By Andy May
A key question to think about, do renewable fuels decrease fossil fuel use, or do they increase it?
What are the costs of using renewable energy? The sun and wind are free, does that make wind and solar power free? Biofuels require power to plant crops, make fertilizer and spread it, harvest the plants, make and transport the ethanol. Solar and wind require power to produce, transport and install the equipment. All renewable energy sources require lots of land per megawatt of electricity produced. We will not be able to determine a cost for renewable power in this essay, but we can discuss the components of the calculation and provide some context.
The energy return on investment (EROI)
Energy used to make a fuel, like a biofuel, has to be much less than the energy output for the fuel to be useful. The metric commonly used is known as “energy return on investment” or EROI. It is computed by dividing the usable energy in a fuel by the energy consumed to make the fuel. Thus, an EROI of one means just as much energy was used to make the fuel as we can get out of it. This calculation is complex and as a result, estimates for any given fuel can vary a lot. Often local factors dominate the calculation so comparing one fuel to another using this metric is tough (see figures 1 and 2). Notice the range of values for oil and gas, they depend very much on location, the type of crude oil or gas, the time period used, local regulations and infrastructure. It is very hard to pin down a value for a fuel because local economics, quality and timing have such a huge impact.
Hall, et al., 2014 describe four different EROI calculations. The standard EROI is computed at the point of origin, the well head, the ethanol plant or the factory making the wind mills or solar panels. This can leave out a lot of energy required to utilize the fuel and backup intermittent sources, like wind and solar. The second calculation takes place at the point of use, this includes refining and transporting the fuel, the Extended EROI includes the energy required to use the energy, such as maintenance, friction losses, etc., finally they describe the societal EROI which includes the actual gains from a fuel for society. This latter has yet to be achieved due to its complexity. None of the calculations include (except possibly the last one, which has not been done yet) the cost of fossil fuel backup for solar and wind generation. Often the values calculated do not include capacity correction factors to account for downtime.
Figure 1, source Hall, et al., 2014.
Figure 2, source Hall, et al., 2014.
So, EROI calculations are not standard or complete and are difficult to compare to one another. It is especially difficult to compare technologies to one another, for example natural gas to solar or wind. But, even so, most calculations show that corn-based ethanol has an EROI of only 1.25:1 (Kiefer, 2013). When we consider the loss of energy when using ethanol in a vehicle, this is a negative return. Cars and trucks are not perfectly efficient, so breakeven has been estimated to be around 3:1 by Hall, et al. (2009). According to Kiefer, even ancient Rome did better with grain for slaves, oxen and horses, their maximum EROI was about 4.2:1. In building the colosseum the EROI was 1.8:1. Kiefer also reports that, because modern society requires so much energy, when the overall EROI drops below 6:1 the economy contracts and we are at risk of recession.
Much later, coal-fired steam engines came along with an EROI of 10:1 or more. In the early coal mining days extracting coal was very easy since it was accessible at the surface or very near the surface. This was a good thing because early steam engines were very inefficient. However, as coal fired steam engines improved and proliferated they replaced slave labor so the social and economic benefits were large. Some historical published EROI values for coal are shown in figure 3 from Hall, et al., 2014.
Figure 3, source Hall, et al., 2014.
Our civilization depends very much on EROI as the surplus energy (energy not used in obtaining and using fuels) defines our affluence. Because we currently enjoy a large energy surplus, we can spend our time doing things other than simply growing food and gathering wood for shelter, heat or cooking.
Energy consumption or energy efficiency?
It is well documented that wealth and standard of living are closely related to energy consumption. This is worth repeating and emphasizing, it is energy consumption that is strongly related to our wealth and standard of living. Obviously, energy consumption is related to price, the cheaper energy is, the more we consume and the better off we are. But, price is secondary to consumption. Timothy Garrett (2011) has shown that every additional 9.7 milliwatts consumed increases our global wealth by one 1990 US dollar. Other documentation of the intimate relationship between energy consumption and wealth can be seen here and here. The quickest way to raise people out of poverty is to supply them with energy and the quickest way to throw more into poverty is to take it away or make it unaffordable. See this article in Spiegel Online for more details.
While Stephen Chu and the IEA may think energy efficiency will save energy overall, history says this is not so. Energy use is subject to “Jevons Paradox” which states that greater energy efficiency leads to lower energy costs and more energy consumed. This counteracts most of the efficiency gains, improves the economy, our standard of living and leads to still more energy use. Today, because of energy consumption, fewer people are needed to grow our food and build our houses. One might think in an affluent country, like the US, a market would become saturated with energy consuming goods, like cars, air conditioners, and refrigerators. This is not likely longer term, since new products, all using energy, will be invented and, if attractive, will be bought and used. When I was a young child we did not have a television in the house, now my wife and I are empty-nesters and we have three televisions, four computers, two computer tablets and two smart phones. They all use energy. It’s quite simple really, consumption goes up faster than efficiency improves.
While EROI is the ideal way to compare the quality of fuels and energy sources, the calculation is complex and fraught with problems. Another way to look at energy sources is through the levelized cost of electricity. Both the US EIA and the International IEA have attempted these calculations and while they come up with different numbers they mostly agree qualitatively. The EIA computes the costs for the United States and the IEA computes them for the whole world, this is part of the reason for the differences. The results are summarized in table 1 below in US$/MWh. Both sets of numbers are corrected for downtime, that is wind is corrected for the time the wind does not blow, solar is corrected for nighttime and cloudy days, and coal and natural gas are corrected for maintenance time. However, unlike regular maintenance, solar and wind downtime is not planned or controllable and these numbers do not reflect the cost of the required (nearly) 100% idling fossil fuel backup for windless nights, thus the solar and wind estimates are lower than reality. Given how dependent wind and solar are on the weather, we can only imagine the boom in meteorology that must be occurring!
For the most part the renewable technology used in all countries is the same, the difference in costs reflect differing prices (for example coal or natural gas prices), fuel quality or the cost of differing regulations. Modern coal power plants in the US and Europe have all had pollution control equipment installed for decades and as the table shows these plants produce electricity for $80 to $100 per megawatt-hour. But, “CCS” (carbon sequestration) to remove non-toxic carbon dioxide from a coal plant effluent is very expensive. Carbon dioxide is inert and not a toxic gas like sulfur dioxide or mercury and is very difficult and expensive to remove. This raises the cost of coal power plant electricity to $140 per megawatt-hour in the US.
Cost of renewable energy sources
Renewable energy sources have many advantages, but they tend to have low EROI values and their use raises electricity costs. In table 1 we can see that renewable power averages about twice the cost of the cheapest alternative. These estimates do not include the cost of fossil-fuel backup for wind and solar. Nuclear power is the cheapest source of power in Europe and natural gas is the cheapest in the US due to shale gas production.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Germany’s electricity costs have risen 60% due to their subsidies of renewable energy. This has lowered their GDP, standard of living and competitiveness. BASF, SGL Carbon, Basi Schöberl GmBH and Siemens have all moved operations from Germany or are planning to, due to the high cost of energy.
