Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030′

The November 2009 issue of Scientific American has a cover story by Mark Z. Jacobson (Professor, Stanford) and Mark A. Delucchi (researcher, UC Davis). It’s entitled “A path to sustainable energy by 2030” (p 58 – 65; they call it WWS: wind, water or sunlight). This popular article is supported by a technical analysis, which the authors will apparently submit to the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy at some point (or may have already done so). Anyway, they have made both papers available for free public download here.

So what do they say? In a nutshell, their argument is that, by the year 2030:

Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.

Big claim. Does it stack up? Short answer, no. Here I critique the 100% WWS plan (both articles).

The articles are structured around 7 parts: (1) A discussion of ‘clean energy’ technologies and some description of different plans for large-scale carbon mitigation. (2)  The amount and geographic distribution of available resources [wind, solar, wave, geothermal, hydro etc.] are evaluated, globally. (3) The number of power plants or capture devices required to harness this energy is calculated. (4) A limit analysis is undertaken, to determine whether any technologies are likely to face material resource bottlenecks that risk stymieing their large-scale deployment. (5) The question of ‘reliability’ of energy generation is discussed. (6) The projected economics of this vision are forecast. (7) The policy approaches required to turn vision into reality are reviewed.

In this post I want to concentrate on (5) and (6) — what I consider to be “The Bad”. But first, let’s look quickly at “The Good” (actually, more like the “Okay”) and then the really “Ugly” parts.

The majority content of the twin papers is focused on making the banal point that there is a huge amount of energy embodied in ‘wind, water and sunlight’ (“Plenty of Supply”), and that a wide diversity of technologies have been developed to try and harness this into useable electrical power.  No critic of large-scale renewable energy would argue any differently, and the size of these resources has been covered in detail by David Mackay. In that context, I wonder what they hope to add to the literature? There’s nothing wrong in this section, and well explained, but it’s just standard, rehashed fare.

Next comes a simple extrapolation of the total number of wind turbines, solar thermal facilities, etc. required to deliver 11.5 TWe of average power (close to my figure of 10 TWe in TCASE 3). This part is similar to that which I provided in TCASE 4 except they use a mix of contributing technologies rather than considering a hypothetical limit analysis for each technology individually. Curiously though, they never really explain (in either paper) how they came up with their scenario’s relative mix of hydro capacity, millions of wind turbines, billions of solar PV units, and thousands of large CSP plants, wave converters, and so on — except in pointing out that some resources are more abundant in deployable locations than others (see Table 2 of the tech paper). They do provide a useful discussion of possible material component bottlenecks for different techs (e.g. Nd for permanent magnets in wind turbines, Pt for hydrogen fuel cells, In/Ga etc. for solar PV), and argue how they can be plausibly overcome via recycling and substitution with cheaper/more abundant alternatives. This bit is quite good.

So what’s “The Ugly”? Well, it’s something utterly egregious and deceptive. In the Sci Amer article, the following objection is raised in order to dismiss the fission of uranium or thorium as clean energy:

Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered.

Hold on. How could this be? I’ve shown here that the “reactor construction” argument is utterly fallacious – wind has a building material footprint over 10 times larger than that of nuclear, on energy parity basis. Further, Peter Lang has shown that wind, once operating, offsets 20 times LESS carbon per unit energy than nuclear power, when a standard natural gas backup for wind is properly considered. I’ve also explained in this post that the emissions stemming from mining, milling, transport and refining of nuclear fuel is vastly overblown, and is of course irrelevant for fast spectrum and molten salt thorium reactors. So…?

Well, you have to look to the technical version of the paper to trace the source of the claim. It comes from Jacobson 2009, where he posited that  nuclear power means nuclear proliferation, nuclear proliferation leads to nuclear weapons, and this chain of events lead to nuclear war, so they calculate (?!) the carbon footprint of a nuclear war! (integrating a probability of 0 — 1 over a 30 year period). I quote:

4d. Effects of nuclear energy on nuclear war and terrorism damage

Because the production of nuclear weapons material is occurring only in countries that have developed civilian nuclear energy programs, the risk of a limited nuclear exchange between countries or the detonation of a nuclear device by terrorists has increased due to the dissemination of nuclear energy facilities worldwide. As such, it is a valid exercise to estimate the potential number of immediate deaths and carbon emissions due to the burning of buildings and infrastructure associated with the proliferation of nuclear energy facilities and the resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons. The number of deaths and carbon emissions, though, must be multiplied by a probability range of an exchange or explosion occurring to estimate the overall risk of nuclear energy proliferation. Although concern at the time of an explosion will be the deaths and not carbon emissions, policy makers today must weigh all the potential future risks of mortality and carbon emissions when comparing energy sources.

Really, need I say more? Can it really be that such wildly conjectural nonsense is acceptable as a valid scientific argument in the sustainable energy peer-reviewed literature? It seems so, which suggests to me that this academic discipline needs a swift logical kick up its intellectual rear end.

So, on to the grand renewables plan. The fulcrum upon which the whole WWS analysis pivots is the section entitled “Reliability”.  Here’s where the steam and mirrors of their WWS dream (sorry, solar thermal pun) really starts to blow off into the atmosphere and shatter on the ground.

First, the authors cite ‘downtime’ figures for each technology (i.e., the period of unscheduled maintenance, as opposed to scheduled outages). From this, they leave the uninitiated reader with the distinct impression (especially in the Sci Amer pap piece) that wind and solar PV is actually more ‘reliable’ than coal! (Who knew? We’d better tell the utilities). They also say that unscheduled downtimes for distributed WWS technologies will have less impact on grid stability than when a large centralised power plant suddenly drops out. Sorry, but I just don’t get this. If the downtime of solar PV is 2%, for instance, and you have 1.7 billion 3 kW units installed worldwide (their calculated figure), then 340,000 of them are out at any one time. That seems rather significant to me…

Next, to overcome intermittency, they claim that for an array of 13-19 wind farms, spread out over an 850 x 850 km region and hypothetically interconnected:

… about 33% of yearly-averaged wind power was calculated to be useable at the same reliability as a coal-fired power plant.

Let’s parse this. By reliability of the coal plant, I assume in this context that they mean its capacity factor (rather than unscheduled outages), which would be around 85% of peak output. Now, wind in excellent sites has a capacity factor of ~35%, so the yearly-averaged power of a hypothetical 10 GW peak wind array of 13-19 farms would be 3.5 GW. Now, following their statement, 33% of 3.5 GW — that is, 1.15 GW or ~12% of peak capacity — would be available 85% of the time. Or, to put it another way, we’d need to install 10 GW of peak wind to replace the output of 1.4 GW of coal? Is that what they are saying? Did they cost this? (hint: no, see below). Perhaps someone else can confirm or reject my interpretation of the statements on p19 of the tech paper.

Also, consider this. Say we instead installed 20 GW peak over this 850 x 850 km area. We’d still only be able to deliver 20 x 0.35 x 0.33 = 2.3 GW of baseload-equivalent power. That is, adding more and more wind doesn’t help with system reliability, as it would for coal.  I suppose the overall system reliability might get a little better as you spread your wind farm array over increasingly large geographical areas, but I suspect that this would be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. How can such a scheme be considered economic?

(Note: I’m not arguing for coal here, just using the power technologies given in their example. For me, insert nuclear instead).

Then they introduce ‘load-matching’ renewables. For instance, they present a “Clean Electricity 24/7” figure for California (see above), in which geothermal, wind, solar and hydro together provide a perfect match to an average power demand curve for CA for a given month (July in this figure). Strangely though, they neglect to mention what happens during the many imperfect, less-than-average days, when it’s cloudy and/or calm for some or most of the day and night (or strings of days/nights), or how much extra capacity is needed in winter months. How is the gap filled if either or both of wind/solar is mostly unavailable? Do the residents of CA go without electricity on those days? Err, no. Apparently, in these instances, grid operators must ‘plan ahead for a backup energy supply’. Riiiight. Where does this come from again, and how will this be costed into the WWS economic equation?

I could go on here, but won’t. This post is already getting way too long, and besides, many of these points will be topics, in and of themselves, in future TCASE posts.

As you’d have already gathered from the above, the economics of WWS is pretty strange. Here’s another example:

Power from wind turbines, for example, already costs about the same or less than it does from a new coal or natural gas plant, and in the future is expected to be the least costly of all options.

How can they justifiably say this, and yet neglect to mention that the power these these technologies produce is variable in quanity, low quality (in terms of frequency control), not dispatchable, diffuse (thereby requiring substantial interconnection), and that their projected energy prices don’t include costs of backup? In other words, in the real world, what exactly does the above quoted statement mean? Nothing meaningful that I can see.

They make a token attempt to price in storage (e.g., compressed air for solar PV, hot salts for CSP). But tellingly, they never say HOW MUCH storage they are costing in this analysis (see table 6 of tech paper), nor how much extra peak generating capacity these energy stores will require in order to be recharged, especially on low yield days (cloudy, calm, etc). Yet, this is an absolutely critical consideration for large-scale intermittent technologies, as Peter Lang has clearly demonstrated here. Without factoring in these sort of fundamental ‘details’ — and in the absence of crunching any actual numbers in regards to the total amount of storage/backup/overbuild  required to make WWS 24/365 — the whole economic and logistical foundation of the grand WWS scheme crumbles to dust. It sum, the WWS 100% renewables by 2030 vision is nothing more than an illusory fantasy. It is not a feasible, real-world energy plan.

I also see that they are happy to speculate about dramatic future price drops for solar PV and concentrating solar thermal with up to 24 hours future storage (Although even they admit it would not provide sufficient power in winter – what do we do then, I wonder? – have huge capacities of coal and gas on idle and as spinning reserve?). Well, I guess that if analysts like Jacobson and Delucchi are willing to forecast such optimistically low costs for future solar, then we can be quite comfortable doing the same for IFR and LFTR, the Gen IV nuclear. What’s good for the goose…

Finally, a quick note on the section “Policy Approaches”. I found one thing particularly amusing. They start by emphasising the critical need for feed-in tariffs (FITs), to subsidise the initial deployment of WWS technologies, because these deliver a necessary kick start towards lower future costs. It’s ironic then, that they end with a quote from Benjamin Sovacool (2009) which says:

Consumers practically ignore renewable power systems because they are not given accurate price signals about electricity consumption. Intentional market distortions (such as subsidies), and unintentional mark distortions (such as split incentives) prevent consumers from becoming fully invested in their electricity choices.

Well, excuse me, but if FITs, and WWS technologies that are priced without adequate storage/backup, are not market distortions and subsidies, then what the hell is?

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Charles Barton at Nuclear Green has two further useful critiques of the WWS papers here and here; these follow on from his earlier dissections of Jacobson, Archer’s and Sovacool’s work.

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Appendix: Further comments on WWS from Dr. Gene Preston of SCGI:

By profession I do transmission studies for wind and solar clients. My company name is TAC meaning Transmission Adequacy Consulting. I currently am doing studies all across the US.  “A path to sustainable energy by 2030″ omits the transmission system needed by 2030.  Because the wind and solar and water and geothermal projects are not in the locations of the existing power plants, new lines will be needed.

Looking at the graph on page 63, and carefully measuring scales on the graph, I estimate that there is 40,000 MW of wind and 40,000 MW of centralized solar on that graph. The reason I omitted rooftop solar is because Jacobson has its contribution to be rather small.  For example, multiplying out the numbers on page 61 you will get 5.1 TW of rooftop solar and 26.7 TW of large scale solar of 300 MW size in farms, much like wind farms.  This seems reasonable since centralized solar is twice as cost effective as rooftop solar.  Since the rooftop solar is small I will omit it from these comments.

That leaves us needing 80,000 MW of new wind solar and geothermal generation just to serve California. I think an estimate of 500 miles from wind and solar resources to major load centers is reasonable.  A 500 kV transmission line is rated at about 2000 MW max power. But you don’t want to operate it at that power level because the losses are too high and there is no reserve capacity in the line to handle the first contingency problem. Therefore I will estimate we will load the new 500 kV lines to about 1500 MW on average.

So we have 80,000 MW of renewable sources widely scattered around the Western System (WECC) with each carrying 1500 MW so that we need roughly 50 new 500 kV lines of 500 miles each, for a total length of 25,000 miles.

The article assumes there is little solar power energy storage and it also assumes the wind be blowing at night.  We know for sure that the solar power is not available at night so we are nearly totally dependent on wind for night time energy.  You are going to ask about the geothermal energy.  One geothermal project I recently worked on for determining the transmission access for looked like a good project until the geothermal energy extraction failed to work.  Recently other geothermal projects have created human induced earthquakes.  Geothermal energy seem less likely today than just a few years ago.

So we are nearly totally dependent on wind energy for the night-time CA energy as envisioned in the 100% renewables by 2030.  If we plan for those few occurrences when there is no wind in the WECC system, we must interconnect WECC with the rest of the US so CA can draw power from other wind generators that do have wind (hopefully) outside the WECC area, such as the Texas coast and east of the rocky mountains where massive wind farms can be constructed. However we will need at least 40,000 MW of lines that I estimate will average 2000 miles in length. If we used 500 kV lines, we would need about 25 of these lines bridging from WECC to the US eastern grid and ERCOT and the total length would be about 50,000 miles. By 2030 we would need 75,000 miles of new 500 kV lines just to serve California with 100% renewables. Considering that we have the period from 2010 to 2030, that means we would have to construct about 4000 miles of new 500 kV lines every year from now until 2030 for the renewables plan as outlined in this article to work.

