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Are Green Times Just Around the Corner?
Posted by Euan Mearns on January 7, 2011 - 12:07pm
This is a guest post by Dr John Constable who is Director of Policy and Research at the Renewable Energy Foundation in London. This article first appeared in Standpoint, a leading monthly cultural and political news stand and online magazine. We thank the editor, Daniel Johnson, for permission to republish the text here. Hugh Sharman will shortly provide a review of John's article together with further opinion on the direction of UK energy policy.
In private, the best-informed analysts now agree that Britain's environmental policies have put the country on track to have the world's most expensive electricity. This is mainly because our competitors are almost certain to choose cheaper routes to emissions reductions, such as natural gas, or to shun emissions reductions altogether. The Coalition's own Annual Energy Statement for 2010 concedes that by the year 2020, nearly one third of the average domestic electricity bill will consist of green energy charges imposed by law (£160 out of £512, or 31 per cent). Business will be hit even harder, with environmental charges for the average medium-sized non-domestic user accounting for £404,000 out of £1.224 million, or 33 per cent.
If other economies are more cautious in loading burdens upon their wealth creators, Britain will be a less attractive place in which to deploy capital, with obvious implications: high green charges on domestic bills might be merely questionable when household income is both stable and generous, but they would surely be indefensible in the context of lower wages and unemployment.
Government takes comfort from estimates that energy-saving policies, for example to encourage the use of better fridges, will reduce annual domestic electricity bills by £187 in 2020, and by £128,000 for non-domestic consumers. Such savings are desirable, but they are also extremely uncertain, even improbable. And if, as seems likely, these savings do not materialise, then consumers will be looking at very testing bills made still more trying by environmental policies. They may not like what they see.
Public awareness of these concerns has been inhibited since the costs of environmental legislation tend to be moderate in the short run, with the pain of the full impact only likely to be felt in years beyond the political horizon. However, it is clear that the impact of subsidies is already economically significant even if it is not yet psychologically salient. Britain is obtaining only a fraction of its electricity from renewable sources, just under 7 per cent in 2009-2010. The wholesale price of that quantity of electricity would be approximately £1bn, but the Renewables Obligation, a complex subsidy paid to generators but drawn indirectly from bills, adds a further £1.4bn, more than doubling the cost to the British consumer.
The predicament of UK energy policy illustrated by declining oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy production.
In its first three months, from July to September 2010, the Feed-in Tariff for microgeneration (guaranteed prices to support, among other things, solar photovoltaics [PV] and wind turbines up to a capacity of five megawatt) has produced roughly 0.005 per cent of UK annual demand, at a cost of £2.6m. This generous support has encouraged the construction of an installed capacity of microgenerators totalling 59 MW. To put that in perspective, peak load in Britain on a cold winter's afternoon is nearly 59,000 MW.
The implication is that should renewables contribute a large share of national needs in 2020, then environmental costs will become politically visible. If some 30 per cent of UK electricity were renewable in 2020, this would require an ongoing annual subsidy of upwards of £6bn (assuming an average subsidy of 5p per unit).
Furthermore, the subsidy is not the end of the additional costs implied by the policies. The character of most renewables increases overall system operating costs. Wind power, for example, requires sufficient flexible conventional generation to meet demand at times when the wind fleet is all but becalmed, and major grid expansion. Such costs are inherently difficult to estimate, but they are very unlikely to be trivial.
The question is whether these generous levels of tax and spend - and the Renewables Obligation is classed as such by the Treasury and the Office of National Statistics - will produce any compensating benefit. The government's own Impact Assessments are not encouraging. The lifetime cost of the Feed-in Tariff scheme is £8.6bn, while its benefits, including climate change benefits, amount to only £420m (technically, the Net Present Value is negative £8.2bn). Government's figures for the revised Renewables Obligation needed to meet the 2020 targets shows that costs exceed benefits by £33bn. The emissions savings fail the government's own cost-effectiveness tests.
Although such policies should never have been allowed to proceed, they duly became law under Labour and the Coalition has yet to grapple with this toxic inheritance. Indeed, it would seem that the current government has persuaded itself that the transition to a low-carbon economy will redeem the situation.
In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry last October, the Prime Minister David Cameron said of the offshore wind programme: "It's a triple win. It will help secure our energy supplies, protect our planet, and the Carbon Trust says it could create 70,000 jobs." Well-meaning talk of this nature needs to be tempered with cool reason. While the gross effect of public expenditure on renewables may well be positive, the net effect is likely to be negative as the costs of creating jobs in the green sector reduce activity in other areas. An authoritative 2009 study from the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institute for Economic Research (RWI) in Essen notes: "Initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade, and other assumptions...claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable." Such wealth destruction is hardly surprising when it is considered that the subsidies per worker in the German solar PV industry exceeded €175,000, far in excess of average wages. The study adds: "It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany's export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US."
Spain's experience is even worse. In a May 2010 document, the country's Ministry for Industry showed that businesses were paying 17 per cent more for electricity than their European competitors, largely as a result of subsidies to renewables, which were €5bn in 2009. It also noted that whereas prices should have fallen due to cheap fuels, they actually rose because of environmental policies.
Moreover, because Spanish energy companies do not recover the full cost of renewable generation from consumers, but accumulate government debt instead, one company alone, Endesa, was owed €8.3bn by the state at the end of September 2010. The total "tariff deficit", as it is called, amounted to around €16.5bn in 2010, and according to the ministry, will increase by a further €2bn in 2011 in spite of efforts to rein in subsidies. Whether Spain has fared any better than Germany in its attempt to create a self-sustaining green or low-carbon economy is also open to doubt. A study by Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Madrid's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos has estimated that the market distortions needed to create one green job destroyed two jobs in other sectors. Since 2000, each green-sector job has cost €570,000, with wind-industry jobs costing €1m. The details here are debatable, but they are consonant with German experience, and do not bode well for Britain.
Perhaps the most instructive example, and of particular relevance to the Coalition, is the Japanese solar thermal hot water industry. In response to the first oil shock, governmental support created a market that was by the early 1980s installing 2.7m square meters of panels a year. Unfortunately, the resulting companies were weak and the products were either poor or poorly installed, with the result that the industry not only collapsed as the oil price fell but, due to consumer disenchantment, has failed to recover in recent years in spite of higher hydrocarbon prices. Installation rates have flat-lined for the last decade at around 0.25m square metres a year and it is at least arguable that the Japanese solar thermal industry is less vigorous than it would have been had the government never offered a helping hand. The Japanese call this the "solar tragedy".
All told, subsidies and targets are unlikely to be a successful means of driving energy system change, and probably entail government responsibility for the income of a large part of the electricity sector, perhaps in perpetuity, with consequential gross inefficiency and wealth destruction through misallocation of resources.
Despite these dismaying precedents, the Coalition is attempting to drive a green industrial revolution by means of state-guaranteed rates of return for investors in nearly half the electricity sector. The Government's own figures show that this will be expensive, resulting in costs that will seem all the more insupportable if natural gas prices remain low. In addition, current ambitions may have disastrous opportunity costs. To achieve targets, government must commit itself to currently available emerging technologies and thus will forestall or forego as yet unknown inventions and innovations.
No one knows whether there is a green low-carbon economy waiting for us in the more distant future, but we can be confident that the current policies — the EU Renewables Directive, the Renewables Obligation, the Feed-In Tariff and the Green Deal — are most unlikely to deliver such an outcome. Indeed, they are probably counterproductive, since they insulate nascent technologies from competition and thus infantilise them.
But push is coming to shove, and as quotidian pressures make themselves felt, the green subsidies will be slowly reduced, and our short-term electricity needs met by patched-up coal and nuclear stations, and by older gas plants. A new generation of Combined Cycle Gas Turbines is likely, though build rate will not be of satisfactory scale or pace if government fails to restrain the growth of subsidised on- and off-shore wind power, which is damaging the investment case for all unsubsidised technologies.
Concerns over gas availability and price appear to be alleviated by the unexpected growth of global shale gas production, though there are residual anxieties that the UK may become overwhelmingly dependent on one fuel for reliable electricity. As a consequence, there will be pressure for nuclear and for high-efficiency super-critical coal after 2020.
There is a strong argument for steering into this skid, rather than looking away as the Coalition seems inclined to do. Britain could renegotiate a more realistic and equitable commitment under the EU Renewables Directive (one quarter of the EU-wide costs of the scheme fall on us), while the various renewables subsidy mechanisms could be wound down or cancelled retrospectively for those generators whose capital has been recovered. Instead, government could announce a combination of a carbon tax and a realistic set of emissions regulations. The emerging Emissions Performance Standard might be a basis, but will need revision if it is not to discourage any and all conventional generation.
Regulation and judicious tax could be used to specify the character that we wish to obtain of our electricity system, so that the energy sector can quickly find the most cost-effective way of realising that desire insofar as it is practical to do so. However, this would require significant improvements in the transparency of Britain's electricity market, which at present is far from truly liberal. Many of the costs imposed on the consumer are still concealed and there are areas in which relevant information is either difficult to obtain or simply non-existent, inhibiting new market entrants and preventing understanding of problems and system inefficiencies that might be solved by novel technologies. The government's forthcoming Electricity Market Reform could serve as the vehicle for such a radical programme, but it would require all of the PM's charm to overcome the objections of vested interests.
With current errors decisively corrected in this way it is just possible that we might see the beginnings of a self-supporting low-carbon economy that also generated sufficient wealth to fund adaptation to climate change, should that be necessary. By contrast, the present policies can only offer emissions reductions through further deindustrialisation and significant economic contraction, effects that are unlikely to be popular with the electorate whatever the weather.
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John, form the chart it is quite clear that the UK must do all it can to boost primary energy production and to reduce energy consumption. How to achieve this?
Higher prices are known to work in reducing consumption and in this regard are not necessarily a bad thing. I recently worked out that increased use of wind power in Scotland may add something like 18% to domestic bills by 2015 - not the end of the world. But I wonder if these cost estimates capture all hidden costs, especially the cost of mitigating for intermittency and for discounting as discussed here by Nate Hagens.
Applying Time to Energy Analysis
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7147
I suspect the real cost of integrating intermittent renewables is way higher than current estimates. Some of this cost will fall on traditional producers who will have to put up with lower load factors on their plant as coal is displaced by wind, and higher ware and tear due to more frequent cycling. Am guessing these costs will get passed on to consumers.
The other area where government policy is deluded is the notion that energy efficiency will lead to reduced energy use when in fact the exact opposite is true. I am talking about Jevons' Paradox / Khazoom Brookes postulate. Simply put, if we get more energy efficient fridges then we will buy bigger ones and more of them. We of course must become more energy efficient but the realities of human behavior must be confronted if this is to lead to reduced energy use.
Euan,
Just how much extra cycling do you think that the intermittency of renewable energy will cause? There is the common mistaken image of a system in almost steady state were it not for renewables. In fact a large fraction of our coal plant is taken on and off line every day as load varies. With nuclear generation run at constant power around the clock the bulk of the adaptation falls to fossil fuelled plant. Yesterday coal generation ranged from 13GW to 22GW and gas from 12GW to 21GW. Often the swing is greater. Provided the renewable energy is predictable, the main effect will be that plants that were anyway about to be brought online or taken offline do so a little earlier or later adding nothing to the wear and tear.
To the extent that the renewable energy is unpredictable there needs to be extra balancing power but there is already a large unpredictability in load demand and the unpredictable fraction of the renewable generation appears as a negative unpredictable load. Since the two unpredicabilities have very little correlation they add in quadrature. That is average of the square of the combined uncertainty equals the sum of the squares of the uncertainties of the load and the renewable generation. Even when renewable generation equals 20% of total generation the renewable uncertainty will be considerably less than load uncertainty. If it were 30% of load uncertainty it would add about 4.5% to the total uncertainty.
There will be a drop in load factor and hence higher costs of the remaining fossil plant as it will not be possible to close down all the plant equivalent to the average output of the renewables but a fair proportion of this plant can be shut down at least while renewable generation remains a relatively low percentage of the total. Another false idea put out by some (including to their shame the Royal Academy of Engineering) is that because there is a finite probability of zero output from renewables, no conventional plant can be closed down. This ignores the fact that all electrical supply is based on a small but finite risk of failure. The total potential load is vastly greater than the total available supply capacity and system reliability relies on the low probability of a sufficient percentage of the potential load being connected at any one time to overload the supply. This principal applies at all levels from the national system to the local distribution capacity to individual homes where in the UK a 100A main fuse is deemed sufficient to supply 30 or 40 13A sockets.
In so many discussions of intermittency, the percentage penetration of renewables is not stated and the costs are assumed to be linear. They are anything but. At the present penetration of about 2% the cost of intermittency is almost zero. At 20% it will become significant but still a low percentage of total costs. Thereafter the costs rise strongly.
Yes, I prefer the more accurate term variable output to the negatively connoitred term 'intermittent' so frequently used. Wind energy does not flick on and off like a faulty lightbulb, it smoothly transitions from one variable state to another.
I think u hit the nail on the head here and I'd agree with this. My comments are made in the context of the following chart which summarises the ambition and energy policy of the Scottish Government.
I'm actually working on a project right now (looking for someone to fund it) modeling in detail (hourly resolution) the implications of closing down our central FF and nuclear plants and introducing a vast amount of wind to the Scottish grid. So my comments come form the perspective of >50% wind penetration. The outcomes of this work so far are quite far reaching. we can start with the planned closures of Cockenzie (coal) and Hunterston B (nuclear) by 2015. One of the main outcomes of this is that Scottish exports of electricity to England all but disappear. But somehow we still expect to receive balancing services from England. None of this adds up.
I agree with your comments about the need to cycle plant on a daily basis, but fact is that on occasions wind will strenghthen at 09:00 am just when u need it and at other times it will be disappearing meaning a slew rate double that of normal. With high wind penetration the load on FF plants falls significantly - this of course is the objective - and I don't necessarily disagree with that, but keeping and maintaining FF plant running on for example 10% load, will likely cost the consumer. I'm not sure the economics of this have been properly addressed.
Euan,
Over the next few decades we will start to see a significant storage capacity added to the grid in the form of EV batteries. The latest EV offerings will have between 15kWh and 25kWh of battery pack.
Do you see this as being a potential solution to improved load balancing of the grid, plus allowing the possibility of 2-way power flow (vehicle to grid V2G) as a means of balancing more renewables?
Anyone care to guess the EV population by 2020 or 2030, and the resultant storage capacity?
2020
The Scottish model I'm working on right now for February 2020 has 12.4 GW of wind capacity and a lull that lasts for 6 days that needs 314 GW hrs of FF back up. So if I done my sums right, we'd need 12.6 million 25kWh EV's to span that lull and have a population of 5 million people.
The trouble with wind and storage is these long lulls. Storage works best with a couple of windy days followed by a couple of calm days - then you can re-charge your storage (batteries, pumped hydro or chemical) and then run it down during short lulls. With long lulls you simply need massive storage.
Dear Euan.
I have always thought of using vast number of battery vehicles as base storage as a bit of a bummer. I would expect most would be charged at night but I can't see them being of much use if they are used to commute when they are standing in a car park all day not connected too the grid during peak usage. The assumption is that there will be thousands of recharge places, what are being put in at the moment are usually subsides to gain politicians green brownie points. The price of putting these in place at the moment seems insurmountable. I personally would not want my electric car used as in a car to grid system. I am doubling the number of recharge cycles and that would shorten the life of my already expensive battery. Better place's idea of battery recharging stations seems even less viable. From what I read they intend to make there living selling electricity to car owners not the grid. I would expect them to be just a consumer of electricity not a provider, there bottom line is going to depend on it.
The only viable system I can see on the horizon is the gravel battery technology by
http://www.isentropic.co.uk/
They have done proof of concept and are building a pilot system. We should know the results in a couple of years, because it uses known technologies I can see very few road bumps in its speedy implementation inert argon (can be extracted from the atmosphere)and gravel none of which have recycling problems like lithium. If it works implementation can be quick and cheap as the infrastructure is in place, nothing more than civil engineering and metal bashing all locally sourced, none of trying to ramp up new complex industries and trying to import with the accompanying expensive factories, that is apart form importing lithium.
