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”
(sighs)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloncurry_solar_power_station
“A solar thermal power station is to be built in Cloncurry, in north-west Queensland. Thhttps://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/16/solar-power-realities-supply-demand-storage-and-costs/e solar thermal power station will have a capacity of 10-megawatt and will deliver about 30 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to power the whole town.[1]”
“The total cost of the project is A$31 million including a A$7 million gift from the government.[2] The plant should be running by early 2010.[3]”
So what’s that… $3100/kw nameplate at the small scale of production, not enjoying economies of scale? Yep, 70 times more expensive indeed!
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Neil Howes, #329
Neil,
Thank you for your two posts (#329 and #332). There is lots to answer, and it will take me a little time. I am not sure I’ll be able to answer in detail today. But here are a few quick randonm points.
You have some excellent points, and I will consider them in more detail, but later.
The ESA site at http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/ provides some costs for pumped hydro. I find these useful for initial scoping studies. I recently provided ESA with the missing information for Tumut 3 and they are about to update the pumped-hydro table with the Tumut 3 information. This is the information I sent:
Tumut 3
On-line date 1973
Hydraulic Head (m) 151
Maximum Total Rating (MW) 1500
Hours of discharge at maximum generation rate 44
Plant cost (in 1967 A$) A$64.3 M
Maximum pump storage rate (assume 80% efficiency) (MWh/h) 440
Hours of storage in lower (smaller) reservoir at maximum pumping rate (h) 21
Note: The hours of discharge that can be stored in the lower reservoir at full generation discharge rates is just 6
The costs for the Three Gorges hydro scheme cannot be applied to the Australian situation. The river flow is enormous. There is nothing like it in Australia. Regarding the turbine costs, you can’t pull just that component out and say that is the major cost and then use that as the basis of estimate. Costs for hydro, of all sizes, are readily available. But actual costs for a specific site are highly site dependent. Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) and Pacific Hydro have conducted feasibility studies for many sites.
Recall that the technically and economically excellent Tulley-Millstream hydro plant in Queensland was cancelled in about 1990 because of opposition from environment groups. There is no chance of building hydro in Australia at the moment. It is about as popular as nuclear.
Most Australian dams are for water supply not for hydro. If we want to use the dams for pumped-hydro storage, they cannot be used for water storage. The reason is because when used for water storage the water level is drawn down to a low level (even emptied, as at Goulburn a year or so ago). For pumped storage hydro, the water levels in the dams must change by a small height. The active zone for Tumut 3 is about 10 m in both the top and bottom reservoirs.
You say: “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.”
The pumps at Tumut 3 were not added after the power station was built. They were part of the original power station. The pumps are below three of the six turbines. Adding three more pumps would not increase the peak power output. It would only increase the amount of energy stored – so that we can produce 1500 MW for longer. That also requires that the lower dam’s activity capacity be doubled. Not an easy thing to do. It probably would require building a new dam downstream. I suspect a suitable site does not exist, because if it does that’s where the downstream dam would have been built originally. You may have more details on this.
The lower dam and reservoir, Jounama Pond, was not added afterwards. It was constructed as part of the original scheme; the dam was completed in 1968. Just for details, the dimensions I have for it are: active capacity = 27.8 ML and area at full supply level = 380 ha.
If we want to use Blowering for the lower storage reservoir, I suspect we’d have to stop using it as water storage for irrigation, or at least curtail it. I have no idea what the cost would be of a ‘virtual dam’ (ie pipes and pumps) that you suggested here. You seem to have done quite a bit of work on this. It is interesting. It will get me thinking some more on some of what you suggest. Good stuff!
You do have some good points about what could be done theoretically. However, I suspect nowhere near the power, and duration at full power, figures you are suggesting. I also expect most of it would not be economic – except perhaps together with nuclear. Then it would make sense. The least cost nuclear option would be with about 8 GW of pumped hydro storage, and more to reduce the amount of redundancy required in nuclear power stations.
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EclipseNow,
Haven’t you understood yet.
Intermittent renewables cannot supply ANY houses without sufficient storage to get through the night and cloudy days.
You quote the site as saying ” enough to power the whole town.[1]”
People keep falling for this spin. It is total rubbish. Just think of what you are falling for. Haven’t you understood anything that has been explained to you on this web site?
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I think you’ve missed a vital element of this Cloncurry power station. It’s a graphite heat storage. It’s the “missing battery” technology that you’ve been worried about. The mirrors point the sun’s heat directly onto a block of high purity graphite that can store the suns heat for weeks depending on the rate of energy in V energy out. Now it all depends on the cost as these graphite units are scaled up, but there is no TECHNICAL reason they cannot store enough solar heat to last the 3 or 4 days of overcast weather you are worried about. That’s “as advertised” anyway. It’s just how much money do we want to pour into the graphite blocks to store for what period of time.
You also haven’t responded to many of the hybrid solar thermal options that are arriving, which can have biogas storage tanks that are CO2 neutral (or negative if coming from biochar) and cover those 3 or 4 day scenarios.
Anyway, back to the graphite.
“The Lloyd Energy Storage System, (pic here) is, in own words,”a breakthrough technology in that it provides energy storage from tens of kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts with applications varying from short duration standby generations to mainstream continuous power plants and almost all combinations in between.” The Lloyd system, developed in Australia, is a block of high purity graphite, which is said to accept heat in any form and can then store it for many days or even weeks, “depending on the rate of energy extraction to the rate of energy replacement.” The trick that Lloyd have on their side is apparently they’ve managed to figure out how to refine low grade graphite into high quality crystalline graphite. The storage capacity of which we’re told “ranges from around 300kWh (thermal) per tonne at a storage temperature of 750°C to around 1000kWh (thermal) per tonne at 1800°C.” Now, if this all sounds like it should be in the ‘too good to be true’ basket, well the Australian government announced (PDF) a couple of months ago that Lloyd Energy Systems were beneficaries of $5 million AUD in research funding, with plans to support a 16-tower solar array for a regional NSW centre. The proof of the pudding, as the proverb goes, will be in the tasting.”
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/lloyd_energy_th.php
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” enough to power the whole town.[1]”
Says who? On what basis?
If you look at Lloyd’s promotional material, you see the project aims are to:
1. Demonstrate solar energy “on-demand” through Lloyd’s solar storage system
2. Provide peak and backup supply for Cloncurry
3. Ensure power quality in the area
This is not “powering the whole town”. Instead, this is apparently a technology demonstration with limited aims, namely to demonstrate the graphite block thermal storage.
It should be obvious that the aims of providing peak and backup supply, and ensuring power quality, are limited aims, and are simply not attempting to power the whole town.
Now, if they were to attempt to power the whole town, then they would start to hit the intermittency and storage constraints we’ve discussed at length here. To overcome those constraints requires the kind of overbuild Peter has analyzed, and the cost turns into a very different number than the $31m/10MW value you cite, which is not the cost for powering the town, but the cost for “ensuring power quality”.
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I just received this email from a colleague I asked to check my rough cost calculations for solar thermal.
“Certainly based on NEEDS costings a solar multiple of 4 will cost over $15,000/kW. For this reason I don’t think we will see 18 hour storage systems unless the cost of the solar field reduces significantly. Remember the NEEDS costs are for parabolic mirrors. Fresnel fan David Mills from Ausra would argue that his collectors are cheaper.
I suspect that the market for solar thermal over the next couple of decades will be daytime peaking power only so storage will be limited to a couple of hours max to cover for short term cloud periods.
It’s worth looking at what the real field engineers (not academics like ….) are actually doing. Worley Parsons the engineering company with a consortium including BHP and Rio plus others is planning a 250 MW solar thermal plant with a solar multiple of 1.35 using 1000 MWh (thermal) molten salt storage with no co-firing which will cost $1 billion ($4000/kW). The solar field will be 6 sq kms. This is a peaking plant only and is only justified on peak wholesale rates. The cost seems less than your numbers would suggest even for a 1.35 solar multiple (my estimate based on your numbers would be about $1.5 billion – the $1 billion quoted could just be an “order-of-magnitude” number).
I think we can forget solar thermal baseload for quite some time to come.
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EclipseNow.
No. I haven’t missed anyting. It does not have sufficient storage (or anywhere near it) to allow it to generate through the night or cloudy days.
Got it yet?
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Neil Howes, and others interested in hydro,
I have an excellent power point presentation of the Russion hydro plant failure. It was produced 1 week after the failure, has excellent photographs and annotation on the photos. It is 57 slides. If you want it post your email address and I’ll send it to you (or to Barry, if he wants me to).
Here is web site with some slides from the accident: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1207093/Accident-Russias-biggest-hydroelectric-plant-leaves-seven-workers-dead.html
This accident puts some perspective on the scale of what is involved in electricity generation. If Stephen Gloor is still reading these comments, this might reinforce what John D Morgan said in his excellent post #327. (I would commend this post to other readers to read again).
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John and Peter, what do you make of the following claims?
“Renewable Energy cannot become mainstream without Energy Storage. Put simply the wind may blow or the sun may shine when you don’t need it or it is not cost effective to sell. The reverse is also true. The times when the need for energy is high may correspond to times when the availability of the wind or sun may be low or nonexistent. Energy Storage allows owners and operators of power systems based on wind wave or solar, to forward sell power to maximise returns as there can now be certainty that power will be there to dispatch at the time designated. Energy Storage enables owners of renewable assets to better maximise the use of their assets. In wind systems this means being able to capture more of the available wind.”
http://www.lloydenergy.com/despatchable.htm
Also, “The storage capacity of high purity graphite ranges from around 300kWh (thermal) per tonne at a storage temperature of 750°C to around 1000kWh (thermal) per tonne at 1800°C.”
http://www.lloydenergy.com/heatstorage.htm
They also talk about being able to store heat for weeks… and I WISH I could get the BZE interview because they mentioned how much loss there was after a MONTH!
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Neil Howes,
You’ve caught my attention. Got me interested..
I’ve just looked up the details for the Tumut 3 and Blowering schemes. Here are the relevant stats:
Surface areas at full supply level:
Talbingo reservoir (Tumut 3’s top reservoir) (ha) = 1943
Jounama Pond (Tumut 3’s lower reservoir) (ha) = 381
Blowering Reservoir (ha) = 4303.
Water levels:
Tumut 3 Pumps (existing) maximum operating level in lower dam = RL 392.6 m
Tumut 3 Pumps (existing) minimum operating level in lower dam = RL 381.0 m
Blowering Full supply level = RL 380.4
Blowering (proposed minimum operating level) = RL 376.4
Blowering Reservoir has over twice the surface area of Talbingo Reservoir at their respective full supply levels. If we could use Blowering as the lower reservoir for Tumut 3, we could increase Tumut 3’s energy storage capacity for pumped-hydro from 9 GWh to 66 GWh.
How could we achieve this?
1. Keep Blowering reservoir near full supply level. It could not be used for irrigation water storage anymore. It would have an active zone of 4 m (full supply level minus minimum operating level).
2. Lower the elevation of the Tumut 3 pumps by about 5 m (from RL 381m to RL 376). Deepen the tail water channel by 5 m and extend it down stream as far as necessary. Lowering the pumps could be costly and adds no generation capacity.
3. Perhaps it might be practicable to leave the old power station as is for generation only and add a second pump and generation station.
Very interesting, Neil. Thanks for prompting me on this. Are you the author of letters suggesting the Snowy Mountains Scheme could be converted into a “battery” for SE Australia, or something to that effect?
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EclipseNow,
You asked what do I think? I’ll take the question to refer to all the stuff you keep posing.
The answer that comes to mind is “obstinately inumerate”.
Suggest you read David Mackay’s book so you can get a handle on how to do some calculations for yourself.
The stated purpose of the book is to “Reduce the emissions of twaddle”.
Of course, it can only succed in that aim if people are prepared to do some simple calculations for themsleves.
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Don’t forget 50 thousand V2G cars = 1 gig storage. Australia has 15 million vehicles. Say half convert to EV that’s 150gigs. Allow for Moore’s law in battery storage over the next decade or so (being deliberately vague just to make a point) as the fleet changes to 50% electric, and maybe we’ve got 300 gigs storage? Eventually replace the WHOLE fleet to EV down the track, allow a little bit more of Moore’s law, and that’s 600gigs storage?
If we’ve learnt anything about batteries after the laptop market wars it is that we’re incrementally improving them to a very rough Moore’s law. Just wait till the EV market wars start.
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Neil, and others, I’d like to put some perspective on this statement I made in post #346,
“If we could use Blowering as the lower reservoir for Tumut 3, we could increase Tumut 3’s energy storage capacity for pumped-hydro from 9 GWh to 66 GWh.”
Making Blowering the lower reservoir for Tumut 3, and adding a new pumped hydro station would give us 66 GWh of energy storage.
We need 450 GWh to power us through the night from 3 pm to 9 am. So, about seven of these (Talbingo, Blowering and new power station) could allow solar PV to power Australia’s NEM at a cost of about $2.8 trilion, versus about $120 billion for nuclear to do the same job.
