Aliso Canyon methane leak (photo Earthworks, December 2015)
Utitlity-scale wind and solar power are typically backed up on-site by gas peakers, or backed up indirectly by gas-fired power plants. These gas plants lead to significant greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane. So at what point does a renewable-plus-gas combination become worse for the climate than coal-fired power? Mike Conley and Tim Maloney, long-time members of the Thorium Energy Alliance, have calculated what they call a “Worth-It Treshold” that gives the answer. And they conclude as things stand, natural gas isn’t a bridge to a sustainable future.
“We need about 3,000 feet of altitude, we need flat land, we need 300 days of sunlight, and we need to be near a gas pipe. Because for all of these big utility-scale solar plants – whether it’s wind or solar – everybody is looking at gas as the supplementary fuel. The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are gas plants.” 1
– Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Environmental activist, Member of the board of Bright Source, developers of the Ivanpah Solar Station, Nevada, a 392 MW (peak) concentrated solar plant
Part One
Natural Gas – the polite term for methane
The methane leak in the Los Angeles suburb of Porter Ranch is America’s worst environmental disaster since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But even more troubling is the larger issue of “fugitive” methane, and what it means for our growing reliance on wind and solar energy.
Burning methane for energy produces about half the CO2 of coal, which is a good thing. But fugitive methane – the gas that leaks before it can be burned – is a powerful greenhouse gas, with 84X the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2.
The big idea behind wind and solar farms is to fight global warming by reducing greenhouse gases. But since most of a farm’s power is actually generated by gas, the rationale for a massive build-out of utility-scale wind and solar hinges on the issue of fugitive methane.
That rationale just had a major meltdown at Porter Ranch.
But it’s natural . . .
Natural gas is about 90% methane, so when you see all those upbeat natural gas ads, that’s what they’re talking about – burning methane for fuel.
The nice thing about methane is that it’s a lot cleaner than coal. Coal toxins are legendary, plus there’s all that CO2. For the same amount of energy, burning methane releases about half the CO2, along with some water vapor. And that’s it.
That makes methane the back-up fuel of choice for renewable energy. Whenever wind and solar fail to deliver (which is most of the time), a gas turbine kicks in to make up the difference.
Like anything else in nature, wind and sunshine ebb and flow, come and go. And it’s the unreliability of these renewable fuels2 that lowers the Capacity Factor (CF) of a typical U.S. solar farm to about 23%3 of its Peak Capacity, which is the maximum power a farm can generate under ideal conditions.
To fill the yawning gap between the real and the ideal, methane must generate most of the farm’s “nameplate” power: A one-gigawatt solar farm with a 23% CF is actually a 770-megawatt gas plant enhanced by 230 megawatts of sunshine.
So with all due respect to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he was misstating the case. Because wind and sunshine are the supplementary fuels, not the gas.
The Worth-It Threshold
Wind and solar farms, and stand-alone gas plants, have what we call a Worth-It Threshold: Beyond a certain leak rate, you might as well be burning coal for all the good it’ll do you (global-warming-wise, not total-pollution-wise.)
The Worth-It Threshold isn’t an abrupt borderline between worth-it and not-worth-it, it’s the point where it’s totally not worth it. A third of the way there means that a third of the green energy benefits are gone.
The problem is, the average wind or solar farm generates carbon-free power in such a narrow margin of utility that even if the optimistic 1.6% national leak rate claimed by the gas industry is true, it’s enough to erode nearly half of the climate-saving advantages the ratepayers hoped to see.
We’ve developed two simple formulas to quickly determine if a renewables farm, or a gas plant, is as bad for global warming as coal. For a gas plant, we used the fuel efficiency of the turbine and the leak rate of the infrastructure fueling the plant. For gas-backed wind and solar, we used the farm’s Capacity Factor, the efficiency of the back-up turbine, and the leak rate. This is what we found:
The Worth-It Threshold is the point where a gas-backed wind or solar farm, or a “stand-alone” gas power plant, is as bad for global warming as a coal plant. © Michael Sean Conley and Timothy Maloney
To determine the Worth-It Threshold of a gas-backed wind or solar farm, find the farm’s Capacity Factor (CF) on the horizontal axis (the bottom of the chart.) Go straight up to the Threshold line, then straight across to the left side of the chart. The leak rate at that point on the vertical axis is the farm’s Worth-It Threshold.
The Worth-It Threshold of a CCGT power plant (Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine) is typically 4%, based on 45% of the CO2 emissions rate from an equivalent coal-fired plant. If the emissions of the gas plant are substantially different, use Maloney’s First Formula to determine the actual Threshold.
An Inconvenient Truth 2.0
As promising as renewables may seem, the harsh reality is that gas-backed wind and solar are only marginally effective in the fight against global warming. And the narrow margin in which they operate can be reduced, cancelled, or even reversed by a minor leak in a complex infrastructure of wells, pipelines and storage facilities that is completely beyond the control of the renewables industry.
If that seems like we’re stepping on everyone’s Green Dream, then please understand that when it gets right down to it, Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s favorite technology.
She doesn’t care if some people think that nuclear power is awesome, or if others think it’s the work of the devil. And she doesn’t care if some people think that global warming is settled science, or if others think that it’s an anti-capitalist con game concocted by liberal academics angling for grant money.
She frankly doesn’t care what anyone thinks, hopes, or believes. All she cares about is objective reality, quantified by math and explored by science, both disciplines guided by a diligent respect for the true nature of things.
Thin ice in a warming world
If the purpose of renewables is to reduce our impact on global warming, then our formulas clearly show that the entire effort is skating on thin ice.
Energy is the lifeblood of civilization, the master commodity that underlies all economic activity. And as pleasant as the thought may be to power a global civilization with the capricious whims of Mother Nature, sustainable modern life requires terawatts – not megawatts, not gigawatts, but terawatts – of cheap, reliable, carbon-free and controllable baseload power. There is no other choice.
To be anything more than green ornaments of the fossil fuel industry, wind and solar companies will have to:
(a) Overbuild by at least 3X (and probably 6X or more) the thousands of farms they envision, on tens of thousands of square miles, with the hope that all those farms can eventually back each other up4 (and the stability of the grid does not bode well for this approach5), or
(b) Overbuild by 3X, while also constructing hundreds of Hoover Dam-sized “pumped-hydro” mass energy storage systems with trillions of cubic meters of water to back up the farms. In the middle of a biblical drought.
The road to 100% renewables runs through Porter Ranch
An all-renewables national infrastructure would cost tens of trillions of dollars (that’s trillions with a T), plus about 30,000 square miles of land (that’s miles, not acres.) Imagine the entire state of South Carolina carpeted by solar farms. And the equipment would have to be replaced every 20 years, if it lasts that long.
We’re not waxing hyperbolic – the scale of a self-supporting, interdependent, renewable energy buildout really is that enormous.6 And note that we said “interdependent,” not independent: Without gas backup, becalmed wind farms in North Dakota will have to rely on solar farms in sunny Arizona. Unless it’s cloudy.
And during the several decades it would take to get there, we’d have to rely on gas backup for wind and solar, the marginal utility of which is detailed below.
In case you think we’re overselling our point, here’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. again:
“We need about 3,000 feet of altitude, we need flat land, we need 300 days of sunlight, and we need to be near a gas pipe. Because for all of these big utility-scale solar plants – whether it’s wind or solar – everybody is looking at gas as the supplementary fuel. The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are gas plants.”
Thank you, sir. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
PART TWO
In which we use Maloney’s First and Second Formulas to demonstrate the marginal utility of methane in the fight against global warming. (It ain’t pretty . . .)
The bridge fuel to nowhere
Natural gas is touted as the carbon fuel that can help the world transition to a carbon-free energy paradigm, the friendly fossil fuel that’s working its more unsavory relatives out of a job. The “bridge fuel” that can take us to a new world.
The big selling point of renewables is carbon-free power, but their big drawback is unreliability. To overcome this handicap, renewables need backup power, until that hoped-for day in the distant future when enough farms in enough regions produce enough excess energy to back each other up.
Coal is just as reliable as natural gas, but it’s universally understood to be bad for our health7 and bad for the environment. Coal plants are notorious for pumping out megatons of CO2, along with a host of toxins like mercury, arsenic, cadmium, sulfur and lead. Carbon dioxide isn’t a toxin, but just like drinking two gallons of water in one sitting, too much of a good thing isn’t a good idea.
Nuclear is even more reliable than coal, and it’s carbon-free, but renewable energy fans are convinced that in spite of its many advantages, nuclear comes with its own special kind of awful.
We beg to differ. While contamination is serious stuff, fear and paranoia are the two most common forms of radiation sickness.8 (For a layman’s overview of nuclear power, see: Power to the Planet 9, and Thorium Nuclear Slideshow.10)
Hydroelectric is reliable and carbon-free, but in the last century alone hundreds of thousands have died from dam failures11 and millions more were displaced by dam construction.12 Aside from those two drawbacks, hydro also has a built-in limit to growth: You can’t build more rivers. So that leaves methane.
But methane is such a potent greenhouse gas that even a tiny leak can make a gas-backed wind or solar farm just as bad – or worse – than a coal plant, when it comes to global warming. But at least renewables farms don’t kick out toxins . . .
Unless you count all the toxins involved in manufacturing solar panels,13 or the environmental horrors of mining neodymium for wind turbine generators.14
“Natural gas. It’s hot stuff”
That’s what the GE ads keep telling us. And their new gas turbines are mighty impressive beasts. The 7HA “Harriet” is huge, efficient, and relatively cheap, a state-of-the-art behemoth that can be delivered by rail and configured as a “CCGT.” (Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine: A large turbine that burns methane to produce power, combined with a steam turbine to generate more power from its hot exhaust, boosting total fuel efficiency.)
A complete CCGT power plant with two Harriets was just built in Pennsylvania for $592 Million, delivering 1,029 MW of baseload power. That’s 57¢ per “installed watt,” meaning the price per watt of something that generates X amount of watts.15
In the U.S., a new coal plant installs for about $2 a watt. And that’s a regular coal plant, not a “clean coal” plant (which, many will argue, is a contradiction in terms.) A Generation-IV Molten Salt Reactor is predicted to cost even less than a regular coal plant.16 But even so, they won’t be as cheap as a CCGT system.
Gas turbines can’t be beat when it comes to the price per installed watt, and that’s one big reason why America’s shale oil and gas industry is enjoying a massive expansion. The holy grail of domestic energy independence finally seems to be in reach, thanks to methane, the not-so-awful bridge fuel that can take us to a clean, green future.
