Why Baseload Is Irrelevant To The Power Discussion

[wtmusic]

Spoiler: because renewables don't stand a chance of meeting our energy needs.

"Mr. Wellinghoff of the FERC famously said “I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do.” Since then the debate between those that believe baseload is, for the foreseeable future, required and those that believe, like Mr. Wellinghoff that baseload is an anachronism of the 20th century. In fact, recently a paper published by an economist at Duke University claims that North Carolina (apparently serving as a proxy for the entire country) does not require any baseload capacity and that wind and solar can pretty much take care of everything. I have some issues with this latest paper. The author makes some rather sweeping assumptions at the outset regarding a 28% reduction in TOTAL consumption based on his observations of 100 houses and how large the impact of demand response can be from smartgrid initiatives.

<>

"By looking only at the fundamental energy balance, ignoring the furor over baseload and energy storage, it is clear that renewable energy systems available today simply cannot fully replace forecasted energy requirements. Even after forecasting the construction of an additional 1000 land based wind turbines, 5000 off shore wind turbines, 13 million solar panels and 300 solar farms, insufficient energy is generated to eliminate all coal fired power plants.

"If we truly want to eliminate carbon dioxide in our electrical generation, we must consider nuclear as a key option to include in this mix. However, nuclear alone will not get us to a carbon free electrical generation by the year 2035. nuclearEach 1500 MW nuclear plant built generates almost 12000 GWh per year. Looking at the original forecast graph and assuming one new nuclear plant every five years within the state’s borders, at the end of the 2035, we would still require significant quantities of coal to generate electricity. We need to consider ALL of our options and build ALL of them as quickly as we can."

http://www.4factorconsulting.com/energy-industry/why-baseload-is-irrelevant-to-the-power-discussion

Why not build the most viable options as quickly as we can?

[Statistical]

1. As quickly as we can is the key but it applies to all options.

There is production capacity limits for all alternative energies. Wind turbines require manufacturing plants. Those plants have finite capacity even when running 24/7. The turbines also have finite lifespan and some losses each year which reduce net capacity growth.

PV panels tend not to be destroyed but a little known fact is output drops every year. It isn't a lot (0.5% on average for good panels) but output does slowly decline over life of panel. PV production fabs are extremely expensive to build, take long time to build, and have finite capacity also.

So not only do we have limits on how much wind/solar we can install each year but we have limits on how fast the factory/production capacity can grow each year.

Even if the US had the money we couldn't just drop a terrawatt of wind down in a year.


Nuclear can't do it alone but neither can wind or solar. Building all emission free power capacity at the maximum rate possible is the only way we can make meaningful dent in emissions. Even that isn't enough so we need to consider CCS although I don't think it is a long term solution and coal is evil for non carbon reasons it needs to be part of the mix.

A nationwide incentive for efficiency gains to reduce per capita demand is also needed. Grants to upgrade worst buildings. Programs to improve govt buildings (like schools), mandates on new construction, prohibition on wasteful versions of appliances & building material, etc.

[Kolesar]

2. Fabs?

fab 1 (fāb)
n. Informal
Fabrication: building a shed of metal fab.

dictionary.com

[Statistical]

5. Sorry fab is slang for semiconductor fabtrication plant.

Fab = semiconductor "factory".

When most people think semiconductors they think Intel, computer chips etc however there are many other semiconductors.

LCD panels for example are made in fabs as are PV modules. While PV and LCD fabs use different fabrication technology many of the economics are the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_%28semiconductors%29

What most people don't realize the there is very little raw material cost in semi conductors. That $800 intel chip maybe has $10-$20 in raw material. The cost comes from fact that the fab costs billions to build.

The joke at Intel is that all the chips are cheap except the first one which costs a billion bucks.

The economics of a fab make for very interesting business decisions.

Say you decide to build a PV fab with capacity of 1GW annually. So you borrow couple billion dollars and build a plant. Everything is going fine for 4-5 years. The material cost for your PV modules (not panel just modules) is maybe $0.70 per watt and you are selling them wholesale for $3.00 per watt. You aren't massively profitable because most of the gross profit is going to make interest payments on the construction cost of the fabs.