How much do these lines cost? Probably about 2 million dollars per mile.  Also, the 500 miles is just an estimate.  If you have specific projects in mind that eliminates some of the uncertainty in estimating costs.  For example the distances might be less to wind generators.  However I suspect that opposition to the wind generators unsightliness and opposition to power lines will result in longer pats for lines zig zagging around the countryside and the wind generators being not allowed anywhere on the coast, so I understand that Mexico is the desirable place for wind.  But if you were to string out 40,000 MW of wind, I bet you would find the 500 miles was not that bad a guesstimate after all.  The first few sites might be closer to load centers, but opposition is likely to drive them farther away.  The construction time for lines is mostly how long it takes to get all the ROW and get approval to build the lines.  How many years will a line be held up in hearings?  Add one year to that number of years and you have roughly the time it takes to build a new line.  Now try to build new lines across the Rockies and see how long that will take – decades I predict, if ever.

In sum, I do not believe this is achievable at all.  Therefore the concept envisioned in the SA article is not a workable plan because the transmission problems have not been addressed.  The lines aren’t going to get built.  The wind is not going to interconnect.  The SA article plan is not even a desirable plan. The environmental impact and cost would be horrendous.  Lets get realistic.

Red Necked Aussie Greenies

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy.

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UK Economist Lord Nicholas Stern is the latest in a growing list, including IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri and NASA climate scientist James Hansen calling for a global shift in dietary habits towards less meat. The CSIRO has issued a new Home Energy Saving Handbook which tells people diplomatically, but unambiguously, that if they do use the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet, with its huge meat component, then use it for as brief a period as possible and switch to a high carbohydrate diet which has a much lower greenhouse footprint. The book also has a great section on the implications of suburban food growing, including a mention that this also tends to reduce meat consumption. This new CSIRO handbook is a long way short of the major public corporate apology that I called for in my recent book CSIRO Perfidy, but it’s an excellent start. All in all this CSIRO book is a great practical book about how people can significantly reduce their various footprints on the planet. It doesn’t fall into any of the all too common traps like considering the fuel consumption of a car, but ignoring the emissions generated during the building of the vehicle.

Stern’s call reduced animal product intake follows close on the release of a report on livestock and climate change from the Food Ethics Council in the UK(commisioned by World Wildlife Fund (WWF)). The press release announcing the report contains a statment which will probably raise the blood pressure of any meat producer. It says that the report:

Identifies a wide array of measures by which government might change consumption behaviour, …

The livestock industry can live with feel good statments about breeding for lower emitting cattle and the like, but changes to consumption, changes that would actually make a difference, that is anathema.

At the risk of boring people who know this stuff, let me quantify using an analogy that I hope will clarify. Consider a computer screen. I’m using a 19 inch 37 watt LCD. My TV is a little bigger and uses 58 watts. Most people know that huge plasma TVs can be more than a little bigger and use 10 times more power. Systems labelled home theatre can run to over 1500 watts … about half for the sound and half for the picture. Now, pause and think what would happen if somebody started making 7400 watt screens that were much the same size as normal screens. Imagine further that these screens caused serious and frequently life shortening health problems.

Would anybody defend such screens? Would anybody bother with a defence that better manufacturing could reduce their power usage by 25%?

The 7400:37 ratio is about the same as the ratio of greenhouse emissions between lean beef and pasta. The ratio is even higher if the short term (20 year) warming impact of methane is considered. A study hot off the press in Science into the indirect effects of methane calculates that adding these flow-on impacts lifts the warming due to methane by as much as 50%. This makes lean beef akin to a 10,000 watt screen.

Tim Flannery, in the longest chapter of his recent Now or Never essay (Quarterly Essay 31) has put forward a plan to massively increase global beef production … the direct equivalent of a plea to stock the planet with an abundance of 7400 watt computer screens. This has been criticised by both myself (see Quarterly Essay 32) and Peter Singer. Responding to Singer in the US edition of Now or Never, Flannery writes:

And in the beef sector, it’s been found that smaller breeds of cattle produce 25 percent less methane than standard breeds, and that the overall management of the herd has an enormous impact on the overall greenhouse gas balance of the business.

If he were consistent, Flannery should similarly allow that a 25% reduction in the power required for a 7400 watt screen should earn it a green energy saver badge.

In Perfidy, which is about far more than just the CSIRO’s dodgy diet, I examine the implications of Flannery’s call for more cattle in some detail. Firstly, it’s an impossible vision. But going with Flannery’s flight of fancy and assuming there is enough land to graze enough cattle so that most of the planet (leaving out a billion or so steadfastly vegetarian Indians) ate the same amount of beef as Australians (bearing in mind that more chicken is eaten than beef in Australia these days), we would add about another 98 mega tonnes to the annual global emissions of methane. If you are unfamiliar with the global methane budget, the current anthropogenic emissions are about 350 mega tonnes, so a 98 mega tonne injection of methane would be huge.

So, on the one side we have a growing international call to scale down the livestock sector, particularly cattle, but in Australia we either don’t report such calls (and you won’t find the Food Ethics Council paper on the Australian WWF website), or they get a brief mention on page 23 and we have high profile environmentalists like Flannery pushing in the opposite direction. One of the reasons I’ve always been on the fringe of environment groups and more comfortable in animal rights groups is that many greens (and Greens), like Flannery, seem to place the sanctity of the BBQ above the health of the planet. I have absolutely no idea what drives such people, they steadfastly refuse to follow where the evidence leads. Anybody who reads Peter Singer’s work will realise that for him and others in the animal rights camp, using information and logic to formulate ways to minimise suffering isn’t mere entertainment, but the final arbiter of action.

Which leads me to Kelly’s Bush.

Kelly’s bush is about 7 acres of bush land on Sydney’s wealthy North Shore. In the early 1970s it was threatened with development. Some regard the fight to save Kelly’s Bush as the birth of the modern Australian green activist movement. The fight was spear headed by the famous Green Bans imposed by the Builder’s Labourers Union, led by Jack Mundey. The bans began in the early 1970s, but the story I want to tell goes back a decade earlier to 1962. What happened in 1962? Yes, I know, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, but that’s just a book, what actually happened? What actually happened was that Bob Kleberg of King Ranch in Texas bought 50,000 acres of primary rainforest along the Tulley River in north Queensland (ironically not far from where Jack Mundey grew up) and worked out how to use 50 tonne bulldozers to fell giant rainforest trees for just $20 a cleared acre. A huge rolling steel ball with spikes is dragged between the dozers on a chain and when it hits a tree it climbs. As it mounts the tree, the dozers gain leverage and can knock down anything. By 1965, the 50,000 acres (about 20,000 hectares) was gone. By the early 1970s, I’ll wager some of that Tully beef ended up in BBQs and sandwiches at Green Ban picket lines in Sydney. Meanwhile the bulldozers where shipped to Venezuela and the now perfected methods were used there and later in Brazil in an attack on the planet’s rainforests that is on-going.

Such is the story of high profile environmentalism in Australia. The real fight to preserve biodiversity should have been fought in our supermarkets, but the big green organisations, the ones with a profile high enough to have a chance at effecting major consumer change, are too busy having BBQ fundraisers and fighting for can deposits and against plastic bags. But the deliberate focus on the trivial by many in the green movement is more generally symptomatic of what passes for ethical debate in Australia. This is particularly obvious when we consider the ethics of climate change.

Back in May, The Lancet published the results of a joint study with the University College London on the health impacts of climate change.

The study contains the following map (from a 2007 study) showing the causal responsibility of climate change compared with the likely adverse health impacts. The former were measured in giga-tonnes of carbon emitted between 1950 and 2000 while the latter were measured in mortality per million of population. The geographical area of each country in the map has been transformed so that relative areas correspond to relative causes or health impacts. The malnutrition component comes from an earlier World Health Organisation modelling study and is due to a projected increase in regional droughts.

Note that this is a per-capita measure of suffering, not an absolute measure. A map showing relative absolute suffering would make the ethical responsibility even more obvious but would possibly see some of countries which are major causes of climate change totally disappear in the map of adverse impacts.

The malnutrition impacts are considered to have already started. It is of course difficult to disentangle malnutrition due to climate change from malnutrition due to other causes but a June FAO press release shows we have climbed to over a billion undernourished people, having been hovering at about 800 million between 1990 and 2003 when the wheels started to fall off the global food machine. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is now reporting in its 2009 State of Food Insecurity report (SOFI) that the absolute number of malnourished people has been rising since the mid 1990s.

The Lancet isn’t on my list of regularly read journals, but I thought it a little wierd that I’d never heard of this report. So I did some googling to see who covered it at the time. Who did I find? The only sizable news sources which reported on the report were: Radio Australia, The ABC (online) and The Mercury. Unsurprisingly, I found no mentions in any of the major newspapers.

Taken at face value, the maps make the asymmetry of causes and impacts abundantly clear. We in the developed world are responsible for most of the pain and suffering that will be felt predominantly (but not exclusively) in the developing world.

Humans have an extraordinarily well developed sense of fairness and justice. But it isn’t just humans who have this. A sense of fairness extends, at least, to other primates. Capuchin monkeys will refuse to work for rewards where they can see other monkeys getting more rewards for the same work. Sound familiar?

The maps plus the monkey research make it entirely unsurprising that both the Chinese and the Indians are playing hard ball in the run up to the Copenhagen climate negotiations.

Wondering why the report and the maps weren’t more widely reported in Australia, I formulated a quick hypothesis: Australians don’t care much for ethical issues. But then I thought more deeply and considered NSW’s MP John Della Bosca’s recent resignation and the blanket media coverage it received. So I modified my hypothesis. Australians treat ethics as a spectator sport, rather like football. Its great to watch a bit of biffo as long as you’re not on the receiving end of the real thing. This is supported by a few tables in How Australia Compares, a nice book of selected OECD data tables selected by Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins. In particular Australia is down at, or near, the bottom of the OECD countries in the income of its disabled people, the rate of children living in poverty in either single mother or two parent households, the level of unemployment benefits, and a host of other measures. This book came out in 2004 and most of the tables reflect data as of the year 2000, but I doubt much has changed. The generous country I thought I grew up in has either vanished … or perhaps it never existed.

But one aspect of the above maps worries me … the attribution of malnutrition to climate change.

Brazil doubled its cereal production between 1990 and 2003 with only a 35% rise in human population, it was awash with food. During the same period the proportion of Brazil’s cereal going to feed livestock went from 44% to 57%. Asia between 1990 and 2003 experienced a surge in livestock feeding between 1990 and 1995 going from 15% of cereals to 19%. The lower rate probably reflects the Asian preference for chicken and pork over beef. In any event, this fraction persisted until at least 2003. Indonesia and China dominate the Asian picture and both had a surge in corn production during the early 1990s, with the only beneficiaries being livestock. Total Asian cereal production, imports and and livestock feed ratios moved little between 1995 and 2003, despite a rising population. But the rising use of food for feed elsewhere in the world meant reductions in food available (and possibly affordable) to meet the short fall. The result was that undernourishment increased in Asia … exactly as the UN SOFI report finds.

Australia’s grain production goes up and down like a yo-yo so its difficult to discuss food/feed ratios on a yearly basis. But the amount of grain used as feed in 1990 was about 4 million tonnes, in 1995 it was 6 million, by 2003 it was 7.6 million and by 2006/7 it had surged to 12 million. So all up, Australians eat about 2 million tonnes, feed an increasing amount to livestock which leaves a steadily shrinking volume available for export.

The spread of western meat based diets globally has been accompanied by a spread of factory farming, obesity and chronic disease together with a change in the world’s livestock distribution. Factory farming now produces the bulk of the world’s 98 million tonnes of pigmeat and factory farms are high capital operations which demand, and can pay for, a consistent feed supply chain. They can outbid the world’s poor and turn food into feed and food producers into feed producers in exactly the same way that coffee drinkers turn food growers into coffee growers. While it is perfectly reasonable for any country to have a mix of food and cash crops, its the balance that matters.

Between 1984 and 2004 the world’s cattle population fell by 25% in the developed world but increased by a similar proportion in the developing world. This means that of the world’s 1.33 billion cattle, over a billion are in the developing world. Brazil has 190 million, Sudan and Colombia have 41 and 26 million cattle respectively and all three get a mention in the SOFI report with Brazil still having 12% undernourishment in 2004-6 despite a veritable glut of food production capacity.

Globally, this conversion of food to feed to drive increasing meat consumption accounts for the increase in undernourishment without requiring much, if any, input from climate change. As the better off eat more meat, they create a livestock industry which can outbid the poor for food.

But in Australia, our red necked BBQ culture reigns supreme. It’s impacts are felt in poor countries who can no longer buy as much of our grain because is has been siphoned off to feed livestock. Our culture is felt also in rich countries who buy our beef and get bowel cancer and heart disease as a result. We will continue to focus our ethical might on the sexual peccadillos of our politicians and our environmental muscle on plastic bags.

The Integral Fast Reactor – Summary for Policy Makers

Steve Kirsch, after discussions with a large number of the principal researchers on Argonne National Laboratory’s IFR project, has prepared his ‘one stop shop’ summary of the Integral Fast Reactor technology (sometimes referred to as the ‘Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor’ [LMFBR] or the ‘Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor’ [ALMR], although in reality, the IFR is the systems design that includes an ALMR and on-site pyroprocessing) and the urgent need for deployment.

