The decision by Warren Buffett’s utility company to order about $1 billion of wind turbines for projects in Iowa shows how a drop in equipment costs is making renewable energy more competitive with power from fossil fuels.
Turbine prices have fallen 26 percent worldwide since the first half of 2009, bringing wind power within 5.5 percent of the cost of electricity from coal, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), yesterday announced an order for 1,050 megawatts of Siemens AG (SIE) wind turbines in the industry’s largest order to date for land-based gear.
Wind is the cheapest source of power in Iowa, and the deal indicates that turbines are becoming profitable without subsidies, according to Tom Kiernan, chief executive officer of the American Wind Energy Association trade group. That’s a boost for suppliers including Siemens, General Electric Co. (GE) and Vestas Wind Systems A/S (VWS), and a threat to coal miners such as Peabody Energy Corp.
“If Congress were to remove all the subsidies from every energy source, the wind industry can compete on its own,” Kiernan said at a press conference at a Siemens factory in Fort Madison, Iowa, yesterday, when the order was announced.
–Power from wind is now cheaper than power from newly built natural gas plants, said Amy Grace, a wind analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“Most people expect gas to become more expensive,”she said in an interview. “I think in most windy areas in the U.S it will be competitive by 2020.”
DTE Energy Co. has announced lower electric rates for business customers in 2014 by 5.5 percent to 7.4 percent, depending on their service level. DTE also is cutting residential electric rates by 6.5 percent, company officials said today.
The rate cuts, said DTE, are due to lower fuel supply costs, which include lower renewable energy costs from wind, and ongoing efforts to reduce the company’s cost structure.
This is the first rate decrease for Detroit-based DTE in more than five years, spokesman Scott Simons said. Michigan approved the renewable energy package in 2008.
From 2007 and 2012, for example, DTE held operating cost increases to zero compared with average cost increase of 33 percent at its peer electric companies over the same period.The plan was approved by the Michigan Public Service Commission.
The MPSC also cut its renewable energy surcharge by 85 percent, which reduces the fee to 43 cents per month from $3. Customer bills will be reduced by about $90 million.
“Our use of renewable energy is saving customers money while improving the health of Michiganders around the state,” said Rory Neuner of MI Air MI Health, in a statement.
Detroit — Gov. Rick Snyder laid out four goals for Michigan’s energy policy Thursday, but offered few details on how he intends to accomplish them through a legislative proposal in 2014.
Snyder told reporters in Detroit his goals include reducing the amount of energy the state gets from coal and boosting the amount it generates from renewables, particularly on-shore wind.
It’s nice to see that change in US energy investment. Now if we can just get more people to see that change is possible without wrecking the economy. It may even be a boost to the economy because it gives more buying power to the working class. The people that manufacture, build and maintain wind turbines make good money and it can’t be off-shored unless they want to pay a lot of shipping costs. Those will probably be the new roughneck jobs. Current oil workers should look into training on those skills. Another upside for them is that there tends to be fewer accidents because of all the safety precautions and a less volatile energy source.
I think we need a more ‘couth’ name for roughnecks in the wind industry…Greengos?
Call a true “roughneck” a “greengo” and, after looking at you funny, he will likely “couth” you one in the “proboscis” and knock you on your “derriere”. LOL
In truth, working 400 feet in the air actually has a fairly high rate of nasty accidents:
* Not particularly low. The 180 billion kWh from coal, scaled down to the 15 billion kWh from wind, would be expected to cause 250 deaths; this is reasonably close to the 163 counted from wind. By contrast, the zero figures from nuclear are remarkable and worthy of praise and emulation.
Inquisitr has more.
Nuclear has a far greater disaster potential than Wind does. It’s like like if it gets hit by a Earthquake/Tsunami that a Wind Turbine would go into meltdown and release lethal doses of radiation. That at there’s no need for storing radioactive waste for thousands of years.
Not like.
Wind cannot stand alone as a source of generation capacity (it needs backup or large amounts of storage), so your statement assumes an apples/oranges comparison.
Further, let’s take the worst-case nuclear accident on record. Chernobyl killed a few tens of disaster-response workers, and is postulated to cause/have caused a few hundred (maybe 4000) deaths beyond that. Wind is supposedly safe, so long as you remain out of range of thrown turbine blades and ice (and never work on one of the machines directly). But that backup is an issue. The best backup for wind is hydro… and the Banqiao dam failure killed an estimated 171,000. There have been a number of failures in pumped-storage facilities that could easily have had civilian fatalities, and that can be considered just a matter of time if they are expanded as RE models require.
