Since I’ve been incautious enough to mention the N-word in the previous post, I’ll open another sandpit specifically devoted to discussions of the merits, and otherwise, of nuclear power. Any mention of this topic on other threads will be deleted and will risk bans or restrictions on the offender
Update Since it’s still going, I’ve moved it up, which should reopen comments
John Quiggin 
I prefer coal.
No point really 😦
Aaarrrrrghhh – Im turning green – but I agree its one way to keep other threads from being hijacked. Sort of solitary confinement. Now the libertarians will complain they lost their freedoms next.
Ratio – U seriously made me laugh! LOL
The term sandpit is a bit insulting but I’ll resist the temptation to be offended.
One issue about the nuclear industry is the lack of standardisation in plant design. They all look unique which creates low learning-by-doing and high costs, delays in construction etc. My guess (pure guess) is that the lack of standardisation reflects environmental concerns.
I have heard that the Russians are building a more standardised nuclear station and that this will reduce costs. I assume Chinese can do the same. The extent to which replication reduces costs was discussed by Zimmerman in 1970s – I wonder if it raises safety issues?
I suspect nuclear will gain lots of acceptance when impacts of climate change are so obvious and severe that even columnists at The Australian will be vigorously condemning the manufacturers and distributors of climate change denial and are decrying the lack of investments in renewables. i.e. when the need to close down all the existing coal plants is urgent and new ‘low’ emissions gas isn’t low emissions enough.
To date more effort has gone into developing policy that lets us do the least that we can get away with, rather than the most we are capable of – that goes for investment in renewables as well as clearing the impediments to nuclear.
The Greens are wrong to have blanket opposition to nuclear but they do have an appreciation for broader issues of sustainability and the limits of our Earth’s environment. Cheap, abundant energy can as easily carry us further past those limits as much as it has the potential to shift them back a bit; as long as the pro-nukes arguments are primarily about growth, wealth and not having to limit anything – business as usual minus the catastrophic climate change – they will be at odds with lots of green thinking folk who might put climate fears ahead of proliferation and waste disposal fears but who won’t see nuclear as the Great Solution.
The Merits:
It’s zero emission
It uses a truly tiny quantity of fuel
New fast breeder/pebble bed reactors seem pretty safe
The Otherwise:
It’s complicated, expensive and over-engineered
It generates serious quantities of nuclear waste – Which kills people, lasts for 10’s of thousands of years, and can’t be safely stored.
The otherwises seem to be a killer for me (quite literally). It seems like solar/solar thermal/geothermal/wind is approaching the same cost per KwH, is on a much more encouraging cost curve, and has the added side effect of not killing anyone (For a given value of anyone – I suppose the birds don’t think much of wind turbines, but one problem at a time) 🙂
Coal:
Merits:
* Cheap.
* Base load, great capacity factors.
* Did I mention that it is cheap?
* Locally produced.
* Don’t forget that it is cheap.
Otherwise:
* None that I can think of.
I think we should spread crushed coal on the Gold Coast beaches for the enjoyment of the public. Here’s a problem with coal; it’s going to increase in dollar cost with or without carbon taxes. China’s domestic production is expected to peak circa 2015 and they plan to get more coal by rail from Russia. India will source more coal from Mozambique. Australia can’t make up the Chindia demand shortfall unless there is a global recession. We’ll end up paying world prices for coal even though we seem to have plenty for now.
In my opinion we should cut the $43 bn NBN budget in half and buy two AP 1000 reactors. One on the eastern seabord and one on the southern coastline. If possible integrate the cooling systems with desalination. We are supposed to be 20% renewable in just 10 years time but that will require a fourfold increase if we exclude hydro. This is despite generous subsidies. Suppose we did achieve 20% renewables; what about the other 80%? Federal minister Ferguson has been waxing lyrical about gas fired electricity, just like the Brits in the Thatcher era. Now they get gas from Siberia under constant fear of the tap being turned off.
I’m saying wind and solar are not going to deliver, coal won’t always be cheap and some say it has other problems, gas is finite. What does that leave?
@Rationalist
So you obviously did not read all the previous discussion on this.
