A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins
Jim Torson
A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins
This covers a variety of issues, e.g., Big Coal, liquid coal,
biofuels, etc. Here is an excerpt:
------------
<snip>
So I would not pay too much attention to what Congress is doing. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but ultimately economic fundamentals govern what will happen -- things that don't make sense, that don't make money, cannot attract investment capital.
We see this now in the electricity business. A fifth of the world's electricity and a quarter of the world's new electricity comes from micropower -- that is, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration) and distributed renewables. Micropower provides anywhere from a sixth to over half of all electricity in most of the industrial countries. This is not a minor activity anymore; it's well over $100 billion a year in assets. And it's essentially all private risk capital.
So in 2005, micropower added 11 times as much capacity and four times as much output as nuclear worldwide, and not a single new nuclear project on the planet is funded by private risk capital. What does this tell you? I think it tells you that nuclear, and indeed other central power stations, have associated costs and financial risks that make them unattractive to private investors. Even when our government approved new subsidies on top of the old ones in August 2005 -- roughly equal to the entire capital costs of the next-gen nuclear plants -- Standard & Poor's reaction in two reports was that it wouldn't materially improve the builders' credit ratings, because the risks private capital markets are concerned about are still there.
<snip>
Zeke Hausfather
is the cost of safety regulations (which have effectively doubled the
cost of a plant since 1970). These safety requirements have been
instituted for a good reason, but it does skew the economics a bit.
Also, small-scale power can work up to a point. Given our current
energy grid, I could foresee small-scale distributed generation
providing 30, maybe 40 percent of total power, assuming you find a
good way to regulate intermittent fluctuations in generation (say,
through hydrogen production or efficient battery systems). However,
you soon start to run into the spacial power density issues, that tend
to require small power plants capable of producing large amounts of
power (see http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/Powerdensity.jpg
). For example, even if you covered every inch of downtown Tokyo with
100% efficient solar panels, it would not produce sufficient
electricity to meet the area's energy needs.
Now, if you are willing to invest in a superefficient superconducting
electricity grid, it would be perfectly viable to power New York using
massive wind farms in Iowa or solar plants in Nevada. However, that
would not be cheap.
Also, ignoring what congress is doing is not always the best idea,
when its congress who has the ultimate power to change the economic
logic of the system (e.g. by pricing the climate externality via an
emissions tax on carbon).
On Jul 27, 7:35 am, Jim Torson <jtor...@commspeed.net> wrote:
> http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2007/07/26/lovins/
> A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins
> This covers a variety of issues, e.g., Big Coal, liquid coal,
> biofuels, etc. Here is an excerpt:
> ------------
> <snip>
> So I would not pay too much attention to what Congress is doing. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but ultimately economic fundamentals govern what will happen -- things that don't make sense, that don't make money, cannot attract investment capital.
> We see this now in the electricity business. A fifth of the world's electricity and a quarter of the world's new electricity comes from micropower -- that is, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration) and distributed renewables. Micropower provides anywhere from a sixth to over half of all electricity in most of the industrial countries. This is not a minor activity anymore; it's well over $100 billion a year in assets. And it's essentially all private risk capital.
> So in 2005, micropower added 11 times as much capacity and four times as much output as nuclear worldwide, and not a single new nuclear project on the planet is funded by private risk capital. What does this tell you? I think it tells you that nuclear, and indeed other central power stations, have associated costs and financial risks that make them unattractive to private investors. Even when our governmentapproved new subsidies on top of the old onesin August 2005 -- roughly equal to the entire capital costs of the next-gen nuclear plants -- Standard & Poor's reaction in two reports was that it wouldn't materially improve the builders' credit ratings, because the risks private capital markets are concerned about are still there.
> <snip>
gerh...@aston.ac.uk
I think this is highly misleading. The only way to get such figures is
to count stuff that is anything but "micro" (such as co-generation in
petroleum refineries or large scale hydropower projects).
What is conventionally known as microCHP (<100 kW) has a negligible
market share and even that largely because of very generous
subsidies. Not to mention that it's near exclusively fueled by oil
and gas.
