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Open Thread 23

The last Open Thread is feeling a tad dated, so time for a new one…

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

By Barry Brook

Barry Brook is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania. He researches global change, ecology and energy.

1,181 replies on “Open Thread 23”

Preoccupation with HMW repositories distracts the public from more serious matters.

The whimsy is to bury too much material. Fission products are only one gram per person, per annum, easily buried as deep as the benighted fearful should require.

People frightened of newfangled power stations would rather pollute our skylines with windmills waving their prayers, while their gas backup pollutes the greenhouse with more than ten tons of gases per person, per annum.

For people who like the excitement of frightening the public, they would serve history better to direct public concern towards the terrible consequences of a polluted greenhouse.

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That should be “HLW” for high-level waste, concentrated radioactive material with long half lives. Some is fission products, some is transuranics, aka fast fissiles. HLW repositories are mooted all over the world where activists have frightened their public. Used fuel does contain such material, which will become increasingly valuable as fast reactors emerge into the power market 20 years or so hence. So, as tomorrow’s raw material, it should not be buried – not all of it, not yet.

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Which would you rather live within a kilometre of, a coal fired power station or a nuclear power station. Would you rather live in Kerala India or next to a HLW repository.
Just as the word Nuclear has negative connotations so does the word radioactivity and the word radioactive causes hysteria in the media.
The Australian school system misinforms students about radiation, intimating that there are radiation free zones. I tell my nieces yes that place is LALA land.

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Checking the BPA wind graph one can see that the Columbia basin wind has died. The prediction is that it will be back late on Monday, giving us a 10 day air quality advisory.

Here hydro will pick up the load. Most places will have to oxidize more carbon.

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BPA graph – wind is in green. Because the graph is updated every 5 min, the week-long collapse DBB refers to will eventually be erased – when happenstance indulges us.

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Yes, John Cameron has a short essay, posted above by R. Clifton, which is in agreement with “Radiation and Reason” by Wade Allison. The reason for this hormetic effect is known; up regulation of DNA repair.

Again I cannot post the links, one to a paper by a researcher at LLNL, until the weather improves enough to go visit my desktop machine.

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@Peter Farley

“It will also probably have for a long time a small amount of gas which contributes 10-15 or even 20% of power on peak days but only 1-3% of power over the year. In some grids there will be a little nuclear, some there will be significantly more nuclear, in some there won’t be any.”

Peter, you are probably being too optimistic about a maximum 3% contribution from gas in the absence of cheap bulk storage. With eventual very cheap solar (IEA say it could be as low as 1.5 US cents / kWh by 2050) you can afford to over-configure quite a bit, which means the sunlight hours probably have few gaps (given some wind is available during the day too). But from dusk to dawn the main renewal generation will be wind, and it is correlated over large distances. Even with two independent locations (> 1000 km apart), you still get times when there is not enough wind to satisfy demand. Here’s a chart based on a Rayleigh distribution of wind speeds and a capacity factor of 50% :

If you over-configure wind capacity to twice peak load (around 2.5 to 3x average load), then you still end up with 30% of non-sunny time (say 20% of total time) generating less than the off-peak demand, in which you are short of around 50% of the off-peak load. So this is probably somewhat higher than 1-3%. Hydro may cope with some of this, but is there enough of it – in both total energy stored and output power?

Although wind is currently cheaper than solar PV this is likely to be reversed by 2050, so you may not be able to over-configure wind to the same extent, and in any case the geographic spread is the key thing, which brings in transmission costs.

“When it comes to addressing GHG emissions the additional cost of phasing out the last gas plant will be much higher per tonne of GHG removed than if the money was spent on transport or building efficiency, not to mention land use changes, that is why I feel that leaving some gas (or even a few small USC coal plants) in the system is not a big issue.”

Germany is going for power to gas (and back to power), generating hydrogen from electrolysis using the over-configured renewables electricity. Power to power efficiency is a maximum of 42-45% By 2050 solar power will be the cheapest and variability doesn’t matter. To turn hydrogen back to power the options seem to be fuel cells (very expensive) or hydrogen-compatible CCGT (hopefully cheap capital costs similar to natural gas CCGT). Electrolysis cells are clearly very simple compared with mechanical generators.

Given that CCGT powered by renewable hydrogen or renewable methane causes no CO2 emissions, you might not want to get rid of it at all, but rather use it to eliminate the awkward last few percent (or tens of percents) of CO2 emissions by driving it with renewable hydrogen from electrolysis powered by cheap solar power.

And in the final analysis we probably need to do both – eliminate all emissions from electricity generation and implement all possible energy-efficiency measures.

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Peter
Thanks for your comments and particularly the graph. Can you tell me the source.

I may well be too optimistic about wind at night although wind does tend to be stronger and more consistent at night while demand is much lower. In theory if we have existing biomass/ landfill and hydro running at capacity there is about enough capacity with 30GW of wind running at 5% capacity. There are other renewables, geothermal, marine and hydro while we can add more pumped hydro. In many cases it is simply a question of cost.

To make such a system work would require a change in the way our hydro is operated so that wind, solar marine are used when available then biomass/geothermal, then hydro and then gas.

In Germany there aren’t many opportunities for cheap storage so power to gas might be a good thing. In Australia there are probably cheaper solutions Power to gas at the moment is probably more expensive than pumped hydro here but in 5-10 years time when decisions have to be made who knows. If wind takes say 30-40% of the load then that means more of the existing hydro storage is available for peak load or extended low wind times.

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Peter F,
it’s interesting how you lament nuclear power’s need for storage just to cover afternoon & evening peak demand, then fantasise about how we’re going to cover a whole night time of power with a renewable grid.

You’ll inflate hydro and biomass schemes so that they can run our nations all night, yet exaggerate the difficulty nuclear power would have in meeting the evening peak. If all those other things can run our entire energy grid overnight, what about saving them all up for fast dispatch in the evening peak and then just using nuclear power for baseload all day and all night? You’re focussing on a few hours of peak demand in the evening, and just brushing aside the whole night where renewables go dark. Talk about focussing on the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the log in your own!

Nuclear becomes even more essential when we consider weaning off oil, and how NREL says America could charge 45% of her car fleet as EV’s on today’s grid as long America charged overnight. There goes any overnight dip in demand! It will be full bore, all the time, 24/7. Indeed, considering weaning off oil, maybe if all those cars are timed to start charging AFTER peak hour in the evening, there won’t BE any ‘peak hour’. I’m not sure how demand would ultimately shake down, but maybe we’ll create a more stable grid if we just run our nukes at full bore and time charging EV’s around domestic demand peaks in the evening.

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Amen to your sentiment that we should eliminate all emissions. But why on earth should we “implement all possible energy-efficiency measures”? Let’s remember that there are perhaps 1 billion people consuming plenty of energy each, and 6 billion people aspiring to increase their energy consumption to the same level. In that light, you might as well be saying, “let them eat cake”.

We need to do quite the opposite. Copious, cheap, reliable power everywhere with no emissions at all, would allow the current pace of industrialisation to continue without climatic disaster. Beyond that, such availability of power will allow the world’s energy economy to move forward past the current carbon-based system.

The ecomodernists have a vision that the world’s population might withdraw from the land into the big cities, complete with their intensive food, water and energy production. (The link is to a video talk by Barry Brook).

Who knows, there might even be enough carbon-free intermittent backup power available to indulge the religious practices of a few reactionary communities locking themselves away in the countryside with their windmills displayed to the sky.

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To Roger Clifton
No matter who is right in this debate, delivered energy will never be cheap, therefor the less of it we need to use for a given standard of living the the better.

Many developing countries can avoid our mistakes and end up with energy use about 7,000 kW.hrs per person including transport and industry which is a bit less than Spain now and around half Australia or the US. In the meantime the developed countries can reduce overall demand 1-2% per year.

If we get it right (I agree big IF) the world’s population could live at current European living standards with about the same total energy consumption as we have now,

If we built houses in Australia to the latest Californian standards and adopted the current Japanese or US fuel economy standards for light vehicles, got public transport use to Sydney levels around the country, then we would all save money and have a better physical standard of living, so why not spend money on making our houses and buildings more comfortable, better public transport etc, than more and more costly and ugly energy infrastructure.

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Peter Farley, you flatter yourself in claiming to be one end of a “debate”. You get your numbers wrong when you quote them, then fail to understand correct numbers when we spell them out to you. Then you change the subject as though you alone understand and the rest of us should follow you. No, we weren’t talking about “cost”.

Peter Davies used the word “eliminate” and I heartily agreed. After all, the most important advance at the Paris Meeting this year was that the world’s leaders agreed that we should “eliminate” GHG emissions. That makes obsolete any pretense to “reduce” emissions by this or that process.

However what you have quoted is the tired old Greens’ polemic about “reductions” through energy efficiency. Earlier in these threads we have hammered it out for you that there is no way you can make token reductions and achieve elimination. It is mathematics and round here we can see when the maths shows your assertions to be wrong. It is no more than Greens’ bluster – it attempts to cover up the fact that the Greens don’t really want to eliminate carbon emissions when the alternative is nuclear energy. Such talk would rather have their descendants fry in a hell on earth rather than permit the use of this newfangled technology.

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Roger Clifton said “Greens don’t really want to eliminate carbon emissions when the alternative is nuclear energy.”

This is exactly my experience, whether talking to my “green” friends or commenting on blogs worldwide it seems that so called environmentalists would much prefer the consequences of global warming than give up their anti science anti nuclear beliefs.

