"Sustainable Energy — Without the hot air." No bullshit approach to carbon issue.

[free spirit]

hold on a second - this paper's a 375 page document... I may be some time

 

[elbows]

Yes its a tad long but my god its the best thing Ive ever read.

I have resorted to skimming it to try and get an overall feel for things. Where I have paused to look at detail, I have been overjoyed by the approach taken, lots of brilliant numbers, ways to compare things, and humor.

Joy Joy Joy!

Im nearly half way through the skimming, and the details on what the different renewable energies could provide, along with figures for what we consume, is just great. Its certainly going to help get the tidal stuff in perspective.

 

[free spirit]

we'll compare notes in a bit then

eta - have to say I'm finding his habit of changing everything into kwh per day per person to be a bit annoying - makes it pretty hard to work out what he's trying to say the total potential for tidal power... think he's saying 13 gigawatts from the atlantic coast.

actually I can see one major mistake in this already in that he's using an average of 4m tidal range to calculate these figures, but you'd obviously site and tidal barrages / lagoons where the tidal range was highest - ie the severn estuary where the tidal range is around 7m in height so the potential energy per m2 is much higher than using the figures he's using.

erm, dammit should have finished the chapter - he discusses the severn barrage separately

 

[elbows]

Yes the Severn barrage details are interesting, and he is understandably positive about tidal powers potential. The figures seem broadly comparable with those you mentioned earlier. Overall he is very generous with all of the renewables kWh/d figures, allowing us to see what the picture would be like if all the renewable possibilities are carried out on a mind-boggling scale. We get to see what renewables could do in the UK if we threw ourselves totally in that direction. Later he looks at all the problems, and how a more realistic view of what we will actually manage with renewables severely reduces how much energy they could provide us.

The kwh/d stuff would be annoying if he didnt mention the details of how these figures were arrived at. But I think its a stroke of genius to put the numbers as kWh/d, because it allows us to actually compare all the different aspects of our lives, and the potential solutions, in meaningful ways. Regardless of whether the book changes anybodies opinion of the various different sources of energy, it is extremely valuable for making us think about energy use in a consistent way. Glorious perspective.

 

[spacemonkey]

I see you took note of my desertec thread then

Yep. Covered it a bit in my MSc as well.

 

[elbows]

Well I have overloaded my bonce by trying to read too much of it in one go.

It gets rather interesting later on when he shows 5 different possible ways to meet our energy needs, using different technologies. A couple of them are totally non-nuclear, although not necesarily do-able, its nice to see how it could be achieved, just how realistic it seems, and he invites people to do the maths and come up with their own preferred solutions. Its all a lot more practical than picking one technology you love and betting its the total solution.

I obviously need to spend a lot more time with the work, but from what I saw it looks like solutions that involve no nuclear power at all, could be achieved if we are very focussed, lucky, have good international cooperation, and most importantly significantly change our lifestyles to vastly reduce energy consumption.

I can certainly see why nuclear remains on the agenda. If new generation of nuclear power is implemented at the complete expense of real progress with renewables, then it would be counterproductive. If it is done in conjunction with everything else, for all its drawbacks, I can see why planners may consider it to have at least medium-term benefits, even putting to one side the economic, political etc 'unjust' reasons why Nuclear may be a preferred option.

 

[teqniq]

Yep.
I have my fingers crossed for a few of the maverick approaches to fusion (ie. not the $20b ITER project), which will provide all the concentrated power of fission without the horrible waste. Fingers very tightly crossed indeed.

That'd me too.

 

[free spirit]

think I've spotted a slight 'dime bar' moment...

talking about the desertec plan for large-scale concentrated solar thermal in the desert...

They say that at 4m2/(MWh/y), solar can do 50MWkk. But 4m2/(MWh/y)
is 28.5W/m2! So they have exaggerated by nearly a factor of 2. (Or are
assuming the 50MW power station would not operate at full capacity!)