Wind itself isn’t safe for the workers. 161 fatalities a year over 25 years totals as much as Chernobyl’s entire projected cancer toll in Ukraine, and that is what GB experienced at 1/12 the generation level of coal; scaled up, it would come to half of a Chernobyl every year.
No one is going to build another RMBK. Fukushima Dai’ichi is about the worst-case LWR accident, and the radiation-related death toll stands at zero with 3 injuries, all recovered. Designs currently under construction cannot fail in the same way. So no, I must disagree with you most vehemently: the disaster potential for nuclear is relatively tiny. But most important, nuclear is our best and likely only means of heading off a climate disaster to dwarf them all.
The Banqiao dam disaster??!!! Seriously?!??!?!
How many GW of wind power was being backed up by hydro in China ( or anywhere in the world ) in 1975?
How many dam systems are at risk of failure due to a weather event similar to Super Typhoon Nina, which was largely responsible for the dam’s failure?
What are the chances of such a Super Typhoon remaining stationary for 3 days, dumping all its rain, as Nina was held by a cold front over Henan province?
How many times has such an event happened inland?
If the world heeds your incessant advice to go all-out nuclear, do you recommend that all hydro dams be mothballed / demolished?
If not, why not?
After all, your ultra-safe and super-reliable fission reactors would obviate all other forms of power generation.
Reply to MM re-parented here:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/12/21/buffets-wind-purchase-further-proof-of-wind-power-competitiveness-in-the-heartland/comment-page-1/#comment-37185
Have you crunched the numbers on all of this? How many nuclear plants are we talking about here? It takes a long time to plan and build one nuclear plant and it has to get approval first. They also have to figure out a way to store radioactive waste. There’s also the problem of uranium supply. How long would it last if we replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear energy and didn’t increase renewable energy? There’s also the risk of proliferation. Can you guarantee that nuclear weapons wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands? In contrast, solar panels or wind turbines can be easily constructed and easily get approval in most places. Both are relatively safe and there’s little or no risk a of a major disaster affecting them to the same degree as Nuclear. Both Wind and Sun represent an abundant energy supply that will likely last for a very long time.
Don’t talk to E-Pot about the safety of nuclear power. He will come back with “nobody died” and ” the plants and animals are flourishing in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl”, with no thought to the irony of why humans are excluded from that “exclusion zone”.
A small but spectacular nuclear power accident (with apologies to the survivors of the three who died there for bringing it up) is the SL-1 accident in Idaho, in which one fatality resulted from a worker being speared by a control rod that exploded out of the top of the reactor. It pinned his body to the ceiling above, and it took days to retrieve it. And yes, the funerals were “closed casket” (LEAD caskets).
We could make up a song using the names of the reactors and nuclear facilities that have had serious safety issues—-Fukushima, Chernobyl, Windscale, Brown’s Ferry, Fermi, Kyshtym, TMI, Chalk River, Greifswald/Lubmin, Tokaimura, and Kashiwazaki, to mention just a few.
Nuclear needs backup. How much does nuclear cost when you add the cost of backup?
Does that dam disaster count toward nuclear in France which uses hydro for peaking or likewise in Ontario? Hoisted by your own petards?
Its 14 deaths not 163 from your own source. You got them mixed up. Skipping around a lot picking numbers from different years and different countries is not helping understanding. Since accident rates are low, the number has to be taken over years and best in multiple countries. Why would nuclear power plant accidents be less than a geothermal or hydro plant? Ordinary industrial accidents occur at nuclear plants. One person died at an Arkansas plant.
http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=10122
Of course, uranium mining deaths count. A worker died in a rockfall accident.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700035311/Moab-miner-killed-in-uranium-mine.html
None of these are radiation or cancer or anything like that. They are the same kinds of accidents that happen due to any industrial endeavor. The zero figures would be more remarkable if they were more candid and honest.
While it is not in dispute that ordinary industrial accidents at nuclear power plants are low, there is the much wider view of the total impacts, including other types of deaths, injuries, and impacts such as permanent displacement from homes, etc. Focusing exclusively one one metric, one year, one country does not speak to viewing the full impact in a balanced way. For example, emergency evacuation zones, no fly orders, national security issues, proliferation, and so on. Those are also issues that need to be evaluated.
Zero deaths for nuclear? How about the two deaths at the reactor construction site in Flamanville France?