Methinks that Amory Lovins is trying to hit the right levers with free
market type voters,
however, you just can't neglect the role of governmen, which
determines taxes, subsidies and the regulatory environment. It's not
that hard to regulate things out of existence, eg simply don't allow
build (natural gas fired power in the 80's in the US), or ask for huge
safety add-ons that result in 4 year construction times becoming 10
year construction times at twice the capital cost (nuclear power in
the 80's in the US), or demand that no wind power be built within 100
miles of US borders or airbases due to the potential for radar
interference.
Jim Torson
Though one could argue that the main barrier to economic nuclear power
is the cost of safety regulations (which have effectively doubled the
cost of a plant since 1970). These safety requirements have been
instituted for a good reason, but it does skew the economics a bit.
proliferation, the economics of nuclear power would no doubt improve
Also, small-scale power can work up to a point. Given our current
energy grid, I could foresee small-scale distributed generation
providing 30, maybe 40 percent of total power, assuming you find a
good way to regulate intermittent fluctuations in generation (say,
through hydrogen production or efficient battery systems). However,
you soon start to run into the spacial power density issues, that tend
to require small power plants capable of producing large amounts of
power (see http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/Powerdensity.jpg
). For example, even if you covered every inch of downtown Tokyo with
100% efficient solar panels, it would not produce sufficient
electricity to meet the area's energy needs.
on a long email from James Hansen:
http://climateprogress.org/2007/07/27/hansen-on-who-killed-the-electric-car/
Hansen on "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
<snip>
- Of course it is sensible to allow a trial power plant to be built of the sort intended to eventually include carbon capture and sequestration. But there is no way that anything more than a trial should be allowed. These plants are gargantuan. There is no guarantee that they will even make sense, once carbon is properly priced. Scandinavia provides a good example (B.E. Johansen, The Progressive, July 2007): Denmark, e.g., has remade its energy infrastructure. While in the 1980s it had 15 large power plants, it now has several hundred smaller ones, thus closer to homes and offices with reduced power loss during transmission. Much of the energy is renewable. Energy efficiency has been promoted, so the average Dane uses less than half the electricity used in the U.S. In the process, their economy has become strong.
Hank Roberts
suicide, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Don Libby
From: "Hank Roberts" <ank...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: gmane.science.general.global-change
To: "globalchange" <global...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 8:40 PM
Subject: [Global Change: 1996] Re: A conversation with energy guru Amory
Lovins
>
> The thing about fission power is, as a doctor I know says about
> suicide, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
>
>
Clever quip. I'm sure your physician friend can appreciate how mastectomy is
a permanent solution to the problem of breast cancer - not perfect but
better than the alternative.
The trouble with stabilizing carbon dioxide is, building 2000 new nuclear
power plants is not enough to guarantee success, but not building 2000 new
nuclear power plants is enough to guarantee failure.
-dl
Michael Tobis
>
> The thing about fission power is, as a doctor I know says about
> suicide, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Can you be specific? What is more temporary about the problem than
about the solution?
mt
Hank Roberts
On Aug 3, 7:55 am, "Michael Tobis" <mto...@gmail.com> wrote:
Basically we have to stop increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, no
question. Peter Ward makes the case in "Under a Green Sky" and I
think in the current Sci. American.
That's the temporary problem ---- emitting net excess CO2 at all.
That has to be solved in this century or the climate system goes far
beyond anything we can. The consequences of however much CO2 we do
emit go on for half a millenium or more before the system equilibrates
and the natural processes start reducing CO2 again.
Fission plants are useful for maybe 50 years. The cleanup of the
resulting mess and storage of the radioactive waste, including the
actual plant itself, takes quite a while thereafter. I think building
a huge number of new fission plants will cause cleanup problems that
would persist long after we fix our problem with CO2.
Each fission plant built is going to buy that roughly 50 years of
generating capacity, and those decades of cleanup and hundreds of
years of storage costs.
Building a closed cycle coal plant run on liquid oxygen, producing
concentrated CO2 for sequestration and electricity (and perhaps liquid
nitrogen removed from the input gas, if we have superconducting
electric power cables that will run at liquid nitrogen temperatures)
is the comparison big-utility choice. If we manage superconducting
cables at liquid-nitrogen temperatures, then the whole rail system is
availabe for rights-of-way to lay them out, and that adds the
possibility of using electric locomotives widely too.
All this is intended to stretch out for some half millenium or more