Noah Smith’s classic definition of “derp” as “the constant repetition of strong priors” was developed with particular reference to solar energy, to refer to people who’ve taken the view, at some point in the past, that solar energy can’t work, and who are neither willing to change their minds, whatever the evidence, nor to state their views once and for all and remain silent thereafter.
The classic illustration of this would have to be Ted Trainer of the University of New South Wales. For the past 20 years, he’s been writing and rewriting the same paper, showing that renewables can’t possibly sustain a consumer society. Here’s a version from 1995, and from 2003, and here’s the latest.
What’s striking is that, while the numbers change dramatically, the conclusions don’t. The 1995 report says, in essence, that solar PV is totally unaffordable for all practical purposes. [1] So, our only hope is to embrace a massively simpler lifestyle,
The most recent version, written at a time when cheap solar power is a reality, has much less scary numbers. He estimates that the capital investment required for decarbonization of the economy would amount to 11 per cent of GDP. That’s still an over-estimate but it’s in the right ballpark. Trainer rightly observes that this number far exceeds current investment levels and is unlikely to be attained. But, unlikely as it may be, it would certainly be chosen if people accepted Turner’s conclusion that the only alternative was to live in huts with peat roofs.
And, over time, the insistence on negativity about renewables has led Trainer to promote views that are the opposite of his original concerns about simplicity For quite a few years, his work was published primarily at pro-nuclear site, Brave New Climate[2].
If Ted Trainer actually wants to help save the planet it’s time for him to abandon the campaign against renewables and urge society to accept the relative modest reduction in the rate of growth of income needed to decarbonize energy supply. Once the prospect of massive extinction has been staved off, we will have plenty of tiem to think about a simpler lifestyle.
fn1. As an illustration, the cost of a system to charge an electric car is estimated at $350 000, an estimate that is supposed to take account of optimistic projections of efficiency gains. These systems haven’t quite arrived yet (as usual, there are a bunch of technical difficulties to be overcome) but it appears they will soon be on the market for less than $10000. These systems have an obvious potential to resolve the problem of mismatch between peak PV availability at midday and peak demand in the evening, and may therefore reduce the conflict associated with the idea of a “utility death spiral”/
fn2. BNC ran into the same problem. In his eagerness to push the idea that nuclear power is the only way to save the planet from global warming, Barry Brook ran slabs of anti-renewable nonsense from climate delusionists such as Peter Lang.
John Quiggin 
Having a DC plug on the inverter of one’s rootop solar system would be a more efficient way to charge an electric car than using AC power. However, depending on how much these systems cost at first the cheapest option, particularly in places like Australia that have plenty of sunshine and plenty of roofspace, might be to just use a standard inverter but install a slightly larger system than one would otherwise to make up for the small efficiency loss. Of course, once solar inverters with DC plugs for charging cars are produced in volume their price will come down.
How much solar would be required to produce electricity equal to what an electric car would consume? Well, the average car in Australia is only driven about 40 kilometers a day and electric cars generally get over 5 km range to a kilowatt-hour, so that means 2 kilowatts of solar PV should be plenty anywhere in Australia and that includes Hobart. Bought as part of a larger home system, the average installed cost of 2 killowatts right now is about $3,500. And that will take car of your car fuel costs for decades. No need to go searching the wastelands for petrol so you’ll be able to throw your leather Mad Max costume in the bin.
I don’t know about this solar electric car-charging proposal, John.
Your reference gives a tentative price of “less than $10,000” for 2.5 kilowatts of garage-top solar power. Let’s say it’s $9000; that’s $3600 per kw. With the cited capacity factor of 13.7 percent, that works out to an average capital cost of $26,277 per kilowatt. That’s three times more expensive than the per-kw average capital cost of the Hinkley C nuclear plant, five times more than V. C. Summer and 10 times more than South Korean nuclear plants. So it seems like nuclear would be a much cheaper source of low-carbon power for electric cars than the proposal you spotlighted.
The article doesn’t say whether that price includes stationary batteries so you can charge the car at night, when it’s actually in the garage. Without that storage, the garage charging station can’t be used very often because cars usually go abroad in daytime. But charging via stationary batteries entails conversion losses, so the effective capacity factor would be even lower and the costs higher than I calculated above.
The Honda Smart Home demonstration project the article mentions has a much larger 9.5 kw solar array with a 10 kwh lithium-ion battery. I can’t find any price data on it, but this site estimates the solar rig at about $40,000 installed without the battery, so even pricier than above. (httpcolon//www.torquenews.com/1574/honda-smart-house-will-charge-your-2015-fit-ev-solar-power) Note that a 10 kwh battery could charge a Chevy Volt to run all of 30 miles, so on Day 2 of cloud cover it’s back to gasoline.
Which last means that all-electric transport powered by intrinsically unreliable solar charging would impose large backup costs on the grid as a whole. During periods of extended cloud cover, especially in the winter, the grid must have lots of dispatchable reserve capacity on hand to charge transport because solar charging stations are moribund. The costs of those dispatchable generators are large: a good rule of thumb is that there must be enough dispatchable capacity to run the grid in the absence of any intermittent power—so an entire second grid of dispatchable generators for times when wind and solar output collapses almost entirely for days on end, as often happens in Germany. That adds a lot to the grid’s capital and overhead costs. And it means that there will be no “utility death spiral”: the utilities’ dispatchable generators will always be needed—and subsidized—even at very high penetrations of intermittent power.
Given all this, are you sure solar electricity is a good choice for powering transportation?
You’re right that a retreat to energy starvation is impossible (thank God). But we have to be realistic about the limitations of intermittent energy, and understand that it can’t shoulder much of the burden of powering a modern society.
@willboisvert
The average across all six city capitals for 10kw solar was $8478 in March. The high was Hobart, our southern-most state, the state of which, Tasmania, exports hydro and has no coal fired at all.
There is also ample room on the rooves and covered walkways of our stations to use carparks to recharge vehicles throughout the day and also to use these to load balance the grid and maintain LOLP standards, obviating much if the need for system redundancy sometimes asserted against penetration of intermittents. Similarly, it would be possible for other existing commercial carparks — say in shopping centres or workplaces to offer charging at a cost in a context where a user could elect to participate in load balancing for a commission on power traded. Naturally this would mostly be done while vehicles were idle during typical working hours. Some vehicles, in addition, (e.g. Some of the iMievs) carry solar panels on their rooves. I imagine some flat rooved trucks could use these — especially if the weight of the panels continues to fall per nameplate capacity.
