Along with 60 other Australians, mostly more eminent than me, I’ve signed an open letter to world leaders calling for a moratorium on new coal mines and coal mine expansions. The letter focuses particularly on Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine in Queensland but this is part of a global movement to stop new coal mines everywhere in the world.
The underlying reasoning isn’t spelt out but ought to be clear enough. If we are to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 ppm or below, as the world’s leaders have already agreed we should, it is necessary for carbon dioxide emissions to peak soon, and decline to zero over the next 30 years or so. Given that burning coal creates major health hazards in addition to C02 emissions, coal burning needs to eliminated even more rapidly. That means first, that no new coal mine can expect to work for an operating life of more than 30 years, and second that any new coal mine must be offset be additional closures of existing coal mines. Once these factors are taken into account, it’s essentially impossible for new coal mines to make economic sense within the constraints imposed by a limited carbon budget. Certainly, that’s the case for Carmichael, which is a massive boondoggle keeping alive only in the hope of extracting some form of government assistance or compensation.
{ 72 comments }
Gareth Wilson 10.29.15 at 2:21 am
I totally support this proposal, and it should have been enacted 30 years ago.
ZM 10.29.15 at 2:37 am
This is a bit similar to my argument at VCAT about the broiler farm at the moment, although coal mines are of course bigger sources of emissions, but I don’t have any coal mines in my local government area since geologically we are a gold and granite etc area not a coal area.
“and second that any new coal mine must be offset be additional closures of existing coal mines.”
There is a reasonably recent precedent for this in Victoria , in the Dual Gas (HRL) case where VCAT ruled that an extension to a gas plant was only permitted on the condition that a similar sized GHG emitting development be closed.
The developers lawyer is arguing that this is not a Tribunal matter, but a government matter. But I am arguing the government has to follow the rule of law, and is accordingly bound to its fiduciary obligations of ensuring the sustainable use of resources for future generations by the public trust doctrine.
ZM 10.29.15 at 2:38 am
And well done for signing the petition John Quiggin. Especially with the Environment Minister recently approving the coal mine development again.
If the developer goes ahead and it goes to court you could be an economic expert for the case.
ozajh 10.29.15 at 4:55 am
Prof. Quiggin,
Best of luck, but I believe the horse has already bolted on this one. Two main reasons.
Firstly, the entire World’s economic system is currently based on burning enough fossil fuel to raise the CO2 concentration by 2.5 ppm per year. 450 ppm is 20 years away at that rate. There is only one area (electricity generation) where there is a semi-viable alternative, which will become fully viable when photo-voltaic prices fall below about half the current level. (I acknowledge this might be quite soon.)
Even if ALL electricity generation became renewable overnight, other uses of fossil fuels would still keep the CO2 concentration rising, albeit more slowly.
Secondly, many Climate scientists believe the past rise from 280 to 400 ppm will take decades if not centuries to play out. Temperatures and sea-levels will continue to rise, and there’s nothing we can now do about it.
I truly hate to say this, but I think the otherwise execrable Bjorn Lomborg has a point when he states that we need to focus on developing mitigation mechanisms. (He, of course, also believes we shouldn’t be attempting to reduce emissions, which is IMHO ludicrous.)
John Quiggin 10.29.15 at 6:26 am
@4
* Electric vehicles are a viable medium-term alternative for transport, and big gains in fuel efficiency are available in the interim.
* With lower final demand for steel (likely for a bunch of reasons), it would be possible to meet most demand from recycled scrap rather than new blast furnace product
* There are viable technologies for low-carbon cement http://www.technologyreview.com/fromthelabs/428147/low-carbon-cement/
* There are plenty of opportunities to reverse deforestation
None of that means that fixing the problem will be easy. But, if there is a will, there is certainly a way.
Matt 10.29.15 at 6:41 am
Best of luck, John Quiggin. Coal is the worst fuel that is burned in significant quantities, and that needs to end, the sooner the better.
This looks like it’s going to be one of our periodic energy/CO2 roundup threads.
1) Austin, Texas recently contracted for hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity, at a price of less than $40 per megawatt hour. That’s with a 30% federal Investment Tax Credit built in, but the price with ITC stripped out is no more than $57 per megawatt hour. That’s nearly competitive with new-build natural gas plants and cheaper than new-build coal. If you haven’t seen it yet, expect the smarter coal shills to start touting the costs of running old grandfathered coal plants as being cheaper than building solar, now that new coal plants are not cheaper than new solar plants.
1a) Well, not everywhere is as sunny as Texas, so new-build coal is still cheaper in much of the world than new-build solar PV. But sunny Australia shouldn’t build any more coal plants. Of course as I hear it Australians already have too much generating capacity, so the coal boosters are hoping for exports rather than increased domestic consumption.
2) In 2015 US thermal coal consumption is the lowest since 1989. The US will (estimated) consume 70 million tons less this year than in 2014. Almost every US coal company is losing money, 4 have gone bankrupt this year, and naturally they’d like to replace domestic demand with exports but…
3) US coal exports are down 39% since 2012, 2015 estimated to be the lowest since 2009 Producers can’t even use all the export capacity that currently exists.
4) Some of that idle capacity is a mismatch between the cheapest remaining coal producing regions and port locations. New coal terminals proposed for Washington, Oregon, and California face intense local opposition though, and there aren’t a lot of other options for sending American coal across the Pacific.
5) Even if more terminals are built, they might turn into stranded assets. China is setting a coal consumption cap. Chinese imports are down 29% through September, and analysts expect the fall to continue next year. Both China and India are trying to become self-sufficient in coal. Both are also trying to reduce relative dependence on coal of any origin, though India’s measures are weaker.
6) It would be nice if the world could have agreed on a coordinated phaseout of coal earlier. But if cooperation didn’t work, maybe divide-and-conquer will. We need coal prices to stay low long enough in the West that the industry-specific capital assets and supply chains rust away. Less institutional memory at coal mining enterprises, reduced economies of scale, reduced profits to lobby with, higher risk priced into loans, fewer communities bought off with miners’ wages: that’s what I’m hoping for. When it’s just benighted foreigners (and The Australian newspaper) left cuddling up with coal, a little good old fashioned jingoism and othering will help us take a war-footing approach to cutting CO2. Tongue half in cheek.
