Every now and then, one hears complaints about solar energy: "But it takes too much land!" "An entire Idaho!" "Three Californias!"
Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity. Even acre for acre, I'll take Solar One's pleasant campus over a coal mine.
Math below the fold.
The 400-acre Nevada Solar One produces around 134,000,000 kWh per year. About three quarters of this is mirrors and heat engines, the rest support services and access.
This pencils out to 7.69 kWh per square foot per year, or slightly less than 154 kWh over the course of 20 years.
According to the EIA, one ton of coal produces about 2,000 kWh of electricity. Per acre yields for coal vary a lot, but in Appalachia it appears that mountaintop removal produces about 10,000 tons of coal per acre. So a coal plant produces around 11.5 kWh of electricity per square foot consumed in a single year. And then you need to consume a second square foot the next year. So producing the 154 kWh per square foot that Solar One produces over the course of 20 years would require mining 13.4 square feet.
Ignoring everything after the decimal point (this kind of calculation is not that precise, in any case), for coal to produce the same electricity Nevada Solar One will provide over the course of 20 years would require 13 times that 400 acres, or 5,300 acres.
Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?
Comments
View as Flat
nattaylor Posted 6:33 pm
25 May 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 11:16 pm
25 May 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Pompey Road Posted 11:29 pm
25 May 2008
How so much uproar could be caused by an oil spill like the exxon valdez and this catastrophe made common place is beyond me. We had a sludge pond break and run all the way into the Ohio River that was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez and it hardly gets a line of print.
This is criminal what they are doing down here and the people doing it should be held accountable. To me it is not just a matter of stopping the practice of MTR but also making sure no one every resarts this practice again when an administration changes in Washington.
Most of the regulations that were loosened to allow this practice were at the administrative level. George Bush is the main culprit when considering who allowed this practice. In the 1977 law the coal companies had to put the land back on the original contour. Stripping of any kind is abhorrent to me but at least you just lost the mountainnn now you lose the mountain a valley and a fresh water stream.
It boggles the mind when considering what we have already lost down here in appalachia. To know that this practice is going to continue on is devestating. They outlawed hydraulic mining over a hundred years ago and it just partially destroyed a mountain, how in gods name can in the year 2008 a practice like MTR still be allowed to continue.
We are fast becoming the U.S. version of Chernobyl. Maybe Sixty Minutes will give us as much attention one of these days as they did 3 Mile Island. The nation as a whole has written off the state of Kentucky and W.Va. Nobody really gives a damn about what happens to dogpatch if that is what you have to destroy to keep your lights on.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Cyranix Posted 12:07 am
26 May 2008
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racc Posted 12:48 am
26 May 2008
It is really important to consider this up front or we'll end up just jumping from one ethanol type mess to another.
This is why conservation is so important.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 1:32 am
26 May 2008
Point is, unlike coal-strip mines, which often take down forests and understory as well, solar plants (due to their sunny nature), usually aren't built in areas with large vegetative cover to begin with, so their impact is less destructive.
Could a tortise live at a solar farm? Quite possible. At a strip mine? Probably not.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 1:36 am
26 May 2008
True, but also remember that many of the base components for solar farms can be recycled and reused for other purposes (includin' newer solar farms), whereas the best you'll get from coal would be flyash for concrete (not really recycling).
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:57 am
26 May 2008
Also to nattataylor who said "I understand from the next paragraph that 7.69 kWh per year is meant to read 7.69 kWh per square foot?" Yes. good catch. corrected.
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nedruod Posted 1:57 am
26 May 2008
Some might estimate that as low as 10 years, I'd probably say 20, if the right practices are followed. From what I read they aren't, and when they aren't it might be more like a hundred years for recovery, maybe more.
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:57 am
26 May 2008
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:05 am
26 May 2008
I Love Mountains: Anti-coal coalition
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Jonas Posted 3:07 am
26 May 2008
Molten sands are certainly interesting for energy storage but haven't been proven on a commercial scale.
So unless a viable energy storage technology becomes available, such large solar plants remain dependent on fossil fuels for their baseloads and peakloads (or biomass).
That's why its often difficult to compare these technologies from a practical point of view.
One should look at how big a solar plant's minimal baseload/peakload requirement is (that is, its minimal reliance on coal, gas or biomass), add this to the equation, and then compare with pure coal, which does always deliver base and peakloads.
Leaving this crucial context out of the equation, it does seem like solar-thermal plants like the one mentioned are quite efficient when it comes to the amount of space they take up. But is this really even an argument?
It seems to me that stored energy sources (coal, oil, gas, biomass) have many other advantages that make them so attractive: they can be physically moved and traded. Solar power cannot. Can't ship concentrated solar power from one continent to another. You're stuck in a rather inflexible local context. But then that's probably the context many of us want to move to: one of more locally rooted energy self-reliance, instead of energy interdependence.
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sunflower Posted 3:11 am
26 May 2008
Coal removal is a one time event per location. Solar locations can be retrofitted indefinitely if we survive.
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racc Posted 3:19 am
26 May 2008
As well, the impact per farm will likely increase with each new plant as resources become more and more scarce.
Now resources are required to build the coal plant and mine the coal. Maybe this requires more resources than building and operating a solar farm, but right now, we don't know or at least I don't.
The era of cheap resources is over. Everyone seems to forget that.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:35 am
26 May 2008
There are several, dependin' on the type of solar technology. One I know of uses thermal exchange from water/steam to create energy (with turbines, of course), and even at night or when the solar panels aren't in operation, the temeprature differential is still great enough that energy is produced in mass quantities.
I don't know if it qualifies as technically bein' "energy storage", so much as it is leftover potential energy which can run until new energy is produced, but the point is that it works.
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:10 am
26 May 2008
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bigTom Posted 9:59 am
26 May 2008
The other approach would be to use the solar, either in the form of heat electricity or light to manufacture fuel, for use during periods of low solar availability. The simplest "storage" is simply to use the solar input to displace natural gas consumption on the same grid.
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green8659 Posted 11:40 am
26 May 2008
Green | Almighty Cleanse | Web Design Indiana
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:18 pm
26 May 2008
Look, you've proven your case that yes, at today's high energy costs, solar is viable and even profitable.
