Kozmos
Jew Detective
Personally I'm waiting for a Dyson Sphere.
"Alternative" Energy
- Thread starter Ziggy Stardust
- Start date
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Good pointRight. But I'm kind of wary about having lots of mirrors in space after the trouble we had with Hubble
I know! We'll just build 2 \o/
Spoiler :
The big problem with talking about nuclear energy as a "stop gap" is that it's only really viable in places that meet a lot of pre-conditions:
-Already has some sort of nuclear capacity in place to build from already (building a nuclear power industry
-Geological and political stability
-Has the $billions in government money to spend on ongoing subsidies, and insuring for risk the private sector won't touch
-Has the available water that is able to be contaminated with heat
-Can deal with the waste issue
-Doesn't have such widespread public opposition that delays, cost increases and uncertainty kill projects dead
Nuclear power is about 14% of current energy supply. At current energy need levels and with the cost curves major technologies are following, it's probably not ever going to reach much more than that.
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Personally, I'd love to see deep rock geothermal take off. Pretty much the perfect way to generate electricity.
-Already has some sort of nuclear capacity in place to build from already (building a nuclear power industry
-Geological and political stability
-Has the $billions in government money to spend on ongoing subsidies, and insuring for risk the private sector won't touch
-Has the available water that is able to be contaminated with heat
-Can deal with the waste issue
-Doesn't have such widespread public opposition that delays, cost increases and uncertainty kill projects dead
Nuclear power is about 14% of current energy supply. At current energy need levels and with the cost curves major technologies are following, it's probably not ever going to reach much more than that.
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Personally, I'd love to see deep rock geothermal take off. Pretty much the perfect way to generate electricity.
Singularity
Infinite Density
Problem with geothermal is that it needs to be done in a geologically active region, and at the same time not so active that it could risk triggering a dangerous earthquake(geothermal trigger earthquake swarms all the time, but luckily they're so small normally that they're of no concern).
You're basically scalding volcanic rock with injected water and harvesting the return steam as electricity or hot water pipes for warming. Pretty basic stuff that's still in it's infancy in terms of working power plants close to higher population areas.
I think nuclear energy and an updated "super grid" to deliver it over large areas is what we need. This would work very well with any future renewable technology as well to ensure supply and demand works as smoothly as possible at any given time of the day. I used to be sceptical of nuclear energy, but if the topic is "quick alternative to fossile fuel" then the only solution is nuclear IMO when you look at it in a 10-20 year perspective.
You're basically scalding volcanic rock with injected water and harvesting the return steam as electricity or hot water pipes for warming. Pretty basic stuff that's still in it's infancy in terms of working power plants close to higher population areas.
I think nuclear energy and an updated "super grid" to deliver it over large areas is what we need. This would work very well with any future renewable technology as well to ensure supply and demand works as smoothly as possible at any given time of the day. I used to be sceptical of nuclear energy, but if the topic is "quick alternative to fossile fuel" then the only solution is nuclear IMO when you look at it in a 10-20 year perspective.
meromorph
Chieftain
It took less than 50 years from the discovery of the nucleus (Rutherford in 1909) to the construction of the first commercial nuclear power plant (Obninsk in 1954). Along the way we had to develop quantum mechanics, a minor tool.
The point is, humans can develop some amazing things in a very short time span, if we set ourselves on doing it. Right now, the international funding for fusion research is very small. The funding for the ITER, which aims to build a commercially viable fusion plant by 2019, is a total of about $7billion. Here is a study which found that the US renewable energy subsidies were approximately $30 billion for the period 2002-2008:
http://www.elistore.org/reports_detail.asp?ID=11358&topic=Energy_and_Innovation
Some studies put the figure even higher, at $10 billion per year for solar alone in the US. These subsidies are not an investment into R&D that will pay off in the future, but rather we are subsidizing the dead-end purchase of inefficient and overpriced solar cells.
