The World Could Reach Peak Coal And Oil In Three Years, Thanks To Cheap Renewables

66 Comments on "The World Could Reach Peak Coal And Oil In Three Years, Thanks To Cheap Renewables"

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 4:28 am 



Now for something like the truth.

‘A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/10122850/True-cost-of-Britains-wind-farm-industry-revealed.html

Quite a lot of cash for something that provides 10% of UK electricity and perhaps 2% of its total energy supply. And this doesn’t include the cost of intermittency, which more or less doubles the real cost of wind power. Of course, that cost ends up being met by dispatchable generators that end up losing market share, so it tends not to appear in the ‘official’ statistics for the cost of wind power. The costs will be higher still, when wind grows to the point where actual energy storage is needed, as we will then be building power stations that consume intermittent electricity as ‘fuel’ and releasing dispatchable electricity to the grid.

Here is another article from the US:

http://europe.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480?rm=eu

Some interesting articles by Euan Mearns:

http://euanmearns.com/parasitic-wind-killing-its-host/

http://euanmearns.com/brave-green-world-and-the-cost-of-electricity/

At present, most installed wind power is on land, with small amounts installed in favourable offshore locations, in shallow water with stable seabed. When we expand this energy source to provide the 100’s of TW-hours per year that we need, we will need to build in deep water, in much less favourable conditions.

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 4:48 am 



Antius, have you any idea how much money was thrown at the nuclear industry from the fifties onward?

Or to make a comparison: you need to throw money at a human child for 25 years before it can slowly become productive and return on investment?

Wind energy is a relatively new technology and indeed needs to be nurtured, just like anything else in a state of infancy

But even if you would have a point in claiming that nuclear has the lowest kwh price of them all, nuclear is unacceptable, for reasons of:

1. Too hazardous
2. Uranium depletion
3. Unsolved waste problem
4. Proliferation
5. Hidden military costs in ensuring supply (French-Dutch military anti-Jihadist operations in Mali for instance)

The nuclear industry received its death-blow with the meltdown of Fukushima, a problem that is still not under control and which caused the Germans to overnight but correctly decide to get rid of the dangerous technology completely.

Nobody in his right mind is going to advocate a technology that has the potential to make large parts of your country uninhabitable, certainly not in overcrowded European countries or overcrowded Britain. We will be having trouble enough in ensuring that old nuclear clunkers in Belgium, France, Ukraine and Britain won’t melt down, let alone that we are going to even consider to building new ticking time bombs.

Your kwh-price argument (if it is valid in the first place, which I reject) is going to be rejected as the sole argument. Nuclear is fundamentally rejected for the reasons stated above, even if the price would be half of that of solar and wind.

P.S.1 Do you have a commercial stake in the British nuclear industry?

P.S.2 Scottish nationalists singing the European hymne, Beethoven’s “Alle Menschen werden Brueder” in British (for how much longer?) Parliament.

Epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8HoKUaVXkQ

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 5:38 am 



Union of concerned scientists: Billions of dollars in Subsidies for the Nuclear Power Industry Will Shift Financial Risks to Taxpayers

http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/nuclear_power/Nuclear-Subsidies-in-APA-and-ACELA.pdf

Nuclear Subsidies: $7.1 billion a year

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/Nuclear_Subsidies.html

peakyeast on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 5:45 am 



Denmark has the most expensive of everything.

But about 95% of the electricity price is government taxation.

Look at this calcuation on the price of a new car:
https://www.180grader.dk/Politik/samlet-skat-for-ny-bil-559

Total taxation on the purchase of a car worth about 15.000$. Is …suspence… Tax is …559%.

Davy on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 5:56 am 



The reality is we need to be throwing money at alternatives over the alternative which is infrastructure with no future. Alternative will likely never scale in size and in time to be a transformation. Society has the appearance of a decline trajectory along multiple metrics. Alternatives are vital as a way to diversify our energy mix heading into decline. Alternatives are a lifeboat technology. We need more sustainability period. We need resilience to mitigate energy shocks.

Ideally we would have a big drive to outfit the end users with dispersed solar. Communities would utilize more localized solar. Emergency services could get the bulk of the investment. Ideally is not reality. Reality is the economics of alternatives must battle in the market place so we get grid sized alternative projects. This is still better than airports, highways, and (god forbid) new sports stadiums. The costs are worth it.

