mileage.." (And as one of the first writeups to Raiders of the Lost Ark quipped, 'Ford knows a lot about mileage..')
As I have argued elsewhere here, solar PV costs at the factory gate isn't really the issue. It's everything else.
Has someone done a large study of averaging out these stochastic renewables? They are really not completely random. We certainly know that the sun rises every day, so solar power has that regular cycle. And conveniently, solar PV puts out the most energy just at peak demand times (when it is sunny and everyone cranks up their AC).
Wind is certainly not as regular but it is also not completely random. There are many regular wind patterns. For example, in the SF Bay area in the summer, we can often rely upon hot days to cause air to rise in the central valley which causes cool winds from the ocean to be sucked inward. This creates a reliable afternoon wind that windsurfers under the Golden gate bridge know very well. So, with some half-way decent weather forecasting, that wind will be known.
And the wind is always blowing SOMEWHERE. If you can connect together enough geographically separated wind farms in a united grid then you should be able average them out to greatly reduce the volatility. You'll still need back-up natural gas systems but the amount needed should be reduced.
Has anyone done such a study to correlate various wind corridors to figure out which need to be combined to guaranteed a certain constant load?
And in the long term, I do think we can start integrating more batteries into the system to act as power buffers. EVs and old repurposed EV batteries can be used to level out the demands.
I have done comprehensive analyses of two different sets of wind data, one from Germany and one set from Ontario. The variability of wind is exactly the amount that the Maximum Entropy Principle would predict. Given that a mean wind speed w/kinnetic energy occurs, the variability is given rather precisely by an exponential probability density function.
Can you translate that. :-)
Are you saying the wind is just really random so that one should be able to come up with some level of energy that can be obtained with high probability given enough turbines at different locations?
The wind interactions are so complex and have so many states thst the statistical laws of entropy take over. Its al random save for the fact that higher energies, i.e. higher velocities, become much less common decreasing at an exponential rate. They also seem largely uncorrelated with time. Search my blog and you can see the data and the model. http://mobjectivist.blogpot.com
And you are probably right that a spatial sampling of turbines can counteract this inherent randomness to provide a more uniform source of power.
WHT, aren't you just looking at the distribution of velocity versus frequency? That doesn't say much about the correlation with time, i.e. if at time T the velocity is V, what is the probability at time T+deltaT of the speed being W? With small enough deltaT the clustering ought to be pretty significant.
I doubt your maximum entropy principle explains all -at least without one or more local tuning factors. For instance, where I live average windspeed is pretty high, but gales are almost unheard of. When I lived in Boulder Colorado average windspeed wasn't very high, but 100-140mph chinooks were not uncommon. Likewise in the subtropics during ordinary weather winds are light, but they do get the occasional hurricane/typhoon. So the range of wind speeds, and the average wind speed for a location are not going to be highly correlated.
I did the correlation over time and it also showed the same randomness. Consider how long it takes to reach a certain energy level by integrating power over time.
Below a certain time, there may be correlations but we try not to be alarmed by this fact. I did the autocorrelatiin for one set here
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/05/wind-energy-dispersion-analysis...
We have completed an in-depth analysis of those stochastic patterns for many European countries where they have a significant share today, and a pan-European analysis of correlations for wind power.
Wind has seasonal patterns, but other than that is not following any major reliable rules (some regions show slightly higher wind outputs during the day in summer, for similar meteorological reasons like the ones you describe). But equally, there can be days without that phenomenon. That is exactly the problem.
The same is true for solar. In summer, it is significantly correlated with daytime consumption (and A/C use), but on bad days only with A/C use, and negatively with daytime light use and heating.
All these things, including the use of batteries, will be covered in the second part of this electricity post.
Did you include Ukraine and European Russia ? Or did you just confine your study to the wind patterns of the relatively small Western Europe, where a single weather system can affect all the nations at once ?
Alan
Lots of data is publicly available from various geographic locations. It all fits the same distribution, either the entropic Rayleigh or some tweaks to that, called Weibull, which I think are inconsequential.
The problem is to make wind viable you need class 3 winds. Class 3 winds are sparse over the US.
Agreed. On a large scale, PV will be very predictable on clear days, and should be predictable to hour or minute timescales on overcast days. Partly cloudy days would present the biggest issues.
Yes, on partly cloudy days solar has more variance than wind: clouds can be large and sharp-edged, so that they can slide in and cut off a large percentage of solar very quickly.
OTOH, A/C demand is correlated with sunshine, so if we have Demand Response in place then utilities can reduce A/C at the same rate that solar supply drops.
So you have to phrase the problem statement correctly. The issue is not the strength of the solar, it is the variability of the clouds. Solar strength depends to first order on the latitude and season. Cloud variability is entropic.
As long as solar is distributed areawise these sharp changes will be washed out. Even an area as small as a town will have much smoother solar output than an individual array.
Yes, but it's probably doubtful that the solar will be so evenly distributed area-wise. A single megawatt size utility scale system can make completely meaningless the distribution of hundreds of smaller residential or commercial systems.
OTOH, utility scale systems will be fewer, and may be able to be managed at grid scales with dedicated monitoring. But I'm just speculating.
A single megawatt size utility scale system can make completely meaningless the distribution of hundreds of smaller residential or commercial systems.
Modern inverters with this size have utility management functions: http://www.sma.de/en/products/knowledge-base/sma-inverters-as-grid-manag...
Besides 1 MW is still less than 0.001% of a big power plant output during a sudden shut down.
I think the larger concern would be a concentrating solar facility in the 100+MW scale. CSP needs direct sun, so clouds have a big impact.
Besides that there are not many concentrating solar facilities, CSPs usually have thermal storage:
This 50 MW CSP plant has a heat storage capacity of 7.5 of peak load hours:
http://www.solarmillennium.de/upload/Download/Technologie/eng/Andasol1-3...
Plenty of time for utilities to plan ahead.
Yes, heat storage like that would certainly handle the cloud problem.
There are several very large CSP plants planned in California. Do you know if they include heat storage?
Yes, that bolsters my point that management is needed. One can't just rely on the physical distribution of systems to handle a partly cloudy day.
My personal experience would indicate that the average price of electricity could rise significantly before large changes in usage habits would occur. We get 93% of our electricity from oil.
During the 2005-2008 run up in oil prices our rates went from about $.22 per KWH to a high of $.49 per KWH. There are still relatively high oil prices and, as such, out rates are now around $.39.
This would be a disastrously high rate on the mainland US and yet it did not seem to change usage patterns much here in Kauai. Consumption per household dropped by 15% in the 2005-2008 period but rose back up as rates came back and is now above the usage it was during the low of 2005.
Obviously we do not have much industrial activity, but the general population and the tourist industry seems to have settled in at these rates just fine. Electricity is the epitome of useful cheap energy. It will rise in price a long way before people stop using it.
Hawaii also does not have the heating or cooling load of the mainland, and homes tend to be much smaller than on the mainland. So total electricity use per household is much smaller, keeping the ratio to income closer to the overall rate than one would expect, based on a comparison of electricity costs per kWh alone.
Also, Hawaii uses very much less than the average amount of gasoline for transportation, so that helps balance budgets.
I expect that the big cost for Hawaiians is air travel, and that gets squeezed when oil prices rise (hence electricity and gasoline prices.)
