Wherein I settle the renewables/nuclear "are expensive" squabble for all time

Lizard (2014) (h/t wikipedia)

The US consumes approximately 4 billion MWh per year. Our GDP is currently about $18 trillion. So if you pay $50/MWh (good wind, unfiltered coal, unfiltered gas) your cost for that is $200 billion annually, or 1.1% of the GDP.

If you pay $100/MWh (nuclear, solar) your cost is 2.2% of GDP.

If you pay $150/MWh (offshore wind, gas with CCS, rooftop solar) your cost is 3.3% of the GDP.

The cost of intermittency is pretty minor:

Apologies for smallness, original here. Bottom line: at a 30% level of penetration, you can add about $30/MWh to the cost of wind or solar, or about 0.7% of the GDP.

In other words, the costs of ALL of the alternatives under discussion are minor. We can do what we want to do. Very high levels of penetration of intermittent sources like wind or solar poses special problems, but we are a long way from having those problems today (1.)

Arguing whether nuclear is cheap or expensive, or what the costs of waste disposal will be, or what the cost is to back up wind or solar, or whether the costs of PV systems will continue to fall, misses the point entirely. We have multiple affordable low-carbon options, and the question is not which is best -- we will learn more about that as we build and operate the plants, and different sources will be optimal for different communities in different circumstances.

The point is that we need to do something, and we have both the technology and the resources to solve this aspect of the global warming problem in the next ten to twenty years. In many ways, this is the easy part -- the electrical grid (easier to green than transportation, land use, or industrial CO2 release) in the richest country in the world. The fact that it is so easy and yet we haven't done it yet underscores that it is political will, not technology or money, that are lacking.

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1. I am optimistic about synthetic fuels, as I explore here. To quote myself:

Conventional batteries continue to get better and cheaper, but right now their capacity is orders of magnitude below what would be needed to store, say two or three weeks of energy.

However we do have a large amount of energy storage in the form of fossil fuels: liquid, solid, and gas. This form of storage is stable on geological time scales and extremely energy dense. Unlike many of the alternatives, including chemical batteries, capicators, pumped hydro storage, or molten sodium, the infrastructure to store and release hydrocarbon energy is simple and cheap -- in the case of petroleum, it can be as simple as a barrel or a hole in the ground. . . .


Start with a conventional gas plant equipped with carbon capture technology (assuming we ever get serious about perfecting and deploying that technology.) Then, rather than put the CO2 in the ground, feed it into a synthetic natural gas plant and use a clean energy source to turn the CO2 back into gas. Burn, capture, and un-burn as needed in a closed cycle that doesn't release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Regardless of how cleverly we deploy storage and smart grids, we will meet our emissions goal much faster with nuclear than without it, which is why I remain a strong supporter of retaining and building out the nuclear power sector, despite the irritating epistemic closure on the value of renewables and general hippie-punching tendencies of nuclear power's more fervent advocates.

Cheap coal, cheap sun

I was reading DeSmogBlog's account of the toxic coal ash problem, and it put me in mind of a recent interview Richard Rosen gave to Dot Earth. There are many excellent things in this interview, and it is a real pleasure to get the insider's view of these technologies, and the real barriers to replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources. Rosen is very clear that, while he is pessimistic on the prospect of dramatic R&D breakthroughs in renewables, he thinks the technology needs to be implemented on a broad scale today.

That said, I think he overstates the case here:

The situation is similar for solar thermal technologies; they have had major R&D expenditures for decades and they are improving slowly. But they can never be as cheap as coal-fired electric generation because the energy density of the sun’s rays are not nearly at the level of fossil-fuels like coal, so you necessarily need more physical equipment to collect the energy, and turn it into electricity. Also, the lower temperatures that result from collecting the sun’s rays compared to burning fossil fuels inherently limits the efficiency of solar generation, but more importantly, it increases its costs relative to fossil generation.

It's very difficult to predict, based on physics, what kinds of technologies will be cost-effective and which won't. Physics would suggest, for example, that long-haul trucks could never compete with trains for hauling heavy freight (in fact, they dominate the market in the US). Rosen is, under the gloss of a scientific argument, reasoning ex post facto from the actual relative cost of these technologies today.

Suppose we instead lived in a world in which wind, photovoltaic, and solar thermal sources provide most of our energy, and some clever reformer was proposing coal as a solution to the intermittancy problem. How might Rosen explain the prospects that coal would overtake solar and wind?

ALTER-REVKIN: Coal is a promising emerging technology, easily scalable, with theoretical efficiencies twice what we can achieve with solar, but will it ever compete on price?

ALTER-ROSEN: Coal may be a valuable minor player, but it will never be as cheap as solar. There are too many costly inputs and costly side effects. Imagine, you need a research team to locate the coal, you have to purchase the rights to the coal deposit, then you need an entire operation, separate and independent from power generation, to get the stuff out of the ground. That's trucks, it's heavy machinery, burning fuel and writing paychecks to the operators. Then you need to haul it to the power plant -- more trucks, more heavy machinery. Finally you burn the stuff, and it produces coal ash, which is toxic. You have to store that safely for hundreds of years -- it's not like you're going to dump it behind a rickety wooden dam somewhere and walk away!

ALTER-REVKIN: Wow, that's a lot of costs.

ALTER-ROSEN: And we're not done yet. Researchers estimate that if this technology were widely adopted, millions of people would die each year from atmospheric pollution. So the companies would be paying from that, as well.

Bottom line, it's too complicated to find it, extract it, transport it, store the wastes and cope with the consequences of the pollution for coal to every compete with a no-fuel, no-pollution source like wind or solar.