I should note that Steve’s piece is not written for a science, technology and engineering audience. The aim is to alert policy makers, politicians, and everyday folk with a concern for cleaning up our energy supply, to the great potential of the IFR as a major alternative route to slashing carbon emissions.

You can get the Word version of this ’summary for policy makers’ here. Print this, read it. Send the link to others who you think are currently ignorant of this prospect (either through not appreciating what Gen IV nuclear means, or because they’ve never heard of it!). Print out copies and hand it to them. This sort of information must be more widely known, appreciated, discussed and debated. It’s critical, and we’re all running out of time. The public dialogue on this matter must begin in earnest.

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The Integral Fast Reactor

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch stk@propel.com

“In the decade from 1984 to 1994, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory developed an advanced technology that promised safe nuclear power unlimited by fuel supplies, with a waste product sharply reduced both in radioactive lifetime and amount. The program, called the IFR, was cancelled suddenly in 1994, before the technology could be perfected in every detail. Its story is not widely known, nor are its implications widely appreciated. It is a story well worth telling, and this series of articles does precisely that.”

— excerpt from Plentiful Energy and the IFR story by Charles Till, former Associate Director, Argonne National Laboratory

Executive summary

Congress should add a provision to the climate bills to authorize $3B to have DOE work with industry to build a demonstration Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) plant in order to jump-start this critical clean energy technology.

A successful IFR demonstration can lead to the following important benefits:

1. The only technology we have with a realistic potential to save the planet. The IFR is the first viable solution to how to eliminate CO₂ emissions from coal plants because it can do that without increasing costs. Eliminating emissions from coal plants is required to prevent a climate catastrophe. But using carbon capture adds cost and may not be practical or viable. The IFR, on the other hand, can replace the burner in an existing coal plant while reducing operating costs. This is why the IFR is one of Jim Hansen’s top five priorities for saving the planet.
2. Solves the nuclear waste problem and opens the door for the expansion of nuclear power in the US. The IFR uses today’s nuclear waste as fuel. The waste product from the IFR is minimal and short-lived. Solving the waste problem is required if we are to expand nuclear power in the US. The IFR does this.
3. Opportunity to become the world leader in clean energy. The IFR is the state-of-the-art nuclear technology that everyone wants. It is better in every dimension than any of today’s nuclear reactors. If we make a strategic bet on this technology and heavily invest in it, the US has the opportunity to become the undisputed world leader in clean electric power generation. Nuclear is the elephant of clean power technologies and the IFR was determined to be the best nuclear power technology by an extensive comparative study DOE. It is arguably the most powerful clean power technology on the planet.
4. Creates enormous economic value. It turns our existing nuclear waste into an asset worth over $30 trillion dollars. That is a fantastic return on investment for a one-time $3B investment to jump-start the technology. Nothing else comes close.
5. Unlimited clean power. The IFR allows us to power the entire US electricity needs for the next 1,500 years without doing any additional mining of uranium; just using the “waste” we have on-hand that nobody wants. The power is carbon free. If we mine, we can power the power needs of the entire planet forever.

Background

The IFR is an advanced fourth generation sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor (SFR) combined with a reprocessing facility using pyroprocessing, typically in the same power plant. The combination of a fast reactor plus waste processing is known as the Integral Fast Reactor.

Unlike today’s nuclear power plants (all of which are second generation designs built 30 years ago), the IFR uses fast neutrons (instead of slow neutrons) and thus is known as a “fast reactor.” Fast neutrons have the advantage of “burning” the nuclear material completely so that the only waste products are fission products (elements near the middle of the periodic table).  This waste is only dangerous for a few hundred years which is much less than the 100,000-year sequestration time that many think is needed for conventional nuclear waste.

Sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor technology was developed beginning in 1964 by a team of scientists at Argonne National Laboratories. Their test-bed reactor, known as the EBR-II,  ran flawlessly for 30 years until being permanently shut down by Congress in 1994.

Today, while other countries such as Russia, India, China, France and Japan are successfully and aggressively pursuing fast reactors,[1] the US hasn’t had an operating fast reactor since the EBR-II was shut down 15 years ago.

The need

To prevent a climate disaster, we must eliminate virtually all coal plant emissions worldwide in 25 years. The best way and, for all practical purposes, the only way to get all countries off of coal is not with coercion; it is to make them want to replace their coal burners by giving them a plug-compatible technology that is less expensive. The IFR can do this. It is plug-compatible with the burners in a coal plant (see Nuclear Power: Going Fast). No other technology can upgrade a coal plant so it is greenhouse gas free while reducing operating costs at the same time. In fact, no other technology can achieve either of these goals. The IFR can achieve both.

The bottom line is that without the IFR (or a yet-to-be-invented technology with similar ability to replace the coal burner with a cheaper alternative), it is unlikely that we’ll be able to keep CO2 under 450 ppm.

Today, the IFR is the only technology with the potential to displace the coal burner. That is why restarting the IFR is so critical and why Jim Hansen has listed it as one of the top five things we must do to avert a climate disaster.[2]

Without eliminating virtually all coal emissions by 2030, the sum total of all of our other climate mitigation efforts will be inconsequential. Hansen often refers to the near complete phase-out of coal emissions worldwide by 2030 as the sine qua non for climate stabilization (see for example, the top of page 6 in his August 4, 2008 trip report).

To stay under 450ppm, we would have to install about 13,000 GWe of new carbon-free power over the next 25 years. That number was calculated by Nathan Lewis of Caltech for the Atlantic, but others such as Saul Griffith have independently derived a very similar number and White House Science Advisor John Holdren used 5,600 GWe to 7,200 GWe in his presentation to the Energy Bar Association Annual Meeting on April 23, 2009. That means that if we want to save the planet, we must install more than 1 GWe per day of clean power every single day for the next 25 years. That is a very, very tough goal. It is equivalent to building one large nuclear reactor per day, or 1,500 huge wind turbines per day, or 80,000 37 foot diameter solar dishes covering 100 square miles every day, or some linear combination of these or other carbon free power generation technologies. Note that the required rate is actually higher than this because Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, now both agree that 350ppm is a more realistic “not to exceed” number (and we’ve already exceeded it).

Today, we are nowhere close to that installation rate with renewables alone. For example, in 2008, the average power delivered by solar worldwide was only 2 GWe (which is to be distinguished from the peak solar capacity of 13.4GWe). That is why every renewable expert at the 2009 Aspen Institute Environment Forum agreed that nuclear must be part of the solution. Al Gore also acknowledges that nuclear must play an important role.

Nuclear has always been the world’s largest source of carbon free power. In the US, for example, even though we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in the US for 30 years, nuclear still supplies 70% of our clean power!

Nuclear can be installed very rapidly; much more rapidly than renewables. For example, about two thirds of the currently operating 440 reactors around the world came online during a 10 year period between 1980 and 1990. So our best chance of meeting the required installation of new power goal and saving the planet is with an aggressive nuclear program.

Unlike renewables, nuclear generates base load power, reliably, regardless of weather. Nuclear also uses very little land area. It does not require the installation of new power lines since it can be installed where the power is needed. However, even with a very aggressive plan involving nuclear, it will still be extremely difficult to install clean power fast enough.

Unfortunately, even in the US, we have no plan to install the clean power we need fast enough to save the planet. Even if every country were to agree tomorrow to completely eliminate their coal plant emissions by 2030, how do we think they are actually going to achieve that? There is no White House plan that explains this. There is no DOE plan. There is no plan or strategy. The deadlines will come and go and most countries will profusely apologize for not meeting their goals, just like we have with most of the signers of the Kyoto Protocol today. Apologies are nice, but they will not restore the environment.

We need a strategy that is believable, practical, and affordable for countries to adopt. The IFR offers our best hope of being a centerpiece in such a strategy because it the only technology we know of that can provide an economically compelling reason to change.

Nuclear is our best clean power technology and the IFR is our best nuclear technology. DOE did a study in 2001-2002 of 19 different reactor designs on 27 different criteria. The IFR ranked #1. Over 242 experts from around the world participated in the study. It was the most comprehensive evaluation of competitive nuclear designs ever done. Top DOE nuclear management ignored the study because it didn’t endorse the design the Bush administration wanted.

The IFR has been sitting on the shelf for 15 years and the DOE currently has no plans to change that.

How does the US expect to be a leader in clean energy by ignoring our best nuclear technology? Nobody I’ve talked to has been able to answer that question.

IFRs are better than conventional nuclear in every dimension. Here are a few:

1. Efficiency: IFRs are over 100 times more efficient than conventional nuclear. It extracts nearly 100% of the energy from nuclear material. Today’s nuclear reactors extract less than 1%. So you need only 1 ton of actinides each year to feed an IFR (we can use existing nuclear waste for this), whereas you need 100 tons of freshly mined uranium each year to extract enough material to feed a conventional nuclear plant.
2. Unlimited power forever: IFRs can use virtually any actinide for fuel. Fast reactors with reprocessing are so efficient that even if we restrict ourselves to just our existing uranium resources, we can power the entire planet forever (the Sun will consume the Earth before we run out of material to fuel fast reactors). If we limited ourselves to using just our DU “waste” currently in storage, then using the IFR we can power the US for over 1,500 years without doing any new mining of uranium.[3]
3. Exploits our largest energy resource: In the US, there is 10 times as much energy in the depleted uranium (DU) that is just sitting there as there is coal in the ground. This DU waste is our largest natural energy resource…but only if we have fast reactors. Otherwise, it is just waste. With fast reactors, virtually all our nuclear waste (from nuclear power plants, leftover from enrichment, and from decommissioned nuclear weapons)[4] becomes an energy asset worth about $30 trillion dollars…that’s not a typo…$30 trillion, not billion.[5] An 11 year old child was able to determine this from publicly available information in 2004.
4. Safety: The IFR is safer than conventional nuclear because the reactors safely shut down based on the laws of physics if something goes wrong. Today’s third generation nuclear designs are very safe: 1 accident predicted every 29 million reactor years. The IFR should be even safer due to the passive safety inherent in the design. Also, IFRs are much safer than the coal plants they replace. Coal power plants are estimated to kill 24,000 Americans per year, due to lung disease as well as causing 40,000 heart attacks per year. Outside of the Soviet Union,[6] commercial nuclear has never killed even a single member of the public in its entire 50 year operating history.
5. Proliferation resistant: The IFR is proliferation resistant on two counts.  First, the pyroprocess used to recycle the fuel does not and cannot produce plutonium with the chemical purity needed for nuclear weapon. One of the world’s top nuclear proliferation experts is strongly in favor of the IFR for this reason.   Second, if all reactors were IFRs, there would never again be need for enriched uranium. Because possession of a pyroprocessing facility could give a nation a leg up in a quest for a nuclear weapons capability, facilities for both reprocessing and uranium enrichment should be operated under strict international supervision. The need for international control is arguably the most compelling reason for the U.S. to proceed rapidly with the IFR.
6. Consumes existing nuclear waste from nuclear reactors and weapons: Fast reactors consume our existing nuclear waste (from reactors and decommissioned weapons) and transforms it into elements that are safe after 300 years.
7. Minimal waste: A 1 GWe IFR plant generates 1 ton of fission products each year that needs to be sequestered for 300 years until it is safe. A conventional nuclear plant of the same capacity creates about 100 tons of “waste” each year, containing isotopes that need to be sequestered for 1 million years according to the current US depository requirements. If you powered your entire life from IFRs, the amount of waste you’d generate would be smaller than 1 soda can and it would need to be stored for only 300 years.
8. Nuclear material security: The nuclear material in the reactor or reprocessing facility would be too hot for a terrorist to handle. The nuclear material that leaves the site are the fission products which are completely useless for making a nuclear bomb.
9. The IFR creates a huge economic opportunity for the US to be the leading clean energy supplier to the world. Nuclear is the lowest cost scalable energy technology we have and the IFR is our best nuclear technology. If we focus on the IFR and invest in ramping up the volumes and reducing the cost, the IFR will be cheapest power source that every country will want everywhere instead of coal. Our economy will benefit and our planet will too.

A brief history of the IFR

Developed in the last decades of the 20^th century by a team of scientists at Argonne National Laboratory led by Charles Till. It used as a test bed a small fast reactor that first produced power in 1965 and ran for 30 years without incident.

In the 1970’s, the fast reactor  was the top energy priority of the President, Congress, and the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1971 Nixon said, “Our best hope today for meeting the Nation’s growing demand for economical clean energy lies with the fast breeder reactor.”

In his 1994 State of the Union address, President Clinton declared that the IFR was unnecessary and later that year Congress terminated the project. The scientists were ordered to dismantle the test reactor so it could never be restarted, and they came to understand that it would not be wise to criticize official policy so they stopped talking about it.

The IFR demonstrated that fast reactors can be operated for decades without incident or mishap and that the on-site reprocessing technique for removing the fission products and putting the material back into the reactor works.

