OK, if you're just joining us in this apparently interminable series, here's where we've been:
- Jeremy said the power players in China and India (C&I) "care about money, not climate." But if that's true, they're not going to go for clean coal either -- it's more expensive. Happily, I think it's not going to be true for long. Developing countries are going to work to reduce their emissions; they have to.
- There are indeed compelling reasons to think that C&I will opt for clean coal over R&E. Immense social and economic power has gathered around coal; it would take extraordinary efforts to dislodge it.
- Nonetheless, C&I are going to have to make the shift to R&E sooner or later; coal won't last forever. There are reasons to think it will run out sooner than most people know, and there are reasons to think social, economic, and environmental factors will conspire to kill it well before it runs out. So the question for C&I is really when to make the shift away from coal, not whether.
Believe it or not, all that was just prelude to this post, which will try to offer some arguments for the position that C&I should make the shift now rather than later. And while I won't try to predict the future -- what's going on in China alone is beyond my (or I suspect anyone's) feeble powers of prognostication -- I do think there's a good chance that C&I will see it the same way within a few years. Moreover, I think there's a great chance they'll see it the same way if the U.S. uses its power and influence to a) strongly discourage continued coal use, and b) offer financial assistance to ease the transition to R&E. That's what this dispute is ultimately about.
Here are some reasons I think clean coal is a poor route for C&I:
It may not work at all. What clean coal technology needs to demonstrate is not merely that CO2 can be separated and sequestered. That's already happening in certain niche applications. It needs to demonstrate that:
- a massive, nationwide infrastructure for separating, capturing, transporting, and burying billions of metric tons of CO2 a year can be designed and built
- with real-world security features and protocols that ensure it will remain safe from accident or sabotage indefinitely
- with effective systems for preventing cheating in the far-flung, loosely controlled provinces
- in time to save us from the worst of climate change
- at a cost that is not flatly prohibitive relative to its clean-electricity competitors.
Color me skeptical. And color me doubly skeptical of the confident projections and predictions that float around CCS these days. (Recall, if you will, the projections and predictions of yore, around the cost and scalability of nuclear power.) It's like a guy who just figured out how to tune his flute telling you he should be ready to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in about, oh, nine, ten years. Well ... maybe. But would you bet your planet on it?
In short, clean coal is an unproven theory.
It is intrinsically more expensive that the status quo. No matter how cheap scrubbers get, no matter how efficient IGCC plants get, no matter how scaled up and commoditized CCS gets, clean coal is always more expensive than dirty coal. Why? Because coal contains a shitload of carbon. Burning it sets CO2 free. Anything that captures and sequesters the CO2 is an add-on: additional capital cost up front and less efficient operation for the life of the plant.
I expect that the costs of fuel transportation and water will rise in coming years too, raising the price of coal altogether, but the point is, whatever the cost of coal power, the cost of clean coal power is substantially more and will always be so.
In contrast, the cost of renewable power has been steadily falling. That's with a renewables as a negligible fraction of the world's electricity generation; who knows what economies of scale will come when it hits 5%, 10%, 50%. Even without technology breakthroughs -- and they're coming, in solar, storage, grid tech, green building, etc. -- the cost of R&E will steadily fall, reaching parity with and eventually undercutting coal. It may not happen in 10 years, but if not that, 20.
In short, betting on clean coal means betting on permanently higher costs; betting on R&E means betting on temporarily higher costs.
The economic growth numbers coal produces are deceptive. Comparisons between the price of clean coal and the price of R&E rarely take into account the fact that coal is grossly overvalued.
Even if clean coal can eliminate CO2 emissions entirely, coal still means intensive water use in an era of freshwater shortages; rising particulate pollution that could cost China alone up to $39 billion a year by 2020 in healthcare costs; pollution of already devastated rivers; growing social and political unrest.
In 2005, the China Sustainable Energy Program (CSEP) of the Energy Foundation did a comprehensive study of coal's social and ecological costs. In results CSEP emphasized were not comprehensive and probably underestimated, it found that coal's true cost was 56% higher than its market value.
Yes, coal generates enormous gains for GDP, but they are deceptive, since a substantial portion of the wealth created is plowed back into healthcare costs, environmental remediation, and social control.
The true comparison is between clean coal, accurately valued, and R&E -- and in that comparison R&E wins already.
Best cast scenario, it won't be ready for ten years. That's when the (I'd be willing to bet optimistic) projections say CCS will be commercialized and ready to implement. That's ten more years of skyrocketing emissions. Climate scientist James Hansen is well-known for saying we only have about 10 years to reverse emissions growth before the climate enters irreversible changes. Even if you don't buy that, how long are you willing to wager we do have? 20 years? 50? Feel like gambling the world on it?