Occupational hazards are not a big deal to me, doing a specific job is a choice. Otherwise ordinary construction business would not be attractive to work for. However nuclear presents a hazards to the generic population for which they did not choose to risk, this is something entirely different.
Nothing to do with radiation, and 2 deaths for a 1600 GW(e) plant is far fewer than you’d expect from constructing the same nameplate (let alone average!) wattage of wind turbines. Working high in the air is dangerous.
Those hazards turn out to be negligible. By contrast, “renewables” present a false promise to the general population, which amounts to fraud when they cannot possibly get what they paid for and were promised.
Or is it just more of the same exaggeration?
Who said anything about radiation being the only danger working in the nuclear industry, like getting hit by a turbine blade is the only way to die in the windbusiness? And why do you need shifting goalposts to make your point? And, lastly, 1600 GW, really?
I wonder, what was promised to the general population that ‘renewables’ cannot possibly deliver?
By contrast, ‘nuclear’ presents a false promise to the future generations, which amounts to fraud when they have to clean our shit up (waste and decommissioning).
How many deaths & serious illness from uranium mining?
It’s been 35 years since Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act was passed.
What’s been done with the tens of millions of cubic yards of radioactive waste / mill tailings?
I have read that they paved over some tailings piles to keep radon from escaping, radioactive dust from blowing off, and stop rainwater from leaching down through and carrying “glow in the dark juice” elsewhere. They have dug up and carted away some very large tailings piles—the one that loomed over the southern part of Durango, CO in 1966 was not there in 1984. Does anyone know where they “hid” it?
Perhaps they buried it under the Great Sand Dunes outside Alamosa? A good place to hide it. Just as we could “hide” some of the more deluded members of the Crock “commentariat” in mental hospitals. Speaking of mine and miill tailings, if anyone is interested in how run amok capitalism destroys beautiful places in CO, check out the new method of gold recovery from old tailings piles. You simply line a valley with plastic and a grid of collection pipes, fill it with the tailings, dribble a cyanide solution down through it to dissolve the gold, and collect the “juice” at the bottom of the valley. Then just abandon the whole thing and go count your $$$$.
“Must-take” provisions and “renewable portfolio standards” are non-cash subsidies, but if wind was suddenly stripped of those, it would find itself with a much smaller market. So by all means, let’s eliminate subsidies.
Let’s also eliminate artificial liabilities, like the carte blanche given to regulators to arbitrarily pile new costs onto certain forms of energy, but not others. The goal should be to have as much carbon-free energy as we can get while maintaining the reliability of the grid, so any form of energy that has a track record of being safe for the public should have the regulator’s hand stayed on any grounds of safety and should instead be aimed towards replacement of coal first and then natural gas, with regulations re-written to make this replacement as expeditious as is consistent with safety.
That’s not strictly true. The energy may be cheaper, but “capacity” (power on demand) from wind is not. Energy when you don’t want it is useless, or worse; ask anyone in the path of Sandy.
A recent Argonne study on the Illinois grid shows very rapidly diminishing returns, with emissions cuts falling to less than half the pace of gross energy contribution as wind penetration goes from 30% to 40%:
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-false-promise-of-renewables-1-wind.html
It’s only useless until you find a use for it.
Excess power has been a problem for a long time and utilities have been giving very cheap, sometimes free power to industry long before wind turbines were a factor.
Or they’ve had to pay other grids to take it.
But there are power-intensive projects that can be tackled when free power is available. While the wind subsidies continue, this is a losing strategy but those won’t last more than 20 years and this represents a shrinking segment.
Plus, electricity is only one piece of the puzzle and it’s one that’s being addressed. It’s past time the others, especially the construction & building industry put as much effort into reducing their carbon footprint.
You need to get enough benefit out of the use to pay for the systems using the power. You need some pretty cheap systems when your load factor is heading down past 10%, and few people consider amortization in these schemes. Are there any high-value products that can be made using surplus electric power that is interruptible, and the consumption and delivery of product is not time-sensitive? If you can identify a number of such uses and show how their energy consumption fits in and handles the “excess peaks” problem, everyone can breathe easier. But if anyone has done that work, I’ve never heard of it. Maybe you can be first?
I opined that Iowan ethanol plants could contract with wind farms to subsitute variable electricity inputs (negative regulation, perhaps) for gas-fired process heat, at some discount from the delivered price of gas. Win/win, no?
The only time you’ll ever see “free power” is when you have subsidized RE (which cannot go on forever) in excess on the grid. Any generator selling at market rates without subsidy will curtail output to keep prices above zero; incurring wear and tear on machines to dump energy for free is a losing proposition.
