Wind's latest problem: it . . . makes power too cheap

Bloomberg has a somewhat confusing article about the newest complaint about wind power, but the gist of it is that wind power is an issue for the industry because it brings their revenues down:

After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.

Implicit in the article, and the headline (which focuses on lower revenues for RWE) is the worry that wind power will bring down the stock market value of the big utilities - which is what the readers of Bloomberg et al. care about.

But despite the generally negative tone of the article, it's actually a useful one, because it brings out in the open a key bit of information: wind power actually brings electricity prices down!

windmills (...) operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years

The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers.

Spanish power prices fell an annual 26 percent in the first quarter because of the surge in supplies from wind and hydroelectric production

This tidbit of information, which will hopefully begin to contradict the usual lies about the need for hefty subsidies for the wind sector, has been publicised by EWEA, the European Wind Energy Association in a report on the merit order effect (PDF). This is the name for what happens when you inject a lot of capital-intensive, low-marginal-cost supply into a marginalist price-setting market mechanism with low short term demand elasticity - or, in simpler words: when you have more wind, there is less need to pay to burn more gas to provide the requisite additional power at a given moment.

I've long argued that this was one of the strongest arguments for wind (see my article on The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind from last year), and I've pushed the EWEA people to use it more - so this study (which I was not involved in) is most welcome.

The key thing here is that we are beginning to unveil what I've labelled the dirty secret of wind: utilities don't like wind not because it's not competitive, but because it brings prices down for their existing assets, thus lowering their revenues and their profits. Thus the permanent propaganda campaign against wind. But now that this "secret" is out in the open, it's hopefully going to make one of the traditional arguments against wind (the one about its supposed need subsidies) much more difficult to use... The argument remains true for solar, and to a lesser extent for offshore wind, but the utilities are going to complain much less about offshore wind given that they are investing so much capital in that sector right now. The reality is that wind power brings prices down for consumers, even taking into account the cost of feed-in tariffs or other regulatory support mechanisms, which means that these regulatory schemes are not subsidies, but rather smart corrections of market inefficiencies for the public good.

Ironically, wind provides "utility-like" returns to investors, that is low, stable single-digit returns, as befits a regulated strategic infrastructure activity required for the common good. Utilities and investors should love the sector; but they have been spoiled by market deregulation, which has allowed companies to seek higher returns by under-investing, building merchant gas-fired plants, going for M&A games, and playing on market price volatility and trading - in other words, by behaving as perfect clients for investment banks...

As I've noted many times, the energy sector is one of the best examples of how the financialisation of the economy has brought results that are bad for everybody except the investment bankers and top management; it's also, thankfully, one where reality can most objectively re-assert itself.

And the reality is that you get cheaper electricity with wind - and oh by the way, wind requires no imports of fast-depleting fuels from unstable countries, spews no carbon and provides lots more domestic jobs. And it's a perfect investment for our pension needs - safe, low risk, stable, decent long term returns...

Part of my Wind power series.
Full disclosure: I advise wind developers on their financing needs.

One thing that strikes me is that you seem to object to the basic premise of the article--that utilities have a right to a fair rate of return, and wind, with its strange pricing structure (extreme variability, including negative rates, reflecting payment to the customer for using electricity) represent a problem.

It seems to me that if you add a new, subsidized provider of electricity, and as a result, the other providers cannot make a fair rate of return, then you have a problem. It seems to me that all of the utilities need to earn a fair rate of return. If the rates are not high enough to cover, say, the price of natural gas, then the electricity won't be provided very long. Or if they have to default on their debt, that is an issue too.

There are a lot of ways our electrical systems can go down. One of them is if important parts of that system become bankrupt. If we have a strange system that benefits wind, but not the others, how is that beneficial to keeping our lights on?

One thing that strikes me is that you seem to object to the basic premise of the article--that utilities have a right to a fair rate of return,

There is no right to profit. You have to earn money.

Unlike the fossil fuel industry, renewable energy advocates believe in capitalism and a free market. Thus we do not believe that anyone has a right to make a certain amount of profit - it's up to the producer of a good or service to make that good or service attractive to purchasers, and price it at a rate where it remains attractive and yet still provides a decent profit.

It seems to me that if you add a new, subsidized provider of electricity

As opposed to the old subsidised providers of electricity?

Direct fossil fuel subsidies from national governments worldwide make up about US$500 billion annually, Science Daily tells us. For example, Iran spends $55 billion to keep the local price of petrol down. This does not include indirect subsidies such as invasion of oil-rich countries, simply refraining from taxing fossil fuel companies, and so on. Let's just look at simple handouts.

As of 2004, of the World Bank's funding for electricity generation, 86% went to fossil fuel generated electricity [WB report, p11]

The EU alone gives EUR 6.3 billion to the coal industry annually, EUR 2 billion in grants and EUR 3 billion in preferential loans, and altogether the funding is EUR 13 billion for coal, EUR 8.7 billion for oil and gas, EUR 2.2 billion for nuclear, and EUR 5.3 billion for renewables [EEA report]. Thus, funding for power generation from currently depleting resources is more than four times that for renewables.

So if you want to get rid of subsidies for all energy resources, by all means I am in favour of it. But you cannot argue for a free market in one area and not in another; that is simply protectionism. Just come out and say openly, "I want to protect fossil fuels from competition from renewables, because fossil fuels would lose that competition."

If we have a strange system that benefits wind, but not the others, how is that beneficial to keeping our lights on?

More than 80% of all subsidies go to fossil fuels. If this "benefits wind" power, I'd not like to see what you think disadvantages wind power.

Your comments are the typical political blabber (as is the article). While they're not technically lies they deliberately paint a blatantly untrue "big picture". It is so transparent, but no-one seems to take you up on it, so I'll just sacrifice my time here.

As opposed to the old subsidised providers of electricity?

Direct fossil fuel subsidies from national governments worldwide make up about US$500 billion annually, Science Daily tells us. For example, Iran spends $55 billion to keep the local price of petrol down. This does not include indirect subsidies such as invasion of oil-rich countries, simply refraining from taxing fossil fuel companies, and so on. Let's just look at simple handouts.

And, pray tell, WHAT are they subsidizing ? Iran is subsidizing the price Iranian "voters" pay at the pump, because they know people will be cowards : as long as they can reasonably expect to remain alive and comfortable by not criticizing the constant mass-rapes and massacres the islamic state commits, in order to satisfy the virgin-hungry baboons that their politicians ("imams", "mullah", or any other muslim military rank) recruit as their personal military forces) they will not do so. They will also not really fight, and no targeted mass-movements will spring up and demand the termination of islam, perhaps entirely (and at the very least they will demand separation of the paedophile faith and state). Of course, once the subsidies stops, the dictatorship will faces massive hordes of people that have no choice but to fight for their lives (islam demands people live under dictatorship, just one of it's many "achievements" to be "tolerated").

A corollary is the sad tactical realization of the inevitability of what Iranian politics will eventually lead to : Iran will do what Iraq did. Iran will attempt to eradicate it's own population before it's oil reserves run out (which might be the real reason they're looking to fight Israel, so as to have someone to blame)

Do Iran's subsidies go to electricity producers ? Well, no. Do they go to energy producers ? Again no. They go to the people the Iranian state fears. And if there's one thing they're not used for, it's energy production.

The same goes for your other example. Yes the EU gives 6.3 billion to the coal industry. It gives that amount in order to get them NOT to mine (they need the money to pay for the pensions and benefits of their ex-laborers). Another few billions is given to the municipalities that used to mine coal, and no longer do so, why not include that ? None of it is used to either mine coal, or produce energy in any way.

Incidentally, the EU takes massive amounts of taxes on petrol. The average price of fuel in Europe is currently 5.2 euros per gallon or about 7 dollars per gallon. Companies pay about half the amount of taxes (which still results in a price of nearly 4 euros per gallon).

So you have done what any good politician did : you described reality in such a way, using facts, without even directly lying, so as to evoke an image that is the exact opposite of reality : both Iran and Europe (and anyone else) tax petrolium and fossil energy production in general, in order (amongst other things) to pay people to install wind turbines (yes Iran actually does that), and even paying people to keep them running (because even with construction cost reduced to zero, maintenance costs versus cost reductions still used to lead to a lot of shutdowns. Incidentally on my way to work I pass one of these subsidized European wind turbines. In 2 years, I've never seen it in operation).

So Congratulations. You convinced people that wind is cheap, while it's in reality that wind + free tax money that's cheap. You then claim that states sponsor energy production, so it's fair to compare "wind + free tax money" to "fossil energy X + free tax money" when the reality the article describes is dead simple :

$("wind + free tax money") < $("energy X - taxes going to wind power and others")

Congratulations, I'm sure Obambi could use people like you in government.

Iran is subsidizing the price Iranian "voters" pay at the pump, because they know people will be cowards : as long as they can reasonably expect to remain alive and comfortable by not criticizing the constant mass-rapes and massacres the islamic state commits, in order to satisfy the virgin-hungry baboons that their politicians ("imams", "mullah", or any other muslim military rank) recruit as their personal military forces) they will not do so.

Oh! Oh! Can we play the name change game?

The USA is subsidizing the price American "voters" pay at the pump, because they know people will be cowards : as long as they can reasonably expect to remain alive and comfortable by not criticizing the constant corporate welfare and massacres of other nations people, in order to satisfy the virgin-hungry baboons that their politicians ("republican", "democrat", or any other party label) they will not do so.

See how wonderful the name change game is?

What you have stated about political bodies 'paying off' voters happens all over, as does institutionalized violence.

Rather than rail about what some other nation is doing are you rather certain that your own nations house is in order 1st? In theory, you can clean your own home up, no?

So Congratulations. You convinced people that wind is cheap, while it's in reality that wind + free tax money that's cheap.

And how cheap has the Carter Doctrine of keeping oil flowing out of the middle east for US benefit been?

It strikes me that there are a whole lotta chickens out there looking for roosting places.

I sense a certain dislike of the Iranian regime. I'm not sure what relevance that has to anything I've said. Whatever the motivations of the subsidy, it remains a subsidy. If I give a man $100 it does not really matter whether I gave it him as a gift, payment for a service, or because he's mugging me; he still has $100 in his pocket. Likewise, the Iranian petroleum countries have receive public money.

Public money goes to encourage fossil fuel consumption. Considerably less public money goes to encouraging renewables.

India subsidises petrol, too, as do Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Mexico. Would you suggest these are all tyrannical regimes whose masses are only kept back by the promise of a cheap tank of fuel?

None of which even addresses the subsidies for nuclear; whatever the promises of future technology, currently nuclear energy is used in a way which depletes the finite resources of uranium. Worldwide, subsidies for nuclear, both direct grants and indirect loans etc, far exceed subsidies for renewables.

Worldwide, depleting fuels - fossil and nuclear - account for over 80% of all energy subsidies. That's worldwide, as referenced in my comment above, not merely the EU.

Worldwide.

WORLDWIDE.

Clear enough now?

I suggest you re-read my comment and practice your reading comprehension. Or wander off and try to start a revolution in Iran or something.

Not to forget the oil subsidization by the cost of war and other political involvement.

One thing that strikes me is that you seem to object to the basic premise of the article--that utilities have a right to a fair rate of return, and wind, with its strange pricing structure (extreme variability, including negative rates, reflecting payment to the customer for using electricity) represent a problem.

It seems to me that if you add a new, subsidized provider of electricity, and as a result, the other providers cannot make a fair rate of return, then you have a problem. It seems to me that all of the utilities need to earn a fair rate of return. If the rates are not high enough to cover, say, the price of natural gas, then the electricity won't be provided very long.

What you refer to as a problem, I would call a blessing in disguise. It would be extremely helpful if we could get to the point where coal-burning power plants were uneconomical to operate and therefore might have to reduce operations or close. I don't care if the coal mine that recently collapsed made money or not. Nor do I care if the TVA Kingston Coal Plant (site of the largest coal slurry spill in US history in 2008) made money. I really don't care if BP loses money having to clean up the catastrophic oil spill in the GoM. It would be better for everyone, including the companies involved if these plants/production were big money losers and had been closed down or not-drilled previous to these disasters. I personally hope that the greenest technologies make the biggest profits and the most polluting ones make the smallest profits, because in the end, that is the only way for overall power generation to become less polluting.

Negative rates and extreme fluctuations in the power supply can be eliminated or at least smoothed out, at a cost of course, with the addition of more (pumped or other) storage and by spreading out the locations of the generation equipment, adding offshore wind, etc. Greener power sources can back up each other, wind can be backed up with geothermal or hydropower, or even more expensive solar power or in the future as develpments continues, with tidal power. Also, note that all sources of electricity generation require backup, as no source is 100% reliable, or requires no maintanance.

Each wind turbine/renewable energy facility that we bring online buy us a little bit more time. The less fossil energy we use, the longer our limited supply will last. The more we can reduce our overall demand for fossil energy, the smoother and flatter the energy decline curve will be, and the less catastrophic the consequences. The more we extend our current fossil fuel supply, the more time we have to build even more renewable energy, and in the end, no matter how inadequate the supply of renewable energy might be, it will be our only option. The end of all fossil energy is a fairly long way away, but the beginning of the end (oil) is just around the corner.

wind, with its strange pricing structure (extreme variability, including negative rates, reflecting payment to the customer for using electricity)

Wind does not have a strange pricing structure at all. Its main effect is to dampen prices (ie push them down) and lower the volatility when it is around. When wind is not blowing, you just get back to the "normal" volatility of windless regimes (such volatility caused by the need for very high spot prices to get peakers online). Negative prices are a quirk of the US system where wind gets a tax credit when it produces, meaning that it is still cashflow positive even with negative prices (up to the value of the tax credit) and can thus bid such low prices. In other jurisdictions, you don't see such negative pricing, or you could eliminate it by putting it different curtailment rules.

It seems to me that if you add a new, subsidized provider of electricity, and as a result, the other providers cannot make a fair rate of return, then you have a problem.

You profoundly misundestand my point. My point is to say that in a deregulated regime, where short term profit is the rule, wind tends to reduces profits for all (and benefit consumers). Wind is not competitive in such a regime, because of its fixed cost structure, but bringing in a regulatory regime that makes wind possible is a good thing for consumers, so is smart regulation.

No if other producers say that they don't want competition anymore, and would rather have stable returns, then let's by all means change the regulatory regime in order to make priduction decisions based on something else than short term marginal cost. In such a scenario, wind, with its lower long term average cost, would get even more development. And producers with baseload production, like coal or nukes, would actually make even less money because they would get the cost of production + regulated margin, rather than (often higher) spot prices...

But the utilities want ot have the best of both worlds - the spot pricing, and the lack of competition from cheaper, but capital intensive, wind.

Negative prices do occur also in European markets (e.g. EEX, APX), though up till now it occurred only a few times, mostly at night when the consumption of energy is very low. Wind power (and other renewables) receives either a fixed feed-in tariff, or a price premium (e.g. green certificates), meaning that it is cashflow positive, even with negative prices.

By the way, also in systems without wind or solar, negative prices could occur, because of inflexible power sources, especially nuclear. Even for coal it is often not economical to switch off because of a few hours during the night with (moderate) negative prices.

Though negative prices sound strange, they are not an evil thing. They provide an incentive for more flexible power, flexible loads, storage, better interconnections with neighbouring countries (or states), locating wind power at different sites, which wind speeds are possibly uncorrelated, etc.

yes. Negative prices happen when available power sources are hard to cut. In the case of wind, this happens only because regulations mandate full offtake. This is needed to make the revenue flow predictable, given the inherent unpredictability of the production flows; but at some point in the level of penetration, it is likely that this rule will need to be relaxed. It i technically very easy to cut wind off, and that flexibility may become valuable in itself at times, and could be remunerated in ways that compensate for the loss of revenue from the sale of kWh.

I note that Vestas is already advertising the ability of their turbines to provide the equivalent of "spinning reserves" by pointing out that when wind blows, the ability of their turbines to change output is very high, and the rate of change is actually faster than for gas plants...

My point is to say that in a deregulated regime, where short term profit is the rule, wind tends to reduces profits for all (and benefit consumers). Wind is not competitive in such a regime, because of its fixed cost structure, but bringing in a regulatory regime that makes wind possible is a good thing for consumers, so is smart regulation.

Wind is not competitive because it costs more. But given a regulatory regime where it is subsidized it drives down the costs of competitors. It seems very unlikely that wind drives down the costs of competitors long term by more than it costs to subsidize wind.

The competitors are already competing with each other. If wind lowers ROI of competitors then some competitors will exit the market until remaining competitors make sufficient ROI.

Your argument just sounds like spin for wind. Now, I happen to favor wind development. We need to move away from fossil fuels for a variety of reasons. But it is just irritating to read a subsidized industry make a fallacious argument to support its subsidies.

This is the International Energy Agency (hardly a pro-wind outfit) on long term average costs, in their 2008 Energy Outlook:

Wind is not more expensive. Gas is more expensive everywhere, yet gets built in preference to all technologies in our current deregulated regimes.

Unfortunately, we (and especially you) don't have deregulated regimes. The electricity sector, especially in the US, could just as well has been run by Soviets.

Wind is more expensive, about twice the levelised cost of coal and nuclear. You can do the calculations yourself - just look up levelised cost on wikipedia for the formula and insert realistic parameters and compare. (Off-shore wind is twice that again.) Something that is more expensive and require more work can never benefit consumers - if you weren't a socialist you'd realise this.

You combine a naive but very antagonistic and bitter socialist outlook with a very twisted view on energy alternatives, and the combined result is, quite frankly, awful.

Wind investments hurt wind more than anything. Why? Because wind in a grid move more or less in tandem, so each new wind turbine lower the spot price on 90% of the electricity produced by all previous turbines. But baseload electricity's average spot price is just hurt some 30% of the time. Volatility certainly increases with wind, and so the need for peaking power and grid improvements - external costs for many wind operators.

Today, nuclear is our best hope for fossil free electricity. Wind is merely a psychological hindrance on the path to that insight.

Wind is more expensive, about twice the levelised cost of coal and nuclear.

Not, it really isn't. Wind costs about $2/W. Nuclear has a capacity factor 3x that of wind, but also costs at 2x-3x as much in capital expenditures, and has higher operating costs. Old, dirty coal is cheap, but new coal plants are just as expensive as wind & nuclear per average watt generated, and cost more to operate than either.

As you can see in Jeromes graph, US nuclear costs are higher than in Europe, mostly due to a hefty regulatory burden - that's simply a choice you have made.

Nuclear costs will fall at mass production, a potential wind seems to have exhausted by now. I don't agree wind operating costs are lower - AFAIK, they are about the same. Also, nuclear plants have some 3-4 times longer life and don't require the same grid upgrades.

You assume that nuclear costs will fall with mass production, however I do not see mass production coming because it is simple too expensive so nobody will invest, so there will be no mass production. All sources I read put wind (including balancing posts) at more or less the same level as nuclear without a lot of insecurity about the investment.

Grid updates will actually be beneficial for nuclear as well as wind and will add redundancy and security.

Also in Europe every country has his own rules and regulations, his own commissions to earn a living his own standards for environmental etc. etc.

Also Nuclear (at least in the Netherlands)will require big upgrades of the network as the capacity at the nuclear site will increase from 500 MW to 2000 MW and this will no go over the same lines.

Well, as I have mentioned, with politics and bureaucracy you can make nuclear as expensive as you wish, but on a fundamental level, with reasonable safety and regulations, nuclear is a lot cheaper and scale better. Wind is arguably limited around 20% penetration, while nuclear is not.

Sure nuclear needs grid upgrades at new sites, but a wind farm will need three times as much grid capacity for the same average output, for obvious reasons.

on a fundamental level, with reasonable safety and regulations, nuclear is a lot cheaper and scale better.

There's no question that there's a theoretical possibility. OTOH, we're clearly not very close to that - see my other post about people's objections.

Wind is arguably limited around 20% penetration, while nuclear is not.... a wind farm will need three times as much grid capacity for the same average output, for obvious reasons.

I would disagree. There are no studies that show that kind of ceiling. Instead, there are studies that have identified a floor - IOW, they've validated that certain levels are feasible. Those studies have only looked at 20 and 30% (here's one that validated 30%: http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/ewits.html . The ceiling has not yet been found - I would argue it's around 50-60%.

US nuclear costs are higher than in Europe

And yet, many in Europe want to phase out nuclear power, due to costs not counted in conventional accounting.

Nuclear costs will fall at mass production

That's certainly a theoretical possibility, but it hasn't happened yet.

a potential wind seems to have exhausted by now

Wind costs are continuing to fall. Like nuclear, there was a temporary rise due to the recent bubble in commodity costs, especially construction related.

I don't agree wind operating costs are lower - AFAIK, they are about the same

Nuclear operating costs in the US are about 1.9 cents/KWH, and wind operating costs about 1 cent/KWH.

nuclear plants have some 3-4 times longer life

That often requires additional investment. In any case, the time value of money means that doesn't make much difference to current costs.

don't require the same grid upgrades.

Those aren't that expensive.

And yet, many in Europe want to phase out nuclear power, due to costs not counted in conventional accounting.

No, nobody seriously does that. Those who use that argument are just using it instrumentally as a part of their anti-nuke arsenal, without any real regard for whether it is true or not. The real motivation is either attachment to a social movement where "renewables" are considered high-status, or on an irrational fear of nuclear disasters.

Nuclear costs will fall at mass production

That's certainly a theoretical possibility, but it hasn't happened yet.

No, because mass production hasn't happened yet. However simplifications and improved designs has made nukes cheaper and more powerful, but those cost reductions has been used for increased security design and regulatory burdens. This is more or less a political choice and it leads to many more deaths on average as it maintains coal deaths while reducing nuclear deaths from 0 to 0.

Wind costs are continuing to fall. Like nuclear, there was a temporary rise due to the recent bubble in commodity costs, especially construction related.

Wind costs plateued in 2005. They should certainly continue to fall somewhat, but not very much. IAE seems to agree, according to Jeromes graph.

Nuclear operating costs in the US are about 1.9 cents/KWH, and wind operating costs about 1 cent/KWH.

Does that include taxes or subsidies? The comparisons I have seen for Europe put them on par. Besides, we cannot be really sure how well the current turbines age.

nuclear plants have some 3-4 times longer life

That often requires additional investment. In any case, the time value of money means that doesn't make much difference to current costs.

Yes, but not much additional investment, and those additional investments often include capacity upgrades. It makes quite a bit difference - if you calculate levelised costs, you'll see it.

don't require the same grid upgrades.

Those aren't that expensive.

Not for low penetrations, no.

many in Europe want to phase out nuclear power, due to costs not counted in conventional accounting. - The real motivation is either attachment to a social movement where "renewables" are considered high-status, or on an irrational fear of nuclear disasters.

I agree there's some group-thinking going on there, but I think there's more than that. The European Green movement started as an anti-war movement, and a lot of that was anti-nuclear weapons. Now, the link between nuclear power generation and weapons is complex and sometimes indirect, but it does exist. Weapons came first; electrical generation was promoted in part as a way to amortize weapons R&D over a wider base; uranium was developed in preference to thorium because of uranium's greater usefulness for weapons building; and uranium enrichment can be used for both generation and for weapons, as we see in Iran.

So, when I say that Europeans feel that there costs not counted in conventional accountin, I mean that in a broad sense.

simplifications and improved designs has made nukes cheaper and more powerful, but those cost reductions has been used for increased security design and regulatory burdens.

Could you give more detail, and/or provide sources/links?

Wind costs plateued in 2005. They should certainly continue to fall somewhat, but not very much

I see no reason why they won't continue to fall as they have in the past. Turbines continue to grow size & MW wise, and improvements continue in materials; design; and manufacturing engineering.

Nuclear operating costs in the US are about 1.9 cents/KWH, and wind operating costs about 1 cent/KWH. - Does that include taxes or subsidies?

No, those are pure costs. They're current figures from the Nuclear Energy Institute, American and Wind Energy Associations.

The comparisons I have seen for Europe put them on par.

I'd be curious to see those. I suspect the European numbers would be higher than the US NEI numbers, because the US nuclear industry runs a mighty tight ship. OTOH, wind operating and maintenance really is very cheap.

Besides, we cannot be really sure how well the current turbines age.

Engineering forecasts aren't that hard to do. There are occasional outliers (Vestas, in particular had some early problems), but they'll typically show up in "infant mortality", meaning that problems will show up fairly early.

nuclear plants have some 3-4 times longer life - That often requires additional investment. Yes, but not much additional investment, and those additional investments often include capacity upgrades.

Yes,capacity upgrades are a bright spot for the industry - relatively very high $-ROI.

any case, the time value of money means that doesn't make much difference to current costs. - It makes quite a bit difference - if you calculate levelised costs, you'll see it.

It's easy to see the difference: just do a present value payment calculation for, say, 8% interest and 25 years vs 60 years: the payment required only goes down by 14% when you extend the amortization to 60 years. This makes it clear that the additional life isn't nearly as important as an intuitive, straightline calculation would suggest. When you add in the 5-10 year planning & construction timeline, the difference becomes even smaller.

don't require the same grid upgrades. - Those aren't that expensive. - Not for low penetrations, no.

Certainly the marginal cost will rise for higher penetrations, but not as much as you might think. Geographical dispersion is very effective at reducing variance, and DSM will only expand: think 230M EVs, mostly charging when rates are low, and eventually even sending power back to the grid when prices are especially high. Yes, I know that sounds like science fiction, but the tech for it is all here now - it just requires a little development, mostly standards setting and a bit of infrastructure building which is already in progress. Shouldn't we be "thinking outside the box" here?

One problem with electric power price comparisons is that wholesale prices for electric power vary. Wind's problem is that it doesn't produce the most when wholesale prices are highest. Wind electric is therefore worth less per kwh on average as compared to baseload power and wind electric is especially worth less as compared to peaker electric power plants that operate only when electric power prices are high.

True. This is a problem for both wind and nuclear (wind's output is only slightly higher at night).

It's important to keep in mind: the current peak in demand is purely artificial. It's an artifact of residential flat pricing. That can, should and will change.

Utilities are now mostly compensated as a % ROI for capital investment. They don't get compensated for DSM, so it's badly underutilized. This too can be changed - it was changed long ago in California, and it should change elsewhere.

"a minimum 10.3% return on equity for Exelon/ComEd and automatically increasing customers’ rates when profits fall short of that mark. "

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=38097&ba=1

My point is to say that in a deregulated regime, where short term profit is the rule, wind tends to reduces profits for all (and benefit consumers). Wind is not competitive in such a regime, because of its fixed cost structure, but bringing in a regulatory regime that makes wind possible is a good thing for consumers, so is smart regulation.

This paragraph seems contradictory to me (although it could easily be that I'm misunderstanding). Unsubsidized wind in a fully deregulated regime is either competitive or it's not. Over the course of a year, wind-generated electricity must be priced to recover the cost of generation, including repayment of capital plus interest. If it's competitive on price, then whether it affects the profits of other generators is subject to a variety of factors, the most important ones having to do with the structure of the market:

  • If all power has to be bought and sold in a short-term market -- ie, like California's experiment -- I'll concede your point. Wind can be reasonably forecast an hour ahead or a day ahead. Low-cost wind power will bring down the average market-clearing price and reduce other generators' profits. OTOH, while a short-term-only market may produce a lower average price for consumers, it will also produce much greater variability in price. However, many economists believe that a short-term-only power market is inherently unworkable.
  • If most of the power is bought and sold in long-term contracts -- like the PJM exchange -- then the wind-generator faces additional complications. If the wind generator confines itself to the short-term market, when it can accurately predict power, there will be hours when the wind generator has lots of power available for sale, but there is little spot-market demand. If that happens regularly, capital costs must be spread over lower volume, increasing the wind generator's price. If the wind generator sells long-term contracts, there will be hours when it is obligated to deliver power, but the wind's not blowing, so the wind generator must buy power from someone else in the short-term market at prices higher than it's regular generating costs.