7) If Bjørn Lomborg says the Pope is Catholic, you should check for breaking news of His Holiness’s conversion to Scientology. There is no environmental issue where consulting Bjørn Lomborg is the best available option.
ZM 10.29.15 at 9:17 am
“When it’s just benighted foreigners (and The Australian newspaper) left cuddling up with coal, a little good old fashioned jingoism and othering will help us take a war-footing approach to cutting CO2. Tongue half in cheek.”
I’m hoping The Australian is shifting its views. The Higher Education section said Australian National University was a thought leader for divesting from fossil fuels before the other universities.
Timothy Scriven 10.29.15 at 10:46 am
The Higher Ed section is utterly distinct from the rest of the paper- a far, far softer shade of neoliberalism.
Dipper 10.29.15 at 11:51 am
What would be really useful is some big batteries; something to store the electricity when the wind blows at night, and release it on cold days when there is no wind. Any progress on that? Is the Tesla Powerwall http://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/powerwall the revolution it claims to be or is this just hype?
Cheryl Rofer 10.29.15 at 12:27 pm
@ John Quiggin #5
Electric vehicles are only as clean as the source of their electricity. If it comes from a coal plant, they are worse than gasoline vehicles for carbon emissions. Much worse because of losses in converting heat to electricity and then transporting it to where the vehicles are charged.
So a shift to electric vehicles would need to be accompanied with a shift to non-carbon sources of electricity. Natural gas is better than coal, but, I suspect, worse than gasoline power.
Cheryl Rofer 10.29.15 at 12:31 pm
@ Dipper #9
I have seen credible assertions that the Tesla batteries are not large enough to store reasonable amounts of energy for a household, but haven’t done the calculations myself. I will try to find a link.
Technology “breakthroughs” are always much less than their promoters claim and the news media hype. A general rule that I have not seen breached in a very long time.
SamChevre 10.29.15 at 12:43 pm
What would be really useful is some big batteries; something to store the electricity when the wind blows at night, and release it on cold days when there is no wind.
So long as it doesn’t need to be portable or household-sized, this is wide-spread, extant technology; build a 2-level lake, pump water up when there’s extra power and use it to run a turbine when power is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Trader Joe 10.29.15 at 12:57 pm
@9
Its an Elon Musk invention – as a result you can be 100% sure of three things 1) its a clever idea that ought to exist and should exist and 2) if he’s talking about it now, the real working version that actually accomplishes what is hoped for is a minimum of 5 years away and 3) as cool as the idea might be and as much as the average green citizen might love to have it, only the 1% have any hope of afording it and even if all of them did so its unlikely to make the expected impact.
That doesn’t directly answer your question about the science, but its probably the more realistic answer regardless of the science.
Dipper 10.29.15 at 1:02 pm
thanks all for your responses.
SamChevre I was aware of this, particularly here in the UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station. I was under the impression this had closed but I see it is still operating. Given your comments I don’t understand why this isn’t being pushed more particularly as it makes wind and solar more realistic options.
Joshua W. Burton 10.29.15 at 2:38 pm
There is a limited amount of favorable geography for hydroelectric full stop; for pumped hydroelectric, doubly so. Better batteries are needed anyway, but the insight from pumped storage is sound: when energy is being banked for load-balancing, the required charge/discharge rate does not usually have to grow with the storage capacity. (Economists will think of this as a distinction between flows and stocks.) A battery is doing both jobs: if you need ten times the storage at the same flow rate, ten batteries are expensive overkill.
Two years ago I mentioned here that my undergraduate daughter had done a summer of work on quinones for the negative-potential end of organic flow batteries. This summer the same lab cracked the positive-potential end of the problem. The basic science is now in place to reversibly store electrical energy in chemical potentials (at roughly 0.01 times the mass efficiency of lithium ion batteries, or 1000 times the mass efficiency of hydroelectric) using nontoxic, non-inflammable, noncorrosive aqueous organic reagents at both electrodes. You still wind up cleaning leaves off a skating rink on your roof, but at least you don’t need a bomb in your basement.
Matt 10.29.15 at 4:55 pm
According to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 60% of Americans now live in regions where a new EV produces fewer global warming emissions than even the most efficient gasoline-hybrid vehicle. This is due both to improving vehicles and to reduced coal use in the US generating mix. A new EV charged off of natural gas electricity emits less than a new hybrid or pure ICE vehicle. Heavy coal use of course does make the EV even worse than conventional vehicles.
At present the Tesla Powerwall is a niche product. People are researching a lot of alternatives for grid storage that might be better. Lithium ion might be a dead end for grid storage, pushed out by technologies designed for grid storage instead of borrowed from other applications. But I also remember the case of photovoltaics themselves, where for 40 years researchers have been chasing radical alternatives to stodgy old crystalline silicon. But every year, for 40 years, boring little incremental improvements in crystalline silicon PV meant that radical alternatives have never been able to deliver the same combination of price and performance. There have been years where niche non-silicon technologies were cheaper or were more efficient, but never both at the same time. So crystalline silicon dominates installed PV in 2015 just like in 1975, though the silicon PV of 2015 is much improved over 1975.
If grid scale storage comes to be dominated by something other than lithium ion batteries, the flow battery chemistry cited by Joshua W. Barton is as good a candidate as any. The new all-alkaline quinone chemistry is great news because it is now non-corrosive to steel and most common plastics. Building big tanks to hold electrolyte is pretty cheap if you don’t have to use special corrosion-resistant materials. Using the 18.8 watt-hours per liter energy density of this newest quinone scheme, dimensions of large oil storage tanks, and Google Earth, I was able to calculate that you could fit 24 hours of electricity storage for San Francisco County on less land than the nearest local high school takes up.
It might make more sense to co-locate big flow battery storage units with utility scale wind and solar farms, though. Those farms are already located where land is cheap, and onsite storage can firm up renewables plus reduce the peak capacity you need on transmission lines connecting them to demand centers.