Coal:
Merits:
* Cheap. In short-term only and with massive (possibly uncontrollable) costs in long-term
* Base load, great capacity factors. Which can be developed with better renewable technology
* Did I mention that it is cheap? – Just like a restless chicken.
* Locally produced. But waste and yellowcake is shipped all around the world.
* Don’t forget that it is cheap. Will someone silence this chook ❗
Otherwise:
* None that I can think of. But your grandchildren will be spitting on your grave.
@Hermit
Another slow learner who has not read previous discussion.
No-one is contesting that:
Only a range of renewables and storage capacity, plus population policies, will protect our environment for future generations, keep risks of accidents and pollution at much lower levels, and enable the energy sector to be better distributed and competitive.
Two AP1000 reactors providing energy will be like having two banks providing banking services. This leads to permanent profiteering rip-offs, plus claims of “two big to fail” gambits imposed onto mug politicians.
So what does that leave? Nothing that is not finite other than Solar, Hermit.
Your saying “solar won’t deliver” is a bit of an empty statement, particularly coming from someone whose personal energy sources are 95% solar (and very good for you by the way).
Solar is the only thing that is truly “infinite” (we all die before the sun does so that is infinite in meaningful terms).
So is big solar getting under way. It seems so. These people
http://www.wizardpower.com.au/
seem to be at the forefront of a wave of large solar installations.
@Chris Warren
You can’t get base load from windmills and black squares on your roof.
Very little population policy seems to be happening at the moment, apart from continuing appalling methods such as the baby bonus that was set up by the ideologically-motivated pair, Howard and Costello. There was little hope of this changing under Rudd who had a similar ideological bent. At least Gillard doesn’t share this view but it hasn’t made any difference to baby bonus policy as yet. Demographic transition has gone into reverse in Australia as a consequence of having had a throwback government (Howard-Costello). The Chinese and Indians must be staggered by the baby bonus.
Chris W,
‘“two big to fail” gambits imposed onto mug politicians’
is a very real risk if any nuclear facilities were to be built in Australia. This is why the attempt to establish a nuclear waste dump in Australia followed closely by the receiving of toxic waste from Europe is a huge risk to Austalia. It is all bad.
The Gen IV S-PRISM reactor which will eat nuclear waste is now one step closer.
Anti-nukes just keep repeating old fashioned, out dated critiques such as ‘we don’t know what to do with the waste’ or ‘we’ll hit peak uranium’ or my favourite, ‘They’ll never invent commercially viable Gen IV reactors!’ (As if they know the future).
But we have 300 reactor years with breeders. And the SPRISM just keeps being developed, and slowly marches forward.
http://tinyurl.com/2d4d22y
Oh, and Bilb, very soon we will not be calling it ‘nuclear waste’ but ‘once-through fuel’. GenIV is coming. Then we’ll power the world for 500 years on today’s nuclear ‘waste’ alone! By then we’ll have fusion. It’s all GOOD!
EclipseNow,
#15 ditto on BNC claims that solar energy will never eventuate.
#16 the thing that you guys fail to realise is that once everyone is generating their own energy locally from the sun, the Nuclear reactors will have no customers other than in the extreme northern climes. Nuclear fission is a redundant technology.
If you do some study on energy consumption over time you will see that as technology improves energy consumption per person reduces. I would be only too pleased if Nuclear fusion became a reality, but from what I can see even that is not as clean as was originally imagined. One of the big problems is neutron embrittlement of the containment vessel. There weren’t supposed to be any free neurtons as I recall. And they are talking of mining for fuel on the moon.
Meanwhile the sun keeps on shining. That must be so annoying for your guys.
Sometimes it is necessary to stand back and look at the big picture.
1. To contain warming to anything resembling a safe level, CO2 emissions must be cut by 80% or more by 2050.
2. Energy demand is rising and despite the best efforts at efficiency, will certainly continue to rise worldwide.
3. Taking into account world economic growth, population growth and our desire to electrify most energy use – eg transport directly or via synthetic fuels, space heating, industrial processes etc, etc – to achieve the above mentioned emissions cuts, world demand for electricity could by 2050 be five times what it is today.
