Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumCost of wind keeps dropping, and theres little coal, nuclear can do to stop it
Cost of wind keeps dropping, and there’s little coal, nuclear can do to stop itAn annual look at the costs of generating power.
MEGAN GEUSS - 11/6/2017, 12:08 PM
Though a lot has changed since 2016, not much has changed for energy economics in the US. The cost of wind generation continues to fall, solar costs are falling, too, and the cost of coal-power energy has seen no movement, while the cost of building and maintaining nuclear plants has gone up. And none of those conclusions reflect subsidies and tax credits applied by the federal government.
The conclusions come from Lazard (PDF), an asset management company that publishes cost estimates for various types of electricity-generation assets each year. Lazard’s numbers reflect the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which averages the estimated costs of construction, maintenance, and fuel for electricity-generating assets over the number of megawatt-hours that each asset is expected to produce over its lifetime. In other words, the LCOE is the lifetime cost of a turbine divided by the amount of energy that turbine will produce over its lifetime. LCOE is a good way of comparing electricity generation sources that vary dramatically in cost to build and cost to maintain.
The result, tracked over years, is one way of gauging how the US energy mix is changing and could change in the coming year. Though the new presidential administration was expected (and still is expected) to be a boon to coal and nuclear energy, those efforts are still mired in the political process. And even if they succeed, thwarting the cost advantages of wind and solar energy while propping up coal and nuclear power will require not-inconsiderable amounts of intervention from the US government.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/economics-working-against-coal-as-cost-of-wind-solar-power-drops/?comments=1
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NNadir
(33,511 posts)...natural gas on which the so called "renewable" wind industry depends.
Redundancies are not cheap, neither environmentally nor economically, nor for that matter, thermodynamically.
It also happens that wind turbines have a short life time, slightly on the order of cars. If it is momentarily cheap for this selfish and clueless generation, it won't be for future generations who will need to clean this worthless junk up, when it becomes worthless junk.
The wind industry just soaked, in the last ten years, over one trillion dollars out of the world economy without producing substantial energy. The entire industry, assembled in more than 50 years of mindless cheering, can't even match the annual increases in the use of dangerous natural gas, for which the wind industry is merely an smokescreen.
It did not work; it is not working; and it will not work. We are now observing the fastest increases ever observed in the dangerous fossil fuel waste concentrations in the atmosphere. Ever. Ever.
No one alive now will ever see concentrations of carbon dioxide below 400 ppm ever again, and the reason is partially, if not totally, a function of the ability of people to lie to themselves about energy and the environment.
The wind industry is a failure.
hunter
(38,309 posts)All you have to do is BELIEVE!
NNadir
(33,511 posts)...this is because I check the atmospheric carbon dioxide figures every damn week.
It's getting uglier and uglier.
I don't know if the goal is to grind up birds and anything else that flies, but the wind industry has nothing at all to do with the goal of saving the atmosphere. Measured by this criteria, it's far more disastrous as that even that went down the memory hole pretty quickly, specifically the deepwater horizon disaster.
hunter
(38,309 posts)... are natural gas extraction.
There's more than enough "natural" gas (great marketing term!) to destroy the world as we know it, and too many wind and solar energy enthusiasts who become unwitting shills for the gas industry.
Nimble gas power plants in combination with solar and wind energy may be profitable in the short run, but they are hardly any better than coal, especially in expanding fossil fueled economies.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)You said >>>
"Nimble gas power plants in combination with solar and wind energy may be profitable in the short run, but they are hardly any better than coal, especially in expanding fossil fueled economies."
Gas power plants have a couple of fundamental advantages over coal.
1) Smaller footprint - a storage tank replaces the area needed for on-site coal storage.
2) Transportation - coal is brought in either by truck, train or barge. NatGas comes in via pipeline.
3) Currently NatGas burns without the need for scrubbers that coal plants require. What those scrubbers remove from the exhaust is stored on-site in a containment pond. The insurance on those ponds has to be considerable since the catastrophic breach in East Tennessee that TVA spent over a $1 Billion to clean up. There are over 400 of these containment ponds in the US. Duke Energy is having a lot of trouble with seepage from ponds in NC.
