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The Health Benefits of Wind and Solar Exceed the Cost of All Subsidies (arstechnica.com)
New submitter TheCoroner writes: A paper in Nature Energy suggests that the benefits we receive from moving to renewables like wind and solar that reduce air pollution exceed the cost of the subsidies required to make them competitive with traditional fossil fuels. Ars Technica reports: "Berkeley environmental engineer Dev Millstein and his colleagues estimate that between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion. The benefits from wind work out to be more than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
But what if we make the world better for no reason?
But what about the health benefits of me driving a '69 Charger Hemi R/T? It's great for my stress level and has cured my erectile dysfunction.
You are welcome on my lawn.
is it just me or when you read an article like this one does your "This is a crock of sh*t" alarm go off?
Seems like about 1 million assumptions and taking estimates into facts and global averages into local and assuming 100 utilization of generation and zero pollution cost of manufacture and disposal of generation equipment. Plus probably more. I mean I love renewable energy but this article just smells bad despite all the clean renewable air.
$30B / 3k people = $10 million per person. That's a heck of a lot of economic benefit per person.
Indeed. It seems silly to say that preventing the premature death of some random person would bring $10M in economic benefit. That is far more than most people earn in a lifetime. It seems more reasonable to assume that most of the people dying from air pollution are sick or elderly, and would otherwise be an economic burden on society. So keeping them alive would be a cost not a savings.
Of course, it has long been known that if the negative externalities of coal generation were factored in it would be way more expensive than other generation forms. Did they also count the concerns about coal ash storage, which has caused drinking water problems and even a flood of radioactive, toxic sludge in the case of the Tennessee Valley?
It should come as a no surprise that the stuff that comes out of tailpipes is not good for you to breathe. It can and does kill people. People who want to kill themselves quickly, breathe a lot of it in a short amount of time. The rest of us are doing it over a longer period of time.
The sooner we switch away from a gas burning engine, the better.
and we create a better world for nothing?
Jokes aside, at least in the US nothing's going to change unless our electoral system does. Right now about 55,000 coal miners in swing states are holding our national elections hostage trying to hold onto jobs made increasingly irrelevant by fracking and cheap natural gas... With our electoral system it doesn't matter how you vote because we don't weigh each person's vote equally. Which was after all the entire point. It keeps change to a minimum and protects landowner's interests.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Even including the deaths from Chernobyl nuclear power has an impressive safety record. More people died from windmill and solar accidents per energy produced than nuclear.
Sure, there were a lot of accidental deaths in the early days of nuclear power but it's making a lot of safe energy now. Wind and solar combined make very little energy, and you compare that to worker deaths from electrocutions and falls and nuclear has them beat by an order of magnitude on safety. Nuclear is better for the environment too, less carbon produced per energy than wind or solar. Pretty sure nuclear kills fewer birds and bats too.
I just heard on the radio today of the health effects of the sound made by windmills. I think they called it "infrasound", it's the low frequency hum made by windmills that cause headaches, hearing loss, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Maybe that's a bunch of pseudoscience, I don't know.
I see a lot of comparisons of wind and solar to coal and natural gas. Why not compare it to nuclear? I know why. By comparison wind and solar is expensive, dirty, deadly, and did I mention expensive?
If these articles want to convince me that I need wind and solar power then they need to compare it to nuclear too. But they don't. Again, I know why.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Economist here, people are generally considered to have an intrinsic value. It's how we decide if we should put up a barrier on the edge of a road or not.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
Here's TFA:
"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said. "The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide." Jacobson calculated that if one small nuclear bomb exploded, the carbon emissions from the burning of a large city would be modest, but the death rate for one such event would be twice as large as the current vehicle air pollution death rate summed over 30 years.
So basically, to make Nuclear just fall off his chart, he assumes that building more powerplants will lead to nuclear war, and calculates how much stuff that will burn. Is that not completely absurd?
Basically, the gist of what he's saying about Nuclear is this: "We have to pretend like it's a bad idea, because if we don't, other countries will want to do it, and then they might build bombs. So, say it with me: Nuclear is a baad idea."
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US? And besides, what's more likely to cause war: Clean and cost-effective nuclear powerplants that the rest of the world will want to copy, or an energy shortage which sends us looking to secure fossil fuels? I think the latter.
Anyway, this calculating methodology is so incredibly bizarre that I suspect it's bought.
So I'm always hearing about how the climate science community is rigorous and weeds out bad work, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but it's been eight years and AFAICT this study was never retracted nor the lead scientist (Mark Z. Jacobson) confronted over it.
The cost of Fukushima alone is 187 billion dollars US. Where's that factor into the tired "Nuclear power forever!" rhetoric? Or the fact that one of the only remaining power companies with nuclear ambitions in the US has gone bankrupt for cost overruns. Or the fact that solar power can still improve dramatically for cost, and should able to beat the, entirely theoretical, ROI on nuclear within a decade. While the new "safe" nuclear power plants won't be even theoretically ready until then; and would actually be up and running years after that. Not too mention all the hundreds of millions needed in R&D for them could easily be spent elsewhere.
