The two recent posts focusing on Peter Lang’s wind study have generated considerable debate, and some very stimulating discussion, among BNC readers. This post is a follow-up, which this time highlights Lang’s analysis of solar power and related problems associated with energy storage.
This is about solar photovoltaics (PV), which generate electricity directly via the photoelectric effect. The other rising player in the solar field is concentrating thermal power from deserts, which use a steam turbine to generate electricity via a temperature differential, in the same fundamental manner as a coal-fired or nuclear power station. I asked Peter whether he was planning to do an analysis of CSP. He told me:
“I’ve had a bit of a look at doing a similar paper for CST, but I wasn’t able to obtain the detailed output and cost figures I need. It seems the researchers are holding the figures close to their chest.”
I’ve had similar advice on this matter from Ted Trainer. He has attempted an analysis of CSP, and I might post up a highlight of this shortly, and describe some of the gaps in knowledge that Ted and others are seeking. Lang says the following on this matter:
There are two technologies for generating electricity from solar energy: solar thermal and solar photovoltaic. This paper uses solar photo-voltaic as the example because energy output and cost data are more readily available than for solar thermal. It is not clear at this stage which is the lower cost option for large generation on the scale required (see here): so any cost difference is insignificant in the context of the simple analysis presented here.
Lang’s ‘Solar Realities’ paper (download the 17 page PDF here) is summarised as follows:
This paper provides a simple analysis of the capital cost of solar power and energy storage sufficient to meet the demand of Australia’s National Electricity Market. It also considers some of the environmental effects. It puts the figures in perspective. By looking at the limit position, the paper highlights the very high costs imposed by mandating and subsidising solar power. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability. The capital cost would be 25 times more than nuclear power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.
Conclusions: solar power is uneconomic. Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these additional costs must be carried by others.
The analysis, which focuses on the Australian national energy market (NEM) but is obviously relevant for other countries, considers electricity demand, the characteristics of solar PV and one possible means of storing its energy (pumped hydropower), capital costs of a system that could reliably meet demand for 1-day through to 90 days, and then an attempt to frame these numbers in perspective with an alternative low-carbon energy source — nuclear power.
The ‘Introduction’ of Lang’s paper sets the context quite clearly, with the following statement:
The paper takes the approach of looking at the limit position. That is, it looks at the cost of providing all the NEM’s electricity demand using only solar power for electricity generation. Looking at the limit position helps us to understand just how close to or far from being economic is solar power.
The key characteristics of solar power that are relevant to this discussion can be summarised as follows:
1. Power output is zero from sunset to sunrise.
2. Power output versus time is a curved distribution on a clear day: zero at sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday.
3. Energy output varies from summer to winter (less in winter than summer).
4. Energy output varies from day to day depending on weather conditions.
5. Maximum daily energy output is on a clear sunny day in summer.
6. Minimum daily energy output is on a heavily overcast day in winter.
Backup for solar power is clearly required — to store energy when being generated at peak times and thus deliver energy during times when nothing is being generated (at night, during cloudy weather, and to ensure sufficient winter supply). For this PV backup, Lang focused on pumped hydro in preference to sodium-sulphur or vanadium-redox batteries, due to pumped hydro’s lower costs (the latter do have some other advantages). He also considered transmission requirements.
One key feature of the analysis was his consideration of the problem of just how much energy to store. To have enough backup to meet the total national energy market demand for a 24 hour period turns out to be a much more costly proposition than creating a larger, long-term storage option.
Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, it all comes down to those nasty ‘extremes’ — those few days of the year when solar power will give you almost nothing (yes, even the deserts have cloudy winter days, although the problem would be much worse if we were reliant on a distributed system of rooftop PV which was largely sited in the major population centres along the southern and eastern coastlines).
If you’ve only got enough solar PV storage to maintain continuous power supply for 1 day, then you need to overbuild your installed capacity by a truly massive amount to cover yourself for those days when the 24-hour capacity factor of your national system is not 20%, but 5%, or 2%, or 0.75%. To borrow a suitable analogy, under a small energy storage system, you’ve got no money in the bank to tide you over until the next paycheck comes in.
Please do read Lang’s comprehensive analysis to get yourself clear on the full story involved in this matter. I cannot emphasise enough how critical this information is if you wish to understand the implications of a carbon-constrained world based on renewable energy without fossil-fuel backup.
Lang concludes his analysis with these strong words (summaries from the last three sections):
Solar power is totally uneconomic and is not as environmentally benign as another lower-cost, lower-emissions option – nuclear power. Advocates argue that solar is not the total solution, it will be part of a mix of technologies. But this is just hiding the facts. Even where solar is a small proportion of the total energy mix, its high costs are buried in the overall costs, and it adds to the total costs of the system…
The capital cost of solar power would be 25 times more than nuclear power to provide the NEM’s demand [$2.8 trillion for the least-cost solar solution with backup versus $120 billion for nuclear]. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability. The least cost solar option would emit 20 times more CO2 (over the full life cycle) and use at least 400 times more land area compared with nuclear (not including mining; the mining area and volumes would also be greater for the solar option than for the nuclear option)…
Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy, but these additional costs must be carried by others.
As noted above, the solar story is not complete without also looking hard at the situation for solar thermal power. I will address this in due course.
Brave New Climate 
506 replies on “Solar power realities – supply-demand, storage and costs”
Peter Lang @226
“The Queanbeyan site is fixed array.”
Now you did not make this plain at the start so this is false:
“Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day: zero at
sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday (See Figure 5).”
This is only the power output V Time for a FIXED array which you did not make plain. A tracking array has a more level output during the day and gives quite a bit more output. I thought from the graph that it was a fixed array.
“As Barry, I and others have pointed out repeatedly on this thread, the annual average is not relevant. It is the minimum output over the period defined by the amount of energy storage available, that is the key determinant of the cost of the system. The “Solar Power Realities” paper explains this. Some of your comments make me wonder if you have understood this key point.”
However you have taken no notice of the points that others have made. Basing your calculations on a single fixed PV array in Queanbeyan is not valid. Also you the power for Queanbeyan does not have to come from Queanbeyan so the CP is determined by the placement of a solar plant in a prime solar location. You also have ignored research by the NREL that gives indicative prices for solar thermal plants with storage that completely contradict your results.
The minimum output of a solar thermal plant is entirely determined by the amount of storage and the frequency of low insolation events for particular sites and whether they correlate with other low insolation events in other connected sites.
Lets summarise your paper.
1. You are basing your calculations of solar costs from on fixed PV array in Queanbeyan.
2. You are ignoring tracking, concentrating PV and solar thermal with storage.
3. You did not disclose that the PV array was fixed and presented the output V time as a characteristic of all PV stations.
4. You base your storage requirements on a 9.4% CP for a day because this is what a fixed array in Queanbeyan does.
I am not sure however I do not think that you could have been more unscientific. I wonder if Barry was presented with such a paper from one of his students or you had presented this to any one in the solar field what your grade would be.
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EN #231:
1. MOX eats bomb material. That is Gen II/III. The French reprocessing eats spent fuel. That is Gen II/III. Vast quantities? So that rules out technosolar also.
2. “But refusing to count the waste disposal for 100,000 years is like not counting the true cost of coal. Different problem, but same basic vibe of an energy company trying to dump its real expenses on the government purse.”
So the fact that the nuclear industry has been paying for this for the last 40 years, via their electricity charges (0.1c/kWh in the US, for instance), is ‘refusing to count’? Ignoring this fact certainly is.
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Stephen #232: “Peter’s cherry picked data”.
It was June 2009, which I presume was the latest month of data available. Here’s a challenge Steve — why don’t you find a month of data (any month, any year) from a regional array of wind farm that DOESN’T show those same characteristics?
“It is an analysis of replacing the entire USA demand with solar power.”
No, it isn’t. It’s speculation via simple extrapolation of small to large scale, which is ultimately no different to what Garnaut and Stern do with their top down approaches.
As it is completely at odds with what peer reviewed literature exists I am surprised that you give it any credence at all especially considering the treatment climate change skeptics get presenting their non peer reviewed single papers as evidence that AGW is incorrect.
That is an absurd comparison. The peer reviewed literature on this matter of large-scale renewable energy systems analysis is sparse, bordering on non-existent. The literature for AGW is massive. Further, the climate change sceptics simply recycle long-refuted arguements. In this case, by comparison, the arguments haven’t been refuted (except by saying ‘it isn’t so!’). Indeed I can see no one is using scientific data or modelling to come up with a rational supporting analysis that refutes what people like Lang, Mackay, Trainer, Hayden, Barton, me (and many others) are now saying. They simply side-step the issue. Now the work of Jacobson, Diesendorf and others starts this process (which is good and necessary), but it is just the first mile of the marathon.
Your post at #234 focuses on minutiae and ignores the bigger issue of overbuilding vs capacity factors. Now, certainly I’ll agree that no one can be sure on these matters at this stage — how representative the current data are — and large-scale spatial analysis and modelling studies, underpinned by real-world data, are critically needed. I’m tempted to get into this professional work myself.
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Stephen (#234),
It is becoming increasingly obvious you never even read the paper. If you’d been interested you would have lookewd up the references.
I’ll repeat the suggestion I made in post #226.
“Can I suggest, instead of picking at issues that are down in the weeds in the context of the simple analysis described in the paper, you do your own calculation of the cost of a solar system to provide 20 GW baseload, 25 GW average power, and 33 GW peak (at 6:30 pm). We are trying to replace coal and fossil fuel use, so do the calculations of the cost of a system that can do that.”
If you are are unwilling to attempt that, I’ll assume you are intent on taking issue with minor points that make no difference to the conclusions while ignoring the important points exposed.
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Barry, re: storage: “So the fact that the nuclear industry has been paying for this for the last 40 years, via their electricity charges (0.1c/kWh in the US, for instance), is ‘refusing to count’? Ignoring this fact certainly is.”
Oh really? Who is paying for all the research going into Yucca Mountain?
“To get a sense of the costs of nuclear waste disposal, we need not look beyond the United States, which leads the world with 101,000 megawatts of nuclear-generating capacity (compared with 63,000 megawatts in second-ranked France). The United States proposes to store the radioactive waste from its 104 nuclear power reactors in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The cost of this repository, originally estimated at $58 billion in 2001, climbed to $96 billion by 2008. This comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor—almost $1 billion each—assuming no further repository cost increases. (See data).”
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm
Ooops.
Also, has 40 years of electricity prices really paid for security monitoring of such sites for 100,000 years? (Nudge nudge, wink wink).
This is one of the main reasons I’m against any nuclear that doesn’t eat its own crap.
“Despite all the industry hype about a nuclear future, private investors are openly skeptical. In fact, while little private capital is going into nuclear power, investors are pouring tens of billions of dollars into wind farms each year. And while the world’s nuclear generating capacity is estimated to expand by only 1,000 megawatts this year, wind generating capacity will likely grow by 30,000 megawatts. In addition, solar cell installations and the construction of solar thermal and geothermal power plants are all growing by leaps and bounds.
The reason for this extraordinary gap between the construction of nuclear power plants and wind farms is simple: wind is much more attractive economically. Wind yields more energy, more jobs, and more carbon reduction per dollar invested than nuclear. Though nuclear power plants are still being built in some countries and governments are talking them up in others, the reality is that we are entering the age of wind, solar, and geothermal energy.”
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm
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Peter Lang in #237 completely ignores the valid points Stephen Gloor makes. It’s a classic *whine* then *diversion* tactic.
“Stop nitpicking!” and “Now run along and do this for me!”
Peter, how about you actually address the points Stephen makes, or even admit you were wrong to admit these very important facts from your “article”?
I agree with Barry that this is a fairly new field. Most “off-the-fossil-grid” places seem to be small unconventional villages either running on biomass power or are in hippie “Earthship” lifestyles.
However, that is no excuse for what appear to be enormously *convenient* omissions in whole sectors of this discussion. Try again Peter.
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This is utter BS. Their is only ONE reason wind is built *anywhere*, and it’s not ‘economics’ or because wind, as wind, is ‘profitable’. It is because in a place like Europe, EVERY windturbine gets 8 cents per KW/nameplate and the same for producing power per KW/hr. That’s it. As Jerome de Paris what would happen to even operating wind turbines if their much vaunted public subsidey called the “Feed in Tariff” was removed. “Profitable” my ass. It’s my pocket into the wind manufacturers and utilities pockets. SAME in the US, albeit it is “only” 1.8 cents KW/hr here. On, and PV? 50% of the cost is paid for in California. Again, my pocket into the PV manufacturers.
If wind, PV or CSP had to truly compete with nuclear we’d be *exactly* where we were 10 years ago with No wind; No PV and no CSP…just a lot of nuclear.
David
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Never mind, wiki had an good entry on this (in fact flash desal is often paired with power plants):
First, the seawater is heated in a container known as a brine heater. This is usually achieved by condensing steam on a bank of tubes carrying sea water through the brine heater. Heated water is passed to another container known as a “stage”, where the surrounding pressure is lower than that in the brine heater. It is the sudden introduction of this water into a lower pressure “stage” that causes it to boil so rapidly as to flash into steam. As a rule, only a small percentage of this water is converted into steam. Consequently, it is normally the case that the remaining water will be sent through a series of additional stages, each possessing a lower ambient pressure than the previous “stage.” As steam is generated, it is condensed on tubes of heat exchangers that run through each stage.
Such plants can operate at 23-27kWh/m3 of distilled water.[1]
Because the colder salt water entering the process counterflows with the saline waste water/distilled water, relatively little heat energy leaves in the outflow- most of the heat is picked up by the colder saline water flowing into the process and the energy is recycled.
In addition MSF distillation plants, especially large ones, are often paired with power plants in a cogeneration configuration. Waste heat from the power plant is used to heat the seawater, providing cooling for the power plant at the same time. This reduces the energy needed from one-half to two-thirds, which drastically alters the economics of the plant, since energy is by far the largest operating cost of MSF plants. Reverse osmosis, MSF distillation’s main competitor, requires more pretreatment of the seawater and more maintenance.[2][3]
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“Nudge nudge, wink wink”
Considering the juvenile nature of that comment, I won’t bother to answer in detail. Please try to grow up if you’re going to be taken seriously on this blog. I might disagree with Stephen Gloor about most things concerning sustainable energy, but at least he has the courtesy to be polite and not condescending.
But to your basic question: who pays? As I already said, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, requires utilities which generate electricity using nuclear power to pay a fee of one tenth of one cent ($0.001) per kilowatt-hour into the Nuclear Waste Fund. This has paid for all the work (~$9 billion) at Yucca Mountain to date. As of December 31, 2008, payments and interest credited to the Fund totalled $29.6 billion.
http://www.politicalbase.com/groups/office-of-civilian-radioactive-waste-management/14282/
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/repository/index.shtml
For now, Yucca Mt has been halted, which is a good thing since with fast reactors, it should only ever be conceivably used to store vitrified fission products.
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Barry Brook – “Indeed I can see no one is using scientific data or modelling to come up with a rational supporting analysis that refutes what people like Lang, Mackay, Trainer, Hayden, Barton, me (and many others) are now saying.”
I would agree with you there and more work needs to be done. However flawed work like Peter’s paper do not do the nuclear side of the equation any favours. If you have to nobble the opposition (so to speak – renewables are not opposition) by only using the most expensive type in an unfavourable location then your own arguments look weak in the process.
I would like to see more research however the work that has been done shows us the way and operational experience in wind and solar I am sure will back up the work that has been done.
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Peter Lang – “It is becoming increasingly obvious you never even read the paper. If you’d been interested you would have lookewd up the references.”
I read the paper thoroughly however you need to address the flaws and do more research.
