I thought I should respond to the latest suggestions from Department of Industry and others that nuclear power is an option worth considering for Australia. While I’m at it, I’ll add some updates on global developments.
* The most striking feature of recent Australian discussion, beginning with the Australian Energy Technology Assessment from 2011 is the claim that “small modular reactors” represent an appealing option for Australia. AETA listed these as being one of the cheapest options for 2020. with an estimated levelised cost of between $75 and $125/MWh. That’s both ambitious and remarkably precise for a technology that does not yet exist, even in prototype form. Leaving aside niche technologies like the Russian proposal to adapt nuclear sub reactors as floating platforms, the only serious contender in this field is the US, where the Department of Energy has provided grants for the development of two pilot plants. The target date (almost certainly over-optimistic) for these to begin operation is 2022. To get any idea of economic feasibility, it would be necessary both to undertake commercial deployment (in the US, obviously) and to to accumulate some years of operating experience. To get this done by 2030, or even 2035 would be an ambitious goal, to put it mildly. Again assuming everything goes well, Australia might be in a position to undertake deployment of SMRs by, say, 2040. But obviously, if we are going to reduce emissions on anything like the scale we need (80 per cent by 2050), we need to phase out most fossil fuel electricity well before that. Obviously, all these points apply in spades to proposals that exist only as designs, with no active proposals even for prototype development, such as the Integral Fusion Reactor. As I’ve argued before, to the extent that nuclear power makes any contribution to reducing CO2 emissions on a relevant time scale, it will have to be with current technology, most likely the AP1000.
* Talking of the AP1000, the builders four plants under construction at two sites in the US have just announced another 6 months delay, pushing the operations date out to 2017 or 2018 (release from FoE, but links to originals)
* Most interesting of all are projections released by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year for the period to 2050. Currently nuclear power accounts for around 11 per cent of global electricity. The IAEA “low’ projection has that falling to 10 per cent by 2030 and 5 per cent by 2050. The “high” projection, which includes steady growth in both North America and Western Europe as well as spectacular growth in Asia, has the share remaining roughly stable. So, even on the most optimistic projections of the world’s leading nuclear agency, nuclear power won’t play any significant role in decarbonising the electricity sector, let alone the economy as a whole.
I’ve come to the conclusion that nuclear power advocates, like climate delusionists (virtually all climate delusionists are nuclear fans, though not vice versa) are essentially immune to empirical evidence. So, I’d prefer no comments from our usual advocates (hermit, Will B etc) unless they have something genuinely new to say.
John Quiggin 
….”meters” will be a display snap on which reads the output of the existing meters but records that against real time so that the power companies can charge penalty rates for peak consumption. “Smart” meters are only in the interests of the energy retailer.
Well thought through domestic power storage is more attractive than people realise.
When mainstream politics and especially conservative Right politics chose to deny the seriousness of the climate problem (or not deny it but just carried on as if they had) they hurt the prospects for nuclear more deeply than anything a noisy bunch of fringe anti-nukers ever could. No climate problem, no need for nuclear.
In a nation that floats atop a deep layer of coal, with an electricity industry that has no desire to replace any of it with nuclear except under extreme duress, there is no genuine mainstream political backing for nuclear. Even the most influential voices that would push for it – commerce and industry – have been successfully bought off by the simple expediency of being offered (by Abbott and team) the attractive option to do little or nothing at least cost. Acting like climate change is crap is cheaper and less disruptive to their businesses than doing the minimum necessary at some cost. And if they all go along with it, then no-one can get blamed when it all leads to an intractable mess. By this simple means the strongest and most influential Right leaning proponents of nuclear have been subsumed into broader political opposition to action on climate and their calls for nuclear have been successfully diverted and and muted.
If mainstream politics really accepted the IPCC version of climate change and they really believed that nuclear was the best and only option then a noisy bunch of fringe anti-nukers would not stop them. Two decades ago, with commitment to act on climate, nothing would have, but renewables have exceeded expectations and still have ample room to keep doing so.
A 2013 update to the AETA data was recently released, as reported by RenewEconomy. The capital cost of nuclear power has been revised up significantly, such that it is estimated to have the highest levelised cost of energy among the options in 2050 (see bar chart in the article).
