[Editor's note: this post contains technical errors that affect the conclusions of the post. A clarifying post will be written shortly. Please see comments below for now. -Jesse Jenkins, policy editor, IGHIH]
In the spirit of questioning assumptions, I want to do some serious questioning of the constant push for wind and solar electricity as a solution to the climate crisis. At conferences, direct actions, and in the media, I’ve seen countless calls for transitioning from fossil fuels and nuclear power to a “clean energy economy” powered by wind and solar. Wind and solar! That’s all I hear these days from folks about what to do (with maybe an occasional mention of the much less significant geothermal or tidal electricity). But what if a massive rollout of “wind and solar” isn’t really viable? And what if a massive rollout of these technologies won’t help us gain independence from dirty energy and avert the worst of climate chaos? For now though, let’s focus on solely on wind power.
The obvious problems with wind-generated electricity is, of course, that the wind doesn’t always blow. In order to deal with this, something has to be ready to provide an uninterrupted source of electricity to prevent blackouts. This is problematic because it requires dirty energy sources (coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, or, in the case of Denmark, massive hydropower imported from Sweden) to hold up the electric grid when the wind isn’t blowing. With this approach wind don’t break us free from dirty energy sources. Of course, though we wouldn’t be completely independent of fossil fuels and nuclear, certainly we’d be consuming less, right? Unfortunately, this seems to be a false assumption.
Let’s take Germany as an example. Germany has the largest wind power infrastructure in the world, with an installed capacity of over 22,000 MW. E.ON Netz, the company which owns about 40% of Germany’s wind energy capacity, gives some shocking findings in their 2005 Wind Report, reporting that “Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent.” The report continues, “traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online in order to guarantee power supply at all times.” So, wind power potentially only saves 10% in fossil fuels. Let’s say that again, Wind power reduces fossil fuel consumption by only 10%.
[Editor's note: the above conclusion is based on technical errors. The E.On study states that traditional power stations must be kept in reserve to "back up" wind power capacity if generation falls off. However, these reserve generators are not running at all times and are not consuming fossil fuels. The term "permanently online" in the study means permanently connected to the grid and held in reserve, not permanently generating power and consuming fuel. - Jesse Jenkins, policy editor, IGHIH]
It gets worse. As Germany plans to ramp up installed wind capacity, this savings decrease even further. From the report (p. 9):
In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.
This means that as installed wind capacity increases, wind power will only reduce Germany’s reliance on traditional energy sources by 4%. For all that effort in construction, grid expansion, and infrastructure development, that’s effectively nothing. If this is the news from the world’s leader in wind generation, how can we keep pushing for wind power as a solution when it simply isn’t doing the job to end our reliance on dirty energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Surprised? Shocked? Tearing up? Yeah, it sucks. It really sucks. And, for now, I’ll leave you at that.
Subscribe by Email!
Subscribe by RSS!
Share on Facebook
Doesn’t make sense - perhaps you’ve made a wrong assumption? By my reading of this: they have 90% worth of generating capacity connected but that doesn’t mean they are actually running the plants at capacity. It seems to me that while connected the plants could be actually producing a fraction of the potential capacity, no?
The intermitency of wind is a problem, but certainly not an insurmountable one. The development of batteries, such as pumped-storage hydroelectricity, that allow the turbines to save energy for times when the wind is not blowing will help to overcome this problem.
Commenter #1 is correct. This report is saying that Germany needs to keep 90% of its traditional power generation online JUST IN CASE the wind doesn’t blow - which means that the “10% reduction” is an absolute minimum in fossil fuel savings - we’ll be saving more than that whenever the wind blows anywhere in Germany. The traditional power stations will stay online just in case the wind dies down, but they’ll be burning much less fuel.
And your second quote indicates that by 2020, Germany still expects to have enough wind power to shut down 2,000 MW of “traditional” power production altogether. This is still pretty remarkable, given that people are still talking about building new coal plants in the USA.
One solution to the problem of wind dying is to couple wind generation with a grid of solar generation, since the sun is usually shining when the wind is calm, and it also tends to be windier during storms and the winter months when there’s less solar energy.
Another issue raised in this report is the state of Germany’s grid infrastructure - the power lines were all built to serve fossil fuel power stations, but these lines don’t work as well to deliver wind power. As I understand it, Germany is now building direct-current lines that will deliver wind electricity more efficiently. Coupling that development with variable pricing, which could give consumers an incentive to only run their appliances when the wind is blowing somewhere nearby, could further reduce the need to keep traditional power stations online.
German cities are also looking at using plug-in hybrid city bus fleets as massive battery banks that can store wind electricity to power the city after the evening rush hour, when more buses are idle and electricity demand peaks.
Certainly energy storage is needed if wind and solar are to take a baseload role in energy. And that energy storage better be cheap or else you will replace a 24/7 energy source with an expensive combination of partially used energy sources with partially used energy storage.
One thing I have always noticed is that these terms “clean energy” and “dirty energy” are thrown around. Yes coal pollutes, but you need to process steel for windmills and purify silicon for PV. I see environmental impacts more as a spectrum rather than a simple duality of clean vs dirty. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of each energy source and its associated acreage needed, tons of steel, deaths and illnesses, fuel requirements, etc per unit energy. I have seen pieces of this kind of study (e.g., ExternE), but nothing comprehensive in one report.
Evan, you have entirely misread the E.On study. Please do a little more homework before writing your next post on technical material like wind integration (which is pretty freakin’ technical). Otherwise you are prone to repeating often-cited myths like the one that wind power does not displace dirty energy sources.
