One thing I am sure of is that I will be happy and support the use and research of any clean energy source. Have a good day Bob.

Ummm thats actually completely true Bob. Solar and wind often cut variable costs for a utility but their intermittency, unless always offset by some other complementary renewable source (nearly impossible given weather scenarios), will always require a supplemental back-up or storage supply that raises fixed costs.

Generally solar storage is built on-site my friend, It electricity more or less fills cavities but the trading part of it is a bit more complicated. Im not sure about the logistics of having a storage supply 500 miles away from a large PV plant.

Hang onto your dreams I respect wind and solar pioneers.

Next gen nuclear is a very interesting dream, I will hang onto it as well. Thanks

Global warming has already shown itself to be an imminent danger and it could possibly already be too late to save our skins. A few people are already breathing the “extinction” word and having looked closely at the science I can’t debunk their assessments.

Overview: { http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ina16XSJQvM }
Specifics: { http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html }

Like any sane person I hope that they are somehow wrong. Time will tell. All that I know is that if we don’t get serious, like you have, we are f*ck&d….

“Lark energy recently installed a 34 MW utility scale solar farm at a cost of £35 million.

http://utility-exchange.co.uk/east-midlands-is-home-to-uks-largest-solar-fa-22101/

This is a cost of $1.60 at today’s exchange rate – completed at the end of March this year after an 8 week build.”

I plugged $1.60/W into a LCOE calculator. That installed price would produce electricity for 5.6 to 7.7 cents per kWh. The sunny part of CA to the least sunny parts of the lower 48 (except the foggy Seattle coast).

If the Brits can install for $1.60/kWh, so can we.

Prices at this level will turn the utility business upside down.

A capitalist climate in which companies compete to gain market share is going to result in companies building new nuclear and trying to sell $0.15/kWh electricity rather than installing wind and solar and offering electricity at $0.05/kWh.

Yep, that’s how things work in a capitalist climate.

I’m not saying that we should discard ideas. I think we should continue researching nuclear and clean coal (not spending a fortune on that research, but pursuing promising leads).

I’m saying that we have a problem to solve right now and we have technology in hand that will replace fossil fuels at an affordable price. We need to go to war with the army we have, not the army we might have decades from now.

a next generation nuclear prototype is nearly a decade off if it is to ever arrive, but that doesn’t mean we can’t at least discuss its potential a little bit, and some of the development in that area. If you want to talk about 20 MW wind turbines with blades that morph and respond to turbulence via hydraulic cavities I’ll be just as willing

Im really just interested in how the world will move forward and don’t think any of these ideas deserve to be so quickly discarded.

Natural gas is unlikely to become cheaper or even stay at the current price due to the cost of drilling new wells.

The capital to drill the first round of wells which created the current supply and surplus which we are now burning through came from a rush of money via investors who jumped on the “get rich quick” NG drilling/fracking wagon.

The resource is there (for a limited number of years), demand will continue but likely be damped by rising costs. New capital will come only if there are profits to be made. And it seems that NG prices will need to rise in order to attract sufficient capital.

The grid needs upgrades regardless of supply source. Wind will require some new transmission to be built. Solar will require little, if any.

(New nuclear, were we to build any, would require new transmission.)

The storage we have now is on the grid. That means that it is in the right location. There are these things called “wires” that carry electricity from one spot to another.

“the fact that solar and wind drive up fixed costs for a utility because of the required and underutilized backup”

This is not a fact. It is, in fact, false.

You think that there will be some breakthrough in nuclear energy which will make it cheap, safe and easy to site. I can’t prove that won’t happen.

If you want to hang on to that dream, that’s your right.

Watching what is happening around the world leads me to believe that we are going to have grids dominated by renewable energy. Since we already have the technology and since it is already affordable, and since it’s already being installed – I’ll stick with my belief.

The gird needs some infrastructure upgrades, but not necessarily to the scale that would be required for a large network of intermittent sources. The scope and cost of that is altogether different. The storage we have online now isn’t in the right location to be utilized by renewables.

Wind and solar “dominating” the grid is a little far-fetched at this point. The California netmetering program is capped at 5% of non-peak system
load, and the program is scheduled to end in 2015. At that point the utility will purchase power put into the grid by an outside source for a lower price than retail unless the government intervenes. This is all driven by the fact that solar and wind drive up fixed costs for a utility because of the required and underutilized backup. In certain situations this extra fixed cost can be offset variable cost savings that wind and solar offer through fuel offsetting and peak shaving.

Terrapower is a pretty interesting company.

