Uh oh, North sea wind power a hopeless quest – it's all about the foundations

“it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double.”
It’s been well known from day one that all things “green” cost more then real, proven and cheaper energy sources.
So just bringing up the fact that it’s going to cost more won’t make anyone reconsider the project !!

Lemonade from lemons: Turn each offshore windmill into a power source for a drilling rig next to its foundation. When the windmill finally comes loose and pops out, GUSHER!

Are there any reliable sources to back this up other than “I have it on good authority from a marine engineer…”?

The problem in the UK is that a succession government ministers put in charge of energy have no grounding in science or engineering. Most are lawyers, PR, or media lovies whose training is in wishfull thinking not reality. Huhne was a case in point. He failed to listen to anyone but his closest ministry civil servants telling him what he wanted to hear rather than what the problems are. It is plainly obvious to even the dimmest that using wind was not a good idea let alone putting them into the North Sea one of the roughest seas on earth with no infrastructure for the transmission of any power to the coast. Cost of North Sea wind generation £100Bs, cost of the infrastructure £100Bs. A double whammy.
Dreamers have no place in government.

Seems to be a shallow water problem from this article on scouring:
“A question mark hangs over the long-term stability of Europe’s shallow-water turbines, after research linked to the Horns Rev 1 wind farm found that high-powered currents were causing the stone “armour” around the base of monopile foundations to collapse.”
[http://www.rechargenews.com/energy/wind/article302545.ece]

It does not just flow to your home you know, it has to be pushed.
The electron flow meets resistance.
From the top of the windmill out at sea to your homes wires, resistance.
Transmission has issues.

….so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

Did it? Some of them may have been on the scam. How many are landowners / spousal land owners with windmills? How many with wind / carbon investments?

The arguments just get louder and more intense – when WILL our (UK) politicians start to listen..?
As a retired mechanical engineer who spent much of his career trying to keep production machinery working under one roof – never mind dotted over our (once) picturesque upland landscapes, or, worse still – way out in the North and Irish Seas – I have no doubt whatsoever that expecting these monstrosities to last twentyfive years is just laughable.
At a fundamental level, our politicians are entrusting a large part of our electricity generating capacity to – the weather. Are they under some illusion that The Climate Change Act is just that – and includes a clause that will cause the wind to blow steadily at 25mph over the whole United Kingdom..? When will ‘groupthink’ eventually fail – or is the ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ arrangement SOOOOO attractive to the Exchequer that to question it amounts to heresy..?

The linked article is well worth a read. Further down, there is mention of a Matt Ridley prize, to be awarded for the best essay that uses actual empirical facts to show the short-comings of wind power.

It often occurs to me that, in today’s world, our tottering governments are still conduits for oceans of money. In such an environment, even a small ‘leak’ at the bottom creates innumerable opportunities for politicians, hangers on, and rent seekers to tap these streams with little straws, for a tasty drink.
Every program you consider that just makes no sense at all is far better understood by the realization that a ‘program’ is a leak. It’s a way to make legal, covert theft from the public treasury. Better yet, done correctly, it not only creates new places to drink, it also makes the folks filling the ocean fall in love with the concept. In their rapture they continue to re-elect the ‘drillers’.
Wind turbines are about money, period. In the U.S. they’re about General Electric. They’re about all the money it takes to get them put up. They’re about all the money given to farmers to place them in their fields. The very last consideration to them is energy.
This is why we pay for scientific studies to validate things that everybody over the age of 5 knows in their gut. This is why countries create carbon trading in the vain promise to reduce pollutants in quantities amounting to a stream of pee in a tropical storm. This is why we pay for models dominated by tuning wheels. None of it is what you think.
All of it is theft by people who have discovered the enormous advantages of a law degree and suit, over a gun and mask. And oh, by the way, don’t forget all the ‘scientists’ driving the getaway cars either.

Jimbo says:
March 5, 2012 at 5:34 am
….so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?
Did it? Some of them may have been on the scam. How many are landowners / spousal land owners with windmills? How many with wind / carbon investments?
============================================================
In the UK, there’s a noteable one. The father in law of our prime minister trousers 1000 UK pounds per day from his subsidy farm http://windfarmaction.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/david-camerons-father-in-laws-350000-annual-bung/

amicus curiae says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am
Let’s Compare Power Generation Costs . . .

Did your friend send a link to the source of those figures?
/Mr Lynn

The Arctic is currently behaving badly with runaway melt.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php

Amicus Curiae says coal burning power is $79 per kWh. I think he meant MWh.

