A few days ago, in the pre-Christmas lull, the Queensland government quietly abandoned a plan to build a “clean coal” power station called ZeroGen. According to the Oz, the cost of the proposed plant would have been 50% higher than the 4.3 billion dollars originally budgeted – roughly 6.5 billion dollars. A billion here, a billion there, you’re talking real money…
Barry Brook has a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Energy which reviews a number of published estimates for energy costs for a number of low or no-carbon sources. The highest estimate of the studies quoted for a combined-cycle gas-fired power plant is $80/MWh (ah, the joys of the dollar at parity, no need to disambiguate…).
The way I crunch the numbers, the fixed costs for the ZeroGen proposal (capital, at 7% and depreciation), add up to something approximating $140/MWh (or, equivalently, 14 c/kwh, even before you distribute the power). That’s before you mine any coal or employ anyone to operate and maintain ZeroGen. Assuming emissions of 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per megawatt-hour for a the combined-cycle gas plant and 0.1 tonnes for ZeroGen (a rather misleading name, seeing it would have captured approximately 90% of the CO2), even before taking variable costs into account ZeroGen would have required a carbon price of $200 per tonne of CO2 to be competitive with gas.
Just as a point of comparison, the infamous Olkiluoto-3 reactor project has blown out in cost from $4.2 billion to $7 billion. Same amount of money, for a power plant three times the size – and cheaper to run.
No wonder Anna Bligh thinks it’s not financially viable.
Martin Ferguson may not be pleased, but sooner or later governments around Australia look increasingly likely to have to face an inconvenient truth. Carbon capture and storage, technically feasible though it may be, is simply going to be too expensive compared to the alternatives, for a long time to come.
These findings surely come as no surprise. While it is “technically feasible” to burn coal then liquefy the CO2 and pump it underground for storage, the notion that this will ever be practical on an industrial scale is self-evidently ludicrous. A great example of the difference between “possible” and “practical”.
As for cost, the price of “clean coal” can only rise as it is scaled up due to competition for limited sequestration locales. In contrast, the price of renewable energy is dropping rapidly. No contest really.
That said, some form of carbon sequestration will be vital if we are to avert major climate change. We are already over the safe limit of CO2ppm in the atmosphere. Some form of soil sequestration (biochar) coupled with biosequestration (growing forests) will likely be necessary.
The sooner we get started on it, the better.
I still think CCS is quite viable, just using old technology. You plant stuff, you harvest it, you bury it. To save the hassle of burying it you could even plant-harvest-burn. For the real old school look, burn it inside a horse, and use a one horsepower vehicle to get round in. But techno-CCS? Not so much.
Also, http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org FTW
I’m inclined to the view that industrial-scale algae farms might turn out to be cost-effective in resequestering CO2. Rather than using the resultant biomass as a new fuel source, you dry it, compress it and seal it in something fairly inert and of low value (salt? clay? sand?) and then either bury it deep in disused mine workings or perhaps drop it into one of the deeper parts of the ocean where under pressure and isolated from light and oxygen it ought to remain stable for as long as we need it to.
Moz, the Beyond Zero Emissions guys are naively optimistic.
Barry Brook’s blog has featured fairly extensive critiques.
Robert said:
And the problem there had little to do with anything intrinsic to nuclear power. Rather than allowing Areva to run its own show, the government bowed to demands for local employment. This meant having to train lots of people and massively holding up the project. There were also significant problems with sub-contractors and inadequate specification. Olkiluoto, like most nuclear plants was very much a first of a kind type and so the timeline was always somewhat ambitious and going to be more expensive than a settled down design completed by people who had done it many times.
Not only that, but the inexperienced Finnish regulator asserted the right to approve all components itself as the project progressed causing even more delay and cost.
They aren’t unhappy though because they have ordered two more. Getting independent of Russian gas and coal is a good thing, the Finns think.
For anyone technically-minded who like reading through reports, there’s a neat little summary of the Olkiluoto project in Engineering the Future (pp35-45 especially).