Wind and Solar Power
Wind and solar are intermittent because the wind doesn’t always blow at the right speed and the sun doesn’t always shine. According to Hall, et al. (2014), good EROI calculations for solar and wind are not available at this time. This is largely because solar and wind are highly dependent upon fossil fuel backup and are essentially “subsidized by” higher EROI fossil fuels and exactly how to account for this is not known. According to Hall, et al. (2014):
“Alternatives such as photovoltaics and wind turbines are unlikely to be nearly as cheap energetically or economically as past oil and gas when backup costs are considered. … Any transition to solar energies would require massive investments of fossil fuels. Despite many claims to the contrary—from oil and gas advocates on the one hand and solar advocates on the other—we see no easy solution to these issues when EROI is considered.”
A clear example of the problem can be seen in Germany, where some 32% of installed energy capacity is from wind and solar. Just because solar and wind are installed and can produce 32% of the required power doesn’t mean they actually do. Demand fluctuates and so does wind speed and incoming solar radiation. Electricity in 2016, cost Germans 39 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 27 cents for the rest of Europe and about 11 cents for Americans, this has cost Germany jobs and businesses. Because of regulations that require all renewable power be purchased, there are times electricity prices are negative (paying people to take electricity) in Germany. Because 100% fossil fuel backup is necessary, the German and UK governments must pay for idle fossil fuel capacity, because emergency backup is essential for a stable grid. These payments are called “capacity payments” and can be thought of as subsidies for coal power plants. These payments are above and beyond the normal excess power generation capacity required in the absence of renewable power purchase mandates.
One factor about wind power generation that is often overlooked is the space required. In table 1 we see that offshore wind generation is 2 to 3 times the cost of land wind generation. Yet, onshore windmill farms produce less than 2 W/m2 of land, this means to make any significant contribution to our power grid an enormous amount of land must be taken up. For comparison, corn-based ethanol produces 0.315 W/m2 of land, which is even worse. A modern oil field, on average, produces 90 W/m2 of land. The late David Mackay in his ebook “Sustainable Energy” estimates that even if 10% of the UK were covered in windmills they would not generate enough energy for the country.
Commercial solar has a similar space problem (6 W/m2), rooftop solar does not. But, solar has a severe capacity utilization problem. In 2012, Germany had an installed solar power electricity generation capacity of 254 TWh (terra-Watt hours), but it only produced 19.3 TWh of electricity, 8% of rated capacity. In other parts of the world the usable electricity from solar is higher, but it almost never exceeds 30%. German usable wind power is about 17% of capacity. By way of comparison most fossil fuel power plants achieve capacity factors of over 80% and nuclear 94%. It is the uncontrolled and unplanned intermittency and the wasted power generation that results in high costs. Further, although the stated goal of using renewables is to lower carbon dioxide emissions, the fact is Germany’s CO2 emissions have gone up. The country’s fossil fuel backup is coal because they have shut down their nuclear power plants.
Biofuels
The US mandate to use biofuels, mainly corn or cellulosic ethanol, has been a disaster. When the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was enacted in 2005 it was hailed as a step toward energy independence, but it has been fraught with unintended consequences. Ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline and when they are blended, the resulting fuel gets fewer miles-per-gallon than the original gasoline. Using corn to make fuel raises food prices around the world, which hurts the poor. And because corn requires fertilizer, growing more corn can be an environmental hazard. Further, ethanol, whether from corn, sugarcane or cellulose requires so much energy to produce it either barely breaks even on EROI or is negative, in that it may take more energy to make ethanol than it delivers.
As Captain Ike Kiefer writes in “Twenty-First Century Snake Oil,”
“Some prominent figures and pundits argue that biofuels will increase our domestic supply of transportation fuel, end our dependence upon foreign oil, reduce military vulnerabilities on the battlefield, and generally improve national security. Biofuels are further promised to reduce fuel price volatility, reduce polluting emissions, reduce greenhouse gases, and even stimulate the economy. These arguments all fall apart under scrutiny. … uncultivated biomass produces biofuel yields that are far too small, diffuse, and infrequent to displace any meaningful fraction of US primary energy needs; and boosting yields through cultivation consumes more additional energy than it adds to the biomass. Furthermore, the harvested biomass requires large amounts of additional energy to upgrade it into the compact, energy-rich, liquid hydrocarbon form that is required for compatibility with the nation’s fuel infrastructure, its transportation sector, and especially its military. When the energy content of the final product biofuel is compared to all the energy that was required to make it, the trade proves to be a very poor investment, especially in consideration of other alternatives. In many cases, there is net loss of energy.”
Ethanol is corrosive, it contains oxygen, it attracts water, and can cause steel to crack. This means that it cannot be put in normal pipelines and often has to be trucked. Engines, pipelines and storage tanks have to be specially modified for ethanol, increasing costs and lowering EROI.
Some claim that burning wood produces “good” CO2 because the trees cut down for fuel will be replaced by trees that will absorb the CO2. This may or may not be true, but either way the cost of cutting down trees, planting new ones, preparing and transporting the wood to a power plant is so high, the EROI of burning wood is very low. It is much lower than the EROI of burning coal, even with a full set of pollution scrubbers on the coal burning power plant.
As Senator Roger Wicker said last year:
“Ending the RFS [Renewable Fuel Standard] would … save money for consumers. For example, biofuels like ethanol in the fuel supply mean drivers are paying for fewer miles per gallon of gasoline. The Institute for Energy Research says the RFS has cost consumers an additional $83 billion since 2007.”
“In the last Congress, I introduced legislation to prohibit gasoline blends with 15 percent ethanol, which have been shown to cause engine damage.”
Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation has written:
“Enacted in 2005 and expanded in 2007, the Renewable Fuel Standard—the ‘ethanol mandate’— decrees that American oil refiners must include a minimum amount of renewable fuel each year, increasing to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Fifteen billion gallons may come from corn-based ethanol; the remainder must come from other biofuels.”
As of July, 2014 only 50,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol had been produced for the year, although the EPA target was 17 million. The EPA has repeatedly cut the cellulosic ethanol blending requirement, but the actual production remains extremely low. The customer (the refiners and the public) cannot buy what does not exist, but is punished for not buying it. According to Nicolas Loris:
“… until 2012, no cellulosic ethanol had been produced because it was not commercially viable. In 2012, only 20,000 gallons had been produced—far short of the 8.65 million gallon revised target. Consequently, refiners had to pay millions of dollars in waiver credits or surcharges to comply with the EPA’s minimum volume requirements. Refiners pass those costs on to the consumer, further inflicting economic pain caused by the RFS. In January 2013, a Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA’s target was an “unreasonable exercise of agency discretion” and vacated the cellulosic ethanol requirement required by the RFS.”
Not only has cellulosic ethanol production fallen far short of the government mandate, it has provided fertile ground for con-men and hucksters of all sorts. KiOR was supposed to produce cellulosic ethanol in Mississippi and was provided with millions of dollars in subsidies to help them get going. In November of 2014 they filed for bankruptcy and shut down after producing very little ethanol. The Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood then said:
“[KiOR was] one of the largest frauds every perpetrated on the State of Mississippi.”
The reasons behind KiOR’s failure were simple, they couldn’t get their technology to work and when they did manage it, yields were far lower than KiOR had claimed. The plant was supposed to produce 13 million gallons of biofuels a year, it produced 133,000 gallons in 2013, sold another 97,000 gallons in early 2014, and then shut down.
Another failed cellulosic ethanol plant was recently sold to Alliance BioEnergy by Ineos Bio, which could not get their process to work. Alliance BioEnergy has just finished testing their new “CTS” process for converting cellulose to ethanol. Time will tell if this process proves commercial. Other companies that tried to make cellulosic ethanol have also gone bankrupt, these include KL-Energy, Range Fuels and Codexis biofuels. Codexis still supplies enzymes to pharmaceutical companies, but has shut down their cellulosic ethanol company.
