Against my better judgement, I got sucked into a minor Twitterstorm over the weekend. The main outcome was to remind me that, while Twitter is useful in the role of a microblog, providing quick links to, and sharp observations on, more substantial material, it is utterly useless as a venue for discussion and debate.
Update : A large number of nuclear fans were eager to tweet and share snarky responses on Twitter, but only three people were willing to debate the issue here. Thanks to David Michie, Jonathan Suhanto and Ben Huxham who did at least respond. For those concerned that I might have a home-field advantage, I suggested that they post on a site of their own, with links, but no one took this idea up. That says it all for the nuclear “debate” on Twitter, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve muted the lot of them. End update.
In this case, the debate was over nuclear power, and this post from last year. It’s reasonable to ask why I would bother arguing about nuclear power, given my frequently expressed view that it’s dead as a doornail. The problem is that nuclear fans like Ben Heard are, in effect, advocates for coal. Their line of argument runs as follows
(1) A power source with the characteristics of coal-fired electricity (always on) is essential if we are to decarbonise the electricity suppy
(2) Renewables can’t meet this need
(3) Nuclear power can
Hence, we must find a way to support nuclear
The problem is that, on any realistic analysis, there’s no chance of getting a nuclear plant going in Australia before about 2040 (see over the fold). So, the nuclear fans end up supporting the Abbott crew saying that we will have to rely on coal until then. And to make this case, it is necessary to ignore or denounce the many options for an all-renewable electricity supply, including concentrated solar power, large-scale battery storage and vehicle-to-grid options. As a result, would-be green advocates of nuclear power end up reinforcing the arguments of the coal lobby.
Looking at the argument set out above, point (1) is generally taken as self-evident, even though the idea of baseload demand is basically a nonsense, at least until the renewables share gets much closer to 100 per cent.
Point (3) is based on the claim that since France did this 40 years ago, Australia can do it today. The fact that France has long since lost the special characteristics that made its dash for nuclear power possible isn’t even considered. When I looked at the issue a few years ago, I concluded that only China had anything like the characteristics needed, but nuclear power has stalled even there.
Coming back to the Australian debate, it’s striking that it’s still going on, given the negative findings of the SA Royal Commission, established at the behest of the nuclear lobby. But I’ll spell out the problem one more time. Let’s look at the most optimistic possible timetable. The hardest evidence relates to the time between the issuing of a contract to build a nuclear power plant and the connection to the grid. The best-case scenario is that of the KEPCO contract in the UAE, one of the rare cases where the construction phase was completed on time and on budget. There have, however, been unexplained delays in startup. The contract was signed in December 2009 and, on current projections, the first plant (of four) will be connected to the grid ten years after that, at the end of 2019.
So, to get nuclear power going in Australia before 2040, we’d need signed contracts by 2030 at the latest. What needs to happen before that goal can be achieved
* First, obviously, both major parties need to be convinced of the case for nuclear power. That’s highly unlikely but let’s suppose it can somehow be done by 2020
* Next, the current ban on nuclear power needs to be repealed. This ban looms large in the minds of nuclear fans, but actually it’s such a minor problem we can ignore it
* Next, we need to set up, from scratch a legislative and regulatory framework for nuclear power, and establish and staff a regulator similar to the US NRC. Bear in mind that there is essentially no one in Australia with any relevant expertise. I’d be surprised if this could be done in five years, but let’s suppose three
* Next we need to license designs that can be built here and, at the same time, completely remodel the National Electricity Market in a way that makes nuclear cost-competitive with both gas and renewables, while not opening the door for new coal (again, three years would be incredibly optimistic)
* Next we need to identify greenfield sites for multiple nuclear power plants, almost certainly on the east coast, and go through the processes of EIS, Environment Court and so on. In any realistic view, this would never succeed, but let’s suppose another three years.
After all that, we have to find companies willing to build the plants, and organize the necessary contracts. Given the absurdly opimsitic schedule set out above, this would have to be done inside a year.
In summary, even on magical assumptions it would be impossible to get nuclear power going in Australia before 2040, by which time we would already have had to close most of the coal-fired generation fleet. It follows that the only effect of nuclear advocacy is to prolong the life of coal-fired power to the limits of technological feasibility.
In practice, support for nuclear power in Australia is support for coal. Tony Abbott understands this. It’s a pity that Ben Heard and others don’t/
John Quiggin 
@Ikonoklast
While I can be over-optimistic at times, you let your pessimism run away with you. You say “We have made NO progress in stopping the growth of carbon emissions. None, zero, nada, zilch.”