BilB, I think smart meters can still result in things being pretty dumb unless they involve feedback more sophisticated than a minor coronary when the monthly bill arrives. Feedback could be as simple as a phone message that lets you know when the cost of electricity goes above say $1 a kilowatt-hour. That at least would let people take action to reduce their consumption.
@Ronald Brak
This means the electricity that solar cells produce won’t be worth much and the price of electricity at other times (which has to come from other types of generation) will be much higher.
Ikonoclast – we also have stellar fuel in the form Thorium and Uranium sitting in the dirt much closer to home.
France: 80g CO2/Kwh
Australia: 850g CO2/KWh
Take your pick.
@Ronald Brak
$150 per kilowatt-hour is about what lead-acid car batteries cost so I find the above very hard to believe. Deep discharge lead-acid batteries cost more per kilowatt-hour than car batteries because they have much greater longevity for storage purposes. I’ll start believing figures like $150 per kilowatt-hour when deep discharge lead-acid batteries are always replaced by something else.
Smart meters can ,and hopefully will, do some good things apart from meaning that suppliers dont have to pay people to walk around and read millions of meters every 3 months .Now we pay them for the privilege of having a smart meter. They could put you on power rations until you pay your bill.
Some green energy puts power in the hands of people rather than further concentrating it in the hands of the big boys -that may seem a bit counter intuitive and scary to some.
For me to consider nuclear I need a good answer to the waste problem .Waste is an easy way for evil doers to render large areas of land useless for generations .I cant see how it could be kept away from people like that for 1000’s of years .
@Chris O’Neill At $150/KWh battery storage for just one MWh costs $150,000 and for one GWh it’s $150m.
12GWh (half a day) costs $18B
You can buy a lot of generating capacity for 18 billion dollars.
A lot of the storage burden can be borne by clever use of electric car batteries. Cars can be linked into the grid and supply as well as consume electricity, according to demand. I thought this was common knowledge, but perhaps not, particularly if your ideological bent insists on the assumption that V8s can only get bigger and thirstier into eternity.
Chris O’Neil, currently I pay 46 cents a kilowatt-hour all up for electricity from the grid. If the wholesale price of daytime electricity fell to an average of one cent a kilowatt-hour then I’d only be paying something like 41 and a half cents for daytime electricity. I don’t think that’ll be enough to kill the solar industry. Nor the upcoming storage industry. Something bigger would be required.
Good grief , Ronald B, 46 cents per unit???? No wonder you are so up to date on power information. Tbat is out right robbery. I take it that you have calculated in your connection cost to the small amount of power you buy to suppliment your rooftop solar.
I have nothing on the roof yet but I’m planning a 2 kw system that will also provide 3.5 kw of thermal energy, and track in 1 dimension to make this effectively a 3kw fixed system equivalent. I should be adle to get that done this year. I’m doing a bit of study on the ammonia cycle heat pumps for an air con system that can be either solar or wood powered.
When that is installed the exercise will be to reorganise the household consumption to occur during solar daytime. There are some good Aussi products to help with that. The storage will come later. People with pools might consider changing to the LG ultrasonic algae suppressor (aus invention) yo save on pumping energy and chemical costs.
In the longer plan changing to gas for cooking and with 2 kwhs of battery storage and my household will be mostly grid independent. My householb power bill is now over $2000 per year so that is a healthy budget to finance the transition to solar. I think at the 3 year mark I will have a total energy bill under $500. Thankyou greedy energy retailers.
Chrispydog you have yet to appreciate that rooftop solar and household level storage is readily affordable as it offsets the RETAIL rate of energy costs, not the production rate or the wholesale rate. So all of your arguments on costs are irrelevent to the home and small business rooftop solar power generators.
The other flaw in the arguments of people such as youself is in the assumption that on cloudy days solar generation drops to zero. It does not. It drops to a third or there abouts. Still enough to power refrigeration and charge batteries for nightime lighting and computer and entertainment powering. It does not take very much storage at all for a reliable basic 24/7 system.