In March of 2014 Mark Peplow wrote an article on cellulosic ethanol in Nature. He showed a map of facilities in North America, figure 4 is his map, updated by the author.
Figure 4 (Source Nature, modified and updated by the author)
While the 2014 Nature article was very upbeat and optimistic, the Abengoa facility, which was to “start commercial production in the next few months” is shut down and Abengoa has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy. In May of 2016 Scientific American published a more up-to-date article on cellulosic ethanol, entitled “Whatever Happened to Advanced Biofuels?” They summarized the situation in this way:
“Cellulosic fuels’ main hurdle seems to be economic. In April, 2012 Blue Sugars Corp. of South Dakota produced the first batch of qualifying cellulosic ethanol, a little more than 75,500 liters, then promptly went out of business. In 2013 no cellulosic ethanol was produced but by last year—after several DoE-supported plants came online—all five of those biorefineries produced a total of 8.3 million liters of cellulosic ethanol, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the RFS. Already, Spanish multinational corporation Abengoa’s cellulosic ethanol plant—which opened in 2014 in Hugoton, Kans.—sits unused due to technology troubles as well as Abengoa’s bankruptcy. That plant consumed a $132-million loan guarantee as well as a $97-million grant from the DoE before idling.”
The EPA now requires 1.2 billion liters of cellulosic ethanol for 2017, which will never happen. Only 8.3 million liters were sold in 2015 and probably less than 10 million liters were sold in 2016. We are now 12 years past the ethanol mandate and there is not even one commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in production. It seems very unlikely we will see one soon.
Captain Ike Kiefer summarized the situation quite well in this WUWT comment on March 1, 2017:
“The technological feasibility of cellulosic ethanol is readily assessable for those willing to look and think. It is essentially the same challenge as a paper mill making paper from trees, except after extracting the cellulose, you are trying to make a very expensive additional conversion from solid to liquid that involves the steps of colonization and fertilization, fermentation, distillation, and dehydration. And the liquid product (ethanol) has a lower market value than the solid (paper). [This is a] pretty awful business model, especially when we know paper mills are barely hanging on. Also, when the EROI of corn ethanol is less than 2:1 … and it is chemically 5 times harder to hydrolize cellulose than corn starch, there is a pretty good chance EROI is going to be upside down for cellulosic ethanol.”
Finally, we need to consider that numerous studies show that more than 70% of the increase in food prices around the world are due to making biofuels according to Kiefer’s paper. Both the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations have called for all G20 nations to drop their biofuels subsidies. Grain prices have increased for the poorest consumers as much as 50%, increasing hunger and malnourishment for the global poor.
Conclusions
While it is clear that fossil fuels and nuclear are cheaper, more flexible and more reliable than renewables, it is less clear by how much. Kiefer reports that, since 2007, the military has spent $68 million on 1.35 million gallons of biofuel, over $50 a gallon. This does not include the cost of federal and state biofuel subsidies. Conventional fuel would have cost the military $8 million. As Hall, et al. (2014) concluded solar and wind cannot be used without lower EROI fossil fuels or nuclear power to back them up, they are not “base load” technologies. Corn based ethanol requires a lot of fossil fuel energy to grow and transport the corn and even more to make the ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is not currently economic and may never be. As discussed in Kiefer’s paper and others, renewables are not displacing fossil fuels, they are accelerating their use. The only way to displace fossil fuels and nuclear power, is to produce renewable fuels that have a higher EROI than either fossil fuels or nuclear. This can happen if the fossil fuels or nuclear EROI goes down or the renewable EROI goes up, but it must happen. Otherwise renewables are simply a parasite on conventional power and as renewable use goes up, fossil fuel and nuclear will go up, just like in Germany and Denmark today.
Currently, the true cost and EROI of renewables is unknown. The only way to compute it accurately would be to find a renewable fuel that is made using only itself as a source of energy. As an example, this would mean a solar powered factory for solar cells and panels, solar powered vehicles and equipment for transportation and construction, backup batteries made in a solar powered, factory, etc. Would this facility be economically viable? What about analogous facilities for ethanol and wind? But, no such facilities exist, so we don’t know. Only when the dependence of renewables on fossil fuels and nuclear power is fully understood, will the calculation will be possible. To compute the true, backed up, EROI of solar, biofuels and wind requires deciding where to draw the line between costs that should go into the fossil fuel EROI calculation and costs that should go into the renewable EROI calculation. This is not a trivial problem. But, the final EROI for renewables, once calculated, are all likely to be less than 3:1, which is the practical lower limit and clearly in recession territory.
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EROI is super interesting, and the EROI of renewables has been the topic of quite a lot of research (just search for EROI renewables in google scholar and follow the references). I’ve done some research on the topic myself, but nothing published as of yet. IIRC it’s about 4, which obviously is lower than fossil fuels. The actual relevance of EROI as an indicator for renewables is debatable, but probably not in the comment section of WUWT 😉
With respect to the actual price of renewables, they have come down a lot. For example this news today: 63$/MWh for 24-hour dispatchable solar energy (CSP+molten salt storage). That is the no-subsidy price. As noted above, coal is a lot more expensive than that!
It’ll be interesting to see how the anti-renewables argumentation on WUWT evolves in the ever evolving energy landscape.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/13/solarreserve-bids-24-hour-solar-6-3-cents-chile/
Cheers, Ben
In the Atacama desert. Not elsewhere.
Chile of course cancelled coal power plants simply because the Atacama and other parts of Chile have one of the worlds best solar resource levels.
solar power continues to be rolled out in Chile – it is an excellent idea for that nation.
Solar Reserve has a Crescent Dunes plant near Tonopah, Nevada. It went online with much fanfare in early 2016. In October 2016 it developed a leak of the molten salt tank. As of March 2, 2017 it was still offline. I’ll be grateful for actual production data.
Cleantechnica named Aquion a “Company of the year” in late January 2017. Aquion went bankrupt in early March 2017.
Yes elsewhere. You’re just suffering from confirmation bias and don’t want to look at news sources outside your bubble.
Examples of incredibly cheap renewables are too numerous to mention. Off the coast of my country they are building a new wind park (offshore) for 60$/MWh. That is A LOT cheaper than Table 1 in this article. Ironically, it will be built by Shell.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/14/shell-consortium-sets-new-lowest-offshore-wind-price-700-mw-borssele-iii-iv-wind-farms/
The Borssele III and IV Wind Farms deal includes a maximum subsidy (grant) of $5.35 billion. This raises the effective price received by the operators to $131.02/MWh, assuming a 40% capacity factor.
http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/project-dates-for-borssele-3-and-4-nl0j.html
so much time and effort spent on supporting your own beliefs, and so little on actually reading what it says.
“The second Borssele offshore wind farm (which is itself made up of III and IV) is expected to be constructed and operated with a subsidy of only €0.3 billion, well down on the originally anticipated €5 billion.”
also I should point out that your comment betrays a misunderstanding of how reverse auctions work. There is a maximum cap that is offered and then in the auction companies bid downwards. The project with the lowest subsidy requirement (or no subsidies in the case of Chile) wins. So using the maximum subsidy cap is wrong. Unless you understand that and are just trolling, but you don’t seem the type for that 🙂
benben dear, read a little above about your trusted sources, cleantechnica and Solar Reserve. A confirmation bias?