If I complain about green and alternative energy issues it is mostly in respect for the truth. There is a pseudo religion among the greens and technos. They believe in progress and transitions. They discount and dismiss an economy in decline. They consider climate change manageable. I consider it a foregone conclusion of the seeds of our undoing. They use embellished data that is predictive at best for what is theoretical at best. To clarify this I am making this point in regards to the widespread applications in a market penetration over 50%. I am also including transport, manufacturing, and construction. Greens and technos are misleading our children the sheeples. The sheeple just wants a better status quo. They are using the best tool of manipulation called optimism to hoodwink the sheeple and it is working…for now.

Here among big boys and some girls let’s talk reality. We are not afraid here to talk about death and destruction. These have always been a part of life but now life appears to be on a different trajectory. We are in or the vicinity of a transition period of a paradigm shift. In some ways it is the bumpy plateau we talked about in peak oil. It is the beginnings of abrupt climate change with the arctic warming. It is the economy entering macro stagflation with oversized debt and unfunded liabilities. It is world ecosystems in decline and failure. It is the 6th great extinction. It is states with populations on the threshold of unsustainability even with a global economy. It is ourselves a global people who are now at a crossroads of globalism or nationalism. This change to globalism may be the most dramatic because it is only the ever growing economy that allows globalism to continue. We have a growing global population that must grow economically. Within this population growth we have consumption growing but increasingly only possible through wealth transfer. This wealth transfer is tearing society apart with unfairness of privilege and elitism. We have our academia and media corrupted in politics instead of pursuit of knowledge and the reporting of the truth objectively. We have politics that has always been foul that has entered a new stage of legalized disregards for the law. We have a reality TV star running a major power that is a reality TV show about a dream that has failed. We have a rest of the world that tags a long like a pissed off little brother. This is about the walking through the door of moral hazard which is now closed. We are now a Ponzi economy and a house of cards global government.

Hell, I could go on and on but you get the picture. This is clearly decline so yes, all resources we can throw at something as important as more diversified energy sources is well over the top of a good investment even if it does not pencil out with the status quo. Compare that to all the rest and it is a no brainer. I even accept the dream team our greens and techno’s fairytales. It’s ok because the children need fairytales.

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 6:02 am 



Charging a high price for electricity is a blessing in disguise. It forces a household to economize and invest in efficient household appliances. Danes may have to pay three times as much for a kWh as Americans, but they most certainly are not three times as poor.

When I cycled through Denmark from Flensburg/Germany to Frederikshavn and the ferry to Gothenburg/Sweden last summer, I could verify that indeed Denmark is a damned expensive country. But I also saw that the state of the country is good, infrastructure is fine, everything is clean and well kept.

It is also a bit of a lonely and isolated country. Where in Holland all roads are congested with lorries from all over Europe, mostly German and Polish but also from Italy, Spain, Ukraine and Russia, heading for Rotterdam harbor, Denmark is mostly a Danes-only country. You hardly see foreign license plates.

There could be a little more cafe’s and hotels though. And it would be nice if the Danes began to charge a price for coffee. Not having to pay for it in a cafe makes me as a Dutch coffee junkie feel embarrassed, feel guilty and I have to push money into their hands and quickly run away. The truth is of course that Danes don’t take coffee seriously and for them it is merely a stepping stone to something more, shall we say, substantial.lol

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 6:25 am 



OT – British’s elite, surprised by the untimely Brexit coup carried by the British population (not the British elite), is now forced to opt for plan B, the good ol’ (anti-continental European) “Special Relationship”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waoLo-OEKUg

Britain-2017, a sort of Belo-Russia-1987.

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 6:58 am 



Cloggie, you have already made up your mind. Nothing I could say, facts that I could give, would make any difference would it? If I shot this to pieces, you would still continue to believe in it because you want to. My logic is no match for your devotion.

Wind power is not like nuclear power. One of the advantages that a wind turbine does actually have over a nuclear reactor is its simplicity. You have a nacelle that tracks the wind; blades; a tower that resists shearing forces; a shaft connected to a synchronous generator (some with, some without a gearbox in between); power electronics and cabling. That’s about it. The simplicity allows us to build these things at a local level, something we would be almost impossible for a nuclear reactor. We have actually had these things in one form or another, for a very long time. Electric aero-generators have been on the market for as long as we have had electricity, mechanical systems a lot longer than that. To a certain extent, improved technology has improved the economics of wind energy. We now have carbon fibre blades that are much lighter and durable than the aluminium alloy blades of the 1980s. We have synchronous machines that don’t require gearboxes – power electronics can generate the wave forms that we need to interface them with the grid. Many of these advantages are of benefit to nuclear and other generation schemes as well.

We are now at the point where we have applied state of the art technology to wind turbines. Any further improvements will be small, because a pylon and nacelle case basically is what it is. Bearing and synchronous machine design is now well developed. Power electronics are cheap and off the shelf. A wind turbine of today is a very optimised piece of equipment.