The renewables master plan goes something like this:
If we just keep building lots and lots of wind and solar farms with methane training wheels, we’ll eventually have a nationwide interdependent network of renewable power plants. And if we overbuild the farms by 3X or more, they’ll produce enough excess energy to back each other up, and we can even drop the training wheels. Problem solved! (Adios, Mr. Methane, and thanks for the help)
But there’s a catch . . .
Any gas is an escape artist, and methane is no exception. And with such a strong GWP (Global Warming Potential), a leaky infrastructure can easily cancel whatever green energy advantage a gas-backed renewables farm, or a gas power plant, is supposed to provide.
Like we said, natural gas is about 90% methane, and methane (CH4) is a tiny little critter – a carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms attached. In spite of its size, the molecule punches far above its weight: Pound for pound (actually, we’ll be calculating in kilograms) methane has 84X the GWP of CO2. But if it makes you feel any better, it mellows out to “only” 28X after the first 20 years.17
Nerd notes:
Technically, a CO2 molecule has more mass than a CH4 molecule, as distinct from more weight. Weight is the pull of gravity on mass, which is why the stuff we send to Mars weighs less there than it does on Earth. That’s why scientists prefer to use mass instead of weight. But since our calculations are for the same planet, we’d rather use the more common term.
Sometimes you’ll see a GWP of 86X for methane, instead of 84. Here’s why: When it floats around in the atmosphere retaining infrared energy (heat), the global warming that methane causes will also cause the planet’s natural carbon sinks to absorb less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “Carbon sinks” are things that absorb CO2, such as the oceans and land-based plant life, and the warmer it is the less efficient the sinks are. This add-on effect raises methane’s GWP from 84 to 86X, but we’ll be using the more conservative number.
“Infrared energy” is the heat that radiates from the earth’s surface after it’s been warmed by the sun. “Greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere capture and retain this energy. Some do it more effectively than others, and different gases do their thing for different lengths of time. Carbon dioxide remains active in the atmosphere for centuries, but in the short term methane is far more powerful.
And the short term may be all the time we have to prevent the worst of global warming. Since the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, the billions of tons of methane hydrate frozen in the ocean and in Arctic lakes (“calthrate ice”) is starting to bubble to the surface, and the permafrost is leaking methane as well.18 So if you think a leaking gas pipe is a problem, just wait . . .
But getting back to the here and now: The problem with fugitive methane is that any wind or solar farm backed by gas, or any stand-alone gas power plant, will exceed its Worth-It Threshold if the well-to-wheels infrastructure supplying fuel to the turbine leaks by more than a few percent.
The “well-to-wheels infrastructure” is an oil industry term that covers everything from the well in the field to the spinning wheels of a vehicle, including electric vehicles charged by fossil-fuel power plants. The term encompasses the wellhead, the pipeline, railcars, trucks, storage tanks, service stations, vehicle gas tanks – the works. Whatever’s needed to get the stuff out of the ground and into a combustion chamber. And any of them can leak, at any time.
Leakage
In the U.S., fugitive methane leaks range from 1 to 9%.19 Modern-era leakage has more than doubled our atmospheric methane from an estimated pre-industrial 750 parts per billion to about 1,800 ppb today.20
And the leaks don’t just come from operating wells. They can happen anywhere in the infrastructure.21 The Aliso Canyon storage well in Porter Ranch is only one infamous example. Infamous but not unusual, because there are over 40022 such storage sites in the U.S. under what’s been termed “shoddy” supervision.23
Our formulas demonstrate that any gas infrastructure with a leak above 4% will render most gas-backed wind or solar farms, or state-of-the-art CCGT plants, as bad for global warming as a coal plant. And leaks approaching 8% will make even the highest-performing wind farms a threat to the climate as well.
One disaster like Porter Ranch, and there goes an entire region’s green energy goals, for months or years on end. Switching to methane for cleaner power generation, or using it to back up renewables, can end up being little more than a feel-good gesture, like bailing out the Titanic with a coffee cup.
Scrupulously maintaining the integrity of an entire national methane infrastructure is hard enough as it is. But banking on it as a bridge to a clean, green world could be riskier than betting the farm. We could be betting the planet.
But wait! There’s less!
Remember how we said that burning methane for energy produces about half the CO2of coal? About was the operative word in that sentence, because “simple-cycle peakers” are much less energy efficient than the big CCGTs.
“Peaker” is industry slang for a simple-cycle gas turbine, meaning there’s no combined-cycle steam system to exploit its hot exhaust. A peaker can be quickly started and ramped up (accelerated) to top speed, and just as quickly ramped back down to idle mode, or powered off until it’s needed again.
The term comes from using these specially-built turbines to kick into action and ramp up, sometimes within minutes, to generate power for unexpected peak loads on the grid. Like, say, when there’s a freeway chase with a dozen cop cars and helicopters, and everyone turns on their TV. No grid operators can anticipate stuff like that, so they have peakers on stand-by. Think of them as gas-guzzling hot rods, ready to burn rubber on a moment’s notice.
A Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine, on the other hand, is like a fuel-efficient touring sedan on cruise control, a gas-sipper that’s made for the long haul. They’re built for comfort, they ain’t built for speed. CCGTs can take hours to ramp up to full power, and then they can hum along like that for months on end.
Unfortunately, the gas-guzzling peakers are the only kind of turbines nimble enough to back up the variable energy of wind and solar. If a CCGT is used to back up a renewables farm, it’s operated in simple-cycle mode, which essentially turns it into a big peaker – a Winnebago-sized sports car.
When operated as a true combined-cycle system, a cruise-control CCGT emits 45% of coal’s CO2, while a hot-rod peaker emits about 60%.24 Which means that a typical peaker-backed wind or solar farm has the potential to exceed the Worth-It Threshold even easier than a stand-alone, fuel-efficient CCGT.
A few words before we begin
We used the best numbers we could find for the continental U.S. They might need to be adjusted for another country, or if further research alters any of the numbers we used. But in either case, the formulas themselves are entirely valid.
For example, burning U.S. coal to generate a megawatt-hour will, on average, emit about 900 kilograms of CO2.25 Some regions use cleaner coal and some use dirtier coal, but no biggie – just tweak the number and you’re good to go.
The idea behind both formulas is real simple: We determine the best-case scenario, which is the “CO2 avoided” by using methane instead of coal, and we divide that by the worst-case scenario, which is the “CO2-equivalent” if all the methane we planned to use leaks before we can burn it as fuel.
Dividing the best case by the worst case gives us a leak percentage, which we call the Worth-It Threshold. Any leaks approaching or exceeding that threshold make the switch from a coal plant to a CCGT, or from a coal plant to gas-backed wind or solar, a useless gesture in the fight against global warming.
The Worth-It Threshold for any CCGT gas plant
Trigger warning: A little bit of math, but it’s well worth it. Because instead of just taking our word for it, or buying into someone else’s contrary opinion, you’ll know exactly how we reached our rather sobering conclusions.
First, let’s look at coal vs. a CCGT, using:
Maloney’s First Formula
To generate one megawatt-hour with less Global Warming Potential than coal, the fugitive methane rate of the infrastructure fueling a CCGT plant must not exceed:
(900 − 405) ÷ (84 × 147) = 0.040 = 4%
Relax! This is an easy formula. But go find a pencil, you’ll need it. (We’ll wait . . .)
Alrighty, then: First, look at the numbers on the left side of the formula, before the division sign. To produce one megawatt-hour (one megawatt of power for a period of one hour), a coal plant emits about 900 kgs (kilograms) of CO2 (the exact emissions depend on coal quality.) To produce that same megawatt-hour, a methane-burning CCGT plant emits 45% of that, or 405 kgs of CO2.
Now look at the numbers on the right side of the formula, between the division sign and the first equal sign. Methane has 84 times the GWP of CO2, and a CCGT power plant burns 147 kgs of methane to generate one megawatt-hour. (Just like coal can vary in quality, the percent of methane in natural gas can vary as well, but it’s usually around 90%.)
Let’s click the pause button
When the CCGT burns 147 kgs of methane, 405 kgs of CO2 comes out the chimney . . .
That seems like a discrepancy, doesn’t it? Until you remember that we have to add oxygen from the atmosphere (an “air-fuel mixture”) to burn the fuel. And oxygen weighs a lot more than the hydrogen in the methane molecule (CH4.)
When a CH4 molecule goes into the turbine, it meets up with two oxygen molecules in the combustion chamber. O2 molecules contain two oxygen atoms – they usually travel in pairs. This air-fuel mixture “combusts” (gets burned), causing the three molecules to break apart, which gives us nine individual atoms.
The carbon atom (C) from the methane links up with two of the oxygen atoms (O) to form one CO2 molecule, while the four hydrogen atoms (H) from the methane link up with the other two oxygen atoms to form two molecules of water vapor (two H2O’s.)
Forming these three new molecules releases a lot more energy than the heat that broke the old ones apart, which is called an “exothermic” reaction. Exploiting the heat in carbon fuel is the science trick that changed the world.
So there you have it, as simple as Tinker Toys: One methane molecule goes in, combusts with air, new molecules are formed and energy is produced. And one carbon dioxide molecule comes out the chimney, along with two water molecules. But for our purposes, just follow the carbon:
One carbon atom goes into the combustion chamber with four hydrogen atoms attached (CH4), and comes out with two oxygen atoms attached (CO2). And since oxygen is much heavier than hydrogen, the CO2 molecule winds up being much heavier than the CH4 molecule that went in – 2.75X heavier, to be exact.
And that’s why you emit 405 kilograms of CO2 when you burn 147 kilograms of methane, because 147 × 2.75 = 405.
Back to the left side: Why do we subtract the 405 kgs of CO2 from the 900 kgs of CO2? Because that gives us the amount of CO2 that we didn’t put in the atmosphere by burning methane instead of burning coal. Which is the main reason we want to switch to a cleaner fuel – to avoid emitting so much CO2.
So here’s the calculation: 900 − 405 = 495 kgs of CO2 avoided by using methane. That’s our “best-case scenario”: We avoided all that CO2 by switching from coal to methane. Keep the 495 for the final step (we told you to get a pencil!)
On the right side, we have the GWP of methane, which is 84 times that of CO2. And we multiply that by 147, which is the kgs of methane the CCGT needs to produce a megawatt-hour.
Why are we multiplying those together? Because we want to know how much CO2those 147 kgs of methane are equivalent to (global-warming-wise), if they all leaked out before we can use them as fuel.
So 84 × 147 kgs = 12,348 kgs of CO2 equivalent. That’s our “worst-case scenario”: We switched to methane, and it all leaked out! Keep the 12,348 for the final step.