Well if that doesn't argue for a well thought out regulation nothing does. Coal, the base load fuel of choice in the US, is underpriced do to legislation and regulations heavily lobbied for by the coal industry which near completely discounts almost all long term costs of coal. Nothing about the current market is fully deregulated and to insist that the systemic advantages coal has greased into the the current system constitute an unregulated market would be the most bald faced of lies. Old coal isn't near as cheap as it is priced. Gas is another can of worms--thriving because of short market bias that completely discounts the long term--damn that looks to be the same can of worms. What do you know ?- )

Negative prices are a quirk of the US system where wind gets a tax credit when it produces, meaning that it is still cashflow positive even with negative prices (up to the value of the tax credit) and can thus bid such low prices. In other jurisdictions, you don't see such negative pricing, ...

Not just the US. In the Nord Pool spot market, prices below zero have been allowed since last November, to deal with Danish wind.

A negative price floor has been in demand for some time - especially from participants trading Elspot in the Danish bidding areas. In situations with high wind feed in Denmark there have been incidents where sales bids have been curtailed at price EUR 0. Curtailment of sales may give an imbalance cost for the affected seller and thus creates a willingness to pay in order to deliver power in the market.
http://www.nordpoolspot.com/Market_Information/Exchange-information/No16...

One comment above already covers profits: Nobody has a right to profits. As for subsidies, apart from the direct cash subsidies, most countries do not force the industry to internalize its very heavy externalities. I agree: lift all direct subsidies; and force internalisation of all costs. Wind will look even more appealing.

Nobody has a right to profits.

Well, from the 1930s until relatively recently, many utilities in the US did. State regulators were willing to guarantee a fixed return on the rate base, which included labor costs, depreciation, interest on debt, etc, etc. In return, the utilities guaranteed that they would provide power to anyone who requested it (with some provisos about locations where the cost of extending the grid exceeded a certain level), that they would not play favorites on pricing, that they would maintain the necessary rolling reserves to assure reliability, build and maintain a transmission network, operate the IT systems to process millions of monthly bills, etc.

While this structure was originally pushed by large business customers seeking reliability and stable prices, residential consumers have done very well under it.

One thing that strikes me is that you seem to object to the basic premise of the article--that utilities have a right to a fair rate of return, and wind, with its strange pricing structure (extreme variability, including negative rates, reflecting payment to the customer for using electricity) represent a problem.

In my case I actually object to the notions that "utilities" corporations etc... should have "rights" that supercede the right of the people to not be subjected to the monopoly and control exerted by those companies. The other very real issue is what exactly is a "fair" rate of return. Perhaps there are things such as health care and access to energy that should be completely outside the profit motivated universe.

But despite the generally negative tone of the article, it's actually a useful one, because it brings out in the open a key bit of information: wind power actually brings electricity prices down!

LOL! that is the epitome of irony. However perhaps in a contracting and shrinking global economic paradigm that is exactly what needs to happen to facilitate transition away from the destructive forces of capitalism.

Perhaps in the societies of the future communities will come together and build energy networks for the benefit of their societies much like the spirit of sharing that was tapped for helping a neighbor build a barn. They will be based on mutual sweat equity and the benefits will be shared equally. I know, I know, I can still dream can't I?

Isn't this about having clean, renewable energy?
If we are still living in a "rate of return" world, we are screwed anyhow.

A while back, there was a post from someone about the number of idle wind turbines at a wind farm he passed on the way to work. Gail was attacking wind power as being unreliable and suggested that these turbines were down for maintenance. That was her tack then.

I responded that most of these systems likely were idled due to load requirements and utility's cost/price structuring, and that there have been some reliability issues that are solvable, same as any other electricity source.

At times, Gail has critisized wind because it "can't reproduce itself" and is therefore unsustainable.

She has repeated arguments regarding wind's intermittancy and the "storage" problem.

Now, Gail (burning the midnight oil, as it were) seems to agree that wind is too cheap (works too well?), unfairly subsidized, and unfair competition for fossil based sources of electricity, and that this denies investors a "fair return", which is their "right".

Perhaps she's just playing a Devil's Advocate, forcing posters to continue to show why renewables are a really good idea.

Methinks that it is time for Gail to come clean as to the real (and legitimate) reasons for her extreme bias toward wind energy, and renewables in general, lest she becomes known as "Drill Baby Gail".

As a journalist, Gail does a good job. She lays out a thesis, presents various sides to the story, and doesn't get too excited.

We need the Devil's Advocates, and if as you suggest she is, more power to her.

An oil company flew Gail to a foreign country (not economy class, I'm sure), put her up in a hotel, and gave her a guided tour of their facilities, so she could write an... impartial article about them.

So far as I know, no wind power company has offered her the opportunity to travel and see their facilities and write impartial articles about them.

Jerome, could this be part of the finance package?

To be fair, I think Gail's bias is more to do with the premise that we are highly reliant on oil and it's products and are therefore doomed when the supply declines. If in fact, we are not so dependent on oil, then the doom idea goes out the window.

The conflict arises from a logical paradox - if you warn someone about something dangerous, so that they avoid it, was the warning wrong? If you tell people there may be solutions to a serious problem, will they become complacent about the problem?

Making the point that wind energy won't save us from peak oil, that its EROEI is too low, or that we should focus on, or invest in other mitigations is one thing.

Exaggerating its faults, holding it to a different/higher standard than other sources of electricity, implying that it is subsidized disproportionatly, or agreeing that it produces electricity too cheaply (and this is somehow "unfair" to utilities) is another matter entirely.

"If you tell people there may be solutions to a serious problem, will they become complacent about the problem?"

There's enough information here on TOD to scare the crap out of anyone seeking clarity. I seriously doubt that giving wind energy an unbiased hearing here will create much complacency. An inaccurate spin on alternatives and their real capabilities isn't informative, it's manipulative. I hope that TOD can hold itself to a higher standard.

The conflict arises from a logical paradox - if you warn someone about something dangerous, so that they avoid it, was the warning wrong? If you tell people there may be solutions to a serious problem, will they become complacent about the problem?

It is clear that if it is certain something dangerous will occur unless it is avoided, then the warning was not wrong. So why is it a paradox?

Do you mean to say that, if one warns against something one thinks may happen and it does not, was the warning wrong?

If telling people about solutions to a serious problem leads to complacency, then that is because the informees are not rational.

It's difficult to reconcile logic with irrational behaviour.

"strange pricing structure (extreme variability, including negative rates, reflecting payment to the customer for using electricity) represent a problem"

That may be aproblem for the fossil fuel based utilities, but is just great to people wanting to implement eletricity storage.

These claims are amazing and need a more sophisticated analysis than the linked pdf. Remember wind power around the world gets one or more of
- feed-in tariffs
- sale of carbon credits
- compulsory purchase
- production tax credits
- green quotas.

Something cannot be right because windpower to my knowledge is the only energy industry that sometimes has negative prices. That is the producer pays the consumer to take the product away in order to keep the subsidies coming. If a new island arose out of the sea any power system would have to include backup power in order to shadow the fluctuations in wind. Without the benefit of a large and flexible pre-existing power system new wind may not be so cheap.

I suggest as a way of testing the 'merit order' effect that wind producers receive none of the above subsidies but instead bid to supply power to the short term (10 minute and half hour) spot market. The prices they quote should cover their expected long term average costs including a return on capital. I suspect they may struggle to compete even when coal and gas burners pay carbon taxes which makes their bids higher. Try that experiment then we'll see if wind power is truly competitive.

windpower to my knowledge is the only energy industry that sometimes has negative prices. That is the producer pays the consumer to take the product away in order to keep the subsidies coming.

As noted above, this is a quirk of the US regime, with its tax credits which are unrelated to market conditions, and thus wind can still be cash flow positive as long as the negative price does is not as big as the tax credit. This can be dealt with with simple regulatory changes (no negative quotes allowed from wind, or different curtailment rules)

The prices they quote should cover their expected long term average costs including a return on capital.

You completely fail to understand market pricing. Market prices are based not on long term average costs, but on short term marginal costs. That's the whole point of market prices. If wind could compete on its long term average price, it would not need support or subsidies at all, as it is price competitive - maybe not as cheap as existing coal and nuke, but definitely cheaper than gas-fired plants...

But we are in market regimes, and the reality in Europe and North America is that markets will build ONLY gas-fired power plants because that's what makes it possible to make profits in the short term. Nuclear and coal are not being built today - and they won't be under "pure" deregulated conditions, even though they are cheaper than gas-fired power on average. They suffer from the same problem as wind - they are more capital intensive than gas, and thus have trouble covering higher fixed costs in a spot market envrionment driven by short term variable costs...

Boof, I'm in your corner here. I always think that it's redundant to both mandate the purchase of a product, and then subsidise it. This happens in the US with ethanol, and almost everywhere with wind.

The first step is thus to remove one or other of first purchase or feed in tariffs, but ideally both.

It is clear that wind produces lots of energy when when it is least needed, and remove the mandate and subsidy, and its pricing will reflect that. ( It is a carbon neutral source, so it has earned its right to that credit). This reality will show that to be effective, wind needs to be coupled with either storage, or discretionary loads. Presently, pumped hydro is the only large scale storage, and is very expensive to build, and geographically limited.
A more interesting approach are the discretionary loads, particularly things like over cooling of cold storage, over heating of buildings/hot water, or over cooling the buildings (in summer).

Overall, what needs to happen is increased use of time of day pricing for all customers (it is not available to residential customers in US and Canada, and often only to large industrial customers). When they have access to cheap off peak electricity, they will start to use it.

One other part of the wind power story I have never seen reported, but maybe someone else here has, concerns the business of buying wind power. Many utilities offer customers the option of buying wind power, and some third parties, like Bullfrog Power in Canada do the same. But it seems to me that they are all trading on total kWh on a monthly basis. In reality, it should be on an instantaneous, or more practically, 10-15 min interval.. So, you can't buy wind in the middle of the day if there is no actual wind production -you are actually buying from another source, or storage. But the premium you paid is going to the wind producer, and the swing producer, or storage operator, is getting nothing, even though they are the one enabling you to "use" wind energy when there is no wind.

Again, if the wind producers can only get their premium when they are actually producing, and have to add/buy storage if they want the high value peak rates, then the real economics become clear, and he cost of building wind energy, if you have to build accompanying storage or dispactable generation (gas turbine) will double. Just ask any of grid person - the cost of their battery storage is likely equal to or greater than their wind turbine (though not the solar cells).

It always comes down to the simple fact that the more you "protect" these industries from the realities of the market they are selling into, the bigger the house of cards you are building. Just look at the painful wind back of subsidies for solar industries in Spain and Germany, whole industries existed purely on the basis of subsidies, and now that the taxpayers can't afford it, they are dissappearing, wasting much of the money that was invested.

End all the subsidies, put on a simple, but meaningful carbon tax (say $100/ton) and then leave all the players to go from there. Let them game a carbon tax instead of subsisidies, at least the field is level then.

Presently, pumped hydro is the only large scale storage, and is very expensive to build, and geographically limited.

Actually tiny Switzerland is currently building over 4GW of pumped hydro because of inflexible nuclear power plants nearby and not because it is interested in storing wind electricity generated farther away somewhere on Europe's coast.

I always think that it's redundant to both mandate the purchase of a product, and then subsidise it

You mean like forcing taxpayer to pay for organizations such as EURATOM and IAEA to promote nuclear power?
In fact Austria without nuclear power pays almost double as much on EURATOM than on its 995 MW wind power.
http://www.igwindkraft.at/index.php?mdoc_id=1009697

Or having laws forcing consumers to pay for the breathtaking capital costs of a new nuclear power plant in advance?
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837

Or having taxpayer backed loan guarantees for nuclear power?
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15545418
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aC7VY11v6aMw

Or having taxpayers to pay over $159 billions on nuclear R&D?
Nuclear power has dominated government spending on energy research and development, accounting for over US$159 billion between 1974 and 1998. Although its share has fallen, it still accounts for 51% of the OECD energy R&D budget:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2001/fig-htm/frasf6-h.htm

Or having taxpayers to pay over $100 billions for decommissioning of nuclear power plants?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower

Or having taxpayers to pay billions on ultimate repositories?
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2008/aug/27/nuclear_surge_needs_waste...

Just look at the painful wind back of subsidies for solar industries in Spain and Germany, whole industries existed purely on the basis of subsidies, and now that the taxpayers can't afford it, they are dissappearing, wasting much of the money that was invested.

This is a blatant lie. Besides that these industries DO in fact LOWER TAXES and feed-in-tariffs are not paid by the tax-payer but by the consumer and actually make a minuscule amount of the electricity bill. According to the facts the feed in tariffs lower the electricity prices more than what the consumers pay for them:

Photovoltaic factories in Germany pay more taxes than what they indirectly receive in feed-in tariffs - not to mention that they reduced the German costly unemployment rate:
http://lohnsteuer-kompakt.de/redaktion/steuereinnahmen-der-solarindustri...

And the German wind power industry not only generated over 90,000 sustainable, tax-paying jobs and Germany exports 83% of its wind-turbines with a tax-paying PROFIT, wind power actually does lower electricity prices in Germany:
http://www.wind-energie.de/en/news/article/wind-energy-made-in-germany-i...
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/art271,2147183

And talking about ACTUAL subsidies: With the $180 billion spent on AIG and its bonuses, one could have financed 600 Oerlikon thinfilm photovoltaic factories, which produce 960 GW in 10 years.
http://www.oerlikon.com/ecomaXL/index.php?site=SOLAR_EN_press_releases_d...

Presently, pumped hydro is the only large scale storage, and is very expensive to build, and geographically limited.

Actually tiny Switzerland is currently building over 4GW of pumped hydro because of inflexible nuclear power plants nearby and not because it is interested in storing wind electricity generated farther away somewhere on Europe's coast.

Not all countries have the same hydro potential that mountainous Switzerland, That Switzerland considers building some additional pumped hydro infrastructure does not negate the assertion that pumped hydro is geographically limited.

In fact Austria without nuclear power pays almost double as much on EURATOM than on its 995 MW wind power

Having an international organisation located in a country usually results in increased influence, imports of well qualified jobs and opportunities for development clusters. The French pay for the Strasbourg Parliament, the Belgian for the European Commission, the Germans for the ECB. If Austria does not want Euratom anymore, I have no doubt that lots of European countries will apply ...

having laws forcing consumers to pay for the breathtaking capital costs of a new nuclear power plant in advance?

It is an investment for the future; exactly like paying a feed-in tariff to currently non-economical solar power plant in the hope that it kickstarts an industry that will be eventually price competitive. If I had the choice where to put my money, I would definitely choose the nuclear option

Or having taxpayer backed loan guarantees for nuclear power?
...

And the German wind power industry not only generated over 90,000 sustainable, tax-paying jobs and Germany exports 83% of its wind-turbines with a tax-paying PROFIT

I don't know of any nuclear power plan loan guarantee that has actually been exercised. Therefore, no costs for the taxpayer.

I put these two quotes together because a lot of these exports are possible only through the support of state-linked Export finance entity. Even Jerome admitted that it was an essential part of his successful financing of windmills in Aruba. From the horse's mouth :

The interesting question is: how did we find $60 million in December 2008 for a project in what is hard to call a priority location for any hard-pressed European bank (and with clients who are small developers - while highly experienced and competent, they could not be described as strategic customers, an increasingly strict requirement these days for banks to commit any funds)?
The answer is simple: we did not. My bank is not actually lending a cent of its own. The ways this has been possible is thanks to the involvement of two other entities - one is the export credit agency (ECA) of the country of origin of the turbines, and the other is a Scandinavian bank which has accepted to provide funds - but not for the project: only for the government of that Scandinavian ECA. So that bank is notionally the lender to the project, but it actually only takes government risk, being fully guaranteed for all sums by the ECA, which is a government-backed entity. My bank could then join the project by counter-guaranteeing the ECA for a share of the project risk. This is a deal where those that take the risk and those that do the funding are almost completely separate, and where a government provides the vital link...

Or having taxpayers to pay over $159 billions on nuclear R&D?

Well ... if one relates this expense to the amount of power effectively generated, nuclear had the best return on R&D so far.

Or having taxpayers to pay over $100 billions for decommissioning of nuclear power plants?
Or having taxpayers to pay billions on ultimate repositories?

There are provisions for that. Are they sufficient, maybe, maybe not. There is a lot of future production to come before decommissioning. If it becomes necessary, provisioning rate can be doubled without compromising the competitiveness of nuclear power, especially as fossil fuels become more expensive (you know, that Peak Oil thing...). Remember, Nuclear Power costs 0.03 EUR per kWh to produce (figure from French "Cour des Comptes" 2005).

And the German wind power industry not only generated over 90,000 sustainable, tax-paying jobs

I don't see the difference between a job building wind turbine, gas turbine or nuclear power plant. Why an employee working for Enercon or Nordex would be worth more (or less) for the economy than an employee working for Siemens ?

I don't know of any nuclear power plan loan guarantee that has actually been exercised. Therefore, no costs for the taxpayer.

If only this (no cost to the taxpayer) were true. The largest municipal bond default in US history was the (state of) Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, retroactively refered to as WHOOPS), which in the early 1980's defaulted on $2.25 BILLION dollars of debt related to construction of 5 nuclear power plants. After cost overruns and other problems, only 1 nuclear plant was actually completed (construction on 2 others was halted and the last 2 essentially never got off the drawing board). Over 25 years later this is still the largest default in US history, and about 15% of a residential ratepayers electric bill in the state of Washington still goes towards principal and interest on the 3 (1 completed and 2 terminated) plants.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008082460_nukeop31.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,955183,00.html

So, now you know of one. =)

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. The article were interesting indeed. I note however a few important points :

a) this is a municipal default, not a federal loan guarantee activation. The investment has been ultimately paid by bondholders and ratepayers, not by taxpayers (neither at the Washington State or the federal level).

b) from the time article you submit :

Whoops was ill prepared to build one nuclear plant, much less five. Many of the 23 members of the agency's board were farmers and small businessmen who were neophytes in the nuclear business. Whoops used three different designs for the five projects, which suffered from repeated delays and huge cost overruns.

Three different design for five projects !!! What were these guys smoking ? Nuclear Power can be an economical endeavor, but is not invulnerable to stupidity. When a cooperative takes bad decisions, the members of the cooperative pay for it. It is fair.

c) There is nothing wrong paying principal and interest on a completed, functioning and low cost nuclear power plant (the Columbia Generating Station). As for the other two that were terminated (at the stage where everything was built and what remained to do was testing and commissioning) , it happened in 1994, when fossil fuel price were "obviously" getting past the 1980's peak.

NOT !

and Greenhouse Gases were "obviously" not yet a relevant issue at the time.

On September 8, 1992, the US president George Bush transmitted the UNFCCC for advice and consent of the U.S. Senate to ratification. The Foreign Relations Committee approved the treaty and reported it (Senate Exec. Rept. 102-55) October 1, 1992. The Senate consented to ratification on October 7, 1992, with a two-thirds majority vote. President Bush signed the instrument of ratification October 13, 1992, and deposited it with the U.N. Secretary General.

NOT !

The blunder was actually to terminate these two plants. Had these plants been built, carbon intensive coal base-load could have been avoided or electricity could have been sold at an economical price to Californian customers, preventing them to be cornered by the Enron clique.

That Switzerland considers building some additional pumped hydro infrastructure does not negate the assertion that pumped hydro is geographically limited.

But it negates the assertion that it is too expensive and is being built because of wind power.

Having an international organisation located in a country usually results in increased influence, imports of well qualified jobs and opportunities for development clusters.

Besides that Euratom is not located in Austria: All European countries are obliged to pay for Euratom.

If I had the choice where to put my money, I would definitely choose the nuclear option

Of course, you'd rather spend $8000 per kW on nuclear with its dependence on imported uranium plus $1000 per kW and billions for decommissioning for than spending $1480 per kW on wind which in addition doesn't require any cooling water.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=55119
http://www.secinfo.com/d11141.253.htm
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2008/aug/27/nuclear_surge_needs_waste...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower?gusrc=r...

Why an employee working for Enercon or Nordex would be worth more (or less) for the economy than an employee working for Siemens ?

If they both work on reducing expensive fuel imports and export over 80% of their work / added value with a profit there would be indeed little difference.

Well ... if one relates this expense to the amount of power effectively generated, nuclear had the best return on R&D so far.

Obviously not: Otherwise the world economy would mostly be nuclear powered and not get over 97% of its energy from other sources - even hydro beats nuclear:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0908/0908.0627v1.pdf

Anyone, if your numbers are correct about the costs of wind v nuclear, then wind should able to get built in preference to nuclear, no subsidies or feed tariffs required.

But I would assert a better comparison would be:;

What is the cost of a wind system, with adequate storage/alternate generation to be able to produce the same, guaranteed production curve/availability of nuclear?

So wind coupled with your Swiss pumped hydro for example, or even wind + GT.

You can't make an apples to apples comparison unless you take enough steps to match the 98% availability of nuclear/coal/GT/hydro.

There is the fundamental problem of wind producing stuff when no one wants it, and sometimes not producing it when people do want it. When wind is prepared to either accept a limited role (e.g. max 20% of market) or shoulder the cost of providing it's own backup/storage, then it has earned it's place at the table. until then, to pay more money for a less useful source is simple a waste of money. Spend the money on solving the problem, the feed in tariff and must buy mandate simply make this problem ever larger (and more expensive).

But I would assert a better comparison would be:;
What is the cost of a wind system, with adequate storage/alternate generation to be able to produce the same, guaranteed production curve/availability of nuclear?

Ok - Why do you make this assertion?

Eric, I'm hoping you were trying to be sarcastic and I missed it. Typically base load plants collect revenue through power purchasing contracts with major users of electricity. A lot of times, wind farms collect revenue through selling electricity at spot market prices.

Electricity is much like healthcare. If you have a heart attack and go to the hospital, the bill you receive is not for the time and materials the hospital staff spent on your needs. It is the cost of caring for you plus the cost of staff that was sitting around waiting for you to have a heart attack. You don't want to show up at the hospital with a heart attack, and get stuck waiting for the staff to get to you because they are already busy.

A government regulator responsible for ensuring zero shortages of power is forced to raise capacity margins if wind power (as it is currently used) is a major source of electricity. Obviously there is a cost to increasing these margins.

The author of the post implies that lowering the cost of a product is beneficial. It sounds nice but if the cost is lowered enough to reduce investment, it will increase prices in the medium term. These fluctuations are not always small, and can be devastating to economies.

Eric, I'm hoping you were trying to be sarcastic and I missed it.

I'm going for the point that we* don't need* a '100%' on-demand grid.

We* are just used to that. Ya know, if you are not in say Bagdad.

* for certain values of we and need. Other values that become damaged due to temp cycling or out of round when movement stops have more of a real need.

The reason why I make this assertion is that supplied by wind alone, the grid cannot ensure 100% meeting of electrical demand. These other sources MUST be there to ensure reliable delivery.

Consider this thought exercise - an electrical grid supplied by 100% wind, with no other connected sources. According to some of the posters here, with wind's low capital and lower operating costs, electricity would be very cheap. But the trade off is that there would be times when supply is severely curtailed because there is no wind. would that be acceptable to the public? You can even add solar, and the two will provide better, but still not guaranteed reliability. Look at any off grid house supplied by wind and solar - it will ALWAYS have a storage backup. This is a considerable expense, and involves a significant energy loss through charging and discharging of batteries. And to get long life out of your batteries, you don;t discharge more than 50%.

So what I am saying is, that since (subsidised) wind is now displacing other sources, we need to consider what happens if its really successful and displaces them completely. Every coal, NG and nuke operator gets religion on wind, and close down their fuelled plants for wind turbines. Not out of the question over the next 20yrs.

So now we have a 100% wind system, but run the risk of unpredictable blackouts. The hot, still, summer day cause max demand and minimal production - then what? We have placed all our eggs in the basket of a technology that cannot guarantee delivery.

Alternative generation (fuelled or storage) is needed, and presently this is an external cost not borne by the wind operators. But clearly, as wind gets to be a larger %, or even majority of the generation, this issue must be addressed, and by the wind operators.

So a long winded answer to your question.

Quite simply, you can have a grid that is 100% coal, or 100% nuke, or 100% GT, or 100% hydro, and have 100% reliability in each case (though the electricity prices would vary from system to system)
But you CANNOT have a system that is 100% wind, AND has 100% reliability. No matter how cheap the electriicty, you cannot close the reliability gap. Presently, the reliability gap is made up by other sources

My point is that if wind energy displaces other sources, the reliability of supply is reduced, and so the wind industry must either;
a) bear the cost of doing whatever is required to make it's power 100% reliable (storage, wind operator owned GT, etc), or
b) be prepared to accept whatever is the market price, with no "must buy" mandate, (as the other operators are bearing the cost of making up the reliability gap)

Just considering proven renewables, as "100% reliable"* you're neglecting geothermal, and most importantly solar thermal. I exclude wave power as not commercially proven, and tidal as having only a small potential.

You're also neglecting the reliability to be found in diversity; Europe, the US, Australia etc already have grids connected across one-third or one-half a continent, it's not beyond our powers to make these systems cover an entire continent, and it is rather unlikely to be both dark and with still air across an entire continent at once. Add in some geothermal and solar thermal and you have a very reliable system overall.

Just as a wise company does not rely on a single product for its entire sales revenue, so too would wise countries not rely on a single energy resource. Diversity gives reliability, strength.

(*) I ignored it for the sake of simplifying the discussion, but in fact no power source is "100% reliable", all at the very least have some down-time for maintenance. However this is usually predictable, and so provided you have more than one power station in the system, it's not a problem.

Wind's unreliability doesn't get canceled out by the unreliability of other power sources.

As I've pointed out on my own blog installed wind capacity increased 39% in 2009 and yet the amount of electricity generated from wind in Dec 2009 was less than the amount generated in Dec 2008. That gives a sense of just how unreliable wind is. The variation from month to month is quite large. Click thru to the US government monthly wind output table I link to.

Neglecting geothermal: The post above is about wonderful wind, not wonderful geothermal. Geothermal's virtues do not make wind a better power source.

From month to month in 2009 grid solar output varied by a factor of 20. What happens in December when the wind dies down? Little solar, no wind power, gotta have full back-up for the demand that wind and solar satisfy at other times. That back-up costs money.

That back-up costs money.

That back-up is already available:

The US has already 622 GW of flexible capacity installed:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html

That existing back-up was designed to complement existing baseload. Add in more wind and the wind will force some of the baseload to get shut down. Wind increases the need for flexible capacity beyond the amount already available.

Wind power output is predictable and it does not require any spinning reserves. Wind power is intermittent but not unreliable like these plants:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

but unfortunately laymen will never understand this very essential difference.

installed wind capacity increased 39% in 2009 and yet the amount of electricity generated from wind in Dec 2009 was less than the amount generated in Dec 2008

I'm not really interested in cherry-picking some particular months here or there to try to make wind power look bad. It's the equivalent of the climate change deniers saying, "but it's snowing today." It's being wilfully obtuse. Your own blog says,

"Wind grew by 15,398 thousand megawatt-hours of actual output in 2009 or 28% (as distinct from the capacity numbers that the AWEA reports above). So nameplate capacity grew by more than actual output."

Energy output grew, that's good enough for me. Less than namelate capacity? Nothing new there for renewables - as you say, "We should expect wind's costs to rise as more wind power gets installed at less ideal wind farm sites" - usually the best spots are taken first, the crappier ones second. So load factor of wind, at least, tends to drop as its nameplate capacity rises. Happened in Denmark and Spain both.

Big deal, though. More electricity's being produced, and with much less fossil fuel requirements and emissions. That's the important thing.

Geothermal's virtues do not make wind a better power source.

Actually, they do.

No renewables advocate claims that any single renewable will provide all the energy we need. The claim is that a diversity of resources will be needed. We don't expect only coal, or only oil, or only natural gas to provide all our energy needs - why would we hold renewables to that standard?

That back-up costs money.

