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Open Thread

Open Thread 26

Time for a new open thread, since apparently the previous one is now loading a little slowly… I’ll close the old one to comments, so please continue discussion here.

As for the quiescence of BNC over the past few months, well, I’ve been travelling — what can I say? But I have a new post to put up tomorrow, and a few others in train.

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.

786 replies on “Open Thread 26”

Yes, I was wrong.

£70/t CO2e is equivalent to = £257/t C
and in USD $88/t CO2e is equivalent to = $323 /t C
and in AUD $116/t CO2e and $425/t C.

Hmm, so that much wouldn’t be enough to drive change. I wonder what would! I will pin up Fig 14 and see if it bestows understanding on me.

Like Hansen et al, I would rather the tax be paid at the point of extraction (as C) rather than at the exhaust (as CO2) to pre-empt cheating and favours to mates.

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Roger, you ask:

Hmm, so that much wouldn’t be enough to drive change. I wonder what would!

I reckon I have the economically rational answer to that queestion – i.e the method that has been demonstrated to succeed since humans began to swap and trade goods and services (200,000 years ago?).

The method is not more government intervention. It is less. It is to remove the impediments that have stalled progress for the past 50 years. Nuclear would now be around 10% the cost it is now if progress had bot been disrupted in the late 1960s and since. Nuclear could have saved 174 Gt CO2 and 9.5 million fatalities if the transition to nuclear had not been disrupted. More on this here: https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/cama-working-paper-series/9070/nuclear-power-learning-and-deployment-rates-disruption

Happy to post my developed proposal on how to proceed if interested. However, I hope you can read the link above first as essential background.

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Back to seaweed again. Can everyone please watch this 15 minute TED talk and tell me what you think?

He says the area of Washington State could feed the world… if we were ‘seafood vegetarians’. He’s not saying we’ll all become vegetarians. But there’s more. He’s not just growing kelp, but restoring ocean ecologies so that oysters and other shellfish grow in his farms, and fish return. He’s creating artificial reefs. He’s created an OPEN SOURCE MODEL so anyone can copy him and run their own farms!

Anyone know any ocean experts to verify if there’s enough appropriate nutrient rich SHALLOW ocean to backup his Washington State claim? W.S. is 185 thousand km2. That’s a lot of seaweed farms!

NUTRIENTS: The nutrient rich ocean upwelling area is around 2% of world oceans which is 7.2 MILLION km2, so that’s not an issue.
SHALLOW: Must be shallow enough to anchor his buoys, so that means continental shelves, which also happen to mostly be nutrient rich from erosion and also oceanic upwelling currents occur along coasts.
NOT IN SHIPPING LANES
NOT SPOILING NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS like coral, mangroves, wetlands, etc.

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California, with its pricey power, installs utility scale battery farms:

Speedily in response to the gigantic natural gas storage leak.

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Is it true that just one more halving of the battery price would make it ‘profitable’? Is that just to cover peaking power, or are they starting to think it could provide overnight backup?

But for the most part, according to a BNEF analysis, the costs of new projects would need to drop by half in order to be profitable on a wider scale in California, and that’s not likely to happen for another decade. The total installed cost of a battery plant would need to fall to about $275 per kilowatt hour. While Tesla declined to provide its pricing data, the similarly sized Altagas project was expected to cost at least $40 million, or $500 per kilowatt hour. It’s possible that with the remarkable scope of Tesla’s Reno operations, the company will be able to establish new floors for pricing, forcing the industry to follow, BNEF’s Sekine said.
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/surge-in-utility-scale-battery-projects.html

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Eclipse Now — That is just for peak shaving. Nobody could afford the batteries required for longer intervals.

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Eclipse Now,

https://www.eosenergystorage.com/products/

EOS are already selling DC battery packs for $160 / kWh for orders of more than 40MWh. To that add inverters and DC charging. Inverters are maybe $240 / kW (and coming down with the increase in solar PV volumes), and DC chargers must be cheaper – say half that at $120 / kWh. So for 4 hours of storage you would expect the total hardware price to be around 160 + 360/4 = $250 / kWh.

Tesla’s technical manager let slip in a public conference call last year that Tesla battery pack prices were currently $190 / kWh, but that Tesla was expecting $100 / kWh once the gigafactory gets into full production by 2020. Reading different reports there was room for doubt whether the second figure was a battery cell or battery pack price, though the context implied battery pack price (maybe 30% more than just cells). The gigafactory on its own equates to global 2013 lithium ion production, so you would expect a big impact on costs form such a scale.

At such prices storage would be cheap enough to cover peaks and allow nuclear stations to be run mostly at constant full output, probably a cheaper solution than modulating output daily. i.e. the saving on the reduced nuclear capacity requirement would more than pay for the batteries to reduce that requirement.

Similarly you can afford the few hours of storage required to get a grid such as ERCOT (Texas) with excellent local wind + solar resources up to 80-85% renewables, with a surplus of another 10-15%. But this solution still needs natural gas backup for the longer-duration gaps of up to a few weeks. Batteries will always be too expensive for such gaps so the last step towards a 100% renewable grid is a lower-cost / GWh storage solution such as renewable hydrogen or methane alongside the batteries (which are still required).

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Hi all,
I’ve finally found the paper Tim Flannery was quoting. This peer-reviewed paper claims that they can use submersible digesters out in the ocean that slowly draw in the kelp when it is ready to harvest, slowly bio-digest it, release the energy gases off the top and then recycle all the nutrients back out to the kelp farms in big tea-bags that slowly release nutrients, fertilising the next round of kelp! That’s how they farm 9% of the oceans when only 2% have the nutrients required to grow kelp: recycling the biomass nutrients on site while syphoning the useful energy off the top.

They even claim we could return CO2 to 350ppm and reverse ocean acidification THIS CENTURY! But far more controversial for this list is the fact that this could provide abundant bio-gas backup to a renewable grid and all the liquid fuels we could need.

goo.gl/aTtfW

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Eclipse, I won’t do the homework of studying the linked documents, but address your summary. That reference to “artificial layers” sounds as if they admit that there are insufficent reservoirs for that quantity of CO2 and instead plan on fracking on a scale many times greater than current fracking for gas.

The title (‘storing CO2 as liquid”) shows a clear intention to play on the ignorance of the faithful, as CO2 wont stay liquid in the store. Although it can be pumped down as a (sub-critical) liquid, CO2 reacts instantly with any water present. Only at dangerously shallow (~permafrost) depths would stable hydrate form immediately. Deeper, it forms an acid that attacks both reservoir and seal. The reaction is exothermic, so any large volume of both liquids would raise the temperature past the critical point of 31 C. Supercritical CO2 is an escape artist.

The Australian regulator is skeptical about the permanence of such hideaways, requiring all sites to be undersea. Thus, after the contractor has collected the payoff and closed up their legal liability, the gas escapes into the sea and eventually makes its way back into greenhouse. Fish and porpoises might die off, but no Lake Nyos type disaster occurs.

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OK, here’s the idea.

“Seafloor container carbon storage combines reductions in risks, property rights issues, and costs, relative to the substantially researched “geologic” (deep-earth) injection. Geosynthetic storage reduces cost, particularly for coastal communities without nearby oil or gas reservoirs. The cool and high-pressure nature of the deep ocean allows the CO2 to become a solid (hydrate) denser than seawater at the same time it ensures geosynthetics will remain serviceable for millennia. A thin geomembrane covering is all that is needed to prevent the hydrate from dissolving. Because hydrate requires heat to “melt,” it cannot fail catastrophically. The ease of access and sensor placement in the ocean allows detecting and repairing leaks and ultimately demonstrating that 99.9% of injected CO2 remains contained. There is no pressure build-up during filling. “

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Okay, Eclipse, how does he get the CO2 down there? He cant pump a solid hydrate down to the sea floor, the stuff must be liquid CO2. He must somehow manufacture the hydrate at the pipehead, and remove the heat of reaction to elsewhere before it’s released. Then spread the lumpy stuff throughout a vast volume (remember, cubic kms are needed) enclosed by a flimsy film.

As a liquid above 0 C, its density is less than seawater by ~150 kg/m3, so the (weighted) pipe must withstand a pressure difference of ~3 MPa across a head of say 2000 m depth.

I’ve worked with geotextiles. They resist tearing, but thin ones puncture easily, especially when laid across a rocky surface – and prickly crustaceans. Osmotic pressure through the punctures to the concentrated CO2 will ensure seawater mixing, inflation, tearing and eventual escape of the whole mass in a maelstrom that boils its way back up to the surface.

I doubt that reading his text will explain all this away. I suspect he hasnt thought it through, and is confident that you won’t try to. Arent you insulted?

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The safest way to remove carbon dioxide is nature’s way: react it with mafic rock to produce carbonates. Gone forever.

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Yes, and I’m all for the olivine programs if someone will fund it. But who is going to, and why? Saving us from climate change AND de-acidifying the ocean, as olivine promises to, is great. But where’s the money?
This seaweed program promises to feed the world, solve climate change, provide ALL our energy needs, and save the oceans from acidity! IF possible. I mean, isn’t ocean depth an issue? Don’t they need to anchor kelp farms? If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

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Here is a potential source of funds:

Instead of giving it all away in tax relief or whatever, use some to trial mafic rock to carbonate removal, some to trial forests in deserts and some to trial kelp farming. And whatever else appears highly promising.

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EN. – Except that it isn’t going to save the planet. The project provides no more than an excuse for emitters to continue emitting. By putting the environmental damage out of sight, we would commit another massive crime against the commons.

Edward de Bono once proposed that pollution should be dumped upstream of the polluter. So if you really can convert CO2 into some horrible mud, it should be pumped into the main streets of each capital city. The horror arising from the prospect would do a lot more to stop emissions and save the planet.

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David,

Politically the Republican $40/ton carbon tax proposal will only fly if it is a revenue-neutral tax i.e. the proceeds are returned to the people. Otherwise it would be seen as a “left wing” big-government style proposal and won’t get past the Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives.

But a revenue-neutral tax it fits well into the Trump agenda. The Trump supporters mostly end up net gainers. Further, those who gain most are those on low income who have a greater propensity to spend money, and this would help increase GDP – a Trump pledge. It would also spur investment in nuclear, wind and solar which would produce more jobs – another Trump pledge.

$40 is quite a good starting price too. It would add about 0.8 cents per kWh on electricity produced by coal, and half that for gas.

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By digging out the fossil fuels and burning them, we have let the carbon cat well and truly out of its underground bag. We cannot put it back conveniently. The way now is to live with it. Earlier, we the humans cut off forests to convert the land to farms, housing, roads and other ‘developments’. We are definitely not going to turn it all back. Ditto with carbon dioxide.
Additional developments are now indicated. Some of the important ones are
1. Change our burning habits to avoid poisoning our atmosphere with sulfur and particulate matter. Convert all fuel to gas and clean it before burning. Burn nuclear fuel to reduce mining footprint.
Preferably go for closed cycle to reduce nuclear waste.
2. Develop crop varieties that feed on more carbon dioxide and environmental heat to produce more biomass. Cultivate them to recover the investment as food, fuel, fibre and useful chemicals.
3. Further the water retention by geoengineering. We have to make up for loss of snow and ice.
4. Convert the spare biomass from cultivation to char and store it on farm and forest land. Gases and liquids from processing should replace fossils as biofuel.
5. Supplement energy by wind and solar energy combined with storage.

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Hi Jagdish. In the past, you have spoken of very interesting Indian work on plutonium fuels. Has there been further progress?

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Hi Jagdish. You have spoken of some very interesting Indian work on plutonium fuels. Has there being further progress that you know of?

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EN, you got it right. That was my clumsy attempt at irony. In fact it is rotten news, enough to damage any one’s day.

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This chart demonstrates the tiny scale of Wind+Solar in comparison to the overall task of decarbonising the globe’s energy systems if it is to do any heavy lifting.

Nuclear power is not much better, but at least it has the advantages of safety, scaleability, capacity factor and reliability.

Why are we still hearing of “100% Renewables” solutions? If that is the answer, then the question was wrong.

Wind and solar’s contributions, current and projected as at 2035, are lumped into the tiny bars on the right hand side.

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WNN reports that the Russians have been able to achieve a 99.99% separation of fission products from actinides when recycling nitride fuel. I have been unable to find further literature on the subject, but it appears to be a wet process.

