'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues' Former climate change alarmist Dr James Lovelock, famous for popularising the "Gaia" metaphor, continues his journey back to rationality. Lovelock is objecting to a "medium sized" (240ft high) erection planned for his neighbourhood in North Devon by infamous windfarm operator Ecotricity. The UK currently has 3,000 onshore …
Fusion *is* the thing I'm clamouring for and which is a potential problem solver for once and for all... IF we can get it to work. So it'd be nice to see a bit more funding shoved that way. And when I say 'bit', I mean 'lot'.
Ultimately, tying our energy needs to black stuff that we burn is a dumb idea. Currently, in the UK it's a better investment to just buy a tanker-full of petrol than it is to put it into a bank, and we're not even close to running out yet.
The article takes a swipe at wind regarding subsidies. This is fair enough but lets not forget the cost of storing nuclear waste. There’s no even semi-permanent storage facility in the UK. Cumbria county council voted against the only site that has gotten as far as being considered to check if it would be a good idea to store the waste there. The nuclear industry isn’t bearing the full costs for the full life cycle of their waste products. If you remove every subsidy direct and indirect that both industries get, nuclear would not be so cheap then. I think we need at least some nuclear in the mix but we are paying more for it than we realise, just not in the electric bill.
Of course we should take advantage of these advances. And careful account of them too. Renewables are advancing more rapidly than any other form. Carbon sequestration is much younger and less proven. Advances will also improve nuclear over time, but won't get rid of any of the fundamental problems with it. That's why we probably need at least one last generation of nuclear plants alongside an expanding and developing renewables sector, because the renewables sector is advancing somewhat faster while not yet capable of supporting more than about 50% of electric demand within the next 10 years, at a time when nuclear is more mature and a few new nuclear plants on existing nuclear sites will help guarantee energy supply over the next 20-30 years.
"Renewables are advancing more rapidly than any other form. "
Sadly not true. Solar power is barely much better than it was ten years ago, wind turbines have done little other than grow in size, and wave power remains a pipe dream (despite not inconsiderable research funding). What has changed is that misguided subsidies have been thrown at anything that is labelled reneweable.
A large proportion of the UK's inventory of nuclear waste is the result of somewhat cavalier attitudes during the rush to develop weapons during the cold war. But even including this, the total £76 billion estimated cost of disposal/storage divided by total nuclear fueled electricity produced during the last two decades amounts to just 2.8 pence per kWh. I think this is a price worth paying.
The shame is that because of pressure from greenies and nimbies and government incompetence the UK is behind the curve in new technologies which will consume and transmute a large proportion of the waste.
I would like to know where those figures come from and do they cover the cost of indefinite above ground storage (including the need to guard it)? What about the limited liability that the industry enjoys which lowers their insurance and the security and infrastructure provided by the state? For reliable lower carbon electricity I think we need some nuclear in the mix but it’s not as cheap as the industry makes out.
A recent xkcd 'what if' was suggesting that you could swim in a cooling tank for fuel rods and get less radiation exposure than basic background radiation above ground. If that's the case then vast quantities of waste could be stored permanently and cheaply.
Also I seem to recall that latest breed of thorium reactors could use current nuclear waste as fuel, thus further reducing storage costs.
"thorium reactors could use current nuclear waste"
In the nuclear industry, all the way from mox to fusion, the word "could" invariably means "start shovelling cash into a money pit now".
I could create for you a world-beating wide bodied nuclear passenger aircraft, but I think the cost and the timescale would be impractical. However, I'm prepared to give it a go. About a billion pounds should be enough to get my corporate HQ running.
Just went and looked at the xkcd what if you cited. quite good I thought.
I was particularly taken by the last two sentences;
"But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.” "
@James 51 - I posted the data in comments back in August 2012.
The figures come from something I saw a good few months ago. I had been surprised that the cost is quite low, because the greenshirts had been moaning about the cost of disposal.storage, then estimated at £76 bn.
Data for electricity supplied by nuclear power in the UK is available here; peak annual nuclear production was 90.6 TWh in 1998, which represented 29.2% of the total, falling to 62.7 TWh by 2011:
www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN03631.pdf
While a certain amount of long-term storage of waste may continue to be needed, as soon as the industry moves away from designs largely skewed towards weapons production it will be possible to reduce hugely the half-lives and volume of waste products. All our existing plutonium stocks, for example could be 'burned' to make electricity if we were to give up nuclear weapons.
