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.

For those who have not been following this misinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry, here is a brief synopsis. Back in March 2010, AWEA heard public reports that the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States (IPAMS), a lobby group representing the oil and natural gas industry, was working on a report that would attempt to claim that adding wind energy to the grid had somehow increased power plant emissions in Colorado.

Perplexed at how anyone would attempt to make that claim, AWEA decided to take a look at the relevant data, namely the U.S. Department of Energy’s data tracking emissions from Colorado’s power plants over time. The government’s data, reproduced in the table below, show that as wind energy jumped from providing 2.5% of Colorado’s electricity in 2007 to 6.1% of the state’s electricity in 2008, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 4.4%, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions fell by 6%, coal use fell by 3% (571,000 tons), and electric sector natural gas use fell by 14% (Thorough DOE citations for each data point are listed in the hyperlink). Two conclusions were apparent from looking at this data: 1. the claim the fossil fuel industry was planning to make had no basis in fact, and 2. the fossil industry was understandably frustrated that they were losing market share to wind energy.

In early April 2010, AWEA publicly presented this government data, and when the fossil fuel lobbyists released their report later that month it was greeted with the skepticism it deserved and largely ignored. Case closed, right? We thought so too.

After the initial release of the report fell flat, the fossil fuel industry tried again a month later. John Andrews, founder of the Independence Institute, a group that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry, penned an opinion article in the Denver Post parroting the claims of the original report. Fortunately, Frank Prager, a VP with Xcel Energy, the owner of the Colorado power plants in question, responded with an article entitled “Setting the record straight on wind energy” that pointed out the flaws in the fossil industry’s study and reconfirmed that wind in fact has significantly reduced fossil fuel use and emissions on their power system. Having been shot down twice, we thought that the fossil industry would surely put their report out to pasture.

Yet just a month later the report resurfaced, this time in Congressional testimony by the Institute for Energy Research, a DC-based group that receives a large amount of funding from many of the same fossil fuel companies that fund the Independence Institute. The group has continued trumpeting the report’s myths at public events around the country and on their website, and these myths are now beginning to spread through the pro-fossil fuel blogosphere. In recent days, these myths have re-appeared in columns by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the fossil-funded Manhattan Institute.

The fossil fuel industry’s desperate persistence and deep pockets make for a dangerous combination when it comes to distorting reality, so we’d like to once and for all clarify the facts about how wind energy reduces fossil fuel use and emissions.

The Truth about Wind and Emissions

The electricity produced by a wind plant must be matched by an equivalent decrease in electricity production at another power plant, as the laws of physics dictate that utility system operators must balance the total supply of electricity with the total demand for electricity at all times. Adding wind energy to the grid typically displaces output from the power plant with the highest marginal operating cost that is online at that time, which is almost always a fossil-fired plant because of their high fuel costs. Wind energy is also occasionally used to reduce the output of hydroelectric dams, which can store water to be used later to replace more expensive fossil fuel generation.

Let’s call this direct reduction in fossil fuel use and emissions Factor A. Factor A is by far the largest impact of adding wind energy to the power system, and the emissions reductions associated with Factor A are indisputable because they are dictated by the laws of physics.

In some instances, there may also be two other factors at play: a smaller one that can slightly increase emissions (let’s call it Factor B), and a counteracting much larger one that, when netted with B, will further add to the emissions reductions achieved under Factor A (let’s call this third one Factor C).

Factor B was discussed at length in an AWEA fact sheet published several years ago. This factor accounts for the fact that, in some instances, reducing the output of a fossil-powered plant to respond to the addition of wind energy to the grid can cause a very small reduction in the efficiency of that fossil-fueled power plant. It is important to note that this reduction in efficiency is on a per-unit-of-output basis, so because total output from the fossil plant has decreased the net effect is to decrease emissions.

As a conservative hypothetical example, adding 100 MW of wind energy output to the grid might cause a fossil plant to go from producing 500 MW at 1000 pounds of CO2/MWh (250 tons of CO2 per hour) to producing 400 MW at 1010 pounds of CO2/MWh (202 tons of CO2 per hour), so the net impact on emissions from adding 100 MW of wind would be CO2 emissions reductions of 48 tons per hour. Unfortunately, fossil-funded groups have focused nearly all of their attention on Factor B, which in this example accounts for 2 tons, while completely ignoring the 50 tons of initial emissions reductions associated with Factor A. A conservative estimate is that the impact of Factor B is at most a few percent of the emissions reductions achieved through factor A.

(Mr. Bryce’s recent Wall Street Journal article is the most creative in its effort to exaggerate Factor B and downplay factor A. In his article, Bryce exclaims about the “94,000 more pounds of carbon dioxide” that the IPAMS study claimed were emitted in Colorado due to Factor B. To be clear, 94,000 pounds is equivalent to the far less impressive-sounding 47 tons of carbon dioxide, or the amount emitted annually on average by two U.S. citizens. Yet just a few paragraphs later, Mr. Bryce speaks dismissively when noting a DOE report that found that, on net, wind energy would “only” reduce carbon dioxide by 306 million tons (enough to offset the emissions of about 15 million U.S. citizens.)

Factor C is rarely included in discussions of wind’s impact on the power system and emissions, but the impact of Factor C is far larger than that of Factor B, so that it completely negates any emissions increase associated with Factor B. Factor C is the decrease in emissions that occurs as utilities and grid operators respond to the addition of wind energy by decreasing their reliance on inflexible coal power plants and instead increase their use of more flexible – and less polluting – natural gas power plants. This occurs because coal plants are poorly suited for accommodating the incremental increase in overall power system variability associated with adding wind energy to the grid, while natural gas plants tend to be far more flexible.

(It is important to keep in mind that the supply of and demand for electricity on the power system have always been highly variable and uncertain, and that adding wind energy only marginally adds to that variability and uncertainty. Electric demand already varies greatly according to the weather and major fluctuations in power use at factories, while electricity supply can drop by 1000 MW or more in a fraction of a second when a large coal or nuclear plant experiences a “forced outage” and goes offline unexpectedly, as they all do from time to time. In contrast, wind output changes slowly and often predictably.)

To summarize, the net effect of Factors A, B, and C is to reduce emissions by even more than is directly offset from wind generation displacing fossil generation (Factor A).

Unsurprisingly, government studies and grid operator data show that this is exactly what has happened to the power system as wind energy has been added. A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released in January 2010 found drastic reductions in both fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions as wind energy is added to the grid. The Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study (EWITS) used in-depth power system modeling to examine the impacts of integrating 20% or 30% wind power into the Eastern U.S. power grid.

The EWITS study found that carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by more than 25% in the 20% wind energy scenario and 37% in the 30% wind energy scenario, compared to a scenario in which our current generation mix was used to meet increasing electricity demand. The study also found that wind energy will drastically reduce coal generation, which declined by around 23% from the business-as-usual case to the 20% wind cases, and by 35% in the 30% wind case. These results were corroborated by the DOE’s 2008 technical report, “20% Wind Energy by 2030,” which also found that obtaining 20% of the nation’s electricity from wind energy would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 25%.

The fact that this study found emissions savings to be even larger than the amount directly offset by adding wind energy is a powerful testament to the role of Factor C in producing bonus emissions savings. By running scenarios in which wind energy’s variability and uncertainty were removed, NREL’s EWITS study was able to determine that it was in fact these attributes of wind energy that were causing coal plants to be replaced by more flexible natural gas plants (see here page 174).

As further evidence, four of the seven major independent grid operators in the U.S. have studied the emissions impact of adding wind energy to their power grids, and all four have found that adding wind energy drastically reduces emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful pollutants. While the emissions savings depend somewhat on the existing share of coal-fired versus gas-fired generation in the region, as one would expect, it is impossible to dispute the findings of these four independent grid operators that adding wind energy to their grids has significantly reduced emissions. The results of these studies are summarized below.

1 http://www.ercot.com/content/news/presentations/2009/Carbon_Study_Report.pdf

2 Transmission Expansion Plan, Vision Exploratory Study, Midwest ISO (2006), http://www.midwestiso.org/page/Expansion+Planning

3 http://www.state.nj.us/dep/cleanair/hearings/pdf/09_potential_effects.pdf

4 http://www.iso-ne.com/committees/comm_wkgrps/prtcpnts_comm/pac/reports/2010/economicstudyreportfinal_022610.pdf

It is even more difficult to argue with empirical Department of Energy data showing that emissions have decreased in lockstep as various states have added wind energy to their grids. In addition and in almost perfect parallel to the Colorado data presented earlier, DOE data for the state of Texas show the same lockstep decrease when wind was added to its grid. This directly contradicts the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States report when it attempts to claim that wind has not in fact decreased emissions in Texas.

Specifically, DOE data show that wind and other renewables’ share of Texas’s electric mix increased from 1.3% in 2005 to 4.4% in 2008, an increase in share of 3.1 percentage points. During that period, electric sector carbon dioxide emissions declined by 3.3%, even though electricity use actually increased by 2% during that time (c.f. here). Because of wind energy, the state of Texas was able to turn what would have been a carbon emissions increase into a decrease of 8,690,000 metric tons per year, equal to the emissions savings of taking around 1.5 million cars off the road.

The fossil fuel industry’s latest misinformation campaign is reminiscent of scenes that played out in Washington in previous decades, as tobacco company lobbyists and their paid “experts” stubbornly stood before Congress and insisted that there was no causal link between tobacco use and cancer, despite reams of government data and peer-reviewed studies to the contrary. It’s time we enacted the strong policies we need to put our country’s tremendous wind energy resources to use, creating jobs, protecting our environment, savings consumers money, and improving our energy security, even if it means leaving a few fossil fuel lobbyists behind.

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?

But first a quick-catch up to newcomers not familiar with the term ‘peak oil’. Oil fields tend to ramp up in production as new wells are drilled and the full size of the field is confirmed. But after about half the oil has been pumped out, production stabilises… and eventually declines. It’s to do with oil pressure, which forces the first oil out at high speed. We’ve all seen iconic images of drills ‘striking oil’ where the gusher shoot high into the air. But once enough oil is pumped, the pressure goes down. The going gets tough. Think about sucking on an ice-cone slurry. The first half is fast and thick and juicy, the second half is hard work and slow and watery. The life of an oil field is just like that, but spread out over years or even decades. For a further introduction to peak oil the ABC has some brilliant free online movies to watch, starting with Catalyst [2], Crude [3], and Four Corners [4]. Or you can read the Peak Oil Primer at Energy Bulletin [5].

The history of peak oil in one minute

In 1956 M. King Hubbert (wiki) famously stood up at the American Petroleum Institute seminar, and predicted that within 14 or so years American oil would reach its maximum production or ‘peak’ and then begin to decline. Hubbert was laughed off the stage, as the American oil industry had pumped exponentially more oil every year for decades, with no end in site. As time rolled on and 1970 rolled around, the oil industry laughed at Hubbert and claimed “We’ve never pumped so much oil!” The irony was they never would again, as 1970 was the year they peaked.

How did he do it? In extremely simple terms, you have to find oil before you can pump it. Hubbert noticed that the discovery of oil in America had peaked and declined, and with a little math could plot when the exponentially growing consumption of oil would follow the same pattern. Watch this 2 minute youtube clip as an illustration.

Of course this was a vastly complex data management issue involving thousands of wells and production profiles, but that’s it in a nutshell. Hubbert then made a stab at world peak oil, which he predicted for 1995. But the world soon forgot. Other than Limits to Growth and a smattering of articles here and there, the world assumed we would all be flying “Mr Fusion” powered hover-cars with Marty McFly. This was all ‘in the future’, and something would turn up by then!

New authorities challenge the old

The peak oil discussion started up again in earnest when lifetime geologists Colin Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère wrote a 1998 article for Scientific American, The End of Cheap Oil. [6]. This article re-ignited the debate. It carries the weight of two grandfathers of the oil industry. Other geologists craved a clearer, more scientific approach than was currently being practised by the official government agencies. Colin Campbell eventually founded the Association for Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) at Uppsala University, Sweden [7]. This university think tank receives papers from all the ‘good old boys’ of the oil industry, veterans with a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration and production. They have a range of publications [8] in everything from newspapers and magazines, academic theses, through to peer-reviewed works [9]. This coalition of oil professionals and professors is was the first Association to present peak oil as a scientific case unfettered by economic bias.

Joining ASPO is an act of rebellion against the status quo. These experts are taking a stand against the might of the USGS, and all those agencies the USGS advises. This includes the American Department of Energy (DOE) and their sub-agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA).

Even international concerns depend on the USGS. The International Energy Agency (IEA) was set up by the OECD after the 1970′s oil crisis. The IEA advises Australia on the international oil situation as well. (ABARE focus on our domestic resource issues. Dr Brian Fisher indicated to Four Corners [4] that he felt ABARE had not been commissioned to report on the international oil scene, even though it advises the Australian government on the oil price.)

ASPO is even winning sceptics in this titanic battle. Lifetime oil professionals are shifting from trusting the USGS to battling them in the peer reviewed literature. One such person was Chris Skrebowski (wiki):

Chris has 38 years experience in the Oil Industry, starting work in 1970 as a long-term planner for BP. His career has been divided between industry planning/market analysis and oil journalism. He was Senior Analyst for the Saudi Oil Ministry in London (1985-1994) , Editor of Petroleum Economist (1994-97) [8] and Editor of Petroleum Review (1997-2008)[9]

Chris now questions the USGS methodology [10], writes extensively to the UK Parliament about the dangers of peak oil, and formed the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas (APPGOPO). As this coalition of geologists and energy experts grows and forms their own consensus that peak oil is imminent, the contrast with the established authorities could not be more profound. It is as if the world’s climatologists had reached a consensus on global warming with the IPCC all along rejecting it!

What are the main arguments that are convincing the likes of Chris Skrebowksi to abandon the ‘IPCC’ of oil, the USGS?

1. The USGS uses incorrect categories

Campbell and Aleklett [11] explain how the term ‘Proved’ reserves evolved in the unique historical setting of early Texas drilling. In this chaotic environment back in the heyday of American oil exploration, it was not unreasonable to simply multiply annual production volumes by 10 to give a rough ‘Proved’ resource. But today we use seismic mapping technologies that give a far more accurate estimation in the first place, and so using this ‘Proved’ formula can artificially inflate reserve estimates.

Unfortunately the world also has a variety of definitions of ‘Proved’ and ‘Probable’ and ‘Possible’ reserves, which also confuse the real story. Half the battle for accuracy seems to focus on terminology alone.

Campbell shows some respect for decades of US Geological Survey work right up until the 2000 report. Then it all went horribly wrong. The USGS inappropriately extrapolated specifically American categories to the rest of the world. Not only that, but magical technological improvements were assumed to allow ‘reserve growth’ – getting more out of existing fields – by an astonishing 76%! Economic paradigms were forced over the data. As Campbell and Aleklett explain in their abstract:

…what may be called the Flat-Earth Approach, in which the resource is deemed to be virtually limitless, with extraction being treated as if it were controlled only by economic, political and technological factors.