First off, as Ken points out, the statement means that 90% of the capacity of the wind must be kept “online” as reserves from some dispatchable energy source - e.g. a natural gas, coal or hydro plant, or a dispatchable energy storage system, if we can commercialize them. That DOES NOT mean that the fossil generators (in Germany’s case) are RUNNING (and spewing GHG’s and other pollutants), just that they are connected to the grid and sitting idle, ready to ramp up if the wind falls off.
You have made an easy mistake common to people not familiar with electricity gird operations: you have confused two very different things here: energy and capacity.
I am working on a post to clarify this common mistake and will post it shortly. However, because the implications of this post - that wind = dirty energy - are based on this technical mistake, I am going to add an editors note to the beginning of this post to make it clear to readers. I’m sorry to do that Evan, but I think readers could be very easily misled by this post. If you have questions, please email me, and I’ll work on posting the clarification post soon.
Certainly there are problems with wind energy, but equating it to coal or other fossil fuels is simply ridiculous. Even if the assumptions you make are correct (which Ken pointed out, they are not), Germany still has 10% of it’s energy coming from wind. Right now, the United States has a fraction of 1% of our energy coming from wind and America (especially the Midwest) has far more wind and more consistent wind than Germany.
I think what you’re trying to get at is the logistical question of “How?” and to a certain extent, I agree with you. Wind and solar are not going to solve it all. However, I don’t think our response to that challenge is to crumple, give up, and assume that all technology is thus flawed. We need to embrace the challenge, use our brains, and figure out how we’re going to do this. I would say that efficiency and conservation are key, and after that, a diverse source of renewables is the best option. For example, check out this graphic from “Carbon and Nuclear Free” by Arjun Makhijani.
Germany’s sitting pretty good right about now, eh? This isn’t to say that we don’t need a massive investment in R&D, but only that we need to continue to think strategically and holistically.
When developed correctly, community wind solutions have the ability to revitalize our rural economies that are desperately losing jobs and forced to give up their rights to industrial farmers. Wind power can reempower communities that have long been pushed aside; coming from rural South Dakota, I know how disheartening that feeling is, but also how exciting these new opportunities can be. We must be developing just solutions and constantly reassessing our technologies and development strategies, but I’m confident and excited that wind power will continue to be used not only to power our infrastructure but also our people.
Another note: 48,000 MW of wind capacity (at a 33% capacity factor) will generate the same energy output of 17,600 MW of coal baseload plants (at a 90% capacity factor). So while they may “only” entirely shutter 2,000 MW of coal plants (a pretty huge feat on it’s own!), the 48,000 MW of wind expected by 2020 in Germany will displace the generation from 17,600 MW of coal, or the output of about 35 medium-sized (500 MW) coal plants!
That’s nothing to be teary or shocked about. Again, I’ll try to explain more when I have time to write a full post later today.
Put another way, what the E.On study really says is that 48,000 MW of wind plants will let Germany completely shut down four coal plants (at 500 MW each), and cause the equivalent of 35 more coal plants sit idle each year because wind generation is meeting the country’s needs, not fossil generation. Those plants won’t completely close, because they will need to be held in reserve to run occasionally when the wind dies down, but they will sit idle much of the time, avoiding GHG emissions, coal consumption, etc.
(To be fair, some of the power displaced by the 48,000 MW of wind will be other fossil generation, like natural gas, which has less global warming impact and less emissions. The wind plants will displace the energy equivalent of 35 coal plants, but that energy will come from a mix of power plants, including coal and gas. However, because nuclear power, hydropower and other renewables have no/very low fuel costs, they are the last plants to be displaced by wind generation. Fossil fuel plants with high fuel costs are typically displaced by wind generation on the grid - first more costly natural gas, then coal, typically).
Also, and apology to Evan: my initial comment here (after re-reading it) may be a little snarky or condescending. I apologize for that. I’ve simply seen this dangerous myth repeated far too often, and typically by people much less well-meaning than you (i.e. people trying to protect coal power’s role in our energy future from the efforts of clean energy advocates). This is honestly an easy mistake, and a frequent one.
Some quick numbers for the future:
1. Current worldwide electrical power requirement is somewhere between 3 and 4 TerraWatts (TW) -
a more precise number is not needed for this discussion.
2. A 2005 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research was one of the first to quantify
harvestable wind capacity. The derived number from that study was about 75 TW - the true
capacity in the wind (averaged over the whole surface of the earth is closer to 200 TW)
3. Hence from the macroscopic physics point of view, we just need to build a machine to capture
5-10% of the available wind energy (distributed across the planet) to meet our current
and future electrical needs.
4. Yes, many, many, many technical barriers exist towards achieving this harvest (not the least
of which are material shortages to build turbines) but conceptually, there is not “intermittency”
problem with wind when collected over a sufficiently large scale. Any regional scale (e.g.
Germany) will suffer from intermittency and in a little known event that occurred in March 2007,
the wind stopped blowing all over germany for about 1 hour - that did wreak havoc on their
grid.
5. However, its not physically sensible to pretend you can scale a local intermittentcy problem
into a global value to then claim that wind requires substantial “back up power”.
6. If we can make significant progress is the physio-absorption of hydrogen onto other
large atoms (or in nano tubes) then the wind-hydrogen-battery system can be realized - but
we may have run out of materials by then to build a sufficient number of turbines.
