A common area of stoushing on energy threads of doom is the reliability of wind power.
Wind Farm Performance, as the name suggests, brings actual data to the table.
Based on AEMO market data, you can see how much power south-eastern Australia’s wind farms are actually producing, and compare the patterns to total demand.
For what it’s worth, July 2010′s performance is particularly illustrative in my view.
Hat tip Barry Brook.
Great link Robert, its wonderful to see some actual data. Now does anyone know of a comparable resource for solar?
Just note the difference between the axes on that graph – when the wind farm line crosses the demand line doesn’t mean that SA is running on 100% wind power. Nice though it would be to think that.
I’m slightly surprised that the average output is so low – I’d assumed that “good wind resource” meant utilisation well over 50%, not 20%-30%.
What’s the deal with measuring supply and demand in different incomparable units? Is something being hidden here?
What’s your point, Robert? (sorry, haven’t been following the stoushes that prompted the link)
dk.au, if I may, the “nameplate” capacity of a wind farm bears little relationship to the amount of wind produced. Which is also highly variable, you’d hate to be a network engineer trying to deal with this sort of fluctuation.
if we can think of a cheap and highly efficient storage medium (compressed air?), then wind power could have a role. But it’ll never be as big a role as its proponents advocate.
While Australians moan and whinge about the paramount importance of baseload power, the people who brought you the Alfa Romeo and the Bianchi bicycle are using wind turbines with a feed-in tariff to solve the problem of power for people in a rural town.
http://www.theage.com.au/world/italian-towns-turn-a-profit-with-the-wind-at-their-back-20101003-162ns.html
The accessibility of utilities and services in rural and remote Australia is always in the news. Maybe we could can the constant negativity and do something along these lines. Lots of employment for metal and electrical trades workers, too.
Helen, if you look at that graph, there is absolutely no power being generated for days on end, across all of south-eastern Australia. would you like to run any sort of an economy at all with that sort of reliability? I’d moan and whinge too. So would you, after you’d thrown everything out of your freezer a dozen times.
In India, every store has a stinky little generator belching onto the street for when the lights go out. Of course we could plan better than that, we could have a fast turn on power plant for when the wind’s not blowing. But that ends up begging the question, why did we build the damn windfarms in the first place?
No, windfarms aren’t the answer. They’re part of the answer, but only a pretty small part.
Two points, dk.
1) Arguments go back and forth forever on just how variable wind power’s output is, particularly when wind farms are installed over a large area. We now have a good resource with easy-to-access empirical data of operating wind farms in south-eastern Australia over both the short and long term, which should make it easier to settle those arguments.
2) The link to July 2010 data shows that there were extended periods – of a week at a time or so – where south-eastern Australia’s existing wind farm capacity produced SFA electricity.
I’ve lost the reference now (it was about 20 years back), but there was a farmer in the Illowa (Warrnambool) district who went on wind power for his home electricity because he could not afford the cables connection installation charge in the 1930s – then about 300 quid.
He solved the storage problem by converting excess generation to hydrogen from water. Then baseload could be reached or topped up by a hydrogen-powered generator. He extended more or less as a hobby by converting his tractors and farm machinery to hydrogen power (he must have been a pretty handy bloke). The system worked right up to that time, when he had home 240v electricity and TV, plus all the usual home gadgets – and still no mains connection.
You’d think it would have been replicated by now if it was that easy, but I haven’t heard of other examples.
Wilful said:
That used to be my view too, but now I have my doubts. Even if there were indeed some high round trip efficiency and cheap per unit of stored energy technology for wind/solar about with a very small ecological footprint about, you still need to have the input to make use of it.
First question: what do you size the storage medium to? If you have 1GW of wind and your CF is 30%, but you know that there can be long periods where output is just 3% then your storage has to be able to supply the other 27% or whatever it is as long as you’re under. So what you’ve got to do is to work out how long you are likely to need to top up from storage and size to that. That’s obviously going to be a guess because even five years of wind stats is not 100% predictive. You can probably guess a little on the low side if you’re happy to use dispatchable as backstop, but there goes zero emissions.
Second question: How will you top up the buffer when it is exhausted? Farly obviously, you don’t get to use depleted storage so there’s no point building storage that takes too long for wind to replenish.Even if, in the long run, you will get to 30% by the end of the year, if you spend 3 or four months well under, you are going to be calling on FF a lot. Again, one suspects that the most sensible thing to do would be to simply allow fully dispatchable generators running at optimal thermal efficiency to replenish the storage rather than backing them off as demand fell.
Again though, this would be a step away from zero emissions and retiring FF.
The more you rely on dispatchable power the less storage you need and the less intermittency is a problem — which is pretty much what we are doing now. It does raise the question though: why have wind at all? Unless you are foreclosing a lot of fossil fuel usage and doing it at about the cost we are willing to pay to foreclose, why do it? If in the end, gas is your best lower carbon option, why not just use that? Why farnarkle about with wind?
Wind may well be a good option in places that aren’t connected to the grid and where intermittency is not a problem, and in those places, fine. Let’s not pretend though that it is applicable in places where power interruptus is a major news item.
I think the point of wind is that it’s a very low carbon source when it works, so if you have the gas plants anyway because the chorus wants to build those, wind is a useful marginal generator to drop the average carbon ouput.
moz: the trouble with this is that not all gas plants are equal.
The most efficient gas plants are what’s called “combined cycle“. These are considerably more expensive to build and don’t ramp up and down as efficiently (as I understand it).
If your wind power is backed up by less efficient single-cycle peaking plants, much of the CO2 benefits of wind over gas are lost.
Will@11,
How about dams?
Somewhere on wiki it said that water pumps could be 70-90% efficient.
I guess you’d need another dam under the current one to have water to pump back up the hill again…
Stephen:
two problems (and there was a good post on this on Bravenewclimate).
One – where are you going to build your additional hydro, particularly as new dams are a dead duck in Australia?
Two – wind power’s short-term fluctuations don’t work all that well with pumped-storage hydro. See here for some discussion.
Robert,
CCGTs can ramp pretty well. They are not as flexible as open cycle plant (OCGT), but could still easily fill most of the shortfall that the July graph reveals.
The point is I & U not whether CCGT could cover for most of wind’s intermittency but whether, when you combine CCGT and wind, the CO2 savings per dollar (and the total absolute savings in foreclosed emissions) are better with wind in it than you could achieve with CCGT only.
If it turned out for example that the net savings in CO2 with wind in the mix were only 5% greater than with CCGT only and getting that extra 5% cost $300 per tonne* (compared for example with $50 per tonne for CCGT only) would this be the best way to spend your CO2 abatement dollars or would you be better spending it on retiring more coal plant in favour of CCGT?
In the end, it’s the total abatement that matters and if you have a limited budget to do it you have to choose between abating less or blowing your budget if you make poor choices.
* I actually did some rough calculations based on Peter Lang’s scenarios with wind + OCGT and CCGT in the Environment Victoria report, and the marginal extra cost per tonne was up in the thousands of dollars. Unless the extra cost is comparable to the average cost of the system as a whole, it doesn’t stack up.
It is well known that, without backup or storage, wind power could only provide a fraction (5%? 15%?) of our total electricity. So using the data to argue that wind can’t provide all our electricity is really arguing with a strawman (or else arguing with the unimformed).
What this data *is* useful for, is it may help to put an actual number on that fraction that wind can provide without issues.
The problem with charts like this is that in presenting total demand and total windpower output on the same chart like this, the viewer is being invited to examine whether windpower can satisfy total demand – that is, they are being invited to ask a trivial question to which the trivial answer has long been known, and did not require a look at the data to determine. Windpower was never meant to try and match total demand, it is just meant to provide a low greenhouse contribution – for every kWh provided by wind, that is a reduction in GHG.
Would be interested in what current thinking is on the actual quantity of windpower the Australian grid can handle without much need of backup, storage, additional ancillary measures etc, given this data. When last I looked Prof Hugh Outhred from UNSW (about 5-6 years ago?) was saying that the Oz grid could accommodate about 9,000 MW (nameplate capacity) of windpower (can’t find a reference), across SE Australia.
Fran,
I agree with you. There is no question that the cheapest way to reduce power generation emissions intensity by up to 50% (or so) is by switching from coal to gas. Windpower is not really economic unless and until the goal is to drive emissions down further than this.
wilful @ #5:
Nameplate capacity might not bear much relation to output at any particular point in time because the wind varies in strength (der?). But it does bear a relation to aggregate output over time.
Any commercial windfarm would have been sited to maximise the capacity factor.
e.g. from the website for the NSW capital hill windfarm:
“The Capital wind farm… total installed capacity is 140.7MW. The Capital wind farm … has a net capacity factor of approximately 35.8%.”
So this means that over the year, the windfarm is expected to produce 140.7MW x 8760hours x 0.358 = 441,246 MWh of electricity.
From my rough understanding, NSW and lesser VIC/TAS/SA windfarms would have capacity factors about 30-35%, and the better windfarms in the VIC/TAS/SA would be 40%+.
The data Robert linked shows that wind output – even on a regional scale across all windfarms in SE Aus – is highly variable. This variability puts a limit on how much windpower we can have before the greenhouse reduction potential of that power is eroded by the need for backup from greenhouse intensive sources. However, the data does not say anything about what that quantity of windpower is, nor how much the greenhouse intensity of wind is eroded if it needs a modest amount of backup.
I’d be stunned, S C Pritch, if it was anything like 9GW without backup. You could probably sneak 5% (i.e about 1-2GW) into the existing system without greatly enlarging redundancy.
In Tasmania, where they have good winds and lots of hydro, you might be able to do a bit more (though I’ve heard that their hydro has been suffering for lack of water lately) anyone confirm?
Yes … but can it do even that, and if so, under what circusmstances, and at what cost in tCO2 abated?
ACtually, look at the scale for aggregate demand for the July data Robert linked to – it varies from about 20,000 MW to 30,000MW – a variation of 10,000MW.
At the moment, we have about 2,000MW of windpower. So at our current level of installed windpower, the variation in wind output that the grid has to cope with is quite a bit smaller than the daily variation in aggregate demand – a variation that the grid copes with just fine.
It is pretty hard to tell from the graph whether the grid-wide variability in wind out is fast-changing enough that it couldn’t be planned for – on a regional basis, does it change much faster than the daily change in aggregate demand?
You can’t tell whether or not any and what amount of spinning reserve might be required to cope with the variability of regional wind output shown in this data.
Its a really easy to be misled by this data I think.
“I’d be stunned, S C Pritch, if it was anything like 9GW without backup.”
Why would you be stunned? Robert’s data shows daily variability of 10,000MW in aggregate demand, which presumably already requires some level of spinning reserve (not to mention the threat of outages requiring more spinning reserve).
Is the speed of change of output of 9GW of windpower spread across all of SE Australia so fast and so unpredictable (given weather forecasts across such a big region) that we would need enormous amounts of additional spinning reserve on hand at all times to cope with output changes?
The point Hugh Outhred used to make is that – spread over a large region – the speed of change of output is less quick, and more predictable and more manageable. 9000MW is still smaller than daily aggregate demand changes, and if the variablity in that 9,000MW is predictable enough and slow enough, maybe not much additional spinning reserve would be required.
Hugely expensive for SFA output.
Keep up the good work Greenies – you’ll finally destroy the western democratic economies if you just keep spinning the BS, but spin better than your beloved wind farms.
I like the idea of having several renewable resources working in tandem. Wind and solar being obvious stand-outs plus geothermal, hydro…
Since hearing about molten salt storage solar towers providing base-load power I’m convinced that’s the primary way to go. It’s fascinating, proven and suits our climate.
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/node/95
well razor, I think you’d find that quite a few of us here would make some claim to being greenies, yet here we are, criticising wind farms.
Fran,
The point is that windpower looks – to the rest of the system – just like “negative demand”: ie the remaining power stations now have to meet the “residual demand” of consumer demand minus wind output.
By definition, residual demand is no higher than current demand, so the other power stations can certainly cover the peak residual demand. The question is whether they can handle the increased variability of demand.
As SCPritch notes, the system operator already schedules “spinning reserve” to cover rapid changes in demand. In fact, spinning reserve is primarily needed to cover the sudden failure (“outage”) of a generating unit. The largest unit in Australia is 660MW, so 660MW spinning reserve is required, to replace this generation within about 6 seconds, following a failure.
With 9GW of wind capacity, I would guess that some increase in spinning reserve would be needed. However, this can be provided relatively cheaply (in $ and carbon terms) from existing generation.
I’m not sure if the 9GW number is correct, but it sounds plausible to me. Of course, it may be the case that the transmission grid cannot cope with it: particularly if the 9GW is all located in SA.
I found a reference to the Outhred publication where I remember the 9,000MW figure from. I made a mistake – he found “8,000 MW under certain conditions”, not 9,000 MW.
Outhred H (2003), National Wind Power Study: An
estimate of readily acceptable wind energy in the National
Electricity Market, Australian Greenhouse Office. Available:
http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/renewable/publication
s/pubs/wind-power.pdf.
That link is broken, but you can get it here:
http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/content/documents/unsw-readilyacceptablewindpowerinnem_000.pdf
Also, there is a big stack of papers at CEEM/UNSW on the subject of wind power variability in the Australian grid, can sort through here for them:
http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/content/LargeScaleRenewableEnergy.cfm?ss=1
@Robert @14
You’d be surprised how much topological capacity there is in our landscape for pumped hydro storage. Obviously water is one constraint, land-use is another, and NIMBY is a third. I suspect (and am currently investigating) that sufficient pumped hydro could be built to support significant storage capacity in the grid.
I’ve got no idea about the costs though!
Not to mention, FMark that dams/pumped storage have their own ecological footprint.
SC Pritch
The geographic reticulation argument is specious. Firstly, the areas that went down would fit into a rough circle with an 1100km more diameter and they were still producing virtually no output. And of course the wider you cast the net the more expensive it becomes to collect and reticulate it. In the end there is no more guarantee than you will get what you need than that six really well credentialled bats in the test cricket team will get you 350.
Self-evidently, power that might be produced is not as valuable as power that will be produced. And as I said, if you are depending on the existing system, then that carbon debt has to be applied to the system when calculating the rationale for building it.
We want to build a zero emissions system, and so choosing tools that demand “shadow” emissions subverts the rationale.
@Fran @ 28
What sort of ecological footprint do you have in mind? There is the water used, the land used (and ecosystem services displaced) and the materials/energy used in the construction.
Anything I’ve missed?
Benjamin Disraeli
Interesting data, but not very general.
Robert
There are appear to be a few problems with this graph – several trivial and a couple highly questionable. First the more trivial:-
1. The red line (demand) is measured in MW
2. The blue line (capacity factor*) is measured in percentage
3. A demand measure is not really compatible with a supply measure. For example the supply from coal fired power plants doesn’t really jump around like that red line, they tend to run at fairly constant output.
Now what I think are some more serious ones (which I derive from the description of this data as:
Monthly graphs of wind energy supply contrasted with overall demand are provided below. The raw data (5-minute instantaneous readings in megawatts courtesy of AEMO) is also provided and is arranged in a CSV for ease of analysis)
a.) The red line would appear to be grid load due to wind (NOT total grid load). I get this from the description
b.) The blue line would appear to be some other number “capacity factor” which is not explained – do you happen to know what it means?
Now the really serious ones:
1. there is no source data series at AEMO named “aemo_wind_201007.csv” (which is the filename of the “source” data that windfarmperformance.info provide)
2. none of the data at AEMO (so far as I can tell) addresses MW – it’s all quoted in price (dollars) and I can’t see any way to match it to the windfarmperformance.info file
3. the field names in the windfarmperformance.info file are listed (in the first line of the file), but not explained
Whilst I accept that it is possible to reverse out MW data from price data, windfarmperformance.info don’t explain how they do it (or at least I can’t find any explanation)
In short, I don’t think we have enough information to properly examine or reproduce windfarmperformance.info’s results.
Do you know
(i) how they produce this data?
(ii) exactly what AEMO data they use as input?
(iii) what the data in the windfarmpeformance.info file means?
