Does wind power reduce carbon emissions? Counter-Response

Posted on 1 September 2010 by Barry Brook

About 1 year ago, I posted on BNC two important pieces by Peter Lang – “Does wind power reduce carbon emissions?” and a follow-up reply. Together, these stirred up considerable discussion (about 500 comments to date) and raised important questions about the ability of wind-energy to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels, when natural gas usage for backup is properly factored. Below is a response sent to me by Michael Goggin, Manager, Transmission Policy, American Wind Energy Association. I look forward to the ongoing debate this will foment on this key topic — I certainly look forwards to joining in.

I’d also like to flag, for those in Adelaide, that #3 in my series “Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy” is on tonight at the RiAus. Tonight’s topic is “Future Renewables“, covering engineered geothermal, ocean energy and next-generation biofuels. Hope to see some BNC readers there! And for those who can’t make it, there are always the videos.

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The Facts about Wind Energy’s Emissions Savings

Guest Post by Michael Goggin. Michael represents the wind industry on transmission matters, coordinates member input on the development of policy positions, facilitates the exchange of information between members, handles press inquiries on transmission-related issues, and advocates policy positions that advance wind industry interests. Through these activities, he works to promote transmission investment and advance changes in transmission rules and operations to better accommodate wind energy in the power system while maintaining system reliability. Prior to joining AWEA, he worked for two environmental advocacy groups and a consulting firm supporting the U.S. Department of Energy’s renewable energy programs. Michael holds a B.A. with honors in Social Studies from Harvard College.

Recent data and analyses have made it clear that the emissions savings from adding wind energy to the grid are even larger than had been commonly thought. In addition to each kWh of wind energy directly offsetting a kWh that would have been produced by a fossil-fired power plant, new analyses show that wind plants further reduce emissions by forcing the most polluting and inflexible power plants offline and causing them to be replaced by more efficient and flexible types of generation.

At the same time, and in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the fossil fuel industry has launched an increasingly desperate misinformation campaign to convince the American public that wind energy does not actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, we feel compelled to set the record straight on the matter, once and for all.

The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Desperate War Against Facts

Not to be deterred by indisputable data, numerous refutations, or the laws of physics, the fossil fuel lobby has doubled down on their desperate effort to muddy the waters about one of the universally recognized and uncontestable benefits of wind energy: that wind energy reduces the use of fossil fuels as well as the emissions and other environmental damage associated with producing and using these fuels.

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 56 Comments »

Peak Oil Discussion

Posted on 29 August 2010 by Barry Brook

Given the flurry of heated discussion on the topic of ‘peak oil‘ on another BNC post, I invited one of the protagonists, Dave Lankshear (a.k.a. “Eclipse Now” — see here for his blog), to write up a summary piece which described his position on the topic. This is given below, and should provide a good context for discussion; I also hope that this thread will help corral comments on this topic to a central point.

For earlier posts on BNC regarding peak oil (all done, incidentally, prior to BNC’s nuclear awakening), see:

Michael Lardelli on peak oil

Olduvai theory – crackpot idea or dawning reality?

Earth as a magic pudding and

Beyond peak oil – will black gold turn green?

I made some comments on the other comments thread about my position. To paraphrase: a fundamental problem with arguing that authorities like the IEA, EIA and ABARE are overlooking the looming ‘peak oil crisis’ is that so far, they have been correct — at least in the sense that it hasn’t yet happened, just like they predicted (or at least if it has, its ramifications to date on oil prices and availability have been minimal). As such, their predictions which ignore peak oil are, on the bald face of it, justified. Peak oil HAS happened in limited jurisdictions (including the US), but has always, to date, been compensated for by imports, or gas substitutes, other technological improvements etc., such that no nation has so far gone from being an high oil consumer to a low oil consumer on the back of peak oil.

Now I’m not making the argument here that peak oil is an invalid concept — at least regionally — and I’m not even arguing that it’s not a potentially serious future issue for which we ought to be preparing to counter now. But as far as authoritative energy bodies have been concerned, they currently have nothing to hang their heads in shame over in that regard. They’ve got it right. If they are right by luck, and misfortune is about to strike Australia and other industrial nations any time soon, then we may well curse their lack of foresight. But that’s a big IF, and there are many eminent people, including Prof Richard Hillis at my own University, who argue that by the time rising oil prices is a really serious issue, alternatives and substitutes will have been found, as they always have before. Price, they argue, will always be the principal driver of innovation. (In passing I note that this is the reason I argue that full recycling of used nuclear fuel has not yet taken hold with any real enthusiasm — mined uranium is still too cheap).

Anyway, now on to EN’s comprehensive primer, from a ‘peakist’s’ perspective…

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On peak oil authorities

by David Lankshear (Eclipse Now), Peak oil activist since 2004

Background

Recent debate on BNC has focussed on the issue of the reliability of government energy authorities in regards to the global peak oil debate. As someone with a mere Social Sciences background and no technical training, I was asked to submit an article on why I have the audacity to hold certain ‘energy authorities’ with a high degree of suspicion. Was it all just paranoid conspiracy theories I absorbed from the net? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the way our governments have been informed regarding our most important resource, oil?

Introduction to peak oil

In the last 5 years a handful of new government sponsored reports and agencies have suddenly sprung to address an urgent question. Are we suddenly facing the final oil crisis? Are we only years from the beginning of the end of the oil age? Has it already begun? With Scientific American just today predicting global peak oil by 2014 [1], how did we come to be asking such an important question so late in the picture?

