Planet Earth fact of the day

“No it does not. Or rather there is a minor decrease in production costs but there is also a massive increase in costs as the cherries are picked. The previous poster was right. The first sites picked for wind (and even more so hydro) power are the best. The same is true for solar but less so. As generation expands, worse and worse sites have to be built which results in worse costs.”

Absolutely. Wind suffers from increasing marginal costs per KWh. Manufacturing gains are entirely overwhelmed by inferior sites. And, I might add; large field wake effects. You can lose 30% of turbine cost-effectiveness when you go from a single turbine to a 100-plus field of them.

Prior

You are simply wrong about wind turbine cost effectiveness at the margin. I’m starting think you don’t understand the argument. Do you understand the difference between effectiveness and cost-effectiveness? Do you even understand what marginal cost-effectiveness is?

Your cut-and-paste doesn’t answer the challenge at all. I’ve noticed similar responses from low-ranking engineers here; ones who don’t understand these economic terms and aren’t trained in systems thinking.

Anyway, since you think so highly of engineers, let me tell you, as an engineer, a bit about wind turbines and their cost-effectiveness. Firstly, you make them more cost-effective by building them BIGGER (uprating), and to a lesser extent by building them in quantity. The gains from simple up-rating have generally been greater than the reduction in industrial costs; it accounts for the majority of historical improvements in wind £/KWh. But current models lie close to practical limits on size…

Secondly, there really are a limited number of good onshore and offshore sites, though the effect is lessened offshore. If you want to build on a national scale, you will have to use mediocre sites which are about 50% the yield of the current (mostly good) sites.

Thirdly, all wind-sites suffer from large field wake effects. If you double the number of turbines in a field, all the turbines generate about 5% less energy. When you start building large, let alone national, scale fields, things get messy.

Prior,

Agreed we may be talking past each other. I will try to be precise. The frame of analysis is the variance in turbine cost-effectiveness which is explained by different technical and environmental factors. If we list those factors in numerical ORDER OF SENSITIVITY they look like this:

Scaling / baseplate
Location
Field wake effects / # of turbines locally
Lowered manufacturing and installation costs
Reliability improvements
General aerodynamic improvements

Wind turbines are a mature technology now. The small factors don’t matter; there’s not much more benefit to be mined in reliability or aerodynamics. Similarly scaling is almost exhausted as we head for 7MW baseplates (Too big for land now really. And close to limits for anywhere). Improvements in cost-effectiveness must now come from general manufacturing and installation costs, which do progress modestly over time and scale. All well and good…

Unfortunately, Location and Wake field effects are meanwhile working against us. As you ramp up from small (MW) capacity to large (multi-GW) capacity we saturate and exhaust the good sites, moving onto less good sites, which we saturate in turn. The effects are distressingly large; you can lose a factor of 2 or 3 on cost effectiveness over this scale. If you were to go further and deploy UK national-scale offshore wind farms, say 140GW baseplate with, say 35,000 turbines in 100 fields each about 14km square. I expect such fields would run at about 20-25% collectively, compared to a single prime-site performance of 45-50%.

Overall, this means the £/KWh for wind turbines is not going to improve much, and may even decline in high-deployment markets. The numbers I have used historically for cost-modelling are quite generous in this regard an assume constant technical improvement and relatively slow saturation. All this might be acceptable for an expensive but not outrageous solution. Perhaps 2 or 3 times as much as an equivalent fossil fuel mix would cost.

But then the intermittency problem begins and ruins everything….

‘But it is not a defensible position to both claim that climate change is an existential crisis of massive proportions, and also oppose nuclear power.’

Of course it is (though it becomes a broader discussion when talking about future technologies). Currently, essentially all nuclear reactors produce bomb suitable fissile material, and though not exactly highlighted, one reason so many nations use nuclear power is that this provides the opportunity, if necessary, to build a nuclear arsenal fairly quickly. This is a major source of opposition to nuclear energy in Germany, by the way – somehow, it just never seems to appear in English language reporting. And this is where it is fair to note that this is in reference to what exists today – other fission designs do not necessarily create bomb suitable fissiles. Though oddly, those designs never seem to get built, while even today, the designs that create bomb suitable material are under construction. Nonetheless, and particularly in a place where everyone assumed nuclear weapons would be used, it is quite possible to be opposed to (current design) nuclear power, merely because it is not unreasonable to consider a major nuclear war something along the lines of an existential threat of massive proportion.

