peak fossil fuels by 2017

mheslep

I don't believe that follows. Could you clarify how you arrived at the replacements and the new energy demand numbers?

First, the current world wide installed reactor base is 439, average age 26, with 50 currently under construction; replacing all operating reactors over the next 40 years is 11 per year. Also, I suggest renovating an old nuclear plant (versus simply shuttering it) with an existing license to operate on an approved site is a far less expensive and difficult task than building a brand new plant from scratch. Thus adding counts of replacements together with new plants and using the sum as figure of metric to gauge feasibility is at least partially flawed approach.

Second, regarding new demand, Mohr says he already incorporates some kind of new demand model in his estimates for fossil fuel production. So it appears that 1) declines from some future peak fossil production point that is a function of demand, and 2) new future demand have at least some overlap in composition, and thus counting them separately would be double counting at least in part.

Third, the One EJ/year equivalents list I suggested above are simple energy balance metrics, i.e. so many solar panels produces and EJ/yr. I included no prescription saying one type must be used to the exclusion of the others. The world is free to pick and choose any combination non-fossil sources, as of course it will.

apeiron

OK, call it 10 a year.

The point of the study is how little the peak changes with various demand and supply considerations. And the 90 a year was based on your suggested figure.

But let's be reasonable and halve it - biofuels and other renewables can take up any of the slack.

I've already halved the nuclear contribution in the 190 figure I quoted - accepting scenarios like the Shell study where biofuels and other renewables take up the slack.
(p17 - http://www-static.shell.com/static/p...arios_2050.pdf)

Current world energy consumption is ~470 Ejy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_e...uclear_power_2).

Consumption would be double this by 2050 given BAU and good efficiencies.
(http://www.worldenergy.org/documents...udy_online.pdf)

OK, allow peak fossil fuels to be 2020 and the peak to be 520 Ejy, that will mean that on top of new energy to plug the post-peak decline, there will also have to be 420 Ejy extra capacity in 2050.

Let half of that be nuclear reactors - 210 Ejy.

So if 30 reactors = 1 Ejy (as you said) then that is an extra 6300 reactors by 2050.

That comes to a build rate of 158 a year. (A lesser figure as I've been even more generous with the assumptions).

So 10 + 45 + 158 = 213 new reactors world wide every year to give us BAU (presuming nuclear carries only half the load and the contribution can be matched by other non-fossil fuel sources).

That is four new reactors every week. And about $6 billion in capital cost (or probably a lot more as fossil fuel peaks and energy costs soar).

Sounds like a tall order to me. Can you supply any evidence to suggest the world can build this many reactors and also manage the waste? Peak uranium would also be a consideration at this level of building of course.

mheslep

Yes I know the 90 reactors are for gap plugging in fossil fuel decline based on my estimate of 30 reactors per 1 EJ/yr replacement. My second question was about your figure of 190 (6.3 EJ/yr) Buisiness-As-Usual new demand reactors. What is the basis of that figure? Edit: appears you address that below, thanks.

Before I plough through that 52 pgr, what exactly are saying that the Shell scenario provides as relevant to your point? Could you quote a relevant passage?
Agreed (you meant this top link I believe)

Ok, I don't know about the 'BAU' and efficiency qualifiers but I agree a world wide doubling of energy demand by 2050 is in line at least with some of US EIA's Outlook predictions, most of that increase coming from the developing world.

That's my point above - you are double counting there by at least 50 EJ/yr (110 EJ/yr in case 3) as the fossil peak already counts increased demand.

To avoid double counting let's simplify: In 2050 EIA predicted demand is ~940 EJ/yr.* Then, Mohr's 2050 fossil production is ~480 EJ/yr (case 3), so the 2050 demand deficit from fossil decline is 460 EJ/yr. If nuclear is tasked to cover half of that as you propose, then we have 230 EJ/yr * (30 reactors/EJ/yr) over 40 yrs is 173 reactors per year world wide, plus 10 replacements per year.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html
Regarding cost for nuclear, this varies considerably by country, another reason why addressing the problem world wide is complicated. In the US yes nuclear capital costs appear to be $5-7 / W(e). However China is throwing up PWBs for $1.6/W(e), or $1.6B for a one GW(e) reactor (as pointed out by signerror)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_4542917.htm

Eh, peak production of Uranium isotope 235 maybe, otherwise no there's no peak production of fissionable fuels anywhere near 2100.

(i.e. 2500 years of 1000 EJ/yr production)

*I'm highly sceptical that real demand will reach that high coming from the developing world, that instead efficiencies such a solar water heating, high efficiency lighting, and more efficient aviation (e.g. 787) will leap frog the more wasteful technologies just as the cell phone leap frogged land telco lines in the developing world. But for now I'll accept the doubling prediction of 940 EJ/yr in 2050.

apeiron

OK, BAU = business as usual. ie: continued GDP growth and energy demands basically unchanged apart from significant efficiency moves (by 2050, consumption merely doubles rather than quadrupples).

