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 
Hermit,
Trainer came to a total bill of 2.5 times global GDP to replace fossil fuels with renewables, with the grand conclusion that this could not de afforded.
There are several things wrong with the conclusion recognising that he correctly identifies resources depletion as being a guiding restraint.
One is that if that were un fact a realistic figure, then the amount would be afforded, simply because to not attempt the change would mean glibal ecinomic failure.
Secondly by any reasonable evaluation the figure is grossly over inflated. Putting it into the Australian context by Trainers ratio this would be 3.8 trillion dollars.
In simple terms 800 million square metres of 20% efficient panels with an exposure 275 by 6.5 Will give 267 billion kw hours and double tgat to electrify transportation and an installed price of $400 per square metre you have 640 billion dollars. Double that for good measure and it comes to 1.2 trillion dollars or one third of Trainers conclusion. You would have to be coping with massive complications to require triple the fundamental requirement.
It does not take much technological or innovative improvement to achieve huge changes. For instance where solar panels are fitted to buildings and recognising that 30% of domestic electricity is used for water heating then hybrid pv/thermal panels reduce the number of panels required by that amount. Rooftop solar thermal has a huge number of applications for industry as well. Intelligently spec’d hybrid cars also reduce the number of solar panels required to service them. Further more they reduce the liquid fuel required for extended range travel to an amount that can be supplued drom a midest oalm oil industry.
I am sure that a study performed by with a full field of understanding would demonstrate a stabard of living and gdp raising renewable energy future with negligible disruption.
@ BilB,
“Will Boisvert @ 2,
You mistake is that you have double applied the solar derating.”
I don’t understand what you wrote, BilB, but I sure didn’t make a mistake.
JQ’s link said the 2.5 kw solar charging system costs “less than $10,000” which I glossed as $9,000, or $3600 per kw, a very typical price for US rooftop rigs. It produces 3000 kwh of electricity per year. That’s a 13.7 percent capacity factor, which is also quite typical for US rooftop solar. That means the system’s average power output is 3000 kilowatt-hours divided by 8760 hours=0.3425 kw. $9,000 divided by 0.3425 kw is $26,277 per “average” kw of capacity.
@ Fran Barlow, on nuclear vs. solar build times.
“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.”
–Over the long term it’s faster to build nuclear than to build solar. According to Wiki, Australia added 0.9 GW of solar PV in 2011 and 2012 and 0.8 GW in 2013. (Let me know if there’s more I missed.) At 20 percent capacity factor, that’s a growth rate of about 180 MW average capacity per year, or 1.8 GW per ten years. A ten-year Hinkley C build would bring 3.2 GW on line with capacity factor of 90 percent, so 2.9 GW average capacity over ten years, a rate that’s 61 percent faster than the current installation rate for Australian PV. So Australian PV has to speed up considerably just to match the build rate of the Hinkley C fiasco.
In the short term, of course, we get the incremental solar power while nuclear is still building. But other nuclear builds are going much faster than Hinkley C. The Chinese EPRs are due on line next year after 7 year builds. VC Summer is due on line in 2018 after a 7-year build (knock wood!). Chinese nukes, South Korean Gen III nukes and Japanese Gen III nukes all have established records of 5-year builds—dramatically faster than PV installation rates.
(The above is based on a PV capacity factor of 20 percent, but that may be too optimistic; AEMO pegs the rooftop PV capacity factor at 15 percent. So the solar pace may be much slower given that most Australian PV is rooftop.)
–Solar is already being mass produced (in China) and deployed en masse in Australia, so possibly there is not much more economy of scale to harvest. Mass deployment of nuclear in China and South Korea has lowered costs to a level I don’t think solar can possibly match, as I argued above, and for dispatchable power that’s of much better quality than solar power. No reason Australia can’t do the same.
@ Mike H,
“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).”
Thanks for those numbers, Mike. Your stats for solar generation imply a capacity factor of 14.6 percent, which would make the capital cost per “average” kilowatt for rooftop solar correspondingly higher than I calculated upthread, so $15,753 compared to $9000 per avg kw for Hinkley C. AEMO pegs the rooftop solar PV capacity factor at 15 percent. At that capacity factor there’s little question that rooftop solar has higher costs than Hinkley C power (which is not the same as higher prices).
It may make economic sense to buy a solar system given Australia’s extraordinarily high grid electricity prices. In the US retail electricity prices average 11-12 cents per kwh, so Americans can’t make money by switching to rooftop generation without large subsidies. (Can someone explain why Australian electricity is so expensive, and why Australians accept that?)
@ Ronald Brak, on costs of solar,
“Rooftop solar…for about $2 a watt without subsidy…with a 9 percent discount rate Australians can produce electricity for about 13 cents a kilowatt-hour…a 5 percent discount rate will produce electricity from rooftop solar at about 9 cents a kilowatt-hour.”
Ronald, what assumptions of capacity factor, payback period and O and M costs are you making in those LCOE calculations?
If I use your number of $2 per watt capital costs, take AEMO’s figure of 15 percent capacity factor for Australian rooftop solar, use a 20-year payback period, and 1 cent per kwh for O and M costs, at 9 percent discount I get an LCOE of 17.7 cents per kwh, not 13 c/kwh. At 5 percent discount I get 13.2 c/kwh. (I’m using the NREL LCOE calculator at httpcolon//www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html)
People also tend to underestimate the huge opportunity cost in manufacturing globally (as of 2012) 60 million automobiles. This number excludes vans and trucks. Internal combustion engine automobiles are hugely inefficient for personal transporters. Their engines are very inefficient and they often carry only one person, the driver.
Were we to cut global automobile manufacture to 30 million automobiles and invest the saved capital, materials and energies into a mix of mass transit, plus solar and wind power, we would be much better off.