The future of offshore wind: artificial reefs.

amicus curiae says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am
“….Power Generation Costs….Australian…..
Coal fired power station $79 per kw/h (kilowatt/hour)…”
I think you are out 3 orders of magnitude. In Canada I pay $0.10 / kw-hr. Perhaps your units should be MW-hr. The relative costs seem about right though.
Bill

“amicus curiae says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am
Let’s Compare Power Generation Costs”
The rates quoted may or may not be correct, but let’s get the units right,
The rates are intended to be $/MWh (dollars per Megawatt.hour)

jlc says: March 5, 2012 at 6:42 am
[The rates are intended to be $/MWh (dollars per Megawatt.hour)]
Iin Europe it is M$/Whr.
(the metric system eh)

Amicus Curiae,
Perhaps you meant megawatt hour? My domestic tariff, as high as it seems to me, is only around 15pence per kilowatt hour.

MSG;
If you haven’t yet, read anything and everything by Bastiat. Here’s a good link:
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G007

We had several interesting days in the UK last weel where there was no wind and no sunshine thereby knocking out the two prime means of renewables.
The only way forward (assuming we don’t see sense with shale gas) is to use the ocean via waves/tidal power.
tonyb
There are less (sometimes no) waves when there is no wind, so that could be a double whammy.
Tides change directions a couple of times a day and therefore switch off power generation. I admit this is more manageable being predictable. If we make use of the Solent then there is potential for fairly continuous power generation?
“The unusual phenomenon of the ‘Double High Water’ in the Solent and Southampton area is well known, but it is not caused by the existence of the two entrances to the Solent or the Isle of Wight as is popularly supposed. However, the two entrances to the Solent do cause other effects to the tide which are not so well known, namely, the ‘Young Flood Stand’ and the short duration of the ebb tide which are both valuable assets to the mariner.”

Wonder if anyone will take inventory of the amount of wind and solar capacity lost in the US over the past week as the latest series of major storms crossed the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

2009 American levelized cost estimate for 2015 http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized-cost-of-new-generating-technologies/
2011 estimate for 2016 http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html
Over here, only solar thermal is more expensive than offshore wind.

Simple solution. Get Greenpeace to buy another thousand boats, and have Xena et al lean over and prop the damn things up. Should be fun in a storm.

How do you service these ocean wind turbines once they are installed. They will fail and require maintenance just like anything mechanical placed in a violent and corrosive environment does.
I am familiar with offshore platforms that include space in order to service equipment and the producing wells.
A floating vessel with dynamic positioning, a wave motion compensated crane and diving support (for inspection) is like 30 to 40 K per day. Have they anticipated hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operating cost to maintain these devices?

“It’s worse than we thought !”

Renewables seem to be planned by enthusiastic amateurs, not engineers.
It was amusing to read of a huge wind turbine development in southern Germany where they did not plan for connecting it to the grid! They are now trying to install 1000 km of power lines against strong public opposition.
Germany has spent 100 billion Euros on solar panels, and gives 6 billion a year in subsidies, but they only provide about 0.3% of German power requirements. They can’t afford it. The current situation could have been predicted before the first panel was installed, but the idea of cost/benefit analysis never seems to be used for renewables.
There are issues with most ‘green’ solutions :
– Experts point out that if wind power comprises 20% of the grid the variations in output will destabilise the grid causing blackouts or even damaging the infrastructure,
– If 15% of cars were electric it would require hundreds of billions spent on upgrading the grid with new power stations and transmission lines.
– Biodiesel is claimed to produce 4 times as much CO2 as the oil it replaces, and almost a litre of oil is used to produce a litre of biodiesel, plus the destruction of forests and wetlands for palm plantations.
– Ethanol has been proved to require 40% more energy to produce than it creates [a green group said they had disproved this but as is often the case I suspect ‘disproved’ should read as ‘ignored’!], and the watts per square metre using corn is abysmal.
It seems that many decisions are made by people who don’t have a clue, surprising when such vast quantities of money are involved.

“”””” ColinW says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:59 am
Are there any reliable sources to back this up other than “I have it on good authority from a marine engineer…”? “””””
So Colin, who would then back up your “reliable sources” that you propose would back up the author’s Marine Engineer ?
Would Connolleys wikipedia, be an authoritative enough source ? Why would anyone believe ANY opinion other than their own ?

Bob Dylan may have been wrong [The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind….]
CO2 continues to be the red herring needed by so-called environmentalists to push their anti-human agenda through… energy starvation to cram humans into smaller and smaller spaces and allowing the earth to return to its “normal” condition. Recently, however, environmentalists have been successful in using H2O as their environmental, anti-human, red herring.
Conveniently forgotten is that, as a species, we are capable of implementing rational solutions… if a non-rational agenda does not get in the way.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2012/03/h2o-continues-to-be-more-important-than.html

Steven Mosher says:
March 5, 2012 at 9:00 am
“…cost that could have gone into nuclear, could have gone into water projects,…
We need to take action, but smart action.”
Nuclear or water power is the only current practical source of a replacement to fossil fueled energy that will not cripple our civilization. We need plentiful and cheap power to make things, melt steel, melt glass, and make the world a better place. Electric Arc Furnaces. Safer nuclear is one of the few solutions that will succeed in this endeavor.
Stop the delusion and fund nuclear now. It’s the best we have.

