Serious action to reduce CO2 emissions has been stymied in Australia and the US for the moment. So, to get an idea of what is likely to be feasible, and on what timescale, we have to look at Europe, which has both a working Emissions Trading Scheme and a bunch of special incentives to promote renewable energy. At least on the latter point, there is some cause for optimism.
Here’s a graph of new installed capacity and decommissioned capacity for 2009 from The European Wind Energy Association (link here was broken and is now fixed-JQ). The results pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll add a couple of observations.
The fact that solar PV was a major source of new installed capacity surprised me. Until now, solar (along with fusion) has been one of the contenders for the tag “the energy source of the future and always will be”. But, on current trends, solar is set to be a major contributor in the future. Of course, the outcome so far has been the result of large subsidies, such as feed-in tariffs. But, even as the subsidies are cut back the volume of installations continues to grow. Before long, solar could be competitive with coal on the basis of the ETS and peak-load pricing, without the need for an extra “renewable” subsidy. Gas is likely to be cheapest for some time to come, but there are sound reasons for not wanting to depend entirely on an energy source that can be cut off at short notice.
The other point is that for coal (and also, less surprisingly for nuclear) installed capacity showed a net decline. The combination of the ETS and strong political opposition has made the construction of new coal-fired power stations in Europe almost impossible, at least without a commitment to CCS or some other sweetener.
On this issue, where Europe has led, the rest of the world will follow sooner or later. The big question is whether it will be too late. The good outcomes we are seeing in Europe suggest that, even with a few years’ slippage, big reductions in emissions will be possible in time to stabilise global climate.
John Quiggin 
Hermit,
When SA has its first 1 gigawatt CSP facility, with storage, in the desert there that problem disappears. That is the value of a mixed renewable system, good baseload stability.
BilB – What do I pay? Much the same as the rest of Australia:
http://www.aemo.com.au/data/avg_price/avgp_daily201004.shtm
This isn’t bad considering that South Australia doesn’t have huge deposits of cheap to mine coal, resulting in most electricity being generated from more expensive natural gas. Fortunately wind power helps keep prices down.
Hermit – Heatwaves are a problem for wind power on account of how we never have a heat wave when there is a lot of wind. Funny that. Anyhow, in a heat wave the price of electricity shoots up. This is supposed to activate the magic of the free market. A few years ago AGL which owns the biggest generator in the state refused to supply electricity for less than $5 a kilowatt-hour during a heat wave. I guess getting $5 for something that is usually around 7.5 cents was pretty magical for them.
What happens when Cooper Basin runs out of gas? Well, my guess is that we’ll use a lot less gas. Fortunately wind power has dramatically reduced the amount of gas being used in the state so it will last a lot longer than it would otherwise.
So realistically, what you need to do in SA (ruling out nuclear for the moment) is
a) build more storage capacity so that wind’s decline during a heatwave is not so important
b) build other resources for your desal. CETO might be a candidate. It might also help with your power.
Here’s electricity price and demand over the past couple of days in SA:
http://www.aemo.com.au/data/GRAPH_30SA1.html
While demand can still be high in the evening, peak prices almost always occur during the hours when solar power is operating around maximum output. This improves the economics of solar power considerably. We appear to be rapidly approaching the point where large electricity consumers paying spot prices will be able to save money by installing point of use PV.
Fran – Energy storage won’t be built currently because it’s cheaper to simply build another gas turbine. And with the amount of wind power that is coming online and reducing gas use and the amount of fracking going on there is probably going to be natural gas available for quite some time. But a price on carbon would make energy storage more attractive.
South Australia has great wave energy resources, but wave power is not really economically feasible at the moment. I’m inclined to think that solar power is much more likely to help Adelaide cope with heat waves or help provide energy for desalination. This is because it’s costs have been coming down very rapidly recently, it produces electricity during periods of high demand and it is complementary with SA’s wind power. Also, PV can be installed at point of use which can make it economical even though the cost per kilowatt-hour is much higher than electricity supplied to the grid wholesale by natural gas.