Joshua W. Burton 10.29.15 at 5:32 pm
Lithium ion might be a dead end for grid storage, pushed out by technologies designed for grid storage instead of borrowed from other applications.
My understanding is that Tesla is treating it as a reclamation/cogeneration problem: the Powerwall uses Li cells that fail capacity rating for the cars (hence allowing Tesla to operate economically closer to the technological edge than they would if the near-misses were deadweight loss), and will eventually use tired cells that come back from older cars after moderate degradation. The marginal cost of a Li cell that has, say, 80% of rated capacity may be very, very low, if the whole ecosystem can be managed effectively together.
Joshua W. Burton 10.29.15 at 5:44 pm
Also note that crystalline Si photovoltaics are able to scale up without limit because sand is cheap and plentiful — the whole crust of the planet is rich in Al and Si, because that’s how supernovae roll. Elemental Li, Be, B are “rare lights” because they are principally formed by cosmic-ray spallation of carbon nuclei in free space: there might not be enough accessible lithium to go around, and even if there is, a 10^3-fold scale-up of Li production is going to uncover all sorts of new and unanticipated environmental concerns. Roy Gordon’s lab has a firm principle, now successfully honored twice in observance (with low-emissivity float glass coatings in the 1980s, and with quinine flow batteries today): if you are going to up-end the world economy with chemistry, do it with atoms we already know where to get.
Matt 10.29.15 at 6:38 pm
If you look at USGS data about lithium, for the past 20 years the trend is that lithium resources and reserves are discovered considerably faster than mining depletes them. So much so that as of 2015 world lithium reserves are about six times higher than in 1996 (13.5 million tons to 2.2 million).
This admittedly now-5-years-old analysis of lithium ion batteries concludes that about 400 grams of lithium are needed for each kilowatt hour of usable battery capacity. That’s 400 tonnes per gigawatt hour of capacity.
If lithium battery manufacturing grows really fast, it might increase prices for lithium to the extent that competing chemistries offer a compelling value. But increased lithium mining capacity might then send prices back down and erase the value in a few years. That’s what happened with the ill-fated restart of Californian rare earth mining in response to price hikes from Chinese rare earth producers. It’s also what happened to low-silicon and no-silicon solar PV technologies that got a very temporary boost from purified silicon supply bottlenecks/price spikes around 2007-2009.
Increasing lithium production 1000-fold would undoubtedly have environmental problems if it’s even possible at all. But that’s a bit of a strawman, IMO. The same would be true of 1000-fold scaleup of producing any mineral, and nothing currently planned would increase lithium demand that much. The IHS forecast for grid storage in North Amerca is only 3.3 gigawatt hours, cumulative, by 2020. It would take less than 1% of current lithium production to supply that storage capacity as batteries over the next 5 years.
I think there’s a good chance that technologies other than lithium ion batteries will come to dominate grid storage. There are also a lot of historical examples of people saying “material X is too rare/expensive for truly widespread use — therefore it will inevitably be eclipsed at some point” and being wrong. A combination of additional prospecting for resources, improved extraction techniques, and material thrifting in final products can go a long way toward keeping incremental developments abreast or ahead of the revolutionaries.
David of Yreka 10.29.15 at 7:05 pm
Among my other burdens, I have some experience with storage and alternative-energy generation. I own an off-grid micro-hydro system, which generates about 400 watts 24/7. That doesn’t sound like much, but with the addition of about 4kwhr of lead-acid batteries (The power wall wasn’t available then) and a 3.3kw transistor inverter, it serves my purposes quite well. That system supports a refrigerator, a washer, a (propane) dryer, a a microwave, a toaster, a couple of very aggressive vacuum cleaners, lots of LED and CF lights, and occasional use of power tools (up to about 4 hp, that is to say, about 3 kw, which is a pretty meaty table saw). You have to pay some attention to nameplate current ratings and simultaneous uses, but overall it isn’t onerous. And in fact quite a bit of those 400 watts end up dissipated as heat when the batteries are full; throttling micro-hydro is much harder than throttling solar (hint: with solar, it can all be done by transistors).
I note that there is no air-conditioning, interior heat comes from burning wood, hot water from propane, and cooking from propane. So it isn’t a complete solution. But it’s close.
I note also that this isn’t a third-world standard of living. I imagine that there are some billions of people who would be very glad to have those 400W, or I suppose about 1500 watts solar (mileage might vary). I mean, lights and a refrigerator alone would be a real improvement in some places. So storage, even local and smallish, is a big deal. The Tesla power wall is available, IIRC, in 7.5 kWhr increments, which would be enough to power, e.g., my refrigerator for about a week with no input from any prime mover.
I note further that the cost of the grid, i.e. power transmission and distribution, is n/a because the house is off the grid; there is no grid there. Batteries and solar, you see, if sufficiently puissant, create a smooth tradeoff with no grid at all at one end, and a twentieth-century grid-and-station layout at the other. If you substitute any intermittent or low-output source (like my 400W micro-hydro) for solar, and any storage technology that suits for batteries, and you get the same answer. So it’s also possible to have a much skinnier grid, supplying, let us suppose, 400 watts per household, to a village with some common storage. That’s a lot less copper, digging, etc. than it would be to supply the peak 3.3kw per household that my system supplies, or the peak 20kw or so that’s common in on-grid California households of a certain age.
Putting all this together says to me that electrifying all of the villages in rural India might be quite reachable, with perhaps not a California lifestyle but a lot better than it is now, for a price tag roughly corresponding to the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Back of the envelope: a billion people, 4 people per household, cost of solar cells about $1/watt, 1600W installed solar per household, cost of batteries about $.5/Whr, storage 4kWhr/household, and we get about $4e12 before economies of scale and sundries).
And I am of the opinion that the rural third world is an important potential source of greenhouse emissions: business as usual might not have it so, but one suspects that as the march of progress totters on we will see more demand for power in such places, not less. Certainly I’d rather spend the price of a war or two in that way than on subsidized volcanoes pumping reflective smog into the public sky; or by burying the money in disused coal mines.