“As a believer in AGW and somewhat who believes we must take the right action, I observe the following. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require a great sum of money down the line. wasting money today on solutions that are not ready for prime time is worse than pouring C02 into the air.”
Then you’ve missed the point of the new “Green-Collar” industry altogether.
1) Start with a dump-truck full of money.
2) Use it to prop up as many Solyndras as you can find.
3) Reap the political benefits of making rich new friends and a nifty new factory as the backdrop for your next campaign speech
4) Win re-election
5) Repeat as necessary, or until term limits kick in.
Viable solutions? Those actually detrimental to the process. Once the problem is solved, the crisis is over, and I’ve lost my reason to secure additional dump-trucks of money.

amicus curiae says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am

Let’s Compare Power Generation Costs
Here are the statistics on the cost of power generation in 2010 from the Australian Government’s own Productivity Commission:….

It is disappointing that in a science blog no citations are provided with figures like that. Here is something of vital importance with respect to the figures you provided, which specific figures may have come from a quote in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, in Australia:

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misquoted energy figures. The Productivity Commission said the cost of electricity generated by wind was $150 to $214 per megawatt hour, not $1502; and solar was $400 to $473 per MWh, not $4004.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/labor-all-tied-up-in-red-and-green-tape-20110724-1hv8i.html#ixzz1oGUu4imp

That makes me wonder why it is that the Sidney Morning Herald in it original article so seriously misquoted those figures and exaggerated them by a factor of ten. How can such a gross exaggeration happen?
I have not been able to find the report at the source, the Australian Productivity Commission.

amicus curiae. There are times where the costs on wind are far larger that you say. Here in Ontario, Canada a lot of wind power has been installed. The grid is not stable, unless wind power is less that 15%. So, when the wind blows, you need to produce nearly 6 times as much power from stable sourses, as the wind is generating, just to keep the grid stable. If we dont need that much power, then Ontario has to PAY other places to take the excess power off our hands. Or it has to pay the wind producers NOT to produce power. I am sure this must add to costs.

Bruce Hall :March 5, 2012 at 9:08 am
said: “Bob Dylan may have been wrong [The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind….]…”
Obviously in error here.
Bob Dylan is never wrong 😉
Dylan : And the masters, make the rules, for the wise men, and the fools….

This sort of reminds me of the remake of the .’War of the Worlds’ where at the end the Tripods were all broken and leaning up against buildings or fallen over in fields.. Wont be long now.

“If ethanol uses more energy to produce than it creates, please explain why the wholesale cost of unblended ethanol is less than the wholesale price of unblended gasoline. The wholesale price includes the cost of all resources that go into the product with a profit.”
ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy density of gasoline. So even if they cost the same per gallon, ethanol would still be more expensive.
Beyond that, subsidies baby, subsidies.

Och, it doesn’t matter too that they’re unstable; it’s their inefficiency that’s the greatest and most obvious problem (and I suppose cost comes into that equation). Wind and wave power systems don’t deliver when they’re most needed: in the midst of a long calm very cold spell for example. Clear winter skies usually mean hard frost and no wind, meaning a greater demand for power for heating . . . .just when the turbines are standing stock still and the waves have died away.
And the idea of installing WIND turbines out at sea, ABOVE flowing water – a much more powerful and reliable source of force – looks a wee bit absurd to me. It’s an industrial insult. A commercial joke.
I despair at the antics of the wind and wave power brigade in the uk, when our coastal waters are constantly on the move. The tidal currents flow to a pattern; they are utterly reliable – so long as the moon continues to do its work – and they are readily accessible. Give me a decent sized RIB and in one hour I could take a dozen of our politicians and industrialists to numerous locations off the coast of Galloway which would supply the solution to Scotland’s electrical energy needs for a very long time to come. And I don’t mean by using an underwater version of the turbines that some have in mind for the job: the approach should be large scale marine equivalents of our loch and river HEP systems; massive operations that are stable and capture and convert vast amounts of tidal power. All they have to do is space them out around the coast to ensure that differing, but short, slack water periods are adequately covered.
Too obvious? I’m beginning to think so.
Not about energy supply, but more about profit from subsidies? I’m inclined to believe that too.
As someone who’s spent much of his life on the sea around Galloway I’ve been waiting for over 40 years for real HEP stations to be built on the tidal rivers that flow within much of the local coastal waters. I don’t expect to live long enough to see them now. So long as they go on building wind turbines on land or at sea in particular, that in itself is prima facie evidence in my view that it isn’t really about solving the energy problem. . . .

