Climate change: R&D breakthrough, at last

Any real progress on de carbonisation of the energy economy has been stuck for some years by the economics of renewables. They are more expense than fossil fuels and so the developing world in particular can't afford to go down that path. See the graph which shows that the CO2 emissions of China and India in particular have increased dramatically in the past 20 years.

In Australia we have the Green Party and the Labour Party who are in denial about the high cost of renewables. The Greens have called for a 90 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 (source). Labour has called for a carbon reduc­tion target of 45 per cent by 2030 (source). Greenpeace activists demand 100% renewables.

The problem with these policies is that they imply that renewables in their current state of development can do the job. From my reading of the evidence of those who have studied this in detail, they can't.

Let's assume for a minute that there are people who are neither alarmists, nor deniers, that there are people who actually want to think more deeply about these issues than the latest media headline about the Paris summit or how it's going to be very hot this summer. For those people here are some articles which provide a starting point:
Has Renewable Energy Finally Ended the Great Clean Energy Stagnation? by Jesse Jenkins
A Look at Wind and Solar Part 1: How Far We've Come by Alex Trembath
A Look at Wind and Solar Part 2: Is There An Upper Limit To Intermittent Renewables? by Alex Trembath

Nevertheless, it seems that something quite significant has at least coincided with the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. It follows that if de-carbonisation of the energy supply is a good thing and that renewables or nuclear for that matter can't currently replace fossil fuels (due to cost in the case of nuclear) then what is required is more research and development in order to lower the price of these alternatives.

From this perspective the dual announcement of the government based Mission Initiative and the entrepreneurial based Breakthrough Energy Coalition which focus on the need for more R&D is a very good thing.

Bill Gates has been pushing for more R&D for a while, see American Innovation Energy Council and TerraPower. I guess more wealthy people are coming on board now and even Obama, from the government perspective, now sees the need for more R&D.

Under capitalism the benefits of more R&D tend to go to all capitalists since once a breakthrough is made it is hard to stop competitors finding a way to copy it. In cases of energy development with long time lines and massive expenditure requirements it can only happen this way with big government - big capitalists seeing the need and combining efforts. Historically, massive R&D has happened before due to huge rivalry between different big powers. One example, was the Manhattan Project when America feared that the Nazis would develop the first nuclear weapon. Another example was the crisis caused by the USSR putting the Sputnik into space. This quickly led to funding for massive science research in the USA which created the moon landings, the internet, etc. I guess an issue has to be perceived as urgent before that happens. So my guess is that this dual announcement does represent a significant change.

Could this be the beginning of the end of a futile argument between global warming alarmists and deniers that has distorted our political landscape for the last 20 years?

environmental talking points and references

This is an appeal for myself and others to study more rigorously the real state of the world, ie. the environmental world and its connections to the political, ethical, philosophical and economic worlds. My study is incomplete but I feel I have done enough to make some valid points and to map out a path of further study. At the least, this article is an annotated reading list which indicates the general direction of my thinking at this stage.

It is difficult to separate your hopes and world view (we all carry around and rely on bullshit detectors, filters and blinkers) from an objective assessment of what is really happening in the world.

At one extreme there is a world view which I will call "deep Green" that we are rushing towards environmental Armageddon. At the other extreme you find cheery technological optimism, that any problems created by our technological advance can also be solved by further technological progress.

In history we find people who have made extreme predictions and have ended up looking foolish. See The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

"University of Illinois economist Julian Simon challenged Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was and wager up to $1,000 on whether the prices of five different metals would rise or fall over the next decade. Ehrlich and Simon saw the price of metals as a proxy for whether the world was hurtling toward apocalyptic scarcity (Ehrlich’s position) or was on the verge of creating greater abundance (Simon’s).

Ehrlich was the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most prominent environmental Cassandra. He argued in books, articles, lectures, and popular television programs that a worldwide population explosion threatened humanity with “the most colossal catastrophe in history” and would result in hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation and dire shortages not just of food but all types of raw materials.

Simon, who passed away in 1998, was a population optimist. A disciple of conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, Simon believed the doomsayers’ models gave little or no credit to the power of efficient markets and innovative minds for developing substitutes for scarce resources and managing out of crises. He went so far as to claim that population growth should “thrill rather than frighten us.”
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Bet

Although Paul Ehrlich's extreme predictions were wrong and the bet was won by Julian Simon it does not follow logically that there may be extreme environmental concerns that we should be dealing with urgently. I think the only valid response to those ringing alarm bells about environmental issues is to investigate deeply the real state of the world. This is a different response to ridiculing alarmists who have been wrong in the past.

Humans are contrasted to nature by the deep Green side of the discussion. I feel that the humans - nature division is a false dichotomy which leads to a contamination of language. Words such as wilderness, sustainability, biodiversity and ecology need to be looked at carefully.

Wilderness is a human social, religious construct. This is powerfully argued from within the environmental movement by William Cronon in The Trouble with Wilderness. The concept of wilderness tends to reinforce a polarised human-nature dichotomy with nature worship on one side and arrogant human "mastery" of nature on the other.