The only thing solar needs are a bunch of evil oligopolists to buy it all up and then force us to use it...
Oil Is So Hot!
http://oilismastery.blogspot.com
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Skeptico Posted 3:03 pm
26 May 2008
15MW is about the power generated by a freight train with multiple locomotives. So this plant is going to offset the equivalent energy of one big train. For over a quarter of a billion dollars? It's hard to see how this could make sense.
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:14 pm
26 May 2008
If you look at costs over 20 years and include interest and O&M that is a cost somewhere between 10 and 12 cents per kWh - not an unreasonable cost for peaking power.
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CFL CTA Matt Posted 10:49 pm
26 May 2008
The Field Museum 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60605-2496
Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum
2430 N. Cannon Drive, Chicago, IL 60614
And by buying solar lights & calculators and paying carbon credits for renewable energy, we can help even if we dont have panels on our roof!
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Pompey Road Posted 12:00 am
27 May 2008
A reclaimed strip is much uglier to me and you have to know when you aggregate stone and mineral ladden rock you will multiply the leaching effect.
The water runoff from these MTR's is ladden with heavy metals, some toxic. They will lay around and leach out heavy metal water for years. Even selium that is a good mineral in the soil has been shown to create birth defects in children when the mother takes in heavy concentrations in liquids.
To be fair, if a land owner or farmer wants a dry valley to be leveled for a specific use, ranching or farming if the topsoil is set aside I really have no problem with it. The random strip mining of wilderness area's and just walking off and leaving it, now that's another thing altogether.
They proclaim the need for flat land in appalachia for housing developments or industrial parks. They never have a developer or industrialist onboard, just create the flat land without regard for future development. We have had enough flat land created for us to meet the industrial requirements of China and enough created to put all the sub-prime mortgage default properties on.
The price of oil has caused the price of coal to rise to the level of making it profitable to mine it underground again. Even though I dislike all mining and coal use until it can be proven you can burn it clean, I would prefer underground mining 10 to 1 over MTR.
You seal a mine, remove a few buildings and clean up the stock pile area and you can reclaim around an underground mine after the coal has been depleated. There is no proper reclaimation with MTR. The mountain may subside or shorten the thickness of the coal seam when the mountains sits down when the coal is extracted but you will still have the mountain.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Sean Casten Posted 12:20 am
27 May 2008
I'm not for a second suggesting we shouldn't push solar or that we shouldn't try to shut down coal - simply that the suggestion that the success of one comes at the expense of the other isn't really accurate, and so land-use comparisons between them aren't that material.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:33 am
27 May 2008
Backup power can come from biogas employed in solid oxide fuel cell/turbine power plants distributed around the grid. The ultimate backup source can be natural gas, decades of extra supply exist in the form of coal, oil sands, and oil shale that emits natural gas. That natural gas conversion can be increased with human help.
And solar is not as intermittent as it appears. Thermal solar furnace powered factories that refine silicon or recycle glass or metal, for instance, can cogenerate power all night long from the heat of the products.
Wind distributed widely around the continent, connected to a High voltage DC (HVDC) grid provides a stable baseload power source.
A smart grid can store energy for high load uses in building mass, emergency power levels for communication and lights can be augmented with batteries for short term storage, 12 hours emergency power to get through brownout, black out and storm incidents.
Natural gas/biogas backup generation distributed in local areas on farms, landfills, and sewage processing plants would be enough to power the grid for longer emergencies.
The main cause of power emergenicies is not peak load, it is storms. Storms growing ever worse seemingly related to GHG cklimate change. More solar energy trapped in the atmospheric system, more and more severe storms.
I think a different view of the grid as a self survivable system that manages demand as well as supply with renewable distributed generation and storage is necessary. The old monolithic central generation grid is obsolete. It is killing itself with GHG climate disaster.
The more central power, the more GHG, the worse the storms, drought, and heat events that break it's back. No way it can get more reliable. It will only get worse.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Skeptico Posted 1:01 am
27 May 2008
$260,000,000 / 134 Million KWhr/year /20 years = 10c per kWHr. But that is before any maintenance and before interest. The entire $250 million is paid up front. At only 5% that increases costs by a factor of 2.65, and that's before maintenance.
Come on - $260,000,000 for 15MW (not 60MW as you wrote). That can't possibly make sense.
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Sean Casten Posted 1:05 am
27 May 2008
The main cause of power emergenicies is not peak load, it is storms.
This isn't quite true. Power emergencies occur when demand exceeds supply at the point of power consumption. Storms are but one way that this type of emergency can happen. Peak load is another way. Neither is universal. You can see this most dramatically in New England, where there are actually two times a year when the system has blackout potential: really hot summer days and really cold winter days. The former is a function of transmission constraints, when it is not possible to shunt more energy to users because the system is at full capacity. The latter is a function of the gas-dominance of the New England power grid, and the fact that - when the natural gas system is tapped out - natural gas, by law, preferentially serves heating loads, and so there is a potential for generation to be fuel-starved.
Your comment about storms relates more to the summer New England peak, but note that the issue here is really one of wires capacity, not storms per se. If a hurricane knocks out a transmission section, it doesn't blackout the grid unless the grid cannot be served by another, unaffected transmission section. A big part of the reason that we have seen increasing number and severity of blackouts in recent decades is because transmission investment slowed dramatically starting in the 1970s. With more wires capacity per MW of demand, there was a greater statistical probability that weather events could be routed around. As those margins have tightened, we have a greater chance of weather-induced blackouts. (Or, indeed, other variables. The 2003 Northeast blackout was blamed in part on a lack of tree-trimming in Ohio, which caused sagging transmission cables to short-out... but was only a problem because they could not be routed around.)
To your other points, you are right that decentralized power (e.g., generation sited close to the load) alleviates these issues, by reducing the need for transmission per MW of load. But it does not eliminate the basic truth that if demand exceeds supply, it will be dark.
