The Power Makers’ Challenge – and the need for Fission Energy (Part 1)

Posted on 11 May 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Martin Nicholson. Martin studied mathematics, engineering and electrical sciences at Cambridge University in the UK and graduated with a Masters degree in 1974. He has spent most of his working life as business owner and chief executive of a number of information technology companies in Australia. He has a strong interest in business and public affairs and is a keen observer of the climate change debate and the impact on energy. He is author of Energy in a Changing Climate, as well as an upcoming book on sustainable energy systems, and is the lead author of the 2011 paper in the journal Energy “How carbon pricing changes the relative competitiveness of low-carbon baseload generating technologies“. He wrote a popular post last year on BNC entitled: Cutting Australia’s carbon abatement costs with nuclear power

This post, and the  one to follow, provides an insight into Martin’s new book: The Power Makers’ Challenge: and the need for Fission Energy

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PART 1

Introduction from the Book Cover

“The Power Makers – the producers of our electricity – must meet the demands of their customers while also addressing the threat of climate change. There are widely differing views about solutions to electricity generation in an emission constrained world. Some see the problem as relatively straight forward, requiring deep cuts in emissions now by improving energy efficiency, energy conservation and using only renewable resources. Many electricity industry engineers and scientists see the problem as being much more involved.

The Power Makers ’ Challenge: and the need for Fission Energy (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2813-7) looks at why using only conventional renewable energy sources is not quite as simple as it seems. Following a general introduction to electricity and its distribution, the author quantifies the reductions needed in greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector in the face of ever increasing world demands for electricity. It provides some much needed background on the many energy sources available for producing electricity and discusses their advantages and limitations to meet both the emission reduction challenge and electricity demand.

By analysing the three main groups of energy sources: renewable energy, fossil fuels and fission energy (nuclear power), readers can assess the ability of each group to meet the challenge of both reducing emissions and maintaining reliable supply at least cost. It is written for both non-technical and technical readers.”

Synopsis

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are changing the landscape for our Power Makers – those good folks that deliver our ultra-reliable electricity supply.

The Power Makers have been largely reliant on fossil fuels for providing abundant and relatively cheap energy and delivering a high standard of living in developed countries. Even so, more than a third of all humanity still has no access to electricity. For those living in less-developed countries, their long-term aspirations are to achieve the same high standard of living enjoyed in the developed world. That means access to abundant cheap energy – and much more of it!

The mainstream scientific consensus is that GHG emissions are the primary cause of recent global warming. In addition, fossil fuels are a finite resource. Continuing to use fossil fuels as our main energy source for generating electricity could lead to both an energy supply and climate disaster: two good reasons for migrating our electricity generation away from fossil fuels.

Technically, economically, socially and politically – we face many challenges in trying to harness non-fossil-fuel energy on a large scale.

The challenge facing our Power Makers is to maintain a reliable, cost effective electricity supply with substantially less emissions. With over 65% of our electricity currently coming from fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) that produce 44% of the world’s GHG emissions, this is no small challenge. The Power Makers have no choice but to clean up the fossil fuel power plants (or replace them) while maintaining the supply security paramount for both Power Makers and their customers.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Renewables | 9 Comments »

Carbon offsetting of uranium mines?

Posted on 6 May 2012 by Barry Brook

Below is an article I wrote for the South Australian Mines and Energy Journal on carbon emissions of uranium mines. (This, and others in the SACOME series, have also been published by my co-author, Ben Heard, on DecarboniseSA.com). This is a new version of a blog post I published on BNC a few years ago — but streamlined, simplified and updated. I hope you find it useful.

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South Australia is host to the single largest known deposit of uranium in the world, at Roxby Downs. The recent plans to massively expand production at its Olympic Dam mine will take uranium production from 4,000 tonnes of uranium oxide (tUO2) in 2010-2011 to 19,000 tUO2 by the early 2020s. This enlarged open-cut polymetallic mine, run by BHP Billiton, will also produce 730,000 tonnes of copper (the principal product) and 25 tonnes of gold.

Some environmentalists have objected stridently to this plan for an expanded mine, including Greens MLC Mark Parnell who said: “Our state risks being left with a huge carbon black hole as we become the greenhouse dump for one of the world’s richest companies“. Such hyperbolic claims are easily made and can sound persuasive. But are they be supported by evidence? Let’s consider the accuracy and context of such an argument from a climate science perspective.

The greenhouse gas emissions from the mine expansion will come predominantly from heavy use of diesel and other liquid fuels for vehicles and mining equipment, and a 650 MW increase in electricity demand (likely gas powered), including the supply of 200 ML/day of desalinated water to the site. The result is that carbon dioxide equivalent emissions could peak at 4.7 million tonnes per year (tCO2-e). The Environmental Impact Statement acknowledged this would add almost 10 per cent to South Australia’s forecast emissions in 2020 under a business-as-usual scenario.

Now, let us consider the net effect of this on global greenhouse gas emissions.

The uranium from the expanded mine will fuel nuclear power plants in countries like the U.S., France, U.K., South Korea, China and Japan, to be used for electricity generation. A modern 1,000 MWe thermal nuclear reactor requires about 170 tUO2concentrate each year, in order to fabricate 16 tonnes of slightly enriched fuel rods. This plant will then produce 8,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of reliable, on-demand electricity, used to directly displace baseload coal or gas.

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | 2 Comments »

What volume of synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can we generate in the future?

Posted on 30 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Chris Uhlik. Dr Uhlik did a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford 1979–1990. He worked at Toyota in Japan, built robot controllers, cellular telephone systems, internet routers, and now does engineering management at Google. Among his 8 years of projects as an engineering director at Google, he counts engineering recruiting, Toolbar, Software QA, Software Security, GMail, Video, BookSearch, StreetView, AerialImaging, and research activities in Artificial Intelligence and Education. He has directly managed about 500 engineers at Google and indirectly over 2000 employees. His interests include nuclear power, photosynthesis, technology evolution, artificial intelligence, ecosystems, and education.

(Ed Note: Chris has written previously on BNC on calculating the cost of ending global warming)

In a hypothetical carbon-neutral future, we can still use liquid hydrocarbon fuels if they are synthesized from non-fossil carbon sources. This analysis looks at how much carbon we use today and which of those uses can be readily substituted by electricity and synthetic fuels.