‘Yes, nuclear power has some risks, but it is the one technology which could viably replace carbon-emitting power generation at scale, right now.’

Leaving aside construction lead time and how most current designs are not exactly stellar in terms of safety, Germany is demonstrating, right now, how it is possible to replace nuclear with renewables – and still burn less coal, and emit less CO2 for electrical generation. Germany has been following this path for a couple of decades at this point, admittedly, allowing engineers to solve engineering problems instead of saying something clearly cannot be done.

‘Germany can do it to some extent because it is near Norway. But not everyone lives near Oslo.’

And the U.S. is next to Canada, with considerably larger hydro-electric capacity – ‘Canada is the world’s second largest producer of hydroelectricity after China, and one of the few countries to generate the majority of its electricity from hydroelectricity (59% in 2006). In 2011, Canada consumed the equivalent of 85.2 megatonnes of oil of hydroelectricity, 10.8% of all the hydroelectricity generated in the world.

Some provinces and territories, such as British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Yukon produce over 90% of their electricity from Hydro. All of the dams with large reservoirs were completed before 1990, since then most development has been run-of-the-river, both large and small. Natural Resources Canada calculates the current installed small hydro capacity is 3,400 MW, with an estimated potential of 15,000 MW. A report on the future of hydroelectricity, suggests the remaining 78% potential will remain undeveloped up to 2050, citing a lack of public acceptance.

Canada has about 75 GW of installed hydroelectric capacity, producing 392 TWh of electricity in 2013’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Canada

A lot more people live closer to Quebec than live next to Oslo would be a reasonable guess.

I will keep repeating this, since so many commenters seem so thoroughly unaware of it – engineers solve problems using engineering. The U.S. seems to have lost its ability to even understand that, much less have its engineers follow in the footsteps of others who solved the seemingly insurmountable problems involved in using renewables a decade or two ago. To be a bit honest, the reality is, just like with how the pharma industry is viewed in the U.S., this perception is shaped by simply repeating the same inaccurate points repeatedly, so that those exposed to them remain unaware of just how incorrect they remain. Almost as if someone is profiting from such perceptions.

@Jan, environmentalists were pushing solar and wind power, and opposing fossil fuel derived energy, long before the climate change issue came to the fore.

@P_A, I suppose there is a defensible argument opposing nuclear power on the basis of it enabling nuclear war. But it’s a very weak argument where nuclear weapons already exist. The U.S. already has thousands of nuclear warheads and a robust capability to create more fissile material for weapons. Building some more nuclear power plants is not going to increase the risks at all. Germany is part of a military alliance possessing nukes, and also has some hosted on its soil as part of that alliance. Again, I don’t see how Germany having nuclear power plants increases the risk of nuclear war at all.

@dan, I think if you ask around you will find that is a very small minority today.

Even many decades before warming was less certain, you have to wonder why the environmentalists (I believe Nixon was one) were pushing those things. There were real issues with clean air the, which government has largely addressed. I suspect that was a major factor.

The amazing thing to me is the way pro-nukes glide over bad experiences, like San Onofre, and promise the good old “clean, safe, too cheap to meter”

It is almost like they prefer theory to practice, Sci-fi to experience.

Build a nuke, they said. It will be great, they said.

Ok we did, and it sucked. It was one long sad expensive comedy of errors. And now we have to pay billions for decommissioning.

Real experience.

Thomas, go read about San Onofre.

It was not killed by regulation. It was killed by human error, the thing that never happens in the “clean, safe, too cheap to meter” dream.

“It was not killed by regulation. It was killed by human error, the thing that never happens in the “clean, safe, too cheap to meter” dream.”

God that sounds terrible. How many people were killed by that error?

prior_test2 June 2, 2017 at 5:09 am

Again you spam us all with pages of Wikipedia in order to change the topic and distract everyone from the fact you do not know what you are talking about.

I did not say every idiot around them had done so. I am well aware of what France has been doing. One reason they are happy to sign up to these stupid conventions is because they invested so early so heavily in nuclear.

And so we get two P-As in a row. First you claim that the German power companies don’t care about decommissioning because the government is paying for it. Then you claim that Germany has a free market and the government is not paying for it. You are beclowning yourself.

There is an awful ot of coast line waiting for the improved turbines being designed and built from the experience gained from the earlier wind parks. That too is part of the miracle of mass production – if one is interested in actually improving efficiency. We haven’t even come close to picking cherries, we still have problems seeing the couple that right in front of our face.

