Distributed Generation Could Eventually Dominate the Energy Landscape
About a year ago, I had lunch with the top two people from Forester Media, whose publications include Distributed Energy, and during our conversation I expressed my interest in co-promoting one another’s content. For my money, anyone who’s concerned with the subject of distributed energy, whether that means distributed generation (DG), energy storage, vehicle-to-grid or whatever, ought to be interested in what we’re doing here at 2GreenEnergy.
I’ve always felt that DG is the real ace-in-the-hole for renewable energy. Of course, the power utilities are praying that this doesn’t happen, but I think there is a more-than-likely scenario under which the paradigm of centralized generation, transmission, and distribution evaporates over the coming century. We’ll see what happens.
I’ll find out Tuesday morning over breakfast if I’m able to strike some sort of win-win deal with the fine people at Forester. Again, we’ll see.
Those who favor wind power assert that it can be made reliable by interconnecting wind farms over huge areas, the assumption being that if the wind is not blowing in one area, it will be blowing in another area. Of course there is no proof that that assumption would ensure reliable power. Therefore, it should not be relied upon until or unless such proof becomes available. And obviously solar power is available for considerably less than 12 hours per day.
Widely distributed generation would require a much more expensive grid since it would need to be able to gather power from widely distributed sources. That would add to costs.
It has been proposed that an answer to the intermittency problems of renewables is battery electric vehicles which would be used for energy storage. In theory that could work here in the U.S. and some other prosperous countries where there are large numbers of cars. But does anyone seriously think that that could work in poor countries where most people will never be able to own a car? And do we want to encourage an increase in car ownership in those countries? Is it likely that in India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and in other developing nations, that there would be enough EVs to provide sufficient storage?
Where migrating away from fossil fuels is concerned, we have to consider other parts of the world. If only the U.S. and other prosperous countries migrate away from fossil fuels, the reduction in CO2 emissions will be greatly insufficient.
Renewables are a good choice in areas where connecting to the grid will remain impractical for the indefinite future, but in other places, it is unclear that renewables will ever be practical.
If we decide to depend on renewables and later find that they are incapable of doing the job, we will have wasted precious time that could have been devoted to developing an implementing a better nuclear power technology.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Molten Salt Storage are both proven technologies that can provide 24/7/365 by harvesting modern sunlight from the only truly safe nuclear reactor known to humankind – the one that already pours down on our planet thousands of times the energy we need, the one we spin around at a safe distance of 93 million miles. Our planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from its harmful effects. We merely need to act rationally upon current knowledge in order to use the bounty it provides.
The Germans – certainly no slouches when it comes to engineering – are abandoning nuclear and pursuing true renewables, distributed solar quite notable among them. This reality prevails even given Germany’s latitude’s and climate’s marginal suitability for solar.
We in the US enjoy a latitudes and climates that range from excellent for solar across the southwest to suitable over nearly our whole country.
Sure heat can be stored with molten salt tanks (a mix of KNO3 and NaNO3), to use for power generation later, but the problem is storing enough energy to do the job. There is a system in Spain that is supposed to be able to store enough energy to generate power for seven hours after sunset, but to provide reliable power 24 hours per day 365 days per week would require storing enormous amounts of energy. Whether any larger molten salt storage system has ever been built I don’t know, but I wouldn’t assume that it is practical until one several times larger has been built.
Yes, the Germans are (temporarily) abandoning nuclear power. To do so, they are even now building more coal-fired plants and the type of coal they are using is lignite, which is the dirtiest form of coal. They are also importing more power from France which is mostly nuclear-generated.
Before passing on the success of Germany, it would be a good idea to wait a few years.
Germany’s energy portfolio was 6% renewable in 2000 and 25% in 2012. That’s concrete success.
It should also be noted that France’s contractual exchanges with Germany were +10.8 TWh export to Germany and – 8.4 TWh imports from Germany, leading to a net contractual export from France to Germany of +2.4 TWh in 2011. So, there is a lot of energy flowing across the border in both directions. With all of its other neighbors, France has a positive balance, with Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium being especially big importers of French electricity. Essentially, those countries have made a strategic decision to let France host the nuclear plants rather than building them at home.
Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power (not yet proven to be temporary) has resulted in a temporary shift from one dirty fuel to another – from their own dangerous-waste-producing nuclear to that of France, and to an especially filthy form of coal. France, notably, has almost no native supplies of fossil fuels. France’s nuclear power experience has been one of increasing costs over time rather than decreasing. Still, France is not a nation known for its wise energy policy, having made themselves largely dependent on the hazardous “pressurized water reactors” which they continue to maintain as a standard.
However, Germany still maintains its strong course toward a renewable energy portfolio, and the current German importation of energy from France is therefore quite likely to be temporary. Adding to this likelihood is the fact that French power consumption continues to increase dramatically, whereas power consumption in Germany has been basically flat in recent decades. The gap between base load and peak power in France continues to widen from roughly 52 gigawatts in 2003 to 71.5 gigawatts in 2012, when peak demand is exceeded 100 gigawatts in the country for the first time. In contrast, German power consumption – with a population roughly 30 percent greater – still generally peaks below 80 gigawatts and is generally in the 60s.
Another worthy consideration is that – unlike Germany’s government support of renewables through public economic price supports like the feed-in tariff, EdF is substantially owned by the French Government, with around 85% of EdF shares in government hands . 78.9% of Areva shares are owned by the French public sector company CEA and are therefore in public ownership. Currently in Germany, a four-person household pays roughly €12 euro per month for renewable energy subsidies; in 2013 that number is likely to rise to €16.60.
There have now been four grave nuclear reactor accidents: Windscale in Britain in 1957 (the one that’s never mentioned), Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 and now Fukushima. Each accident was unique, and each was supposed to have been impossible. As Edward Teller, the great nuclear physicist, said, “If you construct something foolproof, there will always be a fool greater than the proof.”
Moreover, poor countries don’t have the knowledge and facilities to design, build, maintain and run their own nuclear power stations. This puts them at the mercy of wealthier and more technically advanced nations if they go down the nuclear power route.
The only nuclear plant built in a liberalized-energy economy in the last decade was one ordered in Finland in 2004. Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf concludes that the total cost of power from a new nuclear plant today is 4.31 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s far more than 3.53 cents for electricity from a conventional coal-fired plant. When he removes tax subsidies from the equation, Metcalf finds that nuclear power is even less competitive at 5.94 cents per KWh compared with 3.79 cents.
If we’re going to be granting public subsidies, they should be for renewables.
Note: The above “Anonymous” comment and reply are my own.
You wrote:
“Still, France is not a nation known for its wise energy policy, having made themselves largely dependent on the hazardous “pressurized water reactors” which they continue to maintain as a standard.”
Unfortunately, that is true. I see PWRs as a serious mistake. They use less than 1% of the available energy in the fuel and the rest is discarded as waste. Here in the U.S., we should be doing more R & D to prepare a better nuclear technology for implementation, and there are better technologies possible which would eliminate the usual objections to nuclear power and be able to use our present “waste” to produce power. Other countries are doing R & D on better nuclear technologies and if we don’t resume the R & D ( which was discontinued during the Clinton administration), we will end up buying better technologies from China and other countries.
Even with PWRs, nuclear power would be considerably less expensive than it is if anti-nuclear power had not found ways to make it more expensive. Constant unnecessary delays run up costs dramatically as the interest cost increases before the plants are permitted to produce power.
Nuclear plant design and management have significantly improved since Three Mile Island. In any case, the disaster at Three Mile Island was only to the investors.
Who would have considered Chernobyl to be impossible? The basic design was dangerous, safety devices had been disabled to conduct a dangerous test, and there was no containment structure.
The Fukushima disaster, so far as is known, caused no deaths or serious injuries. The set-up was just plain stupid and was largely the result of Japanese culture. In that culture, criticism is a serious faux paux, so when, during the design phase, problems were noted, they were not addressed. From the beginning, people saw that it was a serious mistake to locate the Diesel generators and power panels where they could be flooded, but nothing was done about it. Actually, I see it as a mistake to use reactors that depend on power to operate emergency cooling systems. The new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor seems to have solved that problem, although I still do not like PWRs.