I see great scope for V2G
Will, I’ll start with the two most obvious points, and leave the rest to others.
1. Your calculations compare capital costs, but ignore fuel, operation cost, transmission, distribution and retail (ie the great majority of the final cost of electricity).
2. Most cars are in garages, or open air car parks in the middle of the day. For people who take public transport to work and leave the car at home (or who don’t go to work), a home system makes sense. For those who drive to work, it would make sense to charge the car there. Quibbling about the location makes you look silly.
And to avoid making the point over and over again, let’s stipulate that South Korea is doing OK with nuclear.
All this talk of the cheapness and convenience of PV charged electric cars may be lost on some. That includes renters, apartment dwellers, people working less than 20 hours a week, people concerned about their job security, people with long commutes from the urban fringe and people whose employer won’t supply power cables to the car park. Thus it would help to have a detached house and garage or car port, to have a well paid secure job and to live within 40 km or so from work and services. Maybe this explains the lack of EVs on the road. People need to get rich quickly and mover closer in.
I tend to argue reductio ad absurdum in such matters. By definition, all non-renewable energy sources (typically fossil fuels and fuels for fission) will run out. By extension, if global or local civilization is to survive (at some level) then it must survive using renewable energy sources. Therefore we have no alternative but to attempt the renewable energy route. The argument that we can put off indefinitely the attempt at a renewable energy transition is refuted by the existence of near limits.
These near limits include but are not limited to the following issues. AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is already underway and the IPCC scenarios indicate that reduction in fossil fuel use needs to commence now (if not sooner!). Peak conventional oil production has already occurred (2005) thus validating peak resource theory for all non-renewable energy sources. The addition of non-conventional hydrocarbons, while moving forward the peak of all hydrocarbons, does not invalidate peak theory. This is just as switching to a reserve fuel tank does invalidate the fact that all fuel tanks run out. There is ample evidence that the gas and unconventional oil “renaissance” will be relatively short-lived. It will very soon become unsustainably expensive in terms of recovery costs and environmental damage including climate damage.
Nuclear fission also suffers from the problem of peak resources. The uranium production peak has already occurred, in about 1980. There is evidence that this production peak was the result of a combination of impending physical limits, geopolitics and economics. A second production peak seems achievable and likely at about 2020 though there is great doubt that it can rise to equal or exceed the 1980 peak. In the intervening years the supply deficit was met by decommisioning and fissioning fissile weapons material. One should concede that is a good service the nuclear power industry has helped to provide.
We must get back to the main point. Eventually, all non-renewable resources run out and we must convert to renewable sources. This “eventually” is shown by climate data, peak oil, peak uranium and so on to be “now”. The eventual is NOW. Insofar as we continue to use fossil fuels and fission fuels we must begin to regard them as transition fuels. Transition fuels should not be squandered on profligate consumption (excess motoring or consumerism for example) but utilised to fund the transition financially and energetically.
Ted Trainer’s question is “Can renewable energy sustain consumer society?” If the question is “Can renewable energy (and the biosphere) sustain a consumer society as wasteful and environmentally damaging as our current society?” then I am certain the answer is a resounding NO! If we are asking whether renewable energy can sustain some reasonable level of global, regional and local civilization with retention of our essential scientific, technical and knowledge gains then we must hope and act on the assumption that it can.
Ultimately it is physical reality, not ideology, that presents us with these genuine TINA moments in human history. When it comes to utilising renewable energy There Is No Alternative.
Footnote On the Electric Car Issue.
I illustrated in another post that a 10 kW solar PV system with associated evacuated tube solar hot water system would provide all the power needed by a home of 4 to 6 persons and all the power needed to re-charge a Nissan Leaf. This would hold certianly true in a good sunshine state like Queensland or California.
This is very easily demonstrated. The Nissan Leaf has a 24 kW·h lithium ion battery with a range (2011/12 models of 117 km (73 mi) EPA. A round 5 kW of the 10 kW nameplate system could be applied to charging the Nissan Leaf and would charge in it 5 hours. This obviously is on a sunny day with the car home in the garage.
To support this, one would want the capacity (and deal) to feed a grid and get power back at about parity to charge the car at night. Or one could have a house battery pack too of maybe 50 kW-h capacity or one could purchase solar power at one’s parking station while at work. There is no reason train station car parks etc. cannot have entirely roofed parking with solar panels and charging points for each parking spot.
@Hermit
Cripes Hermit, just about every bogan in our society can afford a petrol car. Why won’t every bogan be able to afford an electric car? Costs are to do with volume (among other things). The Nissan Leaf now costs about $50,000. Looking at its size and what’s in it, I would be surprised if it should cost more than $20,000 brand new (in today’s dollars) when made in volume.
Of course, the above assumes costs won’t rise due to material and energy shortages. However, if costs do rise due to material and energy shortages then bogan-mobiles (petrol cars) will rise just as much. Society will face the same private transport crisis either way in that case. Bogan-mobiles (petrol cars) are dirty, inefficient, complicated and require more servicing and maintenance. Electric cars are clean, elegant, cheap and simple by comparison.
The price of a 10kW solar PV system is around $21,000 – about a quarter of what it was in 2008. As I wrote in a post above, such a system will run your home and recharge your Nissan Leaf. You could also recharge at the parking station, shopping centre etc. You might not be aware but in Canada some car parks are wired with a plug outlet for each vehicle. This is currently to run engine block warmers in their -20C to -40C winters. So wiring carparks is no big deal.
Intermittency issues can be dealt with, with energy storage and even with power generation methods (solar convection towers) which produce power 24/7. The bottom line is we either make renewables work or we collapse. Or do you deny that fission fuel reserves are finite on earth?
@ikonoclast
About 10 weeks ago I went to my local Nissan dealer and was advised $43k on road (and that was inclusive of the now dropped tariff).
Doubtless if charging stations were made nearly ubiquitous (i.e. most commercial carparks, stations, shopping centres, high density housing) the demand for PEVs would be huge. As turnover of the fleet is about 80% in seven years, if these stations were rolled out in 2 years in the major urban centres, we could have an 80% EV car fleet in the major cities by 2023.