It (99.99%) seems like a fine point to make, when the original IFR tests routinely lost 8% in their early crude “pyroprocessing” cycles. However, if the recycling is to continue indefinitely, with hundreds of cycles, users would not want the fuel to be accumulating problematic minority elements. One of them is Sm, a strong neutron poison. Other elements might increase alloying with the zirconium cladding, ageing that version of the fuel prematurely. However, such cleansing need only be done after so many electroprocessing cycles that the concentration of the offending fission product has become significant.

On the other hand, it helps the geological disposal of the fission products to have the long-lived actinides absent, so that heat production after burial is minimised. Environmental protection is also served if there is no possibility of a strongly radioactive waste re-emerging thousands of years hence.

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Any chance we could get a new Open Thread in the near future? Loading OT26 is getting to be pretty slow. Granted my internet connection is probably slower than most, and I wouldn’t want you to update the thread for one person. But at least I can serve as a canary in the mine.

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Hi Huon,
that’s why I wish more of us linked to the forums. Forums only load the page of the discussion that you’re up to. We could use this thread to link to interesting new discussions over there, and the forums would take the bulk of the heat.

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Huon, my sympathies. Although my workplace has enough bandwidth for repeated reloads, home doesn’t, so when at home I keep track of new comments in email, without loading BNC, by taking the “via email” option at foot of each thread.

The forums have a “most recent” page to bookmark, so that long-idle threads can be monitored without having to watch the grass grow: http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/posts/recent

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Eclipse Now and Roger Clifton,

Thanks so much for your helpful comments. I will be using the Forum more in the future, but I continue to treasure the freewheeling nature of Open Thread. As you say, the synergy between the two offers the best of both worlds.

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What forums?

I see no mention of forums on this page, the front page or the side bars.

I note the subsequent post’s link to a proboards address – again, not described in the main pages – is this part of the fabled “forums”?

If so, perhaps an explanatory note for the less-familar would not be astray.

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Just go to the link above and log in there. At once stage there was so much traffic here that each article was referred across to the BNC forums to discuss there. Then the blog slowed a bit and they just found it easier to concentrate mainly on this wordpress blog.

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I have followed the link to the proboards about which I still have little informationapart from the apparent fact that the content is not moderated.

Apparently I will need to register, to manage yet another password and put up with glowing comment about storing and recovering electricity for less than a day, at 30% recovery factor and presented as though somehow this is an improvement on load-following, scaleable, reliable electricity generation.

I accept that I am intellectually limited but I am not yet completely insane.

The molten silicon idea has all the hallmarks of a scam, starting with admission that large sums of public money have already been absorbed by its backers, with no practical outcome.

I wish them well with the IPO. Suckers, please line up.

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I initially discounted the viability of Allam Cycle combustion, which claimed enhanced thermal efficiency and very much simplified CO2 capture as a liquid at high pressure.

Now I am not so sure, due to the paper presented at a conference last year describing progress by Toshiba and others of a 50MW operational power station.

Click to access Speaker70049_Session15954_1.pdf

Anybody discussing CCS will need to keep an eye on this project.

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Agreed. In Scotland the dream is to pump it into wells for enhanced oil recovery… and more FF to burn.

In current low carbon debates, it seems that each of many proponents lives in his/her/its own universe.

(What gender is a corporation? Hence “Its”.)

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SE — Well, starting from home, you have access to nearly 300 live threads. Here are the most recently updated threads for “energy”.

Unlike the “Open Threads” where a gem of a comment is soon buried in the chatter, (though it could possibly be found again with your browser), the forum threads are uncluttered enough to continue a thoughtful conversation with months-long intervals.

You would be in erudite company. Indeed, I was surprised to note your absence. Many of us keep a watch out for juicy threads breaking their silence.

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Thanks, Roger.

I have visited the Proboards again, after an absence of perhaps 6 months.

There may be 300 threads there, but only a couple of dozen have been active in the past 4 months.

I have no idea how to register and thus have posted as a guest.

I have no idea how to obtain notifications of new posts on Proboards.

Maybe posts to Proboards would be better initially posted on OT and those which are not rubbish transferred by someone who cares to Proboards as some kind of archive on a rolling basis.

I guess this depends to a certain degree what value individuals place on archived material and how their short term memory for say, a couple of months is functioning.

I’m fairly comfortable operating on BNC’s OT26, despite desperately slow connection speeds. Thanks, Telstra 4G Mobile and the non-existent NBN. which recently condemned me to SkyMuster satellite and thus to significant latency and monthly max quota 35Gb. Higher quotas are advertised but are no longer on offer via retailers due to congestion and a resulting NBN-imposed average across all residential customers of “less than 40 Gb”. That quota works out to less than 4 minutes per day download of a video such as the evening news. From then it will be “shaped”, ie stuffed.

If I can survive on OT, others can do also.

If I need higher speeds, I am forced to drive in my diesel fuelled ute to a hotspot in town and be a bludger.

Has BNC considered the post-NBN FF usage that the more poorly served “customers” of Australia’s emerging poor quality NBN as they travel to others’ hotspots or to deliver kids to better served friends and associates so that they can get their School of the Air, gaming, digital film and digital TV experiences?

I long for the “Bad old days”, when Telstra still maintained its copper system and we were able to receive ADSL 2+ and use a Skype phone or video session, neither of which is now available to me via any means.

If a low energy future for Australia includes reduced personal transport through improved communications, then my experience has been that we are going backwards service-wise, despite doubling costs.

One last example: my specialist doctor cannot read MRI scans in sufficient detail in my town due to slow data transfer rates, of 17,000, so he drives 80km to John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, where my scan was performed. At least part of this single person transport, is repeated many times per day. Yep, another 21st Century advance due to “Fibre to the Wazoo”.

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Well done, EN. You asked the crucial question, “what’s the catch?” and identified correctly what it is.

Meanwhile, I was sucked in by the use of the cachet, “supercritical”. Thermodynamic systems that cycle near the critical point of a fluid can make use of some special properties – but only in the vicinity. The Allum Cycle described does not cycle anywhere near the critical points of either CO2 or H2O. Indeed, the presence of twice as much H2O as CO2 (from burning methane) would defeat the point of cycling near the critical point of CO2 and vice versa.

Nevertheless the system does cycle wholly as a gas, compressing the working fluid without the heat-expensive step of condensing it, as done in most steam cycles in use today.

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France has the longest track record of reprocessing used nuclear fuel. Now some of that know-how is being transferred to China to assist in the construction of a Chinese used fuel reprocessing facility. (WNN)

The move is significant. Whereas the French process was to supply plutonium to a growing fleet of fast neutron reactors spawned by Phenix and Superphenix, the French program has been fought to a standstill by antinuclear groups. The Chinese program has no such obstruction and plans to expand with fast reactors beyond its fleet of (slow neutron) PWR’s to at least 200 GW by 2050. (WNN)

Does that imply an international trade in reactor grade plutonium ? Not necessarily.

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Here is a story from The Age that should have been saved for April 1st. There is not much chance of the public ever having a realistic appreciation of radiation risks when junk journalism like this gets printed.

Over $1 billion to dig up some dead cows that were buried after being injected with a radioactive trace? If anyone finds the punch line could you let me know?

The Age

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EN, feedstock for mass protein production would likely consist of synthetic amino acids. They all need fixed nitrogen, presumably as ammonia from the Haber process.

Someone on BNC has spoken several times of synthetic protein a few years back, possibly Huon. A synthetic protein (“Protex”?) for stockfeed was launched but flopped, possibly because it is still cheaper to plunder the oceans.

Interested readers should also read Geoff Russell’s thought provoking thread on providing protein for the world.

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David, thanks for posting the link https://www.quora.com/Can-we-reverse-global-warming/answer/Scott-Strough for my proposal to reverse climate change. I can answer any skeptics questions here if anyone has any. For those unwilling to do their homework:

Executive summary:

Yes we can reverse Global Warming.

It does not require huge tax increases or expensive untested risky technologies.

It will require a three pronged approach worldwide.

1) Reduce fossil fuel use by replacing energy needs with as many feasible renewables as current technology allows.
2) Change Agricultural methods to high yielding regenerative models of production made possible by recent biological & agricultural science advancements.
3) Large scale ecosystem recovery projects similar to the Loess Plateau project, National Parks like Yellowstone etc. where appropriate and applicable.

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Scott, you say that we can rapidly reverse global warming. Surely, you would require that we eliminate all emissions before beginning carbon removal?

However, by merely saying, “reduce fossil fuel use” you would allow an unstated amount of fossil fuel use to continue. Indeed the only replacements you advise are “as many feasible renewables as current technology allows”. All currently feasible renewables have been deployed in Germany by the believers, yet they have not reduced CO2 emissions below the continuing 400 g/kWh, when the need is for zero emissions. Renewables just can’t zero emissions.

Zeroing carbon emissions requires zero-carbon energy sources. Your text needs to speak instead of replacing fossil fuel use with “as many feasible non-carbon energy sources as current technology allows”, with the clear implication of deploying nuclear.

The plan must bite both bullets before beginning remediation: zeroing emissions and deploying nuclear energy.

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Executive summary:

Yes we can reverse Global Warming.

It does not require huge tax increases or expensive untested risky technologies.

It will require a three pronged approach worldwide.

1)Reduce fossil fuel use by replacing energy needs with as many feasible renewables as current technology allows.
2)Change Agricultural methods to high yielding regenerative models of production made possible by recent biological & agricultural science advancements.
3)Large scale ecosystem recovery projects similar to the Loess Plateau project, National Parks like Yellowstone etc. where appropriate and applicable.

https://www.quora.com/Can-we-reverse-global-warming/answer/Scott-Strough

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A very interesting video where Paul Howarth, CEO of the National Nuclear Laboratory in the UK talks about the UK Government journey towards achieving 60% emissions reduction by 2050 and 80% by 2080.

Initially the Government’s (Labour) ideological position was this could be achieved with renewables until Government scientists developed an emissions reduction computer model. When the model was run it showed that it is not possible to achieve the emissions reductions required until nuclear was included in the mix.

Based on science and not political ideology the UK Government with bipartisan agreement is now moving towards their emissions reduction goal by developing a nuclear energy industry that will also include a closed nuclear waste cycle by mid century.

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Yes, driverless minibuses also offer a solution to urban sprawl, where personal vehicles have previously been a prerequisite. The vehicle could even chatter to passengers about which bus/train is due, when, at each bus/train stop in range.

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I’ve been following the robot-car story for a decade, and this article astonished even me. 1 robot-electric-taxi-cabs could displace anywhere from 10 to 30 family cars as those families stop owning their own cars and rely on super-cheap taxis, it could free up 14% of LA for redevelopment of old, bankrupted car-park towers, and they’ll all be electric, and wear out after clocking up 300,000 miles in a year which means we’ll constantly be hiring this year’s model!
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/job-opportunities/25-shocking-predictions-about-the-coming-driverless-car-era-in-the-u-s/

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… since the railway is electric (of course), the local electric minibuses would sleep at their local railway station, charging up overnight on a DC feed provided by the railway’s substation.

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Hi, Roger. My wife and I happen to be members of the social class known as YOPS (Young, Old, Poor and Sick – the target audience of town planners, especially traffic & transport planners.). We are OS: retired and with restricted mobility. Universal solutions must address the full scope of the problem.

I note that you revert to “minibuses” when others mention “driverless cars”. Driverless cars appeal much more to me than minibuses, because we need door to door delivery, including when doing Main Street shopping.

Since human drivers with their fixed and variable costs such as wages and meal breaks will not be part of the equation, I see little point in other than single destination vehicles,ie one or two passengers. Additional advantages include speed and flexibility. Individual vehicles will go directly to their destination, after which it can be directed to either a recharging point (rail station?) or to the next customer. Passengers will not be delayed while their carriage winds through the suburbs dropping off and/or picking up other passengers.

For these reasons, personal autonomous transport, though shared, will tend to be small. How this will suit families with several young children is another question – as one of a family of 7 children, 9 seats appeared to be ideal: actually, we children climbed into the tray of a small truck, along with our baggage, which is not exactly acceptable in these days of seat belts and detailed road safety rules.

Maybe “platooning” of several smaller self-driving vehicles will work, along the lines of platoons of trucks on a freeway.