Making the claim that we can’t afford solar power or wind power whilst not condemning the huge amout of resources we waste on automobiles (which enable journeys at an exhorbitant cost, many of which could have been made in more cost-effective ways) is simply the height of hypocrisy and absurdity.
The problem is one of habituation and normalisation. We become habituated to an absurd and maladaptive state of affairs, accepting it is as normal. It is extraordinary at this late stage, facing post peak oil and climate change, that there is still no significant debate about doing away with personal ICE automobiles. On the contrary, TV and other media still bombard people with ads and messages to buy, buy, buy the petrol powered automobile. Bob Dylan’s 2014 Super Bowl car ad is a case in point. It is ironic that the ad ends with the chorus strapline “Things will change.” Indeed they will.
@Will Boisvert
What percentage of the world’s total power (not just stationary electrical power) comes from nuclear fission plants? Answer: 5.8%.
How long could all known recoverable reserves of uranium power these plants? Answer: about 200 years.
That means nuclear fission with enough generating plants could provide all the world’s current energy needs, without further growth, for just 11.6 years. That’s hardly a long term solution.
The bottom line is the nuclear argument is already lost. Recent nuclear plant builds are thin on the ground. The global average age of plants is 28 years. The nuclear share in the world’s stationary power generation has declined steadily from a historic peak of 17 percent in 1993 to about 10 percent in 2012.
Nuclear power is a mature industry. If it worked overall, being cost effective, safe and acceptable to the public in democratic, mixed economy nations then it would still be succeeding. That fact that it is failing (despite massive subsidies and the assumption of most risk by the state) is the clear empirical evidence of its unfitness on competitive and safety grounds.
Nuclear power is heading for extinction except for specialist military applications like reactors for nuclear subs and carriers. You are flogging a dead horse. Save yourself the trouble.
@Will Boisvert
Yes, but in Australia there would have to be a bipartisan consensus on doing nuclear power in circumstances where every community where a plant might go would fight it tooth and nail. Those generic figures about support for nuclear power don’t take into account how many communities would slug it out with the state to stop one being built within 100 kms of their place.
No state or federal regime is going to an election with that in their policy whatever some of them think privately, especially post-fukushima. At least one of the parties would be destroyed if they tried this in isolation.
So those build times are moot, until a consensus can be established around their desirability.
I might add that the build times for solar reflect the fact that almost all of this new capacity arose in small scale ad hoc private development. If the state — which owns railways — were to adopt a policy of covering their rooves and walkways with solar panels, and require new warehouses, shopping centres, big housing developments and shopping centres to include solar capacity to a certain capacity based on their roof space, then build times would utterly dwarf the build times for nuclear.
Keep in mind also that even allowing that a single modular mass production nuclear plant design were adopted, the total engineering capacity of the planet to simultaneously build and check these as they were fitted would not go close to what was needed. It’s all very well quoting build times in authoritarian states like China and Korea, operating without significant competition from other plant developers, but can you imagine the build times if, say, 50 jurisdictions decided to simultaneously replace 80% of their coal or gas fired capacity with nukes?
Here in Australia, our regime along with some others, stupidly signed on to buy a joint strike fighter from the US … That is way behind schedule and way over budget despite the embarrassment of the US.
I dare not imagine what would happen if Australia put in an order to Westinghouse for 25 nuclear plants in five years. I’d be surprised if we saw the first kWh of sent out power before 2030 if ever.
Will Boisvert,
You seem to have a problem with Self Investment. From the end user’s point of view the solar garage represents an annual offset cost saving of $2250 per year against the petrol that would otherwise be bought. In terms of electricity this is a $750 per year saving at the electricity retail price. The solar roof however has a much longer service life than the car it shelters. It will last at least as long as 2 cars with a 20 year useful life, perhaps 3 with a little maintenance. So the Solar Roof has a value to the end user of a minimum $30,000.
Your argument is that the car company would be better taking a share holding in the Nuclear power station and giving the electricity to the customer,…or something. But this makes no sense either. Maybe you think that the car company should just pay the end users electricity bill up to $9000.
The reality is though that the car charge roof is not going to cost the car company any where near the $9000. That is only its retail list price for such an item and is an inducement to get the customers engaged, as no doubt you know.
Therefore the savings to the customer/car owner are all real. The cost of the hardware is entirely speculative. And your application of a capacity factor is a fantasy as it is in no way a factor in the calculation.
Knowledge that Nuclear energy is “cheap” to produce is in no way and inducement to buy an electric car when the electricity is to be provided free via solar. Paying a customers “fuel” bill for the life of their product is not an inducement to the car company to manufacture such products as they must pay the retail price, cars are all over the country and not necessarily in range of a nuclear power station, and even if they held shares in one they would still have to pay the retail price with the uncertainty of what future pricing could be.
There is no way that the capacity factor features in this calculation as the charging roof was sized to service the charging needs of the vehicle. The solar de-rating calculation has already been performed.
Your back calculation to make the cost of the investment seem expensive against the cost of a nuclear power station is irrelevant because the car owner does not want to pay for his fuel. That is part of the appeal of Solar Electric Transportation. With this combination a person is SET for the future, and one solar garage is likely to last them for their entire driving life, capacity factor or no capacity factor.
@Will Boisvert
I’d also like more information on this claim
A properly situated solar panel will collect useful energy for about 30% of the year, though on cloudy days, the amounts will be less. Maybe that’s what you meant. Of course, it will be supplying all of that power when it’s most in demand. That it supplies zero between 11 in the evening and six in the morning is moot because demand is very low. Building new nuclear so that the solar capacity drop off can be covered would be silly, and non-commercial. The more important time when solar produces less than demand is between about 4pm and 9 pm and between 6am and about 10am. So a more generous CF discount (allowing that some power will be returned early and late in the summer for solar is closer to about 45%. That would put it closer to 400mW p.a.
