After Fukushima: a new dash for gas? Really?
Posted by Jerome a Paris on March 23, 2011 - 11:58am
The final outcome and cost of the nuclear accident at Fukushima are yet to be determined but the obituary of the nuclear industry has already been written, and one competing source of power has already been declared the absolute winner by the Serious People: natural gas.
To fill the gap, renewables are likely to receive a boost. But there will also be a need for a reliable power generation that works even when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Gas-fired power plants are quick and cheap to build, and natural gas is plentiful in the US. It could also be abundant in Europe and China if American production techniques can be imported. (FT)
Despite a push to increase power generated from renewable sources such as solar and wind power, the wind doesn't blow all the time even in Northern Europe, and the sun is notoriously elusive. Renewables aren't cheap either, in part because they need other methods of power generation to back them up because they generate intermittently. Despite improved technologies, coal is still a relatively dirty fuel, while switching to oil in a $100-a-barrel world doesn't seem appealing either. But there is a fuel that's plentiful, and becoming more so, emits significantly less carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated than coal, and where power stations can be built and online in a relatively short time: natural gas.(WSJ)
The theme is eerily similar: renewables are nice, but unSerious (not "reliable," too expensive) so we need to rely on the big boys. Coal is a bit too dirty to be pushed openly, so gas is it. Cheap, abundant, clean and quick to be ramped up. Case closed.
Or is it? Let's take all of these arguments in turn.
Added to my Wind Power series
The usual disclosure: my job is to advise projects in the wind sector on their financing plans
Gas is "clean?"
This one is actually simple: gas is clean only when compared to coal.
Burning gas means fewer particles and other nasty by-products than what you get from burning coal. Producing and transporting gas is also generally less dirty than producing and transporting coal. And burning gas means emissions of carbon dioxide which are roughly half that of coal for the same production of electricity.
Source: Externe project
But it still produces a lot of carbon emissions - a lot more than other alternatives - and natural gas itself is methane, which is a much more potent hothouse gas than carbon dioxide, so any losses during production and transport need to be added there with a high contributing factor.
Gas is "abundant?"
This is a perception which has taken hold in the past 2 years, as demand in the US fell (due to the crisis) while production actually increased, thanks to new developments and the emergence of shale gas as a significant contributor to the country's production. This in turn has significantly lowered US imports of LNG, releasing these volumes for Europe and Asia and creating an impression of glut over there as well.
The articles above flag this new source of gas, and suggest that similar developments could happen in Europe, where shale gas deposits do exist and could provide a domestic source of gas. But this overlooks a number of things:
- shale gas is generally more expensive to produce than current prices suggest. This FT article notes that shale gas costs are probably double current gas prices, and Arthur Berman here at the Oil Drum has some extensive writing (see the most recent one) on this;
- shale gas creates serious environmental problems as it uses production techniques ("fracking") which, while well known to the industry, create issues of water use (large volumes) and water pollution which are much more sensitive in the inhabited areas where shale gas tends to be found than in more traditional out-of-the-way areas of gas production;
- most importantly, shale gas volumes are not that significant in the long run, even in the US. A lot has been made out of the most recent prospective study by the US DoE, which sees shale gas providing almost half of US gas within 25 years, but as the graph below shows, this mostly compensates the decline in traditional production and does not even allow the country to eliminate its need for imports from Canada. (And of course, this assumes a "business as usual" scenario, with no significant switch from nuclear towards gas-fired electricity generation beyond current trends):
While shale gas has indeed changed the dynamics of the gas markets, and has allowed a new source of gas to contribute to the overall supply, the fact remains that 50% of world reserves are controlled by Russia and Iran, and most of the rest from the same countries which control the oil supply, so "abundance," in addition to being a temporary situation, is still a concept largely subject to political risk. This is seen as a small risk today (because of that short term "abundance") but go back just 4-5 years to see how our leadership can quickly become hysterical about this...
Gas is "cheap?"
Current gas prices are lowish:
Source: FreeCharts.com
If anything, that graph demonstrates that natural gas prices are highly volatile. So electricity prices for gas-fired plants are highly dependent on what assumptions one makes about future prices - for the next 25 years! Most price scenarios, and in particular the most widely quoted one from the IEA (see here) tend to see slow increases over time, with no volatility and no expectation of geopolitical or geophysical disruption.
Additionally, as I've noted before in various articles (see here for instance), gas-fired electricity is currently advantaged cost-wise by the political choice made in the past 2 decades that power sector investment should be made by the private sector rather than the public sector - that means that the discount rate, i.e. the cost of money, for investment in the sector is higher today than it has ever been. Gas-fired plants are the cheapest to build per MW, and most of the cost of electricity in their case comes from the cost of fuel - so using a higher discount rate increases the overall cost per kWh less than for other technologies, thus giving gas a very real relative advantage. Again, this is a political choice and absolutely not an objective fact.
Despite all this, estimates of the long term cost of gas-fired power do not show any meaningful advantage for gas:
Source: ExxonMobil's "Energy Outlook: A view to 2030"
Which takes us to the arguments that we'll do gas because the alternatives, i.e. wind or solar, besides being more expensive, are simply not reliable or scale-able enough.
Renewables are too expensive?
As the graph above shows, onshore wind is fully cost competitive, in the long run, with other traditional sources (coal, gas, nuclear), even when one accepts a whole set of highly loaded assumptions (no payment of externalities by the various sectors beyond a largely symbolic price for carbon, continued expectation that the private-sector cost of capital is the relevant metric, no price for security of supply).
But as I've noted repeatedly (for instance in The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind, or in Wind's latest problem: it ... makes power too cheap or in Wind Lowers Prices: New Scientist), wind, as a zero-marginal cost of production source, has an additional effect on market prices, bringing them down for consumers.
Source: Economics of wind (pdf) by the European Wind Energy Association
So, either we are in a market situation, and that dampening effect on prices (the "merit-order effect") should be taken into account when evaluating the cost of wind, and not just the gross cost of wind. If we start moving away from marginal pricing mechanisms, the fact that the cost of capital has such an impact on the cost of wind kWhs should be brought into the picture, and public financing of power plants (at a lower discount rate) could be considered: this would allow one to incorporate wind into the system on the basis of its long term contribution (little capacity, but a predictable number of kWh at a fixed cost over a very long time) and take advantage of its capital-heavy cost structure. Allowing public funding would not change the cost of gas-fired plants much, but would significantly lower that of wind (as it would for nukes), and that is arguably in the public interest. Whether this is a good use of public funding is an open question, and a very political one, but saying that we should use "pure" markets is also, implicitly, a political choice, by denying the value that the lower costs of public funding bring to the calculation of the cost of a vital public good (one which is in any case a heavily regulated one for purely technical reasons, as it cannot be stored).
Renewables are not reliable?
The next argument is (as noted in the footnote of ExxonMobil's graph) that renewable energy sources are intermittent and unreliable as providers of firm production capacity. The intermittency of wind and solar is very real and obvious (although they should not be overstated - both offshore wind and solar production patterns happen to follow intra-day variations of demand quite closely; with offshore wind's capacity factor around 50% or more in the North Sea, intermittency is not an issue most of the time), but it is also something that (i) current systems know how to deal with at almost no cost, (ii) could become a problem only at very high penetrations, and (iii) will remain a problem only if our grid stays as it is and does not adapt over the next few decades as renewables increase their share of generation.
As DoDo noted in the The 3-part view of power generation, the intermittency of renewables is largely predictable, and thus no harder to deal with than the daily variations of demand - which current systems deal with, as it were, on a daily basis...thus the argument that the "cost of backup" for wind or solar is largely insignificant (adding, at most, a few % to the cost of wind) up to significant penetrations into the system (current studies, and the ongoing reality in Denmark, Ireland or Germany, suggest that more than 20% of power could be supplied by renewables without significant need for new investment in the grid or backup systems).
DoDo pointed here to an interesting table:
Source: the Oil Drum
That table indicates the compatibility of different technologies with each other. Basically, gas and hydro are compatible with everything else, and can be used for peak load or balancing; most other technologies are less flexible and thus largely incompatible with each other. What this means is that wind or solar are no harder to incorporate in a power generation system than nukes or coal, provided that you have sufficient flexible capacity in the form of hydro or gas. While this does suggest a long future for gas in the power sector (as a provider of peaking plants and daily balancing capacity) where hydro is not available, it certainly does not mean that baseload needs to be done by gas. A side note on that table is that wind and solar seem less incompatible with each other than with traditional baseload sources, meaning that a combination of wind and solar would probably be somewhat easier to balance than a pure-wind or pure-solar input into the grid.
And what the Japanese crisis demonstrates as well is that large power plants have "intermittency" problems of their own: when they are offline, which does not require events as rare as 9.0 earthquakes (a technical problem on a power line can have the same consequence), the system may not have enough spare capacity to deal with their sudden large-scale disappearance, or have to deal with blackouts. Dispersed generation sources like renewables do not present this risk.
Renewables are too small?
The last argument is that renewables are simply not up to the task because they are too small to matter. But this is silly. That renewables are small does not mean that it will remain this way. There are no practical obstacles to building up capacity - and it has indeed happened when policies made it possible. Denmark went to 20% of its generation from wind in less than a decade in the '90s, using what was then less mature technology; Germany has gone from less than 10% of its capacity to close to 40% being renewables in less than 10 years...
The reality is that gas-fired power is the default solution for a number of bad reasons: it's a price-maker and thus a smaller financial risk, it's more profitable for private sector investors than for public sector utilities, and it's backed by large and powerful incumbent industrial companies. But inertia is not a policy.
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I agree with the conclusion of this post.
However, while I know the author didn't make this, I disagree strongly with this chart.
The notation of B, C, P, S refer to baseload, load follow, peaking, and stochastic relative to demand. Yeah, this last one is complete bull. We normally say natural gas is load follow and peaking, although that generally applies to combustion turbines. Combined cycle plants are almost entirely shifted to baseload now but that could change depending on the price.
I believe this table is a non-technical analysis, and misses the target by a long shot. Wind and solar don't go together if you get the profiles and put them together. So why give it an "average" rating? Well, they go better together than if you took a baseload profile... maybe. But that doesn't mean that the 2 together are not a negative outcome.
The fact of the matter is that integration follows directly as
P > C > B > S
This is just the reality of the world. Peaking is always more maneuverable and easier to work with. You could make your entire grid 100% peaking plants. Why not? It's just the characteristics of the technology by which we classify them. You can NOT make a grid 100% out of baseload or out of the S category (basically renewables). Either way, peaking goes best with everything and renewables go worst with everything. Sorry, this is the reality. Making a low carbon grid means using B and S. And no, that's not possible with the way we manage the grid right now. So the only option is to use the virtual power plant in terms of the demand-side management. I don't know if the demand-side management should be more aptly classified as P or C, but it's good enough, but you will need a lot of it to ever go low carbon. Either way we're not prepared for that.
Still, I get the argument that we're entering the age of natural gas. If it's possible to make something a reality by repeating it enough times, the natural gas advocates should be pretty close by now. I also don't hold out hope for shale gas putting a cap on the price (which is the argument), but at least you might see a long-term cap at greater than $6 per it's units. I figure, meh, that will be acceptable for the present and hopefully it can take down coal. The picture still doesn't bode well for nuclear, but it bodes far worse for renewables. And I want people to understand that reality.
This is the ultimately power generation in Germany from "renewables"
http://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/ren-Strom-D/index_e.php
Especially interesting is the high figure of biomass, which works very good together with wind and solar as renewable "baseload" power.
Burning food for energy basically, boosted by FERTILIZERS!...not to even mention how much energy manufacturing those photovoltaics solar cells will require. It is all typical German pseudo-environmentalism when you count ALL the costs and energies needed. Simply put, the others (France/Russia) will do the dirty work but in Germany it looks all GOOD!
Tim;
Just another poster here, but would you mind cooling it on the 'F' word, etc. It undercuts the ability of this site to get past School and Library filters.
Appreciate your thoughts, just the same. viva la debate!
Bob
It depends...
Of course you're right to some degree, but it is not true that the "biomass" is food or even animal feed which is used in Germany. Mostly it is by-products of farming and straw from fallow grounds, which originally where just thrown away or left where it stands.
I thought you needed to leave this so it would add nutrients to the soil.
Of course you do.
Don't believe the hype.
We owe a gargantuan debt to the soil that can only be paid in biomass.
But we are the species of monkeys that are endlessly fascinated with burning things.
We are essentially burning our children (and their children...) as we speak.
If you look at the chart, more than 50% are waste (paper industrie, home-waste, wood industrie, bark). The population in Germany is declinieng fast - we will soon lose more than half a million people a year. The region where i'm from was one of the first industrialized regions in the world (south-west Saxony). We are shrinking really fast and everything around me gets green (even in inner city areas, where buiding are demolished all the time), whe're troubled allready with the trees spreading in the city areas. So we have more than enough "biomass".
I admit that the "German way" could never be an option for fast-growing population in the middle east or african desert regions. But here we have quid a lot "Biomass" to "burn" without directly collapsing our soil...
Germany had a negative population growth rate in the 1970's and 1980's but bounced back to positive both times.
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_grow&idim=country:...
Population growth is looked at as a negative by so many if it were to actually occur in Germany they would just import more foreigners. And since those would all be non-Germans, no one can protest without being called racist.
Do you know why Germany bounced back after the 1980's?
- large-scale Immigration, especially from eastern Europe (so called late resettlers from Russia) and Turkey (family joining)
- The "Baby boomers" of the 1960's came in their childbearing years, which ends at about 2005
This will not happen again, the population decline in Germany is inevitable througout the 2050's, the total fertility rate of Germany is around 1.4 since around 1970 (west Germany, US of A: 2.0) and never came back. The autochthonous population has a total fertility rate about 1.2, academic German woman 0.9! We will never "bounce back" in any way. At about 2030 France will have the biggest population in Europe, eventually at that time also the UK will surpass us (BAU supposed, especially in the UK).
And large-scale Immigration? I doubt it. We are not an english-speaking country, so large amount of Indians and African Immigrants are not an option. In the last several years we actually had negative migration flows. Beside this, it has to be shown if very large ammounts of cultural different immigrants in context of a fast aging and shrinking autochthonious population has big benefits in the long run.
What if the ash is returned to the soil?
Returning the ash is very helpful but does not restore and maintain the soil nearly a well as leaving all the "waste " biomass such as crop residue and slash( limbs and leaves of harvested trees ) on the ground in the first place.
Of course returning ash derived from burning residential and industrial waste wood and other biomass refuse is a very good thing to do-so long as the ash is not contaminated with noticeable quantities of heavy metals or other dangerous pollutants.
In a world with only a few hundred million of people, and an economy geared to energy efficiency and conservation, we could probably develop a sustainable biomass based economy and still enjoy the primary benefits of industrial civilization.
But if we ever get seriously started doiwn the biomass road withthe population well up into the billions, it's all over for the poor people in the short term, and for most of the rest of us in the longer term.
Nick - good to see you back!
I agree with OFM here that returning whole biomass is better, though there are, as always, some exceptions.
Ash contains mainly the P and K, whereas whole biomass contains lots of carbon, and varying amounts of N and S. Adding biomass to the soil also improves soil structure, water holding capacity, cation exchange capacity, and soil microbes and fungi. In short it makes the soil a healthier and more diverse ecosystem.
Ash is also a problem if too concentrated. Logging operations often create huge piles of slash, and then burn them, There is so much ash in one place that the soil is then rendered sterile, while the soil around has been depleted! You can see that a few hundred years of this sort of cycle will create serious problems.
One exception for biomass - in Australia, some of the the eucalypt forests actually degraded soil quality with their leaf fall (high oil content Mallee eucalypts). years of leaves, and the eucalyptus oil the contain, can actually coat the soil grains making them hydrophobic! So the soil holds less water over time. This is why some (not majority) of cleared areas have made for very poor farming soils initially, and, if managed, improved as the eucalyptus oil was eventually degraded.
There are some other trees (black locust?) that produce toxins in their wood and leaves, and these can prevent other stuff from growing around them - I would be tempted to burn that slash too.
For a forest farm, the thing to do is indeed to mulch the leaves, bark and branches back. It has been observed in Australian forestry that, when establishing forest on former farmland, the trees deplete the soil of nutrients for the first 4-6 years, and after that it stabilises from the annual leaf fall. When harvesting, you don;t want to shop away whole logs (unfortunately this is the normal practice) you want to debark and slab them on site, so both the bark and nutrient rich sapwood are retained, and send away the nutrient poor (but best lumber) of the heartwood.
If using the trees for energy, you will probably burn the sapwood, but mulch the bark/branches/leaves - though I would extract the eucalyptus oil first.
Regardless of the farming enterprise, the first priority is to maintain and improve soil fertility. Companies harvesting trees on Crown land (most of BC) are not always interested in that - that is why there are now limits on burning and requirements for chipping/mulching slash. A definite improvement, but, predictably, long resisted by the lumber co's and logging contractors.
good to see you back!
Thanks! I get busy sometimes...
Ash contains mainly the P and K, whereas whole biomass contains lots of carbon, and varying amounts of N and S.
I suppose the N is emitted as a gas along with the CO2, but the S could (and probably should) be scrubbed out of the exhaust, right?
I believe this is not the case in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland where most of the biomass is derived from the forest products industry.
Here's a chart (auf Deutsch) from the Austrian Biomass Association:
Over 80% of the source material is derived from forest products (all the shades of green and blue).
And what else would you do with Hackschnitzel anwyay -- Eat it? ;-)
Jon
"And what else would you do with Hackschnitzel anwyay -- Eat it? ;-)"
Gotta love those Austrian and german words!
I should point out, that an increasing amount of the biomass being burned in Europe is coming from... North America!
Don;t know when we''ll see biomass/wood pellets in the energy databrowsers, but here is a link to a table of world production for 2009.
http://www.pellet.org/wpac_003.htm
In 2010 Europe used 10m tons of pellets, and 1.5m of those came from Canada/US. Pellets are the fastest growing forest products industry in north America.
Hmmmmmmmmmm
What else would you do with (holz)hackschnitzel?
That would be"woodchips" in the lowest of low German dialects known as English.
To draw on another quaint Germanism, may I suggest hugelkultur??
http://newworldgeek.com/?p=1286
We are already in a tug of war on a number of fronts between fuel and food--energy and sustenance.
I'm afraid I am always going to fall on the side of sustenance, since we have lived long as a species without much in the way of energy (beyond what we could generate with our own bodies).
But we have never lived very long, as far as I know, without food.
(Apologies to all breathetarians, of course)
Not a stab at you, but it irritates me that biomass proponents think they've found a new source of energy from a previously untapped resource. They're ignorant if they think these sources weren't already being used for fuel, fertilizer, and other products.
I look at biomass as, often, an ignored and/or wasted resource. Certainly, it is getting used for somethings, but not others, and often the way it is used, is not very efficient - see my comments above about slash burning.
An example of the wrong way to use it is happening in Australia, where a coal fired power co is paying farmers to grow trees for future, carbon neutral fuel. Sounds good, at first, but the farms are 300mi away from the power stn, so you will have lots of fuel being used to truck the wood, and the ash will be mixed with the coal ash, and so is removed permanently from the farm system. The farm gets its electricity, ultimately, from this station(after 300 mi of line loss).
A better way to go is to set up a small biomass power station at the nearby town (say 1-5MWe) using gasifier -ICE , which is as efficient as large scale steam. This way there is minimal transport of the wood, or the electricity, it decreases load on the transmission system instead of increasing it, and the ash can be returned. And the jobs and revenue stay in the farming community instead of mostly going to the power co.
So, biomass is certainly not a new energy source, but we can, carefully, apply new ideas and technology to make it work better, and more sustainably. We can never power our whole society from it, unless our society depopulates substantially, but it can be a good economic activity in certain places, and more profitable/lower risk than farming, in marginal areas.
What large and significant source of biomass was formerly going to waste?
"We can never power our whole society from it"
Not even a tiny bit, at least not sustainably.
What large and significant source of biomass was formerly going to waste?
Lets see..
Most sewage sludge goes to landfill
Most food waste goes to landfill
Lots of wood waste goes to landfill
Some of these things are just incinerated, with no energy recovery.
There are beaches in my area (BC coast) that have banks of driftwood 30' high, and plenty of logs floating around at river mouths.
Lots of farmers have marginal land that is not used, that can grow trees for energy - but they don't at present as there is no market for such. An energy forests does not need to be clearcut, it can be harvested continually, while maintaining biodiversity, and will produce more using less water and nutrients, and fossil fuels, than any cropping system. Properly managed, you can also get food out of it and/or run ivestock.
There are vast areas of forest that accumulate lots of wood on the ground, which is usually gotten rid of by burning - sometimes controlled, but not if nature beats us to it - then you lose the trees too.
There is one billion (!) tons of standing dead trees in BC, killed by mountain pine beetle. Other areas of dry pine forest in western Canada and US have about the same amount again. They are getting drier each year and burn very well, especially when struck by lightning and we get to watch vast areas burn uncontrollably. If they just stand there, they prevent regeneration of the forest, so you have a still life landscape for a decade or more.
Many sawmills still just burn bark/sawdust with no energy recovery.
The energy used in collecting transporting recycling paper/cardboard can (in some areas far from paper mills) exceed the energy that is available as a fuel.
So there are lots of sources, you just have to know what you are looking for. A waste is just something in the wrong time or place.
Not even a tiny bit, at least not sustainably.
Depends which societies you are talking about. Canada could. New Zealand could, Australia could (with a bit of work) you just need to have lots of land and not too many people - some countries have that.
I believe Finland is number two in the world, behind Ireland, for burning its peat resources for energy. Both for home heating, and for power plants.
This nuclear disaster in Japan is going to be a disaster for the environment, not directly from the leaking radiation, but by rejection of the cleanest form of energy on the planet.
Perhaps, but would you have your children drink the water in Tokyo? Tough times. No easy solutions.
Actually I'd be more worried about some folks basements (radon) than the water in Tokyo. Would you drink water from within or under any of thousands of rubbish dumps or hazardous waste dumps in the US? By number and volume, there's far more to worry about.
As far as this accident, would you have been in favor of ending chemicals manufacturing after the Minamata or Bhopal disasters?
Mistakes made - lessons learned. It's too valuable to civilization to give up because of a disaster that can be prevented with superior processes and engineering. Outside of this disaster, it's a relatively very clean source of power.
Outside of [these]disaster[s], it's a relatively clean source of power.
Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
Lincoln"s last words: "I need to see this play like I need a hole in the head...."
Anyway, if you're in favor of discontinuing any industrial processes if they cause a disaster, are you in favor of discontinuing mining, manufacturing chemicals, using natural gas?.....
Pretty sure natural gas kills far far more people, and destroys far more property than nuclear power.
Yes. I'm in favor of discontinuing, as quickly as possible, all current human practices that are not sustainable, and are harmful to the functioning ecology of the planet.
Aren't you?
I'm not interested in going back to living in the stone age, and I don't take for granted how my computer is made, or solar and wind turbine equipment, or EVs, or any of the many modern conveniences and activities that I enjoy.
The mere fact you're using a computer demonstrates you're not in favor of discontinuing mining, the processing of minerals, manufacture of chemicals, etc.
Or maybe you're feeling guilty now, and are going to walk away from it........
Neither am I, although that's a red herring. It's toxic industry as we know it today, or stones, is it?
All of those things that you mention can exist within cradle to cradle recycling loops. Given a smaller and stable global population we have already extracted plenty of minerals to provide for a closed loop system in perpetuity. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that there is anything that we currently do, technologically, that we could not do with non-toxic chemicals and processes. I believe it is political and economic hurdle, not a technical impossibility.
Fantasy? Sure. We will do as we do until we can't do it anymore. It's our genes that got us here.
Who said anything about the stone age?
As far as I can tell nuclear engineers were the cave men here, they used terrible designs to maximize profits. So the barbarians were in fact the nuclear proponents and capitalists. Not the other way around. Get a grip. They failed because they wanted to fail. They knew the costs and risks.
No one likes the chemical barbarians either who make chemicals carelessly. They are also from the stone age. They are the same sort of evil.
It is not some magical thing that happened like an asteroid. It is on the Ring of Fire in a major Tsunami Zone.
Tsunamis are in the Japanese vocabulary and they understand them. They are very aware, except of course when deisgning nuclear plants, which is ODD to me.
No no thanks to nuclear in a know HIGH RISK area. And yes I think only cave men would consider it. snicker ;-)
Lawmakers had mandated 6m walls toward the sea to guard against tsunamis, so I guess someone had done a risk analysis there and was wrong. Your idea that everything is the fault of greedy profit seekers, however, is your problem, not reality.
Yes thanks to nuclear in a known high risk area. Earthquake-wise it worked well. With diesel generators higher placed, or the passive cooling of new reactors such as AP-1000, this won't repeat. (And yes, nuclear accidents will happen again, some other way, albeit with ever-increasing intervals as we learn and build better designs, but we have to accept this as alternatives are worse.)
(And yes, nuclear accidents will happen again, some other way, albeit with ever-increasing intervals as we learn and build better designs
Of course those intervals would be computed in MW produced. If nuclear generation were significantly ramped up the worldwide (increased by a factor of 3 or 4 or more) I would expect the intervals between accidents would likely decrease when simply measured in calendar days.
Designs have improved considerably, and are more standardized today. I would expect intervals to increase.
The processes aren't so superior. We were just shown that the sequence of 'solutions' at Macondo pretty much matched line for line what they did for Ixtoc.. 30 years before, just 5000' deeper. Junk Shot, Cap one, Relief well, Cap 2 ...
It's a spitball contest with different colored paper.
They ARE learning lots of lessons on how to game the narrative, it seems.
Would you argue for the disuse of Aluminum because of the Ajka alumina plant accident?
If not, why?
I'm not arguing for the shuttering of Aluminum or the Metals or Chemicals Industries, but they do have to be held to STRICT emissions and tailings standards.. which so far, I can't see being impossible goals..
Nuclear we don't have the ability to control, especially within Peak Oil, Climate Change and/or the ravages of a growing Economic Crisis. That Thoroughbred will not tolerate such Rustic, Farm conditions, and will bite even the hands that are trying to feed it pure sugar.
It says more than enough, however to see you guys hiding behind Bhopal, Alcoa and Coal in order to make Nuclear look 'Clean' by comparison. It helps put Nuke on the right part of the spectrum..
That statement is simple political rhetoric. The Life Cycle Assessments show nuclear to be clean. The other industrial accidents have been mentioned to expose double standards towards nuclear, nothing else.
Nuclear is a bit like flight. Very secure on average (killed/passenger mile or TWh) but accidents are spectacular media fodder.
Telling us 'well, OTHER industries have spills that they cover up and lie about too.' Is exactly my point in showing just how clean Nuclear is NOT.
Look at the Fukushima track record, humbly apologizing for previous lies and scandals.. leaks and engineering tweaks to cover them up... and then going and doing it again. It's a Dirty and Dangerous industry with a very Clean Front Office. A Hollywood facade..
Now you shift your focus to lies and cover-ups. I don't care. Either it's clean or it's not, regardless. History shows it to be clean and LCAs shows it to be clean. Theory and reality agrees.
This is patently false.
As I have stated in other threads the Boxing day tsunami was 24 metres high in Aceh with the 9.0 magnitude earthquake. The lesson learned should have been along the lines that this could happen elsewhere, yet in one of the most geologically active regions of the world, the nuclear industry as a whole did nothing to help protect the Fukushima plant.
How many other/new mistakes will be made in siting further nuclear reactors, what lessons have been learned that have been rectified in existing plants, or does the industry only learn from mistakes that cause disaster in planning for newer plants?
I think you have a good point. There is some talk of energy storage for renewables, and of course the people who live off-grid have backup batteries or generators. Some of the ideas are interesting - such as the idea of switching to an electric car-based system, and using car batteries as part of the overall grid - but as for things working and ready here and now, it seems pretty thin. However, I disagree with your statement that they are worse off than nuclear, simply because I think nuclear will be very hard to build with the combination of citizen resistance in democratic countries and high costs to build. Especially if the contamination in Japan turns out to be more serious, or affects Tokyo more seriously than it has so far. If you are in a financial crisis AND lots of people hate nuclear, is nuclear going to be feasible? I can't imagine it.
Also, I would say you can build your grid out of any type of energy source - but the results will differ. A solar and wind based grid could be built if there was feasible or distributed storage, or if society operated on the assumption of less constant energy. Only if we assume things are going to keep going like they have been going does the argument hold that we "can't" do this or that. Ultimately I tend toward semi-doomerism, so I would say what will happen (is happening to some extent) is that financial crashes will created demand destruction in proportion to events. Of course, recently an act of god created demand destruction cancelling out some of the other geopolitical events lowering oil production.
Also, what ever happened to geothermal energy? Iceland uses an awful lot, and it would seem practical in places like Japan or the Western US. Yet it seems to have dropped entirely from the discussion of renewable energy.
Perhaps the off-grid people are doing it right - maybe our whole idea of centralized power production and energy storage isn't the way to go for the future. But assuming we keep trying to do the same thing forever, gas has a big advantage over renewables. When everyone starts using gas, then that advantage very quickly will turn into a disadvantage as the price rises.
I believe that Indonesia and the Philippines are among the few countries that have geothermal potential near the level of the US and Iceland.
Both are working very hard to develop the resource with the Philippines in lead.
Pretty much the whole "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific has excellent geothermal resources, but many countries in Central and South America, and Asia lack the infrastructure and capital to exploit those resources. But El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica all get more than 10% of electricity from geothermal currently.
Globally, building out geothermal capacity would make much more economic sense than a rush to put nuclear plants into countries that do not have the infrastructure or political capacity to operate such a dangerous technology with weapon proliferation possibilities safely.
Other than tapping existing shallow hot aquifers, such as is done at The Geysers in California (largest geothermal in the world, BTW), Iceland, the Philippines, Italy, etc, geothermal is yet another pipe dream.
Distinguished from naturally occurring geothermal resources, enhanced geothermal is fraught with extremely high costs and technical problems. I wouldn't pour my money into it, unless I was Google, and needed the tax write off.
I would not underestimate geothermal. All those drilling rigs will be freed up as the oil drilling bonanza ends and people begin to see the writing on the wall. Ask the Philippines to discontinue geothermal and they lose 30% of their power. A little too early to call that one. Look at the plant in New Zealand. Started in 1958 and still making about ~150-180 mW of juice with very high capacity factors in the 90% range:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wairakei_Power_Station
Hawaii could run most of its base with geothermal if it wanted to, but alas shipfuls of coal seem to be in their future:
Geothermal:
http://www.punageothermalventure.com/PGV
Coal plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_Hawaii_Power_Plant
A slow turn to it will happen as the coal streams and nat gas dry up.
You're not understanding my comment, or at least the subject in general. The power station you cited isn't what I'm referring to. The one you cited taps an existing shallow aquifer containing waters hot enough to for our energy uses. It's to be distinguished from enhanced geothermal, which involves drilling hot rocks, fracking them, and pumping in water, as opposed to tapping an existing aquifer.
Sites like The Geysers and Wairiakei are unique geologic features, and relatively rare.
Sure. I see, but hot rocks and deep wells are possible with advanced drill practices developed by oil drilling today to get into deep water and sub-salt and so forth, meaning it will be possible to drill 5-10 km.
Yes, it is cheaper to burn NG but how much more of that can we develop.
I am not an expert but I tend to think geothermal is a renewable worth considering due to the issue of fossil fuel scarcity.
Geothermal does put out base power. Yes it is hard to drill. MIT is developing a spin-off company to drill using a newer technology.
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/51671/495728149.pdf?sequen...
I'd never argue it's not possible. What I am arguing is that it's fraught with technological problems that are too expensive to make it a practical endeavor.
Enhanced geothermal ≠ tapping naturally occurring situations like The Geysers.
hot rocks and deep wells are possible with advanced drill practices developed by oil drilling today to get into deep water and sub-salt and so forth, meaning it will be possible to drill 5-10 km.
If you drill that deep, you will never get your invested money, or your invested energy back. The EROEI would most likely be less than 1.
You're grossly underestimating how expensive and energy intensive it is to drill a deep well. You need to hit an oil and/or gas field (and a big one at that) to get this to pay.
Electric cars as storage points for renewables? Talk about a double pipe dream!
Can you imagine the switching and accounting technologies that would be needed to distribute, track, sort, and bill the flows involved? And what would people do when they awoke and found themselves stranded from driving to work because their car battery just had to be sucked dry to fill a hole in the grid?
More fundamentally, if we attempt to keep using personally owned, 95% idle, 3,500-pound machines to accomplish daily commutes, we are simply done for, regardless of the power source.
Your computer does more work just to show you a You Tube video of Cats Drinking from the Toilet.
Grid-tied Cars wouldn't have to be drained, as if the grid would ring them out like oranges when it was thirsty, you would have limits on how much discharge you'd allow, probably based on Price Buy Signals, and 'Time to Drive' settings..
Regardless, there are numerous other ways to implement storage for renewables, particularly Heating and Refrigeration/Freezer storage, which could drink up a lot of overpeaking windpower in pre-pressurized refrigerant, preheated water, overcooled industrial freezers, etc..
EV's on the grid would probably function in much smaller waves, like capacitor banks smoothing the supply.
on your last point, having EV's at all doesn't mean a promise to continue 'Happy Motoring'.. some might want that. I know that we will still need some wheels with motors to move things. You think we won't?
"Can you imagine the switching and accounting technologies that would be needed to distribute, track, sort, and bill the flows involved?"
As soon as it is allowed, there's be an app for that.
As noted above, computers do far more work for far less useful things.
I think an important distinction here is between user controlled load shedding/storage/V2G, and utility controlled.
For user controlled, I can program the EV to sell back if the price is higher than X, and maintain a minim charge level of Y - sounds a lot like stock trading, and there are *many" well developed, online systems for that.
So too, I can program my heating thermostat , and the fridge, hot water etc.
For the utility's point of view, this negative load would be just like wind and solar - predictable averages over time, but not on any given day. And like wind/solar, it would save fuel (peaking plants) but not capacity.
