Has the Russian invasion put the energy transition into hyper drive?
The Economist has this report.
A few notes: they make the obligatory nod to nuclear power, and to their credit point out that the technology has had more than its share of hiccups.
Also, mandatory “But what about Lithium mining?” trope.
That’s been more than answered many times on these pages.
Bill McKibben in Mother Jones:
A little more than a decade later, another plan arose. There’s a played-out garnet mine in Johnsburg, at the top of a hill on the edge of a vast state wilderness. And the owners of the mine wanted to put up 10 big wind turbines to generate clean power—this was in 2005, and it would have been one of the first big such developments in New York state.
In many ways it was the perfect site: There was already a road up the mountain, it had a big power line, and it was zoned industrial. But the turbines were indeed big—they would have been clearly visible even from deep in that very wild wilderness area. I knew those woods as well as anyone—I’d skied and hiked and paddled there for many years, I knew where the bear and coyote and martens lived. I’d found lost hikers deep in its trackless reaches, and I’d found much of my own love of wild places out there too. It meant as much to me as any place on Earth.
Most local people were okay with the plan—it would have created some jobs, and they were already worried about global warming; I had a neighbor who printed up buttons that just said “In My Backyard.” But the region’s biggest environmental group, supported mainly by people who lived at a distance and vacationed here, was opposed, on aesthetic grounds. The sight of those turbines would degrade the wilderness, they thought. They also, of course, came up with a bunch of spurious arguments—at one hearing their representative argued that in a big storm the turbines might spin right off their support towers and then roll down the mountainside several miles and crash into the school. Which is not how wind turbines work.
It forced me to think more deeply than I had before. All things being equal, I’d just as soon not have to look up at those towers when I scaled some wilderness peak. But all things, I knew, weren’t equal. Having written the first mainstream book on what we then called the greenhouse effect, I understood that the far deeper threat to this forest was that if we didn’t quickly stop burning fossil fuels, then there wouldn’t be a real winter to den up the animals; that if it kept warming, the birch and beech and maple that blazed red and yellow and orange in the early autumn would be replaced, at best, by drab hickory and elm. That the challenge to the character of the place I loved came from not building these wind turbines.
I wrote a piece for the New York Times saying just that, and earned in the process the enmity of some of the region’s professional environmentalists (and they won the fight; there are no wind turbines). But it felt as if I’d been true to the place by saying no to one plan, and yes to another. The dump was just a stupid idea; the wind turbines, though they came with drawbacks, were a necessary one.
Right now we’re at a moment when we need to build in a way we haven’t for quite a while, maybe since the days of the New Deal and the Second World War. The consensus among scientists and engineers who study this stuff is that we need to replace about a billion machines in America alone—regular cars with EVs or e-bikes, furnaces with heat pumps. And to run them on clean power, we need to build out lots of solar panels and wind farms and battery arrays. The factories to churn these things out are going up fast, in response to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. But once this stuff has emerged from the factory, it needs to go in someone’s basement, someone’s kitchen, someone’s…backyard. Transmission lines have to cross fields; railroad tracks need to be built through rights of way. Some NIMBY passion will need to be replaced by some YIMBY enthusiasm—or at least some acquiescence.
Electricite de France SA’s nuclear project at Hinkley Point in the UK will cost as much as £10 billion ($13 billion) extra to build and take several years longer than planned, the latest in a series of setbacks for the budget and timetable of the country’s largest energy project.
EDF now expects the two reactors it’s building in southwest England to cost between £31 billion and £35 billion in 2015 terms, the French energy company said in a statement on Tuesday. That’s up from an estimate of £25 billion to £26 billion in 2022, and is the fifth budget increase in eight years. At today’s prices, the project would cost as much as £46 billion, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator.
Electricite de France, like most operators in the West, hasn’t built a reactor in forty years, and it shows. Nevertheless, the ones they’d already built meant that France last year made about a quarter as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt/hour as the UK did, even though the UK’s emissions were the lowest ever.
Once the two reactors at Hinkley Point C are turned on, they’ll make three billion watts 24/7 for at least sixty years. By then, most of the current crop of wind turbines will have needed replacement four times. Last month, on its best day, wind made 57% of the UK’s power. Three days later, it made less than 10%. When that happens, Britain relies heavily on imports from France, but that won’t always be an option. Mostly, it just burns gas.
Hinkley C is training up a new generation of skilled workers, engineers, and site managers, who could help build a real energy transition.
There’s not a commercial reactor operating in the world that’s 60 years old. Some solar panels are. Insane people keep approving longer & longer licenses for reactors that are already unsafe at 30 or 40, but that doesn’t mean any of them will ever reach 50, let alone 60.
Wind turbines typically last 25-35 years; that’s largely because they’re improving so fast they’re replaced, either onsite or elsewhere, by new, more powerful, efficient ones with higher capacity factors that therefore produce cheaper power. Since the old ones can be 95% recycled, there’s only gain. Like replacing brake pads on a bicycle.
Things they last longer than: tooth brushes, pencils, peaches, toaster ovens, cars, most sub-atomic particles,
Things that last longer than they: some species of tortoises, some blind dates,
So as usual, even when not strictly lying, John is lying.
Renewables work as a set & make grids more reliable, including grids with nukes. Nukes will continue to get less reliable as cooling water gets scarce & hot. Renewables will continue to get more reliable as more are built (law of large numbers) & they get better & better connected & divided into micro-grids with solar DERs.
“Rooftop solar and home batteries make a clean grid vastly more affordable: Distributed energy is not an alternative to big power plants, but a complement.”
David Roberts, Volts, May 28, 2021
https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries?s=r
The UK is ~6% powered by onshore wind with a capacity factor of ~44%, 5% powered by offshore wind with a marginal capacity factor of 63%+. Scotland is at 67% onshore, 2% off, so there’s tremendous potential for more offshore wind, especially even-better floating wind.
Non-US reactors’ cf is 70-80%, but decades of construction at 0% capacity factor, followed by ever-decreasing load because of supply problems, water problems, weather disaster failure problems, war & other difficulties not to mention low demand because it’s just way too fucking expensive in a world where solar & wind are 1/4 the price of what they are now will make it lower than onshore wind’s cf. And solar’s?
If people continue to be insane there’s nothing we can do. If some can be made sane, or positions of responsibility can be filled by people of the sane, Britain can rely on wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal from France, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Russia, Kazakhstan, & much of the rest of Afro-Eurasia.
Bill McKibben: “All things being equal, I’d just as soon not have to look up at those [wind]… towers when I scaled some wilderness peak” I’m also sympathetic to the environmentalists who kept those wind towers out, but agree with McKibben’s logic here and add some of my own: You can take down a windmill, but you can’t take down a 50% increase in a greenhouse gas. The damage to the view is reversible tomorrow. The damage to the biological diversity is permanent for a thousand years or more.