David of Yreka 10.29.15 at 7:48 pm
D’oh. I think my BOTE example was off the high side by a factor of 4.
DMC 10.29.15 at 9:18 pm
The really big breakthroughs in bulk(ie grid scale) energy storage are in high efficiency compressed air, where enormous amounts of energy can be stored with very little loss either in storage or regeneration; and so-called “flow batteries” which involve simple biological processes as a storage medium. Musk has indeed come up with a Lithium/Ion battery for household use with rooftop Photovoltaic systems
http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall
ZM 10.29.15 at 11:39 pm
“And I am of the opinion that the rural third world is an important potential source of greenhouse emissions: business as usual might not have it so, but one suspects that as the march of progress totters on we will see more demand for power in such places, not less. ”
The latest MSSI paper looked at what GHG emissions would be like taking equity concerns into account, and I Indian GHG emissions were to rise between now and 2030 given this.
Australia would need to reduce GHG emissions by 2030 by 50-65% in line with a 66% chance of staying under a 2 degrees C rise in temperature. I think this in not adequate myself but it shows the scope of a cut in GHG emissions in the next 15 years.
But since Indian emissions are low, they can rise by 2030 by 80-98%.
But I think the general idea is that it would be best if India and other less advanced economies “leapfrog” coal and go into renewables without expanding coal power stations and so on.
Portable solar lights and cooking is already better for the poor. One of my friends did a bit of work with an organisation that distributes solar lamps and cooking a while ago. It is really important especially for children in slums as it helps them do their homework and prevents health problems caused by kerosene lamps and cooking, or coal burners etc.
John Quiggin 10.29.15 at 11:39 pm
Cheryl Rofer @10 My comment was in response to ozajh@4, commenting on the OP. ozajh stipulated that decarbonizing electricity was feasible, so I started from there. And of course, stopping new thermal coal mines is a necessary step to decarbonizing electricity.
ozajh 10.29.15 at 11:40 pm
Prof. Quiggin @5,
Yes, indeed!!
Nothing I wrote in my previous post was intended to imply we shouldn’t keep trying.
Your last paragraph IMHO captures the essence of the situation, but I am concerned that it isn’t in the nature of businessmen OR politicians to find that will until they’re absolutely forced to. And, to be fair, general society wouldn’t let them if it meant even minor pain. I’m haunted by a memory of reading that Ford had seat belts as a below-cost option back in the 60’s ($5; trivial even then) to promote car safety, and most people wouldn’t buy.
Unfortunately, Climate Change may be (sociologically) an inherently intractable problem in that by the time the symptoms ARE sufficiently apparent it will be far, far too late to avoid very serious consequences.
Omega Centauri 10.30.15 at 5:09 am
I wanted to jump in in defense of EVs. Above I saw the claim that CO2wise an EV charged by a coal dominated grid is worse than an internal combustion vehicle. I’m not in possession of the numbers to dispute this, but it strikes me as wrong. I’d since many rightwing hack computations where they start with the worst possible premises such as, an EV must use as much energy to run as is represented by the gasoline consumed by an average car, i.e. counting the thermodynamic inefficiency of conversion on one side of the equation, but not the other. Also upstream losses in the creation of gasoline are usually ignored, but are in fact substantial. I note the EPA mileage equivalences on most EVs come in around 100mpg, or about twice the better ICE cars.
As for the carbon intensity of the grid, I contend that taking an average intensity of the current grid is wrongheaded. EC power demand is new electric demand (i.e. incrementally increasing electric power demand), and as such should be compared to the carbon intensity of newbuild electrical generation. The later has been dominated by renewables, and secondarily by nat gas, so its carbon intensity is much lower than the grid average. The fact that many EV purchasers also purchase solar PV system, only makes the greenness of the marginal demand even higher.
But, beyond that, overall systemwise, a great challenge will be converting the nonelectric fossil fuel demand to either electricity and/or alternative fuels. The greatest of these demands are transportation and heating. EVs will be a large part of the transport electrification effort. Heating applications can be converted from direct heating by combustion, to electrically powered heat pumps. So the technological feasibility of this conversion is already becoming clear.
The other advantage of EVs, has been the spur it has given to battery development. Something like the Powerwall has come along as a spinoff from EV battery development (and economy of scale effects of production of them). Batteries for grid storage would be much less developed had it not be for EVs.
ZM 10.30.15 at 5:42 am
Omega Centauri,
For heating, in urban areas and towns district heating is also something to be considered, as I believe it is more efficient and can use geothermal energy if it is available, or waste-to-energy.
maidhc 10.30.15 at 6:43 am
Some 60-70 years ago my grandfather had a cottage on the coast near Bateman’s Bay, which at the time had no electricity, water or sewerage. One of the neighbours was an ANU professor who had built a wind-powered electrical system using lead-acid batteries. I believe it was a 15V system that was used primarily for lighting.
There were no refrigerators–everyone used a Coolgardie safe. And cooking was a wood stove or Primus stove. So it wasn’t the lifestyle of David of Yreka. But it shows you what you can do with very primitive technology. David of Yreka’s setup shows how far we have advanced since those days.
ozajh: My father bought a Plymouth in 1963 (not brand new but still under warranty) and had the dealer install seatbelts. But people are still weird about seatbelts. A couple of years ago I got caught in a speedtrap in Wyoming, and the cop gave me a discount on the ticket because we were wearing seatbelts. Really? I automatically put on the seatbelt even if I’m just moving a car around the parking lot.
I also see people riding bicycles with a helmet dangling from the handlebars. In the 1.5 seconds between flying off the bicycle and hitting the pavement, you’re going to put the helmet on?
Zamfir 10.30.15 at 11:11 am
Omega, the numbers are not hard to run. A Tesla uses about 200 to 250 wh/km, measured at the battery. 200 seems to require effort, more than 250 is unfortunate circumstances or a very heavy foot. Out op of that, there’s 10 to 15% loss during charging. Let’s say a Tesla consumes 250 wh/km measured at the grid. Should not be far off.