Fran @10
“high round trip efficiency” is a bit of a canard. Unless you’re into building perpetual motion machines you’ll never get 100% and the 70-90% achieved by existing hydro storage is pretty good.
The real question is whether you can make use of hydro storage as a form of “ballast” in the system economic.
Since we already can, and do, do this the whole hydro argument is moot. It’s available technology and we already use it in various places around the world. Just because the source of the energy is wind or solar rather than coal (or more commonly, other hyrdro) doesn’t make it unworkable.
JM, I think the presentation of the data is fine. Capacity factor is simply output divided by nameplate capacity, expressed as a percentage.
As to the methodology by which the megawatt data is calculated, I’ve asked the creator of the site to provide more information. But I don’t think it’s at all implausible that it’s readily available from AEMO.
Robert
Thank you, I’ll wait for your advice.
Robert, you said:
Two – wind power’s short-term fluctuations don’t work all that well with pumped-storage hydro. See here for some discussion.
But that article – while great – is concerned solely with the economics and engineering of an ambitious pumped hydro project in the Snowy Mountains. Apart from this sentence:-
But pumped hydro is not well suited to intermittent, unscheduled generators.
(and an accompanying caption to a graph, which only compares pure nuclear with nuclear plus pumped hydro) it says absolutely nothing about the suitability of pumped hydro for balancing wind or solar.
Apart from mere assertion, it offers absolutely no support for your statement.
I’m afraid I need a lot more convincing that that.
Good link Robert. It is worth starting on Sept 28 and going stepping through for a week. On Sept 30 the capacity factor for combined wind farms listed goes down to about 5%. It is also worth looking at the weather patterns for these days. In this case it looks like the problem was a large high moving across the gulf rather than local issues.
If we accept that the system has to be able to deal with capacity factors as low as 5% there has to be massive over capacity or enough back-up to provide an alternative for bad wind days. an earlier LP post puts the case for using CCGT as a the transition stage to full clean power generation. I didn’t have the wind data when this earlier post was written but the wind data strongly suggests that it makes sense to convert most coal power to CCGT before making a big investment in wind.
CCGT can handle variable loads by using adjustable compressor blades
Looking at the figures
But the main issue has to be– and especially in a country as vast as Australia, how to have geographically disparate wind farms, so as to statistically minimize the periods of low wind, linked into the electricity grid. That is how to transport electricity efficiently. I note that a lot of the wind farms in Europe are offshore– there must be enough locations in a landmass the size of Australia to be able to consistently (aka securely) supply electricity via wind.
In Germany there is a lot of talk about:
1) the wind farms being in the north and the manufacturing being in the south (State politics.)
2) energy security being provided by some kind of storage measures, aka batteries.
The other possibility is to think more regionally. That’s one response to the inefficiency of having a national grid. Not that the national grid would be completely replaced, but that local networks would be much more autonomous in the context of a national grid.
It’s time to think hard about and invest in clean energy. In my honest opinion a much more credible project than the NBN.
JM, read the comments thread of the link.
There are two potential problems that I can see:
1) the economics of pumped-storage hydro are typically designed around pumping steadily during the night and operating during the day. If you’re going to operate the pumps intermittently and on an unpredictable schedule, they are less productive. Therefore, the project either results in less electricity storage, or will be more costly, than otherwise would be achieved.
2) I do not know the details of pumping megalitres of water 900 metres up a hill, but I imagine that it puts considerable stresses on machinery, and I also imagine that starting up and shutting down such machinery puts additional stresses on it. If you’re switching the pumps on and off a lot to smooth out the supply-demand balance, this may increase the maintenance costs of the project and decrease the working life.
3) The more intermittently your pumps operate, the bigger the dams you need at both ends of the system; the bigger the dams, the more they cost and the more land they flood.
Joe, making a grid more regional would make the problem worse, not better.
Robert @40,
My experience of pumped storage is that it requires continuous pumping but that it can handle intermittent generation. Indeed, pumped storage is typically designed for intermittent generation. Your “July” graph does suggest that good wind periods last a day or two, which would provide ample pumping opportunity.
Joe @39,
I agree. Geographically disparate windfarms is the key. At present, 61% of capacity is in a region of SA and 23% in SW Victoria. That requires a national grid, of course, not separate regional grids (if that is what you are suggesting).
Robert@40: varying the output of the pumps is likely to be easier on them than start-stop, and the wind power is variable rather than intermittent, so I expect that they’d work fairly well together. Given the common location of wind farms on hills there may even be synergies in location. Of course, given the nimby problem that wind farms already have that might not help. But technically I think the problems are not as bad as you expect.
Of course, at a very high level tying wind power to two things Australia is notoriously short of (hills and water) might not be the best plan.
Why use two totally different scales and then overlay them? If you’re going to divide power output by some number (that presumably varies with time) then you should do it for all power data, not just one set of data. Either that or not overlay them. It’s this kind of non-sense that makes my BS meter overheat.
This is the most urgent reason for establishing every form of solar energy system. From The Oil Drum
“Now, after just 150 years of oil extraction, we have burned through roughly half of it. The world is consuming four barrels of oil for every one we find, more than 80 million barrels of oil every day. The United States alone consumes more than 20 million barrels a day. Most major oil exporting nations are well past their supply peaks, with giant fields rapidly diminishing in size and new finds proving to be small and relatively insignificant. Worldwide oil supplies have plateaued and now face a decline from which there is no return. This peak, plateau and decline is referred to as “Peak Oil.” Many of the world’s top energy experts attending ASPO-USA’s annual peak oil conference in Washington, D.C. this week agree that the era of low-cost, easy-to-get oil has come to an end just as global demand will start to accelerate.”
If there is only 50% oil remaining, with 50% consumed over 150 years by a population increasing from under 1 billion to 7 billion now, then the future endurence of the oil for a high oil consuming population rising to 10 billion is likely to be 50 years at best with a maximum of 20 years easy access remaining. Think of that in a political climate where governments reliably procrastinate for decades at a time (Howard for 11 years and Rudd for 3 with Gillard showing no real understanding of the problems ahead).
And this is entirely besides the challenges of global warming, climate change or the vortex of economic crises soon to come as oil escalates in price.
Simply put “we are screwed” if our politicians continue as Gillard in the standard Labour “health/education/employment security” platform, or Abbott with his dead brain scorched political earth poison.
After yet another round of wind farm ping-pong, I doubt if anyone has shifted their positions significantly.
I’m conflicted – I’d really like wind to be a significant contributor to our energy needs, but it’s pretty clear it won’t be.
Fran @30:
There are two possible arguments about spreading wind farms around over a large area.
1. That by spreading them around, you can achieve a form of baseload power, because there will always be at least some wind farms that are active. (e.g. an SA report some years ago found that the wind farms in SA could be counted on for about 8% of their nameplate capacity). The data Robert links shows that even this seems to be not the case – as there seems to be times when none of the wind farms are active across all of SE Australia.
But there is another argument:
2. That by spreading wind farms around, the minute-by-minute variation of TOTAL wind farm output does not change so rapidly, because all of the wind farms will be experiencing somewhat different weather. So if the wind abruptly lessens at once location, it probably doesn’t abruptly lessen at another location at the exact same time. You need to have all of the wind farms change their output simultaneously in the same direction to get an aggregate big change in output.
#2 is *not* specious. The output of a single wind farm is too small in relation to the whole grid to require spinning reserve. It is only if the total unpredictability and speed of change introduced to the grid by all of the wind farms combined is sufficient that spinning reserve is required, because then changes happen too large and too quick for new generation to be scheduled. Spreading the wind farms around helps to cope with this challenge.
David Irving @46: If, by significant contribution, you mean something like 30% or more of our electricity needs, then the answer is clearly that it won’t be able to provide that until we have large scale storage and stuff.
If, by significant contribution, you mean 5-20% of our electricity needs*, then wind could potentially do this. We are arguing over what that percentage is – is it 5% or 20%?
* By electricity needs, I mean MWh (energy needs) not MW (peak demand needs).
JM @34 said:
Actually, it’s the beak of the canard. (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun)
It is relevant however. Nobody can hope for a loss free energy strogage and conversion system but if round trip efficiency is poor, theoretical power and dispatchable powere are greatly different and you need to facto that in when you cost and size the system.
As someone who was convinced for a long time that pumped storage (especially ocean shore PS) was the technology that would make intermittents, especially wind, serious players in the near zero market, I am very much aware that 80% RTE is quoted for PS. In some places, it might be a bit higher than that, because in some places, upper reservoirs have low evaporation and benefit from rainfall.
The broader problem though is that every PS project will have its own very significant site-based costs. Much as I wanted to have it otherwise, you can’t just put them along the coasts and hope to do so at acceptable cost.
FMARK asked:
Plainly, iot very much depends on where you put it. Retro-fitting a dam set up to do hydro power probably wouldn’t have much of a footprint, but that greatly limits what you can do, obviously.
On the other hand, a new dam and lower reservoir will certainly affect the structure system around the river — movement of fish and other river-dependent fauna for example. Sudden changes in water volume below the facility can degrade shorelines, change patterns of sedimentation and so forth. Some of this footprint resembles the footprint of tidal barrages.
It’s also worth recalling that both water, and the weight of structures needed to retain it is very significant. In some cases artificial lakes have been associated with earth tremors.
These problems are not insuperable of course. One can imagine having a closed loop dedicated system, perhaps making use of some abandoned mineshaft but a system like that is still going to cost a lot per unit of stored energy.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see one built that didn’t disrupt a river because even if it were no use for wind, it would be of very considerable use with the FF we are going to be using for some time yet. The question of course is whether it would be economically viable to do it (i.e. would it fit into the abatement budget we are willing to wear?)
I’m not surprised that wind generation in SE Aus all rises and falls at roughly the same time. Looking at the windfarminfo site all these turbines are South and East of the North tip of the Bight, and the weather systems that dominate here are big East-West high pressure ridges which regularly sit astride this region, and not uncommonly blot out the southern half of Oz, so the turbines are not very distributed on a weather system scale. Without thinking about it much
my gut feel is you’d need linked wind generation on an almost coast to coast scale (E-W or N-S) to escape some of these effects.
Poo power energy backup
http://www.gizmag.com/human-waste-to-gas-project-goes-live/16572/
Too many people looking for silver bullets, when ordinary ones are just fine.
BilB
There was a piece on ABC24 on biomethane in the UK
Very interesting, although, needless to say, all of the key detail was omitted.
RM- Making a grid more regional wrt wind energy would make the geographical effects of generating secure power with wind more difficult– but in a local energy plan, providing secure power through wind might not be required. Other sources of energy would also have to be used.
Where I’m living thermal energy is also used– especially for heating.
Australia has to move away from the inherited big plan mentality and really start to think “flexibility.” There is no single solution or best-practices solution, there may be many different solutions, all answering particular questions and requiring the expertise of different people. But we should be able to do that in the technological society in which we live. (It’d be a much better solution than the service-industry based economy, in which we currently live.)
I agree wholeheartedly. That is why we need a carbon price that allows everyone to respond to the carbon reduction challenge how they think fit. (I would call that a “market” solution, but I have been told off for using that term on this blog in the past) We do not want or need these statist solutions which rely on government-run strategic planning or tendering/contracting.
But, having said that, I think that we still require a national grid to integrate all of these different options, particularly when they provide intermittent but diverse generation.
Please tell us how the market can set a price on carbon without the government first setting a cap, and tell us how such a “statist” cap is different from a carbon tax.
@Silkworm,
You are right, government first has to create the carbon price (either through a carbon tax or ETS). Individuals can then independently respond to that price, with no further government intervention.
Sorry to be unclear.
Fran @49
Could you stop with the noise please? Unless you’re trying to argue that pumped hydro doesn’t exist at all (which it does), and/or isn’t efficient (which it is); none of your points are relevant except to the engineers who are charged with optimizing its implementation.
To others, and particularly Robert, I would say this:- do you understand what an analog integrator is?
It’s a concept that comes from integral calculus (that’s been around since Newton) but is capable of physical realization (that’s the analog bit).
Basically it’s the area under the curve of the graph that Robert referenced in this post.
Something can go up and down like a bloody yo-yo, but if you can store it and smooth it out then only the average matters. Hourly peaks and troughs? Meah!
That’s what pumped hydro does. It’s smooths out “intermittent” power production like that from wind farms and solar. The production from solar and wind is matched to demand by pumping water uphill as and when you get it, and then letting it flow downhill in response to demand. (Sure you lose energy doing this, but so what? The 2nd law applies everywhere and in this context it’s only the economics of it that matters.)
[BTW - this fact is the dirty little secret of the "base load" argument:- It. Is. Absolutely. Wrong. Baseload is simply an artifact of coal driven power production, it is not a given.]
And every retired engineer who pontificates about how solar and wind won’t work because of “intermittent” production needs to hand back their degrees. If they can’t figure this out, they should never have got them in the first place.
wilful @ 5:
Wind farms don’t produce wind, as wind is produced through air moving from an area of high atmospheric pressure to an adjacent area of low atmospheric pressure.
Wind farms harvest the wind.
Sure we can smooth stuff, and given an infinite budget we could put laser beams on sharks and fly kittens to the moon but at some point we ought to get back to discussing secure energy supplies at an economical price. Wind and solar represent a lot of hot air.
JM
No. It’s how long it stays under the average demand that matters and how much storage capacity you have (and how long it exceeds the average and can deliver that surplus to replenish storage) if you wish to avoid load-shedding.
A lot of issues are at play– for example, last year I was looking at housing guidelines form the City of London from the mid 70s and they recommended that the living area, aka kitchen and lounge room should have an average temperature of 20C- the bedrooms need only have 16-18C.
The 22C which we have today is actually quite a new development brought on, according to some, due to overcapacity in energy supply. The first buildings and for a long time the only buildings to have 22C average temps were the government ones– and yes Australia was at the forefront of this development.
Now, some people believe that it is healthier to have more seasonal variations in indoor temperature– it’s actually good for the immune system, when we throw on a pullover in winter.
In relation to what JM said, which is interesting– this does in fact seem like a geographically local solution. We don’t have to get rid of a national grid, but we can attempt to manage at a higher level of detail the energy requirements of different locations in the grid.
JM @57,
I think we all understand the concept of pumped storage. It is the practicalities that matter.
Pumping efficiency is important, because it affects the cost of supply. For example, if efficiency were only 50%, then the wholesale cost of windpower (via pumped storage) would effectively double.
Storage is critical. If the “July” graph linked to this post were typical, a huge amount of storage would be required, far more than could practically be provided across Australia.
Pumped storage is certainly part of the solution, but it is not a solution by itself. You should take more notice of those “retired engineers”.
Fran and I&U
You’re both talking about volitility/variance/whatever.
It doesn’t change the basic fact – it is the average that matters.
Further efficiency only has impact on the economics of your solution. No process in the universe has 100% efficiency and you might as well wish for a unicorn.
Pumped hydro works just fine to store power from coal and nuclear generated powere. It works just the same for solar and wind.
As for the amount of storage needed – all you need is a big enough downstream lake to capture the water you just let flow downhill but don’t actually need for irrigation or drinking purposes. You catch it there and pump it back when you can.
You might be old enough to remember Lake Peddar in Tasmania. Do you know what that dam was for? Buffer storage to smooth peaks and troughs.
Give it up guys. Pumped storage has not only been around for yonks, it is actually the most efficient and cost-effective method for achieving this stuff.
You might as well argue against fire because of the “waste” heat.
JM said:
It works fine because these power sources have limited capacity to rapidly slew whereas white start (and even black start) capability of pumped storage is excellent. That allows these fully dispatchable thermal units to stay very close to optimal thermal efficiency (and in the case of coal, this is especially important both in terms of cost and CO2 per unit of delivered power). It also works well because the output of thermal units is predictable within a schedule. Thus one can have great confidence in how much storage is needed — and on what schedule pumped storage resources can be efficiently replenished.
Not so with wind or even solar thermal.
