This is a Discussion Thread, because I really want your feedback. But first, some context.
By late 2008, I was pretty stressed about climate change. Working on the science of climate (and other anthropogenic) impacts on natural systems, as I do, I could foresee potentially insurmountable problems for biodiversity and human civilisation this century. A time of consequences. Things looked grim, unless there was a massive change in attitudes towards energy supply and resource sustainability. This was exemplified by my post on the Olduvai Theory and Paul Gilding’s short essay on “The Great Disruption”. I got really annoyed by ‘climate change sceptics’ because I felt they were undermining our collective will (and political capital) to take effective action, using mostly recycled, pseudo-scientific distractions.
Then, I started to study the energy problem in detail. It was a Damascene conversion, as I came to realise, via the analysis of the real-world numbers rather than hype or spin: (a) the inadequacy of renewable energy as a complete (or even majority) solution to achieving low-carbon future (…and therefore avoiding the worst of climate change impacts), and (b) the comprehensive value of nuclear energy in solving the energy and climate challenges the world now faces, in the race to supplant our dependence on fossil fuels.
At this point, mid- to late-2009, I got really annoyed with anti-nuclear protesters, because I felt that, through their outdated ideology and inexcusable hypocrisy, they were undermining the collective will (and political capital) needed to pursue a future in sustainable atomic energy. What galled me the most about this was that I felt I was now fighting a war on two simultaneous anti-science fronts — against trenchant ‘fossil fuels forever’ interests (who ironically understood the need for energy security and technological prosperity) on one side, and hardline ‘nuclearphobes’ (who ironically understood the need for action to avoid serious climate change) on the other.
Now though, I’m much more relaxed about it all. In short, I’ve learned to stop worrying about ‘sceptics’ and ‘antis’ and love energy economics (the real-world outcome, not the academic discipline!). Let me explain briefly, prior to further elaboration in the comments section.
Historical emissions of fossil fuels have come largely from the developed world (US/Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.). In the 21st century, the growth in emissions, and quite soon the total mass of emissions, will come from the developing world (China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc.).
In the developed world, there is general recognition of the energy and climate problems, but little real political incentive to do anything meaningful about it (at least in the short term). There are, however, many minority (but influential) special-interest groups trying to block or stymie change. Now, environmental well-being is ultimately very important to these societies, as is steady economic growth and maintenance of high standards of living, but they also (think they) have the luxury of making choices that balance these priorities against more nebulous or philosophical concerns. This has, in turn, led to inaction, endless circular debates, media wars, unstrategic planning, and public policy that is guided by political points scoring and partisanship rather than rational analysis and long-term cost-benefit. In short, slow, suboptimal change.
In the developing world, there’s a race on. A race to higher standards of living and lots of energy, delivered as cheaply as possible. Environmental concerns have tended to take a back seat, although immediate, local problems, such as air and water pollution, are quickly rising to prominence. These nations represent an economic and demographic freight train, and nothing we ‘decide or advise’ in the developed world is going to slow it down. Anti-nuclear campaigners and climate change sceptics are both utterly irrelevant in these places. By the time the dust has settled, and these societies have the ‘luxury’ of paying any attention to special interest groups, it’ll already be game over — be it a ‘win’ or a ‘loss’.
Now, if the Chinas and Indias of this world do end up following a fossil-fuel-intensive pathway to development, we’re all stuffed — whether they manage to make it all the way up the development curve or fail in the attempt. It won’t matter at this point what gains the currently developed world might have managed to achieve. If, alternatively, these rapidly growing economies are able to develop and deploy non-fossil energy sources cheaply and on a massive scale, we all win. Whether the technology ends up being ‘proven up’ in China, the US, or wherever, the very fact that it will have proven cost-competitive with coal will mean that everyone has won. I return to my favourite quote from Steve Kirsch:
Pouring money into token mitigation strategies is a non-sustainable way to deal with climate change. That number will keep rising and rising every year without bound. The most effective way to deal with climate change is to seriously reduce our carbon emissions. We’ll never get the enormous emission reductions we need by treaty. Been there, done that. It’s not going to happen. If you want to get emissions reductions, you must make the alternatives for electric power generation cheaper than coal. It’s that simple. If you don’t do that, you lose.
Take a nation like Australia. It has very high per-capita carbon emissions. It currently has an anti-nuclear government. It has many noisy, influential climate change sceptics, including leading politicians. It makes token gestures towards subsidising renewable energy, but won’t commit to it seriously (for good reason, in my opinion). The upshot is that we’ll vacillate, debate and tinker with toy solutions for years. Then, when it makes economic sense to do so — when those places with the incentive to make things happen have done so and the cheaper-than-coal alternative energy is available — we’ll follow like sheep as the viable-clean-energy bell calls us home. As such, I see my role as a messenger, a public educator, a futurist, a facilitator (e.g. via SCGI). I won’t change what’s coming, but I might influence the timetable of events!
So, the debating point I open to BNC readers is this. Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? My evolved position is that they don’t — at least not in any way that is meaningful — but I’m happy to debate it below. The floor is open…
(Acknowledgements to Dr Strangelove for the title of this thread. Also, regarding the topic of weapons proliferation and used nuclear fuel, I highly recommend the following essay that has just been posted on DepletedCranium, “Why You Can’t Build a Bomb From Spent Fuel“. It’s the best layman’s summary of the issue I’ve yet seen, bar none, with lots of useful diagrams too. Do yourself a favour and go read it.).
Brave New Climate 
456 replies on “Do climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter? or: How I learned to stop worrying and love energy economics”
**GOVERNMENT POLICY OR PEAK RESOURCES CHANGING MARKET REALITIES**
Personally I don’t have a lot of hope that government are actually serious about climate change.
Yes, climate change is part of their dialogue, but it’s meaningless. Kevin Rudd’s CPRS (Ceep Polluting Regardless Scheme) issues free carbon permits to King Coal. What the heck is that about? The rest of us have to pay for pollution and buy permits, but King Coal gets them for free? Ummmm, anyone else see something wrong here?
The EU has done a bit, but are their emissions actually coming down? So I for one am hoping that the University of Newcastle peak coal study placing it between 2010 and 2048 is actually on the earlier side, because physical shortages driving the price up FOR REAL seems to be the only way we’re not going to cook our bacon.
**WHICH ENERGY SUPPLY STRATEGY WILL WIN**?
There’s lots of useful data on renewable energy from the EU, which you and Mark Diesendorf can debate till the cows come home. I for one remain unconvinced on the ultimate winner economically because I don’t think the renewables OR Gen3 / Gen4 reactors have enough market penetration and we don’t have enough experience to accurately model the inevitable economic game changers. “Black Swans” could take everyone by surprise.
EG: Don’t groan, I’m not trying to be a troll, but Better Place V2G electric cars can be seen as just one of a number of interacting factors that could tip the scale. It could become a major new ‘battery’ smoothing out the fluctuating renewable energy sources that many pro-nuclear advocates simply ignore in their thinking. So often I have seen storage factored into the costs of Solar PV or wind, when it:
* Simply may not be quite AS necessary as they advertise given the rise of true baseload renewable power. (CETO wave power currently being deployed in WA, geothermal across central Australia, and solar thermal of various descriptions working at different times to wind power, together approximating baseload power).
* Simply may not be an EXTRA cost to the utilities when it might indeed be there anyway, provided free of charge (or built into our car travel costs, depending on how you want to look at it). The V2G market will arguably smooth some of the demand as it becomes economical to sell power back during times of peak demand.
Also, anyone see the discussion about the new Solar PV at 83% efficiency? That should eventually bring the price of solar PV daytime power supply down.
Any other game changers I’ve forgotten? Nano-tech new materials that super batteries and make off-grid homes with 84% efficient solar feeding a futuristic superbattery could be a game changer.
So, while I’m not AGAINST nuclear any more, as long as the material I’m reading on these blogs is accurate, I’ll remain agnostic as to which energy provider is ultimately the best strategy because there are too many unknowns.
**SUMMING UP**
Bring on peak oil and gas, as they seem to be our only hope of truly getting this civilisation to WAKE UP and take the emergency action required.
Lastly: A comment on the Blees points about nuclear desalination.
Why would we waste so much energy doing desalination the old fashioned way? Anyone that is serious about energy conservation AND water needs to investigate the lectures on the Seawater Greenhouse. This truly is a miraculous technology that only requires a small amount of energy to pump seawater inland to the Sahara desert where the Seawater Greenhouse will do the rest, and produce 5 times the water it needs for the crops grown inside the greenhouse!
We could green large parts of the Sahara desert while using solar thermal power to pump the water.
Food + renewable energy + fresh water + a green Sahara that can support more timber, fibre, etc for the population growth of the region.
Please spend a few hours here. It’s a truly miraculous synergy of needs met, and could easily work here in Australia as well.
http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com/
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In my opinion the critical issue to address is the whole decision making process. I believe the time has come in democratic countries to replace adversarial government and with its partnership with a reactive, topical and competitive media. Adversarial government and competitive media encourage misinformation and manipulation of perceptions of people who are unconcerned about issues we all face. This is why the climate change and nuclear sceptics are having such a prominent undeserved voice.
Attempts to lobby governments in this environment is unable to meet the need for change fast enough, just as renewable energy is not able to meet the needs in time to make a difference. We need to construct a new means of informed discussion starting from the most important issues facing the global community. It needs to gather enough momentum to not merely make governments notice, but to make the current system irrelevant. In this new age of electronic communication there is the potential for this to happen.
There are powerful websites, such as Avaaz.org that provide a powerful voice, but a person can too easily vote without having any knowledge of the background. Actions are too easily dismissed as electronically generated email or as uncritical followers. There must be ways around this, such as a quiz like those used in on-line training whereby one cannot proceed until the correct answers are obtained to demonstrate familiarity with the content.
There could be a proxy voting system, whereby anyone could nominate a person to vote on specific issues on his or her behalf. Individuals in the voting public could nominate different people to represent them on different issues.
I would like to find if others are thinking along these lines at all?
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Yes,climate change deniers,nuclear deniers and,even worse,population deniers,do matter- a hell of a lot.We are running out of time.
Until those sheep you are talking about can be convinced,in sufficient numbers,that the above 3 issues are make or break for this nation then we are going nowhere except into crash and burn mode,sooner rather than later.
I don’t see any of the available nonpolluting electricity generating methods being cheaper than coal.Not when the full cost of coal extraction and burning is ignored.I don’t see the powerful coal interests allowing a full accounting to happen unless they are regulated by government.Positive action by government to build nonpolluting generators is essential.
The only way that anything of value is going to happen is if political pressure is applied.The current oligarchy believe that Business As Usual is not only possible but desireable.This is due to stupidity,ignorance,arrogance and greed.Most Homo Saps only learn fom the application of pain to sensitive parts.In this case the pain has to be applied in a bipartisan manner to politicians and senior public servants.Industry will read the lay of the land and make their own arrangements to try and stay in business.
This is all well and good but is any of this going to happen? Not bloody likely until the aforementioned crash and burn wakes up the sheep – too late.
As a mere layman without pull,or push,outside of letters to the editor or some useless and corrupt minister there is not much I can do. So I’m not losing any sleep over it.
Interesting times!
Podargus – swift,silent hunter of the night.
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Both debates have been gravely hindered, if not made practically impossible, by a false democracy, which treats everyone’s opinion, even on highly technical subjects, as of equal value. This is equivalent to a denial of objective truth.
When the German government established a commission to decide the future of atomic energy with equal numbers of experts and anti-experts, the result was a great number of papers, minutes of meetings, opinions and counter-opinions, responses and counter-responses. Everything was discussed and nothing became clear. And what is worse, the experts were the best experts that could be found, so there was nobody left who could give a final opinion.
As for climate change, it does not seem to have had much effect on the lives of most people. There are reports of the melting of the Arctic ice, the inundation of New Orleans, and the melting of the permafrost; but these things happen far away, and anyway what can I do about it? People only take action when their own lives are directly threatened. The first priority of governments is to win the next election, not to introduce expensive measures to save the next generation.
Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is using their right to employ money-amplified free speech to persuade the world that man cannot possibly change the world’s climate and that continued use of their products is mankind’s wisest course of action.
These are the real antinuclear forces, these are the real climate skeptics, and the ones that can still do the most damage. The bellicose, and the scare mongers can be marginalized, their message doesn’t have the same impact it did twenty years ago, but it is a mistake to believe that the opposition to nuclear energy is a spent force. They are regrouping even now, and they have come from behind and blind-sided plans for a nuclear power future before.
Don’t count them out.
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I think you are asking the wrong question. the question should be “do anyone’s opinions matter?” You would get the same answer – they don’t or at least not in the way you appear to be hoping for.
One of the things that emerges from this post is something that, in the years I worked as a an international consultant dealing with China and India and Asia generally, was quite common among westerners – a failure to understand the nature of decision making in these areas.
When I say our opinions are irrelevant I mean that the motivation to pursue a particular policy direction is not based on any global considerations but purely and simply on what is in the domestic interest.
What will motivate both India and China is any technology that is affordable and will enable them to increase their economic growth. But affordable is not merely defined by price – it is also determined by expertise – the simpler the technology the more attractive it becomes for they do not want a technology where they will remain dependent on the west.
But whether I think they should forgo the nuclear route or you think they should go the nuclear route is totally irrelevant as far as they are concerned.
Indeed if we look at government decision making globally then one would have to conclude that what people think is by and large irrelevant; politicians have learnt the art of selling whatever message they want to sell. The fact the clean coal is being sold to us is one indication of that belief.
So Barry you do not have a question to debate for both of our ideas are equally irrelevant.
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John Tons, I don’t understand what you are arguing against here, or what you think I’m ‘hoping for’.
By saying “What will motivate both India and China is any technology that is affordable and will enable them to increase their economic growth… But whether I think they should forgo the nuclear route or you think they should go the nuclear route is totally irrelevant as far as they are concerned” you are agreeing almost exactly with the point I was making in the post above. So what is your idea that’s different to mine?
DV8’s point about fossil fuel interests being the real anti-nuclear and climate ‘sceptics’ is spot on. In the long run, they can’t stop the non-fossil-fuel energy transformation, but they can slow it down enough to make a real difference for climate — especially in the West — but also in Asia. That’s the biggest danger, so the question is, can Western governments do anything to prevent this, even if they decided this was in their interest?
Perhaps what “we” can do is help in getting costs of low-carbon electricity down. In which case, maybe climate sceptics and anti-nukes do matter after all? This is the discussion I’m trying to get us to knock around…
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If Rod Adams were here, he might argue that your two-front war is in reality one enemy attacking on two fronts, but whose homeland can be knocked out in a concentrated push against it. He would likely identify these as the current fossil fuel interests.If DV82XL were here he might point out the extreme unlikelihood of the continuous attack from this opponent to be abated by any means of reasoned debate, and the most likely path to victory in the first world leading through mass political action. I also suspect that first-world energy companies have a great deal of potential and motive to maintain their partial monopoly on relatively expensive energy, and won’t hesitate to take action to delay nuclear power everywhere around the world. The economics of scarcity can have its own logic for those in charge of supply.
In short, I don’t share your judgement that complacency is justified, or that activism is not.
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Robert Lawrence,
You’d probably like a group I used to belong to called “Beyond Federation” where they discussed alternative political models that did not favour the 2 party system.
However, in light of Lord Monckton’s “COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY!” (oh the humanity!), comments about changing the nature of our democracy have to be very carefully spelt out as still being in favour of democracy, or we’ll play right into Moncktons hands.
Podgarus,
surely peak oil will take care of the “BAU” mentality, within 5 years I’d argue? Then the “Emergency Economy like WW2” speaches can begin.
DV82XL is tempting me to abandon democracy with his speech on ‘treating everyone’s opinion as the same’ shtick, but Monckton might not like it. ;-)
The thing is, having been involved in political reform groups (Beyond Federation), the energy required to reform one JOT of the Constitution is unbelievable. That document is stuck in the mud,and the constitutional reform processes are stuck in the mud as well!
So good luck with dreaming up new political formats for Australia, I’ll trust to peak oil.
John Tons has given us a little Asian political culture, which is essentially pragmatic, about getting the job done, rather than popular opinion.
But where will the priorities of energy spending be in those nations within 5 years? Once the reality of peak oil hits the world marketplace and the price signals for oil change forever, surely a pragmatic, economic growth model favouring fast trains and electric cars will take off exponentially? I can imagine emergency legislation that basically orders all car companies to be “Better Place” batterys-swap compliant, just to help the international standards along.
Finrod remains an idealist.
“The economics of scarcity can have its own logic for those in charge of supply.” Part of me admires this, but I’m so burnt out after various family crisis and failed experiments in activism that I shrug my shoulders and wait for new technology and peak oil and gas to do the job for us.
Hopefully coal will plateau and we’ll see emissions finally come down because there’s less oil and gas to burn, full stop! And if Gen3/4 reactors, thin film solar PV, and solar thermal can compete with coal, all the better.
Keep on trucking guys, because apart from the occasional rant on my blog, I’ve got nothing left.
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@Finrod – I am here and you have succinctly captured one of my first reactions – the anti-nuclear movement and the climate change skeptics are aligned in many ways.
In response to Barry’s original premise, I am not complacent, but I am optimistic. I recognize that there is a tremendous amount of wealth and power behind the twin anti-science fronts that Barry has identified, and that is a bit scary. However, I am consoled by the fact that we have amazing communications tools that do not cost much money to use, and by the fact that there are a hell of a lot more energy consumers in the world than energy producers.
If fission was just a little bit better than combustion, I would have given up a long time ago. However, it is far more than 2 million times better than combustion and we are still on the early flat part of a traditional technological ‘S’ curve of development. I still converse on a regular basis with Ted Rockwell, a man who was an adult when fission power was first put into human hands and he was part of the team that made that happen.
That knowledge is quite refreshing when I get down about the seemingly slow progress of the second Atomic Age. We are in a competitive battle with some very well established rivals, but just as inevitably as microprocessors replaced mainframes, so will uranium and thorium replace coal, gas and oil.
They have fundamental advantages in energy density and in the tiny volume of used material production. The machinery needed to use them is simplified by the reduced need to move massive quantities of material and by the lack of dependency on a lengthy supply chain for continued operation.
NuScale, mPower, Hyperion, TerraPower, and perhaps many others are going to win as they learn how to produce power that is so cheap that it will impoverish coal, oil and gas producers. That is the way we will win, and the politics of the situation will support us as people recognize the truth of our statements about energy that really is cheap enough to sell on an “all you can eat” basis with a flat monthly rate.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
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Eclipse Now
Thanks for the warning about Monckton’s spin.
I have sat in many meetings involved in the management of a particular large education institution in which each discipline area had an elected representative. The organisation was run democratically without any thought of a bipartisan approach. This approach could happen without any change to the constitution. All it needs is for people to choose representatives and to refuse to vote for political parties. Getting voters to see the importance of this is, unquestionably, an ambitious aim, but so is saving the planet from global warming, overpopulation and acidification of the ocean.
Barry
I don’t think Western governments in their current form have any capacity to resist moves to slow the transformation from coal. The major parties in Australia are funded by people in pro-development industries who will do anything to keep environmentally sensitive groups out of government. Our current major parties cannot meet the demands of the Greens because they are funded to be different from them. The major parties are just trying to be a tiny bit greener than each other to woo the green voters who don’t like either of them. They need to be democratically removed. It seems more feasible to make such a change in Australia than in the United States because our government departments stay in place from election to election. There is great scope for improving the way these departments work together. Currently in South Australia we have a population growth aim and dog and cat management policies that are working against the environment. No wonder Western governments are powerless.
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I won’t speak about climate change deniers; but anti-nukes matter very much to me.
First, my personal efforts and professional drive are both spurred on by the increasing trend of former anti-nukes changing their opinions to favour nuclear power.
Much can also be gained by reviewing the history of anti-nuclear campaigns. For example, in the late 1990’s anti-nuclear campaigners fought against a new Australian research reactor – specifically citing one of its uses (to produce medical isotopes) as redundant and unjustifiable. Fast forward to today and the two research reactors that produce the lion’s share of the most utilised medical isotope in the world (Molybdenum-99 or Mo-99) are now in long term maintenance shutdowns that have resulted in the US FDA and a number of medical associations announcing a worldwide supply crisis. Clearly, alternative production technology does, in fact, not exist.
Another example is the 2007 Labor political campaign – including anti-nuclear scare tactics and promises of emissions cuts. We were led to believe an easy and obvious cocktail of efficiency, conservation and renewables could do it all; fast, cheap and with very low risk. Subsequently, Labor took the helm. In control of National Government and at all State and Territory levels; I doubt a political climate more favourable to a Labor agenda could have existed, yet tangible action to cut Australian emissions is yet to begin. Worse, large coal stations continue to be planned around the country to satisfy growing demand.
These historical lessons are quite valuable and should not be forgotten during ongoing discussions.
Also, it is important to understand that there are different degrees of what may be perceived as ‘anti-nuclearism’. On the much more reasonable end of this spectrum lie hard working and credible scientists providing very valuable input with respect to non-proliferation, waste management options , etc. that may negatively reflect on one or more nuclear deployment option. Open, frank discussions with nuclear sceptics can and often do lead to optimised technology deployments while minimising legacy challenges.
Furthermore, nuclear advocates are often their own worst enemies, shouting down one technology in favour of another (thorium vs. fast reactors vs. LWRs, etc.). Often times these debates give fodder to the eager and less informed antis.
Actively engaging anti-nuclear advocates is important to advancing the consideration of nuclear power around the world. Challenging as it sometimes is, engagement helps educate the public, shift political climates and progress technology development.
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“anti-nuclear movement and the climate change skeptics are aligned in many ways.”
**Rod Adams**,
that’s just a sneaky way of calling everyone an idiot that disagrees with you on nuclear! Play nice. “Climate change sceptic” is not a nice thing for an environmentalist to call another environmentalist.
“NuScale, mPower, Hyperion, TerraPower, and perhaps many others are going to win as they learn how to produce power that is so cheap that it will impoverish coal, oil and gas producers. That is the way we will win, and the politics of the situation will support us as people recognize the truth of our statements about energy that really is cheap enough to sell on an “all you can eat” basis with a flat monthly rate”
Or will it be thin film nano-solar with some spunky new nano-materials super-battery we haven’t dreamed of yet? Some of the thermal materials required for Gen4 reactors to become commercially viable are also of interest to the solar thermal guys for high heat retention storage devices.
Basically, you seem to be counting your chickens before they’ve actually hatched… just as some of the renewables guys have made similiarly bold pronouncements about the way renewables will play out, heck, or even the FUSION geeks! “We’ll have power off the meter because fusion will be here before 1999.” Right.
I am encouraged that there are so many technologies, but discouraged about the honesty of bloggers that count on things before they’ve been commercially proven and appear so idealogically committed to one position that they alienate other climate activists by calling them names!
**Hi Robert**,
coal runs out in NSW in 33 years. Production will peak sometime before then.
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honesty of bloggers
should have been
“honesty” of bloggers or…
so called honesty of bloggers who talk it up, while calling their climate activist allies dirty names. Tch tch. (Wags finger).
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@eclipsenow – I am confused by your post. If you are not anti-nuclear and not a climate change skeptic, how did I insult you?
With regard to your dreams of magical devices that somehow turn the sun into a reliable energy source, despite the easily observed phenomenon called “night” all I can say is – huh?
Bill Gates had an interesting statistic during his TED talk. If you total up the energy storage capacity of every single battery that is in existence in the world, and compare that to the world’s energy consumption, you will find that we can store roughly TEN MINUTES worth of energy.
I have it on pretty good authority that Bill received some strong technical backup during the preparation of his talk, so I am pretty sure that the statistic is accurate.