This is true. I like the “wooden skyscraper” scheme, turning buildings into carbon sinks. It’s certainly possible to make insulation radically better than today’s code-minimum. But that doesn’t handle today’s building stock, nor does it de-carbonize industrial energy use. All of that needs to be done somehow.
As soon as electricity is abundant and cheap, aluminum smelting is found. And water pumping, and on. Iceland, Washington. Demand expands to meet supply. End of story.
You are actually referencing your own site? You are not concerned about confirmation bias? So now its “wind reduces CO2, but…” The “must take” provisions are riding the rounds of the Heartland Institute and wind bagger sites. Are you sure, you are not carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, not even unwittingly? The Inquisitr reference is referenced from “The New American”. What do we find there?
-Al Gore predicted ice free Arctic; Ice cover increased 50%
-EPA vs USA (the war on coal)
-What happens without coal? ( real hit piece on all renewables, lots of falsehoods)
-A real turn-off:last phase of light bulb ban
Duped?
“You are actually referencing your own site?”
Christopher! Shhhhhhhhhhh!
Don’t discourage him. Let him go off and talk to himself on his own “site”. A short link is a lot easier for us to ignore than his long gallops. I myself can’t help but read and absorb some of them as I scroll by or delete them, but links fortunately don’t have the same effect.
(and asking a narcissist if he is concerned about confirmation bias is funny stuff)
OK dumblikefox, my mind has cleared. A few ideas. First, what’s all this deception about electricity price hikes in Germany? Renewables are not the cause! Unlike the US, where we have Marcellus shale, and Bakken, EU gets gas from Russia, where it is expensive. Renewables have depressed prices not increased them. But here is the real kicker. Industry pays less, households more. That has nothing to do with renewables, but speaks to the societal imbalance and points out the sheer hypocrisy of the complaining industries themselves.
http://blog.rmi.org/separating_fact_from_fiction_in_accounts_of_germanys_renewables_revolution
EU has historically had very high petrol costs. Why? Because their governments did not want large oil imports, so they taxed motor fuel heavily. Not so in the US where the government has a tie to petro dollars. Oh, that. So historically, EU countries had less auto use and higher efficiency. And here in the US, the debate keeps coming up and dying, shall we increase gas taxes to lower the economic impact of oil addiction? Never went for that. US waited until the oil prices went up all by themselves. Now we are in a worse position. Shortsighted thinking. Part of the drill, baby drill stupidity. So contrast the policies and the results. On the electricity side, same thing. Lower rates, less efficiency in the US, and more fossil fuel dependency and emissions. Well, that does not seem to be to difficult to choose from. I choose the German path. See how you can get sucked into the denier frame of thinking if you are not careful? They want to frame the debate all about costs, not consequences and argue that the consequences are small. The other argument is that the consequences of mitigation are unappetizing. Then Germany comes along and spoils the whole picture. All those BS arguments about having to go back to the stone age are destroyed by Germany. No wonder deniers are so upset about Germany that their minds are starting to .. well…
Would add only that deniers will flip and flop to any argument that suits their purposes at the time, and have no problem “meeting themselves coming around the barn” from different directions. I try not to get a headache following all the arcane statistics. It’s like wading into the swamp of regression analysis with daveburton, or to the edge of the flat earth they inhabit with O-Log, Stonehead, and The Dube—“There be monsters here”, the old maps said.
The one thing I am sure of is that runaway capitalism and self-serving free-marketers are driving the denial. If and when the economics ever become attractive to the bottom-liners, we will see a rapid swing. Unfortunately, they want to burn up in just a few centuries every speck of that carbon that took so many millions of years to become “fuel”, and have no concern for the environment. By the time it “pays”, it may be too late.
Yes. I admit to a certain pleasure in knocking down their cardboard arguments. Here is the thing. Once you do the dance with any of them, you find out how serious they are. Its safe to say you know each one of them by heart. I will never waste one second replying to omni. He lacks the scientific framework for rational discussion of probability. Forget it. Swallow? Head of stone? I just note that his challenge to global warming that Hadcet, one small spot in central England is representative of global temperature? Yes, a stone head. I note breathtaking leaps of inference and disguised statements. Dube? Well trotting out 600 year lag was not too swift, but I enjoyed thinking about his endothermic earth nonsense. I actually understand Trenbeth’s analysis of climate better, because I was forced to try to understand the thermodynamics. It makes me more confident to wade in it. Dave? One tide gauge Dave? Lord. What a mess. Perfect example of computation without understanding. I will always treasure his argument that the surface of the ocean might cool due to increased evaporation from warming. Yes, the worst part is the headache you get from trying to figure out nonsense. Its like grading flunking student science exams. Agree about the no respect for the environment.