Deep Regards
Yorkshire Miner
In addition EVs wouldn't help balance the longer gaps - commuter EVs needed charged by ~7AM every day can only help grid balance on a scale of hours at best when wind needs days to months and solar weeks to months. To my mind electricity to gas + gas storage would have a better chance of working although clearly very expensive.
It seems to me that there is a fairly simple answer to the problem of storage of renewable energy for now, and probably for at least another decade.
We apparently have enough conventional gas and coal plants, and enough gas storage capacity, in the general scheme of things, to simply put whatever gas and coal can be saved by utilizing wind and solar power into storage, to be burned during periods of low winds and cloudy days.
Of course coal really doesn't need anything much in the way storage facilities-just hard ground with good drainage somewhere near the plant; expanding coal storage should be dirt cheap.
Of course eventually, IF growth continues, we will have to build more conventional generating plants.
But is not this point still a good ways off?
Of course and that is what the UK is doing by default and will work fine for the initial stages of widespread renewable use - we have always stored coal for months and it lasts years in open store if necessary. In the end the UK is unlikely to be able to afford much imported fuel in future so we may well end up trying to store renewables to make up the gap.
The immediate issue in the UK though is that we face a big shortfall in generating capacity simply due to nearly all the coal fired and nuclear plants being life expired. We need to make a good decision now what to replace them with and renewables plus gas plus new nukes make a good balance (the gas stations are cheap to build but expensive to run, renewables and nukes are the opposite so keeping gas to make up the gaps and load follow seems sensible in the medium term). We should seriously consider making any seasonal use gas plants installed CHP as well.
Cost objections always seem to assume cheap fuel in future which hardly seems a good bet - even if we were able to return to UK mined coal it would not be cheap.
Bingleybong,
Much has been written in the media about the generation gap expected in the UK around 2016 because of the closure of the older coal fired stations and the decommissioning of the end of life nuclear plants.
However, the situation is not as dire as the press would have us believe. The power generators have since about 2005 known of this shortfall and have new CCGT plants either under the planning or construction phase to help fill the gap.
One such is the new 1200MW plant being built for Eon at Drakelow in Derbyshire
http://www.eon-uk.com/generation/drakelowccgt.aspx
This will come on line in 2013, and a further 1450MW extension is currently in planning and is expected to be operational by 2017.
The trend is to build these CCGT plants on the sites of the older coa plants - for example a new 1200MW CCGT station is planned to be co-sited with the coal plant at Cockenzie in East Lothian
http://www.cockenziepowerstation.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/commu...
Somewhere on the DECC website is a list of all new UK CCGT plants either in planning or under construction.
It is very easy for the UK media to spread doom and gloom about powercuts and the lights going out in 2016 - but the reality is that the generators have the situation under control, and it is in their interest to move from inefficient coal to cleaner natural gas, as the labour costs on a modern CCGT plant are considerably less than those of a 40 year old coal plant.
On the flip-side, it does however mean that a much greater percentage of our UK generation capacity is wholly reliant on imported natural gas. We will have to bid for this gas on the world market, as we wil have little of our own indigenous reserves left. This will not be good for UK energy security.
Was the gift of the 2018 Football World Cup to Russia and 2022 to Qatar, a sweetener from the West to ensure future preferential petroleum imports?
2020
2020
I pretty much agree, personally I don't think we will have serious problems with blackouts in the absence of a gas shortage (its not like all the old plants will suddenly be shut down on new years day 2016) but I do wonder if building even very efficient CCGT plants alone is the best option.
It is possible to imagine a wind + gas backup system as a very efficient but expensive gas plant, say 2/3 of the output from distributed wind + 1/3 from load following gas at 33% efficiency is effectively a 100% efficient gas plant v.s. up to 60% from the best CCGT assuming they can load follow efficiently. From memory I think the gas price would need to roughly triple to make a system like this have cost parity with CCGT and there is still the problem of scalability of wind.
At the moment the UK seems to be headed in in a reasonable direction provided gas holds up in the short-medium term and we build some more pumped storage to help the effective efficiency of everything else. It seems we are heading for something like 20% wind 20% nuclear balance mostly gas and coal over the next decade or so, the question is what to do next as the 1980s gas plants and remaining nuclear ones need replacing and sufficient gas becomes expensive if not unobtainable. I would tend to try for modern nuclear to run of all the waste we have stockpiled but that does assume these ideas actually work.
Despite the cost I think it a great pity the Severn barrage has been abandoned as this could have helped reduce the overall fuel demand quite well with fully predictable output.
Conspicuously missing from the original article is any realisation that whatever we do the electricity price will go up since nothing is a cheap in the short term as burning low grade imported coal in long depreciated base-load stations that the present owners got quite cheap at privatisation.
Yes, this is my impression.. as long as we can import enough Natural gas, we'll be fine.
I'm not sure it's a great position to be in, and it's going to be expensive.
A problem that I am seeing, right across the board with these issues, is the 'either or'. Either renewable or stored or gas or coal etc. If wind dies off for a few days or weeks then why not a chain of backup? Maybe nukes or coal cannot load follow to a few hours but they can be buffered by stored and gas. There is too much focus on THE electricity supply mechanism and too little on producing a combined system, a flexible system that will change as fuel supplies change. (for fuel include natural ones such as sun, gravity, geothermal etc).
NAOM
delete double post
Euan
Denmark produces around 20% of all it's electricity from wind, but can only use around 10% of this due to wind blowing at wrong time.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/denmark/Wind_energy_-_the_case...
Norway is in the position to be able to buy the excess cheaply and effectively store it as hydro power then selling it back at a nice profit.
Do you think the UK can learn anything from Denmark?
We can certainly learn something from Denmark, just not sure what that might be. The flip in The North Atlantic Oscillation that has brought Europe severe cold winter weather also means reduced precipitation and thus less hydro. Norway's hydro magazines are heading for zero this winter:
Norway hydro reservoir content
http://www.nordpoolspot.com/reports/reservoir/Reservoir-content-Norway/
There is no more capacity in Norway to provide secure balancing services to other countries.
Scotland's hydro suite of 1584 MW is an enormous asset but is under-scaled relative to the 12400 MW of wind that is "planned". We could do well to expand our hydro network, but need to be careful about environmental impact.
You should also check this out:
Why wind power works in Denmark
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/31/194053/962
In an earlier life I was known here as Cry Wolf:-)
Luckily there is always more wind power in the winter:
In fact wind turbines already save water in Spanish hydro reservoirs:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1579694720080415
Norway primarily needs the capability to import surplus wind power in the winter.
Also, the power on existing hydro power plants can be increased without building more dams. A dam doesn't care how many turbines it feeds or how many pumps are connected to it.
Here are 4 examples of Swiss turbine/pump additions on existing dams:
http://www.nant-de-drance.ch/Eckdaten.htm (600 MW)
http://www.repower.com/ch/anlagen/projekte/lago-bianco/ (1000 MW)
http://195.186.84.92/pages/edu/nw/power01a4a1.html (1040 MW - 1140 MW)
http://www.grimselstrom.ch/elektrische-energie/kwo-plus/kw-handeck-2 (600 MW)
Besides interconnected wind farms do provide baseload:
www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
Oh well, ignorance is bliss.
Thanks for the link to the Stanford paper
Here's a chart I made from published hourly Irish, Danish, German and Spanish wind data. don't know how many wind farms are involved, hundreds and hundreds I'd guess spread all over west Europe. Now if connecting more and more wind farms mitigates for intermittency I'd have expected this to be approaching a flat line - but its not! Would you care to provide your explanation - but first see my reply to your post at foot of this thread.
I don't know the source of your data.
But there is little correlation, if you compare Spanish wind data with German wind data over long time period:
https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html
http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/daten_uebertragungsnetzbetreiber/stro...
Also, I don't remember seeing wind power data of Spain ever being over 70% or at 0% of total installed capacity.
Regardless: Your chart shows exactly how irrelevant the hydro reservoir capacity is, because the frequency of the wind variation is high. (If your chart would show one peak on one single day per year and no wind power during 364 days than you would have to worry about hydro reservoir capacity - but the opposite is the case. You may need more hydro turbines but you don't need more dams.)
If you look closely (which you have to do) you'll see there are lulls that last for several days - that is the challenge for storage. You make some good points about reservoir capacity - but Switzerland has lots of mountains and water. Smaller reservoirs do care about how many generators are on them. UK pumped storage reservoirs are drained empty after 6 to 8 hours operation. Not much point doubling capacity there to drain them twice as fast.
As your graph demonstrates, there are long periods of time in which the wind does not blow anywhere, and so any country with large amounts of wind power needs peaking power plants to cover these lulls. Typically these are hydro or natural gas. Coal-burning or nuclear power plants cannot be turned up and down fast enough to cover the gaps. Oil burning units are too expensive at any time and likely to become much more expensive in the near future.
Britain, being a relatively flat little island, does not have enough hydro potential to cover the wind shortfalls, so it is going to need gas-fired peaking units to cover 100% of the wind capacity in case the wind fails. It will be expensive, but I think that is the way Britain is going - expensive electricity.
Before anyone from Britain gets upset at the "flat little island" comment, keep in mind that I am speaking from the perspective of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Flat and little are relative. Canada is the second biggest country on earth, my house is at a higher altitude than any point in Britain, and there are two fairly large hydro plants a short walking distance away from it.
There is still the possibility of building several more pumped storage reservoirs which will help a bit (and pumped tidal lagoons could add a bit more too) but you are correct we don't have the geography to do very much compared to the size of the problem. Your comment reminds me of standing next to an Austrian lake waiting for a ferry and it being pointed out we were already higher than the highest point in the UK with a mountain still to climb.
Why not? If we are talking about multi-day lulls, it doesn't seem worse than the normal day-to-day load following that occurs due to demand cycles.
In Germany most of the medium term daily load following appears to happen via coal plants and in France nuclear plants were built to load follow and shut off over the weekend.
Oil burning is currently also used mostly for peak supply and when other sources are not available.
It might no longer be economical once the load factor drops, but technical it should be possible.
It will be expensive, but then electricity and energy in general is expensive in much of Europe anyway due to high taxes and it has managed to cope quite well with that.
The problem with wind generators is that the wind does not vary on a day-to-day basis but on a minute-to-minute basis. Coal burning power plants require several hours to heat up and cool down, and nuclear ones are similar. They are much better for base load than for peak power.
Steam generators and turbines require a lot of energy to keep on standby since all the components need to be kept hot to prevent damage due to thermal expansion and contraction. By contrast, hydroelectric generators can be kept as spinning reserve - spinning at full speed but generating no power while using little water. When the demand comes (e.g. the wind stops blowing), a hydro power plant can open the gates, dump water through the turbines, and bring its generators up to full power in a matter of seconds.
Gas-powered peaking units can also be brought up to full power fairly quickly. Not as fast as hydroelectric power plants, but much faster than coal-powered or nuclear-powered units.
Again interconnected wind farms don't show sudden minute-to-minute changes.
Spain has about 20 GW of wind power installed.
Here you see the power production of all power plants in Spain:
https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html
You will never find a sudden 10% (=2 GW) drop or increase in wind power feeding the grid. The electricity demand change in the grid is more abrupt than the wind power change. (Besides it's not like wind turbines cannot reduce their output if necessary).
To quote Wikipedia:
Well, it varies both on a minute-to-minute, as well as a day-to-day basis. But I would think the day-to-day basis is the real issue here. Minute-to-minute swings fit much better into what the grid can cope with already today. After all, it can survive a momentary drop out of a nuclear power station of 1 - 2 GW, with a momentary reserve of several GW, and primary and secondary reserves of similar magnitude, after which the standard load following can kick in. And unless you have something like a total solar eclipse, these momentary (minute-by-minute) swings decorolate over spacial area. Also hydro storage, batteries, smart grids can probably be constructed to capture those short swings quite well.
It is the long term corrolation of whole weather systems that can cause a multi-day lull over larger areas of Europe, or the multi-month long lull of solar during the winter, for which the storage technology doesn't yet really exist. But on those time scales Coal and Nuclear could help in case they are still around.
Hydro (including run of river), geothermal, tidal and biomass firing will be around. Those will likely be the constant-grinding away inputs of the future grid.
What we are going to have to do is to build a lot of storage. We can back that up with gas turbines, fired with biogas if we get very serious about eliminating fossil fuels. And don't forget, in the worst of times, we can find clever ways to cut our usage.
We're not going to move to a 21st Century grid in one decade. What we may be able to do in the next ten years is to get a large portion of coal off our grid. We'll do this by bringing more renewables and natural gas generation on line along with increased conservation.
Gas turbines are attractive to 'good old boys' running utility companies because they understand using heat to generate electricity and the price of NG is low. That works in our favor in the short run as NG produces about half as much CO2 as does coal. Then as the price of wind and solar continue to drop their lack of fuel costs will idle those NG turbines, leaving the turbines in a back up role.
If we have "eight day" lulls in the wind then we'll have to engineer our grids to make it through those times. Lots of storage (pumped-hydro and hydro uprating will be cheaper than gas turbines as will utility scale batteries). Lots of turbines built years before and standing by. Lots of ability to scale back our usage (temporarily crank up kWh cost so that people adopt a 1 LED per person/1 TV per household lifestyle for a few days).
These are all going to be practical decisions based on costs. It may be that we can't afford more than 30%/40%/50% of our power to come from wind. Or, if storage prices drop, we might find it best to get a high percentage of our power from wind and just store lots for the calm periods.
Actually, you can load follow with nuclear plants without many problems damaging them. There just isn't any point in trying to do it.
Inserting the rods and lowering reactor power distorts the flux across the core, meaning that the bottom of the core ends up being burned up, whilst the top remains relatively fresh. So you still need to refuel with all of the costs associated with shutdown & refuel on a similar timescale. Given that fuel is generally a smaller portion of total costs for a nuclear plant (comnpared to coal or natural gas plants) and refuelling is expensive due to the downtime, there really is no point trying to load follow to any significant extent with a nuclear plant. You simply divide the same fixed cost by less total output.
Switzerland has a maximum storage capacity of 8765 GWh: 8765 GWh = 6 days @ 61 GW. 61 GW is about an order of magnitude more power than what Switzerland needs on average.
http://www.bfe.admin.ch/themen/00526/00541/00542/00630/index.html?lang=d...
And Austria, France, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain etc. have significantly more hydro capacity.
Maybe the UK does not have sufficient hydro capacity but Europe does. And the UK can be connected to this capacity (besides it is not like that the UK is currently an electrical island).
Maybe the UK does not have sufficient hydro capacity but Europe does.
The EU has about the same hydro capacity as Canada does - about 300-400 TWh/year, depending on rainfall - but Canada has only 35 million people (fewer than Spain), whereas the EU has about 500 million.
It's not really enough to provide stand-by power for wind farms on the days in which the wind does not blow. If the EU wants to rely on wind power, it has to provide backup power of some sort other than hydroelectric because there is just not enough hydroelectric capacity available in Europe.
An interesting further storage technology might be sodium sulfur (NaS) batteries [1], that appear to start to become commercially viable [2]. It might at least be able to support hydro resources and help improve the intermittency issue.
Also, I don't think anyone suggests running a grid with 100% only from wind and solar. 100% scenarios typically have a mix of Solar PV, Solar CP, Wind onshore, Wind offshore, geothermal, bio-gas and solid biomass, together with storage. Bio-gas and solid bio-mass can act as a storage quite well too.
[1] http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/power/nas/index.html
[2] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/4-billion-1-gigawatt-energy-...
[3] http://www.greenpeace.de/fileadmin/gpd/user_upload/themen/klima/2010_05_... (German)
[4] http://www.greenpeace.de/fileadmin/gpd/user_upload/themen/klima/studie_e... (German)
Hi Euan,
I think there is good stuff in the comments, building up a realistic picture of European wind capacity and how we might use it.
My interest is in storage here in Scotland from our new wind farms - here is a link from a post of Jerome's a year ago. I reference the two new pumped storage hydro schemes proposed by SSE at Loch Ness. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6154/583884
Here is the actual development plan for Loch Sloy/Loch Lomond.
http://www.sse.com/SSEInternet/index.aspx?rightColHeader=30&id=20512&Tie...