Meanwhile, solar thermal and geothermal are up and running, available around the clock for baseload power, carbon free, and cost competitive with coal. Recycled power is woefully untapped and could probably displace as many coal plants as scrubbers could clean up. Wind is closing in quick. Solar PV is dropping. Not to mention the suite of negative-cost efficiency measures that have already been well-tested.
Clean coal is an optimistic projection of possible future technology. R&E is now.
It ratifies the centralized hub-and-spoke model of electricity. Not everyone will find this argument convincing, but I do. Truly sustainable development -- of communities resilient enough to weather the coming, um, weather -- means distributed, appropriately scaled electricity generation: Lovins' "soft path." For the U.S., and increasingly for urban China and India, the infrastructure-heavy, politically and economically centralized hard path is already fait accompli. But rural China and India, not to mentioned less-developed nations, could leapfrog that model and skip directly to the soft path. We should be doing everything we can to encourage them. The sooner C&I can show the way the better.
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Does this mean I am stamping my feet and demanding that coal disappear? That I want to shut down all C&I's coal plants tomorrow? No. Obviously there's going to be some mixed approach. The question facing us here in the U.S. is how we can influence the path C&I take. More on that in the next post, which, God willing, will be the last in this series.
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
Comments
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apsmith Posted 5:07 am
03 Dec 2007
The theoretical trouble with CDM is that it motivates developing nations to over-state and over-plan their future expectations of CO2 emissions so they can earn higher credit levels from developed nations for not emitting so much, when in reality they wouldn't have anyway. The practical effect has been to limit trust (most spectacularly in the US) that everybody's getting a fair shake on this, and in particular to severely limit the investment levels in renewables in developing countries that were originally hoped for.
So is there a fundamentally better and fairer way, or do we just need to tweak CDM to fix it? I think there's a need to look at the whole issue holistically, but I can't say I see a good solution obvious to me now.
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rgmerk Posted 9:20 am
03 Dec 2007
Your argument (stripped of stuff about energy efficiency, which is an important contribution to reducing emissions but essentially irrelevant to the question of where the energy comes from in the first place) seems to go something like this:
Clean coal is fundamentally more expensive than dirty coal (if air pollution is uncosted).
Renewable power will come down in cost.
Therefore,
3) Renewables will be cheaper than clean coal.
I accept that premises 1 and 2 are completely correct. But the implications you draw are not supported by your premises.
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David Roberts Posted 9:44 am
03 Dec 2007
Also, it is more efficient to build a wind turbine and harvest power in perpetuity for nothing but maintenance costs than to build coal plants that forever require tearing up new land, transporting huge amounts of coal long distances, and creating massive healthcare costs. Basically, coal, natural gas, even nuclear all have thorny, ineradicable fuel issues -- finding it, transporting it, being dependent on it (security), etc. Wind, solar, and geothermal don't. That makes them, again IMO, part of the efficiency picture.
There's obviously plenty we and C&I can do on efficiency within the bounds of the current power portfolio, but it's not crazy to say that distributed renewables are an extension of efficiency efforts in a way coal plants aren't.
As for the alleged fallacy: yes, it doesn't logically follow. There are some background assumptions. But the only way it could turn out to be false is if renewables hit some sort of price floor, above the price of coal, that condemns them to being forever more expensive. That seems fantastical to me. Do you think it's a serious possibility? I don't. So the only question (for me) is when they get cheaper, not if. If you think it won't happen until, say, 100 years hence, then yeah, you've got a good argument for going with clean coal. But everything I know indicates that properly priced they already are close to parity, and technological developments and economies of scale will continue driving costs down as fast as they have been over the last few decades.
Anyway, I take it you disagree. I'd love to hear why.
grist.org
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rgmerk Posted 12:23 pm
03 Dec 2007
But this is mutually contradictory to the usual arguments people make when the intermittancy of wind and solar is pointed out "oh, we'll distribute the generation over a wide area, after all, the wind is always blowing somewhere". Well, guess what, you can do that, but you'll have to pay the cost, both in terms of the capital costs of building a highly distributed power grid, and the efficiency costs of taking power from one end of it to the other.
Not that I think these are showstoppers, by the way; high-voltage DC connections are very efficient ways to send lots of power a long distance. But that applies whether it's power from a disparate bunch of solar cells, or a 1600 MW nuclear plant.
As for the alleged fallacy: yes, it doesn't logically follow. There are some background assumptions. But the only way it could turn out to be false is if renewables hit some sort of price floor, above the price of coal, that condemns them to being forever more expensive. That seems fantastical to me. Do you think it's a serious possibility?
Renewables aren't chasing a static target. There's still plenty of room to make coal-fired power (both dirty and clean), more efficient and thus cheaper. The thermal efficiency of steam and gas turbines keeps going up, for instance.
Furthermore, as renewable technology matures, the big cost-efficiency leaps will start to drop off. I'm no expert, but I don't see that there are big gains left in wind turbine design, for instance. Furthermore, the kinds of things that will help renewables will also help the competition. For instance, far as solar thermal goes, the steam turbines are pretty much the same as those for other thermal power plants.
