Research or Implementation?
Andrew Revkin has two interesting posts giving different perspectives on the best way to implement a post-carbon energy system. One quotes from a recent interview with Bill Gates in which he argued that increased government funding of energy-related research and development is the key, and the other gives a response from Richard Rosen arguing that Gates is overestimating the potential for major breakthroughs in energy research and that while more research funding is needed, what’s more important is rapid and widespread implementation of the clean energy technologies available now. From my understanding of energy technology and economics, I think Rosen is basically right here, although he seems to be implying that Gates is making a stronger argument against implementation than he is. Nevertheless, there’s less dispute here than meets the eye, I think, and it’s really more a matter of balancing priorities than of making binary decisions, which I think both Gates and Rosen understand. Neither of them, however, is really grappling with the elephant in the room on this issue, which is the immense political challenges in getting any of these policies implemented on a scale that’s going to do any good, although Revkin does mention this in his follow-up questions to Rosen and Rosen discusses it a bit in his response.
August 26th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Rosen thinks we can get where we need to go with windmills and solar panels.
I would urge anyone that believes that to review how much wind power was generated in Bonneville Power Administrations grid area on August 23rd to 25th.(None) http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
The reality is that in the summer high pressure systems bring high temperatures, they don’t bring the wind. Last I’ve checked no one has worked out a cheap,practical way to store wind energy.
Gates thinks we need nuclear. Besides the waste issue, nuclear isn’t particularly thermally efficient. To get more thermal efficiency means running hotter, running hotter has issues related to material science.
We need some serious research money in material science and materials manufacturing. Regardless of what we choose for a power source, the weight of vehicles largely determines the amount of energy required.
The insane math of transporting a 150 pound person in a 3000 pound vehicle with a 25% efficient motor. What’s that work out to be? 75% of the energy is lost thru drive train inefficiency and then 95% of what is left is used to propel the vehicle, rather then the occupant.
In 1976 the average weight of a US car was 4,079 lbs, in 1981 the weight had dropped to 3,202 pounds, by 2004 the weight had crept up to an average of over 4,000 pounds again.
Clearly there has been no progress on the issue of vehicle weight in 30 years. DOE has recently tossed some chump change at the weight problem, but it’s chump change.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I do think Rosen gets a lot of the details wrong and has an obvious prejudice against nuclear power. I’m not quite sure if that invalidates his larger point, although it makes it discouraging trying to get to grips with it instead of calling him on his errors.
I’d sure hate to be a medium sized utility forking out big money for a concentrated photovoltaic system today, only to be surprised by much cheaper systems on offer next year. The industry phrase is ‘every generation of solar is 20% better performance.’ I’ve spoken with solar executives recently who think that they’re just a couple of years away from grid parity for many locations (grid parity changes depending on where you are).
I also think that calls for immediate employment really bring out the worst in industry sales people. Last year wind power was 9% more expensive than 2008, at the same time that natural gas and solar lowered their prices significantly. If I were a wind power executive I’d be yelling for immediate deployment. If I were a consumer I’d be thinking about waiting a year or two. Which isn’t really an optimal decision from the climate’s point of view…
August 27th, 2010 at 3:39 am
As Teofilo sais, both innovation (of new/improved technologies) and implementation (of existing technologies) is needed.
Innovation is needed to be able to remain efficient in the long term, and allow for deep and fast emission reductions in the long term. Its pay off though is inherently uncertain.
Implementation is needed to get started on emission reductions. It’s the cumulative emissions that we’re concerned with, so earlier cuts in emissions are more useful to climate stabilization than similar cuts made later.
Counting on innovation only risks postponing doing anything until a a silver bullet comes along that may never will (fairy dust).
Counting on implementation only risks high costs to achieve needed emission cuts (or an effective inability to reach needed emission cuts, if we don’t want to pay for it).
They also influence each other:
Implementation could pave the way for innovation, by giving a sign that society is clearly embarking on a low carbon path. It makes investing in innovation more worthwhile. The opposite is also possible: Innovation could be stalled if easy money is made on implementation of current, relatively inefficient technology. That is the pitfal we need to prevent.
Innovation could make people/businesses hesitant to employ current tech (waiting for next year’s tech may be better, but if you keep saying that till eternity, nothing ever changes).
