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22 comments on The Bullroarer - Monday 30th June 2008
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22 comments on The Bullroarer - Monday 30th June 2008
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Cheaper than nuclear seems to be the relevant entry point from your point of view and CSP is certainly that, which is why I advocate it.
Its the best option available, and therefore the one that should be implemented.
The latest on nuclear costs vs CSP or wind:
http://www.energycentral.com/centers/energybiz/ebi_detail.cfm?id=525
Nuclear can't compete without massive government intervention and will be dead as a dodo as far as new plant construction goes in 10 years time once everyone realises that nuke plants can only get built with a lot of taxpayer cash subsidising both ends of the plant lifecycle.
Which is why I'll keep warning people not to waste time and money on futile acts of reversalism when they should be planning for the long term...
Interesting how the article concludes that nuclear costs will be several times higher than those currently in France. What the article failed to mention is that CSP is not so cheap if you have to duplicate it at the end of long transmission lines to ensure catching the sun somewhere. Since there will be whole weeks of rain and cloud there will need to be 100% backup capacity with fixed costs even if that backup is idle.
The 'latest' will be when a CSP plant produces enough cheap continuous power so that a large coal plant can be dynamited.
Yeah - I'm sure the Simpson and Mojave deserts get weeks of rain at a time - show me how many times that happened in the last century.
You can complain we need to extend the grid (to reach the deserts) or you can complain about rain (in locations where the grid already reaches). You can't have it both ways.
Of course, you'll struggle to get nuclear power plants built in these wet places at all - because the residents won't want them where they live.
The desert doesn't have this problem.
I know someone who has switched to pro nuclear, which is amazing after past rhetoric. The key thing seems to be the realization that oil is running out and gas and coal will follow. Can we actually imagine a world running on geothermal+solar+wind+bio+?. Is there a document that gives a reasonable description of such a world (complete with numbers, as per withouthotair.com). My guess is that voters will soon be saying "we don't want energy options excluded". So antinuclear arguments will need to be compelling. Saying "we'll be able to build this huge renewable power station in 2 years time after we fix a few bugs" isn't going to cut it.
I dunno about numbers, but the Germans have tried it, and it worked. See for example this youtube vid.
They used solar and wind for generation, and hydro and biogas cogeneration for backup.
If you have an electricity grid across the better part of a continent, it's very unlikely that it'll be overcast and with still air across the whole continent. So really this is just a matter of supply management, the managers of the grid taking supply from one place to meet demand in another. And we already do that across continents. When hydroelectric can't go in Tasmania because of a drought, they get extra coal-fired power from Victoria. When a power line from Victoria to NSW goes down, the Victoria plants pump up their output to compensate. And so on.
So intermittency is already something our engineers deal with on a regular basis. With renewables, it would only differ in nature; instead of planned outages from maintenance and unplanned outages from accidents, you have outages forecast by the weather forecasters; and if enough spare capacity were put in place then it'd be okay. We already put in spare capacity in case of outages.
If you know from weather forecasts that on some days there'll only be half as much sunlight or wind, well then you put in twice as many panels or turbines. It gets expensive, but infrastructure is always expensive, just last year my home state paid $2.5 billion for 45km of road, if we can afford that we can afford doubling up generation capacity for backup.
Anyway, the Germans have tried it in Kassel and it worked. I think that beats a sheet of numbers any day.
Interesting video. It certainly convinced me that it can't be done. I encourage everyone to have a look and see whether they're convinced. My guess is that they couldn't grow as much biogas as they would need for the fill in, and the lakes going up and down to store power would be an environmental disaster. Quite apart from the fact that biofuels are always an environmental disaster: nature needs "waste" bio material to be recycled back into the soil, not burnt. [Also, while it's not too clear, I think it was only a virtual experiment and real life would not be so easy.]
I'm not convinced it can't be done, because they did it.
I agree that biogas in general as generally currently practiced is not sustainable, I've previously written that biofuels - as generally currently practiced - are bad for climate change. But neither is agriculture and forestry in general sustainable, and yet we do not condemn them as useless on that account, but instead call for changes to sustainability. And in any case some manage it sustainably.
The Finns and Swedes have a few towns with wood-burning stations which generate electricity and hot water pumped around for heating, etc, and they manage to do it sustainably. See for example this discussion of Finland's energy here. Wood provides about a tenth of their electricity consumption, which is about 16-17,000kWh per person annually, if I recall correctly. So something like 1,600kWh per person annually is coming from wood.
Now, a study [Alan D. Pasternak, Global Energy Futures and Human Development: A Framework for Analysis] looked at HDI (human development index - longevity, education and income) vs electricity consumption, and what the guy found was that HDI rises very quickly as you add electricity, reaching 0.8 with 2,000kWh or more total use, and maxing out around 0.9 with 4,000kWh total use; that is, adding more electricity after 4,000kWh doesn't improve people's lives at all in any real way.
So that Finland's sustainable biofuel use for cogeneration gives them 1,600kWh, which is a fair way to assuring an HDI of 0.8 needing 2,000kWh, though only a third of the way to maxing out at 0.9.
Looking at forest area, we see that Finland has 219,350km2 of forest, or with 5 million people, 0.04km2 per capita, and Europe as a whole 10.3 million km2, or with 750 million people some 0.01km2 per capita. Thus Europe as a whole has one-quarter the forest per person Finland does, thus logically could manage sustaible cogeneration from wood of only one-quarter what Finland manages.