Finally, as far as security goes, at least in the USA one thing you have no shortage of is coal, and much of the world's uranium comes from those known rogue states Canada and Australia. If there are energy security concerns (in the narrow supply sense), they revolve around oil and natural gas, not coal.
By the way, I'm not ruling out the distributed renewable energy future - it might indeed pan out. But I'm not betting against the possibility that the only thing that will change is the direction of the exhaust pipe on the local coal-fired power station. And if that's the cheapest solution well and good; we can use the spare cash on fixing the damage that's already locked in from the carbon we've already released in the atmosphere.
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GreenEngineer Posted 6:08 am
04 Dec 2007
Part of efficiency will, IMO, be siting sources close to loads to reduce transmission loss. That means small- and mid-size distributed power -- not ginormous, distant coal plants.
But this is mutually contradictory to the usual arguments people make when the intermittancy of wind and solar is pointed out "oh, we'll distribute the generation over a wide area, after all, the wind is always blowing somewhere". Well, guess what, you can do that, but you'll have to pay the cost,
This is a very valid point, from a high-altitude, long-term perspective. As has been noted, an all-renewable power infrastructure is a question of when, not if (barring the collapse of technological civilization), and such a system would certainly have to bear a high cost in terms of storage and/or long distance power transmission for baseload support.
However, in terms of formulating short-to-medium term policy and making resource allocation decisions, it's not really an issue. There's still quite a bit of room in most places for distributed renewable generation to offset centrally-generated fossil-fuel energy.
If the question is, as I think it is currently: spend money now on renewables, or spend it on "clean" coal, then increasing renewable generation capacity is the low-hanging fruit and a better investment. It's the difference between an infrastructure that is 50-60% centralized, and one that is 99% centralized (which is what we have right now).
It's true that we also need to be looking towards the long-term issue of replacing our current baseload capacity with something cleaner, and for that, research into clean coal is probably a good idea. But there's a big difference between trying to develop efficient IGCC+sequestration for a future application, and starting to site plants for immediate construction that will "someday" have sequestration capacity. That, I think, is David's point.
As an aside, I'd like to point out that reliable baseload capacity does not necessarily require big centralized generators. Molten carbonate fuel cells can generate electricity from natural gas most efficiently than even an IGCC plant. But they are silent and small, so they can be located close to the load where their waste heat can also be captured (giving 80%+ total fuel use efficiency). They're ideally suited for baseload, since they don't ramp well. They can also be renewable, running on biogas. Or they could run on coal gas, which isn't ideal but may be necessary. Either way, though, they would represent a better investment than centralized next-gen coal. But they also represent a break with traditional utility solutions, which is a big part of the barrier.
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GreenEngineer Posted 6:10 am
04 Dec 2007
Improvements of this sort will improve the fuel cost per kWh, but will almost certainly increase the capital cost substantially. And that's the key issue: high capital cost is the Achilles heel of IGCC coal, and is also a major barrier to deployment of renewables.
After all, it's really hard to compete with the fuel cost for solar panels.
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bookerly Posted 3:01 pm
05 Dec 2007
Interestingly, I think that both China and India will be doing all of the above. They both face the same problem, how to greatly grow their economy (to lift people out of poverty), thus needing more and more power, while at the same time dealing with the problems of global warming.
They will both be doing a lot of everything. (And don't forget other rising economies, Brazil, South Africa, and other nations).
The vast sums for research to make technologies as cheap and environmentally friendly as possible must come from the developed countries. (Japan, for one, is spending money to help China (and perhaps others) with energy efficiency).
The EU member nations are doing varying amounts.
BUT there aren't even any proposals in the US to do ANYTHING!!!
The US is too busy trying to portray China as the enemy on global warming, while ignoring the rest of the developing world. Bad form, folks.
As long as poor nations are used as scapegoats for US problems (outsourcing, immigration, trade), the US government won't be able to try to help them grow sustainably. You can't help people you are busy demonizing.
patrick in Beijing
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amazingdrx Posted 3:49 pm
05 Dec 2007
I believe Jeremy is comparing renewable energy costs here in the US to the raw cost of coal power in China and India. Comparing chinese manufactured and installed wind to chinese coal power plants would put wind in a better light.
Furthermore, the aim of China right now is to vend it's less expensive wind machines world wide. That mass production cost efficiency will drive China to use wind for it's own grid. The same economics will apply with solar.
Oh yeah, one more thing, the centralized grid model would take a huge upgrade to deal with storms and rising demand. The distributed renewable grid (with conservation)won't need new transmission capacity and it will be much more immune to storms. Dodging trillions in grid upgrade costs and trillions in lost business due to months long wide spread power outages from ever increasingly severe GHG climate change related storms.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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