Nano anything is not going to change that fact. Batteries are important devices for a lot of reasons, but they have no significant current or future role in supplying reliable energy to the world economy.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
PS – I am not just a blogger, but a reasonably experienced practical engineer.
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Eclipse Now
Is the situation with coal the same in Queensland? It is an interesting question to think about how Australia will fair after we have sold off most of our mining resources in the next 50 years.
Rod Adams
There may be many other better ways to store energy than batteries. Silicon Chip magazine had an article on some new kind of capacitor that could help fill the gap. Blee’s idea on the use of Boron also has potential.
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@Robert Lawrence – so if we add up the ten minutes worth of storage in all of the world’s batteries (think automotive, UPS, portable devices, telco backups, etc.) and then add up “new kinds of capacitor” and “Boron” how much storage would we have – perhaps 10.01 minutes?
We are not going to solve our energy supply challenges with anything that is being discussed on a laboratory scale. Fission technology is relatively new in the energy world, but it has demonstrated its ability to actually capture significant markets from fossil fuels because it is better than they are.
There is a reason why US nuclear power plants operate at an average CF of 90+% and why 10% of the grid’s capacity produces 20% of its electricity.
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Great questions.
Does debating climate sceptics matter? Yes. Here are the numbers (Australian polling data from Possum’s Pollytics).
Basically, for every percentage point increase in global warming scepticism, there’s an equal decrease in support for a CPRS. (I’m assuming CPRS support is a proxy for support for action, despite the legislation’s flaws.) Possum’s commentary is interesting:
Global warming scepticism has more than doubled (13% -> 31%) since 2006, and its growing. So if the political strategy is develop a policy on global warming, a much more effective response to the sceptics is critical.
I believe that this pattern will be the case in every western democracy, which need to be part of the climate solution. So the debate needs to be joined, not just in Australia, but everywhere.
Does debating anti-nukes matter? Yes. There are significant steps that Australia needs to be taking now if we are going to see nuclear power deployed here sooner rather than later. Regulatory frameworks, establishing departments of nuclear engineering, uranium mining and processing and transport, a public discussion of siting. All these need community support, and this can be confounded or derailed by antinuclear campaigners. Just like the climate denialists, this debate has to be joined in the public sphere to create a more sophisticated community dialogue and provide models of reasonable intelligent people with motives beyond reproach advocating NP, which basically don’t exist in this country, though Barry’s carving himself a niche.
I assume this applies elsewhere in the West, though perhaps not to the same extent as Australia.
Barry, I agree with your ‘broad sweep of history’ prognosis – Asia takes the lead in deploying the technology for pragmatic reasons, and we will ultimately follow, for pragmatic reasons. But there are good arguments for pursuing the public debate for some time yet, if the aim is to bring forward NP deployment in Australia, and probably elsewhere. We haven’t reached the point of diminishing return on effort, yet.
Incidentally, Possum has analyzed polling on both climate change attitudes and nuclear power and how the issues play out in voting patterns. Why don’t you see if he’d be interested in doing a guest post on these topics?
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Rod Adams,
you didn’t offend me, but probably offended many lurkers who might come here for Barry’s climate knowledge but are tradiational greenies, wary of nuclear energy. They will not be won over by calling them names. It will take time, and patience, and facts, and a gentle manner to win them over.
“With regard to your dreams of magical devices that somehow turn the sun into a reliable energy source, despite the easily observed phenomenon called “night” all I can say is – huh?”
Nice calm, rational, polite reply there. What the heck is it about blogging that brings this out in Alpha Males? I’ll tell you and Barry something: it wasn’t the *pissing contest* that happens on these blogs that won me over, but the more polite and fact based presentations for Gen4 Reactors that Barry has in his various podcasts.
As for that terrible phenomenon of the NIGHT (drum rolls!)
Ever head of batteries?
Before you scoff there are ways batteries will help. Everyone else can stop reading now, as this is a bit of a rant reply because I’m so sick of some of these myths and cherrypicking.
1. Radical hippie lifestyle changes that are becoming more commercially mainstream in the culture.
If one is willing to sacrifice a bedroom or 2 on the size of the average oversized American **McMansion**, and will build a home with proper passive solar tecniques, then you can go off-grid economically. My sister in law has a Phd in passive solar design using thermal mass as an interior temperature controller.
But check out these even more radical guys that have made the decision to go off-grid. They’re totally off all services, and live a comfortable, *cheap* life. And just as you guys want to turn nuclear-waste into gold, these guys turn other unusual materials into solid walls and thermal mass collectors!
http://earthship.net/
UK councils are looking at Earthship designs. This could be going mainstream. Heck, they even built an Earthship on the ABC’s “Grand Designs”.
2. So Bill Gates and that 10 minutes thang?? That’s because the world sucks at building homes right now, and sucks at transport, and sucks at energy efficiency, and the Better Place Vehicle To Grid cars have not been deployed yet.
10 minutes of the world’s grid is probably true. I have no problem with that statement as a statement of today’s technologies.
But you totally missed the fact that *I* was basically quoting Bill Gates, and YOU’VE CHERRYPICKED HIM. Was he saying batteries will *never* be part of the solution? Or was he saying a ‘miracle’ was needed, much as I was above when I referred to a nano-tech miracle?
Let’s listen to him.
“We need a big breathrough here, something that is going to be a factor of 100 or better, than the approaches we have now! It’s not impossible, but it’s not a very easy thing”.
(12 minutes in).
All I can say is, “Ooops”. There’s that honesty thing again.
3. Electric cars that can sell back to the grid.
I NOTE WITH INTEREST that Better Place cars were overlooked by Blees in the debate with Diesendorf. Blees kept hammering home the point that European wind often blew at night, when there was no real need for it. There might not be much of a need for it TODAY but in 5 or 10 years when the market is starting to be saturated by electric cars? When every home has a Better Place V2G car in it, there WILL be a market for that electricity, and it can be sold again in the peak afternoon periods.
4. Now put Bill Gates dream battery in those Better Place cars. remember, you don’t have to BUY these batteries… they are owned by the Better Place battery swap scheme and the price is covered in the charge cost / km, currently at around 2/3 the price of oil!
Imagine a 100 fold increase in the power of a Better Place car battery, which would be about 600km worth of juice in it! Just imagine the synergies between various renewable supply times and the grid-demand smoothing capacity of V2G cars.
5. Who said I NEED to worry about the night anyway? Maybe I like my 87% energy efficient solar panels on my roof for economic reasons, and it belts out the power when I need it most. Then I turn the TV off and stop cooking and go to bed, and local industry shuts down, and guess what? There might be a bit of wind blowing at night, or some baseload geothermal, baseload OTEC, baseload CETO wavepower, or even baseload solar thermal.
MAYBE I’ll just ignore the night, if that’s OK with you, and just enjoy what PV does… and gives me nice, cheap, clean power during the day!
Having said all that, I’m now quite excited by the idea of Gen4 reactors eating up all our old waste for the next 500 years, by which time I doubt we’ll need fission *because* of my many sci-fi like dreams of fusion and the miracles nano-science may bring us. But unlike some here, I’m not trying to **count** our chickens before they’ve hatched. I thought the context of my writing clearly showed that I was **guessing at** Black Swans, which by definition are unknowable surprises in the science, and just saying “nano-tech” in front of something these days seems to also indicate magical properties, largely because… they are.
I was extrapolating out many dreams people were having about the future… including Bill Gates.
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Do these posts have a size limit? My last post doesn’t appear to have come up.
Rod Adams,
you didn’t offend me, but probably offended many lurkers who might come here for Barry’s climate knowledge but are tradiational greenies, wary of nuclear energy. They will not be won over by calling them names. It will take time, and patience, and facts, and a gentle manner to win them over.
“With regard to your dreams of magical devices that somehow turn the sun into a reliable energy source, despite the easily observed phenomenon called “night” all I can say is – huh?”
Nice calm, rational, polite reply there. What the heck is it about blogging that brings this out in Alpha Males? I’ll tell you and Barry something: it wasn’t the *pissing contest* that happens on these blogs that won me over, but the more polite and fact based presentations for Gen4 Reactors that Barry has in his various podcasts.
I have a few comments to make on batteries, especially your cherry-picking of Bill Gate’s talk, but this post is probably too long.
[Ed: No size limit, but they do sometimes get caught in the SPAM queue, especially if they have multiple embedded links. If you post something and it doesn’t appear, I suggest you don’t re-write or repost it, but wait until I get to the spam queue clearance, which is usually a few times a day]
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@eclipsenow – Being polite and accommodating has not gotten me very far in life, so I have decided to be more like some of my high school friends who moved to Florida from Brooklyn. If I think someone is making false statements or trying to blow smoke, I will say so.
Nothing anyone says or writes should win you over – what matters is the facts. Solar energy is weak and diffuse and that is a good thing – it allows us to take advantage of the sun’s warmth and light without becoming crispy critters.
On the other hand, mechanical devices can be made ever cheaper if they can use concentrated energy sources that do not require much much material per unit energy. Nuclear fission fuels are 2 million times as concentrated as the most concentrated combustion fuels.
With regard to cherry picking Gates’s talk for information about the limitations of batteries, all I did was take a pithy quote that supports my thesis, but also did not misrepresent the remainder of the point that the original source was making. That is exactly what my English lit teachers taught us to do.
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Energy economics will win the day if people can read the signals while there is time to act. It seems we will will take decisive action only when there are repeated dire warning signals, and maybe not even then. I think early peaking of fossil fuels or logistic shortages may achieve more than deliberate climate policy. Here’s a couple of reasons why emissions may decline in the next decade even without carbon taxes
1) Peak Oil slows the global economy and takes coal with it
2) China and India need more coal, particularly hard coal, than the rest of the world can supply.
If either scenario eventuates we will get a bumpy and conflict ridden transition to lower carbon, along with decades more climate change. Then the same people who scoff at climate concerns will scream loudest for new sources of energy. It’s not hard to predict the early winner will be gas until it too becomes expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if the politicians and the ETS lobbyists could acknowledge this well in advance instead of trying to blackmail special deals. I’m talking brown coal, aluminium smelting, soil carbon and so on.
Sidenote on how politicians think; it’s well known the vanadium redox battery on King Island intended to store wind power has been a disappointment. The island still has $2m a year fuel cost to run the diesel generator. Now that fuel will be even more expensive biodiesel so they can claim to be ‘green’ after all. It’s easy being green when someone picks up the tab.
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hi Barry,
I think your whole argument rests on whether nuclear is cheaper or will soon become cheaper than coal, or not.
I’ve been reading Tom Blees book, the 2005 IEA study on which he relies, some follow up about France, John McCarthy’s site and also Bernard Cohen’s online book for some historical perspective. There are arguments in these places that nuclear has been cheaper (Cohen), is currently competitive (France), could be cheaper (Blees quotes an IEA study) and should be cheaper in the future (the IFR solution).
However, I’m still not sure. If in fact it was cheaper or would soon be cheaper then more nuclear plants would be being built or in the pipeline rather than the more modest increase that we are currently seeing. We can’t blame the lack of fast progress just on manipulative coal companies or the failure of nerve and ignorance of politicians, or even the skeptics or anties, although no doubt that all contributes to the churn. As you say, economics is the bottom line.
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@eclipsenow – You are quite mistaken about renewable critics trying to be “Alpha Males”, or engaging in “pissing contest”. Mitigation of climate change is a serious business, and we need answers that we can be reasonably assured will work. Barry, Rod, and I are serious people, and we have all asked renewable advocates serious questions, for which they have been unable to provide satisfactory answers. There are some renewables advocates who freely admit that renewables will fall far short of mitigating 80% of carbon emissions by 2050. They offer no ifs, ands, or buts about this admission, although they do continue to believe that renewables offer far more value in mitigating carbon than I do. I have pointed to evidence coming from pro-renewable research sources, that carbon mitigation by onshore wind, will cost 3.5 times as much per ton, than carbon mitigation by supposably more expensive nuclear. No renewables supporter has even attempted to deny my conclusion, let alone to engage me in debate on my evidence or my conclusion. Renewables supporters seem unable to offer support for their contentions that is backed by well attested facts, and tightly reasoned arguments. When challenged, renewable supporters, either withdraw in confusion, simply move on to another previously discredited argument, or engage in ad hominem attacks on nuclear supporters. Terms like “Alpha Males”, or engaging in “pissing contest”, are examples of that tactic.