As I said though, if the state were to engage in an active program of building renewables, or including them in building licensing the capacity growth would be far larger.
Will Boisvert, you wrote that you found a figure of 15% capacity for Australian rooftop solar. While it’s good that you went out and found that figure I think there may be some context you’re missing. Germany can get over 13% of capacity for solar and even the sunniest parts of Germany don’t come within 15% of the insolation populated areas of Australia receive. Let me show you how to think it through so you won’t be caught out by this sort of thing in the future. So to start with, I presume that you agree with me that one kilowatt of solar PV in direct sunlight and angled towards the sun will have an output of about one kilowatt?
I doubt if calling people derps and lecturing on priors (ie not agreeing with you) is going to change too many minds. I wonder if it applies to James Hansen.
Of course all the argy bargy could be avoided if all low emissions technologies are embraced. But the dominant tendency in the generic greens won’t have that preferring to cling to ideology that might have been valuable in the frightening era of the Cold War but has more more than outlived it’s usefulness. In fact anti-nuclear ideology has become a hot bed of anti-science conspiracy theorists.
It is exactly the “my way or the highway” attitude on renewables that has lead to informed critiques of renewables. When non-hydro renewables provide such a tiny portion of the worlds energy, the certitude displayed on this subject is truly astonishing.
But never mind a bit of name calling will deal with all of this.
What you are saying, Quokka, is that there is a significant amount of Derpishness in the Greens liturgy. That would have to be true.
No doubt we all have some, but it should not be a problem if the exchanges flow in a way that exposes new concepts and ideas to explore thereby creating fresh idea-scapes from which to reflect back and review entrenched thinking with altered perspectives.
Quokka, the point of the lecture is that I’ve concluded that nothing will change your mind, or Ted Trainer’s, or that of nuclear fans in general.
Despite your fantasies about green activists, the Bush and Obama administrations backed nuclear enthusiastically, and faced barely any resistance. France tried hard to restart nuclear, as did Finland. The result has been a damp squib. But you are still fighting with imaginary enemies from last century.
So, the name calling isn’t to persuade you, it’s to point out to others that discussion with you is pointless.
Hermit,
I’ve taken the liberty to represent my ghastly phone pad typing effort above, typos removed.
Trainer in his “latest” came to a total decarbonising bill of 2.5 times global GDP to replace fossil fuels with renewables, with the grand conclusion that this could not be afforded. Certainly politically true.
There are several things wrong with the conclusion, recognising that he correctly identifies resources depletion as being a limiting restraint.
One is tha,t if that were in fact a realistic figure (2.5 time GP), then the amount would have to be afforded albeit over extended time, simply because to not attempt the change would mean global economic failure. But…
Secondly by any reasonable evaluation the figure is grossly over inflated. Putting it into the Australian context by Trainers ratio this would require 3.8 trillion dollars (uncannily close to Peter Lang’s total figure).
Evaluating Trainer’s claim in simple terms:
800 million square metres of 20% efficient panels with a solar exposure 275 days by 6.5 hours will deliver 267 billion kw hours.
Let’s double that to electrify transportation and apply an installed price of $400 per square metre.
Now you have 640 billion dollars.
Double that again for good measure and it comes to 1.2 trillion dollars,…. or one third of Trainers conclusion.
You would have to be coping with massive complications to require triple the fundamental requirement.
I conclude that Trainers figure is so far from reality as to be obviously discounted.
It does not take much technological or innovative improvement to achieve huge changes.
For instance where solar panels are fitted to buildings and recognising that 30% of domestic electricity is used for water heating then hybrid PV/Thermal panels reduce the number of panels required by that 30% amount. Rooftop solar thermal has a huge number of applications for industry as well.
Intelligently spec’d hybrid cars also reduce the number of solar panels required to service them. Furthermore they reduce the liquid fuel required for extended range travel to an amount that can be supplied from a modest palm oil industry.
I am sure that a study performed by with a full field of understanding would demonstrate a standard of living and GDP raising renewable energy future with negligible disruption.
Quokka, let me quote you, “As a reality check, to generate the same amount of electricity as did the damaged Fukushima Daiichii plant from PV farms would require the entire evacuation area around the damaged plant.”
To back this up you write: “Time you looked at the numbers. We will take as an example, the Antelope Valley PV project in Califoria. The important numbers
Nameplate Capacity: 100 MW
Area 8.5 km^2”
This is astoundingly Derpy. You couldn’t give the output of a typical Australian rooftop system because that would show your claim was not connected to reality, so instead you had to go out of your way to find information on some place called Antelope Valley in America and try to use that to support your lie. According to you, Antelope valley solar has a capacity of 11.8 watts per square meter but the figure for Australian solar is roughly 10 times that amount. And in Japan their higher average panel efficiency should roughly compensate for their higher average lattitude and give a similar result.
And for extra derpiness, if you had bothered to enter ‘Antelope Valley solar’ into a search engine like I just did, you could have found out that the capacity of their PV system is actually about 100 watts per square meter, so you really had to bend over backwards to get this one wrong, didn’t you?
@Ronald Brak
Not only that, but even if those figures were true, I’d be quite OK with a situation that replaced 10,000 years of toxic land (and whatever other consequences from the lost core and continuing radiation of the Pacific) with:
That would be far more preferable than the ongoing meltdown and radioactive contamination we currently have, I would think?
Megan, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t trade a 250-500 billion dollar nuclear accident for massively disappointing solar farm.
@ Fran Barlow,
“Those generic figures about support for nuclear power don’t take into account how many communities would slug it out with the state to stop one being built within 100 kms of their place.”