So as a back-of-the-envelope sort of figure, we can say that if Finland can manage 1,600kWh per person annually from wood, Europe as a whole must be able to manage 400kWh per person annually.
Against this 400kWh we must set
- 2,000kWh for HDI0.8+,
- 4,000kWh for HDI0.9+,
- 8,000kWh in France or Germany
- 12,000kWh we see consumed in the US or Australia
- 16,000kWh in Finland
- 25,000kWh in Iceland or Sweden
and so we can conclude that at first glance, it seems that sustainable cogeneration can go a long way (10-25%) to supplying the power needs for a decent standard of life, but is hopeless when set against our current high and wasteful consumption.
That is, renewable energy can work well if coupled with a prudent but not spartan level of conservation of energy. Which really is what you hear most renewable energy advocates outside the actual energy companies saying - we need conservation and efficiency, too. Renewable energy can provide us with enough energy for a decent lifestyle, but not enough for us to waste it as we do with fossil fuels.
A nice way of saying close to the edge. You take that to the voters and I'll take nuclear. Seriously, things like natural disasters happen where you need a lot of extra energy. Also: nuclear is the energy source that the rest of nature doesn't use. The alternative portrayed involves us gobbling up every last bit of energy we can get from the natural world. Nuclear looks a lot greener to me.
"closer to the edge"? 4,000kWh annually is "close to the edge"? Residential use is generally a third of all use, so that's 1,333kWh for domestic use, 3.7kWh a day each, so for the average Aussie household of 2.6 people that's 9.5kWh daily for the household... this is meant to represent being "on the edge"?
You're reminding me of when Boof tried to tell us that if you took the train instead of flying that was like cladding yourself in "sackcloth and ashes". Oh, the suffering one would have in the dining car of the Ghan!
Please describe a natural disaster any time in human history which was mitigated by having more electricity.
Radioisotopes are part of nature, too, and like fossil fuels, are finite. Of course pro-nuclear people are fond of telling us that they're so large in supply they may as well be infinite. But then, in 1880 Britain thought they had a 2,000 year supply of coal. We may or may not have a limited supply of radioisotopes, but we certainly shall not run into limits of sunshine, wind and wave in any reasonable timeframe. So we can bet on something which may or may not run out, or something which we know definitely won't.
So whether we choose nuclear, wind, hydro, geothermal or whatever, we are going to face at some point resource constraints and have to learn to restrain our appetites to merely fill ourselves to bursting, rather than filling ourselves to vomiting. I believe we can manage this difficult task, as onerous a burden as it may seem to some of us.
I'd be glad to take the offer of renewables and conservation to the polls, especially if we were offering nuclear as the alternative. I know of only a few occasions in history where the public was actually asked if they wanted nuclear power in their country or area. I list only the binding votes, as opposed to local council resolutions as gestures, etc.
- Austria, 1978 - NO
- Sweden, 1980 - NO - only semi-binding in that it required the government to get rid of the plants as soon as possible if it wouldn't cause any problems to anyone
- Italy, 1987 - NO
- Switzerland, 1990 - this was two votes, the first to have nuclear power at all - YES - and the second whether to build any new plants in the next decade - NO
- Japan, Maki, 1996 - NO - this was on having a plant in their area, two other areas whose names I forget had a similar vote the same year and also voted no.
What the referenda results show us is that once people have nuclear, they accept its presence but don't welcome its expansion; but if they don't have nuclear, they don't want to start with it.
Nuclear, then, would be an excellent stick to offer with the renewable and conservation carrot; if we simply offer renewables and conservation, people may reject them in favour of burgers and SUVs. But if it's a choice between renewables with conservation and nuclear, I've no doubt what the majority would choose.
I would, then, be very comfortable in taking to the polls a question something like,
"choose one of the following:- (a) renewables with heavy energy conservation, or (b) nuclear with no energy conservation"
Are we remembering that our post-fossil energy supply has to cover all transport as well? E.g. create hydrogen from water and use hydrogen fuel, or some such. Given high conversion losses this is very significant. And yes: we used a lot of fuel helping people after the tsunami, and in every emergency.
"choose one of the following:- (a) renewables with heavy energy conservation, or (b) nuclear with no energy conservation"
You can have renewables with no energy convservation too, if you so choose.
It will be easier to replace all our energy needs with renewables than it would be to do so with nuclear, that is certain.
You can, but then you need to build heaps more renewables than you would with conservation, which even ignoring the extra money it costs means it takes much longer to get us entirely renewable.
And since most conservation consists simply of getting rid of pointless waste - lit-up offices at night, houses warmed when nobody's in them, SUVs with one person in them idling in traffic, plastic wishbones and the like - I don't think conservation need cause great suffering.
So perhaps we could rephrase it as,
""choose one of the following:-
(a) renewables with heavy energy conservation,
(b) nuclear with no energy conservation,
(c) heaps and heaps of renewables at much great cost than (a) or (b) so you can have the privilege of pointless waste"
When it comes to nuclear I think it fair to present it to a voting public impartially so they can choose; when it comes to waste I see no reason to present things impartially.
My point is that (c) wouldn't cost more than (b).