I’ll use numbers for the United States as economic and energy use data are well published by various government agencies such as the National Laboratories and the Energy Information Administration.

Flows of fossil carbon in the US Economy: (Please forgive the excess precision)

Coal: 9.08e11 kg/year which I estimate to be about 64e12 moles/carbon/year

Petroleum: 19,498,000 bbl/day, (incidentally I was surprised to learn that only 46% of this ends up in motor fuel)

Natural Gas: 7.4e11 m^3/year produced + 1.1e11 m^3 cuft/year imported

Cement: 2.5e9 Mg clinker/year worldwide of which I estimate 24% is used in the United States (by ratio of USA GDP/world GDP)

This amounts to a fossil carbon flux of about 170 x 10^12 moles of fossil carbon being extracted and released to the atmosphere each year in the United States.

To what uses is it put?

  • Electricity generation (coal and gas fired thermal plants)
  • Automobiles and light trucks (light transportation)
  • Highway trucks and rail trains (heavy transportation)
  • Ships
  • Airplanes
  • Heating oil
  • Steel production
  • Cement production
  • Fertilizer production
  • Residential and Commercial gas
  • Industrial gas
  • other materials

By combing a variety of sources and making educated guesses, I break it down like this:

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Filed under: Emissions, Future | 1 Comment »

The future of Brave New Climate

Posted on 26 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.  ― Lao Tzu

The Brave New Climate (BNC) blog has seen many changes in its almost 4 years of existence. I’d like to think of this as an evolutionary process — underpinned by a natural selection of ideas and advocacy based on what I think is important and workable, framed in the context of identifying viable options for global climate change mitigation. As the quote above emphasizes, this flows naturally from a progress of thought and effort.

A few years ago I announced a shift in focus on the website, in the post ‘A necessary interlude‘. Now things on BNC are changing again.

In summary, the motivation for the new changes are: (i) time limitations, (ii) audience outreach and (iii) freedom and flexibility. I’ll first explain what is going to happen, and then elaborate a little on the justification.

1. A BNC Discussion Forum has been established. This will, hereafter, be the main place for comments.

2. A new website – KnowMoreFearLess.com [KMFL] — will be launched (currently locked and under development). This will be focused on public education on nuclear power for greenhouse gas mitigation.

3. The Front Page of the bravenewclimate.com website will become a semi-static PORTAL page. This will include fixed links to the BNC Discussion Forum (see 1), the BNC archives (after some further indexing and re-organisation of this page), KMFL, and also provide a summary (with links) to the latest BNC blog post.

4. The flow of BNC blog postings will be less frequent and more opportunistic — rather than regular and scheduled (the historic rate was a post every 3-5 days).

The BNC twitter feed (microblogging) will not change in character or frequency — mostly consisting of up-to-date links to articles on climate change and low-carbon energy.

Okay, now some explanation on these changes.

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Filed under: Future, Hot News | 29 Comments »

IFR FaD 13 – cost comparison of IFR and thermal reactors

Posted on 22 April 2012 by Barry Brook

This is the fourth and final part of the series of extracts from the book Plentiful Energy — The story of the Integral Fast Reactor by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang.

Reproduced with permission of the authors, these sections describe and justify some of the key design choices that went into the making the IFR a different — and highly successful — approach to fast neutron reactor technology and its associated fuel recycling.

These excerpts not only provide a fascinating insight into a truly sustainable form nuclear power; they also provide excellent reference material for refuting many of the spurious claims on the internet about IFR by people who don’t understand (or choose to wilfully misrepresent) this critically important technology.

For reference, here are the previous entries:

Part 1 (metal fuels and plutonium).

Part 2 (coolant choice and reactor configuration).

Part 3 (lessons learned from fast reactor capital costs).

This last extract considers the cost differences and similarities between the next-generation IFR and the current generation of thermal reactors (using a comparison with a generic LWR). Note that this section does not include the costs of fuel (mining, enrichment, fabrication, recycling, and so on). That is, however covered later in the book:, with full fuel-cycle cost estimate being: LWR = 0.55 c/kWh at current uranium cost (Table 13-4) and IFR 0.44 c/kWh — or $35 million/GWyr (Table 13-9).

This section is drawn from pages 277-280 of Plentiful Energy. To buy the book ($18 US) and get the full story, go to Amazon or CreateSpace. (Note that the images below do not come from the book).

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Generic cost comparison between the IFR and LWR (light water reactor) 

Comparison of fast reactor capital cost with the capital cost of commercial LWRs is not straightforward either. First, the part that should be straightforward, that of identifying the capital cost of commercial reactors, isn’t straightforward at all. U.S. LWRs were built twenty or more years ago, under wildly varying construction environments, some prior to the anti-nuclear campaigns of cost increases, some during the height of them, and a few after. Comparisons between PWR, BWR, heavy water reactors, and gas-cooled reactors are not straightforward either, even though, with the water reactor types, we are dealing with actual experience. Comparison with yet-to-be-designed fast reactors involves more uncertainty. However, the details of the makeup of capital costs do provide useful insight.

The Department of Energy’s Energy Economics Data Base (EEDB) defines a code of accounts for estimating and categorizing such cost components. [6] For illustrative purposes, a reference PWR capital cost breakdown developed for the EEDB is presented in Table 13-2. [7] Since the database was generated in the 1980s, the absolute dollar amounts have little relevance to today, so the cost breakdown is expressed in terms of percentage of the total direct costs.

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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 12 Comments »

Off to Russia

Posted on 15 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Well, I’m just about to hop on a plane to Russia to visit for a week — destination Moscow. This is part of my duties as a member of the International Awards Committee for the Global Energy Prize (see here for details).

Whilst in the heart of the former Soviet Union, I’ll hook up with Tom Blees (President of SCGI) and Evgeny Velikhov (President of the Kurchatov Institute), among others. It’s going to be my first trip to the country, and although I’ll only get to see Moscow this time around, I’m returning to the country in again June (partly for the GEP awards ceremony, after which I go directly to the U.S. for lots of other exciting activities); on the June trip, I’ll go to the wonderful old city of St Petersburg. Lucky me, eh?

Anyway, I hope to be able to post one or two updates on BNC during the trip, provided I can hook up to the internet from time to time.

