Pick up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of renewable energy. Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar, and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists and materials scientists… Or does it?
Guest Post by John Morgan. John is Chief Scientist at a Sydney startup developing smart grid and grid scale energy storage technologies. He is Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT, holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and is an experienced industrial R&D leader. You can follow John on twitter at @JohnDPMorgan. First published in Chemistry in Australia.
Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.
The problem is analysed in an important paper by Weißbach et al.1 in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that was required to build it. It takes energy to make a power plant – to manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on. The power plant needs to make at least this much energy to break even. A break-even powerplant has an EROEI of 1. But such a plant would pointless, as there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.
There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded.
For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al. estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7. An energy source with lower EROEI cannot sustain a society at those levels of complexity, structured along similar lines. If we are to transform our energy system, in particular to one without climate impacts, we need to pay close attention to the EROEI of the end result.
The EROEI values for various electrical power plants are summarized in the figure. The fossil fuel power sources we’re most accustomed to have a high EROEI of about 30, well above the minimum requirement. Wind power at 16, and concentrating solar power (CSP, or solar thermal power) at 19, are lower, but the energy surplus is still sufficient, in principle, to sustain a developed industrial society. Biomass, and solar photovoltaic (at least in Germany), however, cannot. With an EROEI of only 3.9 and 3.5 respectively, these power sources cannot support with their energy alone both their own fabrication and the societal services we use energy for in a first world country.
These EROEI values are for energy directly delivered (the “unbuffered” values in the figure). But things change if we need to store energy. If we were to store energy in, say, batteries, we must invest energy in mining the materials and manufacturing those batteries. So a larger energy investment is required, and the EROEI consequently drops.
Weißbach et al. calculated the EROEIs assuming pumped hydroelectric energy storage. This is the least energy intensive storage technology. The energy input is mostly earthmoving and construction. It’s a conservative basis for the calculation; chemical storage systems requiring large quantities of refined specialty materials would be much more energy intensive. Carbajales-Dale et al.2 cite data asserting batteries are about ten times more energy intensive than pumped hydro storage.
Adding storage greatly reduces the EROEI (the “buffered” values in the figure). Wind “firmed” with storage, with an EROEI of 3.9, joins solar PV and biomass as an unviable energy source. CSP becomes marginal (EROEI ~9) with pumped storage, so is probably not viable with molten salt thermal storage. The EROEI of solar PV with pumped hydro storage drops to 1.6, barely above breakeven, and with battery storage is likely in energy deficit.
This is a rather unsettling conclusion if we are looking to renewable energy for a transition to a low carbon energy system: we cannot use energy storage to overcome the variability of solar and wind power.
In particular, we can’t use batteries or chemical energy storage systems, as they would lead to much worse figures than those presented by Weißbach et al. Hydroelectricity is the only renewable power source that is unambiguously viable. However, hydroelectric capacity is not readily scaled up as it is restricted by suitable geography, a constraint that also applies to pumped hydro storage.
This particular study does not stand alone. Closer to home, Springer have just published a monograph, Energy in Australia,3 which contains an extended discussion of energy systems with a particular focus on EROEI analysis, and draws similar conclusions to Weißbach. Another study by a group at Stanford2 is more optimistic, ruling out storage for most forms of solar, but suggesting it is viable for wind. However, this viability is judged only on achieving an energy surplus (EROEI>1), not sustaining society (EROEI~7), and excludes the round trip energy losses in storage, finite cycle life, and the energetic cost of replacement of storage. Were these included, wind would certainly fall below the sustainability threshold.
It’s important to understand the nature of this EROEI limit. This is not a question of inadequate storage capacity – we can’t just buy or make more storage to make it work. It’s not a question of energy losses during charge and discharge, or the number of cycles a battery can deliver. We can’t look to new materials or technological advances, because the limits at the leading edge are those of earthmoving and civil engineering. The problem can’t be addressed through market support mechanisms, carbon pricing, or cost reductions. This is a fundamental energetic limit that will likely only shift if we find less materially intensive methods for dam construction.
This is not to say wind and solar have no role to play. They can expand within a fossil fuel system, reducing overall emissions. But without storage the amount we can integrate in the grid is greatly limited by the stochastically variable output. We could, perhaps, build out a generation of solar and wind and storage at high penetration. But we would be doing so on an endowment of fossil fuel net energy, which is not sustainable. Without storage, we could smooth out variability by building redundant generator capacity over large distances. But the additional infrastructure also forces the EROEI down to unviable levels. The best way to think about wind and solar is that they can reduce the emissions of fossil fuels, but they cannot eliminate them. They offer mitigation, but not replacement.
Nor is this to say there is no value in energy storage. Battery systems in electric vehicles clearly offer potential to reduce dependency on, and emissions from, oil (provided the energy is sourced from clean power). Rooftop solar power combined with four hours of battery storage can usefully timeshift peak electricity demand,3 reducing the need for peaking power plants and grid expansion. And battery technology advances make possible many of our recently indispensable consumer electronics. But what storage can’t do is enable significant replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy.
If we want to cut emissions and replace fossil fuels, it can be done, and the solution is to be found in the upper right of the figure. France and Ontario, two modern, advanced societies, have all but eliminated fossil fuels from their electricity grids, which they have built from the high EROEI sources of hydroelectricity and nuclear power. Ontario in particular recently burnt its last tonne of coal, and each jurisdiction uses just a few percent of gas fired power. This is a proven path to a decarbonized electricity grid.
But the idea that advances in energy storage will enable renewable energy is a chimera – the Catch-22 is that in overcoming intermittency by adding storage, the net energy is reduced below the level required to sustain our present civilization.
BNC Postscript
When this article was published in CiA some readers had difficulty with the idea of a minimum societal EROI. Why can’t we make do with any positive energy surplus, if we just build more plant? Hall4 breaks it down with the example of oil:
Think of a society dependent upon one resource: its domestic oil. If the EROI for this oil was 1.1:1 then one could pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. If it were 1.2:1 you could also refine it and look at it, 1.3:1 also distribute it to where you want to use it but all you could do is look at it. Hall et al. 2008 examined the EROI required to actually run a truck and found that if the energy included was enough to build and maintain the truck and the roads and bridges required to use it, one would need at least a 3:1 EROI at the wellhead.
Now if you wanted to put something in the truck, say some grain, and deliver it, that would require an EROI of, say, 5:1 to grow the grain. If you wanted to include depreciation on the oil field worker, the refinery worker, the truck driver and the farmer you would need an EROI of say 7 or 8:1 to support their families. If the children were to be educated you would need perhaps 9 or 10:1, have health care 12:1, have arts in their life maybe 14:1, and so on. Obviously to have a modern civilization one needs not simply surplus energy but lots of it, and that requires either a high EROI or a massive source of moderate EROI fuels.
The point is illustrated in the EROI pyramid.4 (The blue values are published values: the yellow values are increasingly speculative.)
Finally, if you are interested in pumped hydro storage, a previous Brave New Climate article by Peter Lang covers the topic in detail, and the comment stream is an amazing resource on the operational characteristics and limits of this means of energy storage.
References
- Weißbach et al., Energy 52 (2013) 210. Preprint available here.
- Carbajales-Dale et al., Energy Environ. Sci. DOI: 10.1039/c3ee42125b
- Graham Palmer, Energy in Australia: Peak Oil, Solar Power, and Asia’s Economic Growth; Springer 2014.
- Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall, Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution, Springer 2013.
Brave New Climate 
642 replies on “The Catch-22 of Energy Storage”
An important addition is that, even if storage scales and is cheap enough, it will be many times more useful for nuclear since you need only a little and the nuclear plants can then be ran as baseload plants.
Yet renewable enthusiasts such as PPP251 and many others, continue to use the magic playing field where storage is assumed in huge amounts for renewables, yet nuclear must operate without any such storage even though it needs less than 1/10th the storage of renewables.
Readers will notice this magic playing field comparison everywhere, without exception, from renewables advocates.
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Cyril R.: Reference: “Don’t Even Think About It [Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change]” by George Marshall, 2014.
Psychologists quoted by Marshall are very pessimistic. Chances are very good that we will go extinct because of Global Warming [GW].
Reference book: “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart. The fear started thousands or millions of years ago with the fear of witches, wizardry, magic etc. The design of the human brain is very bad. See “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer.
“The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart needs “Religion Explained” as background. A lot of modern first world people do magical thinking rather than logical or scientific thinking [not all logical thinking is scientific]. That is, they think of technology and things they don’t understand as magic. That is especially true of anything “nuclear.”
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Edward Greisch, you are mixing capacity factor and availability. Wind has something like 97-98% availability, which means that in theory with overbuilding wind you could meet 97-98% of demand. In practice there are limits to overbuilding, but German simulations show that it’s possible to get 60% of wind with relatively minor spillage (< 10%).
If 10% of natural gas bothers you then maybe you should tell that to the French. They have done nothing more than decorate gas turbines with nuclear, to use your kind of language.
Cyril R, you make the same mistake as Edward. You mix availability with capacity factor. In addition to that, solar is available during times of higher demand (daytime), which means that it can meet higher percentage of demand than it's capacity factor would suggest. You should revise your numbers, preferably with results from simulations that have looked into this more in depth.
You can check real time generation mix for France on this page:
http://clients.rte-france.com/lang/an/visiteurs/vie/prod/realisation_production.jsp
It is perfectly clear that coal is ramped up to cover higher daytime load. Fuel oil is also used for peaking. This just reinforces my point about low/high capex and low/high marginal cost generators.
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ppp251: To disambiguate: Solar gives you 15% of nameplate power. Wind gives you 20% of the old nameplate power or 23% of the newly lowered nameplate power. Together, that adds up to less than 35%, or 30% of the old nameplate power.
Solar gives you power near noon. Noon misses the peak demand time by a few hours.
Wind gives you full power whenever the wind is blowing at optimal speed. Too fast and you shut it down or loose the turbine. Too slow gives you less power, varying as wind speed to some power, 3 or 4.
Coal does not ramp well. In fact, coal must be kept burning all the time, as in spinning reserve, to ramp up. You may as well just use coal and forget the renewables. You burn almost the same amount of coal either way.
ppp251: You are dreaming. You are decorating a coal fired power plant with wind turbine “giant flowers.” You are not noticeably lowering your CO2 output. The only way to stop making CO2 is to convert the coal burner to nuclear.
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Then maybe you should explain why does German simulation of 100% renewable grid store only 75TWh from a total generation of 680TWh, which amounts to about 11%. Is 9.5%, that France used in 2006 according to your link, less than 1/10th of 11% that Germany would use in 100% renewable scenario? What kind of math is that? Since when is 9.5% on tenth of 11%?
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Here’s an interesting piece of math: on cold winter evenings France has peak load of 100GW (link). If they wanted to cover this with nuclear they’d need about 110GW of nameplate capacity (you always need some extra margin). Annual consumption is about 550TWh (according to IEA), which means average load of about 61GW.
This implies that capacity factor of their hypothethical 100% nuclear fleet would be 56%. Significantly lower than their already low 75%! Such low CF means much higher system costs (because most of the cost for nuclear is upfront) and lower EROI (which, of course, people like Weissbach don’t bother to include in their papers).
If you want to make 100% nuclear grid, then the last 10% will not be cheap, easy or straightforward. Some exceptions (like Sweden) which are blessed with hydropower may do this without fossil fuels, but for most countries seasonal differences in peak load imply that dispatchable low capex/high opex fossil fuels is the only realistic option available. That’s why France is using coal, gas and fuel oil for the last 10%.
Unfortunately, there is no alternative to gas turbines to do this. The best we can do is to put a price on carbon and use renewable methane instead.
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I looked at the link to Franc’s electrical supply, thanks. That’s a pretty picture! Wish the rest of the world could do that. Looks like efficiency is starting to kick in too. The fossil fuel component is even less than other’s clean energy components. Again, thanks for the visual for nuclear!
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“can you please unpack spillage and capacity factor for laypeople? How do we measure spillage, and how does that relate to capacity? Thanks.”
I’m not Cyril, but I can explain a simple version of spillage.
Suppose you have a grid with 100 GW of demand. For now, just assume constant, no need to deal with peaks for this simple example. Over the course of a year, 8760 hours, that grid will need 100GW X 8760 Hrs = 876,000 GW-Hours of energy in electricity from some source.
A generator that operates 100% of the time, would just need a capacity of 100 GW to supply our hypothetical grid. 100 GW out, 100 GW in, for 8760 hours per year and 876,000 GWHrs. of energy per year.
Such an imaginary generator has a capacity factor of 100%.
Unreliables, like wind and solar only produce energy a small percentage of the time. Let’s say that time is 25%.
So, one needs 400 GW of wind and solar capacity to generate the amount of energy needed in a year. 400 GW X 25% X 8760 = 876,000 GWHrs of energy per year.
Absent storage, this still doesn’t satisfy our electricity supply for our hypothetical grid. Sometimes unreliables produce 400 GW. Sometimes they produce 0 GW. Sometimes they produce something in between. They don’t sit and reliably produce 25% of capacity all the time. 25% is an average over time of how much they produce, including the time periods when production is 100% and time periods when it is 0% and all the times with production levels in between.
This average of percent of maximum electricity production over time is the capacity factor. For the mathematically inclined, if you graphed power from an electricity source vs. time, the capacity factor is the integral of the area under the curve (power*dt) divided by (the maximum power the source is capable of, times the same period of time.)
100 GW is needed 100% of the time.
When the source of energy is producing more than 100 GW, then not all the power can be consumed, and some of it must be abandoned. This is spillage.
And note, that even with 4 times the demand in capacity, there are still times when unreliables will not produce any power. Other times when it will produce far more than 100 GW.
So one might try to fill in the periods when no power is produced, by building still more unreliables. 8X. 12X. 16X demand in unreliable capacity. Well, as you do this, trying just to be sure you have 100GW all the time, the periods when you have more than 100GW, and can’t use it, keep increasing, and your spillage goes up and up, and your effective capacity factor goes down and down.
If you had 100 GW of demand and a storage facility that could “charge” at a 300 GW rate, then you could kind of get away with just 4X capacity in unreliables. Except, that storage costs you a substantial percentage of the energy in inefficiencies. And you must be able to output from the storage 100% of the grid demand, and you must be able to input to the storage (((grid_demand/capacity factor) X 1/efficiency) – grid_demand) power at all times in order for this to work. Where efficiency is the efficiency of your storage system.
Again, if you have efficient, affordable storage, why bother with unreliables? With unreliables, you need enough storage capacity to last your grid a week or three. This is very expensive. With nuclear, enough storage capacity to provide half of the peak demand for a quarter of a day is probably more than sufficient.
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ppp251: cold winter evenings France: Germany makes up the difference by buying power from France and Sweden. Power is traded all around the EU.
Nuclear costing too much for the last 10%: Nonsense. The cost of not-nuclear is death and extinction by Global Warming. 10% more nuclear is a bargain at twice the price. Extinction is an infinite cost.
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ppp251: To re- state in hopefully better terms: Multiple wind turbines in one wind area, where all of the wind turbines get wind at the same time, would not help. You still get calm everywhere at once. To get wind all the time, you need to cover enormous distances, like 12 time zones. For solar, you need to ring the planet with solar collectors.
I don’t believe that France is using coal to fill in the time gaps in renewable power. It takes too long to build up a head of steam. Gas turbines can ramp up quickly, but not instantly. Gas turbines are better at filling in gaps, but not as quick as batteries or a generator that is already spinning. It is better to “dispatch” power from somewhere else.
Reference: “Don’t Even Think About It [Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change]” by George Marshall, 2014.
Few people are natural engineers, and nobody is a good engineer without years of training and experience. Power systems is a specialized field and not my field. I listen to the experts.
