Woe is the newly blossomed Solar Panel market which China has pulled the rug out from underneath, already

[JohnB]

It was never my position to suggest they were, nor are those fears. Those are about providing perspective, and showing that the concept of "industry" may perhaps mean someone is thinking too small. It was about showing that more than just "industry" can drive demand.

 

I would tend to agree. I think in terms of the energy needs of the civilisation and "Industry" is a subset of that. I look from the perspective that if 20 Terawatts are needed to run the society, then the society will be richer and more robust if the power costs 5 cents per watt rather than 15 cents per watt. Our civilisation requires large amounts of energy to function and every cent taken out of circulation to pay for power is a cent less that can be used for other things. This is possibly a poor analogy, but in extremis power costs can be like subsistance agriculture. If power costs too much, you finish up with the entire economy devoted to providing enough money to provide enough power to keep the system running and there is nothing left. I simply want power generation to cost the least amount of GDP possible, like agriculture.

 

(BTW, my comment was meant as very tongue in cheek, sorry if it didn't come across that way.)

 

Now if you could help me out with this link you gave;

Wind technology is competitive today in bulk power markets with support from the production tax credit, and in high-value niche applications or markets that recognize non-cost attributes.

 

I read this as saying that wind is competitive provided there are subsidies or it is used in places where monetary costs aren't the major factor. This doesn't sound too competitive to me.

 

Current performance is characterized by levelized costs of 4 to 5.5¢/kWh (depending on resource intensity and financing structure),

 

Fair enough, the final price will always depend on resource availability and financing structure so that would be true of all power generation.

 

capacity factors of 30 to 40 percent,

 

I have a problem with this. Wind is competitive assuming a capacity factor of 30-40% but is anybody getting that figure in reality? Using the Wiki figures, the Burton Wind Farm runs at 25%. I'll grant the Danish Horns Rev 2 farm comes in at 46.5% but that is that absolute worlds best performance. According to this 2005 report on British wind farms;

In the UK the annual capacity factor for wind power has varied from 24% to 31% with a long term average of over 27% (Dukes 2005) for onshore locations.

 

So the 30-40% sounds quite conservative but is in reality an extremely optimistic assumption with little in the way of factual evidence to back it up. What matters for the costing of wind power is not the capacity factor you might get, but the capacity factor you will get.

 

availability of 95 to 98%

 

This is an interesting figure. "Availability" in wind power parlance simply means that the generator works and is not undergoing maintainence or repair. It is "available" to provide power if the wind is blowing however this does not mean that if you throw the switch you will actually get any power out of the thing. In a similar fashion a hydro dam that never turns on it's turbines is said to have an "Availability" of 100%. The big difference is that if I turn on a hydro turbine, the water will flow and the turbine will turn and power will be generated, this is not true of a wind farm. So availability is a buzz word that means nothing and has no connection to reality at all. The energy is "available" in much the same sense as all those wrecks in the aircraft boneyards are "available" to the Air Force.

 

total installed project costs ("overnight" — not including construction financing) of $800 to $1,100/kW,

 

This says to me that they are only counting the actual cost of the wind turbine and not the cost of installation or grid link up. I could be wrong on this, but that's how it reads to me.

 

and efficiencies of 65% to 75% of the theoretical (Betz limit) maximum.

 

This sounds really good until you look up the Betz limit and find that the maximum theoretical limit for wind power is about 59%. So they are assuming 65%-75% of that 59%. This means that they are assuming an actual efficiency of between 38% and 44.25% yet a really good wind turbine maxs out at 35%. The figures don't make sense. There's a good run down here.

 

So let's compare what is said to what is really said;

Original;

Wind technology is competitive today in bulk power markets with support from the production tax credit, and in high-value niche applications or markets that recognize non-cost attributes. Current performance is characterized by levelized costs of 4 to 5.5¢/kWh (depending on resource intensity and financing structure), capacity factors of 30 to 40 percent, availability of 95 to 98%, total installed project costs ("overnight" — not including construction financing) of $800 to $1,100/kW, and efficiencies of 65% to 75% of the theoretical (Betz limit) maximum.

 

What is really said;

 

Wind technology is competitive today in bulk power markets provided that it is subsidised or cost isn't a major factor. Current performance is characterized by levelized costs of 4 to 5.5c/kWh (depending on resource intensity and financing structure), assuming an unrealistic capacity factor that long term studies have shown won't be achieved, availability of 95 to 98% (of course if the wind isn't blowing they won't generate anything but we'll stick in a 98% figure 'cause it sounds really, really efficient), and providing we don't count the cost of actually installing the things, and assuming generator efficiencies that nobody has ever got and in fact almost break the laws of physics.

 

The thing is that I'm not arguing against wind power. I really don't give two hoots where the power comes from but the requirement of our civilisation is that it must be cheap. I have no idea how many reports and webpages I've read on this and I've pretty much given up in disgust. Each group is minimising the costs and subsidies for their preferred option and maximising those factors for their opposition. An actual balanced comparison is rarer than hens teeth as everybody has a dog in the fight one way or another.

 

Personally I'd love to see a straight comparison on a 500 MW plant. Compare Solar, Wind, Coal and Nuclear. How much to build it, what are the running costs, the maintainence costs etc and run it out for a 40 year period. Stuff subsidies and tax credits, just a simple "What will it cost to build and run a 500MW plant in each of these types over the next 40 years." Once these basics are covered, then start adding in efficiencies etc, but get a baseline comparison first.

Edited October 3, 2011 by JohnB

[JohnB]

Double Post.