Why do power companies use NatGas for peaker plants and not coal? I think there is a functional difference in the type of turbines each requires. I have heard that the turbines for coal plants require long warm up periods before they are ready for a load and as a result they are typically kept on during off peak periods - mainly overnight. Using coal to keep them spinning without producing any power.
hunter
(38,309 posts)Gas is coal's nasty little brother.
With new fracking, LNG ocean transport, and deep water extraction technologies, gas "reserves" are the greatest threat to this civilization and what's left of the natural environment.
Global warming is real, the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is real.
An optimistic electric power mix of even 50% gas and 50% wind is extremely undesirable, especially so when electric markets are expanding. "Better than coal" means nothing, it's quick poison vs. slower poison. The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels by banning their extraction. Fossil fuels will not be displaced by imaginary "green" technologies. Gas IS NOT A "TRANSITION" FUEL when there is nothing to transition too.
Nuclear fusion probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Nuclear fission power is the only hope for maintaining a high energy industrial economy similar to the affluence some humans now enjoy.
I propose we abandon our high energy (but not high technology) industrial economy as soon as possible. We need to create more communities where daily automobile use is unnecessary and automobile ownership rejected, we ought to be experimenting with satisfying lifestyles having a very small environmental footprint.
It's a quixotic quest. I still think wind turbines are ugly, and those endorsing them become unwitting shills of the gas extraction industry.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)What you said about the lifespan of windmills is misleading. It may be said that windfarms from 40 years ago are in disuse but that was mainly due to factors other than mechanical.
Comparing the lifespan of a windmill to that of a car is fairly open ended. Are you talking about a 40 yr old Mercedes or VW Beetle or 10 yr old Ford Focus?
The fact is that windfarms today produce power at very little cost and are making economic life miserable for both coal and nuclear.
Most of the cost of a windfarm is in initial construction - going thru the permitting process. Unlike a fossil fuel plant that needs a constant supply of fuel. Once online the cost to replace the generator or blades is minor and offset by improvements in output and it's not like fossil fuel plants don't have considerable maintenance costs as well.
NNadir
(33,511 posts)...Danish wind turbines published by that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole of a nation's website?
I've worked with it extensively.
Before accusing someone of being misleading it would be useful to know what one is talking about.
I'll post a link to something called "data analysis" later.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)The lifespan of a windmill is a function of the cost.
The typical windfarm is built by one company and once it's up and producing power is sold to another company. They then use the returned capital to develop additional windfarms. The problem with a process like this is that the a better quality windmill drives up development cost and since the intention is to sell early in the lifespan, it's more likely that cheaper windmills will used.
Now if the first question the buyer of a producing windfarm was to ask is what is about the MTBF (mean time between failure)? That pushes the initial developer to source a better quality windmill and thus a longer average lifespan.
Going back to your analogy using cars - typical powertrain warranties today are much longer than 20 yrs ago. Pretty much the same process would apply to windmills.
NNadir
(33,511 posts)Again, I'll post the data when I get back to my home office. (I forgot to do so.)
The wind industry, just for the record, has a serious materials science problem already, and has been totally ineffective at addressing climate change, which is might have been the justification for this experimentally FAILED industry in the past, but no longer is, given that more than 1 trillion dollars has been squandered on it with the result that the rate of carbon dioxide increases is rising, not falling.
Even if - and I doubt it on engineering grounds and not on paper shuffling MBA kind of stuff - they made this crap less rickety than it has proved to be - we still need to replace a trillion bucks worth of this stuff assembled over the last 20 years.
It's not worth it. It's useless, dirty and, frankly, since it needs to include the external costs of dangerous natural gas as well as internal costs, it's not at all inexpensive.
It's a waste.
NNadir
(33,511 posts)Last edited Sat Nov 11, 2017, 01:16 AM - Edit history (2)
The data can be found, in both Danish and English here: Master Data Register of Wind Turbines by clicking on the link for the Excel Spread Sheet:
Data on operating and decommisioned wind turbines (end of September 2017)
One may use the normal Excel functions to find the mean life time of these pieces of shit, the maximal lifetime, the shortest lifetime (in a few cases zero) and of course, the total energy produced by them. In fact, one can see the total energy produced by them month ot month, and determine how much gas they need to burn in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark, to make up for the times the wind doesn't blow.