So with SA heading towards 40% electricity demand coming from wind power (renewables) that state is managing its Kyoto CO2 emission requirements ahead of the time frame. That is very impressive.
It is amazing what one finds while ferreting around
Click to access
I don’t know if this went ahead or not, but its very proposal is delightfully forward thinking. Is Adelaide Australia’s secret coven of advanced intelligence?
@BilB
Without knowing the numbers here it is hard to say what feasibility is but it has always seemed morel likely in principle that a solar thermal plant that was primarily aimed at desalinating water would be more likely to be commercially feasible. Water is a lot easier and cheaper at the margin to store than power and if you can save long distance pumping costs, better still. Reducing the fossil energy component in desal also makes lots of sense and if you can also generate some power for a substantial user such as industry then costly storage can be minimised.
I’d love to see some hard numbers here but it does sound plausible at first inspection.
Fran,
You really have a problem with the whole energy storage thing, don’t you. If you read reports from CSP operators you will see that CSP energy storage (heat into eutectic salt tanks) is the high profit end of the business as this provides the ability to boost supply into peak demand periods. IE storage pays for itself 2 fold.
If you read the Point Paterson article a little more closely you will see that the additional commercial viabilty comes from salt production.
I’d probably put energy storage up at the top of the technologies we most need to significantly improve; with it even existing PV starts to look viable on the massive scale required to impact emissions.
I have to agree with Ronald; with abundant fossil fuels powering plants running 24/7 there’s no immediate need for large scale storage. Given the Australian energy sector’s complacency and outright recalcitrance their investment in that kind of developing technology is notable for it’s near non-existence. They see no need. Except that there is an immediate and absolute need to reduce emissions which they also fail to acknowledge and isn’t that at the heart of the problem?
Australia’s energy sector, rather than being proactive leaders in the changeover to low emissions are mired in climate science denialism and are active lobbyists against effective climate policy. What we have is mainstream politics that only pays lip service at best to that absolute need for emissions reduction and blithely continues doing all it can to maximise the world’s consumption of CO2 precursors like coal and gas from Australian sources.
I often think that the only way the world will successfully reduce emissions is for those technologies like PV with storage to be so cheap that no-one will want to buy our coal and gas. Even at the discounted lowest of low prices that stuff you just dig up and burn can be reduced to. Not that I think it can’t be done otherwise but not by a Labor government that buys into that biggest of greenwash scams – carbon capture and storage – and uses it to justify the growth of greater global dependence on fossil fuels, Or by an opposition that prefers to pander to the votes of denialists and completely ignores the abundant scientific advice that consistently tells them that huge reductions in emissions are absolutely essential. And are even more supportive of the mass expansion of export of coal and gas exports than Labor.
What’s happening in Europe is only heartening in the sense of knowing that with genuine commitment progress can happen. The lack of commitment here in Australia is a disgrace.
Medium scale solar PV installations built in South Australia have been quite expensive and we could have produced much more electricity and had a much better return if the money had instead been spent on more wind power capacity. However, the price of these systems was probably fixed several years ago, before the recent large drops in PV prices. I was just looking at the Solarbuzz website:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/
They say that a 50 kilowatt Solar PV system, which is something that could fit on the roof of a school, warehouse, small shopping center, etc., can produce electricity for 25 US cents a kilowatt-hour. This is still quite expensive and they assume a 5% capital cost which is considerably lower than what’s usual in Australia. Also, our GST would bump up the purchasing and installation cost. On the bright side, their calculations assume an average of only 5.5 hours of sunlight and places such as Alice Springs average considerably more than this. This makes me think that solar PV could be close to paying for itself in a town like Alice. Since the price of solar electricity is likely to continue to decline at around 4% a year, I expect that over the next decade solar will become a major source of electricity in sunnier rural areas and as prices continue to drop it provide a significant amount of electricity in coastal regions. To me this seems fairly inevitable as I expect a price to eventually be put on carbon emissions and even if there are no further improvements in the design of solar cells, I think economies of scale and decreased installation costs should be enough to make solar competitive.
