Bright Source to cost $15,000 per kW

Earlier this week the New York Times titled Major California Solar Project Moves Ahead. The story reported that the US DoE had approved a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to BrightSource Energy, for the construction of the 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.
The story discussed that an environmental controversy involving had broken out the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity were objecting to the project for environmental reasons although at least in principle support solar energy projects. One has to ask where these distinguished environmental organizations think it would environmentally sound to bulldoze several square miles of desert habitat, and cover the denuded land with thousands of mirrors?

The Times story contained major flaws. as David Lewis noted in response:

If you take the $1.37 billion loan guarantee as the cost of the project, and NREL published data for the estimated yearly output in MWhr (1,079,232 per yr), this works out to $11,120 per available kWhr. But this project relies on a natural gas assist. From the California Energy Commission's webpage on the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System: "Each plant also includes a partial load natural gas fired steam boiler... for thermal input... during the morning start-up cycle... and during transient cloudy conditions". The gas fired assist explains how this plant can claim to be designed to produce power @ 31% capacity factor - a solar plant at that location could only be expected to produce 24% or so.

If you factor out the gas assist, you get actual low CO2 emission solar thermal power out of this thing for a mere $15,0000 per available kW, which is only THREE TIMES what it would cost to put in a nuke plant, if you assumed that Lester Brown is correct when he cites the Areva plant in Finland as the true "tombstone" poster plant that will kill the nuclear renaissance because it costs $5000 per available kW after the cost overruns are included

It would take about 11.7 of these Brightsource "392 MW" nameplate 123 MW actually available on average projects to equal the output of the far too expensive for Lester Brown to consider using Areva Finland nuke. Lester touts solar thermal, so, let's see, for a mere $16 billion or so, you could cover 75 square miles of places the Sierra Club, et al, say they don't want to see covered and use generating stations like these instead.

There was a reason that the Sierra Club used to support nuclear power.

Environmentalists continue to insist on their absurd argument that nuclear power is to expensive, while hiding the real cost of renewable power. The Times, of course, enables the confidence game.

My Energy Collective debate is finally winding down

My debate with Stephen Gloor, an Australian pro-renewables engineer, seems finally to be winding down. I have been very ably assisted by Bill Hannahan, Rod Adams, and Nathan Wilson. This morning I wrote the following comment:

Stephen, you have in our discussion nicely illustrated the case against renewables, while offering your defense of renewable power systems. When confronted with the limitations of wind, you offered redundant dispersed wind installations as a solution. When it was pointed out that wind dispersion still left gaps in wind electrical generation, you offered solar-wind redundancy as a solution. Against the case that solar and wind both fail over wide areas, you offered another redundancy, the CO2 emitting use of natural gas as a backup to the not always reliable renewables system you call for.. Your solution also requires an enormous and expensive expansion of the electrical transmission system. I have called attention to a statement by a electrical transmission systems expert that an all renewables generation system would require 75 thousand miles of new transmission lines for California alone, in order to make the system reliable. Your solution to almost any renewable reliability problem is to build further, redundant renewable facilities, and connect them up with hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines.

You claim that nuclear construction it too slow, but nuclear power with its superior reliability, and its potential to be located near consumers, is far far more easily scaled to meet carbon free energy requirements, and to fulfill consumer demands than renewables are.

You never once stop to count the cost of the multiple redundancies and grid expansion you advocate. When confronted with the fact that even with the huge investments in wind, solar and natural gas facilities, there still would be uncovered problems like summer peak demand, in areas like Texas. Your response was to call for even more huge investments in energy efficiency. Thus you like other renewables advocates never stop to count the cost of your solutions, you simply recite the claim that nuclear is too expensive, while ignoring the fact that the renewables system you advocate would be far more expensive. You argue that reactors cannot perform load following, despite the fact that nuclear load following is performed as a matter of course in the French electrical system. You reject the possibility that nuclear research and a new generation of nuclear technology might lower nuclear costs.

Conclusions from our debate:

1. Renewable advocates have failed to make a convincing case that wind plus natural gas "backups" actually saves significantly more CO2, than wind alone. Money spent on wind generators is not justified unless a strong case exists that they actually save CO2.

2. Wind generators seldom operate at full capacity. Redundant wind generators are required to equal the capacity factor of reactors.

3. Even with multiple generators, natural factors such as day and night influence wind output. To achieve high renewable penetration, wind generators require daytime solar back up. The solar backup is a second form of renewables redundancy. In order to insure the availability of solar generated electricity during all daylight hours, heat storage is required, Heat storage requires redundant gathering fields, in order to insure that enough heat is collected during limited daylight hours.

3. All forms of energy storage, if used with renewables, require redundant generating capacity to service them. In addition the storage-generator unit is a further redundant electrical generator.