Edited October 3, 2011 by JohnB

[iNow]

Nice post, John. I experience frustration on the other side of the coin. So often when we talk of costs, people leave out the downstream costs on the system due to pollutants and warming. Take coal, for example. If you only look at amount burned and kW generation, it seems cheaper. However, when you look at health issues of miners, lost mountain tops from explosives, runoff into watersheds from broken slurry containment, and all of the toxins and CO2 the chimneys piss into the air when it's burned, I find the cost of solar or wind much more palpable, primarily because they don't come with all of those same downstream costs.

 

Also, you should understand my position. I'm not for just wind or just solar or just anything. The only thing I'm just for is moving away from dirty fuels as quickly as absolutely possible. I'm okay with nuclear, provided it's balanced with solar, wind, and geothermal, and we have better battery technology for storage during times of non-production.

 

Again, though... Nice breakdown. I think you're likely better read on this than I am, and I appreciate what you bring to the thread.

[JohnB]

Thanks mate. I totally agree with your points. The problem as I see it is that we can't get an even baseline figure to start from. If we had that, we could then add in the extras and get a good picture of the long term costings. There is a lot of money on both sides in this and neither are really out to tell the truth, just the truth as they see it.

 

Something I do find interesting is this mountain top mining that America seems to do. Frankly I'm sort of scratching my head on that one. Our mines are all open cut, bloody great holes in the ground, we don't have coal on mountain tops.

 

The other thing is that this is where we build the power stations. If you use Google Earth, go to Queensland and search for "Tarong", one of our big generators. The open cut coal mine is about a mile or so south of the generators. This to me is a sensible arrangement. The coal comes out of the ground, onto the conveyor and into the furnaces. This is standard for us, you can see the same thing at the Bayswater Plant in Muswellbrook New South Wales. If there is a big coal mine and some water nearby for steam, then there is usually a large generator station there. We also don't seem to have the slurry problem that you do. I don't know if this is due to different techniques or whether the coal itself is different.

 

Looking at the mountaintop mines in West Virginia, they strike me as rather small and wasteful, a bit too much following the elevation lines and not enough digging. Most of the ones I looked at aren't as big as the mine for Tarong power station. What I mean by wasteful is this. If you're going to have say 144 square miles of mine, then make a big mine 12 miles by 12 miles, don't have 30 mines dotted over the counrtyside of 4 square miles each. In the long run one big mine does a lot less damage to an area than 30 small ones. This is actually one of my worries with wind and solar, they take up so much space. This will improve with time, but ATM you need a lot of wind towers just for a piddly 500 MW output. I suppose that I'd rather keep using coal etc while spending good money on improving wind generators and then change over rather than changing now to the little things we have available.

 

Reforestation of the mined areas in West Virginia isn't too bad but could be better. The mines need to smooth the drop offs a bit more to give a more natural contour.To illustrate the difference we have a big open cut uranium mine at Jabiru in the Northern Territory, easy to find on Google Earth. Some 60 miles to the north east was the open cut Nabarlek mine, now closed down. See if you can find it. A bit easier to find is the old sand mining area in northern New South Wales about 3 miles north of Byron Bay. I know that it's there because I saw the rutile operation as a kid, but go down to Belongil Beach and you wouldn't know. There's a panoramio pic of the beach on GE, very hard to believe that the area was once a giant sand mine.

 

Your govs really need to put more pressure on the mine companies to rehabilitate the land much better than they do. There is nothing wrong with mining per se, but the companies really have to clean up the mess when they are finished.

Edited October 3, 2011 by JohnB

[iNow]

Something I do find interesting is this mountain top mining that America seems to do. Frankly I'm sort of scratching my head on that one.

 

<...>

 

We also don't seem to have the slurry problem that you do.

The issue as I see it, John, is two-fold. I think it has more to do with our culture than anything else. One, we generally look for the easiest way to do something, even if it's not the best way. Get more with less. Along similar lines, we have two, the fact that companies look for the absolute cheapest way to do things. Fewer heads, fewer machines, fewer upgrades and improvements, more output. Why pay miners and use high-tech equipment when you can use some TNT instead?

 

 

Those approaches lead to outcomes like these:

 

 

 

 

 

In this context, it may become more clear why some folks are so much more strongly and passionately for renewable energy than others.

[JohnB]

In this context, it may become more clear why some folks are so much more strongly and passionately for renewable energy than others.

 

Agreed. The reverse is also true. Since we use draglines and the like and therefore don't have the same problems, we don't see the need for change to be as immediate as you might. Don't get me wrong we still blast, but I wonder if our coal seams are thicker and can be worked more easily than yours. Either way, you govs really seem to be falling down on the job.

 

I think that if our mines were run as badly and messily as yours are, I'd be just as passionate about ending it as you are.

[swansont]

Your govs really need to put more pressure on the mine companies to rehabilitate the land much better than they do. There is nothing wrong with mining per se, but the companies really have to clean up the mess when they are finished.

That's a huge problem, since it's too easy to set up a mining company that is leveraged to the hilt and has no net assets, created as a spin-off from the parent corporation. After the operations are done and the profits have been extracted, it folds and if the cleanup costs exceed the deposit they put down, there's no way to recover any additional money. There was talk of BP doing this if the gulf cleanup cost got too high — spin the company off, give it all of the liability and load it up with debt. If it's forced to pay out too much in liability/recovery, it just declares bankruptcy. If it's less visible than the BP spill, as most mining operations are, you limit the PR backlash against the parent company.