I notice you fail to offer up any formula for calculating how much storage you need and even what you outline above is not accurate. It’s the size of the upper reservoir that is key to the potential duration of full dispatchability. Once that is exhausted, it wouldn’t matter if you had 50 petalitres in the lower reservoir. The reserve is out of action. If that occurs before you can bring other units online and/or demand falls, you will get load shedding. And even if demand does fall and you bring other units online until there is a surplus that can be used to restore the upper reservoir, it is offline. Since you cannot be sure when intermittents can generate the surplus, you are absolutely reliant on dispatchable sources. In Australia, where we don’t yet do nuclear power the only non fossil source we might have is geothermal, or perhaps eventually some biomass plants.
There’s absolutely no argument that pumped storage is technically and organisationally feasible and in many circumstances economically feasible. The question is whether it can make intermittents feasible and the answer to that is at best unclear.
Last night, on Lateline Business, the ABC did a segment on solar thermal technology.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/business/items/201010/s3031476.htm
This figure differs from that of Beyond Zero Emissions, which maintains that Australia could be producing totally carbon-free electricity with 60% contribution from solar thermal.
I&U – storage that is 50% efficient may or may not double the cost of wind. It will depend on how much energy is used directly and how much is used post storage. If it is all stored before usage then twice as much energy will be needed. However even that assumes the financial cost of the storage fascility, as opposed to the energy cost, is zero.
Fran – previous encounters tell me we differ substantially on political ideology (I’m a small government, free market sort of guy), however in terms of these energy discussions I am impressed with your mastery of the topic and patient explanation.
Fran
What you say is theoretically correct, but practically speaking:- complete nonsense.
Let’s take Cardinia Reservoir in Melbourne which is currently about 50% full. That’s about 135,000 Mlitres. Annual usage in Melbourne was 369,000 Mlitres in 2007.
So Cardinia, in the absence of rain, contains about 1/3 of the annual demand equivalent to 133 days of supply (the Thomson which is upstream of Cardinia contains 4x as much or around 400 days)
Do you really mean to say that there will be no wind or sun in Melbourne (or Victoria) for 133 days?
Somehow I don’t think that’s very likely.
If on the other hand we used the Thomson as the upper reservoir we’d be able to go for a year in Melbourne without sun or wind, and still meet our water consumption demands without problems and without overflowing the lower Cardinia reservoir.
> Not so with wind or even solar thermal.
That’d be why the EU is seriously considering doing exactly this then?
> I notice you fail to offer up any formula for calculating how much storage you need
Because it’s a high school calculus problem. It’s virtually the first toy problem students learn.
“Not so with wind or even solar thermal.”
There is no basis for this claim thus far – certainly no argument has been made from Robert’s data.
1. There is a pretty comprehensive effort within the national electricity market to forecast windspeed and changes.
2. On an individual wind farm scale where variability is hard to forecast and change happens quickly, storage of any kind is not necessary, because the wind farms are small enough that the variations they cause are small in comparison to the size of the grid and what it has to cope with even without wind
3. When you look at the variability of all the wind farms combined spread out over large regions, the size of the changes can be large, but the speed of change is slower, because you smooth out over the weather changes across large areas.
So if there is an argument that wind power is incompatible with something like pumped storage, that argument is yet to be properly made.
Fran
> It’s how long it stays under the average demand that matters and how much storage capacity you have
I’m not sure if I should return to this topic, but it’s statements like this – which show complete ignorance of most of the points I’ve made so far – that demonstrate to me that you have thought this through properly.
1. Pumped hydro smooths and matches supply to demand. It decouples wind (or solar) production from demand. It does not smooth demand at all. I didn’t say that it did, and you’re misrepresenting my argument.
2. Generally speaking wind (or solar) will be under or over average supply 50% of the time each way. It will be something very close to a normal distribution with reversion to the mean.
3. The length of time it stays under the average will therefore be equal to the time is stays above the average and the length of each period will show a normal distribution
4. That’s what the smoothing is for. To remove volatility. Unless you have a fat-tailed distribution you really can reduce your exposure to well under a once in [choose-your-period] event*
5. The capacity (non-)argument I dealt with upthread.
In other words, your position, while apparently plausible, is completely wrong when examined in detail.
* Unlike financial returns, which have fat-tails and are not normally distributed.
Sorry, that should read:
that demonstrate to me that you have not thought this through properly.
JM @70,
You were right the first time.
I&U
No. I think I made a typographical mistake. However, if you think I’ve made a more substantive mistake perhaps you could explain.
I don’t think I have.
An ecological impact of new hydro storages that has been missed above is methane emission from anaerobic decomposition of drowned vegetation. One estimate was that this could be as significant as to largely negate the CO2 abatement benefits over the likely lifetime of the lake, such is the greenhouse potency of CH4 in comparison to CO2.
JM, I’m not getting your @67 at all. Aren’t you erroneously conflating water consumption with power consumption?
@69, are you sure about wind and solar output generally being normally distributed? Robert’s July 2010 graph looks like it would be quite fat-tailed to me.
In a similar vein, SCPritch @68, some of those changes look pretty abrupt in the July 2010 graph, and SE Australia covers quite a large area (I believe Tasmania is included for this purpose).
Mark
I’m still checking a couple of things so I’ll get back to you later on some numbers. But in the meantime can I respond to some of the issues you raise.
Re. your first paragraph – Cardinia is about 40 years old. I’d be astonished if there was any vegetation left in it all let alone enough to cause any significant CH4 emissions. Trees don’t grow underwater. Where did your estimate come from?
@67 I’m not really confusing water and power consumption, I’ll just eliding a little to point out that a.) the capacity of these dams is very large and b.) it’s not really possible for Fran’s argument about capacities to have any significant effect. If we were talking about large swimming pools she’d have a point. But we aren’t.
If you want to increase the flow between upstream and downstream lakes this is additional to any water consumption requirements and so long as you can pump it back (ie. you have enough input solar and wind to do that) you can do it with impunity and not have any serious effect on water availability.
Fran’s point about “once the upper reservoir is empty” is therefore for all practical purposes, rubbish. Her assertion that peta-litres would be insufficient is laughable.
Now @69 I said two things were normally distributed, and I’m confident they are.
1. The distribution about the mean. Robert’s referred graph doesn’t show this but I’d be astonished if it wasn’t normally distributed as this conclusion comes straight out of the laws of physics. If it’s not normally distributed, I’ll need quite some convincing evidence before I’d believe it. Fat tailed financial returns don’t do this, and nobody knows why. We don’t have any underlying “laws of finance” to guide us.
2. The length of periods above and below the mean. Same as above. And Robert’s graph simply isn’t long enough to show this one way or the other. Nor does it present the data in a suitable form to determine this.
Lastly, I very much doubt you can tell a fat tailed distribution from visual inspection of raw data alone (although we don’t know yet from Robert how that data was produced). It’s a very subtle effect even with financial returns which are known to be non-normally distributed and it took analysis of several decades of data before this was detected in the 1960′s.
So subtle that most of the time people assume normality as an approximation and are still able to make money from things like the Black-Scholes equation for derivatives even though we know these equations are not quite right.
Short answer – we have enough existing infrastructure to introduce pumped hydro storage for current production levels of wind and solar.
If production levels rise, we simply increase the cycle between the upstream and downstream dams – albeit at some cost to efficiency on each cycle. But we’re only trying to smooth a distribution with a known variance here, not store several years of power against a disastrous contingency.
It’s doable.
Footnote: At BrandNewClimate I found this paper by Peter Long who I think is the author of Robert’s graph and also the source of Fran’s assertions. It contains this rather incredible statement:
The installed generating capacity of solar panels (4,000,000 MW) needed to meet the NEM’s demand, if only one day of energy storage is available, is equal to the world’s total electricity generating capacity (4,000,000 MW). [p14]
Let me translate. The NEM is Australia’s National Energy Market. What Mr Long is saying is that in order to supply Australia with electricity solely from solar panels we would have to install solar generating capacity equal to the entire worlds existing generating capacity from all sources
Ponder that for a second.
“Meeting Australian demand requires generating capacity equal to the entire world. The entire world I tell’s yah. But if yah use coal, it’s all cool”
Australia represents about 1.5-2.0% if the worlds economy.
I’m not sure we should be taking this guy seriously.
Mark Duffet @73
Mark that is the sort of desperate drivel that comes out of BNC nuclear thinktank. There are many process at play in water storages. By far the greatest over time is algal blooming and silt deposition. This combination has the effect of sequestering carbonaceous material as the bottom ooze is progressively silt layered forming the material that will eventually become new rock strata. This process far exceeds the original loss of vegetation, many times over.
Yes, JM, Peter Lang is ultra anti solar energy. I have it on my to do list to refute one of his earlier “papers” on solar energy in detail. His entire platform is built on the notion that a solar alternative energy system must provide name plate delivery…permanently, but it is OK for a nuclear reactor to be out of commission for years because that is “scheduled”.
What you are refering to is one of his typical outlandish claims. Another of his ridiculous conclusions was that to provide all of Australia’s electricity (35 gigawatts) from Concentrating Solar Thermal would cost many trillions of dollars, and his argument was built entirely on extrapolated information from an aging tiny ill designed photovotaic installation near Canberra. You will notice on page 5 of the fiction to which you linked he makes the claim that he excludes information on solar thermal because “it is hard to acquire”. Some researcher he is. If government was actually listening to him, which I doubt, it might go some way to explain what has been happening politically with energy policy.
@74 and 75, as luck (or maybe not) would have it, Robert Merkel has today included a link to a piece in Nature setting out the significance of CH4 emission from hydro storages. Unfortunately it’s paywalled, but other examples are here and here.
“Desperate drivel”, BilB? Tell it to the guys who publish (and publish in) Nature.
JM @ 67 & 74
Cardinia Reservoir elevation: 91 metres ASL
Thomson Dam elevation: ~380 metres ASL (Bells Portal)
Average Victorian (couldn’t find a Melbourne-only figure) electricity usage: ~140,000 MWh/day
Potential energy stored if Cardinia pumped to Thomson:
E = volume x density x g x h
E = 135000000 x 1000 x 9.8 x 289 (SI)
E = 382347 GJ = 106207.5 MWh
i.e. unless I’ve misplaced a decimal point or mixed up my megas and gigas somewhere, Cardinia offers less than one day’s worth of electricity storage for Victoria. Not 133 days, or anything like it. And that’s assuming 100% efficiency in both directions.
Mark Duffett @ 77
So Cardinia Reservoir + wind power won’t be suitable for a huge amount of baseload generation over many days, according to your calcs.
But for smoothing of variability to prevent the need for spinning reserve, and ensure that each MWh of wind power generated is in fact close to zero emissions?
@78,
Go back to the “July” graph that Robert linked to in his post. That suggests that there may be limited windpower for weeks, rather than days, at a time.
In that case, if Mark Duffet’s calculation is correct (and it sounds plausible to me), there is unlikely to be anywhere near enough pumped storage potential to make windpower “firm”.
Tasmanian hydro storage is around 14,000GWh, which is around 3 days of NEM electricity consumption. So even that may not be enough (leaving aside the difficulty of converting it into pumped storage, expanding its generating capacity by a factor of 10 and then duplicating the existing Basslink interconnection 40 times over).
@79,
Sorry, Tasmanian Hydro Storage is around 3 weeks (not days) of NEM consumption, so it could provide sufficient pumped storage, if those other practical issues could be overcome.
I&U @ 79
I think I just said that – I acknowledged what Mark Duffet’s calcs showed. I am not arguing for wind power to be ‘firm’ or ‘baseload’.
I am arguing that we can have a decent amount of total wind power in the grid, without needing spinning reserve from fossil fuels. If you don’t need spinning reserve from fossil fuels, then windpower is almost greenhouse free.
20% windpower in the grid, with its variability smoothed by regional distribution of turbines and pumped hydro, maybe is achievable without needing gas-fired spinning reserve.
A power generator doesn’t need to be baseload to be useful.
I&U,
14,000Gwh would be 23 days electricity supply for Australia.
220 billion kilowatt hours total annual consumption or 220,000 Gwh total for Australia (2007).
600Gwh per day.
SCPritch @79,
OK, sorry, I did not read your comment properly.
Bilb @82
Agreed. See my correction @80
JM @74,
Peter Lang seems like a clown (what is it about geologists?). But why do you associate him with the windpower output graphs that Robert links to?
As for cardinia and thomson reservoirs, these are reserved for drinking water people, any power plant utility they can add would be great, but Melbourne Water has a statutory requirement to guarantee water supply to Melbourne, not the become electricity traders. And there are no other dam sites anywhere else in Victoria, no unutilised valleys, not unless people plan on buggering up the Mitchell, which I assure you will never ever happen. Pumped storage hydro is a non-starter in Vic and SA.
After a bit of lunchtime googling…
The domain windfarmperforance.info is registered to Andrew Miskelly. Don’t know who he is but he would seem to be a regular weather anorak:
http://weather.ajcmiskelly.id.au/
He’s also the co-author of a report (with Tom Quirk, a physicist and IPA board member) entitled ‘Wind Farming in South East Australia) — the abstract reads:
http://bit.ly/aDuyJk (PDF)
I don’t know whether they have anything to do with Peter Lang.
I’ve been in contact with Andrew Miskelly.
He gets the generation data from here:
http://www.nemweb.com.au/REPORTS/CURRENT/Next_Day_Actual_Gen/
and
http://www.nemweb.com.au/REPORTS/CURRENT/Daily_Reports/
You may disagree with his conclusions, but the numbers appear to be solid.
Wilful @86,
As I understood the proposal, it just involved pumping water from one reservoir to another. I cannot see why it should have any impact on water supply.
However, if both reservoirs were full, it would rather limit pumping opportunities.
Mark @77
Sorry I was not saying that Cardinia provides 133 days of power. I was saying that it provides – absent rainfall – 133 days of water (with Silvan and Thomson upstream providing more) so SCPritch’s* clarification that we are talking about smoothing and not actual power source should be well taken.
What I was trying to get across to Fran is that these are large dams and you can marginally fiddle with their volume and get all the smoothing you need without materially affecting water supply.
Wilful’s point @85 about drinking water is basically irrelevant. Pumped storage requires that the water be pumped back uphill and therefore it is not lost – it is still available for drinking. (A largish number of people don’t seem to get this.)
I&U @80. If Tasmania has 3 weeks of power for Australia as a whole then that should be fine for smoothing purposes (spectacular actually). Thanks, I hadn’t looked at that, but it means we’re well into the realm of feasible solutions. (Norway for example, can do all of Europe for 4 weeks.)
I only used the Cardinia and Thomson hypothetical as a test of my opinion. I had no idea how the numbers would work out beforehand so I took a bit of a punt based on the well established facts that:-
* the sun shines every day
* you can’t go for very many days without the wind blowing somewhere in Victoria
* you can’t live in Melbourne for more than a month without experiencing rain to replenish your reservoir.
I&U @84. I associate Peter Lang with Robert’s graphs because they appear in the paper Robert linked to and in a slightly different version in the paper I linked to. Lang is the author of both. Maybe I’m wrong there, maybe the sourcing went the other way.
* Thanks mate
Mark D@77,
Godd article links there, Mark. I think that in time more complete studies will demonstrate that what is being reported in these early studies represents data taken out of the full context. What this means is that mature land scape prior to flooding is realeasing methane at a high rate anyway. There is a single pass at CO2 absorption for all forested land as it goes from bare earth to mature forest. Beyond that point methane and CO2 are released in balance with Oxygen release and vegetation regeneration. So whereas it is true that the flooded forest yields part of its initial CO2 capture, which may have been thousands of years earlier, that is not the complete story. Beyond that I would see significant quantities of methane “fizzing” out of the water at the turbine as being an energy collection opportunity.
I take these articles at this stage as being exploratory science, part of a study that will lead to a better understanding of the carbon flow in lake systems rather than a damning case against hydro electricity.
So, Nature Magazine, please take note there is more to come on this story. Kind regards, BilB.
BilB: I recall your attempt to blind everyone with waffle and misdirection when you launched your foray into BNC. You failed there. You will fail here. Let the games begin!
