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Post by Barry Brook on Mar 14, 2013 17:02:49 GMT 9.5
A new post has been published on BraveNewClimate. Link here: bravenewclimate.com/81000-truckers-for-solarThe World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently released its World Solar Atlas report reckoning that the world's entire projected needs in 2050 of something beginning with "e" could be met with solar panels on less than one percent of the planet's surface. But how realistic is this in the real world, and what are the other options that WWF ignored? In a guest post, Geoff Russell asks the hard questions. This BNC Discussion Forum thread is for the comments related to this BNC post.
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Post by singletonengineer on Mar 14, 2013 20:43:09 GMT 9.5
Nice one, Geoff and Barry.
Unfortunately, I expect many more reports from WWF and Co before their supporters and apologists realise the realities of distance, logistics, geography and environmental impact.
Until the day arrives when the flow of nonsense from ZCA2020, WWF and other supreme optimists ceases must arrive in order for the real debate to begin in earnest.
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Post by Paul on Mar 14, 2013 20:54:37 GMT 9.5
You might like to calculate the limits of photoactive raw materials used also. PV grade silicon alone is not as sustainably recoverable as many assume.
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Post by nukesqrrrl on Mar 14, 2013 22:23:10 GMT 9.5
Nice article! Allow me to add some interesting data for Germany, where the majority of the population has somehow been convinced that solar energy is "da bomb". Germany's biggest solar power plant is Lieberose: www.solarpark-lieberose.de/zahlen/default.htmlPV in Germany has a capacity factor of about 11%. This means that Lieberose will generate on average 53 MW x 0.11 ~ 5.8 MW, somewhat above 50e6 kWh yearly. This corresponds to a power area density of 3.6 W/m^2 (162 ha area). In order to replace a 1 GW nuke plant with a capacity factor of 0.9 with Lieberoses, you'd need: (1000 MW * 0.9)/(53 MW * 0.11) = ~154 Lieberoses, covering an area of 162 ha * 154 = ~250 km^2, a square of about 16 km x 16 km size, bigger than the city Stuttgart (207 km^2). Now, Germany presently consumes about 66 GW of electricity (800 W individually), and ca. 450 GW primary energy total. If we convert all the industrial and transport processes to electricty (or electrochemically produced fuel), our total energy consumption would fall, but the electricity consumption will rise sharply, maybe to 3 or even 4 kW individually - resulting in between 250...330 GW electricity generation. Let's say 300 GW. This would mean we'd need to construct (300.000 MW / 5.8 MW) = ~52.000 Lieberoses!! => corresponding to a covered land area of 52.000 * 162 ha = ~84.000 km^2! This is bigger than Bavaria, which has only about 70.000 km^2. Of course, we also have other renewable sources, like wind, hydro or biomass, but their power density is, naturally, even lower. Trying to go "all renewables" in a small, densely populated country like Germany is simply bonkers. I hope people here may someday realize that nuclear power isn't such a bad idea, after all...
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Post by speedy on Mar 14, 2013 23:35:01 GMT 9.5
The WWF report is not a PV study at all. It's simply an insolation study, where the total annual insolation of a piece of land is multiplied by 15% efficiency (probably slightly optimistic, but about right) for PV and a 0,8 "fill factor", which is way too optimistic IMO, to get the PV output. There absolutely no discussion of storage/backup and electricity distribution, which are just as important as finding enough land.
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Post by Richard on Mar 15, 2013 2:52:56 GMT 9.5
Barry, in regards to the SMR reactors, these units look like they have a small foot print and are tall, the tolerances must be tight and the unit would move about in a earthquake more than large foot prints would do making it more vulnerable. Is the SMR walk away safe if all power is lost, we were told that story before building the first plant then costs made them change. Is the spent fuel rods toxic and what happens with them. These losses are missing in your evaluation . Where is the savings of not using useful land around the plants to keep human activity away .(my city has a ban on human activities around a small chemical plant for about one mile in all direction from its property boundaries, I would think it would be more at a nuclear plant) I have not seen a brake down of the loss of land and property from nuclear reactors melting down from past and projected future melt downs and leaks from plants. Where is the cost savings of health care for those exposed to toxic material when a meltdown occurs . Where is the cost savings for solar not needing insurance for damages of land, property and health cost do to a melt down or leaks of toxic materials or liquids(when insurance is so high that they will not buy it why should I cover it (insurance would be more then my power bill with any type of power).