Icon : $50,000 Plus $21,000 equals $71,000 for a range of 170kms and recharge of 6-8 hrs
People these days want big stinking SUV’s . Even in trendy places like Fitzroy.
The solar powered leaf would have stayed forlornly in the garage these last four days in Melbourne!
Fran:
The future of Australia’s first large-scale electric car experiment is hanging by a thread following the departure of global Better Place CEO and former Australian chief Evan Thornley.
Thornley, the former Labor upper house MP who famously turned down the offer of a ministry in the Brumby government to pursue his electric dreams, departed the firm in mid-January after strategic differences emerged with the board of the Israel-based charging and battery swapping operation.
Your dream has turned into Evan Thorley’s worst nightmare
@chrisl
Within a few years, the combined price – of a Nissan Leaf size electric car and a solar PV system sufficient to power house and car – will likely come down to about $40,000. That will be feasible for most families if our overall economy continues to work in much the same way as presently.
People might want big stinking SUVs but there is often a difference between what people want and what they can have. People may will indeed have to moderate their wants and accept more modest but still liveable, enjoyable, safe and healthy lifestyles.
The Leaf would not have stood forlornly in the garage these last four days in Melbourne. It could have been re-charged with wind-generated electricity from South Australia.
I notice that anti-renewables people particularly focus on and obsess about intermittancy as if it is an insuperable problem. I guess it is their final fall-back position. As other issues like basic feasibility and cost have been addressed it becomes necessary to fall back and hold on to this last objection like grim death. This necessitates ignoring all further evidence of progress. Intermittancy is a difficulty for sure but it is not insuperable. Now, I could enumerate again the various measures that can be and are being used to address to the intemittancy issue but I wonder if anti-renewables people even listen to evidence. State a willingness to listen to evidence and I will go through this again.
I also have had concerns about the long term viability of renewable energy. However my concerns have tended to revolve around issues of EROEI (energy return on energy invested) and the feasibility of obtaining all the materials for a renewable energy build-out (scalability). My lay investigations have shown to me that both problems appear feasibly solvable but there are ultimate limits to the solution. These limits will eventually determine sustainable world population, technology levels and living standards but there is a considerable degree of uncertainty about where these limits are.
But if you reject renewables what is your alternative plan? Non-renewables (fossils and fissiles) will run out. What then? Show me the plan. Or is this just about negative gainsaying without having an alternative plan? I’ve been there myself (negative gainsaying) and it does have some devil’s advocate value. It forces the opposition to think harder and overtly develop all their arguments and solutions. But it becomes a mental ditch ( a “derp trap”) if you adopt an ossified position where you ignore or reject all new empirical evidence which might required a personal reassessment.
Older non-professionals (like me) or older professionals commenting in fields outside their own expertise often lag in knowledge in these times of fast developments. They keep repeating what was true 20 years ago, 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, oblivious of rapid new developments. Challenge your assumptions or at least put them aside and re-research the field. You might find your knowledge and assumptions are out of date.
I’m sure Trainer means well, but people who subscribe to meta-narratives such as “in the richest countries we are experiencing accelerating social breakdown and a falling quality of life. This is the result of the triumph of neo-liberalism which has made the maximisation of monetary wealth and business turnover within the market the supreme social goal” are promoting faith-based narratives. One might just as easily argue, and to just as little constructive purpose, that “in the richest countries we are experiencing accelerating social breakdown and a falling quality of life. This is the result of people turning away from Jesus and making personal self-gratification the supreme social goal.” Indeed of course lots of people do argue that.
In other words reduce complex problems to simplistic terms and preach Utopian solutions without any realistic plan for achieving them. It’s fine in the pulpit, or on blogs, if it makes them happy; but it has no place in serious scholarship. Still, it is the School of Arts I guess …
GM is taking a punt on natural gas cars with the 2015 Chevrolet Impala gasoline/CNG bifuel car. For large bottomed people it has all the room you want with 800 km driving range after (quickly) filling both tanks. Should this approach take off it will turn the tables on LNG exporters since at petrol equivalent prices domestic demand will outbid export. Petrol at say $1.55 for 35 MJ thermal is equivalent to about $44 per GJ. Admittedly a big chunk of the petrol price is excise. We are worried about the Japanese paying $19 for LNG when our big gas users don’t want to pay much more than $5 for piped gas. Gas powered cars will suck back that export market.
I take the point that conventional, fracked and coal seam gas will effectively run out in a couple of decades and using it as a transport fuel will accelerate that process. If people think the transport energy problem is easy to solve we should all have some of what they’re having.
@chrisl
I’m not sure what you expected from Better Place, but to me it was always obvious that it was a high-risk venture with a small chance of success. It was trying to expand everywhere before it had proven that the core concept worked.
I think the introduction of EVs into Australia, like elsewhere, will be incremental. The market here is particularly difficult compared with places like Europe because we have low density settlements, relatively low fuel prices, and no government incentives for EVs. EVs will need to become a lot cheaper before they get a foothold in this country. However, the subsidies driving sales in Europe and Japan may help them do that.
One thing about Australia is that once we get electric cars designed for European/Australian current we will easily be able to charge any electric car with a Leaf sized battery overnight from a normal power point. There’s no need to go through the expense of installing special charging points. If you charge your car for eight hours at work it would give the typical electric car over 80 kilometers of range, which is a lot more than most people’s one way commute. Fast chargers would still exist but most people would almost never use them. And if you had 500 watts of solar cells on your car you could get maybe 10 kilometers of range if you parked it in the sun on a fine day while at work. Actually it’s possible to make a town car that gets all or most of its electricity from solar cells on the car itself. It would be small and light with a lot of PV. The onboard battery storage would be small to keep both weight and cost down. It certainly wouldn’t meet everyone’s needs but it would do for the vast bulk of my driving and I would rarely need to plug it in. Vehicles like this may not catch on in a rich country like Australia, but they might be a hit in places like India and Africa where it’s looking like the grid may never reach a lot of people.