Dividing the best-case scenario (the CO2 avoided) by the worst-case scenario (the CO2-equivalent if all the methane leaked out) gives us the Worth-It Threshold for a CCGT:
495 ÷ 12,348 = 0.040 = 4.0%
Translation: To generate one megawatt-hour, 495 kgs of CO2 emissions can be avoided by burning methane in a CCGT instead of burning coal in a coal plant. However, since methane has 84X the GWP of CO2, the equivalent of 12,348 kgs of CO2 will be emitted if all the methane needed to generate that megawatt-hour leaks from the gas infrastructure instead of being burned in the CCGT.
Bottom line: If the fugitive methane from a gas infrastructure averages more than 4%, then generating power with any CCGTs fueled by that gas infrastructure will cause more global warming than generating the same power with coal plants.
The Worth-It Threshold for any gas-backed renewables farm
Let’s say your community is powered by a nasty old coal plant. A green energy company blows into town and proposes to replace it with a 1 GW (gigawatt) gas-backed solar farm: Sixteen million panels on 20 square miles of land (!) that will generate an average capacity of 23%. Which is a pretty good Capacity Factor (CF) for the American Southwest (we just decided you live in California.)
With a CF of 23%, this 1-GW farm will average 230 MW of solar energy over the course of a year, and a gas peaker will back it up with 770 MW for the full 1-GW rating. (Which means that it’s actually a gas plant, augmented by solar. But anyway . . .)
So how do you decide if this multi-billion dollar investment would be a good move in the fight against global warming? All you need is three things:
The estimated CF of the solar farm, the fugitive methane rate of the gas infrastructure that would fuel the farm’s turbine, and the following formula:
Maloney’s Second Formula
Where CF is Capacity Factor, to generate one megawatt-hour with less Global Warming Potential than coal, the fugitive methane rate of the infrastructure fueling a simple-cycle gas turbine backing a renewables plant must not exceed:
{ 900 − [ (1 − CF) × 540 ] } ÷ { 84 × [ (1 − CF) × 196 ] } = ?
We know, we know – it’s more complex than the first formula. But you got through that one relatively intact, didn’t you? This is what the numbers represent:
In the generation of a megawatt-hour, coal emits 900 kgs of CO2, while a hot-rod peaker emits 540 kgs. The 84 of course is the GWP of methane, and 196 is the kgs of methane a peaker burns while generating a megawatt-hour.
Working the Second Formula
The way to do a formula like this is to work each side from the inside out, then do the final calculation with the numbers you got from each side.
The Capacity Factor of the proposed farm is 0.23, so starting on the inside of the left side, we do the ( ) part first: (1 − 0.23) = 0.77 (yes, you can use a calculator.)
Then we do the [ ] part: [0.77 × 540] = 416. And then we do the { } part: {900 − 416} = 484 kgs of CO2 avoided. Save that number for the final step.
On the right side, we also start with the ( ) part: (1 − 0.23) = 0.77. Then we do the [ ] part: [0.77 × 196] = 151. And then the { } part:
{84 × 151} = 12,684 of CO2 equivalent.
Divide the left side by the right side to get the Worth-It Threshold.
Plugging in the farm’s 0.23 Capacity Factor and doing the math, we get this:
484 ÷ 12,684 = 0.038 = 3.8%
Bottom line: If the methane leak rate of the gas infrastructure that will fuel the farm’s turbine exceeds 3.8%, then you might as well just keep on burning coal for all the global warming good it’ll do you. (Again, we’re just talking global-warming-wise, not total-pollution-wise. Coal is a lot dirtier than methane.)
But all in all, the numbers are pretty pathetic, huh? Especially when some of the most recent measurements of fugitive methane in the U.S. are up to 9%.
Here’s why the Second Formula works
Maloney’s Second Formula compares generating a megawatt-hour (MW-hr) with a renewables farm backed by a peaker, versus generating a MW-hr with a coal plant.
In this example, it’s a solar farm with a CF of 0.23. That means the panels produce, over the course of a year, an average of 23% of the full capacity of the farm, which is rated at one gigawatt (1 GW, or 1,000 megawatts.)
Let’s start with the inside of the left half of the formula:
The (1 − 0.23) calculation gives us the percentage of power the peaker has to generate, to help the solar farm produce its advertised 1-GW output. With a 0.23 Capacity Factor, the peaker winds up doing 77% of the work: (1 − 0.23) = 0.77.
The 540 represents the kilograms of CO2 emitted by a peaker generating one full MW-hr.26 Remember, a simple-cycle peaker is a lot less fuel efficient than a CCGT, whose emissions per MW-hr are only 405 kgs of CO2.
The [0.77 × 540] = 416 calculation gives us the kilograms of CO2 the peaker emits while generating 0.77 MW-hrs.
Next, we do the { } calculation, where we subtract the peaker’s emissions of 416 kgs of CO2 while generating 0.77 MW-hrs, from coal’s emissions of 900 kgs while generating an entire MW-hr: {900 − 416} = 484 kgs of CO2 avoided.
Now why did we do that? At first blush, it looks like we’re cheating. But think it through: We’re comparing the emissions of the entire solar farm, versus the emissions of a coal plant, in the generation of one MW-hr. And just like we do in the First Formula, we’re looking for the total amount of avoided CO2.
Since the solar panels are producing 23% of the farm’s power, the peaker’s emissions come from generating the other 77%, not from generating the entire MW-hr. And since the solar panel energy is emissions-free, the “total emissions comparison” between the solar farm and a coal plant comes down to the solar farm’s peaker emissions @ 0.77 MW-hrs vs. a coal plant’s emissions @ 1 MW-hr.
So our best-case emissions scenario for a 1-GW solar farm with a 23% capacity factor is the CO2 avoidance of its peaker combined with the zero CO2 emissions of its panels, which comes to 484 kg / MW-hr.
Like the First Formula, the right side of the Second Formula determines the worst-case scenario: The CO2-equivalent emissions if all the methane the peaker needs to generate 0.77 MW-hrs leaks out before it’s used as fuel. Note that the solar panels would still be generating their carbon-free 0.23 MW-hrs, although the leak would wipe out the CO2 avoidance of the panels. And then some.
On the right side, we also have the percentage of the solar farm’s total energy that the peaker has to generate: (1 − 0.23) = 0.77. We multiply the 0.77 by 19627, which is the kilograms of methane a peaker would use to generate a full MW-hr: [0.77 × 196] = 151 kgs. This gives us the methane a peaker burns to generate 0.77 MW-hrs.
In a worst-case scenario, all the methane would leak before we can use it as fuel. Since methane has 84X the GWP of CO2, we do this calculation: {84 × 151} = 12,684 kgs of CO2-equivalent.
And just like the First Formula, we divide the best-case scenario by the worst-case scenario to arrive at the Worth-It Threshold:
484 ÷ 12,684 = 0.038 = 3.8%.
Applying the Second Formula to the real world
You can determine the Worth-It Threshold for the peaker all by its lonesome.
Let’s say it’s nighttime. The solar panels aren’t making any juice and the peaker’s doing all the work. What leak rate would make the peaker as bad as coal? To find out, run the Second Formula with the Capacity Factor at zero. Answer: 2.2%
Pitiful. But let’s say the CF of the solar farm is an impressive 30%. Answer: 4.5%
That’s better. Let’s try it at 40% CF. Answer: 5.8%
Pretty good. Now let’s say you’re living in Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, and you set up a wind farm where the CF is a mind-blowing 50%. What leak rate would make your ultra-high-performance 1-GW wind farm useless for fighting global warming? Answer: 7.7%
Granted, that’s a substantial improvement, but all in all it’s still a dicey proposition, considering the thorny issue of fugitive methane. Not a lot of wiggle room for a multi-billion dollar investment covering dozens of square miles, that could end up doing bupkis for clean energy.
This is especially true if long-term wind patterns shift or calm down – just two of the many consequences anticipated with climate change. And since the EROEI of a wind farm (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) is already so meager28, relocating the farm to catch the wind would be totally out of the question.
And, since dismantling fees are rarely factored into the cost of a wind farm, yet another consequence of climate change may come to pass: Thousands of rusty, abandoned pinwheels the size of Boeing 747s littering the American landscape29.
Three steps forward and one step back
The Aliso Canyon storage well in the Los Angeles suburb of Porter Ranch leaked for nearly four months, from October 23, 2015 till February 11, 2016. California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) concluded that the leak totaled 94,000 metric tons, or 94 million kilograms. That’s an average of 35,300 kgs / hr.30 (Some sources say it’s over 100 million kgs, but we’ll use the conservative number from CARB.)
Before Porter Ranch, CARB determined that California’s statewide infrastructure leak rate was 29,000 kgs / hr. 31 Which means Porter Ranch more than doubled the leak rate – just like that.
(29,000 + 35,300) = 64,300. (64,300 ÷ 29,000) = 2.2 times
We’ve determined that California’s “ongoing” fugitive methane rate (meaning “without Porter Ranch”) is already one-third of the way to the Worth-It Thresholds for the average gas-backed wind and solar farms, and for any CCGT power plants. No matter how well they perform, the state’s leak rate is a handicap that wipes out a significant part of their green energy advantage.
But don’t take our word for it. Let’s run the numbers (get your pencil . . .)
A narrow margin of utility
The handicap imposed on any state’s methane-generated electricity can be found by dividing the state’s total methane leak by its total methane consumption.
Like we said, California’s fugitive methane rate, without Porter Ranch, is 29,000 kilograms / hour. At 8,760 hours a year, that’s: 254 Million kgs methane / year.
Now we have to find their total methane consumption. California’s Energy Almanac tells us that in 2014, they used 121,934 GW-hrs of methane-generated electricity.32That’s a good place to start, but there’s no breakdown of how much power came from CCGTs and how much came from peakers, in their traditional role as fast responders to the sudden demands of the grid.
To be more than fair, we’ll calculate a “weighted average” of fuel consumption, based on 80% CCGT generation and 20% peaker generation. If you recall, a CCGT uses 147 kgs of methane to generate a megawatt-hour, and a peaker uses 196 kgs. The 80 / 20 weighted average comes to: 156.8 kgs / MW-hr.
(0.80 × 147) + (0.20 × 196) = 156.8
And since 1,000 megawatts equals one gigawatt, we multiply by 1,000 to get the fuel needed to generate one gigawatt-hour: 156,800 kgs methane / GW-hr.
To get the total methane consumption, we multiply the fuel rate by the amount of energy produced, and get: 19.1 Billion kgs methane / year.