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I have repeatedly argued that climate change skeptics are far less opposed to effective AGW mitigation in practice, than anti-nuclear greens are. AGW skeptics can be persuaded by arguments, such as energy independence, lower health care costs, and lower cost electricity, as selling points for nuclear power, and will willingly accept a nuclear based AGW solution, if that solution has economic advantages.
There is a band of hard core breens, who are not willing to engage in a dialogue about the use of nuclear power for AGW mitigation. They consistently exaggerate the liabilities of nuclear power, refuse to acknowledge advances in nuclear safety technology, refuse to acknowledge the possibility of further technological conclusion, refuse any comparison between the costs of renewable and nuclear solutions, and attempt to decide the issue be appeals to emotions, rather than science based arguments.
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@Bill – economics are the bottom line, but that does not mean that the power system that is the lowest cost is the one that is selected by the people who build and operate power plants.
Their decisions are driven by building the power plants that can provide them with the most reliable stream of profits.
Under current rules, at least here in the US, those plants are often the ones that are fueled by natural gas or coal. The reason is a bit complicated – nuclear plants cost more initially because of all of the layers of requirements that drive their construction times to several years longer AND most of the electric power companies are in places where they are allowed to pass through fuel costs but must justify plant investment costs.
That gives them an incentive to build low cost plants that might have to use high cost fuel. The advantage that nuclear has is that the fuel does not cost much per unit of heat. That advantage is not given much credit under the current rules, even if it would result in lower cost power over time.
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@eclipsenow:
Even if we miraculously improve our tech by several orders of magnitude, what exactly do you plan on making all these batteries and technosolar harvesters out of? Rare Earths? Hope you live in China.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/china-tightens-control-over-rare-earth-metals-vital-for-green-technology.php
By the way, why would a technosolar advocate choose a name like ‘eclipsenow’? Yet another example of why we would need the batteries…
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DV8’s point about fossil fuel interests being the real anti-nuclear and climate ’sceptics’ is spot on. In the long run, they can’t stop the non-fossil-fuel energy transformation, but they can slow it down enough to make a real difference for climate — especially in the West — but also in Asia. That’s the biggest danger, so the question is, can Western governments do anything to prevent this, even if they decided this was in their interest?
Of course they can, but they have to want to do it. They wont want to do so without strong lobbying by special interest groups with the funds to make themselves heard, or mass political action which threatens to undermine their electoral base.
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I think Charles Barton touches an important point with the attitude of the ‘pro-renewables’.
There are a lot of people out there who accept that we need to ditch fossil fuels, but think that renewables can solve the problem. If they would think critically about the true cost of renewables, they might realise otherwise.
Until they question their faith in renewables, they will not look any further, so talking to them about nuclear gets you nowhere.
It may even help when talking to pro-renewable people not to mention nuclear. Eventually, they will bring it up themselves, saying that surely, even if renewables aren’t yet good enough, nuclear is worse, so what choice do we have? By that time their argument is spent, and they may actually be interested in listening to you.
I suspect that the pro-renewable, nuclear-indifferent camp outnumbers the staunchly anti-nuclear camp, so addressing them may yield better results.
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I’d like to chime in on the idea that energy economics combined with peak oil/coal/natural gas will directly help us confront AGW. Unless nuclear, or some other technology, can beat fossil fuels at today’s prices, and do so clearly, it is quite possible we will go down the post peak slope of the famous peak oil bell curve burning all the fossil fuels we can lay our hands on that has an EROEI > 1. It is my understanding that we need to leave fossil fuel in the ground, even the supplies with an EROEI much greater than 1, if climate change is to be avoided.
If the free market operates in energy as some would advertise it, we can expect rising fossil fuel prices to prompt conservation and investment in alternatives, followed by a drop in demand that prevents prices from skyrocketing indefinitely. Paradoxically, this could allow China, India and the rest to continue using the fossil fuels available with a reasonable EROEI. 100+ years from now, the world’s last highly efficient coal plant could be shut down, the last super advanced kerosene burning jetliner could roll into a bone yard and the last gas fired plant be switched off. Trouble is, it will be too late from a climate perspective by then. It won’t matter that the economy is running on clean electricity, as far as the world’s climate is concerned.
So, the climate change deniers matter because they don’t see the need to leave fossil fuel in the ground and the anti-nuclear greens matter because they may be standing in the way of the cheapest alternative.
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Hi Barry,
I am a retired engineer, and I am trying to invent things to fight climate change and its effects.
I have a patent pending invention in Australia
for a system to fight bushfires.
http://www.electric-fluid-pipeline.com
I am looking for an Australian company to develop the invention.
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Rod.
You are just beeing disrespectfull to any PV engineer and researcher.
Among nuclear bloggers there is something like an kno-it-all-god-like complex.
Beeing anti-renewable is not better than anti-climatechange or anti-nuclear.
Artikles like that which mix unrelated topics are just showing that.
Barry, you should threat this two in extra articles.
I wonder if you even could recognice the fact that renewables might be cheaper than nuclear solutions.
Did I just miss the point where you turned form nuclear engineer to pv/storage engineer?
Eclipsenows first and third post sum it up pretty well.
It is possible to have solar cells at 83% or just the other way round like Austrian researchers just demonstrated: Cells at 20% of the cost without indium or germanium for that matter.
It is also possible to have LFTRs or fussion someday. That does not mean one has to support Gen3.
Battery capacity…so what? How many handsets/mobiles did exist in 1995?
I can also recall various times when Billy was way of with his predictions.
He once thought that MS BOB would be an important milestone product …you might never heared of that mutantzoo.
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@Marcus – I was once enamored enough with the rosy talk that I had heard about solar and wind to take several 400 level renewable energy engineering courses with a respected researcher and professor. His name is Chih Wu; he actually wrote the book on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and published a number of papers for several decades.
After I had run the numbers and designed – but certainly not built – several solar and wind systems; Dr. Wu and I agreed to work together on a paper. It was called “Nuclear Powered Gas Turbines, An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come”. You can find it here – http://www.atomicengines.com/Documents/IASTED_Aug5-7_1992.pdf In other words, I convinced Dr. Wu that nuclear energy had more interest and potential than he had realized. He confessed to me that he only remained involved in renewable energy because there were interesting engineering problems to solve, not because he thought it would actually solve any energy supply issues. (There was also an issue of research funding; at the time, there was essentially no research money available for nuclear energy research in the US outside of national labs and associated universities.)
Unlike many of Dr. Wu’s students, I was not a typical undergraduate – I had served for 12 years as a nuclear submarine engineering officer and already had earned an MS. I also had developed what Admiral Rickover called a “questioning attitude”. I did not dismiss renewables without detailed knowledge, but once I had taken the courses, done the studies and run the numbers I dismissed them as snake oil.
You are correct. I disrespect solar PV engineers who are doing anything more than developing efficient cells for emergency communications, calculators, and perhaps space based applications. If they are actually interested in solving the world’s energy problems they are either innumerate or blind. Of course, they may also just be trying to make a living for their families, a motive that I can accept as long as they are taking steps to find a more honest way to earn money.
I have yet to see an honest accounting of solar performance. The closest I have come to finding an attempt for such accounting is Google’s page about their 1.6 MWe solar system installed in July 2007. Apparently even that monitoring system is out of commission. The total power generated number has been exactly the same since at least February 11, when I wrote to a friend who works at Google to find out if the web page was ever going to be fixed.
http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home
Completely separate topic, but here is a hint for you. If you want respect in an technical discussion, please learn to spell. Occasional typos do not detract too much, but if you have three or four misspelled words per paragraph it will be easy to dismiss you as simply uneducated.
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Rod, Marcus is Austrian. His spelling mistakes are far more forgivable than his conceptual errors.
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Barry
Good post. I think we’re both pretty much in the same place.
The trouble with real world economics though, is how rarely prices equate to real costs. Until our societies learn to properly internalise costs which are distant to us in time and place, I’m never going to love economics (although I’m starting to appreciate how important it is).
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Barry,
You have invited us to debate the proposition that “climate sceptics and anti-nukes don’t matter” which you purport to be your current point of view.
As far as I can follow your logic, your new position is predicated upon the fact the fate of the world lies in the hands of the Indians, Chinese and, possibly, the Russians and that , because these states are pressing ahead with nuclear power deployment,
what happens IN the West doesn’t have much significance. However, you spend little time dwelling on what will happen TO the West in such circumstances.
I think there were revealing comments in the update of Dr Stanford’s last post. His points 7) and 8) seem to be an acknowledgement that failure of the USA expeditiously to adopt an active nuclear stance will doom it to lose its role as the world’s policeman and leave it with a second class status on the technological front. If correct, it follows that power and economic might could permanently move to Asia with no prospect of economic recovery in the States and Europe to follow the financial meltdowns they have experienced.
In my second paragraph, I attempted to understand your logic. However, I suspect that, to a degree at least, your logic may be driven by your current emotional state which, I suspect, may be a mixture of frustration and despair. As I understand it, you have had an extremely distinguished career and are undoubtedly an adept at communication. You have worked assiduously to diagnose our problems and then gone on to fix on the only solution you deem to have any likelihood of success. With like minded fellows, you formed SCGI which you hoped would make a mighty splash and further the cause you believe in. Notwithstanding, the more you have pressed, the less members of the public have followed, obsessed as they are with leaked e-mails and non disappearing Indian glaciers.
I can understand that emotions of fury and hopelessness could easily lead to you to say “Bugger it – leave it to Chinese and Indians”. In fact, from an Australian perspective, it could even make sense. You have a large and not densely populated country with excellent reserves of strategically important commodities. Let the Asians commit to the Rand D necessary for efficient nuclear development and then pick the winning designs for future purchase. Keep selling them all the uraniuum they need but demand the waste back as a quid pro quo. Meanwhile start training appropriate numbers of nuclear scientists and technicians. It sort of makes sense. However, as a UK citizen, I have to say that I sincerely hope that you won’t wind down your activities because I still believe you have the potential to be extremely influential if you keep pressing on.
On a slightly different tack, Dr Stanford’s point 6) in the update acknowledges the greatly increased proliferation risks associated with more widely dispersed knowledge of enrichment and reprocessing techniques. I think he may be mistaken in thinking that US could control the associated risks just by obtaining the appropriate technology itself. However, what becomes clear is that one shouldn’t waste one’s time trying to downplay proliferation risks – they’re already out there. Fortunately, DV82XL has explained that no nation can realistically build up a significant nuclear weapons arsenal without others becoming aware of it. It is also clear that 4th generation nuclear plants will certainly not make proliferation risks greater than they now are – in fact, they will reduce them. DepletedCranium’s post on “Why you can’t build a bomb from spent fuel” is also reassuring. However, short of an all out nuclear war with a resulting climate changing risk of a nuclear winter, all other risks of nuclear accidents or even the odd explosions from nuclear bombs pale into insignificance compared to the risks of AGW. Therefore, though mad mullahs may be a worry, there are greater things to worry about.
I think Bill Kerr made an excellent point that economic arguments are vital and it is necessary, if one believes in nuclear power, to demonstrate that it has the potential to be the cheapest power source that mankind has or, for that matter, that we ever have had if, in the past,, we had our current know-how. Rod Adams highlighted problems which, in effect, were highlighting the differences between ROI and ERoEI . However, Gen 3 nuclear plants don’t seem to have overwhelming advantages over competing energy technologies when considering ERoEI. Rod Adams states that fission is over two million times better than combustion but, in the real world, this stunning difference is not reflected by reality as understood by politicians and the public.
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Google is not the only one. Theres also FedEd in Köln/Bonn and the US.
http://fedex.com/at/about/enews/articles/0609article1.html
It obviously saves them money.