"Nuclear!" is just a fantasy people with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger effect concerning energy utilities yell to make themselves feel superior.
Since nuclear has such a wildly greater EROEI than wind and solar,
No, you're wrong. Here is the science. Short answer negative EROEI on nuclear.
why isn't this story about the trillions of lives and quintillions of dollars saved by nuclear over the last 50 years?
Because there isn't any story to tell.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
why isn't this story about the trillions of lives
Assuming you mean humans, there are only billions on the planet, not trillions.
The live cost of Chernobyl is estimated to be up to a million.
and quintillions of dollars saved by nuclear over the last 50 years?
Because nuclear power is the most expensive power we have? And always was?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Vehicles emit pollution that weighs roughly as much as the vehicle- every single year.
Electric cars emit tire rubber dust (same as ICE) and brake dust (but only 1/10th as much).
That's it. No micro particulates, no unburnt hydrocarbons, no leaing fluids, no CO2, CO, or Sulphur.
Any pollution created by the cars manufacture is going to be highly localized, containable, and filterable.
Any pollution created by electrical generation is going to be highly localized, containable, and filterable (even coal).
If your town has 1 million ICE vehicles in it on a given day, replacing them would remove 4 billion pounds of pollution per year from your town.
That's going to help many over 65, and anyone with breathing problems, probably cut cancer noticeably due to the reduction of PM10 combustion emissions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The so called Liquidators alone are more or less all dead:
At the peak of the cleanup, an estimated 600,000 workers were involved in tasks such as building waste repositories, water filtration systems, and the "sarcophagus" that entombs the rubble of Chernobyl
One advocacy group, the Chernobyl Union, says 90,000 of the 200,000 surviving liquidators have major long-term health problems.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
Sorry, no idea where you have your numbers from, but I saw several thousand dead bodies myself.
Keep in mind: the Liquidators where 17 - 19 year old recruits of the soviet army, they should be about 50 now, more than 2/3rds are dead.
And that does not even include the civil persons that died in the area around the plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The worst nuclear accident in history may have killed "up to" a million. Coal kills a million every year (air pollution in general kills 5.5M a year) in normal operation without an accident (and also has numerous accidents that kill thousands every year).
Coal only kills about 13,000 Americans a year these days, but is much worse in most of the world. For example, "researchers found that coal use shaves off 5.5 years of the average lifespan of a person living in northern China compared to the someone in the south." (source) In China alone Coal kills 670,000 a year.
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No, not really. You see, elderly people who're most at risk of dying due to the increased pollution are those with pre-existing respitory conditions that by themselves are already expensive to treat.. What do yu think is one of the driving factors of causing those people to have said conditions? Pollution. So by cutting down pollution, you reduce the amount of elderly people in need of care, thereby decreasing costs. And it's not as if only young people fall to these illnesses. They're at a heightened risk obviously, but inhaling pollutants does increase mortality risk in all age-groups.
Take London during the industrialization for example with its massive amounts of coal-smoke. There too, the vast majority of people outside factory and mine-workers that suffered and died of smog-induced illnesses were older people. By your logic it should have been fine to leave London covered in smog, because 'nah, it really just kills older folks they're going to die anyway'.
Or look at modern day Chinese megacities with pollution so bad, that in certain areas just going outside to breathe the air is equivalent to smoking 1-2 packs of cigarettes a day.. You think the chinese are interested in cutting down pollution en masse just because they wanna appear green, or because they've done that math and figured out that having an explosion of respitory illnesses will cost them a metric fuckton in lost years of employment as well as treatment costs?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
If you believe in any form of government then you believe in re-distributive taxation. The question from there is not the morality of such a thing, anyone who has agreed that government is necessary has already agreed to that. The real question is what money should be spent on.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
But what if we make the world better for no reason?
7 million dollars per death ? come on really?
In "macroeconomic terms," retired people continue to provide economic value to a society. For example, providing "free" child care services for their grandchildren (since typically now both parents must work to stay afloat) -- child care being one of the biggest expenses a working family can face. And that's just one example... retired folk frequently volunteer their time toward many different sorts of "economically invisible" endeavors. And, of course, they continue to be consumers, which gives us poor working folk something to do.
Just because retired people don't receive W2's from their corporate overlords doesn't mean they don't contribute to the economy.
If you don't like the subsidies for renewables, please also fight the subsidies for fossil fuels, such as free waste disposal. We're losing hundreds of billions a year just to health problems caused by fossil fuel pollution. Problems caused by climate change will just add to that hidden fee. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of my wealth being transferred to clean up someone else's problem, especially since they got -- and still are -- rich from making the problem in the first place.
Let's step away from Chernobyl for a second and get back to the implicit question: is nuclear power "safe"?