Well, I do not really know what will happen with electricity (but I suspect it won`t be so cheap and available in the future as it is now). That is why I am happy, because my children now spend HOURS in front of the TV watching a lot of junk. One day this will not be possible anymore. The waste of time, mental energy and resources.....will come to an end for economic reasons having to do with resource availability. Yay. I suspect that ONLY when the TV is not showing programming regularly and the electricity is not 100% reliable will people stop sitting gaping at the idiot box!
I really dislike television!
TVs are becoming pretty efficient. A properly adjusted LED TV should be about 125 watts / square meter.
The problem with energy consumption is the size of TVs. 480-line TV was designed so that the line structure cannot be seen by a person sitting more than 4 times picture height from the set. With 1080-line TV, you can sit as close as 2 times picture height before the line structure appears. Therefore, you have to either sit really close or buy a bigger set in order to get the benefit from HDTV. (And actualy, most of the perceptual advantage comes from the digital sound, lack of interference and ghosting, and lack of interlace "crawl" rather than the higher definition.)
The chart: HDTV power consumption compared
I am not sure I follow...
We sit from 120-190" from a 52" diagonal LCD TV, watching both normal and HDTV signals.
We do not feel the need to sit closer in the slightest, and both our non-HDTV and especially our HDTV look far superior to our former 32" Sony CRT.
But, we never favored sitting closer than halfway to movie theater screens either. Makes our eyes bug out...
A 52" TV with a 16:9 aspect ration is about 25.5" high. At 1080 lines, the lines are therefore 0.0236" apart.
At a distance of 120", the angle subtended by two lines is 0.000197 radians, or 0.013 degrees, or 0.676 minutes of arc.
A person of 20/20 visual acuity would be able to resolve lines with an angle of about 1 minue of arc. So you can move towards the set to about 81 inches before you might start to see the line structure of the set, and you can probably move even closer. I think that 20 seconds of arc was used for the analog TV display requirements of 4 times picture height for 4:3 aspect ratio analog displays.
At distance of 190", the angle subtended by two lines is 0.427 minutes. Had you purchased a 720 line set, the angle would be 0.641 minutes of arc. A person with normal visual acuity will not see a difference between a 720 and a 1080 set of that size at that distance.
In fact, a 480 line set with a 25.5" picuture height would have an angle of 0.961 minutes at 190", so there is no perceputal difference in the ability to see fine detail betweeen the 480, 720 or 1080 line sets that are 25.5" high at 190" viewing distance.
I used to be involved with impressing executives with the merits of HDTV. It was very important to put the chairs at the right distance so that they could see the difference between the regular and high definition displays. And to turn up the bass on the HDTV set.
I do not contest your math here, however, I just re-measured my three seating areas (couch at ~ 190 inches from the screen, love seat at ~90-120 inches from the screen, and circular lounge chair ~ 80 inches from the screen.
At all three seating areas, I, my wife, and my two adult children can see a markedly better picture on HD channels than on the non-HD channels (and to be clear (No pun intended), most of the non-HD channels look pretty nice).
If we did not see a better picture on the HD channels, then we certainly would cancel our HD cable service and go with a non-HD plan.
If we are not seeing better resolution, then, as you say, there must be other aspects of the picture quality which cause a perception of a better picture. And, to re-iterate, the non-HD pictures do not roll, have snow, etc...at least not that we can perceive. The HD channels simply look sharper.
To be complete in my description, certainly some HD channels have noticeably lesser (perceived picture quality) than other HD channels (perhaps due to how the original footage was shot, on what type of equipment, etc.).
How does a DVD compare with the HD channel from the cable company? The non-HD channels from the cable company may be sent in analog form or highly compressed digital form and not be equivalent to true 480-line performance.
Or even better, compare DVD and BluRay.
Hi pi,
Thanks for sharing.
I'm puzzled, though - you live there, too, right? They are your children (too)?
What about the option of reducing or throwing out the TV altogether?
What most kids say they want, is more time with their parents.
For how to have a discussion, and perhaps also, how to talk about your own needs and desires, and theirs (why are they watching? Nothing to do?)
I suggest this site: www.cnvc.org
Here are some things I just looked up on "google" for you.
http://www.trashyourtv.com/switching
Tips for reducing TV viewing and Strategies for getting rid of your TV altogether
Congratulations! By reducing or eliminating TV time, you have just given yourself and your family up to four extra hours a day! This will turn out to be the best decision of your and your family's life. Here are a few strategies to get started.
http://www.livescience.com/culture/080904-no-tv.html
Excerpt:
Science does in fact support many non-watchers' worst fears about TV.
"The research tends to show that increased exposure to television and violence results in greater aggression in children," Krcmar said. "That's a pretty consistent finding."
There is no reason why the situation should be different for energy inputs other than oil, as higher energy costs always leads to this diversion away from consumption and investment.
This is unrealistic: a large share of the problems caused by rising oil prices is due to imbalances between exporters and importers, while a much larger portion of electricity is produced domestically.
a similar portion (2.5%) is spent on electricity, at the average price of 6.83 cents. Should this price – for example – triple to 20 cents, suddenly 7.4% of total industrial cost would go towards electricity. This is far more than the profit margins of most energy-intensive industries.
This is unrealistic: if electricity prices were to triple, industrial costs would rise by only 5%. A large share of that rise would be mitigated by increased efficiency, some would be handled with cost reductions elsewhere, and industrial product prices would go up by perhaps 2%. Profit margins would be pretty much unaffected.
many applications are simply inflexible, like those that require something to run for 24 hours a day - data centers are among them, and so are some key industrial processes.
The example given (aluminum smelting) didn't support the argument: it is a large consumer of electricity, and it is 90% flexible.
Lighting is not flexible
Sure it is. Lighting levels can vary by 30% without people noticing.
nor is access to heavy uses of electricity in households, such as cooking, using electronics or most kitchen appliances. We also want hot water and cool air when we need it, and usually we don’t want to schedule our laundry because someone tells us to do so, even though this is probably the easiest part
We also want to use cell phones whenever we want to, but we live with price bands and limited minutes. When land-line telephones had price bands, everyone lived with them.
The biggest residential application will be dynamic charging of electric vehicles, and that will be fully automated. EREV/EVs will represent roughly 40% of residential demand, and 20% of society's overall demand, and it will be almost fully controllable.
Most users obviously prefer the inconvenience of higher prices versus the inconvenience of service interruptions, even for things that are not mission-critical. This fact leaves us with approaches that actively shift energy consumption without affecting the end-user.
This is astonishingly, breathtakingly unrealistic. All of society will collapse because we're unwilling to inconvenience consumers slightly??
No, dynamic pricing will be imposed on consumers, and the price differentials will be made large enough that consumers will have to respond. Period.
All of society will collapse because we're unwilling to inconvenience consumers slightly?
I believe such arguments have been made.
The neighbor to my left when the power goes out shrugs his shoulders. The neighbor to the right gets foam at the mouth about how its an outrage and how they pay their bill and therefore they should have power et la.
with renewable energy supplies, we are suddenly confronted with irregular patterns that can include days to weeks of over- and undersupply. In those cases, storage and conversion losses beyond a few days become almost insurmountable hurdles, as cumulative losses grow quickly over time.