I think I’m with James Fallows on this. Coal’s going to continue to be in use for much longer than anyone proposing alternatives, whether nuclear or wind or whatever, seems ready to admit. Better we work on decarbonising and sequestration than just throw up our hands at the price tag and do nothing. There ought to be an effort at alternative funding sources: maybe fewer freeways and more tollways?
Robert, Brooks seems to be someone for whom the answer is nuclear, never mind the question. Sure, his critques of current renewables in Australia are valid, but it’s easy to critique his solution too. His focus on Australia being the first country in the world to commercialise unproven reactor designs seems bizarre. He also seems to assume away the liability for waste based on that being a precondition for nuclear to be commercially viable.
I would much rather see the billions of dollars of research funding he wants directed into low-carbon nuclear put instead into renewable energy.
Australia just doesn’t have the nuclear research base to make sensible decisions in this area, and our whole history with nuclear is a litany of terrible decisions. From above ground weapon tests and the uranium mine in Kakadu to the cut-price new reactor at Lucas Heights, there’s nothing that makes me think our politicans would suddenly make smart decisions in this area.
Moz said:
That’s a handwave. There’s nothing negative about critiquing a proposal. It’s what one makes of that critique that is most important. The critique of BZE shows that it is improbably optimistic and even then, unlikely to be accepted and implemented on the time scale we need, given that it’s approximately 10 times the cost of the NBN which is widely seen as too expensive.
That’s improbable. Russia will probably commercialise the first IFR in 2015 or shortly after. Amusingly, it will probably be used substantially to pump gas from Siberia to the west.
What does this actually mean? I’ve read it thre times carefully but it’s not clear what you’re claiming.
That is a classic high risk gamble. The entire world has been doing serious R&D on renewables since at least the 1970s. This has been pursued with the pasion with which humans sought the means to turn lead into gold. Here, the idea of getting “free energy” from the sun or the wind or some place else was the nearest people thought you could get to the perpetual motion machine. The prospective advantages were very high: energy independence at a time when people widely believed that hydrocarbon resources would run out and resented being hostage to crises in the middle east or hated big oil. The Brazilian dictatorship largely reshaped their transport system around ethanol following 1973.
Yet 40 years later, the problem still looks about as hard as it did in the 1970s. Storing energy is hard and costly and almost all renewables are intermittent and weakly dispatchable. You’re making the kind of gamble of which people who like the 100-1 shot in the race because it is a bit muddy are fond. That’s OK if you only bet a few dollars, but dreadful if your entire living expenses are put on it.
If we don’t build nuclear and spend the billions on renewables and don’t get cheap dispatchable renewables as a result really soon that can be rolled out on a world scale we lose both time and money, and in the meantime, we are stuck with coal. Instead of doing something that would work acceptably now, we favour something that probably won’t ever work acceptably and accept the status quo in the interim.
That’s a very poor risk trade when you are gambling with the life chances of all humanity.
Ho-hum, look at all the things that people are saying about renewables and then think about the state the computing industry was in in the 1970s. In view of this, the continual cries of “but it’ll never get any better!” just seem unduly pessimistic to me (or, in the case of “clean coal” boosters, dishonest.)
You also need to factor in the fact that there has been massive opposition to renewables from the fossil fuelcorporateocracy. Help stamp out that, and you’ll be greasing the wheels considerably.
Right now is a good time to get on with replacing coal fired power with something cleaner. Most of the mining companies supplying coal fired stations would increase their profits if they no longer had to supply coal to Australian power stations. So no job losses here.
There are other mines, of course, that are unable to divert their product to foreign markets. However, mineworkers who lost their jobs when their mine shut down would lose their jobs when there is a very robust demand for experienced mineworkers.
Modern coal fired power stations employ very few people directly and would have skills that would transfer to other forms of power station as well as other electricity using industries. Once again it is a good time to lose a power station job because the market for power station worker skills is quite healthy.
The Martin Fergusons of the world may think that what they are doing is “protecting jobs.” However, while there is some truth in this they may be putting people in a position where the inevitable job losses will put people out of work when there is a general decline in the demand for coal and/or mineworker skills. Deferring the replacement of coal fired power on the grounds that sequestration might become economic at some time in the future hardly seems responsible.