...The figures come from something I saw a good few months ago. I had been surprised that the cost is quite low, because the greenshirts had been moaning about the cost of disposal.storage, then estimated at £76 bn...
Actually, their usual trick is to obtain a cost for disposal/storage of high-level waste (a matter of a few cubic meters per year, stored at high cost), and then multiply that by the total volume of ALL 'nuclear waste' (lab coats, papers, general rubbish from a facility).
I'm surprised that people don't call them out on that more often, but then they usually only shout these meaningless figures at other believers...
"I would like to know where those figures come from and do they cover the cost of indefinite above ground storage (including the need to guard it)?"
Well you are the one claiming its expensive without any figures - how about you research your own?
Also, who says it needs to be stored above ground? Surely the stupidest place to store it, a long way underground is dramatically safer.
Can you really argue that all the subsidies from 5,400 wind turbines every single year for their entire life expectancy couldn't pay for storage of nuclear waste from a single reactor?
If you're gonna do an anti-nuclear rant at least have something of substance to back it up.
"But even including this, the total £76 billion estimated cost of disposal/storage divided by total nuclear fueled electricity produced during the last two decades amounts to just 2.8 pence per kWh. "
From that perspective it seems quite sensible.
If only the debate had been couched in those terms perhaps people would be more reasonable.
Always.
See e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7421879.stm
Usually it under-delivers too. Luddite beard-mutterers like Orlowski witter on about intermittency (without actually understanding what it really means - but never mind) but say nothing about the unreliability and unplanned outages at the UK's nuke plants.
The fact is that when you build renewables you know what the total project cost is, from build to tear-down and cleanup, and you know what the energy price is.
So which is going to keep energy cheaper over time? Systems that rely on technologies that have been proven to be unreliable (nukes), experimental (fracking), or on external imports that are subject to supply constraints and speculative shocks (other fossils) - or systems that use a perpetual natural resource and have a known fixed cost?
It's not hard to be rational about this.
Really, it's not.
I'm not doubting that nuclear always costs more than it's supposed to.... however I would suggest that every single friggin' capital project in the world, ever, has come in over budget. It's in the nature of suppliers / proponents to play down costs and talk up advantages. It's true about nuclear, it's true about wind, it's true about every energy technology.
With nuclear, theer is the question - are costs being inflated unnecessarily by insisting on 'safe' radiation levels that are far below natural background radiation? Also, historical costs of nuclear are based on 1st / 2nd generation reactors, and the decommissioning thereof. Latest-generation reactors could be designed with future decommissioning in mind to reduce decommissioning cost.
Ultimately, whatever source of energy we will end up using, we need to accept that it will cost a LOT more than digging up ready-to-burn fuel from the ground where it has been pre-packaged in the most convenient and energy-dense manner possible.
"I'm not doubting that nuclear always costs more than it's supposed to.... however I would suggest that every single friggin' capital project in the world, ever, has come in over budget."
In aggregate they do come in over budget, because you can't forecast what you don't know, and sooner or later there's something that you didn't expect. But the over-spend shouldn't be more than 10% on a well run capex programme. Most of the big CCGT's recently commissioned were built on budget and on time (which is to say that the modest budgeted contingency covered the unexpected costs).
The problems with nuclear are largely down to less expertise, because we don't build them often enough to have relevant experience and skills in design, planning or construction. That leads to delays and rework, and the problem with construction is that if you build it wrong, you have to knock it down and do it again, or if it is just a delay, you're still paying a large workforce to sit around reading The Sun.
The most famous nuclear overspend of recent times is Olkiluoto in Finland, running at around €9bn against an original "fixed price" quote of €3bn. But if you built a similar plant now you'd know what to expect, what to look for and what contractual arrangements haven''t worked out, and you'd probably be able to do it at the orginal budgeted costs. Problem is that most of the world doesn't build fleets of nuclear reactors, and so we don't have the chance to apply any learning. France did build reactors in fleets, and it worked rather well for them, of course.