The cost reductions of recent years can be attributed to a combination of factors: (1) Large economies of scale. Up to a point, doubling production of anything will drop costs by ~10%. Ultimately, there are material, energy, capital and labour costs that result in diminishing returns. (2) Low interest rates, especially for large projects. Wind energy is very capital intensive because of the sheer amount of infrastructure involved and low interest rates will improve its economics; (3) A deflationary environment, in which the cost of manufactured goods like steel and physical components are deflated due to collapsing demand and dumping onto world markets; (4) A regulated electricity supply system in which wind is given seller of choice priority.

One problem is, even with these advantages, wind power cannot compete with base load fossil or nuclear when all costs are added in (especially back-up and storage costs). And this is a problem today, when wind is benefiting from a lot of advantages that probably will not continue indefinitely: Low commodity prices, large economies of scale, an abundance of good sites to locate new turbines and a political culture prepared to ignore its fundamental problems.

Bigger problems relate to the basic limitations of the resource. To expand it to the point where it meets a large chunk of Europe’s total energy needs will require both heavy building on land and deep water construction at sea. The physical scale of the infrastructure is huge and good sites are already facing saturation in the UK. Building on land is a lot cheaper, but means ramping up its external costs. We are talking about tens of thousands of square kilometres built out with turbines at minimum practical spacing. The second pushes up capital costs substantially.

The fundamental problems with wind are things that we just can’t easily get around: intermittency and low power density. This means huge physical impact on the environment, comparatively large material investments and the need for separate power plants to deal with intermittency. These are the basic reasons why this can never be cheap.

Nuclear power really needs a separate post. But it has the potential to be substantially cheaper than any intermittent renewable energy source simply because it is dispatachable (controllable) and its power density is so much greater. A wind farm has a power density of 2W/m2. A fast reactor core has power density 300-500MW/m3. Whether or not it can practically capitalise on that advantage is another matter. But the potential is there in a way that is impossible for wind.

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 7:01 am 



‘Charging a high price for electricity is a blessing in disguise. It forces a household to economize and invest in efficient household appliances. Danes may have to pay three times as much for a kWh as Americans, but they most certainly are not three times as poor.’

False. The GDP of an economy is directly proportional to its electricity use per capita. You can reduce energy intensity of an economy by switching to more thermodynamically efficient fuels, i.e from coal to natural gas or electricity. But once you get to electricity you hit a limit. And the more it costs, the less resources you have available for other things.

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 7:03 am 



PS – Why do you keep banging on about Scotland and Brexit? These things have nothing much to do with the economics of wind or solar power.

Davy on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 7:28 am 



Antius, that was a great post and sums up the wind power situation in a short space. It points to the problem for wind with scale and the facts of technological and economic diminishing returns. I am not sold on NUK power but I just don’t have the understanding of it plain and simple. I am afraid of it but I know some of these fears may be irrational. I am still listening. We are facing a severe test of our civilization. One I feel we are not going to win. It is how we make our retreat in my opinion is where our successes can be found. So I am preaching success in failure. I don’t feel NUK is a good technology with a civilization in retreat. Yet, we are stuck with what we have at a minimum it must be maintained.

I copy and paste exceptional posts and this was one.

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 8:05 am 



That’s a long post Antius. Perhaps I will address it later tonight, because you at least you know what you are talking about and these sort of people are rare on this board, where many think that a sneer is an argument.

Let’s drop the “kill argument” first then:

Peak Uranium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

Share nuclear global electricity production: 11%

Most pessimistic estimates peak uranium: 2035. Could be wrong, but reliable data about real reserves don’t exist.

Mind you that date of 2035 is for current level of nuclear electricity production. If we were to scale up nuclear production, that date of 2035 would come closer proportionally with consumption.

The ASPO Peak oil 2015 story was bogus because they forgot to call it by its real name: “peak conventional oil”, where in reality the earth’s crust is loaded with low quality, but upgradedable fossil fuel, giving us combustible material for centuries to come. The real limiting factor is climate change, not running out of fossil fuel.

But with nuclear it is a different ballgame; there is no low quality uranium.

Here an article that says that whatever the real reserves, it is not possible to increase production of uranium much above the current level, making your strategy obsolete in the first place:

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.nl/2017/01/peak-uranium-future-of-nuclear-energy.html

We can’t substantially increase uranium production to realize your nuclear dreams. Your vision is based on quick sand. It is completely unclear if we have the fuel in the first place to expand our current capacity.

