The basic point I obviously did not communicate clearly enough is that when name plate capacity exceeds demand, actual production will also exceed demand on windy days.
This means that your total build of wind capacity cannot exceed a nameplate capacity equal to your base demand unless you are willing to throw part of your electricity production away, or have a way to store that surplus.
And the gap between average output and nameplate capacity always gets filled by gas.
Thus a decision to rely on wind, is in fact a decision to rely mostly on gas, with some wind power thrown in, and this will hold true until the day someone invents a battery far beyond anything we have.
I am and I do.
The point which I have apparently repeatedly failed to get across is that even including the pumped storage facilities and the losses on windy days a good wind location will provide cheaper MWh than nuclear plants.
Pumped hydro. Gravitational potential energy is the lowest-loss energy storage known to man.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Eh, well, it appears you are wrong. At least in europe. The eocd, EU, and IEA studies I just googled again to check, all site prices per kwh for new nuclear a bit below that of wind, and while both wind and nuclear really do require pumped storage for optimal operation, the storage needed for nuclear should be much smaller, and thus cheaper than that needed for wind. The numbers I can find for the US look a heck of a lot more favorable for wind than the european ones, I will freely grant, but we have neither a great plains to place windmills on, nor a legal system that allows opponents to increase capital costs via nusiance lawsuits.
There are extant examples of wholly carbon free electricity grids. They all rely on favorable geology (hydro, geotermal) and nuclear. And these technologies can be scaled up to meet a future with very high electricity demand, so these are the technologies we should deploy. We know this will work, because it already does. In this context, wind is, basically, nothing but a distraction. The concrete in the bases would be better poured into containment domes, and the steel better used in pressure vessles.
(note that I am not really a fan of the extant nuclear industry either. Its not ambitious enough, by far. We need to increase our build rate by orders of magnitude)
double plus good... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
"doing some good", "gradual improvements", "20 % decrease in carbon emmisions"- all these are things that strike me as "Not fracking good enough". Carbon has to be entirely removed from electricity production, because nothing can really be done to clean up transport, industry or heating without clean electricity.
Then I flatly fail to comprehend why you take issue with wind and solar. To achieve that target - which seems like a sensible and responsible thing to do - you'll need to mobilise a considerable fraction of our industrial capacity. Ignoring an entire class of energy technology strikes me as a poor way to mobilise industrial capacity swiftly.
any decrease in electricity consumption your gain from more efficient appliances and tvs, ect is going to evaporate when you plug in your electric car to your mains
Cars are never going to be economical for bulk transportation over middling to long distances. The thermodynamics favour rail and water too massively for that. So no, there will not be a massive migration to electrical cars. There will be a considerable migration to electrical trains, but they are more energy-efficient than cars pr. person-km and ton-km. By around an order of magnitude...
not to mention what asking industry to burn as little gas and coal as possible will do to demand.
Presuming that industrial production continues at its present pace and energy intensity. Which is a dubious assumption, since we are entering a century of widespread raw material scarcity (not just energy, though that is certainly the most pressing constraint).
And, frankly, much of what is being produced is worthless garbage that we would be better off without.
The International Energy Agency (which I'd described as mildy pro-nuke, and mildly anti-wind) provided this in its 2007 outlook:
So: fairly comparable costs for wind and nukes.
French numbers (by the DGEMP) tend to be lower, but French numbers are critically dependent on public or quasi-public cost of funding for the investment - and using such cost of funding for wind would also do wonders for its cost (and thus my recommendantion to do such public funding in both sectors).
Altogether, I'd say that well-run, publicly funded nuclear MWh are somewhat cheaper than wind, but the range for nuclear cost, both for uncertainty and to discount for less-well run organisations, is much higher for nuclear. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
firstly, as you scale up wind to a bigger proportion of the grid, the quality of your sites degrades quickly
So what? That's an argument against trying for 100 % wind, which is a crude straw man that nobody is defending.
You propose a 0/0/80/20 mix.
I tell you that this is unlikely to be economical, and is susceptible to all the normal risks of monocropping vis-a-vis systemic failures.
A 80/0/0/20 mix is equally unlikely to be economical, but that is irrelevant, because no sane person proposes this mix. Personally, I could see a 45/25/10/20 mix, if solar matures rapidly, or a 45/10/25/20 mix if it does not. Give or take ten to twenty percentage points.