It will take decades to pay off the fab construction cost. So year 7 or 8 disaster strikes. Someone perfects a much cheaper methods to make PV panels. Fab cost drops from $5B for 1GW plant to $800 million for 1GW. Since new startups have lower capitalized cost they can undercut you on price.

Based on how cheap they can make product and how fast they can ramp up production you may face a situation where no matter how good you are you can never produce enough semiconductors (in this case PV modules) to be profitable. If you keep prices high then you sell less and plant runs at less than full capacity = death in semi industry. If you lower prices you can cover material costs but interest payments on your "too expensive" plant sink you.

As such companies are extremely conservative when expanding fabrication capacity.

All PV modules in the world come from about 12 fabs. All LCD panels in the world (regardless of brand) come from 4 companies. AMD exited the fab business all together. They have other companies do fabrication for their designs.

[kristopher]

3. What is wrong with you that you can't comprenend simple airtight logic?

You wrote:

There is production capacity limits for all alternative energies. Wind turbines require manufacturing plants. Those plants have finite capacity even when running 24/7. The turbines also have finite lifespan and some losses each year which reduce net capacity growth.

PV panels tend not to be destroyed but a little known fact is output drops every year. It isn't a lot (0.5% on average for good panels) but output does slowly decline over life of panel. PV production fabs are extremely expensive to build, take long time to build, and have finite capacity also.

So not only do we have limits on how much wind/solar we can install each year but we have limits on how fast the factory/production capacity can grow each year.

Even if the US had the money we couldn't just drop a terrawatt of wind down in a year.


Nuclear can't do it alone but neither can wind or solar. Building all emission free power capacity at the maximum rate possible is the only way we can make meaningful dent in emissions. Even that isn't enough so we need to consider CCS although I don't think it is a long term solution and coal is evil for non carbon reasons it needs to be part of the mix.

A nationwide incentive for efficiency gains to reduce per capita demand is also needed. Grants to upgrade worst buildings. Programs to improve govt buildings (like schools), mandates on new construction, prohibition on wasteful versions of appliances & building material, etc.

Your argument goes as follows:
Renewable energy technologies require factories to build.
Factories have a finite production capacity so there is a limit to how much we can build in a year.

Conclusion: To expand beyond this capacity we must build nuclear power.

Your conclusion does not follow from your arguments.



Renewable energy power generation does require upstream factories.
So does nuclear power generation.

Factories have a finite capacity.
Factories also must cover their capital costs by spreading it over the entire production run, so building a factory line to produce a component for a couple of hundred nuclear plants is prohibitively expensive.

The limit imposed by hitting maximum production capacity is not a reason to switch to a more expensive technology, it is a reason to build more factories producing the less expensive technology.


It is impossible to justify spending money on nuclear power with economic or environmentally based reasons.

[Statistical]

6. No that wasn't my conclusion at all.

Since you have made if obvious you don't want to understand I will simply ignore you. :hi:

[kristopher]

7. That is exactly your conclusion and you've repeated it often.

[kristopher]

4. That is blogging, not research. There is no basis for the numbers except "I assume that"

For it to qualify as research, there has to be a basis behind the assumptions.

For example, the offshore wind capacity factor is "assumed" to be the same as onshore when it is more likely to be nearly 50% higher.

The rate of offshore installation is assumed to be one per day. Why not 2, 5 or 10 per day?

The same shoddy work is at play regarding solar. The blogger hasn't even done the most basic research to give validity to the claims. Nor does he/she actually ever address the issue of why baseload would or would not be important; there is absolutely no background (and obviously no research) on the reasons that baseload is, as a fundamental concept of delivering power, a fiction.

In all, this is a real piece of trash.

[NNadir]

8. Thus spake the blogger.

It would be interesting if I can recall ONE post in eight years here by an anti-nuke that would constitute either what I would consider decent library research or laboratory research.