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Future shock | 73 Comments »

Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor at UC Berkeley – low cost nuclear?

Posted on 25 August 2010 by Barry Brook

When I visited California earlier this month, Tom Blees and I paid a visit to Prof Per Peterson and Prof Jasmina Vujic at the Nuclear Engineering Department of UC Berkeley. After chatting over lunch, Per took us on a personal tour of his lab, which was quite an experience. Per’s research focuses on development of a high-temperature reactor with an incredibly high power density. Why? In short, it’s about the money. Per’s argument — and a quite persasive one — is that if the costs of advanced reactors can be brought way down, below that of pressurised and boiling water reactors (PWRs and BWRs), then their scaled-up deployment is highly likely. The following post owes a lot to Per’s insights on this critical issue.

Currently, one the most frequently cited criticism of nuclear energy, especially with reference to Europe or North America, involves economics. High construction costs for Advanced Light Water Reactors (ALWRs) have emerged as the number one issue limiting near-term deployment, and it now appears that the $18.5 billion in loan guarantees now available will fund no more than 2 or 3 new plants. The major area of anti-nuclear emphasis today is on preventing an expansion of this loan guarantee volume to the $50 to $100 billion level that the nuclear industry believes could be productively used in the near term. Even with loan guarantees, cited nuclear construction prices in the US remain high enough that nuclear remains marginally competitive and most utilities are slowing down their plans for new nuclear construction. Really, nuclear is getting nowhere very fast in the US at present, despite its great promise. AREVA France is now facing similar issues. China, happily, is not.

The main issue with Generation IV reactors such as the IFR or LFTR is the general expectation that they will be more expensive than ALWRs — at least in the early stages of deployment. Increasing the cost of new nuclear construction can hardly be viewed as a winning strategy these days.

For instance, a lot of design work was done by GE on the S-PRISM, after Department of Energy support ended, to bring down the cost. But it still needs to be updated to take into account new construction technologies and requirements (including aircraft crash). It would be very helpful to be able to argue convincingly that IFR technology will be less expensive than ALWRs. If this could be shown to be the case, one could also expect more substantive commercial interest and investment, such as a willingness to cost-share the Design Certification and to construct a prototype reactor outside the federal appropriations process (for example, under loan guarantees with some federal contract for procuring fuel irradiation services for transmutation fuel development and demonstration). Members of SCGI are working behind the scenes on these key issues, and progress is being made, but it’s naturally a protracted process.

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Filed under: Nuclear Energy | 83 Comments »

Accuracy of ABARE Energy Projections

Posted on 22 August 2010 by Barry Brook

Download the printable 13-page PDF (includes appendix) here.

By Peter Lang. Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy end use management projects.

Introduction

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) is an Australian government economic research agency that provides analysis and forecasting of, among other things, our energy production and usage. ABARE’s projections have been criticized by some hoping for large scale changes in our energy sector as unreliable, biased towards the fossil fuel industry, and as underestimating the contributions that will be achieved in the future by renewable energy, energy efficiency, smart grids and the like.

To test these criticisms I have compared ABARE’s projections [1] for the year 2004-05 with the actual figures for 2004-05 [2] [3] [4] [5] [6].  I have compared the following: primary energy production, electricity consumption, resource reserves, and CO2 emissions.  I also comment on what was being advocated by green energy proponents in 1990, and point out how little has changed.  The same arguments are being repeated again now by the same sorts of groups with similar beliefs and agendas.

The reason I’ve used the year 2004-05 for the comparison is because ABARE’s 1991 projections were for the period 1990-91 to 2004-05.  I have my own hard copies of that and earlier reports but not of later reports so I used this readily available source.

I make two points:

  1. ABARE’s projections are the best we have to work with.  We can’t do better than follow their projections.
  2. The arguments about what can really be achieved with renewable energy, energy efficiency improvements, smart grids and the like, have all been had before.  Twenty years later, nothing has changed.

These ideas proved excessively optimistic in the past, as shown here, and people with sound engineering judgement and experience are warning against repeating the same mistakes.  The effective solution is not to try to apply draconian methods.  The priority should be on developing rational policies, largely aimed at facilitating rational fuel switching.

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 220 Comments »

Climate change basics III – environmental impacts and tipping points

Posted on 19 August 2010 by Barry Brook

The world’s climate is inherently dynamic and changeable. Past aeons have borne witness to a planet choked by intense volcanic activity, dried out in vast circumglobal deserts, heated to a point where polar oceans were as warm as subtropical seas, and frozen in successive ice ages that entombed northern Eurasia and America under miles of ice. These changes to the Earth’s environment imposed great stresses upon ecosystems and often led to mass extinctions of species. Life always went on, but the world was inevitably a very different place.

We, a single species, are now the agent of global change. We are undertaking an unplanned and unprecedented experiment in planetary engineering, which has the potential to unleash physical and biological transformations on a scale never before witnessed by civilization. Our actions are causing a massive loss and fragmentation of habitats (e.g., deforestation of the tropical rain forests), over-exploitation of species (e.g., collapse of major fisheries), and severe environmental degradation (e.g., pollution and excessive draw-down of rivers, lakes and groundwater). These patently unsustainable human impacts are operating worldwide, and accelerating. They foreshadow a grim future. And then, on top of all of this, there is the looming spectre of climate change.