(156,800 kgs / GW-hr) × (121,934 GW-hrs generated) =
19.1 Billion kgs fuel / year
Now we have the two numbers we need: They’re using 19.1 Billion kgs of methane / year to generate electricity, and they’re leaking another 254 Million kgs / year (again, without factoring in Porter Ranch). Which means that California’s ongoing statewide fugitive methane rate is: 1.3%
254 Million (leaked) ÷ 19.1 Billion (used) = 0.013 = 1.3%
That’s a significant handicap for every gas-backed wind or solar farm, or CCGT, in the entire state: 1.3% is a bit more than one-third of a typical wind and solar farm’s Worth-It Threshold of 3.8%, and a bit less than one-third of a CCGT’s Worth-It Threshold of 4.0%.
And that’s in a bellwether state at the forefront of renewable energy, with strict air quality standards and a lower leak rate than the rest of the nation.
If Porter Ranch leaked a total of 94 million kgs, and if California’s yearly leak is another 254 million kgs, that’s a grand total of 348 million kgs for the year. Which makes their leak rate, with Porter Ranch factored in, downright dismal: 1.8%
348 Million (leaked) ÷ 19.1 Billion (used) = 0.018 = 1.8%
That’s almost halfway to the Worth-It Thresholds, which is a bad way to start the year. But now that Porter Ranch is plugged, just one-third of California’s climate-saving efforts are going down the drain again, instead of almost half.
So everything’s back to normal in the Golden State, which should calm the nerves of the anti-nuclear folks in Sacramento. Particularly since they placed all their bets on gas in the wake of Fukushima, and shut down the two reactors at San Onofre, which were generating more power than Hoover Dam.33 They now intend to shut down the Diablo Canyon reactors as well.34
That’s two Hoover Dam’s worth of carbon-free power, one gone and one under threat. San Onofre was shuttered in January 2012, and by year’s end, the final tally of California’s methane consumption had jumped by 16%.35
It gets worse
As recently measured by the EPA, the nationwide fugitive methane rate averages 2.3%, with leaks ranging from 1% to 9%. NOAA reports some leaks at 4%, the University of Colorado reports that the Uinta Basin in Idaho is leaking at 9%, and a Cornell researcher says the total fugitive methane leak over the life of a typical gas well is 3.6 to 7.9%. In spite of these troubling reports, the gas industry assures us that the national average is 1.6%.36
So the numbers are all over the map. But even if we accept the industry’s optimistic number, it imposes a handicap on every single gas-backed renewable farm or CCGT in the country. For the average farm or a CCGT, the handicap works out to around 40ish%:
(1.6 ÷ 3.8 = 0.42) (1.6 ÷ 4.0 = 0.40)
And that’s without any Porter Ranch “meltdowns.”
And as we mentioned, there are over 400 storage facilities like Porter Ranch scattered across the nation. Most are in rural areas, so they don’t catch the public’s attention. But Porter Ranch is a well-to-do community in one of the largest cities in the nation, a media hub with an environmentally conscious slant.
So now fugitive methane is a thing. Which is good – public awareness is the first step toward effective change. But even in the wake of the Porter Ranch disaster, most people still don’t realize that it was the tip of a very large iceberg.
Everything’s bigger in Texas
The Barnett Shale Formation in north-central Texas produces about 8% of America’s methane, and is thought to be the largest onshore gas field in the nation. This underground treasure trove fans out westward from Dallas/Ft. Worth into the windswept prairie. The deposits of natural gas are held in “tight” geologic formations, but have now been unlocked with fracking technology. 37
In spite of the industry’s best efforts, Barnett has an ongoing leak rate of 76,000 kgs / hr. That’s more than twice the average leak rate at Porter Ranch:
76,000 (Barnett leak / hr) ÷ 35,300 (Porter Ranch leak / hr) = 2.15
Even so, the ongoing Barnett leak isn’t regarded as a disaster like Porter Ranch was. But that’s because nobody really notices – the region is sparsely populated, and unlike the gas stored at Porter Ranch, methane doesn’t come out of the ground scented with mercaptan. No, the Barnett leak is just the cost of doing business. Goes with the territory, like breaking eggs to make omelets . . .
Even though it’s more than two Porter Ranches that never gets plugged. And if that sounds awful, it is. But that ain’t the half of it. Not by a long shot.
From sea to shining sea
The yearly methane leak rate for the continental U.S. is estimated to be about 7.3 Billion kgs / year.38 As you recall, the conservative estimate of the total leaked at Porter Ranch is 94 Million kgs. So we can make a rough calculation as follows:
7.3 Billion ÷ 94 Million = 77ish
Think of it: More than 70 Porter Ranches – unplugged and ongoing, all year long.
Which begs the question: If Porter Ranch was the worst environmental disaster since the 2010 Deepwater oil spill, what should we call this?
A faster, cleaner way to kill the planet
Using methane is a perfectly valid way to avoid the toxic emissions associated with coal, such as arsenic, lead, sulfuric acid, cadmium, etc. But if our main purpose in switching from coal to methane is to reduce greenhouse gases, or to use methane as the training wheels for wind and solar, the strategy is a flop.
Power generation has been driving the market for this leak-prone fuel, but the glory days may be coming to an end sooner rather than later: Several of our largest domestic gas fields have peaked.39 And when gas fields peak, they decline a lot faster than oil fields. So even if all the foregoing wasn’t true (and it is), our domestic energy boom may soon be going bust. And as we toboggan down the far side of the graph, the rise in price will be just as nerve-wracking.
Which, when the dust settles and the tears dry, might not be such a bad thing after all. Because with its sky-high GWP and its propensity to leak, methane is only marginally better than coal in the fight against global warming.
And for the few who still don’t “believe”40 in global warming, the question remains: Who wants to breathe all that gunk? Combustion was a great advance for power production 200 years ago, when the world had one billion people. But now we have over seven billion, with nine billion likely by mid-century, and we’re still burning stuff for power.
To be perfectly blunt, fire is obsolete. So quite aside from the issues of global warming, or smog, soot, acid rain, lead, mercury, cadmium, asthma and emphysema (the list goes on and on), is combustion any way to power a planet?
Like the ads say, “Choosing energy is choosing the future”
The dispersed and intermittent energy of wind and solar is a natural handicap that can be minimized, but never eliminated. And as highly evolved as wind and solar technologies are, they still suffer from meager Energy Returned On Energy Invested.41 Gas-turbine backup paints them into an even tighter corner, and the amount of land that wind and solar require is mind-boggling.
If we truly value our environment, then why in the world would we try to generate the power we need by industrializing nature? And then, once the damage is done, why compound the error every twenty years, by trampling those thousands of square miles of what used to be wilderness in order to replace millions of worn-out solar panels and tens of thousands of worn-out wind turbines?
Thus far, the best attempts by the green energy sector to mimic the output and reliability of coal, hydro, and nuclear have amounted to building gas plants with inefficient peaker turbines, augmented by windmills and solar panels.
The fundamental problem is, wind and solar companies have about as much control over the reliability of their methane supply as they have over the reliability of their two renewable fuels, the wind and the sun. Which is no control at all.
That’s because the well-to-wheels methane infrastructure is controlled by an entirely different industry, with an entirely different set of priorities and market pressures. And as earnest as they are, the renewables industry can only be as clean as their suppliers’ worst stretch of pipeline.
The future is now
We focused on methane’s 20-year GWP because most people who are seriously concerned about global warming agree that the next 20 years, more than the next 100, is the critical time for action.
If that’s truly the case, and if they’re truly the environmentalists they claim to be, then perhaps they should re-think their choice of mass energy production systems. Because if global warming is actually happening, and if it’s actually man-made, and if it’s actually caused by excessive greenhouse gases, then the only sensible conclusion to be reached is this:
Methane isn’t a bridge fuel to a greener world – it’s a gangplank.
© 2016 by Michael Sean Conley and Timothy Maloney
Editor’s Note
Mike Conley is a writer living in Los Angeles who has been studying energy issues for several years. Tim Maloney is a retired community college professor of Electronics Technology and Machine Control, with an MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Toledo, and a BS in Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
The co-authors are long-time members of the Thorium Energy Alliance, an advocacy group for the widespread acceptance and deployment of thorium-fueled Molten Salt Reactors.
Wind and Solar’s Achilles Heel is part of their upcoming ebook Let’s Run the Numbers, a comparison of nuclear power with wind and solar. LRTN in turn will be part of Mr. Conley’s forthcoming book “Power to the Planet – How Thorium Energy can Change the World”, a comprehensive exploration of MSR technology and its many benefits, written for the general public.
This article was first published by Daily Kos and is republished here in consultation with the authors.
Footnotes
- tinyurl.com/…
- The term “renewable energy” is shorthand for “the energy produced with renewable fuels,” since the supply of fuel (sunshine, wind, wave power, etc.) is constantly replenished by nature.
- Topaz Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo, CA: tinyurl.com/…
- The Solutions Project (Jacobson, et al): tinyurl.com/…
- Intergrating renewables on Gemany’s grid: tinyurl.com/…
(note Fig. 25 Interventions)
- “Let’s Run the Numbers” (Conley & Maloney): tinyurl.com/…
- Preventable Coal Deaths (Maloney): tinyurl.com/…
- “The Fukushima Disaster Wasn’t Very Disastrous” (Conca): tinyurl.com/…
- Power to the Planet (Conley): tinyurl.com/…
- Thorium Nuclear Slideshow (Maloney): tinyurl.com/…
- Banqiao Dam failure: tinyurl.com/…
- 1,000,000 people displaced by Three Gorges: tinyurl.com/…
- “Solar Energy Isn’t Always as Green as You Think” (IEEE Spectrum): tinyurl.com/…
- “The Worst Place on Earth” (BBC): tinyurl.com/…
- High-tech Harriet turbines (GE): tinyurl.com/…
- Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal” (Hargraves): tinyurl.com/…
- 2013 IPCC report. For methane’s GWP, see Chapter 8, page 58: tinyurl.com/… In January 2013, the EDF used a GWP of 72X for methane: tinyurl.com/… Later that year, they began using the IPCC’s calculation of 84X: tinyurl.com/…
- Arctic Methane Emissions: tinyurl.com/…
- Fugitive methane measurements 1 to 9%: “Methane Leaks Erode Green Credentials of Natural Gas” (Nature): tinyurl.com/… “Air Sampling Reveals High Emissions From Gas Field” (Nature): tinyurl.com/…
- Atmospheric methane concentrations: tinyurl.com/…
- Tracking fugitive methane leaks: tinyurl.com/… tinyurl.com/…
- 400+ underground methane storage sites: tinyurl.com/…
- Supervision of methane storage (Reuters): tinyurl.com/…
- Power plant emissions (U. of Colorado / NOAA): tinyurl.com/… As we mentioned, coal’s emissions will vary depending on coal quality. To be more than fair, we went with 900 kgs / MW-hr, which is a bit below CIRES’ average of 915 for the 15-year period between 1997 and 2012 (see paragraph 5 of the linked article.) Paragraph 5 also cites 436 grams per kilowatt-hour as the average CO2emissions of a CCGT for the years 1997–2012. That scales up to 436 kilograms per megawatt-hr, not the 405 kgs we used. However, instead of using the 15-year average emissions rate of this evolving technology, we used the latest number available, which as you can see on the article’s graph is significantly lower: The graph shows the 2012 emissions rate as slightly above 400 g / kW-hr. We “eyeballed” that spot on the graph as 405, and converted to kgs for MW-hr calculations.
