The right’s anti-wind campaign is pure scaremongering

#1 Cost of transmission, intermittency (backup) etc of wind energy

Here are two good reports
http://www.gl-garradhassan.com/assets/technical/beyond-the-bluster_Aug2012.pdf
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/Downloads/PDF/06/0604Intermittency/0604Intermitt
encyReport.pdf

The first one is for the general public, the second one is quite detailed. Bottom line: at current penetration, the extra cost because of intermittency is less than EUR (or USD, or GBP) 0.01 per kWh.

BTW Intermittency is nto really a problem for larger areas. Output variations cancel, and wind power is well predictable for the next 24h or so. See here for a good example:
https://demanda.ree.es/demandaGeneracionAreasEng.html

Somewhat off topic, but my concern about nuclear is that it is replacing one finite source (fossil fuels) with another (uranium). At this point, Tim Worstall will usually turn up to say that there is enough uranium for a 100 years (I can never remeember whether this is at current usage or projected future usage).

My response is simply – so? 100 years still isn’t infinite, and in the meantime we’ve spent billions on something we have to dismantle at ever greater cost probably within the lifetime of people being born now.

Also, no one has yet come up with a good enough plan for storing the waste long term.

Katherine @ 4

The highly-radioactive components of nuclear waste can be separated out of the waste and used as fuel (that’s what the French used to do.) That solves both problems at once.

And if my memory serves, current stocks of already-enriched uranium and plutonium would last somewhere around 1000 years, without fuel re-processing or further mining. (Using it to produce electricity seems to be a better idea than keeping it as bombs.)

Being hard on your enemies and easy on your friends is what humans do, but its a bad thing that humans do. You’re right that wind power isn’t dangerous. My understanding is that wind and solar share the problem of being intermittent at sometimes annoying times, but essentially my position is that we need to be doing lots more nuclear, wind and solar–a position which isn’t exactly easy to vote for in the US (or anywhere really).

Mapmaker is right on ethanol. We still haven’t gotten that environmentalist mistake under control, and if my (yes totally anecdotal) experience is remotely mainstream there are still lots of normal people who believe that ethanol as transportation fuel/additive is good for the environment.

The birds thing is typical gaming on both sides though. I fully admit that I may be totally behind on the research, but last I heard the bird thing really was a thing. I’m fine with pointing out that people who rarely care about birds are being selective in counting that as a serious cost, but people who normally are willing to shut down large projects over such questions see surprisingly blasé over the issue. Which I guess brings us back to my first sentence.

Omri @ 9

Agree–reprocessing has its own set of problems. It’s certainly better than mining and enrichment, but the international security issues with any form of enrichment are huge.

There’s enough uranium in seawater to last for thousands of years. Extracting it is expensive, to be sure, but lots of progress has been made in recent years in reducing that cost by developing better extractors.

I don’t buy that we need nuclear for anything, and I strongly suspect the reason certain classes prefer it is that it, like fossil fuels is great for rentier classes to dominate. Another great natrual resource for everyone to rely on and a privileged few to own, and the need for very large centralized captial intensive facilities to keep down pesky competition. Renewable energy is not inherently amenable to rent sucking, since wind, solar and geothermal are feasible at household or neighbourhood levels and you can’t own the sun or wind.

(As I type this, the Simpsons was probably more prescient than many realize in making their plutocrat a nuclear power plant owner, and they even had a plot where Burns blocks out the sun because it provides the town free light & heat).

If we base the system on renewabled and find in practice we need a certain amount of nuclear for those periods of low light/wind, fine, but let’s cross that bridge when we get there. Giving up now and basing the grid on nuclear is to say “we’ve tried, nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” We’re really at the dawn of renewable energy technology and if it half the state help nuclear got to get off the ground (not that it ever really did since no private entity can cover the worst case liability), we’d likely be well on our way to a clean energy system.

I’ve worked in large power dispatch centers, and also in long-term generation planning, so I’m generally familiar with the concepts ;-)

The problem isn’t, as you note, as hard as the reactionary forces claim (Upton Sinclair rule), but neither is it anywhere as easy as renewable proponents assert. We’ve built a society that is so heavily dependent on a guaranteed supply of electricity that – like breathing air – we don’t even notice it is there. Maintaining that availability & amount is difficult and tricky. Especially since we don’t really understand how the electric grid we have built really works.

Cranky

In the US of A we also have to deal with the Federsl Energy Regulatory Commission being controlled by Republican appointees with freshwater-school views who fervently believe that the solution to every electricity problem is more “markets” and auction processes. Including planning for future supply – that’s one they are ramming down the throats of the provision industry (unregulated & regulated) right now, and ignoring the objections of state regulators in doing so. That makes Germany-style forward planning quite difficult.

Cranky

Renewable energy is not inherently amenable to rent sucking, since wind, solar and geothermal are feasible at household or neighbourhood levels and you can’t own the sun or wind.

Renewable energy generation isn’t something you’re going to put together in your garage over the course of a few weekends, it’s an advanced technology that requires significant capital investment to develop and deploy. Not as much as a nuclear plant, but it’s not like it just comes from nowhere.

The burn plants and call it green approach in my impression has less love here [in Germany] from environmentalists.

My impression (admittedly, from The Economist) is that Germany prefers burning trees, rather than corn. I suppose this is an improvement, but I’m not certain how great an improvement.

Perhaps tangential to the OP, we’re currently experiencing an anti-solar campaign here in Arizona. Recently, Arizona Power Service announced they’re seeking approval from regulators to begin imposing a monthly fee on all new rooftop solar owners – citing infrastructure upgrade costs needed to support net metering. APS claims existing installations would not have to pay the fee under their plan.

But APS employs a consultant, who is in turn linked to a Virgina-based 501(c), 60 Plus. 60Plus claims to lobby for lower taxes, etc, on behalf of seniors, but receives funding from the Koch brothers.

60Plus is funding a media campaign in Arizona, which claims rooftop solar owners are effectively being paid 5x the going rate for the electricity they feed into the grid, and that other ultility customers are paying higher fees in order to fund that overpayment.

The campaign is aimed at galvanizing the majority behind a scheme to end net metering or assess penalty fees on homes participating in net metering; in essence, to kill the program.

The alleged connections aren’t conclusive – APS wants to change billing practices to the detriment of rooftop solar, APS hires a consultant to work on that plan, the consultant also works for 60PLUS, 60 PLUS gets funding from the Koch brothers, the Koch brothers are out to kill alternative energy, and suddenly 60Plus is running anti-solar ads in Arizona targeting supporting the change APS wants to make. Maybe it’s a coincidence, not a conspiracy. Maybe.

“That’s the headline for my latest piece in the Oz edition Guardian.”

I think it’s wonderful the way the Guardian’s Oz edition is giving opportunities to previously underheard voices. That was what they were intending, wasn’t it?

OK, snark over, I’ve taken their cash too. Nice place to write for.

Re wind power even as a fully paid up right wing loon I don’t worry about the health effects. But I am rather concerned about the economics of it.

“A number of rightwing commenters have weighed in with the claim (false, when you take account of the underpricing of CO2 emissions) that wind is subsidised relative to fossil fuels.”

I think I’d like to see proof of that contention. We know from Stern what the carbon tax should be, $80 per tonne CO2-e. And I don’t actually know what the wind power subsidy is per tonne not emitted. Which is why I’d like to see it. I do know the German one for solar, which is something disastrous like $1,017 per tonne not emitted.

And I have to admit that I’m very, very, dubious about offshore wind: engineering friends (I know, arguing from anecdata!) tell me that marine environments are going to require a great deal more maintenance than is currently planned for.

All of which is pretty odd really given that the biggest current market for the metal I deal with is for wind turbine blades: actually makes them more efficient.

“Somewhat off topic, but my concern about nuclear is that it is replacing one finite source (fossil fuels) with another (uranium). At this point, Tim Worstall will usually turn up to say that there is enough uranium for a 100 years (I can never remeember whether this is at current usage or projected future usage). ”

It’s actually some thousands. And yes, of course, every physical commodity does have ultimate limits to its usage. But I generally regard “more than one thousand years” as being someone else’s problem. Seriously, would we have welcomed Willy the Bastard telling people not to use up alum deposits because people might like to have them in 2066? Technology changes so much over such time scales that, as I say, I regard a thousand year supply as being sufficient for us to carry on.

As to reprocessing, vitrification. Works, known to work technically, just not acceptable politically.

“Cranky Observer, you might care to observe that heat waves coincide with sunny weather, and so are pretty easily addressed with another renewable technology: solar power.”

That’s not really a good answer. For your assumption is that we must have both wind turbines to meet peak demand and also solar power to meet peak demand (and summer heatwaves in AC land is peak demand). That gets very expensive in capital very quickly, insisting that we must have two power generation systems.

“And if my memory serves, current stocks of already-enriched uranium and plutonium would last somewhere around 1000 years, without fuel re-processing or further mining. ”

You might be right but that sounds excessive to me. No real evidence, it just sounds too long a period. Off topic though I would like to praise Al Gore for a moment. His bombs for electricity thing after the fall of the SU was inspired. Don’t like much else about him but will applaud that.

“There’s enough uranium in seawater to last for thousands of years. Extracting it is expensive, to be sure, but lots of progress has been made in recent years in reducing that cost by developing better extractors.”

