You are also confusing “efficiency” with “generating power”.

Hmmm … the pot calls the kettle black. You are the one who thinks greater efficiency can meet longterm energy demand. At best, it can defer the day when we need to install new capacity, or lower our per capita demand, but it can’t deliver any new capacity and unless we retire some fossil capacity as a consequence then our output will be the same.

Give up Fran, your arguments are full of holes

Hardly. You refuse to stand behind your claims. If you really believed nuclear could not be viable, you’d favour internalising energy externalities, abolishing MRET and allowing nuclear to compete on a level playing field.

That you don’t shows that you are merely engaging in wishful thinking which you yourself don’t believe.

Good job you don’t work in science, or science funding, with your eyes fastened firmly on the rear view mirror.

You are also confusing “efficiency” with “generating power”.

You also made a total dog’s breakfast of both your assumptions AND maths on solar power.

You willfully misrepresent the data at every turn.

Give up Fran, your arguments are full of holes.

At the moment the Russians are working on building an IFR at about $1000 per KWe. It should be online in 2015. If they succeed it will have a payback time of 1 year and maybe less. Right now, pumping gas costs the Russians 45% of the gas they export just in the energy to pump it west to Europe. They will be able to sell that gas and the energy cost will be near zero, and maybe less than zero if they can run it on waste that people pay them to haul away.

But frankly, I am agnostic. Why don’t we remove all the subsidies and all the RECs and all the policy objections, impose a proper cost on the externalities of all sources and then let everyone with the resources and expertise bid to supply power.

If nuclear really is as expensive as you say, then what you or I think about it will be moot. You won’t have to ban it — nobody will supply it because they won’t be competitive. If PV works out as being economically viable, lots of it will be taken up and I will party just as hard as anyone about that result.

It’s pretty simple really.

In the meantime though this doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with future energy demand. No conceivable combination of efficiency measures can generate enough power to render fossil energy redundant. Finding ways to generate the right mix of energy supply at acceptable cost is essential. And dealing with 13%, if you could still leaves the other 87% (less hydro) to deal with.

We don’t have to do anything either 100% or 0%, in order to make a difference. That is the distinction between pale green and deep green, I guess. I would be delighted if some people make some changes. No policy or activity has to be 100% of households doing the same thing.

Have a look at the link @144 and my accompanying remarks.

“Personally, I would be quite OK with spending 2-3 times what nuclear costs per unit of output”

A new study puts the LCOE generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from US $250 – $300 per MWh.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants/

That would be A$290 – A$350 per MWh for nuclear power.

Compare that with the other options on that graph. And consider that they probably haven’t properly included all the costs for waste disposal.

Where is this 2-3 times cost comparison in favour of nuclear? Looks to me like you have the comparison around the wrong way.

Fran @142, you are still making absurd claims. And you still haven’t apologised for your sarcasm.

There was nothing sarcastic about flying with the angels (not fairies). I was sending you a bouquet not sarcasm.

As to my figure for household consumption I relied on this:

The ‘average’ household in Australia supposedly uses around 15 to 20 kWh of electricity per day.

You say

The 2008 target of 6800 gigawatt hours (GWh) is equivalent to the residential electricity consumption of more than 1.4 million Australian households.”

Well that’s not close to being the total number of households in Australa, unless you’re saying each household has 15 people in it. Last I heard, the average household size was under 3.

The number of households in Australia is projected to increase from 7.4 million in 2001 to between 10.2 and 10.8 million in 2026, an increase of between 39% and 47%.

The same source suggests 2.3 per household by 2026. Your figure would be less than 20% of households.

From actual operating data, averaged over a year, we can get an average of 6 kWh/day from 6 panels (a 1.3 kW system). It is not unreasonable to think that 12 panels (a 2.6 kW system) will give about 12 kWh/day averaged over a year.

OK … let’s accept your figures for the sake of argument. Your proposal is to produce 12KwH per day per household for an entire year * 1 million households using PV panels, correct? You say you can buy them for about $21,700 correct?

OK so that’s 1,000,000 * $21,700 for an installed capacity of 2.6 KWe * 1,000,000 or $21.7bn for 2.6GWe or about 8.3 billion per GWe installed. If the panels last 60 years without change or loss in harvesting effectiveness and nuclear’s current cost remains the same then it only costs a bit more than double nuclear power’s cost, not including the storage needed to capture all that output and hold it through periods of low insolation or RTE losses or decommissioning cost.

This seems fabulously optimistic.

How on earth did you manage to escalate $21 billion to $702 billion?

I redid my calculation and it seems I used a couple too many zeroes on the input when calculating the number of systems. Those calculators should include commas! I apologise for that. And of course I was using 50k per system costing initially.

Fran, your estimate of 13% household consumption would appear to be too low, by quite a margin.