If I thought humanity could use nuclear power safely and wisely I might support it as a transition fuel. I mean as a fuel that could help in phasing out fossil fuels and in transitioning us to a full renewables economy. However, it is patently obvious that humanity cannot use nuclear power safely and wisely. Firstly, the temptation to weaponise it cannot be resisted. Secondly, the temptation to cut safety corners to increase profit cannot be resisted. Finally, major accidents are so dangerous and so dirty that wide tracts of land can never be used again. Witness Chernobyl and Fukushima.
The argument that other power technologies are dirty and dangerous (which they are) is no argument to excuse nuclear power. How does this argument make sense? “We are doing several environmentally dirty and dangerous things so let us add one more to the mix.” Of course, this does not make sense.
Industrial scale solar and wind power can and should be built. The technology has arrived and is safer and clear than anything else though of course not perfect. Everything we build at industrial scale will have unavoidable effects on the environment.
Having been in Canada for some time now, I can see that Canada is as wedded to oil and dirty oil (tar sands) as much as Australia is to dirty coal. The politics of fossil fuels are such that the oligarchs of these industries are still in complete control and setting the agenda. But it is more than that. The expectations of the bulk of our populations are such that these expectations can only be met by continuing down the fossil fuel path. Even most of us who decry fossil fuel use, actually use as much or nearly as much of it as our more unaware neighbours.
So far as I can tell, the political and military authorities of the powers that matter, USA, China, Russia and a few others, know that it is too late already. They are now planning adaptation to not prevention of global warming. We have probably passed a kind of tipping point where this makes a kind a mad sense. However, I think they are all underestimating how bad it will be. The issue will not be so much adaptation as a mad scramble to merely “crash-land” rather crash catastrophically.
I knew a grad student who was working on this idea of using car battery storage for the grid. It has issues:
1. Connection to the grid is mostly during low demand period. (Nighttime charging in the garage.)
2. Drivers of electric cars have zero interest in jumping in their car to find it drained of power. Imagine getting in your gasoline powered car to find that the oil company had taken your gas? Even if they paid you something to take their power back, what you want it for is transport. Electric cars already have serious range issues.
3. Utilizing automobile batteries that way means that the utility will cycle the batteries more times than you would. Lithium battery cycles are commonly considered to be around 200 before serious degradation sets in.
4. Efficiency of distributed batter storage is significantly lower than on a utility controlled farm. Why? Because of transmission losses that are higher. Low voltage transmission has higher losses, and transmission distances are longer. Also, the utility won’t be maintaining and monitoring connections and inverter equipment, the customer will. Those also degrade.
Using electric car batteries for storage is a nice idea, but not a very useful one if you work out the details. What the grad student worked out that could work is to use hybrid vehicles and allow the utility to turn on the gas/diesel generator for the car on demand instead of using the batteries. But even then, you have to outfit parking lots with hookups into the grid, and people have to plug in their car after parking. Again, because peak demand is during the day.
I can’t find the link but I wonder if Australia’s 1.2m solar roofs (PV) and I think half a million solar water heaters will level out. The main reason being feed-in tariffs dropping to about 8c per kwh Australia wide. If this is right it means centralised power generation is here to stay. Stinkers like Hazelwood will be with us to around the year 2030. Big Coal knows it and is not too worried by whatever else is going on.
For home batteries to take off they would have to be cool temperature, compact allowing wall mounting and so people visiting in a van could speedily replace them after a few years. The battery replacement cost would have be affordable by retirees. I think the California Air Resources Board has a target of 4c per kwh for energy retrieved from commercial storage which may be unachievable by home batteries. In contrast I don’t see too much wrong with France’s model of electricity supply..it is centralised, low carbon and cheap. I repeat the words of sometime nearby who lives off-grid and is getting worn out from the constant struggle… ‘I’m getting too old for this sh*t’.
Not sure what you mean by “nuclear fans being climate delusionists”. Most nuclear fans have reluctantly accepted climate change theory, because they see in this a way to win over genuine environmentalists. There is the exception of Barry Brook, who now enjoys a sort of “hero” position within South Australia’s fervent nuclear lobby, and who probably did start out as a genuine believer in climate change theory.
@Christina MacPherson If you download the film “Pandora’s Promise” from iTunes, you will see a number of environmentalists who’ve spent years railing against nuclear power who have recently re-evaluated their positions.
