California’s three biggest utilities are sparring with their own customers about systems that store energy from the sun, opening another front in the battle that’s redefining the mission of electricity generators.
Edison International (EIX), PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy (SRE) said they’re putting up hurdles to some battery backups wired to solar panels because they can’t be certain the power flowing back to the grid from the units is actually clean energy.
The dispute threatens the state’s $2 billion rooftop solar industry and indicates the depth of utilities’ concerns about consumers producing their own power. People with rooftop panels are already buying less electricity, and adding batteries takes them closer to the day they won’t need to buy from the local grid at all, said Ben Peters, a government affairs analyst at Mainstream Energy Corp., which installs solar systems.
“The utilities clearly see rooftop solar as the next threat,” Peters said from his office in Sunnyvale, California. “They’re trying to limit the growth.”
California is the largest of the 43 states encouraging renewables by requiring utilities to buy electricity from consumer solar installations, typically at the same price that customers pay for power from the grid. The policy, known asnet metering, offers a way for households to reduce their bills. It underpinned a 78 percent surge in the state’s residential installations in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
As Danny Kennedy, author of the book “Rooftop Revolution” and co-founder of solar company Sungevity in California, said in an interview with Alternet earlier this year:
Solar power represents a change in electricity that has a potentially disruptive impact on power in both the literal sense (meaning how we get electricity) and in the figurative sense of how we distribute wealth and power in our society. Fossil fuels have led to the concentration of power whereas solar’s potential is really to give power over to the hands of people. This shift has huge community benefits while releasing our dependency on the centralized, monopolized capital of the fossil fuel industry. So it’s revolutionary in the technological and political sense.
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The tensions between decentralized forms of energy like rootop solar or small-scale wind and traditional large-scale utilities is nothing new, but as the crisis of climate change has spurred a global grassroots movement push for a complete withdrawal from the fossil fuel and nuclear paradigm that forms the basis of the current electricity grid, these tensions are growing.
Below, Lester Brown on the vision of a Green future:
“The utilities clearly see rooftop solar as the next threat,” Peters said from his office in Sunnyvale, California. “They’re trying to limit the growth.”
When the power goes out who are you going to blame? It’s a simple question.
When you’ve finished covering your roof with panels your going to be able to accumulate enough energy to brew your coffee in the morning. That’s if you have expensive batteries and converters installed along with the panels.
Won’t that be nice?
Unsustainable ‘American Dream” lifestyle is fading, but not without pain. LED lighting requires much lighter, much cheaper wiring, microwave cooking, much smaller currents, super insulated housing of more reasonable size, much less heating/cooling energy, recent transistor advances consume less, lower voltage currents, previously corporately ‘hidden” refrigeration needs little, lower current. Fact is: whole realistic households outside the influences of the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores persuasions do exist! Germans, for one small example, enjoy furnace/generator setups that yield heat and electricity from the same natural gas or propane or LP gas, your choice, Americans waste on heat alone! Solar water heaters heat homes at night all over Europe, Asian! Yankee Doodle misses out! Hot water in China comes for free from roof top Solar water heaters? U.S. “transmission Losses” on power lines are so over 50% for fucks sakes! Up the frequency/voltages for a better deal? Geothermal systems heat whole homes in Canada by robbing heat from lakes, concentrating it for use in the home, often offering higher than 60% cost reduction over conventional methods and providing “Free’ air conditioning in the summer months.
You can buy them in the USA also. The domestic name is “Freewatt” (the web site is down at the moment). But even the Freewatt is not a panacea; it is reliant on natural gas, and cannot use any other source of energy. If something happened to gas supplies or prices, Freewatt owners would be screwed.
One of my on-line buddies is married to a gal from Shanghai and visits with family there. Their Shanghai solar DHW is good for about 2 very brief showers in the morning. No word on what sort of space heat it contributes, but I suspect it’s not much.
The true figure is about 7%, and I’ll let you in on a secret: you will be taken more seriously if you are not obviously deluded, disinformed or lying.
I think the lower the wire gauge, the less resistance there is, so it might be better to have thicker wiring in your home, even though it’s more expensive up front.
Also, if you have a hot water heater outside your conditioned air envelope, such as a basement, a garage, or in the in-between space of condos/townhomes, and live in a hotter climate, there are now hybrid heat pump water heaters that use only 1/3 the energy of an electric heater, or only about 1/2 of that of a gas heater. They’re a bit more expensive up front, but because they save so much energy, they’re cheaper over the life of the heater. In some cases, it’s cheaper to rip out a fairly new, inefficient heater and replace it with the heat pump system. Certainly they’re cheaper than solar heaters.