When climate change is discussed in the modern context, it is usually with reference to global warming, caused by anthropogenic pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. Since the furnaces of the industrial revolution were first ignited a few centuries ago, we have treated the atmosphere as an open sewer, dumping into it more than a trillion tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), as well as methane, nitrous oxide and ozone-destroying CFCs. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now nearly 40% higher than at any time over the past million years (and perhaps 40 million years – our data predating the ice core record is too sketchy to draw strong conclusions). Average global temperature rose 0.74°C in the hundred years since 1906, with almost two thirds of that warming having occurred in just the last 50 years.

What of the future? There is no doubt that climate predictions carry a fair burden of scientific ambiguity, especially regarding feedbacks in climatic and biological systems. Yet what is not widely appreciated among non-scientists is that more than half of the uncertainty, captured in the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is actually related to our inability to forecast the probable economic and technological development pathway global societies will take during the twenty-first century. As a forward-thinking and risk averse species, it is certainly within our power to anticipate the manifold impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and so make the key economic and technological choices required to substantially mitigate our carbon emissions. But will we act in time, and will it be with sufficient gusto? And can nature adapt?

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Ecological impacts | 59 Comments »

Science Educator award, Sydney talk, BNC 2 years old

Posted on 15 August 2010 by Barry Brook

On Friday night, 13th August, I was awarded the 2010 Community Science Educator of the Year. On September 8, 2010, I will be speaking on nuclear and solar energy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The BraveNewClimate.com blog is 2 years old! Details below…

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I got back from China at midday on Saturday and spent the next 24 hours in bed recovering from a stomach bug. It often happens after a long haul of travelling, and, after 3 weeks abroad, it’s great to finally be home. I’m now on the road to recovery — enough to enjoy reading the blog comments and to see what an impact the BNC readers made in Tassie, Vic and NSW in this year’s Walk Against Warming. Great work guys! I still have 300+ emails to wade through and reply to, however. Anyway…

A little over 2 years ago, on 7 August 2008, the Brave New Climate blog, later to be shorthanded to BNC, was born. Little did I foresee the evolution it would take over the next 290 posts and 20,000 comments (although John Morgan turned out to be quite prescient). It’s been a real learning experience for me, and has been thoroughly enjoyable (albeit exhausting and exasperating at times, in about equal measure). I’ve been helped greatly along the way by talented guest posters, including regulars Peter Lang, Geoff Russell, Tom Blees and many others. My sincere thanks — and here’s to another year of trials and tribulations, as we, together, think critically about sustainable energy and climate change.

In part recognition of the blog’s influence in educating the general community, I was very proud to be awarded the title of ‘Community Science Educator of the Year‘ for 2010, at the SA Science Excellence awards:

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 18 Comments »

‘Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan’ – Critique

Posted on 12 August 2010 by Barry Brook

‘Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan’ – Critique

Download the printable PDF here

[An addendum on wind farm and solar construction rates, by Dave Burraston]

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Edit: Here are some media-suitable ‘sound bytes’ from the critique, prepared by Martin. Obviously, please read the whole critique below to understand the context:

  • They assume we will be using less than half the energy by 2020 than we do today without any damage to the economy. This flies in the face of 200 years of history.
  • They have seriously underestimated the cost and timescale required to implement the plan.
  • For $8 a week extra on your electricity bill, you will give up all domestic plane travel, all your bus trips and you must all take half your journeys by electrified trains.
  • They even suggest that all you two car families cut back to just one electric car.
  • You better stock up on candles because you can certainly expect more blackouts and brownouts.
  • Addressing these drawbacks could add over $50 a week to your power bill not the $8 promised by BZE. That’s over $2,600 per year for the average household.

By Martin Nicholson and Peter Lang, August 2010

1. Summary

This document provides a critique of the ‘Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan’ [1] (referred to as the Plan in this document) prepared by Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE). We looked at the total electricity demand required, the total electricity generating capacity needed to meet that demand and the total capital cost of installing that generating capacity. We did not review the suitability of the technologies proposed.  We briefly considered the timeline for installing the capacity by 2020 but have not critiqued this part of the Plan in detail.

In reviewing the total energy demand, we referred to the assumptions made in the Plan and compared them to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) report on Australian energy projections to 2029-30 [2]. The key Plan assumptions we questioned were the use of 2008 energy data as the benchmark for 2020, the transfer of close to half the current road transport to electrified rail and transfer of all domestic air travel and shipping to rail which could have a devastating impact on the economy. In the Plan, total energy demand was reduced by 63% below ABARE’s assessment. We recalculated the energy demand for 2020 without these particular assumptions. Our recalculation increased electricity demand by 38% above the demand proposed in the Plan.

We next turned our minds to the amount of generator capacity needed to meet our recalculated electricity demand. We assumed that the existing electricity network customers would require the same level of network reliability as now. At best the solar thermal plants would have the same reliability and availability of the existing coal fleet so the network operators would at least require a similar proportion of reserve margin capacity as in the existing networks. We kept the same proportion of wind energy as in the Plan (40%) and recalculated the total capacity needed to maintain the reserve margin. The total installed capacity needed increased by 65% above the proposed capacity in the Plan.

The Plan misleadingly states that it relies only on existing, proven, commercially available and costed technologies. The proposed products to be used in the Plan fail these tests. So to assess the total capital cost of installing the generating capacity needed, we reviewed some current costs for both wind farms and solar thermal plants. We also reviewed ABARE’s expectation on future cost reductions. We considered that current costs were the most likely to apply to early installed plants and  that ABARE’s future cost reductions were more likely to apply than the reductions used in the Plan. Applying these costs to the increased installed capacity increased the total capital cost almost 5 fold and increases the wholesale cost of electricity by at least five times and probably 10 times. This will have a significant impact on consumer electricity prices.