Actually, growth in emissions stopped completely from 2014 to 2016, though they increased again 2017 and probably this year. That’s glass half-empty stuff, but you should get your facts straight.
https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/march/iea-finds-co2-emissions-flat-for-third-straight-year-even-as-global-economy-grew.html
@Mark Bahner: I proposed Germany as a test case. I also put South Australia forward as one, given the high proportion of existing renewables (primarily wind). These are empirical tests where we might be seeing the *economic*, not *technical* limitations of variable & intermittent sources of electricity at play. Note that it isn’t the renewable-ness that hurts the economic model, but the uncontrolled variability which introduces “financial externalities”. The technical limitations come into play further down the track …if we even get there.
So I’m effectively bringing the scientific method into economics (bold, I know). I’ve set the hypothesis; let’s see what the empirical results bring us.
As Martin Connolly points out, the whole problem is caused by the ideological necessity of artificially constructing a “market” for a “product”, where no such thing is naturally possible. This what leads to arbitrage, negative prices etc., a sure sign that something is wrong with the “market” approach. Govt. built and owned was working fine until the neocons got into the act. There is heaps of data to show that the old approach was hugely more efficient, especially if you take into account the training of apprentices, the savings on manpower for “marketing” etc.
On the aluminium industry;
“..the largest consumers of coal-fired power in Australia do not have a sustainable commercial case for investment in their essential input: coal-fired power.”
https://insidestory.org.au/deja-vu-all-over-again/
@JQ Global emissions increased again in 2017. Flatlining emissions is hardly an achievement when we have only 600-800GtC remaining in our carbon budget. The atmosphere only cares about cumulative emissions. Every gram of carbon we put in the atmosphere from now on makes our predicament worse. Carbon emissions continuing at record high levels is no cause for celebration. We should be throwing absolutely everything at this and not excluding one technology or the other because it’s too expensive or we don’t like it. What’s happening in Germany at the moment should give 100% renewables advocates pause. This is not something we can afford to get wrong.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-germany-emissions/
Quote from the Bloomberg article:
“The challenge looks really difficult,” said Andreas Loeschel, head of the government commission monitoring Germany’s energy transition. “There was too much confidence that renewables would do the trick. It’s about getting dirty energy out of the mix.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-germany-emissions/
It’s extraordinary to me, given what’s at stake, that anyone has the confidence to rule out a proven source of zero-carbon energy.
Whilst the ultimate aim is 100% the current and near term aim has to be to push it in that direction. That won’t happen with a requirement that we know beforehand how the entire transition will be achieved and how much we expect it to cost; if anyone thinks they know how the endgame plays out or even much past the more immediate steps, like investing in lots more RE, they are kidding themselves. Everything we do now will change the nature of those future challenges but any expectations we can have, let alone must have certainty is unrealistic.
We should push RE as far as it can go, as the principle, available and deployable option, knowing in broad terms what challenges that is going to present as the proportion grows. I think that, pragmatically, those challenges will not be dealt with so much with foresight and planning – sadly lacking across mainstream politics – but by having so much RE that serious energy companies have no choice but invest in the complementary technologies to make it work at larger scale. As long as they don’t have to, they won’t.
Of all low emissions options, nuclear appears to be the one where long term foresight and planning and promotion are most essential; climate science deniers, no matter how much they profess to like nuclear, are not going to provide it. Emphasising the seriousness of climate consequences is the key argument for persuading the public that putting aside their distrust of nuclear is reasonable but even now we have an Australian government that cannot bring itself to admit the problem is serious let alone commit unequivocally to that 100% target. They want an NEG that will produce no new investments in solar or wind until 2030 but extends the life of existing coal plants – perhaps even financing for new ones. The essential reasons they oppose strong climate policies have nothing to do with the unpopularity of nuclear and I believe those would remain unresolved even if ‘green’ opposition to it vanished.
BTW, Prof Loeschel retweeted his remarks from the Bloomberg article. He’s the head of the German Energy Transition. I reckon he knows a thing or two about transitioning a major industrial economy to 100% renewables. This is credible and should not be dismissed with a hand wave.
Germany has made things unnecessarily difficult by closing down existing nuclear plants prematurely. The result is that these have to be replaced, and ending coal-fired power is necessarily a lower priority.
The opposite mistake is to advocate spending billions per GW new nuclear capacity, at the cost of a substantially greater increase in renewable capacity.
if one of the biggest nuclear proponents, Ziggy Switkowski, says it’s not going to happen in Australia, I think it’s game over for nuclear here.