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Sean Casten Posted 1:16 am
27 May 2008
This math seems off, but Skeptico's appears closer to reality. If I want to build a $260 million power plant, I have to get that money from someone who wants to earn a return on that investment, with the return a function of the investment risk profile.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that one can get cheap money with a 20-year term. Say 10% returns. (e.g., well below what private equity demands, but above what you could get on low-interest bonds, reflecting a risk profile and a sufficient premium to attract capital away from other investments.) Personally, I rather doubt you could get financing this cheap, but even these numbers are illustrative.
Paying off that money requires a $30.5 million/year annuity. On 134 million kWh, that equates to 23 cents/kWh, and is before including any maintenance or operating costs, or returns above capital recovery. Drop the rate to 5% (e.g., absurdly low) and you're still looking at 16 cents/kWh. Increase the rate to 15% (e.g., the low end of the private equity spectrum) and you'll need 31 cents.
How do you get 10 - 12 cents from these numbers?
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:21 am
27 May 2008
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:37 am
27 May 2008
http://www.nevadasolarone.net/the-plant/how-it+-works
Yes lower capacity, but as a peaking plant it does provide that (actually it has peak of 70MW but 64 MW is something is it is able to deliver in a sustained way for the whole peak period.)
"and so land-use comparisons between them aren't that material.
Secondly, people who oppose solar and wind make the land use argument all the time. It is a common talking point, and thus worth refuting. I'll drop the comparison if anti-renewable people will. Also, I think you will find that coal is not the conventional technology more land intensive than solar or wind. Hydroelectric is too.
And I've seen fields where oil and gas are drilled. I'd be curious to know how many barrels of oil a one acre field produces over its lifetime. Like coal I suspect it varies a lot from field to field. Still I would be suprised if land requirements for oil and gas were non-trivial (or water pollution for offshore production).
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Sean Casten Posted 1:59 am
27 May 2008
But on the flip side, I think there are legitimate issues with respect to the land-intensivity of solar relative to other clean techs. Someone who really wants to install a renewable power supply may be biased against solar if they don't have the real-estate available to meet their power needs. (And note that this is also true of coal, even without getting into MTR, by virtue of all the fuel storage and handling needed for any solid-fueled power plant. Biomass has the same challenge. But coal and biomass that operate closer to baseload are typically not really in competition with solar, as they participate in such different markets.)
I'd be interested to see a comparison between those technologies that really do compete with solar on a land-use basis.
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sunflower Posted 2:02 am
27 May 2008
The easy stuff will be solar displacing those valuable fuels used for low grade heat, like industrial process heat, or commercial heating and cooling. Some hundreds of billion dollars later solar would find less profitable high-temperature applications, like making electricity, glass, concrete, and so on. Billions later, high temperature storage will further expand solar markets.
Why do the most expensive stuff first?
The value of solar is the cost of fuel displaced. At scale, solar thermal should cost something like $100/m2 (2007$) and deliver the energy of 1 bbl of oil per year in Colorado climates (half that in Seattle or Boston). Against the current price of gas that is a simple payback of 2 years.
The predicted return on investment depends on what you think the price of gas and oil will be over the lifetime of the installation, something like 30 years.
Do not be discouraged by pretty solar pictures with ugly numbers. We can do much better.
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:44 am
27 May 2008
I wrote an entire book you may remember in which:
Efficiency comes first and is dealt with in detail
Energy sources come second are dealt with in summary form.
Passive solar is given space in the efficiency section that probably exceeds the whole electricity section.
But we will need electricity. And as biofuels look less and less viable probably a fair amount of electricity. So we should institute efficiency and solar and wind electricty simultaneously. It looks like we need to drop our use 70%-90% in the next 20 years - front load the reductions. That has to include some source substitution as well as reduction in use.
And it is a lot cheaper to store heat than electricity. Even NS1 has thirty minutes of thermal storage to increase reliablity.
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:51 am
27 May 2008
Do we really have time to try and devise technologies that would mitigate climate change and make investors happy? Shouldn't we just build it, particularly if investor participation makes it more expensive?
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Sean Casten Posted 3:03 am
27 May 2008
I think it's a dangerous line of questioning to assume that government money is free while only the private sector demands returns. The relevant question has to be how to get the maximum CO2 reduction per dollar. Everyone from governments to the homeless has a finite number of dollars, and so any deployment of those resources towards high cost CO2 reductions is implicitly limiting total reduction.
Ultimately, who provides that $ and the relevant interest rate are questions of policy. But you ought not assume that any investor will tolerate interest rates <0%.
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:22 am
27 May 2008
Let's look at the military budget as a capital fund. Then were should that trillion dollars per year be best invested for our national security? I would say that most of it, going into things like chp and csp, would have a much higher return, for society as a whole, than more B1 bombers.
But there are other capital funds that are slopping around our society as well...the huge health care administrative costs, the taxes not collected from the superwealthy and corporations, the subsidies...
So the bottom line is, the government does have the capacity to create a certain amount of capital, if it so chooses -- and I'm arguing that this is a good place to so choose.
Another good use of government money would be to mandate that all coal plants use CHP technology to get up to a certain level of efficiency, say 80%, from the now pathetic 30-odd percent, and provide loans to buy the equipment, etc.
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Sean Casten Posted 3:36 am
27 May 2008
Could we argue that some portion of the military budget could be more appropriately spent elsewhere? Absolutely - but to my way of thinking, that doesn't argue that we repeat the same mistakes with respect to delusional capital allocation. Government is always prone to fiscal boondoggles. Or, as de Tocqueville said, democracy fails once the citizens realize that they have the power of the purse. The only way I know to minimize those boondoggles is to force policy to be technologically agnostic and clearly articulate goals. Stipulating that Technology X should get cheap government money is antithetical to that goal-based approach.
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sunflower Posted 3:37 am
27 May 2008
I live a most efficient lifestyle, in a passive solar home near Seattle. I was drifting off topic with economics, (and avoiding work).
By solar thermal I meant solar concentrating technologies, like those troughs pictured here. My numbers actually apply to heliostats and dishes.
High-temperature thermal storage was developed to solve the problems of thermal cycling and steam slugs from intermittent clouds interfering with turbines.
Base-load solar power is right-wing BS and totally irrelevant to the profitability of solar investors.
Politics and business do not mix well.