Some kind of carbon pricing structure (preferably a straight tax and rebate) would spur both innovation and implementation. It could avoid the pitfal mentioned above, which is more prevalent in subsidies.
August 27th, 2010 at 7:59 am
No matter how you slice it, alternative energy costs more. If country A forces a transition from fossil to alternative energy and country B does not, then A’s economy will be at a siginificant disadvantage. It is a competitive world…
Since the goal is reducing global CO2, there has to be a mechanism whereby all countries transition in a way that’s fair. There has to be a way to enforce the rules…
How does that work?
What do we do with cheaters? What if the cheater is a realy big nuclear power?
August 27th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Or like China, has not had a green movement for the last 30 years, and their politicians have not been swayed by the CAGW delusion. (note I mean the catastrophic pronoucements of, greenpeace, oxfam, wwf, Gore, etc. 20 feet plus sea level rises, etc)
If China/Russia do not ‘believe it’ what can anyone do…..
If the most senior, Chines vclimate official let slip the following (note a non wester event) what do they realy think, are they laughing at the west, ramping up their economies, as al the CO2 producing business’ relocate east..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7067505/China-has-open-mind-about-cause-of-climate-change.html
China has ‘open mind’ about cause of climate change
China’s most senior climate change official surprised a summit in India when he questioned whether global warming is caused by carbon gas emissions and said Beijing is keeping an “open mind”.
“It is already a solid fact that climate is warming. The major reasons for this climate change is the unconstrained emissions produced by the developed countries in the process of industrialisation. That’s the mainstream view [but] there are other views. Our attitude is an open attitude”.
India and South Africa’s environment ministers appeared to be baffled by his comments.The Indian delegrate, Jairam Ramesh, said he did not believe his Chinese counterpart had meant what he said, while South Africa’s minister Buyelwa Sonjica said she could not “second guess” what Mr Xie had meant by his comments.
They appeared to undermine the new group’s main argument, that Western developed countries should pay for poor countries to switch to low carbon models because its emissions had caused climate change.
August 27th, 2010 at 10:21 am
I think both authors make good points, but I have to say Rosen misses some important factors, the energy and resources it takes to produce these technologies. It is my understanding that photovoltaics are quite energy and material intensive to produce, deploying them on the scale he is talking about seems like it would be difficult and wasteful if not impossible. (? someone with more knowledge please comment on this)
I work in biofuels and corn ethanol was definitely a result of the ‘implement the best we’ve got’ mindset. I don’t reject Rosen’s argument, I just urge more caution than I think he shows.
August 27th, 2010 at 11:15 am
“post-carbon energy system”
August 27th, 2010 at 11:25 am
#6
— the EROEI for solar PV is very high (around 30). Ethanol and other biofuels OTOH don’t do so well…The difference of course is that not all energy end-uses are the same. The appropriate comparison for biofuels isn’t solar, it’s
on a lifecycle-basis — as an ethanol guy you’re familiar with this right
Rosen is probably too pessimistic about how other renewables will compete with wind as others have noted, but he is correct that many of the intermittency issues associated with renewables in general are overblown and will likely be overcome.
Teleo I’m glad you posted this because it seems to me that most people would be in fierce agreement that it’s not a binary either/or proposition. We need both deployment and R&D.
It seems to me that want to put more emphasis on the latter are doing so implicitly on the grounds of political practicality. This raises a number of important questions.
1) In a U.S. context, is a greater emphasis on PUBLIC R&D than carbon pricing strategies and deployment more likely to be implemented?
2) Assuming the anwser to 1) is yes, then would such an approach have a reasonable chance of success?
The anwser to 2), of course, depends very much on how one defines success. For some, success is *any* progress. For others, it may be judged in terms of absolute emission reductions relative to what is needed to avoid significant cliamte change impacts. Some days I lean to the former metric but other days (when I’m feeling less sanguine about things) I think in terms of the latter…
Sure a $5 tCO2e tax on fossil fuels ala breakthrough and Gates is good. But is it really the best the U.S. can manage (at the federal level)?
To put it in context, $5/tCO2e = < 1 cents per gallon…
To put it slightly differently, why are most of the climate change policies discussed in federal u.s. politics so timid and grossly inadequate relative to scale of the problem?