The University of Reading study by Bentley also raises concerns about the categories used [12].

2. It doesn’t work

The USGS 2000 study doesn’t work in practice. The USGS have such a vastly inflated estimate of the oil on this planet that their projected discovery rates were double what actually occurred in the real world [11].

3. The Growing Gap: those ‘twin peaks’ appear again

As we saw above, Hubbert predicted American peak oil from the ‘twin peaks’ of the discovery bell curve forecasting the consumption bell curve. We can now clearly see the same pattern unfolding on the world stage, as modelled by ASPO from Exxon Mobil data [13].

Discovery peaked way back in 1965, 45 years ago. Also note that as production keeps climbing, discovery keeps dying. The last time we found more oil than we burned was in the early 1980’s. A whole generation has been born, educated, attended university and entered the workforce since we stopped even finding as much oil as we burn each year. We now burn 4 or 5 times more than we find, and are eating into the oil our grandparents discovered. The discovered volumes of oil look quite high compared to our current consumption peak, it is a tricky thing to judge visually. The experts have to mathematically ‘smooth out’ the already discovered oil to supply the world’s oil on the downside of the consumption bell curve, just as Hubbert did back in 1956 to predict the American peak of 1970. ASPO add their more grounded future discovery trends and come to an Ultimately Recoverable Reserve (URR) figure. Apply this to the bell curve, and we get the peak somewhere in this decade. I call this the ‘working from the end’ method.

4. Megaprojects — looking forward

This is in contrast to the forward estimates method of Chris Skrebowski. As his wiki says:

Initially sceptical about Peak Oil predictions,[4] he was persuaded by Colin Campbell of the unreliability of oil reserves data and the risks this posed to energy supply projections.[5] His insight was to recognise that future production flows, rather than oil reserves, were the key determinant of global oil supply. Consequently, he developed Peak Flow Analysis based on the future oil flows identified in his own Global Oil Megaprojects Database[6]. Using this methodology he concluded that major supply/demand imbalances would occur by 2007 with actual Peak Oil flows occurring no later than 2011[7].

The Megaprojects report is a database of the performance of every megaproject, or oil field that pumps over 100 thousand barrels a day [14]. The whole of Australia’s current production would only add up to about 4 of these fields. We are a drop in the ocean. The world needs the equivalent of 840 ‘megaprojects’, or 84 million barrels a day!

Aleklett claims we now live in a world where 54 out of the top 65 oil producing nations have already peaked [15]. These fields are now permanently producing less oil every year. Skrebowski’s concern is to look ahead, and forecast the ability of the new megaprojects that start each year to offset the oil we lose each year. Skrebowski published his Megaproject Reports in the prestigious Petroleum Review [16]. He is also responsible for variety of magazine articles, video conferences, and podcasts with his ODAC group in the UK. Dr Fredrik Robelius wrote his Phd thesis to also focus on how tracking trends in the world’s super-giant fields alone proves peak oil to be imminent. [17]

5. The consensus is growing — and grouping around this decade

The Australian Federal Senate Committee showed in Chapter 3.86 that many other significant geologists, energy companies, and even energy investment bankers have also disagreed with the USGS 2000 study [18]. A graph from the Peak Oil wiki also illustrates the point.

6. The USGS is under review

The word is spreading. The IEA now appears to be reviewing their practice of relying on the USGS for oil data [19]. A senior IEA official has even warned the Guardian of undue American influence in denying peak oil in the IEA [20]. And government’s are starting to hold their own independent inquiries, such as the American DOE’s Hirsch Report [21], the UK’s APPGOPO and of course Australia’s own Senate Committee [18].

7. OPEC hidden

ASPO and the other major peak oil agencies and authors doubt OPEC’s reporting. We had over 30 years of Western oil companies surveying Saudi Arabia before the oil industries were nationalised in 1970 and Western nations were banned. Since then, they want us to believe they have conveniently discovered exactly much oil as they have pumped over the last 40 years of production! Only they don’t let Western nations audit their fields. Robert Hirsch put it best when he told Four Corners [4]:

ROBERT HIRSCH, CONSULTANT US DEPT OF ENERGY: Basically, what they’re asking us to do is to trust them. And, frankly, on something that’s the lifeblood of our civilisation and the way we live, to trust somebody who won’t allow any audits is extremely risky. I personally don’t believe the numbers that are out there.

A difficult transition

The Australian Senate Committee [18] decided to remain agnostic towards a final peak oil date. But even the possibility of peak oil in the next few decades has them spooked. Chapter 3 states:

3.137 The committee cannot take sides with any particular suggested date for peak oil. However in the committee’s view the possibility of a peak of conventional oil production before 2030 should be a matter of concern. Exactly when it occurs (which is very uncertain) is not the important point. In view of the enormous changes that will be needed to move to a less oil dependent future, Australia should be planning for it now.

3.138 Most of the official publications mentioned in this report seem to regard the ‘long term’ as extending to 2030, and are silent about the future after that. The committee regards this as inadequate. Longer term planning is needed. Even the prospect of peak oil in the period 2030-2050 – well within the lifespan of today’s children – should be a concern. Hirsch suggests that mitigation measures to reduce oil dependence ‘will require an intense effort over decades…’

This inescapable conclusion is based on the time required to replace vast numbers of liquid fuel consuming vehicles and the time required to build a substantial number of substitute fuel production facilities… Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

If the peak in global oil production is in fact this or next year, the implications for the world economy are profound, but beyond the scope of this article.

Footnotes

[1] Scientific American (September 2010) How much is Left? The Limits of Earth’s Resources.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-much-is-left

[2] ABC Science Catalyst (2005) The Real Oil Crisis (12 minutes)
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1515141.htm

[3] ABC Science (2007) Crude – the incredible journey of oil
Part 2: Last hours of ancient sunlight (31 minutes)
http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/resources/links.htm

[4] ABC Documentary 4 Corners (2006) Peak oil? (43 minutes)
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20060710/

Transcript:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1683060.htm

[5] Energy Bulletin — EnergyBulletin.net is a clearinghouse for information regarding the peak in global energy supply. We publish news, research and analysis concerning:
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer

[6] Scientific American (1998) THE END OF CHEAP OIL by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère,
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/_archive/ScientificAmerican199803/EndOfCheapOil.htm

[7] Association for Peak Oil and Gas
http://www.peakoil.net/about-aspo

[8] Range of published material
http://www.peakoil.net/publications

[9] Peer reviewed works from ASPO are generally behind paywalls
http://www.peakoil.net/publications/peer-reviewed-articles
However, Uppsala Universitet hosts a variety of their work for free.
http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications.html

[10] Depletion – the missing demand element? by Chris Skrebowski — questions the IEA paradigms
http://www.energyinst.org.uk/index.cfm?PageID=952

[11] Minerals and Energy (2003) The Peak and Decline of World Oil and Gas Production by Kjell Aleklett and Colin J. Campbell
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2006/s1683060.htm

[12] University of Reading, Reading (2007) Assessing the date of the global oil peak: The need to use 2P reserves byR.W. Bentley, S.A. Mannan, S.J. Wheeler
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/why-now/bentley/

[13] World Energy Vol. 5 No.3 (2002) The future of the Oil and Gas Industry: Past Approaches, New Challenges by Harry J. Longwell, Exxon Mobil Corporation
http://www.aspo-australia.org.au/References/Exxon-WE-Longwell-dec-02.pdf
Longwell denies peak oil is imminent, but the data supplied by Exxon Mobil shows the 40 year trend in declining discoveries

[14] Heading For Peak: Skrebowski’s Oilfield Megaprojects Update (2005) Julian Darley interviews Chris Skrebowski
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/5266

[15] The oil supply tsunami alert (2005) by Kjell Aleklett
http://www.peakoil.net/Oil_tsunami.html

[16] Petroleum Review (2006) Prices holding steady, despite massive planned capacity additions: Petroleum Review regularly updates its listing of the upcoming so-called ‘megaprojects’. The aim of the listing is to attempt to answer the question as to whether sufficient oil is being developed to meet likely requirements going forward, writes Chris
Skrebowski.

[17] University of Uppsala, Sweden (2007) Giant Oil Fields – The Highway to Oil by Dr Fredrik Robelius
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:169774

[18] Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee, Australia’s future oil supply and alternative transport fuels (2007), © Commonwealth of Australia 2007, ISBN 0 642 71726 5
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/rrat_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/oil_supply/report/index.htm

[19] Journalist and author David Strahan (2007) IEA reviews reliance on USGS resource estimates
http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=69

[20] Guardian (November 2009) Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency

[21] Download the entire Hirsch Report PDF from the wiki references and footnotes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report

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.

Per argues that fluoride-salt reactor technology (AHTR/LFTR) has a clear path to achieve substantially lower energy production costs than ALWRs. His expectation is that this evolutionary path will remain focused mainly on thermal-spectrum reactors, with efforts to push to higher temperatures and efficiency, and the introduction of thorium.  Sodium-cooled, metal-fueled reactors are intrinsically bulkier and lower temperature/efficiency than AHTRs and LFTRs, but are not intrinsically more expensive than ALWRs. IFR is more mature than AHTR and LFTR, so the big question is what will be the most practical route to commercial demonstration. IFR will be a tough sell, though, if the general perception remains that it is more expensive than ALWRs. This is a complex topic, which I will endeavour to do more justice to in later posts in the IFR FaD series.

The 410MWe PB-AHTR core (left) next to the 168MWe PBMR right.

So, back to Per’s lab. He has various engineering models set up to test movement of TRISO pebble fuel through a fluoride salt coolant, whereby the pebbles are inserted in the inlet pipes and rise up through the reactor module over time, and then are put back through 5 or 6 times. This allows for very high burnup — exceeding 50 %, high power density due to the heat capacity of the liquid salt, and high temperatures thanks to the durability of the pebbles. This is a big (potential) advantage over the current Pebble Bed Modular Reactor technology (PBMR), because in that design, the gas coolant has a very low power density. He’s flipped the problem on its head. The reactor also has various inherent safety design features, such as control rods that sink naturally in response to elevated coolant temperature, thereby passively regulating reactivity. Very safe!

His testbed lab units use analogue fluids, including water and oils, and synthetic pebbles made from a nylon-like material. The model core of the reactor stood about 2 metres tall, and I asked what the power output of a full-sized 4 m tall (2 m wide) reactor core unit would be. Try 400+ MWe. Wow…

I’ll end this post with something a little more technical, if the above wasn’t already too techie for you (apologies to some BNC readers). Below I reproduce Per’s summary of the PB-AHTR, which he wrote up late last year in response to some prompting from me and others on the IFRG (a nuclear energy mailing list the Per and I, and many others from SCGI, are part of). It’s a terrific summary of Per’s research, for those with an engineering background or nuclear science predilection. For those who lack either, the core message is this:

Per’s aim is to develop really compact nuclear units with very high power densities, based on mostly well-understood technology that is deployable on the time-scale of a decade or less. The driving aim is to get these units commercialised in the near term, and to bring down costs, thereby paving the way for later widespread commercial deployment of full Generation IV designs like the LFTR and IFR, which not only achieve high burnup, but also completely close the fuel cycle.

Here’s Per’s summary:

———————————————-

Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor

The Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR) is a liquid salt cooled, high temperature reactor design developed at UC Berkeley in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other national labs.

The annular Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR) design has a nominal thermal power output of 900 MWth (and electrical output of 410 MWe). The PB-AHTR differs from conventional helium-cooled HTRs because its liquid salt coolant enables operation with a core power density of 20 to 30 MWth/m³, compared to the 4.8 to 6.0 MWth/m³ typical of modular helium reactors (MHRs).¹ The PB-AHTR delivers heat with a core outlet temperature of 704^oC, achieving 46% thermal efficiency with a multi-reheat helium Brayton (gas-turbine) cycle. The low-pressure, chemically inert liquid-salt coolant, with its high heat capacity and capability for natural circulation heat transfer, provides: (1) robust safety (including fully passive decay-heat removal) and (2) improved economics with passive safety systems that allow higher power densities and longer-term scaling to large reactor sizes [>1000 MW(e)] for central station applications.

PB-AHTR uses conventional TRISO high temperature fuel in the form of pebbles slightly smaller than golf balls. The baseline PB-AHTR design uses the well understood beryllium-based salt flibe(⁷Li₂BeF₄) as its primary coolant, and flinak (LiF-NaF-KF) as its intermediate coolant. Metallic structures and components like the reactor vessel are constructed using Alloy 800H, a ASME Section III code qualified material, with Hastelloy N cladding for high corrosion resistance. The coolant loop of the ORNL Molten Salt Reactor Experiment ² operated with clean fluoride salt, like the PB-AHTR, for over 26,000 hours without any detectable corrosion to Hastelloy N samples that were studied after the reactor shut down ³. The major components in the reactor core are fabricated from graphite, which is chemically inert to fluoride salts.

The PB-AHTR combines together technologies derived from earlier reactor designs to create a new high-temperature reactor design with a unique combination of features:

• Modular helium reactors (PBMR): TRISO pebble fuel, nuclear-grade graphite; high-temperature metallic and carbon composite structural materials; helium Brayton power conversion.
• Sodium fast reactors (S-PRISM/EBR-II): Pool-configuration reactor vessel; reactor building seismic base isolation; direct reactor auxiliary cooling system (DRACS) for passive decay heat removal.
• Light water reactors (AP-1000/ESBWR): Integral effects test scaling and best-estimate safety code validation methods; modern computer aided design, manufacturing, and modular construction technologies.
• Molten salt reactors (MSRE/MSBR): Liquid salt pumps, heat exchangers, corrosion resistant alloys; liquid salt corrosion test and thermophysical property data base.

Like modern MHRs, the baseline PB-AHTR uses a conventional low-enriched uranium fuel cycle. But the PB-AHTR technology also supports advanced fuel cycle options:

• Deep burn fuel cycle: the PB-AHTR can use deep burn TRISO fuels to destroy plutonium and other transuranics from commercial spent fuel
• Once-through seed-blanket fuel cycle: the PB-AHTR can operate with a low-enriched uranium seed and thorium blanket fuel cycle that can reduce uranium consumption and waste generation while maintaining once-through operation.
• Closed thorium fuel cycle: the PB-AHTR can operate with a closed thorium based fuel cycle with greatly reduced production of plutonium and other transuranics. Achievable conversion ratios are being studied now.
• Liquid fluoride thorium reactors: The PB-AHTR provides technology that can be applied to future deployment of molten salt reactors using sustainable closed thorium fuel cycles.⁴
• Fission/fusion hybrid reactors (LIFE): The PB-AHTR provides technology that can be applied for the future deployment of fission/fusion hybrid reactors that would operate sustainably without enrichment or reprocessing of their fission fuel.⁵

References

1. P. Bardet, E. Blandford, M. Fratoni, A. Niquille, E. Greenspan, and P.F. Peterson, “Design, Analysis and Development of the Modular PB-AHTR,” 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP ’08), Anaheim, CA, June 8-12, 2008.

