Comments Ned Ford has made

  • It's the capital cost, not the fuel cost...

    Along the lines of Sean's comment, this is a good reference, and probably one a lot of people ought to read.  But to make it a lot simpler, he's talking about the industry convention of describing energy price by the "average" cost of a "marginal" (meaning the last) kwh that has to be generated at a particular time to meet a particular load.  Peak times produce some stunning marginal costs, but most of the time isn't peak, and more to the point, we don't pay the marginal price.  What we pay is the combined marginal price of all moments plus the capital cost, and from our perspective, what drives CHANGE in price, is largely (not entirely) CAPITAL costs, which the author probably deals with in another chapter, but not in this section.

    And when capital costs are considered, the heierarchy he identifies goes belly-up.  Efficiency is the cheapest, at 3 cents per KWH, followed by wind (I hear that wind has been affected by the price shocks hitting the coal industry, so let me say I think wind is 20% cheaper than coal, plus it has no fuel costs, but duck the price issue) coal seems to be pushing 9 cents or so, internal capital only cost, and natural gas is right there.  Nuclear is ironically, too expensive to meter while efficiency has now taken over the mantle of being too cheap to meter.

    A lot of people in and out of the industry still don't get it.  But Wall Street does, which is why all those coal plants are being cancelled.  Let's help them along and educate some more people about the true costs of electricity.

    - NedOn Walt Patterson argues that electricity cost comparisons are political, not economic posted 2 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

  • Melt your Hearts out

    Amundsen did traverse the Northwest Passage in 1905.  Trouble with comparison to today is that he started in 1903.  

    Jim Hansen wrote a recent article on Scientific Reticence stacks.iop.org/ERL/2/024002 in which he describes how scientists don't do a good job of reflecting the cumulative information because it requires individuals to step outside their personal field of expertise. Five years ago a report noted that Greenland's melt rate indicated a complete loss of ice cover in a thousand years.  If you look at the globe, Greenland is unique at its latitude for having an ice cap, and is regarded as a self-perpetuating relic of the last ice age.  About three years ago the melt rate was shown to have doubled as indicated by increased runoff from inland waterways, and extreme surface melting.  Earlier this year, the rate was again doubled, due to measurements of melting of ice around the shores and the rate of exposed rock warming and melting surrounding ice.  These reports are not being reconciled with eachother, but the suggestion is that in five years we have gone from a thousand years to 250 years for a 20 foot sea level rise.

    Nor do we reconcile the fact that if Greenland melts, the WAIS probably won't be unaffected.  I don't like to sound like an extremist, but I don't like to see good information neglected either.  We are seeing Arctic ice melt because over 20 times as much thermal warming has entered the surface waters of the ocean as has entered the atmosphere.  This was not adequately considered in climate modelling until a couple of years ago, and is probably only now being examined in any detail.  The Arctic melt won't raise sea level much, but it will accelerate warming due to albedo change.  It will affect thermal expansion of the ocean.   Someone will tell us how much, soon, and that estimate will be dated, soon, because there will be supplementary factors the first estimate will forget to consider.

    Climate change is like that.  Yeah, it is.

    - NedOn Ice loss hits record low this month in the Arctic posted 2 years, 2 months ago 6 Responses

  • Efficiency first

    When the Bush Administration claimed in 2002 that they would reduce "Energy Intensity" by 18% in ten years, they managed to completely fool the media into thinking it meant taking action.  Energy intensity is energy/gross domestic product, and that measure has fallen consistently for over half a century.  From 1970 through 1999 it fell 42%.  By that measure the Bush "pledge" was to continue the status quo.  Indeed, all they have done is kill programs which might have permitted them to over-achieve this particular goal.

    Whether energy intensity is a measure of efficiency is debated.  One argument is that it includes export of manufacturing.  We no longer burn coal to make steel, but instead buy steel from Asia.  But global energy intensity has paralleled the U.S. trend almost exactly.  So that argument is fragile.  Dr. Skip Laitner did an analysis of 1970 vintage technology and 2000 population and found that by that measure the U.S.   had achieved as much as three quarters of it's added energy capacity over the period from improvements in efficiency.  Energy intensity would indicate only a little over half of all the added energy capacity, so there must be some other way to measure it.

    But the absolute measure is less important than the fact that we are presently cutting almost the same amount of growth by improving efficiency as we experience in real growth of energy consumption.  In other words, without efficiency our growth would be double the current rate.  This means that we need merely double this rate to completely eliminate growth of CO2 emissions.  Doing this would save hundreds of billions of dollars per year for the U.S., within a decade.

    This is not especially hard to prove.  Some states are already doing this in the electric sector.  All that is needed is for more people to look at efficiency seriously enough to be able to advance these arguments consistently and clearly until the point gets across.  Rising energy prices have opened the door to making this an effective approach.

    I don't know if there's a size limit here, so I'll cut this off, and try to post more later.  But efficiency is presently being added to the U.S. energy infrastructure at approximately 1.8% per year.  All renewables combined are being added at approximately 0.3% per year, and that includes a lot of ethananol and forest products which are probably not really sustainable energy resources.On Talking point: The environmentalist yes posted 3 years, 3 months ago 13 Responses