We consider the Plan’s Implementation Timeline as unrealistic.  We doubt any solar thermal plants, of the size and availability proposed in the plan, will be on line before 2020.  We expect only demonstration plants will be built until there is confidence that they can become economically viable. Also, it is common for such long term projections to have high failure rates.

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Filed under: Renewable planet | 265 Comments »

Nuclear Power or Climate Change: Take Your Pick – a BNC business card and printable FAQ pamphlet

Posted on 10 August 2010 by Barry Brook

So now I’m about to fly out to China for 5 days – probably the last of my international trips for 2010. I may not see you here on BNC until I get back to Australia, because WordPress blogs are blocked by the ‘Great Firewall of China’. It is possible, though difficult, to punch through this, but I honestly doubt I’ll try, since I have so many other things on anyway. Meanwhile, here are two things to talk over on BNC.

First, I want to highlight the ‘business card’ for BNC that was made by John Morgan. It’s terrific:

I suggest you print some of these out, and have them on hand to pass to people when you wish to talk about climate change and energy solutions. If nothing else, it’ll get people thinking (and reading BNC!). A good place to start handing them out is at the Walk Against Warming event, this coming Saturday.

Second, I’m very proud to distribute a new information pamphlet on nuclear power and climate change. It was created by my sister, Marion Brook. She calls it “The BraveNewClimate Real Climate Action FAQ”. It is designed to be printed, double-sided, and then folded thrice, to create a 6-panel, single-sheet pamphlet. It’s just brilliant (!), and relates directly to the more extensive FAQ material collected here.

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Nuclear Energy | 62 Comments »

US Travel update, ‘Argonne West Diaries’ upcoming

Posted on 7 August 2010 by Barry Brook

Hi BNC folks. I’m currently sitting in Los Angeles airport waiting to board a flight to Sydney in a few hours time — it’s my first time on the internet for a few days. It’s been a fabulous trip to the US, and I intend to post up a couple of ‘diary’ entries in which I detail my visit to California (including the eye-popping lab of Per Peterson at UC Berkeley) and my incredibly awesome visit to Argonne West at Idaho Falls, site of the EBR-I and EBR-II fast reactors and the fuel conditioning facility (with lots of photos, just to prove it!).

Two things to note for now, both on a non-nuclear front.

First, The 6-day intensive workshop in Chicago was terrific, and Corey Bradshaw has done a great job of describing its outcomes. Rather than re-hash this, I’ll quote Corey:

Linking disease, demography and climate

Last week I mentioned that a group of us from Australia were travelling to Chicago to work with Bob Lacy, Phil Miller, JP Pollak andResit Akcakaya to make some pretty exciting developments in next-generation conservation ecology and management software. Also attending were Barry Brook, our postdocs:Damien Fordham, Thomas Prowse and Mike Watts, our colleague (and former postdoc) Clive McMahon, and a student of Phil’s, Michelle Verant. At the closing of the week-long workshop, I thought I’d share my thoughts on how it all went.

In a word, it was ‘productive’. It’s not often that you can spend 1 week locked in a tiny room with 10 other geeks and produce so many good and state-of-the-art models, but we certainly achieved more than we had anticipated.

Let me explain in brief why it’s so exciting. First, I must say that even the semi-quantitative among you should be ready for the appearance of ‘Meta-Model Manager (MMM)’ in the coming months. This clever piece of software was devised by JP, Bob and Phil to make disparate models ‘talk’ to each other during a population projection run. We had dabbled with MMM a little last year, but its value really came to light this week.

We used MMM to combine several different models that individually fail to capture the full behaviour of a population. Most of you will be familiar with the individual-based population viability (PVA) software Vortex that allows relatively easy PVA model building and is particular useful for predicting extinction risk of small populations. What you most likely don’t know exists is what Phil, Bob and JP call Outbreak – an epidemiological modelling software based on the classic susceptible-exposed-infectious-recoveredframework. Outbreak is also an individual-based model that can talk directly to Vortex, but only through MMM.

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Filed under: Nuclear Energy, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Energy in Australia in 2030

Posted on 3 August 2010 by Barry Brook

I’m about to hit the road once again, this time to take the great American road trip for 13 hours, from Sacremento to Idaho Falls, with Tom Blees, leaving bright and early tomorrow morning. Today I had a fantastic visit to UC Berkeley and the lab of Prof Per Peterson, and will have lots more to say about this, and my upcoming Argonne National Lab visit, in some ‘diary’ entries once I get back to Australia.

For now, I’d like to present an essay I wrote for COSMOS magazine for their issue ‘Seven Visions of the Future‘ (No. 33). To get your copy of the 2030 special issue, and to read the other great articles in this future gazing exercise, order it from here:

WHAT WILL THE WORLD BE LIKE IN 2030? Leading thinkers – including Jeffrey Sachs, Sir David King and Alan Trounson – forecast the next 20 years of medicine, energy, transport, cities, food, and communications. From driverless cars to regenerative organs, the world of the next 20 years may look very different from today.

My sincere thanks to COSMOS editor Wilson da Silva for allowing me to reproduce this article on BNC.

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ENERGY: A REAL TURN ON

The time has come for society to face up to the true cost of our energy consumption, says Barry Brook. By 2030, nuclear may be leading the march.