I have heard this argument made countless times before, but this is actually one rolled out by those who hold either a defeatist or obstructionist viewpoint. The reality is wind and other renewables are viable if the entire system is upgraded as well. You cannot simply plug wind into the old grid and expect them to replace coal.
Designing an electricity grid that effectively utilizes renewables is decidedly more difficult than simply using old centralized generation such as coal or nuclear, but that does not mean it isn’t possible. Germany has repeatedly stated that wind is only a small part of a larger strategy to modernize it’s electricity system. Here is how a modern electricity system can work:
1. Wind must be installed in conjunction with other complimentary electricity sources. The easiest is to offset with hydro-electric power (withold water behind a dam when it’s windy, release it when it is not), but it is also possible to use small relatively low-impact generation such as decentralized high efficiency combined heat and power plants for this purpose.
2. Upgrading to a ’smart grid’ can dramatically improve wind’s viability. This involves remotely controlling the demand for electricity across the grid and providing incentives for users of electricity to focus their use when electricity is most abundant (times when it is sunny and windy). This can be done to a high level of sophistication, and can can significantly reduce the ‘peak’ demands that require nearly 20% of generating capacity that is otherwise needed (most often coal). Heavy industrial users can get major savings from voluntarily shutting down during peak times of demand, and a computerized network remotely shuts down air conditioning and other uses when needed. A spot market for electricity and ’smart meters’ allow consumers to use electricity when it is cheapest.
2. The best long-term electricity generation technology is ultimately solar. While currently expensive to install, efficiencies are increasing rapidly, and costs are falling. If solar is installed locally on millions of rooftops (as is planned in Germany and elsewhere) a vast percentage of day to day electricity demand can be met locally, reducing transmission inefficiencies. Improved computerized control of the grid is required to handle the complexity of widespread decentralization of generation, and these upgrades are part of the shift to renewables.
Simply put, it is not a simple as just building wind towers. We must redesign the entire system, both to manage demand (massive upgrades in efficiency and demand management), and to manage supply (installing a mix of different types of renewables and sophisticated grid control).
Don’t give up on wind yet!
I have encountered a similar problem myself, with misleading info from pro nuclear supporters.
If anyone wants a challenge you can find the discussion here:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/letters/display.var.2193524.0.0.php
The Herald is a Scottish newspaper and i did my best to defend the good name of wind turbines.
Jesse,
No worries. I apologize I was a bit quick to jump to conclusions, and I look forward to your post so I can better understand these issues.
Evan
Yes, this is a misconception as several have pointed out. Thanks for your comments, Jesse. For other readers, an excellent, authoritative source on the major utility studies that have been done in the U.S. on this subject is the Utility Wind Integration Group site at http://www.uwig.org . Please check it out. Click on “Wind Integration Library.”
Regards,
Tom Gray
American Wind Energy Association
http://www.awea.org
http://www.powerofwind.org
PS: One commenter notes that the utility system has to be redesigned to accommodate wind. If so, it won’t be the first time–huge operational changes were needed when nuclear power was introduced to the system.
OK, I’ve finished my primer on energy, power and capacity which should hopefully bring some clarity and help avoid some common mistakes. I’ll write more specifically about this post and how wind helps back off and displace fossil fueled power generation soon (I hope I have time)…
Collecting wind and solar, then store and distribute with a global smartgrid. Yes it is possible, but that is probably as challenging as aneutronic fusion (i.e., the deuterium-helium 3 reaction being researched in UW-Madison). Also, you will need time for something of this scale (the US interstate took ~30 years and that was just laying asphalt and concrete). Something else will be needed during the transition? [I would vote for thorium as one of the transition sources, but that is my old age and senility talking...]
Keep on rockin’ Evan! I hear where you are coming from about wind. Usually a response I get is, oh, doesn’t that kill a lot of birds?! Yeah, maybe like 5 birds or even 25, but that’s a hell of a lot better than thousands of human lives from the coal process. But regardless, solar and wind power are viable, and a heck of a lot better for human health. Living off the grid is available today (and fairly easy), with combined solar, wind, micro hydro and geothermal, plus any number of newfangled quantum electronics yet to be invented. Perhaps battery research or decentralized “smart grids” is where we should be going. You are right, direct action is needed to stop coal plants from being build. Adding new coal plant boilers now is like shooting ourselves in the foot (more like the arm or leg!)
We should be tearing down coal plants in the next 25 years…not pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Yikes!
Like the reduce, reuse, recycle trilogy, renewable energies come along with conservation and efficiency. But there are priorities…first, reduce (use less), then reuse (use again), then finally when it’s trash (recycle it). Same with conservation, efficiency and renewables. In my opinion, conservation is first priority, then efficiency, finally renewables. If we turned off lights when not being used and don’t waste kWh(CONSERVE)….and if the appliances use less electricity based on their design(EFFICIENCY), PLUS renewables, we will get there, and be able to shut off coal plants. Yippee!! All three of these sectors could provide green JOBS too!
But it will take a lot of work, energy, passion and FUN (and persuasion). Also cardboard windmills….and eventually real ones! Baseload demand for electricity should be addressed, but don’t give up on wind just yet. It’s definitely economically viable…not very risky either. I could tell a different story about nuclear or coal.
Keep on keepin’ on…..
<3
The original post was overly pessimistic about wind energy, but please read the E.On study. It does indeed point out some drastic and very disturbing problems for wind power proponents. Simply proving the original post has inaccuracies does not eliminate any of these concerns. Before so quickly piling on and righteously declaring all of these criticisms to be false, more facts must be considered, because the majority of the post was spot on, though some of the figures were wrong.