My approach to this problem embraces the concept that technology is more powerful than politics. My model is to teach thousands to build a million solar mirrors, followed millions to build a billion. Viral growth of open source technology for rapid global scale up.
BTW, one acre of spaced solar mirrors is worth about 900 barrels of oil per year in Colorado.
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GRLCowan Posted 4:08 am
27 May 2008
You might like the idea that government should be made to guarantee the debt of private solar power plant developers. If, having been made to agree to this, they find ways of derailing the project, the natgas revenue they thus gain is offset by the money they lose paying the developers' debts.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:39 am
27 May 2008
Now, we have a similar situation. Investors don't know much about that there solar and wind -- in fact, they are so "stuck", at least in the world of electricity, that anything that isn't about 50 years old seems to be too "new" for them.
So, the government needs to step in and give the system a kick -- by building lots of different kinds of renewable systems, including CSP, PV, CHP, Wind of various sorts, CCAs, financing PV, etc. etc.
It doesn't even have to "pick" a particular technology -- as long as the fuel is free - wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, you get the idea -- or the efficiencies are real, then go for it, we will provide you financing, because that huge, inefficient thing called the financial sector, which just probably blew trillions of dollars, can't get it's act together to build what we need to avoid catastrophe.
As to whether, as you say, "Government is always prone to fiscal boondoggles", everybody is. Another thing that DeTocqueville and Jefferson talked about -- you need an informed and participatory citizenry in order to create a more perfect republic, because, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, you get the republic you deserve.
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Sean Casten Posted 6:32 am
27 May 2008
The question that I think you're asking is why we don't see more clean tech getting built in that environment. In some cases, it's clearly an R&D issue. But in many, it's because of massive regulatory distortions that throw money at the worst technologies. To my mind, this argues not for throwing counter-balancing subsidies at clean stuff, but rather for fixing the underlying regulatory flaws so that the flood of global liquidity chases better projects. That's a heck of a lot cheaper, and while it may be politically hard, I'm not sure it's any harder than the alternative. (Witness all the recent fight to try and fund renewable tax credits. If that fight didn't start from the perspective of diminishing federal coffers, it wouldn't be politically hard.) If you didn't provide liability waivers for nuke, no one would invest in nuke. If you don't provide rate-payer guarantees for coal, no one will build central-station coal. That $ will then go looking for technologies that don't have liability issues and don't have massive pollution control costs. I suspect you can probably think of a few! : )
But the key is that we don't need more inefficient fiscal simuli, unless we really are in a deep depression (we aren't). We do need to fix the regs, and the cleanest way to do that is to reframe them in terms of goals instead of sops to special interests. Don't get me wrong, I like being on the receiving end of government largesse. (Nice tax credit for CHP in the just-passed house bill, which I'm rooting for for entirely self-interested reasons, for example.) But from a policy perspective, we'd be far better off fixing the underlying legislative failures. No $ required: just a willingness to confront vested interests and (from the perspective of the legislator) admit a bit of culpability in creating/maintaining the current legislative status quo.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:42 am
27 May 2008
I'm still curious though, about what I was trying to get at (in a clumsy way) with my Keynes analogy -- the idea that investors -- as well as engineers and managers -- are so comfortable with sticking a big, inefficient coal plant somewhere, and not having to worry about anything else, that they are basically scared (and maybe a little lazy) about setting up things like CSP (or even CHP).
I find it comforting that just the threat of a price on carbon has led much of Wall Street to stop backing much of coal construction, so maybe we are doing OK stopping things, but I'm still concerned about starting renewable projects.
There's one more problem I wanted to bring up. Since the governments of Germany, Denmark, Spain, and Japan are pushing their wind and solar industries, their wind and solar equipment industries are getting a head start. So what may happen is that the equipment manufacturers may all come from outside the U.S., since the U.S. is not providing the same kind of support.
Perhaps things like extending and deepening the tax credits would do much of the trick? (including regulatory changes, of course).
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:48 am
27 May 2008
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Sean Casten Posted 9:12 am
27 May 2008
The aforementioned regulatory barriers to clean, cheap power.
Commercial immaturity of those in the clean, cheap power business.
This is a bit of a vicious circle, I will admit. Regulatory barriers keep entrepreneurs out which limits the ability of folks to learn how to build good, viable businesses, which limits the success stories out there to change the political environment and limits the credibility of us clean energy dudes when we go to the legislature which in turn slows the change in the regulation. But those remain the underlying two obstacles. Many technologies make plenty of economic sense today, but are not deployed because of a combination of those two barriers.
Adding incentives to increase the number of cost-effective projects may tip the scales slightly in favor, but doesn't fundamentally address those underlying issues. Regulation cannot create viable business plans. But it can get rid of regulatory barriers. That, therefore, ought to be the priority of any regulatory reform. Because with it, a clean energy subsidy is like giving a kid with a broken leg a carbon-fiber bike. Will it make them faster than they would be on a steel bike? Yes. But it's far from the optimal way to make the kid ride as fast as possible.
(Note that I don't think people build big, central coal because they're lazy, but rather because developers of big central coal plants have been able to present a better investment thesis than the many people seeking to deploy modular local power. Modular local power is societally better, from both an economic and environmental perspective... but developers of those technologies have not made a sufficiently compelling case that those projects are competitive investments. That's starting to change, but it's got a long way to go.)
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Sean Casten Posted 9:22 am
27 May 2008
In many cases, building developers are not building owners, and building owners don't pay the utility bills. This creates a whole series of split incentives, whereby the party who must bear the additional cost for greater building efficiency has no economic gain from long-term energy savings.
This can actually be even worse. A colleague of mine briefly ran the energy operations for one of the major US commercial property operators. They did a lot of innovative things in their buildings, most notably putting CHP in many of their NYC, SF and Chicago properties. But perhaps the most innovative thing they did was in terms of corporate structuring. As a Real Estate Investment Trust, they are required by law to pay out a portion of their profits every year to their investors. This limited their ability to fund efficiency projects, because they couldn't trap those profits in the business to recycle into other activities. They therefore created a separate company specifically to invest and own those assets, with energy costs treated as a fee from the REIT to the energy company, so that the energy company could trap those costs and reinvest in the portfolio. Very clever, but purely a business issue - without which, you could not create an investment thesis in that particular company. Those are the type of innovations I'm talking about when I say that the energy world is commercially immature.