For utility controlled, they can then shed the loads when they need, and it is then the equivalent of a peaking load - this can save fuel and capacity. This is done all the time with industrial customers on interruptible rates. if you choose to drop x amount of load when asked , the utility will pay X. But, if you give the switch to the utility, so they don;t even have to ask, they just do it, then they will pay more than X, and do it more often, as it is far more valuable to them. You just have to have a load that can handle this - space heating and cooling are the most common candidates.
Now, I agree that the physical control equipment or the utility to turn on and off domestic heat, hot water and fridges would add cost, but it can be done.
I ran the electric utility for a ski resort where we had an active control system that monitored every baseboard heater and electric HW unit in 500 hotel rooms/condos, and we could shift significant load for short periods (hours not days), though you had less flexibility in occupied rooms.
And the equipment is getting cheaper. BUT, I don;t think this control equipment is really justified unless the consumer is willing to give control to the utility, and many won't. For commercial customers there is lots of scope for this sort of thing. For residential, i think mandatory time of use rates (for all customers, actually) is the way to go, and then they can program their loads and lifestyles accordingly. if they want to go to the trouble of a utility interactive control system then great, but as long as the customer can decide to end that arrangement (e.g house is sold and new owners don;t want it), the utility can't decommission generating capacity, all they can do is idle it.
I do agree about the wisdom of our obsession with My Personal Transportation Device, but I think we will only extract those from their cold, dead, hands.
That said, V2G capacity is a potentially useful function that ICE's can;t do.
Actually, I think all that is necessary is to plug in your EV at night with a timer and your meter does the accounting. Charge the vehicle at night when overall demand is low and you are doing the utility a big economic favor by increasing overall plant factor(coal or gas). Likewise, charge the EV at night when the wind is blowing in excess of system load levels, which will increase the wind system's plant factor. That's the beauty of a distributed system; lots of little supply and demand points even out the big peaks and valleys.
And then you will have a personal vehicle that is doing double duty, which is a heck of a lot better that what we are currently doing.
"Charge the vehicle at night when overall demand is low and you are doing the utility a big economic favor by increasing overall plant factor (coal or gas). "
And hydro too, as there are minimum river flows to maintain.
A post with almost no imagination. Thanks for contributing.
You are crazy if you think you would need to drain your battery each night. It is a statistical problem. 5 million plugged in cars can space shift power resources at small un-noticeable percentages to your appliances or to the grid if need be. It is a possible large scale cheap buffer.
One could make an agreement with the power company to offer there car for various levels of electric power buffering. Then later in the evening when the grid calms down the car can be topped off. Why is that so hard to understand. It is done with Smart metering and it is not rocket science. You trust the grocery store to scan your groceries right? LOL
Do a calculation to prove to me that it is impossible. But don't get on a soap box and act like you know something without numerical justification.
Batteries cost $500/kWh of storage. The Tesla's battery system is expected to retain 70% capacity after 5 years and 50,000 miles. That is a loss of 16 kWh capacity after 50,000 miles which draws 16,000 kWh in total. So you lose one kWh of capacity when you draw 1,000 kWh. Since that storage kWh cost $500, the average capacity loss per kWh used represents a cost of 50 cents.
Maybe this is a good argument to go to all EVs as soon as possible. It will be so expensive to drive it will kill the automobile as a viable transportation mode. There is no answer if the question is, how do we maintain our dependence on the automobile. We can't. And you haven't even shown the cost per mile just for the battery. EVs are great if you take out the motor, the batteries, and replace everything with a pedal drive train. Just put in really low gears.
Maybe this is a good argument to go to all EVs as soon as possible. It will be so expensive to drive it will kill the automobile as a viable transportation mode.
That would be my assessment of the current technology. If they make EV's mandatory, it won't be long before everyone is riding or walking everywhere and the freeways are empty. Hopefully they put in electric train service so people can make long trips, too.
Wow, that is a fascinating calculation jeppen. 50 cent/kwh storage cost plus 25-30% conversion loss plus generation and transmission cost, plus, O&M,plus profit, perhaps 75+ cents per kwh.
If those numbers hold up nobody will allow their car to be used as smart grid storage. It would undoubtedly violate the warranty.
At 50 cents/kwh a 1.5 GW nuke plant would gross $11.8 billion per year.
It is a fascinating calculation, but i don't think it is quite accurate.
Firstly, the Tesla uses an obsolete battery style. The current crop of Li-ions are good for up to 2000+ charge cycles and have less degradation, thanks partly to new chemistry, and advances in battery management systems.
here is a link to one mfr, there battery has 81% of original capacity after 2750 charge discharge cycles to 80% DoD- that is every day for 7.5 years.
http://www.valence.com/energy-storage/xp-12v-19v-lithium-phosphate-batte...
if you discharge the battery from 90% SOC to 50%, you can do LOTS of cycles - these batteries may well die of age rather than cycles.
But, assuming the battery dies after 3000 to 80%, and costs $500, we are looking at 0.167c/kWh. The difference between peak and offpeak rates in say, San Francisco, is about 30.5 to 5.3c/kWh, so you get 25.2c/kWh, and come out ahead. assuming we charge/discharge 0.5kWh, and lose 20% on the round trip, the battery would make a $120 profit over it's life.
http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-9.pdf
BUT in really high demand times, the power company charges 45c, and for customers that can give back power (curtailment) often offers more. In these cases, a 25kWh car can sell back, say 12kWh/day, and going from 45 to 5c, makes $4.8/day Assume 20 such days/year and you are at $1k/yr, or $40/1kWh battery/year.
All this is at current electricity prices, which are likely to go higher, and current batteries, which are likely to cost (slightly) less and have (slightly) longer life.
So while the Tesla was negative, current ones are now past break even, and in five years, the equation is likely to be better still. EV's themselves may still be very expensive, but the V2G part will likely be cost effective. If the utilities can make good use of it, they will pay for it. By the time this is a reality, there will be an app in the car's computer and/or your smartphone, that will automatically work out the situation and optimise how much, if any, to sell back to the grid. It is just another form of day trading, but one that actually performs a useful function.
The loss in capacity of a bettery is a function of the depth of discharge. The greater the battery is discharged, the shorter its lifetime and the less total energy that can be stored. How to prolong lithium-based batteries
Since charging a lithium battery to 100% decreases its lifetime, lithium batteries for EV's are usually changed to about 80%. Cycling the battery between 70% and 80% will not decrease its lifetime as much as you calculated, but your point is still correct. Using an expensive battery designed for portable use in an EV for load leveling the grid would be expensive.
However, after the capacity of a battery has dropped too low for an acceptable range in an EV, the battery may still be useful in a stationary system owned by an electric utility for load leveling. If a used EV battery sells for $25 / kWh, then a stationary system may be practical.
I find this idea quite neat. But it's obviously far away and will need a lot of money and research. SMART grid might help with some of the issues. I'd see this as an engineering challenge and I think we could do with some real innovation. Electric cars supplying energy will obviously require intelligent control, better batteries and some fairly significant investment into infrastructure.
Baseload, storage, costs - yep, all huge issues which will need a lot of money research and innovation. Nuclear would be clean if it weren't for the scary amount of waste piling up. To date only the Fins think they've found a safe storage option.
Maybe we need to accept that there is no such thing as truly cheap energy. We can't switch to large scale renewable energy supply any time soon - but we can develop it further. I think the key to renewable energy supply is a hugh, sophisticated grid network. That might be one way to get around the baseload problem.
My personal opinion is that the best way to go is exclusively solar and wind. Here's the kicker, something that your average Joe can't accept:
Power usage will need to be limited by availability. Hydro power will be available for mission-critical applications, and for everyone else who needs 24/7 power, they will supply their own battery backups and backup generators.
For the rest of the world, your meter will be told how much power is available, and price the power accordingly. It then talks to your devices, which either run or don't run based upon the pricing. You throw your clothes in the washer, and it starts up when there is power for it. You watch your TV when it's cheap to do so, you pay the price, or maybe you fill up your batteries when power is cheap, then use the batteries when the power is expensive.
Why? Well, I shouldn't have to cite anything, as most of this stuff is likely documented somewhere in this thread anyhow regarding "conventional" power sources.
Coal: Nasty as heck in every step of the process. Finite resource.
Gas: Hydrofracking. We're realizing the potential negative consequences of poisoning our groundwater with these techniques. Also a finite resource.
Nuclear: Never been done right from the start. There are safe technologies available, but thanks to over-engineered failures over the years at various plants, not a viable choice politically for a while. Also, nasty when it comes to mining, which stirs up uranium, polluting groundwater in Texas, for instance. Finite resource.
Hydro: Almost fully utilized in locations it can be utilized.
So, Solar and Wind are "expensive" and not baseline power producers.
My answer: SO WHAT?
Our system, our ideas of what is acceptable need to change to adapt to the power source, and stop trying to lean on old tech.
Gas should be reserved for cooking and heating homes. Solar Hot Water systems for hot water, PV for electricity. 2kw of panels is all I need to cover my energy usage, excluding heating my home and hot water for showers, etc. With a large enough SHW setup, that could be covered as well, with natural gas or propane as a backup option.
/rant
As I saw someone else say below, strong form demand management (which is what this requires), is politically toxic, especially in the US. And you can bet the fossil fuel powers that be will spend heavily on a disinformation campaign to make it increasingly toxic.
And as three seconds of reflection on relatively recent history shine brightly in your eyes (or slap you with sharply across the face...whatever metaphor you prefer), what is and what isn't politically 'toxic' or doable can change in a heartbeat--or at the rate of the Berlin Wall falling or Apartheid collapsing...
If anyone on this forum thinks that what is needed is the kind of thing that can be completely easily be slipped in to what appears to be acceptable in the current political and cultural climate, they may need some glasses or something.
Can we stop with the trying to constantly censor any idea that doesn't seem to conform itself perfectly with the current political banalities, errr, I mean 'realities.' Anyone with a modicum of brainpower can see that the 'current political realities' are totally and utterly divorced from anything remotely resembling actual, real reality.
This will either become clear to the general population (or whoever else has power to alter these 'realities') and then all sorts of previously unthinkable things will become possible; or it will not any no remotely sane approach will ever have any chance of influencing any decision. If you want to plan your whole world based on the assumption that the latter is the only option, go ahead. But please stop shooting down ideas of those hoping for, praying for, and working for the first scenario coming in to being at some point.
[/rant]
Since natural gas is also used to make fertalizer through the Haber process, plastic, ethanol and as a feedstock in many industries, what will replace these other uses? How will urban houses be heated when the global production of natural gas peaks in a few decades? Fossil carbon emission from burning it needs to be drawn out of the atmosphere.
"Our system, our ideas of what is acceptable need to" adopt a long term perspective and heed the consequences of our present choices. We must be smarter than yeast which begins by recognizing that we live in a Petri dish, i.e., a finite environment with finite resources.
You are one of the people who "get" the Renaissance of wind power.
This is the basic quality of low-carbon energy. Think about it, zero-carbon means that either you don't get the energy source from extraction from the ground, or what you get is nuclear fuel (fission or fusion) that is easy to mine and hard to use.
Duh moment: If your costs are not on the front-end of the fuel, then where are they? They are ALL in capital. If they are all in capital, do you have maneuverability? No. The only maneuvering consists of throwing away otherwise nearly free energy. Hydrocarbon energy is pay-as-you-go and zero-carbon energy is pay up front.
Our pricing system is for a hydrocarbon system. We will not continue with that system because it is unsustainable and that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. The transition will come like this:
Option 1: Pay $texas$ for your electricity
Option 2: Pay $texas$ at some times for electricity and really low prices at other times, completely sporadically.
People will choose option 2. It would be nice if they could think ahead and build the infrastructure and integrate it into their lives before it becomes critical. lol. haha. ahahahahaha!
Seriously man, you totally get it. But you're on of the few.
Well, the reason why I understand it is because as an experiment, I lived out on my land with 180 watts of solar power, and 400 watts of intermittent wind power for a year. My only heat was a small propane catalytic heater. I had no air conditioning. I did my work on my laptop, and I was connected to the net using an AT&T AirCard that would connect me at a lowly 36kbps...
What I learned from that experiment was the ability to use power when it was available. I was running off a 12v system, with 2 deep cycle batteries in parallel. (Should have used two 6's in series, but 2 12v batteries is what I had.) I learned to us my 12v TV when the sun was shining, or when the wind turbine was going. Sure, I could run off of battery power, but when I used it during the day, it was "free" as it didn't discharge the batteries. Battery discharge costs money, as it places wear in the batteries.
I'm back to living in a carbon-fueled location at the moment, as I have a different job, and commuting 1.5 hrs in each direction costs more than renting a place closer to work.
As a side note comment to BlueTwilight, I agree, nat gas should be used for feedstock for physical items above all other uses. My main point was that nat gas shouldn't be used for electricity generation, or for transportation. I'm also of the mind that it shouldn't be used for fertilizer, as I believe we should use more organic forms of fertilization, but I also realize the feasibility of that being done full scale is limited without some paradigm shifts in the farming industry as well. :)
Sounds good to me, so I have to disagree. Stochastic relative to demand is a technically correct description. Unless you just want to call it stochastic.
If a farmer was depending on rain to grow his crops, he would classify it as "stochastic relative to demand". He could only predict it with only some degree of certainty, and that certainty goes up over a number of growing seasons. If a long term confidence ceased to exist, farmers would stop growing crops. We have a long term confidence in wind in just the same way.
That's essentially what stochastic implies.
Actually, in some parts of the USA, that long term confidence doesn't exist, or at least it's very dodgy. That is, a rain-dependent farmer would have a reasonable chance, over a lifetime, of being put out of business and being forced to move into town by a few successive years of drought. That's why we have crop insurance, and it's one reason/excuse for farm subsidies, corrupt as those may be in some respects.
What's unclear amidst hand-waving discussions such as these is this: what is the "crop insurance" backing up, say, wind, should wind ever reach a high level of penetration. Sure, the long term average may be fine, just as the long term average may be fine or even excellent on some of those drought-prone croplands that would be abandoned without crop insurance. But what happens when the big blocking high parks over most of the USA for a couple of summer months, temperatures soar, and wind electricity production tanks? Penetration is still too low for that to be an immediate problem, but aren't policy-makers obligated to ask such questions?
Sounds like a good reason to have plenty of solar on hand.
Reads like you're also not aware of the severe limitations of solar power.
You are missing energy storage. Pumped storage. Concentrated solar can store heat all night long in molten salt. Hydro stores water behind a dam. Geothermal draws radioactive thermal energy from the dirt -- continuous duty. Solar PV provides peak power, when power is needed during the daytime when people are doing things.
Yes, you need base power, but you do not need 100% base power.
Renewables are not excluded by major physical constraints: mostly politics and grid regulations are in the way. Ya think NG and Coal and Nukes are happy about renewables. Can the planet withstand large amounts of CO2. Not looking good. LOL. There is money in this game.
The A/C needed in the Midwest is going to get worse as the planet heats up. I guess people should adapt to the problem, by doing what my grandparents did -- open the window. LOL
"Pumped storage"
Limited in scope, major losses in pumping, and currently mostly used to take low value off peak generation, and sell it at premium peak time prices.
"Ya think NG and Coal and Nukes are happy about renewables."
I most certainly do. Wind and solar are a boon to the natural gas industry. A guarantee we're going to drink that milkshake just like we drank the petroleum milkshake.
"Geothermal draws radioactive thermal energy from the dirt -- continuous duty."
Don't confuse geographical situations like the The Geysers with enhanced geothermal.
"Solar PV provides peak power, when power is needed during the daytime when people are doing things."
If you actually count energy use, which you should, and not just electricity use, peak energy use in many areas is actually on early winter mornings when it's coldest, and folks are getting up to turn on lights, shower, dry hair, make tea and coffee, cook breakfast, and power up that computer to debate on The Oil Drum.
France and some utilities within the southern US, report their record wintertime peaks, and in some cases, all time peaks, in early morning hours. If you're not new to debating this subject, you're aware that heat pumps are the answer to weening off of burning fossils for heat. It's heat pumps and resistance heating that gives southern utilities and France their early morning wintertime peaks. Although heat pumps are superior to burning fossils and resistance heating, they're still the same refrigeration units that cool us in the summer, and they still draw a lot of current.
The simple answer is that wind and solar do not provide capacity (MW), but only electricity (MWh). Today, this works fine with the existing capacity in the system, and it can continue to do so for a while, but your question is a fair one.
The good news is that gas-fired capacity is actually quite cheap: for plants that you don't expect to use that much, the gas bill will be low in absolute amounts. A simple way to look at this is that if every single MW of wind was backed by a MW of gas, it would only add a third to the cost of wind MWh, as gas MWs costs one thirs of wind MWs (plus a little bit in cost of gas for the few MWh generated when wind is not available). If you looked a a theoretical system with 4 times the capacity of wind that you actually need on average (to take into account the lower capacity factor, then you'd only need to build 1MW of gas for every 4 (or maybe 3, to take into account of peaks in demand) MW of wind, so an additional cost of just 10% to your initial capital outlay.
You'd have full backup by gas-power plants (peakers all), and they would be used very sparingly, as most of your MWh could be provided by wind. This is a very theoretical exercise, but it does provide an additional limit to how expensive backup can be in a wind-intensive power system.
In other words, the cost of MWs and the cost of MWhs are not the same thing and nothing about one can easily be inferred from the other, esepcially with technologies that have such a different cost base than wind and gas (wind has expensive MWs but low marginal costs, gas has cheap MWs but margianl costs driven by the cost of gas).
Don't peaks in demand in most places almost always coincide with hot, sunny days? That always struck me as the strongest argument to have a good quantity of PV in the mix, even when taken on its own it doesn't seem as good a return on investment (in terms both in terms of $ and EROEI) as wind and some other things.
The other thing that often gets overlooked in these discussions is demand management. What's wrong with scaling back on various non-essential usages when there are long periods of lulls? We are used to adjusting our lives around other extremes of weather (around here that is mostly snow days, the Spanish--historically, anyway--were famous for very reasonably taking siestas in the hottest parts of the day...). This would just be another case of allowing nature to play some roll in shaping our patterns of activity. Why is this such an unimaginable horror to some people?
"Why is this such an unimaginable horror to some people?"
Because you will have some customers who do not have to cut back, and others who do. People hate being told to cut back when they others are not, and the decisions as to who has priority would be subject to LOTS of political interference.
For example, you can"t (really) cut back on the hospitals, schools, water and sewage treatment etc, as they are "essential" But then the food stores will say so is their refrigeration. And if they stay open and have power, then, like a Wal-Mart, they can sell all their other things, while the apparel store next door, definitely not essential, is darkened. Do places like a Disney world, energy hogs that they are, have to shut down, even though they provide thousands of jobs? Do the hotels close rooms, etc etc. Whichever city takes this pill first, will be unlikely to attract new business/industry if they have unreliable power. if they guarantee reliable power to industry X, everyone who is not involved with X feels (rightly) they are giving up for the benefit of X, and on it goes.
I work in water demand side management, and these same issues come up, all the time, with planning for (serious) shortages and imposing water restrictions. But with power, it will be a headache on a much greater scale.
AS for the PV's, look at the real cost of utility scale (best economies of scale)PV system, and you would get better value for money with wind and gas backup. PV is still a very expensive way to make electricity.
Minor incentives are more than enough to convince a number of major institutions now to cut back their electric use during peak. This would just be an extension of this. It might take some adjustment getting there, but once it becomes habit, no one will notice.
As for PV, are you basing your judgment of it on price at peak usage?
Depends whether you are talking "institutions" (i.e. government) or commercial/industrial customers. It is not easy to convince a hotel to cut back on A/C for occupied rooms in summer. But this does not mean things can't be done, and I have done many such projects, but my experience is that you need major, not minor, incentives for commercial/industrial customers. That is why the local utility, BC Hydro, is offering to pay up to 60% of the capital costs for permanent energy efficiency improvements - I call that a major incentive.
With Pv, the cost of building it, is independent of the price you sell the power for. It costs the same to build a kW of PV here (Vancouver) as in California, but, of course, in Ca, you will get more kWhs out of it, and they are worth more on those hot summer days. But that doesn't change the fact it was expensive to put in, and without all the gov subsidies, it would not be getting put in. This indicates, that even Ca peak prices are not high enough to create a useful payback on solar, so why pay people to do something economically unproductive?
If PV is $5k/kW(installed) and gov is paying 1/3 of that, $1700/kW, they gov could have bought an entire 1kW of wind for that. Put the subsidy to wind instead, and you have then got 3kW for the same amount of private and public money. Capacity factor is about the same for both, but the wind will save 3x the fuel (for NG peaking plants) per year, and lower the average electricity cost more.
, Now once wind is saturated (about 20% of total) then you may want to look at solar, but even then, it is so expensive that to build enough to make any real difference is too expensive - better to do DSM.
The other problem I have with subsidising rooftop, is that this encourages continued A/C use on those hot days, as they are producing it themselves, and were paid to do so. With not panels, you have a greater incentive to conserve, by whatever means. Doesn't mean rooftop should not be allowed, just that I don;t think it should be subsidised.
But it is very sexy, and gets panels on the roofs of many registered voters. That is why all PV subsidies are chosen, and paid for, by elected governments, and when utilities implement, and have to pay for, generation/DSM, they never do PV - there is much better value to be had.
Sorry, Paul, but you seem to have no glimmering idea what you are talking about here.
By 'institutions' I don't mostly mean government. I mean colleges, universities, businesses, factories...much of the segment of society that uses the majority of energy.
Right now they are managing their demand based on incentives from utilities for how much electricity they use at what times.
Doing this for renewables represents no great disconnect from what happens right now.
Claiming otherwise implies that you are ignorant of basic facts about electricity use and management in most of the US, or that you do know these fairly basic facts, and that you are intentionally trying to mislead people here for some end that I have no idea of.
Dohboi,
In the utility business (which I work in) , be it water, gas or electricity, users are divided into Commercial, Industrial and Institutional, commonly called CII, or ICI. Institutional does not include business and factories - they would be the commercial and industrial.
Right now they are managing their demand based on incentives from utilities for how much electricity they use at what times.
Well, some more than others, and not all are on time of use rates, either. Many (and all in BC and Alberta, for example) are on demand+energy rates, irrespective of time. And others like large customers of Portland General Electric (http://www.portlandgeneral.com/our_company/corporate_info/regulatory_doc...) the difference between peak and off peak is so low (5.99 to 5.23c/kWh) that there is hardly any incentive to load shift.
Most customers manage their demand first according to their business needs. Then, if they can, and if it is worth their while, they will manage to minimise electricity costs. One (not very sustainable but real world) example - a ski area doing snowmaking - when its cold enough, they run their system regardless of the electricity prices because no snow = no skiing, and the costs of shutting down and starting up for peak/offpeak periods is simply not worth it. An aluminium smelter can;t shed load at off peak times, as the hot metal will start to cool and solidify fairly quickly, same goes for many other industrial processes, where they may be able to shed some ancillary, but not primary loads.
Other customers, like a cold storage, have lots of flexibility to shift load, and will do so. But, quite simply, there needs to be enough in it to be worthwhile, and many cases, especially where control equipment is required (e.g. active load control for hotel rooms) there just isn't the payback.
In short, the utility costs need to be on the verge of "painful" for anything other than low hanging fruit to be picked.
Doing this for renewables represents no great disconnect from what happens right now.
Actually, it does, if you mean doing it according to the production patterns of wind (or solar). Peak and off peak periods, as presently exist, are defined periods of the day, and operations can plan and schedule things accordingly. Wind fluctuations are random, and managing load to this is not nearly so simple. Scheduling equipment to be down for maintenance during a peak power period is easy when it is known in advance. If the wind suddenly drops and power prices spike, you don;t have this option, all you can do is turn off discretionary loads. In effect, you are trying to schedule according to weather, and that is much harder than time of day. When you get into the interruptible rates, the differential can be high enough to make the snap decision to shut down - some mines/sawmills will do this because they can afford to pay their staff to go home, and sell back the power and still come out ahead. but if that sawmill is filling an order for a customer that needs to be shiopped tomorrow, they will not shut down regardless of the power price.
Claiming otherwise implies that you are ignorant of basic facts about electricity use and management in most of the US, or that you do know these fairly basic facts, a
No, it means dealing with the realities of these situations. I have been doing DSM for water and electricity (mostly water) for ten years - I am very well versed in the facts of trying to implement DSM. Quite simply, the customer will always put their needs first - the trick is to have DSM options that align with their needs, which, of course, are different for different customers. The more complicated the management involved (on their part) the less likely they are to do DSM.
You (the utility) can do "involuntary DSM" of course, like water restrictions/rolling power curtailments, but you only do that when you have no other choice - otherwise you lose the goodwill and trust of your customers very fast.
And that you are intentionally trying to mislead people here for some end that I have no idea of.
I am not trying to mislead anyone - I come here to learn, and in areas where I have some knowledge, contribute. Part of that means showing the realities, and limitations, of certain things, such as DSM.
Sorry for the harsh tone in my earlier comment--I get cranky sometimes.
And thanks for your long and thoughtful reply.
I still do think you over state a bit. Wind is not completely unpredictable. Not many locations have major Aluminum smelting plants in them. And, I'm sorry, but faced with the enormous challenges coming down the pike, keeping snow on the slopes when it isn't snowing just can't continue to be a major priority for society.
On the other hand, I probably understated. Adjustments to some intermittency will not be painless, but they don't have to spell the end of civilization (there are plenty of other candidates for that). We do have to start reshaping society to fit our more energy constrained reality. And that will mean adjustment that will seem painful to some.
But the alternative, it seems to me, is to just burn everything in sight till there is nothing left, or turn full tilt to nuclear and see more and more mega-cities with radioactive water. In other words, I don't see an alternative to managing load. And yes, eventually that management will need to be more aggressive.
Thanks again for your insights and your service.
Paul, maybe it's best not to be too practical about PV on rooftops, even if it's subsidized and used for AC. (Remember when Judas got all bent out of shape because Jesus bought the foot ointment?)
I think you should listen to your instinct about the huge value in the increased visibility, coolness (literally) and familiarity that PV panels bring to the community. Solar, and the big energy questions that go with it, are unfamiliar to most people, plus maybe even unpleasant, math-ridden, and uncomfortable. Lots of compelling reasons for ordinary people to go full ostrich on the whole issue. So I say anything that gets regular people standing around talking kilowatt this and renewable that is great, and still important to do. And if people back into it gradually, like "hey, I'm using a renewable resource to continue my indulgent lifestyle!" well, at least they're on their way, and eventually, they will get to the more unsettling part of the math.
Tim Russell stubbornly drove his hybrid around Hollywood for a jilllion years before the cool people finally took notice. Geeks sweated to get computers to add 2+3, to the derision of pretty girls everywhere...now who doesn't regularly text and tweet? It takes time for technology to move from seeming obscure and useless to being seen as simple and useful. (I speak as a late adopter of new tech.) So here's to PV AC! ;)
Hi Erica,
The reason why i get a little bent out of shape on (subsidised) PV is because it is very expensive for what it achieves. If we are wanting to produce serious amounts of electricity, it is far from the best way to go. If we are wanting to improve awareness amongst people about energy issues, and get people talking kilowatt this and that, we can achieve it, much cheaper and faster with some shock increase in rates, or curtailments - that gets everyone talking and motivated to do something.
I am a resource conservation engineer (one of those geeks who was derided by the girls)- I work mostly in water efficiency - something that you can't "generate" like you can with electricity - all you can do is carefully use (and sometimes re-use) what you have got. With electricity, having a renewable resource is great - but using it wastefully promptly defeats the purpose. When we do high efficiency showerheads, if the person takes longer showers, we have achieved nothing.
So too with subsidised PV, all we have achieved is people who can afford to pay for the unsubsidised portion, feeling good about it, and maybe more aware, while everyone else has had to pay for that. In this case government is not using the resources (tax revenue) very efficiently.
So, I'd disagree that "anything" that get's people talking is good . If the gov objective is to get people talking, then look for the best way to do that. If the objective is to save energy/generate renewable energy, then look for the best way to do that - they are not always the same thing.
The Prius does actually save fuel - lots of it. Solar PV to run your AC is the equivalent of running a Hummer on ethanol or biodiesel- a wasteful use of a renewable resource - how much has the driver really learned?
I guess where I really differ is that I don;t see PV as simple and useful - except for off grid situations. If we are in need of renewable energy, it is the hardest/most expensive way to do it. People can choose to do it themselves, of course, but I think gov needs to be more focused on results - I don;t want to pay taxes/higher utility rates primarily for others to feel good - I don't think we can afford that luxury - I'd rather see the problems solved.
Paul, I think your Hummer analogy is stuck in a deep rut, you might need a solar powered winch to get it out of there.
Disclaimer: I have no stake or affiliation with this company, I just met their engineers at a recent F.A.R.E. conference.
http://www.usrenewableenergyinc.com/
Oh yeah, I think they have some small PV panels to power the circulation fans. Not exactly running your Hummer on biodiesel.
Yet another scheme requiring another source of heat when solar isn't there for you. More resources for back up, likely powered by fossils when insolation rate is low.
First of all when solar isn't available you also tend to need less cooling. If you had read anything in the link I posted you might have known that the system continues to cool for 96 hours without any sun or backup power source. Now imagine if this system is used for cooling in a well planned, well insulated building that doesn't need much cooling to begin with and is inhabited by people who are not total morons and actually understand limits and know how to live within their means. Yeah, I know it's hard but give it your best shot anyway...
>First of all when solar isn't available you also tend to need less cooling
Yea, you need heating. BTW, unlike the southwestern US, in the hot southern states, the rainy season is during the hot summer months.
Fred, he's got you here. If a particular item doesn't solve every problem in every location, it is worthless. And yes, I'm being sarcastic.
I live near the worlds largest solar thermal plant in the world. We use just as much energy for winter heat as we do for summer cooling, except for now, we're mostly drinking the natural gas milkshake for that.
I recommend working on your knowledge of geography.
Paul;
I'm going to side with Fred (Unsurprisingly, I suppose) and say you sound really stuck on this PV cost thing. Right in this thread, we have a homeowner ( DR_DR ) who has said his PV have already paid for themselves in his outright costs, and are on their way to recover the amount that the subsidies provided, all well before the expected lifespan of the system has run its course.
That's a large item from the Expense column that is reliably moving over into the Profits column.
Beyond the steady 'Turtle' Profits that this source will acquire to win its race, it can also 'Rabbit' its advantages when the chips, or the power lines are down.
It's NOT how much they COST, it's how much they're WORTH.
Remember "grid parity" is a suboptimization. You cannot escape the fact that PV is 5-10 times more expensive than typical generation. This means they draw 5-10 times more resources, which would mean that if 10% of society's work is devoted to energy extraction today, an all-PV-world would raise that to 50-100% + all efforts needed for intermittency mitigation.
Stuff is not WORTH to do if they COST too much.
"You cannot escape the fact that PV is 5-10 times more expensive than typical generation."
Seriously quit that nonsense jeppen.
PV is NOT 10x as expensive as typical generation! In a country with less sunlight than most--Germany--PV costs maybe 3x "typical generation". And that is before you count the added value of PV providing power when people need it most-during the day!
I maintain 5-10 times, but if you agree to 3x, that's fine. Now, why should Germany invest in PV instead of three times as much wind? To keep their subsidised coal mines open?
To diversify their options.
You base these hysterical arguments on presumptions like "An ALL-PV powered world", which is a thoroughly useless hypothetical, as no such thing is being proposed in this argument, or is possible.
Clearly, right out of the gate, pursuing such sources as PV go hand in hand with an awareness of the resource limitations that have brought us to this point, and so the 'total demand target' is also in the sights of those who are trying to create workable solutions. Finding ways to substantially reduce the wasteful uses of electricity are going to be key, and so calculations that presume to replace all of today's power with any 'WonderDrug' source are conveniently creating a non-existent condition where they get to define this failure.
You mentioned Grid Parity, which I did not, though pointing to dr_dr's success indicates that this is what he was able to achieve.. but what he has achieved is valuable in several other metrics, both mentioned and unmentioned.. (such as the resilience and emergency benefits that his immediate neighbors can also benefit from by having very nearby a source of electric power, including possibly food storage or communications or working tools, just plain lighting, which could become the lynchpins in success or failure during a challenging time.. the more neighborhoods that become so lucky, as well as those with electric vehicles to boot.. they will have options for rallying their efforts and getting right to restoring their households and community, while others are waiting for central authorities to show up and help)
Why PV instead of Wind? Well, of course, it is 'In addition to wind', and I would expect it is also in addition to Insulation standards, to Solar Heating, to Mass Transit options.. they are looking forward, and it sounds to me as if you are really looking 'Back to the Bright Future' that was promised to us very foolishly.
I think reductio ad absurdum often is an instructive tool, but I guess that presumes the reader is open for it, and not just knee-jerking objections.
So, the enormous 5-10x resource waste of PV go hand in hand with an awareness of resource limitations? Fantastic statement.
No, they are not. With a 90% fossil powered world that is still poor and still growing in per capita numbers, huge scaling of non-carbon generation tech, AND a price on carbon, are going to be key. We cannot do this if we are going to waste our resources on PV.
Ah, great. No need for tough choices. Let's just do everything, whether effective or not. Coal replacement can wait - doesn't need focus or determination. Let's just talk some of "renewables", of "negawatt" and of "sustainable", because then we are good people, and providence always favor those who are good.
I look forward to humanity continuing on the great path that the West have taken and that much of Asia are taking now and that Africa needs to start walking. And I'm hoping that fossil use can be curbed in time, and view nuclear as our only real hope to do that.
"why should Germany invest in PV instead of three times as much wind?"
To begin with, I already pointed out that there is an added value that PV provides power during the day (when demand is generally highest).
But I'm not German, and I don't pretend to know what the Germans should or should not do.
Still I am very glad that they have made the investment in PV technology, thanks mostly to Germany (and a few other mostly European countries) the cost of installed PV has fallen ~50% over the past decade, and looks set to continue falling for the next decade (albeit at a slower pace).