The lower subsidy is based on a higher electricity rate.
The contract allows up to a $5.35 billion subsidy based on the bid price. “If the electricity price develops as” expected, the subsidy goes away after 7 years. The contract caps out at about $120/MWh and has a floor of about $30/MWh. In the low price scenario, the operator can earn the full subsidy.
Curious George, it is indeed in fashion to pretend facts are whatever you want them to be, but there are plenty of other sources, including the one given by David Middleton.
David: you’re not understanding how the reverse auction system works. The 120$/MWh you quote was the maximum allowable bid in the tender, which would have resulted in 5bn subsidies. The shell consortium bid at 70$/MWh, meaning that they’ll never get payed more or less than that over the life-time of the contract. The subsidies will make up the difference between the going market rate and that 70$, resulting in est 300m subsidies.
I know you really want to believe that renewables are a bizarre investment, but perhaps it is time to reconsider? The times they are a-changing 😉
benben dear, I showed that cleantechnica and Solar Reserve pretend facts are whatever they want them to be. Mind you, you brought them in this discussion. If you want to persuade me that I am wrong, there is an easy way to do it: get data about Crescent Dunes actual output for 2016 and as much of 2017 as available.
ah OK, you’re actually talking about something else than what we are talking about. I did not bring up Cresent Dunes my dear George.If you read the interview with the solar reserve guy, they actually ask him about how they can bid such a lower price than the Cresent Dunes plant. The answer was that Cresent Dunes was a first of its kind large scale plant and had lots of teething issues. That is a fair answer. Especially since they’re now putting their own money where their mouth is by bidding on a no-subsidy contract.
I challenge you, dear George, to find me failure rate of the first large scale coal fired power plant ever built 😉
I am not recommending unproven technology; you are. Bye.
You had me going there for a minute until you cited CSP and molten salt. Then I knew you were off the rails. What is so hard to understand about lowest bid price in utility scale solar PV without the protectionist domestic content rules of some places like Ontario, EU, and India? The cost plunge continues and not just from current over capacity in China. I will admit that the current cost numbers of the leaders do not pop out immediately with proprietary information withheld and project competition among the leaders on bidding. The bottom line is that capacity additions of solar pv utility scale will continue to grow and dwarf rooftop and become more obvious if natural gas prices start to move up. That won’t happen until the combined weight of new industrial users, LNG exports, and baseload electricity demand force it higher. Hurry up and wait as usual.
I’m sorry but I don’t understand this comment…
Resourceguy – I could not understand it either.
benben, this is in answer to both posts. As ristvan says, the Chilean desert is perfect for solar, but the storage facility is only good for 14 hours! I live near Houston, Texas and that amount of storage would not work here. I doubt it would work on 90% of the Earth’s surface. Every source of energy has its perfect spot. East Texas is perfect for natural gas, West Texas for wind, Saudi for fuel oil and Poland, UK, China and Germany for coal. Nothing works everywhere. And renewables don’t work most places.
Ha, what a moving target WUWT sets. In other posts renewables are still a horrible green blob that only works because of copious and corrupt subsidies. I’m glad we agree that renewables make sense where they make sense.
The second piece of the puzzle is the crazy rate at which prices are dropping (crazy, but expected I should point out). Offshore wind has nearly halved in costs in western europe in the past couple of years, and shows no sign of stopping. It’s pretty obvious that no-one is going to invest in a coal fired power plant that needs a 40 year life time to recoup its investment. Even if coal makes sense today, it will not in ten years. Basically the age of coal is over, purely for economic reasons.
benben. This is tremendous news. At last a commercial 24 hour solar generator. This technology is still at the beginning, and it can now compete in specific areas. It will not take much improvement for this to be competitive in more areas. This should be celebrated by everyone, whatever your view on CO2. This could lower energy costs for everyone!
A high voltage continental wide DC grid could be used to connect everywhere to the desert sun with lower transmission losses than AC. USA is getting a line soon, but China has had them for a while.
“China’s use of UHVDC began in 2010, with the completion of an 800,000-volt line from Xiangjiaba dam, in Yunnan province, to Shanghai. This has a capacity of 6,400MW (equivalent to the average power consumption of Romania).
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21714325-transmitting-power-over-thousands-kilometres-requires-new-electricity
DC grids are more stable than AC grids as well.
Andy got a good start, for two sentences.
“The metric commonly used is known as “energy return on investment” or EROI.”
By who, idiots and simpletons?
Let me check the reference.
“State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry”
Nailed that, not the first place I would go to find idiots and simpletons. In California, it would be Stanford and UC Berkeley. In NY, it would be Cornell.
I do not have a problem with make work for college students. I have a problem with the application to international decision making.
Garbage in, garbage out!
I called it.
MarkW comments when I comment, when I do not comment, and now before I comment.
This does not indicate that MarkW is a rocket scientist.
I know it is unusual here at WUWT but I comment on things that I know about and I really enjoy when others do the same.
I have read this a few times now, it did not make sense when I first read it and it still does not. Are you saying that anything that comes out of this department is by definition garbage? Or have I missed some cultural reference? It looks like an ad hominem fallacy, but as I said may have missed something.
“It is well documented that wealth and standard of living are closely related to energy consumption. ”
More commonly accepted BS. Steam engines do work, motors do work, ICE do work.
It is about replacing muscles with machines. If EROI was a criteria, I would ride a milk cow to work and let it collect solar energy from grass.
Make me energy Czar and I will increase quality of life and reduce energy consumption.
First energy reduction would be putting Al Gore in a one bedroom retirement home and no access to internet, SUVs and private jets. That would improve my quality of life.
““It is well documented that wealth and standard of living are closely related to energy consumption. ”
That says energy consumption, not EROI. Steam engines do work, but the amount of energy consumed when we had steam engines was much, much lower than the energy consumed today.
It is certainly accurate to say that energy consumption has correlated well with standard of living (as measured by GDP or most other measures). It is not certain that this must continue, although it almost certainly will globally for a while yet.
@seaice
So it would appear but association is not causation.
As much as I hate to admit it, I think the rule of law and lack of corruption has more to do with a high standard of living.
I asked a project manager how his project biomass renewable energy was going in a third world country. He said it was stopped because violence made working condition unsafe.
Retired Kit P: I seriously doubt rule of law and corruption are as important as energy consumption in our welfare. If that were true very corrupt countries, like the Philippines, Russia and Indonesia would not be as affluent as they are today. The overall standard of living today, versus in 1800 is mostly due to our higher energy consumption. For a given level of energy consumption, countries with less corruption do better, but corruption is secondary to energy consumption.
“They all use energy.”
They use electric power and not very much. Think about the energy required to deliver the daily newspaper and the environmental of making paper and the printing process. The local paper used to be one the top ten polluters in any city.
What do you mean not very much? When I am charging my Samsung smartphone with 8 cores, an integrated GPU, LTE modem over a 5V USB cable… oh wait, I get it now. A single device drawing ~10W can replace a TV, modem, cable box, DVD player, and printing press. Indeed, not much power.
Exactly!
“Renewable energy sources have many advantages, but they tend to have low EROI values and their use raises electricity costs. ”
Finally, May’s agenda. I suspect the next step will be confirmational bias.