Alternatively, one can consider the marginal cost of adding capacity. Since nuclear has already harvested all the economies of scale that are likely to apply, you are facing constant or increasing marginal cost as you add nuclear to the energy mix. Wind has harvested much but not all of its economies of scale, so for a while you're going to see declining marginal cost before they start going up again.
Now, in any scenario where you have two or more factors of production that all have constant or rising marginal cost, it makes sense to diversify. This is really, really simple arithmetic...
There is an issue around nuclear power: some people see it in terms of cost benefit analysis and some simply believe that the risks are such as to exclude it - they effectively belief the costs are unbounded. You can't solve that by talking about cost.
Two problems with this: firstly, as you scale up wind to a bigger proportion of the grid, the quality of your sites degrades quickly, and this is really bad for their economics (this is why nearly all current danish build is at sea or replacement of existant turbines, all quality sites are in use) Secondly.. Eh, well, it appears you are wrong. At least in europe. The eocd, EU, and IEA studies I just googled again to check, all site prices per kwh for new nuclear a bit below that of wind, and while both wind and nuclear really do require pumped storage for optimal operation, the storage needed for nuclear should be much smaller, and thus cheaper than that needed for wind. The numbers I can find for the US look a heck of a lot more favorable for wind than the european ones, I will freely grant, but we have neither a great plains to place windmills on, nor a legal system that allows opponents to increase capital costs via nusiance lawsuits.
1. Quality of sites degrade quickly, using tiny Denmark as an example? Straw man AND false. Of course in Europe coastal sites have stronger mean annual winds, but "degradation" doesn't equal unviable. Long-term cost of energy calculations for wind include the less productive inland sites, which also have lower O&M costs. Secondly, the industry has developed a generation of multi-megawatt scale turbines to take advantage of inland winds, with shifted power curves and larger rotors. Third, even in northern Germany, so-called packed, there's enough virgin sites remaining for years of intense build-out. The situation is actually a socio-political one, solved as people become more at ease living with windparks.
There is barely a replacement industry in Denmark, and it's because of government policies, not lack of sites. Reality is the political and utility will has CHOSEN to go offshore, partly because we need to anyway, but also to avoid the socio-political issues. And inland sites don't have "bad economics" when properly sited, simply not as good as coastal areas, which have other mixed use problems. Further, for those who constantly analyze actual data, a significant portion of "degradation" comes from poor siting, which is easy to remedy.
US costs "heck of a lot more favorable for wind than European ones?" Europe and the US both have a wide mix of wind resources, even if the Great Plains is the US's Saudi Arabia. When one factors in proximity to load, transmission issues and grid upgrades, and distance in general, Europe has it all over the US. Further, turbines in Europe are currently 2-5% more efficient than when the same turbines are placed in the US, when adjusting for wind differences. This is because of turbulence (minor) and infrastructure (major.) The European infrastructure advantage will disappear over time, but turbulence issues will remain.
Bottom line on costs, as Colman pointed out, I'm one who uses the costs that are current, knowing that there's a huge margin of error remaining. In the case of nuclear, it never goes down, and no one can yet assume externalities are properly accounted for.
5. "increase capital costs via nuisance lawsuits?" Wave your true colors here, Thomas. We're not talking about customers not knowing how to hold a cup of hot coffee. We're talking about the right of the citizenry to demand true accounting, and science-based environmental impact statements which include real assessment of externalities. That's only a nuisance in dictatorships, or perhaps centralized control of power generation. Say what you will, the nuclear industry has been guilty of lying and malfeasance throughout the world, on a major scale, to this day. It's even too soon to know if France is the exception or not, but everywhere else in the world the evidence is in, and the track record of deceit is appalling. Every month for the past three decades another example of lies and cover-ups is reported, the latest being yesterday's fine to Babcock and Wilcox for not reporting an emergency according the US NRC regulation.
Given the half-lives involved in the technology, calling what remains of the system of legal redress a "nuisance" denotes a certain lack of reality in your viewpoint, or at best a world view needing some enlightenment.