Tidal power is not much better than wind. There is no proven technology. The tides are standardized in a rule of twelfths for simplicity. The flow rates are described as: 1-2-3-3-2-1 where the middle two hours of the 6 hour tide contain half the flow, hence half the power (+/-) of the tide. This means that the useful tide would be in 4 x 2hour segments each day and the rest of the time would be wasted. Unfortunately the times are later by about 40 mins per day so there is no standard time for power generation. They then vary from Spring (fast) to Neap (slow) over a fortnight so no standard power output there either. Most places have very little tide. i.e. The Mediterranean. Notable exceptions are the Bay of Fundy, Bristol Channel etc. So I would say that tidal power is not going to be much better than wind. Best to just dam the rivers and have done with it. In Brittany the Rance is dammed for hydro electric and the Vilaine for fresh water. Well known and proven technology. So a few swamp toads die out. Life is a bitch. Get over it.
(Add Oxford commas and parenthesis to your taste)

I expect that salvaging these turbines will be a very lucrative business soon.
Maybe connect them to natural gas turbines, sell them to small municipalities.

cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:17 am
“Nuclear cannot be modulated to match loads, nuclear covers base load only.”
———————————————————————————————–
Although I did not spell it out, I include new generation thorium salt reactors and many smaller facilities. My understanding is that nuclear power plants generate heat to boil water that spins steam turbines that generate electricity. To match loads, all one needs to do is switch a valve to turn the turbine on or off. Keep the plant online and making steam… turning a valve will generate power just as quickly as a hydro dam water valve…. what’s the problem?
The old generation nuclear breeder plants are white elephants. Best bet is to perfect thorium.

It is entirely possible that politicians get their solar and wind power information from watching the Teletubbies on the BBC as children. Subliminal indoctrination! What a devilish conspiracy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJTOtrGKEls&feature=related

PS: If current nuclear power plants cannot quickly adjust to demand loads, then the original design was lousy. A plant should have 20 or 30 separate turbines to start and stop with valves in the design to adjust to the load. If they only have one big turbine, then they were idiots.
We need to build thorium reactors by the thousands everywhere.

kbray in california says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:57 am

PS: If current nuclear power plants cannot quickly adjust to demand loads, then the original design was lousy. …

I wonder what makes you say that. A thermal, coal-fire power plant may take as much as a couple of days between being fired up and having its generating capacity bought up to snuff and fed into the grid. That lag time is generally a few hours for gas-fired power plants. Nuclear-fired thermal power plants are in the same range.
The problem with bringing a new source of generation on-line is that not only must it adjust to the power demanded of it but it must also be in sync and exactly in phase.
The more turbines are feeding into the grid, the more complex the regulating issues become. Wind-powered turbines complicate that problem to an enormous extent. The more wind turbines are connected to a grid, the more difficult it becomes to prevent cascading outages. That is on account of the stochastic nature of their generating capacity jeopardizing system stability.
The European electrical system operators have very great and growing concerns about that and issue warning after warning that the grid in being placed at ever increasing risk of large-scale, cascading outages, due to connecting ever-increasing numbers of wind-farms to the grid. They state that as of now there is no foreseeable solution to the problem. Reaction times for regulating and stabilizing the grid due to the stochastic nature of wind-generation.must be within a fraction of a second, while the reality of power regulation of generating-capacity, -voltage, -frequency and -phase from conventional sources can not ever hope to achieve that.
The problems posed by that may be alleviated somewhat if all of the transmission lines in the grid were to be converted to high-voltage DC-transmission, but that would in essence require the re-engineering and re-construction of the whole transmission grid, with the construction of DC-AC and AC-DC converters being required wherever voltage needs to be stepped down or up.
One issue that escalates the problem is that the education of engineering personnel required to address all of that seriously lags the demand.

It’s amateur hour.

Here in British Columbia, Canada’s version of California ,the liberal government, nicknamed the Fiberals because of past and ongoing lies and corruption have applied a carbon tax. Oh by the way BC is also the home of David Suzuki and Andrew Weaver. This carbon tax is applied to so called fossil fuels so that ups the cost to school districts, hospitals and such. Now money from this carbon tax is supposed to be applied to environmental initiatives and c02 emissions reductions. Some of the money just happens to windup in the pockets of companies and luxury resorts of fiberal friends under the cloak of emissions reduction.
Now with this the fiberals supported the development of Independent Power Producers, IPP’s. The IPP’s are run of the river and windpower private projects. These projects are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer and read like a book of fiberal cronyism. BC Hydro the government run utility is also forced to buy the power from these IPP’s at a rate higher than what Hydro can produce from its own generation.
Now because of the IPP contracts and other money loosing dealings over the years and dispite our vast natural resouses the province is now heavily in dept. Oh the fiberals have now picked a fight with the teachers as a diversion.
Now added to all this the natives of Haida Qwaii, formally know as the Queen Charlotte islands, self proclaimed stewards of the environment want to build a vast wind farm offshore in some of the wildest weather and roughest waters on earth. All for the protection of mother earth. My BS meter went off scale on that one.
C02 a vast money picking entity that has never before been seen. Though economies of the world and now starting to see the devastating results of this money picking.

