The Energy Collective in the Era of Confusion

One of the principle problems of the Energy Collective, is the failure of most collective writers to understand the issues they write about it terms of cost. Not only are Energy Collective writers confused about cost, they spread their confusion to the public. Some of the most popular writers on the Energy Collective are what I charitably call aggressive, anti-nuclear nut cases. The anti-nuclear nut cases relentlessly harp on the supposedly enormous cost of nuclear power plants, often using high end cost estimates to make nuclear power look bad. These writers inevitably advocate the use of renewable generating capacity as an alternative, with the implied assertion that electricity generated from renewables will cost far less than nuclear generated power.

Needless to say the aggressive anti-nuclear nut cases never compare the cost of nuclear power with the cost of reliable renewable electricity. But even renewable advocates who do not take an aggressive anti-nuclear position, pitch puffballs at renewables costs. Renewables manufacturers, and installation builders frequently try to hide the very high costs of part time, unreliable renewables facilities. Unfortunately renewables friendly writers are party to the conspiracy to hind renewables cost, This pattern shows up over and over in the writing of Energy Collective renewables friendly writers.

In order to demonstrate the problem I made a case study of a recent Energy Collective post by Tyler Hamilton, a senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star. I would not classify Tyler an anti-nuclear nut case and I have posted a link to "Clean Brake" on Nuclear Green. But Tyler is a far to uncritical renewables advocate in my book. My case study is based on a post of June 18 titled, Duke Energy solar storage pilot worthy of replication. Tyler is nothing, if not a shameless cheerleader for renewable energy, opens his story:

It’s with great delight that I read about the handful of U.S. utilities that are seriously testing out various conservation, smart grid, storage and renewable technologies in an effort to extend greener offerings to customers. The latest is Duke Energy’s McAlpine Creek project, part of which involves the deployment of a 50 kilowatt solar PV array, consisting of 213 solar panels, at a substation that feeds the grid or, alternatively, can charge up a 500-kilowatt zinc-bromide battery system.

But no where in Tyler's story is there a hint about how much such a system would cost. This is a very practical question that energy writers should be answering. I decided to to do the leg work that Tyler failed to provide his readers. So how much does the installation cost? According to solarbuzz, PV installations cost from $8 to $10 per W. That would give us an installation cost of $400,000 to $500,000. The facility will have an optimal output on uncloudy days of 333,000 kWh. Hamilton claims that battery backup costs as little as two cents per kW, but I was unable to find any confirmation that zinc-bromide batteries were available at that price. I managed to track down the cost of ZBB zinc-bromide batteries which run to $400 per kWh. Thus the 500 kW battery most likely costs another $200,000. We clearly have a facility which is capable of producing electricity on demand, and will produce something close to 14 kWs per hour in a 24 hour day. The facility costs $600,000 to $700,000. Thus we have a cost of from $43 to $50 per watt of reliable output, or 5 to 6 times the cost of a hugely expensive nuclear plant.

Were Tyler to compare the cost of reliable electricity from the Duke PV facility with the cost of nuclear power, he would simply be forced to admit that reliable PV power was not competitive with nuclear power. No doubt Tyler would experience something less than "great delight" as he made this admission.

During the last two years, I have done repeated case studies that address the cost of reliable renewable electricity. I have looked at several schemes to make solar and wind generated electricity reliable, and assessed the cost of each scheme. The results were always the same. The estimated cost of reliable renewable electrical generating facilities have always proven to be more expensive than the estimated costs of new nuclear generating facilities, For far to many Energy Collective writers, this all too obvious conclusion is so distasteful, that they are simply participating in what amounts to a massive coverup of the real price of reliable renewable generating facilities. The failure of Energy Collective writers to address the issue of adverse renewables cost is an ethics issue, and it has serious consequences.

I have dubbed this current period in thinking about energy, the era of confusion.

We live in an era of confusion. We know that our energy future will be different, but we are like people who are somewhere between dreaming and being fully awake. Our dreams intrude into our thoughts, confusing us. In order to wake up we must stop confusing dreams with reality.

Unfortunately this confusion between dream and reality infects writers whose real responsibility is to help deliver the public from its confusion. To continue to yield to ones own confusion while ignoring evident reality is only human, but to lead in an era of confusion one must do a great deal more than yield to one's own confusion. For energy writers there is an ethical imperative to not yield, even if by not yielding we are forced to admit things which we find distasteful.

T. Boone Pickens and a viable energy plan

Not only is T Boone Pickens' energy plan a bad plan. He is presenting it to the public in the wrong way. We have a plan to solve our problems announced from on high, just like the 5 year plan in the old Soviet Union. Of course the plan did not come from the Central Committee, it came from one man. There are several important things wrong about this plan:

* It is going to costa lot of money without solving the CO2 issue.
* It's success or failure will profoundly effect everyone's lives.
* The plan is not very likely to succeed.
* There has no public preplan discussion of energy options, just the launching of Pickens' slick advertising campaign.
* There was no consultative process with energy experts, or the creation of a panel of wise people to make energy recommendations. T. Boone was the whole panel!

