The Flawed Renewables Paradigm

When I first began thinking about renewable generation of electricity, the first question I asked was "how are you going to provide electricity when the sun is not shining, or the wind is not blowing?"  I got two different answers in response,  The first answer was that we will use the existing generating resources of the grid to bridge any gap when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.   The existing resources being "nuclear", a word that causes most renewable advocates to foam at the mouth whenever it is mentioned.  Almost all of  the grid resources that renewables advocates would depend on bun fossil fuels.  Coal, which every renewables advocate professes to hate, even though some of them take coal money to advocate something called carbon capture and sequestration, is marked by renewables advocates for replacement by renewables. Natural gas, which is after all a carbon based fuel, is almost always treated in the thinking of renewables advocates as an honorary renewables and carbon free resource.   Thus we have renewables advocates, in effect, arguing emitting CO2 is OK as long is prevents the use of new reactors in the generation of electricity.  

When I looked at the entire energy economy, I saw that there were areas where it would be very difficult to replace fossil fuel.  For example some cement manufacture require 1500 degrees C heat.  Advanced high temperature reactors produce 1000 C.  The theoretical maximum for LFTR's with carbon-carbon parts is somewhere around 1200 C.   Thus heat for cement manufacture, and other industrial processes, may have to come from natural gas.  Land transportation can be electrified.  Unless small reactor power plants for ships become a practical reality ocean going transportation may remain dominated by fossil fuel power for a long time.  Air transportation is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and if the air transport industry is to continue to exist, it may remain dependent on fossil fuels for a long time to come. Fossil fuel consumption may continue to be required for agricultural use.  Fossil fuels may continue to have a variety of military uses.  Thus if our goal is an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050, it is unlikely that much of the remaining 20% will be devoted to the generation of electricity.   Thus we will have to assume that the 2050 electrical system will have to do without any fossil fuel backup.  

In 2007 I looked at these facts and came to the startling conclusion that neither a renewable dominated electrical generation systems, nor a conventional nuclear dominated system was likely to be affordable as a replacement for the fossil fuel electrical generation.  In addition energy had to be found to power surface transportation.  Other energy gaps included a new technology for lower temperature industrial process heat, were not well filled.  

I found Robert Hargraves' Pebble Bed Reactor site.  I was impressed with the argument for factory production of  of Pebble Bed Reactors, but I knew of a radical reactor design that could be mass produced, and which in a number of ways was superior to the PBR, and which was amenable to mass production.  

But natural gas is not renewable, it is expensive, and when it is burned carbon dioxide gas is produced. There is something else about natural gas that renewables advocates will not tell you. When natural gas is burned radioactive gases such as radon get released. Now the big rap against nuclear power is the argument that the danger of releasing radioactive materials like radon is two great and thus nuclear power is toxic and dangerous. When renewable advocates tell you about how clean natural gas is they ignore the release of the very radioactive and toxic gas radon from natural gas powered plants, and the ignore the emissions of CO2 from the same natural gas fired generating facilities.

When it is pointed out to renewables advocates that their plan to use grid resources when mother nature fails to cooperate in the production of renewable generated electricity, they fall back on energy storage. Three schemes get mentioned: Battery storage, pump storage, and Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES). In addition solar thermal electrical schemes may rely on energy storage in such media as molten salt, or pressurized water. All energy storage schemes are expensive, in fact so expensive that when the cost of the storage system and redundant generating capacity required to produce the energy to be stored, the cost of carbon free renewable systems almost invariably turns out to be higher than the cost of nuclear power. In addition the CAES solution requires the burning of natural gas.

Thus the renewables paradigm is either requires that we continue burning natural gas or turn to a storage solution that makes renewables produced electricity more expensive than nuclear power.  Thus renewable generated electricity either will not completely displace the use of carbon based fuels, or it displace them at a cost that is higher than new conventional nuclear power. It would be very damming if the cost of a carbon-free renewable system were to be higher than the cost of a conventional nuclear power system.  

The renewable paradigm yields the following operational hypothesis: "Renewable electrical sources can replace replace carbon emitting fossil fuel burning electrical generating systems at a lower cost than nuclear power."

The Null hypothesis would be: "Renewables can only replace carbon emitting fossil fuel burning electrical generating systems at a cost that is higher than nuclear power."

I have repeatedly tested the Null hypothesis on Nuclear Green using actual cost information from the renewables industry, and data on capacity from reliable sources.  When I had to make assumptions, I was if anything generous to the renewables industry, but it would have been unreasonable to assume that nuclear costs would be subject to inflation while renewables  costs would not be, unless it could be shown that renewables costs would not be subject to the same inflationary pressures  that nuclear costs would be.  That evidence has yet to emerge. Repeatedly. I have tested the null hypothesis in Nuclear Green case studies of renewables costs.   The null hypothesis tests have  shown that renewables cost data supports rather than falsifies the null hypothesis.  That is it has not been possible, using cost data and capacity factor data, to show that it would cost less to replace the fossil fuels electrical generating system with a renewable based system, than it would cost to replace it with a nuclear based generating system.  Thus the renewables paradigm fails the falsification tests.   Admittedly it is has not been possible to explore every possible renewables system, because in some cases there is not enough empirical data to construct a test, so while the range of possible renewable options has been shown to be very limited - for example wind, PV and most forms of ST have been shown to fail the falsification test - it has not yet been possible to run the falsification test on every form of  ST.  

