Abbott & NLP: x2 Lost Wars Already, #3 Renewable Energy

[pietillidie]

[Tannin]

[Mugwump]

[HAL]

I think he knows a great deal.

[Mugwump]

^Tannin, thanks for the links above. I'm on leave next week and I'll read them carefully. As I am not personally familiar with the data, I admit I do not have a hands-on view. I do, however, live with high-quality engineers and scientists at work, adn I had dinner with several last night.

All of them tell me that, absent some serious battery breakthrough (several of them were optimistic about the potential of graphene, here), renewables will need to be backed up by fossil fuel infrastructure comparable to today's capacity, to deal with the problem of intermittency. So renewable power involves something like duplicate infrastructure, with capital costs that are unlikely to be politically acceptable to the public.

Everything is political in the end, of course - you can pay for that infrastructure, and I understand that Germany -where the political will has been huge - managed to produce 50% of its electricity from solar a few weeks back, when it was 37 deg and a holiday. It is a striking number, even under favourable conditions.

I will read your links, when I have time. I'm comfortable doing the numbers, if I can find an impartial data set, and it's an interesting topic.

[Wokko]

The problem is baseline power and always has been. Nuclear covers that if the NIMBYs will get out of the way. We'd have enough uranium here to power ourselves for a few thousand years while renewables and storage become a viable option for baseline power. I'm sure a modern 2015 designed reactor built in a highly geologically stable area in Australia (so pretty much all of it) would be perfectly safe.

[David]

[Tannin]

Cheers Wokko. If I was to say that "there is no such thing as baseload power" it would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. There is almost no such thing as "baseload" power. Traditionally, most power was generated in large, centralised fossil-fueled plants burning coal. (Or sometimes something else; mostly coal though.) These plants, for technical reasons, were (and still are) unable to vary their output in response to demand. It takes hours or even days to bring one up to full production, and just as long to spin it down again. (Nuclear plants are even worse in this regard: you can't just "switch off" a reactor anymore than you can start one up at a moment's notice. And they usually hate running at low power settings - the Chernobyl disaster was caused by, among several other things, trying to shut the thing off too fast without allowing time for the xenon poisoning to decay. But that's off the point here.)

In consequence, like most countries, we ended up with a number of large so-called "baseload" plants which had to run all day, every day whether the power was needed or not, and a smaller number of peaking plants which cost more to run but could switch on and off relatively rapidly (at something like a half-hour's notice usually) to deal with the daytime and late afternoon peaks, and also to be on standby for both planned and unplanned outages from the "baseload" stations. Unfortunately, this model was unworkable as it stood: either you had a lot of expensive peaking capacity (which made power rather dear) or else you had to increase the "baseload" generation well beyond the actual minimum daily load and waste a lot of power (which is also expensive). Additionally, you needed large spinning reserves - generators powered up and consuming coal but not connected to the grid. Spinning reserve was needed purely for unexpected short-term demand spikes and (more commonly) to cut in at short notice (roughly between 10 seconds and 10 minutes) to deal with unplanned outages. Obviously, spinning reserve is very wasteful - except when you need it!

There was no solution to this dilemma on the generation side of the supply-demand equation. It was solved instead by artifically manipulating demand by time-shifting as many power-intensive tasks as possible to off-peak periods - notably domestic and commercial hot water services with overnight storage heaters, domestic heating with "heat banks", and a variety of non time-critical industrial processes. All of this was done simply to compensate for the inability of "baseload" generators to vary their output in response to demand. In recent years we have seen this same idea taken further with time-variable industrial supply contracts where, in exchange for a substantial discount, many large industrial and commercial users have some of their power switched off remotely by the power utility. For example, industrial buildings can have their air conditioning shut down for an hour or so during large demand peaks, which isn't noticable so long as it's only off for a short time.

Take away the existing artifical time constraints on power use (these are mostly enforced through time-of-day pricing mechanisms) and there is very little demand for power between (roughly) midnight and (roughly) dawn. If the trouble with most renewable power is that you can't turn it on when the sun has set and the wind isn't blowing, the trouble with old-style "baseload" power is that you can't turn it off when no-one wants the electricity.

[HAL]

Can you think of another example?

[Tannin]

Still replying to Wokko, let's consider nuclear power. We will consider safety first. Despite the wild claims of pro-nuclear activists, it isn't "safe", far from it - but then neither is coal. Or gas. Even renewable technolgies carry a certain amount of risk. You see figures purporting to show that nuclear is the safest form of power generation ever discovered, and it's easy enough to concoct such numbers by buggerising about with your starting assumptions in such a way as to rule out almost everything short of being present at a core meltdown, but they are not credible. Equally absurd are the numbers some of the nuttier anti-nuclear activists cite. On balance, the answer lies somewhere in-between those two extremes and, at least in the short to medium term, rather closer to the "safe" side than the "dangerous" side, provided only that we assume the extensive (and very expensive!) safeguards specified by international best practice.

Now let's turn to environmental consequences (setting aside radiation and weapons proliferation concerns). Contrary to the claims of nuclear activists, nuclear power is not a zero carbon technology. There is substantial carbon generation involved in the extraction and processing of the fuel, and a very large one-off carbon hit during the construction phase. Because the life of a nuclear plant is quite short - around 40 years, give or take - the "one-time" carbon cost is quite significant. Nuclear power isn't in the same street, carbon-wise, as wind, tidal, solar or hydro. It is nevertheless vastly superior to coal and gas. It's not "no carbon", but it is "low carbon".

In summary so far, nuclear power isn't ideal from a safety or a carbon-release point of view, but it is quite good.

Finally, let's consider the economics which are, in three words, somewhere betwen bad and terrible. It is very, very expensive. Most of the world pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants several decades ago, and this wasn't because of Three-mile Island and it wasn't because of Chernobyl - though neither of these helped - it was simply because the plants take years to build (closer to decades in some cases) and they are incredibly expensive. Most of the Western world's tiny handful of new-build reactors are only proceeding because of massive government subsidies (either direct subsidies or - more commonly - not-so-well hidden subsidies delivered via commercially insane power purchase contracts).

Nuclear power plants also take a very long time to construct, and the newer, more technologically attractive late-generation power plants we read about from time to time will take still longer because we don't even have a final design for them yet. By the time we could decide on and legislate for and build a nuclear power plant here in Australia - think 10 years absolute minimum, almost certainly closer to 20 years - the cost penalty will be even bigger than it is today. There is no reason to think that nuclear plant will get any cheaper, and every reason to expect that renewables like solar and wind will continue their dramatic and sustained price drops, and that the cost of storage will drop even faster.

In short, nuclear is an answer, it's just not a very good one.

[Tannin]

To be complete, I should also mention fusion power. Seventy-odd years ago, the commercial debut of fusion power was 20 or 30 years off. Today, after 60 or 70 years of effort and untold billions of dollars tipped over it, the commercial debut of fusion power is 20 or 30 years off.

[Tannin]

[Mugwump]

[Mugwump]

[pietillidie]

Oh what reactionary BS you've posted in this thread, Mugwump, and especially laughable in a discussion on just about the most tyrannical industry known to humanity.

The only hysteria here lies in your strained efforts to read Rundle legalistically when blind Freddy can see he is clearly not even close to deploying that genre here

Even worse, you've trotted out all the old monopoly fear lines in defense of a once necessary evil that needs to be booted forth from humanity.