Support

1. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu[7]
2. White House Science Advisor John Holdren[8]
3. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
4. Hans Bethe, Nobel laureate, Physics[9]
5. Charles Till, Former Associate Director Argonne National Laboratory
6. Yoon Chang, former Associate Laboratory Director, Argonne National Laboratory
7. John Sackett, former Associate Director, Argonne National Laboratory
8. Ray Hunter, former Deputy Director of the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
9. Leonard Koch, 2004 winner of the Global Energy International Prize (equivalent to the Nobel prize for energy)
10. California Lt. Governor John Garamendi
11. Congressman Jerry McNerney
12. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo
13. Congresswoman Jackie Speier
14. Senator Lamar Alexander
15. Senator Jeff Bingaman[10]
16. General Electric (who already has a plant design for the IFR ready to build)
17. The American public, 59% of whom support nuclear power according to a March 2009 Gallup poll, despite zero PR by the nuclear industry.[11]
18. Dean Warshawsky, Mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA

Opposition

1. We do not know of any members of Congress who oppose restarting the IFR. Most have never heard of it.
2. Environmental groups, in general, do not like nuclear power. For example, environmental groups in Germany got Germany to ban nuclear power. The result is that Germany is forced to build more new coal plants…the worst possible outcome for the environment and exactly the opposite of what the green groups wanted. The green case against nuclear is based largely on dogma and myth. See Mark Lynas: the green heretic persecuted for his nuclear conversion which is an eye-opening account of a noted environmentalist who took an objective look at the facts. One of the top people at NRDC (speaking on his own behalf), says his only objection to the IFR is the cost competiveness of nuclear. GE says IFRs can be built in volume for $1,500 per kW which is cheaper than coal (and slightly less than the $2,000 per kW that the Chinese paid to construct Qinshan Phase 3 which was completed 52 days ahead of schedule and under budget in 2003). The NRDC spokesperson is skeptical of GE’s cost numbers for the IFR ($1,500 per kW).
3. The Sierra Club is in the process of determining their position on the IFR.

You won’t have any trouble finding people who will throw darts at the IFR. They will argue it’s too expensive, unreliable, unproven, increases the proliferation risk, etc. These arguments lack credibility; they all fail in the face of the facts, e.g., the EBR-II and the Russian BN-600 experiences. These two reactors are are the “inconvenient truths” for the fast reactor skeptics.

Even if you believe all the arguments of the opposition and completely discount the arguments of the Argonne scientists who best know the technology, it doesn’t matter because we do not have an option: we have to make this work now. Renewables alone can’t kill coal in the time allotted. The point is:1) virtually every credible renewable expert agrees we cannot reduce our carbon emissions enough without nuclear, 2) the IFR is our best nuclear, 3) the IFR is the only technology we have with a realistic chance of replacing coal burners in a coal plant with a lower-cost carbon-free alternative.

So objections noted, but our planet is at stake and we have got to make this work. We should be joining together and doing things that our most credible scientists tell us we have to do to save our planet, rather than arguing amongst ourselves and debating what the optimum solution is. The time for debate is over. We are so late on deploying clean energy technologies that any new technology that has a realistic potential to make a significant positive impact should be welcomed with open arms by every human being.

Urgency

“Within the next four decades, human civilisation must eliminate its use of fossil fuels and replace them with 10,000 gigawatts of reliable, sustainable power. The only realistic way that this extraordinary challenge can be met is with the rapid and large-scale deployment of nuclear power, on a worldwide basis, led by countries like the US, Russia, the EU, China and India. Generation III nuclear plants will be critical to this expansion over the short term, and Generation IV technology is the astoundingly attractive long-term prospect, with the IFR being the flagship Gen IV design. The urgency in getting the IFR commercialised and deploymed on an industrial scale cannot be overstated”.

– Professor Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, The University of Adelaide

1. The climate crisis won’t wait. The sooner the IFR is perfected and deployed to eliminate emissions from coal plants, the better.
2. You can’t expand nuclear in the US without a solution to the waste problem. For example, in California, you can’t build a new nuclear power plant until there is a federal waste repository.
3. We need to do the technology transfer while the people who know how to do it are still alive. This technology is not trivial. No other country has been able to successfully replicate the IFR. If we wait 10 years, the people who built the IFR will all be dead. This could set the project back another decade or two.
4. Ensures energy independence for the future. If the world ramps up conventional nuclear, we will run out of cheap nuclear fuel faster than many people think. For example, the Russians published a paper showing that in Russia, if they doubled their nuclear capacity in 20 years, they would run out of cheap nuclear fuel in as little as 25 years. (see the first paragraph of BN-800 as a New Stage in the Development of Fast Sodium-Cooled Reactors). With fast reactors in place, we never run out of fuel.
5. Solves the waste problem now. President Obama has said nuclear power will not be expanded in the US until we have a solution to the waste problem. The IFR provides that solution since today’s “waste” now becomes valuable “fuel” for our future fast reactors. The only real waste, the fission products, are small and only need be stored for about 200 years. This is a trivial challenge compared to the problem we face today. Regarding storage today, the US government could make this offer any state willing to store nuclear waste: “if you store it, you can sell it.” So if one state stores all the nuclear waste, that state would own an asset with an eventual market value of $30 trillion dollars. What state can resist that offer? Instead of rejecting nuclear waste, every state would be clamoring to get its piece of this national asset. If all the states are foolish enough to reject that offer, a number of American Indian tribes have said they are more than happy to store the nuclear waste on their land so long as they can sell that “waste” to power fast reactors, whether in the US or other parts of the world. Senator Bingaman’s bill  in fact contemplates such compensation to a State and/or Indian tribe which hosts a repository.[12] The DOE would have to supervise the storage.
6. The genie is out of the bottle: refusing to play will not make fast reactors go away and will ultimately make us less safe. If we don’t re-start our fast reactor technology, then other countries will take the lead. France, Russia, India, Japan, and China all have fast reactor programs and all are either operating fast reactors now, or soon will be. The US shut down our last remaining fast reactor 15 years ago. Leadership is important for two reasons: 1) if we fail to lead, we will have missed taking advantage of our superior technology and missed a major economic opportunity as the premiere supplier of clean power technology and 2) the nuclear industry is in far safer hands if the US leads the way than if we abdicate. For example, if Chernobyl had been a US reactor design, that accident could never have happened.
7. No advantage to waiting. Fast reactors are the future of nuclear power. These reactors are better in every dimension than today’s nuclear designs. The sooner we transition to them and standardize them, and focus on getting the volumes up and the costs down, the lower our energy costs, the greater our impact on climate change, and the greater our chances of capturing the economic opportunity. There is no advantage to waiting to deploy these reactors. But we cannot deploy them until we build one first. We are way behind other countries. Russia has found that their fast reactors are their best performing reactors. China recently ordered two of the Russian BN-800 fast reactors. So while the Russians are the first country to be exporting commercial fast reactors and had no trouble getting $3.5B from the Russian government for their fast reactor program, the US hasn’t spent a dime exploiting the world’s best fast technology that we shelved in 1994 (which the Russians would love to get from us). That is not a winning strategy. It is a dumb strategy. We should either fish or cut bait on fast reactors. If we aren’t going to pursue them, then we should sell the technology to the Russians so we get at least some economic benefit from our research instead of zero. If we are going to pursue fast reactors, we need to get off our butts and build one now like our top Argonne scientists have been telling us for the last 15 years. If our objective is for Russia to lead the world on commercial advanced nuclear reactors, then we should keep doing what we are doing now, i.e., nothing.
8. Building high dollar value nuclear reactors will help re-start our economy. Unlike with convention nuclear plants, the IFR reactors are built in a factory then shipped to the site on rail. We can re-tool idle factories, create jobs, and help reverse our trade deficit. Today, thanks to US government inaction, the Russians are the first to export commercial fast nuclear reactors. This is technology we invented and perfected.

Why Congress must order the DOE to build an IFR demo

Congresswoman Eshoo inquired about the IFR with the DOE and was told the following:

Although the IFR program per se is no longer active, research and development in sodium fast reactor and pyroprocessing technologies have continued.  In its FY 2010 budget, the Office of Nuclear Energy is requesting $153.8 million for Fuel Cycle Research and Development, a portion of which will continue research in IFR related technologies like metal fuel development and pyroprocessing.  Some additional funding is also requested in the Generation IV R&D activity to support sodium fast reactor work.  The precise distribution in FY 2010 for these activities will depend on the final appropriation.  Further research is needed to establish the scalability and economics of liquid metal and pyroprocessing technologies as well as their fuel cycle and proliferation-resistant benefits before they are ready for commercial consideration.

So DOE, if left alone, will just do more research. While the Russians are building commerical fast reactors for export, DOE wants to study it more.

Think back 44 years ago. The EBR-II sodium cooled fast reactor was designed and constructed in just a few years. That’s without the aid of computers. After over 30 years of operating experience, the original scientists who worked on the IFR say we are ready to build a full-scale demo plant now. That is their expert opinion.

Today, the DOE wants to do more research and they haven’t even committed to building a small test reactor. So we were further along 44 years ago than we are today. At least back then, we actually had an operating fast reactor. Forty four years ago, we had a “can do” attitude. Today, we’ve lost it. We have a “do more research” attitude.  Today we have no operating fast reactor of any kind and DOE has no plans to change that.

How is it that we need more research today, yet 44 years ago, we had sufficient research to design, build and operate a sodium cooled fast reactor? Did we lose all that knowledge? Did we not learn anything of value over the 30 years of operation?

Compare what is not happening in the US to what is happening in Russia today. They have been operating their BN-600 sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor without incident for the past 30 years. This is a commercial reactor, not a test reactor. And now they are building commercial fast reactors for the Chinese. So we are currently 30 years behind the Russians because DOE would rather to fund research rather than being forced to actually build something.

We are out of time.

If the government orders DOE to have a 300 MWe IFR plant built and operating in <8 years and they make it a priority, then DOE will get it done. Short of that, nothing will happen. It’s like JFK and putting a man on the moon. Without setting high expectations, nothing gets done. It’s clear that Congress has got to request it and set high goals (just like the Chinese do) because left alone, DOE will simply research fast reactors until the cows come home and nothing will get built. If Congress requests nothing, then that’s what we will get: nothing.

Next steps

“On the waste issue, GE has technology called PRISM reactors that we can employ …we can deal with nuclear waste through those reactors, but again, the decision to deploy that technology is really in the hands of the government. What China has done right though is they’ve set long-term policy with very very tall objectives. And the US has been very on and off, very short term.”

-   John Krenicki, president and CEO of GE Energy during interview on CNBC (Note: PRISM is GE’s commercial implementation of the IFR)

The House bill already allocates $10B for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) and $0 for fast nuclear. Bingaman’s bill allocates $6.6 billion for 10 “early mover” large-scale CCS projects and $0 for fast nuclear.

The Boxer-Kerry Climate bill should be modified to provide DOE at least $3B to construct a demonstration IFR plant.

This would be a better use of public funds than CCS, because 1) there is a greater likelihood of a successful outcome with the IFR than with CCS, and 2) the IFR solution is a superior solution to CCS because the IFR reduces the cost of operating a power plant, whereas CCS will dramatically increase it. So even if CCS worked as designed, everyone will find a reason not to adopt it. Every country would be much more likely to adopt an IFR solution (that lowers costs) than a CCS solution (that increases costs).

So why are we allocating billions to CCS and zero to the IFR? It makes no sense. You’d only do that if you were 100% confident CCS would work and would negligibly increases costs and were 100% confident the IFR would fail. But it is much more likely that the IFR will work and CCS will fail.

There is over $20 billion dollars in the Nuclear Waste Fund. Senator Lindsay Graham introduced legislation in April to have all of it rebated to consumers. That’s a dumb idea; it would not move us closer to solving the waste problem. But taking some of that $20 billion dollars and investing it in building an IFR would be a brilliant move.

For further reading

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/390139/ifr/IFRintro.doc (Is the electronic version of this document with all the hyperlinks ([if you are reading a print version])

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-kirsch/climate-bill-ignores-our_b_221796.html (My Huffington piece provides a good overview and has links to primary sources like the DOE study showing that the IFR is the best nuclear design ever invented.)

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/390139/ifr/IFRKirschCongressBriefing.ppt (A PowerPoint that gives you the gist in the first 15 slides)

http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html (Article about the history and significance of the IFR)

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/390139/ifr/Ray%20Hunter%20email%20to%20Senator%20Reid.doc (A letter written to Senator Reid by the former #2 nuclear guy at DOE. Ray Hunter was at DOE for 30 years.)

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2008/20081121_Obama.pdf (Jim Hansen says IFR is priority #4 of the 5 things we must do [see bottom of page 7])

http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/Argonne_News/news97/crtill.html

Senator Kempthorne wrote into the Congressional Record on the retirement of Charles Till:

But [Charles Till’s] greatest contribution, to both his discipline and to the world, lies in the development of the Integral Fast Reactor, the IFR. This inspired source of electrical power has the capability to achieve incredible efficiency in fuel use, while significantly lessening problems associated with reactor safety and nuclear waste. In 1986, the IFR showed that it can protect itself from overheating and meltdown. It does so through the natural physical properties of the materials used rather than by relying on operator intervention or an engineered safety system. The IFR was also designed to burn most of its own waste, as well as that of other reactors and the material from dismantled weapons. Unfortunately, this program was canceled just 2 short years before the proof of concept. I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret and reverse this shortsighted decision. But complete or not, the concept and the work done to prove it remain genius and a great contribution to the world.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4836556.ece (Mark Lynas, a well known UK environmentalist, read about the IFR and he realized that the green groups had been pulling the wool over his eyes all these years. It is a great read if you have time)

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/ (This article talks about using the IFR to replace the burner in a coal plant. The comments on this article are also interesting reading. Some of the comments are from people who are misinformed, and some of the comments are actually very astute and accurate.)

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/390139/ifr/IFRKirsch.ppt (This is my catch-all slide prezo of all IFR slides.)