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Post by cyrilr on Mar 15, 2013 3:33:11 GMT 9.5
The WWF... is not an energy organisation. Yet they obtusely insist on publishing energy studies. Not surprisingly, almost all of it is dross, complete poppycock and nonsense. In stead of embarrassing themselves further, I suggest the WWF stops publishing about areas they are clueless about. The only published material that is worse than their energy "studies" are the "studies" regarding nuclear power. And how evil it is. Bad, bad nuclear power. If you're knowledgeable about nuclear power, don't read these studies unless you have no issues with blood pressure. Anyway. Thanks for the great article. I'd like to add something important. The sun is quite unreliable, not being there 80% of the time in the tropics, and 90% of the time in a northern country like Germany. Yet society needs very reliable and nearly constant energy sources. This means a huge amount of energy storage will be needed. This dwarfs the solar panel equipment by at least 1 order of magnitude. I'll let the numbers do the talking: physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
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Post by Craig Schumacher on Mar 15, 2013 7:05:22 GMT 9.5
I don't know which is more depressing. The fact that anyone thought that they could get away with a glib announcement involving covering 'just 1 percent' of the Earth's land surface with something as expensive as PV panels, or the fact that for many people, this sounded like a good idea. Did they not once stop to think about the implications of '1 percent' of the Australian land-mass? 8 million hectares is 80,000 square kilometres! Could the Australian economy afford such a boondoggle? Could even the world economy as a whole afford to provide Australia with such a quantity of PV panels?
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Post by David B. Benson on Mar 15, 2013 7:14:27 GMT 9.5
Very well done. Thank you.
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Post by David B. Benson on Mar 15, 2013 7:22:01 GMT 9.5
Richard --- The LWR SMRs sit in a concrete lined hole in the ground, with braces. In addition, the pit is filled with water.
The pictured design, along with similar units, use convection for cooling so a meltdown is almost impossible. Even if the standard cooling via the steam generator is unavailable the heated pressure vessel loses heat to the water in the units 'bathtub'. So long as evaporative loses are made good no meltdown can occur.
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Post by John Morgan on Mar 15, 2013 8:57:13 GMT 9.5
Thanks for a great article Geoff.
Not mentioned was all the diesel consumed by those 50 million B-double loads to get the panels to their destination. And remember, those loads don't start from your local solar shop. They don't start from a container loading dock in Sydney. They all start from a factory somewhere in mainland China (in all likelihood).
By the time they travel to the middle of Australia, do they ever produce enough energy to be a net greenhouse gas saving?
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Post by David B. Benson on Mar 15, 2013 10:16:01 GMT 9.5
John Morgan --- Travel by train and then by cargo vessel is inexpensive and does not produce much CO2 per unit shipped. But the diesel trucks are certainly another matter; thank you for mentioning it.
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Post by richard on Mar 15, 2013 11:12:09 GMT 9.5
Barry, solar uses X area of land for as long as you want thousands of years but nuclear uses Y area for 50+ years and the land is lost for almost all time and uses another Y area for the next 50+ years that is lost for all must ever so at some time you will use much more land then solar and it will be useless for all most ever.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Mar 15, 2013 13:03:52 GMT 9.5
@ Richard - says land used by a NPP is lost forever. Not at all, at the very least, it is fit for another power station.
If there have been spills of radioactive substances, they are at least dying away, which cannot be said of the fragments of glass and concrete, slowly dissolving compounds of rare earth elements, and lead-poisoned soil that would come to litter a long-used solar farm.
More likely, the solar farm will fall derelict when subsidies vanish, a sad junkyard memorial to the forest that could have been left alone. Except, of course, for the NPP tucked away deep in the forest that surrounds it.