So what. Everything costs money. We're forever spending zillions on infrastructure. Just today in our paper here in Australia we're learning of $5.3 billion to be spent on a highway, Westlink. Not sure how big it'll be, but Eastlink was $2.5 billion for 39km, $64 million per kilometre. If we can spend a year's decent wages for a metre of highway I reckon we can afford to whack up some windmills.

Infrastructure costs money, heaps of it. There's no question that we will spend billions on infrastucture, the only question is what particular infrastructure we'll get. Getting more asphalt roads and fossil fuel powered electricity generation seems a bit dumb when fossil fuels are running short and burning them is messing up our climate. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Depends on how deep a hole you find yourself in--might have first to dig in a different direction and excavate some sort of ramp to get yourself out ?- )

" it's not beyond our powers to make these systems cover an entire continent, and it is rather unlikely to be both dark and with still air across an entire continent at once. Add in some geothermal and solar thermal and you have a very reliable system overall."

it certainly is not beyond our powers, though it may be beyond our pocket book. Re-read what you have just said. You are effectively saying that WA will need to have enough wind to supply all of Australia, and enough transmission to send it. Equally, eastern Aust must have enough wind capacity to send back to WA, and that's one hell of a long line.

So, yes if you want to build enough redundancy, you can cover it. Given that wind typically operates at a capacity factor of 35%, you need 4x redundancy. BUt to ensure real reliability, you probably need double that, and you need to spread the sites out over as many different geographical areas as possible, maximising the amount of transmission lines needed. so sure, it's cheap at $1400/kW, but per effective kW it is at least $5600, and for some degree of reliability, over $10k/kW, plus a hell of a lot of new transmission lines.

Solar thermal is has barely progressed past the demonstration project stage. It took decades for wind to get to where it is, and it will be the same for solar thermal. And it's reliability, (and capacity factor) in winter is hopelessly low.

And geothermal, while possessing 100% reliability/controllability, is also geographically limited, even more so than hydro.

I'm not saying wind can;t be done, but to be done to guarantees the reliability needed, you are looking at much, much more than $1400/kW

I'm not fussed about the cost. Given the depletion of fossil fuels and uranium (given current reactor designs), it can't possibly be more expensive than they will be.

Electricity is a necessity. As fossil fuels and uranium to burn for transport, heating, cooking, and cooling deplete, we will pay. Because the alternative is living in the cold dark.

The grand old ship of fossil fuels and uranium is sinking. I'm not going to quibble about the price of the lifeboat.

The reason why I make this assertion is that supplied by wind alone, the grid cannot ensure 100% meeting of electrical demand. These other sources MUST be there to ensure reliable delivery.

"the grid" suffers failures quite often. Locations I have been at have suffered losses of electrical power due to:
Animals (domesticated crow picking at the wire)
Car/truck collision with poles
Trees falling into wires
Airplane in the wires
Step down transformer failure

Usually the loss has nothing to do with the generation source and is the grid itself.

The only generator related failure I know of came from the Russian Turbines that went a couple years back.

involves a significant energy loss through charging and discharging of batteries.

You have a source for iron nickel batteries?

But the trade off is that there would be times when supply is severely curtailed because there is no wind. would that be acceptable to the public?

If that is what the public always had in the past and the public had no expectation of anything else, why would not the public accept that?

Electricity and what it can do is a wonderful tool - to have it on occasionally is better than nothing.

But you CANNOT have a system that is 100% wind, AND has 100% reliability.

"we" don't have 100% reliability now. And if the captured tears of babies that go into supercapacitors ever come into being - your CANNOT may go the way of passenger pigeon medallions in a white sauce.

Nuclear is not a very flexible power source, that is, output from a nuclear plant does not have a high turn down ratio.

Hydro sites run their turbines in protprtion to demand, so they are in effect load balancing.

My guess it that there are many hydro sites that could be modified for pumped storage; however, this is espensive due to the size of the pipe that would have to be used. The only pumped hydro site I am familiar with (looked at general arrangement drawings) is bored through granite to a reservoir atop.

Combined cycle natural gas plants are ideal for peaking and many have been built in the US in the past 15 years. Capital cost is reasonable for nat. gas combined cycle because there are no railyards and coal handling facilities.

It would seem there would be many combination wind/tidal/pumped storage locales (though most are probably a ways offgrid right now) with great potential, is that sort of tech on anyone's drawing boards?

Anyone, if your numbers are correct about the costs of wind v nuclear, then wind should able to get built in preference to nuclear, no subsidies or feed tariffs required.

Despite the fact, that nuclear undoubtedly gets way more subsidies than wind, wind power is growing much faster.
Last year the world added over 38 GW of wind power while only 0 GW of new nuclear was added.
http://www.gwec.net/fileadmin/documents/Publications/Global_Wind_2007_re...

What is the cost of a wind system, with adequate storage/alternate generation to be able to produce the same, guaranteed production curve/availability of nuclear?

AGAIN, new pump storage in Switzerland is being built to store inflexible nuclear power and NOT wind power.
Nuclear does need pumped storage or gas turbine back up just like wind does. No place in the world runs on 100% nuclear power or 100% wind power.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

The problem with nuclear is that it at $8000 per kW while wind is at $1480 per kW and gas is at $500 per kW.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
No wonder even a Russian nuclear power plant in Turkey is at over 20 cents per kWh:
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/67392/politics-key-to-russia-turkey-nu...

In view of the long-term guarantee, the consortium's bid price of 21.16 euro cents/kilowatt hour (KWh) caused further controversy, being considerably higher than the 4-14c/kWh that private companies currently sell power into Turkey's slowly liberalising power market.

In addition nuclear depends on uranium imports, requires $1000 per kW for decommissioning and billions for an ultimate repository and depends on cooling water.
http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=55119
http://www.secinfo.com/d11141.253.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2008/aug/27/nuclear_surge_needs_waste...

There is the fundamental problem of wind producing stuff when no one wants it, and sometimes not producing it when people do want it.

Actually it is worse with nuclear, because nuclear generates the same power all year round (e.g. 100% power output on a Sunday night when nobody needs it), while wind consistently generates more power during winter when heat pumps require more power.

I am suspicious of a lot of claims of high nuclear power subsidy because some of the articles I've seen making this claim swept in all money spent by the federal government on nuclear including military nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons materials disposal. You got a good source of nuclear's subsidy today that doesn't include stuff irrelevant to civilian nuclear plants?

Oh, and US government spending on waste disposal doesn't count as a subsidy because the nuclear power industry pays a tax for the waste disposal site that the US Congress has refused to even finish.

You got a good source of nuclear's subsidy today that doesn't include stuff irrelevant to civilian nuclear plants?

Actually all of them if you cared to read them.

Oh, and US government spending on waste disposal doesn't count as a subsidy because the nuclear power industry pays a tax for the waste disposal site

Unfortunately this tax doesn't cover the costs entirely.

" I don't know of any nuclear power plan loan guarantee that has actually been exercised. Therefore, no costs for the taxpayer."

Even if this is true it means that there is definitely no level playing field out there. If you want to build a nuclear power plant you can get a 2% government backed loan, if you want to build a wind turbine you will have to pay 8% market rate.

For both investments the capital costs are a main part of the future operating costs.

If you check this report from Citi bank https://www.citigroupgeo.com/pdf/SEU27102.pdf it basically says without big government support nuclear will not get built.

My opinion people pointing at wind and telling but they are subsidised we should built more nuclear is the pot calling the kettle black.

Also I wonder who will be profiting more from a bigger grid, "conventional" power because they get a larger market for their base load or wind power.

I've read claims that the US government's loan guarantees for nuclear (which are for plants yet to be built) end up lowering nuclear's cost by about the same about as the renewables production tax credit lowers the cost of wind. Now wind builders in some cases are managing to get other subsidies as well (e.g. state level mandates for renewables that drive up the price that utilities will pay for wind power). So I am not convinced that the subsidy for current and future wind electric is less than the subsidy for future nuclear electric.

As I understand it, the next 6 US nuclear plants will indeed get the PTC.

Now wind builders in some cases are managing to get other subsidies as well

Actually the opposite seems to be the case:

http://awea.org/blog/Index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=323
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14893587

Last week, the Wyoming wind electricity tax was passed by the Wyoming House, and it is now being considered by the state's Senate.

The loan guarantees are only needed because of a crazy US regulatory environment that keeps operators fragmented and prohibits them to accumulate funds that could finance large long-term investments.

It never sieze to amaze me how often patches and fixes for regulatory problems are viewed as subsidies, and how often regulatory failures are said to be market failures.

On the other hand wind farm builders have no problems accumulating private capital without loan guarantees.

Anyone,

That is an impressive list of nuclear subsidies. For the record, I am not supporting those either, two wrongs do not make a right.

AS for the solar industries and feed in tariffs - any industry is only pulling its weight when it is profitable enough to pay taxes, rather than being subsidised. IF the German and spanish (or any other country) solar industry is creating more tax than its subsidies, then clearly the subsidies are no longer needed.
As for the feed in tariffs, I am yet to see any evidence that paying someone 50c/kWh for solar, regardless of the prevailing market prices, will lower the prices for everyone.

The feed in tariffs are not paid by taxpayers (until they have to backstop utility losses/bankrupticies), but the subsidies/tax breaks for building solar factories, and installing solar panels most certainly are paid by the taxpayers.

And as for AIG, well, three wrongs don;t make a right either. Get rid of the subsidies, put in the carbon tax, and internalise appropriate external costs (e.g. appropriate environmental and safety rules ) and then let enterprise do its thing. Let the customers (market) pick the winners, not government.

The current approach just encourages all industries to go to government with their hands out, because that is easier than innovating to solve problems, or for dinosaur companies (AIG, GM) to face reality and go bankrupt.

As for the feed in tariffs, I am yet to see any evidence that paying someone 50c/kWh for solar, regardless of the prevailing market prices, will lower the prices for everyone.

Besides that feed-in-tariffs in Germany are already below 30c/kWh, as opposed to wind power which undoubtedly does reduce electricity prices - PV may not reduce electricity prices, but it does reduce overall costs as the solar factories, inverter factories, distributors, installers etc. pay more taxes than what they indirectly receive in feed-in-tariffs. In addition they do reduce the unemployment rate and unemployed people are costly.
And if people want to reduce their electricity costs, they can just buy connector strips and efficient light bulbs. As opposed to taxes, no-one is forced to pay high electricity bills.
http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/profitable_dat.html

The feed in tariffs are not paid by taxpayers (until they have to backstop utility losses/bankrupticies), but the subsidies/tax breaks for building solar factories, and installing solar panels most certainly are paid by the taxpayers.

Actually besides that most solar factories are currently being built in Asia and not in Germany the tax breaks received for building a factory which btw even a Hummer or a gun factory receives are no factor compared to the feed-in tariffs. (Furthermore factories in China also get cheap or even free government loans, while in the West only non-producing banks get free government loans...)

And as for AIG, well, three wrongs don;t make a right either. Get rid of the subsidies, put in the carbon tax, and internalise appropriate external costs (e.g. appropriate environmental and safety rules ) and then let enterprise do its thing.

I agree but just because you get rid of feed-in-tariffs for PV, Wind, Geothermal, Biomass etc. does not mean that the fossil and nuclear industry and banks won't keep on getting huge subsidies. If you get rid of feed-in-tariffs you mainly kill this renewable industry and continue living with a high dependence on fossil fuel and may not survive when prices for fossil fuel climb too quickly or cannot be imported at the required rate.
And in this case we may end up living in an actual free market but this free market will probably rather resemble something like this:

I thought this group would like the report on the Area Diversity Interchange. It is a pilot project that allows different balancing authorities to trade their excess power to control areas that need it. It covers a large part of the WECC (including BC Hydro).

You can read a .pdf about it here, if you like:
http://www.westgov.org/wga/meetings/nwcc07/Opatrny.pdf

or Google "Area Diversity Interchange"

I could see this program expanding to include all balancing authorities, and starting to make use of back up resources in other balancing authorities to reduce the amount of backup generation in any one authority, assuming that there would not be an extreme event in all regions at the same time (even then, demand side management could hopefully keep critical loads operating). Given enough transmission and the right market rules, I could see wind penetrating to 50% or more of the power market.

End all the subsidies, put on a simple, but meaningful carbon tax (say $100/ton) and then leave all the players to go from there. Let them game a carbon tax instead of subsisidies, at least the field is level then.

Once you can get the 70% overhead gone from the "carbon market"
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/12/08/uk-report-just-30-of-carbo...
I'm sure you'll see more support.

(Does anyone REALLY think 70% "overhead" is at all reasonable?)

windpower to my knowledge is the only energy industry that sometimes has negative prices.

Wrong. In Europe it is actually mostly nuclear power. Europe has almost 170 GW inflexible nuclear power installed.

French nuclear plants can adjust their thermic load by 5% per minute. Inflexible is not the first term that comes to my mind.

Except that according to the facts they do not and run flexible hydro and expensive but flexible gas and oil power plants instead:
http://clients.rte-france.com/lang/fr/visiteurs/vie/prod/realisation_pro...

In addition France exports lots of nuclear power at night and on week-ends when electricity prices reach a low and imports electricity during day time, when electricity prices reach a high:
http://www.indexmundi.com/france/electricity_imports.html

Not all is well with the France nuclear miracle:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilitie...

France is being forced to import electricity from Britain to cope with a summer heatwave that has helped to put a third of its nuclear power stations out of action.

and

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/the-reality-of-frances-agg...

Still, fantastic claims about the benefits of French nuclear power persist. In May, the French ambassador to Canada wrote in the National Post, "France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation." Last year, France exported 83 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and imported 27.5 billion kilowatt hours--obviously, a large net export. But the ambassador neglects to mention that France cheaply exports base-load power and imports expensive, essentially fossil fuel-based, peak-load power to use in its citizens' wasteful winter heating systems. Net power imports from Germany, which is phasing out nuclear power, averaged about 8 billion kilowatt hours over the last few years, and the emissions linked to these imports are attributed to the exporting country, not France. But the radioactive waste stemming from its exported nuclear-generated power--equivalent to the output of a dozen reactors--remains in the country.

I applaud you providing of references for your positions. However, I question the impartiality of that particular reporter at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. At another point, he tries to discredit France's nuclear industry with the statement

In 2007, nuclear energy provided 78 percent of France's electricity, which corresponded to 39 percent of its commercial primary energy but only 18 percent of its final energy. Primary energy is the energy contained in the fuel when it enters the system, while final energy is what is left over for the consumer after processing, transformation, and distribution. In the case of large nuclear or coal-fired power plants, only about one-quarter of the primary energy reaches the consumer's home, office, or factory. In France, more than 70 percent of final energy is provided by oil, gas, and coal

My question is how, if nuclear generation provides 39% of Frances "commercial primary energy" *(define commercial ??), can it account for only 18% of its "final energy". That implies that nuclear electricity generation is only half as efficient in use of thermal energy as the average of all other energy uses in France, presumeably dominated by autos, trucks, agricultural tractors etc. which are lucky to get to 25% efficiency which reactors typically can operate at about 33% thermal efficiency. There's clearly a flaw in this particular argument of this particularly flawed report, or at minimum a lot of HIGHLY questionable claims.

I'd also question the reasons for using some measure as obscure in mainstream energy literature as "primary energy" which can have simply no meaning at all to the growing areas of wind or solar. (eg. define it for us)

It's something that I'm trying to wrap my head around without getting dizzy, but many if not all of the energy bean counting agencies (IEA, EIA, BP, etc.) start with the heat generated from nuclear fission when including it in primary energy. The energy remaining after generating electricity is then comparable to generation by burning coal or gas. But if you calculate the nuclear portion from only the kwhs (and don't treat the other contestants similarly), one is no longer counting similar things. And yes, they perform similar stunts with solar, hydro, geothermal, and wind. All in the quest for "a" number that can serve as the measure of everything. But in this case, the data compression process is not lossless.

If the room stops spinning, I might write something on this.

Definitions? We don't need no stinkin' definitions!

It is really quite problematic to compare energy released to spin turbines to generate electricity with energy released at user end points. For example, imagine you use natural gas to generate electricity. Then you transmit the electricity to homes and use it to heat homes with simple space heaters. That is a much less efficient way to use natural gas for heating than to burn natural gas in a highly efficient home natural gas heater (which can achieve 90+% efficiency). But if you use the natural gas to generate electricity to power a ground sink heat pump you can potentially achieve more than 100% efficiency in heat generation.

Similarly, burning natural gas in an internal combustion engine (ICE) to power a car is probably less efficient than burning natural gas to generate electricity to charge batteries for an electric vehicle.

France does an admirable job of using nuclear power as a major power source. Going in to Peak Oil any Western country would be in much better shape to have such a large nuclear capacity per capita as compared to not having it.

Actually, if the homeowner is using a high efficiency heat pump (COP >3), then you are actually getting about 200% of the heat content of the gas, so this is definitely the optimal solution. Couple it with a night heat storage system and you are even further ahead.

As for the car example, the difference would be marginal, at best. Though one benefit of the electric car is that when it is charging (at night) NG plants are unlikely to be generating.

200% of the heat content of the gas

How do you come up with that? After generating and transmitting the electricity, you have ~1/3 of the energy left. So if you have a COP of three, that sounds more like a wash to me.

Natural gas combined cycle is 60% efficient.

What is the percentage of total electricity in the US (or elsewhere) generated from these at present?

If houses get converted from heating oil or natural gas heating to heat pump heating then electric power demand increases and new electric power generating capacity gets built. The new capacity is more likely to be wind, nuclear, or IGCC natural gas than the existing capacity. So my guess is that shifting to heat pumps will decrease carbon emissions quite substantially.

As the other Paul the engineer points out, CCGT is 60% efficient. Allow 10% line loss to consumer and you are at 54%. The heat pump runs with a COP of 3, so for every one unit of energy used, it pumps 3 from outside to in, plus the energy used by the heat pump itself. So we than have 4x 54% = 216%, but I rounded down to 200% as that's a nice number.

The humble heat pump is really an amazing device, there is a lot of electric resistance load, and NG and oil heat that can be replaced by this. Multiply these numbers by all the heated space across the continent, and you have MAJOR energy savings.

A much better use of subsidy money for reducing GHG's would be to pay for heat pumps rather than wind and solar. The cleanest electricity is that which is not needed.

Hi Paul,

Just to clarify one point: the COP rating is the ratio of heat supplied to the amount of energy consumed, so a heat pump with a COP of 3 would provide 3 kWh of heat for every 1 kWh consumed. The numbers should not be added.

I agree that we should be displacing electric resistance and fuel oil to the greatest extent possible, and high efficiency heat pumps are an important part of the solution, along with improvements to the thermal envelope.

Cheers,
Paul

Thanks Paul - can always rely on you in all matters of heat pumps!

So, the Fujitsu 9RL has a heating EER of 12.99 which equates to a COP of 3.43.
So, to plug this into my example, 3.43 x 54% = 185%.

So, we are still close to double the heat content of the gas, and are still double the delivered heat of even the highest efficiency gas appliance.

Only thing better is wood heat, but that's a whole different discussion (see my response to you in drumbeat about the pyrolysis oil)

Paul

Actually, the numbers are even better for the Fujitsu 9RLS. The HSPF and heating EER ratings are 12.0 and 15.0 respectively (source: http://www.fujitsugeneral.com/wallmounted9-12RLS_specs.htm#specs). The HSPF rating is a more appropriate measure of heating performance and it translates to be a COP of 3.52, so 3.52 x 0.54 = 190%. That's double the efficiency of the best condensing gas furnace. In addition, the 9RLS has a SEER rating of 26.0 which makes it twice as efficient as the majority of central air systems sold today.

With respect to air-to-water systems, the COP of Hitachi's YUTAKI heat pumps is reportedly 4.28 (source: http://www.hitachiaircon.com/argws/category.do?action=getCategories&rang...) and Mitsubishi's Ecodan falls between 3.1 and 3.7 (see: http://ecodanlive.mitsubishielectric.co.uk/default.asp).

Cheers,
Paul

This bears repeating:

A much better use of subsidy money for reducing GHG's would be to pay for heat pumps rather than wind and solar. The cleanest electricity is that which is not needed.

I've also read that solar water heaters are far more cost effective than solar photovoltaics on homes.

A much better use of subsidy money for reducing GHG's would be to pay for heat pumps rather than wind and solar. The cleanest electricity is that which is not needed.

Actually you will need more electricity if you replace fossil fuel heaters by heat pumps. This is a fact.

But luckily heat pumps can adapt their demand flexibly and thus run well on wind power.

Actually you will need more electricity if you replace fossil fuel heaters by heat pumps. This is a fact.

Hi anyone,

You may require more electricity, but there will still be a net reduction in fossil fuel consumption and GHG emissions, or am I mistaken?

Cheers,
Paul

That's correct, but we will still need more electricity.
And it does make sense to get this additional electricity from more renewable sources to further reduce fossil fuel consumption (rather than building additional coal plants).

Agreed. Ideally, they could be coupled with on-site thermal storage to help minimize their operation at peak times and to likewise "mop up" excess renewable energy during periods of low demand.

Cheers,
Paul

on-site thermal storage

Are there easy and cost-effective retrofits or add-ons for NG furnaces?

What's best for heat pumps?

Hi Nick,

A dual-fuel or "hybrid" heating system would work well for those with oil or natural gas furnaces (e.g., http://www.bryant.com/learnmore/guides/hybrid_heat.shtml) and for those with all-electric homes, a heat pump with ETS backup would be one option (see: http://www.steffes.com/off-peak-heating/forced-air-heatpump.html). For "wet" or hydronic heating systems, an air-to-water heat pump such as the Mitsubishi Ecodan equipped with a suitably sized buffer/storage tank would allow for some flexibility in operation, especially in the case of in-floor radiant heat.

Also, Hydro-Québec offers an attractive dual-energy rate that is tied to outdoor temperature (they have an extremely large electric heating component that is obviously sensitive to changes in temperature); above -12°C (or -15°C depending upon the region), electricity is used and below these temperatures it switches over to oil or natural gas. It's a smart and cost-effective way to shed load when the utility is under heavy strain.

See: http://www.hydroquebec.com/rates/pdf/dual_energy_customer.pdf

Cheers,
Paul

Thanks!

French nuclear plants can adjust their thermic load by 5% per minute. Inflexible is not the first term that comes to my mind.

The essential inflexibility of a nuclear generating plant with respect to dispatching is that it costs almost exactly as much per hour to run the thing at 10% output as it does at 100% output. This means that paying extra for electricity that must be accommodated by decreasing the output of a nuke is a loser for everyone except the provider of the alternative source.

This means that paying extra for electricity that must be accommodated by decreasing the output of a nuke is a loser for everyone except the provider of the alternative source.

Only when there is a feed-in tariff in place. If not, the alternative source receives the marginal cost electricity. I.e., according to you, zero. Selling price of electricity is above zero only when the alternative source is not producing. Not a fantastic business plan...

The reality is that feed-in tariffs are equivalent to mandating free electricity storage price, to be borne by electricity sources that have this capacity (fossils, hydro and nuclear). The problem is that the price of storage is not zero, even for gas-fueled power plants (don't get into the fantasy that "gas requires less capital costs", most of the cost of gas comes from the capital cost of gas producing facilities : the power plant maybe worth a 1/3 of the price of an equivalent nuclear or hydro facility, but the other 2/3 - and even more that that - are in the gas pipeline, LNG terminal and gas-field rigs, there is no free lunch).

"gas requires less capital costs", most of the cost of gas comes from the capital cost of gas producing facilities

electricity producers buy gas on the market, and there is a spot market for gas. The structure of the price of gas itself is irrelevant, the power plant does not pay for gas's capital costs. The price of gas represents the largest chunk of the cost of production of gas-fired electricity.

The structure of the price of gas itself is irrelevant

...except for the final consumer. Utilities cannot forever sell their juice for a lower price than they can produce. So they have to adjust their selling price. I live in a 100% gas-powered country, I see the swings !

the power plant does not pay for gas's capital costs

Of course it does, it is always the customer that pays for the capital cost of the producer through the purchase of their product. The electricity consumer pays for the capital cost of the wind project, the wind project pays for the capital cost of the turbine producer, etc... When a german "load balancing" power plant buys Russian Gas to run, it pays for everything : the pipeline, the gas field, the FSB agents and the share of the intermediary in Switzerland...

They are physically capable of reducing and increasing power output quickly, but in practice they do not because it damages the fuel rods and their cladding as the temperature leaps up and down quickly.

In Europe it is actually mostly nuclear power.

Depends on what you call Europe. Here is the EU mix in 2002:

Add in UK and Eastern Europe, and things get more coal-ish.

Errr..; the UK is part of the EU - as is most of "Eastern Europe"

UK

Well, they eschew the Euro, so they don't count.

most of "Eastern Europe"

Not in 2002.

Of course but I meant: In Europe it is mostly nuclear power which causes negative prices. (No-one in their right mind runs a flexible gas or hydro power plant when prices are negative).

Weird listening to a right-wing talk-show host complain about wind turbines today. He went through a litany of drawbacks ranging from ice flying off the turbines in the winter, to excessive noise, to birds being killed.

This was particularly weird in the context of the GOM oil disaster. The number of birds killed by blades is simple attrition. The number of birds, and everything else killed by a single event oil spill of this magnitude is devastation.

He did talk about the disaster but bemoaned the fact that the most "green" oil company BP was responsible for the disaster. I screamed: "they are not green, they are an oil company, what do you expect???".

I wrote a post last week comparing wind to a Renewable Hubbert Curve. Interesting that based on the intermittency of the wind powering a single wind turbine, the time to reach a certain accumulated energy level looks like an asymmetric peak. Starting from an arbitrary power-up time, there is a dead zone where you have to wait for the energy to accumulate, a sweet spot where you can can most likely expect to collect the energy by, and then a long tail where you might have to wait a long time for the wind to pick up. This comes from some basic ideas of energy and entropy. But this is not so bad, because many of these turbines aggregated in different geographical locations will smooth out this intermitency.

We just have to prepare for a level of expectations, and feeding off of temporal entropy is something we will have to deal with. That is something that the wingers will never understand, because they do not want to adapt.

Edit:
By the way the talk-show host was Jason Lewis and he had a guest by the name of Robert Bryce who has written an awful propaganda book "Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence".
Lewis is the worst propagandist I have ever heard BTW. He actually talked up the idea of abiotic oil.

I am still asking everyone (but I doubt I will get an answer) to the question: Will the cost of the damage from/and the cost of the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill be calculated into those glowing EROEI statistics we often see for oil? Want to take any bets? Has the cost of cleaning up any oil spill or the damage the spill did ever been calculated into the EROEI of oil?

RC

There are no stupid questions, but this is one ;)

Of course not!

Also a lot of tax payers money will not be paid back and the damage to the ecosystem can not be calculated in money so you can also not ask money for that.

Housecats kill order of magnitudes more birds than wind turbines (with the difference that they don't reduce the dependence on fossil fuels).

We just have to prepare for a level of expectations, and feeding off of temporal entropy is something we will have to deal with.

And this is easy.
Most energy is needed for heat energy (heating, hot water, washing machine, dish washer, refrigerator, air conditioning etc.).

Heat energy can be stored cheaply, so heat pumps can bridge hourly, daily and even weekly fluctuations. In fact this house can store the heat energy collected on the roof during the summer over an entire winter just by using its integrated, insulated water tank:

Do you have a link?

Thanks

This is just pushing the storage cost to the final consumer. I have no problem with that, it is a market based solution. Bear in mind however that it requires structural work on a house, or worse, requires to amortize early an old house and building a new one. Housing assets are around 100% of GDP. Switching from, say, a 50 year amortization schedule to a 33 years amortization schedule would weight on real consumption by 1% during 33 years. That is quite a drag on the economy.

In energy economy matters, one cannot neglect :
- the interaction between different source of energies (for instance the storage capacity of fuel based power plants being used for the benefit of intermittent wind and solar)
- the existing asset base (early amortization due to a energy mix switch has a big impact)

All I know is, that the rents in this solar house located in central Europe, which does not require any heating fuel at all, are lower than in the US Northeast - and this without considering the saved fuel costs.