But I can't. Anti-nukes live by google and read only what they want to believe and hear only what they want to hear.

We have bloggers here who repeat the same damn reference day after day, week after week, month after month. It may seem insipid, but it's true.

[kristopher]

9. I'm not a blogger.

As I recall, you are the one that attempts to write on DKOS.

[joshcryer]

13. You do so enjoy posting blog links though.

[wtmusic]

10. A response from the blogger to this post, received by email:

From Margaret Harding:

"Thanks, interesting reading. I'm not a member of the Democratic Underground and as a registered Republican, probably should not join. However, one response I'd love to make to the individual who calls my work 'trash'.

"You've picked on my assumptions relative to the speed of installation and claimed, therefore, that my entire work is 'a real piece of trash'. I would state that those assumptions are not relevant to my final conclusion. Had the speed of installation of wind and solar changed the fundamental answer, I would have made an effort to validate the possible build rate considering that North Carolina is not the only state in the union that would be making an effort to build out as quickly as possible. My final conclusion was based on the fact that building EVERYTHING that I could identify as possible with wind and solar still did not generate enough electricity to replace all of the coal generated electricity within the state. If you assumed INSTANTANEOUS construction, which is equally outrageous, you STILL cannot replace all coal fired power with wind and solar.

"Perhaps my work is trash, perhaps not, but at least address the fundamental conclusion and not assumptions that do not make a difference to the answer. It is my conclusion that you must not be able to find a worthwhile point regarding that end conclusion and were forced to pick on a point that doesn't matter in an attempt to discredit the valid points I've made."

[Statistical]

11. "you must not be able to find a worthwhile point regarding that end conclusion...

"It is my conclusion that you must not be able to find a worthwhile point regarding that end conclusion and were forced to pick on a point that doesn't matter in an attempt to discredit the valid points I've made."

:rofl:

Wow he summed Kris up pretty well for someone who hasn't met him.

[Nihil]

16. *Psst*

*She* did indeed ("Margaret").

:evilgrin:

[kristopher]

12. That response is more of the same nonsense.

It is an exercise by someone seeking a predetermined outcome who was using a host of unsupported data and self-serving assumptions to reach that outcome.

This is what an actual analysis looks like:

Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina
Dealing with Intermittent Electricity Sources
by
John Blackburn, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics Emeritus, Duke University

March 2010
Conclusion
The important conclusion from all of the calculations is that a system with annual
sales of 91 billion kWh can be run with 76% of total generation coming from intermittent
solar and wind sources. The intermittent sources would be assisted by 2,000 megawatts
of biomass generation or cogeneration, 2,500 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity, and
1,500 megawatts of pumped storage. If such a system also has ice storage (in the
summer), load control, and access to vehicle batteries, it can be run with some modest
outside-of-system purchases and 2,700 megawatts of auxiliary gas-fired capacity.
Purchases and auxiliary generation are needed for 6% of electricity loads. There were, in
this simulation, 17 hours out of the 2,952 examined in which generation would fall short.
These results were obtained with only three onshore windpower sites. The periods of
shortfall would be reduced in a system with multiple wind sites distributed over a wide area
(North Carolina has 200 mile long area in which mountain winds are strong, 320 miles of
coastline and vast areas offshore). Also, the auxiliary power needs shown here would be
somewhat smaller if carry-over power in pumped storage facilities were applied to needs in
succeeding days.

The conclusions of this study, of course, are subject to the simplifying assumptions
enunciated early in this report that one must make in order to begin to analyze such
complexity. Of the many further refinements that would be appropriate, only one is likely to
modify the conclusions by more than a few percentage points. As the variation in hourly
utility loads is introduced, there would be some additional hours in which purchased power
or auxiliary would be needed. This would take place primarily in the winter and to a lesser
extent in the summer. It is the weather-related loads that introduce most of the variation
around monthly means for each hour. In the summer, cooling loads, as indicated already,
are partially correlated with solar electricity production. Another study may take up this
task – time did not permit its inclusion here.

