Massachusetts Makes Smart Grid Mandatory

If my 14 y/o daughter keeps growing at the rate she has been for the past 13 years

She'll be 14 ft tall and weight 520 pounds by the time she's 25.

The fallacy of this attempt to undermine renewables has been demonstrated before many times.

Since you post this obviously in response to the predictions of high renewable growth that are emerging, it's looks like your efforts still target renewable energy.

You were working to promote the nuclear industry when you began doing this, but you say now that you've seen the error of your ways and that nuclear is no good either.

A person could be forgiven for doubting your sincerity.


Although it may not seem like it, we are making very good progress with renewable technologies. This stage is largely building a manufacturing base large enough to bring renewable energy costs down to where they are competitive with fossil fuels. We are there with several important technologies in a number of markets; onshore wind is one of the least expensive types of new generation, and solar PV is competitive in a rapidly expanding range of markets. With that reduction in price comes a corresponding growth in demand which drives growth in manufacturing which results in lowered costs that sets off another cycle of growth in demand - rinse and repeat.

What happens then?

NREL: 23% Of Global Electricity Generation Supplied By Renewable Sources

This is a chart heavy discussion with embedded links to literally dozens more than are displayed.

NREL: 23% Of Global Electricity Generation Supplied By Renewable Sources

Originally published on 1Sun4All.

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) released a report – 2012 Renewable Energy Data Book – in October of 2013 regarding the status of renewable energy globally and in the US. The report has an abundance of great charts and, in reading through the pages, I discovered that renewable energy accounts for 23% of all electricity generation worldwide (4,892 TWh) (on page 41). I’ve brought out a few of the relevant charts and findings. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

In 2012, Germany led the world in cumulative solar photovoltaic installed capacity, reports the NREL. The United States leads the world in geothermal and biomass installed capacity. China leads in wind, and Spain leads in solar thermal electric generation (STEG). The following is from the 2012 Renewable Energy Data Book:

Leading Countries For Installed Renewable Energy
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Credit Suisse Projects ~85% Of US Energy Demand Growth Coming From Renewables Through 2025

Article reproduced in full under Creative Commons license
Originally published by CleanTechnica
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/01/credit-suisse-projects-85-us-energy-growth-coming-renewables-2025/

Credit Suisse Projects ~85% Of US Energy Demand Growth Coming From Renewables Through 2025
Zachary Shahan

Credit Suisse on December 20 released a report with some quite bullish projections regarding renewable energy growth and generation in the United States, which someone in the solar industry kindly passed on to me. Here’s the short summary:

Our take: We see an opportunity for renewable energy to take an increasing share of total US power generation, coming in response to state Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) and propelled by more competitive costs against conventional generation. We can see the growth in renewables being transformative against conventional expectations with renewables meeting the vast majority of future power demand growth, weighing on market clearing power prices in competitive power markets, appreciably slowing the rate of demand growth for natural gas from the power sector, and requiring significant investment in new renewables.

What percentage of future growth does Credit Suisse say might come from renewables? About 85%.

Renewables will meet most of US demand growth. We estimate that ~85% of future demand growth for power through 2025 (including the impact of coal plant retirements) could be met by renewable generation with compliance to the existing 30 mandatory and 8 voluntary RPS programs. From this we would see over 100 GW of new renewable capacity additions with wind and solar market share more than doubling from 2012 to 2025.

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Solar PV’s rapid cost drop. Credit: Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Other key points are that falling wind and solar costs make them competitive with natural gas, even ignoring externalities. As a result, Credit Suisse has cut its natural gas projections considerably. “We estimate renewables slowing the rate of natural gas demand growth from power generation to <0.5 bcf/d through 2020 versus our prior estimate of 1.0-1.2 bcf/d even when taking into account planned coal plant shutdowns and assumed nuclear plant retirements.”