Firstly, the variability of wind power over the period of a DAY is severe. Current coal power plants cannot be started or stopped in under four hours, the typical plant in the US currently requires over twelve. The most modern expensive new coal power plants require three hours to start up.
http://www.hitachi.com/ICSFiles/afieldfile/2004/06/01/1_r2003_02_101.pdf
http://www.uwig.org/ewec06gridpaper.pdf (page 7)
Wind can go from 60% of capacity to 1% over the course of two hours. This means it’s ability to replace coal power is essentially zero, the coal power plants cannot be brought up quickly enough to ever shut them down, whatever the wind production may be. The E.On report and the original post do correctly state this. Even if advanced forecasting methods enabled one to sometimes shut down coal power plants it would likely not be desirable to do so, since the heat up and cool down stages are the most environmentally damaging and economically expensive (coal used to heat up gigantic metal furnaces generates absolutely NO electricity, only CO2 and other nasty GHGs and cancer causing substances).
What the post neglected to identify was that natural gas can be quickly cycled. Over the course of thirty minutes or so a natural gas plant may be brought online. Also this is not without losses, since the thermal mass of the turbines must be first heated up. But natural gas prices are already high and will only increase if we need to rely on them more to offset the uneven production of wind power. Add to this that the US is running very short of natural gas, to expand much more we’ll need to liquefy it, put it on a fossil fuel burning boat, and transport it from the middle east to the US.
Also, Germany is not taking coal power plants off line, despite the growth of renewable capacity they are actually still building coal power plants. Ironically they could reduce emissions more, but silly environmentalists stop the construction of any new coal plants, so they are just running dinosaurs from the 40s which have much lower efficiencies.
All said and done, renewable energy is useful for up to 20% penetration, but beyond that it becomes increasingly expensive to integrate it and returns begin to really diminish (see above report). Solar might compliment wind to some degree and increase maximum useful penetration, but on a cloudy overcast day it’s sometimes quiet still, and you’re getting about 5% of the light, so wind cannot really be depended upon to replace solar.
Just look to Denmark, they’ve already reached this penetration, and are seriously cutting back subsidies simply because there ISN’T enough of a return for further capacity expansion. Furthermore they are actually already overly penetrated, but they can rely on Sweden to provide hydro-power at low points. If Sweden decommissioned 20% of their nuclear capacity and replaced it with wind, as people here would likely advocate, then Denmark would indeed be in dire straights.
Also the places where wind is plentiful, as mentioned, such as the mid-west, have few or no options for pumped hydro storage, because we don’t have big hills. The only significant one in the midwest, Taum-sauk, collapsed last year scaring what was a truly beautiful stretch of river and a very popular tourist destination (Johnson Shut-ins). Environmentalists are blocking the construction of a new one.
Take on the other hand France, which has even the most ambitious of you wind proponents beat since 1980 when it comes to carbon free power. They have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and it’s 95% fossil fuel free (and 80% nuclear)! Not a single person has died in either the civilian French or American nuclear industry. Unlike our wind industry, where something like 20(?) people have died during the upkeep of windmills, so much for safe power. They reprocess their waste, eliminating the long lived isotopes and reducing the dangerous life or the waste down to a few thousand years. You can thank Greenpeace and Carter that we’re forced to store our waste for 100,000 years in Yucca mountain.
For some good reason Denmark gets over 20% of its power from wind and Ireland gets most of its energy from renewable sources. I think you ought to learn more about the wind and solar industries before you give these comments. The fact is that smart grids can make up for wind’s and solar’s variability. But even in the case where these are heavily scaled up, it doesn’t mean that coal or natural gas need to continue to be used. Solar thermal power is just as good in terms of capacity factor and can be competitive with natural gas.
You’ve also got batteries being developed for large-scale storage. I’ve seen projects from 2MW to 20MW of storage being deployed. As these develop, wind will have its variability issue solved.
But another thing you miss is the fact that it’s cheaper to promote efficiency and conservation than to bring in new generation. We don’t need to expand generation. We need to meet energy demand through energy efficiency. Anywhere you put it, energy efficiency makes economic sense.
Finally, I want to point out the fact that Hansen has put a limit of 350ppm on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. We’re at 385ppm. So, we either make things work or we’re cooked. I’d rather think that obviously we’ll make things work to bring emissions globally down to zero and then dramatically scale up reforestation and other carbon sequestration practices.
For your reference, please become a regular reader of Renewable Energy Access at http://www.renewableenergyworld.com. You will learn a lot.
In my discussion at the Herald newspaper web site (see my first posting above) i mentioned Sorne Hill wind farm in Ireland using Vanadium Redox Flow batteries.
I think solutions will come. You can’t devise a solution until your have created the problem!
BTW. The UK is probably leading the development in some areas.
1. Deep Sea offshore wind turbines. The Beatrice demonstrator is up and running. This is a pair of massive 5 megawatt turbines placed near a North Sea oil field. It is likely that offshore turbines like this will move upto the 7 megawatt range once full scale farms are installed. At a distance of 15 miles from the shore, winds tend to be more consistent. The maintenance costs tend to be higher though, which is why it is worth scaling up the engineering to get more power per turbine.
http://www.beatricewind.co.uk/
2. In the last few weeks a large underwater tidal demonstrator turbine is being installed off Northern Ireland. Marine Current Turbines have already demonstrated a small scale system for some 3 years. I think Canada has already placed an order for a small scale ‘tidal’ farm using these turbines.
http://www.marineturbines.com/
Massive battery storage systems to replace the variability of wind power? That’s a highly environmentally damaging way of storing power to say the least, as well as being expensive.