Man Bearpig says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:11 am
This sort of reminds me of the remake of the .’War of the Worlds’ where at the end the Tripods were all broken and leaning up against buildings or fallen over in fields.. Wont be long now.
———————————————
I think many of us will see it in our lifetimes, or maybe it’ll be the new land and sea salvage boom. Fact is, the whole idea is totally unsustainable. Ironic, eh?

Any way to get a web cam going to film the sea brids getting chop/chop as the blades hummm?
Sell the film to PETA, then film the naked protestors when they show up and sell that film to ,,, well you know.

Disko Troop – a little learning about the ebb and flow of the tides can leave you a long way short of a reasonable understanding of the potential of tidal currents at numerous points/locations around the British Isles. I think you need to take a trip out to one of the thousands of areas where there is a rapid tidal flow for upwards of 18 hours a day. And even where it’s not rapid – around most of our less rugged and varied shores – the key thing is that there is considerable flow over a vast area . . . . funnelling slower waters into narrower streams and having reversible equipment that catches the flow in both directions – surely not beyond the modern mind – are just two of the methods by which even a modest and variable flow can be captured. GIven the chance to see one of these tidal streams in action a half decent problem solving mind will immediately recognise the enormous and regular power that;s there to be tapped. A visit by boat to the Mull of Galloway for example, on an average sized tide would open up a world of possibility to you, far beyond the notions of tide tables. If understanding such as yours is widespread amongst those who would make judgements in such matters, then perhaps that explains the lack of developent.

Wind power won’t work, mainly because of the huge quantity of concrete required for it’s anchorage. The amount of embodied energy required to manufacturer cement needed for concrete is astronomical. This is the primary reason the EROEI is 1.
Wind power is unsustainable on land and twice as bad offshore.

Many so called nuclear power boosters but want “safer” thorium reactors are are somewhat confused. They will likely get neither.
Merely “standardising” the existing LWR designs has taken two decades and mega- Billions of dollars. Plus they started with functioning designs that are running safely for some twenty years already.
You can’t really expect a thorium reactor to be licensed in less than twenty five years from the date that you begin to do so. No one has done so ,and it takes an organization/firm with Billions of dollars to spend to even creditably begin.
Commercial Fusion is probably as close, and won’t need anywhere near that amount of time to secure a license, because they are inherently safe. They can’t run away; and there is no great store of radioactive materials in a Fusion reactor to fear. If you don’t work very hard to maintain the appropriate conditions, the thermonuclear fire just goes out.
The “safer” nonsense is just that. Nonsense. There is nothing “safer’ about a thorium reactor that runs on/produces fissle U233. You can make bombs from U233, just as you can from U235 and PU 239. No one not even any of the rogue states have made a bomb from a commercial reactor. But LWRs have permanently incinerated over 10,000 nuclear weapons.
BTW, the people who negotiated the ” Megatons to Megawatts” treaty should have won a Nobel Peace Prize not phonies like Obama, Gore, and the CAGW hucksters.

jim hogg, Glasgow says:
March 5, 2012 at 1:30 pm
funnelling slower waters into narrower streams and having reversible equipment that catches the flow in both directions – surely not beyond the modern mind
——————
If we can put a man on the moon in 1969…

I think the first post by amicus curiae: March 5, 2012 at 4:38 am
Coal fired power station $79 per kw/h (kilowatt/hour)
may refer to mw/h as I pay $0.1499 per kw/h off-peak and $0.2499 peak power and get paid $0.68 kw/h for solar feed-in.

“All of it is theft by people who have discovered the enormous advantages of a law degree and suit, over a gun and mask.”
When it’s finally shut down, and the thieves are exposed and (hopefully) gutted of their profits, and when we find a way to clean up governmental systems so that presidents can’t give their buddies billions to pursue such obviously worthless busywork, and when we refine those systems to such an extent that we no longer see that every retiring politician and his family and his friends have mysteriously become billionaires during his time in office, you’ll be thanking the lawyers who were responsible for those changes.
Yes, there are enormous advantages to having a law degree, but that’s true whether you’re a thief or a reformer. If you need to demonize people in easily-recognized subgroups, demonize thieves, not lawyers.

Budgenator says:
March 5, 2012 at 1:53 pm
If you want your wind-farm to do well, the secret is the fertilizer, put down a good layer of unicorn manure and the crop will take right off!
——————————————————-
The crop yields from the unicorn manure are undeniably excellent (for those that own uncicorn farms – they don’t call it funny money for nothing).
For the rest of us who have families to feed – not so good.
Makes me sick. They treat us peasants like, well, peasants.
The sea is a cruel mistress – no way yer gettin’ yer money back, cap’n.
Specifically on the subject of off-shore windfarms I agree totally with other commenters that 25 yrs operating life is pure BS.