I believe the reason for this is that it's a 50mw peak power station, that stores part of the thermal energy during the day at points when demand is lower to be released during the night to allow the plant to continue generating through the night when the suns not about.

essentially this is one of the most useful aspects of the concentrated solar thermal - it's ability to pretty much instantaneously boost power to respond to surges in demand, and store heat for use during the night when demand is lower. It basically overcomes all the usual objections to wind power being unreliable and needing spinning reserve fossil fuel stations to back it up etc.

eta - i could of course have misunderstood what he's on about...

 

[free spirit]

ok - finished skim-reading it, plus going back and checking a few bits that I wasn't sure about.

I reckon that's probably the best attempt to really cover this issue that I've read - albeit a work in progress.

for those that can't be arsed to read it all, here's a diagram outlining his 5 different potential scenarios for a zero / very low carbon (?) energy future for the UK. Note that this is for total per capita energy usage not just current electricity generation (i think). In all scenarios he anticipates a mass move to electric vehicles charged off the grid, so there actually needs to be an increase in electricity production to cater for this. He also anticipates largely switching from gas for heating to ground & air source heat pumps (plus some solar thermal) in all scenarios, meaning that we'd have to also produce additional electricity to power the heat pumps (though in total they're more efficient than gas boilers so that makes sense).

roughly - plan d is a fairly broad mix of UK based renewables, nuclear and clean coal, plan N is the nimby version with much lower wind, other renewables and nuclear, and most of the slack taken up by 50gw of Concentrated Solar Thermal in the deserts of north africa using the desertec model, plan L is no nuclear with desertec taking up much of the slack, plan G is the ultra green, no nuclear option with huge amounts of wind, and plan E is supposed to be based purely on the most economic solution with mostly nuclear plus a variety of renewables.

These 5 options do seem to be a little bit thrown together, and I think are really aimed at demonstrating the extremes of the various different view points / options rather than what he really thinks is the best plan or even what's actually viable - eg the wind power in option G is about 80GW which is pretty insane - 4 times the entire current global installed capacity just in the UK.

One thing I have a major quibble with him about though is option E where he essentially says that nuclear is more economic than pretty much anything else for electricity generation. I can't see what figures he's using for this, other than the comment below which seems to indicate that he's using the figure of £1 billion per gigawatt of new nuclear capacity. Given that the top boy at E-on is talking about £4.8 billion per gigawatt (if I'm translating his figures right), and you've then got the operating costs and major decommissioning costs to factor in, I'm not convinced that Nuclear is actually cheaper than desertec, wind, tidal & serious wave power.

The capital cost of regular dirty coal power stations is £1 billion per GW, about the same as nuclear;

I believe that he's also missed a large part of the point of desertec in that it is designed to enable the entire system to cope well with the largescale fluctuations from largescale wind in the UK and Ireland as the Concentrated Solar Thermal plants in North Africa / middle east store more of the heat instead of using it to generate electricity when the wind's blowing in europe, and then release this additional heat as electricity to power europe when the wind stops blowing. He spends much of the report talking about the need to find additional pump storage type capacity to back up any largescale increase in UK wind power... desertec has that covered already, so the largescale wind + largescale desertec option is a lot more viable than I think he's realised.

eta - he's professor of physics at cambridge though, so I may well have missed him making exactly this point somewhere in my skim reading of the report.

eta 2: I was wrong about that diagram being for total per capita energy use. For some reason (simplicity he says) the energy demand he's aiming to cover in that diagram only includes transport, heating and electricity

To avoid the plan’s taking many pages, I propose to make a cartoon of our country, in which we consume power in just three forms: transport, heating, and electricity. This is a drastic simplification, omitting industry, farming, food, imports, and so forth. But I hope it’s a helpful simplification, allowing us to compare and contrast alternative plans in one minute.

Seems a bit daft to write an entire book on energy policy then at the end simply exclude industry from your recommendations entirely to make things simpler - industry accounts for around 21% of UK energy consumption, and I believe is also the sector that (excluding electricity generation and transport which is already accounted for) has actually decreased it's carbon footprint the most in the UK since 1990. Industry also holds part of the key to being able to regulate demand fluctuations to nelp offset the impact of fluctuations of supply from wind.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I suspect the more technically minded members of Greenpeace might have some issues at being identified with his 'Plan G' though (concrete over the whole UK to build wind farms to maintain something like business as usual, with a few modest nods to demand reduction.)

