At any rate, there’s every reason to believe that if the government stepped completely out of the way and gave no special treatment to any energy generating industry that wind power would compete just fine. Unfortunately I doubt we’ll ever get a chance to find out.

But as it is, we are making a dash to wind farms without heavy subsidies

(indeed, I read recently that in Australia its not directly subsidised at all – rather, utility companies are required by law to source a certain fraction of their electricity from wind farms).

I’m left speechless.

Coal power plants in parts of China are extraordinarly cheap only because of extremely lax safety and pollution standards. They are already paying the price for this (in lives, as well as dollars), as ultimately will the rest of world. I suspect it will turn out to be extremely false economy.

Peak efficiency is irrevelant.

Like hell it is. You can’t blow into a turbine and hope the rotors roll over.

Coal power plants run at about 30% efficiency.

There are numerous grades of coal.

As for the subsidies – the reason renewables require subsidies is because they only become competitive with coal or nuclear over a far longer period than most investors are prepared to. And like I said, coal and nuclear get plenty of subsidies anyway.

Oh, that’s what they kept saying about the textile business in Australia when we were imposing quotas and tariffs.

As for lower living standards – sure, moving to slightly more expensive forms of electricity generation in the next 10 years could have a very slight negative effect on GDP growth, meaning we wont be quite as immediately wealthy as we would be otherwise, but I can hardly see this keeping anyone awake at night.

Not according to a survey that Andrew Norton reported on. The survey showed that people were only really prepared to pay about 10 bucks a week for mitigation, which shows what a low tolerance people have to lower living standards. Cheap advice. Never ever run a political campaign on lowering living standards as you will lose.

At any rate, the extra cost of electricity generation is pretty easily recouped by using it more efficiently.

How so?

Look, I quoted you figures showing that wind farms are less expensive to operate than coal fired power plants.

Which isn’t true otherwise we would be making a dash to wind farms without heavy subsidies.

As for whether maintenance costs for wind farms are likely to decrease relative to maintenance costs for coal plants, its a reasonable assumption, given projected coal prices (US DoE projects them to remain basically flat on a $/BTU basis out to 2025*),

Yea and you know this because………..

and the fact that theres plenty of scope for automating wind farm maintenance, whereas coal power plants have spent the last 100 years gradually reducing their maintenance costs through increased automation etc., and all the easy savings have been made already.

Youo don’t know what lies around the corner so it’s no use speculating.

*

Unfortunately like most organisations the DoE has a lousy recent track record forecasting fossil fuel prices, consistently underestimating them. If the DoE is predicting flat prices out to 2025, Im willing to bet theyll actually increase substantially, especially if CTL takes off.

China doesn’t have a problem with the use of nuke power but it still builds coal plants. Why? Clue, it’s not because she loves BHP and Rio.

As for lower living standards – sure, moving to slightly more expensive forms of electricity generation in the next 10 years could have a very slight negative effect on GDP growth, meaning we won’t be quite as immediately wealthy as we would be otherwise, but I can hardly see this keeping anyone awake at night. At any rate, the extra cost of electricity generation is pretty easily recouped by using it more efficiently.

Look, I quoted you figures showing that wind farms are less expensive to operate than coal fired power plants. I did find one or two sources that attempted to estimate maintenance costs, but nothing specific enough to be worth quoting (interestingly, off-shore maintenance is cheaper, due to lower turbulence). As for whether maintenance costs for wind farms are likely to decrease relative to maintenance costs for coal plants, it’s a reasonable assumption, given projected coal prices (US DoE projects them to remain basically flat on a $/BTU basis out to 2025*), and the fact that there’s plenty of scope for automating wind farm maintenance, whereas coal power plants have spent the last 100 years gradually reducing their maintenance costs through increased automation etc., and all the easy savings have been made already.

* Unfortunately like most organisations the DoE has a lousy recent track record forecasting fossil fuel prices, consistently underestimating them. If the DoE is predicting flat prices out to 2025, I’m willing to bet they’ll actually increase substantially, especially if CTL takes off.

OTOH, theres some reason to assume that maintenance costs for wind farms may well decrease in the future with better automation and tougher materials etc.

And why and how make that assumption and on what grounds? You can’t assume you’ll get what you done have.

And why make the assumpton that technology would only improve for your favourities. If your naking assumptioons on one side of the ledger you have to also make the assumption that there will be better technology for coal and nuke in an unhampered market.

JC, like I said, give me nukes over coal plants anyday, but they are not any sort of silver bullet

Why not? Cuddly little Sweden and France use nuke for 80% of the energy needs.

Id be more than happy for governments to get out of the way and let any private enterprise that thinks it can make nuclear cost-effective in Australia have a go at it, but its not going to happen in the next 10 years.

Well lets get ready for lower living standards then.

Can you give me some references indicating that operating costs for solar or wind plants is higher than for coal or nuclear plants?

Its not costs, although it is evident that solar and wind turbines are not efficient as they require heavy subsidies to keep them going. Its operating efficiency. Wind can only ever work at about 59% peak efficiency. That means that we can only ever extract 59% of the energy input going in. Solar is almost as bad.

Everything Ive read has implied quite the opposite

Look, sticking a solar panel on every roof as even less efficient than sticking generators in every home.

Maintenance costs are generally estimated to be about the same (except some older wind farms),

Theyre not and you need very, very wide geographic displacement.

gives the operating costs for modern wind farms as 0.5c/kWh, rising to 1c/kWh after 5 years.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/issues/opctbl1.html has the operating cost for a coal-fired power plant at 1.8c/kWh. There is a downward trend here, but given recently rising coal prices, I doubt it will ever get as low as 1c/kWh, especially once carbon pricing is factored in.