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Post by anonposter on Mar 15, 2013 14:32:19 GMT 9.5
Barry, in regards to the SMR reactors, these units look like they have a small foot print and are tall, the tolerances must be tight and the unit would move about in a earthquake more than large foot prints would do making it more vulnerable. Historically earthquakes have not been a problem for nuclear safety (it does sometimes require repair work, but the ground shaking has never caused any threat to public safety (tsunamis OTOH have, but there are ways to deal with that)). Is the SMR walk away safe if all power is lost, we were told that story before building the first plant then costs made them change. wtf? I don't think anyone said that the first nuclear power plants were walk away safe. Is the spent fuel rods toxic and what happens with them. Recycle it into new fuel, then the waste that is left over and can't be reused gets buried. Nuclear waste is less of a problem than the waste from solar panel manufacture due to there not being anywhere near as much. These losses are missing in your evaluation . Largely because they are imaginary. Where is the savings of not using useful land around the plants to keep human activity away .(my city has a ban on human activities around a small chemical plant for about one mile in all direction from its property boundaries, I would think it would be more at a nuclear plant) In some countries it is, even though there really isn't a justification for not having homes right up against the outer wall (even more so for inherently safe reactors like the IFR and LFTR). I have not seen a brake down of the loss of land and property from nuclear reactors melting down from past and projected future melt downs and leaks from plants. The cost of a meltdown with any western reactor is the cost of replacing the reactor plus the extra cost of decommissioning a damaged reactor (compared to an undamaged one) plus the cost of more expensive replacement fuel while the replacement reactor is built. Everything else is a cost not of nuclear power, but of the anti-nuclear movement (we can see from Chernobyl and Fukushima that the anti-nuclear movement is more dangerous than nuclear power). Where is the cost savings of health care for those exposed to toxic material when a meltdown occurs . You have to balance that against the cost savings of health care for those injured installing solar panels (and to cover 1% of the surface of the Earth you are looking at a truly massive construction project, people will die, you only have to kill a hundred to have killed more than nuclear has). Hell, you'd probably lose more than that in traffic accidents just getting the materials and workers to the site. Where is the cost savings for solar not needing insurance for damages of land, property and health cost do to a melt down or leaks of toxic materials or liquids(when insurance is so high that they will not buy it why should I cover it (insurance would be more then my power bill with any type of power). Nuclear power is statistically the safest way to generate electricity so why are you assuming that solar shouldn't be required to pay? Barry, solar uses X area of land for as long as you want thousands of years Solar panels don't last forever and neither do the subsidies solar power for power grid use needs. but nuclear uses Y area for 50+ years and the land is lost for almost all time Once a reactor has reached the end of its life there's nothing stopping you from building a new reactor on the same site (this in fact gives incentive to decommission old reactors instead of just leaving them there to rot as renewable energy developers do when their subsidies run out, so that the land they occupied could be used for a new reactor).
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 15, 2013 15:00:25 GMT 9.5
Barry, solar uses X area of land for as long as you want thousands of years but nuclear uses Y area for 50+ years and the land is lost for almost all time and uses another Y area for the next 50+ years that is lost for all must ever so at some time you will use much more land then solar and it will be useless for all most ever. Simply false. Even when nuclear goes wrong, the land is still productive. Wildlife are doing very well at Chernobyl. People do fine also. Veggies still grow. Think about what would happen with a catastrophic molten salt tank failure at a solar thermal plant with salt storage? How long before the land can be cropped?
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 15, 2013 15:11:19 GMT 9.5
Thanks for a great article Geoff. Not mentioned was all the diesel consumed by those 50 million B-double loads to get the panels to their destination. And remember, those loads don't start from your local solar shop. They don't start from a container loading dock in Sydney. They all start from a factory somewhere in mainland China (in all likelihood). By the time they travel to the middle of Australia, do they ever produce enough energy to be a net greenhouse gas saving? I did run a few numbers on this, and it really doesn't matter how far you ship the panels, they'll still produce a lot more energy than the shipping uses. Roughly speaking you can shift a kilo of anything 300 kms for about 66 gms of CO2 ... in a truck. So shifting a tonne of panels generates about 66 kg of CO2 ... not counting the return trip That's pretty easy to make up once you start generating electricity and displacing coal at 800 gm-CO2/kwh. This is the food miles paradox all over again. It's not where it comes from that matters, its what it is that matters ... beef production generates 35-80 kg-co2eq per kilo as eaten (just in terms of methane). How far can you ship that before transport emissions exceed production emissions? 50000/66*300=272,000 kms!
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Post by Michidus on Mar 16, 2013 1:30:30 GMT 9.5
First of all, I am a big fan of nuclear, and I also worked as Piping Stress Engineer for a nuclear plant in my country. Now I work the same for oil&gas industry. Regarding to this topic I have some observation to make.
I think that for solar power the most relevant factor is the EROEI. I am not impressed by the big numbers of the countless loads. We only have to add this on the EROEI and we have the right figures to focus on. According to wikipedia, for a lifetime of 30 years, the EROEI for solar power is somewhere between 10 and 30. Looking at the bio-fuels and at the tar sands (1,3 and 3) I think that especially for Australia solar might be a solution.