Layman can never grasp the simple fact that efficiency has an excellent return on investment and layman can never understand the fact that people who actually build inefficient houses almost never have to pay the heating bills.

The number of birds, and everything else killed by a single event oil spill of this magnitude is devastation.

It's actually much much worse than that because it can potentially wipe out an entire ecosystem and make it completely unable to nourish and provide conditions for a complex web of life. Sort of like a cascading domino effect of extinctions.

Not that humans really have to worry about such things because they aren't part of nature and their economic systems will be able to quickly substitute natural ecosystems with something better.../snark

Robert Bryce appears to argue that since politicians have been insincere in their efforts to achieve energy independence in the past that energy independence is not achievable. But since world oil production is headed for a long decline isn't it inevitable that most countries (including the United States) will have energy independence forced on them?

The dangerous delusion is that it will be possible to maintain imported energy dependence.

I don't know that I would call it "independence," FP. I would say rather that we will have energy limitations forced upon us. There will not be enough energy sources for all of the mundane, trivial and idiotic gizmos and games foisted on us in the name of consumerism. When that happens, adaptation will become mandatory. We will lose the games and discover the necessary. Energy triage will be the new paradigm. The alternative is non-survival.

We are, indeed, a part of nature. We have a momentary hubris; nature has a way of eliminating that.

Best wishes for a long gradual decline; a sudden ecological tragedy of sufficient impact could turn it to a short, steep one.

Craig

I agree.

A quibble: Jimmy Carter was sincere - it wasn't his fault that his successors mostly undid his work.

Hi WHT,
Just for the record,I do appreciate what you are trying to do in terms of applying mathematical analysis to variuos phenomena not yet adequately described in such terms. I 'm just a little embarassed and irritated that my math skills are too rusty to follow you easily if at all, and my statistical skills are nearly nil.

If you succeed, then at the highest levels of academia, science, and govt,the people involved as advisers can say WE KNOW, WE ARE COUNTING rather than guessing.This would be analogous to some one like Koch ( the guy known to all medical types for his postulates)saying , look, I have DEFINITIVE PROOF that this little bug causes this disease.People making decisions about unusual or unlikely events will KNOW THAT THEY KNOW , rather than thinking that they know,just what the cards hold, if they apply your methods-assuming you perfect them of course.

You could wind up with a chair at some prestigious university endowed in your name, and math majors might have to take a year or two of courses based on your work.

But I can still catch a baseball without analyzing it's flight path digitally;the old analog machine in the skull works just fine for most everyday problems.

NOW -A QUESTION: Roughly how much money do yo estimate is saved not only by the consumers of electricity but also the industrial, commercial and household consumers of natural gas as a result of wind power loewering the demand for ng, and thereby depressing its price?

Apparently we get about 1 percent of our electricity from wind today here in the US This should mean that the consumption of ng and coal combined , in electrical energy terms, is lowered by roughly about 1 percent.Maybe the actual use of ng is lowered by around one third to two thirds of one percent, as a lot os used for other purposes.

Since it appears that wind displaces only ng , let us assume the entire reduction of ff is in ng alone.

How much might this translate to in dollars annually?

I realize your will have to estimate the price elasticity of ng to answer this question, but you are just the guy to do this.

I could do the rest of this problem myself after hunting up the annual usage data by market segment of ng.

It occurs to me that the subsidies so far paid to the wind industry developers might actually be repaid over a few years , economy wide,thru the collective savings on the ng gas bill.

It would also appear that this happy state of affairs would become more and more to our collective advantage as the wind industry expands.

Roughly how much money do yo estimate is saved not only by the consumers of electricity but also the industrial, commercial and household consumers of natural gas as a result of wind power loewering the demand for ng, and thereby depressing its price?

I think I disagree with that premise, though much depends on the mix of other generating sources in the dispatch queue. In areas where coal, nuclear or run-of-river hydro (eg. Niagra) provides baseload power and gas peakers provide the balance, adding wind will actually increase natural gas use because of the general rule that baseload capacity (continuous operation) generation can only be operated up to the minimum of the daily load curve, all the remainder must be provided by start-stop gas turbines. Adding wind to such a system has two negative effects. 1) because the wind generation might operate at full rating at night when the load curve is at minimum, then be offline during the day when the load curve is at maximum, a smaller total mw rating of high-efficiency baseload gets dispatched, and a larger total mw rating of start-stop capable gas turbines get dispatched. 2) because a greater proportion of the total mw dispatched in a day are gas turbines, the first-on-last-off ones must operate for a longer time period, increasing natural gas consumption vs. if wind were not connected.

In general, there are very good (personal economic) reasons why large owners of gas resources like T. B. Pickens are also great supporters of wind generation.

I get your point, in that the PROPORTION natural gas out of all of fuel used might increase;but the conventional wisdom seems to be that ng plants are the ones TAKEN OFF line when the wind blows.

At any rate, since hydro is apparently not allowed to go to waste under any circumstances, and nukes don't load balance easily or quickly,EITHER wind or coal must be displaced in total.

Either way there is a big saving of ff, over a years time.How much is that much coal and ng worth?

Perhaps more importantly,in terms of money, how much does this loss of demand force down the price of the REST of the coal and /or ng sold?

"but the conventional wisdom seems to be that ng plants are the ones TAKEN OFF line when the wind blows."

OFM, this is only true when the wind blows during peak hours, when NG plants are operating. In the middle of the night, NG (and hydro) plants are already shut down, so it is then coal and nuke that must shed load to make room for wind.

What I don't like is this business that they MUST shed load to make way for wind. The normal way to beat out a competitor in a commodity market is to undercut them on price, and that is what i think should be happening here. I am a supporter of the carbon tax concept ( I already pay one here in BC), so there is a price advantage over coal, but not nuke.

So once the coal plants are gone, what then? Do we start to replace controllable nuke/hydro/ng with uncontrollable wind? Should we still be subsiding wind, and having the "must buy first" mandate at that point?

If somewhere like Texas needs to build HVDC lines to export the excess of wind energy, are the wind operators prepared to pay the cost of building this, or a transmission cost to cover it? (like an oil pipeline toll). And if most of the export energy is in the off peak period, when it has close to zero value in the export market, is it worth it?

I am a supporter of wind, but it can;t shirk it's responsibility. If it can;t deliver when demanded, it is up to the wind industry to make alternate arrangements, or accept the lower price of being an unpredictable supplier.

If it can;t deliver when demanded, it is up to the wind industry to make alternate arrangements, or accept the lower price of being an unpredictable supplier.

Besides that interconnected wind farms provide baseload.
www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
Of course it is - just as it would be with unpredictable nuclear:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

And before you are getting all scared about too much wind power:
North America has already 175 GW of hydro power installed:

The installed hydropower capacity amounts to 175 GW (67 GW in Canada, 99 GW in the US, and 10 GW in Mexico).

And the US alone has already 622 GW of flexible capacity installed and is currently at 35 GW wind:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html
There is obviously a lot of flexible capacity which wind can still displace and if necessary wind can always and easily reduce its output.

And this is besides the fact that fossil fuel heater will need to be replaced by flexible heat pumps. There's no point in ever having a grid with much more renewable electricity while still heating with fossil fuels.

Should we still be subsiding wind, and having the "must buy first" mandate at that point?

Actually while nuclear keeps on getting huge subsidies wind power is getting higher taxes:
http://awea.org/blog/Index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=323
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14893587

Last week, the Wyoming wind electricity tax was passed by the Wyoming House, and it is now being considered by the state's Senate.

So don't worry, politicians in North America may soon stop the growth of wind power and make sure to not reduce its dependence on fossil and imported fuels.

You should read Stanford's Archer and Jacobson paper on wind and baseload more carefully. The key sentence:

It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum
of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power.

That's 33% of average output. Average output is maybe 30% of nameplate (i.e.30% of max assuming an average output of 30%). So maybe 10% of nameplate can be counted as part of baseload. I pointed out this 10% of nameplate for baseload back when the Archer and Jacobson first released their study.

So think about that. 90% of the max output can not be counted as baseload.

What huge subsidies does nuclear get? Can you state those subsidies for existing plants in terms of cents per kwh? Can you state those subsidies for new plants in terms of cents per kwh? I've read claims that those subsidies are not that high when stated in terms of cents per kwh.

So maybe 10% of nameplate can be counted as part of baseload.

Randall,

We've had this conversation before. This is what I said:

"The Stanford study doesn't seem to be very ambitious. They look at a small system of wind farms with nameplate capacity only 1.5GW, or the equivalent of a medium sized coal plant, distributed over an area with a radius of about 250 miles.

They demonstrate rigorously what we already know intuitively: a number of sources will have a lower ratio of variance to mean production than a single source. That's all they're trying to do, and it doesn't really tell us much about the limits of the value of interconnection of truly widely separated wind sources."

And here's what you said:
"Nick G,

So far the Stanford study is the best I can find in the public domain. Obviously we need something bigger."

Paul, Some NG plants in the US are baseload, not peaking. They are built with much higher capital costs in order to be more efficient. Since they run all the time the higher capital costs can be justified.

Wind and build-out of HVDC lines: Well, of course the wind industry wants to shift the costs to others.

Wind reduces the fraction of electric power generating capacity that is baseload. Wind increases the need for peaking generators. Some portion of wind's displacement of fossil fuels CO2 emissions while the wind is blowing is therefore counterbalanced by a shift away from more efficient baseload fossil fuel burners.

Some portion of wind's displacement of fossil fuels CO2 emissions while the wind is blowing is therefore counterbalanced by a shift away from more efficient baseload fossil fuel burners.

Actually besides the fact that baseload fossil burners are less efficient than combined cycle gas power plants, wind power does reduce CO2-emissions considerably:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-wasson/extreme-misinformation-in_b_55...

I read your link. You haven't provided any evidence that contradicts my argument. Let me break it down into several points and you tell me which one you think is wrong:

- Old baseload natural gas burners are less efficient than new baseload natural gas burners.
- New baseload natural gas burners are more efficient new peaking natural gas burners.
- Wind reduces the development of new base load natural gas burners.
- Wind increases the development of new peaking natural gas burners.
- Therefore more wind results in a larger fraction of all natural gas for electricity getting burned in peaking natural gas burners.
- Therefore the average efficiency of natural gas burning for electricity goes down from what it would have been absent the expansion of wind.

Granted, the net effect of more wind is less CO2 emissions. But the effect is not as big as you might expect since natural gas burning efficiency goes down due to less baseload and more peaking burning of natural gas.

Again, wind power output is predictable and it does not require any spinning reserves. Wind power is intermittent but not unreliable like these plants:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

but unfortunately laymen will never understand this very essential difference.

Wind power is not predictable. Wind power does require reserves. Wind power output sometimes drops suddenly with little warning:

An abrupt loss of 1,200 megawatts of wind energy production on Feb. 26 that caught the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Inc. by surprise and forced it to declare emergency conditions underscores a critical policy issue, according to a key industry official.

ERCOT said the sharp drop in production during a three-hour period -- while overall electricity loads were increasing -- threatened the stability of the power grid and could have caused rolling blackouts.

It is not hard to find reports like that one. You just have to look.

Well, who knows - maybe they don't have any wind forecasts in the US or Texas. But they certainly do in Europe...

Wind forecasts help, and so does interconnected grids, but intermittency and the 3-to-1 ratio of nameplate to average still puts a limit on penetration. Sure, 20% wind, 20% hydro, but then what? Should the 60% be nuclear or coal and gas? If nuclear, why don't we go 80% nuclear and 0% wind instead, for cheaper electricity production and less footprint?

Simplest is to finally start reducing demand overall in the US ;) For instance try these for a change http://cajiente.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/wasknijper.jpg

Today I have read that Google starts to invest in wind farms in the US, also the already have a license to trade energy.

Now I do trust people to do good, but I am a bit suspicions.

Will they not take the tax benefits for investing in green energy and just buy on the spot market the power when prices are very low (or negative) for their local data centre cool a couple of extra degrees and thus benefit fully from low prices (maybe even negative) and as soon as the price is lower somewhere else move the traffic (and thus most of the electrical load)

Or am I now going to far ...

intermittency and the 3-to-1 ratio of nameplate to average still puts a limit on penetration.

Yes, I doubt that more than 60% would ever make sense.

If nuclear, why don't we go 80% nuclear and 0% wind instead, for cheaper electricity production and less footprint

It's probably best not to have any one source account for more than 40%, if at all possible.

Finally, I just can't get excited about uranium-based nuclear, in a world where Iran are developing weapons with the help of nuclear generation. I could get excited about thorium....

I doubt more than 20% wind would ever make sense. Diversification seems not really necessary.

Unfortunately, you can make weapons from spent thorium reactor fuel too (U-233). However, civilian reactors, whether uranium or thorium fueled, aren't and won't be used for this in practice - you build small military heavy water reactors if you want weapons-grade plutonium.

Also, to the best of our intelligence organizations' knowledge, Iran is not developing weapons. However, they are clearly developing parts of the ability to develop weapons.

Would you agree that there is reason for concern about Iran's actions, and the example it's setting for it's neighbors, who are now talking about doing the same thing?

Would you agree that the Bush/Cheney move into Iraq and kid glove approach to North Korea might be as important an influence as Iran's actions?

I don't know about N. Korea, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that Iran will have some legitimate concerns about invasions into countries on both their East and West borders.

How does the above change concerns about weapons proliferation? Even if weapons of mass destruction are developed for a rational reason, they're still a problem, don't you think?

BTW, what do you think should have been done about NK?

I've never had a good idea of what to do about North Korea, as far as I see can see they are much more of a concern to their giant neighbor China than they are to us. My point was invading Iraq and staying far from NK sends the following message loud and clear: "possessing nuclear weapons is top drawer insurance against US led invasion."

Having lots of conventional artillery within range of Seoul had already given the Kim dynasty plenty of insurance against invasion from the south.

Yeah, our troops there wouldn't even be a speed bump in the short run. But the world's focus has not been on Kim's artillery and the perception that nukes are the insurance is the issue here. That is related to the perception that those handful of men we keep in harms way at the DMZ there are only the very tip of a much greater iceberg which it would best to keep clear of.

Weapons from U-233 are not really an issue, the stuff is horrendously dangerous, you'd need robots to handle it, and the bombs won't store, the stuff decays and pollutes itself. So if some country were involved in a global war where they were tossing around nukes like firecrackers it could be worth having a mass production line of U-233 bombs fired within a month or two of being created, but really nobody else is going to bother with it.

What's of concern with thorium reactors in weapons proliferation terms is that current practical designs require a plutonium core - just about the amount of plutonium you need for a bomb. (In theory you can do it with U-233 instead, but again it's horrendously dangerous to handle, plutonium's much easier.) So anyone who wants thorium reactors needs to have a source of plutonium - a conventional uranium reactor, or fast breeder. This gives countries an excuse to have plutonium sitting around stockpiled in large amounts.

The technology for weapons and peaceful nuclear unfortunately overlaps a lot. The father of the Pakistani weapons programme, AQ Khan, trained in Netherlands studying enrichment of uranium, and later took that knowledge back to the Pakistani reactors which had been built by the US under the Atoms for Peace programme. Basically, if someone teaches you the peaceful technology, developing the warlike technology is a lot easier.

70 countries have nuclear reactors of some kind. About 28 of these had at some time definite nuclear weapons programmes (as opposed to just someone senior talking about it, eg Konrad Adenauer in West Germany; there are a few doubtful cases such as Egypt maybe wanting to build its own nukes, and Saudi Arabia maybe looking to buy some). 13 of these went on to produce or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons (Belarus, Canada, China, France, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, UK, USA). 5 of them later renounced them (Belarus, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Ukraine).

We could count the countries differently if we chose, making things sound worse by including the countries involved in NATO weapons-sharing arrangements (eg Netherlands and Germany), or sound better since some of the nuclear countries were formerly one country (esp Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine), though this would drop the number of countries renouncing weapons, too. I mean, had Belarus been independent since the Russian Revolution, it seems unlikely they'd have developed weapons on their own. On the other hand, once they got them they could have chosen to keep them, Russia in 1991 wasn't going to be able to stop them.

Note that only the 5 permanent members of the UNSC openly said they wanted weapons, all the rest claimed it was all entirely peaceful.

Anyway, it seems that if your country gets a "peaceful" nuclear programme, there is a 40% chance that someone will take serious steps to make that a weapons programme. Of those starting a weapons programme, about half will actually produce weapons. So we get about 20% of "peaceful" programmes producing weapons.

Hydro can be higher than 20% in the right location, and geothermal - unmentioned by you - can also be very high. See NZ, Peru, Iceland etc for examples of these things.

Of course, hydro potential drops with global warming...

Sure, hydro and geothermal can be higher locally, but globally I don't see hydro go above 20% and I don't see geothermal make significant contributions at all. I'm talking global coal/gas replacement here.

Ah, now I see the clash here, two unspoken assumptions - that energy use can or cannot be reduced.

20% of "a fair bit" is a smaller number than 20% of "the enormous amounts we use now" or "the even more enormous amounts we might use if we had the chance."

The bill for energy resources seems pretty high when, well, our use is profligate. And so then yes, hydro/geo could only be 20% or less of global use. But if we use less...

I know, radical idea, consuming less. Thing is that different countries have very different per capita energy use levels, and yet have quite comparable lifestyles. Iceland uses 25,000kWh electricity per person annually, US or Australia 12,000, and Germany 8,000 - from memory, don't quote me. And yet they have comparable lifestyles. Wherreas Ethiopia with 300kWh each plainly has a much lower standard of living.

Quite obviously, whether we can power the world entirely with renewables and/or nuclear is a very different question with 8,000kWh each than with 25,000kWh.

I guess if Iceland stops importing bauxite to make aluminium for the world market with their vast hydro and geothermal resources, the global percentage of renewables would actually go down.

But yes, I agree we have that clash about total energy use. World average per capita consumption of energy is about 2.5 kW. Typical European and Asian industrialised countries use 5 kW. North America does 11 kW. Sure North America could come down to 5 kW, but that is no real game changer. 40 years from now, we are going to be 9 billion people and the average energy consumption is more likely to go up than down.

Given that we need to electrify transportation and space heating, I don't think electrical consumption is going to fall anywhere.

And, that's ok - we have plenty of affordable, clean wind, solar, or nuclear (if that's your thing).

A while back when I still had a blog, I had a look at the numbers. They're pretty daunting. I made some estimates about the likely electrified energy costs of mass transport, agriculture and so on. Even allowing for the efficiencies we'll get (it's less energy - electrical or otherwise - per person per kilometre to move people in trains than cars, etc), we'll still want something like 2,000W per person.

Electricity availability when I considered this issue a couple of years back was about 260W per person. A study by Pasternak shows that the human development index - a UN measure of quality of life - tops out at 0.9 with around 4,000kWh each. More power than that makes people have more money, but doesn't improve their quality of life much. 2,000kWh gives us 0.8. Well, let's be ambitious and aim for 0.9. 4,000kWh is about 460W.

As for other energy, Pasternak puts maximal HDI (0.9) as coming at around 5kW per person. Efficiencies such as we get from mass transit and more localised electricity generation and production could halve that without trouble, as we can see simply from the world today - countries like Germany and Denmark have less than half the per capita energy use of countries like Australia and the US, yet have similar or better lifestyles.

And as Pasternak notes, electricity is a versatile energy medium. The same plug that powers my laptop can power a heater or fan or power drill; whereas my gas can cook or heat and that's it. So we can safely discount it a bit more and aim for 2,000W per person worldwide.

In 2050, we'll have 9-10 billion people. Cornucopians tell us in 2050 we'll all be much richer and more literate and politically free; this drops birth rates a lot. Doomers tell us in 2050 we'll all be medieval peasants or something; this increases birth rates, but greatly increases infant mortality. Either way, 10 billion is about as many people as we'll ever need to power and feed at once.

10 billion people at 2,000W each is 20,000GW.
Current world energy use is about 15,500GW, but electricity generation is about 2,000GW of this. A tenfold increase in 40 years? Doable, but difficult.

However, doing it renewably is much harder, because of lower load factors for renewables than fossil fuel fired stations. And renewables are not zero carbon, just low carbon. Hydroelectric gives us rotting forest valleys, windmills are made from aluminium at 1kWh/kg, and all power stations need a stack of cement at around a tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per tonne. So we must consider not simply capacity, but actually delivered energy, and the emissions per delivered joule.

Remember also that renewable installation capacity is not infinite. There's only so many places for geothermal, hydro and tidal, not everywhere you could install solar or wind would be worth the trouble, hydro may become problematic if climate change melts all the glaciers, and so on and so forth.

The table below shows renewables in 2007. "Emit/DelGW" refers to the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions compared to getting the same power from coal. "Load factor" is the percentage of capacity the station can be expected to deliver at over a full year, going on most recent experiences. "Installed GW" is the imaginary amount installed in 2050, and "delivered GW" is how much is actually delivers = load factor x installed GW. "Emissions" are those as a percentage of what it'd be if it were all coal.

Generator Emit/DelGW Load Factor Installed GW Delivered GW Emissions
Geothermal 0.06 0.7 9.3 6.5 0.1%
Hydroelectric 0.17 0.45 816 367.2 1.6%
Solar PV 0.08 0.15 5.4 0.8 0%
Solar thermal 0.08 0.25 1 0.2 0%
Tidal 0.08 0.28 2 0.5 0%
Wind 0.03 0.2 74 14.8 0%
Totals 907.7 390 1.7%

Okay, using the currently unused capacity, we could get something like the below in 2050. I assume that about half the geothermal, tidal and hydro resources would not be used, either because cliamte change screws up the last two, or for other environmental reasons. Also, the best estimates I could find of the capacity of these resources were from industry bodies promoting them; if oil companies exaggerrate their favoured energy resource's reserves I don't see why renewables companies wouldn't, so halving seemed a fair guess.

Generator Emit/DelGW Load Factor Installed GW Delivered GW Emissions
Geothermal 0.06 0.7 108 75.6 0.001
Hydroelectric 0.17 0.45 1566 704.7 0.031
Solar PV 0.08 0.15 34453.75 5168 0.108
Solar thermal 0.08 0.25 20672.25 5168 0.108
Tidal 0.08 0.28 152 42.5 0
Wind 0.03 0.2 51680.625 10336.1 0.081
Totals 108632.625 21494.9 0.329

So it seems that in order to have an ecotechnic world society by 2050, and along the way to avoid catastrophic climate change while not reducing the useful energy we each have, we must build around 108,000GW of renewable energy. Put another way, we must build fixty-six times more electrical generation capacity than exists already in the world today.

Is this achievable? Well, from 1980 to 2005 worldwide we added 2.79% generation annually. At that rate we go from 2007's 2,000GW to 6,500GW in 2050. Far short. Well, some years the world's added 6% or so of capacity, usually when someone built an enormous hydroelectric project. 6% annual growth gives us 24,500GW annually, a quarter of the way there. We need about 9.5% growth every year for 40 years. All renewable, too.

All that and it still gives us about one-third the emissions we'd get if we did it all with coal. 25,300GW of coal-fired power would give us about 21,500GW delivered. At the usual figure of about 1kg CO2e per kWh, or 1t/MWh, or 1,000t/GWh, we'd be pumping out 21.5 million tonnes an hour all year, or 188 billion tonnes CO2e. A third of that is 60Gt CO2e, or close enough.

This is around twice current world emissions.

Crucial here are the emissions involved in building and maintaining these renewable energy sources. Currently production of things like aluminium is very energy-intensive, and it's inevitable that a fair portion of this energy will come from fossil fuels. And producing cement from limestone gives off carbon dioxide, that's a chemical process, even if the furnaces were entirely solar we'd still get those emissions - so we need some other way to anchor our wind turbines.

You can tweak my assumptions above, but in planning to electrify everything we must remember that renewable energy is not zero carbon, it's just low carbon. But "low" multiplied by a much much higher demand still leads to catastrophic climate change.

I don't know of anyone else who's calculated the likely emissions from a world run entirely renewable energy, so I can't offer cases for comparison. I'd love to be wrong.

A quick comment: You say 5 kW/capita suffice for a good life. I agree - that is what Europeans use. 5 kW * 10 billion people is 50 TW (today we use 15 TW). So me thinks your 108,000 GW (108 TW) of renewables is quite off - way more than necessary.

Also, you forget nuclear, which is as good as or better than wind regarding carbon emissions. With nuclear or wind generation at 3% of coal emissions, those 50 TW would be like 1.5 TW of today, which mean less than a tenth of today's emissions.

Then we can probably optimize this and let nuclear and renewable power bootstrap itself more - just because you use a lot of coal electricity to make wind aluminium today doesn't mean you need to keep doing that.

I don't forget nuclear, along with biomass and wave power I dismissed it.

Nuclear is out because like oil, coal and natural gas, uranium is a depleting resource. Sure, with fast breeders and thorium it wouldn't have to deplete super-fast, but using current commercially proven technology, it depletes.

Biomass is out because we want to deal with global warming. Back in 2004 which is what the IPCC2007 figures were based on, deforestation was 17% of greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture was another big chunk, too. If we're going to start putting food into fuel tanks, that'll only make the deforestation and agriculture emissions worse. Again, in theory they could be zero (they do it well in Finland) but in practice in the world today they're not. Illegal logging is a fair chunk of world forestry. If we can't regulate it properly for conservation we won't be able to for climate change.

Wave power is out because it's not been commercially-proven. Great in theory but they're finding it difficult to make it work well over in Portugal.

I just look at technologies which are commercially-proven worldwide today. I don't rely on another 20 years of R&D for my favourite technology. I hate nuclear and love biomass and wave power, but I try to use fair and consistent standards in judging all of them.

I now wait for people to respond and tell me thst their favourite technology could work today, honest, and it'd be really cheap, too, but those others will never work. Again, I'm just talking about what's been commercially-proven to use resources in a non-depleting way today. The future's unknown.

Biomass is out because we want to deal with global warming.

As long as people drink milk, eat eggs, eat chicken and produce waste etc - biomass remains always a flexible power option (albeit a smaller one):

http://www.genewscenter.com/content/Detail.aspx?ReleaseID=10251&NewsArea...
http://www.energyboom.com/biofuels/making-power-out-chicken-waste-china

In addition running a biomass waste power plant actually reduces GHG-emissions.

Sure. I mean, already we often run water sewerage treatment plants off the methane coming from the waste. But it's small stuff when talking in terms of the terawatts of renewables needed worldwide.

If you wanted to pump it up to a level where it'd be significant worldwide, then most likely we're looking at making the agricultural (manure and nitrogen fertiliser producing NO2, a strong greenhouse gas) and deforestation components of climate change even worse.

Not much use stopping burning fossil fuels if we're just going to cut down all the forests instead.

It's small but I don't consider 5% insignificant - especially since it is an energy source that can be stored.

The energy needs I outlined were 2kW per person worldwide. In 2050, that's 9-10 billion, let's call it 10 billion to be pessimistic and the maths simpler.

So that's 20,000GW of delivered electrical energy. That's 175 million gigawatt-hours. 1.75 x 10^17 wh = 6.3 x 10^20 Joules. 5% of that is 3.2 x 10^19. Wood manages about 20GJ per tonne. So we'd need 3.1 x 10^9 tonnes of wood - 3.1 billion tonnes. Of course, when you burn wood for electricity you're only going to get about 1/3 the energy from it actually become electricity, so we have to triple requirements to 9.3 billion tonnes. The other 2/3 the energy is still useful as the Finns have demonstrated, pumping hot water around their towns.

Still, we're after electricity. So we can say that for 5% of our required 2kW per person in 2050 to come from timber, we'd need 9.3 billion tonnes of it annually.

By comparison, all of Europe and the CIS in 2000 consumed 707.1 million tonnes of wood and wood products [source]. World timber legal production (and we can be sure the illegal production is not done sustainably) in 2005 was 1.732 billion cubic metres [source, table 1-1-a], or about 1.25 billion tonnes.