I'm pretty sure they'd want to say you have to be a lot more radical with demand reduction than he's assuming. Of course, considering those scenarios to even the same degree of accuracy would require another book this size and as the author points out. 'Such plans are difficult to sell' ...

 

[editor]

*thread renamed and moved to science.

 

[xenon]

very short version

the seven estuary tidal barrage can produce roughly the same amount of electricity as the entire planned new generation of nuclear power stations for just over 1/4 of the cost of the nuclear power programme's building costs alone. The nuclear power stations will then have higher operating costs while they are running, and a huge decommissioning cost at the end of their life. You will also need to build 4 generations of nuclear to cover the time span that the severn barrage is expected to operate - 30 years vs 120 years, so in actual fact the seven barrage about 3% of the total cost of the nuclear option (taking account of 4 build and decommissioning cycles).

I thought the barrage was said to be able to provide up to 7% of UK's electricity needs. Are you saying all the planned nuclear power stations, if built, would deliver less than that? Because if so. That could be used as an argument for building more nuclear stations. Not that I'm going to make the argument. I don't know enough.

 

[rich!]

for reference,

the nuclear decommissioning authority need £8 billion in the next three years. Their discounted cost assumptions for decom. the entire current nuclear estate is £37 bn, though this is based on the current known scope; sites like Sellafield may have significant further problems to discover and resolve...

 

[free spirit]

I thought the barrage was said to be able to provide up to 7% of UK's electricity needs. Are you saying all the planned nuclear power stations, if built, would deliver less than that? Because if so. That could be used as an argument for building more nuclear stations. Not that I'm going to make the argument. I don't know enough.

no, not exactly.

as I understand it the current plans are to build about 10 gigawatts of nuclear at a cost of £48 billion or so (using the e-on chaps figures).

the severn barrage according to that plan would have a rating of 8.6 gigawatts and cost around £14 billion to build.

so the proposed new generation of nuclear would have a rated output of around 1.4 gigawatts more than the severn barrage. I'm also not entirely sure whether that rated output for the barrage is it's peak output, or an average output - I'm guessing probably peak output, so it's average would probably be nearer 5-6 gigawatts at a guess. Nuclear tends to operate on around a 90% of rated capacity type rate, so would actually be nearer to 9 gigawatts from the 10 gigawatts rated capacity. So using these (very) rough figures the planned expansion of nuclear would produce around 50% more electricity than the severn barrage, but at 3-4 times the capital costs, higher operating costs, and with a huge decommissioning and open ended waste storage bill at the end.

It's not an exact comparison, and the figures are pretty rough and ready, I was merely trying to make the point that those arguing that nuclear is the only technology capable of delivering reliable carbon neutral energy on a large scale in this country at a low cost are talking bollocks.

It's also worth noting IMO that for all those arguing that going for wind is a mistake because it's a variable supply, that we built 2 huge pump storage facilities totalling 2 gigawatts in the 70's and 80's basically to cope with the fact that Nuclear couldn't be switched off and on very quickly so we had to have somewhere to dump excess electricity from nuclear at periods of low demand, and rapidly increase supply at periods of peak demand. Something to consider next time someone bangs on about the reliability of nuclear compared to wind, and how we'd need 'x' amount of spinning reserve from fossil fuels to back up any largescale increase in wind. It is true that we need to have the ability to smooth the peaks and troughs of wind, but there are other methods of doing this than using fossil fuel power stations... and we've done it before for nuclear, so why not for wind / renewables?

 

[Crispy]

You'd need a LOT of pumped storage, basically. As the article says, you'd need to use most of the country's lakes and lochs.

 

[Brainaddict]

You'd need a LOT of pumped storage, basically. As the article says, you'd need to use most of the country's lakes and lochs.

This also makes me wonder about wind power on environmental grounds.

 

[Crispy]

I'm leaning towards the thermal solar power, cables from N. Africa myself. The plants are easy to construct, so local business should be able to get in on it. And the power delivery is very reliable - the sun always shines in the desert!

 

[xenon]

Thanks for clarifying Freespirit. You see what i mean though. Those supporting just a nuclear option, will site thosesame figures as evidence we need even more nuclear.

