I share this straight from the blog of my fellow Green New Deal Group member Jeremy Leggett, who knows more on the issue of energy usage than I ever will. Look at this and then reflect on what it means for markets; an issue I have just discussed. And also have some hope:
A short introduction to a historic report, published 12th April 2019 by LUT University and Energy Watch, that models the global energy system on an hourly basis using the real economics of existing renewable energy technologies. A unique first, and essential ammunition for all worried about climate change.
Those who would like the original powerpoint, with source urls as notes, can find it — with all the other source files, for free use — in this folder.
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Scotland has already been able to generate in excess of 100% of its electricity from renewable resources. The Western Isles, for instance, has the potential to increase its output from both wind and sea but is thwarted by Ofgem, who have not agreed to the 600MW instead of the 450MW interconnector that is necessary to access the national grid on the grounds of cost. The cost? 4p per household per year.
http://www.hebrides-news.com/subsea-interconnector-15419.html.
I agree
And this will be the basis for Scotland’s long term stability
Willie – I did a project on that 10 years ago as part of a Masters and they are STILL debating it!
It was a case study on environmental decision making – or rather on how to avoid making decisions. And how sometimes ‘environmental’ groups can be their own worst enemy…
We could go on to talk about the dicking around that has gone re tidal. No serious investment or continuity there either.
Robin Stafford wrote “We could go on to talk about the dicking around that has gone re tidal. No serious investment or continuity there either.” No argument there, Robin. Ofgem’s intransigence and the Tories’ lack of interest in tidal are unforgiveable. However the Business page of today’s Herald carries better news about tidal energy:
https://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/17582159.edinburgh-tidal-energy-firm-wins-35m-backing/ (NB. the URL overstates the funding – it’s £3.5m not £35m as per the link)
It’s telling that the investment comes from Scotland and Germany, not Westminster. I’m hopeful that the testing work in Canada will be successful so that Scotland can then start to reap the benefits from the abundant tidal resources available around our coasts.
It is indeed telling, Ken.
I was in Orkney last year and we found ourselves staying in a B&B owned by an engineer working on tidal. He was bemoaning the lack of sustained investment and how the companies working in that space kept changing ownership, with little interest in or availability of longer term funding. Whats the betting that we’ll end up with it all be installed by German, Danish or French companies, as with so much of our wind-power.
… thanks Richard… I think harnessing the energy of the school kids strike and Greta Thunberg along with Extinction Rebellion is the best hope that Labour for a Green New Deal has to mobilise support for what should be an even more ambitious program…
Why is the renewable energy still dominated by the “fear of nuclear power [that] was created by people who had ideological fears or sought to exploit it for political gain … even the Sierra Club was pro-nuclear in the 1960s.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI6IzPCmIW8
Given the illegitimacy of the nuclear bogey man (still unthinkingly accepted as ‘truth’ – witness the near invisibility of nuclear in the LUT report above) the thesis that’s its either possible or desirable to wean humanity off fossil without nuclear, is yet further contested by others who “know” more than any of us here, on grounds the other renewables use too much land, and all that thus follows…
https://www.cnet.com/news/figuring-land-use-into-renewable-energy-equation/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay
Nuclear power is the greenest option, say top scientists – Environmentalists urged to ditch their historical antagonism and embrace a broad energy mix
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nuclear-power-is-the-greenest-option-say-top-scientists-9955997.html
Why fear nuclear power?
Does that really need an answer?
Really?
Richard, Willie John, Here’s some data:-
Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/millionGWhr)
Coal global average ……….170,000
Coal China ……………………. 280,000
Coal U.S. ………………………..15,000
Oil ………………………………… 36,000
Natural Gas ………………….. 4,000
Biofuel/Biomass …………… 24,000
Solar (rooftop) ……………… 440
Wind ……………………………. 150
Hydro global average …… 1,400
Nuclear worst case estimates ….. 90
Chernobyl ……………. 47
Nuclear – commercial power plants only rest of the world ….. 0
“Chernobyl. Some two decades after the explosion 47 workers had died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children died of thyroid cancer. The Chernobyl Forum, comprising a number of UN agencies including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme , other UN bodies and the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, used the Linear Non Threshold Model to put the estimated number of possible deaths in the highest areas of exposure at 4000. This was later upgraded to 9, 000 to cover a larger area. Without the linear no-threshold extrapolation the death toll remains at 56. It was also reported that mental health problems resulting from lack of accurate information about risk was the largest public health problem created by the accident.”
https://alexcoram.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mathsnuclearumass2o13oooo1o.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
“The April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture. […] The Chernobyl disaster was a unique event and the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power where radiation-related fatalities occurred. The design of the reactor is unique and in that respect the accident is thus of little relevance to the rest of the nuclear industry outside the then Eastern Bloc. However, it led to major changes in safety culture and in industry cooperation, particularly between East and West before the end of the Soviet Union.”
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx
Relative global death rates cannot be the source of objections to nuclear, since the data render such a view irrational. Generation 4 e.g. molten salt nuclear reactors, being built now in China are fail safe. I’d be please to read your objections, rather than a silent appeal to myths peddled by the anti-nuclear lobby? Be precise. Thanks.
And what will you do with Sizewell in 30 years?
And then East Anglia, come to that?
This is yet another case of discounting facts
Chernobyl.
70 years and a huge amount of investment and fundamental problems of safety, disposal and decommissioning still not solved. If a fraction of that sum had been spent on renewables over the last 20-30 years, where would we be.