Thus, to get 5% of our electricity from wood would require about eight times the world's current timber harvest. Bear in mind that currently deforestation is about one-sixth of world greenhouse gas emissions, and IPCC2007 told us we need to get to 15% of 2000 emissions by 2050 to keep warming under 2C. That is, deforestation alone - even without land use, cement, and burning fossil fuels - is enough to give us 2C warming. And we have this deforestation problem with 1.25 billion tonnes wood production.

What would we have we eight times as much harvest?

I think biomass is great in principle, but unfortunately messy in practice if we want the whole world doing it.

Depletion isn't very interesting if the reserves are big. Uranium reserves are huge.

And that thorium and uranium wouldn't deplete "super-fast" with breeders must be the understatement of the year. We'd literally have easy fuel for millions of years.

As I said, I restricted the power generation used to the commercially-proven renewable methods. Current uranium reactors are commercially proven, but not renewable. Thorium and fast breeders use so little on the full cycle as to be effectively renewable, but are not commercially-proven. I excluded wave power on the same basis - renewable but not commercially proven.

If we're going to include technologies that are not yet commercially-proven, we not only have to include thorium and fast breeders, but wave power, ocean thermal power, a whole swag of solar PV stuff still promising us less than US$1/Watt sometime in the future, honest, and so on. And of course the fabled fusion power, too.

If we include all the commercially unproven technologies, then the nuclear options will be even less popular than they are now. So I wouldn't recommend to any nuclear advocate that we extend that benchmark.

Let's stick with what's been proven to work, and work renewably. Let's not rely on vague promises that this or that technology - whether nuclear, solar, or whatever - will work sometime in the future, honest, if only we spend another few trillion on it.

However, doing it renewably is much harder, because of lower load factors for renewables than fossil fuel fired stations.

I don't think that's a helpful way of putting it: costs are the important variable. Renewables and nuclear are more capital intensive, but their life-cycle costs aren't higher.

renewables are not zero carbon, just low carbon.

I'd estimate wind as about 1% of coal, not even 3%. Same for nuclear.

There's only so many places for geothermal, hydro and tidal,

There's plenty of wind and solar. Even the UK and Germany would have plenty of places, if they stopped worrying about the view.

A load factor of 20% for wind is a bit low. It's reasonably accurate for Europe, in part because of siting limitations. OTOH, the US is getting 35% in new installations, and offshore, while more expensive, has higher capacity factors. 15% for solar is probably low, given that utility-scale solar is likely to grow quite a bit, and it can achieve 30%. I think you're safe using, at a minimum, wind: 25% and solar 20%.

Jeppen has a good point: eventually renewable energy will be the input for building renewable energy, so it will become zero-carbon.

Finally, I would agree that 9.5% annual growth of renewables is a bit of a challenge. OTOH, I certainly think it's doable. Two thoughts: renewables are not more expensive than FFs, so this growth rate is really just a question of redirecting investment. 2nd, if we fail, we cook the planet, not run out of energy. That's not better, but it's different, and it's important that we know what our challenges really are. In this case, it's not Peak Energy, it's climate change.

Costs aren't that important in the long term. In the end we'll have to choose between renewable electricity, or no electricity. Whatever it costs, we'll pay.

I saw a similar thing in Peru. It took a month's minimum wage to fill a tank. But people kept on truckin', because they need to travel from A to B. Transport is a necessity, so people will pay for it. Likewise with electricity.

The load factor for wind accounts for the fact that yes, you get a few good spots with 35%, but as you build more and more you have to choose less ideal places. And someone will complain about the view, and someone will be listened to - so even less ideal places will be chosen. This has been the experience in Denmark and Spain, where load factors started high but over the years dropped to about 20%.

The 15% for solar accounts for the fact that people are going to put their power stations where they live, and a lot of people live in northerly latitudes getting less sun. 10-15% is what the Germans get.

Renewable energy will never be "zero carbon". There are some emissions which are unavoidable for chemical or biological reasons. If you flood a forest valley to make a hydroelectric dam, organic material rots - giving off methane and carbon dioxide. If you pour concrete foundations, well cement is made by roasting limestone giving off carbon dioxide. And there are many chemical processes involved in refining the various minerals to get the metals we use in a solar thermal plant. And so on.

Low carbon, definitely. Zero? No. And this is the issue of concern: low carbon multiplied by high electricity consumption leads to high emissions. Not as high as with fossil fuels, of course - but still high enough to be of concern when we're looking at needing global reductions of 90% or so.

The load factor for wind accounts for the fact that yes, you get a few good spots with 35%, but as you build more and more you have to choose less ideal places. And someone will complain about the view, and someone will be listened to - so even less ideal places will be chosen. This has been the experience in Denmark and Spain, where load factors started high but over the years dropped to about 20%.

Capacity factor for wind is to some extent a matter of choice: put a big propeller on a small generator and you'll get a higher number than if you put a small propeller on a large generator. But that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more kW·h per year or per dollar....

Costs aren't that important in the long term. In the end we'll have to choose between renewable electricity, or no electricity. Whatever it costs, we'll pay.

I agree.

as you build more and more you have to choose less ideal places. And someone will complain about the view, and someone will be listened to - so even less ideal places will be chosen.

Yes, under BAU conditions. But think about what you said - "whatever it costs, we'll pay." If the costs include putting a wind turbine in one's "view-shed", we'll do it. The same applies to solar: if we need to put massive CSP installations in Arizona and North Africa, we will.

Renewable energy will never be "zero carbon".

It can if we're willing to pay a relatively small premium to make it so.

If you pour concrete foundations, well cement is made by roasting limestone giving off carbon dioxide.

A new cement has been developed, which consumes rather than produces CO2.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/31/cement-carbon-emissions

there are many chemical processes involved in refining the various minerals to get the metals we use in a solar thermal plant.

We use processes that emit co2 and other CC inducing chemicals because we have chosen to, not because we have to. There are alternatives and substitutes, and ways to be far more efficient.

Climate Change is about choice, not destiny.

We use processes that emit co2 and other CC inducing chemicals because we have chosen to, not because we have to. There are alternatives and substitutes, and ways to be far more efficient.

Quite true. However, sensible public policy must be made assuming there's some friction in the machinery of the system, a lot of imperfections.

For example, we have spent the last forty or fifty years combating deforestation, illegal logging and so on. I mean, it was one of the prime issues which started environmentalism, before that environmentalists were just loopy people who liked poetry and being naked most of the day.

But still deforestation is a huge problem, causing around one-sixth of greenhouse gas emissions. So if for example we want to consider biomass as a fuel source, we have got to account for that. Increased demand for timber or agricultural land will make the deforestation issue worse.

Sure, in principle we could plant three trees for every one we fell, and get a net increase in forest area. But let's be realistic: while there are companies seeking short-term profit without regard to long-term effects, and while there are a few billion people in the world living on less than US$2 a day, there will be illegal logging. No doubt about it.

Much the same applies to all these various other issues of mining and construction and so on. Yes, in principle some or all of these could be done zero carbon. But that would require that everyone be perfect. And a plan which requires that everyone be perfect is doomed to failure. People will be greedy, people will be lazy and cut corners, people will out of inertia keep doing things the way they've been doing them for decades, people will fuck up.

We're human. It's best to plan assuming human imperfection, some friction in the machine. I mean, have any wind turbines been built with this cement which absorbs carbon dioxide? If not, why not? There must be some reason for it.

Let's be realistic. We won't be zero carbon, but we can perhaps be very low carbon - if we work hard at it.

I'd estimate wind as about 1% of coal, not even 3%. Same for nuclear.

Nuclear is actually somewhat higher than wind according to this article which looked at 103 lifecycle studies:

This article screens 103 lifecycle studies of greenhouse gas-equivalent emissions for nuclear power
plants to identify a subset of the most current, original, and transparent studies.

It begins by briefly detailing the separate components of the nuclear fuel cycle before explaining the
methodology of the survey and exploring the variance of lifecycle estimates. It calculates that while the
range of emissions for nuclear energy over the lifetime of a plant, reported from qualified studies
examined, is from 1.4 g of carbon dioxide equivalent per kWh (g CO2e/kWh) to 288 g CO2e/kWh, the
mean value is 66 g CO2e/kWh.

http://bit.ly/9MnEjw

The high values are for using outdated enrichment technology requiring about 20 times more energy. If you only count LCAs with modern centrifuge enrichment, you get a much, much lower mean.

What % of enrichment in the US is still done with gaseous diffusion?

If you only count -

If you only count any particular set of figures you can make anything look really good or really bad. The turkey's 364 days of increasing food consumption excluding the 365th day when he receives a surprise come to mind.

Sensible public policy is made based on real-world results, how things are usually done.

Actually new nuclear is more expensive than new wind and new nuclear has a higher footprint than new wind and increases the dependence on fuel imports. In addition, nuclear has high decommissioning costs and high repository costs and requires cooling water.

www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/67392/politics-key-to-russia-turkey-nu...

In view of the long-term guarantee, the consortium's bid price of 21.16 euro cents/kilowatt hour (KWh) caused further controversy, being considerably higher than the 4-14c/kWh that private companies currently sell power into Turkey's slowly liberalising power market.

Most electricity consumers may not be willing to pay extra just because power was produced in a new nuclear power plant.

Wind power is not predictable.

Well, it's partly predictable.

Wind power does require reserves.

Yes, but they can come very, very cheaply from DSM. Utilities don't naturally lean towards DSM because the regulatory framework doesn't reward it.

Wind power output sometimes drops suddenly with little warning

Actually, ERCOT admitted afterwards that they needed to improve their forecasting.

It is not hard to find reports like that one. You just have to look.

The ERCOT incident was indeed unusual. And, yet, they were able to handle it without any disruptions to the grid using....good old DSM -from the article: "Operators implemented Step 2 of its emergency electric curtailment plan at 6:41 p.m. Most loads, according to the council, were restored and the grid's operating reserves pushed back above 3,000 MW. "

So some people are rusty in their math. Some other people aren't. No big deal.

I am quite rusty in my farming skills. Actually they are non-existent. I almost burned down the oak trees in the yard when the leaf shredder caught fire a couple of years ago.

This was particularly weird in the context of the GOM oil disaster. The number of birds killed by blades is simple attrition. The number of birds, and everything else killed by a single event oil spill of this magnitude is devastation.

Here on TOD when wind machines were mentioned in the past some posters would talk about the dead birds, bats and even talked about shooting the nacells with guns.

So you should not be shocked.

The same Robert Bryce...

who said in an article linked to last week in a Drumbeat, that electric cars would never catch on because:

"40% of Americans don't have access to an outlet where they park their cars".

Excellent article, Jerome, these are just my words.
And this is what more and more entities are publishing in Germany.
For example the German environmental ministry stressed the "merit order effect" a few years ago. The study recieved some critique, which - as far as I remember is due to the general difficulty to determine price effects, especially in a volatile demand and supply situation.
Meanwhile there are quite a few studies around about this issue, in cluding one from a bank, which also concluded that the stock market value of companies building new coal power plants is pretty much challenged by the new market situation (renewables + carbon costs).
At least a few conventional power utility companies seem to know this. For example the mayor power company RWE employs a former wind entrepreneur who had claimed that wind will become the market's "cheap maker".
This goes also well in line with the power companies' behaviour: Since the EU's decision to charge the companies for their carbon emissions many plans of building new coal power plants were cancelled and no new project was started. Instead the utilities try to convince legislation to extend the usage of old nuclear plants, which is expected to be very profitable for them and doesn't bear the risk of stranded investment.
Furthermore, it may not be a coincidence that so far the old power utilities' grid operators were extremely slow in permitting the access of new offshore wind turbines to their grid - which they are obliged to do by law - as these will put even more competitive pressure on the rate of return of the fossil power plants.

yep, there's a sea change underway right now.
Utilities (the German ones in particular, given their presence in both Germany and the UK) realize that (i) most of the new capacity they are going to be building in the next 15 years is offshore wind, to the tune of several billion per year, and (ii) they have had ot detach their networks from the rest of their activities and can no longer use them to block access to others.

This means that their portfolio is going to change significantly in a few years (thus wind revenues will start to matter a lot to them), and that they are going to be employing hundreds or thousands of engineers and workers in the wind sector for the foreseeable future, creating large groups of people that take wind seriously. And they won't have any incentive or possibility left to play with their grid assets to stop this.

Wind is getting a free ride from fuel-based energy which provides the storage wind lacks.
The customer never sees the variability.
On your bill you pay a customer charge across all generation, distribution and a variable/fuel charge.
In my bill over 60% of the bill is per kilowatthour .
Wind should increase the customer charge but reduce the average fuel charge but your bill doesn't work like that.

Wind is getting a free ride from fuel-based energy which provides the storage wind lacks.

If wind farms don't provide reliable peak capacity, they don't get paid for it. If other sources do provide it, they do get paid for it. No subsidies at all.

Wind should increase the customer charge but reduce the average fuel charge but your bill doesn't work like that.

The customer charge pays for utility overhead, like transmission & distribution, not the capital expense of generation.

Re the bloomberg article: Its an admission capitalism doesn't work.... its that simple

OOH wind is subsidized therefore too cheap for the competing energy uses impacting supply

but OTOH this is an admission that the market doesn't automatically correct to introduce new energy sources as the market makes it work because energy is "fungible"...

if they are correct then there must be an infinite supply of something else other than wind at a better price?

you can't have it both ways

if the argument is wind is undercutting established energy production methods that will need replacing??????

they why doesn't the market respond?

if the counter argument is wind unsubsidized is too expensive that we are stuck with the cart before the horse..

ie money produces energy... which I'm afraid isn't reality

if you want to stick to the market system and define everything in those terms then MASSIVE PRICE CORRECTION for established energy sources has to take place before any meaningful comparison of prices can be made..

current energy prices are too cheap.... which leads us back to the market got it wrong and always has

the article is psychotic if you dwell on it

THE END NO RETURNS

Midi, you miss one key point here. The government has ruled that the grid MUST buy the wind power first, so from there we don;t have areal market. It matters not if other producers are cheaper, because the wind power must be bought first, so in this case, it is not actually fungible.

Remove the wind first requirement, and the wind feed in tariffs (but you can keep the carbon tax), and then you will have a real market again. Right now, wind gets so many favours that it can arbitrage the market when it gets the same feed in tariff regardless of the actual market price. Remove this anomaly, and things will change.

Using spot market prices favors generators with low fixed costs and mostly variable costs, ie gas-fired power plants. It's no surprise that the only kind of power plants built in Europe and North America in the past 15 years is gas-fired ones - they are the only ones that can be profitable in that regulatory environment. No nukes or coal plants can get built, this is not just about wind - even though coal and nuclear are far cheaper, on average, than gas-fired power. It's just more risky and less profitable.

And ultimately, that's a political choice, which just happens to profit investment banks (who love to trade gas and electricity, and enjoy the volatility created by a gas-dominated market).

Gas-fired plants were built because of environmental opposition to coal electric and higher costs and political opposition to nuclear.

But you are misrepresenting the nature of the natural gas build. Some of the plants built were peaker plants that have lower capital costs and lower efficiency. But other gas electric plants built were base load plants that have higher capital costs in order to achieve higher energy conversion efficiency. These plants are designed for 24x7 operation.

The net effect of wind on natural gas plant construction is that less base load natural gas plants will get built and more (lower efficiency) peaker plants will get built. This has to be the case because subsidized wind power will lower the ROI of base load plants - and not just natural gas base load. All base load will have lower ROI due to subsidized intermittent wind power lowering the wholesale price of electric power when the wind is blowing hardest.

Stop spinning.

I'm not spinning anything. I'm just saying that in a deregulated market, only gas-fired plants get built. We have 2 decades of experience in several markets that demonstrate that.

All base load will have lower ROI due to subsidized intermittent wind power lowering the wholesale price of electric power when the wind is blowing hardest.

That's markets in action or you. Wind has the lowest marginal cost. Why would you want more expensive plants to keep on functioning? (and if you say that wind wouldn't get built without subsidies, well neither would nukes or coal; and if you say we should function on 100% gas-fired plants, as this is the most "efficient" solution, well we end up with other problems as there isn't enough natgas...)

Jerome, there's a disconnect between your arguments here.

First you say in a deregulated market, only gas gets built, based on last two decades.
But then you say eventually we won't have enough nat gas. Deregulated or not, GT won't get built if there is not enough nat gas to power it, so other sources will.

But for now, GT gets built because it is the best return on investment.
It, like hydro is the most commandable form of electricity, can be turned on or off in quick time, and does not need much land, and is not geographically constrained, and can be built very close to demand centres, minimising the cost and loss of transmission.

Wind has none of these benefits, only a cheap marginal cost

So it is no wonder GT has been the generation method of choice.

If governments really want to favour wind, then do so with a carbon tax. But building a whole lot of wind does nothing to change the fact that it has these major drawbacks, and the wind industry barely acknowledges them,and makes it other generators problem with the must use first provision.

Ultimately, if people(and gov) want to have a high % of wind, they must accept the cost that comes with it, in the form of extra transmission lines, and maintaining large standby capacity

Paul:

A wind farm needs a lot of land, however you can still have sheep underneath a wind mill a foundation is not bigger the 40*40 meter, also you can grow vegetables, etc. etc.

Also you can build a windmill close to villages 1500 meters or so. That means very low transmission losses and (certainly in the Netherlands) a lot of high voltage lines have already been put in for all these nice dirty coal plants so we do not need to construct any additional overland lines (most 10 kV is below ground in the Netherlands)

Now take new nuclear, we are discussing to put in a new nuclear reactor, a new modern one would be 1600 MW, the current one in 500 MW, can you imagine what additional power lines will have to be built to distribute that electricity?

How much spinning reserve is to be added to make sure that the lights do not go out when something happens with the new power plant?

In the US the wind is down the middle of the country. It is not near where the bulk of the population lives. High amounts of wind use therefore requires a big build-out of HVDC lines. When the price of electricity goes negative at night in an area of Texas where the wind is blowing the price does not go negative in all of Texas let alone neighboring states.

Our politicians and energy companies do not believe that we are running out of natgas. They don't care about the price of gas in 15 years' time.

in the form of extra transmission lines, and maintaining large standby capacity

People already live with a large standby capacity:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

Or do you think all the gas power plant capacity built during the last 10 years (gas was number one in the last decade in the EU and the US) will somehow magically disappear.

Plants that do not generate enough profit to pay for their staffs do get shut down.

Also, some natural gas and coal electric power plants can't serve as back-up for wind because they take far too long to start. Plants that spin up quickly are designed for that purpose. Designing a plant to work as baseload costs more. Designing a plant to serve as baseload and also to start quickly costs even more.

Again, wind power output is predictable and it does not require any spinning reserves. Wind power is intermittent but not unreliable like these plants:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

but unfortunately laymen will never understand this very essential difference.

Plants that do not generate enough profit to pay for their staffs do get shut down.

These standby operating costs are real, but they're much lower than the original capex, and in the case of coal much less than the marginal generating costs.

some natural gas and coal electric power plants can't serve as back-up for wind because they take far too long to start.

Second to second, minute to minute, even hour to hour "spinning reserve" is far more cheaply provided by DSM.

So, why is it that spot markets rule when they appear to result in a non optimal allocation of capital?

If they continue to be required method of operation, wind needs to be subsidized regardless of its long term average costs.

The fact that this disadvantages coal is a good thing but perhaps it would be more efficient to ban coal outright.

Colorado has just passed a law that mandates conversion from coal to natural gas which is reported to be the first place in the world to do this. That was done in a bipartisan way and showed great political courage.

Instead, we play these market based games so we can pretend the market rules.

We should cut to the chase. Pick the winners and don't pretend you are not.

The more I think about it the more amazing it is that Colorado cut through the crap.

I agree, we should make explicit political choices about what kind of generation system, because that's what it is in the end.

Spot larket rules because Wall Street loves them - they can do the trading and the hedging and the stick market analyses and they love the volatility.

Spot markets rule because both demand and supply vary by the minute or less.

One can allow buyers and sellers to engage in longer term supply contracts and still leave some supply to be sold on spot markets. One can get the benefits of both spot markets and long term contracts. This happens with natural gas and other power sources. It happens in some areas with electric power.

One of the stupidities of the late 1990s California misregulation (mislabeled "deregulation") was that utilities were not allowed to enter into long term supply contracts with generators. Plus, retail prices were not variable. So when demand spiked the utilities had to buy huge amounts of power at the spot market prices and the higher prices did nothing to dampen demand.

whooooshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

hear that...?

ok flippancy aside ... doesn't matter if it; was, is or will be a real market (or not)

think about what your saying..

you'r in essence saying the market can't correct...

put it even simpler... why has this problem arisen in the first place? if what you say is "correct" we shouldn't be where we are

Midi I am saying that if you pay someone to produce electricity (i.e. the feed in tariff), and keep paying them even when the value of the product drops to zero,(middle of night) then you have a problem, and certainly not a "free" market. What is the pojnt of paying someone to produce something when it is not needed?
Much as I dislike subsidies, I am ok with a subsidy either for wind capacity construction ($/MW) or a subsidy per kWh produced (e.g. in Canada there is 2c premium paid by gov) , but paying 15c for something when the market value is zero? How is that ever a good economic decision for anyone except the seller? When would anyone make that buying decision unless they are forced to?

Let the wind operators get paid the market price for their product, when they produce it, same as anyone else (put you carbon tax/credits on top of that). Then wind operators will look either for sites that produce more daytime wind, or find ways to store their power, or just sell it at night for what they can get. But at least the customer base is not paying the 15c for something worth zero

Remove the buy first mandate (but replace with a carbon tax), and the feed in tariff, and then if wind is as cheap as you assert, it will get built.

However, regardless oft he economics of wind, it does not address the fundamental problem, that you can have a situation where there is no wind blowing, so other sources must still maintain capacity to supply the entire demand. But what happens if the coal plants are decomissioned, and there is now insufficient non-wind capacity? Can you force someone to build non wind capacity? Will the people accept occasional blackouts as the trade off for not having enough non wind generation? Do you require wind operators to own or secure an equal amount of non wind generation (or storage).

It is inherently wrong for wind to get paid the highest price, for uncontrollable electricity, and pay the lowest price to the other generators that must remain as the source of last resort

Paul Nash said,

"Then wind operators will look either for sites that produce more daytime wind, or find ways to store their power, or just sell it at night for what they can get. But at least the customer base is not paying the 15c for something worth zero"

Actually, there may be something very important in what you just said there: Right now, with the market the way it is (someone must pay for the electric power produced by wind, no matter when it is produced) leaves no real incentive to develop and implement electric energy storage systems. Why do it if you get paid whether you can move the productive capacity to peak hour needed parts of the day?
What you are proposing might actually encourage what is most needed (reliable and cost effective electric power storage, an industry that has long been under-supported and under utilized). I say this being a wind energy supporter, but perhaps it is time to make the wind producers provide not only clean electricity but predictable and reliable energy.

As for finding sites where the wind blows in the day instead of the night, I would assume the best sites are already taken. If we intend to build the kind of "mega-turbines" we now see on the drawing boards, the number of available sites must be pretty limited, especially if you count in local political opposition. By the way, it is local political opposition that caused many potential funders abandon wind for solar...I don't have statistics for this, but I do have conversations with alternative energy supporters who will tell you that local opposition to wind projects can stall a project for years and drive the cost of developing the project through the roof.

This creates another whole set of issues to try to chess game...if reliable cost effective electric power storage were developed, what advantage would wind have over solar? Given the problem of local opposition to many wind projects (opposition which solar panals on flat roof buildings essentially invisible to the public would not have to face) is wind still that much cheaper to do than solar? I am asking, I sure don't know the answer...

RC

RC, I do indeed think it is important, that is why I am so against the "must buy wind first" rules, when the wind producer is getting their fixed feed in tariff, why should they care about either spot price or storage.

But the reliability is key. We, as a society, demand 100% reliability, and wind just doesn't deliver it. It's the electrical equivalent of flying standby - you may get it very cheap, but you might not get anything at all either, and miss out on the family thanksgiving. When something is really important, most of us are prepared to pay a premium, which means wind should be prepared to receive a discounted price. If they want the reliable price, make themselves reliable, it's that simple.

As for the sites, well, I don't know if all the best ones are taken, but probably the best ones that you have a chance of developing without excessive local opposition are. Another advantage to gas - it can be put in nondescript buildings in industrial areas - close to where it is needed. Add in the transmission lines for wind farms and you have more land used and (slight) visual pollution.

In california a new wind project is three years minimum, and possibly never of the lawsuits succeed, in Texas, about three months, where are they being built today?

As for solar, when people start to see the sizes involved for solar plants to replace coal or GT, they will be equally unpopular - already opposition to proposed solar thermal in Death Valley!

I don;t thin a storage system would help solar that much more. It is so expensive today, in all forms (PV and thermal) without storage, so add that and it gets even worse. Paradoxically, cheap large scale storage would favour coal and even nuke plants, as they can store at night (when wind is blowing) and sell lots during the day. Only real loser is GT and maybe hydro.

But, other than pumped hydro, the resources need for large scale storage are staggering. A much better approach is to have universal time of use charging, even allow residential customers to opt for market linked rates - with Smart meter technology this could be done. People will realise the value in shifting discretionary loads to off peak - run the AC more at night (even make ice if need be), do a load of washing each night instead of all on one day, run the dishwasher at night, use night store heating, programmed off peak preference water heating.
I used to run the elect and gas utilities at a cdn ski resort, and once we had time of day charging, we found almost 1 MW of shiftable load (and about 200kW of wasted load that we eliminated altogether). When you can get paid to shift load, you start to look for ways to do it. If drivers knew they could buy gas at half price from 1am to 4am, they would start doing so, pretty quickly.

There is so much potential for load shifting, at reasonable expanse, that I'd say it's bang for the buck is better than storage by at least 10;1 if not 100:1. All it needs, to start, is make the offpeak pricing accessible, and consumers will start to game the system.

This is the single best thing the wind industry could champion. Everyone except the GT and hydro will benefit from this.

Jerome has pointed out (correctly) that in deregulated (supply) markets, GT gets built. Time to deregulate the customer (demand) markets too, and we will see some significant reductions of daytime peak and increase in night load - ideal for wind.

As I have said elsewhere here, the wind industry has not put forward (to my knowledge) and real plan for dealing with the reliability issues when wind is more than 50% of capacity. They can't dodge this bullet forever.

I'd personally be favorable to having capacity markets (ie a market for MW on demand, separate for the market for MWh). Wind could not compete in that market, but would sell the MWh. Reliable suppliers would get the relevant revenue for their on-demand capacity.

That's what we have in the US: separate payments for capacity and KWHs.

Paul Nash says,

"A much better approach is to have universal time of use charging, even allow residential customers to opt for market linked rates - with Smart meter technology this could be done."

I am ABSOLUTELY in favor of time of day pricing! I am a night person at heart, completely out of sync with most of our culture, and it would work for me. I also see it as part of the needed step to break out of this idiotic fascination with synchronization our culture seems to suffer (everyone hit the road at the same time, on holidays and "drive time"....we have to build everything to peak copacity because we ourselves create the "peaks"!)

I do not take as dim a view of the potential for storage as you do however, I think that with some effort the costs could come down fantastically, and in fact are already beginning to. The hot oil systems and molten salt systems used in thermal solar plants do not seem like such a burden, and the technology is already mature. Interestingly there are only 4 ways of storing power known:

Chemical (crude oil, coal, methanol, etc,)
Mechanical (compressed air, stored hydropower)
Thermal (ice, stored heat, stored steam)
Nuclear (the splitting of or the fusion of atoms, meaning energy that is stored in the stuff of the universe itself, hydrogen in particular)

It is known that much of the energy we use is in thermal form (home heating, air-conditioning, even autos, planes and trains are powered by heat engines) All that is really required for energy storage is a tempeture difference, which then creates a pressure difference if needed....the storage medium could even be super chilled or crogenically chilled air...liquid nitrogen, which again is already a mature and pretty large scale industry...