4. Even with significant redundancies, a high renewables penetrated grid requires significant natural gas backup. Natural gas backups thus form a further redundancy.

5. Renewables seldom can be located close to energy customers. Transmitting electricity from renewables generating facilities to customers usually requires new and expensive transmission lines. The cost of those transmission lines are a hidden cost of a renewable generation system, Using renewables output from other regions as a backup to local renewables requires still more new transmission lines. These interregional transmission lines that would not be required by an all nuclear grid, are transmission redundancies required to support a renewable power system.

6. Construction of nuclear power plants use significantly fewer materials than the construction the construction of solar and wind facilities require. The United States must compete with growing Asian economies for construction materials, and the current trade balance places the United States at a significant and growing disadvantage in this competition. Hence the cost of power generation facilities construction can be expected to rise during the next 15 years, with the cost of renewables rising more than the cost of nuclear power. The rise in materials cost, will also effect the cost of transmission lines, and this will effect the cost of an all renewables system far more than the cost of an all nuclear system.

7. Renewables advocates when confronted by the limitations of renewable energy and its high cost, fall back on a further redundancy, and that is efficiency. Efficiency advocates point to potential energy efficiencies, but seldom attempt to understand why these efficiencies are not already being adopted. Efficiency advocates often believe that naming an efficiency and describing it as a low hanging fruit is the same thing as demonstrating that it is a low cost alternative to building generation facilities. This is not in fact the case.

8. Renewables critics of nuclear power never reference renewables cost and compare the total cost of an all renewables electrical system, with the cost of an all nuclear electrical system. But judging from the current cost of renewables generation facilities, their capacity factors, and the added cost of new transmission lines needed to bring renewable generated electricity to distant customers, and the likely inflation of the cost of materials, the total cost of an all renewables system is likely to be several times higher the cos of an all nuclear system.

Barry Brook and Company Destroy the Case for Renewables

When I first got interested in energy related issues I encountered what amounted to the "Green" party line. That was that Renewables would soon be so cheap, and our energy use would be so efficient that electricity would be virtually given away. I began however, to find reliable sources of information. Sometimes that reliable source was a press release for a "renewables" project, a wind farm or solar array. Reliable information could include the cost of the project, although this almost never included transmission lines. The press release often included the rated output of the project. If it was a solar project, the press release might refer to the area the project covered. The press release got really interesting when it talked about the projects cost. I should say estimated cost, because I suspect that some of those projects I read about ended up costing more than the reported cost in the press release.

I began to analyze this information. I was interested in the answer to the question, how much would it cost to replace CO2 emitting fossil fuel in electrical generation with a post-carbon energy source. That is where I ran into the reliability problem. You cannot replace coal powered electrical plants with wind generated electricity if the coal mainly produces electricity in the day time, and the wind blows at night. It was explained to me by some renewable advocates that the day time coal could be replaced by solar generated electricity, while night time power would be supplied by wind. This sounded good, but that meant that you had to pay for at least two generation facilities in order to be assured round the clock energy production. That got to be a little expensive, but then I discovered that even with solar and wind generation facilities you might not always have electricity when you wanted or need it. So you needed electricity from other sources.

Surprisingly renewables advocates told me that those other sources would burn fossil fuels. But that did not satisfy me, because the point of my exercise was to discover how much it would cost to replace fossil fuels., not how much burning fossil fuels would cost as a crutch for the limitations of renewables.

Some renewabes advocates told me that energy from renewables could be put into storage, and drawn out when there was demand for electricity. How much would that cost, I wondered. So I checked on the cost of various storage plans, pumped storage, Large batteries and compressed air. it turned out that there were inefficiencies and sources of energy lost coupled with all of these, ad none of them came cheep. When I started calculating the cost, an interesting pattern emerged. In every case, renewables plus storage was more expensive than the highest estimated nuclear cost. Even when I made assumptions that were favorable to renewables, for example assuming that the cost of nuclear power would be subject to inflation, while the cost of renewables would not be, the cost always turned out to be higher for renewabes. When I assumed a level playing field, the cost of reliable renewables would strikingly higher than nuclear, so much so that no one in his or her right mind would support renewables.

Someone suggested to me that I look at Mark Z, Jacobson's base wind scheme. I read Jacobson's papers and realized that his promised base load output, was about 20% of the name tage output of his wind facilities. Thus in order to produce a promised base load capacity of 1 GW 80% of the time, wind producers would have to put up 5 GWs of wind generation capacity. But 5 GWs of wind capacity was more expensive than a 1 GW nuclear power plant. Once more a favored renewables scheme proved more expensive than nuclear. The problem was much worse than this, however. None of the renewables schemes was as reliable as nuclear was. Jacobson's base load wind delivered 79% of the time, while the average nuke delivered 92% of the time. What is more, at least part of the nukes down time would be for maintenance, and could be scheduled in advance. The Nuke clearly offered superior flexibility over renewables, the nuk would almost always deliver electricity on demand.