I think that is "begging the question". Before we ask whether nuclear technology is safe, we need to know whether its the technology we have to be worrying about or the organizations that are using it that are the problem.
I think it's the organizations that are using the technology that are the danger. That's a bit like the way everyone thinks they're a better than average driver; they are, on their best days. And that's how we judge ourselves, by how we are when we're at our best. But when you're talking about safety, you have to judge yourself by how you are on a bad day.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were old reactor designs that would be considered unacceptable by modern standards. And yet, in both cases the catastrophic failure can ultimately be traced to failures in organizational decision-making. Chernobyl failed because of a safety test that was compromise by pressure to minimize power delivery disruptions that eventually put a reactor that was outside its normal operating envelope in the hands of an operations shift that didn't have the expertise to handle it. Fukushima's failure can be traced to TEPCO's failure to respond to the information that the tsunami statistics under which the plant was designed grossly underestimated a hundred year tsunami; all they had to do was to stage portable power generation equipment on the high ground surrounding the plant, but instead they raised the on-site backup generators by a few inches -- in effect they made a token response, which showed they got the message but didn't take it seriously.
Look around at the crappy, semi-competent or corrupt companies you have to deal with. In a world with only a few reactors, you have some chance of making sure none of the companies running them would be like those. In a world where nuclear reactors are ubiquitous, you have to design them so you'd be comfortable with companies like Comcast or Wells-Fargo running them.
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That's the EPA's standard figure based on the average total contribution a person makes to the economy over the course of an entire lifetime. It's not just how much you pay him to drive the bus - it's all the money every business loses if he doesn't show up to drive the bus because their workers can't get to the factory.
And if there's a problem with that figure, it's that it's way out of date and hasn't been inflation adjusted since the study that produced it was done in the 1990s - the real figure from the same study would be a LOT higher now. But it remains the best studied, and most comprehensively an accurately calculated average financial value of a human life that exists in all of science.
There's another problem with it though - it doesn't calculate the emotional loss to family members when you die, the lost productivity to the economy for your funeral and the reduced productivity as they deal with the many difficulties of grieving, the bad impacts when a primary breadwinner dies and a formerly self-sufficient family is forced to use welfare to make ends meet or any of those things.
If you were to put a number on those losses, then even without inflation adjustment the number is probably low-balling it by at least 30%.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If you believe in any form of government then you believe in re-distributive taxation. The question from there is not the morality of such a thing, anyone who has agreed that government is necessary has already agreed to that. The real question is what money should be spent on.
But it doesn't have to all or nothing. For me the real question is how much money must be taken from those who work.
Even if a totalitarian State could theoretically direct my life better than I can (and all adults know it can't), I still don't want one.
I had a mommy and daddy when I was a child. I don't want that now. Many people want a totalitarian State to direct their lives, I don't.
That's not the same thing as some Mad Max Sudan. I just happen to think that the best government is the the one that provides for the LEAST amount of structure that helps us to live and work together, not the one that strives to tax and re-distribute as much as possible without an armed insurrection.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Followed your link, searched for EROEI (from your post), found this:
The energy return on energy investment (EROEI) is here defined as the ratio of the energy delivered to grid over the energy investments, both measured over the full cradle-to-grave (c2g) period. The energy return on energy investments of the world averaged nuclear energy systems are EROEI = 2-3 under the current conditions, but will decline over time when leaner uranium ores are to be exploited
https://www.stormsmith.nl/i12.html
Now, 2-3x isn't great, but it is more than 1.
Also, a chart from that source indicates that EROEIs of greater than 1 will last until after 2070.
https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/eroeitime070v2.jpeg
Perhaps I read the wrong part of your article, but it is also possible you were just hoping no one would follow your link.
This calculation is absolutely wrong. It vastly over-estimates the costs of Uranium mining and the energy cost of nuclear enrichment. You have to dig into a whole pile of stupid formulas to find it. This is forms a part of the anti-nuclear echo chamber.
EVERYTHING you do affects other people and it has the potential to harm them. Is it likely to harm them? Maybe, maybe not. I will note that you cannot harm someone in a way any greater than by aborting them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Grandma's "free child care" is anything but free. Grandma Social Security and Medicare account for %40 of the Federal Budget. Medicare alone costs $588 Billion a year, and please don't give me that line about them having paid their dues. You average retiree receives 3X the benefits of what they paid into the system. Grandma's benefits could easily cover Free Universal child care and then some
Sorry but your argument doesn't hold water considering that Germany pays twice the rate per kilowatt-hour while still maintaining a booming economy with healthy manufacturing base. The way they do this is simple: Efficiency, as price gets higher the incentives to get smart about waste and savings also go up. Even thou prices are double the average German household electric bill is some %8 lower then in the U.S
Sadly that sort of government depends on politicians with scruples and integrity (and also possibly unicorns).
Stupid sexy Flanders.