Dr. Mackay thinks we could build a dozen of these and get an energy store of 400mwh.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_194.shtml
This would certainly make our wind more useful (to coin a phrase), but I'm not sure the company figures are as optimistic as his.
Still, anything's better than 30 million car batteries.
Happy New Year,
Jeremy.
Dogfox,
The Mackay reference you cite estimate an energy store of 400GWh( ie 400,000MWh), not 400MWh as you stated.
30million car batteries have the potential to store 300,000MWh not sure why you are discounting this potential storage, especially as this can offer very rapid charge/discharge rates(> 30GW) a potential problem with large pumped storage schemes.
Building more pumped storage seems like a no brainer, but the analysis I'm working on is heading in direction of suggesting that storage is less useful with intermittent supplies. At the moment, pumping is switched on from around midnight to 8 am with returns during peak afternoon demand. Day in day out with very predictable pattern. When you get into wind dominated system quite often there is lack of power at night, so you need to adapt pumping to when it is very windy - no problem with that. But you are still faced with scale. Is there any point in having 12 new pumped storage schemes if they can only span a fraction of a long lull?
Pumped storage should only be used to compensate for the short, sharp fluctuation. Those long lulls need to be taken up by coal fired stations and nuclear. The pumped storage giving them time to ramp up then handing over.
NAOM
Is the numerical data for that chart readily available anywhere?
(15) German wind data
http://www.tennettso.de/pages/tennettso_de/index.htm
(16) Danish wind data
http://www.energinet.dk/EN/Sider/default.aspx
(17) Spanish wind data
http://www.ree.es/
(18) Irish wind data
http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/
I downloaded Irish data myself, third party sent me the Danish, German and Spanish data. Some of it not easy to get at.
So what are you going to do with it?
It will match to a maximum entropy distribution of wind energies as I showed for Canada and Germany.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/06/wind-variability-in-germany.html
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/05/wind-energy-dispersion-analysis...
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/wind-dispersion-and-renewable-h...
WHT seems to summarize this by saying:
WITH WIND POWER, WE CAN ACHIEVE VERY HIGH USAGE EFFICIENCY GIVEN THE ENTROPIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WIND
Sounds good to me :)
Actually what the analysis does is to allay the fear-mongering. Wind is unpredictable yet it has to obey the laws of physics so that light winds get balanced with strong winds according to a well-known probability distribution based on entropy principles.
If somebody dares bet against this law they are essentially betting against the laws of thermodynamics.
I can take on the fear-mongers but I have a feeling they would rather stew in their own doom.
Well said.
People should remember that wind presents the opposite problem of nuclear in terms of predictability.
Wind is intermittent which means that if we wish to incorporate large amounts of it on our grids then we have to provide storage to supply-shift the power.
Nuclear is 'always on' which means that if we wish to incorporate large amounts of it on our grids then we have to provide storage to supply-shift the power.
That's why most of the pump-up hydro in the US was constructed, to shift nuclear-electricity from low demand hours to high demand hours.
The fear-mongers seem to not be able to look past problems in order to discover solutions.
Vague generalities do not lead to good policy; you have to look at the numbers. In the Denmark calculation I showed that the storage required to level wind power was 24 times greater than that to level the load for nuclear.
That was in a very windy month. For the lowest wind month the ratio would be several times higher. That is the real reason “why most of the pump-up hydro in the US was constructed, to shift nuclear-electricity from low demand hours to high demand hours.”
When nighttime loads increase with electric vehicles the nuclear advantage will get even better. Less storage will be needed to flatten the demand curve. When modular nuclear plants are factory mass produced, the cost may come down to the point where load following is cheaper than building storage.
Agreed. Fossil fuels kill millions each year. Unreliable, expensive energy systems may also kill millions. Yet many people still fear nuclear more because our education system has failed to teach us how to evaluate technology rationally.
I did. See if you can explain this curve:
Why does that curve bend over?
It is for an unreliable undispatchable energy source, and cleverly disguises the true nature of the variability and the true cost to make the energy reliable and dispatchable.
Try drawing the graph for a dispatchable plant, gas, coal, nuclear or wind/solar with unlimited storage.
Wrong. It bends over because the turbine manufacturers prevent the blades from spinning fast at high wind speed, to prevent potential damage. But if they did allow the turbines to operate in that regime, I have no doubt the data would fit the theoretical curve.
Your annoyance is likely due to your own frustration in not understanding entropy and how to operate in a green world.
Since wind has become large enough to produce big surges in wind production, the grid manager has introduced the option for feed in rates to go negative.
If the windmills were designed to work in any wind, their owners would probably have to pay the grid to take their power in high wind conditions. At best they would receive very small payment, but building a windmill to be efficient in all conditions would add a lot to the cost of the machine.
What annoyance?
Try thinking about a grid fed by a cocktail of inputs, some intermittent, some always-on, some dispatchable. We won't build an all-wind or and all-solar grid as those who dislike the idea of renewable energy try to argue.
We'll have to build smart, not overloading the grid with any single intermittent source and balancing that with storage, dispatchable, and load shifting. Were we to build a grid massively supplied with nuclear we would have to build lots of storage in order to supply shift. That's why we have pump-up storage now, to shift nuclear from low demand to high demand hours. (And we never seem to calculate that storage cost when we crank through the nuclear costs.)
And don't get too hung up on the falloff on that wind graph. Winds that high don't blow that hard over all of a widely cast grid shutting down all wind turbines. Others will be getting nice strong wind because the storm will have already passed, not yet arrived, or passing to their sides. Those turbines will be pumping out the power and making the grid happy.
Bob, for some reason your anti nuclear position has become a religion for you. 100 years ago many smart people believed man would never walk on the moon. People who say that now are dismissed as crackpots. Many of the things you state as fact have been disproved by prior events.
There was a time when I was frustrated because I could not present a solid fact based argument to support my anti nuclear inclinations. I took a course in nuclear engineering to get the facts I needed. I learned that nuclear power does not have to be perfect, it just has to be better than any alternate technology, and for the time being it is.
Take a course in nuclear engineering, ask the toughest questions you can think of, see what happens.
If you are right, the people who wrote A Solar Grand Plan are anti renewable, pro nuclear. Read the comments to see if you’re right.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
Using the actual wind data from Denmark for one of the best wind months of the year I showed that the storage needed to level the load for a nuclear system was 37 times less than that required to level the wind. I showed that a reliable nuclear plus storage system is less than half the cost of a wind system and more reliable and longer lasting.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7320#comment-757404
You have not pointed out any errors or provided a calculation of your own, yet you insist the opposite is true.
Have you bothered to actually read my comments? I DID include the cost of storage in the nuclear option, and it is a small fraction of the system cost, far smaller than a renewable grid requires, even in a good month for wind.
Renewable designs and cost estimates are for average conditions. Show me a design and cost estimate for a renewable grid designed to stay up in a heat or cold wave event with 1% per year probability.
If you understand that a large area of extreme wind will be surrounded by an area of moderately high winds you should understand that when Europe is covered by a huge mass of stable, extremely cold or hot air, the surrounding area will very likely have below average wind with no excess 600 GW of power to ship into Europe. But your religious faith assures you that there will always be excess wind power when it is needed.
That is an act of faith, not science.
Bill, is it your worshiping at the glowing throne which causes you to put words into other people's mouths?
I have never suggested "that there will always be excess wind power when it is needed".
The empirical colliding with the theoretical once again. I can agree that on a global scale the intermittency of wind will be close to zero. But on the spatial scale of my plot it is not. I can think of two reasons for this. The first is that the spatial scale of west Europe is too small, being comparable in size to large anticyclones. And the second is that the distribution of wind farms is not random/ uniform - for good reason. I'm guessing that to reduce intermittency a uniform distribution may be required and this will drop load factor - maybe significantly. And to get geographic spread requires mega bucks investment in grid.
What happens if you combine European wind with Pacific NW and Australian wind?
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
http://windfarmperformance.info/
Start with coal fired power plants to be replaced by wind.
The Australian floods and the impact to the coal industry
http://www.economy-news.co.uk/australian-floods-coal-06201101.html
Let us assume La Nina events like the one which caused this flooding are intensified by global warming (still 0.6 degrees warming in the pipeline from CO2 already in the atmosphere)we are going to see a disruption of Australia's coal industry more often in future, with an impact on the sea born coal trade world wide.
Actually demand can be predicted to a fair degree of accuracy well into the future, with modest variability due to weather conditions, perhaps +/- 15%. Predicting the wind output for the first week next July, for example, is impossible.
Look at the figure on page 14 of this pdf.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/denmark/Wind_energy_-_the_case...
You can easily pick out the 7 day cycle for demand. You could make the demand curve nearly flat with 5,600 MWh of storage and supply all the demand with 3,500 MW of nuclear power running at a nearly constant high capacity factor.
To level the wind production curve you would need about 72,000 MWh of storage.
Note that this is for one of the windiest months in a nation that has been pushing wind very hard for 30 years, and is held up as the shining example of wind power’s potential.
Also note that wind output that month was about half of consumption. If wind capacity was doubled to match average demand you would need 144,000 MWh of storage to level wind output. At $100 per kWh stored and a 3GW rate at $1.5 million per GW the storage cost alone would be $19 billion. 5 GW of wind power at $2.50 per watt costs $12.5 billion. Total system cost, $31.4 billion. But that system is only good for the very windy month.
In less windy months you would need more windmill capacity and more storage to accommodate reduced wind and longer wind lulls, as indicated in the next figure for July.
Average July demand was 2.2 GW. Average wind output in July was 0.5 GW. So you would need about 11 GW of installed wind capacity at a cost of $27.5 billion to meet the July demand. You would need 222 MWhrs of storage to level the wind power in July at a cost of $28 billion. The total cost for a wind powered July is $55 billion.
3500 MW of nuclear power at $7 per watt will cost $24 billion. 5,600 MW hrs of storage at a 700 MW rate costs $1.7 billion, for a total nuclear system cost of $25.1 billion, less than half the cost of an all wind system.
This system is good year round for 40-60 years vs. 20 years with windmills.
You can see from the graph that the wind output is less than 100 MW about 5 times in the windy month, 14 times in July, so perhaps you could eliminate more than one very small fossil plant if 14 failures per month are tolerable.
Also note the irony on page 23, when wind is poor the price of kWh's goes up, but when wind is good the price goes down, sometimes to zero.
Simply put, if we get more energy efficient fridges then we will buy bigger ones and more of them. We of course must become more energy efficient but the realities of human behavior must be confronted if this is to lead to reduced energy use.
Yes, but at some point the true costs of all our means of energy production and consumption might finally put such a deep bite into consumers wallets that they will opt for both less consumption and smaller fridges. If not, then the bigger fridges must be taxed out of existence. Sooner or later people will change their behavior due to real pain.
If the carrot doesn't work then bring out the big sticks.
If efficiency gains equal price rises, fridges would stay the same size. Jevon's should hold true only in the case of cheap resources -- you get more utility at the same cost, so of course you buy more. If you rework the equation to keep utility the same, you obviously get that increases in efficiency would offset increases in resource costs.
Kinda goes back to the argument of the post -- artificial price increases are regressive in impact while promoting the desired increase in efficiency (which would NOT result in increased consumption IF the fee structure holds). Simply requiring higher efficiency alone wouldn't help either, as then people go "big" on the fridge. Instead, the goal should be to gently raise fees WHILE improving efficiency requirements via regulation, and while returning the gathered fees flatly per capita. This becomes progressive in cost, simple in regulation and taxation, and would get the desired result.
It must thus be DOA from a political perspective. And of course time is in short supply.
The answer to this is surely to mandate escalator tariffs - the more you consume the greater the per unit cost. This would be extremely progressive (because the starting rate could be lower than current rates) and a great incentive to minimise consumption. The progression could be gentle at first, increasing over time. This would surely be a real win-win for government and consumers alike (except the recalcitrant profligates who need to change their ways in the future anyway), and hence should not be that politically difficult. It is clearly a sensible solution and as such should be easy to sell.
Note that the only thing that would be defined would be the percentage uplift at the break-points. The starting tariff would be open to the energy suppliers to set and compete over.
It's not true that it is extremely progressive: The only houses the poor can afford to buy are the small, old, poorly insulated ones--while the better off can afford newer, well insulated ones. The better off can easily afford to make energy conserving investments costing many thousands of dollars (or pounds); poor people can't--and often don't even own their living quarters so wouldn't be able to make most such investments anyway.
In the USA, "Starter homes" are as badly insulated as the higher priced "custom homes".
Despite the flurry of interest in alternative energy and conservation in the 1970s, the building establishment, financiers, and government are firmly entrenched in the promulgation of mediocrity.
Small houses are nearly always cheaper to heat than big ones. Agreed that insulation has a big part to play, and here it is definitely necessary for governments to be committed to providing free or cheap insulation for the less well off, and certainly here in the UK this has been happening for years. But all other things being equal, smaller houses will always require less energy to heat them than bigger ones.
I think you have something there.
The current (excuse the pun) charging model for power use in the UK is not socially equitable. The people who pay the highest price per kWh are those with pay as you go meters, who are usually poor. I believe they pay 20% per kWh more on average than other domestic users.
Also, the more you use, the less you incrementally pay for the next kWh. So the poor subsidise the rich to some extent.
Since this is a problem of energy constraints - whether due to meeting CO2e emissions targets, or just increasing scarcity of supply - it makes no sense to have such a cost structure. Surely it is more equitable that the first units consumed are the cheapest?
This maybe the exception to the general rule. fridges in most modern US houses have to fit into a almost standard space, so they won't get much bigger. As for more of them, I think the overall space constraints of homes and the decreasing utility of distance from "food processing location" will limit "more of them". This would be true of washers, dryers as well.
An interesting concept to follow for a design group (or for that matter housing code standards makers) would be to focus on those exceptions, well pumps come to mind.
Simply put, if we get more energy efficient fridges then we will buy bigger ones and more of them.
Bigger is limited by the standard height and standard width of a door frame.
Bigger is limited by the standard height and standard width of a door frame.
That only limits the depth of the refrigerator. If you lay it on its side it is only the height of the doorway (typically around 2 metres) that limits the width of the refrigerator, and the height is only limited by ceiling height (plus a little extra clearance to allow you to stand it up).
Bigger is limited by "big enough".
People won't build on to their houses or enlarge their houses just because it gets cheaper to power a refer or light bulb.
Clearly you've never visited the USA.
"energy efficiency will lead to reduced energy use when in fact the exact opposite is true. I am talking about Jevons' Paradox".
Jevon's Paradox is contingent on prices falling as energy is conserved. We are faced with a world of rising energy costs. Energy efficiency is necessary to maintain standards of living whilst reducing energy use, though energy use will reduce anyway whether we implement energy efficiency measures or not. Jevon's Paradox is a bit of an irrelevancy in this context.
+1. Price is what matters.
Simply put, if we get more energy efficient fridges then we will buy bigger ones and more of them.
maybe over simply put. At least in our case a 20-30% larger refrigerator uses about 25% less electricity a year than the fifteen year old one it relpaced and it eliminated the need to keep and occasionally fire up the ancient very inefficient spare fridge whenever our household size has temporary surges. It appears no new power usage has been sucking up any of the efficiencies we have gained by intalling LED lighting in stair and hallways and flourescent lights elsewhere. There may well be a point where first world countries don't add usage as efficiency increases. We really only have so much time to mess with stuff and we are only going to keep the house so light and keep so much fresh food around and on and on and on. That of course remains to be seen...but then there is the fact that most of the world has not even approached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to additional household electricity usage.
I do have to say that reading Jevon's 1865 'The Coal Question' actually made me much more of an optimisit than I had been. It showed how a well informed economist could have a great grasp of the mature technologies of his day but at the same time be absolutely clueless as to just how significant the impact of a new fangled novelty, the control of electricity, would be.
Britain should impose a tax on solar PV. After all, anyone who wastes their money installing solar PV in a place like Britain has to be a moron. No way can it ever pay back the cost.
Why?
Anyway Solar PV is taxed at point of installation (5% VAT) and with FIT support to RoI is 7 to 9 percent per annum so I don't see how it can never pay back the cost?