“If you are are unwilling to attempt that, I’ll assume you are intent on taking issue with minor points that make no difference to the conclusions while ignoring the important points exposed.”
The ‘minor’ points that you refer to completely change the conclusions. They are fundamental points that show weaknesses in your research skills and knowledge of renewable energy. They show that your conclusions are based on flawed data and incomplete research and are therefore invalid.
Before patronising me with a little task to do how about you address the ‘minor’ points I brought up or retract the ‘paper’. I was not the one that set myself up as a energy expert.
Or lets just call it a day. There are 200 odd comments in this thread and I can see that nothing I can say will cause you to change what is in the paper or even admit what is wrong with it.
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Barry Brook said
24 August 2009 at 9.39
“Nudge nudge, wink wink”
Considering the juvenile nature of that comment, I won’t bother to answer in detail.
So I take it you’re not going to support any nuclear power system that produces the long term waste? Because then at least we could have agreement on the type of nuclear power to construct *IF* it is actually demonstrated to be cheaper, more stable, and politically acceptable. Storing waste for 100 thousand years is NOT going to be covered by the money collected so far!
“Please try to grow up if you’re going to be taken seriously on this blog. I might disagree with Stephen Gloor about most things concerning sustainable energy, but at least he has the courtesy to be polite and not condescending.”
And stubbornly ignoring major flaws in Peter’s paper isn’t also condescending? I was just responding in kind. Stephen has been patient in the manner in which he has persistently pointed these out to Peter. Peter has NOT addressed them in any substantive manner, but responded with the blogging equivalent of “Look, bright shiny thing over there!” Unless Peter substantively replies to the main flaws Stephen has highlighted, the sad fact is that this blog will no longer be worth reading.
And that would be a sad thing indeed. I mean that sincerely. This is an important blog asking important questions, and I’ve learnt a few salient points here. But Peter has stubbornly refused to show integrity in addressing Stephen’s points, and you’ve stuck by him as he does so. It brings into question the integrity of this whole blog. I’m not calling you a liar, but merely highlighting how blogs can quickly be interpreted and dismissed by the vast majority of readers… the “silent lurkers” that read “over the shoulder” of the discussions being had here. Readers can be a fickle mob, and if they get even a whiff of your “experts” not addressing certain questions, they’ll leave.
“But to your basic question: who pays? As I already said, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, requires utilities which generate electricity using nuclear power to pay a fee of one tenth of one cent ($0.001) per kilowatt-hour into the Nuclear Waste Fund. This has paid for all the work (~$9 billion) at Yucca Mountain to date. As of December 31, 2008, payments and interest credited to the Fund totalled $29.6 billion.
http://www.politicalbase.com/groups/office-of-civilian-radioactive-waste-management/14282/
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/repository/index.shtml
For now, Yucca Mt has been halted, which is a good thing since with fast reactors, it should only ever be conceivably used to store vitrified fission products.
Hmm, 29.6 billion? So Lester Brown is lying?
“The cost of this repository, originally estimated at $58 billion in 2001, climbed to $96 billion by 2008. This comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor—almost $1 billion each—assuming no further repository cost increases. (See data).”
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm
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The nuclear waste issue is bogus, the fossil fuel pseudo-environmentalist surrogates blockade ANY METHOD of dealing with Nuclear Waste, which amounts to a coke can full, weighing 2 lbs, for the average citizen’s lifetime energy needs. While YOUR REAL SUBSTITUTE Coal power plant will produce 69 tons of solid waste for the same amount of energy & 1300 tons of total noxious waste. Disposal of waste in Salt Domes, deep Seabeds or deep oceanic trench subduction zones is simple, cheap & safe. The coal power plant produces 2 to 100 times more radioactive waste than the Nuclear Power plant, which they are allowed to happily dump into the environment. So why can’t Nuclear Power plants simply dilute their waste with 1/2 to 1/100th of a Coal Power plants volume of waste, i.e. grind it into a fine powder and mix with sand or dissolve in acid and simply dump in the ocean, at least ONE HUNDRED TIMES less toxic to the environment than your typical Coal Power plant is allowed to do. Or burn the waste in a LIFTR or Liquid Chloride or IFR and get a Trillion dollars worth of clean energy.
A 1000 MW coal power plant annually produces 6,200,000 tons of CO2, 20,000 tons Sulfur Dioxide, 20,400 tons of Nitrogen Oxides, 1000 tons of Particulates, 250,000 tons of Ash, 386,000 tons of Sludge, 450 pounds of Arsenic, 228 pounds of Lead, 8 pounds of Cadmium, 16 tons of radioactive Uranium and Thorium, and 800 lbs of Mercury.
The Thorium Molten Salt Reactor would fuel a 1000 MWe power plant for 1 year with 1000 kg of Natural Thorium and generate 1000 kg of waste, 83% of which is valuable for industrial instrumentation, agricultural irradiation and medical cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging. The remaining 170 kg of radioactive waste only needs containment for 300 yrs. The Coal Power Plant thorium waste would run the equivalent Thorium Nuclear Power Plant for 11 years.
Speaking about storing waste for thousands of years, how is it that Coal with CCS fantasy can pretend to store trillions of tons of CO2 underground, which will be released in an Earth Tremor suffocating any human or animal in the region – perhaps even one million years from now? How is it that the Canadian Government can happily store 237,000 tonnes of Arsenic Trioxide right on the shores of Great Slave Lake – permanently like forever – by keeping it frozen – which requires constant maintenance – enough to kill every person on the Earth 300 times over – and the anti-Nuclear Environmentalists are completely silent about it? The double standard against Safe, Clean, Green Nuclear is incomprehensible until you realize the power and influence of the Fossil Fuel Lobby.
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Hi Warren,
all good points against coal which I think the common greenie now knows, and I’ve never heard of this Canadian “Arsenic bomb”! Wow.
However, it doesn’t resolve the case in the affirmative for nuclear, just in the negative against coal.
Now, back to watching whether or not Peter will respond substantively to Stephen’s points…
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EN #245: So I take it you’re not going to support any nuclear power system that produces the long term waste?
I would have no problem with the storage of the small amounts of Gen II/III waste in geological repositories, if that was necessary. But it won’t be, since this spent fuel will be used in Gen IV reactors. The Gen III / Gen IV synergy is splendidly neat. In that context, we should be building as many Gen III plants as we can, as fast as we can, in places like China. US and other well-developed nuclear nations should be building a whole lot more Gen III, with a serious plant to start bringing Gen IVs online ASAP.
Unless Peter substantively replies to the main flaws Stephen has highlighted, the sad fact is that this blog will no longer be worth reading.
Well, that’s your choice and the choice of other readers. But you and Stephen are the only ones complaining about this apparent problem. I think the fundamental issue here is that neither Peter, nor myself, can see anything “substantial” to answer. I don’t say this flippantly — I just don’t see what Gloor is getting at, other than sweeping up dust whilst ignoring the elephant in the room.
Perhaps I am missing something important, but either way, this might constitute a form of cognitive dissonance. To break it, I suggest this. Post one ‘substantive point’ at a time, and I (or Peter) will provide an answer to it**
Hmm, 29.6 billion? So Lester Brown is lying?
Brown, in citing the $96 billion figure, is quoting projected costs through to 2133. I’m talking about costs to date ($9 billion) and the size of the funding base provided by the utilities to date ($30 billion). Given (a) utility funds will continue to accumulate (so $96 billion by 2133 will be easily met) and (b) we don’t need to spend that money on Yucca Mt anyway because fast reactors will better solve the issue, I think agonising about this is a pointless exercise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
**I fly out to Spain in 30 min, so any response from me won’t be for about 36 hours.
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Barry Brook – “I think the fundamental issue here is that neither Peter, nor myself, can see anything “substantial” to answer. I don’t say this flippantly — I just don’t see what Gloor is getting at, other than sweeping up dust whilst ignoring the elephant in the room.”
If you cannot see the problems then we should end the discussion here. To anyone that has the smallest knowledge of renewable energy, like me, the problems stand out like you know what. Neil posted many of the problems with the first paper let alone the second.
Again if the answers in the ‘papers’ are what you want then nothing I say will make a difference – the same thing I said to Peter.
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(about to get on a plane, definitely my last comment for 36 hrs!)
Stephen, please humour me and state the first major problem with Lang’s analysis. I will answer that (if I can) and then move to objection #2. I really do believe that breaking the problem down into pieces will help to get to the bottom of this.
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I’ll take a wild stab in the dark and summarise Stephen’s problems with the paper from post #234
***
1. You are basing your calculations of solar costs from on fixed PV array in Queanbeyan.
2. You are ignoring tracking, concentrating PV and solar thermal with storage.
3. You did not disclose that the PV array was fixed and presented the output V time as a characteristic of all PV stations.
4. You base your storage requirements on a 9.4% CP for a day because this is what a fixed array in Queanbeyan does.
I am not sure however I do not think that you could have been more unscientific. I wonder if Barry was presented with such a paper from one of his students or you had presented this to any one in the solar field what your grade would be.
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Barry Brook – “Stephen, please humour me and state the first major problem with Lang’s analysis.”
Honestly if you can’t see a problem with a fixed array of mono or poly crystalline cell PV panels in Queanbeyan being used to represent solar power in general then we can stop right here.
Objections are.
1. Any large PV array for bulk generation of power would track the sun
2. If it did not track the sun then you would use thin-film that are cheap enough not to bother.
3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
4. The large scale PV answer is concentrating solar PV and it defineately tracks.
5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
So that’s the first one – enjoy the renewable energy in Spain.
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Lets start by focussing on just the fixed vs tracking array criticism.
A key issue that both Stephen and Eclipsenow have is that Peter used a fixed array solar farm, rather than a tracking array. Obviously a tracking array will achieve better output. If the difference between a fixed and tracking array is sufficiently large, it might invalidate Peter’s conclusions.
This is Eclipsenow’s points 1, 2, 3, and 4. It is Stephen’s points 1, 2, and 4. They raise other points in combination, but clearly this is a big deal for them, so I suggest we try to deal with this first. The list of criticisms might be reduced if the difference between a fixed and tracking collector is quantified.
Data for fixed plate collectors vs tracking collectors is available for the US at http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/Table.html. Lets consider average insolation for August (over 30 years) for fixed collectors tilted south at the site latitude, and compare it to solar collectors that track the sun in two angles.
The insolation numbers vary according to location. Lets take the numbers for Hawaii.
The August 30-year average insolation for fixed collectors is 5.13 kWh/m^2/day.
The August 30-year average insolation for 2D tracking collectors is 6.61 kWh/m^2/day.
A tracking array in Hawaii in August does about 29% better than a fixed array. . The percentage improvement is about the same elsewhere in the US, and at other times of the year. Its probably about the same in the mid latitudes here. In particular, its probably about the same in Queanbeyan.
So Peter’s cruelly underestimated solar PV output by a factor of 1.3x. Does this change his conclusion?
Peter’s summary conclusion is,
The capital cost would be 25 times more than nuclear power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.
Before going on, just note that we are going to make about a 1.3x adjustment to Peter’s numbers in favour of the solar pv option, and check whether it makes up for factors of 20-400x. This is what Peter means when he says picking at minutiae or hunting down in the weeds. Its not whining, its just having a basic sense of quantity.
So, the capital cost $/MWhr would probably not be much different, since part or all of the 30% greater plant output has to be paid for with more expensive tracking collectors. And you also need to invest in dams, pumps and turbines, or a lot of batteries. And transmission. So the 30% benefit of tracking first gets eaten up by more expensive collectors, and then diluted by other major capex in the solar plant.
Stephen writes, Any large PV array for bulk generation of power would track the sun. Well, someone built one in Queanbeyan which doesn’t, apparently. I can only guess they looked at the ROI for cheaper fixed PVs vs higher output but more expensive tracking collectors, and found power from the fixed array was more economical.
This suggests the capital costs do not come down substantially for tracking arrays.
On the land area, suppose it is reduced by a factor of 1.3. So the solar pv only occupies 300x the land area of a nuclear plant. Does this change matters, from the original 400x factor? Frankly, I don’t think so.
Its not clear to me how the lifecycle co2 emissions have been calculated. But, to keep focus on the question of whether a fixed collector or tracking collector changes the conclusion, I’ll take the factor of 20x at face value. If the co2 emissions are reduced, the best that could be hoped for would be a reduction of 1.3x, to only 15x as much co2 as nuclear. But, since the collectors are not the only contributor to plant lifecycle co2 emissions, it won’t be that good. Its probably still closer to 20x than 15x the co2 output.
So, to conclude – is Lang’s conclusion that nuclear is far superior on the key metrics than solar pv changed if we consider a tracking array rather than a fixed array? Lets see:
– the capital cost does not look like it goes down, in fact it probably goes up a bit
– the land area might come down, but not by enough to have any policy implication
– the co2 emissions do not change enough to change any policy assessment away from Peter’s conclusion
So I don’t see how deploying tracking arrays changes Peter’s headline conclusion.
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Warren Heath writes,
Coal with CCS is a fantasy, but CCS is not. The distinction is important because it may become necessary to capture and sequester carbon that is already in the atmosphere, without regard to which fossil fuel it came from, and without, of course, building special new converters of coal to CO2.
Let me stress that. Serious sequestration does not have, as its first step, the production of more CO2 so as to have something to sequester. We’ve got that.
It is true that burial of fluid CO2 is rarely discussed by serious people, but this is not because it would necessarily be unreliable. I seem to recall natural pools of CO2 exist some places on the ocean bottom, and this, if true, would not be very surprising because CO2 is stable there.
However, thermodynamics favours the conversion of dilute atmospheric CO2 into even stabler forms: bicarbonate ion dissolved in the ocean, or solid carbonate or bicarbonates on land. This occurs naturally, and speeding it up by pulverizing the carbonate-forming minerals is the easiest and cheapest way to get CO2 down. The mineral does the work, we just catalyse.
This is the only form of CCS that has aggressively demonstrated itself.
So, Warren Heath, are you going to repeat my above message in other conversations, in your own words, at least ten times? Or do I have to?
(Why, in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, was it not mentioned that the little boy had to repeat himself 30,000 times, and ~25,000 of the listeners said something like, “You’re right, the Emperor has really made a fool of himself. Green corduroy! What could he have been thinking?!”?)
(How fire can be domesticated)
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John,
I just copied and pasted Stephen’s summary points, they were not mine.
I did so because he has repeated them about 3 or 4 times on this thread, and then it became truly surreal and comical.
He got fed up that his MAIN points had been ignored and said so.
Barry said he should post them again.
Peter asked why, nobody had addressed them so far.
Barry said: “Stephen, please humour me”
I was nervous that the discussion was just going south because Stephen looked like he was about to leave, and so copied and pasted his summary points.
Then Peter was good natured enough to paste them in again (5th time this thread?) and you addressed…. maybe one of them on PV tracking.
So, once again, I’ll copy and paste Stephen’s MAIN points.
(subtracting the tracking for now)
*****
3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
4. The large scale PV answer is concentrating solar PV and it defineately tracks.
5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
*****
Eclipse here again: remember, Stephen includes 3,5,6 because this article attempts to debunk ALL solar on the basis of the MOST EXPENSIVE SOLAR BY FAR.
He TOTALLY IGNORES the cheapest solar which is now also approaching baseload. There must be 10 new approaches (or refinments to existing approaches) to solar thermal with storage that I’ve heard of this year alone, and so the costs just keep tumbling down. When these companies finally move beyond “getting established” in the peak demand market and start to deploy in the night time market it will be a really exciting race to the lowest price and most reliable technology matrix. It’s not like there is only 1 or 2 technologies out there to cost, but literally dozens of variations on the solar thermal theme, with dozens of new heat resistant materials and fluids that should be mixed and matched for the best fit with the best approach.