In the meantime, here is something that will be of interest to many readers, given recent discussions on the blog. Apologies if you’ve seen it before.

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Economic/Business Case for the Pyroprocessing of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF)

While many still claim that conservation together with wind and solar will solve the world’s energy problems, they are dead wrong. Nuclear power is the only proven alternative source of carbon-free energy that can be developed rapidly enough and to sufficient scale to meet the world’s growing need for energy. This report outlines the actions which must be taken; both to reduce the amount of troublesome nuclear waste called Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) and simultaneously create the fuel needed by Fast Reactors. The authors are certain the use of Pyroprocessing to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and Fast Reactors, particularly in the form of Integral Fast Reactor (IFRs), are inevitable in a fossil fuel-free world.

Read entire article (This is a large file. Please be patient while it loads.)

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Uncategorized | 18 Comments »

The Nuclear Energy Solution

Posted on 12 April 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson. Bill is a physicist and a radiologist, and wrote Lessons about nuclear energy from the Japanese quake and tsunami about a  month into the Fukushima crisis. Greg is an English professor with specialization in critical theory. Both are based in the U.S. For further details about the authors, see the Endnote to this post.

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NUCLEAR ENERGY: THE ONLY SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY PROBLEM AND GLOBAL WARMING  By Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson

The following is a brief rationale and outline of a much longer essay that is also available on bravenewclimate.com (CLICK HERE to download the printable PDF, 58 pages).

This essay unifies four critical contentions that the authors cannot find combined in any other of the many sources on nuclear energy.  Our four contentions are 1) fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) are now the main source of global warming; 2) they must be completely replaced with clean energy sources, chiefly nuclear energy since the inherent physical properties of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal severely limit their use; 3) radiation at the dose ranges encountered in nature, as well as by the public in nuclear accidents, actually promotes, rather than destroys, health; and 4) the profit system presents an inherent obstacle to achieving the goal of clean, sustainable energy.

The authors hold the opinion that all four of these aspects are inseparable, and that a general understanding of all is necessary if any progress is to be made in solving the problems of inaccessibility of adequate electricity for much of humanity and anthropogenic global warming that is nearing tipping points that threaten to make self-amplifying and irreversible changes.  No one of these four, in our view, can be safely put aside as a distraction from some “main” point.

Recognition that the earth is warming and that human activity, rather than natural cycles, is now responsible is only the beginning of this solution — a necessary but not sufficient condition.  Similarly broad general understanding of the severe inherent limitations of all clean alternatives to nuclear energy is needed to hasten the building of nuclear plants world over, and to end the wasteful efforts to scale up wind and solar particularly, that profit a few but at the expense of rich governmental subsidies and higher energy costs that further restrict access to electricity.

Furthermore if nuclear energy is to gain the respect and advocacy of the public, the exaggerated fears of radiation have to be brought under rational control, which requires first that governmental regulatory agencies around the world be forced to admit that they have been basing their restrictions on an obsolete relic of the Cold War — one that falsely claims that all radiation is harmful to our health regardless of how low the dose, known as the linear-no-threshold (LNT) assumption.  However, the science of biological effects of ionizing radiation overwhelmingly points to an evolved response that protects against any harm from low levels of radiation, known as the hormetic effect, or hormesis, a very general biological response to all sorts of chemical and physical agents.

Read more »

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 67 Comments »

IFR FaD 12 – lessons learned from fast reactor capital costs

Posted on 7 April 2012 by Barry Brook

This is the third of a four-part series of extracts from the book Plentiful Energy — The story of the Integral Fast Reactor by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang.

Reproduced with permission of the authors, these sections describe and justify some of the key design choices that went into the making the IFR a different — and highly successful — approach to fast neutron reactor technology and its associated fuel recycling.

These excerpts not only provide a fascinating insight into a truly sustainable form nuclear power; they also provide excellent reference material for refuting many of the spurious claims on the internet about IFR by people who don’t understand (or choose to wilfully misrepresent) this critically important technology.

Click here for part 1 (metal fuels and plutonium).

Click here for part 2 (coolant choice and reactor configuration).

The third extract looks at the history of costs for commercial fast reactors to date (e.g., Superphenix in France). What can this tell us about the possible future costs of the IFR? (the final part will do a comparison with light water reactors). This section is drawn from pages 274-277 of Plentiful Energy. To buy the book ($18 US) and get the full story, go to Amazon or CreateSpace. (Note that the images below do not come from the book).

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Fast Reactor Capital Cost: What can be learned from fast reactor construction experience to date?

A model of the Superphenix nuclear power station, a now closed fast breeder reactor. While it was open, it was highly controversial and once on the receiving end of a eco-terrorist rocket attack.

Some notion of likely cost competitiveness can be gained from past fast reactor construction experience, but the information available is limited. It can be said that the capital costs per MWe of the early fast reactors built around the world were much higher than those of LWRs. But the comparisons are not by any means direct and unambiguous. In comparison to the LWR, every difference between the two adds a cost increment to the fast reactor. With one significant exception, they were much smaller in size and electrical capacity than the LWRs built for commercial electricity generation. There were only a few of them. They were built as demonstration plants, by governments underwriting fast reactor development. There was basically one demonstration per country, with no follow-on to take advantage of the experience and lessons learned. Nor were they scaled up and replicated. The LWR had long since passed the stage where first-of-a-kind costs were involved, and had the advantage of economies of scale as well. Further, their purpose was commercial, with the attendant incentive to keep costs down. None of this has applied to fast reactors built to the present time.

Experience with thermal reactor types, as well as other large-scale construction, has shown that capital cost reduction follows naturally through a series of demonstration plants of increasing size once feasibility is proven. This has been true in every country, with exceptions only in the periods when construction undergoes lengthy delays due to organized anti-nuclear legal challenges. But this phased approach of multiple demonstration plants is no longer likely to be affordable, and in any case, with the experience worldwide now, it is probably unnecessary for a fast reactor plant today. Estimating the “settled down” capital cost potential is not an easy task without such experience. Nevertheless, as the economic competitiveness of the fast reactor is taken to be a prerequisite to commercial deployment, we do need to understand the capital cost potential of the fast reactor and what factors influence it.
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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 54 Comments »

Open Thread 22

Posted on 2 April 2012 by Barry Brook

The Open Thread 21 has passed 500 comments and is getting a little bloated, so time for a new one.