All I want to say here is :
5)The molten salt reactor can react to load changes in less than 60 seconds (unlike “traditional” solid-fuel nuclear power plants)
from wiki:
The molten salt reactor offers many potential advantages:[5]
1) inherently safe design (safety by passive components and the strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity) using an abundant supply of thorium to breed uranium-233 fuel.
2) much cleaner: as a full recycle system, the discharge wastes from the reactor are predominately fission products, most of which have relatively short half lives compared to longer-lived actinide wastes. This can result in a significant reduction in the containment period in a geologic repository (300 years vs. tens of thousands of years)
3) can “burn” some problematic radioactive waste (with transuranic elements from traditional solid-fuel nuclear reactors)
4) possible even in small, even 2–8 MW(thermal) or 1–3 MW(electric). Submarine or aircraft size is possible
5) can react to load changes in less than 60 seconds (unlike “traditional” solid-fuel nuclear power plants)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
Let’s try Thorium.

The relative costs per kWh output over the lives of various electric power plants utilizing various technologies have been readily available for years to anyone with a calculator, a bit of curiosity and a rudimentary understanding of cash-flow analysis. I’ve lain out those numbers in comments on this site several times. That some governments have traveled so far up the financial dead-end path of wind and solar power generation while many of their citizens cheered them on tells something about institutional and group behavior we should all find frightening.

Here’s one for the alternative energy fail file:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9101874/Minister-praises-plan-to-heat-swimming-pool-from-fires-of-crematorium.html

http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/images/NPP-energy-availability-1991-2008.gif
shows Availability factor of nuclear is on the decline and currently less than 80%
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/images/npp-by-age.gif
Shows a majority of Nuclear plants are older than 25 years and a substantial number are older than 35years. Decommissioning that lot will cost!

From the UK
Data of power delivered (interactive)
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html

@1DandyTroll: it doesn’t matter what the EU says or doesn’t say about the lifespan of wind turbines. Twenty years life expectancy has been standard from the manufacturers for decades. In fact if you read Vestas technical specifications, you discover that the full lifespan is only achieved by performing at no greater than 75% of nominal rating. Operating for extended periods of time at full capacity greatly shortens the life of the turbine. So that 1 MW wind turbine you bought is only a 750 kW machine, because you’re going to shut it down every time wind speed would cause it to exceed that amount.

Ah, foundations. I know a bit about those.There was a time, in the mid-1990s I think, when I thought windmills were a nifty idea. Free energy, like. I was working in construction when the world was going ape over this new revolutionary marvel that was, incidentally, going to provide a lot of years of work for our guys. There was no Anthony Watts and WUWT around at the time, so I was put right by a general labourer, an Italian gentleman of modest means and partial primary education. In a heavily accented, grammatically mangled, but a melodically pleasing and descriptively lavish language resembling English, he managed to explain to me how the foundation materials and labour for the foundation system alone would out-cost any possible profits from the energy these gizmos might, maybe, maybe just might generate. “But they would be cleaner,” I countered. And so, with the measured, patient demeanour of the ancient Roman construction maestro gently instructing a passing idiot, he explained to me that just the preparation for the projects alone would burn through…poofah-bang, capisce?…any good the windmill could produce even in two life spans. The amount of fuel this work would use up for the construction phase was considerable, but money being a form of energy as well, there would have to be a goodly amount of it too, to cover things like the ongoing transportation needs, accommodation and workplace facilities of personnel, not to mention legal, administrative, medical, licenses, fees insurance, etc. That was one of my many steps in the dharma of skeptical enlightenment, a near-mystical bodhi/awakening event introducing me to the imutable laws of boondoggles. Cripes, we’ve been fooled and ripped off again, havent we?

cwj says:
March 5, 2012 at 11:48 am

….Your source does not include that the blender’s tax credit was ended last December, yet ethanol producers are still producing ethanol.

While others have shut down their plants, because they could not absorb their losses.
I am not in the ethanol-production business and don’t know why some producers still keep going while others shut down their plants, although I would say that the circumstances and reasons vary enormously with each producer and the location his plant is in.
However, I seem to recall that what got perhaps all of them into the business of ethanol-production were government loan guaranties, and that those were given independently of the subsidies per gallon that the wholesalers or consumers had to pay later on.
That makes me wonder whether all of the defaulted loans that the taxpayers are on the hook for will have been recovered by the time all subsidies stop and no more ethanol is being produced.
Still, I did state that the source out of many others I pointed to (the second one on the list, right after Wikipedia) gives you an idea of why ethanol is being produced. I did not say that the one link out of very many gives you an exhaustive cash-flow analysis of the ethanol-for-fuel-production and -consumption scam.