My grandchildren live in an inner city suburb, where they can use car-less supervised transport to get to school. Walking Trains wind through their street to school with a parent at each end. Children join the “train” along the journey to school. No electricity, no cars, no infrastructure of any type. But not much good for YOPS. Autonomous cars might emulate the walking caterpillar/train…

But I digress. The case for and against autonomous cars Vs minibuses (and maxibuses, etc) is an interesting one.

Ditto, autonomous delivery vans. Smaller, even single-package autonomous vans will have less difficulty parking adjacent to their delivery point, whereas today’s delivery vans tend to have 25 ft long trays and to carry dozens of packages and are entirely unsuited to inner city operation.

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Hi Singleton,
good points, but surely the corporations / govt departments (as I’m still not sure whether this will be reclassified as a public good and therefore be govt owned public transport) will have algorithms that adjust to all this. EG: Peak hour! Do we still want hundreds of thousands of individual cars creating bottlenecks during peak hours, or vastly discounted ride sharing for the community convenience of NOT suffering peak hour traffic? What would peak hour with robot drivers look like, and how could we ensure bulk transit in one direction (to the city in the morning) be made more efficient? How do we ensure EVERYONE doesn’t just jump in a robot car for a comfy ride into town? Doesn’t this threaten public transport, which is known to be a more efficient way to move tens of thousands of people vastly more efficiently than traffic? Maybe there will be congestion rules that apply to busy areas. We shall see.
Then during the day suburban driving takes over, and it could be point to point with pensioner discounts on individual transport plans, etc.

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Hi, EN. I’m not convinced that central planning and government will make all the decisions for us. An example is the resilience of private vehicles, complete with traffic jams, on today’s roads. There are a zillion studies out there in support of shared public transport, yet private transport remains the major mode. An example of a possible future is the Go Get car hire system. It is not publicly owned or administered through a government body, yet offers shared vehicles. I foresee GoGet and other private organisations morphing into businesses that cooperate with local government bodies to provide a public transport service without the aggressive confrontation that has been adopted by Uber as they try to grow their business. The beauty of this model is two-fold: it can grow from an existing model; and it is well accepted by users and non-users alike where it operates.

Plus, it does not rely public money or public bureaucracies.

https://www.goget.com.au/

Your other comments re the difference between peak demand mode and off-peak are relevant, but the resource juggling act is complicated by the need for recharging before and after peaks, not only night time.

The trend for inner city buses includes both larger commuter vehicles and smaller local ones, but there is a practical cost and limit to the number of interchange nodes in a system. The ultimate mix will presumable involve both large and small autonomous vehicles, perhaps eventually replacing trains on some suburban rail routes. Platooning holds promise of a third way, with (say) 6 small coordinated vehicles operating on much less roadway than would 6 individual autonomous vehicles or,worse, 6 private driver-operated vehicles.

Pushed to the imaginary limit, autonomous vehicles could replace most of a notional city’s rail and tram system while offering point-to-point delivery. The idea of “local” might start small – say, a couple of KM’s,but grow with time to tens of kilometres. Besides which, the much reduced need for on-street parking will probably free up the kerbside lanes, thus an additional lane, although perhaps reduced in capacity due to passengers getting on and off the cars.

Given the predicted reduced general demand for car parking spaces, it may be practical to recharge the public autonomous vehicles at former parking stations, thus enlarging the prop-off and pick-up areas at existing rail stations while retaining some or all of the existing station parking for conventional drivers of self-drive cars (for a price).

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PUBLIC VS CORPORATE
I appreciate what you’re saying, and am open to corporations or governments providing the services. It might be various corporations supplying the service, with a little nudge from governments here and there. EG: Maybe there will be areas that are hit by a congestion tax? Who knows. We’ve got to see how all this works first.

TRAINS
Aren’t trains one of the most efficient mass public transit systems for regular folk, so that anyone with special needs can robot-cab it into town without all those competing cars clogging up the roads? If I get a fast train that is clean and runs well, with a convenient robot-mini-bus or robot-cab either end of my rail trip, I’m happy. Maybe my needs will change as I age, and that’s fine too, as long as we’re looking after everyone in various ways.

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EN, the Finnish paper (actually, partial website, not yet a paper) that was cited made no mention of kelp farming. I recommend reading/viewing before commenting.

One difficulty is that an incomplete and misleading report has been published by Lappeenranta University of Technology as part of a government-funded project. Thus, the LUT is acting as an expert agent of the Finnish Government regarding the limitations of renewable energy. Yet it was published without publication of the assumptions. Worst,it demonstrates without any doubt that the desired end result has been adopted as both the findings and the recommendation for future action. Those assumptions that can be reasonably discerned, such as such as weather behaviour, resource limitations, etc, have either been moulded to suit or selected illogically in order to achieve that corrupt goal.

This goes beyond mere poor form: it is very much an attribute of a low quality marketing operation. “This car is a true delight and has excellent acceleration” says the used-car salesman, describing a clapped out rust bucket with no brakes. Buyer beware.

The authors and LUT, their employers, absolutely deserve to be judged against the quality of the report and the damage that it and others like it are doing to the global energy and climate discussions.

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Re trains and mass transport:

I suggest that primary emphasis be placed on “transport”. Whether mass is more or less desirable than personal is axiomatic… given a choice, I’d prefer personal, or at least targetted.

Unlike seemingly the majority of town planning theoreticians, I can imagine a future where huddling in ghettos around mass transport hubs is less desirable than a future where transport is available on a personalised basis via shared individual autonomous EV’s.

Small,mid-density housing would thus allow for things like gardens and sunlight. China’s 30-story rubber-stamped mega-suburbs do absolutely nothing for me, neither do Sydney’s crowded inner city precincts.

A very good case can be made in support of single and dual occupancy suburban development, provided that transport issues have been addressed – which certainly has never been and possibly will never be the case until “transport” no longer requires multi-car garages for each tenancy.

Hence, my conditional optimism regarding autonomous vehicles. Once in such a vehicle, why not travel to your destination if relatively nearby? What additional value would suburban rail lines serve? One station every 5 or 10km might suffice… I haven’t thought this through.

And as for trams… if retained, they would essentially be squatting on land that is better used for public recreation or by autonomous vehicles mixed with the remaining but diminishing yet essential human-operated vehicles.

So, eventually:
Mixed cycle/light vehicle roads,
No trams
Minimal trains, focused on longer trips, say above 10 or 20km.
Large and heavy trucks barred from domestic precincts, including those making deliveries.
Heavy trucks to operate on designated main roads only, to and from depots/nodes.
Exceptions by permit only.

Heavy buses would operate primarily along main roads, stopping at “bus stops”. Novel idea, that one.

(In NSW) Opal or equivalent swipe cards or mobile phone, etc, to be used for payments. Go Get and Uber already use this. NSW buses, trains and ferries are similar. This is established practice.

This leaves some private vehicles, but at a price. They have similar requirements as emergency service vehicles and goods vehicles and can share the same carriageways. However, redundant rail corridors would readily adapt, in most cases, to re-use by autonomous vehicles.

Everything on roads.
Everything (almost) electric-powered.

Now for the best part.
This progressively scaleable transport system works equally well in a town of 5000 and a city of 5,000,000 and requires minimal public capital.

But platooned small autonomous EV’s lie at its core. First things first.

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Yet another half-baked “100% renewables” study, this time from Finland and using government money.

http://neocarbonenergy.fi/internetofenergy/
and
http://euanmearns.com/the-lappeenranta-renewable-energy-model-is-it-realistic/

Why these zealots are permitted by those who they claim to represent to publish incomplete, not peer reviewed nonsense is open to discussion, however two effects are:
1. Public sees the ensuing debate and rightly decides that “100% renewables” have too many problems, so they settle for the status quo, which involves strong headwinds against nuclear power and business as usual for fossil fuels. Net result: FUD.
2. The universities and other organisations which house these zealots have their brand devalued, yet they seem powerless to interfere. Result: Antiscience and anti-expert opinion flourishes. More FUD.

The public and their politicians gravitate towards the loudest voice and populism instead of listening to experts, regarding climate science and energy options.

Irrational pro-100% campaigners are not civilisation’s or the environment’s friends: they indirectly support those who are doing the most harm and, IMHO, should be weeded from the garden of life.

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On renewables: what if they’re all backed up by biogas from kelp? I don’t even know how reasonable the paper I keep quoting is in terms of kelp farming out in the nutrient poor open ocean. But I’d love to see some trials on this. 2% of the world’s oceans have enough nutrients to grow kelp. The 9% figure is an area larger than Africa! But that is a mathematical exercise to provide all the world’s energy and sequester all the CO2 to bring the atmosphere back to normal by 2085, this century! But what if they’re mixing up the renewables grid and then backing it all up with masses of biogas from kelp? That’s 100% clean energy and, unlike poor misunderstood nuclear, popular in the public imagination. If the kelp strategy were economic and feasible, I’d support that. I’m not saying it IS economic or feasible, I simply don’t know enough about engineering and marine biology and systems to provide any meaningful verdict. But if it were, I’d certainly embrace it.

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EN, if it were possible to back up the world’s renewables with biogas from kelp, we wouldn’t bother with the renewables. It is the backup that would provide most of the energy if we had a 100% renewable capacity generation system. Why? Because renewables are intermittent, they are idle most of the time. But during that time the backup provides the power – most of it. So if it were possible to provide most of our power using biogas from kelp (or by rubbing rabbits feet etc), we would have no justification for wasting all that time and money on the renewables.

You say that you are unable to do the necessary arithmetic to check these loony schemes. However you are able to do so, in fact you just did, when you said that only 2% of the world’s oceans are eligible, but 9% would be needed for the kelp farms. Armed with those facts, you are in a position to tell the author not to waste your time with a silly dream that both of you knew all along was nonsense.

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Hi Roger,
that’s what I thought, and why I was trying to get a copy of Tim Flannery’s book. I heard him on a podcast going on about this kelp idea, and when I asked around about it the fact that most of the ocean is a nutrient poor desert kept coming up. So what was Tim going on about? After all, he’s on our Climate Council and was once Australian of the Year for his work on promoting popular understanding of climate science. Then I found a blog post where Tim links to the paper below.

It explains how to grow kelp in nutrient poor regions with in-situ nutrient recycling. It concludes giant kelp farms could give 10 billion people half a kilogram of seafood per person per day, all the biofuels we could need to replace fossil fuels, remove ocean acidity, and through in-situ CO2 sequestration, restore our atmosphere to 350ppm by 2085!
Kelp grown in 6km radius farms is eventually dragged in, placed in biodigester bags, and fermented or digested in these huge underwater bladders. Then after 135 days the gas is siphoned off the top and compressed into a tanker, and the nutrients are recycled through drip-hoses and little kelp ‘tea bags’ on site to grow the next season’s crop.
http://www.psep.ichemejournals.com/article/S0957-5820(12)00120-6/abstract

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Hi Singleton,
“Re algal farming: Found: Cornucopian horn. The gift that keeps giving.”
http://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/photo/cornucopia-with-pumpkins-royalty-free-image/184379147

I hear you! Algoil has been the rave in all the 100% renewable sites for decades. But how many of them are operating profitable business right now that have been open sourced so that other people can copy and implement their own kelp & seafood farms? It will cost the individual $50,000 in start up, NOT from Greenwave directors, but in equipment they can buy for themselves.

Greenwave won the Sustaina Award. The concept is out there!
“The Sustainia Award and Community Award are given to a solution, technology or project with a significant potential to help build a more sustainable future. The Sustainia Award winner is selected by the Sustainia
Award Committee, led by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and includes the Former European
Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, and Executive Director of the UN Global Compact,
Lise Kingo. The Community Award is selected by a public vote.”

Click to access Press-release_Sustainia-Award-winner.pdf

Admittedly this is about farming the nutrient-rich coastal waters. A small fraction of these nutrient rich waters farmed with vertical kelp farms would feed the world all the oysters and shellfish we could eat.

But as to farming the other 7% in the nutrient poor regions of the open ocean? Your Bangladesh comment is ill advised. I imagine the seeding boats would have a few of these tea-bag machines. Of course, it would be specialised for slowly releasing biodigested kelp remains. Here’s some guys building a regular teabag machine now! As an engineer, I’m sure you appreciate the simplicity of this machine. Kelp tea-bags would probably come out already strung to a kelp line that would then be seeded and deployed, but that’s for their engineers to figure out. It isn’t rocket science. It’s tea bags.