Is there anyone who could handle paying 10 times as much for energy (electric, automobile, heating) as they do now? Because that's closer to how much solar actually costs, without the government subsidies. In other words, the world could not be converted to solar on a massive scale without total economic collapse.
Global warming alarmists say we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now, we cannot wait to develop fusion. Maybe they don't understand that fusion power will be cheaper than current energy sources by a factor of 100 or 1000, and we could use it to clean the environment in ways that are unimaginable today, like running giant filters in the atmosphere and the ocean.
Rashiminos
Fool Prophet
Some electricity can be generated by dragging circuits through the Earth's magnetic field from orbiting satellites. Tethers for propulsion have already been demonstrated by NASA, but maybe larger projects can be attempted.
GoodGame
Red, White, & Blue, baby!
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2004
- Messages
- 13,725
I have to say that summarizing biofuel as "burning dead plants" is a tad ignorant.
There are biofuel programs that don't need to be run by government subsidies (they may be in the process of being initiated by subsidies, but they already show great promise of free market profitability) and aren't an undesirable siphoning of food crops (e.g. the corn to ethanol scheme). They have a degree of sophistication to them in that they involve breeding plant feedstocks specifically for the use.
One is the use of switchgrass, a Great Plains prairie grass, for conversion to biomass-based energy. Conversion of bio-mass to ethanol is not the only use of it too, btw. Conversion can be to a form of diesel, as well as direct conversion to electricity when co-burning it with coal.
I'm all for diversification of alternative energy, btw. And some of the economic policy makers are actually not just for alternative energy, but for improving the efficiency of energy use in the first place (energy efficient buildings).
Sidenote: making a case for one technology by making a slanderous arguments against another technology isn't particularly sophisticated, other than in the Platonic sense.
Yes, but we can't count on it happening.
Umm... I'm not saying we can convert to solar right here and now. No doubt there's some significant R&D to be done before then. Though I can easily see the world running on solar (plus wind, hydro, tidal, biomass, etc) in 50 years time.
It's not like the fossil fuel industry isn't subsidised (more than twice the subsidies going to renewables in the United States according to your link), plus the price of coal and oil doesn't reflect the cost of their environmental impact.
meromorph
Chieftain
This is the general trend I'm referring to, fusion is treated as an uncertain future technology we can't count on, but efficient and cost-effective solar cells in the near future are taken for granted. Meanwhile those efficient solar cells have been "just around the corner" since the 1970s, a similar story to fusion, but with solar receiving much greater R&D subsidies.
True, but fossil fuels supply 8 times more energy in the US than renewable sources (84% vs 8% of total consumption according to http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/major_energy_sources_and_users.cfm), while receiving far less than 8 times the subsidies. Therefore the subsidization of renewable sources is still out of proportion with the amount of energy they provide.
Also, I mainly meant to compare the subsidies for solar with the R&D funds for fusion energy.
Solar cell manufacturing costs a small fraction of what it did in the 1970s. Your "just around the corner" dismissal is very uncharitable given the sort of cost curve it's tracking along.
You're also actually way off about the lifetime levelised costs of solar power generation. It's more like twice as expensive from solar PV and three times from Thermal, right now. Not ten times. And even then, it's not like people are proposing an instantenous 100% roll over of all existing generation capacity.
No that's the point, get deep enough and hot rocks are everywhere. I'm well aware of the existing limitations on geothermal power.
You're also actually way off about the lifetime levelised costs of solar power generation. It's more like twice as expensive from solar PV and three times from Thermal, right now. Not ten times. And even then, it's not like people are proposing an instantenous 100% roll over of all existing generation capacity.
No that's the point, get deep enough and hot rocks are everywhere. I'm well aware of the existing limitations on geothermal power.
meromorph
Chieftain
Solar cell manufacturing costs a small fraction of what it did in the 1970s. Your "just around the corner" dismissal is very uncharitable given the sort of cost curve it's tracking along.
You're also actually way off about the lifetime levelised costs of solar power generation. It's more like twice as expensive from solar PV and three times from Thermal, right now. Not ten times. And even then, it's not like people are proposing an instantenous 100% roll over of all existing generation capacity.