2. “MSRE Systems and Components Performance” Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL-TM- 3039, June 1973.

3. “The Development Status of Molten-Salt Breeder Reactors,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL-4812, pp. 200-201, pp.207-211, August 1972.

4. Energy From Thorium

5. Laser Inertial Fission/Fusion Energy (LIFE)

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.

Primary energy production

Table 1 compares ABARE’s 1991 projection of Australia’s 2004-05 primary energy production with the actual production in 2004-05.

Table 1: Primary Energy Production 2004-5: ABARE 1991 Projection, and Actual Production

Points to note:

ABARE’s 1991 projections of Australia’s primary energy production in 2004-05:

• underestimated total energy production by 22%

• significantly underestimated the 2004-05 production of fossil fuels except oil.  It overestimated the production of oil by 8%, which most would consider good forecasting for a 15-year projection.

• underestimated uranium production by 11%

• overestimated the hydro-electricity production by 18%

Electricity generation

Table 2 compares ABARE’s 1991 projection of Australia’s 2004-05 electricity generation with the actual generation in 2004-05.

Table 2: Electricity Generation 2004-5: ABARE 1991 Projection, and Actual Generation

Points to note: ABARE’s 1991 projections of the electricity demand in 2004-05

• underestimated the electricity demand in 2004-05

• overestimated the amount by which energy efficiency improvements would reduce demand growth.

• underestimated the fossil fuel generated electricity by 12%

• overestimated hydro-electricity generation by 18%

Resource reserves

Table 3 compares our known economically recoverable energy resources in 1989 and 2009.  This is not a comparison of ABARE’s projections but is interesting to see how our estimated energy resources have changed over that 20 year period.

Table 3: Known, economically recoverable energy resources in 1989 and 2009 (PJ).

Points to note:

• ABARE’s figures for known mineral and energy reserves in 1989 were based on reports by the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) and Department of Primary Industries and Energy (DPIE).  Now they come from Geoscience Australia (formerly BMR).  ABARE does not undertake its own estimates of resource reserves, so are not accountable for errors.

• Over the intervening 20 years, our estimates of known economically recoverable resources have been revised.  Coal has been revised down and oil, natural gas and uranium have been revised up by 39%, 220% and 145% respectively.

• Known uranium resources have increased by a factor of nearly 2.5 in 20 years and we’ve hardly even looked.  There is little activity in uranium exploration being undertaken.  Most of Australia is locked up against uranium exploration.

CO₂ emissions

Table 4 compares ABARE’s 1991 projection with the actual CO₂ emissions from Australian energy consumption for the year 2004-05.  ABARE’s 1991 projection of 379 Mt is for the ‘Business as Usual’ (BAU) case.  ABARE also defined what we’d have to do to achieve the government’s target (20% below 1988 levels by 2005) and what would be needed to achieve a ‘half way’ target.

Table 4: ABARE’s 1991 forecast with the actual CO2 emissions in 2004-05 from Australia’s energy consumption.

Points to note:

• ABARE underestimated by 4% (based on BAU).  This is excellent given the state of knowledge 20 years ago.

• The government set an extremely low target but made it impossible to achieve by banning nuclear power from being an option.  Nuclear was not even to be considered in analyses by government departments.

• There was strong pressure by the green lobby groups at the time to set lower targets and for governments to mandate stringent regulations for energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy, but no nuclear.

• The same groups are still advocating the same failed policies now.

• Some people never learn!

See Attachment 1, an extract from the 1991 ABARE report.  It is fascinating to be reminded how much we knew, the policies, the CO2 emissions reduction targets, and the realities.  It demonstrates little has changed in 20 years.

Conclusions

ABARE’s projections are good.  I am not aware of any organisation that has made consistently better forecasts of Australia’s energy demand and supply.

I believe the consistently optimistic pressure from green advocacy groups, pushing for projections that align with their beliefs of what governments should do, influenced ABARE to underestimate energy demand, underestimate fossil fuel demand, overestimate renewable energy contribution and over-estimate how much energy efficiency improvement can be achieved over the projection period.

References

[1] ABARE (1991) Projections of Energy Demand and Supply; Australia 1990-91 to 2004-05, ISBN: 0 664 13716 9

[2] ABARE (2006) energy update

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_06/energyupdate_06.pdf

[3] ABARE (2006), Australian energy: national and state projections to 2029-30

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_06/nrg_projections06.pdf

[4] ABARE (2007), Table A Update 07, Table A1 Australian energy supply and disposal, 2004-05 – energy units,

http://www.abare.gov.au/interactive/energy_july07/excel/Table_A_update_07.xls

[5] ABARE (2009), Energy in Australia 2009

http://www.abareconomics.com/publications_html/energy/energy_09/auEnergy09.pdf

[6] ABARE (2010), Energy in Australia 2010

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_10/energyAUS2010.pdf

Attachment 1

(Download the 8-page PDF of the ABARE extract here)
Extract from: ABARE (1991)

Projections of Energy Demand and Supply: 1990-91 to 2004-05, pp 31-37.

“4. Greenhouse gas reduction: an illustrative scenario”

Here I attach a chapter “Greenhouse gas reductions: an illustrative scenario” extracted from the 1991 ABARE report.  It makes fascinating reading.  It shows:

1.  how much we knew back then;

2.  how little has changed;

3.  we knew the targets were impossible given the policies being advocated;

4.  we knew that renewable energy and energy efficiency could not make significant improvement over and above what was already included in the Business as Usual (BAU) projections;

5.  we knew then that if we wanted to really cut GHG emissions we had to go nuclear.

But politics dictated nuclear could not be on the agenda.  The reason was Labor needed the Green vote to hold onto power.

Many conclude the Greens have been the cause of the delay all along!!

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?

The choice of on-going deferment of action is potentially dire. If we do not commit to deep emission cuts (up to 80% by 2050 is required for developed nations), our descendents will likely suffer from a globally averaged temperature rise of 4–7°C by 2100, an eventual (and perhaps rapid) collapse of the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets (with an attendant 12–14 metres of sea level rise), more frequent and severe droughts, more intense flooding, a major loss of biodiversity, and the possibility of a permanent El Niño. This includes frequent failures of the tropical monsoon, which provides the water required to feed the billions of people in Asia.

Indeed, the European Union has judged that a warming of just 2°C above pre-industrial levels constitutes ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’, as codified in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Worryingly, even if we can manage to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 parts per million (it is currently 383 ppm CO₂, and rising at 3 parts per million per year), we would still only have a roughly 50:50 chance of averting dangerous climate change. Beyond about 2°C of warming, the likelihood of crossing irreversible physical, biological and, ultimately, economic thresholds (such as rapid sea level rise associated with the disintegration of the polar ice sheets, a shutdown of major heat-distributing oceanic currents, a mass extinctions of species, and a collapse of the natural hazards insurance industry), becomes unacceptably high.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence to date that we are taking meaningful action to decarbonise the global economy. In fact, it is just the reverse, with a recent work showing that the carbon intensity of energy generation in developed nations such as the US and Australia has actually increased over the last decade. Over the last decade, the world’s rate of emissions growth has tripled, and total CO₂ emissions now exceed 30 billion tonnes a year. China overtook the US in 2006 as the single biggest greenhouse polluter, and within a decade, it will be producing twice as much CO₂. This remarkable rate of growth, if sustained, will means that over just the next 25 years, humans will spew into the atmosphere an additional volume of CO₂ – greater than the total amount emitted during the 150 year industrial period of 1750 to 2000! Of particular concern is that long-lived greenhouse gases, like CO₂, will continue to amplify global warming for centuries to come. For every four tonnes added during a year in which we prevaricate about reducing emissions, one tonne will still be trapping heat in 500 years. It is a bleak endowment to future generations.

Nature’s response to twentieth-century warming has been surprisingly pronounced. For instance, ecologists have documented numerous instances of shifts in the timing of biological events, such as flowering, emergence of insects, and bird migration occurring progressively earlier in the season. Similarly, many species, including insects, frogs, birds and mammals, have shifted their geographical range towards colder realms – towards higher latitudes, upwards in elevation, or both. Careful investigations have also revealed some new evolutionary adaptations to cope with changed climatic conditions, such as desiccation-tolerant fruit flies, and butterflies with longer wings that allow them to more readily disperse to new suitable habitats. On the other hand, some sensitive species have already been eliminated by recent climate change. For instance, the harlequin frog and golden toad were once found in abundance in the montane cloud forests of Costa Rica. But in the 1980s they were completely wiped out by a fungal disease, which flourished as the moist forests began to dry out: a drying caused by a rising cloud layer that was directly linked to global warming.

These changes are just the beginning. Under the current business-as-usual scenario of carbon emissions, the planet is predicted to experience five to nine times the rate of twentieth-century warming over the next hundred years. An obvious question is, will natural systems be able to continue to keep pace? There are a number of reasons to suspect that the majority will not.

Past global climate change characteristically unfolded over many millennia, whereas current anthropogenic global warming is now occurring at a greatly accelerated rate. If emissions are not checked, a level of planetary heating comparable to the difference between the present day and the height of the last ice age, or between now and the age of the dinosaurs (when Antarctica was ice free), is expected to unfold over a period of less than a century! When such catastrophically rapid changes in climate did occur, very occasionally, in the deep past – associated, for instance, with a large asteroid strike from space – a mass extinction event inevitably ensued. Most life just could not cope, and it took millions of years after this shock for biodiversity to recover. It has been estimated that 20 to 60 per cent of species might become extinct in the next few centuries, if global warming of more than a few degrees occurs. Many thousands (perhaps millions) will be from tropical areas, about which we know very little. A clear lesson from the past is that the faster and more severe the rate of global change, the more devastating the biological consequences.

Compounding the issue of the rate of recent climate change, is that plant and animal species trying to move to keep pace with the warming must now contend with landscapes dominated by farms, roads, towns and cities. Species will gradually lose suitable living space, as rising temperatures force them to retreat away from the relative safety of existing reserves, national parks and remnant habitat, in search of suitable climatic conditions. The new conditions may also facilitate invasions by non-indigenous or alien species, who will act to further stress resident species, as novel competitors or predators. Naturally mobile species, such as flying insects, plants with wind-dispersed seeds, or wide-ranging birds, may be able to continue to adjust their geographical ranges, and so flee to distant refugia. Many others will not.

A substantial mitigation of carbon emissions is urgently needed, to stave off the worst of this environmental damage. But irrespective of what we do now, we are committed to some adaptation. If all pollution was shut off immediately, the planet would still warm by at least a further 0.7°C.

For natural resource management, some innovative thinking will be required, to build long-term resilience into ecosystems and so stem the tide of species extinctions. Large-scale afforestation of previously cleared landscapes will serve to provide corridors, re-connecting isolated habitat patches. Reserves will need to be extended towards cooler climatic zones by the acquisition of new land, and perhaps abandoned and sold off along their opposite margins. Our national parks may need to be substantially reconfigured. We must also not shirk from taking a direct and active role in manipulating species distributions. For instance, we will need to establish suitable mixes of plant species which cannot themselves disperse, and translocate a variety of animal species. It may be that the new ecological communities we construct will be unlike anything that currently exists.

Such are the ‘unnatural’ choices we are likely to be forced to make, to offset the unintended impacts of our atmospheric engineering. Active and adaptive management of the Earth’s biological and physical systems will be the mantra in this brave new world. Truly, the century of consequences.

—————————-

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:

Community

Sponsored by The Royal Institution of Australia

The Community Science Educator of the Year Award is open to individuals, groups or organisations for an outstanding and innovative program of science awareness and engagement delivered within the past five years.

The Award recognises the enhancement of the community’s appreciation of the contribution of science and its impact on society and the environment.

My thanks to the judging panel for their wisdom (!), and all those at the University of Adelaide, RiAus and beyond, who have helped me to organise my public speaking events, write a popular book and many newspaper Op Eds, spar on radio, and just get out there and talk to people on issues about which I’m passionate. Public communication of science, and the teaching of critical, evidence-based thinking — especially on such important applied matters as sustainable energy and climate change — is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job and life. It is heartening for my efforts to be recognised in this way. As I was in China on the night, Corey Bradshaw accepted the award on my behalf and apparently gave an excellent acceptance speech. Somewhat worryingly, he still has the trophy at his place…

And finally, 2 years of hard slog and a shiny award later, I’m not about to stop! So, on Wednesday 8 September (6 to 8 pm, CLB6, UNSW Kensington Campus), I’ll be in Sydney to engage in a discussion at the University of New South Wales in a ‘BrainFood’ session called ‘Nuclear — Solar Energies: Facts and Fiction Demystified‘. The other speaker will be Dr Mark Diesendorf, and the facilitator will be Prof Vassilios Agelidis. As the promo flyer says:

Join our experts as they:

• demystify fact from fiction for both solar and nuclear energy technologies

• highlight the merits and limitations of these energy sources

• debate their role to Australia’s energy mix of the future

• share your contributions and address your questions and concerns.

I’ve thought a fair bit about the type of presentation I’ll be giving, considering my previous ‘run in’ with MD at the Adelaide nuclear power ‘debate’. For those who are in Sydney and can make it, I hope you’ll enjoy my new take on the presentation of matters nuclear, solar, and ‘expertise’.

Okay, that’s me signing off for a while. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, in all four quarters of life.

Download the printable PDF here

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

————————

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.

2. 2020 Electricity Demand

BZE make a number of assumptions in assessing the electricity demand used to calculate the generating capacity needed by 2020. In summary these are:

1. 2008 is used as the benchmark year for the analysis. BZE defend this by saying “ZCA2020 intends to decouple energy use from GDP growth. Energy use per capita is used as a reference, taking into account medium-range population growth.”.
2. Various industrial energy demands in 2020 are reduced including gas used in the export of LNG, energy used in coal mining, parasitic electricity losses, off-grid electricity and coal for smelting.
3. Nearly all transport is electrified and a substantial proportion of the travel kms are moved from road to electrified rail including 50% of urban passenger and truck kms and all bus kms. All domestic air and shipping is also moved to electric rail.
4. All fossil fuels energy, both domestic and industrial, is replaced with electricity.
5. Demand is reduced through energy efficiency and the use of onsite solar energy.

The net effect of these assumptions is to reduce the 2020 total energy by 58% below the 2008 benchmark and 63% below the ABARE estimate for 2020. The total electricity required in 2020 to service demand and achieve these reductions is 325 TWh. This is the equivalent of an average generating capacity of 37 GW over the year.

All of these assumptions are challenging and some are probably unrealistic or politically unacceptable. To address these concerns, we have adjusted the assumptions and recalculated the energy estimates shown in Table A1.3 of the Plan.