And it seems you will settle for 183 new reactors a year to cover half the peak fossil fuel gap (which is still a low side case 3 estimate based on Mohr's study).

So that is 183 reactors a year building programme compared to the 21 a year achieved during the 1980s. Almost an order of magnitude increase in building maintained over four decades (if it started this year).

This would be a reactor every two days.

The rosiest projections of the industry lobbiest is "a realistic estimate of what is possible might be the equivalent of one 1000 MWe unit worldwide every 5 days."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf104.html

aquitaine

Ah yes, the grand old EROEI misconception. Fortunately, we have things like electric cars (which are coming out this year and next year) which will allow us to still go to work while avoiding taking the bus. And to make that electricity, we have the most efficient and abundant source of energy ever discovered: nuclear fission. Doomed? Hardly.


I find it interesting you can come onto a science and technology forum and say technology wont find a way around things. Peak oil is very much a problem of technology, and so therefore it has technological solutions.

apeiron

Thanks for the link to the blog "debunking EROEI". It really is very funny. A top source.

The guy is clearly an economic genius .

Your "source" just gets better and better.....

Gosh Aquitaine, I just hope you were in on the joke.....

aquitaine

Unlike you, he knows what he's talking about.

apeiron

No, no. If you want to question my conception of EROEI issues, then you need to link to some credible research and not this satirical nonsense.

brainstorm

I have been trying to compare the cost of expanding solar to rising fossil-fuel costs. Assuming oil and coal prices keep rising, the cost of solar should decline relative to non-renewables. However, solar users who feed-in to their grid are wanting to receive the retail rate in exchange for fed-in energy. This means that there is no allowance for the utility company itself. The question is will utility companies charge more for oil/coal-based power in order to buy-in excess solar for the grid, or will the high costs and declining demand for non-solar drive the utility companies to bankruptcy?

apeiron

I think the point at the heart of your question is about the big possible efficiency gain that would be possible with relocalised energy production. Power has been about big companies/big government building the infrastructure. Now we need a scalefree model of production which would maximise efficiency. It would be good for homescale production to be able to use the national grid as its battery, as actual batteries are a bad idea.

In countries like Germany, farmers have been paid a premium for electricity generated by wind turbines on their land. Hence wind is flourishing in Germany. A subsidised start quickly overcame the NIMBY factor.

In my own country (New Zealand), you can feed power into the national grid. But you get less for it when you later buy it back. So effectively you are penalised.

So I would say there is a natural future in national power grids becoming the storage battery for homescale energy production. But you have two key problems with this happening.

The first is that the existing monopolies have to be made to open up (which is possible where the state is in charge, much harder in privatised systems).

The second is the issue of fossil fuel pricing. Unless there is some imposed pricing mechanism that pushes up the cost of fossil fuel to what it should be (pricing in its scarcity, its carbon footprint, etc) then it will continue to be under-priced and so undercut renewable alternatives.

This is the problem for people who say "technology solutions will save us". The technology may exist, but getting it in place requires some rather serious socio-political-economic engineering. Those of us following progress are alarmed at how little progress there is on behaviour change.

We know that denial is the first stage of grief. Denial is what we mostly still hear from people.

brainstorm

Solar energy is wonderful, but the point I was trying to raise is that for people to sell their excess power onto the grid at the same price they pay for it requires that someone else pay them at that rate PLUS the costs of maintaining the grid, as well as administration costs, etc.

So, ultimately I think it's going to come down to a question of competing labor costs. 1) How much do solar producers expect per kwh and 2) how much are fossil fuel producers willing to take per kwh generated? Solar may end up costing more than fossil fuel only because the people supplying it are indexing their price against what they pay for electricity, whereas the fossil fuel prices are based on supply and demand.

Eventually, if enough people invest in solar panels to make feed-in competitive, there will be supply-side competition and the cost paid to solar-cell owners will go down. However, the question is whether this low price will be sufficient to motivate private individuals to buy and maintain solar systems. It may turn out that big companies undercut private individuals eliminating home-based solar collectors.

At that point, my question would be what was gained economically by switching to solar, if it just becomes another profit industry the same as fossil fuels. Granted the ecological benefits are great, but it's not like people are going to be any more free economically than they are now, even though sunlight is 100% free. See the problem?

apeiron

Afraid that I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

What I was saying is that a key issue with alternatives is that if the power source is "everywhere" as it is with wind and sun, then it makes sense to create a system that can tap into it over all available scales. With electricity grids, this would not actually be that hard to do, although established interests might resist the change.

The "economic freedom" of people boils down to then getting the cheapest power for the longest time. Whether this is achieved by big monopolies or turbines and PV panels on every roof is not really a big deal is it?

brainstorm

If economics was sane, I would say you're right. Unfortunately, though, I was trying to explain that people with solar cells are trying to feed-in power for a high kwh fee. This means those who buy from the grid will have to pay even more to fund the high solar costs PLUS the costs of infrastructure and administration.