With regards to Better Place it seemed clear to me that to succeed they had to offer a price that would make it attractive for taxis to use it. They failed to do this, and so goodbye Better Place. But there are plenty of electric taxis being trialed around the world including in China and Europe and once it’s clear that electric taxis are the most competitive option in Australia we will see a fairly quick change over to them, which will cause a reasonably rapid and significant reduction in Australia’s LPG and petrol use. Electric buses are already clearly superior to diesel and with natural gas prices increasing electric buses are probably the best option. Of course bus companies are likely to want to trial them first to see how well they operate under Australian conditions and Australia’s current high electricity prices don’t help, but it may not be long before almost every new bus is electric. Adelaide’s only electric bus, the Tindo, built in the industrial powerhouse of New Zealand, is still going strong.
Feel better now, Ken?
“Barry Brook ran slabs of anti-renewable nonsense from climate delusionists such as Peter Lang.”
Barry Brook joined the Breakthrough Institute who also run slabs of anti-renewable nonsense.
@Hermit
“If people think the transport energy problem is easy to solve we should all have some of what they’re having.” – Hermit.
I don’t think it is easy to solve. Nor do I think it is impossible to solve. Your approach seems to be that if something isn’t easy to solve at one stroke with one approach then it is unsolvable. Such logic is fallacious. There will not be one silver bullet to the transport issue. There will have to be a multi-pronged approach as follows (from small to large journeys).
(1) People will return in significant numbers to walking and cycling for short journeys.
(2) Mass transit solutions being far more energy efficient will have to become more common.
(3) Urban sprawl, which entails long journeys to shops and work, will need to be progressively reversed.
(4) More interstate goods movement will need to proceed by rail and ship again rather than by much less efficient road transport.
(5) Cars will need to become smaller again and quite possibly less numerous as journeys will be completed by other methods.
(6) Internet functionality, 3D printing etc. will reduce the need for some proportion of personal and freight journeys.
(7) Internet, SatNav and advanced shortest feasible delivery route computation (algorithms) for multiple deliveries will increase delivery efficiency.
All of these advances and adaptations and more will play a role in solving the transport problem at a practical, functional level. To sum up your standard of argument, it always goes as follows with one spurious “point” that is meant to constitute an insurmountable objection to all possible solutions:
“People with big fat asses will always want big fat SUVs therefore no alternative or set of alternatives for transport will ever work.”
I actually wonder if you are serious in advancing such arguments or if you are just trolling.
@ Fran Barlow,
“The average across all six city capitals for 10kw solar was $8478 in March. The high was Hobart, our southern-most state, the state of which, Tasmania, exports hydro and has no coal fired at all.”
Fran, I assume you got that number from solarchoice.net.au, but I’m afraid you misread the March solar price table; $8478 is the average cost of a 5 kw rig, not a 10 kw rig. The 10 kw price is AU$16,514, but that’s after the federal STC incentive to the vendor, which lowers the price by 65 cents per watt, so the unsubsidized price of a 10 kw system would be $23,014.
Assuming a capacity factor of 20 percent for Australian rooftop, that would be an average capital cost of AU$11,507 per kw, or US$10,816 per average kw, so still about 22 percent more than Hinkley C’s average kw capital cost. But with solar’s somewhat lower O and M costs it might be neck and neck with Hinkley C (not counting the latter’s greater longevity). But it looks like Australian solar is still substantially more expensive than North Carolina’s VC Summer nukes and drastically more expensive than South Korean nuclear.
@ John Quiggin,
“1. Your calculations compare capital costs, but ignore fuel, operation cost, transmission, distribution and retail (ie the great majority of the final cost of electricity).”
Good point, so let’s go through those.
LCOE—total of capital costs, fuel, O and M, grid hookup: LCOE is 77 percent capital cost for nuclear and 90 percent capital cost for solar, according to the US EIA, which reckons non-capital costs as 2.5 cents per kwh for nuclear and 1.3 cents per kwh for solar. So solar has a 1.2 cent / kwh advantage on non-capital costs, but that hardly makes up for its 3 to 10-fold higher capital costs. Britain’s DECC reckons solar’s non-capital costs to be about the same as nuclear’s, GBP 24/MWh to 26/MWh. So throwing in generator operating costs hardly changes the comparison based on capital costs alone.
Then there’s transmission, distribution and retail costs—the “grid overhead”. In the US those costs are about 7-8 cents per kilowatt hour, out of a total of about 11-12 cents per kwh on average. If one were completely off the grid on solar panels, then yes one could justifiably subtract those costs on the solar side of the ledger. But virtually no one goes completely off the grid, because there are enormous extra expenses—huge battery stacks, inefficient and expensive small generators and fuel for the inevitable cloudy stretches when the batteries run out—that far outweigh the grid overhead. In the real world, even houses with extensive solar systems remain dependent on the grid, so the grid overhead cannot be subtracted from the costs of solar power. And since higher penetrations of intermittent wind and solar actually require an expanded grid, as we see now in Germany, solar should be assessed higher grid overhead costs than dispatchable generation like nuclear.
–“ For people who take public transport to work and leave the car at home (or who don’t go to work), a home system makes sense. For those who drive to work, it would make sense to charge the car there. Quibbling about the location makes you look silly.”
Really we should not think in terms of linking point of generation to point of use—that is, to imagine charging cars where the solar panels are (which is also untenable in the case of multi-story public parking garages). The genius of the grid is to separate those points. So, we put the panels wherever solar exposure and useless surface make them propitious, and string wires and outlets wherever people like to park. To link solar panel to charging station by proximity is to economize on cheap transmission infrastructure while proliferating expensive generation infrastructure. The whole notion of owning solar panels for the specific charging of ones own car is, as you say, a red herring.
–Should be South Carolina’s VC Summer nukes!
Despite having small behinds by developed country standards, Japan has built and sold electric SUVs. They were not made for export to America, but rather for Japanese people who have to deal with large amounts of snow out in the sticks. Smaller lighter four wheel drive cars can also deal with lots of snow, but some Japanese people like big SUVs. Because of the heavy amounts of snow in some parts of the country it may be Japan that leads the way in installing an electric motor in each wheel for superior traction and control instead of one central electric motor as in current models. And while other countries also have plenty of snow, Japan is leading in electric car manufacture.
@ Ronald B I have a couple of problems with Adelaide’s Tindo bus. If it was T-boned in an accident the Zebra batteries could have meltdown and fire. Almost as if it was nukular except it’s in the middle of the city. Secondly the batteries have to be kept over 200C either in a state of charge or discharge. The bus depot has PV panels but in a rainy week can we be sure no fossil electricity went into the charging?