Retired Kit P: “Finally, May’s agenda. I suspect the next step will be confirmational bias.” Your points are not very clear. What do you think the EROI values for renewables are? I was not able to find any solid values in the literature, but all that I did see were very low, below 3:1. I firmly believe that Hall, et al.’s economic boundary of 3:1 is correct. Do you disagree? planningengineer has written that renewables have to have an EROI below conventional fuels to be successful, I agree with that, do you?
No Andy, I do not agree. First EROI is bogus methodology. Let me be blunt, it is BS.
A few real life examples, material for PV or to enrich uranium is done with coal, gas, or hydro. Later on a nuke plant on the arctic circle or a utility scale PV system in the Mohave desert produces power when and where it is needed.
I think what planningengineer was saying is that it might be more economical to use that pile of coal at a local coal plant used for load following rather than PV or a nuke in load following. Another point planningengineer makes is that you have to integrate the time of use and cost of power over the life of the project.
My point and planningengineer point is that it is complicated. EROI is simplistic and agenda driven.
Retired Kit P, Thanks for clarifying. I agree. EROI is a good concept, but it fails in the real world. I wish the calculation were easier and better, but it isn’t. Maybe one day. In any case, (EROI or not, LCOE or not) it appears renewables (as they exist today) are not economic and until they are they will not replace fossil fuels and will probably increase fossil fuel use.
Here is a physics take on EROI of electric power generation including thermal and renewables.
http://i65.tinypic.com/30x7tzs.jpg
I find it firmer than most economists’ approach to EROI. Data also published openly for community scrutiny.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aux2QwQckeWEdE9UbHNKR3l6THItNi1RTUdxa1RrdUE#gid=0
BTW, Weissbach et al. found that an EROI of 7:1 was minimum for economic viability of electric power generation. What is especially helpful about their approach is that they normalized each source for sufficient stability and controlability to be compatible with a realistic power grid. They did this by pricing the requisite amount of storage to buffer and back-up each source using the cheapest storage option available today — pumped hydro.
This highlights the flaws with EIA using LCOE and RE advocacy websites using capacities as their basis of comparison. The best basis of apples-to-apples comparison is not nameplate capacity or cost of kWh, but levelized cost of “equally dispatchable” kWh. The grid demands power in exact quantities and times and locations to precisely balance stochastic load, or things go black or blow up. Correcting for dispatchability still ignores valuable ancillary services such frequency stabilizing intertia provided by synchronous rotating generators, but not provided by asynchronous solar and wind that are coupled to the grid by inverters. The instability of wind generation and its lack of electrical inertia (to replace the stabilizing inertia of the generators of a closed coal plant) both contributed to the recent catastrophic outages in South Australia.
Outstanding reference Captain Kiefer! Here is the paper he refers to as a pdf for others. http://homepages.uc.edu/~becktl/shaka-eroi.pdf This calculation makes much more sense than the others.
The sun and wind are free, does that make wind and solar power free?
===========
why do we not have wind or solar powered commercial shipping?
many people do not realize that it typically cost more to sail a boat into the wind due to wear and tear on the sails and rigging, plus the time involved, as compared to turning on the engine and burning fuel.
the reason people use sails to cross oceans is that small boats cannot carry enough fuel for the crossing.
We sail because it is fun.
“The only way to compute it accurately would be to find a renewable fuel that is made using only itself as a source of energy.”
That is not true based on the definition of EROI given at the start of the article. If it takes 1 mW to produce 10 mW then you have a 10:1 ratio, no matter what the source of the input is.
The comment was related to accuracy. Once you mix energy sources, the accuracy of the calculation is questioned. What part goes to energy source A, versus energy source B. If all of the inputs are from A, you can get an accurate EROI for A.
The EROI calculation could be valid, but it would be a hybrid EROI and not reveal the relative contributions of the renewable and non-renewable sources. The EROIs claimed for corn ethanol today, which work out to less than 2:1 under scrutiny ( http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2016/02/23/a-critical-review-of-the-2015-energy-balance-for-corn-ethanol/ ), are really hybrids of diesel, gasoline, natural gas thermal, natural gas electric, coal thermal, coal electric, and nuclear. You can better calculate a crude oil-to-diesel lifecycle EROI because every step of the lifecycle can be powered by petroleum-derived energy. The same could be done for ethanol, but no one is even trying because they instinctively if not explicitly know that if they used their ethanol product to run their tractors and power their mill and distill their ethanol, they would use all of yesterday’s product up before making an equivalent amount today to replace it — negative energy balance and inverted EROI.
Again we come to the core eco-green problem: too many people.
Every aspect of the environmental crisis is ultimately too many people. The planet has a time-dependent ability to recover from harvesting the biosphere, mining its resources and removing the poisons that flow from both and our consumption of them. Technology helps, but the natural repair processes are fixed. Too many people – too much activity – simply can’t be handled.
The ROEI says this in numbers. You can be inefficient if you do it a lot, like slavery. But only if “you” aren’t large in numbers. Even primitive cultures extirpate species if there are enough of them.
It always comes back to the elephant in the room. Too many people. Which is then automatically – only because of math – racist. Caucasians have the lowest birthrate and portion of the planet while having the highest standard of living. An equal cut in populations while raising the average living standard won’t solve the overuse of Earth problems. More non-Caucasians have to disappear for the eco-green utopia to come to pass.
Ultimately Greenpeace and the Sierra Club will have to press for population control for people who don’t look like them. They will have to reidentify the victims as the perps.
An ethical and ideological crisis is heading towards the enviro movements. As long as they say the planet is doomed without change, that is.
There is not ‘environmental crisis’ caused by making power.
“Nuclear power is the cheapest source of power in Europe and natural gas is the cheapest in the US due to shale gas production.”
How about 10 years ago, or 10 years from now? Ten years ago natural gas was the most expensive. Surely we can trust the natural gas industry to maintain the cost to utilities, factories, and home owners like last time demand exceeded supply.
Oh, wait, ENRON, was mostly into unregulated natural gas marketing.
Actually, I looked into that question for several reasons. Gas outcompetes coal (low ash low sulfur Powder River strip mined) at anything below about $8/mbtu. Right now gas is $2.5-3 because of overdrilling in the early the shale boom. That low price will work off for three reasons. 1. There was a lot of drill or lose the lease leasing (think McClendons Chesapeake). Not any more, and that burden has been mostly drilled away. 2. NatGas rig counts are way down, Even though fracked gas does not have as steep a decline curve as oil, it is still pronounced: ~80 percent of total production in the first 5-6 years, so oversupply will self correct in another couple years. 3. Demand is going up: LNG for export, petrochemicals, CCGT. So in a soon to be more balanced supply demand market, what might the ‘equilibrium price be? Based on production economics, something between $4 and $5/mbtu (depends on which shale and which operator). Now, since the US has lots of gas shale (Marcellus and underlying Utica are enormous) it looks like prices will be able to settle In that range for several decades. Which is why no USC coal is being built (Turk was planned back when gas was over $9/mbtu).
Given all the Toshiba cost overruns at Voglte 3 and 4, I dont foresee new nuclear or USC coal in the US for several decades.
“Gas outcompetes coal”
BS from Harvard law. Ristvan since you have a dairy farm, tell me why you do not sell milk to New Zealand?
First it is the delivered price of a BTU to the power plant. Spark spread is the term used to determine when a gas plant can compete with coal. Second, gas has storage costs.