Capell says:
March 5, 2012 at 8:40 am
For an authorative analysis of UK generation costs see:
http://www.iesisenergy.org/lcost/
Summarizing: coal, gas, nuclear and the Severn Barrage (now there’s a surprise) come in at about £60/MWh. onshore wind: £190/MWh, offshore wind £270/MWh………………..
//////////////////////////////////////////
Any one who has any experience in shipping/off-shore will know that the costs of maintenance with respect to the off-shore farms is grossly underestimated.
The off-shore environment place a heavy toll on machinery and make maintenance difficult and expensive. The costs of maintenance will be considerably more than twice that of onshore wind, and I would not be surprised if it were even more than tripple.Assuming that the onshore estimate is accurate, a more realistic estimate for off-shore would be £400 to £600/MWH.
In addition, there will be far more downtime since there will be many more periods when conditions will simply be too dangerous for maintenance to be carried out.
I would not be surprised if one sees a life expentancy for off-shore generators of around 5 to 7 years; they becoming uneconomic to repair after this length of time.
When this fiasco is over the shit will hit the fan as wind energy is so patently flawed and it does appear that many of those in power or with influence are directly or indirectly benefactors of this policy. There will be shrill cries to follow the money.

My BS meter clangs every time someone starts pushing nice reliable tidal power. Immersing spinning devices in salt water and keeping them from turning into scrap in fairly short order is a very trying business. Maintenance would be almost unimaginably difficult and expensive. If you think accessing 600′ high turbines in the sea is fun, just try the same thing underwater, with 100X more massive devices!
Clang! Clang!
P.S. The O&M budgets for windmills, land or sea-based, are total fantasies. There aren’t, to begin with, enough mechanics and techs who can stand working unsupported at those heights… only a smallish minority of those with the requisite skills can handle existing tower repairs, and wind turbines are much worse (smooth aerodynamic support poles not the least of the reasons.) Further, the sites are (necessarily) windy, which makes access far more dangerous.
Beyond that, the internal turbines and rotors have limited tolerance for angular changes in force (just a few degrees), and few sites have co-operatively directionally consistent winds.
Literally stupidity on stilts.
Clang! Clang!

****
Rational Db8 (used to post as Rational Debate) says:
March 6, 2012 at 4:23 am
It was on that turbine floor, in the room we had to work in temporarily that they actually had a spider infestation. These were very very knarly BIG brown mottled FAST spiders who lived up on the ceiling, two stories above.
****
Yeah, the plant where I worked was spider infested, especially in the fall as it got colder & they all migrated from the outside of the building to the inside (or underneath the precipitators). Didn’t usually bother me, but one autumn while underneath the precipitator on the catwalks among the bottom-hoppers where it’s warm, I suddenly realized I was enclosed by hundreds, no thousands of webs each w/their fat owner in the middle. Felt like Hitchcock’s “The Birds” movie. Spiders apparently don’t mind sulfur-dioxide…

Spector says:
March 6, 2012 at 6:40 am
I suspect that the primary use of wind power in the post-carbon era will be what it was in the past
Powering politicians?

I am currently in France and my last electricity bill showed 82% nuclear power and 9% hydro plus a few minor contributors. There are a few incidents at the power stations, mostly in support structures, but the reactors themselves cause very few problems. There have been no deaths from nuclear contamination, The only major issue has been the availability of cooling water during dry spells. New generation reactors do not have this problem nor do they make fissile material as I understand it. Greenpeace was formed with the intent to destroy the nuclear industry and in the UK they were pretty much successful, resulting in the deaths of countless coal miners, gas rig workers, and many more from respiratory disease, not forgetting the deterioration of buildings due to sulphur etc.
Now Greenpeace have thrown their weight behind wind turbines.
I rest my case.

@Alan Watt;
I think that “meso-fusion”, to coin a term, is in a forbidden zone. The Plasma Gods will permit stellar plasma fusion — and micro-fusion. Containment of chaotic potent turbulence is one of the biggies, and neutron flux is the other.
Check out the micro side, generically called DPF (Dense Plasma Focus) at LPPhysics.com . Their project, “Focus Fusion”, tiny and privately funded though it is, is the closest by far to unity (break-even) of the known (non-black) programs. It uses physics judo to exploit instability to produce an imploding “plasmoid”. Working with deuterium in the test phase, it will soon advance to proton-boron fuel. That is “aneutronic”; the only outputs are alpha particles (helium-4 ions) and electrons. The latter are fed back into the plasma pulses, and the former are squirted out in a beam which will pass through a series of solenoids to “drain” the current into capacitors. X-ray “brehmstrahlung” is both minimized by the tuning of the fusion “temperature” and mag fields and harvested in a shell of thousands of foil layers. Mild shielding suffices to protect from the slow neutron and gamma radiation from stray “side reactions”; the immediate enclosure is expected to be “below background” within 9 hrs of shutdown for refueling, maintenance, etc.
The net output is pure electricity, neutralized helium, and a low-grade waste heat (perhaps usable for building heating, etc., but probably not worth exploiting). So: no steam turbines required or involved. Capital and operating costs are on the order of 5% of the best/cheapest coal facilities. Fuel cost is negligible (boron is very abundant), <$10/MW-year. The geometry and physics restrict the individual generator size to the 5-25MW range, depending on the advances of cooling tech (for the electrodes). Total footprint of an installation about the size of a home garage. Servicing every few months, a day or two downtime.
Scientific break-even likely this year (subject to about another $750K in funding on top of the ~$2 million spent since late 2008, when the experimental rig was built). Thereafter, another $20-40 on mass-production prototype refinement over 3-4 yrs should see a licensable design to be made inexpensively available to all interested manufacturers, world-wide.
It renders the entire CO2/warming discussion moot, as it makes distributed waste-free power available everywhere.