“the window for GW scale nuclear has closed” and
“With requirements for baseload capacity reducing, adding nuclear capacity one gigawatt at a time is hard to justify, especially as costs are now very high (in the range of $5 billion to $10 billion), development timelines are 15+ years, and solar with battery storage are winning the race.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-has-missed-the-boat-on-nuclear-power-20180111-p4yyeg.html
@JQ But the nuclear capacity is qualitatively different to the renewables capacity. We simply don’t know whether 100% renewables is feasible. It’s never been done before but you insist it is the only path forward. We don’t know what happens to the price of renewables once you push past an 80% share. Some studies suggest the price increases exponentially. They may be wrong, they may be right, but we’re not managing the risk very well if we just assume they’re wrong and dismiss out-of-hand a zero-carbon technology that would cover that last 20%.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/
@Robert Farago I don’t really care what happens in Australia. Apart from South Australia we are so far from a significant renewables share we’re not going to find out if nuclear is needed for a long time. It’s Germany that is pushing the envelope on renewables and it’s looking much more difficult than they anticipated.
Fission fuels supply stuff-all of global energy needs right now and we run out of fission fuels at about 2055 even at this weak contribution rate. Thus fission power is irrelevant to our predicament. The bottom line is that we need to get to 100% renewables for EVERYTHING (stationary electricity, transport, heating etc. etc.) by about 2040 or we fry the whole planet.
There are no alternatives to renewables. It’s renewables or collapse. And it’s ALL renewables by 2040 or collapse. If 100% renewables cannot work for some reason or complex of reasons then we are 100% doomed to collapse.
It’s renewables or bust. This actually simplifies decision making a lot. When are we going to get on with it?
@David Michie I agree the last 20% will be harder and more expensive than the first 80% in a high renewable system. (it could be the last 30% or last 10% will be harder and more expensive, but we won’t know until we get much closer)
Nuclear has the same “base-load” supply characteristic as coal, i.e. reliably running constantly but not able to flexibly & quickly ramp up and down. If we replace our existing 70% coal with 70% nuclear we will still need other dispatchable & flexible generation to match our demand for the last 30%. What zero emission technology do you suggest for that or will we get stuck at 70%?
@JQ has written about the base-load myth before. These days I think base-load is a bug and not a feature. Here is what I wrote recently about why we don’t need base-load in a high renewable supply system.
The use of the term ‘base-load’ can be unhelpful because non-technical readers often confuse it with the term ‘reliability’.
What is ‘base-load’ and do we need it?
Our demand for electricity is not constant as the term base-load demand suggests. In fact our ever-fluctuating demand varies greatly across the 24-hour cycle, between weekdays and weekends, and between extremely hot and cold days and the much more common milder temperature days.
Our existing generation system has always been a mix of base-load (constant and relatively inflexible) generation and other forms of dispatchable (flexible) generation which, together, reliably match supply and demand.
We could replace the base-load generation of coal with another form of base-load generation like nuclear, but we would of course still need dispatchable generation to match supply and demand.
On the other hand, in our future generation system, without a base-load replacement for coal, we could combine very cheap but intermittent renewable generation with a combination of dispatchable generation, storage (pumped hydro, thermal storage and batteries) and demand response to just as reliably match supply and demand.
The features of these tools to help match supply and demand are:
Dispatchable generation – flexibly provides electricity supply, turning it up and down quickly as needed.
Storage – provides both supply (e.g. when water is running downhill in a pumped hydro generator or a battery is discharging) and demand (e.g. when water is being pumped uphill in a pumped hydro generator or a battery is charging).
Demand response – can reduce demand.
Demand response is a little understood but increasingly important technique to help match supply and demand. It works by paying electricity users to voluntarily move their demand from when there is scarce generation and/or higher demand, to times of surplus generation and/or lower demand. We have been doing this with heating residential hot water systems in the middle of the night (off-peak) for decades in Australia because our coal generation is inflexible, and are now offering this option to industrial and commercial customers who have flexibility in when they use electricity.
In our future generation system, the real question is not about meeting base-load demand but whether we can reliably match supply and demand.
from http://www.ethos.org.au/online-resources/Engage-Mail/nuclear-too-late-a-response-to-ian-hore-lacy
David Michie: “we’re not managing the risk very well if we just assume they’re wrong and dismiss out-of-hand a zero-carbon technology that would cover that last 20%.”
How much would it cost to bring nuclear up to 20% of global electricity generation in 2050?