The most economic battery based storage method would be lead acid. However both the production and disposal of lead acid batteries is expensive and currently entails significant environmental and human costs. The cheap lead acid batteries which are cost effective to use in such a system would primarily be used in China, where lead smelters do not follow emissions standards and poison the local environment with mercury and mine tailings.
Anyway, the amount of Vanadium puts a pretty significant limiting factor. It is not especially common the way other ores are, so I would guess specifically mining for it would be somewhat costly. It’s commonality is the earths crust is 160PPM, and it isn’t commercially used the way other elements of similar availability are. That’s the primary reason it’s still so cheap. A storage system for a city like St.Louis would require at least 15 million pounds of Vanadium (back of the hand calculation), more than has been mined in the entire human history.
I’ve also heard of (and don’t know much about) wind being used to pump water into tanks that, during low-wind periods, would be released and turn turbines. Anyone know anything about this?
Yeah, that’s called pumped storage. It’s about 70% efficient, and can’t really be used anywhere in the Midwest (where the most wind capacity expansion is happening).
http://cafnrcornerpost.com/fs2006/spradley_kyle/091806_photostory.htm
There is certainly potential in the west and the east. However any expansion of pumped storage always meets with vigorous opposition from environmentalists, since it has the risk of washing out and the destruction of usually scenic highland areas. The few tall hills in many areas usually turn out to be tourist attractions.
Church Mountain reservoir was the proposed replacement. But there was such opposition from square one from the local arm of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace would likely have gotten involved also, but Amren never even bothered to submit an application or do a basic impact statement since the project would have taken forever to complete and required so much study that profit would have evaporated. The last significant pumped storage project completed in the US was in 1991. After Taum Sauk I would be surprised to see any go forward in the near future. Pumped storage is notably the only nearly economical electricity storage method. Huge banks of batteries are expensive, it would be cheaper just to build a nuclear plant instead and use that as an “energy storage system.”
Isn’t most of Ireland’s renewable power hydorelectric? I am not sure how many spots are left in the US for dams, but my recollection is that environmentalists tend to oppose them. We’re getting to a point where we need to understand that getting rid of carbon will be expensive and probably involve technologies that will be controversial no matter what.
Yup. Most of anyone’s renewable power is Hydroelectric. There are few good spots in the US which present themselves as possibilities for hydro expansion, and none which could go forward without opposition from environmentalists.
The most politically tenable thing to do, when it comes to massive expansion of base load carbon free power, is adding further units to already existing nuclear power plants. This usually has little or no opposition since the local people already favor nuclear power due to the jobs and cheap electricity it provides. To my understanding all power current nuclear projects involve adding reactors to already existing plants, I don’t think there’s a single application yet given to the NRC for an entirely new plant. Building a new plant is extremely difficult and involves writing up costly new evacuation plans, duplicate security, new transmission lines and overcoming opposition. Expanding existing plants requires none of this.
Wind and Hydro on the other hand don’t benefit from that kind of overlap, you can’t build 1000MW of wind mills one kilometer away from another 1000MW of wind mills. You also can’t build a second Hoover dam next to the first one. Renewable energy generally has few synergy’s as it expands, if anything it tends to get more expensive as the more productive sites are taken up and low capacity rural transmission lines must be upgraded to 100% of the wind power’s capacity, even if it will usually use only 16% of that capacity. In Germany (not sure about the US) consumers pay for most of the transmission line expansion, not windmill producers, so that’s another hidden subsidy which which makes wind comparatively less attractive here in the US.
I must again step in here again. Use your full name please Andrew, respectfully a credible person has nothing to hide.
It seems you are suggesting that the problems facing wind are insurmountable, an absurd claim for those who understand the astounding expense, complexity and ongoing barriers continuing to face nuclear to this day… The technical complexities of designing an electricity grid based on conservation and the integration of renewables are real, but I have met few engineers or entrepreneurs who don’t relish such a challenge, or acknowledge the potential risks are quite low compared with old-economy alternatives.
A refresher on nuclear:
1. It takes well over 10 years on average to design and install a new nuclear plant, making it impossible to respond to market needs, or the need to immediately address climate change.
2. Nuclear power plants are by far the most expensive form of base-load generation. In Ontario where I live, electricity consumers must pay a monthly “debt servicing fee” of more than $20 which pays only the interest on our $20billion in stranded debt from nuclear cost over-runs. Every nuclear project we have ever attempted has significantly exceeded expected costs.
3. No insurance company will insure nuclear power plants (the potential cost and likelihood of an accident make it far too risky) Nuclear plants have to be insured by taxpayers (imagine the one-time cost of even a small accident).
4. Global uranium supplies have likely already peaked relative to demand, resulting in steady increases in the cost of fuel over comparable energy sources.
5. No long-term solution has been devised to address the problem of nuclear waste. Reprocessing only accounts for the removal of a tiny fraction of overall waste created, and it itself creates nuclear waste which cannot be reprocessed. No cost benefit analysis undertaken adequately incorporates the permanent long-term costs of storing nuclear waste, including security. By the time the Yucca mountain storage facility is created, more waste will have been generated in the U.S. alone during construction than the facility will hold. What are the long-term costs of storage? Few people have an answer.