Barry Brook has done some calculations for the build rates and material requirements to build the generators to achieve this capacity. All figures per day – every day between now and 2050.
Wind
1,160 GE 2.5xl wind turbines per day. Requiring 340 sq kms of land, 1,250,000 tonnes of concrete and 335,000 tonnes of steel.
— OR —
Solar CSPBased on Andasol 1/2. 45 sq kms of land, 2,215,000 tonnes of concrete and 690,000 tonnes of steel. All transported to remote desert locations – every day.
— OR —
Nuclear Based on Westinghouse AP1000 NPP. 0.04 sq kms of land, 160,000 tonnes of concrete and 10,000 tonnes of steel per day.
The comparison is strikingly lopsided in favour of nuclear. But it becomes even more lopsided when one considers the requirements of overbuild and storage to deal with the variability issues of solar and wind which would add very significantly to the above figures.
And worse still taking into account the service life of wind turbines which is around 20 years. The whole wind component would have to be rebuilt. Nuclear service life is 60 years.
There is no disputing that whatever engineering is used the task is daunting, but to do it mainly wind solar and wind looks plain impossible.
The derivation of the above figures is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/
@Rationalist
With development of all renewables and storage capacity – you can get baseload power.
Noone is claiming you can get baseload from windmills and black squares. This was a three-star fabrication 😈 😈 😈
More accurately, you can’t reliably get any load from windmills and solar. When Australia gets a big fat high over it at nighttime or when the Sun is low, wind and solar are dead. The proponents never say where the electricity is going to come from except for pie-in-the-sky storage schemes.
@quokka
Why do we get this junk?
No-one is suggesting that wind or solar will provide all future energy needs – this is a fabrication.
If you want to play with statistics, try counting the numbers of Yucca’s needed just for current waste, then for the next 10 years, then for the next 10, and so on.
Why don’t you produce the statistics on the isotopes in spent fuel rods and the necessary decay series?
You are just spreading the same boring stuff previously floated.
@Chris O’Neill
Economists have this idea about matching variable demand and supply. It’s called a price.
As I’ve pointed out more times than I care to, our current problem with night-time power is that we have too much of it. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of prices, we can persuade users to take the excess. As the share of solar and wind increases, we get to reduce the discount for night-time energy, and the waste associated with generating it. Conversely, we need to introduce seasonal pricing to flatten out the winter and summer peaks.
Any analysis starting from the assumption that existing demand patterns need to be met (this includes all pro-nuclear analyses I’ve seen) is worthless.
@BilB
“the thing that you guys fail to realise is that once everyone is generating their own energy locally from the sun”
You can believe fairy stories if you like and attempt to individualize what is a social problem, but don’t expect anybody that takes the issues of energy and climate seriously to take any notice.
@Chris O’Neill
So how do you store energy in a “pie-in-the-sky”?
Better a pie-in-the-sky than a nuclear sandcastle on a water table crossed by a fault-line.
@Chris Warren
“Why do we get this junk?”
If you think it is junk, then articulate why. I gave you the reference and I can’t see a problem with the derivation. If you want to contest the projected electricity demand then do so, but also please explain how emissions from transport, space heating, industrial processes can be curtailed without a hugely increased electricity consumption. Also explain how the 25% or so of the worlds population should have to continue without access to electricity.
“No-one is suggesting that wind or solar will provide all future energy needs – this is a fabrication.”
Ok then, what is going to provide future energy needs? Are we to just feel good about wind and solar until something else comes along?
PrQ
Is it your claim though that putting aside those whose night-time power use is discretionary, (e.g. those who leave their non-essential appliances plugged in overnight) there would be hardly any demand from dusk to dawn? If, for argument’s sake, the price of power in this time window were to double or triple, what sources of demand would disappear and how much of the total existing load would it represent? If these usages were shifted to the day, what impact would this have?