@Ken
Storage is fabulous in part because of the advantage to which BilB points. Regardless of the source, the ability to follow load closely reduces the need for redundancy or load shedding or demand management. People want their power when they want it and hardly anyone declines it on the basis that they don’t like the momentary price.
Of course the problem is that unless the cost of storage is lower than the cost of redundant capacity, operators will tend to select the latter. If it costs $2000 to store a deliverable KwH in for example, a hydro facility and only $200 to have some gas plant produce it on demand, there’s no way that operators are going to use one more unit of output from the hydro facility than needed.
Moreover, in the case of intermittent renewables, like wind and solar for example, if you are going to supply the grid with a constant 1GW by using storage to make up shortfalls in output due to lack of windf or insolation then it follows that at some point you have to be producing more than 1GW (or at any rate more than what you are supplying in order to have some “rainy day” power. The less the round trip efficiency of the storage method, the bigger the surplus you will need when things are good on the supply side. So a plant rated at 1GW and supplying that much 24/7 as part of its business model will probably have to be capable of producing substantially more than that on average — probably at least 25% more — and have storage capacity for energy not less than the amount needed during longest period in which its primary source of energy (wind or insolation for example) was outstripped by demand.
This implies very significant overbuild. If for example the longest period of low insolation in the location during the last five years was 9 days when instead of averaging 1GW for 8 hours you would only have averaged 200MW for 8 hours, then the storage required will be the shortfall between the output you would have had then and the output one proposes for the plant (i.e. 9 days* 800MWh * 8hours = 57.6GwH). You also have to have enough capacity to get to that point while trading commercially. If you exhaust your storage in one such period, replacing it is obviously going to be a long process unless your actual capacity is a lot more than the 1GW you are contracted to supply.
Of course, if your storage is cheap enough then there are any number of energy producers besides the solar plant who might use the storage rather than back off output. The key here is having a storage technology that fits well with the system as a whole.
Having cheaper forms of energy storage would certainly be nice, but it’s not much of a problem from the point of view of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If a moderate price is put on carbon then then there would be a large scale build out of wind and other low emission generating capacity. This would allow the current fossil fuel infrastructure to switch to meeting peak demand instead of baseload, with gas turbines being used in preference to coal because of their lower CO2 emissions. Also, fossil fuel plants could be run on carbon neutral biomass and biogas. With current fossil fuel plants providing peak power, storage won’t be needed.
Personally I think that solar energy will soon be ready to help meet peak summer demand, but even if it isn’t, improved efficiency, demand management, improved transmission and smart metering can help. And if we have to, it won’t kill us to build another gas generator (although it might drown a few people in Bangladesh). Electric cars and plug in hybrids are starting to come onto the market and it seems very likely that in the future a great deal of personal transport will be electric. Combined with smart metering this is likely to solve any problems with intermittent sources of electricity. Electric vehicles will be able to store power when it’s cheap and deliver it back to the grid when it’s expensive.
I think the reality will be that energy will be soft rationed and far more expensive. For example the idea proposed for Adelaide and Geraldton that air conditioners will be switched off by remote control in an odds and evens pattern. This won’t apply to energy hogs like aluminium smelters in eastern Australia. I agree that an immediate effect of carbon pricing will be to favour gas fired generation over coal relative to which 50% CO2 savings may be possible, not the 80% cuts we want long term. I also suspect there will be a strong shift to gas as a transport fuel when liquid fuels escalate in price. Then in turn gas will skyrocket as we not only want to export a lot but domestically replace both coal and oil.
I wouldn’t bet the farm on plug-in cars and smart meters as early trials haven’t set the world on fire. Assuming we never get carbon pricing I think a rough sequence of energy innovations will be – a lot more gas fired generation, a few renewables, gas powered transport, some electric transport and non-price rationing. I think within a decade we will be forced into a realisation that a lot of energy should come from nuclear though but I suspect it will take a crisis to instigate action.