6. Nuclear does not have a perfect safety record. Take a look at a list of “significant” accidents here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_accident
7. No nuclear power plant has EVER been fully decommissioned. The costs of taking apart a reactor are estimated to between 2 and 10 times the cost of initial construction when all factors are considered. “Decommissioning” requires that the rector is cut into small pieces which are sealed in shielded containers and shipped off-site to be disposed of… somewhere. Many plants are in some stage of decommissioning, but none have seen completion.
8. Let us not get into the many facets of nuclear weapons proliferation, heat pollution in lakes and rivers, trace leaks or radioactivity considered ‘normal’, or the straight economics dictating that taxpayers inevitably subsidize nuclear throughout all aspects of the industry.
***Back to stopping climate change*** Those relatively inexpensive and risk free renewables, conservation initiatives, and ingenious small-scale solutions are looking pretty good right now. Not to mention the economic benefits of a new industry, energy security (no fuel costs), and potential economies of scale of green energy sources.
No insurance company insures liability for jetliner crashes or vaccine makers either. Nuclear is not alone in the liability arena. As for fuel, uranium has not been prospected for in 30 years and thorium is quite plentiful. Plants in Asian countries such as Korea have been built in 5-6 years. As for accidents, plants such as SL-1 and Windscale are no more like the new plants than DC-3s are to 747s. As for decommisioning, several plants including Ft. St. Vrain, Elk River, Hallam, and Shippingport have been successfully dismantled.
I guess I cannot see why there cannot continue to be both (renewables and nuclear). Each can fill important parts of the grid. I would think such a mix would be more quickly achieved than building a supergrid with complex storage and control technologies in various stages of testing and deployment.
And for those who have not read my previous posts in IGHIH, I am a geezer (age 43 next month) engineer who has over 21 years in the electric power industry.
What, insurmountable? Where did I say that? Sorry, you seem to have somehow read things which I never wrote.
The question is not the technical feasibility of something, but the cost of doing it relative to the benefit. As an engineer I personally enjoy all sorts of difficult problems, but the existence of a potential problem does not
> 1. It takes well over 10 years on average to design and install a new nuclear plant, making it > impossible to respond to market needs, or the need to immediately address climate change.
What? The electricity market is not the market for teenage girls clothing. We are demanding electricity today, we will be demanding more tomorrow, and even more ten years from now. Current nuclear power plants are extremely profitable, including the tax paid for Yucca mountain (Yucca is not paid by tax payers). That’s a totally bunk point. You also did not explain why it cannot address climate change, or even what you mean by that statement.
> 2. Nuclear power plants are by far the most expensive form of base-load generation.
Wrong. Nuclear is one of the cheapest,
> In Ontario
> where I live, electricity consumers must pay a monthly “debt servicing fee” of more than $20
> which pays only the interest on our $20billion in stranded debt from nuclear cost over-runs.
> Every nuclear project we have ever attempted has significantly exceeded expected costs.
The last plants were the last precisely because they were the most delayed. This is also why they were so expensive. Insinuating that this is predictive for the cost of new plants is dishonest of you.
Perhaps you could apply the same methodology to wind turbines? Find the most mismanaged installations and determine the cost/kW of averaged capacity. I suspect the number you get would not be very flattering for wind. The construction in Ontario encountered repeated re-design due to the instance of your politicians to use Canadian home grown CANDU reactor technology instead of taking off the shelf designs from France or the US. That was compounded by repeated foot-dragging by environmentalists who forced repeated increases and changes to reactor safety mechanisms.
Currently there is a lot of interest in British power, since it would offer foreign operators a quick path to building Nuclear power plants. This is without any promise that the government will pay cost over-runs, which is now unheard of for nuclear power, or even loan guarantees. Texas also has a few plants which will probably be constructed once applications go through, with limited loan guarantees, no financial support from the state or local government, and limited subsidies (maximum $125 Million) from the federal government. Don’t give nuclear power any subsidies for all I care, it doesn’t need it. With electricity prices continuing to increase investors can see that they’re only going to go up from here, nuclear is a great investment (assuming environmentalists like you don’t change the laws half way through or stop finished plants from actually being run).
> 3. No insurance company will insure nuclear power plants (the potential cost and likelihood of > an accident make it far too risky) Nuclear plants have to be insured by taxpayers (imagine the > one-time cost of even a small accident).
Imagine the chance of even a small accident (nearly zero). There hasn’t been a single one in the history of the US civilian nuclear industry. Compare this with the very real healthcare costs we are already paying which have been incurred during accidents which occurred during the construction of wind mills.
> 4. Global uranium supplies have likely already peaked relative to demand, resulting in steady
> increases in the cost of fuel over comparable energy sources.
Another common Greenpeace myth. Nuclear fuel amounts to less than 1% of the cost of running a plant, prices could go up 50 times and it would have less than a 10% increase on the cost of running a plant. Secondly, how could supplies have peaked relative demand if Uranium prices are going down?
http://www.uranium.info/prices/overview.html
Secondly, nearly nothing has been spent on exploration in the last twenty years. Much was prior to Chernobyl, but after that there was massive over capacity, so we’ve had a global Uranium glut for the last twenty years. Only now, because of China’s expansion of capacity, was their any increase in price. However that was short lived, a little capacity expansion occurred, and prices are again down. Capacity expansion for any mineral, especially one like Uranium, doesn’t happen over night. The primary reason for the massive increase during 2007 I outlined above, plant owners wanted to secure supplies going ten years out, they’d rather pay ten times more than the spot price if it means they can avoid letting a plant idle, since running them are so profitable.
http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/explorprice.gif
> 5. No long-term solution has been devised to address the problem of nuclear waste. Reprocessing
> only accounts for the removal of a tiny fraction of overall waste created.