- Ibid: tinyurl.com/…
- Ibid: tinyurl.com/…
- Since CO2is 2.75X as massive as CH4, 540 kgs of CO2 emissions requires the combustion of 196 kgs of methane: 540 ÷ 2.75 = 196.
- EROEI: tinyurl.com/…tinyurl.com/…
- Abandoned wind and solar farms: tinyurl.com/…tinyurl.com/…
- tinyurl.com/…
- California methane leak rate is 29,000 kgs / hr: tinyurl.com/… The two middle bars (from oil & gas production and from pipelines) scale to 0.206 and 0.281 MMTCO2eq (million metric tons of CO2equivalent.) The two bars combined = 0.487 million tonnes of CO2eq. CA Air Resources Board still uses factor of 25X GWP for methane over 100-year period, without climate carbon absorption diminishment (feedback): 0.487 million tonnes of CO2eq ÷ 25 GWP = 19.5 million kg of CH4 leaked in a 28-day period of Oct 23 – Nov 20. Therefore: (19.5 million kg ÷ 28 days) ÷ 24 hrs = 29,000 kg / hr CH4 leakage rate.
- California’s methane-generated electricity in 2014: tinyurl.com/…
- Hoover Dam: tinyurl.com/… San Onofre: tinyurl.com/… Diablo Canyon: tinyurl.com/…
- Save Diablo Canyon: tinyurl.com/…
- Energy in California: tinyurl.com/…
- Fugitive methane emissions measurements: tinyurl.com/… See also: tinyurl.com/… Note that in this article, EDF uses the GWP of 72X. As we point out in footnote 15, in November 2013 EDF began using the IPCC’s GWP number of 84X, to conform with IPCC’s AR-5 report from the summer of 2013: tinyurl.com/…. Fugitive methane emissions in the shale gas (fracking) industry: tinyurl.com/…
- Barnett Shale: tinyurl.com/…
- U.S. yearly leak total: tinyurl.com/…
- U.S. gas fields are peaking: tinyurl.com/…
- Ahhhnold on climate change: tinyurl.com/…
- EROEI of solar: tinyurl.com/…tinyurl.com/…
This article and its analysis appear to be based on serious misconceptions about fundamental aspects of electricity systems, climate science, and lifecycle analysis. While there are many issues, the following are probably the most important:
1. The calculations are predicated upon a misunderstanding of how natural gas actually balances renewable energy on the grid. In calculating emissions levels, the analysis assumes that renewable energy’s capacity factor directly impacts how much natural gas is consumed. The example in the paper assumes that because a 1 GW solar plant only has a capacity factor of 23%, natural gas generates the remaining 77%. If this where the case, it would mean natural gas would generate 3 times the amount of any renewable facility. This is not a realistic reflection of how things work.
Plant-specific capacity factors are irrelevant when operating electric grids with hundreds of generators. It is the combined total generation that matters. Solar and wind generation now largely reduce utilization at existing plants (reducing the capacity factors of those existing plants). If you have a 1 GW solar plant you do not need to use natural gas to guarantee you generate 1 GW of power during all hours of the year – no power plant needs to do this. You merely generate as much as you can. You may need some natural gas capacity to back up renewables, but that capacity will actually be run a relatively limited amount – particularly when you consider that wind and solar intermittency largely offset eachother, leaving only a few hours in most days when a balancing NG unit would need to run. What matters is the amount of natural gas generation needed, not capacity. The portion of natural gas generation that can be said to be balancing renewables is much, much smaller than overall renewable generation.
2. There is no justifiable scientific reason to use the 20-year global warming potential for methane alone. Ideally, analyses should use both 20-year and 100-year GWP values as this method reflects both the short and long term climatic impacts of a methane emission. Only using a 20-year number paints a misleading picture.
3. The analysis does not properly account for coal lifecycle emissions. Comparing coal with natural gas and only focusing on natural gas leakage is not a proper comparison. Rather, coal emissions would need to include coal mine methane and coal transportation emissions, which offset large portions of any natural gas methane leakage when examined on a lifecycle basis. Further, coal power plants actually have a very large variation in combustion efficiency. Combined, solar, wind, and natural gas replace the least efficient coal plants with the highest emissions intensities first. Only looking at the average plant is misleading and incomplete.
4. Finally, there is no consideration of technological advancement in this article. Capacity factors for wind and solar are both increasing – regardless, CF is more important for project finance anyways (as opposed to the way this analysis treats it). Similarly, natural gas plant efficiency is increasing over time, reducing emissions intensities (while largely replacing the least efficient coal units with the highest carbon emissions). The methane leakage rate can also be addressed through regulatory action, much of which is in progress at both state and federal levels in the U.S. We need to reduce methane emissions as much as possible – just saying that renewable are worse than coal because of natural gas leakage ignore the fact that leakage can be reduced (and is also an inaccurate framing of the whole issue). And the article does not address how battery storage could change things if the technology develops.
As a closing point, there are issues in renewable intermittency that need to be addressed. Most of them are addressable without storage through relatively high penetration levels. Any serious lifecycle analysis of renewables will find that renewables are much, much better than coal, even assuming that natural gas needs to play a balancing role. This article clouds the issues more than clarifies them.
Alex –
1) The combined total generation of most grids around the world consist largely of coal- or gas-fired plants. If a certain wind farm is backed up by overproduction on the grid, rather than its own gas turbine, chances are the back up is fossil power.
And, while wind and solar hopefully do offset (back up) each other, that can’t be relied upon until a completely (or largely) interdependent renewables grid is built. Until then, backup generation will mostly be fossil – either on site or remote.
If remote it will hopefully be generated by at least some nuclear and hydro. But mostly , it’ll be fossil. Which brings us back to our main point — backing up wind and solar with fossil doesn’t do bupkis for our clean energy goals.
2) The justification for using a 20 year span is explained at the end of the article — this is the time frame in which we need to act to avert the worst of global warming. At the rate we’re going, 100 years will be way too late.
3) We weren’t examining the entire lifecycle of either coal or fracked methane. We limited the discussion to actual power generation.
4) The CF of wind and solar will not significantly increase in any given region – the sun and wind in any particular place is what it is (although wind is predicted to calm ~ 15% this century due to AGW.) And even if CF increases with new equipment in new installations, the formulas and graph still apply. Just plug in the appropriate numbers.
Same thing with examining plants that aren’t average — simply plug in the numbers for the non-average plant, and its fuel. As we point out, that’s how the formulas are designed.
Battery storage, other than pumped hydro, looks nice on paper, but PHES still handles 99% of global mass storage. And while estimates vary, DoE says it costs roughly $2 Million per MWhr.
The math from there is pretty straightforward, depending on how many hours of storage you feel a farm needs. But overall, the trillions of metric tons of water needed for enough pumped hydro systems to back up the amount of solar and wind envisioned by renewables advocates to power the U.S. would break the bank, monopolize our concrete and rebar production, and drain the already meager water sources on our windswept prairies and in our southwest desert – in the midst of a Biblical drought.
The only feasible way to power the country on renewables is to massively overbuild an interdependent grid of wind and solar farms. But between here and there, the road runs right through Porter Ranch. Or coal country, take your pick.
There is no implication in the article that methane leaks will not be addressed by new regulation. In fact, the article will hopefully prompt readers to demand that leaks be successfully be addressed forthwith.
Your article is based on the idea of “shadow power plants” needed for variable renewables. This idea was strongly publicly promoted by German utilities (at that point still vertically integrated monopolies) about fifteen years ago. Even at that point in time this idea was already outmoded by scientific research. I really recommend that you make a study of the serious scientific literature on the grid integration of renewables. You will learn that if you analyse time series of power production and demand over larger regions, you will find that much more is possible than a layman on the subject would assume. Even the conservative IEA finds that most grids can integrate at least 45% of variable renewables using existing technology and very limited additional cost. (IEA power of transition 2015).
Thanks for the tip, Hans. I’ll look into it!
This will sound like a niggle but: “scientific literature on the grid integration of renewables” – actually it is an engineering problem – with very little science (which tends to be more focused on components – WT blades. perm’ mag generators, HVDc links etc). In the case of the 45% you mention – 50Hz in east Germany (a TSO) has no problems with 40% wind content in the network (I’m paraphrasing 50Hz CEOP now) – suggesting that for once the IEA is correct – at the moment – RES intergation is mostly a management problem – not an equipment one. Danish TSO is honing its forecasting systems with look-back for error correction & this lot handle 110% wind. Talking to a Japanese IT company – looks like some form of crude AI might make an apperance to give some further incremental improvement.
However since you did not name the TSO, I will have too assume that it is Elia, the only one on the East side of Germany. This TSO covers an area of less than 1/3 of the state of California. And from population density maps would be about like the northern third of California at that. i.e., one large city and several smaller cities – about 50,000 square miles. Exact population correlation/distribution makes no difference as this TSO is on par with the distribution system owned and controlled by the average US Electrical Utility Power company. From what I read, it seams that most of the “balancing” is achieved in EU by pushing off the unreliable to some other country, TSO, etc. to let them deal with the problem.
Further, look at the equipment needed to acheive that balance – http://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/volume-20/issue-4/features/smart-electricity-distribution-in-germany.html Which brings about my question: “Who is going to pay for all of that equipment which obviously is going to cost about as much as the Wind Turbines and Solar generators them self thus doubling Again,the cost of that FREE electricity?” Are the nations going to dole out more “renewable” energy credits for these band-aids?
All of the before is even more applicable because of a well known principle, often ignored at their own peril. Just be cause something works does not mean it is “scalable.” E.g., Paper airplane. And you are pushing that scaled up paper airplane off of a cliff while collecting fees from the people you sold on building it.