They probably would have considered nuclear if somebody could have provided them with a 2MW reactor that could pay for itself in 5 years.
The goal of pv engineering is to provide renewable electricity.
Solving interesting engineering problems is what helps to futher the technology.
Copper/Indium/Galium/Sulfur/Selenium or CIGSS thinfilm was not around in 1992.
We can do even better than that. Eclipsenow provides a link on his blog.
Some pv-research-group based in Vienna/Talin is just industrialising their role to role process for a complete new pv-cell which does not use Indium, Galium or other RE-elements. It still brings cost down by 80%. Once you integrate these technologies in building materials I would not hesitate to get pv power if it pays for itself in 1-3 years. That might even ad some value to your house.
You might also like that fact that this technology is based on decades of research for the Russian military and Philips semiconductor know-how.
There are always various ways to solve a problem. To stay in your computer analogy…IBM once discarded the personalcomputer and anounced the main frame to be the future. One reason was the price of computers back then.
Does price matter? Does it matter if it works in favour of pv, wind, geothermal, nuclear or whatever? Maybe there are different solutions for every part of the world and there is no one-fitts-all.
Spelling does not make a difference to me but we could also resume the conversation in German (my highschool French and Russian beeing equaly bad as my English).
If you find miss spelled words you can keep them.
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Rod.
You also seem to extend Barrys idea that nuclear critical positions do not matter.
Even advances in renewable technologys do not matter?
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Reading these responses to Barry’s question it seems to me that the majority of the posters are retreating to the territory they understand the best – dealing with the science or engineering issues and I suspect that is also where Barry is coming from – he has come up with a solution and wonders why the rest of the world refuses to embrace that solution.
The point I attempted to make in my initial response would be familiar to philosophers working in the area of social choice theory. It was first identified by Kenneth Arrow in the fifties and has become popularly known as the impossibility theorem. Initially it was merely applied to voting preferences but subsequently it has become to be more widely interpreted as impacting on social co-ordination and co-operation problems which is really at the root of this discussion – for we need to co-operate in identifying and following through on agreed solution to an an agreed problem. For an introduction to social choice theory have a look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
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Marcus, there are multiple problems with solar PV. Problems which even free PV will not solve. Problems such as the cost of gathering electricity from widely dispersed arrays. The cost of over night storage,, and what are you going to do about short, cloudy winter days. Solar PV advocates have been telling us for the last 30 years, that solar costs are going to drop 80% in the next 5 years. It still has not happened.
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@Marcus – as Charles has indicated, even 100% efficient, free solar collectors will not solve their fundamental weakness – they produce ZERO useful energy for about 2/3 of the 24 hour day. Even when the sun is out, its energy is diffuse and requires massive collectors with the best orientation being at a right angle to the incident angle. If you cover vertical surfaces with solar panels, they will only collect energy at a rate of the
solar constant X sine of the incident angle.
With small angles, that number approaches zero.
I could cover my automobile with 100% efficient solar panels, but those panels would only be collecting approximately 5-7 kw at noon on a clear day when the sun is directly overhead. When I fill up my gasoline tank in 5 minutes, the spout is the energy equivalent of a 10 MWe connection.
Solar panels might have a chance of supplying a single family home electricity, but they would have no chance at all – even if 100% efficient – of supplying the power needed to operate a factory, a high rise apartment complex, or an office building.
They cannot push a ship, supply a server farm, or power an off-shore oil rig.
Small nuclear reactors can, and have, supplied similar power demands for more than 50 years.
You have faith in the ability of engineers to solve the problems associated with solar energy, but you appear to have less faith in the ability of engineers to solve the remaining technical issues associated with nuclear fission energy.
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Marcus – Absence of a decent storage technology means we can’t really time-shift electricity demand. When more electricity is needed more power plants have to be running and feeding power to the grid in real time. There’s no way to run plants at night and store the generated power for daytime use.
Transmission losses mean our ability to space-shift demand is limited, too, though not as severely. Electricity-intensive industries (the classic example is aluminum smelting) need their own dedicated power plants nearby.
The combination of these problems means that household energy conservation is mainly a way for wealthy Westerners to feel virtuous rather than an actual attack on energy costs. Household conservation slightly decreases the maximum capacity needed locally where the conservation is being practiced, but has little impact further away, where demand has to be supplied by different plants. Industrial efficiency gains are far less visible; but, because the scale of industrial energy use is so much larger, they matter a lot more.
The combination of these problems also means we cannot, practically speaking, aggregate lots of very small flows of electricity into one big one. It’s not just total volume of energy production that matters, but the energy density available to high-volume consumers at a given place at and at a given time. This may sound like a dry technical point, but it has huge and nasty implications.
One is that the most touted forms of “alternative energy” and are largely useless. Solar and wind power are both time-variable and low-density. Lacking good ways to time-shift and aggregate electricity, means you can’t count on them to run factories and hospitals and computer server farms. The best you can hope for is that they can partially address low-density usage applications, as they have done in the past.
In the real world, there are only four base load sources that matter: coal, oil, hydropower, and nuclear. What they have in common is that you can get lots of energy per gram out of the fuel, thus lots of both energy volume and energy density out of one power plant.
Both economic arguments and historical evidence tell us that you can’t have an industrial civilization without a fuel that has an energy density at least as high (and thus a cost per unit of energy as low as) coal. Higher density is better, because it means lower cost. Those costs are not denominated just in money; low-density energy sources are more labor-intensive to operate and that causes more illness and death. Compare annual deaths from coal mining to annual deaths in the petroleum industry to the annual deaths associated with nuclear power; the trend is dramatic and favors higher-density sources, even if one ignores chemical air pollution entirely.
Nothing on offer from advocates of low-density “alternative energy” even comes close to coal as an industrial baseload source. let alone oil or nuclear. Ethanol and hydrogen look like it, until you consider life-cycle costs; basically, making either costs a lot more than mining coal, both in money and in input energy.
For fixed-location power plants, nuclear is the clear winner. Coal and oil have lower density and serious pollution costs. Renewables cannot produce the power we need.
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Rod Adams writes
Perhaps, but boron — in English chemical substances’ names are not capitalized — is what Blees and I like for getting nuclear power to cars’ drive wheels.
So we would have nuclear stations importing threes of kilotonnes per day of B2O3, separating B from O, storing the oxygen in the atmosphere, and exporting kilotonnes of boron per day. I have proposed a stepwise thermal method for the separation.
A kilotonne of boron per day is 632 MW, but it is inert to air and water, so it wouldn’t have to be exported right away, like electricity. Appropriately pelletized boron — too big to blow away — would allow gigawatt-weeks to be piled on a half-acre out back.
(How fire can be domesticated)
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**John Newlands**
“2) China and India need more coal, particularly hard coal, than the rest of the world can supply.”
As you point out it is the rate of flow of coal that matters here, which is a really important point!
**ROD**
Bill Gates said that all the planet’s batteries might only store enough energy for 10 minutes of the world grid. This is probaby true for now, sounds about right.
That’s because the world sucks at building homes right now, and sucks at transport, and sucks at energy efficiency, and the Better Place Vehicle To Grid cars have not yet been deployed.
But you totally missed the fact that *I* was basically dreaming right *along* with Bill Gates, and YOU’VE CHERRYPICKED HIM.
Was he saying batteries will *never* be part of the solution? Or was he saying a ‘miracle’ was needed, much as I was above when I referred to a nano-tech miracle?
What he said after the 10 minute statistic was:
“We need a big breathrough here, something that is going to be a factor of 100 or better, than the approaches we have now! It’s not impossible, but it’s not a very easy thing”.
(12 minutes in).
You say Bill received some strong technical backup during the preparation of his talk. Cool, then a factor of 100 better battery is not impossible then. Now imagine that these new super-batteries are included in the Better Place V2G electric cars, and you have a “Black Swan” you guys definitely have not factored in, almost like the 83% efficient Solar PV that’s going to require a re-write of Peter Lang’s anti-solar article.
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I suppose “saturated” means “more than half taken over” or some such thing, and not “having had enough and not taking any more”, which is its usual meaning (“the sponge will be saturated with water”).
We’ve been within five to ten years of a millions-per-year rollout of electric cars at all times since they went away in the mid-1910s. Hydrogen cars have similarly been just around the five-to-ten-year corner for many decades.
The Tesla Roadster is an impressive electric car (and so more than a thousand have already been sold): it can go 182 miles at 70 miles per hour, a 2.6-hour cruise, before needing a 32-hour plugin to a 110-V wall outlet. How does it use so few plugin hours, barely 12, per highway hour? I made a montage of it and a Corolla that should provide a clue.
The largest cars now being sold in large volumes could similarly go two or three highway hours on Li-ion battery power. All that would be necessary is a 100-hour plug-in. What, though, if we want to electrify motorists who like big cars and are used to having seven to eight highway hours in reserve?
(How fire can be domesticated)
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@GRLCowan:
I trust you haven’t forgotten that these electric vehicle batteries also have to serve as grid backup storage in V2G applications.
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@Marcus:
I asked you on another thread during your initial differences with Finrod how, given your beliefs, you envisaged the Austrian economy working in 2040 given that official statistics for eg 2007 in your country showed that only ca. 25% of power consumption was in Private Households, the economic sector you exclusively cite, de facto.
You kept on referring merely to PV being able to save power expenses for houses (your Landhaus and the homes of Nukies), and to electrical vehicles.
One could have expected you to cite the Desertec consortium (Munich Re, TREC, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, ABB, E.ON, RWE, Abengoa Solar, Cevital, HSH Nordbank, M & W Zander Holding, MAN Solar Millennium, and Schott Solar), so as to bring the debate up from the level of your wallet to that of national economies such as Austria, but you do not seem to have done that.
Nor do you seem to have answered my question about Austria in 2040.
I am aware you will be worried about NPP Temelin 50 km from your border and I am aware of the Austrian constititutional change regarding Nuclear in 1999. However, when the Austrian NPP at Zwentendorf was halted by referendum vote before going live in 1978, the power shortfall was made up in 1987 by the new 757 MW coal-fired Dürnrohr plant nearby. Why was PV not used for that?
I have the impression that you are looking to possibly deindustrialise your country, inasmuch as you focus exclusively on domestic power usage.
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**Some more points on Batteries**
Batteries
1. Counting on BAU just as the anti-nuclear people do!
As someone with an arts background who is not very technical, it drives me NUTS when even I can pick inconsistencies in the technical debate between you ‘experts’. Hearing the inconsistency and, sometimes seeming *intentional* dishonesty in this debate drives me crazy, and I’m including the likes of Helen Caldicott and Mark Diesendorf ALONG WITH the pro-nuclear guys on this blog that over simplify the issues to warp the picture to their perspective.
It makes me wonder if any of you technical boffins have the whole picture to steer the right course forwards?
EG: How many times have I heard Barry *correctly* point out that the Co2 emissions from constructing nuclear plants will not always occur, because our transport and mining systems will eventually have to wean off oil as peak oil hits?
EG: Better Place synergies with the wind market.
So if Brooks and Blees can point out the changing nature of mining and construction in the face of peak oil, how is it that in the nuclear debate Blees harped on about the fact that certain European Union countries produce their wind power at night when there is *currently* little demand, yet EVERYONE knows that Better Place is about to deploy in those countries and create a market for the wind when it blows overnight, and also create a MASSIVE new V2G battery for the grid?
This is just one example, I have many more.
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**Charles Barton**
“that carbon mitigation by onshore wind, will cost 3.5 times as much per ton, than carbon mitigation by supposably more expensive nuclear. No renewables supporter has even attempted to deny my conclusion, let alone to engage me in debate on my evidence or my conclusion.”
I’ve heard Mark Diesendorf claim quite the contrary, especially about solar thermal.
Re: “Pissing contest”, I was only pointing out the sarcastic nature of the reply I was addressing: as if renewable energy experts had never considered how to deal with the fact of the NIGHT! Now if that ain’t a straw-man character attack, I don’t know what is. I was just pointing out how unhelpful this was in attempting to make a constructive dialogue with the rest of the sustainabilty activists on climate change.