In a modern society like Australia in 2010, we take energy for granted. Whether it be flicking on the light switch and television in your house at night, cranking up the air conditioner to take the edge off a hot day, or turning on the cooking hotplates, your invisible energy slave is always there. More pervasively, it is working behind the scenes to deliver you food, clothing, and manufactured goods. It allows you to travel rapidly from place to place, by car, rail or plane. It is no exaggeration to say that cheap and readily available energy constitutes the most fundamental basis of our economy.

Yet, in many respects, we are living in a transitory dream world. The reason is simple. The way we are generating our energy is unsustainable – both environmentally and economically. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – provided the concentrated sources of energy we required to build our great industrial and information enterprises. But this was a Faustian bargain, and the devil’s due. With the looming threats of dangerous climate change, oil shortages as demand exceeds supply, and rapidly growing demand for an increased quality of life from the developing world (that 80% of humanity – more than 5 billion people – who live on less than $10 a day), a new energy revolution must begin. By the year 2030, it will need to be in full swing, or there’ll be serious consequences.

The next 20 years marks a defining moment in world history. I don’t say this flippantly. Global society must make the choice to set itself on the path to a secure and non-polluting energy future, or it will stumbles and regress. Either way, by 2030, we’ll very likely know whether we’ve collectively been able to chart the right course. Now is certainly the time to make the difference.

Worldwide, a variety of important energy choices will be made during this next decade. In Asia, especially the rapidly industrialising mega-economies of China and India, a huge amount of coal-based electricity infrastructure is being built. This must be phased out. Aside from global warming, it causes chronic regional air and water pollution that consigns millions to an early death each year. Developing countries can see that an ongoing dependence on coal, gas and oil is not in their long-term interest, and are vigorously pursuing alternative options such as nuclear and hydro power. Thanks to clean energy credits from the developed world, they are also deploying wind and solar. In the medium- to long-term, it difficult to know which technologies will come to dominate in these new economies, but cost and scalability will be amongst the most important determinants.

What of Australia? I want to focus in this essay on ‘stationary energy’, which is predominantly delivered in the form of electricity, this being a particularly convenient and flexible ‘energy carrier’. Clearly, the energy replacement problem is broader, but even for transportation and agriculture, it is likely that we will eventually have to ‘electrify’ most of their operations in a world beyond oil, even if it involves using electrical power plants to generate synthetic fuels such as ammonia and methanol.

Today, in 2010, the majority of Australia’s electricity is generated by burning black (55%) and brown (22%) coal, with smaller contributions from natural gas (14%), hydro dams (7%) and wind (1%). Our installed capacity adds up to about 50 gigawatts of power and this stationary energy production results in the release of 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Future shock, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 24 Comments »

Balancing carbon with smoke and mirrors

Posted on 31 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy.

Have I got a deal for you! I’ll be marketting my new patent-pending sandals in China and if just 1% of the population buy them, then I’ll sell 13 million pairs. To test my business plan, I gathered 100 Chinese into a room and sold 3 pairs of sandals. How can my plan fail?

The Wentworth Group of concerned scientists released a paper recently called “Optimising Carbon in the Australian Landscape”. It has a similar deal, but one for all Australians. It quotes a CSIRO estimate that there is a biophysical capacity to store 1,000 million tonnes of CO2eq in soils and vegetation every year for the next 40 years. The Wentworth group isn’t aiming to capture 1% of this “market”, but 15%. A mere 15% would offset 25% of estimated annual greenhouse emissions for the next 40 years. Who could resist a deal like that? How could it fail?

Leaving aside any problems with the methods behind the CSIRO estimate, it seems reasonable to ask just how hard this “market” is. Why pick 15%? Why not 20%? or 10%? But even more important than a justification of the number is the definition of the slippery little word offset. It needs examination. This isn’t semantics, but goes to the heart of the possibilities of climate change stabilisation.

Climate target constraints

First I’ll repeat the physical ground rules for new BNC readers. These basic limits come from James Hansen and coworkers recent paper Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?. Hansen has simplified the presentation in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. He calculates what will happen to atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century if we can phase out unsequestered coal use entirely by 2030. This is unlikely considering the number of coal fired power stations still being built, but where would it put us in 2150? It would give us an atmospheric CO2 level of about 400 ppm and continued climate change with risks of crossing points of no-return to a climate of more and bigger storms and even more serious global food problems than presently. So, even the daunting challenge of phasing out coal by 2030 isn’t enough. Pulling the CO2 level down below 350 ppm will require further action. If we actually want to undo ongoing ocean acidity changes and arctic sea ice shrinkage, then Hansen suggests that a level of perhaps 300-350ppm is required. In addition, we must cut non-CO2 forcings … black carbon and methane being the biggest.

What is the most that a total roll back of 200 years of deforestation could yield? According to Hansen and the best available estimate of what those 200 years of deforestation have contributed to the atmosphere, the most is about 60 ppm … and we need it all.

This is the scenario within which the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and others are discussing offsetting and carbon credits.

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Filed under: Ecological impacts, Emissions reduction | 12 Comments »

Nuclear Power – Yes Please! (why we need nuclear energy to beat climate change)

Posted on 28 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Here is my side of the ABC Environment ‘debate’ I’ve had with Ian Lowe, based around my book ‘Why vs Why: Nuclear Power“.

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The arguments against nuclear power are hackneyed and wrong

In part two of a two-part debate on the prospect of nuclear power in Australia, Barry Brook argues that the arguments against nuclear are hackneyed and wrong. Part 1, “Nuclear Power – No Thanks!” by Ian Lowe can be read here.