Here too I wonder about the claim. It’s possible that that if it cost more to run the A/C or the heater that some people would be more rational in their usage and simply demand lower levels of service. So if it works then per capita, each person gets less power and less comfort but pays about as much as they do now. Perhaps we will compensate them for their trouble and that will be fair enough. And yet if there are more people in a given load centre the total demand may still be the same or greater so all you would be doing would be doing would be to increase the average price of power. And there’s is still that demand rescheduled from off peak to daytime. Doesn’t that put a premium on the interrmittent generators actually being able to meet their assumed capacity?
Doesn’t it make some sense to run industrial plant at night as well as in the day? If we have some people working off-peak doesn’t that take some traffic off roads?
Just wondering.
@quokka
But you repeated exactly the junk, you pretended to query. So you are just playing games….
Where is there ANY evidence that anyone has ever argued:
This was pure pro-nuke high-level rubbish
@Fran Barlow
What an embarrassingly bad argument…..
😳 “each person gets less power and less comfort but pays about as much as they do now” 😳
People can (and do) live comfortably “off the grid”. With the right government policy – they could even pay less than they do now.
@jquiggin
I just don’t get this at all. No matter how much electricity consumption can be time shifted by demand management, there must always be a base load demand defined as the minimum demand on the grid that must be met. Perhaps several baseload figures – day/night, winter/summer, all by time of day. What those minimum demands may be is obviously open to discussion but it is quite uncertain at this time what demand management can achieve. To be overly optimistic is yet another risk and the risks are piling up at an alarming rate.
@Chris Warren
In an aging population, air conditioning in heat waves that can only be expected to worsen is not a luxury. It can be, and is, literally a matter of life and death. I find it hard to be believe that peak electricity demand during heat waves can be “demand managed” away other than by rationing or impoverishment. Despite best efforts at building design, efficiency and so on, peak summer demand will in all probability go up.
In Canberra, when outside in the shade temperatures are over 40C, without airconditioning – old heavy buildings with few windows (old Institute of Anatomy, and old Canberra High School) are remarkably cool, due only to insulation and thermal mass.
A proper building code, with subsidies, will eliminate the need for any air conditioning.
But if we allow our capitalists to construct cheap and nasty housing (to maximise profits) the other costs damage our environment.
@Chris Warren
Doubtless that is so, but can people living at 30 persons per hectare “live comfortably off the grid”.? What if we went to 80 persons per hectare (which we probably should)?
Yes indeed. No proof necessary. Say it loudly and say it often.
With the right government policy a thousand angels could dance on the head of a pin, but sadly, the right policy is hard to define.
You are preaching magic pudding Chris. While there is undoubtedly some demand that could be left unserved without seriously harming people this is peripheral to the main issue. Renewables will cost more per unit of power actually delivered. If people demand a lot less their bills may not increase very much but they will be paying more for what they get.
Depending on how much more that is, and what they have to give up, most may not in practice be worse off. Some may be better off but whether this actually contributes to a more liveable world for most humans remains unclear.
The problem I have is that demand management, which is essentially what PrQ proposes, can only take you so far. Society will continue to operate post dusk and pre-dawn. Petrol stations and refrigeration and domestic power will continue to be served. We will want to pump water and operate sewerage and water treatment plants and hospitals. We can make that more expensive but this won’t change demand.
@Fran Barlow
“Doesn’t it make some sense to run industrial plant at night as well as in the day?”
No only does it make sense, but some industrial processes MUST be run 24/7. One that comes to mind is continuous process chemical engineering. Examples of continuous processes include manufacturing stuff like ammonia, urea, ammonium nitrate etc. The energy is generally supplied by nat gas now, but we would like to stop burning stuff.
Proportion of new arguments put forward on this thread so far: 0%
Proportion of repeated and re-hashed claims: 100%
Number of changed minds: 0
Glad to see the argument is progressing.
Call me a nuclear skeptic, who is genuinely willing to be convinced. Here are my questions.
——————————————————————————————————————-
1 Can you make a commercial nuclear plant so safe that the effort required for terrorists to blow it up would exceed the cost of making a similarly destructive dirty bomb?