As I’ve pointed out numerous times, nuclear proponents systemically and massively overestimate the actual stability/reliability requirements for the grid; I believe that the empirical evidence is unequivocal that unreliable electricity imposes a vastly-smaller cost than pro-nuke analyses require, but even if you disagree with that point, the raison d’etre of “baseload power!!” analyses is to guarantee reliable electricity… but they never include assessments of the benefits of reliability or the costs of unreliable electricity!
This is ludicrous, fit only for mockery, or for consideration by mental-health professionals.
David Michie: the economics of new nuclear power stations are nonsense assuming baseless capacity factors of 80-90%. As backup for a dominant wind/solar grid, with CFs of at most 20% (the current number for gas peakers in the US is under 10%), the economics are Bentham’s “nonsense on stilts”. It’s not an accident that no truly private risk capital has been available for nuclear reactors for decades.
Baseload. Sod autocorrect. Sod no comment edit function, still.
ANU have published a survey on potential sites for pumped hydro
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-22000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-in-australia
It might sound like pie in the sky but Genex are in the process of converting a disused mine for pumped hydro and combining it with solar and wind to generate a significant quantity of power for the NEM.
http://www.genexpower.com.au/250mw-kidston-pumped-storage-hydro-project.html
@Ikonoclast Fission provides more primary energy than wind & solar, so that’s a strange definition of “stuff all” and there’s enough fissionable material just in waste repositories to power the globe for hundreds of years.
@Robert Farago I don’t know if it’s the last 30% or 10% that will prove difficult but nuclear can be load-following.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx
@Nick Nuclear is currently around 11% of global electricity generation, wind 3.7%, solar PV 1.2%. Given the low much lower capacity factors of wind and solar, and the storage and gas peaker required to cover intermittency, getting to 20% nuclear could be a lot cheaper than getting to 20% wind + solar + storage.
“But this issue is not about Australia, solely. It is about the world. And it is not about 50 percent of current total electricity generation or even 100 percent of current total electricity generation. It is about 100% of all energy used by humans on earth. If it isn’t 100 percent decarbonised in two decades or less then we are toast.”
I guess we’re “toast” then; there’s no way on earth that 100% of human energy is going to come from something other than fossil fuels in two decades or less.
But the funny thing is, no economic analysis of which I’m aware shows anything close to us being “toast” for any plausible amount of warming in the 21st century.
@Collin Street It doesn’t matter how many times you have made you point, all I want to know is will 100% renewables actually work. When the head of the German Energy Transition says “The challenge looks really difficult … There was too much confidence that renewables would do the trick” I reckon you should pay attention.
I also pay attention to James Hansen:
“The notion that renewable energies and batteries alone will provide all needed energy is fantastical. It is also a grotesque idea, because of the staggering environmental pollution from mining and material disposal, if all energy was derived from renewables and batteries. Worse, tricking the public to accept the fantasy of 100 percent renewables means that, in reality, fossil fuels reign and climate change grows.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/06/26/thirty-years-later-what-needs-change-our-approach-climate-change/dUhizA5ubUSzJLJVZqv6GP/story.html
“When the head of the German Energy Transition says “The challenge looks really difficult … There was too much confidence that renewables would do the trick” I reckon you should pay attention.”
Germany is one of the worst countries in the world for solar and wind. So of course they have problems. The insanity of the world is that Germany is going away from nuclear and Abu Dhabi is building 4 reactors totaling 5600 MW (except when they really need it in the summer, and they won’t be able to get enough cooling for full power operation).
@David Michie,
One hundred percent renewables will work. The question is at what level will they work? Will we have a feudal age living standard again? No. Will we have the same wasteful consumption lifestyle that we have right now? No.
Hansen and Monbiot don’t seem to understand peak uranium. Fissile uranium is not plentiful. The studies I have read point out that;
(a) currently, nuclear power provides 4% of the world’s primary energy consumption; and
(b) even at this rate, recoverable uranium will be exhausted as a fuel by about 2055.
When people talk about “the staggering environmental pollution from mining and material disposal” for renewables they forget about “the staggering environmental pollution from mining and material disposal” from running our current economy. Having a global automobile industry manufacturing personal automobiles and providing all the roads for them is a stupendously wasteful way to run a transport system.
Eventually, a fully renewables economy would have to move to a mixture of pedestrian ways, bike-ways, electric bus-ways, and electric mass transit (trams and trains). The energy and materials savings would be enormous. There is no doubt that mining and material disposal is a greater problem under the current system.
