What's driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it's all gone. Britain's North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won't last forever. It's created the illusion that the energy problem is over.
Nuclear is discouraging. After Fukushima, nuclear plants are scary. Fukushima was a reasonably good plant which got hit by a larger than expected tsunami and lost site power. That was enough to cause a major disaster. Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city. The small-nuclear enthusiasts are a bit scary; some argue they need fewer safety precautions because their reactors can't melt down. What could possibly go wrong? Big, expensive containment vessels are a good thing; when Three Mile Island failed, the containment held it in.
Battery technology will help. Wind and solar are intermittent, and can't carry too much of the load until there's more storage. But it's going to take a lot of batteries.
[1] http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-...
But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.
In fact its just enough time to build a fleet of nuclear plants, but as you also point out, fear rules that decision far more than physics.
Wind and solar and batteries are awesome, but even in very optimistic case scenarios we need an alternative to coal and the temporary surge of natgas to handle baseload between here and ~2040. It should be nuclear, but, sigh.
Grandparent post was just missing a comma:
"Well, over 40% of US electricity is still from coal"
Wind and solar's bigger problem isn't really the intermittency of availability of electricity, it's the distribution of availability. It needs a more sophisticated grid. America's grid operators (who also own generators) would be shooting themselves in the foot by upgrading the grid since renewables eat into their bottom line (they want to sell natgas/coal/nuclear electricity, not buy solar from your rooftop or set up windfarms that makes a razor thin profit...).
Utility operator lobbyists thus have a marked tendency to overstate the problem of renewable intermittency.
Nuclear is cost competitive with solar and wind but it's only cost competitive if the liability is capped. Remove the liability cap and mandate that nuclear insurance cover the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup and there's no point in ever building a plant ever again. Whereas if you remove all the tariffs (e.g. things like the 40% solar import taxes) and subsidies, renewable prices probably wouldn't change all that much.
What I realize I don't understand is the meaning of "Generation at Utility Scale Facilities" in the header of the table. What does this exclude and how meaningful is the exclusion?
According to the table, net generation at utility scale has decreased 10% over the last decade. How much of that is driven by non-utility scale generation versus decreased energy usage? (Alternatively non-utility scale generation has outpaced total growth in energy use - I'm ignorant of total consumption data so I don't know what is really going on).
Either way, the numbers do seem to suggest a case for new nuclear generation overall.
Currently our known natural gas reserves will last over a century. And we're still finding vast new pockets of it:
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Massive-Natural-Gas-D...
Citation? Unfortunately it looks like there are large proven reserves of natural gas:
>...The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that as of January 1, 2014, there were about 2,474 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of technically recoverable resources of dry natural gas in the United States. At the rate of U.S. dry natural gas consumption in 2014 of about 26.6 Tcf per year, the United States has enough natural gas to last about 93 years.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=58&t=8
It is unfortunate because for those who care about climate change, there are inevitable methane releases from fracking and from distribution of natural gas and those are now known to be much worse for the atmosphere than previously thought:
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947
>...It should be nuclear, but, sigh.
Yea, nuclear has so far been the safest form of base load power we have ever used. Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. What if the Alison Canyon was a nuclear storage site (instead of a natural gas storage site) and 11,000 people had to be evacuated - how much would the media have covered that? Another recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. I can't blame some for being afraid of nuclear power, but there are many who should know better.
No, it's a technology where if you use power plants decades out of date, that have known safety issues, and then cover-up the magnitude of the problem once a catastrope occurs then you have a very expensive clean-up operation.
Cleaning up Fukushima will be expensive, there's no denying it, but it's arguably the case that the Deepwater Horizon rig mess could cost significantly more.
There are many unanswered questions about the long-term impact of hydraulic fracturing on seismic stability and on groundwater, and the technique is under scrutiny in many parts of the world. Predictably favored by energy-lobbyists and opposed by environmentalists, fracking remains a contentious issue whose future in the US could depend on a "simple" party change -- hardly a sure bet.
I do think there are many experiments with different storage technologies to smooth out supply, so this particular advantage of NG could change in the next few years.
The Chekhov's gun waiting to go off in electricity demand is electric vehicles. When they become a non-trivial part of transportation they'll be the biggest new demand driver for electricity in two generations. Hopefully they'll arrive in a big way shortly after the big wave of coal retirements is finished; otherwise they could keep marginal coal units lingering for a while longer.
He doesn't want to reverse it. He doesn't give a shit about coal. He only wants their votes, and the votes of similar industries who will view him as a defender of old-school industry.
What is the relative value of marginal votes from those different areas...
I seem to recall reading a study that suggested that surprisingly few electric bus or delivery van fleets would be required to soak up this cheap electricity and tame demand fluctuations but more recently I heard people saying that it's going to be a problem/disaster.
I'm not sure if there's new knowledge or it's just become a popular talking point.
Not to say, it's not good to keep coal in the ground for the same reason. Just thought I would share another tid-bit lol
(As far as I'm aware most peat extraction happens not for energy usage, but for gardening and agricultural use - but the harm is the same.)
And that's assuming we don't still have access to, say, the hardcopy US Patent filing records. You could get very far indeed with basic metalworking + modern knowledge of the optimal energy-collecting shapes for rotor blades.
I read on until "The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free"
Then I had to give up because its obvious propaganda with no real interest in the truth. I am all for clean energy, but unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.
I could also say that is a falsehood in the practicle sense because of what it left out but that wasnt my original intention. My falsehood statement was to include the part about shale which since shale fields are limited its simply not true.