Correction: tens of thousands of years. Possibly even long enough to get fusion working. (4.6 billion tonnes of U in salt water apparently).

“Renewable energy is not inherently amenable to rent sucking, since wind, solar and geothermal are feasible at household or neighbourhood levels”

Seriously? You need silicon fabs to make solar cells (OK, they’re not as expensive as computer silicon fabs but still). Plus the mining of Ga, Ge, In and Cd and Te. These are all capital intensive industries. For wind you need aluminium plants: their capital requirements ain’t chopped liver either. The production of the energy can be local, but the production of the things that produce the energy is a hugely capital intensive and entirely global industry. Quite seriously, the Te to make the Cd/Te solar cells like First Solar makes requires the entire global copper industry to be sending their wastes to one plant in the Phillippines. That’s hardly local cottage industry, is it?

“Regarding the UK, does anybody know if nimby opposition is the reason why the Uk started with expensive off-shore wind before even touching the best on shore locations?”

No, sadly, the idiots that rule us think that offshore is more efficient.

As some here will know my day job is spent with the weird metals that these various renewables technologies need. I get something of a worm’s eye view of what’s happening next. My best guess is that solar will be truly competitive against coal within a decade: except for the intermittency problem. Wind won’t be, ever (this is excluding the CO2 costs. I do think that unsubsidised solar will beat un carbon taxed coal soon, not just in remote locations at the end of or off the grid). But we still need base load. Maybe a DC long distance grid. Maybe nuclear, fission or fusion. Or the one I have my bet upon, solar to the electrolysis of water to provide H2 for fuel cells. If solar gets cheap enough, and I think it will, this works.

We don’t actually face a shortage of power: insolation is too vast for that. An engineering problem of how we harness it, yes, but that worm’s eye view tells me that we’re close to solving those problems. Indeed, we know how they can be solved, it’s just a few more interations of the technology.

#16 Cranky

I think that generally we do not disgree then.

The consensus view seems to be that up to 20% grid penetration of renewables we don’t have to do anything. If we want more, we need various clever solutions: more grid interconnections, combination with hydro and solar, some back up conventional plants, load shedding, storage.

I think it’s interesting to look at the problem from the other side. Suppose it was a given that the grid was very unreliable, what would happen? I’ve spent some time in Lebanon in the past, where grid outages used to be fairly common. It was inconvenient of course, but still life went on. People adapt to it. We should have a hard look at which services really must be uninterrupted (hospitals, data centres, some factories, cold storage). Ordinary domestic loads could be switched off first, say. I personally wouldn’t mind a few outages of a few hours per year, if I’d pay a lower rate.

On teh bright side, I think we have only started to look at managing grids with much renewable input, and that there is still much room for innovation there.

omri@5: “Cranky Observer, you might care to observe that heat waves coincide with sunny weather, and so are pretty easily addressed with another renewable technology: solar power.”

Problem is, though heat waves coincide with stationary high pressure with little wind, which is no problem in summer: but in winter, stationary high pressure with little wind coincides with long nights, bitter cold, and often with thick ground fog or lasting thick cloud. At that point, your renewable technologies leave us to freeze to death.

Eh, Stephen? Not sure where you live, but where I’ve been, in the northern US, a thick fog or cloud cover means temperatures hovering around the freezing point, not bitter at all. It’s the sunny days in the winter when the bitter cold hits. When once again solar will at least keep your pipes thawed. (And if you burn carbon to keep warm on those few days a year, you might be limiting yourself to a range where the earth’s carbon cycle can keep up.)

Trader Joe, They don’t want to hear your (and my) message, that residential solar is a small sideshow. A big volume of solar requires a large utility-scale sector. Especially if we are to seriously try to replace fossil fuels, we will need to electrify industrial processes that currently burn fuel for process heat -so the industrial and commercial share of electric demand should rise. And few industrial/commecial rooftops are large enough to have solar to make much more than a token difference. My place of work just added rooftop panels, that might supply ten percent of our annual usage.

The latest fad, is thinking residential storage means few will even want/desire a grid connection. This strikes me as completely crazy. The way to make renewables at very high penetration work is geographic and type diveristy. Trying to use batteries to store summer excess sun for use in February is pure madness. There will still be a large fraction of energy generation left to the rentier class. I think it will be well over fifty percent. The same will hold for energy storage, it will largely be done in large rentier class owned facilities, because that will be the most economical way to do it.

And wind does not scale downwards, with the exception of a few farmsteads and rural community owned wind turbines, wind is nearly strictly rentier class stuff.

Residential electrical demand is not just a side show, at least not in the USA. Per the 2012 LLNL Energy Flow Chart, residential electrical demand is higher than commercial or industrial. It accounts for 4.69 quads of electrical consumption out of 12.56 total, or 37% of the demand. Commercial demand at 4.52 quads makes up another 36%, while industrial demand is only 27% of the total. Both residential and commercial properties (e.g. warehouses, offices, restaurants, stores) commonly have enough roof space to satisfy a non-trivial portion of electrical demand from rooftop solar.

A few years back NREL estimated, fairly conservatively, that residential and commercial rooftop solar could surpass the US nuclear fleet in annual generation, at 819 terawatt hours per annum. Replace their scenario’s 13.5% efficiency modules with today’s most efficient rooftop modules at 20%, and you get ~1200 terawatt hours, or more than nuclear and conventional hydro combined. The rooftop generating potential is so large that the bigger question is whether anyone can develop cheap enough storage technology to maximize rooftop use, or if rooftop systems will need to be undersized on account of producing more electricity than anyone can use on sunny days.

Finally, the vast potential of solar does not mean that I disfavor wind. In parts of the US at least it is cheaper than rooftop or utility scale PV, in fact cheaper than most new generating sources. In Texas 20 year PPAs for wind power have been signed below $40 per megawatt hour, or roughly $65 per megawatt hour once you add in federal and state subsidies plus new transmission infrastructure (most of that extra, $22, is the wind production tax credit, and it only lasts for 10 years, so real subsidies-included cost over 20 years is actually less). That’s considerably cheaper per megawatt hour than new-build coal, nuclear, PV, or hydro power, even if Texas had the geography for a big hydro power expansion. I hesitate to compare it to gas given the unpredictability of 20 year gas prices.

Having read JQ’s linked article, I’d say that it isn’t the case that the “baseload” argument might be people talking past each other. The “baseload” problem might have a precise meaning as John describes, but I think the real problem people are getting at is the compromised ability to meet demand at any given time. Wind or solar being unpredictable is a problem. Nuclear or coal being unflexible is a problem. Dealing with the unpredictableness of wind or solar requires combining with something.

Accordingly:

– combining wind/solar with inflexible coal: benefits might fail to materialize as the coal still might have to be running at sufficient capacity for full demand in order to be ready when needed

– combining wind/solar with gas: better thanks some more flexibility to adjust the gas usage, but my understanding is that designing a plant to maximize flexibility involves sacrifices of efficiency, which means offsetting the environmental benefit

– combining wind/solar with hydro: only possible in certain places of course, but certainly the built in flexibility of the hydro helps the combination work. Though leaving a hydro station temporarily dormant does nothing to reduce its primary externality. And you get the occasional drought, though having also some mostly dormant spare gas capacity can get you through that while generally retaining overall carbon reduction.

– combining wind/solar with nuclear: John seemingly doesn’t like the option, as its extreme inflexibility means fuel will be wasted like with coal. But this is fuel that has no more preferable alternative use, and does not cause the carbon externality.

Of course this all leaves a lot of math to be done, but assuming you’re in a location where large scale hydro or geothermal is not possible (or where environmentalists fight against them), it turns into a tradeoff between the carbon externalities of fossil fuel versus the, um, other externalities of nuclear. Wind and solar does not take that tradeoff away, unless you’re one of those folks ready to sacrifice being always on.

” Dealing with the unpredictableness of wind or solar requires combining with something.”

Clearly nuclear is out, then. I mean, nuclear fission is entirely unpredictable on an atomic scale, so our attempts to make an “atomic pile” that reliably generates power are patently doomed from the get-go.

[also, apparently it’s a-priori impossible to make reliable money as a bookmaker or running a casino. I didn’t know that.]

There’s good reason to believe that at least 90% of building heating and cooling energy could be gathered on site. There’s been a lot of research to this point; you might start with Amory Lovins Rocky Mountain Institute for some of the literature.

As to nuclear power…nuclear power has picked up a powerful ally in planetologist James Hansen, who believes that it may be the only thing that will allow us to avoid climate disaster. In fact, he advocates the use of fast neutron to generate more fuel. (Yes, the Hansen who calculated the 350 ppm figure. Yes, that Hansen.) That said, it seems to me a risky course. It seems to me that nuclear power would be a fine technology if we had saints and angels to manage and operate the facilities. Lacking a reliable source of such personnel, it seems to me risky indeed, despite all technical efforts.

@ hix

Maybe, but this is beside the point. The topic is here, specifically, is one power plant. Now, Bavaria simply does not allow it to be mothballed (for whatever reason) because it would threaten grid stability. If Theyssen eventually gets money or not, or if he smells of elderberries, is beside the point. The question I am asking is if this is a normal thing to happen (i.e. the regulator demanding the power station to stay on standby as a backup), or if this is due to renewable penetration.

I could have asked a similar question, not pertaining to reliability of generation, but to surcharges: that is, the announcement of Poland to block temporary eletricity overgeneration at its borders, when German renewables temporarily produce much beyond demand, not below. Etc.

The thing is: the notion that problems with the implementation of the energy transformation in Germany are more or less unheard of is really really wrong, as can easily be demonstrated by diverse media reports. But then, I am not in a position to judge if this is just more buzz from the right-wing imagination-gone-wild assessment of the world, or if this is actually an underlying limit (in the short run) slowly announcing itself.

I have no doubt that a renewable transformation will be accomplished, this is inevitable, as everything else is exhaustible, doh. But there is also mitigation – and if there is a problem with the reliability of electricity generation of renewables right there at 20+ percent share, nuclear forbidden, CCS development stopped, and the backup coal, there might be a problem with regard to this, no? How much of a problem depends, I’d guess, on the temperature target (inherent in the emission target), or the tax level, if we follow an “optimal” emission trajectory. This is why I don’t quite understand why the abatement scenario is never mentioned in these discussions (at least that’s my impression).

@ John Quiggin 38 on intermittency, backup, wind and solar, and renewables achieving 20 percent penetration rates.

The crucial analytic distinction to make is not between renewable and conventional, but between dispatchable generators—nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, hydro, geothermal—and unreliable wind and solar generators. The former can easily achieve very high penetrations. The latter cannot. Dispatchable hydro has achieved 50 percent to 90 percent penetrations in several countries. It’s a world of difference to suggest that wind and solar can break 20 percent penetration without severe problems for the grid.

In fact, wind and solar have not achieved that benchmark in any electrical grid. Denmark? Nope. True, better than 20 percent of the electricity generated inside Denmark comes from wind. But Denmark’ grid is just a small part of the much larger Scandinavian and German grids into which it is fully integrated. The penetration of wind and solar in those larger grids is far below 20 percent. Without Norwegian hydro plants to absorb excess wind power and provide backup in lulls, Denmark’s grid would frequently collapse.

The country that comes closest is Germany, with about 12 percent of the electricity on its grid coming from wind and solar. (The dispatchable renewables, biomass and hydro, make up another 9 percent, but they won’t scale much.) But even at that low penetration Germany is already suffering real problems. High costs have sparked a political backlash. Germany is spending tens of billions of euros on new transmission to relieve bottlenecks, which are costed to the grid as a whole instead of to the wind and solar generators that are causing problems. Poland and Czechoslovakia are threatening to block German access to their systems to protect themselves from chaotic surges of wind power that could overwhelm and black out their grids. Micro-blackouts have been increasing and doing serious damage to German industrial installations and machinery. Wind and solar surges are imposing bizarre distortions on electricity markets, including “negative pricing”: German utilities are legally required to buy wind and solar power at high feed-in-tariffs during periods of low demand and overproduction, and then have to pay customers to waste it to avoid overloading and crashing the grid. Soon these crises of overproduction will grow too large and wind and solar surges will start being curtailed, which will wreak havoc on their finances. Meanwhile, a major effort of the Energiewende is to increase fossil-fueled capacity, which is scheduled to grow from 76 gigawatts in 2010 to 83 GW in 2030.

This is Germany at 12 percent wind and solar—I shudder to think about 20 percent.

France, by contrast, took just 20 years to decarbonize 90 percent of its grid with 80 percent nuclear and 10 percent hydro, with nothing like these problems and with some of the cheapest electricity in Europe. Sweden did likewise with 50 percent hydro and 50 percent nuclear. Germany? It’s planning to reach 80 percent low-carbon electricity by 2050—a sluggish and inadequate performance by any measure.

Combining slightly outdated (2010) EIA numbers about Hawaiian total generation capacity, and newer numbers about wind and solar installations, it looks like Hawaii is probably already past 15% penetration of intermittent renewables. Given the high fuel cost of fossil generation in Hawaii (all based on shipped-in petroleum) it looks like renewables are going to keep growing at a furious pace up to the limits of grid stability. Will that magic point actually be at 20%? It looks like we could see as soon as next year.

One point that doesn’t get made clearly enough in these debates is the presupposition that nuclear is carbon neutral. It just isn’t. (Of course, in an absolute sense, no method of power generation is carbon neutral, but there are degrees). Another issue is that nuclear is a de facto fossil fuel. I know, obviously, uranium is not a fossil fuel. But it might as well be. At the end of the day you still have to dig it out of the ground and ‘burn’ it for power, and it is a finite resource. Tim Worstall’s guesstimate that there is enough uranium for ‘1000’ years is just one amongst many, and many are more pessimistic than him (I’m not on either side of this debate: I have no horse in this race. I’m just, y’know, sayin’).

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/ask-pablo-is-nuclear-power-really-carbon-neutral.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Reserves

“Micro-blackouts have been increasing and doing serious damage to German industrial installations and machinery.”

This is indeed a serious problem. Running industrial machinery off power supplies that vary in throughput can cause the most horrendous damage to that machinery. There is a solution, which is to have, effectively, a sub station or giant UPS at each factory using such power. But that then adds to the capital costs of your renewables using grid.

Hidari @54. Absolutely true that nuclear is not carbon free. I always forget the units used in the comparison but emissions (mainly from mining and the vast amounts of cement used to build reactors) give emissions levels per unit of ‘leccie around that of hydro and wind power, all three being roughly one third of solar (and the three being something like one tenth or is it one twentieth of natural gas?).

Re peak uranium, this is based on a very common but rather tragic misunderstanding of what “mineral reserve” means. To an acceptable level of accuracy mineral reserves are the current working stock of extant mines. It’s therefore trivially easy to look at reserves numbers and shout that we’re going to run out in a generation or two. For every generation does indeed severely deplete the reserves available at any one time. Those reserves being the minerals that we have prepped up to be used in the coming generation.

In terms of what’s actually available in the future we need to look at mineral resources. This is not undiscovered whatever that we think might be out there. This is stuff that we know roughly where it is, roughly how much is there and that we can extract it at reasonble prices and profits. We’ve just not done the work to prove the resources into reserves. The reason we haven’t is that it costs lots of money. I know of one nickel mine using a new extraction technique. They’ve spent $4 billion so far on it. We know there’s nickel there, we know that it can be produced because it is being. But that nickel in the ground is still not, in the strictest sense, a reserve, because it has not yet been shown that it can be extracted profitably.

Please note this description isn’t 100% accurate, but it does contain the heart of the truth. As an analogy, mineral reserves can be likened to the food already in society’s refrigerator: resources to the vastly greater amount available in the total retail chain and farming network.

Once we get past a few hundred years’ worth of resources then we need to take exploration and changing technology into account. At which point we should rather look at total availability. To give an example of how the numbers progress, for potassium (or potash, for fertilizers) reserves are around 60 years. Resources (as above, known deposits of rock we know we can process) 13,000 and total availability is something like 2.5% of the weight of the entire lithosphere (unless I’m giving you the numbers for the other fertilizer, phosphorous. Always get those two confused).

Judging minerals availability by mineral reserves numbers is simply using the wrong number to start with.

The real problem with nuclear is that there is no actually existing technology, with a substantial track record, on offer.[…]It’s bizarre to see [nuclear proponents] raising trivial quibbles about technologies like wind and PV while promoting a non-existent alternative.

This is a truth that is not known enough.

As an addendum to John Quiggin’s piece (with which I fully agree): right wingers are often saying that we should not worry too much about the environment and about climate change because “human ingenuity and technology will save us”.

However now we finally DO have some technologies (wind and solar) which can at least help us part of the way in solving the energy problem, what do you know? They hate it! Now ain’t that strange.

Poland and Czechoslovakia are threatening to block German access to their systems to protect themselves from chaotic surges of wind power that could overwhelm and black out their grids. Micro-blackouts have been increasing and doing serious damage to German industrial installations and machinery

Will, no-one in Europe has heard of this dramatic and apocalyptic news (I was in Germany last week) and I note with concern that the hyperlinks you doubtless included to support have gone missing?

I really do not think that France is a good example with regard to nuclear power. The current construction sites are just extremely expensive. Also, is this really what nuclear advocates call for: 80 percent or so nuclear? There are really nuclear advocates out there who think nuclear is full-blown alternative to renewables altogether? Idk, I thought that a reasonable goal would be somwhere between 10 and 20 percent. I also would have thought that this springs ou of the literature, not of some idea of “advocacy”, e.g.:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/enreec/v51y2012i3p353-369.html

Is there a study suggesting that, internationally speaking, renewables and nuclear are in a direct conflict in terms of mutual exclustivity for the medium term? If not, i.e. if renewables won’t have a near 100 percent share in the medium run, what with the remaining percentage? Shouldn’t, for the rest, the decision about nuclear vs fossil depend on the price on CO2 emissions? (Note that IAMs like WITCH have a higher nuclear share for stringent emissions scenarios. Also, see again, for example, the EMF 22 assessment: there is a 100 percent consensus about the necessity of investment in nuclear and CCS, partly interchangeable, for stringent mitigation – not some crazy idea about 80 percent nuclear, or even close, but not nothing nonetheless.)