There is a lot of technology that you are unaware of, Hermit, technology which will solve problems such as powering air conditioners in an energy cost free manner (really old technology recycled). The threat of climate change tipping points have pushed TECHNOLOGY tipping points. This coupled with a pestilence of people all seeking something to do for their existence to be meaningful, provides certainty to the wave of energy innovation based technological change, under way right now.
A new and very powerful, almost primeaval, drive slowly dawning is for personal energy independence. People are enjoying the notion of providing their own energy, knowing that they are contributing rather than draining. We’ve all, subconsciously, had our eye on the energy fuel guage, disturbed by the disquieting innevitable dipping to empty. We now feel able to recharge from the one true, and only dynamic energy source, the SUN.
Skepticism is well founded. We have been promised so much in the past. Oil enervation promised exciting change and permanence. Instead we found choking smog and bowser queues. Nuclear promised energy forever, instead we have contamination and fear of annihilation. JQ is right to talk of “the energy source of the future” only it is fossil fuels and Nuclear that, now, “never will be” .
@Hermit
…and these people
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/u/uranium-reserves.htm
say that in order to supply all of the worlds energy that way there is about 30 years supply of affordable uranium fuel. There are other studies to say that to supply all of the world’s energy needs from nuclear, requiring a massive expansion of infrastructure, would significantly contaminate most countries based on the statistical probability of the occasional leak and spill.
The sun, on the other hand, doing exactly the same, has 700 to 900 million years supply. This is worth a look.
@BilB
The claim is simply ridiculous BilB.
1. It doesn’t count thorium which is three times as abundant as uranium
2. It takes no account of IFR which uses the resource about 160 times as efficiently as LWRs and uses existing hazmat and weapons grade material. This alone could last the planet for hundreds of years
3. It ignores seawater sources of uranium. The resource is so energy intensive that even at the $200 per Kg recovery for seawater rate the marginal cost of power would be far cheaper than coal; Indeed even the EROI for crushing granite and extracting it would still be massively positive.
4. Coal slag and fly ash contains considerable Th and U — it is not economic to extract it now because uranium is still very cheap.
5. The mass of the uranium involved utterly belies BilB’s claim of “significant contamination from occasional spills”. Much more radioactive waste is emitted by coal recovery and combustion.
Think of it — all of your energy needs for an entire lifetime from a quanity of materiel less than the mass of butter you might apply to your morning toast and cut lunch in a week.
Fran,
Don’t forget that there are also many other sources of uranium that have in the past been proven to work and now are only non-viable as the mining sources are cheaper. Concentrations of uranium in phosphate-based fertilisers, for example, are fairly easy to extract and will persist for as long as there are birds producing guano.
The energy that I will be using has no measurable weight at all. It is delivered to my door step free every day. Think about that.
@BilB
Misleading. Insolation does weigh nothing, but of course the devices to harvest it and convey it and store it weigh a very considerable something — and that considerable something has a massively greater mass than the resources needed to harvest, produce and convey the energy from nuclear power. All of that steel and glass and concrete must be decommissioned at end of life just as nuclear plants must. The comparison does not recommend solar energy.
I am presuming you mean the wind – there does seem to be rather a lot of it down your way – where ever that is.
The problems for the rest of us, of course, are that the machinery needed to harvest it is expensive, harmful to birds, noisy, unsightly, the source is unreliable and tends to shut down when we need it most. Other than that, of course, it is perfect.
If you mean solar – most of the above still apply.
I’m talking about the next generation of Solar PV, Andrew. Three times more efficient than current PV and is part of the roof structure, so it has no effective weight, but many advantages. So if you have a roof over your head in the future, you will have all of the energy that you can use, FREE. Think about that. The only times that it will not be delivering energy is at night and on the darkest of overcast days.
The energy sources we use in the future won’t be decided based upon how long they will last. We knew oil wasn’t going to last forever but just look at how many people gleefully bought SUVs prior to the price hitting $147 a barrel. How dangerous it is will have some effect, but not a great deal. Coal is ridiculously dangerous, it’s dangerous for miners, it’s dangerous for people who breath air, it’s dangerous for the whole freaking ecosystem, but it has still taken us decades to do anything about it. What will mainly determine the energy sources used in the future will be the cost.