No wonder Peter Lang directs our attention to solar PV, it’s a much easier target!
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Lets just focus on the question of the tracking array then.
Do you still think Peter’s conclusion would be changed in either direction if the analysis used a tracking array instead of a fixed array?
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Let’s not just focus on that, because:-
1. I’ve already conceded the point… I don’t know if Stephen Gloor has more to add on that, but I actually think it is one of the minor points.
2. The WORST of Peter Lang’s omissions is that he tried to generalise his PV findings across into Solar thermal. That’s as bad as anti-nuke campaigners arguing we shouldn’t develop nuclear because of Chernobyl. Nuclear technology has progressed so much since then you guys are arguing another Chernobyl is IMPOSSIBLE, and that it is a TOTALLY different technology today! Well buddy, it’s the same with solar thermal. So let’s NOT just focus on the one point I (for one) have already conceded, and let’s concentrate on the fact that we are now at post 257 and Solar thermal has STILL not been addressed. Again, it is making this blog appear agenda driven propaganda rather than science. Have you guys got shares invested in nuclear or something? It’s simply getting that bad. (And that boring to have to keep repeating this!!!!)
Once again…
*****
3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
4. The large scale PV answer is concentrating solar PV and it definitely tracks.
5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
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Let’s not just focus on that, because:-
1. I’ve already conceded the point…
OK, thats great. I think we might have made some progress, assuming Stephen also feels that the fixed vs. tracking array question has been addressed to his satisfaction.
Got to run now, but I’ll look at the next item on the list when I can (or some else can).
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I hope so, because Stephen’s point 3 kind of rules the previous point which I (not Stephen) have conceded as IRRELEVANT anyway!
*****
3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
*****
So I hope you’re not thinking “Phew, glad I’ve the problem 50% solved with these guys…” because as far as I can tell, this minor point really was one of the ‘weeds’. You’ve still got the ‘forest’ to clear.
*****
5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
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#3. So…if PV is not an answer, why is it being *pushed* so much? California is building ridiculously expensive PV ‘farms’, for example. So, obviously, ‘some people’, those with tax dollars, ARE talking about this expensive boutique power as ‘large scale’.
#5/6. CSP, because it’s based on a very traditional Rankine cycle power plant configuration has “potential”. Hmmm…
One has to ask, since just about all the technology is “proven” why no is building it for 24/7 power output? I see “12 hours”, “17 hours” etc. One of the problems is that the TRUE name plate capacity crashes if you go to a real 24 hour system (also being proposed, seriously in my state). This means, because you are still talking about an average of .22 capacity factor for a day, of dividing THIS amount by the remaining 18 hours of non-use with storage. So your “200MW CSP plant” ends up looking like a “50 MW CSP” plant. That’s one issue…
But it points to the larger issue of having to hugely overbuild, way and above the cost of nuclear, for geographically isolated power plants. *What would be the point*?
Now I suppose we are talking about “well, it only has to produce on demand power for say, the peak period, only few hours after solar peak”. True. But a half truth. If you want to run a GRID, you better have full capacity 24/7 available. CSP can’t, and will never, deliver this at a reasonable cost and *abundant* quantity.
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Hi All:
Just finished reading through all 257 posts, and feel I must add my ten cent’s worth.
Firstly if the Australian population is going to double by 2050 (to 44 million), the energy demands will scale accordingly. The existing generation and supply infrastructure is already borderline inadequate (and with power outages a regular occurrence, one could argue that the borderline term is being particularly generous!). In order to meet the demand shortfall, there will be a need for fairly urgent commitment to additional generation & diswtribution infrastructure. Present options for generation include:
1. Coal / Oil / Gas fired conventional generation expansion. From the above posts. not a preferred option becaulse of the pollution burden (gaseous and solid wastes), and finite supply limitations on the fuelstock. The technology is however mature, reasonably inexpensive and rather less emotionally inflammatory than Nuclear, Wind Farms, etc. Advantages are that power output is independent of external climatic variables (i.e. effectively demand-led)
2. Solar: PV. Cost is the major issue here. Top quality monocrystalline panels are extremely expensive, and the production process isn’t exactly environmentally benign either. Seasonal and diurnal variation in output means that a means to store excess capacity will need to be considered, and if a tracking system is included then the cost increases. The perception that PV is a fit and forget option is only valid if one is happy with a very much reduced efficiency. Any tracking system will require added capital investment, and a significant ongoing maintenance programme, all of which cost.
3. Solar: Thermal. More efficient (maybe 4x more efficient) than PV. Great work being done in this area by Queensland Centre for Advanced Technology (QCAT) with their Solar Stirling programme. Stopped owing to lack of funding (seems Horse Racing / V8 Supercars / football are more important . . . . ), however with a little more funding this idea could provide a local generation capacity, and generation diversity (i.e. not putting all our eggs in the one basket!) Solar thermal has been shown to work in the US, however the set up costs were high, and ongoing maintenance is not cheap either.
Big problem with solar – no matter what system you choose, to get a lot of energy out means a large collecting area. Large areas of critically aligned movable collectors (PV panels, Mirrors, whatever) will require regular maintenance, need an inexpensive site (cheap land = remote land), and will require a link to “civilisation”, to provide the energy input, and to provide spares, personnel, etc. Personnel might be a problem too; people prefer not to work in the back of beyond, so to attract the staff needed (who will need to be reasonably well qualified too) will add to the “running costs” – higher than usual salaries, pleasant living conditions, probably accepted home comforts (including water . . . .), etc.
Best of all – the Outback is famous for it’s dust storms – and dust = surface contamination. Looks like the collector arrays will also need regular cleaning (and with abrasive dust getting into moving parts, maybe more than the occasional lubricate).
Without cheap, bulk energy storage, definitely not a “base-band” proposition, and seasonal variation would see a reduction in max. output in the Winter months (when electrical heating demands are highest).
4. Wind: A Straightforward technology, using established systems. More efficient in terms of kWh per $ than PV or Solar thermal, and offers potentially a much higher energy yield per area. Downside is that the towers are visually intrusive (brings up the “Not in MY Back Yard” phenomenon), occasionally noisy, and maintenance is not inexpensive. There have also been disturbing reports of unexpected, catastrophic blade failures resulting in tower collapses. On a small scale wind power is safe and useful (I’ve got one I built myself), however wind power is particularly variable, even in exposed coastal locations, and the optimum location for good wind harvesting is usually offshore, with the problems associated thereof.
5. Tidal / Wave: Tidal is an established technology, but dependent on a reasonably high tidal range to provide sufficient head of pressure. Wavepower using a bobbing “duck” mechanism has been trialled with interesting results (using the “ducks” to operate air pumps, thence operate a small generator), however seawater is a very chemically and biologically hostile environment, so maintenance will be a major cost. The Scandinavian Wave Flume system is less demanding on maintenance but visually more intrusive. Advantages are that Tidal is extremely reliable, and output planning may be performed months (or years) in advance. Wavepower is somewhat more capricious, so can not be relied upon for a baseband provision.
6. Geothermal. This is my favourite! The technology is do-able, and as far as we can determiine the energy source is enduring. The Oil Industry has been digging deep holes for decades, as has the Mining Industry, however the costs of deep drilling are not insignificant!! There has been a successful trial in Western Australia, and there have been prior programmes in the US and Europe. Water-based steam generation would be a simple method, although there are other options. An attractive idea is to use seawater as a feed, and condense the steam as an additional source of fresh water (got to be cheaper than Coal-fired electric desalination!). Land surface area commitment is minimal, and (as far as we can see) environmental impact minimal, so this technology would be ideal in areas where hot subsurface strata are easily accessable. On the basis of continual availability, this is an ideal baseband power source.
7. Nuclear: Established mature technology. Very high energy density, small land area commitment, ideal baseband source (continuous output), not fashionable (“Chernobyl Effect”) but actually considerably safer than fossil fuel generation in terms of net health impact on the local population. No-one seems happly to live near to a Nuclear station, and there are significant extra capital costs in construction, maintenance, fuelling management (including reprocessing / waste management)and decommissioning.
8. Thermonuclear: Still “Work in Progress” with many technical obstacles yet to be surmounted. Heaps of potential but not yet a practicable contender.
Personally I’m a great fan of Geothermal as along term solution. Yes I know that drilling deep holes is challenging, but the technology DOES exist, and steam generation systems have been around for a very long time. Using saltwater as a feedstock might help with the freshwater problem facing Australia, and the smaller land area commitment would allow the generation centres to be nearer the end users (so minimising transmission line costs, losses and maintenance).
p.s. At home we use geoexchange AC – and Geoexchange HWS. Not cheap, but pays for itself in the long term, and that’s what we all need to do – forget “short-termism” and concentrate on the LONG term solution!
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Curious how the Ontario Gov’t, which has probably the strongest Renewable Energy Subsidy program in North America, offers no subsidy for CSP, but offers a 44 to 80 cent per kwh subsidy for Solar PV, plus generous subsidies for Wind, onshore & offshore & home, biogas, micro-hydro, landfill gas & biomass. Seems the Ontario Gov’t doesn’t feel CSP is not viable there.
Apparently that huge subsidy is insufficient, however:
“….Developers of multi-megawatt solar projects, meanwhile, said a tariff of 44.3 cents for power from large solar farms still wouldn’t make such initiatives economical enough to proceed. One solar-industry executive, who didn’t want to be named, cited a tight capital market and poor exchange rate for the concern. “The math still does not work,” he said….”
“…”We are angry because the various government agencies kept telling us not to make waves, that the new numbers would play into the developers’ favour. All are feeling shafted.” …”
<a href"http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/601464" title="Ontario's Feed-in Tariff Program"
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John D Morgan – “So I don’t see how deploying tracking arrays changes Peter’s headline conclusion.”
It doesn’t much – it goes to an error of fact that I was going to bring up next.
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First Warren, your article doesn’t actually discuss solar thermal but solar PV, from the graph through to home owners through to the utilities. I see NO evidence of solar thermal being discussed! You’re basically doing a Peter Lang and debunking Chernobyl again.
Second, the Australian government only just learnt the words “Solar thermal baseload” because Matthew Wright bothered to rock up to our energy and resources minister and show him a video of one on his laptop. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Ontario was having trouble keeping up with the technology changes.
Third, some of the technologies are being incrementally improved as we speak. Fresnel lenses for solar thermal are being implemented in a system with a new thermally resistant processor so that higher steam temperatures can be endured by the equipment. The technology exists, but the fastest way the company can make a profit is by hitting the peak load market. Once they have a market foothold they can deploy even larger investments with the profits. But sadly, it is the nature of cautious governments with so many alternative technologies that they have a “let the market fix it” approach, and “wait and see” which technologies survive that initial round of jousting in the marketplace. Then they might actually back a certain new proven solar thermal technology.
Which slows down the initial deployment, but could have the effect that when we DO deploy a better solar thermal system does so. We shall see. These are just some of the new refinements in solar thermal technology. Download them to your iPod and enjoy on a good long walk… especially the first one on the Lloyd graphite system for storing solar thermal energy in graphite blocks DIRECTLY! (the heat is not siphoned off for storage, but is all directed straight onto the graphite block first of all!)
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/lloyd-energy-systems-graphite-block-storage-steve-hollis
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/solar-power-with-storage-firming-wind-power-for-continuous-supply-chris-turchi-nrel
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/combined-heat-and-power-for-urban-and-industrial-environments-graham-ford-heliodynamics
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/solar-power-salt-storage-baseload-power-rainer-aringhoff-solar-millennium%20
http://podcast.beyondzeroemissions.org/index.php?id=125
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David Walters – “One has to ask, since just about all the technology is “proven” why no is building it for 24/7 power output?”
Solar Tres will have 17 hours of storage which will give it 24X7 capability.
http://www.solarpaces.org/Tasks/Task1/Solar_Tres.htm
So far the market is such that commercial plants being built are selling into certain portions of the market such as morning and afternoon peak. They have calculated the minimum storage necessary to give firm capacity with little risk of missing contracts.
Distributed solar plants will lessen the need for storage however when/if solar thermal starts to replace thermal coal on a large scale then certain plants will have to have more storage than others. Also as operational experience with other forms of renewables builds up then this will also determine the amount of storage required.
I regret mentioning the tracking point however you have all missed an important point. With solar PV there is always a problem with tracking as often the cost of the tracker is more than the revenue from the extra solar energy you receive. Most fixed solar PV arrays are fixed because they are optimised for a particular market and deliver maximum power then. Also thin film cells are cheap enough not to need tracking as the cost of extra cells is far below the cost of the trackers.
However the large scale PV solution is concentrating solar PV that has to be tracked otherwise it does not work. Because they use far less expensive silicon and more cheaper reflectors they are possibly economical in large scales. They also have the advantage of needing far less water than solar thermal.
http://www.solfocus.com/en/index.php
The tracking issue I should have left out until I mentioned the error of fact.
This is the actual issue that I would like a response on:
“Honestly if you can’t see a problem with a fixed array of mono or poly crystalline cell PV panels in Queanbeyan being used to represent solar power in general then we can stop right here.”
If nobody can see a problem with this then we can leave the discussion.
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Stephen, I’m glad the question of fixed vs stationary arrays has been resolved.
I’m going to remove the tracking array question from your list of issues with Lang’s analysis, and see which issues remain:
1. Any large PV array for bulk generation of power would track the sun2.
If it did not track the sun thenyou would use thin-film that are cheap enough not to bother.3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
4. The large scale PV answer is concentrating solar PV
and it defineately tracks.5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
Some of these items appear to repeat, so I’m going to refactor the list to try to get a single issue per point. The remaining issues I can pull out of this list are (and I’m going to call this a revision 2 of your list, to avoid confusion):
2.1. Cheap thin film PV could be viable
2.2. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer (ie Lang’s taking down a straw man)
2.3. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider concentrating PV, which could be viable
2.4. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider solar thermal (which is both cheaper in itself and has more economical storage solutions)
Would you agree that this list represents your issues with Lang’s analysis? Have I been fair to your position in listing them this way? Are there separate issues you want to add (the error of fact you allude to, perhaps), or remove?
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John D Morgan
“2.1. Cheap thin film PV could be viable
2.2. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer (ie Lang’s taking down a straw man)
2.3. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider concentrating PV, which could be viable
2.4. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider solar thermal (which is both cheaper in itself and has more economical storage solutions)”
Looks good for me however this was the start. The first issue is Lang is taking down a straw man because solar PV is not SOLAR total. It is one aspect of solar that has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
The error of fact is this – from Langs paper
“2. Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day: zero at
sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday (See Figure 5).”
This should be “Power output versus time for a fixed array …..” Because Lang does not specify this a reader could think that this is a characteristic of all solar power. Errors of fact this fundamental go to the authors credibility.
Other big problems are:
“The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines how much energy storage is needed.”
This is only true for an isolated system when in fact no grid connected system is isolated. If this were true then when a nuclear power station was being refuelled all the consumers would be in the dark for two months. In reality all grid connected power stations support each other to supply demand and this is no different when considering solar power.
The storage requirement is determined by analysing the risk of a low power event and applying the correct amount of storage to make this risk as small as possible. No one single solar power station has to supply 24X7 power 365 days of the year and therefore does not have to have storage to do this.
“Pumped-hydro storage is the least cost option that can meet these requirements”
Langs neglect of Solar Thermal means that the least cost storage may not be pumped hydro.
“But all of eastern Australia can be covered by cloud at the same time so the problem is reduced but not removed by having distributed solar
farms.”
Where is the reference for this? When was the entire east coast covered in cloud?