It is worth looking at the relationship between the percent of gas fired CCGT power in a blend with clean electricity and emissions per kWh as a percent of the coal fired figure:
% CCGT % emission reduction
compared with black coal
100% 60%
50% 80%
25% 90%
12.5% 95%
0% 100%
The point I am making here that we can go a long way before we really need to get serious about pumped power back-up as long as we use the gas transition as part of the strategy. By the time this is necessary we may well have better answers in the form of hot rocks, kite power or whatever.
Combining solar with wind also has advantages. Solar provides power during the peak demand part of the day.
I am not convinced we need pumped power to reduce the need for spinning back-up. Looking at the average output (black lines on the graphs) the variation over small time gaps is quite small. In addition, I would expect that many of the larger, slower changes can be predicted so that CCGT designed for quick ramp-up would have time to fire up by the time needed.
If you are looking at the Cardinia case above the water flows are impressive – over 5 million m3/hr. We are talking about a tunnel over 20 m in diameter to move this much water at 4 m/s. Flows can be reduced by increasing the fall but tunnel sizes are still going to be impressive.
The Eastern side of Aus has only a few places with the required elevation and reliable supplies of fresh water/ reasonable proximity to salt water.
Robert @88
Ok. But why are different datasets from a different site quoted at the source of the graphs (windfarmperformance)?
This looks a bit like ducking and weaving.
And I still can’t see any explanation of how the numbers in those graphs are derived. This is essential to understanding the argument.
Ahh and Robert I think you missed the point.
Apart from coming from a completely different place from that cited by the analyst at windfarmperformance.info (and therefore giving no support to his/her analysis at all):-
The data files still appear to contain only price data and not production data.
The two are not the same.
And in the absence of a description of the pricing model we can’t tell if the numbers in the graph are meaningful or just complete gibberish.
I think I’d go for complete gibberish.
JM @ 90
I would take issue with every one of your “well established facts”.
First, the sun does not shine every day, due to the phenomenon known as ‘cloud’.
Second, the July 2010 graph clearly indicates a period of at least nine days during which wind output never approached its nominal average 30% capacity rating, and in fact averaged less than 10% CF over this time. That rates as ‘very many days’ in my book, as we’ll see in a moment.
Third, yes, it’s exceedingly rare for Melbourne to go a month without some sort of precipitation. But the rainfall threshold to actually get some significant runoff is rather higher, and for this bar not to be cleared in a given month is certainly not unheard of.
With that in mind, let’s walk through a scenario. July 2030, with wind output the same as in July 2010. 1 July, wind generation is SFA. 2 July, even worse. By noon on that day you’ve already had to let an entire Cardinia’s worth down from Thomson in order to keep the lights on (not to mention all those heaters in the middle of winter). Now what? The wind stubbornly refuses to blow anywhere in SE Australia into 3 July, so you have no alternative but to keep water coming down from Thomson, and spill over at Cardinia. How’s that going to go down if the drought situation is similar to that of, say, July 2008? July 4, wind picks up a bit, but still barely half the nominal average. Maybe you only have to send half a Cardinia down, however there’s certainly nothing to spare for pumping. But 5 and 6 July are heading back towards dead calm. There go another two Cardinias. Some time in the early hours of 7 July, Thomson is empty. The sun rises on a clear still day, after a week of clouds, but good luck trying to use that to microwave your Weet-Bix at 7 in the morning. Even when the wind finally starts blowing on 9 July, you’ve only one Cardinia’s worth to send back up to Thomson. Unless you get some near-Noachian rainfall between 9-19 July, you’re screwed for the next major low-wind period from 20-26 July.
In short, the points made by wilful @ 86 and I&U @ 89 stand.
And last but certainly not least, all the above blithely ignores (as you do above) the requirement for the hydro backup to generate at a rate of many thousands of megawatts, a capacity mostly unbuilt at present. It’s not just about the volume (as alluded to by I&U @ 80).
You’ve built your argument, MarkD, on one energy technology. This is not at all a realistic scenario.
Mark
1. Photo voltaic cells don’t care a great deal about cloud – their output is less on cloudy days but it’s not zero. (In any case Solar-Thermal appears to be more efficient)
2. Where do you get numbers like “there go another 2 Cardinias”?
3. Who said anything about powering all of Victoria off hydro from one dam? We’re talking about smoothing here
I think you might be getting your numbers from Mr Lang here, who wants to power the entire world off a single pumped hydro dam in the Snowy Mountains plus about 126 copies of it.
Lastly, since no-one has explained how that graph is derived (and I for one can’t figure out how it was produced), I wouldn’t go relying on it at this point.
Let’s talk about realistic scenarios. And let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or even the good enough.
BilB @ 98:
Mark is pointing out the faults of one of the technologies you’re advocating. The others you advocate are just as useless. The only way you can maintain the illusion these ideas are wothr anything is by this kind of context-shifting and evasion .
Every time someone points out that renewables tech #1, which required massive overbuild won’t work under known historical example A, renewables advocates point to rt#2, also requiring massive overbuild, then rt#3 after the weaknesses of #2 are exposed. How is this supposed to be in any way sustainable?
JM, I’ve pointed you to the raw data from which the graph is derived.
You can like it or lump it, but the data exists and is consistent with just about every other piece of data I’ve seen on wind farm power output – even spread out over a fairly large geographical area, wind farms jump around a lot and can go quiet for periods of a week or more.
Finrod,
I have cosistently argued over a long period that the key renewable energy technology for grid systems for Austalia is Concentrating Solar Power with integrated storage and gas backup. Wind power, the subject of this thread, will be a significant contributor to the overall renewable energy generation mix. Wind is the minimal commitment, relocatable, quick fix system that Australia has undertaken to date and is being criticised here for not being a total solution. It was never going to be a total solution.
The hybride CSP system is the most cost effective solution for Australia and will become the core of the grid renewable energy system for Australia in due course. It is my belief, however, that distributed energy systems will accelerate in uptake (regardless of government policy) as well as increase in efficiency, and will significantly reduce the ultimate size of the future grid energy system. That is my personal assessment on how the future will unfold. I’ve read your arguments and disagree with your conclusions. Feel free to disagree with mine.
JM, it might be fair to say “I wish we had more data”, but given the data we have, which seems entirely clear, it’s quite illegitimate of you to say “well really wind is always blowing somewhere and that data can’t be true”. Continuing this line doesn’t help your case.
The hybride CSP system is the most cost effective solution for Australia and will become the core of the grid renewable energy system for Australia in due course.
I presume you mean OCGT plants with associated CSP plants. It would be cheaper and cut back on more CO2 emissions if they just said they were going to use gas, and built CCGT plants instead.
No that is not what I mean at all, Finrod.
Then what do you mean, BilB?
Robert, wilful
My complaint isn’t that you didn’t point me to the data.
My complaint is the data you point to is not what you represent it as
It is price data, not power generation data. You can’t draw your conclusions from it.
I tried to find actual wind data as a proxy, but the BOM sells that for $172 a pop.
And Mark, the same applies to your supposed 9 wind free days. The graph doesn’t show wind at all, what it shows is “capacity factor” which is something completely different, and is defined over a period of time – say a month, but more typically a year – it doesn’t have any meaning when “calculated” instantaneously.
Those first 9 days of July are not 9 wind-free days, they are 9 days when Mr Lang’s suspect calculation spits out a low number.
And if you’re ever lived on the South coast of Australia, a moments reflection would have made you very suspicious. I used to live down in Western Victoria where a wind project is nearly complete.
The first two stages are operational at Cape Bridgewater and Cape Nelson. If you’re ever been to these two places you’d know they are extremely windy – the wind comes straight off the Southern Ocean – and I can’t remember a single time I’ve ever been there when there wasn’t a strong wind.
Exactly what I said, Finrod. If you google the words used it will take you right into and ocean of publictions on the many associated technologies.
BilB, what you said was what I described. It is what any plant built with that strategy in mind would be with the current state of the art. The prototype CSP plants with backup storage are expencive, low power units which can barely store power for a few hours, or a night at most. The associated natural gas plant would have to do most of the work. This technology is decades away at best.
We haven’t even touched on siting issues yet.
Clearly you are not seeing at the right technology. Keep looking.
MD @97
It’s about as overcast a day as you can imagine here in Brisbane, and yet my solar array tells me it’s generating 950W, which is about 25% of what it does at noon on a cloudless summer’s day.
I’d hazard a guess that the demand for electricity in Brisbane is similarly down over that hypothetical cloudless summer’s day, since only those nostalgic for the arctic would be running airconditioning.
A major problem with these discussions is that the naysayers/fossil fuel addicts/nuclear fans always assume that current demand patterns are immutable rather than the artifact of production and distribution systems. For example, we here in Australia put a significant proportion of our coal-fired power into aluminium smelting, with smelters in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. This makes perfect sense when the problem is matching constant generation capacity to highly variable demand. There are many other similar industries and uses (e.g. ‘off-peak’ electric hot water) that exist primarily because of the utilities’ need to sell excess power cheap in low-demand times of the day.
However, absent subsidies, this picture immediately changes when there is a price on carbon. Aluminium smelting will move to places in the world with low emissions intensity, perhaps Iceland or NZ?
At any event, the ‘total demand’ side of the graph, whatever the figures’ source and authenticity, reflects use patterns that are themselves heavily influenced by existing generation and distribution technologies.
Just one way this is likely to change is the advent of the electric car for urban transport. As this technology is taken up, households, carparks and garages will become distributed storage units. To a significant degree, batteries will be able to be charged when power generation peaks. Potentially, stored power at a household level will be able to be sold back to the grid when production is lower than demand for whatever reason.
2010 power demand patterns will likely in future hold the kind of arcane fascination we now have for figures showing demand for telephone exchange operators in the 1940s.
Good comments Hal, very much on the money.
@ BilB:
Clearly you are not seeing at the right technology. Keep looking.
You previously stated:
I have cosistently argued over a long period that the key renewable energy technology for grid systems for Austalia is Concentrating Solar Power with integrated storage and gas backup.
If you are now talking about some other technology, kindly inform us of it.
It’s about as overcast a day as you can imagine here in Brisbane, and yet my solar array tells me it’s generating 950W, which is about 25% of what it does at noon on a cloudless summer’s day.
CSP requires an unobstructed view of the sun. A concentrating mirror needs a point-source illumination to work.
Completely false, Finrod. The reason why CSP thermal needs cloudless days is because the system needs to heat the oil in the pipes to 400degC to work and with parabolic trough mirrors even slowing the oil flow will not achieve this. However mirrors do focus for concentrating PV on overcast days. I just did a mirror focus test to prove this. You’ve just been gamma rayed on that one.
For anyone wanting to drill down into the AEMO generation data (spread across many CSV files), you might find this a quicker and easier way to go about it:
http://www.landscapeguardians.org.au/data/aemo/
JM @108,
Why are you persisting with this idea that it is price data?
I opened up a csv file that Robert linked to. (“public_next_day_actual_gen”)
Look at the header in column G: “MWh_reading”.
What are you unable to understand?
I&U @118
Because that data is unsourced. As is (was) the data at windfarmperformance
And it also comes from a site nemweb.com.au that has unknown provenience. It’s a very primitive site – not much more than a set of ftp directories – that looks like it’s being run by some guy in Melbourne. Maybe on the PC under his desk.
AEMO doesn’t – as far as I can tell – publish this stuff. It publishes price data.
Robert can’t claim AEMO authority for these numbers without explaining how they are sourced and derived.
In anycase, I’m not disagreeing that wind is variable, rather that it needs something as “ballast” to even out the peaks and troughs.
Things like pumped hydro are perfectly mature and will accomplish that. And are already used in other applications to balance out supply and demand for hyrdro and coal fired electricity. What’s so special about the Joules from a wind farm that they can’t be stored somewhere?*
Matching two graphs of instantaneous demand and supply, no matter how authoritative (and this one is a bit dubious) won’t change that fact.
* Actually just on this point. It seems that at the moment we mostly use the spot market itself as a storage mechanism, rather than physical means. Clearly as we use more and more wind, the market will have less capacity to smooth fluctuations and we’ll need physical means more to control volatility.
“And it also comes from a site nemweb.com.au that has unknown provenience. It’s a very primitive site – not much more than a set of ftp directories – that looks like it’s being run by some guy in Melbourne. Maybe on the PC under his desk.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMMCO
National Electricity Rules
3.13.4 Spot market
(r) In accordance with the timetable, AEMO must publish details of:
(1) actual generation for each scheduled generating unit, semi-scheduled generating unit and non-scheduled generating unit or non-scheduled generating system;
etc.
http://www.aemc.gov.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Rules/Current-Rules.html
Completely false, Finrod. The reason why CSP thermal needs cloudless days is because the system needs to heat the oil in the pipes to 400degC to work and with parabolic trough mirrors even slowing the oil flow will not achieve this.
The need for cloudlessness stems from the need for a point source of illumination. Otherwise, the mirror cannot focus sunlight where it’s needed.
However mirrors do focus for concentrating PV on overcast days. I just did a mirror focus test to prove this.
I imagine it’s possible to use some mirror arrangement to concentrate the diffuse, attenuated sunlight eminating from the cloud cover on an overcast day into something a bit more powerful than before in a small area, and you can slap a few PV cells in that area, but it’s not going to be very effective.
@ BilB:
Of course, your last reply has nothing to do with the technology you were originally espousing, namely:
the key renewable energy technology for grid systems for Austalia is Concentrating Solar Power with integrated storage and gas backup.
Finrod the light that comes directly through cloud cover is the light available to focus. That can be up to 30%. You really are desperate to shoot everything down aren’t you. Do you have anything constructive to say? Anything at all??
Finrod the light that comes directly through cloud cover is the light available to focus. That can be up to 30%.
By ‘the light that comes directly through cloud cover’, do you mean the light from the sky in the vicinity of the sun’s position?
Anyhow, this is just crazy. PV tech is bad at the best of times. Requiring that the light collection area be expanded to squeeze the most out of the insolation on an overcast day isn’t going to help the economics, ot the capacity dactor, or the intermittency. You’ll still need massive overbuild, prohibitively expensive storage, and OCGT backup.
JM @ 118,
You are as persistent as you are obtuse. The nemweb site is an official aemo website where it publishes data. If you don’t believe me, go to the main aemo site (aemo.com.au) and choose “electricity” and “mms datasets” from the menu. Then click on “current reports” which links to the nemweb site.
Finrod,
You’ve just had HAL9000 give an eye witness account that his PV system is delivering useful power on a grey day. I did a mirror focus test and demonstrated to my satisfaction that direct sunlight is arriving at the mirror surface even on a grey day. Wikipaedia says that that is what is happening, along with a bunch of other web sites. That should be enough. Sydney obtains 275 days with 7.5 hours average direct sunlight. That is enough to to provide all of the energy that an average family needs all year for both household and transport (absolutely free) and with net extra energy to export to the grid (income).
You’ve told yourself over and over that PV is bad so you can’t see anything but bad. Things have moved on from where you started. Go read up on the state of the industry as it is now.
A lot of things have happened in the last 12 months. Electric aircraft have become very practical, there is now a plane that can fly around the world on solar energy alone. If the latest battery technology consolidates to production level then there can be Cessna sized planes flying long distance and all electric family cars with 1000klm range. Businesses are talking of installing large quantities of solar panels on their factory rooves. The technologies are moving far faster than I believe that you are aware.
And it is pretty obvious that your knowledge of renewables systems is fully out of date. The energy storage technologies that stabalise the system will be integrated in the energy generation infrastructure and very different energy management techniques will be employed. As someone upthread pointed out the rolling wave energy consumption pattern is an artefact of coal power generation. Demand has been manipulated to achieve that pattern over some decades. Demand can be manipulated to achieve other energy production patterns. And that is what will happen.
Your massive overbuild is an argument that you guys have devised amoungst yourselves and is mostly myth. There will be overbuild, but not as much as you choose to believe. And, yes, gas will be the final balancing medium, but this will rarely exceed 10% per annum.