And what happens when Europe is becalmed and the wind farms produce nothing (for which there evidence)
Where will the electricity supply come from then?
I have issues with nuclear and fossil fuels (even if there was no environmental issue it's stupid to burn all your resources)
BUT
I am tired of all these people telling me about the green job revolution, I have news for them we cant all earn a living from installing insulation, coppicing willow (and probably living in a lean to in the fucking woods). It's also amazing how wind proponents don't live near wind farms.
Funny how nobody ever mentions geothermal boreholes, they are not seasonal, CO2 free and don't cover 100s of square miles.
As long as the Dhole's don't notice you should be fine
"Luddite beard-mutterers like Orlowski witter on about intermittency (without actually understanding what it really means - but never mind) but say nothing about the unreliability and unplanned outages at the UK's nuke plants."
Power generation depends on a handful of key concepts - of particular relevance here are load factor (how much power you get from an asset compared to its maximum rated output), the merit curve (the idea of using the most marginally efficient/cheap plant most of the time), and reserve margin (where you have more capacity than you need to allow for breakdowns or grid problems.
Nuclear reliability is addressed by reserve margin, but for all types of thermal plant you only need about 15% reserve capacity. With wind you need 100% reserve (for the wind element) because it doesn't work at all in periods of very high or very low winds, nor on the coldest days of the year, giving the very low load factors observed in practice, of around 25%.
The merit curve means you run nuclear whenever you can because its marginal cost is the lowest, so it provides continuous baseload, supplemented by the most efficient gas plants. The intermittent nature of wind doesn't work well here, because given that politicians have mandated that it must be used when it is available, it acts like a form of negative and unpredictable demand. That increases emissions because the marginal plant at the wrong end of the merit curve is used to backfill when wind stops, but that is by defintion the least efficient. With the "must run" status of wind, it has an incredible hidden subsidy offered to no other form of generation, but this also hinders the system marginal pricing model, and makes the marginal thermal generation plants unprofitable. So on the one hand wind power sets a high marginal price for consumers, but without additional subsidies newly required by the thermal plant, then your beloved renewables won't be able to offer any reliable power to this country.
From a purely technical point of view, wind power without cheap energy storage is madness. It destabilises the grid, it sucks up subsidies, both direct cash and hidden ones like "must run", it then requires new subsidies to the least efficient thermal plant to keep them available. And the capital cost of wind is ruinous.
There has been a never ending tale of woe in this country about rising energy prices. Unfortunately that rise will continue because your electricity charges need to pay for DECC's new "energy company obligations", which are DECC mandated spending to benefit the fuel poor (an ever increasing number because of DECC's policies), because the renewables operators and their financiers are snorting up the subsidies that DECC have spread on the table, and because having bust the wholesale market, DECC are going to have to implement new energy trading arrangements to subsidies the least efficient thermal plant throuigh capacity payments. That's before rises in world primary energy prices, and before unfavourable movements in exchange rates due to the government spending more than it raises in taxes.
At this point, somebody from the greeny/lefty/hard-of-thinking camp says that it should all be renationalised, because it was cheap, green, and reliable in the good old days (Yeah! Remember the three day week? winter of discontent?). Unfortunately, no matter who owns it, there's no change to the underlying concepts that I've discussed above, and the "profit" that you think you'll take off of energy bills will be lost through incremental government borrowing costs. Anybody who thinks that a government already living £120bn a year beyond its means would be able to easily borrow a further £150bn to renationalise the electricity industry clearly doesn't understand anything.
150bn to renationalise... rot. Just take it back. Certainly we didn't get so much for it in the first place (the actual figure is hard to find) but the private companies have been extracting the piss and a stack of cash from the countries consumers ever since.
So we should just declare the industry (and while we are at it water, rail and all roads) as tax payer property and nationlised, no longer private. Private 'share holders' in these companies are just tough luck stories.
Private 'share holders' in these companies are just tough luck stories.
I referred to the hard-of-thinking, and luckily one turns up! Welcome, Dave 15.