And since fossil is a long-term no-no and renewable is coming down in price substantially (China doubled its solar capacity in 2016 alone), the race has been run and nuclear lost. Thank God.

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 8:10 am 



‘Antius, that was a great post and sums up the wind power situation in a short space. It points to the problem for wind with scale and the facts of technological and economic diminishing returns. I am not sold on NUK power but I just don’t have the understanding of it plain and simple. I am afraid of it but I know some of these fears may be irrational. I am still listening. We are facing a severe test of our civilization. One I feel we are not going to win. It is how we make our retreat in my opinion is where our successes can be found. So I am preaching success in failure. I don’t feel NUK is a good technology with a civilization in retreat. Yet, we are stuck with what we have at a minimum it must be maintained.
I copy and paste exceptional posts and this was one’

Thank you. My ego just got a bit bigger . And thanks to Cloggie, of course.
I am inclined to agree. The impassable problem is that even a perfect energy source would be a disaster to the world we live in. The more abundant our energy supply, the more we grow and foul the world in which we live. And we would then simply peak at a higher even less sustainable level. The only solution now that allows any sort of happy ending is for humanity to fly the nest. It isn’t impossible, but it is technological feat that won’t be easy to achieve.

Antius on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 8:27 am 



Cloggie, either way I think we are screwed as long as we continue to live on Earth. Global warming and resource depletion is natures way of serving notice that we need to leave.

I think peak uranium is one of the reasons why there is a limited future for the light water reactor. At present, uranium cost is a negligible part of total fuel cost. But nothing can last forever in a finite world and uranium is a relatively rare metal.

The short answer is that we need to close the fuel cycle. The future belongs to the travelling wave reactor and the breeder reactor, there are potentially a large number of ways in which that could be done. Another advantage with these concepts is higher power density and lower cost when economy of scale kicks in. For my masters thesis I developed a concept reactor that had 10 times the whole system power density of a Westinghouse AP1000.

But nuclear energy only provides at best a short term fix for our ultimate problem. We should use it as a springboard to get us off this planet.

Cloggie on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 10:06 am 



You are quite the time-bandit mr Antius. My own credentials: physics engineer, thesis about Lagrangian dynamics applied to wind rotors and phd work on seasonal storage of solar heat in the soil. Made solar cells in the university laboratory, crawled through wind tunnels for wind energy, programmed Apple IIe for sampling wind-rotor data and Burroughs mainframes with CSMP for simulation models for wind rotor dynamics, etc. So it looks that we both made our fundamental choices early on. And that there is no way that either of us is going to make the other change his mind. Not sure about you, but I have no vested (career) interests in alt-energy. When Ronnie replaced the peanut farmer in the US, the whole renewable energy movement bled dry and job opportunities with it. Fortunately there was IT and that’s my profession until today.

I think peak uranium is one of the reasons why there is a limited future for the light water reactor.

At least we agree on that one.

The short answer is that we need to close the fuel cycle. The future belongs to the travelling wave reactor and the breeder reactor, there are potentially a large number of ways in which that could be done.

I saw that one coming.

There is absolutely no support for that sort of Boxes of Pandora in Europe. Remember the fast breeder in Kalkar/Germany? Know what happened to that one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vXVTHn-3nc

Billions and billions for nothing. They had to close the joint down because of massive resistance from the population at the time (including me).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Like many aspects of nuclear power, fast breeder reactors have been subject to much controversy over the years. In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said “After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries”. In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned

It is the same story as with fusion: unfulfilled promises and billions and billions of subsidy wasted.

Even if it could work in theory, after Chernobyl and Fukushima, the image of the nuclear energy industry is so bad that it is impossible to sell that world view to the public.

The EU has made a fundamental choice to opt for renewable energy and phase out fossil fuel by 2050. I think that is a realistic goal.

Davy on Fri, 10th Feb 2017 10:25 am 



There is an alternative and that is to embrace a die off with a hospice and lifeboat mentality. We can turn to living with less and become a global people who say “no”. I know “Not going to happen”. I will say this it can and should happen with some of you as individuals but that is another topic. We need to have all options on the table especially when the deeper reality is we likely don’t have options. Techno optimism is not an option it is the status quo and it is failing. How long until the “failure meter” is high enough that we accept the need for a different model? I will admit the techno option does provide for the here and now and in a cavalier way it satisfy the “now” in immediacy. This is the nearest we can get to human nature and that is immediate satisfaction. As individuals some of us who are bored with immediate satisfaction seek out a higher wisdom and that for me is embracing a collapse paradigm of doom and prep that is both long and short term.