Cranky Observer: “That’s akin to saying that Y2K wasn’t a real problem and all those millions of person-hours spent rewriting software were wasted because the man on the street saw very few system failures in January 2000. Well, yeah…”

Or perhaps it’s akin to saying that we see smooth power on a daily basis, but there are actually people working to make sure that it happens, or that we see fresh produce in the stores, but that there are actually people working to make sure that it happens, or …..

@65
Some people certainly can achieve your results and some are even better – and I’m glad that you and they do. In some geographies its quite possible to clear a 100% during certain parts of the year….but as you point out, you’re at 80%. Something needs to respond to the other 20% and also needs to respond to the multitude of residential locations where size, seasons or multi-family issues preclude getting to anything like the 80% you enjoy.

As Omega noted up thread, there is still the challenge of producing industrial and commerical level renewables as well.

JQ has mentioned 20% renewables as a target which is quite realistic and consistent with current technology. The discussion should be about getting there first (since pittifully few places that can be are) and then pressing for more as additional storage and distribution technology emerges.

When people talk about 100% residential as though its just requires a small bit of political backbone and some funding it results in the reactionaries throwing up all the red-flags in the book (some of which are more valid than others). The actual problem solving is challenging enough without un-needed roadblocks.

@68 I’m responding to Omega’s contention (in claimed solidarity with you) that residential solar is ‘just a sideshow’; not claiming it is on it’s own a 100% solution. In fact, I’ve not heard anyone claim that 100% solar is a practical solution, and I don’t think it is, but it is not ‘a sideshow’. Suppose local solar (residential, commercial, & governmental) replaced 30 or 40% of fossil-fired production in the US? In the world? A sideshow?

There is pretty solid support for wind generation being economic without subsidies in many parts of the world. There are places where there isn’t enough wind for it to work (the US confederate states for example).

But the biggest caveat is the distribution cost. Coal plants can be built where the electricity is needed. Wind generation is best situated where there is wind. But the US needs a new grid anyway. One that is squirrel proof.

So the question of profitability comes down to how the infrastructure costs are allocated.

One reason I oppose nuclear (despite having a degree from a nuclear physics lab) is that the nuclear lobby has for years opposed renewables by using false accounting. Salter’s duck was a potentially viable wave power scheme that the nuclear lobby in the UK killed with a spurious cost comparison. Though of course as we discovered after privatization of the UK electricity system, nuclear actually costs much more than any other source if all the costs and hidden subsidies are factored in.

We might eventually have to build a new generation of fission plants. But let the older generation of nuclear engineers die out first and start the design process from a clean start. The light water and Magnox designs have both been found to be fundamentally flawed. So why build more of those designs? I note that even though the UK claimed that their Magnox reactors were perfectly safe they were all decommissioned in the wake of Chernobyl rather than getting expected license extensions. I strongly suspect that when the details become public we will discover that the reason was that the Chernobyl reactor design had been stolen from the UK in the first place. Although it is not clear that the Soviets got the final plans or earlier drafts.

Solar is not currently economic in most locations but the costs are changing rapidly.

Will, ”

Grid managers won’t let that happen, of course. They will back up the grid with dispatchable generators sufficient to run the whole system in the complete absence of wind and solar power. But if we’ve ruled out nuclear power, what will they use as dispatchable backup, and at what risk?”

Nuclear power is not dispatchable. At all. it takes 24 hours notice to shift the power output of a nike.

If you are overreliant on nukes, you have to have demand side response. Someone flicks a switch on, someone else must then flick one off.

If you have demand side response, you might as well rely on renewables and forget dispatchable power altogether.

Cranky @63.
No. It doesn’t mean the effort put into solving Y2K was wasted. It means that because a significant effort was made, employing many competent people, that the rest of us needn’t have worried our pretty little heads about it. The same thing applies to grid stability. We have to make sure the political/economic system allows the needed investments to be made. But, the heavy lifting will be done by small teams of professionals. The rest of us need not lose sleep over it.

Layman @65:
Well I’m closer to 90%. If I allow myself to count SolarMosaic interest to offset the residual domestic energy bills, my house is already Carbon neutral. But, that doesn’t mean residential rooftops are the answer. They are just one of many BBs. What I don’t like is that that BB gets far more public attention with respect to the other BBs, than its solution-share deserves. In solar, and storage, the real heavy lifting will come from big solar, and big storage.

Palo Alto has contracted to become 100% renewable (electricty only). Half of this is hydro. Eighteen percent is big-solar being built a couple hundred miles away. Rooftop is only a minor piece of the whole.

A 550MW PV farm is under construction. And several more of similar size are planned. Accounting for the fact, that it has much better insolation than the typical residential area, and that the panels are tracked, that is the equivalent of more than 150,000 residential rooftops! The only way we can get from circa 10-20% renewables to 80-90% (still not enough climate-wise), is to have major investment in both big wind and big solar. In terms of renewables we have to do “all of the above, full speed ahead”, we can’t afford to throw up roadblocks on some of it, simply because we don’t like the ownership model.

Alex: “Will, no-one in Europe has heard of this dramatic and apocalyptic news (I was in Germany last week) and I note with concern that the hyperlinks you doubtless included to support have gone missing?”

Well, there certainly is concern about it.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/17/czech-germany-grid-idUKL5N0D43LA20130417

http://praguemonitor.com/2013/05/09/germany-plans-how-ease-burden-czech-grid

http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2013/01/23/germanys-green-energy-destabilizing-electric-grids/

“Germany is phasing out its nuclear plants in favor of wind and solar energy backed-up by coal power. The government’s transition to these intermittent green energy technologies is causing havoc with its electric grid and that of its neighbors–countries that are now building switches to turn off their connection with Germany at their borders. The intermittent power is causing destabilization of the electric grids causing potential blackouts, weakening voltage and causing damage to industrial equipment.”

You may have been in Germany last week: I’m in Bohemia this and it did turn up in conversation in the pub….although that might say more about the sort of pubs I frequent than anything else.

Omega,
Perhaps you missed my 5:53 [#16]? I am one if those professionals [1], and while I am all in favor of more wind & solar and aware of the incumbency problems discussed in this thread I’m a bit concerned it isn’t as easy as the non-professionals think. And that decisions such as getting better efficiency by reducing reliability targets really do need to be understood by the general public in North America. Electric service reliability has essentially been magic in the regions where most of the continent’s population lives since ~1930; changing that would be a big thing.

Cranky

[1] more precisely: have been in both the recent & far distant past and currently seeking to return to.

I’ve seen or read a lot of the arguments for nuclear which hype that it’s a relatively clean form of generation at the point of production,however I’ve yet to see a projection that takes into account the costs( of extracting,refining, and transporting the fissionable materials or of the ecological and economic damage done by especially the extraction of ores of fissionables.Most discussion bases in a demand/supply model but usually only addresses the supply side.If we started with decreasing demand by building more efficient buildings and transport it would have the same net effect as increasing the supply factor of that equation.Also I see little mention of the contributions of tidal and wave generation,which individually might be relatively miniscule but collectively are rather large and less intermittent than either wind or solar alone.

Dick Veldkamp@78: not at continental scale. That’s really the acid test for all new energy systems: do they scale? Can we power continents? Denmark is small; Spain has a lot of wind. Tell me truly: does the technology currently exist to power all of Europe with wind? I work in the USA on designing buildings to take advantage of daylight, and I can tell you that we are not there yet. But reliably doing so for the whole of the USA? We are not there yet, and until we fund the research and development to make it possible, we will not be there.

@ Omega Centauri

Sure, predictability matters, I put that too sloppily: what I meant is that I don’t think that is the problem defining renewable scale-up. Even if everything is perfectly predictable, say, “years” in advance, you still have those backups causing costs, yielding little, and causing emissions.

Sure, one can give a lot of explanations as to what gets cheaper than what, and when, and what externalities have to be accounted for etc. etc. But at the end of the day, you have to put it in some sort of model to see how all these costs interdepent and scale – and what this all would entail in terms of emissions (or: what an emissions constraint would entail!). Again: I am somewhat intrigued that there is one debate about how much we should do about climate change, and then there is a completely independent debate about what technologies to “choose” (or the claim that stringent mitigation coincides with planned and fast transformation to renewables à la Germany – a view squarely contradicted by the available literature). That’s why I linked Tavoni who has done research on this topic.

The question is not 100 percent nuclear or 100 percent renewables. We face the problem that a transition to purely renewable generation will take some time. Up to now we have a lot of guesswork: Germany is simply convinced an energy transition is the way to go; GB is guessing since an eternity if it is ready to pay a certain strike prize to EDF to build new nuclear capacity; France is doing exactly nothing (there is no deep-rooted opposition to nuclear, but Hollande has strategic partnerships with the Greens who strongly oppose it); Italy has voted against nuclear via popular vote (as have Austria and the Switzerlands); meanwhile, the carbon prize in Europe imploded and doesn’t give any guidance at all. The US have shale gas. And absolutely everybody is convinced to have the solution to the world’s problems, and everybody has a story to back that claim up. Absent a “market solution” (e.g. simply put up a Pigovian carbon tax, and some investment in R&D to account for an efficiency/innovation tradeoff), I think decisions should be informed by those who actually publish in this field. I cannot claim to have an overview about the literature, but as I understand it, and if we are serious about emission abatement, it is surely no high shares of nuclear in the medium run, but rather a high share of renewables; but it’s not no nuclear either. This renewables vs nuclear debate is a highly useless debate going on and on in the blogosphere, and with little to no regard for the literature.

@ hix

A nuclear power plant under maintenance does nothing to earn its construction costs: if this were the strategy to deal with baseload in huge excess, electricity prices should be much higher in France than they are. At least this claim is as plausible as yours. Do you have any source to back up what you say?

I follow German media quite attentively, but bascially all of what you claim in the first part seems pure conjecture from your part. Again: could you offer some (serious) sources (German is OK)?

I think I abused this comment thread long enough with hardly on-topic stuff, so no responses from my part any more. Though, if a had a free wish (I don’t): I know that Mister Quiggin has published on the topic of sustainability (especially in the context of discounting), and it would be great to have posts about this issue with regard to renewable energy!

Few commenters seem to have actually looked at the key AEMO study on a 100% renewable electricity supply for Eastern Australia (where the people are) at current high standards of reliability, and without nuclear (an artefact of the brief; but since the cost data they have on nuclear are completely wrong, this is just as well.) Will Boisvert in #51 misrepresents it. AEMO built two scenarios. The first was a conservative one with high demand and little technical progress, in which the dispatchable capacity was lots of CSP with hot salt storage. This is a shovel-ready system demonstrated at 20MW scale in Spain for 24-hour operation. It’s not cheap and needs long-distance transmission from the outback, but clearly feasible. The second assumed lower demand and middling technological progress. They guessed (implausibly to me) this progress would be concentrated on EGS geothermal rather than energy storage, so in this scenario geothermal, also in the outback, replaced CSP.

They did not SFIK run a sensitivity analysis if you scale back from 100% renewable to 95%. This should cut the need for costly renewable backup a lot. It may be better to use cheap gas generators for the last few % and sequester carbon to offset.

I continue to be amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people on the blogs who still think nuclear is a live issue, and have never heard of CSP and EGS, which are far more important.

Refuelling a nuclear reactor typically takes a month or more, and the reactor produces no power while shut down. But this isn’t a problem for planners because it occurs on a predictable schedule. To some extent, superior prediction makes renewables more like nuclear in that large supply drops are easier to deal with if they are known well in advance. The problem with even highly predictable renewable supply drops is that they are highly correlated: the entire German solar fleet produces much less energy in December than in May. Wind can produce energy in the dark (and typically produces more energy at night) but can also suffer correlated drops over a very large region.

The hardest case for high solar use is dealing with seasonal variation in output, and this variation is worst at extreme latitudes. Most of the world’s population does not live as far from the equator as Germans do, so another nation might have better showcased the global prospects for solar power. I sometimes wonder how different the example would have been if e.g. Taiwan had been the first to commit to Energiewende, or its Chinese equivalent.

To a small point, if environmentalists really were concerned about birds they would see to the spaying (or terminating) of cats everywhere and the leashing of dogs in all natural settings, beaches, parks, green belts, etc.

Dick Veldkamp@95: and I agree with you for the most part. Where I disagree is that we do not, in fact, have tested solutions in hand. We have not even so far implemented sustainable energy production at an urban level, let alone the global scale we need if we are to maintain our civilization. The AEMO study is still a study; we won’t know how the system will work until it is actually up and running…or not.

We need to get started!

I continue to be amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people on the blogs who still think nuclear is a live issue, and have never heard of CSP and EGS, which are far more important.

Feel free to educate! Can I suggest less jargon though? Sure, I can google CSP and EGS but it breaks the reading flow.

One potential problem with wind is that it requires rare-earth materials to make generators that are efficient enough, and there may be problems providing enough of those materials, which are needed for other things as well. Wind will be an important part of the energy mix, but I doubt it will be much more than a small fraction. Still, there’s lots of room for many times as much wind energy generation as we have now.

But nuclear is necessary in the medium term. We really have to stop burning coal immediately, and the only way to do that is nuclear. Sure, nuclear is horrifically dirty: it generates vast amounts of radioactive waste (not just the fuel, the reactor facilities themselves are radioactive and can’t be cleaned up) that has to be managed for the rest of human history. But that’s a lot better than the 4 degrees C of global warming it would prevent. Another 50 years of research on renewables, and nuclear won’t be necessary. CSP in the desert, better transmission lines, better solar, some new forms of storage. All of this will happen. But not immediately. Whether it’s 2060, 2075, or 2100, at some point there should be zero nuclear. But there should be zero coal in 2020.

Fukushima was a horrific disaster, but the total number of deaths from Fukushima over all time is going to be very small compared to, say, the deaths from excess pulmonary disease caused by diesel exhaust in metropolitan Tokyo _in any one year_*. As a 60-year old Tokyo resident, I’d be better off retiring to some of the evacuated areas of Fukushima than retiring in place. Sure, background levels are way over Japanese standards there, but New Jersey and Rome, for example, have background levels three times the Japanese standards.

*: “Mortality from diesel soot exposure in 2001 was at least 14,400 out of the German population of 82 million, according to the official report 2352 of the Umweltbundesamt Berlin (Federal Environmental Agency of Germany).” (wiki)
Metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 1/4 that population, maybe Tokyo is only one half as dirty as Germany (unlikely; Tokyo air is not totally gross, but it’s not clean), so we’re talking at least 1,400 deaths every year in Tokyo alone. That’s a lot of deaths; several times as many as the expected excess cancer deaths among the cleanup workers at Fukushima. Sure, everyone dies of something, and a better comparison would be years of healthy life lost. For example, China is looking at coal pollution cutting _everyone’s_ life expectancy by 5.5 years. Oops. They’d be worlds better off with several Fukushima level disasters a year and no coal.

The bottom line is that burning fossil fuels is incredibly stupid, and no matter how scary you think Fukushima was, a vast program of building as many new nukes as possible would save a lot of lives, even in the very short term. (By the way, the reactors at Fukushima were GE mark I containment vessel designs, the same grossly bad design that brought us Three Mile Island. Those reactors should be decommissioned immediately. And there are a bunch of other simple things that can be done to make nuclear a lot safer, e.g. hydrogen explosions can be prevented.)

Of course, none of this is going to happen, and things are going to be very ugly in 2100.

@John Quiggin 101

You say that a nuclear buildout cannot even begin until 2030, 17 years from now. That claim is disproven by history.

France decarbonized 90 percent of its grid in just 20 years by building nuclear plants from a standing start. No renewables scheme anywhere can achieve such fast and comprehensive progress. Many other countries, including the United States and Japan, have conducted large and rapid nuclearization projects, they are the rule rather than the exception. China and South Korea are doing so now, with five-year build times and costs far below those of renewables. New reactor designs are finished, licensed and under construction in many countries, in the West as well as in Asia; the spadework is done. With a concerted mass deployment as in France, economies of scale and series can be leveraged and costs and build times driven down much further.

Will that require subsidies? Maybe—but how much wind and solar would be built without subsidies? It’s disturbing how quickly greens turn into neo-liberals when the subject is nuclear power.

Nuclear, and only nuclear, can get the job of decarbonizing done in the time we need it done. History proves it. The only thing standing in the way is politics—and the willfully obstructionist ideology of greens.

–John Quiggin 55, you write, “ The real problem with nuclear is that there is no actually existing technology, with a substantial track record, on offer.”

I don’t understand your thinking. There are ten Gen III+ nuclear reactors under construction in 4 countries with many more planned; China will bring the first EPR on line next year and an AP1000 in 2015. Japan has built and commercially operated several Gen III boiling water reactors. More advanced Gen IV prototypes are already under construction. China is building two pebble bed high-temperature gas reactors, due on line in 2016. Russia has a an 880 MW fast reactor under construction, due on line in 2014. General Electric has offered to build its PRISM 300-MW commercial fast reactor in Britain as soon as Britain licenses it. There are plenty of complete designs for small modular reactors in the States. The Tennessee Valley Authority has signed a contract with Babcock and Wilcox for up to four SMRs; the only thing holding back construction is the extraordinary slowness of the NRC licensing process. Advanced nuclear isn’t “vaporware”—it’s here.

@ Alex 62, my apologies for not providing a link to substantiate my claim that Poland and the Czech Republic are threatening to block German wind power surges. In addition to the links provided by Tim Worstall above, you can also look at this Bloomberg news story (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-overload-east-europe-s-grid-risking-blackout-energy.html).

One potential problem with wind is that it requires rare-earth materials to make generators that are efficient enough, and there may be problems providing enough of those materials, which are needed for other things as well.

This is not actually true. Direct-drive turbines with permanent magnets represent only a small portion of the total wind turbine market, and there are already large regions where wind is cost competitive with new-build coal, even in the absence of CCS or CO2 taxes. Is there going to be a rare earth shortage if wind expansion continues at the present pace and everyone wants direct drive permanent magnet turbines? It depends on the design. Most DD turbines use neodymium magnets. Neodymium is actually pretty abundant (about half as abundant as copper) and has multiple sources coming online outside of China. The bottleneck is actually dysprosium, a much rarer rare earth element that is hard to find outside of China so far and that is needed in small amounts to make neodymium magnets work at higher temperatures and raise their magnetic coercivity. There’s not enough known dysprosium available to make millions of DD turbines with dysprosium-enhanced neodymium magnets. But there is enough neodymium to make millions of DD turbines sans dysprosium enhancement — you have to provide better cooling though. I recall a couple of years ago that Western turbine manufacturers were investigating these dysprosium-free designs to avoid Chinese dependency. In practice they seem to keep avoiding permanent magnets altogether and improving gearboxes in onshore turbines and perhaps using direct drive with superconducting magnets in very large offshore designs.