A fully electrical economy would be far more efficient. Only about 20% of the fuel burned in an internal combustion engine car is converted into travel (useful work). Whereas an electric engine converts about 80% of the power into travel. Of course, there are losses upstream, for example storage losses in batteries. But if one stops to look at the energy losses upstream in a fossil fuel system, these plus energy conversions losses mean that as little as 10% of fossil fuel is converted into electrical power (thermal inefficiency of the power station plus all upstream mining and transport needed to run the power station. With motive power, as little as 5% of the original energy from the oil well or coal pit gets all the way to actually moving people and stuff. The rest gets used up in drilling, pumping, mining, transporting oil and coal and burning it along the transport chain; not to mention building that infrastructure and all road making.
People forget about these stupendous inefficiencies of the fossil fuel economy when they hyperventilate about the inefficiencies in an electrical powered economy. I would hazard a guess that mining and waste disposal could be a factor of 10 less under a fully electrical economy if it were also coupled with new transport systems as outlined above.
If we stopped building and using private autos alone and the associated roads, that energy and materials saving alone would likely provide for our entire renewable energy systems build-out.
David Michie, thanks but I was after an actual figure. The Argonne lab paper Jonathon Suhanto linked to didn’t address this either so that’s not much help. How much will what you’re proposing cost, based on your understanding of the economics? You could use the figures here as a starting point if you like:
http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/hitachi-gets-cold-feet-over-uks-27bn-nuclear-schem/
I had commented earlier that all utilities should be in public ownership.
I thought I would maybe change this to be that all potential users should have the option of using a publicly-owned utility in preference to a privately-owned one.
However some of the issues raised here about security tend to push me back to thinking about total public ownership.
Nuclear is fine except for the by-products and site remediation needs if it was closed down. There is a huge cost to this.
But even for conventional or renewables generation and transmission there are security issues that, I feel, private owners are probably going to only partially address.
There is a lot of talk about cybercrime, cyber warfare and the coming of AI to that space.
Would you trust a government owned utility or a private utility, with the additional need to make a profit, give dividends, sustain share prices etc, to provide more protection against all this?
When I ask myself that question, I think of the behaviour of pretty much the entire finance sector – locally here in Australia and the damage they did in causing the GFC. I think of the pollution, overt and covert, that has been seen in many places.
Corners WILL be cut to reduce costs, if they can get away with it.
At the moment, regulators are shown to be not doing the job we expect of them.
Yes it could still happen in publicly-owned enterprises, but at least they don’t have to return a profit and they have their funding assured, as long as they have a government sufficiently enlightened to understand that federal spending on this can be provided as a priority above the mere balancing of the numbers.
@Mark Banner: Fair point, but a lot of the developed world (read energy intensive) has poor solar and wind resources. Especially solar.
It’s good to see some consensus emerging here that Germany closing down it’s nukes before coal is bat sh*t crazy.
@Ikonockast There is no peak uranium. There is certainly no peak Thorium. There are vastly more efficient nuclear technologies than today’s PWRs, and many of them can burn today’s waste. For that reason alone we should probably develop the technology.
I agree on all your points about efficiency.
David Michie : Andreas Löschel is not the “head of the German Energy Transition”. There is no such post. If anyone could be so described, it would be Angela Merkel, as the transition is a national policy written into law. Löschel is a professor of energy economics at Münster and director of a research institute, an independent expert worth listening to, among many others.
It doesn’t matter how many times you have made you point, all I want to know is will 100% renewables actually work.
What do you mean by “work”? How reliable do you require the electricity supply to be? These are substantive policy questions as much as they are technical ones, and we can’t just sweep them under the carpet because they’re awkward.
And you really need to keep front-and-centre the reality that there are trade-offs to be made here: insistence that the transition guarantee highly-reliable electricity runs very substantial risks. “10% chance of killing a billion people” risks, and that’s on the low side both for cost and likelihood.
So. Reiterating the question I asked at the top of the post, only this time reminding you that erring too high will quite possibly lead to death on a scale never before seen: how reliable do you require electricity to be to count as “working”?
Once we know what your question means to you, then we can give you a satisfactory answer.
@James Wimberlely: From Andreas Löschel’s website:
“I hold the Chair for Energy and Resource Economics at the University of Münster. Since 2011 I have been the chairman of the Expert Commission of the German Government to monitor the energy transformation. I direct the Virtual Institute Smart Energy North Rhine-Westphalia (VISE). I am a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Report (2010-14, 2017-21)”
In short, he knows a sh*tload more about the German Energy Transition than you, me or Prof Quiggin.