“However since you did not name the TSO” – try reading the post – I did, the East German TSO is called 50 Hz (& is owned by Elia – not relevant to the point I was making). Also not relevant is what california has to do with any of this – I’m not interested in California – I ma interested in the EU. The article linked to was by ABB – a company I respect & in the business of selling equipment & will always say that it is needed – i.e. marketing..
The point is you throw out a statement that implies that “east Germany (a TSO) has no problems with 40% wind content. And thus, the problem is solved! You may know “50hz” stands for the name of a company but it definitely is not clear.
Only if the reader does some research do they determine that the area covered is about the size of the area that is completely covered, serviced and controlled by the average utility district in the USA.
Further research shows that very large sums of money is going to be needed to acheive the level of integration you claim is only for an area smaller than most of the states in the USA. And smaller than the service area of many (most?) utilities in the USA. The smaller the area “integrated” with renewables the simpler the problem is to control, the more control over the system the service operator has. Any competent, even first year of employment, dispatcher will tell you that.
The use of CF doesn’t factor in the load curve and the production curve.
For instance, it doesn’t consider that the typical bell-shaped solar-production curve along a day is in phase with most of the loads (both industrial and commercial). You do not require a back-up at that time – or only during cloudy days. A back-up is required at nights when the usage is a fraction of the use at days.
Your assumption that “1 GW of solar is actually made by 230 MW of solar and the rest of back-up” is then misleading.
As said before what matters is the quantity of energy generated not the available peak capacity.
Also, you assume in your formulas that the methane leakings are related to capacity. Again, the quantities of gas leakings should be related to the use of the gas infrastructures, not to the capacity of the the tubes / reservoirs handling the gas.
Thank you
Marco, That’s what CF is all about – a yearly average as distinct from daily variables. As for our assumption of a 1GW farm = 230 MW solar and 770 MWs gas, back atcha:
Renewables supporters routinely conflate installed capacity and delivered capacity. If a touted 1-GW farm is actually a 1-GW farm, then our numbers are valid. And if it’s not actually a 1-GW farm, then our overall point is the same — for all that money and land hoopla and hope, it’s not doing bupkis for green energy.
Mike
It all depends on what you need the 1GW for: if it is for a constant 1GW power, than your assumption is right; but if the demand load curve is different, like 1GW during the day and 100 kW at night then the actual CF is much higher. Which is the case in the real world.
Add to that storage, wheather forecasts on-the-spot that allow for demand-response and grid-response power management, distributed roof-top solar and you might be able to increase the CF even more. Which is all what the Germans are doing with their “Energiewende”.
That said I agree that nuclear is the best GHG-adverse choice, alas at what price? (See for instance Hinckley-C in the UK and the manyfold over budget for the new Finnish plant from Areva ).
Thanks
And if as the Renewable lovers want, when 50 , 75, 100% of the electrical power generated in the USA, Including all of the extra electrical power needed to charge all of the electric cars that will be charging at night. How much electricity is needed to charge 50 million battery operated autos? Where is all of that “renewable” going to come from at night? Oh, charge it in the day? Not only doers that aggravate the problem even worse (Lager day time load). It also means every work place would have to add charging stations.
Assuming a capacity factor of 33% for either wind or solar. that means that you will need enough 3 times a many wind turbines and 3 times as many solar panels as the name plate requires. It is dark at night – thus no solar. that means you will need to have twice as many 3 x 2 = 6 times as many Wind turbines to make up for the lack of solar. Or, you can backup the lost solar with GAS. Or, you can cover a few states with water for pumped storage. Or you can use the next generation batteries that will cost $5 kWhr and only last overnight.
What happens to battery backup when the sun does not shine for a few days, the wind does not blow for a few weeks – like happens often in wind rich North Dakota? Oh, you are going to build a large enough Battery back up for a week? Then what happens for those ten day periods? Two week periods?
To solve the problem and pick a solution you need to know something about the entire problem. Right now, Wind/Solar works because and only because the “GRID” is the backup source. Once Renewables exceed about 15% the number of blackouts will give you a good picture of the REAL problem with renewables or as I call them Unreliables.
Zakly. And to compound the problem, the US grid only has about 15-20% overproduction. Once that’s used up as “training wheels” for wind and solar farms, we’re going to be in for some interesting times. Like Michael Klare says: “You don’t know what bad times are until you don’t have enough energy to run the machinery of civilization.”
If TSO in the US are unable to integrate large share of renewable energy, there are plenty of European companies who would be glad to take the market…
Marco – If the Germans take Energiewende to full fruition, then that 1-GW will be needed for baseload power, and not just filler. At that point, it’s either backed up by methane (on-site or on-grid) or by other renewables plants.
And any storage other than pumped hydro is still either on the drawing board or not built and tested at scale. So I don’t think it should really be part of the discussion. Renewables fans keep playing the storage trump card, but that essentially amounts to betting the planet on the hope that we will solve the problem when we need to. In my view, we need to formulate a planet-saving energy paradigm with proven and provably scalable technology.
And as for the cost of reactors, watch the South Koreans in Dubai. They’re building AP-1000s, without being bogged down by arcane inspection routines, protests, lawsuits, ant-nuke legislators, etc.
Mike – I guess we need to agree on terminology first.
Baseload should not be intended as a fixed amount of power required all-time countrywide, but as the minumum power required in a certain area in a certain time of the average day (like working hours, nights, off-hours).
Solar delivers its power consitently with the daily baseload where wind does the same at nights.
Instead of the CF (hours of available power / yearly hours) is more meanigful to focus on hours of “required service”.
By mixing RE with fillers from other sources+storgare consistently with the targeted service you may increase RE very much beyond a filling role and reverse the (old) paradigm that baseload = fossil.
What Germany is planning to do (not in a few uears indeed) is pushing RE to be a baseload server while increasing HV interconnections with neighbors. The chances that nor sun nor wind do not feed all Europe at the same time (and that applys to the US as well) are pretty much the same that you run out of gas (and by the way in Europe we got quite close to that in the recent past during the Russia-Ukrania blows).
Another point is the use of biomass from cattle manure. Germans have a tech leadership on that and a fair share of their RE, with double effect of capturing methane and generate constant energy (and there, yes, CF is close to 90%).
About nuke in Dubai: we live in democracies. Safety regulations and insurance costs (not routs or legislators) are pushing nuke costs to be anti-economical.
“The only feasible way to power the country on renewables is to massively overbuild an interdependent grid of wind and solar farms. But between here and there, the road runs right through Porter Ranch. Or coal country, take your pick.”
Or the road could run through: power to gas (= renewable power to synthetic methane). Yes the round trip is not great if you push it through, for example, CCGTs – but it would avoid using gas out of the ground & it would be carbon neutral.
With respect, that seems like a Rube Goldberg arrangement to me. Could you elaborate how that would work, exactly?
Yes – you just need to read the Energy Post articles I have written on the subject.
I do like the notion of using intermittent energy to produce fuel. But I’d like to see some hard numbers on the process — how many kW to produce how many cubic feet of methane, etc.
That aside, fabricating synthetic methane just seems like a awfully risky strategy to fight climate change, in light of its strong GWP, its propensity to escape, and our growing realization that methane infrastructures leak like a sieve. As I point out in my article, while the national leak rate in the U.S. is conservatively pegged at just 1.6%, that’s the equivalent of over 70 Porter Ranches, ongoing and unplugged.
So wouldn’t fabricating methanol or DME be preferable? As liquid fuels, they can be burned in ICE and diesel engines (respectively) with minor modifications.
Not sure if the numbers are comparable to synthetic methane (i.e., how many kWs needed to fabricate how many liters), but it seems to me that fabricating carbon-neutral liquid fuels would be a much better choice than synthetic methanol.
The statement to make bio-fuels from “Unreliables” speaks volumes about the lack of knowledge of the process and the naiveté of the speaker. Ethanol is made within 20 miles of where I live. The plant was sited based upon the availability of low cost electricity and the availability of corn. Just because you or I pay 5, 10, 15 cents per kWh or the EIA claims the average price in that area is 6.5 cents per kWh does not mean that the manufacturers are paying that much for that power. The plant is next to the NPP, they share a common fence. There are only a several towers between the power plant substation and the plants distribution station. This means they are delivered power for less than 1/2 the price that you or I pay for electricity, at about the same price that the utility sell electricity to surrounding municipal power systems or the local military base – at government contract rates! These facilities (ethanol manufacturing facilities) are very similar petroleum refining plants. They need reliable power. Very reliable power. Loss of power does not mean the lights,computers go off or the convener belt stops moving, it means these towers of highly volatile liquids and gas are not performing the designed function and have a very high probability of fire, explosion, and death. Even though the ethanol facility is next to a NPP, the utility still had to add two additional, backup, High voltage transmission lines, coming from two different directions to provide the needed reliability to service these plants. IMHO the only thing wind or solar could be used for is to grind the corn and that would be a waste of money when you consider the true cost of the energy delivered to the process. As someone paid far more than me has said often [by RFK Jr.] “The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants are gas plants.” Once the Wind and Solar starts exceeding the Overcapacity on the grid, the blackouts begin. The “Smart Grid” is not going to make it work and will only double the amount of money burnt trying to prove the fallacy of their dream.
Note, as stated above, this Ethanol facility needed 2 additional lines. This was in addition the the existing line that delivered the power from the plant north and south from the plant and the facility had is own line from the NPP substation. This was needed to provide the required reliability. How many HV transmission line will be needed to prevent blackouts in your hospital, workplace, factory? Smart grids with computers pushing power to where the sun is not shining, or shutting off HVAC units and/or HW heaters is not going to save the day – Unless, and until, you spend the money needed to double the number of transmission lines. All of the recent regional blackouts were due to overloaded HV transmission lines. What is the price tag to double the number of transmission lines? Don’t forget to add in the cost of the various NIMBY lawsuits, and the inevitable relocation of the lines making them even longer and more expensive. Think Keystone XL – still hasn’t happened – 7 + years.
We are not talking about biofuel here but about renewable power methane produced through the Sabatier Process… There are already several plant in operation in Europe and they are 40 times more efficient at producing renewable fuel than an US corn ethanol plant…
Wait, how does the flow in pipeline influence the leakage. Pipeline will leak (or not) regardless of flow of pressurized gas inside …it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is a (over) pressure inside pipeline, how “leaky” the pipes, joints (gaskets) and valves are, and how much of it we have it (length of pipeline and number of valves and gaskets. And providing complete combustion in turbine, that’s it. So leakage is a fixed, not consumption dependent number. And as a far as relation goes, it’s exactly the other way around. More flow there is in the pipe, less share leakage accounts for. If there’s no flow, leakage is 100% of the flow, because that’s the only gas we must feed into the system (to substitute leaked out gas).