Since you continue to "maintain" that installed cost of PV has not come down--I doubt future PV costs matter to you. But it is probably something the Germans do care about, and likely one reason they continue to support solar.
Is the drop in cost of solar panels due to the subsidized end-user demand in Germany or the subsidized low-cost manufacturers in China?
The problem with subsidizing end-users is that the technology goes to low-cost countries. Subsidies should be directed to technology R&D and to manufacturing automation to enable competitively low marginal production costs.
"Is the drop in cost of solar panels due to the subsidized end-user demand in Germany or the subsidized low-cost manufacturers in China?"
Are you trying to create a chicken and egg dilemma? China would not have subsidized the manufacturing if there were no German end-user demand. But irrespective of where the manufacturing takes place, it is the increased scale of the industry (up ~100x in the last decade) that has led to lower costs--imo.
The chicken and egg dilemma exists -- I don't have to create it.
Suppose that the break-even installed cost for solar is $1 / watt. That means that the manufacturer has to sell solar panels for under $0.25 / watt FOB the factory, with the other $0.75 going to shipping, wholesaler and retailer margins, and installation costs.
If you subsidize the end user, so that the break-even installed cost with tax incentives and high feed-in tarrifs is $4 / watt, then manufacturers with costs as high as $1.00 / watt FOB can compete for the business. This probably includes manufacturers with technologies that will never get to $0.25 / watt due to the inefficiency of their technology, the inefficiency of their manufacturing processes or the high cost of labor and other costs at their locations.
The better approach would be to fund the start up and R&D costs for cell, module and manufacturing process design for only those manufacturers who can really achieve a marginal cost below $0.20 / watt in a mature manufacturing process. This gets the industry to the desired goal of efficient solar generation, instead of wasting money on companies who will only make money as long as the subsidies last and go out of business when the subsidies stop.
Shoot, if you know ahead of time which technologies will achieve marginal costs 5-10% the cost of current generating technologies, then by all means invest! invest! invest!
Seems like a goofy premise. Suppose that the breakeven price is $2/watt installed (not $1/watt), you'd be screening out a lot of good competing technologies before you even give them a chance. With fewer competing technologies you are limiting the chance for breakthoughs down the line--and ultimately locking yourself into overpaying for the technology--since it doesn't have viable competitors to bring the price down to what it could be.
PV power plants have become an investment in Germany. The business is buzzing. But they are not just building them in Germany. German companies are also managing projects abroad.
Apart from the price of PVs falling, other equipment should also be mentioned: inverters, cables etc. Inverters have become a lot more efficient: around 94% to 96% a couple of years ago and now they're around 97-98%. Obviously these are products that can be exported along with monitoring equipment and the likes.
Germany is not as windy as, say the UK or Norway (apart from the coast, of course). They are also very keen on solar collectors and low energy housing.
The hope is obviously to become/stay world leaders in renewable energy technology. Universities are offering varied courses in that sector.
Bob/Fred,
To say that I am stuck on the PV cost things is a fair comment - I really do not think that subsidising residential (or even utilityscale) PV is a good investment.
If you don;t like the hummer analogy, that is fine - but can we agree that wasteful use of resources (energy) is a waste, even if the energy being used is renewable?
I think the solar PV on large LA houses exemplifies that. The original problem - houses too large, inefficiently designed, and occupants that use too much energy - is not addressed by adding PV to the roof. And, in some cases, it makes it worse as they might keep their house even cooler because they know they are producing some of the energy themselves. Even worse - I have seen real world examples of this- some homeowners have taken down trees that were shading part of their house, to maximise production of their PV panels. The deciduous trees were perfectly positioned to the south of the house - let in the low winter sun, shade the roof from the hot summer sun. The shaded south facing roof pitch was the good place for panels, and the installer, not wanting to give up a project, said that the two trees would need to come down and so they did. That owner replaced a passive, self regenerating cooling system with a manufactured one. Fred I am not suggesting you would necessarily do this, but that I have seen it done - some people will do anything to get the free money from the government.
In order to solve a problem, you must first identify what the real problem is, then you can identify the potential solutions and pick the best ones.
If we think the real problem is CO2 etc, and we need to replace our current electricity sources with renewables, I don't think solar is the best way to go, with current technology.
If we think the problem is that we use too much energy (my position), then DSM stuff needs to be done, first, on a much larger scale. That is the approach of the off gridders - to make solar supply most of your electricity, first reduce your electricity usage - dramatically. But by subsidising solar panels instead of DSM, we are not solving the problem, but perpetuating it.
For DR-DR, yes he will get a full payback after 15 years (at California's high electricity prices) - if he is satisfied that is a good investment decision, then great, he might even do it again, or on a neighbours house, etc. But where is the payback for the taxpayers that funded it, was it a good decision for government? Would a small wind turbine have produced better results, or DSM to reduce his electricity usage?
Having sat in the chair as a utility manager (for water, sewer gas and electricity), looking at both supply and DSM, you have a very real responsibility to get the best results from the limited capital you have. I am yet to come across an (on grid) situation where solar is really the best value option. Even with Ca's high retail prices,where solar is close to competitive, DSM is more competitive still.
I will maintain - first eliminate the wastage, and shift unneccessary peak demands, then look at the best ways to supply what's left. If, as a homeowner you are spending your own money (as opposed to governments) and decide that solar is the best way, power to you - I am sure Fred will set up the best system possible (and realistically, for most homeowners, solar is the only self generation option) .
But from the utility/grid point of view, better results can usually be gained by other other methods (which are not available to the homeowners). Now, getting some of these consumption-for-profit motivated utilities to do stuff is a different question...
You are preaching to the choir here with regards the absolute necessity of cutting wasteful consumption, I couldn't agree more.
I gather from something else you mentioned up thread that you are employed in some way shape or form on the utility side of this equation. Perhaps a way needs to be found where the utility companies start looking at their customers more as millions of individual partners with mutually beneficial interests instead of as captive cash cows to be milked to the max and then discarded.
Anyways I'm trying to find ways to change the current paradigm, since I at least, am convinced it has no future. If I could somehow find a way to work with the utility companies I might be willing to do so but right now I don't get the feeling that they grasp the concept that it might be in their long term interest to work with their new partners and that we are all in this together.
Hi Fred, appreciate the comments. I guess I shouldn't just single out solar on this - when people think, and they often do, that renewables mean they can carry on unchanged, then we are not solving the fundamental problem - PV's on their roof seem to evoke that more than wind farms out of sight. Same, even more so, with "green" products - you can't "save the planet" by consuming more stuff, regardless of it being "green" or not. Green consumerism has been a monumental failure, IMO, and has taken attention, trust and investment, away from things that can make a real difference.
I am a civil/environmental engineer, and I used to work as a utility manager for a ski resort in the Cdn rockies. Had to look after the water supply, sewer, gas and elec. basically supplying all the elements of life, except food/shelter, for a community at the end of a 20mi mtn road. When a snow laden tree/avalanche/car crash takes out the power line in winter, or an animals dies in the alpine creek that supplies the water - you have the well being of 2500 people in your hands. One month after starting the job, seven people died from contaminated water in Walkerton Ontario, (caused by operator negligence in failing to detect the contamination) and highlighted just how high the stakes are in this business. One serious release of un/partially treated sewage effluent to the creek (where people raft/swim in summer) and the resort would be shut down- period. It gives you a very different view of the utility world, and you understand why they are obsessed with reliability. Absolute reliability involves infinite cost, but 99.95% is good enough. Go to 50, 90 or even 95% and you have problems.
This is why I do not accept statements that some people here make about learning to live with variable power supplies - it leads to awful decisions as to who gets it and who doesn't, and ultimately, safety of people/food/water is endangered - better to just not go there. Conserve across the board, so that reliable power is available all the time at a low, but known level, than have it fluctuate between high and none.
I straddled the fence compared to normal utilities - the object was to provide reliable services, as cost efficiently as possible, but the utility co was not a profit centre, and I had no motivation to increase consumption, and worked very hard to reduce it, to stay within the limits of the transmission line, water supply (creek is at lowest flow in winter which is highest demand!) and treatment facilities. On the electricity side, we had a limit on transmission, which we were not at., but would be one day. Any DSM, or on site generation, would reduce this load, and we went over the place with a fine tooth comb. Came up with 1 MW of savings, achievable for about $500k. It was a very sunny location, and our daily peak was always mid morning - sounds good for solar - but you can tell me what 1MW of solar would have cost - just not appropriate in this case. Neither was wind - valley floor well protected, but the summit - severe storms and winter icing - weather tower did get blown down once!. Looked carefully at micro hydro, but again, minimal flows in winter when we needed it most.
I now do DSM programs as an independent, water mostly, but my industry knowledge is obviously very helpful in understanding their goals, and realities.
For normal utilities, the key is to decouple consumption from profits. Have producers who sell into the power pools, - free market, and the retailers, who buy in that market and sell to customers. The producers can increase sales by out competing other producers. Separate entity again is the wires owner/operator - the only true monopoly. They need to be regulated for both minimum standard (of grid) and maximum profit - this can be and is done. The wires owner must be profitable, as if they are not, you have a poorly maintained grid and unstable company, but they can;t have a licence to gouge.
The old model of the integrated monopoly utility, that generates, transmits, and retails, leads to the motive to maximise sales, with no incentive to manage costs. A variety of suppliers, and retailers, and even HV transmission line operators (same as oil and gas pipeline cos) is the best way, IMO to have competition. The other alternative, government owned, may be "non-profit" but leads to boated entities and kills, repeat kills, innovation.
Best analogy, really, is the food system - there is a multitude of producers, processors, retailers, in all sizes. But all the food got there, eventually, buy the road system (=wires). It has openings for big and small producers, local and otherwise, and does not need to be regulated (other than health safety, but not for profits) . And, it is always available to you - pretty much an ideal market. For the elec industry, it should be as easy to sell into, as it is to buy from - as long as you meet the technical requirements, then let people work out which way they want to go. Governments have had to give the industry a shove in that direction, but the 60c feed in tariffs are counterproductive, IMO. Have net metering and pay them what they would pay, as that is the real value, and do it on TOU rates - one advantage there for solar Going DSM/negawatts/load shifting is just as good,and does not involve the technical requirements of generator interconnection - lots more people/businesses/institutions can do that.
I share your frustrations with trying to change the paradigm ( try to get people to save water in wet Canada!) - ultimately you can only work with those who are willing to change, and trust that the record of success encourages more - but progress can seem glacial at times. For the utilities, start out by finding out what are their most pressing problems, and see if that overlaps with your solutions. For example, they may have one area that has a specific transmission/substation constraint. Putting your solar systems, and any associated DSM, in that area, may be of much more value to them, than just anywhere. I'd like to think the solar industry associations are doing this sort of thing.
Keep the faith - all (most) of us here on TOD are working to make a difference - even if we disagree on ways to go about it (and I am fine with that - we must be open to critique), we are moving in the same direction.
Paul, if you get a chance check out some of proposed projects on this list of The 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Semi-Finalists.
http://challenge.bfi.org/2011Semi_Finalists
I'm not suggesting anyone of them has the final answer but I think like many here on TOD, most of them are searching for a path to a different and less energy intensive paradigm. I myself grew up in Brazil and lived under conditions that many here would consider sub par or even unsafe and managed to do ok. So perhaps my way of looking at things is a bit more flexible as compared to what most people living in the US would find acceptable. I don't necessarily equate safety with 24/7 access to electricity but I'm not all that invested in arguing this point and I think I understand where you are coming from.
That actually strikes a nerve with me personally. Right now, where I live in South Florida we are under a sever drought warning even as we have daily thunderstorms that create flooding on our streets. Try explaining to people that our drinking water comes from that great river of grass otherwise known as the everglades which flows towards the ocean, replenishing our underground aquifers which happen to be seriously depleted and that it is tinder dry out there with grass fires highly likely. The average person just can't seem to parse this for some reason. They look out the window and see pouring rain, drought? What drought they ask? Then they get upset because they can't wash their car...
Listen to Fred, those of you who say that we can't live any other way than we now do.
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona in the 1960's and 1970's. In our neighborhood of several hundred houses, which was newly built in the early 1960's, there were two (2) that had A/C, all the others had swamp coolers. OK, there were times that it was uncomfortable during the humid rainy season in July, but we survived, as did all the neighbors including the snobs next door that had plastic runners on all their carpet so you wouldn't stain them by walking on them. Last year I visited that same neighborhood and most everybody now had A/C. Same exact houses, lots more energy needed than in 1960-1970.
We also spent a couple years in Ensenada, Baja California in the mid-1970's. The electric service was only 20 amps for a three bedroom house. No cooling but a box fan in your bedroom window at night and just a space heater or two in the house in the winter. Poured concrete walls, so there wasn't any insulation. Propane for cooking and hot water was from a couple 100lb bottles, you turned off the pilot lights in the stove to make them last longer, a bottle would last two months instead of one that way. You didn't drink the tap water(too many dissolved salts and other nasties), 5-gal bottles delivered by the truck every morning. Somehow we got by just fine! We didn't feel deprived at all, but my father was not your typical University Professor either, thank god!
I now live in Auburn, Alabama and am finishing the final stages of my off-grid PV system. As I have never been one to have the high-consumption lifestyle, I have not had a hard time adapting to what it can provide, other than getting mad at the dang TV that draws 20 watts even when it's off. Yes, I have several switchable power strips through the house. I get frustrated trying to explain to others how we can actually cut a lot out of our consumptive lifestyle and not make a difference in our happiness. My wife (who is wonderfully PO aware) and I have lots of fun working in our yard which is becoming more and more an edible landscape, both front and back yards. We don't feel that we're missing anything by not keeping up with all the consumers out there.
Fred, thanks for the link, I had not heard about this comp, but interesting stuff. didn't get to look at all their videos, but I know who i would pick as the winner and runner up. The QuaDror housing truss is my winner - a clever design innovation, that allows simple but strong structures to be built anywhere, from almost anything - a 21st century version of Buck's geodesic dome - I think he would approve of this one. 2nd place to the global village construction set - that would be a great asset to any communal farm/small village/island etc. Some of the other entries I don;t think should be there- ones that are using computer mapping systems, or social media, or education etc - Buckminster was about technical innovation to reduce impact. Not saying these "soft" things are not of value, but they just don;t seem the right fit. Whereas the truss thing - that information can be conveyed instantly across the world, and can start being used tomorrow to build better and simpler. being a woodworker myself, I am going to build one (two) this weekend -looks like a great sawhorse, table support etc.
I would agree that most of us here are looking for a different paradigm - there were people doing that in 60's,70's, 80's too - but they didn't have TOD or any other online resources - the power of instant access to information and other people, is I think, the greatest innovation in the post war world. Obviously, we all come from different background's and experience - which is great - it improves the intellectual diversity of this forum - we are unlikely to ever suffer from "group think" here.
I can see where you are coming from with the Brazilian upbringing - life can and does go on without all this excess, and is often more pleasant, too. People here have never done without, and don;t think it can be done. Funny how the "rat race encourages people to try to accumulate as much as they can so then they can retire to a place in the country to get away from it all. If they lived smaller, in better cities, in the first place, you wouldn;t want to get away from it, you be happy to live there!
I grew up on a small farm in Australia - you can imagine our attitude to water there. Our drinking water was what we collected from the roof, we re-used the bath water when we were kids, water from a farm dam piped into the house for our toilet flushing, and the finished water (we never called it "waste" water as there is no such thing) from the laundry and kitchen ran out onto our veggie garden - only time that having phosphates in detergents is actually good thing! When I came to Canada 13 yrs ago I was shocked at the attitude of people here to water. I did learn that Cdns get taught in school they have one fifth of the world's fresh water, and they often act like too. You can see where I get my attitude about not wasting any resource, not matter how plentiful or how it is produced...
But most people know little of the production and supply side, especially for elec and water, and do not understand the substantial challenges that go with that. The safety part of 24/7 electricity really relates to a community that is designed for 24/7 - when you don;t have it, in winter things (or people) freeze, in summer, food and water spoil. If your community is set up for intermittent power, a different story. I am of the opinion, that rather than having everyone be set up for intermittent, it is better, and less resource consuming, to have the utility set up for 24/7 - but the utility has to keep its part of the deal, and the people have to not over use. Failure has occurred on both sides, when utilities price gouge and game the system (california in 2001) and people have overused (california 2001) , which encourages more gaming by suppliers.
With my water system at the resort I had several houses that wanted to put in RO system to "purify" the water, as they did not trust it. I had banned RO systems - a condition of connection that you could not have them, as the filter 10% and throw away 90%. I pointed out that if they did not trust the water, and this was important to them, why did they buy there, and why were they opposed to the water utility charging rates high enough to have first class water treatment. Each house having their own system cost far more than the utility having a good system. Also, if you deliver dirty water to the houses, and they each treat it, there is a far greater chance of something going wrong, than with a professionally managed utility system. BUT, if people don;t trust the utility, then they invest in their own, and then campaign against the utility spending money on treatment as they have their own.
I see PV as being similar - many people do not (rightly) trust the elec utilities, and so they want, and are prepared to pay for, some degree of independence. I see this as a failure of trust and/or information on the utility's part. not one of my customers at the resort ever put in solar panels, though several had small standby generators. I was very clear to everyone that we had a good supply of cheap priced electricity (6c/kWh here in BC) but was subject to the occasional winter interruption - longest ever was 6hrs. Solar or a small wind turbine won;t help - but attention to your house design will. I did not think generators were necessary, just some good lamps, candles and an alcohol fondue set and some port wine and you turn a blackout into an entertaining evening Start up a gen and you ruin the ambience for your neighbours! So, 99.95% reliability is good enough - minor outages can be dealt with.
I would like to see elec utilities charging a connection, and monthly/annual, fee, according to the size of your service - water utilities do this all the time for commercial customers - a monthly fee according to the meter size. Say $4/yr per amp, first 25 is free, so $100/yr for 50, $300 for 100, $700 for 200 and so on. Difference between a 50 and 200 is then $600/yr or $6k over ten years. This way, there is real incentive to manage your peak loads, and the util company can better know what peak loads will occur, as they know the max size for each connection. When everyone has 200 or 400(!) amp service you have to be prepared for them to use it.
In this context, a solar system with some storage and an integrated load governor could enable a house to be 50 instead of 100, so a significant saving. More importantly, people learn to live within a reasonable limit.
Most homeowners have no idea of the cost of generation capacity. Given that 100 amps represents 10kW, and costs about $20k for generation capacity, somewhere and almost the same again for transmission and distribution lines, going from 100amps to 200 amps is claiming a LOT of capacity, yet they never pay for it, only the kWh they use. The pricing system, if set up properly, can drive customer behaviour in the right direction, without making electricity unaffordable - it just makes excess consumption very expensive.
A water utility in LA area has water rates that are X for average household use of up to Y units/month, and then go to 2X for 1-to 1.25 Y, 4X for1.25 to 1.5 Y and 8X for anything over 1.5 Y. This is demand management of a limited resource- you can afford the water you use to live normally, but as soon as you start to waste, you pay, and pay so much that you will make sure you stay under 1.25X
The annoying part is - and I'm sure you see this all the time too, is that people either say they have enough money to pay for the excess consumption, or, worse, that they are entitled to it because this is "not a third world country". Keep using too much and it will start to feel like it soon enough...
Paul;
Thanks for the more complete perspective you come into this conversation with. It helps me understand where we differ, and how the two views are probably comfortably complementary.
I'm looking at this very much as an end-user, and I'm very concerned about the umbilicals that presently support too many facets of my daily household needs. One of my central goals is to find the balances for this, so that I may assure my family some likelihood of stability regardless of the state of the Grid, the Rates or the Tankers and Trucks that bring the rest.. from that perspective, I need to look to more of the things I can establish at the home scale.. and being concerned for all of us, and not just myself, I also look to how these solutions can be multiplied across many, many thousands of homes in all our countries.
It makes sense that you're working with a part of the 'Elephant' that is devoted to keeping those umbilicals together, and I really don't WANT them to fail.. I just don't want a cascade (even temporary) of that system or parts of it to leave me and millions of others hanging with no alternatives, no way to get through the daily grind.. as I look at it, having a healthy collection of these sources within a stone's throw (as I describe my glass-houses, eh?) shows itself to be a good value both in the regular times, and the interesting times.
The mention of the LA mansion Owners and their Alleged Trophy Arrays represents perhaps a certain set of the 'early adopters' and well-off well-wishers for a greener future, but I don't think their contextual blind-spots should be used to define the whole sector.
But your final remark is well-taken, and I do have to work sometimes to keep it in mind.
Thanks,
Bob
Hi Bob,
See my comments above to Fred re trust and utilities. When you are doing your own independent supply, it is because you don;t trust them. Unfortunately, doing your own supply is the only option within your control as you (alone) can't change the utility.
With electricity, the best thing you can do, is take the off gridders attitude, and look at all your loads, and see what can be changed. if at all possible, get a good, high efficiency wood stove (you are in Maine - right?) Collecting and cutting wood is one of my simple pleasures in life (I used to be a competitive woodchopper for a few years), and it really "connects" you and your family to your fuel supply, so you use it efficiently, and appreciate what you get from it. Same as cooking from ingredients instead of from cans/packages/freeze. make your own bread and it will taste better than almost anything you buy. Cook it in the fire (I do this regularly, wrapped in foil) and it will taste even better - there is something very satisfying about cooking in a real fire!
The fire, of course, gives you independence form fuel suppliers, and, other than solar, is the only way to supply your own "fuel".
For other active space heat, the heat pump is, by far, the best way to go. But passive solar heat is better still - look for any and all ways to do this. Here is a great website (www.builditsolar.com) - in your part of the world, too.
Once you have done this, and your family is trained to be efficient, then relax and enjoy the small bills - but don't become OCD about it - it is not worth the mental effort or the time. Manage it once, do your own audit for a few days a year , and that will be enough.
I really like the idea of a return to community scale power generation - where each town had a power plant that supplied the town. Mind you, that was when the demand was about 10A power house, not 200! Still, I see community power co-operatives making a comeback, especially for biomass/waste, and any local wind/hydro resources. Fred may correct me here, but i think solar can be done much better at a 10-100kW scale (tracking?) than house by house. This way the investment, jobs and money spent on power stay local, but there are economies of scale that can't be had at household level. This assumes you are in a good community of course...
I agree that the LA example is not typical, though very high profile. Millionaires having huge PV's and Teslas does not give any help as to how the rest of society does it, or how we earn the money to afford to "go green", which none of them have done by being green in the first place. But I am of the opinion that the Pv's that are made, should be put in sunny locations. Zillions of them in Germany at 11% capacity factor is a criminal under utilisation of very expensive hardware - is it really a good post-peak strategy to employ scarce resources so inefficiently?
I am very dissappointed by the greenwashing continually put out there by governments, utilities, and even some consumer groups. It is diverting attention from the pragmatic actions, and sometimes hard decisions and (minor) sacrifices, that we need to take. I don;t think we are facing a collapse scenario, but it is more like a societal preparing for winter - yet we are being told that summer will go on.
So, those who use less, have less to lose/worry about. That's about the best you can do at the personal level, other than going off grid/self sufficient - and that is really a lifestyle choice, and not one available to everyone.
As you probably know, I don't need to be sold on the benefits of solar, however I do feel it necessary to pick a minor nit with the fact that hot is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to PV efficiency.
While sunny is good, hot, not so much. Unless you are trying to melt salts perhaps.
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter05/chapter05.html
You could always circulate water (at a temperature you control) along the backside of the solar panels and produce more (or less) output from your solarpanels. [more = colder water, less = warmer water] I have this idea for utility solar.
This would not be total control, but it could allow you to compensate/steady output if a big fluffy cloud comes along, or ramp output if there is a demand spike. i.e. you could control the top +20%/-20% of output.
Of course every "engineer" I talk to about this just wants to always overproduce...
And yes to those posters that look at the world through a rear view mirror, I don't believe anyone currently does this at scale (so call it science fiction if you wish). Both solar panels and water plumbing are well established technologies especially the plumbing part.
The added cost and complexity of a cooling system outweighs the cost of adding another panel.
NAOM
Perhaps, but it adds some flexibility to the solar PV as a generating asset in a way that adding another panel does not. If you are trying to manage a system or fleet of assets, sometimes that flexibily can be valuable.
I've noticed a large amount of complaining in the thread around reliability and dispatchability of renewables...just thought I'd toss the idea out there to show how renewables can become more controlable like traditional generating assets. What you do or don't do with an idea is your business.
If you are willing to sacrifice maximum power production, PV is amazingly flexible (if the sun is shining). You can modulate it between 0 and 100% and back instantly at the inverter stage.
However, reducing output does not reduce cost and so not producing the maximum power for now makes no economic sense while there is still production with non zero cost.
In future, PV might well participate effectively in load balancing.
disdaniel:
I don't think circulating water would make sense. You need energy to do that and I don't think you would increase the PV's efficiency enough for that to pay off. Making sure the PVs have enough room behind for air circulation makes more sense. PVs (without tracking) have the great benefit of zero moving parts.
apmon:
What do you mean by 'at the inverter stage'. If you mean after the inverter, then driving it between 0 and 100% instantly could cause some problems if you are connected to the grid.
I think in April inverters for larger PV power plants in Germany are required to have more control. AFAIK They will also be able to supply reactive power according the suppliers needs.
Maybe, maybe not. In a short-term analysis, you might be right, but then again that's one of the first things that has to go, in my opinion.
PV cooling has a number of benefits, and a few different ways of being implemented.. I don't think the answers are really in yet. I know of one company here in Maine testing an installation, and have yet to hear where it stands.
But I know that PV Panels produce more watts when their temps are kept down, and it stands to reason that keeping them cooler could also offer them a longer lifespan as well. How many more panels does that add to this side of the equation, before you even start counting the number of preheating watts the water supply has had added to it?
If you really know of a proper debunking, I'd love to see it.
Calculate the heat collected by the panels. Now calculate how much water you are going to need to achieve that cooling. Can you use that much slightly warm water? The water cannot leave hot as that defeats the purpose of cooling the cells. Would you need to chill the incoming water? How much energy would that take? Is the water circulated through a cooling coil to bring it to air temperature? Do you need pumping to circulate enough water? Need more?
NAOM
The water from a pool at about 21 C is sent to the PV panels to preheat it and then to solar hot water panels for more heat before injecting it back into the pool.
To store heat from the summer underground for use in a ground source heat pump to heat a house in the winter, the water would come out of the hose in the ground at maybe 10 C or 20 C which could be sent to the PV panel for preheating, into solar hot water panels for more heating and then back underground to store the heat in the ground.
The electricity from the PV panels would drive the pumps in both cases.
Sorry, but that doesn't really cover it.
I can anticipate any of that perfectly well.. I asked if you had an actual debunking or analysis.. this was sort of handwaving.
Naturally, such a system would be predicated on having a reservoir that could accept the heat and keep enough thermal gradient so you'd have some Delta T (relatively cooler water) available to keep drawing heat from the panels. Yes, it would probably be actively pumped, tho a thermosiphon arrangement isn't inconceivable at all.
If the problem is that you think there will be TOO MUCH HEAT to collect and use, doesn't that sound more like a solution than a problem? Frankly, I'd worry that the thermal is a little too low, and would want to add a simple level of concentrating mirrors (two add'l suns, perhaps) to boost BOTH the thermal and the electrical take, as long as that works within the PV's tolerances.
A BIT more complexity, a Bunch more energy from the one installation.
A lot more complexity than adding one more panel, as is BlueTwilight's suggestion above. You will end up spending more in materials than the cost of the panel not to mention you will need that extra panel to drive the pump anyway.
NAOM
Thanks for that link.
NAOM
"A simple way to look at this is that if every single MW of wind was backed by a MW of gas, it would only add a third to the cost of wind MWh, as gas MWs costs one thirs of wind MWs (plus a little bit in cost of gas for the few MWh generated when wind is not available). If you looked a a theoretical system with 4 times the capacity of wind that you actually need on average (to take into account the lower capacity factor, then you'd only need to build 1MW of gas for every 4 (or maybe 3, to take into account of peaks in demand) MW of wind, so an additional cost of just 10% to your initial capital outlay."
I don't think you could get away with just one MW of gas per 4 of wind.
The problem being, that when it is not windy, it is often not windy everywhere (e.g. hot summer days). Even for a large area like the continental US, you will have times where the overall wind contribution is low, so all 4MW of the turbines are producing nothing. Whatever was the average load allocated to them must then be made up by the peakers.
So if our "grid" has 1MW wind, that gets 25% capacity factor,and 1MW gas to back it up, the gas is would have a capacity factor of 75%. If we add more wind turbines, to get 4MW wind, that means we will have times with much more energy than we can use, and no help for the calm days. Assuming there is some geographical dispersion, we might get the capacity factor of the !MW wind to 35 or even 40%, but the gas is still making up the rest, unless we have some other storage/load shifting mechansim for the excess wind power.
So, i would say the grid "with 4 times the capacity of wind that you actually need on average " is actually overbuilt for wind, unless you can store/sell it, because there will be times when you just have to dump the load.
I agree absolutely with the distinction between MW and MWh, which many people don;t seem to understand.
An even easier way to look at, IMO, is that wind (and solar) save *fuel* (mostly NG or hydro water) but not *capacity*.
You can pobably cut the backup requirements somewhat by adding in some degree of demand management. Also one company "WindFuels" has a plan to use stranded wind (when there is too much wind for transmission/consumption it is virtually free) plus CO2 to generate fuel. If this comes to pass you can overbuild wind (w.r.t. the capability of the grid to absorb it), which also gives you more output on low wind days (but not calm ones). The key is to use all the resources on the grid together: flow based, store based (fossil fuel & hydro), and demand management to minize the overall system cost, which is the cost of the grid & generation HW, as well as the societal cost of demand management.
let me know when Windfuels turns their website into reality. You need a concentrated CO2 source to do this, and there aren't many of those on the windy plains/passes. The cost of doing this is very expensive, and to make a thermochemical process like this work properly, you need to run it continuously, it is hard to ramp it up and down with the wind.
If your wind capacity factor is 30%, and, say half, the time you can sell the power, then you have 15% of the time you will be running your fuel process. That is a lot of capital sitting ideal 85% of the time, and operating at below ideal conditions (from stop/start) for the remainder.
I agree that we need to find uses for excess wind power, and this one comes up all the time, but even with "free" electricity, it won't be economic if you can only run it 15% of the time.
Any storage scheme has to deal with this reality, that the capacity factor of the storage will be very low, which means it either needs to be very cheap to build/operate, or produce a very high value product.
Possibly a better one, in the right areas (windy coastal with not much fresh water), might be desalination of water, as this is a physical process, which can be started and stopped quickly, and the product has a high value, relative to the electricity cost, and is cheap to store. The desal plant would have a predictable annual output, AND, if needed, in a drought, could be grid powered to produce more water still.
I agree with this, although storage schemes will each serve a combination of many generators, so their capacity factors will probably be higher than the individual generation sites. But for the reason you mention, almost all of the many gigawatts of storage currently under construction is pumped hydro storage, the cheapest storage option, and most of the pumped storage under construction or proposed involves adding pumped storage to existing hydro complexes, again much cheaper than building new single-purpose pumped storage facilities.
You forgot stranded wind to Ammonia. Wind, Air, Water, and < $5 million for a wind turbine, and < $5 million for a Freedom Fertilizer Nitrefinery
(disclaimer: I own a share in this company.)
The last time I checked, high pressure weather systems are correlated with bright, sunny conditions. So at exactly the time that wind output plummets, those PV panels will be churning out power on those long summer days. Perfect example of how different renewables can complement each other. Of course, solar won't cover the night but nighttime power needs are lower and easier to source from gas etc.
The last time I checked, high pressure weather systems are correlated with bright, sunny conditions. So at exactly the time that wind output plummets, those PV panels will be churning out power on those long summer days.
Except if it happens in winter, when you have short days, low sun and long, still cold nights...
You are trying to solve the unpredictability of one resource with another unpredictable resource. When the goal is to get a system with reliability, you have to have a controllable backup for the still, dark night, whether you have solar or not.
And, 1kW of wind costs about $1.5k, 1kW of solar is $5-6k, so you are paying a very large premium for that complementary source, which usually has a lower capacity factor than wind.
That is why, despite the best efforts of the solar industry and $bn in subsidies, solar still makes up an insignificant fraction of generation capacity. It does however make up a large fraction of "marketing" of renewable power, so at least it is good for something.
You won't get anywhere near the output in winter under those conditions as in summer but that does not mean the contribution is not valuable. It is still a fact that PV will at least be putting out power during those short days thus alleviating some of the concerns for low wind output. Less balancing load necessary!! 1/3 - 1/2 of a watthour is not 1 watthour but is clearly better than 0 watthours.
Do you think in 5 years time, if you care to go that far out that 1 KW of solar will still be costing $6,000 when it is a known fact that installed costs for the latest commercial level installations are now coming in at around $3 per W? I can predict with some confidence that within 5 years or so, installed costs for even residential PV will be at $3 per W, with commercial even lower, possibly below $2 per W.
Solar is now contributing better than 2% of the electricity in Germany, with relatively poor climatic conditions. It is my contention that the investment that Germany has made in PV will prove extremely valuable in an uncertain, unstable future world energy market and social environment. Here you have a technology that with a minimal amount of care can be expected to last at least 30 years and most likely longer. Those KW's at whatever fraction of original capacity will prove to be extremely valuable in 2050 and may be treated like gold. There may actually be real issues of securing them from theft.
Less balancing load necessary!!
Depends how you define it. We still have periods of time when both wind and solar were at zero, so 100% backup was needed. yes, the solar panel in winter eked out something, and saved some fuel/water somewhere, but was it worth the cost of the solar?
Look at what the off gridders do - they very aggressively reduce any and all electrical loads as much as possible, to reduce the amount of storage and pV required. I.e. demand side management is cheaper than solar.
This is true in the grid world too, though wind + backup may be cheaper than DSM.
I have a hard time believing that solar will get that cheap, even if you got the panels for free, the balance of system and installation will be more than $3k for residential, and possibly utility. But, if you have some real examples of non subsidised systems at that price, I'd like to see them.