I think the politics of nuclear are actually pretty good at a local level. They sure are in the United States; most nuclear plants are popular in their local rural communities, where they provide hundreds of well-paying jobs and pump billions of dollars into the local economy and tax coffers. It’s people from farther away, who have no interest in the plants except as fodder for apocalyptic fantasies, who tend to get hysterical about them.
And from what I understand Australia is an underpopulated place. Are there no barren seaside locales with few people around to complain (or get in the way of a spew?)
“the total engineering capacity of the planet to simultaneously build and check these as they were fitted would not go close to what was needed. It’s all very well quoting build times in authoritarian states like China and Korea, operating without significant competition from other plant developers, but can you imagine the build times if, say, 50 jurisdictions decided to simultaneously replace 80% of their coal or gas fired capacity with nukes?”
South Korea is not an authoritarian state; it has been a liberal democracy for 20 years.
You’re right that we can’t build all the nukes overnight; it would take a couple of decades. But we know that nuclear capacity is cheaper than intermittent capacity and uses less raw material inputs of concrete and steel per gigawatt-hour, and goes faster than solar new build; so the economic and logistic burden of a mass nuclear buildout is surely lighter than a mass intermittent buildout. We’ve seen this in real life; France built its nuclear fleet from a standing start in 20 years; its nuclear decarbonization program went twice as fast as Germany’s Energiewende, achieved more and cost less. Sweden achieved comparable results with a half-nuclear, half-hydro program.
@ BilB,
I still don’t understand what you wrote.
Look, the economic problem of charging EVs is extremely simple: What’s the cheapest way to supply low-carbon electricity to the outlets where we plug in the car? JQ’s reference proves beyond doubt that supplying that electricity with nuclear is about 3 to 10 times cheaper than supplying it with rooftop solar PV, at least in the US.
@ Fran Barlow and Ronald Brak, on capacity factors.
THe capacity factor is defined as the amount of energy in kilowatt-hours that a generator produces in a year divided by the amount it would produce if it ran at full nameplate for all 8760 hours in a year. It’s a measure of how much the actual production of a generator falls short of the theoretical maximum production. It’s an empirical measurement, not something you calculate from insolation data, though you could estimate it that way in the absence of real-world data.
I have two AEMO studies in front of me, one of them working from empirical data on rooftop PV, which put Australia’s rooftop PV capacity factor at 15 percent or below. Fran and Ronald, do you have any references that show Australian rooftop PV on average getting higher capacity factors? (You can get it from raw generation figures in kwh compared to kw of installed capacity, as Mike H provided upthread, or sometimes its phrased in terms of hours of nameplate equivalent per year, so 1500 hour per year is a CF of 17.1 percent).
The capacity factor is crucial for calculating productivity, costs and build times. You have to multiply the nameplate capacity by the capacity factor to get a true measure of the amount of energy the generator will actually produce. Because of the different capacity factors, every gigawatt of nuclear that comes on line with a typical 90 percent CF is 6 times more productive (0.90/0.15) than a GW of rooftop PV; to generate the same amount of electricity as a 1 GW nuclear plant, you have to build 6 GW of rooftop solar. So if you build 9 GW of rooftop solar over a ten-year period, as Australia is doing, vs. 3.2 GW of nuclear as at Hinkley C, at the end of ten years you will be producing twice as much nuclear electricity as solar electricity. That’s why nuclear can add “true” generating capacity much faster than solar over the long term.
I guess you guys know all this, but the way you write about it just seems utterly confused. Ronald, the amount of power a solar panel produces at cloudless noon gives you the nameplate power, but it has nothing to do with the capacity factor, which will determine the kilowatt-hours of energy produced; the kilowatt-hours, not the peak nameplate power, is what we need to know to calculate the LCOE. You must have used capacity factors in the LCOE calculations you gave upthread—if you did not, you figured wrong—and I’m just asking what numbers you used, and where you got them. (Note that Germany’s total solar CF is 11 percent, rooftop CF specifically rather less. An Australian rooftop CF of 15 percent would be about 50 percent higher than Germany’s, as we would expect in a sunnier clime.)
Fran, you seem to be arguing that the peak electricity production of solar should weigh more heavily in CF estimates, since it roughly matches daytime peak demand and since late-night electricity production is “moot” because everyone is asleep and not using electricity. Fran, no; nighttime demand troughs are usually at least half the daytime peak; the economy uses a lot of electricity in the dead of night! (You do too, unless you unplug the fridge and keep night-vision goggles on the bedstand.) And if we start charging EVs at night—which is the right and sensible way to do it—there will be a huge new off-peak load for night-time generators to service, which solar obviously can’t. And solar produces next to nothing for peak demand on cloudy days; since we have to have dispatchable generators anyway, building solar capacity is therefore redundant.
@Will Boisvert
And now from our reporter, Will Boisvert, in Fukushima Japan:
“I think the politics of nuclear are actually pretty good at a local level. They sure are here in Fukushima province where the nuclear plant is popular in the local rural communities. It provides hundreds of well-paying jobs in nuclear clean-ups, evacuations and resettlements, and pumps billions of yen into corporate coffers… er, I mean into the local economy and tax coffers. It’s people from farther away, like Tokyo, who have no interest in the nuclear plants except as sources of electricity for their flatscreen TVs so they can watch apocalyptic godzilla fantasies. They are so hysterical those Tokyo residents.
Here in Fukushima, people are getting on with life, getting ahead, sometimes getting two heads. They love radioactive isotopes here. They sprinkle them on their cornflakes… well, they would if they ate cornfalkes… sprinkle them on the sashimi they catch down at the local cooling outlets for the Fukushima plant. Yes, that’s right, they catch sashimi! Headless, de-finned, filleted and ready skinned, all the work’s done by the isotopes! Straight from grate to plate!