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Love geothermal as well, but since when was wavepower not baseload?
http://www.ceto.com.au/home.php
The circular motion rather than up and down motion means it can operate in high or low waves. The energy is there, and this seems to be the most low-tech “plumbing” way of harvesting it. No electronics at sea, underwater, not intrusive visually or to shipping.
And… did you watch Shai Agassi’s “Better Place” electric car schemes for Ausralia? He’s already planning that these cars will sell back to the grid. Every 50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt worth of “grid smoothing”. So I guess roll out those EV’s in tandem with the wind… as is the Better Place model anyway!
But I’m with you in that I love geothermal as well, especially the Hot Rock approach by Geodynamics.
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Oh, the internet ad campaign has already started.
http://australia.betterplace.com/get-involved
You can sign up and get a sticker “my next car will run on the wind”
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Stephen,
2.2. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer (ie Lang’s taking down a straw man)
2.4. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider solar thermal (which is both cheaper in itself and has more economical storage solutions)
I think you make a fair point here. Neither the title to Peter’s paper, nor its abstract, nor its introduction, nor its conclusion, make mention of the fact that the scope of the analysis is limited to photovoltaics and excludes solar thermal. Barry’s post title is similarly unqualified. I think it would be reasonable to request Peter issue a revision of the paper that makes those qualifications apparent in title, abstract, intro and conclusion. Peter – how about it?
Having said that, Barry’s post states quite clearly up front:
“This is about solar photovoltaics (PV), which generate electricity directly via the photoelectric effect.”
When I read Peter’s article, I understood I was reading about PV. But without Barry’s intro, I probably would have got a long way through his paper before realizing it.
On the question of CSP analysis, Barry has said above,
“[Ted Trainer] has attempted an analysis of CSP, and I might post up a highlight of this shortly ..”
“As noted above, the solar story is not complete without also looking hard at the situation for solar thermal power. I will address this in due course.”
“Anyway, as I said a couple of times in the above post, I will do another post on CSP shortly. I’m hardly refusing to talk about it.”
He’s made it abundantly clear that he intends to address this topic I’m prepared to take him at his word and see what he has to say on the matter.
If Peter were to revise his text with suitable qualifications on the scope of his treatment, and we accept that an analysis of CSP is forthcoming, could we put items 2.2 and 2.4 to rest? That would mean we are talking about an analysis of PV here.
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Eclipsenow re post – 264
“Second, the Australian government only just learnt the words “Solar thermal baseload” because Matthew Wright bothered to rock up to our energy and resources minister and show him a video of one on his laptop. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Ontario was having trouble keeping up with the technology changes.”
A very minor point I should add :
The Australian gov have known about all these technologies for a long time, if an individual politician doesn’t know that tells you more about the politician’s ignorance I would say.
See the Australian Federal Government’s 2007 “Inquiry into developing Australia’s non-fossil fuel energy industry in Australia: Case study into selected renewable energy sectors” most gov’s are fully aware of all the choices I think, they just get lobbyed by various industries too much.
In fact they all got together in Canberra and had a big scrap over our tax dollars recently, this article makes interesting reading :
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,,25970677-36418,00.html
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re post 221 :
John Newlands said
“Constraints in the energy mix include build time, capital rationing, carbon intensity, nimbyism, …”
& Furball post 261
“Downside is that the towers are visually intrusive (brings up the “Not in MY Back Yard” phenomenon)”
This is slightly off topic so I apologise in advance, but it appears very often in posts around the net, so I’ll be quick :
It pains me every time I see this word, because it downplays peoples legitimate concerns and rights. The industry and gov’s love it because it is easy to name call, and this is really just all that it is, a schoolyard name calling tactic.
Sustainability also encompasses people and the places they live, its not just about technology and numbers.
I recommend this study “Beyond NIMBYism” ->
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/beyond_nimbyism/
Project Summary :
“The Energy White Paper (2003) and recently published Energy Review (2006) contain ambitious goals for decarbonising the UK economy, including increasing development of renewable energy technologies (RET) to provide 20% of UK electricity supply by 2020 (it is currently about 5%) and thus facilitate a step change in carbon emissions reduction by 2050.
The significance of issues of public acceptability are being increasingly recognised by policy makers, the research community and other stakeholders as a necessary condition of reaching this 20% goal. However, our current level of understanding of public views and how they might be relevant to the way in which RETs are evolving (including understandings of the public based upon the NIMBY ‘Not In My Back Yard’ concept), is both limited and restricted, excepting a few case-studies of onshore wind energy development.
In this light, this project, which is part of a major national programme funded by the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council, seeks to significantly extend the current research base by examining a range of forms of technology which are expected to figure, to varying degrees, in the UK renewable energy profile – offshore wind, biomass of various forms, small scale HEP, large scale photovoltaics and more speculatively the various ocean technologies currently under development.”
Their reports and project summaries are available :
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/beyond_nimbyism/deliverables/outputs.htm
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/beyond_nimbyism/deliverables/reports.htm
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Forgot to add the link for the Australian Federal Government’s 2007 “Inquiry into developing Australia’s non-fossil fuel energy industry in Australia: Case study into selected renewable energy sectors”
This is the transcript of the solar discussion, Steve Hollis from Lloyd Energy Systems spoke at length.
Solar : http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/reps/commttee/R10337.pdf
The Australian Government Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism
http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/Pages/index.aspx
has recently announced its $500 million Renewable Energy Fund and the $150 million Energy Innovation Fund, $100 million of which is allocated to the establishment of the Australian Solar Institute. There is also an Energy White Paper scheduled for release at the end of 2009 to announce Australian energy policy
http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/facts/white_paper/Pages/default.aspx)
For recent research in solar see the ARC Centre for Solar Energy Systems at ANU
http://solararc.anu.edu.au/
Solar Energy at ANU :
http://solar.anu.edu.au/
and the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems :
http://solar.anu.edu.au/cses.php
The most recent research I’ve heard about supported by the Australian Government Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism for storage technologies for solar power stations are $7.4million
http://www.wizardpower.com.au/
and $5million for Lloyd and the graphite block + solar concentrators :
http://www.lloydenergy.com
Other recent advances in photovoltaic solar panels in Australia are Sliver Cells :
http://solar.anu.edu.au/research/sliver.php
which have been licensed by Origin Energy :
http://www.originenergy.com.au/1233/SLIVER-technology
It is interesting that SLIVER have caused much of a stir, and have been in the research stage for many years, ORIGIN however have yet to get it to market…
Other research in solar technology are the flexible printable organic cells being developed at Monash University :
http://www.chem.monash.edu.au/solar/index.html
+ the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium :
http://www.vicosc.unimelb.edu.au/index.html
apologies if these links are already given above, not had much time to catch up on this thread. Just how viable this tech is of course remains to be seen. I’ll need to do more research on the tech, Peter’s paper and read through all the posts here properly.
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John D Morgan – “If Peter were to revise his text with suitable qualifications on the scope of his treatment, and we accept that an analysis of CSP is forthcoming, could we put items 2.2 and 2.4 to rest? That would mean we are talking about an analysis of PV here.”
However then what is the point of the original paper other than conventional PV panels are not really suitable for large scale power plants which everybody knew anyway!!!
I would prefer him to retract the paper, do some more research, perhaps using the link that I posted ages ago as a start and making a meaningful contribution.
What I cannot reconcile, if we accept the points you mentioned, why the paper was posted in the first place.
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Re Eclipsenow posts regarding Better Place
We need a “Better Plan” for the Better Place :
http://betterplan.squarespace.com/
The Better Place sticker saying “my next car will run on the wind” should also come with a large print warning, a bit like on cigarette packets saying “Caution : Wind energy can be harmful to the public and the environment”
Dont be suckered in by “ad campaigns”. Have you asked the Better Place people how ethically they intend to obtain all their “clean and green” energy? Are they going to guarantee that no communities or ecologies were harmed in the obtaining of this electricity?
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Sorry mate, I’m not in control of all that. These will need to be NIMBY battles fought out in local areas. If I were in control there would be an absolute minimum distance from any home. Wind turbines would also probably have to be built in rural areas already developed for farming cattle etc. As the wind farming health effects come out into the media, they’ll make better decisions. But I don’t run the show.
It doesn’t disprove the physics of the Better Place plan though, and is only a concern about wind turbines that can be solved by the following 3 words:
*Use where appropriate*.
For instance, we’re not going to stick nuclear power plants on Farm Cove and ruin our view of Sydney Harbour and our botanical gardens are we?
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See my post 272 regarding the term NIMBY, got to dash now…
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I will be pleased to make changes to the paper to improve it.
However, I will make any changes at one time.
John D Morgan, at post #266, you were part way through a process to clarify the issues.
I’d like to see that final outcome of that process first.
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Thanks Peter, thats great.
Stephen: “What I cannot reconcile, if we accept the points you mentioned, why the paper was posted in the first place.”
I think any analysis of these issues is worthwhile, and even if “everyone knows” PV is not suitable for large scale, its worth knowing with some quantification how unsuitable it is, and under what sorts of conditions or assumptions. Its useful to see where PV stands relative to other technologies, and for the discussion of a grid composed of a mixture of power sources, it helps see just how big a fraction PV might reasonably take. I also think, even though the numbers in the analysis will be different, that the same qualities of intermittency that are described for PV, and the issue of backup or alternative generation, will factor in any analysis of csp, as they have done for wind, so its a worthwhile exercise to make that analysis for pv as well.
Again, Peter has offered above to make appropriate revisions, and I’m assuming Barry will make good on his promise of a csp analysis. So, assuming those issues are dealt with, I’m going to have another go at your list:
2.1. Cheap thin film PV could be viable
2.2. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer (ie Lang’s taking down a straw man)2.3. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider concentrating PV, which could be viable
2.4. Lang’s analysis doesn’t consider solar thermal (which is both cheaper in itself and has more economical storage solutions)2.5. Lang is in error: Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day: zero at sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday (See Figure 5)
2.6 “The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines how much energy storage is needed.” This is only true for an isolated system when in fact no grid connected system is isolated.
2.7 “Pumped-hydro storage is the least cost option that can meet these requirements”. Langs neglect of Solar Thermal means that the least cost storage may not be pumped hydro.
2.8 Peter contends “.. all of eastern Australia can be covered by cloud at the same time so the problem is reduced but not removed by having distributed solar farms.” This is false, or at least unreferenced.
John D Morgan, at post #266, you were part way through a process to clarify the issues.
Anyone else feel free to chip in, otherwise this will take a long time ..
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Thanks John, for holding the fort on this. Coming back into this discussion after a few days AWOL, I’m not entirely sure where we are up to. Perhaps this one is a good point to go from, because it gets to the heart of the matter:
“2.6 “The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines how much energy storage is needed.”
This is only true for an isolated system when in fact no grid connected system is isolated.”
I infer from this that you expect the capacity factor of a large dispersed network of solar power stations (PV or CSP, irrelevant for this point) to be higher than any single station? I’ve no problem with this argument, trivially, it will always be as high or higher than the worst performing plant — I doubt anyone does. But some key points which follow are — how much higher, and with what frequency? Do you build to cope with winter conditions and then use the excess summer power for other purposes? What do you do during the (presumably rare) times when a large proportion of the network is clouded in by continental-wide weather systems?
John, yes, I’ll post the CSP comments in due course.
“2.8 Peter contends “.. all of eastern Australia can be covered by cloud at the same time so the problem is reduced but not removed by having distributed solar farms.”
This is false, or at least unreferenced.”
It is not false, but it requires a reference — or, more pertinently, an analysis of the return time of such events.
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Re. the “NIMBY” effect and the current wind turbine design:
Let’s be honest, the current turbine designs are a bit utilitarian, and all follow the basic design of a large 3-bladed propeller – like structure on a tubular support (often concrete or galvanised steel). Hardly inspiring, and probably one of the reasons why many (possibly most) “normal people” (acc. to a recent editorial in the Illawarra Mercury) would prefer not to have these built anywhere near them.
Compare this sad situation with the situation in the Netherlands, particularly the town of Zanse Schans – FAMOUS for it’s windmills, and a major all year round Tourist attraction – to see the WORKING Mills. OK these are of a “traditional” design and “old tech” by today’s “must get every last milliwatt out” obsession with “efficient” design, however these mills (actually they are water pumps) are responsible for today’s Holland, and they are actually very efficient. The 4-bladed design may have some shortcomings in efficiency for a fast rotating aerofoil, but remember these mills are NOT designed to rotate fast. They ARE designed to harvest wind over a large sail surface area, and rotation speeds may be easily managed by a suitable gearing system.
Not only is the design popular aesthetically, these structures have a significant interior space, which in the “old” days would have been the Miller’s family home as well as the working area of the Mill. This was a common arrangement (reflecting the commonality of the Dutch surname Van Der Molen – literally “of the Mill”). Nowadays restored Mills are popular as holiday accommodation, and as premier Restaurants and similar. Unlike the situation with the austere Wind Turbines, people are prepared to pay over the odds to visit or stay in these mills, and rather than being an eyesore, they are a key feature of the Dutch Countryside and Towns.
My point is – Australia has a good reputation Nationally and Internationally for producing Modular and Kit Form housing. If an enterprising Organisation was to design a modern variant of the Traditional Dutch Mill, as a modular structure, such a multi-use structure might help to eliminate the present “turbine phobia”, and be seen as a desirable addition to the locality rather than a utilitarian necessity. Owing to the Termite issues maybe “traditional” (i.e. timber based) construction would not be a great idea, however modern Architects have access to a very wide range of effective, visually appealing structural and cladding products, whilst the traditional sail design could be subtly re-engineered to retain the “Traditional Mill-on-the-Hill” appearance, but provide better, more effective energy extraction. Also, by opting for a larger sail area, but slower rotation rate, stresses on the sails would be minimised.
Such a development strategy could well be seen as aesthetically beneficial by the local population. It is even possible that we might be in the situation where the local Councils would be very keen on such “visual enhancements” and the demand would be quite high! Even if these mills were not as efficient as the present turbines, the loss in efficiency might be more than offset by the reduction in transmission distances (and associated infrastructure), owing to the locality of the mill.
As for uses for the interior spaces – simply copy the Dutch – Museums, Art Galleries, Restaurants, Hotels – all popular, and all revenue generating activities that can reduce investment payback times. GOT to be worth more consideration I’d have thought??
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Thanks John, for holding the fort on this.
Ahh, the cavalry’s arrived ..
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Barry Brook – “It is not false, but it requires a reference — or, more pertinently, an analysis of the return time of such events.”
With respect Barry you do not know, at this point, if it is true or false. I admit that I do not know also so I should have said that this statement is potentially false not false as I stated.
BTW why are you and John D answering these questions and not Peter?
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Because Peter sees these fundamental issues with his paper as “weeds”.
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Eclipsenow, they are weeds (at least some of these issues). I went into considerable detail on, for instance, the question of fixed vs tracking arrays, to show why it was a weed, at post #253. I even explained the metaphor to you:
“Before going on, just note that we are going to make about a 1.3x adjustment to Peter’s numbers in favour of the solar pv option, and check whether it makes up for factors of 20-400x. This is what Peter means when he says picking at minutiae or hunting down in the weeds. Its not whining, its just having a basic sense of quantity.”
You accepted the argument on the fixed vs tracking arrays on the basis that it was, numerically speaking, a weed. I took care to ensure you acknowledged this explicitly, which you did at post #257, so we know you accept this.
And yet here you are again apparently say that the ‘weeds’ are fundamental issues.
One of the reasons I’m trying to answer these questions in this way is I’m sick of seeing the argument run in circles without resolving these issues and moving forward, and you’ve just tried to loop back again.
One of the reasons Peter might not be more active is he might not regard expending the considerable effort required to keep the obstinately innumerate on track as worth his while.