Most people won’t bike to work but will move to EVs as ranges increase and purchase prices fall.

Most people won’t intentionally make their homes efficient. But they will beydefault as the electronics/appliances they purchase become more efficient and the heater/AC units that wear out are replaced by more efficient units. Just stopping the manufacture of incandescent bulbs is going to make a large difference.

Next generation nuclear is not yet invented. And may not be.

The math is fairly simple. In 2012 we produced X amount of NG. That earned $33 billion. Those wells are failing quickly.

The cost of drilling/fracking enough new wells to bring X amount to the surface would be $42 billion. $42 billion > $33 billion. Production will be maintained only if gas prices rise.

The stock market operates on short term profit. Few people are long term investors any longer. And that means that a lot of people jump on board a fast moving horse without considering that it might break down before it reaches the finish line.

And as long as money is the issue, wind and solar (and geothermal) are on route to being our cheapest non-carbon electricity sources. They will dominate the grid.

Even if someone managed to figure out how to generate electricity for wind/solar/geothermal type prices the grid would still need to be upgraded and we would still need to build storage. The storage we have now, ~20GW of pump-up, was built because that was needed to make nuclear work.

I absolutely understand your viewpoint with the soup analogy, I myself have chosen the very expensive soup – I have 6 kw of PV on my rooftop, bike to work everyday, and reside in a very efficient home.

But the flaw with that thinking is the notion that we could reasonably expect the billions of others to choose the same soup. We live at the whim of a capital driven world that values convenience over preservation of the natural world. Unless global warming is proven to pose imminent and life-threatening danger then developed societies will continue to act very slowly in response to it.

The way to overcome this is to provide energy that is both clean and cheap. You probably appall it, but next generation nuclear could fit the bill.

It doesn’t take much digging to realize that the heavily biased claims made on thinkprogress that you linked are untrue. NG reserves have been recalculated to be higher than ever before:

http://www.businessinsider.com/estimate-of-recoverable-us-gas-reserves-2013-4

And one only has to pay a little attention to the stock market to know that players in the fracking industry are more than turning a profit.

“In 2012, US shale gas generated just $33 billion (although some wells also produced substantial liquid hydrocarbons, which improved economics),” Hughes wrote in a February 21article in the journal Nature.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/01/1946781/faster-drilling-diminishing-returns-in-shale-plays-nationwide/

I agree that NG is helping us push coal off the grid. But it seems that we should not expect NG to be a long term fill-in for wind and solar. Most likely NG is a place-holder while we get storage technology better sorted out.

But let me ask you this. Say you come into my restaurant looking for some mushroom soup. I have two offerings. One is delicious but costs three times the other. The other is also tasty but is really toad stools and will kill you. Which soup would you choose?

My point is, alternatives might be a bit expensive in capturing free energy but they are NOT toad stools.

Our energy problems are far from being solved but I see little happening that will solve them and I see a lot happening that will make the issue moot.
Ed

About NG, Im not sure where you are getting your info from – “new wells are not profitable” – but that industry is currently booming, new extraction sites included. Now that they have some experience these drilling operations are increasingly able to cost-effectively extract gas from areas where it wasn’t previously possible. Have you seen the operations in Texas or North Dakota in person? Seeing it and talking to some of the Engineers working there might change your mind as to what is really going on in that industry.

Its not clean but at least all of this NG is pushing coal offline and boosting the economy. It also serves as a good bridge to something else. Maybe it will be in our semi trucks soon curbing some of their emissions.

From April of last year…

“Warmer-than-normal temperatures across Texas drove the hourly, day-ahead wholesale electricity prices between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. on April 26 and 27 above $500 per megawatthour (MWh) in ERCOT, the electric system operator for most of Texas (see chart above). Very high prices for just part of an upcoming day, especially during “super peaks”, can yield high average prices for the entire on-peak period.

$500/MWh is $0.50/kWh. That’s the wholesale price that all providers got. Some solar on the grid would create a 10 cent “ceiling” price.
—

Natural gas is very unlikely to drop in price. New wells are not profitable at $4 and old wells are fading out much, much faster than was predicted. While there is a lot of gas left in the ground it will take frequent re-drilling and re-fracking to keep supplies up.”

NG is slightly under 5c currently
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3045us3m.htm

The fracking industry and processes are just reaching maturity and the domestic resource is just beginning to be tapped. NG prices are bound to fluctuate but I dont see them going up significantly anytime soon which is bad news for basically any clean form of energy, but at least NG is a good complementary technology to bring more renewables online.