That is what everything that I am reading is pointing to. The real surprise I believe will be the strength of the distributed electricity generation sector. The iPod factor is at play here and I believe that it will overwhelm industry expectations. So let’s give it a name right here…iPower…for independent power or individual power. Did you notice how people with solar power systems actually take an interest in their energy generation and consumption? I’ve had people ring me just to say “we generated 25Kwh today and only consumed 6, good huh”.
OK, Finrod, your turn. Give us your take on all of this. I will be looking to see if you have anything constructive to say.
@ BilB:
Apologies for the delay. I’ve been studying your last post for some time with a view to answering it, but I keep being distracted by the surreal character thereof.
So Hal9000 has noted that his PV array is giving 25% of nameplate around one hour past local true noon on an overcast day. Why is this news? Most people already know that PV panels will pick up photons from all over the sky.
Are you seriously proposing to construct specialised CSP systems to marginally improve the performance of PV cells while it’s cloudy? That is what it’s sounding like you’re saying.
If your idea is something other than this, just explain it. Stop playing this ridiculous pseudo-intellectual shell game. This is precisely the kind of crap which you were skewered with when you tried peddling it on BNC.
@Finrod
I don’t know. The idea that cloudy day = no solar power was raised as a knock-down argument with lashings of sarcasm by JM, and you’re the one doing the Robin to JM’s Batman, so perhaps you should answer that question.
But I’d be more interested in your rationale for believing that current demand is an immutable verity, given that it is so driven by the prevalent rather elderly generation and distribution technologies. I reiterate my example of aluminium smelting based on coal-fired electricity generation, which is responsible, on the figures Garnaut cited, for 6% of total Australian emissions. You’re welcome to argue that this is sustainable, but I doubt you’d have many supporters. Removing just this one industry from the equation would make a major difference to the demand patterns cited in the original post here and on the basis of which we are invited to toss in the towel and concede defeat on the role of renewables in the energy mix of the future. This kind of argument may frighten children and Andrew Bolt’s fans, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The whole point of a carbon price is to rearrange the economy to focus on low emissions modes of production and consumption. By doing this, you change things like demand – both in the aggregate and in daily, weekly and seasonal cycles.
One last point – one of the main reasons why there has been so much concentration on wind generation is that it’s already commercially viable in many locations even in the absence of a carbon price because it can produce power at a price competitive even with pollute-for-free coal. By the same token, one of the arguments in favour of distributed domestic solar pv is that it takes stress off the network on peak demand (i.e. hot) days. Neither of these technologies is particularly dependent on a carbon price for their viability, and yet both will become more competitive still when there is a price on carbon.
Actually, Finrod, this is interesting. I’ve been doing a little quantity surveying on the system we are designing. Multiplied 6,000,000 times this system has about two and a quarter times the momentary output of the equivalent nuclear reactors delivering half of Australia’s electricity needs yet it has one third to a half the quantity of processed material by weight. So overbuild need not be inefficient. And there is no fuel required throughout the life of the installation. This just gets better and better.
This is a product in which, as you are aware, I have a commercial interest. So I am prepared to talk about the general function, the specifics will have to wait.
Multiplied 6,000,000 times this system has about two and a quarter times the momentary output of the equivalent nuclear reactors delivering half of Australia’s electricity needs yet it has one third to a half the quantity of processed material by weight.
What do you mean by momentary output? Is this the nameplate capacity? If not, what exactly is it?
True.
But I think there is a considerable overestimation of the ability of demand to adjust to power sources as fickle as unbuffered sun and wind, and an underestimation the costs of doing so.
I would be more inclined to call it nominal nameplate capacity. As this is a solar energy system it does create some of the problems that you regularly refer to. Not so much at the source as we have scaled the system to provide adequate output for the local user under most weather conditions. But obviously during low solar periods the system is not exporting energy to the grid so the grid has to make up the shortfall for industry and commerce. This is the strength of the trough solar CSP hybride system. The gas backup is scaled to match the solar field output. So if the turbine house has extra additional turbines then the CSP infrastructure can operate at up to double the installation nameplate output for significant periods. This ability is a relatively small additional cost against the total installation cost. This ability from CSP will work in well with pumped hydro storage and wind energy to provide a robust 90% renewable system.
So you do not need to have double everything to get double the effect. The beauty of our system is that it is ideally structured to charge electric vehicles during the peak solar period, both locally and accros the grid. And if the Polycell Lithium Air batteries prove to be successful, as these may have the potential to store 1.3 Kwh per kilogram (a fantastic energy density – keep you fingers crossed), then personal and light commercial transport rapidly goes all electric.
I was musing to myself earlier what the effect of removing most of the daily CO2 release and vehicle heat from cities would have if and when car fleets go all electric. Is there a local CO2 heat trapping effect due to the daily CO2 release cycle? A huge pulse in the morning and another at dusk. It is going to be interesting.
HAL9000 @128 The idea that cloudy day = no solar power was raised as a knock-down argument with lashings of sarcasm by JM
Ahhh, no. Innocent of this one. It was raised by Mark Duffet @97
First, the sun does not shine every day, due to the phenomenon known as ‘cloud’.
Sorry I do my own sarcasm, I don’t need to borrow that of other people.
Besides, I agree with you and think Finrod is wrong. Of course photo-voltaics work in the presence of cloud, Mark was talking rubbish in the first place.
The whole standpoint of “unless it’s perfect it shouldn’t be done at all” is incredibly childish nonsense dressed up in macho clothes.
Everybody seems to have their “favourite” generation technology. But what this mindset misses is that a mix of technologies is always required. Australia is currently supplied by a mix of brown coal, black coal, CCGT, OCGT and hydro. It would be quite difficult or inefficient to use just one of these technologies on its own.
100% windpower would be highly problematic, but then so would 100% nuclear (which cannot shutdown and then quickly restart, for example), say. A zero carbon mix would need to include wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and pumped storage. Maybe hydrogen-storage too. It would also be serving a very different demand profile to what we have now – as others have commented.
Small correction. That should have been PolyPlus Lithium Air batteries and Lithium Water batteries
http://www.polyplus.com/liwater.html
@JM Oops. Must be this lack of sun playing tricks with my mind.
@I&U My point exactly. Robert’s line @131 exemplifies the problem. Having launched this thread on the basis of evidence inviting us to conclude that wind is a hopeless joke of an energy technology, he’s retreated somewhat to
First, the notion that ‘unbuffered’ wind and the various solar technologies are going to fill the role currently played by coal is a straw man. Coal-fired power generation is a ubiquitous technology carrying with it a mini-universe of influences on demand and supply and carrying in its train a host of other industries such as cement manufacture. Replacing its myriad roles is not something that one technology can do. ‘Buffering’ I take it means storage, and there are many competing technologies existing and in development, including thermal storage, the pumped hydro done to death above, compressed air, production of hydrogen, flywheels, and batteries large and small, centralised and distributed. I suspect that all of these will be tried, and many may be of practical benefit.
Second, your guesstimate is as good as mine about what future demand will look like when carbon approaches $100 a tonne – as it must within the next 40 years. We can be pretty certain that aluminium smelting in Australia will not be part of the demand mix, however, and that alone will remove a significant factor. Once the principle and trajectory of carbon pricing is established, investment decisions will start to be made. Who knows – at $100 a tonne, maybe even carbon capture and storage from coal burning will be viable in some locations. Introduction of a host of highly efficient replacement technologies will have major impacts on the demand side – for instance replacement of existing street lighting is already being planned. The introduction of the NBN will facilitate highly responsive demand management systems that will allow electricity to be drawn down when it is cheap and plentiful, and used for non-time critical applications or stored on site. I would expect production of appliances incorporating their own storage functions will become more and more popular (and cheaper), just as a for instance.
Besides, I agree with you and think Finrod is wrong. Of course photo-voltaics work in the presence of cloud, Mark was talking rubbish in the first place.
I never claimed that PV doesn’t work when it’s cloudy. I do maintain it doesn’t work well enough to justify its use when it’s cloudy. What specifically does not work under cloud cover is consentrated solar thermal power.
Concentrated solar thermal power was supposed to be the breakthrough solar technology which overcame the problems of solar PV power. It did not occured to me that someone would present the idea of using a parabolic trough to try and squeeze a bit more power out of PV cells while it’s cloudy and expect to be taken seriously. It still seems kind of hallucinatory.
Finrod,
Solar thermal is the backbone technology for future Australian renewable grid energy. No “supposed to” about it. As I said above mainly because it is of the right scale and cost, available right now, and integrates with storage efficiently. It is just going to take a little more time for the penny to drop with our politicians.
If you are talking about trough PV, Melbourne University, those crazy spaced-out hallucinators, are doing a study on that possiblilty.
Hal9000 @136,
I agree with most of what you say, but you raise that old NBN chestnut again and I have to correct you.
Efficient demand-side response requires very little internet communication. For most purposes, a five-minute price signal would be sufficient, perhaps together with some hourly “pre-dispatch” price forecasts: that could easily be broadcast as a piggy back on a TV or radio signal. It does need an internet connection at all, let alone an NBN.
Whoops. Does NOT need an internet connection at all.
On the question of how well solar PV works on cloudy days, the answer is not very well. By taking the radical step of actually looking at the data for Germany which is nicely presented here: http://www.sma.de/en/news-information/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html , we can see that overall maximum output is about 60% of nameplate capacity on the best days and probably no more than 20% of nameplate capacity on poor days. And that is in the middle of the day.
Overall solar pv in Germany achieves about an 11% capacity factor. George Monbiot estimates that Solar PV in Germany has cost 51 billion euros.
Building solar PV at that cost in northern Europe looks really stupid. Germany could have had a single EPR nuclear reactor for < 10% of the cost producing around the same amount of electrical energy reliably. Or conversely 10 EPRs which would have made a very worthwhile reduction in CO2 emission – which solar PV has not.
As this is a solar energy system it does create some of the problems that you regularly refer to. Not so much at the source as we have scaled the system to provide adequate output for the local user under most weather conditions. But obviously during low solar periods the system is not exporting energy to the grid so the grid has to make up the shortfall for industry and commerce. This is the strength of the trough solar CSP hybride system. The gas backup is scaled to match the solar field output. So if the turbine house has extra additional turbines then the CSP infrastructure can operate at up to double the installation nameplate output for significant periods.
Then the OCGTs must run all night and for a good part of the morning and afternoon. On sunny days for a couple of hours either side of noon the facility will be able to deliver double the solar nameplate capacity by leaving the OCGTs running then as well.
This ability is a relatively small additional cost against the total installation cost.
This would suggest that the cost of the solar part of the installation is rather high compared to the OCGT part. Care to indicate just how much higher?
We seem to be assuming that the only way to deal with variable power production is some form of energy storage. However, not all uses need instant gratification. For example, we already have off peak power systems that do things like heat water when spare power is available. If we think about it there are a host of other applications where the option of allowing the power supplier to run some equipment at reduced power and/or delaying the use of power is a realistic option.
In the home, freezers, fridges, heating, cooling and battery charging are all possibilities. Industries such as the aluminum smelting could at least some variation in power supply. Within other industries there will often be equipment that can be turned off for some of the time without effecting output.
Tidal power doesn’t seem to be getting much of a mention but it has the advantage of very predictable outputs and a cycle no longer than 24 hrs – So it doesn’t need much storage to give an even output. (Spacing around the country also reduces the overall system variation.) It may be a logical technology to link with aluminum smelting.
For goodness sake, Finrod, there are no gas turbines involved in Solar Thermal. Please do some reading on the subject.
quokka
How did you come to your best days/worst days conclusion from that link?
What’s presented is a Flash representation of what appears to be live data – eg. right now it’s showing 0 output because it’s nightime in Germany. (Which also means it’s making the same mistake as is made in the graph of wind we’ve discussing – it’s treating capacity factor as an instantaneous value. This means you end up with people like Mark imagining zero wind across all of Australia for 9 days in a row rather than actual results like 30% capacity factor – which is what that graph actually shows when it’s integrated across the month)*
I would have thought for best days/worst days you’d have needed at least a years worth of data due to variation in day length across the seasons.
Yes, I know there is a link to “data” but if you follow the link you don’t get anywhere – you’re taken to the home page of sunnyportal.com which has no data, just an offer to set up a portal for you.
* In fact as I research this a bit I’m starting to think this entire focus on capacity factor is bit meaningless, and perhaps constitutes misrepresentation. Wind farms (and solar) aren’t meant or designed to operate at near-100% and shouldn’t be compared to coal-fired plants which have been so designed.
Skeptic: “The CF of the solar cells on your house is only 20% so obviously it doesn’t work, hah!”
Me: “Point 1 – I’ve coupled them to storage and the system powers my house 100% of the time, I’m completely off grid”
Point 2 – Even if #1 were not true, I’d still be reducing my use of coal fired power”
For goodness sake, Finrod, there are no gas turbines involved in Solar Thermal. Please do some reading on the subject.
The reading I was doing for this particular dialogue included the following:
But obviously during low solar periods the system is not exporting energy to the grid so the grid has to make up the shortfall for industry and commerce. This is the strength of the trough solar CSP hybride system. The gas backup is scaled to match the solar field output. So if the turbine house has extra additional turbines then the CSP infrastructure can operate at up to double the installation nameplate output for significant periods.
At any rate, BilB, we are discussing your CSP system here, not solar-thermal.
I&U@139
I’ll take your word for it, however I’d have thought that you could do some very sophisticated and intelligent demand management, incorporating remote sensing, with better and faster internet. Another time, perhaps.
@JM says
By pressing the ‘<' which gives you the previous day and the day before that etc. You can quickly build up a representative picture of what is going on.
@JM
You know what – I don’t care! What I am interested in is meaningful (which means drastic) reduction of CO2 emissions, not whether somebody gone “off grid”.
What I want to see at a minimum is complete displacement of fossil fuels in baseload electricity generation, not a few people feeling all warm and self satisfied because they have reduced their carbon emissions by a few percent.
Quokka @141: Hamburg is about the same distance from the north pole as Macquarie Island is from the South pole. It is also a lot wetter than most of Australia. German data is not a good guide to what would happen to a solar plant in Australia.
@John D
Quokka: I have problems with the short term obsession with getting rid of fossil fuels. What is important in the short term is getting serious climate action started quickly. One we have started reducing emissions it becomes harder for climate action opponents to continue the great big lie about climate action destroying the economy and costing a mint.
We are more likely to make short term gains if the cost/kWh is low, the technology is already commercially available and the technology will fit into the existing power supply system without problems. CCGT comes well out ahead of all the other alternatives in terms of all these criteria which is why I am so strongly in favour of the gas transition approach. In addition, if it is available, a CCGT/wind and/or CCGT solar combination can provide reliability without the need for energy storage up to quite high emission reduction levels. (See @93 above.)
Yeah thanks quokka, when I first went there I just got an error box telling me there was no power record and it wouldn’t let me get past that.
But now, I’ve seen what it’s doing I think it’s a nice illustration of the flaw in this “instantaneous capacity factor” stuff.
The displays always behave as if the rated output could actually be acheived, but this is not possible over a day. Firstly, the rated output is simply a maximum that the devices will handle without being overloaded (in the same way that the rated output of a coal plant is simply the maximum you can run it at, if you try to overrate it you’ll damage it)
Secondly, you have to remove the daily (and IMHO the seasonal) variation and integrate the total power, not simply look at the transient power. Then when you calculate the capacity factor you have to remember that a simple multiplication of the nameplate capacity by 24 hours per day is not really valid.
A solar installation will never achieve that because the earth turns, so the maximum theoretical capacity has to take account of the effects of the earth’s rotation. (That’s my opinion anyway. If you don’t agree, then you still have to bow to physical reality and accept that over a year you’ll only get about 30% of the rated power even under perfect conditions. Expecting any more is wishing for a unicorn.)
Hear! Hear! Quokka …
I’m not at all sure that Quokka isn’t being disingenuous, Fran.
At any event, ‘baseload’ is, as Quiggin among others has pointed out, an artifact of coal-fired generation technology.
As for a ‘few people feeling all warm and self-satisfied’, this is so much a standard RWDB caricature of the left and environmentalists I’m surprised you’ve fallen for it.