Wrong. Reprocessing removes at least 60% of the volume of the waste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX
> It itself creates nuclear waste which cannot be reprocessed.
Wrong. Never even heard that before. It results in waste which cannot be reprocessed, since that by definition is what you have left over after reprocessing that which can be processed. Reprocessing is not a fission process, so by definition it cannot create more fissile material than previously existed.
> No cost benefit analysis undertaken adequately incorporates the permanent long-term costs of
> storing nuclear waste, including security.
Depends on what you’re thinking of by security and storage. Storage in Yucca mountain has already been paid for by taxes the nuclear industry paid. If you want armed guards standing there for the next 100,000 years, then no, you can’t run a cost benefit analysis for that since we don’t know what the wages of security guards will be 1,000 years from now. But that’s not necessary anyway since anyone wanting to build a nuclear bomb or something would be better off just mining Uranium and running it through centerfuges, as Iran and North Korea have demonstrated.
> By the time the Yucca mountain storage facility is created, more waste will have been generated
> in the U.S. alone during construction than the facility will hold.
Wrong. Yucca mountain is expandable and already is finished. There are just political obstacles to actually storing anything there.
> 6. Nuclear does not have a perfect safety record. Take a look at a list of “significant”
> accidents here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_accident
The US is a country in North America, the proper name is The United States of America.
Civilian means non-military.
I don’t mean to be patronizing, but I tried stating before that I was talking about the US civilian nuclear industry, but you continue to confuse the issue by bringing horrible Russian reactor designs or incidents. There have been operational issues in US plants. But there has not been a single injury due to radiation in the history of the US civilian nuclear industry (or in the Canadian too I think, but I’m not sure about that). There may have been some mechanical injuries, but I don’t think anyone gathers statistics on that.
>> 7. No nuclear power plant has EVER been fully decommissioned. The costs of taking apart a
>> reactor are estimated to between 2 and 10 times the cost of initial construction when all
>> factors are considered. “Decommissioning” requires that the rector is cut into small pieces
>> which are sealed in shielded containers and shipped off-site to be disposed of… somewhere.
>> Many plants are in some stage of decommissioning, but none have seen completion.
Wrong. I don’t blame you for believing this, since it seems to be a common perception. It is however entirely wrong (Though you would have done yourself a favor to check your “facts” before posting them, since it discredits your other points to be so totally proven wrong like this). To my knowledge at least ten former nuclear sites in the US have been returned to Greenfield status (entirely decommissioned, returned to wild state). This is such a routine thing in industry in general, as well as the nuclear industry, that it’s not even news worthy.
http://www.worldenergy.org/publications/survey_of_energy_resources_2007/nuclear/683.asp
> Those relatively inexpensive and risk free renewables, conservation initiatives, and ingenious
> small-scale solutions are looking pretty good right now. Not to mention the economic benefits of
> a new industry, energy security (no fuel costs), and potential economies of scale of green energy
> sources.
Base load power. Pumped storage is the only currently economic method, and cannot be used in much of the world or anywhere in the mid west.
Conservation sounds nice, but it’s a one time thing. If we shut off 10% of our coal plants because we’ve increased conservation we still have not solved the problem of base load power or energy storage. Conservation does not generate electricity, it saves it.
Please note, I’m all for renewable energy. But people need to be realistic about what it can provide, because we need to build a RELIABLE energy infrastructure if we’re serious about replacing coal. Otherwise all we’ve done is provide some nice cheap peak power production and offset some CO2 use. That’s a good start, but it’s not the solution.
Andrew, there are obvious current limitations to renewables… My issue with both the original post and yours however is that they give one message: let’s give up
Your posts disturb me deeply because they suspiciously don’t provide any solution to the issue at hand - climate change. I think you have missed the point of this entire debate. We already have massive amounts of baseload generating capacity, and most of it has a VERY serious flaw - it releases CO2. Any technology that has this flaw can no longer be considered as an acceptable generation technology… period. The problem is that bad.
Renewable energy tech has limitations - overstated in the original post - but these problems are solvable. I see posts like yours as either:
1. a naive assumption that engineers cannot solve the problems with employing renewable technologies
2. the intentional defeatist fogging of the issue based on personal ties to the old line coal or nuclear industry (trolling)
Either way, remember - if your solutions don’t include an immediate and massive reduction in GHG emissions - they have NO VALUE whatsoever, and certainly no place on this blog.
Immediate and massive GHG reductions are not just a technical issue. Has the climate movement involved the regulators (e.g., NARUC)? Swapping out 80% of the installed electric capacity of the US and adding significant new transmission technologies to the grid will require approval from state utility commissions and FERC. I did read with interest a previous post on IGHIH on the Xcel Energy proposed test of a smartgrid in Boulder. Such tests will be needed to convince the regulators that someone is not trying to turn their service territory into a science lab.
If you elimminate all regulatory delays, then certainly a wide variety of technologies are available (even nuclear) to supply low carbon power.