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[1] For example, China, in addition to completing the work on its own 65 MW experimental fast reactor at the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIAE), just ordered two of the Russian BN-800 fast reactors.[2] See the bottom of page 7 in Hansen’s Tell Barack Obama the Truth — The Whole Truth.

[3]The U.S. stockpile of DU amounts to about 700,000 tonnes, which is 7E5 reactor-years of power, or 7E5 x 8760 hours/yr x 1E6 kW/reactor = 6.1E15 kWhr of energy. The annual U.S electricity consumption these days is ~4E12 kWh. This works out to be 1,525 years of fuel.

[4] More than 99% of the current nuclear waste from nuclear power plants, uranium enrichment, and decommissioned nuclear weapons can be re-used to fuel fast reactors. The fission products, which comprise less than 1% by weight of our current nuclear waste, cannot be used for electric power generation, but everything else can. The DU comprises about 90% of the nuclear waste in the US today.

[5] The U.S. stockpile of DU amounts to about 700,000 tonnes, which is 7E5 reactor-years of power, or 7E5 x 8760 hours/yr x 1E6 kW/reactor = 6.1E15 kWhr of energy. At 0.5 cents per kWh, which is the current value of uranium for second generation reactors, this is $30 trillion dollars.

[6] The reactor design at Chernobyl would never have been approved in the US. If Chernobyl was a US-approved reactor design run in accordance with US standards that accident would not have happened.

[7] Chu has talked favorably about fast reactors and pyroprocessing which are the two key features of the IFR. Chu has not specifically mentioned the IFR by name, however.

[8] Holdren as not publicly announced his support of the IFR, but has spoken favorably about the IFR in private meetings.

[9] Bethe met with Till for a full day of briefings on the IFR before the project started. Bethe’s support was important for getting Congress to fund the IFR.

[10] Senator Bingaman has incorporated language into his bill (Section 313 of S.1462) which would allow DOE to lay the ground work for doing some of the planning necessary to restart the IFR. Bingaman prefers that Secretary Chu to lead on this issue rather than have it dictated by Congress.

[11] The public is uninformed about the IFR. The 59% approval is for nuclear power in general.

[12] S.1462, Section 604(d)(2) which can be found on page 329, line 16.

TCASE 2: Energy primer

Before getting entangled in the thorny bramble of sustainable energy options, I thought it helpful to arm you with a set of terminological secateurs. So TCASE #2 (recalling that TCASE = the Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy series) is a brief primer and glossary on energy terms. This is not meant to be anything comprehensive, but it’s enough to get your technical feet wet and to understand some of the units and concepts that are liberally thrown around by those who are used to talking in the energy jargon. (If readers feel I have missed something important [no doubt], please feel free to add this to the comments, and I will also update this post to reflect the important suggestions.)

Anyway, first up, we need to understand the difference between power and energy. Let’s say you have a jug of water. It has some volume, which is the amount of water the jug holds. Now, let’s say you gradually tip out the water — the flow of water (the amount of water being poured per unit time) is a rate. Well, in caricature, the volume of water is like energy, and the flow of water is like power. Not a perfect analogy, but they never are…

Now, when measuring anything, you could use any manner of units. I’m going to consistently stick to SI (Système Internationale) units. If you want to translate back and forth (imperial, metric, nonsensic, etc.), look up the tables here. The basic SI unit of energy is the Joule. The basic unit of power is the Watt (W), which has units of Joules per second (J/s). So, a 60 W incandescent light globe uses up energy at a rate of 60 J/s, or 216,000 J per hour (60 x 3,600 = 216 kilojoules, kJ). Or, to express it another way, in one hour (h) that light would use up 60 Wh worth of energy, and in a day, it’d use 60 x 24 = 1,440 Wh, or 1.44 kWh. So, kWh are a unit of energy.

Energy comes in various forms, such as heat and electricity (the ones that are relevant to TCASE — there are also forms such as ionising radiation, light etc.). Heat (hereafter thermal) energy is considered lower quality than electrical energy — it’s less flexible and difficult to transport — but thermal energy is easier to store. Also, many power production methods, such as coal- or gas-fired, nuclear, geothermal and solar thermal power stations, generate thermal energy and then convert it to electrical energy, in a process that necessarily must throw away waste heat (roughly 2/3 of it) — first used in a practical way by Thomas Newcomen and later improved upon by James Watt. This is commonly done via a steam generator and condenser, although gas turbines are also used. Indeed, combined cycle gas turbines use both a gas turbine (Brayton cycle) and then use the waste heat to power a steam turbine (Rankine or Sterling cycle), which increases their conversion efficiency. Efficiency is strongly affected by the temperature differential, so if (for instance) your steam goes in really hot and then is water cooled, this will be more efficient than if your steam goes in at a lower temperature and then is air cooled. So air cooling saves water, but lowers your efficiency.

Wind turbines are connected (via gearing) to an electrical generator directly, and so avoid the need to first produce thermal energy. Solar photovoltaics also generate electricity without any thermal step, via the photoelectric effect. A hydro or tidal power device will generally use the flow of water to turn a turbine, rather than expanding steam or gas, and an ocean wave generator might pump water to shore at high pressure to turn a turbine. You get the idea.

An important thing to distinguish is the difference between conversion efficiency and capacity factor. You might, for instance, have a nuclear power station that has a conversion efficiency of 38%, but a capacity factor of 92%. What’s the difference? The conversion efficiency is (roughly) the efficiency with which thermal energy is converted into electrical energy through one or more steps. The capacity factor is the amount of energy a power station generates over a given length of time compared to the energy it might have produced if it had been running at full power for the whole period. There is a good explanation of capacity factor on Wiki.

Here, let’s take an example of wind turbines to better explain capacity factor. One of the largest wind turbines yet built is the Enercon E-126 (see picture), which produces a peak power of 6 MWe (that’s 6,000 kWe, where the “e” distinguishes this as electrical energy as opposed to “MWt” for thermal energy). This impressive structure has rotor (blade) diameter of 126 m, and a hub height of 198 m. Let’s say you stuck this on the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula, where it sometimes got strong wind speeds that allowed it to generate its full rating of 6 MW. Other times, the wind would be modest, weak, or calm, at which times it would be generating at less than its peak (nameplate) power. It would also shut off it the wind got too strong in a gale. Now, let’s say you tallied up the energy this turbine had generated over the course of one year at this site, and found it to be 16,820 MWh. If the turbine had generated at full power the whole time, you would have expected it to have produced 6 x 24 x 365 = 52,560 MWh. So, in this case, it’s capacity factor for the year was 16,820/52,560 x 100/1 = 32 %.

Alternatively, let’s say an AP-1000 nuclear power station was rated at 1,154 MWe, and for 11 months it was run at this power output. Then, for one month (say December) it was offline being refueled. It would generate 1154 x 24 x (365-31) = 9,250 GWh for 11 months and for December it would generate 0 GWh. It’s capacity factor would, in this example, be 9,250/10,109 x 100/1 = 91.5 %. And so on, for all the other technologies we’ll be discussing in TCASE.

So, 1 gigawatt (GW) = 1,000 megawatts (MW) = 1,000,000 kilowatts (kW) = 1 billion Watts (W). Solar panels are usually described in terms of their peak kW power. Wind turbines are (these days) usually rated in MW. Nuclear power stations are expressed in MW or GW. Almost universally, their peak (nameplate) electrical power, rather than thermal power or average power (after accounting for capacity factor), is what is reported. So watch out when converting to energy.

Finally, recall I said a W was in units of J/s? A J is a unit of energy. But why then did I start to talk about energy in kilowatt hours (kWh) etc.? Well, this is often a convenient way to express energy (David Mackay chose to use this as his standard), as it’s easy to mentally switch back and forth between power and energy (though there is also the potential to get confused!). Also, J is too small to be of much practical value. But the megajoule (MJ) is a useful value for expressing the energy content of a litre of liquid fuel (for instance), and the petajoule (PJ) and exajoule (EJ) are sufficient for expressing the energy use of nations and civilisations. For instance, the primary energy use (thermal and electrical) of the global human enterprise in 2007 was (very approximately) 500 EJ, which is 138,890 TWh (terawatt hours) — where 1 TW = 1,000 GW. I’m sure by now you’re getting the hang of this!

I like to use EJ and TW when expressing really large energy budgets and power demands — which, incidentally, is the topic of TCASE #3.

Classifying ‘belief systems’ in sustainable energy and climate change

Below I reproduce a fascinating analysis, which attempts to classify people’s ‘belief systems’ in sustainable energy and climate change into four broad categories, types A, B, C, and D. (Note that this is only an excerpt from the introduction of a larger report that Gene is currently writing)

It is written by Dr Eugene Preston, who is a highly-experienced energy transmission systems consultant and member of IEEE. He also teaches classes at the University of Texas. Gene and I correspond regularly as participants of a sustainable energy email group (this particular group is rather special, in that it has a focus on a certain type of technology — no prizes for guessing which one). I reproduce the analysis below with Gene’s permission, and I hope he’ll be able to join in with the opinionated discussion that is likely to follow.

Each person has a belief system that strongly drives them to some vision of what our future should be. Gene says he’s type C (so am I). Which one are you? Is he missing any types of beliefs? How much overlap is there between the categories?

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Belief Classifications

Eugene Preston (http://egpreston.com)

There are many ideas floating around today about how we should develop our future energy supply. People’s opinions are strongly shaped by what they believe to be true. Here is one example of the beliefs that shape the opinions of how our energy future should be developed.

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A. Belief: Nuclear proliferation is a greater concern than climate change.

1. The world’s greatest risk is from nuclear weapons, most likely from terrorists or a rogue nation. Nuclear power should not be expanded until non-proliferation of nuclear materials can be assured on a worldwide basis.

2. Climate change is a problem we must begin to deal with, although its severe effects will not be felt until later, possibly at the end of this century.

3. Coal is a plentiful energy supply the US does not have the luxury to ignore. Capture and storage of CO2 is a technical problem that must surely have a solution.

4. Oil imports must be significantly reduced because the US cannot sustain the outflow of dollars from the US to other countries. Worldwide oil production has not yet peaked.

5. New technology will emerge in battery storage and solar cell manufacture, which will make electric cars and roof top solar power economical and solve the above #4 problem.

Do you recognize these opinions are those of President Obama? The current US energy policies are strongly shaped by these beliefs. Some of these beliefs may be true and are likely to happen, some are too expensive to implement, and some will not be technologically realized. Note that at this point I didn’t say which ones will succeed and which ones will fail. You will be able to see which ones by the end of this report. A well-engineered system can handle the uncertainties and risks. However, I can say for certain, that the above beliefs do not adequately address all the things that we need to be addressing, to insure a safe, reliable, clean, and economical power and energy supply for both electricity and transportation, as well as address the environmental cleanup challenge and also provide new energies for things such as space exploration and additional clean water supplies for the future.

A slight change in beliefs will cause a huge shift in what you think the US energy policy should be. Here are the same bullet items from a person who is completely anti-nuclear.

B. Belief: Solar-wind-conservation and no nuclear is the solution to our energy needs.

1. The world’s greatest risk is from all forms of nuclear which should be completely banned.

2. Climate change is a severe problem and can be dealt with by switching to solar, wind, bio energy, battery storage, and a greater use of conservation.

3. Coal plants should be banned because they emit CO2, which is bad for the planet.

4. Oil imports will be eliminated when all transportation is electrified, or switches to natural gas, which the US has plentiful supplies of. Worldwide oil has probably peaked.

5. Solar cell costs are dropping, new battery technologies will soon be available, and all the renewable power sources make the non-renewable forms of power unnecessary.

This group differs from the A group in that coal and nuclear power are included in the A group but not in the B group, which are opposed to coal and nuclear power. I know many people who fall into the 100% solar-wind-conservation category. The current CEO of Austin Energy and some of my personal friends are type B persons. I think that most persons in the Sierra Club and the Repower America group as well as followers of Al Gore are mostly type B believers. The type B plan will be examined in this report as an engineering exercise at these three different levels: 1) the individual homeowner, 2) an electric utility, and 3) the entire US.

Now I will give you the beliefs of persons who are extremely concerned about the climate change problem. These are concerned scientists who are driven by a rather scary vision of the future.

C. Belief: Climate change is the Earth’s greatest threat which can lead to extinction.

1. The world’s greatest risk is not nuclear weapons or nuclear power because those problems will pale in comparison to the climate change problem. Nuclear power is the only power source that can supply enough power to reverse the climate changes. Using IFR technology, the US has a several hundred year supply of fuel already on hand in the form of high level nuclear waste, which the IFR plants can use as its primary fuel. To make a complete switch off fossil fuels in the US might require 400 new IFR plants.

2. Climate change is the worst nightmare ever encountered by humans and might lead to extinction of all life on the planet once thermal positive feedback mechanisms kick in.

3. Coal plants must be completely retired as well as all sources of CO2 emission (such as petrol cars). Possibly removal of CO2 from the atmosphere will be necessary to allow the oceans to become less acidic, which is currently causing a destruction of life in the oceans. CO2 sequestration is not going to be widely applicable because of the potential environmental damage as well as the implementation costs needed to capture the CO2.

4. Oil imports will not be a problem because there will be minimal use of fossil fuels.

5. Solar power, wind, and batteries may or may not develop, and it doesn’t matter whether they do or do not, because if they don’t, we can rely on nuclear power for all our needs.