Let's think about your idea that we renationalise the utilities without compensation. Easy money, and a success story as proven in places like Venezuela, Argentina, Zimbabwe and the like. But who are these mysterious "shareholders"? Obviously you think that this is the idle rich, so you'll be disappointed to learn that the vast bulk of shares are owned by institutional investors. Never mind, Dave 15, that must mean the banks, and we own them already, don't we? Well, a bit of them is the banks, investing the cash of anybody whose money is saved or simply on deposit. But you don't have a bank account, so let's steal from everybody who has, eh? Who else might be an institutional investor? Well, there's all the insurance companies, who need to earn a return on premiums invested. But you don't buy insurance, do you Dave 15, no car insurance, no life insurance, no house insurance, no phone insurance? So let's steal from everybody who does. And the other big group of institutional investors, they're the pension funds. But presumably Dave 15 works for the public sector, who don't save the money, and just promise it from future taxes.
So there you have it Dave 15, nice idea. Let's steal from small time savers, insurance customers, and anybody in a properly funded pension scheme. And then any lefty minded government will go and try and borrow to fund its chronic budget deficits, and who do you think they'll be asking to lend them money. Institutions, maybe? Go look up what the currency of Zimbabwe is at the moment, and see where your ideas lead.
Systems that rely on technologies that have been proven to be unreliable (nukes), [blah, blah, blah...]
Talk about some spurious arguments! No technologies are perfect and thus none are completely reliable. Such a pithy statement does not in this case lend itself to helpful risk analysis.
Fracking is hardly experimental at this point as it is well into production. If you are claiming that we do not know enough to avoid consequences, unintended or otherwise, we could apply the same argument to every technology with equal validity - and not accomplish anything.
Wind (for example) is not constant or consistent. Nor is it available everywhere it is needed. It may or may not be competitive with its alternatives. The same can be argued concerning most sources of energy. Perpetual over the long term if you sit far enough away and squint is not practical if you do not have it when you need it. This adds to the cost of any intermittent power source (see below).
Finally, it would be fascinating to hear how wind, solar, thermal, et cetera will not succumb to inflation driven by economic speculation. Indeed, there is competition now to create new technologies to exploit these resources. As soon as any of them become economically competitive, investors will pour money in expecting a return (which will drive costs to consumers up). At the same time, it is likely that whatever technology is adopted will require some resources to build. Just on a hunch I would imagine that increased demand for said resources will influence their respective prices upward (which will drive costs to consumers up). Fixed cost? Hardly!
I agree it is not hard to be rational about this. I just do not see that you are.
"Finally, it would be fascinating to hear how wind, solar, thermal, et cetera will not succumb to inflation driven by economic speculation."
"Economic speculation" does not drive inflation of resources. First, "inflation" means "inflation of the monetary mass", resulting in what is commonly called "inflation" by politicians and unwashed plebeians, which is nominal price increases. This is driven by money printing via central banks and subsequent pyramiding via fractional reserve banking. No big mystery or dark forces.
If anything, "economic speculation" will drive costs DOWN as capital will pour in to finally get some work done. Notice what happened with all the computational gear?
...The fact is that when you build renewables you know what the total project cost is, from build to tear-down and cleanup, and you know what the energy price is. So which is going to keep energy cheaper over time? Systems that rely on technologies that have been proven to be unreliable (nukes), experimental (fracking), or on external imports that are subject to supply constraints and speculative shocks (other fossils) - or systems that use a perpetual natural resource and have a known fixed cost?..
Um. I think you are letting your politics run away with your sanity.
What you have just claimed is that items with a fixed cost are always going to be cheaper than items with unpredictable costs. This is simply not true.
For example, I might want a new car. I could design and make one myself - perhaps from a kit - but I can't predict the cost of that precisely, and there may be unanticipated problems - like having difficulty sourcing an appropriate engine. On the other hand, I could buy a top-end Ferrari, and I bet the salesman can give me a precise price on that.
You seem to think that the Ferrari is gong to be cheaper...?
PS I notice that a wind turbine just fell over in Devon. I gather that it's a new design, imported from Norway. So that makes wind power 'unreliable, experimental and dependent on external imports' . Oh dear!
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" or systems that use a perpetual natural resource and have a known fixed cost?"
Except it's not.