To your point that storage would most benefit the fossil fuel industry such as coal plants...that is of course true if we discharge and dismiss the carbon problem and dismiss the horrific ecological cost of extraction of fossil fuel (such as mountaintop removal mining and the mess we now see in the Gulf of Mexico). Why deal with the dirty if we can capture and store the clean?

I will leave off here, I think we have enough to think about.

RC

I am ABSOLUTELY in favor of time of day pricing!

Your utility (if you're in the US) is legally required to provide it. Just ask for it.

In the US the wind blows most strongly in low population density areas. That reduces political opposition to new capacity. However, it simultaneously introduces another problem: The wind power isn't available where people live.

What I'd like to know: What's the cost of large scale HVDC lines running from the plains states to the East Coast of the US? Ditto for Canada. What's probably needed is an HVDC line running from Texas up to Alberta and then HVDC lines running east from it.

Storage: Keep in mind that there are many different storage scenarios depending on swings in demand and swings in availability. Concentrating solar power works well with a molten salt storage to shift solar into the peak evening summer hours. But that molten salt storage isn't going to shift solar power from June to January.

Wind has reliability problems that bigger than can be solved by just shifting power several hours. (I'm quoting myself here)

Wind grew by 15,398 thousand megawatt-hours of actual output in 2009 or 28% (as distinct from the capacity numbers that the AWEA reports above). So nameplate capacity grew by more than actual output. You might think that the lower growth in absolute output as compared to potential output was due to installations happening late in the year. But here's what's odd: The absolute amount of electric power generated from wind in December 2009 (6,270 thousand megawatt-hours) is less than the amount for December 2008 (6,616). Was December 2009 a weak month for wind? How can output go down 5% while nameplate capacity goes up 40%? Wind has reliability problems.

Randall,

I'm puzzled by those EIA monthly wind output figures. Take a look at October 09 to January 2010. Those four months are very flat. If wind capacity ramped up at the end of the year, there should have been a change there. Something's wrong with the statistics - I've emailed a question to an EIA analyst.

then you will have a real market again.

Wow! Two simple actions will make 'a real market'?

Here I thought 'real markets' can't happen with all the government regulation. But Remove the wind first requirement, and the wind feed in tariffs is all it will take to get "a real market"?

Oh, and what is "a real market" so we'll know it when we see it.

A real electricity market - IMEUC - 3 articles on EnergyPulse.net Couldn't resist answering, and agreed, its clearly not very simple to do so it works.

Well, put a big subsidy on coal electric power and it will bring the price of electric power down too. Though it will not bring down the cost of any of the sources of electric power. But taxpayer-funded subsidies will lower the market price of a good.

What this report is really saying is:

- that wind power in local areas without sufficient transmission line capacity will lower the local prices below 0 when the wind blows hard.
- but the wind does not always blow hard and so other electric power sources operate at other times.
- that wind power's penetration in an area will be limited because all the towers will tend to operate at around the same time - lowering ROI for wind farms.
- and so now the wind power industry needs subsidies on long distance DC electric transmission lines so that the electric power can be sold in areas without wind.

There's a debate in the Texas electric power industry about how other power sources have to pay for their lack of reliability. But wind doesn't have to pay. Basically, other power sources pay more to compensate for wind's unreliability. Wind lowers the ROI on base load power sources. Yet wind does not eliminate the need for baseload power sources. We still need electric power when the wind does not blow.

What I'd like to know: How big will the subsidies have to be on long distance DC transmission lines to move Texas wind power to Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, etc?

Well, put a big subsidy on coal electric power and it will bring the price of electric power down too.

That's true, and that's indeed what's been happening for a number of years, through the lack of payment by the coal industry for the damage it does around it...

In general, yes, it makes sense for public authorities to "pick winners" in the power generation sector - that's how nuclear got developed in the first place, and that's the only way it will get built again in the future. The question then is: do you want to pick winners?

The fact is: each of coal, nuclear and wind are cheaper, on average, than gas-fired electricity, and yet market mechanisms dictate that only gas-fired plants get built. So, if you think that's not a good idea (a political opinion in itself), which technology do you put forward? I understand the case for nuclear to be pushed forward - the French exemple is a good one, overall. Coal would likely be out of any rational choice today. Wind is also a defendable proposition.

The lack of reliability is not that hard to solve, nor that expensive, given that we don't start from a blank sheet. The capacity that's here to deal with normal demand variations is perfectly able to cope with the variable (but predictable) input of wind. Wind provides MWh, not MW, but each MWh it provides is that much less fuel burnt.

Putting aside external costs (which both nuclear gas electric have) currently new natural gas electric power is cheaper than new nuclear in the United States. Natural gas electric plants were built because they offered better ROI to electric power utilities than nuclear and less environmental opposition than coal electric.

The variation in wind output already causes negative electric power prices at the current level of wind build. Those negative prices provide incentives for construction of long range electric power transmission lines that can transport that electric power to areas with low wind (e.g. the American South East). If the high range transmission lines require a subsidy to get built then wind's competitiveness isn't as great as you are portraying.

So can Texas wind electric power get transported to Tennessee or Georgia or the Carolinas without government subsidy for the to-be-built transmission lines?

The capacity that is there to deal with normal demand variation has to be increased to deal with added wind power. Wind increases the amount of variability in supply and so will require additional capacity for peaking generators.

The capacity that is there to deal with normal demand variation has to be increased to deal with added wind power. Wind increases the amount of variability in supply and so will require additional capacity for peaking generators.

Actually, peak capacity is already overbuilt, so new capacity isn't needed. This will be the case for quite some time in the US.

Actually, peak capacity is already overbuilt, so new capacity isn't needed. This will be the case for quite some time in the US.

Especially given the fact, that the US consumes almost double the electricity compared to Western Europe.

I would also like the market to pick winners, but I think that we have a different definition of what a market is. As far as I am concerned, this is what it means :

a) pricing of externalities with no grandfathering : it was a bit easy for european utilities (especially german) to build gas-fired plan when they got their carbon credit for free.

b) no forced indexation on power consumers, both corporate and retail. People should be able to pay spot or fixed price for their power in the same way that they pay floating or fixed rate on their mortgage. While I am speaking about mortgages : it would make sense for consumers to buy decades of electricity in advance and attach this "power asset" to their home, even financing it with the mortgage. That would be a perfect ALM for power producing companies, and it would be a wonderful marketing opportunities for retail banking networks.

c) only arms length transactions between different power producers.

I don't think that wind is economical in such a framework, because of the missing storage component. Today's reality is that storage on a large scale is provided by fossil-fueled power capacity. It may make sense for a while with CCS, but I would really want to see CCS working economically on a large scale before committing to massive wind investments.

Don't get me wrong, I would be very happy to see a society powered by wind and a sustainable storage technology, and it can perfectly happen thanks to a technological breakthrough, for instance in the battery arena. But in the same way that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want, you get power with the technology you have, not necessarily the one you want.

I don't think that wind is economical in such a framework, because of the missing storage component.

Storage is by far the expensive approach. Geographical diversity and DSM are the way to go. To quote Paul Nash above:

"But, other than pumped hydro, the resources need for large scale storage are staggering. A much better approach is to have universal time of use charging, even allow residential customers to opt for market linked rates - with Smart meter technology this could be done. People will realise the value in shifting discretionary loads to off peak - run the AC more at night (even make ice if need be), do a load of washing each night instead of all on one day, run the dishwasher at night, use night store heating, programmed off peak preference water heating.
I used to run the elect and gas utilities at a cdn ski resort, and once we had time of day charging, we found almost 1 MW of shiftable load (and about 200kW of wasted load that we eliminated altogether). When you can get paid to shift load, you start to look for ways to do it. If drivers knew they could buy gas at half price from 1am to 4am, they would start doing so, pretty quickly.

There is so much potential for load shifting, at reasonable expanse, that I'd say it's bang for the buck is better than storage by at least 10;1 if not 100:1. All it needs, to start, is make the offpeak pricing accessible, and consumers will start to game the system."

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6418/617220

1/1/07 electricity prices (left), and 2007 wind penetration (right)

These could be interpreted either way -- if at all. Putting prices on the left could imply causality L-R, but I'm not saying.

What is clear, though, is that there is no free market for electricity in Europe, so trying to interpret the situation in terms of one is doomed.

If you look at industrial electricity prices before tax (2007), you get a different picture:
Denmark (20% wind power): 7.06 cents/kWh
Belgium (55% nuclear power): 9.69 cents/kWh
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-DK-07-001/EN/KS-DK-...

I'd rather pay more tax on energy/electricity than on work. (For some reasons many governments have a tax incentive for people who waste lots of energy and work less...)

Interesting, but the point is that it is seemingly impossible to untangle all of the various country subsidies, mandates, and tax structure to determine what electricity really costs by source.

you could be onto something here...... hold on processing....

well if we can't tell why bother placing so much faith in the collective wisdom of actors in the market to "figure it out"

I mean... if they collectively arrive at a price for NG or whatever then complain wind is too cheap they haven't managed to there sums properly..

subsidies are just another part of the landscape to negotiate...

I thought the whole point of markets was they could arrive at the best solution..or somefink?

this argument.. is.. is what? just falling off the edge of the table of accepted wisdom onto the floor of meh

It's the utter meaninglessness of the economic system stupid

Oh ye of little faith...

I always wonder when I see charts like the above how are they choosing which tariff to use in each country. A German business executive told me marginal prices for electricity in Germany are much higher for heavier users, 35 Euro cents per kwh at higher tiers? Sounds like Germany (or at least parts of it) has pricing bands similar to California where higher users pay much more per additional kwh. I'm paying 16 cents/kwh from SoCal Edison. But SoCalEd has tiered pricing with a 23 cent/kwh tier. You can see here a jumping off point to the pricing tiers used by various California electric power utilities.

I come across people on forums from other parts of California claiming they are paying over 30 cents per kwh. I'd like to know at what level of usage per month their high rate takes effect and which utility they are buying from. Rates that high make home solar power attractive.

Actually the rates are as high as 49.8 cents per kWh if you use over 300% of the baseline usage. The baseline varies by region and by whether or not it is winter or summer.

Rest assured this makes solar very attractive for those at or near the top tier.

tstreet, 49.8 cents/kwh is mind boggling. That's over 3 times as much per kwh as I typically pay. If someone has a big family they'll pay thru the nose.

So you paying that high? You have solar panels?

I am not paying that high because I am operating at a lower tier. Btw, PG&E has proposed reducing the number of tiers from five to three and reducing the amount for the top tier. I just noticed that yesterday so I have not thought through whether that is a good idea. It will help drive down costs for the really big users. I am currently renting in Northern California along the coast and am moving back to Colorado in June. So I do not have solar. Where solar really makes sense, of course, in the central valley in July.

We have quite a few power outages here in the winter. So I have been able to experience first hand unreliable and variable power, although not because of wind. Given the electricity rates here, the power outages were actually welcome, in a way. Fortunately, they did not last long enough for the food to spoil.

The rates can be painful, but of course that is the idea, to encourage conservation. If one stays at the lowest or next lowest tier, the rates aren't that bad.

Jerome!

It is as always nice to read your postings.

Please excuse me,though, for being off-topic, but I am wondering if you could make any comment on the situation of the European bankning sector. How healthy do you consider it to be? This question is obviously put against the situation with the debt-crisis in (more of less several) European countries. As I remember it you made some very astute observations long before the present crisis started (autumn 2008) to really show itself.

I live in Sweden, a country that had a banking crisis in the ninety-nineteens. It seems we learned something. Governments both to the left and right have seen to it that the budget deficits since then have not grown out of hand. The present government (right) often states that our country is “best in class” in Europe.

Anyway it would be very interesting if you had the possibility to somehow give us your views on the present debt situation and/or its implications for the banking sector and/or the situation of European economies as a whole.

Best regards,

Jan

Although the article is somewhat biased, the question of how power system dynamics react to large quantities of wind power is an interesting one. The region which is really Germany plus Denmark, is now suffering some very acute problems.

Of course if a new source of any product comes along (subsidised or not) it should push down prices until other sources are displaced at which point (in theory) prices should find a new level determined by the new marginal player.

I don't think the issue is that wind is subsidised - although it is of course very relevant that in the German system of feed tariffs, subsided producers are completely insulated from the market, unlike other systems such as green certificates. If it were as simple as the theory outlined in the first paragraph then there probably wouldn't be a problem, the utilities would shut their most expensive plants and move on.

But, if the utilities were to simply shut the oldest, least economic plants, power cuts would be guaranteed to ensue at times when the wind wasn't blowing. The utilities can't do this, the government would crucify them. But coal fired power plants - which are the marginal units, especially since gas prices collapsed - have very high fixed costs, so if they are frequently forced off the system due to low power prices at times when the wind is blowing, they start to become loss makers very quickly. So the utilities are caught in a nasty trap - they can't afford to keep them open, but they can't shut them either. The only way out for the utilities is to stretch out their open palm towards the government which, happily for them, they are more than expert at doing.

The more wind power that comes onto any power system, the more fiendishly complicated the system dynamics become. It will be interesting to see what happens in the UK when (if) all this offshore wind gets built, because in the UK offshore wind generators rely on actual power sales for about a third of their revenue. I suspect it will quickly transpire that high wind production will very quickly become correlated with very low power prices, and vica versa, and cause very significant cash flow and debt repayment problems for wind projects (many of which are highly leveraged).

Of course there is no doubt whatsoever that the government (or rather the poor consumer) will bail them out, but by then we might have learnt something interesting about the dynamic economics of relatively large quantities of wind energy. I say might because both main parties already have proposals that will insulate wind from this problem - government backed CFDs in the case of labour and feed tariffs for the conservatives, so we might not. The UK is a much more open and competitive market than Germany, with far more players and (historically at least) slightly less government interference. So it will also be interesting to see how the pain of keeping underutilised standby generation available will be spread in a more open market.

I will wager it will not go back to the cause.

I suspect it will quickly transpire that high wind production will very quickly become correlated with very low power prices, and vica versa, and cause very significant cash flow and debt repayment problems for wind projects (many of which are highly leveraged).

Offshore wind project are not so highly leveraged (I should know, given that this is my particular specialty) and the banks will only take minimal merchant risk - meaning that power will be sold to utilities (typically also the owners of the projects) under long term power purchase agreements with significant price protection (fixed or floor prices). Being non recourse, the lenders cannot expect any bailout, whether from the utilities or the government. The reality is that the utilities will absorb the power within their wider portfolios, and they generally seem quite happy with the lowish prices they can impose on the offshore wind farms - but there are enough to pay the debt in all cases.

Jerome, with all respects, this is a marketing title and a flawed game with the words and the economic data, hiding the real energy costs. It reminds me very much the argument used by nuclear lobbies in the fifties/sixties (too cheap to meter)

One of the quotes is

Spanish power prices fell an annual 26 percent in the first quarter because of the surge in supplies from wind and hydroelectric production

From economicist papers.

If wind energy would really make the cost of “Electric” (brackets are mine) too cheap, then the solution is very simple: delete the subsidies, or premium tariffs or tax holidays or exemptions, granted in the ling term to the wind energy, in the countries with these programs.

You can easily make calculations on how many of the 158 GW of wind installed power worldwide and tell us how many GW have been installed without these long term financial aids of the fossil fueled society.

In fact, something do not mentioned in your post, is that in the same moment (more or less) the Spanish economicist pink papers were mentioning your quote, the Spanish Minister of Industry, Tourism and Commerce threatened all energy producers within the renewable energy programs to cancel o review retroactively the long term subsidies (premium tariffs and so). The anger against the Minister has reached up to the highest instances from foreign and national powerful investment groups, accusing the Spanish government of trying to violate the rules of Law. Two days later, and I am afraid not by coincidence, Standard&Poors degraded the risk qualification in Spain form AAA to another lower one. The Minister has been forced to withdraw from this attempt, despite the desperate need of the Spanish government to reduce costs in their national budget.

It is true that there have been moments in February this year (with a lot of wind and a extraordinary hydrologic year) in which the electricity price in the Mercado Electrico (not to the citizens, whose retail prices went up some 20 percent in twelve months) were zero cents of Euro/kWh.

But it has to be clarified that this is due to administrative mechanisms and regulations on how the different energies are entering into the pool, rather than to real energy costs.

I repeat: administrative and regulatory arrangements, rather than the merit of the wind energy itself, led, as a conclusion, that the Spanish energy mix under some special circumstances led to 0 cents of Euro/kWh for quite a number of hours several days.

But not only that; we cover now 14 percent of the Spanish electric yearly demand with wind energy and with peaks over the 50 percent of the total instant national demand in some moments and 2.3 percent with solar PV energy).

Also because some completely filled dams for the heavy rains in many river basins were evacuating for security reasons, not only through the turbines, but even through the spillways. Besides, the nuclear power plants provide a base load that is not manageable and close to minimums of the night valleys of the national electric demand curve. Besides, with the financial crisis and the subsequent drastic reduction in electricity consumption, the night valley lows were basically in coincidence with the minimum base load.

Finally, we had a program in the late nineties, as a consequence of being a very carbon based power generation system, to install a lot of combined cycle gas power plants, to comply with the Kyoto Protocol commitments and trying to avoid the foreseeable penalties for emissions.

These gas plants are the best ones to manage an electric network, due to their fast response to follow the demand curve (the switch off, when wind blows and switch on again and fast when wind stops). So, they are in fact the ones “making the life easy” to the whole electric network management, when the intermitent generation system (wind + solar) become very significant in certain moments (as much as some 2 GW may go in the downslope production of our network in about one minute because wind reductions).

But the gas fired plants were designed and intended in the late nineties to cover an explosive demand growth and thought as a convenient investment as much less polluting than coal plants per kWh generated and also because the proximity of Algeria as supplier with already available pipelines infrastructure and the best regasification structures in all Europe (seven) and a fleet of tanker that is third at world level. The design was made for about 5,500 hour per year and the amortization calculations as well. Today, thanks to the high injection level from wind parks, they are operating at some 2,000 -2,200 hours a year. The operators are very angry, because nobody planned this situation and they are not recovering their investments as originally planned.

It is a paradox, because the power source that is helping renewables in a peninsula, working almost like an electric island, for lack of interconnections, specially with Northern European countries, is paying its extraordinary ability to stabilize the network in favor of a bigger introduction of renewables and labeled now as “inefficient”, while the unpredictable, intermitent sources are labelled here as "too cheap to meter"

And all this complex puzzle leads to the paradox that one of the most market free and liberalized electric markets, following in blind (and in my opinion very stupid) obedience to the economicist rules of the European Union (something that did not happened in France, for instance, that follows its own path, be right or not), has moments of zero cents of euro/kWh, while citizens are paying for their electricity more than ever and on the other hand, the burden of proof (onus probandi) for efficiency is falling on the combined cycle gas turbines and not on the renewables that compulsory need them to stabilize their intermitent injections.

I believe that a new revision on the evaluation methodologies and LCA's of these energy sources and the extra costs of the electric networks have to be examined much in detail and in a deeper, more professional form and that titles like the one you have posted, are oversimplifying in favor of a given technology for whatever the reason and do not help to understand the overall, global situation of an electric network.

"It reminds me very much the argument used by nuclear lobbies in the fifties/sixties (too cheap to meter)"

More on the expression "too cheap to meter" from the late Petr Beckmann.

http://www.fortfreedom.org/p06.htm

In fact, something do not mentioned in your post, is that in the same moment (more or less) the Spanish economicist pink papers were mentioning your quote, the Spanish Minister of Industry, Tourism and Commerce threatened all energy producers within the renewable energy programs to cancel o review retroactively the long term subsidies (premium tariffs and so). The anger against the Minister has reached up to the highest instances from foreign and national powerful investment groups, accusing the Spanish government of trying to violate the rules of Law. Two days later, and I am afraid not by coincidence, Standard&Poors degraded the risk qualification in Spain form AAA to another lower one. The Minister has been forced to withdraw from this attempt, despite the desperate need of the Spanish government to reduce costs in their national budget

Don't expect this issue to fade so easily. Over-leveraged governments always try, and succeed, to default on "soft" financial commitments (such as indexation or timing of retirement benefits, percentage of medical expenses reimbursed, or feed-in mechanisms !) to avoid plain default on their general obligation. Germans may think that Greeks or Spaniards used the cash that they borrowed from their financial insitutions to fund a never ending party, but in reality a good chunk of these went to fund uneconomical wind and solar farms, with a funding counter guaranteed by state sponsored export credit agencies. It is the Mediterranean countries who are in a position of strength here. Why do you think that Angela Merkel finally caved in and sponsored a bail-out bill for the Greeks and soon for Spaniards and Portuguese ? Kicking the can and avoiding to face the truth that a chunk of the export sector destroys value instead of creating it.

People who think that Spaniards and Greeks will calmly forego their pensions or unemployment benefits to fulfill feed-in agreements on power plants already on their soil and built with foreign money are in for a nasty surprise.

Germans may think that Greeks or Spaniards used the cash that they borrowed from their financial insitutions to fund a never ending party, but in reality a good chunk of these went to fund uneconomical wind and solar farms

This is puzzling, given that Germany is fiscally strong, but funds more wind & solar than Spain or Greece.

How much was spent in Greece on wind & solar subsidies? I've never heard a thing about them...

Besides that Spain and Greece have built far less renewable power plants than Germany.

As opposed to nuclear, European wind is not subsidizes or financed with taxpayer money, it is financed by private investors and paid for with feed in tariffs, which happen to reduce electricity prices more than what they actually cost:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/windkraft-macht-strom-billiger/753...

In addition, the wind industry and its employees do not get taxes they do pay taxes.

In fact, even the photovoltaic factories in Germany pay more taxes than what they indirectly receive in feed-in tariffs - not to mention that they reduced the German costly unemployment rate:
http://lohnsteuer-kompakt.de/redaktion/steuereinnahmen-der-solarindustri...

Actually, I get so mad when I read your comments that I really should refrain from even reading them, much less commenting them. Alas, my character is weak, so here goes:

In relation to GDP, Spain has twice as much wind as Germany.

Taxing bad stuff (internalising costs) is more efficient than forcing people and companies to buy what the government thinks is good stuff. This case is no exception, in part b/c it is meaningless to strive for "renewables", which aren't guaranteed to make us more prosperous, to be nicer to the environment or anything else that matters.

The wind and solar industries are subsidised, and even though they pay taxes and may pay more taxes than they get in subsidies, the playing field is extremely setup in their favour, as, for instance, nuclear pays full taxes and is almost always burdened with arbitrary extra taxation and of course the heavy regulations.

And, as a final note, unemployment is NOT, saying NOT, reduced by doing stuff inefficiently or by government programs. Unemployment is structural and depends on stuff like benefits, minimum wages and labour law. Governmental or subsidised employment take taxes or deficits that crowd out private investments and jobs. The net employment result of Spain's wind has been shown to be negative - two jobs lost for each one created.

In relation to GDP, Spain has twice as much wind as Germany.

But what about Greece, Italy, or Portugal? Spain appears to be an outlier, especially given the strong German economy coexisting with strong support for wind/solar. Overall, I don't see any correlation here between wind/solar subsidies and economic problems.

Taxing bad stuff (internalising costs) is more efficient

Of course. We all know that, I hope. Nevertheless, it's obviously much easier politically to add subsidies than it is to add taxes.

unemployment is NOT, saying NOT, reduced by doing stuff inefficiently or by government programs. A

Of course it is. If the economy is running well below full utiliziation, almost any employment is better than none, and doesn't crowd out anything. And, an inefficient domestic program may well be better than an efficient program...in someone else's country (like Saudi Arabia, for example).

The net employment result of Spain's wind has been shown to be negative - two jobs lost for each one created.

That sounds like rising labor productivity...

Overall, I don't see any correlation here between wind/solar subsidies and economic problems.

Neither do I. But your arguments didn't hold, at least not for Spain vs Germany. Germans are known to be disciplined and reasonably fiscally responsible, so they can probably spend whatever they want on renewables and not blow their budgets, as they will cut back on other stuff. For a country like Spain, however, wasting money on renewables may make things worse.

Nevertheless, it's obviously much easier politically to add subsidies than it is to add taxes.

Again, US-centric. I don't think that holds in, for example, Sweden.

Of course it is. If the economy is running well below full utiliziation, almost any employment is better than none, and doesn't crowd out anything.

Yes it does - the money used for the employment is taken from someone who would have consumed that money or sought other investment opportunities for them.

That sounds like rising labor productivity...

Very funny.

Yes it does - the money used for the employment is taken from someone who would have consumed that money or sought other investment opportunities for them.

Wrong. Besides the fact that feed in tariffs make less than 5% of the electricity costs and energy intensive companies do not have to pay for this instrument and electricity costs are generally minuscule compared to rent, healthcare and labor costs: Feed-in tariffs are actually lower than what they reduce electricity prices according to a study from a nuclear power operator:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/windkraft-macht-strom-billiger/753...

Economy works like I says it works, regardless of what nice German links you may have cherry-picked to support your stance.

Indisputable facts regarding feed-in tariffs and the tax-paying renewable industry are what they are regardless of your ignorance and arrogance.

wasting money on renewables may make things worse.

I don't grant the premise. I think the fact that hard-headed Germans are investing in wind and solar is suggestive.

I don't think that holds in, for example, Sweden.

Sure it does. It just happens that Swedes are sufficiently sensible to choose the more difficult option of the two.

the money used for the employment is taken from someone who would have consumed that money or sought other investment opportunities for them.

No, not if the economy is running below full utilization. If the economy is running below full utilization, then that money likely just sits idle in a bank, as investors and bankers await a time when they have more courage to invest.

I think the fact that hard-headed Germans are investing in wind and solar is suggestive.

Yeah, the hard-headed Germans invest in wind and the cowardly French build nuclear. That says something, right? Or perhaps you don't understand European national characters or parliamentary politics very well?

Sure it does. It just happens that Swedes are sufficiently sensible to choose the more difficult option of the two.

That is a contradiction. If we are sensible enough to choose the better option, that option is not "more difficult".

If the economy is running below full utilization, then that money likely just sits idle in a bank, as investors and bankers await a time when they have more courage to invest.

Yes, the crowding out effect is worse the higher utilization you got. (You don't need full utilization, whatever that is.) Unfortunately, it seems Greece and other countries did crowd out when they were close to full utilization, and now they are hurting because of it, in two ways - they can't stop spending b/c that would make the economy worse, and they can't keep spending because the debt is getting unmanageable.

Just because you are ignorant regarding hard facts, there is no reason to get all mad about.

Again, as opposed to nuclear, European wind is not subsidizes or financed with taxpayer money, it is financed by private investors and paid for with feed-in tariffs, which happen to reduce electricity prices more than what they actually cost - according to a study from a nuclear power operator:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/windkraft-macht-strom-billiger/753...

In addition, the wind industry and its employees do not get taxes they do pay taxes.

In fact, even the photovoltaic factories in Germany pay more taxes than what they indirectly receive in feed-in tariffs - not to mention that they reduced the German costly unemployment rate:
http://lohnsteuer-kompakt.de/redaktion/steuereinnahmen-der-solarindustri...

And the German wind power industry not only generated over 90,000 sustainable, tax-paying jobs: Germany exports 83% of its wind-turbines with a tax-paying PROFIT. This means 83% of the workforce in the German wind industry work is financed by foreign investors.
The same is true for Spanish wind turbine manufacturers: Spanish wind turbine manufacturers do produce more wind turbines than what Spain does install.

And your study regarding negative employment and renewable energy is a hoax, regardless of the fact, that as opposed to nuclear, wind is not subsidizes or financed with taxpayer money, it is financed by private investors and paid for with feed-in tariffs, which happen to reduce electricity prices more than what they actually cost:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46261.pdf
http://ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/reports/...

And I completely agree that tax-money should not be used to subsidize the energy industry:

http://www.elistore.org/Data/products/d19_07.pdf

Subsidies to fossil fuels—a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed
government support for many years—totaled approximately $72 billion over the study
period, representing a direct cost to taxpayers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/10/nuclear.nuclearpower

The future cost of decommissioning Britain's existing nuclear sites - estimated at £73bn.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2001/fig-htm/frasf6-h.htm

Nuclear power has dominated government spending on energy research and development, accounting for over US$159 billion between 1974 and 1998. Although its share has fallen, it still accounts for 51% of the OECD energy R&D budget.

Or having taxpayer paid institutions such as IAEA or Euratom to promote one form of energy.

I'm in favor of feed-in tariffs and would also welcome feed-in tariffs for breeder reactors if they run on nuclear waste and do reduce nuclear waste and reduce the dependence on fuel imports and are not more than doubled compared to feed-in tariffs for renewable sources.

You parrot the same desinformation over and over again, and I don't have the time to answer it all. I've said what needs to be said.

Actually what you say is just nonsensical disinformation.

I just deliver facts which truly contradict your nonsense and it's understandable that you prefer to ignore them.

But relax: Maybe the massive subsidies for nuclear power will be further increased such that nuclear power can at least keep its worldwide power share at 15%.

Again, as opposed to nuclear, European wind is not subsidizes or financed with taxpayer money, it is financed by private investors and paid for with feed-in tariffs, which happen to reduce electricity prices more than what they actually cost - according to a study from a nuclear power operator:
...

... that as opposed to nuclear, wind is not subsidizes or financed with taxpayer money, it is financed by private investors and paid for with feed-in tariffs, which happen to reduce electricity prices more than what they actually cost:

Wow. Now you're repeating yourself within a single post.

Hi Jerome, thanks that's interesting. I'm also a UK renewables project developer, although biomass not wind. I guess you're right that the banks will look for fixed price PPAs, that is certainly true of biomass, but because of fuel supply we are considered more risky than wind. Anyway, even for a large baseload biomass plant, the closest we have got to a fixed power price is a 5 year collar on very unattractive terms. I assumed it would be altogether impossible for wind, what with the additional pricing risk of not knowing when the wind will blow. Also I assume the debt tenure is considerably more than 5 years on an offshore wind farm to have any kind of chance given the incredible capex, even if the 2 ROCs stick, and I don't really agree with you on leverage, I know of one project that has 70% gearing, and although I don't know all the terms it still seems way too high.

It may be as you say that utility owners are just assuming the risk, in which case as long as they all do more or less the same thing they may be able to pass the resulting mess through to the consumer in a whitewash as was the case with the heinously overpriced CCGT PPAs in the early noughties.

In any case, someone has to take the pain, but I suspect you're wrong about the bail out, the government will most likely step in to assume the power price risk when it starts to go wrong (unless the Conservatives abandon the sector as Labour's mistake, which I don't believe they can or will), it will be simply too embarrassing for them to have their showcase projects go spectacularly bust. Ultimately that is the reason why the banks are comfortable lending.

Wind will cause a larger fraction of the fossil fuels burned for electricity to be burned in less efficient peaker plants. Wind, by causing periods of very low wholesale electric prices when the wind is blowing, will lower the ROI of baseload plants, whether nukes, natural gas, or coal fired. Utilities will need to build more peaking generator plants to use when the wind isn't blowing.

To compensate for wind's variability the market needs more variable pricing at the end user level and more ability to turn off demand. To develop this ability with smart meters controlling appliances and capital equipment of course costs money. But higher costs for electricity supplied by increased use of peaking generators will provide incentives for this migration. One hopes it is not very expensive to do.

To develop this ability with smart meters controlling appliances and capital equipment of course costs money. ...One hopes it is not very expensive to do.

It's not. In fact, smart meters pay for themselves due to reductions in overall consumption. Cost savings due to time-shifting are a bonus. or...you could reverse the order of those benefits. In any case, DSM is very, very cost effective.

But coal fired power plants - which are the marginal units, especially since gas prices collapsed - have very high fixed costs,

Do you have any sources for that? I think their costs are lower than that description would suggest.

I wonder what the energy mix could be in the year 2050 when fossil fuels are taxed or depleted to the point of irrelevance. Ignoring solar and hydro the main energy sources could be intermittent wind and baseload nuclear which don't complement each other that well. Gas for peaking plant will be prohibitively expensive. Subsidies will have been phased out due to fiscal constraints. Perhaps aggressive demand management and high priced energy from storage will be the order of the day. For example each household will be entitled to one temperature controlled room and a small screen TV. Energy from storage (CAES, battery, pumped hydro etc) will cost an inflation adjusted 10c per kilowatt-hour extra.

This is a massive task just for the needs of the current population. By 2050 we will have not only more people but little or no positive net energy from fossil fuel.

Perhaps nuclear will make up the bulk of the power, there is really quite a bit of fissionable materials.

We need dynamic pricing and sources of demand that can be cut back quickly when the wind dies down. Of course, demand sources subject to cut-backs will expect lower prices in exchange for interruptibility. The growth of wind therefore is dependent on the development of interruptible sources of demand.

Fortunately one big interruptible source of demand is on the horizon: electric cars. A car getting charged up at night could have its demand shifted around while its owner sleeps. Ditto for charging during the day while a car is parked at work.

Of course, demand sources subject to cut-backs will expect lower prices in exchange for interruptibility.

That's for utility controlled DSM. Another method is simply to send price signals to homes/business, and have the users' smart meter reduce consumption according to the owner's preferences.

The growth of wind therefore is dependent on the development of interruptible sources of demand.

That's very like true for KWH market penetration levels beyond very roughly 20%. That EIA study that found that 30% was feasible didn't take DSM into account.

Summary:
1.) Wind is a subsidized power source;

2.) When consumers have wind generators, and are added to the grid, at times the power companies must pay their customers for the excess they (the consumer) produce;

3.) This makes the power companies angry… they are in business to take money from their customers and do not like being forced to buy from them.

4.) Power during times of low wind must still be made from other sources.

5.) 1-3 tends to make that power more expensive, since it must cover all fixed costs.

6.) There are a number of sources other than fossil fuels available and being used.

7.) Major power companies are locked in to fossil fuels, and want to continue to use their existing plants to maximize ROI.

8.) Arguably, the power companies were subsidized during the time they were creating infrastructure and fixed assets, either directly through tax exemptions, or through special use of eminent domain, or perhaps by direct subsidy. In most cases, the subsidy was the granting of a monopoly in exchange for regulated pricing. Once in place, this pricing took the form of ‘cost plus’ and a ‘guaranteed return on investment’ to the investors. Later, even this strained form of regulation was dropped.

9.) People who are invest in one power source tend to denigrate the others as long as possible, in order to maximize their return on investment. This we naively call ‘spin.’ Their concern is money, not people, and certainly not the Euro States, the UK or the USA. They could care less about terrorists, except that people fear them.

10.) People will believe an untruth because they want to believe it is true, or because it is what they fear might be true. (Wizard’s first rule)

11.) Passion rules reason, for better or for worse. (Wizard’s third rule)

In spite of or because of the above, this is a good discussion of Wind, and makes good points from several sides of the discussion. There is, in my opinion, a need to consider the impact on overall price of energy; as the current economic discontinuity continues, governments will be less able to subsidize alternative energy. At which time, policy will be made through directed taxation. Favored projects will be subsidized by lower tax rates, or special exemptions.

Elected officials, meanwhile, will have their own concerns in finding the funds needed to advertise and promote their reelections; corporations will step in, and in return for favors promised, they will provide the ‘free speech’ funding requisite to such. In fact, in order to make certain that they are favored, they will fund both sides (all very surreptitiously, of course). Consequently, existing monopolistic corporations may be expected to continue to garner those tax breaks, and alternative sources will either be taxed higher, or simply be ignored and taxed the same. In either case, the end result will be continued de facto subsidies of fossil fuel power production. All in the name of “what’s best for the country,” of course.

Eventually, available energy will drop below the energy required to continue our convoluted, some would say distorted, way of living. It seems unlikely today that the resources remaining are sufficient to stop that particular train. Barring some horrendous ecological disaster (the spill in the GOM is not it, though it is a portent of what could occur), some black swan event, the decline may well be gradual. With some unknown at present trigger, it could take place quite rapidly.

At which time, we will change. We will evolve. Or not.

Craig

In short: it's possible that wind requires subsidies, but it may be a good thing in the long run to have more wind power, so such subsidies may not be such a stupid idea...

The bottom line is that adding wind generation to an existing grid with a typical mix of baseload (must run 24x7 or shut down for an entire season, typically nuclear, coal and high-efficiency gas turbine) and loadfollowing (some normally small percentage of some coal and high efficiency gas fired, all hydro and peaking gas fired) generation will result in reducing the gross nameplate kw of baseload generation and increasing the mix of loadfollowing generation dispatched. This will naturally result in less efficient fossil fuel generation.

A simple theoretical example based on my estimate of the generation mix in Ontario:

With near zero wind generation, eg. 5 years ago:

nuclear generation 24x7 normally dispatched.- 10,000 MW
coal generation with 33% turndown dispatched - 6,000 MW
hydro generation run-of-river ---------------- 3,000 MW (Niagra Falls)
hydro generation storage --------------------- 3,000 MW
gas turbine peakers -------------------------- 1,000 MW
wind generation --------------------------------- 00 MW
TOTAL --------------------------------------- 24,000 MW

Result dispatch mix for a 17,000 MW 24x7 baseload, 23,000 MW peak on weekdays is:

Baseload 24x7
nuclear generation 24x7 normally dispatched.- 10,000 MW capable, 10,000 MW baseload
coal generation with 33% turndown dispatched - 6,000 MW capable, 4,000 MW baseload
hydro generation run-of-river ---------------- 3,000 MW capable, 3,000 MW baseload

Peaking by merit order:
at 18,000 MW load, 6:00 AM to 11:30 PM, increase coal plant output to 5,000 MW
at 19,000 MW load, 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM, increase coal plant output to 6,000 MW
at 20,000 MW load, 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM, increase storage hydro output to 2,000 MW
at 22,000 MW load, 11:30 AM to 5:00 PM, increase storage hydro output to 3,000 MW, add 1000 MW gas peaker

Now add 5,000 MW of wind generation to that mix, with first right of accesss to dispatch
Result dispatch mix for a 17,000 MW 24x7 baseload, 23,000 MW peak on weekdays is:

Baseload 24x7
Wind generation, 24x7 ----------------------- 5,000 MW capable, 150 to 5,000 MW actual
nuclear generation 24x7 normally dispatched. - 5,000 MW capable, 5,000 MW baseload
coal generation with 33% turndown dispatched - 6,000 MW capable, 6,000 MW baseload
hydro generation run-of-river ---------------- 3,000 MW capable, 3,000 MW baseload
hydro generation storage --------------------- 3,000 MW capable, 0 to 2,000 MW actual (reservoirs not full enough for backup of wind at more than 66%)
Gas Turbine backup --------------------------- 1,000 MW capable, 0 to 1,000 MW actual

Peaking by merit order:
at 18,000 MW load, 6:00 AM to 11:30 PM, add 1,000 MW of gas turbine peakers
at 19,000 MW load, 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM, add 1,000 MW of gas turbine peakers
at 20,000 MW load, 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM, add 1,000 MW of gas turbine peakers
at 22,000 MW load, 11:30 AM to 5:00 PM, add 2,000 MW of gas turbine peakers

Adding 5,000 MW of wind with first dispatch access has forced us a) to build another 5,000 MW of gas turbine peakers, to shut down 5,000 MW of nuclear generation, to operate the coal plants 100% 24x7 except in that random 33% of time when the wind is blowing, and to operate low efficiency gas turbines a lot more. THE NET CO2 emissions from this dispatch order is higher than if the wind were never built. The costs to ratepayers are huge, +5,000 wind, +5,000 gas turbine, lost investment in the nuclear plants.

Having what looks like a good idea (apparently cheap wind turbines) may not actually work out that way in real life. Things tend to happen like that.

And BTW, to the thesis of this article, if a gale force wind forces the market price of electricity way down, then the owners of the nuclear and fossil plants will be forced to simple increase the price comesurately when the wind is no blowing, in order to pay for their capital and opeartions. There's no free lunch.

Actually coal power plants are more flexible than nuclear power plants. So before anyone shuts down nuclear power plants, coal power plants will be shut down.

Wind power output is predictable and it does not require any spinning reserves. Wind power is intermittent but not unreliable like these plants:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

but unfortunately laymen will never understand this very essential difference.

Besides it's doubtful that Ontario will increase wind power considerably:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green/video.html
start watching at 17:30...

Jim Detmers, VP of Operations for the California ISO, gave a speech at an energy conference at Stanford in 2007 where he said that wind is not so reliable:

About wind's unreliability he says: "Wind is not produced on peak. This last summer, when we went across the summer peak, I had 3,000 megawatts of capacity of wind. How much did I have on the summer peak, back in August? No, no, no, I didn't have zero. I had a total of 63 out of 3,000. And we're investing all of this money in wind..." (at around 10:15). Clearly, the wind let him down when he needed it most.

Later on, he talks about energy produced when it's not needed and how his capacity to store energy is limited. "I actually get to the point where I have to pay people to take the energy off the system. Get this straight: I am paying people to take the energy away from me because I am in over supply. Because wind comes up when I can't predict it, and it's all coming in off-peak. I deal with that system today. If we only increase that... help us. Please help us." (14:00). "The wind, this is the one that I like the most, because it presents the most challenges for me on the grid. And the train has already left the station. Contracts are already in place now to bring on about 7,500 additional megawatts of wind on to the system, and I have no place to put it off-peak." (17:30) "I hope everyone in this room walks away and clearly understands that wind has what I call an inverted supply curve. The maximum production of wind is off-peak. Do I need power off-peak? The answer is no! I'm already swimming in the megawatts today! Because I have to keep on-line all of those generators to be there when the wind's not there on the peak. I have to keep them on. Are we achieving and economic benefit from that? ... We may be costing [ourselves] an enormous amount of money... We're making decisions as an industry, as a state, as the United States and around the world because we want it so bad. And we're using existing technology, existing wind, but we're not marrying with that storage capability." (18:00)

The Midwest ISO at one point recorded 2% of nameplate output from wind during summer demand peak. So wind isn't always there when you need it.

No power plant is always there when you need it. But gladly wind power is predictable and not unreliable, so one has plenty of time to schedule output of other power plants connected to the grid accordingly.
Unless of course they fail unexpectedly like these did:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

but unfortunately laymen will never ever understand the very essential difference between predictable intermission and unreliability.
In addition wind turbines can be stopped immediately without causing any potential damage - as opposed to nuclear power plants.

It seems you're the one who doesn't understand.

wind power is predictable and not unreliable

Can you provide any reliable reference for that statement, especially a numeric analysis of a year's output of such a wind generation system? I know that the only figure available to me to now, Ontario ISO's records of output of all the quite widely distributed wind generation in Ontario, indicate that the opposite is true, eg. maximum output typically at night in January, with many hot summer days having the entire system operating at only 2% to 3% of output.

From their wind generation production by hour for the past several years --
A spreadsheet in .csv format

In the past 12 months, the max output was 1017 MW, so there's at least that much online, quite widely distributed accross the 500 mile width of the southern part of the province near the great lakes (purportedly excellent wind resource territory).

On April 20th from 8:00 to 10:00 AM, the output averaged 3.5 MW. (0.34%)
On Mar 16th from 11:00AM to 1:00 PM, the output averaged 4.0 MW. (0.39%)
On Mar 9th from 10:00AM to 6:00 PM, the output averaged 6.7 MW. (0.66%)

That's just a few random picks I made in peak demand hours. I've done thorough analysis of this before and found the data to completely contradict your statement. These wind generators aren't anywhere NEAR to baselaod, and look like they never will be, since winds from here to North Dakota all travel in the same weather patterns.

http://www.olino.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ummels_phdthesis.pdf

Here is a Dutch study to show that wind power can be pretty well forecasted a day in advance.

Also note that his solution is not storage but trade and exchange between regions.

Additional High voltage DC can help all sorts of power sources and (according to my opinion, should be a state enterprise

Exactly.

Forecasting probable availability 24 hrs in advance does nothing to help the situation eg. in Ontario which I showed in my example. A large steam generation plant needs almost a full day to get up to full power and stable, (Long start up times – 8 to 12 hrs. for relatively small 350 MW plants) and once up, cannot simply be turned up or down more than about 30% to 33% according to how the wind blows.

http://www.groenerekenkamer.com/grkfiles/images/regelbaarheid.pdf

Unfortunately in Dutch but most graphs are in English so you can give it a try

Start up gas turbine 20 minutes (Page 9,10), combined cycle approximately 40 minutes and full power after 90 minutes.

Coal (page 7) starts producing power (when having been of for 55 hours completely cold) after 2 hours and 100% after 4,5 hours

Combined with a good 24 hour forecast it should not be a problem to have wind in the system.

If I read the thread Europe has a system better equipped to take wind in the system

Coal (page 7) starts producing power (when having been of for 55 hours completely cold) after 2 hours and 100% after 4,5 hours

So lets take an example day from the wind generation spreadsheet I posted with wind generation providing 1000 MW for 8 hrs off-peak and basically 0 MW for the rest of the day including on-peak, and presume Ontario's coal generation plants are as capable of rapid cycling as the Dutch plants, though I suspect that may be a lucky exception. That means there are eg. 5 day periods when, because of the 1017 MW wind gen. which comes to max. off-peak, and goes to zero on-peak, that a 1000 MW coal generator will need to spend 2 hrs pre-heating to minimum power, 2.5 hours coming to max power, 16 hours at full power, and eg. 2 hrs cooling down again.

Result is the coal plant, instead of operating continuously as baseload for the full 24 hours, will operate with full coal feed at 0% efficiency for 2 hours, at (eg) 18% efficiency for 2.5 hours, and at 36% efficiency for 16 hours, then cool down for 3.5 hours and restart the cycle. The overall efficiency of the plant is thus reduced from 36% as continuous baseload to (2/20.5 x 0%) + (2.5/20.5 x 18%) + (16/20.5 x 36%). Say it burned 500 tons / hour as 36% efficient 1000 MW baseload plant (2 MWh/ton-coal is reasonable estimate), the comparison of coal burned if the wind gen was or was not built is:

Without wind gen. at 1000 MW baseload requirement:
24 hrs x 500 TPH = 12,000 tons

With 1000 MW wind gen. at 1000 MW baseload requirement:
2.0 hrs x 500 TPH = 1,000 tons
2.5 hrs x 500 TPH = 1,250 tons
16 hrs x 500 TPH = 8,000 tons
================================
TOTAL ---------- = 10,250 tons

Total reduction = 1,750 tons coal, or the equivalent of 3.5 hours of coal plant operation.

In other words, in order to entirely eliminate the coal use of one 1,000 MW coal plant, you need to build 24/3.5 x 1000 = 6,700 MW of wind generation well dispersed in a 500 mile area. In addition, that coal plant cycling up and down every day is going to hugely shorten the life of its boiler tubes, steam turbine, etc. etc. so those wind generators are going to cost you a lot in maintenance on the backup units. Changing the example (based on 33% output at nameplate by time of wind, obviously an oversimplification for my example purposes but does illustrate the problem WHEN WIND GETS BEYOND PRESENT EXCESS BACKUP capacities). Reality may be 5,000 MW rather than 6,700, i'd estimate.

Agreed, this is a greatly simplified example, but not too far off. I personally think there IS a place for wind generation on our grids, BUT it needs to be figured out rationally by experts, NOT emotionally by advocates. FIRST, develop controllable load shedding to the maximum possible, with a system such as IMEUC on which I wrote the design documents, SECOND develop thermal storage as much as possible, THIRD develop battery-electric vehicle use and mandate its charging when the wind is blowing, FOURTH, make rational additions to long-distance HVDC transmission (BTW, I filed the patent on the concept of hanging aluminum tubes as transmission line conductors from wind generation towers down the medians on interstates as long-distance HVDC transmission system. The generators on the transmission towers produce enough saleable electricity to pay for the transmission system without charging any transmission fees. 'course it'll anger all the local utilities ;<)

Lengould:

A lot is pending on the forecast of the wind. I do not know the exact location of windfarms etc. in Ontario. Also for a 16 hour operation you would normally not "turn on" a coal plant but do this with a natural gas plant.

Basics to integrate win in the network would be

1) widely spread windfarms
2) A lot of inter connectiing to other states (and if I look at the map of high woltage lines in the US it looks it is prety thin)
3) make sure that your forecasting of wether patern improves
4) Also play with hydro for peaking
5) Peak shaving by consumers

Also (and this is again my experience in The Netherlands) although wind sometimes goes from 100% to 0 normally fluctuations are much more gradual and not so much on of.

I do not see storage as a solution for immediate needs.

==
From the above three charts and the IESO website, it can be seen that on May 8, 2008, the existing 11,328 MW available nuclear operated only 8,488 MW nuclear as continuous baseload, with the remainder shut down. Also 4,353 MW hydro, 413 MW coal, and 1,010 MW other, primarily wood-waste and gas-fired co-gen at industrial facilities, made up the balance of baseload supply. The peak mix at 16:00 was comprised of 8,488 MW nuclear, 2,222 MW coal, 6,100 MW hydro, and 1,314 MW other. The 472 MW connected wind ranged from providing 174 MW at midnight to 19 MW on peak. There is clearly a problem trying to propose adding 4,400 MW new nuclear to this mix to shut down 3,400 MW coal and service an added 1,000 MW new load, since current reactor technology is not capable of load following. However, it appears that part of that difficulty will be addressed by the project now underway to convert the Beck hydro station at Niagara to a peaking station with storage from the present run-of-river baseload facility, and the balance perhaps by a combination of load following with the Lennox gas-fueled station’s 1,575 MW capacity, maintaining 2,980 MW of coal-fired load-following capacity and depending on the 1 million+ Time of Use meters newly being installed to flatten out the load curve
===

If I look at your article on EnergyPulse the nuclear powerplants would be able to benefit a lot from additional transport capacity so they can sell more power to the US.

Also this would mean that a lot of base load coal power could be swithched of in the US for more CO2 reduction.

How do these time of use meters work? We have a discussion in the netherlands to install "intelligent" metering at residential propoerties, but people object beacuse of privacy issues and we will not get any benefit like time of use (rates are fixed for a year)

All rather interesting. But a question:

What do we do when the coal runs short?

On a site dedicated to discussion of the depletion of one fossil fuel, it's often forgotten that the others are depleting, too.

At some point we have to figure out how to do things without burning any fossil fuels at all. None.

May as well plan for it today.

No, not really. If coal reserves last, say, 100 years, and we dismiss AGW (which I don't), then it is wholly unnecessary to plan for how to do things without coal. We'd be better off postponing that planning for several decades.

Right now there are huge quantities of coal that have not even been cataloged properly

There's more coal in the arctic than we previously believed.
Prior to the last couple decades, the last time Alaska's arctic was assessed for coal by the USGS was in a study in 1967. At this time, the majority of the assessment was made by searching for coal outcrops on the surface. In the intervening decades a large number of oil shafts, boreholes, exploration shafts, etc. have been sunk throughout the North Slope and have basically all struck coal. The 2005 USGS assessment of the presence of up to 3.5 trillion tons of coal in the North Slope is based on a mapping of these sites, many of which are widely seperated. This coal is definitely present, but the sparse mapping data causes it all to be classified as hypothetical resource. With further exploration, some of this coal could be reclassified as identified resource, and then potentially added to the reserve base.

Both the above are from this article which does a decent job of laying out the Alaskan coal picture.

That is why so many AGW people are far more concerned we have too much rather than too little coal. Warmer temperatures are translating rather quickly to less arctic ice, which is showing up as the seasonal minimum ice date averaging three days later every year and by the percent of the seasonal maximum that is now only one year old ice.

If these trends continue, and all indications are that they will, the huge mass of coal north of the Brooks Range will be accessible to north west Alaska ports that will have longer and longer shipping seasons in the not too distant future.

I know you live a long way from the northern ice pack, but it is my neighbor so I keep a fairly good weather eye on it at this excellent NSIDC site. The monthly National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports on this page are top notch and searching the archives for a midmonth date for as far back as you wish to search would bring up a nice series of monthly reports that would give a good feel for the actual ebb and flow of arctic ice.

I am suspicious when people tell me there's heaps of coal available, it always sounds just like when they say there's heaps of oil. Sure, it's out there, but how much will it cost to get out, how much of a mess will it make, and so on. And people who understand peak oil still make the "divide reserves by current consumption to get years supply available" mistake with gas and coal.

Even if burning coal gave us vitamin C, my simple guideline would be that we ought not to build a power station unless we can be sure of having fuel for it for its lifetime. And the lifetime of coal-fired stations tends to be rather long, 50 years or so.

We have got to forget any solutions which involve burning more stuff. Eventually we'll have to stop burning stuff. It's bad manners to pass the job onto the next generation, it's like old grandparents taking out a huge loan just before they die.

It turns out that oil is the "odd man out". Most other mineral and mineral-like resources don't follow the same resource pattern, in which 1) there is a very sharp demarcation between high-quality resources and low-quality, 2) high-quality resources run out abruptly, like a straw slurping a soda, and 3) it has been explored for exhaustively.

There really is an enormous amount of coal, unfortunately.

http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2008/06/are-we-running-out-of-coal.html

No arguement with you there, just pointing out that a good deal of a huge mass of coal we have hardly even surveyed is getting closer to mostly ice free water by the year. I'm guessing we will be burning the stuff for steel production for a long, long time. It would be real good if we would quit burning coal to make electricity in the not so very distant future--so many alternative fuels are available. The heavy weighting of short term and discounting of long term costs isn't helping us move in the right direction though.

I do like to throw the NSIDC link out every once in a while. The more people that get in the habit of reading their monthly report the better. Locally, our little cinco de mayo snow should be melted off today. We have had a very dry winter, almost no precip here in interior Alaska from the time the Bering Sea froze almost down to the Aleutians until it retreated a few hundred miles to north a couple weeks ago. Some either uniformed or devious people see the maximum winter sea ice extent and say the polar cap is coming back strong, but that fairly thin one year ice is not at all the same critter as thick multiyear ice, which took a heck of a hit in the summer of 2007. Reading years of the NSIDC reports has really helped me get my mind around the arctic cap.

Len,

I'm puzzled. Your solutions are very sensible. Why don't you lead with them, instead of saying unrealistic things about how nuclear power plants will have to be shut down?

Obviously, nuclear power plants aren't going to be shut down - instead, utilities will do the kind of stuff you're talking about. They won't do it willingly, but they'll certainly do it before shutting down nuclear.

And yet the record of US wind power includes numerous incidents of sudden unexpected drop-offs. This should not be surprising. Weather forecasting is not accurate.

Weather forecasting accuracy drops off dramatically with expanding time scales. 1-hour and 3-hour forecasts are pretty good.

Canada is a funny place: it's provinces are enormous, but it's population is small, and concentrated in the south. In this case, the wind farms are concentrated around Windsor and Toronto in a relatively much smaller area. Further, as of 2008 they only had about 1.2GW wind (nameplate), which really isn't much.

So, this is a good start, but hardly enough to make generalizations.

Even taking into account the 85% you mentioned earlier you would still need more than 90% in conventional power plant capacity to cover for the bad days.

First, you need to do a much more careful analysis than just eyeballing a few days: you need to look at the parts of the year and day where capacity is actually needed, and you have to use the statistical approach preferred by the local ISO to forecast capacity credit. This may not feel intuitive, but the absolute minimum isn't the correct approach. Keep in mind that all forms of generation have variance. Nuclear, for instance, can "trip" in seconds - that can remove a full GW from the grid for days. That's why Ireland, for instance, chooses not to use nuclear: that kind of variance is too much for a small grid.