The Dutch grid (not very clean) weighs in at close to 500 gr CO2/kWh. New power here is actually similar – mostly high -efficiency coal. High efficiency gas is better, something like 350 to 400 gr/kWh. Old coal plants are more like 800 gr/kWh. China is over 1000, even new builds are over 900
At 350 gr/kWh, a Tesla is comparable to a (real world) 3.8 liter/100km gasoline car. That’s seriously good – comparable to the most efficient (non plugin) Prius drivers. I looked at NOx when VW was in the news. That’s less good, a Tesla from the grid is closer to a good diesel, while a Prius is off-the charts good
At 500 gr/kWh, a Tesla is comparable to a 5.3 l/100km car. Very good, but not amazing. At the 800 or 1000 level of inefficient coal grids, a Tesla would not be good at all (except by US standards of fuel economy).
James Wimberley 10.30.15 at 11:40 am
@Dipper #9
We already have affordable storage on the Gwh scale: pumped hydro. The biggest such plant in the UK, at Dinorwig in Wales, is designed to reboot the entire UK grid if it crashes. The technology is old, so it gets no love in the innovation-obsessed greentech community. If you have plenty of ordinary hydro, like Norway or Brazil, you can forget about storage for wind and solar entirely. For the UK, the green alternative to Hinkley C is more wind plus 4 GW of undersea cables to Norway, which has gigantic hydro capacity and unused potential, and can serve as the battery for half of Europe.
Cranky Observer 10.30.15 at 2:15 pm
Everyone involved in bulk electricity production & dispatch loves pumped hydro. The problem is that once we moved out of the Age of Heroic Engineering (~1850-1960, plus some ancient Roman work) and started looking at the damage to Gaia required to build such projects we collectively had second thoughts. See The Storm King Mountain case study and Taum Sauk Mountain Station for examples. I personally find steel mills, 1920s LA civil engineering works, etc beautiful but when I’m down in the Ozarks, come around the corner on the Taum Sauk Trail, and see what was done to the top of Profit Mountain I get sick to my stomach.
cassander 10.30.15 at 2:26 pm
So, just to be clear, should we now consider Maggie Thatcher to be a great environmentalist for shutting down all those coal mines? If so, I eagerly await the retraction of decades of condemnation of her for that particular act.
Cranky Observer 10.30.15 at 2:28 pm
I would ask everyone to keep in mind that the people who designed & built the bulk electricity system (US/Canada, Europe, Russia, Oz) from 1910-2000 were not idiots, had deep knowledge of what they were doing, and did things to handle problems that most outside that world don’t know exist. Many of them are/were conservative bot technically (often for good reason) & politically, resistant to change (sometimes with good reason), and not on the best terms with the environmental movement (unfortunate). But they aren’t stupid, esp technically.
What has been done to the system since the 1994/2003 “market based ‘reforms'” driven by Chicago School thinking is another issue, and terrifies me.,,
Cian 10.30.15 at 3:34 pm
Chicago school types see ‘redundancy’ as ‘inefficiency’. Which is terrifying when you’re looking at any type of infrastructure.
Stephen 10.30.15 at 4:00 pm
According to the Mirror, the third most popular daily newspaper in the UK, and generally a supporter of the Labour party, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed policies is to reopen British coal mines. See http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/labour-leadership-frontrunner-jeremy-corbyn-6221443.
I wonder if that will affect CT readers’ opinion of the wisdom of Jeremy Corbyn, or of mining coal.
Cian 10.30.15 at 5:37 pm
I wonder if that will affect CT readers’ opinion of the wisdom of Jeremy Corbyn, or of mining coal.
Because clearly the only politicians worth supporting are those who are 100% right all of the time. Idiot.
Stephen 10.30.15 at 6:43 pm
Cian: if I have ever claimed that anyone (not myself, not even you) can be expected to be right 100% of the time, you can no doubt provide some shred of evidence. If not, forgive me for regarding you as a vulgar lout.
DMC 10.30.15 at 8:51 pm
Really, you can argue about carbon taxes and exchanges all the live long day but it’s the economic reality of a renewables sector that gets cheaper with every passing day thats going to be the death of coal as an energy source. Effectively ALL new investment in US energy production is in renewables since the photovoltaic price for a Kw/h hit grid parity in the US desert Southwest about 2 years ago. Even the most hidebound coal barons are beginning to see the handwriting on the wall and are frantically casting about for way to dump their current carbon based assets for something with a future
Matt 10.30.15 at 9:08 pm
Australian rooftop solar PV cheapest in world, says IEA report
This is quite remarkable: installed costs of US $1.76 per peak watt for residential rooftop systems, the most expensive kind. That’s cheaper than the median cost of multi-megawatt utility scale systems in the US.
How does Australia achieve such low rooftop prices? Why is the gap between residential rooftop and ground-mounted utility project prices so much smaller than in other countries? And how can we get some of that Australian success replicated in places that are just as sunny but currently have higher project expenses?
Joshua Holmes 10.30.15 at 9:22 pm
As for the carbon intensity of the grid, I contend that taking an average intensity of the current grid is wrongheaded. EC power demand is new electric demand (i.e. incrementally increasing electric power demand), and as such should be compared to the carbon intensity of newbuild electrical generation. The later has been dominated by renewables, and secondarily by nat gas, so its carbon intensity is much lower than the grid average. The fact that many EV purchasers also purchase solar PV system, only makes the greenness of the marginal demand even higher.
Solar’s best use is to charge batteries that, in turn, provide power on-demand. This would be absolutely ideal for electric vehicles, except that most EVs are charged at night. Electric vehicles make solar’s intermittency problem much worse, requiring even more day generation and grid back-up. The increased back-up would make solar prohibitively costly again. Wind can help just a little and nuclear is deader than dead, so the new electricity will need to come from natural gas for the time being. Still environmentally better than oil, but not by an enormous amount.
ZM 10.30.15 at 11:07 pm
Cassander,
“So, just to be clear, should we now consider Maggie Thatcher to be a great environmentalist for shutting down all those coal mines? If so, I eagerly await the retraction of decades of condemnation of her for that particular act.”