Hi Tiny,
Perhaps you should think this so called return on investment over after a good nights sleep. ;-)
If you install such a system, under the subsidy scheme in effect, your gain is all your fellow citizens pain.If everybody installs a system, you will each in effect being in the position of removing quite a bit of money (by means in and of itself very inefficient and expensive to operate, namely the tax system) from your own right trousers pocket, in the form of sterling, to the left pocket, in the form of electricity.
You will find that the price of this basically almost insignificant amount of electricity is shockingly high.
I have consistently supported the concepts of renewables, and posted here many times that imo, we should be pedal to the metal on every front, especially wind and large scale solar.
But I have done so with open eyes rather than religious fervor, basing my hopes on the costs coming down fast due to technological innovation and scaling up production.
Being somewhat doomerish in my own outlook, I also place a very high value on the marginal utility of even a very small amount of intermittent electricity in the event of a medium or long term failure of the grid;furthermore, I understand the value of the example set by early adapters in changing the world views of others in their community by keeping the issue of ff depletion on the radar screen.
It has become perfectly obvious to me however that we should be spending these very generous subsidies on reducing demand by increasing efficiency of energy use-and by taxing any usage past a certain reasonable floor in order to prevent Jevons Paradox effects from wiping out the simply enormous potential savings of both money and energy.
We should continue to invest in renewables of course-but not at the expense of ignoring conservation and efficiency, and only at the margins where the return is highest.
In terms of solar, this would mean places like the southwestern US, and of wind, places like our midwest.
The British in my humble opinion would be far better off investing their money in buying up overseas coal and natural gs and uranium reserves on the one hand and on the other doing everything reasonably achievable to increase efficiency and conservation at home.
At some point not too far down the road, we can ALL of us hope that the TRUE COSTS of wind and solar fall far enough to be truly competitive options in comparison to the alternatives of efficiency and conservation.
In the meanwhile, plenty of other countries seem to be willing and able to bear the costs of seeing green energy over the price hump.
Merry Olde England will be one of the last places where solar can truly pay its own way.
One big point to pick up on - the tax system is not involved in the feed-in tariff, so this "inefficient and expensive to operate" system has no part to justify. The operation of the scheme is quite elegant in my view in that it is self-funding from the climate change levy, and operated entirely by the energy supply companies.
However I do entirely agree that we should be primarily concentrating on reduction of demand, and as you can see from my comment above I suggest that escalator tariffs, an enhancement on your suggestion of taxing usage past a floor level, are the way to proceed for this.
I failed to state my argument properly-feed in tariffs can indeed be collected without direct involvement of the tax system;thank you for pointing out this error.
I was thinking in more general terms.Here in the US, such systems are just another trough from which the lawyers, accountants,building inspectors,lobbyists, and contractors can siphon another easy serving of blood.
I'm still in favor of them, but within the bounds of common sense-we are looking at installing wind turbines locally for instance, although the wind resource is marginal at best.It would be far better to install them only in the best spots, and figure out an equitable way to share the costs.
Perhaps this could be done by taxing commercial scale wind power in ( say for example) West Virginia at the expense of West Virginia consumers,who will thereby have to buy less coal and ng for their generating plants.The revenue could be returned to the general fund of the federal treasury.
This would get us a lot more bang for our renewables buck, as the wind resource is much better there than here.
Small scale solar and wind is just not ready for the big time,except in the case perhaps of those few people who are not only CAPABLE of scrounging, installing, and maintaining their own systems but also actually willing and able to do so.
Such people are generally unable to qualify for the subsidies due to the way the laws are written.
There seems little point, most people seem to have worked that one out for themselves.
I can recall only ever seeing two dwellings here in Scotland fitted with solar PV. One happens to be a house on my way to work, the other is a remote bothy (mountain hut) that I sometimes stay in. It is off-grid and has solar PV to power the 12v DC lighting system.
Rovman,
Because of the very attractive feed in tariffs offered, anyone with a spare £12-15K idling in a savings account and a suitable south facing roof can profit from installing solar. It's even possible to profiteer from this in Scotland, as many case studies will show.
41.3p is offered for every kWh generated plus an addditional 3p for every kWh exported to the grid. It is easily possible for a modest consuming household to become electrically "neutral" and achieve a healthy rate of return on their investment.
Whilst all of this sounds financially attractive, it is probably not beneficial in the long run for the following reasons:
1. Most pV panels come from China and are produced using electricity mostly derived from coal. We are exporting our pollution to China. Just how much primary energy does go into a 1kWp solar pV array.
2. The booming solar manufacturing industry in China is causing further environmental damage and pollution to the air and water courses.
3. We are further increasing the trade inbalance with China, creating jobs and wealt in the East, not in Europe. All contributing to the shift of wealth to the East.
4. The middle classes are more likely to benefit from such a scheme. How many "average joes" have a spare £12K in the bank whilst paying for over inflated houses and the cost of living.
5. It is giving rise to a band-waggon industry in the UK which will attract cowboys and charlatans. This is the latest racket since double glazing.
6. Silicon, glass and aluminium frames, plus oil based plastic backings, all consume valuable natural resources.
7. The 44.3p per exported kWh has to be paid for from someone - and adds to the cost of electricity for everyone else.
8. Germany and Spain have had considerable problems with over investment in solar technology.
9. Whilst the pV panels will eventually pay back the primary energy used in making them, this could be several years depending on location.
All of the above have to be taken into consideration before deciding whether pV is overall a good or bad solution to our energy issues.
2020
You missed:
10: You could save a hell of a lot by buying and installing PV yourself if you are up to it, but in UK pork barrel politics, you can't do your own wiring or installation and you can't get a grant except to purchase an installation from a gov registered supplier. This overegulation in all technical issues has reached insanity levels in the UK over the last 30 years.
Pondlife,
All UK systems have to be installed by MCS approved installers if they are to qualify for one penny of FiTs payments. There is no earthly reason to self-install if you don't receive your FiT payment.
However 17,500 installations have been registered for FiTs and they are detailed here from Offgem
http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/Sustainability/Environment/fits/Documents1/Feed-...
All sorts of schemes arising due to generosity of FiTs payments. Companies offering you a free install, and free panels if you sign your FiTs payments over to them for 25 years. This has the making of the next racket.
2020
This silliness seems typical of the UK's standard practice of swinging from one extreme to the other. A few years ago micro generation was effectively impossible because you had to register as a generator at a high fixed fee to do it at all, now you get a 5-10x subsidy on power you use yourself. A sensible level of subsidy for domestic scale systems would surely be net metering where you get paid/charged the domestic rate for whatever you used or exported that would still be a 3x or so subsidy.
pondlife
I couldn't agree more but it will be a mute point when the cost of PV panels falls to such level that the cost of producing electricity from PV is cheaper than buying it from the grid. Then all these conditions become irrelevant
Or the price of the grid rises until it exceeds that of PV.
NAOM
Not quite correct.
As PV falls {and Grid power rises}, you cannot magically disconnect purely on a price-parity, you still need storage and leveling.
So Grid-connect is going to be around for a long time, as it gives consumers a low cost deep-storage solution.
Of course, the Utilities will look at their Capital Invested, decide a return, and then set a tariff based on what kwh consumers are buying.
That means falling usage will drive higher prices.
A second parity point may be reached, where some decide to buy their own storage, to cover (say) ~80-90% of daily cycles. They keep the Grid, but now rarely buy any kwh.
That further lowers the consumer kwh unilities can invoice, so the price climbs again....
You don't need deep-scale storage; you could get a natural gas/propane/diesel generator for these long solar outages.
Yes we are seeing rapid take-up over the Border in England among well-off retirees for exactly these reasons.
I suppose the only mitigation is that the entire capital cost is payed by the house-owner, and they could be doing something even more unproductive with their money? This afterall is an area where somebody counted 9 or 10 separate cars each making a roundtrip 9 miles journey every day just to collect their newspapers from the same shop. Even with economical diesel this would more than heat my house for a year.
1. If you don't know the EROEI of solarpanels, how can it be a problem then? Because you assume it? Search TheOildrum archives to find the answer.
2. You assume that, or do you have evidence of this? And how does this contrast to the pollution by burning more fossil fuels without solarpanels?
3. With solarpanels you reduce your yearly trade deficit with Saudi Arabia and other fossil fuel producing countries. And how does the Brittish car manufacturing fare these days? Global economy just moves everything to the cheapest countries.
4. Good point, but you can also implement a solar array panel by panel (with individual inverters). That way you need only <1000 Pounds for each addition which reduces monthly cost of living immediately.
5. Which is not unique to solar business and renewable energy cannot be blamed that people are stupid or criminal.
6. Silicon and glass are made of the most abundant material on earth. Everything you use, eat and burn to keep your house warm and lights on uses valuable natural resources. The double digit EROEI of solar panels says you will save oil by installing them.
7. So is your health insurance. Everyone pays for the tax-benefits of North-sea oil/gas producers too.
8. Germany, why, how? Spain, because they made the deal too good which is corrected now.
9. And? After payback they will produce energy surplus for many years, isn't that the whole point?
> Silicon [is] made of the most abundant material on earth.
Yes, it's abundant, but in oxidised and impure form. It takes relatively large quantities of valuable resources (oil, NG, coal) to reduce and purify it.
Not disagreeing with you overall, just suggesting we don't overclaim - on either side.
If the new 'nanowire' crystalline silicon cells turn out to be manufacturable, they'd be a great boon. They use only 2% of the silicon and have at least double the conversion efficiency of polycrystallines.
Nope most of UK is supplied by Sharp in Wales or EU suppliers with MCS certification.
See (1)
See (1)
You don't need any capital to participate just a suitable roof.
Yes and no but MCS is about avoiding the problems of DG.
So? Explain how an alternative source does not use more/less of these materials/resources?
Including those who benefit - generation only covers about 30% of consumption so everybody is paying and just how much?
Germany with over 6GW peak installed has a problem - explain?
What? If this is about EROEI then show how the few KWhr on producing a panel is not completely lost in the many KWhrs produced over the panels life time
UKTony,
I looked at the Sharp operation in Wales. It is only one small part of the process where individual pV cells are assembled into arrays and frames added.
The actual manufacturing of the cells, which is the energy intensive part of the process, melting refining and slicing the silicon into wafers is still done in the Far East.
Sorry, but I stick by my statement that most pV technology is exported from China.
If pV cells were being maunfactured in Europe from hydro and wind electricity then the carbon footprint of the embodied energy would be very different - but the bottom line is that these are mass produced, carbon intensive products made in low cost labour countries, which predominantly burn coal as their primary energy.
Yes - they will pay back their embodied energy, but this is done at the expense of burning low grade coal in inefficient Chinese power stations.
It is just another aspect of globalisation, where pollution and energy consumption and wealth from manufacturing is exported from the richer west to the poorer east.
2020
Germany now has more like 16 - 17 GW peak of PV installed [1] and another 26 GW of Wind by now[2] and is adding 4 - 6 GW of PV per year. That is compared to 20 GW of nuclear and 10GW of Gas [3]
However load factors of Wind and Solar are of cause much smaller, so that in overall terms, Solar is now at about 2 - 3% of electricity and Wind at about 7%.
How much problems Germany has with its renewables appears to depend heavily on who you ask, but so far it has managed to cope with it quite well. The biggest problem seems to have been that is has been more successful than anyone had expected and predicted, such that prices have fallen much faster than anticipated in the FIT degressions, which is why there have been several additional unplanned reductions in the FIT and even the Solar industry is now calling for further reductions as the prices have dropped so fast.
With a typical load of between 45 - 60 GW, the 20GW of wind production on windy days or the 10GW of PV production on sunny days is getting into a regime where it is a very noticeable proportion, as it is larger than what nuclear or gas can deliver alone.
It will be interesting to see how well it can continue to scale up. The intermittency is very obvious on the various graphs [1,5] and particularly the rather long temporal correlations, which neither EV nor smart grids are likely not able to compensate, as they can mostly perform demand shifting on a daily cycle at most.
[1] http://www.sma.de/en/news-information/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany...
[2] http://www.wind-energie.de/fileadmin/dokumente/statistiken/WE%20Deutschl...
[3] http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/freiwillige-veroeffentlichungen-markt...
[4] http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/daten_uebertragungsnetzbetreiber
[5] http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/daten_uebertragungsnetzbetreiber/stro...
I was in Germany last summer and the impression I got from observation and talking to people was that on balance with solar there is much more of a positive than a negative result. BTW it seemed that the average German had more of a long term perspective on things and appeared to expect fossil fuel prices to continue rising in the future. They don't expect solar or wind to provide all their energy needs and seem to understand the limitations of intermittent energy production and therefore the need to adapt to it if necessary. While one can accuse the Germans of many shortcomings, they do appear to be a rather pragmatic people...
http://s289.photobucket.com/albums/ll225/Fmagyar/Germany%20Solar%20and%2...
This is indeed interesting. Are you saying that total installed nameplate capacity of wind and solar combined, amount to almost 100% of the minimum load on the grid? In that case it will be really interesting to see what happens on a day, say in the middle of summer, if it is sunny and windy over large areas of Germany. If the power grid does not fail, that should silence many of the critics of renewable electricity.
Having read some of the criticisms, I have often wondered what the impact of a relatively large installed base of intermittent renewable electricity would have on a national grid. It seems that we will be able to look to Germany to find out. I would expect that, being part of a regional grid, they could export any excess to other countries rather than shut down any base load generators. This would reduce the problems that other isolated national grids, such as exist on islands, might face.
Alan from the islands
That is my understanding, but not being an expert, I might be wrong. It doesn't seem to happen too often though that both PV and wind are strong simultaneously.
It hasn't so far happened on a national scale, although there have been warnings by the head of the German energy agency (dena) that it might [1], but that view has been disputed [2].
One of the things some people have been worried about is fault tolerance. PV converters are required to cut out if there is any abnormality in the grid, such as a brownout, over load, or frequency fluctuations. This made sense when hardly any renewables were connected to the grid kind of like "if anything goes wrong, get out of the way and let the big guys get things stable again". But if suddenly the full 10 or so GW of PV cut out simultaneously if there is a frequency fluctuation, then that will cause havoc, given that the primary reserve of the European transmission network is supposedly only 3 GW. Enough to catch one or two nuclear power plants from tripping off the network.
For that reason the grid connection codes are apparently being tightened for PV to participate in grid stability, by supplying reactive power, helping stabilize frequency and have a better fault ride through behaviour.
I have found it hard to get by many numbers about interconnections, but I vaguely remember that Germany supposedly has connections on the order of 20 GW, so yes, that would alleviate the problem somewhat.
[1] http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2010/1... (German)
[2] http://www.photon.de/photon/pd-2010-12.pdf (German)
I worry more about what will happen to a renewable grid in a 100 year week long cold wave with no wind or sun. Perhaps tens of millions of deaths, even with a modest fossil backup when the fuel runs out.
Perhaps something like has happened this year in the UK with its heating oil crisis? [1]
Or what has happened in 2009 in the Russia - Ukraine Gas dispute, cutting off gas supplies to (eastern) Europe for two weeks in the middle of winter? [2]
So renewables aren't the only sources to suffer intermittency if you are looking at extreme cases.
That isn't to say that intermittency isn't a big problem with Solar and Wind, but tens of millions of deaths are just unrealistic.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/conservative/8199110...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dispute
Let’s say Europe goes with an all renewable energy system. Big solar farms are all over North Africa and windmills all over Europe. In a few decades fossil fuels are rare, stored only in small amounts for a small market.
In the dead of winter forecasters see conditions converging for a record cold spell in Europe. On the night before the weather hits, terrorists use commonplace fishing boats to lower explosives onto undersea transmission lines in the Mediterranean, with timers set to blow simultaneously at dawn. Each line is severed in multiple distant locations.
The grid operator may have equipment, boats, parts and trained personnel to repair two breaks at the same time, not dozens at the same time. They will probably have to special order more parts and cable that will have to be manufactured. It could take months to restore the grid, especially if some key manufacturing is in Europe.
The cold moves in with little wind. Windmills ice up and stop. Cloud cover shuts down local solar power. The stored energy runs out quickly as temperatures drop far below freezing. Drinking water supplies freeze up.