@ Ikon in my case I live on a gravel road 37 km from a supermarket. None of your transport options appeal.
Fair comment about looking for exceptions to any rule but I accept that certain ideas may work on a significant scale even if if they can’t achieve 100%. That’s a lot different from extrapolating tiny niches like off-grid solar to major solutions. In the case of a bus meltdown I think we can accept some risk.
Hermit, I think the fact that all our other buses are powered by either explosive liquid or explosive gas just might result in them being an even greater safety hazard than the Tindo electric bus in the event of a serious accident.
And Hermit, who cares if some coal power was used to charge the Tindo electric bus? I mean really, can you name one person who gives a hen’s tooth if the electric bus was charged with some electricity generated from coal? Can you give me the name of one person, apart from perhaps yourself? I think you’ll find that most people who are concerned about the environment want to reduce the amount of electricity we generate from coal but are not particularly interested in whether or not a particular joule of work in a particular location can or cannot be ascribed to the actions of electrons being wiggled back and forth in a wire by energy released from the coal that we do burn to generate electricity. Let me explain how it works: Reducing the amount of electricity generated from coal reduces the amount of electricity generated by coal. Reducing the amount of electricity generated from coal by 1% reduces the amount of electricity generated from coal by 1%. Reducing the amount of electricity generated from coal by 99% reduces the amount of electricity generated from coal by 99%. If 1% of electricity is generated from coal, it means that the other 99% of electricity is being generated by methods other than coal. Each time we increase the percentage of electricity that is being generated by means other than coal, we reduce the percentage of electricity that is generated from coal. Electricity generated from coal has no zombie characteristics. It does not convert electricity from other sources into coal electricity if it comes in contact with it. Now I realise that the mathematics behind this explanation are rather complex, but if you have trouble following, don’t worry, just let me know and I’ll explain it more simply using puppets.
@Will Boisvert
Apologies for misreading the table. Haste makes waste … 😦
Nevertheless, even allowing your calculation, the build times for enough “solar “Hinckley Cs” in Australia would be far shorter, so the capacity would be far earlier to market. Moreover, if the state were ramping up solar capacity along the lines I suggested, those prices would come down. One of the interesting features of solar deployment in Australia is that whereas many assumed (not unreasonably) that solar panels would be very much an upmarket fad, in our capital cities and their satellites, they sit squarely in the middle of the income demographic, which reflects the practice of giving discounts on installation when several homeowners are able to agree to install at the same time within a small area. Whole swathes of streets took advantage of the state subsidies and relatively high FiT and elected to put them in and got them even cheaper.
I daresay if the local railway station were installing them, a half a dozen commercial locations within a 200 metres of each other would also instal them, presumably at a substantial discount, and and the promoters would have an incentive to bulk buy and tout within the area, even allowing that now, the subsidies are far less generous.
@Ronald Brak
Indeed, and one might add that unless it is proposed that the coal-fired station would be off-line at the time and in black start up, the coal would be being burned anyway. Ok, less coal would be burned than if there were no demands, but still quite a bit, so the marginal usage is key here.
How about a new metric .. cost of CO2 avoided. The current official CO2 price is $24.15 per tonne. If coal displacing generation has a greater cost of CO2 avoided than this then it would seem not to be efficient, or perhaps $24.15 isn’t enough. Roughly using BREE’s levelised electricity cost estimates supposed wind power cost $100 per Mwh. The backup and alternative full time power source is gas, mainly combined cycle but some open cycle. Suppose it has variable cost (mainly gas fuel) of say $60 per Mwh and fixed costs of another $60.
You’ve got that fixed cost of the gas fired generator whether it’s operating or not. Suppose the wind blows strongly and the gas plant can be switched off (neither assumption may be valid) so you save nearly half a tonne of CO2 due to exclusive wind power, make it 0.4 tonnes. The running cost is $100 for wind plus $60 in back up fixed costs. The alternative was all gas but with more CO2. The additional cost is ($100 + $60) – $120 = $40 but the CO2 saving is 0.4 tonnes. Cost of CO2 avoided $40/0.4 = $100 per tonne a lot more than $24.15.
Surely there has to be a better way of reducing CO2 while supplying reliable electricity.
@Will Boisvert
That 10Kw solar system in Hobart would generate 12,775 Kwh a year which according to the AEMO about covers the current high end of household consumption in Tasmania (High (13,763 kWh), av rate 27.64, annual cost $3,804).
Assuming a FIT about equal to the wholesale price that is annual $3,804 cost avoided for an outlay of AU$16,514 (or ~$23,000 without the RET).
Householders are not doing sophisticated modelling using wholesale prices. They are anticipating higher prices and looking at the **retail** cost that they avoid. They are still however paying the fixed supply charge. It is hard to see why the trend to solar is going to stop unless the government introduces some big disincentives.
With the new lower FIT of 8c/Kwh the incentive will be to consume all of that generation in house via storage systems or via electric cars once one or either drop in price.
Germany is encouraging the development of home battery storage via grants and loans to give the technology a kick along.
Correction “Assuming a FIT about equal to the retail price …” which is around what I get in Victoria
@Hermit “Surely there has to be a better way of reducing CO2 while supplying reliable electricity.”
“Surely” is usually a giveaway that something is wrong. No serious analyst has ever suggested that the kinds of reductions in CO2 we need can be achieved for $24/tonne. Certainly the Labor government didn’t claim this. The number was a pure political compromise.
Most serious estimates of the necessary carbon price are in the range of $50-$100/tonne*. To get a feel for what this means, Australia’s total emissions are around 500 million tonnes, so applying a price in this range would give a total of $25-$50 billion, or 1.5-3 per cent of national income. Of course, the costs would start to rise as we approached zero, but it’s clear that we could make big reductions at costs that are trivial in relation to our total income
* The RET amounts to a pseudo-price of about $40/tonne for coal-fired electricity, more for gas since it applies to ‘renewability’ rather than CO2 content.
@Will Boisvert
Fissile materials are a non-renewable resource. What do you propose to do when they run out? BTW, peak uranium production was in 1980. We’ve never matched that production since.
Let us examine one claim critically, even as we accept it for the purposes of argument.
“If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet’s economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.” – Steve Fetter, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.