Again, I strongly suspect that within a few years, Germany will find renewables to be impractical. It is not a good country for solar; because of the weather, the average insolation is rather low. There can be periods of weeks and months when little wind power is available, so making it reliable would require storage capable of supplying power for impractically long periods of time, like weeks or even months. Being able to ship power around Europe would help, but I would see it as unwise to rely on that as a solution.
Simply replacing a high percentage of CO2 emitting power is insufficient; probably on a global basis, we will need to get at least 80% of our power, including power for transportation, from non-CO2 emitting sources as global demand for power increases.
I too have reservations about poor countries’ having nuclear reactors, but in the long run, there may be no choice. It may that safer and more advanced nuclear reactors combined with better educated operators, would make it acceptable.
You stated, “The Fukushima disaster, so far as is known, caused no deaths or serious injuries.”
The thing many folks choose to ignore about exposure to radiation and toxins from such disasters is that it will often take a few years for people to begin to die. In this case, merely two years afterward, the Japanese government health officials have just screened over 90,000 children in the region. They found that 40% of those children already now have serious and unprecedented thyroid abnormalities, with many precursors of cancer.
The food grown in the region is widely judged to be unsafe and is being exported to third world nations, where tracing the effects will be increasingly difficult.
Just as in Chernobyl, about which disaster the reports of the death toll are often limited to fairly immediate casualties (and the initial estimates of radiation release and hazard were soon found to be rashly understated), here with Fukushima the more gradual and subtle (but nonetheless lethal) impacts seem likely to remain rather unfortunately opaque.
The designers and operators at Chernobyl supposed their design and their actions to be safe. The combination of events leading to the disaster at Fukushima were (and still are elsewhere) similarly considered to be of sufficiently low probability as to be dismissible. At Fukushima, that low probability turned out to be an unexpected 100%.
The disaster at Three Mile Island (TMI) may be considered by some to be “only to the investors” but local residents and businesses felt otherwise. According to Eric Epstein, chair of Three Mile Island Alert, the TMI plant operator and its insurers paid at least $82 million in publicly documented compensation to residents for “loss of business revenue, evacuation expenses and health claims”. Also, according to Harvey Wasserman, hundreds of out-of-court settlements have been reached with alleged victims of the fallout, with a total of $15m paid out to parents of children born with birth defects.
As to the flawed design at TMI, it’s noteworthy that in 1983, a federal grand jury indicted Metropolitan Edison on criminal charges for the falsification of safety test results prior to the accident. A TMI control room operator wrote a memo warning of “a very serious accident” if the condensate system problems were not properly addressed. He stated that “the resultant damage could be very significant.” Additionally, James Creswell, an NRC inspector, warned for two years that a design flaw with U-shaped tubes could prevent coolant circulation and cause an accident like that which would occur at TMI. His warnings were ignored until the NRC met with him six days before the accident at TMI. …Too little, too late.
Just as we see with Massey Energy and BP, profits trump safety and punitive fines and settlements are apparently regarded as a cost of doing business generally fitting well within the margin of profit. This would seem to me to be the very cruelest definition of ‘cold calculations’.
Craig,
I don’t know exactly how much distributed generation there is, but I believe I’ve read that petroleum liquids comprise ~90% of the nation’s DG. If that is correct, then current DG penetration is ~0.3%, including diesel generators… and ~0.03% without including diesel generators.
There’s a LONG way to go before this gets relevant.
(Again, here I don’t know for certain that these numbers are valid, but they sound right. Solar generation for 2012 totaled only ~4 TWh, and industrial solar installations (large-scale/not-distributed) totaled ~4.4 GW at the end of the year, which would generate 7 TWh if we assumed they were installed all year and achieved ~18% capacity factor).
We should, therefore, assume an extremely small fraction of the ~4 TWh from solar energy could remain for distributed solar generation.