The world is caught between dwindling energy resources and increasing climate change.

As China and India expand their economies, with the very human aim of improving the prosperity and quality of life enjoyed by their citizens, the global demand for cheap, convenient energy grows rapidly. If this demand is met by fossil fuels, we are headed for both an energy supply bottleneck and, due to the massive carbon emissions from fossil fuels, a climate disaster.

Ironically, if climate change is the “inconvenient truth” facing our fossil fuel-dependent society, then the inconvenient solution staring right back is advanced nuclear power. Not, as many suppose, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind (although they will play some role).

There is a shopping list of ‘standard objections’ mounted by those who challenge the viability or desirability of nuclear power. None of these arguments stands up to scrutiny.

Opponents claim that if the world ran on nuclear energy, uranium supplies would run out in at most a few decades and nuclear power plants would then have to shut down. This is false. The nuclear fuels, uranium and thorium, are both more abundant than tin, and with the new generation of fast spectrum breeders and thorium reactors, we would have abundant nuclear energy for millions of years. Yet even if it lasted a mere 1000 years, we would have ample time to develop exotic new future energy sources.

Critics argue that past nuclear accidents mean the technology is inherently dangerous. However, this simply ignores the fact that it is already hundreds of times safer than the coal, gas and oil we currently rely upon. Moreover, passive safety features do not rely on engineered intervention and remove the chance of human error, making it impossible to have a repeat of serious accidents such as Chernobyl.

Some contend that expanding commercial nuclear power would increase the risk of spreading nuclear weapons. Firstly, this has not been true historically. Furthermore, the products of modern ‘dry’ fuel recycling in fast reactors cannot be used for bombs. Indeed, burning plutonium in fast reactors takes this material permanently out of circulation, and is the most practical disposal mechanism imaginable.

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 81 Comments »

Walk Against Warming in a city near you on 15th August 2010

Posted on 26 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Rob Parker. Rob is a civil engineer with over 30 years experience in both design and engineering construction of dams, freeways, water treatment and general infrastructure. More recently, when confronted by the environmental impacts of our patterns of consumption and growth, he decided to look at ways to influence our political policies. Its turned out to be much harder than first thought. He was a candidate for the NSW Labour Party in the State seat of Goulburn before realising the massive difficulties in getting the ALP to address climate change in a meaningful way. Rob lives in the NSW village of Berrima and campaigns on rational ways to address climate change.

The passion and guts displayed on Friday by Dr. Bradley Smith in Brisbane was a great demonstration of what happens when people of knowledge and courage are repressed. He grabbed Gillard’s limelight and shone it on the real issue of the need for urgent action on climate change.

Through the political haze of Abbot’s denial, Gillard’s gormlessness and the Green’s pursuit of failure we need some hardnosed clarity. On the 15th August supporters of real action on climate change have the chance to demonstrate our conviction that Nuclear Power is uniquely placed to mitigate climate change.

The annual Walk Against Warming will be held in a city or regional centre near you. Check out the locations in your state be visiting http://www.walkagainstwarming.org/

Last year I went to the walk in Wollongong with the smiley face “Nuclear Power – Yes Please” poster. I certainly got some responses – some angry, some very welcoming and others just perplexed. My motivation is always to defeat climate change and educate my fellow Australian’s into the best way of achieving that goal.

This year, in line with the plans for action contained in the Brave New Climate post of the 21st June, we can do a whole lot more.

The Sydney event will be held on the Sunday at 12 noon at Belmore Park opposite Central railway. Come along with your own poster and tees shirt. The Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy (EFN) tee shirt can be purchased from the Pistol Clothing Company in Sydney.

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Nuclear Energy | 79 Comments »

Travels to US and China: ecological models and the Argonne National Laboratory

Posted on 23 July 2010 by Barry Brook

I’m about to fly out for a 3-week trip to the US and China (24 July to 15 Aug).

But fear not! The BNC blog will remain active over that time. Indeed, there are quite a number of new posts in the pipeline for this period, including guest pieces by Rob Parker (this Sunday), Geoff Russell (next week) and Peter Lang (soon — an executive summary and review of the ZCA critique), a couple of new energy policy and planning essays by yours truly, plus parts III and IV of the climate change basics series, part II of the sea level rise post, and some more TCASE entries.

What will I be doing on my travels, you may ask? Well, first I fly to Chicago, where I’ll be working for a week with Dr Robert Lacy, Prof Resit Akcakaya and collaborators, on integrating spatial-demographic ecological models with climate change forecasts, and implementing multi-species projections (with the aim of improving estimates of extinction risk and provide better ranking of management and adaptation options). This work builds on a major research theme at the global ecology lab, and consequently, a whole bunch of my team are going with me — Prof Corey Bradshaw (lab co-director), my postdocs Dr Damien Fordham, Dr Mike Watts and Dr Thomas Prowse and Corey’s and my ex-postdoc, Dr Clive McMahon. This builds on earlier work that Corey and I had been pursuing, which he described on ConservationBytes last year.

After that research workshop, I fly back across the states to Sacramento CA, where I’ll be staying with Tom Blees (author of Prescription for the Planet) for a few days. I’ll also be meeting up with Steve Kirsch and a few other SCGI folks then, which should be great. Then, Tom and I will drive up to Idaho Falls and stay for a few days with Dr Charles Till, who ran the superb R&D programme for the Integral Fast Reactor at the Argonne West National Laboratory. Chuck, along with other members of the 1984-1994 IFR research team, Dr Michael Linberry and Dr John Sackett, will give Tom and I a personalised tour of what is now the Idaho National Laboratory, including the site where the Experimental Breeder Reactor II was run, and a visit to the fuel conditioning facility. Needless to say, I can’t wait!