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This is a myth. The amount of coal burned is substantially lower. Denmark was nearly 100% coal powered in the 80ies with emissions at 900g/kWh, now it’s 33% wind and 15% biomass with emissions reduced to 450g/kWh.
They consumed 12 million tonnes of coal annually in the 80ies and this fell to 6 million tonnes in recent years. The substantial reduction is obvious.
Denmark Coal Consumption by Year
Yes, that is true. That is why you need gas turbines for backup (at the same nameplate capacity as peak load).
They are only used for 10% of the time or so, but nonetheless they must be there.
You mean nuclear power? France is using coal, fuel oil and gas to fill in the gaps (mostly winter gap, because that’s when demand peaks in EU), because they do not have enough hydro to cover interseasonal variations.
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ppp251: 450 grams/kWh is too much CO2. And we can’t tolerate using gas turbines 10% of the time. Everybody has to quit burning coal immediately. Immediately = 5 years. We can convert to 100% nuclear in 5 years. WW2 took only 4 years.
http://oceans.mit.edu/featured-stories/5-questions-mits-ron-prinn-400-ppm-threshold
400 ppm CO2? Add Other GHGs, and It’s Equivalent to 478 ppm
The safe limit is 350 ppm CO2 + equivalents. We are way too close to the doubling point of 560 ppm.
Nuclear’s 30 grams/kWh used the gas diffusion process to enrich uranium as was used in the US, assuming the energy for gas diffusion came from a coal fired power plant. Centrifuges are more energy efficient, and the new laser process is more efficient yet. Even with gas diffusion, nuclear produces less CO2 /kWh than any other source of electricity.
Climate sensitivity is 3 degrees C/doubling short term and 6 degrees C/doubling long term. 6 degrees C of warming is the human extinction point. We are almost guaranteed to go past the 2 degree C limit in the short term already.
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Capacity factor of solar PV in Germany is 10%. Wind in Germany is around 16%.
Electricity demand in Germany peaks in winter, when the capacity factor of solar ranges from 0% to 3%.
These energy sources aren’t there most of the time, and certainly not when they’re needed most which is in the evening and winter.
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Thank you, Cyril R
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You can keep repeating that solar doesn’t produce anything in winter evening as many times as you like, but that won’t change the fact that overbuilding nuclear to meet peak demand massively increases costs.
Pumped hydro will not do, because we’re talking seasonal variations and bulk storage. You either have to overbuild nuclear or use fossil fuels. And we all know which one France chose.
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“Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-w…
“As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall – in the book, from about 2015.”
“Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate from about 2020. Global population begins to fall from about 2030, by about half a billion people per decade. Living conditions fall to levels similar to the early 1900s.”
“Wars could break out; so could genuine global environmental leadership. Either could dramatically affect the trajectory.”
The original paper:
Click to access MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
“Is Global Collapse imminent?”
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Whichever way people may want to spin it, but as a consumer of French electricity I just look at my bill, which is 10 eurocent per kW/h including all taxes, levies, ecoBS what have you. If i look at Germany where they now pay minimal triple that rate i wish everyone all the best with their perpetuum mobile of ‘renawable’ energy.
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Interestingly enough, by comparing Weissbach and Worldnuclear.org to other papers, I’ve just realized where the discrepancy in EROI estimates comes from. One reason is centrifuge enrichment, but another is that Weissbach and WorldNuclear.org apparently count whole thermal output, not just electricity.
This strikes me as a dubious assumption. Nearly all nuclear power plants dump 2/3 of their output as a waste heat. That’s reality. Wind and solar PV don’t do that (and also hydro for that matter), so a fair comparison should take that in consideration. One should count only output electricity, since this is the part that actually does useful work.
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still nuclear energy is way cheaper for consumer then wind/solar… By at least factor 3. Weirdness. Facts contradict theory but still people prefer the theory where have we seen that before?
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Citation required Petrossa. At least a factor of 3 cheaper? What a load of crap.
LCOEs here:
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
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sure i can cite my french electricity bill. It states i pay 10 eurocents per kw/h including all taxes, special tarifs and ecoTAX to pay for the renewable energy subsidies. I can then cite my dutch electritybill where i pay 32 eurocents total. That is what counts in the end, not your cooked up fantasy lists.
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Do you claim there are not and never have been subsidies for French nuclear power?
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a no not that BS argument again…. every company no matter who has the same rights to the same tax benefits. Still i count consumer endprice… if you want to suggest in france energy is 1/3 of that of the nearest countries because of subsidies…. Sorry doesn’t fly
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Meanwhile, German households picked up the growing bill for the wholesale subsidies for renewables that German industry enjoys, which account for 18 percent of the average price that consumers paid for electricity last year — twice as high a proportion as in 2010. Germany’s energy-intensive industries receive generous exemptions from the renewable energy subsidies.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-22/germany-s-green-energy-is-an-expensive-success
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I continue to be amazed by some of the claims made by renewables enthusiasts here.
For instance, regarding peak power need by season for various countries:
We can see that Germany is a highly industrialized country and therefore has enormous need for baseload power. To power Germany with nuclear is ideal, the output is nearly the same over the year. One needs only about 20% more nuclear capacity to cover the winter peak; that’s nearly a 100% nuclear powered economy at perhaps a 20% increase in cost. Not much.
Now compare with the solar output: German electric demand is highest in winter, and for the other countries this is even more pronounced. Solar is anti-correlated to the season as well as the evening peak, meaning it is actively harmful for capacity of the grid. It is “bad” capacity, in an active sense. Not only does it fail completely on a continent sized aggregation level if its cloudy in most of Europe (happens a lot), it is also enormously anti-correlated with the actual demand.
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“Do you claim there are not and never have been subsidies for French nuclear power?”
I can’t believe the unquantified nonsense from renewables supporters that gets approved here by the moderator.
What is the subsidy per kWh for nuclear? What is it for solar in Germany? I know the answers but lets see what the renewables supporters can come up with, in a quantified manner.
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as i tried to point out by simply using the price per unit for consumer. France scores amongst lowest of the world and only reason they are going into ‘renewable’ because it gets them EU subsidies. Silly system, you get massive subsidy for putting up a new turbine but none for maintaining them. So huge incentive to build windfarms but none to make them actually function or maintain.
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“Citation required Petrossa. At least a factor of 3 cheaper? What a load of crap.
LCOEs here:
”
NO. LCOE is largely irrelevant; the challenge we face is not to generate a kWh, the challenge we face is how to reliably power entire countries without using fossil fuels. Even 10% fossil is too much in a future world of 10-12 billion people even if they settle on 1/3 the per capita energy consumption of Germany.
What matters is systemic costs. Fossil fuels are spoiling us all. They are available, they are reliable, they do not require nation sized batteries or pumped hydro storage. We are all like spoilt children that don’t realize what they have got and yet want something else.
What is the cost of powering Germany with renewables while keeping fossil to under 10% contribution? What is the cost of the grid upgrades (which will operate at the terrible capacity factor of renewables in Germany)? What is the cost of the energy storage systems needed? What is the cost of the backup plants? What is the grand total of these triplicated costs?
These are the questions that matter. Not what a kWh costs in isolation. LCOE is dishonest.
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“Interestingly enough, by comparing Weissbach and Worldnuclear.org to other papers, I’ve just realized where the discrepancy in EROI estimates comes from. One reason is centrifuge enrichment, but another is that Weissbach and WorldNuclear.org apparently count whole thermal output, not just electricity.`
Wrong again. The World Nuclear info actually does the opposite, it counts only electrical output but triples all thermal inputs. Despite this it gets to EROEI of 81.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Energy-and-Environment/Energy-Analysis-of-Power-Systems/
The world nuclear website is even wrongly counting the plant self consumption as increased input when in fact plant self consumption is reduced output, hence has nil effect on EROEI because output is so large.
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You can keep repeating that solar doesn’t produce anything in winter evening as many times as you like, but that won’t change the fact that overbuilding nuclear to meet peak demand massively increases costs.Wow, what a load of nonsense. I´ve just shown you a perhaps 20% increase in cost would be enough with nuclear.
With solar, for example, you´d need about 1000% the capacity to power the country in winter, and that´s assuming you have a week of energy storage already. That´s 900% extra capacity versus nuclear 20% increased capacity to power Germany in winter. Amazing. Yet we keep hearing claims of massive costs for nuclear powering countries, despite France already doing this and having cheap and reliable power.
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I should add that solar doesn´t just produce little power in a winter evening, it produces little power on a winter day. A 1% capacity factor is seen on many january days.
In fact, there´s a fun website from a solar equipment manufacturer
http://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html
That shows that right now it is noon in Germany yet only 6.6 GWe is being produced out of a 36.76 GWe peak. That´s feeble, the best time of the day can´t even make 25% of the fleet nameplate. And that´s PEAK capacity, the average capacity factor will be a small fraction of this, perhaps 4 to 6% today. Any other generator that performs this badly would be decommissioned.
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So right now, 15.00 hours, still in the middle of daylight, and its reasonably sunny today in Germany, solar in Germany produces a mere 10% of its capacity, and rapidly diving to zero now.
http://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html
How can anyone think that this can be used to power a modern Industrial country…
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Yeah, switching from France load curve to Germany to make nuclear fit better. The problem does not go away, capacity factor drops in either case (in France to 56%, in Germany to 76% – you can work it out). This increases costs and decreases EROI, a fact that is ignored by Weissbach and other nuclear proponents.
What is the subsidy per kWh for fusion? It’s infinite, because fusion has produced exactly zero kWh. Subsidies should be compared in absolute terms, because it’s the initial capital investment that helps to develop an energy source, not per kWh subsidy. You get kWh later, when you also remove subsidy (and reduce “per kWh subsidy”).
Externalities, however, are different. Externalities do not go away and should be included in price per kWh.
So my answer to question of subsidies would take these remarks into consideration and look at the data. For EU, a recent study titled Subsidies and costs of EU energy was done on the request of EU commission. It aims to quantify subsidies, externalities and LCOE. The results are as follows:
Cumulative historic subsidies 1970-2007 (page vii, figure s-5):
solar ~10€ bn
wind ~20€ bn
nuclear ~200€ bn
coal ~ 100-200€ bn plus 370€ bn of other support
Ongoing externalities (page ix, figure s-6):
solar ~20€/MWh
wind ~5€/MWh
nuclear ~20€/MWh
coal ~ 75-150€/MWh
LCOE (page 52, figure 4-3):
solar ~ 100€/MWh
wind ~75€/MWh
nuclear ~100€/MWh
coal ~ 75€/MWh
Since direct subsidies for solar are locked in by feed-in-tariffs for some years to come, cumulative solar subsidies will grow. But since this was about 15€ bn in 2012 (page iv, figure s-2) it is unlikely that it will ever catch €200bn nuclear (which also gets 5€ bn per year, same page). The same holds for wind.
From historical data, ongoing externalities and LCOE it’s clear that wind is the cheapest, solar and nuclear are somewhat a tie, and coal is the most expensive.
Sure, like $58bn nuclear mess in Fukushima. Or 5-7% of Ukraine government spending that is still used to deal with consequences of Chernobyl (down from 22% in 1991). Not to mention huge security costs that are hidden in the military to prevent proliferation.
I have checked the calculations again and you’re wrong. World Nuclear assumes 7.5TWh of output per year, which is 27PJ. But they’ve written 81PJ, which is thermal output, not electrical. Then they’ve used thermal output to calculate EROI, 40*81/40 = 81. If they used electrical output they’d get 27. But that wouldn’t fit into their agenda, because it’s comparable to wind and solar.
I’ve also checked Weissbach again and he does use only electrical output. However, the details show why his study is such an outlier. He lowballs all of the input energy and highballs lifetime (60 years average?!) and capacity factor (91%, while global maximum was 86% in 2002). This just shows how sensitive EROI is to tweaking details.
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ppp251: More important: Global Warming [GW] will cause civilization to collapse within 40 years because GW will cause the rain to move and the rain move will force agriculture to collapse. It has happened to dozens of previous civilizations because of very minor changes in climate.
Civilization collapse is likely to result in our extinction this time. Extinction of humans is an infinite cost.
Wind and solar do not work because we can’t build the energy storage.
That leaves only one option: nuclear. Cost be damned. There is only one option. Extinction [failure] is not an option.
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Congratulations Edward, that is the funniest serious comment I have ever seen.
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It is not at all funny. “Drought Under Global Warming: a Review” by Aiguo Dai
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/adai/
“Preliminary Analysis of a Global Drought Time Series” by Barton Paul Levenson, not yet published. Agriculture collapses due to the rain moving. The date is uncertain but soon. The original date was 2050 to 2055, but the date was withdrawn.
Reference “Overshoot” by William Catton, 1980 and “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse” by William Catton, 2009. Catton says that we humans are about to experience a population crash. The population biologist, Catton, I think says that we are due for a population crash without GW and without aquifers running dry. Immediately.
“A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction” Collapse within 15 years;
revised to:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
Ogallala aquifer runs dry. No more wheat from the High Plains in the US. Aquifers run dry worldwide. Not included in the above.
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I figured an equation concerning total system percent of input power to output assuming constant power requirements.
Variable generation from a lot of solar will displace the need for baseload, thus that baseload will have to be shut down and replaced with variable generation from NG. That will cause MORE emissions than if we build nuclear baseload and machinery needed to convert the otherwise not needed power (during the day when solar spikes) into liquid fuels (air, water and electricty or heat).
Without nuclear, we need to do exactly what (true) environmentalists warn us not to do… kill the biosphere. I have the numbers to back it up in the form of an equation.
(1/CF)+1/Esoi(1/CF-1)
__________________ (100) =
Equals Imbodied energy of total system as a percentage of output based on constant power requirements. CF is capacity factor, Esoi is energy stored on investment and Eroei is energy returned on energy invested. They say PV requires has an Eroei of about ten (output over entire life divided by energy required to make it). The CP is about 20% (or .2 in the equation) and whatever storage has an Esoi of between 0.2 (? for methanol made from electricity, water and air?), about 5 for batteries, to a lot more for pumped hydro.
IF the RE advocates plug in all the numbers for their favorite intermittent source, they will see that in order NOT to fry the biosphere, by use of using fossil fuels to back the inverse of CF (1/CF), the higher the Esoi of the storage, and the higher the Eroei of the source, the more feasible their scheme becomes.
For example, solar at 10 and clean liquid fuels at, say 0.5 Esoi, consumes 100% of the energy out, thus overall system output gain is zero (however, that means “1 to 1”). Wind and PHS seems to be the best until you do the math on how much land has to be covered by lakes.
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ppp251: How can I contact you?
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Aside from the silliness of trying to get much from solar at German or Canadian latitudes, or trying to get all our energy from wind & solar:
What about trying to get an optimum mix of solar & something steady like nuclear or geothermal at low latitudes? Are there regions where the power demand above baseload matches daily variation in solar power well enough that nuclear plus solar would minimize storage needs?
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Hi Jim,
I love your thinking. Solar PV might be good for reducing ‘gold plating’ of the grid in a largely nuclear grid, but what the final mix is I don’t know. 50/50? 60 nuclear, 40 renewable? We’ll see. A decent amount of nuclear could support a thriving renewable grid. Why oh why can’t they be friends? :-)
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and what exactly would that solve? At even optimal settings solar averages out at 20% of rated capacity. Only a government would be silly enough to invest money in such a scheme. Remember how sunny Spain ran diesel generators to fake break-even output.
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“Why oh why can’t they be friends?” (nuclear and unreliables)
It’s been explained here repeatedly. The intermittency of unreliable, “renewables” causes their output to vary erratically from 0 to 100% of their rated capacity. Which means that capital must be expended on enough other generating capacity to make the unreliable capacity completely irrelevant and less than useless on a rationally designed grid.