As anyone who has paid attention to water demand in south-east Queensland (and elsewhere) would know, individual household consumption (and production and storage) decisions in the aggregate make a huge difference to total demand. To claim otherwise is to reject both common sense and the evidence.
There isn’t going to be a single magic bullet replacement technology that can be retrofitted to our existing electricity generation and distribution systems and that will allow us to continue to increase consumption for ever. No one-for-one replacement technology, and no permanently rising consumption.
Germany is, however a fine example of a really stupid policy squandering large sums of money to achieve negligible CO2 savings when that money could have been spent on meaningful CO2 savings by building nuclear power plants. The bottom line is that the bottom line matters – if electricity generation cannot be cleaned up at reasonable cost, it will not happen and dangerous climate change is inevitable.
Australia is an incredibly conservative country, perhaps this has something to do with the common law system, a pre-modern idea, if ever there was one. It is a national trait to indulge in schadenfreude at the defects of new ideas– especially, when there is an economic angle (Germans naturally have a very different understanding of economics due to their history of super-inflation, great depression, reunification and lack of primary resources).
Nuclear power plants that produce nuclear waste, which is incredibly toxic for humans and the environment and that also have the danger of exploding are the reason why Germany is getting out of using them all together. They are a very real cost factor, for anyone seriously considering using them– and I mean in actually going through the process of costing them, not just touting their benefits. Also consider the price trend of solar power…
screwed up the blockquotes above because of an interruption…
Wow, enough straw men flying around to frighten a murder of crows. I’ve never contended that cloud = zero solar power output (my impression of my dad’s PV array performance in Adelaide is that cloud at noon results in 20-25% of peak capacity). What I do maintain is that cloud means solar cannot be relied upon to contribute to storage pumping when needed. At best it’ll be flat out trying to hold up its end of the direct electricity supply requirement and keeping the molten salt up to the required temperature. More likely there’ll be many times when this sector, too, would place demands on pumped storage, simultaneous with those of wind.
Yes, my scenario incorporates numerous simplifications, but these are on both sides of the ledger (e.g. no accounting for demand from SA, where there is no prospect of any substantial hydro storage). The main point stands – the storage capacity constraints (in both volume capacity and water terms) are significant, and not to be skated over, dismissed out of hand or ‘averaged over a month’, when the latter in particular clearly won’t always cut it.
@Hal9000
Ehhh …. I can assure you I am not.
And Quiggin is wrong. Baseload can reasonably be defined as the minimum demand on the grid. I really can’t see why this is an artifact of coal. It’s just as real in Norway where electricity comes from hydro or France where it mostly comes from nuclear. We can discuss smart grids and demand management for a year and a day, but there will still be a minimum demand on the grid. In any case we are a long way off smart grids making any real difference, if indeed they ever do.
I’m not sure what an ‘RWDB’ is, but I doubt that I’m one of those. I’ve been on the left since the last year of high school when I became involved in the anti Vietnam war struggle. The left is currently weak because of the historical conjuncture it finds itself in, but it’s also not helping itself with woolly headed thinking. If a few people rattle it’s cage that would do no harm at all. And if it leaves itself open to caricature …..
That was in the context of Wivenhoe being at 18% capacity, the need was immediate, there were legal restrictions and it is rather easier to have shorter showers and leave the lawn sprinklers off than it is to constrain energy use. Most importantly it was perceived as a collective effort for the collective well being. Going “off grid” is not a collective effort and never will be. It is a bit of individualism and deserves no more subsidy than the going rate for CO2 abatement.
Nuclear power could be retrofitted to the existing grid and distribution systems with only minor changes. We know that this is doable because France did it. It might even be possible in some cases to retain the turbines and switchyards of existing plants and just replace the source of steam. I’m not denying that it would be challenging and not without problems – but all other options are MUCH more challenging and perhaps so challenging as to be in practical terms impossible.
Declaring that there is no single technology that could oust fossil fuels from electricity generation does not make it so. I’m not opposed to anything that produces clean power in significant quantities but I find reciting the “silver bullet” meme to be just a weak defence of positions that are ideologically attached to certain technologies with known limitations. There is certainly no one single technology that can entirely solve the CO2 problem – but that is another matter entirely.
The second issue of indefinitely increasing energy use is rather complex. History suggests that energy consumption will continue to increase whether we like it or not. Even the small leveling off in some western countries may be at least partially due to the shift of manufacturing to Asia. In the less privileged parts of the world (ie most of it) energy consumption will without question rise dramatically. From a historical perspective it is all but inevitable. I should think that from a Left perspective, a reading of history is vital and political ineptitude is the consequence of a misreading of history.
Sometime in the future, perhaps world energy consumption can be constrained to no further growth, but that time is a long way off. Large growth will happen despite the best efforts at energy efficiency and demand management. To not understand this is to misunderstand the nature of, and underestimate the seriousness of the climate problem. Think globally.
Mark
solar cannot be relied upon to contribute to storage pumping when needed.
This is a purely statistical issue that is dependent on the average daily requirement and the size of the buffer – it has no effect on drinking and irrigation water if the buffer is large enough.
You’ve asserted, as has Fran, that the requirements of buffer storage are huge and beyond practical limits, yet offered no backing for those assertions (Fran’s peta-litres are ridiculous)
I’m working on some modeling of this but let me give you a back of the envelope calculation in the meantime.
Hydro provides about 7% of power in Australia with solar providing less than 1% and wind about 1%. Hydro also involves only a portion, not the whole lot, of Australia’s water resources – and use of water for pumped hydro does not consume water, it re-uses it.
Now 7 > 2, so the suggestion that we can’t find enough buffer space to cope with variation is a trifle weak.
Secondly, wind has a generation capacity somewhere between 1.5 and 1.9 GW of power (with actual delivery only about 20-30% of that). A single pumped storage plant at Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains has a generation capacity that matches that.
The suggestion that we couldn’t balance variation of the existing market with that facility is risible, particularly since we actually balance the existing wind market using spot supply and the financial side of the market
I find the current state of this argument a little bit ridiculous. On the one hand, wind is supposed to be so feeble it can make no serious contribution. On the other hand it is supposed to be so monstrous as to overwhelm our hydro resources dozens – or if Fran is to be believed, millions – of times over.
You can’t have it both ways.
Can you and Fran provide any real numbers?
Oh and regarding the SA situation re. pumped hydro.
Power is transmitted around the country on the grid in the existing market. Transmission losses are about 3-4% I believe and power produced in SA is perfectly fungible for power produced in NSW and Victoria.
So geographical location of the producer and the storage shouldn’t matter too much.
But even if it does, then we simply have an infrastructure problem. And the solution is high voltage DC which suffers much less transmission loss over long distances than the AC we currently use, but it is a solvable problem. The lines are in place, we just need to change the termination equipment.
All we need is a plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
There are many options, both regional and “national.”
quokka @160
On baseload, the money quotes from Quiggin at http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/07/22/the-myth-of-baseload-power-demand/ are
and
But I suggest you read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that water demand in SEQ has never returned to pre-drought levels and is not likely to. People change behaviour for all sorts of reasons, one of which is price, and another of which is civic virtue.
At any event, declaring your undying love for nuclear energy does not make it a goer in the short or long terms either. Check the progress on Obama’s bright nuclear future if you doubt the economic, environmental and political obstacles lying on that road.
Since Australia will not embrace nuclear energy in any conceivable time frame relevant to the required emissions reductions, declaring you have the hots for the plutonium cycle leads us nowhere.
Your actual contributions to the debate have been to decry the very notion of individual action, and now to claim that eternally increasing electricity consumption is written in tablets of stone. The first contribution is to counsel despair and scorn action at a local, workplace and household level. The second is to embrace the philosophy of nineteenth century frontier capitalism. Both are to say the least bizarre positions for a self-described lefty.
This second clause is a weak rhetorical point that I will ignore. The first part is a lovely sentiment that every reasonable person would hope for. However, it is more like a vision statement than an implementation plan, and it is the latter that is of more interest to me – I’ve had enough visioning on climate change over the last decade to last me for many years.
When you bring that vision down to earth, and focus on the challenging work of actually getting something to happen, then – at least in Australia – wind power and other renewables rightly get and deserve attention. Unlike nuclear in Australia, wind power is actually being implemented now, it is actually already reducing emissions in Australia, it is political amenable enough to have already gained legislation and a credit scheme to support its implementation, it is currently one of the most competitive measures for bigger-than-negligible emission reductions in Australia. Unlike nuclear, it is actually going to reduce emissions in Australia within the next decade, and had a clear trajectory already in place.
It is silly to even compare nuclear and wind in Australia. Nuclear in Australia is about vision, well into the future. Wind is about incremental emission reductions, happening right now. They aren’t on the same playing field.
I think pro-nuclear people (or nuclear agnostics such as myself) could best go about turning the nuclear vision into implementation by refraining from even talking about nuclear power for now, and instead just focus on getting a carbon price up – because without a substantial carbon price, nuclear will never happen in Australia.
JM @164 “pumped hydro does not consume water, it re-uses it”
Only if there is sufficient storage capacity at both ends of the system, as my example @97 indicates. One way around this would be to use the ocean as the lower storage reservoir, but there are obvious undesirable consequences.
While on the subject of problematic solutions, a way around the problem of methane emission from new hydro storages would be to raze and burn the vegetation in the impoundment before flooding it. But good luck selling that little exercise as an environmental protection measure.
You want more numbers? Beyond @97 and the realm of the back of the envelope lies the Zero Carbon Australia plan and the critiques of it. Full marks to Beyond Zero Emissions for getting the debate into the quantitative arena, but they’ve left it there undefended, the critiques still unanswered AFAIK. The cudgels really need to be taken up there.
And I can’t get over the apparently unconscious irony of HAL9000 @164. To say “Australia will not embrace nuclear energy in any conceivable (relevant) time frame…” is truly to counsel despair. Indeed the ironies abound, since HAL himself was nuclear-powered.
SCPritch,
I don’t have a problem with people talking about Nuclear in good faith. However, it is commonly raised in bad faith: either as a wedge tactic (“if you are against carbon, how come you are antinuclear?”) or as a false dichotomy (“we shouldn’t have renewables, we should have Nuclear instead.”)
I agree that Nuclear power would have a very long lead time in Australia, but that may be an argument for, rather than against, talking about it now.
A carbon price is, of course, the immediate priority.
Mark @166
Only if there is sufficient storage capacity at both ends of the system,
Yes, that much is obvious. But you’re throwing around numbers like “2 Cardinia’s a day” and Fran is referring to peta-litres.
These are the numbers I’m referring to.
And BTW, the volumes can be at the same dam – most pumped hydro schemes use a capture pond directly below the dam itself, but another dam is ok as it is really only the head that counts.
That’s what I’m asking. Because I have estimates (which I’m still checking) that indicate that both you and Fran are exaggerating the problem by orders of magnitude.
>Do you have any real, justifiable numbers for that? (Let’s start for the sake of argument by assuming that we’re only dealing with current wind production and move on from there)
Yep, and I was orbiting Jupiter back in ’01 too.
Incurious,
I would argue that the long lead time makes it more important to look at it now – and do the advance planning that would be needed.
Arguments against nuclear power:
1. more so than oil, uranium is a rare mineral
2. much more so than oil, nuclear power produces toxic by-products
3. it’s dangerous
4. even “safe” implementations have a negative effect on their environments
5. it represents a very serious security concern
6. there are viable alternatives
7. development of nuclear power technologies has practically ceased, other advanced economies are not investing in this technology any more
8. the price trend of wind and solar is towards lower prices
If any country should be able to actually implement a renewable energy plan than it should be Australia- we have a large land mass, relatively small amount of industry (including energy intensive products such as Alumina.) This is an issue with incredible market possibilities, as the increasingly other nations swap to alternative energy solutions.
As far as I’m concerned the technology is mainly already there, what’s needed is a plan to integrate and organise heterogeneous (probably geographically regional/disparate) energy sources. I believe that this means thinking regionally — even though most Australians live in the capital cities.
PS. A Space Odyssey was produced in 1968 you hippies!
I see you among many others misinterpreted the time travel scene at the end, where the ’01 vision was teleported to Stanley’s mid-60s film stock. We managed to sneak that beta version of the iPad into a whole lot of scenes too. I’m surprised nobody picked it.
Hal, why did you have to go crazy ::sigh::
Andrew @170,
Agreed. That was my point.
I’m sorry Joe. I can’t answer that.
Hey Joe,
Arguments against nuclear power:
1. more so than oil, uranium is a rare mineral
Not really:
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-nuclear-power-sustainable.html
2. much more so than oil, nuclear power produces toxic by-products
Do you really think that the small mass of fission products and transuranics produced in current reactors (nearly all of them in stable solid form and contained in thick, sturdy drums) are anywhere near is hazardous as the millions of tonnes of gaseous combustion products put out by oil and other fossil fuels? Well, clearly you do, but it’s not true.
3. it’s dangerous
Eveything is dangerous. The question is, how dangerous? As it turns out, nuclear power is responsible for less deaths/kW.h generated than any other power source, and that’s after the stats from Chernobyl are included.
4. even “safe” implementations have a negative effect on their environments
Not as negative as not implementing them, since other, more environmentally damaging options must be used if nuclear is counted out.
5. it represents a very serious security concern
The security procedures for nuclear power plants are robust and well-established.
6. there are viable alternatives
True. Unfortunately, these are coal, oil and natural gas. These are what we’re trying to get rid of.
7. development of nuclear power technologies has practically ceased, other advanced economies are not investing in this technology any more
The anti-nukes are doing their best to hamstring the revival od nuclear power in some western countries, and may succeed for a time. In the rising eastern powers, nuclear energy is recognised as absolutely necessary for their future.
8. the price trend of wind and solar is towards lower prices
They are hopelessly uncompetitive. The merest suggestion that the subsidies being provided to the German solar industry might be reduced by 10% or so earlier this year sent the global market for PV panels into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. This is one way to reduce the asking price for PV panels, but it’s hardly sustainable.
If any country should be able to actually implement a renewable energy plan than it should be Australia- we have a large land mass, relatively small amount of industry (including energy intensive products such as Alumina.) This is an issue with incredible market possibilities, as the increasingly other nations swap to alternative energy solutions.
This is a profoundly immoral position. You’re saying that because we just might be able to get our power from wind and/or solar owing to our geographical advantage regarding these sources, we dhould do so in order to encourage other less well situated countries to do the same, to their detriment. What we should be doing is leading by example in the implementation of nuclear power which can be deployed just about anywhere it is needed, rather than wasting time and money promoting boutique ‘renewable’ power sources to the world’s poor.
Hello Finrod
Arguments against nuclear power extended:
1. more so than oil, uranium is a rare mineral
Not really:
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-nuclear-power-sustainable.html
yes, really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium.
For god’s sake Finrod, Uranium is 92 on the periodic table!
2. much more so than oil, nuclear power produces toxic by-products
Do you really think that the small mass of fission products and transuranics produced in current reactors (nearly all of them in stable solid form and contained in thick, sturdy drums) are anywhere near is hazardous as the millions of tonnes of gaseous combustion products put out by oil and other fossil fuels? Well, clearly you do, but it’s not true.
No, it is true. At least C02 is a “natural” ingredient in most biospheres. Caesium-135 is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste
3. it’s dangerous
Eveything is dangerous. The question is, how dangerous? As it turns out, nuclear power is responsible for less deaths/kW.h generated than any other power source, and that’s after the stats from Chernobyl are included.
Everything is dangerous? Here in Germany, the employees at nuclear power stations have an increased risk of cancer and on average die 5 years earlier than the average population. They are also not allowed to blame the government for this, but increase extra money for their work.
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
4. even “safe” implementations have a negative effect on their environments
Not as negative as not implementing them, since other, more environmentally damaging options must be used if nuclear is counted out.
How is solar, wind, thermal, cogeneration power stations, or tidal more harmful than nuclear power?
5. it represents a very serious security concern
The security procedures for nuclear power plants are robust and well-established.
Only because we have never really experienced a time of armed aggression since they have been used. You have a false sense of security if you think that nuclear power stations don’t represent a significant security threat. This threat is magnified by the potential effects of a nuclear power plant melt-down.