OTOH, there’s some reason to assume that maintenance costs for wind farms may well decrease in the future with better automation and tougher materials etc.

There are some estimates that PV operating costs are in the order of 0.25c/kWh, but I haven’t found a good free online source yet. Nobody seems to have any good data on solar thermal.

Can you give me some references indicating that operating costs for solar or wind plants is higher than for coal or nuclear plants? Everything I’ve read has implied quite the opposite. Maintenance costs are generally estimated to be about the same (except some older wind farms), hence the zero fuel cost for solar/wind adds up to something around half the operating costs of coal or nuclear. Admittedly it’s hard to find reliable sources for this.

——————-

For the life of me, I cannot see how anyone who really wants clean emissions would not be actively supporting nuke. Are there risks? Yea limited ones it seems but surely the risk of AGW must be seen to be greater by proponents.

Why would you assume there arent significant economies of scale to be gained from mass-producing wind turbines, solar panels and/or reflectors?

As I suggested it’s not the production of these things that’s the problem. A Martian could come down and give them to us for free and we still be worse off.

Australian climate is generally similar in 1,000 sq mile blocks. So you would need very wide collection area which means there would be huge losses in “transportation” as the turbines etc. would have to be placed in numerous places in equal numbers. The maintenance work is also huge compared to a nuke of a coal-fired plant.

There is also the issue with base load requirements with coal and nuke offering the best reaction times.

Central production of energy is far superior to individual set ups in terms of obtaining economies of scale.

And what physical engineering limitations prevent the development of large-scale storage devices that can be used to turn a variable/unpredictable energy supply into a continuous, reliable flow of electricity?

Cost. We can do it, but the relative cost comparison is huge.

In fact, Ill confidently predict that by 2020 it will no longer be economically viable to build a new coal-fired power plant, even with very modest carbon pricing (say, $15/T). Of course, theres a decent chance that well before then it will be no longer politically viable.

I confidently predict that we will begin to see reason build reactors and move away from this debate once and for all.

Buy uranium stock because at 75 bucks a pound yellowcake is really cheap as most of the worlds stocks are still coming from deactivated nuclear weapons. We have 1/3 supply of the worlds reserves, so were the Saudi Arabia of yellow cake.

Anyway, no-one’s disputing that with present technology, coal-fired power stations are better than wind turbines and solar generators (PV & CSP) at producing cheap continuous electricity. Of course, a good part of the reason coal power is cheap is because it’s indirectly subsidised (e.g. health costs associated with black lung disease), and the cost of long term environmental damage isn’t priced in.

Why would you assume there aren’t significant economies of scale to be gained from mass-producing wind turbines, solar panels and/or reflectors? To be sure, a large wind or solar plant requires far more land area, but we’re not exactly short of that. And what “physical engineering limitations” prevent the development of large-scale storage devices that can be used to turn a variable/unpredictable energy supply into a continuous, reliable flow of electricity?

In fact, I’ll confidently predict that by 2020 it will no longer be economically viable to build a new coal-fired power plant, even with very modest carbon pricing (say, $15/T). Of course, there’s a decent chance that well before then it will be no longer politically viable.

What on earth is technologically superior about coal?

It produces cheap and abundant energy with large economies of scale.

Coal-fired power stations are essentially 19th century technology

The wheel is also 1,000′s of years old technology, N. Age has absolutely nothing to do with the price of hippos when a technology is economically worthwhile.

Theres far more sophisticated technology in a modern wind turbine or solar panel, and if you dont think human ingenuity can adequately solve the issue of intermittent energy supply to wind or solar generators then I suggest you dont have a great deal of faith in it.

There are physical engineering limitations that are insurmountable even if they were freely handed out and their large-scale use would result in a reduction of economies of scale: we would suffer diseconomies of scale in energy production

As for nuclear, well yes, Id be shutting down coal power stations and replacing them with nuclear ones as fast as I could if it were up to me (not least because theyre far safer), but unless youre willing to set yourself up as a dictator to get it done, NIMBYism is going to reign supreme.

Well, it should also be understood that people will begin to suffer material cuts in living standards as we have no technology that would provides cheap abundant energy other than nuke that is emission free.

Joshua Gans speculates on enacting emissions trading systems as a stalking horse for raising the stakes high enough that increased R&D expenditure obviates the needs for an emissions trading system.

Well, yea, but then Joshua G ought to explain to his readers what would have happened if the use of coal had been banned or taxed heavily during the industrial revolution. My best guess (and it would be an easy win if we could go back in time and tried it) is that the IR would have been stopped in its tracks. Stopped dead and there would never have been an IR.

When were taxing and capping emissions and limiting our potential for substitutes ( nuke power) while relying on such technologies as solar that will only bring diseconomies of scale were simply kidding ourselves into oblivion- if not oblivion certainly a lower living standards. Solar and wind power are and will always remain technologically inferior to coal and nuke especially nuke power if limiting emissions is the way forward. Anyone pretending otherwise is simply kidding themselves.

Myers and Dawkins et al. have good reason to be peeved about this movie due to some shenanigans during production etc. and they have sympathy amongst Christian academics who have also been caught out in the same way by the same groups (even if not exaclty the same people as in this case).

However, when it comes to people promulgating bad science in defense of (usually equally bad) theology (creationists and IDers), or people presenting (bad) theology under the guise of science (eg Dawkins), they all deserve each other in my view. Never let it be said that God doesn’t have a sense of humour.

Is there a difference?

I’d (reluctantly) allow my daughter to date a creationist, because at least he’s just gullible.