Battery type storage is not the appropriate way to handle long-term under-supply. Attempting to use it for this purpose will indeed make the problem look unsolvable, but this is unrealistic. The obvious choice is burning biomass.
If our limited biomass is more valuable for other things, than a slightly more expensive option would be overbuilding wind and solar by, say, 20%. This would increase wind/solar generation costs by 20%, of course, and end-user costs by 6-7%% (which isn't much), but it would greatly reduce periods of under-supply and the depth of under-supply when it happened.
Another obvious option would be conversion of "flow" into "stocks" by using the 20% wind/solar oversupply (which is essentially free, as it has already been charged to users as discussed above) to manufacture methanol, methane, or some such simple hydrocarbon which could be stored until needed. This would be relative inexpensive, both to manufacture and use for generation, as we would be using inexpensive peaker generators.
Don't forget: Fossil fuels for hot water (bath, washing machine, dishwasher etc.) and heating will eventually need to be replaced with electricity. And heat energy (hot and cold) can be stored relatively cheaply.
(At least it won't make sense to create a renewable electric grid and still use oil furnaces)
It will probably make more sense in most cases to use direct solar thermal heating for water. Perhaps supplemented by electricity or biomass.
Well, keep in mind heat cannot easily be distributed/shared and electricity can.
And a house heated with solar thermal only, will require a much bigger water tank (seasonal heat storage).
Here's an example: http://www.jenni.ch/pdf/Mediendokumentation_Einweihung%20Solar-MFH%2031....
Also, the installation of a PV system should be easier than of such an elaborate solar thermal system.
Of course, I would only suggest electric heating and hot water generation in combination with an efficient heat pump.
In any case, more heat pump heating and hot water generation will increase the flexibility of the grid as does a biomass power plant (as opposed to a biomass furnace).
And these can be heat pumped based rather than resistance heating. With a heat pump solution efficiency (by the naive measure) is greater than 100%. Right now heat pump solutions are still pretty pricy. Lowe's heatpump based water heater is roughly $1500.
Lowe's heatpump based water heater is roughly $1500.
1 month rent for 20 years hot water is not bad.
Hate to be a Doomer_Dan, but any discussion about electricity (especially as replacing oil in transportation) must take into account the risks of solar storms decimating our electrical infrastructure. Yet one more capital cost to drain our resources in a time of decline.
NASA review of new solar maximum and mechanics of solar weather:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/10mar_stormwar...
1989 solar event causes Quebec power outage:
http://www.solarstorms.org/SWChapter1.html
Recaps of 1859 solar event "Carrington Effect":
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringt...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_031027.html
"Easy" solution.
When we see a massive, once every few centuries solar flare coming, power down for six hours. It may take 12 to 24 hours to get everyone back on-line after that.
Alan
A lot of stuff simply can't be shut down. Do you know what it would look like if the power went out in the entire U.S. for 12-24 hours?
Actually 18 to 30 hours (+6 hours to let the storm pass).
The alternative is 18 to 30 months without power (if society does not collapse and that becomes 18 to 30 years).
Some areas (close to big hydropower plants for example), will be back up in 7 hours.
Mother Nature rules.
The alternatives are:
1) An 18 to 30 hour shut down every x hundred years.
2) An 18 to 30 month shutdown IF WE ARE LUCKY (otherwise famine and social disruption)
3) Raising electric bills by, say, 3%, to harden much of the grid against a low probability event.
I vote for #1.
You are free to vote for #3, but I object to #2.
Alan
I tried to search the web to find out about how much warning time we might get before a large coronal mass ejection or other potentially harmful solar event:
From the link, It would seem perhaps on the order of 30 minutes from the ACE spacecraft (on duty since 1998, hope it lasts!):
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/04jun_swef/
Perhaps if the STEREO pair of spacecraft detect something erupting from the sun as it turns to face the Earth the warning may be several hours?
Some other links showing that the U.S. government has some resources committed to space weather forecasting and detection:
http://www.nswp.gov/nswp_agency.htm
The U.S. Space Weather Center:
http://www.spaceweathercenter.org/SWOP/Forecast/1.html
Your daily space weather current conditions, alerts/events from the past 24 hours, and wanring alerts/advisory bulletins of upcoming situations:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SWN/
It is unfortunate that the next time period of active space weather is forecast to start soon: some of the articles on Google seem to try to tie in a 2012-ish solar active period with the whole Mayan 2012 end of the World pish posh. I wonder what the EOTW cranks will do after 2012 comes and goes, just like the turn of the century came and went?
Back when I flew, the pre-mission Weather Briefing always included space weather as well...it can adversely affect HF radio, other radio transmission/reception, navigation systems, etc.
I have a hard time believing that any President is going to take the heat for 'pulling the plug' on the U.S. power grids, or even smaller regional grid stoppages. The 'cry wolf' factor would loom large. Such a black-out may cause non-trivial loss of life and injuries...afterward, how could the government 'prove' that the alternative would have been worse? It would be especially difficult if no other countries took that last-ditch precaution and came out fine.
I do not contest the potential wisdom of your druthers to implement a temporary shut-down vice a longer-term outage, but the space weather folks better be spot-on with their forecast accuracy.
In addition, such a 'plan' would require extensive public education beforehand (we are inside lead-time away for this to be effective)to prevent panic and provide the best opportunity for an orderly power-down and re-start.
Of course, all grid operators would require an extensive pre-brief, published procedures, protected/enduring comm circuits with a central authority orchestrating the actions, and a published set of scenarios, including phased re-starts of the grids.
All level of law enforcement, down to the local levels (the most important level, would need the same pre-published and rehearsed plans and protected/hardened comm links as well.
The fact that no stories/information about such plans have leaked into the press leads me to think that these plans might not exist. We are not THAT good at keeping secrets...and besides, like I said, it seems the wisest thing to do would be to pre-educate the public as a civil defense measure.
Two people can keep a secret...as long as one of them is dead (old saying).
The severe solar storm hazard is somewhat similar to the high-altitude EMP hazard...but the current cast of national (state)actors are all rational (even KN and Iran)...only when the day comes when small, compartmentalized groups commonly would have access to BOTH small nuclear weapons, AND space launch systems able to orbit such weapons, would I be concerned about such a threat.
Even then, the launch better come from at-sea, because the country of launch origin would doubtless face non-trivial bad consequences.
I would rate the HEMP as minor for the next couple of decades (and by then, if PO decline ideas are correct, the opportunity to squander resources on such high-tech gambits may be a thing of the past, especially for small covert groups).
As far as the whole severe space weather event damage expectancy goes, who knows, that threat may be small as well. Doesn't seem to be a Black Swan/game-changer to me. Hope I'm correct on that guess...
A lot depends upon how much false positive risk you are willing to accept. The flare/CME would be detected at least 18hours before the geomagnetic storm hits. Supposedly the amount of damage depend a lot upon how the magnetic field in the disturbance is aligned. I think counter to the earths magnetic field is the dangerous configuration (but I might have remembered if wrong). So if you wait until we have detailed data from up solar-wind satellites the warning time isn't very long. I supposed you could issue a "watch" on seeing the flare, and industries could prepare for the possibility of the power cutoff. Then when it is semi-confirmed you announce that the switch will be pulled in 15minutes (or whatever). But I don't know how long it will be before we have such operational capability.