But since current nuclear reactors provide about 5.8% of all power use globally, we see that if they provided 100% of our global power use, then all uranium reserves would last just 11.6 years. This puts into perspective just how non-renewable nuclear power is.
Fran, just so you don’t get led astray, I’ll point out that a 5% discount rate is not unreasonable for many Australian home owners. And at that rate the average 10 kw rooftop solar system will produce electricity at around 8 cents or less. This is less than half the cost of the minimum price of electricity from Hinkley C before distribution charges are added. If average Australian distribution charges are added then electricity from Hinkley C would cost 5 times as much as that produced by an average 10 kilowatt Australian rooftop solar system. If you are an Australian with a 10% discount rate then electricity from Hinkley C drops down to only being about three and a half times as much.
And I’ll point out that by the time Hinkley C provides any electricity to the grid solar power will certainly be much cheaper by then. Hinkley C’s power could be 10 times more expensive than Australian solar at that point. And since Hinkley C is supposed to operate for decades we should actually be considering the price of solar after it’s constructed, but I don’t think there is really any need to go on.
Ikonoclast, unfortunately for all practical purposes, the supply of uranium is unlimited. With declining costs of renewable energy there is no real hope for Australia that demand for yellowcake will increase and it appears likely that we will be stuck with dismal uranium prices from now right up until the final fission reactors are retired. But I suppose we could always try to boost prices by getting a new nuclear arms race going. “Psst! Upper Galicia! I hear Lower Galicia is building a nuke! You should build one too! I know a couple of guys called Pigdog and Spider who can get you some uranium.”
@Ronald Brak
Sorry, I don’t understand you. The supply of uranium is not unlimited. Like all elements on earth, or more precisely in the upper crust and seas, only a finite quantity exists. The supply is very limited once you only count deposits which are both economically and energetically viable for extraction and energy production. Commercially, energy production must give an energy profit of at least about 2:1 or 3:1 of energy production on energy input or the whole process does not pay.
The “uranium from seawater” myth is the worst myths of all. The uranium concentration in seawater is only about 3 parts per billion. The energy costs, environmental costs and opportunity costs in extracting this will be prohibitive of any program to run reactors on sea-water extracted uranium.
Footnote:
“The four most concentrated metal ions, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, and K+, are the only ones commercially extractable today, with the the least concentrated of the four being potassium (K) at 400 parts per million (ppm). Below potassium, we go down to lithium, which has never been extracted in commercial amounts from seawater, with a concentration of 0.17 ppm. Other dissolved metal ions exist at lower concentrations, sometimes several orders of magnitude lower. None has ever been commercially extracted.” – The Oil Drum.
Chlorine is also industrially produced from concentrated seawater brine. That is about the extent of chemical extraction from sea water I think. Though iodine is sourced from seaweed. So we are using the seaweed as a natural extractor and concentrator for iodine.
H/T InformationClearingHouse:
The job of boosters is to act like they are “firmly persuaded” so as to firmly persuade others.
Ikonoclast, I mean uranium consumption is going to decline as kilowatt-hours produced by nuclear power declines, which has already begun, and given the current and likely future cost of renewables there is no realistic chance that new reactor construction can turn this decline around. This year we may see solar installed for $1 a watt in India and/or China and nuclear power can’t compete in a grid with the low daytime electricity prices that result from meeting even a small percentage of demand with solar power. Sure, some new reactors may be built for political reasons, either to satisfy nuclear industry lobbying or because big projects can mean big kickbacks. And some may be built to build or maintain nuclear expertise that could be turned to making things go bang in the future. And maybe some reactors will even be started simply because important actors can’t get their heads around the fact that they are now completely uncompetitive. But with wind and solar at their current prices there is really no way that nuclear can compete on price. And this is the case even if some countries do a good job of lowering reactor costs because the cost of renewables are certain to come down. So demand for uranium will basically decrease to zero long before current reserves are exhausted and unless some other use is found for uranium our reserves will effectively become infinite. Because no one will be using them.
This is OT, but Ikonoclast is hiding a lot in that term “commercially”. “Commercially” here just means “at present prices”. But the viability or non-viability of nuclear power is remarkably insensitive to the price of yellowcake, simply because the cost of yellowcake is only a very small part of the cost of nuclear power. According to Wikipedia the current estimated cost of extraction from seawater is $240-300/kg (about triple current prices), plus some good prospects of tech advances lowering that dramatically. As for the energy costs of extraction these must be only a small fraction of the energy costs of running those thousands of centrifuges to enrich, which has not proved prohibitive. BTW this is the ultimate reason why trying to prevent nuclear proliferation by refusing to sell yellowcake is futile – better to concentrate on stopping those centrifuges.
On topic, count me as still sceptical (though persuadable) that PV solar is a really large scale solution. The reason is the dramatic cost reductions in the past decade have NOT come from new, much cheaper, technology but mainly from China massively gearing up production and getting scale economies. The price drops are very welcome but scale economies can only be realised once; I don’t think prices of panels will drop much more unless and until we get that tech breakthrough. And at present prices PV cannot be more than a handy supplement to our present system, rather than a viable replacement.
Someone said, “But if you reject renewables what is your alternative plan? Non-renewables (fossils and fissiles) will run out. What then? Show me the plan.”
By the way, I don’t reject renewables, but they cannot replace the quantity of fossil fuels which is the basis of rail, car and plane civilisation. Even to substitute to the degree they could, requires massive new infrastructure, which would be hard to mine and construct without recourse to fossil fuels.
However, the alternative plan is as obvious and unnoticed as fresh air:
Propaganda about a ‘dematerialised economy’ makes it hard to establish the reality that material industrial productivity is not actually less reliant on burning fossil fuels than it was in the 1970s, [1] and that drawdown on fossil fuels has in fact been multiplied by the needs of much greater populations. Similarly the obvious still needs to be pointed out that increasing productivity means burning more fuel and outputting more pollution, accelerating petroleum depletion and adding more greenhouse gases. Not only do we not need all the goods we produce for consumption at home or abroad, we do not need the income they bring, and their acquisition is a poor compensation for lives given to industry. Wonderful jobs are few and far between. No-one wants to give those up. Some people also derive much of their social life from work but they would derive similar benefits, and perhaps more status and satisfaction, from other community activities. And plenty of people reach a stage of maturity where childlike obedience to workplace regimes in the cause of producing more and more widgets in different colours, or processing more and more customers a day, with unflinching subservience, challenges every natural instinct.