Advancing science morphs the American dream.
This localizing renewable energy use is the downfall of what exactly but office towers full of number crunchers and deadbeat dads.
My guess is that the real problem is Califoronimics. Calif. regulators are requiring the utilities to pay homeowners full retail price for wholesale electricity, if it is “green,” and they’ve taken peak-demand pricing to illogical extremes. That means that in some places, during peak periods, homeowners can get prices approaching $1/kw-hr for “green” electricity. That creates an incentive for people to find ways of selling back conventional electricity, while pretending that it is “green” electricity, to get higher prices for it.
If the pricing were based on actual costs, rather than politics, it wouldn’t matter whether the electricity was “green” or conventional, and the whole argument would go away.
Here’s an interesting & very detailed write-up by a “green” homeowner, who’s using a large rooftop PV array to drive his net power bill down to approximately zero.
How much is TonyBoy Watts paying you for links to his site?
Twice what he’s paying you, MM.
Anthony did use a little article of mine, though, on Saturday — and, since you’re sure to ask, he paid me only half as much as Peter pays me for livening things up here.
From what I’ve seen of your posting here, whatever you’re getting is 10x too much.
your check, as always, is in the mail
Anthony Watts asks whether Bill McKibben has solar panels on his home. Yes, he does.
Anthony Watts is the poster boy for why a price on carbon works. Like many people, he doesn’t care about climate change, but he does like money.
Thanks.
It took a bit of digging because any search for “McKibben Solar” leads to story about him trying to get Obama to accept one of Carter’s original panels but I did finally find a story he wrote in 2007 for the Sierra Club.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200707/mckibben.asp
So, McKibben has been walking the talk for a long time, despite all the spew that gets thrown at him by Tonyboy’s cooligans.
It doesn’t say exactly when he added solar to his home but it was back before the flood of cheap PV and McKibben lives in New England not supersunny California like Watts.
Bill’s green to his core; Tony’s only green is in his wallet.
The problem with requiring utilities to pay customers for their power at the same price that customers pay for power from the grid is that it doesn’t consider the cost to the utilities to distribute the electricity they are producing. In theory a customer with solar panels could make use of the utilities’ electrical grids without paying a dime! Well except for the basic customer fee. My bet is the utilities respond by raising the customer fee on everyone. If you don’t have all the capital costs and overhead of an electric utility you should not be getting paid back the same amount for the energy you sell as for the energy you buy.
The customers wouldn’t just make use of the grid for free, but also get the use of all of the backup generation, reactive power and everything else that the utility pays for with its per-kWh fees and not pay a dime for it. This just shifts costs to others.
The utilities may not be allowed to raise the customer fee. This sort of political market-rigging will not end well, but most people are idiots and will blame the utilities when things go wrong.
What could happen, if stuff isn’t planned in advance, is solar and wind will destroy the utility’s profit, once they are built up enough, and then there won’t be any money to update the grid to a ‘smart’ status. This will leave wind and solar’s contribution stuck in the mud at some number less that what it needed to go full green. Then we’re stuck hoping that wind folks will just keep on building, so as to achieve enough over-build to replicate a relatively flat base load (somewhere around a capacity 3x demand). Smart Grid needs a Smart Plan to pull it off.
In Germany, there are points where there is so much green energy in the system, it’s making the wholesale price of electricity drop, and since green energy gets higher priority at the switch, fossil generation at times is being payed a negative price for their energy. Certainly, they’ll phase out their incentives, and this will generate some cash flow, but at what point does the ‘smart grid’ tariff show up?
You touch on grid management and RE surpluses.
The only way to get a handle on that is with storage on a gargantuan scale. To give you an idea of the scale required, let’s assume that powering the US grid with RE requires storage holding 20% of annual generation (for seasonal buffering). At an average power of about 450 GW, storage requirements come to 90 GW-yr, equivalent to a bit under 700 megatons of TNT.
With fossil and nuclear, the energy buffer is mostly in the ground. But as soon as you insist on running on energy flows in the sun and wind, you have to do all of this buffering yourself. That is no small task, and the failure of even the most ardent proponents to suggest a serious plan (with numbers and a pricetag) for doing it tells me that even they do not believe it’s possible.
already happening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/business/energy-environment/battery-seen-as-way-to-cut-heat-related-power-losses.html
meanwhile, Germany has now focused on storage the way they focused on solar years ago, indicating we are about to see a jump in deployment and a drop in price. history matters.