Nuclear power will not be used in Australia, at least in the short to mid-term future, because new nuclear power is very expensive. Australia cannot realistically create a commercial nuclear industry on its own, so it will have to rely on international expertise. The companies that build nuclear power plants charge a lot of moeny and Australia has no ability to negotiate a price that will make nuclear power competetive in Australia’s (fairly) free electricity markets. Perhaps in the future Chinese companies will be able to build nuclear power plants cheaply enough that they can offer to build them in Australia without subsidy and make a profit by competing in the electricity market, but that day isn’t here yet and it may never come.
Currently wind is cheaper than gas and much cheaper than new nuclear power and its capacity is expanding rapidly in Australia. The more wind power that is built in Australia the worse the economics of nuclear power become because of its tendency to lower the price of night time off peak electricity. A gas or coal generator can save fuel costs by shutting down during periods of high wind and low demand, but since most of the cost of nuclear power is capital cost and not fuel, nuclear power saves very little money by shutting down.
Solar power in Australia is also cheaper than new nuclear power. The solar thermal plant with storage being built in Cloncurry is only a demonstration plant, but it will still produce electricity at a lower cost than new nuclear. Although it costs over $10,000 Australian per kilowatt of capacity, it is still cheaper than new nuclear in the US because of its lower operating costs and the higher value of electricity supplied in the daytime. Solar PV is also cheaper in Australia than new nuclear. I recently read on Bronte Capital how First Solar is producing solar cells for under $1 US a watt, how Chinese manufacterers are likely to outcompete them, how module prices are coming down and how prices are expected to continue to fall rapidly over the next few years. Currently the cheapest module prices are $1.74 US a watt. These developments make point of use solar PV cheaper than new nuclear in all of Australia.
If the choice was between nuclear power and fossil fuels I would gladly chose nuclear and I would be willing to pay $5 to swing a wrecking ball through a coal plant. However, in a free market, nuclear will have to compete with wind and solar and other energy sources and at the moment it just can’t compete.
@Ronald Brak
Ronald the marginal cost of operating a nuclear plant is its strong suit. So not only (using the recent 5.6GW UAE contract) is this plant about three times the installed cost of nuclear and about 1/3 as available. Nuclear plants these days are running at 90% availability. Unlike the solar plants, output is predictable.
Sorry. Over $10,000 Australian per average kilowatt of output. My bad.
@Ronald Brak
$10,000 per KwHe? Is that what you mean? That can’t be right.
In order to compare different sources of electricity I often work out how much they cost to build per average kilowatt of output. For example, if a wind turbine costs $2,500 per kilowatt of capacity and it operates at an average of 33.3% of that capacity, then its cost per average kilowatt of output would be $7,500. This is just something I do personally to keep things straight in my head. Without thinking I accidently wrote this figure down as capacity instead of explaining what I really meant. Sorry for the confusion.
I agree that capital cost divided by capacity factor is a good proxy for the required overbuild ignoring possible extra transmission. For wind we might have $2.50 per watt divided by 25% or .25 c.f. giving an adjusted capital cost per watt of $10.00 For nuclear at $5 and .9 we get $5.56.
Hermit, ‘capital costs include disposal costs. Would you like to redo your calculations, please.
Ernestine,
It is not possible to do that calculation as there has not to been to date been a nuclear reactor that has been properly decomissioned and fully dismantled. Furthermore it is governments who are picking up the tab for nuclear waste disposal avoiding storage.
Here is a mess left for others typical of the nuclear industry
Click to access rumjungle_rep02_a.pdf
with costs stretching into the unforeseeable future.
@Ronald Brak
That way of working it out does get closer but it is important to recall that an overall CF might be 33% is not the same as a minimum 33% or even 30%. The overbuild requirement reflects how much you need to build to guarantee the load the system must bear.