Perhaps the good thing about the Pickens plan and its advertising campaign is that is that it focuses national attention on the need to make an all out effort to find and impliment a solution. What is amazing to me is that $4.00 a gallon gasoline has yet to wake the nation from its slumber about energy issues. The problem with $4.00 a gallon gas is that the wrong people get hurt. The people who are in a position to talk about the problems and initiate a decision making process simply can afford to go about their daily lives as if nothing is happening.

They both create the Main Stream Media and get their information from it. There lives are spent in a reality what is made of encapsulated information that is incredibly filtered and manipulated. The media manufactures reality for people, and it puts them to sleep to the dangers that we face. For such people reality is what they read in the newspaper or see on TV. They are the sleeping. At least T Boone Pickens, with his wrong headed plan has called on the sleepers to wake.

Once the country awakes it will face concophany of voices to sort out. The issues are beginning to be sorted out on the internet now, but that process will take some time. There are still a lot of important questions to ask and answer before we can come up with viable energy plan.

There is an important discussion and debate on the internet about energy issues. Ideas are put out for examination, and they are worked over. Major energy systems are being proposed for the future, and both their virtues and flaws are being examined.

We have recently seen yet another major debate on nuclear energy on the internet, with Joseph Romm and Amory Lovins taking the negative case and David Bradish, Rod Adams, the Sovietologist, Brian Wang, myself, and others to numerous to mention including dozens of Salon posters on one of Romm's anti-nuclear hit pieces. In particular David Bradish emerged as a central figure in the debate, he took on Lovins and demonstrated numerous errors in the way Lovins constructed his arguments, problems with Lovins data, his method of analysis, and Lovins highly selective approach to information. Both Bradish and the Sovietologist raised an issue about Lovins perspective that has serious implications for all renewables advocates. Namely that Lovins vision of the energy future is dependent on the future use of fossil fuels.

The problem with renewables is quite obvious, and it is a fundamental of Pickens' plan. It is the problem of intermittency. Renewable energy is not available on demand. So we have to have another source of electrical electricity for when renewable energy is not available. Thus in addition to the cost of a renewable energy system, we would have to use a back up system. The back up options are to use existing fossil fuel generating facilities, build energy storage facilities, and a third option that is rarely discussed, build nuclear plans for renewables backup.

The first option is seriously flawed, if we intend to get serious about fighting global warming. It relies on CO2 generating technology to back up renewable power. In addition, natural gas, a which would be a major part of the fossil fuel back up strategy is becoming increasingly expensive, and is at any rate a non-renewable resource and thus not an sustainable option. Coal has numerous problems. The proposal to sequester CO2 from burning coal is very expensive, has significant complexities, and carries risks that have not been assessed. It is doubtful that coal with Sequestered CO2 would be less expensive than nuclear power,

The second option, which involves the use of energy storage also has significant flaws. First renewable energy technologies are expensive ways to generate the massive amounts of electricity needed to run the American economy. Renewable advocates argue that renewables are cheaper than nuclear energy, but this is debatable. Renewable advocates have engaged in something less than full public disclosure on the price of renewable energy, or have posted pie in the sky price estimates, that do not survive scrutiny of actual renewable building costs. If the cost of energy storage is added to the cost of renewable electrical generation the cost will probably exceed the cost of building electrical generating reactors by a considerable margin.

Finally, the third approach to renewable back up is to build reactors to generate back up electricity. Although expensive, this plan would would have several advantages. For example it would not solve the CO2 problems related to fossil fuel back up, and unlike fossil fuels, nuclear energy is sustainable. There is so much mineable uranium and thorium in the earth's curst that for all practical purposes we will never run out no matter how much we burn for energy. Reactors are expensive, but not more so than some energy storage schemes that have been proposed. And there are things that could be done to bring down reactor costs. Possibly bring down reactor costs a lot without compromising on things like safety. Nuclear plants are also far more flexible than energy storage schemes. The storage schemes can only accept a limited amount of energy, before they are maxed out. The can only pump out the amount of energy stored. Reactors can pump out a virtually unlimited amount of energy. Once the fuel is burned, more can be added. On the other hand if the wind stops blowing for several days, once we drain our storage, we are out of energy, while back up reactors can keep pumping away. Thus back up reactors promise superior reliability to storage approaches.

There is, however, a problem for renewables in the back up reactor approach. Why use reactors to back up renewables, when the very reliable reactors can do the whole job on their own? It would be cheaper, and perhaps far cheaper to build the entire system using only nuclear power. This is, I believe what a blue ribbon panel of wise people will conclude in response to President Obama's charge to come up with a solution to our energy issues shortly after January 20, next year.