I just thought I’d mention that in case anyone missed it :)
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EN, I think the first statement in quotes is quite correct. But what is at issue is how much energy storage is available, and the argument here is that the storage, plus additional generation capacity, sufficient to cover day or multiday gaps in generation is ruinously expensive.
“The storage capacity of high purity graphite ranges from around 300kWh (thermal) per tonne at a storage temperature of 750°C to around 1000kWh (thermal) per tonne at 1800°C.”
I’ve no reason to doubt these numbers, or that Lloyds have developed low loss storage. Again, its not the issue. The issues are that (i) you need sufficient storage to cover energy requirements through the intermittent outages, (ii) you need sufficient storage to cover the power requirements during those outages (this is different to (i)), (iii) you need sufficient extra generation capacity above usage requirements to be filling that storage up, (iv) that the cost of the storage and additional capacity is very large, and (vi) you’d want to have a long hard look at other options before you spend that sort of money.
For example, the hot block project will cost about A$31m, and will not provide Cloncurry’s power requirements. Truly providing the power to take Cloncurry off grid would cost much, much more if done with solar. But for about the same money as the demo, US$25m, they could buy a Hyperion power module with 25 MWe, stick a fork in it, its done. Why would they not do that? With a 10 year life thats about $1000 per person per year of reliable zero emission power. Why why why would you futz around with solar thermal plus graphite blocks that will be vastly more expensive and won’t do the job? If this power was being bought with ratepayers money the Cloncurry councillors would be lynched in the main street if they bought the solar solution instead of Hyperion’s solution.
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Oh, and I’ve got that Hollis/BZE podcast kicking around on my ipod somewhere, but haven’t listened to it. I’ll listen to it, just for you, :)
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John, very well explained in you post #350.
I don’t understand why the renewable energy advocates blogging here cannot understand it.
The reason for my interuption here is that I made a mistake in my comment #349.
Wait. Much excitment. hoping. hoping.
“I said “We need 450 GWh to power us through the night from 3 pm to 9 am. So, about seven of these (Talbingo, Blowering and new power station) could allow solar PV to power Australia’s NEM at a cost of about $2.8 trilion, versus about $120 billion for nuclear to do the same job.”
But, that’s enough energy for 1 night. So we need sufficient solar paneles to generate that power even on the foggiest days. If you refer to the Solar Power Realities paper, Figure 9, you will see that the cost of the system with 1 day of energy storage is $20 trillion, not 2.8 trillion. My appologies. But it all helps to get an understanding.
Of course the solar alternative is about $120 billion, or about 0.6%
That is, with SEVEN of the enhanced and integrated Tumut 3 plus Blowering systems, solar PV (the least cost solar option) would be 166 times more expensive than nuclear.
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Peter Lang@335
You quote some pumped storage costs in a tadbel at the ESA
Thanks for this link (though I note it leaves out Ben Cruachan in Scotland). The table leaves unclear the time each unit can deliver at peak.
Fairly obviously, the cheaper it is to get head pressure, the better the numbers look, so I’m not sure what to mkake of these numbers. Helms Ca with 520 meters of head pressure and a rating of 1.22GW for 153 hours @ only $416million (1984 dollars?) looks pretty damned cheap though. Racoon Mt Tn with 310m of head pressure at $288m with 21 hours of 1.9GW doesn’t look bad either.
Fairly obviously, we could cut the cost in much of Australia by using the sea as the lower reservoir and some elevated land near it as the upper. Most of us live near the ocean and we are going in the direction of desal. We could use hydraulic wave machines to pump water directly — cutting out some of the electricity and have the pumped storage dual personality supplying either desal or power or some combination of the two. That wouldn’t prevent us from using pumps powered from the grid to do some of this work.
You say:
In practice we don’t. That’s not an option as I said, because no party will dare propose it. The friends of nuclear for the most part are also friends of coal, and since coal is cheaper and part of Australia’s competitive advantage they see no reason why we should switch. When these people mention nuclear, they do it simply to wedge the people like us who want to lower CO2 emissions. Barnaby Joyce would never really advocate nuclear, and he doesn’t have to because the ‘friends of the earth’ will keep it off the agenda for him.
Nuclear is pretty much friendless in this country and that won’t be changing any time in the foreseeable future. I genuinely wish that were not the case. I’d love to switch the coal fired capacity of this country and the world to nuclear starting tomorrow, but it isn’t going to happen. If the choice is between “cheap” coal and renewables with expensive storage, I choose the latter, and I suspect most people will too. If as you say, people eventually decide that nuclear is acceptable, then having pumped storage won’t be a waste — indeed, it will reduce the amount of nuclear we need which may make it more saleable politically.
It could be.
Of course not, but what we do is build the facilities big enough so that both needs can be supplied. It would only be on those occasions when large amounts of power and water were needed within the same time window that there would be a conflict, but even in this case we still have access to the dams and the regional potable water supply. We should also meter water so that it reflects the actual cost of delivery and collection. As we have seen, demand for water is even more elastic than power. Some people would choose to water their gardens, run their washing machines and wash their cars when the cost was high and others wouldn’t. In Sydney, the recent trend involved people largely not washing their cars and watering their gardens until after dusk.
We can create as much hydraulic head as we need by choosing high ground and boring down as far as the budget will permit. Ideally, we can substantially improve urban densities, creating spaces on the best ground for these facilities. This would facilitate rooftop capture, local use of subsurface grey water (foreclosing wasteful open watering)
That’s as maybe. Firstly the Swedes have had nuclear power since 1965. Secondly they are phasing it out. The Forsmark matters have damaged nuclear’s credibility. Some polls suggest that about half the populace favour new reactors. This is all quite unlike Australia, but even in this more fafvourable setting, on your timeline you are hoping to be able to do that here in about 2029 … so the first nuclear plants get here when — 2037? Too late. We need solutions much earlier than that.
It seems to me that the most likely route to getting nuclear accepted here is to advocate it everywhere else as the single most obvious way to cut CO2 emissions at acceptable cost, while setting ourselves up here to make good use of renewables with good storage technologies. With pumped storage we could make coal usage a lot less dirty and make much better use of wind, wave, tidal and solar and we could sell this as dealing with our water problems too. Once we have the storage capacity to make very good use of nuclear’s low marginal cost, then coal can be phased out more aggressively.
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Fran Barlow,
Why don’t you propose a solution that can meet Australia’s power demand and cost it. Just simple calculations will show you that none of what you are proposing works.
Your argument about nuclear is not accdeptable is silly. If it is not acceptable we can’t make any significant cut to emissions. It’s that simple. Gas will cut emissions from electricity generation, but not much when you consider that demand is projected to double by 2030. It will double that again if land transport moves to electricity or to fuels mande by electrricity.
So, in reality, we have two options. Nuclear or keep emitting GHG’s.
It’s that simple.
There is not point continually repeating the same mantra you’ve said over and aover again.
Why don’t you do some calculations. Are you scared of what they might show you?
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Peter,
My information was that Jounama was 23,000ML. The idea would be to install a separate pump turbine in Blowering to transfer water up to Jounama and use existing return pumps. This would not be done daily but only to recover water after a large “low wind” or low solar event. I don’t see any comprimise with Blowering as a water storage, as Eucumbene is at the top with 4.8Million ML storage.
Will follow up tomorrow( my home hard drived crashed)
Neil
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Show me, Peter, where I can get good costings on pumped storage (or a model I can map across) here in Australia.
Really though, whether going the renewable route costs more is irrelevant if people won’t accept nuclear. I suspect it will cost a fair bit more, at least initially, but not the orders of magnitude you are invoking. The logic of your argument in Australia is that the discussion over reducing emissions here is over, but I can’t accept that. I’m for the least costly emissions reductions available at any cost. If nuclear is out, then I’m for the next least expensive, and so forth. Why aren’t you?
We have in Australia a major crisis over water supply and we can use that to bed down the foundation for intermittents. I can’t see why that shouldn’t be done at whatever the cost is, because as I said, right now the major cities are doing dirty desal and stupidly paying people to get water tanks. That’s mad.
And no, I’m not scared of what the cost-benefit calculations might show. You seem to be implying I have some axe to grind against nuclear power. The only ‘axe’ I’m grinding is in favour of lower emissions and reductions in energy-related pollution. Unlike you it seems, I’m in a hurry to get the wheels in motion rather than chasing some fantasy about nuclear power replacing coal in the next decade — which is really what we need — or waiting another 30 years to get started.
If large numbers of people do change their minds on nuclear tomorrow (and believe me, I make the case at least twice each week to someone new, who is suitably horrified that I can be suggesting such a thing: “aren’t you an environmentalist?”), then count me in, but in the meantime I’d sooner get agreement on something that gets us moving in the right direction.
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Fran, this is something I’d like to explore further. The time progression to a zero carbon economy that goes efficiency -> renewables -> nuclear seems to have had the middle stump knocked out. I had hoped for an assist from renewables, but Peter’s analysis points to the very limited co2 impact of even partial integration of renewables into the grid, at high cost. Nevertheless, there is a lot of power out there. What applications of renewables make sense, in terms of net co2 reductions?
Creating stable high embodied energy materials, like desalinated water, aluminium, cement or hydrogen might make sense since there’s no requirement for energy storage, the scale is large enough for an impact to be felt, and the aim would only be to augment existing material supply capacity, not to repower the grid. If v2g plays nice with renewables that might offer some co2 savings as well.
If our only option for co2 reductions over the next 20 years is efficiency then things are pretty grim.
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Fran,
I find this discussion with you pointless. You havent read or understrood the material. The aregument is going around and around because you are tied to a deeply held, but irrational belief. You are ignoring the logic and facts. You say:
I’m for the least costly emissions reductions available at any cost. If nuclear is out, then I’m for the next least expensive, and so forth. Why aren’t you?
Firstly nuclear is not out.
Secondly, the renewabls cannot provide power to meet the demand
Thirdly, renewables cannot significanlty cut GHG emissions.
We’ve been over that.
Your are stuck on a religious like belief. No amount of facts and figures is going to change your mind.
There is no point in me answering anymore of your questions.
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Fran, My appologies for the last comment. I wrote it before I’d read your whole comment. Part of waht I said is correct. But I wil come back and answer later.
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Neil Howes,
My mistake on the active storage capacity of Jounama pond. I meant 28.7 GL (28,700 ML).
What is your data source, not that it matters very much. But I’d still be interested to know if there is newer data avilable than I have. They recently remeasured the volume of many dams and also Sydney Harbour. The latter is abit of a problem because it is no longer 500 GL, which is a bit of a problem because the unit Sudharb is 500 GL. It still is, Sydney Harbour is now a about 5.1 Sydharbs.
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Nuclear is pretty much friendless in this country and that won’t be changing any time in the foreseeable future.
I’d also question this. I’m under no illusions of the difficulty of changing this situation, but nor am I without hope that it could change quicker than you might imagine.
The reality and seriousness of climate change is now broadly accepted, and it seems to me this happened fairly quickly and due to leadership from a few individuals like Gore, and Flannery here. Objectively, nuclear has a very strong and coherent case to make. Leadership, effective communication, the climate crisis, the water crisis and the fossil fuels crisis *could* change things quickly. So could apathy. I’m not entirely sure the nation of consumerists we’ve created particularly give a damn beyond the bottom line of their electricity bill. Frequent brownouts and high electricity bills could soon turn them around.
Its a national debate we need to have, and there are signs its starting to happen. The discussion here is a start. Again, leadership, vision and communication could change things quickly. Sadly it doesn’t seem to be our strong suit.
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Hi John,
I just googled Hyperion. Very interesting! If I were heading off to colonise Mars I’d want a dozen! But that’s in space.
But as Fran says, it’s politically unacceptable here.
Also, it’s in the future. Not available till 2013. Cloncurry will have had a year or so running by then. So will Better Place. So may Eestor batteries!
Wind is about as cheap as coal, but not when we consider backup. OK, check this out. As I was saying, Moore’s law in batteries chugs along…
From Yale 360.
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2170
“EEStor claims that its device, which is one-quarter the weight of a similar Nocera Donna Coveney/MIT Work being done by Daniel Nocera at MIT could open up the possibly that electricity could be stored by splitting (and later recombining) abundant water molecules.
lithium ion battery, can hold a large charge for days. Its patent describes a 281-pound device that would hold almost the same charge as a half-ton lithium ion battery pack installed on the Tesla Roadster. The company’s ultracapacitors have yet to prove themselves in commercial products. But industrial giant Lockheed Martin has already signed up with EEStor to use future ultra capacitors in defense applications, and Toronto-based Zenn Motors, which has also taken an ownership stake in EEStor, says it will have electric cars on the road using the technology in 2010.”
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2160
Now apply future ‘super-batteries’ to a Better Place car model, and you have V2G on steroids. Moore’s law in batteries means slowly increasing electrical storage per battery, in a fleet of car batteries covered by car consumers paying LESS than the price of oil today. Indeed, the cost / km will progress downwards as battery technology improves. Soon it may well become a case of “what intermittency?” Super-batteries are coming, and they may not even be nuclear. ;-)
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Fran,
Ok, I’ve “put my manners back in” and here is another go at replying to your post #356.
You say: “Really though, whether going the renewable route costs more is irrelevant if people won’t accept nuclear.”