I have done these analyses, in detail, twice and it takes about two to three hours of data manipulation to get it all. One needs to use Excel date functions as well as a number of sorts to really understand how useless and pathetic this infrastructure actually is.
I'm not going to do all of this here; I'm tired of confronting people waving their hands in an oblivious fashion to defend the indefensible, that their pet theory - which they will not give up no matter how much information is thrown at them - hasn't worked, isn't working and won't work. I'll post some earlier details from one of my analyses at the end of this post.
However the figures for the month of September, 2017 are illustrative. In the entire nation of Denmark in the month of September, 831,779,994 kWh of electricity. Note that unlike the big lie sold repeatedly by the so called "renewable energy" industry a kiloWatt-hour is a unit of energy and not a unit of peak power. To convert it to the SI unit of energy, the Joule, we need to multiply a kilowatt hour by 3,600,000 to obtain 2.99 petajoules (peta = 10^15). A day has 86400 seconds in it and there are 30 days in September, equaling, therefore September lasts for 2,592,000 seconds.
Thus the average continuous power for the whole damned offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole of the nation of Denmark amounts to 1155 MW.
Each of the single reactors at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California, due be closed in a few years because stupid people hate it and don't give a shit about climate change at all, or about air pollution deaths - or any of the other things on which nuclear energy is, by far the most successful technology ever at ameliorating - produce 1100 MW of power continuously. In August of 2017, the last entry on the EIA data Excel page reporting performance of US nuclear plants, the two reactors produced 1,682,881 megawatt hours of electricity, translating, as above to 6.58 petajoules, or 203% as much energy as all the wind turbines in the entire nation of that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark.
The entire nuclear power plant sits on 900 acres, not a whole fucking country along with a huge portion of the North Sea. It doesn't grind up birds and bats and it operates continuously whether or not there are gas plants nearby. All of the energy produced by the reactors is produced in two relatively small buildings which only take up a small portion of the 900 acres.
The Diablo Canyon reactors could easily operate way beyond the time that it is being forced to close (2025) owing to appeals to ignorance, selective attention, superstition and scientific illiteracy, but the decision has been made to kill people by closing them, and there's nothing I or probably anyone else can do about it. They came on line in 1986. Even so when fear and ignorance forces them to close, they will have operated for 39 years. Again, there is no technical reason they couldn't be operated longer, but never underestimate the power of stupidity to squander highly successful engineering on trivial obsessions.
Here was the results of my more extensive analysis of the Danish pieces of wind turbine shit back in 2015:
The Danes – and we will see that despite all the hoopla that has surrounded their wind program their actual energy production from wind energy is very small, even compared to wind capacity in other countries like the United States, Germany and China – keep an exhaustive and very detailed database of every single wind turbine they built in the period between the 1978 and the present day.[29] If one downloads the Excel file available in the link for reference 29 one can show that the Danes, as of the end of March 2015, have built and operated 8,002 wind turbines of all sizes. Of these, 2727, or 34.1% of them have been decommissioned. Of those that were decommissioned, the mean lifetime was 16.94 years (16 years and 310 days). Twenty-one of the decommissioned wind turbines operated less than two years, two never operated at all, and 103 operated for less than 10 years. Among decommissioned turbines, the one that lasted the longest did so for 34 years and 210 days. Among all 2727 decommissioned wind turbines, 6 lasted more than 30 years.
Of the 5,275 turbines still operating there are 13 that lasted longer than 34 years and 210 days, the longest having operated (as of March 31, 2015) for 36 years and 303 days. The mean age of operating Danish wind turbines is 15.25 years, 15 years and 92 days.
In March of 2015, the entire Danish wind industry produced 1,137,405,953 kWh (or 1.13 TWh) of electricity, which is the equivalent of 4.0967 petajoules (0.0041 exajoules). Thus for the 31 days of March 2015, the average continuous power output of the 5,275 operating wind turbines was 1529 MW. Since the rated (peak) capacity of the wind turbines operating in March of 2015 was 4096 MW, it follows that the capacity utilization of wind turbines in Denmark was 31.2%.
Sustaining the Wind, Part I
Have a nice weekend, and try not to notice that the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 404.17 ppm in the week beginning of October 29, 2017, 22.42 ppm higher than it was in the same week in 2007, as reported at the Mauna Loa observatory. (Accessed 11/10/2017).
