It is thus essential not to avoidably amortize infrastructure prematurely; doing so would multiply the cost of efficiency increases.

Somebody make a bumper sticker!

www.grist.org

I agree on the economics of efficiency.  The economics of efficiency delay are not always advisable.

We tossed out a perfectly good dryer for a clothesline.

Amory's "Natural Capitalism" described consumer choices limited by consumer knowledge.  Example: A front loader washer uses less water, less energy, and cleans the clothes much better than top-loader washers.  I did not know this and did not experience the depth of benefits until after we replaced a broken top-loader.  Now I know we should not have waited.  Old working refrigerators should be replaced new efficient refrigerators.  Economics alone would pay for the upgrade.  We replaced a working electric space heater with a wood stove.  We replaced working incandescent lights with swirl lights.  And so on.

Waiting to replace old infrastructure is not always a good idea.

I had "load images" turned off, did not see those Stirling dishes made by Solar Systems.  Stirling engines have maintenance problems and will not amortize even if the heat (or dish) is free.  Those engines have been replaced with high-intensity photovoltaic cells to supply power with no moving parts.  The 36% efficient pv cells are expected to cost less than $100 per kilowatt(e).

Are you sure? In every one of the Stirling Energy mega projects, every report I can find says they are using heat engines, not PV.

>The economics of efficiency delay are not always advisable.

Nor are the economics of throwing out perfectly good equipment aways right.  It depends.  Incidentally, lot of people live in garage-less apartment buildings in rainy climate. If they have personal gas dryers, or the apartment provides shared ones, these will probably use less energy than having people drive to a laundromat.

Gar - you've been using efficiency rather ambiguously. Contextually it seems pretty clear you're talking specifically about "end-use efficiency" am I right?

You would think that none of the traditional electric provders had received any incentives based on this article when such is far from the truth. The people of the US paid for virtually all the hydroelectric dams that are currently producing power at $.04 per watt.  The cost of the new XCEL coal gasification plants is being subsidized by the public as a separate item on every utility bill.  Cost of natural gas is continually subsidized in the same way.  It is a delusion to believe that these providers are not also receiving incentives for production.
As for the efficiency  of solar, the base reality is that that once the system is in place, THE ENERGY IS ABUNDANTLY FREE.  You can not say that about any of the competing systems, not from XCEL or any of the other electricity providers.  The shear abundance of the sun's free energy available over periods of time that dwarf our civilization make this arguement totally about installation, not efficiency.  While it takes less space to put on a more efficient system,  once the collectors are on the roof, they are producing free energy, no matter how inefficient they may be. Look around your belongings and find one other item you have recently invested in that you can claim the same and at the same tiem without any carbon footprint.
The harder we drive this industry with incentives, the more rapidly the enormous investments will flow in and the potential to install those cheep 40-50% efficient  modules that will produce electricity at lower than market cost.

Fred Pittenger Simplicity Solar Grand Junction, Colorado (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ' ') output += "&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"; else output += unescape(l[i]); } document.getElementById('eeEncEmail_xdjud5iiIq').innerHTML = output; //]]>

I know it's taboo and I'll probably get a lot of boos but what about Nucler Reactors more specifically "Breeder Reactors".  If you want abundant effeicient non-oil source of energy within 20years Nuclear Reactors is a viable alternative.  Breeder Reactors recycle the waste produced to make more energy.  It is not 100% but France does have working Breeder Reactors now.  Just a thought anyway.

>once the system is in place, THE ENERGY IS ABUNDANTLY FREE.

Hmmm - I wonder if I can get an eight million dollar mansion on that basis. Of course I can afford it. Cause one I have paid for it the rent is abundantly free. In life cycle costs, renewable energy, once you use it in large enough quantities to require storage is more expensive than conventional sources - at least until you consider social costs.

>solar thermal is already a competitive source for a large portion of the electricity supply:

Not strictly what they are saying. Their key argument is that with large scale mass production costs could be reduced by 2/3rds per kWh.  They are probably right. The comparatively small production increase Stirling achieved via its  rec ent larger orders already lowered costs by a third.