Without water to metabolize food we cannot keep warm. The low moisture content of the cold air dehydrates people rapidly just from breathing. The subfreezing temperatures last several days, and even after they end it takes several more days, even weeks, to restore minimal services.
Vehicles, mostly electric, are soon down for lack of battery charging power. People with old antique gas powered cars and a supply of fuel, are the only ones moving.
The population of central Europe is about 300 million. If 99% of those people survive the death toll will be 3 million. If 90% survive the death toll will be 30 million.
Please explain, in detail, why this is not possible.
It is possible, but explain why a simple attack on the present on land fossil powered grid would be any less effective. Explain how destroying the gas and oil pipelines or LPG terminals is any less effective. Alternatively come up with a scenario that does not need war or terrorism to break the system (shouldn't' be that hard since simple bad management has blacked out much of the US with our present supposedly more robust system).
Furthermore, if you have created such a just-in-time society that a loss of electricity for a few days will cause 10% of your entire population to die, you have clearly failed at a different level. I.e. at socio/economic level to rationalize out any safety margin or supply side buffers.
Has there ever been a case where a sudden loss of supply chain has caused that sort of loss in life? E.g. after an earthquake a war or some other major catastrophe, that wasn't caused by the incident itself?
Agreed.
Disasters with greater than 10% lose of life are common, but not affecting such a large population. Humans have never constructed such a tenuous life support system for such a large population as the ones being considered now.
Disaster? Yes.
Catastrophic loss of life? No.
The Great Ice Storm of 1998 shut off power to some 4 million people in Eastern NA, and even the cities (Montreal, Ottawa) were without power for many days (Montreal is largely electric-heated). "Damage to the power grid was so severe that major rebuilding, not repairing, of the electrical grid had to be undertaken."
Official death toll: 35.
Sorry, I too fantasize about our doom, and then I am reminded that we tend to persevere, somehow...
sm
Numerous differences here;
…4 million people affected vs. 300 million. Help was available from surrounding areas. With central Europe frozen, help would be a long time coming for most.
… Ice storm temperatures generally high 20’s. Severe cold spell, below zero.
… “The Montreal area typically receives freezing rain between 12 and 17 times a year,” so the people are experienced and prepared.
… Much lower population density.
Most importantly, the ice storm happened in the age of fossil fuel. People had cars, propane, kerosene heaters, and chainsaws. Rescuers had fossil fueled vehicles not dependent on the grid.
Describe how you would design an attack using the same level of effort, that would put central Europe in the dark for several days, with very little in the way of alternate forms of stored energy, asuming today’s energy systems.
A similar level of effort might cut all the big transmission lines going into Paris, but the rest of Europe would be up and running. They could send in thousands of trained linemen to help repair the damage. Land based lines are easier to repair than undersea lines.
Europe could send in trucks with gasoline, diesel fuel, food, water etc. They could set up rescue centers with portable generators, providing hot food, light, a warm place to sleep etc.
In an all renewable energy world, with all of Europe down, this kind of response would not be possible.
Natural gas and LPG are delivered on a year round basis and stored for winter use. Destroying the terminals just before a cold wave would not have the same effect.
Today you would have to destroy a large fraction of all gas and oil pipelines, electrical transmission lines, and you would have to destroy the energy stored in and near cities in gas stations, natural gas storage facilities, truck stops, propane dealers and fuel distribution depots etc.
Explain how you destroy all those facililties all over Europe today, with a dozen or so small boats or trucks.
Why should I do that? It takes nothing away from my point. But let’s say a seismic event in the med breaks the lines, or the people of North Africa decide that they are being taken advantage of and cut off supply demanding triple the price, or a massive global warming induced sand storm wipes out the solar farms.
It also depends on their storage technology. Suppose they use ammonia as a storage technology; I don't see a problem keeping a large amount stored.
Agreed, but I do not see that included in any renewable energy cost estimates.
A nuclear power plant can keep 30 years of spent fuel in a medium sized pool and 30 years of fresh fuel in a medium sized storage room. That does not make sense economically, but having one or more years of fresh fuel on hand is common.
If central Europe was powered by 700 well distributed nuclear power plants with a spider web of power lines linking them to nearby cities and adjacent power plants, that would be a very hard grid to take down. How would you do it?
And many thousands of wind turbines scattered all over Europe plus many millions of roof top solar panels can be taken out all at once how? Your scenario would cause major problems as would a well targeted attack on land based grids (I'd take out the transformer stations not the power lines - these cannot be replaced quickly or the actual power stations) but WWII made it pretty clear that you cannot bring a country down that way. I've nothing against nuclear solutions but I do wish people would stop erecting absurd strawmen in attacking other options.
The cost of storage or non fossil backup must be included in renewable solutions, nuclear may well be cheaper, a combination of renewables, nuclear and storage may be the best in the long term but the sort of absurd costs and risks you keep putting up just look silly.
With a huge stable mass of cold cloudy air. Obviously it is not necessary to bring every single windmill and every single solar cell to zero output. Solar energy is very low in average winter weather, zero on cloudy days. Wind in neighboring countries will probably also be low due to the same weather system. Do you think there will be a lot of excess wind power nearby just waiting to be diverted to Europe in the event it is attacked?
Power stations are fenced and secured with armed guards. Substations are fenced, equipped with security systems and usually located near population centers with police resources readily available.
How would you take the European grid down? How many people would you need? How many bombs? How many guns? How many vehicles? How do you organize that large operation all across Europe undetected?
Nobody had a renewable grid in WWII. And nobody had unmanned cruise missiles that can fly through the window of your choice. But that has nothing to do with my example.
I see only strawmen in your comment. I selected a system that has been proposed, and showed how it can be attacked. You have not provided any hard evidence proving that the attack cannot succeed. In fact you admitted “Your scenario would cause major problems.” So how can you call it a strawman after that admission? Calling it a strawman does not make it a strawman.
Not that I am a terrorist, but I'd probably build something like Stuxnet (needs a little more than a fishing boat, but can be done as has been demonstrated) and blow up some of the 700 nuclear power plants. That would cause way more damage than any of the renewables could ever do due to their low power density. Well, OK, the necessary storage systems would have the problem again, but would hopefully at least not be radio-active.
But I would agree with you that importing all the electricity over a few power lines from Africa is not a very sensible idea and is why I would rather spend a little more on a decentralized system of roof top solar and wind that is hard to take out and can't blow up, even if it is less efficient and more expensive.
Gen II plants are hardwired to switches in the control room. Gen III plants will have more advanced I@C systems, but the controls will not be connected to any outside network. Water moderated reactors cannot blow up like Chernobyl due to basic physics that requires the water to be present to sustain the chain reaction. They also have massive containment buildings.
A grid in which kWh's travel hundreds, even thousands of miles, with multiple transformations and little or no way to route around failures would be far more brittle than the one I described.
A city that splits its power needs over six or more nuclear power plants, using transmission lines coming in from six directions, will be more secure than one that relies on a distant intermittent source.
How would you blow up the nuclear plants? How many people would you need? How many bombs? How many guns? How many vehicles? How do you organize that large operation all across Europe undetected?
I just showed how a renewable system could be used to kill over a million people. You have not shown that it is impossible. What death toll do you estimate for your scenario?
Right, dam failures have killed many thousands for example .
Bill, what happens if we build a nuclear grid and then encounter extreme heat waves during summer?
We're already encountering nuclear plant shutdowns during summer heat waves, both in Europe and the US.
Are we then looking at massive numbers of deaths like what happened in Europe a few years ago when 30,000 people perished during a heat wave?
Would we have to build most/all of our plants along ocean shores and where would we find that much ocean space available?
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The terrorists thing, that applies to both nuclear and renewables. A large enough group of terrorists could choose either to shut down the grid during a period of extreme cold or extreme heat. Given enough well-placed detonations either nuclear plants or the North Africa desert could be cut off for long enough to kill tens/hundreds of thousands.
If we have to concentrate nuclear plants near cooling water sources then it becomes even easier to disrupt the grid.
With adequate planning it might be more possible to minimize deaths during cold periods by simply moving people to well insulated spaces which then would be heated by body heat alone. It might be harder to keep very hot people hydrated if we can't pump water for them, much easier to supply the water needs of cold people.
Bob, this is not a new problem or unique to nuclear. Cooling water raises river water temperature to a level that may harm some life. Take a Google satellite trip down the Ohio River and you will see many plants with cooling towers, fossil and nuclear. That is probably true for many rivers in industrialized nations. If grid failure is eminent officials could wave the temperature restriction in an emergency. It is not a plant limitation.
Cooling towers ad a bit to the cost of the plant but use very little water per kWh. Dry cooling towers add more to the plant cost and reduce thermal efficiency somewhat, but that is an option for very dry regions. The use of waste water is an option as with Palo Verde, a three unit station near Phoenix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
No. the vast majority of those deaths were unrelated to grid failures. Most homes are not air conditioned in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
Some notes from the utility report.
http://www.edf.com/html/ra_2003/uk/pdf/edf_ra2003_full_va.pdf
Would we have to build most/all of our plants along ocean shores and where would we find that much ocean space available?
Mass produced floating plants located offshore or near shore would be a good choice.
How would you shutdown the nuclear powered grid I described? How many people would you need? How many bombs? How many guns? How many vehicles? How do you organize that large operation all across Europe undetected?
It would be orders of magnitude more difficult to produce the result I described.
Why?
OK, so your solution is to either float nuclear plants at sea or use dry towers to cool them. Both solutions, of course, will add significantly to the cost which is already the main reason that the nuclear renaissance fizzled.
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I said nothing about the 30k deaths being due to grid failure. I said that they were due to extreme heat, something that is likely to become more frequent in our near future. And I suggested that it would be easier to keep people alive, warm and hydrated, during extreme cold spells than to cool them off and hydrate them during extreme hot spells if the grid fails.
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You argued that a group of terrorists could disrupt the flow of power from Africa to Europe by bombing undersea HVDC transmission lines. I suggested that they could do the same sort of damage by driving a car bomb close to some on shore transmission towers. I can see no additional safety created by placing generation on the continent.
For example a fairly small group of individuals could take down the Pacific Intertie and Mountain Intertie thus leaving Southern CA without Pacific NW hydro and Utah coal power. That loss, along with blasting a couple of towers hooked to San Onofre could cause a world of hurt for SoCal. It could take several days to get everything hooked back together.
Concentrating nuclear plants near cooling water sources means that it would be easier to take multiple plants off line by bombing one single HVDC line.
No, that is not my solution. My recommendation is to build what is most appropriate in each application. Dry cooling is probably never appropriate, just an example of what is possible. Palo Verde is not dry, for example.
Hydro reservoirs evaporate more water per kWh than nuclear plants. Biofuels consume enormous amounts of water. It takes 1000 gallons of water to grow and process one gallon of ethanol. Buy 20 gallons of E-85 and you consume enough water to make a years worth of nuclear electricity for yourself.
Mass produced floating plants would be cheaper than conventional plants, just as factory built windmills are cheaper than hand made windmills built in the field.
That may be true. If the globe heats up people will become more dependent on AC and refrigeration for food preservation and life support. If terrorists cut off North Africa just prior to a severe heat wave with a huge windless high pressure dome over Europe, the survival rate could be much lower than 90%. Global warming makes grid reliability even more important.
To provide solar power from Africa to Europe through a few undersea connections would require very high capacity lines, beyond anything in use today, and far beyond the capacity of average landlines. The explosives would have to be attached to the tower, but I agree that would not be difficult to do, particularly in rural or wilderness areas.
To put 300 million people using a robust all nuclear grid in the dark for several days would require downing thousands of landlines vs. a half dozen or so undersea cables.
How many people would you need to drop thousands of lines in the U.S. or Europe? How many bombs? How many guns? How many vehicles? How do you organize that large operation undetected?
True. If the U.S. was powered by 700 well distributed nuclear plants most cities would have multiple sources of power using multiple, relatively short, transmission lines. Those interties would not be needed to keep the lights on in California. The nuclear grid would be more robust than the existing grid or the proposed renewable grid.
All nuclear plants distribute their power over multiple transmission lines. In an all nuclear grid power could be routed around any single power line loss.
Carrying power from N. Africa to Europe is a HVDC task. This is oldtech. If capacity per line is the question then it's simply a question of installing more lines. (More lines = equals more reliability in the system.)
I really don't think your terrorist concern will shape how Europe obtains its power. Europe will factor in the potential loss of part of the grid supply. It will have to factor in the loss of some of its nuclear in very hot conditions as is now happening. It will have to factor in periods of no wind in parts of its wind fields as already happens.
Europe will have multiple sources of power. There's hydro in the north, solar and wind along the southwest coast, wind and tidal along the north west coast, geothermal and hydro from Iceland, and existing nuclear here and there. How Europe (and the rest of the world) solves their energy problems will come down to questions of economics which will differ from place to place.
Will the world build massive numbers of nuclear plants? I doubt it. The numbers just don't work unless you are like China with tons of available cash and no need to finance construction. Other countries will look at the ability to bring a wind farm or solar array on line in months, not a decade or longer, thus quickly creating a cash flow and avoiding years of accumulated interest.
That's what we are seeing. Time after time countries/states consider building new reactors but once they work through the numbers they walk away. That's what happened in Ontario, in San Antonio, and recently in Turkey.
England is just now talking up reactors but I'm betting that once they crank through the numbers and compare costs to filling their needs with wind and tidal along with pump-up storage in Snowdon-type areas they, too, will move away from nuclear plans.
Just based on finances alone nuclear faces an essentially insurmountable problem. That's before problems of waste, safety and NIMBY locations come into play. And then there has to be a serious consideration that the end of nuclear could be only one serious melt-down away. Let a TMI, Brown's Ferry, Davis-Bessie incident get totally out of hand (Homer's do exist) and in many locations angry citizens are going to demand plant closure. Decision makers know this. Only totalitarian governments like China will be able to keep reactors in operation.
Clearly true, as indicated by their dependence on long fragile gas lines and imported fuel, leaving them vulnerable to terrorism.
As I pointed out before, this is not a nuclear plant problem. The plants can run with higher cooling water temperature. The same is true for fossil plants. In an emergency, the limits can be waved; some fish will die, some people will live.
New nuclear plants will take care of this issue in the design stage.
Solar thermal plants with storage have a lower average steam temperature than nuclear plants. Their average efficiency is lower than nuclear and therefore they produce more waste heat and evaporate more water per kWh than a nuclear plant. Their efficiency drops rapidly with reduced steam temperature and increasing condenser temperature.
Dry cooled solar steam plants are even more adversely affected by high condenser steam pressure resulting from high air temperature in a heat wave.
Solar thermal plants with storage get fewer kWh's per million Btu of stored energy as condenser temperature rises; nuclear plants can run 24/7 for over a year.
All the wind/solar designs I have seen are designed for average days. Show me a cost estimate for a wind/solar grid that will stay up under 1% per year severe weather conditions. A marginal nuclear grid might have rolling blackouts under worst case conditions, but no total blackout for 300 million people.
I think it will unless there is a better breakthrough technology. I recommend a massive $100 billion per year R&D program to increase the probability of that. We are still firmly locked in the fossil age, and few people recognize that existing renewable technology is unable to change that fact at an affordable price.
Denmark has been pushing wind very hard for over 30 years, yet they have higher emissions than France and higher electric cost. France ramped up to 75% nuclear in less time then it took Denmark to get to 10% domestic wind plus 10% export wind.
The better a technology is the fewer mandates and feed in tariffs it needs. How many billions did government pay to force people to give up their typewriters? The technology that replaces fossil fuel will not need mandates and tariffs.
And how is that cash flow when the wind is high and the price is zero?
We have yet to build the Model T of nuclear power plants. There is enormous room for improvement. Windmills are close to theoretical maximum efficiency; there is only modest room for improvement, storage is a huge issue.
R&D is not a subsidy.
I am more a humanist than a nationalist. If a child is willing to work hard in school to get a good education, and then work hard at a job producing a valuable high quality product, they deserve a better quality of life than the lazy ignorant child who becomes a lazy ignorant adult, regardless of where they live.
If the west is frightened away from this technology by the N word plus an extremely rare accident that kills nobody; then China and India will have a huge, well deserved, advantage.