Jim Hansen discusses this issue in great detail in the following paper.

Click to access 20140221_DraftOpinion.pdf

The global community has a very simple choice. We can make the transition to nuclear electricity as demonstrated by France and almost eliminate CO2 emissions (40g/kWh) OR move to renewable electricity backed by fossil fuels with little or no reduction in CO2 emissions as demonstrated by Germany (576g/kWh).

See http://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/chiffres-cles-en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

Abundant excess non carbon electrical energy from nuclear enables us to use electricity for all urban transport, industrial and household heat and even the production of liquid hydro carbon fuels as developed by the US Navy.

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@Roger Clifton

“However what you have quoted is the tired old Greens’ polemic about “reductions” through energy efficiency. Earlier in these threads we have hammered it out for you that there is no way you can make token reductions and achieve elimination. ”

Germany has made some very substantial energy efficiency improvements. So much so that, despite German domestic electricity prices per unit being higher than almost everywhere else, the average German household electricity bill is smaller than those in the USA – even after eliminating USA air conditioning costs – http://energytransition.de/2015/05/german-power-bills-low-compared-to-us/ !

Clearly energy efficiency won’t eliminate gaps in generation when the wind is not blowing. However, no-one (apart from the Germans) has really taken it seriously. So the real reason we greens are keen on energy efficiency is the usual one – money. There’s plenty of energy efficiency to go at which saves more off the energy bill than it costs. If you need to generate less electricity then the CO2 emissions come down too – at the same time as you are saving money. Sounds like a win win for everyone except the utility profit account. See the chart below @

which is from http://c1cleantechnicacom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2015/12/Lazard-Solar-Wind-LCOE-2.png.

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A lot of Germans now have zero electricity bills because their electricity has been disconnected for non-payment. Electricity is so expensive in Germany that people cannot afford electricity at all.

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“As in other countries, the poor in Germany may very well consume fewer products and services than the rich, so their burden would also be lower.”

“Burden?” The rich are burdened? The poor have a bigger burden: They are freezing in the dark.

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@Tony Carden, Edward Greisch

“The If is getting bigger.”

“Peter Davies is doing an amazing amount of wishful thinking.”

The price of solar panels has come down by 78% over the last 5 years, so if you have a price for solar PV in your head from a few years ago it is several times higher than reality.

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTWEDZ2pavr4bm8g_ugw0OOcpAAc5bgRiIP7vqdQlJ9YGKuEBjZog

In fact even f you are only just over a year out of date on your mental figure then you are still too high by 10%.

If we get another 78% price reduction over the next 35 years then the lowest 2050 solar PPA in the sunniest locations would be coming in at 1.3 US cents / kWh unsubsidised (and it certainly won’t get a subsidy at those prices). But will it really go this low that fast?

In terms of the cheapest global contract to date, the unsubsidised price for a Dubai project from ACWA power was 5.98 US cents / kWh – http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/29/dubai-shatters-solar-tariff-records-worldwide-lowest-ever/ .

Apparently the bid was for 100MW of fixed tilt solar PV. And ACWA offered to supply all of the final target 1000MW at 5.4 US cents / kWh if Dubai wanted to jump straight there. Financing was 1.75% above the variable LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate). Second highest bid was 6.13 cents / kWh.

Let’s take a good look at what is happening with utility solar PV prices.

First the US – indicative of a 16% price decrease per doubling of US installed capacity :

from http://tecnologia.revistacocktel.com/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very-cheap-indeed/

For solar PV panels you would really expect the price to reduce based on doubling of global volumes not USA volumes. Maybe that’s why the log log graph is not a perfect straight line. On this basis you would expect the 2050 price to come in around 2 US cents / kWh (just slightly too high to make power to gas to power storage zero extra cost compared with fossil fuel gas).

Secondly Lazards V9.0 ( worldwide assessment of historical price reductions in solar PV :

from https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf

And here’s a German prediction of 2-4 US cents/kWh by 2050 – with 1.5 US cents/kWh in Australia the USA and the sunnier parts of Europe as a result of falls in the cost of solar finance and reducing the balance of system costs (not the bit which is the panels).

Solar PV Will Be Cheapest Form Of Power Within A Decade

Whether solar PV gets to 1.5 cents / kWh by 2050 seems to depend more on whether the risk element can be removed from the financing, and how much of the “balance of system” costs (everything except the panels) can be removed from the total system cost. No-one is expecting the solar PV panels to be a major cost items by 2050.

So you pick the number you think most realistic for solar power by 2050 for very sunny and moderately sunny locations, probably from the range of 1.5 to 2.5 US cents / kWh for the sunny locations, and maybe twice that for less sunny locations.

Now think about producing renewable hydrogen from electrolysis using solar PV power and you can shave a bit off the cost by realising you don’t need DC to AC inverters as electrolysis will be run at under 2 volts. Panels and electrolysis cells in series will get you there.

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Solar panels would be worthless if you paid me to take them. The sun never shines at night and the sun is intermittent in the daytime. The US can’t afford the quadrillion dollars that it would cost to build sufficient energy storage, and that includes your hydrogen storage scheme.

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@Peter Farley

“Thanks for your comments and particularly the graph. Can you tell me the source.”

The source is a Java program written by me. It assumes a Rayleigh distribution of wind speeds, converting it to an output power probability density function with a parameterised average output power. It also allows the combination of two or more such independent distributions and plotting of the result. Source code available on request.

It would be good to extend this to modelling partially correlated wind speeds or anti-correlated wind and solar, but this is a more difficult problem than modelling independent wind speeds with or without independent solar.

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Peter Davies,
You’ve fallen for the lie. Again. Please, NEVER quote solar or wind price-to-grid at us as if that were the final cost. Sure those particular costs are dropping. We all agree. That’s self-evident. But utterly irrelevant. Traditional greenies come in here raving about cheap solar and we all just shake our heads in amazement at the way these memes spread.

Instead, you should ONLY quote buffered price to grid. Please, include the storage! Or has cleantechnica so baffled every greenie with promises of bright shiny cheap solar that true believers cannot think this through?

Buffering northern countries like Germany could bankrupt any nation that tried it. You can either buy Tesla Powerpack batteries to back up one week of winter in Germany (at a hypothetical 30% penetration of wind and solar, and these wind and solar farms must still be bought), OR you can just buy safe modern nuclear-waste eating nukes that will do the whole job for 60 years. Again, backup a third of a renewable grid for just one week, or nuke the whole grid for 60 years! That’s the economics of renewable storage V nuclear. But here’s the thing. It it was 100% renewables, you’d have to store 3 times as much, and because German winters often cut renewables for many weeks at a time, it would probably cost 6 to 12 times as much!
Point 2 below
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/issues/renewables/the-grid-will-not-be-disrupted

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@Edward Greisch

“Solar panels would be worthless if you paid me to take them. The sun never shines at night and the sun is intermittent in the daytime. The US can’t afford the quadrillion dollars that it would cost to build sufficient energy storage, and that includes your hydrogen storage scheme.”

What is difficult to understand is why anyone would wish to talk about storage costs for an all-wind or an all-solar solution, when it is very obvious that the gaps in renewable generation will be minimised if both wind and solar are installed. This also minimises storage costs too.

The beauty of using variable solar to produce hydrogen is that the variability does not matter – you produce the hydrogen when the sun shines. It’s easy to get a rough estimate of the per unit cost of providing the backup power from renewable hydrogen plus CCGT. Take the LCOE figures for Advanced Combined Cycle (ACC) from https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

If backup gas generation is used for 30% of the total generation instead of 87% of the time (assumed in LCOE calculation) then the capital element of the LCOE must be 3X as much ie. $43.2 / MWh. Fixed O&M remains $2.0 / MWh. Variable O&M (assumed to be virtually all fuel) is the LCOE of solar / 0.44 (for 44% round trip efficiency of this type of storage). For a $20 / MWh solar PV LCOE in 2050 this would give $45.4 / MWh. Assume the transmission investment for solar for the CCGT location with good sunlight of $4.1 / MWh from the same document. Assume no subsidies.

The sub-total for backup CCGT powered by renewable hydrogen would thus be $94.7 / MWh, to which needs to be added the cost of electrolysers and hydrogen storage (if any – the existing gas grid might be used). This is less than the cost of any fossil fuel generation with CCS and comparable with the cost of nuclear.

If the LCOE for solar is instead $3 / MWh then the new fuel element is $68.1 / MWh and the new total LCOE is $117.4 / MWh.

This estimated LCOE cost for filling in the renewables gaps representing 30% of the total generation, when added to the cheap (by 2050) wind and solar, is likely to give cheaper total electricity costs than at present. On the approximate costing, this looks lik a viable and economic solution for 2050.

If it gives cheaper power, why should the overall capital invested in the system be a problem? That’s what capital markets are for, after all. Let them do their job, but let governments take action to minimise the risk element of the interest rates, either by giving loan guarantees or by some other measure. Then you will really see an all-renewables solution fly in 2050.

(Incidentally my personal view is that 20% nuclear would be about right. That is what we have in the UK currently.)