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John and Bryen,
I’m a bit miffed at the way you’ve both taken things I said completely out of context and then tried to spank me for it. Bryen insinuates I’m economically tied to Better Place simply because EV’s are so devastating to his bias against wind. I only raved about it because I was making a prediction to do with the future of the car market, and to explain why I thought that model was so important. But I guess the Vehicle to Grid statistics Shai Agassi discusses helps smooth the wind power issue so dramatically that of COURSE you have to attack ME personally for mentioning it! Nice strawman attempt there mate, but wrong, I have no financial investment with them.
Also, regarding quoting me out of context, if that’s all you think my post about wind power said then that’s a nasty character attack. Please withdraw it because my post was more nuanced than you have presented it. If you don’t, I’ll be completely ignoring all future long winded posts from yourself as those of a charlatan unwilling to accept any data that does not fit his preconceptions.
So John, here’s the complete post. How on earth can you insinuate my position was that all significant ‘weeds’ had been addressed? The small matter of tracking V fixed PV is out the way, and even Stephen Gloor said it was not that big a deal. But please read on! Also, for the record, I’m adding Vehicle to Grid as point 7 as another *fundamental* that should be addressed. I’m with Stephen that this “article” is a confusing attempt to debunk a solar PV baseload system no-one in the world is proposing!
*****************POST #257*****************
Let’s not just focus on that, because:-
1. I’ve already conceded the point… I don’t know if Stephen Gloor has more to add on that, but I actually think it is one of the minor points.
2. The WORST of Peter Lang’s omissions is that he tried to generalise his PV findings across into Solar thermal. That’s as bad as anti-nuke campaigners arguing we shouldn’t develop nuclear because of Chernobyl. Nuclear technology has progressed so much since then you guys are arguing another Chernobyl is IMPOSSIBLE, and that it is a TOTALLY different technology today! Well buddy, it’s the same with solar thermal. So let’s NOT just focus on the one point I (for one) have already conceded, and let’s concentrate on the fact that we are now at post 257 and Solar thermal has STILL not been addressed. Again, it is making this blog appear agenda driven propaganda rather than science. Have you guys got shares invested in nuclear or something? It’s simply getting that bad. (And that boring to have to keep repeating this!!!!)
Once again…
*****
3. Nobody seriously expects solar PV to be the large scale answer
4. The large scale PV answer is concentrating solar PV and it definitely tracks.
5. The large scale solar solution is solar thermal as it is far cheaper in large arrays
6. Solar thermal has the potential to have storage added at reasonable cost allowing 24X7 operation.
7. Vehicle To Grid systems (yes, like Better Place in Canberra 2012).
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EN #286:
3. Yes, they do. People talk about ultra-cheap flat panel PV at well under $1/W all the time.
4. Tracking is essentially irrelevant to the argument. To cite Mackay:
I’m confused! In Chapter 6, you said that the best photovoltaic panels deliver 20 W/m2 on average, in a place with British sunniness. Presumably in the desert the same panels would deliver 40 W/m2. So how come the concentrating solar power stations deliver only 15–20 W/m2? Surely concentrating power should be even better than plain flat panels?
Concentrating solar power does not achieve a better power per unit land area than flat panels. The concentrating contraption has to track the sun, otherwise the sunlight won’t be focused right; once you start packing land with sun-tracking contraptions, you have to leave gaps between them; lots of sunlight falls through the gaps and is lost. The reason that people nevertheless make concentrating solar power systems is that, today, flat photovoltaic panels are very expensive, and concentrating systems are cheaper. The concentrating people’s goal is not to make systems with big power per unit land area. Land area is cheap (they assume). The goal is to deliver big power per dollar.
You don’t magically get a whole lot more W/m2 by tracking — this is not voodoo science, it’s physics.
5. I hope and expect it will be far cheaper. It isn’t right now, but there is no reason to expect prices won’t fall considerably.
6. Heat storage will allow 24X7 operation ONLY IF THE SUN HAS BEEN SHINING THAT DAY. If it hasn’t, or if it’s been weak most of the day, you need commesurately more storage to maintain the 24X7. If it has been 2 days since significant sunshine, you go from needing 16 hours to 40 hours storage. An so on. This is the whole point of Lang’s paper, and on this point, it is IRRELEVANT whether the generating mechanism is PV or CSP, and IRRELEVANT whether the storage method is pumped hydro or heat storage. If you understood this, you and Stephen Gloor wouldn’t be harping on about how the analysis is flawed because it looks at PV with pumped hydro and not CSP. How else can I put this? The type of solar AND the type of storage is largely IRRELEVANT to this problem (the only major relevance is that desert-based CSP should have somewhat higher capacity factors, so the magnitude of this gap may be lessened).
7. EVs are a really good idea to level-out short-term fluctuations in wind, and really do hold some decent promise in this respect. But the EV batteries will only hold a few hours storage for the whole grid demand, so if the wind (or mix of wind and sun) goes out for a longer period than this, the solution breaks. Everyone has flat batteries with no way to charge them. That’s a caricature, to be sure, but no a wholly inaccurate one.
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Thanks Barry.
Don’t forget that Solar chimney’s (although VERY inefficient with the sunlight / m2) are meant to have demonstrated 24/7 baseload power even in overcast days because it is based on low temperature differentials driving artificially created baseload wind power, so I’m not sure if this hybrid solar-wind synergy goes under this topic or wind. ;-)
CETO and geothermal are also meant to be baseload and also meant to be quite abundant in Australia.
If you’re *really* convinced nuclear is the fastest way to get off coal, then this blog is a good way to start, and I commend you for going with your convictions and working this hard on the blog. Also, the Science Show interview wasn’t a bad gig for your side either! :-)
What are your plans for the future? You strike me as the type that could organise some volunteers to produce a free downloadable movie that nuclear-green activists can burn to DVD and show at parties? You know, making a viral movie, the way the bad guys seem to be? (This looks like PERFECT TIMING by the bad guys as we head towards Copenhagen!)
http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/trailer
The reason I ask is that the “renewables can do it” meme is so strong in greenie circles, and nuclear power has SUCH a bad rep, that on the chance you are technically correct and nuclear happens to be the cheapest, most reliable way we can head into a post-fossil fuel world, I’d love to know that society was having the debate out there on the table. A viral greenie meme-building DVD could propel this into investigations by 4 corners etc. “Earth, Wind and Fire” on 4 Corners definitely leaves the argument in favour of renewables being able to do it.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s1895335.htm
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Eclipse, we are not talking about CETO, we’re talking about solar. Where you and Stephen go wrong is believing that there is exist such a big difference between PV and CSP. That CSP is a superior technology due to it’s inherent ability to store thermal energy (at a huge expense) does not get you away from the fact. But as already pointed out, it’s “peak” energy conversion exists in a small approx 3 hour window with power produced falling off on either side of it.
Why invest in anything like this in sunny Australia or anywhere when you really have to over build to make enough baseload power? I know, you think there is a serious renewable energy ‘mix’ that when combined can do this. I would not want to see a industrial Australia sink into every increasing *panic* when people’s AC doesn’t work after a few days of cloudy cover or zero to near-zero wind days over an entire region.
We think this is so wasteful, so unnecessary when nuclear can *easily* handle all this. What we see now is that the trend to acceptance of nuclear for these reasons, along with climate change, has increased and there shows no sign of reversing.
Personally, I going to hold judgment of CETO until we see the results, which should be within a few years, maybe next year, for costs and reliability on a larger scale project (say, 20 MWs). There are quite a lot of wave power projects out there (none of which are economically sensible right now) so we’ll see.
We will also see how the new builds around the world, especially in China, work out.
David
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Barry Brook – “Heat storage will allow 24X7 operation ONLY IF THE SUN HAS BEEN SHINING THAT DAY. If it hasn’t, or if it’s been weak most of the day, you need commesurately more storage to maintain the 24X7. If it has been 2 days since significant sunshine, you go from needing 16 hours to 40 hours storage. An so on. This is the whole point of Lang’s paper, and on this point, it is IRRELEVANT whether the generating mechanism is PV or CSP, and IRRELEVANT whether the storage method is pumped hydro or heat storage.”
This is only true if the solar generating station is isolated. The worldwide average capacity factor of nuclear plants is about 80%. If Peter’s statement applies to solar power generating stations then it equally applies to nuclear and coal. That is nuclear only has 24X7 operation WHEN IT IS SUPPLIED WITH FUEL to use your italics. If we apply this thinking to nuclear and coal then they would need storage for the times that they fail or are, in the case of nuclear, completely down for refuelling once a year or two years.
What you are asking any particular solar station is to be the sole power station in isolation and then doing the analysis on that basis – no wonder it comes out so expensive. You could do the same with nuclear as every single nuclear power station would have to be duplicated so that there was generating capacity available when the other failed or was being refuelled. This is of course ridiculous.
The other point is that Lang has picked the one solar resource where the storage is still very expensive. You can only, at the moment, store electricity from Solar PV in batteries. Solar thermal has a tested and proven method of storing heat at a small fraction of the cost of batteries. In the types of CSP that have come from the Solar Two pre-production plant, the storage is not an expensive add-on but a fundamental working part of the plant. It DOES matter what the storage is as heat storage at the solar plant is by far the cheapest and most efficient method of storing solar energy with present technology. Pumped hydro works well however it is expensive and depends on topology and rainfall to provide the storage media.
Solar thermal will use pumped hydro however it is just as likely to work with gas turbine plants that are perfectly adequate in both reactivity and ramp rate to maintain the grid. Cloudy periods during the day will be covered with the storage as will night-time operation. Also most, if not all, solar thermal stations can have a gas fired boiler for desperation times that can be fired up in the case of very unusual weather conditions. As this will be used very seldom it can easily supplied from renewable sources such as biomass, plasma converters or solar hydrogen. Solar PV cannot have this form of backup as economically.
Finally as you have not noted some of night time demand is ‘manufactured’ demand. That is demand that is only there because up till now it more economical to run thermal coal and nuclear continuously therefore off-peak power is sold off really cheap. This timed nighttime off-peak will end with renewables. This, I believe, will cut night time demand to a point where a certain amount of solar plants with say 48 or 96 hour storage will be able to maintain the grid 99% of the time. For the other 1% they may have to fire up the gas boiler. Also let us not forget that wind blows at night so it would take a 48 or 96 hour period of clouds that was also completely still over the whole south east of Australia to force the solar plants to start burning gas. I will leave it to others to work out the odds that this happens in any one year. My guess that this would be at least a one in 10 year event. And also I have already noted a method where long-term storage solar plants could recharge their storage EVEN WHEN THE SUN IS NOT SHINING (again to use your italics) with surplus wind or energy from other peak (CPV) and intermediate solar stations (CPV and Trough thermal) with little storage, by heating the cold tank fluid with an efficient electric heater to be put back in the hot tank.
In summary Peter Lang’s paper is flawed because it treats a solar power station in isolation and costs it from there and does not mention the solar technology with economical storage therefore completely distorting the costs of solar.
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“Solar thermal will use pumped hydro however it is just as likely to work with gas turbine plants that are perfectly adequate in both reactivity and ramp rate to maintain the grid. Cloudy periods during the day will be covered with the storage as will night-time operation. Also most, if not all, solar thermal stations can have a gas fired boiler for desperation times that can be fired up in the case of very unusual weather conditions. As this will be used very seldom it can easily supplied from renewable sources such as biomass, plasma converters or solar hydrogen. Solar PV cannot have this form of backup as economically.”
Again all great points Stephen. Also consider biochar. It currently only gets to keep 50% of the gas generated as the other half is used up in the next burn. Imagine a biochar plant rigged up near a large solar thermal plant that could use some of that SOLAR heat to run the biochar burn, thereby freeing up that 50%. In a liquid fuels / gas constrained world, it seems like a winner to me. Indeed, local council green bin waste should go to a local solar thermal biochar plant to:-
* generate some gas to backup the solar thermal energy for a “rainy day” or 2.
* generate carbon credits and biochar income for the council, as it sells biochar to local gardeners & farmers.
* generate some gas for hybrid trolley-truck / gas council trucks, so that councils can be prepared for peak oil. Or do you think trolley trucks could mainly run off the trolley lines and then for side streets run off a “Better Place” styled battery? Hmmm, love to see some papers on the fastest way to wean local council services off oil.
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Stephen Gloor (#290),
I disagree with many of the statements in your post #290 and previous posts. But it would take me some time to address them all. Here are a few quick responses.
1. You keep repeating that CST is cheaper than large scale PV. Can you provide evidence for this assertion. The costs used in the ‘Solar Power Realities’ paper are based on current costs.
2. The important point to understand is that there is an order of magnitude difference in the costs of nuclear and solar to do the same job. Unless CST is in the order of 5% of the cost of PV, now, nuclear is still the cheaper option, now. We could argue about which will be the cheaper in the future for ever.
3. The ‘Solar Power Realities’ paper is not about a standalone solar power station. It requires a network and central storage. Refer to points 3 and 4 , page 11, 12 which states in part:
“This calculation assumes that, by having widely distributed solar farms, the
total power output of all solar farms would never fall below the ‘Total Power Demand’, at any time between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm during any day.”
4. The comparison between solar (an intermittent generator when lacking sufficient energy storage) and nuclear is wrong. Coal, gas, hydro, etc. all need redundancy to back up for scheduled and unscheduled outages. Roughly, nuclear running at 90% capacity factor needs one back-up power station for ten power stations. The situation is totally different with intermittent, generators. They also need redundancy to cover for system failures, upgrades, etc. in addition to the problem with their intermittent ‘fuel’ supply.
5. Why would we want to spend the full capital cost for solar generators + gas generators + the much higher capacity transmission system for the solar system, just to save some fuel? It makes no sense if you can meet the demand with nuclear at lower cost.
6. I suspect it is unlikely I can give you answers that will satisfy you unless you are prepared to work out the costs of the systems you are proposing as an alternative. The objective of course is to replace fossil fuel generation with a least-cost, near-zero-emissions system.
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“5. Why would we want to spend the full capital cost for solar generators + gas generators + the much higher capacity transmission system for the solar system, just to save some fuel? It makes no sense if you can meet the demand with nuclear at lower cost.”
That seems to be the core of it. The solar guys are saying their technology is constantly inching along in cheaper materials, cheaper methodologies, and cheaper per unit costs once we scale up production.
The same argument is being made by you guys with your Gen4 modular claims. We’ll only really know after both technologies are rolled out on the large scale.
Until then I think I’m agnostic either way. We just don’t have the real world data. But in the end I’m glad. All these technologies are in a race to provide the cheapest most abundant sustainable electricity, and if we can just adapt transport, mining, and agricultural systems to the new energy flows fast enough we’re home and hosed.
I’ve moved from the “Mad Max” position 5 years ago to seeing a “bright green future” as a serious contender. Still, if things get funky internationally over the remaining oil, we could still end up in a lot of trouble. We shall see.
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Peter Lang
“1. You keep repeating that CST is cheaper than large scale PV. Can you provide evidence for this assertion. The costs used in the ‘Solar Power Realities’ paper are based on current costs.”
From the analysis that I posted (http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/34440.pdf) which is comprehensive even though it is from 2003 it can be used as the basis for evaluating tower technology. On page 21 is a summary of a base case that can be used to estimate tower costs. It comes in at $3622.00/kW. Solar PV on current solar panel prices even assuming a major volume discount is 5 X 200W solar panels@$2000 each = $10 000/kW which is at least three times the cost just for the panels, let alone the balance of the plant which could raise it to at least $15 000/kW which is 5 times the cost.