Though you won this round, as I spent over nearly three hours reading and writing here, when i should have been focused on reality. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
Adressing a few of your points: I include pumped storage because I am in no way interested in what the cost of a given energy source is in a grid that loadbalances with natural gas. I consider natural gas burning for power a grossly unacceptable waste of a valuable resource, a irresponsible risk to the climate, and absurdly expensive. With current technology, that means supply-side loadbalancing has to be done with hydro or throtthling of nukes. If we invent a cheaper solution for energystorage, that would be wonderful, but its not really relevant for generation.
The US economics are more favorable because the US is less densely populated, which means that all else equal, it has more good wind sites per capita. Mackay made a very illustrative graph about this, sec.. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/business/energy-environment/29iht-sustain.html
Increasing nuclear cost via nusiance lawsuits was, and remains, an explicit strategy of american anti-nuclear activists. They do not hide or deny this. I can go qoute hunting, but it isnt very relevant for a discussion of global energy strategy as it is simply an unique economic hazard specific to the US nuclear industry, and equating it to due dilligence hearings in europe or elsewhere would be wholly false, in either direction.
Externality studies are an obsession of mine, and ExternE is in fact what converted me to a nuclear advocate, because it put numbers on exactly how much damage our current, coal and gas based grid is doing year in, year out. Every coal plant in operation is a slow-motion disaster. and looking at the actual methods used, arguing with a straight face that these studies are in any way lowballing the damage of nuclear is impossible. There are uncertainties, yes. But they are of the "we have no good feel for how much we are overstating the danger of nuclear here". kind.
.. Waste heat ecological impact? Ehh.. there is one. Any heat engine of this size is going to heat the water body it uses for cooling, which shifts ecological balances of which species thrive in that strech of water. For plants near the sea, this essentially doesnt matter, because the sea is too big a heat sink to affect, and if you are directly replacing a coal plant with a nuke plant in the same location, it doesnt matter either, since after decades of operation, the local water system will have adapted to the warmer water, and removing the heat source would be the disruptive act. This is not, in general, a very worrysome type of enviormental impact, however. as the footprint is minute, and non-toxic.
Disallowing nuclear power is not the only conscious political choice Denmark has made. Disallowing new wind farms is another conscious political choice. Banning congestion charges is another conscious political choice. Building two new highways every time we do maintenance on one railway line is a conscious political choice.
So let's not pretend that Denmark is an example of a wind/conservation strategy. That was almost true in the 90s, but elections have consequences. Specifically, the election of the current crop of anti-wind, pro-car, anti-conservation, neoliberals had disastrous consequences.
Thomas' position is not unusual, including his tone. Do you remember Ustenzel? En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
So, irrespective of the cost to Danish generators (and you should be happy about coal-plants oweners losing money, right?); it's a positive to Danish consumers and taxpayers.
3) that's an argument not to do anything. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
The energy debate in Denmark post the 70s oil crisis was explicitly between a bet on nuclear and a bet on renewables. Looking at the actual consequences of the choice made, when compared to the people who came down on the other side of the fence, IE: Sweden, France, the wrong side won in Denmark.
The decisions not to expand wind further in denmark have a hell of a lot to do with the costs of loadbalancing it.
The decision not to continue expanding wind in Denmark has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with the fact that Fogh and that useful idiot he installed as minister for the environment hated Sven Auken's guts. Therefore, any project that Sven Auken liked was bad simply by virtue of the fact that Sven Auken liked it. Sven Auken liked wind. Therefore, wind was bad.
(Yes, for more than half a decade, Denmark based our policy in a vital strategic sector like energy supply on "not invented here" and personal animosity towards the outgoing administration. Yes, Danish right-wing politicians really are that petty and stupid.)
efficiency is shiny, but it tends to induce jevrons paradox effects
Only under laissez-faire. In a properly managed industrial production economy, there is nothing which prevents you from adjusting product taxes to compensate for lower cost.
And as far as heat and electricity goes, Jevron's effects are minor to negligible, because heat and electricity are infrastructure, not consumer goods.
If mankind is still about in a thousand years, noone is going to be dying from cancer
And by 2010, we'll have nuclear-powered airplanes. Oh, wait...
Are you open to changing your views when confronted with evidence, i am.
But i'm betting you have some better goal in life, and that tech support is not it, it's just a job for now. What do you want to be doing in ten years?