If we are to go close to zerogen at some time in the future we will need some form of carbon sequestration. However, we need to focus on what we should be trying to do in the next few years – not what is going to be needed in something like forty years time.
As a West Australian I am quite happy for LNG to be the favoured energy source.
We’ve got shit loads of the stuff.
Fran@8: if you swap “nuclear” and “renewable” in your last block the statement makes exactly the same amount of sense. It’s just that renewable energy is much safer than nuclear. So when we’re choosing, why go for the “it’s possible that we might be able to make this safe even though we don’t even have a laboratory mechanism yet” or the “inherently fails safe”?
As for the claim that research on renewables really only started in the 1970′s… in the 1970′s NZ was running over 90% renewable electricty and had been doing so for some time while dramatically building up its generation capacity. The 1870′s would be more accurate.
If you want to talk downside risk, can you just run through the major renewable power accidents of the last, say, 100 years for me? They don’t really spring to mind the way Chernobyl and Three Mile Island do. In fact, I can’t think of any, but I’m sure there have been some – dam collapses are nasty.
He also seems to assume away the liability for waste based on that being a precondition for nuclear to be commercially viable.
Viz, hHe refuses to address liability for radioactive waste. He talks around it, and regularly assumes that the risk is entirely commercial and can be dealt with by existing law. As we’ve seen with asbestos, that is not true. Countries where nuclear power is used have government indemnity and/or limited liability for any problems they cause. He assumes that of course Australia will grant the same immunity here.
In this case, the proposal is that companies produce something that we know is incredibly dangerous with no plan for how to make it safe and only the vaguest plans to for how to store it until it decays naturally. There’s no working waste facility to take the high level waste Australia makes now, we keep having to look for new solutions and play silly games internationally in an attempt to foist the problem onto someone else. To the best of my knowlege there is no such facility anywhere. Egypt is the closest I know of, and that’s only been in operation for about 4000 years, not the 30,000 that we need.
So I come back to: who will do the research to build commercially viable implementations of things that are often not even in the lab yet? At least with renewables we generally have working models in other countries and we’re just looking at extending or modifying something we already know works. Deep geothermal is an attempt to imitate the natural processes that are used to generate electricity in Iceland and New Zealand. And so on.
Helen said:
Indeed Helen, but how did the computing industry respond? They solved the problems. They improved every component of computing — memory, buses, processors, data handling, software, output and input devices, networking, media — the whole box and dice.
What did renewables do in this time? I have an old school text book from 1979 on renewables and the description there looks a lot like what we have now.
I don’t claim that it will never get any better. Clearly, they might. The problem is technical and schedule feasibility: they have to get massively better and right now in order to make the difference we need them to.
This is simply wrong. While it is certainly true that the bulk of the hydrocarbon boosters are flat out opposed to a price on carbon dioxide emissions, they are not wholly opposed to investment in renewables, as AGL has shown. Indeed, AGL, for example is sympathetic to a modest price on CO2 as they fancy it will help their gas compete with coal. Wind and solar will need to be firmed and you are going to need dispatchable power to do that. With no carbon price, that’s going to be coal and some gas. With one, slightly more gas and less coal.
The petroleum folks of course don’t like this at all, but one should note that companies like BP are making a show of promoting renewables.
The fossil HC folks know that renewables are no threat to them on any timeline they care about. Nuclear power on the other hand — now there’s a real threat.
Since I grew up near the place and know people in the area, I’m interested in Wandoan Power which seems to be a joint project between Stanwell power and GE.
Wandoan, 400km NW of Brisbane, has just had a 30 million tonnes pa open cut coal mine approved, which will involve building a railway from Wandoan NE to Gladstone. It’s also on the corridor of the proposed CSG pipeline from the Darling Downs to Gladstone, where at least $30 billion of projects are approved.
FWIW there is already a power station at Kogan, 160km to the SE.
There are expansion plans at Wandoan for a 100mtpa mine, and beyond, plus underground coal and CSG.
Seems Wandoan is in the mix under the CCS Flagships program as part of the federal government’s $4.5bn Clean Energy Initiative. Cosideration is being given to:
An announcement should be forthcoming in the first half of 2011.