Not quite sure I follow you, but what we were examining was a CCGT or an on-site peaker fueled by a leaking infrastructure, which includes everything from the wellhead to the gas tank, not just the pipeline.
That’s exactly, how you shouldn’t do it…all the sources contribute differently with higher consumption (that’ probably also one of the reasons, why are the official numbers on leakage as they are)…different factors have different variables… you can’t just average out everything and extrapolate in one go…your method is grossly oversimplified…
Actually, the new energy paradigm we’re embarking on (Energiewende, etc.) is grossly overcomplicated. In advanced, industrialized regions, reactor can do virtually all you want to accomplish with REs, on about 1% of the land, with a fraction of the concrete and steel, and for 60 years regardless of weather or time of day. And they can utilize our existing nuclear “waste” (and weapons) as fuel, something REs will never be able to do.
REs convinced the private sector to invest in them, something nuclear reactors will never be able to do…
I think the point being made about the severity of gas leaks is very valid and one that the fracking industry needs to address as well as the industry as a whole. The GHG properties of methane are the “elephant in the room”. Much more stringent regulations are required in the gas industry.
Beyond that, I find the conflation of renewables with gas a little overstated. Wind and solar are intermittent energy sources – thank-you – we knew that. But, there are a variety of ways of dealing with that intermittency and complementing with flexible generation, such as gas peakers is but one. Any kind of flexible generation will do, even nuclear. But, there is demand response, storage, grid expansion to name the obvious. I only need to point to the well vetted Energy Futures analysis done by NREL recently.
Overall, I found the tone of this article condescending, presumptuous and annoying. But, hey, I have no problem with the nuclear industry throwing the gas industry under the bus.
There’s no conflation. The article focuses on gas-backed renewables, which is the backing of choice in America these days, courtesy of our fracking bonanza.
If wind and solar farms are remotely backed by nuclear or hydro, then there isn’t a problem. That also applies to mass storage, 99% of which is pumped hydro.
But if farms are remotely backed by a grid that’s largely powered by coal or gas, then there is a problem. Coal isn’t even worth discussing, which leaves gas, either on-site or remote (grid.) So we developed formulas for on-site peakers, and for remote CCGTs. How is that conflation?
Here’s the deal: If the renewables industry could actually replace San Onofre’s 2.15-GW of baseload power with wind and solar, with a 90% uptime for 40-60 years, day or night, rain or shine, and keep the price below $14 Billion (the cost of two AP-1000s), then we might have some respect for what they’re selling.
But they can’t. Hence the tone. Sorry you didn’t dig it, but we’re running out of time, and patience.
Yes, time is running out. But here’s the thing. Solar and wind are the technologies that are delivering today and their build out is accelerating. Arguing that solar and wind is not baseload (no-one ever said it was) is a little off-base. The discussion is around how do we build flexibility into the grid that can integrate greater levels of intermittent renewables. The discussion is about power-to-gas, demand response, bulk storage, flexible charging of EVs, HVDC grids.
I think the future in nuclear is in SMRs that can provide valuable flexibility to the grid. Solar and wind are being built because they are now cheap (and getting cheaper), easy to build and quick to deploy. They are relatively low tech and highly scaleable. All the things nuclear is not. 20th century nuclear is rooted in an increasingly outdated baseload grid paradigm and it’s just not happening.
Don’t take my word for it. BNEF has summarised the data well: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-04-05/liebreich-speaks-about-energy-markets-at-bnef-summit-video
Thanks, I watched the video. I get the point about flexibility, and if we can pull it off, then great.
But I’m concerned about power to gas, and skeptical about the feasibility of mass storage other than pumped hydro.
Methane has a huge downside that is just now becoming appreciated. Seems to me that “power to liquid synfuels” (methanol, DME, etc.) would be much safer for the climate.
Other than pumped hydro, the storage technologies that I’ve seen either haven’t been tested at scale, and/or the service life of the equipment is on par with the longevity of solar panels and wind turbines — after 10-20 years, you have to replace the guts of the system. Reactors last at least 60 years, with a 90%+ uptime.
The price charts, trends, and projections in these presentations never seem to take into account the service life and replacement cost of RE systems vis a vis nuclear. So there’s a lot of apples-to-oranges going on in the rivalry/discussion/argument about our non-fossil energy future, and both camps wind up talking past each other.
When a nuclear advocate sees a chart of installed RE capacity, they mentally cut it by at least a third to compare it to nuclear’s 90%+ uptime. And the price charts are mentally doubled, to account for replacing panels and turbines, to roughly equal a reactor’s 60-yr service life (that’s a ballpark guesstimate, since you’re not rebuilding the entire farm.)
So like I said, there’s a lot of apples-and-oranges going on. And we can’t even agree on a definition of baseload (see Marco’s last comment) much less how important it is. There was no reply button below his comment, so I’m replying here:
Baseload is always-available power, under the control of the grid operator at all times, independent of weather, season, or time of day. (The term has been commonly used to refer to the minimum power required at any one time, but that is encompassed by the broader definition.)
Baseload can (eventually) be cobbled together with a massive buildout of RE + storage + power-to-gas/synfuel, etc.
Or we can embark on a massive buildout of SMRs, on about 1% of the land, with a fraction of the steel and concrete (and rare earth) and get 3X the service life, with the ability to fission our existing long-tem nuclear waste as a secondary fuel. And the spare power to fabricate liquid synfuels for our existing vehicles, and the spare power to desalinate water as well.
I favor the latter approach. The former seems a bit Rube Goldberg-ish to me, and largely predicated on an overblown fear and loathing of nuclear power.
Mike,
thanks for your answer. NERC defines baseload as “The minimum amount of electric power delivered or required over a given period at a constant rate” (nerc.com) and I guess we may stick to it.
Though it is not the definition in question but the range of application.
Why do you believe Germans are wrong in replacing coal with RE? Their RE buildout is not massive compared with the (planned) phase out of nuke + coal but it’s rather a 1 to 1 switch (roughly speaking and considering the reduction of energy consumption going on at general level).
The Energiewende principle leverages on interconnection and demand-response at a higher level (country + neighbours) – on top of RE. The EU agency (ACER) is delivering the electical code updates for that.
Distributed energy from RE located in different areas proved theoretically to be able to support baseload when mixed with the soft “cobbles”.
An example: in Italy almost 100% of users are equipped with electronic meters controlled by grid operators (and the sole transmission operator at a higher level). Any RE plant above 1 MW can be derated or turned on/off to support frequency/voltage control. Cross-country HV interconnections allow for transmission of extra RE toward countries in need. The new code will allow power to flow from the cheap sources to the expensive places (or most GHG-offensive for that matters).
Still the point is how to back all that up with a stable source just in case all RE are off or to low to support baseload. I’m not anti or pro nuke but I can’t find an explanation to why new nuke plants in EU are such a debacle in terms of overtime and overbudget of planned builds? If there is a safe, lasting, cheap technology ready-for-use why Areva is going belly-up from Finnish nuke and Edf sneaks away from UK Hinckley-C?
Agreed with Mike C that SMR’s are likely the way to go barring some game-changing discovery in battery energy density/cost. Switching gears a bit to focus on batteries, I remember reading news from my alma mater and other institutions that they were on the cusp of the fabled 10x10x10x better battery (10x capacity, 1/10 charge time, 10x life, or 1/10 cost, not sure which I can’t remember correctly). Haven’t heard much on it lately and I’m no expert in that realm so I was wondering:
a) if anyone has up to date info on that
b) is it fair to say a mass market battery of that caliber is pretty much the holy grail and would fundamentally transform every energy system.
c) to the degree this breakthrough is likely/unlikely and imminent shouldn’t it drive the conversation in terms of where to invest in production?
If, on the other hand, we’re still 20 yrs away from that (ahem, fusion), it strikes me that we have no other choice but to rapidly develop and deploy at least another 20% of global annual kWh capacity in nuclear (SMR or conventional), if to only replace the ageing fleets. In other posts I read studies stating that 70% wind/solar mix is the absolute upper limit for grid stability given current storage technology. Doing the math there then, under the scenario of no battery breakthroughs, we really should be looking at about 50% of annual kWh production to be new nukes within the next 20 years. Unfortunately it appears we’ll instead be stuck with a bunch of relatively expensive and inefficient, not to mention relatively dirty, gas peakers.
Hi, guys – Most of your comments don’t have a reply button, which is kind of weird. But since your comments were addressed to me, I’ll take a crack at summing up my views, and leave it at that.
First off, here’s a chart that renders me hugely unimpressed with both wind and Energiewende: http://tinyurl.com/javsqqh
Not to rain on your parade, but I just can’t see the advantage of cobbling together a massive buffet of interdependent RE sources – particularly given the land requirements, the raw material, the short service life of the equipment, etc. – to run a heavily-populated, technically advanced, industrial nation in a northern clime.
Quite frankly, it all seems to be an elaborate Rube Goldberg strategy that’s largely inspired (and constantly reinforced) by an atavistic fear and loathing of nuclear power (yes, Helen Caldicott, I’m talking to you.) Energiewende may ultimately work. But why go through all that busyness? Just install some meltdown-proof reactors (AP-1000s, SMRs, etc.) and carry on.
Germany freaked out over Fukushima, even though no one died from the radiation, and it’s likely that no one ever will (unless you actually believe in the LNT “theory” that there is no safe dose…) A few years back, Germany also freaked out over their wild boars eating Chernobyl-tainted mushrooms. Even though you’d have to eat something like 36 kilos of that boar meat to equal the radiation you’d get from a transatlantic flight.
America freaked out over Three Mile Island, even though no one died from the radiation at the time, or subsequently. In the wake of TMI, we embarked on a massive coal build-out to replace the reactors we canceled, and over the last 36 years about 100,000 Americans died from the pollution those coal plants produced.
Think about that – no one died at TMI, but the overblown reaction over that admittedly scary incident resulted in 100,000 actual deaths. And even if we accept the most lunatic fringe estimates of 1,000 “hidden” deaths from TMI, foregoing nuclear power because of the accident still caused 100X more casualties.
Now Germany is embarking on Energiewiende, and their coal use has gone up as a direct result, and they’re importing nuclear power from France. And, there’s that chart I linked to above. I’m underwhelmed.
California freaked out over Fukushima and shut down San Onofre, even though our tectonic / tsunami situation here in Southern California is totally different than the east coast of Japan. California’s methane consumption went up 16% as a direct result of the shutdown, and the darn stuff leaks, and it retains 84X more heat than CO2 . . . and power-to-gas advocates want to make even more of the stuff? Really? I thought this was all about saving the climate.
