Brookings Study Calls Solar, Wind Power the Most Expensive Fossil Alternatives 409
turkeydance (1266624) writes A new study [PDF] from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argues that using solar and wind energy may be the most expensive alternatives to carbon-based electricity generation, even though they require no expenditures for fuel.....Specifically, this means nuclear power offers a savings of more than $400,000 worth of carbon emissions per megawatt of capacity. Solar saves only $69,000 and wind saves $107,000. An anonymous reader points out that the Rocky Mountain Institute finds the Brookings study flawed in several ways, and offers a rebuttal.
Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
And when you include end-of-life costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And when you include end-of-life costs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Baby boomers have learned pretty well from "the greatest generation" how to put in minimal effort and then concentrate on sucking the system dry. Gen X got away with putting nothing at all in, which means Gen Y will be unable to get anything at all out.
Now, this sentiment is nothing new, and has been echoed since greek times and before. The common wisdom of being content because "things could be worse" is continuously being proved true. I have no idea what is in store for Gen z, and I'm not predicting apocalypse, just really, really bad stuff. Sorry, but I got mine. - Good luck with that radioactive shit, maybe somebody will figure out a way to make really dirty weapons out of it and you can blow your generation to pieces, like we tried to.
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
That $400,000 number is suspect. What conditions are what I wonder about.
Don't forget regulation. I can go get some wood pallets behind S-Mart [1], rip them up and make a frame that props a solar panel roughly south, have the wires go to a $10 charge controller, a cast-off battery, and an el cheapo inverter fresh off the Chinese slowboat... and I have a little bit of electric for an outbuilding, for the total cost for well under a C-note, especially if the panel is a cast off or factory second. This isn't a reliable setup, but for a redneck solution to keep a shed lit at night, it is workable.
There is no way in Hell one could ever approach anything nuclear related without billions of dollars in assets. Even a small reactor in the low megawatts will take tens to hundreds of millions of red tape fees, dealing with the anti-nuke lobby and the NIMBY people, then finding a contractor who will actually make a reactor head out of the correct materials and not pot metal, not to mention all the other costs with each step of getting the reactor up and running.
Nuclear power is great scaling up, because it provides the most energy generation for the least amount of real estate. However, it takes no regulation other than basic electrical codes to get solar operational.
[1]: Not Wal-Mart, they want $10 per pallet.
The Brookings Institution? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Brookings Institution??? Why would anyone give a damn what some think tank, er, thinks?
By definition, a think tank's job is to simply rationalize their clients opinion.
Get the facts straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite odd how, out of the first eighteen comments (not counting replies), five are about decommissioning costs, and five are about meltdowns? They seem to repeat the same talking points, almost as if on a script.
I'm not saying they're shills, but at the very least a lot of people seem to be getting their information from the same place, which leaves them missing several crucial facts:
1) Nuclear power works at scale. It's proven, and it scales perfectly. The biggest solar plants on the planet are 500MW (Topaz Solar Farm, PV) or 400MW (Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, thermal). A single nuclear reactor is well above that - scroll down this list [wikipedia.org] and you'll see very few sub-500MW, and quite a few 1GW+ reactors. And remember, most plants have more than one reactor. 66 nuclear plants are enough to give us 20% of our energy. 947 wind plants are only enough to give us 3%, and 553 solar plants (PV and thermal) don't even break half a percent.
2) Nuclear power would be a hell of a lot safer if new designs were actually approved. The regulations are pretty much ridiculous - they don't approve new reactor types that are designed to solve all the problems we've found with the old designs, but they still allow old designs with known weaknesses to be extended long past their designed lifespan. Add to that the ridiculous costs of dealing with the bureaucracy and the weak requirements for cleanup/decommissioning, and it almost seems like the regulations are designed both to make nuclear power unprofitable, and to keep public opinion against it. Hmm...
3) Nobody is arguing for pure nuclear power, because that doesn't work for all the reasons people say it doesn't work. Nuclear (and geothermal, where possible) makes for an excellent base load. Nuclear meshes well with hydro - excess capacity can be used to run the dam in reverse, pumping water up to store that energy for later use. And if positioned right, it provides both cooling water for the reactor, and a single point to close off flow or install filters if something does go wrong. Wind, tidal and solar can supplement this as locations allow, with solar in particular taking the edge off the peak load.
4) Every power plant can go wrong. What happens when a hydro dam fails? Thousands of people die [wikipedia.org]. What happens when a solar plant fails? We don't know yet, but it probably won't be that good considering how much damage they can do even when working properly. Same for wind, and tidal, and geothermal. They do some minor damage even when working perfectly - frying or chopping up migratory birds or fish, or altering the geology in the case of geothermal. Nuclear has the benefit, at least, of being perfectly clean when working perfectly. Yes, if things go wrong it can be absolutely horrible, but that's why regulations need to focus on redundant containment and fail-safe designs, not on constant inspections.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:0, Insightful)
Just because you know your bread will eventually turn green with mold, doesn't mean you should throw it away now. Use petroleum until the economic curves actually cross, not before.
Re:Funny money (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar and wind kill the cash cow.
Solar, yes. Wind, no. Solar PV does not benefit much from scale, so roof-top units make sense. But efficient windmills are big, and getting bigger. The most efficient windmills have a hub height of over 100 meters, and multi-megawatt generators. These are not backyard units. The future of wind energy is in offshore installations, and stratospheric wind. Only big corporations have the capital for that.
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Early solar adopters aren't bearing this cost because the power company charges them same amount for power whether or not the sun is shining - it's not really an issue until solar is a bigger power source. Germany IS already there, leading the way with solar and wind, and has been paying outrageous prices for electricity at certain moments when there is a crunch - up to 400 times the normal rate! [bloomberg.com] But as you can imagine this is a huge financial incentive to create new solutions.
I question the study because the transition to solar will be gradual, and it's hard to say what more efficient means we might come up with to store power. If we had a smart grid that could communicate fluctuating electricity prices to devices, there might be a lot they could do.
Never seen a conservative position on Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Brookings think tank take money from oil and gas interests?
The report is not really pro FF. It is more pro-nuke.
All the slants against making the switch to renewable energy seem determined to to thwart it any way they possibly can
They just show that current solar and wind projects don't make sense on a stand-alone basis. But they miss the point that these technologies are improving quickly. The cost of solar dropped 20% in the last couple years, and is expected to drop quite a bit more, due to both technological and manufacturing improvements. The cost of offshore wind is also falling, and we haven't even started to exploit stratospheric wind.
But they have a valid point that current subsidies for wind and solar are probably not very smart. It would be better to put that money into scientific research, and development of better manufacturing techniques, rather than just subsidizing something that doesn't make sense.
Re:I believe solar thermal does benefit from scale (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And other costs (Score:2, Insightful)
1, and 4 are moot when you are generating all the power you need from your own roof... Now, batteries need to catch up, but a bank of batteries in your basement can keep a house overnight if it's well insulated.
This is assuming you're in a place where it's feasible to do this (see #2, as none of these points exists in a vacuum from the others).
For places like the North Central and North Eastern US, you don't get enough hours of daylight, nor enough quality of light during a good portion of the year to pull more than a trickle charge off a normal sized rooftop. And that's BEFORE calculating a foot of snow and ice on the roof.
Try harder.
Re: Funny money (Score:3, Insightful)