There are some very significant problems with building large numbers of nuclear plants in a short period of time.
We can start with the scarcity of trained, experienced workers/engineers. We don't even have the academic ability to train large numbers right now. It could take a decade to create a new generation of workers.
We don't have the ability to create more than a handful of containment vessels per year. It would take several years just to build the ability to make 20, 30, 50 a year. We could go without steel containment, but the world is not exactly comfortable with taking on that additional risk.
We're not even convinced that we can build new nuclear for anything like a semi-affordable price. (We know that we can't bring nuclear to the grid for the price of NG.) One or two new reactors will have to be built before it will be possible to spring loose the money to start building large scale.
Wind is already cheaper than new nuclear. Wind with storage is probably about the same as new nuclear. Solar is dropping fast. Thermal solar with storage and NG backup is probably going to be cheaper than new nuclear. Utility scale batteries are on line and their price is dropping. Geothermal is cheaper than new nuclear and installation costs are dropping. Hydro-uprating is cheap. Run of the river hydro is cheaper than new nuclear. CAES will provide massive amounts of storage for reasonable prices.
The US and Europe are not looking at significant population increases. Both are working hard to drop power demand. What new demand that occurs is largely peak hour needs which for which nuclear is very poorly suited. To provide peak hour with nuclear then one has to include massive storage which means one might as well store much cheaper wind and solar.
All of that renewable and storage stuff is now and will get better and cheaper during the time it will take nuclear to prove itself and train new workers. I just don't see many new reactors in our future.
Why don't you put your hopes in fusion? It's only 20 years away, just like it's been for the last 40 years....
In the summer of 1945 we had a massive nuclear weapons complex employing several thousand workers, scientists and engineers. 3.5 years earlier there were only a few people with limited knowledge in the field. How did they all get trained?
How did France gear up to 78% nuclear in 25 years, at a time when fossil fuel was relatively abundant and cheap compared to today? How did they all get trained?
Denmark spends more for electricity than France. Apparently you believe training people for the wind industry is easier and requires fewer people per GW year of energy production, yet Denmark wind production is only 10% domestic, 10% export. Why isn’t Denmark more than 78% domestic wind production today?
That assumes a particular level of effort. How did we build thousands of B-17’s/year? How did Gen. Leslie Groves build the Pentagon in 18 months? Is bending steel plate and welding it together harder than building the Pentagon?
You believe that windmills and solar cells will be cheap if only we build enough of them. What do you think the first new U.S. nuclear plant will cost? What will #100 cost? What will #700 cost?
No, windmill data plates are cheaper than nuclear data plates, but reliable dispatchable nuclear kWh's are cheaper than reliable dispatchable wind kWh's, as I showed in the Denmark calculation which you ignore.
Not true. Read the comments on the solar grand plan. What will natural gas cost and what will emission fees be in 10, 20, 40 years?
Good, better for nuclear than intermittants.
Great, level the playing field and see what people build.
More religion. Electric vehicles are going to charge between 11 am and 5 pm, right? And you’re going to meet peak customer demand and charge your massive storage system all at the same time, right? So if Europe needs 300 GW average 600GW peak, you need to build an 1800 GW grid.
Show me a map of that transmission system with the size of the towers and cables required. Show me the cost estimate on that?
The world might be willing to fly Near Miss Airlines if the price was cheap.
But if Near Miss Air augers in a time or two look for ticket sales to crash. The Chinese won't be any different....
More religion, disconnected from reality.
Every airline is Near Miss Airlines. Do you avoid every airline that has had an accident? If so, you are probably flying the newer airlines that have not racked up much time. That is no guarantee of zero risk. New airlines tend to have younger, less experienced pilots.
Most people recognize that flying is safer than driving. People keep flying after an accident. Not enough recognize that nuclear is safer than fossil or intermittent energy.
HVDC lines only make sense for very long transmission lines due to the high cost of the substations. In an all nuclear grid with 700 reactors there would be no HVDC lines because all power lines would be relatively short, with multiple conventional lines extending out from each plant.
I worry more about what will happen to a renewable grid in a 100 year week long cold wave with no wind or sun
Geee there Wille, if there is no Sun - exactly how are the crops gonna grow? Same goes for the cold in your 'future worry' - the "lack" of electrical power from PV and Wind will be the least of the concerns.
There can't be enough of the nuke plants you pimp to save the mass of mankind with the lack of food resulting from your 'future worry' scenario.
But hey, don't let a simple lack of food crop stop you from telling us all how Nuclear Power will save us!
I am referring to a week long cold wave of such a severity that that the probability of an occurrence is 1% each year.
Might make more sense to mothball a few coal plants or just build a lot of extra cheap-to-build NG turbines for those low probability events.
You meant to say a few hundred, right? Put that in the cost estimate. Include building and maintaining the plants, the fuel supply cost, fuel storage cost, escalating fuel and emission costs over the next 50 year.
It would be really useful to have an informed post on German electricity industry. What are the load factors on these massive solar and wind arrays? And how much it has cost etc. I put my email address back in personal details if anyone is interested - but note this needs to be data and chart rich.
It's an interesting possibility that wind could partially back up PV and vis versa. Have there been any studies correlating the two? Anecdotally, wind seems correlated with cloudy conditions where as sunny conditions are correlated with calm, high pressure areas.
There is reasonable data here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
That shows these industry wide renewable capacity-factor numbers for wind, from 2009 back : (Wh/nameplateW)
93543/((45310e6*24*365)/1e9) = 0.235
93269/((39934e6*24*365)/1e9) = 0.266
87597/((35779e6*24*365)/1e9) = 0.279
71487/((32003e6*24*365)/1e9) = 0.254
They say 2009 was 16.1%, so that makes nameplate Renewable ~70% of their Usage.
That's spread over 5 sources, and three (Hydro, biogas, biomas) look to be complementary to the more cyclic renewables.(wind, solar)
My comments about negative experiences in Germany and Spain were based on what I had read in the press:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/mar/11/solar-po...
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/spain-proposes-up-to-45-...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/03/spain-cuts-solar-pv
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/19/pv-crystalox-solar-energy...
http://www.wharton.universia.net/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=1991&langua...
2020
Thanks for the much needed sobriety about 'renewable' energy technologies. Because of the significant embodied energy costs required to create any type of power plant, be it nuclear, coal or wind, it is usually far more cost effective to reduce demand than to create additional production, in a steady-state energy system.
This logic has been conceptualised as an "energy hierarchy" similar to the waste hierarchy which creates a priority list from reducing wastage, to reusing, recycling and finally landfill. The version advocated by the ImechE (2009): goes:
1) Energy conservation
2) Energy efficiency
3) Renewables
4) Non-conventional
5) Conventional
Although these are not meant to be distinct phases (they should be pursued in tandem), it is clear that investment in devices which convert environmental energy fluxes into forms useful to human economies comes quite far down on the list after conservation and efficiency. In light of this article, and other sources of information about the UK's energy policy, it seems to have read the energy hierarchy upside down. Investment in conventional and non-conventional production is huge (citation needed), investment in renewables is small but growing, and real investments in energy efficiency and conservation are negligible.
Given that 4.5 million UK citizens suffered from fuel poverty in 2008 (up from 2 million in 2003), it is easy to see why "high" electricity prices are resented by many, including the author of this article. However, as George Monbiot spells out here, it is not the size of the pie that is important but its distribution: the "big six" private companies (including EON, Europe's largest coal burner) which control the UK's electricity market have been raking in huge profits recently, largely from the poor, who tend to pay more per kWh than the wealthy because of the absurd falling block tariff system in operation in the UK. Here in Spain, water is a sacred resource and is therefore treated to a rising-block tariff, whereby profligate users pay higher at the margin. Surely applying such a rising block system would simultaneously reduce consumption, reduce fuel poverty, and increase the kind of prudence that Gordon Brown whined about while asking the bankers to take bigger and bigger risks before 2008.
Back to the topic, my point is that the article misses the opportunity that the UK's energy problem presents for addressing the energy hierarchy, which demands conservation and efficiency to receive the greatest investment first, and the rarely addressed demand-side of electricity economics.
Yes wind turbines add significantly to the variability of electricity production, and their non-dispatch-able nature means that spare capacity may be needed. But if flexible demand is fostered by well implemented demand side policies and technologies, the problems illustrated in the figure below (from here) may be mitigated.
Francois Bouffard (2008) explains the latter problem succinctly:
"Consumers enjoy relative
isolation from abrupt, short-term ups and downs within the
energy supply chain. This helps sustain society and the economy,
but it has also rendered consumers inflexible and made them
unaware of the impact of their energy use and their expectations
of high quality energy supply."
Many low-cost technologies and polices are emerging to address this problem, although they would develop faster with greater financial support.
Driving up the cost of energy has the benefit of forcing consumers into lower energy lifestyles, but it also comes at the cost of driving electricity-intensive industries offshore, which I think was part of the point of the German study mentioned, or at least I remember this point popping up in the Oil Drum a few months ago. The example I remember was aluminum production.
In a fossil-fuel constrained future, these relative benefits get rearranged, but in the short and medium term the nations who become early adopters of mitigation efforts for constrained fossil fuel supplies come out losers.
This is a great article for the Oil Drum in that it questions those assumptions we often make about a society's ability to plan ahead for an energy constrained future. It's useful to think about how the costs of planning ahead-ahead of everyone else-can be prohibitive and potentially devastating to a country's economic health, perhaps even undermining a nation's ability to undertake mitigation efforts when everyone else really gets underway. This is helpful when reading Hirsch on mitigation.
You've expressed my reaction to the article better than I could have done.
But you'll note the almost immediate invocation of the so-called Jevon's Paradox, mechanical irony for those locked in the mechanistic paradigm, and useful idiocy for others whose main cause in life is to preserve their visual domain from the appalling appearance of wind towers.
The guest post by Dr. Constable is a beautiful example of fossil reasoning. For a breakthrough towards a renewable based energy system, the dogmas of the current fossil based energy system have to be overcome. This however, requires being able to look at our energy system from a broader perspective, something which proves very difficult for people like Dr. Constable and the researchers of the RWI he refers to.
First of all, the energy playing field is uneven. The fossil energy system has had many decades to build up its institutions, regulation, user acceptance etc. Government support for new technologies in order to overcome these setbacks is not generally a bad thing. This support could take two forms. One way is to tax the negative impacts of the current energy supply i.e. with carbon taxes. Things that must be accounted for include not only climate change, but other negative impacts which are often forgotten in the current (climate change oriented) debate. Such neglected aspects include acidification and eutrophication, costs for energy security and safety and cost for importing all of this energy. A second method, as the Germans have showed with their feed-in tariff law, is supporting of new technologies to make them able to compete with the established energy system.
The German Ministry for the Environment had a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of its feed-in tariff law done. For 2008, it concluded that the costs were around E4 billion, and that the benefits far exceeded this number. Only the CO2-emission reduction already yields benefits of around E3 billion. Furthermore, energy imports costing around E3 billion were replaced by German-sourced renewables, so this investment stays in the country, instead of going to foreign fossil fuel suppliers.
On top of that, recent studies by DENA, the German Energy Authority, show that renewables actually lower the market price of energy, because most of the renewable energy supplies (expensive) peak demand.
Furthermore, Dr. Constable first attacks the costs of the support scheme for microgeneration, and subsequently states that the transport of renewable energy is extremely expensive. To me it would not make sense to put solar panels for microgeneration in a field 500 kilometers away from my home. Microgeneration is so economically interesting, exactly because there is no need to transport the energy from the central plant to the consumer.
Last but not least, Dr. Constable assumes that the current energy supply is not being subsidised, as opposed to the new renewable energy technologies. Recent research by the IEA, OECD, OPEC and Worldbank, shows that about 1% of global GDP goes to subsidising fossil fuels. Most of these economic distorting subsidies take place in developing countries. However, developed countries, like the UK, have more subtle ways of supporting their fossil fuel businesses. See my blog http://en-tran.blogspot.com for more information on these topics.
In case anybody jumped over Rick's insightful commentary because of the spacing, here it is again slightly reformatted:
Edit: Sorry, this was not intended as a comment to Rick...
Euan, you quote the paper by Gabriel Calzada Alvarez and seem to accept it's outcome pretty much on face value. Do you think that paper is objective and realistic? It comes across as highly controversial to me. NREL provides some harsh criticisms.
It would also be nice to know how much subsidies are paid for each coal worker in Germany or how much subsidies and tax benefits the oil and gas sector has received in the UK last year. Just to balance the idea given by this article that it's only green jobs that cost society money.
On another note, I wonder how the UK is going to provide more power using natural gas in winter when it already has trouble keeping up with demand now. Especially during peak power in winter.
It is madness to implement these co2 reduction policies which cost us over a billion pounds a year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/7061552/Wind-farm-subs...
While at the same time importing vast amounts of cheap goods made in China, all produced with coal. You could not make it up could you?
I have heard some better ideas.
Firstly put an import tax on all goods coming from countries that do not meet our co2 emissions target.
As the factories come back to this country and the 3 million unemployed get jobs and hope. This would save billions in unemployment benefits. So we could cut taxes.
Remove ourselves from the E.U. giving 6 Billion a year to some of the richest countries in the world cannot be justified. Going back to simple free trade agreement would work just fine, Germany will still sell their BMWs to us just as they do USA.
Use this money to support building of new carbon neutral housing, this may cost about one billion per year.
Past a law that requires all rented properties to have A rated boilers and double glazing, reintroduce the boiler replacement scheme and increase subsidies on new double glazing. Cost £500 million a year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8440557.stm
Building nuclear power stations to level of our base use taking into account increase purchase of electric vehicles would reduce our co2 levels to lowest in the world.
Increase sale tax on all ice engine cars, the worse the fuel consumption the higher the tax.
Give police more resources to catch the 2 million untaxed and uninsured drivers on our roads, increase fines to pay for this.
Increase government incentive to buy electric vehicles for first 5 years to £10,000. cost of one billion a year.
Expand and electrify our entire rail system get many more police on trains and buses so people feel safe and will use it.
Expand bus system in all areas so people do not need cars.
I still have several billion left over but will leave it there.
PS the only people who fear a trade war are those that own the companies in China and worry they would have to pay proper wages here.
I agree with many of your points, but I do wonder why you exclusively pick on rental properties for legislation and enforcement of energy efficiency measures. I have had many discussions with owner-occupiers over recent months and it is shocking how few have actually carried out any energy efficiency improvement measures at all - even loft insulation.
Furthermore it has been most informative to look at house roofs over the recent cold snap. A few houses had snow on them throughout the week-long (or so) period, but equally as many lost their snow pretty much straight away or after only a day or two. Clearly these house owners have no concerns about how much energy they are using.
I can suggest a possible reason.
If an attempt was made to regulate what owner-occupiers do, that would provoke a huge debate about goverment infringement on personal liberty.
The argument that rentiers should provide decent housing for others who don't have a choice is more easily winnable.
Nah, just easier to tweak rent laws than building regs and shorter time scale.
NAOM
Reason is, I have seen the disgraceful state some landlords keep their properties and legislation is needed to get properties up to level they themselves would live in. There are grants, but only for people on some form of benefits or pension. If the legislation and grants were done in the right way a huge amount could be achieved in just a few years, more than any wind turbines could ever do.
http://www.government-grants.co.uk/
If grants were made available to all the take up would be higher, I replaced my boiler using the grant but this helped only a small number of people who have G rated boilers. It needs to be increased and extended and over a period of years.
What some pro wind turbine people fail to grasp is a billion pounds spent saving energy is far more effective than spending it producing electricity that for most part is wasted.
This is just an observation from the Canadian perspective: The British have no idea how to properly insulate or heat a house.
In Canada, good insulation and good central heating are mandatory if you do now want to freeze during the winter. In Britain they appear to be optional. In reality, British builders do not know how to build houses that are comfortable in a British winter, never mind a Canadian one.
In Canada, we know the winters are going to be cold (it's never a surprise), so the builders construct houses to be comfortable at the coldest temperatures that have ever been seen. In fact they often build them for temperatures that have never been seen in recorded history, just in case. (In case of what? Another ice age? I don't know.)
