Cost of green energy 40% higher than government estimates: new study

[GP_Matt]

Originally Posted by Azure

Why even in the industrial area? Alberta has huge open areas where nobody lives. Why not put 10 plants there and just build huge lines back to the city.

Electricity is lost in direct relation to the length of transmission. The further away you place the line the more inefficient the system is. There are also employment issue if you go too far away and the fact that generally speaking, someone always lives nearby if it is dangerous for ten people it is dangerous for one. (I am not saying it is dangerous, just that people see it that way)
From what I know of the attempts by Bruce Power to build nuclear in Alberta the sticking point was rates. In order to build the plant Bruce or any other company will want a guaranteed rate for the lifespan of the plant. The sticking point is in finding a rate that rate payers and the provider can agree to. Right now I think the gap is too large. Most likely because coal power is so cheap.

[GP_Matt]

Originally Posted by comrade

What about the flaring of sour gas? Surely that's a negative (in that it produces SO2 and burns large quantities of propane).

I am not too sure about the propane comment. From what I know of flaring it is done for two reasons, the first is during the test phase of a new well. The well will be opened to test pressure before it is tied in to a pipeline. The flowing gas will be burnt off to prevent it being released into the environment. This happens to both sweet and sour wells. The other reason to flare is to get rid of an unwanted byproduct. ie. if you separate the products and end up with a small amount of sour gas that isn't worth shipping you may burn it off on site.
In both cases you are disposing of a flammable gas so I don't think you would need to add propane to the mix to get rid of it. From what I read though, the amount of flaring has been going down in Alberta, even in absolute terms as the amount of drilling goes up. As to the SO2 I don't really know much about it with regard to volume produced or effect that it may have on the environment, something to read up on I suppose.

I am not intimately familiar with flaring though so take the above with a grain of salt.

[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by crazy_eoj

Those are some wonderful ideas and potential future applications but in today's reality they only serve to reinforce the fact that there are HUGE problems in moving towards green energy sources.

Likely, future technologies will make these sources more realistic but in today's world they are just a huge money pit and incredibly inefficient projects that don't do much to help anyone.

I'm sure someone said exactly the same thing about the internal combustion engine in 1896.

Lucky they didn't listen to him. We'd still be riding horses.

[calculoso]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

As has been mentioned, the cost will come down as greener power becomes more widespread, and the technology improves.

Hey great. It will come down for the next person to buy it. In the meantime, those that invest now get Gen1 of these wind/solar projects and have to pay the expensive price now. If they want to upgrade to Gen5 whenever that is, it will be another huge outlay of cash at that point.

I get that Government wants to drive these things. I get that technology improves. All valid. The costs today, when everyone is griping about being taxed to death, are high enough let alone if they underestimated it to make it even remotely palatable.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Muta

Is it clean? I actually don't know much about natural gas at all.... what are the advantages and disadvantages?

It's natural, it has to be good for you!

[ernie]

Originally Posted by Rathji

It's natural, it has to be good for you!

And it's organic!!

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by ernie

And it's organic!!

Are you my wife's homeopath?

[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by Cowboy89

And if the people of Onatrio all want to pay more for energy and thus create a competative disadvantage for themselves in the world marketplace they shouldn't cry to the rest of us about how all their manufacturing jobs got shipped overseas and to other provinces.

The input costs of electricity to the total costs of manufacturing is about 2.5% averaged out to all industry.

So the issue you cite largely doesn't exist. In some targeted sectors sure like aluminum smelting but there's none of that in Ontario. But you can implement other policies to address that if it turns out to be a problem.

[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by comrade

What about the flaring of sour gas? Surely that's a negative (in that it produces SO2 and burns large quantities of propane).

There's tonnes of environmental negatives to expanded natural gas development.

Not least of which is GHG emissions. While NG is emits roughly half the amount of emissions per raw unit of energy than from coal, it is still much higher than the scientific imperative to achieve 350-400 ppm of GHGs in the atmosphere.

Less technically, if we fuel switched ever fossil fuel source that was more carbon intensive to natural gas we'd still have emissions much higher than what they'd need to be to avoid 2 degree warming of the planet which is generally considered to be the "safe" threshold.

The bigger problem is the idea of stranded capital and lock in. Natural gas plants are expensive and thus amortized out over at least 30 years. Problem is that we lock our energy-economy into continued fossil fuel dependence over this time frame while we actually need to be reducing emissions by a much higher magnitude. The effect is that we would have to decomission the natural gas generating stock earlier than its useful life meaning much much higher costs that if we switch to renewables now.