Where in Europe would you like to put your order-of-magnitude-larger-than-the-Three-Gorges hydro back up? There is a lot of coast line. Not all of it good. But all of it expensive. The best sites were on shore. Now people are going into the North Sea looking for reasonably good sites. Where will they go next?

You do – you are aware the world’s largest pumped storage facility is in the U.S., right?

More Wikispam. Which misses the point. We do it but we do not do it on a large scale because it is expensive and good sites are rare. Where are all the new sites going to come from?

Pumped storage was implemented to handle the problems of using nuclear power – replacing the electricity previously generated by nuclear with electricity generated from renewables means no costs at all in making this work.

No it was not. Pumped storage pre-dates nuclear. Of course there is a cost. Even if we added no more. But nuclear is a large and reliable generator. It does not handle peaks that well. But peaks are often predictable. So some gas-fired turbines with as much pumped storage as you can get is the way to go. But the pumped storage is small. There are just not enough feasible sites. With renewables, you have no guarantee of supply. They are utterly unreliable. So you need something like 100% back up. That is vastly more storage. And it is simply impossible to do without destroying every mountain valley in Europe.

Engineers solve problems use engineering. People making excuses about why something that is working right now cannot work ever are the bane of those who actually know engineering.

If you were an engineer you would understand why everything you say is nonsense.

“Why? Pumped storage was implemented to handle the problems of using nuclear power – replacing the electricity previously generated by nuclear with electricity generated from renewables means no costs at all in making this work.”

Prior, You have no clue about scale. None at ll. That’s why the system engineers and analysts here are screaming at you.

Look at the numbers. Dinorwig is one of the largest pumped Hydro schemes in the world. It has about 1700MW generating capacity. That is backed by a reservoir that can keep those turbines spinning for, I forget, about 12 hours, before they run dry. 12h x 1700MW = 20 GWh.

20 GWh. That’s what you can get from a really, really, big and expensive pumped hydro scheme. How long would that keep the lights on in the UK before the water was exhausted? About 30 minutes.

Now imagine you need not just 1 Dinorwig, but enough to provide 60 days of back-up power to cover typical (not extreme) seasonal variation in a 90% wind-renewable mix. You would need 48 x 60 = ~3,000 Dinorwigs. For the UK alone (good luck finding enough valleys to flood).

Each Dinorwig costs £1B in present money. And you have your wind turbine and connection costs on top.

Do you now start to understand the scale of the problem? Do you start to understand maths and engineering cost estimation at a systems level?

Prior.

I’m sorry, but you’ve built your entire system on beliefs that simply aren’t true. If it helps, you’re not unique. A lot of engineers I have worked with have been unpleasantly surprised once you sit them down and work them through the real numbers.

” The wind is pretty much blowing somewhere all the time, and being able to transport power from a North Sea offshore park generating at full capacity to somewhere near the Swiss border that is currently enjoying a windless day is not exactly a gigantic hurdle”

No. Simply wrong, Though the Greens keep repeating it, so it serves as a useful acid test for professional education in the field (or lack of it…). When you look at the actual data….basically, the wind is NOT always blowing somewhere. At least not on a European continental level. A typical scale length of European wind power is 600 km. That means the instantaneous generation rate in a turbine explains 50% of the variance in an equivalent turbine 600 km away. If it’s quiet in the North Sea, it’s likely to be quiet in Biscay or Berlin. Look at the real generation data! Pressure systems are thousands of km across!

Even if you have the power somewhere, the cost of transferring it with a Europe-wide network of high voltage GW class interconnectors is huge. “Improving the Grid” sounds easy, but electricity is one of the most expensive things in the world to move over distance. Basically, for every 1000 km distance from source to sink, add at least 30p per KWh.

Having doubts? It gets MUCH WORSE. Insofar as regional output is correlated, periodic output is even more so. Summer in UK is Summer in Italy; the wind falls away EVERYWHERE at the same time. Even if you smooth out the short term demand, the seasonal shortfall wrecks you. It’s back to the gas back-up (1 to 1 almost) or storage (no, really, not at £100/KWh) to make it work.

I’ll try to not be too harsh on you. You are right, in principle, that widely distributed fields should smooth at least some short period intermittency. But when you put real numbers in at the European scale you find the continent is not big enough to get rid of even 50% of short period intermittency, and the interconnection costs on top break you, The long period effects, as I said, are not addressed at all, and still need to be backed up.