Poor phrasing, yeah, grant you that. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
Yeah, right, just in your previous comment you were questioning his motives. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
We have a lot of arguments to defend the qualities of wind power and critique some of the claims made by Thomas, so let's focus on these rather than on ad hominems. While partial to nuclear, Thomas' arguments are rational and follow traditional lines that we are all-too-familar with, so let's just respond as we know we can rather than question his motives or good faith.
Don't forget that even within the wind industry, many of the points we regularly make here on ET are not that well known (such as the size of merit-order effect on prices of wind). In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
i think i'll just leave it alone. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
3. efficiency is shiny, but it tends to induce jevrons paradox effects, so I dont trust it as a solution to AGW. Better energy efficiency will make mankind richer, it will only reduce actual energy use if future generations behave in ways no past generation of mankind ever has, and use machines less while they get cheaper to use.
The Jevons paradox goes beyond a normal division of the gains of efficiency between demand and supply to an increase in quantity demanded of the final product exceeding the efficiency gain.
However, where Jevon first observed it, it was in a market for a product where large numbers of low income consumers faced a tight budget constraint, and reduction of the price of coal-fired heat allowed switching to coal burning furnaces from, eg, wood.
Its a common abuse of the Jevon's paradox itself, as well as the far more common cases where Jevon's effect does not apply but the reduction in consumption of the input is less than the efficiency gain, to take it from arguing against sole reliance on efficiency gains - the techno-cornucopian position - to arguing against the benefit of pursuing efficiency gains at all.
We already know that efficiency gains alone are not going to be enough, because as we mine the easiest to reach inefficiencies, the result is a more efficient system with less inefficiency to be mined.
But that is no argument against replacing policies that support and encourage inefficient energy use with policies that support and encourage more efficient use. Its just an argument that efficiency on its own is not sufficient. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Demonstrably, utterly false. Why do you keep pushing this fantasy? The policy decisions of the Fogh cabinet (which I listed in a previous comment, and which you didn't deny but switched to criticise the present policy of parties) and their justifications are well known, as are their effects. And it is also well known that the Danish public utilities themselves prepared studies already back then showing that wind with 50% grid penetration can be easily be integrated in the current grid.
Gas has to go.
Yes, and before it, coal. While gas plants are less CO2 intensive and cheaper for load balancing than coal or oil, on the long run we need CO2-free peaker plants/energy storage, whatever will provide baseload. Now: are you advocating inaction on baseload until 100% replacement of peaker plants is possible?...
wind is a less appropriate technology in tokyo than it is in Texas
This is not an argument but flashy rhetoric. Europe is not one single megapolis like Tokyo, and suburban sprawl USA (including large swathes of Texas) is not a wilderness area like you imagine Texas. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
If those lawsuits are without merit, and the activists lose them, then it's the activists' costs that increases, not that of nuclear. If the lawsuits are with merit, then what exactly are you complaining about? They are only turning externalities into internalities. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
What deterred US nuclear build for decades had little or nothing to do with activist tactics, rather cost and safety issues, as well as little utility desire to counter the prevailing zeitgeist. Add to that the ease of developing various nat gas, because of artificially low fossil prices, and ease and cost of financing.
Please feel free to rejoin reality at any time. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
If those lawsuits are without merit, and the activists lose them, then it's the activists' costs that increases, not that of nuclear.
Not necessarily. Not all American states have anti-SLAPP statutes on the books, and the winning side is not always awarded compensation for their costs.
Sigh. That was the nighties. Then came the naughties, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen made sure to change the credits system so that on-shore installations practically stopped (they only had a second boost thanks to a time-limited repowering programme, which proveed uncomfortably successful for the government); and he halted the projecting of the next off-shore farms in the schedule made law by the previous SocDem government, with the excuse that Denmark already reached the foreseeen share of renewables. (Yes, projecting began again five years later, but you'll see its effects on Denmark's CO2 emissions only in the coming years.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
(I watched bits of connie hedegårds confirmation hearing this morning. Depressing as fuck, as she was standing by the danish consensus on energy policy, and it is a consensus that has failed to deliver)
SF has a coal phaseout policy.
Now, if you subscribe to the theory that SF is firmly installed in S' back pocket, that doesn't matter. But if you subscribe to that theory, you really rather need to take a look at the last EP and municipal elections...