I don’t agree with this on two accounts, First, if people accept that we have to cut emissions they will not only accept nuclear they will demand it. People respond to the hip-pocket nerve.
Second, cost is not irrelevant. If we make bad policy decisions, (like pushing mandating, subsidising renewables for ideologicl reasons), we will seriously damage the economy. People still want their hospitals, nurses, schools, and teachers. With less money in the economy something has to suffer. It will be the environment.
You say “If nuclear is out, then I’m for the next least expensive, and so forth. Why aren’t you?
Firstly, nuclear is not out. It is the only option. Iyt is a matter of having the debate, not avoiding it.
Secondly, There really is no other alternative if we want to cut emissions. I think that is quite clear. Have you looked at David Mackay’s book, p335? What do you notice. Do you see that the EU countries with the highest wind power penetration have the highest GHG emissions from electrcity generation. Do you also see that the countries with the most nuclear have the lowest GHG emissions from electrcity generation?
The options are not nucleasr versus renewables. It is nuclear versus no GHG reductions.
That really is the key point.
You say: “Unlike you it seems, I’m in a hurry to get the wheels in motion rather than chasing some fantasy about nuclear power replacing coal in the next decade — which is really what we need — or waiting another 30 years to get started.”
I’m in a hurry too. But I’ve seen us waste two decades for the same reason as you are saying now. In 1991 to 1992, Ecologiclly Sustainable Development” was the rage. All the government departments were heavily involved, industry was invloved, policy was flying everywhere. Modelling was being done, David Mills was sying Solar Thermal is just 3 years away from providing economic baseload power. He’s still saying the same thing now, and a new crowd of gullible people believe it. The imporatant point is that, back then, just as now, nuclear was not government policy. It was made clear to the bureaucracy they should not embarrass the government by mentioning it. The bureaucrats got the message and it was not to be mentioned. We’ve lost 20 years and we are doing the same again. If this isn’t tackled, we’ll be in the same place in another 20 years.
You wqant aan agreement to do so,etning. I don’t want an agreement on rally bad policy. Hiding from nuclear is bad policy.
You say nuclear cannot be built quickly enough. I say the only way we are going to make major reductions to electrcity emissions is with nuclear. We need to get started. We could have near emissions free electrcity bu 2040 (more likely 2050) bu replacing old coal fired power plants as they reach the end of their economic lives. We could replace the whole coal fleet between 2020 and 2050 if we start now France commissioned its fleet in 2 decades, and that is twice the size of Australia’s needs.
Any coal fired power stations that need to be retired between now and 2020, and any new capacity required should be gas fired. We should continue with geothermal, but I don’t expect much from it.
We need cheapest possible electrcity. The cheaper electrcity is the faster land transport will convert from oil. Also the cheaper clean electrcity is, the faster China and India will adopt it.
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From Fran Barlow:
If large numbers of people do change their minds on nuclear tomorrow (and believe me, I make the case at least twice each week to someone new, who is suitably horrified that I can be suggesting such a thing: “aren’t you an environmentalist?”), then count me in, but in the meantime I’d sooner get agreement on something that gets us moving in the right direction.
The key to building a political concensus for nuclear power in Australia is not to attempt to convert the religiously anti-nuclear, or even the doubtful pro-renewables environmentalists. the key is to mobilise the substantial latent support for nuclear power which already exists.
I fully intend to do this, and am currently putting the pieces in place for an organisation to serve as the vehicle for this cause (would’ve been a bit further along by now if I hadn’t come down with the flu a couple of weeks ago, but we are now back on track).
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Neil Howes (#355),
You said ” I don’t see any comprimise with Blowering as a water storage, as Eucumbene is at the top with 4.8Million ML storage.”
I don’t see how Eucumbene can be involved in any other way other than how it is involved now. Eucumbene is the main storage reservoir for the scheme. The problem with the Snowy system is insufficient water inflows. So, no matter what we do we are not going to be able to fix that problem. We already let the water down stream at the optimum rate to maximise the generation capacity of the scheme (at least that is true when engineers are in control – it goes off the rails when the accounts are in charge as has happened with disasterous consequences).
Are you suggesting connecting Eucambene to Talbingo and making pump storage between these two reservoirs? Eucumbene is higher than Talbingo Reservoir, and some 20 km distance. Eucumbene’s height data is FSL = RL 1165 m and MOL = RL 1116. Talbingo FSL is 544. So there is about 550m hydraulic head – good for pump storage. There would be quite a bit of head loss in 30 km of tunnel. Do you know of any pump storage schemes with 30 m of tunnel? Tantangara to Eucumbene has an existing tunnel, a head of only 40 m. Probably not worth the cost. Jindabyne to Eucumbene has 200 m head and is about 20 km up stream. So no tunnels required, just very large diameter pipes (probably 6 pipes about 6 m diameter each for 1500 MW generation capacity).
I don’t see how it will help to pump water back from blowering “occasionally”. If we want to increase Tumut 3’s energy storage from 9 GWh to 66 GWh we need to use the top 5 m of Blowering Reservoir. Pumping back from Blowering will not add anything significant.
I think you have probably done a lot more thinking about this thn I have. So I probably do not understand what you have in mind. I look forward to hearing from you when you uncrash your HD.
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Looks like you’re all arguing on azimuth tracking without elevation tracking – this is ridiculous and outdated.
You’re not looking at geographical sun incidence for different geographical regions.
For a 220MWe (217MWe with air cooling) 74% capacity factor plant see the Solar 220 using double reheat supercritical turbines (now used in coal plants around the place)
from the US Department of Energy NREL costings confirmed by the Sargent and Lundy Company which does the due diligence on Nuclear, Coal, Gas and Solar plant proposals from utilities.
Click to access 34440.pdf
Solar thermal technologies have the ability to store energy which is really rare for renewable energy technologies. Really only hydro power has a similar capability. But because we are creating heat we can actually stick that heat in a big tank, much like a large thermos, and then we can pull that heat back later on and use it to create steam and make electricity. Dr Craig Turchi PhD – US DOE NREL
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Looks like you’re all arguing on azimuth tracking without elevation tracking – this is ridiculous and outdated.
Back at post #253 I went through the analysis of 2D track vs non-tracking collectors. It makes no difference to the overall numbers or the conclusions you would draw.
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John,
1. Re Hyberion reactors: these things “might” work as advertised in 2013. You’re willing to quote them as a going concern, yet CETO wave power probably WILL work as it has already been tested at the precommercial level! I note good old Peter Lang’s just *all over* CETO with facts and figures to debunk it. ;-)
But Hyperion reactors would have to be buried in the back of every local police station for security! Terrorism remember? If they’re that small, then what’s to stop terrorists grabbing a forklift or other heavy machinery, shoving it on the back of a truck, and trucking one up to Warragamba dam and cracking it open there, poisoning our water supply? Nice! Instead of 30 to 40 sites around Australia being nuclear and highly guarded, we’d need *hundreds* of such sites with high security.
And mini-nuclear reactors moving all over the globe on the backs of trucks… I don’t know that the Australian public are going to like that.
2. Alternatives: Then of course there’s OTEC (not CETO!), that other vast untapped baseload ocean power source, still being developed and kinks worked out, geothermal, and of course… the future smart grid which is the best battery of all really.
That smart grid-battery will function with ever more V2G EV’s (which will also be ever more powerful & efficient).
Then there’s the fact that the grid will have ever greater regional spread. Dr Karl talks about the future worldwide supergrid that can push energy from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. So Victoria’s cloudy? Big deal, we’ll grab some wave power locally. Not enough? We’ll grab some wind power from WA or PNG if we need to!
http://www.terrawatts.com/
http://www.geni.org/
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Peter Langer,
The cost of adding or expanding pumped storage( as in Tumut3) is not the cost of the whole project, just the additional turbines and water pipelines. I am not sure of the cost of 4x 250MW turbines but since OCGT costs are $800/kW I would imagine the generators would be less than $400/kW. I am not sure where I find figures for say installing an additional 12x250MW turbines. Costs of about $400-500Million/GW capacity and $5-50million/GWh storage would seem about correct, a lot less than purpose built storage.
The situation with the Snowy is that water can be stored at Eucumbene, Talbingo or Blowering but it presently makes sense to store as much as possible at Eucumbene.
The most efficient way to use an expanded Tumut3 would be to use the Jounama Pond most of the time( each day peak) but for exceptional demand allow water from Talbingo to overflow Jounama into Blowering and pump it back to Jounama. Most of Blowering is stored in the top 30m so a lower pump would have to lift water usually 10m but sometimes 30m. This could be a low capacity pump taking a week to restore the water that overflowed Jounama(being pumped back to Talbingo each off-peak period).
Talbingo has an area of 30km sq so top 1m stores 30,000ML. Since Tumut3 uses 4,000ML/h generating 1.5GWh/h the top 10m of Talbingo could store up to 120GWh. Probably more than the top 10m could be used at a lower power rating(ie 450,000ML would reduce head by 20%). Since some water is exiting Eucumbene(max 0.24ML/sec), Talbingo would never get have to be lowered to 50% capacity. Usually there is no storage issue with Blowering as it is only full during exceptionally high low rates when pumping would not be used. Dartmouth has a small lower pondage (10,000ML) that could possibly be enlarged or an additional lower pondage added to expand this volume and allow much higher turbine flow rates to be held for a few hours. TAS Hydro also has some good pumped storage potential again without any major new dam construction, but the cost of additional turbines.
If high cloud and low wind conditions persist for several days this is ample time to bring on idle NG and coal-fired power, even 7 days use per year is only going to contribute 1% of present CO2 emissions.
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Neil,
I there are a few misunderstandings in what you say about Tumut 3. It is not a low cost option to increase the pump storage capacity.
We need more energy storage and more generating capacity. You seem to be talking about the generation capacity only. And you can’t just dump them on the side of a hill and hope they’ll work.
To increase the pump storage capacity of the Tumut 3 system significantly, we’d need to keep Blowering full, and add massivce pump storage capability. We could take it from the currrent 9 GWh of pump storage capacity to 66 GWh by keeping Blowering full, adding the pumps and turbines. The pumps would need to be able to pump 66 GWh of water in 6 hours (from solar). That’s 11 GWh per hour. We’d need about 14 GW of pump power. Have you thought any of this stuff through?
I don’t know where the idea aof pumping from Blowering to Jounama ‘occasionally’ comes from. Jounama holds only 6 hours of water at maximum generation rate. To increase the pump storage capacity to more than 6 hours at 1.5 GW, you’d have to pump water up from Blowering every day.
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“The pumps would need to be able to pump 66 GWh of water in 6 hours (from solar).”
Why? This seems like your “all or nothing” strawman again.
Don’t tell me you still haven’t looked into the graphite blocks? Or even the hybrid solar thermal being produced in Israel, that can be mainly solar backed by biogas? Surely a hydro-solar-thermal system would make use of SOME solar thermal storage.
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Peter#370,
I think you are mixing up 1)daily variations on demand( peak versus off-peak) where pumped hydro, NG peak, solar peak can top up wind power and 2) “widespread low wind events” or “widespread high cloud cover events” that may be 1-2 times a month. The second events require a large storage capacity perhaps half daily energy demand but does not have to be “recharged” in 6hours. Several days recharge would be adequate.
Tumut3 can provide 60-120GWh(about 60hours operation at 1500MW) now, but none of the water can be returned except for what is stored in Jounama. The return pumping time used presently at Tumut3 is about 16 hours(about 1,200ML/h). Blowering doesn’t have to remain full to be able to pump out 300,000ML over a period of perhaps 1-2 weeks, via Jounama, the inlet could be 30 or 40 m below the maximum surface level lifting 10-30 meters depending upon water levels. Jindabyne has a similar booster pump to transfer water to Eucumbene.
It would probably be better to have double the present pumping rate with double or tripe the number of turbines to give a potential 6000MW peak(120GWh storage return pumping at 2400MW) , but operate most of the time using 9GWh with minimum water toping Jounama. Other pumped storage could be available to add to short term storage, with just a few dams providing 24h storage.
Adding even a low return pump rate to Eucumbene( perhaps a separate pipeline) would allow additional flexibility to also draw down through Tumut1 and Tumut2 with additional pumped hydro capacity. This could take months to restore(perhaps during months of solar or wind maximum output), as long as Blowering capacity was not exceeded. I don’t see pumping up 500m to Eucumbene from Talbingo to be a problem many pumped hydro systems use this head height.
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Steven Goor made criticisms of the Solar Power Realities paper regarding the following:
1. “Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day”
2. Fixed versus tracking PV
3. Solar thermal is lower cost than large scale PV
4. “All of SE Australia covered by cloud at the same time”
5. “The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines how much energy storage is needed.”
I addressed these criticisms in previous posts. Here is a summary:
1. “Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day”
a. Valid criticism. The word “parabolic” will be changed to “curve” when I next update the paper
2. Fixed versus tracking PV
a. Insignificant difference. John D Morgan did the research and showed that the difference is at most 30% This is insignificant given we are dealing with an order of magnitude difference in the costs.