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Filed under: Ecological impacts, Nuclear Energy | 11 Comments »

Climate change basics II – impacts on ice, rain and seas

Posted on 21 July 2010 by Barry Brook

This is part II, on impacts of climate change. Be sure to read climate change basics I – observations, causes and consequences, and for more on pragmatic energy solutions, see here.

Climate change impacts on ice, rain and sea level

The term “global warming” says it all – a heating of the atmosphere right across the world. But that does not mean that the warming, or its impacts, will be the same everywhere. Regional and local differences can cause things to be worse, or better, depending on where you are.

One example of this unevenness is in the Arctic. Snow and ice melt over progressively larger areas and for longer periods as the temperature rises, causing the Earth’s surface to be duller. Bare rock, soil, vegetation and the open ocean are all much darker than bright ice, and so, just like the dark panels on solar hot water systems, absorb substantially more sunlight. This leads to greater heating, more melting, and so on – just one example of an amplifying feedback that can make global warming worse that it would otherwise be. There are many other such feedbacks, some of which remain poorly understood and could lead to more severe and more rapid warming than expected.

Perhaps the biggest regional impact of climate change faced by mid-latitude temperate regions (where most of the ‘developed nations’ are located), is, ironically, shifts in tropical-equatorial weather systems. Global warming causes the overturning tropical air masses that circulate in giant loops (called Hadley Cells and the Walker Circulation) to expand north and south. This has been recently shown to have happened already – up to 2° of latitudinal expansion over the last 30 years. Atmospheric heating also causes polar winds to whip around the Southern Ocean more rapidly. Together, these effects of global warming act to push rain-bearing mid-westerly weather systems further north and south. So instead of places like southern Australia being doused in rainfall brought in from the Indian and Southern Ocean, progressively more of this rain will be dumped uselessly over the sea, below the continental margin. This means less rainfall for Australia’s agricultural areas, as well other mid-latitude regions such as South Africa, the Mediterranean, Mexico and the western United States.

With less rain in these areas, the vegetation and soils will dry. In combination higher temperatures, the risk of bushfires intensifies. Heatwaves are the most dangerous culprits in this relationship. The 15-day March 2008 heatwave in Adelaide was, on the basis of the 20th century temperature record, a staggering 1 in 3000 year event. Yet under a mid-range projection of global warming (should no action be taken to quickly curtail carbon emissions), such an event would be an expected part of an average summer.

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A, Ecological impacts, Future shock | 20 Comments »

Climate change basics I – observations, causes and consequences

Posted on 18 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Thanks to some strong community input, I now have a F.A.Q. page on BNC, which current has three posts: Take real action on climate change – Part 1: The strategy and Part 2: Frequently Asked Questions, and A checklist for renewable energy plans. In its current form, the FAQ focuses on the action we should take to address the problem of climate change, but skirts around the issue of why I, and the indeed the vast majority of environmental scientists, consider anthropogenic climate change to be a crucially important problem to mitigate (and adapt to). To address this deficiency, I’ve written a couple of posts which attempt to explain the problem in a simple and easily understood way. Here is the first one — feedback welcome.

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What is climate change? Observations, causes and consequences

Earth’s climate has always been dynamic and changeable. In the distant past there have been bouts of intense volcanic activity, periods when vast deserts spanned much of the globe, warm epochs when forests covered Antarctica, and glacial ages when much of Europe and North America were entombed under miles of ice. When large climatic changes occurred rapidly, a mass extinction of species was the result. Life later recovered, but this process inevitably took millions of years.

Just one species – humans – are now the agent of global change. As we develop our modern economies and settlements at a frantic rate, we have caused deforestation and fragmentation of natural habitats, over-hunting of wild species we use for food, chemical pollution of waterways and massive draw-downs of rivers, lakes and groundwater. These patently unsustainable human impacts are operating worldwide, are accelerating, and clearly constitute an environmental crisis. Yet the threat now posed by human-caused global warming is so severe that it may soon outpace all others.

Recent global warming is caused principally by the release of long-buried fossil carbon, by burning oil, natural gas and coal. Since the furnaces of the industrial revolution were first ignited in the late 18th century, we have dumped more than a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, as well as other heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons. The airborne concentration of CO2 is now 38 per cent higher than at any time over the past million years (and perhaps much longer – information beyond this time is too sketchy to be sure). Average global temperature has risen about 0.8°C in the last two centuries, with almost two-thirds of that warming having occurred in just the last 50 years. [play with some plots, here]

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Filed under: Climate change Q&A | 49 Comments »

BNC community analysis of the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Report

Posted on 14 July 2010 by Barry Brook

A new report, Zero Carbon Australia 2020, has been released today. Its aim is to “show how Australia can reach 100% renewable energy within a decade, using technology that is commercially available right now“. From their website:

The guiding principles of ZCA 2020 include:

  • Australia’s energy is provided entirely from renewable sources at the end of the transition period.
  • All technological solutions employed are from proven, reliable technology which is commercially available.
  • The security and reliability of Australia’s energy supply is maintained or enhanced by the transition.
  • Food and water security are maintained or enhanced by the transition.
  • Australians continue to enjoy a high standard of living.
  • Social equity is maintained or enhanced by the transition.
  • Other environmental indices are maintained or enhanced by the transition.