Ignoring the social consequences of closing the coal mines (and I think she closed them for social/political reasons not environmental reasons), it is often noted that Margaret Thatcher was reasonably forward thinking on climate change:
“Back in 1988, however, it was a different politician who put the science of climate change firmly on the global agenda. Unbeknownst to many, that person was Margaret Thatcher.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, she presented a series of high profile speeches on the topic of climate change. Armed with a degree in chemistry from Oxford, her scientific expertise enabled her to speak from a position of strength and knowledge about climate-related issues.
She used that knowledge to act as a champion for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and personally opened the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (the UK’s foremost climate change research centre).
What many people admired about Margaret Thatcher was her ability to embrace the potential of science to guide and lead the way on environmental issues. What marked her out even more is that she embraced the ‘precautionary principle’ years before other politicians did. As she once said:
“…the danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”
On November 8th 1989, she addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations about the need for nations to join together in tackling climate change.
It was a groundbreaking speech where she eloquently set out the case for international action and argued for an ongoing role for the IPCC. Indeed, some would argue that the IPCC owes its existence to the support that Thatcher gave it at that time.
Her political understanding of the issue also led to her call for a global response that would bring about real change:
“It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. Whole areas of our planet could be subject to drought and starvation if the pattern of rains and monsoons were to change as a result of the destruction of forests and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.””
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/04/09/3732680.htm
ZM 10.30.15 at 11:17 pm
In Australia the more conservative Liberal party was ahead on climate change policy in the 1990s when led by Andrew Peacock then by John Hewson the policy was to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2000 I think I read.
It wasn’t until John Howard was the leader that they changed on climate policy, as he was not in favour of acting on climate change. I am not sure why, but he probably looked to the mid-century past as an ideal time, compared to John Hewson who was more reforming and policy oriented.
Cassander 10.31.15 at 12:26 am
@zm
>Ignoring the social consequences of closing the coal mines (and I think she closed them for social/political reasons not environmental reasons)
Ignoring the social consequences is precisely what everyone here is doing in their enthusiasm for this proposal. Were it accomplished the people who suffer most from it won’t be western miners, though they will suffer, but those in undeveloped counties who will struggle to afford electricity.
ZM 10.31.15 at 12:33 am
But developing countries cannot afford coal and gas plants and coal and gas anyhow, or they wouldn’t be in “energy poverty” now.
Renewable energy is likely more affordable for developing countries, as you don’t need great big power plants but smaller house or neighbourhood or district level generation.
Omega Centauri 10.31.15 at 3:47 am
One advantage of developing countries with regards to using solar and wind, is that they haven’t been energy-spoiled. They are used to intermittent power, and solar/wind would be a big improvement even if it isn’t guaranteed available 24/7. Small batteries can allow things like lights, and frigs to run when there isn’t sun/wind available, and they will be able to shut down other uses until the sun shines again. Here in the developed world, we think we have to have unlimited power on demand, and it will take a huge investment in storage to achieve that.
guthrie 10.31.15 at 2:19 pm
James #30 – actually plenty of people think of pump storage. A new one has the okay in Scotland, although there seem to be some commercial and regulatory issues:
http://sse.com/whatwedo/ourprojectsandassets/renewables/CoireGlas/
The issue with doing it everywhere is that it is quite site specific, less so than wind turbines etc.
cassander 11.01.15 at 2:08 am
@ZM
>But developing countries cannot afford coal and gas plants and coal and gas anyhow, or they wouldn’t be in “energy poverty†now.
There isn’t a country on earth that doesn’t have some power. it’s a question of making it easier or harder to get them more at the margins. making coal more expensive makes it harder.
ZM 11.01.15 at 2:52 am
But the idea is not that by not using coal they won’t have access to any energy, it is that they will use Renewable Energy Technology instead.
And RET is generally smaller so should be more affordable in a lot of ways and is consistent with avoiding dangerous climate change.
DMC 11.01.15 at 8:42 pm
EVs can charge during the day as easily as at night with minimal forethought about where they get parked. And the thing about solar p/v for third world application is that its effectively INFINITELY scalable. You can always put up more panels. And pumped hydro still requires HUGE investments and enviromental impacts that are avoided by hi tech compressed air or even hydrogen cracking. The thing about the whole fossil fuel question has stopped being an “if” and became a “when” a couple years back when p/v hit grid parity. Even the dullest lads in the industry realized the party was over at that point.
cassander 11.01.15 at 10:30 pm
@zm
>But the idea is not that by not using coal they won’t have access to any energy, it is that they will use Renewable Energy Technology instead.
that costs more. if it didn’t cost more, then people would be abandoning coal on their own. But coal remains incredibly abundant and burning it to boil water is something we’ve gotten very good at doing very cheaply. RET might be cheaper in the long run, but your average bangladeshi factory worker doesn’t have the luxury of caring much about the long run, his needs are immediate.
geo 11.01.15 at 11:05 pm
cassander: your average bangladeshi factory worker doesn’t have the luxury of caring much about the long run, his needs are immediate
Good point. Since the need to stop burning coal is also immediate, how about dedicating a fraction of the proceeds of Piketty’s global wealth tax (and of the $100 billion fine Exxon should be made to pay for covering up evidence of climate change: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding) to making renewable energy affordable for Bangladeshi factory workers and other desperately poor people?
Matt 11.01.15 at 11:44 pm
Bangladesh produces far more natural gas than coal. Coal plants are slower to build and also have higher risks of time and cost overruns. New natural gas power plants produce about 50% lower CO2 emissions per megawatt hour than coal, and drastically lower emissions of acutely hazardous sulfur dioxide, particulates, and toxic metals.
Of course installing distributed solar is even faster and even cleaner. It’s a one-day job to provide a Bangladeshi household with a small solar system. It doesn’t require prior buildout of grid infrastructure. In 2014, Bangladesh installed over 3 million residential solar systems.