“Computation without understanding” – didn’t we use to call that GIGO – garbage in, garbage out?
Yes, and it’s also caused by data PFTA or using SWAG, and it results in things being FUBAR
Add good ol Epot to that when nukes come up. Forget about reality or reason.
Its kind of ghastly to watch EP post repeated fallacies about nuclear power. Nuclear or nothing, yet nuclear is in decline, electricity only supplies 20% of energy and does not supply energy for transportation and much of industry, cannot expand quick enough to do any good, and requires way to much capital. Its as if the 100,000s of nuclear refugees just disappeared or in some denier dream just returned to their radioactive towns and lived fantasy lives. Its not even a rational discussion anymore. After increasing disasters from TMI partial meltdown, to Chernobyl full meltdown, to Fukushima 3 meltdowns and fuel fire, the conclusion is? Well, Fukushima is as bad as it could ever get and its nothing at all. No recognition of the fact that at each stage the industry said it could never happen. Its like a lover caught inflagrante a third time arguing it will never happen again. Too bad he doesn’t have to pay for the billions in clean up. Thats the problem with nuclear fantasy. They set the table. You become the nuclear refugee. They declare its no big deal. (for them living far away and not experiencing any consequences)
Replying to Morin Moss, re-parented for readability:
Why do you think that’s remotely relevant? What matters is how much water needs to be held behind dams to make your all-RE economy work. As stored energy that can be released suddenly and uncontrollably, it is a potential danger whether it’s stand-alone or otherwise.
It’s not my bailiwick. If you’re concerned about safety, why not work to either operate them to reduce that risk to the absolute minimum (run reservoirs down to almost empty as the default) or remove them entirely?
Organizations like EPIC recommend this already. I admit to having a sympathy for salmon runs over irrigation and hydropower, but I’m agnostic on the energy aspect. Any energy storage that responds rapidly to demand will do. Dams can also absorb flood flows and release them slowly, which was a major argument for installing them in the first place. Running reservoirs close to empty is best for this.
But back to energy and climate. What matters in the end is how far we can get GHG emissions down. We need a minimum 80% cut from current levels, and the lower the better.
We have some real-world examples to work from. Coal-fired Australia is running almost 820 grams of CO2 per kWh generated, while nuclear-heavy France is less than 10% of that at 70 gCO2/kWh. Denmark and Germany are emitting many times as much CO2 as France to generate one kWh of electricity. There are other things to take care of other than that, but many of them are best handled by electrification and that goes straight back to a low-carbon electricity supply.
Some of this is simple math. If we can emit at no more than 20% of current levels, and electric generation accounts for 1/3 of current CO2 emissions, if all other carbon emissions were magically eliminated the grid would need a minimum of (a) 40% reduction in CO2 with (b) NO increased electric demand. That’s a cut from ~800 gCO2/kWh to 480, which even Denmark hasn’t achieved yet. If you require proportionate reductions from all sectors, the grid’s contribution can be a maximum of 160 gCO2/kWh. Denmark has no prospect of achieving this in the foreseeable future; France is well beyond it.
None of the “renewable” offerings on the table can do what we can see needs to be done. I have no objection to developing them and using them when they’re ready, but as my colleagues at The Oil Drum like to say “hope is not a strategy”.
Incidentally, Finland has learned from the effort to build the politically-compromised EPR and has signed with Rosatom for new plants. The Russians don’t have Greens dictating their designs, and that shows in their price tags and schedules.
I think that it’s relevant you raised a spurious objection against windpower that you now cannot defend or will not defend.
The Russians don’t have Greens dictating their designs, and that shows in their price tags and schedules.
Considering the historical state of the environment in Russia / USSR, they could have used a lot more environmentalists.
And just what ARE these price tags & schedules? From what I’ve been able to find, it’s an estimated 5-8 yrs from start of construction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Russia#Nuclear_power_reactors_under_construction
NONE of the ones with a 2013 completion appear to have gone online. So how much longer until they start producing electricity?
Good points. The Russians know how to design tanks and automatic rifles, as anyone who ever came up against a T-34 or AK-47 can confirm, but their airplanes regularly fall out of the sky and their nuclear submarines had many problems—many didn’t come back. And then there’s Chernobyl. No, there’s probably a good reason those reactors are not on line yet. Maybe they’re afraid to turn them on?