“2. The important point to understand is that there is an order of magnitude difference in the costs of nuclear and solar to do the same job. Unless CST is in the order of 5% of the cost of PV, now, nuclear is still the cheaper option, now. We could argue about which will be the cheaper in the future for ever.”
Only in your flawed analysis.
“3. The ‘Solar Power Realities’ paper is not about a standalone solar power station. It requires a network and central storage. Refer to points 3 and 4 , page 11, 12 which states in part:”
You say these things however how does this reconcile with the amount of storage that you think that a solar power station needs to function? You say this with this statement from page 7.
“The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines
how much energy storage is needed.”
How is this true when the solar power station are networked?
“4. The comparison between solar (an intermittent generator when lacking sufficient energy storage) and nuclear is wrong. Coal, gas, hydro, etc. all need redundancy to back up for scheduled and unscheduled outages. Roughly, nuclear running at 90% capacity factor needs one back-up power station for ten power stations. The situation is totally different with intermittent, generators. They also need redundancy to cover for system failures, upgrades, etc. in addition to the problem with their intermittent ‘fuel’ supply.”
The worldwide capacity factor for nuclear is 80% (http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm) so actually they need 1 backup generator for 5 power stations. Wind farms are highly reliable as the loss of a single generator does not mean the total loss of the plant. Solar power stations likewise can be modular so that the whole plant is not taken out for maintenance.
“5. Why would we want to spend the full capital cost for solar generators + gas generators + the much higher capacity transmission system for the solar system, just to save some fuel? It makes no sense if you can meet the demand with nuclear at lower cost.”
Because the gas generators are needed for nuclear or solar/wind for peaking. Renewable actually only need a relatively small increase in peaking power. The reason for renewables is that they are faster to deploy, cheaper and without the attendant problems of nuclear, the ones you refuse to acknowledge. Only in your flawed analysis is nuclear cheaper than renewables. You did this by making ridiculous assumptions about the storage required for solar and then used the one form of solar that has to have the most expensive storage.
“6. I suspect it is unlikely I can give you answers that will satisfy you unless you are prepared to work out the costs of the systems you are proposing as an alternative. The objective of course is to replace fossil fuel generation with a least-cost, near-zero-emissions system.”
Hang on a second – I am not the self styled energy expert with a flawed analysis. It is up to you to correct this, not for me to propose an alternative. I may in the future however you need to correct the problems or retract the ‘paper’.
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Ender Fatigue returns with a vengeance. I wouldn’t blame Peter Lang is he doesn’t bother to engage again with your patronising, repetitive and illogical diatribe. I certainly won’t be bothering.
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Me, on August 16, above:
Emphasis added. The NYT, August 18th, hat tip to The Capacity Factor:
Well, I was going to quote something, but it’s hard to tell, in that NYT article, whether anything happened on the 17th or 18th. Maybe I prophesied the past.
(How fire can be domesticated)
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Barry and Peter – “Ender Fatigue returns with a vengeance. I wouldn’t blame Peter Lang is he doesn’t bother to engage again with your patronising, repetitive and illogical diatribe. I certainly won’t be bothering.”
May I remind you of this at #250?
“Stephen, please humour me and state the first major problem with Lang’s analysis. I will answer that (if I can) and then move to objection #2. I really do believe that breaking the problem down into pieces will help to get to the bottom of this.”
I have done this and no such answer has been forthcoming. I was prepared to leave this before this post and you asked me for objections. It is totally unfair to ask for a discussion and then cry “Ender fatigue” when neither you or Peter seem to be able to give satisfactory answers the questions that I have posed and others have acknowledged as problems with the paper.
For my part I have a bit of Barry fatigue refuting your baseless objections to ‘technosolar’. So lets leave the discussion here. I certainly will be posing no more questions.
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We worked through to the end of your list, answered your ‘objections’ in manifold ways (it not just me who did this, John Morgan for instance did an admirable job). And then, in the last few comments, we were apparently starting it all over again. That is what induces fatigue. Your demands that Peter ‘withdraw his paper’, whatever that might mean, and your characterisation of him as ‘self-styled’ were frankly insulting.
You may like to claim, as is your predilection to so often do, that the objections raised here and elsewhere to technosolar being a large-scale energy solution are ‘baseless’ and ‘refuted’. You are also free to claim that nuclear power is ‘unnatural’, dangerous and unneeded. But saying these things doesn’t make them so, and I suspect most readers of this blog are now of that opinion, being interested as they are in evidence, logic, and pragmatism, rather than myth, zealotry and ideology.
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I’m sorry Barry but I missed the bit where Stephen’s case was overwhelmingly batted out of the game?
You asked him to break it down.
Peter Lang finally answered in #292, but answered with unsubstantiated dogma. Stephen replied in #294 with important points that were on-target and backed by substantiated papers. So when he’s thrashing you guys you cry “Ender fatigue”? You never really wanted to go over his problems with the paper point by point did you? I mean, Peter even bumps the capacity factor of nuclear up by 10% and no one blinks when Stephen quotes the real capacity factor.
So when you say Stephen’s post was a “patronising, repetitive and illogical diatribe”, all I can hear is sulking.
Yeah, I really think you wanted to discuss the actual subject with Stephen. ;-) Nice agenda poking through there mate. I’m done with this blog.
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Right EN, and that agenda would be what, exactly, other than getting to real, full, workable solutions? From someone who, on his own blog, says things like “Eeewwwww! Imagine all the nuclear boosters learning this! What a foul way to power the world!“, I don’t think it is me who has the agenda.
Gloor never did break it down as requested. It was left to folks like John Morgan to try to do that, and as far as I could see, John ended up with ruled lines through most of those arguments. Peter Lang and I then addressed the remaining ones.
And if you want to understand the concept of ‘Ender Fatigue’ to its full extent, I strongly suggest you trawl back through the reams and reams of comments by him, and the detailed responses from me and others (such as Tom Blees), of the same general nature as the ones that arose here, on literally dozens of other threads. There is a good reason why that term exists.
As to your other points, give me a break. The capacity factor of nuclear power in the US is 93%. The only ‘paper’ he cited was from a 2003 study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Why not use the 2009 EIA estimates, or a dozen other similar recent costings? And you’d know it was irrelevant anyway, if you understood the point being made (again, and again, and again), because it is not the capital cost of the generating infrastructure that is at issue here, it’s the cost of the required backup for the inherent variability.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re ‘done with this blog’, if you do indeed feel comforted that a technosolar dream for our energy future remains intact — and if it doesn’t, well hey, then you have your Mad Max scenarios to take pitiable solace in once again. For the rest of us, it’s back to doing our bit to help realise what we understand to be demonstrably workable global solutions.
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To play Gloor’s game is to destroy the planet. Just like Alderaan, boom, gone.
I thought of saying that the first time I saw him here, but it wouldn’t have done any good. We always believe that finally, this time for sure, the football won’t be pulled away as we try to kick it.
— G.R.L. Cowan, (‘How fire can be domesticated’)
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/
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“Eeewwwww! Imagine all the nuclear boosters learning this! What a foul way to power the world!“
I forgot I’d written that. If you look at my right hand link bar, my ‘summary thoughts’ on nuclear power have actually changed as a result of your blog! I’ve stated that I remain “agnostic” about nuclear power, and will wait and see what develops in terms of safety specs and cheaper modular production. I deleted all my “traditional greenie” objections to nuclear, and if I haven’t done so through all my previous blog posts, well tough, my link bar sums up my latest position and that should be good enough.
Gloor never did break it down as requested. This is what I’m “done with” Barry. He DID, you just didn’t like it. Basically I see Stephen as pointing out that renewables may not be as “intermittent” as you argue, but when ever this is pointed out the response is a semantic shift from either capacity to storage to name-plate to some other verbal dance and ignoring the basic point.
I really hope you are right and that “they” can build SAFE, CHEAP nuclear power that eats its own waste. It would be great to know we had another backup plan in case the solar-thermal, CETO, OTEC, geothermal, kite-wind, wind, biomass, biochar, solar PV, hydro, micro-hydro, solar chimney grid backed by the VTG-EV market actually DID NOT work 365 days a year after all.
As for Cowan’s suggestion that renewables would make earth go “boom, gone”… that’s just childish. We’re on the same side guys, we want global warming dealt with. IF the mix of renewable energy supply above doesn’t work as advertised, we might have a few days blackout. North America survived that. It was nasty, but a civilisation capable of building reactors is still there. So much for “Boom, gone”! Grow up!
In short, thank you for this blog Barry, it is genuinely interesting to think that one day we might finally be dealing with the waste issue and even power our civilisation for the next few hundred years on the stuff! But your debating style, and that of some of the other contributors here, leaves much to be desired.
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I am becoming increasingly agnostic about the lay-person’s ability to know ANYTHING about energy matters! Only a few hours ago I sent an email about how while I was a fan of solar thermal power as one option, I thought the “solar roads” project was probably developed by a few dreamers intrinsically aware that America should be ashamed of all it’s tarmac. Now it seems they’ve got funding, but in American terms it seems to be the equivalent of giving the kiddies a couple of cents to play with and see what they can do.
*****
“”Solar Roadways, a project to replace over 25,000 square miles of road in the US with solar panels you can drive on, just received $100,000 in funding from the Department of Transportation for the first 12ft-by-12ft prototype panel. Each panel consists of three layers: a base layer with data and power cables running through it, an electronics layer with an array of LEDs, solar collectors and capacitors, and finally the glass road surface. With data and power cables, the solar roadway has the potential to replace some of our aging infrastructure. With only 15% efficiency, 25,000 square miles of solar roadways could produce three times what the US uses annually in energy. The building costs are estimated to be competitive with traditional roads, and the solar roads would heat themselves in the winter to keep snow from accumulating.”
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/29/0018256/Solar-Roadways-Get-DoT-Funding
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Solar Thermal
The system must be able to provide the power requirements at all times, even during long periods of overcast conditions. We must design for the worst conditions.
We’ll consider two worst case scenarios:
1 All power stations are under cloud at the same time for 3 days.
2 At all times between 9 am and 3 pm at least one power station, somewhere, has direct sunlight, but all other power stations are under cloud.
Assumptions:
The average capacity factor of all the power stations when under cloud for 3 days is 1.56 % (to be consistent with the PV analysis in “Solar Power Realities”; refer to Figure 7 and the table on page 10).
The capacity factor in midwinter, when not under cloud, is 15% (refer Figure 7 in “Solar Power Realities”).
Scenario 1 – all power stations under cloud
Energy storage required: 3 days x 450,000 MWh/d = 1,350,000 MWh
Hours of the day when energy is stored (9 am to 3 pm) = 6 hours
Power to meet direct day-time demand = 25 GW
Average power required to store 450,000 MWh in 6 hours = 75 GW
Installed capacity required to provide 75 GW power at 1.56% capacity factor (say 6.24% capacity factor from 9 am to 3 pm) = 1,202 GW.
Add 25GW to meet the direct day time demand.
Total peak generating capacity required = 1,227 GW
If the average capacity factor was double, the installed capacity required would be nearly half. So the result is highly sensitive to the average capacity factor.
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Scenario 2 – at least one power station has direct sun at all times between 9 am and 3 pm
One power station provides virtually all the power. The other power stations are under cloud and have a capacity factor of just 1.56%.
Energy storage required for 1 day = 450,000 MWh
Hours of the day when energy is stored (9 am to 3 pm) = 6 hours
Average power to meet direct day-time demand = 25 GW
Average power required to store 450,000 MWh in 6 hours = 75 GW
The capacity factor in midwinter, when not under cloud, is 15% (refer Figure 7 in “Solar Power Realities”).
Installed capacity required to provide 75 GW power at 15% capacity factor (say 60% capacity factor from 9 am to 3 pm) = 125 GW.
Add 25 GW to meet the direct day time demand.
Total peak generating capacity required for the station in the sun = 150 GW.
But the clouds move, so all the power stations need this generating capacity.
To maximise the probability that at least one power stations is in the sun we need many power stations spread over a large geographic area. If we have say 20 power stations spread across South Australia, Victoria, NSW and southern Queensland, we would need 3,000 GW – assuming only the power station in the sun is generating.
If we want redundancy for the power station in the sun, we’d need to double the 3,000 GW to 6,000 GW.
Of course the power stations under cloud will also contribute. Let’s say they are generating at 1.56% capacity factor. Without going through the calculations we can see the capacity required will be somewhere between the 1,227 GW calculated for Scenario 1 and the 3,000 GW calculated here. Let’s say 2,000 GW for a quick number as a basis for the cost calculation for scenario 2.
So, Scenario 2 requires 450,000 MWh storage and 2,000 GW generating capacity. It also requires a very much greater transmission capacity, but we’ll ignore that for now.
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Some notes on cloud cover
A quick scan of the Bureau of Meteorology satellite images produced the following:
This link http://www.bom.gov.au/sat/archive_new/gms/
provides satelite views. You can choose IR or visible wave lengths. I looped through June, July and August 2009, and noticed that much of SA, Tasmania, Victoria, NSW and southern Queensland were cloud covered on June 1, 2, 21 and 25 to 28. July 3 to 6, 10, 11, 14. 16, 22 to 31 also had widespread cloud cover (26th was the worst), as did August 4, 9, 10, 21, 22.. I have not conducted a rigorous study.
I also looked at the BOM Solar Radiation Browse Service for March and April 2002 (the data on this site only goes up to 14 April 2002). http://www.bom.gov.au/nmoc/archives/Solar/index.shtml
I’ve included the URL below so you can run the loop yourself if interested. Notice the low solar radiation levels for 25 to 30 March and 8 to 12 April 2002 over the area we are looking at. Following is the actual URL for the loop I looked at:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/nmoc/nmoc.sat.monthlylp.pl?satellite=sat/archive_new/solar_radiation&files=IDE3GS01.20020320.gif,IDE3GS01.20020321.gif,IDE3GS01.20020322.gif,IDE3GS01.20020323.gif,IDE3GS01.20020324.gif,IDE3GS01.20020325.gif,IDE3GS01.20020326.gif,IDE3GS01.20020327.gif,IDE3GS01.20020328.gif,IDE3GS01.20020329.gif,IDE3GS01.20020330.gif,IDE3GS01.20020331.gif,IDE3GS01.20020401.gif,IDE3GS01.20020402.gif,IDE3GS01.20020403.gif,IDE3GS01.20020407.gif,IDE3GS01.20020408.gif,IDE3GS01.20020409.gif,IDE3GS01.20020410.gif,IDE3GS01.20020411.gif,IDE3GS01.20020412.gif,
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Some thoughts on Future Costs?
How much cheaper can solar power be?
NEEDS figure 3.7, p31 suggests that the cost of solar thermal may be halved by 2040.
How much cheaper can nuclear be?
The first large reactor ever made was built in 15 months, ran for 24 years, and its power was expanded by almost a factor of 10 during its life.
If we could do that 65 years ago, for a first of a kind technology, what could we do now by building on current designs if we wanted to put our mind to it.
Is it unreasonable to believe that, 65 years later, we could build nuclear power plants, twenty times the power of the first reactor, in 12 months, for 25% of the cost of current generation nuclear power stations?
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Solar Thermal
I should have said before comment #304:
The solar thermal system is required to provide the following:
20 GW base load power;
33 GW peak power (at 6:30 pm); and
25 GW average power.
This power is to be provided during winter months.
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So, Peter, you don’t need to convince me of the huge over build needed to supply a 100% renewable package for Australia. It seems astounding that people hold on to this dream as an almost religious necessity. But, I would agree with some here that a ‘true’ renewable portfolio would be a combination of things: residential PV (NEVER, EVER, build an industrial PV system, it’s just plain stupid financially), “CETO” if it works out, CSP, wind etc.