This article puts the Qld coal export industry at $40 billion pa, so the interest in CCS is obvious.
Moz said:
No it doesn’t, as renewables do not work acceptably well now. Nuclear can give us cheap dispatchable power now. It remains by a long margin the cheapest near zero carbon source we have.
No it isn’t. The major source of renewables actually used –hydro — does not have as good a record as nuclear power. It also casts a bigger ecological footprint than nuclear. Even if one includes Chernobyl, (which one really shouldn’t as no nuclear plant will ever be built and operated in that way again) per TWh of power delivered nuclear is very safe.
That makes my claim stronger: all that time and so little progress. Of course, you are counting things that do not exist in most places — massive hydro resources, geothermal and a market that could be enclosed on a portion of the east coast of NSW.
If you are going to compare like with like you need to make deaths a function of power actually delivered. In the case of wind, you have to look also at the gas plants needed to make them viable and treat them as a whole system.
You’re right about dam failures being nasty. The failure of the Banqiau Dam in August 1975 precipitated the failure or deliberate destruction by air strikes by the PLA of 62 other dams. This directly caused the deaths of at least 90,000 and possibly as many as 230,000 or so people (we don’t of course know how many died building the dam in the first place)*. A figure of 145,000 is given for those who died in subsequent famines and epidemics.
This makes Chernobyl with its 53 proven deaths look rather modest.
FTR, the Chinese government simply built them better next time around. The chief engineer, who had been ignored prior to the disaster, was reinstated and put in charge.
* Interestingly, the Hoover Dam is recognised to have taken the lives of 112 people in the construction of the dam. In an odd twist the first was a surveyor named J. G. Tierney and the last, his son Patrick W. Tierney.
Dam collapses are not uncommon and can be precipitated quite easily by quite banal things.
Let’s unpick this. High level (and even intermediate level) waste is certainly dangerous if you approach it and of course if you ingest it but it’s fairly easy to sequester because its mass is small and it is non-volatile. You can keep people away from it until it is innocuous. The plans are not vague at all. Nuclear plants store their waste on site. When breeder reactors become a commonplace, the period that the waste will be unsafe in the above senses will possibly not as long as 300 years. CO2 on the other hand — that is forever.
There should be. I agree. Of course, people jumping up and down as if it’s all too hard to handle doesn’t help.
I fixed that typo for you. It looked as if you were at least two orders of magnitude out.
That’s just it. It doesn’t work, if by “works” you mean “supply power at commercial scale by contract on 24 hours notice with penalties for non-supply”. Yes, if you compel people to take power on the spot market whenever a renewable is available and have backup on standby then yes it works but this is a hugely expensive way per tCo2e to abate emissions.
Helen said:
Expecting developments in energy production to be analogous to those in computing is misplaced. Above all else, it is miniaturization that has driven the dramatic improvement in performance and dramatic reduction in price for computing.
Such miniaturization cannot happen for renewables. You cannot change the amount of solar irradiance or the energy available in wind blowing through turbine blades. There are hard physical limits that cannot ever be changed. Energy production on an industrial scale involves heavy engineering and utilization of large amounts of material such as steel, concrete and land. While there will no doubt be engineering improvements, it is this that ultimately will put a floor under the price of wind, CSP, wave, tidal etc etc. Renewables require LOTS of material. It is very unlikely that there are any technological miracles to be had. PV is the dark horse but it also has it’s (obvious) limitations.
Fran,
No worries about nuclear wast , we just dump it on aboriginal lands – problem solved.
Huggy
As Morrissey said, how soon is now? the lead time to building enough nuclear power stations in Australia, including the political and social process of getting communities to accept nukes in their immediate area, would take years, I’m thinking probably decades.
No worries about nuclear wast , we just dump it on aboriginal lands – problem solved.
Huggy
Used nuclear fuel should be stored in sedure repositories near to population centres, both for ease of addess when the time comes to recycle the fuel through breeders, and to be close to emergency response personnel in the unlikely event of an accident with potential to endanger members of the public.
Helen said:
That’s not a technical feasibility objection though. That’s operational feasibility and we can change that through changing people’s minds. You are part of that Helen. People ought not to object to any development, except that they are persuaded that on one ground or another, it subverts the public interest.
Arguing that because people have morbid and irrational fears of nuclear power stations, they should not be built is not reasonable. Subject to community acceptance of course, nuclear power stations can indeed give us cheap dispatchable power at th scale required on timelines far better than anything renewables can offer.
I’d urge you Helen to consider the matter carefully. Delay in adopting low carbon technologies at the scale required will certainly have serious consequence for all of humanity. To reject nuclear power, when there is no alternative that ticks all of the feasibility boxes (schedule, technical, financial, environmental, operational) adequately, is to argue for some variant very much like the status quo. Yet as you and I agree, that is ecologically unacceptable.
Fran,
Thanks for the link to the “lessons learned” paper.
On page 3 we have “Enigineering the Future”: typical bloody engineers (which I are one), giving us all a bad name, unless they’re being cute with “energy” and “engineering”.
davidh
Ladies and gents, we’ve had “nukes vs. renewables” arguments for years now.
Helen is right – it would take “years” to build nukes. But it will take “years” to build enough renewables capacity to displace coal. Changing our stationary energy architecture is a project of decades, whatever we do – unless we decide to go for a crash program of replacement, which would be desirable but isn’t likely yet. If we do go for the moonshot, it will likely be because of a short-term climate emergency, and then all bets are off. NIMBYism (be it anti-wind, anti-hydro, anti-CCS or anti-nuke) is likely to get pretty short shrift in such circumstances.
For what it’s worth, ZeroGen would still have been cheaper than solar thermal.
Robert (and others), the thing that really shits me about the renewable energy debate is that some of were whining about this 40 years ago. If we (collectively) hadn’t pissed that 40 years away, we’d probably have a carbon-free economy by now.
The other thing that shits me (but not quite as much) is that our solutions don’t have to be nukes vs solar (eg) – we should be exploiting every possibility without getting too concerned about which one is the cheapest.
I quite take your point Robert but given that Helen’s principal objection turned on community opposition, [operational feasibility] it seems that the argument must keep being had.
It will take years to build nukes but it will take even more years to build them if this argument is not settled and nuclear power allowed to enage in a bona fide contest to contribute to the solution.
Here’s my challenge to the renewabilists: drop your objections to nuclear power’s feasibility being considered. You don’t have to jump ship. You can continue to love solar thermal or Bluegen or biomass or whatever. Let each of the technologies bid for a place in Australia’s energy mix and let the best low-carbon mix win. Let’s take the high blown rhetoric out of this.
If nuclear power really is as unsuited to the job as they say, and the process is transparent with properly specifed and non-technology based performance benchmarks, then nobody need fear the outcome.
No it doesn’t, as renewables do not work acceptably well now. Nuclear can give us cheap dispatchable power now. I As Morrissey said, how soon is now? the lead time to building enough nuclear power stations in Australia, including the political and social process of getting communities to accept nukes in their immediate area, would take years, I’m thinking probably decades.
Over the next few years you will see developments in the electricity networks and in consumers homes that will make the argument for nuclear (base load generation) irrelevant.
The argument will be seen for what it is, a desperate attempt to hold back progress and to lock us into an already obsolete, polluting and toxic technology, that is really only a cover for nuclear weapons development (see Israel, Iran)
Trials of the new system will begin next year and the program can be run out at a cost of about $16 billion over 5 years. Since it will defer about $50billion of network upgrades for about 20 years and reduce the number of power stations required by about 4 GW I guess it is cost effective. It will fix the network, put intermittent renew ables on the same footing as base load whatever and dramatically reduce the cost of electricity to the consumer.
Soon all will be daringly revealed.
Meantime the nuke dupes can dream on and prepare to dump even more nuclear waste on Aboriginal lands and open the way for the Aussi bomb program.