Wonderful place! Will Boisvert live from Fukushima! (Background flickers and turns to green-screen.) Am I off air? Where am I for the next segment? Chernobyl? Haha, lucky it’s green screen, or I might need a contamination suit and a side arm for the radioactive wolves. What? Is the mic still live? You idiot, what was your last job? Nuclear plant operator? That’s a joke, right? (Mic goes dead.)
Will Boisvert @ 20
Simple question, Cheaper for who?
More seriously, do nuclear proponents get that many people are prepared to pay for safety? If I was presented point blank with two options, nuclear power at 10c /kWh with a nuclear power station anywhere within 50 k of my home or green power (solar /wind) at 30c /kWh then I would take the latter deal. I suspect most people would.
@Will Boisvert
Correct but misleading. The vast majority of the country lives a couple of hours drive from the coast and most of us on the east coast. Unsurprisingly, that’s also where the load is. Past polls here that simply ask for/against nukes showed a rough 50-50 split, substantially along major party lines, with those voting Liberal much more supportive than those voting Labor. In both cases though, given that virtually all election results since Federation could be reversed utterly on a 5% swing, either party going unilaterally pro-nuke would be immediately wedged by the other side. The appeal of the government benches exceeds the appeal of nukes, and of course, the side with the least objections — the Liberals — are joined to the fossil fuel lobby as firmly
Oops … Damned ipad …
as firmly as any pair of conjoined twins, so they aren’t going first. There’s nothing in it for them. When Howard last raised this here, the first question was “where would you put those 25 nuclear plants?” and almost immediately, actual or prospective Liberal MPs stood up to declare, “not in my backyard”. In the electorate of Bennelong, that of PM Howard himself, and where I lived at the time too, Howard declined to say whether he’d support one.
Polls show that those who are OK with nukes are most OK with them on the other side of the country. The other side of the country is WA which tends to vote Liberal, but they’d rather the nukes were on the East coast, where most of the demand is. You see the problem. In practice, most people who like them want them some place else. There is no place far enough away from where enough people live to place a nuclear plant without destroying the party responsible for doing it. Even the folk at Lucas Heights aren’t all that keen on the research reactor there.
Moreover, the Liberals are rightwing populists. Jumping onto little towns in the countryside to plant nukes there would provoke an orgy of Tea Party-style outrage — and I note in this respect that in the US even the Tea Party is coming around to the idea of renewables — on the basis of localism.
And all this was pre-Fukushima.
As I said, realistically, for political reasons, nuclear power in this country is not on the 20-year horizon, and it’s hard to imagine how that horizon can even begin drawing closer. We would be better off supporting it in places where it’s politically viable and where our support would make a difference.
That the solutions on offer are predominately from ‘greenies’ is no more than indicative of the lack of solutions on offer from mainstream politics. Why are we continually told by Conservatives that ‘greenies’ are the problem? It sure isn’t in order to build support for action on climate by nuclear. Or by any means.
The best things that could happen for climate action and nuclear as a solution in Australia are – Conservatives ditching climate science denial and obstructionism: Conservatives pushing for stronger action on climate instead of undermining it: Conservatives supporting and promoting strong carbon pricing instead of staunchly opposing it.
If you think it’s a small (but vocal) minority where the power to make or break effective climate policy resides then I think you are buying into one element of the ongoing, multi-pronged Conservative campaign to diminish ‘green’ political influence – that in the absence of ‘green’ opposition to nuclear, they would use it aggressively to tackle emisssion. The reality is the most significant aim of anti-green campaigning by conservatives is to undermine community calls for action on emissions.
It isn’t anti-nuclear activism that gets commerce and industry to shut up about nuclear, it’s Conservatives offering them a budget, do as little as possible option. Part of the ‘price’ of this ‘get out of climate action free’ card is to not rock the climate science denial boat, or even better, embrace it’s lies and misinformation on climate as a self interested ‘free’ choice.
It ain’t strength of opposition that kept nuclear down at the moment in history that looked made for it, it’s weakness of support. That support will remain weak to the point of nonexistent as long as fossil fuel interests have a stranglehold on Conservative politics.
@Will Boisvert
My 1.5kw system produced 2380kwh last year for a cf of 18%. Page 4 of this link shows the average cf of Australian rooftop solar systems to be around 17%.
Click to access Solar-Choice-Clean-Energy-Council-Solar-PV-Consumer-guide.pdf
Part of the capacity factor is in the ratings of solar panels which are the output at 25degC. Even on a cold day with the sun shining will see panels up around 40degC where they lose 1% efficiency with every degree above 25C. Amorphous silicon panels lose about half a % efficiency per degree above 25C. All types of solar cells are steadily becoming more efficient and prices are steadily dropping. How does that compare with nuclear?
And one other thing you might consider Will Boisvert: if PV and wind bite hard into the most profitable portions of the energy market, what effect will this have on the ability of FHC generators to offer concessional pricing during the off peak? Won’t they be obliged to mothball capacity until one or more generators can reach break-even price? Won’t this force up the retail price of off-peak? Won’t this in turn force a shift in demand away from off-peak usage and make home/commercial energy storage more viable? Wouldn’t more non-shifted demand be supplied by hydro (existing or pumped) and/or wind? Won’t this all happen faster than any conceivable roll out of nuclear power here? Indeed, doesn’t the mere prospect of that prejudice the commercial case for nuclear power here? If so, isn’t the case for nuclear here premised on explicit state commercial guarantees and likewise indemnity against planning constraints? Given that this is politically improbable, isn’t it better to accept that the heavy lifting on decarbonisation, at least in this country, is likely to be done by renewables rather than nuclear power? If that occurs but we still fall short of where we need to be, wouldn’t that be a more propitious moment to advance the case for nuclear power as a bridge to total decarbonisation, especially given that the effluxion of time might have ushered in new and better nuclear capacity and softened the memory of Fukushima?