Biodiversity appears to be a plural concept, a pseudo scientific term, partly invented for environ-political reasons, which can't be clearly defined (see James MacLaurin and Kim Sterelny's What is Biodiversity?). No doubt, biodiversity is a "good thing" but there isn't just one biodiversity but a plurality.

Is ecology a science, or, what sort of science is ecology? Mark Sagoff suggests that it isn't a science (What Does Environmental Protection Protect?), that holistic systems ecology is a figment of the environmental imagination, that ecological concepts such as structure, function, stability, resilience (emergent holistic properties) are more or less meaningless terms. In his vision the whole debate about invasive species is a distraction since species migrating is a natural process anyway. However, I lean to those who seem to be more expert on this issue such as Daniel Simberloff, who specifically reject Mark Sagoff's views and who appear to have studied the issue more closely:

"Sagoff [Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18 (2005), 215–236] argues, against growing empirical evidence, that major environmental impacts of non-native species are unproven. However, many such impacts, including extinctions of both island and continental species, have both been demonstrated and judged by the public to be harmful"

A better descriptor of where we are at is co-evolution in the Anthropocene.

"The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that marks the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems" (Wikipedia).

This recognises that we are both part of nature, an evolutionary product, as well as recognising our unique influence over nature, both good and bad.

How can this issue be better framed? Humans who are a part of nature, a tool making product of natural evolution, are destroying huge amounts of the rest of nature and this is bad in its own right (in a spiritual or aesthetic sense) as well as incredibly dangerous for human quality of life too (anthropogenic global warming and other issues - ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, nitrogen cycle, phosphorous cycle, global freshwater use, change in land use, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading and chemical pollution). The claim is that we are shitting in our own nest and that is aesthetically ugly and dangerous for our own health.

"Tread lightly on the Earth". This is an ascetic and / or anti consumerist position. eg. Mahatma Gandhi. Poverty ennobles and wealth corrupts. But it turns out that in India Mahatma Gandhi is highly respected for his nationalistic, non violent and humanistic outlooks but less respected for his ascetic, deprivation and traditional viewpoints, that the caste system is natural, akin to an ecological niche. Once again, the modernist beliefs in equality undermines the position of letting things stay as they are. See Shome, Siddhartha's The New India versus the Global Green Brahmins.

But anti-consumerism, for those who are currently advantaged, can be argued from a non Gandhi position as well. See the Vaclav Smil references below.

Pascal Bruckner has written a philosophical critique and addressed the House of Lords about the promotion of fear and mother earth as a sacred object by deep Green ideology. I would see this as an important contribution to human political psychology but one which does not claim to begin to investigate the real state of the physical world.

There is no static balance in nature. Irreversible change has always been the real state of the natural world. See Alston Chase's In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature where he critiques the biocentric viewpoints that "There is a balance of nature", 'that nature can be "healthy' or "unhealthy" ' in a similar sense to the human body being healthy or unhealthy, that "in the beginning all was perfect" (a Garden of Eden or Golden Age) and that "Nature is sacred".

Rambunctious Garden is a good metaphor for an environmental future. Not the only metaphor but a good metaphor. This is the title of a book by Emma Marris. Subtitle: Saving Nature in a Post Wild World. She is saying that nurturing nature in the big cities is an important part of the path we go down. It fits my preferred vision of human-nature co evolution in the Anthropocene. However, it does seem to be written more from the point of view of how to think about nature rather than an attempt to assess the real state of the world:

Every single chapter challenged my thinking about how we classify and define what is natural, what’s worth saving, why, and how to got about it. However, I must admit, I began reading with the expectation of spending some time communing with, well, nature. But this book dwells less on experiential factors and more on the meta: it dives deeply into the thinking and philosophical frameworks that undergird the conservation of nature today. http://sciencetrio.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/review-rambunctious-garden-saving-nature-in-a-post-wild-world-by-emma-marris/

Anthropogenic global warming has received more attention than any other issue of late. A reasonable solution to the anthropogenic global warming issue has been articulated: massive increase in R&D in non carbon energy sources, including nuclear (see The Climate Fix by Roger Pielke jnr; The Long Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus).

I agree with the Shellenberger / Nordhaus article which concludes with 12 theses, 8 approaches that won't work and 4 approaches that will work.

Eight approaches that won't work:

1. better, louder climate science won't transform the global energy economy
2. fear / scare tactics backfire
3. environmental justification won't work
4. anti consumerism won't work
5. regulation / pricing schemes won't achieve a clean energy economy
6. climate change is not a traditional pollution problem
7. a soft energy path (reduced green energy) is a dead end
8. internalising fossil fuel cost won't work

Four approaches that will work:

1. R&D into clean energy
2. embrace nuclear power
3. the State needs to invest in clean energy
4. Big, centralised energy is the way to go, not Small is beautiful

But ocean acidification is a relatively understated problem which may lead to extreme marine life destruction through destruction of coral reefs. (see Elizabeth Kolbert's "Ocean Acidification"). Roger Pielke snr has long warned against the issue of ocean acidification as have scientists concerned about the future of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Several writers have pointed out that the widening gap between the world's rich and the world's poor (both in terms of money and access to energy) over rides environmental concerns. See Chris Foreman's On Justice Movements: Why They Fail the Environment and the Poor. Roger Pielke's iron law is correct, "that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emission reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time" (The Climate Fix, p. 46).