The revised assumptions are as follows:

1. Comparing Australia’s energy use per capita with Northern Europe ignores the significant differences in population density and climate between the two regions. To address this, we have used ABARE’s forecast for 2020 as the benchmark year for our analysis. The ABARE forecast assumes energy efficiency improvement of 0.5 per cent a year in non energy-intensive end use sectors and 0.2 per cent a year in energy intensive industries.
2. The export of LNG will continue. Much of the world may not wish to, or be able to, emulate this plan and the demand for gas as an energy source will continue for several decades. The other demand reductions shown in BZE assumption 2 above are included.
3. A substantial modal shift in transport to rail is unlikely to be politically acceptable, particularly domestic aviation and bus travel. Domestic aviation and shipping will continue to use fossil fuels or bio-equivalents. In our analysis, nearly all road transport is electrified but without a reduction in distance travelled. Though this transport electrification is unlikely to be achieved by 2020, it is a realistic long term goal so has been included in the revised calculations. ABARE energy data are for final energy consumption so a tank/battery to wheel efficiency comparison should be made. This is considered to be a 3:1 energy reduction [3] not 5:1 as identified in the Plan.
4. All fossil fuels energy is replaced with electricity as per the Plan.
5. Demand is reduced through energy efficiency and the use of onsite solar energy as per the Plan but discounted by the energy efficiency already included in the ABARE data identified in 1 above.

These assumptions and recalculations are based on information provided in Appendix 1 of the Plan. Each SET column shown in Table 1 below are defined in Appendix 1. Recalculations are based on data provided in Appendix 1. ABARE provided data for 2008 and 2030 only so 2020 is our estimate based on the ABARE figures.

The net effect of these revised assumptions is shown in Table 1 which is a rework of Table A1.3 in Appendix 1 of the Plan. The total electricity required in 2020 to service the revised demand and achieve the energy reductions is 449 TWh or 38% more than the ZCA2020 Plan estimate of 325 TWh.

3. Total Capacity Needed

A number of assumptions have been made by BZE in assessing the generating capacity needed to supply the electricity demand in 2020. These can be summaries as follows:

1. The Plan relies on 50 GW of wind and 42.5 GW of concentrating solar thermal (CST) alone to meet 98% of the projected electricity demand of 325 TWh/yr. In addition, the combination of hydro and biomass generation as backup at the CST sites is expected to meet the remaining 2% of total demand, covering the few occasions where periods of low wind and extended low sun coincide.
2. In the Plan system design the extra generating capacity needed to meet peak demand is reduced relative to current requirements. The electrification of heating, along with an active load management system, is assumed to defer heating and cooling load to smooth out peaks in demand resulting in a significant reduction in the overall installed capacity required to meet peak demand.
3. In the Plan, negawatts are achieved through energy efficiency programs which lower both overall energy demand and peak electricity demand as well as by time-shifting loads using active load management. Negawatts can be conceptually understood as real decreases in necessary installed generating capacity, due to real reductions in overall peak electricity demand.
4. The current annual energy demand in the Plan is considered to be 213 TWh which can be converted to an average power figure of 24 GW. BZE assumes that the current installed capacity to meet maximum demand is 45 GW. The difference (21 GW) is then considered power for meeting the demand for intermediate and peak loads only. The peak load in 2020 is assumed to be equal to the average of 37 GW plus the 21 GW for intermediate and peak loads. This is then reduced by a 3 GW allowance for ‘Negawatt’ to give an overall maximum demand of 55 GW.
5. In the worst case scenario modelled in the Plan of low wind and low sun, there is a minimum of 55 GW of reliable capacity. This is based on a projected 15%, or 7.5 GW, of wind power always being available and the 42.5 GW of solar thermal turbine capacity also always being available with up to 15 GW of this turbine capacity backed up by biomass heaters. The 5 GW of existing hydro capacity is also always available.

The key issues in these assumptions are that the maximum (peak) demand is 55GW and that the proposed installed capacity can deliver a minimum of 55GW at any time. We will deal with each of these issues separately.

3.1. Recalculation of peak demand

The ZCA2020 Plan proposes a single National Grid comprising the existing NEM, SWIS and NWIS grids. The current installed capacity and loads in the three regions are shown in Table 2. An accurate assessment of peak demand – not average demand – is critical for assessing the total installed capacity needed.

Reliability in each network is maintained by additional available capacity over and above the expected peak demand. This is to cover for planned or unexpected loss of generating capacity either through planned maintenance or unplanned breakdown. This additional capacity is often referred to as the ‘reserve margin’.

The current reserve margin in each network is approximately 33% higher than the actual peak load. Note also that the actual total installed capacity is 53 GW and average power is 26 GW across the three networks. These are both higher than suggested by BZE in assumption 4 above.

The anticipated electricity demand in 2020 from Table 1 is 449 TWh. Assuming no change in current peak demand we can expect the pro rata peak in 2020 would be 78.7 GW (39.7 x 449/227). If we apply the 3 GW negawatt reduction discussed in assumption 4, peak demand will become 75.7 GW as shown in Table 3.

3.2. Recalculation of required capacity to reliably meet demand

The Plan insists that the combination of wind power and solar thermal with storage can deliver continuous supply (baseload). The only way to accurately assess this and the capacity required to meed the performance demands on the network is to do a full loss of load probability (LOLP) analysis. This does not appear to have been done in the ZCA2020 Plan, or at least it was not discussed as such in the report.

It is also beyond the scope of this critique to perform an LOLP analysis. A reasonable proxy is to apply the reserve margin requirements currently in the network. To maintain reliability, all three network regions have a reserve margin of 33% above the anticipated peak demand.

The size of the reserve margin is, among other things, related to the reliability of the generators in the network. In the current networks the predominant generators are conventional fossil fuel plants supplying over 90% of the energy.

In the Plan, the predominant plants are solar thermal with biomass backup supplying just under 60% of the energy. The Plan states that “The solar thermal power towers specified in the Plan will be able to operate at 70-75% annual capacity factor, similar to conventional fossil fuel plants.” The remainder of the energy mostly comes from wind powered generators. It would therefore seem likely that the network operators would continue, at a minimum, to require a 33% reserve margin to maintain the current levels of network reliability. The reserve margin may well be higher given the proportion of wind power and the use of relatively new solar thermal/biomass hybrid plants.

Table 3 shows the anticipated peak demand and total capacity needed to meet the 2020 demand calculated in section 2.

3.3. Estimate of the required wind and solar capacity

As close as possible we have kept the percentage of energy coming from wind and solar the same as in the Plan. This means that roughly 40% of the energy will come from wind and 60% will come from solar thermal plants with sufficient biomass capacity and sufficient fuel supply system to back-up for when there is insufficient energy in storage.

40% of the 449 TWh demand required by 2020 shown in section 2 will require 68 GW of wind. This is 36% higher than the 50 GW of wind used in the Plan.

The Plan assumed that 15% of wind power would always be available (assumption 5 above). This is the capacity credit allocated when assessing network reliability. Dispatchable generators like fossil fuel plants typically have a capacity credit of 99%. [4]

For the purpose of this estimate, we have assumed that the solar plants will have sufficient biomass capacity and reliability to be given a capacity credit of 99%. This may require a higher availability of biomass at the solar sites than has been included in the Plan. Without an LOLP we are not able to make that assessment.

Table 4 shows the amount of wind and solar needed to satisfy the network requirement for a total capacity of 101 GW calculated in 3.2 and shown in Table 3. The solar supply and biomass backup will need to be more than doubled from the present 42.5 GW to 87 GW.

4. Capital Costs

The Plan makes an estimate of the capital costs for the generators and the transmission lines. The Plan states that it “relies only on existing, proven, commercially available and costed technologies”. This is misleading. Although it is true that wind and solar thermal generators have been used commercially for a number of years, the particular products and product size suggested in the Plan are not yet available and caution is needed when estimating future costs for these products. Further, the Plan also assumes that baseload solar thermal is available today when the International Energy Agency does not expecting competitive baseload CSP before 2025. [5]

In this analysis we have compared the costs proposed in the Plan with known costs for solar and wind plants, together with ABARE’s suggested likely cost reductions over time.

4.1. Wind costs

According to ABARE [6, 7], current costs for wind farms in Australia are around $2.9 million/MW. In 2009 the costs were $2.3 million/MW – see Table 5.

The following assumptions have been made by BZE in estimating the cost of wind farms:

1. The Plan involves a large scale roll out of wind turbines, that will require a ramp up in production rate, which will help to reduce wind farm capital costs and bring Australian costs into line with the world (European) markets.
2. The 2010 forecast capital cost of onshore wind is approximately €1,200/kW (2006 prices) or $2,200/kW (current prices). By 2015 the European capital cost of onshore wind is estimated to be around €900/kW (2006 prices) (or $1,650 in current prices).
3. It is expected that Australian wind turbine costs in 2011 will reduce to the current European costs of $2.2 million/MW. For the first 5 years of the Plan, the capital costs of wind turbines are expected to transition from the current European costs to the forecast 2015 European amount — $1.65 million/MW.
4. In the final five years the capital costs are expected to drop to approximately $1.25 million/MW in Australia.

Wind turbines are not new technology and this would not normally suggest such significant falls in future costs. The 7.5 MW Enercon E126 turbine proposed is significantly larger than any currently installed on-shore commercial turbine and is still being developed. No firm costs for such a turbine are yet available. It seems very optimistic to suggest that the cost of these turbines will almost halve over the next decade. That projection is not supported by ABARE, which forecasts² a reduction in the cost of wind power of 21% from 2015 to 2030. This is a simple average reduction of 1.5% per year.

Given the current cost of turbines in Australia ($2.9 million/MW) and accepting some economy of scale both in turbine size and volume purchased it might seem more prudent to assume the cost will fall from the current cost of $2.9 million/MW to $2.5 million/MW over the decade in line with ABARE’s forecast.

4.2. Solar costs

The solar plant proposed by the ZCA2020 Plan is a solar thermal tower with 17 hours molten salt energy storage. The proposed 220 MW plant is 13 times larger than any existing solar tower system. As with the wind proposal, no firm costs for such a large sized plant are yet available.

We have prepared an analysis of two solar thermal tower projects of varying sizes and using molten salt with varying energy storage sizes. These are plants where the capital cost could be identified and shown in Table 6. All costs are converted to 2010 A$.

Part of the variation in cost per MW is related to the hours of storage. The size of the solar field has to be increased to support more hours of storage as does the size of the storage tanks. According to the Plan (p140), 80% of the cost of a solar tower system using molten salt storage comes from the solar field and the storage system.  Scaling up the storage will increase the cost per MW. These costs have been adjusted in Table 6 to 17 hours storage as proposed in the Plan.

The Plan (p61) has applied the following pricing which falls as more solar plants are installed:

1. The first 1,000 MW is priced at a similar price to SolarReserve’s Tonopah project at $10.5 million/MW.
2. The next 1,600 MW is priced slightly cheaper at $9.0 million/MW.
3. The next 2,400 MW is priced at Sargent & Lundy’ conservative mid-term estimate for the Solar 100 module which is $6.5 million/MW.
4. The next 3,700 MW is priced at Sargent & Lundy Solar 200 module price of $5.3 million/MW.
5. The remaining 33,800 MW is priced at $115 billion or $3.4 million/MW.

The Tonopah project is treated as a First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) plant. Unfortunately the Tonopah plant has only 10 hours of storage [8] not 17 hours as required by the Plan. Grossing up the $10.5 million/MW from 10 hours to 17 hours based on the additional materials needed makes the cost $16.4 million/MW. For comparison, the Gemasolar plant shown in Table 6 has a scaled up cost of $25.7 million/MW.

ABARE² forecasts a reduction in the cost of solar thermal with storage of 34% from 2015 to 2030. This is a simple average reduction of 2% per year. It might seem more prudent to assume the price will fall in line with ABARE’s assessment which will lower the price from $16.4 million/MW to $13.7 million/MW over the decade.

4.3. Assessment of generator capital costs based on revised capacity

In 3.3 we estimated the needed capacity to meet reliability standards in the electricity networks. From Table 4 the wind capacity needed was 68 GW and solar thermal plant capacity was 87 GW.

In this section we take the construction timelines suggested in the Plan (p57, p67) and gross them up to meet the capacity figures above. We then apply the prices calculated in 4.1 and 4.2 to calculate the revised total capital cost.

Table 7 and Table 8 apply a construction schedule as close as possible to the schedules provided in Table 3.7 and Table 3.14 of the Plan. The price each year is assumed to fall uniformly over the 10 years. We recognise this is not what would happen in practice but the end result would not vary greatly.

The Plan’s projected capital cost of wind = $72 billion.

The Plan’s projected capital cost of CST = $175 billion.

Because the required capacity for wind is 36% higher in this analysis than in the Plan and the capacity for solar is 105% higher, there is significant increase in capital cost over the Plan. This is particularly so for the solar component as the average cost per MW over the 10 years has increased from the BZE assessment of $4.1 million to $14.6 million. This a 3.6 times increase in average capital cost.

4.4. Assessment of the revised total investment cost

As the total installed capacity has increased then both the transmission system and biomass supply will also need to be increased. For the purpose of this assessment, the biomass is assumed to increase pro rata with the increase in solar thermal capacity. The transmission is assumed to increase pro rata with the total installed capacity. The actual increases could only be properly assessed with a full LOLP analysis.

The Plan assumes that the biomass fuel will be transported from the biomass pelletising plants, which are located in the wheat growing areas, to the solar thermal power plants by electrified railway lines.  It seems the Plan does not include the cost of these.  We have made an allowance of $54 billion for the capital cost of the electrified rail system for the biomass fuel handling logistics.  This assumes 300km average rail line distance per solar power site, for 12 sites at $15 million/km of electrified rail line.  This is included in our revised total investment cost shown in Table 9.

4.5. Uncertainty in the capital cost estimates

Capital costs for this Plan are highly uncertain.  None of the proposed generator types has ever been built.  Previous estimates for wind power and solar power have often proved to be gross underestimates. Our estimates include projections of cost reductions due to learning rates as does the Plan.  However, there is evidence that real costs have been increasing for decades so the learning rate reductions have to be considered uncertain.

The Plan calls for electrified rail lines to run from the pelleting plants in the wheat growing areas to the solar power stations but the capital cost for lines was not included.  We have included an estimate for this as discussed in 4.4.

There is uncertainty on the downside due to potential technological break-throughs which might make the learning curve rates forecast by various sources: Sargent and Lundy, NEEDS, DOE, IEA and ABARE achievable.  BZE projects a cost reduction of some 50% for solar and wind over the decade.  We will consider this to be the downside uncertainty.

There are several uncertainties on the upside:

1. 1. A qualified estimator will state that the uncertainty on the upper end is as high as 100% for a conceptual estimate involving a particular design using mature technology for a particular site. The Plan and our estimates are for a concept that does not involve mature technology, without specific site surveys and without a system design for a totally redesigned electricity system.
2. Previous estimates for solar thermal plants over the past two decades have often underestimated the cost of the actual plants.  For example, the estimated cost of Solar Tres / Gemasolar increased by 260% between 2005 and 2009 (when construction began).
3. 3. A loss of load probability (LOLP) study would be essential to accurately estimate the generating capacity and transmission network requirements before this Plan was executed.
4. The wind power contribution to reliability is based on an assumed firm capacity of 15%.  Many consider this highly optimistic.  Should the LOLP study suggest a significantly lower firm wind capacity, then much more solar thermal and biomass capacity would be required, increasing the total capital cost.
5. Some consider that almost none of our hydro resource could be used in the way assumed in the Plan to back up for low sun and low wind periods.  If this proved to be the case then more solar and biomass capacity would be required.
6. 6. All existing CST pilot plants have been built in areas that are relatively close to the necessary infrastructure such as road, water, gas mains and a work force.  This will not be the case for most of the 12 sites proposed for Australia.