I don't think Germany;s solar will be a good investment, putting an expensive technology in a place where it produces half of what it would if it was put 1000 miles south? They would have been better to build the solar in Spain and send the power to Germany. But for obvious political reasons, they couldn't do that, so they install it in Germany and get an 11% capacity factor. At $5k/kw, that is $45 per actual kW equivalent - horrendously expensive. They created an industry dependent on subsidy. Once the subsidy is removed, the industry can;t compete with China, and so there is little residual value achieved. Meanwhile, the people who couldn't afford to have PV's on their roofs will be paying money for 20 years to those that do - what does that achieve?
They would have been better off building more windmills, if they couldn't think of anything better. They are pretty theft proof, too.
"they very aggressively reduce any and all electrical loads as much as possible,"
Sounds like a pretty darn good plan to me.
Let's do that, and then renewable become doable.
In fact without that, nothing is doable.
If you aren't planning a renewable future, you aren't planning any future at all. So what, exactly, is your point?
Well, I am planning a renewable future, for what I do. But I don't get to plan what everyone else, or government does.
Much as we would like everyone to "aggressively reduce loads", they only way that happens, aggressively, is by curtailment, and that just doesn't happen, if it can be avoided. Otherwise progress in load reduction is incremental, and not by everyone - you can tell people, but you can't force them. In some cases I have been involved in, you have to wait for them to die, so that a younger, more aware person can make the changes the older one wouldn't.
So, yes, I am planning and working towards, a renewable future, but it is not going to happen overnight. There is only so much I can do to get other people to do things - extreme circumstances motivate people much more than any amount of education, or peak rates etc, ever do. But not many people think we are in extreme circumstances, and our governments do their best to convince us of the opposite. Neither you nor I would be here if we believed them, but many others do.
I also work in energy efficiency, primarily contracting for California PUC on energy conservation measures (software development for building energy simulation).
California has made huge progress in "aggressively reducing loads", to the point that a California building uses about 30% less energy than a Colorado building in a comparable climate zone. But efforts to reduce energy use have been more successful than efforts to reduce demand at peak times.
I am confident that the combination of over-hyped but still useful Smart Grid and better Time Of Use rates will drive demand down at peak times. Pre-heating domestic hot water and conditioned space and pre-cooling conditioned spaces by a few degrees here and there could reduce peak demand significantly, and also accommodate renewable variability.
I am confident that the combination of over-hyped but still useful Smart Grid and better Time Of Use rates will drive demand down at peak times.
Agreed, sort of. if they had hyped the TOU rates, instead of the Smart Grid, then we would see more action, IMO. The problem I see with smart grid, is that consumers will think the grid can do it all for them - that they don;t have to think. And that misses the point - we can achieve so much more if the user does think. Large differential TOU rates will do that - then the smart grid can be the way the changes are implemented.
But on it;s own, listening to GE's marketing, you are led to think a smart grid can solve everything. Like a good on board computer in a car, a poor attitude from the operator can still defeat it's best fuel saving efforts.
I agree about time shifting of space and DHW heating. At the ski resort where I managed the utilities we were able to shift almost one MW (!) by doing that. This was, of course, totally eclipsed by the 5MW of the snowmaking system - one of the reasons why many commercial ski resorts are not long term sustainable.
Trying to have the smart grid control lights, the toaster etc is more complexity than it is worth, IMO - though I do support control to turn off the DHW while cooking appliances are running - that does reduce day and evening peaks.
There is lots of potential there, but some people get carried away thinking it can be used to control, and solve, everything. It is an arrow in our quiver, but not a magic bullet.
"not many people think we are in extreme circumstances"
You put your finger on it there.
GW is an existential threat greater than any military enemy we have ever had. (And now we see that nuclear power can be one, too.)
So we should be operating on a war footing beyond what we saw in WWII when, for example, Britain reduced its domestic petrol consumption by 95%. They didn't say, "Oh, we can't convince people to curtail, so we'll just try to educate the young folks and wait for the oldsters who don't get that we're in a war to die off."
But, yes, even here on this board we have delusional notions floating about that sustainability is an irrational religion. The Koch brothers and Exxon have been very busy with their delusion machine and it has done its damage to the conversation and to the future of complex life on the planet.
"New Record for German Renewable Energy in 2010
One-Quarter Million New Solar-Electric Systems Installed
New World Record: 7,400 MW of Solar Photovoltaics Installed in One Year
Renewable Electricity Penetration More than 30% of Supply on February 7th
New Renewables Near 17% of Electricity Supply
Renewable Generation Greater than Natural Gas--Closing in on Nuclear"
http//www.wind-works.org/FeedLaws/Germany/NewRecordforGermanRenewableEnergyin2010.html
At the rate of growth, just give it a decade
On the North American Front
"Ontario's Solar PV Installations May Surpass California in 2011"
http://www.wind-works.org/FeedLaws/Canada/OntariosSolarPVInstallationsMa...
We can calculate kWh for a PV array for a location using NREL's PV watts, Do we really know the kWh cost from a NEW coal plant or Nuclear unit with all the uncertainties ? How about the cost when a coal barge takes out the primary 4 lane bridge, as happened in Pensacola, FL in 1990, thousands had a 60 mile daily drive instead of 3. Distributed Generation, ie, watts on the roof, is way under valued. IMHO
Right, I admit I struggled with that term a little bit. I would rather say "uncorrelated with demand", but now I can see how it's basically statistical (stochastic) balancing between one demand value to the next.
I'm actually totally on board with that. It's a obvious reality really, but we get into significant mathematics when analyzing it more closely.
Oh, one thing I missed: demand
Demand itself has variation that has to be compensated for. If it did not, 100% of the grid could be baseload. But what I'm getting to is that the balance of maneuverable, reliable, and uncontrollable resources need to sum up to produce a net maneuverable grid that compensates for the grid's movement.
A graph or two showing demand over the course of the day would be useful. (for example: http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html ) This time of year LA needs power during the day, with an ugly peak in the evening. In the summer, there is a much higher peak from 3-6 pm. Solar falls off a little earlier than is ideal, but it clearly provides power when power is needed. Sure, there are times that it isn't up to the job, but those days are relatively rare. Those days will require other sources, or adjustments to consumption. We will need to deal with that reality.
Every climate and location will have different demand curves. Solar (or wind) will work with some of those location very well, but will fall short elsewhere. I get really ticked when I hear colleagues parroting some BAU fossil fuel shill bashing solar when they know zilch about it. I put a modest 3 kW system on my roof 10 years ago. Power hasn't gone up in price as much as I expected, and Edison changed the rules a couple years ago which made PV/TOU less favorable, but the fact remains that my reduction in purchased power has more than paid for my system and I have many years of free power ahead. (assuming I have many years ahead...).
Other advantages are well known here....one doesn't need to spend $200 billion per year (military, never mind the oil) in the middle east for solar. It doesn't kill salmon. It decreases the demands on the grid by being delocalized (potentially). No smoke. No noise. It makes one's relationship with consumption more personal, perhaps educating members of the household about conservation. Sure, there are up front costs and environmental impacts, but they are less evil than many alternatives. I'm a believer.
Thanks for sharing that. Don't worry about saying it too many times, either. People hear the opposite on a continuous and heavily amplified loop.
If I may ask a further detail, have you figured out how much longer it'll take for any subsidy dollars (if there were any) to also get paid back? I don't ask that to make a dig, but knowing that this question is the next one coming from doubters, and if that doesn't satisfy them, then the Life Cycle Assessment challenges come next.
Bob
yeah...that is a fair question as my cost was halved by incentives. I haven't paid rapt attention to my exact savings given the marginal rate I should charge production against, etc., but I figure my payback was 7-8 years on the half I paid for, and will be 9 on the second half. That ignores the cost of money (buried in the mortgage) and makes no allowance for rising electricity rates. The difference is a handwave largely resulting from my cancelling TOU and going to a standard tiered structure. The argument I have successfully made to 3 friends/coworkers (two engineers, one retired physicist) who have purchased their own similar systems is that my amortized cost is $50/month, but the produced power is worth $100. Boom. With the subsidy I double my money. Without it I break even. A chunk of my mortgage is tax deductible and power rates will probably go up so the financial side is probably even more favorable.....who knows, maybe some breakthrough just over the horizon will make power too cheap to meter and everyone will laugh at me. But hey...they laugh at me now (maybe just roll their eyes) when I show them Excel charts with 10 years worth of PV production and my cconsumption.
Note also....the guvm't (or Edison, or whomever) with its rebates isn't really giving me money. They already "borrowed" it from me and merely returned some of it in recognition of my commitment to a stable grid that helps everyone except maybe Enron.
Excellent post Jerome. Either you are incredibly bilingual in technical subjects or you have a very good translator.
I have a couple of questions.
--Why is hydro counted only as base power? I know little about it but I always thought it was more load following. As long as you have extra storage capacity in the reservoirs, you can store your potential power for peak periods. At Pacific Gas and Electric's Pit River system in my region, the reservoirs have signs warning fishermen that water levels can change very quickly. There is a recently constructed wind farm adjacent to these reservoirs. I would hope that its output could be coordinated with the hydro output. This would be a big advantage in late summer when the water flow is greatly diminished.
--Does the cost graph for wind and solar include upgrades to the grid that you mention will be needed? This could be a bigger issue in the US than in Europe.
Hydro can also be used as baseload (subject to some technical constraints, ie availability of rainfall, mainly), but its ability to be flexible makes it more valuable than that.
As to your last question, I agree that it's a bigger issue in the US.
The good thing about adding natural gas is the reduced CO2 and heavy metals contamination relative to coal. Also more draw on NG will raise the price and electric rates will go up, forcing people to cut back and move to more efficient appliances and lighting and so forth. Smart Grid gets a chance to establish itself and renewables keep marching in at a better price range.
It is doubtful that NG can keep a low price forever, but the wind, sun, water and earth will not increase in price as quickly.
NG could be a good intermediate from Coal to renewables.
But nuclear is all but dead unfortunately as Fukushima overtakes Chernobyl in net radiation leak. Maybe new nukes can be built but the old ones are likely to be shut down -- one by one. Especially those near large cities. once Tokyo has no good drinking water the politicians will get their emails. Independents are firmly against it so the Repubs are left with minority support for nuclear.
Generating Energy Storage & A Combination Renewable Energy System
Any renewable energy system that is installed should have extra capacity and be able to convert water into hydrogen which will be used to power a hydrogen generator as a back-up power source.
We should install a renewable energy system that utilizes solar & wind, when possible add geothermal to the mix.
A design is needed for a renewable energy system that can generate electricity and heat water with a step down mixer allowing the system to provide water hot enough for radiant heating and at the same time utilize a step down mixing valve to reduce the water temperature to be able its use for hot water in normal consumption.
A thermal renewable energy system may be able to provide both.
Prior to sizing up a renewable energy system, an energy audit should be conducted and energy efficiency recommendations should be implemented, that includes changing habits in utilizing energy and utilities in general.
Habitual changes can save between 20 to 50% of energy & utility consumption
YJ Draiman, Energy/Utility Analyst
Any renewable energy system that is installed should have extra capacity and be able to convert water into hydrogen which will be used to power a hydrogen generator as a back-up power source.
So we need in one location: oversize wind turbine, electrolysis station, hydrogen storage, thermal hydrogen powered electrical station, electrical battery and heat sink. Obviously it can be done as a prototype, but will be quite difficult and very costly to roll out, especially in LA.
Nice article. I have a question about wind energy. according to one politician here in belgium one nuclear powerplant is the equivalent of 4500 wind turbines at sea. I'm sure it is possible but how much land do you need for that amount of wind turbines and how much is the cost? Belgium has a dense population and I have seen some youtube video's about people complaining about the noise and they see shadows of the wind turbines sometimes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLFzFtXHWAg
No problem with these in the backyard, though, I assume?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_g5n8cg045Yc/TGm3zWjCV8I/AAAAAAAAAzY/iVpMEDD3v9...
The problem with wind power is the instable, low level average power (20-25 percent) compared to capacity (=during very high winds) BUT you have to build the grid to withstand that maximum power anyway! Which you get once or twice per month at best. Plus the fact when the need is highest (freezing temperatures and high air pressure), there is usually no wind (< 4m/s).
If you use wind power as base power then cities and factories would have to build backup power plants which are usually environmentally not so friendly. So without storing the energy somehow during peak production times or using it together with something else, the wind power is expensive waste of time. For one 1000 MW nuclear plant you would need 3000 one MW turbines. Those spaced 200 m apart would cover 120 square kilometers (46 sqm). That is about half of Liverpool for example.
BTW, Chinese have done that kind of mammoth wind turbine projects. They installed whopping 16500 MW during 2009-2010, doubling their wind power capacity, but they are also building a lot of nuclear reactors for the base power. Nuclear is only clean way to satisfy high energy needs such as steel and assembly line factories.
Hydro and geothermal energy very clearly can power factories. Iceland smelts aluminum, yet all of their electricity comes from renewable sources - hydro and geothermal. The issue is that these are geographically determined, and not every area is blessed. Then again, solar would work much better in Arizona and New Mexico than it is in Germany. With fossil and nuclear power, you can build it anywhere, but you may have to buy it from someone unsavory.
I think all arguments that nuclear is the "only option" are highly questionable, especially now - and to call nuclear "clean" in ANY sense is clearly wrong. The deeper you dig into the reality of nuclear power the more accidents and near-misses you find, and the potential to contaminate large swaths of land for extremely long periods of time is non-trivial. More nuclear power over a longer period of time means more accidents will happen. Some of these will be serious.
This statement is demonstrably false as plenty of factories are powered by hydro (US PNW aluminum,etc.) and geothermal (Iceland,etc.).
Plus the technologies to store intermittent renewables are well-known and reliable, especially pumped storage, with well-understood costs.
So the statement that "renewables plus storage will have higher costs than fossil generation" is true and defensible, but "nuclear is only clean way" is simply untrue, and I have to question why you make a false statement that 1 minute with wikipedia would refute?
Really? Maybe so, but hydro seems to be tapped out and engendering a lot of opposition over snails and fish. And geothermal seems to be smashing into a nuclear-style wall of fear over small earthquakes. Feasibility does not imply scalability, so existing users can continue, but there may not be a whole lot of room to convert, say, the far larger number of factories now running basically on coal.
Although pumped storage facilities are indeed ugly to look at (bath tub rings,etc.) their environmental impacts are much less than damming rivers. Recent pumped storage systems tend to use high-head rather than large reservoirs, and the use of seawater as in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_Yanbaru_Seawater_Pumped_Storage_Pow...) would allow huge potential for expansion.
The seismic issues with geothermal need to be addressed, but decades of experience with operating plants indicates the problem can be overcome.
Paul - I'm just a little familiar with geothermal projects. A company I worked for decades ago owned the Geyser's Project in N CA. There's no threat comparable to a nuclear meltdown. The worse thing that can happen is the well bores collapse and the building falls down. Unless you're in the building when it falls there's no potential damage to anyone.
OTOH the number places around the globe where geothermal is economical is very limited. Drill any reachable depth anywhere on the planet and you'll find hot rocks. That's not the problem. It's the cost to drill and the sustainability of the project that generally are the deal killers. I've seen many economic models that make it look feasble. And none of them were designed by folks who ever developed a geothermal resource. Just make a Google search and see how many geothermal projects have been built in the last 25 years. Granted with current energy costs the economics might look beter today than ever before but still may not be viable.
From wikipedia, geothermal has grown 20% between 2005 and 2010, so your estimates of what is economical may be changing based both on developing technology and changing energy costs. The 20% failure rate on drilled holes was surprising to me, but the levelized energy costs of 0.04-0.10 € per kW·h sound quite competitive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
"The International Geothermal Association (IGA) has reported that 10,715 megawatts (MW) of geothermal power in 24 countries is online, which is expected to generate 67,246 GWh of electricity in 2010.[1] This represents a 20% increase in geothermal power online capacity since 2005. IGA projects this will grow to 18,500 MW by 2015, due to the large number of projects presently under consideration, often in areas previously assumed to have little exploitable resource.[1]" ...
"Geothermal power requires no fuel, and is therefore immune to fuel cost fluctuations, but capital costs tend to be high. Drilling accounts for over half the costs, and exploration of deep resources entails significant risks. A typical well doublet in Nevada can support 4.5 megawatt (MW) of electricity generation and costs about $10 million to drill, with a 20% failure rate.[19] In total, electrical plant construction and well drilling cost about 2-5 million € per MW of electrical capacity, while the levelised energy cost is 0.04-0.10 € per kW·h.[6] Enhanced geothermal systems tend to be on the high side of these ranges, with capital costs above $4 million per MW and levelized costs above $0.054 per kW·h in 2007.[32]"
Geothermal also needs water, and often where you have hot dry rocks, you don't have water. That Geysers project was running out of water, so they built a 20+mile pipeline to take sewage effluent from the city of Santa Rosa to there, for steam generation. That has kept the project going, but the same water, with a little more treatment, could be used for growing grapes and food in Sonoma county, and produce much more economic value.
Also, putting water into hot dry rocks (or wet ones) can often bring out all sorts minerals and metals, desirable and otherwise. Several of the geothermal areas in NZ have very high mercury in the water, so you have to be very careful if you are bring that to the surface.
Agreed that geothermal is far from a panacea, with variable economics and environmental impacts.
The simplest and cheapest form of geothermal generation does require sub-surface water, but systems to work with binary fluids in hot,dry rock are under development. Injecting geothermal water back into wells reduces surface impacts, but uses up some of the energy generated.
Globally there is a huge amount of geothermal resource that has not yet been exploited and plenty of money is being made by geothermal developers, without nuclear's massive government subsidies.
tommy - Did you get the impression that the expansion was coming more from existing projects or new areas? Back in the oil boom in the late 70's there were a lot of very deep wells drilled in S. La that found reservoirs with salt water over 300 F. The feds even had an incentive program for companies who donate such wells so that cut the capex considerably. But in the end the operational costs were too high. But as you say with energy costs rising might be some renewed interest.
"Globally there is a huge amount of geothermal resource that has not yet been exploited"
No there isn't, at least not relative to our current demands. What folks are trying to point out to you is that geologic situations like The Geysers are relatively rare, and if they were all exploited, it wouldn't amount to much relative to demand. I certainly hope we never exploit Yellowstone for it's geothermal energy.
ROCKMAN - I'm wondering what you and others think about the idea of saving much of the cost for geothermal drilling, by using existing oil wells to provide a substantial "head-start" for such projects. There are roughly 340,000 shut-in oil wells in the USA alone, with about one-third of these in Texas. And of course there are many thousands more oil wells in the US nearing end of service as "stripper" wells - and while still productive (collectively contributing over 1 million bpd towards America's oil needs) many such wells would seem likely to become available for other possibilities in the near future. It's often said that the USA is the longest running and most extensively explored/drilled oil region in the world. Does this also provide the US with a very nice foundation (of holes in the ground ;) for doing a large-scale ramp up of geothermal energy?
If the bottom hole temperatures of some of these wells are not quite high enough for geothermal production, then perhaps additional drilling to deeper levels might cross that geothermal threshold, less expensively than drilling to the total depth from scratch (or so I would guess). However, I have no significant oil field experience or expertise, so maybe this is a bad assumption on my part?
Years ago, I read about a proposal for using pairs of abandoned oil wells to implement geothermal energy production. This was by additional drilling into two nearby wells, to go slightly deeper and at such angles that the wells will meet at a common point, which is then enlarged to become the primary reservoir for water heating. New water would then go down one well, heat to steam at the deep common point, and then be directed back up the other well, which would terminate at the surface in a turbine/power generation facility. No doubt I've left out many important details, and I am no longer able to locate the original article (or maybe it was pre-Internet?).
But, there does seems to be growing interest in geothermal energy, both in general and also in conjunction with existing, already-drilled oil wells.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/12/low-tempera...
Geothermal energy can be thought of as being by far the safest and most natural way of extracting nuclear heat energy from the earth. It may also be the renewable form of energy most suitable for providing baseload power to electric grids (hydropower may also serve this role where available, except for times of extreme drought, as recently observed in Venezuela).
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/03/safe-nuclea...
http://www.watersense.co.za/2010/02/23/drought-climate-change-jeopardize...
And recent efforts involve Co-production of both Oil and Geothermal energy, some using hot wastewater from oil production. Some work involves technology called geothermal Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems; and also Binary power systems, which are said to produce useful power using lower temperature fluid inputs than before.
Several links for Oil/Geothermal Co-production related articles are at:
http://www.rmotc.doe.gov/symposium.html
Interesting. If it's not hot enough to power a turbine, how about for district heating?
It would be ideal for that- except for one thing - there are not many people living above most (not all) oilfields.
They would be ideal for running a low heat process, like ethanol distillation, or grain/material drying, for example.
j - That was tried back in the late 70's. I don't recall the details but the feds gave a tax credit to companies that donated deep wells in S La for geothermal exploitation. Many had bottom hole temps well above boiling point. And thick sands full of relatively easy to flow salt water. But even with a free $6 million well the economics apparently did work. Unfortunately since the wells were typically in the south there was no use for district heating.
One of the problems with utilizing a water injection effort is that once the heat is extracted from the rocks at the bottom of the hole it will take too long to recharge the latent heat rock. Heat conductivity in rocks is just too low.
I suspect on paper I could get the economics to work on producing deep hot salt water, extracting the heat to aid in electrical generation and then dispose the salt water down an injection well. But selling the idea on a scalable level could be difficult. OTOH given the hit the nuclear industry just took it might not be as hard to sell as it was a few months ago.
I did see a report a while back that low temp geothermal had a good chance of catching on even before high fuel prices jumped and Japanese meltdown. Wells just a few hundred feet deep were fitted with a recirculation system of hoses that feed a heat exchanger. The system was built to supply a newly constructed nursing home in Georgia. Not nearly a sexy as the Geysers complex in Ca but could have a much more universal application
Of course, 5 MW wind turbines are now in production, so 600 5 MW turbines would equal the output of a 1 GW nuke. And turbines just do not "cover 120 square kilometers", of course, the vast majority of land area in a wind farm is not "covered" by anything but simply part of the required turbine spacing, and available for other uses. Here in Colorado, turbine are often spaced several hundred yards apart and wind farms are used for grazing land just as they always were, with essentially no impact on productivity. To claim that these wind farms are "square kilometers" "covered" by turbines is pure mis-information.
In contrast, solar thermal and large scale PV does truly "cover" land and those impacts need to be considered in project planning.
"wind farms are used for grazing land just as they always were, with essentially no impact on productivity"
You would not still want that 5 MW whump whumping near your household within one mile, would you?
I am guessing you have not spent a lot of time in Eastern Colorado, North Dakota, or Wyoming. There are many square miles of grazing land with only a few scattered ranches, and the ranch owners have been very happy to hear the whumping, as long as they get the thousands of dollars per year of wind farm lease fees.
Eventually I expect most wind turbines to end up off-shore as technologies for deep water installations improve, and then no one will be bothered by the whumping.
The bottom line is that claiming land is "covered" by wind farms is mis-information.
As soon as I can figure out how to finance it, I will have *several* 5MW wind turbines on the family farm in northern iowa. I get quite a nice view from the top of a grain bin, I'm looking forward to be able to watch the sunset from the top of a turbine. I'll definitely want one with a lift in the tower.
Did I mention that the turbine access roads improve farm productivity because it's easier to get the 4-5 tons of corn per acre that get produced out?
Well, not quite right. Plants and grass can still grow. Some PV power plants let sheep graze between the rows. I have heard that filling up a field with PVs can have benefits: the land can recover from farming ... and you see a lot of birds of prey circling them.
But, yes, they are not always a pretty sight - but they don't make as much noise as wind turbines.
I think a good mixture is right way to go.
I wonder if these people complain about their heartbeat or their breathing?
People are well-evolved to cope with heartbeats and breathing. Maybe not so much for the distracting flicker from a nearby wind turbine (there are even guidelines for Web sites and video games concerning flicker), or the constant distracting, sleep-depriving whoomp-whoomp from the change in the turbulence pattern as each turbine blade passes by the supporting post. So by regulation wind farms have to be sited a long way (just raised to 1800 feet in Wisconsin IIRC) from residences. Which implies major transmission lines from far-flung rural areas back to town where most people actually live. Which opens up yet another can of worms.
Which gets to what's really troubling - the "say no to everything" meme. More likely we'll have to say yes to nearly everything. Either that, or the picketers at the state Capitol carrying signs complaining bitterly of "third world America" will experience their nightmare become reality.
How about the flicker of eerie light being emitted from Japanese spinach?
Quite stunning, really that some here are still shamelessly promoting nukes as the water for the ~40 million people in the Tokyo are becomes increasingly unsafe to drink.
People have lived without ff and nuclear power for most of their existence.
We have rarely lived for very long without water.
The Wisconsin 1800' property line setback is dead in the legislature. That one was just going too far, even though both houses are controlled by the same party as Gov. Walker.
Effectively, the 1800' rule would have required farms with 3/4 mile dimensions on each side. That's a rare bird here in Wisconsin - most farms are significantly smaller, and the 3/4 mile square doesn't happen very often - it's usually 1/2 mile square and other combinations of quarter sections.
The PSC's 1250' from households siting rule will probably be governing for the next few years.
There is a well financed opposition to wind power here, that reeks of astroturf.
The numbers don't sound right. If we were going to build a nuke today it would probably output about 1.5GW. A modern offshore turbine is probably 3MW, give the offshore WTs a capacity factor of 33%, and that means the 4500 offshore WTs average 4.5GW, or three nukes. Now perhaps he is more concerned with what you get on the days where wind isn't very strong, and the WT field is barely producing much. But, at least in terms of raw KWhours per year, the WTs do more. And people are designing 10MW+ Sea Titans for a few years from now.
The big issue with the wind becomes societal acceptance of serious demand management, i.e. there will be periods when some to a lot of industrial capacity and other high demand uses must be curtailed. That isn't like current BAU, so it requires a whole new outlook.
The war of all against all to determine who gets left in the lurch (or cooked in a stopped electric train with panoramic sealed windows, or saddled with a huge bill to replace frozen plumbing, or just laid off for a couple of weeks when the wind fails to blow) will be entertaining, anyway.
This is not a serious argument.
HVAC & lighting represent 70% of building load (commercial and residential); Smart lighting and t-stats, where customers, based on price signals and a customer specified level of service required for various space types (lobbies treated differently than operating rooms) could easily free up capacity in real time. Dimming a light 10% and stepping up or down a thermstat by 2 degrees for 30 minutes would not cause any undue hardships. Add delaying pool pumps and motors for refrigeration (based on T) and a lot of on-demand capacity could be generated for relatively little cost.undue
See the discussions upthread about curtailing various users. There will be plenty of commercial users lobbying about TEOTWAWKI if they get cut off. So once we get into the rationing business, the average person is going to be very very very low on the totem pole.
Great.
So go rail against lobbying, not against basic sanity of energy management
(unless, of course, you are a lobbyist of sorts yourself. Then, I guess, you just can't help yourself and must be excused.)
1 nuclear plant = 1,600 MW (new EPR, bigger than Belgium's current plants. Capacity factor = 90%
1 offshore wind turbine = 6.15 MW (as currently being built at the C-Power project off the Belgian coast). Capacity factor = 50% (yes, really).
To get the same number of MWh each year than your nuke plant, you need 1,600/6.15*90/50 = 470 turbines.
Thanks for making a realistic estimate.
I keep seeing the decimal demon on energy sites. I thought everyone in energy knew basic math. But when folks exaggerate the numbers in their favor by a factor of 10 they undermine their position in this game. They reveal harsh bias.
Currently in Tokyo they are trying to confuse milli and micro to cover up the release of radiation. I guess math is not important anymore -- as the public swallows these numbers made from whole clothe.
Maybe the reporters are having trouble with "m" versus "μ". Odds are that the average reporter can't find μ on their keyboard.
And every now and then, someone really slips up and reports a dose in the range of MegaSieverts
Where do you get the micro symbol from?
On English-centric US Windows computers it may be easiest to cut and paste the "μ" from where it already is, as I just did. Or follow the directions in Word to get it to appear, and cut and paste it. Or use start/programs/accessories/system tools/character map. With most keyboards, alt-0181 should work provided that you remember the number and enter the digits on the number pad. On Linux computers it might be a bit more complicated depending on versions and the application. On a Mac I don't know.
Linux, KCharSelect
NAOM
Oh, you can always cut and paste from someone who has used it already μ :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix gives the various prefixes used in the International System of Units (SI)>
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/characterentities_famsupp_69.html shows the character references in HTML 4.0. So the micro symbol can be expressed by the characters & m i c r o ; (with the spaces removed). I actually used & m u ; which is probably not correct, although it seems to produce the same glyph. µ and μ look the same on my browser.
Micro should be mu, looks more like 2 typefaces.
NAOM
(10^-6)?
Micro, mu, μ the prefix for
10^-6
eg 1μm = .000001 of a meter(m) = .001 of a milimeter(mm) = 1000 nanometers(nm).
NAOM
You can use the HTML character code "& mu;" (remove the space between the ampersand and m) to get "μ."
μ
mu μ Mega M milli m
What's the difference if you are the regulatory body for Japanese nuclear plants?
Thanks Jerome! It's somewhat reassuring to hear something other than 'renewables shmenewables' once in a while. Even if the majority still continues to want to cling to the BAU paradigm at all costs.
All the regulars here will understand that my personal position, as a realist in relation to the environmernt and politics, is that all renewables should be built to the maximum extent that it is possible to secure financing.
This position is as I see it the best of a poor lot of choices for several reasons.
Solar pv will often get built in geographic locations where it does not perform very well, and installed in particular spots where the installation costs an arm and a leg in labor-such as on residential roofs.
Wind suffers from the same problem-some wind farms are going up in spots where average production is rather poor compared to other wind farms, and so far as I can see,home scale wind power mounted on on residential roofs or very short towers(hieght limited by local building codes) is nothing more than a joke in most places, in terms of cost versus production.
I know nothing about wave and tidal power except that for now it appears that nobody has yet built a wave machine that has proven itself in actual service-this could change of course.Tidal barrages and underwater turbines seem to have a lot of potential, and have proven track records already.
But while the potential is high, the number of suitable sites are relatively few, and getting construction permits will be a tough nut indeed in or near the areas where the juice is really needed- much tougher than for wind farms imo, speaking as an armchair observer of the political scene.
What I'm saying is that a large part of the money being spent on renewables is being spent poorly, and earning a poor return.Nevertheless, given the reality of politics, and the gravity of the ff depletion problem,the maximum achievable build out should go ahead at all costs.The money will at least generate some long term returns when spent on renewables, as opposed to none idf spent on most otyher popular causes , such as bailing out particular kinds of social parasites with good political connections, such as.....fill in your own choices, I won't start a fuss about which ones.
Whatever energy is generated will definitely imo be a bargain within ten years, in terms of dollars and cents and repaying loans with inflated money earned by selling scarce energy at inflated prices.More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that our second best mid term bet is to hope renewables can scale up fast enough to prevent a collapse of the grid such that chaos results;bau is of course dead in the long term, but we MIGHT avoid collapse as such if we are lucky, and the production plateaus of oil, coal, and gas last long enough.
My personal guess is that money spent even on ill considered renewables today will hopefully in the end contribute enough to the scaling up to enable us , collectively, to turn the corner.
What we really should be doing in the short term is going flat out for conservation and efficiency, but these lack sexiness , and the political calculus simply doesn't work;people are too spoiled by easy living, and simply refuse to believe it is coming to an end.
There are some things that might be easily done, however, to seriously enhance the economic growth of renewables, pv in particular, if some major professional organization, such as the civil or electrical engineering organizations, would get behind the issue and lend professional prestige to the effort.
I will post my thoughts on this later today.
In the end, we will find that Jerome is actually dealing rather gently and diplomatically with the future prospects for natural gas-the price of it will go thru the roof once it becomes necessary to begin seriously sunstituting it for oil-which must happen within the next decade at the latest.
If I were yoing and ambitious, I would seriously consider opening a garage specializing in converting diesel trucks to diesel/ compressed or lng( when suitable lng tanks become available) dual fuel operation.
"What we really should be doing in the short term is going flat out for conservation and efficiency"
Amen to that.
So how can we make these high-pay-back but low-sexiness measures more appealing?
Which starlet or Hollywood hunk would be most effective at bringing some...attractiveness to conservation? Nominations?
Get Justin Bieber's new haircut to be a wind turbine shaved in the back of it? Better yet have it done by a wind turbine...
Are we going to get renewables to prevent the rise of CO2 or do we just forget that and continue with blinders securely fastened and rely on faith hope and charity.
A poster up thread said "I believe".
All this thread says to me is all the believers are outright or closet global warming deniers.
Talking about the wonders of renewable devices is fine but the actual changeover should have happened half a century ago. Just keep this in mind, the only reason renewable energy is even give a cursory thought is because the EROEI of FF's is decreasing and forcing prices up. Renewables are about the almighty dollar and a last ditch attempt at preserving the lost cause of BAU.
We have gradually used up our credits until all we have now, well we have nothing actually, except use them (renewables)to build fences around deposits of fossil fuels. As if that's going to happen.
I don't mind the discussions about the power of renewables, they WERE a good idea but it frustrates me immensely when people say we can merrily build them as fast as we can and at the same time continue to burn at peak.
You know I really think the enormity of the CO2 problem is beyond just about everyone here, so it simply gets placed in the subconscious, so talk about the future and a world of peaceful renewable energy, can continue to keep us occupied and happy.
I dunno maybe renewables are the morphine to a terminally ill patient. Really though I think we are going to die in pain anyway, we'll soon find out that the morphine is a placebo.
What I'm saying is that a large part of the money being spent on renewables is being spent poorly, and earning a poor return.
Bingo!
We have seen a huge waste of government $ on less than ideal renewable projects, often with the primary purpose of vote buying. I have commented above, and will repeat here, that when governments do renewable they choose to subsidise PV , especially residential, as it reaches the most voters. When utilities are required to do renewables, and are not gov subsidised, they do almost anything but PV.