The download is an 8.6 MB colour PDF, 194 pages long (including appendices). But it’s a nicely presented document, so it not a difficult read and can be done in parts.

Here, I throw a challenge down to the BNC community — analyse and critique! [I will also participate, of course]. Some guiding principles, in the spirit of TCASE:

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 560 Comments »

Vote for Brave New Climate!

Posted on 14 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Brave New Climate, has been listed as one of the 10 finalists

for ‘Australia’s best science blogger 2010‘.

If you think I deserve to win, vote now!

The winner of The Big Blog Theory, as determined by public vote, will be named the official National Science Week 2010 blogger and will receive a four-day blogging trip to their choice of events during National Science Week (14 – 22 August) and a Huawei U8230 Android Smartphone with $100 prepaid credit.

As the official National Science Week 2010 blogger the winner will have the opportunity to blog about the events they attend, the people they meet and some of the interesting things they learn. The tour prize will include travel, accommodation and entry to events during the four-day tour

Thanks to the esteemed panel for their choice!

So, if you feel inclined, click  here and lend BNC your support. You need to provide your name and email address, and then reply with a confirmation email (to check you’re not a bot).

In related news, BNC has now passed 700,000 hits and 19,000 comments since launching in Aug 2008, and my Twitter feed has 600+ followers. Thanks for all your ongoing support.

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Filed under: Hot news in climate science | 5 Comments »

TCASE 12: A checklist for renewable energy plans

Posted on 12 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Guest post by John D. Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC.

A 10-page printable PDF version of this post can be downloaded here.

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Beyond Zero Emissions recently launched their Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan (read the BNC community critique here).  It joins a growing list of renewable energy plans – Desertec, Greenpeace’s Energy [R]evolution, World Wildlife Fund Australia’s Clean Energy Future, Peter Seligman’s Australian Sustainable Energy, and others around the world.

The need to cut ourselves loose from our carbon based economy is urgent, and proponents of these plans are to be applauded.  But, can they work?  Many posts and comments at Brave New Climate have focussed on the hurdles facing large scale renewable power.  Here I have tried to distill these points into a checklist to bear in mind when considering these plans.  The list is followed by some brief exposition of each item. Some of these items refer to some Australian specifics, but similar questions will arise in other countries.

These items are not a set of pass/fail criteria, rather, they are prompts to ask “Did the plan address this point, and how?” The list is not exhaustive – many other questions could be raised, and hopefully will be in the comments.  I have not really considered nuclear power in this list because I am not aware of similar comprehensive attempts to plan carbon free nuclear economies (perhaps there should be) – there would be questions, but unlike renewable energy, we have existence proofs that it can be done.

So, how does the plan check out?

0. The checklist

□     What is the emissions reduction target?

□     What is the budget for the plan?

□     How is the plan to be financed?

□     What is the cost of power if the plan is implemented?

□     What is the CO2 avoidance cost ($/tCO2 avoided)

□     Can the plan scale to 100% emissions reduction?

□     What is the timeframe of the plan?

□     What current and future demand is assumed?

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Filed under: Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet, TCASE Series | 106 Comments »

TCASE 11: Safety, cost and regulation in nuclear electricity generation

Posted on 8 July 2010 by Barry Brook

Guest post by DV82XL. He is a Canadian chemist and materials scientist. For his previous article on the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, see here, and on why an informed public is key to acceptance of nuclear energy, see here.

Unless you intend to design a nuclear reactor from scratch, you are going to have to accept whatever level of safety is designed into the one you buy. No original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is going to derate their product to cut costs for you. And that will go for things you will have to build yourself, like the containment, and spent fuel facilities. No one is going to risk their brand letting you install their product on a substandard site. But this is not where costs get out of control anyway.

Nor is it in operating safety protocols, which at any rate are tied into general plant integrity routines that must be done anyway. Ultimately cutting back in this area runs the risk of some failure occurring that might stop the plant from producing power, (i.e. stop making money) or causing harm to an employee. In other words most of this falls under housekeeping anyway.

The only place where costs can be controlled which is often (erroneously) referred to as safety issues, is unreasonable procedural nonsense during the initial build. Even this is not the real expense in and of itself, but it is the delays that these can cause that push cost overruns into the stratosphere. It is seeing that these do not get out of hand that is the real way to keep costs down. In any sane world too, most of these procedural issues would be properly referred to as Quality Assurance, or Quality Control (QC), as they would have little to do with real safety issues, but in the politically charged world of nuclear power plant (NPP) builds, the antinuclear forces spin these to security and safety issues their own ends.

Okay, so how to avoid this sort of pitfall? First and foremost there must be only one government agency/department/ministry/whatever, in charge of oversight, and it needs to be at the national level, and it needs to exercise eminent domain. Once the project has broken ground, it cannot be delayed by politics, or by lower levels of government. Some local water commissioner up for re-election cannot be permitted to bring the project to a halt while he grandstands demanding a second opinion on groundwater contamination, two years after the first one was done and approved. Similarly, abuses of the legal system by non-government organisations (NGO’s) have to be made impossible as well. Many of these like Greenpeace, are well aware of the financial dynamics of these builds, and are past masters at using the courts to get injunctions for the sole purpose of running up the costs, in the hope of getting a project cancelled. In fact they have been successful more than once with this tactic.

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Filed under: Nuclear Energy, TCASE Series | 28 Comments »

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