It takes courage to stand up as a leading UK environmentalist and say, in public, sorry, but I’ve looked at this again, and hey, nuclear is actually the only thing that will do the heavy lifting to replace coal. This is what Mark Lynas did.
In fact the film maker, Robert Stone, started his career in film, making a documentary about the evils of nuclear testing.
Stewart Brand, who published the iconic counter culture book “The Whole Earth Catalogue” is in the film explaining why he too now understands that the risk of climate change is existential but the risks from nuclear power are very very low.
To study the facts and change your opinion is not motivated by a desire to win converts, it’s to realise the truth: renewables on their own cannot replace coal.
Think about it seriously, we either go the way France (and Onatario, btw) did, or we keep burning more and more coal.
Germany is spending billions to subsidise ‘green’ technology while its emissions keep rising…does this look healthy to you?
@chrispydog
I think the key to a lot of the arguments raised in this thread boils down to that word you’ve used:
In the peak oil context, there is an argument that the worst possible thing would be to NOT run in to limits for our never-ending growth in energy consumption.
There perhaps should be a side argument in this context about whether it is desirable to continue to grow energy consumption, regardless of the source. If we used LESS energy we would use less fossil fuels, more renewables and could avoid nuclear anyway.
I paid 46 cents a kilowatt-hour all up including supply charges over the last three months, and since the start of this year I’ve been paying almost 48 cents a kilowatt-hour. While I’m paying more than average my experience is not that unusual and I’m sure that if people here worked out what they were being charged in total for electricity it would be over 30 cents a kilowatt-hour for most. (For Australians that is.) With these sort of retail charges for electricity it’s not hard to see why rooftop solar is popular, why home energy storage will become popular, and why supply charges result in there being a real risk of people buying home energy storage and a small generator and dropping off the grid. (Note the generator would only need to be very small as it could slowly charge the home energy storage sysem and with a properly sized system would not need to be used often.)
@Christina MacPherson
I have no doubt at all that Professor Brook accepts the IPCC consensus. To the chagrin of deniers who used to post there, Barry devoted considerable space to climate science and eventually adopted a policy of not hosting commentary from those rejecting the science.
I see Professor Brook’s positions as the result of informed reflection rather than some artifice as you imply.
This is a type of home energy storage system that a lot of people may be installing soon:
http://www.sma.de/en/newsroom/current-news/news-details/news/4283-sunny-boy-smart-energy-from-sma-distinguished-with-the-intersolar-award-2013.html
It is a solar inverter with two kilowatt-hours of built in storage. It’s wall mounted just like a normal inverter and light weight as it has lithium-ion batteries. It’s design life is 10 years. These systems pay for themselves very quickly in Australia by preventing people from dipping into that expensive 30 cent grid electricity when there’s a cloud or a period of high demand during the day and by reducing the amount of grid electricity used during the evening. Many people will of course opt for more than 2 kilowatt-hours of storage.
Speaking as someone who is known in this forum and elsewhere as sympathetic to the idea of nuclear power in the energy infrastructure mix, I am rather disappointed with the contributions of some advocating nuclear power in this topic. There’s a lot of bagging of renewables, much of it IMO misleading instead of an account of the positive case for nuclear power.
It seems to me that the strongest case for nuclear power is its potential for low footprint energy production in settings much less constrained by site considerations than is the case for renewables. Per unit of sent out power, nuclear plants demand far less steel, concrete and other materials than is the case for most renewables, particularly if one includes the transmission infrastructure needed to reticulate technologies such as wind and industrial scale solar or hydro.
As PrQ points out though, nuclear power is not going to be cheap. That shouldn’t discourage those of is who put priority on the protection of ecosystem services of course. Those of us who take this view are entitled to be worried at the schedule feasibility questions of course. Even allowing that the ecological footprint of a well-designed, sited and maintained nuclear plant at improve somewhat on wind, indutrial or retail solar, or hydro, the unfortunate reality is that nuclear power cannot do the job humanity needs of it on the timeline we need most — between now and 2030. That’s not an argument for closing existing plants or abandoning actual or proposed projects, or R&D but it is an argument for a sober and pragmatic view of the contribution nuclear power can make when it is most likely to count.