We could further get into UV rays breakin down solar panels etc but that really wasnt my point. I dont expect people to see the rhetoric and falsehoods used in this article but it stood out to me like a sore thumb so I commented.
Nor was I somehow saying save coal or coal is more efficient etc. It was only a comment on the rhetoric and falshoods I saw in a very short span of words.
The marginal cost for additional GW is essentially free. The marginal cost totally ignores capital cost and just involves operational costs, which are (?)nothing for solar and (?)low for wind.
Why do you think "essentially free" marginal renewable cost is a falsehood? The difference between lettings the electrons flow and not letting the electrons flow on an installed plant is what, exactly? That's what's being referenced.
Though there's lots of data to support the article, they do leave out the cost of extracting natural gas from the "practically free" wells. What is that cost?
>unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.
As I see it, the article's thrust is true. I'd love to be proven wrong though, with some facts, if you can provide them.
Why do you think "essentially free" marginal
renewable cost is a falsehood?
Unless you can control the sun, the cost for one extra kilowatt of solar power is the cost of a 1kw solar panel?There's lots of talk, and boy would I ever love to see these actually happen!
However, there's stuff that a utility can design and install toady, and there's stuff that's decade out. For nuclear, deployment of "understood" designs can take a decade, easily.
The other thing about these new nuclear reactors, I don't ever hear anybody talk about them being much cheaper than current reactors. That should be one of the key selling points. They need to be cheap enough that they can run at, say, 50% capacity over the course of a day to follow the demand curve. Right now nuclear runs continuously at near maximum in order to be economical.
Wind and solar are getting cheaper. Storage is getting cheaper. These new nuclear technologies don't need to compete with natural gas and coal, they need to compete with the cost in 20 years of renewables with 30%-50% of that energy getting stored.
In any case, I'd love to see these technologies enter production so that we have a more diverse energy pool. But I don't think it does them any favors to pretend that they're further along than they actually are.
Every nuclear reactor design that has something complicated going on in the radioactive section has had serious problems. Gas-cooled reactors leak. (Ft. St. Vrain was so promising.) Pebble bed reactors jam. (The one in Germany is permanently jammed and can't be disassembled.) Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Ones with attached chemical plants have problems with handling of hazardous materials. It's discouraging.
Ordinary water-based reactors have a simple radioactive section. All the complexity is outside. Yet even those have problems.
Hyman Rickover on this subject:
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose ("omnibus reactor"). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
You can have an equivalent in solar, wind + storage in less than three years. That's 17 years of not producing electricity.
A nuclear power plant can crank out 5 gigawatts.
There aren't any solar or wind plants of that capacity that were constructed in any amount of time, much less three years.
I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now.
Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of 10 or so and is on a clear trajectory to beat fossile fuels on costs, without subsidies.
I'm suspecting there is something cultural going on here–maybe some instinct to seek out what others perceive as dangerous? Beats me...
Science fiction commonly has nuclear reactors at the core of energy for space travel. For extremely long hauls it's compact in terms of volume and weight. As far as I can tell.
So nuclear has a history of being the "future." So tech-related people like it for that reason. We're not going to get personal jet-cars for transit either, most likely. But there's that hint of a dream in tech culture.
Any reasonable carbon-neutral energy plan that I've seen uses at least a bit of nuclear. It won't be the backbone, and it's unlikely that its performance characteristics or cost will change much, but the rest of the century will likely see a consistent amount of nuclear energy, given the longevity of existing reactors.
Because it works.
Fusion probably would have been if funding for nuclear fusion research had been kept at the same level as it was in the 70s. It took a deep dive after that though for reasons which most people can probably guess.
But it was not creating fuel itself and it had some issue with corrosion which would have been fixed. There was not one built since and a lot of documentation was lost but luckily saved by NASA.
In last 10 years more and more people are working on them, specially India and China but also USA (Bill Gates is working on similar thing among others)
The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for their ship to come in while the politicians get ever fatter.
Further, if you've lived your entire life in a coal town, the sheer scale of the plants, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure can make them seem permanent, reliable. It is very difficult to imagine so much specialized infrastructure simply ... going away.
Imagine if you had spent your entire life as a datacenter tech, as had your father. You knew the business inside and out, understood the network of suppliers, the customers, the hardware, everything. You've gotten into arguments about different rack configurations and which you prefer to work on. This is your career. You got into this business because it would provide a stable life for you and your family, and you were damn good at it. Then people started telling you that we would no longer need datacenters - at all - in 5 years because there were now cheaper, better alternatives. You wouldn't believe them.
W. Virginians are notoriously undereducated. So it will take a while but eventually the truth will be known and a day of reckoning will come.
To be fair my undereducated family in neighboring rural Virginia truly believed Trump "will bring the jobs back". They were aghast when I showed them a video of Tim Cook on 60 minutes explaining that those (manufacturing) jobs aren't coming back.
I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.
The end incentive of a politician is to win and retain power. The means to the end this is to take popular positions and be seen to do something about issues voters care about. They're doing precisely that.
"We are backing nuclear"
"This time it will be good"
Can you see a populist saying that?
The ones truly complicit in the Great Lie know who they are, and I have a feeling their day of judgement is closer than they want to believe.
Coal still accounts for 28% of total world energy production (behind only oil, at 31%) and about 41% of the world's electricity production (way ahead of natural gas, at about 27%).
It's not going anywhere, dude.
Here is a list of Independent power producers in BC https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...
Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm>