This is a guest essay from Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh of the Rocky Mountain Institute. It is part two of a series; see part one here.
-----
Part two of David Bradish's critical look at "The Nuclear Illusion" (PDF) raises two additional issues to which we respond here. As in his first critique, it appears that, unable to rebut and hence unwilling to address our paper's data and logic, Mr. Bradish must content himself with trying to manufacture an illusion of confusion.
Does RMI's data fit their definition [of micropower]?
Yes, precisely; it just doesn't fit various other definitions that Mr. Bradish has invented on his own. We clearly defines micropower (an Economist magazine term) thus at pp. 11-12:
1. onsite generation of electricity (at the customer, not at a remote utility plant) -- usually cogeneration of electricity plus recovered waste heat (outside the U.S. this is usually called CHP -- combined-heat-and-power): this is about half gas-fired, and saves at least half the carbon and much of the cost of the separate power plants and boilers it displaces; [and] 2. distributed renewables -- all renewable power sources except big hydro plants, which are defined here as dams larger than 10 megawatts (MW).
Mr. Bradish arbitrarily and wrongly assumes "that the size of 'micropower' plants is 10 MW or less," then claims this is our definition and contradicts our data. It's not and it doesn't. Our 10 MW limit applies only to small hydro, distinguishing it from big hydro using the most conservative criterion. Any power source except small hydro can be larger than 10 MW but still meet our micropower definition: WADE's onsite-fueled-generator definition, which we've adopted, includes onsite units up to somewhat over 180 MWe for gas turbines (though few actual units are over 120 MWe) and up to 60 MWe for engines, as well as onsite (nearly always cogenerating) steam turbines of any size if they're in China and India; however, WADE's database excludes steam turbines elsewhere, and all units below 1 MWe.
Mr. Bradish complains that we and WADE don't specify onsite generator units' size distribution. The size distribution for 2006 additions can be found by looking at the Diesel and Gas Turbine Worldwide: Power Generation Order Survey (PDF). WADE details its assumptions, which we adopted, about what fraction of these units provide onsite generation and hence fit our micropower definition. To give a rough idea of the size distribution of new non-biomass decentralized generation capacity additions in 2006, after separating out peaking and standby units, about 88 percent of new onsite diesel capacity came from units less than 10 MW in size. For onsite continuously-operating gas turbines, 10 percent of new capacity came from units less than 10 MW, 74 percent came from units between 10 and 60 MW, and 17 percent came from units over 60 MW.
Mr. Bradish adds further confusion by injecting his personal opinion that "micropower" shouldn't include what he calls "centralized renewables," like windfarms. But we define micropower to include all renewables except big hydro, consistent with Economist usage and the terminology long established in the field. For reasons explained in our 2002 Economist book of the year Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size, we think the key distinctions between micropower and central stations turn on their ability to capture many of the 207 "distributed benefits" catalogued in that definitive work. A windfarm totaling hundreds of megawatts still captures the deployment speed, modularity, low financial risk, and economies of scale that come from mass production of its ~1-3 MW turbines. The windfarm lacks the large unit scale, long lead times, and high financial risks of a GW-scale thermal station. Mr. Bradish thinks we should count only the ~5 percent of wind machines that are relatively small and onsite, but we clearly counted all windpower, as he notes from our posted database. Had we meant to count only rooftop solar cells and other small-scale generators resources sited at the user, we would have said so.
In short, we chose and defined our terms carefully, presented data consistent with our definitions, and cannot be responsible for Mr. Bradish's pretense that we meant something different and should have said so. He's welcome to compile his own data using his own idiosyncratic definitions, but he shouldn't blame us for not adopting them.
Mr. Bradish offers a graph from a proprietary Ventyx/Global Energy Decisions database to which we don't have access. We therefore can't tell whether smaller, cogenerating, and non-utility units were fully included. We doubt they were, for two reasons. First, when we finally reached Ventyx on June 13, 2008, their specialist told us that their database fully includes only units of at least 25 MW, and omits smaller units to a degree he couldn't specify. (We requested further details of what is or isn't included in their database -- in size, type, and ownership -- but haven't yet heard back.) Second, EIA data on U.S. net-summer-capacity additions (May 2008) show renewables added respectively in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 about 14.5, 15.1, 8.2, and 12.6 GWe, but Mr. Bradish's graph shows respective values, read off the graph, of only about <1, 2, 3, and 4 GWe. (We can't similarly check cogeneration additions because the Ventyx database doesn't break them out.) All these kinds of units are included, however, in the public-source data we analyzed in detail at pp. 23-34 of Small Is Profitable, to which we invite his attention.
Mr. Bradish's assumption that micropower can't be growing quickly because, he states, average U.S. plant size was ~150 MWe in 2007 appears to reflect (a) major omissions of small units from the Ventyx database, and (b) the United States' lag in adopting micropower (~6 percent of ~2007 electricity, vs. ~16 percent globally and >50 percent for the highest adopter, Denmark). The high micropower adoption demonstrated by our global market data might require his claimed ~20-40 MWe average unit size if micropower had to be <10 MWe per unit, but under our definition, it doesn't.
Finally, Mr. Bradish claims our data don't show thriving micropower in the rest of the world. Huh? Our empirical data document that micropower added ~43-58 GWe worldwide in 2006, vs. 1.44 GW net for nuclear (more than all of it from uprating old units). Micropower now provides a sixth of the world's total electricity, about a third of the world's new electricity, and from one-sixth to more than half of all electricity in a dozen industrial countries. Renewables other than big hydro attracted $71 billion of private risk capital in 2007; nuclear, zero. Mr. Bradish does not deny or even address any of these data; he simply tries to distract readers' attention from them.
Big plants yield greater efficiencies and economies of scale than small plants.
Mr. Bradish's claim (borrowed from Peter Huber and Mark Mills's book The Bottomless Well) is simply shorthand for the high-temperature cycles with higher Carnot efficiencies that can be achieved in larger boilers with higher volume-to-surface ratios. This is true as far as it goes, but is grossly incomplete, reflecting a primitive understanding of scale economics:
- An efficient plant discarding 2 GWt of waste heat -- too much to use in most sites -- has a lower fuel-to-useful-work efficiency and a lower economic efficiency than a small cogenerator matched to its thermal and electrical loads and achieving roughly twice the big plant's system efficiency (our record is ~92 percent and the state of the art is probably ~93 percent, vs. Mr. Bradish's cited 35-39 percent for advanced nuclear plants or ~50-60 percent for modern combined-cycle plants).
- Unsuitability for cogeneration in most sites is only one of a huge array of diseconomies that offset the well-known Huber/Mills economies of scale. The history of how utilities that at first sought only economies of scale realized that diseconomies of scale were often more important is on pp. 11-34 of Small Is Profitable. Numerous phenomena come into play, such as the lower uptime, longer lead time, higher reserve margin and spinning reserve requirement, and higher financial risk of big units. Small Is Profitable exhaustively details both economies and diseconomies of scale. Mr. Bradish seems to think that only heat-to-electric efficiency matters, but owners know better.
- The claim that big stations are more economical than small ones is flat wrong. Small Is Profitable, in over 400 pages of detailed analysis,documents 207 reasons how units the right size for the task can capture "distributed benefits" that often increase value by roughly an order of magnitude -- enough to flip any investment decision.
- Interestingly, and contrary to Mr. Bradish's claim, it's not even true that big gas turbines, the mainstay of today's combined-cycle plants, are more efficient than small ones. Tom Casten's Electricity Journal article in Dec. 1995 showed that at least at that time, the highest simple-cycle efficiency came from an aeroderivative 40 MWe unit (GE's LM6000), not from the largest units at 250 MW, and that "many offerings below 50 MW compare well with 250 MW machines," especially counting cogeneration potential and avoided high-voltage step-up. Of course, in the right applications, such as wind turbines, economies of unit scale can and do exist, but that does not contradict our thesis nor support Mr. Bradish's.
Small plants are too slow to build to achieve a desired total capacity.
Mr. Bradish starts by wrongly assuming a maximum 10 MWe unit size, then ignores our empirical data showing that micropower is already achieving very large total capacities, far faster than GW-scale thermal plants can or do. For example, in 2006, global micropower added 30-40x more capacity than nuclear did.
His handwaving claim that building many small units quickly is somehow "not practical" flies in the face of the extensive data we present on what investors are actually buying and operators are actually installing and operating. Whatever exists is possible: Micropower is empirically outpacing nuclear, in capacity added per year, by factors of ten. Of course this ratio is smaller for electricity output because of differences of capacity factor. But nuclear remains a bit player in today's global power market, where micropower (not to mention efficient end-use) is starting to put a dent in sales of all central thermal plants -- nuclear, coal, gas-combined-cycle, and big hydro. Thus the U.S. in 2007 added more wind capacity than it has added coal capacity in the past five years combined. The U.S. or China or Spain each added more wind capacity in 2007 than the world added nuclear capacity. Utilities and investors do not appear to share Mr. Bradish's theological commitment to the impracticality of micropower and the manifest virtue of central plants.
Contrary to what RMI believes, there is no one-size fits all solution.
Neither in the articles at issue nor elsewhere have we ever proposed such a solution. Rather, we suggest the right size for the job. Most jobs are small. For example, in 1993 (Small Is Profitable, p. 36), 75 percent of U.S. households had average loads <1.5 kW, and 75 percent of commercial buildings had average loads <12 kW. (A typical U.S. house uses, on average, only about one-twentieth as much electric power as the solar flux falling on that house.) Thus a single 1.4 GW generating unit could serve nearly a million typical households or more than 100,000 typical commercial buildings in the lower three quartiles of average usage. That customary practice no longer makes economic sense.
To be sure, a few very large industrial facilities do use ~10^9 to 10^10 W each, and as one of us (ABL) wrote in the 1970s, it would be just as silly to run an aluminum smelter on small wind turbines as it is to heat houses with a fast breeder reactor. But there is no technical or economic rationale for the many-orders-of-magnitude gap between gigawatt unit scale and the scale of the end-use devices important in our daily lives (typically 10^-1 to 10^3 W) or of our living and working units (usually 10^3 to 10^5 W). That extreme mismatch, as Small Is Profitable shows in detail, wastes money and energy. We hope Mr. Bradish will study that analysis before further promoting his "one-size-fits-all" solution.
Mr. Bradish has posted part three of his critique, claiming that RMI has overlooked Jevons Paradox, which undoes and reverses the intended energy savings from more efficient end-use. We have rebutted this invalid claim in a response to Mr. Bradish's cited primary source -- an article by Robert Bryce in his newsletter. Completion of our response was delayed by travel, but we expect to finish it shortly, and will then post it on RMI's website, in this blog, and (Mr. Bryce has assured us) on his site.
Meanwhile, readers should know that the claimed "rebound" effect -- phenomena that make net energy savings smaller than gross savings -- is real but generally very small, and has no material effect on our conclusions. This is firmly established in the empirical literature, and is well-known to knowledgeable energy economists but evidently not to Mr. Bryce, Mr. Bradish, or the theory's current standard-bearers, Dr. Peter Huber and Mr. Mark Mills. A brief introduction to some basic concepts is on Wikipedia.
We will address Mr. Bradish's forthcoming posts on "nuclear and grid reliability" and "costs" as they appear.
‘Heretic’ battles straw man
Two senators push to ramp up nuclear energy
Comments
View as Threaded
Sean Casten Posted 6:23 am
20 Jun 2008
I'd suspect you're right on the Ventyx data, and would frankly be amazed if the WADE model doesn't substantially undercount the installed base of micropower, for many of the same reasons. As power plants get smaller, they have less and less impetus to report data on their existence or operation, such as is necessary to quantify their total. As a domestic example, FERC requires all generators >1 MW to report to FERC. Which means that everything below that cutoff is in datasets only to the degree that someone - at WADE or elsewhere - was patient enough to try and cobble the data from other sources. We at the USCHPA ran square into this in the late 1990s, when we began our effort (still underway) to assemble and maintain a domestic inventory of all known CHP installations, which started 5 years ago from the FERC data. When I reviewed that list from the vantage point of the company I was running at the time, I found just 2 of our 100 domestic installations included in that list! I have no reason to believe our experience would not be representative, suggesting that the micropower total could be well higher than even RMI suggests. This raises a rather interesting question: how much of our current grid reliability is currently depending upon the actions of thousands of tiny actors that are neither known, nor monitored, nor planned by any central reliability coordinator?
A minor quibble: I accept that you can define your terms however you want, but it is confusing to list central wind in a micropower database. There are plenty of good things associated with wind power, but the benefits of local generation are not among them, at least of the central variety. It is a minor criticism though, and only one of methodology rather than conclusion.
Permalink
Laurence Aurbach Posted 7:56 am
20 Jun 2008
I think I understand his point, which is that when large power arrays are composed of small modules, then the large array has many of the benefits of the individual modules.
Maybe an easy way of defining such facilities is by marginal costs: Is the cost of adding 1% or 5% to the capacity of a large array approximately the same as building that same amount of capacity as a standalone micropower unit?
That's probably true for a lot of wind farms, solar PV, trough solar thermal and wave power. It's probably not true for larger, more centralized renewable plants like solar power towers, geothermal power or tidal power.
In all fairness, though, a good 10-20% of Lovins' 207 benefits are related to transmission and scale. Maybe his methodology would be more consistent if he were to separately break out large and/or remote renewable power facilities that are composed of small modules.
Ped Shed Blog
Permalink
Gar Lipow Posted 9:35 am
20 Jun 2008
Permalink
David Bradish Posted 2:07 am
23 Jun 2008
This is great. I thought I'd only get one response from RMI but it's good to see you guys defending your work.
Here are my questions and comments.
I still don't understand the definition of "micropower." The word micro obviously implies very small plants. The average power plant unit size in the U.S. is about 60 MW. So "micro" plants (at least in my opinion) should be much smaller than 60 MW. Yet according to the WADE data you provided, it includes plants over 60 MW.
As well, if the "micropower" data includes other plants greater than 10 MW, why put that limit on hydro then? According to you, I wrongly assumed "micro" was less than 10 MW, but there was nothing else to go by.
Mr. Bradish adds further confusion by injecting his personal opinion that "micropower" shouldn't include what he calls "centralized renewables," like windfarms. But we define micropower to include all renewables except big hydro
Your definition says "distributed renewawbles." 95% of wind is centralized. Why include the word "distributed" if the data is not then?
Mr. Bradish offers a graph from a proprietary Ventyx/Global Energy Decisions database to which we don't have access. We therefore can't tell whether smaller, cogenerating, and non-utility units were fully included.
Good point, let me explain. The dataset I used from Ventyx is called "Generating Unit Capacity." It includes every single unit pretty much ever conceived in the U.S. - operating, canceled, small, big, etc. The specialist you talked with was referring to a different dataset called "CEMS Unit Summary." This dataset uses EPA data to count all of the emissions from plants over 25 MW. I also gave you evidence in my post that my data does include small plants. Here's what I said: "There are a total of 80 GW of co-generating capacity operating in the U.S. (same number reported in WADE's 2005 Survey on page 27). Of the 80 GW, only 3 GW are less than 10 MW in capacity."
We hope Mr. Bradish will study that analysis before further promoting his "one-size-fits-all" solution.
What? You quoted me as saying "there is no one-size-fits-all solution." Yet, you're saying I'm "promoting" a "one-size-fits-all" solution?
Completion of our [Jevons paradox] response was delayed by travel, but we expect to finish it shortly,
I'll be looking forward to it. It's going to be pretty hard to contradict a well-established phenomena, but we'll see.
Permalink
President Lindsay Posted 5:19 am
24 Jun 2008
I can see only two possible explanation for this. Either Lovins is ignorant of these systems and their great advantages (in which case he has no business pretending to be an expert on anything nuclear) or else he is being unconscionably deceitful by omitting evidence that would completely undermine his argument. Or I suppose it could be a little of each, both intellectual dishonesty AND ignorance. Altogether, it makes the rest of his points pretty moot, since any comparison he makes with any other types of energy systems aren't worth the electrons wasted downloading his blather.
Permalink
David Roberts Posted 5:28 am
24 Jun 2008
grist.org
Permalink
President Lindsay Posted 2:54 pm
24 Jun 2008
Of course if you have a better way to get rid of spent fuel and use it to generate prodigious amounts of clean energy, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.
Permalink
advancednano Posted 2:36 am
25 Jun 2008
Since 1980, nuclear power TWH has increased by over 400%.
<img src="http://www.world-nuclear.org/images/info/neprod.gif">
The charts that Lovins uses are only looking at 2000 forward or look at "new additions" when the bulk of nuclear power generation increases was from operating improvement and uprates to existing reactors.
The "micropower" is mostly natural gas of small and big sizes. Natural gas has 4 deaths per TWH (Externe source). So 2500 Twh (to displace nuclear power) would be 10,000 deaths per year.
Natural gas is not renewable. So is Lovins advocating an increase of more than double the US military deaths of the 5+ years of the Iraq war every year from more natural gas air pollution and other causes ?
All energy build costs went up with the increase in commodity prices (steel, concrete, oil)
There are wind turbine shortages and backorders for several years for the large efficient turbines.
Nuclear operating costs are on track for improvement.
Laser uranium enrichment 3-10 times cheaper and more efficient
Existing nuclear power plants are getting 20 year extensions and power uprates.
MIT/Westinghouse commercializing new 50% power uprates for annular fuel.
Permalink
advancednano Posted 2:38 am
25 Jun 2008
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 2:53 am
25 Jun 2008
Let them build three different designs. At the very least maybe they can treat the waste they already created?
Get the nuclear lobby out of the way of this renewable/conservation energy revolution. Let the nuclear priesthood cloister in their remote monasteries, in yucca mountain like environs maybe.
Will they emerge with a fine wine, or (radioactive) vinegar to show for the billions of tax dollars spent on research. We'll see.
I think they are incompetent and delusional and are used to having every huge error they make overlooked. but that's just my opinion. Let them take a decade to prove it, hehehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
President Lindsay Posted 6:36 am
25 Jun 2008
Your analogy of high priests is probably apt, though. Like deep spiritual mysteries, the vast majority of people know not a whit about nuclear fission, and must get their information from those who do (or claim to), and from that they form their opinions, often fanatical ones. So you've got the real nuclear physicists and engineers who could be compared to the mystics, few in number but steeped in the most intimate knowledge of the mysteries. Then you've got the regular clergy, in this case personified by the private utility companies who understand it all pretty well but whose main interest is in keeping the hierarchy stable and making some bucks while they do it. Then you've got the tent show revivalists, TV evangelists, and street corner nutjobs who rant and rave about something they know little or nothing about but who know they can make a buck off the fear and ignorance of the public.
You're free to listen to whoever you like. But I say we should get all the people who are trying to make a buck off it--private utilities and scaremongers alike--out of the picture. Let's take the best of the mystics' knowledge and harness it for the good of humankind. Energy should be a human right just like health care, and neither should have to be profit centers.
Permalink
David Roberts Posted 6:40 am
25 Jun 2008
Spoken like a man whose favored technology private investors won't touch with a ten foot pole!
grist.org
Permalink
GRLCowan Posted 8:06 am
25 Jun 2008
He likes public enterprise. That might be fine, but not when the public's hired help is the biggest oil and gas rentier, and behaves, in re nuclear energy, exactly as would an oil/gas company with law-making powers would.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html
Permalink
advancednano Posted 11:29 am
25 Jun 2008
The "micropower" is mostly diesel, biomass and natural gas of small and big sizes. The diesel (oil) portion is 35 deaths per TWH. The biomass about 10 deaths per TWH (35,000 deaths per year if diesel was the main source). Natural gas has 4 deaths per TWH (Externe source). So 2500 Twh (to displace nuclear power) would be 10,000 deaths per year.
The blended rate of deaths per TWH from micropower is over 12 deaths per TWH. Far higher than the 0.65 deaths per TWH calculated by Externe for nuclear power. Even if the micropower deaths per TWH was cut in half for lower distribution losses the number is still far higher. Diesel and natural gas are not renewable. Over 75% of the power that Lovins is talking about is diesel, natural gas and biomass.
Permalink
President Lindsay Posted 10:27 am
26 Jun 2008
Precisely. Did you know that 26% of the electricity people consume in the USA is provided by nonprofit organizations? Who's to say we couldn't make it 100%? Getting the private investors out of it is exactly my point. That 26% get their electricity more reliably and at a discount of about 18%.
Permalink
anyone Posted 8:43 am
28 Jul 2008
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1554 ...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8916 ...
After 60 years of massive public funding, it's time for nuclear to learn to walk on its own feet.
Permalink