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Brookings Study Calls Solar, Wind Power the Most Expensive Fossil Alternatives
turkeydance (1266624) writes A new study [PDF] from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argues that using solar and wind energy may be the most expensive alternatives to carbon-based electricity generation, even though they require no expenditures for fuel.....Specifically, this means nuclear power offers a savings of more than $400,000 worth of carbon emissions per megawatt of capacity. Solar saves only $69,000 and wind saves $107,000. An anonymous reader points out that the Rocky Mountain Institute finds the Brookings study flawed in several ways, and offers a rebuttal.
"$400,000 worth of carbon emissions", it says. What, monopoly money?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Decommissioning costs (including storage, disposal, and demolition) never seem to figure into these numbers.
Can we factor in the cost of even 1 minor nuclear plant accident and see what the numbers look like then?
Oh, but the Sun will run out of fuel eventually!
So, you're saying we should use non-renewable, polluting alternatives just so it's a better match with wind and solar?
Seriously?
SERIOUSLY?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If you read the article and linked information, you'd know they included decommissioning costs, plus costs related to accidents and insurance costs. Also, many nuclear power stations have been fully decommissioned. A surprising number of them are now greenfield sites in the US.
We're looking into Solar right now, and I'm considering everything from a leased system that only provides daytime power offset, to a full system with battery bank and generator capable of intentional islanding off-grid for those few times that the power goes out. Trouble is trying to size the thing, one estimate suggested we only get 12.5kW, but with three HVAC units and two hot water heaters, plus the air compressor and other things down the road like a welder I don't think that the ~50A from such a system would really be enough given that the property is sized for 200A service and I have an outbuilding to support. I can buy a propane-powered 20kW generator for about $4000, so I'm wondering if I'd be better off sizing solar to be similar.
Even costing more than other non-fossil-fuel sources, solar appeals because it's something that I can do at home. I can't really do wind, there's probably not enough thermal gradient to do geothermal, there's no stream or river to do hydro, and obviously nuclear is out. That pretty much leaves me with solar.
I'm disappointed that codes for new construction haven't started mandating the installation of solar. Integrated into the design of a house it could probably fit aestetically better than a retrofit, and the cost to purchase such a system when rolled into the 30 year loan would probably make it more feasible for most to have it. On top of that, wider adoption would serve to drive costs down for everyone else, including possible retrofits like mine.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So naturally I go price it out. 25-30k+ for most systems.
I assume that this is for solar. A friend who was a building contractor in a former life recently looked at solar and was rather peeved. Seems that the materials are about $5K (US) now and the installation takes a trained group of about 5 to 7 people one day to install. Someone is making a killing on these things.
My friend is now trying to convince local contractors to get into the installation business (most is done by "carpetbaggers") and lower the cost to 10K to 15K. (And the contractor still makes out).
Similarly, the amount of radioactive material released by burning coal is rarely mentioned.
.: Semper Absurda
Waste disposal problems are just a special case of the NIMBY tax. We could just toss it all into a big, dry hole in the ground. As I understand it, we'd come out ahead over coal in terms of health even if we ground up all the waste and tossed it into the atmosphere, or the ocean. The problem really is that people don't understand the cancer risks of living near a coal plant, whereas nuclear energy is OMG NUCLEAR!!!!, so they're trying to compare to perfection instead of as an improvement over what we already have.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
so often? 3 times is not really so often.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I'm installing solar this month.
The ROI calculators show a first year 7% ROI (of course, this will increase as electricity prices increase).
It's hard to find another investment which will give me 7% return on my investment and where the return will increase by 3-5% per year for the next 25 years.
This is a no-brainer.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yes, they also factor in fuel disposal costs.
It's on pg. 14 if you're interested.
This paper: assumes $0.2 - $0.3 billion to decommission a nuclear power plant (based on a 2013 report by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
UK: $9 billion decommissioning costs per plant, based on an estimate by the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
Japan: $1 billion per plant so far, but estimated $1.8 billion per plant for the remainder
I suspect this paper gets its results by downplaying by an order of magnitude the decommissioning costs of nuclear power.