I have heard many British immigrants to Canada say they have never been more comfortable in winter. It's just a matter of knowing how to build houses for cold weather. And, if they have enough insulation to be comfortable in cold weather, they will also be much cheaper to heat.
The British are stuck using construction techniques that date back centuries. If they want to build houses that are properly insulated to be energy efficient, they have to realize that these techniques are no longer adequate. They are going to have to build houses that, although they may look traditional, are internally like nothing they are used to. They are going to be built more like thermos bottles than like tradition British houses.
Hi RockymtnGuy
Our building regulations are behind many other countries, that is why we have put moeny into energy saving before wind farms. I did read an article resently which said UK is improving on that score.
Trouble is most of our housing stock is very old, pre 1950s and were build with solid external walls. My old house was that type and the outside walls were cold to touch, the house I recently moved into has cavity walls and was insulated some time ago, the walls feel warm.
But insulating solid walls is not cheap.
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Home-improvements-and-products/Home-...
Again the government needs to find money to help people do this, they found billions of pounds to help the likes of Bank of Scotland quick enough.
I also had a flat in the north of England some years back, in that area I would say half the houses and flats had single glazing. the central heating hardly turned off due to heat loss. After installing double glazing and loft insulation my bills dropped by nearly half.
Many people in these areas heated these sort of houses with electric fires, every house insulated would be a little gas and electicity saved. Over time 10 Million houses would save vast amounts of imported gas and wasted electricity generated.
Odd way to put it-I mean the part I italicized. Fifteen years ago even here in interior Alaska-where winters at least rival the parts of Canada that house 90% of her population-triple pane windows where considered overbuilding for the cold. The payback was just too slow and the windows might not have even lasted long enough to ever achieve it.
But move forward. Now with fuel oil (which unfortunately is what powers most of our heating) price rising from sixty cents to over three dollars a gallon the payback on triple pane windows (through the heating cost saved/added comfort) is shortened substantially, so much so that triple pane has become standard in new construction.
Throw enough heat in a thin paper walled house of large enough dimension and it could have a habitable portion that would be comfortable in temperatures colder than have ever been recorded. The tradeoff is cost of a comfortable heat retaining design vs. cost of heating the space above the expected outside temperature range for the life of the building.
An overbuild at low or moderate heating fuel cost may well become an underbuild at very high heating fuel costs. Or to put it another way, a house said to be built to be comfortable at 120 below zero at current heating costs might but considered built only to be comfortable at 40 below zero at three or four times today's heating cost.
My observation was just that the Canadian houses I have lived in had quite large amounts of insulation (6 inches or 150 mm in the walls, 12 inches or 300 mm in the ceilings), and yet the furnaces were sized such that they could keep the house warm even if it had no insulation at all.
I have tried to point out to furnace installers that they don't need to put in such big furnaces, but they persist in doing so. The furnace is barely running even on very cold days, and the result is heat stratification in the air. Ideally, in the coldest possible winter day, the furnace should be running continuously, not cutting in and out because it is running at part load. It's not efficient to put in a furnace twice as big as you need.
However, the modern 95% efficient furnaces with multi-speed fans are much more efficient at part load. They will circulate the air even if they are larger than necessary, and the result is no air temperature stratification and a more comfortable house. They are expensive but worth it, more for the comfort factor than the saving in fuel costs.
Properly sizing a heating unit can be a bit of an art when the outside temperature can hold at minus twenty to minus forty for weeks but heat is still needed when, during other months, the temp vacilates daily from 30 to 50 or 60F. For years a lot of contractors found it easier to just put in a giant unit that wouldn't be working at near top efficiency load levels ever. But like you say furnaces are improving (and getting more costly) as is contractor awareness.
Air to air heat exchangers to balance the demands living inside an ever tighter building envelope create have added more cost to the modern house. The super tight structural insulated panel design has become popular here of late--8 inch foam wall panels and 9 or 10 inch roof panels. Of course on one project where the army required blast windows the SIP system got very complicated. I doubt very much using the panels reduced on sight labor demands one lick on those buildings.
On my last main addition I ran standard old fashioned fiberglass insulated 2x6 stick frame, then sealed it with 6 mill poly and firred in (with minimal outside wall contact) a couple inch dead space that also handled all the wiring and boxes. Very simple, not much extra material or labor and quite tight. Since we were living in the house it was quite nice to get the insulation sealed out before having to to mess with wiring and the like. So many ways to skin that cat.
In these parts boilers are more popular than forced air but then you have to balance boiler and hot water reservoir size as well. No doubt there is lots of room for improvement in all these areas, but adding layers of complexity to create efficiency isn't always all its cracked up to be.
I'm hoping I'm not sorry I bought a wood pellet boiler--it still sits in bubble wrap waiting for me to give it the piping it needs to function. I did feel some pressure to move off oil these days so I made the plunge--even though pellets do seem to track oil's price.
It will be hard to beat my undersized Monitor fuel oil heater for simplicity. It doesn't shut off for months on end, with four automatic burn settings, a thermostat a few feet away and me knowing just what setting at what outside temperature will give the best balance of over heated daylight basement, cool top floor bedrooms and comfortable main floor living space (the house grew along with the kids ?- )).
The problem with passing laws on rentals is that's effectively an unfunded mandate on landlords, which simply drives down the prices of properties -- not exactly what the market wants to see right now. Bringing incentives for landlords to parity with owners would make a lot more sense.
In general, landlords don't do upgrades for a number of reasons. First, they get no payback if the renter pays his electricity bills, because renters mostly only look at the top-line monthly rent number. Second, you really don't want to upgrade a unit that is occupied - then you set the stage for a litany of upgrade requests from that user (because there will be a host of things they'd have rather seen before more insulation in the attic!) and from all your other renters (who have been there longer, and paid on time every month by God!). Third, to recoup the investment you have to raise rents, and that means disrupting the rental economy some more, and causing flux in rentals (try convincing a renter that his $100 rise in rent will be offset by a drop in utilities).
If you add requirements, add them upon sale of the property with a long grandfathering period. It'll still get worked into the property price and hurt resale value, but at least you won't be bankrupting land-lords who are on the edge. Better, provide tax incentives and/or financing to landlords to make the upgrades you want to see. Done right, you'd probably see quicker savings than for homes, since most land-lords have multiple properties, and would upgrade a lot of units in short order if it made fiscal sense.
I noted on a vacation this summer that all the HVAC units in the hotel (which was built to be be condos and apartments) were 20+ years old, and would in no way come close to the legal minimum. You could see sky around the door seals, and door was hot to the touch from the inside as well, from sunshine. Cheap, single-pane windows to boot -- who knows about wall insulation. And this was in a "green" area of a "greenish" state with summer highs of 100F and winter lows below zero. Even in this case where the landlord would actually save on utilities even the most reasonable upgrades were not getting done, probably due to perpetual cash-flow issues. I'm sure there were always more obvious improvements that were needed. They did have free beer and wine at happy hour though -- gotta have priorities straight!
Here in Canada there are small little inexpensive fixes that pay most bang for the (pound).
A common problem for renters in Canada is that the heat is not always included in rent. So low-income people (e.g. students) have to do things on a budget. The first thing is to deal with drafts and single pane windows. The cheapest short term fix is to cover the window frame-to-frame with a purpose-made shrink wrap. $15 per kit good enough for two windows is available in hardware stores here. Effectively it traps air between the windows and foil, and reduces air leaks. You can't open the window, but when it is iced up you can't anyway. Heck, even bunching curtains on a windowsill instead of hanging free visibly helps. Number two is to look for air leaks (with a stick of incense, not match or lighter!!!!) and fill them with expanding foam. Third put a ceiling fan that will blow warm air back down, when you do not have forced air heating. Insulating top floor celings and attics and replacing windows go next. Walls should be done last - in Canadian conditions at least, because even very lousy ones are still quite good.
The first few fixes cost a couple hundred dollars maximum and make a real difference in heating bills and subjective feeling of warmth. I suspect they would work in UK even better than here.
Here in Canada there are small little inexpensive fixes that pay most bang for the (pound).
-The cheapest short term fix is to cover the window frame-to-frame with a purpose-made shrink wrap.
-Number two is to look for air leaks (with a stick of incense, not match or lighter!!!!) and fill them with expanding foam.
- Third put a ceiling fan that will blow warm air back down...
Been there. Done that. Go down to the hardware store, buy a roll of 2 mil polyethylene plastic and put it over the windows; buy a few cans of expanding foam, take the trim off the windows and shoot it into the gaps around the window; and buy a cheap ceiling fan and use it to replace a ceiling light fixture to prevent temperature stratification and drive the warm air down to floor level. Whatever it takes to survive a Canadian winter.
If you actually own the place, the next step is to go up in the attic and lay down 1 foot (300 mm) of fibreglass insulation, and then start tearing out the insides of the walls, firring them out to 6 inches (150 mm) with wood strapping, and putting in 150 mm of fibreglass insulation. And then you put in 6 mil polyethylene sheeting on the warm side of all the insulated walls because you don't want them to rot. This would be particularly important in Britain because it's humid there.
Been there, done that too :-). The second step is quite a bit more complicated in masonry/concrete/stone buildings, because poor Brits must frame the walls from inside or completely rip outside to glue the foam outside. In our case old siding would get replaced with new siding - fast and cheap. If they have nice red solid good quality brick in those row houses, it is a shame to destroy. But they do not need R20 (Rsi 3.5) walls and R40-60 ceilings, although passive house has something like R-100 ceiling.
I am thinking that a good strategy there could be reflective foil, new strapping and new drywall inside - It's only 1 1/2 inch loss of space, for quite an R-value.
There are rigid panels for inside wall insulation being used. One does loose a tiny bit of floor space, but that's just how it is.
As for windows, low-e films and inert gas between layers of dual panes might be better than triple glazing. I'm really impressed with the windows I installed in my new house. A set of French doors were mis-shipped as dual pane but without the low e rating and will have to be replaced. They are significantly colder than the large windows on the same wall.
And be careful about which expanding foam gets used around windows and doors. The 'normal' stuff will expand too much and shove frames out of alignment. I've seen special versions for window/door use.
The best material for dry-lining walls is insulated plasterboard such as Gyproc Thermaline. This comes in various grades and is essentially plasterboard which is directly bonded to foam insulation. The thickness of the plasterboard is between 9.5mm and 12.5mm, and the overall thickness varies between about 25mm and 100mm. Some grades act as a vapour control barrier as well, removing the requirement for a separate membrane (as long as the joints are properly taped).
In older houses which have lime-based plaster (representing very little thermal insulation) you can often gain almost as much space in the room by removing it first as you lose through fixing the board on the walls. It's not cheap, but it is pretty quick to install so you gain in labour costs what you lose in material costs.
For those living in solid brick or stone homes, here is a report on Build it Solar of a couple who used external foam insulation to bring an uninsulated school house to near passive hause standards. Basically, they put on an exterior wood frame, sprayed it full of foam, and replaced the windows.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/SolarHomes/SchoolHouseRetrofit/Main...
This was Canada. One advantage of moving all that brick thermal mass inside of the insulated envelope is that it takes 18 days without any heating (solar or mechanical) before the house cools to freezing. 18 days! That solves the lul in renewables problem right there!
As for windows, low-e films and inert gas between layers of dual panes might be better than triple glazing.
I doubt triple glazing will be needed in a maritime or even temperate climate but just thought I'd mention up here in the subarctic our triple glaze has both low-e film and inert gas fill--and the windows are god awful heavy. The relatively small additional gain from the triple over double glaze does require a whole lot of winter or very high heating cost to make it pay. Most folks would agree that six to seven months of winter with a couple month long deep core is a whole lot of winter but 'times they are a changing'...
December had its lowest arctic sea extent since the beginning of satellite record.
Here is the NSIDC arctic sea ice report for December 2010
poor Brits must frame the walls from inside or completely rip outside to glue the foam outside. In our case old siding would get replaced with new siding - fast and cheap. If they have nice red solid good quality brick in those row houses, it is a shame to destroy.
The British do have something of a problem with the solid walls on many of their buildings, and many of them are very nice looking albeit rather chilly and difficult to do anything with.
The typical Canadian 2x4 or 2x6 walls are much easier to work with. You can rip off either the inside drywall or exterior sheathing and siding, fir out the walls with wood to make them wider, if necessary, and then add fiberglass batts on the inside and/or additional foam insulation on the outside. Replacing either the inside finishing or the exterior siding is a rather common occurrence and a good excuse for adding extra insulation.
I googled the Gyproc Thermaline product that ncollingridge mentioned, though, and it does look like it would be useful in the British context.
But they do not need R20 (Rsi 3.5) walls and R40-60 ceilings
In the context of rising world oil prices and declining North Sea oil and gas production, maybe they do. If I was a Brit I would be enthusiastically re-insulating my house at this point in time in anticipation of it becoming much more expensive to heat. Actually, I would have done it some time ago.
You and me both (and I have already taken a lot of energy-saving measures on my house). But realistically most people just can't be bothered.
I had a chat with someone the other day (a pretty bright guy) who was moaning about how much heating oil costs now (doubled in price in the past few months here) and he said that he wouldn't be doing anything about his admittedly poor level of loft insulation. I was incredulous, but he said that the only difference it would make is that he would have to fill his oil tank up a few weeks earlier than if he improved the insulation.
Like many people, he's just not bothered that much about the total cost, so why do anything about it? That attitude doesn't compute for me, but quite honestly he is representative of the majority. Sadly the only realistic way of changing attitudes is for government to do something that will kick people into action.
Yes, the person who whines and complains that the price of heating oil has doubled, but then decides to do nothing about the poor insulation in his house is just trying to ignore reality.
What is he going to do if the price doubles again, which is not unlikely in the near future? At some point the cost of fuel is going to exceed what he can afford to pay, and he will have to live in a cold house, or not live in a house at all.
My personal choice has been to put in more insulation than required (currently 150 mm of fibreglass in the walls, 300 mm of fibreglass in the ceilings, and 40 mm of plastic foam panels plus 90 mm of fibreglass in the basement. With double-glazed windows, some passive solar features, and a 95% efficient furnace, it's a very comfortable house to live in regardless of temperatures. It's warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
In Canada, I pay much lower prices for natural gas than people in Britain. I could also heat my house for nothing because I have a wood fireplace and an unlimited supply of free wood in the forest behind the house. And the house is also sitting (literally) on a huge deposit of anthracite coal that there's no market for because our vast oil and natural gas reserves are more convenient.
The British do not have these advantages, so it behooves them to pay much more attention to insulation than they currently do. Otherwise, it could become awfully expensive for them to heat their houses in the future.
I recounted a similar story in a recent Drumbeat. We visited one of my in-laws over the Christmas holidays, a couple, both in their 70's and in rapidly declining health. They live in a large, older all-electric home and want to sell and move into a small condo closer to where he receives his medical treatments (he makes three 220 km round trips for dialysis each week). Their electric bill for November was $800.00 and it more than doubles during the dead of winter. I've been after them for years to do something about it but to no avail; they're relatively well-off and so it hasn't a big concern to them. Then I pointed out that these high utility charges could make it difficult to sell their home without incurring a steep loss and that it could languish on the market for a very long time. I haven't spoken to them since, but I'm hoping this might finally prod them into action.
Cheers,
Paul
Inertia can be the enemy of us all. I once rented an very modest all electric house in Anchorage and remember how quickly I wanted out after one winter--at that time my natural gas generated electricity didn't even approach the cost you speak of. Very difficult to make the changes in your 70's when health is on the wane--and those decades seem to rush at us as we approach them.
I'd best get off my can, take the bubble wrap off my pellet boiler and get to moving. But not today--almost time to slug through 20k or so up and down the ski trails ?- )
Just the other side (the south side) of the large hill on which I live the school district is experimenting with solar thermal panels seasonally recharging the ground a heat pump is cooling during the winter. Way too much a project for my means so I've decided to lock myself into the local wood pellet supply--it will be good to have an alternative to oil but I'm not about to delude myself into thinking the price of pellets and of fuel oil will be all that disconnected.
Best of luck, Luke, with your new (soon to be installed) pellet boiler and to your school district and their GSHP -- the recharging of soil temperatures during the summer months sounds like a smart way to go.