Don't mix past and present. I don't know what the parties current plans are, but the overall failure over the past decade can be blamed 100% on Fogh. The previous SocDem plan was all-out. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
have a way to store that surplus.
that's where the electric cars in everyones' garages come in, topping up all night long.
or have downtown daytime charging stations for all the office workers' parked cars, that themselves are charged up during the windy nights.
having 300% of nameplate would also lower the price to the public, no?
lowered tax revenue from utilities' lower income could be boosted in compensation, by schemes like industrial locations to attract new business investment in low footprint businesses, offering extra low electricity rates, especially for night time automatised production facilities.
i don't see why a simpler, lower-tech version could be offered to small, poor countries with wind too, with weights lifted through electrical power at night, left to descend during the day, and geared to turbines that would charge transport batteries or generate current for daytime use on windless days.
all the shoreline communities with exposure to the trade winds would qualify, i imagine.
in a planet that is moving into a more active seismical cycle, might it not be foolish to think we know the future costs of storing nuclear waste are going to remain stable? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
in a planet that is moving into a more active seismical cycle
What?
i installed that quake extension for firefox, it is quite eye-opening, though i set it low at 3.
i'm not that far from l'aquila, and in a 400 year old house, so i do think about it a lot.
i don't have the stats, do you?
the fact that it's prophesied by numerous seers from many cultures is not adding to my concern, at least on a conscious level, lol.
try the extension, the popups are interesting enough as you realise how much rocking is going on globally.
when the screen starts shaking, (local quivers), as it has the last two days in a row here, i start coiling my muscles, ready to spring somewhere safe(r).
i know science can't predict earthquakes very well yet, but it's getting good at linking the information. having indonesia and l'aquila last year, and haiti this year may be no formal trend, but it's walking and quacking, i'll be thinking about statistics i'm sure as i leap from a window!
ireland is unusually blessed with stability in this regard... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
It sounds like you're saying that because you're more aware of quakes there must be more of them, which would be bullshit. I assume that's not what you mean.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Are Earthquakes Really on the Increase?
Are Earthquakes Really on the Increase? We continue to be asked by many people throughout the world if earthquakes are on the increase. Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant. A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations and the data now comes in rapidly from these stations by electronic mail, internet and satellite. This increase in the number of stations and the more timely receipt of data has allowed us and other seismological centers to locate earthquakes more rapidly and to locate many small earthquakes which were undetected in earlier years. The NEIC now locates about 20,000 earthquakes each year or approximately 50 per day. Also, because of the improvements in communications and the increased interest in the environment and natural disasters, the public now learns about more earthquakes. According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 17 major earthquakes (7.0 - 7.9) and one great earthquake (8.0 or above) in any given year.
We continue to be asked by many people throughout the world if earthquakes are on the increase. Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant.
A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations and the data now comes in rapidly from these stations by electronic mail, internet and satellite. This increase in the number of stations and the more timely receipt of data has allowed us and other seismological centers to locate earthquakes more rapidly and to locate many small earthquakes which were undetected in earlier years. The NEIC now locates about 20,000 earthquakes each year or approximately 50 per day. Also, because of the improvements in communications and the increased interest in the environment and natural disasters, the public now learns about more earthquakes.
According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 17 major earthquakes (7.0 - 7.9) and one great earthquake (8.0 or above) in any given year.
Also, some stats here.
The stats are interesting - numbers for catastrophic quakes remain relatively constant, very small earthquake numbers have dropped, and there was a trend and spike for mid-sized earthquakes that peaked in 2008.
I'm not totally convinced that was an effect of improved monitoring. You'd need to check info about the total number of monitoring stations to know for sure.
This was 2000 to 2010 only. Numbers for previous decades are available, if anyone wants to dig through them.
apologies to all for not being fact based, and thanks to Colman for calling it out. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
In the larger cities of most low income countries (and in most low income countries, electric grids are most commonly in place in the larger cities), the excess in demand over supply capacity is addressed by system wide brown-outs and rolling black-outs, and as a result, there is widely dispersed energy storage to cope. If substantial wind capacity is added, the intermittent brown-outs become less frequent, as does the number of days per month that any given neighborhood is blacked out. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