August 27th, 2010 at 11:26 am
#6
to finish para 1….the appropriate comparison for ethanol is gasoline and/or other energy currencies that are relevant to the transportation sector.
August 27th, 2010 at 11:45 am
Thanks Marlowe,
I wasn’t comparing biofuels and solar, I just used corn ethanol as an example of bad policy. My question was concerning the energy and material used to create PV cells. Theoretically there are an infinite number of ways to capture energy from the sun, maybe PV’s are a poor way to do that?
August 27th, 2010 at 11:50 am
hard to argue with an EROEI of 30 isn’t it?
August 27th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
kdk33 Says:
“August 27th, 2010 at 7:59 am No matter how you slice it, alternative energy costs more.”
As a real estate agent would say-
“Location, location, location.”
The cost of steam coal in a Chinese seaport is $116/ton up from $27/ton in 2002 .
A Westinghouse AP1000, 1,000 Megawatt nuclear power plant can be built in China for $2 billion. (Labor costs are substantially less in China).
On the flip side, coal can be mined at a profit for $12/ton in Gillette, Wyoming, and that same Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactor costs $5-$7 billion to build in the US.
Given that a 1,000 megawatt coal fired plant burns 3-4 million tons of coal per year, at $100/ton for coal a $2 billion for a nuke plant is a financial no-brainer.
In the US South East the math gets a little more complicated.
Since the US Southeast is experiencing inward migration some new generating capacity will have to be built to accommodate the growing population.
A new 1,000 megawatt coal fired plant with NOx,SO2,Soot etc scrubbers goes for about $4 billion. A 1,000 megawatt AP1000 plant goes for $5-$7 billion. We’ll use the 7 billion number, so we would need a fuel savings of $3 billion for the plant to be cheaper. The current delivered price of coal in the US South East is about $100/ton. At 3 million tons per year the fuel cost is $300 million per year. So it will take us 10 years to recoup our investment assuming zero fuel cost for the nuke plant. At a 10% interest rate we will never recoup our investment. At a 5% interest rate the nuclear plant becomes slightly financially interesting. $300 million a year in fuel savings minus $150 million a year in additional interest costs, our payback is about 20 years on a plant that last 60 years.
The cost effectiveness of Solar is similarly location dependent. Inyokernn, California gets an average of more then 7.5 full sun hours per day. Seattle, Washington gets an average of 3.5 hours per day. Solar is twice as expensive in Seattle as a result, yet various environmental activists insist we should spend tax dollars installing solar panels in Seattle.
August 27th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
#8 Marlowe Johnson Says:
To put it in context, $5/tCO2e = < 1 cents per gallon…
If the purpose of the tax is to reduce CO2, then the above tax has little/no effect. As it will have little effect, the cry will go out to make the tax high enough to affect use. A tax high enough to affect use will ruin the US economy as jobs will fly to China and India.
I know I will be using my vote in November to see a stake driven into the entire scheme.
August 27th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
We have a lot of hard data on how much energy wind and solar has produced over the years. We also have good knowledge on how much energy is used. The task is to come up with an environmentally friendly solution, where x*wind+y*solar+z*hydro+n*GNW meets the energy needed during every minute 24/7/365. GNW=other means of producing energy besides wind, solar and hydro.
If we build massive amounts of wind and solar power, they sure will produce a lot of energy, when the weather is right. However, when those do not produce energy, most of the needed energy has to be produced with other power plants. And there are a lot of hours and even days, when wind and solar produce next to nothing.
The problem of wind and solar energy is not the amount of energy that’s produced. The big issue is, that they need massive amount of backup from other power plants. What are those other power plants, how much will they cost and how much will they pollute?
For those, who wonder. GNW=God Knows What.
August 27th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Another interesting point of contention in the “Global Climate Debate” is that anyone that is not specifically a “Climate Scientist” should not comment or have any weight of discission on “Climate” related issues.
But, when it comes to the “Engineering Science” side of the “Climate Science”, these same “Climate Scientist” insist on weighing in on the domain of “Engineering” as well. I crack-up on a daily basis reading papers and articles of research scientist that are continuously doing engineering and it is not in their field of “expertise”.
Astonishing how the rule of authority/expertise can be. corrupted.