Thomas Wells, in Debating Climate Change: The need for economic reasoning also argues that a pragmatic approach is far more likely to succeed than moralising about the state of the earth.

Poor people and indigenous people, "the wretched of the earth", usually desire modernity. Listen to Marcia Langton's Boyer lectures about how the mining industry, for all their faults, has done more for Australian aboriginals than the Australian government. You can't leave out the poor in your environmental considerations.

The problem with "the noble savage" metaphor is that our progressive Enlightenment values such as equality of women, non violent raising of children, against capital punishment, for democracy are repelled by the values of tribal hunter gatherer societies, once we scrutinise them carefully. Modern people aren't prepared to give up modern values and so "the noble savage" metaphor fails.

Bjorn Lomborg built his reputation initially around his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg began by trying to refute Julian Simon's optimism for the future but ended by agreeing with him. Following that he developed the Copenhagen Consensus forums about the best way to spend money to solve world problems. However, Lomborg has come under a lot of criticism for inaccuracies in his work (which he fails to acknowledge) and promoting short term issues over longer term issues. I must admit that I like a lot of what Lomborg does but feel that the criticisms developed at Kare Fog's website, Lomborg Errors, do significantly weaken his case.

There are a few books around about the threat to biodiversity. If you prefer one written by an actual scientist then see Edward O Wilson's, The Future of Life (2003). Others, written by journalists without a strong background in science, include The Sixth Extinction (2014) by Elizabeth Kolbert and The Song of the Dodo (1997) by David Quammen).

I read Edward O Wilson's 12 dot point "strategy aimed at the protection of most of the remaining ecosystems and species" which is on pp. 160-64 of his book along with some other parts of his Ch 7 "The Solution". In summary:

• Salvage the hotspots, 1.4% of the Earth's land surface protects 44% of known vascular plants and 36% of known mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.
• Keep intact the 5 remaining frontier forests
• Cease all logging of old growth forests
• Save lakes and river systems
• Define and save marine hotspots, eg. coral reefs
• Complete the mapping of the world's biological diversity
• include the full range of the world's ecosystems, eg. deserts, arctic tundras
• make conservation profitable
• use Genetic Engineered crops
• initiate restoration projects, from the current 10% of protected land up to 50%
• use zoos and botanic gardens to breed endangered species
• support population planning

I still feel that technological risk taking is a sensible way for the human race to proceed (the proactionary principle critique of the precautionary principle, http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.html).

People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.

R&D, nuclear power and genetic engineering are important parts of the solution. Humans are a tool making species and irreversible change has always been normal. But technological optimism as a blind faith is not a good outlook. Be neither a religious environmental alarmist nor a religious technological optimist. Rather explore the facts of the real state of the earth, without hype.

The Planetary Boundaries analysis asserts that we are headed towards environmental tipping points in a number of fields: climate system, ocean-acidification, ozone depletion, phosphorous levels, land use change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen levels, freshwater use, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. For some critical discussion of this view see Nordhaus, Schellenberger and Blomqvist. The Planetary Boundaries Hypothesis: A Review of the Evidence. They assert that in most cases these are not "tipping points" in a global sense but need to be evaluated according to local conditions. However, they do agree that Climate Change and Ocean-acidification are in grave danger of reaching tipping points.

So, which authors are on the track of documenting the real state of the world? How will issues such as rich-poor gap, energy, biodiversity, global warming etc. work themselves out in the future? I've become very interested in the writings of Vaclav Smil who has written Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken from nature (2012) and Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 years (2008). I've only read selected extracts from these books so far and feel that he is neither an environmental alarmist or denier but someone striving to work out the real state of the world.

Some of Smil's other writings (about energy, nitrogen / food and oil - see references) could provide extremely valuable background knowledge about how to think about these issues.

REFERENCE / FURTHER READING:

Brand, Stewart. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands and Geo-engineering are Necessary.

Bruckner, Pascal. 2013. The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings.

Bruckner, Pascal. Against Environmental Panic.

Bruckner, Pascal. 2013. Address to House of Lords

Chase, Alston. 2001. In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature

Cronon, William. 1995. The Trouble with Wilderness. http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Trouble_with_Wilderness_1995.pdf

Foreman, Chris. 2013. On Justice Movements: Why They Fail the Environment and the Poor.

Kolbert, Elizabeth 2014 "Ocean Acidification" http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/ocean-acidification/kolbert-text

Kolbert, Elizabeth 2014. The Sixth Extinction

Langton, Marcia. 2012. The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom.

Lomborg, Bjorn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist

Lomborg Errors. http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/ (Kare Fog)

Marris, Emma. 2011. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post Wild World

MacLaurin, James and Sterelny, Kim. 2008. What is Biodiversity?