Just wondering.
Will, would you like to guess why I think 15% is not the appropriate figure to use in the example I gave, or would you like me to continue my explanation?
Commercial world nuclear power is withering away or so it would appear. The nuclear share of the world’s stationary power generation declined steadily from a historic peak of 17% in 1993 to about 10% in 2012.
The 2012 renewable share in the world’s electricity mix was 20.8%. The only data I can find for the 1993 renewable share (with a quick search) is “not significant” though this probably excludes large hydro.
I dunno Fran. We’ve got new reactors going up in the US at three sites, and the locals are happy to have them–good jobs, good money. They’re building at already existing plants, so people are familiar with nuclear power already. And they are in the right-wing South which, sad to say, is simply not as phobic about these things as the left.
It seems like in Australia, with the public split in their attitudes, there might be an opening for genuine greens to embrace nuclear power and try to bring their slice of the electorate into a consensus.
“Will, would you like to guess why I think 15% is not the appropriate figure to use in the example I gave, or would you like me to continue my explanation?”
Enough with the guessing games, Ronald. State your case and defend your numbers, if you can.
You seem impatient Will, so rather than explain, I’ll just give you a link:
http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html
And tell you that its figures for Australia match up well with other figures I have and that the database is not set up for the Southern Hemisphere and thinks north here is south. My example was for a new system that will in general have smaller system losses than the average system and was for a system installed to maximize production, not maximise self consumption.
“The number of reactors peaked in 2002 at 444, compared with 427 today. The share of electricity they produce is down 12% from its 2006 peak, largely because of post-Fukushima shutdowns in Japan. As a proportion of all electricity generated, nuclear peaked in 1993 at 17% and has now fallen to 10%. The average age of operating plants is increasing, with the number over 40 years old (currently 31 plants) set to grow quite rapidly.” – The Economist.
Nuclear power is declining and being phased out notwithstanding the rare new build. I wonder which will fade out first? Nuclear power or the cranks that still support it?
@Will Boisvert
This is the kind of thing I mentioned above, as a reason I don’t take you very seriously. The three sites are all brownfield and all in states with cost-plus pricing, and one of them is completing a reactor that was started (IIRC) in 1973. The other two (accounting for 4 new reactors) will probably be finished towards the end of this decade, but there is nothing else on the horizon. The rest of the proposals put forward in the early 2000s have been abandoned or put on hold. It’s highly unlikely we will see any more plants in the US before 2025 at the earliest. And, that’s with brownfield sites and an existing regulatory setup. Australia has none of the requirements for a nuclear power industry – no legal framework, no sites (even under consideration), no economic basis, no usable regulatory model, no construction firms with industry experience, no nuclear engineers or technicians etc etc. Even if the government decided tomorrow on a crash program, we wouldn’t be breaking ground before 2025. So, there’s really no point in putting forward nuclear power as a way to decarbonize the economy in the US, Australia or most other developed countries.
Will fossil plants shut down because of oversupply from subsidized and prioritized solar and wind? Maybe a little, but not much. Those dispatchable generators have to remain in service to power the grid when solar and wind collapse together for long periods (which they assuredly do). At high intermittent penetrations fossil plants will be dealt into the subsidy regime to keep them in business; that’s in the works now in Germany, where regulators are denying utilities’ requests to shutter unprofitable plants because they are needed for grid stability. It’s possible that hydro and geo could displace some fossil, which is great, but I understand that Australia doesn’t have many good hydro and geo sites. An oversupply of wind will lower, not raise, off-peak prices, so that would counteract a shift toward peak usage. So there will likely be no withering of fossil capacity, and certainly no rate rise during off-peak hours.
The economics of subsidized intermittents put the grid into a state of persistent oversupply: you build a lot of redundant intermittent capacity but you can’t shut down much dispatchable capacity, which is needed for grid stability. That over-capacity bids down electricity prices on the wholesale market but, paradoxically, raises electricity costs because intermittent electricity is more expensive than fossil and nuclear built en masse. Those extra costs are paid through overt and hidden subsidies from tax- or rate-payers. We see that paradox unfolding now in Germany, where wholesale electricity prices are declining while retail rates soar.
An analogy would be a government program to build Mercedes-Benzes with tax money and them give them away free to everyone. The price of transportation would go down because of over-supply: everyone has a free car. (And if you’re a Ford dealer, you’re out of business.) But the costs of transportation would go up, because Mercedes-Benzes are pricey rides.
And remember that you can’t get to high solar penetrations by market mechanisms alone without large subsidies. (Or perhaps the negative incentive of Australia’s absurdly high retail grid prices.) Solar oversupply may bite the profits of fossil plants, but it will devour itself first. That’s because solar generators can only sell their overcapacity during the few sunny hours when other solar generators are also selling their overcapacity. Unlike dispatchable plants, they can’t sell during sunless off-peak hours when oversupply eases and prices rebound. No rational entrepreneur will build solar generation knowing that it can only sell into a market where prices are constantly being driven lower by ever more solar generation. The common-mode, surge-and-slump character of intermittent generation guarantees it can never be profitable at high penetration without subsidies.
So that scenario you suggest probably won’t happen at all, and certainly not quickly. I understand that Australian PV has had incredibly high FIT’s—of, what, 40 cents per kwh?—for the last few years. But in all that time they’ve managed to build 3 GW nameplate; with a 15 percent capacity factor, that’s the equivalent of a single 500 MW coal plant over four years. That’s not “heavy lifting”, that’s outright malingering.
You are right that nuclear may require subsidies to compete with fossil, and will certainly require a smooth regulatory and planning regime. That may be difficult without supportive politics. The problem with intermittents is that even when they have lots of political support, and subsidy, they still go slow.