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“What is difficult to understand is why anyone would wish to talk about storage costs for an all-wind or an all-solar solution, when it is very obvious that the gaps in renewable generation will be minimised if both wind and solar are installed. This also minimises storage costs too.”
What is difficult to understand is why anyone would wish to talk about solar price-to-grid falling as if that were the only cost they were assuming, when really they meant everyone to understand that to cover a GW of power they were not just building one nuke (with 7% reserve) but solar AND wind AND hydro AND biomass to try and get us through the night. Want to revisit your solar-price-to-grid again? See, in reality even you admit there’s not such thing. It’s the solar + wind + hydro + biomass price to grid, with a continent spanning super-sized super-smart super-grid thrown in for good measure. Desertec talk about bringing solar thermal from Africa to Europe, there are plans to link Australia to Asia, etc.

After all, renewables advocates keep telling us the wind is always blowing somewhere. (But forget to explain that somewhere then has to have enough wind farms to cover everywhere else, requiring stunning overbuild to follow weather patterns).

Not only that but it’s we’ve all got to buy ‘smart’ appliances that are load-following, like smart-fridges that only operate when the supply is highest, storing electricity as ice. Riiight.
(Scratches head). How much does all this cost again?

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Have you ever tried storing hydrogen? Storing hydrogen in tanks long term won’t work because hydrogen is too “leaky”. Tanks meant for methane are even leakier.

The army used to use tritium lamps as calibration lights for the sight systems for cannons. The tritium lights would be mounted at the muzzle end for the sight system to aim at. A tritium lamp is a glass capsule filled with heavy hydrogen, tritium. Sometimes the capsule breaks and must be replaced. A person at one of our repair facilities had a bucket full of broken tritium lamps beside his desk. Panic ensued when the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] found out about it because the tritium was not gone.

Glass is a sponge, not a container, for hydrogen. The person near the bucket of broken tritium lamps absorbed tritium. We had to design an alternative sighting lamp very quickly. TACOM’s license to own tritium was revoked.

When hydrogen gas touches a solid surface, it sticks. The single electrons leave the gas molecule, leaving only protons. A proton is 1/1000 the size of an atom, so the proton easily wanders through any material. If the material is a conductor, of course the electron wanders as well. The proton can exit the material at any place where it can get an electron, which is any place.

The natural gas pipelines and tanks are not perfect at containing methane. They typically leak at valves, but some natural gas tanks also expand and contract.

Problem 2: Hydrogen causes steel to become brittle. People have shipped hydrogen through pipelines for more than a century. But we don’t do it a lot because steel is a sponge for hydrogen. Besides loosing hydrogen out the sides of the pipe, you also get an easily broken pipe and lots of maintenance.

Problem 3: Hydrogen fires are invisible. You could walk into a hydrogen fire because you don’t know it is there. It has happened.

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BNC MODERATOR
I am terminating your conversation with Roger Clifton here. The argument was circular and the tone was deteriorating.
Several commenters had already complained about the repetitive nature of their exchanges with you.

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“You refuse to acknowledge that the main difference between the capacity factor of nuclear in the US and France is not technological differences, it is the fact that at 20% market share the US nuclear generators always have a market. At 75% market share there are many hours of the year that they would have to generate below capacity i.e their capacity factor falls.”
Seriously, most of this be irrelevant when we start to wean off oil as well? Won’t overnight demand almost equal daytime demand as we try to charge more and more of our electric cars at night, or split water for hydrogen (bad idea as hydrogen is hard to store and move), or even recycle boron pellets? Renewables advocates always make allowances for getting through the night. But when we start to wean off oil, night time demand will only increase, which makes your market share concerns completely invalid.

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The goal is low carbon dioxide emissions.

Wind satisfies this for about a third of the time. The remaining two thirds has to be covered by a dispatchable resource.

Suppose the best alternative is natgas open cycle generators. That is about two thirds as carbon dioxide intense as coal, I assume. So assuming some natgas, i.e., methane, leakage, one has about one half of the carbon dioxide emissions of a coal based electricity grid.

Did I do this correctly? If so, that is only a relief of one half of carbon dioxide emissions. That is not enough, by half again.

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@Edward Greisch

“Have you ever tried storing hydrogen? Storing hydrogen in tanks long term won’t work because hydrogen is too “leaky”. Tanks meant for methane are even leakier.”

Before converting to natural gas, the UK and USA grids used to use “coal gas” or “town gas” which was produced from coal in the coking process and which contained 50% hydrogen. Everyone old enough will remember the huge cylindrical “gasometers” used to store it. No-one ever complained they leaked significant quantities of hydrogen.

And we can afford small hydrogen leaks from a gas network, because hydrogen (a diatomic molecule) is not a greenhouse gas, unlike methane.

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Yes, producer gas is hydrogen and CO. CO is poison. The CO is not leaky. You take the gas home and use it right away. Some of the hydrogen leaks, but you don’t notice it. Under the circumstances, nobody would notice much unless somebody died from the CO. Those days were rougher and more dangerous than today.

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David Benson is correct the goal is to eliminate global carbon dioxide emissions by 2100 from Electricity Production.
But we need to be aware of the enormity of this task.
So lets look at the biggest electricity market in the world China.

The source of my figures is a beta report from the US Energy Information and Administration dated May 14,2015

https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=CHN

This report says:
‘China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world and accounts for about half of the world’s coal consumption’

Further it says:
‘China became the world’s largest power generator in 2011’

Obviously, if we wish to achieve our goal our first task is to work out how we are going to China from being the largest consumer of Coal to one of the smallest.

Some people say variable renewables, I said Nuclear, now having thought about it I am not sure.

China currently has 1260 GWe of generating capacity (GC) of which 76 GW is Wind and 15 GW is solar as at the end of 2013. Lets say 1200 GW because it is a nice round number.

So lets look at how much GC we require by the end of 2023 ( 10 Years ).
In ten years time China needs if growth is:
3% per annum an extra 413 GW (Total 1613 GW)
5% 755 GW (Total 1955 GW),
7% 1160 GW (Total 2360 GW) .

In the last 10 years China’s GC has doubled from 630 GWe to 1260 GWe. Based on past performance growth could be as high as 7% per annum for the next ten years. By 2023 China will need another 1200 GW of GC or roughly 2400 GW.

Here is a reference to a slightly euphoric report from Clean Technica dated September 22, 2015 by Joshua S Hill titled ‘China’s Wind Energy Capacity To Triple By 2020, Says GlobalData’

China’s Wind Energy Capacity To Triple By 2020, Says GlobalData

Actually it says this,
‘Research and consulting firm GlobalData forecast in a report from earlier this year that China’s installed wind capacity will grow from 115.6 GW in 2014 to a whopping 347.2 GW by 2025.’

Let’s say they run ahead of schedule and we have 350 GW of Wind installed by the end of 2023.
Using a capacity factor of 30%, ( now that is being mean give wind 33% ) at 33% Capacity Factor we have a total of 116 GW equivalent to coal.

Oops nearly forgot the solar, the US EIA report above says that solar in China will increase from 15 GW to 100 GW by 2020 so say 140 GW by 2023. The figure I found for Capacity Utilization Factor on the net for solar was 20%. So that gives solar 28 GW equivalent to Coal.

Now, I know I have given Coal a capacity factor of 100 and you will say it is less than that but i don’t have all day to do this and it won’t make a significant difference any way.

Nuclear is hard to get estimates of future capacity, but in 2013 Nuclear generated 2 % of China’s demand so let’s say that by 2023 it is still doing that and lets measure that by installed generating Capacity.
So if demand growth is,
3% our target for Nuclear in 2023 (3% of 1613) 48 GW.
5% our target is (5% of 1955) 98 GW
7% our target is (7% of 2360) 165 GW

So in our 3% Growth Scenario, Generating Capacity has grown by 413 GW, less 28 GW of solar, 116 GW of Wind and 48 GW of Nuclear = Net 221 GW
We still have to find another 221 GW of Generating Capacity from fossil fuel or hydro.
At 5% it is 755 less 28, 116, 98 GW of nuclear = net 513 GW
At 7% it is 1160 less 28, 116, 165 GW of Nuclear = net 851 GW.

These figures at even 3 % growth are enormous.

The figures tell me that even with the amount of money being spent, GHG emissions will continue to increase over the next ten years and maybe for the next ten years after that.

I doubt that there will be any agreement on this site even by then. But being a betting man I will still put my money on Nuclear to swoop across the finish line after 2050.

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Earlier there was a comment which used a Raleigh distribution to model wind speed. Ordinarily a Weibull distribution is used for this purpose.

However, a paper by R. Kullo et al. entitled “Mixture probability distribution functions to model wind speed distributions” (2012) indicates that two other distribution function, the so-called mixtures, are preferable to Weibull and two other distribution functions.

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@David B. Benson

“A paper by R. Kullo et al. entitled “Mixture probability distribution functions to model wind speed distributions” (2012) indicates that two other distribution function, the so-called mixtures, are preferable to Weibull and two other distribution functions.”

David, thanks for the link to the paper which I read with interest.

The 2-parameter Weibull distribution takes parameters λ (Greek lambda in case it doesn’t post correctly) which describes the scale of the distribution and k which describes the shape. If you set k = 2 then you get the Rayleigh distribution. k=1 gives you the standard exponential function. k = infinity gives you a delta function.

The intention was to get a reasonable, but not necessarily perfect, function to describe wind speeds. Then to use it to produce a reasonable probability density function for wind turbine output power and to calculate combined independent (uncorrelated) wind power from two or more completely independent areas.

If you wanted to do it precisely you might use use actual wind speed data. Simplifying down to a Rayleigh distribution lets you see what is going on and to develop an intuitive understanding of what happens if you combine wind power from two uncorrelated regions (e.g. North Africa and the North Sea).

As you can see from the paper you cited, different locations fit different distributions. If you are fitting to the Weibull distribution then for a given set of wind data k might not be precisely equal to 2, but the average across locations is usually somewhere close to 2 according to a few other research papers, which gives the Rayleigh distribution.

Given the limited time I have to spend on coding simple Java wind speed models the accuracy of using the Rayleigh distribution will have to suffice. The next priority would probably be to find a way of modelling partially correlated or anti-correlated wind speed distributions rather than using a function with a slightly better overall fit.

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Keep working on wind speed distributions. Somewhere in the past week or so I saw something about using 300 wind turbines to get a smooth output. I don’t remember where.

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Prof Brook and the moderators of BNC have been on holiday since Christmas Eve.

We are now back and I have spent some time checking the comments made over that period.
It would be far too time consuming to go back and moderate them all and the conversation would be disjointed if I did.
Would everyone please re-read the Comments Policy and abide by same. Thank you.

Unapprove | Reply | Quick Edit | Edit | History | Spam | Trash

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I opine that the route to partial correlation between wind sites begins by first understanding the autocorrelation at a single site. I found one paper but have no idea if this is the definitive study.

Blanchard & Desrochers “Generation of autocorrelated wind speeds for wind energy conversion studies” (1984)

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Searching for
Partially correlated wind speeds
finds a vast literature, only some of which is relevant to wind electric power generation. But even for just that there are not only papers but books and conference proceedings.

I’m not knowelgable enough to suggest a place to start.

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@Edward Greisch, David B. Benson

“Where can we find an expert?”

Prof Tim Green at my college (Imperial College London) has supervised at least one PhD student on a project relating to wind speeds s(http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.550875 ). If he’s not an expert himself then he ought to know who is as he is also the director of the Energy Futures Lab which is supposed to co-ordinate the activities of the 2,000 or so researchers working on energy at the college.

I’ll ask him at an opportune moment.

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Wangdee & Billinton, “Considering load-carrying capability and wind speed correlation of WECS in generation adequacy assessment” (2006)
appears to have a relevant abstract.

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Qiong Xu et al. “Correlation modeling among multi-wind farms based on Cupola-ARMA wind speed model” (2014)
has an interesting abstract and to my mind a correct model for wind speeds.

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Ning Zhang et al. “Simulation methodology of multiple wind farms operation considering window speed correlation” (2010) also appears from the abstract to take a reasonable approach and seems to include an unusually high level of detail regarding turbine operation.

These 3 citations, and many more, were found by searching with
Wind speed multiple correlation

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A section of the Comments Policy has been rewritten viz:

“Relevance and Evidence – Please maintain focus on the topic at hand. Do not attempt to solve big problems in a single comment, or to offer as fact what are simply opinions about complex matters. Please avoid posts that are convoluted, irrelevant (Off Topic -there is a separate Open Thread for these) repetitious or circular. To avoid this provide scientific data, links, references, etc. to support your arguments”

Please take some time to read the full Comments Policy. Thank you.

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I read the ERP Managing Flexibility report. Quite good and also points out the difficulty of eliminating the last of the natgas burners, basically for times of high demand when the wind does not blow.

The link to the report is in a comment on the Capacity of Wind thread. I would copy to this thread but, alas, don’t know how to on this mobile device.

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CalTech
10/19/2015
Toward a Smarter Grid

describes some research and progress towards a highly distributed grid based on modern computer and communication capabilities. Worth the short read.

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In DBB’s link on smartgrid research, we read, “if the network is eventually going to comprise 15 or 20 percent renewables, then the current grid is robust enough. But if we are going to have 50 or 80 percent … you can’t solve it just as an engineer, just as a computer scientist, just as a control theorist, or just as an economist”

In other words, these university researchers are scraping the barrel for solutions.

In the book and movie, “Catch-22”, Milo Minderbender sees the Egyptian cotton crop drop to rock bottom prices and buys the lot. He resorts to extremes to make the stuff attractive to buyers, including coating cotton bolls in chocolate and selling them as candy. He holds faith in its potential value, despite what the market had told him in the first place.

Of all the windy champions who have visited this website, not one of them has been able to point to a profitable heavy industry running on an intermittent power supply.

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@ Roger Clifton

I have heard similar statements from a MR W (Bill) Gates that grids become unstable when VRE’s start supplying approx 20% or more. Whilst this person may not have any qualifications in renewable energy, he certainly does in the area of “SMART” technologies.

I think ,personally, calling a technology ‘SMART’ ,as opposed to another catchy acronym, is dumb. The technology usually never meets expectations.

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“For example, AEMO calculates that wind power can only be relied upon for 8.6 percent of it’s stated capacity. So, for example, in SA we have 1200 mega watts of wind capacity, but in summer, when our peak demand is 3,300 megawatts all we can rely upon from wind is 103 megawatts.
https://bravenewclimate.com/?s=energy+nirvana 5 March 2015

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I am not surprised.
Once upon a time, wind was the choice of power for a great part of the world’s economy and it had been for well over a thousand or maybe two thousand years when it displaced manual motive force (the oar).
With the invention of the steam engine, wind power was blown out of commercial use (pun intended) due to its unreliability or to use the soft term intermittency.
I keep reading this thread and following the references in the hope that someone has discovered something new but alas we are all still becalmed.

South Australian’s might well ask their government when are they going to stop burning fossil fuels, brown coal imparticular.

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@ Jens Stubb

Thank you for that information about Denmark and Nordpool but you have not answered my question.

When is it proposed that Denmark will stop burning fossil fuels as part of its energy mix for electricity generation ?

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Roger Clifton — Thank you for posting the link. I take the current situation as one in which the research is far from complete. The current economic rules for the USA IGOs are clearly wrong with loopholes though which financial institutions make considerable money without contributing anything positive to grid operations. FERC has tried at least twice and still the IGOs have to violate the economic rules in order to maintain grid stability which is controlled by the physics.

So I am not convinced that actual generation, not nameplate rating, as high as 25% of the total is possible without violating the FERC rule of not more than 8 hours of blackout per year from all causes.

Still, as a problem in control engineering it is interesting; one would like, for starters, some feasibility theorems.

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Responding to Peter Lang: From a World Nuclear Association article, fission power, wind power and solar panel power all have about the same low carbon dioxide emission intensity. And indeed most grid operators attempt to treat all three as must-take. There are minor exceptions for reasons of grid stability.

The problem that I see is that wind power, especially, requires extensive, fast acting backup. If hydro is available, fine. If not, I fear biomass will not ordinarily serve.

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Rod Adams @ Atomic Insights is worth following, in my opinion.

Recently he politely took apart Joe Romm’s anti-nuclear opinion piece.

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Aiden Stanger — Here in the Pacific Northwest there is not enough difference between the daytime and nighttime wholesale price of electricity to make it worthwhile to complete the one pumped storage (potential) project.

This has essentially nothing to do with the introduction of some wind turbines.

I suppose this is rather unique to this region.

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Tony Garden

Former premier Anders Fogh Jensen who rose Lomborg into fame had a change of heart in 2007 and suddenly turned into an environmentalist (the opportune thing to do if you want an international career – he later served as the General Secretary of Nato). Later on 96% of parliament voted to free Denmark of all fossil use by 2050. The belief was perhaps that by then all oil and gas resources would have been depleted in Denmark anyway. I the later years the right wing now rally around the fossil industry and do their best to stop renewables. So to answer your question I think you would have to have a way to look into the future. What is clear is that the transition to carbon free energy supply is continuing and it is getting cheaper as cost follow carbon emission technologies keeps dropping.

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The short answer is again no.
So Denmark being part of the largest electricity market in the world, Nordpool, can not ween itself off fossil fuels, despite having the wind resources that it does.

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Hello All

I’ve been lurking this site for a while now and I’m still puzzled as to its purpose. The name BraveNewClimate implies it is focussed on CAGW but most of the discussion (let alone the site owner’s background) seems to be on nuclear advocacy – especially since there is at least one regular here that does not support CAGW.

Anyway, I really appreciate the detailed discussion here on nuclear energy for Australia – a position that I have long supported, prior to any AGW debate (much to the consternation of many friends).

Regards
Greg Kaan

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We are talking about how to “mitigate GW Global Warming. If you do the math, you find out that nuclear is the only possibility right now. If you are afraid of all things nuclear, you make excuses for wind and solar.

Please read this book: “Radiation and Reason, The impact of Science on a culture of fear” by Wade Allison. The Wade Allison in England, not the other Wade Allison at Harvard.
http://www.radiationandreason.com/
Professor Allison says we can take up to 10 rems per month, a little more than 1000 times the present “legal” limit. The old limit was 5 rems/lifetime. A single dose of 800 rems could kill you, but if you have time to recover between doses of 10 rems, no problem. It is like donating blood: You see “4 gallon donor” stickers on cars. You know they didn’t give 4 gallons all at once. There is a threshold just over 10 rems/month. You are getting .35 rems/year NATURAL background radiation right where you are right now if you are where I am.

Natural Background Radiation is radiation that was always there, 1000 years ago, a million years ago, etc. Natural Background Radiation comes from the rocks in the ground and from exploding stars thousands of light years away. All rocks contain uranium. Radon gas is a decay product of uranium.

Please read 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.”

The US government did a lot of propagandizing about nuclear things in the 1950s. Some US government officials used secrecy as an instrument of political power at the same time. The secret is:

THERE ARE NO SECRETS.

Nature is an open book. Nature is the same everywhere. Any country with enough money, sanity, scientists and uranium can make a nuclear bomb. Most that could, chose not to. Iran seems to be stuck by a lack of something cultural. Uranium is mineable in most countries and we know how to get uranium out of ocean water.

There is no possible way that a reactor could ever become a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl did not. I will have to tell you a little about how to make a bomb to explain the difference. Nothing classified.

All of Generation 4 reactors are intrinsically safe, relying only on Nature for safety. Spent fuel is fuel for Generation 4 Integral Fast Reactor. Read the book: “Prescription for the Planet” by Tom Blees, 2008; and read
http://BraveNewClimate.com
free download:
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html

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Prof Wade Allision is an old man. Like me, he knows how to use CGS units, slide rules and powers of ten, but for readers who learnt SI units at school, here are his figures in SI…

100 mSv/month max safe dose rate
8000 mSv lethal dose
100 mSv max safe single dose

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WOOPS!! Your max safe single dose is wrong. It is more like 250 to 1000 mSv. The dose required to give you a stomach ache is 1000 mSv, which is 1 Sv. You would recover from the stomach ache.

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Just GW. Global Warming. Denialists like to doctor the acronym. Nobody else should. CAGW= AGW=GW

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@ Peter Davies says: “Electrolysis equipment and hydrogen storage costs very little … CCGT … with a small uplift for hydrogen-compatible operation”

For more than forty years we’ve been talking about intermittent hydrogen production, storage and back to intermittent power, but have yet to achieve an efficient operation. Can you point to one?

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David B. Benson – have you checked the peak and off-peak wholesale prices? They may not correspond to day and night at all.

If there isn’t much difference between those, it appears to be a transmission problem: your region has insufficient links to other regions.

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DBB is correct. It is not an interlink problem. Momentary price can go to $10,000/kilowatt hour anywhere. DBB is in the US, where there are the best interlinks in the world. Peak is generally in the afternoon to late afternoon. Off-peak is 12 hours later.

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So I read about Brayton cycle generators. Um, one does not, certainly not, want to power these with hydrogen. Even using methane is difficult enough.

If you must make hydrogen, please convert it to methane right away. Maybe even figure out how to make use of the heat so created.

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I agree with DBB. Hydrogen has a long list of practical problems, such as an invisible flame and leakiness. If you play with hydrogen, you are likely to get burned.

Does hydrogen embrittlement mean that hydrogen forms an alloy with steel?

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@Edward Greisch

“afraid of all things nuclear”? I must have worded my intro post very poorly for you to take my position that way.

I meant to say that I have been pro nuclear for a very long time which has brought me into conflict with many of my friends as they persist in believing the ravings of people like Helen Caldicott and Naomi Oreskes on the dangers/costs etc of nuclear power.

This site is invaluable for quantifying the reasons why such fears and arguments are mostly baseless. Unfortunately, I have found that most who hold anti-nuclear stances simply will not accept the facts and continue to believe in coverups, hidden subsidies and hidden agendas by the nuclear industry and governments.

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@Edward Greisch

Hydrogen embrittlement is caused by the diffusion of hydrogen into the metal crystalline structure which then forms metal hydrides, weakening the structure,

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Bill McKibben
Power to the People
The New Yorker
2015 Jun 29

Recommended for the trend, not the least the varying utility company respones to solar panels.

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Edward Greisch — The maximum observed peak rates are in the neighborhood of US$10,000 per megawatt-hour. You have overstated by a factor of one thousand.

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Edward Greisch gave us a summary of Prof Wade Allison’s recommendations for safety limits on dose and dose rate. Knowing that many of our readers would like to know his values in modern units, I summarised the SI equivalents thus –

100 mSv max safe single dose
100 mSv/month max safe dose rate

Professor Alison was a high-energy particle physicist, so probably did get many hefty doses in laboratory accidents. Edward protests that 100 mSv should be much higher for a safe limit for a single dose, and I confess I was surprised too when I read that there are cancer statistics among the Hibakusha correlating all the way down to 100 mSv. Alison respects the finding when suggesting the single dose limit. He discusses the recovery time, but nowadays we can point to the fact that radiation oncologists might give two doses (of thousands of millisieverts) twice in a day, but recommend that a day separates doses.

Although he (or Edward) speaks of 8000 mSv as a lethal dose, that figure has been revised downward on studies of the hospitalised Chernobyl firemen to an LD50 of 5000 mSv. Much as Edward says, a single dose of 1000 mSv might give us nothing more than a bloody nose. That’s shock, but we are also concerned about triggering cancers.

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Legal standards are quite out of touch with reality, the regulations having been written before we knew enough to say. The regulations were written tight to try to assure people and accomplished the opposite.

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Here is a reference to a previous post on this site about radiation

What can we learn from Kerala?

This post states that the background in Kerala has been 70 mSv/ yr for ever. The background level at Fukushima has been set at 20 mSv/yr.There are 33 million people living in this area of India

Incidences of Cancer at Kerala are less than world averages.

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Thanks for that reference. Allison used data from the “Radium girls” who painted luminous watch dials, and from Hiroshima. If you really want to get cancer, there are chemicals that will do the trick quickly. There is some chemical that they use to give cancer to lab rats.

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@Edward Greisch in reply to Tony Carden
GW = Global Warming (due to any/all causes)
AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming (due to man made causes)
CAGW = Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (due to man made causes with dire consequences)

There is a distinction and one does not need to be a sceptic/denialist of CAGW to acknowledge this.

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Leonard Hyman & William Tilles
Utilities Cling to Regulated Model as Markets Turn Against Them
Oilprice.com
2016 Jan 12

More about the woes for segments of the USA electricity market as changing technology and FERC insistence on the market make the future quite uncertain.

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Peter Lang — I don’t know of enough data to assess which combination of low GHG generators is actually the lowest.

The problem is the inconsistency of the load. That means some form of storage is required, without reverting to natgas, and too little can be forecast about some storage options.

But as the storage requires input energy, basically any low GHG generator will do to energize the store. It’s all in what is least cost.

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Indeed. LNT was established by the (brilliant) pioneers in nuclear research and development as a worst case in the absence of knowledge about low exposures. The depressing thing is how anti-nuclear scare-mongerers cling to it in the face of the far more comprehensive information that is now available (eg Kerala, airline pilots etc)

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Greg Davies,
A number of us have already discussed Mark Jacobson’s report on Open Thread 23. In short he has not completed the report. The storage element has not been finalized and is due for completion in 2016. Then I am an anticipating a cost estimate for this project. Until that is done his report is speculative as will be a lot of the comments.

I will re-post this comment on Open thread 23 where it is appropriate to discuss off thread topics.

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This company promises an exposure of 1700 pCi/L, which amounts to 63 Bq/m3 (63 decays per second!). In the open air radon is typically less than 10 Bq/m3, but varies indoors. The Australian standard does not recommend action for households unless this level goes over 200 Bq/m3. Rather than being hormetic, this dose rate is harmless.

Radon has two alpha decays in quick succession, both absorbed by lung mucus and the beta-unstable daughter soon coughed up – except by smokers.

However if these people are being seated in an old uranium mine they would be getting a hefty gamma dose from all of the uranium daughters nearby.

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Regarding the Washington state requirement for a certain amount of wind power, the local utility, Avista Utilities, is planning to acquire a simple cycle natgas generator in order to balance the additional wind generators. It appears that using the existing hydro for this purpose is not a feasible option.

So carbon dioxide emissions will increase, as opposed to adding a SMR, although the earliest date for that is a few more years in the future.

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Marvellous irony! A state rich in hydro must increase its emissions in order to give the illusion that it is reducing them.

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Do you have a link to this, David? I haven’t been able to find one.

The situation seems reminiscent of the outcome of the El Hierro scheme described on Euan Mearns site by Roger Andrews

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Greg — I do not recall the search terms I used to find the Avista Utilities planning report. I opine that that name together with simple cycle may well locate it.

Unfortunately, on this mobile device there is no way known to me to provide links.

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Aidan Stanger — The Wikipedia page on electricity markets might answer many of your questions. It is quite good but in my opinion underestimates the mismatch between the assumed economics and the physical reality of a reliable grid.

In particular the day-ahead market is a convenience which only approximately works but enables some generating stations to plan the next day’s operations.

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But wind and solar have a feed-in tariff of 57 cents whether needed or not. Excess power is sold out of Germany at a negative price. They pay somebody to take the power. That is how the price to the consumer continues to go up.

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A post discussing the effects of very low bid prices in the British market for backing up renewables. It is reported that industrial diesels, both new and existing, are dominating to the detriment of CCGT’s, which, despite higher capital cost are less carbon intensive.

http://energyandcarbon.com/backing-up-renewables-is-proving-a-lot-cheaper-than-we-thought/

There appears to be a mixture of good and bad news for renewables. Good, because of the low prices for backup, bad because diesels are more carbon intensive than CCGT and, thanks to VW’s ongoing woes, are seen as serious atmospheric polluters.

My questions:
What is the longer term picture, ie 10, 20 and 30 years?
To what extent is this situation the result of very low current GHG emissions prices?
If so, then when and how might the emission prices be raised sufficiently to drive higher polluting but very low capacity factor plant such as diesels out of the mix?

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Diesel engine backup for wind might be a good low carbon dioxide emissions choice. Afterall, the basic design of the engine was to be able to run on vegetable oil.