Nordhaus, Ted; Schellenberger, Michael; Blomqvist, Linus. The Planetary Boundaries Hypothesis: A Review of the Evidence.

Pielke jnr, Roger. 2010. The Climate Fix

Planetary Boundaries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

Proactionary Principle. http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.html

Quammen, David. (1997) The song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (1997)

Sabin, Paul. 2013. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

Sagoff, Mark. 2013. What Does Environmental Protection Protect? http://cstp.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Sagoff-environmental-protection-for-CSTP-1-24-13.pdf

Shellenberger, Michael and Nordhaus, Ted. 2011. The Long Death of Environmentalism

Shome, Siddhartha. 2012. The New India versus the Global Green Brahmins. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/the-new-india-versus-the-global-green-brahmins

Simberloff, Daniel. 2005. Non-native Species DO Threaten the Natural Environment!

Simberloff, Daniel. 2013. Invasive Species: What everyone needs to know

Smil, Vaclav. 2001. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production.

Smil, Vaclav. 2008. Oil: A Beginner's Guide.

Smil, Vaclav. 2008. Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years

Smil, Vaclav. 2010. Energy Myths and Realities.

Smil, Vaclav. 2012. Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken from Nature

Soule, Michael. 1985. What is Conservation Biology?

Wells, Thomas. Debating Climate Change: The need for economic reasoning.

Wilson Edward O. 2003. The Future of Life

ABC's Vision Impaired by Solar Hype and Hope

Critique of the ABC's "Power to the People", 4 corners, 7th July 2014

The ABC narrative goes something like this:

1. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a huge problem, so we have to reduce our carbon outputs.
2. PM Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt (Environment Minister) are not serious about tackling this problem. As well as scrapping the carbon tax they are now threatening to scrap the 20% renewable energy target as well
3. Renewables, with a focus on solar power is a vital way forward for Australia. We are in grave danger of being left behind the rest of the world as they latch onto the clean energy market. (jobs, economic development)
4. Solar thermal and solar PV can make a big difference now provided you have some insight, determination and care for the planet.
5. In the not so distant future we will develop a radically different electricity system, with community micro-grids and technology that allows buildings to create and store their own energy.

Geoff Russell has already written a critique, Four Corners and its field of dreams, of this program on the pro-nuclear Brave New Climate site. He correctly takes the ABC to task for not doing the maths required for a critical assessment of the potential of solar power (point 4 above). In his view, consistent with the Brave New Climate perspective, nuclear power can do the job of serious carbon reduction much more effectively than solar:

By comparison, France built an essentially carbon free nuclear electricity system in under 20 years. So while Australian electricity generates 850 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, France is down around 70 grams per kilowatt hour and she’s been there since 1990. 

My research also indicates that there are a huge range of problems with solar and wind power. These problems were either glossed over by the ABC or not even mentioned. Nevertheless, the ABC claims to be well researched with dozens of supporting links revealed when you press the Show Background Information button on their website. In such a long standing polarised debate it is always possible to find lots of support for your preferred position. In omitting consideration of core issues the ABC has been far too selective, blinkered and unreflective in their focus.

The problems I refer to are energy returned on energy input (EROI or ERoEI) for renewable technologies, intermittency, diffuseness, storage, integration into the grid (the nature of baseload and peaking) and capacity issues. The capacity factor is how much electricity a generator produces relative to the maximum it could produce.

These issues, some of them technical, should form the core part of an informed program about the role of renewables in the energy mix. But apart from misleading claims about the storage issue most of them are not even mentioned in the ABC program. They have chosen to be warriors in the cause of renewable energy before completing the research that has to be done to be an informed warrior.

A good, free online reference to these more complex technical issues is Energy intensities, EROIs, and energy payback times of electricity generating power plants. Warning: it contains something missing from the ABC program - mathematical rigour.

Also see the book reviews on Brave New Climate for (an unfortunately too expensive book) Energy in Australia: Peak Oil, Solar Power and Asia's economic growth by Graham Palmer. (1) Precis by Graham Palmer (2) Review by John Morgan

This summary by Peter Lang (first comment after the book review) illustrating the relatively low values for solar and wind of the energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI) could form the starting point of a further discussion of the problems involved with solar and wind power.

• PV (Germany) 2.3
• Solar thermal 9.6
• Wind 4
• Hydro (NZ) 35
• Coal 29 – 31
• Gas 28
• Nuclear 75 – 105

The ABC program is a complete fail with respect to these core issues of energy transformation. Here is a sample, referring to Canberra's Royalla Solar Farm:

STEPHEN LONG: And still tiny by world standards.

It costs a lot to build a plant like this, and that does feed into electricity prices, but in the medium term, the energy will be cheaper because the fuel input, sunlight, is free.

SIMON CORBELL: The economics is a no brainer and it also drives down the cost of electricity more generally in the market because, often, at times of peak demand, renewables is the cheapest source of energy into the electricity market

This could only be described as manipulative journalism. By mentioning that sunlight is free, and ignoring the other fixed production cost of the panels and labour as well as the relatively poor return due to the diffuseness and intermittency of sunlight, the impression is given that energy returns on inputs for solar power is an economic "no brainer". But the ERoEI figures above demonstrate the falseness of that claim.