Deploy out in a 6km radius, let the stuff grow for 6 months, replenish the tea-bag lines as needed, and add more kelp syrup to slow release drips as needed. After the kelp is the right size drag it back into the big bladder and let it sink another 4 months or so. Once it is biodigested, the tanker comes along and siphons off all the gas. Hey presto, natural gas!

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I was thinking more along the lines of a circular mattress 6km in diameter… a vary large tea bag.

Not convinced yet… watching from the sidelines… must be an engineer.

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I hear you Singleton! I’m not even an engineer, but am still wanting to at least see this kind of open ocean kelp farm working for a few years before I’m sold. But if anyone can do it with all their seagoing kit, it’s big oil. Now, if only there were a nation or corporation brave enough to actually try it! Wonder how the economics would pan out against the brute force of Blue Crude? (Synthetic diesel from seawater). One relies on passive sunlight technologies, vast areas and long timescales, and the other the brute force of a thousand nuclear power plants to cook up the diesel from seawater. (1000 nukes for America’s diesel needs). Which would win, if the giant kelp farms are even possible? And let’s not forget Tom Blee’s boron!
At least now I have the opposite problem from when I was a newbie peak oiler. Back then I didn’t know if there was any solution. Now I don’t know which solution will ultimately win out, or which combination of solutions, but at least I know nuclear power is one fantastic option that we don’t even have to call a ‘necessary evil’ any more. :-)

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In the above, instead of “not listening to experts”, perhaps “not listening to reason” would be a better expression.

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Singleton,
there are awful psychological consequences to the town plans you’re discussing. Isolation can be crippling emotionally and even result in health consequences. The first and last video’s on my Rezone page are classic! The first one is a jazzy 4 minute summary of the goals of New Urbanism, and the last one is a hilarious TED talk by James Howard Kunstler, a city design specialist who lampoons the uglier side of suburbia.
There can be nice suburbs with some sense of community, but even where I live in the tree-lined streets of North Epping, the sense of isolation can be terrible. Sometimes there’s no “there” there. Suburbia can have no soul.

Rezone

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There’s more than a grain of truth to what EN says about loneliness, but I doubt that massing folk together in mass transport is the antidote. Bridge clubs and gardening groups do the same thing,only better, now that sundays are no longer reserved for separate gatherings of RC’s and various Others in their respective monumental buildings.

I still fancy that we are envisaging too many transport options in future and that the choice between personal (shared, communal, EV) transport against group (mass, communal, EV, Train, Tram) will lean toward the former, thus limiting the lives of Canberra’s, Sydney’s and Newcastle’s currently under construction new trams.

We shall then witness mass conversions of redundant garages into B&B’s or hydroponic nurseries for illegal vegetables.

I guess that EV and I share a recognition that the eventual demise of the motor car as we know it is not able to be confidently predicted. There are still horses, though few and far between, about 130 years after the arrival of the horseless carriage… but most around here are paddock-bashers as also the occasional vintage ute.

If we both live to see 100, we will know the answer.

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I read all the hype on driverless / autonomous cars with a few grains of salt. Firstly I just can’t believe that the motor manufacturing industry is happily engineering a future for itself that results in their industry producing only one tenth of current vehicle output. But it’s a mighty good sales pitch.

Secondly, I’m reminded of the nuclear industry’s to repeated early sales pitch that power would be ‘too cheap to meter’. Autonomous vehicles provide a promise and a dream that allows us to keep cars as the mainstay of transportation and this dream is fervently held by hordes of enthusiasts because we do so love the power and sense of identity and autonomy that cars have given us. We’ll do whatever it takes to keep those advantages.

But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating and that even applies on the safety front.

Autonomous cars are coming our way and they have their millions of dreamy advocates but it’s a good idea to keep our feet on the ground and not build a too romantic aura around them, as has happened on the renewable energy front.

We’ll have some thirty years of overlap when both types of private vehicles share the road (nearly all cars bought today are IC ones) and a lot of legal and other stuff will go under the bridge before we discover the net benefit and negative side effects.

Who predicted, when computers hit the deck, the vast amount of additional paper that would be consumed, the level of IT addiction that afflicts many people today and the advent of circulating viruses…. and so on and so on? Every new technology comes with a set of unintended consequences that we see only in the rear view mirror.

That’s not an objection to any particular technology, just a plea to keep our feet on the ground. Transport policy needs a well grounded approach on many fronts all at once. There’s no easy fix..

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Hi Singleton,
RE: TOWN PLANNING
I once asked my sister-in-law – who has a Phd in sustainable city design and has featured on ABC’s old Catalyst – what the most important part of an eco-city was, or even an eco-tower. She said designed social spaces where people can spontaneously and accidentally bump into each other and catch up. Informal public places where people can sit and get a coffee and watch the other people walk by in a naturally busy, vibrant environment. It’s why people go on holidays to Paris and Rome, and not to sit in the gutter at suburban North Epping. Now, North Epping has a few shops where a few locals might accidentally bump into each other when running an errand, but that’s not the same thing. It doesn’t have the same scale as a New Urbanist town hall traffic free plaza where people can just go and hang because it is pleasant and social.

Mega-malls have the opposite problem: they’re too vast and too crowded, leading to yet another sense of alienation. But New Urbanism has places for spontaneous connection with regular locals. Not just a smattering you might wave to on your way to your box that you go home to sleep in, and not the overwhelming press of a strange crowd. Regular & local. In other words, it’s how you develop a sense of family beyond your own biological family, without having to manufacture it by going to an official club just once a week. Clubs have their place. Some suburbia will still have it’s place. Country living like yours can have it’s place. But the extra few BILLION people that will be joining us by 2050 have to have a home somewhere, so I’m suggesting more New Urbanism and ecocity living to fit them in and less suburbia so that people like you don’t get pushed off your farms as suburbia grows expone

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Hi Chris,
“Firstly I just can’t believe that the motor manufacturing industry is happily engineering a future for itself that results in their industry producing only one tenth of current vehicle output. But it’s a mighty good sales pitch.”
I don’t think you understand. It’s not about an individual car company wanting to sell less of their product. It’s about them seeing the writing on the wall, and wanting to get at least a share of the robot-cab market as the industry inevitably scales back. This isn’t coming from hippie sociologist types: it’s coming from the car companies themselves. It’s an arms race! The companies that can get their first and sell transport-as-service rather than car-as-product will be the winner.

“We’ll have some thirty years of overlap when both types of private vehicles share the road (nearly all cars bought today are IC ones) and a lot of legal and other stuff will go under the bridge before we discover the net benefit and negative side effects.”
True, but Volvo have already said they are willing to fund the insurance! Liability will be worked out. There’s simply too much money at stake. The car corporations are panicking about becoming the next dinosaurs, selected against because the other guys got there first.

“Every new technology comes with a set of unintended consequences that we see only in the rear view mirror.”
Understood, but futurists are paid to try and anticipate these things. I suggest reading the article carefully.

Shopping centre saturation and internet shopping mean car trips are down.
From 2 years ago: HAVE WE REACHED PEAK CAR?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/30/have-we-really-reached-peak-car

REAL MONEY WILL BE SAVED:-
1. NOT BUYING CARS:
““A robotic electric car could displace the usage of ten regular vehicles. This will also reduce the supply chain ramp-up burden. Instead of needing to make 2 billion electric vehicles, 200 million robotic ride sharing vehicles would have the same displacement effect. Only 80 gigafactories instead of 800 would be needed to generate the displacement effect,””
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/01/robotic-ride-sharing-electric-vehicles.html

2: WORKING IN THE CAR: “As indicated, Americans drive some 2.4 trillion miles each year and spend at least 50 billion hours doing it. (This latter number is my own very rough estimate.) A robocar may eventually approach a level of mobile comfort similar to a train, with a nice seat, a wide desk, internet, a computer/TV and phone. This turns those hours into more productive, comfortable hours. At the national average salary of $37,000 per year (SSA) for a 2000-hour work year, I rate this time as worth roughly one trillion dollars per year.”
http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/robot-cars.html

REAL MONEY IS BEING THROWN AT THIS:
“On Monday morning, ride-hailing startup Lyft announced a new $1 billion Series F funding round, half from General Motors, the 107-year-old American automaker. The $500 million investment will serve as the backbone for a new partnership between GM and Lyft to create a network of autonomous vehicles that they hope will challenge tech giants Google, Tesla, Uber, and even Apple in the race for self-driving domination.”

HERE’S THE TAKEAWAY FROM GM’S PRESIDENT
“General Motors President Dan Ammann says GM’s leadership believes transportation will change more in the next five years than it has in the previous 50 years. “As we think about what the future of mobility looks like, what we found was that the Lyft team had a common view of what that world would look like, the role of mobility as a service, particularly in an urban environment,” he told FORBES.
The potential self-driving future poses a challenge for GM, a company built to manufacture and sell cars to individual drivers. The carmaker’s bet on a ride-sharing could be seen as a hedge on that classic business, at least in highly-populated areas where startups like Lyft and Uber have seen the greatest traction.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/01/04/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-for-self-driving-car-race-with-uber-tesla-and-google/#123cfa5475b0

Mobility as a service, rather than car as a product. If I were a betting man, I’d put the house on this starting and accelerating over the next 10 years. Read the rest of the Forbes article above. The desperate race for cash in this is jaw-dropping!

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The field appears to be narrowing. Google/Alphabet announced a month or two ago that they don’t expect to manufacture cars, but will build their business around being a supplier.

Here’s a link to an earlier article. Right now I cannot find the actual statement to shareholders.

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Hi Chris. I doubt that the carmakers expect a collapse in their sales. As you say, cars give us sense of identity and autonomy, even if only for the Sunday drive. The rise of car ownership in Japan in the 1960s defied (our) expectations, but the Japanese continued to use public transport for commuting, only bringing out the brand-new vehicle in their private time.

As the price of fuel for internal combustion vehicles rises, we can expect the price pressure driving people back to public transport for commuting. Hopefully.

Although a timely coincidence, I don’t see any necessary connection between the rise of electric vehicles and robotic driving. However, I imagine that the average consumer would be more willing to accept robotic driving in a newfangled machine than to surrender the wheel in his updated gas guzzler.

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Apologies to all… I have inadvertently posted some material on the SA Royal Commission thread that was better suited to the Open Thread.

Here is the latest.

https://www.energycouncil.com.au/news/rising-electricity-prices-reveal-true-cost-of-national-policy-inaction/

At last, some well presented contribution to the Australian national energy debate from industry. Plus a link to a more detailed paper.

………..

That fits well against today’s arrival of the Gas Statement Of Opportunities from the AER.

The press release which links to the GSOO Report is at https://www.aemo.com.au/Media-Centre/Media-Statement—Gas-development-required-to-meet-future-energy-demand.

These two documents (EC submission and AER GSOO Report) contain essential background for the coming Finkel Report.

Happy reading.

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DBB’s academic’s spiel is here. Solving a problem for any uni research lab, Prof Blakers is able to attract bright young students with bright young ideas.

EN speaks of a key parameter that most RE fanatics gloss over – rise time for the backup. The fastest rise time that I know of is implied by the grid frequency shift. As wind drops off, the AC frequency drops slightly, and all synchronous generators on the grid ramp up automatically to restore correct frequency. But it needs enough fossil generators to be within a certain impedance range (distance) from the laggard. Peakers fill this gap, but they need to be hot and idling in sync before they can lurch forward. SE might tell how-long which-system takes to generate so-much rising power. All these require fossil generators (grid-scale batteries are mythical).

In contrast, pumped hydro takes minutes of rise time to generate megawatts of backup. Notice that the spruikers don’t assert that they can eliminate gas.

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Pumped hydro can be set up as a reference for frequency, but will still provide too little inertia and have too long a rise time to satisfactorily respond to faults.

The frequency control trick is to have the pelton wheels disconnected from the generator and for the generator to be running, unloaded, and synchronised. See MSM,Master Synchronous Machine in the second reference below.

That provides a frequency reference but not inertia.

Conclusion: Inertia is essential, but cannot be provided by standby hydro,including pumped hydro, acting alone.

An example is the very troubled El Hierro Island wind/pumped hydro system with upper and lower ponds.

The whole system was constructed at great expense to the EU as a demonstration project but due to factors not all of which are public, it seems that dreams of 100% wind plus pumped hydro storage and peaking has in practice become 30% diesel, with the remainder almost entirely wind, with pumped hydro pretty much sidelined, except as a sink for surplus wind – an expensive sink at that.