Jatropha species grow easily in the semitropics and the tropics. Indeed, I am under the impression that these are considered to be noxious weeds in West Australia and Northern Territory.

However, the seedpod is filled with a poisonous oil which is readily pressed out with a manual press. Impervious gloves are recommended. The resulting seed cake makes a fine fire for cooking. The oil can either be slightly refined to burn in existing stationary diesel engines or the diesels slightly modified to run on Jatropha oil.

The scheme depends upon low cost labor to harvest the ripe pods and press the oil. It is also clear that the volumes are relatively small.

One needs check that refined Jatropha oil can be mixed in any proportion with petroleum-based diesel but I believe this is the case. So a pathway to low carbon dioxide emissions diesel exists, so long as not much of it is required.

With considerable hesitation, I suggest that WA and NT might wish to change policy to enable Jatropha plantations while still eliminating sports in the bush.

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This whole debate is becoming quite stupid. Renewables need an overbuild of 3-4 fold and then there will be circumstances where there will be still more power wanted. So we build 20% diesel? Lets replace the coal generators with equivalent non CO2 producing base load generators.

Go Nuclear then await Fusion developments. The world cannot afford overbuilds!!!

Regards,

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That is correct. Nuclear is the only way GW can be ended. The problem is irrational fear of all things nuclear. Thank the coal industry for that.

Coal contains: URANIUM and all of the decay products of uranium, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, THORIUM, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. There is so much of these elements in coal that cinders and coal smoke are actually valuable ores. We should be able to get ALL THE URANIUM AND THORIUM WE NEED TO FUEL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS FOR CENTURIES BY USING COAL CINDERS AND SMOKE AS ORE. Unburned Coal and crude oil also contain BENZENE. BENZENE causes leukemia. We could get all of our uranium and thorium from coal ashes and cinders. The carbon content of coal ranges from 96% down to 25%, the remainder being rock of various kinds.
The uranium decay chain includes the radioactive gas RADON, which you are breathing. Radon decays in about a day into polonium, the super-poison.

If you have cancer, check for benzene, dioxins, vinyl chloride, etcetera in your past.
See:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
or
http://clearnuclear.blogspot.com
in case the ORNL site does not work.

Make coal fired power plants meet the same requirements for radiation release that nuclear power plants have to meet. They can’t.

Chernobyl released as much radiation as a coal fired power plant releases EVERY 7 years and 5 months. You get 100 to 400 times as much radiation from coal as from nuclear. Natural gas can contain radon.

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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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Thankfully, Edward Greisch, the days of the 57 cent guaranteed tariff for wind power seem to be numbered.

Here’s a link to a very recent report of a Spanish tender for several hundred megawatts of new renewables, primarily wind, which drew winning bids which require no government subsidy of capital cost and no guaranteed selling price.

I know nothing about the site – if it is true it is amazing.

http://www.icis.com/resources/news/2016/01/15/9961000/spain-ushers-in-new-era-of-subsidy-free-wind-power/

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Some good news for the climate, French electricity CO2 emissions remain at very low levels for 2015 (42g/kWh) which are more than 10 times less than Germany (569g/kWh).

http://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/chiffres-cles-en

http://decrypterlenergie.org/en/la-sortie-du-nucleaire-en-allemagne-entraine-t-elle-une-hausse-des-emissions-de-co2

Unfortunately while Germany achieved record renewable electricity outputs for 2015, decarbonisation of the energy system is stagnating and unchanged since 2011 (see page 41 in the following report).

Click to access Agora_Jahresauswertung_2015_Slides_web_EN.pdf

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Albany Democrat-Hearld
2015 Aug 29
Nuscale hopes to change the conservation on nuclear power

The hope is around 25–30 modules per year.

Maybe Australia will want some. I’ll try to push for some here in Washington state.

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Kirk Sorensen, to his credit, wrote about cloride reactor research funded by DoE on 2016 Jan 16.

This design has the advantage of instant off and fairly rapid on. One commenter opined that it could be used as a peaker.

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Hi guys, pardon the bad case of “the humanities” I caught in High School and my Advanced Diploma, but what advantages does chloride have over fluoride? I always thought Kirk was pushing for LFTR’s.

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Eclipse Now
Sadly Chlorine is an element in the periodic table and to some extent we have to live with it. More importantly I think it is crucial to a lot of industrial processes.

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Eclipse Now,
I agree. Some of the stuff that is taught at high school is just not correct. As for tertiary ed. I guess it depends where you go.

Cheers

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Eclipse Now — Very fast spectrum, no solids, eats everything eventually. Kirk’s article on Energy from Thorium is easy reading.

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Better for what? The advantages of the cloride version includes essentially instant off and on capability.

There is no claim that the cloride version is better in all respects.

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Bargh! Amory Lovins at it again.

I’d love to see a debate between Lovins and a switched on eco-modernist. How are we going to wipe that smug smile off his face and get him to confront reality for once? What about Tim Flannery and his renewables-only Climate Council? They were going on about Denmark’s 45% wind penetration the other day, when even a humanities geek like myself knows there is no such thing as the ‘Denmark grid’. It’s the Nordic grid, and wind is only a tiny fraction of that.
How are we going to confront these myths? There’s “Pandora’s Promise”, but we really need some sort of show or layman-friendly youtube production that regularly debunks the silliness out there.

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The highly influential Northwest Power and Conservation Council doesn’t want any more wind or solar in their latest 5 year plan. Instead, more energy efficiency and demand response. Oh yes, kindly more research on tidal power and geothermal power. And in the meantime, more natgas burners.

I’m not happy with this, but it is utterly damning for more wind generation here in the Pacific Northwest.

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The Northwest Power and Conservation Council sets policy for the Bonneville Power Administration. The draft 7th 5 year power plan states “At present, it’s not possible to entirely eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the power system without the use of nuclear power or emerging technology breakthroughs …”

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Thank you DBB. Where can I find an official copy of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s statement?

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Where can I find “The Northwest Power and Conservation Council sets policy for the Bonneville Power Administration. The draft 7th 5 year power plan states “At present, it’s not possible to entirely eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the power system without the use of nuclear power or emerging technology breakthroughs …””

I’m looking at https://www.nwcouncil.org/media/7149714/draftplanbrochure.pdf

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I used the name of the organization as a search term to find the web site. The draft documents of the 7th power plan are prominently displayed. My quotation is from the Executive Summary, a 16 page pdf.

I point out that these 5 year updates are prepared by professionals using public input.
This shift away from wind power is a significant change from the prior two updates.

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DBB tells us about events in the US NW. Even there, where there is massive hydro in the grid, it seems there is no zero-carbon back-up for intermittent generators. That’s at least partly due to the short time of rise and fall required of hydro for back-up as the wind or solar drops in and out. In round numbers, if a head of 100 m of water is generating 100 MW via pipework of 10 m2 xsection, then the water forms a water hammer, more than a hundred metres long, with a momentum of 1000 tonnes at 10 m/s. How fast could you stop such a thing, in a hurry, without ageing your pipework?

In the absence of redundant OC gas turbines among BPA’s generators, they have been forced to balance a compulsory inclusion of wind generation by adding an equivalent capacity of OC gas. Wind has increased, not reduced emissions.

We can clearly say, “wind meanz gas”. It is a convenient rejoinder for when some deluded soul asserts that renewables will eliminate carbon emissions. It won’t work against the salesmen, of course, who work hard to keep it unclear.

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Thank you Roger for explaining another ‘inconvenient truth’.
If the Pacific North West with its considerable Hydro resources has had enough of wind, I wonder how the driest continent on earth can continue installing wind beyond the same levels..

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Roger Clifton — The central point from the draft 7th power plan is that BPA cannot act as balancing agent for any more wind generators. The existing wind farms can use the existing hydro as backup. I believe you linked the appropriate graphic from BPA. But no more.

The draft 7th power plan does not include additional OC gas generators; it simply states no more wind generators.

However, my utility, Avista Utilities, is under state ordered requirement to produce more from wind, and trivally from solar. To do so, Avista Utilities plans to acquire a OC gas generator, which they call simple cycle.

Avista Utilities buys some power from BPA, but mostly generates from its own hydro, natgas and coal plus odds-n-ends of its own.

Of interest are the subtle hints in the draft 7th power plan of obtaining another nuclear power plant in the BPA service area, as opposed to acquiring another CCGT.

Still, your basic point remains, at least for the Pacific Northwest: much wind means natgas.

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Advanced Rail Energy Storage. The idea is to build a railroad track going up a goodly grade. When excess power is available the electric bowers shove the weighted cars up. When power is required, regenerative breaking is used on the way down.

I’m not making this up. A company in California proposes to make money by doing this out in the desert.

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Something like that has been suggested before, but with weights on cables wound onto drums. The usual problem happens. The energy density is too low to make any difference. But it sounds good until you do the numbers, which means that the innumerate will insist on it.

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In discussion re John Morgan’s post discussing the limits on market penetration of wind power, transmission losses of 10% or more in the Australian context have been mentioned.

In this regard, AEMO’s short (30p) paper at http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Market-Operations/Loss-Factors-and-Regional-Boundaries/Treatment-of-Loss-Factors explains their approach as applied to wholesale electricity generators.

Essentially each of the five regions of the SE Australian network to the point of supply to local distribution systems has been allocated a notional RRN or Regional Network Node. Loss factors have been allocated to each large generator, these notionally representing the loss which reflects the difference between its energy sent out and that which arrives at the RNN. Marketing people in the power stations where I formerly worked used to refer to this as approximately 2%. It applies to all wholesale energy output, regardless of where in the region the loads exist.