I think this report and the revisions implicitly highlight something very interesting that is going on in the energy industry. Renewable energy costs are primarily based on the cost of the technologies themselves, while fossil fuel costs are largely based on the fuel sources. As renewable energy grows, the technology costs come down. In the case of fossil fuels, increasing demand brings the price of these finite fuels up. Forecasts should take this into account, but they routinely seem to underestimate renewable technology cost drops, and thus also underestimate renewable energy growth. Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and others that are a bit better at these projections are quickly shifting their forecasts to catch up with the renewable energy revolution we’ve been seeing. This new report from Credit Suisse analysts is certainly one of the most positive I’ve seen. The title of the first section says it all: “Renewables Are Economic and Disruptive to Conventional Markets.”

Credit Suisse analysts see Renewable Energy Standards (RES) as driving much of the coming growth, but they aren’t shy about saying (repeatedly) that renewables are also now cost competitive, and that technology improvements just keep advancing their prospects.

“We think old-line arguments against renewables – too expensive, too intermittent, too remote – will continue to fade, allowing a resource base that is underappreciated in the market but is positioned to have a broad impact on power and energy markets.”

The report projects that wind power, which is exceptionally cheap, will account for about 80% of the renewable energy growth, while solar will account for the other 20% or so. It sees a doubling of installed US wind power between 2012 and 2020, while it sees solar increasing 11 times over — starting from a much smaller installed capacity, of course. Together, solar and wind’s combined market share is projected to grow from ~4% to ~9%. By 2025, Credit Suisse projects that renewables will account for ~12% of US electricity generation.

Key drivers of the increasing competitiveness from wind and solar are a bit different in each of the industries. Wind farms have become a lot more effective at capturing energy from the wind and turning it into electricity. “Wind utilization rates have increased by 15-20 percentage points, with new machines in the same wind resource yielding 50-55% utilization rates from 30-35% in 2007 due to improvements in turbine design, taller towers / bigger blades, and better wind modeling. Higher utilization has led to dramatic drops in levelized costs with many new projects clearing at ~$30/MWh (Exhibit 5-Exhibit 6), in effect ‘creating’ natural gas under 20 year PPAs at less than $3/MMBtu.”


In the case of solar, it’s a story that CleanTechnica readers should be very familiar with — the price of solar technology has fallen off a cliff. “Solar capital costs have continued to bend the cost curve with utility scale PV today at ~$2000 per KW of capacity from $3250 in 2010, lowering levelized costs for utility scale solar to $65-80/MWh from well over $100/MWh and bringing solar to price parity with newbuild natural gas peakers.” Efficiency improvements have also helped solar on this front.

Yes, solar costs came down due to massive oversupply of polysilicon, solar cells, and solar panels. However, as demand has come to match supply again, costs have remained down. In fact, most solar market research firms project that the costs will keep climbing down in the coming few to several years. Furthermore, many big efforts to bring down the soft costs of solar are also now in motion, as these are the costs that make US solar much more expensive than German solar and are now taking up a huge chunk of the solar price pie.

As we’ve written and read numerous times in the past year, all of this also means some hurt for utilities and fossil fuel generators. Renewables are expected to result in lower power prices than were previously projected, while fossil fuel plants will not be able to sell as much of their (more expensive) electricity to the grid, cutting into their profits.

Here’s a snippet regarding the power prices: “Using our bottom-up power market models, the risks we see to power markets are rooted in a slower market recovery as more (and bottom of the stack) generation is added leading to a fundamental step down in power prices $1-2/MWh or ~5% relative to a scenario without significant renewables growth, as the overall supply curve is ‘pushed to the right’ with lower cost renewables added.”

And here’s one regarding the threat to fossil fuel generators: “while generation output will be lower, the operating costs are broadly fixed meaning that coal and natural gas plants will produce less revenues without a change in cost structure, leading to some minor degradation in EPS.”

The entire report is very interesting, with many details that are surely useful to investors and industry insiders. But the overall trend is clear as a sunny day: the future is renewables.