By the way, according to the report by the Frankfurt School/UNEP/Bloomberg report, we've been squandering about a trillion dollars every ten years on the useless and land wasting wind industry, with the result that carbon dioxide concentrations are rising at an average of roughly 2.2 ppm per year, the highest rate ever observed since observations have been made.
Again, have a nice weekend.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)Still looking over the data.
I see columns for decommissioned Windmills but nothing on their lifespan.
Under decommissioned - take 2003 for instance. 1230 were taken out of service but they only had 110,620 kW capacity. That supports my point on the advancement of the technology. A simple fact is that output is cubed by doubling the diameter of the blades so replacing early models that were smaller capacity with larger models with higher output is an economic issue not one of lifespan. Although I would also concede that early models probably had maintenance issues but that's typical with any manufactured product exposed to the elements and the loads on moving parts.
The fact is that in 2015 Denmark got 42% of their electricity from wind. They have set goals of 50% by 2020 and 84% by 2035. I have a difficult time understanding your stance that they produce nothing of consequence. I think Scotland is also getting most of the electricity from Wind. A key fact about Europe - their electric grids are interconnected so excess supply in one area can be used to address demand in another.
Diablo Canyon is a horrible example. Even though it was designed to withstand a 6.75 quake and later updated to 7.5, Fukushima is a clear example of what happens when the unexpected occurs. It is built close to 4 different faults!!! Again, it's not that nuclear plants are capable of producing a lot of electricity for decades - it's what happens when bean counters are in charge of budgets. It's when people that are wholly unqualified to judge the risks associated with delayed maintenance, reduced manpower, inadequate training or substandard quality on replacement parts are making the decisions. Every one of those tactics improves the bottom line until there's a failure. We have clear examples of what those failures look like. And guess who pays when there is an a failure - the ratepayers and tax payers. It's an unfunded liability just like the tons of nuclear waste each plant produces each year.
NNadir
(33,511 posts)Here's why: The plant has operated for more than 3 decades without killing anyone, ZERO people. During its operation the State of California lost tens of thousands of lives to air pollution, if not hundreds of thousands. Tens of thousands more died in automobile accidents.
This obviates the mentality of anti-nukes perfectly. They don't give a shit about was IS happening but elevate their paranoid fantasies over human life, based on their imagination of events that they have convinced themselves are inevitable, even though the evidence shows they are hardly, not even remotely, so.
Like their enthusiasm for the failed and expensive, and frankly environmentally questionable wind industry, they elevate "could" over "is." The wind industry is not producing significant energy, and yet, almost half a century of experience with it, they keep claiming it could do everything.
It hasn't; it isn't; it won't.
The example of Fukushima shows this in spades as well. In that earthquake 20,000 people died from seawater, while deaths from radiation, if in fact there were any, were vanishingly small.
Yet our anti-nuke community is doing everything in its power to assure rising seas and thus even more seawater deaths,
It is a crime against all future generations to shut Diablo Canyon.
The logic of anti-nukes is bizarre. Compared to to other technology related accidents, for example planes, trains and automobiles, half a century of commercial nuclear power is remarkable in how little loss of life it's involved.
I'll consider taking the deadly rhetoric of anti-nukes with slightly less contempt when I find one who's anti-car. So far no luck.
NNadir
(33,511 posts)Last edited Sun Nov 12, 2017, 09:19 PM - Edit history (1)
It's ENERGY from carbon free sources at ANY time in the future. The FACT is that the Danish government is currently opening parts of the North Sea to oil and gas exploration. This says a great deal about their view of energy.
The only acceptable amount of electricity from carbon free sources to my mind is 100%
There is no doubt in my mind that the air pollution from the combustion of Danish North Sea oil and gas production has lead to a number of deaths that easily dwarfs radiation deaths from Fukushima.
I regard all of this percent talk engaged in by the defenders of wind and solar as delusional. They are so caught up in inappropriate defenses of their pet technologies that they have lost interest in what was supposed to be the result, a safe and clean environment.
While they happily cheer tha "only" 55% of electricity in Denmark some day be produced by burning dangerous fossil fuels and dumping its toxic waste in the atmosphere, the deterioration of the planetary environment is accelerating, not slowing. They miss the point.