So if at times the system is running at 10% capacity over a significant period of time (and if this occurs at short notice) then at $2500 your figure would be $25000 per KwH. In the case of something like wind or solar this overbuild would not be viable. In practice you would set aside some cheap redundant capacity — some OCGT capable of covering the shortfall for example. This cost then has to be factored in along with the cost of the associated emissions and other externalities. Since gas is cheap compared to wind, it would make sense to stick with the rated capacity at $2500 (or whatever it is — I’ve actually heard a lot cheaper for wind — about $US1600) and cover the difference between nameplate and the minimum with various kinds of gas.
In the end though this means that wind will have a footprint like gas. The higher the CF and the less volatile it is, the lighter the footprint.
This is the difference with nuclear, because nuclear runs at about 90% and it is entirely predictable. At $3500 per Kw your measurement would imply about $4000 but of course unlike gas-backed wind or solar, its carbon footprint is tiny because it burns no carbon when producing energy.
BilB,
Yes, I know. Hence my question. Lets see whether our HS teacher has a go at answering it.
Hermit, you can get the figures for wind power by looking at existing wind farms in Australia. For example, the recently opened Clements Gap wind farm cost about $7,500 per average kilowatt of output. Estimates for future proposals such as the Coopers Gap wind farm in Queensland are about $6,200 per average kilowatt of output. But I don’t think your figure of $5 a watt for nuclear could be correct. Why would Australia be able to build nuclear capacity at a lower cost than the United States?
Fran, I’m having a hard time understanding your last post. Are you saying that wind power in South Australia has not reduced natural gas use?
The trend with nuclear power plants seems to be to build a new one next to the old so decommissioning is avoided. Same I suspect when wind turbines wear out. They remain permanent no-go areas for the public. How much will it cost to clean up the tar and heavy metals at an old coal fired station?
I omitted to mention solar PV capital cost divided by capacity factor $6/.16 = $37.50. Outside the US it looks like the Westinghouse AP series reactors will come in well under $5 per watt. China is supposedly building them for $3.50 per one estimate and the UAE will get 5.6 GW for $14 billion including desalination plant or $2.50/w. For some reason countries of European descent make nuclear installation more expensive.
Fran,
You’re waffling in the wind again,
“So if at times the system is running at 10% capacity over a significant period of time (and if this occurs at short notice) then at $2500 your figure would be $25000 per KwH”
to say this is to completely forget the European published information which demonstrates that the larger the renewable system the more baseload stable it is. One wind turbine on one hill is not a “system”. Wind power alone is not a system. Wind coupled with CSP, PV, and wave is a baseload stable system.
Hermit, you might have to go to the bottom of a valley in Tasmania to get a figure of 0.16 of capacity for fixed PV in Australia. I’m not sure how you’re determining this, but if you are using a figure of 1,000 watts per square meter for direct sunlight, then vast areas of Australia will get 0.25 of capacity or more for fixed PV. Here are figures for various Australian cities and towns:
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:5QK-0xb5busJ:www.peakoil.org.au/australia.insolation.xls+insolation+australia&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
In Alice Springs a 1,000 watt solar system will generate an average of over 6.5 kilowatt-hours a day, or more than 0.27 of capacity. Using your figure of $6 a watt for capital costs and dividing it by 0.27 gives $22.2. As retail electricity prices in the day are much higher than average wholesale prices, and PV has minimal operating costs, the cost per kilowatt-hour should work out to be considerably cheaper than for your $5 a watt price for nuclear and much cheaper than the cost of new nuclear in the US.
But can solar PV be installed at a cost of $6 a watt? While the cheapest modules are currently only $1.74 US a watt, the final installed cost can be much higher, especially for residential installations. Fortunately, the total costs for larger point of use installations are much lower than for residential installations, so an installed price of $6 a watt or less for new mid to large sized PV systems should be doable.
Ronald,
Hermit is making the usual mistakes or starting with a figure of 1000 watts per sq m solar insolation at the equator when it is actually 1366 watts per sq m, and then imagining that solar panels at higher latitudes are layed out flat on the ground rather than inclined to be perpendicular to the incoming radiation. Along with a bunch of other misconceptions. It seems that just thinking about nuclear energy and the power of free neutrons has the effect of knocking off brain cells particularly in the analytical part of the brain. Our nuclear trogladites need to get out into the healing power of the sun’s rays a little more.