There’s an oft-repeated falsehood that goes something like: “wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars all rely on rare earths imported from dirty Chinese mines” — delivered with a subtext of drill baby drill or the only real solution is to change culture instead of technology, depending on whether the speaker has a right or left political-tribal affiliation. Wind turbines and electric car motors and batteries can use rare earth elements. They do not require rare earth elements. Tesla Motors, for example, does not use rare earths in motors or in batteries. It is also only heavy rare earth elements like dysprosium that still have a critical dependency on dirty Chinese mining. The light rare earth lanthanum, needed in Prius batteries, is now being mined again in California. So are neodymium, cerium, and the other light rare earths.

Solar panels do not use rare earth elements at all. Some thin film solar designs use indium or tellurium, rare elements sometimes confused with rare earth elements. More than 90% of solar modules sold are based on super-abundant silicon. The best CdTe and CIGS modules are considerably less efficient than the best silicon modules, despite resorting to much more expensive and rare semiconductor materials, so there is no trade-off between abundance and efficiency either.

The Three Mile Island partial meltdown did not involve a GE boiling water reactor. It was a pressurized light water reactor made by Babcock & Wilcox. I agree that nuclear power is far preferable to fossil fueled power, but new safer designs aren’t going to be as cheap as what was built in the 1970s (look at what has happened to EPR costs and scheduling in France and Finland) and is really needed only for baseload power. Like JQ I suspect that the demand for baseload power decreases significantly if you pass through all generation costs, including emissions, to users in near real time. I still hope that small modular reactors might overcome the “reverse learning curve” of nuclear costs, but I will freely admit that they’re not here today and wind turbines are.

@ John Quiggin 53

I’m pretty dubious about the claim that intermittency problems will be solved by spot market pricing of electricity via smart meters, and that these innovations will even obviate the need for baseload supply.

Even if this works, it means that you’re using market prices to force electricity demand to meet an extremely volatile electricity supply through the mechanism of extremely volatile electricity prices. Do you really think the economy can switch from a regimen of stable electricity prices to one of volatile electricity prices, one that’s explicitly intended to drive volatile shifts in usage, without suffering large systemic costs?

I don’t. The intensified spot-pricing and smart-metering of electricity is the mother of all ill-advised neo-liberal schemes—all just to accommodate the infatuation with wind and solar generators whose unreliability makes them unfit for a modern grid. Again, it’s disturbing how leftists suddenly embrace neoliberalism when it comes to energy policy.

Even though this is a wind thread, I’d like to mention my favorite thing about rooftop solar: the “utility death spiral.” The cost of local distribution infrastructure accounts for about half of retail electricity costs. In most locations it is folded into the per-unit rate rather than billed as a separate fixed charge, even though it is a fixed cost. The death spiral idea is that rooftop solar users who get a portion of their power from the roof* instead of the grid pay less to the utility because they use less electricity, even though they’re not decreasing the reliance on fixed infrastructure**. This leaves their non-solar-using neighbors to pick up a larger share of the fixed distribution costs through their grid electric rates, which encourages those neighbors to jump on the solar bandwagon too. Eventually everyone who can has deployed distributed solar power, your annual demand is way down, and your costs per unit delivered are way up. Depending on how expensive the grid gets and how cheap storage gets, people might even go off-grid in the middle of the suburbs.

The utilities that are fighting so far are campaigning on fairness, mostly targeting incentives: why should your rich neighbor who can afford solar power get government help while a regular guy gets the extra costs? This is not a bad argument. The problem is that as solar costs drop, and incentives shrink, it will be much harder to sell “why should the poor lose their electrical infrastructure subsidies to solar users?” (Which is what would be happening if the fixed infrastructure charges became an explicit part of billing.) The portion of the American public that loathes subsidies doesn’t really seem to care whether they benefit people richer than them or poorer than them, as long as it’s not them. This would be purely pernicious if utility power were already largely decarbonized and solar users were just offloading costs. But since utility power in most locations is much more CO2 intensive than solar power, it is actually a poetically just market failure. If you spend your money to install rooftop solar, not only do your costs go down, but you’re imposing an indirect carbon tax on all your neighbors.

It reminds me of the “subsidized wind can sell at negative prices and still make a profit” complaint from generators. The negative pricing from government incentives makes for a good narrative to turn the public against government wind support. But if you simply prohibited negative-price sales by wind generators it would barely hurt their bottom line, or improve that of competing generators, because it doesn’t happen that often. What’s really killing other forms of generation is the much more common times when wind prices aren’t negative but too low for a nuclear, coal, or gas plant to turn a profit. It’s difficult to rally the public behind “wind is making electricity too cheap,” even though there is a legitimate and much more complicated public interest around preserving availability in the presence of intermittent sources with tiny marginal generating costs. Competing generators getting hurt by wind will tell the story of government meddling leading to negative-price sales and hope that the laws aren’t fixed to correct this problem, thereby forcing them to explain a much more complicated gray area to the public.

*This process is amplified by solar incentives like feed-in tariffs or net metering, but still present if solar does nothing but partially substitute for a user’s grid demand.

**Actually, rooftop solar can delay the need for transmission and distribution capacity upgrades if peak demand is on hot sunny days, but it is probably not enough to compensate for revenue losses.

@ John Quiggin 116. Is it really your belief that none of the ten Gen III+ reactors now under construction will ever enter operation, even the Chinese ones that are now less than a year from completion?

If so, I expect you’ll have the integrity to issue a retraction when these reactors do come on line.

@ John Quiggin

Apologies for my heated and stupid remark at 118.

At any rate, I think the Gen III+ reactors will indeed come on line, and soon, and show the extraordinary promise of the technology.

Perhaps it seems too tangential to others, but what about having fewer people? Population control. The idea seems to have sadly gone away, killed in the 1980s (that low, dishonest decade).

Also, I’ve just read the Bloomberg piece. It looks like there is not enough grid capacity between Northern and Southern Germany. Specifically, the North is a source and the South is a sink (and Austria is a store), and the shortest path between Berlin and Vienna is through Prague, so the Czechs get a lot of power transiting their grid.

First of all, in what way isn’t Well, build some! a sufficient answer?

Further, one of the complaints from the Czech grid operator is that they sometimes have to turn off coal-fired generators because there is lots of wind power coming down the track from north Germany. But it strikes me that displacing coal generation is a feature, not a bug, and if it damages the profitability of coal plants (old, Soviet-engineered, brown coal burners to boot!) so much the better.

One factor that one must always consider when thinking about the motivations of our right wing friends is to remember that The Big Grift is their dominant motivation. Much of the anti-wind power propaganda can be traced back to funding from the Koch brothers and other coal, oil, and natural barons. And it is for a very old fashion reason. They want to suppress competition with their products. Less wind generated electricity, more demand for coal and natural gas generated electricity. http://climatecrocks.com/2011/07/26/out-in-the-open-koch-brothers-make-it-official-we-hate-wind/

P.S. Went and looked up Poe’s law. Of course it should be called “Swift’s Axiom” since Jonathan Swift discovered this particular peril of satire when many reacted to “A Modest Proposal” as a serious proposition when he proposed this solution to Ireland’s problems: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”[1]

“First of all, in what way isn’t Well, build some! a sufficient answer?”

In the NOOOO, i dont want to see a major power line anywhere within 5 km of my home ill sue so this takes forever kind of way.

Many years ago, I was put in charge of cataloging a large depository collection of U.S. government documents. In the course of the decade or so of work that followed, I occasionally found myself reading interesting things, among them NRC documents concerning the design and maintenance of nuclear power plants. I particularly remember one shocking paper about the neutron embrittlement of various grades of steel.

This was in Southern California, where during the same period, I watched the steady deterioration of the Los Angeles freeways. When I arrived, they were just finishing the Santa Monica Freeway. When I left, in the early oughts, it was pretty much a crumbling ruin, in use and usable still, but in an awful state of disrepair in many places, and for all sorts of reasons, mostly economic, there wasn’t much being done about it.

Then I read about the practice, well-managed in France, apparently, and not so well managed in the United States and Japan, of routinely re-certifying nuclear power plants that have already passed their designed operational life. The question which occurs to me, and perhaps to others , is whether heroic attempts should be made to maintain large-scale infrastructure projects decades beyond the date that they were originally designed to last, especially in an era when one must do so at costs much greater than the budgeted amounts available to the agencies which operate them. And can one honestly make the same case for Connecticut Yankee that one makes for the Golden Gate?

Frankly, I smell entropy at work here, or at very least, unacceptable political and economic fiddling, and it worries me. The grand enthusiasms of engineers who designed and built things when concrete and labor were cheap now often seem too expensive to fix, and too vital to do without. Do people reading here who actually know something about how this all works share my concerns, or have I just put two and two together and gotten five.