Furthermore, I think the critique of the ABC needs to go beyond the technical issues. Their full message is for a clean, green and decentralised future, point (5) above. A nuclear energy future is not decentralised and so it is important to address that claim as well. The ABC claim is a political / cultural message that such a decentralised, energy future is desirable and possible, the cultural appeal of the long standing "small is beautiful" movement.

The ABC program suggested strongly, towards the end, that centralised electricity through the traditional grid would be replaced in time with decentralised micro-grids. This thought bubble inspired the "revolutionary" title of the program, "Power to the People".

Consider these extracts, I have emphasised the hype:

a) From the section about the Orange City Bowling Club in the central west of New South Wales.

STEPHEN LONG: An electricity bill that was running at $116,000 a year has fallen by more than a third, and the investment in rooftop solar will pay for itself in three years.

This humble bowling club may be part of a paradigm shift, a new era for the economy.

Danny Kennedy calls it the rooftop revolution, power to the people.

DANNY KENNEDY: What we've had is these big power stations at the middle of a hub and spoke model, shunting electrons down a one-way fire hose, telling us what we should pay for it.

What we're getting now is the ability to participate in the creation of electricity. We're going to have our own power plants on our own roofs. There's going to be a community level storage system, a solar farm or a wind farm out the back, and all those are going to take part in the creation of electricity and the economics of electricity, and it's all going to be managed through software and information communications technology.

b) From futurist Jeremy Rifkin:

JEREMY RIFKIN: We now have millions and millions of small players, home owners, small businesses, cooperatives, even large businesses that are producing their own solar and wind generated green electricity at near zero marginal cost.

In 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we'll have tens of millions of local sites producing green electricity on micro-grids

c) The section discussing the aftermath of superstorm Sandy:

STEPHEN LONG: When super storm Sandy struck the United States in 2012, Americans discovered what it's like when the power grid breaks down.

Millions of people across the east coast were left for days without electricity: no light, no heat and no communications.

RICHARD KAUFFMAN, CHAIRMAN, ENERGY AND FINANCE, NEW YORK STATE: The thing that people had the hardest time with during Sandy was the fact that they were cut off from communications. If you're without power for days, it is, not just inconvenient, but it really feels like you can't live your life.

Individuals and communities want to have more and more control over their energy system. We again saw this after Sandy where communities have asked for their own micro-grids because they don't want to be as reliant upon the grid.

STEPHEN LONG: Former investment banker, Richard Kauffman, is known as New York's Energy Tsar. He's overseeing a move to decentralised electricity.

RICHARD KAUFFMAN: In the last 10 years, we've invested $17 billion just to keep the grid as it is. And, in the next 10 years, if we keep just doing exactly as we've been doing, it's, we have to invest another $30 billion.

The Empire State is instead planning a radically different electricity system, with community micro-grids and technology that allows buildings to create and store their own energy.

RICHARD KAUFFMAN: It used to be that you had to get the electricity that came through the central grid because that was the only alternative.

Well that's not true anymore, so we have had, across a whole range of industries, the benefit that customers are now in charge and the technology exists now for that to be true in the power sector.

The cost of all these solutions are going down, while the cost of the traditional central station power and distribution systems goes up.

The ABC is promoting a decentralised field of dreams here. Here is a rebuttal to their views found on line. DG stands for distributed generation. Emphasis added.

If you want to know what utilities actually object to about DG, it is policies that functionally require them to purchase power from solar homeowners at $0.30/kWh when they don’t need it instead of buying it on the wholesale market for $0.04/kWh when they do. The result is not just less-profitable utilities but also higher rates for the vast majority of ratepayers. A recent California Public Utilities Commission study concluded that by 2020 the state’s net metering programs would increase rates by a billion dollars annually.

That’s not to say that the growth of renewable energy is not disruptive—just not in the way its advocates claim. Look at just about any place that has achieved significant deployment of renewable electricity, and what you find is that the vast majority comes from large, utility scale installations, not rooftop solar or any other behind-the-meter generation source. Even Germany gets over three-quarters of its renewable generation from large-scale wind, hydro, and biomass.

Given the current state of renewable technology and the scale of generation necessary to run a modern economy, these basic dynamics appear unlikely to change anytime soon. Take a peek at any of the dozens of scenarios produced by renewables advocates that claim we can run the U.S., Europe, or the world largely on renewables, and what you find is that most generation comes from massive industrial scale wind and solar developments from North Dakota to the North Sea—not DG.

In fact, a renewables-powered future will probably require more centralized generation, not less. Achieving significantly higher penetrations of renewable energy will require transmitting electricity over hundreds or thousands of miles from where large amounts can be generated to places where it will be consumed. Renewables champions may talk small-scale DG, but what they intend to build is every bit as centralized as the centralized power sources we have today.