I recently discovered that Australian Climate Scientist Barry Brook was posting information on his blog Brave New Climate that resembled my studies and which came to similar conclusions. These studies, many of which were preformed in part or completely by people who had far more expertise than i have came to the same conclusions that I came too.

i regard Barry as a major figure in the carbon mitigation debate. Perhaps there is a little vanity in this assessment, In many respects Barry's thinking is similar to mine, however, we party company in one significant respect. Our views on preferred nuclear technology differ, and the clash has at times been rancorous. I will deal with the issues on another occasion. At present I want to focus on Barry's month long attack on renewables. On August 8, Barry posted on brave New Climate a discussion of a paper by Peter Lang. Barry describes Peter:

(Peter is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on a wide range of energy projects throughout the world, including managing energy R&D and providing policy advice for government and opposition. His experience includes: coal, oil, gas, hydro, geothermal, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal, and a wide range of energy end use management projects)

The post was titled "Does wind power reduce carbon emissions?" The Lang paper offered the following statement:

A single 1000 MW nuclear plant (normally we would have four to eight reactors together in a single power station) would avoid 6.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year. Five hundred 2 MW wind turbines (total 1000 MW) would avoid 0.15 to 1.3 million tonnes per year – just 2 to 20% as much as the same amount of nuclear capacity. When we take into account that we could have up to 80% of our electricity supplied by nuclear (as France has), but only a few percent can be supplied by wind, we can see that nuclear can make a major contribution to cutting greenhouse emissions, but wind a negligible contribution and at much higher cost.“

The discussion which followed contained over 150 comments. This post was followed by an august 13 post titled, Wind and carbon emissions – Peter Lang responds. Lang's second essay offered the following statement: I would argue that average capacity factor is not valid for determining the amount of back-

up generation capacity required. The total generation system must be able to provide peak power when there is no output from the wind turbines. When wind power is zero, or near zero, at the time of peak demand, we need sufficient conventional generator capacity to provide the peak demand. This is because electricity demand must be matched by supply at all times. In other words, wind power cannot displace much, if any, conventional generator capacity.

If wind doesn't reduce CO2 as much as nuclear does and cannot be counted on in periods of peak electrical demand, what good is it? One hundred eighty four comments followed.

This was followed by an August 16 Lang based post, Solar power realities – supply-demand, storage and costs. This time a Lang paper goes after solar power.

This paper provides a simple analysis of the capital cost of solar power and energy storage sufficient to meet the demand of Australia’s National Electricity Market. It also considers some of the environmental effects. It puts the figures in perspective. By looking at the limit position, the paper highlights the very high costs imposed by mandating and subsidising solar power. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability. The capital cost would be 25 times more than nuclear power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.

Conclusions: solar power is uneconomic. Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these additional costs must be carried by others.

Four hundred thirty six comments followed this post. The Lang paper on solar power was followed by an August 31 post,Solar thermal questions, this time based on a paper by University of NSW academic, Ted Trainer. The Trainer essay is an all out, no holds barred, take no prisoners assault on solar, and what sort of intellectual respectability is left to solar advocates after their thrashing at Trainer's hands is open to question. Trainer writes:

The heat storage capacity of solar thermal systems overcomes some of the intermittency problems that trouble wind and PV systems, such as the occurrence of night time. The standard provision will be 12 hour storage enabling continuous 24 hour electricity delivery. However examination of climate data reveals that even at the best sites sequences of 4 or more days without sunshine are not unusual. The best US sites often have 2 runs of 4 consecutive days of cloud in a winter month. (Davenport, 2008)

If 1000 MW(e) output was to be provided for four cloudy day from stored heat, some 290,000MWh of heat would have to be stored. Storage cost has been estimated at $(A)10/kWh(th) meaning that the required storage plant would cost more than $8 billion, or around twice the cost of a coal-fired plant plus fuel. However this refers to trough technology and it is likely that for the ammonia process costs would be higher.

Again we would be faced with the prospect of very high capital costs for a large amount of plant that would not be used most of the time, and would still be insufficient occasionally. There would also be the question of whether there would be enough solar radiation in winter to meet daily demand and also recharge a large storage sufficiently to cope with the next run off 4 cloudy days.

The Trainer essay and Barry's discussion drew 98 more comments. Finally on the 10th Barry followed up Lang's first solar essay, with Solar realities and transmission costs – addendum.
Basically Lang compares the cost of providing reliable power for Australia with Nuclear and solar power. Trainer had observed,

examination of climate data reveals that even at the best sites sequences of 4 or more days without sunshine are not unusual. The best US sites often have 2 runs of 4 consecutive days of cloud in a winter month. (Davenport, 2008).