Huggy
HuggyBunny put the magic pudding position with enthusiasm:
then HB went negative, dishonest and just a tad silly
As far as we know, Iran has no nuclear weapons program, though in a novel twist, the US and the UK are asserting that they can launch one in 45 minutes. (oops … sorry … that was left over from a post a few years back on someone else). Israel has weapons but no nuclear power industry, which makes this an odd sort of “cover”. They began with the thing they wanted — weapons — imagine that.
HB finishes with a sutiably lurid piece of venting:
One has to laugh and shake one’s head. No proponent of nuclear power in this country I’ve ever heard of is contemplating an “Aussi bomb program” (sic). Nor do we propose “dumping” nuclear hazmat anywhere. In the event that this country gets a nuclear power industry, a process of determining where and how best to deal with/store hazmat will have been developed. Calling such a process “dumping” is simply reckless and emotive sloganeering.
It does show however how uncomfortable the cultural opponents of nuclear power are becoming.
Hey Fran, No waste on aboriginal lands ?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/aboriginal-site-nominated-for-nuke-waste/2007/05/25/1179601635076.html
Distributed energy storage is no more magic pudding than the little green nukes that arrive on the back of a truck at your gated community (according to some denizens of this site) )OK I put in the “gated community” bit. Or the nukes that burn up all the waste that the conventional nukes want to dump on our land.
If you bothered to really investigate what is going on in the power industry you would find that there is an enormous global push on both distributed and very large scale energy storage. This will create a level playing field for intermittent renewables, it means that the only criteria will be average energy production, power will not matter at all. (I suspect that quite a few of the nuclear proponents do not know the difference)
My opposition to nuclear energy has a cultural base, certainly; as well as a totally pragmatic foundation. Nuclear energy is simply more of the inadequate centralised generation paradigm that is gracefully failing all over the developed world.
You live in the 21st century, get with it.
Huggy
HuggyBunny continued in nebulous mode:
Wow! An enormous global push you say? Well there you go. Problem solved. The push will do it. If they run out of steam, they could have a bit of a pull as well. Perhaps one of those fabulous pushmi-pullyu creatures of Dr Dolittle fame could be their symbol?
Very sensible. Why would anyone care about power output or even whether source generated the minimum required in any given hour. Just as someone who averages the minimum number of calories over a year to maintain health is quite as well off as someone who always gets the minimum number each day so too it doesn’t matter at all on a level playing field if at some time when demand is high that hardly any output is being produced as long as at some other time when demand is low lots of ouput is flowing to bump up the averages. As everyone who watches cricket knows, it doesn’t matter how long one goes without scoring a run or taking a wicket. It’s the longterm average that counts as performance is intermittent.
What a clever fellow this HuggyBunny is, showing how the incompetent and dimwitted engineers who run industrial scale power systems have missed the fact that power doesn’t matter, only averages.
Unlike HuggyBunny, who obviously knows which of these is important! Such wisdom from the mouths of furry little creatures! Who’d ‘a thunk it?
Gosh … this one is a keeper.
With distributed energy storage systems the energy is stored (natch) but the instantaneous power is a function of the local generation (solid state) it has nothing at all to do with the power of the energy source. The two are decoupled – can you get your 19th century head around that?
For your edification: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40047394/EPRI-Market-Driven-Distributed-Energy-Storage-System-Requirements-for-Load-Management-Applications
Early next year I will post one of my papers on distributed energy storage on this site; seems it is about time to educate you and your ilk.
Have a great 19th century XMAS.
Huggy
Huggy,
The battery was invented in the year 1800 and the photoelectric effect first observed in 1877. Distributed electricity generation using PV and batteries is still a trivial and very expensive fraction of the worldwide capacity.
Fran,
You’re mocking Huggy from your usual position of assumed knowledge. It is right to say that there is a global push on for energy storage, again your incredibly shallow perspective and zero creative ability fails you in understanding.