Instead of those complicated international agreements about percentile reductions in emissions over the years to come, which are hardly enforceable or even measurable, remaining mostly in the control of the corporate emitters, the solution lies much closer at hand, and could ultimately be controlled at grass-roots levels by the masses themselves. Relocalisation is obviously the best way to develop the solidarity and self-sufficiency to reorganize work.
Political commentator and climate activist, Clive Hamilton, writes in Growth Fetish,
“Reduction in working hours is the core demand for the transition to post-growth society. Overwork not only propels overconsumption but is the cause of severe social dysfunction, with ramifications for physical and psychological health as well as family and community life. The natural solution to this is the redistribution of work, a process that could benefit both the unemployed and the overworked.”
He remarks that “Moves to limit overwork … directly confront the obsession with growth at all costs,” and talks about the liberation of workers “from the compulsion to earn more than they need.”
Because growth is sustained by a constant ‘barrage of marketing and advertising’ Hamilton wants advertising taxed and removed from the public domain, and television broadcast hours limited so as to “allow people to cultivate their relationships, especially with children.”
It should be obvious that the slower we work, the more fuel will remain, the less greenhouse gas will be emitted. If the populations which have ballooned to unimaginable proportions since the 1950s were allowed to return (through natural attrition) to more natural sizes by 2050, and the economy permitted to slow, it would take the heat off the planet and us as well. With so much less effort we could make such a positive difference to the planet and to our personal effectiveness.
[1] Cleveland, C.J., Kaufmann, R. K. and Stern, D.I. “Aggregation and the role of energy in the economy”, Ecological Economics, 2000, vol. 32, issue 2, pages 301-317, also at http://www.bu.edu/cees/people/faculty/cutler/articles/Aggregation_role_of_energy.pdf
@derrida derider
Those ‘scale economies’ depend a lot on underpaid and overworked wage slaves. And I fear that this kind of ‘scale economy’ is being globalised. As increased demand, plus rarity in many cases, drives up the cost of materials, fossil fuels and any substitutes, industry will substitute cheap or slave labour wherever it can. Until recently decency dictated that the slaves and near-slaves had to be accessed off-shore. Now the laws are changing to make it possible to have people working for little or nothing in Australia. Last year I ran into so many ‘interns’ working for free, it was amazing. And they were displacing skilled occupations. With high immigration driving up the cost of land for housing and small business, raising mortgages and rents, much of Australia’s population, home-grown and immigrated, will never know freedom from servitude. They are already debt-bonded.
Yeah,
@Sheila Newman The problem with cutting wages/increasing productivity is that you end up losing customers, they lack the surplus cash to buy things. Customers are either working real hard just to keep up with the bills or they are unemployed and eventually unemployable due to business cycles and shifts to the political right. This is the problem with capital, it has been so successful in wealth creation it now lacks opportunities for investment eg global % rates remain suppressed while US stockmarkets at record highs despite lack of commensurate earnings.
From what I can see reading Trainer’s “latest” offering he makes some horrendous maths mistakes after missing some very important realities. For starters where Australia’s 2008 total electricity consumption was 225 billion kwhrs and has fallen off significantly since then Trainer has decided that by 2050 Australians will consume 32,000 billion kwhrs (115 Exajoules), or 140 times the current highest. He then claims that to deliver that amount of energy it would require an installed capacity of 5400 gigawatts of panels at $12.61 per watt ($2300 per panel installed).
Is there any need to examine further. This looks like an exercise of think of a number and square it. Does Trainer have a Degree in anything? How can anybody be that far out and still keep their position?
The rationalities that Trainer misses are that by 2050 more than 70% of household energy production will be user installed and invested. That installed capacity will be Solar PV/Thermal where water heating and space heating will be from the thermal collectors reducing the electrity required production component by more than a third. Electric lighting will be predominately LED lighting further significantly reducing the required electricity production requirement.
So where all of the realities are indicating a downwards trend, Trainer indicates a steeply upwards trend. Not credible.
Will Boisvert @ 2,
You mistake is that you have double applied the solar derating.
The practicle worked example can be based on the coming VW GTE hybrid which has an 8kwhr battery offering 50 klms range battery only at speeds up to 130 kph. The faster the speed the shorter the range. Using Ronald Bracks 2kw garage top example we use the approximation that for Sydney we get 275 days of 7.5 hours average solar exposure before further derating gives a daily 11 hours for chaging the car. If you derate the amount by a third this still gives 7.5 hours. And, even using your 13% figure this still gives 6.3 kwhrs available daily.
What you have done is take the Sun Power figure from JQ’s link which already includes the availability derating, the derated the output again to come to your $26,000 per kilawatt figure.
This is a common mistake made by fossil fuel and Nuclear enthusiasts.
I have just realised while testing assumptions that Trainer was calculating for the whole world, not just Australia (my mistake is in reading PDF’s on my phone).
Even so to demonstrate how Trainer is wrong I simply have to refer to the activities and achievements of “The Barefoot College”. Here you will see how people can with minimal support work up from nothing to an acceptable living standard in the human sense.
Secondly Trainer has failed to compound systems.
Thirdly he has failed to allow for ongoing technological development in basing his work on 15% pv rather than Sun Power’s 22.5%, Panasonic’s 24.5%, Semprius’s 35% or Spectralab’s 40.5% efficiencies.
Fourthly his cost estimates are highly suspect. My recent example that every Australian requires the annual extraction of 15 cubic metres of fossil fuel to mainrain our lifestyle properly puts into perspective the failure of the notion that the production of solar hybrid systems cannot be afforded or justified.
@BilB
I suggest you write a detailed critique of Trainer and get it published so we can check it line by line to see who has the dodgy arithmetic.
Suppose for example on top of ~22 kwh per day appliance demand the average home wants another 8 kwh for electric assist transport. That’s a 36% increase in residential electricity demand right there. If rooftop PV is to be the source of that energy there’s the slight problem that installations have nosedived dramatically since 2012; see the CER website for figures. Thus it would seem people are now less willing or financially able to install PV let alone buy an electric car.
On future energy demand note also Australia’s population increased by about 0.4m last year. There will also be greater need for air conditioning and desalination that offsets the manufacturing slump.