It seems to me that in he medium term (the next 20 years) the key decarbonisation infrastructure is likely to be what we call renewables, not only because they are cheaper, but because they are going to start producing output far sooner. They also attract far less political dissent which is germane in any democracy. Their potential to be seen as local assets allows them to appeal even to the right. Windfarms can be community held or generate income for rural landholders.
It is often argued that the intermittency of wind entails more fossil HC as back up but as Spain showed last year wind increased at the expense of gas and coal and just tipped out nuclear power which remained stable.
The figures are in: 2013 was an annus horribilis for the nuclear power industry ? its third in a row ? and the nuclear renaissance can now be pronounced stone cold dead.
The most that could be said for the 2013 figures ? four reactors connected to grids, four permanently shut down ? is that they weren’t as bad as the previous year. Nuclear power suffered its biggest ever one-year fall in 2012 ? nuclear generation fell 7 per cent from the 2011 figure.
Nuclear generation fell in no less than 17 countries, including all of the top five nuclear-generating countries. Nuclear power accounted for 17 per cent of global electricity generation in 1993 and it has steadily declined to 10 per cent now.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/1/13/energy-markets/nuclear-renaissance-stone-cold-dead
Chrispydog, you were lying either intentionally or through negligence when you wrote, “renewables on their own cannot replace coal.” There is no reason why renewable energy cannot replace coal use. In Australia renewable energy has reduced coal use, particularly in South Australia which is the state with the most wind and solar power per capita where one of a total of two coal plants has been mothballed and the other switched to seasonal load following where it only operates for six months of the year. As the state’s renewable capacity expands the final coal plant will be shut down for good as it won’t be economical to run. Solar power will help meet peak total electricity demand and wind will lower the average wholesale cost of electricity until maintainence and fuel costs make the coal plant no longer economical to run.
As for how renewables could eliminate fossil fuel use there are a number of studies that show how that could be done, or you could sit down and think it through yourself. But I will mention that the goal is to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, not fossil fuel use. The two things are very similar but not quite the same. At about 10 cents a kilowatt-hour or less Australia can use existing fossil fuel capacity if a shortfall in renewable output requires it and then extract the CO2 released from the atmosphere. This is still cheaper than Hinkely C’s minimum price plus insurance.
oh, rah-de-rah, ontario. new brunswick, too. but, what, nuclear power in ontario as counter-foil to mixed renewables from the start, now, for this country?
well let’s all gather round & watch while the canadian tax-payer in one form or another funds the decommissioning of the pickering nuclear plant outside toronto; a plant that has in its life reached only 40% to 75% operating loads.
meanwhile gov’t policy in quebec – with an economy & climate challenges comparable to ontario – is already committed to go carbon-free by 2020, while continuing to earn bucks exporting hydro-sourced juice to new england, which, 2020, is of course about the time ontario will begin to decommission its oldest pickering nuclear plant.
we have options ontario didn’t have in the 1960s, and options – like vast tracts of land under sunlight – it will never have at the best of times. i know what i’d prefer my gov’t to back. -a.v.
@Fran Barlow I agree with almost everything you said Fran, except your last paragraph needs some expanding. Spain did indeed produce over 20% of its electricity from wind last year, and its emissions did fall, unlike Germany’s which also produced a lot from wind but saw emissions rise again.
The only difference is unlike Germany, Spain has not turned off any of its nuclear power, which is still near 20% (from memory). (And lets not talk about how bankrupt the entire Spanish generating industry is…it’s a colossal financial disaster)
If you want to decarbonise quickly, then Germany is a sobering lesson: spend hundreds of billions and do diddly squat, or spend hundreds of billions and replace coal with nuclear.
Sure, pick the ‘low fruit’ with renewables, but the cost benefits roll off pretty quickly when you start putting a lot of it on a grid due to its inherent fluctuations.
Someone above quoted a round trip efficiency for pumped storage as 13%. In fact RTE for such systems is generally 75-85%. The larger the pipes the lower the viscosity so perhaps the 13% figure was some DIY job with a really long narrow pipe run. This isn’t a fair benchmark for industrial pumped storage.