The title of the data table is "Estimated costs of new generation resources, 2016." Also, in the report from which the table is taken ( http://205.254.135.24/oiaf/aeo/pdf/2016levelized_costs_aeo2011.pdf ), it says the following:
"The duty cycle for intermittent renewable resources of wind and solar is not operator controlled, but dependent on the weather or solar cycle (that is, sunrise/sunset). The availability of wind or solar will not necessarily correspond to operator dispatched duty cycles and, as a result, their levelized costs are not directly comparable to those for other technologies (even where the average annual capacity factor may be similar). "
I'm not opposed to allocating R&D funds to study solar cells in the laboratory, but there is no good reason to subsidize the mass production of today's dead-end solar technology for the consumer market.
Those are actually pretty minor things. The only reason it's 2016 is the long lead time of some power plant types meant they needed a year far enough in the future they could project the whole period of construction for those plant types.
All the other thing is saying is that the average annual output doesn't come at the same times as controllable output sources and they're not comparable because output isn't controllable. They don't respond to dispatch and can't decide to NOT generate if the spot price isn't at a break-even, and since they may generate at higher demand times or lower demand times, their actual returns per MWh will differ.
However, the methodology here isn't particularly impacted by this. The EIA is being pretty over-cautious, actually. Bear in mind that the lifetime levelised costs are just a calculation based on dividing total useful output (MWh) into the sum of capital costs, O&M, fuel, etc. THe result is a unit price. Dividing inputs into output to get a unit price isn't really altered by the intermittency thing. You can still compare capital costs per MWh, O&M per MWh, fuel costs per MWh.
And what we see is that wind stacks up very well in all input categories. Solar doesn't yet but is curving downward pretty well and will continue to do so.
And, here's the important bit: none of this means the assertion that solar power is ten times more expensive is anywhere close to holding water. If there was reeeeaaaaally the possibility that the figure was over $1000/MWh for solar PV rather than $210/MWh, the EIA would've flagged that.
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Oh and while we're on subsidy and fossil fuel, defining "subsidy" is sometimes tricky. There's all sorts of legacy arrangements and sunk investment that tilts the electricity system in favour of the status quo.
For example, the concession rate off-peak electric hot water we get essentially provides free money to coal power and increases base load above what it would otherwise need to be. It is an entrenched arrangement that has existed for decades and provides an ongoing competitive advantage to generators which need to be constantly on and are inflexible in their output (ie, in this country, coal)
Likewise, there is literally decades and bullions of dollars worth of state-funded transmission infrastructure that is geared towards the locations where fossil fuels exist is an ongoing advantage to those generators.
Not only does the legacy of existing infrastructure play a decisive role in where and how electricity generation can happen, ongoing decisions about where and how to spend network investment funds playa huge role in profitability and competitiveness.
For example, in South Australia there are inadequate connectors and transmission in what is a world class wind region (the Eyre Peninsula). South Australia is a small state which has not needed much infrastructure in the past. But there is existing infrastructure in areas with coal deposits (Victoria and NSW). And hey, guess what, wind cannot compete unless that stuff gets built instead of some other use of same moneys. Unless the regulated and conservative entities that plan and run power grids and ensure their reliability are satisfied that it's worth throwing down 5 billion to hook those areas up, they don't get built and new sources of generation never get a chance to compete.
Frankly, a direct subsidy and/or a carbon price is necessary to overcome those legacy advantages and even begin to create a level playing field.
All the other thing is saying is that the average annual output doesn't come at the same times as controllable output sources and they're not comparable because output isn't controllable. They don't respond to dispatch and can't decide to NOT generate if the spot price isn't at a break-even, and since they may generate at higher demand times or lower demand times, their actual returns per MWh will differ.