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/12/german-energy-storage-plan-could-trigger-new-market-boom/
Because of the refusal of this blog’s software to use the full window width for comments, I’ve put my reply at the base level here:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/10/14/california-utilities-face-rooftop-revolution/comment-page-1/#comment-30304
Regulated utilities do not attract the innovative and risk-taking folks that are needed when there is a major shift in the environment. To be fair, they’ve played by the rules for a long time and throwing them under the bus when a virtually instantaneous (by their watches) new paradigm hits their industry is not equitable. Also, we do need their grid, and will for some time to come. So let’s not treat them as the enemy, let’s ease them into a partnership and that includes paying them fairly for the use of their grid now, with a long term plan for a new kind of decentralized grid. Maybe even help them hire some innovators.
I’m re-parenting this comment at the zero indent level for readability.
Greenman3610 wrote:
That’s nowhere near the scale or cost required, which is why I keep telling people to do the numbers. From the article:
This is suitable for daily cycling, if the cycle life is long enough. But storing March winds to power August’s air conditioning? That’s one cycle a year. If you have to pay 7% for money, a $160/kWh battery cycled once a year costs you $11.20/kWh just for the interest.
If you want to play with these numbers yourself, make a spreadsheet (I’m using oocalc). Label cells A1 through A5 “Interest, %/yr”, “Calendar life, yrs”, “Cost, $/kWh”, “Cycles per year”, and “Cycle depth, %” respectively. Label cells A7-A9 “Annual cost, $”, “Throughput, kWh/yr” and “Storage cost, $/kWh”.
The formula for cell B7 is “=PMT( B1/100, B2, -B3, 0)”
The formula for cell B8 is “=B4*B5/100”
The formula for cell B9 is “=B7/B8”
For a 20-year battery costing $160/kWh, running 260 cycles/year to 75% depth and money at 7%, storage costs 7.7¢/kWh. But if you cut this to 1 cycle/year, cost leaps to more than $20/kWh. Conclusion: You can afford to do daily load-levelling and peak-shaving with batteries at $160/kWh, but not seasonal storage. At 52 cycles per year to 75%, roughly corresponding to cycles of front passages and wind strength, storage costs almost 39¢/kWh. Maybe you can afford to buffer wind on such cycles, but even a week of storage costs a whale of a lot per kWh.
Heavy reliance on wind really requires storage costing a few tens of dollars per kWh. Storing electricity on annual cycles requires costs well under a dollar per kWh of capacity.
Do you know what $160/kWh batteries ARE well-suited for? A grid with lots of nuclear baseload, time-shifting wee-hours generation to the following afternoon (daily cycles). Also electric vehicles. Those two things would de-carbonize huge amounts of the economy at a relatively bargain price.
storage for nuclear baseload is the reason we have the Ludington pumped storage plant here in Michigan – it’s something like 1800 MW and being expanded. There are dozens of facilities like it – and, using a suite of emerging approaches, could be more.
http://jbsnews.com/2013/10/11/old-iron-mine-repurposed-for-new-pumped-storage-hydroelectricity/
I think the March to august time frame is unrealistic – and you assume no sun or wind for 12 months to get your pessimistic numbers. You also assume, for your .39/kwh estimate, that the technology being implemented in NY will never improve, never get cheaper. This would be counter to experience. I don’t think its a stretch to imagine that with the amounts of money and engineering now being mustered, this storage tech could very well drop your .39/kwh dramatically over 20 years.
Also unrealistic to assume that months-long storage, if indeed it’s EVER needed, will be needed right away. Germany has several states where wind is 50 percent of demand with no large storage in place. There are models that show the possibility of needing no storage, or very little, for all-renewable economy.
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/the-grid/solar-wind-storage-could-supply-99-percent-of-grid-by-2030.html
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/new-york-energy-031213.html
In addition, I’m not sure your model addresses the type of storage mentioned in the original post, i.e., on site small scale home or business storage. This would clearly be a part of a much smarter grid, which WILL become a reality in coming decades, and, I predict, grow organically as technologies mature and regulatory schemes catch up.
Part 1/2.
Built for Palisades, specifically; the two can crank out almost 2.7 GW running full bore. Six 312-MW pump-turbine units, 1872 MW nameplate rating. (I live a handful of miles closer to it than you do.) I was unaware of the machinery upgrade, but note what is NOT receiving an upgrade: the size of the reservoir. The only change will be to get water (and energy) in and out faster, not the total amount of energy stored.
Now, consider what you’d have to do to make a facility like Ludington buffer several days of slack generation instead of just the afternoon demand peak. You’d have to let that fixed amount of water (stored energy) out much more slowly, to make it last; over days, not hours. The useful power generating capacity would fall to a fraction of what it is now when it can be refilled at least partly every night, and completely on the weekends. It would be much like Hoover Dam, rated to generate many hundreds of megawatts but lacking the stored energy to run anywhere close to capacity.