While Li-Ion has been a very important battery technology, new materials are coming on board all the time. Various types of flow battery materials are being developed which may prove as effective if not more so than Li-Ion. On the whole, the need for storage to deal with intermittency seems to me to be overstated. Plainly, in Australia, we have very significant hydro resources, and if a significant portion of our vehicle fleet was either plug in electric or hot swap battery then in practice we ought to have plenty of reserve. There is obviously plenty that could be done on the demand management side of the balance sheet. We can choose for example when water needs to be pumped to local catchments, and of course reuse of grey water in medium or higher density residential or industrial estates could cut some of this demand. And even where we are obliged to run thermal plants, biomass from ah waste or biogas are good options.
@Fran Barlow
These options are all limited. For example flow batteries were tried on King Island in Bass Strait but have been abandoned. In the case of biomass a bagasse burning cogen plant in Queensland had to buy in timber waste when the sugar cane harvest was low. Biogas is already done where practical. Most good hydro sites have been taken and mini hydro sites may have access or transmission problems; I know because I’ve been looking for them.
These things can be expanded with effort perhaps a few times over but not by orders of magnitude. We need a a replacement for coal and baseload gas that has massive 24/7 grunt, say 20 GW or more. Otherwise we’re going to wonder why we’re not making big enough gains in emissions cuts. The former climate change department said the aim was 80% emissions cuts 2000 to 2050. Pro rata that means 32% by 2020 not the pathetic 5% that we’re already congratulating ourselves over.
Chrispydog
The picture for Spanish nuclear suggests it’s a dwindling technology there.
It’s unlikely that the kinds of loans and guarantees needed for construction and the risk premium price would make new nuclear capacity a viable choice in Spain any time soon. That said, I’m not in favour of closing plants that are viable, but the track record of nuclear in Spain has been patchy and their plants are ageing.
I’d say that if you had hundreds of billions to spend on energy infrastructure here in Australia, you could completely decarbonise the stationary energy system without nuclear power — indeed, you could probably do 95% of that in practice for well south of $100bn, even allowing for transmission and storage. Most importantly, you could do that within 15-20 years (maybe faster) rather than by 2050.
Really, if our aim were to reduce global emissions, using nuclear power, it would make more sense to look at what we could do to support R&D, to foster modularity in plant components, to develop fuel fabrication, devise and implement effective hazmat storage, taking back spent fuel from our exports and so forth. Much of the opposition to nuclear power focuses on the hazmat or proliferation, and Australia is in an excellent position to make nuclear power more feasible in places emitting far more GHGs than do we. That policy could be used to allow us a quid pro quo on the mitigation policies of those jurisdictions. That IMO is a more productive discussion than endlessly saying that renewables can’t do the job.
@Fran Barlow
I am mostly in agreement with your views. You are one of the commenters I always find most worth reading. I don’t have any ideological objections to nuclear and expect that globally it will be very important, but it is far from a perfect solution and not all it’s problems are activists’ exaggeration.
Nuclear requires long term bipartisan commitment. It requires strong international regulation, oversight and policing. It will need governments either enticing or forcing energy companies to adopt it. If carbon pricing is steep enough they may choose it, except that renewables are increasingly attractive even in it’s absence. In every way the nuclear solution is one that needs State intervention as well as government financial backing – strange that the free marketeers imagine they prefer nuclear even as they refuse to contemplate the interventions required, whilst it’s those leaning green that want market based solutions.
Meanwhile, in the Australian context, nuclear has no genuine mainstream political support, so arguing about it is mostly a distraction. The only mainstream party that might put it on the table is the LNP and then only if or when the climate science deniers and obstructors – and the resources sector – lose their stranglehold on the party. That is the bit that Brooks and others don’t want to address – the unfortunate alliance of politics in favour of nuclear for Australia with those most strongly opposed to forcing the issue on the basis of climate science.
There is no doubt that Barry Brooks is sincere about tackling the climate problem but BNC nowadays avoids the issue of climate science denial and obstructionism in favour of fighting anti-nuclear activism and undermining support for renewables. Pre the last election I don’t think there was any post that criticised the LNP for their opposition to action on climate, only criticism of green preference for renewables and opposition to nuclear.