Unless fusion is proven to work at a powerplant scale. Or an economical way of radically reducing the harf life of fissile materials comes into use. I see we need a mix of these technologies. I'd like to see more off sure hydropower plants being built. And that grid idea you linked to a while back. using deserts in North Africa for Solar Thermal energy.

 

[WouldBe]

You'd need a LOT of pumped storage, basically. As the article says, you'd need to use most of the country's lakes and lochs.

With tidal the moon does the pumping. You should be able to generate on both the incoming and outgoing tides.

 

[free spirit]

You'd need a LOT of pumped storage, basically. As the article says, you'd need to use most of the country's lakes and lochs.

well you would if pumped storage was the only method of dealing with the peaks and troughs of wind - luckily it isn't.

I'm leaning towards the thermal solar power, cables from N. Africa myself. The plants are easy to construct, so local business should be able to get in on it. And the power delivery is very reliable - the sun always shines in the desert!

the desertec plan (or a slightly improved version of it) for solar thermal in the arid / desert areas of north africa, middle east and southern europe combined with a HVDC network across Europe that effectively would allow the CST plants to operate as a large part of the buffer for our wind. When the wind's blowing we'd export electricity to africa / Europe, and the CST plants would reduce their output and increase the amount of heat going to their thermal stores for later use (or simply stop generating if it was nighttime). When the wind stops the CST plants would increase their output to compensate & export additional energy to the UK.

Then you could have undersea HVDC cables to Norway and Iceland to make use of their hydro (and geothermal in icelands case) power capacity on the same basis... the only reason denmark is able to have such high levels of wind power is that it uses Norways hydro power as it's buffer, no reason why we can't do the same.

Then you've got the potential for increased dynamic demand control to temporarily lower demand levels when either generation slumps rapidly or demand rises rapidly - essentially to give the power generators time to bring additional generation capacity onstream. Worth noting that he's talking about pretty much all space heating coming from ground source / air source heat pumps, so if every new heatpump installed was fitted with a dynamic demand controller that automatically switched it off for half an hour or so when the voltage dropped (and switched it on for half an hour if it rose) that'd actually be a fair amount of buffer that could operate without anyone really noticing.

There's also the potential for landfill gas generators & waste to energy facilities in the Uk to essentially only operate at peak times to provide extra surge capacity. this might not be instantaneous, but with a good spread of wind across the country, plus tidal, wave, hydro & the pump storage facilities & dynamic demand control it should be quick enough to mean you wouldn't actually need much / any actual spinning reserve IMO.

Possibly the key idea to take from this report with regard to buffering for largescale wind is the idea of having all these electric vehicles (he's looking at pretty much every vehicle being electric eventually) plugged in when not in use, and using some form of dynamic demand control system to not only stop charging the batteries when the voltage drops (supply from wind drops), but also to use all these millions of car batteries to potentially trickle charge the grid for a short amount of time when needed. I'm not entirely convinced about the trickle charging the grid idea, but either stopping or slowing the rate of charge when the wind drops could really make a major difference if repeated on millions of cars.

 

[free spirit]

I'm leaning towards the thermal solar power, cables from N. Africa myself. The plants are easy to construct, so local business should be able to get in on it. And the power delivery is very reliable - the sun always shines in the desert!

UAE invests US$15 billion in future energy solutions


I do believe some of that oil money might be getting used to fund this idea in the not too distant future

 

[stavros]

There are two known ways to reduce population growth. Increase everyone's standard of living to a comfortable level (as in Europe, Japan etc) or authoritarian methods (as in China) on a global scale - presumably requiring some kind of global governmental system. Which do you suggest we use?

I don't know, but I would really like to see discussed in the popular arena, which currently is not the case..

 

[elbows]

I do believe some of that oil money might be getting used to fund this idea in the not too distant future

Yeah, Gordon Brown's request at the Saudi oil conference, for the big oil exporters to invest their money in our renewable energy systems, is not as silly as it sounds. It gives them a stake in our energy systems long after the oil runs out.

Although Ive obviously still not read the book properly, it seemed to me that the 5 options were not supposed to be presented as the most sensible solutions, just possibilities to get people thinking about how the energy mix should work.