Ludington is huge, but it’s tiny compared to what a fully renewable grid would need and going fully RE means switching a lot more than just the electrical grid. As I wrote before, we are talking hundreds of megatons-equivalent of energy storage for current electric consumption alone. Then you add electric vehicles, industrial demand converted from fossil-fired process heat, electrified space heat and DHW…
Now ponder that one load of fuel, roughly 1/3 the total uranium in the reactor, is enough for Palisades to crank out 798 megawatts for about a year and a half. It’s so physically tiny that every bit that’s ever been used by the plant can be stored in a few casks taking up the area of a not-very-large parking lot, and the plant’s exclusion area is by default a wildlife sanctuary. The reservoir for the Ludington plant is 842 acres (1.3 square miles) and is deadly to just about everything multicellular, especially fish. How much of Michigan would you put under massive reservoirs to provide the energy storage you propose? A couple semi-trucks of fresh fuel rods would probably store the same. Which disturbs less land? Which creates less methane from decay of organics? Which sits more lightly on the earth… not forgetting that the storage is one of the smaller elements of the RE system?
It’s more or less what you get with conventional hydro; your reservoir fills up with the spring thaw and you deplete it until the autumn rains, but instead of rain and snowfall you’d be grabbing seasonal peaks of wind and such. In any all-RE scheme, you need to store enough during the times of plenty to coast across the lulls. Suppose only 20% of your net energy needs to be stored season to season; that’s still going to cost a lot, and you’re never going to do it with batteries.
Part 2/2.
That article has been on-line for some time. I ask you to please re-read it closely, because there are spoilers in it. For instance, this:
They’re assuming half of today’s prices, when the model depends heavily on things like offshore wind and the Cape Wind project has been stymied for over a decade and Germany’s build-out is way over budget and schedule. There’s talk about synthetic natural gas made from CO2 and electricity as a backup and motor fuel, but nobody (and I mean NOBODY) will mention what it costs. The rule of thumb is “if they won’t tell you, you can’t afford it.” In other words, driving and cooking and even heating when the RE isn’t working much will be luxuries.
Do you think people will stand for that? They’ll throw out governments, or even riot in the streets.
If you’re seriously concerned about the climate, you’ve got to take GHG emissions as the #2 issue right after survival (physically and politically) and deal with everything else as lower priorities. This is why it stuns me that people are seriously proposing that Ontario and France de-commission their nuclear fleets and build “renewables”. As I write this, the real-time display on Steve Aplin’s blog shows Ontario emitting a mere 35.7 grams CO2 per kWh generated. According to Sunearthtools, Denmark emits just shy of 360 grams CO2 per kWh. That is TEN TIMES AS HIGH AS ONTARIO. In short, if the world’s electric grids were as carbon-stingy as Ontario’s, we would be at least halfway to solving the climate issue already; I’m sure France is as good if not better. To suggest that Ontario and France should raise emissions—and presumably prices—to Danish levels so they can follow a “green path” that nobody has demonstrated successfully is utter, total insanity.
I keep saying that this small on-site storage is only good for daily load-levelling and peak-shaving; you need to re-charge every night, or the rationale falls apart. This means you need available excess power every night, not multi-day lulls. Why am I not getting through?
Ontario only got to those numbers because the greenies & the socialists fought hard to convince all 3 major parties to close all the coal-fired power plants, which should be complete in another couple of years.
They also have well-developed hydroelectricity, nearly equal in capacity to their nuke fleet – a renewable resource that Denmark lacks.
The nuclear industry in the US has done a very poor job of getting out in front of the perceived problems, leaving all the publicity to politicians and activists.
I can recognize the faces and know the names of most of the leaders of Big Oil but I can’t name a single person from the nuclear industry.
Ontario getting those numbers TODAY, while the coal plants are still operating; the Liberal Democrats lost their majority in Ontario because of resistance to gas-fired plants in many ridings, which have since been cancelled (and substantial penalties paid). Replacing coal with gas only lowers CO2 by about half; Ontario is achieving CO2 numbers around 1/10 of “renewable” Denmark. If you actually care about the climate, pushing Ontario to become another Denmark isn’t just wrong, it’s insanely so.