In my view, everyone’s freaked out about nuclear to the point where they’re engaging in elaborate and expensive work-arounds, instead of fixing nuclear’s shortcomings and getting on with it. It’s like we have a creaky front door and the kids are too scared to go in the house, so we’re building a big elaborate staircase (with sustainable lumber) to get them in through the attic window, instead of just oiling the front door hinges and carefully explaining to them that no, Dracula actually isn’t lurking behind the front door. It was just a really scary noise.
Power to the planet, gentlemen!
Peace, I’m out.
Mike Conley
Los Angeles
ps – go nuclear or go extinct 🙂
I really don’t think you do your cause any favours by claiming the nuclear is safe and cheap. As someone who is open minded about nuclear I find this the most troubling. Implicit in this constant parrying about the number of deaths due to radiation is that we should be comfortable with meltdowns. Um, no we shouldn’t.
The constant pointing to the 100,000s of deaths from coal seems to be saying nuclear should get a fair quota as well. I don’t think you really mean to say this, but you guys should really listen to yourselfs.
Get a public relations expert and figure it out.
Here’s a more compelling arguement:
1. It is vital that we decarbonise immediately.
2. Coal is enemy number 1. It is imperative that we phase out coal first and foremost, and then on down the line of fossil fuels.
3. Nuclear can be built safely and it can be an excellent complement to intermittent renewables. It is worth the cost in order achieve our emissions goals and to forestall a greater threat in the foreseeable future.
(ps – I think depth of replies are limited on this site, hence no reply buttons)
With respect, I believe you missed my point, which is essentially this: Fear and paranoia are the two most common forms of radiation sickness.
I didn’t say, or even imply, that we should be at all comfortable with meltdowns. In fact, I strongly favor Molten Salt Reactors, which are physically incapable of melting down, even if someone tried. Physically as in “the laws of physics” – how do you melt a liquid? If the reactor is damaged or destroyed, the liquid fuel leaks out and solidifies into an inert blob of rock salt. The mess can be measured in square meters, not square kilometers.
What I meant to get across was that the fear and loathing of nuclear power is fantastically overblown. And, that fear-mongers and propaganda artists are using two meltdowns which didn’t kill anyone, and a third meltdown in a reactor type that will never, ever be built again, as the rationale (or irrationale, as I see it) to shut down all of commercial nuclear power. instead of fixing what needs to be fixed, and carry on.
It’s like banning all cars because Pinto gas tanks blew up, and because some Toyotas had brake failure. We take the deaths from those errors in stride, and re-design and carry on, but a negligible trace of tritium is found in a Vermont Yankee water leak and we shut down a reactor that produces 600MW of power, 24 / 7 / 365?
Shut it down and replace it with what? America’s move to coal in the late 70s was obviously a bad move, methane infrastructures leak, and I frankly don’t see Energiewende as a real smart move, either.
Terawatt for terawatt, nuclear energy is the safest form of mass energy production in the history of the world. And no, it’s not perfect, and no it’s not totally safe. Any form of mass energy production has its risks – people die falling off roofs installing solar panels, dams burst and have drown thousands. And there have been wind turbine installation and maintenance deaths.
But for all the terawatts of American nuclear power, from over 100 reactors, there have been three deaths from a partial meltdown of a test reactor in Idaho in 1961, and 5 deaths from non-nuclear causes in construction, inspection, and maintenance.
That’s it. That’s the sum total of casualties in 60 years of American commercial nuclear power, generating 20% of all electricity for a major industrial nation. But TMI happened and we freaked out and brought the buildout of nuclear to a standstill, and went with coal. Way to go, my fellow Americans…
So it’s quite clear to me that the relative risks of nuclear have been blown entirely out of proportion – and then whipped into a froth of bug-eyed terror from there – to the point where the public has developed an atavistic fear and loathing of a well-proven technology that can be successfully utilized – right now, and at scale – to play a pivotal role in saving the climate.
If PR experts should figure anything out, it’s how to turn that around.
“Germany freaked out over Fukushima” – the proportion of the German population against nuclear has been reasonably stable at around 70% for close to 40 years. Throw-away generalisations do not make your argument stronger – quite the reverse.
OK, how about this: “A tsunami happened half a world away, and Germans finally gave into their long-held nuclear fears.”
The result is the same – they abandoned a carbon-free energy system that could have easily been beefed up or modified. Like banning automobiles because Pinto gas tanks blew up. In a country that makes Porsche and Mercedes.
Germany is the technical genius of the world, and they couldn’t figure out that if the backup generators at Fukushima hadn’t flooded — the way the didn’t flood at Onagawa, 50 miles up the coast — the meltdowns wouldn’t have occurred.
All four reactors at Fuku, and the four at Onagawa (which experienced *twice* the shaking as Fuku) shut down perfectly intact, within seconds. It was the flooded backups at Fuku that caused the problem.
Simple fix – place all backups on high ground, or if no high ground, put them in watertight vaults with snorkels. The Germans are world champs at building submarines, so the vault-and-snorkel thing would be child’s play for them.
And if they’re concerned that their reactors could still melt down, they could have replaced them with reactors that don’t, which already exist and are being built as we speak in Dubai, the US and China. And several more models are ready for production.
Instead, they’ve committed to a Rube Goldberg work-around, trying to harvesting the fitful whims of Mother Nature to run a densely-populated, industrialized nation in a norther clime. Sounds pretty freakout-ish to me.
Last point – after swiping at Rick about being an American therefore Trump, you’re chastising me about throwaway generalizations weakening my argument?
Mike
Great article , you guys are spot on. Also re the Korean plants in the Middle East your information is correct , coats are much lower – we have an OTT regulatory culture in the west. As you well know South Korea is generating nuclear electricity at $3 cents / KWhr and France’s existing fleet is under 6 cents.
Love the analogy – it’s not a bridge it’s a gangplank – wicked !!!
Keep up the writing
Some good reading for those of you in UK or EU that feel that Renewables are the answer. Have a nice summer.
“Our 2016 Summer Outlook Report was published on 7 April. The report presents our view of the gas and electricity systems for the summer ahead. It is designed to inform and enable the energy industry to prepare for this summer and beyond.”
http://www2.nationalgrid.com/UK/Industry-information/Future-of-Energy/FES/summer-outlook/
& your point is?
By the way – I don’t need to read the report since I contribute to some of the reports that NG writes. They, in common with many Euro TSOs see little in the way of problems with accommodating RES – but a great deal of problems caused with the way govs’ implement energy (non) policy which tends to flip flop.
“…………..feel that Renewables are the answer” – & the question would be?
I sense that you are an American – so I’ll give you my own absolute:
“the answer is Socialism – the question is irrelevant” – & when you see Trump tell him I know a good hairdresser.
I would greatly appreciate someone with your vast knowledge of the UK TSO to explain to me how, with no large power sources maintaining frequency, VARS or even providing spinning reserve, the grid will operate. That is, push electricity from an areas with excess power, to an area needing power, when all of the power sources are less than 2 megawatts and there are tens of thousands of other sources (roof-top solar, backward wind) that are less than 100 kw/hr feeding the grid from esentially every home or business.
At least it will provide your true, ideal, socialist power source.
No problems Rick – I’m happy to explain to you – for my usual rate – which is very similar to that charged by American consultants and lawyers i.e. $2k/hr.
Funny: you seem to say that privately owned small power production systems are socialist and state mandated power monopolies are free market.
The fact that Germany has a government owned power plants is the problem of the German citizens, that is part of socialism, That is what comes with Socialism.
However, the individual citizens or even small companies purchasing, installing and operating hundreds of millions of small (less than 500kWhr) solar, wind, micro-hydro, whatever generating facilities is going to increase, I repeate increase the price you pay for reliable power. Power that is available 24/7/365. available in emergencies, available to properly run assembly lines, manufacturing plants, and even communication facilities – Radio, TV, cell-phone towers. etc.
You can dismiss this statement if you wish, however do the research, quit reading the propaganda and learn how it works.
I have had and used personnel, self owned, solar wind generators and even a micro-hydro generator electrical generating systems since 1957.
Solar Panels may give you lights in a cabin in the woods or off grid. but the life it provides (if your sole source of power, is like that of a hermit. I have a fishing cabin in the woods with a solar panel, as that is the only way to get electricity. Several times there have been periods that there was not enough sun to charge my cell-phone because of the inclement weather.
You need to move that fishing cabin to Hawaii 🙂
You are a bit inconsistent. First small privately owned power systems are socialist. Now central large power plants owned by the government are socialist. I wonder how you will label privately owned vertically integrated commercial companies that have a state granted monopoly and guaranteed profits like they exist in the US?
By the way the large powerplants in Germany are owned by large commercial companies. Different levels of government do own shares in three of the four big companies. So it is slightly more nuanced.
What a strange way to pitch Thorium reactors. I mean everybody knows Fracking is bad and needs to stop and everyone knows coal is bad and needs to stop and everyone knows that the entire coal value chain is struggling despite very lucrative direct and indirect subsidies that combined are factors higher than what wind and solar can get and the situation is exactly the same for shale oil and fracking gas production part of the value chain.
There is no reason to assume that coal and Fracking gas is going to survive for much longer unless both industries get a bail out and still higher subsidies.
The last major agreement in USA opened for exports of oil and gas while also beginning a complete phase out of subsidies for wind power and solar power.
Everyone in the wind industry cheered that deal because the annual price drop is stable and high. The current annual price drop will half the average wind PPA to less than two cents unsubsidized by 2021.
At that price point it becomes cheaper to over provision and curtail wind and solar than to operate fossil power plants – and of cause still cheaper to price differentiate the electricity and sell the excess electricity for Synfuels production – yet another stab into the fossil fuel industry’s vulnerable belly.
As for Energy from Thorium this is also very bad news because this means the window of opportunity is closing fast.
Actually, there are tens of millions of otherwise savvy and intelligent people who think that, on balance, fracking is more of a plus than a negative. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in coal country (or the majority of registered Republicans) who think coal is a net negative.
The pitch for thorium reactors is admittedly low key; it’s more of a process of elimination. The idea of the article is to demonstrate the folly of gas-backed wind and solar (either backed up on-site, or by a gas-powered grid.)
The only viable non-carbon mass energy alternative is nuclear.
” a gangplank ” to the future , you Californians are wacky but I love it , great article well referenced . I’m nuclear qualified and can tell ye guys know your stuff
We need the global nuclear industry to start cranking out visuals now for a world wide advertising campaign – what chance of that ?
D