The conclusion, to summarize, is that a high-penetration solar and wind utility
system is possible, that it requires supplementation of about 6% of electricity demand,
from sources now used for peaking purposes. A corollary observation is that the concept
of baseload generation is more or less irrelevant to its successful operation of such a
system.

Full report download:
http://www.ieer.org/reports/NC-Wind-Solar.pdf


Feel free to explain where it is wrong.

[joshcryer]

15. I would think this image would be satisifactory for you:

[kristopher]

17. That Image = Garbage In Garbage Out

It is an exercise by someone seeking a predetermined outcome who was using a host of unsupported data and self-serving assumptions to reach that outcome.

To put not too fine a point on it, the blogger is either an idiot or a liar. "As usual, I decided to “do the math” on this issue using government data or, at least, reasonably reputable data for my research. Because I’m no expert on the detailed workings of power generation, and neither are most of my readers, I’m going to make some extremely simplistic assumptions just to try to get at an understanding of the trend and reasonableness of energy generation claims."

This is a blank check to insert whatever self-serving numbers she wishes. She has engaged in a series of false representations so extensive it is obvious to anyone doing even a cursory review of the blog that her work has no merit what-so-ever. When criticized for the "simplistic assumptions" she claims they have no bearing on her conclusions anyway. Of course, that leaves you to wonder why they are in the paper in the first place, right?

Let's take a more specific example that is related directly to the conclusion - where does the 18.3Gw offshore resource number come from and how was it derived? Her conclusion is basically that the wind and solar resource is inadequate to do what Blackburn's paper claims, so it is certainly relevant to her conclusion to ask where she got the upper limit of wind that she claims.

Just my personal knowledge base tells me that North Carolina has more than 200 miles of coastline, Delaware has 25. The depth and wind conditions of the two areas are very similar (NC has a tad better wind) and I know that when using the GE 3.6 turbine near shore wind resource in little old bitty Delaware is almost 16Gw.

There is more than enough offshore wind energy ALONE to meet ALL of NC's energy needs. The artificial ceiling the blogger inserted is just that, an artificial ceiling designed to guide the outcome of "the math" to the predetermined conclusion.

This is what an actual analysis looks like; feel free to show anywhere that it is wrong. Be specific, for example, what claim is specifically negated by the information behind the graph you posted?

Matching Utility Loads with Solar and Wind Power in North Carolina
Dealing with Intermittent Electricity Sources
by
John Blackburn, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics Emeritus, Duke University

March 2010
Conclusion
The important conclusion from all of the calculations is that a system with annual
sales of 91 billion kWh can be run with 76% of total generation coming from intermittent
solar and wind sources. The intermittent sources would be assisted by 2,000 megawatts
of biomass generation or cogeneration, 2,500 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity, and
1,500 megawatts of pumped storage. If such a system also has ice storage (in the
summer), load control, and access to vehicle batteries, it can be run with some modest
outside-of-system purchases and 2,700 megawatts of auxiliary gas-fired capacity.
Purchases and auxiliary generation are needed for 6% of electricity loads. There were, in
this simulation, 17 hours out of the 2,952 examined in which generation would fall short.
These results were obtained with only three onshore windpower sites. The periods of
shortfall would be reduced in a system with multiple wind sites distributed over a wide area
(North Carolina has 200 mile long area in which mountain winds are strong, 320 miles of
coastline and vast areas offshore). Also, the auxiliary power needs shown here would be
somewhat smaller if carry-over power in pumped storage facilities were applied to needs in
succeeding days.

The conclusions of this study, of course, are subject to the simplifying assumptions
enunciated early in this report that one must make in order to begin to analyze such
complexity. Of the many further refinements that would be appropriate, only one is likely to
modify the conclusions by more than a few percentage points. As the variation in hourly
utility loads is introduced, there would be some additional hours in which purchased power
or auxiliary would be needed. This would take place primarily in the winter and to a lesser
extent in the summer. It is the weather-related loads that introduce most of the variation
around monthly means for each hour. In the summer, cooling loads, as indicated already,
are partially correlated with solar electricity production. Another study may take up this
task – time did not permit its inclusion here.