> Andrew, there are obvious current limitations to renewables… My issue with both the original post > and yours however is that they give one message: let’s give up
> Your posts disturb me deeply because they suspiciously don’t provide any solution to the issue
> hand - climate change. I think you have missed the point of this entire debate. We already have
> massive amounts of baseload generating capacity, and most of it has a VERY serious flaw - it
> releases CO2. Any technology that has this flaw can no longer be considered as an acceptable
> generation technology… period. The problem is that bad. ”
Long posts need to be moderated. In the one above the short blurb I addressed the best solution. But you can’t see it yet because it hasn’t been moderated.
Anyway, that’s a cheap shot. We both want to solve the problem of coal power and GHGs. Read my above posts. Too put it succinctly, I think renewable sources are great for up to 20% of grid capacity, but environmentalists need to re-think their stance on nuclear. Before rebuking this point, see what I wrote above since I might have already addressed your points. Here’s a simple break down for you though:
Solar & Wind: Intermittent, capacity to replace coal is limited.
Nuclear: Great base load, low cost. But it has a long lead time so we need to start building now.
Coal: Polluting, twenty times more people than Chernobyl did every year. Not a solution.
I do believe there are solutions. Indeed, solely relying on solar power and wind power may be one of them for people who are willing to pay for the huge over capacity you would need for wind and solar alongside complex pumped storage or battery bank systems.
Perhaps you believe that I think there are no solutions, because you have already decided that nuclear is not a solution, and you interpret my saying “Solar, wind, hydro and Biomass(!?) alone are not practical or cost effective or indeed on average safer solutions than nuclear” as to mean “I like coal power.”
> Renewable energy tech has limitations - overstated in the original post - but these problems
> are solvable. I see posts like yours as either:
> 1. a naive assumption that engineers cannot solve the problems with employing renewable
> technologies
Wrong. It has nothing to do with solving simple engineering problems, such as one must solve when determining how to build bridges across a ravine. Efficient, low cost, electricity storage is not an easy problem to solve. We’ve been working on it for one hundred years. Right now the best thing is pumped storage, but as I’ve pointed out that doesn’t work throughout the mid-west since we lack large hills.
Besides, it seems far more naive to consistently believe the promise of venture capital companies which are always promising some revolutionary technology which will make renewable energy cheap, consistent and low impact. Companies are always promising vapor-ware, but when you’re talking about infrastructure investments which lead times of decades then you need technologies which can be deployed now. Wind can to a limited degree. Nuclear certainly can.
> 2. the intentional defeatist fogging of the issue based on personal ties to the old line coal
> or nuclear industry (trolling)
Ah, now you admit it. You’re not even willing to discuss nuclear power. In fact that’s pretty much the definition of trolling: Instead of giving a substantive argument or rebuttals to my point you simply insult me. I supposedly represent the “nuclear industry” whatever that means. Well, you are probably a lobbyist for the multi-billion dollar solar industry, who is trying to get massive subsidies from US taxpayers so your client can make a nice fat profit.
> Either way, remember - if your solutions don’t include an immediate and massive reduction in
> GHG emissions - they have NO VALUE whatsoever, and certainly no place on this blog.
Agreed!
I also find it interesting that not a single anti-nuclear proponent has addressed my point about France:
“Take on the other hand France, which has even the most ambitious of you wind proponents beat since 1980 when it comes to carbon free power. They have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and it’s 95% fossil fuel free (and 80% nuclear)! Not a single person has died due to radiation in either the civilian French or American nuclear industry. People have been injured by mechanical means, but that’s not intrinsic to the nuclear industry, which actually has a better on the job safety record than some office jobs (check OSHA).”
Would France and the world somehow be better off if they had instead continued to run oil power plants back in 1970 while hoping renewable energy became cheap and practical? Or should they have just run hydro power plants and forgotten about computers, high speed trains and so forth in the name of environmentalism (this would be quite hypocritical of you, given that you’re posting on the internet which is powered by computers powered mostly by coal). Tell me, inquiring minds want to know.
No, back in 1980 you couldn’t deploy solar in any meaningful way, since the development of modern panels stems from developments made in the computer hardware industry. Wind power could be making a larger contribution, but couldn’t replace their nuclear capacity given that Germany has almost reached onshore saturation and only get 8% of their electricity from wind.
If you could change the past would you have France in 1970:
A. Build nuclear as they did, saving lots of GHGs.
B. Forget nuclear, invest a bit more in renewable sources, but add six times the yearly GHG production of the US to our atmosphere.
Another interesting point.
Firstly, let me clearly state that I do not necessarily think lack of Indium will be a determining factor in the adoption of PVs. Supplies will likely expand. But current consumption based on known reserves indicate that the world’s supply of indium will be depleted by 2020. Even before that of uranium, based on currently known reserves (1). Without indium, there are no economical thin film photo voltaic panels.
Indium is already more expensive than Uranium(!), $1,000 per kg for indium vs. $151.8 per kg for Uranium oxide (2). Sure, perhaps a different process could be used. But the same goes for Nuclear, they could use thorium.
Concentrated solar is a lot less sexy, pretty boring actually. But it’s a proven alternative which could provide base load power. If we’re not going to do nuclear, and environmentalists are going to block all new pumped storage, then we ought to do concentrated solar. Or at least build concentrated solar in equal quantity to PV, those two could ACTUALLY complement each other, since humans have direct control over when the power of a concentrated solar setup is used. Unlike the wind-solar pipe dreams, where the idea seems to be building lots of solar panels and windmills, crossing your fingers and hoping that whenever the sun doesn’t shine the wind will blow.
(1): http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426051.200-earths-natural-wealth-an-audit.html
(2): http://www.uranium.info/