Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Finance Summit, US Secretary of State John Kerry thinks new breakthroughs are required to bring the renewable revolution “to the finish line”. My question – if the technology is not yet fit for purpose, by Kerry’s own admission, why is the Obama administration wasting so much US taxpayer’s money, funding production scale renewable projects which won’t deliver value?
… I think it’s fair to say that here in the United States, President Obama is leading as no other president has yet dared to do. His Administration put in place fuel standards that empowered automakers to invest in more efficient automobiles. We’ve finalized rules that limit the amount of carbon pollution coming from new and existing power plants, making investment in harmful energy far less attractive than investment in cleaner alternatives. And this past winter, in a hard-fought win, Congress did pass a five-year extension of the production and investment tax credits for solar and wind installations, in order to make it easier to get new clean energy projects up and running. And they did that with bipartisan support, both sides of the aisle recognizing that leaving aside their differences and their fight over the evidence, investing in clean energy just makes good business sense.
Now, since President Obama took office, wind and solar power have grown by more than 200 percent. Costs for these technologies continue to plummet and today more than four times as many Americans are employed by renewable energy companies than by the fossil fuel industry.
Let me be clear. Government can provide the structure, the incentives, the framework. But I know – and so do you – that it’s the private sector that will ultimately take us to the finish line. And it will be the private sector – innovation, entrepreneurial activity, maybe something we haven’t discovered yet – the breakthrough on battery storage, a breakthrough on a clean fuel burn – I don’t know what it is, but I trust in the ingenuity and the capacity of the American people and of our allocation of capital and our capacity to make this work.
Solving climate change will require perhaps the largest public-private partnership the world has ever attempted. At its core, the Paris agreement that President Obama and I – and so many of you here, and Mike and others worked for – is about ensuring public-private energy collaboration in every part of the world, for generations to come. Together, what we did was create a framework – based on ambitious, individually determined emissions-reduction targets – that is designed to become even more ambitious as time goes on and energy technology evolves. And the legally binding component of that agreement is the part that requires the review and the technology updating as we go along. …
Read more: http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/04/255506.htm
The people in Kerry’s audience know that renewables don’t work. Even the legendary engineers at Google Corporation tried and failed to make renewable technology viable.
But now we know the US government is also aware, that current generation renewables are not up to the job.
Even if you believe renewables are the future, surely it makes more sense to spend money on research, rather than wasting vast sums building production scale systems which don’t work. If the billions of dollars currently being wasted on unviable renewable projects was diverted to research, there might actually be some useful breakthroughs.
Funding production scale projects which everyone knows will fail is just a colossal waste of taxpayer’s money.
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“More than four times as many Americans are employed by renewable energy companies than by the fossil fuel industry” to produce 11% of the nations power (or 6% if you don’t count hydro power)? Like so many in government John Kerry is math challenged. Anyone who can do math can see that alternatives are bad for our standard of living.
According to Wikipedia:
… With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O’Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR. Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O’Leary led the opposition to the reactor, arguing that it would be a threat to non-proliferation efforts, and that it was a continuation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project that had been canceled by Congress …
The end of the IFR project killed advanced nuclear power research in the USA. Bush’s Republicans would not restart, correctly arguing that long term projects like IFR needed cross-party support.
What irony that wannabe climate hero John Kerry is responsible for preventing a technology that could’ve done much to reduce USA carbon dioxide emissions.
PS: IFR = Integral Fast Reactor, which has a current incarnation in the form of Hitachi’s PRISM reactor.
Let me explain breakthroughs and economy of scale in the power industry.
Admiral Rickover developed LWR to fit in the hull of a submarine in the 50s. Wind and solar will never never make a breakthrough that will power a ship to speeds of 30+ knots or power a city of a million people with one power plant. .
The smallest naval PWR I operated was 150 MWt. This was after receiving a BSME, being interviewed and selected by Rickover, and two years of training leading to board qualification to supervise the operation of a naval propulsion reactor. Supervised operation of 6 different reactors.
The smallest commercial power plant I worked at was 913 MWe (commissioned 1975) and the largest 1600 MWe (commissioned 2016?). The largest wind turbine is about 5 MWe but when considering capacity factor and life of the generator, lets say it takes 1600 wind turbine to make the same amount of electricity.
One of the biggest environmental factors in any power plant is concrete. The first thing you need at a power plant construction site is a batch concrete plant. A wind farm and a nuke plant use about the same amount of concrete on a per MWh basis. Of course, the wind farm needs 1600 foundations.
The next consideration is rotating machinery and associated bearing lube oil systems. One generator compared to 1600. One steam turbine compared compared to 1600 wind turbines.
Now let me explain the beauty of a steam plant. They are very compact. The 900 MWe nuke plant has the approximate footprint of Walmart. The 1600 MWe nuke plant has the approximate footprint of Walmart. Each reactor has 4 steam pipes between reactor vessel and steam turbine. The pipes have diameters a few inches larger for the plant with 1600 MWe output.
The point is that the economy of scale that results from forced circulation heat transfer dooms the economy of scale wind and solar from the get-go.
These concepts are not intuitive without a lot of upper level power engineering course. This is why GOOGLE failed. You can plow a field with a renewable draft horse and feed a few people but you will not be able to afford the internet to GOOGLE anything.
Salute – graduate, Nuclear Power School Bainbridge Class 7501. Got my BSME after I got out of the Navy (class in college very easy after Nuc School).
I went to nuke school twice in Mare Island. I was originally a chemistry major before enlisting but after being in the fleet as machinist mate I fell in love with steam plants. Enlisted nuke school crammed 4 years of engineering principles into 6 months. I got picked up for NESEP and finished my degree on the navy’s dime. College is a lot easier when you know the basics and have to apply calculus to it.
Officer nuke school was surprisingly hard. I was surprised by the number of officers with engineering degrees who washed out. I think that is by design.
Anyhow Djozar we were in the fleet at about the same time. My eyes got bad in college and I failed the sub physical so I ended up on CGNs on the east coast.
CGN doesn’t sound bad. I was on SSN 660 Sandlance. Congrats on making it thru Officer Nuke School – officers had it much harder.
[Couldn’t be that much harder. Heck, even the moderators passed officer nuke school, prototype and EOOW/OOD qual’s. 8<) .mod]
I guess we need to look back at Germany for a guide to admitting energy policy mistakes and reforming it. They invested heavily in high cost solar variants of solar and wind and the costly grid upgrades after the fact. Now they are coming back with common sense and fairness in bidding. It’s the periodic lapse in common sense that enriches the politically connected the most.
WSJ…
Germany has spent some €200 billion ($228.09 billion) since 2000 transforming its energy industry into a green dream, and now Berlin wants to spend more. Witness its latest attempt to discourage investment in wind power, which happens to be the only renewable energy generation that makes even vague sense for Germany.
A review now under way of the 2014 renewable-energy law could change the way Berlin chooses new generating capacity. The current system of subsidies and feed-in tariffs (requirements that utilities buy renewable electricity at above-market prices) has led to a bonanza of solar- and wind-farm construction, and renewables now provide one-third of electricity generated in Germany.
The renewables never seem to fall in price the way boosters promise, and with costs skyrocketing Berlin needs a cheaper way to boost renewable capacity to its self-imposed goal of 45% of electricity generation by 2025.
…
The proposed solution is a bidding system in which renewable producers would compete for the right to produce a share of the planned new green capacity based on who can offer the lowest price. An auction process is supposed to make green energy more affordable.
Hello,
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Later, gerjaison