I know. You’ll ignore this as well. But ignore it all you like. It doesn’t change the math and physics. Unreliables are useless wastes of time and money that simply distract from much needed action that actually can reduce CO2 emissions.
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Except I’ve read that unreliables, especially solar PV, also produce their most when Australian airconditioners are burning the most electricity: on the hottest days. Solar PV might then be reducing ‘gold-plating’ of the grid: the excessive investment in grid infrastructure where we spend say $7000 on grid infrastructure to support a $3000 air conditioner, just to cope with the top 4 hottest hours of the year. (Or whatever: this is illustration purposes only). If that $7000 goes on solar PV, then maybe it can cover the hottest 4 hours of the year AND produce some electricity into the grid the rest of the year.
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Everywhere I’ve heard about, the peak solar output is several hours before the peak AC demand. I doubt that Australia is any different.
But even if it wasn’t, the point remains that at times that solar output is zero when you need it. Clouds, dust, eclipse, whatever. So you must have sufficient capacity in reliable generators bought any way. If your reliable capacity is non-polluting nuclear, then you may as well just run the nuclear all the time. You had to pay for it any way because you can’t count on solar.
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Keep at it champions, I am sure you are just one pithy remark away from making every major economy in the world realise that renewables don’t work and that nuclear actually is the answer.
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I wouldn’t try to outguess what people will do unless they try to use renewables for a week while off the grid. That should be enough to bring them to their senses. Make it a month in the winter.
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“I wouldn’t try to outguess what people will do unless they try to use renewables for a week while off the grid. That should be enough to bring them to their senses. Make it a month in the winter.”
And not winter here in Australia. Make it somewhere interesting, like Germany. Or even North America. I hear the weather up there is just fine and dandy today! ;-) Just right for all that solar and wind! ;-)
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Hi eclipse.
I love the idea to have cheap renewables compete against nuclear.
But who in there right mind would built uneconomic powerplants?
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A RELIABLE source of power is so much better than an UNRELIABLE source. It might cost more upfront. It might not be as cheap on a strictly per kwh basis as solar PV on your roof. That’s because Solar PV lies. It is only cheaper that third of the day. What do you do the rest of the time? Coal. That’s not good. OK, pardon me for asking what you’re going to do the rest of the time, I know it’s not a ‘nice’ question to ask renewables fans, but it is the honest question to ask.
Unreliable power that only works a third of the time is trouble and that trouble ends up being expensive.
1. it requires more than 5 to 10 times as much concrete and steel.
2. needs you to build 4 or 5 times as much power to try and offset the down time
3. needs you to overbuild capacity so there’s some spare electricity to pump into storage
4. requires ridiculously large super-grids to get power from where the sun and wind are to where the consumers are
5. requires a ‘smart grid’ and smart appliances so everyone’s fridges are ‘load following smart appliances’. More cost to the end consumer.
6. NOW NREL tells us that we don’t need baseload power, when before they were saying we could charge 85% of our cars at night.
7. Now that we’ve got to charge our cars during the day, we’re (roughly speaking) going to have to DOUBLE the day time capacity to charge our cars.
Or we could just build nukes and avoid super grids, avoid smart grids, avoid massive over-capacity builds, and avoid doubling the day time capacity to charge electric cars by charging at night on pretty much the same grid we have today.
So which is cheaper? A few expensive nukes, or 600 cheap but quickly rising solar PV panels and wind turbines to offset one nuke AND a super-grid AND a smart-grid AND a doubled daytime capacity to charge EV’s instead of at night AND a bunch of smart-grid friendly appliances for everyone? Um, d’uh. Nukes are far cheaper. The super-smart super-grid is probably going to cost so much just on its own that the nukes would be cheaper.
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“who in there right mind would built uneconomic power plants?”
Pretty much every Western-style democracy – because politicians were quick to understand that their re-election is much more likely if they deliver policies that make their voters “feel good”. Policies that actually mitigate carbon emissions are a bit hard to explain in 75-word sound-bites.
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Wow, you guys get 75 words? We only get 10.
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Eclipse.
I guess there is no use to tell you that the grid is not a part of the trading price. 4c power will always outbid 8c power.
When you can’t sell your 8cent power for 12h you will have to sell for…
Guess what your nukes just got outbid again by natgas, wind, hydro and some batteries!
I like the idea of your PV/wind filter…installed already?
Leaves coal for you.
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Wind was required by a very stupid law. Nuclear did not get outbid. It was a bad government that made the law requiring a % renewable energy.
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Whatever law made wind cheap…
The French still take cheap German energy over expensive nuclear any time.
So does Austria (why should they buy expensive energy from France?) which actually imports almost 50% of its power (exporting 30% again) yet their pumped hydro is only utilised to 10%.
Storage is not built because it is not needed.
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Or just try using solar panels on a comet-landing satellite. I heard this morning that they’re straining to get as much data as they can, because the satellite uses solar panels for power and it landed in a shaded area. So after hundreds of millions of dollars and ten years out of how many careers, they get two hours of data and no more, because they used solar panels instead of an RTG.
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@heavyweather, I’m not sure what are you up to?
Yes, but why is this such a problem? Seasonal demand variation inevitably leads to low capacity factor for significant fraction of generators. Peaking gas turbines are sacrificed for this because of low capital cost. Grids already operate this way.
Renewables do require more backup capacity, but numbers should decide whether this translates into higher system costs.
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@ppt251
Just found no way in WordPress to get a private message to you.
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Renewables definitely do force a higher system cost. Look at the comment above showing the prices. The French pay 10 eurocents. The Germans pay 30 eurocents.
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Eclipse Now, a lot of today’s technology is much more complex than it used to be. But that doesn’t mean that it’s more expensive. On the contrary, by many measures it’s cheaper. Take computers for example, they’re much more complex but much more powerful and cheaper (per bits of information processed) than they used to be.
Just because you don’t like renewables or you’re too lazy to comprehend what would a renewable energy system look like, it doesn’t mean that it would be inefficient and expensive. You haven’t provided any real numbers. You just listed your personal feelings, many of which are wrong to begin with.
On your list:
1. yes it does, but it doesn’t mean much
2. not really, see for example Kombikraftwerk 2 (or english summary) for details
3. not much, see 2.
4. not much, see 2.
5. smart grid doesn’t necessarily imply more cost
6. irrelevant
7. it’s easy to double PV capacity
@Edward Greisch, according to Eurostat French households paid about 16cents/kWh and German’s 29cents/kWh (see Table 1). Disaggregated prices are as follows (see Table 4):
Energy and supply:
Denmark 0.048€/kWh
Germany 0.087€/kWh
France 0.058€/kWh
Network costs:
Denmark 0.077€/kWh
Germany 0.062€/kWh
France 0.052€/kWh
Taxes and levies:
Denmark 0.169€/kWh
Germany 0.143€/kWh
France 0.049€/kWh
It is clear that the majority of price difference is due to taxes and levies. This holds for both Germany and Denmark. The difference between energy+network between France and Denmark (or Germany) is minor. It mostly reflects that paid off nuclear has low O&M costs, and even so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
There is no real evidence that “nuclear is far cheaper” or that “renewables force higher system costs”.
I didn’t even mention $58 bn Fukushima cleanup, which Japanese taxpayers have to pay. Care to include these costs into your nuclear system costs, the same way you want renewables to include network costs?
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you are funny with your ‘taxes and levies’ scam. Look taxes and levies are hidden energy costs…. For a large part they consist of subsidies to pay for the huge cost of ‘renewables’ (or perpetuum mobile as i like to call them) So no matter how you try to skew the numbers, the price for energy is lowest in France due to nuclear, and highest in Denmark due to perpetuum mobile energy.
Furthermore your numbers for france don’t correspond with my energy bill which i think is a better more reliable indication. By your stated numbers my kw/h price would be 19.9 cents whilst my bill states its 8.4 cents total including ALL taxes and levies… Calculate yrself.. 9513 kw/h for 1131 euro including ALL taxes, levies, gridcost, VAT gives 8.4 cents per kw/h. In other words your information is wrong. Link to kopie of relevant bill https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1828618/edffactuur.jpg
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Petrossa, in the space of two paragraphs you first argue that subsidies and taxes MUST be included in the cost of renewables, then that the only measure is the cost paid by residential consumers. You can’t have it both ways champ.
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i guess you should reread what i said… The TOTAL cost paid by consumers includes the subsidies THEY (the consumers) have to PAY for YOUR ‘green’ energy. I have it only one way, the total endcost for the consumer.
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ppp251, You said it’s “easy to double” renewable energy. That is conceivable, however, it is NOT easy to build up the inverse of the capacity factor AND store ~3/4ths of that AND do so to such an intent as to completely replace fossil fuels for 10 billion people living at HIGH standards.
Here is the equation (I finally figured it out!)
(1/CF)+1/Esoi(1/CF-1)
__________________ (100) =
Eroei
Equals Embodied energy of total system as a percentage of output. Now, this is assuming power requirements are exactly the same throughout the night. However, it also assumes that there will be NO long lulls, since it is based on CF. Therefore, to be safe, in a modern world powered ONLY by renewables (minus nuclear), we would have to build even MORE capacity, MORE powerlines and MORE storage. Why? Because I KNOW we both agree that we can no longer afford to burn things.
Nuclear’s high CF and high Eroei makes possible the production of clean liquid fuels, especially WHEN solar is built up to capacity because nuclear will be wasted in the noon hours, otherwise!
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Every source of energy got its own economical threshold.
Even a source with an eroei just above 1 can be economic.
What really counts is the price.
Also the built and payback time are important. Everything reflected in cost.
I take the cheap energy even when the source got an eroei below 2.
BNC MODERATOR
On BNC you are required to back up your comments with scientific, peer reviewed links as per the Comments Policy. You consistently fail to do so. I will approve this and your next two comments, already in the moderation queue, but thereafter, moderation will be applied to those of your comments not abiding by the BNC Comments Policy.
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Just because an economic eroei of 12 was perceived as important for a finite resource like oil does not mean that a higher eroei yields lower price in any other system.
12 also looks like a minimum exceptable number because of dimishing marginal return as you move up the eroei number.
Is electricity an abundand form if energy?
Why should storage reduce the eroei of any source of energy.
Building storage is demand. As long as I can meet demand and the price is low I am good.
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Petrossa, Eurostat is a statistical office of EU and provides objective statistics with common methodology for all EU members. The numbers I referred to are an average numbers for household consumers and are comparable as much as average numbers can be compared.
You may have a lower tariff than average, but I doubt that Eurostat is making things up. You can google for other sources, pretty much all of them confirm Eurostat.
I used Eurostat numbers because network costs can be compared. It is evident that network costs in Germany and Denmark are not the main driver of price difference. Taxes and levies are the main driver of price difference.
As far as the statement that “the endcost for consumer is all that matters” is concerned, this is a recipe for disaster. Fossil fuels don’t pay air pollution and climate change costs and if we ignored these externalities we’d choke ourselves and destroy the planet. Nuclear has limited liability in the case of accident and that is an effective subsidy. In Japan Tepco was nationalized and Japanese taxpayers have to pay for Fukushima cleanup. These are real costs, being ignorant does not make them go away.
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http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/The-Nuclear-Debate/
“All nuclear reactors, at least in the West, are insured. Not only so, they are a sought-after risk because of their high engineering and operational standards. Beyond the cover for individual plants there are national and international pooling arrangements for comprehensive third-party cover.”
ppp251: Are you selling wind turbines? What is your real issue? It is quite clear that there is something else going on with several anti-nuclear commenters.
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yes and the IPCC is also very reliable, as is the WHO… Sorry but i’ll stick to my energybill if you don’t mind. Being dutch who migrated to France i can compare the two easily, and for the price of 3 months worth in the Netherlands i can do a year in France. But hey you read your papers, i’ll live in reality land.
Taxes and levies are needed to pay for something, such as the huge cost of wind and solarfarms plus the losses incurred by their enormous underperformance plus the need for baseload making it necessary to install double the capacity of which part just is idle. Yeah… great idea that.
Before Germany went all wacko green their energy price was comparable to France, since they went ‘green’ it suddenly doubled…But hey, that’s totally unrelated..
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fireofenergy: my plan was actually to use fusion/fission energy to convert ample seamethane into liquid fuel such as diesel or petrol. Advantages are you can leave the entire transport infrastructure intact and have ample time to invent some miraculous micropowerplant to drive electric cars whilst at the same time taking away dependence on gruesome regimes
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“World Nuclear assumes 7.5TWh of output per year, which is 27PJ. But they’ve written 81PJ, which is thermal output, not electrical. `
Wrong, wrong, wrong. As usual PPP is wrong. 7.5 TWh of electrical output is 81 PJ of ELECTRICITY. Not thermal. Interestingly the World Nuclear table name is also wrong, in calling this thermal output. I´ll send them an email on this.
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Sorry, my bad, 27 PJ electrical is correct. So EROEI indeed becomes EROEI around 25 to 30, though keep in mind once again this is counting thermal inputs as triple which is not correct since it is reduced output from plant parasitic loads like pumps, not increased input.
PPP is not correct though to argue that reducing capacity factor reduces EROEI much. This is because most of the input is variable, basically mining and enrichment and such, these are insensitive to the actual powerplant capacity factor.
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`Keep at it champions, I am sure you are just one pithy remark away from making every major economy in the world realise that renewables don’t work and that nuclear actually is the answer.”
Sadly we are not getting there. Entire countries are still addicted to the poison of renewable energy solves all the problems religion. Its amazing that a society that can land a probe on a comet can get another technology field, the field of energy transitions, so wrong.
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“This just shows how sensitive EROI is to tweaking details.”
True. That’s why we have lifecycle analysis such as from the Forsmark nuclear plant where exact inputs and outputs are measured and known to 99% accuracy. These clearly state EROEI in the range of 70 to 80.
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“Yeah, switching from France load curve to Germany to make nuclear fit better. The problem does not go away, capacity factor drops in either case (in France to 56%, in Germany to 76% – you can work it out). This increases costs and decreases EROI, a fact that is ignored by Weissbach and other nuclear proponents.`
Increases cost, yes a little. France gets 80% nuclear and has the among the lowest rates in Europe. The cost increase from going to 56% from the 70 to 80% capacity factor that France gets would be on the order of 20%.
EROEI is not affected much because variable energy inputs dominate. The energy cost of the actual construction of the nuclear plant is tiny relative to output so does not change the EROEI much.
Interestingly PPP once again does not compare this ´problem` of his (which entire countries such as France have largely solved already) to the problem that wind and solar have at high energy penetration. We´ve seen that enormous energy investment is needed in energy storage systems which nuclear doesn´t need if you overbuild 20 to 30%. Solar and wind also need much more overbuild even with energy storage, than nuclear,.
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Sure, like $58bn nuclear mess in FukushimaA small fraction of the amount of money thrown brainlessly at solar in cloudy countries to no avail. Nuclear has a big share in the global electricity supply, solar has nil to show for its costs.
Yet nobody talks about the 100 billion dollar solar mess in Germany, people talk about a nuclear mess that hasn´t killed a single person and consists mostly of fabricated costs.
If solar wastes were as vigorously treated as nuclear wastes, and they need to be since some of them are toxic forever, how many billions would have to be spent…
And what is the cost of a global electrical blackout if we have a bad solar period. What is the cost, how many billions, in energy storage on the level required to service the large majority of the world electrical supply.
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Ongoing externalities (page ix, figure s-6):solar ~20€/MWh
wind ~5€/MWh
nuclear ~20€/MWh
coal ~ 75-150€/MWh
So here we have a solar enthusiast that cites a reference claiming solar and nuclear to have identical external costs.