@Collin Street: By “work” I mean completely decarbonise a modern industrial economy within two decades, including electricity, heat, transport, industry and agriculture. I do *not* mean decarbonise Australia’s electricity grid.
Exactly how are 1 billion people going to die? Certainly possible in a 4C world.
@Collin Street: By “work” I mean completely decarbonise a modern industrial economy within two decades, including electricity, heat, transport, industry and agriculture. I do *not* mean decarbonise Australia’s electricity grid.
Look.
If you don’t really have any firm ideas on how reliable energy grids have to be to meet your expectations, then that’s OK! Nobody knows everything. But… the thing about not really understanding a topic well enough to have an opinion or perspective on it, it means you’ve… kind of got nothing to say on that topic, do you? Those who know themselves to be ignorant on some topic should listen and read rather than speak and write.
I asked you a question. If it’s not something you have an answer to at hand, if it’s not something you’ve thought about, then like I said that’s OK. But it’s something you’ve talked about, and talking about things you haven’t thought about — if that’s what you’re doing, and if I’m wrong and you have thought about it then I welcome your answers — is not admirable behaviour, I think.
[I don’t really want to have the conversation move on to another topic until we’ve settled this one; if you don’t mind, can we defer discussion of actual and predictable death tolls until after we properly understand each other’s perspectives on grid stability?]
@JQ: Is doing it this way really an improvement?
On Twitter vs blogging, I think this thread/post illustrates that the platform matters a bit less than JQ thinks and the topic matters more. Nuclear power seems to be a topic that makes discussions about Israel/Palestine look detached, calm and coherent.
Colin Street:
” As I’ve pointed out numerous times, nuclear proponents systemically and massively overestimate the actual stability/reliability requirements for the grid; I believe that the empirical evidence is unequivocal that unreliable electricity imposes a vastly-smaller cost than pro-nuke analyses require … ”
You make two claims here but you fail to provide evidence. You then hector David Michie for not giving an assessment of how reliable the grid needs to be.
The costs of an unreliable grid are huge in my opinion but I would love to Colin’s “unequivocal empirical evidence” that suggests otherwise.
Power blackouts mean spoiled food in homes and supermarkets; excess heat/cold related death; the shutdown of industry etc…
A systemic reduction in grid reliability would obviously send jobs offshore. Who would dare manufacture in Oz if it had third world grid reliability combined with first world wages?
And grid reliability is obviously even more important in a decarbonised economy as vehicles will most likely be running on grid charged batteries.
There are plenty of studies one can google that try to place a value on power outages. Google “Value of Lost Load” to get started.
The first study that Google gave me says what I would consider bleedingly obvious:
“For industrialized countries aiming at energy sustainability through the increased use of renewable energies for power supply, additional efforts are necessary to preserve the level of power supply security, such as grid adaptations, as Pesch et al. (2014) have shown for Germany. All these options involve increasing costs, which must be considered if power supply security is to be maintained.
On the other hand, efforts to maintain or increase the level of power supply security should be balanced against the damage as a consequence of blackouts, because it is obvious that blackouts involve far-reaching consequences for the entire socioeconomic system (Petermann et al., 2011). Obviously, (nearly) every economic process is highly dependent on a safe and reliable supply of electricity.
***www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2015.00055/full#h3
So I ask again, where is this unequivocal evidence that we don’t need a reliable supply of electricity?
@Collin Street: Whatever. There are a wide range of opinions on whether a 100% renewables grid (or economy) is feasible. Some credible people (e.g. Hansen) say it’s not. Some credible people say it is. I don’t know who you are but labelling someone “ignorant” is not something I’m going to stoop to. I’ll simply observe that globally we need to get to zero emissions in 20-30 years, sooner in developed nations. No country has come close to decarbonising their electricity grids using only wind + solar + storage, let alone the rest of their economy. Germany is clearly struggling with the task. Despite this awesome global challenge many countries have decided that one particular source of zero carbon electricity and heat should not be considered. It seems the Swedes are reconsidering. The French already have. Let’s hope Germany succeeds.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/nuclear-revival-talk-could-upend-historic-swedish-energy-accord
You make two claims here but you fail to provide evidence.
It’s interesting, because the very next words, the precise point you cut off the sentence, were “but even if you disagree with that point”. Which is to say, I dismissed those claims from consideration. They’re commentary and context, not something I’m using in the discussion here. My actual claim is is the bit after that, talking about the continued failure of nuclear proponents to do any sort of work justifying their valuation of reliability, a claim that’s central to their conclusions.
Did you just stop reading as soon as you had something you thought you could gotcha me with, or what, here?