The continued reliance on NG or an expanded role for NG in the future essentially means your producing unconventional gas which has some key concerns. The big ones are:

1. Handling, processing and inevitable spillage of waste water and fracking fluid into ground water.
2. Significantly higher terrestrial impact of shale gas - estimated that you would need 100x more wellpads for shale gas than for conventional gas to achieve the same levels of production


A side point, you could have had exactly this conversation in BC 50 years ago when the province went on a massive dam building exercise. Large hydroelectric generation is very capital intensive and has high start up costs, much like wind does now. The argument back then would be exactly the same. Why are we investing so much more of a premium in hydro power when we could be the same capacity using coal for much cheaper?

Thankfully, or not, BC did build the dams and is now producing basically free energy from them with the sites being fully paid off. Over the long term the dams made sense and is actually a competitive economic advantage due to some of the lowest electricity rates in North America.

Building renewables now basically hedges against the rising cost of fossil fuels in the future plus all the other environmental benefits that stem from them.

[SeeGeeWhy]

I like the potential offered through Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors. No high pressure water in the process, which reduces levelized costs, footprint and elimiates risk for the type of fallout that the public has come to associate with nuclear power. Also, depending on fuel selection it can also reduce the amount of plutonium that is produced to the point where it is considered "non-proliferating" and the waste products have half lives in the hundreds of years as opposed to tens of thousands.

In my opinion, it is the only technology with a short term delivery window that has the potential to seriously replace electricty from conventional sources (coal, nat gas, hydro).

[Dan02]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Thankfully, or not, BC did build the dams and is now producing basically free energy from them with the sites being fully paid off. Over the long term the dams made sense and is actually a competitive economic advantage due to some of the lowest electricity rates in North America.

The difference here being hydroelectric dams can last over 100 years, unless something has changed recently in the wind/solar areas, I'm pretty sure the life expectancy of most types is ~20 on the high end.

[Thor]

Places in the world which can should be building geothermal plants.

I'm in favor of natural gas, nuclear and anything to move us to better energy with less debilitating effects. We need to move green, but not at the expense of doubling our energy bills.

[HOZ]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

I'm sure someone said exactly the same thing about the internal combustion engine in 1896.

Lucky they didn't listen to him. We'd still be riding horses.

Fortunately not everyone is endowed with your logic skills and lack of historical perspective.

Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).

BUT BUT

Henry FORD was given 17 billion dollars to run his factory by Obama......oh I am sorry he wasn't.

Ingenuity took the day. Go figure.

Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. This was possible because of the ingenuity of inventors and entrepreneurs such as Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford, and a system that gave them the freedom to put their ideas into practice. Even more important, however, was the existence of the price mechanism. The problems described earlier meant that the price of horse-drawn transport rose steadily as the cost of feeding and housing horses increased. This created strong incentives for people to find alternatives.

How about we read history Rouge. Start HERE

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by GP_Matt

From what I know of the attempts by Bruce Power to build nuclear in Alberta the sticking point was rates. In order to build the plant Bruce or any other company will want a guaranteed rate for the lifespan of the plant. The sticking point is in finding a rate that rate payers and the provider can agree to. Right now I think the gap is too large. Most likely because coal power is so cheap.

What else do you know about that? I've been trying to contact Bruce about their proposal and have had no response. Their reactor isn't even on the queue for projects on the AESO site anymore. SNC almost bought out AECL (who owns a portion of Bruce) last year, but that deal fell through as well.

I've also tried to contact the guys who were involved with EAC who got bought by Bruce, but they're ghosts at this point.

It would seem to me that a JV with a dedicated customer (i.e. large industrial project) would be a better fit than selling to the grid, where power supply and cost certainty would be a good thing for the project on both sides of the equation.

Coal is losing is cost competitiveness, especially if the end user ends up getting hit with the carbon emission penalties that are in place, particularly once a coal plants gets to be beyond 40 years old. The incentives to build new coal are dropping off - nat gas does seem to be the next best alternative in this respect, but there is also the spectre of carbon tax...

From what I understand, the Bruce Whitemud project was to be an ACR1000 reactor which is a third generation AECL design and probably quite expensive, and unproven. I believe it does have the ability to use Mixed Oxide fuels (and thus accept some thorium), but it is not as nice as the molten salt designs which can be predominantly Thorium based.