There is one more thing the wise peoples panel should look at, and that is the best way to generate electricity from nuclear energy. The conventional approach is to use Light Water Reactors, but they are very expensive, and generate waste. There are two proposals that have the potential to dramatically reduce reactor costs, the Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR), and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). Both reactor types are safe. Both reactor designs can be quickly mass-produced, and could be churning out power within months of being ordered. There are minimal siting problems for both reactor types. Neither concept is new, and both reactor types have received substantial research from the scientific community. Development costs would be extremely inexpensive if view in light of the amount of money America spends in even a week on imported oil. Both reactor types are safe, but the PBR still has generates nuclear waste. The LFTR does not generate a significant amount of nuclear waste, and indeed the fission byproducts from the LFTR can be sold for Industrial, agricultural, medical and sanitary uses.

The road is clearly open to a safe, low cost solution to our national energy problems. We need as a nation to discover the road and resolutely take it.

The cost of wind

The blogger Jérôme à Paris is one of the best source of information about the cost of wind power. He both builds wind generating facilities, and also works on the financial side of the wind generating business. Hence he is exceptionally well informed about cost. Yet in the past Jérôme à Paris appears at times to have lowballed the cost of building wind generators. For example, in 2006 he claims:

"initial investments [in wind generators] are high, around 1000 $/kW. This is high because a kW of wind power produdes fewer kWh (typically, a third or a quarter as many) than a kW of coal, nuclear of gas)-fired power, due to the intermittent nature of wind. Thus the cost per kWh over the life of the plant of that investment is much higher. On the other hand, it is possible to invest small amounts as individual wind turbines are relatively cheap ($2-3M today for modern models).

Yet accordint to a press release from American Wind Energy Association, which à Paris notes, the U.S. wind energy industry installed 5,244 megawatts (MW) in 2007, while investing $9 billion while doing so. Now that comes to an investment of something over $1700 per KW, much higher than the $1000 a Paris claimed in 2006. By a Paris's own accounting the cost of wind power in Europe is even higher. He reported that in 2007, on shore wind generating facilities in Europe cost between 1200 to 1600 Euros per KW ($1745 to $2320). Off shore facilities were even higher, 2200 to 3000 Euros per KW ($3190 to 4350).

What à Paris is talking about is name plate power, or rated power. In the real world wind generators rarely produce their rated power, because the wind rarely blows as hard as the speed that would produce maximum generation. For example, if a wind generator is designed to produce its rated power at in a 20 MPH wind, it will not produce maximum power in a 10 MPH wind. Real world wind generation is rated by something called a capacity factor. The capacity factor is the average percentage of name plate power produced over time. So for example if a 2 MW generator averages producing 1 MW of power over a year, it has a capacity factor of 50%. If you install a 2.5 MW wind turbine, that sounds impressive, but if the capacity factor is 10% you are not producing much electricity for what you paid. Jérôme à Paris tells us for example, that the onshore capacity factor in Europe is 29%. He appears to be seriously fudging here. A Paris also tells us that the average wind turbine operates 2100, or 1/4th of the time. It would be impossible for a wind generator to have a capacity factor of 29% when it was only operating 25% of the time. Reports indicate that the capacity factor for Denmark is 20% and for Germany is 18%. Many British wind farms have a capacity factor of 20%, but some have capacity factors as low as 9%.

Why would à Paris fudge? The answer is simple. It takes a 30% capacity factor for a shore based wind farm to make money. Wind farms in Europe and the United States that produce power at a lower capacity factor stay in business because of government subsidies. Jérôme à Paris is in the business, and he does not want to show his business in a bad light.

A Paris also appears to fudge about off shore wind costs too. In a recent European Tribune post, à Paris claimed offshore costs ran from 2200 to 3000 Euros per KW ($3190 to 4350) Yet in a 2006 post for The Oil Drum, a Paris described and off shore oil project, he described an off shore project to building 60 wind turbines that produced 120 MWs for 378 million Euros ($550 million), which amounts $4.58. A Paris suggested but did not overtly indicated that he included the cost of interconnecting cables in his cost report. A 2007 report from Long Island power stated, "Generic estimates for European installations are expected to exceed $4,000 per kW before the inclusion of interconnection costs within a few years." Long Island power indicated that it faced a "$500 per kW premium on the North American GE turbine" over European costs. Long Island power reported its total cost would run an "estimate of $5,231 per kW (before interconnection)."

Long Island Power found that its offshore wind project, had a "green premium." It observed, "the Green Premium per MWh was calculated as the total cost per MWh of wind power versus
the total cost per MWh of the CCGT. Then to arrive at an annual dollar value we simply
multiplied the Green Premium per MWh times the number of “green” MWh’s produced by the
Project. That annual stream of dollar values was reduced to a net present value (“NPV”) in order to arrive at the NPV Green Premium. That NPV Green Premium was calculated to be $787 million. We also calculated the levelized Green Premium to be $153/MWh, or 15.3 cents per KWh, over the 20-year time horizon."

Long Island Power also indicated that its expected capacity factor was 38%. Thus LIP would be paying something like $13,766 per KW of real world generating capacity. Shortly after it received this assessment, Long Island power, canceled its off shore wind project.