In general I think we are going to see big breathroughs over the next few years in storage. For example, there is proposal to make pumped storage system with large scale underground storage. So you have a closed cycle, with your "high" reservoir at ground level. That may well provide comparative inexpensive electricity storage

>Small heat engines just do not have  long lifetimes

Hmmm - some of the plants in California have been running for twenty years. So it seems that these commercially manufactured engines do have a decent lifespan.

(under full torque) and I will buy that engine.  I will follow up on your source if you have it.

OK - another try at posting the email:

ses(AT)stirlingenergy(DOT)com

again in non-harvestable form that human common sense can translate

>Try Vanadium batteries from VRB systems at about $150/kWh

Last I check out their FAQ, the cost was more like $325 per kWh.  Having a capacity of one hour per KW for wind would let it overcome the 20% barrier, while other displaced "spinning" reserves would pay for most the capital cost. But you can't use  $325 per        hour storage for a fully renewable grid that requires about 75 hours of capacity. That is where things like pumped storage (where it can be done in an environmentally sound way) and thermal storage shine; they are simply cheaper than other means. Even hydrogen, which I tend to dismiss, is cheaper than VRB batteries when you are talking large capacities.

Note that the it's lates sale to large wind farm in Ireland provides about 12 megawatt hours of storage to a 39 megawatt wind farm. Nominally that is less than 20 minutes of storage, but if you consider actual average production wind turbines it is probably close to an hour of typical output.

But VRB power is a Canadian company.

How do you run the grid on 100% renewables without some sort of storage? What if cloudy weather coincides with windless days for three days in a row? Can happen. Especially since a lot of good wind sites have times as long as a month when they produce nothing, which means you are going to be relying entirely on sun. If you are in area that is cloudy and has to import sun, that could easily give you three days without either sun or wind sources.  An alternative to storage is backup - but when you need to backup 100% of capacity, that is expensive too.

I want to avoid confusing what is works when renewables provide a minority of grid power to what it will take to make them  dominate. That is very small amounts of storage will greatly improve the value of variable sources in a fossil fuel dominated grid. It takes a lot more to replace fossil fuels completely or nearly so.

But I may well have overstated the case. The only studies I could find suggested a three day storage requirement for any grid where 80% or more of power was supplied by variable sources. Has anyone  done a robust analysis study suggesting a smaller number? I'd be very interested - cause this is an area where I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong. The less storage you need the less expensive storage becomes, the more you can afford to pay for capacity.

Wind power is 4 cents per kwh without subsidies, eyyh Gar?  Cheaper than coal and natural gas with subsidies.  How much is coal or natural gas without subsidies?

With distributed generation and stortage plenty of storage time would be available even if renewables all shut down at once.  All that is needed is a few hours to fire up natural gas power plants until coal plants can then come online.

These plants are already in place and would supplement the power shortage from areas that still have wind, water, or solar power.  The part of the grid that was without renewable power would be powerd by backups in that local area as well as surrounding areas.

Eventually as superconducting grid storage comes online and more renewable power is available from further away, the role of backups will shrink.

And they can be convereted from coal and gas fired steam turbines to solid oxide fuel cell/turbines with 3 times the efficiency.  With biogas from waste digestors and dry cellulose from algae fueling most of the backup power.  But pulverized coal and regular natural gas can be used until the renewable sources take over.

Just as you wrongly assumed wind was more expensive than coal and natural gas, you now imagine storage makes renewables much more expensive.  It just isn't so.

I agree on efficiency though.  But it is best acomplished with geothermal heat pump heating and cooling, electric plugin hybrids, and muti-fuel cell/turbines.  Another big efficiency sterp is to do energy intensive manufacturing like smelting and refining only when excess renewable energy is available, when the energy excess subsides the factories are idled.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

>Just as you wrongly assumed wind was more expensive than coal and natural gas,

Where did I do that for variable power

>With distributed generation and stortage plenty of storage time would be available even if renewables all shut down at once.  All that is needed is a few hours to fire up natural gas power plants until coal plants can then come online.

In the long run, we don't want natural gas and coal as backup. In the short run - I already said that small amounts of expensive storage can pay quite well. Where I'm talking about storage as the bottleneck - it is the bottleneck for getting a really high percent of power from renewables.  Look we have enough variable wind to provide many muliples of our current needs in North America - even before efficency. the problem is, above 20% you need storage. If you only have a few hours storage, then natural gas and coal are still going be supplying huge amounts of your energy.  I agree, and have said in the past that an hour or so of storage could be very valuable. It would certainly break the 20% barrier; but it would not break the 50% barrier.

