Comments Nigel Goddard has made

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    So why all the fuss? Not because 1.4 cents/kWh is going to kill our economy. Rather, it’s a big deal from the perspective of a power plant owner. A $20/ton carbon price imposes something like a ~40% reduction in the profits of a modern coal-fired power plant unless they can pass it along to their customers.

     

    This is only true if the permist are auctioned.  If they are given to the owners, then as economists will say and as the EU ETS has shown, the price will be passed on to consumers.

    Nigel

    On Economic impacts of carbon pricing posted 6 months, 1 week ago 11 Responses

  • Capital investment

    The big question is: how fast can we make the necessary investment without dropping living standards enough to cause instability?  Can we do it fast enough?  Better to look at embodied energy in the solar, wind and efficiency new plant than to look at the monetary funding.  Another way of putting this: is there enough useable fossil energy (given climate constraints) to both maintain developed living standards and grow undeveloped living standards AND build the solar/wind/tidal systems to replace the fossil systems?On Population is not the short-term problem posted 2 years, 6 months ago 15 Responses

  • Pump design

    Richard LaRosa asked me to post this on his behalf in response to your question:


    The pump is powered by Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion  (OTEC) technology, which was used in the demonstration in Hawaii. Surface water 27 deg C or greater is pumped through the evaporator heat exchanger to vaporize ammonia that runs a turbine. Exiting vapor is condensed in a condenser heat exchanger through which 5 deg C water from 1000-meter depth is pumped. The ammonia liquid from the condenser is pumped into the evaporator to complete the circuit.

    Despite 90 years of development, there are no operational OTEC systems. This is because people tried to export electric power or some substance that requires power for its manufacture. This demand burdened the design with excessive size and low thermal efficiency. I use the power produced by the machine to only run itself and the necessary on-board equipment. This results in a thermal cycle efficiency of at least 3.66 % and a manageable size. All the cold water is pumped through the condenser, and a similar amount of surface water is pumped through the evaporator. This results in low temperature drops in the heat exchangers, so that a good fraction of the ocean temperature difference is applied to the turbine.

    It is not difficult to lift the cold water because the density of the water outside the pipe is only slightly lower. The power required to overcome gravity is about the same as the power required to overcome pipe friction.

    On The basic approach of the Bright Lines project posted 2 years, 7 months ago 16 Responses

  • Re: Sequestration the exception not the rule

    Gar, the point of your original posting was taxing or permitting upstream being better than downstream - yes?  Not contrasting taxing vs. permitting.  I am commenting on the upstream vs. downstream issue.

    Clearly upstream is better.  Especially if as you say the need for downstream measurement of tax credits for carbon-mitigation is the exception rather than the rule.  But is it really going to be the exception?  Maybe initially.  But over time, because of whatever tax credits are arranged for mitigation activities, there is incentive to develop more and better methods of mitigation.  So we can predict that mitigation will spread (good!).  And there will be pressure to add tax credits for new mitigation methods (good!).  And all this mitigation will need to be measured - it's sort of the opposite of the problem of measuring the emission if you want to tax downstream.  So it's going to end up a complex system anyway.

    The only way out of this hole is if the non-carbon technologies (do they exist?  Even solar panels need energy to resource and manufacture) are so much cheaper than the taxed carbon-based technologies that people just stop using the carbon-based technologies.  So we can hope to get there eventually, but in the meantime we have the complex carbon-emissions and/or mitigations to measure, with all the attendent (as you point out) possibilities for mistakes and gaming.

    I'm not trying to say that upstream is worse than downstream, or that it makes no difference, just that we are going to have to have regulatory regimes to minimize mistakes, gaming, etc, in any case.On Because shopping shouldn't require matrix algebra posted 2 years, 7 months ago 9 Responses

  • It is simple.... not!

    Gary, I take your point about consumer choice enabling more carbon-efficient technologies to displace less carbon-efficient ones.

    But the point you make about the plant operator increasing profits by installing sequestration technology and thereby getting tax credits is exactly the point I was making - you need to measure the sequestration amount downstream from Gar's ideal tax place (which is the minehead) at the point of us (which is the plant).  So, taxing upstream is better, but it doesn't get rid of all the need for downstream measurements and the associated opportunites for mistakes and gaming.

    So, I think we agree, yes?On Because shopping shouldn't require matrix algebra posted 2 years, 7 months ago 9 Responses