Another similar area arises with respect to any enterprise (buildings, hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) where you have (a) great efficiency opportunities, which deliver good returns on investment, but (b) cost profiles wherein energy costs are insignificant. The list chosen above was intentional, as they all have great EE potential, but little reason for the senior leadership of those organizations to focus on energy costs. Again, this is a business issue, not a technical one - but the result is that unless you can solve that issue, you're stuck with lots of projects who's deployment is - by definition - contingent on a decision that must be made by someone who doesn't have what it takes to rise to a position of leadership in that organization. That's a big barrier that has nothing to do with economic incentives and everything to do with commercial issues.
Anyway, I could go on, but you asked... (and it's an excuse to elaborate on my prior, somewhat more cryptic post.)
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Jon Rynn Posted 10:01 am
27 May 2008
The way in which negawatts are incorporated, frankly, is not very clear to me, but could be one of the most important innovations of CCAs. That way, the service provider takes an interest in efficiency, even if, as in your example, the university, etc. doesn't have much expertise or financial motivation to do so. I believe that the way it works is, the provider contracts to provide "services", that is, lighting/heating/etc, for a certain price -- if they can reduce that with efficiency measures, it doesn't cost the customer any money, but the provider makes a profit. I think.
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hapa Posted 11:22 am
27 May 2008
ugh, though, about the federal boondoggles. how many trillions were just blown away in the housing-credit fiasco? ah but that's not a boondoggle. that's youthful exuberance.
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Sean Casten Posted 11:51 am
27 May 2008
My best example of that is at Pfizer, where I worked on a project about 5 years ago that would have cost something like $1.5 MM and saved about $500K/year in energy costs. Good returns, right? Unfortunately, I think it's fairly easy to show that if Pfizer spent no money on energy next year, it wouldn't have a huge impact on their bottom line - their costs are dominated by other factors. Needless to say, the project never got built. (Still there, if there are any Pfizer employees reading this!)
Note though that this isn't necessarily a cause to throw in the towel - simply a suggestion that you ought to pick your battles. It's why we now spend so much time working with commodity industries (steel, chemicals, etc.) where margins are slim and small savings in energy costs have big impacts on overall profits. That's our business model, and it works for us - but there's money to be made for the person who figures out how to craft a business model that will also be able to deploy capital in less energy-intensive industries.
When we teach new employees about capital budgeting, we show them a very simple, two axis plot. Rate of return on one axis, dollars per year of savings on the other. There is some threshold rate of return below which industrials won't spend money... but there is also a threshold dollar level. And therefore, it is only those projects on the NE corner of this plot that ever get built - in spite of the fact that every single spot on this plot generates profitable GHG reductions. This is a point that individuals know intuitively, but economic theorists miss. Consider: which investment is more attractive for you personally? A $5000 insulation upgrade that saves you $2000/year in energy costs or a $50 purchase that saves you $25/year in energy costs? Assume all else equal, including the amount of fine print on the deal that you have to evaluate to figure out if they will deliver as promised.
The second is the higher return, but the first may well be more tempting because of the greater total dollars, and the fact that it's more worthy of your time to review the fine print. This is fundamentally the same calculus that causes an industrial to invest $50 million in a $10 million/year savings before they invest $50,000 in a $25,000/year savings - and the bigger the company, the higher this threshold. As a result, there are lots of good investments in companies that simply don't fit their capital budgeting model, regardless of whether or not the utility pays them a bit extra for the power. And yet we frame economic & environmental policy as if there are no profitable opportunities to reduce fuel use!
But there's gold in them thar hills if you can figure out how to put your money to work on those opportunities...
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:04 pm
27 May 2008
Just to throw another curveball, the point of her book was basically that employees should have more decision-making power. Perhaps if that were so -- employee ownership and operation would be the ideal -- the various departments would have more control over their budgets, feel more responsibility for their turf -- so a corporate governance issue, perhaps.
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Sean Casten Posted 12:46 pm
27 May 2008
That said, your boiler example is odd. In my experience, energy operators can get money for investments that boost energy plant reliability, since that facilitates more paper-making. (And many industrials end up favoring reliability at the expense of efficiency as a result.) Your example sounds more like bad management at one company than an extrapolateable point - but only because it's about reliability. If it was about efficiency, I'd say it's ubiquitous, but for understandable reasons.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:41 pm
27 May 2008
But how much of that is a consequence of not have municipal utilities? Would they be as jealous of their turf as investor-owned utilities(IOUs)? Which brings me to a question that Paul Fenn raised, to what extent are utilities, municipal and IOU, driven by their huge debt, and in particular the debt on their transmission infrastructure? One of the advantages of a CCA is that is doesn't have this debt and transmission lines, but that still begs the question of how to control T&D.
Wouldn't the warped incentives that T&D debt brings -- to keep out non-utility generators and wires, to try to increase electricity consumption -- be ameliorated if the grid was nationalized or taken over by the states? Generation could be private or locally owned, but the nightmare associated with the grid -- including the fact that it could start falling apart soon -- could be isolated and dealt with as the public monopoly it is. Whaddaya think? (assuming you need to sleep).
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amazingdrx Posted 4:18 pm
27 May 2008
We had a slight local dip every night around 3 am about 10 years ago, but then the local utility put in superconducting electromagnetic energy storage. It was a paper mill load that switched on that caused the dip, I didn't realize it until years later when I read about the storage system. The first utility scale system of its kind.
It eliminated the need for more reserve capacity to cure that persistent dip. That's how storage and conservation work together. Imagine the effect of storage as heat/cold in buildings, it would be huge.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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ThatsTheFuture Posted 6:24 pm
27 May 2008
http://www.energyglobe.com/de_at/energyglobe-award/die-pr ...
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_9386645?source=bb
http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/paginas/Contenidos ...
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=spec ...