There are two things.

We have breakthroughs coming through.
But it is very hard to get people to support starting a path - when you are depending on stuff we can't currently do inexpensively. So it is better to lay out a way to eliminate fossil fuels with stuff we have a price for now. And then you can end up doing much better than projected as the inevitable advances occcur.

Incidentally in terms of efficiency - making manufacturing follow the natural rhythms of wind and sun is not exactly cost free. Extremely costly in terms of capital and labor utilization.

"How do you run the grid on 100% renewables without some sort of storage? What if cloudy weather coincides with windless days for three days in a row?"

No-one is suggesting that we do this.  You cannot run the grid on 100% thermal coal or 100% nuclear either as both these technologies require 'backup' from peaking plants to provide the demand for short term changes that neither of the technologies can provide.

We need to get away from the concept that renewables need backup.  Fossil fuels need backup as well and it is called spinning reserve.  Right now there are massive generators spinning consuming energy, producing CO2 and generating nothing.  They are doing this because at any time a large generator could drop out and they are the backup.

What the true picture is that each generating source has its capacity factor - storage increases this for renewables.  Yes a single wind farm, even in a good wind area, may not have any wind for a month however a coal plant may be out for the same period for maintenance or faults and nobody bats an eyelid.  Some nuclear plants are out of action for a year or more from serious faults.

Due to the fully automatic operation of vanadium batteries and the fact they are as efficient small as they are big they do not have to big and central.  The storage can be distributed in thousands of small power nodes in communities providing local storage not only for wind farms but local PV plants on people's homes.

Stephen Gloor Perth Western Australia

So what percent of the the grid do you want to be powered by fossil fuels? Do you want 30% of your energy from coal and natural gas? 40%? 60%?

When plug-in HEV with 60 miles of electric range and electric vehicles become widespread, at least a significant portion of the capacities of their batteries can be used for storing electricity produced from solar (and wind) energy, and/or used as the means for load leveling of the electrical grid. You are talking about up to 20 kWh of storage by cars alone for each car when all the vehicles have 60 miles of EV range. If there will be 100 million PHEV/EV in this country, the storage capacity can be as high as 20 x 100 = 2 billion kWh/day.

For wind energy storage, the battery may be able to charge and discharge a few times a day as a means of load leveling.

I guess 2 billion kWh/day is likely enough to make up the shortage in nights in this country - remember we will always be able to generate a significant portion of the electricity during nights from wind, hydropower, nuclear, and other types of power plants.

The key is to develop rechargeable batteries with very long cycle life and a reasonable cost, I believe.

It will not be a fixed percentage, but rather the percentage from renewables will increase with time.

The question is how fast do we want to get to as close to 100% renewable as we can?  I think 10 years to 75% and 20 years to 100% is feasible.

On that time scale global climate change could be reversed in time to head off much of the worst damage.  Before the ocean current conveyor stops and plunges the US and Europe into an instant ice age.  And before ocean levels rise to cover most major oceanfront cities.

Using coal and natural gas plants to backup renewables will be how this is done, then coal and gas plants will eventually all be converted to fuel cell/turbine running on biogas and powdered algae that the veggie oil has been removed from for biodiesel.

By expanding conservation reserve cropland and going to organic agriculture, global climate change creating GHGs can actually be sequestered back out of the atmosphere until the natural balance is restored.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

I'm a little late arriving to the party, however this article represents the most pragmatic recommendations I've read in this area for a long time.  It is foolish to prematurely write-off existing infrastructure and replace it with renewable sources.  The economics simply don't add up (even after attributing value to CO2 social costs).

Now this is true for developed nations (the West).  However how do these economics stack up in India and China?  Regions which do not have massive sunk cost investments in existing fossil fuel consumption.  These two giants are also about to rapidly expand their energy infrastructure and thus may represent excellent targets for implementation of new technologies.

A challenge to the folks who submitted with religious zeal about new renewable technologies:  If these new renewables are so great right now, let's see you step up in India and China.