I think you’re too pessimistic, John. There’s no law of nature that says a nuclear build has to take very long to prepare. The United Arab Emirates announced an interest in a nuclear plant in 2008, had a plant under construction by the Koreans in 2012 and will have it running in 2017-8.
Australia could do it faster. It already has considerable nuclear expertise and an extant nuclear regulator. If it doesn’t insist on reinventing the regulatory wheel it could simply accept the AP1000 or the ABWR, both of which are already licensed by the gold-standard US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as safe, and launch a tender. (Skip the EPR, that thing is an albatross.) I just don’t buy that in all of that vast and sparsely settled continent there are no plots that aren’t obviously suitable for a nuclear power plant. You can even build them in the desert with air cooling, with only a five percent hit on output.
Granted, nuclear may require some subsidy to compete with fossil. And politically it’s a hard sell. Maybe committed advocacy could change things. Isn’t that the raison d’etre of the left?
Because it’s not like renewables are getting the job done. At the current build rate, Australia’s solar capacity in 2025 will be 14 GW nameplate; at 15 percent capacity factor that’s the equivalent of 2 large coal boilers. And with the recent subsidy cuts, that pace may slow even further.
The all-renewables approach to decarbonization is failing everywhere. (Except Norway and Iceland.)
@Will Boisvert
Actually, it will lower all prices, peak, offpeak and shoulder, preventing coalfired from getting the prices it needs to stay viable, unless a subsidy is paid, but politically, nobody is comfortable with that. At the moment, most coalfired capacity is owned by the states (Victoria has privatised) so the losses will be carried by the states — an effective indirect subsidy, but that is clearly not maintainable. Inevitably, capacity will have to be mothballed and older plants will go first. Storage will begin to look to be an attractive alternative instead of new plant. Gas fired will carry more of the redundancy but even this will become marginalised and given that gas can be shipped for better returns O/S the temptation to do that will be great.
We do have some good potential geothermal in South Australia and I daresay that may be online by 2030 when even our newest coal plants will be at their end of life.
Let’s talk about subsidies. The IEA’s latest estimates indicate that fossil-fuel consumption subsidies worldwide amounted to $522 billion in 2011. Aid for renewables was about $88 billion. Nuclear energy subsidies are difficult to calculate on a per year basis being so numerous, so various and in many cases of such long standing (and written off long ago ie. paid by the taxpayer).
The following excerpts are from the report, “Nulclear Power: Still not viable without subsidies” – Union of Concerned Scientists.
“SUBSIDIES OFTEN EXCEED THE VALUE OF THE ENERGY PRODUCED
This report catalogues in one place and for the first time the full range of subsidies that benefit
the nuclear power sector. The findings are striking: since its inception more than 50 years ago, the nuclear power industry has benefited—and continues to benefit—from a vast array of preferential government subsidies. Indeed, as Figure ES-1 (p. 2) shows, subsidies to the nuclear fuel cycle have often exceeded the value of the power produced. This means that buying power on the open market and giving it away for free would have been less
costly than subsidizing the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Subsidies to new
reactors are on a similar path…
The most important subsidies to the industry do not involve cash payments. Rather, they shift
construction-cost and operating risks from investors to taxpayers and ratepayers, burdening taxpayers with an array of risks ranging from cost overruns and defaults to accidents and nuclear waste management. This approach, which has remained emarkably consistent throughout the industry’s history, distorts market choices that would otherwise favor less risky investments.”
Click to access nuclear_subsidies_report.pdf
Will Boisvert, have you had enough time to look at the database I gave a link to and see that a capacity factor of 15% for my example isn’t high enough?
And more to the point, do you understand that even if your figure of 17.7 cents a kilowatt-hour was correct, point of use solar is still more competitive than fossil fuels in Australia and is most definitely cheaper than nuclear power?
@ Ikonoclast, on nuclear subsidies,
–The Koplow report for the anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists that you referenced estimates the subsidies at anywhere from $80 to $110 per megawatt-hour. That’s grossly out of line with other sources. This 2008 US Energy Information Agency briefing, for example, put nuclear subsidies at $1.59 per MWh (httpcolon//www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/energy_subsidies.cfm)
It lists subsidies to wind and solar at $23.37 and $24.34 per Mwh, about 15 times higher than nuclear’s subsidies per unit of energy produced. A 2010 update of that report put nuclear subsidies at $3.14 per mwh vs. $56 per mwh for wind. (httpcolon//www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2011/08/03/eia-releases-new-subsidy-report-subsidies-for-renewables-increase-186-percent/)
Your UCS study is not a very credible source. We shouldn’t rely on it for estimates of nuclear costs or subsidies.
@ Ronald Brak
“You seem impatient Will, so rather than explain, I’ll just give you a link:
http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-irradiance.html”
Ronald, your link took me to a website with solar irradiance data. That’ not a suitable proxy for capacity factors, especially for rooftop PV; actual production will be influenced by many other factors, including site shading, shape of the roof, quality of maintenance, etc. Empirical data on kilowatt-hours produced per kilowatt installed take precedence over guesstimates derived from insolation figures per square meter. As I’ve said before, the AEMO estimates for Australian rooftop PV, derived from actual production data, indicate capacity factors of 15 percent or less. If you have data indicating otherwise—production data, not insolation guesstimates—please provide them. If you don’t, then your cost estimates are suspect.
To see the kind of error this leads you into, upthread you told Quokka that the Antelope Valley solar farm in California has a power capacity of 100 watts per meter (derived, I’m guessing, from insolation data). That’s incorrect. Antelope Valley when finished will have a peak capacity of 579 MW from a panel field of 3200 acres, or about 13 million square meters. That’s peak power of 45 watts per square meter, not the 100 watts per square meter that you estimated upthread. So your calculations from solar irradiance data are introducing two-fold errors into your estimates, compared to actual production figures.