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

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There was quite a bit of discussion in the previous OT on radiation levels and the Fukushima evacuation zone. Relevant to this is the recent announcement that Japan will lift the entry ban on some cities within the prefecture. To quote:

In areas where annual radiation measurements are below 20 millisieverts per year, a government safety guideline, residents will have free access to their homes during the day and will be allowed to return permanently at the earliest opportunity post-decontamination. Where readings are between 20 to 50 millisieverts annually, evacuees will also have unrestricted access during the day although their permanent return will come later. In areas where measurements top 50 millisieverts, residents will not have free access and they will not be allowed to return for a minimum of five years.

A past BNC guest poster, engineer Chris Uhlik, analysed the situation a private email distribution list, and I thought his summary with respect to LNT (linear no-threshold hypothesis of radiation damage to living organisms) was very useful. With Chris’ permission, I reproduce it below:

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The official position of every regulatory agency & scientific body, and even the people who will tell you “we don’t know what’s going on under 50 mSv”, the weight of the evidence favors LNT.

Here’s what I think is going on:

Under 50mSv/year we can’t find any epidemiological data to support LNT. There is simply too much noise and other effects to see sub-0.5% changes in cancer rates in populations where the variations from other effects (smoking, stress, chemical exposures, etc) are in the range of 20–45%.

The rates of different kinds of cancers are affected differently by radiation. Some kinds appear to increase while others decrease. Some kinds of cancer are more treatable than others and thus result in different mortality rates, even if the occurrence rate increases. Simple statements like “cancer death rates show a LNT response to radiation exposure” are way too simplistic to be true, but such statements are easy to base regulations around. When regulators feel a need to support a regulation with some math, they’d rather choose simple math than more-correct, but difficult to understand and explain math.

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Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 282 Comments »

Environmentalism in the mud: responding to Jim Green’s attack on Barry Brook

Posted on 28 March 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Ben Heard. Ben is Director of Adelaide-based advisory firm ThinkClimate Consulting, a Masters graduate of Monash University in Corporate Environmental Sustainability, and a member of the TIA Environmental and Sustainability Action Committee. After several years with major consulting firms, Ben founded ThinkClimate and has since assisted a range of government, private and not-for profit organisations to measure, manage and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and move towards more sustainable operations. Ben publishes regular articles aimed at challenging thinking and perceptions related to climate change and sustainable energy at decarbonisesa.com.

Ed: This is a cross-post from Decarbonise SA.

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This has got to stop, and it stops when people start taking a stand… The schism in environmentalism over nuclear power is now well underway. It is sad that the other side seem to have decided in their righteousness that they are allowed to play dirty and go after individuals, using the same cherry-picking abuse of science that is all to familiar in climate change denial.

I was saddened this week to be forwarded a hatchet job on my friend and collaborator, Professor Barry Brook, authored by Jim Green of Friends of the Earth (FoE). Saddened, but not surprised. FoE has form in this department, having deployed these guerrilla tactics before against James Lovelock when he became inconveniently persuasive on the subject of nuclear power. It would seem that it is now Barry’s turn.

Jim Green, Australia's anti-nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth

I have come to know Barry very well over the last 12 months. I know him well enough to know that he is both the last person who would ask for defending, and the most deserving of defence. So I offer this response to Green’s work. I really, dearly hope it will be read outside my circle of existing readers and supporters. I have some important things to say.

Green begins by getting some things really, really right. Namely, that Brook is highly qualified, highly regarded, extensively published, completely independent of the nuclear industry, and operating from a genuine concern about climate change. When you add to that the fact that he is highly influential, it becomes easy to understand why FoE have resorted to getting the hatchet out.

We are told Barry glibly believes “it’s nuclear power or it’s climate change”. This is an inaccurate and out-of-context portrayal of his position. It is a deeply considered and thoroughly researched position from a highly qualified scientist, the head of Climate Science at Adelaide University no less. It also happens to be a position that is largely shared by a long and growing list of prominent environmentalists (including the aforementioned Lovelock, James Hansen, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas) who have taken themselves through a similar process of critical examination of this problem as has Barry.

Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, Adelaide University. Prominent Australian nuclear advocate and founder of Brave New Climate

More times than I can recall, Barry has made the point that he does not care which technology does the job of rapid decarbonisation to avoid the worst effects of climate change. It is simply his well researched opinion that the central technology will need to be nuclear power or we will not succeed. Others are free to agree or disagree with him. But he states his case so cogently and robustly that every day more and more people are compelled to agree.

To suggest he is in error, Green refers to other, non-nuclear plans that supposedly demonstrate the redundancy of nuclear including a 2011 piece by Dr Mark Diesendorf of the University of NSW. I’m familiar with the Diesendorf study. I read both a critique of it and then a rebuttal from Diesendorf himself at this great site called Brave New Climate, run by a guy called Barry Brook. You see Barry (and therefore BNC) is not remotely concerned by robust debate on energy solutions. He positively encourages it, including running a very interesting and useful piece from none other than Jim Green! BNC is probably the best moderated and therefore most reliable place on the Australian web for robust, genuine debate.

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Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear, Policy | 54 Comments »

Dietary Guidelines Committee ignores climate change

Posted on 24 March 2012 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. His previous article on BNC was: Feeding the billions on a hotter planet (Part III).

He also wrote a brilliant recent piece for The Punch: Fukushima was no disaster, no matter how you spin it

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IPCC calls to reduce meat consumption

Back in 2008, head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri told the world to eat less meat because of its large greenhouse footprint.

At about the same time the National Health and Medical Research Council appointed a committee to update Australia’s Dietary Guidelines … last issued in 2003. The preface from the 2003 document is clear:

“The Australian Food and Nutrition Policy is based on the principles of good nutrition, ecological sustainability and equity. This third edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults is consistent with these principles. The food system must be economically viable and the quality and integrity of the environment must be maintained. In this context, among the important considerations are conservation of scarce resources such as topsoil, water and fossil fuel energy and problems such as salinity.”

The Terms of Reference give no instructions about what the committee should do other than to update the documents with the best available science. Environmental issues were clearly worthy of lip-service in 2003, if nothing else. Any reasonable update to the 2003 document should see those issues front and center.