This project is one of the reasons for my conviction that 100% renewables is not only unachievable in a networked system, but that the phrase “100% renewables” is the answer to the wrong question.

My guess is that El Hierro was the result of an intention to get 100% renewables. The chosen path was to provide a generous number of wind turbines,hence plenty of energy.

Support them by a generous amount of pumped hydro (hence, “backup”, but note the fatal flaw regarding inertia, initial response and eventual restabilising the system, perhaps several minutes later.

As further backup, diesel generators on heavy oil, sized to be able to comfortably run the whole load, including peaks plus a margin for maintenance and growth was also provided.

The next fatal flaw was the discovery that at least one diesel was essential online because the hydro cannot start instantaneously. Heavy oil means that the diesel must run at close to 50% load or above. So,perhaps 2 of the 5 diesels operating full time. 2 x 50%.

…………………………

A. There is a mass of information about El Hierro here: http://euanmearns.com/el-hierro-portal/

B. For discussion targetting the stability or otherwise of wind without diesels and the role and purpose of the pumped hydro, see this post and its comments. Lean back with a fresh coffee – it is a significant read which demands a clear head. NB Not all relevant information is in the public domain and that efforts to obtain it are continuing, so parts of this technical discussion are best guesses based on available evidence. http://euanmearns.com/an-independent-evaluation-of-the-el-hierro-wind-pumped-hydro-system/

This second link includes a description of the pelton wheel/generator system, plus discussion of why the three components of El Hierro aren’t working together as intended – the probable answer lies in the control systems which manage the interfaces. The author provides a guide to how the interfaces could have been managed better.

The El Hierro exercise may become a textbook example of why it is essential to engineer systems and projects, not just to push ideas that address only part of the problem.

I recommend starting by reading the conclusions first, then re-start at the top and work through.

The discussion about pelton wheel turbines is below Figure 14,under the heading “diesel-off mode”.

Project management isn’t bright ideas. It is the art of making them real.

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Roger C: “Notice that the spruikers don’t assert that they can eliminate gas..”

El Hierro tried to eliminate diesel and ended up with wind + pumped hydro + problems.

Adding gas would not have avoided the problems.

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It appears that SA has been saved. Mr Musk and his Musketeers have offered to install an 80MWhr battery system within 100 days of signing something or it’s free. But is an 80MWhr system enough and how many MWhrs can it really provide and for how many years will it do so. OOPs $ have not been mentioned.

Apparently he has already saved California.

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No.

He has abused the reputation of the Australian National University in his rush to publicise rather than to publish.

No peer review.

No respectable publisher.

There is no prospect that the hundred+ pumped storage hydros and thousands of kilometres of HVDC transmission lines will ever be built.

Like so many before him, he has attached himself to the “100% renewables” wagon.

Unfortunately, that world simply does not exist, no matter how determinedly the data is tortured.

If “100% renewables” is the answer, then the question was wrong.

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What we need in here is a marine biologist who has farmed kelp to put to bed the kelp as biogas paper. Otherwise, I have to keep that open as an option for backup for a 100% renewable grid.

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EN, you don’t need a marine botanist to tell you the kelp story is a fairy tale for the credulous. The figures you’ve quoted are enough to dismiss it as a waste of your time. And our time.

Like an April Fool’s joke, it leads you on with stretches of fact until eventually you realise you’re being made a fool of. Then you either get angry or get embarrassed. If you act dumb, you get us angry.

Check for facts. Read Wiki on kelp. How long do the fronds grow? How big a sea (ie what storms) can the fronds survive?
So it sucks CO2 until only 350 ppm equilibrate. So where do they put those hundreds of gigatons of waste where it can’t escape or ferment to methane?
9% of the world’s oceans? Like where in the blue world is there that much space untraversed by shipping or migrating animals?

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We do need a marine biologist in here with some experience of kelp farming because the authors address the frequency of storms and the impact on average yields (page 469), spend their entire paper explaining how they want the kelp to ferment in giant submersible biodigesters so they can extract the methane and CO2, and then recycle the nutrients in-situe, and they have a whole extra paper dedicated to CO2 storage in geosynthetic bladders on the ocean floor. We also need experts in here because some of the authors are experts, and we need to see how this gets peer-reviewed.
“I am currently a Lecturer in climate change and the marine environment at the Pacific Center for Environment and Sustainable
Development of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. For the last 25 years I have studied the marine plant biodiversity of Pacific Islands, and do research in biofuels and fertilisers, anaerobic digestion, ocean acidification and seawater temperature. I have also worked with the University of French Polynesia in Tahiti and the IRD Institute in Nouméa, New Caledonia.”
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antoine_De_Ramon_NYeurt

EG:
David P. Chynoweth
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, United States

This idea is being promoted by big names in climate activism like Prof Tim Flannery, so we need answers or everyone is going to be tempted to think this is the ultimate backup to renewables, or the silver bullet itself. I heard about it on the radio. It’s being promoted. I hardly hear any positive stories about nuclear power in the media, and I’m looking.

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Elon has just announced that he can ‘fix’ South Australia’s power network in 100 days or it’s free.
It’s about installing 100 to 300MWH of batteries. Prices from the article mention $100m for 80MWh, which is $1.25m for 1MWH or $375m if they install a full 300MWH. That’s for batteries, not generation.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/10/elon-musk-i-can-fix-south-australia-power-network-in-100-days-or-its-free

Average SA demand is between 1500 to 2000MW. (Note the jump in demand at 11:30 when all that hot water turns on! What’s the night time profile going to be if SA also converts their car fleet to Tesla motors, and they charge all those at night as well? So much for the Amor Lovin’s and Mark Diesendorf line that “We don’t need baseload.” )

Click to access 2016_SAER.pdf

So is it correct to say that $300 million would buy you only 5 to 6 minutes backup? Can someone explain to me what Elon is trying to achieve? I’m sure it’s not that simple, and that 300MW would be stretched out to fill in smaller gaps than just trying to supply the whole grid. But what gaps, and how do I as a lay person have any hope of understanding what’s going on? And if it’s this hard for me (with a humanities background but a keen interest in energy issues and sustainability), how can the average footy watching pundit have a chance? How do we communicate these issues?

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I see Elon Musk’s role as being a Human Headline. Headlines sell newspapers catch people’s attention and sell newspapers.

SA needs precisely the opposite right now… they need to get the problems of their electricity supplies and gas supplies off the front pages.

I don’t know where the cool heads are going to come from, because now that AEMO, the State Premier and Treasurer, seemingly every federal politician who has used a microphone in the past 6 months, every editor in the land, plus employers’ representatives, BHP’s senior executives and so forth have expressed opinions. The topic is now hopelessly polarised. There are, essentially, very few publicly trusted agents who are not already associated with one or another partisan view.

EN’s own commitment to sustainability is understandable and commendable,but is now the best time to fly that flag? The very word brings out the worst in some folk, because it has often and publicly been used not to add to knowledge or understanding, but to close down discussion of options, where sustainability (in the conventional sense of the word, not as a stamp to be collected)… where sustainability is one of many criteria, not the sole and only criterion by which to assess the merit of proposals. Maybe even an essential criterion. But there are many other essential criteria for a successful energy, fit to task.

That is why I am consciously technology agnostic when it comes to energy. That stance does not win me many friends, but at least I hope to consider the whole range of issues.

Yesterday, a friend of mine rounded on me with: “John, the change is coming. Get used to it. No coal, no fossil fuels, only sustainable energy.” This she repeated half a dozen times in as many minutes, indicating firm reluctance to consider anything to the contrary, as though there is no other relevant consideration. When asked to explain her perception of the problems with SA’s electricity generation and distribution systems that her preferred proposal would fix or to provide details of the “change” she envisages, she didn’t get past “Get used to it” “It will happen”. This, from an electrical technician with life-long experience in the (coal) power industry. All flag, no stick.

Back to Elon Musk. He is very good at getting his hands on other people’s money, at making headlines and at losing that money. My questions include “What truly have been his successes? How is that measured? What does he bring to this problem?” Or is SA just his Next Big Global Headline?

As EN pointed out, a few hundred million dollars of strategically located battery systems, plus control systems, might buy SA a few minutes’ worth of energy, but this is a long way from being demonstrated to be a complete solution or even a partial solution to the problems.

This month’s AEMO and other reports will help us to understand the problems better. Then, perhaps, we will understand what the characteristics of the solutions (plural!) might be.

Then, provided that the echo-chamber of competing voices can be quieted for a while, a suite of the most effective solutions might emerge… including addressing those ill-defined adjectives-turned-nouns “sustainable” and “renewable”.

As I mentioned a month or two ago, South Australia is learning the hard way, as Germany and Britain, Spain and others are also learning through their failures, that sustainability a.k.a. renewability alone does not ensure adequacy. Elon Musk’s shareholders and funders are in the same situation.

Elon Musk should be invited to send his best technical advisors, plus a priced proposal, to the SA Premier’s office to sit down with the best and brightest from South Australia to work together behind closed doors and to quit the bullhorn politics.

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Here are some links
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/6/14523196/tesla-battery-powerpack-los-angeles-electricity

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/10/14879246/elon-musk-tesla-battery-farm-australia-blackouts

These provide a bit more information about the cost of saving SA from it’s power outages.
The price $250 per kwh. As it is an American publication I assume that is $US so $330 Aus.
Detail such as how many kwh the battery wall can deliver in its lifetime and other important details are not mentioned.

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Thanks for the links, Tony. My earlier comments stand. DBB summed it up pretty accurately.

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Singletonengineer, Do you agree with EN’s calculations re the amount of electricity that the Musketeer’s battery wall can provide.
Could a couple of oil powered gen sets provide the same amount of power.
I disagree about renewables.
Renewables are not sustainable in the modern 21st century.

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Hi, Tony.

I don’t have the information that could be used for calculations.

IIRC, the second AEMO into the 28 September blackouts identified over 400MW of wind generation that failed due to incorrect protection settings. A storm of the magnitude experienced, even without loss of a HV transmission line, would cause faults due to lesser power lines clashing or being felled by debris, thus phase-to-phase or phase-to-earth faults.

These are generally isolated very quickly and automatically, but they would still register at the wind farms as faults. Ideally,ride-through settings would enable generation to resume after only a flicker – this is called “ride through”. It seems that instead of ride-through settings of up to 12 faults within a nominated time period, many (all?) were installed with only zero or 1 as the setting.

Again, “apparently” this would not have been acceptable in Germany, USA and elsewhere, but since NEM had not been advised of this negative feature of SA’s wind farms, they were blind-sided on the day. Once the system went black, these wind farms could not return to service until reconnected to the grid, without which they would not have a reference current to synchronise with. So, sit and wait.

Happily, it has been reported that the turbine manufactures have re-set the ride-through and other protection.

This should be explained in detail in this month’s AEMO final report.

What to make of Elon Musk’s offer?
First, “If an offer looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

Technical details have not been published yet. So, let’s assume that the offer is for 100MW load and 300MWh storage capacity.

I agree that SA’s typical demand is of the order of 1500MW, but so what? The battery system is clearly not going to pretend to be able to carry the whole of the State’s load.

So,let’s assume that protection systems which failed last September can be made to work and that faults are isolated before they spread.

Examples:
A failed generator might be isolated at the generator circuit breaker.
A failed transformer in a switchyard, isolated on both HV and LV sides.
A faulty transmission line would be isolated by circuit breakers at each end, probably within switchyards.

The question becomes “How big is the largest credible fault?” By credible, I mean a fault that will be included for in the design – omits comet strikes and volcanoes, but probably includes severe wind storms and earthquakes of a nominated magnitude.

So, the batteries I mentioned could handle a 100MW fault. That’s about a quarter of the wind power in the state at any time and is larger than any single transmission line except the Heywood Interconnector.

So,the new design requirement is to assume that the Heywood has NOT been lost but that blackouts have occurred in various locations throughout the state.

Elon’s batteries will perhaps be located in a single switchyard or group of switchyards. Immediately, the question arises about the probability of a fault between the batteries and the switchyard’s internal heavy duty conductor, the bus bar.

This might have to be treated as “non credible”, because to be a problem, this event would have to coincide with other major faults.

Where is this going?

The answer is not a single calculation, but the answer derived from a probability-based system model. That model would have to be run many times to evaluate all credible events and credible multiple events.