The conclusion, to summarize, is that a high-penetration solar and wind utility
system is possible, that it requires supplementation of about 6% of electricity demand,
from sources now used for peaking purposes. A corollary observation is that the concept
of baseload generation is more or less irrelevant to its successful operation of such a
system.

Full report download:
http://www.ieer.org/reports/NC-Wind-Solar.pdf


Feel free to explain where it is wrong.

[joshcryer]

18. I don't disagree with that paper, and neither does she.

It's only put in to perspective that the buildout is not enough. What "realistic" numbers would you say were feasible?

[kristopher]

19. .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x238026#238205

[joshcryer]

20. Half of your posts are pointless copy paste jobs.

[kristopher]

21. .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=238026&mesg_id=238205

[Dead_Parrot]

22. Only half?

He's making progress, then.
:party:

[joshcryer]

23. Heh, it may be 1/3rd.

[FBaggins]

26. Misleading.

If 85% of the coins I have in my pocket are pennies... It would not be an untruth to claim that 50% were pennies...

But the statement would be similarly misleading.

[wtmusic]

32. OK, 85% of his posts are pointless copy paste jobs.

Accuracy is important. :D

[bananas]

24. LOL - the pro-nukes are so desperate, they're quoting right-wing bloggers who admit they don't know

what they're talking about!
:rofl:

[joshcryer]

14. She claims 500 a year after some time.

100 a year is reasonable for the time being.

[Merchant Marine]

25. Why should the rate of offshore wind be any higher?

Do you have any idea of how wind turbines are installed at sea? The Mayflower Resolution, the world's only specialized turbine installation vessel, only works at a rate of one turbine per day, and that's only after divers have installed a specially prepared base on the seafloor. Then the transmission lines have to be run.

It's a lot of intense, dangerous work involving some very huge loads in potentially heavy seas, so anyone with a goddamn bit of sense takes it slow, one day at a time.

[kristopher]

27. That says nothing about how rapidly we could build out the resource

The issue of build-out isn't technical so much as it is a decision to commit resources and formulate goals. If we decide we want to install at the rate of 100 offshore turbines/day within 3 years it is well within our industrial capability to do that. If you doubt it, just look at the ramp up of industrial capacity for production of weapon's platforms during WWII.

[Merchant Marine]

28. So you're talking about the rate of installation for a government controlled command economy

In other words, total political and economic fantasy. Have a nice day.

[Dogmudgeon]

29. He's right, you know

And I am not in agreement with his program.

We actually DO have that capacity, it's true.

However, we also have the capacity to build 100 nuclear reactors (@ avg. ~ 1.25 GWe) in a year. I am certain, though, that arguing in favor of this ability would bring vociferous and angry denials from most of the antis.

"In other words, total political and economic fantasy."

To your judgment, I must defer. It's possible -- but a fantasy.

--d!

[kristopher]

31. It isn't a fantasy at all.

And it isn't at all comparable to generating the capacity for building 100 nuclear reactors in one year.

There are a pretty limited number of components involved in renewable technologies, and it is easy to build facilities for mass production of these components.

If we wanted to make a production run of 2,000,000 10 ton tractors (as in tractor trailers) over 10 years you wouldn't blink an eye at the challenge. The wind turbines would be a lot closer to that than they would be to 100 nuclear power plants.

[kristopher]

30. Wow, that is the absolute WORST straw man I've ever seen...

There are a number of policy choices for getting to whatever goal we set. Among them would be a set under the heading of "a government controlled command economy", or we could just use the more mundane route of taxes, incentives or even just a simple renewable energy portfolio standard.

The key element is the establishment of a goal and the perception within the business community that the goal is 1) unavoidable, and 2) not going to change.