Our impacts on the climate will flow on into most other environmental issues, whether we are concerned with other species, or more narrowly focused on the habitability of the planet for our own. If food choices have a significant impact on climate forcings, then documenting and explaining the extent of those impacts to the public should have been front and centre in the workings of this committee. In addition to the head of the IPCC, no lesser scientific authority than NASA climate scientist James Hansen said in 2009:

If you eat further down on the food chain rather than animals, which have produced many greenhouse gases, and used much energy in the process of growing that meat, you can actually make a bigger contribution in that way than just about anything. So that, in terms of individual action, is perhaps the best thing you can do.

He made an equivalent statement to me in 2008 and advised that he was changing his own diet and was “80-90% vegetarian“.

We shall see later that Hansen’s claim is easily supported.
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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Emissions, Impacts | 47 Comments »

Further critique of ’100% renewable electricity in Australia’ – winter demand and other problems

Posted on 21 March 2012 by Barry Brook

Recently on BNC, I ran two guest posts on the economic and technical challenges of supplying an energy-intensive, developed-world market using 100% renewable sources (under a situation where large hydro and/or conventional geothermal can provide little or no contribution). The case study was the national electricity market of Australia, with an average demand of 25-30 GWe.

100% renewable electricity for Australia – the cost

and the response, from one of the authors of the original simulation study:

100% Renewable Electricity for Australia: Response to Lang

Below is a further commentary, by Ted Trainer of UNSW, which focuses particularly on the issues of supplying winter demand, the feasibility of the biomass option for the gas backup, and the “big gaps” problem (i.e., long-run gambler’s ruin). Ted asked me to post it here on BNC to solicit constructive feedback (and has promised me he will be responding to comments!).

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Comments on

“Simulations of scenarios with 100% renewable electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market”  Solar 12011, 49th AuSES Annual Conference,  30 Nov – 2 Dec., By Ben Elliston, Mark Diesendorf and Iain Macgill, UNSW.

Ted Trainer; 21.3.2012

The paper outlines a supply pattern whereby it is claimed that 100% of present Australian electricity demand could be provided by renewable energy.

The following notes indicate why I think that although technically this could be done, we could not afford the capital cost.  This is mainly because the analysis seems to significantly underestimate the amount of plant that would be required.

I think this is a valuable contribution to the discussion of the potential and limits of renewable energy.  It takes the kind of approach needed, focusing on the combination of renewable sources that might meet daily demand.  However it is not difficult to set out a scenario whereby this might be done technically; the problems are what quantity of redundant plant would be needed to deal with fluctuations in renewable energy sources, and what might the capital cost of this amount to?

Two of the plots given set out the contributions that might be combined to meet daily demand over about 8 days in 2010, in summer and winter.  It seems to me that when these contributions are added the total capacity needed is much more than the paper states.

Australia's recent history of energy use by source

The task is to supply 31 GW.  The plots given show that at one point in time wind is contributing a maximum of 13.5 GW, but at other times its contribution is close to zero, meaning that other sources are backing up for it.  The corresponding peak inputs from the other sources are, PV 9 GW, solar thermal 27, hydro 5 GW and gas from biomass 24 GW.  Thus the total amount of plant required would be 75.5 GW of peak capacity… to supply an average 31 GW.  (in his response to Peter Lang, Mark Diesendorf says their total requirement is 84.9 GW.) That’s the magnitude of the redundancy problem and this is the major limiting factor for renewables; the need for a lot of back up plant, which will sit idle much of the time.

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How realistic is The Economist’s cool view of nuclear power?

Posted on 17 March 2012 by Barry Brook

Last week, the influential weekly news and international affairs publication, The Economist, ran an essay on the future of nuclear energy – The dream that failed: Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal.

As you might have guessed from the title, it was decidedly cool towards nuclear’s future prospects. Below I sketch some thoughts on what was wrong (and right) about the article. Interestingly, I understand that the author of this piece (Oliver Morton) will be joining us at the Breakthrough Dialogue in San Francisco in June 2012 — so I’m sure we’ll have some robust dinner conversations!

In his assessment of the current situation in Japan — 52 of its 54 reactors shuttered (at least 6 permanently), 100,000 people displaced by the evacuation resulting from the 20 km exclusion zone, and the speculation that Japan’s share of nuclear in the country’s electricity mix over the next few decades could decline rapidly or evaporate completely — the article is accurate and suitably sanguine.

The energy supply problems Japan now faces, due to the lack of baseload electricity for heavy industry and domestic consumption, is putting real pressure on the economy, and of course on the social fabric of the nation and the people’s respect for government.

As reported by The Breakthrough Institute blog (see table to the right), costly imports of fossil fuels to partially cover the shuttered reactors has led to a chronically increasing fuel bill and the country’s first trade deficit in 30 years (to the tune of -$32 billion).

From a climate change perspective, it also looks bad — emissions are rising steeply as the Japanese electricity sector once again ‘goes fossil’, as illustrated in the carbon-intensity-from-energy chart below:

An obvious question to ask is, would Japan have faced this situation today if it had never pursued nuclear energy? I think the answer is two-fold:

Cosmo refinery fire - who knew, who cares?

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Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 70 Comments »

IFR FaD 11 – sodium coolant and pool design

Posted on 11 March 2012 by Barry Brook

This is the second of a four-part series of extracts from the book Plentiful Energy — The story of the Integral Fast Reactor by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang.

Reproduced with permission of the authors, these sections describe and justify some of the key design choices that went into the making the IFR a different — and highly successful — approach to fast neutron reactor technology and its associated fuel recycling.

These excerpts not only provide a fascinating insight into a truly sustainable form nuclear power; they also provide excellent reference material for refuting many of the spurious claims on the internet about IFR by people who don’t understand (or choose to wilfully misrepresent) this critically important technology. Click here for part 1 (metal fuels and plutonium).

The second extract, on coolant choice and reactor configuration, comes from pages 108-111 of Plentiful Energy. To buy the book ($18 US) and get the full story, go to Amazon or CreateSpace. (Note that the images below do not come from the book).