6. there are viable alternatives
True. Unfortunately, these are coal, oil and natural gas. These are what we’re trying to get rid of.
No, there are many more viable alternatives than these 3 you mention.
7. development of nuclear power technologies has practically ceased, other advanced economies are not investing in this technology any more
The anti-nukes are doing their best to hamstring the revival od nuclear power in some western countries, and may succeed for a time. In the rising eastern powers, nuclear energy is recognised as absolutely necessary for their future.
I was not talking about the politics, I was talking about scientific issues, an overview of which can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactor#Future_and_developing_technologies
8. the price trend of wind and solar is towards lower prices
They are hopelessly uncompetitive. The merest suggestion that the subsidies being provided to the German solar industry might be reduced by 10% or so earlier this year sent the global market for PV panels into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. This is one way to reduce the asking price for PV panels, but it’s hardly sustainable.
If any country should be able to actually implement a renewable energy plan than it should be Australia- we have a large land mass, relatively small amount of industry (including energy intensive products such as Alumina.) This is an issue with incredible market possibilities, as the increasingly other nations swap to alternative energy solutions.
This is a profoundly immoral position. You’re saying that because we just might be able to get our power from wind and/or solar owing to our geographical advantage regarding these sources, we dhould do so in order to encourage other less well situated countries to do the same, to their detriment. What we should be doing is leading by example in the implementation of nuclear power which can be deployed just about anywhere it is needed, rather than wasting time and money promoting boutique ‘renewable’ power sources to the world’s poor.
No, I disagree completely. You are thinking in terms of today’s prices without forward projections of values. The market for alternative energy is not only developing countries. The US and Europe consumes the majority of today’s oil production (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Oil_consumption_per_day_by_region_from_1980_to_2006.svg). Reducing this will have a more significant impact on green house emissions than “giving” developing countries alternative energy supplies.
I believe many people are effected by a perception of science as being relatively more rational. The more purely technological the solution, the more “scientific”, rational and attractive it is.
JM @168 “Let’s start for the sake of argument by assuming that we’re only dealing with current wind production and move on from there”
Whoa. Have we been talking at cross purposes all this time? To frame the discussion in these terms completely misses the point I and others have been trying to make. The crux of the argument is scalability. I don’t think anyone has issues with wind providing up to around 20% of our electricity, as this can be soaked up within the existing grid (though this won’t result in the retirement of any fossil fuel generating capacity, and many would argue these resources could be better invested).
The situation I (and presumably others like Robert Merkel) have in mind is something like the Beyond Zero Emissions proposal, which calls for wind contributing 40%. It’s this that I’m warning against as a recipe for rolling blackouts.
Mark, you’re wriggling. You framed the question in terms of the current market “producing no output for 9 days” and requiring “2 Cardenia’s per day” with the ocean at the lower end. That’s what I’m asking you to justify. (Also Fran’s peta-litres if you feel like addressing that)
Obviously, if wind production did reach 40% much larger quantities of water would be needed – although I doubt it would scale linearly as there would be more geographic dispersion involved and therefore much reduced risk of “9 days of no wind” (The current market is concentrated into only 3 relatively small geographic areas and so there is much less dispersion than is desirable)
I’m only trying to put the discussion on a much more concrete footing and base it on real-world examples instead of lazy rhetoric. Therefore I think it’s reasonable to start with the current market, examine the implications for infrastructure and only then move on to more speculative scenarios.
Finrod I read your posting about the abundance of uranium but I think you’re being much too sanquine:
a.) no matter how much is in the earth’s crust, we live there and are not going to dig up dry land down to the mantle
b.) we are not going to drain the oceans and dig up the sea-bed down to the mantle
c.) at a concentration of 3 parts per billion, the amount of sea-water that must be processed to retrieve 1kg is staggering and is going to cost way more than $300/kg. A second’s reflection should tell you that. Compare it to recovery of gold from rock. The concentration has to reach something like 5 parts per million before it is economic and gold is worth something more than $24,000/kg (at $700/ounce)
d.) I think your posting is quite dishonest about the relative abundance’s of U235 and U238 (1% and 99% respectively). Sure you acknowledge this, but completely gloss over the consequences, and say nothing about how to address the problem other than making a vague implication that since only 1% of uranium is usable at the moment that there is surely some technical fix that will improve this – short of re-running the big bang and the formation of the galaxy, I don’t see how
BTW – re. the economics and politics of nuclear. A member of my family just spent the last 5 years trying to get a uranium mine going in this country – with no political hassles, the partners squared away both political parties before the 2007 election. However, the price of uranium has fallen about 25-30% over the last year and they’ve abandoned the project because it’s no longer economic. Chinese demand wasn’t enough to sustain the price.
Even the relatively easy end of the nuclear economy (mining) is much more marginal than you present it as.
It’s amazing really, the pro-nuclear crowd like to chest-beat about how practical they are and how un-realistic the renewables crowd are, but it is renewables that are Here-Right-Now and nuclear that relies on new, undeveloped and unproven technologies that will be Here-Real-Soon-Now.
Cognitive dissonance?
Finrod I read your posting about the abundance of uranium but I think you’re being much too sanquine:
Rather than taking JM’s word for what I say in my linked article, I advise anyone who seriously wants to understand this issue to read it for themselves. He has either misunderstood or misinterpreted several crucial points.
Finrod, it’s a long article – perhaps you could point me to the particular point/s I’ve missed. Particularly, as I’ve only taken issue with a couple of points in it.
The situation I (and presumably others like Robert Merkel) have in mind is something like the Beyond Zero Emissions proposal, which calls for wind contributing 40%. It’s this that I’m warning against as a recipe for rolling blackouts.
Well no Mark, we wouldn’t be that stupid, we’d just build a shitload more fossil-fuelled generating capacity, lying idle at great expense.
JM, regarding wriggling, I don’t believe I’ve seen any acknowledgement from you regarding the original figures being credible and legitimate (and incidentally showing up to 9 days in a row (in winter, I’d hate to see autumn) where little power was being generated.
Finrod, it’s a long article – perhaps you could point me to the particular point/s I’ve missed. Particularly, as I’ve only taken issue with a couple of points in it.
I don’t know whether or not you’ve ‘missed’ any points from it, but the ones you’ve mentioned indicate that your interpretation of them needs some work.
a.) no matter how much is in the earth’s crust, we live there and are not going to dig up dry land down to the mantle
b.) we are not going to drain the oceans and dig up the sea-bed down to the mantle
So whoever said we were? I pointed out that with current mining techniqes we could access a certain quantity of uranium and thorium. I did not propose that we dig it all up over the whole planet right away. The article was, after all, an investigation into the long term sustainability of nuclear power.
c.) at a concentration of 3 parts per billion, the amount of sea-water that must be processed to retrieve 1kg is staggering and is going to cost way more than $300/kg. A second’s reflection should tell you that. Compare it to recovery of gold from rock. The concentration has to reach something like 5 parts per million before it is economic and gold is worth something more than $24,000/kg (at $700/ounce)
You clearly didn’t bother looking at the linked articles. The Japanese seawater extraction system consists of a special adsorbent cloth suspended in an ocean current, collecting uranium over some months, then being hauled up to the surface for processing.The energy needed to keep the current flowing over the collecting surface comes from the ocean itself, something that renewables advocates should approve of.
The prototype demonstration managed to achieve something like $1000/kg. This is not currently economical, due to the low price of conventional uranium resources, but even if the price of seawater extraction dropped no further, it would still be economical to fuel nuclear plants with it as the price of nuclear fuel is a minor cost input to the price of nuclear power.
d.) I think your posting is quite dishonest about the relative abundance’s of U235 and U238 (1% and 99% respectively). Sure you acknowledge this, but completely gloss over the consequences, and say nothing about how to address the problem other than making a vague implication that since only 1% of uranium is usable at the moment that there is surely some technical fix that will improve this – short of re-running the big bang and the formation of the galaxy, I don’t see how
Your perusal of the article must have been shallow indeed. I stated that the abundance of U-235 in natural uranium is 0.7%(more precicely it is 0.7202%), not 1%. How is specifically pointing out this issue and shaping the whole essay around it glossing over it?
Commercial breeder reactors are currently under construction in China, India and Russia. Far from being some unspecified technical fix, they are under continued development and current implementation now.
This is why I advise people who are genuinely interested in these issues to read the essay for themselves rather than rely on your glib misrepresentation. You are clearly not comfortable with the startling implications people will see once they understand the true magnitude of the nuclear resource.
If it were intended as a stand-alone essay I may have spent some time explaining breeder technology in more detail, but it is intended to be one of a linked series of essays for an upcoming website. Breeder reactor technology will have its own essay.
BTW – re. the economics and politics of nuclear. A member of my family just spent the last 5 years trying to get a uranium mine going in this country – with no political hassles, the partners squared away both political parties before the 2007 election. However, the price of uranium has fallen about 25-30% over the last year and they’ve abandoned the project because it’s no longer economic. Chinese demand wasn’t enough to sustain the price.
What you have described is the normal to-and-fro of the market over a plentiful commodity.
Cognitive dissonance?
Back at ya!
wilful, I was leaving that alone because I thought it was unproductive.
But in my defense I think I was justified in my initial skepticism:
1. The original references provided by Robert was not AEMO data
2. The subsequent AEMO references provided by Robert did not contain data that could be used to produce the graph
3. The follow up references had no provenance. There was nothing to indicate it was in any way associated with AEMO
4. It was only when you provided a quite obscure link on an AEMO page that any association was established.
OK? I really don’t think I should have to trawl around the AEMO site and even the wider web itself (which is what I ended up doing) when the onus was on Robert to provide a decent reference in the first place.
Now generally speaking I like Robert’s posts, but IMHO he dropped the ball on this one.
wilful where little power was being generated.
This is part of a wider topic, which I’ve alluded to, in that I think the graph is misleading. It is energy production that is important.
I might comment on that aspect later.
Finrod
The technologies you mention – thorium and breeder reactors – are still experimental or in pilot stages. Also I believe the thorium economy is reliant on uranium and is actually more expensive (which may be why it is only India who is pursuing it as they have large reserves of thorium).
All of these might arrive Real Soon Now, but they ain’t here yet.
the abundance of U-235 in natural uranium is 0.7%(more precicely it is 0.7202%), not 1%.
Do you understand significant figures? Obviously not. No physics student would make a solecism like this. There is no substantive difference between 0.7% and 1% – one is rounded, the other not – but by claiming the 4 digit accuracy of 0.7202 you’re making a fairly big claim.
What you have described is the normal to-and-fro of the market over a plentiful commodity.
Not really. Mining relies on a mine lifetime of at least 20 years. These guys are no longer confident they have something that will be viable for that long. They expected prices to rise during the development, they didn’t they fell and look like staying down.
It’s a marginal investment.
JM @ 184,
I think you are being unfair to Robert. He clearly had his reasons for trusting the linked material and it turns out his trust was justified.
I don’t think that he is obliged to cater for conspiracy theorists such as yourself and provide chapter and verse on how the referenced material is sourced. If you are sceptical, do your own research (which really wasn’t that difficult in this case).
I&U
I’m not being unfair – he pointed to data that he clearly thought justified the graph. I questioned him on it pointing out that the data wasn’t what he thought it was, he pointed me elsewhere where the data didn’t support the conclusions, etc.
Robert was making the claim, I just wanted to check it and understand it better.
The technologies you mention – thorium and breeder reactors – are still experimental or in pilot stages. Also I believe the thorium economy is reliant on uranium and is actually more expensive (which may be why it is only India who is pursuing it as they have large reserves of thorium).
The three countries mentioned appear to have high confidence in their breeder tech. Thorium is indeed a bit further off, but only becuase the brass tacks engineering development has not been pursued with the same vigour as the uranium fuel cycle. There’s nothing magical or mysterious about it, and early work on the molten salt thorium breeder reactor was extremely promising before it was chopped in favour of the development of FBRs. This unfortunate decision had come under increasing scrutiny of late.
Do you understand significant figures? Obviously not. No physics student would make a solecism like this. There is no substantive difference between 0.7% and 1% – one is rounded, the other not – but by claiming the 4 digit accuracy of 0.7202 you’re making a fairly big claim.
If you are talking about using a technology which exploits a small portion of a larger resource, just how smaller a portion is a rather important matter. It was a matter which had to be looked at in order to give people an idea of just how much or how little you get from the raw material. If U-235 is 1% of natural uranium, you need to mine 100 tonnes of natural U to get 1 tonne of fissile fuel. If it’s 0.5%, you need to mine two hundred tonnes to get that amount of fissile material. Since I was examining the total tonnage of natural U needed for a given level of power production, these details are more important than you indicate.
Given that the current enrichment process leaves some U-235 in the DU tails, I rounded the final portion of U-235 which ended up as fuel in LEU fuel bundles to 0.5%. This was a little mean of me, as the breeding of Pu-239 in a reactor core during a normal fuel burn actually brings the total portion of the original natural U burned as fuel up to 0.6%, but I left it at 0.5% for ease of calculation for people (after all, I was more interested in getting people to grasp the general order of magnitude of the resource than in nagging them about fine details).
Not really. Mining relies on a mine lifetime of at least 20 years. These guys are no longer confident they have something that will be viable for that long. They expected prices to rise during the development, they didn’t they fell and look like staying down.
It’s a marginal investment.
It’ll be a lot more marginal once breeder technology gets going.
Hmmm, I should have resisted your pedantry, I usually do.
It’ll be a lot more marginal once breeder technology gets going.
Breeders are not a magic pudding. The breeder factor ranges (I believe) from about 1.01 to 1.20 which is hardly that encouraging. It’s like squeezing the last drop of blood from a stone, you’ll get a little bit but nothing like the amount available from the primary source.
And breeder technology has been around for about as long as I’ve been alive. It’s gradually moved from Real Soon Now, to “about 15-20 years away”.
Pretty soon it’ll probably be in Fusion-Time (aka “30 years away”)
This doesn’t inspire confidence.
We have a problem right now and need a solution right now, so those of us in the real world will adopt whatever we have to hand right now and leave you purists and idealists to your rhetoric.
Breeders are not a magic pudding. The breeder factor ranges (I believe) from about 1.01 to 1.20 which is hardly that encouraging. It’s like squeezing the last drop of blood from a stone, you’ll get a little bit but nothing like the amount available from the primary source.
Deary me, you really don’t understand this technology at all, do you? The advantage of the fast breeder is that it can continually breed replacement fissile fuel from U-238. The 0.01 to 0.20 over unity which you refer to is actually in addition to the 1.0 which represents this continuous replacement. Thus, instead of getting by with using only 0.6% of natural uranium as fuel in LWTs, we can use 100% of it.
We have a problem right now and need a solution right now, so those of us in the real world will adopt whatever we have to hand right now and leave you purists and idealists to your rhetoric.
Agreed. What we have right now is LWR and HWR technology which can see us through quite well until the widespread adoption of the breeder.
And breeder technology has been around for about as long as I’ve been alive. It’s gradually moved from Real Soon Now, to “about 15-20 years away”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
“The BN-600 reactor is a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor built at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Designed for 600 MW (electric), it produces 560 MW (electric) dispatching energy to the Middle Urals power grid. It has been in operation since 1980.”
You’re overplaying your hand Finrod. Your own posting acknowledges that even breeders are only an extender of existing resources – but the extension is not indefinite, I think you nominate 300 years.
Similarly, you concede that extraction from seawater demands large resources “11 billion tonnes of adsorbent cloth with a cross-sectional collection area of nearly half a million square kilometres”
Further: Extracting large quantities of uranium from such low grade feedstock will require ever more infrastructure to maintain supply
In other words, this route suffers severely from diminishing returns and increasing costs (yes, I do understand mathematics Fin ol’ chap)
And then there’s the Fusion-Time question. All this stuff is decades away from commercial fruition.
It’s a dead end, and its status is “pie in the sky”. Just where it has been for the last 50 years or so.
JM @190
Actually, breeders are about as close to a magic pudding as you are going to get in this life. The only thing better would be fusion: running the planet off seawater.