Huh…
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`
Except I’ve read that unreliables, especially solar PV, also produce their most when Australian airconditioners are burning the most electricity: on the hottest days. Solar PV might then be reducing ‘gold-plating’ of the grid:
`
Well, you heard wrong. Aircon demand peaks in the afternoon and early evening. Typically there is then another peak due to lighting and appliances and such. This is typical.
No coinciding peak. Just when demand is the highest the solar output is well on its way down. Anti correlated when it matters most. To deal with this you need ice storage and such which increases the cost of the aircon system greatly.
In most countries, at least where most of the energy is consumed, there is actually a winter peak. Completely anti correlated with PV output. Germany being a good case in point, but most of Europe and North America and also much of China is like that.
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“If they used electrical output they’d get 27. But that wouldn’t fit into their agenda, because it’s comparable to wind and solar.”
You haven’t read the web page haven’t you?
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Energy-and-Environment/Energy-Analysis-of-Power-Systems/
It says 81 on a thermal basis, and 25-27 or so on net power basis. This is working on the wrong assumption that plant electrical consumption is increased input when in practise it is reduced output (the power to operate motors in the plant is taken from main plant output, it would be silly for utilities to do otherwise).
You’re accusing the World Nuclear Association of having an agenda with points that aren’t justified. The information on the World Nuclear Website is excellent and there are many different sources and references given. It is much more scientific than the cheering dribble we get from global solar energy associations and the like.
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Funny coincidence. Here is an excel sheet https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1828618/inventarisatieturbines.xls (in dutch but mostly numbers) which show a total of up till now 172 windturbines of about 7 yrs old to be replaced because of the 350 million euro EU subsidy they get before end 2014, not because they are dysfunctional. In fact they were build with a 25 yr expected operating life. Great system, capital destruction gets subsidized.
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[…] “The Catch-22 of Energy Storage” by John Morgan is quite an article. It exemplifies proper systems analysis, which requires one to stand back and look at the overall Big Picture — examine all of the important variables — in order to improve the odds of arriving at a proper solution. […]
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ppp251 Slightly off-topic but nonetheless noteworthy: interesting tidbit about Eurostat you rely on. “MEPs accuse commission of blocking EU statistics ‘whistleblower’ Talks aimed at increasing transparency on EU statistical output have collapsed after the European Commission refused to apply the rules it demands of national statistical offices to its own statistical agency.”
http://euobserver.com/news/123293
Eurostat is a politicized agency just about nothing coming out of there hasn’t been polished up to fit the narrative.
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fireofenergy, I’ve seen this formula in some comment on theenergycollective, but I’m not sure if it’s correct. It doesn’t take into account different lifespan for EROI and ESOI. If EROI=20 and ESOI=10, then you need to build 2x storage in the same lifespan (actually 2x is not entirely accurate, but it’s close). Lifespan should be reflected in the formula, but I don’t see it. If I insert some numbers for PV=20 and storage=10 (and 100 and 1000), then I get that it’s very sensitive to EROI and very insensitive to ESOI, but it should be (roughly) the other way around.
Cost would increase much more than 20%. They have about 63GW of capacity today. If they wanted to cover peak demand they’d need 100GW. Capital costs would go through the roof.
What kind of comparison do you have in mind? I think that for high latitude countries like Germany it’s clear that bulk storage will be needed, but that batteries, pumped hydro or compressed air are not feasible for this task. However, chemical storage in the form of renewable methane is feasible. This may come from power-to-gas or possibly other means. Economics are unknown at this point, but dismissing it is irrational.
Besides power-to-gas, artificial photosynthesis (hydrogen) and algae biomass are also an option. As an interesting example: a building (in Germany) with algae biomass integrated into facade. These can be integrated into buildings the same way PV can be.
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“Cost would increase much more than 20%. They have about 63GW of capacity today. If they wanted to cover peak demand they’d need 100GW. Capital costs would go through the roof.”
I’ve seen documentaries claiming that LFTR’s could be mass produced at $2bn / gig. Extra power in off-seasons could be put to mass producing various fuels and fertilisers and desal. Combined purpose, as demanded by the local market.
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OK guys, help me out here: online contacts keep asking me why we won’t just build more wind and solar.
Wind gives us an ERoEI of 3.9 with buffering (storage), then that’s the night time and winter time capacity done.
If society only needs an ERoEI of 7
So (and I know this ignores wind’s supposedly ‘cheap’ cost argument by doubling it!) build the wind twice. The second lot will have the full wind ERoEI of 16, because the first lot charges the buffering.
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PS: By ‘charges’ I mean builds, maintains, and replaces the hydro dams etc.
PPS: I know the equation is output / (renewable + storage input), but I’m looking for someone to argue why in English. Is it because we are looking at the proportions of storage energy to output? If so, then the second lot won’t sneak through at 16, because the hydro still costs what it costs to build. But the overall ERoEI would be nearly 8. (If we did the insane thing and build the wind grid twice!)
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What TIMESCALE are you talking about in this article?
Are you addressing energy needs for the next
50 years?
500 years?
Only then can we discuss:
– Reliance finite resources which WILL run out (oil coal, uranium)
– The pollution of the ecosystem which WE RELY ON for food and oxygen.
You should state what problems are you prepared to externalise to future generations in solving this generations energy needs?
Ultimately there are only 2 choices for the LONG TERM energy solution:
option A – Sustainability
option B – Death
If you know any other option, please let me know.
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///Only then can we discuss:
– Reliance finite resources which WILL run out (oil coal, uranium)///
As an old peak oiler, I have some sympathy about where you’re coming from. But uranium and thorium are just as ‘renewable’ as the sunlight leaving the sun! Are we ever going to see that sunlight again? No. Entropy. Are we ever going to see the uranium and thorium we fission away again? No. And that’s entirely irrelevant. Breeder reactors can turn today’s nuclear ‘waste’ into 500 years of fuel. By then, who knows what we’ll have? Baseload solar power from space? Fusion? Who knows? But in case we don’t have these things, check this wiki. Uranium particles silt down our rivers and into our oceans, constantly topping up our oceans with more uranium than we can use. With continental drift, this will continue as long as there is life on earth. At $400 to $600 for a kg of fuel, which is a whole lifetime of fuel, cradle to grave, uranium from seawater costs are quite negligible. Nuclear’s main price is in the capital. And that can crash down with serious mass production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_renewable_energy
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We are headed for a human population crash from 7 Billion to 70 thousand or zero people within 40 years. Some say within 15 years. We don’t have time for research or fooling around with renewables.
1. Global Warming [GW] will cause civilization to collapse within 40 years because GW will cause the rain to move and the rain move will force agriculture to collapse.
2. Population biologist William Catton says that we in the US are overcrowded; immigration must reverse. Collapse any time now. The Earth has 4 Billion too many people.
3. Aquifers running dry
4. Resource depletion
4A oil
4B minerals
etcetera.
War will kill a lot of people. Famine will kill 8 billion out of 7 billion.
So put the time scale at 5 years to 30 years. We can replace coal with factory built nuclear in 5 years. That would cut CO2 production 40%. But we have no time for nonsense like renewables.
5 years to 30 years.
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Hi Edward,
I agree with the urgency but cheer up a bit. None of us know the future. Look what just became economical! Food from seawater and deserts!
(Point 3)
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There is a lot in this report http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2014.html but nothing that suggests nuclear is superior. It is written by the World Nuclear Industry.
It includes this passage:
“• Increasing System Incompatibilities. The traditional concept of baseload electricity generation might become obsolete with increasing renewable energy penetration in national grid systems. Several countries now experience periods of very low or even negative electricity prices on the spot market. Electricity generators literally pay to produce because shutdown and restart would cost them even more. As illustrated with empirical examples from Germany, nuclear plants turn out the least flexible to react to unfavorable economic conditions and keep operating for hundreds of hours at spot prices below their average marginal operating costs.”
Drop this idea that nuclear can work with renewables or that it can load follow or any of these crazy load shedding ideas that have never been attempted, let alone demonstrated commercially. The World Nuclear Org says nuclear is too inflexible to work in a dynamic market.
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HI EVCricket,
the problem is the ‘dynamic market’ as you called it cannot guarantee supply on its own. The ERoEI alone proves that, let alone the enormous economic expense of trying to ‘backup’ an unreliable source of energy. Indeed, the evidence may be seen another way. It’s time to get rid of the wind and go back to reliable baseload supply as a more economical alternative. Then we’d at least have a reliable overnight supply to charge all our EV’s, rather than having to DOUBLE daytime capacity to try and do it during the day as well as running industry and stuff.
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That isn’t what the article said. What it said: If you insist on renewables, you are going to freeze in the dark.
Evcricket: What is your financial interest in renewables? What is your fear? Why should I bother to answer you when you aren’t being serious?
Yes, we know that renewables are nothing else but disruptive. I did read the article. Intentional misinterpretation is not OK.
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The foundation on this article is the industry EROI claim for Nuclear at the top end EROI 75. But other experts estimate EROI less than 1.
according to this study by scientificamarican:
”
Nuclear:
As with hydroelectricity, the EROI estimates for nuclear power span a very large range. Some claim that the EROI is actually less than 1—which would mean that the whole process is not a source of energy, but rather a sink—whereas others (such as the World Nuclear Association, an industry group) estimate that the EROI is much higher than perhaps any other source of energy, around 40 to 60 when using centrifuge enrichment. I drew on a paper that reviewed many studies, and estimated the EROI to be 5. Lenzen, “Life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy: A review,” Energy Conversion and Management (2008) (link).
”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eroi-behind-numbers-energy-return-investment/
So where does that leave us?
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With nuclear fuel recycling, you can get an eroei of ten thousand.
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Evan –
“It is written by the World Nuclear Industry.”
“The World Nuclear Org says nuclear is too inflexible to work in a dynamic market.”
Do you even know who worldnuclearreport.org is?
Mycle Schneider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycle_Schneider http://atomicinsights.com/sotu_2013/#comment-84596
Antony Froggatt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Froggatt
Both clearly anti-nuclear, and as representative of “the nuclear industry” as the Australian Vaccination Network is of the Australian Society of Immunologists.
And notice that neither puts “anti” in their letterhead, which I think is intended to deceive, and clearly has.
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ppp251,
Yes, I did not include the lifetime of the source’s. Neither di I consider the life of the storage because that is already in the Esoi. For, example, Li-ion is better not because they require less energy than lead acid (I believe they require more), but because they last longer. Clean liquid fuels HAS to be substantially less than “1”. Therefore, only the sources that already have a high capacity factor and Eroei could “afford” it. Perhaps wind (and a LOT more clean fuels production)? Nuclear is still far better in this respect which matters.
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“Drop this idea that nuclear can work with renewables or that it can load follow or any of these crazy load shedding ideas that have never been attempted, let alone demonstrated commercially.”
WOW! Just… WOW!!!
Does anyone, even a single person, actually fall for this nonsense?
Have you even paid attention to anything whatsoever on Bravenewclimate, the very website you’re commenting on now EVCricket?
Have you considered the excess solar and wind capacity required to make a renewables grid work, and how much excess capacity needs to be shedded at sunny windy times and the amount of storage needed for not sunny not windy times?
This is orders of magnitude worse than the nuclear “inflexibility” argument of yours. If you can make renewables work on a scale large enough, and high enough grid penetration, to solve GhG and sustainability problems, you’ve got such enormous emounts of load shedding and storage capability, that accomodating nuclear output is a walk in the park. Yet if you do this then why bother with renewables? Why tune down the nuclear plants to make room for solar and wind output? Why not skip the costly wind and solar and just run the nuclear plant at full bore, and dump excess nighttime capacity in charging electric vehicles?
Drop the dreaming EVCricket and other renewables enthusiasts like PPP251. France is powering itself from nuclear. It does not need wind and solar and putting it on is pointless from any environmental or emissions perspective. Meanwhile Germany hates nuclear so uses fossil powered grid, garnished with pretty wind and solar pictures to absolve the guilty conscience of the woeful energy policy Germany has.
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“Li-ion is better not because they require less energy than lead acid (I believe they require more)”
Actually they require enormously more energy per watt-hour than lead acid, per the ref PPP251 gave. So its pretty much a washout on ESOI, increased lifetime is cancelled by the increased energy to make them.
Only pumped hydro has this advantage of long lifetime really improving the ESOI.
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Well, what exactly do you mean by clean fuels? Just power-to-fuel, or do you also include algae biofuels and artificial photosynthesis?
Power-to-fuel does have EROI 1. They bypass ‘power’ and they utillize solar energy directly.
Here’s an interesting building: power-autonomous building EnFa.
For 80% of energy it uses solar PV+batteries and for 20% biogas. It’s not connected to the grid. Even if we take very low EROI for biogas, combined EROI doesn’t change much. The amount of batteries is also sufficiently small that it doesn’t change EROI much: about 3.6kWh for 1kWp of PV, as opposed to Weissbach who wants storage for 10 days of full load, which is something like 30-35kWh for 1kWp of PV. An order of magnitude difference.
While biogas cannot be scaled to global levels, algae and artificial photosynthesis can be scaled. So you can like nuclear energy if you want, but this type of system is also viable and there are some benefits in it.
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Except that you don’t have a working algae or synthetic photosynthesis yet. They are pipe dreams. It is nuclear or extinction.
We are headed for a human population crash from 7 Billion to 70 thousand or zero people within 40 years. Some say within 15 years. We don’t have time for research or fooling around with renewables.
1. Global Warming [GW] will cause civilization to collapse within 40 years because GW will cause the rain to move and the rain move will force agriculture to collapse.
2. Population biologist William Catton says that we in the US are overcrowded; immigration must reverse. Collapse any time now. The Earth has 4 Billion too many people.
3. Aquifers running dry
4. Resource depletion
4A oil
4B minerals
etcetera.
War will kill a lot of people. Famine will kill 8 billion out of 7 billion.
So put the time scale at 5 years to 30 years. We can replace coal with factory built nuclear in 5 years. That would cut CO2 production 40%. But we have no time for nonsense like renewables.
5 years to 30 years.
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“Power-to-fuel does have EROI 1.”
Something mixed up, apparently wordpress doesn’t like inequality sign. This should be:
Power-to-fuel does have EROI less than 1, but algae biofuels and artificial photosynthesis have EROI greater than 1.
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Cyril R: ” Meanwhile Germany hates
nuclear so uses fossil powered grid, garnished with pretty wind and solar picturesto absolve the guilty conscience of the woeful energy policy Germany has.”
Don’t forget the part where they’re feeding their forests (and imported pelleted forests) into their electricity generators.
The bulk of Germany’s so-called renewable generation is bio-fuels or wood burning. It’s larger than wind and more than twice as large as solar.
The only reason why Germany has a “renewable” generation figure above 15% is because of wood burning and the 3% legacy hydro.
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Here’s the German data to the end of 2012 … pretty clearly that nuclear rather than fossil fuels are the principle target and being replaced not just with wind+solar, but lots of burning forests. Green is the new dirty brown.
Click to access GERMANY2.pdf
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P.S. 2012 just happens to be the latest data available in this form on the IEA site.
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I don’t understand the motivation of some Anything-But-Nuclear commentators who decry the time and expense of nuclear capacity build (and granted there are some bad examples) while defending the potential of storage and alternative generation technologies in the context of developed nation decarbonisation.
I bet we could get more than a few reactors built in the time it takes to fully demonstrate the viability and scalability of most of these. Which of course would provide cleaner energy with which to develop and build them (less C-intensive EROI) down the track.
They are not competing options while they are nascent, prototypical or lab-scale, and especially when they fly in the face of physics. Citing them as supporting the expansion of existing renewables actually weakens the case.
The case for supporting existing, proven renewable technologies is more confidently made these days by Everything-On-The-Table commentators http://decarbonisesa.com/2014/10/27/nuclear-and-renewables-in-the-name-of-national-interest/
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actinideage: I can tell you this much:
1. Reference book: “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart. The fear started thousands or millions of years ago with the fear of witches, wizardry, magic etc. The design of the human brain is very bad. See “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer.
“The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart needs “Religion Explained” as background. A lot of modern first world people do magical thinking rather than logical or scientific thinking [not all logical thinking is scientific]. That is, they think of technology and things they don’t understand as magic. That is especially true of anything “nuclear.” This applies to many Americans.
Some key phrases from “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart:
violate the natural order
forbidden sight
forbidden knowledge
secret knowledge
special knowledge
shamanic knowledge
monster
death ray
growth ray
failed rebirth
mad scientist
witch, wizard, shaman, devil, etc.
Wind and solar energy make sense in simple ways. Nuclear requires more science. That puts nuclear into the realm of religion, since science and religion are “opposites.”
There are many Americans who cannot believe that there are people who believe neither in god nor in the devil. If you tell them that you believe in neither, they may get upset. The US is not a well educated country.
A clue to action: “A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian. Boghossian’s idea is to get people to look at experimental evidence by what he calls “street epistemology.” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines how we know. The same methods should apply to any counterfactual belief. The problem is how to apply it to billions of people at once. Of course there will be resistance from clerics and the establishments.
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I was part of a team that briefed the NSW Upper House Cross-Benchers on peak oil and energy security back in 2005. The Christian Democratic party leader Fred Nile was there. After our presentation, he immediately burst out “We’ll THAT’S why we’ve got to build nuclear! I’ve been saying that for years!” But the guy’s own website also condemns him as a global warming denialist, seeing pinko commo conspiracies in climate papers. It’s weird how he’s so passionate for the solution, but can’t let himself accept the problem. But don’t go blaming his Christianity for that. Interesting new statistics have come out that demonstrate that an individual’s politics are more deterministic on views about climate change than their metaphysical worldview.
So, as I’m a Christian and know plenty of Christian thinking people that take climate change seriously AND also some that support nuclear power, I’d prefer you drop this bunkum assertion that fear of nuclear or radiation is a result of some latent technophobia coming from a Theistic worldview. Christians aren’t technophobes: they LOVE their microwaves and iphones and computers and the internet, and hardly any of them understand the ‘forbidden knowledge’ that makes it all work. ;-) And yes, many Christians have worked in the sciences, in fact established many of the sciences at the beginning of science, and there is a strong argument that western science accelerated because of a Christian worldview. See Cosmic Chemistry: Do Science and God mix? ABC’s Big Ideas: Dr John Lennox.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2014/10/01/4098188.htm
You want to know why people fear nuclear, and nearly wet themselves at the word ‘radiation’? Look at Helen Caldicott screeching away like a parody of herself. Look at the Cold War. Look at 1980’s cold war movies like “Threads” or “The Day After”. Look at the article here recently about German romanticism and how that’s fuelling anti-nuclear sentiment. Look at media reporting. Look at Greenpeace, for crying out loud! “Radioactive fluid is seeping out of Fukushima, and could be heading to American shores!” Many of those leaks were just tritium water. Wow. Talk about life threatening. (Sarcasm). You don’t need to get into some Bulveristic psychiatric claptrap about brain-wiring or ancient fears of the unknown to understand this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
Our modern ignorance and fears are quite up to the job, thanks! And we’ll have enough trouble unwiring all those bad modern memes. I know. I was one of them until I started reading BNC a few years ago. There was nothing incompatible with my Christian worldview and nuclear energy, but everything incompatible from bad wiring in the modern memes I’d caught like a bad case of the flu. Typical stuff like nuclear waste lasting a gazillion years and the risk of accidents and proliferation and terrorists getting the bomb; then we’ll have an ‘incident’ and our babies will end up with 3 eyes! And worst of all, people like Homer Simpson are at the helm! ;-)
Thankfully some here were calm and considered and talked me through these silly memes. When I hear them now I wince. So uninformed!
Your books are just plain wrong. Metaphysical worldviews are about philosophical and historical and scientific data: and how they all relate. They’re simply too big to discuss on a blog that’s already emotional enough debunking entirely MODERN fears about nuclear power being pushed by Greenpeace and Caldicott. I suggest you stop using this back-door approach to push your own worldview, and agree to keep this blog about the science? Then the blog will reach the widest possible audience and alienate less readers. Thanks.
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Eclipse Now: I said nothing about any particular religion. I don’t care which religion.
I don’t agree that Helen Caldicott and the like are all there is to blame. Helen Caldicott would get ignored if a lot of people didn’t have a predisposition to believe Helen Caldicott.
I agree that there has been a lot of propaganda. Spencer Weart talked about the propaganda a lot in his book. Propaganda falls on deaf ears if the people whose ears it falls on understand the subject and are able to think for themselves.
A huge number of people did not study the science for themselves or go to school or otherwise learn the science. Why? You tell me.
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“if the people whose ears it falls on understand the subject”
There’s the problem: science is actually hard work, and even learning to understand what scientists are saying in layman’s terms can be hard work. Many people would rather watch the footy or some stupid reality TV show than even bother with a science show like Catalyst! Much of the population are scientifically illiterate. Like me, with a humanities and welfare background. But I’m curious, and an exception to the rule in my part of the world, because I actually watch Catalyst, listen to science podcasts, and come here to interact with more technical folk than myself when I have questions.
“A huge number of people did not study the science for themselves or go to school or otherwise learn the science. Why? You tell me.”
Ooh ooh! I know, it must be ancient superstitious pattern recognition hard wired into the brain that became too highly tuned and started perceiving patterns where there is only random noise, thereby deducing the existence of spirits, malevolent forces, and gods, thereby creating a million-year-old bias against nuclear power!
— OR —
Science is actually hard work, and even learning to understand what scientists are saying in layman’s terms can be hard work. Many people would rather watch the footy or some stupid reality TV show than even bother with a science show like Catalyst!
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Eclipse Now: Science is not hard work. I learned enough to be interested in nuclear power rather than afraid when I was in elementary school. In high school, I knew how to make a simple gun type uranium bomb. There was no hard science course in high school. “Hard” didn’t happen until I got to Carnegie-Mellon university.
Watching football and reality shows is boring. Most TV shows are nothing else but boring. I have never seen your TV show “Catalyst,” but my guess is that it is easy.
Probability and statistics is in the “Kitty” Literature for children. I read a book to my children about mice doing statistics and my 8 year old daughter got 10 pennies and tossed them 100 times and made a histogram. Parents have to be involved, and teachers have to do something besides lockstep. It is easy to teach children science and math if you are not afraid to do so. Science is fun. If it is fun, learning is easy.
All Religions have 2 bad features: They require belief in something that is nonsense and they teach people to use bad epistemology. “Belief” is a problem word. “Belief” prevents questioning and analysis. The change to science isn’t hard to learn. It is just quitting belief and testing concepts by doing experiments. Experiments WORK! Once you begin experimenting, you quit believing things. Then you are doing science. You still have a lot to learn, but you are free from the domination of clerics.
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Hi Edward G,
Dismissing my argument that Australians generally find science ‘hard’ compared to the arts or just doing a trade or watching sport because you found science interesting is about as anecdotal as you can get. What you want are generational statistics. The last few decades have witnessed Australian enrolment in science drop off a cliff!
“Twenty years ago, 94 per cent of year 11 and 12 students were enrolled in science subjects, but last year the figure dropped to 51 per cent.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-21/australian-students-shun-science/3741316
But that would only account for the youth of today’s anti-nuclear stance. The rest? Well, my working class mates are too busy discussing the footy or Walking Dead or latest Marvel movie or computer games, and my middle class mates are busy as dads, on the P&C or helping out at Scouts or arranging their next overseas holiday or food tour or winery escape. Life gets in the way!
Your argument about epistemology is superficial philosophically. EG: Please arrange a scientific experiment that proves scientific experiments are the only category of knowledge. In other words, what do you make of other disciplines like philosophy and history? Do they not contribute ‘knowledge’ about the world? Does not psychology show that everyone, even scientists, approach knowledge of the world through their own presuppositional framework? EG: Atheists might explain Christians as believing what they believe because they’re afraid of the dark, but Christians can turn that around and explain atheists as being afraid of the light. Drawing up a position on the other side that tries to explain why they believe what they believe does not actually disprove what they believe.
When there are so many modern anti-nuclear memes doing the rounds, it is interesting that your first choice is to promote a rather fanciful evolutionary biological Bulverism. It’s a cheap logical error. Rather than proving that any particular religion is wrong, try to demonstrate why they all became so silly. It fails to explain the deep thought and compatibility between science and Christianity as demonstrated by the John Lennox talk, and the history of science beginning in largely Christian circles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
Now we get to this classic Bulverism!
“Religious memes disable scientific thinking and creativity. That may be why Eclipse Now thinks that science is hard. Eclipse Now would find science to be easy if Eclipse Now would abandon the religious memes that are preventing him from thinking.”
It is “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc” of you to assume that I, in particular, find science hard because I happen to be a Christian! You’re being very unscientific, and using correlation, not causation. I generally enjoyed High School but had some issues with my Maths teacher, and then the scientific side of things went down hill from there. But Tut tut! Yet more Bulverism. You obviously missed the history of science lesson that explained the origins of science in Western culture. Naughty. It’s time for you to do some more reading and thinking!
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2014/10/01/4098188.htm
The fact that we are still having this discussion, and that you are resorting to yet more cheap character attacks (Bulverism) in an attempt to inflame it, shows what your real motives are for being here.
///We have very few years in which to prevent our own extinction by a number of problems. GW is one of them. Eclipse Now, I am trying to rescue you.///
1. I think your particular extreme view of climate science is a bit too ‘out there’, and not shared by the peer-reviewed journals. Extinction of the human race this century? Wow. You’ve got some pretty serious belief issues yourself here mate. Want to prove that scientifically?
2. I don’t, and this blog doesn’t, and this society doesn’t need you to ‘rescue me’ from my acceptance of certain historical and philosophical and metaphysical positions. That’s just your hobby horse, and it’s diverting this blog from its purpose. This blog is about how to minimise CO2 emissions by quickly deploying the best clean energy systems. This blog is about promoting nuclear energy to people of whatever faith or political persuasion or nationality. Don’t try and force it to adopt a particular metaphysical system as well. You’ll just end up alienating half the population in the process!
Also, you may end up getting in the way of something new if it comes along. What if something better than nuclear power comes along? Something like KiteGen (or something equally left of field) turns up that is better than nuclear power. Baseload, cheaper, and faster to deploy? Would you adopt that as passionately, or are you too committed to your Bulverism books to let yourself even get excited by such a possibility?
Can we get back to the part where this is a blog about nuclear power and not your cheap insults at people who also take history and philosophy and metaphysics seriously? Thanks.
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Click to access sam-harris-letter-to-a-christian-nation.pdf
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Jeff Walther: I agree. The problem is the strange unfathomable fear of anything “nuclear” on the part of people who will protest. It is like the fear of electric fans in Korea.
Note on Sam Harris’ book: “While this book is intended for people of all faiths, it has been written in the form of a letter to a Christian.”
“Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.”
Religions are all about the same. Reference: “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. “We are now in the midst of conversion/growth from a static society to a dynamic society.”
Religious memes disable scientific thinking and creativity. That may be why Eclipse Now thinks that science is hard. Eclipse Now would find science to be easy if Eclipse Now would abandon the religious memes that are preventing him from thinking.
We have very few years in which to prevent our own extinction by a number of problems. GW is one of them. Eclipse Now, I am trying to rescue you.
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Except that we have working algae and working artificial photosynthesis, it’s more a matter of cost than anything else. While artificial photosynthesis is relatively far from being commercial, algae biofuels are semi-commercial already (and likely to become fully competitive with scaling and technology improvements). Put a price on carbon and things will take off.
The problems with scaling nuclear to global levels are allocation of capital, fuel constraints (which is a real problem for burners) and shortages of trained professionals (Chinese are pushing as hard as they can, but they still managed to build more low-tech wind).
Nuclear has historically shown negative learning curve. The more you build, the more you realize you need better safety standards, additional supporting infrastructure, waste management procedures, etc. If nuclear is scaled to global levels negative learning curve is likely to continue. Waste management, additional infrastructure and proliferation problems would increase on a whole new level.
And for me it’s not really about ‘anything-but-nuclear’, it’s about what is the most viable way to phase out fossil fuels (which is what this blog says it’s about in description, but I have my doubts). It’s easy to get lost in technical appeal of nuclear and forget (or flat out ignore) that private investment, cost reductions, scalability and societal aspects are much more in favor of solar and wind. In addition to that, it’s much more likely that we’ll get algae commercialized than a global nuclear rollout.
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Global nuclear is already rolling out. Russians are building the reactors in our absence. Iran is getting 6. Third world countries are getting reactors. The negative learning curve is caused by ppp251.
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http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-China-plans-for-nuclear-growth-2011144.html
China currently has 19.1 GWe of installed nuclear generating capacity. According to the plan, this will reach 58 GWe of capacity by 2020, giving China the third largest nuclear generating capacity after the USA and France. In addition, by 2020, China should also have a further 30 GWe or more of new nuclear generating capacity under construction.
Bolivia, France sign accords on nuclear energy, lithium
At the moment, only two countries in the world are building their first nuclear power plants: Belarus and the United Arab Emirates.
Staffordshire Newsletter
UFO Buzzes Nuclear Plant In Mexico,
India, EU to sign civil nuclear pact by next year
S. Africa to hold second nuclear vendor parade
Saudi Arabia soon announced its intention to build 16 nuclear power plants
The member of the Energy Commission of Iranian Parliament (Majlis) … Salehi said on October 20 that the country needs 20 new nuclear power plants …
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Eclipse Now: “he immediately burst out “We’ll THAT’S why we’ve got to build nuclear! I’ve been saying that for years!” But the guy’s own website also condemns him as a global warming denialist, seeing pinko commo conspiracies in climate papers. It’s weird how he’s so passionate for the solution, but can’t let himself accept the problem. ”
Logically, it matters not at all if folks are denialists, as long as the societally accepted solution for CO2 emissions is totally ineffective; i.e. building wind, solar and biofuel installations.
I’d rather a person be pro-nuclear and anti-climate-change-acceptance, than pro-climate-change-acceptance and anti-nuclear.
The former person’s goals will result in a net reduction in CO2 emissions. The latter person’s goals will prevent any progress ever being made on CO2 emissions and will also waste valuable resources and time on schemes that have been proven again and again not to work. Ultimately, the latter person’s goals will exhaust the public on the topic of climate change as they recognize that they’ve been forced to pay huge amounts of money for no progress in the originally stated problem. The wind and solar crowd will ultimately kill public motivation to do anything about CO2 emissions.
Additionally, I believe, but cannot prove, that many so-called denialists take that position because in the public fora wind and solar are inextricably linked with climate change as the only solution. The consequences of embracing climate change, and then implementing wind and solar as the “solution” are disastrous, and many climate denialists recognize this.
I think that if we can change the conversation from, “CO2 emissions are bad and wind and solar are the answer” to “CO2 emissions are bad, but even if they aren’t, it still makes sense to convert as much of our energy economy to nuclear as we can” then many of the denialists will either change thier position or will no longer oppose acceptance of climate change so vociferiously. The solution will no longer threaten civiilization, and then they will be able to accept the problem statement.
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ppp251: once people stop using 1950s science to frighten people about radiation, there’s no reason we can’t make much cheaper nukes. Linus Pauling made a bunch of assumptions that we know now are just plain wrong when he predicted atmospheric fallout would cause cancers and birth defects. One of the little factoids I put in GreenJacked is that backyard pools in a low population country like Australia kill more children every year than Chernobyl thyroid cancer has killed in the past 28. As for birth defects, consider swine flu. Anything that makes pregnant women run a fever is far more potent than anything even remotely likely from the
worst reactor failure. But cancer isn’t something people understand and once that link between radiation and cancer has been made it’s incredibly hard to get it into perspective.
Half a century after Pauling, we now know the big causes of cancer and it wouldn’t matter how many Chernobyls we had, reactor accidents simply wouldn’t make the cut. Sunshine is far more potent as are sausages. Lots of people now have a vested interest in nuclear fear mongering … more than a few within the nuclear industry itself. Once you understand more about cancer, then you can put reactor accidents into their proper spot. They are just nasty industrial accidents and far less nasty than many other categories of industrial accidents.
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“And for me it’s not really about ‘anything-but-nuclear’, it’s about what is the most viable way to phase out fossil fuels (which is what this blog says it’s about in description, but I have my doubts).”
Just so you know, however unintentional, it really comes across as exactly “Anything-But-Nuclear”. Especially with the whole reliance on as-yet unscaled, unproven, and of course undeveloped technologies. Putting these forward in spite of repeated reminders about France, Sweden, Switzerland and Ontario, that are now all extremely low emissions regions is exactly Anything-But-Nuclear.
Keep reading this blog and it’ll hopefully become clearer that this is what “it’s about.”
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In fact it’s the other way around. Ignoring repeated reminders that scaling nuclear under government plan in one country is something different than scaling it on global levels, and that wind and solar have much more favorable global trends is nothing short of nothing-but-nuclear.
Only through the lens of nothing-but-nuclear can be putting forward solar and wind seen as anything-but-nuclear.
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ppp251: Do you realize that you are working for the coal industry?
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@ppp251: Nuclear has already demonstrated real world scalability and speed far superior from anything yet achieved by renewables http://bit.ly/1rbnaid and it’s obvious why … Ivanpah took about 4 years to build and generates 1 Twh per year … when the sun is shining. You need to build 10-11 of these to match the output of a single 1.4 GW South Korean nuke which also take about 4 years to build. How many Ivanpah’s can you build in parallel? First you need to find the sites and then you need to spend a few years doing environmental assessments … and do this 10 times compared to doing it all once for a nuke. And the environmental impact study is easier because the site is far smaller and you aren’t going to cover anything like as big an area with concrete, steel and silicon. And you don’t need as big an overbuild because the nukes run 24×7.
I can see a few niche markets for solar and wind until SMRs are fully commercialised, but otherwise there’s no contest, renewables have a much higher environmental and resource cost and have demonstrated over the past 15 years that they are simply too slow to build. We wouldn’t have a need for quite so much urgency if we’d all been using nuclear for the past 25 years, but we screwed up and can thank the anti-nuclear movement for the current urgency in dealing with climate change. We can thank them for trashing the Hunter Valley in Australia for coal and for trashing South West Queensland and adding to the woes of the Great Barrier Reef. We didn’t have to have 3 decades of coal in Australia but they were delivered to us by the anti-nuclear movement … which included me until the end of 2008.
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Geoff Russell, why did wind in China surpass nuclear despite starting years later?
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2014/highlights45
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Hi PPP251, google engineers have just agreed with us.
We need power that is mostly on, not mostly off; mostly reliable, not mostly unreliable; abundant and concentrated, not limited and widely dispersed; works with today’s grid ASAP, not some hypothetical super-smart super-sized super-grid in the distance future, can shut down today’s coal plants in today’s society, and do not depend on tomorrow’s energy efficient eco-city nirvana in some distant hypothetical future. (I say this even though I love New Urbanism and Ecocity ideas and promote them on my blog!) Only nukes can be deployed fast enough to have a hope of preventing absolutely catastrophic climate change. We simply cannot assume that our choice of energy also means a choice of ecocity lifestyle that the vast majority of Australians are not ready for yet. France closed 73% of their oil burning power plants in 11 years. We could do the same.
More about that Google study:
//Koningstein and Fork aren’t alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly). That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go – none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.
So nobody’s up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork – and many others – remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real and massive. Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that we must move rapidly not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the air by such means as planting forests).
So, how is this to be done?//
http://tinyurl.com/ky4gad6
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Eclipse Now, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is one of the world’s top climatologists (he was advisor for Merkel on climate issue, and he also worked with Hansen in some papers) and he seems to differ on this issue. German engineers would also disagree. And remind me again, what is Angela Merkel by training?
There are different opinions. If google people have any detailed numbers to show I’ll be glad to see them.
Meanwhile, you can also try to answer why did wind in China surpass nuclear? If nuclear is so quick, what’s taking it so long in China?
And how do you expect nuclear to roll out on global scale? Example of France doesn’t translate on global scale. We don’t have a global government.
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Angel Merkel has a political problem. She has to foerm a coalition with the so-called “Green party” that is not at all green. The German Greens may as well be the coal industry.
What the coal companies know that most people don’t:
As long as you keep messing around with wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, the coal industry is safe. There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and wave power can replace coal, and they know it. If you quit being afraid of nuclear, the coal industry is doomed. Every time you argue in favor of wind, solar, geothermal and wave power, or against nuclear, King Coal is happy. ONLY nuclear power can put coal out of business. Nuclear power HAS put coal out of business in France. France uses 30 year old American technology. So here is the deal: Keep being afraid of all things nuclear and die when [not if] civilization collapses or when Homo “Sapiens” goes extinct. OR: Get over your paranoia and kick the coal habit and live. Which do you choose? Nuclear is the safe path and we have factory built nuclear power plants now. A nuclear power plant can be installed in weeks. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html
Fossil fuel money is spent to scare you away from nuclear.
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@ppp251: My guess is that China doesn’t quite know yet what it wants … still training, still building a little of everything. Remember, back when the west was designing nuclear plants, China was hanging science teachers in public squares. She’s come a huge distance in a short time. Historically we know how fast a nuclear roll out can be … but obviously, not everybody will choose that path … e.g., Australia chose coal ahead of nuclear and that’s still the position of our Greens and those in Germany and the current position of Greens in France. I also don’t know enough about internal Chinese politics. There is a growing environmental movement and it may, like its western counterpart, have a greater fear of radiation than climate change. But how much power does it have? I’ve no idea.
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Hi Geoff,
what do you make of the Chinese LFTR committee?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026863/china-going-for-broke-on-thorium-nuclear-power-and-good-luck-to-them/
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New nuclear designs are a bit like new cameras, you can spend all your life deciding the best model without ever taking anything other than test shots. By all means evaluate carefully, but don’t waste too long flitting between the endless stream of bright new ideas. Lots of choices will get the job done. Any reasonably designed reactors are better than coal or biofuels or vast fields of concrete, steel and silicon.
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The only problem now with nukes is the price has artificially augmented by the greens using FUD forcing engineers to design in extreme precautions one fits for all like flood protection for nukes which have zero change to flood ever, or earthquake protection for the 1 in a zillion change there might be one. The latest reactor being build in France now has greatly surpassed budget because of this nonsense .
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[…] die heilige graal bestaat niet, beweert ene John Morgan uit Australië. Hij is niet de minste onder de energie-deskundigen, want betrokken bij een startup […]
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This blog post has been picked up in a quite a few places. One of them is the blog of physics professor Micha Tomckiewicz, Climate Change Fork. Micha posted my article, then wrote another three posts detailing what he saw as problems with it.
My article has proven quite difficult for a lot of people to grasp or accept, in places, and has resulted in a lot of intellectual gymnastics in trying to find ways out of the Catch-22. Micha’s three articles include a number of the common misunderstandings. I wrote this comment to address them. For some reason the comment is not showing up on his blog, so I will post it here, as the misconceptions I address are not just confined to the Climate Change Fork blog.
Micha has responded to my EROI article in three posts; I’ll consolidate a response here.
The core thesis of my article is that: energy storage cannot back up wind and solar for primary energy supply, because storage degrades EROI below a viable level.
In his three posts, Micha discusses a range of issues, but does not challenge that core thesis about storage, which I believe stands. There are now over 500 comments on this piece at The Energy Collective and Brave New Climate that directly interrogate that conclusion at a range of technical levels, and while many qualifications can be elaborated the conclusion appears robust.
The storage data presented is for pumped hydro. According to the Stanford solar paper I cite, batteries require an energy input about 10x higher than pumped storage. So if pumped hydro is not viable storage, we can certainly be sure that batteries are not viable, even if there were quite generous errors in favour of the EROI of solar or wind.
Micha focusses on the Weißbach paper and carefully points out the authors work in a nuclear physics department (why?). In fact I cite four sources, and the other three are from solar and renewables and biophysical economics researchers, including a respected Stanford renewables team. The Weißbach paper happens to present its conclusions most clearly, and is the easiest to discuss in limited space (this article originally appeared in print, with a limited word count). The Stanford paper is particularly obscure in its presentation. But they all arrive at much the same place in respect of storage EROI, and are themselves part of a larger literature.
Micha is dismissive of the EROI threshold because it is determined economically, but this does not somehow invalidate either its reality or its importance. The EROI itself is not economic, its a purely physical energy balance. The absolute threshold requiring EROI > 1 is also purely physical. That there exists some threshold above 1 that is a minimum requirement for a given mode of organization of society is also physical. The exact value of this threshold is very difficult to establish, but one exists. For a modern technological society Weißbach et al. estimate a value of 7. This is in fact a lowball estimate; the more recent work I cite in my Postscript pushes it up around 12-14. Modern batteries, wind turbines and solar components are at the pinnacle of human technological achievement. Societies capable of producing these components operate at a high EROI threshold, almost certainly well beyond that yielded by stored energy from low EROI sources.
He’s equally dismissive of lifecycle analyses (LCA) for estimation of EROIs. Certainly, these are difficult measurements to make, and there is variability among the different attempts. This doesn’t mean we ignore this work. It means we intelligently discriminate between different studies, with better or worse methodologies. Micha for instance points to wide variability in nuclear EROI, from less than 1 to greater than 100. But the <1 values are clearly absurd. The other low range values come from calculations that include some fraction of very energy intensive diffusion-enriched uranium. But my understanding is there are no longer any diffusion enrichment plants left operating anywhere in the world. That leaves centrifuge enrichment, which gives a nuclear EROI of ~40-60. This is near enough to Weißbach's value of 75 to accept that its in a reasonable ballpark. Adopting more recent values for plant life, for instance, would likely rationalise the differences.
In fact the Mason Inman EROI review Micha cites has very similar numbers to the Weißbach paper – 6 compared to 4 for solar, 16 compared to 20 for wind, 49 compared to a range of 40 – 250 for hydro, nuclear 40-60 compared to 75. These are all very close for such a difficult-to-measure quantity. There's lots of work to do here, but you can't sustain the idea that the Weißbach values are outliers or otherwise unreliable. They're consistent with the literature and can be taken as representative of the current state of the art. In preparing his review Inman interviewed the authors of three of the other papers I use – these are authoritative voices in the field.
In his third post on biomass Micha observes the difference between the USDA's and Farrell's value for the EROI of corn ethanol of 1.2, and Weißbach's value of 3.5 for corn biomass. But they should be different. Weißbach is referring not to corn ethanol but to corn biogas – natural gas produced from corn, and burnt in gas turbines. They are different fuels produced in different processes, so there is no expectation they should have similar EROIs.
So, putting it together, we have: credible values for EROI for a variety of energy sources which are consistent with the current literature, a lowballed estimate of the minimum societal EROI for a technologically advanced civilisation, and a calculation of storage impact on EROI that is also lowballed because it uses the storage technology that consumes the least energy (pumped hydro). This is a very conservative calculation. If the result is that stored wind and solar PV power have EROIs too low to power society, it is very likely to be true, because any correction to the calculation makes it worse for these power sources. Stored solar thermal is marginal on these numbers, and fails if the minimum societal EROI is slightly higher (for instance).
The implication is that energy storage does not help wind and solar variability. They can contribute in the long run only in their direct, unbuffered form. This limits their penetration in the energy mix to a modest share. Other energy sources must fill the gap which are both high EROI, and dispatchable. Of those available with these characteristics all have high greenhouse emissions, except for nuclear.
This may be unpalatable, but no compelling challenge to this thesis has emerged, here or elsewhere.
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This issue certainly has Bob Wallace of Cleantechnica rattled. He’s dancing around all over the place trying to avoid answering the questions! He tries to argue that the financial system measures the energy inputs, and says that wind and solar with hydro backup actually work, because the financial system says they work!
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/11/coal-is-still-dominant-and-no-solution.html#comment-1718588503
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John Morgan, I don’t think it’s such a clear cut as you’re trying to present it.
Cherry picking data to fit desired conclusions is very obvious in Weissbach’s paper. He uses old data for wind and PV and he assumes very large amounts of storage (10 days of full load) which are not really justified.
Getting to 80% renewables doesn’t require 10 days of full load storage. In this case storage requirements are significantly less and unlikely to pose a problem from EROI point of view.
However, getting from 80% to 100% renewables does require significant amounts of storage. This probably cannot be done on global scale with todays technologies, but it conceiveably could be done with larger grids (world grid) and improvements in storage (power-to-gas, artificial photosynthesis, and so forth).
From emissions point of view it doesn’t make much of a difference. Both 80% and 100% are good enough. And we’re decades away from either of them, so the debate about EROI is pretty much pointless.
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///From emissions point of view it doesn’t make much of a difference. Both 80% and 100% are good enough.///
No, that’s terrible! Our electricity sector can EASILY wean off coal and oil and gas, as France shows. We CANNOT afford to get lazy or self-indulgent about electricity emissions when the harder emissions to cut are from agriculture, forest use, and replacing oil.
///And we’re decades away from either of them, so the debate about EROI is pretty much pointless.///
The ONLY reason we’re decades away from hitting 100% clean electricity is because of FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about nuclear power.
Tell me, do you care about climate change? If you do, what on earth has you so frightened of nuclear power that you wouldn’t prefer a 100% nuclear grid in say 15 years over climate chaos?
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If you argue that 80% low carbon is terrible, then you have no real arguments. And just as a reminder: France still uses coal, oil and gas for 10% of their electricity.
Why exactly would emissions from agriculture and deforestation be harder? A large chunk of it is driven by meat consumption and this means that behavioral change would significantly reduce emissions.
Replacing oil does seem harder, but second generation biofuels is quite promising. At the moment they’re still more expensive than oil, but a price on carbon would fix that. In the long term, everything will be electrified.
In my opinion the biggest problem is lack of price on carbon. A price on carbon would be the biggest boost low carbon energy sources could get.
First of all there is no 100% nuclear grid let alone 100% nuclear in 15 years, and secondly, yes I do care about climate change and sustainability in general. But I am also realistic about our options. You can go and invest in nuclear if you like, but I don’t see any plausible way how nuclear could be a global solution.
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I think everybody here agrees that excess CO2 is the major challenge. Its not going to be JUST your pet peeve. I say this with the exception of nuclear. It can solve ALL the problems (it can also deal with high RE variability if it must, as there IS a way). It might be too expensive (because of wacko laws) but the physics state that a denser, more reliable and more steady source is the best way to solve the excess CO2 problem. As for the wastes, keep ’em stored at site and reuse them (or keep ’em contained in triso spheres)! Fission products are no big deal if vitrified after the cooling period, onsite (it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to locate a “mini glass factory” adjacent or integrated with any nuke plant). The site must, of course, be situated away from water.