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ThatsTheFuture Posted 6:26 pm
27 May 2008
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Sean Casten Posted 10:12 pm
27 May 2008
That is essentially how we got to today's electric regulation. Entrepreneurs in the early 1900s (think Edison) convinced regulators that (a) a single electric grid was in the national interest and (b) they wouldn't build it without guaranteed returns on equity. Both statements, were, at the time, largely correct. Thus we got regulated monopolies, cost-plus rate making and all the other things that bedevil reform today. Thus, while we probably did need the current regulatory system in order to electrify the country, we need a different regulatory system to greenify our electric grid.
You are right that munis tend to be less conflicted, but at heart, they have many of the same challenges. A small muni with one big industrial load in town will behave in ways that seem very anti-competitive to keep that industrial load, on the basis that - like all electric utilities - their costs are largely fixed while their revenues are largely variable. In that model (like in airlines) losing a big chunk of their variable revenues = bankruptcy, and an inability to serve other customers.
There are a couple ways this cat can be skinned though. One, as you mention, is to nationalize all the wires. This has a certain economic logic to it, in the sense that if you can compete, compete. If you can't, nationalize. But get rid of the for-profit monopolies in the middle that are protected from competition even while they get to put a tax (in the form of their profits) on service. It has a certain logic, but is politically really hard - not least because of the sheer scale of the nationalization. Remember, this is the biggest industry in the country at $650 billion/year in revenues. Even if you could get past the lobbying pressure against nationalization, you still have a basic problem that such an approach would sail right into the American free-market psyche. Hard to see how you'd sell that.
The other approach (which we have been working on quite a bit lately) is to mandate that the utility (or some higher-jurisdiction entity) buy all the power that comes from a clean generator (defined as <50% of the fossil-intensivity of the US grid, but without any stipulation to technology). This financial transaction can be made regardless of where the electrons go, such that even if you are generating 100% of your power for a "behind the fence" load, you still financially settle across the fence. The muni or other utility keeps their load, doesn't have any financial pressure to fight you and the clean generator gets a long-term contract with a credit-worthy offtaker (just as the central, inefficient plant currently does with the state by virtue of our regulatory model.) There are kinks to be worked out, but the advantage of this approach is that it doesn't compel anyone to lose or act against their own interest - nor does it stipulate an increase in rates. (We have framed to require that the price for purchased power be 80% of that which would otherwise be paid for new generation, so that no one can argue that this isn't in the national economic interest.) I think it's got legs... and probably should do a post about it soon.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:40 am
28 May 2008
Regulate the grid so that GHG free energy can be traded freely amongst customer/generators. With a small fee charged by the owners of the grid. Like a highway tarrif or fuel tax, that supports the national highways.
If the utility has to pay 80%, then the 20% constitutes the fee charged for using the grid.
Would it help to have GHG free energy coops that allow members to buy and sell power to each other over the grid, with the grid operator getting the transport fee?
This would create a pool of capital for low interest loans to install renewables and conservation. And an organization to oversee and promote mass production/installation of the necessary systems, solar, wind, biogas, smart grid switching, storage, and backup.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:10 am
28 May 2008
Amazin, the best local idea still seems to be a CCA, I believe that in SF, at least, they are putting about 160 MW of PV on buildings, so it must be fairly easy to put more electricity on the grid after that gets worked out, an interesting question.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:02 am
28 May 2008
If they were the same company, as is the case now, the bill would separate those costs, as I think it actually does now, list those costs separately.
In the case of a local renewable energy coop, members who generate power would get payed by members using the power. Through the regular utility billing system. The utility would be paid for billing services as well as their electric power transport charge, a small percentage of the generation cost.
Is this at all feasible? Given a smart grid that keeps track of each kwh and it's related billing this might get a lot easier.
Just guessing here Sean. We really need you to tell us what is possible in the real world of lights on/off and customers dependent on the grid. And utilities at the mercy of fossil fuel traders.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:52 am
28 May 2008
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Sean Casten Posted 2:56 am
28 May 2008
The point to bear in mind is that the technical question as to where electricity flows is separable from how the generation is financially settled. Since a watt-hour generated on site is one less watt-hour imported from the utility, one can conceivably have a financial settlement for that electricity either with the industrial (in which case they don't pay the utility as much for power as they used to) or with the utility (in which case the utility retains full revenue from the customer, and can then re-sell their suddenly-freed up electricity to someone else at full retail rates.)
It seems an obvious point, but it's a relatively novel one. To take the most glaring example, the reason why electricity is largely regulated by the states instead of federally is because courts have ruled that the feds only have jurisdiction when interstate commerce is involved. To the best of m knowledge, electrons have no knowledge of where state borders lie - but financial settlements are most commonly between a utility and their customer, within a single state. But the fact that we have a national grid means that one could conceivably have cross-border financial settlements, even for locally-sited generators. (We do have such transactions on the high-voltage transmission system, which is why transmission transactions are federally regulated - but the fact that we don't have them on the low voltage side is only because people haven't quite thought to do it yet.)
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Sean Casten Posted 3:51 am
28 May 2008
Both of those businesses are dominated by capital costs, but the generation side also has significant variable costs (fuel especially, but also a bit of labor & maintenance). And of course, neither can survive without the other. Thus, both are heavily exposed to variable sales (on a $/kWh basis) since their costs are all so heavily dominated by debt repayment. The Regulatory Assistance Project has done some pretty neat - if a bit disheartening work - showing how very small reductions in kWh sales lead to massive collapses in equity recovery at utilities. I forget the exact numbers, but they are in the range of a 5% reduction in sales leading to a 20% reduction in equity repayment. As a result, those businesses have a very strong financial interest in maximizing energy sales - which is, of course, contrary to environmental objectives of conservation.
So the real challenge becomes how to fix this. We not only need the grid, but also need a way to attract the massive amounts of capital necessary to build and maintain that grid. This historically has been done by quasi-socialist monopoly regulation. The aforementioned Regulatory Assistance Project has done some interesting work on decoupling to try and figure out how to compensate utilities for their capital without linking that compensation to volumetric kWh sales, which is pretty interesting.