Did you just stop reading as soon as you had something you thought you could gotcha me with, or what, here?
You are not making any sense. You are making demands of others while simultaneously making fantastical claims that are obviously false yet in your view “unequivocally true” due to empirical research that you fail to furnish and that presumably exists only in your imagination.
My actual claim is is the bit after that, talking about the continued failure of nuclear proponents to do any sort of work justifying their valuation of reliability, a claim that’s central to their conclusions.
Well, no, you don’t get to make something up and then say something else was your “actual claim”. Besides, there are thousands of studies at your googling fingertips that estimate the costs of an unreliable grid. There is no need for nuclear advocates to do “any sort of work” as regards reliability when others have already done it. Nor when it is bleedingly self evident that a first world country must have a very reliable electricity supply.
It sounds to me like you live in a bubble of first world privilege. I recall Vietnam in the 1980’s. I recall the constant power outages in Saigon, the skinny men dressed in rags who carted about ice blocks, the lack of industry, the massive unemployment and the sheer overwhelming poverty and sense of misery and despair. I remember being warned off certain areas of the country lest I see walking skeletons. A reliable electricity supply was essential to getting Vietnam back on its feet.
Almost everywhere you look across the globe, a lack of a reliable electricity supply means hunger, poverty and death.
Having said that, I don’t think nuclear is economic in Australia based on the available data.
You are not making any sense.
I’m going to sound flippant, here, but: Confusion is a normal part of learning. If you already understood something, you wouldn’t need to learn it; it’s only the things you don’t understand that you need to learn… and the thing about things you don’t understand is that they confuse you. If you throw up your hands in despair when you get told things that “don’t make sense”, if you don’t work through that confusion, you won’t learn.
The above may confuse you. In that case, what you should do is think to yourself, “this confuses me”, and — holding that thought in your head — read the paragraph again.
After you’ve done that, you might want to think about the following:
if I stop telling you you’re wrong, does that mean you were right?
This is good, Ikon “One hundred percent renewables will work. The question is at what level will they work? Will we have a feudal age living standard again? No. Will we have the same wasteful consumption lifestyle that we have right now? No.”
But…. they say; “I recall Vietnam in the 1980’s. I recall the constant power outages in Saigon, the skinny men dressed in rags who carted about ice blocks, the lack of industry, the massive unemployment and the sheer overwhelming poverty and sense of misery and despair. I remember being warned off certain areas of the country lest I see walking skeletons. A reliable electricity supply was essential to getting Vietnam back on its feet.”
And I ask….A reliable energy supply was essential to getting Vietnam – back on it’s feet? When was Vietnam actually on it’s feet?.
And was it essential that Vietnam develop in the way that it did? Perhaps it could have developed in a different way without a ‘reliable’ power supply?
For sure there will be costs to a life lived with ‘unreliable power’ – if such a thing does eventuate – but it is possible and I think probable that the benefits for our health mental and physical will compensate for the loss of retail therapy and the associated dubious benefits of the lifestyle that the current level of energy use has enabled.
This next quote is a prime example of the faulty thinking that leads people to ignore the fact that in a 4C world it is probable that 1 billion people are going to die. ” Almost everywhere you look across the globe, a lack of a reliable electricity supply means hunger, poverty and death.”
I ask… Are you sure it isn’t more likely to be war and vampire capitalism that means hunger poverty and death and not an unreliable supply of electricity?
There are a lot of studies on costs of outages but all these studies base their judgement about value on the capitalist individualist value system and I’m not sure that is useful since climate change needs to be considered as a war and if necessary we should face up to the necessity of the levels of regulation that people endured during the wars since nuclear is obviously not a realistic option.
The unequivocal evidence that we don’t need a reliable supply of electricity is that humans have survived without this for some time.
The unequivocal evidence that we don’t need a reliable supply of electricity is that humans have survived without this for some time.
This is the wrong discussion to have! They haven’t said and won’t say what standard of reliability they’ll find acceptable; I won’t, and you shouldn’t, be trying “is this good enough? is this good enough?” again and again until they proclaim themselves satisfied.
Until David comes back to us and says, “I think that an acceptable standard would be an hour a month average and more than six hours at a time very very rarely” or something there’s really nothing more to say. But… well.
I’m having extreme difficulty even framing a standard of electricity unreliability that imposes a bigger cost than “ten percent chance of a billion people dead”. Almost certainly David is in the same situation. Living in ’80s vietnam may well have been terrible, but even if it had been a satanic hell-pit run by literal balrogs, the people there were still, you know, alive.