There are many other factors at work to guarantee a renewable energy future for Australia, the most significant of which is the pace of technological change, The best minds of a 7 billion large population working the greatest technological tool box ever are working on renewable energy from a staggering number of directions. It would be foolish in the extreme to take todays energy reality as the basis for the future.
Australia has a very special status being the only nuclear free continent (Lucas Heights aside), and being a continent with premium solar energy availability. Nuclear energy has no place here. More to the point if Nuclear Power plants were built here they would seriouly run the risk of becoming a failed economic experiment. The recent, and even not so recent, advances in photo voltaic conversion efficiencies, along with massive improvements in wind energy systems, promise to seriously permanently alter the economic structure of the electricity industry. At the very time when most energy infrastructure investors will be having wet dreams imagining the unprecedented profits starting to flow as our electricity prices soar in expectation of a CPRS, there is now certainty that a distributed electricity system will provide most of the electricity needed by all residents and small business. The grid system of the future will have a very different role, and a role for which nuclear output is entirely unsuitable.
Oops. Alice Springs gets about 6 kilowatts of sunshine per square meter on average, not 6.5. This gives 0.25 of capacity and $6 capital costs divided by this gives $24. Sorry for the mistake.
@BilB
Here’s a surprise for you I’ve got 2 kw of PV which is why I’m underwhelmed by it. I get net metering, no feed-in tariff. To take your ideas to their logical extension we should have vertical solar panels pointed at the horizon at the South and North Pole. What’s your power source for the long months of darkness?
No harm done, either way, Ronald Brak. You provided your data source and it can be easily seen that the parameter value 6 corresponds to a horizontal mounting while the value 6.5 corresponds to an estimate for latitude adjusted mounting. It is up to specialists to comment, if necessary, on the data.
Good on you, Hermit, for doing the solar thing. You had spoken of your system before. I can’t see how you would be dissappointed you are reducing your electricity bill by 2 Kw times whatever your solar exposure is times what you would otherwise be paying for electricity which should be say 2*7.5*.8*.15, to be conservative, which is $1.8 per day times say 280 full solar days per year, $504 per year. Nothing wrong with that. If you want bigger savings put on more panels. Some good news is that my partner is developing far more efficient inverters (up to 98% efficient) which will improve your output by 10 to 20% depending on which inverters you are currently using. Arctic? talk to the experts,
http://www.absak.com/library/solar-photovoltaic-power
Some more info for you, Hermit, on Antarctic solar PV
“Abstract:A solar photovoltaic power system was designed and built at the NASA Lewis Research Center as part of the NASA/NSF Antarctic Space Analog Program. The system was installed at a remote field camp at Lake Hoare in the Dry Valleys and provided a six-person field team with the power to run personal computers and printers, lab equipment, lighting, and a small microwave oven. The system consists of three silicon photovoltaic sub-arrays delivering 1.5 kW peak power, three lead-acid gel battery modules supplying 2.4 kWh, and electrical distribution system which delivers 120 Vac and 12 Vdc to the user. The system was modularized for each of deployment and operation. Previously the camp has been powered by diesel generators, which have proven to be both noisy and polluting. The NSF, in an effort to reduce their dependence on diesel fuel from both environmental and cost standpoints is interested in the use of alternate forms of energy, such as solar power. Such a power system will also provide NASA with important data on system level deployment and operation in a remote location by a minimally trained crew, as well as validate initial integration concepts. ”
You will be comforted to know that Antarctica does not have a feed in tarrif system.
I take it this field camp is abandoned during the long darkness. Back here in the mid latitudes we still have the problem of keeping hospitals and night shift businesses running at 2 a.m. I also question whether private citizens should have to use their own capital for electricity generation. Surely governments should provide affordable power to all as a public good.