I disagree with the BNC approach which seems to see the whole issue being about trusting or not trusting nuclear, and that all would be well if only we could love nuclear as he does. Unstated is the idea that the conservative Right are climate obstructionist as a consequence of popular opposition to nuclear, which seems naive in the extreme; it’s not green pro-renewables politics that keeps nuclear down, but pro fossil fuels politics. The pro-nuclear Right routinely lie about climate to protect coal interests but not even the truth about climate is sufficient to bring them to push back against the (convenient to the fossil fuel sector) public distrust of nuclear.
I don’t think there is any better evidence of how shallow support for nuclear is within conservative Right politics than that of it’s aligned mainstream media and it’s favored commentators. They routinely push climate lies. But they don’t have more than mild objections to anti-nuclear stories. If that isn’t clear sign that the rich end of town doesn’t want to act on climate simultaneously with not wanting nuclear, i don’t know what is.
Hermit
There’s been some interesting work done using organic compounds such as quinones by Harvard. If these came to commercial fruition over the next decade, they could be a far more sustainable option.
Assuming it’s waste I’m not sure what your objection is. If such plants are purely for backup their footprint would be marginal.
So you say, and perhaps you’re right. We could keep doing it, or expand upon it using waste gas from landfill and sewage treatment. Again, it depends on how much ‘goldplating’ we want for the system.
Again, if one sees energy access as a basic good, then we can choose between the environment or our capex. I’ve no doubt that their are places at the seaboard where we could build facilities capable of storing useful tranches of the energy output of the grid.
I’m not sure that’s so. Maybe we’d want it for about 400 hours per year. It might make more sense to supply that 5% largely from biomass plants or vehicle to grid storage and scale the other storage with that in mind.
I’m amazed Chrispydog, how you represent Germany’s renewables generation as some kind of failure because their overall emissions still rose. Imagine how their emissions would have been without the CO2 emissions savings from the renewables.
No one knows better than the Germans that there is a long way to go.
Interestingly, Germany’s wind turbines pushed the renewables share of energy output past there 2020 target of 35% back in December.
@Fran Barlow
Fran you seem to have gotten religion all of a sudden. Read what others are saying
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21594336-germanys-new-super-minister-energy-and-economy-has-his-work-cut-out-sunny-windy-costly
That’s right – quinones could change things. Very cheap. Let’s hope there aren’t critical issues that show up in terms of scaling up from the lab, durability or reliability. Let’s hope.
13% efficiency is what I remember from the article I read over 20 decades ago. I find efficiencies of 75%-80% hard to believe without a cite.
@Brian
Here’s a good, fairly recent summary by Ben Rose in RenewEconomy.
@Brian
For a different take on pumped hydro storage, try this from a Professor Heindl in Germany.
Wow … You were reading up on pumped storage RTEs before 14 CE! 😉
Actually the figures are pretty easy to find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Oops you’re only 200 years old … So you were reading up on it around the Congress of Vienna
@Ronald Brak
I have to stop maintaining my rage against this blog (for sexism) for a moment to confess I’ve been lurking and seen this post of yours – wow that Sunny Boy thing sounds brilliant! Have you any idea if/when those things will be in commercial production and how much they will cost? I imagine something like this could supply most of my energy needs even in winter.
A person (I think a pro-nuke type) further up the thread raised some issues about available lithium not being enough for these types of batteries to be made widely available – do you know if there is anything in that?
Val, the Sunny Boy home energy storage inverter went on sale in Germany in the last quarter of last year. I don’t know if it’s available in Australia yet. But you can get something similar from a solar installer who does off grid installations, but be warned that home battery systems for off grid use still tend to be pricey in Australia so you might need to shop around. You might also find it worthwhile to cheap with people who install uninteruptable power supplies to see what they can currently do.
As for how much the Sunny Boy system or something like will cost when it becomes available in Australia, the answer probably is expensive at first, but dropping rapidly in price. If the battery pack is made from a pile of small commercial lithium batteries that are currently in mass production, then the price for the batteries should be under $150 a kilowatt-hour but there will be an expense involved in wiring them up and getting them to work together as a unit. But I would expect the sale price to be $500 a kilowatt-hour or more when introduced since that competes well with whats available and still gives a reasonable return on the investment. And then a combination of competition and heading off the competition will cause prices to rapidly drop over the next few years.