Ultimately, what is disrupting the existing utility model is not the distributed nature of renewables, it is their intermittent nature, and the policies necessary to make them viable. Heavy public subsidization of the capital costs of wind and solar, combined with preferential purchase requirements for the power they generate, ensure that the marginal cost of wind and solar will always be lower than just about anything else when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Hence, Germany simultaneously boasts the highest retail electricity prices in Europe and the lowest wholesale prices—not because the power costs less to generate but because most of the cost has been shifted elsewhere. In Germany, expensive, highly subsidized, intermittent renewables generation has driven wholesale prices so low that the utilities that must manage the grid and operate conventional power plants can no longer operate profitably. This, not cheap distributed solar, is what is disrupting the utility industry here and abroad.
- The Revolution won't be distributed (2014) 

Consistent with it's decentralisation thesis the ABC program provides us with a false idea about the nature of disruptive technologies:

MATTHEW WARREN: Oh look, I think we are seeing in the energy industry, it's going through a transformation that's not dissimilar to telephony to retail to newspaper media and that is, we're seeing, you know, quite radical transformation that is driven by technology and driven by changing market conditions.

DANNY KENNEDY: It's disruptive like media was disrupted a decade ago.

Once upon a time, the ABC and New York Times were all the news that was fit to print and they shunted the news of the day down the one way fire hose, and now we use social media and Twitter and whatever else to co-create what is the news stream and what makes for big news.

And, the economics, we know well, has been completed transformed. That's coming to electricity. The coal and other protected, vested interests of Australia are going the way of the Dodo if they don't adjust to this reality.

The important point about digital disruptive technologies is that they start out cheaper than established technologies. Mobile phones and online journalism start out cheaper than the media which they threaten to displace. The reverse situation applies to solar and wind power, which are still far more expensive than fossil fuels. Moore's law does not apply to energy technology as the ABC is suggesting.

Is a 20% Renewable energy target a good idea?

We need both more energy, particularly for the world's energy poor, and more clean energy, meaning, in part, energy produced without or with reduced CO2 emissions, also known as decarbonisation of the energy supply.

The program begins with Kerry O'Brien voicing the fear that the Abbott government is threatening to cut the 20% Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Why would Abbott and Hunt contemplate this? Well, the real reason, not spelt out clearly in this ABC program, is that renewables are expensive and so have to be subsidised.

The Australian political reality is that ongoing political uncertainty (no one knows what will happen electorally in the future) threatens renewable energy subsidies. As long as renewable energy can't compete with fossil fuels in the capitalist market place then it will remain dependent on subsidies whose delivery will remain politically uncertain.

Roger Pielke jnrs iron law says (assuming the continuation of the capitalist system) that when tough decisions have to be made economic issues will always trump environmental issues. He's right. The Australian people won't support a political system which raises or even vaguely threatens to raise energy prices to the point which either cuts deeply into our standard of living or makes us uncompetitive on the world stage. The election of the far from popular Tony Abbott as PM, who promised to rescind the carbon tax introduced by the ALP, demonstrates that.

So how to proceed? What policies do I support, which may be capable of gaining political traction? (1) Intelligent subsidies where there is justified hope for a rapid price reduction in the given renewable (2) Much more emphasis on Research, Development and Demonstration (RD and D) to bring the price of renewables down. Setting a target with a strict timeline does not necessarily promote these policies. I think the critique of the Abbott government's policies by Roger Pielke jnr (Australia's Climate Follies) has far more substance than the ABC critique.

Given that renewables such as solar and wind remain far more expensive (despite considerably cost reduction to date) than nuclear which in turn remains more expensive than fossil fuels then the emphasis needs to be on RD and D to bring the price of clean energy alternatives down to a level where they can compete.

REFERENCE

Further reading about policy decision making in the USA: Beyond Boom and Bust

current assessment of climate science and policies (Pielke snr)

For a current assessment of the state of climate science and policy conclusions that flow from that see Pielke snr's recent Summary Of Climate Science Issues and follow his links for more detail. Here is an abbreviated summary:

the science:

• humans do effect the climate in various ways, not only global warming
• CO2 is important but IPCC focus is misleading, they focus too much on CO2 and computer modelling
• computer modelling of futures is too inexact to be useful at this stage
• global average surface temperature is an inadequate measure, ocean heat, measured in joules, would be a superior measure

policies:

• funding of computer modelling in the hope of achieving accurate predictions decades into the future is a waste of money
• focus on brute force CO2 reduction to achieve a more stable climate will achieve little
• climate policy should be mainly separate from energy policy
• vulnerability analysis, risk and disaster prevention are underutilised policy options

peak oil discussion

Peak Oil Discussion

I'll keep my eye on this discussion thread over the next few days. Discussions at Brave New Climate often reflect a wide range of opinions some of them well informed. The lead article is well researched. There is a cautionary editorial at the beginning from Barry Brook, the owner of BNC.

My current not very well informed opinion is that peak oil will only become a severe problem if we fail to develop nuclear power. We are failing to do this in australia since the Labour Party and The Greens especially won't go near it and public opinion is against and not being challenged much. For now in Australia the anti nuclear fear mongers have won. But other countries such as China, Russia, France etc. are going ahead and will develop nuclear further. Over time it will become cheaper than alternatives, but the time line is not possible to predict

Renewables can't supply the energy we need. In the long term our energy future is nuclear.