As a once upon a time trained engineer it disappoints me to say it but nuclear has had its chance. Background research needs to be continued but the big money needs to go elsewhere.
Perhaps its a bit like the internal combustion engine – its had a good run and we’ve tried our best, but we’ve finally concluded that its time to move on. Encouragingly, my son is closely involved with a very large vehicle manufacturer – expectation is that all their new vehicles will be wholly or partially electric by 2025. Industry might actually be moving faster than government of even the bulk of the public.
Not 100% on topic, but hopefully close enough. In her article published today in ‘The Intercept’ Naomi Klein presents ‘A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ – https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/green-new-deal-short-film-alexandria-ocasio-cortez.
(Here’s the direct YouTube link to the delightfully illustrated video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ).
Enjoy.
Nice to see an optimistic presentation. The devil will be in the detail. There will be resistance in some unexpected quarters, not least & taking one country as an example, the UK’s electricity network operators (DNOs) – private monopolies, mostly foreign owned &, naturally, focused on maxing out on making money.
Ofgem, the regulator in name only, has been tinkering at the sidelines attempting to regulate for circa 30 years. It has been a total failure due to information asymmetry & competence (DNOs have bragged to me how they run rings around Ofgem – which surprises me not one jot). The example given of the Hebridies is typical of what does/does not go on (& btw, I know & like the SSE people – DNO that covers the Hebridies). The situation is no different in, for example, France also known as EdF. The foregoing remarks refer mostly to small to medium-scale renewables connected to distribution networks, which have a very important role to play – although one that many governments (exceptions Germany, Austria and Denmark) have so far seen fit to ignore. Time for renationalisation, abolish Ofgem and implement a Renewable Council with a very strong public service ethos coupled to strong political and public control to drive the energy transition in terms of local generation forward.
I have just downloaded the associated MS Excel data file covering Europe and I have to say they don’t make it easy to verify their claims. I did find a website that critiqued the original issue of this document in March 2017. Some of the problems highlighted included very high import/export flows between countries, strange wind generation capacity factors – France, Britain and Germany average 8% on 14/05/2030 11:00 but the Benelux countries have a capacity factor of 29%, and some instances where the export to a neighbouring country exceeds the recipients total generating capacity – on 23/11/2030, Switzerland is required to absorb 10 times as much electricity as it generates!
My first thoughts are that this needs very careful analysis and doesn’t prove that renewables are the panacea suggested.
I will need to spend a lot of time getting to understand to data provided before I’m convinced it has proved anything!
Richard,
I’m not advocating we build more generation 3 pressurised water reactors PWRs, such as Sizewell, designed in the 1940s & 50s & as used by most nuclear power stations globally.
I am advocating the UK builds generation 4 plant e.g. molten salt reactors as being built in China and India and other more enlightened jurisdictions globally now.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/generation-iv-nuclear-reactors.aspx
So asking “And what will you do with Sizewell in 30 years?” and “And then East Anglia, come to that?” is irrelevant: the gen 3 decommissioning issues / costs issue remain, and are not exacerbated by gen4 tech.
In fact they are ameliorated: Gen 3 PWR reactors burn only circa 2% of the energy in their fuel, and its dangerous for 30,000 years. But Generation 4 reactors can burn the remaning 98% of the energy in gen3 waste. The UK has 120 tonnes of gen3 waste, enough for 100s of years of all the UKs electricity if burned in gen 4 reactors, with the gen4 waste safe as background in under 50 years. Also nuclear weapons can be burnt in gen4 reactors for energy.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/energy-and-environment/in-depth/prism-project-a-proposal-for-the-uks-problem-plutonium/1016276.article
I was an anti-nuclear die-hard until 2010. I changed my mind after I studied facts.
For example, I tried to stress test Greenpeace’s aim of the UK becoming 100% non-nuclear renewable by 2030, but discovered it would require between a quarter one third of the UK’s land i.e. a silly pipe dream.
China is going ‘full steam’ ahead with gen4 nuclear aiming to dominate the global industry, exporting modular reactors.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx
How can the GND you promote succeed, when you refuse to properly address (did you see or read any of the links I gave above?) then dismiss the nuclear lobby, which most scientists support?
Perhaps its you who is advancing “yet another case of discounting facts”?
I note all you say
And since the age of 13 – dealing with a father who helped build Sizewell – I knew it was profoundly wrong
As profoundly wrong as burning our planet
Your rationality is not rational at all – it’s just another form of extinction risk
And we can well do without nuclear – as Jeremy Leggett shows
So the answer is a simple one – let’s do without it, for good
No analysis will change that: playing with fire means we will get burnt. And nuclear is worse than that
Richard
Natasha – I’ve wanted to believe in nuclear power for years but its history is a succession of unfulfilled promises, with new technologies promising to deal with the problems of the old. And then not delivering despite huge sums being spent.
As Ive said, if we’d spent a fraction of those sums on all forms of renewables, combined with energy saving practices through more efficient housing, transport et al, then where would we be?
The dramatic acceleration in the development of EVs in just the last 5 years shows just what can be achieved when the investment starts to flow, driven by industries seeing where their future lies. The UK renewables sector has been treated with derision by the UK finance sector and the state as well, whilst we’ve watched the billions poured into ever delayed nuclear projects, now reliant on Chinese technology and still incredibly complex. In contrast, renewable technologies are all far simpler and could – if we put our minds to it – create new industries and jobs in the UK. Time to put our big money into renewables but keep nuclear on the back burner
Thanks Robin
I agree