I also have some observation regarding the calculations in the article. Since 8 milion hectares (1%) would provide the 2,6 energy need, results that 3 milion hectares are enough for the entire need of Australia. Assuming that all of that is extracted from agricultural land we have 3 milion of 25 .....which is 12%. I don`t think that 12% less food is going to drive Australia into starvation...
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Post by edireland on Mar 16, 2013 6:10:58 GMT 9.5
I tried to calculate the EROEI for an IFR a while back.... Came out at 16000:1 I think I made a mistake. Barry, solar uses X area of land for as long as you want thousands of years but nuclear uses Y area for 50+ years and the land is lost for almost all time and uses another Y area for the next 50+ years that is lost for all must ever so at some time you will use much more land then solar and it will be useless for all most ever. A rather large portion of the area of a nuclear power plant is stuff other than the reactor itself. Even if you are forced to leave the reactor containment standing indefinitely you can dismantle the turbine hall or even repurpose it to use another primary containment constructed next to the previous one. A 900MWe reactor like the ones at Gravelines in northern France has a main containment building roughly 40m in diameter. That is an area of roughly 1260 square metres. A 1260 square metre solar farm would produce roughly ~38kWe average, compared to potentially ~810MWe for the LWR (90% lifetime capacity factor). Which means that to produce the same amount of energy as the LWR did during its 60 year life, the solar plant would have to be in place roughly 21315 times as long. That is approximately 1.28 million years. I think the reactor vessel would be safe to cut open and dismantle loooong before then.
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Post by John Morgan on Mar 16, 2013 6:49:40 GMT 9.5
Karl Friedrich Lenz has responded to this article at his blog, k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9040 His take on the 50 million truckloads is, (1) its a good problem to have, (2) choose closer deserts, and (3) airlift the panels with helium blimps instead of trucks.
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Post by quokka on Mar 16, 2013 9:18:03 GMT 9.5
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 16, 2013 10:33:57 GMT 9.5
Karl Friedrich Lenz has responded to this article at his blog, k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9040 His take on the 50 million truckloads is, (1) its a good problem to have, (2) choose closer deserts, and (3) airlift the panels with helium blimps instead of trucks. 66 tonnes with a helium blimp? A B-double truck can handle 40-50 tonnes, so 66 really won't make a big dent in the problem ... except you will need to build yourself tens of thousands of baloons, train pilots, find the helium, insure against accidents, etc etc. E.g., a chemical plant in Qld at Gladstone needed to shift half a million tonnes of salt a year 84 kms from the nearest salt field ... Port Alma. They had a choice of rail, ship and road. Road was cheapest. The study makes for interesting reading. www.sd.qld.gov.au/dsdweb/docs-bin/v2/eis/lg_chem_eis_addm_app3.pdfAnybody who thinks large scale logistics problems like this are trivial needs to speak to a little French guy who had a few problems with them back in 1812 ... and he was really, really good!
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 16, 2013 10:46:45 GMT 9.5
First of all, I am a big fan of nuclear, and I also worked as Piping Stress Engineer for a nuclear plant in my country. Now I work the same for oil&gas industry. Regarding to this topic I have some observation to make. I think that for solar power the most relevant factor is the EROEI. I am not impressed by the big numbers of the countless loads. We only have to add this on the EROEI and we have the right figures to focus on. According to wikipedia, for a lifetime of 30 years, the EROEI for solar power is somewhere between 10 and 30. Looking at the bio-fuels and at the tar sands (1,3 and 3) I think that especially for Australia solar might be a solution. I also have some observation regarding the calculations in the article. Since 8 milion hectares (1%) would provide the 2,6 energy need, results that 3 milion hectares are enough for the entire need of Australia. Assuming that all of that is extracted from agricultural land we have 3 milion of 25 .....which is 12%. I don`t think that 12% less food is going to drive Australia into starvation... You are of course right. Nobody will build on 8 million ha, or even 3 million and if they did, they'd use agricultural land and simply stop feeding the tens of millions of people in developing countries that we currently feed. These people will pay the price for us being able to feel clean, green and renewably holy. This is the animal feed and biofuels story all over again. The poor used to just compete with cattle, pigs and chickens, now they also compete with motor cars and, if renewable advocates get their way, they'll also compete with electric turbines. The poor always get shafted.