The PV and battery system on my grid connected home has been more reliable than the grid – blackouts, including ones long enough to be more than mere inconvenience, occur here several times a year. Some susceptible local businesses have invested in backup generators but are increasingly likely now to turn to PV and batteries in their place. Solar and wind are intermittent and variable and, individually by themselves, might be deemed ‘unreliable’, but within larger systems and with storage and backup they are not. Mostly the charges of unreliability are political/rhetorical rather than technical. These technologies don’t exists in isolation; they are part of a larger systems which, by their nature, deal with changes in the balance between supply and demand all the time. The Hornsdale Reserve (SA’s “Big Battery”) is proving very valuable within the network, with very fast response times to frequency and voltage changes. Ten of those would probably take SA to close to 100% RE most of the time and be a significant source of system reliability for the whole NEM.
Within larger systems wind and solar are not significant sources of overall system unreliability. The systems are going to change to be more dynamic and responsive – different in some ways to steady state, always on, supply style of the past. Whilst lacking the conceptual simplicity of directly replacing coal plants with nuclear, RE heavy systems are not intrinsically unreliable.
Not that nuclear or coal are intrinsically reliable – cooling water and other heat issues for example, can and do take them off-line; rooftop solar contributions were credited recently with keeping the NEM from blackouts when heatwaves caused coal and gas plants to go off-line. Coal and gas will shift to backup roles as RE share grows – and the costs of such plant sitting idle much of the time will only make the incentives for investing in solutions – storage, demand management, efficiency – stronger.
“Some credible people (e.g. Hansen) say it’s not. ”
Hansen is a justly famous climate scientist, but he knows nothing about economics or electricity. He is reliably wrong on these issues.
“@Mark Banner: Fair point, but a lot of the developed world (read energy intensive) has poor solar and wind resources. Especially solar.”
Yes, as an environmental engineer with decades of experience in analyzing energy/environmental issues, it is tremendously painful to me to see people advocating (and even worse, mandating) inappropriate technologies. Examples include wind and especially photovoltaics in Germany, wind and photovoltaics in the U.S. state of New York…and nuclear power in Abu Dhabi (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Australia).
Photovoltaics and wind are particularly dependent on climate and factors like population density. Photovoltaics are ideally suited to warm and sunny climates, and relatively low population densities. In other words, Australia is almost perfect. Wind is ideally suited to places with very high wind speeds (obviously)…but also modern wind turbines need to be out in open spaces. No city in the world wants a wind turbine with 100 meter blades located in the middle of the city.
“It’s good to see some consensus emerging here that Germany closing down it’s nukes before coal is bat sh*t crazy.”
Yes, the German Greens (not to mention Angela Merkel) have really hurt what one would think they stand for…which is protection of the environment. But there’s a lot of craziness going around. There are the nuclear reactors in Abu Dhabi (sorry I keep returning to them, but since I was personally involved, it’s personal). There are the attempts to turn the U.S. states of New York and New Jersey into photovoltaics giants. So much madness! 😦
There have been questions about electricity power system reliability. Here are two sites that can inform the conversation:
https://www.tdworld.com/commentaries/us-power-reliability-are-we-kidding-ourselves
“The average U.S. customer loses power for 214 minutes per year. That compares to 70 in the United Kingdom, 53 in France, 29 in the Netherlands, 6 in Japan, and 2 minutes per year in Singapore. These outage durations tell only part of the story. In Japan, the average customer loses power once every 20 years. In the United States, it is once every 9 months, excluding hurricanes and other strong storms.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268155/ranking-of-the-20-countries-with-the-highest-quality-of-electricity-supply/
In the above website, the U.S. electrical supply is about #20 in the world, behind all the countries listed above. Australia is ranked #21 (right behind the U.S.) in that ranking.
As I understand it, Professor Quiggin is not saying that we should sacrifice a reliable electricity supply. I think he takes the more optimistic view that we can reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere without compromising our standard of living. I share that view.
Time and time again the notion that the switch to renewables will be ruinous to the economy has been disproved. It’s not the source of energy, its the politics of power that presents the major obstacle.
Thanks, Mark Bahner.
I live on a farm and I seem to have much more frequent power outages than is normal for Australia.
At the risk of being derided as having a “capitalist individualist value system”, I think the circa $200 of spoiled refrigerated food that I must throw out each year is appalling.
As I get older, I’m also less happy to have to climb a ladder with a rope and a bucket to get water out my tank, which is what I must do as I don’t have the luxury of mains water.