I’ve heard the one of the reasons that solar power costs have been declining is precisely because the economies of scale are different – building a nuclear plant is a multi-billion (tens of billions) dollar project, taking 10-20 years. There’s not as much learning curve due to replication, and it is a single, hierarchical, top-down central planning project.

No idea whether that’s true, but it makes a lot of sense. PV lends itself to small-scale experimentation, too, in a way that nuclear doesn’t. Get a couple of bright materials scientists and a few million in funding, and they can start a startup making their own slightly-better PV cells, and scale up as the business grows. That’s not really an option for a couple of bright nuclear engineers with a great concept for a slightly-better nuclear reactor.

“daytime power will be cheaper than nighttime”

This comment calles to mind an interesting article some time ago related to this topic and it mashed together the “problem” of increased solar usage where obviously more power is generated during the daytime and the possiblity of a greater proportion of plug-in hybrid vehicles where, in most cases, people will want to be doing their recharges at night and what this might mean for load balancing, base capacity etc. That author proposed nuclear as the “solution” although it was a simplistic article that didn’t go into the various objections raised here.

Clearly not an insurmountable problem, all the more so if storage systems improve and of course it all deals in ‘potentials’ rather than practicalities. Perhaps a little off topic – but I found it an interesting example of green initiatives colliding.

Omega @ 133

“The fairness quote that I thought was best, was that excess solar from the rooftop installations should be no more costly to the utility than thewholesale price of solar electricty from a gridscale plant.”

What’s wrong with ‘excess solar from rooftop installations should be no more costly to the utility than the price the utility charges the rooftop owner for baseline power from the utilities’ grid’? What’s unfair about that?

@ ajay 127, on the longevity of power generators:

“In 2075 every single currently operating power station in the world will have shut down, and all the power stations built to replace them will also have shut down.”

That’s true if you’re talking about wind turbines and solar panels, which are expected to wear out in 20 to 30 years.

It’s not true of nuclear reactors. New models are rated to last 60 years, and there is talk of extending life spans to 80 and 100 years. So nukes that come on line in 2020 would still be around in 2080, and maybe even 2120. Hydro dams could also last that long. That longevity is another reason why those generators could be a better long-term bet than wind and solar.

Thanks, Will. When it comes to systemic failures, though, I’m more of a pessimist than you are, thanks to experiences far removed from the technical. I’d prefer to believe your reassurances, but the darkness just won’t leave me alone….

@ Omega Centauri 133, on nuclear angst:

Your analysis of anti-nuclear anxiety and the dread of worst-case scenarios is a good one. A nuclear risk profile that balances infinitesimal likelihood against seemingly infinite damage fills people with terror no matter how remote the odds.

So it’s worth noting that the damage really isn’t infinite. Even worst-case scenarios for nuclear accidents are no worse than dam breaks, and an order of magnitude smaller than the yearly worldwide toll of hundreds of thousands of deaths from coal-fired air pollution.

The Banqiao dam break in China in 1975 drowned about 27,000 people, about as many as the Union of Concerned Scientists reckon will die from the Chernobyl accident. But while the dam-break body count was very evident, the UCS estimate is conjectural, based on applying high-dose radiation risk factors to the extremely low doses civilians incurred from Chernobyl—and far too small to be discernible in epidemiological studies.

The observable health effects from Chernobyl are modest. There were 6000 thyroid cancers, which could have been avoided had Soviet authorities warned the population not to drink milk contaminated with radio-iodine. (Fortunately, thyroid cancer is readily treatable, so only 15 deaths resulted.) There’s a possible slight uptick in leukemia rates among “liquidators” who received the highest radiation doses, an effect that wavers on the brink of statistical significance. Otherwise, according to the authoritative UNSCEAR report, there are no observable health effects at all to civilian populations. So perhaps a few hundred deaths can be definitely attributed to Chernobyl.

The reality is that radiation is a weak carcinogen that does very little discernible harm at the doses civilians receive even in major nuclear accidents. A nuclear spew doesn’t produce a zombie apocalypse. The risk to an individual is equivalent to discovering that your house has radon; that’s the scale of threat that people should associate with nuclear disasters.

So the risk profile of nuclear power is not, “There’s a one-in-a-thousand chance that it will cause an apocalypse.” The true risk profile of nuclear is, “There’s a one-in-a-thousand chance that it will cause your house to come down with a moderate case of radon that will largely wear off in a few years.”

If people focused on that true risk profile they might be a lot less terrified.

Omega @ 143

“Take a look at the problem from 30,000 feet, with an eye for cost flows, and you should be able to see the correctness of his statement.”

I’m trying, believe me. If the problem is that, by drawing less grid power, rooftop solar users end up paying less than their fair share of infrastructure costs, with the result that someone else is paying more than their fair share, what that situation highlights is that those infrastructure costs have always been unfairly allocated, with smaller homes and conservationists transfering costs to everyone else. What that implies is that utilities should change how they allocate fixed infrastructure costs, not that they should pay rooftop solar owners less for a kWh than they charge those same owners when they sell them one.

@Layman

Another way to say this is “electrical users who conserve pay less to the utility than those who don’t, because they use less electricity, even though they’re not decreasing the reliance on fixed infrastructure.” A corollary is “electrical users with smaller houses pay less to the utility than those with larger houses, because they use less electricity, even though they’re not decreasing the reliance on fixed infrastructure.” When you frame the complaint that way, it is patently absurd. Of course people who use less electricity pay a lower portion of the cost of fixed infrastructure, because the utilities have chosen to recover the cost of fixed infrastructure via the variable fees for electricity used.

You are right, and I forgot to mention this in my post about the utility death spiral. High distributed solar penetration has the potential to be even more costly for utilities than conservation, due to the fact mentioned above that solar output (grid demand suppression) is highly correlated. But conservation hurts them too: if neighbors respond to solar neighbors and their costs by using a clothesline instead of an electric dryer, replacing failed appliances with more efficient ones, or getting rid of the last of their incandescent lighting, that is also a problem for the utility.

There are different reasons that coal plants are shutting down in the United States: cheap shale gas, wind power, and the anemic yet much lamented “War on Coal” of increasing environmental standards. The main reason coal plants are shutting down is because the demand just isn’t there. Not only has the economy contracted and then sputtered along, but part of the recession belt-tightening was finding out how to be more efficient with energy. In some places the future demand curve that would have been predicted back in 2005 has been delayed by a decade or more. If demand were humming along coal plant operators would just pay the upgrade costs and their customers would just buy electricity that’s a little more expensive, but that’s not going to happen. If and when the US economy returns to robust growth, it will be too late for operators who have mostly-idled coal plants today. The non-coal path dependency will already be locked in.

@Willl @144. A very good response. I do think that nuke dangers have been massively overestimated. But there seems to be no way to win the PR battle. I gave up after Fukushima. Fukushima made me change my assesment of the danger of N power. There is little dircet danger to life/health, but huge danger of economic losses, as any areas of increased radiation are rendered uninhabitable because of our overreaction. So bad N accidents mean that hundreds or thousands of square miles are abandoned for several decades, and this results in hundreds of billions of loses for a single serious accident. Unless you can change the public perception of risk of lowlevel radiation, that is what we are stuck with. I know it is highly unoptimal, and fristrating, but we have to deal with the PR envirnonment we have, not with the one we wish we had.

Omega @ 151

“Grid connected customers do not just reduce their consumption. They also export power to the grid at times, and import it at other times. Even though I am net metered, my bill lists both flows (into and out of the house).”

Me, too.

“If I am near net zero, I am getting free storage of juice by exporting during the day, and importing during the night, or during cloudt weather -or worse during an extreme heatwave my 24hour usage may be a multiple of my PV generation.”

Me, too, though I would word this differently: ‘If I am near net zero, I am selling excess power to my utility during the day, and buying electricity from them during the night &tc’.

“So I get great benefit from my grid connection.”

add ‘…as does my utility company’.

“At low penetration, in a region with demand that strongly peaks during sunny days/hours, that isn’t an issue for PG&E, since my power is exported at a time when spot electricity prices are high. That won’t be the case once PV reaches some modest amount (25 or maybe 50 percent), and daytime spot electricty prices collapse. So if I am not to be a net burden to the other customers, I must accept a low price for my exported power. The price of wholesale (utility scale) solar, seems like a fair price to me (even if I don’t like it).”

This is very clear, thanks. I agree that when PV density reduces the value of my daytime excess capacity, I should expect to be paid less for it; but until PV density reaches that point, there’s no justification for paying me less than I pay them, or for claiming I’m stealing from my neighbor.

I have been fooling around with public utility rates since 1977, which I suspect is before some of you were born and before many of you got out of college. (Alright, it wasn’t that long after I got out of college.) That pursuit has required me, a humble country lawyer, to become a jackleg economist, a half-ass engineer, and a quasi-accountant, not to mention something of a politician.

The economists want perfection (they call it optimality, often the Pareto sort), the engineers never have enough time and resources, the accountants worship the false certainty of numbers, the politicians are usually ineducable, and the lawyers want what their clients want, and to get paid. Those are the people who set utility rates, at least in the United States.

I have read the above with fascination. Plus ca change, oh, plus ca change. Two things seem persistent all these years. Electricity still cannot be stored in large amounts for very long , which accounts for all the discussion of intermittency, dispatchability, and so forth. Second, marginal cost pricing makes the most economic sense and, ruthlessly applied, is political suicide.