There were nine number in the analysis which were badly outdated. Doing it right reverses the order. http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
We're looking into Solar right now
I looked into solar last year. In California, we have tiered pricing, where the first tier costs $0.10 per kwhr, the second tier $0.12, and if you go over that, the third tier is $0.30. I wanted to at least eliminate the top tier. But before I invested in solar, I decided to try to cut consumption as much as possible. I added insulation to the attic (saving gas in the winter, and electricity for A/C in the summer), installed an attic fan, and switched all our lighting to LEDs. LEDs are expensive at retail ($10 per bulb) but far cheaper on eBay ($2 per bulb). The result was that I was no longer using any top tier electricity, and the solar no longer made sense. I did all this for about 5% of what the solar would have cost.
Exactly correct. Using correct number reversed the order. http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
The input data were badly out of date. http://www.forbes.com/sites/am... Wind is the cheapest.
The Rocky Mountain Institute had already debunked this story at http://www.corvalliscommunityp...
The Brookings Institution??? Why would anyone give a damn what some think tank, er, thinks?
By definition, a think tank's job is to simply rationalize their clients opinion.
Quite odd how, out of the first eighteen comments (not counting replies), five are about decommissioning costs, and five are about meltdowns? They seem to repeat the same talking points, almost as if on a script.
I'm not saying they're shills, but at the very least a lot of people seem to be getting their information from the same place, which leaves them missing several crucial facts:
1) Nuclear power works at scale. It's proven, and it scales perfectly. The biggest solar plants on the planet are 500MW (Topaz Solar Farm, PV) or 400MW (Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, thermal). A single nuclear reactor is well above that - scroll down this list and you'll see very few sub-500MW, and quite a few 1GW+ reactors. And remember, most plants have more than one reactor. 66 nuclear plants are enough to give us 20% of our energy. 947 wind plants are only enough to give us 3%, and 553 solar plants (PV and thermal) don't even break half a percent.
2) Nuclear power would be a hell of a lot safer if new designs were actually approved. The regulations are pretty much ridiculous - they don't approve new reactor types that are designed to solve all the problems we've found with the old designs, but they still allow old designs with known weaknesses to be extended long past their designed lifespan. Add to that the ridiculous costs of dealing with the bureaucracy and the weak requirements for cleanup/decommissioning, and it almost seems like the regulations are designed both to make nuclear power unprofitable, and to keep public opinion against it. Hmm...
3) Nobody is arguing for pure nuclear power, because that doesn't work for all the reasons people say it doesn't work. Nuclear (and geothermal, where possible) makes for an excellent base load. Nuclear meshes well with hydro - excess capacity can be used to run the dam in reverse, pumping water up to store that energy for later use. And if positioned right, it provides both cooling water for the reactor, and a single point to close off flow or install filters if something does go wrong. Wind, tidal and solar can supplement this as locations allow, with solar in particular taking the edge off the peak load.
4) Every power plant can go wrong. What happens when a hydro dam fails? Thousands of people die. What happens when a solar plant fails? We don't know yet, but it probably won't be that good considering how much damage they can do even when working properly. Same for wind, and tidal, and geothermal. They do some minor damage even when working perfectly - frying or chopping up migratory birds or fish, or altering the geology in the case of geothermal. Nuclear has the benefit, at least, of being perfectly clean when working perfectly. Yes, if things go wrong it can be absolutely horrible, but that's why regulations need to focus on redundant containment and fail-safe designs, not on constant inspections.
Call me when you can actually get 4-5 BILLION megawatt-hours a year out of Wind and Solar in a stable manner 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Oh. And I will NOT be holding my breath waiting for you.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
120V service is derived by adding a center-tapped-neutral to a 240V single-phase system. Residential power is calculated based on that 240V number. So, 240V at 200A is my max power capacity before tripping the main breaker.
