105 comments on Energy: the fundamental unseriousness of Gordon Brown
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105 comments on Energy: the fundamental unseriousness of Gordon Brown
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It is impressive the gains nuclear made without adding new plants.
A problem I see is that the levels of subsidy for nuclear are fuzzy.
How can the subsidy playing field be leveled?
If govts. were to offer a $0.04 / kWh (but no other subsidies) for solar, wind and nuclear, a lot of wind would be built, a lot of solar thermal, but no nuclear.
Nuclear needs subsidies for construction, insurance against catastrophic accidents, R/D, and maybe mining.
Although it is unlikely to happen, I think it would be nice to equalize the subsidies. Each year, for example, wind, solar and nuclear would each an equal amount of money.
This could be used to subsidize the construction of nuclear reactors, nuclear reactor R/D, or anything the nuclear subsidy distribution committee felt would be worthwhile.
Meanwhile, the solar and wind distribution committees would decide how to allocate the funding: operational per kWh subsidies, R/D, construction loan guarantees, or whatever.
If any of the power generation approaches was innately less economic, it would naturally fall behind.
Why? The objective is to transition from fossil fuels while reducing green house gases, isn't it? It is not to distributes the public spoils. We should do what it takes to build the mix that best serves society, right?
Right, we want to build the mix that best serves society.
The obvious approach which I mentioned first would do that, giving a per kWh subsidy that is the same for each energy source.
The most cost effective and efficient sources of energy would win.
However, nuclear would lose out, because even with a generous per kWh subsidy, private money would still not build any plants.
The second suggestion was a possible way around that problem.
Then giving every source the same subsidy would not necessarily achieve our objective of building the mix that best serves society.
I think it is more complicated than that. We have to decide, Do we want a system where production meets demand or do we want to tolerate shortages and ration? If we want the kind of system that we have now and we want to reduce global warming as much as possible, how do we do that? If we just leave it all to a free market, can we be assured that all the costs like waste cleanup and living with shortages will really be reflected in the market over the long term?
In a free market, the most cost effective solutions generally win. In this case we are discussing using govt. subsidies to "augment" or "distort" the free market.
While some purists oppose all subsidies on principal, they can be a valuable tool to accelerate the development of useful technologies.
It sounds like you are assuming that using only per kWh subsides will result in shortages and rationing, or that unless nuclear power receives more substantial subsidies we will have shortages.
I am not convinced that this would be true, as I think that microgeneration, renewables, conservation, and energy storage advances will work together keep the system robust.
Why do you feel there be shortages and rationing if nuclear does not receive substantial subsidies?
Because, as you said earlier, this might result in nuclear not being built. If we were to rely only on wind and solar and have no baseload generation and dispatchable reserve as we have now then we would be building a system that has chronic shortages by design. At night, when the wind is not blowing, you get no power. The assumption seems to be that we can fit up to 20% intermittent power into the current system without effecting its power on demand characteristic. I am not sure that is true and instead advocate the we build nuclear, wind and solar as fast as we can and see what mix works best. I suspect that wind and solar will max out long before nuclear because nuclear can do baseload and completely eliminate coal plants while wind and solar cannot.
Pumped hydro storage can convert wind and solar to dispatchable reserves at a penny or two per kwh.
And of course, plenty of onshore and offshore locations have wind at night (you have obviously never been to Wyoming, Colorado or the Aleutians).
OK, but then it still only displaces the other dispatchable reserves (gas and hydro) and not the coal baseload, which runs as the same level no matter what. That does not really help mitigate climate change. To displace the coal baseload, you need a nuke. And you have to count the cost of building the pumped storage, the cost of its operation (electricity to pump the water up hill) and the energy lost in the process into the cost of wind and solar operations, which limit their operating attractiveness. But it is still a good idea.
If you build enough wind generation, and enough pumped storage / interconnection to back it up, then it's obvious that you can shut coal generation down. A simple carbon tax provides the necessary market signal.
Perhaps, but all the wind generation along with pumped storage would be pretty expensive to build and operate. How much additional capacity would you have to build into it to cover a prolonged wind drought? With global warming, today's wind patterns might change in unpredictable ways and we might badly miscalculate how bad the wind droughts could be. Might it not be better to build nukes to take out all the coal and build your part to supplement/displace the existing dispatchable reserve gas, keeping enough gas to cover the wind drought?
Without major subsidies, it does seem unlikely any new nuclear plants will be built.
However, much can change in the 13 years before 2020 when the first of the new nuclear plants would come on line. To justify these subsidies for nuclear, we need to gamble that superior technologies will not be available in 2020.
This is the main reason private investment does not like nuclear.
A subsidy that does not require such a long term gamble is a per kWh subsidy for power generated. Private investment can fund wind and solar plants that come online 12 to 24 months after the decision to go foward, maximizing the changes that the plant will give the anticipated return on investment (factoring in the subsidy or carbon tax).
Your point is that neither wind nor solar is a direct replacement for existing generation is obviously true. The decision to apply present-day funding to nuclear vs. other promising technologies would ideally be made based on careful analysis of probabilities.
I can think of several emerging technologies would work with wind and solar in a practical system, that could be quite mature by 2020.
Lithium batteries
Solar thermal plants with thermal storage
Flywheel storage
Flow batteries
Coal gasification with carbon sequesterization via terra pretta
Organic material gasification with carbon sequesterization via terra pretta
High efficiency LED lighting
The real killer is energy efficiency. Already, I have a cloths washer that uses 0.15 kWh per load, lighting is making great strides, and organic LED flat panels use miniscule amounts of power. With high degrees of efficiency, the storage required for household power is semi-affordable even now.
If the money needed to subsidize nuclear plant R/D and construction was put into the above technologies, I would be very surprised if they did not provide a robust power system. Even without heavy subsidies, they should do very well.