However I can see a rationale for home generation in that it feels dirty to be reliant on coal power. That extra cost helps buy a clearer conscience. Of course we could opt to not re-elect a government who back in 2007 promised to uphold the principles of the Kyoto agreement. Since then that government has botched the ETS, botched the home insulation scheme and helped boost coal exports and the destruction of farmland in favour of coal mines. My advice to concerned citizens would be if you can’t afford PV change the government.
Hermit, in Australia we have no problem at all supplying electricity to hospitals and night shift businesses at 2 a.m.. Early in the morning is when we have the most spare generating capacity. We don’t need PV to help meet demand at night, which is just as well because the sun doesn’t shine at night and if it did I’d be concerned.
Where Australia does have a big problem meeting demand is in the daytime in the summer. Especially when it’s very hot. Solar power is very useful in meeting this demand because the sun shines in the daytime, it shines for more time in summer than winter and when it’s cloudy it’s not so hot.
Currently solar power is still quite expensive. However, I think that in a decade it could be effective in helping meet peak demand for the following reasons:
1…It is very sunny in Australia.
2…The cost of solar electricity has been decreasing at around 4% a year and looks set to continue for quite some time.
3…I expect a price to be put on carbon emissions reasonably soon.
4…Many large consumers of electricity pay spot prices which improve the economics of solar power and the number people paying spot prices is set to increase in the future.
Nuclear power is not helpful for meeting summertime peak demand. Nuclear is good for providing baseload power. Building a peak nuclear reactor is not profitable. Electricity from a peak reactor that operates half as often as a baseload reactor will cost nearly twice as much. If the peak reactor is used to produce electricity all the time, then outside of peak periods it will push the price of electricity down towards zero and will operate at a massive loss. The cost of using nuclear to meet peak demand is much greater than that of current solar power, or gas, or burning biomass or biogas, or pumped storage, or anything else that’s currently used to meet peak demand in the world today.
@Ronald Brak
Not so. The marginal cost of the fuel is low enough that it doesn’t matter. In any event some reactors designs allow much better load following. Also, there are other utilities — flash desal for example which you can do with surplus power. You can produce H2 from steam. Pump water. Provide industrial heat. With a small reactor you copuld desalinate at the coast and pump to the headwaters of the Darling …
Moroever, reactors can be tailored to a range of sizes like the PBMR. There’s even a small “nuclear battery” called the hyperion that produces 25MWe.
Fran, with your nuclear enthusiasm there is a big future for you in India. Until they have their first accident that is.
@BilB
Bilb – Gotcha. Training provided for free at Union Carbide first. Thinking outside the box – with that superior command of copious bizphraseaology peppered with eco jargon, knowledge of a vast array of markets and industries as well as listmaking skills – now that I really take an idea shower about it – going forward – Im sure a suitable post could be mapped with a nuclear company seeking global strategic vision in India.
In response to a statement on ‘profitability, Fan Barlow writes:
“Not so. The marginal cost of the fuel is low enough that it doesn’t matter. In any event some reactors designs allow much better load following”
This kind of mis-information by means of misuse of well established economic terminology is a nuisance.
Fran, we currently we use low capital cost, high fuel cost gas for peak power. Gas is good for peak power because it’s not very expensive to build the capacity you need to meet peak demand, and since it is only going to be used part of the time the high fuel cost is acceptable because its more than made up for by the lower capital costs. Nuclear power is the opposite of gas. It has high capital costs and low fuel costs. A gas turbine can save a lot of money by switching off because its fuel costs are high. A nuclear reactor saves very little money by switching off. A nuclear reactor will cost a power company almost the same amount of money whether is running at full capacity or zero capacity. Can you see why this is the case or would you like me to explain further?
Cheap or zero cost electricity could be used for a variety of purposes, but if you push the price of electricity towards zero, how are you going to pay for your reactors? And if the goal is to reduce the price of electricity, why not use cheaper wind power to achieve this? Even current solar is cheaper than new nuclear and is much better at matching Australian demand. I’m afraid using nuclear power to meet peak demand does not make sense.