I have to look at both while-running max load and have to consider startup demand. Breakers for individual circuits are supposed to be sized for startup demand (though apparently there's a tiny bit of room for fudge here, with slower-acting breakers so that a peak draw at startup could theoretically exceed a breaker rating for a very short time without either tripping the breaker or being especially dangerous) but by and large, that's what I have to do. I can rule-of-thumb the breakers for the 240V devices to figure out approximate max startup demand if everything kicked on at the same time.
If I add up the startup demand for the three HVAC units, the two hot water heaters, and probably 20A for all of the various residential 120V circuits for lighting and devices, I'm well over the 50A of a solar system, and I expect that with all of that running at the same time I'm probably over 50A there as well. That's the biggest concern, and I know that I've had all three HVAC units running at the same time before. The air compressor doesn't run very often, but it also draws 30A while it does.
We're probably going to put a couple inches of foam insulation on the outside of the house and have it stuccoed, and we're going to change the windows. Unfortunately there are a lot of windows to change, and it'll be close to five figures to change them all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
on 9/11 the terrorists actually flew past indian point nuke plant to get to the trade center
Or... how about the plane that flew right past the Statue of Liberty to attack the second Trade Center tower?
Or... how about the Pentagon plane which executed a complex maneuver to hit the segment of the building that had recently been renovated and reinforced... to better withstand... a plane?
Imagine that -- "They hate our freedom" and yet spared Lady Liberty. This official conspiracy theory is coming apart at the seams. Toto, I get the feeling we are not talking about those terrorists anymore.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Per unit of power generated, wind and solar are much more dangerous than nuclear even if you factor in the meltdowns. What's going on is the same reason some people are afraid of flying. When a plane crashes it gets reported all over the world, with hours of coverage and video and pictures.. Meanwhile, most car crashes go unreported (did you know wind turbines killed more people in 2011 than Fukushima?). Thus creating the misperception that cars are safer, even though statistically planes are far safer.
New windows and a 2" layer of insulation on the outside of the house is on the agenda too, but it won't exactly be cheap to do with as many damn windows as we have.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Decommissioning a nuclear plant site (not counting proper long-term fuel-waste disposal) has estimated costs of $7 Billion per nuclear plant.
My experience with engineering projects tells me that "double it and add 30 (%)" ;=) is a good heuristic for determining how much it will really cost, since everything is usually low-balled to win contracts. So we could guess $15 billion per plant.
No one has really implemented a proper long-term high-grade nuclear waste storage facility yet, so capital and ongoing costs for that are unknown.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Or not appreciably so, even compared to coal. That they do so is a myth being promoted for short-term economic gain.
A major problem with natural gas infrastructure is the leakage of methane (unburned) in the extraction and transport process. If that leakage rate reaches 3%, natural gas energy is about equivalent to coal on greenhouse gas effects on the atmosphere.
So increased natural gas energy is not an effective solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the global warming process.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
As wind builds out, it will provide more electricity than is needed at times. Using that to produce methane provides a drop-in replacement for fossil methane. This is being included in carbon emissions reduction stratagems these days. http://arstechnica.com/science...
If you measure its negative impact only by lives lost... what about if you also include how much it actually ended up costing to clean up after an accident? The Three Mile Island incident didn't kill anyone, afaik, for instance, but remains on record as the worst one in US history (exceeded worldwide only by the Chernobyl meltdown, afaik).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Early solar adopters aren't bearing this cost because the power company charges them same amount for power whether or not the sun is shining - it's not really an issue until solar is a bigger power source. Germany IS already there, leading the way with solar and wind, and has been paying outrageous prices for electricity at certain moments when there is a crunch - up to 400 times the normal rate! But as you can imagine this is a huge financial incentive to create new solutions.
I question the study because the transition to solar will be gradual, and it's hard to say what more efficient means we might come up with to store power. If we had a smart grid that could communicate fluctuating electricity prices to devices, there might be a lot they could do.
New windows and a 2" layer of insulation on the outside of the house is on the agenda too
I recommend that you put off the solar till after you make the other improvements. Then you can reassess how much power you need. The cost of solar is falling, so there is no rush, unless a tax credit or subsidy is expiring.