In the meantime the evidence for the likelihood of severe economic crisis independent of energy concerns is growing stronger so I continue to focus my study in that direction

economics of nuclear energy

Irrespective of other concerns (safety, disposal, proliferation of weapons) the generally accepted wisdom about the cost of nuclear generated electricity is that it is more expensive than electricity from coal or other fossil fuels.

I thought this as well until I researched it. Here are some notes

France is the number one country in the world which generates electricity from nuclear power. France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Their electricity costs are very competitive in Europe. France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this. (Nuclear Power in France)

In the 1970s in the USA electricity from nuclear power was sometimes cheaper than coal. But this situation reversed itself in the 1980s which led to many planned nuclear power stations being abandoned. The reasons for this are clearly documented in an online book, published in 1990, The Nuclear Energy Option, by Bernard Cohen. Here is a brief summary of his Chapter 9:

• construction time for nuclear plants doubled from 1971 (7 yrs) to 1980 (12 yrs), which in turn doubled the costs
• labour costs also doubled with the biggest increases being professional labour

(these figures corrected for inflation)

So, the cost of nuclear plants quadrupled in 10 years and as a result they were no longer built. The main reason for these increases were regulatory ratcheting (excessive) and regulatory turbulence (the latter being having to change things after the project has started and hence more expensive)

According to Cohen it was accepted wisdom by the utilities in the USA before the over regulation of the 1980s that nuclear would be cheaper than coal and would replace coal.

"Many utilities seek cost analyses from economics consulting firms, some utilities have their own in-house economists to make estimates, and banking organizations maintain expertise to aid in decisions on investments. From the early 1970s until the early 1980s, all of their reports found that nuclear power was the cheaper of the two. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the largest electric utility in the United States. Its profits, if any, are turned back to the U.S. Treasury. It maintained a large and active effort for many years in analyzing the relative cost advantages of nuclear versus coal-burning power plants, consistently finding that nuclear power was cheaper. The 1982 analysis by the Energy Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, was the first to find that coal and nuclear were equal in cost; their previous analyses found nuclear to be cheaper. By 1982, these analyses were mostly discontinued, since it seemed unrealistic for a utility to consider building a nuclear power station, or even to hope that it could be done without regulatory turbulence"
- Ch. 10, The Nuclear Energy Option by Bernard Cohen

Tom Blees also discusses and updates answers to these questions in his book Prescription for the Planet. One of the important points he makes is that the modern reactor designs (Gen III and Gen IV) employ passive safety using molten sodium as a coolant and consequently do not have to operate under high pressure, except for the steam portion of the system in the turbine room. This means that significantly fewer valves, pumps and tanks are required compared with the older reactors. This lowers construction costs.

The other main point made by Blees about high costs in the USA (compared with France and some other countries) is that the nuclear industry there has yet to agree on a standard design and each new design has to jump many regulatory hurdles all of which pushes the cost of the process higher.

Thanks to Barry Brook's blog I recently attended a debate in which Tom Blees participated. Subsequently, I bought a few copies of his book and have distributed them to friends who are interested in discussing these questions.

I notice that the Obama administration has just announced a loan guarantee intended to underwrite construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the reactors would be the first begun in the United States since the 1970s.

From what I have read I conclude that electricity from nuclear power could be as cheap as electricity from coal.

update 4th March: After a fair bit of discussion on threads at Strange Times (Technology, development and c... c... c... climate change) and Brave NewClimate (Do climate sceptics and anti nukes matter?) I have changed my mind again. In general nuclear is not cheaper than coal unless extra costs such as a carbon tax are (in the future) added to coal.

thoughts on the nuclear debate

Debate: "Should we consider Nuclear Power as a response to climate change?"

Affirmative:

Professor Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide, and author of the blog Brave New Climate

Tom Blees, President, Science Council for Global Initiatives and author of the book "Prescription for the Planet."

For the Negative:

David Noonan, Australian Conservation Foundation

Dr Mark Diesendorf, Deputy Director, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales".

I bought Tom Blee's book Prescription for the Planet. Tom was a very effective presenter due to his extensive research and personal contact with a wide range of people deeply involved in these issues allowed him to communicate telling and interesting anecdotes - and he has a wicked sense of humour, which was much needed on the night

The majority of the audience was anti nuclear (2/3rds or 3/4) but thanks to the work done by Barry Brook on his blog, Brave New Climate, there was a significant pro nuclear presence

Mark Diesendorf was energetically aggressive in his attack on nuclear power as an "idealistic fantasy". He argued that renewables could completely replace fossil fuels by 2030 and presented a slide showing the growth of various renewables illustrating how this could be done.

I felt this slide was dodgy but didn't know enough to refute it. Mark also made a big issue of his expertise and criticised Barry for pronouncing outside his field of primary expertise.