The floating cost is the cost of whatever covers the power budget when they are not working, which on land is expected to be 75% of the time. But it could 94% (there is a wind turbine in the UK listed as running 6% of the time. WTF motivated anyone to site it where it is I have no idea).
And as for "natural" resources well they all are. Unnatural would be creating a black hole and harvesting the radiation as material hits the event horizon.
A technology I predict will be perfected before fusion becomes a reality.
"Luddite beard-mutterers like Orlowski witter on about intermittency (without actually understanding what it really means - but never mind) but say nothing about the unreliability and unplanned outages at the UK's nuke plants."
Wind turbines have outages on a DAILY, even HOURLY basis compared to a couple of times a year for nuclear FFS - how can you possibly compare the 2 in terms of providing stable power?
"It's not hard to be rational about this. Really, it's not."
True - you should try being rational, you might find the world makes more sense.
What, spend £30 billion on an asset that generates for eight hours a day, at cyclical times not always associated with peak demand? That'd just make the problems of wind turbines even worse, because until (if ever) you can store the energy cheaply, you still need to have thermal plant available to cover 100% of peak demand.
As long as the true costs (not necessarily monetary) are reflected fairly and clearly.
With all present nuclear fuel there is an undisclosed cost with storage of waste materials and with many renewables there is an undisclosed cost be it dead birds, visual impact, noise etc..
There is also an undisclosed cost for fossil fuels with regard to defence/war costs and the lives of our people sent to some distant land to be possibly maimed or die - just to keep the oil flowing because we have no political alternative fuel source!
All energy for our use has certain costs involved in the production and distribution - what those true costs really are composed of is often hidden from view not allowing a balanced decision to be made by the people.
I personally find Lovelock has a reasonable pragmatic approach to these costs, but again it is down to the individuals interpretation of say the value of a bird or human life.
Only the heads aren't monuments of a failed civilisation. New evidence shows that the civilisation of the island was working quite nicely right up until the point it was wiped out by diseases introduced by Europeans:
http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/jan/17/statues-walked-what-really-happened-easter-island/
The only way it can accurately be described as 'failed' is if you take the broad view of any civilisation that no longer exists is automatically failed by default. So the Parthenon in Greece is the monument of a failed civilisation?
> European diseases and enslavement, the same as everywhere else in the Americas and the Pacific.
Eco-guilt replaced by white guilt? I can live with that.
> So the Parthenon in Greece is the monument of a failed civilisation?
Yes. Some writing are left. The rest ... well, look at what's up. PIIGSified utterly.
Guilt of any kind is counter productive to making positive change and tends to lead to a 'what the hell' effect:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/03/the-what-the-hell-effect.php
Given what we know of the effect of guilt on human behaviour, "Eco-guilt" is likely to provoke people to actions perceived to be less environmentally friendly, and "White-guilt" is likely to make white people behave worse towards non-white members of the human population.
I'll gracefully leave leave the other part of the argument with regards to 'failed civilisations' because we are obviously working with different definitions and I find it fruitless to argue over the definition of a word.
the fuckwit government subsidised it far too generously.
I don't know if you lot have looked out of the window lately but my next door neighbour is laughing his tits of after putting up a couple of whoppers (27m high) last year. They've been running practically flat out for the last couple of months and are exceeding their production expectations by over 4* and that would be even higher if they'd put some bigger alternators on them.
Should these conditions continue for the expected life time of the windmills the real generation costs are going to be well less than 5p/kwh - and he's getting, what? 32p for them.
And he was ripped off over the installation and purchasing costs because the price he paid was the market price and not the 'build cost + a healthy profit', which as far as I can tell is about 1/4 of what he paid.
"Um? A couple of hundred years at most. Where are you getting your figures? La-La land?"
Well, if it's only a chunk of the UK irradiated for a couple of hundred years, I'm sure the local residents will withdraw their protests!
In all seriousness, the fact that a fuck-up has such dire potential consequences means that there really can be no such thing as "too many safety systems".
Having lived in the Selby area I'm very familiar with coal-fired power stations including Drax, Eggborough and Ferry Bridge.
They may be quite big up close but for the amount of power they generate for the UK they are a mere speck on the landscape. The amount of space required for wind turbines to produce equivalent power could eclipse whole counties.
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