The LED bulbs will give you the best ROI. At $2 each, they will pay for themselves in a few months if replacing incandescent bulbs, and within two years if replacing CFL. Unlike CFL, they work fine when cold, so you can replace your porch light, refrigerator light, etc.
PV (photovoltaic) won't benefit much from scale, but some of the solar thermal options that use mirrors for heat that's then used for steam generation certainly do.
Solar thermal is dead. There are some existing plants, but no new plants are being built anywhere in the world. The cost of solar PV has fallen, and solar thermal is no longer competitive. While the cost of solar PV is expected to continue to fall, the cost of solar thermal is not. It is basically just a bunch of pipes and mirrors, so there really isn't much to improve.
Solar thermal has the advantage that the hot molten salt can be stored, and used to generate steam at night, thus providing round-the-clock baseload power. But this is not a practical benefit, since the price of electricity almost everywhere is highest during the day when the sun is shining.
In which universe does (240*200)/(120*200) = 4 ???
Power only varies with the square of voltage for constant resistance, not with constant current.
Has anyone looked into storing solar PV energy by heating a medium and bringing it online outside of peak times for use?
This would make an excellent question for a high school physics test. Any student that cannot easily explain why this is really bad idea would flunk the class.
Heat is the graveyard of energy. It is easy to turn electricity into heat (just run it through a resistor) but difficult to go the other way. The round-trip efficiency of electricity-heat-electricity at molten salt temperatures would be about 30-40%. Almost any other form of energy storage would beat that by a mile.
They obviously left several stages out of their calculations.
From Nature.com
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The Brookings Institute guy is completely wrong, garbage in/garbage out AKA his inputs were all wrong.
Thoroughly debunked here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
And Here
http://www.nature.com/climate/...
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Straight conversion efficiency isn't the only factor that matters by a long shot, and might not even be the most important factor. Maximum charge cycles / lifespan strikes me as important. Cost of materials. Safety. Regulatory complications. A 10% loss in efficiency is probably worth it to go from 3,000 charge cycles to 10000.
fencepost
just a little off
Talk about a skewed, worthless study from Brookings. Garbage in, garbage out.
As Amory Lovins ably pointed out, its data is old. It also does not consider the entire cost of production, usage and cleanup. Cleanup costs count too! Are West Virginia, Ohio, British Columbia, Alberta, the Niger River basin, or Ecuador's rainforests, or the Gulf of Mexico just not in Charles Frank's back yard? I guess not. Screw people for living there, then. Do not the geopolitical considerations of an aggressive military foreign policy required to keep the oil flowing not count too? Screw those GIs and the people who live where they're sent in oil wars, too. Exxon's got to make a buck.
That's what externalization is. It means omitting key and pertinent parts of the picture and just sticking it to whomever is dealing with the consequences.
Solar panels are rapidly getting more efficient and cheaper to make, and you can put them directly on site where they're needed so you don't have to lose electricity to resistance across a far-flung grid with its necessary redundancies and overproduction, which are required in the event that a powerstation needs a maintenance cycle.
Someone's just keen to keep a bloody monopoly.
Because as we all know.. Batteries are free and last forever! Hallelujah.
Sigh.
Solar thermal still makes sense where the aim is to generate heat, rather than electricity. As a method of heating water (either for domestic or industrial purposes) it will always be tough to beat, boasting as it does a zero wastage conversion rate (because there is no conversion- you produce the desired end product straight away).
An awful lot of energy is expended to produce heating, so cutting out the electrical middle-man is no bad thing. There is also no reason why you can't distribute hot water via pipes from a central solar heating installation.
now that I've had experience with electric power, I wish that our main residential service was more than 120VAC for residential appliances, and that we weren't generally limited to just 240VAC, and then only for bigger things like appliances and tools.
So uh, rewire your house 240. You use all the same wiring, and change just the outlets and [most of the] breakers. Of course, you're going to have to buy all new stuff, except for stuff with external power supplies or the items which support dual input voltage, like most PCs. New tea kettles and waffle irons and so on.
What I'd really like would be three phase
Have you got a lathe the size of a truck that you'd like to be running slightly more efficiently, or...?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"