Energy and electricity overlap but they are not the same. Gas is separate as you know.

Fran, I think you are seriously distorting the available figures, to suit your anti-solar, pro-nuclear story.

I’m not anti-solar at all. Personally, I would be quite OK with spending 2-3 times what nuclear costs per unit of output if the whole thing could start tomorrow. Time is of the essence. But even allowing 30 years of life for PV at the average you specify, we are closer to six times the cost and of course, once you do cover your (shrinking) 13% where do you go next? We need to get down to near zero emissions by 2050 if not 2030. bear in mind also that with nuclear you get other benefits — flash desal and water/gas pumping during low periods of demand for example; use of process heat to reconstitute boron to run cars and buses and so forth. With the spare capacity left in nuclear power we could resupply our river systems with potable water. These are benefits PV cannot supply.

On our electricity bill, kWh is reported as “Units”.

They give you the Total units consumed for the billing period, and they also give you an average Daily consumption in units/day.

If you have SmartPower and solar PV, they THEN give you two more pages of close-packed figures to calculate whether they owe you or not. It is enough to make a normal person go cross-eyed, checking it.

http://www.sunpowercorp.com.au/utility/why-solar/why-pv.php

It gives the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) in A$ for 2009/2010. Check the horizontal axis of the graph $AUD/MWh.

LCOE is the total installed cost of a system – including the cost of land, building materials, construction and maintenance – divided by the power generated by the system.

Solar PV is $114 – $183 per MWh, or in other words 11-18 cents per kWh.

Synergy currently charges: Peak 32 cents/kWh, Shoulder 19 cents/kWh, Off-Peak 9 cents/kWh for their dirty coal-fired power.

It looks pretty close to game-on for solar PV, as far as I can see!

According to a government report: “The 2008 target of 6800 gigawatt hours (GWh) is equivalent to the residential electricity consumption of more than 1.4 million Australian households.”

This comes from: http://www.orer.gov.au/publications/media-releases/mr01feb10.html

That gives us 4,857 kWh/household/year.

Divided by 365 days/year, that gives us 13.3 kWh/day.

Government figures, Fran. And you would have it that 12 kWh/day is “flying with the fairies”?

We do not need to resort to a bunch of spurious square meterage estimates. From actual operating data, averaged over a year, we can get an average of 6 kWh/day from 6 panels (a 1.3 kW system). It is not unreasonable to think that 12 panels (a 2.6 kW system) will give about 12 kWh/day averaged over a year.

If we assume no rebates and no system of supporting mitigation of climate change, and use the AustralSun offering of $12,500 for 1.5 kW, then prorata we have $21,700 for a 2.6 kW system.

For 1 million households, that is $21 billion, unless I am sorely mistaken. If the government funded this to the tune of say 20%, it would be $4 billion.

Meanwhile you are saying “…you would still be looking at $702 billion dollars, which assuming we put 5% of GDP into funding it would be paid off by … err … 2150″

How on earth did you manage to escalate $21 billion to $702 billion?

Incidentally, according to the government figures, households consume 26.7% of electricity generated.

http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/drs/indicator/326/index.html

Scroll down to the table “Energy end-use by source and by sector”, and look at the column labelled electricity, and the figures for Residential and Total. Residential 184.4
Total 689.9

Percentage = 184.4/689.9 *100% = 26.7%

Fran, your estimate of 13% household consumption would appear to be too low, by quite a margin.
Just as your estimate of the cost of individual solar systems is too high, by quite a margin.
Just as your estimate of the impost on government coffers is too high, by quite a margin.

Fran, I think you are seriously distorting the available figures, to suit your anti-solar, pro-nuclear story.

Fran @138, something else you might like to consider, is that NOBODY anywhere has suggested that household solar panels will replace ALL baseload.

Actually Elise I didn’t consider replacing all baseload but rather the 13% of it going to households — i.e. where households’ net demand was zero. I think it was either BilB or Hannah’s Dad who suggested that rooftop PV might in 2050
account for 60% of Australia’s electrical demand.

As to the installed price I eventually allowed a very generous 90% discount and none at all for nuclear, and yet it was still a lot more than an order of magnitude more expensive per unit of output.

Mindy Said:

Actually Fran, if you sing up with Origin Energy and sell back the RECs you can get a 1.5kW system for about $5K. You have to live within the Sydney basin or within a 100km radius of one of their offices though.

Self-evidently then it is fairly limited but even if this were general the final cost of the syastem still has to be paid in one form or another by someone. If not the householder directly then by the payments of whoever makes the RECs you trade financially worth trading. There is no free lunch. There are no separate pools of magic pudding money to do this. How costs are distributed and settled upon stakeholders is a policy question quite separate from what total costs are.