So your Bangladeshi factory worker will want distributed solar if minimizing time to installation is absolutely critical. Or want natural gas power if around-the-clock availability is more important. Or want coal if he’s been listening to The Australian pontificate about how imported coal is best for poor countries like his.
John Quiggin 11.02.15 at 1:33 am
As geo implies, if those making the international equity case for coal were sincere, they’d back more cost effective transfers, such as subsidised access to renewables, or a higher allocation of emissions rights in a global trading scheme, or just plain cash. They aren’t and they don’t.
Collin Street 11.02.15 at 1:45 am
As geo implies, if those making the international equity case for coal were sincere
Evidence strongly suggests that they’re making what they believe to be good-faith arguments: they use the same arguments and make the same mistakes in areas where you can presume they don’t want to mislead [internal policy-direction debates] and in areas where the deception techniques don’t work [such as for example here].
We have no reason to doubt Cassander’s sincerity. There is no falsity I can see, and I don’t think any falsity exists.
John Quiggin 11.02.15 at 2:37 am
Collin Street @54 Can you cite this evidence? My observation, on this particular issue, is that people who are opposed to doing anything about climate change are much more open about their tribal/political motivations when they are talking among themselves, or can assume a friendly audience, than when they are addressing the general public.
What we see in public is a lawyerly series of arguments in the alternative, that
(a) Climate change (in the sense of rapid global warming) isn’t happening
(b) If it is, it’s not caused by human action
(c) Regardless, it won’t be very damaging
(d) Even if it is damaging, doing anything about it will be economically disastrous
(e) Even if doing something about it were feasible, it would represent a victory for the bad guys (enviros, socialists, the UN, Agenda 21 etc). The circle is closed by the claim that the ample evidence disproving (a) to (d) has been ginned up by a global bad-guy conspiracy
In internal discussions, it’s clear that (e) is the main story. But in public discussion, the most preferred focus is on (a) and (b), sliding to (c) and (d) when these fail.
None 11.02.15 at 4:39 am
Collin Street @ 54 – “Evidence strongly suggests that they’re making what they believe to be good-faith arguments: they use the same arguments and make the same mistakes”
On the contrary, the evidence screams out that “they” are reading and regurgitating the same BS. oft-refuted talking points over and over again to the point of abusing the forbearance of the host. There’s nothing original or intelligent there & it’s very likely – 99.99 % – being done in bad faith.
Just outta curiosity – how does your foolproof spidey sense, the one you just used to absolve the commenter of wrong-doing, detect bad-faith arguments ? Why don’t you let the rest of us know so we can benefit ?
Sebastian H 11.02.15 at 6:09 am
Generally trying to dismiss things as bad faith argumentation just further polarizes things without helping. Often that is because you have to mischaracterize the argument to make it more clearly bad faith. In John’s list I would say that d) is the strong internal argument and e) is more properly “we know that d) [even if it is damaging, doing anything about it will be economically disastrous] and we know that the bad guys don’t bother looking at cost-benefit analysis properly so we should try to just shut them up].
Now that interpretation is WRONG but it isn’t in bad faith. I’m not sure I’d even say that emotional appeals are in bad faith, so much as they are marketing. [See for example the fact that anti-GMO boosters almost always focus on inchoate health concerns despite those concerns being flatly anti-factual. But worrying about agricultural monocultures isn’t very emotional.]
Collin Street 11.02.15 at 6:39 am
In internal discussions, it’s clear that (e) is the main story. But in public discussion, the most preferred focus is on (a) and (b), sliding to (c) and (d) when these fail.
Sure. But you use different arguments for different audiences. I mean, if I offered the argument, “the death penalty is bad because it costs a lot of money”, well, that’s not actually something that resonates strongly with me, but it is something that I genuinely believe to be true. If the arguments I do feel to be compelling — “killing people is bad and should be avoided as far as possible” — weren’t getting traction I might shift to something that I didn’t feel mattered but still felt was true. Is this insincere? I don’t think so.
I think that Cassander genuinely feels that coal electricity would be cheaper for indians than solar. I don’t think he’s got very good reason for believing this, and I don’t think it’s something that motivates his actions more than a teeny tiny bit, but the sincerity of the belief seems obvious to me.
[my point about internal discussions is more that they use bad logic — “paranoid style” — to the same degree as the ones for external consumption: the details of the arguments used might vary, but the core structure remains deeply flawed.]
Peter T 11.02.15 at 10:42 am
I don’t know if Collin Street is a mind-reader, nor do I know if cassandra is sincere. I do know a lot of people for whom the logic of validation boils down to “I don’t like it”, where anything at all may be cited in support. Are their arguments specious? Certainly. Are they sincere? Equally certainly: consistency and accord with observation are simply not relevant to them.
John Quiggin 11.02.15 at 10:14 pm
Australian experience is relevant as regards the balance between (d) and (e). In 2012, the Labor government introduced a carbon price of $27/tonne, which is high by world standards. The LNP, then in Opposition, described it as a “wrecking ball” through the Australian economy and promised to remove it, which they did a couple of years later. There was no noticeable impact (except for a modest change in electricity prices) on either occasion. The economic growth forecasts prepared by the LNP didn’t even mention it.
I conclude that fears of (d) are just as bogus as claims of scepticism about the science. It’s all culture war, all the time. In the context of culture war, where truth is entirely relative, the question of sincerity becomes moot.
Gareth Wilson 11.02.15 at 10:40 pm
How does Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything” fit into the argument? It’s amusing that she wrote a book about bad people cynically using natural disasters to push their own agendas, then used climate change to argue for a socialist revolution. On a similar note, how do you feel about replacing all taxes with carbon taxes? Yes, it would be brutally regressive, but if you’re genuinely concerned with saving the planet, and aren’t letting your political ideology get in the way…
Matt 11.02.15 at 11:31 pm
It sounds like you’re pulling a Klein yourself, but in pursuit of a certain tax agenda instead of an anti-capitalist one. There’s nothing contradictory about believing that we should have carbon taxes without eliminating every other kind of tax. Or do you think people are ideological hypocrites any time they propose Pigovian taxes without agreeing to tear down the rest of the tax system?