I have no problem with renewable portfolio standards, but let's not have the gov trying to pick the wining technology - this has diverted much investment from other areas, including DSM, into PV, for very poor return.
I completely agree with your comments re cng trucks - just make them dual fuel not dedicated CNG. if i were to set up that business, i would be targeting fleet operators, particularly municipalities and delivery co's, where vehicles have home bases. There is a huge opportunity there.
Wan't it Bill Gates who suggested not deploying anything, but pumping money for research and at some moment "go for it"?
Can;t confirm that CC, but I do agree with the principle.
In the case of NG for trucks and vehicles, I don't think there is any more R&D to be done. Thew tech for running engines on NG is mature. Westport Innovations, from Vancouver, has been doing this for years, which is why Cummins partnered with them. Off the shelf engines are available, as are dual fuel setups.
The carbon fibre tanks are available for CNG, I can;t see what could improve much on those. For LNG, Dewar flasks are mature tech.
And there are already millions of ng vehicles around the world. The hurdle here is economic. Truck operators won;t do it until refueling is there, truck stops won;t do it until they have customers. Seems like a good situation for some targeted gov spending - say $1m per CNG station each of the first 500 truckstops, on the interstates, that put them in - that would jump start things, but have a big benefit in terms of oil displacement
For solar PV, I think we have jumped too early - $bns have been spent on volume at the high end of the cost curve, and to displace what - coal or NG, neither of which this continent is short of. The solar farm at Sarnia, Ont was just an exercise in bragging rights, much more power could have been generated by doing more wind, small hydro, etc.
For small solar, the cost is not really the panels, it is the inverters, and installation, so why subsidise small systems that have the highest unit costs? The taxpayer is getting the least value here.
But I am particularly of the opinion that displacing oil should be priority 1. It has significant economic and environmental benefits - displacing coal electricity really only has environmental benefits, and doing it with solar has negative economic benefits. All the $bns spent on solar panels could have put the entire truck and train industry on NG. Trying to do everything at once spreads resources thinly and into unproductive areas.
Let's just be clear that any money going in to subsidizing renewables or research into them is massively dwarfed by the boatloads of cash still going in to supporting ff and nukes.
Yes, thanks Jerome, for your rational and clear viewpoint, but the situation for wind turbines will actually be even better in the next 2-4 years. Several turbine technology developers are developing prototypes of 10 MW capacity, and American Superconductor claims their design will easily scale to 20 MW. So you can divide your estimate of 470 turbines by about 3 (20/6.15), giving about 160 offshore turbines with 50& regularity to replace a 1600 MW nuke with 90% regularity. That nuke will take at least 10 years to plan and build. Those 160 turbines could be installed in the next 5-8 years. This really is a slam dunk for wind, and any claim to the otherwise is just plain delusional. The required solutions to the additional technical challenges of high wind penetration in the grid are basically off-the-shelf today. The problem is that utility industry is dominated by players who resist the new business models of high wind and PV penetration. They will come around soon.
I wish we would have an open discussion about the policy positions and grid operator limits to the penetration of wind and solar.
These policies are not energy intensive to change, and we should be pushing for changes that reduce carbon and generate power from renewable sources ASAP.
I think a lot of red tape oddly -- big government -- is protecting King Coal.
Any thoughts?
Yes, I know that renewable energy plants in Germany are occasionally taken off-grid to ensure nuclear power plants and others keep their share.
That's an issue. Obviously we can't just switch it all off and nuclear power plants can just be driven up and down. Solutions? Maybe gradually phasing out some of the coal, oil, gas and nuclear plants as more renewable energy is produced and developed.
In Germany I've heard of small towns converting. One small town/village mentioned was supplying 60% through a mixture of renewables. They took it into their own hands and had some fights with the big suppliers. That seemed like a neat way to go about it.
In Germany I've heard of small towns converting. One small town/village mentioned was supplying 60% through a mixture of renewables. They took it into their own hands and had some fights with the big suppliers. That seemed like a neat way to go about it.
That is very interesting - I have been of the opinion for some time that the best way forward for renewables is on a community scale - built, owned, operated and consumed by the community, with outside power as necessary. Lots of scope for rural communties, not so for cities but small cities/toens are a good start. Do you have any information (hopefully in English) on that?
Off-shore is criminally expensive, and assuming you have a fixed investment budget per year, expect nuclear to be some four times faster. If you dream of 20 MW off-shore turbines, I could as well dream about laser fusion or LFTR fission. We are simply not there.
It seems US generation is about 20% nuclear, 20% gas, 50% coal, 6% hydro and 4% renewables. Wind and gas are a perfect match, so I guess you could try to gravitate towards 20% wind and 50% gas to replace coal. That would be great, but more expensive, less environmental and less sustainable.
To think wind and solar alone can replace coal is "plain delusional". You portray mitigating high wind penetration as "off the shelf", but let's wait and see if any one electricity region (less than 10% imports/exports) anywhere gets above 25% wind. I'll believe it when I see it. (Denmark has gross electricity import/exports both in the range of 30%.)
Portugal has gone from 0% to 17% wind power in a very short time, so I don't think you will have long to wait for 25% wind. But the (less than 10% imports/exports) is really an artificial, unnecessary and counter-productive requirement, especially for wind, since spreading out spatial variability with grid interconnects is much cheaper and more common-sense than storage, plus it provides redundancy when single source baseload (like nukes in Japan) goes down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Portugal
"In 2010, Portugal generated 9.024 TWh of wind energy, or 17% of its total production [2], putting it above Spain and only behind Denmark, as the second highest wind power mix contribution in the World[3].... The record for highest instantaneous weight of wind energy was achieved in 31 October 2010 02:15 AM, reaching 75% of total consumption. The highest daily contribution of wind energy was attained in the same day at 61%. [4]. The record of wind power generation utilization was achieved on October 8, 2010 at 15:15 with 3235 MW."
But the (less than 10% imports/exports) is really an artificial, unnecessary and counter-productive requirement, especially for wind, since spreading out spatial variability with grid interconnects is much cheaper and more common-sense than storage, plus it provides redundancy when single source baseload (like nukes in Japan) goes down.<.i>
So where, then does Japan, or New Zealand, or Australia, or Hawaii, etc export to? The spatial variability of wind is not as great as you might think, and to utilise what there is, requires long transmission lines from A to B, that have capacity reserved exclusively for wind, which means they will have a capacity factor even lower than the wind turbines themselves.
Portugal, has a very high length of Atlantic coastline relative to its area, and load, so is indeed an ideal place for wind, but I will also want to see how they get their annual up to 25+% - it starts to depend on the co-operation of other countries, and in Europe (or anywhere else) that is not always guaranteed.
Australia, New Zealand and Japan are easy enough with HVDC to their neighbors, but I agree that Hawaii is unlikely to export wind power to anyone, but why should an extreme special case (with abundant geothermal resources) drive global decision-making.
Under-sea HVDC connections are becoming more common all the time. HVDC between Ireland, Europe and UK already exists and more links are under construction currently. Iceland has proposed an HVDC link to Europe to export geothermal.
As usual, wikipedia is my friend,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
"Undersea cables, where high capacitance causes additional AC losses. (e.g., 250 km Baltic Cable between Sweden and Germany,[14] the 600 km NorNed cable between Norway and the Netherlands, and 290 km Basslink between the Australian mainland and Tasmania[15]"
"A number of studies have highlighted the potential benefits of very wide area super grids based on HVDC since they can mitigate the effects of intermittency by averaging and smoothing the outputs of large numbers of geographically dispersed wind farms or solar farms.[25] Czisch's study concludes that a grid covering the fringes of Europe could bring 100% renewable power (70% wind, 30% biomass) at close to today's prices. There has been debate over the technical feasibility of this proposal[26] and the political risks involved in energy transmission across a large number of international borders.[27]
The construction of such green power superhighways is advocated in a white paper that was released by the American Wind Energy Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association[28]
In January 2009, the European Commission proposed €300 million to subsidize the development of HVDC links between Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, as part of a wider €1.2 billion package supporting links to offshore wind farms and cross-border interconnectors throughout Europe. Meanwhile the recently founded Union of the Mediterranean has embraced a Mediterranean Solar Plan to import large amounts of concentrating solar power into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East.[29]"
Australia already has an HVDC link with Tasmania, HVDC from Australia to New Zealand and
Australia to NZ would be a 1700 km long HVDC link - that is hardly trivial. And, it connects two countries that are in almost the same latitude, and only time separated by 2hrs - so how much geographic wind dispersion are we getting?
To use this link, say 2000MW for the geographic dispersion of wind, means the capacity must be set aside for wind, only - it can;t be used for baseload transfer. That is a *massive* cost, just to get a 2hr timeshift of wind power from Aust to NZ and vice versa.
You will get better value from such an HVDC link by the time shifting of peak demand and baseload response across it (using spare cap in Aust for NZ peak and vice versa, you would get reliable usage of capacity once a day, in each direction.
A N-S HVDC from northern Qld to Victoria might be better value, as the both have strong wind resources, but are different patterns. But, I'll bet the coal, Ng and Snowy Hydro plants would outbid wind for the cable capacity, as they would use it, predictably, every day.
Yes, this makes more sense than Aus-NZ
Australia is big enough to "export" to itself
(with possible future solar thermal power opportunities as well)
There is no practical reason to "have capacity reserved exclusively for wind" in either new or existing HVDC connections and as far as I know wind reservation has never been implemented or proposed. In practice, HVDC lines will be used to wheel the cheapest power to the highest bidder, as always, and if carbon is priced appropriately some fraction of the power transmitted will be wind, but North African summer solar thermal may meet Italian AC loads, while French nuclear electricity may wheel to the UK. But the same infrastructure can balance varying loads in time and space with varying renewable generation.
But if the capacity is not reserved for wind, and is used by something else, then how does this benefit wind?
For the Aust-NZ example, if a coal plant in Aust is sending power to NZ in the morning (5am), as NZ's load ramps up (7am NZ time), and then the wind pipes up in Australia (and there is none in NZ at that time), how does the wind power get to NZ? Only by paying more for the cable capacity, at that time, to displace the coal plant.
if we have 2000MW wind in each country, and the cable of same capacity then yes, we can swap from one place to the other, but how often does this happen at full capacity? For the cable operator, the best thing they can do is sell capacity to whoever wants it, at any time. So if the wind dies in NZ, an Aust NG plant might start up and send full power. Then the wind comes up in Aust, but the capacity is already being used by NG, so the wind is just as stranded as if there was no cable.
Unless, of course, if there is capacity set aside for wind - and then the cable will be under utilised...
We are pretty far into hypotheticals here, but some combination of grid storage and interconnection will be used, so time shifting with local storage on either end of an HVDC link would allow load/demand balancing, so some time slot would, as you say, be required to move renewable electricity, but permanent reserved capacity for wind would not be required.
Most people are unaware that both the US and Europe already have significant grid storage capacity (5% of baseload in EU) , and more will be added, because the combination of cheap wind and cheap pumped storage will still be cheaper than escalating fossil and nuclear costs (in my opinion...).
From wikipedia (of course)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
"In 2009 the United States had 21.5 GW of pumped storage generating capacity, accounting for 2.5% of baseload generating capacity.[3] PHS generated (net) -6288 GWh of energy in 2008[4] because more energy is consumed in pumping than is generated; losses occur due to water evaporation, electric turbine/pump efficiency, and friction.
In 2007 the EU had 38.3 GW net capacity of pumped storage out of a total of 140 GW of hydropower and representing 5% of total net electrical capacity in the EU (Eurostat, consulted August 2009)."
But a few islands are not the real crux of global electricity generation, the vast majority of world electricity consumers are already connected to continental grids, that can allow load/demand balancing over large enough areas to accommodate renewable's variability and interconnects and HVDC are continually being added. Increasing both storage and interconnection at the same time will have synergistic effects that make the grid more robust.
more will be added, because the combination of cheap wind and cheap pumped storage will still be cheaper than escalating fossil and nuclear costs (in my opinion...).
But here's the problem - pumped storage just isn't that cheap, and there is only so much of it that can be built. Not saying we shouldn't build, it I am a big fan of it, but there just isn;t that much that cone be done, cheaply.
In 2009 the United States had 21.5 GW of pumped storage generating capacity, accounting for 2.5% of baseload generating capacity
That is good, but we are trying to get wind to 20%, and wee know that we need 20% backup. We can build lots more wind, but not lots more pumped storage - what then?
the vast majority of world electricity consumers are already connected to continental grids
In the US, the grid is actually four separate grids, that are not interconnected, and this seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
Increasing both storage and interconnection at the same time will have synergistic effects that make the grid more robust.
The grid(s) as they are, are already robust. But, if we want large scale wind (variable) generation, then yes, we need to add lots of interconnects and storage. What I am getting at is that this needs to be priced into wind as a large scale solution. Up to 10%, not an issue, but between 10 and 20, yes, and definitely for above. You are doing a lot of work to accommodate the unpredictability, and geographic distribution, of wind, that you would not otherwise do - it has to be factored in.
At the moment, the wind industry wants to build turbines, connect them, and leave the rest (interconnects, storage etc) to someone else. And, presently, what the someone else will do is build simple cycle gas turbine, because that is the cheapest way to handle the variability of wind - and that is what we have seen for the last decade. Spain has added lots of wind, but adds twice as much NG each year!
And, with simple cycle GT, you get only 75% of the fuel efficiency of combined cycle. Given that a CCGT backing up a wind turbine would run 75% of the time, you might as well just build a combined cycle unit, which can be built close to the load centre, and forget the wind turbine, transmission lines, interconnects, HVDC, storage etc.
At present the cheapest "storage" available is NG sitting somewhere as fuel for a turbine. It can be done anywhere, anytime. there is no other storage technology on the horizon that comes close.
so unless we are, collectively, prepared to pay the price for the redundancy of lots of turbines, HVDC, storage etc, NG is going to rule the roost for the forseeable future. Personally, I think we just accept that, for now, and get on with displacing oil first, and use the money we save on that for the electricity system.
New sources of electricity are important, but getting off oil is both urgent and important - the US economy will not crash from using too much coal, but we have seen what happens from too much oil.
I am guessing you get the 75% runtime from assuming 25% capacity factor for wind, but actual installed wind capacity factors are running from 35% onshore at good sites to 50% off-shore at good sites. But whatever the capacity factor, the runtime of backup gas depends on the load/generation balance. If enough 35% capacity factor wind turbines are installed, then the backup gas turbine will run much less than 75% of the time, although excess wind power might need to be frequently dumped or exported. This might not be the most economic arrangement, but the assumption of 75% runtime for gas backup is not valid for many, or even most, utility territories and realistic scenarios.
Well, the run time will be 1-cap.factor, and at present in Can/US, there is no offshore (one proposed for Lake Ontario has just been scrapped), and the onshore ones are often some way away from load centres.
Point is, still, you need to have enough dispatchable capacity to handle your peak loads - wind/solar are just fuel reducing bonuses. Reduce your peak loads by DSM and you can reduce your dispatcahble capacity, and up the effective utilisation of the wind/solar
Granted, at night there is likely to be little need for the SCGT in the presence of other baseload (coal or nuke) but my example was about a renewable only grid.
In the real grid world, there is some ability for nukes/coal/ccgt to load follow, so when wind pipes up, they can pipe down, somewhat.
The angle I personally think should be explored (and am looking doing this myself) is using biomass for peaking. At present most biomass (Can/US) is wood burning associated with pulp mils, and in Europe a lot is CHP (operated as baseload). The medium scale (10-30MWe) steam systems don;t lend themselves to load following or rapid start up (peaking).
But there are other ways to do biomass (ICE and GT) that can be.
A wind farm can also be a biomass farm (miscanthus, sorghum, trees, whatever) - both have a fairly predictable annual production, but the biomass can be stored. So then during peak hours, if the wind dies, your biomass comes up. During the off peak hours, the biomass is off, regardless of what wind is doing. So the 'renewable farm" can guarantee peak hour power (high value) and sell off peak wind (low value) as a bonus.
That is my king of complimentary renewables. A 1000ha biomass farm could produce 10,000t/yr, or enough for 7MW at 6hrs/day average, and the same sized farm could sustain quite a bit more wind than that. It would be more profitable than any agriculture except perhaps dairy.
My idea for complimentary renewables is to dump excess wind power into concentrating solar thermal molten salt thermal reservoirs via resistance heating (or a heat pump). Since most new CST plants will have some thermal storage, excess wind can just take advantage of the existing thermal storage and turbines. CST will already have a beefy grid connect that would be underutilized in non-sunny hours. Probably somebody is already doing this.
I agree that biomass makes great peaking and is wasted as baseload. Given my background in building energy efficiency I would like to see a PassivHaus standard universal in the US, at which point we would need no new fossil generation, and could use existing FF capacity as backup for renewables. Much more practical and economic than a nuclear buildout, or massive build of gas peakers, but politically very difficult.
If you go to thermal and back again, you can expect to lose 70% of the energy.
Not if you use a heat pump with high COP on the charge side.
Even if you use simple resistance heating, it is nearly 100% efficient on the charge side, and generation will depend on Carnot efficiency of your turbine and whether you have other uses for low-grade heat
So, let's use a high COP (5) heat pump and then use a turbine with carnot efficiency (73%) to retrieve the electricity again. You could loop that and triple your electricity in every cycle. Great stuff. No, I maintain that you'd lose around 70%.
If the above statement were correct, then Denmark at 20% and Portugal at 17% could not exist, since they clearly do not have 20% backup. Instead they modulate existing hydro capacity and use wind as a fuel saver. There is no reason that the US could not do the same thing, so 20% wind in the real world does not require 20% backup, but simply intelligent modulation of existing FF/hydro generation. And with successful energy efficiency efforts, current FF and hydro are adequate for that purpose, although additional storage is clearly economic and will continue to be added.
Portugal and Denmark (in particular) are interlinked with other places that have lots of hydro (norway) and natural gas (Spain) and partial load following nukes (France). The US grid can link to more of the hydro in Canada, of course, and we're happy to sell it back at peak times. Would be nice if California paid the bills though...
Don't believe me about the 20 MW turbine. Go to the website http://www.amsc.com/products/applications/windEnergy/seatitan.html or search through the large number of websites discussing this technology. This technology will never be low-priced, but it will be attractive and competitive in markets with good access to good offshore wind resources. This is a slam dunk. I expect Japan will soon lead the way on this as the true horror of their nuclear industry risk is fully understood. Pictures from inside some of the Fukushima reactors are coming out now and if you have some knowledge of what is going on, you will agree the final outcome will be a nightmare.
In my comment above I examine replacing one typical nuclear power plant with next generation wind turbines. I did not suggest that it is a good idea to replace all existing nukes and ff power plants with wind turbines, and I agree, this is delusional. It is in any case delusional to believe we can continue to consume energy in the future as we do today. We need building standards for insulation like Sweden's, which drasticly reduce our need for energy to heat our homes and buildings in the winter or cool in the summer. We need full implementation of low-energy lighting, low-energy appliances, heat recovery, etc. to reduce our need for energy. This is essential for any strategy for large-scale implementation of renewables and "scale-down" of nuclear and ff.
http://www.fillescv.n.nu/images/fillescv/tehachapi-wind.jpg
This is a random week from a wind park somewhere. Posted earlier at TOD.
ALL CAPS and cursewords do not add to the force of your argument.
That wind produces at a percentage of capacity is news to no one on TOD, although modern installations tend to have capacity factors higher than the 20-25% you incorrectly claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
"Typical capacity factors are 20–40%, with values at the upper end of the range in particularly favourable sites"..
"In a 2008 study released by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the capacity factor achieved by the wind turbine fleet is shown to be increasing as the technology improves. The capacity factor achieved by new wind turbines in 2004 and 2005 reached 36%."
Variation from 60% to 0% over one hour almost never happens, of course. Pumped storage to store intermittent renewable energy is well understood and gigawatts of new pumped storage are under development in Europe currently.
New nuclear power plant development in democracies is done for a decade at least, I believe.
No private sector developers will build nuclear plants without government subsidy, especially for insurance and liability.
The hypothetical modular reactors do not currently exist, so comparing available technologies like wind and solar with hypothetical products is not a realistic alternative.
Why stress about wind power, mate? It has pluses and minuses. Nuclear has + and - too. Get a grip. Nothing is the "perfect solution". Nothing.
There is no vast conspiracy to place Green power out there. We are hitting hard limits and need to make choices about air and water and land quality. Nukes are not 100% squeaky clean. Wind does not use zero land.
Public debate and economics will shift the playing field in different ways in different countries.
Why overly rely on any one source?
Some people (like me) think that:
* wind power has twice the cost of nuclear, at least in the second wave of nuclear. Money is time.
* wind is limited to some 20% of generation due to intermittency issues.
* wind power cements gas generation, as you can't currently balance wind with nuclear.
* wind power gives the public the impression that nuclear isn't needed, and nuclear ramping is delayed by this.
* France went from almost zero nuclear to about 75% nuclear in 19 years from the decision, so swift scaling is possible.
* Uranium is plentiful and the world will have no problem in powering ten times as much nuclear generation for a century, and then breeder reactors, with or without a thorium fuel cycle, can power us virtually for eternity.
* Nuclear is extremely low-carbon, environmentally low-impact and its radiological threats are greatly exaggerated.
* AGW is a serious threat and coal generation keep expanding.
* China is set to overtake the Western world by launching a comprehensive nuclear program. They are clearing our IP rights and are developing their own, and may proceed to dominate the world of energy in a few decades. (This is perhaps more of a promise than a threat. It's better that they push the world forward than nobody does it.)
You may think we are wrong, but you should understand our frustration given what we hold as truths, no?
This is not just the case in Nuclear, but also in wind and solar. They are aggressively pursuing all of them. We are aggressively resisting all of them.
Nuclear plants are projected costs. Wind costs are actual. Nextgen nuke plants are way over budget and likely to get more expensive
You know, the US isn't the entire world. There has been recent nuke builds, and recent contracts. For instance, UAE has bought four APR-1400 from South Korea for $20 billion. China is aiming for $1000/KW for their indigenous design and are not too far off today. The also build on budget and on time. Of course, land, labour and so on is more expensive in the US, but anyways.
Please give a source for this claim, US Department Of Energy report referenced on wikipedia has on-shore wind cheaper than nuclear, which agrees with everything else I have read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_d...
US DOE report has 2016 wind at 97.0 $/MWhr versus Advanced Nuclear at 113.9 $/MWhr and geothermal at 101.7.
This wind average is across all sites, and at the best sites DOE has wind at 81.7 and nuclear at 109.7
That agrees with everything else you have read? Then you should widen your scope a bit, me thinks. Or even better, why not calculate yourself? It's easy with excel and the wikipedia formula for levelized energy cost. You can play around with input parameters a bit and you'll probably come to the same conclusion.
So the source for your claim is a suggestion that I "play around with input parameters a bit"???
Hardly convincing data.
The problem is that we can both find cost estimates that suit our preconceptions. I didn't want the argument to end in a pointless fight over the credibility of sources and where the mainstream lies. It's better if you and I do the LEC calculations and argue a bit over input parameters.
I can start:
Nuclear data according to the UAE contract, 4*APR-1400 for $20 billion. Assumed build time 5 years, all investment taken the first year of project. 90% capacity factor, 60 years life, fuel+O&M+backend 2.4 cents/kWh. LEC is 9 cents/kWh at 10% interest, 5 cents/kWh at 5% interest.
Wind according to a current Swedish project: $6.2 million for 2.3 MW, 1 year build time, O&M+backend 1.6 cents/kWh, 28% capacity factor, 20 years life. LEC is 14 cents/kWh at 10% interest. 10 cents/kWh at 5%.
What do you get, and what parameters do you use?
"Why stress about wind power, mate? It has pluses and minuses. Nuclear has + and - too. Get a grip. Nothing is the "perfect solution". Nothing."
You have perfectly summed up the stress issue. There is no magic bullet this time. We have been spoiled by a century of living with a magic bullet. 140 years ago we used coal, rendered whale and cow fat, biomass, bee exudate, windmills, water wheels, and what we now call passive solar. And we had just given up forced human labor and considered that a huge advancement.
We are going to have to be creative again about scrounging energy. It's going to take some getting used to.
Natural Gas 4.29 + 0.94%
both offshore wind and solar production patterns happen to follow intra-day variations of demand quite closely
No it does not.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
Anyone who looks at wind production graph over a few days will see wind production is all over the place and often produces the most when least needed and the least when most needed. 22 march is good example of this at 18.00-20.00 hours wind production was at its lowest. Producing only 5% of wind installed capacity.
Also Germany renewable installed capacity of 40% is misleading it produces nothing like that amount.
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=5436
On the renewable side, wind power provided 6.2%, biomass 4.7%, hydro power 3.2%, photovoltaics 2% and waste power plants 0.8%.
Not a coincidence that people who work in the wind industry are full of wind and little substance.
Your thinking is very intermittent there buddy. You can't complain that it is sporadic on the one hand and then cherry-pick an example of a point in time that the power is very low. We all know this happens! That is the nature of a stochastic or random process.
At some point we will get used to this attitude just like we get used to people complaining about the weather. Complain all you want, but nothing you can do but deal with it.
But you still need to cover the energy need during that 18-20.00 with SOMETHING! And that is what matters.
Wind provides MWhs not MW. Reasonable wind proponents do not claim otherwise. Yes, you need capacity for these periods, and yes it's not wind which is going to provide it. But thankfully, it's easy to build cheap MWs which are rarely used.
As an aside, I' note that you also need some backup when 6GW of nuclear capacity gets pushed offline because of an incident (and no, I'm not just talking of 9.0 quakes, just an incident on a big powerline or a transformer can do the same trick....)
Large-scale, dispatchable energy storage, tim, was invented by the NON-DISPATCHABLE BASELOAD POWER INDUSTRY in the 1980's, because they were giving their power away for free in some markets all night, every night, when no-one was using it. This same technology will work for grids with high penetration of intermittent power sources. This really is a no-brainer. It will cost some of course, but it will be a good investment, especially compared to our favorite technology with no business case, i.e. nuclear.
And the name of this nameless storage technology is ... ? Can't be the pumped storage that can supply 2.5% as cited above, 2.5% is a joke on the scale that would be needed. If it exists, why does anyone still need natural-gas peaking plants?
Hi Paul, I thought most people who bothered to take the time to write comments here had a little more previous knowledge, so my apologies for not giving everyone a 3-page summary of compressed air energy storage technology. Please look this topic up in Wikpedia or the professional literature if you have a problem with open-source online encyclopedias..
D - I think you are being a little unfair here- there are lots of different energy storage schemes that have been *invented*, but very few that have been *implemented*, and the only ones on a large scale are pumped hydro and underground natural gas storage.
The only commercial scale CAES currently in operation is the 110MW one in Alabama. One project in the 20 yrs since the tech was developed is not large scale implementation - in fact - it seems more like a niche success that has not been replicated.
Of course, if natural gas is expensive enough, then CAES will become viable, but the fact that pumped storage has and is being built around the world, and CAES isn't, suggests it is not viable today. Though i would be very happy to see some breakthrough that would make it so.
Cite above said that pumped storage currently equals 2.5% of baseload in US, 5% in Europe.
Current installation has very little relation to what pumped storage
, since the Europe has about 7 GW proposed or in construction, while the US has 31 GW of pumped storage proposed or in construction. And of course none of the above reaches the possible limits of pumped storage, since pumped storage can be implemented at many other locations besides existing hydro-electric sites (pretty much anywhere with an elevation change, water, and potential reservoir).
WHT
I am not cherry picking, do yourself a favor and try and predict the wind output for tomorrow and Thursday. Then see how it compares with reality, do that a few times over the next few weeks and you will see that in order to fill the gaps you have to have 95% of wind backed up.
In other words the cost of wind is the wind turbine costs and the cost of the backup plant.
Talking about stochastic is all very well but unless you can convert ethereal thinking into reality it is of little practical use.
Just like the oilconundrum has little practical use at predicting what oil production in iraq will be in 2015 or 2018. That is why you cannot do it, :-)
But, of course, industrialized countries already have generation capacity in place to meet current needs, so wind can serve to reduce fuel use immediately, while existing fossil generation is shifted to a backup function. With good meteorological prediction, even coal plants can be modulated to adjust to renewable fluctuations. Eventually a renewable grid will need dedicated storage, but using the current fossil plants as load/generation following assets is quite practical.
Building a new wind plant does not require building a new gas plant, but only adjusting the operating profiles of existing fossil generation.
Typical dishonest statement from Greens. Of course those new wind farms will require new backup plants if the existing plants cannot cover the deficit all the time. A lot of new lines are also required to cover those thousands of wind turbines at sea.
Tim73
You will find out as I have that some people here will need to have power cuts to their homes on a regular basis before they understand what you are saying.
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/drax/
Power output of 4000mw
In order to replace this power with wind turbines yesterday evening when wind produced 175mw from a total capacity of 3226MW we would need 4000/175 = 22. 22 x 3226 MW = 73,737MW.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
73,737MW is more than the entire capacity of all coal, gas, nuclear combined, just to replace 4,000MW of coal.
This is why pro wind people hide the truth, that is of course assuming they knew it in the first place.
Wind will only ever be a side show, when it comes to replacing gas and coal.
Yeah, and if you stick around long enough you will also find out that more than a few people here understand what you are saying perfectly well, they just don't see things from your narrow and rather limited perspective, many have even lived quite well in places around the world with regular rolling blackouts. Besides that they actually walk the walk of conservation and efficiency. Some even live completely off grid with 24/7 access to most modern conveniences such as refrigeration, lights and internet access etc... More than a few people here also understand that BAU is no longer tenable.
Some people here, both know the truth and do not shirk from it, though some other people here continue to be quite deluded about what is and isn't possible, they tend to be ones who insist that renewables are unworkable because we can't use them to power our fossil fuels based economy. Well Duh! So, move right along now, nothing to see here!
3,226 MW is the maximum capacity of the wind farms that report their power to BMRS and should not be construed as the continuous power that they would output. Their average power output is the nameplate rating times their capacity factor which is usually about 1/3, although I do not know the average capacity factor in the UK. Therefore you should expect these monitored wind farms to output an average of 1,075 MW, not 4,000 MW. Your calculation should be:
1,075 MW / 175 MW = 6.14
6.14 * 3226 MW = 19,800 MW of maximum wind capacity to get 1,075 MW of power when the wind is weak. On average the UK would be getting about 6,600 MW from wind which, if managed appropriately, would reduce UK's consumption of coal and natural gas at existing power stations. It would also decrease fossil carbon emission.
The way wind power is currently being attached to the electric grid, it is intended to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, not to replace them and their power plants. To do what you are arguing, replacing all electric power generation with wind power, would be a bad idea. You need to use a mixture of all the renewable power sources, incorporate energy storage in the grid and use demand side regulation. If you read further (pages 187 to 201) in the link you provided in another post to Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, David JC MacKay discusses energy storage and demand management to eliminate the variability of wind power. You might also need to realize that the UK can not support its current population of about 62 million people without burning fossil fuels. Quickly checking Wiki's Demography of the United Kingdom:
shows the population of the UK was about 16 million circa 1800. You might have to do the unthinkable by reducing your population.
If you are advocating a build out of nuclear power along with or in place of renewable power sources to eliminate the consumption of fossil fuels for electric power generation, then the history of the nuclear power industry indicates you will turn your countryside into a radioactive waste land sometime this century complicating your situation. Look at Japan's current predicament. If you are advocating building out natural gas generators to compensate for the variability of wind power, then the UK will be in a bad situation when natural gas becomes expensive and scarce due to its finite quantity. Because all options lie between a rock and a hard place and human society has so far acted like yeast concerning population, resource consumption and pollution, I am doubtful about our ability to make wise choices.
Does it? The only such event is Chernobyl. Japan doesn't qualify - a number of 70-ies reactors are subjected to extreme earthquakes and tsunamis and has partial core meltdowns and STILL no wasteland of any kind as a result, as it seems.
I disagree. Fertility rates are dropping like rocks, pollution has been controlled in lots and lots of instances, and resource consumption is made more efficient all the time.
You are, again, mixing up the price of MW and MWh. Adding backup MW to wind MW adds little to the cost of wind MWh, because gas capacity is so much cheaper than wind capacity (0.5 MEUR/MW vs 1.5MEUR/MW, to keep things simple). And since you only use that backup capacity rarely, the use of fossil fuels is low and does not significantly to your bill either.
You won't use it rarely. To convert wind generation from intermittent to baseload power, you need to provide gas generation that, combined with the wind generation, match the wind's top generation days. Since top generation days over an area may be 75% and average 25%, you need (75-25)/25 = 2:1 gas:wind in MWh to provide even power.
Then you have to consider that the cheap balancing gas generation you talk about has a lower efficiency than advanced combined cycle plants, so you lose some MWh that way. Wind saves some gas, but not a lot!
We are having this discussionon TOD every few months.
There was a series of posting here in July 2010 about problems and issues with moving towards renewable sources
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6641 under title: "The Fake Fire Brigade - How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future" It was comprehensive, composed of a few separate articles:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6704 Revisiting the 'Fake Fire Brigade' - Part 1 - General Issues
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6758 Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade Part 2: Biomass - A Panacea?
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6910 The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 - The Biggest Part of Business As Usual - Electricity
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6957 The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #4 - Delivering Stable Electricity
also
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7340 Renewables Won't Keep the Lights On
We should re-read it before reinventing the wheel
"In our next and final post, we will provide individual technology reviews to show what each generation, storage and demand management technology can provide to future energy systems based on current knowledge." was stated in the 4th installment published last September.
Whatever happened to that final installment?
Our so-called reliable grid is only as good as the supply of fuels to it. So without much more in the way of additional coal or significant increases in NG supplies, then we are left with renewables and nuclear (the currently other non-fossil ugly cousin on display in Japan ;-) ).
So when a train line to a coal plant derails, then the coal plant goes down. Plant maintenance leads to a down plant. Blown lines and so forth.
But with enough interconnectedness, some appliance controls on your A/C and water heater, and various deployments of wind and solar provide a reasonable level of base power.