On the generation side, things are a bit easier. So long as we have a viable grid with fair access, generators have a way to get their product to market. Think of generation as a banana farmer, and the grid as a banana truck. If all farmers have access to the trucks, you've got a viable system. But if one banana farmer owns all the trucks, you'll almost certainly find that other banana farmers can't get their product to market on fair terms. This one-farmer-owns-the-trucks model is essentially what you get in a monopoly system, and it is one that various regulators (most notably FERC under Pat Wood) have been trying to break. Generally speaking, the idea is similar to the one Dr. X proposes: charge a consistent fee for grid access and get out of the way. Devilish details of course, but it is the basic model. Note though that you really don't need that smart a grid to accomodate this structure - you just need the legal framework within which to separate financial settlements from electron movement, coupled with a transparent system for market access.
Hope that helps.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:24 am
28 May 2008
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hapa Posted 5:16 am
28 May 2008
As a result, those businesses have a very strong financial interest in maximizing energy sales -- which is, of course, contrary to environmental objectives of conservation.
not necessarily. it depends how quickly vehicles go to the grid. if the transmission people were competing with oil to power cars, buses, and trains, then, negawatts being all they have to sell to plug-in drivers, without building new wires, that's still a maximum sales model.
Note though that you really don't need that smart a grid to accomodate this structure
right but that's about wheeling electricity for the purpose of selling more as a peak-for-all-regions generator. if you're doing it to smooth solar-generated renewables all the way across the continent, then new long-distance transmission might reduce the local cost of going very green.
i hear a lot of people talking about how this can't be done and they're all thinking about individual wind farms' strength and weaknesses, comparing them with individual thermoelectric plants, when where they get really strong is through networking, is what it sounds like to me.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:22 am
28 May 2008
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hapa Posted 6:16 am
28 May 2008
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hapa Posted 6:20 am
28 May 2008
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:32 am
28 May 2008
Most of the capital cost of the grid (as opposed to generation) is distribution and local transmission, not long distance transmission. About two to one I think.
HVDC transmission (which is what we would need for really long distance transmission of renewables) adds to grid stability rather than detracting. HVDC probably would reduce that two to one ratio a bit.
Personal anecdote: In Washington State when we recently had an extended outage due to wind storms the long distance portion was repaired within hours. But it took nearly a week for the local legs to be fixed. So I wonder if maintenance and external grids costs are even more disproportionately weighted toward the local rather than long distance end.
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Sean Casten Posted 6:35 am
28 May 2008
Ultimately, whether one starts with coal, solar or some yet-to-be-named fuel and whether one uses it for transportation, television or air-conditioning it is always good to squeeze more value out of every Btu we use. Ergo, any model with a vested interest in maximizing Btu consumption exists in some degree of conflict with larger energy goals. It doesn't make them bad per se, but we ought not ignore the conflict - especially on the grounds that in some narrow set of technological futures it might not be quite so bad.
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:49 am
28 May 2008
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hapa Posted 7:27 am
28 May 2008
population is growing. summer heat is growing. new (or shuttered) industrial capacity will come online to build new infrastructure and equipment. how much work the wires are enabling will undoubtedly increase much faster in the near future than it has in the recent past. at the same time, which equipment "wins" at scale will determine the size of the coming increase in overall electrical demand.
i don't see any way the grid would be asked to provide less, unless we let it fail completely. congestion's another matter.
(i don't get how electric transport and encouraging nuclear proliferation are connected. maybe a better example would be the overall environmental impact of the interstate highway system. the problem is that no matter how you look at it, nothing but electricity can move people peak oil's pushing away from airplanes and ICE cars.)
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Sean Casten Posted 8:30 am
28 May 2008
The nuke point was simply that every new technology looks sexier in front of us than in the rear-view mirror. The nuke industry was built on claims of "too cheap to meter". Consequences were a bit surprising. The auto industry was initially seen as a huge environmental boon, primarily because it got rid of the piles of manure on city streets. Again, there were other consequences we didn't expect.
This is not to knock new technology - simply that we need to be careful not to fall in love with any particular technology. And the overarching theme throughout must be conservation. I'm actually not certain we couldn't get by with a lot less power on the grid. Better lightbulbs, air conditioners, etc. I may be wrong, but let's make sure that the regulatory environment doesn't stand in the way of that goal.
Apologies if I misunderstood your point.
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hapa Posted 9:55 am
28 May 2008
i don't have the US numbers at hand but my understanding is that with aggressive efficiency measures, we'll have our work cut out to keep today's types of electrical demand flat overall. depending what happens.
that basically counts only population growth as pressure upward. other pressures include switching away from hydrocarbon space heating, extended hotter summers, electric transport.
(before, i should've said "nothing but electricity can move people and cargo," and i meant that to be talking about inside the next 15-20 years.)
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Sean Casten Posted 11:48 am
28 May 2008
Bottom line is that there are actually tremendous opportunities for improvement, both upstream (better conversion efficiency) and downstream (better appliances). And if the best we can do is to tie the Danes, we'd cut our fossil fuel use in half without reducing our actual consumption of useful energy. Pretty remarkable opportunities await.
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hapa Posted 5:23 pm
28 May 2008
now we're looking at needing to almost totally wipe out our CO2 output before 2030. stop poisoning the ocean and ruining the fresh water systems and forests. i think everybody really knew that was what we were looking at, just didn't want to face up to it.
we need a clean break. what some people call the transitional period -- the next 25 years -- i think more are now realizing is actually the overhaul period -- the time that we apply all our best available technologies and methods to get out of the hole in best possible style.
after 2030, when we have a much, much better picture of what the future holds, we'll also have many more tools at our disposal, i'd think, wouldn't you? design tools, very affordable and effective personal and industrial technologies, all that kind of stuff. and maybe then some of the things we have to do from now till then, will seem another unfortunate set of sunk costs, or maybe they won't, maybe they'll have been "enough" or maybe they'll have been "correct."
we don't just have to get there, we have to make sure, when we get there, there's more road ahead of us. i don't think 50% is safe.
