How can we compare the cost, performance and value-for-money of alternative large-scale clean energy projects? Actually, it’s pretty tough to try and avoid apples-and-oranges comparisons. Still, some adjustments can be made, such as for capacity factor, to partially levelise comparisons. Below is a simplified comparison of four recent real-world projects. All can be considered first-of-a-kind […]
Category: TCASE
Thinking critically about sustainable energy (TCASE) series
In the previous TCASE post, I considered how various low-carbon energy technologies meet the following criteria: commercial readiness, scalability, dispatchability, fuel constraints, load access, storage requirements, capacity factor and emissions intensity. Here I consider the next issue: cost of deployment, based on expert consensus. The primary data again come from the work I had published in 2011 […]
The problem of replacing our dependence on fossil fuels is complex. In Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) #12, a checklist was provided to allow assessment of energy transition plans. The sort of questions listed in TCASE 12 are critical for evaluating the feasibility of future scenarios, like the ones from the recent IPCC report […]
Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) is a series of posts I’ve built up over the last year on BNC (and continue to add to). This has also branched off into a live seminar series (described in detail in this post), hosted by the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus), and has proven to be very […]
Guest post by John D. Morgan. John runs R&D programmes at a Sydney startup company. He has a PhD in physical chemistry, and research experience in chemical engineering in the US and at CSIRO. He is a regular commenter on BNC. A 10-page printable PDF version of this post can be downloaded here. ———————————– Beyond […]
Brave New Climate 