The technology may be similar to an atom bomb in slow motion, but it is impressively frugal nevertheless.
You’re overplaying your hand Finrod. Your own posting acknowledges that even breeders are only an extender of existing resources – but the extension is not indefinite, I think you nominate 300 years.
You have once again completely misunderstood or misrepresented what you have read. If you really want to understand these matters, you should put in the effort to read for comprehension, rather than just skimming for cheap shots, which have in all cases backfired on you.
By the way, JM, if global temperatures approach 5degC then the ocean currents begin to shut down and the Nuclear seive has a relatively short life as a technique. Not that it would have much of a life anyway, can you imagine the disaster it would be for marine life. It would take the constitution of a Japanese whaler to put such a plan into effect. ie non starter.
After thought, it is also certainly not something that an environmentally concerned naturalist such as Barry Brooke would endorse, I imagine.
if global temperatures approach 5degC then the ocean currents begin to shut down and the Nuclear seive has a relatively short life as a technique.
If we delay the introduction of the nuclear economy until AGW has driven the temperature up by 5 degrees C, our situation will be dire indeed.
After thought, it is also certainly not something that an environmentally concerned naturalist such as Barry Brooke would endorse, I imagine.
I imagine Barry would see this as another reason for supporting his favoured option of the integral fast reactor, which could sustain the 100TW global economy I was using as a baseline for discussion in the essay without resorting to oceanic U extraction at all. Mind you, the massive figure for the oceanic U estraction infrastructure was for PWR technology (once again assuming that a 100TW power infrastructure will be needed to support 10 billion people at US living standards). For IFR technology, the infrastructure could be scaled back to about 0.6% of that figure.
Whereas Nuclear does have a place in various parts of the world (not Australia I contend) its ultimate viability is not sound in any country with overall good insolation. Read my comment on Quiggin and see what you think. What should be the saviour for nuclear, peak oil, will actually its undoing here.
I am going to have to concede that I think that there will be no other option for future shipping than nuclear power. And this need could well come on suddenly. I can see that there will even become a role for some shipping as floating power houses to solve the need for rapid support where small nations are overwhelmed by change, and for natural disaster relief. Maybe these vessels will be more submarine like (semi submersible).
Fin
It’s a dead end mate. I remember back when I was a kid during the 1960′s and I first became aware of the limited lifetime of uranium as a resource.
Then it was “don’t worry, we’ll have fusion in 20-30 years, then we’ll get energy from seawater”
Later – when fusion became the tech equivalent of waiting for Godot – it was “don’t worry, we’ll have breeders in 20-30 years”
Now it’s – after experimental breeders have been around for a few decades with nothing but problems – it’s “don’t worry, we’ll get uranium from sea water in 20-30 years”
Honestly at some point you just got to give up.
And what’s happened to wind and solar in the meantime? They’ve gone from hopelessly utopian to commercial deployment.
(And BTW Fin, please stop insulting my knowledge of physics – I trained in it, worked in it and probably understand it better than you do.)
@ JM #201:
You have lost every exchange with me so far, and your response is to declare victory.
(And BTW Fin, please stop insulting my knowledge of physics – I trained in it, worked in it and probably understand it better than you do.)
If you want people to respect you in this, you need to stop posting asinine comments.
Finrod,
You are obviously a bit delusional.
You are obviously a bit delusional.
Oh well. At least I’m happy.
But if you think I’m wrong, go ahead and outline it.
Time for a new avi finrod:
http://www.supermanhomepage.com/images/chris-reeve-movies5/NuclearMan.jpg
Time for a new avi finrod:
As an in-depth critique of my position, your link lacks a certain something.
Oh C’mon Finrod, at least it’s not black and white– for all I know, it could even be Technicolor.
But seriously, it’s all been said above. You can not honestly believe in harvesting U from the ocean?!
But seriously, it’s all been said above. You can not honestly believe in harvesting U from the ocean?!
What exactly in what has been said above do you find so compelling? Details, not just a vague reference to what has gone before.
The Japanese seem to be serious about the project. They have a long-term interest in making it work.
Bilb @200
What about windpower?
Finrod: The Japanese seem to be serious about the project.
I think you’re referring to a paper from 1994. I can’t get to that one because it’s behind a paywall, but others I’ve seen (from 1980 through to last year) are far less optimistic than your presentation. In fact one makes the point that if there is any pumping involved beyond 3m then the energy balance doesn’t come out right – you lose more in the process than you gain from the uranium.
Which would suggest that this “cloth” you’re talking about producing in 500,000 sq km quantities would have to be damn cheap. I’m not sure that something called “macrocyclic hexapolymer”, or in another version “amidoxime polyethylene” is going to be as cheap as newsprint somehow.
There’s also apparently a lot of engineering involved to sink the membrane under water and hold it in place – ironically one of these schemes involves wind turbines.
This doesn’t exactly sound cheap-as-chips Fin’.
They have a long-term interest in making it work
You sure?
JM @179, I don’t think I’m the one who’s wriggling. My contention is that a proportionally large contribution from wind is impractical. Your response was ‘well, let’s start by assuming the contribution is really small’.
I can’t see that leading anywhere illuminating, so to speak.
There is a company from Italy that is working on windpowered ships.
They generate electricity and run E-Ships.
Funding comes from the EU.
They also built the kitegen.
http://www.kitves.com/
and kitegen.com, a new form of windplant.
The first units are under construction since October.
There is also skysails.info with kitesails for shipping.
I guess this is much more practicable than privatly owned nuclear vessels.
There are just a few nucelaer Icebreakers, all owned by governments.
So Mark
Can I take it that your earlier assertion of “2 Cardinia’s a day” was completely hyperbolic?
Can I also take it you are unwilling to offer any quantified assessment of how much water would be involved in any realistic load balancing of wind at all?
Lastly can I understand that your assertions that “only the ocean is big enough as the lower reservoir” is equally hyperbolic and based on nothing more than your most desired wish for a rhetorical point?
If so, go away.
If not, come back with something better.
Ah, and may I remind you Mark that your assertion of “2 Cardinia’s a day” was based on actual data from July 2010 showing what you have interpreted as “9 days of no wind across Southern Australia”.
I’m willing to stick to that as an example. Are you? It’s your example after all.
I think you’re referring to a paper from 1994. I can’t get to that one because it’s behind a paywall, but others I’ve seen (from 1980 through to last year) are far less optimistic than your presentation.
I can’t seem to find a working link to the Japanese site, but here are a couple of links describing the technique:
http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/two-proposals-for-mining-ocean-for-720.html
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_165.shtml
I think you’re referring to a paper from 1994. I can’t get to that one because it’s behind a paywall, but others I’ve seen (from 1980 through to last year) are far less optimistic than your presentation.
I can’t seem to find a working link to the Japanese site, but here are a couple of links describing the technique:
http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/two-proposals-for-mining-ocean-for-720.html
Here’s the page of David MacKay’s online book refering to the Japanese research:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_165.shtml
Thanks Fin’
I had a look, but it still doesn’t look cheap. If anything it looks fairly expensive.
As for David MacKay, I’ve encountered him before and think he’s a nutcase> don’t consider him credible.
Barry Brook somewhere claimed that with Integral Fast reactors, we’ll have enough energy just from current waste stockpiles already dug up to last several hundred years, and that future mining would give us more than 10 000 years supply. An average Australian would consume less than a kilogram of uranium for their entire lifetime, including transport fuels etc etc.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/22/ifr-fad-4/
As for David MacKay, I’ve encountered him before and think he’s a nutcase> don’t consider him credible.
Why?
For those who don’t know, this is the Professor David MacKay who JM has such a low opinion of:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/313680/renewables_expert_david_mackay_appointed_to_government.html
yeah, what a crank.
BTW, his book Sustainable energy – without the hot air is available as a free download.
Finrod,
I have to say that I have held a similar low opinion of David Mackay’s work, we diverge at the point where conclusions are drawn.
Having said that, I totally endorse
“Mackay also recommended at the meeting that a new political body be established ‘with long-term responsibility for renewable energy’ – avoiding the four-year politics and promises of the electoral cycle”
This is the only solution for Australia and I hve aired that view on a number of occaisions.
And he frames the British energy problem quite well
“The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people’s deserts. If we imagine having a choice between 50 nuclear power stations – 50 Sizewells – which would cover current electricity consumption in Britain… If we say “No, we don’t want that”, the alternative is we go to Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and talk about building five Greater Londons’ worth of solar power stations.”
In that statement he fairly equates the options.
Where we would disagree is in preferences, but then that is Europes problem to solve, not Australia’s.
@ BilB:
I have to say that I have held a similar low opinion of David Mackay’s work, we diverge at the point where conclusions are drawn.
Just to reiterate, the ‘similar low opinion’ of David MacKay (who was last year appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change) with which BilB is agreeing is:
As for David MacKay, I’ve encountered him before and think he’s a nutcase> don’t consider him credible.
But apparently that doesn’t matter when he says something which BilB agrees with:
Having said that, I totally endorse
“Mackay also recommended at the meeting that a new political body be established ‘with long-term responsibility for renewable energy’ – avoiding the four-year politics and promises of the electoral cycle”
This is the only solution for Australia and I hve aired that view on a number of occaisions.
And he frames the British energy problem quite well
“The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people’s deserts. If we imagine having a choice between 50 nuclear power stations – 50 Sizewells – which would cover current electricity consumption in Britain… If we say “No, we don’t want that”, the alternative is we go to Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and talk about building five Greater Londons’ worth of solar power stations.”
In that statement he fairly equates the options.
Well, there’s nothing like a balanced approach to these things.
But we have our own deserts.
But we have our own deserts.
Before we can “scale up” solar thermal, we must have something viable in that line of endevour to be scaled up. In spite of BilB’s enthusiasm, there are major problems with the technology which will take decades to address, if indeed they ever can be. Even if we have a clear run through various prototype designs and tests up to full-scale commercial plants, we won’t be seeing a significant rollout of this technology this side of 2030.
Finrod,
Come off it mate. You point the sun at a lump of salt. How hard can it be? It ain’t exactly splitting the atom.
Come off it mate. You point the sun at a lump of salt. How hard can it be? It ain’t exactly splitting the atom.
All you need to do to split an atom is chuck a neutron at it. Quite simply, really.
The messy engineering details count far more than glib soundbites.
Wow.
“Renewable energy made big national headlines October 12 as a group of investors, including search engine giant Google, announced plans to build a 350-mile offshore wind power transmission “backbone” off the U.S. eastern seaboard. The developers of the plan say it will make wind power more economical and enhance the reliability of the existing grid.
The proposed high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable, dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC), would run from southern Virginia to northern New Jersey, occupying shallow trenches on the seabed of federal waters some 15-20 miles off the shore. The line would connect with the mainland at four points—southern Virginia, Delaware, and southern and northern New Jersey. And if all goes according to planned, it would have a whopping 6,000-megawatt (MW) capacity—roughly equal to that of five large nuclear reactors and capable of powering some 1.9 million homes.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=massive-offshore-wind-power-backbon-2010-10-12
Finrod 227
Thermal CSP is a mature technology with at least 25 years of proven performance. Ten minutes examination of the Harper Lake SEGSXIII average 1998-2002 performance figures reveals that the 20 year old facility achieves 1 kilowatt hour per day per square metre of collector area, for the Harper Lake insolation conditions. In simple analysis terms based on the Harper Lake insolation it would take 1,500 square kilometres of Thermal CSP (basic) installation to produce all of Australia’s 260 billion Kwh 2009 electricity consumption. This is an area 2 and a bit times the area of the Hunter Valley open cut coal mine. At the price of 75 million euros per square kilometre (storage included), a rule of thumb price quoted on a number of occaisions by the European agency charged with researching and designing these systems (the per kilometre price required an order size of 100 square kilomtres of system), this would deliver a cost of very roughly 113 billion euros. So if you derate these figures from Harper Lake insolation to Australian desert insolation then double that figure and double it again, it comes nowhere near the “studied” results from BNC “researchers” of 880 billion to 4 trillion dollars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems
The more wild the claims made about renewable energy systems become the more foolish at the end of the day the claimants become.
Finrod @227 and @229,
So what is it, “major problems” or “engineering details”?
My comment @228 was alluding to the latter, which your post @229 seems to confirm.
So what is it, “major problems” or “engineering details”?
Well Incurious, for nuclear power it’s mainly the latter, but for solar thermal, it’s a bit of both.
I know this needs some exposition, but I’m a bit busy at the moment. I’ll try to get to it later today.
Well, Finrod, I think that it is pretty obvious that you know little or nothing about renewable energy systems, so for you to say
“Well Incurious, for nuclear power it’s mainly the latter, but for solar thermal, it’s a bit of both”
is just more spam.
Patience BilB. I’m aware that my response to you needs to be more thorough. Don’t worry. It’s coming.
Finrod: ” It’s coming.”
Or not. As the case may be.
JM,
Finrod did warn us that this could take decades to address.
I&U
Not where I am concerned, I&U, I’ve just closed one of the gaps in our GenIIPV system. One to go.
If you’ve read this
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/aspo-peak-oil-energy-crunch-association/10/14/2010/id/30551
You will see the reason to speed things up.
I earlier got an email to say that Polyplus Battery Company have been invited to speak at the next Electric Aircraft Symposium. This company has the technology to dramatically increase the energy density of Lithium batteries. ie more energy stored for less lithium used.
The whole thing is just blasting along. Of course if you have your mind made up that there is only one technology that works then you would be missing all of this.
A few years ago I thought that Carbonsink’s all electric world was too extreme to contemplate. Now I see it as being the most certain reality. He was right. And the owner/user electricity generation system will be the primary accelerator to make the rapid transition. All based on unsubsidised private industry and the free (local) market. Everybody wins, I love it. The environment wins in many ways too. One of the key downsides for conventional vehicles is the life of the engine. When the engine needs a rebuild the whole vehicle is usually scrapped. Electric powered vehicles will be very different. Motors and running gear are all long life components. It would be easily possible to build an electric chassis to last for 50 years and more. What will deteriorate will be the interiors. Mechanics will become refitters, and vehicles will become heirlooms. Battery packs will be recycled with each exchange offering more range than the last. Car companies will boom for 30 years then consolidate to a much smaller body of chassis builders with upper body builders becoming many small business boutique style enterprises. Automobiles will become much lighter and road servicing will become less expensive. Electric powered planes (Cessna size and very quiet) will be flying Sydney to Melbourne on a single charge which will cost $40.
The electric future looks good to me. Why didn’t this happen sooner?
Oh, and relevence to the variable output of windfarms? well the timing for when to charge your vehicle will become highly discretionary as batteries offer longer range. So waiting for when there is more electricity in the system will be a desireable thing.
In the face of climate change and peak oil, there is one future reality that we are all going to have to come to terms with is
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/china-cosco-ceo-seriously-considering.html
Nobody else about? I’ve got the stage to myself.
Nuclear shipping. The only nuclear container ship to date
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Sevmorput
There were 4 now there is one, didn’t take. You’ve got to wonder why. If it was cost, I’m sure the Chinese will not let that get in the way.
But then there is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
coming to a harbour near you.
Ohhhhh…those Russians!
Well now I’m just messing about to see if I can fill up the whole “recent comments” field with my name. What you get for that though is
http://www.metaefficient.com/news/new-record-worlds-largest-wind-turbine-7-megawatts.html
This article has some very interesting information in the text. Give a read.
BilB,
You realise that if you make 5 comments in a row, Finrod is just going to come back with 10.
Yeah..I know. But…there was no one around…and I started, I couldn’t help myself..I just couldn’t stop. It just went on and on.
Its OK, I’m better now.
Finrod?….Oh he wouldn’t have noticed. Phew. He’s off prowling where ever A*******ive and S***r are used in the same sentence. I’ve discovered that’s what attracts them. Like moths to a bright light.
Don’t get too relaxed. I’ve been busy with dome more pressing non-web issues lately.
I understand, Finrod. I’m just having a little slow day fun here. You will have noticed that I have given you some pro nuclear ammunition above in an area which I believe will need urgent debate in the face of peak oil adaptation.