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Sean Casten Posted 12:06 pm
29 May 2008
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hapa Posted 6:29 pm
29 May 2008
but, if you're asking me, who'm of no consequence, to support fossil-powered cogeneration where biomass or biogas or geothermal or whatever would do the job, you're the one putting some technologies ahead of others. none of the fossil fuels are safe. extending the oil and gas's availability for their hard-to-replace aspects is as important to me as reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and ending the damage done to ecosystems by extraction -- and all of that means reduced fuel use is a near-term band-aid stop-gap until we can get rid of it all.
we all know, i think, that there are applications for fossil heat and power we can't easily replace. that's where cogeneration should be focused -- by law -- because anybody who can go to zero emissions on a daily basis, should. we basically need to do an inventory of this or something like an inventory.
so, from what i can tell, more-efficient central (or medium) fossil-fuel generation is a completely different and somewhat budget-incompatible strategy with building smart transmission for a very high solar/wind percentage of power, because the higher variability and periodiciticity of local-only wind and solar resources seems ok when you have lots of "cleaner" fossil peak capacity. and all of that wonderful cleaner investment is paid off over the period of when we need to be building for the future and this is during now when loans are not the easiest or getting easier.
this is why i want supply efficiency applied with great care, on the understanding that it will absolutely not interfere with building local, regional, and continental wiring that will allow very high percentages of near-zero-footprint power in the next 20 years.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:30 am
30 May 2008
Providing distributed backup generation for a renewable smart grid at very high efficiency (75%) and allowing cogenerated waste heat to be used where it is needed.
This allows a transition from natural gas to biogas as the grid goes renewable. It also saves a lot on grid transmission capacity. At first natural gas would be the main fuel, then as renewables and conservation start to take over, biogas supply would increase and natural gas could be mainly a backup fuel.
The cogeneration would help the process along, instead of extending the life of fossil fueled power generation.
The beauty of biogas from waste is it's offsetting characteristic. Since the methane that constitutes the fuel part of biogas is 21 times worse as a GHG than CO2, if 5% of our energy came from biogas, that would offset the rest of our CO2 emissions.
That methane would normally be released from manure run off, sewage, garbage, and crop waste biomass directly into the atmosphere. If we can intercept it, with biodigestion, and use it to generate clean kwh, reduction in total GHG effect could push our carbon footprint to zero.
The power grid backed up by biogas could eventually be mainly renewable and we could actually go carbon negative, reversing the GHG effects of these industrial revolution and chemical farming decades.
Biogas is the key technology, luckily it is well understood and in wide, but so far sparse application. With targeted subsidy a boom could get biogas/fuel cell power to 5% of our power generation within a decade.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Sean Casten Posted 12:59 am
30 May 2008
We're mixing apples and oranges here. Economically, it is a good thing to squeeze as much useful energy out of every Btu as possible. Environmentally, it's a good thing to squeeze as much useful energy out of every Btu as possible. That is true whether those Btus come from coal, landfill gas, solar energy or cow-farts. (Consider: would you rather serve the full load of some area with 500 acres of solar panels or 100 acres of solar panels? This isn't a hard question - but the latter implies greater energy efficiency).
Framing the argument as efficiency vs. renewables misses the point, because efficiency enhances the value of every fuel source. And after all every fuel source is finite. There's only so much solar radiation that hits the earth, only so much water that flows down hills, only so much wind that blows and only so much biomass that can be sustainably harvested. And only so many dollars available to deploy them. As such, it is in our global interest to ensure that policies maximally reward and incentivize efficient energy conversion, regardless of what the upstream fuel is.
Do we need technological changes for some clean technologies? Absolutely. But we need regulatory reform for all clean technologies. And so long as those regulatory barriers stand in the way of the lowest-cost GHG-reducing technologies, it behooves us to fix those regs. Or as Amory Lovins put it recently "If you're standing under a tree full of low-hanging fruit, shake the damned tree!"
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:25 am
30 May 2008
HAPA, I think you and Sean both have a point. There is a dilemma here that neither of you are seeing because it is a case where the need for quick reductions conflicts a bit with the need for deep reductions.
In a lot of cases, the cheapest fastest way to reduce emissions are various forms of cogeneration. In this scenario we replace existing natural gas turbines with more efficient turbines which use the same natural gas, but produce more electricity, then use some of the waste heat to replace more natural gas and electricity use, and also use some of the electricity to drive heat pumps replacing still more. Then we use waste heat from industrial process either to produce still more electricity or in other industrial processes. That alone might let us completely phase out coal. And the point is it might let us get those reduction very very quickly, fast enough for the peak to come when Hansen and the head of the IPCC says we need it to by 2015.
Hoever, we also need to phase out emissions deeply. Following this path and putting all other possible efficiency means in place won't be enough to reduce emissions by 80% to 95% we need to by 2030. We are going to have to put as much efficiency in place as possible, drive everything electrically we can, and then generate that electricty at least 80% from low carbon sources. If we put too much co-generation infrastructure in place, we are going to have replace most of it within 15 years or less. Now that is not out of the question. I think Sean will confirm that most recycled heat potential could pay for itself in a lot less time than that -typically five years or less. So we could take the natural gas we use now to generate some of our electricity, do much of our climate condition, and fuel many of our industrial processes, and by using recycling of heat continue to use them for these purpose but also massively increase the electricity we produce to the point where we could phase out coal (maybe: I'm not use the math quite works out for this). Then after these deployments have paid for themselves start phasing out some of them as more renewable electricity comes on-line
But at the same time, it might make sense in terms of long term cost to deploy efficiency, and massive wind and solar development from the beginning. Earlier deployment of capital, but at least not deploying capital twice for the same purpose. And in terms of politics, a building a clean efficient infrastructure only to replace it because it is not clean enough could be very problematic.
The science says we need two things, a peak or a small drop by 2015, and a massive reduction (80% to 95%) drop in emissions by 2030, followed by a slow phasing out of remaining emissions and conversion to negative emissions.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:39 am
30 May 2008
Crops are fed to animals and humans, the whole waste stream working off of that. Garbage added in, a lot of that from paper.
What percentage of that original solar energy ends up in the biodigestable waste? What percentage of that could be converted to biogas?
We only need to get to 5%. With half of energy use curtailed through conservation, that would help a lot, cutting the amount of biogas needed in half. A lot of weed overgrowth (from fertilizer and manure run off)is emitting a lot of methane already, that could be harvested for extra biogas production/GHG offset.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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