Finally how much gas, coal, and wind does Georgia have. The cost of nuclear is the people working in the state for 60 years. Large amounts of money leaving your state or high paying jobs. Not a hard choice.
What ristvan means when he looked into it is that he wrote politically paper in college.
In any logical assessment of the entire cost of renewables the costs of back-up HAS to be added to just the renewable energy costs to give a true cost, as without back-up the next-to-useless windmills and rooftop scrap metal simply couldn’t stand alone. ‘Renewables’ continue to be by far the biggest scam in global energy production, a privilege for which we all pay handsomely. A total and utter racket and they’re not even reliable.
Do renewables save energy? well the UK has massively reduced coal use in the last year (45% of which was imported) and dropped its CO2 output to lowest since the 19th century.
On another point, corn derived ethanol is a US boondoggle, and a Republican one at that, a failed pre shale attempt at energy independence.
It is a nonsense and nothing whatever to do with renewable energy. and biomass from foreign imports is no better ad condemned by all green groups.
Damn that Republican Al Gore!
Typical half-truth, the renewable sector is tiny and only increasing because of government mandate.
The reduction in coal use is mainly due to the growth in gas:
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/UK_mmtoe_area.png
Same as US. CCGT burning gas is 61% efficient. Old US coal is 34; the one new USC coal (Swepco Turk) is 41% ( a smallish 600 MW). CCGT gas wins on lower capital, faster to build, cheaper to operate.
Do renewable save energy and reduce CO2 emissions?
Apparently so, at least a bit, but not in themselves but because they add to the overall cost of energy use way out of proportion to their contribution thereby cutting energy use by consumers who cannot afford the additional cost i.e. the relatively poor.
@ur momisugly Chris H.
Always appreciate when someone brings reality back into the discussion. Thank you.
Renewables do NOT save energy. Whether they save CO2 depends on the accounting, but possibly not given intermitant backup (UK onshore running high 20s capacity factor) plus manufacturing emissions (wind turbine steel, cement, rare earths, glass fiber, epoxy; solar polysilicon). But the question is pointless as CO2 is provably not a CAGW problem. The planet is greeting. Except for a now coold 2016-16 El Nino blip, no warming this century except by Karlization. Yet this century produced ~1/3 of the atmospheric CO2 increase since 1958 (Keeling Curve onset). Look both facts up yourself, please. Keeling curve at Scripps Oceanographic, temps at UAH and RSS.
Corn derived ethanol is NOT a US boondoogle to the 10 % E10 blendwall. Does two important things. Replaces groundwater toxic MBTE to boost octane, meaning more good gasoline per barrel crude. (Higher octane enables higher compression ratios which enables higher fuel efficiency). And provides a fuel oxygenate that lowers smog inducing emissions. The E10 blendwall was set because that is what Los Angeles needs in summertime. E85 is, I agree, a boondoogle. About 40 percent of corn goes to ethanol. But that returns 27% distillers grain (look it up) enriched in fiber and protein (from yeast). Ideal ruminant feed supplement. My dairy cows love it. Which means we grow and feed less alfalfa (the traditional fiber/protein fairy feed), and can use the freed up land to grow make up corn. Not nearly what some whinge on about.
I share your condemnation of SE US hardwood forest wood pellets at DRAX. Both an ecological and economic abomination. And on a 100 year horizon, CO2 stupid. More initial combustion CO2 than coal because less heat content per kg, AND less biological CO2 sequestration on 50+ year time frames. We are cutting for UK consumption hardwood bottom lands last logged in the 1800’s, some never before logged. We have oaks and cypress and tulip poplar that live 250+ years in that region. Being clearcut– a mortal hardwood forest environmental sin.
I think ristvan is making up stuff about the SE US.
It is that BS Harvard law thing. He is convincing even when he is clueless which is 90% of the time.
“Replaces groundwater toxic MBTE [sic] to boost octane.”
MTBE itself is not toxic. It is hydrophilic and greatly increases the miscibility of hydrocarbons in water. The U.S. EPA considers the benzine, toluene, and xylene (BTX) components of gasoline to be carcinogenic, and these mixing into groundwater instead of floating on top of the water table is the toxicity related to MTBE.
Guess what? Ethanol does the same for gasoline as MTBE! And the EPA knows it, but ignores it. A blue ribbon panel has advised EPA to drop ethanol and all oxygenates from U.S. motor fuels formulations because they are not needed to reduce carbon monoxide emissions any more (engine computers solved that in 1993), and because the do more harm than good in increased ground water pollution, increased particulate and VOC and ozone emissions. In fact, EPA admits that putting ethanol in gasoline is causing about 245 more premature deaths from pollution each year than if we used straight gasoline.
Isn’t it comforting to have a federal agency so concerned about America’s air, water, land, and human health?
Citing Bush for the ethanol policy fail is a common technique of Dems to bypass their own continuance and stepwise expansion of the policy (for decades) and their campaigning for it whenever in Iowa. That is dishonest and prays on the uneducated observer to spot the fraud (like a lot of other misdirection plays). Also, Bush started the policy for dealing with the last energy crisis before shale bestowed energy independence and took energy off the list of causes for recessions, thanks to the private sector of course. It should never have been institutionalized to go on and distort markets all around the economy including higher feed prices for users of grains and end use consumer food prices.
According to an article in ASTM’s Standardization News (March/April 2016) about 200 of the world’s 434 operating nuclear reactors will be shutting down and decommissioned over the next 15 years. We apparently can also expect no new nuclear or coal power plants to be built in the developed western world and that many existing coal power plants and mines will also be closed. Since nearly 60% of the world’s electrical production comes from these sources, this is going to create a big hole in global generating capacity. There is clearly no way that wind or solar or any other source that the greens and global socialist favor can make up this capacity. So there is no question that we will have to burn vastly more oil and natural gas to replace the nuclear and coal capacity. At least this will be the case in North America and Europe. Asia (China in particular) shows no sign of doing anything but rapidly increasing their coal and nuclear based electrical generating capacity.
Between the EU and NA, we are looking at having to replace a substantial portion of about 145 Peta Watt hours (PWh = 10^15 Wh) per year. In North America the total is about 87 PWh. I estimate that the entire US installed wind power capacity is about 0.4 PWh assuming a very optimistic 40% of nameplate capacity. It would take about 100,000 new 3 MW wind turbines to produce just 1 PWh per year. That’s just 1.1% of the current US nuclear/coal capacity. Solar is even less feasible due to the lower efficiency, vastly lower operating hours and much larger geographic foot print needed to generate in the megawatt range. Wind at least can blow at night and when it’s cloudy. But neither wind nor solar have the capacity to adequately meet load demands or store sufficient energy that would be necessary to provide electricity on a reliable 24 hour a day basis.
This is an absurd situation. In engineering the wise and cost effective use of resources is always an important consideration. One must consider the most efficient and economical use of energy resources and each of the available energy sources. This should take into consideration the principal of “Highest and Best Use”. The following is my view on the most efficient and sensible applications of these resources.