3. Solar thermal is lower cost than large scale PV
a. False. Solar thermal is higher cost than PV. In fact, solar thermal is not yet capable of providing baseload power at any cost. It is physically impracticable. NEEDS projects that Solar Thermal may be able to provide baseload power by 2020, but that is for the case where there is no cloud cover for a full day or more, ever.
4. “All of SE Australia covered by cloud at the same time”
a. I’ll change “All” to “Most”. A quick search of BOM cloud cover and solar radiation showed that a large part of this area is frequently covered by cloud, all at the same time. I provided a link to the site and to a loop of satelite images at midday each day for a month. However, this doesn’t make any difference to the conclusions because ‘Scenario 2’ is higher cost than the ‘Scenario 1’. Scenario 1 is all power stations in cloud at the same time. Scenario 2 is at least one power station in the sun but need every power station to be able to generate the power because the clouds move.
5. “The capacity factor on the worst days, or worst period of continuous days, defines how much energy storage is needed.”
a. True. This is the most important point to understand from the paper.
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Neil,
You think I don’t understand, and I think you don’t understand.
I don’t know whether we are going to make any progress.
Perhaps you can let me know if you follow and agree with the Solar Power Realities paper, and if not, what do you disagree with. If we can nail down just where the disagreement is, we could make progress.
I suggest you do need to read from the beginning, and look at the references. Please ask me if you do not understand the reason for any of the assumptions and statements.
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Neil,
I’ll have another go at this.
Humour me while I try to get my point across. You need to consider all the following together.
1. In an earlier post you said we could get a lot more pumped hydro storage capacity. You mentioned we could easily get another 10 GW of power.
2. Renewable energy advocates have been saying that renewables like solar and wind, but mainly solar, can provide our baseload electricity needs.
3. For intermittent renewables, like solar, to be able to provide our baseload power they must be able to meet the demand throughout the night, throughout the winter, and through extended periods of overcast weather.
4. We need 450 GWh of energy to get us through the night in winter (3 pm to 9 am).
5. If a pump storage system was made between Blowering and Tumut 3, the system could provide 66 GWh of energy. That is about 15% of what we need. And we need to pump and release that every day!!
6. To get 10 GW power out of Tumut 3 every day we would need 7 times the Tumut 3 generation capacity. Where do you think we can locate 7 Tumut 3 power stations?
7. We would also need the pumping capacity of 25 Tumut 3 (to pump 66 GWh or water in 6 hours of sunlight).
And this would give us just 15% of what we need for solar to power us through the night.
Do you understand what I am trying to highlight?
There is no point in saying solar is not intended to be the only generation technology, it will be a mix of technologies. That does not avoid the problems. And the more you have to double up technologies the higher the cost. Do you agree with me on this point? If not, we can debate that further.
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I just googled Hyperion. Very interesting! If I were heading off to colonise Mars I’d want a dozen!
Yes, they’re nice little units. Also look at the Toshiba mPower reactor, and other small designs.
But as Fran says, it’s politically unacceptable here.
Well, as I said, I think that can change. In particular, if it were ratepayers paying for their own power, you might be surprised how objective people can be about value for money, and how quickly purely ideological objections might fall away.
Also, it’s in the future. Not available till 2013.
2013 is only three and a bit years away. Of any serious repowering solution, these should be available in the short term.
Now, they have yet to get their design certification, and that could blow the timelines, but even so, this is a real solution that will be available in the near term.
Wind is about as cheap as coal, but not when we consider backup. OK, check this out. As I was saying, Moore’s law in batteries chugs along…
Unfortunately, Moore’s “Law” does not apply to technology in general. Its been a remarkable descriptor of progress in semiconductor processing, partly because of a strong connection to information science which allows arbitrary complexification of design, and partly because in 1965 the physics was a long way from absolute limits. Other technologies either don’t benefit from abstract structuring the same way, or are already much closer to physical limits, or require fundamental breakthroughs rather than incremental engineering in order to advance.
This is another example of the difference between the information sciences and the more physical sciences that I talked about in post #327. Moores law does not apply to materials science, and batteries are a materials science application.
For what its worth, this is the most significant recent advance in battery technology, in my opinion, and it’s not improving storage capacity, it’s improving charge/discharge rates. This has huge implications for electric vehicles.
If they’re that small, then what’s to stop terrorists grabbing a forklift or other heavy machinery, shoving it on the back of a truck, and trucking one up to Warragamba dam and cracking it open there, poisoning our water supply? Nice!
Do you think this scenario is realistic? These reactors are intended to be buried underground encased in tonnes of concrete. Accessing them is not trivial, time consuming, and not likely to go unnoticed by the plant operators, the community being serviced, or the government.
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If they’re that small, then what’s to stop terrorists grabbing a forklift or other heavy machinery, shoving it on the back of a truck, and trucking one up to Warragamba dam and cracking it open there, poisoning our water supply? Nice!
What’s to stop these hypothetical terrorists getting hold of any one of a suite of potent chemical or biological agents and doing exactly the same thing? What’s so special about nuclear fuel, other than it would be the most damned difficult to access and would be less effective than dozens of other more readily accessible toxins? This is just crazy stuff.
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Peter#
“There is no point in saying solar is not intended to be the only generation technology, it will be a mix of technologies. That does not avoid the problems. And the more you have to double up technologies the higher the cost. Do you agree with me on this point? If not, we can debate that further.”
You have proposed that solar energy would need to be overbuilt x>20 fold or have up to 90 days energy storage. Let’s look at a fairly simple scenario (when all NG is exhauisted) where solar provides 50% of power and wind provides 50%, and both wind and solar farms are dispersed across Australia solar in both southerly deserts and in northern deserts, and wind along the high wind regions from Geralton, via SA, VIC and NSW to Cooktown. (I think a mix of nuclear, wind and solar is more likely but use this for illustration)
1st problem: low solar energy in SE Australia(Queanbeyan) during winter days. Wind energy is available (100%) and solar in N Australia so total solar may be 70% of average. Would need 130% of average solar capacity.
2nd problem: no solar after 5pm; 2h time shifting E to W would allow some solar to about 7pm, 3h molten salt storage brings this to 9pm. Wind is still available so 50% of average power is available MOST times.
3rd problem: cloudy periods of SE Australia; wind still available, sun available in West and North, about 50%solar available MOST times.
4th problem: Wind variation in SE, sometimes no wind available. Just looking at most low wind periods in June2009, and comparing Gunning with Capital sites( high correleation) shows that if Capital had been operating with all 140MW capacity on line, some of those low wind periods would have been giving twice as much power. The variance of sites is very high so clearly having say 100 sites over 4,000Km rather than 11 sites over 1200Km is going to greatly reduce wind variability(but possibly still deliver 50-150% of average output).
Bottom line is you are overestimating storage. The present variation of the NEMMCO grid would suggest that about 8GW x6h storage is going to be needed with any power source ( or 25% over-capacity). The more diverse sources of energy the less overall storage is going to be required but with wind and solar probably 12h of average consumption(25×12=300GWh) would be required after we stop using NG for peak power( would be higher than this due to higher power demand >2050, lets say 600GWh).
If we get it wrong and have a nation wide cloud cover and no wind we do what we do now, or would do if one nuclear design had to be shut down( due to a need to correct a design flaw); ration power for a few hours by power shedding.
To deliver that 600GWh in 40 years time would require an additional 36,000MW hydro of turbines (1000MW per year) and some minor storage building(not major dams) additional raceways and transmission lines. At todays costs 1000MW of turbines/year is going to be about $400million per year.
The big costs are going to be generating wind and solar power and the transmission lines to cities. Energy storage costs will be minor so there will be little incentive to over-build nuclear solar or wind.
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You said “You have proposed that solar energy would need to be overbuilt x>20 fold or have up to 90 days energy storage.”
Allow me to clarify. The least cost option is with 30 days storage if we use pumped hydro or 5 days with chemical storage.
You said “Let’s look at a fairly simple scenario (when all NG is exhausted) where solar provides 50% of power and wind provides 50%”.
Do you mean the installed capacity of wind and solar are each 50% of peak installed generating capacity, or do you mean the system is designeed so each contribute 50% of energy on average over a year (or some other time frame)?
You said: “1st problem: low solar energy in SE Australia(Queanbeyan) during winter days. Wind energy is available (100%) and solar in N Australia so total solar may be 70% of average. Would need 130% of average solar capacity.”
I presume you recognise that for solar thermal we need a solar-multiplier of 4 just to store sufficient energy to last the night in winter. It is actually worse than this because this does not allow for the lower capacity factor in winter.
In problem 4 you mentioned Capital wind farm. Do you realsise that Capital and Cullerin Range shut down suddenly at the same time about a week ago because wind speeds were too high.
You have not considered the cost of the transmission system. (you will recall that yesterday you pointed out local peaks in Melbourne and Adelaide which result because the existing transmission system is not adequate.) If we want to rely on all the power being supplied at a point in time from solar power in say NT or from the SW coast of WA, for example, the transmission system has to be sized to carry the full 33 GW of power from every region. Ever considered what the cost of this would be?
Regarding your 4th problem. You are being swayed by statistical analysis rather than actual figures. There is evidence from all over the world that wind is highly variable, over large areas, and frequently drops suddenly to near zero.
Regarding your last paragraph, I recognise it is a simple analysis, but I do not agree with your highly optimistic analysis which is based on statistics and computer simulations.
You say: “To deliver that 600GWh in 40 years time …”. The 600GWh is what we use per day now. So if you want to use wind and solar as your generators, that is the power that we need to deliver now, in 2007. It will be double that by 2030.
Neil, when I got to the last few sentences, the are so optimistic that I don’t know where to begin.
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The question is how could we supply NEM 2007 demand with near zero GHG emissions, and how soon could we achieve that? Also what should we do in the interim?
Let’s keep this simple for a start. We can get more complicated later if we need to.
The aim is to get to near zero emissions electricity generation as quickly as possible.
To keep it simple, so we can illustrate the point about intermittent renewables, let’s restrict the preliminary discussion to the following technology options: wind, solar and nuclear. We can use pumped hydro, chemical and thermal energy storage.
We are basing the calculations on 2007 NEM electricity demand, because we have the detailed data at 5 minute intervals, but we recognise that demand is likely to double by 2030.
We could commission large nuclear power plants from 2020 on if we wanted to, and smaller ones earlier.
We recognise we want to reduce emissions as much as possible to before 2020, but without wasting resources or damaging our capacity to take the best possible actions over the long term.
Again keeping the analysis simple, we have two options from now until 2020:
1. All new plant is gas generation (mostly CCGT)
2. Wind, backed up by gas generation (mostly OCGT)
OCGT will reduce emissions compared with new coal by about 25%
CCGT will reduce emissions compared with new coal by about 50%
So wind power backed up by OCGT will displace very little GHG emissions compared with installing just CCGT instead. This is the result although it is much more complicated than this. See the paper “Cost and quantity of greenhouse gas emissions avoided by wind farms” on the BNC web site for more information about this.
Furthermore, CCGT will be valuable beyond 2020. OCGT less so. So investing in wind plus OCGT instead of CCGT is a waste of resources.
Regarding the capital investment, the choice is either CCGT or wind power plus OCGT. Wind power avoids almost no investment in the fossil fuel back up generator capacity. (the statements to the contrary by RE advocates are not correct – see “The fallacy of the Mark Dr Diesnedorf’s Baseload Fallacy”). So the full cost of wind power is an additional cost of generation and purely to save some fuel and little GHG emissions. A very low benefit / cost ratio.
Remember, I am keeping this simple to get the main concepts across for all readers.
Now let’s move to beyond 2020. Our options are: wind, solar and nuclear.
Nuclear can do the whole job on its own. It can be done at about 10% lower cost by using some back up for peak generation. 10 GW of hydro would be ideal. Nuclear could be implemented over two to three decades from 2020, by replacing coal fired power stations as they reach the end of their economic lives and or as we buy them back through our new ‘Cash for Coal’ program. The capital cost of the nuclear and pumped hydro option would be about $120 billion.
The alternative to nuclear is solar plus wind plus energy storage.
There are occasions when the sun is not shining anywhere (eg at night) and the wind is not blowing sufficiently anywhere. At that time, all power must come from energy storage. So we need energy storage capacity to provide the full peak power demand and sufficient energy storage to last through the longest period of low generation days.
Sometimes the wind isn’t blowing and sometimes the sun isn’t shining, so we would need a high installed capacity of wind power and of solar power, to provide the immediate demand and to store energy for night and cloudy, low wind days.
The estimated cost of the solar PV options with pumped hydro storage is $2,800 billion. Solar PV and chemical storage is $4,600 billion. Solar thermal with 1 days storage (this technology does not yet exist) about $8,700 billion.
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Following is a ‘ball park’ calculation of the cost of a trunk transmission system to support wind and solar farms spread across the continent and generating all our electricity.
The idea of distributed renewable energy generators is that at least one region will be able to meet the total average demand (25 GW) at any time. Applying the principle that ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’ and ‘the sun will always be shining somewhere in the day time’, there will be times when all the power would be supplied by just one region – let’s call it the ‘Somewhere Region’.