Steve Aplin’s display currently reads 11084 MW nuclear, 4365 MW hydro, 687 MW gas, 394 MW wind, 358 MW coal, 123 MW other, 736 tons/hour CO2, 43.3 gCO2/kWh. I get nothing from the CWEA site, but the Montreal Gazette says that Ontario currently has 1500 MW of wind connected to the grid. 394 MW is about 26% capacity factor. If the nuclear capacity was taken off the grid, gas would have to generate the additional 11084 MW and the additional CO2 at 550 g/kWh would be 6096 tons/hr, multiplying total emissions almost 8 times.
A bit more than half; see the above IESO report.
Denmark has strong grid connections to hydro-heavy Norway and nuke-heavy Sweden. I have written many times that wind power ONLY works well when it is backed up by a large amount of rapidly-dispatchable generation with a great deal of stored energy to draw from. Conventional hydro is just about the only thing which meets those criteria. However, hydro is limited by the water supply to the reservoir. If you rely on it for too much, you run dry. Ontario has enough water to use hydro for peaking (it fell to about 2600 MW overnight), but not for baseload. A “renewable” Ontario grid means it effectively runs on gas.
There isn’t one in the G7, per se. Every player in nuclear is also a major player in fossil energy. Most utilities, aside from specialist merchant operators like Exelon, have more fossil capacity than nuclear. They have no incentive to promote nuclear over anything else… and no incentive to get in the crosshairs of pols and activists who might be able to threaten their other business interests to get their way.
Despite your criticisms about Denmark, their per-capita CO2 emissions are 60% that of Ontario’s and even if the Danes make no further progress, will still be 30% lower than what’s projected for Ontario by 2020.
I’d say the Danes have more to teach than learn.
“Ontario getting those numbers TODAY, while the coal plants are still operating”
You may want to revise that statement after taking a look at the numbers for coal-fired power generation since 2003
http://news.ontario.ca/mei/en/2013/1/ontario-getting-out-of-coal-fired-generation.html
What was the overall CO2 per kWh for each of those years?
It certainly wasn’t the 36 grams per kWh you claim as the current rate of emissions.
“I have written many times that wind power ONLY works well when it is backed up by a large amount of rapidly-dispatchable generation with a great deal of stored energy to draw from”
That depends on the percentage and you’re assuming that the wind dies suddenly and can’t be predicted, confusing availability and capacity factors.
There has been a huge buildup of gas plants and more, er, in the pipeline, so to speak but it’s not to act as a backup of those pesky turbines, unless you imagine that 2 GW of wind requires 10GW of backup generation.
Ontario Hydro racked up $20 billion in debt with cost associated to nuclear and the citizens have been paying an extra debt retirement charge added to the monthly electric bills since ’98.
And for the 2nd time since 2009, they’ve shelved plans to build new nuke plants, even though the costs are now lower than the $26 billion estimate from 4 yrs ago.
Pity they didn’t make the decision before spending $26 million for nuke companies to prepare tenders.
Re-parenting my reply for readability again; clicky.
Wouldn’t better grid interconnection North-to-South, East-to-West mitigate all that as solar & wind deployments increase?
I’m not against nuclear but the industry has to do a better job and we have to stop burying or storing nuke waste until we’ve eked out every last erg from the fuel.
People hate powerlines and will fight them for years. Even pipelines are problematic (look at the battles over Keystone XL). If you can develop e.g. a superconducting power line that can be buried and is less obtrusive and dangerous than a natural gas line, maybe you can build out such a grid quickly and quietly. Until then, I’d ask you to prove that you can do it BEFORE asking the nation to bank on it being done.
Heavy-water and graphite-moderated reactors can extract another 40-50% energy from “spent” low-enriched fuel from light-water reactors. Then you can extract the transuranics, use them as seed fuel in fast-spectrum reactors, and go back for the other 99% of the energy in the raw uranium that thermal-spectrum reactors can’t get out. Your fission products become less radioactive than the original uranium ore (with its radium, polonium and radon) in 500 years.
Until people get real about the rewards (and they’re huge), water pools and dry casks will be fine places to stash fuel rods. The energy in them is literally worth more than their weight in gold.
There are alternative to energy storage besides batteries.
Tiny (relative to the US) Japan has over 25% of the world’s pumped storage capacity, whereas America is under 20%.
And there are interesting if unproven developments such as Isentropic UK’s argon / gravel heat pump and Gravity Power’s underground vertical hydropump.
Perhaps someone can explain why Isentropic chose argon over nitrogen?
Gravity Power: http://www.gravitypower.net/index.aspx
Isentropic UK: http://www.isentropic.co.uk/our-phes-technology
Argon is a monatomic gas and has a ratio of specific heats (γ) of 5/3; nitrogen is diatomic and has γ=7/5. The ideal gas law for isentropic processes is Pv^γ = constant, so the monatomic gas gives you a greater temperature increase (and energy transfer) for a given pressure ratio.