Yes, well then you notice the Russians don’t quit when everything is up in flames and a complete ridiculous disaster. Its that kind of society. The BN-600 breeder is a good example. They actually designed it so that half of it could be on fire and they could operate another half. Then they proceeded to operate it that way. The BN-350 had a spectacular fire. Despite fires and failures all through their development, the Russians pressed on. The situation is so ridiculous, that Russia is forging ahead with new breeders, while the West is funding decommissioning and cleanup of the BN-350. How dumb is that? Safety, Shmafety, who cares?
How about reactors for Nigeria?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=russias-nuclear-reactors-could-take-over-the-world-safe-or-not
Heres more on the lies about radiation safety at Fukushima.
http://fairewinds.org/media/in-the-news/fish-data-belie-japans-claims-fukushima
“How about reactors for Nigeria?”
The Nigerians don’t need reactors. They’re busily drilling holes in their pipelines and drawing off enough “free” oil to take care of their needs. Or just scooping it up from all the lakes of oil formed at the many leaks.
You should know better than to take Wikipedia as an authoritative source. Try World Nuclear Association instead:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/NuclearDatabase/rdResults.aspx?id=27569
That list shows just how inaccurate Wikipedia is. For instance, the Leningrad reactors that Wikipedia claims were to have been operational this year started construction in 2008 and 2010. To be moving at NRC-allowed rates, they wouldn’t be operational for several years yet.
Russia has started several reactors recently, including Kalinin 4 in 2012 and Rostov 2 in 2010. The start of Novovoronezh II-1 is projected for next year.
In other words, Russia has yet to complete ANY reactor where construction was started AFTER Chernobyl.
So we won’t know for at least another year if your claim about their cost & construction speed is accurate and that’s only for ONE reactor.
This one was started 7.5 yrs ago and doesn’t even have a projected end date.
For now, I’ll ignore the 2 that are marked as “floating”.
Strictly speaking, no. Anything started between Chernobyl and 1991 was begun by the Soviet Union, not Russia. Sorting out the political details and recovering from the economic aftermath took a while. You might have noticed that there wasn’t another Chernobyl-type event regardless of what was going on politically.
The USA has halted and resumed construction on plants also. Watts Bar Unit 2 was begun in 1973, and is on schedule to go on-line in 2015.
It’s one of three first-of-a-kind units, the other two being in China.
Given the number of floating (and submerging) reactors which are cranked out on schedule by several nations, that’s probably the one least worth ignoring.
At this point, all you’ve been able to show is that Russia is apparently not falling behind schedule on plant constructions but not details on cost.
What do you mean by NRC-allowed rates? Why is Russia subject to that?
It was a comment on the US regulatory system and how it imposes delays for no discernable reason than delay, which increases the costs that anti-nuclear people say are too high.
It was a joke. They’re not, but they’re also concerned about foreign sales. Making sure they’re getting everything right is part of the learning process that will help them make future deals. The USA, sadly, has decided to crush its nuclear industry instead of using it to cut pollution and create jobs.
Isn’t Russia / Rusatom building VVERs?
This is a +40-yr old design with some refinements and they’re still “making sure they’re getting everything right”? And taking 7+ yrs to do it?
Better to stick with General Electric; at least they can put up some wind & gas turbines to provide at least some electricity while we grow old waiting for the nuke plants to come in overbudget and behind schedule.
Russia owns the design, yes.
You can bet that just about every skilled worker who was on the job at the beginning has moved on, if not retired outright. One of the things Rosatom would be doing is training up a new workforce to make subsequent jobs quicker and better.
You walk before you can run. The initial copies of production cars also go very slowly and cost a lot.
A sub-20-year “renewable” generating asset, backed by a 50-year carbon-emitting asset.
This is a thread about wind success. Have you noticed?
Nope. He’s too busy admiring how brilliant he is. His ability to insert unclear power (deliberate misspelling) into any thread is matched only by daveburton’s irrelevant insertions of the alleged non-accelerating rate of sea level rise.
He’s brilliant alright. Someone mentioned Nietzsche and made a comment along the lines of filtering out what one does not want hear.
The wiki has an amusing entry saying the Russians are using Chernobly as a selling point. Puts hormesis in a new light. How much hydro needed? None for a while, and since when is storage automatically better than curtailment or reserves? Caiso operates with 50% reserves and very little renewables. It has to be there for the annual peak demand. Russian commercial success is far from a one sided story.
http://www.euractiv.com/energy/cancelled-russian-nuclear-plant-news-514723
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/reactors-to-cost-double-russia/1047796/
Cheap is easy. Safe is hard. Price tags are cheap when you sweep dirt under the rug.