The scenario to be costed is as follows:
Wind power stations are located predominantly along the southern strip of Australia from Perth to Melbourne.
Solar thermal power stations, each with their own on-site energy storage, are distributed throughout our deserts, mostly in the east-west band across the middle of the continent.
All power (25GW) must be able to be provided by any region.
We’ll base the costs on building a trunk transmission system from Perth to Sydney, with five north-south transmission lines linking from the solar thermal regions at around latitude 23 degrees. The Perth to Sydney trunk line is 4,000 km and the five north-south lines average 1000 km each. Add 1,000 km to distribute to Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane. Total line length is 10,000km. All lines must carry 25GW.
Each of the double circuit 500kV lines from Eraring Power Station to Kemps Creek can transmit 3,250MW so let’s say we would need 8 parallel lines for 25GW plus one extra as emergency spare.
The cost of the double circuit 500kV lines is about $2M/km.
For nine lines the cost would be $18M/km.
So the total cost of a transmission system to transmit from the ‘Somewhere Region’ to the demand centres is 10,000km x $18M/km = $180 billion
The trunk transmission lines might represent half the cost of the complete transmission system enhancements needed to support the renewable generators.
Just the cost of the trunk transmission lines alone ($180 billion) is more than the cost of the whole nuclear option ($120 billion).
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Peter … not sure whjat you base your Eraring estimate on
Here’s another example:
Son La to Soc San in Vietnam.
Here it’s unlear what the exact cost is for, but taking the shortest 500Kv line of 120km the project cost is $425,385. That works out at $3544 per Km … and if you look at the terrain and vegetation between the two parts of Northern Vietnam (hilly and densely cvovered), it’s nothing like the wide open terrain the Australian lines go over. Bear in mind too that all of the initial project costs get spread over your much larger project (10,000 km)
Sure we pay people better here, but the job would get done much faster and the copper comes at a bulk rate. So the coast per Km is $3544 * 8 * 10000 … =$283.52 million, and less if it’s not 10000km.
Still a lot but orders of magnitude smaller than you suggest, even if we allow for a much higher wages bill.
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Fran, as I understand it the $1 to 2 million per km is a fairly standard cost quoted for high capacity HVDC lines that can carry 3 GW.
Take Murraylink as an example. A 220 MW capacity line at ~150 kV DC which runs for 180 km cost $100 million. That is $560K per km, for a much lower capacity line than Peter is talking about. So Peter’s figure seems correct.
Indeed, I asked Gene Preston about this and here is what he had to say:
“The analysis that was done is a simplified one, probably way oversimplified. I doubt the wind plan is reliable as stated, even with the rather massive amount of transmission. I would throw in some storage in each area an then redo the economics. With storage in each area, there could be less transmission. But the storage costs would have to be added. I would use $0.7/W for the storage capacity (inverter and switchgear) plus $0.4/Wh for the amount of energy to be stored (batteries). This complicates the problem, so it will require a really long coffee break to do the wind system economics and many many napkins”
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I agree with all this, including Gene Preston’s statement. It is a very simplified analysis – (‘ball-park’, ‘book-end’, etc).
However, this simple analysis assumes that all storage, necessary to provide a steady 25GW of power to the eastern states, is located at the generators. That is why the estimated cost of the solar thermal generators to provide the total NEM demand is … (Barry will reveal this soon).
In addition we have 8GW of energy storage (e.g. pumped hydro and/or Compressed Air Energy Storage) as close to the demand centres as possible. This energy storage will store energy when demand is less than 25GW and generate the additional power when demand is greater than 25GW. You will recall that baseload is about 20 GW in July and the peak is about 33GW. The peak on the National Electricity Market (NEM) occurs at about 6:30pm in winter (based on 2007 figures).
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Further to my comment above, and doing a very simplistic analysis using Gene Prestons unit costs for storage, the cost of the energy storage at the generators is:
25GW x $0.7/W = $17.5 billion
450 GWh x $0.4/W = $180 billion
So more than double the cost of the transmission. And we still need to get 25GW power to the demand centres.
But that is storage for just one night. We need sufficient storage at each generator to provide full power through several days of overcast weather or no wind. That is, because the storage is decentralised, we have to overbuild the storage as well. If we want to centralise the storage instead, then we have to build very much higher transmission capacity.
Any way you try to do the figures, intermittent renewables are simply not viable. Not even close.
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Fran Barlow #382,
I asked a friend who is more knowledgeable than me on transmissions about your comment. Here is his reply:
“Peter,
Absolutley no-one uses copper for conductors any more anywhere – your critic is an idiot hasn’t a clue what she is talking about.
Our 500kV lines are double circuit, 3 phase, quad Orange ie is 2 circuits times 3 phases times 4 conductors per bundle ie 24 wires per tower. Orange is ACSR, Aluminium Conductor Steel Reinforced, with 54 strands of 3.25mm dia aluminium surrounding 7 strands of 3.25mm dia steel. Roughly 1/3 of the cost of a line is in the wires, 1/3 in the steel towers and 1/3 in the easements required to run the line.
“Bonneville Power Administration Grand Coulee-Bell 500-kV…would cost about US$152 million. These are reasonable costs for the construction of 84 miles of single circuit 500-kV line and associated substation work” – (NB single circuit!)
“The Pepco Holdings 500-kV line, designated as the Mid-Atlantic
Power Pathway (MAPP), … The (230 mile) MAPP line is expected to
cost $1.05 billion and would be built in stages over …”
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Fran Barlow,
This provides a recent cost estimate for 500kV transmission line in the USA.
Click to access Chapter%2010.pdf
Here is some information on the Bonneville Power Administration Grand Coulee-Bell 500-kV project:
Click to access ROD011003.pdf
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Fran,
I’ve summarised the $/km costs for the four 500kV projects in the USA, see below. The last two figurees are US4/km and A$/km
Total cost (US$) Miles US$/km A$/km
246.5 79 1.94 2.42
115 28 2.55 3.19
342 70 3.03 3.79
99 40 1.54 1.92
The data source is here:
Click to access Attachment_C_-_2008_NOS_Project_Descriptions.pdf
Based on these figures $2M/km does not look like an over estimate.
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Again Peter, I’d submit. looking at the relevant maps, that these don’t strongly resemble the terrain we are discussing here in Australia, nor in scope, the project size.
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Hi Fran, #382, #389
There will always be variations from one project to another, one site to another, one country to another. But for the +/-50% estimate we are doing here, I submit to you that the variations wouldbeb well inside that. Do you believe the $2M/km should be $1M/km? If so on what basis?
Just to remind you of the figures in my earlier opost, the rate is about $3M/km for similar transmission lines in the USA.. Victoria and NSW both use $2M/km as their basis for planning.
I agree that there are variables. In the desert the cost of easements would be next to zero. But the cost of access roads would be higher as they must all be built from scratch (and then maintained). Also, we haven’t included the cost of the feed in and step up of hundreds of small capacity lines from wind farms and solar farms into a trunk lines. I haven’t allowed for any of that.
Do you believe the estimate is out by 50%?
Even if the estimate is too high by a factor of 2 (highly unlikely, it is more likely to be too low that too high), it is insignificant in the overall cost comparison. The transmission system alone for RE, let alone the generators and the storage, are as much as or more than the total cost for the nuclear option including 10GW of pumped hydro storage. Add the reneweable generators and on-site storage and the renewable system is 20 times (for PV) to 100 times (for solar thermal) higher cost than nuclear.
I find it hard to believe that you cannot see that the difference is an order of magnitude or more.
Choosing RE instead of nuclear when there is a cost difference of a factor of 20 would be like buying a new Holden car for $600,000 from Dealer A when Dealer B could have suppiied you exactly the same car for $30,000 but you didn’t like Dealer B. Even if the costs are half what are used in the estimate, we still have a factor of 10 difference.
Please tell me what is the source of our misunderstanding of each other’s position.
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Now Peter your analogy is overdrawn. It’s more like paying $100,000 for a Tesla Roadster when someone will sell you Kia for $12,000
We don’t disagree fundamentally — all things considered, nuclear power would be quite a bit cheaper for Australia and better in a global sense too. I’d favour making Australia a place where IFRs could degrade reactor waste from other places.
My problem is a political one. Hardly any of the people who’d need to support such an approach are likely to do so. And if the best option isn’t politically saleable, then the next best one is what we should be willing to try and make work. The near perfect should not be the enemy of the pretty good. Renewables are not as expensive you claim, and even if Australia defers nuclear, other countries won’t. Fortunately, Australia’s attitudes are not shared by the whole planet.
Interestingly, the best places for nuclear here politically might well be in remote areas and there’s the cost of those 500KV lines … (admittedly you’d need fewer)
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My problem is a political one. Hardly any of the people who’d need to support such an approach are likely to do so.
I think you are very much mistaken about this. I believe there is sufficient support for nuclear power already in Australia… it just needs to be organised.
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Is there a single political party in Australia campaigning for the inclusion of nuclear power in the energy mix?
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Is there a single political party in Australia campaigning for the inclusion of nuclear power in the energy mix?
None that I know of. Who cares? The parties will follow where the public leads.
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There is no pro-nuclear public to ‘lead’. Totally wacky causes get political parties but not nuclear, which does tend to suggest there aren’t many who think it’s an issue, and most who do are on the far right and are typically climate change denialists.
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There is no pro-nuclear public to ‘lead’. Totally wacky causes get political parties but not nuclear, which does tend to suggest there aren’t many who think it’s an issue, and most who do are on the far right and are typically climate change denialists.
I don’t know who you talk to Fran, but my experience of discussing nuclear power with people suggests that a substantial number are supportive, and enough of the rest can be swayed in favour of nuclear.
I shall have every opportunity to put this contention to the test in the near future when we launch our membership drive.
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As a physicist and an activist I have had much discussion on the approval of nuclear power from the Australian public, scientific community and activist community.
Within the scientific community there is a fair acceptance of nuclear power as a future option for the world, and great acceptance of uranium free options (Gen V+) but reluctance to accept that Australia should build uranium powered plants. The excess of (good/black) coal and sun/potential renewable power is usually sited along with our excessive western lifestyle and the reductions that could be made in energy use without reducing quality of life. Nuclear proliferation, waste and accidents are all still concerns.
The activist community, especially environmental activism are still strongly opposed to all uranium related activities. Mining, processing, power production, waste, bombs, depleted uranium etc. Mining and waste are issues which greatly effect the aboriginal populations of Australia and the campaigns seem to have been combined to an extent. The bombs and depleted uranium are very much associated with the current/recent wars which we have been involved in and the campaigning is included in that. Power production is of course associated with climate change. Many activists have noted this change in recent years while reaffirming their disapproval of any part of the nuclear debate. If these groups combine to counter a pro-nuclear movement it would still be substantial.
The Australian public seems to be fairly uninformed about possible nuclear options. They know nuclear used to be bad but assumed that science has taken care of most of that by now. Unfortunately Australia is most likely to go with very old technology that still has many of the same problems as it did 50 years ago due to cost, and the cost/kwh will still be significantly higher than coal fired elec.
And of course – we have a lot of NIMBY’s. There is no where near enough trust in nuclear power for an average Australian to live in the same city as a nuclear plant, especially not with children. Many of these people would join the environmental activists to stop nuclear plants.
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Fran,
I agree that politics is a total block to nuclear in Australia at the moment. But this can change. Educate people what the real cost diffenence between nuclear and renewables is, and they will change in a hurry. Explain how many hospitals, nurses, schools and teachers will have to be forgone. Put it in terms that people understand. Their idelogical beliefs will fall by the way side quite quickly.
So that brings us back to the fundamental question. What is the cost difference between a least-cost zero-emissions generation system with nuclear allowed and not allowed.
To help me understand, and also to clarify it in your own mind, could you jot down what you believe would comprise a system to provide the following:
25GW average power
33 GW peak power at 6:30 pm in July
20 GW baseload power
600 GWh per day
450 GWh between 3pm and 9am.
What would be the components you would assemble for such a system? Where would they be located? How would you provide power quality?
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Peter
I’ll get back to you on the load composition if that’s OK …
On the political questions I think we should steer clear of running the negative side of the opportunity costs question. It’s going to sound like a long bow to most people who don’t accept the bona fides of government on most of the services you have put into the mix.
I think a better approach would be more like the tone adopted by David Mackay, whose work we evidently both admire, with a touch of reverse psychology.
Australia is very lucky at having such ready access to such a diverse array of high quality renewables we’d say. Few other countries are as well placed as we are to make use of nature to meet their energy needs … we’d continue, affirming our green credentials, pride in the country and what most people believe. While it will likely prove considerably more expensive to harness this bounty without resort to nuclear power, the premium we wish to pay to avoid nuclear power is worthwhile if it allows others not so fortunate as we are to decarbonise at a lower cost and reassures those here who would be troubled by the creation of a localised nuclear power industry. What we must above all things do however is decarbonise as rapidly and as cheaply as it is possible to do, not merely to answer thew challenges of climate change, but to clear our skies and our waters of the toxic radioactive effluent emitted by coal-fired power plants. And overseas, where nuclear power has achieved acceptance, we should press for the replacement of coal fired capacity with the very best nuclear technology.
Given that you and I both know that nuclear power will not see the light of day here for at least 10 and probably 15 years, we are giving up nothing by putting the matter this way. We do however put into the heads of those who are not religious about opposing nuclear power, the idea that Australia is in fact scoring an own goal by passing on nuclear power, and handing a competitive advantage to others. Like Mackay, we say not that we are pro-nuclear, but pro-arithmetic. We don’t get piegeon-holed as enemies of renewables or the environment but we lay the foundations for circumstances in which the heat will be turned up on nuclear’s main competitor — coal.
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Given that you and I both know that nuclear power will not see the light of day here for at least 10 and probably 15 years…
If the mini-nuke startups such as Hyperion and Nuscale can get themselves licensed, I think we can see them being introduced to Australia within seven or eight years. If we rely solely on gen III reactors to begin with, ten years is probably about right.
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Fran #399)
I agree with Finrod (#400). I do not agree with the approach you advocate. We’ve followed that route in the days of “Ecologically Sustainable Development” in about 1990 to 1993. We’ve lost nearly 20 years as a result. I do not see any value in following that failed path again.
Instead, I believe we need to get out and explain. Australia is educated and intelligent. They can see through the anti-nuclear spin once its put to them as a choice between clearly spelled out options and costs to the individual, and to future generations, and to the environment.
What I feel you have not yet accepted, or grasped, is the enormous cost difference between nuclear and renewables to provide our electricity demand. That is why I encourage you to do the sums yourself. Or, genuinely try to find fault with the papers on wind and solar on the BNC web site. Don’t concern yourself with finding errors of 50% or less. We need to find fault with a factor of twenty for solar.
As I’ve said previously, I do not believe it is wise to waste our resources (I’d say massively waste our resources, on renewable energy. The calculations show that they have very little effect on reducing GHG emissions and are very costly. So why do it?
In my opinion it is a wrong policy. Better would be to get on with nuclear right now, explain the options, benefits and costs to the population and get started asap. I do realise what is involved.
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Fran,
Further to my post #401 in reply to your #399, It is very important that we (the world) does everything possible to have least-cost, low emissions electricity.
I put least cost before low emissions intentionally. Electricity is enormous benefit to mankind (more on this below). The lower the cost, the more rapidly it can be provided to the poorest people of the world. The lower the cost of low-emissions electricity the more rapidly it will be adopted instead of high emisions electricity. If we want China and Indoia to reduce their emissions as quickly as possible everyone need to focus on building the least cost low emissions electrcity – and implementing it as quickly as possible.
Also importantly, the lower is the cost of low emissions electrcity, the faster it electrcity will displace fossil fuels for land transport and heat.
There can be no questions, from a logical perspective, mandating and subsidising renewable energy is bad policy.
Regarding the benefit of electrcity, have a look at the link below. This is a lovely package on the net that pulls UN data and charts it. You can run ‘Play’ and it runs through the data as a video and you can see how the statistics change over time. You can select what data you want to display on two axes and what countries you want included. You can pick log or linear for the axes.
Follow the steps below to see an example that shows the more electricity we use the lower is the infant mortality. Conclusion, if we want to save the planet, the more electricity we use the better, so the cheaper electricity is the better!!:
Go to: http://www.gapminder.org/
Click on the “Explore the World” chart
Select ‘Electricity generation per person” on the X axis and ‘Infant Mortality Rate’ on the Y axis. Select log scale for both axes.
Run ‘Play’ and watch the chart change through 1965 to 2006.
Next: change the X axis to ‘Nuclear consumption per person’. Select log scale
This is even better.
Conclusion: the more nuclear power the better^2 for the planet.
So we need to keep electricity prices as low as possible for the good of the planet and for the benefit of future generations.
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Fran,
Look at the first slide here:
Click to access FR_power_system_061212.pdf
One third of the nuclear and hydro capacity plu 2GW to replace the 27.5GW of coal oil and gas capacity would meet our 2007 NEM demand wiht near zero GHG emissions.
The nuclear was commissioned over about 2 decades. Some 20 years later, surely Australia should be able to install one third of that capacity in substantially less than 2 decades if we wanted to.
We just need to educate the population and make the decision to get started.
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Peter
I don’t agree that the approach I am advocating has been tried before. More than any other single event, Chernobylk and concern over nuclear hazmat in the post-Soviet Russia did much to form up attitudes to nuclear power as an unsafe technology. In the early 1990s, AGW was still a fairly controversial idea. And no, we didn’t discuss the comparative utilities then. What essentially happened then was a plebiscite on nuclear energy.
One of the key components of the energy system would be pumped storage. This can be sold bothas basic water infrastructure and as a way of reducing the carbon intensity of coal pluis integrating intermittents since with substantial pumped storage, you could keep coal plants either running optimally or at black start.
There are lots of sites within urban areas and on the fringes where, in aggregate across the country you could have 600GwH of storage — enough to cover 15 hours of zero energy from intermittents.
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More than any other single event, Chernobylk and concern over nuclear hazmat in the post-Soviet Russia did much to form up attitudes to nuclear power as an unsafe technology. In the early 1990s, AGW was still a fairly controversial idea. And no, we didn’t discuss the comparative utilities then. What essentially happened then was a plebiscite on nuclear energy.
People’s attitudes have moved on now that we have a greater general understanding of the causes and consequences of the Chernobyl event, and the public has gained a more accurate picture of nuclear technology (at least in some quarters).
We need to stop living in the past and take advantage of today’s situation and opportunities.
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Fran Barlow (#404)
I respectfully disagree with all three of your main points (your three paragraphs).
You say: “In the early 1990s, AGW was still a fairly controversial idea. And no, we didn’t discuss the comparative utilities then.”
Your statement suggests you were not involved in the ESD processes. Do you recall the “Toronto Targets” – i.e. we shall cut CO2-eq emissions to 20% below 1988 levels by 2005 – with an important caveat. Both the main political parties supported that policy. Nuclear was supported by the Oppostion but not by the Government. The Government went to the 1993 election opposing nuclear, the Opposition saying we’ll allow it and let the market decide. The bureaucracy was effectively banned from mentioning nuclear in the ESD reports. However, many studies showed that it was the only way we could have any chance of achieving the Toronto Targets, and even with nuclear it could not be achieved in the 12 years left until 2005. Have a look at the ESD Energy Production report. ABARE did a lot of excellent modelling. They also wrote the original report which showed that ETS is preferable to Carbon Tax. (“Tradeable Emissions Permit Scheme” ABARE Report 93.5, 1993), and Productivity Commission and Energy Research and Development Corporation (ERDC) were all heavily involved. By the way, ERDC also funded a study on the compariative costs of IGCC, gas CCGT and solar thermal for Australia’s electrcity generation as part of trying to meet the targets without nuclear. So, I do not agree with your statement “And no, we didn’t discuss the comparative utilities then.”
You said; “One of the key components of the energy system would be pumped storage. This can be sold both as basic water infrastructure and as a way of reducing the carbon intensity of coal plus integrating intermittents since with substantial pumped storage, you could keep coal plants either running optimally or at black start.”
Fran, we do not have suitable hydro sites available in Australia. Even if we did, it is very expensive. If you have centralised storage with intermittent generators, the transmission system to every intermittent generator must be sized to transmit the full installed capacity of each generator. Say ten times higher transmission system cost than having storage at the generator site. Lastly, hydro is not acceptable on environmental grounds. Tulley Milstream got killed off in about 1992 for that reason. No new large hydro sites have been built since.
You says; “There are lots of sites within urban areas and on the fringes where, in aggregate across the country you could have 600GWh of storage — enough to cover 15 hours of zero energy from intermittents.”
Fran, that is complete an utter nonsense. Can I suggest you look up David Mackay’s book on how to calculate the energy you can extract from hydro, and then do some calculation yourself. You could also read “Solar Power Realities”. It explains the area of land that must be innundated and the hydraulic head required. You havce absloutely nbot a clue about what you are talking.
Please read the “Solar Power Realities” paper and do some arithmetic.
Fran, Intermittent renewables are totally uneconomic.
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Peter
You quote me:
Then you say:
One can extract 0.272KwH per cubic meter of water at 100m of head pressure. There are lots of locations along the Great Dividing Range and its spurs that have elevations inexcess of 1000m — ten times that figure. Parts of the Newnes Ranges near Oberon are 1390 meters up and some of these are in areas where old worked coal mines exist allowing even greater head pressure. An upper reservoir of 100m*100m*1000m gives 10,000,000 cubic meters of water or about 27GwH of theoretical output. How many of these would we have to buiild across the country for 600GwH? About 40. Actually, some would be larger and most would be smaller, since we’d be looking at them as local water resources. I suspect what would be more sensible is to have the large ones where there was serious head pressure as a consequence of the topography and where good rainfall could top up the upper reservoir and much smaller ones would exist in suburbia where you might be happy with 100m of head pressure and about 1,000,000 cubic meters of water.
The cost of doing this would be considerable, but of course it is not just storage but water and desal and it would be saving on energy demand, the cost of new dams etc.
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Fran, although I disagree with your relatively rosy optimism about just how much renewable energy can contribute to our low-carbon energy future, and also disagree with your view on how far off the Australian public is in supporting nuclear energy, I have to feel sorry for your recent blogosphere experiences! For those who don’t know, I’ve seen two other forums (Quiggan and Deltoid) where Fran’s been bounced around like a basketball by their regular commentators for supporting nuclear power as part of the energy mix! It’s ironic, I know, but at least Fran seems to have a fair bit of resilience to her (which you need to engage in this process).
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Thanks Barry … it is odd. Here I’m cast as the overly credulous supporter of renewables and elsewhere people thinking I’m spruiking for the nuclear power industry! I think I gave as good as I got, but you can see the problem. Many of those that are as exercised by the health of the biosphere as you and I, see nuclear power as anathema and respond with the kind of animus one expects from culture warriors from the denialosphere. The worsdt thing is, as I pointed out on my post at Deltoid, that I can empathise. I was in that place not so very long ago. I have to hope that means that others can make the journey too, though I wish they’d get on about it.
Like you I’m keen to see that we shut down coal and other significant sources of new CO2 emissions ASAP, especially since most of these sources are also undesirable on other grounds. Mackay makes the fair point that contrary to popular belief, coal is unlikely to last much past 2090 if the world continues to grow and it is not replaced (even putting aside climate change issues).
I did like your piece on Stateline but mentioning the 100,000 year hazmat figure probably wasn’t the best thing to say. Probably better to refer only to the periodicity of the hazmat that is in practice a serious risk on human contact — which is much shorter. I think it’s also worth pointing out how long the CO2 from any CCS project would have to be sequestered and ther implications/relative probability of that escaping near a populated area. The only other weak point in your Stateline piece was that IFR was called ‘just a theory’. It would have been nice to counter that term.
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Barry (#408),
Well said, point taken.
Fran (#407),
you say: “The cost of doing this would be considerable, but of course it is not just storage but water and desal and it would be saving on energy demand, the cost of new dams etc.”
No, you cant effectively mix the uses of hydro and water storage for town and irrigation use. If it is for electrcity we manage and use the stored energy to meet peak demand, to maintain steady power and frequency on the grid and for emnergency use (i.e. when a big generator trips out). This use cannot be effectively mixed with water supply.
Secondly, the pumped storage sites are simply not available. Your calculations are too simplified, but it will take too long to explain the basics of hydro here. You can’t simply use the elevation above sea level in your calculations. You need to calculate the elevation difference between your upper and lower reservoir. And the active storage volume in the two reservoirs. Then calculate the area of land that will be required. I’ve done that for you in the “Solar Power Realities” paper. I also did it earlier (#365, #370, #375) for example to demonstrate how much energy could be obtained if we stopped using Blowering for irrigation and instead converted it to be the lower reservoir for Tumut 3. I also pointed out, in those posts, what would be required to turn other existing reservoirs into pump storage schemes. Did you see that? We nedd very long lengthes os tunnels and pipes. Lewngth leads to head loss (meaning a reduction in the efficiency of energy storage and recovery, as well as high cost for the energy recovered. In simple terms, Australia simply does not have the topography or hydrology to make much hydro viable. If it was viable, we’d be building it. Remember, one the best sites in Australia that is not yet developed is Tulley Millstream. That got canned for environmental reasons.
If you want to calculate costs for generic sites you could use this unit rate as a starting point (although I’d suggest you double it for Australia): US$1000/kW and US$100/kWh for pumped hydro storage (http://www.electricitystorage.org/site/technologies/).
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Fran, peter,
I don’t think we would need more than 15GW pumped storage with a storage capacity of 300GWh( ie av 20 h operation), and I used this figure in my reply to Peter’s challenge of (see #82,Solar thermal questions). This would also need 10-20GW of OCGT but would only use at 0.10 capacity factor, so a lot less CO2 than using nuclear for next 50 years, assuming we can build about 1.2 GW per year.
None the less, lets see what would really be possible using only the Snowy Mountains existing dams.