2nd, if generation can't get above 85%, then you don't need to "back up" any more than that. Actually, you don't need to back it up at all, because you never plan for that kind of generation as part of peak capacity - you just have to manage the change in generation, as the winds die down and wind generation comes down from it's peak. The best way to do that is to use Demand Management: ramp up demand during that peak (say, by signaling to commercial refrigeration to set it's temp down a couple of degrees, and for electric vehicles to charge at maximum), and then ramp demand down as the wind dies. Very cheap, very effective, well tested, widely used. It's what Texas used recently to deal with such a problem.

my reply last time:

Many ISO's don't like wind. This isn't surprising: it makes their lives harder. Utilities don't like the best solutions to wind variability (inter-grid balancing, DSM, time-of-day pricing, etc), because utilities are paid for their investments, not for fine-tuning of demand.

BTW, 3GW isn't very much - it's not surprising that it sees high variance.

Not clear to me your point. I disagree on your first premise. When the dispatcher needs to react to rapid fluctuation, they'll keep coal plants on preferentially to nuclear, because coal usually has at least some capability to back down rapidly from max output if the wind comes up, whereas nuclear normally does not. Does that explain why German nuc's were offline in July?

The obvious solution is DMS, aka load shedding, as you noted above. Far cheaper, far more effective.

Hi Len,

How do Ontario's interties/non-firm energy exchanges with Manitoba, MN, MI, NY and Québec affect these numbers?

[Ontario has 4,600 MW of import/export capacity with neighbouring jurisdictions; last year, it imported 4.8 TWh of electricity and exported 15.1 TWh.]

Cheers,
Paul

Hi. Interties to Manitoba's good hydro potential are extremely poor. Might be possible to knock down the small Thunder Bay coal plant, but the transmission commitment would be significant. Improving the connection to Quebec is obvious (swap Ont. baseload nuclear for Que's storage hydro is perfect) but not politically possible I think maybe because Que. voters refuse nuclear power? Otherwise, ties to USA not much use, though Bruce nuclear exports a lot to Michigan.

I agree with you that the ability to exchange energy with Manitoba is limited, but I see these other jurisdictions as alternate consumers of excess wind energy, Québec in particular, as it would help H-Q to conserve water. In short, these interties should allow Ontario to increase wind capacity well beyond what would be operationally and economically feasible otherwise.

Cheers,
Paul

last I saw, about 5 year ago Hydro Quebec made their own deal with GE to supply wind turbines to their own excellent sites on the Gaspe Penn. I doubt Quebec govt. is naive enough to let Ontario do all the wind building which their huge hydro resources can potentially backstop (with some added generation installs likely).

Ontario and Québec routinely trade power just as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick pool their generating resources for mutual benefit. It's fair to say Hydro-Québec would be pleased to purchase excess wind energy from Ontario when prices are low, conserve water and sell this energy back at peak times when price is more favourable. And with 40,000 MW of hydro-electric capacity on tap, plus another 4,500 MW under construction, it can easily absorb whatever Ontario throws at it, in addition to its domestic wind energy production (currently, 659 MW).

Cheers,
Paul

Why would you close nuclear plants when you build wind? You're not building the system from scratch with wind, you're building on top of what exists.

Are you assuming constant rapid growth in power usage? I thought that was enough to get banned from here.

Good numbers Len, amazing actually.
An interesting question then becomes what if wind is not guaranteed first dispatch? It can undercut the prices of others to be dispatched first, but not mandated.

I guess the real issue is that as soon as you start decommissioning coal plants, their capacity has to be replaced with some other dispatchable power source, which is not wind.

Or, as I have always said, wind must be complemented by an equal amount of backup capacity..It may save fossil fuels but it can't displace their capacity.

their capacity has to be replaced with some other dispatchable power source, which is not wind.

nor is it expensive nuclear...besides the fact that interconnected wind farms provide baseload.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/665644

And it is highly doubtful that Ontario will increase wind power and other renewables such as biogas considerably:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green/video.html
So start watching at 17:30 and rejoice...

besides the fact that interconnected wind farms provide baseload.

Can you provide any reliable reference for that statement, especially a numeric analysis of a year's output of such a wind generation system? I know that the only figure available to me to now, Ontario ISO's records of output of all the quite widely distributed wind generation in Ontario, indicate that the opposite is true, eg. maximum output typically at night in January, with many hot summer days having the entire system operating at only 2% to 3% of output.

From their wind generation production by hour for the past several years --
A spreadsheet in .csv format

In the past 12 months, the max output was 1017 MW, so there's at least that much online, quite widely distributed accross the 500 mile width of the southern part of the province near the great lakes (purportedly excellent wind resource territory).

On April 20th from 8:00 to 10:00 AM, the output averaged 3.5 MW. (0.34%)
On Mar 16th from 11:00AM to 1:00 PM, the output averaged 4.0 MW. (0.39%)
On Mar 9th from 10:00AM to 6:00 PM, the output averaged 6.7 MW. (0.66%)

That's just a few random picks I made in peak demand hours. I've done thorough analysis of this before and found the data to completely contradict your statement. These wind generators aren't anywhere NEAR to baselaod, and look like they never will be, since winds from here to North Dakota all travel in the same weather patterns.

eg. maximum output typically at night in January, with many hot summer days having the entire system operating at only 2% to 3% of output.

That's great given the fact, that heat pumps require more electricity in the winter and hydro power plants typically produce much less power during winter days and a surplus on summer days.

On Mar 16th from 11:00AM to 1:00 PM, the output averaged 4.0 MW. (0.39%)

0.39% predictable output for 2 hours is still better than having seven nuclear power plants generating 0% unreliable output for several weeks:

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47909

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to generate any electricity this month due to technical breakdowns. They have about half the production capacity of Germany's 17 nuclear reactors, but Germany did not suffer any power shortages.

You still haven't answered my request for information regarding why 7 nuclear plants were down in midsummer in Germany. Was it because the nuclear plants are totally unreliable? (unexpected for a German industrial group) or because too much wind generation had primary dispatch access (as will happen as my examples above illustrate). If the second, then you are guilty of at least stating bald falsehoods.

I assume that not all of them where down during maintenance but I know for sure (sorry no reference) that at least 2 where down because of problems with burned out transformer.

The result was no black outs.

Chances of 9 nuclear plant being down because of wind power sounds rather unbelievable. Most power in Germany is produced burning lignite which is much more expensive then old nuclear.

Of-course in Germany they are champions in wind and solar so there is some spare capacity standing around ;)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,635788,00.html

Number one which was off line during this period

Accisdent with transformer

anyone:

BERLIN, Jul 31, 2009 (IPS) - Seven German nuclear plants have failed to ...

Okay, that's nine (9) times you've posted the same factoid in this one discussion. Did you think people had missed it the first half-dozen times?

[edit] And as for the reliability of German wind power, check out http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/12/section-17.html

Obviously even YOU missed and failed to understand it. Because seven unreliable (but holy?) nuclear power plants producing 0 % for several weeks is a much bigger problem than having 10 GW of predictable wind power missing for a few hours.

Btw, besides the fact that this predictable German wind power reduces natural gas imports and hard coal consumption, this (evil?) wind power also reduces electricity prices:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/windkraft-macht-strom-billiger/753...

Obviously even YOU missed and failed to understand it.

If I'd missed it, I wouldn't have commented on the repetition, would I?

Look, we all have tidbits of information that we're fond of, but you seem to have about a dozen that you feel compelled to post over and over.
... And over. ... And over.

As for reliability, I keep losing track — does it mean that a source of power will be there whenever you want it, or that its output is predictable for some distance into the future? 'Cause if it's the latter, an off-line reactor is as reliable as a brick.

Anyone - something is really being left out here, with regards to your nuke outage factoid. Please list why each plant experienced an outage and on what dates. Shouldn't be hard, not a lot of plants involved. How many were planned outages eg refueling? How many were failures? Bet it was very few - so we have a transformer issue - that's one (that by the way is a failure that can happen with any large power source). Were the plants of the same design ie is it possible several plants of the same design were shut down to proactively address some common issue? You must have more information at your fingertips, you've relied so many times on the same factoid. I hope your not cherry picking some item that you have run across without checking into it, in order to support some preconceived viewpoint you have. Have you ever looked up the average capacity factor for eg the nuclear fleet of the United States (google it). Its very high. Compare it to the capacity factor of wind power (google it if you must).

D*mn - I just googled "average capacity factor for eg the nuclear fleet of the United States" & got numerous references stating the entire US nuclear fleet averages over 90%. I did the same for "the capacity factor of wind power" and got numerous references stating that about 35% is the accepted number, more or less depending on the site.
Sounds to me like the wind doesn't always blow. I rely on wind forecasts for my living and my personal safety & have for 24 years. Wind forecasting is regularly quite wrong, sometimes in a life threatening way. Weather is a complex system and has a fairly strong chaotic element.
Now an entire nuclear fleet at a capacity factor of over 90% is extraordinary and a testament to what we can accomplish. This is not cherry picked info. Look it up. Something that is not shown in the data is that the required and planned refueling outage, commonly every 18 months, is responsible for about 5% of the lost capacity factor in the nuclear fleet. Nuclear power is very, very dependable.

PS I'm referring to the fleet of civilian power reactors. Should be clear by context,but I suppose I should say it.

So you are basically saying that nuclear cannot do load following and requires spinning reserves?

And you are also saying that hundreds of wind turbines distributed over a wide area are losing their power within seconds - like if they were a similar sized nuclear power plant which shuts down unexpectedly - because the wind forecasting over a wide area is unreliable even within a minute time frame and also wind typically goes from 50% to 0% within seconds over wide areas?

you don't like answering simple, direct questions, do you? No, that is not what I was saying, it is pretty clear my comment had nothing to do with load following or spinning reserves. Please reread it.

A few thoughts:

The US nuclear industry achieves higher utilization than other countries. This is in part due to good management, but it's also due in part to older plants, that have had quite a bit of time to optimize. It doesn't necessarily tell us as much about new plants and designs as we would like.

Wind forecasting accuracy is heavily dependent on timeframes: 1 or 3 hour forecasts are much more reliable than 2 or even 1 day forecasts. Utilities need forecasts measured in hours, not days.

Nuclear plants can trip at a moment's notice, and stay out for days. Due to their large size, this creates a significant management challenge. For instance, Ireland has chosen not to consider nuclear, due to this "integer" problem. The Swiss plant discussed below apparently provides 15% of Switzerland's power - that presents a significant backup challenge.

While nuclear is indeed reasonably reliable, you have to grant that it is not without intermittency of its own. Why is this important? Because critics of wind tend to hold it to an unrealistic standard: utilities don't require zero intermittency, they just need manageable intermittency.

Wind power generation have its limitation so as there are also some problems and concerns of people with conventional resources, but there is still huge potential in this sector. We have seen a substantial growth in wind energy sector in 2009. As of December 31, 2009, wind capacity grown to nearly 35,000 MW. That’s the equivalent of more than 9.7 million homes. The U.S. wind industry currently directly employs more than 2,000 people. Further development of wind resources as spelled out in the DOE’s plan for future wind capacity that will account for at least 20% electricity generation in the United States by the year 2030. In the beginning of 2010, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released an update of wind energy potential in the United States listed at approximately 10.5 million MW of wind power, or almost nine times larger than current U.S. electricity consumption.
Want to learn more about balanced energy for America? Visit www.consumerenergyalliance.org to get involved, discover CEA’s mission and sign up for our informative newsletter.

you know, the comments on both sides of the wind power issue seem at times a bit over the top. Seems like people want to whack each other over the head with references, a good many of which are from biased sources. Facts are right, wrong, and gray, depending on how you use them. Same idea with choices and how you make them.
Why worry about grid problems if wind becomes 40, 60, 100% of our power? Won't happen. If I buy 2 snack size bags of potato chips, no need to argue that a 100% potato chip diet is unhealthy. Doubling my chip consumption doesn't effect my overall diet. Neither will doubling wind, in the big picture. It is presently a snack size bag of chips. Get more if you want.
Why the stress about subsidies? They are governments' way of pushing industry a certain way for policy reasons. Seems to me that many governments have decided that they are strategically vulnerable to a grid that is too one sided in favor of fossil fuels. Can't blame their logic. When wind expands to a certain size, subsidies will be reduced.
I do wish the dissemination of misinformation for political reasons was reduced.

I'm a defended of wind because a lot of people (at least in the Netherlands) always come with reasons why they should not be built like

* They are ugly (personally I like them more then all these offices and big box stores)
* They only run on subsidies and can never even earn back the energy invested in them
* They kill birds

I can not imagine a system with only wind we have to add some other sources too but the comes the nuclear advocates with

* We have to built 5 nuclear plants it's much cheaper (cost of energy of wind 0.06-0.08 and nuclear 0.07 kWh)
* They are CO2 free
* Storage is not a problem

There must be a mix and Wind is a good part of the mix. How much? 20% 30%? I don't know, but I would not start worrying too much until it reaches 20%

I agree, doubling wind is not a big problem, it's a snack size bag of chips. The problem is the public and political perception that we shouldn't build nukes or fast-track research in breeder concepts b/c there is nice, cheap renewable energy we could use instead.

So - there is not just a bit of economic crowd-out going on here, but also a much worse mental crowd-out. This will, in retrospect, be shown to have delayed a real phase-out of coal with two to three decades. I have no real hope that this can change - it will just have to play itself out.

That's a reversal of reality.

The phase-out of coal isn't being delayed by the presence of wind as an alternative, it's being delayed by people who work in, or are invested in the coal industry.

Similarly, windpower gets a lot of resistance from the coal and nuclear industries:

"Why is Exelon lobbying against the legislation while marketing itself as a renewable energy leader? Publicly, the company is claiming the measure will drive up consumers' electric bills. But Crain's suggests that there could be another underlying reason:

...a continued influx of homegrown wind power could hit Exelon where it hurts the most, reducing wholesale power prices in Illinois. That's because wind tends to blow hardest at night, when power demand is lowest. In recent years, real-time prices at night have turned negative at times, requiring generators to actually pay to unload their juice, because supply has outstripped demand. More local wind power likely would exacerbate that effect. Exelon's nukes run around the clock, making them more vulnerable to these price swings, while natural gas- and coal-fired plants can shut down when demand is weak [...]

Joseph Dominguez, Exelon's senior vice-president for state governmental affairs, acknowledges more wind power in the market could hurt prices the nuclear plants could charge, but he said it could hurt higher-cost coal-fired plants more. "

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5063585505117878771&postID=667...

http://www.progressillinois.com/posts/content/2010/03/30/exelon-attempts...

I stand by my comment. I don't think coal people have much to do with it.

Read the second link, which I just added (disregard the first, which is a mistake).

By the way, Wyoming which is a big coal producer is also introducing a wind energy tax:

http://awea.org/blog/Index.php?mode=viewid&post_id=323

"Donors work hard for the cash. In order to bypass strict campaign laws limiting individual donations to $2,000, each donor 'bundles' together cheques from his own circle of friends and employees. But the effort seems worthwhile.

A classic example is that of West Virginia coal baron James Harless, a Pioneer in 2000 and 2004, therefore contributing at least $200,000 to the Bush campaign. He saw his grandson appointed to a Department of Energy team looking at drawing up new policies. The Bush administration then reversed a campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that bedevil the coal industry and eased environmental restrictions on opencast mining.

'Here is where ordinary Americans are sold down the river. When donations affect policy, it is ordinary people who end up biting the bullet,' Wheat said. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/23/usa.uselections2004

It is very common in the US to blame everything on lobbyists, but I think you exaggerate the problem, listen too much to Michael Moore and his ilk. Besides, you are often too US-centric. I'm talking about world coal, not about US coal. And I'm talking about wind vs nuclear, where we are going to end up losing time as wind is not a full-scale contender to coal, but is perceived as one.

It is very common in the US to blame everything on lobbyists

I'd like to believe that. Seen any stories to support that?

you are often too US-centric.

I know the US best. Besides, it's 25% of world energy consumption, so it can't be ignored. I make a point of noting where something applies to the US, which makes the US orientation more visible, but actually by making it visible I'm demonstrating an awareness that it's not the only thing that's important, and encouraging that awareness in my readers.

wind is not a full-scale contender to coal

As it happens, I disagree. Still, I think the idea that wind advocacy is a primary reason for coal's enduring place is a red herring, created by nuclear advocates. I know, for instance, that Germany is thinking about shutting down nuclear, while still building coal plants. I seriously doubt that would be very different, even if the wind industry hadn't been so strongly encouraged in Germany.

Any stories? No, just a personal observation from my participation in discussions on the Internet.

The US is at around 23% of world coal consumption, but China is at 29% and rising fast.

I know you disagree about wind being limited to ~20%. I'll prepare some sources for you till another time - I won't have time to do it before this thread closes.

Still, I think the idea that wind advocacy is a primary reason for coal's enduring place is a red herring, created by nuclear advocates.

I didn't say anything like that, so I guess the red herring is yours. I'm talking about public and political perception, not about lobbyism. People think we don't need to invest in nuclear b/c we can do wind, solar and wave. Politicians listen and subsidise. When it gets apparent that wind, solar and wave doesn't cut it, we'll have to refocus on breeder tech, and it will take decades to get it up and running and ramp it.

Wind is nice in Germany. They can ramp it together with Russian natural gas to replace their lousy brown coal. The build-out is all well and good. The problem is what it hides, what it crowds out, what they do not do. The German socialists agrees to phase out nuclear on the insistence of the Greens - it's about parliamentary pawn sacrifices. What if the Greens got a clue and advocated nuclear research and deployment instead? What if they would have had a clue since the beginning of the 90-ies? They could already have gotten rid of their coal with a similar electricity production as France has.

The US is at around 23% of world coal consumption, but China is at 29% and rising fast.

True. Coal's bit of an outlier: the US's share is about 25% of oil, electrical generation, and overall BTU's, and China's share of those is still much smaller.

I didn't say anything like that, so I guess the red herring is yours. I'm talking about public and political perception, not about lobbyism

Ok, then let me rephrase: I think the idea that public and political perception of wind/solar etc is a primary reason for coal's enduring place is a red herring, created by nuclear advocates.

As a practical matter, I don't think nuclear will be phased out in Germany, and I don't think that a pro-nuclear Green campaign would have accelerated the phase-out of coal very much. The fact is that incumbent/legacy industries that stand to lose because of change (either jobs, careers, or investments) fight change very, very tenaciously. They buy media outlets, they create think-tanks, they buy politicians, they buy advertising, etc, etc. The potential losers fight change with an intensity that is much, much stronger than the energy that comes from people who want change.

Don't overly discount the power of lobbyists in the US, the term, in its greater sense, projects all the way through advertising dollar influence on media content. Thus far the US has managed to hold a rather broad piece of realestate under one flag and currency for all but about four years out of the last two and a quarter centuries or so, I wouldn't overly discount the value of that either--that also brings difficulties, but not quite as many as trying to hold the whole EU together does.

As a current events aside: since you are in the heart of it, do you expect the Euro zone to contract to Germany, most of its bordering countries plus maybe Scandanavia or try to stumble on in its expanded form? I've about as little feel for how that is all playing out as most Europeans have about the ins and outs of US politics. To give you some idea of how clueless an American can be about the continent, I look at a map and think it would be most sensible if Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia decided to join together with the United States as the European Regional Commonwealth of the United States, tie into our currency and become a tariff free trading zone. That would at least put a fair size DMZ through the middle of the continent ?- )

It is very common in the US to blame everything on lobbyists,

The lobbyists in Europe are just as effective.

For example: Switzerland spends over 100 times more on a single bank bailout without investments in Switzerland (thanks to the bank-lobby) than on Swiss new renewable power plants with Swiss jobs reducing the dependence on fuel imports (thanks to the power-lobby).

Actually, the Swiss nuclear power operators are running ad campaigns against renewable energies such as these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8VeugmAsx8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFw6lyRoRyQ
Basically telling people whoever supports renewable energies is an esoteric loon and if Switzerland were to invest in renewable energies the lights will go out. Ironically the same nuclear company which is running PR-campaigns against renewable energies had a 1.2 GW nuclear reactor producing 0 kWh for almost 6 months - on the other hand the wind has never stopped blowing for 6 month straight (neither did the sun ever stop shining for 6 months straight)...

And when you search for photovoltaic energy on Swiss Google you get ad-links from the nuclear power operators telling you that photovoltaic energy has no use.

What nuclear plant? Why was it shut down? Any info at all? I doubt.

This nuclear power plant due to a generator failure:

http://www.suedkurier.de/region/hochrhein/waldshut-tiengen/Atomkraftwerk...

This reactor is a boiling water reactor, in operation since 1984. It provides on average 15% of Switzerland's electricity. In 2005 it shut down for 5 months for generator work. Your information is cherry picked.
How many megawatt hours can your windmill produce before the city lights go out? Clue - This old reactor has already produced more power than about a thousand of your windmills will in the same period of time, at less cost, and its still going strong.
Wind has its place but it cannot provide the kind of dependability we are used to.
Anyone, I am self employed. I assume that this week you are working for some firm interested in promoting wind. Next week will you be promoting another client, say coal? Disinformation and skewed facts do our culture damage, regardless of what side it comes from.

It provides on average 15% of Switzerland's electricity. In 2005 it shut down for 5 months for generator work.

It was an unpredicted generator failure. But that is exactly the point 15% less electricity for 5 months without warning!

Do you understand that: MINUS unpredicted 15% during whooping 5 months!

Can you tell us about wind farms providing 15% of the electricity of an entire country, which did not produce one single kWh for 5 months straight?

The nuclear power operator runs a PR campaign saying that if we were just to get about any amount of electricity from renewables (apart from hydro) the lights would go out but missing 15% of electricity during 5 months without warning is obviously no problem whatsoever!

Do you finally understand the absurdity of this PR-campaign funded by the nuclear industry? Or do you simple believe an electric motor will not run because the electricity to run it was partially produced with a wind turbine as opposed to a nuclear power plant...

I have to honestly say your opposition to nuclear seems to border on religious. Read Kiashu's detailed post above on power requirements come 2050 and then come back and tell me why we don't need to be putting real efforts into both nuclear and renewables. Even if his numbers are off by a factor of ten it looks there will be no shortage of power demand. Of course I hope the LFTR is more than a dream and can be developed into a truly viable technology. Enough religious opposition to nuclear and that doesn't even have a prayer of happening.

Did you actually read what I wrote?
I'm not against nuclear. As I said before I would welcome feed-in tariffs for breeder reactors if they run on nuclear waste and do reduce nuclear waste and reduce the dependence on fuel imports and are not more than doubled compared to feed-in tariffs for renewable sources.

I'm against the fact that the established power including the nuclear industry is running an elaborate and expensive PR-campaign to prevent renewables from increasing their market share.

And we should spend our money wisely. You cannot spend the same dollar twice.
It does not make sense to spend $8000 per kW on a new nuclear power plant, increase the dependence on uranium imports, have to deal with high decommissioning and repository costs and require cooling water when you can have wind power for much lower costs and in a much shorter time:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644
It's simply not wise to spend over 20 cents per kWh, just because the electricity was generated in a holy new nuclear power plant, when you can have that electricity for lower costs without increasing your dependence on fuel imports.
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/67392/politics-key-to-russia-turkey-nu...

Slated to eventually consist of four separate units of 1,200 megawatts (MW) each, the planned plant would go a long way to meeting Turkey's expected growth in power demand albeit at a price, that of a guaranteed off-take which will see Turkey's power grid take 100% of the power the plant produces at an agreed fixed price up to 2030. In view of the long-term guarantee, the consortium's bid price of 21.16 euro cents/kilowatt hour (KWh) caused further controversy

And there is no simply no shortage of renewables:
http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/repo...

The EEA estimates the technical potential of offshore wind in 2020 at 25,000 TWh, between six and seven times greater than projected electricity demand, rising to 30,000 TWh in 2030, seven times greater than projected electricity demand.

And most household energy is heat energy and heat energy can be stored cheaply.
And the world's hydro capacity (power) is already doubled compared to nuclear and can be increased to bridge lower power output of other renewable sources. (Hydro does not need to increase its total energy output just its power output.)

In addition, especially the US would run far better if it would spend dollars on efficiency than any new power plant (renewable or not). There is simply no reason why the US should consume double the electricity per capita compared to some European countries with a higher GDP per capita.
But apparently most people (or lobbies?) prefer to have their labor taxed as opposed to their energy consumption.

I must have missed or that forgot the nuclear feed in tariff part as you turned up the volume. Hydro of course has its own issues, where have all those Columbia salmon swum to? No doubt well thought out hydro still has loads of potential, especially if we can reduce long distance transmission costs.

There is simply no reason why the US should consume double the electricity per capita compared to some European countries with a higher GDP per capita.

Part of the reason is right in that statement. Poor working folk (and non working) in the US are using a heck of lot crummier electrical appliances and heating systems than their richer GDP country counterparts and ever so many really resist the spending the extra couple bucks on more efficient lighting even though it pays for itself in less than a year (that item seems pretty easy to fix). Then of course this country is a whole lot larger than those little European countries and lights a whole lot more miles of road per capita--just one of many reasons why lower population density will increase per capita electrical usage. The higher GDP European countries you are not mentioning have many fewer cooling degree days than a huge chunk of the US has as well. The comparison is really a bit of apples and oranges. Our per capita usage shouldn't be double but it likely will always be a significant amount higher. Of course the good thing is we do use electricity so inefficiently that getting the first third more bang for the buck should be relatively painless. Best start teaching how to do that in kindegarten though, as that will likely be the most effective place to put effort to get things moving the right way.

I once happened to live in the US Northeast. The rents were higher than in central Europe and the housing insulation was really, really bad - the heating bill for one month was almost higher than for an entire winter over here. I remember buying plastic films to entirely seal these leaking, sliding windows (why would anybody make windows that leak?) and buying an electric blanket to at least keep the heating bill somewhat under control (you cannot buy window sealing films and electric blankets in central Europe because there is obviously no market for it). I also remember never having a need to open the windows as the aeration was thanks to the bad insulation actually very good (even when the windows were sealed).

Maybe some people are too poor to buy an efficient light bulb but then again the best selling car in the US is this:

And of course the landlords who receive high rents for these badly insulated buildings can simply not be that poor. But they do need tough regulations or incentives to do something.

As I noted above, nuclear plants can trip at a moment's notice, and stay out for days. Due to their large size, this creates a significant management challenge. For instance, Ireland has chosen not to consider nuclear, due to this "integer" problem. The Swiss plant discussed above apparently provides 15% of Switzerland's power - that presents a significant backup challenge. While nuclear is indeed reasonably reliable, you have to grant that it is not without intermittency of its own.

Why is this important? Why is it reasonable to look at incidents like this, even if they're unusual? Because critics of wind tend to hold it to an unrealistic standard: utilities don't require zero intermittency, they just need manageable intermittency.

Nick - a valid point - this Swiss reactor is 1100 MWE - an issue if any single power source this large trips off, nuclear, coal, hydro (see the Russian dam disaster) or otherwise. Units of this size were common in the late 70"s and early 80's, when utilities built one-off plants and sought economy of scale.
But see the many modular nuclear designs now existing, currently seeking certification. 40, 80, 100 MWE per unit and several can be used in one plant. These designs address the "integer" problem. They most certainly will promote manageable intermittency. They also may be considered for the retrofitting of existing eg coal power plants.

I'm sceptical we'll ever see smallish nuke plants. They really are a technology that has economies of scale, a 100MW plant is not going to be 10% the cost of a 1,000MW plant. And governments in general are in favour of the One Big Facility, lets them make grand announcements. I think this is something that's held back renewables - you can't have a single 1,000MW solar panel or wind turbine, politicians aren't as excited by miles and miles of panels or windmills.

Our contemporary hysteria about terrorism will play in here, too. It's a lot easier to guard a single 1,000MW plant than 10 x 100MW ones.

Then there's the NIMBYism. You might be able to persuade one neighbourhood to have a nuke plant there, but ten? A lot harder. And the company wanting to build it then has ten times as many community meetings to go to. After a few of those meetings they're probably going to suggest to government they build One Big Facility instead.

Putting several small ones in one place in principle makes them more reliable, but in practice they'll share all sorts of facilities, so if one goes down several will. And anyway someone will say, "if they're all in one place anyway, why not just make One Big Facility?"

So if we build them at all, we'll be building big ones.