Using Nuclear Power to Extract Oil?

April 27, 2009, 9:35 am
Using Nuclear Power to Extract Oil?
By JOHN LORINC
Oil sands

Mining trucks carry loads of oil-laden sand at the Albian Sands project in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.
The Associated Press
After several years of speculation, the Alberta government last month released a long-awaited “expert’s report” on nuclear power and oil sands and has now embarked on a series of province-wide public consultations.

The move comes on the heels of a decision last month by Bruce Power, a private company that operates a publicly-owned nuclear station in western Ontario, to seek approval to build a $10 billion nuclear station at a site known as Whitemud, about 310 miles northwest of Edmonton.

Bruce Power hopes to begin an environmental assessment next year. Its proposal calls for two to four 1,000-megawatt reactors, with three vendors – Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Westinghouse and Areva – competing to supply the equipment.

According to the expert panel report, almost 90 percent of Alberta’s electricity comes from coal or natural gas, and demand is projected to jump 74 percent within the next 15 years, largely due to the needs of the oil sands projects — which consumes roughly 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily.

At the same time, the National Energy Board has projected a drop in long-term natural gas production in Western Canada...

Why Are So Many Redditors Obsessed With Uncompetitive Nuclear Energy?

The comments are a wonderful sampling of the problem. This was written during the fallout from the Reddit Science editor's decision to recognize climate change deniers as trolls and ban them from that forum.

Published with permission under Creative Commons licensing
Originally published by CleanTechnica
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/27/many-redditors-obsessed-uncompetitive-nuclear-energy/

Why Are So Many Redditors Obsessed With Uncompetitive Nuclear Energy?


I’m not a big reddit user, but I like the site and find it quite useful at times. Of course, reddit is humongous and the users span the social spectrum. Furthermore, there are hundreds if not thousands of subreddits, each with their own unique subculture. However, time and time again, I see a highly unrepresentative sample of nuclear enthusiasts over there, or in the comments of our posts when someone submits one of our stories to reddit and it does quite well there.

Nuclear supporters are far outnumbered by solar power supporters amongst the general population. Within the overall energy world, the general consensus is that solar power will grow tremendously around the world; nuclear power… not so much. Yet, on the /Energy subreddit, a popular solar or wind power story is sure to get swarmed by nuclear enthusiasts. Actually, it’s rare to even see a solar or wind story do well there despite the massive growth of these industries around the world. Renewable energy stories submitted there have a history of being immediately downvoted by redditors who simply don’t want to hear any positive news about renewable energy.

Interestingly, in the sidebar of the /Energy subreddit, where it’s routine to post links to related subreddits, there’s a link to /Renewable but not a link to the much, much larger /RenewableEnergy subreddit. And, above that, there are links to two nuclear subreddits + a subreddit that includes nuclear energy: /NuclearPower, /ThoriumReactor, and /HardEnergy. /HardEnergy, which covers fossil fuels and nuclear, is the top subreddit included there, despite having hardly over 1,000 readers (a small number for a subreddit, especially an overarching subreddit).

The /Energy subreddit isn’t the only one where the prejudice seems to be widespread. I’ve noticed it on the /Technology subreddit (to a lesser extent), and elsewhere. Recently, Elon Musk tweeted one of my solar energy stories (yes, bit of a nice surprise for me), and someone subsequently posted it to the /Futurology subreddit, one that I’d never even heard of but has quite a following. Sure enough, the same thing as always happened in the comments of the original post as well as on the /Futurology post to some extent.