Face it Coal and NG do not want to cede that space on the power grid due to some technological and some policy constraints.
But the technology is not magic or ethereal. LOL.
Show me the science that says Wind and Solar cannot ever produce base power. It is just about who gets to be used when peak power is needed. It is about having pumped storage. It is about smart grids and selecting appropriate times to heat your water heater. It is about efficiency.
Why else are the Coal and NG lobbyists against smart grid/efficiency/home solar subsidies? LOL. It undermines their ability to hide behind BIG Government policy positions.
Coal plants where I have worked as a contract maintainence mechanic in the south eastern US usually maintain a sixty to ninety day supply of coal on hand- or at least they used to, back when I was only middle aged.
This was in case of strikes by miners as much as for any other reason.
I don't know how much coal is typically kept on hand these days but I doubt if a railroad being out of commission for a few weeks would result in a blackout in most places.
It's not about the science which says wind/solar plus storage can't be used as base power; it about the economics. A huge proportion of the population can't afford a doubling or tripling of electricity costs.
Cold Power Dropout: The greatest danger of high penetration wind is that wind is often the LOWEST when the NEED is the GREATEST.
i.e. if power and heating fails on the coldest days in the middle of winter. See:
We Spent Billions on Wind Power… and All I Got Was a Rolling Blackout
Severe cold freezes livestock to death in Mongolia
"ULAN BATOR (Xinhua) -- More than 910,000 livestock nationwide had frozen to death by Tuesday as a severe cold wave continued ravaging 19 of Mongolia's 21 provinces, the state emergency commission said Thursday."
Icing conditions will also stop a wind farm. See:
Northern New Brunswick wind turbines frozen solid
Far more people will die faster from hypothermia than from heat waves if the power and heating systems fail.
Yair...I have no qualifications to contribute to this discussion except for experiences in a previous life where I lived and operated an engineering/ship repair business with no connection to the grid.
Reading through this thread I get the impression that most folks are commenting from the perspective of BAU continueing as is. In the long term I don't see how this can happen.
It seems to me that fossil fuels and nuclear generation have allowed humans to populate northern areas at a far higher density than will be viable in an energy deficient world.
As mentioned in the post above...if you don't have heat in a cold climate you die whereas we folks fortunate enough to live in a benign climate become uncomfortable if the A/C should fail.
In other words (it seems to me) if nuclear is abandoned the only northern regions that can continue to function (at the present population density) after fossil fuel will be those that have access to hydro, wind and hot rock generation...and even then personal transport will obviously be an issue.
There is much political debate here (Australia) about a carbon tax to be levied on polluters such as coal fired generation plants...the crazy thing is they are talking about rebates and tax breaks for consumers when the price of power inevitably goes up...no where do I see mention of the need to use less power.
At present domestic power use seems to be pretty inelastic...a sixty per cent rise in price (in NSW) over the past couple of years has had little effect on demand. If households were limited to (say) twenty amps and folks had to manage their consumption they (the consumer) would have lower power bills and the supplier would maybe not have to expand their generation capacity...and thereby stands the rub.
Much of the Australian generating capacity is now privately or semi-privately owned and it is probably not in their shareholders best interests to reduce consumption.
As I have mentioned here before (and at the risk of being flamed) I say again...folks have to be taught to take resposibility for their own consumption.
Smart grids and automatic controls are one thing but there is nothing like having to wait five minutes to manually reset a breaker to make folks realize that having power isn't a God given right.
It isn't hard...you just have to turn the A/C off in the lounge before you turn the one on in the bedroom...and you maybe can't run the oven, two hotplates and the toaster. We had a meter in the kitchen and knew the current draw of all appliances.
Same thing at the workshop. We had a HR4 Lister running 30Kva and I used to schedule work around the output...sometimes we had to work a nightshift if for instance a job in the big lathe created too much demand.
It could be a pain at times but we managed. These days of course, in a similar situation (with the subsidy) a twenty thousand dollar investment would provide sufficient PV to run a mill, a small lathe,a couple of TIGs, power tools and whatall.
I find that a pretty bizzare statement about a species that evolved during the ice ages. The Inuit had no heat, other than whale oil candles, and they survived. But us soft fat pampered moderns will die if it gets below 72F! We are far more adaptable animals than people give us credit for. In fact a good case can be made that our unprecedented adaptability was responsible for our unprecedented population expansion and geographical spread. We've been spoiled by our ability to change our envoronment with the brute force application of energy. We have a preference for surroundings that minimize a bodies consumption of calories -not an especially healthy adaptation in the modern world.
Most people will die if the still air temperature goes below about 40F unless they have dry clothing. Wind also will increase heat loss from dry skin and greatly increase heat loss from wet skin.
So while heat is not essential, dry clothing and waterproof shelter are.
The needle is the crucial invention that enabled the technology of tailored clothing and allowed peopling of the Eurasian continent during the coldest part of the last Ice Age.
Good points Merrill - clothes make a huge difference.
A good article here about the energy saving benefits of insulating yourself (clothes) before insulating your house;
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-thermal-underwear...
As someone who has spent a few nights camping in the snow, and one in an ice cave, I can personally attest that, properly clothed, and sufficiently fed, you can survive, comfortably, without space heating in sub zero conditions.
Not as convenient, to be sure. Given a choice of no heat in a large house, and some heat in a smaller house, I would opt for the smaller house, as would most people, and soon enough, that "choice" will be forced on many.
We may have evolved, but we can;t shake the natural instinct to not burn calories if we don;t have to - the body is always trying to maximise its own EROEI, and its preferred way is to minimise energy invested (spent) - that is why we are lazy, if we can afford to be.
Paul - thanks for the link. That is a good article. As noted therein, the first few degrees that you lower the thermostat result in very significant savings, since you lower the temperature differential by that much for all of the days of the heating season.
We've been using 65F this winter, and it is comfortable with a heavy shirt and sweatshirt. At lower temperatures, my hands tend to get cold, but this can be cured by a little occasional exercise. Which is also beneficial for other reasons.
At present domestic power use seems to be pretty inelastic...a sixty per cent rise in price (in NSW) over the past couple of years has had little effect on demand. If households were limited to (say) twenty amps and folks had to manage their consumption they (the consumer) would have lower power bills and the supplier would maybe not have to expand their generation capacity...and thereby stands the rub.
The funny thing about the increase in prices in Australia, is that the wholesale electricity prices have not increased - it is all in transmission, distribution and "retailing". The NSW average wholesale price is 3c, and the residential rate is 25c!
But the reason that it is inelastic, is that, even at 25c, or double, it is still about the best value, quality of life enhancer you can buy. Most people will give up a lot of other things before electricity - it is just too convenient.
As I have mentioned here before (and at the risk of being flamed) I say again...folks have to be taught to take resposibility for their own consumption.
This is something the US, in particular, is not good at - they are actually quite socialist in this regard, expecting the government to do something about increasing supply to meet their excessive gasoline consumption, so they don;t personally have to cut back. A house supply that was limited to 50 amps would catch people's attention!
I have worked with a guy here in BC that does island micro hydro systems. He developed a special load governor that allows you to select the priority order of your loads, so that when you turn on C, it has to drop one of A or B and when you are not using any of ABC it dumps the load to an appropriate place (a hot tub/pool is great for this) . It is a microcosm of the utility priority order that would be needed in a supply crunch situation - you just can't have it all, all the time.
A 2kW micro hydro can do a lot, and a 5kW one can let you have a "normal" house, but you just don't run the big things at the same time - it's not the end of the world, really.
Part of the problem is, as you point out, there is no incentive, and no money, for private elec suppliers to make their customer use less. people will only do so when they come up against limits, and when some one else sets that limit for them, they won;t be happy.
instead of a smart grid, a utility rate scheme that gave serious discounts for demand reductions at residential scale might work, but I think most users would just pay it. Their objective is to make enough money to not have to worry about managing such things.
>The NSW average wholesale price is 3c, and the residential rate is 25c!
Now you're getting to why I have photovoltaic panels on top of my house. I don't care what the utility pay to generate electricity. I only care what they charge moi for it.
"Not a coincidence that people who work in the wind industry are full of wind and little substance."
At least it's powerful wind, and you can breathe it!
What, by the way, are all the Petrofuel and Nuclear boosters bound to be full of then, and is it still toxic and undetectable when it's buried under rugs of topsoil and glossy press-releases?
considering it took a 9.0 richer earthquake and a 60 foot tsunami to cause a nuclear accident in a forty year old plant. Most people will think that our new plants being built will be safe.
The British Prime minister has just announced nuclear will have a bright future in the UK.
Excellent news.
Your Island is a lot smaller than theirs. Good Luck!
Are you from Australia? Ok, maybe Your island is bigger.. and gets just ridiculous amounts of Sun.
Seems like an easy choice to me.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/22/chernobyl-cleanup-survivors-message-fo...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/19/huhne-says-uk-might-have-...
"Britain may back away from the use of nuclear energy because of safety fears and a potential rise in costs after the Fukushima disaster, says Chris Huhne, the energy secretary."
..." But he conceded that the Japanese disaster was likely to make it more difficult for private investors to raise capital to build the eight new reactors planned by the government. "There are a lot of issues outside of the realm of nuclear safety, which we will have to assess. One is what the economics of nuclear power post-Fukushima will be, if there is an increase in the cost in capital to nuclear operators.""
Quite simply, the multi-billion dollars lost in Fukushima catastrophe should increase the cost of capital, since the potential for loss of billions in capital by nuclear plant operation has been demonstrated to have greater than zero probability.
Our PM seems to say anything to please the person speaking to him ... or anything which vaguely reflects what his advisers recently told him. Meanwhile, our Secretary of State for Energy (Lib.Dem.) seems to have become much more equivocal since the accident. He probably knows that there's now only one supplier interested - the French government (aka EDF Energy) - as the German companies will probably lose interest, having seen their domestic market further threatened by Merkel's statements that life extensions for existing plants are off for the time being.
The unfinished nuclear plants in France and Finland are both vastly over time and over budget. An interesting question is what safety measures will now have to be added to these, further raising their cost. Anyone know?
Considering that fission provides 3% of UK delivered energy, and would only provide about 4% in 2040 with the largest of the proposed reactor-building programs, I wish we could have a proper debate about energy as a whole, not about an uninsurable technology which provides a-sixth of UK electricity. The proportion has been slowly falling in recent years, despite powerful lobbying for the last 60 years for governments to build more of it.
The Green Madness in Germany is particularly strong. In the end they end up paying dearly to France to cover the energy deficit in the future.
Sweden recently decided to keep ALL their 10 nuclear plants and renew the plants if necessary, despite people voting against it in the 1980's. They are also building a wind power farm but the costs are very high, two times of similar nuclear plant. They have done the calculations and renewables just ain't gonna be enough.
The "Greenpeace" policies are dangerous because it lulls people to think there are real alternatives when in reality, there are none. Now western nations are trying desperately to extend the life time of the old nuclear plants, instead of building new, safer, more powerful ones.
What are you on about Germany paying up to France dearly? Germany is still one of the largest net exporters of electricity in Europe. It has the capacity to fully backup its own renewables. It was able to immediately shut off 8 of its 17 nuclear power plants with little consequences on its own power or that on the rest of Europe.
The rest of Europe is probably benefiting more of German renewables than Germany itself, as the 27 GW of Wind and 17GW of PV are pushing down the prices of electricity considerable on the european power exchanges (payed for by German electricity customers).
Also it has been more than once, that France had to import large amounts of power from Germany because it had to turn off its nuclear reactors due to overheating rivers in summer, just when German PV is at its maximum.
Furthermore, France relies on Swiss pumped storage to balance its nukes too.
Germany has the financial and industrial resources to transition to a 100% renewable energy system. The question will be will it have the political capacity to do so?
According to CIA world factbook, France exports 60 TWh and imports 10 TWh. So they net export five nuclear reactors' worth of electricity, low carbon and probably at a low price.
That 50 TWh approximately match what Germany produce from wind in total. Germany's net exports are only 20 TWh, and it imports 95 billion cubic meters of natural gas, which represents about a thousand thermal TWhs. No, Germany does not have the financial and industrial capacity to go 100% renewable. Not by a long shot.
Face it: France chose a much, much better path.
Yair...
Untill some nutcase flys a light aircraft loaded with ampho though the cieling of a plant just upwind of Paris.
Or the wrong valve freezes up.. Or a safety check is put off for a few months. (RE: the Diablo Canyon backup cooling pumps that turned out to be unusable for 18 months..)
It's just an inherently unstable source, that we have enough OTHER energy inputs around to hold in relative calm, for now.
Germany also have nukes...
Also, the indicident you're talking about won't come close to killing as many as German coal and ng does, nor to doing the same environmental destruction. The only thing bigger with the terrorism act will be the headlines.
Do you have a source for that? Most capital costs put nuclear 2-3 times more than wind (per MW)
In reality you could build 2MW of wind and 1MW of CCGT's for the same price as new nuclear build, your risk would be split across two technologies and they could be up and running in a much shorter time frame.
The 'we would need X thousand turbines to generate all our electricity' talking point is a moot one as we don't rely on any single technology to generate all our electricity at the moment, and a wedge of wind power in the mix can only be a good thing.
In reality wind probably does have a natural limit to ~20% of a grid mix, but while we are still only at single figures percentages its not something we need to worry about.
If we are going to cherry pick, Spain is getting over 30% of its electricity from wind right now.
David
If you wanted a cup of tea yesterday evening and relied on wind to replace just one nuclear power plant of 1000MW we would have to build 1000/175 = 5.7 x 3226 = 18388MW of installed wind.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
Which is just crazy, have you any idea what that would cost?
Of course building 18X required wind capacity is crazy and certainly would never happen. Building pumped storage to deal with temporal variation and grid connections to deal with spatial variations makes much more sense, and of course both those processes are happening quickly all over the world. And of course, developing multiple renewable sources (wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal) that tend to have uncorrelated variability, and finally some low-capital requirement gas peaking for backup, makes more economic sense,
18X capacity is just a pro-nuclear strawman, that I am wasting my time even discussing.
The pro-nuclear people remind me of the Japanese hold-outs on the Pacific islands, fighting on long after the rest of the world knows that the war is over. Nonsensical arguments about building 18x capacity will convince no one.
Which areas of Greater London would you propose to be flooded for your "pumped storage"?
BTW, Chinese did exactly that with Three Gorges Dam, "However, the dam flooded archaeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people, and is causing significant ecological changes, including an increased risk of landslides.[7] The dam has been a controversial topic both in China and abroad.[8]"
Seawater pumped-storage can be provided anywhere on a coast with elevation difference.
No need to flood London unless you have other motivations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_Yanbaru_Seawater_Pumped_Storage_Pow...
High head instead of large reservoir provides big capacity with minor environmental impacts.
The numbers don't add up. It's been thought of. The link is to a 30MW plant with enough storage for 2-3 hours.
Hi tim, look up "compressed air energy storage" in Wikipedia. Pumped storage is not the only large-scale energy storage technology. If you did not know about this technology, which has been operating commercially at two large sites since the 1980's, one in Germany and one in the US, you have exposed a huge knowledge gap on your part. If so, you would be wise to be a bit more humble in your claims in your comments.
Can you tell me the cost of pumped storage in a site that has no rare advantages in terrain?
Three Gorges displaced 1.3 million people for 18 GW of capacity. Coal in the US averages more than 200 GW. What would ten Three Gorges worth of pumped storage cost?
Am I missing something. When you store energy the units are: GW-Hr.
Watts are in J/s which is not a measure of energy.
But you do not need to have the same exact one-to-one match of pumped storage to base load power.
You are acting as if all the renewable grid across the entire continent will be zero all at the same time. That has a probability of zero.
There was a study I saw that you only need a nominal percentage of storage for wind to be a baseload system.
http://www.ifandp.com/article/009866.html
The needs to smooth out power generation are on the order of seconds to minutes and less often for very extended periods.
I'm a bit sceptical that you will connect the entire US continent. If one fairly isolated grid has 50 GW average coal and you want to replace this with wind, then you may well need to be able to store and dispatch more than 50 GW in pumped storage in that same area. Remember you need more than 150 GW nameplate wind to replace the coal, and that 50 GW average coal will likely be more than 75 GW nameplate and you may wish to be able to call for this capacity during low wind and high demand. You need to smooth out power generation on the order of a few weeks, at least.
From http://blog.cleantechies.com/2010/09/13/pumped-hydro-part-of-the-solutio...
"n 1985, a 2,100 MW pumped hydro facility in the United States cost $1.7 billion, or approximately $800 per kW. Today, a new pumped hydro facility costs approximately $1,500 per kW, give or take. Once built, the cost per kWh of storage is relatively economical, approximately $125 per kWh. While there are a myriad of citing and permitting issues, there are 40 pumped hydro facilities, totaling approximately 31 GW, planned in the United States alone. The question is: how much more growth will we see of this technology?"
So the cost for 200 GW of pumped hydro storage would be (veeeery roughly) 1500 $/kW * 1,000,000 kW/GW *200 GW = $300,000,000,000 for ten Three Gorges worth of pumped storage capacity.
300 billion is less than $1000 per capita in the US, so the number is not too frightening to me, if amortized over many decades of use monthly costs would be less than $10. Climate change will likely cost many orders of magnitude more.
Ok, thanks! Where does the $125/kWh come in? If you need to store a week's worth of energy, you come in at 200e6 KW * 7*24h * $125 = $4.2 trillion.
From the WSJ article cited by tommyv below:
"Modern nuclear plants are among the most capital-intensive structures ever built"
Wind is far cheaper and far safer than nukes.
Just as an aside: I'm generally pro-nukes. It's not because I think wind works that I don't think nukes are a good idea. I fail to see why nuke proponents should feel so threatened by wind that they need to trash the sector in all threads about it.
I'd further note that my post did not say a thing about nuclear, it was about the exaggerated claims of the gas industry to "save" us from nuclear better than renewables. I focused on their arguments against renewables, but maybe I should have stated that their starting point is wrong to start with anyway.
Wind is wind's worst enemy. (Wind turbines co-vary, so they kill each other's spot price.) But the next worst enemy of wind is nuclear, and vice versa.
There are two reasons for this. The first is technical in nature:
Intermittent sources are very, very badly matched to stochastic sources. A high wind penetration needs demand that can soak up its best production. If there is, for instance, nuclear baseload power at 50%, then the demand above this base level has just half the room for wind (or less). Conversely, if you do have wind, you need gas to balance, and nuclear penetration is limited.
The second is political in nature, and an issue of public perception: Wind is, to many, a way to do away with coal and get rid of AGW without scary radioactivity. However, due to intermittency, this is a false hope. Wind is an alibi for continued coal, and this ineffective method for dealing with AGW delays nuclear ramping, which is currently the only tech that can be scaled well enough to to replace coal/ng. Conversely, if there already is nuclear, such as in France and Sweden, there is a certain reluctance to subsidise wind and litter the country-side with wind towers.
As I said - a very badly matched pair. If you believe either one is the best solution, you probably have a problem with the other, at least if you realize the bad match.
Well we can litter the countryside with Nukes instead. LOL
You have not a chance in Heck on that happening anymore.
So lets assume nukes are dead.
Now we have NG and Coal to worry about, and neither of those have a sustainable future.
Looking like wind and solving intermittency is the main path forward.
I'm not ready to give up on nukes. The path forward without nukes is NG and coal, with some token wind subsidies as an alibi.
The wind infrastructure minimized the pain in Natural Gas rich Texas. LOL
Name the folks in Texas that did no appreciate using their wind assets.
Natural gas will be worth too much to keep wind from being developed.
They are just going to overbuild NG electric generation and they cannot keep drilling in shale at a 2-fold loss.
I agree that NG and wind are a good match. NG + wind is better than coal, but it will only serve to postpone any AGW calamity heading our way a few years. It is no solution.
You can't tell the difference between intermittent and stochastic. Stochastic means random and intermittent is the random variant of regular. So they both are stochastic.
Let me give you an education. Put two random sources that are IID (independent and identically distributed) together that each have a random 50% duty cycle, and you will get a 75% probability that either one or both will deliver power at any moment.
Ha ha, there you go, that is randomness for you. It can work to our benefit and you can't escape the math.
WHT, this is true, but with wind, the problem is that two wind turbines, even separated by quite some distance, are not necessarily independent. So getting the overlap we want, by having more and widely distributed turbines, just isn't that easy.
As you have said before, wind is predictably unpredictable, and we have to think of new ways to take advantage of it, but just adding more in more places helps a little, but not a lot.
The most basic statistical calculation is the following:
P(M,N) = M! / N! / (M-N)! * p^N * (1-p)^(M-N)
Now call P the probability of a configuration of windmills being on.
M is the total number of windmills.
N is the number of windmills that are on.
All windmills can either be on or off.
Assume the little p probability is 0.5. A coin flip.
Now do the math. As you increase M to larger and larger numbers, the odds of having all of the wind power off moves closer and closer to zero, where the most probably state of the system is some 50% balance of wind systems kicking along.
This is why chemistry happens. It fundamentally explains entropy.
Like a number of other commenters, you keep insisting, in effect, that, given X1 and X2 as the "producing" states of two wind turbines:
P(x1 ∪ x2) = 1 - (1-P(X1)) * (1-P(x2))
e.g. if each has a 50-50 chance, than there's a 75% (1 - 0.5*0.5) chance that one or both are producing. But even if they're separated by a distance such as from eastern Australia to New Zealand, especially at a similar latitude, that relation is false. In the real world, as opposed to some fairy-tale world where wind turbines are like molecules in a beaker:
P(X1 | X2) ≠ P(X1)
and:
P(X2 | X1) ≠ P(X2)
that is, the probability that X1 is producing, given that X2 is producing, is not equal to the probability that X1 is producing; and similarly the probability that X2 is producing, given that X1 is producing, is not equal to the probability that X2 is producing - and likewise for "not producing" instead of "producing".
In fact, continuing with the 50-50 example, if either turbine is producing, the other is more likely to be producing, and if either is not producing, the other is more likely not to be producing. So the chance that one or both are producing is in fact less than 75%. It's not clear why this is so hard to grasp, why anyone would keep insisting that wind turbines are just as independent of each other as quantum-mechanically governed chemical molecules in a beaker.
In other words, do the math, but do the right math, the applicable math, the math that takes correlation into account (and acknowledges that there are days and maybe even weeks when wind is very low all across even a continent-sized region) even though it's not the math that supports False Fire Brigade thinking.
Again, the banksters made exactly the same assumption with respect to mortgages. That is, they figured that if Fred couldn't pay up, that had nothing whatsoever to do with Joe's ability to pay up, so they "did the math" and concluded that large tranches couldn't possibly ever go bad within the lifetime of a even trillion successive universes. Boy, oh, boy, wuz they ever wrong. See Bayesian statistics, and see Taleb.
Paul,
You think again that I do not understand the fact that two wind turbines could occupy the same exact space and receive the same exact wind levels. Yes, they can, but that is not how wind works.
One could embellish the model if the degree of dependency is known. But it cannot be your extreme where everything is linked. That is quite silly to believe. They you could predict the world and no one can predict the world.
I do not have the datasets on wind activity. Look them up. The weather is not static. The weather is a dynamical system, which means all kinds of air movements all around all the time. Nothing sits still perfectly -- and certainly not everywhere. Furthermore, there are predictable seasonal fluctuations which may be adapted to by very simple means.
You take the extreme position that all wind towers are connected to the same wind at the same time. (This is improbable and impossible.) You understand this. I know. If you could get that to be true then you would be able to predict whether one wind tower is not working by examining the other wind tower. LOL. Are you God or something? No one can predict this sort of thing; therefore, you must be wrong.
Now that we have disproven that you cannot know whether a wind tower is turning in advance. Lets move onto the situation where wind assets are spread over a wide geographical area which has strong wind characteristics.
Say 75% probability of sustaining winds.
You will never see a situation where all the wind towers are inactive (if they are chosen at sufficient numbers and spacings), and they will move to the maximal probable state.
Dismiss it all you want to. You'd need to dismiss the basic statistics that explains almost everything around you.
Air on this planet is not some giant homogeneous mass the moves and stops predictably.
Read this for reference: http://dust.ess.uci.edu/scapps/presentations/topics_in_climate.pdf
Same goes for PV and solar plants placement: http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/reports/lbnl-3884e.pdf
I see whether it is wind or whether it is car-miles traveled or whether it is human behavior, you believe in the idea that we cannot know anything from statistical methodologies. Well then. That is certainly a religious viewpoint. With that attitude then why is it that a chemical reaction happens the same way every time?
It is all about building a robust distributed system. It is about statistics. The US is a large place with lots of wind.
A quote from the second paper:
"As is well known for wind, however, accounting for the potential for geographic diversity
can signi cantly reduce the magnitude of extreme deltas, the resources required to accom-
modate variability, and the potential increase in balancing reserve costs. The aggregate of
just ve close sites in the SGP network show that 99.7% of the 15-min and shorter deltas are
no larger than 25% of the expected clear sky output of the aggregated sites. Furthermore,
we estimate that 99.7% of the 15-min and shorter deltas from 100 sites in a 10 10 grid
with 20 km spacing would be no larger than 10% of the clear sky output of the aggregated
sites (this compares to 60% for an individual site). We also nd that the sub-hourly deltas
from similarly sited solar and wind are expected to be within the same order of magnitude,
though deltas in the 5-15 min range are expected to be somewhat more severe for solar than
for wind."
pg 34
That is a very good argument. The other argument is just one of energy conservation. Thermal energy is entering our atmosphere at a constant rate and that gets transformed partly into kinetic energy at a fairly constant fraction. This kinetic energy is air movement. This means that if one place on earth has zero air motion, somewhere else has to make up for it.
This is basically a maximum entropy argument in that all states of the system are maximally dispersed according to the constraints. In this case the constraints are of average kinetic energy.
Now if you look at actual data, it fits this idea to a T if you look at a single place with wind velocities tallied over time. This is for Ontario:
If you don't like that agreement, then this is for Germany:
The top end curvature is due to safety cut-off on the turbines, otherwise the fit would extend over a greater range.
Next, to back up what Jerome says in that what counts is MegaWatt-hours and not MegaWatts, take a look at this graph, and the agreement to what "predictable upredictability" theory would give:
This gives the spot probability that you would have to wait a certain amount of time to collect a certain amount of wind energy. This shows very little autocorrelation for practical purposes.
What gets my goat about people like PS is they just complain and they never do any analysis themselves. They seem to think their intuition is so perfect and bullet-proof but it inevitably shows epic fail each time. BTW, I processed all this data myself from a couple of wind energy sites and it is more fully described in The Oil ConunDrum.
Yes, this is very nice data.
So the final plot needed would be the spatial component or distance between wind towers and their degree of correlated operation.
I guess there would be an inverse square of the distance relationship regarding their correlation. But if you had on and off shore then you could imagine fairly close systems with different wind patterns.
In chemical systems things can be very correlated. One process comes to mind, protein folding. There the amino acids in the protein either want to be folded into a single 3D shape or fully unfolded. So they move together in a cooperative transition. The amino acids are not independent agents.
In any case, I should read your compilation there.
I may have to write an exam question now about wind power and maximum entropy. ;-)
Ahh, the Ontario data - amazing how well it matches the straight line.
Oct, agreed that what is need is a spatial component, or to see something like the graph for all eastern wind, all western wind, and a combined.
I will disagree about an inverse square distance rule - local geography will be far more important. Even staying on-shore, some coastal areas (west coast of Australia, for example) will have pretty consistent wind up an down the coast, so correlation almost independent of n-s distance, but move a short way inland and it decreases dramatically, and stays that way for several thousand km, so almost a step function in e-w direction.
If the wind changes are due to day-night temperature fluctuations, a common inland - mountain scenario, then your distance correlation (e-w) will be linear, as that is time change, in addition to topographical influence.
The US midwest has a strong wind resource, but there are days when all the midwest is calm, and the system operator there assigns 2% effective production to wind, and it may not change, geographically, on that day until you reach a coast.
I'm not sure exactly how you would characterise the change in correlation with distance, but I don't think it would be inverse square in real (geographic/topographic influenced) situations. Sounds like a good question for WHT to answer...
I can only answer that if there is data. I did my thesis on detecting spatial autocorrelations at a microscopic level and don't see anything conceptually difficult about doing this kind of work. Like everything else, its is all about searching the scientific literature to see if this has been done before or stumbling across something by good fortune. The reason I looked at the data I did was because Len Gould volunteered the location of the Ontario wind data in a TOD comment that he made, and then someone else gave the location for the Germany data.
Sorry Paul, I am currently working on charge-charge interaction energies and forces. So the inverse square of distance is on my mind.
Lots of interesting issue with on and offshore sites. Balancing variation requires field studies to get the measurements I imagine. This is a serious cost for wind deployment I imagine, but like prospecting for oil, it is the nature of their beast.
In any case, as always, you know a lot of stuff here and I enjoy reading your posts.
Hi Oct,
I hope you can get the inverse square off your mind when doing such mundane things as driving, cooking, reading etc!
My interest in energy started out with hydro, which is about the most geographically determined source you can get, but wind is the next in line. I find the landscape micro-variations in wind quite amazing - windy hills tops when all else is calm etc. One can be seduced by the "wind maps" which give good general info, but there are many localised spots with good wind that don't show up on wind maps.
My family;'s farm in Australia is not, officially, in a "good wind area", but it is in a n-s valley, and the hill where the water tanks are does get consistent breezes, and our windmills pump fairly well. We are going to put up a 10kW turbine there. Even though it is not a high wind site, it is, economically, a good one, as there is already a power line there (20m away), road there, someone there (my brother) and a user (the farm), so there is no transmission loss, and we are offsetting retail prices (23c!) not taking wholesale prices. So, the ROI is actually as good as industrial turbines, without the visual pollution. I think there is lots of potential for this sort of thing, and every bit helps the farms they sit on, rather than large corporations.
While I do not think that there is that enough geographical dispersion of wind to make it a reliable baseload supplier (more than about 109% of capacity) the real beauty of it is that there are usually local loads that can use it, be the turbines at farm or industrial scale. In NSW, Australia, the generation is mainly centralised coal plants, near Sydney (and some hydro). By the time it gets to western NSW, 33% of it has gone in line loss. There are not a lot of people out there, but any energy input at that end of the line offsets 1.33 at the other.
I don't think wind can power everything, or even a majority of the grid, but there sure are a lot of niches for it up to 20%.
The monitoring is not nearly as expensive as it used to be - you can buy units for a few hundred dollars and stick em up on a pole and they will record everything. In my opinion, every cellphone tower should have a wind monitoring station - you would get a very good coverage from that.
My plan is to install my own solar here, but alas I need a little more time and a little more money. But I will grid tie it. I have a nice roof (new), lowish pitch and good south-facing arrangement with no trees yet. My fruit trees are being trimmed to my short height. In any case, I have a reasonable mechanical and electrical ability and figure I can do it when the time is right. We do not use much electric power. No A/C. No fancy tv or anything. I am looking at a modest 2-2.5 kW system.
Yes, I agree Wind can go to 20% no problem. Beyond that it needs storage and grid controls and lines and policy moves. Still there is hope, because NG will hit a snag if it moves in too strongly. They cannot keep it up without paying for the fracking costs eventually.
I used to think nuclear was a viable plan. I am skeptical about its robustness and its perception to the public in developed countries, i.e. japan is a mess.
Well, when you guys get this all worked out and write the thing, I will dip into my Ibuprofen reserve and edit/proofread it for you.
Be warned, I may add a joke or two, just to improve the reading experience.
I think I used up my limited supply of humour in yesterdays drumbeat. But, point taken, for some reason, discussions focussed on wind and solar power are very "dry".
Personally, I'd recommend a nice glass of naturally produced Cabernet instead of chemically made Ibuprofen - I have found the effects to be about the same, but the cab tastes better.
Dry subject, dry humor, washed down with a dry wine, perhaps a fine Chianti >;^)
You are correct about the Cabernet.
Interesting about the difficulty Canadians have in understanding water conservation. We have the same issue in Minnesota, where I live now--I'm originally from BC. I didn't get water conservation myself until I sat for awhile on my city's capital project committee and realized that it's not so much an issue of water scarcity or even the cost to pump, but the huge costs of treating it--on both ends, so to speak! And I really had never thought much about stormwater management, but now I do.
(Just to give you a sense of the extent to which I represent the mindless, slow-to-change, shallow consumer: I was in my late twenties and had lived in the US for 10 years when I got a small gig doing a children's play about electricity. That was when I learned that there was more than one way to generate electricity--I thought it was all just Hydro, and it was somehow sent around the continent from mountain areas.)
Those wind towers are designed to shut down when wind speeds are below the 1% probability of very high winds.
They are very smart designs given the parameters that they work under.
Then next step is to link these microgenerators into a robust web of generation that yields a stable base.
Certainly not a challenging problem. Just a matter of money and engineering; proper siting, computers, some storage, and linking diverse areas -- yes and a little help from fossils in the beginning.
Very promising times for wind.
I wasn't responding to that, I was responding to whatever generic statement that Jeppen brought up. He said there was some event that was "stochastic" and that there was another event that was "intermittent". I assumed that these were IID because he did not say anything else about it. That's why I invoked the IID rule.
Now, if you happened to be talking about 5 nuclear reactors all pretty much co-located and estimated the probability that only one would have problems if a Tsunami hit, then I would not invoke the IID rule. This is an obvious case of concern for common mode failures.
You are barking up the wrong tree if you are trying to catch me on an obvious error. The further apart the pieces are, the less they are correlated. Most physicists and scientists understand this.
But then again, if you really want to catch me on something and prove your superiority, I recommend going through The Oil ConunDrum and find something substantial. The entire book is premised on my doing probabilities correctly or at least usefully. Start with the section on entropy and disorder of wind.
BTW, (1) Taleb talks up a good story but leaves the math for Sornette. (2) Bringing up Bayesian statistics is a non-sequitor, as it is used to practical effect in lots of places.