Maybe it was too subtle for you. The problem is the natural variability of the source combined with the “must-take” provisions of the law. The two together are a major headache, transferring the problem of dealing with un-needed generation from the source (wind farms) to grid operators. The problem of diminishing returns to wind power well before 40% penetration also needs to be taken seriously.
Considering the state of the environment in Finland, and that they are still operating some 70’s-vintage VVER reactors purchased from Rosatom quite successfully, you might want to ask if they know something you don’t.
If the ones started in 2006 start slipping their completion dates, we’ll know something’s up. That doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
Or maybe you’ve conveniently forgotten what you originally wrote.
To refresh your memory, you brought up the Banqiao dam disaster and pumped-storage failures as a strike against wind power and its perceived need for storage.
In one more week, it’ll be 7 years from the end of 2006. You were making the point that Russia was building plants faster & cheaper because they don’t have to deal with all that stupid Greenie interference and regulation.
There’s no evidence yet of faster or cheaper. How is it that they cannot build plants in under 5 years?
It’s part of an evil conspiracy.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yB_iV9QVcvs
<sigh> This should be painfully obvious, but since you’re being so explicit about Not Getting The Point I’ll spell it out in detail:
1. The only abundant renewable energy sources are strongly intermittent.
2. Intermittency requires backup from a stockpile of energy.
3. There is not enough biomass to use combustion systems for all backup purposes, so for all intents and purposes they must be regarded as non-renewable and carbon-positive.
4. The most widely used, best-proven and most efficient system for storing bulk electric energy uses water pumped uphill, meaning large reservoirs held behind impoundments. For all intents and purposes, dams.
I thought the commentariat here had the intelligence and background knowledge to grasp these things without lengthy explanations (in other words, was capable of more than repeating Green dogma and doing the point-and-screech at deviations from orthodoxy). Perhaps I was wrong.
“I thought the commentariat here was capable of more than repeating Green dogma and doing the point-and-screech at deviations from orthodoxy. Perhaps I was wrong”, says E-Pot.
Yes, very wrong indeed. But what you were wrong about was failing to recognize that your inability to unwrap yourself from around yourself has made it impossible for you to understand that your “lengthy explanations” are ignored or rejected by everyone, no matter how often and how lengthy you make them.
SBAN, E-Pot!, You are crowding out O-Log, King Dubious, and even daveburton as you try to make it all about you.
“I thought the commentariat here had the intelligence and background knowledge to grasp these things without lengthy explanations (in other words, was capable of more than repeating Green dogma and doing the point-and-screech at deviations from orthodoxy). ”
Perhaps we thought a self-styled Engineer-Poet could make a cogent argument against wind power, without resorting to spurious correlations between it and hydro.
Were we wrong?
Show me a completely wind-powered grid somewhere, with neither non-wind backup nor storage, and I will admit that the correlations between wind and hydro might be spurious. Otherwise, YOU admit that they are firmly established.
Show the evidence. I’ve got Kodiak island and Ethiopia to back the wind-hydro connection just for starters. You have what, exactly?
Your claim against wind can be made for ANY other form of generation – THAT is why it’s spurious.
Most grids are using gas to back up wind, not hydro and Sweden has been using hydro to back up NUKES for decades, which I guess is useful when you have to shut down a reactor to clean out the jellyfish from the cooling intakes.
Really? What combustion-based generation does nuclear REQUIRE as backup? Nuclear plants are independent of each other; they have no equivalent to night, clouds or a large-scale high pressure area with its calm winds. If you really need to load-follow at high rates, nuclear plants could simply dump steam directly to condensers to cut generation quickly; they could put the steam back through the turbines to increase generation just as quickly. All it takes is putting the feature in the design. Nuclear heat costs a fraction of a cent per kWh, cheap enough to dump some of it to meet other needs.
How does wind or solar increase generation on demand? They can’t. They MUST be backed by something with a store of energy. Coal and gas work from stockpiles of combustibles, nuclear works from a store of fissiles. Wind and solar CANNOT load-follow, they source-follow. They cannot be dispatched. They cannot be relied upon.
I know it irks you that there is no magic wand to make solar panels and wind turbines run our world. Take the world as it is, not as you wish it could be. Grow up.
“Take the world as it is”
Take your own advice first.