Huggy is talking about electricity storage in large measure and he cytes the activities of VRB and ABB. There are plenty of others. More to the point there are many other storage forms than you appear unable to comprehend. The main front runners on the electricity front are pumped hydro (especially salt water), Vanadium Redox Battery, CSP storage and high tech batteries, with super capacitors and chemical storage of various forms on the horizon. Each of the 2 main regulars pumped hydro and vrb’s have an efficiency of only 75%. That is a problem. Vrb though which is at present 20 watt hours per litre has the prospect of achieving 40 watts hours per litre, in which case the full cycle loss would only be 13%. CSP storage is linked to a generation system but will I believe become the basis for grid stability in most countries of the world. The other technologies will be the basis of load spreading for local distributed sytems. The catch is the way that these storage systems will be funded, and I believe there are some “off the wall” surprises coming up in that area.
But what else is there? Biofuels are an energy storage medium which you completely fail to take into account in your mocking. Even Robert Rapier who is usually seen attacking inefficient biofuel development in the US is consultant to a European energy storage initiative of immense proportions which is a system of forestry to compound cogeneration via gas production.
There is so much that you are totally unaware of. It is downright annoying to see you mouthing in that way and intimmidating people with initiative, particularly when you yourself have absolutely nothing creative to put forward.
Quokka, Bilb
The very first “domestic” (in the grounds of the very rich) were dc battery storage systems (Plante cells) these had a huge advantage in that they could make use of the intermittent generation sources available at the time. Then along came Tesla with the invention of Alternating Current (AC). This development made it possible to bring electricity to the middle class at a reasonable price.
The distributed storage model failed because of the shortcomings of the Plante cell.
We have made significant progress in energy storage since 1800.
More importantly we can now package over 10 kW of AC generation capacity ; sufficient for even a McMansion, into a package that weighs less than 10kg. Add a modicum of storage to this; there are a number of cost effective options out there, and you can supply the McM with its 48kWh of daily energy consumption with 2 kW average power. Now when you consider that at least 10% of the total generation capacity is “spinning reserve” the first thing you can do is dispense with that and the need for VAR support. Then all sorts of other benefits flow on to a large scale network of distributed energy storage systems including the capacity to absorb energy from intermittent sources.
We can keep the AC distribution system as it has excellent fault clearing ability thanks to the natural zero pof the AC waveform. Good argument however to convert the transmission system to bi directional DC. Oh yes we will always need a network.
Do the energy storage thing properly and you could close down at least 3- maybe 4 coal fired power stations at about 60% of the cost of building a single nuke.
Huggy
There are opportunities for using smarter demand management to reduce the need for spinning reserve, peak generating capacity and grid loading. At the moment we have off peak water heating which does give some flexibility of demand. However, if you think your way around the house there is scope for turning off most of the equipment we use for short times and external management of the time at which things such as washing machines can be turned on.
There are also opportunities for using thermal inertia to increase the time for which freezers, fridges and air conditioners can have their power switched off for.
There may also be benefits from thinking locally as an intermediate between the big grid and distributed extremes. About half my power bill goes on “grid costs” so anything that reduces the peak loads on the mega grid might be beneficial.
Huggy:
I don’t believe it. Lets see your costings. Conventional pumped hydro is off limits because it is a scarce resource.
Quokka,
Estimates from inside the power industry are that distributed energy storage at the consumer level should save at least 10% of the total energy generated.
Since there is about 40 GW of generation, this amounts to about 4 GW maybe 3 of the least efficient generators. Also the gas fired peaking plant can be decomissioned — say about another GW.
Cost ? There are about 8 million households in OZ.
Cost of energy storage system? About $4K. So you get 50GW of peaking generation and about 40GWh of energy storage for $32 billion. About what it would cost to set up a Nuke program- before you build any reactors. Oh and then you have to spend a further 60 odd billion $ reinforcing the network. This is not required under the distributed storage scenario.
Huggy
Furthermore, the After Diversity Average demand for all the residential areas is less than 3 kVA.
If each home had an energy storage system that averaged this over 24 hours we would only need 24 GW of generation to serve the residential population (8 million homes).
In fact the situation is even better than this as the average power required by atypical home is less than 1 kW averaged over 24 hours (24 kWh). It would be entirely feasible to supply all the residences with 8 GW of generation capacity. leaving 30+ GW for Industry.
Now check out the demand profile for your average office block or factory. You might be getting an idea of what I am on about.
Huggy