So you are saying that all the weather on the earth is correlated? Do you believe in predestination and things of that sort? That is absurd. Is wind speed in the entire State of California on and offshore homogenous as either all on or all off at all elevations? If it is then why does it snow in some places, rain in others, hot dry still in other parts of California? All at the same time.
Yes, I can. My thoughts simply came out wrong through the keyboard. I was talking about wind vs. nuclear and should've said that intermittent sources are very badly matched to baseload sources with very dominant capital costs. (It should've been obvious - I feel a bit sorry for guys that lack the pattern matching abilities to correctly mend mistakes such as that one.)
I've seen no reports that the tsunami was that high at the site (though some reports were claiming 14M). While I may be in agreement with that, that a proper takeaway from the accident should be, "the new plants will be safe", that grossly misrepresents the way most people think. Partly the case becomes ad-hominem, "they (TEPCO) lied to us, therefore we don't/won't trust anything the nuclear industry says, ever". Because of that, I think nuclear will be extremely difficult to sell, and adding yet more safety regulations could easily put the cost out of reach. So we have to recognize the new reality, few if any new nukes will be built in the OECD countries. We now have to deal with that new more constraining reality.
I have seen this site showing U.K. electricity production, neta (The New Electricity Trading Arrangements) - Balancing Mechanism Reporting System (BMRS) - Electricity Data Summary, repeatedly referenced by people who are anti-wind power and complain about variability.
The help page defines power park modules as:
The spread sheet contains a list of 68 sites (solar, wind, tidal & wave) that report their power generation to BMRS. 8 of them have a maximum power output of 0 MW which might mean they have not reported power generation yet. The total maximum power from all sites is 3,226 MW. I do not know where any of these sites are located or if they are offshore wind farms except for one, Barrow Offshore.
Does anyone have a map of all the reporting U.K. wind farms so I can see how well they are dispersed? If these wind farms are mostly onshore and bunched together, then it would explain the variability.
This has been my favorite expression -- wind is predictably unpredictable. Because it is a phenomena borne from entropy and disorder, it has much in common with random walk processes. And since random walk leads to diffusion and we harness diffusion all the time (see the electronics industry for example), it stands to reason we should take advantage of this behavior.
Jerome, you need to push The Oil ConunDrum as it goes into the science in detail.
In english please.
I'm just a guy.
The behaviour of individual elements/pieces/particles etc is as random as physically possible. When averaged over long time and large space they behaviour shows a pattern of some situations being more likely that others. WHT wrote about wind concisely in his blog/book, I tried to explaine his methodology in virtually non-mathematical language while not trivializing it.
Here is my attempt from a while ago: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7258#comment-753490 followed with http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7258#comment-753746 The latter explains the math approach and summarized how the wind problem was solved.
Use a shotgun for ducks instead of an elephant gun.
I'd much rather "take advantage" of the immeasurably small stochastic deviations from average encountered in a diffusive system with on the order of 1030 independent elements and the laws of quantum mechanics ensuring essentially no correlation between them, than attempt to "take advantage" of wild deviations of a power source that can be all but shut down over a continent-wide area at the fickle whim of the weather. Where do we ever get enough independent wind elements to emulate anything approaching the practical certainty of heat diffusing through the walls of a boiler?
All the histograms, probability density functions, and pretty graphs of same in the world won't help me one bit if I die of hypothermia (or hyperthermia) during an outlier of a week, a week that's perfectly normal but far from average. It's precisely that "cherry picked" week (or month) that's worrying, because it's dead certain that the the Great Stochastic Cherry Picker In The Sky will eventually pick it. And I'm just not seeing, for example, any plans for energy storage that lasts on the order of weeks (never mind months) and that also looks to be scalable enough to matter.
Nobody is proposing a 100% wind electrical system. Predicting that the sun will rise seems safe, and as Jerome mentions the capital costs of natural gas backup are low, while the fuel costs for backup very rare events are insignificantly low. All the parked airplanes will provide plenty of available gas turbines soon, just mount them up on concrete and hook up a generator for the once in a decade weather events.
Basically do this at home right now.
Flip a coin and record your results.
Now ask what is the probability of seeing 1 heads when you flip the coin 2x?
Now ask what is the probability of seeing 2 heads when you flip the coin 4x?
Now ask what is the probability of seeing 4 heads when you flip the coin 8x?
...
Now ask what is the probability of seeing 100 heads when you flip the coin 200x?
...
Now ask what is the probability of seeing N heads when you flip the coin M times?
Or run this calc on an Excel spreadsheet. Noting that when N = M/2 the probability and likelihood are maximal.
P(MAX) = M! / (M/2)! / (M/2)! / 2^(M/2)
You will find the more flips you do that the average number of heads out of flips moves toward the 50-50% probable range.
This means ever larger systems should provide stable power at 50% duty.
It is the basis of chemical entropy.
No. By predictable here, we mean by weather forecasting, that the output of a WT field can be forcast with reasonable accuracy hours to days ahead of time. Thats makes them play a lot better with a grid, than something that is stocastic (meaning not predictable, except proabalistically) on a minute to minute basis. The variation comes from weather, which is not totally stochastic in nature.
:-) No :-) The predictable is that over longer period of time this much wind will blow. Weather forecasting is too much failure prone. Yesterday I was supposed to get 8" of snow with 30mph wind. I got sun. Area 100km west got hammered.
The minute by minute variation is a real problem. In the fake firebrigade series of posting several months ago there were discussions about possible wind penetration in the grid and I recall numbers on the order of 20% with locally better situation like Denmark wind/Norwegian hydro dependence (that is Danish wind depended on Norwegian hydro - $$$ windfall for Norway, BTW), or maximum reasonable penetration in the grid in Western US.
There was a conclusion that wind has to be balanced with extra capacity
You won't get minute by minute variations in wind, because the wind farms are distributed over a large area. A region wide lull (massive blocked high pressure region) is the sort of thing that is predictable days ahead of time. The exact track of a compact storm is a different matter. But distributed sources don't care which part of the field is getting the wind, just the total amount.
...A region wide lull (massive blocked high pressure region) is the sort of thing that is predictable days ahead of time... will the lull come at 2pm or 2:15? I have to put 3000 MW of gas on standby :-) Will the front of the storm pass through the middle of the farm or the side?
http://www.consultkirby.com/files/Regulation_48971.pdf page 4 just for one example. There were gazilion link over months to Swiss, British, German, Ontario data and they all looked like a wood saw with chipped teeth.
As far as large areas:
This mathematical reality, combined with Fig 2 and 3 very quickly discourages the belief that “the wind always blows somewhere.” Well, we don’t want to say that there isn’t a tiny bit of wind that always blows somewhere, but not to an appreciable degree. from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6957
etc...
As someone pointed wind will always be a side show - just by the nature of it.
Yes.
For instance, it's a fairly common occurrence in the UK for a winter blocking high to develop, with low to zero winds, very little sunlight and low temperatures for a week or more. There was a freak one last December.
Perfectly predictable.. and at the moment there is absolutely no way that any storage system could bridge the gap. If we had severe blackouts at the same time as very low temperatures (most people's heating systems need electricity to work), it would not be unreasonable to expect excess winter deaths to double, i.e. increase by 25,000 or so.
But that's OK because at least they wouldn't be killed by radiation.
I'm seeing a lot of ANGA (American Natural Gas Association) commercials at the moment - the buzzwords are "Clean - Abundant - Domestic - Jobs".
They appear to be running in markets, unsurprisingly, where there is potential supply, as well as discussion about the hazards of "fracking".
http://www.anga.us/media-room
One phrase which caught my attention, specifically, was related to base-load - they say "kept the lights on, during a calm day at the wind farm"
http://www.anga.us/media-room/advertising
They target coal too, by mentioning mercury. I do take objection to the phrase "clean the air" as it does not deal at all with carbon emissions.
Natural gas cannot be ramped up much more. They do not have enough gas. Are they going to make everyone turn down their heaters. LOL
People doubt storage but imagine 10% EV car charging at night.
125,000,000 cars * 10% ownership * 75% drained battery * 50 kW-Hr storage = 470 GW-Hr of storage
Assume 75% drain on batt. and 125 million total cars.
So for 11,000 GW-Hr of daily generation you get 4% storage.
夏炉冬扇 （かろ とうせん） karo tōsen
Literally: Summer heater winter fan
Meaning: Something which is out of season and therefore rendered useless.
The warmth comes. It is 1946 again. There is time to change course much if it makes sense. Remember?
I may be stating the obvious, but the whole market is rigged by gov's and is just a 'bread and circuses' exercise:
There was never any reason why anyone who wanted to build a gas powered generator could not be compelled by law to add the same nameplate capacity of wind or solar or tidal. This would have reduced fossil fuel use and covered intermittency.
Solar is the most reliable energy around. It rises every day. It is known that cloudy days contain a good % of the energy of bright sun eg 30% typical. All PV solar needs is concentrating mirrors servo-ed to prevent overload of the cells in full sun. The system could be self powered. Or solar thermal for larger scale. The losses are a low priority when the energy is 100% guaranteed.
Tidal also. This requires gov organisation, not venture capital etc.
Like I said this is just stating the obvious - for the record...
I agree it is a matter of public policy and when the printing presses are running anyway, then it is immediately clear that the powers that be want to constrain the energy markets for no other reason than to retain power. Print more money and get off the blasted coal or at least capture and store it in oil wells or something. Or else we can fry our kids.
Great article. Thanks.
However, I think you have missed one of the key rebuttals.
"Renewables", especially in warm climates, is not a synonym "wind and solar".
In fact, in tropical regions, neither of these sources are likely to play a major role in the transition to renewables until solar costs come down a lot. Even as far North as Spain, wind is a less important resource.
Thailand now generates something near 5% of power using biomass and biogas. The country is developing a few hundred MWs of power on the back of subsidies near triple commercial rates, which is clearly not sustainable, and has almost no wind.
The Philippines, India and others have made great progress in utilizing waste biomass from agricultural to produce electricity. I don't know South America as well, but understand there are thing happening there as well. Small hydro, geothermal and a few others are also growing sources of power.
So, yes, rich countries in Northern climates have brought the most renewable energy on line to date and this has consisted of wind and solar.
But this model is going to be limted to them until cost come down for solar. Wind may never be a significant source of energy is most of the warm regions of the world.
The first response to anyone who says renewables are intermittent is to force them to add "in some cases" to the argument.
True, yes.
I tend to write less about other renewables because I know less about them, but you are correct that they are often quite large (and still much larger than wind in many countries).
Depends on the market.
In many tropical countries the prime movers are diesel engines and/or in poorer countries there is no a robust transmission and generation infrastructure. In both of these cases solar and wind make sense - see http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Harnessed-Wind-Electricity/dp/0061730327.
One obvious point is that natural gas is a finite resource even with unconventional natural gas included. Right now gas provides less than 25% of US energy (and 21% of US electricity) and at ~650 Tcf of reserves could supply US energy needs for just 30 years. Chances are even existing gas power plants would find difficulties operating to the ends of their service lives.
Regarding the graph on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, I just want to point out that there are studies that show nuclear life cycle CO2 emissions are higher than solar and wind:
I know this keypost is about gas, but I loathe the subliminal free ride that nuclear gets from treatment like in said graphic...
So, to summarize, gCo2e from this meta analysis:
Coal ~960
Ngas ~443
Nuke ~ 66
Solar ~ 32
Wind ~ 10
Studies that put nuke CO2 emissions higher than wind typically assumes use of (some proportion of) outdated enrichment technology driven by electricity from coal or from an average mix (instead of bootstrapping with nuclear electricity). Modern enrichment tech (centrifuges) is 16 times more efficient. The meta analysis in question, if I remember correctly, incorporates old studies with extreme CO2-estimates, and then averaged them all.
Does it include the fuel used by the managers, technicians and security guards to travel from home to work daily to maintain a waste stockpile for 1000's of years? Or do they volunteer to live next door? Or hike to work every day when cars are gone?
If you bury the waste in a deep repository, you need no maintenance and no security. That's the whole point of it. Same if you reprocess and burn the waste in breeders. Also, please remember that whatever we do, we have the waste and need to solve the problem. (It is already solved, of course, but I don't expect anti-nukers to acknowledge this.)
jeppen, if you were to bury all the world's current nuclear waste in a deep repository (which I assume would have no entrance/exit if there's to be no security) how many years would it be until the waste, if exposed to air or groundwater for whatever reason, would not emit more radiation than background?
In other words, in what year could we high-five and call it good?
Depends on what you mean. The waste will, after the plutonium is gone, remain forever a quite concentrated pile of uranium ore, and uranium is responsible for radon gas. However, if we view the pile as a part of the surrounding rock, the average concentration/radioactivity of the ore is low. I wouldn't worry. The standard answer is 100,000 years, but in reality, if it's buried, it's buried and you can forget about it.
BUT - what I would be worried about, if I were so inclined, is that the reactor-grade plutonium in the pile slowly converts to weapons-grade. You see, the contaminating Pu-240 has a half-life of 6000 years, whereas Pu-239 halves in 24000 years. Spent fuel starts at around 26% Pu-240 and for weapons-material you need to get down to 7%. This ratio is achieved after about 20,000 years, with most of the Pu-239 remaining. There is no satisfactory solution to this problem, and whether we continue doing nuclear power or not will not change this.
Well, that's a long time.
Realistically, I don't think that we can forget about it if it's buried. At the very least, you'd need security/observation of the site, and you'd need to be able to check and make sure that casks weren't corroding, etc.
Do you believe that there's any suitable burial location that could be free of earthquakes/other disasters for 240k years?
What kind of observation/security do you envision? It's very hard to dig 500 meters down and extract the material. No, why would you check the casks? The point of the methods is that you do not need to. You seal the repository and then you are done with it.
Oh, yes, 240k years is not much. Why would earthquakes matter? The capsules embedded in clay around them will hardly notice a little shaking.
Within the KBS-3 project, the Swedish method, different analogies from nature have been researched. For instance, in Littleham Cove in England, naturally occuring copper plates a few millimetres thick have been embedded in clay for 175 million years, and have lost only about half its thickness during that time. Also, in Dunarubba in Italy, clay has preserved tree stumps for 1.5 million years. Another analogy is the Cigar Lake mine. Surrounding the (extremely rich, 14-55%) ore body, that has been there for 1.3 billion years, is a layer of clay that has kept the radioactive materials from reaching the surface. No elevated radioactivity on the surface.
In all these analogies, the times are orders of magnitude longer, the conditions worse and the materials less pure than will be the case with real, human designed repositories. And yet they held. Now you stack these barriers - the copper, the mountain, the bentonite. All are selected and designed for the purpose, and only one of them need to last for a geologically short duration.
It's a box canyon--running a high-risk enterprise into an area that's very difficult to back out of. Just seems wrong to me.
Let us take natural gas. What about the storage and transport? Are we suggesting a massive natural gas network? How does that fit the 'I want my own 1 month supply' mentality? How does a massive pipeline infrastructure fit a seismically active Japan for example? Yeah a LNG handgrenade is better than an I-133 blast but is that the standard we use?
It is relatively easy to expand the distribution of gas to the relatively small number of electricity generating plants. This is even allowing for the fact that these are typically smaller than coal or nuclear plants and can be sited in a more distributed fashion to lessen the need for distribution grid upgrades.
Furthermore, a small number of large diameter pipelines to generating plants is a lot cheaper than replacing the relatively vast pipeline network for distributing gas for residential use. Much of that pipeline network is beyond the end of life in major metro areas.
Is there a current polymer or cemenatatious piping as well as automatic shutoff technology ready today that can help? Better joining and monitoring? Better pigs? It is sounding promising. Are we ready to send T. Boone Pickens in a 'guppy' tanker and tell Honda to switch the Korean plants to gas Civics, Jazzes and small pickups. What is the new 'bottle', some carbon fiber deal? Thanks for the reply.
It's warm and sunny in Cambridge today.
With output from Egypt and Libya disrupted, and demand from Japan being predicted to rise sharply, the spot price of
NG has risen sharply in the UK, close to the highs seen in the recent extreme December weather.
http://marketinformation.natgrid.co.uk/gas/frmPrevalingView.aspx
62p/therm today.
In a recent market analysis a government paper predicted gas prices would vary between 30p/therm (low case) and
50p/therm (high case) for at least a decade.
The price has been above 50p/therm for the last four months and shows no sign of falling.
Planned Nameplate Capacity Additions from New Generators, by Energy Source, 2008 through 2012
http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p4.html
I'm not shure nearly no new wind capacity will be installed in 2011 and 2012 in the whole US of A.
Wow, that was a depressing table. Wind falls off a cliff in 2011 and 2012, and I am not sure why.
Is it the potential end to the Production Tax Credit?
Or are the numbers simply incorrect, zero new US wind capacity in 2012 seems hard to believe, since I can see wind farm construction occurring in Colorado right now?
And gas does have the lion's share of new capacity, which makes me wonder where US nat gas will be on the supply/demand curve in 2015.
I think wind farms get added to these tables fairly late because the development process is much faster and construction then only takes a few months. Onshore, you can get from initial site assessment to building rather quickly (offshore is another story, of course).
Wall Street Journal article from Singapore...
The Business Case Against Nuclear Power
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870405020457621801257386687...
"The relentless media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan has centered on safety and reliability concerns with modern nuclear power plants. Such fears have prompted China to suspend its nuclear building plans at least for the short term and will also affect the prospects for new plants in Europe and the U.S. But this safety debate obscures an economic point that already was emerging before the Japan disaster: Nuclear power makes little economic sense.
Modern nuclear plants are among the most capital-intensive structures ever built. Initial construction of a new reactor consumes close to 60% of a project's total investment, compared to about 40% for coal and 15% for natural gas power plants (the remainder goes to costs such as fuel, maintenance and operations). The nuclear industry is typically the most capital-intensive business in any country that builds nuclear plants."
...
"So how has anyone been able to afford to build any plants at all? In short, government support. The business model for nuclear power generation relies primarily on extracting huge amounts of taxpayer subsidies.
This has been true since the industry's early days. Nuclear power in the U.S. received subsidies of $15.30 per kilowatt hour between 1947 and 1961—the first 15 years during which nuclear technology was used for civilian power generation—compared to subsidies of $7.19 per kilowatt hour for solar power and 46 cents for wind power between 1975 and 1989, the first 15 years when those technologies came into more widespread use. Nuclear operators are often protected by laws limiting liability that shift most of the expense of serious accidents to the public, thus shielding operators from the costs of insuring a potentially more dangerous technology.
All of this ought to raise questions in a lot of minds in Asia, where nuclear increasingly has been viewed as the next big energy thing. Asian governments purport to have plans to build 110 nuclear power plants between 2010 and 2030. Achieving this build-out would necessitate hundreds of billions of dollars of continued subsidies. Conservatively estimating a per-plant cost of $5 billion, and very conservatively estimating subsidies equal to one-third of project costs (it's closer to 70%-80% in the U.S.), that still works out to around $180 billion in subsidies simply to build the plants, let alone operate them. Can Asia afford that?
Nuclear-power proponents often argue that the market should decide whether nuclear makes sense. They're right. The reality is that but for government support, nuclear is a terrible business proposition. Asian policy makers should take note.
Mr. Sovacool, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is co-author of "The International Politics of Nuclear Power," forthcoming from Routledge."
Public opinion case against nuclear power
"Only 43 percent of those polled after the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan said they would approve building such new facilities in the United States to generate electricity. That is a steep decline from the 57 percent who said in 2008 that they approved of new plants. That poll was taken at a time of soaring gas prices and mounting concerns about global warming that led to calls for a new national energy policy and that drove popular support for nuclear power to its highest level in three decades."
WHAT IS THE TRUE RADIATION LEVEL AND HOW BAD IS IT?
Its VERY obvious that the japanese people in particular and world in large are not being informed enough, that is, enough in terms of frequency, magnitude and truth. In terms of frequency that the number of times any related thing is reported by japanese govt is not large enough, that is, there are too few reports. In terms of magnitude is that the amount of information spread by japanese govt is too little. In terms of truth is that there are serious logical and consistency issues in what is reported.
So, what is the truth? What is the real / actual radiation level and what do that mean? For a layman any report in terms of a unit of radiation is meaningless unless there is something to compare it with. That is why media report in comparison of chest x-rays, dentist visits, cell phone usage etc but that is not the right thing to compare with. The only right thing to compare with is the natural radiation which people on this planet were getting 1,000 years back. The problem with that is at different parts of world at different times in history people were getting different amounts of natural radiation. So, what should we chose as the meter stick?
I think the best meter stick is to take a measurement of radiation that most people were getting in the time immediately before the start of industrial age. Industrial age started around 1770, so how far behind should we go?
I think the year 1500 is a good choice. Its because at that time there were major empires in world and there was extensive trade, industry and science.
As about what geographic area to take I would say that any area that was not near to any natural reserve of radiation such as a uranium or coal enrich-soil. Instead of searching for that data and doing calculation I would simply ignore all natural radiation other than the solar radiation. I assume that the radiation due to other celestial bodies such as stars, comets etc and radiation due to cosmic microwave background are too little to compare with the solar radiation so I ignore that.
I found out that a person gets 1 milli-severt of radiation per year from sun on the surface of planet. I know this unit is meaningless yet because there need to be something similar to compare it with. Here is that, the radiation from the reactor is 400 milli severts per hour. By a simple calculation (400 x 24 x 360) it comes out to be 3,456,000 times the natural.
There are more issues with that than "just" a factor of 3.5 million. The radiation we get from sun is not stored in our food or water so we don't actually digest it. Its a known fact that radiation we get on our skin can be may be 100 or 1000 times less dangerous than radiation we digest.
First we were told that its all safe as there is "defence-in-depth" aka 5 layers of shields. Then we were told that it would most probably go in sea as wind appears to below towards the sea (like we should not worry about permanent damage to sea-life). Then we were told that "some" vegetables and fruits are defected. Now we are told that residents of tokyo should not drink tap water. More time pass more bad news come. Please do visit http://www.counterpunch.org/takashi03222011.html (not my blog) to get some real facts.
Anybody who think nuclear is safe please answer these questions:
(1) If safe, why are they not build in the center of cities? Why built tens or hundreds of kilometers from cities due to which half of the electricity is lost in transmission?
(2) Why its always funded by govt? If its safe then the insurance cost shouldn't be too high to be funded by private businesses?
(3) Why do you worry about profileration of nuclear bombs while you think nuclear electricity is safe when in comparison its like keeping a grenade in deep shelter in armoury vs routine heating of your home with explosives?
(4) Where and how should we dump the spent fuel rods?
(1) If safe, why are they not build in the center of cities? Why built tens or hundreds of kilometers from cities due to which half of the electricity is lost in transmission?
Do we build coal plants or chemical factories near cities? No, nuclear plant is a kind of chemical factory, one that produces mainly energy instead of chemicals.
(2) Why its always funded by govt? If its safe then the insurance cost shouldn't be too high to be funded by private businesses?
Bhopal pesticide plant was not insured by anybody in 1984, it was in the middle of city but still, thousands died. So we should shutdown all chemical factories, no? BTW, the largest reactor in the world, now currently being built in Finland, is not funded by government.
(3) Why do you worry about profileration of nuclear bombs while you think nuclear electricity is safe when in comparison its like keeping a grenade in deep shelter in armoury vs routine heating of your home with explosives?
Making nuclear bombs is totally different than making reactors for nuclear plants.
(4) Where and how should we dump the spent fuel rods?
Bed rock, one or two kilometers down. Much more safe than a coal plant blasting more co2 TODAY to the atmosphere...
Actually this plant is being built by 2 government-owned companies, so inspecting their books would be required to determine the quantity of government funding.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-24/areva-s-overruns-at-finnish-...
Areva’s Overruns at Finnish Nuclear Plant Approach Initial Cost
"June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Areva SA, the French nuclear-reactor builder, took a new provision for cost overruns at a plant it’s building in Finland, leaving the door open for more charges as the project is still 2 1/2 years away from completion."...
"EDF-Areva Talks
The two state-controlled companies remain at odds over nuclear fuel supplies, and “negotiations with EDF on conditions for the shutdown of the Georges Besse 1 enrichment plant” continue, Areva said in its statement yesterday."...
"The French state owns 91 percent of Areva, and EDF owns a 2.5 percent stake."
(1) Its dumb and ignorant to say that nuclear power plant is like a chemical factory. Please educate yourself about radiation and spent fuel. A chemical factory when burn/blast burn/blast and do damage and thats it. There are no continuation of damages/disasters after that. The land do not have to be abandoned. The damages can be reversed. A nuclear power plant when damaged contaminate the area for 100,000 years, that is, there are continuations of damages centuries, even eons after the disaster. The land have to be abandoned. The radiations cannot be reversed, there is no anti-radiation.
Besides, chemical factories exist because of fossil fuels. In absence of oil and gas you cannot have any significant, even noticeable number of chemical factories. We should agree by now that dependence on fossil fuels was a mistake. The fossil fuels would better be left in ground. We get more bad by using fossil fuels than the goods. This implies that making a chemical factory is also bad.
(2) When a person give one or ten examples then that shows that infact the statistics are not in favor of that person's point, because if they were then he would be talking in terms of percentages or using adjectives like "most". Candy picking a few favorable examples is too easy. Even in that example we should have shutdown all chemical factories. We not need them to live. We were living without them for a million years and we were living healthier, happier lives. Who "need" them is bankers and jews who live on markup money and therefore require growth. Normal people like you and me don't want to live in constant fear. Would you like to sleep every night on top of a bed of grenades when that bed is in a castle of gold and I have the remote controlled mechanism of blowing those grenades whenever I wish? Oh, and what about the other 1000 reactors already built and in operation? Is your Finland's plan huge enough to compensate those 1000 counter examples? Even for that reactor, who is providing insurance?
(3) You missed the entire point. Please read it again and this time be careful and pay attention.
(4) So you think that 2 km of bed rock (or any rock) is enough? Please educate yourself about nuetrinos, gamma rays. Hell there are 1400 sub atomic particles and you can't shield from even half of them. They have half lives going to as much as 0.1 million years. Do you really want to plan for even a hundred years? What is the guarantee that in future the spent fuel would not be dig up and used by nato-leftovers to rebuild a nuclear bomb? Please don't give the CO2 related reason. CO2 in atmosphere can be bring up or down. The simplest way is deforestation and forestation respectively. For example you can grow a forest, cut it down, put all the wood underground and on the surface grow forest again. Do this as much times as you like. Every time when forest grows, CO2 would be captured from atmosphere. Now try getting radiation level down. You can't. There is no known way of anti-radiation. That is the problem. That is the fear. You have an ON switch but you don't have an OFF switch. Its like death. You can kill but you can't unkill.
This is complete nonsense. Mercury, for instance, is forever. Iodine-131 halves every 8 days.
Congratulations, you won the price for todays' most anti-civilisatory comment.
This is hilarious. Neutrinos? Sub-atomic particles with half-lives? What does this have to do with anything? Sweden plans for 500 meter deep repository with the rods in copper capsules and the capsules in bentonite clay, and that is extremely over-designed. But it'll make for a good mine in 100,000 years.
Whatever we do, we have thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste already. The problem needs a solution (and has solutions). Upping the volume 10 times doesn't change that.
This comment would be better placed in one of the Drumbeats / Fukushima threads. Thank you.
"Inertia is not a policy" - excellent end to an excellent post.
However, another sub-heading would be useful too:
Nuclear is dead?
Reports of its total political death are greatly exaggerated, notwithstanding row-back in some jurisdictions. I doubt that a major nuclear accident is enough on its own now or was enough previously with Chernobyl - neo-liberalist tendencies, low gas price etc. all played their part. The "Serious" expected difficulties of high penetration of renewables are politically toxic at this time, as the expectations of the electorate massively diverge (following a way of life dependent on high EROI oil/cheap abundant energy) from the expected results of a high renewable scenario. This post makes an economic argument against these last concerns, but as everyone never ceases to complain, that doesn't mean politicians listen to it.
My own usual disclaimer: saying nuclear isn't dead doesn't mean I support nuclear.
A point I haven't seen discussed yet is the dispatch system for power generators. This is more of an issue in the US, I believe, than in some other countries. For the last 15 or more years, the US has shifted towards a system where dispatch rules are based on market purchases, some made far in advance.
This trend, combined with the uncertainty of when the wind will blow, is a significant disadvantage to wind and solar producers. By way of contrast, in the last couple of years Spain has set records for the percentage of total demand it has met with wind power during certain hours. They have a centralized dispatch mechanism that can preferentially dispatch wind power, ordering fossil fuel plants to throttle back in order to use the wind when it blows. In the US, a large provider with multiple generating technologies might be able to do the same thing (ie, throttle back their gas turbines when the wind is blowing). A producer that only owns wind farms is clearly in a much worse position. If the wind blows somewhat harder today than anticipated, the surplus is simply wasted because there are no consumers for that power that haven't already paid for power from some other source.
At least some Cato Institute economists -- as pro-market a bunch as you are likely to find -- have concluded that the costs to structure a wholesale market such that you can guarantee it won't be gamed probably exceed the costs of vertically-integrated centrally-regulated utilities. It seems likely to me that the same would be true for a market-based dispatch system that was intended to maximize use of intermittent renewables -- the costs of setting up and operating such a market that couldn't be gamed would be higher than those of a simple centralized dispatch authority.
The probability of reversing policy direction in US wholesale power markets seems small.
State by state renewable portfolio standards (like Colorado's Amendment 37) may impact dispatch rules via state Public Utility Commissions.
So change may not happen at the level of wholesale power markets, but within individual utility territories via PUC mandate.
Which would work fine for Western US utilities with good renewable resources, but not so well in the Eastern US.
Maybe, your kinds of bad winds will carry far away...
But remember..The SUN...evil fusion reactor...
Tim;
You seem to be running out of arguments.
The fact that we have working Fusion power (and always have) that is mostly self-contained and self-funded and offers free delivery from a safe 93 million miles away is hardly something that any Renewable Advocate objects to in any way.
You need to count to ten and find some points that will further your position here.
One thing I need to understand better is the relationship between FERC rules and state PUC rules. Certainly as a general principle, federal laws and rules trump anything a state may wish to do. FERC is moving everyone in the direction of independent system operators who manage the dispatch of power. This paper discusses some of the problems that the New York ISO is facing in integrating wind power into the grid in response to a state requirement for renewable power. Among the steps that required FERC approval were provisions that exempted wind generators from the penalties associated with non-delivery of scheduled power.
Your point about the unequal distribution of renewable resources between east and west in the United States is a good one, IMO. Especially when you line it up with the population distribution. Powering the eastern US from renewables would certainly appear to require that they build very large redundant transmission systems to move western energy to the East Coast.
It's hard to see renewables being built or maintained in a world with no fossil fuels. I suggest that wind power largely owes its existence to open cycle (gas turbine only) peaking power plants that can shadow the variations. The proposed biomass plants for backup still require FFs for harvesting (straw, woodchips etc) then taking the ash back to the fields. Gas is the mug who works hard to support a trophy wife who has to do little besides look good in public. The need for backup means that a megawatt-hour of wind generated electricity does not fully displace a Mwh of FF generated power. For the UK the CO2 displacement is apparently only 40% or so. The question then becomes: why not just run the gas plant in full load following mode and save all the cost and disamenity of wind farms, power lines and feed-in tariffs?
I suggest the supposed merit-order-effect is an artefact of subsidies. I'd call it not-quite-negative-pricing. Wind generators cut their price to keep the subsidy cash coming. In the long run I'd expect the discounting will not quite match the subsidy. At least electricity consumers are getting some of their money back.
Boof, the opposite strikes me as being true.
In a world without fossil fuels, all of our energy will come from renewables. Without fossil fuels, our options appear to be either renewables, or nuclear power.
In a worst case scenario of global energy/economic/population collapse, it is easy for me to imagine the survivors dusting themselves off, planting permaculture gardens, and scavenging materials to assemble hydro/solar/wind harvesting systems to run motors and lights. Will they dust themselves off and build nuclear reactors? Highly unlikely.
In a long descent scenario, our ability (or willingness) to build, fuel, and maintain nuclear reactors will fail long before our ability to do so with solar, wind, and hydro does.
In a business as usual scenario....
Well, there isn't a business as usual scenario, is there?
Nuclear power is the most dramatic example of deficit spending that mankind has yet devised. We create wastes that are toxic to all life for thousands of years to create a commodity that we consume instantly. For our momentary convenience we expect descendants we know not of, living in cultures that we cannot predict, to bear the cost and suffer the consequences. How is that in any way sane or ethical?
I find it especially curious that the most staunch supporters of nuclear energy are often members of the political demographic that claims to be fiscally conservative, opposed to government, tax phobic, and are proponents of the free market. Nuclear power makes no economic sense, requires strong central governments and regulatory bureaucracies, socializes its costs to taxpayers, and would not survive in a truly free market. It simply could not compete without subsidization and externalization of its costs.
When we dust off the ashes and soot of the carbon fuel epoch, I'd just as soon we didn't have to deal with glowing nuclear ruins as well. We simply cannot guarantee that we will have the capacity to safely store the waste and safely decommission the plants. We aren't doing that now while we are still rich and lavishly powered.
A new nuclear plant is one of the largest investments in the future that we do. We provide them with plentiful clean power, and since investments create more investments (growth), we give them more economic possibilities. This is important for us, but even more important for Chinese and Indians, who really need more energy. We also save the environment by not causing AGW or coal cancer deaths or ocean acidification - stuff that also ripple and magnify through time.
You are wrong. Nuclear is about the only thing, besides some already existing hydro, that would survive in a truly free market.
If we don't, some nuclear left-overs is the least of our problems. The most important thing is to try to guarantee that we keep up the industrial society, and that we don't destroy the Earths climate. Nuclear vastly improves our chances on both counts.
No, we don't provide them with clean power. The designed lifetime of nuclear plants is 30-40 years. We may pass along to one generation down the capacity to temporarily continue to produce several more decades of radioactive waste for a commodity that they also consume instantly, but ultimately the whole mess gets inherited by those who have received no benefit at all, including non humans.