My energy math concerning the inputs for various sources, is flawed because of faulty premise. No matter how many multiples of RE capacity we would need (in the absence of fossil fuels), I can not say that subtracts from its Eroei. However, the inverse of the capacity must still be stored (to do it right)! There will be overlap with wind and solar for example, but there will also be LONG lulls. That equation would best be called “upfront energy costs”, not “total EROEI of set”
Nuclear advocates should be trying to promote whichever best load leveling design that is also best for making that necessity: clean liquid fuels.
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A 100% nuclear grid is possible within 5 years. That makes the electric grid the low hanging fruit. New Nuclear can load-follow.
Remember, the alternative is the collapse of agriculture, civilization and the population within 40 years. We don’t have any time available to wait for more research. We don’t have the option of waiting for people to change.We would still be under 350 ppm CO2 if we had gone 100% nuclear in the 1960sand 1970s.
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“If you argue that 80% low carbon is terrible, then you have no real arguments.”
If you argue that 20% HIGH carbon is acceptable, then you have no real environmental credibility.
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@pp251 Your facts about france ‘s energy mix are wrong, about 7% is carbon based. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1828618/3-12-2014%207-40-42.jpg which to any normal person is next to nothing.
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The Post Carbon institute and the Senior Fellow Richard Heinburg have been banging on about this for over a decade….when the penny drops it is a startling and confronting reality… the next generation will not live like us, I hope we don’t kill everything in the process of collapse….
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Hi Jason 1738,
I’ve met Heinberg when I helped co-ordinate the 2005 Sydney Peak Oil seminars. He doesn’t have an answer to nuclear.
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Common sense in Finland.”Finns green light $8.7 billion Russian nuclear plant order. Fennovoima said that at less than €50 per megawatt-hour (MWh), the plant will offer a good deal for years to come.” http://rt.com/business/211867-finnish-russian-nuclear-plant/
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OK, don’t kill me, I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I’ve been pushing the Weissbach paper pretty hard lately and coming across some resistance. What if the Storage were part of another industry we were going to build anyway? In other words, what if we were not building it as an extra energy demand on society, but it was replacing car engines? What about the potential for electric cars to back up the grid, and if that came from maximum daytime output from wind and solar at their highest ERoEI’s. (Wind at 30 or whatever, some say it might be higher). As “Climate Crock of the week” Peter Sinclair argues:
A fleet of electric cars would be equal to 10 to 12 times US electric grid capacity.
And the service car owners provide to utilities is so valuable, you may have your electric bill credited 2 to 4 thousand dollars per year, just to have it plugged in when you’re not using it.
http://climatecrocks.com/2010/02/08/plug-in-hybrids-renewable-energy-solution-of-the-month/
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imho there is no way on earth you get a reliable grid to take up that kind of extreme power distribution. As it stands now grids worldwide are already failing now to cope with the relative little variable electricity input from ‘alternative’ powerplants. Brownouts, rolling blackouts are common and reports state that gridregulators express their fear of things to come.
If you add to that the vast flow of intermittent variable 2 directional transport energy you get a recipe of disaster.
Investments needed to (re)build a grid that could actually cope reliably for now and future growth were already too high for Germany alone who so very intelligently build their ‘alternative’ powerplants in the north whilst having their biggest energy consumers in the south leaving them without the means to get the energy were needed so they just dumped it on the european grid.
With the hilarious result of nations splicing themselves of the grid during German spikes not to risk their own grid causing negative electricity price throwing a huge hole in the eroi calculations.
All in all even here some form of occams razor counts, the more complicated the solution of the energy problem the less likely is it’ll work
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I find it rediculous that you only look at storage required for renewable energy and assume that nuclear energy and coal do not have to be backed up by storage technologies, which, especially in the case of nuclear they do. This is because of intermittencies in demand. Coal and Nuclear simply cannot respond to the peak load problem and so a lot of energy today it wasted. Your EROI may in fact be much lower for these technologies. Japan has had pumped hydro storage for years to cope with their nuclear power plants inability to respond to changes in demand.
Additionally, solar energy output naturally peaks during high demand – ie – during the day – and so is itself an alternative to energy storage. Do you really think you can find a day where it isn’t sunny anywhere on your continent? Good luck with that. You’ll need boatloads of it.
Also, you ignore the fact that the EROI for fossil fuels increases with time. Alberta tar sands bitumen has an EROI of 2 to 3.5, according to the latest numbers I’ve heard. So if you genuinely believe we need an EROI of 7, then we must absolutely begin the transition away from oil and gas now before their EROI drops to that level.
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Julius: Nuclear and coal power plants can load follow. It is economics that makes the electric companies turn secondary power plants on and off. Since nuclear power plants get 1/3 of fuel rods replaced every 18 months to 2 years on schedule regardless, running them at 100% constantly doesn’t cost any more than running them at 50%. Backup is generally an older coal plant that is inefficient, or a natural gas plant that is cheap to build but more expensive to run.
Pumped hydro storage has a place where it is cheap and easy to build, but storage is not necessary. We could use load following nuclear only.
Solar works 15% of the time, nuclear works 100% of the time except for scheduled refueling. Wind works 20 to 23% of the time. Solar works best at noon but peak power is several hours later. So Julius is completely wrong.
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“Additionally, solar energy output naturally peaks during high demand – ie – during the day – and so is itself an alternative to energy storage. Do you really think you can find a day where it isn’t sunny anywhere on your continent? Good luck with that. You’ll need boatloads of it.”
We want to have reliable power all of the time, and you appear to be proposing that we rebuild the ENTIRE grid’s capacity in Victoria, and in NSW, AND in Queensland, AND in Western Australia, AND in the Northern Territory just in case the entire eastern half of Australia is overcast in a cyclone. Really? Have you actually thought about what you’re saying, or are you just parroting renewables dogma?
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Julius: Are you arguing for using solar instead of nuclear or for some sort of optimum mix of solar and nuclear.
If the former than as others have pointed out you can load follow with nuclear, it is more expensive, but not so expensive as to make it impractical to run an electric grid on nuclear only.
If the latter, then you may have a point. The same point I suggested farther up the thread.
For anyone else: Has an analysis been done for some very sunny region of whether if you optimize the direction of solar panels to west of equatorward to get maximum solar power when demand is highest, solar will actually reduce the amount of storage or peaking generators needed to get reliable power on the grid? Is there any place consistently sunny enough to make solar electricity a worthwhile supplement or is it only useful for low power off grid applications?
Re: the low EROI of difficult fossil fuels like oil sands.
Essentially, that is using some higher EROI energy source like natural gas or maybe in the future nuclear to make liquid fuels for machinery like cars & airplanes that can’t run directly on the high EROI energy source. The worth of doing that is another matter.
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mm, what everyone here seems to forget with their dreams of solar is that it’s still a very variable energysource which has proven to wreak havoc with (in)ternational grids. Germany selling energy for negative prices because of it since it dumps an excrementload of electricity when nobody wants it and forces conventional powerplants to go into standby making both EROI’s diminish. A sillier system isn’t possible. Furthermore solar in the northern hemisphere comes to about 20% of rated capacity overall so as an investment pretty idiotic
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You do need to note that the solar calculation is for Germany, which is quite far north. The same calculation run for a southern desert country would show solar to be quite a bit higher – not great, but not a total loser.
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That doesn’t help the battery calculation. My estimate for the US battery is still $ ½ QUADRILLION.
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I have glanced and read at the comments written here and I think some people are missing the point. On the figures given Nuclear Power using PWR technology has an EROI of somewhere between four to twenty times the returns of Wind and Solar. But the PWR technology that is used to release this Nuclear Energy has remained basically unchanged since Alvin Weinberg developed the model for Rickover over sixty years ago. If we spent the same amount of money on Nuclear R&D as we did on Solar, Wind, Battery storage etc what kind of EROI would we obtain for a Molten Salt Thorium Reactor. Someone claimed that the EROI of Nuclear goes to 10000 if the fuel is recycled. Even if it is only 1000 it is obvious that the returns by investing in Nuclear far out weigh that of renewables. Remember that there was time when the world shipping fleet was powered by wind and it was quickly abandoned with the development of coal fired steam
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the graph showing nuclear energy with the way tallest bar immediately reminded me of a mushroom cloud – and the lingering attraction of nuclear fallout, say like in Chernobyl or Fukushima.
the derisory comparison of solar as a teeny stub looks to me like a visual suggestion that solar is rubbish (by a proponent of the nuclear industry?) whereas it is in fact the main and primary free source of energy to all life on this planet, and is only a matter of time before we harness it effectively.
so – your suggestion that nuclear is way better than solar – sorry it looks like an argument from a vested interest – and I don’t buy it.
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disclaimer
I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in the nuclear power industry. My only interest is in stopping Global Warming. My only income is from the US civil service retirement system.
I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in the electric utility industry, except that I buy electricity from the local utility.
If you actually do the math, as the electric utility industry has, you will find out that nuclear is the only replacement for fossil fuels that actually works.
My nuclear experience is at the army’s lab for nuclear weapons effects, specifically EMP. That was a long time ago. I switched to working on weapons that kill fewer people at a time. I had something to do with getting robots into on-the-ground missions. I wanted to be able to give a war without “blood and gore,” as the song says.
I do have a B.S. in physics from Carnegie-Mellon University and a lot of grad courses in physics and engineering. I am retired from US government service as a scientist and engineer.
disclaimer
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Hi Frank,
the only vested interest I have is my kids, and ensuring their future isn’t stuffed because of wishful thinking about a 100% renewable grid.
Regards
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Frank: Please take the nuclear power course from coursera.org. I can tell you how to make a bomb so that you can understand that bombs and reactors don’t mix, but you need to learn some science and engineering first.
You might also like this course: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial.
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About this Course
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Why the gap between the public and scientists?
What are the psychological and social drivers of the rejection of the scientific consensus?
How has climate denial influenced public perceptions and attitudes towards climate change?
This course examines the science of climate science denial.
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Frank,
Nuclear provides more power than solar at this time (hence the short stub), however, IF we develop the molten salt reactors (such as this one http://transatomicpower.com/white_papers/TAP_White_Paper.pdf
Then, we would have the plentiful energy required to: 1, develop the world out of poverty, 2 lower GHG emissions (and save the biosphere) and 3, advanced humanity to become a space based race (in which case, unlimited space solar power will provide even more power than Earth’s fission resources!
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Excellent, havent I heard that before though….too cheap to meter?
I really can’t think of anything quote as stupid as combining molten salts, complicated pumping and instrumentation systems, and neutron bombarded steels that crack
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I don’t have a favorite type of reactor. There are several methods of recycling spent fuel. Only some types of steel crack when bombarded by neutrons. Have you ever heard of natural background radiation?
WHERE DID NATURAL BACKGROUND RADIATION COME FROM?
The visible universe [ignoring dark matter and dark energy] started out with only 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. All other elements were made in stars or by supernova explosions. Our star is a seventh generation star. The previous 6 generations were necessary for the elements heavier than lithium to be built up. Since heavier elements were built by radiation processes, they were very radioactive when first made.
Our planet was made of the debris of a supernova explosion that happened about 5 billion years ago. The Earth has been decreasing in radioactivity ever since. All elements heavier than nickel were necessarily made by accretion of mostly neutrons but sometimes protons onto lighter nuclei. The original nickel was radioactive and decayed to cobalt, then iron. Radioactive decays were necessary to bring these new nuclei into the realm of nuclear stability. That is why all rocks are still radioactive. The supernova made all radioactive elements including plutonium, cesium 137, etcetera.
Radiation also comes from outer space in the form of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays come from supernovas that are very far away. There will always be cosmic rays.
Again: 4 Billion years ago, the Earth was a lot more radioactive than it is today. There is no place in or on Earth or in space where there is no radiation. There never was.
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LOL, I am surprised you didn’t play the Oklo card, or the banana fallacy. Actually all steels bombarded by neutrons are hard hit. Many old reactors now get shroud replacements.
PS the shroud is in internal lining that protect the reactor vessel somewhat from the neutrons that are part of fission.
Pretending that because radiation is “natural” is one of the great lies of the nuclear radiation cartel.
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Why don’t you get yourself a geiger counter and find out for yourself?
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You said “stupid”??? Really???
Preventing excess CO2, preventing a partial collapse of civilization (when we do finally realize that we CAN’T burn hydrocarbons anymore – and that we need to apply ALL of our energy – just to sequester the excess CO2 that our fathers – which would be you and me – emitted already) and preventing the quicker global development for BILLIONS of people from poverty for fear of a little tiny istsy bitsy radiation leak (not explosion) via SIMPLE instrumentation, NO computers necessary (for civilian safety), no hydrogen explosion possibility, and no meltdown possibility (even in a Carlington event – you advocates for the type of nuclear that Alvin got fired for not wanting in favor for the MSR – search “Carlington event”)…
Preventing ALL THAT:
For fear of a crack in a primary loop that also has to have a crack in the SECONDARY heat exchange loop… is not what I would call smart!!!
http://whatsthebackupplan.com/
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Frank: WHERE DID NATURAL BACKGROUND RADIATION COME FROM?
The visible universe [ignoring dark matter and dark energy] started out with only 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. All other elements were made in stars or by supernova explosions. Our star is a seventh generation star. The previous 6 generations were necessary for the elements heavier than lithium to be built up. Since heavier elements were built by radiation processes, they were very radioactive when first made.
Our planet was made of the debris of a supernova explosion that happened about 5 billion years ago. The Earth has been decreasing in radioactivity ever since. All elements heavier than nickel were necessarily made by accretion of mostly neutrons but sometimes protons onto lighter nuclei. The original nickel was radioactive and decayed to cobalt, then iron. Radioactive decays were necessary to bring these new nuclei into the realm of nuclear stability. That is why all rocks are still radioactive. The supernova made all radioactive elements including plutonium, cesium 137, etcetera.
Radiation also comes from outer space in the form of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays come from supernovas that are very far away. There will always be cosmic rays.
Again: 4 Billion years ago, the Earth was a lot more radioactive than it is today. There is no place in or on Earth or in space where there is no radiation. There never was.
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A diverse group of renewable generators would greatly reduce the need for storage. It wouldn’t make sense to have storage for a wind plant and storage for a solar plant when you could share the storage requirement across multiple regions and generation profiles.
This work also ignores the fact that you can spill renewable energy rather than using storage to capture it. Losing a few percent to spill per year would lower the EROI for the power plant but greatly reduce the need for storage.
No matter how cheap storage it will always be a small part of the power system as increasing storage reduces arbitrage opportunities.
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Wind power works 20% of the time except when they lower the nameplate power to make it look better.
Solar works 15% of the time.
Due to overlap, wind and solar together work 30% of the time.
The big problem: Winter can be cloudy and calm enough to drain your batteries a weeks’ worth over 4 months. This is especially true in New York where the sun rarely shines. The battery required to make up for intermittency would cost half a QUADRILLION dollars for just the US. That means we can’t do it if you want to run heavy industry on renewable energy.
There is no possible way to get renewables to work except in a very few places without technology that we do not have. Running heavy industries on batteries is silly. SILLY.
We do not have superconductors that will work everywhere on Earth without liquid air cooling. Renewables without energy storage require superconducting transmission lines that go all the way around and up and down the Earth.
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Ed Ed Ed, by parsing the question in such a limited way, that is fallacy of logic, a false argument, aka a lie.
Storage will consist of many technologies, not just batteries. And to speak of losing a week of charge over 4 months, is hilarious, just light us the gas genset dummy. Its winter, you need to add energy like I just added a log to the fire, duh, lol
And to get diversity from superconducting wires, great diversity could be had over hundreds or say 500 miles…..
Wake up your precious is going away
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TOM: Whatever your hangup is, get over it. You are going to get one of the following:
1. Nuclear power.
2. Intermittent electricity causing a collapse of civilization.
3. Global Warming causing a global famine that kills YOU.
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To everyone engaging Black 888,
As much as I’d like us all to tear down the delusions of another petty little climate denier, I’d encourage us NOT to ‘feed the troll’. We’ll just get dirty, and the troll loves it!