—————-

The Coolant Choice

Liquid sodium was the choice of coolant from the beginnings of fast reactor development, because the neutron energies must remain high for good breeding and sodium doesn’t slow the neutrons significantly. (Water does, and so nullifies breeding.) But sodium has other highly desirable properties too—it transfers heat easily and removes heat from the fuel quickly; it has a high heat capacity which allows it to absorb significant heat without excessive temperature rise; its boiling point is far too high for it to boil at operating temperatures, and importantly, even to boil at temperatures well above operating; and finally, although a solid at room temperature, it has a low enough melting point to stay liquid at temperatures not too far above that. In addition, there is no chemical reaction at all between the sodium and the structural materials making up the core (such as steel and zirconium). It is chemically stable, stable at high temperatures, stable under irradiation, cheap, and commonly available.

Further, as a metal, sodium does not react at all with metal fuel either, so there is no fuel/coolant interaction as there is for oxide fuel exposed to sodium. In oxide fuel, if the cladding develops a breach such reactions can form reaction products which are larger in volume than the original oxide. They can continue to open the breach, expel reacted product, and could possibly block the coolant channel and lead to further problems. Metal fuel eliminates this concern.

For ease of reactor operation, sodium coolant has one supreme advantage. Liquid at room pressures, it allows the reactor to operate at atmospheric pressure. This has many advantages. Water as a coolant needs very high pressures to keep it liquid at operating temperatures. A thousand- to two-thousand-psi pressure must be maintained, depending on the reactor design. Thick-walled reactor vessels are needed to contain the reactor core with coolant at these pressures.

The diameter of the vessel must be kept as small as possible, as the wall thickness necessary increases directly with diameter. With the room-pressure operation of sodium coolant, the reactor vessel, or reactor tank as it is called, can be any diameter at all; there is no pressure to contain. And leaks of sodium, if they happen, have no pressure behind them, they drip out into the atmosphere, where generally they are noticed as a wisp of smoke. The important thing is that there is no explosive flashing to steam as there is when water at high pressure and temperature finds a leakage path.

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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 49 Comments »

Purpose and target audience of BraveNewClimate.com

Posted on 7 March 2012 by Barry Brook

Before I write a scientific paper, I always try to identify: (1) my main message [MM], in 25 words or less, and (2) my target audience [TA]. Doing this helps focus the ‘story’ of the manuscript on a key point. Papers that try to present multiple messages are typically confusing and/or too long for busy researchers to read. It also dictates the background and specialist terminology that the reader might be safely assumed to understand, as well as guiding the choice of journal that I will submit to. For instance, a paper written for Nature requires more general context setting than one sent to Wildlife Research.

However, it occurred to me that I’ve never tried to define the main message of the BraveNewClimate.com blog, nor really reflected on who the chief audience is. So let’s try.

In reality, both have evolved over time. Back in late 2008 – early 2009, when the blog (and my thinking on climate change policy) was in its infancy, it would have read something this:

2009 MM: Communicate the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming to the general public and policy makers, and advocate the need for, and urgency of, effective mitigation.

2009 TA: People seeking understanding of past climate change, current/future impacts, and the basis of modelled forecasts – all explained in relatively straightforward terms. A secondary target audience was those who were confused by, or enamored of, the repeated assertions of ‘the sceptics’.

Although I was proud to have developed the website on this scientific and philosophical foundation, neither of the above MM or TA are appropriate to BNC’s central purpose in 2012. So let’s try again.

2012 MM: To advocate an evidence-based approach to eliminating global fossil fuel emissions, based on a pragmatic and rational mix of nuclear and other low-carbon energy sources.

2012 TA: Environmentalists who disregard or oppose nuclear energy, and instead believe that renewables are sufficient (or that continuing to rely on fossil fuels is a rational energy policy).

The main message changed because I became progressively more interested in educating people on practical solutions to the problems of global change, rather than preaching doom-and-gloom. This shift in purpose was not because I don’t still consider the impacts of climate change to be incredibly serious and the evidence (ever increasingly) compelling — I do! It’s rather that I found the generic message of: “This is really bad, we must do something!” to be ineffectual, unappealing, and frankly, depressing. Besides, there are other sites that do this very well, so I now tend to leave it in their capable hands.

Instead, I became interested (okay, obsessed is a better word) with grasping and communicating the high-level issues associated with which low-carbon energy solutions will work most effectively at displacing fossil fuels and thus ‘solving’ climate change, at scale, in time, and within reasonable costs.

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Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Nuclear, Policy, Renewables | 45 Comments »

The Fukushima Question: How close did Japan really get to a widespread nuclear disaster?

Posted on 2 March 2012 by Barry Brook

I think The Breakthrough Institute guys, led by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are doing great working in environmental policy and thought leadership, which is why I was delighted to become a 2012 Senior Fellow. Below I reproduce an important article published today in Slate.com, on Fukushima and its ensuing hyperventilation. Much of the post-accident speculation was constrained only by people’s imagination (which can be pretty wide ranging), and utterly failed to resolve the fact that RISK is probability X impact. Instead, anti-nuclear types typically choose a huge, speculative impact, and then try to attach a large probability (often near certainty) to it. For truly catastrophic outcomes, the product of the many low-probability events required for initiation make the mathematical risk a vanishingly small one.

How close did Japan really get to a widespread nuclear disaster?

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

Posted on Slate Thursday, March 1, 2012, at 4:55 PM ET

With an eye to the first anniversary of the tsunami that killed 20,000 people and caused a partial meltdown at the Fukushima power plant in Japan, a recently formed nongovernmental organization called Rebuild Japan released a report earlier this week on the nuclear incident to alarming media coverage.

The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture as of February 2012. Issei Kato/Getty Images

“Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis,” screamed the New York Times headline, above an article by Martin Fackler that claimed, “Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.”

The larger crisis was a worst-case scenario imagined by Japanese government officials dealing with the situation. If workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated, Fackler writes, some worried “[t]his would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.”

Fackler quotes former newspaper editor and founder of Rebuild Japan Yoichi Funabashi as saying, “We barely avoided the worst-case scenario, though the public didn’t know it at the time.”

To say that Japan “barely avoided” what another top official called a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns and the evacuation of Tokyo is to make an extraordinary claim. One shudders at the thought of the hardship, suffering, and accidents that would almost certainly have resulted from any attempt to evacuate a metropolitan area of 30 million people. The Rebuild Japan report has not yet been released to the public, but there is reason to doubt that Japan was anywhere close to executing this nightmare contingency plan.