In Table 9 , we have used a downside uncertainty of 50% and an upside uncertainty of 260% for solar plants and 200% for the other components.

5. Electricity Costs

The wholesale electricity cost, the price paid to the generator, makes up between 30% to 50% of retail electricity prices so any significant increase in the wholesale cost will impact consumer electricity prices. The Plan claims that wholesale prices will rise from the present $55/MWh to $120/MWh after  2020 (p122).

Table 10 shows estimates for the cost of electricity from solar thermal plants and wind farms for different years. It is clear that the Plan estimate for solar is significantly less than the other estimates. This would suggest a significantly lower capital cost for solar in the Plan than anticipated by these other assessments. The Plan does not offer an electricity cost for wind farms.

Based on the ABARE electricity cost estimates shown in Table 10. for solar thermal and wind, if the ratio of energy generated is 60% solar and 40% wind then the wholesale electricity price would need to be, at a minimum, $270/MWh by 2020 to cover the cost of generation.

However this is not a total system cost.  The wholesale cost of electricity would be about $500/MWh based on the capital cost of $1,709 billion, the supply of 443 TWh/a, a lifetime of 30 years and real interest rate of 10% pa.

If the capital cost is at the low end of the range, $885 billion, the electricity cost would be about $270/MWh.  If the capital cost is at the high end of the range, the electricity cost would be about $1200/MWh.

The $500/MWh cost is over 4 times the cost proposed in the Plan and nearly 10 times the current cost of electricity.  The low end of the estimate, $270/MWh, is more than twice the estimate proposed by the Plan and 5 times the current cost of electricity.  The high end of the range is over 10 times the cost proposed in the Plan and over 20 times the current cost of electricity.

6. Implementation Timeline

The Plan is not economically viable; therefore it will not be built to the timeline envisaged in the plan. As an example of how unrealistic the timeline is, the Plan assumes 1000 MW of CST will be under construction in 2011.   This is clearly impossible.  The first plant with 100MW peak capacity and just 10 hours of storage won’t be on-line in the USA until 2013 at the earliest.  It could be years before Australia can begin building plants with 17 hours of storage.

Trying to schedule the proposed build is making a category error. It is unlikely that any project manager would touch it. The project is simply not scoped.

We expect only demonstration plants will be built until there is confidence that they can become economically viable.  We doubt any solar thermal plants, of the size and availability proposed in the plan, will be on line before 2020. .

7. Conclusions

We have reviewed the “Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan” by Beyond Zero Emissions.  We have evaluated and revised the assumptions and cost estimates. We conclude:

• The ZCA2020 Stationary Energy Plan has significantly underestimated the cost and timescale required to implement such a plan.

• Our revised cost estimate is nearly five times higher than the estimate in the Plan: $1,709 billion compared to $370 billion.  The cost estimates are highly uncertain with a range of $855 billion to $4,191 billion for our estimate.

• The wholesale electricity costs would increase nearly 10 times above current costs to $500/MWh, not the $120/MWh claimed in the Plan.

• The total electricity demand in 2020 is expected to be 44% higher than proposed: 449 TWh compared to the 325 TWh presented in the Plan.

• The Plan has inadequate reserve capacity margin to ensure network reliability remains at current levels. The total installed capacity needs to be increased by 65% above the proposed capacity in the Plan to 160 GW compared to the 97 GW used in the Plan.

• The Plan’s implementation timeline is 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 be economically viable.

• The Plan relies on many unsupported assumptions, which we believe are invalid; two of the most important are:
  1. A quote in the Executive Summary “The Plan relies only on existing, proven, commercially available and costed technologies.”
  2. Solar thermal power stations with the performance characteristics and availability of baseload power stations exist now or will in the near future.

8. References

[1] Australian Sustainable Energy – Zero Carbon Australia – Stationary Energy Plan

http://media.beyondzeroemissions.org/ZCA2020_Stationary_Energy_Report_v1.pdf

[2] ABARE Australian energy projections to 2029-30

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_10/energy_proj.pdf

[3] European Commission – Mobility and Transport

http://ec.europa.eu/transport/urban/vehicles/road/electric_en.htm

[4] Doherty et al – Establishing the Role That Wind Generation May Have in Future Generation Portfolios IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 21, NO. 3, AUGUST 2006

[5] IEA – Technology Roadmap Concentrating Solar Power

http://www.iea.org/papers/2010/csp_roadmap.pdf

[6] ABARE’s list of major electricity generation projects – April 2009

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_09/EG09_AprListing.xls

[7] ABARE’s list of major electricity generation projects – April 2010

http://www.abare.gov.au/publications_html/energy/energy_10/EG10_AprListing.xls

[8] SOLARRESERVE GETS GREEN LIGHT ON NEVADA SOLAR THERMAL PROJECT July 2010

http://solarreserve.com/news/SolarReservePUCNApprovalAnnouncement072810.pdf

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.

Here is an image of the front side page – click on it to enlarge, and click here to download the high-resolution printable PDF version:

Here is the back page:

This would also be a great bit of paperwork to hand out in the Walk Against Warming, or to leave at your local doctor’s waiting room or other public places where information pamphlets are generally left. Oh, and if you find any typos or errors, let us know and we’ll create a revised version.

Finally, I should note that this pamphlet is targeted towards an Australian audience. Ideally, its core information should be readily available for a broader international audience. In this spirit, I’ve already had a volunteer to create a US-oriented version – and when that’s ready, I’ll post this up on BNC also. But if you live elsewhere, and wish to edit the pamphlet in order to make it better suited to your own country, then that would be great. To do this, just email me and I’ll send you the Word document version. Then edit it and send me back the revised, country-specific version. I’ll then upload it to BNC (after checking it) and provide a permanent link to it on the FAQ page.

Let’s continue to build the BNC community and get the message out there – there are real solutions to climate change and sustainable energy.

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.

I’ll use one example of our work to explain what happens. We are interested in understanding the dynamics of a disease like tuberculosis entering and spreading through the population of swamp buffalo in northern Australia (see previous post for all you need to know about swamp buffalo). We first set up an epidemiological model inOutbreak using some fairly well-quantified estimates of contact rate, transmission probability, latency period, and recovery of tuberculosis in cattle and other bovids on a daily time scale. We then built a annual-timescale demographic PVA in Vortex based on our measured estimates of mortality, fertility and sex ratio.

MMM then allows the two models to exchange information at the different time scales. The disease enters and spreads through the population following the daily dynamics, and then these outputs are read into Vortex at the end fo the year, modifying vital rates like survival and fertility according to each individual’s disease status. The population is projected one year forward, and the daily Outbreak dynamics are run again on the surviving individuals, and so on until the end of the projection interval.

Pretty bloody cool, no?

We then can test a couple of important management options should tuberculosis (or similar pathogen) ever re-enter the Australian population of buffalo. These include, what’s the probability of detecting the disease if present based on various sampling frequencies? How many animals must be culled to eradicate the disease? These questions will be answered for you in a few months once the paper is complete.

We also worked on another example to combine the cohort-based modelling software RAMAS with Vortex and Outbreak via MMM. The example included the complex interaction of black-footed ferrets, prairie dogs and plague determining the extinction risk of the ferrets. For the first time ever, RAMAS and Vortex are now working together. We also plan to bring climate-change projections into the combination in the near future.

We anticipate punching out over the next 12 months a heap of manuscripts explaining all this for your benefit, and we sincerely hope that MMM will grow into standard platform for combining disparate, but related population models for all sorts of conservation and disease-management applications. Stay tuned and I’ll keep you informed.

We worked pretty hard this week and rewarded ourselves with a little trip Friday night to Buddy Guy’s Legends blues club in the heart of Chicago. Fantastic music; I’ve never seen Clive happier (he’s a massive Blues Brothers fan).

Many thanks especially to Bob, Phil and the Chicago Zoological Society for hosting the workshop. We’ll return the favour next year in Adelaide.

Second, a little something to make you all a little jealous.

Yesterday, thanks to the generous hospitality of Chuck Till, I spent a wonderful day touring Yellowstone National Park, followed by a drive by of the Grand Tetons (twice as high as Australia’s Snowy Mountains). It’s a truly amazing piece of the planet, and the weather was perfect blue skies all day. One for the memories. I saw elk, bison (hundreds) and all manner of birds and smaller mammals (no bears, alas). I’ve got a photo of me standing in front of an erupting ‘Old Faithful’, and other ones at bubbling (smelly) hot springs and glooping mud pools (including a cave called the ‘Dragon’s Mouth’), and the Yellowstone ‘Grand Canyon’ (very spectacular — see photo to the left). I’m just waiting for Tom Blees to send me his iPhone pics with me in it! I also played golf this morning in front of a bunch of spinning wind turbines that form part of the Bonneville Power authority (I shot a 95…).

So, I’ve covered 7 US states in the past 2 weeks (California, Illinois, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Utah). It’s been quite a trip. However, no sooner will I get back to Australia on Sunday than I head out again to Shanghai, China, for the World Expo 2010, where I’m a plenary speaker at the ‘Australia — China Futures Dialogues: Achieving Sustainable Economic Development in the Asia Pacific’ (I’ll be talking about climate change, sustainability, and of course, nuclear power and other alternative energy sources). No rest for the wicked!

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.

Under the ‘business as usual’ scenario outlined by the Garnaut Climate Change Review, demand for electricity is expected to rise by a further 60% by 2030. In a recent statement by the federal resources and energy minister in March 2010, it was projected that Australia will need to invest a whopping $100 billion over the next decade in electricity generation and transmission infrastructure – just to keep pace with escalating demand and to replace old, worn out power plants that are due for retirement. This is policy area that has stagnated for too long, and the situation has now become urgent, if we wish to avoid rolling blackouts and much higher energy prices due to unmet demand.

Still, the pressing need for major investment in electricity supply in the period 2010 to 2030 can also be grasped as the perfect opportunity to launch a revolutionary change in the way we go about generating our power. As I see it, there are four possible energy ‘storylines’ that could be written for Australia over the next two decades:

1. Coal-for-coal, whereby we simply replace our old coal-fired power stations with newer, slightly more efficient models, which then continue to pump out carbon dioxide for another 40 to 60 years.

2. Gas-for-coal substitution, using combined cycle gas turbines to replace baseload (24 × 7) coal, with some minor contributions from renewable energy such as wind and solar.

3. A large renewable energy expansion, with open cycle gas turbines used to provide backup.

4. Nuclear power rollout for baseload, with support from renewables and peaking power gas.

It’s clear that these alternatives are not equally likely. From an economic perspective, as a coal-rich nation which exports hundreds of millions of tonnes of the stuff each year, it would be tempting to take the ‘easy’ short-term course of action and simply build more coal-fired power stations. But this is totally unacceptable in terms of climate change impacts, and further, will become an increasingly uneconomic proposition if a national or global carbon price comes into force at some point in the future. To a lesser degree, the same is true of option 2 – as natural gas prices rise internationally due to burgeoning demand (especially when gas is used to replace oil), energy prices will escalate. Also, in terms of carbon dioxide, a complete coal-to-gas swap out will reduce our stationary energy emissions by less than half, which is way short of the mark required to mitigate global warming.

These problems with the coal and gas storylines would be reduced if it can be demonstrated that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels can be captured, compressed and buried underground in a commercial plant at a competitive price. But right now, that’s pure speculation – no industrial-scale facility is operating anywhere in the world, and almost certainly won’t be within the next 20 years.

The feasibility of option 3, a large push towards renewable energy, is difficult to assess. The current government target has Australia aiming to derive 20% of its electricity from wind, solar, wave and geothermal (hot rock) energy by 2020, driven by legal mandates and large financial subsidies. These policy interventions will inevitably drive up energy prices – at least in the short term – until and unless these alternative energy sources can compete economically with the price of fossil fuels.

Beyond this modest market penetration, there are huge uncertainties. No country anywhere in the world has non-hydro renewables contributing more than a consistent 20% of supply (whereas, by comparison, France derives 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy). Denmark has the highest, per capita, based largely on wind power. Yet even the Danes still rely on domestic coal and imported nuclear and hydro to meet their reliable baseload power needs, and they have the highest power prices in Europe. If Australia is to push significantly beyond the 20% barrier for renewables, to 40 or 60% by 2030 and still further by 2050, we would truly be charting a new, world-leading frontier – one underpinned by stunning advancements in large-scale energy storage, significant overall cost reductions, and some serious ‘smart grid’ technologies to better balance supply and demand and improve the efficiency with which we manage energy use. Anything is possible, but whether renewables can win out in the cost-benefit equation remains a big, unanswered question.

The final alternative is for Australia to become energy copy cats, duplicating the deployment of those technologies that have proven to be economic internationally. This is the most likely way we would move into nuclear power. Although atomic energy has stagnated for the last few decades, this is changing rapidly, with more than 50 new large reactors now under construction worldwide in 2010, and many hundreds more in the late stages of planning and approval. If this next-generation ‘renaissance’ of nuclear power turns out to be as cost-effective as the Asian tiger nations are banking on it being, then it could also turn out to be the clean energy game changer for Australia. But expect plenty of socio-political clashes and economic wrangling before the dust settles!

Only time will tell – both with respect to the final costs of new nuclear, and the ultimate economic viability and scalability of non-hydro renewables with energy storage. Even if the nuclear option is eventually pursued in Australia, I don’t expect a serious decision to be made before about 2016 (that is, two more Federal election cycles). Yet, under such a time-frame, it is conceivable that we could have a dozen reactors operating here by 2030, with many more in the construction pipeline.

Australia’s electricity generation system in 2020 will not be all that different to today. One decade is too short a period to make major changes to critical infrastructure. We will probably have more gas-fired power stations, and may also have retired a few coal plants without replacement. We’ll also have more renewable energy installed – mostly wind – but also some desert-based solar. By 2030, however, things could be shaping up quite differently. My bet is that nuclear power, on economic and logistical grounds, will be the technology most on-track to replace coal.

But then again, as atomic physicist Niels Bohr once observed: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.

Barry Brook is Sir Hubert Wilkins Professor of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute

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.

Offsetting within a constraint

If you accept Hansen’s target and understand that the long atmospheric lifetime of CO2 severely hampers your pathways toward that target, then this determines the kind of offsets that make sense.

Hansen understands this implicitly when he says that deep cuts in non-CO2 forcings can allow us to slow the rate at which we reduce CO2 emissions (the coal phase out). Similarly, cuts to cooling aerosols will need to be offset by even quicker cuts to CO2 emissions or non-CO2 forcings.