It would need to consider protection settings such as trip levels (current, voltage, temperature, rates of change in data, times (durations), and anything else that the boffins come up with. I am far from competent in this; few people are.

The plan would also have to consider stepped responses in time following development of each fault.

Initially, voltage and frequency drop. Conventionally, that’s where inertia kicks in – the first few milliseconds, then the next couple of cycles, then buildup of steam, opening of valves, operating of circuits that support the frequency.

Frequency is, ultimately, the primary concern. Everything must remain close to 50 cycles per second and within tolerance on the reference sine curve for the grid.

The battery system must be able to kick in in a fraction of a second and continue to provide up to 100MW until either the load is reduced to manageable levels, or additional generation comes on line to take over.

If that means starting a GT from cold, then 1/2 an hour isn’t out of the question, allowing for startup, synchronising, initial loading and ramping up. Theoretically, perhaps only minutes, but let’s say 1/2 an hour.

So, the batteries have run at 100MW for 1/2 an hour. 50MWh energy drained. 250 to go.

That seems reasonable to me, because further faults can develop during the storm or the fire or whatever the root cause of the disturbance was.

So Elon’s proposal could carry 100/1500 = 7 percent of SA’s typical load until support arrives or a few hours, whichever comes first… provided that the transmission system generally is healthy.

There is no guarantee that Elon’s system could stand alone or provide black start capacity. It might need a reference power supply to synchronise with.

Conclusions.
A. Elon’s best and brightest need to get with SA’s and AEMO’s brightest and nut out some details PDQ, before the public becomes even more confused and optimistic. Reality is a very unforgiving task master.
B. I am only a civil engineer who has been around a bit. Rapid redesign of a whole state’s electrical generation and HV distribution systems in a hurry is a job for teams genius level electrical engineers with access to huge amounts of data.
C. Don’t believe the sidewalk supervisors, the heros in their own lunchboxes or the loudest voice in the pub. This is a job for the experts. Mere mortals can hope to follow and understand the advice received down the line.
D. Politicians are not the professionals.

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D’oh! My humanities is showing itself again! ALL I found above is the fraction of the grid, not the time. Please check, but it’s more like 1500MW demand / 300MWH supply = 5 times into the grid, divide the hour by 5 = 12 MINUTES supply for the whole SA grid. Is that how this money to power to storage thing works?

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Tony Carden — Thanks for the links. From those we see that a battery wall will replace a peaker, but the power is actually limited to a maximum of 25% of the rating. So if a gob-smaking 500 MW is needed right now, say as a replacement for a CCGT which tripped off, one requires a 2000MW rated battery wall.

From what little I understand about the power woes of South Australia I doubt a big battery is going to solve the problems. Some batteries to smooth wind farm provided power seems sensible. We have one here in Pullman, Washington, for that purpose, rather than just relying on adjusting the hydropower turbine intakes. Seems to work well.

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I wonder if ARENA will ever approve this giant seawater pumped hydro ‘battery’?
“The grant will cover a feasibility study into a Spencer Gulf project that the company says has a capacity to produce about 100 megawatts (MW) of electricity with six-to-eight hours of storage.

EnergyAustralia says the storage is the equivalent of installing 60,000 home battery storage systems at one third of the cost.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/21/arena-to-give-energyaustralia-grant-to-investigate-pumped-hydro-storage-project

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Eclipse, you did some attractive arithmetic back up the thread, showing us that you are indeed a sceptical intelligent layman. I would be impressed if you would do the same for the Spencer Gulf proposal. Rather than have us do the homework, perhaps you could, and tell us the height difference between the top reservoir and the bottom, the maximum amount of water stored, and the power delivered on call.

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It depends on which one they’re going to build. The Nullabor plain one sounds seductive to renewables types. There’s a proposal for one that could run the whole of Australia for 10 hours!

The details are found here. (PDF warning, 155 pages of renewable energy plan, and the hydro dam starts on page 49).

Click to access Australian_Sustainable_Energy-by_the_numbers3.pdf

Page 43 shows the costs:
Storage pond = $2 billion.
20 huge turbines & pipes = $33 billion.
Wiring it all up with a new DC super-grid across the bottom of Australia = $20 billion, which is also required by the renewable energy projects themselves. Remember we still have to bring electricity from the sunny deserts and windy coasts to where the people live.

So there’s $55 billion, which would build maybe 11 AP1000’s (or more if they go on the production line in China!) which could work for the next 60 to 80 years. Not only that, we could just plug them into the existing grid, saving the $20 billion lost on a DC super-grid.

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Well are we looking to put a couple of AP1000’s somewhere convenient?

There’s a nice site for a power station just here. Just became available this month. It’s a centre on the national grid, has committed water supplies, a workforce wanting an honest job and a community in need of clean air.

When the anti’s complain, we can tell them it’s got three years’ storage at 1100 MW, and can deliver through storm, flood, earthquake, war and months of cold snap. And it can keep on delivering even when all the valleys have run dry and those batteries have run flat. Yes, even when blockaded by the anti’s themselves.

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Very much agreed, Roger.

NSW is similarly situated:
Coastal Sydney Harbour power station sites have all gone to housing.
Lake Macquarie:
Munmorah being dismantled – going to developers.
WangiWangi – Closed and gone.
Vales Point is partially dismantled. Remainder to be in service till maybe 2030.
Eraring. Operating. Close 2030+?
Hunter Valley:
Liddell (2000MW) to close in 2022.
Bayswater to coles post 2030.
Western, Lithgow:
Wallerawang – Closed and demolished. Future of the site uncertain.
Mt Piper – Newest in NSW. Could last to 2040.
South Coast:
Tallawarra Power Station – Closed and gone.

The real loss is the access to cooling water, either salt or fresh plus ready access to very expensive high capacity transmission lines (the backbone of The Grid).

As you stated, local workforce for construction,maintenance and operation is or soon will be ready to start.

An essential first step is for these sites and their cooling water supplies to be retained for future use if necessary – eg by land zoning constraints.

Once these sites are lost, the alternative is more expensive, land-hungry and noisy air cooling, which is possible but not desirable.

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http://www.powermag.com/blog/molten-salt-reactor-claims-melt-down-under-scrutiny/

This is a link to a not-very authoritative magazine. The article touches on two important topics.
1. The strength of MSR claims, starting with an attack on the team that reportedly presented the concept as their own invention, despite it having been around for decades.

Read the comments to see attacks on the NRA and the chilling effect of slow approvals processes on USA’s role as a global nuclear powerhouse (pun intended) or otherwise.

I happen to agree that China and others are poised to make a run for the front – indeed,I would welcome it because progress towards reducing CO2 emissions has been slow to achieve the desired results. The regulatory system needs a rocket up its fundamental.

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So this Prof uses HOMER to extrapolate how many wind and solar farms it would take to provide Australia’s energy with the giant Nullarbor seawater hydro battery to back it all up. The author claims the total bill to take Australia to 90% renewables (45GW) with this massive pumped seawater hydro-dam ‘battery’ and HVDC wiring across the bottom of Australia and all the wind and solar to recharge the battery would cost $253 billion.

Click to access sub982_attach.pdf

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Besides which, the cited study was published in 2010, 7 years ago. That means that the numbers are somewhat rubbery – either inflation or efficiencies could change them,

5% up or down pa for 7 years => divide or multiply by 1.4, so essentially indicative only.

$253B => $180 to 350B

This is the conversation that should have happened many years ago, eg in Germany as well as Australia. What happened instead, the world over, was that the winners were chosen before the race was run. “I’ll back those pretty looking horses called Wind and Solar.”

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Understood. But it is possible? I thought the arguments against a renewable grid were that backup would be so vast and expensive that it was economically impossible. Now with this Nullarbor dam it looks like nuclear is just more economically competitive, not the only possible solution to our energy crisis.

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$350B is impossibly high. It’s close to 3 months of Australia’s entire annual GDP.

Besides which, the Nullabor salt water hydro proposal uses a notional transmission system, where in reality it will be much more complex,with parallel redundant paths to provide security against failure of a single line, as happened with the Heywood Interconnector to SA from Vic on 28 September 2016. Heywood must, eventually, be duplicated,one way or another, unless significant new, reliable baseload is constructed in SA.

Optimisation demands that blends of all available technologies must be considered. Not all will be present in the final design, but I am convinced that the “100%”brigade, whether renewables or anything else, will be very uneconomical as well as impossible.

The tendency to look for a single, simple plan is doomed to fail not because of what it contains but what has been omitted. For example, relying on a single huge salt water pumped hydro dam in the middle of the Great Australian Bight is excessively risky. But multiple dams of varying sizes located around the coast? That’s another proposition with different risk profile.

What we have all witnessed in the past week is emerging public recognition that it ain’t that easy.

Here’s hoping that the irrational and/or partisan interests such as subsidies (of “renewables”) and prohibitions (of nuclear…) are progressively pushed aside by the public.

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45GW in nukes at, say, $4bn per GW, comes in at $180. Also the nukes would last a lot longer so for the same lifetime of 60 years energy the renewable option would probably be double that. But still, people are funny about nuclear. If this seawater clifftop hydro dam is viable and the prices not too far out, won’t anti-nuclear Ausssies prefer to pay for this?

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Upper reservoirs along the Great Australian Bight? As Peter Lang pointed out, that is all limestone, prone to serious leakage. Color me extremely dubious.

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He costed plastic sheeting to line the base, kind of like the geosynthetics we were discussing in the underwater CO2 bladders above, but notably, did not cost concreting the entire 7km wide dam.

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A comment on deep ocean kelp farms I found thought-provoking:-

To grow Kelp in the deep ocean, you would need some kind of anchorage for it. That would have to be some floating device that supported some kind of submerged plastic netting. That would have to be extremely robust to survive a storm.
Then there’s the problem of nutrients, I doubt if you could get much of a yield without some kind of upwelling.
I think it’s a non-starter, on cost grounds. The infrastructure costs would be enormous, and the returns tiny.

My own suggestion for capturing carbon using the oceans would be to pump up nutrients from the sea floor to the surface.
You would then get huge plankton blooms, where once there was ocean desert. This would provide a huge increase in fish stocks, which could finance the operation, and the plankton would be producing hard shells, which would sink to the ocean floor, locking carbon in the carbonates for many thousands of years.

This happens naturally, wherever there is a natural upwelling. We would just be replicating that in areas of ocean desert.

So could large nuclear powered floating oil platforms pump up enough nutrients to do this, or is it more economical to fertilise the oceans in the traditional geoengineering manner of ‘just’ adding lots of iron rich ore?

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Fe fertilisation could backfire. All these loony schemes ever achieve is to distract us from our number one responsibility: stop emitting carbon.

Every one of these desperate schemes amounts to no more than the “broken wing” behaviour of the carbon emitting civilisation. At least the plover is hiding her eggs. We, on the other hand, are concealing a crime.

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Also, even if we DO just stop emitting carbon…

“On the low estimate for 1.5C degree change, the world is about 14 months away from using up the permitted CO2 emissions. On the low estimate for 2C degree change, the world is less than ten years away from using up the permitted CO2 emissions.

China added 5% more power generation in 2016. This was 240 TWh more to 5920 TWh. Almost half of this was coal or other fossil fuel power.”

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/03/world-will-blow-through-two-degree-co2.html

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Whaddyer mean, “permitted”? That’s like giving away tickets to a pack crime. No-one should validate a right for any nation to pollute.

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OK, Rog. I’ve stopped breathing. What’s next?

…

…

But fair comment. The climate discussion, since becoming a political football, is handicapped by excessive use of adjectives, adverbs and other qualifiers and weasel-words.

After editing, EN’s sentence now reads:
“FF energy use has damaged the globe’s climate. More emissions will cause more damage.”

Reductions from or comparisons with from business as usual, even by use of “permitted”, clearly indicates the author’s acceptance that BAU, or close to, is in some way a desirable outcome. “Acceptable, permitted or allowable emissions” means “Accepted, permitted or Allowable F-up”.

In WWII jargon, SNAFU.

In a time of guaranteed failure, the only hope is for adoption of the least worst energy option.

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That’s why I’m keen on CO2 sequestering geoengineering measures. In an era when a third to half of all human jobs could be made redundant due to automation, we’ve got to allow for the exponential growth of other technologies. We might see a droid revolution, with massive robot-run factories producing eco-bots that farm kelp or grind olivine or run desal plants or grow trees in the desert or biochar seaweed and spread it around. It’s our only hope.