As for whether or not there is enough lithium in the world, well, I believe I worked out that there is about enough lithium in current known reserves for about a billion or so electric cars so there’s certainly no shortage now. And if we did start using large amounts of lithium more desposits would be found. And if we need to, lithium can be extracted from seawater and this has already been done commercially. And finally there’s the fact that home and business energy storage doesn’t need to be lithium based. It’s just that lithium batteries are light and so a lot of effort has been put into improving them so they can be used in electric cars and home energy storage is piggy backing on this. There are plenty of different chemistries that can be used for home storage and at some point I’m sure we’ll develop something that’s better than lithium batteries for electric cars anyway.
@Fran Barlow
Oh, I am very old indeed. Pardon my Freudian slip.
I am older actually. My mother, the gazelle, and my father, the wild donkey, engendered me, four wild asses raised me on their milk. 😉
Thank you. Delightful to be corrected!
Google, “Technical Analysis of PS and Integration with Wind Power in the Pacific Northwest” for a better citation. That cite gives cycle efficiencies above 80%. (Sorry, I didn’t trust Wikipedia on its face.) I can only imagine the article I read 2000 years ago had a typographical error. 😉
@Val – Current battery technology is problematic at scale. With pumped storage having cycle efficiencies above 80%, it will be difficult for any battery technology to compete with it on life-cycle cost. But, since I have been corrected, this puts a significantly different spin on potential wind, solar and nuclear energy storage.
Battery systems can run at 90%, but the inverters don’t. They operate at 50%-80%. (
Solar-facts.com How Much of your DC Power Comes Out as AC Power) (I’m not going to dig for a stronger cite because this agrees with every other source I have read.) Do the math on that: 0.8 x 0.9 x 0.8 = 57.6% system cycle efficiency. It is common for subsystems to be presented standalone.
Now, a higher efficiency can be had by improving the conversion efficiency to inverters. For instance, superconducting components should potentially raise the optimum efficiency of inverters to 98%+. But, the cost of replacing battery systems on a regular basis would still be prohibitive i think. Perhaps quinones will make it possible to build batteries with cheap enough materials.
Again, Fran, thank you. I appreciate it very much!
@Ronald Brak
Thanks Roland most interesting. Since I have just installed a solar system, I am not really in the market for such a system, but as I am also one of those people whose electricity usage is normally very low, I do feel somewhat frustrated that I am paying so much for the service charges associated with being on the grid (even though they will be largely offset by the feed in tarrif for at least part of the year). It is also annoying that low users like me are effectively subsidising high users through the service charges and I think this may turn into a political issue eventually.
Anyway relating this back to the subject of the post, this supports my growing belief that the most important factor in achieving 100% renewables is this question of storage, and in turn, that that issue is being rapidly addressed through research and development. Therefore I tend to feel that the nuclear advocates are at best misguided, and at worst deliberately trying to derail the debate and block the path to a low emissions future.
@Brian
Hi Brian thank you – however the question also relates to whether you want to be on or off the grid. I think many of us now would like to be off the grid, and for someone like me, living in an inner urban apartment, I don’t see pumped storage as being a very relevant off the grid solution (though feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this 🙂 ).
I’m interested in community solutions also (a la Hepburn Wind and the emerging community solar projects I’ve been writing about on my own blog), not just individual household solutions, but I am really over corporate models of energy provision. The old state systems had their good and bad points, but since our Lib/Lab governments have generally gone over to the corporatised, neo-liberal models of energy provision, being off the grid looks very appealing.
@Fran Barlow That new battery using quinone is very much at the lab stage and they have yet to make quinone both + and – .
Burning bio material is fraught with problems, at one stage in NSW they were burning wood chip to meet the renewable target but the losses incurred in burning wet or damp product made it a no goer.
@Val
I don’t say that the nuclear advocates as a group have malign intent or are foolish. Some in that camp are playing a duplicitous game but people such as chrispydog and quokka above are as far as I can tell, speaking out of a genuine desire to see better environmental policy. They are not right of centre folk or deniers of climate science.
I think they misapprehend the constraints on the implementation of NP in non-NP states and misidentify renewables as a competitor, when their principal enemy is the fossil HC movement which is using NP as a wedge against change, precisely because they grasp how destructive the debate can be to progress.
@rog
I wasn’t suggesting it would be available tomorrow but if I arrives in time to cover the last 5%, that will do.