Eucumbene is >1150m and has 4,800,000 ML capacity. Blowering is about 600-700 m lower and has 1,600,000 ML cpacity(say 600m for calculations). Pumped hydro use is not going to compromise Blowerings use for irrigation as it is rearly full and when full would not need pumped storage. It would require pumping intakes about 40m below full height. If we assume that only 1,000,000 ML is moved around this would generate 1,500MWh/1,000ML or 1,500GWh/million ML.
This would require keeping at least 20% of Eucumbens capacity or 70% of blowerings or a little of both. Alternatively all of Talbingo could be bypassed and its 900,000ML used just for pumped hydro, so irrigators don’t give up any storage.
Adding a continuous tunnel about 30km in lenght over the 600m drop, and a lot more turbines, perhaps the size of the Three Georges Dam( 22GW ). This would more than make up for any shortfall in wind or solar energy for a day or two, because we are always going to have some wind energy and some solar energy over the entire 8million sq km of Australia.
I don’t think we need that much storage but the argument that we don’t ahve the existing sites is clearly wrong.
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Neil,
I am working on a asimple spreadsheet to allow me to calculate cost and CO2 emmission for options of nuclear versus RE with storage.
However, this statement just caught my eye on ths thread so I thought I’d beter check your assumptions. You said: “This would also need 10-20GW of OCGT but would only use at 0.10 capacity factor, so a lot less CO2 than using nuclear for next 50 years, assuming we can build about 1.2 GW per year.”
Are you saying that OCGT emits less CO2 than nuclear, even at 10% capacity factor.
The round figures I use for Australia, net at power station boundary, are (in t CO2-eq/MWh) brown coal 1.3, black coal 1.0, OCGT 0.75, CCGT 0.5. Nuclear in a fossil fuel environment 0.15. Wind, excluding fossil fuel back up and other impacts on the system, 0.15. These figures are rounded and based on both the table from international comparisons and the Department of Climate Change.
Are you using similar figures, especially for nuclear, wind and OCGT? If not, we have a serious problem because if you are using the GHG emissions figures from sources such as Leuewen and Smith, we have a long way to go before we can even start comparing figures. Did you see the article at the top of the “Wind and carbon emissions – Peter Lang responds” thread. The international studies on GHG emissions factors are summarised there.
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Neil,
I can do all these calculations and check your figures, but it would really be better if you did it your self. I’ve provided figures on the Snowy potential from about comment #346.
There are lots of problems with what you are saying. Snowy system is for bot irrifgation and hydro. Eucambene is the main storage reservoir and rises and falls throughout just about its full height to serve both objectievs. If we want to turn it into punp stoegag it will compromise its use. This applies much more to Blowering which is not kept near full as you say. It rises and falls throught its full active storage (most of its volume). It catches and stores the water being released from Eucambene to generate peak power in the three Tumut power stations. It releases it when needed to maintain the appropriate flows in the Murrumbidggee River for irrigation. So to make this into a lower reservoir for pump storage will require some serious options analysis and politics.
Regarding your 30km tunnel, have you thought about that. How many tunnels and what diameter. And what would be the head loss in tunnels of that length used as pressure tunnels? I suspect you should cut your pump storage efficiency to 50% (from 80%). Is it continuous tunnel with sufficient overburden to revent hydrofracturing of the overlying rockmass (I haven’t checked but doubt it. If not we need steel lined tunnels). Does it surface at any stage?
How many Tumut 3 sized generating stations do you need? How many Tumut 3 sized pump station capacities do you need? (I think I worked this out for you in an earlier post for Blowering).
Where are you going to fit all these. Probably a lot will have to be underground. That is very costly
Then lastly what is the transmission line length and capacity required from all your wind farms to the Tumut pump stations?
Now what is the cost of all the works? I can tell you, without even doing the numbers, there is no way!
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Neil
Regarding Pumped-hydro potential:
For background Refer to: Neil #411, my replies #412 and #413, and several posts from #346.
I’ve done a bit more research on a pumped storage project between Eucumbene and Blowering.
In short the distance is 90km. If the flow rate was the same as Tumut 3, this project could generate 7.5GW. To get the flow rate, I expect we would need six tunnels of about 7 m diameter. I have not done the head loss calculations. I have not worked out what would be required to pump the necessary amount of water. The tunnels would be shared beteen pumping and generation, so this would definitely be a peak power plant only. Pumping time would be limited.
A better option might be Tantangara to Blowering. It hasd 900m head. The tunnel distance would be shorter (55km instead of 90km). At the same flow rate as Tumut 3 this would generate 9GW. To get the flow rate I expect we would need 6 tunnels oof about 7m diameter (ie same as for Eucumbene-Blowering butr shorter, so less head loss and roughly 2/3 the cost).
Tantangara-Blowering has another advantage over the Eucumbene-Blowering. Eucumbene Blowering would effectively strand the Tumut 1, 2 and 3 assets. Tantangara-Blowering, on the other hand it would not strand the Tumut 1, 2, 3 assets. They would continue to operate just as they do now. There would be a slight loss of effective storage capacity and regulation capability of Tantangara and Blowering.
I like Tantangara-Blowering. I might do some more work on the head loss in 55km of 7m diameter tunnels, the pumping requirements, and the costs. I’ll see.
By the way, I love hydro.
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Peter,
The Tantangara/Blowering suggestion sounds like a better option, as this leaves the flexibility of having both an expanded Tumut and Tantangara. Adding even one 7m return pipeline from Talbingo to Eucumbene would allow a lower cost way of returning water to Eucumbene and allow >2000GWh storage, although at perhaps only 10-12GW peak output but for 150 hours operation.
On the matter of maximum wind output, even using the figures now available form 13 wind farms very rarely is 75% capacity exceeded, while looking at any 3 of these they often exceed 95% capacity. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that 100 wind farms spread over 5 times the coastline is going to result in rarely exceeding 50-55% of capacity. This means we could probably build out about 40GW wind capacity now and be able to use 99% of output with existing energy storage, but still need considerable OCGT cpacity for those low wind periods. I think transmission capacity will be more important a limitation.
Bye the way, I think we should build nuclear as fast as possible, but think that 1 reactor per year is going to be our limit for completion from 2020 to 2030. That leaves a lot of coal fired power to be replaced by OCGT or CCGT.
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Neil (#415)
I need to build a wee spreadheet to look at the options for 2030. I’ll also look at each 5 years from 2015 to 2050. Of course, this has been done by many others before, and with much more powerful modelling capability than I can do. I like to approach these analyses from a perspecitve of ‘big-picture’, define the bounds and limits rather than get down to optimising all the possible scenarios. Once we get into looking into the future, the arguments are endless about the assumptions. So let me see if we agree the following inputs:
Electricity demand to 2030 is as forecast in ABARE: http://www.abareconomics.com/publications_html/energy/energy_07/auEnergy_proj07_tables.pdf
Nuclear can be installed at the rate of 3GW by 2025, 10GW by 2030, 1GW per year to 2035, then 2 GW per hyear after that
We can remove 1GW per year of coal fired power stations from 2012
We can replace coal and build new capacity using:
CCGT
Wind + OCGT until 2020
Wind + storage
Solar PV + storage
solar thermal + storage
pumped hydro and or CAES up to 15GW max
nuclear
Transmission
Do you agree with these. No more options. This is big enough job on its own.
I also want to cost the Tantangra-Blowering pumped hydro scheme. I’ll probably tackle this first.
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Neil Howes (#415),
You said ” Adding even one 7m return pipeline from Talbingo to Eucumbene would allow a lower cost way of returning water to Eucumbene and allow >2000GWh storage, although at perhaps only 10-12GW peak output but for 150 hours operation. ”
One tunnel from Eucumbene to Blowering (not Talbingo) would give you only 1.25GW power – not 10 to 12 GW as you stated – and that is only if the flow rate in 90 km of 7m diameter rough rock tunnel is the same as in 1km of 5.6m diameter steel pipe – which I doubt!
I haven’t touched on the power reqired to pump the water back up and the efficiency losses.
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The 154MW solar power station being built at Mildura has just gone into adminsitration.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,,26040367-36418,00.html
“AUSTRALIA’S leading solar energy company was placed into the hands of voluntary administrators yesterday and almost all of its 150 staff stood down pending a review to see if the business can be salvaged.
Solar Systems had received promises of $129m in funding from federal and state governments to build Australia’s first large scale solar power station, a $420m project near Mildura in Victoria.
It also had ambitions for 1000MW of large-scale solar installations in Asia, using its unique solar dish technology, at an estimated cost of more than $3 billion, and to become one of the top five global solar energy companies over the next five years. ”
I suppose some people will argue it is all the governmen’s fault – e.g the governments haven’t provided enough subsidies.
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It comes back to this (doesn’t it always?):
My my. $3000/kw overnight costs. Times…4? 5? Really, it gets so tiring people just will not get it.
So you know, the US NEI site has a shout-out for this thread noting it’s “ridiculously long commentary that is well worth the read” to paraphrase, not quote.
David
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Peter#416,
These values seem about right, is this for a National(ie including WA, and some of the smaller isolated grids, such as karatha, Esperance) grid?
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peter#417,
A single 7m returm to Eucumbene from Talbingo would be to restore water to Eucumbene ,not primarily power generation(0.18ML/sec).
The existing Tumut1&2, or upgraded Tumut3 provides the power but you have an large long term store in the water at Eucumbene that can be used perhaps once every few months for extreme events.
You would be draining Talbingo faster than refilling, but still add a lot more reserve
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Neil (#420)
I should probably reduce the ABARE demand figures to the NEM share.
I’ll think about this when I get to it.
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Neil,
Before I go to the trouble of estimating the cost of a Tantangara-Blowering pumped hydro scheme, have you already crunched some costs on this or other similar pumped hydro systems, using reasonably up to date costs?
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Neil #421
You says; “A single 7m returm to Eucumbene from Talbingo would be to restore water to Eucumbene ,not primarily power generation(0.18ML/sec).”
I don’t understand what you are trying to achieve with this.
1. You would be pumping water out of Talbingo before it has generated power in Tumut 3. What is the point of that? Pumping 90 km is going to require in the order of twice the power generated.
2. The flow rate you have suggested is twice the flow rate pumped by the Tumut 3 pumps.
3. How much water spills over the spillway at Tumut 3? If very little, than there is nothing value to be gained by pumping water from Tumut 3 to Eucumbene. I expect very little does spill. I expect the releases down the Tumut River (through Tumut 1, 2 and 3 are very well controlled to optimise electricity generation. I doubt much is wasted. If I am correct, then there would be no spare water to pump back to Eucumbene from Talbingo. It would be better to pump from Blowering to Tantangara
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Heads Up …
Tim Lambert over at Deltoid has just kicked off a topic on the utility of nuclear power.
I might have been harangued, as Barry notes, but apparently Tim thought it worth taking up and specifically cited my text as the prompt, adding his own view, expressed in 1988, about the relative merits of nuclear power over fossil fuels in combating climate change.
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Yes, I might dip my toe in there ..
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Neil and Barry,
Here is an idea that someone might like to research further. The idea builds on suggestions about energy storage, especially those of Neil Howe, David Benson, and Fran Barlow. This idea might make wind power along the coast of the Nullarbor more economically viable.
The bedrock under the Nullarbor Plain is limestone. I understand it is cavernous. Perhaps it could host Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) sites close to the wind farms along the coast. If so, we could store energy near the wind farms and supply high quality power from the CAES. There would need to be relatively short, high capacity transmission from the wind farms to the CAES but the trunk lines from the CAES to the demand centres would be much smaller that otherwise required – they would be sized to carry peak load (instead of having to carry the nearly full capacity of all the wind farms – for the occasions when they are all blowing flat out and we want to store the energy in pumped storage in the eastern ranges).
I wonder how big are the caverns and how leaky are they. We’d also need a gas supply to the CAES sites.
Barry, what a great little multi-disciplinary research project for some students. Perhaps even a role for the geologists!
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Peter#423, 424,
I don’t have any firm figures for a 1000MW of turbines and generators, but it’s got to be less than 1000MW OCGT, or a 1000MW CAES the other alternatives for peak power.
My information was that Tumut 3 uses 1.1ML/sec( about 4000ML/h) generating 1500MW(that fits in with Jounama’s capacity of 23,000ML). Tumut 1 and Tumut 2 are about 0.24ML/sec(from memory; on frozen hard drive).
The value of being able to pump back from Talbingo is that it more than triples the actual storage, say 500,000ML from Talbingo to Blowering(150m; 200GWh), another 500,000ML from Eucumbene to Talbingo(550m? 600GWh)or even more if Blowering has the capacity.
Tantangara only has 245,000ML capacity so perhaps 150,000ML could be pumped(150GWh?), useful if Blowering has the capacity( which it would have except in spring).
Talbingo would be emptied about twice as fast as replaced by a total of 0.18 and 0.24ML(0.42ML)but this would keep Talbingo closer to full capacity longer.
Any consideration of future energy demands should assume a nation wide grid, the 1500Km gap between NEMMCO and SW WA grid needs to be completed to take advantage of peak shifting, longer solar power output and wind variability, not to mention problems such as Vargus? Island gas explosion almost crippling the WA grid. WA has lots of OCGT capacity that could help close down coal fired power in Eastern Australia a little earlier.