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Post by anonposter on Mar 16, 2013 12:24:36 GMT 9.5
I don`t think that 12% less food is going to drive Australia into starvation... Australia is one of the biggest food exporters so it wouldn't drive us to starvation. The countries that have to import food may not like the idea of a big exporter producing 12% less. 66 tonnes with a helium blimp? A B-double truck can handle 40-50 tonnes, so 66 really won't make a big dent in the problem ... except you will need to build yourself tens of thousands of baloons, train pilots, find the helium, insure against accidents, etc etc. Then you get to the fact that large airships are a bad idea and that so far the largest airship ever built had a cargo capacity of only 19 tonnes (and that was using hydrogen, a superior lifting gas to helium).
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 16, 2013 15:28:30 GMT 9.5
I don`t think that 12% less food is going to drive Australia into starvation... Australia is one of the biggest food exporters so it wouldn't drive us to starvation. The countries that have to import food may not like the idea of a big exporter producing 12% less. 66 tonnes with a helium blimp? A B-double truck can handle 40-50 tonnes, so 66 really won't make a big dent in the problem ... except you will need to build yourself tens of thousands of baloons, train pilots, find the helium, insure against accidents, etc etc. Then you get to the fact that large airships are a bad idea and that so far the largest airship ever built had a cargo capacity of only 19 tonnes (and that was using hydrogen, a superior lifting gas to helium). Thanks Anon, for this and other answers above. I assumed the good Professor Lenz knew more than me (which is nothing) about blimps!
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 16, 2013 15:42:14 GMT 9.5
I tried to calculate the EROEI for an IFR a while back.... Came out at 16000:1 I think I made a mistake. I guess nobody wants to build stuff with a negative EROEI, but for anything with a reasonably positive EROEI, then many other factors determine what gets built because cost may not be proportional to EROEI and there may be plenty of things which are really cheap with a very high EROEI, but which have some other issue which prevents wide acceptance ... bicycles being a case in point. They achieve "auto-parity" a long time ago, but the car still rules. Regardless of the usefulness of the EROEI concept, I'd urge anybody who can find an IFR EROEI figure from a reasonable source, to add it to the Wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested
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Post by edireland on Mar 16, 2013 15:56:31 GMT 9.5
This handy PDF helps with EREOI calculations for LWRs. With fast reactors you can assume stockpiled uranium is used or the uranium is obtained from the sea adjacent ot the plant by one of those new passive uranium capture rigs the Japanese are working on. The dominant energy consumption then comes from plant construction. (The amount of fuel that has to be handled in the fuel fabrication facility consumes essentially no energy compared to plant production) EROEI has problems because it doesn't explain what you consider as a "modular" process. For instance is the energy required to run the reactor cooling pumps counted as energy "in" or just removed from the energy "out" figure. When you are at EROEIs of 50:1 or similar then single megawatt draws can make major differences in figures.
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Post by geoffrussell on Mar 16, 2013 20:07:30 GMT 9.5
I did a google for "IFR EROEI" and up popped this post on some obscure Australian website ... bravenewclimate.com/2010/03/08/tcase8/ Barry estimated the IFR EROEI it at about 900 ... ie., 10 times better than the top ranked hydro figure on Wikipedia!
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Post by Cliff Claven on Mar 16, 2013 23:12:17 GMT 9.5
Some people seem to confuse the sun with solar power. Solar power is not forever. PV solar is a system of hardware with a finite lifespan--generally 25 years or so--that degrades in performance over time. If we cover 1% of the world in solar panels, we are going to need 1% of the world as landfill for those panels 25 years from now. The energy to mine the bauxite and iron and rear earths, and smelt the steel and aluminum, and manufacture and transport and emplace and operate and maintain and decommission and dispose/recycle today's solar and wind systems exceeds their lifetime energy outputs and costs. That's why those costs have to be federally and state subsidized, and shared across utility customers and taxpayers and investors, and hidden in complex funding schemes involving future RECs and undisclosed PPAs. The O&M contracts for many of these installations have already changed hands more times than a Countrywide liars-loan mortgage. When solar and wind power have progressed to the point where they can provide the power density to run mines and smelting plants and manufacturing facilities and remelt the glass and aluminum and steel and re-crush and re-kiln the concrete, then we will have something. Until then, this is just a big, expensive circus being pulled by the locomotives of oil and gas.
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Post by Cliff Claven on Mar 16, 2013 23:14:13 GMT 9.5
BTW, thank God for mathematicians. The few remaining folks who can still add, subtract, multiply, and divide might be our only hope for salvation.
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