——————————————————————————————————————-
2 What about natural disasters?
——————————————————————————————————————–
3 The whole world can’t convert it’s electricity to once-through U235 burners. There isn’t enough recoverable uranium to last a decade. Yes, there is plenty in seawater, but that can’t be used to make positive net energy unless in a breeder. The question then, is why are there no commercially successful breeders operating without special government subsidies?
——————————————————————————————————————–
4 If commercial, gen IV breeder reactors really are just around the corner, and they can eat the radioactive waste from earlier reactor designs, then why all this fuss about Yucca mountain? Why were so many, pro-nuclear bush administration types expending huge political capital trying to bury all this useful fuel?
——————————————————————————————————————–
6 Say you made a passively safe, underground, subcritical (neutron beam supplemented), transuranics-eating, electricity-producing breeder reactor. Surely such a plant would be far more expensive than current ones? Since the cost per mega-watt hour of a current nuke plant is roughly comparable to renewables, wouldn’t these super plants be more expensive?
6 => 5
I’m going to give a bit of advice to industry groups, standards bodies and anybody else compiling technical standards for demand management. And I’m going to yell it! MAKE THE DAMNED THINGS OPEN AND FREE. Where “free” is as in beer.
I have a background in programming and data communications and tend to have a bottom up approach ie I like to see how things work, look at the use cases and in general build a mental picture of how it hangs together before buying into too many hand waving claims. In particular, for demand management I would like to know how they propose to do the signaling – over the grid? over the internet?, what is to be managed and how it is to be managed and so on, estimates of energy saving, estimates of how far the time window of demand can be shifted etc
After I did a bit of trawling, I found an industry body compiling a lot of this stuff but they wanted an arm and a leg for the technical documents – something like 500 euro per set with multiple sets. This is STUPID. To promote this stuff you want the widest possible audience with the appropriate technical skills to gain some familiarity. This is not just true for what might be called capable amateurs but also professional engineers who in their current role cannot make a business case for their employer to fork over the money.
Have they learned nothing from the internet experience where technical documents were always open and always free? That is one of the reasons why some of the IETF stuff came to dominate over perfectly viable alternates from ITU and ISO.
@Sam
1. Yes, easily. In any case the risk from dirty bombs is greatly over inflated.
2. What about natural disasters? Such as? Earthquake? The critical structures in NPPs are designed to withstand earthquake as are tall buildings in Tokyo.
3. There is enough uranium for any conceivable deployment of current PWRs well into the second half of this century at the least. A recent MIT study has reaffirmed this. That uranium is cheap is a major reason for the continuing once-through fuel cycle. The US obsession with reprocessing as a proliferation risk is another. Pyro-processing offers very little proliferation risk. The US will have to get over this, as the rest of the world is going to do it anyway. France, Japan, Sth Korea and India all have fast reactors in their long term game plan and research is ongoing. China is building two BN-800 commercial size fast reactors with Russian partnership. Not real soon, but it is coming.
4. See 3.
5. We don’t know until one is built. Designs with near atmospheric pressure cooling such as liquid metal cooled fast reactors or molten salt reactors offer potential savings in reactor vessels and containment structure. Increasingly modular design and small modular reactors should offer savings in factory as opposed to on site manufacture.
These questions are all answered better over at BraveNewClimate, and it’s not really possible to do them justice here.
@Fran Barlow
Where is this magic pudding?
Governments can easily develop policy – such as feed in tariffs, insulation rebates, etc. Are these magic puddings? Off-grid policies are no different.
Perhaps you are throwing magic pudding around because you have not considered all options properly. Anyway, capitalism is based on privatising (or ‘enclosing’) all supposed ‘magic puddings’, so you are probably thinking like a capitalist.
Anyway, except for capitalism, why shouldn’t people have their magic pudding?
@jquiggin
It’s news to me that wind produces more energy in the day than during the night. What would happen with large amounts of wind energy, of course, is that the price will vary inversely with the wind. In that case there will be a huge discount during high wind periods. You don’t get to reduce discounting of wind energy during such periods and the waste associated with generating it. Using wind fails as a strategy for avoiding this waste and it probably makes it worse.