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**Charles**
“AGW skeptics can be persuaded by arguments, such as energy independence, lower health care costs, and lower cost electricity, as selling points for nuclear power, and will willingly accept a nuclear based AGW solution, if that solution has economic advantages.”
Wow, what universe do you live in? I’ve been in many science forums trying to point out to the sceptics what experts like Barry are actually saying, and how the basic physics of Co2 and the mathematics of the Radiative Forcing Equation are all repeatable, demonstrable, testable phenomenon and have not ONCE seen a denialist change their minds.
Whereas I am living proof that anti-nuclear greenies CAN be convinced to not be AGAINST nuclear power, even if I remain agnostic as to the ultimate winner at this stage because I see *the potential* for other options.
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I’m with **Bill Kerr**
If nuclear power is so cheap, why did a UK study in the last few years state that it would cost $140 billion to decomission their existing old reactors?
(Claim by Diesendorf).
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**Zachary**
Cute post, except that I was talking about nano-science, which often produces things out of carbon (with nano-tubes) and other materials not normally associated with electronics. Rare earths are of course an issue with the *current* way we design stuff, but of course I’m not talking about that, am I?
Eclipse Now came from my previously “Olduvai Gorge” view of the world… I was arguing that we had to Eclipse ourselves, or we would “be eclipsed” by peak oil. It was a pun on the word which can mean both itself and its opposite. The idea was that peak oil was so serious we had to so outperform our previous energy and societal paradigms as to cast them into darkness, or we would shortly be cast into darkness ourselves.
It was about the crisis being now, and makes for a cool logo.
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**Rod Adams**
So you’ve studied renewables?
WHEN?
Have you studied the latest solar thermal storage materials and unique mixes of salts which may be giving longer thermal capacity and less cost / unit electricity? What about the graphite block method of storing energy which can theoretically store thermal energy at only 3% loss / day? What about the solar PV at 83% efficiency, did you study that?
You sound just like Helen Caldicott, ranting against yesterday’s paradigms.
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**Finrod**
Thank you for pointing that out about Rod’s character attack on Marcus. Rod’s losing any credibility because he spanks others for character attacks, and then behaves like that. How childish.
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I doubt that electric vehicles will achieve the market penetration some are hoping. Even GM’s market research for the Volt is not that optimistic. In Australia a lot of people have long commutes to the city from outlying areas due to the cost of housing and lack of public transport. I think those people will turn to natural gas cars. Even a 6 minute high pressure fillup for 300 km range beats 8 hours of 110v battery charging for just 40 km range which I believe are the specs for the GM Volt. EVs are also expensive. Let’s wait and see if the Better Place concept of swappable batteries takes off because I have my doubts.
If this hunch is right, namely that road transport will move to CNG not batteries, there are major implications for gas demand. I tentatively suggest that for every tonne of oil used in 2010 (in Australia’s case 40-50 Mtpa) we could use a tonne of gas by 2025 or so. That means the Diesendorf plan for gas backed renewables could be even more expensive because transport demand is sucking all the natural gas. Currently gas for transport is 3% of demand but it could go to 30% or more. Combined cycle plant for grid generation may be cheap and quick to build but the fuel cost will be exorbitant.
A mixed transport solution may be EVs in the city limits maybe with toll exemptions and preferential parking, then NGVs for the highway and outer suburbs. If enough EVs are sold to make V2G workable that is a bonus. Most electricity should come from NP however.
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**Douglas Wise**
Nice summary Doug, and I agree. Keep up the great work Barry, blogging against the climate sceptics and doing what you can.
One thing I’d love to see is a master podcast page on this site, like the link to the university debates but with all your own podcast and radio interviews.
Indeed, do you have mates that could help set up an iTunes podcast where you can have maybe a fortnightly or monthly report? I’d subscribe to it. I don’t get to read everything on this blog as I’m studying, but when I’m walking / cooking / doing the dishes, I LOVE listening to good podcasts full of information.
Anyone else think Barry and friends should form a podcast? Would anyone else subscribe to it?
I know you’re busy Barry… just saying, I love your work. (When it’s not driving me nuts ignoring the potential for Better Place to act as a partial renewables battery! But that’s all part of the fun! ;)
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**John Newlands**
Long commutes are not an issue with Better Place. Got to drive over 160km? Battery Charge running low? Just pull into a Battery-Swap station and you’re out in 2 minutes, faster than the average fill up. (7 minutes).
Better Place is coming to many cities around the world, and the Australian leg informs us that Canberra’s trial should be up and running by 2012. That’s not long to wait. The cost / km works out at a petroleum equivalent price of 80cents / litre. Know anywhere you can get that for oil?
If these pro-nuclear guys are right, electricity will be the transport currency of the future. If Bill Gates is right on batteries that are 20, 50, or 100 times as good not being IMPOSSIBLE… then eventually Better Place’s battery swaps will become outdated. (Just 20 times as good would be 3200 km!)
But if not, we’ll swap batteries the way the King’s Messenger used to swap out their horses!
Please google Better Place and get back to us.
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Oh yeah, and can anyone calculate how much energy we’d store in 15 million Australian cars able to drive 3200 km each? That sounds like another “Black Swan” to me.
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**Marcus nails it**
Marcus mentioned integrated solar technologies built into homes, which leads to point 2 on batteries.
2. Radical home redesigns.
Just as the construction industry will be forced to change as a result of peak oil, the house building culture will probably change as the true nature of resource scarcity becomes better understood.
The following may sound a little hippie and ‘out there’, but some have made an economical **house and lifestyle package** that is attractive and off grid. They see it in terms of trading a room or 2 on the average oversized American McMansion for the more compact home designs of the “EarthShip”.
Before you laugh at these designs, more conservatively decorated versions are already being considered by UK councils as becoming a mainstream housing platform, and one was even demonstrated on the ABC’s show “Grand Designs”.
http://earthship.net/
My sister in law has a Phd in sustainable architecture and we constantly chat about the various changing meme’s in both local scaled home design and city-wide New Urbanism and ecocity changes. (EG: San Francisco’s Mayor is thoroughly on board for an ecocity makeover of San Francisco city).
Energy efficient homes is just the start, what about energy efficient CITIES? However, we were talking about batteries and my point is that these “Earthship” off the grid homes are economically competitive now, before BEFORE the solar PV has hit 83% efficiency as has recently been announced!
This is also BEFORE the ‘super-batteries’ of Gates imagination have had time to be developed.
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(Oooh, gives me chills down the spine, the terrible night! Dear oh dear! It’s as if you’re all implying renewable experts have never thought of night time. Man this gets old quickly!)
Who said I NEED to worry about the night anyway?
Maybe I want 83% energy efficient solar panels on my roof for economic reasons, and it belts out the power when I need it most. Then I turn the TV off and stop cooking and go to bed, and local industry shuts down, and guess what? There might be a bit of wind blowing at night, or some baseload geothermal, baseload OTEC, baseload CETO wavepower, or even baseload solar thermal. Or if the global grid guys have their way, there might even be some other juice flowing from some country nearby.
MAYBE I’ll just ignore the night, if that’s OK with you, and just enjoy what PV does… and gives me nice, cheap, clean power during the day.
FREE PV? Even better! Imagine it on every Australian home. Imagine a spray on PV nano-goo (some are working on it) that generates gigawatts of power during the day. Maybe it will be economical to just rely on that during the day and CETO or Geothermal at night?
What about the rise of smart appliances that store energy? You know what I’m talking about, even though YOU don’t talk about it. Fridges that communicate with the grid and STORE COLD when the grid says the juice is flowing and it’s the right time to ‘charge up’ on the cold. It’s basically turning your Fridge into something like V2G EV’s that can suck down on the juice when it’s flowing, and then help smooth the electricity demand during the day.
Now I know I’m sounding like a “pro-renewables” only guy at the moment but I’m not! I’m as excited about the prospect of Gen4 reactors burning up waste we’ll have to store for the next 100 thousand years otherwise! It’s the prospect of Gen4 to deal with the horrible legacy of the last generations of nuclear waste that ultimately hooked me into this. Burn it, then store only 10% of the mass for just 300 years, and buy the world 500 years to solve these renewable issues? Who can argue with that?
But again: My point is that the Blees, Brooks, and Diesendorfs of this world are all very busily ignoring each other on some of the subtleties of this debate, and it is driving me nuts.
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@ Rod Page:
I agree that capital costs are higher for nuclear and fuel costs lower, cf coal. However, the desire of utilities for a quick profit stream that you mention is not going to go away anytime soon.
Some have argued (eg. Cohen) that excessive regulatory requirements in the USA brought on by the perceived need for super super safety has crippled the nuclear industry there. I can accept that and the USA may be a special case due to the success of anties influencing previous Democrat governments (Clinton, Carter). Blee’s book exposes this.
However, if nuclear was really cheaper than coal then China would be building far more nuclear plants than they are currently. The Chinese government is more focused on cheap electricity than regulation for safety. For this reason I don’t believe that nuclear is cheaper.
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From what I can see, China is very heavily focussed on safety — there is no evidence to the contrary. The AP1000 design is the safest ever put to commercialisation, by an order of magnitude, and that is China’s new darling design. One must be careful to separate NRC-style ‘regulation’, and all the contorted bureaucracy that’s involved, with an affirmative ‘get going’ attitude.
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However, if nuclear was really cheaper than coal then China would be building far more nuclear plants than they are currently. The Chinese government is more focused on cheap electricity than regulation for safety. For this reason I don’t believe that nuclear is cheaper.
Give them a chance, Bill! They’re ramping up nuclear reactor production just about as quickly as they feasibly can. Remember that they’re also putting a whole manufacturing supply chain in place to support domestic production.
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@Bill Kerr –
That is an excellent point. I am not sure if you are aware of China’s current deployment plans for nuclear – they get updated pretty frequently and the news is not always tracked closely in places outside the nuclear industry or China itself.
From a 7 January 2010 article in World Nuclear News titled “Firms flock to Chinese supply chain”:
Here is a later quote from the same article:
Of note is also the fact that the famous coal fired plants that China has constructed in cookie cutter fashion during the past dozen or so years are well suited for what my friend Jim Holm has dubbed a coal to nuclear conversion. (www.coal2nuclear.com) A development that few in the West know much about is a reactor called the HTR-PM, which comes in modules that produce 450 MW of thermal energy at a temperature that is essentially identical to that used in those modular coal fired power plants.
Click to access htr2004_d15.pdf
China has two HTR-PM reactors under construction today, with expected commercial operation by 2013 or 2014. That system is based on the already operating HTR-10 prototype.
With regard to whether or not nuclear is cheaper than coal, here are the stats for production costs in the US as of 2008 –
nuclear – 1.86 cents per kilowatt hour
coal – 2.75 cents per kilowatt hour
Both of these ignore capital costs, but at least in the US the capital cost for a new coal plant that meets current emissions standards is not much lower than the capital cost of an AP1000 or EPR. The nuclear costs can be reduced through steady production, learning curves, and reduction in first of a kind design costs as more experience is gained.
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@eclipsenow, – I have to admit that I am having some difficulty following you arguments, however if you are waiting for 83% energy efficient solar panels, cheap effective storage, and the smart grid, you might as well line-up behind those that are placing their hopes on fusion.
All of these are ideas that have gotten a lot of play in the press and with the renewables crowd, but very little in the way of practical examples. There are many potential issues with concepts like V2G and demand side management, that have been glossed over, and breathless reports of very high efficiency PV have never come to much in long run.
On the other hand, current designs of nuclear power plants can be built cheaply and quickly, and can go a long way to replacing coal, right now. While the future may belong to Gen IV, it really isn’t necessary to bring this on-line before we can make a good dent in GHG mitigation.
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All these “solar energy is diffuse” posts are boring me to tears. IF science finds an extremely cheap way of producing vast quantities of 83% or higher efficiency nano-solar PV, then we can cover *vast* areas of both domestic and factory and carpark rooftops with it. Trying to argue that this being CHEAP is somehow irrelevant ignores the interaction between consumer behaviour and economics.