The further losses within the retail distribution system are estimated by the regional distributors and charged to the retailer, who recover them from the retail customers as part of the retail tariffs.

The end result, as stated in the report, is
“In the NEM, losses in the transmission network are typically around 2.5 – 4.5% of the power transmitted, while losses in the distribution networks may be much higher, particularly when supplying rural customers.”

Adding the losses attributed to generator and the eventual customer, the quoted overall first pass guesstimate of 10% seems to be reasonable… certainly 2% as mentioned (I think) by another is seriously on the low side.

In summary:
(a) HV transmission system losses are of the order of 2.5% to 4%.
(b) Wholesale (ie non-embedded) Generators pay for these by way of a charge against income for energy sent out, on the basis of estimated losses between the generator and the RNN.
(c) Local distribution losses are of at least a similar magnitude.
(d) Retail customers and embedded generators pay for these losses through their connection and tariff structures.
(e) 10% total is a reasonable overall estimate, in the absence of specific calculations.

From Page 23: “If loss factors were not used and the same spot price applied across the entire NEM the pool would operate in deficit. This is because generating unit must produce more energy than is consumed by customers due to network losses, and this difference would result in a shortfall in revenue in each trading interval.”

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Nuscale not only has a first customer in Idaho Falls but has seen interest in other states: New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Tennessee and several eastern states according to the Corvallis newspaper.

Of more interest for Australians, is the strong interest in the United Kingdom with Nuscale planning on setting up a supply chain and factory there. All of this from about 2025.

Interested?

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@ DBB – It is reassuring to hear that NuScale are being allowed to manufacture overseas, if am I reading the tea leaves correctly. A factory-built reactor of 200 tonnes, NuScale can be railed or trucked from factory to site. Not needing special heavy presses, SMR production can be scaled up as orders increase, with potential economies of scale in mass production.

Climate crises may create a market of 1000 GW of mass-produced SMRs by 2050. At 50 MW apiece, NuScales are unlikely to tot up the implied 20,000 units before other SMR designs hit the marketplace. But they are frontrunners!

The first SMRs shipped to Oz could as easily come from west coast US, Japan or Korea. Royalties would go to the developers of the IP, regardless of the location of the (licensed) factory.

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EDF postpones decision on UK Hinkley Point C reactor.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35415187

Despite the Chinese offering to pick up one third of the bill in exchange for a one third stake, EDF cannot yet commit to go ahead with the Hinkley Point C reactor project. The amount of capital it has to provide for Hinkley is now more than its total share capital!

There are two causes of this. French electricity prices have recently reduced, reducing EDF’s revenue, profit and reserves dramatically. And it has had huge problems with the Flamanville EPR reactor which was originally suppose to cost €3.3bn and start generating in 2012. Now it is going to cost €10.5 bn and start up in 2018.

A lot of us here in the UK think £92.5 / MWh with inflation increases for 35 years is too much to pay anyway for power from Hinkley Point C.

The irony in the situation is that it may well be the French and Chinese taxpayers who end up providing all the capital for UK’s new Hinkley’s reactors. This is similar to the situation a few years ago when the US taxpayers ended up as Manchester United Football Club’s most generous shirt sponsors when AIG went bust and the US government had to foot all its bills!

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Another good thing about SMR’s is that they will be cheaper, safer, easier to construct with a smaller time frame. But the best point is that when they come off line there is only a small amount of power coming off line. I would like to see these in Australia. If all goes well at the SA Royal Commission a ‘nest’ of them could be assembled at the Playford Power Station (Port Augusta) all run from the one control room. The same applies at Morwell-Yallourn to replace the very old brown coal fired power stations.

Regards,

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Peter Davies — I think the EPR is far too expensive.

Graeme — Does not a national prohibition regarding nuclear power have to be repealed first?

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David,

It certainly does but the Nuclear Royal, Commission if it hands down a favorable opinion may cut the repeal time significantly.

Regards,

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DBB
That is correct, australia still has a no nukes policy apparently supported by both sides of politics.
I do not remember ever being asked to vote for a no nukes policy.

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Yes, DBB, the SA Royal Commission is seen as a giant opportunity, but it alone cannot achieve anything much.

Assuming that the RC returns favourable recommendations and that these are well received politically, and that legislation (State and federal) is amended reasonably promptly, 2017 will have come and gone… almost certainly 2020 as well.

Procurement, detailed design approval, project planning and development approval, off-site manufacture, on-site construction and commissioning and commissioning are pretty much sequential activities.

Even if (a big IF) all the stars align, I can’t envision the first unit coming on line before 2030, so no contribution to Australia’s CO2 emissions till after 2030.

Two possible conclusions:
We have missed the window of opportunity so, as they say, in the long run we are all dead, or
There is no time to spare – Let’s get started!

A closing thought: The Snowy Mountains Authority was legislated in 1946. In the next two decades, Australia’s largest emissions free electricity and irrigation project was pretty much designed and constructed under Federal laws with supporting State (NSW and VIC) legislation and in post-war conditions including multilingual immigrant teams.

Optimists,of which I am one, would point to this and say that if fast tracked the job can be done.

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There’s not a strong case for Australia going for nukes, as it has decent wind and excellent solar resource, both of which are going to drop significantly in price by 2025, and by 2050 solar PV will beat everything else hands down. Storage technology is progressing too. Australia has a very low population density and plenty of desert in which to stick solar panels or solar thermal farms.

USA should be in a similar situation to Australia.

Nuclear is difficult to avoid in countries like the UK here, where our population density is high and we don’t have enough onshore space to meet the complete primary energy needs (i.e. replacing all fossil fuel – not just electricity generation) without turning a lot of the country into a giant wind / solar PV farm. Offshore wind helps as we have plenty of coastline, but is more expensive. There’s a good bet the ultimate UK solution will involve 20-30% nuclear – if the industry can get its act together and not charge 9.2p / kWh for the 35 years with annual inflation increases.

China is likely to be forced to use some nuclear because it has a highish population density (but not as high as in the UK), and, being much bigger than UK, doesn’t have the benefit of the same high proportion of coastline to area that we do here. India is in a similar situation to China.

So horses for courses in the zero CO2 emissions race. If you can do it cheaply and conveniently by 2050 without nuclear then why not? If this would involve stepping from one solar panel to the next then bite the bullet and put in enough nuclear to give you some green countryside back.

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Nuclear power is the only way to stop making CO2 that actually works. To stop Global Warming, we must replace all large fossil fueled power plants with nuclear.

Renewable Energy mandates cause more CO2 to be produced, not less, and renewable energy doubles or quadruples your electric bill. The reasons are as follows:

Since solar “works” 15% of the time and wind “works” 20% of the time, we need either energy storage technology we don’t have or ambient temperature superconductors and we don’t have them either. Wind and solar are so intermittent that electric companies are forced to build new generator capacity that can load-follow very fast, and that means natural gas fired gas turbines. The gas turbines have to be kept spinning at full speed all the time to ramp up quickly enough. The result is that wind and solar not only double your electric bill, wind and solar also cause MORE CO2 to be produced.

We do not have battery or energy storage technology that could smooth out wind and solar at a price that would be possible to do. The energy storage would “cost” in the neighborhood of a QUADRILLION dollars for the US. That is an imaginary price because we could not get the materials to do it if we had that much money.

The only real way to reduce CO2 production from electricity generation is to replace all fossil fueled power plants with the newest available generation of nuclear. Nuclear can load-follow fast enough as long as wind and solar power are not connected to the grid.  Generation 4 nuclear can ramp fast enough to make up for the intermittency of wind and solar, but there is no reason to waste time and money on wind and solar.

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Edward,

Liked your argument but you completely put people off with false statistics. NEM for 2014 reported Wind at 29% efficiency and I would think that solar is closer to 25% not 15%. I agree with the intermittency and unreliability of renewable energy. We need to go Nuclear. But inserting false numbers just alienates renewable proponents even more.

Regards,

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Selection Effects

Really good numbers without selection effects would be welcome. As I answered to Peter Davies, I think his numbers are strongly affected by selection effects. A selection effect happens when people test for annual wind energy before choosing to build a wind turbine. If you have a continual 20 knot breeze that never fails, you build wind turbines. Then you say: “It works so well for me, everybody should install wind turbines.” It isn’t so for everybody.

Solar energy: Daylight isn’t good enough. The comparison is with nameplate power. Nameplate power is what you get in the best possible circumstance, such as measuring only at the equator in perfect weather at noon. That doesn’t happen here and it rarely gets close in Olean, New York. 15% is correct. Olean is not a good place to install solar power, so the actual average power people get from installed solar power is better than 15%. People who live north of the arctic circle don’t install solar power to keep warm in the winter. There is a strong selection effect. Installed solar could indeed get 25% of nameplate power, but the average is still 15%. The difference is the selection effect. I am measuring everywhere, not just where there is lots of sunshine.

Selection effects are something scientists are very careful of. Unintentional selection effects can really screw up your research. The average person has never heard of selection effects, and so falls prey to them if he is not careful. Ignoring selection effects can be a financial or scientific disaster. You are forewarned.

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It is called the law of ever decreasing returns.
Of course you build the first wind farms in the in the best place for performance both economic and electricity generating capacity. Then you build them in the next best place etc etc.