The reason for the discrepancy is simple: solar irradiance data is the theoretical limit of power production that actually existing solar energy systems can harvest only incompletely. To substitute solar irradiance for production data thus introduces systematic errors into your estimates.
@ Ronald Brak,
“And more to the point, do you understand that even if your figure of 17.7 cents a kilowatt-hour was correct, point of use solar is still more competitive than fossil fuels in Australia and is most definitely cheaper than nuclear power?”
No, I don’t understand. Can you explain it, please?
Will, rooftop solar competes with the retail price of electricity which is now close to around 30 Australian cents a kilowatt-hour, although it’s hard to know just what the actual figure is. We had some market reforms in the electricity sector a while back and apparently a vital part of them was to prevent Australians from ever knowing exactly how much they pay for electricty. Apparently this is vital for the market forces to work. The only way I know how to work it out is to take the total of my electricity bill and then divide it by how many kilowatt-hours I used. When I did that to my last bill it came to just under 48 cents a kilowatt-hour. But I should point out that’s not representative. I’m not normal.
Anyway, electricity from rooftop solar outcompetes grid electricity which means it outcompetes any form of utility scale generation that supplies electricity to the grid. Even if it cost nothing to generate grid electricity, distribution costs would still make it more expensive than rooftop solar. If a new coal plant was constructed for free by slave labour from juvenile delinquents and powered entirely by coal brought to them by Santa Claus because they were bad, it still would not be able to compete with rooftop solar. And magical free nuclear plants operated by Dobby the house elf and his friends are pretty thin on the ground, so nuclear definitely can’t compete with rooftop solar.
And Will, if you’re only just getting this, you really need to pay a bit more attention.
There are always people in discussions like this going renewables will never work blah blah blah it hasn’t worked in Germany blah blah blah
So because I am in Germany at present I thought I’d let everyone know that today at noon renewables accounted for almost 60% if Germany’s energy use
More info here https://twitter.com/energiewendeger/status/455357439274389504
And yes I know some people will say but it’s not the middle of the night is it, so ha ha you’re still wrong – so yes, storage is the big issue, but as the many technically well informed people on this blog have pointed out, there’s a lot of work being done on that.
And just in case anyone still doesn’t understand this, the reason fossil fuel generation has increased slightly in Germany recently is because they are committed to phasing out nuclear. The target I believe is by 2020. It’s ambitious, and they may not meet it by then, but I believe they will get there. So pro-nuclear ppl and denialists both, please don’t keep trying to use Germany for your arguments.
Sorry nuclear advocates, you had your chance; solar is too cheap now for anyone to bother with nuclear. If you miraculously achieve an 8-year build time, imagine how much cheaper solar will be by then? No one would commit the capital to build a plant with a 35 year payback period. So keep supporting nuclear if it makes you feel good, but know that no nuclear power plant will be built in Australia in the next 25 years.
Also on capacity factors, there seems to be this idea that we need as high as possible. What an odd idea. What do you reckon the capacity factor of demand is? IE, demand on the NEM peaks around 40GW, but how often does it achieve that? I reckon average demand is closer to half that [could work it out, NEM annual demand/[NEM capacity*8760]]. So why is a plant with very high capacity factors desirable? It isn’t.
The problem with electricity supply is matching supply with demand. Traditionally electricity use peaks during the day (very hot days peak later, around 6pm). Solar peaks during the day and reduces the peak significantly. So nuclear could supply the overnight load and the same during the day, running as baseload. But what if we end up with more solar than we need some days, so the value of electricity drops to virtually zero? Then nuclear has to compete with energy storage with free fuel. Good luck with that.
So it’s not helpful to mention greener-than-thou Germany’s new coal fired power stations.
Germany’s green dreams meet harsh reality. Nor that battery storage at 40c per kwh levelised cost is 10X what the Californian authorities say is reasonable. Nor that Australian PV installations went from 343,000 in 2012 to 14,000 so far in 2014. I get it…ignore hard facts and imagine what it’s supposed to be.
@Hermit
I don’t know whether or not it’s helpful. Short sighted and badly informed, yes, but helpful?
@Will Boisvert
Those links don’t work for me. Warning literal is Directory Listing Denied – This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.
Clearly nuclear advocates are motivated to minimise the apparent subsidy. Clearly, the UCS are motivated to maximise the apparent subsidy. The EIA are very conservative (by which I mean right-wing and all for capitalism and established big business) but they do seem to be against energy subsidies in principle. It is not the case, I think, that any of the bodies outright lie in compiling subsidy statistics. However, the field is fraught with difficulty. How do you count government R&D stretching back over 50 years, government involvement in fuel processing and storage solutions, government liability guarantees, cheap government loans, unfunded liabilities (which will fall back on the taxpayer) for clean-ups and decommissioning and many other forms of assistance for nuclear power? To some extent, the results of each study will depend on judgement calls, amortisation rates and a whole host of other factors: in other words the method of costing adopted by each study. A full methodological study would need to be made to assess the costing method of each report.
Having said the above, I think UCS are most motivated to be most thorough and to find every subsidy past and present in the system. Therefore, the UCS study will retain credibility if it cannot be shown to contain mathematical and accounting errors (in its ancillary workings) and if each subsidy it claims to exist can be shown to be real, valid and properly accounted. I am not sure if the UCS study has been peer reviewed. On balance, I find scientists and economic/accounting academics to be far more credible people that business lobbyists. We can point to any amount of evidence (TEPCO, ENRON, Madhoff for instance and more generally the S&L crisis and the 2008 Banking crisis) of the outright dishonesty of capitalist corporations and their hired lobbyists. So, I can tell you who I believe, Will, and it is not you and your sources.