A more successful approach would be a drastic powerdown to what can be supported by renewable sources. Sorry, no sale.
MODERATOR
David – you are a new commenter so I let your post stand this time. Please read the Comments Policy before you submit another. BNC is a science based site and requires refs/links to support your contentions. If you wish to post your personal opinion, without substantiation, please do so on the Open Thread where this is allowed.

Your efforts are impressive and explanations are succinct as are your presentations. (mining industry geologist)

Where there is still life, there is still hope. That may be about the best we can do.

By the way, the $92 billion you mentioned is their estimate (too low) for jsut the upgrade to the transmissions system. Their estimate for their whole replacement electricity system is $370 billion. As the second dot point in the conclusions above says the $370 billion figure is far too low.

But actually, the cost estimates are irrelevant because the technology simply doesn’t exist and is unlikely to ever be financially viable.

You might like to point to these two critiques of the study you are referring to:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/08/12/zca2020-critique/

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/09/trainer-zca-2020-critique/

The conclusions of the first listed above are:

• 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.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/22/2934080.htm

Would anyone care to comment?
Regards.
Kevin Bennewith

Lewis is a big solar proponent, when not talking about beaming microwaves to earth from his space station solar plant.

if nuclear requires a “seemingly impossible” rapid build, what would that mean for other energy forms that are low capacity factor and unreliable?

perhaps L answers this since I didn’t read the article.

Farrelly’s article doesn’t stack up because she doesn’t understand how to calculate energy measurements (a very common problem among reporters). She writes:

“Global energy demand is about 13 terawatts (a terawatt is a trillion watts; a watt is a joule per second). Eighty per cent of this is fossil-derived. For civilisation to survive, a California Institute of Technology chemist, Nathan Lewis, calculates, 90 per cent must be carbon-free by 2050. To do it with nuclear power would mean building a reactor every two days for the next four decades.”

Energy demand is not 13 terawatts, it’s 13 terawatt-years. So her calculations about how many reactors we’d have to build is completely haywire.

Without getting too far into the weeds with statistics, let’s just take a simple look at what was already accomplished with old-style (Gen II) nuclear power plants. Gen III and Gen IV plants are designed to be modular and mass-produced in factories, so one can safely assume that the pace of building could be (especially if we put our minds to it) accelerated considerably over what was accomplished with Gen II plants, which had a lot of on-site construction demands.

Even with that, though, France converted their electrical generation systems to about 80% nuclear in about a decade without even breaking a sweat. With a concerted worldwide effort and the far more efficient systems now beginning to be built (or soon to be built, such as the PRISM fast reactor), there is no reason whatsoever (except politics) that over the next couple decades we couldn’t convert virtually all the world’s electrical generation to nuclear, and the couple decades after that we could add at least that much more nuclear to provide liquid fuels and meet other energy demands not currently met with electricity.

But we have to commit to doing it. Therein lies the rub.

( http://www.computare.org/guests.htm)

There are several articles and presentations posted there under “Western Focus Seminar”

Duane Pendergast

As per Albert Bartlett “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Water vapor follows exponential function. So we fail to understand its implications.

For producing each KWhr in a coal based thermal powerplant, we have to release 0.6 Kg of CO2 and more than 2 Kgs of water vapor. 13 moles of Co2 and 111 moles of water vapor molecules. Around 124 moles of greenhouse gases are released for producing 1 KWhr electrical energy.

For producing each KWhr in a nuclear powerplant, we have to release at least 3 Kgs of water vapor due to poor efficiency on account of safety. Around 166 moles of greenhouse gases are released for producing 1 KWhr electrical energy. So Nuclear power plants release at least 34% more greenhouse gases than a coal based thermal powerplant and also plenty of waste heat.

Water vapor stores huge amount of heat. It can absorb both incoming solar energy and outgoing energy from the earth across several wavelengths. Because of the above properties only Earth is a warmer planet. These water vapor molecules have the capability to liberate additonal water vapor molecules from water bodies (oceans lakes etc) due to its huge heat handling properties.Even if we assume 1000 water molecules can liberate one water molecule in a day, the total will be very much higher than all other greenhouse gas molecules.

Water vapor molecules can become liquid ONLY after rejecting heat to sky. Already heat rejection is the major problem for the Earth.So it becomes vicious circle.

In my opinion Nuclear energy should be reserved for Space,submarine applications only.

The permanent economic collapse which is underway now, is reducing global energy use and the corresponding dumping of water vapor into the atmosphere. This has led to very mild hurricane activities in the Gulf of Mexico region in the past two years and the trend will continue.

Rain does a better “carbon capture” than any man made technology. But the “storage” depends on the water temperature. Colder water stores more CO2 molecules. So if we reduce heat in the atmosphere by white roofs,reduced energy use,avoiding nuclear energy etc, we can easily achieve “carbon+water vapor capture and storage”.