In South East Queensland Rooftop Solar has simply delayed the peak. It used to be between 4pm and 6pm. It is now between 6pm and 8pm. Luckily pumped hydro exists here.

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Selection effect is not the law of decreasing returns.

Selection bias
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Selection effect)
Selection bias is the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.[1] It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The phrase “selection bias” most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account, then some conclusions of the study may not be accurate.

Diminishing returns

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In economics, diminishing returns (also called law of diminishing returns,[1][2] law of variable proportions,[3] principle of diminishing marginal productivity,[2] or diminishing marginal returns[4]) is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.

The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant (“ceteris paribus”), will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns.[5] The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common.

A common sort of example is adding more workers to a job, such as assembling a car on a factory floor. At some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other’s way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively.[6]

The law of diminishing returns is a fundamental principle of economics.[5] It plays a central role in production theory.[7]

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@DBB @Roger Clifton

Roger Clifton – The central point from the draft 7th power plan is that BPA cannot act as balancing agent for any more wind generators. The existing wind farms can use the existing hydro as backup. I believe you linked the appropriate graphic from BPA. But no more.

The draft 7th power plan does not include additional OC gas generators; it simply states no more wind generators.

The plan is for BPA to use the cheapest renewable resource of all to meet most new demand over the next 15 years – energy efficiency.

As most here probably realise by now, I’m very much in favour of wind and solar generation. But energy efficiency measures beat both of these by miles, causing almost nothing in the way of CO2 or other greenhouse gas emissions, generating no nuclear waste, and usually costing much less than any other form of generation.

If they can meet demand this way at the same time as meeting clean power obligations and renewables obligations, they would be stupid to spend additional money on wind and solar, plus the fractional requirement for CCGT backup.

They also plan to develop significant demand response capability which provides a solid base for the next tranche of wind or solar, whenever they need to install that.

So to focus on the lack of new wind generation is a little short sighted, because the BPA plan has a much better, greener, nuclear-emissions free, low-cost alternative which they really ought to be pursuing as the first priority.

Good luck to them.

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“generating no nuclear waste, and usually costing much less than any other form of generation.”
What’s wrong with nuclear waste? Chuck it in a breeder, then synroc the final fission products for 500 years. Done.

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“significant demand response capability” can mean only one thing: open cycle natural gas or producer gas. Producer gas is made from coal. Wind and solar ALWAYS entails more CO2 unless you have 22nd century technology.

So how are wind turbine sales going?

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Peter Davies — I assure you that the draft 7th power plan is pushing in the direction of a modest amount of new nuclear power, about 500 MWe, which is the size of a standard dozen Nuscale modules, rather than the stated CCGT towards the end of the 20 year plan. They cannot come right out and state that as Nuscale doesn’t yet have the required NRC license.

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Edward Greisch — “Demand response”, in my understanding, refers to removing some of the load during times of peak demand for electricity. A good example is shutting down the air conditioning on a big box store, coasting for a couple of hours.

Wind generators are often backed by open cycle, sometimes called simple cycle, gas generators. These are basically jet engines attached to the electric generator. These units start up just as fast as the engines on airplanes. Therefore the units are not kept spinning.

Other thermal generators may need to be kept spinning but as not generating this reserve consumes little fuel.

There are other storage options which produce no carbon dioxide emissions. Pumped hydro is one.

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Thank you. The problem with pumped hydro being the availability of the required geography.

Demand response: I don’t want that to happen to my air conditioner while I am home. If it happens to a store and they haven’t stored enough ice, my shopping trip could be shorter.

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@Edward Greisch

Renewable Energy mandates cause more CO2 to be produced, not less.

Selective dynamic studies of poorly configured grids with wind plus majority of unresponsive coal and not much fast response CCGT aren’t significant. The coal will be gone in 5 to 10 years. Generally wind does require complementary CCGT but saves 2/3 of the equivalent coal baseload generation CO2 emissions.

Renewable energy doubles or quadruples your electric bill.

Let’s have some proof of this please. I suggest Texas, Germany, UK and Australia would be good statistics to analyse. Texas has the most wind generation in the USA and has cheaper electricity than most states.

Even in Germany it is not true that renewables have doubled electricity bills, and Germany has been pretty cavalier with the speed of implementation of renewables, and therefore the degree of subsidies.

In fact the average German electricity bill is less than those in the USA, even after subtracting the extra US load due to air conditioning. That’s because Germany takes energy efficiency very seriously, so while electricity per unit prices are higher, bills are slightly lower.

Since solar “works” 15% of the time and wind “works” 20% of the time, we need either energy storage technology we don’t have or ambient temperature superconductors and we don’t have them either.

Forget Australian rooftop solar. Utility-scale solar will be predominant in the future, and plants are already in the 25-30% capacity factor range.

http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/09/new-solar-capacity-factor-in-the-us-is-now-30/

New USA solar PV plants are now coming in at over 30% capacity factor. In 2010 the equivalent figure was 24%.

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b

All USA utility solar PV plants averaged 28.3% from December 2014 through to the end of November 2015.

America has no offshore wind yet. From https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/what-are-the-capacity-factors-of-americas-wind-farms/

http://energynumbers.info/capacity-factors-at-danish-offshore-wind-farms

Offshore wind is typically higher than onshore wind. Average 43.4% over the last 12 months

Wind and solar are so intermittent that electric companies are forced to build new generator capacity that can load-follow very fast, and that means natural gas fired gas turbines.

At last something supported by facts. However, the combination of wind + CCFT typically replaces coal baseload generation, saving around 2/3 of the coal CO2 emissions.

The gas turbines have to be kept spinning at full speed all the time to ramp up quickly enough. The result is that wind and solar not only double your electric bill, wind and solar also cause MORE CO2 to be produced.

Again this is not true.


Wind power predictability is very good and new CCGT startup times are also pretty good, so you only need the spinning reserve you need. Old coal however, takes hours or days to respond.

Germany considers it to be a power grid “exceptional event” when the hourly wind power forecast for 24 hours ahead is more than 10% out from the actual production achieved.

In conclusion, wind and solar power are clearly in very much better shape than the original post claims.

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As you said: “Generally wind does require complementary CCGT but saves 2/3 of the equivalent coal baseload generation CO2 emissions.”

We are not looking for a ⅔ reduction in CO2 production compared to coal. We need 99% reduction compared to coal. That means wind is not useful for mitigation of Global Warming [GW]. GW would continue to be dangerous if we used the maximum amount of wind and solar because CO2 production would continue and soon return to its exponential rise.

Your information is very interesting, and of course, the wind and solar resources vary enormously from place to place. In my home town in Cattaraugus County, New York, wind and solar are virtually nil. Here in Illinois, I am paying 7&½ cents per kilowatt hour. Who is Ramez Naam?

Energy Information Agency: Why do nuclear and hydro capacity factors vary from month to month? Nuclear should be producing at 100% except for periodic shutdowns to replace fuel rods. Repairs and upgrades should be done during the shutdown to replace fuel rods. The schedule is known in advance. There is no reason for correlation in refueling schedules.

Denmark seems to have a good wind resource compared to Illinois, USA. That is expected for a flat country near sea level.

American wind farms per Carbon Counter must indicate a selection factor. People don’t build wind farms where the wind resource is worse than average. I think your numbers are biased by the selection effect. You don’t have an average of wind capacity factor uniformly over the Earth’s surface, nor do you have the wind capacity factor over places where the power is needed. There is lots of wind over the ocean around Antarctica, but it does no good here.

How is Australia getting so much solar energy? They must be overbuilding solar. No, storing energy is not cheap. Somebody is giving you wrong numbers on that.

Nuclear is still the only way to get 99% reduction in CO2 production compared to coal. That forces our hand. The choice is between 100% nuclear and Global Warming. GW is a sure killer.

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@Edward,

In the final 2050 all-renewables solution you have a combination of renewables and storage. The storage can be various 24-hour storage technologies for the short gaps and for the longer gaps pumped storage hydro or power to gas using renewable hydrogen from electrolysis (once the electrolyser technology becomes more mature), and driving CCGT or fuel cells. This is a zero CO2 emission solution which is likely to be cheaper than an all-nuclear alternative by 2050. Personally I believe there will be a nuclear element only in countries with high population densities.

What you were originally claiming was that right now wind power did not save on CO2, It generally does save significantly on CO2 when inflexible coal generation is not used as backup.

You should read up on what smart grid demand response is and is not, and what complementary technologies are available. If you have a cold store in a house you can certainly allow air conditioners to be intelligently controlled by smart grid demand response without the occupants needing to know whether the air conditioners are actually on or off during any particular period.

As well as a law of diminishing returns economists have laws to do with cost reduction from learning as manufacturing volumes increase. This says that the higher the volume you manufacture, the more learning you get in the manufacturing process and the lower you can make the cost. For solar PV the estimate is for around 16-20% cost reduction from this per doubling of total cumulative solar panel volumes made. Wind is a little less as it is more mature. And you can expect 4 or 5 doublings of installed wind and solar power before 2050 and therefore huge price reductions (and as an example solar PV prices have already reduced by 80% in the past 6 years).

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“Running a 2 TW electrified country for 7 days requires 336 billion kWh of storage.”
A Nation-Sized Battery

Do the Math
Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options―by Tom Murphy

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

You didn’t figure out how much storage you really need and work out the price from there.

You can’t afford the energy storage!

And electrolysis of water to make hydrogen is not going to solve it for you. Remember that hydrogen leaks out of anything and show me the arithmetic.

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