Blog Commenting Policy:
“This is a website for people concerned about mitigating climate change, protecting biodiversity, whilst also enhancing human well being and growing our civilisation. A core goal is to seek timely, cost effective and technology-driven solutions. If you are not interested in these focal areas, and are instead looking to aggravate those who are, then go elsewhere. It’s a big internet, and there are plenty of ‘alternative’ places in which you can rant.”
Black 888 may scream ‘censorship’ all he/she wants — but debating these guys is like debating “The Moon Landing was faked” crowd. It just gives their delusions oxygen, attention, and wastes our time. Barry has asked us not to engage, but to remind deniers of the blog policy here and then let the moderator ban them if they continue. Given the scientific consensus, and the cantankerous natures of those few 3% of climate scientists that actually do deny climate science, I think that people like Black 888 are responding out of 2 possible motives. They secretly do know that climate change is real, but just enjoy bashing people they expect are all from another political wing (which itself is delusional as there are right-wingers who take climate change seriously), or they are driven out of their minds by some version of a paranoid leftist global conspiracy theory. In either case, there’s no point engaging. The few who are genuinely confused and would change their minds with the relevant data (like myself about 10 years ago) are few and far between, and don’t post like Black 888. They actually ask questions. They’re open to the right information. This guy isn’t, so don’t give him what he wants!
BNC MODERATOR
Thanks Eclipse – black 888’s comments have been removed and his name blacklisted, as per the Comments Policy on climate chamge denialism, which you quoted.
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All references and replies to climate change denialism have been deleted. BNC no longer discusses this wrong supposition but is concerned only with solutions to the problem. Check out the BNC Comments Policy for further clarification. Thankyou.
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I just wrote a blog post using information from this article. It’s called Low EROEI and Low Power Density is a Serious Problem. In it I combine EROEI and Power density in a way that seems pretty obvious but that no one seem to do. I think it’s worth read.
http://ratdog-justbecause.blogspot.com/2015/01/low-eroei-and-low-power-density-is.html
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Things that society require, like infrastructure, education, food, clothing etc. are all part of the capital and operating energy expenses and must be included in our EROEI equations.
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indeed so. Such as replacing the entire grid of all nations to cope with the vagaries of variable energy coupled with supplying the vast energy needed to replace fossil fuels as energy source for transport. Germany is a nice example, where they just gave up because even for that wealthy nation it was cost prohibitive. Weird alternative solutions were suggested such as using the trainway electric cables as transport.
So if even Germany who only needed to transport the ‘renewable energy from the north to the south of their nation couldn’t do it (they dumped it in the European grid) for the mere 16% ‘renewable’ even without the added burden of supplying transport energy we can safely say that without some miraculous new transport method ‘renewables’ are incompatible with a sound budget for any advanced society.
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The notion that eroi for solar pv limits their value is completely false. PV has an energy time cost of just 1.5 years, and where that 1.5 years construction energy is of solar origin, ie the factory that makes the panels uses solar energy not fossil fuel energy, the argument is moot. There are other considerations which the anti renewable tack fail to consider, and these involve the variety of energy use methods available to rooftop solar users.
PVET, which raises the efficiency of fooftop solar from 15% to as high as 60%, is rarely mentioned here. Appliances specifically designed for solar system compatbility never raise a mention, particularly refrigeration with eutectic plate negative to ambient energy storage. Energy use management which serves to minimise the amount of energy storage required is also an ignored concept.
EROI for lead acid batteries is, however, a valid argument. The Stanford study gives lead acid an ESOI of just 2, against LiIon’s 10. So the conclusion is clear, rooftop solar requires LiIon storage batteries, and particularly that such batteries are produced using Solar Energy as their primary source. Grid storage also benefits from LiIon mass storage
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/AES-Betting-on-Lithium-Ion-Batteries-For-Long-Duration-Energy-Storage
That is not the end of the story, though.Battery technology is very much a dynamic field where battery specfic capacity, storage cycle life, specfic density, specific power, and chemistries, are all variables. For domestic rooftop solar solid state batteries might be the more viable solution once they become available in larger power sets, for instance.
Apart from energy storage anti renewable obsessionists are fixated over extended low solar periods. This, very real problem, is more than sufficiently being resolved by the up coming Liquid Piston 70 cc engine which is ideal for power generation at the 2.5 kw power level fueled by natural gas. This is a high efficiency, low noise, zero vibration, non wankel rotary engine, which provides sufficient electrical energy and heat energy (water cooled) to back up the average solar household and its battery storage. In the so doing it significantly reduces the battery capacity required for an optional stand alone house hold energy system.
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Vaguely asserting that various modern batteries are being made from completely different chemistries in the hope of introducing vague hope into the numbers completely ignores the fact that modern battery lifespans are limited, and offer nothing like the performance of a 100 year lifespan of hydro dams. Per unit of energy invested in a hydro dam, it returns so much more stored energy. Even hydro dams that are not powered by a river but are just for storing pumped water (like the Nullarbor plains scheme for pumping seawater up the cliff to store for peak demand periods) have much better energy storage on energy invested to build that storage capacity than other modern batteries.
As the paper above shows, 10 days of storage = so much energy invested, even in hydro dams, that it bankrupts the energy return of solar & wind. Appealing to modern chemical batteries just makes the matter worse!
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Some people don’t have as much access to sunlight than others – that’s why Ford needed roads (so to speak). There ain’t any good reason to get rid of the modern grid, unless you are what Alvin Weinberg said so many decades ago – neo-anarchist. Way back then, he realized that personal political beliefs would come to play in the clean energy debates. The opposing view, the neo-centralists “will be seen as old fashioned”. Yet, he knew that industry requires roads and grids – and that efficiency alone can’t power a decent lifestyle (or cheat the laws of physics required to bring water, food and manufactured goods to the house).
What’s going to happen when there are 10 billion+ people all burning natural gas to fill in the inverse of solar’s capacity factor? I hope that battery mass manufacturing (and recycling) technology can make them for dirt cheap, and I would think that the modern grid is built up (to accommodate more solar from further away, and for those who don’t have enough solar and or nuclear), however, I also hope that the MSR with the least chance of proliferation also gets mass produced!
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@Bilb
Batteries don’t have an EROEI. They are not an energy source, but an energy use. I would be interested in knowing how much energy the different types of batteries use, if you have a source.
You seem to fixate on homes. Manufacturing is even more important. That is if you want to have batteries and solar panels. A lot of manufacturing needs to be run 24/7/365 in order to keep the costs down so energy storage is important.
I understand a lot of people don’t care about EROEI, but I think they really should.
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You are right, sodacup, I am fixated on homes as that is the area where the greatest difference can be made to peoples standard of living. Industry will find its own solutions when it has a need to.
Most industry is happy to operate within a 10 hour window which is partially compatible with solar pv, but the hybride csp system resolves the 24/7/365 issue for that section of industry that needs it.
My design focus is on a 4.5 kw PVT (I wrote PVET above which was wrong) system which delivers 4.5 kw peak electricity and 9kw equivalent thermal energy. This will be accompanied by (I am rethinking the batteries) 4kw Li-ion batteries and the 2.5 kw Liquid Piston engined gas fueled generator.The household would use gas for cooking. The 9kw thermal provides 4.5 kw water heating and 4.5 kw for absorptive air conditioning.
That is the target system. All achievable, but at what price. There is a commercial model that allows such a system to be put together at modest cost for wide distribution, but the full system needs to be fully proven before launching.
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Nice to focus on homes, but that only is functional in a very specific and locale limited portion of the world. Anyhow even if it weren’t since Henry Ford it has been clearly established that mass production always comes out cheaper, energy as well. Divvying up energy production into millions of tiny portions screams inefficient.
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BLIB, as the earth’s human population increases, it lives more dense and therefore fixation on homes may not be the correct focus. for example, look at the picture of Tokyo at night in this article “Why Power Density Matters” http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/257481/why-power-density-matters Also, read the article, of course.
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Not the best choice of supporting argument, Petrossa. Ford proved something quite different. His main achievement was proving that people want independence, even at a significant cost. The grid has been the energy public transport for a century, and it has served well. But more recently the grid has fallen out of carefully managed public hands, its price has escalated, affodability has plumetted, and in consequence the people are ready for aFORDable energy. Self produced, self managed, and permanently available at the same price,…free. All the user needs is the vehicle to convert it from sunlight.
You do know that the first Fords ran on renewable ethanol, don’t you? The great Henry Ford would be the first to manufacture Solar PV panels.
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now you’re really cherrypicking ‘proofs’ come on. He invented the mass production line, mass produced cheap cars. The freedom you read into it is really a very personal take on things. Your phrase about ethanol is weird, if it was that good it would be the mianstay now. It isn’t so it wasn’t. QED
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Eclipse, there is no vague hope here. Yes, today’s batteries have limited lifespans, however there is a massive effort underway, funded by a $200 million grant to universities, to identify the full spectrum of available chemistries for electrical energy storage. The market demand for better battery technology is massive and the potential profits for successful solutions are both huge and instantaneous.
Keeping this in perspective, I have pointed out that if the energy required to manufacture a battery is sourced from solar and the materials are recycled then that cost becomes an efficiency factor. For Li-ion that efficiency is 90%, for lead acid it is 65%. For fossil fueled electricity the efficiency is 40%, and for petrol powered cars it is 25%. So batteries aren’t as bad as the article makes out, even though there is huge scope for improvement.
The next part of this evaluation is who pays the cost of the inefficiency. Obviously the end user. So what is that cost?
For battery storage it is the storage component inefficiency over the total electricity consumed. The control for domestic solar is that grid supplied power represents 100% loss, so the battery efficiency loss (using Li-ion for the example at 10% loss) is the stored component loss over the total consumption, which depends heavily on the system useage. For my 4.5 kw PVT system, if I store 8kwhrs per day then the battery storage inefficiency is 2.5%, but if you take into account that the PVT system also stores energy in the form of heat and considering only the hot water component the the total storage inefficiency becomes just 1.25 %.
So that is for the consumer a 1.25% storage efficiency loss for battery backed up rooftop solar, against a 100% loss for grid supplied energy, regardless of its source: fossil, wind, solar, or nuclear. As for grid storage, you used pumped hydro ie Snowey Mountains which is an essential component of our East Coast grid, to begin with it has a 30% efficiency loss, and a further never mentioned wheeling loss. Wheeling is the process of transporting electricity across the grid and in the past has had a 30% cost share of the retail rate. Under today’s ultra greedy grid operation that wheeling cost share has risen to 50%. So the cost of moving power from the generator to the dam and the moving it out to the consumer has a significant cost.
By contrast grid battery storage is placed either near the generator or in California’s case, near the consumer, so apart from being operationally more efficient, it does not cary the wheeling losses as well. It is not at as straight forward as the writer above suggests.
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That is a very good article, Todd. A cursory look identifies that the energy returns for various systems in his Rossling graph are averaged over 365/24 time periods. So where CSP has a 20 watts per sq meter value, that is actually 175 kwhrs per year pr sq m. The author has failed to do his sums correctly in coming to his conclusion. It is not just about reading, it is also about understanding.
The energy consumption figures per person also need scrutiny as they are total figures including energy in all products. There are some huge parts of the energy folio that cannot be supplied easily by solar. Shipping would be the most glaring one where there is potential for 4000 gigawatts of nuclear energy production capacity. I invite you to demonstrate how the nuclear energy industry is addressing this need.
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//Keeping this in perspective, I have pointed out that if the energy required to manufacture a battery is sourced from solar and the materials are recycled then that cost becomes an efficiency factor. For Li-ion that efficiency is 90%, for lead acid it is 65%. For fossil fueled electricity the efficiency is 40%, and for petrol powered cars it is 25%. So batteries aren’t as bad as the article makes out, even though there is huge scope for improvement.//
No it doesn’t become ‘an efficiency factor’, that’s just words with no numbers attached to it! Do you even know what we are actually discussing here? Hint: it’s not the round trip from energy source to battery and back again! It’s the energy cost of building the battery in the first place.
You said: “For battery storage it is the storage component inefficiency over the total electricity consumed.”
Component inefficiency only really comes into the question of how much storage we need to build. It’s not the bottom line of the conversation: it’s not the punchline of this joke. The punchline is we’re asking how much energy you really get back from a solar PV farm after counting the cost of building the solar farm AND building the century-long hydro dam ‘battery’ that farm needs to maintain reliable power to the local town.
ESOI = energy delivered / (storage energy cost + solar PV energy cost).
Given the low solar insolation over winter, and how often cloudy days will simply halve solar performance, just 10 days out of 365 days does not sound like a lot. But just 10 days of storage for the whole grid KILLS the energy return dead. It simply costs too much energy to build out! So don’t patronise us by trying to change the subject to market demand or round trip efficiencies: the ‘cheapest’ (in energy cost) storage technology we have is hydro by an order of magnitude — no electro-chemical battery comes close — and it KILLS the ESOI of solar & wind dead.
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BilB, I am unfamiliar with the shipping industry and if nuclear plays any role today, but there may be potential for the future, if this is what you are referring. http://atomicinsights.com/nuclear-powered-trans-ocean-shipping-3rd-place-new-york-advance-energy-contest/
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I’m pointing out how huge the opportunity for nuclear power in shipping is, and just one student working on it does not sound like a serious attempt to take advantage of it.
45,000 by 120 megawatt reactors potential, and one student working on it.
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Eclipse, as per renewable knocking normal you are attempting to frame a debate around one technology, excluding all else, and claiming some kind of sucker punch.
If the discussion is totally about storage and grid supply, then for Australia the technology is predominately Hydride CSP with storage. In this system, the storage is in the form of heat and the extended low solar backup is from biomass and gas (13% max), or overcapacity. What area is required? Australia needs aprox 60 Gw of CSP capacity to complement wind and rooftop power, and provide the energy backup ( thermal battery). This is 1500 sq klm of CSP, or a bit over twice the area of the Hunter Valley Coal mines.
So when you look at more options it is obvious that wind and solar are parts of a larger energy picture in which chemical batteries are an option, not a necessity.
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Petrosa, one of Fords main aims was that the people who built the cars should be able to afford them. It was the coal industry of the time that ran an aggressive and dirty campaign to prevent the uptake of ethanol as a universal fuel.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/biofuels/did-you-know-learn
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You can argue till you’re blue in the face, but Ford’s main contribution was the invention of mass production thus making cheaper cars whatever you believe his ulterior motives were. As any business man the guy was just trying to make a profit, and for that it was necessary that people could buy his cars. It’s rather naive to think he was some kind of saint whatever the narrative is. History is nice it can be rewritten at will.
That he was mistaken about ethanol has been proven by the fact it’s not the mainstay fuel and never will be. This is just basic logic, IF ethanol was that good there would be no need to use something else.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
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As I have suggested elsewhere, fireofenergy, the grid of the future will look nothing like that of today. I’ve just come back from Australia day lunch where I was shown a news clipping were people with solar panels are being ordered to turn their panels facing West or face a penalty. The article refers to a future prospect of 2035 when there are 7 million homes with solar panels.
That is the official expectation, 7 million rooftop solar systems. Now consider how the future will pan out if there are nuclear powered ships feeding energy into the grid while they are tied up alongside, or at anchor off Newcastle where there can be 20 ships at a time making 2 Gw available to the local area.
That is a longshot, but 20 years ago talking about 7 million rooves with solar panels would have been eutopic. The future will have ever more to do with Solar and ever less to do with fossil fuels, and we haven’t mentioned global warming once.
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I live in a unit like many people in the inner city. Where do i put my solar panel? What do we do at night?
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