Oh, and third, people in developed countries want juice when they want it. We spent decades getting them hooked on it and there’s no soon weaning off.

The obvious dynamic tension among those three propositions underlies the entire erudite discussion above. What an irony that when CT moves into an area of my own expertise I have no one to argue with–for you are all, in some degree, right.

@Layman and Omega,

I understand that grid-tied customers who have solar systems export and import power to/from the grid at different times. I focus on the case of solar self-consumption with no opportunity to export to the grid as a long term limiting case. It’s what happens if solar keeps getting cheaper but neither solar users nor their neighbors want to pay for more wiring and transformers to enable increased peak solar exports — this is a “best of the worst case” scenario where solar costs keep falling but the electric utility model stays the same. Your neighborhood is plastered with solar panels, at the same time the sun is shining on your system it’s shining on all your neighbors, and there is more local power than local demand when it’s sunny. You need to store the surplus locally, get it distributed further, or waste it. Wasting it part of the time may be cheaper than uprating infrastructure to get it out to more distant consumers or building storage to use it locally later. If electric vehicle adoption increases, battery charging at times of peak sun may represent some dispatchable demand that you can match with the intermittent solar surplus.

Cranky 157:

Synchrophasor stuff is all well and great, but monitoring 30 times a second instead of every four seconds does not beget 120 times more useful information. That is, I don’t think it will reduce load relief incidents by the same proportion. Still, every little bit helps, if cost-justified, and I note there was a federal grant involved.

Insull (who started out with Edison himself), along with EBASCO (Electric Bond And Share Company), needs to be remembered, and that memory needs to be feared. The multiple financial leverage, in which debt of the parent, and the parent’s parent, and on up, becomes equity in the operating subsidiary, led to a near-total collapse of value in a time period shorter than my vacation. Insull understood two things very well, economies of scale (centralized generation) and ripping off investors.

Against that historical background, the last several years of FERC emphasis on the market as the solution, coupled with its price incentives to transmission investment, may be a bit worrisome. It encourages a move away from holistic power generation and delivery planning to one more function-specialized, and just as when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when all you have is transmission, everything looks like congestion. RTOs (Regional Transmission Organizations) such as MISO are supposed to mitigate that problem. We shall see.

I agree with Daniel, but they also need to come up with a way of linking their technology with a terrifying weapon with the potential to destroy us all. Maybe a geothermal thing which can cause earthquakes on other continents or a tidal generator which can create tsunamis – I’ll leave the details to the boffins.

Matt @ 156

“If electric vehicle adoption increases, battery charging at times of peak sun may represent some dispatchable demand that you can match with the intermittent solar surplus.”

I don’t own an electric car but have considered it. I have short commutes due to opting to live in the city rather than the suburbs of Phoenix, so it’s an option. But I’m guessing I’d want 2, for precisely this reason – to be able to charge one off my solar at peak sun. So, it’s an expensive proposition, doubled.

@ John Quiggin 155

“Renewables and energy efficiency measures are the most cost-effective way of replacing/displacing fossil fuels in electricity generation….Nuclear would substitute neatly for coal in this sense, but it’s far too expensive.”

I don’t think that’s an accurate summation of the consensus.

Levelized Cost of Electricity estimates generally place new nuclear and onshore wind at about the same cost, with nuclear being substantially cheaper than offshore wind and solar.

But LCOE calculations do not take into account the large systemic costs that wind and solar impose on the grid—like costs for super-redundant transmission capacity and storage and backup. They do not take into account that nuclear plants have very long lives of low-cost production after the mortgage is paid off, while wind and solar must be rebuilt every 20 to 30 years so that they are always paying off the mortgage. They do not take into account the drop in capacity factors that will occur as the overbuild of wind and solar starts to necessitate regular curtailment. They don’t take into account larger costs to the economy of having an erratic, volatile electricity supply from wind and solar that will require volatile spot prices that drive volatile shifts in usage.

Nor can wind and solar and efficiency completely replace/displace fossil fuels in any sense. Countries that have avidly pursued renewable policies, like Denmark and Germany, remain dependent on fossil fuels after decades. Starry-eyed all-renewables schemes rely on dispatchable technologies like hydro and geothermal that may not scale, or on biomass, which hopefully will not scale because of its devastating effects on the environment and food production. Realistically, schemes dominated by wind and solar will continue to burn massive quantities of fossil fuels. That’s not a path to the kind of rapid and complete decarbonization the world needs.

But why puzzle over studies and forecasts? We can just look at history. Both France and Sweden decarbonized 90 percent of their grids in 20 years using nuclear and hydro, at some of Europe’s lowest electricity prices. That’s a performance that no renewables scheme can hope to match either in pace or cost.

Building a low-carbon energy system definitely does not require agonizing structural changes to our economy and way of life.The nuclear-hydro system can do the job fast, cheaply and expediently. History proves it.

Look, it does not work because Denmark has lots of co2 emissions is besides the point. Denmark did not implement a go green, no co2 strategy from the outset when they started to introduce high energy use taxes and windgeneration. Rather, their focus was and still is in large parts oil independence after the opec embargo. Denmark recently banned fosile heating in new constructed buildings. Those who heat conventional when other options are aviable will soon have to pay an “energy security fee”, not a heat the planet fee.

In the colder parts of the world that have no shale gas boom, a switch from conventional heating to heat pumps is already one of the cheapest ways to reduce co2 emssions in new buildings. Thus, the chearing of cost escalations through indirect solar buildup subsidies (were soon going to see unsusidiced solar buildup on a massive scale, both on roofs and large scale ground mounted so much is predictable*) might backfire. Higher variable electricity costs do not only decourage electrity waste, they also decourage a switch to more efficient electric heating and mobility (at least in a scenario where marginal new electrity does not come from coal powerplants).

*Both solar and the demand management a big solar buildup requires are semiconductor stuff, which gets cheaper at a pretty predictable fast pace.

One thing that has intrigued me with solar would be a combination of a panel and an appliance. That way a do it yourself type could dispence with all the soft costs, permits, inspections, and so on. I know of one guy who scored for $.34/wat panels, and connected them to an electric water heater. He figures its cheaper than the old fashioned solar-thermal hot water heater for the same app. I could imagine doing something with an aircondition, that could be reversed seasonally as a heat pump. Directly connect it to a couple of PV panels, and you get some heating/cooling without the utility ever being involved. Your reduced cost just might be big enough to make up for the power you waste when you don’t need either.

Also Nova Scotia’s utility is promoting electric heaters that can be turned on when there is excess wind power on the grid. There certainly are oportunities to make use of cheap stranded power, when a robust renewables powered grid has too much.

“No idea whether that’s true, but it makes a lot of sense. PV lends itself to small-scale experimentation, too, in a way that nuclear doesn’t. Get a couple of bright materials scientists and a few million in funding, and they can start a startup making their own slightly-better PV cells, and scale up as the business grows.”

Most certainly true to some extent. There are a number of people so funded playing around with all sorts of variations. But the real driver in the recent fall of PV has been that people simply got serious about making the basic silicon metal for it.

Not so long ago PV was made from stuff that had been manufactured for the computer chip industry but had failed the grade. Then solar got big, prices soared to $450 per kg. Which for Si, something that is pretty much just boiled sand, is a high price. So work was done on how to produce Si metal cheaper. Current production costs, inc. capital costs, are around the $30 a kg level now.

This is the same story as yours of course, it’s just been happening in a slightly different corner of the industry. Not so much new materials but better ways of making the standard one.

First Solar with their Cd/Te thin films is a more direct example of your particular variation of the point.

The signanage idea is interesting (to me) as is Yucca Mountain’s connection to Ruin Value: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/15/entertainment/et-hart15

On the topic of strategic reserve power sources, apparently Scotland’s first (and only?) oil-fired power station, and tallest free-standing structure, is currently being demolished.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23330157

Building started in 1970, but by the time it was completed six years later, burning oil for electricity was no longer economic, so it was kept as a strategic reserve for decades.

Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the generally excellent comments on this thread… I learned quite a lot, still have a lot of reading to do. Boffo, a good one :)

Today I had the opportunity to confront Victoria’s Premier, Dr. Denis Napthine about VC82, the planning law that essentially prevents commercial wind power development here.

I began politely enough by asking if he’d consider repealing that law… it got less polite and essentially I lost my cool and ended up accusing him and his party of being ideologically moribund and beholden to the energy industry. (If he or his minders notice this post, please know that I accuse Labor of the same).

Anyway, his reasons for keeping that planning law were
* that it was an election promise, which I can understand to some extent (even if _he_ didn’t make that promise) and
* that it was all about maintaining property values.

It seems to me that the “property values” argument is particularly effective – even if someone is generally on board with ecological arguments, the NIMBY thing can still win them over. I’m sure someone must have some data on this one way or the other?

One of points I tried to make (perhaps not coherently) to him for wind was that it can be delivered pretty much entirely from indigenous materials and manufacturing capacity. I realise that’s a long row to hoe given the billion or so dollar a year brown coal industry, gas, oil etc.

It felt a little like throwing pebbles into the Grand Canyon, but I was glad I tried.