You also have a THEORY that the magnetic cloud our little corner of space is drifting through may cause many EMP events.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/boeingwhistleblowers.pdf
(before one worries TOO much about this - it is theoretical and who knows if the planet hasn't already been drifting through such space clouds in the metal using past. Makes for one heck of a black swan however.)
As for pish-posh - if one goes for the 'governments like crisis - otherwise why would they create so many' line of thinking - a crashed grid may be viewed as a good thing. Considering however there are plans for the invasion of Canada sitting on a shelf, I would not be shocked if post EMP has not been war gamed.
OK, I'll bite: What plan to invade Canada???
We all do know that Canada is the other half of NORAD, correct?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR200512...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread190502/pg1
Plan Red, is a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex Canada. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was eventually declassified in 1970
deleted
I can only imagine the beauty, as it has become so difficult to experience the night sky unpolluted by electric light and the audiosphere unburderned by the drone of electric motors.
Of course, it won't happen, since so many hospitals and what not have backup electricity generation systems.
Ah well, I suppose that maintaining the flow of meds is worth some pollution.
Sure it would be expensive. And if it turned out the predicted geomagnetic storm didn't materialize, there would be a hell of a lot of recriminations by those who lost serious money in the shutdown. But, the alternative could be far worse. I've seen articles where it is claimed recovery would be exceedingly difficult. There is only so much capability to build power transformers (and even what we have assumes functioning industry), and such a storm could take out a large fraction of the worlds power transformers. This is sold as a back to the stoneage sort of event. So we will just have to bite the bullet and shut down ALL long range transmission, and any other vulnerable infrastructure.
Seems they have already learned from the 1989 instance, and have moved to reduce the effects of Geomagnetically-Induced Currents (GIC)
Of course, testing the mitigation steps, is not simple, it's a bit like earthquakes. You hope the real event, 'behaves' much as you modeled.
Since the 1989 blackout, Hydro-Quebec has installed transmission-line series capacitors at a cost of over $1.2 billion and has improved its real time measurement, monitoring and communication capability for grid management.
Most utilities in susceptible regions have relied on similar guidelines
and limited contingency plans but they have not been tested fully and may not be sufficient for a rapid response to any large-scale cascading grid failure.
Effects like transformer saturation and I^2R heating, can be given some operational margin, by doing some Grid Load Shedding.
For normal industrial goods, price curves often show an asymptotic form...Eventually, when labor and production costs become optimized, the decline in price of the product slows, until it reaches a stable retail price more dependent on the raw materials and energy required to produce and transport the good.
This is incorrect. Manufacturing costs fall, reliably and in the long-term, across all products. For instance, in the US manufacturing labor productivity has increased by 5% per year consistently since WWII. That's why manufacturing employment has dropped dramatically in the last several decades despite the fact that US manufacturing output has risen by 50% since 1979.
Incidentally, the author's casual assumption that OECD countries have lost the majority of their manufacturing is wrong. They've been confused, as so many have been, by the fall in employment, which is very different from output.
for solar panels, the permanent reductions experienced in the past haven’t continued between 2003 and 2008, despite rapidly growing production. The last important cost reduction happened since around 2006, when Chinese manufacturers entered the market, bringing low-cost production energy (mostly coal-based) into the game. Not truly a sustainable model. And, in 2009, due to overcapacity and massively reduced raw material prices, costs came down again, and there might even be more room for some reductions, but this story has an end once input prices go up.
This confuses prices and costs. What the authors observed here were fluctuations in price caused by temporary bottlenecks in silicon supplies, and changes in PV panel supply and demand. PV costs have fallen strongly and consistently for decades, and if anything that trend is accelerating.
The same thing is true of wind turbines: prices, not costs, rose temporarily in the last couple of years due to demand exceeding supply.
True. The smarter place to look, is factory costs, and they are steadily falling.
- and factory Builds, which is strongly climbing.
Efficiency is edging up, which helps maintain profits.
We have around 76c/watt for Solar PV (factory cost), and sub 40c/watt for inverters.
That leaves margins, delivery and installation/connection in the price mix.
[common, no matter what power design you choose]
Spot prices for moderate volumes, are here:
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm
These were as low as $1, but have firmed slightly.
Spending $512 gets you $1.80/Watt, and $1700 gets you 1.1kW at $1.55/W
Why do I keep reading post after post after post from Nick, and keep thinking "thank you Nick". So many points need to be made, and you are doing a great job making them.
Thanks!
There was a shortage of high purity silicon but new production is coming on line that will quadruple output, price of silicon is expected to fall. More, larger and more efficient panel factories are coming on line. Old factories with inefficient and expensive manufacturing are being closed down. Larger cells are being produced, same handling cost for more power. If supply can keep pace with demand then prices will fall.
NAOM
Yes, there is a LOT of capacity expansion going on.
Also, not all Solar PV is silicon, and Reel-Reel has very strong scaling potential.
Efficiencies are steadily climbing.
One detail to note, is that the PV Cell prices are falling faster than Inverter prices, and are already within ~ 2:1 of inverter prices.
If that continues, cells could fall below inverter costs.
Then you add finance, install, etc, and the percentage of the final price that is PV Cells, is declining.
(so, ultimately even if PV cells fall to zero, the 100MW plant price might decline less than 30%).
Of course, cheap PV cells do open other applications, like building cladding, and they will allow refurbish/upgrade of built plant, at lower costs.
Inverter prices are also falling. If inverter & other Balance of System costs become the majority of PV installation costs, I think they'll become the focus of intense cost reduction efforts.
Note I did say that : PV Cell prices are falling faster than Inverter prices
There is price pressure on Inverter, but they do not scale like reel-reel and large fabs do, which is why their prices are falling more slowly than PV. (sub 40c/w)
Other costs like local substations, admin buildings, perhaps tracking mechanisms etc, also lack the FAB 'economies of scale' and are rather more likely to follow average construction prices, than track the Solar PV curves.
Some Solar inverter info is here: (just under 40c/W, across the whole industry)
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4206189/Solar-inverter-sales-sha...
and here, one company claims $0.243 per watt for large-scale inverters
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/satcons-record-q2-solar-inve...
["While solar panels have experienced extreme price pressure and rapidly falling ASPs, this trend has not impacted the inverter field. Power electronics and metals are a more mature industry and likely will not experience the same plummeting prices. Inverter prices and value could actually increase as the inverter becomes more "grid-aware" and absorbs some other system functions. "]
Thanks for the info.
BOS also includes mounting and installation: here's an interesting article about that:
"There's a lot of metal in a solar array that doesn't need to be there, as far as Zep Solar is concerned.
The company, which spun out of High Sun Engineering, has come up with a mounting system that eliminates a significant amount of the racking required to erect a solar system and in turn lowers the cost. Zep claims it can trim the price of a solar system by 50 to 80 cents per watt, a sizeable discount. A University of California study stated that residential solar cost $5.40 a watt after installation and incentives in 2008 and many installers quote $7 to $6 per watt as the going price.
Additionally, modules employing Zep's mounting system can be installed onto a roof in four to six times less time, according to Christina Manansala, the vice president of operations. GroSolar, the prominent distributor and installer, has agreed to work with Zep. The coming-out party for Zep occurs later this week at Solar Power International.