Aspects of this slide were challenged by Barry Brook. How could geothermal grow so quickly when on another slide Mark had shown geothermal at the R&D stage in Australia and that new technologies took 40 years or so to reach large scale commercial stage. Mark had used this to argue that IFR (Integral Fast Reactors) was pie in the sky, so Barry's counter was quite effective.

There was other to and fro along these lines, some of it amusing. Barry pointed out that renewables only made up 1% of the world's energy. Mark responded that it was unfair to take a world average because some European countries had a much higher percentage. But Mark had earlier criticised Tom Blee's example of ineffective solar panels in Germany as "cherry picking" because Germany had a cold climate. This sort of exchange confirmed my belief that you need to have a firm grasp of the arithmetic to engage intelligently in this debate. I've read this page (Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy intensive society) of Barry's site and downloaded Ted Trainer's pdf from that page to improve my own knowledge here

David and Mark were unreasonably dogmatic in their anti-IFR stance. The issue of urgency was used in an irrational way, given the reality of the failure in Copenhagen and the certainty of developing countries like China and India to continue using massive amounts of fossil fuels. Even if IFR does take 50 years to develop on a large scale (in itself debatable) then that is not a reason not to develop it. There is a can do and a can't do mentality and wrt IFR their attitude was totally can't do on technical grounds alone. They want a total roadblock on nuclear power. They spent quite a bit of time on this, irrespective of their other objections.

Barry took a realistic economic approach that coal would not be replaced by alternatives until a cheaper alternative emerged - and the best shot for that was nuclear.

Mark disputed that but admitted that his renewable futures would be more expensive. For me this was the real "idealistic fantasy", his repeated statement along the lines that people power would convince governments to change.

The other main objection from the anti-nuclear side was proliferation. What emerged here was that IFR reactors do not produce weapons grade plutonium and there are other more effective means of producing weapons grade plutonium, such as high-speed centrifuge technology. I felt the pro-nuclear side was on shakier ground here since more IFR reactors will lead to more transport around the world of weapons grade plutonium (as a start up fuel) and so the probability of it falling into the hands of terrorists will probably increase.

Mark said that nuclear power was 14% of the world's electricity production and declining. Barry offered a bet that the nuclear percentage would increase but Mark declined to accept it. Good move, Barry!

So, it boiled down to who was living in the "real world" and who was living in "fantasy world"

energy release calculation for the Victorian bushfires

David Packham estimated that the energy released in the recent Victorian bushfires was equivalent to 660 Hiroshima bombs. This surprised me and the figure also supports the argument for the need for fuel reduction.

I did my own calculations based on the Victorian fires and found that Packham seems to be roughly correct. I obtained the figure of 1290 Hiroshima bomb equivalents compared to Packham’s estimate of 660. I'm not saying that my figures are more accurate, there is some guess work involved, but my figure is in the same ballpark as that estimated by David Packham

Here are my calculations.

David Packham:

More than 330,000 hectares were destroyed in Victoria’s “hell on earth” bushfires and according to Mr Packham each hectare contained 30 tons of bushfire fuel — adding up to 9.9m tons. ”That equates to the energy release of 660 Hiroshima bombs” ...
- Victoria's bushfires compared to Hiroshima

Yield of Hiroshima Bomb: 1 Hiroshima Bomb is roughly 20 Kilotons TNT Equivalents of 1 Kiloton of TNT: 1 Kiloton TNT equals 1.15 x 10^6 Kilowatt-hours. KT means Kiloton.
- The fission product equivalent between nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons

The amount of energy in wood is a tricky one to calculate accurately. It can vary between fresh wood which has only 2000 Btu/pound of energy and the "high heat value" of 8660 Btu/lb, which is obtained only with perfectly dry wood (0% moisture content) and only in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. Given that the Victorian fires were fuelled mainly by partially or largely dried out dead fuel then it is fair to take an intermediate figure, let us say 5000 Btu/pound
- The Amount of Energy in Wood Fuel

1 Btu (thermochemical) = 0.00029287508333 kilowatt-hours
http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm

1 pound = 0.00045359237 ton (metric)
http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_all.htm

By our estimate, wood burns to create 5000 Btu/pound. To convert to Kilowatt-hours / ton then multiply by 0.00029287508333 and divide by 0.00045359237

Hence wood burns to create roughly 3300 kilowatt-hours / ton (rounded). For 9 million tons burnt –> 9 * 10^6 * 3300 kilowatt-hours energy = VB (victorian bushfires)

1 Hiroshima bomb = 20 * 1.15 x 10^6 Kilowatt-hours = HB (Hiroshima bomb)

To calculate Hiroshima bomb equivalents divide VB by HB = 1290 Hiroshima bomb equivalents

David Packham's qualifications:

OAM, MAppSci, worked for 40 years in bushfire research with CSIRO, Monash University and the Australian Emergency Management Institute. He was responsible for fire weather services in the Bureau of Meteorology. His extensive research concentrated on the physics of bushfires, and he applied this research to practical issues including the development of aerial prescribed burning, non-evacuation of properties, modelling of fire behaviour, and forensics