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The concept of a carbon budget crept into the 5th IPCC report. The idea that we would only meet a certain decarbonisation target if less than so-much carbon was emitted globally before the target date.

As such, it was discussed as a global budget. However, in the hands of the spin doctors it instantly became permission to emit, guilt-free. Just how much each community is permitted to emit is not examined too closely, although more innocent countries such as Burkina Faso are permitted to emit for longer. After all, we have a good go at wrecking the commons, so they must have a right to do the same. And we can buy their rights from them so we can perpetuate our own business as usual. Guilt-free of course, since we have paid for it.

We are surrounded by people who believe we are freed from guilt by mounting some prayer wheels (on a prominent skyline above the main road into the capital city) to power the entire industrial economy. It follows that any shortfall has to be made up with a teensy-weensy bit of gas. It just has to be so, and we leave to teacher to explain it away to the kiddies. (There now, aren’t we taking care of the kiddies?)

Currently in Australia a frenzy of righteous demands is committing the country to a hundred years or more of infrastructure for copious gas supplies. It’s being handled as an immediate problem that has to be ensured right now. The other question of how we are to meet our 2050 and 2100 decarbonisation targets, it seems can be addressed later.

The delay is only possible if we are permitted to use some gas. Just “some” and we must not how much that is or for how long, just that it is … permitted.

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OK, I’ll bite…

Chri Uhlman’s article looks pretty good at first glance. Then the errors appear.

“The RET has been driving investment.” Half right… until recently. However some retailers have chosen to pay the tax rather than to obtain and cancel certificates, thus saving money but concurrently steering money away from investments in renewable energy.
“The RET has been… helping Australia to meet its carbon reduction targets.” Since the carbon reduction targets have been fiddled from time to time, meeting them has become somewhat of a game of whack-a-mole. Whether RET has been helping is not always clearly true… especially when one effect has been to steer money away from investment.
“…merit order, where low-cost generation is dispatched first.” (a) Some wind is non-dispatchable and most (ie the remainder) is semi-dispatchable. None is technically fully dispatchable. (b) The merit order is not established on the order of lowest cost first; rather lowest bid first. The neither the marginal nor the long-term costs of production is relevant to dispatch order. Many who comment on this subject make the mistake that the bid price, which reflects many things including the effects of subsidies and taxes represents costs, which is not the case.
“When the wind is blowing a generator’s marginal cost of producing electricity is next to nothing, so it underbids coal and gas.” Possibly the marginal cost is low, but that is only one factor driving the wind owners’ bidding philosophies.
“solar panels on suburban homes means that electricity demand is suppressed in the middle of the day, which also cuts into their margins.” The actual (operational) demand is not affected. Solar PV, when present, reduces the apparent demand. If the weather changes, thus lowering the amount of PV generation, the apparent demand will increase or decrease accordingly, thus requiring system response from other generators to match the apparent load curve.
“Put out the fire or remove the water and the inertia in the turbine will keep it spinning until it is stopped by friction.” Friction is negligible. The turbine slows because the work done by the generator as it rotates on its shaft. Inertial energy is transformed to electrical energy, until eventually the frequency drops to the lower limit, at which point the generator circuit breaker will open and the emergency stop (steam) valves at the inlet of the turbine will open. Soon after, the residual heat in the boiler will cause the pressure to increase within the boiler and steam main and the steam relief valve(s) will be opened.

It isn’t friction that slows the turbogenerator’s shaft – it is conversion of rotational (inertial) energy – the energy contained in a moving mass – into electrical energy that slows the shaft initially.

The shaft is not permitted to “slow to a stop”, because that would result in a bent shaft as it cooled, thus requiring a stripdown and rebuild of the turbine and generator.

(Frequency stability) “is another service that is often imported from Victoria.” Partly true. Frequency stability is maintained via inertia, which is generally provided by steam driven plant – which might include (in part) gas-fired CCGT or other plant which must be in service at the time of the fault. In general, the larger the fault (disturbance) the greater the amount of inertia needed to respond. Thus, the SA network is theoretically able to be controlled while islanded from Victoria, but only for minimal disturbances. If/when other thermal generators are constructed in SA (eg, see proposals for solar thermal), or synthetic inertia is available from batteries or other electronic devices, frequency stability will always rely on Victorian thermal power stations.

The term “often” in the quotation is close but still misleading.

“…limitations of renewables demand that gas generation has to fill the void left by coal.” Or nuclear, or Solar Thermal, or ST with thermal storage via molten salt, or batteries, or other electronically derived synthetic inertia, possibly assisted by future appropriately equipped and managed wind turbines, or geothermal, or compressed air, or flywheels, or anything else with a rotating mass on the generator shaft that can provide inertia or, more correctly, rotational momentum and hence energy plus a reference frequency, to the system. Late addition: Hydro using impulse turbines, eg Francis Turbine, rather than reaction turbines eg Pelton Wheel.

My count is thus 7 or 8. Electrical power engineers will possibly correct the finer points of my response and add another few issues. I feel that my effort has been fairly good for a civil engineer, late in the evening.

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SE quotes: “When the wind is blowing a generator’s marginal cost of producing electricity is next to nothing, so it underbids coal and gas.” Except that wind doesn’t underbid, it doesn’t bid at all. Wind produces power and jams it sideways into the grid, at cost to the conventional units that did bid honestly, but are now blocked from supplying what they have set up to generate.

A responsible government should require the renewables community to pool their generation, back it up with their own dispatchables and only then bid to supply reliable power in 5-minute blocks through the well-established auction system. Their cash losses (perhaps subsidised with a carbon tax) would then be visible to all as a measure of how viable intermittent generation can be.

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Perhaps “marginal cost” could be calculated as the costs saved by reducing output by one unit. Then assigning a marginal cost to wind has meaning, because the grid operator would often (well, would often like to) instruct wind generators to reduce output. The avoided wear and tear on the turbine then provides a measure of marginal cost – to wind.

It is hard to see any cost saving in cutting back nuclear generation. The several-year schedule for changing the fuel would not change, so there is not even any fuel saving. There are costs imposed (not saved) by changing thermal stresses, so the marginal cost for nuclear may even be negative.

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Roger, changes in thermal stresses within NPP’s due to load following will be minimal – the steam will still be at the same condition. Agreed, though, that the sunk capital and fixed fuel costs don’t result in savings at low loads – but they do enable, as French experience has indicated for decades, use of existing NPP’s instead of adding more cost elsewhere in order to construct additional generating plant.

Hence, “avoided costs” due to load following.

Thanks for your comments – I agree regarding the sideways entry of wind and solar power into the formerly stable and economic market, but chose not to awaken that particular sleeping dog.

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Gentlemen, well done. I missed the RET. Now perhaps singletonengineer would care to package this short conversation and send it to the article writer?

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I will give it a shot in the morning. If it ends out small enough I’ll post the text here.

I don’t always agree with Uhlman, but in recent articles re energy he appears to be trying to understand, as against merely parroting that which has been fed to him as predigested opinion.

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In DBB’s link to a roadmap to liquid fission: “converting all energy use to electricity will triple electric power consumption.”

Australians, like most in the developed world are consuming about 1 kW each of electricicty and more kW for heating and transport. Thus Oz currently consumes about 25 GW elec. The all-electric factor of “x3” projects a future need for 75 GW at constant population.

As 2050 approaches, an all-developed (optimistically) world would have demand for 3 kW x 10 Gpax ~ 10,000 GW. Thats an awful lot of power generators. Even if were possible to mass-produce (as per the link) reactors of 1 GW capacity, that target would require an average of 10000/33 = 300 reactors per year. Big ones, continuously being trucked/railed/barged out of factories worldwide.

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We’re losing. The double think is everywhere! “What is the future of baseload generation in such a system? “That’s asking the wrong question”, says Holliday. “The idea of baseload power is already outdated. I think you should look at this the other way around. From a consumer’s point of view, baseload is what I am producing myself. The solar on my rooftop, my heat pump – that’s the baseload. Those are the electrons that are free at the margin. The point is: this is an industry that was based on meeting demand. An extraordinary amount of capital was tied up for an unusual set of circumstances: to ensure supply at any moment. This is now turned on its head. The future will be much more driven by availability of supply: by demand side response and management which will enable the market to balance price of supply and of demand. It’s how we balance these things that will determine the future shape of our business.”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/head-of-uks-national-grid-says-idea-of-large-power-stations-for-baseload-is-outdated-53893/

I want to smack him around the head and tell him customers just want reliable cheap power and nuclear is the only way to do that around the clock, but again, I just don’t have the math. “Free at the margin” sounds so good. So politically correct. Baseload being so stuck in the past, and not nimble enough for a ‘flexible’ grid. Hogwash. Greenwash. Whitewash. Pukable! This old article was recently recycled in a hyperlink from The Conversation. The myth won’t die. We’re all power stations now, apparently, even if most of us actually don’t have solar with enough batteries to keep us running during winter!

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Stop reading ReNew Economy. It’s bad for the health, especially the blood pressure.

The cry was “No coal!” (But please keep the gas coming.)

Then “No Nuclear! Remember the Alamo! Besides which all nukes are bad nukes – warheads in disguise!”

Then, when found out… “We need more renewables! And more money!”

Then “Batteries! And money!”

… “And Hydro!” … “And Interconnectors, because the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere, so we should just nip on over there and bring it back home for us!” “And we aren’t paying!”

Now, when the holes have appeared in the earlier “plans”, the excuse is “We don’t need baseload!” – an attempt to pretend that the naughty baseload people have somehow destroyed the future of the beautiful renewables.

Of course, the Unreliables apologists were going to blame the baseload folk, even if only as a distraction from their own failures.

Otherwise it would be obvious, even to Blind Freddy and the Boys Down At The Pub that the Unreliables’ agenda was a roadmap to nowhere.

We of course do need a roadmap. Here is a very good recent non-aggressive discussion along those lines. Maybe there is hope after all, and it might come from the conservative side of American politics.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-conservative-takes-on-climate-change/article/2007344

And another one, this time urging action:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/a-quick-fix-for-the-energy-crisis-nuclear-power-20170324-gv5xzz.html

The words we hear about not needing baseload are only words. Not to be confused with reasons. Wishing isn’t the same as thinking.

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Text from feedback to the ABC regarding C Uhlman’s article and DBB’s comment.

STARTS:

To: Chris Uhlman
ABC
Subject: Article published 20 March 2017
Comments from a retired power station engineer.
Reference: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-20/hazelwood-closure-leaves-major-energy-black-hole-prices-to-rise/8367826

I want you to know that I value your background pieces on the power industry, especially as they relate to SA’s woes and the impending closure of Hazelwood PS in Victoria.

I have cross-checked some points made in your article with the SA Wind Study Report, which I thank you for bringing to the public’s and my notice. My opinion is that you went easy on the nature and effects of wind power, but my purpose is to address a few technical issues from the article.

Let’s progress to my comments, pretty much in the order of mention.
1. “The RET has been driving investment.”
Half right… until recently. However, some retailers have chosen to pay the tax rather than to obtain and cancel certificates, thus saving money but concurrently steering money away from investments in renewable energy.

“The RET has been… helping Australia to meet its carbon reduction targets.”
Since the carbon reduction targets have been fiddled from time to time, meeting them has become somewhat of a game of whack-a-mole. Whether RET has been helping is not always clearly true… especially when one effect has been to steer money away from investment via a penalty tax.
“…merit order, where low-cost generation is dispatched first.”
(a) Some wind is non-dispatchable and most (ie the remainder) is semi-dispatchable. None is technically fully dispatchable.
(b) wind doesn’t underbid, it doesn’t bid at all. Wind produces power and jams it sideways into the grid, at cost to the conventional units that did bid honestly, but are now blocked from supplying what they were set up to generate. The merit order is not established on the order of lowest cost first, but in order from the lowest bid, after wind has taken first spot. Neither the marginal nor the long-term costs of production is relevant to dispatch order. Many who comment on this subject make the mistake that the bid price, which reflects many things including the effects of subsidies and taxes represents costs, which is not the case. Margins, both positive and negative, are reflected in bids for a range of reasons, eg to try to avoid the increased operating costs of all forms of thermal generation due to additional starts and stops.
“When the wind is blowing a generator’s marginal cost of producing electricity is next to nothing, so it underbids coal and gas.”
Possibly the marginal cost is low, but that is only one factor driving the wind owners’ market philosophies. Currently, wind avoids having to bid in to the NEM at all, and receive a guaranteed price for the energy which they supply to the grid, plus any other subsidies, a term which I use loosely, with apologies to the purists. I see this as being at the root of some failures of the NEM market, one consequence of which is higher tariffs for retail customers. Since some charges are levied after the wholesale NEM market, they will not be reflected in the wholesale price but still be included in the tariffs. Examples include green energy surcharges and increased transmission costs due to the ever-increasing distance between the generators and the customers.
“solar panels on suburban homes means that electricity demand is suppressed in the middle of the day, which also cuts into their margins.”
The actual (operational) demand is not affected. Solar PV, when present, reduces the apparent demand. If the weather changes, thus lowering the amount of PV generation, the apparent demand will increase or decrease accordingly, thus requiring system response from other generators to match the apparent load curve.
If the sun ducks behind a cloud, the real demand returns and must be met by other generators.