August 27th, 2010 at 5:33 pm
There is real money to be made in solar. Love this item that came out a bit ago.
Just ask Spain or Germany how well it has worked for them.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/13/its-true.html
“ The prices paid for green energy were so high that it appeared to be profitable to generate that energy by shining conventionally fuelled arclights on the solar panels.”
August 27th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Marlowe Johnson Says:
August 27th, 2010 at 11:25 am #6
“Rosen is probably too pessimistic about how other renewables will compete with wind as others have noted, but he is correct that many of the intermittency issues associated with renewables in general are overblown and will likely be overcome.”
Bonneville Power Administration, which manages a large chunk of US hydro-dams, had 6,000 Megawatts of load balancing laying around, that ‘nearly free’ load balancing capability has now been spoken for either by existing or planned projects.
The Chinese built a pumped storage system to balance their windmills for a bit more then $1 billion, it’s got all of 13,000 Megawatt/hours of storage. Two 8 million cubic meter (2,1 billion gallon) reservoirs separated by a 600 meter drop. Niagara Falls is a 52 meter drop. Grand Coulee Dam is 168 meters. Sears Tower is 442 meters.
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/tianhuangping/
Nothing technically difficult about pumped storage, all one needs for pumped storage is money, a mountain and environmental permits. If the Chinese can build 13,000 megawatts of pumped storage(the equivalent of 1 nuclear power plant for 13 hours) we should be able to do it for $3 billion.
Wind farms tend to run at 25% efficiency. So 4x 1,000 megawatts wind farms at $1.5 Billion each plus a $3 billion dollar pumped storage facility…just $9 billion dollars for the equivalent of 1 nuclear power plant. Assuming you have good wind and a mountain.
August 28th, 2010 at 2:47 am
harrywr2, I tried to find any operating statistics for that Tianhuangping plant but to no avail. Do you (or anyone else) have access to any? Mostly I’m interested to know, how good the efficiency was. The Chinese claim 70%, but that sounds implausible.
August 28th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Vieras,
Here is a study done for some pumped storage options in the US claiming 78% efficiency.
http://rethink-technologies.com/static/Niagara_Pumped_Storage_Project_ESA_008c.pdf
Here is a brochure from Alstom, they claim 80% efficiency
http://www.power.alstom.com/_eLibrary/presentation/upload_43926.pdf
IMHO 70% efficiency is plausible.
The big problem with pumped storage is figuring out how much is needed…I.E. In the Pacific northwest the wind hardly blew at all in February ’10 and the windmills ran at 10% for the month.
A months worth of storage is a lot of storage.
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/Winter0809_vs_Winter0910x.xls
August 29th, 2010 at 3:13 am
We’re building 1600 MW Olkiluoto 3 here in Finland. If we assume that pumped hydro works at 70% and that OL3 will produce at 95% reliability (like the other Finnish plants) we’d need 9 x 1000 MW wind farms. That’s about $16 Billion using the prices above. OL3 is estimated to cost $6-8 Billion (due to big delays).
So one nuclear plant or 3000 3MW wind mills all around our coast line plus a huge artificial lake somewhere in Lapland? Not a difficult decision to make.
August 29th, 2010 at 11:58 am
vieras Says:
“August 29th, 2010 at 3:13 am. OL3 is estimated to cost $6-8 Billion (due to big delays).”
The price of coking coal has risen quite dramatically in the last 5 years increasing the cost of steel and cement. . The price of coal plants, windmills, nuclear power plants have all gone up as a result.
Excerpting an article on a coal fired plant in the US.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-07-24/news/ct-met-coal-plant-costs-20100723_1_expensive-coal-plant-prairie-state-energy-campus-overruns
“Under pressure to hold down skyrocketing costs that promise more expensive electric bills for dozens of Midwest cities, developers agreed Friday to cap the construction budget for a massive coal-fired power plant in downstate Illinois.
The Prairie State Energy Campus already has more than doubled in cost to $4.4 billion”
The 6.5 million tons of coal it will burn a year isn’t going to be cheap either.
September 15th, 2010 at 4:11 am
[...] on a comment I made at collide-a-scape (teofilo) on the same topic. For a different perspective, see e.g. this comment by Heiko on a [...]