Although it's not as glamorous as cell design or efficiency, installation is rapidly gaining more attention in the solar industry as a way to bring down costs and/or percolate demand. Installation can account for one-third of the cost of a solar project and in some ways it can be more difficult to control than manufacturing. The work ultimately has to be performed on location in varied conditions by people with a wide range of skills. Still, the "plumber's crack problem" is not the kind of research project that tends to attract DOE funds.
In recent years, Solar City, Sungevity and Global Solar Center have devised software that trim project planning and estimating costs. Akeena Solar and GreenRay have promoted all-in-one solar panels complete with inverters that reduce the amount of sawing and work that has to occur at a job site while Armageddon Energy has created an Ikea-like kit for assembling solar arrays in minutes. Home Depot is expected to put more emphasis on do-it-yourself kits. Another start-up, Sollega, has started to tout a one-piece rack from recycled plastic.
Large panel makers, meanwhile, are starting to tailor panels to particular roofs: module modularization like this echoes how the PC market evolved to better suit customer needs.
How does Zep's system work? Instead of mounting solar panels on the equivalent of a steel or aluminum coffee table, Zep props up on a device its calls the Interlock Zep. In layman's terms, the Interlock is essentially a leg that clamps onto the frame of a solar panel and serves to prop up the solar panel and fasten it to the other panels in the array. Instead of a table, you just buy the leg.
"You have to have a frame in the module so you already have a structure," said Manansala. "Why double up on it?"
The Interlock requires a special grooved frame. Zep, however, is already in negotiations with a couple of manufacturers on swapping out traditional frames with its grooved one. The grooved frame uses about the same amount of raw material, she added. The patents for the Interlock came though a little while ago.
Unlike Lighthammer Software, the company name was not coined as a tribute to Led Zeppelin. The founders wanted something short and "all of the good short words were taken," Manansala said. Zep just happened to be available."
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/cutting-the-fat-and-cost-out...
Zep and Andalay (Akeena's system, which I work with) simply take the structural part of the traditional rack system (i.e. the 'rail') and put it in the module frame instead. While this does result in using less material, it's not much, and these companies have probably taken the approach as far as it can go. Meanwhile, they offer the low profile of such mounting systems as a selling point to the clueless, aesthetically minded customer who has no idea that putting panels closer to the roof makes them hotter and less efficient.
If you want to talk about inefficiencies in installation, my co-workers and I go on about that all day, every working day.
If you want to talk about inefficiencies in installation, my co-workers and I go on about that all day, every working day.
By my guest: I'd be interested, and I think others would too. It directly addresses one of the main theses of the Original Post...
It may not be as interesting as it sounds. Mostly comes down to the same issues lots of businesses face: proper planning, proper inventory practices, good execution, so that crews aren't making extra trips to the work site. I actually think that for the industry in general there isn't much room for improvement.
Perhaps more interesting to talk about would be the business model of solar installers. The industry is not mature enough yet to have sprouted installers in every locality. Which means that some installations are done by crews that live hundreds of miles away, thus consuming a good part of the energy (and carbon emissions) saved by installing solar, as well as affecting the bottom line of companies and employees. Plus, not every company is forward looking enough to think about the day when their trucks should be electric.
Some general thoughts:
It seems to me that industrial/commercial flat roof installations ought to be much more efficient than residential. Does that make sense to you?
Residential PV gets a lot of attention, by my understanding is that I/C installations represent 80% of the capacity being installed in California.
Shouldn't installation as part of new construction be much more efficient than retrofits? Isn't the additional cost of retrofits in effect a premium we're paying to install PV in a hurry? A premium which, in the long run, would go away?
Yes, certainly those complaining about Solar PV, and ignoring the curves, also miss the important fact that Solar PV can be installed where others cannot.
By installing close to users, you also save on
* Peak Grid built outs, otherwise needed
* Transmission losses
Solar PV makes the most compelling sense, in locations where peak load == peak sun.
Note that as panel prices fall, the goal posts shift.
You now do not HAVE to use tracking, and you can include Solar PV in new construction.
(likely also mixed with Solar Hot Water).
So Solar PV certainly IS worth the investments, and it will continue to improve.
Maybe. According to industry publications, costs are less with larger systems, but I don't think that has much to do with flat roofs. For one thing, to maximize output on flat roofs you need tilt-up racking, which is an extra step in the installation usually not required in residential. Also larger installations I think sometimes end up taking on additional burdens associated with high-power grid interconnections. According the study Gail cited in the electricity post, commercial systems cost more for the same size system.
Why? From an installation point of view, I don't know why retrofits should cost more. It seems to me it's the same amount of work, so taking your word for it that retrofits cost more, I think the source of that must be financial or something.
Also, it's kinda moot, because we don't really need lot's of new housing right now, do we?
Why would it go away, exactly?
, I don't know why retrofits should cost more. It seems to me it's the same amount of work
All wiring can be included in the original plans - that has to cost less. BIPV should cost less: you don't have duplicative structures.
A premium which, in the long run, would go away? - Why would it go away, exactly?
Because you can't retrofit forever. Eventually, all of the existing buildings which are appropriate have been tackled. Then, it's new construction.
Still not following you... It's still usually the same amount of wire and conduit and the same amount of work to install it. These are very marginal differences in the cost of a solar installation, especially for residential installations; tens of dollars in a system cost of tens of thousands. 3/4" conduit costs 50cents a foot or less. Wiring is about the same.
You can retrofit forever. By the time you're done (50 years? optimistically?) it's well past time to start replacing all of the systems that were new when you started. (Plus, roofs will need to be redone in the meantime.) And for god sake I hope that the amount of new housing that's ever built in the future is a small percentage of the existing housing stock. Eventually we have to stop covering the planet with houses.
same amount of work to install it.
Surely installation is less work with construction, especially large volume new construction, with standard plans. The walls are open, all the wiring is done at the same time.
By the time you're done (50 years? optimistically?) it's well past time to start replacing all of the systems that were new when you started.
With just a little luck the wiring would still be just fine. With a little more, the structure would be too.
Plus, roofs will need to be redone in the meantime.
Yes, and I would hope that BIPV would become part of that. Surely BIPV should become very cost-effective: just install shingles that are designed to provide connections automatically, and connect it to the existing wiring.
Now, stochastic renewable sources (mostly wind) coming into play, often with a “right of passage”, i.e. no limits in selling into the grid at a preferred price. ...new, unpredictable pool of sources that deliver whenever they deliver, irrespective of demand.
This is simply a policy decision. It's perfectly practical and low-cost to occasionally clip peaks in wind output.
Any economic analysis of high % wind grid has to assume that 1% to 4% of potential wind power will be spilled (or used locally for totally discretionary uses, like pumping water, electrolysis of water for hydrogen, resistance heat#).
Just like hydropower plants occasionally spill excess water during the spring melt or after heavy rains. It is some times not economic to build turbines to catch 100% of the water, or transmission, load following, etc. to accept 100% of the wind output.
Alan
# I could see small towns and rural Iowa where electric resistance heat comes on by signal when wind power would otherwise be spilled. Either hot water tanks or space heating in fall & winter. Crop drying at elevators, hot water at slaughterhouses, etc.
Iceland has a 150 MW surplus in renewable power 9 out of 10 summers (dry the 10th year). They have several customers that otherwise use FF or can store heat (fish processing plants or example) at concessional rates.
So ? - An operator could still choose to have the broader peak (spill flattens peaks) , as the area under the curve, is what they sell.