Without government, and without the role that war played, nuclear power would likely have never been developed at all. And perhaps by a truly free market you mean one that can externalize its liabilities onto others with impunity, as it is unregulated and won't regulate itself out of short term profit at the expense of others who inherit the costs. Well, in that case, sure, nuclear power might thrive. Hurray!
Personally, I don't think it is important to guarantee that industrial society as we now know it persists at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The sooner we lay its corpse to rest, the better off future generations of life will be. It is our industrial society after all which is the destroyer.
Perhaps there is a technical/industrial culture possible that is sustainable and compatible with ecology, but if there is, it bears faint resemblance to this monument of inefficiency and waste that we've hobbled ourselves with. And it sure doesn't include nuclear in my view, because sustainable means you are not producing waste at all; your loops are closed, and non toxic.
The designed lifetime is 60 years. Electricity is a commodity that is consumed instantly, but the benefits extend much further. Non-humans don't care about radioactivity.
Without government? Irrelevant!
Au contraire, my friend. I mean one where costs are fully internalized. In that market nuclear would thrive, as its external costs are tiny, and its competitors external costs are huge.
Then you are completely clueless. Completely. If industrial society collapses, most humans will die and the rest will suffer horrendeously. And you'd like that, for the benefit of a few hundred million survivors that could thrive in some romantic fantasy world of being once again in sync with nature and in peace with all?
Why? If you look at ecological footprint indexes and remove carbon, then we are in balance, roughly. And of course, if we hit a wall in some aspect, we adapt and do that differently.
"Sustainable" is religion, and as all religions, it is dangerous and stops you from performing rationally.
You think "industrial society" is here forever?
Industrial society got us into the predicament we now find ourselves.
Population overshoot, environmental degradation and greenhouses gases threatening to allow global warming to run completely out of control.
Industrial society is going down whether you like it or not. All we are able to do now is determine whether we all die or some survive. Ignorance will ensure we all die.
I see it like this:
Value of industrial society: 1
Value of non-industrial society: 0
Chance of sustaining industrial society without nuclear: N% where N > 0
Chance of sustaining industrial society with nuclear: (N+M)% where N,M > 0
The expected value is strictly larger with nuclear.
Thanks for the education. Okay, so let's throw another two decades on that side of the teeter-totter and see how it balances out against those thousands of years of radioactivity on the waste side of the fulcrum.
Sure, electricity can produce useful work the effects of which can last, but the CPU modelling the cancer cell that leads to the cure doesn't care how the power was generated. We have other options which is the central topic of Jerome's essay.
Please note that I wrote: "as we now know it", and "as quickly as possible", regarding industrial society. Those bits are kind of important.
Admittedly, I would like to see the global population decline, I do think that it leverages our problems, but I certainly don't want to see it happen catastrophically. Over the next century, more than seven billion people will die of natural causes. The big question is how many will be born.
Do you think industrial society as we now know it is sustainable, even if we had unlimited energy?
The desire is to work towards identifying the attributes of the culture we have created that can't persist, and try to migrate as quickly as possible towards one organized in a way that can persist, with the objective of the best quality of life for the most number of people as possible. Obviously, the definition of "quality of life" varies widely. I think it is safe to say that most would include uncontaminated food and water supplies in the definition though. Seems to be a legitimate bit of a concern in Tokyo at the moment.
I'd like to see the ecological footprint indexes that you mention. I'd be pleased as punch if what you say is true. If it is, why are we extincting species so quickly? Is it all about the CO2?
"Sustainable" is a word to represent a concept (or maybe it is an abstraction ;). Dunno what you mean by religion. If it can't be sustained, it isn't sustainable. You apparently think it is rational to create persistent toxic wastes using systems that are potentially at risk of catastrophic accidents, in exchange for a bit of electricity. I do not.
Perhaps not in the human sense of "care", but other species are still impacted by it. We aren't the only sentient species. We aren't the only ones that know we are suffering when we suffer. As a human, I care about our negative impacts on other species.
Four of my siblings, have thyroid related health problems, two of them had cancerous thyroids removed. They were children in the 1950's, living in Utah, downwind of the U.S. weapons tests. Am I concerned about the health impacts of radiation? Yes, I am. It has negatively affected the lives of people I care about.
But we don't - at least not if we take AGW seriously.
Oh yes, easily. With unlimited clean energy, we can do unlimited cleanups, unlimited recycling, unlimited metal extraction, unlimited synthetic resources, unlimited waste handling and so on.
We'll always have contamination of different kinds, I hope. To me, that's part of living a full life.
Check out the WWF Living Planet Report. I'm not sure it captures everything, though.
The question is why we need to be sustainable. It isn't sustainable to pick up a gold nugget that you find on the ground. You can't expect to keep doing that. Who cares - pick it up! When you can't sustain something, you change. But why change five centuries ahead of that time, if five centuries of BAU is nice (and makes you more likely to be able to change your unsustainable practices to something else)?
I absolutely do. Electricity is extremely important to civilization and to our well-being. No other source can produce it in sufficient quantities, with sufficient quality of delivery, and make a lower environmental impact.
I think that in the animal kingdom, there is a more or less constant rate of suffering and death. If you introduce a bit of radioactivity, you simply shift the suffering a bit among causes. One fox dies in cancer, and another one then gets more to eat and won't die of malnutrition, for instance. (Also, Chernobyl evacuated areas have been reported to have a much richer animal life. Evacuating humans were much more positive than radiation was negative.)
That is emotionally very understandable, but has nothing to do with rational assessments of risks, benefits and costs.
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
Yair...
Although written in a disparaging context the above quotation sits pretty easy on my soul...the few hundred million survivors sounds reasonable to me.
It wouldn't be a "romantic at peace with all" fantasy world but provided the environment has not been nuked or otherwise made uninhabitable it would be an improvement on what we have at present...I read a quotation somewhere that the greatest buildings ever built, the greatest music ever composed and the greatest writting ever written all happened before the era of fossil fuel.
As I enter my seventieth year and look at back at a life lived to the full I realise that my generation has pretty much experienced the best this world has to offer.
The human race has truly squandered an amazing recource in fossil fuel and to try to extend BAU by risking a nuclear future I believe is unfair on future generations.
Nicely put.............
Maybe our generation has. Knowing how past generations lived allows us to perceive that we had/have the best of times.
I could imagine a very good life a few hundred years ago, living in a cabin by a stream trapping and working hard dawn to dusk. Each generation though, as FF use came to the fore expected growth and getting in the way of "progress' was not in the best interest of humans. The simple fact is that if we never came to experience the best of things we would never miss it.
It sits easy on your soul... Me thinks that mindset has been shared by many an ideologically motivated dictator: You know what's best for humanity, a humanity that is "like yeast" and squanders its potential and resources. A culling to 5% of the population is just the natural order of things.
I'm very happy that you guys doesn't have much influence.
And are you then unconcerned with the Dictatorial behaviors (not just interpreted blog comments) by oversized Energy Consortiums that have very heavy fingers in government?
They have a lot of influence.
I'm a libertarian, so yes, of course I'm concerned. But mostly of the power of competitors and of greens, as the balance of power is not in favor of nuclear. However, if more countries do as the UK just decided, i.e. put a (floor) price on carbon that is $26/tonne and rising to $49 in 2020, then the game will start to change. But you do need reasonable nuclear regulation as well.
You might not but we and our neighbour Finland are doing quite a lot for handling the waste in a responsible manner. It would be even better to recycle it in new types of reactors but that would take about 20 years of development and prototype building, I support this development as a better alternative to pursue in parallell with building the about 500 m deep bedrock repositories.
I realy hope we will go forward and replace old BWR:s with new generation 3+ reactors since that will give 60 years of power to keep our society prosperous during hard times. We got a fair amount of hydro power but it is even better to also have a lot of nuclear power.
My view of the worst case scenario is that its handling is about making the icelands of politicaly stability, economical productivity and ongoing long term investments as manny and large as possible. Nuclear power is a very important part of my own analysis about how to get our culture thru the post peak oil bottleneck. We can have a better future and do more for our neighbours if we ASAP replace our three oldest nuclear reactrs with new ones and then keep going as the technology is refined.
The importance of nuclear power for handling the post peak oil era makes me depressed when I see the Fukushima accident and the initial political reactions to it. There is a large risk that manny millions of people will lack electricity in the 2020:s and 2030:s from a lack of investments in the next 5-10 years. This accident might seal the destiny for whole nations. :-(
We can allways hope for a technological miracle or a political miracle. So far is the political scene in Sweden fairly calm but I do wish that even more people had a deep understanding about what the limitations in physical resources actually mean for our future.
Villagers in India protest construction of a nuclear power plant. Police arrest 300 and ban memorial service for Japanese victims: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Jaitapur-bans-Japan-memor...
thanks Jerome, excellent post
and natural gas itself is methane, which is a much more potent hothouse gas than carbon dioxide,
Certainly a better descriptive term than the over worked 'g' word. It doesn't carry all the left leaning baggage of the 'g' word, and it also avoids the glazed over feel that the endless commercial dilution has brought to the mere mention of the 'g' word.
But the 'g' word is still my favorite color--20 plus years in the subarctic with six or seven months a year of constant white landscape can make that happen ?- )
and if as on Q
good news and bad news.
The good news is the maximum arctic ice extent for 2011 probably happened on March 7 while the average date since satellite record has been March 6.
The bad news is 2011 looks to have tied 2006 for the lowest maximum arctic ice extent on record.
Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent on March 7 was 14.64 million square kilometers (5.65 million square miles). The orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 median extent for that day. The black cross indicates the geographic North Pole. Sea Ice Index data. About the data.
—Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center
I can't say I agree with the fact that renewables are inexpensive. They now receive fixed income, but what the market will look like with high penetration and no fixed (subsidized) rates?
Price goes down when wind blows, goes up when it dosen't, right? So how can you expect them to make money? Every other source will be producing when the wind is not blowing, earning far more $$$ then wind power, which will be anti-correlated to power prices.
The value of wind generated electricity can be perfectly measured this way:
sales ($) / electricity sold (MWh) = Average value of each MWh sold.
I can't say how much the number will differ from gas / coal / nuclear / hydro, but I can bet wind will be lower.
Wind may generate a lot of electricity, but if it's does worth 2 times less it may not be same game.
It is a matter of national priorities to have a lasting energy-producing asset. Once coal is burned. It is gone. Burned gas is gone.
The major cost is pollution. That is a liability of most fossils and nuclear.
If you place no cost on assets or you do not care about pollution at all then you miss the point and undervalue renewables, indeed.
I care about my kids. Many Americans do not, but that is their choice.
yes yes
But I am compelled by simple honesty to remind anyone willing to listen to my ramblings:
that we have not used our stupendously enormous bonanza of essentially free mega energy of ff and nukes particularly wisely--having used it, after all, to bring about the sixth and possibly greatest and penultimate mass extinction event since the beginning of complex life on the planet.
And I don't see any great and shining evidence that we will use any new energy source, no matter how pristine, to the exact same ends of consuming beyond our ecological means, with all the eco-horror that accompanies that practice.
I've said it many times, but I'm afraid it bears repeating:
The first, second, third, fourth...and umpteenth priority must be vast reductions in the amount of energy (and land and water and light and materials...) that we as a species consume, reductions for the US that would be in the range of 90-99%.
Once we do that, all sorts of ways to supply the fraction that's left seem doable.
Without that--with anything remotely resembling BAU--we are stuck in variations of absolute hopelessness.
(By the way, this site has become quite the shill-haven. We need more posts by the likes of greenish and Magyar...Oh, but I guess they actually have to work for a living, rather than being paid by various industries to spin the message on sites like this.)
"but what the market will look like with high penetration and no fixed (subsidized) rates?"
Are you talking about 15+ years from now? If you are then I'd like to know what you think gas generating costs will in ~2026+?
I'd be surprised if you could accurately predict what gas will cost in 15 months!
Wind should be forward selling call options on its production (it kinda does this via PPAs, but I don't think it is getting properly valued) since it is the only cost competitive source that knows (with very high certainty) what it will cost it to produce energy in 10-15 years. It can therefore afford to offer a fixed price today for power many years from now (obviously wind would set price above cost!).
If I were a major corporation I'd be buying call options from wind producers now to protect against volitile energy prices beyond 10 years out. (again utilities are doing this *kicking and screaming* via PPAs) But I think corporations in general would get more value since they pay more for power than the utilities (and hence get whipsawed more in volitile markets).
50% is pretty impressive
It seems the North Sea is a treasure trove of energy in more ways than one
Correction for current reality: it used to be in more ways than one.
Yes, fast approaching the bottom of the
treasure chestbarrel50% is pretty impressive
It seems the North Sea is a treasure trove of energy in more ways than one
It is nothing like 50%
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
This morning they are producing just 126MW, so when we close down our old nuclear and coal, relying on wind will ensure blackouts on a regular basis.
the UK electricity balancing and settlement code company, forecast the cumulative nameplate capacity of wind farms connected to the transmission network to be 2.662 GW.[7] On 6 September 2010 a historical peak of 1860 MW was recorded from these wind farms accounting for 4.7% of total generation at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
This was the best ever achieved from 5.2GW installed capacity, but you have to build and maintain backup for the worst days. Like Tuesday just gone or Today 8AM 24 March 2011 where wind output in about 0.6% of total UK output. In other words a bit of a joke when it comes to running a developed country.
The power output recorded on the bmreport says it all.
Are we comparing Apples with Apples here ?
- from Jerome a Paris upthread
The 3 thousand wind turbines in the UK which span the entire country from shetlands to the coast of Cornwall should give anyone a good idea of what to expect.
The fact is taken all together their capacity factor is less than 25%.
Anyway capacity factor disguises the fact that wind production cannot be predicted, nobody on this website would dare give you an estimate for production tomorrow at 18.00-20.00 hours which is peak demand.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
these figures are produced by Elexon
http://www.elexon.co.uk/pages/introductiontothebsc.aspx
Fact is most people use electricity at certain times, if wind maximum output is between 01.00 and 04.00 hours and minimum output is at 18.00 hours than what use is it?
As I said if the UK closed down the biggest coal fired power station(drax) you would have to build 72,000mw of wind capacity to match it this morning. That is what wind proponants do not tell us.
Also wind needs gas backup and as our is running out we will be more at the mercy of other countries and political uncertainty. Not the best policy I hope you agree.
How much of that is offshore in the North Sea ?
BTW: the bm report has the Total Metered Capacity at 3226 MW
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php#peak_wind_generation
(wiki has 5204 MW)
Do you know why/where there is the difference ?
The bm report has that forecast
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php#wind_fc_outturn
Looks like yesterday 23rd was windy, today 24th not so windy, tomorrow 25th not so windy
The EWEA report defines Capacity Factor as:
The capacity factor of a wind turbine or another
electricity generating plant is the amount of energy
delivered during a year divided by the amount of energy
that would have been generated if the generator were
running at maximum power output throughout all the
8,760 hours of a year.
Taking an instantaneous reading (this morning) is not what the capacity factor measures
It is meant to provide a figure across a whole year
I think (correct me if I am wrong) what you are trying to say is that if the wind is weak, then you dont get much power - if so, then I dont think anyone would disagree with you
So yes you do (obviously) need a backup for those occasions
Energy for All
Exactly capacity means absolutely nothing if you want to know if wind will power your electric shower tomorrow morning. It is a useless statistic which paints the wind industry in the best light possible, but when you dig deeper you find that you need to backup 95% of wind capacity to make sure you get your shower in the morning.
If you would rely on wind for just 10% of our base usage you would have to build 20 times that in capacity. It's like having a train service that only one day in ten runs at 8am to get you to work.
Pretty useless it running at 3am.
Wind proponants want us to believe they are of equal value when in fact one is close to useless.
Do you know why/where there is the difference ?
I believe the difference is the turbines not on grid and therfore not metered.
You are making the common mistake of confusing low probability events with 99.9% of the wind conditions, which is ironically in your favor. LOL You act as if you can make them nearly the same in certainty.
I could do the same for nuclear or natural gas. Look at Texas this winter. LOL. They are the kings of NG and their grid shut down. I could then say the NG grid is intermittent and unreliable. But that is not the most probable state of their NG system. SO I WILL NOT do that. That is wat you do. LOL
It is all about grid management.
Increase pollution all over a little change public policy and transmission systems and profits. Very clever.
I give you all credit. You have your spin. But I fear you do not care one iota about the pubic at large, and you love to ignore the data and statistics on wind power.
Anyway to an armchair person like me I feel better now about my personal positions. They are more in line with what the Average person needs rather than in line with a few investors and various King Pins in the Energy Cartel. But please come up with statistically defensible positions and not this BS stuff.
Oct
the data I am quoting is from Elexon
http://www.elexon.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx
I realize they must be difficult facts for you to come to terms with; however replacement of fossil fuels is a very complex issue. Unfortunately simple people like simple solutions and when that simple solution is deprived them they get all uppity.
As you have just shown.
Jaz, you need to post the statistics for your argument.
There is no data underneath that link.
Post the data or the numbers of occurrences of poor wind conditions over the lifetime of the wind installations. Average them all together and show me that they were all down to zero more than a majority of the time.
Somewhere in there you made a factor or ten exaggeration about how poor the resource is. You need to base your comparison against the time the resource is good.
Just do that math. But saying some anecdotes of a several bad days for wind is like me saying Texas could not run NG infrastructure when it got cold once.
I hope you see my point. You need a statistically robust argument against wind. Not an anecdote.
That is all you have after all the intermittency issue which is an issue of scale and grid connectedness.
Between October 2006 and February 2007 there were 17 days when the output from Britain’s 1632
windmills was less than 10% of their capacity.
Taken from Klayden post below.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_187.shtml
No, dont pick a seasonal fluctuation. Show me the money! ;-) The whole lifetime of the operation.
In any case, don't bother. You see my point. It is just a suggestion.
BTW, I know this is true about wind power helping Texas through that Natural Gas shortage.
Is there not an obvious need for balanced designs of electrical infrastructure:
LINK
"Many parts of the Texas experienced rolling blackouts, coinciding with unusually cold temperatures across many parts of the state. Millions of customers statewide appear to have been affected. Here are the facts as they are currently understood:
Wind energy played a major role in keeping the blackouts from becoming more severe. Between 5 and 7 A.M. this morning (the peak of the electricity shortage) wind farm power was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW, roughly the amount it had been forecast and scheduled to provide. That is about 7% of the state's total electricity demand at that time, or enough for about 3 million average homes."
Fossil fuels don't have a capacity problem as you just turn on the gas valve and you can make electricity at 30-50% efficiency. Theoretically a power plant can run 8760 hours per year whereas a wind turbine might only run 2200 hours per year so
1 MW of wind is comparable to 1/4 MW of fossil. Of course, most gas turbine peaker plants don't run 8760 hours per year either, more like 2200 hours per year.
MWs is an extremely narrow view of everything that's involved in producing electricity.
Wind farms alone tied to the fossil dominated grid is problematic as only about 1/3 of the energy(Mwhs) on average is grid compatible at least for onshore wind farms, which then leaves 2/3 of the energy in search of a solution (aka energy storage).
Fossil fuel backup while it makes up for the lost 2/3s doesn't recover that energy so the net effect is that wind seems less efficient than it really could be IMO.
One solution is storing AC electricity in utility scale DC batteries and then converting back to AC for the grid;
75% AC->DC x 75% DC->AC or a 56% round trip.
another is producing hydrogen from wind electricity(80%), storing it and burning the hydrogen in 60% efficient fuel cells for a ~50% round trip.
So basically wind would be about 50% efficient with storage.
Wind energy should be (over)built out as quickly as possible in the anticipation of energy storage to follow as fossil fuels become depleted.
For example, if the US were to build out 2 TW of onshore wind farms it might only save 1466 Twh of fossil electricity but with storage
it would provide 2200 TWh/yr of independent baseload if paired with maybe 100 TWh of 'battery'/energy storage.
You just brought up a point that many seem to overlook. The intermittency issue is primarily an economic issue. We technically can store all the energy of the renewables by a myriad combination of technologies including pumped storage, hydrogen, compressed air, flow batteries etc. etc. There are also a myriad array of renewable technologies that are in fact baseload or can be varied to demand like ocean thermal, geothermal, biomass electric, some hydroelectric etc. Of course they are not cheap, but cheap energy is a thing of the past!!
Of course, as many have pointed out, trying to maintain the current industrial setup with current energy consumption is ultimately a futile exercise given that energy is just one of a multitude of our problems. Chemical toxins, radiotoxins, arable fertile land availability, clean and fresh water availability etc. etc. are issues that may even dwarf energy in magnitude of effects and implications.
"The obituary for nuclear has been written"?
I don't think so. This isn't the 70s. Even Japan says they're not abandoning it.
Peak oil / peak fossil fuels guarantee that nothing that generates energy will be abandoned. Even if nuclear were much more dangerous than it is, it wouldn't be abandoned. Economics is more powerful than politics. It was possible to abandon nuclear for a time in the 70s because we were nowhere near peak on anything.
We will see a pullback and re-evaluation of nuclear technology for 5-10 years, and we will see the shutdown of a lot of old plants with designs similar to Fukushima. Both of these are good for the nuclear industry in the long term and need to happen.
But in the long term, I think we're at the very early stages of nuclear adoption. Nuclear is going to have a very long adoption curve... probably over a hundred years until it reaches a level of adoption comparable to fossil fuels.
Today the nuclear share of electricity in the world is shrinking. It is currently number four, after coal, gas and hydro. In the year 2050, however, I believe nuclear will be number one.
My 2050 prediction (waves a dead chicken in the air):
Nuclear will have replaced most of the generation share currently belonging to natural gas, which will have peaked. Coal will still be in use, but about half of its share will have been displaced by wind and solar. Most buildings in sun-belt areas will have solar roofs, and solar hot water will be common. Anywhere with a lot of wind will have windmills everywhere. They'll be a common sight, and people will be as accustomed to them as telephone poles.
Petrol will be primary bio-derived (algae, cellulosic butanol, etc.) and will be 2-3X as expensive as today. Public transit will be more common, and people will live closer to where they work. There will be cheap electric SmartCar-sized cars on the market with ranges from 50-120 miles per charge (depending on vehicle cost). Everything else will run on biofuel.
Ground-extracted petroleum will still be around, but will be mostly used as a chemical feedstock rather than for energy.
You said yourself that the economy will rule.
How are you so sure that the economics of Nuclear actually can prevail? They represent some incredible financial gymnastics to accomplish, even if you want to claim these remarkably cheap rates at the back end.. there's a mammoth threshhold to clear not just to build one, but to keep it functioning.
I think he is talking about the world. Of course, the US may keep giving the world the finger regarding CO2 emissions.
The assumption, I guess, is that the rest of the world will try to get off coal and gas, and that intermittent sources can't reach very high penetrations. Then nuclear will have an easy time, as there is no real alternative.
Also, you may find the Chinese changing the pricing landscape in the nuclear arena quite soon. Finally, fundamentally, nuclear is cheap, but regulation can make it arbitrarily expensive. There will come a day when we can't afford to keep it expensive.
I think nuclear will replace coal and that gas will remain. Solar will not be very prominent, and neither will wind mills. Petrol will still be fossil, but reserved mainly for chemical uses and for aeroplanes. If there is too little, oil sands and CTL will provide - the extraction will be enhanced by nuclear process heat. EVs will rule the day, along with great public transit in megacities. Biofuels will not have expanded much.
I'm late to the party, but let me play too please...
Forty years from now, let's see....
First Solar will hit $0.50/watt in a couple of years so in a few years more we will have PV at somewhere between $0.10 and $0.25/W. Some smart company will bond them to a steel roofing system something like standing ridge steel and when people build or re-roof they'll cover everything facing more or less in the right direction with solar. Efficiencies will be up so owners will sell lots of power back to the grid and the roof will pay for itself in about five years. Then create an additional income for the next ~35 years.
In a few years existing wind farms will be paid off which means that their power will be almost free thus forcing most other forms of generation off the grid. Those paid off turbines will last well past the 20 years that people often quote. We're just now pulling the original 30 year old turbines down at Altamont and they are still working. It's just that we want the real estate for larger, taller rigs. Newer turbines will last 40-50 years.
We'll have punched in a lot of geothermal and by 2050 many of those facilities will be paid off. To the extent we need more 'always on' power we'll punch more and install more run of the river hydro.
Tidal, did I leave out tidal? We'll have a good hunk of tidal rumbling along giving us that nice dependable stuff with which to build the bottom. And we'll have dropped a lot of turbines in the Florida Straights and along the east coast of Florida in order to use that very energy dense 4MPH+ current.
We'll have taken some of the ~80,000 existing dams in the US and installed multiple turbines and buffering reservoirs below those dams. That will give us 100% efficient backup, no pump-up needed, as the power will be provided by stream inflow.
We'll have developed affordable batteries so that we can create 'neighborhood' storage thus letting us supply shift and take the strain off of the local grid.
We'll have perfected load control so that we don't need a lot of storage. EVs will come into their own here since most will be plugged in 90% of the time, ready to suck up any over supply. Likewise AC systems will store "cold" anytime of the day power is plentiful and cheap. Lots of buildings will have gone to geothermal HVAC which will take down demand.
We'll have tied North America together into one big grid with HVDC and HTS. That will also greatly reduce the need for storage since we'll be able to ship Bay of Fundy tidal power to Oaxaca, Mexico if that's where it's needed.
Any generation system with a fuel cost or high operational costs will be forced off the grid. No more coal, natural gas or nuclear.
Thanks. That was fun....
Uh, and maybe we can start with some improvements in efficiency? Why does this concept get left out so often around here? Too many armchair generals wanting to rebuild the world in their own image, I guess.
What is cheapest energy option? What puts people to work? What uses available technology? What can be ramped up immediately? What keeps money in the hands of ordinary people? You got it. "Waste not, want not."
If you are interested, I would recommend www.architecture2030.org and www.rmi.org
Probably because it has been said so many times, and is *technically* such a no-brainer that there may not be anyone left to argue against it.
HOW you can effectively get people to improve efficiency (aside from fiat)...that is a debate worth having.
AFAIK, efficiency is improved all the time. The real gdp dollars per unit of energy improves by about 2% per year, if I remember correctly.
Ah, those would be nice but I doubt it will happen. The FF lobby will lobby so hard for the BAU that by the time FF becomes untenable it will be too late to implement any of this. I wish I didn't have to feel that way:(
NAOM
This article has annoyed me enough to join the site. The author has cherry picking statistics, like comparing costs based on onshore wind turbines and claiming a capacity factor of 0.50 for offshore wind turbines. That statistic is what really annoyed me. In the planning stages the load factors are usually overly optimist, for obvious reasons, but this 0.50 is the most absurd statistic I've heard yet. If there is some justification for it I'd love to hear it. I'd guess it is related to non-existing deepwater wind turbines. They don't exist yet because they're so damned expensive.
After doing a little searching the load factors that can be expected are actually much worse than I thought. I found this excel sheet from the DECC website.
http://www.decc.gov.uk/media/viewfile.ashx?filepath=statistics/source/re...
The average factor for offshore wind farms in the UK over 5 years is 0.276. The reason the load factors are so low is they're not getting the benefit of the higher mean wind speeds due to maintenance difficulties, you can't drive a van up to wind turbine in the North Sea. And if it's very windy you can't get there in a boat either, oh the irony.
Regards what I think is the biggest issue with Wind Power, buffering, www.eirgrid.ie is a great resource. They publish statistics for the Irish electricity grid, including electricity produced from wind. David MacKay used a sample of those statistics in his book, see below.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_187.shtml
With the kind of long term lull in wind power seen in these graphs pumped storage simply won't be practical. The fact that these lulls will be rare but not rare enough to ignore means only open cycle gas or diesel will be feasible.
At the moment buffering is being taken care of by the existing electricity production infrastructure. The extra costs associated with this are not taken into account in wind turbine costings, having to throttle gas/ coal plants reduces the plants efficiencies and thus increases their costs.
If wind turbines get to a stage where the existing infrastructure is unable to handle the buffering, seems to be generally touted as 20%, the extra cost of actually paying for the buffering will be prohibitive.
Just by dumping some data doesn't make it statistics. Lift a finger and do some real analysis. Even a baseball statistician would be embarrassed by this.
Web,
Europe will go heavy into wind and the American "fossil" Barons are hitting their desks with ever tighter fists.
"We have to stop Europe from not using fossil fuels. Goldman-sachs, hey guys, can you default their bonds and do something." LOL. Meanwhile, we get to see the goods and the bads in there layouts and designs, making adopting here in the US fairly straight forward.
But do these people think that Europe should use more fossils when they do not have the fossils. LOL
And they are doing great with 20% wind penetration.
Texas needs more wind penetration to smooth out their cold snaps and Natural Gas problems. LOL. The irony.
Oh but it is funny watching them squirm as the stats roll in and the kinks and policies are ironed out. In many ways Europe is leading the pack in policy with respect to the environment and logical energy matters with renewables, especially wind. Look how they forced BPA out of plastics in the US -- European policy is forcing the issues. I guess the American lobbyist can only stretch his might so far. Very amusing times to watch the Energy Barons squirm.
why don't you stochastic this.
http://www.aweo.org/problemwithwind.html
Denmark cannot even cope with 20% wind, what do you think will happen when every country in Europe has 20% wind.
fact is if you do not like the data you will manipulate it to show what you want it to show.
The UK is expanding wind capacity by 3x, at the same time it has to close several old coal power stations.
Since neither of you know how much wind power can be relied on, neither of you can tell people reading here how many of these coal power stations need to be replaced. That is the issue here, real problems costing real money.
Its not a problem, its an opportunity.
You can just as easily say that its a problem with conventional generation sources in that they can't be easily adjusted to meet loads.
Hey buddy, I know what research involves. Early on, I worked quite a bit with materials such as gallium arsenide and I heard all the talk about how it wouldn't go anywhere. At the time I didn't really care because all that mattered is that it had interesting characteristics and that it showed promise. Well, it didn't take over silicon's role but it (and its cousins) became successful beyond belief, used in DVD players and mobile phones. This is a niche role but it occupies it well.
Here is another case. After that, for awhile I worked on germanium, which was the original semiconducting material that Bell Labs developed the first transistors with. This was eventually taken over by silicon for some obvious reasons. Yet, we played around mixing it with silicon and within a few years it again occupied a niche market for high-speed electronic devices.
So I suggest looking up the history of gallium arsenide and silicon-germanium and then consider the context in which wind power advocates and researchers are operating in. They are actually in a worse situation because not only do they have to face up to the nay-sayers, they don't have the luxury of trying to optimize their systems in some private lab, away from all the attention. We need this technology now and it will be in our faces whether we like it or not.
I hope you appreciate this information because it is a good story worth telling.
Mining industries cannot cope with ever and ever more diffuse sources of minerals and gas and oil.
So you are going to tell me that that problem is easy to solve and intermittency is hard.
Please, it is the same problem.
I am not surprised that neither of you could answer the question.
If you are going to attack someone, you had better at least be able to defend your arguments with some semblance of balanced arguments based on proof.
WHT again when it comes down to the wire your grasp of the subject is wanting. At least when I give an opinion I can back it up with reason.
Oct
You do not even understand the difference between average output and the vital necessity to provide the right level of power on a minute by minute basis.
Intermittency is hard now. Uranium is easy now. What the future brings, we can't be sure. But we know we need to do the easy stuff to get rid of coal in time.
The problem with nuclear is the amount of investment required and the fact that you can't just change the output to accommodate intermittent sources. It might be a solution now but I fear it will prevent other sources from being developed or reaching any kind of significant market penetration.
However, once the renewable ball has really started rolling - who knows how far we'll be in 50 years time?
An extensive grid network might be able to solve some of the issues with intermittent sources of energy. A nice big mix of different sources connected in a huge international power grid could be an answer. There is no way that will be allowed to develop if we build loads of nuclear power plants. We can't just shut them all down and we don't want coal. Maybe gas really should be the solution in the meantime.
Any other options?
I expect electrolysis plants who make hydrogen of night and weekend nuclear electricity and "excess" wind power, hydrogen that then is used for makig fertilizer, upgrading very heavy and sour crude oil and upgrading synthesis gas from biomass gasifiers.
Woaw. What a thread! You guys and editors and contributors are AMAZING. To be part of this loose organisation makes me PROUD ;)
Can we get like bumper stickers or something?
Michael Kane has a new piece on Mike Ruppert's web site about increased EPA safety guidelines for radioactive isotope pollution titled "Fallout."
FALLOUT
"March 24, 2011, 12:30 EDT, NEW YORK CITY– In the wake of the continuing nuclear tragedy in Japan, the United States government is still moving quickly to increase the amounts of radiation the population can “safely” absorb by raising the safe zone for exposure to levels designed to protect the government and nuclear industry more than human life. It’s all about cutting costs now as the infinite-growth paradigm sputters and moves towards extinction. As has been demonstrated by government conduct in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Deepwater Horizon and in Japan, life has taken a back seat to cost-cutting and public relations posturing.
[snip]
In 1992, the EPA produced a [Protective Action Guidelines] manual that answers many of these questions. But now an update to the 1992 manual is being planned, and if the “Dr. Strangelove” wing of the EPA has its way, here is what it means (brace yourself for these ludicrous increases):
* A nearly 1000-fold increase for exposure to strontium-90;
* A 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for exposure to iodine-131; and
* An almost 25,000 rise for exposure to radioactive nickel-63."
Full Article:
http://www.collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access/item...
"5. Don't let anyone -- in industry, government, or the media -- define an "acceptable level of risk" for your own death or disease. They may not have the same vested interest in the right answer as you do." -Sam Smith, A Poker Player's Guide To Environmental Risk Assessment
WOW!...
Not one mention of "Gasland" anywhere.
You should really oughtta realllllly see it!
I hear it dismissed offhand by people who, well, no, never saw it.
Rolling landscapes of destruction tell their own stories.
the straightest people you've ever seen tell of altered lives,
Of facing lies.
Pay for it on pay per view.
Pay for a torrent service that has it.
Once last year somebody posted it on Youtube. It lasted three days.
Look for it using www.google.ru
Russian google
Russia... where there is still some freedom of information...
compared to corporate America.