From what you’ve provided, at best, the numbers seem to work out to still a huge 3x over-build regardless of combination, along with a continental HVDC and a continental SG. I don’t ever see this happening in the ‘time frame’ demanded by renewable advocates, nor is it technologically nor financially feasible.
In discussing storage, and that you point out the fact that you need MORE than just 16 hours of storage, it seems totally impossible what they advocate.
David
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Talk about solar or wind providing “on-demand” energy always has the additional issue of energy storage for times when the “sun ain’t shining or the wind ain’t blowing.”
This adds tremendous costs to these approaches.
Shai Agassi has an (integrating) idea on using the energy stored in electric car batteries to provided a distributed storage source for intermittent power like solar or wind. His talk focuses on infrastructure solutions on batteries and electric cars. Countries and car manufactures are already on board. The issue of using car batteries as distributed storage doesn’t come up until the end of his talk and the Q&A session. Electric car batteries are a given no matter how you generate the electricity but Shai’s suggestion would _seem_ to provide some leverage for the solar and wind technologies. Any comments on whether his storage idea would help solar or wind be economical enough so they could compete with nuclear?
http://fora.tv/2009/07/22/The_Electric_Horizon_Shai_Agassi
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At current penetration levels (of 5 – 15% of average electricity demand in many developed countries), one of the biggest concern facing utilities / grid managers is dealing with the 30 second, 5 min, and 30 min slews that are introduced by wind power (wind constituting 90+% of the technosolar contribution so far). For this, I can see a huge fleet of BEVs having great appeal. But with larger and larger % wind/solar penetration, the BEVs will not, in my humble opinion (and that of many others, though it’s not an exclusive belief by any means), be useful in coping with extended lulls of 12 hours through to a string of a few days in a row. Other storage methods will be needed for this, which is where the major future costs would lie.
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[…] Comments Kropotkin on Recent nuclear power cost esti…Barry Brook on Solar power realities – …Mark on Solar power realities – …David Walters on Solar power realities – […]
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I actually work for a oil and gas company and we try to be environmentally friendly as much as possible, but like anything dealing with fossil fuels we are contributing to the problem. I have recently decided to talk out about it and am in the process of converting my home into using solar power. Even if i only cut my useage in half i am helping and am working with others in my area to do the same. It’s time we showed everyone that changes only takes one person to start it and then for them to help the next person to start and on and on……
Just my 2 cents.
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David Walters,
Thank you for your comment #309. In part you said:
“But, I would agree with some here that a ‘true’ renewable portfolio would be a combination of things: residential PV (NEVER, EVER, build an industrial PV system, it’s just plain stupid financially), “CETO” if it works out, CSP, wind etc. ”
Several others have made this comment on this thread. Ted’s article on the “Solar Thermal Questions” thread (started by Barry this morning) explains the problem clearly: Renewables are not additive. However, the cost is additive.
We can keep adding more types of generators but there will still be periods when they do not supply sufficient electricity to meet demand. If we have 1000 MW of each of Wind, solar, CETO and tidal, and each one is $4000/kW (to keep it simple), then the total cost is #16,000/kW, but there will still be times when they cannot generate 1000 MW. So we need a nuclear power plant at $4000/kW for back up (fossil are fuel plants are not allowed).
Since the nuclear plant can do the whole job on its own, we do not need the renewables.
This is obviously an over simplification, but I am attempting to clarify for several of the others who have commented about this on this thread.
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Except that CETO, OTEC, Geothermal and solar chimney’s are pretty much baseload, no matter what the cloud cover is like. So your contention that we need to overbuild by a factor of 4 is just plain ridiculous because we are NOT building 100% of the grid for wind, and then another 100% of the grid for solar thermal just in case the wind stops blowing, and another 100% of the grid in CETO just in case there’s a still, overcast day… indeed, if we built a 100% CETO grid the job’s pretty much done!
(Nice attempt at a straw-man, but FAIL! Even I can see what a caricature this is.)
Now I don’t know what % of each we’ll end up with. But you are simply misrepresenting what renewable advocates are arguing for.
EG: A mix of the baseload providers such as CETO, geothermal, solar chimneys and solar thermal could supply say 80% of the energy BETWEEN THEM, with wind topping up the grid with its high EROEI energy, but mainly topping up those sectors that can handle intermittent supply, like VTG-EV’s, then no problem.
Now, cloud cover? You would argue that this means a complete 100% overbuild is required… but not if solar thermal is only about 20% of the grid. Cloudy days are often windy. That’s where the wind may come to the rescue, and even the cars. If not, that’s when those solar thermal plants turn on their biogas burners for a few days. Then hey presto, the sun shines again, and they’ve got a few weeks to build up enough biogas before the next burn.
Yes there will be some overbuild, but there already is for the fossil fuel energy market. All these points have been made by Stephen Gloor with far more detail than myself. Is it that you feel safe to construct such a ridiculous straw-man now that you’ve all shouted Stephen off the list with rude “Ender Fatigue” routines?
You’re also ignoring that mining companies are already starting to buy solar thermal energy because they CAN guarantee the price of the “fuel” for the next 20 years. They’ll have plans for those 3 day stretches you’ve been discussing. It’s not rocket science… but economics. Maybe their situation is so remote and off the grid that solar thermal with a bit of extra backup (gas or diesel generators?) is economical.
So once again it comes back down to economics, and a diverse energy supply to the grid. We shall see. But please don’t harp on about 100% overbuilds any more hey, because that is just dishonest.
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Peter
my feeling is that future cloud cover will be different to the past, as in unpredictable. It has rained from 1-24 hours a day in SW Tas in June-July-August while Queensland has had record temperatures. Maybe that will reverse in a month or two. My gut feeling is that it is getting cloudier everywhere, not just Tas but probably in Alice Springs and Broken Hill. If so traditionally sunny areas can expect a lot less insolation for periods of a month or more at a time regardless of El Nino or La Nina. I don’t know how to quantify this.
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Eclipsnow,
I don’t understand how you still don’t get it.
You say “Except that CETO, OTEC, Geothermal and solar chimney’s are pretty much baseload, no matter what the cloud cover is like.”
Well pick one of them to provide our baseload power and calculate the system.
Ir it provides baseload, all we need to do is pick the least cost. Trying to muddy the waters by saying we’ll have a mix is nonsense. Either the technology can or it cannot provide reliable power at stable and controllable output 24/365. None of these technologies can do this, and adding them together increases the cost but does not solve the technical problem.
I would have thought this point is made absolutely clear in the “Solar Thermal Questions” article Barry posted this morning. I thought that article was so clear it would have convinced anyone that Solar is a complete waste of resources, especially solar thermal.
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Barry Book –
This may be my last post here so indulge me for a minute and at least read it before lapsing into “Ender fatigue”
The fundamental problem here is a difference in concepts. To try and explain it I will delve into my world of IT for a minute. To me a PC not connected to anything is completely useless. I would have a hard time doing anything useful with it other than a couple of standalone games which I do not play anyway.
Where the PC gains its power is by connecting it to other networks. No longer does the PC have to have terabytes of storage because it can connect to a computer that does. No longer does a single PC have to have all the information on it’s hard drive because it can connect to any server in the world that does. In fact it would be very hard to find a PC now that does not have an ethernet connection or a connection to the Internet.
The problem I see with Peter Lang and others that seek to dismiss renewables as toys that serious people do not play with is that they do not understand the concept of networking. When I see a PC I see a network node. When I see a Solar thermal power station I also see a network node not a power station. I am completely used to the concept of networks as I use them everyday and in fact my job would be impossible without them. I can log onto a fix a server in Columbia as easy as one next to me in Perth and I think nothing of doing this because of networks. One of the reasons that I think that renewables can is because people that have used networks get used to the idea and concept of networks and get used to the idea of shifting loads around the network seamlessly. Even on a very simple level the wind/gas network at Esperance gives an idea of what can be done. The smart connection between the wind farm and the gas turbine allows the wind, which comprises 15% of the generating capacity, to contribute 22% of the electricity supply.
Although Peter Lang says that he has allowed for networking I do not really think that he ‘gets’ it because he is unused to thinking in terms of the power of the network controlled by intelligent controllers. I used to get this a lot twenty years ago arguing with mainframe computer people who now supervise empty computer halls where mighty mainframes used to be.
When Peter says things like this:
“If we have 1000 MW of each of Wind, solar, CETO and tidal, and each one is $4000/kW (to keep it simple), then the total cost is #16,000/kW, but there will still be times when they cannot generate 1000 MW. So we need a nuclear power plant at $4000/kW for back up (fossil are fuel plants are not allowed).”
Even assuming a non-despatchable baseload power plant could back up renewables which it can’t, it shows that he is unable to think network and see that a network of renewables can respond and supply 24X7 power.
As the the other accusations I did break it down however the first point that Solar PV cannot represent solar in general never did get answered properly we never moved from there.
You have moved from a reasonable position to one highly polarised in favour of nuclear to the exclusion of all else and in doing so you have, in my opinion, “jumped the shark” leading to reduction in quality of discussion. Your blog, at least on the subject of nuclear power, is starting to resemble Jennifer Morohasy and Andrew Bolt’s where only discussion that agrees with their point of view is tolerated. Perhaps this is natural route of all blogs as Jennifer’s blog started out pretty reasonably as I was one of the first lot of commenters there. Perhaps they got Ender fatique as well however that was when I was vehemently opposed to the idiots there and there pathetic arguments against AGW.
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Peter#306,
Examining the AEMO(NEMMCO) data of the 13 operating wind farms with a capacity of 1100MW, we find that on most cloudy days significant wind power is being produced. For example you stated July 26( worst cloud cover); on 26thJuly wind farms produced 6am;270MW, 9am;300MW, 1200noon;160MW, 3pm;179MW ( with the most westerly site back up to 40% capacity and most Easterly site zero), 6pm; 372MW, 9pm;372MW. At 35% capacity factor would expect 400MW( maximum was 860MW July to August)
An expanded wind and solar energy may need some short term (6h back-up) and that’s exactly what hydro is very good at providing and the present 2,240MW of pumped hydro could be very easily expanded to 10,000MW to provide 6-60 hours storage without any significant new dam building( at most expansion of lower small pondages similar to Journama Pond), some additional turbines, pipelines and upgraded grid capacity.
Your second statement that we can’t use any fossil fuel back-up is completely ignoring realities at least until 2050. We are going to have significant OCGT for rapid peak demand response, and significant coal fired capacity that could be used on 12-24 hour notice. Neither fuels have to contribute significant CO2 if used only as back-up to renewable and nuclear.
For example OCGT or coal-fired used for 6 hours 3-4 times each month for 50% of peak demand implies a capacity factor of 3% or about 1.5% of present CO2 output. If we can reduce Co2 emissions by 98.5% by 2050 I do not think we will need to be concerned about the remaining 1.5%.
It’s improbable we would overbuild 40% nuclear to avoid using pumped hydro or OCGT back-up, and just as improbable that we would overbuild solar or wind for the same reasons.
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Stephen Gloor,
Wow, Stephen, I was sort of hoping I might get an appology after you’d read the posts I put up last night. I should have known better.
I thought what I posted last night, and what Barry posted this morning would make it absolutely clear for you.
But now I realise you do not have even a basic understanding of the electricity supply and distribution system.
When there is demand (someone turns on a switch) the power must be generated immediately. It cannot be stored (other than by generation or release from energy storage).
Your comparison of electricity networks and computer networks is not valid. You talk about storing data somewhere, and about shifting data around the system. How does this compare with storing energy if you don’t have sufficient energy storage? What are you intending to shift around in the electricity network? Where are you going to store? How much storage do you need? What is the cost?
With renewables you need massive amounts of storage. With nuclear you do not need any (although it would be more economical to have some).
The “Solar Power Realities” paper and my posts on this thread last night explain the amounts of storage needed and the costs.
I suggested some time ago that you do a rough cost estimate of the system you are proposing. The reason I proposed that is because doing the analysis would help you to understand what is involved. I’d still suggest you do that.
By the way, nuclear IS dispatchable, wind power is NOT!. Dispatchable means the generator can provide power when the grid controller calls for it, and can turn down the power on instructions from the operator. The power requirement is ‘dispatched’ from the network operator to the generator who responds and provides the power requested. Wind cannot respond on demand. Nuclear can.
If you think nuclear cannot follow load, look back to a previous post where that is described.
Have you ever thought how embarrassing it might be if you told the captains of a nuclear powered submarine or nuclear powered ice breaker that he could only run at full power whereever he goes. What fun it would be to watch them dock their boats!
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Hi Peter,
1. Why a diverse energy market?
Because we’re in unknown territory, and as a matter of policy governments seem to be backing all these different approaches to try and crack the cheapest combination. An energy market is the best way to go, as the marketplace comes up with some surprising solutions. As various energy niche’s grow we’ll see various problems and solutions, winners and losers, and I’m OK with that.
2. Solar thermal storage unable to cope with 3 days?
Apparently these new graphite blocks are incredibly efficient means of storing thermal energy and hardly lose heat overnight. They mentioned storing heat for a month on the BZE podcast but I can’t seem to access their backup files right now, they’re doing a site redesign. Anyway, these are the graphite modules.
http://www.lloydenergy.com/heatstorage.htm
So again, economics. How expensive would it be to have a few extra of these graphite blocks siphoning off say 5% of each day’s heat for those 3-5 day stretches we’re all worried about? Or would the economics allow biogas as a stand-bye? I’ve emailed them to as for more detail, we’ll see if they have time to engage the thread.
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Neil Howes,
There are many things I disagree with in your post #319. I believe the papers, the covering articles by Barry, the posts by Barry and others, the posts I made on this thread last night, and the “Solar Thermal Questions” article Barry posted this morning explain clearly that intermittent renewables are not viable. The cost of these options is at least an order of magnitude higher than nuclear.
The first paragraph in your post #319 is about combining wind and solar to produce baseload power. It cannot be done economically. Ted explained it very well. You will get the sum of the cost of both systems, but not reliable, dispatchable power. You only need one time when the combined systems are not producing the power to meet demand to demonstrate this. So instead of going through the wind and solar records looking for the maximum output, you should hunt for the times when the power output from the two systems is less than demand.
You say “that’s exactly what hydro is good for”. True. But that is also why stored hydro energy is very valuable and is used for balancing the system and for emergency use. We don’t have the hydro capacity, or topographic and hydrologic conditions suitable to provide it.
You say “the present 2,240MW of pumped hydro could be very easily expanded to 10,000MW to provide 6-60 hours storage without any significant new dam building at most expansion of lower small pondages similar to Journama Pond), some additional turbines, pipelines and upgraded grid capacity.”
This is simply nonsense. There is no point in debating this in sentences. The only way you will get an understanding of this is if you go through the exercise of working out what is involved and calculating the cost.
You make all these statements, with absolutely no thought about the cost. That is just arm waving. The proposals are irrational if not costed.
You say “Your second statement that we can’t use any fossil fuel back-up is completely ignoring realities at least until 2050.” This totally misses the point of the paper. The paper is an exercise to compare the cost of nuclear and solar to provide our baseload power needs without producing GHG emissions. It is a way to determine which technologies are the most cost effective and, therefore, the ones we should focus on. Of course I realise there will be a transition period.
It is frustrating that you say your proposals are easy, but you do not attempt to understand the costs of the various options.
It seems to me that you and some other people posting here have very strongly held beliefs and do not want reality to spoil them.
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Eclipsenow,
It is pointless suggesting more and more expensive alternatives. You seem to have no appreciation of the cost comparisons. Your latest proposals are all more expensive than the options considered in the cost comparisons.
Can you grasp the concept that if something is 20 times more expensive than an alternative that does the same job, there is no point spending most of your effort researching the expensive option?