Timeline clarification: the FF (Focus Fusion) experimental rig was funded late 2008, and completed and began running in fall ’09. It has advanced rapidly from the point reached >10 yrs ago when DoE was instructed to cease funding all fusion research except tokamak designs by Congress. Progress has been held back by about 40-50% by the need to engineer in-house and commission custom components to replace under-performing commercial-grade switches etc., with only skeleton staffing (about 3 FT and 3 PT, depending on priorities and funding, at any given time).

RE: Stas Peterson: (March 5, 2012 at 2:01 pm)
“Many so called nuclear power boosters but want “safer” thorium reactors are are somewhat confused. They will likely get neither. …
“Commercial Fusion is probably as close, and won’t need anywhere near that amount of time to secure a license, because they are inherently safe. They can’t run away; and there is no great store of radioactive materials in a Fusion reactor to fear. If you don’t work very hard to maintain the appropriate conditions, the thermonuclear fire just goes out.”
I do not think we should rule out any approach for providing an alternative source of power for the coming post carbon era. One reason that Dr. Chris Martinson gives for dismissing any quick technological silver bullet solution for the energy crisis is that it takes about forty years to make such a modal change and no such candidate is being developed. Fusion is potentially cleaner than fission reactors, but I do seem to recall a comment that there could be an issue with the gradual release of dangerous mutated elements into the atmosphere.
The reason fusion has been so hard to develop is because extremely high pressures and temperatures are required to push two strongly-repelling positively charged nuclei close enough to join. In the case of fission, uncharged neutrons have no problem slipping into an atomic nucleus and making it unstable so that it either breaks apart or throws out an electron to move one-step higher on the periodic table. The liquid-salt thorium reactor has the potential advantage of safe, low-pressure operation and a continuous recycling operation that destroys almost all fissionable nuclei. The only radioactive materials left over are neutron-overloaded fission fragments that quickly decay, in most cases, by just throwing out electrons.
Here is a video outlining a new proposed design for a 40 Megawatt prototype unit by Charles (Rusty) Holden:
Charles Holden –
Liquid Fueled Thorium Reactor 40 Megawatt Pilot Plant Outline
@ TEAC3
Uploaded by gordonmcdowell on Dec 30, 2011
39 likes, 0 dislikes; 2,376 Views; 18:17 min
“Charles S. Holden gives an overview of his 40 Megawatt Thorium Molten Salt Reactor design. No Plutonium Produced. No melt downs. No fuel rods. No cooling ponds. No 10,000+ year spent nuclear fuel storage.
“Presented at the 3rd Thorium Energy Alliance Conference, in Washington DC”

RDb8;
Here’s one more wee control trick: before typing or pasting the material to be “tagged” (with blockquote or any other), create both the opening and closing tags. Then put the cursor between them and you can’t “forget” to close them!
The CA Assistant Greasemonkey script works fine, though it displays a few options that aren’t actually enabled (sub- and super-script, underline, source code, TeX, and insert image). But the Preview is Priceless!!
Oh, one or two (i.e., six) other add-ons you should explore:
Ghostery
Lazarus
No-Script
Read It Later
Readability
UnMHT
🙂

Alan Watt says:
March 6, 2012 at 5:58 pm
@Brian H.
Thank you for the references, but if LP Physics can’t attract more funding than they show, I suspect this is a dead end.
…
So why is LP Physics scraping along on such a tiny budget asking for donations of lab gear?

It seems to be too small. And Eric Lerner, the principal, will not sell voting stock, only participating shares. Not out of greed, but because he’s had a few brushes with the PTB, who find this an altogether TOO disruptive technology.
Personally, I think it would be more along Elon Musk’s line. But he has controlling interest in Solar City, which would be some of the immediate economic roadkill if this comes to market (or is even proven feasible). That could/should happen this year, on the science side. The engineering seems surmountable over another 3-4 yrs., but even the likelihood would make investing in any renewable a mug’s game.