I have performed falsification test on both state wide and national renewables plans.  The state plans were for wind generation in Texas, and the plan to produce 33% of California's electricity from renewable by 2025.   I also tested the Picken's energy plan, and the google energy plan. Both plans had nation wide scope, both plans contained significant flaws in addition to failing the falsification test for their renewables components.  It is clear then claims that the claim that a renewables based electrical generating system will cost less than a nuclear based electrical system is not not derived from facts.  

Thus renewables, at a cost that is lower than the cost of nuclear power, cannot fully displace the use of fossil fuels.   It would appear that the cost of fully replacing the use of fossil fuels in electrical generation would drive the cost of an all renewable electrical generating system  to a cost level that is higher than the cost of a nuclear based system.

On The Cost of Wind Reliability

Wind advocates point to a study by CRISTINA L. ARCHER AND MARK Z. JACOBSON
“Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms”.

This study shows, wind advocates claim that systems of windmills, given proper grid interconnection, can supply base power. I will not dispute this conclusion, however, I do wish to point to some aspects of the Archer and Jacobson study that wind advocates often ignore, and which demonstrated that base wind power has undesirable features.

Archer and Jacobson based their model on wind data for the southwest. They chose 19 sites in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. They calculated that the average capacity factor for each site was around 0.45. Thus given the installation of a standard 1.5 MW windmill, the average output per windmill would be around 670 KWs. They were able to calculate that 79% of the time windmills from the combined sites would be able to produce at least 312 KWs, or 47% of the average output. Thus the base wind production from the 19 facility system would be .45 X .47 of the rated outputs of the 19 wind facilities or a little over 21% of rated capacity. Producing electrical energy 79% is about as good as your average coal fired steam plant. So this puts wind into the base capacity ball park. But consider how much this is going to cost.

Yesterday I used the figure of $2.5 Million per megawatt for wind costs. We would have to tack on the cost of the interconnecting grid, but we can ignore that for right now. How much would our wind base power cost? Well, if base power is 21% of rated capacity, we can get the figure by deviding the cost of rated capacity, by .21. At $2.5 million per MW, with a 1.5 MW system our wind mills will cost $3.75 million a pop. So how much is our base power going to cost us. Well $3.75 divided by .21 = $17.86 per base MW. Wow, now that is expensive!

Now Google wants to have 380 GWs of wind generators by 2030, how much of that if going to count as wind basic? The answer is 380 x .21 - 79.8 GWs. That seems like a very credible addition to our wind generations system until we realize that there is a serious performance fly in the ointment.

The capacity factor of wind generators drop on hot days. Really drop, and the hotter the day, the bigger the drop. This is a problem because it is hotter during the summer than during the winter. To make matter’s worse, electrical demand goes up during the summer. How bad does it get? In Texas and California on the hottest days, wind capacity factors drop to as low as .02 during periods of peak electrical demand. Thus when the system needs reliable base load capacity the most, wind base capacity is unavailable. If the .02 capacity factor for very hot days held for the entire Google 380 GW national wind system, the combined electrical output of the entire system during the hottest hours of the day would be 7.6 GWs. About the amount of electricity produced by 4 very large nuclear plants.

In order to have its desired wind generation system by 2030 we will have to build 360 Billion GWs of windmill generating capacity. This will cost about $900 billion. The same amount of money will buy 112 reactors. And those reactors will have a .9 capacity factor. Instead of the average output of 79.8 GWs of base power, you will get an average output of 101 GWs of base power from the reactors. But instead of only 7.6 GWs output during the summer peak demand periods, the reactors will and average of 109.76 GWs of output at any given time during the period of summer peak demand.

Summer wind power will never be able to compete with nuclear power as a reliable source of electricity, and any money spent on windmills would buy far more reliable power if spent on nuclear power.

The California Green premium for electricity.costs.

ECOWorld.com has published some cost estimates by Ed Ring in connection with California's Proposition 7, which mandates an average renewables power of 50% of California's electricity outputs by 2025.

ECOWorld estimates the installed cost of solar power without transmission or storage infrastructure costs about $7.0 million per megawatt of rated output, or $7.0 billion per gigawatt. However on the best days California, solar output would only produce 4.5 hours per day electricity. Thus in order to produce 500 gWh of solar generated electricity each day in California, a solar array with a rated capacity of 111 gigawatts would be required. Such an array would cost $777 billion dollars.

For $777 billion would pay for 100 nuclear plants capable of producing 100 GW continuously, or 2400 gWhs a day, nearly 5 time the daily output of the solar facility.

What if California chose wind instead of solar. ECOWorld estimates a capacity factor of 17.5%, a very problematic figure a wind array equal too 119 gigawatts of wind generating name plate capacity, which would cost $297 billion dollars. Too this must be added the cost of new transmission lines. grid upgrades, and massive energy storage units. ECOWorld estimates the minimum cost for wind to be $300 billion. EcoWorld calculate the cost of energy storage to be $350 Million per gWh, and calculate that 100 gWhs of storage is needed, which would run $35 billion for a total cost of $335 Billion. The 350 million per GWh for storage is probably low but I won't argue. At any rate #335 will get you ate least 42 reactors. 42 reactors with average capacity factor of .90 will produce 900 gWhs of power every day. Since we need 500 gWhs, we only need 24 reactors and that will cost $192 billion, or 57% of the cost of a 42 reactor generating system. Thus the Green premium will run 43% of nuclear system costs for wind. The Green premium for solar would be an astonishing 300% of the cost of a nuclear system.