Lang noted,

A loop through the midday images for each day of June, July and August 2009, shows that much of south east South Australia, Victoria, NSW and southern Queensland were cloud covered on June 1, 2, 21 and 25 to 28. July 3 to 6, 10, 11, 14. 16, 22 to 31 also had widespread cloud cover (26th was the worst), as did August 4, 9, 10, 21, 22.. This was not a a rigorous study.

Thus Lang was thus responding to this data by asking how much would it cost to provide electricity during cloudy winter days in Australia..

It is assumed that South East Australia would need a power reserve capable of providing electricity during the cloudy winter days. That reserve can be either provided by nuclear power plants or by solar systems with three days energy storage, that is capable of being transformed into electricity. Lang's conclusions can be summarized with the following table:
Discussion of the latest Lang post continues, but it is clear that Lang, Trainer and Brook have destroyed the case for renewables beyond redemption.

Truth, Solar Costs, and David Biello

As a teen age boy, i often walked a mile and a half to the Oak Ridge Public Library on summer days. There I would read a number of magazines and journals, and from their contents i constructed my world. I held Scientific American in very high regard then, and read each issue eagerly. i always thought of Scientific American as the gold standard of reliability.

No more. Last week David Biello posted a story on reliable solar electricity in the SA electronic edition. The story offered an account of the Andasol 1 solar thermal power plant. The Andasol 1 facility represents an advance in solar thermal technology. It offers heat storage in low cost molten salts. The molten salt technology offers several improvement over conventional Solar thermal technology. Stored heat allows the facility to load follow and produce peak energy. It also allows operators to to smooth out the dips and spikes in electrical generation caused by alternatively cloudy and sunny conditions. With molten salt energy storage electricity can be generated at night. Biello tells us how much electricity Andasol 1 produces - 50 MWs - the number of hours it can produce electricity - 7.5 - and its cost - $380 million. But then something goes very wrong in Biello's account. Solar Millennium AG, Andasol'sbuilder acknowledges that Andasol is

currently remunerated with a feed-in tariff of just under € 0.27/kWh.

That is $0.34 a KWh. Indeed capital cost of the Andasol 1 facility is $7600 per KW, a 50% priemium over thye current high end estimate of the cost of conventional nuclear power.

Biello does not reveal this shocking cost to his readers. instead he inserts a completely misleading statement from National Renewables Energy Laboratory engineer Greg Glatzmaier suggesting that "Electricity from a solar-thermal power plant costs roughly 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to both with and without molten salt storage systems". This is of course utter nonsense, as anyone who would make the effort to check on the cost and generating capacity of recently constructed or proposed solar facilities. The NREL has a history of making highly optimistic statements about solar costs. Statements that appear to have no relationship to project balance sheets. According to Biello, Glatzmaier told him that Molten Salt storage only cost $50 per kilowatt-hour to install. This is very misleading. Storage may not greatly add to the cost of the facility, but increasing the amount of heat captured does. The daily electrical output of a solar thermal facility without storage is equal to about 4.5 hours of electricity at its rated capacity. In order to increase that amount to 7.5 hours at rated capacity, more heat has to be captured, and this is done by increasing the size of the very expensive array of mirrors used to reflect sunlight onto the heat capturing mechanism of Andasol 1. Rest assured that installing the extra mirrors cost more than $50 per kilowatt. Glatzmaier 13 cents figure is what is called a canard - something that leads us away from true knowledge of the cost of solar thermal generated electricity. The electricity from Aldasol 1 costs well over twice 13 cents.

Now it is clear that the proponents of a solar power would like us to believe that it can be delivered cheaply, if only a hugh subsidy is given to solar manufacturers. if only they are given a chance the manufacturers will bring the price down. This of course is a scam, at the tax payers expense. It is clear that Biello is promoting the scam. What is not clear is whether Biello is knowingly using the authority of Scientific American to promote the scam, or whether he lacks the intelligence to understand the deception. What ever is the case David Biello has no business writing about energy for a science magazine that wishes to maintain a reputation for quality.

People change, values change, institutions change. Sometimes the changes are for the better, sometimes the changes are neither good nor bad, but some changes are decidedly for the worse. It is clear that Scientific American has changed for the worse. It is no longer the reliable and responsible voice I put my trust in as a teen age boy. I previously pointed to the anti-nuclear propaganda of David Biello in the Scientific American Electronic edition. The rot of Scientific American is so far advanced that Biello has not been fired as his incompetence would require. Instead the editors of Scientific American allow Biello continues to disregard truth and behave like the hack he is, pretending that distorted, and dishonest propaganda is fact. It is to the everlasting shame of Scientific American that its editorial leadership has allowed this to happen.

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.