Gareth Wilson 11.02.15 at 11:37 pm
In this case I’m just using it as an extreme example, not advocating it. More broadly, how much are you willing to compromise your ideology for the sake of the planet? If the answer is “not at all”, if there’s absolutely perfect alignment between your political ideals and atmospheric physics, we’re entitled to find that a bit suspicious.
John Quiggin 11.02.15 at 11:47 pm
My estimate of the desirable carbon price is around $75/tonne, which would greatly reduce emissions. In a high emitting country like Australia, that might raise $20 billion a year, or a bit over 1 per cent of national income. So, it’s not a candidate for a single tax. As you say, consumption taxes are generally regressive, so a revenue-neutral package should focus on offsetting tax cuts for low income households, as happened in Australia.
I agree entirely, and it’s why I don’t regard any rightwing “sceptic” or “lukewarmist” as a good faith interlocutore. Most environmentalists initially favored detailed regulation and held the view that dealing with climate change would involve radical transformation of society (roughly, Klein’s view). In the 1990s, support for market mechanisms like cap and trade came from the political center and right. But as it’s become evident that these are the only feasible and cost-effective solutions, the great majority of environmentalists have come to support them.
So, for greens and most of the left, there have been big ideological compromises in the name of saving the planet. The right, on the other hand, have adopted fantasy science in order to defend a fundamentalist version of free-market ideology, heavily larded with the politics of tribal vendetta.
Matt 11.03.15 at 12:02 am
I prefer unionized labor but I’m willing to support (typically non-unionized) companies installing distributed solar over unionized coal production. I prefer curtailing fossil fuel exports but I would lift the US oil export ban in exchange for incentives to non-fossil energy. I’d be willing to roll back my state’s liquor taxes — which I voted in favor of just a few years ago — and replace them with carbon taxes.
Collin Street 11.03.15 at 12:08 am
So, for greens and most of the left, there have been big ideological compromises in the name of saving the planet. The right, on the other hand, have adopted fantasy science in order to defend a fundamentalist version of free-market ideology, heavily larded with the politics of tribal vendetta.
Sure.
But, look. “We need to keep digging up coal, because shipping it over largely non-existent transport networks to Banda Aceh or Mount Hagen, where it can be burnt in largely non-existent power plants and distributed over largely non-existent grids is something that has an important role to play in energy planning in the developing world” is a stupid argument. Obviously if you genuinely believe it you’ve got Problems, but if you genuinely believe that it’d convince somebody else then that’s no different.
If you’re offering the argument you’re ipso-facto disturbed, good faith or bad faith, and occam’s razor says we don’t need — and shouldn’t conclude — bad faith.
Gareth Wilson 11.03.15 at 12:09 am
Fair enough. I’ve seen a lot more scolding about the horrors of the market from environmentalists myself, but I admit that might not be the whole story.
steven johnson 11.03.15 at 1:23 am
The implicit position seems to be:
(a) Climate change (in the sense of rapid global warming) is happening
(b) It’s caused by human action
(c) It will be very damaging to later generations.
(d) Not doing anything about it will be economically disastrous for later generations.
[Geoengineering projects a la Freakonomics may or may not be feasible…but it is entirely unclear how they are to be incentivized. After some will benefit from global warming and others will be uncertain the benefits will outweigh the costs. This is a striking but entirely expected omission.]
The rub comes at (e), which you might expect to read: Doing something about it is feasible, and a victory for the good guys. This is sort of a strange conclusion too. Judging from a later comment “market mechanisms …are the only feasible and cost-effective solutions….” Therefore I suppose the real conclusion is (e) Market mechanisms can cure the problem, in a way that leaves wealth basically untouched, which makes it politically and socially feasible, but political reforms for which there is no elite support will keep all this from lowering the standard of living.
I am skeptical about the presumed efficiency of market mechanisms, and doubly skeptical about the magical appearance of reforms like the redistribution of income.
If you insist on market mechanisms, it seems to me that it would be prudent to pay people in coal producing areas for keeping carbon reserves, keeping it off market at a lower price. The higher price makes alternative energy sources more effective. And this should eventually be done for petroleum as well.
John Quiggin 11.03.15 at 5:54 am
@68 And yet, the Australian carbon tax pacakge did in fact deliver a net improvement in the progressivity of the system.
ZM 11.03.15 at 6:50 am
I don’t think a carbon price is a great idea.
Where energy producers are separate from energy retailers a carbon price could encourage energy retailers to choose renewables over fossil fuels. But you could just as easily mandate a staged process for energy retailers phasing in renewables and phasing out fossil fuels over a period.
The fossil fuel energy generators are going to have to shut down, so it is a bit unfair charging them carbon prices when they are also gong to have to shut down.
And fossil fuel mining companies are probably going to get slower, as fossil fuels won’t be used for energy anymore. And mining is already a field where investment is often risky and there are peaks and troughs.
I think financing the transition away from greenhouse gas emissions is important. But green development banks and green bonds are better ways of financing this than carbon prices in my opinion.
Even if there was a carbon price, or greenhouse gas price, there would still need to be other policies to manage all the various changes needed.
In terms of there being a left/right divide, I think what will happen is more partnerships between levels of government, businesses, non-government organisations, and members of the community.
This is already beginning to happen. In my shire the government is partnering with the community in a pilot program to make one of the smaller towns 100% Renewable. And the Melbourne City Council has an urban canopy strategy to reduce heat in the city by 4 degrees, and a new plan for that is to “green” some of the city laneways — and they are looking to see if residents and businesses will partner with council to maintain the plants in the laneways.
steven johnson 11.03.15 at 9:03 pm
“@68 And yet, the Australian carbon tax pacakge did in fact deliver a net improvement in the progressivity of the system.”
This is the one that was repealed right? That’s not persuading me that planning to reform capitalism is the sensible thing to do.
Stephen 11.03.15 at 9:19 pm
JQ@60: “It’s all culture war, all the time. In the context of culture war, where truth is entirely relative, the question of sincerity becomes moot.”
Does that apply to both sides in the war, or only to one of them?
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