The above beliefs are those of Dr James Hansen and an increasing number of scientists. US policy will slowly move toward C if the IPCC reports increasingly support these scientist’s predictions and neither the energy ideas in A or B prove to be complete climate change solutions.

There is one other group that I need to state because they represented the ideas of the previous administration and are still strongly supported by many persons in the US, especially the Senate.

D. Belief: Climate change caused by humans is fiction.

1. Nuclear power is an economical source of power and eventually a way will be found to handle the nuclear waste problem. Nuclear weapons proliferation is adequately addressed here in the US. Rogue countries and terrorists can be dealt with through international agencies, treaties, and rules. Additional nuclear power in the US should be dictated by the economics of the free market, not a socialized system such as the French nuclear program, i.e. the US government needs to stay out of the nuclear power building business.

2. Climate change caused by humans is fiction. The CO2 amounts are far too small to cause the claimed warming. We may be in a cooling trend. A new ice age is likely to form at any time. Climate change hysteria is causing us to make bad investments.

3. Coal power is the cheapest on the planet and should be developed to meet our energy needs, including energy for transportation, to ease the nation’s oil import problem. CO2 capture costs and cap and trade program will harm the US economy and are unnecessary.

4. Oil imports will be addressed by developing new oil supplies in the Gulf, off the east and west coasts, in Alaska, in the Arctic, and from Canada’s oil and tar sands. In total there is plenty of oil to continue our current lifestyles for decades. All we have to do is go get it.

5. Solar and wind power will make some advances, although they will supply only a small amount of energy compared to gas, coal, and nuclear power supplies already operating. The energy problem is solved for now by conventional methods. There are likely to be new energy solutions in the future that can be implemented when they are needed.

These beliefs are strongly held by many persons in the electric power industry. The US Senate report strongly supports the above ideas. Many of the persons living in my neighborhood are type D believers. I have many ham radio friends who are type D believers.

However, the entire set of beliefs in D crumbles if: 1) the earth continues to warm and certain things like the melting of Greenland’s ice continues at an annual accelerated rate, 2) the acidification of the oceans continues to increase, 3) IPCC reports increasingly show the effect humans are having on the planet, and most importantly, 4) the oceans begin rising more rapidly and at a predictable rate. I will examine the possibility of an accelerating rate of Greenland’s ice in this report and then you can make the call as to whether you want to continue to support the beliefs listed above (assuming you are currently a type D believer).

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There are odd relationships in the above sets of beliefs. For example, those strongly believing in climate change (C) and strongly against climate change (D) both believe in developing more nuclear power, but for different reasons. However, their ideas diverge on the use of coal.

Climate change drives those opposed to nuclear power (A and B) into believing that wind and solar power will make a significant difference, however, the strongly anti nuclear and anti coal (B) split with the moderates (A) on the future need to have coal and nuclear power.

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Endnote:

How effective will the cap and trade be at eliminating coal plants? I recently attended the Bureau of Economic Geology seminar at the University of Texas. A handout (that was in a handbag labeled as Clean Coal Technology Information by American Electric Power) stated that cap and trade in Europe had seen market values of 30 $/ton of CO2. A 1000 MW coal plant will produce about 3 million lbs per hour of CO2.

I verified that this rate of CO2 production is correct when one of my friends said it couldn’t possibly be that much. It is a good average taking all coal plants into account, new and old, small and large. Newer plants might have slightly less CO2 production. You also have to be careful about some CCS reports that show smaller amounts of CO2 capture. The are probably capturing only a part of their CO2 emissions.

Multiplying (30$/ton)(3e6lbs/h)/(2000lbs/ton) = 45000 $/hr …. then

($45000)/(1000MWh) = 45 $/MWh = 4.5 cents/kWh, which is a very high cost, higher than the bus bar cost of a new coal plant.

The cap and trade will show that coal is not the lowest cost base load generation. Nuclear will win that battle. However, power companies move slowly. It will take several decades for existing coal plants to be retired and new nuclear plants to be constructed if we follow the traditional utility planning practices. I do not think this will work if the type C beliefs are correct. Because there are many different beliefs, the IFR will develop slowly unless we can eliminate the beliefs of the categories A, B and D by showing they are in error and will ultimately lead to failure.

Solar power realities – supply-demand, storage and costs

The two recent posts focusing on Peter Lang’s wind study have generated considerable debate, and some very stimulating discussion, among BNC readers. This post is a follow-up, which this time highlights Lang’s analysis of solar power and related problems associated with energy storage.

This is about solar photovoltaics (PV), which generate electricity directly via the photoelectric effect. The other rising player in the solar field is concentrating thermal power from deserts, which use a steam turbine to generate electricity via a temperature differential, in the same fundamental manner as a coal-fired or nuclear power station. I asked Peter whether he was planning to do an analysis of CSP. He told me:

“I’ve had a bit of a look at doing a similar paper for CST, but I wasn’t able to obtain the detailed output and cost figures I need. It seems the researchers are holding the figures close to their chest.”

I’ve had similar advice on this matter from Ted Trainer. He has attempted an analysis of CSP, and I might post up a highlight of this shortly, and describe some of the gaps in knowledge that Ted and others are seeking.  Lang says the following on this matter:

There are two technologies for generating electricity from solar energy: solar thermal and solar photovoltaic. This paper uses solar photo-voltaic as the example because energy output and cost data are more readily available than for solar thermal. It is not clear at this stage which is the lower cost option for large generation on the scale required (see here): so any cost difference is insignificant in the context of the simple analysis presented here.

Lang’s ‘Solar Realities’ paper (download the 17 page PDF here) is summarised as follows:

This paper provides a simple analysis of the capital cost of solar power and energy storage sufficient to meet the demand of Australia’s National Electricity Market. It also considers some of the environmental effects. It puts the figures in perspective. By looking at the limit position, the paper highlights the very high costs imposed by mandating and subsidising solar power. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability. The capital cost would be 25 times more than nuclear power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.

Conclusions: solar power is uneconomic. Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these additional costs must be carried by others.

The analysis, which focuses on the Australian national energy market (NEM) but is obviously relevant for other countries, considers electricity demand, the characteristics of solar PV and one possible means of storing its energy (pumped hydropower), capital costs of a system that could reliably meet demand for 1-day through to 90 days, and then an attempt to frame these numbers in perspective with an alternative low-carbon energy source — nuclear power.

The ‘Introduction’ of Lang’s paper sets the context quite clearly, with the following statement:

The paper takes the approach of looking at the limit position. That is, it looks at the cost of providing all the NEM’s electricity demand using only solar power for electricity generation. Looking at the limit position helps us to understand just how close to or far from being economic is solar power.

The key characteristics of solar power that are relevant to this discussion can be summarised as follows:

1. Power output is zero from sunset to sunrise.

2. Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day: zero at sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday.

3. Energy output varies from summer to winter (less in winter than summer).

4. Energy output varies from day to day depending on weather conditions.

5. Maximum daily energy output is on a clear sunny day in summer.

6. Minimum daily energy output is on a heavily overcast day in winter.

Backup for solar power is clearly required — to store energy when being generated at peak times and thus deliver energy during times when nothing is being generated (at night, during cloudy weather, and to ensure sufficient winter supply). For this PV backup, Lang focused on pumped hydro in preference to sodium-sulphur or vanadium-redox batteries, due to pumped hydro’s lower costs (the latter do have some other advantages). He also considered transmission requirements.

One key feature of the analysis was his consideration of the problem of just how much energy to store. To have enough backup to meet the total national energy market demand for a 24 hour period turns out to be a much more costly proposition than creating a larger, long-term storage option.

Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, it all comes down to those nasty ‘extremes’ — those few days of the year when solar power will give you almost nothing (yes, even the deserts have cloudy winter days, although the problem would be much worse if we were reliant on a distributed system of rooftop PV which was largely sited in the major population centres along the southern and eastern coastlines).

If you’ve only got enough solar PV storage to maintain continuous power supply for 1 day, then you need to overbuild your installed capacity by a truly massive amount to cover yourself for those days when the 24-hour capacity factor of your national system is not 20%, but 5%, or 2%, or 0.75%. To borrow a suitable analogy, under a small energy storage system, you’ve got no money in the bank to tide you over until the next paycheck comes in.

Please do read Lang’s comprehensive analysis to get yourself clear on the full story involved in this matter. I cannot emphasise enough how critical this information is if you wish to understand the implications of a carbon-constrained world based on renewable energy without fossil-fuel backup.

Lang concludes his analysis with these strong words (summaries from the last three sections):

Solar power is totally uneconomic and is not as environmentally benign as another lower-cost, lower-emissions option – nuclear power. Advocates argue that solar is not the total solution, it will be part of a mix of technologies. But this is just hiding the facts. Even where solar is a small proportion of the total energy mix, its high costs are buried in the overall costs, and it adds to the total costs of the system…

The capital cost of solar power would be 25 times more than nuclear power to provide the NEM’s demand [$2.8 trillion for the least-cost solar solution with backup versus $120 billion for nuclear]. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability. The least cost solar option would emit 20 times more CO2 (over the full life cycle) and use at least 400 times more land area compared with nuclear (not including mining; the mining area and volumes would also be greater for the solar option than for the nuclear option)…

Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy, but these additional costs must be carried by others.

As noted above, the solar story is not complete without also looking hard at the situation for solar thermal power. I will address this in due course.

Power to the People – Nuclear energy in South Australia

Update: Listen to me on ABC Radio, talking about nuclear power, fast breeder reactors, renewables, and the inevitability of growing societal energy demand. This also features an interview with Dr Jim Green, and my response. It runs for about 16 minutes in total: http://tr.im/vXE2

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Published in the Adelaide Advertiser, 4 August 2009 (pg 18). This opinion editorial I wrote builds on the recent flurry of interest in the Australian media on introducing nuclear power.

BARRY BROOK IN MY VIEW

Imagine someone handed you a lump of silvery metal the size of a golf ball. They said you might wish to put on some plastic gloves to hold it, although that would not be necessary if you washed your hands afterwards.

You look down at the metal resting on your palm. It feels heavy, because it’s very dense.

You are then told that this metal golf ball can provide all the energy you will ever use in your life. That includes running your lights, computer, air conditioner, TV, electric car, synthetic jet fuel.

Everything. Using 1 kilogram of uranium (or thorium, take your pick).

That is what modern nuclear power offers. An incredibly concentrated source of energy, producing a tiny amount of waste.

Taken over its life cycle, when used in next-generation fast spectrum nuclear reactors, this energy generation will produce less carbon dioxide emissions than wind turbines. It gets better.

Your lifetime’s worth of energy waste, also weighing just under a kilogram, will be less radioactive than the natural rocks around Roxby Downs within 300 years. Not 100,000 years. Only 300 years.

South Australian rocks contain this metal in great abundance. We live in one of the most energy rich areas on the planet.

We are endowed with far more energy than all the oil and gas in the Middle East. We already export a few thousand tonnes of it each year, and are planning to ship much more overseas in the future. Yet, we don’t use it ourselves.

We recognise the fact that our natural gas supplies are limited. Worse, burning this fuel produces vast amounts of carbon dioxide, which is destabilising the climate system.

Coal, found in great abundance in Australia’s east coast states, is twice as bad as natural gas in terms of carbon emissions, and also dumps heavy metals, soot and chemicals causing acid rain into the air. Clearly, we must unhitch ourselves from the fossil fuel energy bandwagon, and quickly.

Right now, we are pushing for more and more wind and solar power. This is well and good, but these variable and diffuse renewable energy sources have severe limits that often go unacknowledged.

They cannot power a large fraction of the needs of future all-electric society without major breakthroughs in energy storage technology, and much cheaper backup options than now exist.

Energy found in hot rocks deep beneath our deserts holds great promise, but is shadowed by many unknowns. We’d be taking a great risk if we gambled our entire energy future on this one possibility.

My research has convinced me that nuclear power is by far the best prospect that we, as South Australians and as a global community, have of drastically cutting carbon emissions.

The world is experiencing a nuclear renaissance, with almost 50 new reactors now being built, and another 350 being planned, in places like China, India, Europe and North America.

Nuclear power station companies are now focusing on designing smaller sized reactors that are built to a standardised, ultra safe design, in a factory, and then shipped to site. This brings economies of scale to bear, which means cheaper electricity.

Also, because each individual reactor can be quite small, you can simply add more units as your energy needs grow, and as your retire old infrastructure. The age of huge plants, which can be difficult to finance and take many years to build, may soon be history.

It’s time for Australia to embrace nuclear power as a major enabler of a low carbon economy. Companies like Rio Tinto recognise this need. We all should.

After all, South Australia is perfectly positioned to be a leader in this new energy revolution.

Barry Brook is Sir Hubert Wilkins professor climate change at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.

INSET BOX

Almost 90 per cent of the world’s — and Australia’s — electricity is powered by fossil fuels.

Despite conservation efforts, global demand for electricity is growing at about 2 per cent a year.

Australia’s use of electricity is expected to double from current levels in the next 30 to 40 years.

About 36 countries use nuclear power, which accounts for almost a quarter of electricity generated in OECD countries.

In France, 80 per cent of electricity is nuclear.

Counterpoint – nuclear power and the low carbon economy

Recently, I was interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson for Counterpoint, a current affairs radio programme broadcast on ABC Radio National. The topic was the potential role of nuclear power in Australia. Below is the transcript of the interview, broadcast on 13 July, and a link to the original .MP3 audio of the broadcast. I’d be interested in any feedback you, as readers, have — not only on the content of the interview (remember, this was done off the top of my head, so there may be a few minor misstatements), but also on the effectiveness (or not) of this sort of communication strategy.