The same day the New York Times published its story, PBS broadcast a Frontline documentary about the Fukushima meltdown that invites a somewhat different interpretation. In an interview conducted for that program, then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan suggests that the fear of cascading plant failures was nothing more than panicked speculation among some of his advisers. “I asked many associates to make forecasts,” Kan explained to PBS, “and one such forecast was a worst-case scenario. But that scenario was just something that was possible, it didn’t mean that it seemed likely to happen.”

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100% Renewable Electricity for Australia: Response to Lang

Posted on 27 February 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest post by Dr Mark Diesendorf, Institute of Environmental Studies, UNSW.

Click here for a printable 6-page PDF version of this response.

——————–

This is a personal response to Lang’s (2012) article critiquing the peer-reviewed paper Elliston, Diesendorf and MacGill (2011) ‘Simulations of scenarios with 100% renewable electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market’, referred to hereinafter as EDM (2011).

I appreciate the large amount of work that Lang has done in attempting to assess our work. However, I think his critique is premature, because he has misunderstood the intent of our work, which was clearly identified as exploratory. It is the first of a series of planned papers that will pick up on some of the issues that he has raised (and others) and step by step prepare the ground for an economic analysis. Several other questions that he raises are simply repetitions of questions that we have already raised and in some cases answered in EDM (2011).

Lang appears to be confused and mistaken in some key issues, such as the reliability of generation, where his conclusions are incorrect and potentially misleading.

Reliability of generation

Lang misunderstands and hence misrepresents our result that, in its baseline scenario, supply does not meet demand on six hours per year. He draws an incorrect conclusion from this result to claim that ‘renewable energy cannot realistically provide 100% of Australia’s electricity generation’. However, he overlooks the fact, clearly stated in the abstract, the main body and the conclusion of EDM (2011), that all our scenarios meet the same reliability criterion as the existing polluting energy system supplying the National Electricity Market (NEM), namely a maximum energy generation shortfall of 0.002%. This criterion inevitably means that any energy supply system, including the existing fossil-based system, is likely to fail to meet demand on at least several hours per year.

This is simply realistic, because no electricity supply system has 100% reliability. To achieve this ideal would require an infinite amount of back-up and hence an infinite cost. For this reason, electricity supply systems have reliability criteria such as Loss-of-Load-Probability (LOLP, the average number of hours per year that supply fails to meet demand) or energy shortfall. The NEM uses the latter. Since Lang refers to LOLP later in his article, he presumably partly understands this fundamental principle of electricity supply, yet somehow forgets this when critiquing the principal conclusion of our paper.

His oversight invalidates his conclusion. Hence our conclusion stands: namely that, subject to the conditions of the model, a 100% renewable electricity system is technically feasible for the NEM based on commercially available technologies.

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Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 67 Comments »

IFR FaD 10 – metal fuel and plutonium

Posted on 19 February 2012 by Barry Brook

Over the next month or two, I will publish four extracts from the book Plentiful Energy — The story of the Integral Fast Reactor by Chuck Till and Yoon Chang.

Reproduced with permission of the authors, these sections describe and justify some of the key design choices that went into the making the IFR a different — and highly successful — approach to fast neutron reactor technology and its associated fuel recycling.

These excerpts not only provide a fascinating insight into a truly sustainable form nuclear power; they also provide excellent reference material for refuting many of the spurious claims on the internet about IFR by people who don’t understand (or choose to wilfully misrepresent) this critically important technology.

The first extract, on Fuel Choice, comes from pages 104-108 of Plentiful Energy. To buy the book ($18 US) and get the full story, go to Amazon or CreateSpace.

—————-

Metal Fuel

The IFR metal alloy fuel was the single most important development decision. More flows from this than from any other of the choices. It was a controversial choice, as metal fuel had been discarded worldwide in the early sixties and forgotten. Long irradiation times in the reactor are essential, particularly if reprocessing of the fuel is expensive, yet the metal fuel of the 1960s would not withstand any more than moderate irradiation. Ceramic fuel, on the other hand, would. Oxide, a ceramic fuel developed for commercial water-cooled reactors, had been adopted for breeder reactors in every breeder program in the world. It is fully developed and it remains today the de facto reference fuel type for fast reactors elsewhere in the world. It is known. Its advantages and disadvantages in a sodium-cooled fast reactor are well established. Why then was metallic fuel the choice for the IFR?

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) system

In reactor operation, reactor safety, fuel recycling, and waste product—indeed, in every important element of a complete fast reactor system—it seemed to us that metallic fuel allowed tangible improvement. Such improvements would lead to cost reduction and to improved economics. Apprehension that the fast reactor and its associated fuel cycle would not be economic had always clouded fast reactor development. Sharp improvements in the economics might be possible if a metal fuel could be made to behave under the temperature and radiation conditions in a fast reactor. Not just any metal fuel, but one that contained the amounts of plutonium needed for reactor operation on recycled fuel. Discoveries at Argonne suggested it might be possible.

Metal fuel allows the highest breeding of any possible fuel. High breeding means fuel supplies can be expanded easily, maintained at a constant level, or decreased at will. Metal fuel and liquid sodium, the coolant, also a metal, do not react at all. Breaches or holes in the fuel cladding, important in oxide, don’t matter greatly with metal fuel; operation can in fact continue with impunity. The mechanisms for fuel cladding failure were now understood too, and very long irradiations had become possible. Heat transfers easily too. Very little heat is stored in the fuel. (Stored heat exacerbates accidents.) Metal couldn’t be easier to fabricate: it’s simple to cast and it’s cheap. The care that must be taken and the many steps needed in oxide fuel fabrication are replaced by a very few simple steps, all amenable to robotic equipment. And spent metal fuel can be processed with much cheaper techniques. Finally, the product fuel remains highly radioactive, a poor choice for weapons in any case, and dangerous to handle except remotely.

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Filed under: IFR FaD, Nuclear | 86 Comments »

The Grattan Report on low-emissions energy technology – some critical comments

Posted on 14 February 2012 by Barry Brook

Guest post by Dr Ted Trainer, University of NSW (http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/).