Indeed, if you are looking at wind, there is inherently a LOT of energy spill : Glance at any turbine Power vs wind speed curve, and you'll see that climbs to a Flat plateau, which is the design limit (not the wind limit).
This limit is set by the design: It might be gearbox wear, blade torque, heating losses, or nominal inverter ratings, that set this.
Nate after scanning not reading that post I do not have the time right my cell phone is lost, the keys to the program are lost and janet the cop, said Charles can I help you get home,
Yes I said, can I hop a ride in the padded cell back seat in the jail on wheels?
\
Reatpeated scycle signal, Jo cool I got you note the camera's data in the mail, to offer to price the auction to the max massive price, to offer God's only son, dead killed nailed to a tree, the cnn news at three.
Local time seems to matter less and less, local power on the solar cells, hanging off bridges, street lambs, cams in the sky's eyes wrotor blades, powerful energeering skills roll the planes back out in WW! and WW!! and WWWWWWWWW now this second and IDE an i explosive device is packed in my back pack.
A coded nuke dukem code in my email
A coded key code to rachel's code lock down key, Charles' programers are on line night and day, so am I , yes yes sir sir three baggies full a kilo of cheese for 33 dollar that lady said, yes, I dropped 2 on the floor as a wild eyed charles left the store, and then had to go back and get something else again and agian, by the time I left Argenta Market Fireangel was a widely known person, ME Charles E woens Jr.
Charle s Author at large, you get that if you get email from me, edioters, You have 3 days in 23 seconds to reply then you are added to the list if you like it or note not Mike B he is off the blgo role list, Mike ! says , later much later, when I am good enough to beat you in a fairs fairs fair game, rules, there are not stinking rules in the USA AIR ARMY AIR CORPS
I. O> E> E<
I. O. E. E.
Was for Charles Edward Owens !!!
He'll be the richest bastard son I'll ever not have unless they test me, I have never been teste3d if I can have or not h ave a child
Charles,
HUgs,
Signs of the times, the cell towers powers solar radiation.
Sunshine on time 13 hours local length, but not at the polar orbits, higher local and lower upper lower twisted 17,0000 miles per hour spin cycle,
power the nukes to the dstars.
Death stars kill plants,
These guys gut suns.
Fire angel solar killers, Black Holes in space and time.
Later dudes, party haerty
Cahrlea.
?
Drinking while posting?
You know guys you know I dram not drink in a bar I have no money to play only one game of pool in.
LOL,
silly little guys, ducks in the quacker shop
Kit the cracker, tea bisquits, or is that a g, either way,
I don't drink and play pool, well yes and know, only if the party is hotter than hell
but them the coffin nails come out haveing the fire tongued, I dear not drink, but water to putout the soda fire.
Soda,
Yes Xoda,
Yoda
Yes!
Get back to bed yoad the toad, yoda, go to bed, way past your bed time child, you are only 108.
Charles.
jokuhl, you the camera man, dude. solar flares, solar arrays, do the math, solar will win hands down.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs, solar natural, no arrays, just the workof stones and mass effort,
1.6 to )(().125 acres\
Thanks.
European electricity generation: Reading through all of the comments to this thread it strikes me that some of the people commenting are ignoring the fact that there have been absolutely HUGE changes in the mix of energy sources used for electricity generation in a VERY short period of time indeed. In just the past ten (10) years Europe has reduced the consumption of petroleum for power production by a massive 50%! Yes. That's right - Europe is using only half as much petroleum as a mere 10 years ago. And the trend is continuing. In a very short period of time European electricity prices will not be (directly) affected by petroleum prices.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=...
The US did the same thing. In 1979 20% of US power came from oil, and now it's .8%.
Nick, Thank you for reminding me of the numbers. The point of course being that rapid changes in the mix of energy sources providing our electricity can be made in a relatively short period of time. (While the basis for many of the discussions on TOD seems to be that change is virtually impossible).
Europe has replaced this entire petroleum decline by importing natural gas from Russia. It is doubtful this is a long run solution.
Lots of problems with this article.
1. We are not going to see a shortage of electricity any time soon (barring a damaging solar storm). US has plenty of coal and natural gas for the next few decades, which is enough time to convert over to renewables, which are getting cheaper with time. We could (and should) convert a lot faster than we are.
2. A rise in electricity prices is not nearly as damaging as a rise in oil prices.
a. The average home uses around 1000 KWh/month, about $100/month at .10/KWh. If the price doubles, that's an extra $100 per month, not pleasant, but not a big deal. By comparison, a household uses around 100 gallons of gasoline per month, so doubling oil price would be $300/month.
b. It is MUCH easier to reduce electric use: turn off unused lights, use the microwave rather than stove, adjust the thermostat. With oil, reducing use may involve buying a more efficient car, which has a 15-year service life and is a large capital expense.
c. Americans waste a *huge* amount of energy of all kinds. So, no, renewables won't support BAU, but renewables WILL support a good lifestyle with much less waste. The saving grace is that since we waste so much, we can solve much of our problem just by not wasting it. Businesses waste a lot too, since it is so cheap. [Aluminum, of course, is a special case.]
d. Gail seems to imply that wealth is synonymous with large power use, or that large power use is required for wealth. But New York and California, two of our wealthiest states, have among the lowest per-capita electricity use. The highest per-capita use is in Kentucky, hardly known for wealth.
3. A distributed, small-scale renewable power system can actually be much more robust than a central-grid-only system. Backup power is not necessarily too expensive. Good old lead-acid batteries cost about $100 per KWh, so for $1000 you can get 10 KWh of backup, 10 hours of average use or several days of just refrigerator and a few lights. The batteries last for 10 years, so that is $10 per month, not a big deal. (You need an inverter, currently a few thousand, but could be less with mass production.)
I currently have 9 KW of solar PV (soon to be 12 KW) with battery backup, in Austin (Alan is right about Austin Energy being one of the best municipal utilities in the country). Also solar water heating. With 12 KW, I expect to be able to meet all energy needs from solar, including cars for local driving when electric cars become available. I commute by road bike and electric bike, less that 1 KWh for a 14-mile round-trip commute.
Was the solar power pricey? Sure, but less than many people routinely spend on one car (NYT just reviewed a Mercedes, $86K base but $101K as tested). We have been in the same house for 33 years, and we used 40,000 KWh per year when we first moved in, or $4,000 per year for electricity. Now we are getting close to zero grid energy use.
I would say that we are already living in the all-renewable mode, but if you visited our house, it would be unremarkable and appear to be BAU. (Albeit few people ride a bike to work, though it is one of the best things one can do for health). So my reaction to an article saying we can't do it with renewables is "What do you mean we can't do it -- we are already doing it."
Hi Techsan,
Thanks for bringing up these points.
re: 1. "1. We are not going to see a shortage of electricity any time soon (barring a damaging solar storm). US has plenty of coal and natural gas for the next few decades, which is enough time to convert over to renewables, which are getting cheaper with time. We could (and should) convert a lot faster than we are."
You put a lot into one point.
Re: "Shortage." Everything in the electrical delivery system is intertwined with oil use. See my other replies for examples.
It depends on what happens with oil, to start with.
Re: "US has plenty of..."
You are choosing to focus on only one aspect of the electrical generation and delivery system, and that is the input fuel source.