So there will be a discount for summer time energy generated outside of the heat-waves, and the waste associated with generating it. You have not treated both sides of the issue the same way.
Quoka @ 23,
You still do not have an understanding of what is possible from solar energy, and largely, as I have said before, you have blinkered your thinking to suit your passion for a nuclear future. That is ok from as far as personal choices go, but from a commercial position this is entirely inappropriate. I don’t think that you appreciate how far peoples thinking has changed. A brief glimpse came from the changes to the NSW FiT where Woolworths declared their disappointment as they are in the process of strengthening the rooves on all of their stores in preparation for the installation of solar panels. And Woolworths know all about rollout. A national Woolworths solar rollout will be truly impressive. You grossly underestimate the impact of individual performance, and you do this possibly because this sort of change has never happened.
One of your most determined objections to solar renewables is the need for overcapacity to cover night time and seasonal fluctuations in solar energy conversion. This objection is the numbers game that you play for grid infrastructure. Such objections are hyper inflated for the grid system, but for the individual distributed system they are irrelevent as each person basses their affordability decisions on entirely different considerations. And overcapacity is no problem in the distributed system. Have you ever stopped to calculate the entire horsepower value of the national vehicle fleet? Now that is serious overcapacity, and you know what? it does not matter at all, as each person has made their own transport energy needs decisions based on personal convenience and affordability.
As we head into climate change, carbon affordability and oil availability, people will be making the changes to best energy system fit for convenience and living standard. Another thing that you arrogantly overlook is that solar energy systems have never been available before in the manner that they are today and certainly not as they will be available in the near future. This is entirely unexplored territory and there will be many preconceptions that prove to entirely baseless as we forward.
@Chris O’Neill
Chris, you were the one who mentioned night-time demand. Obviously, this is relevant to solar and not particularly to wind. Given the difficulties of running a coherent discussion, lets stick to solar for the moment, then talk about wind later.
So, to repeat, the current system generates more electricity at night than would be demanded at constant prices. Adding solar will allow a gradual move towards uniform pricing. When the share of solar becomes large, the current pattern of discounting will be reversed and daytime electricity will be cheaper.
@quokka – to state the above in your terms, the notion of baseload demand is nonsense as I’ve explained repeatedly.
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/07/22/the-myth-of-baseload-power-demand/
@BiiB
I’m hardly surprised that Woolworths are disappointed that they are to miss out on a FIT of $0.60 per kWh or whatever it is (or was). It is completely unacceptable that ordinary people are taxed to boost Woolworth’s bottom line for no more than a gesture that may “impress” some, but makes not a blind bit of difference to climate change.
Yes, overbuild of capacity does matter. It is the overall social cost that counts because resources devoted to overbuild are of necessity being diverted from other things. That’s the way it is. Furthermore many people do not have freedom to luxuriate in all this nonsense. People living in rented and high density housing for start. But most of all, people that simply cannot afford it which includes most of the population of the planet.
Then more expensive you make electricity, the more difficult it is to get substantive change.
@Tim Macknay
Not true. I used to think that pumped hydro was an economic solution to the storage problems associated with wind and solar. The arguments put up against it looked facile to me. e.g. the downstream dam caused additional environmental damage but these dams are only a tiny fraction of the size of upstream dams. It wasn’t until I started looking at the actual figures involved that are required to support variable sources (wind and solar) on a large scale that I realized that the scale and cost of the required pumped hydro is absolutely enormous. If a system was set up that acquired most of its energy from wind then the name-plate capacity of the wind generators would have to be at least comparable to the peak demand of the system, e.g. to supply 50% of the energy in a system like this, the wind generators would need name-plate capacity at least as high as the peak demand based on the very optimistic assumption that the average output of the generators was 50% of the average demand which is about 75% of peak demand, i.e. the wind generators would need to achieve an average to peak output ratio of 37.5%.
Of course, this is only going to work if the pumped hydro is capable of taking 50% of wind generation during off-peak times. This is a massive capacity the pumped hydro must have which would cost a fortune. And this is on top of the fact that only a small fraction of wind name-plate capacity can be relied on during maximum demand. All that money put into capacity of wind generators and it still has to be more or less duplicated somewhere else. No-one is going to pay for all this.