The comments from the nuclear enthusiasts are almost always the same. They attack irrelevant matters related to solar energy. They make mistakes in their overall conclusions. They don’t seem to understand why solar power is growing so fast and why even Shell thinks there’s a good chance it will dominate the entire energy industry by the end of the century. They don’t seem to get that solar costs have fallen tremendously and are projected to keep falling, while nuclear is going in the other direction. They don’t seem to understand why there are massive campaigns against solar and wind funded by fossil fuel and utility industries. Or maybe the do?…

The cynic would likely conclude that many of these fanatics are indeed paid by the nuclear industry to spread misinformation and attack renewables on major sites like reddit. Such campaigns by various industries have been uncovered in the past. Frankly, I don’t think that’s the case with the majority of the nuclear commenters, and wouldn’t even contend that it’s happening at all. Rather, I think people who have worked in the nuclear industry and people who have been mesmerized by the idea of insane amounts of cheap energy from supernatural nuclear (you know, the “too cheap to meter” stuff) have simply been too enclosed in a nuclear-enthusiast bubble for too long and simply don’t have a good sense for where the energy world is today. (emphasis added - k)


The bottom line for nuclear is that it’s far too expensive, hugely unpopular amongst the masses, and poses large financial and environmental risks. It is only really pushed through by corrupt or very confused governments. The private market won’t touch it and projects have no chance where legislation doesn’t ensure profit and put the financial risk of the projects on taxpayers or ratepayers. The following graph and quote from one of the commenters on my solar story (in reply to some of the nuclear enthusiasts) captures the financial absurdity quite well:

It compares the guaranteed pricing for the planned Hinkley Point C nuke in the UK with the current feed-in tariff for large scale solar in Germany. One gets less than 10 Eurocent/kWh for 20 years without inflation correction, the other gets 10,6 Eurocent/kWh for 35 years with inflation correction (plus free 3rd party liability insurance provided by the British People, plus cover for the long term disposal of the waste). Guess which is which. BTW, wind power is even cheaper than large scale solar. New nuclear is not cheap anymore!

Now you will say “but what about at night or when it rains”. The last thing we need then is a base load power plant that can meet above costs only if it runs 8000+ hours per year, regardless of demand.

The details of the proposed UK new nuclear power station Hinkley C were announced in October 2013. The nuclear power plant to power with a fixed payment of 92.5 lbs / MWh (10.9 ct / kWh) are paid in the base year 2012 with full compensation for inflation. Thus, the nuclear power plant would be more than twice as expensive as photovoltaic systems in Germany.

And so the smoke clears: Polluters list points the way to combating climate change

Polluters list points the way to combating climate change
Just 90 companies are revealed as having produced two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions, clearing the smoke that envelops action on global warming
Posted by Damian Carrington
Wednesday 20 November 2013


Coal open cast mine near Ordos, Inner Mongolia province, China
Trucks load at a new open cast mine near Ordos, Inner Mongolia province, China, November 2008. The mine is part of the state owned Shenhua Group, China's largest coal company and world's largest too. Photograph: Jonathan Watts for the Guardian

And so the smoke clears: just 90 companies produced two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions that have been smothering the planet since the dawn of the industrial revolution. The new research is a landmark because knowing exactly who caused global warming is a big step towards knowing how to stop it.

It is tempting to see the list as a rogues gallery, full of familiar names such as ExxonMobil who have lavishly funded campaigns to deny the role of fossil fuels in climate change. The prospect of legal challenges to extract damages from the titans of the extractive industry looks attractive, particularly as scientists get ever better at attributing extreme weather events to the heat trapped by carbon dioxide.

...It is now clearer than ever before that a just few dozen companies and cartels have presided over the mass pollution of our planet, unknowingly for many years but no longer. Energy fuels the world economy and the list shows just how that power has been concentrated in astonishingly few hands. There are few more terrifying threats a government faces than the lights going out or the petrol pumps running dry.

Energy companies are the biggest corporations the world has ever seen and this concentration of immense power makes them the biggest vested interests ever to do battle with the public good.

<snip>

This carbon bubble is starting to be taken seriously by the biggest financial institutions in the world, from Citibank to HSBC to Goldman Sachs. If you think the idea of a carbon bubble...

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