Please see previous point for details.
Re: "We should convert faster"
Is the conversion project feasible? If so, what would it require in what terms? (material, energy, labor, finance)?
If the conversion project sustainable over what period of time, under the oil decline scenario we face?
I'm not saying it's not (necessarily).
I keep saying (and have had little - actually no - response) to the following point:
As far as I understand it, no one, no group, nobody anywhere is doing the "top level" analysis required in order to assess the feasibility of a complete and total transformation from a largely oil-based industrial civilization/or economy to a largely electrical-as-carrier (regardless of fuel source, but, OK, we can look at the different scenarios for the fuel sources in our analysis) system.
No one is doing this.
It hasn't been done.
Therefore, we are missing the forest.
There are critical inter-dependencies not being looked at in a scientific and objective manner.
re: Your point "2d"
The regional assessment of correlating wealth and electrical use does not take into account the electricity "embedded" in the products and material throughput of the wealthier regions.
This throughput of material goods originated from the resource base located in the natural world.
Likewise, often, transported, and transformed (manufactured) into some end-product.
Consumed, used or otherwise trashed by the wealthier regions.
Everything in the electrical delivery system is intertwined with oil use. See my other replies for examples.
Not really - see http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/09/can-everything-be-electrified.html
Is the conversion project feasible? If so, what would it require in what terms? (material, energy, labor, finance)?
Here is a start at that analysis: http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-expensive-is-wind-power-needed...
Aniya,
Here is one calculation re feasibility:
It takes about 8 Kg of silicon to make 1 KW of solar photovoltaic panel. Making the silicon takes roughly a 50 lb sack of sand and a 50 lb sack of coal. [Actually they now use carbon black from natural gas.] We have lots of sand and coal.
A trainload (100 cars * 200,000 lb per car) of sand and trainload of coal would provide silicon for 400,000 KW. So, one trainload of each per day (peanuts by today's volumes) for 3 years would provide silicon to put 4 KW of PV solar on 100,000,000 homes, basically every home in America.
The expense of PV solar is all in the purification of the silicon and growing and slicing the wafers. A "Manhattan Project" to get the manufacturing costs down would be a good investment. Of course, lots of people are doing research on bringing the cost down, and some of that will pay off. Computers once cost millions and only businesses had them; now we all have one. The same thing will happen with PV solar before long.
Not, it's in transportation, mounting and installation of the panels.
No, panel costs are already low. Other costs dominate.
Nope. I just got a quote for an installed system; panels are the biggest item. Plus, if you do it yourself, the labor cost is your own labor.
We're talking about different things. People here claim thin film panel production costs of $0.7/Watt, but installed costs are likely to be ten times that. But you are probably talking about the cost of a monocrystalline panel delivered to your door by some guys who wants to make a profit on both the panel and the installation job?
It's under $6/Watt for polycrystalline silicon panels, inverter, racks, installed, turn-key package. About $2/Watt labor.
You can reality-check the panel price, on this website :
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/inverters_sma.htm
which has moderate volume, panel prices.
If you are paying $2/W labour, that means Solar PV Panels have fallen below the Labour price, on domestic installations.
You're talking about residential installations, right?
My understanding is that in California that residential installations account for most installations by unit volume, but that industrial/commercial installations account for most MW volume.
My understanding is that I/C PV installations are running more like $3.50 per Wp, due to economies of scale.
So, only a bit more than twice as expensive as wind Wp, at 3/5 of the wind's capacity factor? Wow.
Solar, of course, has some unique advantages: close correlation with electrical consumption; on-site production, which makes PV compete with retail after-tax costs, not wholesale costs. On that basis, PV has reached grid-parity in a few spots where it does best.
Most importantly, PV costs continue to fall fairly quickly, as they have been for 30 years: PV is running a marathon, not a sprint.
Wind is clearly lower-cost right now, and can be installed quickly, so it's clearly the best choice for the majority of investment.
I understand you prefer nuclear power, and I'm sure it will maintain it's place as a significant contributor. Do you work in the industry?
Not so much in Sweden. Globally, perhaps, but that advantage goes only so far.
That's actually not an advantage, but a big drawback. The result is suboptimisations on a grand scale. All production of electricity should be taxed equally.
Just like wind cost curve have bottomed out, so will the cost curve for installed PV. I don't expect PV costs to ever go lower than wind costs.
All else equal, I much prefer wind and solar, as they are less complex and less controversial. Alas, all else is not equal. Wind is twice the cost of nuclear and solar is eight times the cost. (I know you and many others don't agree about these cost multiples.) Also, wind and solar are intermittent and so have additional external costs for grid improvements, DSM, spinning reserves and so on, and are also limited in that they won't scale above some 20% of average demand.
In a resource-constrained world that is under the threat of global warming, wind and solar serve mostly as a diversion that makes the public and policy-makers lose focus. The result is that time and resources we need to combat coal is lost. My estimate is that TMI/Chernobyl cost us two decades (1980-2000), and wind/solar will prolong that another two decades (2000-2020), along with the worth of at least half the investments we make in renewables. It's a failure on our part that authoritarian Asia is the bright spot here.
close correlation with electrical consumption; Not so much in Sweden.
Isn't that an artifact of pricing (I/C pricing being lower at night, and residential pricing being flat)? Even in the North (with electric heating), most human activity correlates reasonably well with sunlight.
PV compete with retail after-tax costs, not wholesale costs. That's actually not an advantage, but a big drawback. The result is suboptimisations on a grand scale.
This breaks into 2 questions.
On retail vs wholesale, a lot of the overhead cost is, in the long-term, related to production levels. Administration, transmission & distribution, etc. So, I think it's fair for end-use PV to compete with retail costs.
On taxes, superficially I'd agree. OTOH, one can think of those taxes as in part a way to internalize external costs. You'd agree that there are substantial external costs (pollution, etc) that should be internalized, right?
Just like wind cost curve have bottomed out, so will the cost curve for installed PV. I don't expect PV costs to ever go lower than wind costs.
All we can be sure of is that both will continue to fall for quite some time. This applies to both panels and Balance of System.
I know you and many others don't agree about these cost multiples.
The cost of wind, solar and nuclear are enormously dependent on technology and economies of scale. Could nuclear cost much less, if it were produced on a modular manufacturing line? Absolutely. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear close.
Yes, China is pushing nuclear hard. OTOH, they're pushing wind and solar hard as well. They're pushing everything harder than the rest of the world.
, wind and solar are intermittent and so have additional external costs for grid improvements, DSM, spinning reserves and so on
Intermittency-related grid costs aren't large: less than 10% of primary capital cost. DSM, in particular, is very, very cheap.
and are also limited in that they won't scale above some 20% of average demand.
You didn't respond to the NREL study. Not to mention that the NREL study is conservative: it doesn't include DSM, overbuilding, or hydrocarbon synthesis using excess power (from overbuilding).
To some extent. But, you know, in the northern parts of Sweden, there is no sun at all for two winter months a year, while there is sun 24/7 for two summer months. Sure, the southern parts are much more densely populated, but even Stockholm only has sun 9:00-15:00 at worst, and 01:00-21:00 at best. Also, the sun doesn't rise high half the year, so you'd need tracking.
We need heat and light during the winter months and during nights. We don't do much air conditioning.