There is a factor of 20 difference in the costs of solar and nuclear to do the same job.
Start learning about nuclear, instead of spending all your time flogging a dead horse.
Flogging the renewables horse is delaying Australia progressing. As long as Australia remains anti-nuclear it is politically impossible to progress. The public needs to learn. There is some excellent material on this web site. But you need to be open enough to begin to digest it.
The message is clear, but can the die-hard renewable fanatics understand it?
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Again you *assert* that it is 20 times more expensive, but without actually addressing the issues.
We live in a world with coal fired stations, gas fired stations, gasoline, LPG, diesel, trains, trams, trucks, cars, semi-trailers etc. Different energy streams doing different jobs in different sectors of the economy.
You want it too simple. You want to close your ears and say “La la la” to all that and just plain ignore reality. EG: Assuming there is enough power for business and home use, what is wrong with wind “topping up” the extra demand of EV’s? No no no! chants Peter, “IT HAS TO BE ABLE TO SUPPLY THE WHOLE GRID ALL THE TIME OR IT IS NOT WORTH IT” you insist. What rubbish!
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Peter
While I applaud your sentiment in favour of low cost removal of CO2 the hard reality of Australia’s political arrangents is that nuclear is out as a short oer even medioum term (up to 15 years away) proposition. I wish this were not so but in practice it is.
Neither major political party will advocate wholesale replacement of coal fired or gas fired power with nukes because that would be a death wish and expending your energy showing that the altertnatives won’t work really amounts to doing the work of dirty power advocacy even though I accept that you are sincere in your desire for getting rid of dirty power. Look at Victoria where one of the dirtiest power stations in the world — Hazlewood — has been extended to 2031 which will make it 62 years old at retirement. Bucketloads of cash are being wasted looking at CC&S.
Pumped storage is a viable technology and it need not cost much if it is built coextensively with buttressing local grey, sewage and stormwater capture and processing as the costs could be spread across multiple necessary usages. We save energy pumping water, we foreclose the need for new dams and desal and we have large amounts of localised energy storage capacity with round trip efficiencies of about 80% — and maybe more if we get good rain over the upper reservoirs. These resources could immediately lower the CO2 intensity of even coal fired generation and of course provide a ready store for all intermittent output, including V2G, PV, etc. If we ever get nukes, even better.
The fact of the matter is that if most people don’t like nukes, even if their animus is unsound, they are entitled to agree to pay more to have something else. IMO we should not put the case as if it is ‘take it or leave it’, because right now, most people, for a variety of reasons, will leave it, and where does that get us?
In this country we have pretty much unlimted wind, solar, wave/ tidal, waste biomass, geothermal etc. If we can store that energy we can get by without nuclear or coal and on very little gas.
We ought to do it
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Hybrid solar thermal. Rig it up to a biochar plant and turn any biomass into natural gas and biochar, then use the natural gas to supplement the solar.
http://www.solarthermalmagazine.com/solarized-gas-turbine-system-hybrid-power-for-distributed-generation/
http://podcast.beyondzeroemissions.org/index.php?tag=Pinhas-Doran
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Stephen, on networks, and an information-inspired approach – you’ve mentioned this before, and then as now it reminds me of situations I frequently encounter at work.
I work in a company comprising both computer scientists, and physicists and engineers, working on a particularly challenging problem. There are cultural differences between these different backgrounds that can create cognitive dissonances or communication difficulties, which are often just as you described above. I’ve thought about why this is so. It seems to me the domain of the information sciences is that of rich and complex logical structuring of information and operations, but which are nevertheless abstractions. Intuition is something that is developed through years of working in a domain, but can mislead if applied to a different domain – intuition developed in classical mechanics will lead you astray if applied to relativistic mechanics.
In this case I think an intuition forged by working with information flows in networks may not map well to power generation and transmission through networks. Information networks are extremely ‘light’ – almost non-spatial, non-temporal, zero cost function data structures. To apply network ideas to a power grid, the network model needs to be spatial, temporal and suitably weighted. The links have multiple cost functions (establishment, dynamic losses), the nodes have costs (establishment, running, fuel), their latency is good to dreadful to infinite, and it all has a side effect of co2 emission. Imagine running a network where the servers had random, long, latencies, random failures, information can’t be left on a server but is deleted when read, there’s no hard drive or tape storage on these servers, the server bandwidth is a strong function of geographical proximity, etc. etc. This is a network with very different properties to the internet. The connectivity that gives networks their value is much reduced when they are aggressively pruned and weighted.
I’m not saying you’re unaware of this, I’m really just musing on some cultural differences.
I for one hope you’ll continue to post here, as I’ve said before. Even if the exchange is exasperating there’s usually something worthwhile in the discussion.
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Fran Barlow, you say (#325)
“Pumped storage is a viable technology and it need not cost much if it is built coextensively with buttressing local grey, sewage and stormwater capture and processing as the costs could be spread across multiple necessary usages.”
This is an assertion. Without costs it is not helpful. You say it need not cost much. How do you know.
I can tell you it is totally uneconomic, ny orders of magnitude. The solar power realities paper explains what is required for hydro generation and pump storage. If you want to work with less than Australia’s 1 day energy demand, scale the figures down.
You sau: “In this country we have pretty much unlimted wind, solar, wave/ tidal, waste biomass, geothermal etc. If we can store that energy we can get by without nuclear or coal and on very little gas.”
It is an enormous IF. It is not feasible. Simply do simple costs for your self if you do not believe the costs in the papers provided.
You say “We ought to do it” meaning build renewables. I say we definitely should not do it. It will make next to no difference to Austrralia’s GHG emissions, will damage the economy, and will make us less able to take the correct actions.
All is explained in the papers. The posts 304 to 308 address the main points that have been raised on this thread. Barry’s new post this morning supports the conclusions presented in the papers.
I’d just like to say, one more time, without costs, asll these suggestions are simply arm waving.
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Peter #322,
It’s relatively easy to check some of the hydro dams that exist in Australia, and their capacity to expand the present 2,240MW pumped storage(4-10hours duration) to >10,000MW power and >100GWh storage.
It is true that we have very limited water resources but we do have a number of very large reservoirs. You may be confusing the costs of purpose built pumped hydro with modifications of present dams to enhance existing infrastructure. The Tumut3 power station is a good example of what has been done, with the construction of a very small(170Ha, 23,000ML) short term storage and the modification of 3 turbines with additional pumps.
What would be possible with the addition of booster pumps at Blowing Res(1,600,000ML capacity) the present 23,000ML storage could increase pumped volume to 230,000ML, allowing Tumut3 to be expanded(with 12 additional turbines from 1,500MW to 4,5000MW peak with 18hours duration. The present Snowy Scheme has >40 turbines, >10 major dams and a total capacity of 3,800MW(9GWh storage), while the addition of 12 additional turbines and 3 booster pumps to increase the capacity to 6,800MW( with a x10 increase(90GWh) storage) is “relatively” minor.
Two major storage dams in VIC should be suitable for pumped storage upgrades. Dartmouth Dam 180m height storage(3,906,000ML) has a small(10,000ML) Lake Banimbola Pondage that would be suitable for increasing present 180MW to 2180MW or 3,000MW(with minor modifications to the pondage. The second potential pumped storage is Eildon Lake(3,330,000ML)which with the construction of a lower(or upper) pond could expand the present 150MW turbines to 2-3,000MW capacity.
Tasmania has a number of suitable dams that could allow most of the present 2,200MW to be converted to pumped capacity but would require an upgrade of the Bass-Link to contribute to mainland Australia.
If Australia has 40GW average demand by 2030, whether supplied by, wind, solar or nuclear there will be a need for >20GW peak power. For the cost of one 1,000MW nuclear reactor >10,000MW pumped hydro capacity and >100GWh of storage could be added to the present hydro storage.
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Fran,
Have you seen any capacity or cost estimations for storing and leveling power generation/consumption using pumped storage via water and and sewerage infrastruture?
This is an interesting idea. It becomes more interesting if it can cuts costs by employing existing sewerage and water infrastructure. Even if new infrastructure can be desinged for duel use.
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If you’re right Peter, then we are at the end of the section. Lower the curtain and kiss everyone good night.
I don’t accept that is so. We are committing to $25-40 billion on submarines by 2025, and desal in every city at 2 billion a throw, so don’t tell me we can’t build basic water infrastructure in cities.
Please understand: no amount of persuasion is going to get enough people in this country to accept nuclear power within the time window we need. Even if it were free, proposals for nuclear are nearly as appealing as a half-way house for pedophiles near the local kindy. We need to start now — well ten years ago really but we won’t start for at least another 15 years, if ever if it all depends on nukes.
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Peter,
The 3 Gorges Dam has a total construction cost of $US 51Billion for 22,000MW. The dam has a lower head than the Australian dams and the turbines were supplied by international companies, so guessing that the turbine cost was 15% of the total cost that would be $340million/1,000MW of turbines($340/kW),so the major costs in expanding Australia’s pumped hydro by 10,000MW would be a total of $US 3.4Billion. Expanding the Tumit3 storage from 9GWh to 90GWh would cost <$700Million or <$10/kWh, probably a lot less than this.
If anyone has a better cost estimate for 1,000MW of hydro turbines I would appreciate the information.
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Mark
I’d love to see them. I’ve tried looking up the costs of water treatment plants but I suppose the site costs would be pretty specific.
The way I see it, we currently use a bundle of energy essentially pumping water to treatment plants that then get pumped out of ocean outfalls. We don’t use stormwater at all, but leave it to flood local roads during storms and wash crap into creeks. We also use a bundle of energy pumping water from dams to local reservoirs. Apparently about 3-6% of the potable water escapes from the ageing pipe infrastructure.
If we could reconfigure the system to pump water from local residential, industrial and commercial sources to local treatment then the total distance each gallon of water would be pumped would decline quite sharply. We could foreclose building new dams AND use these local reservoirs to do pumped storage. The only extra cost would be the extra volume of the reservoirs and of course the energy capture infrastructure. Given the elevations, you could put VAWTs on the top and in most places get some reasonable energy output.
I’m not against nuclear energy — indeed, I rarely miss an opportunity to mention its potential efficacy, but most people who are interested in the idea of reducing CO2 favour “clean energy” aka renewables and for them, nuclear doesn’t count.
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Mark Bryen (#330), Fran Barlow (#331, #333),
Mark, you asked for costs for micro hydro. Before you do the costs, you need to work out how much energy you can get, how much storage you will need so you can have dispatchable power for peak load only, and how you are going to build the system. To assist you with the first part of this, can I suggest you read the section in David Mackay’s book about how to calculate hydro. You could take a simpler approach. You could say “if this is not being applied anywhere else in the world, even in places with high rainfall, falling regularly and frequently throughout the year, why would it wortk in Australia where we have low rainfall and long periods between showers. That would be a sanity check before you start.
For pumped hydro storage costs, and to get an idea of the dimension of the larger facilities, look at: http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/ and http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/pumped_hydro/
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Mark Bryen (#330), Fran Barlow (#331, #333),
Mark, you asked for costs for micro hydro. Before you do the costs, you need to work out how much energy you can get, how much storage you will need so you can have dispatchable power for peak load only, and how you are going to build the system. To assist you with the first part of this, can I suggest you read the section in David Mackay’s book about how to calculate hydro. You could take a simpler approach. You could say “if this is not being applied anywhere else in the world, even in places with high rainfall, falling regularly and frequently throughout the year, why would it wortk in Australia where we have low rainfall and long periods between showers. That would be a sanity check before you start.
For pumped hydro storage costs, and to get an idea of the dimension of the larger facilities, look at: http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/ and http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/pumped_hydro/
Fran Barlow (#331),
You say: “If you’re right Peter, then we are at the end of the section. Lower the curtain and kiss everyone good night. “
False. We have the option of nuclear power to provide least-cost, low-emissions electricity generation.
You say: “I don’t accept that is so. We are committing to $25-40 billion on submarines by 2025, and desal in every city at 2 billion a throw, so don’t tell me we can’t build basic water infrastructure in cities.”
False premise. Adding mini- and micro-hydro is not “basic water infrastructure in cities”. When someone needs water do we say “no, we’ll let you have some water when we are generating peak power; you’ll have to wait until then.”? There are many other issues such as where will we creat the storage, irregular flow, insufficient hydraulic head, etc. Refer to my post to Mark Bryen. And please read David Mackay’s section on hydro.
You say: “Please understand: no amount of persuasion is going to get enough people in this country to accept nuclear power within the time window we need. Even if it were free, proposals for nuclear are nearly as appealing as a half-way house for pedophiles near the local kindy.”
I agree that that is the position now. But perceptions can change quickly. I was in Sweden in the mid to late 1980’s watching and listening to the nuclear debate. I could go into a restaurant and ask a person sitting next to me “what do you think about nuclear energy”. People would willing, openly, intelligently discuss it. They were informed and knowledgeable. That situation hasn’t arrived in Australia yet.
It will, and probably much sooner than we expect. Once people are persuaded that we really do have to cut emissions from electricity generation, it needs to be done quickly, and it is going to cost a lot, people will take an interest in the options.. There is no question, by far the least cost way will be with nuclear. Renewables are a total waste of our money. And they save very little greenhouse gas emissions. Once people realise this, it wont take long for the perceptions to change.
If you doubt these statements, re-read the wind and solar papers. The questions have been asked and ansewwered in the follow up articles and the comments. There should be no lingering doubts at this stage. The least cost option is nuclear by a country mile.
BNC is doing an excellent job in explaing the options. This is the start of the debate Sweden and Canada had in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
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I’ve done some simple, rough calculations on the cost of solar thermal based on their figures for their reference technology (solar thermal trough). http://www.needs-project.org/docs/results/RS1a/RS1a%20D12.2%20Final%20report%20concentrating%20solar%20thermal%20power%20plants.pdf
It seems to me, it is impracticable to produce baseload power from solar thermal. The size of the collector field has to be too great to provide sufficient energy on overcast winter days.
The NEEDS report projects we will have trough technology (the least cost option) able to store 16 hours of energy by 2020. But that is based on average annual hours of daylight. In winter we need 18 hours of storage and charge it in 6 hours. And that is on a sunny day. So when might we reach this capability? Perhaps 2030? But, how can we provide sufficient storage and generating capacity for when it is cloudy?
Solar thermal seems to me to be impractical at any cost (as a solution to replace coal for baseload generation).
A rough calculation of the cost for a Solar Thermal trough system, with 18 hours storage, to meet Australia’s NEM demand, is $8.5 trillion. This is for a system which can provide the power requirements on the most overcast day.
To keep this in perspective, recall the cost to do the same job with nuclear was ($120 billion); i.e 1/70th of the cost!
This is optimistic because I used the storage cost rate for 7.5 hours, and applied it for 18 hours without any increase in the rate, and I used the cost rate for the collector field, thus not making any allowance for the technological improvement that would be needed in the 100 times greater length of tubing to maintain themperature in the fluid over the greater length.
I’ve done the calculations with 3 days of storage using the same unit rates, ($4.3 trillion) but the technology seems even further in the future.
I haven’t included transmission in any of these estimates.
My conclusion: forget solar thermal, forget solar PV, forget wind. Furthermore, since these are considered to be the most likely technologies to be viable, it is unlikely that any of the other non-hydro renewable technologies will be more viable. (Hot fractured rock geothermal may make a small contribution, we’ll have to see).
Before suggesting other possibliities, can I urge you to do some calculations on what you are proposing. David Mackay’s book, referenced on this web site, and accessible on line, explains how to do the calculations. David Mackay summarises the purpose of his book, in the first sentence of the Preface, as “To reduce the emissions of twaddle”
“TO REDUCE THE EMISSIONS OF TWADDLE”.
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