The best place for CAES would be in the limestone caverns on the Bight, using an E_W grid at double capacity( going both directions both E and W) and connecting to SA and NT solar farms and wind farms along the Bight coastline.
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From
http://www.cleanenergysystems.com
the pdf
ADAPTING GAS TURBINES TO ZERO EMISSION OXY-FUEL POWER PLANTS
is well worth reading.
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Neil (#430)
Below are some figures, (I think I gave you some of these in a previous post):
Current costs for hydro schemes world wide are US$2000/kW to US$4,000/kW.
Tumut 3 flow is 1,132.7m3/s generating at 1500MW (total of 6 turbines)
Tumut 3 can pump at 297.3m3/s (total of 3 pumps)
Journama Pond’s active capacity is 27,800,000m3. Area at FSL is 381ha
Talbingo Reservoir’s active capacity is 160,400,000m3. Area at FSL is 1,943ha.
Blowering Reservoir’s active capacity is 1,608,700,000m3. Area at FSL is 4,303ha.
Tantangara Reservoir’s active capacity is 238,800,000m3. Area at FSL is 2,118ha.
I don’t understand your third, fourth and fifth paragraphs. Do you have some reservoir names back to front. It looks to me as if you are pumping down stream. I don’t understand what you are suggesting.
It seems to me it would not make sense to pump any water from Talbingo to Eucumbene. If we did so we would be removing the water before it had flowed through Tumut 3, which happens to be just about the most economic of all the Snowy projects. Pumping from Blowering to the top of the storage (Talbingo or Eucumbene) would make sense if the schemes are economically viable.
By the way, I’ve done a first cut cost estimate for a Blowering-Tantangara pump storage scheme ($3.5 billion). At first glance that appears to be excellent if correct, but I need to check further.
There is one problem. Francis turbines, which are by far the best for pump storage, currently have a head limit of about 600m. We have 900m hed. The manufacturers are working on increasing that. I understand there is a lot of work going on to double them up.
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Neil and others interested in pump storage,
I’ve been looking at the Tantangara-Blowering pumped hydro scheme Neil suggested.
As usual with these projects the mor you look at it the harder and more costly it gets.
I’m writing this because some people may nbe interested in what is involved. One of the critical items to consider is thet the water table along the full length of the tunnel is above the full supply level in the dam. If the water table is below the full supply level, then water will be lost from the tunnel. We can grout small areas or line the tunnel, but both add massively to the cost.
When I first looked I thought we could run a tunnel to within 5 km of Blowering reservoir and then run steel pipes down the slopes to the reservoir. Or alternatively run the tunnel down at a steady grade and line the last 5 km of the tunnel with concreate then steel as we get closer to the reservoir. But both options have difficulties (ie costs).
I also looked at running a much shorter distance with the tunnesl and then running down the Tunut valley with pipes, This option seems to be a no go option because of the rugged topography.
Getting back to the first two options, the problem is that there is barely sufficent cover (ladn height above the tunnel for much of the distance. So perhaps as much of the tunnel may have to be lined with a water tight lining, or extensive grouting (probably the former, because it is a known engineering solution that can be costed from the beginning). The last 10 m is a problem. Running the pipes down the slope so that the slope is always negative (ie no hollows) means the pipes will be longer than appears on the map. As to how much steel pressure pipe will be needed is an open question at the moment.
Right now I have the project at about $4 billion including 20% contingency. It still seems to be exceptionally good benefit/cost ratio. I can’t work out why it hasn’t been built already.
It would work beautifully with nuclear. Store that excess energy generated in the early hours of the morning and provide up to 9GW peak power every evening. Two beautifully reliable and controllable power supplies. Who could ask for more?
Just like France. See the first and second slides on this presentation as an example of the near perfect electricity gereration system. That’s what we should model Australia’s generation system on. Notice on the second slide the rate at which France commissioned its nuclear power – and that was 30 years ago. What could we do now if we put our minds to it?
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Sorry, forgot the link.
Click to access FR_power_system_061212.pdf
Also forgot to check the spelling and grammar before hitting the submit button.
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Here’s an interesting thing from the Deltoid nuclear thread. I think it explains quite clearly why the above ‘arguments’ with Stephen Gloor came to nought. Why? Because it could never have been anything else:
Stephen Gloor wrote:
“Fran Barlow – “I’ve no problem at all with creating an incentive to reduce waste. If people waste less stuff, that is a very good thing. Even if the recovered waste heat comes from fossil fuels, then ceteris paribus that is agoodthing.”
But the whole nuclear thing is in my opinion an attempt to perpetuate business as usual. Proponents of nuclear see nuke plants as a direct replacement for coal plants with no real need to reduce waste as there is in their view plenty of energy available. As far as I can tell from reading Blee’s book the road to world peace and prosperity is simply supplying energy in unlimited quantities so that we can continue on the unsustainable party.
Embracing renewables as the primary solution also usually means energy efficiency and conservation are the number one priority BEFORE attempting to supply demand. Nuclear being primarily baseload encourages high demand so that the nuke plants can be run in the most economical mode ie: flat out 24X7.
We have major problems with our society that cannot be fixed with more energy supply. We must reduce demand and demand growth to give our society any chance of avoiding collapse and/or dangerous climate change.”
I suggest Stephen Gloor is firmly entrenched in the missing category E of Gene Preston’s classification.
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“We have major problems with our society that cannot be fixed with more energy supply. We must reduce demand and demand growth to give our society any chance of avoiding collapse and/or dangerous climate change.”
That, folks, is the single biggest philosophical difference between Green renewable advocates/anti-nuclear activists and those that support nuclear energy. These wings of the discussion do not just represent different approaches to an “energy question” but how we view the advancement (and not retreat) of humanity in solving the issue of the day.
Stephen Gloor is simply in the “We use too much energy” School of Energy Starvation Advocacy. He wants the world to use ‘less’ as if ‘more’ is somehow the root of all the planets evil. How wrong he is.
What his proposing is the continued oppression, repression and subjection of the masses of Africa, Latin America and Asia to remain in that state. A state that leads to war, ethnic cleansing and eventual destructions of whole peoples on this planet. Stephen Gloor sees this (or perhaps doesn’t see it at all being in an Ivory Tower, perhaps) as *preferable* to the employment of nuclear energy or mix of nuclear and other non-carbon, non-fossil alternatives.
In the world today, we need *more* not less energy of per-capita use. Do we need this with conservation? Efficiency? A reversal of the worst aspects of the US-imaged consumer society. Of course. But the premise…the material physical base of this, needs to be built on a foundation based on an abundance of clean, cheap accessible nuclear energy. Without this, simply put is a false promise of a “Green future” based on renewables that this discussion has proven beyond a doubt is not only too expensive, but impossible to actually implement.
BTW…what do I mean in terms of “abundance”. I’ll tell you: a stinking light switch that’s what. 2 to 3 billion people don’t have the ubiquitous light-switch that gives LIGHT when you want it. Why? because there is no grid. There is no generation. It doesn’t exist. this means no light. No refrigerator to preserve food; no small 9″ B&W TV set; not internet access; no clinic that can preserve blood and antibiotics. Not industry to provide decent paying jobs. Just misery.
The choice fellow activists is a future of shrinking energy usage, continued underdevelopment and massive poverty or one that is based on abundance. Stephen Gloor proves this more than anyone.
D. Walters
left-atomics.blogspot.com
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Peter#430,
I had a figure of 920,000ML for Talbingo and 3000Ha surface, perhaps most is mot active storage?
The reason for suggesting a pump back from Talbingo to Eucumbene would be to take greater advantage of the full storage of Blowering and adding active volume of Talbingo. So at full energy storage Blowering empty, Tantantaga, Talbingo full. At end of energy use Tantangara empty, Talbingo and Blowering full(the original water from Talbingo replaced by Eucumbene water( generating another 1GWh/800ML)so total storage could be 1,600,000ML at blowering( 245,000 from Tantangara @ 800ML/GWh=300GWh?) plus (Talbingo to blowering 1,300,000 ML at 2,600ML/GWh=500GWh) plus 1,300,000ML from Eucumbene to Blowering vias Talbingo with Talbingo finally full(800ML/GWh= 1,600GWh) for a total theoretical storage of 2,400GWh.
The catch would be the slower flow rate from Eucumbene to Talbingo meaning that only 800GWh could be generated qwuickly.
This would not have to compromise water release for irrigation, but would be a problem if Eucumbene and Blowering were full, but then could have greater environmental flows.
Do you have turbine costs of your $2,000/kW of hydro costs, surely most will be for the dam construction( not needed in this case)?
.
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David Walters (#434),
You should publish that piece. It is spot on and eloquent.
Neil Howes, (#435),
Your proposal to pump from Talbingo to Eucumbine makes no sense to me. Talbingo has only 10m of active storage. It is designed that way to maintain the maximum head for genetrating power in Tumut 3. It is not intended to be a storage reservoir. It has much more storage than Jounama Pond the lower reservoir in the pump storagte system. So if we wanted to do anything to improve Tumut 3, we’d have to expand the volume of Jounama Pond. We could do that either by keeping Blowering full, as discussed before, but the water users downstream would lose out. Blowering would no longer be a storage reservoir. Just a very costly lower pond for pump storage. Bad idea.
Another alternative is to replace Jounama pond with a new dam down stream. There is a site and it would approximately tripple the size of Jounama pond. Looks promising, but nowhere near the value of the Tantangara-Blowering pumped-hydro scheme. However, we can have both Blowering Tantangara and increased storage capacity in the lower reservoir for Tumut 3 if we build this new dam to replace Jounama Dam.
Getting back to the Talbingo-Eucumbene tunnel, I see no value in it whatsoever. Talbingo is kept at its optimum capacity by filling from Eucumbene – by releasing water that flows down the Tumut River to Talbingo and then Blowering, where it is retained and later released to serve the irrigators needs and environmental flows down the Murrumbidgee. As the water is released from Eucumbene it generates power through Tumut 1, 2 and 3. Talbingo is maintined at the optimum level for maximum head but also allowing some capacity for water pumped up from Jounama. You could think of Talbingo and Tumut 3 as mainly a run-of-river hydro scheme with a small pumped hydro top up. I can see no value in pumping from Talbingo to Eucumbene.
Regarding your question about turbine costs, they are a minor cost item in the Tantangara-Blowering cost estimate (1%). The main cost items are the tunnels (44%) and the steel pipes (35%). No dams are involved and no costs are included for the dams. The power station, including generators, turbines, pumps, transformers and the civil structures is about 5%.
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Neil Howes, #435,
I’ll paraphrase what you are saying in your post #435, then give my opinion and a very, very rough cost estimate.
You are proposing two pumped storage schemes:
1. Increase the capacity of Tumut 3 to 4500MW by adding twice the existing generating and pumping capacity to the Tumut 3 Power station (probably in two new power stations similar to the original Tumut 3, but each with twice the pumping capacity of Tumut 3). Increase the storage in the downstream reservoir by pumping back from Blowering to Jounama [and tripling the storage capacity of Jounama (my suggestion)].
2. Effectively make Tumut 1 and Tumut 2 into pump storage by pumping from Talbingo to Eucumbene and generating power by releasing from Eucumbene through Tumut 1 and Tumut 2.
I doubt Option 1 is viable. Jounama is not big enough. Tumut 3 can suck it dry too quickly. It would be too costly to install sufficient pumping capacity to pump from Blowering to Jounama to make a significant difference. If we wanted to increase the pump storage capacity of Tumut 3, I expect building a larger reservoir downstream of Jounama would be the better option. There appears, from the contour maps, to be a dam site about 4 km downstream from Jounama that would give a reservoir with about three times the active volume of Jounama. The location is where the transmission line crosses the valley.
My very rough calculation of the cost of this project is $1.9 billion for an extra 1.5GW generating capacity and $3.6 billion for an extra $3GW. This includes pipes and pumps from Blowering to Jounama with capacity to pump at the existing Tumut 3 rate (1.5GW option) or twice the Tumut 3 rate (3GW option).
This also includes building a new dam at the site below Jounama. Without the extra storage capacity in Jounama, I doubt the scheme would be viable.
I haven’t looked at option 2 in detail. However, the tunnel would be much the same cost as for the Tantangara-Blowering tunnel. Almost everything that is required for the Tantangara-Blowering pumped-hydro facility is required except the generators. So the cost is almost the same, but the head is much less and the generation through Tumut 1 and Tumut 2 is much less. The generation is less for two reasons: firstly because the head from Talbingo to Eucumbene is only 600m, and secondly, because Tumut 1 and Tumut 2 do not capture all the hydraulic head from Eucumbene to Talbingo. This proposal has little to recommend it that I can see.
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Neil,
I’ve just seen you new post about the Snowy Hydro storage potential on another thread. I’ll work on that. So, don’t bother answering here, unless you want to.
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FYI…Californians don’t get “paid” anything for their PV into the grid. In our case the meter runs backward when feeding into the grid, the right way when taking power. AT the end of the year, you get a bill with $0 due if you supplied more power than you took out. So no one is going to make any money doing this except for the fact that your bills go away, if you get enough sun.
David
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