Coal – Coal is a high energy density fuel available in large quantity from relatively small land areas and has an existing infrastructure to get it where it is needed in the quantity needed. But it is a dirty fuel which requires very large and expensive facilities to use with adequate controls to prevent pollution issues. Modern large scale “clean coal” power plants are capable of doing this at a reasonable cost. Coal is not particularly suitable for other energy applications like building heating or powering vehicles. Electric heat and re-chargeable electric vehicles entail about a 60-70% energy conversion and transmission loss. You also will need a much bigger battery in your electric car if you want to drive 100 miles or so in comfort when it is either cold or hot out. Electricity is far more useful for running electric motors, industrial manufacturing equipment, lighting and computers.
Oil – Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are best for transportation applications. We will likely not see a truck, boat, bus, train, airplane, tractor, or automobile that is powered more efficiently by any other fuel than gasoline or diesel for at least decades. The exception is small scale nuclear which is very successful for military ships and submarines.
Gas (natural-propane) – Best use is building and industrial heating. These fuels can be delivered to the site where they are used very inexpensively by pipeline. When burned, they are very clean emitting virtually no particulate and only trace levels of CO. Modern heating equipment produces conversion efficiencies of over 90%. This is by far the most efficient use of this resource. Gas and oil refining by-products are also an important source of feed stocks for manufacturing polymers and other products.
Nuclear – Clearly only practically useable for electrical generation and large seagoing vessels (although not used in non-military ships as far as I know). However, other than hydro power which is close to being maxed out already, nuclear fission is currently the only source capable of very large generating capacity without emissions of any kind. There is, of course, the issue of disposal of radioactive waste which has is being dealt with. But, if cutting CO2 emissions is really an issue, there is virtually no other economically sensible way to make up the lost capacity of shutting down coal.
Wind – The best use of wind power was probably for pumping water in rural areas before general electrification occurred in the developed world. But modern wind turbines will not likely be cost effective in terms of the real costs of building and maintaining them unless the cost of fossil and nuclear energy is artificially inflated and/or they continue to be heavily subsidized.
Solar Voltaic – Best use is to power small loads like highway marker signs or remote instrument data transmitters. SPV panels with relatively small rechargeable batteries are highly cost effective where the alternative is to run electric power lines significant distances. Small scale SPV systems can somewhat reduce grid power usage, but unless and until there is a major breakthrough in energy storage it will not substantially replace 24/7/365 grid power.
Shutting down a major portion of the coal and nuclear electrical generation capacity can only be realistically replaced by burning vastly more oil and gas in our power plants. That means substantially more rapid depletion of the resources that are far better utilized for heating and transportation. And it also means that the reduction in CO2 emissions is not going to be all that much. Gas and oil are, after all, fossil fuels which increase CO2 levels when burned.
The reality is very clear to at least some of us engineers that the public and politicians have been stampeded into a disastrous process of shutting down our most reliable, efficient, and economical sources of energy over an extremely tenuous projection of some sort of calamity that might occur generations in the future but quite likely won’t happen at all. This is clearly not about science and reality based concerns for the climate. It is about restructuring economies and society into a non-capitalist, non-free- market, socialist world. It is about trying to create a system that attempts to assure equal outcomes rather than strive to create equal opportunity. It is about crony capitalism, bigger government, taxation on a global scale, redistribution of wealth and more power for the elite and corrupt.
I guess we can only hope that someone will have the foresight to shut down coal and nuclear plants in a manner that allows them to be brought back into service without huge costs when it becomes clear that closing them was a terrible idea. But it is still an outrage that the world’s economies are being forced to divert hundreds of billions and probably trillions of dollars to trying to remake our energy environment instead of investing that capital in businesses and markets that would expand the availability of reliable inexpensive energy to areas of the world where millions of people currently live in energy (as well as economic) poverty.
For those who have bought into the hype and support the Green and Socialist agenda, I would ask that you reflect on this movement in a decade or two as you freeze in the dark.
+10
Rich let me suggest that you spend less time reading magazines and more time watching what happens.
Expect more more nukes will run 80 years than shutdown in the next 15 years. Same for coal plants.
While you are looking at numbers consider the ratings of the power plants. Old smaller plants are the ones shutting down. It makes sense to replace them with gas.
There are two plants in particular that the during an election year are going to be closed by the governor. It only takes one cold winter for the new governor to extend the plant for 20 more years.
In a place with good solar existing PV and battery tech can provide 100% of all domestic power.
Add in CSP and pumped storage and grid scale batteries plus a few other renewables and you can cover the rest.
Each neuron in my brain has about -55 mV’s potential. With 1 billion brain cells + does that mean I’m worth about $5 billion? Oh well, my accountant says nice try. 🙂 RR
Like I have said many times, those with an agenda make list of irrelevant criteria:
EROI
Efficiency
Capacity factor
Cost
Footprint
Diasater
Energy density
Corrosion
Failure
You name it
Here is what is wrong with May’s list. It is just like Griff’s and Roger Sowell. All are idiots.
As an engineer, I know what society needs with respect to electric power. The lights need to come on when you turn the switch. Clean water needs to come out of the tap. Dirty water needs to away.
Those of us who fall into the category of ‘those who can do’; we also have lists of what we need to meet this finite need to accomplish. First and foremost is safety. The safety standard is insignificant risk. ‘Safer’ is not a criteria. This hard to explain those who who never used a slide rule. A risk of ‘one in a billion’ is safer than ‘one in a million’ but both meet the safety standard.
Protecting the environment is also a criteria. The US power industry produces power with insignificant environmental impact. Killing a few birds is not significant.
This is also no rule that we do it one way. There are many ways to produce power. Hydro, fossil, nuclear have been the historic order. Biomass is another source.
Wind and solar have been demonstrated also. y
Let me explain why both Andy and Griff are idiots. What has been demonstrated is that some of our electricity can come from wind and solar. Why make up stuff that is ridiculous?
No one made the argument that *none* of our electricity can come from wind and solar. *Some* of it clearly can come from wind and solar. However, *all* of it can’t come from wind and solar. *Most* of it has to come from coal, natural gas, nuclear and other dispatchable sources.
Why does most of our electricity have to come from dispatchable sources? Two words: Capacity factor.
I agree with you that EROEI is a meaningless buzzword and that it doesn’t make sense to spend money on making something “safer” if it’s already 99.9999% safe.
Energy density is important; but not as important as power density. Land costs money. The more power you can generate per acre, the less acres you need for your power plant.
Efficiency is only important to the extent that it enables you to generate more $$$ per unit of energy expended.
Cost is extremely important. It doesn’t matter if gasoline made from amoeba farts has a better EROEI than gasoline made from crude oil, because the amoeba fart gasoline would cost $70/gal.
Disaster is also a very important word. No energy company ever wants the word “disaster” to appear in a news article which also mentions the company’s name. Disasters are expensive. In the oil & gas business, we really try to avoid them… But, they still happen on occasion.
Corrosion is also kind of important. Oil wells can be expensive to drill. Corrosion of well casings can cause a really good well to quickly become a disaster and cost a lot of money to fix.
“Corrosion is also kind of important. ”
David, it is very important. I can think of several nuke plants that shut down 20 years early because they did not manage corrosion issues.
My point about long lists is that it is about winning a debate to support your agenda. Explaining the finer points of such issues such as corrosion control is very time consuming.
no, most of it can come from renewables.
No. It can’t. Because nondispatchable sources can’t carry baseload.
@ur momisugly Kit,
Wow. Did you retire from reason? Maybe you are off your medication?
I guess your definition of “idiots” is people who use math and evidence and logic to test the veracity of claims. You just lost all credibility in my book by your anti-rational and ad hominem tirade above.