By the way, in this system, the ratio of peak to minimum demand is around 2 to 1 when the the peak to minimum price is 680 to 1 (28/1/2009). I wonder what the price ratio would be if 50% of energy had to come from wind? I wouldn’t be surprised by a million to one.
@Chris O’Neill Umm, you do realise that consumers are totally insulated from prices in this system. No wonder it works so badly.
But, as I said, I’d appreciate a response on solar and day-night pricing before we jump on to other topics.
Widespread Nuclear power at this point in time is like putting fireworks in the hands of adolescents. No nation on earth has the foresight, the wisdom, the ethics, the security, the understanding of sustainability or even the technical expertise to manage nuclear power with the responsibility required.
Nuclear power is the choice of the BAU side, the Subaru WRX choice of the 17 yr old.
Solar thermal is very efficient at capturing the Sun’s energy which can and is driving air conditioning, refrigeration and industrial processes. Anyone who has been to a Sustainable House Day would be impressed by how little energy a house can be set up to use, or save.
We can and will make huge changes to the amount of energy we use for transport. That’s AMOUNT, not TYPE of energy. We send goods all over the planet for no good reason and this has to cease. Claims that we will require more electricity generation for the electrification of transport can easily be proven wrong by choosing more intelligent trading and transport methods, mostly in the area of reduction.
That’s pretty much the response I expected from you, Quokka. For starters no satisfaction that 600 very large national energy consuming stores decide to become zero CO2 emitters. True it smacks of opportunism for a highly profitable corporation to cash in on the 60 cent heavy handout. The test will be if they go ahead with the programme regardless. But again you choose to take every advancement in renewable energy as an isolated incident to can as being insignificant. News flash! these all add up to significant difference to climate change.
Over capacity? This is going to surprise you, but our GenIIPV system uses less than half the consumed material resources of that for Nuclear Power for the equivalent delivered energy. Against that Nuclear Energy is wasteful of resources. Furthermore our system has a longer service life to nuclear power stations. Affordability? The most certain outcome is that solar energy installations will become significantly cheaper, and that nuclear energy installations will become significantly more expensive.
Electricity prices are running away all on their own, the final running electricity price is an open question at this stage. Future prices are not determined by temporary implementation incentives.
@jquiggin
Solar probably has a correlation-with-demand better than wind, which I guess has negligible correlation with demand. So in that sense, solar is better than wind, but perhaps not a lot better.
Assuming solar correlates well with demand which is simply not true. Even in summer, peak demand varies tremendously with the weather. Also, heat waves often have their maximums late in the day when the Sun is low. (Try living in Melbourne for a while. It’s not like Brisbane where the maximum in summer usually occurs by 2pm.) From April to October the peak time in this graph is around 6 pm for which solar is absolutely useless. That period also has a secondary peak at 9 am for which solar is not very useful.
Also, solar output varies a lot with time of year while energy demand per day does not. This is another reason why solar does not correlate well with demand.
I’m sure it will be cheaper in summer daytime when a heat wave is not occurring. The problem is, it would become (much) more expensive during peak demand in winter which occurs when there is no Sun or, at 9am, when there is little Sun.
You can move on to wind now, which has very little correlation, if any, with demand.
Let’s not move on just yet. We’ve agreed that solar has a weak +ve correlation with demand. That’s an advantage relative to “baseload” (more accurately, “base supply” sources) which have zero correlation with demand, since their preferred mode of operation is always-on.
So, the standard cost comparison between solar and existing sources, including the high capacity factors for baseload sources actually overstates the case.
Obviously, as you say, pricing under a system with a lot of solar will have the same characteristics as pricing now. Electricity will be cheap/dear when it is abundant/scarce relative to demand at the average price, just as it is now.
If you’re happy with that conclusion, we can move on to wind.
@jquiggin
It’ll be interesting to see the political effect of a maximum to minimum price ratio of 680 to 1 at a predictable time. Even more interesting will be the political effect of a maximum to minimum price ratio even higher than 680 to 1 at random times.