The 10 terawatts that you mention we need by 2050. I assume that is a worldwide figure? Is that figure based on everyone staying at their present economic level, ie Australians stay as comfortable middle class and say Indians stay poor? Or does it take into account all 6 billion people on the planet having say an economic level equal to say Australia?

Alistair

Real development can occur, and living standards rise, when electricity that is currently dear for a variety of reasons: costs, grid degradation, existing but limited generation, limited fuel, usually oil or diesel, all combine to prevent industrial development and all that goes along with this.

The problems *most* of humanity faces is the ability to ‘taste’ electrons but not make a meal of it. Growth remains stunted, the masses remain in poverty.

David

A quarter of all humanity, some 2.5 billion people…

…does not compute. World population = 6.7 billion, 1/4 of that is about 1.7 billion.

I think continuing this discussion without costs is futile. We’ve been over and over this discussion simply repeating the same statements. I disagree with most of what you say. Can you provide cost estimates for the entire system you are proposing? It is the only way to have a rational discussion.

I do not agree that nuclear should be built to higher safety standards than is required for other industrial plants, based on an equivalent risk basis. We are overbuilding nuclear plant in comparison with the risk we accept from other plants. This makes nuclear far more costly than it needs to be. The overbuilding is being done on the incorrect assumption that nuclear accidents have worse consequences than chemical accidents, and that radioactive contamination is worse than chemical contamination. It is not. The opposite is the case.

You repeated again your comment/question “how fast can we build nuclear?”. You did not answer how fast can we build equivalent renewable energy capacity (on an equivalent energy basis without fossil fuel). I am very interested in your answer to that question. You posed the original question, so you should be prepared to answer the question for renewables.

Neil, do you dispute that wind generation can be near zero over the NEM sometimes? If so, on what basis.

Your argument about 5% back-up does not make sense. A total cost for the system you propose is needed.

Re CSP and NG back-up. Again, a cost for the entire system is needed. (wind power and storage, solar and storage, NG back up, transmission, gas lines as well as maintaining the coal fired power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine).

The more I read your posts and the more I try to answer, the more I realise that it is a pointless discussion unless you are prepared to do the cost analysis. It seems to me that you have no understanding nor interest in the costs.

I calculated capacity of hydro as total generated(563,000GWh)/capacity(173GW)x 8760h)=563,000/1,515,480=0.34(34%).

Well this goes and shows you why capacity is not always the best judgment of something far more important: availability. And, why capacity is actually not used in contracts or ISO deliberations except as the broadest out look of what’s available.

Because hydro, more than coal, loses nothing by being dispatched as on demand, load shifting plants, and the benefits of retaining higher head level allows it also to be used in a sort of peaking capacity as well, actually MWhrs produced by hydro are not always the determining overall availability. This is not unlike CCGTs which are used for both peaking, baseload and load following. The ‘real’ capacity can be well over 90% that is, it’s “availability”, which is what’s important. So the fact that it’s only being dispatched at half load, doesn’t really lower it’s true capacity.

Because French nuclear can load follow, it’s ‘official’ capacity rating is well below the US’ 92%. But it’s availability rating is actually somewhat higher, which is real world ‘what counts.’

What lowers a hydro unit’s capacity, or it’s availability, is maintenance and low head pressure due to drought.

It would be interesting to parse this out more and do further investigation.

I have always been in favour of a nuclear power program in Australia, but not if we use the WWII standards that were applied to Oak Ridge and Hanford. I lived in Oak Ridge for years and can assure you we don’t want to have the type of contamination that still exists at dump sites surrounding Oak Ridge. Nuclear should be built to the higest safety standards as it is in Japan and France and most other nuclear operating countries. The issue is how quickly can we go from one research reactor to 10 or 25 power reactors? This is also an issue for solar but less of an issue for wind as we are actually building considerable capacity at present.

I was not being selective on the 18 wind farms as they have only been operational since August. However on the lowest few hours of output(78MW) the original 11 farms would have had a lowest output at this time of 30MW. The high variance of each farm indicates that as more locations are added, lowest output will rise faster than total capacity.
The issue with NG back-up is not total capacity but use, if you re-read what I said I implied only 5% of power generation would need to come from NG back-up. Similarly if CSP solar has thermal storage NG back-up for those few consecutive cloudy days in winter.
We don’t need half hourly figures for solar insolation if we have 12-24h thermal storage but only if we consider all power will be generated from solar PV. Daily figures should be fine to determine if we need 300Gwh, 600GWh or 1200GWh total storage( ie thermal, hydro pumped etc). You had demonstrated that Tantangara/Blowering pumped hydro could have 8GW capacity and >500GWh storage. Other sites also exist so several days storage is feasible without any more water consumption or new dams.

Whenever we have widespread dust storms( once in 20 years?) we have lots of wind as data shows, so again a mix of wind and solar is complementary. Until we have data of >10 solar locations it will not be clear how cloud cover is going to impact solar performance, but it should be better than one site.

I calculated capacity of hydro as total generated(563,000GWh)/capacity(173GW)x 8760h)=563,000/1,515,480=0.34(34%).