It clearly makes sense to use the term offsets when trading emission reduction methods. If you increase one, you must offset this with a decrease in the other. But can reforestation be regarded as an offset for some positive emission? No, because it is already being used for something … namely the restoration of 350 ppm. Likewise if you use the shutdown of a coal station as an offset for some other emission, then you have achieved nothing.

A numerical example will help. Suppose that, as part of our goal to get to 350 ppm by 2150, we plan to reforest N million hectares. Now lets say we propose some activity which leads to CO2 emissions … for example that we increase the national cattle herd by a million animals which turn carbon dioxide into methane … massively increasing its warming impact for the next decade or so. Whatever we do to offset these animals must be over and above the reforestation, because that reforestation already has a purpose. It is spoken for. To regard it as a cattle offset is double counting.

Grazing and balancing

Recently, Barry Brook had an email from Tony Lovell of Queensland Accountancy firm AllStatePartners who was interested in increasing soil oxidation to absorb methane from cattle.

In the previous section I outlined why any increase in cattle can’t be balanced by reforestation, unless it is by an increase in reforestation over and above the level required to get us back to 350 ppm by 2150. Can an increase in either soil carbon or soil’s ability to absorb methane be used to offset methane from current cattle populations?

In principle, yes. But we must avoid double counting. Here’s how to run the calculations. Let’s assume for now that we can just use increases in soil carbon to offset methane.

Consider a grazing area g with a particular herd you wish to offset.

1. Calculate what the rolling back of deforestation and soil carbon losses on g would contribute (if anything) to the 60 ppm achievable from a global deforestation roll-back. Call this the sequestration potential S(g) of area g. Cleared rainforest in Queensland has a huge reforestation potential, cleared mallee rather less. Some areas of deforested land are simply unavailable for reforestation … we live on them. But, in Australia, this is only 2 million hectares out of the total of 100 million cleared since white arrival. The sequestration potential of any area we can’t reforest has be made up … somehow.
2. Now calculate the carbon difference associated with keeping the land under grass for cattle with a normal management regime rather than reforesting it. Call this the foregone sequestration F(g) that results from running cattle.
3. Lastly we add in the amount of carbon required to offset the various emissions (particularly methane and nitrous oxide) from the cattle. This is the production cost P(g).

The amount of soil carbon and/or reforestation you need to provide to offset the herd on g is thus F(g)+P(g). If you are finishing the cattle with feed or fodder grown elsewhere on land needs to be kept clear, rather than reforested, then you will need to add in a further foregone sequestration amount. If you are running the cattle on uncleared land, then F(g) may be quite small.

Here’s a simplified concrete example. Consider a grazing area near Daintree in Far North Queensland. Assume it was cleared and will support a rainforest with a carbon sequestration potential of around 500 tonnes per hectare when fully reforested. If we leave the cattle in place the pasture may have a soil carbon content of perhaps 100 tonnes per hectare. The NSW Department of Primary Industries is telling farmers they can add 0.3 to 1 tonne per hectare for perhaps 50 to 100 years using improved management practices. Being very generous, this amounts to 200 tonnes per hectare, giving us a 300 tonne per hectare shortfall over straight reforestation. F(g) per hectare over the area is 300. Add in a number for P(g) and this is what your improved management practices really need to be delivering to compensate for keeping the land under cattle rather than returning it to its previous state.

Balancing and capping and trading

The fundamental shortcoming of cap and trade and carbon taxes is the presumption is that if we just stopping emitting carbon, everything will be okay. This belief is intuitively plausible but not supported by the science. The carbon already in the atmosphere won’t decline quickly without our active efforts to sequester it. To do this we must stop global burning and other activities which prevent reforestation from drawing down carbon and oxidising other trace gases.

Under a cap and trade system foregone sequestration doesn’t appear. It is an off balance sheet item.

And then there’s triple counting

The third step in the grazing balance formulation above, the calculation of what you need to do to offset production emissions is quite complex and I’ve just glossed over it in my example … not that the first two steps are really simple either!

The methane and nitrous oxide from cattle can be dealt with in various ways. You can sequester some quantity of carbon to account for it, or you can arrange for the soil to oxidise an equivalent amount of both gases or some mixture of the two.

But it isn’t enough that the soil under the cattle oxidise an amount of methane equivalent to that produced by the cattle. Why not?

That soil was always oxidising methane, even back in preindustrial times when atmospheric methane was 0.7 ppm rather than the the 1.82 ppm that it is now. Ignoring other methane sinks in the upper atmosphere, the soil oxidised the methane produced in wetlands, bogs and the like. It’s like a see-saw with a block of natural methane emissions on one side and natural breakdown on the other. There was, at human time scales, a rough balance. It was 0.65 ppm in 1600 and just 0.7 ppm 200 years later. Now however, people are quantifying that natural methane breakdown block on one end of the see-saw and saying, ”Wow, we can put an equivalent block of cattle on the other end of the see saw and the emissions will be offset. Beef can be carbon neutral!” Of course, there is a way to make beef carbon neutral … remove an equivalent number of other natural emitters … drain some wetlands, for example. This is a popular method for making grazing country in the South East of South Australia. But just counting natural oxidation as offsetting additional cattle is double counting, plain and simple.

This kind of double counting of a natural sink is over and above the double counting we discussed previously, which is where we take increases in forest cover or soil carbon that are absolutely imperative to bring us to 350 ppm and think we can use them in offset calculations. Combine the two and we have the real possibility of triple counting.

It’s all in the numbers

Here’s a little quantitative background on soil oxidation of methane.

Back in January 2010 US Environment news source Grist ran a story about cattle in which all sorts of claims were made. Including the following:

In contrast, one cow’s worth of healthy land actually absorbs one hundred times the methane emitted by that cow in any given year.

The claim turned out to be based on an article in the Australian last year which mentioned high country in the Monaro region of New South Wales that could oxidise 8.7 tonnes of methane per annum per hectare.

How does that number look to you? Tonnes?

A paper published last year surveyed areas in temperate, Mediterranean and sub-tropical regions of Australia with sites in both forested and pastured land found a range of absorption per hectare of -0.8 to 2.6 kg of methane per annum in pasture and 0.08 to 4.3 kg per annum in forest. That’s right kilograms in the peer reviewed journal and tonnes in the Australian. I’d been meaning to chase that descrepancy for months and finally did it when I decided to write this piece.

It’s a mistake. A microgram figure got promoted to milligrams. Ouch. Off by a factor of a thousand. It happens. Everyone can be thankful it isn’t in an IPCC report or we’d have high-country-gate! Professor Mark Adams has kindly sent me a conference paper which gives correct figures and a correction has been printed (see previous link). Unfortunately, the myth will live on and be circulated far and wide by cattle friendly bloggers … not everybody sees corrections … and the correction doesn’t seem to have made it to the original newspaper!

The bottom line is that the high country can oxidise 2 or perhaps 3 times more methane than the other areas measured, but not a thousand times. Grass fed cattle might produce 83 kg of methane per annum so it may take 10 hectares of high country to deal with each cow, assuming it wasn’t already dealing with other emissions. Remember, even after the mistakes have been rectified, this is still just double counting.

Here’s a quote from the conference paper that Adams supplied:

Given the parameters of this [beef] production system that equates to 5.4 tonnes CH4 produced annually.

Given the average rate of CH4 oxidation … for each landscape element, multiplied by the area represented in this production system, total sequestration amounts to 7.6 tonnes, or a 2.2 tonnes offset to enterprise scale emissions of CH4

So the natural methane oxidation is being claimed, not just to offset the beef methane, but the excess (in this case) is considered a further offset asset.

Rewriting environmental history

Part of the reason people think they can get away with double counting is a warped view of the history of animal life on earth. Lovell in his email to Barry paints a depressingly common, but wrong, picture to support his scheme:

We have had billions of ruminant animals on the planet for millions of years, without any issues until human management and mismanagement got involved. Nature has a way of balancing things, and the simplest way to balance the bacteria in a rumen that produce methane is to have some other bacteria in the soil that oxidise methane.

Not true … in a number of ways.

Ruminants evolved about 50 millions years ago as small (less than 5 kg) forest dwelling omnivores. While animals we would easily recognise as cattle are perhaps 2-3 million years old, there weren’t very many of them until very recently.

Here’s a chart from a few posts ago showing some relevant animal populations in 1500 and now. There were a couple of hundred million largish ruminants in 1500 and a couple of billion now.

The current total population of wild ruminants is estimated at a mere 75 million and most of those are quite small animals. There are, all up, 46 times more domestic ruminants. That’s right 3.5 billion. And there are not just many more of them, but many have been artificially selected to be bigger. Our agricultural selection pressures have totally changed the metabolic processes in the animals. Dairy cattle, for example, aren’t just bigger, but they now produce about 2.5 times more milk than a wild variety of similar size would produce. N.B. If you understand allometric equations, then you will understand the full import of this sentence. More milk requires more feed and thus entails more methane. Second, many of the large grassland areas that have emerged during the past 8,000 years are anthropogenic. Following the last ice age, global forests expanded as the ice receded, a process which lasted 8,000 years or so.

The prairies of the US were far smaller 18,000 years ago than 8,000 years ago. The large bison herds at the time of European arrival in North America were a human creation, not some non-anthropogenic natural phenomena. People with fire can clear forest and have been doing it for thousands of years. But until recently there weren’t that many people. The current explosion of humans and ruminants, not to mention other domestic animals is unprecedented.

Another of Lovell’s misunderstandings is his apparent belief that nature made soils with the aim of balancing that ruminant methane. Nature doesn’t give a damn about balance and has no goals of any kind. This is demonstrated by the way that the planet has whip-sawed with speed and violence between ice ages and hot ages as recorded in ice core and other climate records. When things move slowly on human time scales, we infer balance, but on longer time scales it is quickly seen as an illusion.

Similarly, evolution doesn’t strive for balance or efficiency or perfect form and function. Many of its “inventions” are suboptimal kluges that would embarrass any engineer. Others are elegant or efficient or both. Evolution always has to build on what went before. Unlike an intelligent designer, it can’t start with a blank page. Sometimes we judge the result to be brilliant, sometimes not.

It is humans who seek balance and it is us, along with many other animals, who have goals and desires. We have thrived during the recent few thousand years of relatively stable climate and we desperately want it to continue … well some of us do.

Offsets, carbon trades and all the other financial paraphernalia have some lawyers and accountants salivating overtime with dreams of trotters in the trough. It may be inevitable that such mechanisms will be put in place, given the prevailing economic ideology. But they need to be solidly constructed so that they don’t undermine what we absolutely must do in the coming couple of decades.

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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.

Is the sun enough? No way!

Those opposed to nuclear energy claim it would leave a legacy of nuclear waste which would have to be managed for tens of thousands of years. This is true only if we do not recycle the uranium and other heavy metals in the waste (called “transuranics”) to extract all their useful energy.

Right now, mined uranium is cheap. However, in the longer term, a once-through-and-throw-away use of nuclear fuel – which extracts less than 1 per cent of the energy – will make no economic sense. Feeding ‘nuclear waste’ into fast reactors will use all the energy in uranium, and liquid fluoride thorium reactors will access the energy stored in thorium.

After repeated recycling, the tiny quantity of fission products (shattered uranium atoms) that remain will become less radioactive than natural granites and monazite sands within 300 years.

To claim that large amounts of energy (generating greenhouse gases) would be required to mine, process and enrich uranium, and to construct and later decommission nuclear power stations simply ignores a wealth of real-world data. Authoritative and independently verified whole-of-life-cycle analyses have repeatedly shown that energy inputs to nuclear power are as low as, or lower than, wind, hydro and solar thermal, and less than half those of solar photovoltaic panels.

That is today’s reality. In a future all-electric society – which includes electric or synthetic-fuelled vehicles supplied by nuclear power plants – greenhouse gas emissions from the nuclear cycle would be zero.

Finally, when all other arguments have been refuted, critics fall back on the claim that nuclear power takes too long to build or is too expensive compared to renewable energy. These arguments are perhaps the most regularly and transparently false arguments thrown up by those trying to block nuclear power from competing on a fair and level playing field with other energy sources.

Is nuclear power enough? Sure is!

Indeed, the evidence on energy replacement I present in the ‘yes’ case of the new book ‘Why vs Why: Nuclear Power’ (Pantera Press, 2010) demonstrates that large-scale nuclear power actually offers the fastest, cheapest and the only complete solution to ending our dependence on coal, oil and gas.

Many environmentalists believe the best low-carbon solution is for governments to guide us back to simpler, less energy-consuming lives, a vastly less consumer-oriented world. Notions like that are unrealistic. The world will continue to need energy, and lots of it. But fossil fuels are not a viable future option. Nor are renewables the main answer. There is no single solution, or “silver bullet”, for solving the energy and climate crises, but there are bullets, and they’re made of uranium and thorium, the fuels needed for nuclear plants.

It is time we embrace nuclear energy as a cornerstone of the carbon-free revolution the world needs to address climate change and long-term energy security in a world beyond fossil fuels. Advanced nuclear power that provides the technological key to unlocking awesome potential of these energy metals for the benefit humankind and for the ultimate sustainability of our global society.

Professor Barry Brook is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute. He runs a popular climate change and energy options blog at http://bravenewclimate.com

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.

I’m getting some T-shirts printed with the Smiley Face “Nuclear Power? – Yes Please” as well.

There are some good poster ideas in the BNC post. I particularly like Poster #1: Nuclear Power or Climate Change — Take your Pick

In Sydney I would really like to link up with any other NSW based BNC readers to make this a big day.

I’ve contacted Richard McNealI at EFN so that we can have a combined group and meet with them just before the walk starts at say 11.45am. I’m suggesting we meet first at the south western corner of Belmore Park.

If you can come along then let me know by emailing here.

But please, this is not just about a Sydney event. Brave New Climate readers are Australia wide so even if you’re on your own or in a group, get your tee’s and posters ready and remember – have fun and be kind to each other!

Together we must defeat the forces that are preventing “Real Action on Climate Change”.

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!

Then, Tom, Chuck and I will go on a sightseeing drive through Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, before I fly out of the US. This will be great, as I get to look over the sites occupied by the endangered Yellowstone grizzly bear, for which I wrote a population viability analysis (among other species) for my PhD studies back in the 1990s.

I then go straight to Shanghai for World Expo 2010, where I’m a plenary speaker at the ‘Australia — China Futures Dialogues: Achieving Sustainable Economic Development in the Asia Pacific’, thanks to an invitation from Prof Andrew O’Neil of the Griffith Asia Institute. I’ll be talking about climate change, sustainability, and of course, nuclear power and other alternative energy sources.

Right, I’d better go and pack, I’ve got a lot of last minute organisation to get done!

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.