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When it comes to climate change and reducing carbon emissions Barry Brook challenges many in the environmental movement to think again about nuclear power. He says in the future we’ll need more energy, not less, and the only way to meet increased demands for power is an inconvenient solution — nuclear.

Download audio (ABC Radio National, Counterpoint, 13 July 2009)

Transcript

Paul Comrie-Thomson: First to nuclear power, the old bete noire of the environmental movement. Is it time for rehabilitation? Could nuclear power in fact be the technological answer to climate change? Three Mile Island and Chernobyl still linger in the minds of many, but Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, says it’s time to move past old prejudices. So, Barry Brook, just how safe are current nuclear reactors?

Barry Brook: Modern reactors are designed on the principle of being inherently safe, and what that means is they have a number of design principles that are based on the laws of physics. So in order for them to melt down or explode there would have to be an extraordinary set of circumstances where you would have multiple systems failing, and in the new reactors that are being proposed, even more than that, you would have to have the laws of physics being violated, which of course is not particularly likely.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: It’s not likely. So Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, given the new reactors, are now a thing of the past?

Barry Brook: Chernobyl was a special type of reactor built by the Russians to breed plutonium for bombs, so it had a graphite core and it meant that if you had problems in the reactor where the water flow would stop, it would actually run out of control. No American reactor can actually do that. And Chernobyl also lacked a containment building, which was another problem because when it started a graphite fire all of the radioactive material was dispersed into the air, another disaster. That also can’t happen in an American reactor.

Three Mile Island was a lesson where there was poor training of staff and a failed system for notifying the staff of actually what was happening. And so they made mistakes such as opening valves when they should have been shutting them and letting water in when they shouldn’t have. But Three Mile Island didn’t hurt anyone. There were no fatalities, there was no radioactivity of any note released into the environment. So even in that worst-case scenario for an American reactor there were essentially no problems. But of course the reactor was destroyed, it cost millions of dollars, and it set back the American nuclear program by decades really because of the effect on public opinion. That’s gradually changed.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And also it happened 12 days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome.

Barry Brook: But of course what was speculated in The China Syndrome was that the reactor would melt completely through the floor of the building into the Earth and cause a steam explosion, it would spread radioactivity everywhere. It didn’t eventuate because of course that was a completely unrealistic scenario.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Yes, very convincing but unrealistic…convincing in terms of entertainment. Let’s explore a little more costs and build times. You say that we now have standardised modular passive safety designs which can be factory built and shipped to site. You say they’re game changes for the industry. How does it change the game?

Barry Brook: One of the biggest problems with the American reactor program and why it stalled in the ’70s and ’80s, Three Mile Island notwithstanding, was that the costs were escalating. When it cost $300 million to build a reactor in 1972 and it cost $6 billion in the early ’80s, something has gone terribly wrong. Part of that was the legal suits that extended the reactor certification time over to a period of decades. So part of it was the anti-nuclear movement that did that, but also a part of it was each design was different. So everything was built anew, new features were tried out, every design needed a special certificate to actually be built and then another certificate to be run. So the whole system ultimately was set up to fail and things became more and more expensive.

If you can have a system where you have a standardised design with components that are built to a particular specification, if you can have components that are built in a factory and shipped to site rather than everything needed to be constructed on site, if you have modules where they’re smaller such as they can be put on a rail car or on a large truck and taken to site and the many of these units put together to constitute a plant, then you can start to see that there’s huge benefits in terms of efficiency, the fact that you don’t need a standardised certificate for each and every new reactor, that there are economic benefits in building multiple units at a given factory. The places where this is happening is China and India right now. So although these have often been blamed as some of the worst carbon polluters, ultimately and ironically they could be the nations that lead us out of the carbon economy and into a low carbon economy based on nuclear power.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: The 2006 Switkowski Report on nuclear power in Australia, it hardly mentioned fast reactors. How do you see their potential?

Barry Brook: Fast reactors are an old type of reactor design. The first reactor, the Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 built in the US to work out many of the glitches in nuclear power production was a fast reactor, but almost every reactor that’s been built since and all of the currently commercial reactors in the US, in Japan and in France are what’s known as light water reactors. They’re basically two designs; a pressurised water reactor and a boiling water reactor. They use water to slow down neutrons in a nuclear reaction to make the fission of uranium 235 more likely…it’s a bit of a technical topic, I know, but basically it makes it a lot easier to generate power from uranium 235.

Fast reactors use a different technology where instead of using water to cool the fuel and transfer heat to a steam turbine they use a liquid metal. Sodium is often used, lead is another possibility. It’s hard to imagine that you could have a molten metal as the coolant in a reactor but that’s exactly what it does. And it has a number of advantages because you can not only burn all of the uranium 235 but you can burn the uranium 238 which people may have heard of as depleted uranium, the uranium that’s left over after you’ve tried to enrich it to increase the concentration of uranium 235. It’s the stuff they use in bullets and tank armour, it’s very common. If you can get the energy out of that, which is what fast reactors can do, then potentially you can unlock 100 to 300 times the energy we’re currently using out of uranium. And even better than that, we can take all of the spent fuel that’s been generated by all the world’s nuclear reactors to date and generate power from that, and change it from a 100,000-year management problem to about a 300-year management problem.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Which is why you say nuclear power is the world’s primary source of sustainable carbon free energy. It’s a big claim.

Barry Brook: Well, every source of energy currently requires carbon to construct it, but then there are a range of technologies that don’t actually emit any carbon once they’re generating power, and nuclear power is one of those. The great advantage of nuclear power is rather than relying on a diffuse and variable power source, which is what most renewable energies rely upon, it’s relying on an extremely concentrated power source. A kilogram of uranium contains about as much energy as two million kilograms of coal, and coal is already a concentrated form of energy. So it’s an incredibly concentrated form of energy if you can harness it to its full advantage.

I probably didn’t answer your earlier question completely in that you asked why there weren’t any fast reactors right now. The main reason is a simple matter of economics, that fast reactors require a special type of reprocessing of the fuel known as pyroprocessing which doesn’t separate plutonium, so you can’t use it to make a bomb, but it requires a little bit of extra money to close the fuel cycle. And in an era when uranium is very cheap, it’s not worth paying that. Once uranium gets above about $150 a kilogram or so, these become highly economical. So to date it’s been the abundance of uranium and the relative lack of concern about storing nuclear waste over the long-term that has I think stopped the commercial development of these reactors.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Many will say that this is all very well but renewables are the answer. But what role do you see wind and solar playing over the next decade?

Barry Brook: I think in Australia they’re going to play the primary role in trying to reduce our dependence on carbon based energy for the simple fact that it’s going to take ten years to get nuclear power here, and that process will involve getting public support, discussions on the merits of nuclear power and the potential problems (I don’t think we’re having that educated debate in Australia right now), right through to setting up an organisation that can certify reactors and getting the first ones built, which might take four or so years. So that’s a ten-year process, in which case we can give our attention to wind and solar and see what they can achieve.

My pessimism of wind and solar is not that they won’t have a role in our future energy supply but that they are not able to supply sufficient energy to power an industrial economy or indeed to allow the economy to continue to grow in that way. There are many problems with back-up, with storage of energy, with the sort of grid connections you’re going to require to remote areas to harness energy from these areas, because of course because of the diffuse and variable nature of these technologies they require a continental scale deployment to provide enough power for all of society. We’ve only done them on a very small scale so far. If you look at all of the power generated in Australia, it’s only just over 1% now that’s generated by the sort of renewables that we’re talking about which are wind and solar, what is often termed techno-solar, as opposed to other forms of renewable energy that we do rely on quite a lot which is hydro power and biomass burnings, burning wood and other forms of animal and plant generated produce.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And of course looking at what people call the new economy or moving away from a carbon economy, people talk of desalination and electric vehicles, but you make the point that they’re energy-hungry enterprises, and so if we’re going in that direction we will need more energy, not less.

Barry Brook: Yes, that’s exactly right. Right now we have a convenient energy carrier that’s available for us to mine, which is oil and, to a lesser degree, gas. When we are depleted in that energy carrier, which we use for almost all of our vehicular transport and heating needs, we’re going to have to create one, and the way we’re going to create it is through electricity. So ultimately we’re going to become a 100% electrified society, notwithstanding the contribution that may be made from biofuels, things such as the aviation industry. So if we’re going to move from being about a 30% electrical society through to a 100% electrical society, it’s pretty easy to do the maths and find that at the very least power demand is going to triple.

I can’t see any way around that if we’re going to decarbonise the economy which in my view is going to be required for multiple reasons. Whether or not you’re concerned with climate change, there are issues of pollution involved with coal such as particulates and mercury and heavy metals and sulphates that cause acid rain. We’d rather get rid of that if we can. There are certainly sharp limitations on the supply of oil and ultimately gas. So at some point we’re going to have to move our society away from fossil fuel dependence to other energy sources. I think that nuclear power is a sufficiently sustainable source of power to provide all of the growth in our energy demands that are going to come in the next million years or so.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: This requires a radical rethink and you said it’s time for green groups to become rational, promethean environmentalists. Is this call falling on deaf ears at the moment?

Barry Brook: I think it’s not. I’ve talked to many environmentalists who are greatly concerned about climate change and concerned about energy supply in the future and having a low carbon economy. Most of them are locked into the thinking that renewable energy can do it. I’m a supporter of renewable energy, I think we need to be pushing this, but I am not deluding myself into imagining that this is going to provide all or even the predominance of our energy supply.

And when I actually talk to most environmentalists about the benefits of nuclear power and the fact that many of the old myths and half-truths that hang around the nuclear power industry have either been…were never true in the first place or have been superseded by technological developments, they’re willing to listen. I would suggest there’s maybe 10% to 20% of people who are so ardently anti-nuclear that they’re immune to any such argument and they’ll never change their mind, but I think the vast majority of people who are concerned about the environment and, let’s face it, everyone is concerned about having a planet that’s fit to live on and fit to pass to our children, anyone who listened sensibly to those arguments is willing to consider the arguments for nuclear power. So I think it would be quite reasonable to get 80% of the population on board with this idea.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: And yet in Canberra we hear the cry ‘Do you want a nuclear power plant in your backyard?’ This is sort of thrown up…during the last election campaign it was said ‘Where are the nuclear power plants going to be placed?’ and so on. There’s a bit of work to be done there in terms of public debate, isn’t there?

Barry Brook: There is. Of course you could ask the similar question ‘Would you like a 30-metre wind turbine put in your backyard?’ or ‘Would you like a coal-fired power station next to you?’ and I think the answer would be no in those two cases as well. There’s always this NIMBY factor to overcome. With nuclear power plants the best place to put them is along the coastline so they can use cooling water from the ocean rather than using it from drinking supplies, although if you’ve got a large enough body of water even that’s not necessarily a problem. But I think ultimately the first reactors will probably be built in places where there are not a lot of people but where there are transmission lines.

One ideal place I can imagine is in places in WA or South Australia where there’s large mining developments, a huge demand for desalinated water which nuclear plants are very good at supplying, and a huge demand for power for mine expansion. If you can expand the mining industry on the basis of low carbon or zero carbon energy and supply those water needs as well, it just seems like a win-win scenario. It will prove to people the benefits of nuclear power in Australia, whereas people in Europe, in France and Belgium, are living cheek by jowl with nuclear power plants and have done so for decades and are extremely happy with them. I just think it takes a bit of time for people to demonstrate to people the advantages of having these reactors, which are very safe.

If you live next door to a nuclear reactor, there are a number of radiological studies done on a hypothetical person called Fencepost Man who’s supposed to have his house on the fencepost on the boundary of a nuclear power site. He would get approximately one millirem of radiation more than the general public, and that might sound like a lot but in fact the general public gets over 300 millirems of radiation each year just from natural sources. So essentially there’s no difference between living next door to a nuclear power plant and living in most other places in the world. And indeed, if you live on top of a granite intrusion you’d get about twice that. So people tend to be a bit irrational about radiation and we need to have a bit of an education campaign about that too.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook, summing up your position, you’re painting a picture that we have nuclear power plants in coastal regions next to desalination plants in mining regions. It all sounds very agreeable. What main public problems and political problems do you see in this becoming accepted as the way to go?

Barry Brook: One of the problems people are concerned about is cost, that there are heavy costs involved in setting up any sort of new industry. In places like America there’s been a lot of speculation about how much their new nuclear plants are going to cost. I think we will know a lot more about costs in the next few years because China in particular are building a lot of reactors. They’re currently constructing 12 of them with plans for another 160 gigawatts of nuclear reactors within the next decade or so after that. We’re talking big numbers here. If the economics are favourable in China as a result of this build-out of nuclear power, then I think the arguments for replacing our current coal-fired power stations as they are retired or indeed retiring them early with nuclear power plants rather than renewable energy may become very relevant, because in this next ten years we’re going to find out the true costs of building a substantial amount of renewable energy to power Australia.

We’ve got ten years essentially to build 20% of our power supply, according to the expanded renewable energy target. We’ll know a lot about costs by then and I think that may well reframe the argument substantially and have people talking very seriously about nuclear power. But my warning is that if you haven’t started the process now, if you haven’t started the public discussions, the ideas for how you might get certification of these reactors here, where the suitable sites may be, having the public meetings, getting public support, it will take another ten years after we’ve found out that renewable energy can’t do it, and that’s just too late.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook, thanks very much for talking to Counterpoint.