Yes. The old lifecycle external cost estimates I've read put PV very high on external costs - lots of nasty chemicals and lots of energy goes into the production, but hopefully this has improved with thin-film.
If you ramp nuclear as fast as you possibly can, with regard to bottlenecks of different kinds, then I'm ok with you going for wind as well. I think China is doing that. However, I can't be ok with PV expansion - I frankly find it offensive to waste resources like that in the name of the environment.
Obviously, for low penetrations. I don't argue that you can get to 20% with reasonable impact.
I've skimmed the executive summary. It does include DSM and overbuilding. The suggestions in the study seems quite far-reaching to me when it comes to cooperation and, for instance, other producers willingness to curtail their own generation to leave room for wind. Also, while it does cover some economics, I found myself missing the big picture, and how wind destroys its own profitability. It's not just a matter of being able to give preference to wind kicking everything else out, it's about wind getting paid for its generation.
Re: Sweden - yes, I would emphasize wind more than solar. Sweden has a lot of hydro, and a lot of wind resource (according to the Swedish Wind Energy Association, around 540 TWh/year, or 3x current total generation). With that much hydro, balancing wind intermittency would be pretty easy.
old lifecycle external cost estimates I've read put PV very high on external costs - lots of nasty chemicals
My understanding is that properly regulated (namely, not Chinese) producers handle chemicals properly - mostly recycling them.
lots of energy goes into the production
Yes, I think that's not even really true of crystalline silicon any more.
wind destroys its own profitability
Again,nuclear has exactly the same problem: high capital cost, very low fuel cost, which requires night time production into low demand.
Nuclear requires MASSIVE spinning reserves, wind and solar essentially none.
WHY do you think France keeps burning coal and natural gas ? Spinning reserve is one reason.
Alan
"Massive", I guess, is a matter of definition. What I'm pointing out is that utilisation and fuel efficiency of other energy producers drops as wind is given priority. This is an external cost. Again, France has the problem with nuclear at 80% as wind will have at 20%.
It is *NOT* a matter of definition. The FACT is that wind and solar take essentially zero spinning reserve and nukes take massive amounts (nukes can go off-line suddenly). Regardless of % penetration.
When the Texas electrical island ERCOT added nukes, the spinning reserves required almost tripled. Adding 12 GW of wind to ERCOT will not increase spinning reserves required by 1 watt.
BTW, France is adding 5 GW of wind (as Phase I) to make their grid operate more efficiently and to use less FF.
Alan
utilisation and fuel efficiency of other energy producers drops as wind is given priority.
Dropping utilization isn't an increase in cost, it's a legacy cost which has fewer kWhs over which to be amortized. Dropping utilization of fossil fuel plants is a virtue.
Dropping fuel efficiency is exaggerated. Far better to use DSM to handle intermittency than to use single-cycle gas generation.
France has the problem with nuclear at 80% as wind will have at 20%.
Only a little: on average they have exactly the same problem. The peaks in wind, at night, represent a relatively small % of wind kWhs.
It is certainly NOT easier to reduce electricity usage than gasoline usage.
Gasoline usage can be cut significantly by driving no faster than the speed limit, careful driving (no stomping on the accelerator) combining trips, walking short distances, carpooling...
You can only cut electricity usage substantially by making major investments. For example my biggest usage is a dehumidifier in the basement. It would cost thousands of dollars to cut the inflow of moisture into the basement (I have vast numbers of cracks in the walls and floor...)
PS. Americans average significantly more that 10 cents per KWH now (I believe $.14...)
The point is, most people can make substantial reductions in both fairly easily and quickly.
IOW, a lot of energy use has relatively small value - it's convenient, and moderately useful, but only moderately useful.
"I agree with Nick" as they used to say during the UK election campaign. Goes for just about everything he's written. Good to have a pragmatic, well-informed, optimist on the block.
I certainly do agree with Nick: Peak Oil is a challenge, but one that we can most definitely overcome; Climate change is harder to deal with though, and we may be dealing with it too slowly.
Thanks!
Sadly, I agree with you about climate change: it appears to be much harder to deal with than PO, and as best I can tell we definitely are dealing with it too slowly.
That's very frustrating, as the cost of reducing our CO2 is really quite small, relatively. See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-expensive-is-wind-power-needed... and http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-expensive-is-wind-power-needed...
The main problem is resistance from a minority.
"A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change. Funded by corporations and conservative foundations, these outfits exist to fight any form of state intervention or regulation of US citizens. Thus they fought, and delayed, smoking curbs in the '70s even though medical science had made it clear the habit was a major cancer risk. And they have been battling ever since, blocking or holding back laws aimed at curbing acid rain, ozone-layer depletion, and – mostly recently – global warming.
In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion, and promote doubt. As the authors state: "Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/climate-change-robin... and
"The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are waging a war against Obama. He and his brother are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?curren...
The above is blatantly incorrect. Air conditioning and electric dryers are the obvious examples. About 85% of US homes have air conditioning, but of course at one time 0% had air conditioning. Simply turning off the air conditioner saves one of the biggest electricity uses and requires NO investment. We live quite comfortably without air conditioning, simply by opening windows at night and closing windows and curtains in the day, while we listen to our neighbors' air conditioner compressors whine 24/7. Similarly, clotheslines cost almost nothing, but eliminate another huge electricity user.
Finally, CFLs cost $1.99 at Target, not a major investment in anyone's book, but lighting is another easily reduced electricity consumer.
Today's paper had low energy simple refrigerator/freezers for $299.
It's true you can save some gas this way, but in most cases the savings are not what I'd call significant.
These are much more significant.
Not true. Many people could cut their electricity usage substantially by turning off the lights and television when they are not in the room. Or by never using needless modern conveniences like electric leaf blowers. Changing to CFLs is a very minor investment, not a major one. Your situation involving a humidifier is unusual.
"2. A rise in electricity prices is not nearly as damaging as a rise in oil prices."
Say what?
For me it's 35-40 gallons of gas a month, even if I drive the pickup every day it's only 80 gallons. And this is with a 30 mile (each way) commute.
Electricity though is 700 kw-h in the summer and 3500 in the winter. The house is all-electric, no natural gas service available. And no way to shift to a heat pump, which is of limited utility anyway, as much of the winter would be spent on the backup heaters, which would be electric.
So for me an increase on electricity is far more painful than a bump in gas prices.
As an aside, I had a contractor look at the heat pump situation and he said it couldn't be done in this house unless it was part of a wholesale down to the studs remodel. Exactly why it couldn't be done was sort of vague. I think he may have been scared off by the plaster walls. And I was considering both conventional and a ductless system. I have since found a through the wall heat pump (Looks like a window AC unit, but works both ways) that looks interesting. If it could take the chill off in march and April it might be worth going that route when the current AC unit dies. However, considering I used it exactly two days this year, and not at all last year, it may never wear out. Darned Al is keeping all the global warming for himself.
I was assuming 2 cars.
What you want is called a mini-split heat pump. Google it and you will get plenty of hits.
I believe that the Fujistu versions have SEER 25 & 26. Comparable heat pump efficiencies. And they use half the electricity of resistance heat down to temperatures colder than they EVER get in New Orleans (-10 C, +14 F) according to HereinHalifax.
A new technology that is just beginning to make it into central units.
Easy to install, even in historic homes.
Best Hopes,
Alan