Such heatwaves and regular intensive fires also causes great stress to most species, leading to higher mortality, failed reproduction, and reduced body condition. These synergies, between water availability, hotter temperatures and changed fire regimes, are some of the primary reasons why unrestrained climate change is anticipated to lead to the extinction of an appallingly large fraction of our biodiversity. [climate change basics III will explain more about this]

Sea level rise is a more universal threat. When salty seawater mixes with fresh groundwater, the result is diluted seawater. A once usable water resource becomes worthless, with obvious impacts on coastal drinking and irrigation water supplies, as well as ecosystems which tap into aquifers. Severe storm surge events occasionally result in this exchange, but if these events are rare and do not encroach too far up the shoreline, the impacts are generally minor and localised. But what if the frequency of flooding events from the sea were to increase dramatically, and do so across the entire coastlines of  heavily populated nations with expensive waterside properties or valuable low-lying agricultural land? That ominous threat is just what is anticipated due to climate change, and should therefore be a major concern to coastal planners and beachside residents alike.

There is clear evidence that sea levels have risen over the past century. Long-term records from a globally distributed network of reference tidal gauges show that sea levels rose about 20 cm from 1870 to 2004, correlating with a globally averaged rise in temperature of about 0.8°C. Since 1992, a satellite monitoring system has made regular and precise measurements of sea level, which show an accelerating rise over the last decade. If the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets hold together, the most recent estimates suggest another 50 to 140 cm of sea level rise this century. A worst-case scenario, now being predicted by some eminent scientists, is 3 metres by 2100 should the polar melt continue to accelerate. Yet, even 50 cm would be enough to make a 1 in 100 year storm surge event a yearly occurrence.

The need for action is urgent and our window of opportunity for avoiding severe impacts is rapidly closing. Yet the obstacles to change are not technical or economic, they are political and social.

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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]

Complex computer simulation models of the atmosphere have been developed and refined for over 40 years. They are now sufficiently advanced that they can reproduce most of the major features of climate change observed over the last 150 years. Under a business-as-usual scenario, which assume a continued reliance on fossil fuels as our primary energy source, these models predict 1.8°C to 6.4°C of further global warming during the 21st century. There is also a real danger that we have reached or will soon reach tipping points that will cascade uncontrollably and take the future out of our hands. But much of the uncertainty represented in this wide range of possibilities relates to our inability to forecast the probable economic and technological development pathway global societies will take over the next few decades.

Year by year, our scientific understanding of climate science and responses of the Earth system continues to grow and mature.

In short, it remains within our power to anticipate many of the impacts of future global warming, and to 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 effort to avoid dangerous climate change?

Should we choose to take no effective action, we can expect increasingly severe consequences. For instance, beyond about 2°C of further warming, the Great Barrier Reef will be devastated. Extreme events will become much more frequent, such as storm surges adding to rising sea levels of many metres, threatening coastal cities. There is the possibility that a semi-persistent or more intense El Niño will set in, leading to frequent failures of tropical monsoonal rains which provides the water required to feed billions of people. Above 3°C, up to half of all species may be consigned to extinction because of their inability to cope with such rapid and extreme changes.

Worryingly, even if we can manage to stabilise CO₂ concentrations at 450 parts per million (it is currently 387, and rising at 3 parts per million per year), we would still only have a roughly 50:50 chance of averting dangerous climate change. This will require a global cut in emissions of 50–85% by 2050 and certainly more than 90% for developed nations like Australia. Peak oil, global warming and long-term sustainability all require that we move rapidly to adopt sustainable, non-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear power and renewables (with the choice dictated largely by economic viability). Many credible studies show we can cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions IF the right policies are in place. For details of the principal mitigation and adaptation options that are available, see the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence so far that we, as individual countries or as a global collective of humanity, are taking meaningful action. Indeed, ‘carbon intensity’ (expressed as gross domestic product per tonne of carbon emitted) in developed nations such as the United States and Australia has actually increased over the last decade, the global rate of emissions growth risen from 1% to 3% per year, and total carbon emissions from all sources now exceed 9 billion tonnes a year. China overtook the United States in 2006 as the single biggest greenhouse polluter and will be producing twice as much CO2 within little more than another decade at its present rate of economic activity.

This exponential growth in carbon-based energy, if sustained, will mean that over just the next 25 years, humans will emit into the atmosphere a volume of carbon that exceeds the total amount emitted during the 250-year industrial period of 1750 to 2000. Of particular concern is that long-lived greenhouse gases, such as CO₂, will continue to amplify global warming for centuries to come. For every five tonnes added during a year in which we dither about reducing emissions, one tonne will still be trapping heat in 1,000 years.

It is a bleak endowment to future generations.

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:

1. Be fair — acknowledge what is good and useful about this effort. [From my first skim, I would say 50% is good to excellent, 15% is so-so, 15% is highly dubious and 20% is unmitigated nonsense]

2. Focus on key assumptions — how sensitive are the outcomes to these, and how grounded in reality are they? [Cost for CSP is a good example]

3. What are the gaps? This will help — print out and have it to hand: “A checklist for renewable energy plans“

4. What are the biases? Are there examples of cherry picking? What important details have been glazed over?

5. Are the estimates of system reliability, build time and cost, acceptable? [Monthly averages...?]

6. What are the environmental impacts of this plan, compared to alternatives?

And so on. Perhaps the comments can also help me build up this list of guiding principles better aid later commenters.

Okay, BNCers unleashed!

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.

Guest post

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

———————————–

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?

□     What efficiency improvements are assumed?

□     Does the plan include power for electric vehicles, desalination, and industrial use?

□     What are their worst case scenarios for solar and wind generation, and how have they been handled?

□     Is enough wind and solar generation planned to cover their minimum capacity factors and longest outages?

□     Do the wind and solar outputs account for dumped power due to production in excess of demand?

□     Is enough energy storage planned to provide continuous power?

□     Is enough generation capacity planned to charge storage in addition to supplying demand?

□     Are wind and solar assumed to contribute to emissions reduction?  If so, why?

□     What lifetime of wind and solar plant is assumed? Can these estimates be supported by data?

□     What maintenance and decommissioning costs are assumed?

□     Are all proposed generation and storage technologies mature?

□     Can the plan meet National Electricity Market reliability standards?

□     Does the plan increase the NEM mandated spinning reserve from the current 850 MW?

□     Does the plan increase the NEM reserve generation capacity from the current 20% value?

□     How much new hydroelectricity is assumed?

□     How much new pumped hydroelectricity (GW) does the plan call for?

□     How many hours storage does this provide?

□     What sites are proposed for the pumped storage?

□     What power source is proposed for pumping?

□     How much new transmission infrastructure is planned?

□     What power are the transmission lines rated for?

□     How much steel, concrete, land and water are required?

□     What are the proposed sites for the wind and solar installations?

□     Has the availability and cost of labour been addressed? Does it consider transport to remote locations and accommodation?

□     Have the ecological impacts of large scale wind and solar been assessed for the proposed sites?

□     How much natural gas is used?

□     Does the plan cost in large increases in the price of gas?

□     How long is natural gas assumed to last?

□     What will take the place of natural gas when it is no longer economically available?

□     Was nuclear power considered as an option?

1. Scope of Plan

1.1. What emissions reduction is targeted?  Is it sufficiently ambitious?

Climate change is a big issue, and we have to think big.  Unambitious targets will not solve our problem, and risk delaying effective action.  Targets of 40% or 60% cuts to CO₂ emissions are not enough.  The endgame is to completely decarbonize our energy system.  Even if the plan does not reach that goal at once, it should have the potential to scale to 100% emissions reductions.

The preindustrial atmospheric CO₂ concentration was 280 ppm.  It is currently about 390 ppm, and increasing at about 2 ppm per year.  We need to bring it back down to 350 ppm or less, in a timeframe of decades.  Failure will result in irreversible and extremely damaging consequences for human civilization and planetary ecology. The immediate goal, as proposed by James Hansen, should be to completely phase out coal power by 2030.  An effective plan must be able to shut down coal plants, one by one, until they are all gone.

Unsurprisingly, these topics have been well covered on Brave New Climate:

Target atmospheric CO₂ levels, not vague carbon emissions

We need a real global plan for carbon mitigation

Managing catastrophic risk – the six step plan

How to get rid of existing coal

1.2. What is the budget for the plan?

No plan can be credibly advanced without a credible budget.  Is this plan costed, not just for the direct generation plant, but also backup, storage, transmission, maintenance, decommissioning, and so on?  Is the rising cost of the fuel for backup (gas especially) into the future considered?  If not, pass.

1.3. How is the plan to be financed?

Having a budget is one thing. Knowing how the plan will be paid for is something else again. A plan that can’t be paid for can’t be built. There are many ways to do this – does the plan specify a financing model?

1.4. How cost effective is it ($/tCO₂ avoided)?

We don’t have unlimited cash to spend on emissions reduction.  We want bang for buck.  We want to be able to measure value for money.  And we want to shop around.  Can I get better value with a different plan?  So, what is the emissions avoidance cost, in dollars per tonne of CO₂ avoided?

Environment Victoria is campaigning to close down the Hazelwood coal plant.  Their plan is to eliminate 12 MtCO₂ per annum with wind and gas at a cost of $64/t CO₂ avoided.  Had they considered gas alone, they could have the same emissions reduction for $22/t CO₂ avoided.  If nuclear were available it could be even cheaper.   Choosing the more expensive option virtually guarantees their plan will fail.  This is just one coal plant. Do we want to make the same mistake with nation scale infrastructure, and fail also?

Peter Lang has calculated the emissions avoidance cost here for a number of generation options.

1.5. Can the plan scale to 100% of demand (or more)?

Adding small amounts of renewable energy to the grid is relatively easy (albeit costly).  But it gets harder as we add more.  Can the plan take us all the way to 100% decarbonization?  Or will we fall short, and be left with no other option than to bridge the gap with fossil fuels?

Each power source has its own limits.  Hydroelectricity is limited by availability of suitable sites and adequate rainfall.  Wind power penetration is limited by its effect on the stability and reliability of the grid.  Even coal is limited to less than 100% by its slow response time to rapidly changing demand.

1.6. What is the timeframe of the plan?

Does the plan have a schedule? We should expect to see milestones in such terms as “20% emissions reduction by 2020 through to 80% reductions by 2050″.

I do worry that such goals are a bit amorphous.  Our power supply does not come in continuous percentages, it comes in discrete chunks – the power plants.  So the best schedule would be a list of coal fired power plants, by name, with a date for closure.   Energy Victoria have exactly the right idea with their campaign to close Hazelwood by 2012.  Now can we set a termination date for the rest of these plants?

1.7. What energy sectors are in scope?

Do we just consider the energy sectors that are visible to us as consumers, like household electricity, and driving the car?  A plan that includes household efficiency, ‘green’ electricity, and reduced car usage might then look very appealing. But is it enough?  Can the plan provide

• Household electricity
• plus commercial and manufacturing uses of electricity
• plus desalination
• plus electrification of transport

and perhaps more, including energy intensive carbon drawdown?

2. Demand and Efficiency

2.1 What current demand is assumed?

The electrical energy demand for Australia in 2009-2010 is a nice round 1.0 exajoule, according to ABARE.  That’s 10¹⁸ J, or 280 TWh (1 terawatt.hour is 10¹² watt.hours).  It’s the equivalent of about thirty seven 1 GW power stations running for one year.  We have 49 GW installed generation capacity (2008).

Peak power demand in the National Electricity Market is of the order 33 GW (2007).

This demand is not met just by generating this very large amount of energy.  It is met by generating the total power demanded by all customers at all points in time and serving it to customers at the moment it is demanded.  These figures are for electricity as a product which can be sold, not just energy which can be generated.

2.2. What future demand is assumed?

Our current demand will not stand still.  The population will grow, and we will want more air conditioning and larger TVs!  New uses will be found for electricity, including electric vehicles and water desalination.

ABARE projections have Australia’s electricity production increasing to 366 TWh in 2030, without assuming significant adoption of electric vehicles.  What future demand does the plan assume?

2.3. What demand reductions due to efficiency are assumed?

Of course, we could use less energy by being more efficient.  However, plans that rely on a large efficiency component are due some close examination for a number of reasons.

The first is Jevon’s paradox, which observes that when some technology becomes more efficient, the technology is more widely used because it becomes cheaper, and net energy use increases.  Then there is the Khazoom-Brookes Postulate, which holds that energy efficiency allows increased economic growth, also leading to an increase in net energy use.

Efficiency only makes a big difference for uses that are already inefficient.  But very energy intensive activities tend to be quite efficient, as there is a strong economic incentive for them to be so.  Of our 280 TWh/yr of electrical energy, 43 TWh/yr is used in production of non-ferrous metals (29 TWh/yr just for aluminium).  These processes are already close to optimal.

So we are looking for efficiency improvements down in the tail of the Pareto distribution – amongst a large number of smaller consumption categories.  It is harder to achieve these efficiencies as improvements are spread over a diverse array of activities, each with its own special way of saving energy.

If we expect large efficiency gains from behavioural change, we will be disappointed.  Few people are motivated to make large lifestyle changes to support deep cuts in energy usage.  In the big picture, they are a hobbyist population that is of no consequence.  The greater mass will resist inconvenience, strongly, and will resist any political move to coerce such inconvenience.

3. Generation

3.1. Wind and solar

3.1.1. How much redundant capacity will be built?

There are traps lurking in the average capacity factors of wind and solar that can lead us to underestimate the number of power plants required.  Is the planned generation based on:

• The nameplate capacity?
• The annual average capacity factor?
• The capacity factor for seasons of lowest output (eg. the winter capacity factor for a solar plant)?
• Further derating the capacity factor to account for use of suboptimal sites, if very large scale generation is planned
• Further overbuild to cover extended periods of low generation that hide inside average capacity factors, such as a run of cloudy days or wind lulls?
• If we plan to store energy to cover these outages, we can’t use the same generators to service demand and charge up the storage – is additional generation capacity included for the energy we want to store?

TCASE10 discussed a number of issues related to capacity factors and outages.

3.1.2. What are their worst case scenarios for solar and wind generation, and how have they been handled?

The sun does not shine at a constant average rate, nor does the wind blow at a constant average speed.  Averages are not good enough for planning a power generation system.  What is the longest period of low wind and zero wind power that the plan assumes?  What is the longest run of cloudy days?

For instance, the Bonneville Power Authority in the US Pacific Northwest has 1.5 GW nameplate wind over four states, which in January 2009 ran for 11 continuous days at less than 50 MW (3% capacity).  Or you might look at all the wind in Ireland through 2006-07, where you can pick out a number of periods of about a week running at about 10%. These low generation periods need to be covered by alternative generation, use of stored power, or backup generation.

The worst case for generation drives many critical assumptions around scale, storage, cost, backup and emissions.  Does the plan explicitly state, and accommodate, the worst case?

3.1.3. Do the wind and solar outputs account for dumped power due to production in excess of demand?

With enough wind power in the system, sometimes output will exceed demand, in which case the energy is dumped, or sold at negative cost.  This “spilled wind” reduces the capacity factor, or impacts the economics of the generator.  It means that beyond point, perhaps 20% penetration if Denmark is typical, meeting demand by adding more wind to the grid is chasing diminishing returns.  A similar effect is expected for high penetrations of solar power, although not enough solar power has been built to test this.