However, the methodology here isn't particularly impacted by this. The EIA is being pretty over-cautious, actually. Bear in mind that the lifetime levelised costs are just a calculation based on dividing total useful output (MWh) into the sum of capital costs, O&M, fuel, etc. THe result is a unit price. Dividing inputs into output to get a unit price isn't really altered by the intermittency thing. You can still compare capital costs per MWh, O&M per MWh, fuel costs per MWh.
And what we see is that wind stacks up very well in all input categories. Solar doesn't yet but is curving downward pretty well and will continue to do so.
And, here's the important bit: none of this means the assertion that solar power is ten times more expensive is anywhere close to holding water. If there was reeeeaaaaally the possibility that the figure was over $1000/MWh for solar PV rather than $210/MWh, the EIA would've flagged that.
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Oh and while we're on subsidy and fossil fuel, defining "subsidy" is sometimes tricky. There's all sorts of legacy arrangements and sunk investment that tilts the electricity system in favour of the status quo.
For example, the concession rate off-peak electric hot water we get essentially provides free money to coal power and increases base load above what it would otherwise need to be. It is an entrenched arrangement that has existed for decades and provides an ongoing competitive advantage to generators which need to be constantly on and are inflexible in their output (ie, in this country, coal)
Likewise, there is literally decades and bullions of dollars worth of state-funded transmission infrastructure that is geared towards the locations where fossil fuels exist is an ongoing advantage to those generators.
Not only does the legacy of existing infrastructure play a decisive role in where and how electricity generation can happen, ongoing decisions about where and how to spend network investment funds playa huge role in profitability and competitiveness.
For example, in South Australia there are inadequate connectors and transmission in what is a world class wind region (the Eyre Peninsula). South Australia is a small state which has not needed much infrastructure in the past. But there is existing infrastructure in areas with coal deposits (Victoria and NSW). And hey, guess what, wind cannot compete unless that stuff gets built instead of some other use of same moneys. Unless the regulated and conservative entities that plan and run power grids and ensure their reliability are satisfied that it's worth throwing down 5 billion to hook those areas up, they don't get built and new sources of generation never get a chance to compete.
Frankly, a direct subsidy and/or a carbon price is necessary to overcome those legacy advantages and even begin to create a level playing field.
aelf
Ashen One
The electron pump. Somebody's gotta say it.
Actually while we're at it, the non-comparability works the other way, too. A power source generating mostly at peak demand times can be viable with a higher levelised cost of energy than power sources spread over all demand times. That's why gas power is viable even though it's more expensive.
So in a warm climate a table of levelised costs is likely to be understating the viability of solar power. In a cold climate, it may be that the wind power's competitiveness is being understated.
So in a warm climate a table of levelised costs is likely to be understating the viability of solar power. In a cold climate, it may be that the wind power's competitiveness is being understated.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
It is. That's why it said "dead plant and animals", and it was referring to oil, coal and gas, or the non-alternative energy sources.
Not biofuel.
Thorgalaeg
Deity
That is called affirmative action. And i agree totally with it. If we use it for fundamental rights why not for fundamental needs.
Sure. I don't think a reasonable case for expanding nuclear energy in developed countries can be made. The discussion's mainly about how long to extend the capacity that's already there.
Yeah. Obviously my focus is on Australia. Water constraints, capital and insurance costs, federalism, plentiful alternatives, and political opposition all make the idea unfeasible even though we export massive amounts of uranium.
Instead we have turned the topic into a weird meta debate which is really a culture wars argument. People keep saying "we should have the debate" but nobody ever proposes anything. This is because concrete plans would show how irrational they're being, but keeping it vague and principled and abstract let's them avoid discussing things like location, finance, etc.
But by saying "we should have the debate" they get to act like they're tough-minded forward-thinking sensible realistic pragmatists, unlike those silly Greens with their windmills. The irony is amusing.
Instead we have turned the topic into a weird meta debate which is really a culture wars argument. People keep saying "we should have the debate" but nobody ever proposes anything. This is because concrete plans would show how irrational they're being, but keeping it vague and principled and abstract let's them avoid discussing things like location, finance, etc.