Wood, A, T. Ellis, D. Mulloworth, and H. Morrow (2012) No Easy Choices: Which Way to Australia’s Energy Future. Technology Analysis. Grattan Institute, Melbourne.

This report is a valuable addition to the literature on the prospects for renewable energy in Australia, providing some recent data on key output and cost factors. It is especially to be commended for expressing a considerable degree of caution about this possibility, and pointing to the difficulties and problems that would have to be overcome. Almost all literature on renewable energy reinforces the faith that it can fuel energy intensive societies, and enable smooth transition to a carbon free economy. Over some years I have groped to a more confident statement of a case contradicting this position. (Trainer, 2012.)

The following brief comments indicate the strength of this case, and argues that the Grattan Report fails to recognise the reasons why it is very unlikely that the world can run on renewable energy.

The Report’s cost and output assumptions for the various renewable energy technologies seem to be inline with those in other recent documents. The explanation of the limits and difficulties associated with geothermal, carbon capture and sequestration, nuclear and biomass are especially valuable. Their estimate of biomass potential is a remarkably low c 500 PJ of primary energy, about 8% of the present Australian total, and their discussion of the logistical problems in getting large quantities of this low density material to generators is sobering.

I think that the major problem in the Report is that there is no analysis of the quantity of plant and the resulting capital cost of a total renewable energy supply system. Two years ago I published an attempt to do this, (Trainer, 2010a), and have now considerably improved the application of the approach based on more recent and more confident data. Trainer 2012 explores the amount and cost of plant needed to meet a 2050 world renewable energy demand assumed to be 1000 EJ of primary energy, about twice the present amount, in winter and net of long distance transmission energy losses and the embodied energy cost of the plant.

The conclusion arrived at is that the ratio of energy investment needed to GDP would be much less than derived in Trainer 2010a, but still unaffordable. It would be around 15 times as great as it is now – even though a number of significant factors difficult to quantify were not included in the analysis. These would multiply the ratio several times. (The output and capital cost assumptions used were more or less in line with those in the Grattan Report.) Combining more optimistic assumptions (including solar thermal plant costing one-quarter of today’s cost) would only reduce the total capital cost by 40%.

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Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 68 Comments »

100% renewable electricity for Australia – the cost

Posted on 9 February 2012 by Barry Brook

Download the printable 33-page PDF (includes two appendices, on scenario assumptions and transmission cost estimates) HERE.

For an Excel workbook that includes all calculations (and can be used for sensitivity analysis), click 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: hydro, geothermal, nuclear, coal, oil, and gas plants and a wide range of energy end use management projects.

Summary

Here I review the paper “Simulations of Scenarios with 100% Renewable Electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market” by Elliston et al. (2011a) (henceforth EDM-2011).  That paper does not analyse costs, so I have also made a crude estimate of the cost of the scenario simulated and three variants of it.

For the EDM-2011 baseline simulation, and using costs derived for the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET, 2011b), the costs are estimated to be: $568 billion capital cost, $336/MWh cost of electricity and $290/tonne CO2 abatement cost.

That is, the wholesale cost of electricity for the simulated system would be seven times more than now, with an abatement cost that is 13 times the starting price of the Australian carbon tax and 30 times the European carbon price.  (This cost of electricity does not include costs for the existing electricity network).

Although it ignores costings, the EDM-2011 study is a useful contribution.  It demonstrates that, even with highly optimistic assumptions, renewable energy cannot realistically provide 100% ofAustralia’s electricity generation.  Their scenario does not have sufficient capacity to meet peak winter demand, has no capacity reserve and is dependent on a technology – ‘gas turbines running on biofuels’ – that exist only at small scale and at high cost.

Map of Australia's transmission lines. There are no transmissions lines to any of the proposed CSP sites, and the best solar areas are far removed from the existing transmissions infrastructure.Source: Grattan Institute, Figure 10.1 (attributed to DRET (2010), Grattan Institute)

Introduction

I have reviewed and critiqued the paper “Simulations of Scenarios with 100% Renewable Electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market” by Elliston et al. (2011a) (henceforth EDM-2011).

This paper comments on the key assumptions in the EDM-2011 study.  It then goes beyond that work to estimate the cost for the baseline scenario and three variants of it and compares these four scenarios on the basis of CO2 emissions intensity, capital cost, cost of electricity and CO2 abatement cost.

Comments on the EDM-2011 study

The objective of the desktop study by EDM-2011 was to investigate whether renewable energy generation alone could meet the year 2010 electricity demand of the National Electricity Market (NEM).  Costs were not considered.  The study used computer simulation to match estimated energy generation by various renewable sources to the known hourly average demand in 2010.  This simulation, referred to here as the “baseline simulation” proposed a system comprising:

  • 15.6 GW (nameplate generation capacity) of parabolic trough concentrating solar thermal (CST) plants with 15 hours thermal storage, located at six remote sites far from the major demand centres;
  • 23.2 GW of wind farms at the existingNEMwind farm locations – scaled up in capacity from 1.5 GW existing in 2010;
  • 14.6 GW of roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) inBrisbane,Sydney,Canberra,MelbourneandAdelaide;
  • 7.1 GW of existing hydro and pumped hydro;
  • 24 GW of gas turbines running on biofuels;
  • A transmission system where “power can flow unconstrained from any generation site to any demand site” – this theoretical construct is termed a “copperplate” transmission system.

The accompanying slide presentation by Elliston et al. (2011b), particularly slides 5 to 12, provides a succinct summary of the objective, scope for their simulation study, the exclusions from the scope, the assumptions and the results.

The results of the baseline simulation show that there are six hours during the year 2010 when demand is not met, with a maximum power supply shortfall of 1.33 GW.  It should be noted that the supply shortfall would be significantly greater with higher time resolutions, e.g. 5 minute data rather than the 1 hour increments used, but this limitation is not addressed by EDM-2011.

The EDM-2011 approach is more realistic than Beyond Zero Emissions (2010) “Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan” (critiqued by Nicholson and Lang (2010), Diesendorf (2010), Trainer (2010) and others), especially because EDM-2011’s approach, as they say, “is limited to the electricity sector in a recent year, providing a more straight forward basis for exploring this question of matching variable renewable energy sources to demand.”  As the authors say, “this approach minimises the number of working assumptions”.

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Filed under: Emissions, Policy, Renewables | 153 Comments »

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