And I think later on he uses the rather over the top examples to demonstrate the enormity of the challenge we face, and thus why rather large reductions in energy use, which are dismissed by some as totally silly, seem sensible compared to the scale required for some of these other options to work.

If Europe can remain united, then pooling our energy resources makes a lot of sense. I think I have mixed feelings about placing our bets on an energy system in Africa for multiple reasons, such as whether its in the interests of the African nations involved, whether they might not prefer/deserve that energy for themselves, general security concerns and stuff like that. It's certainly worth persuing though to learn more about these issues.

The globe so needs to work together on these issues, both climate change and energy supply woes, yet there remains dangerous potential for competiton and war in future, just as there was in the past. And as some parts of the book show, the energy costs of 'stuff' we buy, and that whole aspect of the globalisation project, is a big chunk of energy use.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I think his numbers for energy consumption via our food systems look rather low. I'm trying to figure out why at the moment.

The numbers I'd expect to see and the potential for demand reduction I think exists in that area are certainly big enough to be taken into account in his estimates.

 

[free spirit]

If Europe can remain united, then pooling our energy resources makes a lot of sense. I think I have mixed feelings about placing our bets on an energy system in Africa for multiple reasons, such as whether its in the interests of the African nations involved, whether they might not prefer/deserve that energy for themselves, general security concerns and stuff like that. It's certainly worth persuing though to learn more about these issues.

the desertec idea if done right would mean that the north african countries benfitted from dirt cheap solar energy for their nations, not just flogging it all to us. Europe would also be partly powering them from Wind, wave, tide and possibly even hydro etc so it's not all one way traffic.

basically though it'd be turning pretty much valueless areas of arid land into huge income earners for the host countries (if they invest in the technology themselves rather than just selling the land dirt cheap to some multinational)

 

[ymu]

the desertec idea if done right would mean that the north african countries benfitted from dirt cheap solar energy for their nations, not just flogging it all to us.

But will they be flogging it to us - or will it be the corporate investors siphoning off all the profit as usual?

 

[laptop]

I'd heard it was increasing education levels rather than increasing standard of living that reduced population growth, although you'd imagine the two would be related.

Yep: AFAIK the only humane thing with the ghost of a realistic chance of affecting population growth is increasing the proportion of girls educated to age 12.

At one of my jobs I've been getting three or four "population bomb!" emails a day this past week - lots of them from organised lobbies. None make the faintest hint of a proposal about how a reduction would be achieved. So I've been working on the question...

It's too late for contraception to make any difference (though increased access to it remains desirable on human-rights grounds). If every woman already alive had just 2 babies on average, we'd reach 9 billion in 2050. Even without increased access to education, babies-per-woman numbers are dropping fast enough that the world population is currently projected to fall after 2050.

So the only way to get to fewer than 9 billion peak population is for lots of people to die.

So of that population lobby I ask: "Are you volunteering?"

 

[free spirit]

But will they be flogging it to us - or will it be the corporate investors siphoning off all the profit as usual?

from the looks of it it'll be the arabian monarchies investing their oil profits. That's the thing about hereditary rulers, they do actually have some incentive to think long term and play the long game.

the multinationals seem intent on investing all their profits in securing as much of the remaining oil as they can, meaning they'll probably miss the boat on renewables as they've essentially just sat on their renewable energy investments for the last decade and done fuck all with them.

funny how we chose to squander our last remaining years as an oil producer on stupidly expensive military interventions with some vague (very ill thought out) aim of securing longterm oil supplies, rather than investing that money wisely in a renewable energy future that we could have been world leaders in... ah well, not to worry eh

 

[ymu]

So Africa continues to get screwed. Grand.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> And I think later on he uses the rather over the top examples to demonstrate the enormity of the challenge we face, and thus why rather large reductions in energy use, which are dismissed by some as totally silly, seem sensible compared to the scale required for some of these other options to work. <snip>

Yep. After you've considered what we'd need to build to do any version of 'business as usual' sustainably e.g. turning an area the size of Wales into a wind-farm etc, some of the 'unthinkable' demand reduction scenarios start to look a bit less unthinkable, or so one might hope.