Again, many thanks for your recent series of articles. They are helping to open up the discussion space, which has been excessively polarised around few talking points such as:
“Wind and solar are renewables and thus are always good”. Compared to what…?
“Nuclear power is always bad”. Again, compared to what? You will have guessed my opinion by now, but that is not my point here.
“Coal is bad.” But, apparently, not as bad as nuclear… see France’s past 45 years and Germany’s failure to reduce CO2 emissions in the past few years, despite spending a lot of the nation’s treasure claiming that is the objective. Many news sources, eg The Guardian, completely rule out nuclear power yet are far less critical of coal, even brown coal and hardly critical at all when it comes to gas turbines, which in Australia, emit 2/3rds as much CO2 as coal, but have been unable to find gas supplies to operate. Recent examples include NSW’s Colongra and Engie’s plant in SA, multiple times in the past half year.

Submitted for your casual reading and in the hope that the emerging, much more nuanced, discussion continues to flourish.

Batteries, hydro (small and large), more interconnectors, more on-call gas turbines, along with engineering considerations such as inertia, stability, reliability and cost are now on the table, in part due to your efforts.

This subject is far too important to the future of an energy rich Australia and, hence, the prosperity and health of all Australians.

Plus, of course, as a response to the challenges of global warming, but my reason for writing this note is essentially technical, not philosophical or political or about climate change.

Congratulations for a job well done.

ENDS.

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Two apologies:
1. Thanks to Roger Clifton for the words I lifted re wind being jammed sideways into the grid.

The final 3 points of my initial list were pruned by the ABC’s comments submission site. If I find a snail mail address I will send the whole thing.

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Done,re Uhlman and the ABC.

The last 3 points have been added and the finished job forwarded as a Word doc. I won’t bother you with further repetition.

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singletonengineer — That is a fine summary, but leaves out the correction regarding inertia in a power system. Your discussion was quite good, although maybe overly technical for non-engineers. Still, passing on even that to Chris U. is better than doing nothing. Would you be so kind?

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Hi, DBB. Chris U’s writing indicates that he has at least a rudimentary understanding of intermittency. I decided to leave it for another time.

The good news is that journalists are, at last, presenting some of the complexity of control of real AC systems, whereas previously the discussion didn’t even consider that a MW of nameplate capacity with CF of 20% is not the same as a MW of capacity with CH of 95%.

If Chris U responds to my email I will try to increase his understanding of intermittency and of the emerging re-definition of “baseload”, which reflects better the ability of “baseload” generators to load-follow,when necessary, for a price and within ramping rates and upper and stable load limits.

The French example is probably the best. Their NPP’s achieve about 70%CF, as against the USA fleet of approximately 90% The difference, as I understand it, is due to load-following, which in the French case is essential because their proportion of nuclear power in France is several times greater than that of USA.

Hence, many “baseload” generators can be operated flexibly to follow loads when necessary.

This is recognised in the fundamentals of Australia’s NEM, where thermal generators bid in advance for 5-minute blocks of load between their minimum and maximum generating capacity.

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Eclipse Now — Your math skills are adequate. The quotation you offered simply indicates that the writer fails to understand baseload. Baseload is that proportion of the maximum load, aka demand, which is omnipresent. Typically it is about 70% of the maximum load.

Power planners attempt to find a least cost method of supplying the demand at all times. This has traditionally led to finding the least cost method of meeting the baseload demand via large thermal generators. Recent attempts to use wind to meet baseload demand has resulted in higher prices for electricity as exemplified by the German experience.

Perhaps you would care to pass this along to the commenter you quoted.

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I understand how an honest journo can trip over the difference between say, 100 MW of wind capacity and 100 MW average generation, especially when an author fails to specify which. I trip over it too. The ratio is the “capacity factor”.

He does quote stats of wind’s capacity factor in SA as 33%, which is valuable info. Then he infers that “wind farms deliver their advertised capacity for about 35 % of the year”. Well, not quite. Like the chance of tossing a hundred heads in a row, the chance of all wind turbines across SA generating at full capacity at any one time is negligible. Always, there would be some lesser power delivered, so the stats can be inferred to say, “SA’s average generation is 33% of their capacity“.

The Federal ALP (Party currently in Opposition) has promised the electorate 50% renewables”, without specifying which. The faithful are allowed to infer that a rising half of their power bills will be generated by wind/solar and a declining minority by fossil fuels. But that is 50% capacity – they fail to see that every 33 units of wind generation will be matched by 66 units of gas or coal generation. While there are wind turbines turning out blessings to us from the skylines, we are locked permanently into a necessity to emit twice as much carbon dioxide as they replace.

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Hi, Roger C. Yes, you did provide “muscle words” where I needed assistance.

Semi-dispatchable, when applied to generators, is interchangeable with the term semi scheduled, which IMHO applies to the energy output of such generators.

In practice they seem to be close to interchangeable. Possibly, over time, one term will dominate.

These terms are explained fairly well in http://aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Security-and-reliability/-/media/0DE87F5ADD5D42F7B225D7D0799568A8.ashx

An earlier reference, to indicate that the term has been around for a while, is here: https://www.atse.org.au/Documents/Events/nuclear-energy-australia/pr-sligar-john.pdf

Simple Google searches deliver examples of these terms from around the globe.

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EN asks, a field to protect Mars? For comparison, Earth’s dipole moment is 80 × 10^21 A/m^2 (amperes per square metre). It’s maintained in the core – the core is conductive, its fluids in forced flow generate currents equivalent to a loop the radius of the core (3500 km) carrying a billion amperes, 1 GA.

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The energy of the field goes up as the square of the current, so creating it would cost a lot of energy. Maintenance would not be free either, as trapping plasma involves maintaining equal-and-opposite forces.

Protecting a spacecraft might be more practical than protecting a planet. But the field strength has to be much greater, to deflect high energy protons in the smaller distance.

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The end of what?

Westinghouse? Has already died once, then was sold to Toshiba.

Chicago Bridge and Iron (CBI)? Another long-standing great American corporation that is no more, after being bought by Toshiba/Westinghouse to resolve contract disputes. That great, highly professional organisation had the life squeezed out of it a few years back.

USA’s DOE and other regulatory agencies? They lost their drive forwards many years ago and are long overdue for overhaul. They won’t die.

Toshiba itself? Maybe so, but it seems that the arms and legs are being cut off to leave the torso intact.

The AP1000? I think not. CNNC and S Korea seem to be doing OK, without the shackles of regulators that are captives of the opposition.

Maybe this is a sign not of the end, but of a restart. I certainly hope so. Westinghouse’s knowledge base is too important to be allowed to die.

One thing that has just died is the immediate future of new nuclear power in the english-speaking world.

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At least one of the Westinghouse-designed AP1000’s in China are to start operation this year. That augurs well for the AP1000 projects elsewhere. If Westinghouse were to be wound up, its AP1000 operations might be bought up and continued. The Wiki page has been recently updated, and WNN’s milestones page will keep us informed.

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To be fair, I cannot imagine a future without the Westinghouse legacies of intellectual property, design expertise and demolition. They are far too valuable to simply evaporate.

On the other hand, those who have been contemplating the future of nuclear power plant construction will agree that it is swinging strongly towards non-anglophone countries.

Languages such as Russian, Korean, Mandarin and French, perhaps, but not native english speakers… except perhaps for SMR’s.

Thanks to a long list of folk, some of them Australian such as that Caldicott person, American regulators became timid, ineffectual captives of their own opposition decades ago.

What continues to amaze me is the Australian national failure to recognise that we have been gifted ideal conditions to benefit from abundant nuclear power, yet we seem to be determined to rely solely on coal and gas for our electricity, with about 8% each of hydro and Unreliables, both supported by levies and handouts.

All this while the climate goes down the toilet.

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Eclipse, if all else is lost, I would eat drink and be merry. Geo-engineering would not help the doomed.

However, SE only gloomed that the cause was lost in the English-speaking countries. In that case, you might try learning Korean. The Korean reactors at Barakah are on time and on cost. The first is scheduled to begin operation next month, in May 2017.

It will be helpful for us to be able to speak of carbon-free baseload gigawatts, in five-year construction times and a capital cost of $5 per watt.

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Come to think of it, we should quote 5 $/W as capital cost plus 3 years’ fuel.

If gas cost 10 $/GJ, then 3 years’ fuel for a gas 1 GW plant would cost about 3 $/W, implying a breakeven within a few years.

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Thanks, RC.

China and Russia, in particular, have used engineering projects to achieve their geopolitical goals. The South Koreans seem to have taken a strongly commercial stance, offering quality and price. I expect that all three will out-compete Western competitors across South Asia, Africa, Middle East and South American markets,provided that the security and monetary systems don’t collapse first.

Here’s hoping… but I would be much more optimistic if Toshiba/Westinghouse was healthy.

Can SMR’s fill the gap? Only an optimist would say so.

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Public discussion about electricity and energy seems to be easing towards reasoned debate whereas until recently (28 Sept 2016?) mud-slinging seemed to predominate.

Two journalists, in response to emailed congratulations for well written articles, have expressed interest in further discussion and provided contact details. One asked me to say where I disagree with his article and to discuss them by phone.

I suggest that others approach journalists, via their employer.

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A good article is balanced by including a contrary opinion from an independent expert in the topic. Since you (SE) are a retired engineer experienced in power generation, a good journalist should pounce on you as an on-tap resource to balance his/her stories on power.

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My preferred role is as BS detector and explainer.

I imagine that related discussions are also opening up: Climate change, nuclear power (safety and cost of) as well as the chemistry relating to batteries, energy storage and conversion.

Others can address these topics far better than I can.

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It is almost impossible to read this Open Thread as it has become too long for this mobile device to cope with. Nonetheless here is a link to the latest paper co-authored by Barry Brook:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117304495
in which the so-called 100% renewables electric grid papers are found to be infeasible for reliable grids. The paper appears to be open access.

Those with good contacts with reporters or with politicians are encouraged to pass this along.

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Eclipse asked earlier, how/whether to recycle pebble fuel. Here is a description of the structure of a pebble. It’s tuff stuff.

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Wondering what you all think of this old Science Show claims wind power with submersible compressed air would have the cheapest energy storage.
For Transcript text you may have to click the brown/red “Show” button right of Transcript heading.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/wind-energy—storing-the-power/3028588

My quick summary:-

Wind turbines that float far off the coast and not be visible from land. They compress air, not generate electricity. The compressed air is stored in large rubber balloons deep under water, about the size of your house. These balloons use the pressure of deeper sea water to maximise the pressure that the air is stored at, making the rubber materials cheaper than trying to store all that air in steel strong enough to take compressed air on land. With good wind, the turbines blow the compressed air straight into generating electricity. When the wind is low, the balloons take over supplying the compressed air to move the turbines. It’s cheaper than any storage so far: Batteries are at about $500,000 per mWh, Pumped hydro is about $80,000 per mWh of storage, but these compressed balloons are only about $1,000 per mWh! They claim that the whole UK could run on wind without Brits even seeing the turbines because they are all so far off-shore!

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Is Denmark’s wind really that expensive? (I’m re-writing my wind page).

In 2014, Danish industry paid around 32øre/kWh for the electricity cost,[1] about EU average. Denmark has mediocre electricity costs (including consumer-paid incentives (PSO); costs for cleaner energy) in EU,[11][12][13] but taxes increase the consumer price to the highest in Europe[14] at around EUR 0.304/kWh.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Denmark

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