But by saying "we should have the debate" they get to act like they're tough-minded forward-thinking sensible realistic pragmatists, unlike those silly Greens with their windmills. The irony is amusing.
For weather driven power sources this effect is most likely to be the other way around. If power generation has a large weather dependent component, the market will be mostly supply driven. So power will be the cheapest when all the windmills are generating power and the sun is shining on all those solar panels.
The most money would be in generating power when the weather is not favorable for wind and solar power generation. And that is where gas power would be shining. The reason it is viable is that it can be switched on and off quickly, so you can run it when there is a supply gap and the most money can be made. With wind and solar you have no influence when it will generate power, so often you would be generating power when it is cheap anyway. So this is more likely to make those power sources less viable.
On nuclear power I think that in countries where there already is nuclear power, large investments should be made into transmutation power plants that process nuclear waste. Other than digging a big hole and hoping that the waste will stay there long enough, this will be one of the very few options to get rid of the waste. This would not be the cheapest form of energy around, but the energy is just the byproduct of the waste processing so we might as well use it.
I think I posted a graph showing the something like that effect occurring in Spain's day to day generation mix a dozen pages back. Gas power and hydro (and even coal) operating around the variability of wind output since wind always generates whenever it does and can simply bid zero and get all its power sold. It's nice when something can be demonstrated by actual reality.
I think what you're describing, though, is a market where variable uncontrolled generation is a huge fraction of the total generation mix - higher than anywhere actually existing at the moment. Like, if say 70% of capacity was variable and uncontrolled sources, I think the market would behave the way you describe.*
Even then though, I'm not sure it's unworkable. This is because the cost structure of wind and solar is basically a large upfront capital cost and then negligable ongoing maintanance in future years. The levelised cost comparison is just used to justify the long term viability, but it's pretty sensitive to assumptions about the period of reference. Once you've established your generator, you just have to keep generating for long enough to recoup your initial investment. The longer the time horizon of lifetime comparison, the more attractive solar and wind look compared to power sources with higher ongoing year-to-year costs from fuel. Because obviously, a large capital investment and very low ongoing costs, calculated over 15 years, looks less attractive per MWh than calculated over 30.
*But bear in mind that peak load is predictable in most places. In hot climates like here, that means hot summer days. I don't know whether wind output coincides very well with peak demand in cold climates (is your peak demand during cold nights? Does cold nights mean high wind?). In Australia, though, a system with a high proportion of solar power probably wouldn't suffer from the sort of situation you describe, just because all our extreme demand times happen due to air conditioning demand. High spot prices happen then. And if it's 42 degrees Celsius I guarantee you it's very sunny.
I think what you're describing, though, is a market where variable uncontrolled generation is a huge fraction of the total generation mix - higher than anywhere actually existing at the moment. Like, if say 70% of capacity was variable and uncontrolled sources, I think the market would behave the way you describe.*
Even then though, I'm not sure it's unworkable. This is because the cost structure of wind and solar is basically a large upfront capital cost and then negligable ongoing maintanance in future years. The levelised cost comparison is just used to justify the long term viability, but it's pretty sensitive to assumptions about the period of reference. Once you've established your generator, you just have to keep generating for long enough to recoup your initial investment. The longer the time horizon of lifetime comparison, the more attractive solar and wind look compared to power sources with higher ongoing year-to-year costs from fuel. Because obviously, a large capital investment and very low ongoing costs, calculated over 15 years, looks less attractive per MWh than calculated over 30.
*But bear in mind that peak load is predictable in most places. In hot climates like here, that means hot summer days. I don't know whether wind output coincides very well with peak demand in cold climates (is your peak demand during cold nights? Does cold nights mean high wind?). In Australia, though, a system with a high proportion of solar power probably wouldn't suffer from the sort of situation you describe, just because all our extreme demand times happen due to air conditioning demand. High spot prices happen then. And if it's 42 degrees Celsius I guarantee you it's very sunny.