Also, I thought a lot of nuclear reactors take a loss on their electricity at times and make a large portion of their profits on the sale of things like radioactive isotopes for use in medicine, enriched plutonium for warheads, and other by-products... it would be interesting to see this kind of data.

All I know is that I don't particularly want a high pressure water cooled reactor in Alberta (or anywhere for that matter) when a superior design exists and should be developed further.

[Tinordi]

The big knock on nuclear isn't necessarily the most obvious. Most people, rightly, question the security and waste issues of a large central nuclear plant. But what really doesn't make sense about nuclear is the cost. It's just a terribly high cost generation option. And it's not even the upfront costs (which are huge) but all the costs of waste management and final disposal which are never factored into a levelized cost analysis and decommissioning.

[ernie]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

The big knock on nuclear isn't necessarily the most obvious. Most people, rightly, question the security and waste issues of a large central nuclear plant. But what really doesn't make sense about nuclear is the cost. It's just a terribly high cost generation option. And it's not even the upfront costs (which are huge) but all the costs of waste management and final disposal which are never factored into a levelized cost analysis and decommissioning.

The costs make a nuclear plant one of the cheapest options for energy. yes the up front cost is large as is the back end but that is ALL factored in to the cost of a nuclear plant project for any new design (AP-1000s for instance).

Those decommissioning and waste handling costs are factored in because the utility companies are on the hook for those costs. Things may be managed by governmental agencies but it is the utilities that pay for those programs in most countries.

Also note that the molten salt reactors are on the backburner. Instead the PWR designs are all designed with passive systems to keep things safe in case power, cooling etc are lost.

[Tinordi]

There's so many incredible subsidies to the nuclear industry that aren't accounted for in the levelized price. First just look at the billions of dollars that went into AECL, which the government then sold for $130 million. Worst investment ever. Second, if nuclear operators are so competitive why can't they buy insurance? No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear facility. So those costs are socialized to the taxpayer. Nuclear operators also usually get sweetened land and water rentals to build the economic case. And the final disposal is not the utility's problem. THe final disposal is also one of the most costly steps of using nuclear power. No matter which way you slice it, nuclear is incredibly expensive once you really start looking at all the implicit subsidies they receive.

[Cheese]

again here is a great report done by the Pembina institute for Ontario...good read and very clear.
http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/behi...itch-final.pdf

and the presentation report
http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/behi...esentation.pdf

[crazy_eoj]

Most of the external costs applied in this thread to Natural Gas generation are still based upon unproven science and theoretical models, so to apply these costs as 'fact' is counterproductive.

The subsidies applied to 'green' energy projects are also quite incredible and many dwarf those applied to nuclear construction.

Bottom line here is: most green energy is still highly expensive, uncompetitive, and unreliable. Plus the costs are usually hugely underestimated. The technology is still not close to compete with conventional energy production so investing billions of dollars into it is a horribly innefficient use of our resources.

[ernie]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

There's so many incredible subsidies to the nuclear industry that aren't accounted for in the levelized price. First just look at the billions of dollars that went into AECL, which the government then sold for $130 million. Worst investment ever. Second, if nuclear operators are so competitive why can't they buy insurance? No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear facility. So those costs are socialized to the taxpayer. Nuclear operators also usually get sweetened land and water rentals to build the economic case. And the final disposal is not the utility's problem. THe final disposal is also one of the most costly steps of using nuclear power. No matter which way you slice it, nuclear is incredibly expensive once you really start looking at all the implicit subsidies they receive.

It depends on the country but the utility or technology owner is generally responsible for disposal of wastes and are often responsible for the funding of the agencies that control that disposal. ANDRA in France is a good example. The nuclear operators are legislated to have decommissioning funds and funds to deal with wastes set aside. In France this amounts to something like $50 billion between AREVA and EdF (if I remember the number correctly from a few weeks ago at the ICEM conference in Reims)

In Canada it is the NWMO that is funded by the utilities and established in 2002 through an act of parliament. They are responsible for doing all the work behind where to dispose of waste and give recommendations (government chooses the solution they think is best). The companies then have to finance the disposal. The UK has similar agencies.

There will always be government money involved in some way shape or form just as there is if it was coal or oil burning plant or other green energy (or industry for that matter). Countries have energy policies for a reason. I'd say even 10 years ago you would be correct but not today. Today the utilities companies need to and do factor these things into the cost of operation.