@Hermit
Trainer’s 1995 and 2003 versions are linked above, and I point out in the OP that the numbers are totally wrong. Given that you formed your own opinions around the same time, and presumably on the basis of similar estimates, would you care to defend those versions? Or, in true derp fashion, do you want to rely on the 2013 numbers, but still derive the 1995 conclusions?
@Hermit
I am not sure what my household’s average electricity use is per day. I would have to check the numbers. However, I do know that with a 5.5 kW (nominal) solar PV system and evacuated tube solar hot water system, we produce about 175% of our electricity needs and have seemingly endless hot water. That is for a family of four who make no real effort to conserve power, have 2 flatscreens, 4 PCs and a biocycle system with electric pump plus all the other standard mod-cons and “vampire” devices. We also have electric dishwasher, washing machine and electric cooktop and oven. We use no gas. We use minimal heating, maybe a few nights a year, and run air-con in one large, well-insulated downstairs room for maybe 12 hrs a day, 60 days a year.
We get the feed-in tariff bonus and of course you can argue about whether people should get that or not. On the basis of the above I could own a Nissan Leaf and charge it every night for almost no real cost, maybe at about 8 c/kWh for most of the charge. When you look at all the household economics, even without the feed-in tariff this would be worthwhile.
People don’t seem to be making very wise financial decisions yet re energy. I know quite a few people who would think it normal to spend $55,000 or more on a new car, every 5 to 10 years, almost exclusively used for urban commutes. A car for commutes is a dead loss cost, it earns you nothing. Alternatively, they could spend about $40,000 on a Nissan Leaf and about $15,000 on a system like mine even without solar PV feed-in subsidies. They would be far better off financially. So there is no genuine financial reason Australian middle-class families could not afford this set-up. The obstacle is their inability to be reasonably rational agents. Instead of being more financially rational, they choose rather to pay a huge premium to own a middle class status symbol, a $55,000 plus internal combustion engine car, 4WD or SUV.
If anything is cramping young middle class families, apart from petrol car status symbol purchase, it is the exessively high cost of housing, which has risen from costing about 3 times the average annual wage to costing about 6 times the average annual wage. This has occurred due to excess bank lending and federal government subsidy grants to buy new houses. Misconceived policies in other words. Imagine if you only got the housing grant if you installed an approved solar PV system. That would increase uptake and see new houses built where the grid can take more solar PV. Also, imagine if all fossil fuel subsidies were removed. This would alter matters too.
Rather than not being able to afford solar PV, households are advertised, incentivised and manipulated away from it by economically distorting policies i.e. perverse incentives and perverse subsidies.
Derrida, you wrote, “And at present prices PV cannot be more than a handy supplement to our present system, rather than a viable replacement.” I don’t think that’s correct, given enough time. At present prices rooftop solar can provide electricity to households and businesses at a lower cost than any form of utility scale generation. And utility scale solar has been installed in the UK for about a pound a watt, in Europe for about a euro a watt, and in India for about $1.42 a watt. Let’s take the developed country example of a euro a watt, which is currently just a bit less than $1.50. Near Melbourne, the cloudiest mainland capital, utility scale solar at a 9% discount rate will produce electricity at around 9.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. That is competitive with both new coal and new gas capacity. Around Sydney electricity from utility scale solar would cost about 8.5 cents. Brisbane 8 cents. Cairns 7.5 cents. Darwin 7 cents. Port Hedland 6.6 cents. So at costs of installation that are currently being done in Europe, utility scale solar is capable of eliminating a huge amount of fossil fuel use from daytime electricity production if given enough time for existing fossil fuel capacity to wear out, even if there is no carbon price and no subsidy for solar. So solar could end up as a pretty huge supplement. Given how we use more electricity in the day and how demand will shift to take advantage of cheaper daytime electricity at current costs perhaps fossil fuels could end up as a supplement to solar and other renewables. Unfortunately people are dying right now from the effects of climate change so we don’t really have the decades to wait for a large amount of our existing fossil fuel capacity to wear out and be replaced by utility scale solar. But fortunately point of use solar is much more competitive than utiltity scale solar.
Rooftop solar is being installed in Germany for about $2 a watt without subsidy so we can be certain we can get it down to that level in Australia as Germany isn’t doing anything special that we can’t do. This means that without subsidy and with a 9% discount rate Australian households can produce electricity for about 13 cents a kilowatt-hour which is less than half the actual price most Australians pay for electricity. And note that many Australians have discount rates of less than 9% when it comes to rooftop solar as they may have access to home equity or have money sitting in term deposits. A home owner with a 5% discount rate will produce electricity from rooftop solar at about 9 cents a kilowatt-hour. So even if Australians were only paying 15 cents a kilowatt-hour for grid electricity they would still have an incentive to install solar. And for some reason no electricity distributers have announced plans to lower electricity prices to 15 cents a kilowatt-hour. It’s a bit slack of them, but then what can you do? It’s a free country. And the interesting thing about rooftop solar is that at current retail electricity prices and a 9% discount rate and $2 a watt installation and assuming that people receive nothing for the electricity they contribute to the grid and just have it stolen from them, most Australians still have an incentive to install systems large enough to export more than half the electricity produced to the grid as they try to minimise the amount of expensive grid electricity they have to pay for. This means that as long as retail electricity prices remain high, people can have an incentive to install rooftop solar regardless of what the actual wholesale price of grid electricity is during the day. Which means we could end up with an awful lot of it, even if its price never goes below $2 a watt.
So to sum up, at current PV costs and just the expectation that installation costs in Australia will decline to what they already are in other parts of the world, solar power could end up as a massive supplement to the “present system” and given that in Australia wind power is also cheaper than new coal or gas capacity and is complementary with solar in that it produces electricity at night and tends to produce more electricity when it is cloudy, and given that Australia has existing hydroelectric capacity and pumped storage, fossil fuels should end up as a supplement to renewables even without a carbon price or a subsidy for renewables. Of course if we sit around waiting for that to happen by itself our inaction will result in people dying. But I am optimistic for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we’re not completely silly in Australia, we just go through patches where we get a bit mental and I’m sure will get around to moving forward on pricing in externalities involved in fossil fuel use instead of going backwards. And secondly, I am certain that the cost of renewables will continue to fall.