I forgot to mention that Pv = RT also holds, so a bit of algebra gets you
T = constant * (P2/P1)^((γ-1)/γ)
Thanks. Still a couple things I need to wrap my head around but this is very helpful.
I’m somewhat behind in this thread, – work gets in the way sometimes – but
” I ask you to please re-read it closely, because there are spoilers in it. For instance, this:
The authors based their models on projected capital costs per kilowatt-hour of renewable energy sources — assumed to be about half what they are today ”
Given that, according the Michigan Public Service Commission, contracts for wind energy are being signed in my state today that are one half the cost of just 3 years ago, the “spoilers” you claim are not all that spoily – especially if we look at the cost curves going out 10 or 20 years. Think Moore’s law – which is nearly the profile that solar is now following, with battery technology the next area where research is now focused.
This is why utilities are panicking.
My reply to greenman is re-parented here.
Replying to Morin Moss, re-parented again for readability.
Goalpost-shifting: you’ve switched from electric-grid emissions (the ones allegedly addressed by wind power) to total per-capita emissions. Which, for 2006, were 15 tons/capita in Ontario and 9.9 t/capita in Denmark (per co2-art and Wikipedia respectively).
That’s worth looking at also. Canada’s per-capita emissions are relatively high compared to Denmark in part because Canada is a large country with long distances between cities, and Denmark isn’t. I can’t find VMT data for Canada, but suppose that Ontario’s 6.7 million light vehicles (as of 2005), which burned 11.6 billion liters of fuel, achieved the US average of about 22 MPG. That is 10.7 liters per 100 km, which implies 108 billion vehicle-km. CO2 emissions from gasoline are about 2.4 kg/liter, so total emissions were roughly 28 billion kg or 28 million tons.
Now assume that this vehicle fleet is replaced with Telsa Model S’s, or the pickup-truck equivalent. The Model S uses about 380 Wh/mi or about 235 Wh/km. Running 108 billion km would consume 25 billion kWh. At a grid carbon emissions rate of 36 g/kWh, total LDV-related emissions would fall to about 910,000 tons. I’m unable to find motor fuel consumption data for Denmark at the moment, but I doubt very much that its emissions related to personal transportation are anywhere near that low. Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 levels requires cutting emissions by roughly 80%; 28 million metric tons to 910,000 tons is about a 97% cut, more than enough.
Denmark doesn’t have enough land area to grow biofuels to make carbon-free motor fuel and can’t cut its per-kWh emissions to go with EVs either, so it’s stuck. It’s an example of blind-alley strategies I mentioned earlier.
At 1 ton/MWH for coal, Ontario’s 2002 coal-fired fraction of 25% (balance nuclear, hydro and “other)) would have meant an average of 250 g/kWh. This is roughly 1/3 lower than TODAY’S Danish figure. With the refurbishment of the reactors at Bruce Point, Ontario’s per-kWh emissions are now roughly 1/10 of Denmark’s. Even if Ontario used resistance heat to displace fossil fuels for space heat, it would emit less carbon per GJ supplied than Denmark; with heat pumps, a fraction of that.
Yet you still think Ontario should increase its emissions to Danish levels as part of being “greener”. Insane.
No, that is what affects the likelihood of blackout and/or the need for compensatory DSM (which has costs of its own). The carbon emissions are set by the fraction of non-RE generation required and the efficiency of the generators capable of meeting the ramp-rate requirements imposed by the net demand; simple-cycle gas turbines start and ramp fastest, but don’t have the efficiency of CCGTs. And of course, both are hostage to natural gas supplies and prices.
This is temporary. There’s a huge amount of new gas demand in the pipeline also, from LNG export terminals to conversion of both the local and long-haul trucking fleets to CNG and LNG. When North American gas is just a $3/mmBTU boat ride to markets where it sells for $17/mmBTU and truck LNG competes with $30/mmBTU diesel fuel, today’s low gas prices are not going to last. Those gas plants will soony be much more costly to run than coal and nuclear, and nuclear is the only competitor which can beat gas in GHG emissions.
To stabilize the climate, we need to cut carbon emissions by at least 80%. For the electric grid, this means from its historic levels around 700-800 gCO2/kWh down to 150. Ontario (and presumably France) have managed to get down to a third of THAT level, maybe less. Denmark is stuck about 140% over spec. The Danish experiment has failed; it’s time to stop demonizing the atom and go nuclear.