Barry Brook: It was a pleasure.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Barry Brook holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is the director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide.

Discussion Thread: Is the EIA forecast of 2016 energy prices realistic?

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently (April 2009) made a forward projection of estimated energy generation costs for 2016 in its Annual Energy Outlook 2009. The results are given in the table I’ve reproduced below (click on it for a larger version) — the original comes from the Next Big Future blog, here. Nuclear Green also has a post on it, with an alternative figure, here, NEI Notes here, and there is an excellent summary provided by the Institute for Energy Research, here and here. The IER are the guys who extracted this data from the AEO 2009 report and summarised it in a useful format. Make sure you read these links: they’re packed with useful analysis.

Prices are expressed in 2007 US dollar terms per megawatt hour [MWh]. To convert these figures to kilowatt hours [kWh] — more relevant to you, perhaps, because you probably use between 120 and 250 kWh per day — simply divide these figures by 10, and read as cents instead of dollars. So, for conventional coal, the table tells you the cost is projected to be 9.4 c/kWh, whilst for wind it is 14.2 c/kWh. O&E stands for “operations and maintenance”. The levelised energy cost is an economic assessment of the cost the energy-generating system including all the costs over its lifetime: initial investment, operations and maintenance, cost of fuel, cost of capital. These costs deliberately exclude state and federal subsidies, to give you the real figures. The AEO 2009 report also includes an energy demand projection through to 2030.

One might choose to dispute any of the entries given above, for a variety of sound reasons. For instance, the cost of Advanced Nuclear is based on an overnight capital cost of about $8 billion per GW installed capacity for the US, when the recent Asian experience (Japan, Korea, China) is considerably lower (between 1/2 and 1/4 this price). Likewise, the price of gas might rise considerably higher than the EIA anticipates, especially regionally, as geographically important supplies dry up in places like the US and LNG prices rise concomitantly due to export/import bottlenecks. I’ll be interested to see the debate that ensues in the comments below, especially from those who advocate cheap renewable energy.

Topics for discussion might include the following: Do you believe the EIA forecast is reasonable overall? What about for your ‘favourite’ energy source? If not, why not? What’s been left out? Have hidden costs (e.g., investor confidence, energy storage and backup, etc.) been adequately represented? Has peak oil or the ongoing effects of the global financial crisis been properly factored in?

Voluntary Actions and the Rudd Government’s changes to its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System

Guest Post by Tim Kelly. Tim works as a Principal Climate Change Advisor in the Water Industry and is a regular contributor to Brave New Climate.

The Australian Government is belatedly acknowledging the harm that its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will have on the effectiveness of voluntary actions taken to reduce emissions.

The media release from the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Minister For Climate Change and Water on May 4, 2009, stated that : “The Rudd Government has listened to Australian households who have raised concerns that their individual efforts to reduce emissions will not be adequately taken into account under the CPRS”, and a number of measures were proposed.

So did the Government listen enough and has it has fixed the problems in regards to voluntary actions as claimed, or made them worse?

Firstly, this discussion is not about the overall target or whether the potential change to the upper end of the Government’s potential target provides sufficient improvement. Secondly, whilst I do believe that voluntary choices for businesses and households to avoid emissions intensive products and services are essential in an effective low emissions economy, this comparison can be seen in my joint submission [1] with Professor Barry Brook to the Senate Economics Committee.

Where do the benefits of voluntary actions currently belong?

Under emissions trading, the benefits of voluntary actions are changed or cancelled, yet many believe that there are simple fixes that can be applied. It is important to understand how voluntary mechanisms work, whether actions are effective, and who owns the benefits. This understanding can serve as the foundation to determining whether the actions still have merit under emissions trading. So lets consider several examples:

1) Energy Efficiency: Without emissions trading, where individuals, households and businesses find ways to reduce their electricity use, fuel use or consumption of other products and services, their greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

2) GreenPower: Under Australian law, GreenPower works as a donation. Customer emissions are not reduced (despite marketing messages that suggest otherwise [2]) but new renewable energy is created which serves to avoid emissions from non renewable power stations so National emissions are reduced.

3) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are sold: Where households esablish these systems, their emissions are reduced, but their RECs are signed across to third parties, either other renewable energy that was already required by law is no longer needed so there is zero reduction in emissions Australia wide or, their RECs are used to create GreenPower that double counts the greenhouse reduction and use benefits as it is sold to other households and businesses negating the additionality of the efforts of the GreenPower Customer.

4) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are kept by the householders: Household emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

So there are a number of good outcomes and wasted outcomes from current voluntary actions, and I maintain that there is an urgency to either reform GreenPower and electricity emissions accounting or clarify that it is really just a donation system for the benefits to be shared amongst all grid customers in proportion of their use so that the Trades Practices Act (1974) is complied with. (Also note that this matter is about the legal assignment of benefits and has nothing to do with how the grid is used or how inputs or outputs to the grid are measured).

The basic problem of voluntary actions under an emissions trading system.

As pointed out [3] by me since September 2008, by Richard Dennis in his discussions from the Australia Institute, and others where greenhouse gas emissions are voluntarily reduced by an individual or business under an emissions cap and trade scheme, this frees up permits that can then be used elsewhere in the market resulting in zero reductions in Australia’s National emissions.

So let us run through the same four examples again, under an emissions trading scheme with no Government fixes of problems. (I will skip the some of the details that still apply).

1) Energy Efficiency: Individual, household or businesses reduce their emissions but National emissions are no longer reduced reduced as permits are redirectred and used elsewhere.

2) GreenPower: Customer emissions are not reduced (as before), but now National emissions are not reduced either. The Nation’s biggest electricity users receive the lion’s share of the scope 2 greenhouse reductions where the State grid emissions intensity factors are reduced.

3) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are sold: Household emissions are reduced but National emissions are not reduced because a) renewables that were already required by law are no longer needed and b) because permits are redirectred and used elsewhere in the market.

4) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are kept by the householders: Household emissions are reduced but National emissions are no longer reduced.

By using these examples we can see that individual actions to reduce emissions become less meaningful under emissions trading, compounding a number of pre-existing problems.

Government contradictory approaches on how voluntary actions have meaning under the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System:

In the Government’s Discussion Paper on a National Carbon Offsets Standard, and in follow up claims by Minister Penny Wong there have been a number of explanations on how voluntary actions might work under the CPRS. The Government first claimed that traditional tangible voluntary action still has value in that it reduces:

“the demand for permits. This will in turn reduce the carbon price, reducing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy decreases it becomes increasingly feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets”.

With this approach, it is the “feasibility” aspect that determines whether the cap is reduced in following 5 year target and gateway periods that determine how quickly Australia will move towards and beyond its mid term target in five yearly blocks. My own view is that this approach was probably close to how the scheme would work but it has virtually been abandoned by the changes announced on May 4, 2008.

Voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units (also referred to as permits)

The contradictory approach comes from the concept of voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units AEUs. The basic idea is that if there is a fixed amount of permits released, and persons or entities acquire these permits but retire some of them voluntarily without causing emissions then this will cause a reduction in total permits available for pollution so National emissions will be reduced.

There are two fatal flaws with this approach as follows:

a) Where AEUs are released in surplus, this approach has no impact. This can where the the cap is breached and unlimited permits begin to be released as can occur under the CPRS proposal for $10/tonne unlimited permits in the first year followed by $40/tonne unlimited permits commencing in the subsequent year. As soon as the cap is breached, there would be proof that voluntary retirement of permits has failed.

Alternatively, recession can cause permit surplus (as currently being experienced in the European emissions trading system) meaning that individuals may be retiring permits that may not have been used anyway.

b) Secondly, the logic is a complete contradiction of the Government’s case for traditional tangible voluntary actions to have meaning. This is what will happen:

Voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units causes greater AEU scarcity. This will in turn increase the carbon price, increaseing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy increases it becomes less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets.

In addition, unlike traditional actions like permanent improvements in efficiency or additional renewable energy generation, throwing AEUs in the bin, does not create infrastructure that would improve Australia’s capacity to reduce emissions further.

Changes made to the CPRS on May 4, 2009

Australian Carbon Trust

Sounding like something dreamed up in an episode of “ The Hollow Men”, the Government has proposed the Australian Carbon Trust where Australians can donate money that will be used to “fund efficiency improvements in commercial buildings and businesses”. Well at first glance this sounds good but this does not reduce emissions under the Government’s scheme so it is really just more charity for businesses. Which ones, we don’t know!

Voluntary Retirement of Permits

The Federal Government has proposed that “a new website will provide a one-stop shop for individuals and households to simply calculate their energy use and buy and retire carbon pollution permits under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.

The question must be asked as to why individuals and households would buy and surrender permits? This will cause greater AEU scarcity, increase the carbon price unnecessarily, increase the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement and make the situation less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets! This is the Government’s own logic applied the defence of traditional voluntary actions but acting in the opposite direction.

One further complication is that as the price of pollution increases in time (and it must to achieve deep cuts in emissions) the cost of this approach increases in a perverse manner. In a propper functioning market, the cost of voluntary action to reduce emissions should decrease in comparison to greenhouse intensive options, not be tied with the cost of pollution.

Changes to GreenPower

The Government will now retire an Australian Emissions Permit associated with GreenPower sales above a threshold. This means that the indirect benefit of GreenPower that as previously described by the Department of Climate Change will reduce the demand for permits. This will in turn reduce the carbon price, reducing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy decreases it becomes increasingly feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets is now cancelled because a permit is now going to be removed to increase the demand for permits. This will in turn increase the carbon price, increase the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy increases it becomes less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets.

So with the Government’s proposed change, we end up back where we started from. Decreased scarcity to ultimately reduce emissions is undone with re-introduced scarcity. I am astounded that the Australian Government has used the same logic at once in two different directions claiming that either way emissions will be reduced.

GreenPower Threshold

GreenPower threshold that causes AUE retirement only for purchases above 2009 levels has focused attention on the fairness of the threshold rather than the mechanism itself. Whilst the use of thresholds to count or discount voluntary efforts of individuals in any given year is blatantly unfair, it is irrelevant and diversionary in this instance as the whole concept of throwing permits in the bin is flawed anyway and the general problems of whether voluntary action is meaningful under an emissions cap and trade scheme are not resolved.

Furthermore, none of the underlying problems of GreenPower, its greenhouse accounting and its marketing messages have been resolved. The Government is proposing to recognise greenhouse reductions of a product that has no greenhouse reductions to offer, as these benefits have already been assigned to all grid customers under Australian Law. The Government might has well retire an AEU with old shoes because in terms of greenhouse reductions they have the same merit.

Efficiency

So where does efficiency end up under the Government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System? Whilst not making a clear unambiguous statement, the Australian Government has now progressed on a pathway that suggests that energy efficiency which reduces the emissions of households and businesses is futile in terms of emissions reduction unless further payments are made to the Australian Carbon Trust to throw permits in the bin.

The Governments Fact Sheet on Individual Action reads as follows:

“Web based tools will enable households and small businesses to calculate their energy use and the dollar savings that can be made through actions to reduce energy use such as installing energy efficient appliances. Individuals can then pledge the resulting savings, or any other amount, to the Energy Efficiency Savings Pledge Fund. The fund will buy and cancel carbon pollution permits to create additional emission reductions. Individuals could also choose to purchase and cancel offset credits complying with the Government’s forthcoming National Carbon Offset Standard“

If my family and I go a bit hungry and shiver in the dark and manage to halve our personal emissions this doesn’t count under the Government’s new implied perspective on voluntary action. Instead of being able to use our savings to pay off our mortgage, to reduce emissions we then need to donate our savings to the Energy Efficiency Savings Pledge Fund presumably managed by the Australian Carbon Trust where it will be used to buy a permit which forces up electricity prices, does nothing tangible to reduce emissions and makes the situation less feasible to reduce the cap in the future.

In my view, if my family reduces its emissions by halving resource use then this should be recognised in regards to our personal footprint, and if the Federal Government is now suggesting that under the CPRS our actions are not genuine and that we should also buy and throw permits in the bin, through a mechanism that cannot work in the real world then the system is wrong and it is offensive.

Conclusion

Given the choice between throwing permits in the bin or enhancing traditional voluntary actions in support of the concept that this will provide greater capacity to reduce emissions and ultimately make a diference, the latter option is better.

Both options are less than satisfactory. Both options cannot be used at the same time and still be regarded as credible.

It is my view that the Federal Government has not fully understood the problems of voluntary actions under its CPRS, and its proposed mechanisms for voluntary action are unrealistic, contradictory (therefore self cancelling), unfair and ineffective. The situation is no better as a result of the Government’s changes to recognise GreenPower, or its Carbon Trust. A more transparent approach would have been to be upfront and state that voluntary actions don’t work effectively under emissions trading.

The tragedy in all of this is that the Federal Government is proposing a scheme that is more like a taxation mechanism anyway because of its significant interventions to manipulate the price, the setting of upper limits starting at $10 per tonne CO₂-e and increasing to $40 per tonne CO₂-e in the second year, and unlimited permits in any given year. This approach relies on managing the price beneath the cap in a way that is more akin to a carbon tax scheme. The only difference is that all actions are voluntary and enhanced under a carbon tax approach whereas voluntary actions are harmed under the proposed emissions cap trade scheme.