Ike
I have never called someone an idiot who has correctly applied math, evidence, and logic.
If you catch me explaining how land an airplane, feel free to call me an idiot. While I have been on many airplanes and I understand the engineering principles, it would be idiotic.
For Retired Kit P, who named me an idiot. A friend alerted me to being mentioned in a WUWT comment, so here is my response.
For those who have not followed along for the past few years, RKP has a complete disagreement with me over the role nuclear power plants should play in providing energy. I maintain that they are not economic, are not safe, and the new designs under development will be even worse in each category. I have decades of experience as an engineer, economics, and planning on which to base my conclusions. Each of the 30 – plus points I made in my articles Truth About Nuclear Power have proven true, with more nuclear plants in the US shutting down due to bad economics, more asking for government bailouts and subsidies, more having emergency problems leading to NRC investigations. Also, the four reactors that are under construction in the US (all the modern, faster and easier to construct AP1000 design) have substantial cost overruns and schedule delays of several years, and nobody put up any money to buy and install small modular reactors.
The foreign experience is also getting worse, with many of France’s reactors offline for safety inspections, the new French reactor at Flamanville years behind schedule and billions over budget. Finland, too has similar troubles wth their French EPR plant under construction – same as Flamanville – years behind schedule and billions over budget.
The Japanese recently revealed massive billion-dollar losses in their US nuclear design subsidiary, Westinghouse. The losses will likely lead to Westinghouse declaring bankruptcy and zero future orders.
So, if being right on all counts makes me an idiot, then call me an idiot.
Here’s the link to Truth About Nuclear Power, for anyone interested. These have more than 25,000 views.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-30.html
The usual way to calculate EROI is in an existing net, where you depend on existing plants for backup.
You could instead think of installing from scratch an electric supply with plants and wind/solar.
The net cost (transport wires) would be the same except when you depend on outside connections.
You could not rely on solar and wind alone, you have to add batteries or outside connections and deals with outside producers, or you could built own fossil backup.
Except for the domestic net that would be more or less the same then comes the sum of all the combinations for the real EROI.
The first MW you put in an existing net is cheap end effective, but the more wind you put in the costlier it becomes and with lower efficiency.
I rather think the overall goal behind EROI analysis is destine to failure. The problem is that meeting a community’s energy needs is a portfolio problem, whereas EROI basically assumes assumes energy is a uniform commodity. It isn’t. It has all kinds of different attributes that make different sources suitable for different uses. It only really makes sense to look at the EROI at the community or systems level.
Complicating the calculations is the demand side. EROI has to proceed on the basis that the energy is fit for purpose (hence the complications with intermittent supply), so changes there (eg DSM) can improve or otherwise change the optimum EROI.
If I give an example from NZ. We happen to have 80% renewable electricity largely based on hydro with 10% geothermal and 5% wind (all good resources given geology and geography). The wind and hydro work well as a portfolio – while the wind and the rain are correlated the storage helps buffer and provide spinning reserve. Geothermal is good base load, and fossil fuel (mainly NG), unlike much of the rest of the world, is peak and dry year cover (coal).
Now down here the lowest cost (levelised) next generation is geothermal and wind. But the demand is for peak generation not average. So to meet this increasing demand we need NG OCGT. And incidentally our peak is winter evenings, so PV is of little use in NZ which is a hard conversation to start in proper circles. So to meet demand NG OCGT is the investment of choice – it is the most economic because it is low capital cost, high variable cost resource – ideal for lowest cost peak operations.
However, and here’s the rub, because of the low utilisation the NG will not be running at optimum EROI. But who cares, its meeting the demand. Similarly domestic wood burners are a cleaner way to shave the peak and they will have a lower EROI than NG one suspects.
The important point is that the focus needs to be on having energy markets that are driving towards optimising the portfolio of generation and demand. In the particular case of winter peaks domestic consumers here are protected from the true time of day marginal cost of the electricity. That is now emerging and this will drive low cost inter day load shifting, leading to a better optimised energy demand and supply system, and who cares about the EROI (and the EROI of load shifting will always be downhill regardless of the economic advantages).
End of rave.
uhuh..
To brag a little: please see: Grain Ethanol vs. gasoline
(This was first published as a Calgary Herald guest column on April 7th, 2007) now only on my site as winface.com/amt./ethanol.html
Can’t find it, can you post the exact link?
Delete the dot after amt.
Thanks Paul Murphy and curious George, here is the actual link: http://winface.com/amt/ethanol.html
Good essay.
So what is the end result of the ethanol production target that never gets met? Do the pumps mandated to contain ethanol not contain it or are large amounts imported? I ask because there is a whole automotive mythology around the impacts or otherwise of ethanol in fuel.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/bc.marfeel.com/bangordailynews.com/2016/11/15/opinion/contributors/why-collins-deserves-praise-for-fighting-for-maines-biomass-industry/%3Fmarfeeltn%3Damp
—–
Collins and her family are on the take. Goes back a generations or two and Angus King regarding the wind business. See what committees they are on…
“Because 100% fossil fuel backup is necessary, the German and UK governments must pay for idle fossil fuel capacity, because emergency backup is essential for a stable grid. These payments are called “capacity payments” and can be thought of as subsidies for coal power plants. These payments are above and beyond the normal excess power generation capacity required in the absence of renewable power purchase mandates.”
It seems to me it would be more accurate to say these “above and beyond capacity payments” to fossil plants should be thought of as a hidden subsidy for renewable energy plants.
Denmark has less than 100% fossil fuel back up these days.
The UK keeps changing its arrangements for reserves… power stations paid to be available on stnadby for last 3 winters were not called upon at all.
Increasingly grid storage is replacing spinning reserve.
100% fossil fuel backup and spinning reserve are on the way out.
“Griff March 14, 2017 at 2:37 am
Denmark has less than 100% fossil fuel back up these days.”
So 99.9%?
By Andy May
A key question to think about, do renewable fuels decrease fossil fuel use, or do they increase it?
___________________________________________
No and Yes.
– No, renewable fuels don’t decrease fossil fuel use.
AND
– YES, renewable fuels increase fossil fuel use.
Good question, Andy May.
Slight answer.
Cheers, Hans
By the way, we had women’s day –
what about
Fannie Kaplans day.
Kior did not produce cellulosic ethanol. It produced pyrolysis oil, a syrup of chemicals and water with substantial oxygenates in it. That part of the process is relatively straight forward. But the really hard part is hydrotreating that mess into hydrocarbon fuel. That took a lot of H2, energy, and yet still produced product that only grudgingly could be called fuel. The gasoline component was highly aromatic when aromatics are being phased out of fuels. The diesel component had a very low cetane and was a very poor blend component as it hurt the properties of the blended fuel, not helped it. The diesel component also contained phenols and other toxic components that were also corrosive. All in all, a very poor fuel production scheme that ultimately didn’t work technically and commercially. Only $2B lost by investors and the governments that subsidized this venture. But I think Vinod Khosla made a lot of money when it went public.
He bought a nice private beach in California.
Zackly.
The real costs of this green nonsense are the opportunity costs. The opportunity cost of this global warming nonsense is astronomical, measured in multiples of the Apollo Program. The following article puts in perspective what could have been done with the money being wasted on this nonsense.
Just How Much Does 1 Degree C Cost?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/just-how-much-does-1-degree-c-cost/