You can find data on Danish car registrations incl fuel efficiency at http://www.statistikbanken.dk/statbank5a/SelectTable/Omrade0.asp?SubjectCode=06&ShowNews=OFF&PLanguage=1
I’m still working through the various tables but I’d say that avg fuel efficiency is significantly better than in North America.
The electricity sector in Canada doesn’t need much in the way of decarbonisation and it could probably be addressed through “negawatts”.
Transportation & construction is another matter entirely.
The Danish stats list average fuel consumption, but you can’t get numbers sold (at least not on the same table). They won’t aggregate multiple months of sales or aggregate fuel consumption. There’s nothing for total fuel consumed.
All in all, a web site which appears devoted to frustrating inquiry rather than facilitating it.
Whatever the deficiencies in the Danish numbers, I can do a little back-of-the-envelope scribbling.
0.0453 l / km * 2400 g CO2/litre = 109 gCO2/km
0.235 kWh/km * 36 gCO2/kWh = 8.5 gCO2/km
A Tesla driver in Ontario could drive about 2.5 times the mileage of the Dane and still achieve 80% lower vehicle-related CO2 emissions.
As I’ve said in an earlier post, the electricity sector in Canada doesn’t really need to much cleaning up. The most populous provinces’ electricity supply are all pretty darn clean by any measure.
But what would it take to reduce Ontario’s per-capita emissions to Danish levels and how much would it cost?
By the way, the Danes seem to be flirting with a countrywide hydrogen refueling network. I’m personally not a big fan of fuel cells for cars – I’d prefer a Tesla – but it looks like the FCEV is not far off.
http://www.stateofgreen.com/en/Profiles/Danish-Partnership-for-Hydrogen-and-Fuel-Cells
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/24734/denmark-to-launch-hydrogen-infrastructure-programme-keep-fuel-cell-vehicle-tax-exemptions/
As for the UK nuclear plans, let’s see if they can get it done on-time and on-budget.
Reactors may generate a lot of power for decades but you still have to keep warm waiting 5-10 years for them to get them built and running.
If they follow the Ontario plan of racking up huge cost overruns and debt that bankrupts the utility, those British soccer hooligans are going to look like girl scouts compared to the voting masses.
Heads-up: I have a reply in progress, just no attention to spare to work on it right now.
Okay, finally got done with it: http://climatecrocks.com/2013/10/14/california-utilities-face-rooftop-revolution/comment-page-2/#comment-30777
Thanks.
I’ll have to tackle it in bits & bites.
You mentioned the oft-quoted 80% cut in a much earlier comment but didn’t specify a date. I know that some countries are saying they’ll reach 80% by 2050.
Based on their progress, I fear most of them haven’t realized it means 80% LESS than, not 80% OF their 1990 emissions.
In any case, George Monbiot made a case for a global average reduction of 90% by 2030 – a target I doubt anyone in the G20 will meet and some will have to reduce by even more.
His estimate for Canada was 94%
http://www.monbiot.com/2006/09/21/an-87-cut-by-2030/
You may think that the Danes are stuck but it’s Ontario who’s in a bigger bind.
If that 36 g CO2 / kWh is accurate, then as a per-capita amount, it’s trivial and cutting it to zero would be largely symbolic.
But that means there’s no low-hanging fruit to be found there and the per-capita emissions are still WAY above the Danes ( who are way above the Swedes ).
The EV that will convince Ontario’s drivers to switch en masse has not yet been built at a price they would be willing to pay but let’s say that such EVs will be available in 5 yrs and cost about the same as the cars they’re intended to replace.
That means that your 97% cut to light vehicle emissions will take 15-20 yrs, cost more than $200 BILLION (assuming replacing 6.7 millions light vehicles with a $30,000 EV) and will only reduce per-capita emissions by 2 tons.
If we assume the populations of each to stabilize at 17 million for Ontario and 6 million for Denmark, then an 80% cut means a per-cap target of 2.1 tons Ontario / 1.6 Denmark.
That’s not how much has to be cut but the max allowed to be EMITTED.
And you think the Danes are a failure??
Total emissions matter and I was demonstrating how the Danes have used CHP to increase the efficiency of the fossil plants and thereby reducing their emissions.
And speaking of total emissions, the lifecycle emissions for nuclear is worse than hydro, about the same as wind energy though, far better than anything based on fossil fuels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources
Your estimate’s pretty good, bit on the high side – the Canuck gov’t says 22.4 million tons for 2007
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-001-m/2010012/part-partie1-eng.htm
I don’t think it’s the distance between cities that’s the problem but that very few of them have good public transit
EV uptake in Canada has been quite slow and the Volt is outselling the top 3 BEVs combined.