Another way to put it is that people will have to pay the same amount of money to the utility companies to cover their infrastructure and administration costs AFTER investing in their solar system. PLUS, the price per kwh will go up as a result of how many less kwh are being bought by people living off their solar systems during the day.

So you're going to ultimately end up paying more for solar energy because the people working for the utility companies are going to want to keep making the same amount of money, along with the people who produce infrastructure, build buildings, etc. Either that or the economy has to be radically restructured to make life sustainable with significantly lower amounts of income.

talk2glenn

This is a legitimate problem with net-metering generally, but is a policy, rather than market problem.

Power companies are required by federal law to buy back excess eletricity, at some rate. Exact policy varies state-by-state. At the market-end of the spectrum, states either allow the utility to contract with homeowners directly (setting a contract rate), or provide a legal wholesale rate (which is significantly lower than the market rate for the electricity, reflecting the fact that the utility maintains the grid).

Other states, however, require that homeowners be compensated at the utilities own market rate (the same rate the utility charges its customers for electricity draw). These policies make little economic sense; the homeowner does not have to pay for his share of the infrastructure, as you point out, and he does not have the overhead of grid maintenance. His only infrastructure costs are the initial PV installation, which was itself already heavily subsidized by the public utilities and the state. This means rates generally must go up to offset the added costs of paying the owners of solar setups at greater than market rates (if the power company and homeowner negotiated, the agreed upon price for the homeowners energy return would be significantly less than that charged by the power company itself), and effectively non-solar households are subsidizing solar households, a market distortion.

While unfortunate, it is not unique to electricity return. Even without these kinds of net metering policies, taxpayers generally are already subsidizing the installation of solar cells on homes, through federal and local programs.

apeiron

Market mechanism are maximally efficient in theoru, but usually suffer from extreme short-sightedness in practice as only the immediate future is easy to see.

So it would be normal to subsidise behaviour that we want to encourage long-term. This is why public transport is subsidised.

Alternative energy needs subsidising for the same reason. Indeed, the situation is worse. Fossil fuels are priced too cheaply (in the longterm view). Yet the response to a price rise is economic contraction - which then reduces the demand and thus price. This is because production is based on longterm infrastructure investment. So the system is locked into an attractor that keeps fossil fuel prices artificially low and prevents a move to more expensive alternative energy infrastructure.

The relationship is well understood. And countries can make choices about how to break-out of the feedback loop.

brainstorm

Subsidizing solar systems, either though formal subsidies or buying excess energy they produce at retail rates, is a double-edged sword. Yes it promotes the installation of solar systems, but it also spoils the supply-market of solar-cell producers by making them accustomed to subsidized profit-levels. The question becomes whether the solar-cell industry will remain in business once subsidies are reduced or eliminated. Ironically, if solar growth is very successful, it will contribute to oil conservation, which will extend the life of oil as an available fuel. This in turn lowers demand and therefore the price of oil, which in turn makes it harder for solar to compete. Ultimately the question is whether solar cells will become so simplified and/or plentiful that they will be as easy to cultivate as, say, a lawn sprinkler system. Will people be able to go to a local hardware store and pick up the parts to set up or fix a solar system and, as such, will the industrial production of these parts become so massified as to render the parts as cheap as any other relatively meaningless mass-produced commodity, such as pvc and pvc fittings?

talk2glenn

If this is true, why does it follow that the government would be more able to anticipate long term needs than the market? Is the future more easily foreseen by public than market forces? I would argue that the evidence strongly suggests the latter outdoes the former; the centrally planned Soviet Union could not anticipate long term needs for winter clothing in one of the most consistently cold regions on earth, while we take it for granted that there will always be enough milk on store shelves to go around, with little to no waste, despite dramatic fluctuations over both the short and long terms. Markets in fact have a harder time anticipating short-term demand than long-term, due to unforeseeable events (disasters, for example, but also apparently random fluctuations in short-term consumer preferences that are relatively stable over longer periods).

Public transportation isn't subsidized because of an anticipated long-term growth in demand, but for precisely the opposite reason: the long-term demand trend has been negative.

As demand for public transport has gone down, it has become increasingly dependent on public subsidy to survive, because there is an excess in supply (which would tend to push prices down and eliminate weaker competitors, in a competitive marketplace, reducing supply and increasing demand until a new equilibrium is met).

Fuel prices are not kept artificially low; the market rate is a product of supply and demand. If it is the case that supply of cheap fuels is decreasing irrecoverably, while demand for energy is increasing, then these prices will rise until alternative sources become viable.

Clearly, if subsidies were not offered, demand for solar cells would decline, which would lead to short-term price falls. This would have the effect of eliminating the weakest competitors in the industry. The industry would survive, but it would be composed of a smaller number of companies.

This is only true for the short-term. In the long term, oil companies will respond by reducing supply, and price levels will rise again. The new equilibrium level in the long-term may or may not be lower than the initial price.