Cheers,
Paul
Could even be self funding :)
If people can afford the ticket or get in through the doors. Why not fund a move to telecomute. I used to love the times I would use several buses/trains to travel a hundred miles to use my laptop on a client site while I could do exactly the same work at home. {/sarc}
PLEASE. We used to have the last bus leave the station 5 mins after the first commuter train was dues to arrive - the one that was always about 20 mins late. No surprise everyone needed cars.
NAOM
Hi NAOM
The reason I bought my first car is I got fedup getting out of work and having just missed a bus would have to wait half and hour. sometimes and Hour if next bus was cancelled, not much fun after a 12 hour shift.
On Sunday it was even worse, no bus for hour and a half after I finished night shift.
So when I say expand i mean EXPAND, so people have a viable choice and not a third rate system we have at the moment.
Telecommute is excellent, but if you had a boss like mine who wanted people around so he looks good organizing people, not sure how government can help with that.
As petrol prices go up, more people will move to trains and so again more carriages and more trains are needed.
I bought a company bicycle ..... then we had a really wet summer :(
NAOM
Thanks, toilforoil. I did indeed skip over Rick's comment because of the formatting. And he does make some good points.
On the internet, white space is free, people! ;-)
As far as I'm aware, the FF industry is a major source of tax income to the UK government through production taxes paid by production companies operating offshore, through corporation taxes paid on vast profits made by the UK based oil companies, through VAT and excise taxes paid by motorists on petrol and diesel and so on. From what I understand the renewables industry would go quickly bust without subsidies.
JonFriese makes good points about accepting the need for the new to be subsidised by the old. Please spare us this notion that FF are somehow unprofitable and shifting to lower energy quality renewables is some how a breeze. Those who make these points present the biggest obstacle to actually making progress through obfuscating reasoned debate.
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Renewable_Energy_Foundation
The Renewable Energy Foundation is a front group or a think tank opposed to the widespread introduction of wind farms.
...
The Renewable Energy Foundation recieved over £300 000 in donations in 2009, but the source of funding is obscure.
...
The REF has consistently and vociferously opposed the Renewables Obligation.[6] The Renewables Obligation is the current main mechanism for supporting large scale generation of renewable electricity.[7] Instead the REF argue that carbon capture and storage (known as clean coal) is a viable and mature proposition.[8]
Don't be fooled. Follow the money. Shouldn't authors who post here have to disclose any potential conflicts of interest they might have, such as...I don't know, funding from the coal and oil and gas industries? The assertion that the UK has "shunned natural gas" demonstrates clear denial of facts. How exactly should the UK increase its reliance on NG, pray tell, when it is already issuing multiple Gas Balancing Alerts every year now? "Clean coal," mature and viable? LOL? TL;DR version: let's continue BAU, it might kill us but gosh, the alternative is so EXPENSIVE!
Wishing TOD editors had higher standards, and recognizing as much as the idea might sound appealing, you can't actually separate the politics from the energy discussion. This article is a joke,
W/E
If you think several thousand wind turbines will save the day, you are easily misled, There is a much bigger picture here, as you say follow the money, where does the billion pounds each year go, which many poor people have to pay.
why are we paying 6 billion each year to E.U that come up with these rules?
I said nothing of the sort, what I said was that people need to consider the source of their information and the biases it contains. This article (and increasingly, thanks to the new mantra of "energy, not politics," TOD in general) fails to do so, and as a consequence the quality of the information has deteriorated. The truly misled are those who believe increasing reliance on finite energy sources are viable "alternatives" themselves.
And, it's bad enough to feature articles from authors who are shills for BAU, but to do so without even acknowledging biases (and leading readers to believe the source is objective) is simply intolerable. How ironic, the rotating quote widget in the top right currently reads:
“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”
—George Eliot
Were that we had a few more people here who recognized that the author here is arguing for just such a pyrrhic victory.
What I would like to see is poor people not being taxed to subsidize big industry either coal, oil or wind farms.
Use the saving to help poor people save energy with double glazing, efficient boilers. new housing zero carbon rated.
The money is there but it goes to big industry and banks, it is impossible to talk about energy and not see the relationship with politics. such as war in iraq or deals with saudi arabia where human rights are abused on a daily basis.
Another thing everyone has a bias, quite often we are not able to see our own only those in other people who disagree with us.
Here are the conclusions from Dr. Constable's presentation here in Duluth, Minnesota: http://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/138/jc.duluth.energy.13.10.09.pdf
I have to admit that calling oneselves the REF while advocating that renewables are nearly useless smacks of running a false flag operation and that badly undermines ones credibility. Coal is not a renewable resource on any timescale relevant to the human economy. If the REF is a pro coal industry advocate, then it would be far more respectable to say so up front.
Now, on to the article. More renewables does not mean more NG. The UK could opt to build more storage instead. "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" by David J.C. MacKay, has an excellent section on just how much pumped hydro would be needed to balance a 5 day lul in a windless summer. From MacKay's book:
For details on the 12 sites see:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_192.shtml
Scotland is wonderfully positioned to deliver the storage service (and, gosh, maybe find a way to profit after the oil runs out?).
As far as free markets being the best way to create an energy policy, I am a little shocked such an idea is even considered. The Hirsch report made clear that a 20 year head start would be needed to mitigate a peak in oil production. How could such a plan be implemented 20 years ahead of the price signal via market mechanisms? It cannot.The market is useful for some things and useless at others. Planning for a dramatic (future) shift in costs is one of the things it is not useful for.
Subsidies are useful for building efficiency of scale and pushing a technology further down the learning curve (and cost per kWh curve) before the market would do so itself. Wind is less expensive to build in the US than new NG plants almost entirely because of Dutch and German subsidies. It would be economic suicide to wait for the Energy Return on Energy Invested of fossil fuels to drop low enough for unresearched technologies to be competitive. By the time the alternatives were developed, most people would have frozen and starved. Again, forward planning is essential to avoid a catastrophe because rates of change in cost of fossil fuels happen much faster than new technologies can be developed and deployed. The market cannot handle such cases.
Jon, you make good points. I have not managed to read MacKay's book from beginning to end but have dipped in and read many sections. I'd start by noting that a 7 day lull in february probably needs twice as much storage as a 5 day lull in summer, and the consequences of not bridging the lull in a very cold February would be much worse. And the scale is staggering. Which in current climate leads me quickly to thinking is it not better to build nukes? As opposed to thousands of windmills and TWhrs worth of storage. This is where the debate is heading.
Your comment about need to plan is well made - but in the UK are we all clear about the imperative for the need to plan?
Thanks, Euan. Even with Nukes you need quite a lot of storage to balance the load swings and to handle unplanned nuke plant shutdowns. The EROI of nukes is low, like 14 with centrifuge enrichment, so society cannot really afford to have them load follow (over build capacity). If nukes are EROI 14 and wind is EROI 20 then wind uses 2% less energy to construct. So the real question is: will the extra load balancing needed for the wind turbines take more than 2% of the total energy delivered. If so, then nukes may be the best solution, or, if not, then build more wind. (Some country willing to store nuclear waste could earn quite a fortune. It would be nice if that country was not in a glacier prone or tectonically active region, nor was in a drainage basin to the sea).
On the need to plan: Here in the US we are clearly not planning! Sadly, the argument of using the market as a planning tool has a powerful sway here because those currently profiting would like to continue to do so, even if it means great poverty for most in the future. That is just human nature and is part of the tragedy of energy transition. The poverty is technically avoidable, and yet not socially avoidable.
My experience with the power industry thus far is not very good. They do seem to favor solutions that best suit them and not the consumer and seem quite happy to pursue expensive options sure in the knowledge that the consumer will have to pay - this is a growth industry!
I think the energy cost of mitigating for intermittency is substantial - this does not have to be a fatal problem, but I see little point in pretending that these energy and financial costs don't exist. Nuclear combined with pumped storage is a highly predictable solution allowing high utilisation of both sets of infrastructure.
Do I hear the sound of the Pied Piper in most,if not all of these comments and the article itself?
You are marching off to some bizarre tune and ignoring the realities.Renewables will never supply anything near the electricity which is required to maintain something resembling a civil society.
With this mindset you will continue to burn fossil fuels until you can't.By then it will be too late to build the only sensible alternative - nuclear. Wake up.
I see that the pledge for "less content" has been achieved by moving the Drumbeat to 4x per week; I guess we'll have to wait for the "higher-quality content".
Shorter Renewable Energy Foundation: Renewables Suck.
Is the link between the name "Renewable Energy Foundation" and its goals analogous to another industry front group called "Friends of Science"? It certainly looks that way...
The only thing that Government can do to help the situation is to fall on its sword.
It is no more possible to direct an economy to arrive at a given result by interfering in the market than it is possible to improve an ecosystem by controling the movements and feeding habits of the animals.
I expect that in the future,(within my life time), if you want electricity, you will probably have to make it yourself.
Cutting government and it's "services" to the bone is the only way to free up funds to allow people to explore options that may suit them.
There arn't going to be any solutions coming down from on high to save civilization.
I'll agree with Dr Constable this far: the government should not pick winners.
However, it most definitely should pick losers. Thermal coal must be a loser if the rest of us and our grandchildren are to win.
The choices are a carbon tax, or cap and trade.
About a tax, I'd just like to reiterate a point made by Prohibitionists in the early decades of last century: a tax is an income stream. The taxing entity has an incentive to ensure that it continues.
A well set out and vigorously enforced cap-and-trade system would be ideal. But I could barely write that sentence with a straight face.
What a dilemma!
I found it strange that a Director of Policy and Research at an organization called the Renewable Energy Foundation would be criticising subsidies for renewable energy. For a while there I thought Dr. Constable was just being magnanimous but, thanks to other posters who exposed the misleading nature of the REF's name(A(nti)REF would be more apt) I now understand. It calls into question the validity of his arguments as he obviously represents the views of vested interests who would like to see BAU.
A very similar debate, minus the generous subsidies for renewables, is going on in my neck of the woods at the moment. A nagging thought for me in all of this is, what if some of the more doomerish predictions we hear on this site are right and we see crude oil supplies fall by 50% or worse by the year 2030? All these pro FF and even pro nuclear arguments assume X years of supply at current usage rates. If oil supplies decline "unexpectedly" and coal and NG are called upon to fill the gap then the whole issue of supply/demand/price becomes very volatile. In that event early investments in renewables may turn out to be very sensible even if they seem unreasonably expensive now.
I fear that the projections of people like Dr. Constable are based on information supplied by the likes of the IEA, that is, they distinctly avoid the concept of any discontinuity in crude oil supplies. In my neck of the woods I am assuming that, as world oil production begins to decline, small island states such as mine will increasingly find that, renewable energy is all we've got. In the case of my tropical island renewable energy includes sugar cane ethanol, oilseed crops and biomass.
Alan from the islands
Is this still The Oil Drum I'm reading?
+500,000,000
This is one of the worst contributions I've read on TOD.
Besides the fact that Germany is investing much more in renewable energies than Britain is and the German economy is in fact booming. (If the renewable industry would somehow harm the German economy it would not be booming.)
This is particularly embarrassing:
This study was funded by the Institute for Energy Research (IER) which is partially funded by the oil and coal lobby:
http://www.verivox.de/nachrichten/kampf-der-lobbyisten-oeko-energie-vers...
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/26/opinion/la-ed-0525-mileage-20100526
By the way the head of the RWI Manuel Frondel also claims that there won't be any oil production issues in the decades to come:
http://www.aktiv-online.info/Home/tabid/36/ArticleID/1355/language/de-DE...
So maybe Britain should therefore invest in oil power plants (after all there are no limits to oil production and there is no global warming according to RWI, IER)...
Btw, Britain and the US may continue to ignore solar hot water (to TODs excitement) - but China certainly isn't:
Are you suggesting that the German economy is booming because of investment in renewable energy or despite investment in renewable energy?
I guess my view would be it is booming because of exports of Mercedes Benz, Porsche, Audi, Volkswagen and BMW motor cars to the East along with a host of other consumer and capital goods - but there ya go, how ignorant can one get?
Here's a copy of our reader guidelines (you'll find the link under the banner up top). I suggest you read these carefully and learn them off by heart.
http://www.theoildrum.com/special/guidelines
It is likely to be despite. But that is the point. If you set the right policy and invest early into something productive and sustainable rather than into e.g. financial bubbles or over sized houses, you can do it without harming the economy too much. And one will see if in the end it was a sensible policy, once FF become increasingly expensive and constrained.
Besides the fact, that Germany is exporting over 80% of its wind turbines and this is certainly helping Germany's economy.
Germany's economy is booming regardless of its renewable energy program. Despite the fact that Germany has by far the biggest renewable energy program in Europe, it does not have a big share of the German GDP.
Regardless of the German facts, your article suggests doom to Britain, if it were to invest in renewable energies. To proof this ridiculous articles point, it cites sources, which also claim that there is endless oil supply and that global warming is a hoax.
So what's your solution according to your article? Should Britain therefore build oil power plants instead of investing in efficiency and renewable energy?
Btw, why does your article not strictly adhere to:
Or are the TOD guidelines irrelevant to your articles?
Alternative energy sources are alternatives and not primaries because they arn't as good. We use fossil fuels because they are the most concentrated, transportable, and the most easily aquired.
In the same manner that animals choose food items that contain the greatest amount of calories vs the effort required to obtain them, we use FF over solar,hydro,wind,etc.
This isn't to say that FF use isn't a dirty devil's bargain, since it is, and an eventual dead end certainly. What I'm saying is that you can't replace FFs with alternatives no matter how much money you throw at the problem.
Sure, the technologies used to harvest alternatives can be improved, but only to a point. The alternatives harvest energy from diffuse, non-transportable sources and require greater investment of funds and resources to aquire.
I'm not saying that you can't have a civilization that runs on alternatives, of course you can. I'm saying that it won't be anything like this one, and it won't support 6.5 billion people.
It is of cause fairly speculative, but I think technically you could. Even Germany, not directly blessed with a lot of sun, could supply 100% of its electricity from Solar rooftop, as it supposedly has only used up about 1% of south facing roofs producing about 1 - 2% of its electricity from PV [citation needed]. Of cause, that would leave you with a gigantic surplus of electricity in summer and a lack in Winter for which you will need storage. But if really wanted to you could build storage systems capable of it. For example there is an interesting concepts, that suggests storage capacity in the range of a TWh [1]. Well, that does require to raise and drop a granite mountain by 500 meters, which environmentalists will probably not like given they even complain about such simple things as a overhead electricity line, but that is another matter.
So if you really had "no matter how much money your throw at the problem", and money would have to translate into available resources you would likely be able to do it. Just that you would probably have to stop producing iPods, tamagotchies, movies, military, stop flying into the Caribbean or what have you non-essential luxuries we enjoy for a few years, so thats not going to happen.
So there is the question of what is technically possible and what is economically / socially possible.
[1] http://www.solarserver.de/solar-magazin/anlage-des-monats/hydraulische-e...
I guess this explains the German interest in Desertec. Install the PV in North Africa and you can still generate significant amounts in winter and generally improve the capacity factor. The improved ROI from operating at a latitude closer to the equator would go towards the cost of building transmission lines.
Please... don't stop flying to the Caribbean. Those non-essential luxuries provide some not so non-essential income for some folks in the Caribbean ;-)
Alan from the islands
The original title of this article by somebody at the self-styled Renewable Energy Foundation is Renewables Won't Keep the Lights On. Anachronistic, but at least it's honest and not misleading, unlike the new title.
Are good articles just around the corner? Here's hoping, etc.
The Renewable Obligation is a bit of a misnomer. There are several biomass-electricity plants going through the planning process in Scotland, led by Forth Ports. The trumpet is of course the jobs, and the carbon savings. Aside from all the obvious problems with such assumptions what struck me most was the response I received from Ofgem regarding the payment of credits and the sustainability of source fuel for biomass plants.
"Clearly ROC issuance hinges on a number of factors (a station must be accredited under the RO, the station must agree appropriate fuel measurement and sampling procedures etc). However in terms of sustainability, you are correct in your assumption. The issuance of ROCs is not dependant on the perceived sustainability of a fuel, only on the provision of a completed sustainability report within the relevant timeframes."