Have you (conveniently) forgotten how long it took nuclear to reach the vaunted reliability you tout?
Not just capacity factor, because it seems that the industry has gotten very good at running the plants above nameplate, but AVAILABILITY factor as well.
After all this time, why hasn’t France, Sweden, or someone else gone 100% nuclear?
And a great many people in many countries have qualms, fears & concerns about nukes. Safety, waste, proliferation, cost, etc.
That’s the way the world is, and has been for at least a generation.
So when are you going to “take the world as it is, not as you wish it to be”?
Also, anyone who browsed through our respective posting histories & conversations here on Climate Crocks would quickly realize that it’s YOU who are irked some by the lack of a magic wand that would make the whole world fall in love with your perenially overbudget multibillion-dollar radioactive tea kettles.
Don’t project that onto me. You may think that I’m anti-nuke but that’s not really true; I spoke out very early on against the Merkel decision to shutter Germany’s plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
But I think many of us are just tired of the industry’s continuing failure to deliver.
You’re not going to find picketing about a nuclear plant unless it’s truly an epic boondoggle but the industry has yet to convince me that there isn’t one ( or more ) in progress.
Response to MM reparented in 2 parts starting here:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/12/21/buffets-wind-purchase-further-proof-of-wind-power-competitiveness-in-the-heartland/comment-page-2/#comment-38928
Morin is asking a simple question. What about the five years? At least address it directly with a simple yes, no, maybe before rambling off in a different direction.
This thread should have been about wind success in the Midwest. What do we have?
Warren Buffett invests in Midwest wind,
Midwest rates lowered by wind
High wind penetration increasing in Midwest states
Utilities improving wind integration
High wind growth rates
Wind competitive with coal and gas
No grid problems yet
Sounds good to me. I see a bright future. The Midwest could become a wind energy economic power house. Looks like that is happening and the most famous investor is in the thick of it. Probably wise to bet with him. Looks like there is some momentum. The amount of remaining undeveloped wind energy is stupendous. As fossil fuels diminish and increase in cost, wind will the sole cheapest source, at least if local solar does not beat it in the future, which is a possibility. In the meantime, we can take comfort in the fact that wind will supply power without economic or environmental penalty. Our sustainable day of reckoning is postponed. GW is mitigated not removed. But that all depends on renewables gaining and coal declining. How much, how soon.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/wind-picks-up-as-coal-declines-in-midwest
Hydro, geothermal, wave power are not abundant? You stated it. Your burden of proof. These arguments have a desperate tone. I mean they are provably false. Your arguments are serially dependent like a string of Christmas lights. And there are multiple failures. Like all power sources, dispatchable renewables may have some localization. As I keep saying, they will be used together, not separately. Arguing one source like bio will not serve all needs is a straw man. Nobody here said that. You constructed it. Taken in toto, the energy available in all three is substantial. At present, the biggest issues are where these are in relation to current demand. As coal and oil decline, demand centers will shift to the sources of cheapest energy. Our demand centers have developed in coordination with abundant cheap fossil fuels. As fuel costs increase local sources that require less transport benefit. As they increase further, new energy sources encourage demand development closer to the energy sources.
1 wrong
2 based on a false 1
3 biomass the only backup not enough so scratch it? Quit the straw man.
Is this critical thought and reasoning? No, it’s not the only dispatchable renewable. No you can’t dismiss it on this flimsy reasoning.
4 pumped storage is the cheapest, but not the only storage available. There are many ways of balancing demand cheaper than storage, including increased reserves
Peter – can we show a daily power graph like caiso so people can understand how energy sources work? A few pictures illuminate the concepts perfectly. I have in mind a daily renewables example like this:
https://www1.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20121018_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
And a daily load/generation/reserves like this:
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/assets_c/2012/06/Screen%20shot%202012-06-25%20at%205.04.04%20PM-31140.html
Its easy to that reserves are always large, even without renewables, and that no extra storage or backup is needed.
that would make a cool widget in the sidebar. open to ideas if anyone knows how to make it happen.
daveburton is a computer geek—-Dave! Be useful for a change and tell Peter how to do this.
That would be awesome. I had in mind just the simple static graph showing one day with reserves vs demand. There is no clearer way to show that reserves are large compared to demand. The graph shows a 50% reserve buffer. Simplistically, intermittently could be 50% of demand without trouble. The other graph shows renewable base load, biomass, hydro, small hydro, geothermal. Renewables have been falsely painted as all intermittent. It’s a straw man. I am not an expert in embedding the app in WordPress, but I know some geeks.