You also have to do something about heavy vehicles. Getting the carbon out of Danish electricity will be easier than getting it off of Ontario’s roads.
EVs would be a benefit to Denmark as they would absorb some of the wind production that is exported and there’s a pilot project studying V2G
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2011/06/16/v2g-nuvve-denmark/
Not according to the wiki link I posted above. Lifecycle emissions matter, too.
For the 2nd time in 4 yrs, Ontario has rejected the idea of building brand-new nukes.
When they’ve gotten their TOTAL per-capita emissions to within striking distance of where the Danes are, then you can call them a failure. The most optimistic projection I’ve seen puts that
But a better question is why Ontario, with all its nuclear & hydro, hasn’t long outpaced the Danes and isn’t chasing the Swedes – how’s that not a failure?
Time for the nuclear industry to get out in front of their perceived problems and in the public’s face.
Don’t tell us why we should choose nukes over wind & solar – tell us how you’re going to help us get rid of COAL ( or natgas ) Take over and build on the sites of the biggest & dirtiest – the electrical infrastructure is already in place and you can retrofit the towers and perhaps the buildings.
Dammit, I screwed up the formatting and didn’t italicize.
Wordpress needs a preview mode.
Also I dropped part of a sentence in the 2nd-to-last paragraph.
Should be – “The most optimistic projection I’ve seen puts that beyond 2025”
Peter, I appear to have a long reply to Engineer-Poet awaiting moderation, thanks.
Replying to Greenman, again re-parented again for readability.
It’s my state too. Lived here most of my life, and I just went through the steel-and-fiberglass forest in Gratiot county again last weekend. It is impressive, I grant you. But is it an effective way to de-carbonize our grid, or is it the Green equivalent of the GM diesels of the 1980’s?
How low is that? Does it include the Federal subsidy from the PTC or first-year tax writeoffs that competing zero-carbon generation doesn’t receive? I suspect that if the playing field was truly level, we wouldn’t have many wind farms at all. Instead, we would have 40 AP-1000’s under construction in the USA instead of 4, with another couple hundred hot on their heels.
There are others I didn’t get into that deeply, like the reliance on vehicle-to-grid buffering to keep the grid operational. I am a fan of V2G, but as grid backup it’s only good for minutes. Suppose each one of the 250-million LDVs in the USA had a Nissan Leaf-sized battery pack of about 24 kWh. That’s a total storage of 6 TWH. That sounds like a lot, but in a fully-electrified economy with an average power demand of about 1 TW, it’s only 6 hours of backup even if it was all fully charged (not likely) and completely devoted to the grid (not possible). In a generation lull like, say, a blizzard with low wind speeds, everything would be drained in short order and people would run out of power and be stranded (in some of the worst conditions for it).
Don’t get me wrong, V2G is a wonderful idea. A few hundred thousand Leaf-class vehicles could provide grid regulation all day or instantly switch from charging to back-feeding the grid if a major plant or transmission line tripped. They could provide a lot of spinning reserve while burning no fuel, giving a few minutes for backup gas turbines to spin up and take load or other loads to be shed in an orderly fashion. But they just cannot do major buffering for RE variability without becoming useless for their main purpose of getting people around… or worse than useless, stranding people in danger.
Moore’s Law applies to microelectronics because more things can be crammed onto the same area of silicon as the technology improves. This is simply fallacious when you try to apply it elsewhere. The amount of light falling on a square meter of PV, or the amount of wind going through a square meter of rotor disc, does not change with the technology. Things like RE and batteries improve at much slower rates without major changes in e.g. materials.
Most of all, I don’t see the issue of storage being addressed. I had hoped that the Iowa Stored Energy Park project would produce a breakthrough. It didn’t. There are some really clever ideas out there like the near-isothermal compressed air scheme, but its scale is far too small to be a solution. Let me remind you that any failure to actually get the job done at a reasonable price leaves people either blacked out or priced out. Either way they have no electric lights, no refrigeration for food, and may even be in acute danger.
Over at Atomic Insights, Joris van Dorp relates a tale of sustainability consultants who believe that pricing people out is the way to go green. Experience from Greece shows that what you get instead is rampant deforestation and lousy air quality. The whole idea is based on faulty premises and needs to be re-thought.
As someone who’s been given a piece of junk and told to make it work more than once, I can tell you that any panic comes from the certainty that they’ll be told to buy whatever others produce in preference to their own, run their own equipment at the ragged edges of spec to keep the grid up, and eke out profits in what isn’t a free market but a game that’s now rigged against them. I was always free to quit and go somewhere else. Utilities with massive investments in plants and lines do not have that option, and shareholders have the right to sue the board if they mess up.