24 hour power supply from solar PV is a function of the cost of the solar PV and the cost of storage.
IF the solar PV is so cheap, it will change the function significantly. If the battery technology improves 10 fold (let alone Bill Gates wish for 100 fold increases), then the idea of more homes going “Earthship” in design is not so laughable. Going off grid in an Earthship is already fairly economically competitive TODAY, let alone with these 83% efficient solar PV or futuristic batteries.
As for industry and factories? They tend to have big roofs and car parks that they could cover with 83% solar PV. Flats? Well, heck, maybe they’ll have to buy electricity OFF THE GRID which might have access to massive CHEAP 83% efficient solar PV farms! Imagine that? The grid! Who wood-a-thunkit?
Or buy some from the next state if it’s rainy.
Come on guys… give the FACT of 83% efficient solar PV a bit more play in your imaginations. Surely Peter Lang has to re-write his solar PV article again hey?
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**Cowan** is denying the impending roll out of Better Place Renault Nissan electric cars.
Download the audio podcast here, and get back to us on that.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/08/14/2656263.htm
Want to make a wager? I’ll bet at *least* 25% of the market within 15 years and that is conservative once the reality of peak oil hits. The WHOLE car market changes over every 16 years, and when peak oil hits in a few years I can imagine legislation demanding all cars be Better Place compatible.
Good luck with that one mate.
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• **How will the Vehicle 2 Grid work?**
• So, car has 160km range.
• Car drives average 40km to work in the morning.
• Car plugs in & charges on peak solar output during day.
• Car drives home 40km and plugs in.
• Car sells maybe 100km worth of electrons back to the grid during afternoon/evening hours of peak demand when everyone is watching TV, cooking, etc.
• Car will NOT sell below the charge necessary to get to the nearest Better Place battery swap, in case an urgent trip is *suddenly* required.
• Battery swap not only means you are guaranteed an instant ‘range extension’ on the rare occasions you need it, but you don’t have to keep buying new batteries every 4 years or so. “Better Place” sell you the car, but they own the batteries!
• Car charges later that evening after 12pm when industries and other demand on the grid starts to wean and there is more power available from baseload renewables like OTEC, CETO wave, solar thermal, evening wind, geothermal, etc.
• Car is fully charged by morning.
• 50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt of “grid smoothing” potential. Australia has 15 million cars.
• If powerlines come down in a storm, the cars can help power the grid locally for service men to have access to power. In other words, rather than stressing the grid Better Place V2G cars will *assist* the grid.
• It’s about smoothing supply and demand of the electricity grid.
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**John**
“40 km range which I believe are the specs for the GM Volt.”
This is a joke mate. Do some more reading. How am I meant to take you seriously after posting that?
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eclipsenow, I live in a universe in which nuclear supporters who also happen to accept the AGW hypothesis can actually talk to AGW skeptics. We agree that a massive expantion of nuclear power is important, but not on AGW. Are’t you pleased that AGW skeptics will accept some form of mitigation?
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“All these “solar energy is diffuse” posts are boring me to tears. IF science finds an extremely cheap way of producing vast quantities of 83% or higher efficiency nano-solar PV, then we can cover *vast* areas of both domestic and factory and carpark rooftops with it. Trying to argue that this being CHEAP is somehow irrelevant ignores the interaction between consumer behaviour and economics.”
If we find a way to inexpensively produce electric energy from fusion, all bets are off too. I fail to see your point.
Do you have one?
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Hi Tali,
interesting post on peak resource etc. One observation that blew me away was Michael Lardelli’s talk that said if we burnt all the available economically affordable fossil fuels we’d only hit 460ppm.
Of course, the IPCC’s 450ppm is now out of date and 350.org is the new mantra.
We’ll see.
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DV82xl,
83% efficient Solar PV is already here, so no, I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched.
The business model for Better Place battery swap EV’s is already here, with HSBC bank already putting $350 million into it, and a billion promised already.
Money talks.
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“83% efficient Solar PV is already here”
I’m surprised I missed that, do you have a reference you could point me to?
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83% efficient Solar PV is already here, so no, I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched.
That’s excellent news, EN. Can you tell me which number I call to contact the Australian distributors?
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DV82xl
“If we find a way to inexpensively produce electric energy from fusion, all bets are off too. I fail to see your point.”
DV82xl just *ignores* the point and wanders off into the ether….
My point is that you guys often ignore inconvenient FACTS like the emerging V2G Better Place car market and the impact on smoothing the grid supply & demand this could have.
You ignore the FACT of CETO baseload wavepower being deployed in WA.
You ignore the FACT of incremental advances in baseload solar thermal. Where’s the paper critiquing the new solar thermal graphite blocks storage mechanism?
My point is you guys have not published a new paper critiquing the new FACT of the 83% efficent Solar PV: and all the papers on solar PV on this blog are now out of date as a result.
My point is that by the time you renewable sceptics have published something, it is out of date because of the speed of renewable increases in technology and deployment, let alone the foreseeable ‘miracles’ that Bill Gates envisages.
So nuclear may eventually win out in the end of this race, but I’ve got even bets either way. It’s the dogmatic assertions here that ignore other known facts that blow me away, like John’s 40km EV limit. Ha! Laughable. He REALLY needs to read up on Better Place, and HSBC has just given him 350 million good reasons to do so!
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Finrod,
I know there are plans for Gen4 reactors, but when can I buy one? ;-) (Nudge nudge wink wink, say no more! Say no more! Please).
For those interested in the latest SCIENCE that could soon hit the market, try here.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/02/15/2818151.htm
Oh, and my memory was wrong.
“The scientists claim up to 85% of usable sunlight is absorbed by the new panels, compared to approximately 17% efficiency with current commerically available solar cells.”
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Wind can also supply baseload when the grid is big enough or with new wind technology.
60GW windpowerplants are possible. At 70%CF.
Wind can also power electric ships…so nuclear is not the only alternative to oil.
And it is cheaper than reactors and take up less space.
Thats something that can be installed right now and save fuel right now.
A 1GW Windpowerplant can also sit on an reactor.
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Finrod,
I know there are plans for Gen4 reactors, but when can I buy one? ;-) (Nudge nudge wink wink, say no more! Say no more! Please).
If you can come up with the bucks, the Russians would probably jump at the chance to sell you a BN-800 fast breeder, such as they are selling to China. In a few years you might also be able to purchase an Indian fast breeder as well, and possibly even a Hyperion Power Module.
Oh, and my memory was wrong.
“The scientists claim up to 85% of usable sunlight is absorbed by the new panels, compared to approximately 17% efficiency with current commerically available solar cells.
Does ‘absorbed by’ equal ‘efficiency’? If not, what is the true efficiency? What technical issues remain to be resolved? What is the projected timeline to commercialisation?
I remember reading with interest an article proclaiming 40% efficiency on PV panels. That was about 10 years ago. So far, that technology is still just a laboratory curiosity.
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Finrod…
you would not install pv anyways.
Or would you? Why would you?
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eclipsenow I’m 61% out since you can drive up to 40 miles on the electricity stored in the battery so it seems I muddled miles and kilometres.
One of my former jobs was a night shift security guard living 65km out of the city. I couldn’t afford to buy a PHEV on such a low salary. I would barely get to work on a single charge and I wouldn’t get back home without recharging. So I hope future night shift employers maintain secure charging points for each of their staff.
I suggest EVs are for well heeled folks who mainly use them for local shopping in leafy suburbs.
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@eclipsenow – I am not ‘wandering off’ (as much as you might wish I would) nor do I ignore things like V2G, and advances in renewable technologies. In fact I pay a great deal of attention to these things as a roundly criticize them on a regular bases, for making claims they cannot back up with fact, or avoiding the many issues that some of these ideas will create, if they were implemented.
But I see now that you are so ignorant of the science that you cannot differentiate between percentage of sunlight absorbed, and how much of it is converted into electricity, and you have fallen back on insults, a sure sign that you have nothing of any real importance to add to this discussion.
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Oops. A pile 40 m across the base and 11.5 metres high (about as big of one as can fit on a half-acre, 2023 m^2) is only enough for about 12 gigawatt-hours, not multiple gigawatt-weeks as I said.
Fortunately we live in three-space, so if we increase the basal area by some factor, the number of gigawatt-hours increases by the three-halves power of that factor. So giving the pile eight acres instead of a half-acre gets you from half a day to 32 days.
(How fire can be domesticated)
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John, wrong again.
The Better Place cars are so cheap that, with a few foreseeable advances in technology, you might be able to walk into a show room and simply agree to a price / km charge rate for the next 5 or 7 years or so, and get a MASSIVE reduction in the price. This is what the CEO has said on “The Economist”
http://castroller.com/podcasts/TheEconomist/1443204
As well as when discussing it in Melbourne.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/08/14/2656263.htm
The guy is about to make EV’s mainstream, and as Barry argues above, this sort of thing will only happen because the PRICE DEMANDS it!
80cents a litre fuel equivalent price / km? You’d be mad to pass it up. They’ll install EV charge points when they “do” a city. Canberra is 2012. Have you written to your local member demanding this yet?
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Crystalsol is developing its roll to roll process for monocristalyne cells right now.
Just like offset printing you can get out hundreds of meters per minute.
They are using abundant materials…no rare-earth.
The technology is developed. By 2011 they will be ready to apply their technology to roofing, tiles, metall, windows…many building parts….at 20% of the price today.
Why would you not integrate that into a new building?
Maybe on your nukes.
We also use less energy in Europe. It would be good if Americans could just reduce their energy needs by at least 50%.
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Opinions matter.
In the USA, most utility regulatory commisions are required to use out-of-date law, leading to poor decisions. Enough complaints and the laws will be modernized.
It’ll take a lot of complaining.
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I guess, to answer Barry’s question, I agree: AGW deniers and antinuclear casuists neither of them matter, and should be ignored, but they do make it difficult!
(How fire can be domesticated)
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DV8,
sorry, have you got EVIDENCE against the claims of the solar PV link I shared?
Finrod,
what happened to the “nuclear power too cheap to meter” that we were promised by now? What if I don’t want to buy an expensive BN-800 but instead want a cheap Gen4 blueprint?
You’ll *believe in* the *coming* Gen4 reactors being realistic, yet not accept the basic findings of Solar PV scientists. Why is that?
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eclipsenow – The onus is on those making claims to provide proof. Nothing in the link you pointed to makes the claim that these cells are 85% efficient. Since you won’t bother, I traced this claim back to source and found that:
a) No actual solar cells have been produced from the new microwire technology, yet. In other words this is just theroy at this point.
b) 85 percent of the full spectrum of incoming sunlight absorbed is in comparison to standard photovoltaic cells. Thus these are, and I quote: “almost as good as that of traditional silicon wafers.” The primary benefit being they use less material to fabricate them.
AND
c) The new cell can turn 9.6 percent of incoming sunlight into electricity, according to testing from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. A somewhat less spectacular claim than what you are makeing.
An accessible article discussing this technology can be found here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=photovoltaic-breakthroughs-brighten-outlook-for-cheap-solar-power
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Thank you Dv8, and I apologise if people felt I was misrepresenting the article. However, your SCIAM article is pretty good as well.
***
“”With one one-hundredth of the material, we’ve gotten it to absorb 96 percent of the peak visible light,” Kelzenberg says. “There’s lots of reasons to believe this could be scaled to make thin-film solar cells.”
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eclipsenow, – Give me a break son, your contrition comes a bit too late to get any sympathy from me, especially given the ascendant tone of your posts in this thread.
As for this technology, it is like a hundred other reports that claim some breakthrough in photovoltaic cells, only to be forgotten within the year. And for sure a sub 10% performance is not going to garner much interest from the money. Material costs have not been the limiting factor in solar energy, the boring fact (to you) that solar energy is diffuse, is.
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No, anything that affects the ECONOMICS is the subject here mate, otherwise you’re being selectively blind.