Does the plan account for this effect, or assume it can simply add wind up to 100% penetration without penalty?

3.1.4. How much storage is planned?

How many hours of storage (for generation at full power) are planned?  Is it enough?

For instance, a solar system should be able to provide some power throughout the night.  You might guess this requires about 18 hours storage.  The Spanish solar station Andasol 1 has 7.5 hours storage, which apparently gives “almost 24-hour operation of the power plant during high sunshine periods.”  Or to put it another way, it can’t provide a full day’s power, even in high summer.  How much storage is required to see us through a cloudy day?  24 hours? 36?  How many continuous cloudy days might we expect?  Better plan storage for those days too.

Similarly for wind, we need to ensure the storage can cover multi-day lulls.  If it doesn’t, we’ll be burning some form of carbon instead.  And the cost of the fossil fuel plant must be paid for by the small amount of energy generated, so the cost per unit energy is very high.

3.1.5. Are wind and solar assumed to reduce emissions?

How much does wind power really reduce CO₂ emissions?  Does it even reduce it at all?

We currently back up intermittent wind with fossil fuel plants.  As these plants idle in standby, or follow the variable wind output, they use more fuel, like a car in city traffic, idling and starting and stopping.  Have these additional CO₂ emissions been accounted for?  Is there a net reduction in emissions?

In fact, introducing wind into the grid may even increase emissions.  A series of studies on wind integration for the Netherlands, for Colorado, and for Texas have all found increased overall emissions as more wind is added.

The same question has been considered here at Brave New Climate.  Even if wind power does reduce emissions it is not on a watt for watt basis, and the cost of avoiding emissions is very high.

(I suspect a similar situation applies to solar power but to a lesser degree, but am not aware of any studies on this.)

So, does the plan attribute any emissions savings to wind power?  If so, on what basis?

3.1.6. Maintenance, lifetime and decommissioning

Advocates of nuclear power have long been taunted by calls for decommissioning costs and full lifecycle analysis, and rightly so.  And it’s a question that should also be asked for other generators.  So, what does the plan assume for:

• Lifetime of wind and solar generators
• Maintenance costs
• Decommissioning costs

Decommissioning is expensive.  For instance, decommissioning for the Beech Ridge project (West Virginia) was estimated at ~US$100k per 1.5 MW turbine net of scrap value.  With 119 turbines producing ~186 MW that’s about $12m, or $60m/GW.

Offshore wind is more expensive.  One UK study estimates £34m/GW nameplate capacity, or about £100m/GW average output.

Several comments here by Bryen give a great rundown on a number of wind farm life cycle issues. To quote a few of his points:

Wind industry developers suggest a 20 to 25 year lifespan for an industrial wind turbine .. However, due to the majority of these installations being new developments, few turbines have been around to test these lifespan assumptions under real world conditions .. Gearboxes in wind turbines are often replaced within the first 5 years .. Jan Pohl of insurance firm Allianz in Munich, who faced about 1000 claims in 2006 stated : ‘an operator has to expect damage to his facility every four years, not including malfunctions and uninsured breakdowns.’

3.2. Hydroelectricity

The Snowy Mountains hydro scheme can generate 3.8 GW sustainably for 1184 hours per year.  It took 25 years to build, and we have neither the rainfall nor the sites for a large expansion of hydroelectricity.

Because of hydro’s rapid response to power fluctuations, introducing variable generators like wind into the grid will increase the demand for hydro.  Do we have enough hydro capacity to serve the proposed renewable generators?

3.3. Immature technologies

Geothermal power, wave power, tidal power, are all potential or actual sources of low carbon energy.  Perhaps these and other generators are included in “the energy mix”.  Are they commercial?  Or are they R&D projects?  Is the plan deploying proven technologies, or R&D projects?

4. Grid Storage and Backup

4.1. System Reliability

The National Electricity Market must meet reliability standards.  Unserved energy must not exceed 0.002 percent of total demand.  The NEM is also required to carry 850 MW of spinning reserve to ensure reliability.

Further, the grid carries about 20% capacity margin in reserve (Australia 2005, US 2004), which is 7-8 GW in Australia. Adding a large amount of intermittent generators to the grid would require an increase in the reserve power to ensure reliability.

Can the plan meet currently legislated levels of reliability?  What happens if it can’t?  How much should the reserve power be increased to ensure reliability?  Does the plan include this additional reserve power?

4.2. Storage with Pumped Hydroelectricity

Renewable energy requires energy storage, and the cheapest large scale storage is pumped hydro.  Questions to consider for pumped hydro are

• how much power (GW) is needed?
• how much energy (hours of storage at full power) is needed?
• how long does it take to pump up the storage?
• what is the power source used for pumping?
• where will we put it?

Australia has 2.5 GW of pumped hydro.  1.5 GW of that is the Tumut 3 system which can generate full power for 6 hours.  Then it requires 21 hours to pump it back up again.

The 0.5 GW Wivenhoe facility pumps from midnight to 6am.  It generates for about 7 hours per day, and is on standby for 12 hours. During standby it provides some power to stabilise the grid.  It can’t pump up during daytime standby or generation periods.

Australia’s pumped hydro capacity is a poor complement for wind or solar because pumping requires steady power – it can’t start, stop or ramp quickly.  This means you can’t generate power while charging.  So it generates power during the day, and is pumped up at night.  This is obviously a poor match for solar, and it’s also a poor match for wind. The power for pumping needs to be cheap.  Coal fired base load works, wind and solar would be uneconomic.  But the main limitation on expanding pumped hydro is the lack of suitable sites.

Peter Lang has analyzed a potential pumped hydro scheme using existing reservoirs in the Snowy Mountains scheme on Brave New Climate.  It could provide 8 GW of power for 5 hours a day. It would cost ~$12- to $15-billion.  There is much useful discussion in the comments to this post.

So, does the plan depend on pumped hydro to store energy generated by renewables?  How much storage does it require? And where will we put it?

5. Transmission Infrastructure

5.1.  How much new transmission infrastructure is assumed?

Long transmission lines are needed to collect power from generators far enough apart that local cloud or low wind is averaged out.  The length scale is the size of the continent.

Each individual site will need a transmission link to the trunk, and each individual turbine will need to be connected.  Additional switchgear and control systems will be needed.

So, does the plan have a comprehensive, costed, transmission infrastructure?

5.2. What is the capacity of the transmission lines?

The transmission lines must be sized to handle the nameplate capacity of any wind or solar plant, not the average capacity.  Wind and solar need about three times the transmission capacity of a conventional generator (nameplate/average capacity).

Large scale weather systems impose greater transmission capacity requirements on wind and solar than conventional power plants.  If the east coast is covered in cloud but West Australia is generating, the east-west transmission must be sized to carry the east coast load.  There’s a lot more power ‘sloshing’ across large distances.

So, are the transmission lines sized for the spatial load balancing and high peak loads of wind and solar, or does it just use capacities appropriate to our current generation system?

6. Resource Consumption, Land Use, and Ecological Impacts

6.1. Steel, Concrete, Land

TCASE4 considered steel, concrete and land usage for solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.  The resource consumption of the renewables are stupendous, one or two orders of magnitude greater than nuclear power.  Does the plan address the use of these resources?

6.2. Water for Concrete, Cooling and Washing

Renewable energy has large water requirements. Has water supply been considered?

Has the water supply needed to make the concrete during construction been factored in. Where will the water come from? What is the cost of supplying around 10 times as much water for the concrete for a solar thermal plant than for a nuclear plant of the same capacity?

As explained in TCASE6, all thermal power plants – solar thermal, coal fired, nuclear – have similar cooling water requirements, because they all produce power with steam turbines.  For closed loop cooling, solar thermal and nuclear use about 3000 L/MWh.  Open loop cooling withdraws much more water, about 100 000 L/MWh, which is returned to river, lake or ocean at a higher temperature.  The water lost to evaporation is about the same as used in closed loop cooling.

A particular issue arises for solar thermal if the plant is to be located in the desert – where does this water come from?  It is possible to use air cooling for thermal plants, but the cost is higher, and the thermal efficiency takes a hit, with less energy from a more expensive plant, so the cost effectiveness and investor return is reduced.

So, does the plan include a large amount of solar thermal power?  If so, do the plants use open loop, closed loop or air cooling?  Where does the water come from? Are costs and outputs appropriate to the cooling technology?

Finally, the mirrors in solar thermal plants require regular washing to remove dust, which blocks the sun. Does the plan describe the water supply for these plants, particularly if they are to be sited in the desert?

6.3. Gas

Large scale wind and solar requires lots of gas fired backup, and gas reserves are finite.

Professor Barry Brook has reviewed the availability of natural gas in Australia.  He estimates that our reserves, less exports, if used to serve our full energy requirements, would last perhaps 20 years.  How we actually choose to use it is an open question, but it is clear that gas as an energy source has a limited lifetime.  Brook says:

The UK is now paying dearly for their dash for gas, following the coal mine closures of the 1980s. Their once-abundant North Sea fields are rapidly depleting. Again, Australia should take note of this warning. We must not go down the natural gas-for-coal substitution route. It would be long-term economic suicide.

If we commit to renewables, we commit to expanded use of gas, at the same time as gas prices are expected to skyrocket.  What happens to the price of electricity?  Can we afford renewable power that commits us to dependence on a finite and increasingly expensive resource?  And how long do we have before the gas runs out?

6.4. What are the proposed sites for the wind and solar installations?

Renewable energy takes up an enormous area because the power is so dilute.  Meeting Austraila’s energy needs with 2.5 MW turbines would occupy about 15 000 km² (a naïve calculation based only on the average capacity factor, without overbuilding).  To give this some perspective, our best wind resource is on our 25 000 km coastline.  Covering Australia’s southern coastline a kilometre deep with windfarms would give us the required area.  If you don’t like this idea, where else should they go?

Similarly, meeting our needs with Andasol-class solar thermal would require about 2000 km².  Where will these plants go?

What ecosystems will they impact?  Who owns the land now?  On what terms will we negotiate with existing owners for access to their land, or acquisition of it?  What planning processes will be used?  How long will this take?

6.5. Labour

Does the plan consider the workforce that will be required?

Renewable energy is labour intensive in construction as well as maintenance.  And we don’t just need to find the labour, we need to transport the workers to remote areas and accommodate them.  In his Emissions Cuts Realities paper, Peter Lang writes:

To construct the solar thermal power stations in areas throughout central Australia [or remote wind power –jm] will require large mobile construction camps, fly-in fly-out work force, large concrete batch plants, large supply of water, energy and good roads to each power station. Air fields suitable for fly-in fly-out will be required at say one per 250 MW power station.

Does the plan consider the labour resource for remote development?  What cost of labour is assumed?  Is it competitive with the mining industry in similar situations?

6.6. What are the ecological impacts?

Building wind power amounts to light industrialization of the landscape.  The installation requires access roads for trucks, cranes and cement mixers, excavation of foundations and pouring concrete footings, construction of transmission lines and substations, and so on.  The packing density estimated by Professor Brook for a typical turbine would give an average spacing of about 500 m.  These activities are directly damaging to sensitive ecosystems, disrupting soils and causing erosion, and providing vectors for pest plants and animals

Solar mirror fields completely build over the area they occupy, which may mean local destruction of desert ecosystems.

Birds and bats are killed by blade strikes.  While there are many sources of bird mortality, wind turbines appear to be particularly hard on raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, etc.).  Many other ecological effects have been reviewed in the report for the US National Academies, “Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects”.

These impacts may appear trivial, or sound like NIMBYism.  But for renewable energy deployments at very large scale, they may be devastating.  Have the direct environmental impacts of the plan been considered?

7. Comparison to the Nuclear Alternative

Constructing a renewable energy plan is like composing a sonnet or a fugue.  The constraints imposed by the form drive creativity and grand ambition.  A fine thing for poetry, but what if we just want to get the job done?

The constraint accepted by so many of these proposals is that we design the system without nuclear power.  What happens if you relax that constraint?  Was this even considered?

If the goal is to avoid disaster in the biosphere, or to do an end run around peak oil, does the fastest, most certain path to a fossil fuel free future include nuclear power, or exclude it?  Is our most effective course of action to pursue large scale renewables, or social and legislative change to enable rollout of nuclear power?

Were these questions even considered?

Guest post

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.

Next, the agency that does have oversight must operate under a rational set of rules. This is not as hard as it may seem. Most national aviation authorities have a time-tested set of protocols with with they administer their bailiwick, and they seem to be able to do it without disrupting the civil air transportation system unless they have very good reason. Nuclear regulators should have a similar set of rules, legislated into the laws that created them, so some commonsense prevails.

One of the cornerstones of transportation regulation (at least on the technical side) is the emphasis placed on the chain of responsibility. It is inculcated into everyone, from the first day you start, that every action is traceable, and every individual accepts unlimited criminal liability every time they sign off a job. Furthermore. it is made clear that your job is not in danger if you refuse to sign. If your supervisor is comfortable that the job is done right, and feels that you are wrong suggesting it is not – then he signs it off – and so on up the chain, until someone decides to take responsibility, or the job gets done again. The situation that cannot be allowed to develop is one where the regulator has to be involved at every step, and at every minor deviation. Yes, they should have independent on-site QA people, overseeing the quality process, but under no circumstances should the regulator need to sign off at every step.

How does this work? More to the point why does it work? It works because everyone is made to understand that they can be traced and tracked down, and will face charges if they are found to be responsible for shoddy/illegal work, if necessary years latter. This creates a culture where caution and attention to quality comes from the bottom up, rather than enforced from the top down. Small deviations will still be made, and time will be saved, but these will not be anything outside the comfort zone of all involved, and reason will prevail.

[aside: To give an example, for awhile I had a job clearing deviations for a group of Canadian subcontractors to a U.S. bus manufacturing firm. The client firm required strict adherence to their standards, or the signature of someone certifying the change was equivalent. The sort of deviations I was signing off were for things like using a paint with the colour "009876" instead of the standard "009875" a difference almost indistinguishable to the naked eye, for a bracket that would never be seen by the public. If they had not employed me, every change would have to go to engineering for approval, wasting time and money. However they hired me because I was expected to know which changes to let through and which need higher approval.]

As it stands in most jurisdictions, nuclear builds do not allow for this sort of thing. Every change must go through the full process of being approved by all the stakeholders including the regulator, no matter how minor. Many of these are not safety issues, and if they are legitimate QC issues they shouldn’t need global approval. Worse, as can be seen in the trials Areva is enduring in Finland, a regulator with too much responsibility coupled with a lack of experienced people, does more harm than good.

If Australia wants to lower the cost of building NPPs to help make them cost competitive, the area to focus on is not lowering the safety threshold, (which at any rate is likely impossible) but by controlling runaway costs generated by counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, and closing the avenues that permit NGOs and others to practice barratry. At the same time the public needs to be constantly assured that quality and safety, while related, are not always codependent and must be managed separately to assure both objectives can be met.