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I suggest you drop the “diffuse” argument as you’re starting to sound a bit silly. If one can produce an extremely cheap form of solar PV, it can become *cost effective* to cover absolutely every inch of my roof with Solar PV rather than just a few meters of it. What matters is the price, and if it’s 1/5th the price but requires my whole roof to go solar, why not?
“Diffuse” is a myth. There’s more than enough space to go solar, and a variety of technologies with which to do so, as long as the dreaded “NIGHT TIME!” is covered by some of the many strategies covered above. (CETO, OTEC, geothermal, solar thermal with graphite blocks, , off-grid Earthships, etc).
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Indeed, I just remembered Dr Karl says with 12% efficiency all Australia’s power could be met in 50 by 50 km solar pv. And night time? He says just plug into the coming world wide grid.
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We will drop the diffuse argument when you can show it to be wrong, and I suspect that any ‘proof’ you can table will be of the same caliber as what you have offered to date.
Nothing of substance can be said about the impact these new photovoltaic cells will have on the economic picture based on their stated (not proven) use of materials only. Fabrication costs, useful lifetime and other factors will have to be seen, and I note that in none of the actual papers published by this group, were these issues discussed in any detail.
And any talk of a ‘world wide grid’ demonstrates a total lack of any grasp of the physics of transmitting electrical energy over great distances.
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Whilst I do not hold much hope for governments of any complexion taking much notice of public opinion for those of you who are convinced that nuclear is the solution I suggest you look here http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/
It provides a costed plan to enable australia to be powered by 100% renewables by 2020 – for me the frustration is with the pro nuclear lobby that gives government an excuse to procrastinate on taking immediate action – to switch Australia even to a mixture of nuclear and renewables will take considerably longer than even 2050 – so even if ine allows for a degree of hyperbole in assuming the switch can be made by 2020 this proposal is still light years ahead and it quite rightly focusses on what we can do in our own backyard.
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John, I saw that, thanks, but the BZE executive summary doesn’t show any of the modelling assumptions, we’ll have to wait until the full report is released to know what to make of it. It is interesting that the cost data for CST comes from the Sargent & Lundy 2003 report, rather than the NEEDS 2008 report. In the latter, the cost-projections were much higher, as real-world figures started coming in.
The broader question is this – who pays for the BZE plan? Government? If so, why would they not take a no-regrets strategy and invest in nuclear, CCS, geothermal etc. too? Where is the money diverted from? If it’s private money, where is it being invested right now, and how does one convince investors that they’d do better to divert it to this project, and how would the loans etc. be secured?
I guess I’m left wondering who the target audience of the BZE piece is? Who do they wish to influence, and to what extent is it a real-world plan?
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DV8,
‘diffuse’ is irrelevant, economics is. If it is economic to cover your roof, do so. If it is economic for a forward thinking company to build a few km’s squared of solar pv, they’ll do it.
EG: If material X is half the price of Y, yet requires double the area, one might still go for it even though it is a more ‘diffuse’ way of collecting the sunlight.
Economics trumps the ‘diffuse’ argument in this example.
And you’ll have to call Trec Europe and disprove the Trec-Solar Africa concept because the power can’t travel down HVDC transmission at only 3% loss per 1000km, according to YOU anyway. ;-) I men, there’s some BIG money going into this concept all based on the faulty prmise of a pan-African – European supergrid. Quick, save them the billions, oh the humanity!
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eclipsenow, you wrote:
“IF science finds an extremely cheap way of producing vast quantities of 83% or higher efficiency nano-solar PV, then we can cover *vast* areas of both domestic and factory and carpark rooftops with it.”
(Setting aside the problem that absorption ≠ efficiency, not by a long shot . . .)
So what? IF everybody in the United States just gave me just one thin penny, I would be a multimillionaire. Oddly enough, getting them to do it is not that easy.
The point: you reference a “we” that presumes the power to “cover *vast* areas” of carparks with solar collectors.
“We” who? Do you own these carparks? Is eclipsenow an international carpark entrepreneur with the ability to order that carparks all install solar collectors on their “roofs” just as soon as the 83% (or 85%) but actually 9.6% solar panels are available?
I recently debated an anti-nuclear activist before a group of state legislators who are on environmental committees in the USA Midwest. One of his talks had references something to the effect of “all the rooftops that are available for solar.”
Says who? There are huge transactional costs involved in appropriating rooftops owned by other people for solar panels, and even if you actually have your 85% absorption/9.6% efficiency solar, you still have to get the rooftops, plus deal with all of the rest of the interconnection infrastructure issues. On millions of rooftops, owned by millions of different people or Companies. Each of which has its own motivations and objectives.
Maybe many owners of the roofs don’t want to take the chance that anchoring solar installations on their roofs will cause roof leaks through which water can infiltrate and decimate their capital investment and their underlying business. Maybe they have plans to put trees up there (another “green” idea). Or maybe they just want to be left alone, and are busy with other things a/k/a “their life.”
I would point out to eclipsenow and marcus that, with nuclear, we don’t have to remake the whole energy infrastructure. We knock out coal plants and put in nuclear plants, displacing carbon. There exists a pretty clear path to doing this in the developed world, which produces most of the carbon emissions. No multi-trillion dollar replacement power grid is necessary or changes of consciousness and consumer habits is a precondition to accomplishing this carbon displacement.
One of the problems with visionary energy solutions is that they tend to assume that all of the institutional arrangements will just fall into place under the notion that everyone will see the compelling logic of the visionary’s notions. Either that or they assume a dictatorship of the visionary.
In my experience (getting to be long experience) the world does not work that way. The morass of competing institutional interests has a way of making change difficult to accomplish. This is why (and this addresses Barry’s point in launching this discussion) we have to engage in the battle of ideas constantly, though perhaps not so much on blogs where we just talk to each other.
It is nowhere written that superior economics of advanced Gen IV nuclear energy will, of necessity, lead to displacement of existing energy arrangements. Beta was a better technology than VHS, but who won?
Gen IV has to come into wide and reliable use. That has to be brought about, and that requires further investment, best sourced from very large entities such as governments. For my part, I hope this is Western governments, because I like that particular civilization.
Diligent frustrating advocacy is required, and to make it more difficult, we have to remain honest when nuclear opponents are not.
Nowhere is it written that your advocacy life would be a rose garden, either.
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Do you honestly think you can escape with some silly sophomoric argument like that?
You haven’t got a technology on hand that makes your argument anything more than a vague hypothetical.That’s the point. Anyone can construct castles-in-the-sky on the bases of what ifs, so why not use cold fusion or the claims of the over-unity idiots? In practical terms solar is simply too diffuse to provide real power to run a real civilization, and it is not the cost of the converters that is the limiting issue.
As for the Trec-Solar Africa concept, please understand that the rules of logic, the rules of debate, and commonsense investment strategies, demand that those making claims prove them. You and nobody else can make an assertion and then pompously demand that it be taken at face value, unless proof is provided the statement is wrong. I have seen all sorts of wild schemes to turn deserts into solar plants, but when push comes to shove, I also see that those countries with vast deserts are turning to nuclear power to meet their comming energy needs.
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Sorry the previous was addressed to eclipsenow, not Frank with whom I totally agree.
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I can’t anwer for t he rest of the world but I am sure Australia does not need induced nuclear fission to supply its energy needs. Nor does it need coal.
The alternatives at present seem to be:
Photovoltaic:
Disadvanages: currently very expensive and requiring materials such as silicon and only operating when the sun shines
Advantages: no extra land use for rooftop phoovoltaics, tends to replace peak generation
Solar thermal
Less expensive, generally requires land set aside. Heat can be stored either as heat or chemically, for use when the sun is not shining.
Wind
Intermittent, but this can be largely overcome with widely dispersed generation. Storage possible. Ealtiviely cheap though more expensive, without factoring in externalities and carbon price, than coal.
HIghly visible and uses land although stock may be grazed around towers and crops grown. Not suitable for highly secenic spots and bird migration routes or close to houses.
Some people have complained of noise and visual intrusion. I find some wind generators quite beautiful and would rather look at them than a chimney belching smoke or a cooling tower.
Tidal, wave and hydro.
Not able to comment.
Geothermal (hot rocks)
A safe kind of nuclear, utilising heat from natural radioactive decay of rocks.Has enough capacity to supply Australia with base load power for several centuries.
Currently in its infancy, but if it works there will be no need to for coal or nuclear generation in Australia.
Fourth generation nuclear plants may or may not be safe. There is no long term future for current generation nuclear reactors as high grade uranium ore would be exhausted in about 30 years if all generation were nuclear.
I favour renewables including geothermal for Australia’s energy future. Some other countries may possibly need to resort to nuclear fission at least in the short term.
Electricity use:
People tend to get more electrical appliances and buy more goods as they get richer, but there are other trends in energy use. For instance, I recently managed to save about 800 Wh per day by replacing my 12 cubic foot dinosaur fridge with a new, and admittedly smaller fridge that was adequate for my needs. Electronic equipment has been getting smaller and probably more energy effcient over the years.I am told the LCD screens are more energy efficient than cathode ray screens and accordingly replaced my defunct cathode ray computer monitor with an LCD screen. On the other hand there is a trend at the moment for people to buy huge plasma telelvisons.
Cars are more energy efficient than they used to be. A trend towards electric transport replacing petroleum based internal combustion engines will increase the proportion of energy coming from electricity but reduce overall energy use.
The challenge is to become less energy intensive and carbon intensive while not sacrificing quality of life. Even China, which wants to raise its living standards, offered to reduced its carbon intensitiy by 50% (or was it 40%?) at Copenhagen.
Australia’s economy is one of the most energy intensive on earth. This may be partly due to heavy industry, but one might also note that one can enjoy a high standard of living while using less energy.
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Frank,
‘we’ the marketplace, society, civilisation in general as the self interested consumers paying for whatever works and earns money. IF the breakthroughs that I’m reading about in dyesolar, sliver cell, etc efficient & cheap solar cell materials come to fruition as advertised, then all I’m saying is it forms a whole new marketplace of cheap Solar PV for myself as a domestic consumer to make use of during daylight hours, and possibly even have some left over to sell back to the grid.
Selling back to the grid is the key here, that frees up industry to buy from whoever has some spare roofspace left over.
“I would point out to eclipsenow and marcus that, with nuclear, we don’t have to remake the whole energy infrastructure. We knock out coal plants and put in nuclear plants, displacing carbon. There exists a pretty clear path to doing this in the developed world, which produces most of the carbon emissions.”
This is a good point Frank!
“No multi-trillion dollar replacement power grid is necessary or changes of consciousness and consumer habits is a precondition to accomplishing this carbon displacement”.
This is not so strong, as from what I’m reading the American grid needs a super-makeover anyway due to age, and while rebuilding it… why not make it ‘smart’ and flexible for both nuclear AND renewables?
“One of the problems with visionary energy solutions is that they tend to assume that all of the institutional arrangements will just fall into place under the notion that everyone will see the compelling logic of the visionary’s notions. Either that or they assume a dictatorship of the visionary.”
Yeah, some people are like that. However, I’m discussing market behaviours. This is where “diffuse” becomes irrelevant, as if there is a commodity to provide (solar energy) at the right price (“cheap enough”), then the marketplace will find a way… whether that is covering carparks, domestic rooftops, or the local school hall to sell energy back to the local community.
“It is nowhere written that superior economics of advanced Gen IV nuclear energy will, of necessity, lead to displacement of existing energy arrangements. Beta was a better technology than VHS, but who won?”
Can you please show me a functional Gen4 reactor that has been mass produced on the production line? Where can I order one? At what *demonstrated* market price? Sound familiar to certain individuals attacking solar PV at 85% of the full spectrum of light wave lengths?
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I looked at the BZE website to see where they stood on nuclear. As they have no search engine I used the Google Chrome ‘find in page’ command for ‘nuclear’ and ‘uranium’, not sure to what extent that includes linked pages. Result 0 finds.
My first thought is that the coal industry is not going to lose a wink of sleep as their approach doesn’t seem that hard hitting.
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