I recently stumbled on a comment by Amory Lovins under an article by Fred Pearce at Yale 360 called Industry Meltdown: Is the Era of Nuclear Power Coming to an End?
360 holds every comment for moderation, which tends to thwart any meaningful dialog but that's a little better than no comment field at all (VOX), and much better than CleanTechnica's method of systematically censoring comments and commenters who have viewpoints that differ from that of the moderator. Watch for his confirmation bias and the backfire effect--a term that describes how people will cling ever more, ah, heartily, to a strongly held belief when confronted with facts that dispel it. There is very little difference in that respect between creationists and anti-nuclearists like Lovins.
Assuming that not all edits and comments will appear or will appear in a timely fashion, I thought I'd throw them into an article. From Lovins:
In
the first five years after Fukushima, Japan has displaced 70% (64% without GDP
renormalization) of its previous national nuclear output with electricity
savings, renewables, and a bit of other distributed generation.
Your
link is broken and your source which states that its mission is to “establish a
society based on renewable energy,” is suspect.
From 2011 through 2013, Japan’s trade
balance worsened by a cumulative 18.1 trillion yen ($169 billion), estimates
Taro Saito, director of economic research at the NLI Research Institute in
Tokyo. Of that amount, 10 trillion yen, or 55 percent, came from energy
imports.
$169/3 = $56.33 billion
55% OF $ 56.33 billion = $30.98 billion.
2016-2011= 5 years.
5 years x $31 billion/year = $155 billion dollars lost to
fossil fuel costs as a result of antinuclear fear mongering that has closed
Japan's nuclear. How many nuclear power stations would that have paid for in
that brief period?
(Note that my original comment had misinterpreted the $169 billion as being for each year instead of the cumulative total).
The
uptick in coal-fired generation ended in 2013
Coal
use was 10 percent higher in 2015 than in 2009 (source: BP statistical review).
…and was more than entirely
due to record net power exports (particularly to France) as renewables helped
drive German wholesale power prices well below French ones. (Data in
German…)
Data in
German? Wholesale prices drop when wind or solar create a glut on the market
(because it has little value). Exporting that glut to areas without wind or
solar is a way to minimize damage to the finances of your own domestic power
producers (who have bills to pay).
Beware
of the many press reports about German CO2 that confuse the power sector with
the whole economy. The notion that Germany substituted lignite for nuclear
power or built backup capacity for "intermittent" renewables is
nonsense…
Beware
of those who want you to believe that German emissions would not have been less had they closed coal instead of nuclear. Roughly 40% of German
electricity still comes from coal.
The
French Academy's "common-sense" claims are a throwback to the 1990s,
ignoring extensive European analysis and experience in achieving high renewable
electricity shares (e.g. in 2014, as a fraction of total annual domestic
consumption, 46% in Spain, 50% in Scotland, 59% in Denmark, 64% in Portugal)
without adding backup capacity or bulk storage, and with superior reliability.
From
the Breakthrough Institute:
When
wind oversupply would crush their energy market, they export it to other grids
that have little wind. So what happens when those grids have as many wind
turbines as Denmark? Denmark won't be able to export it. So, in
other words, because Denmark is part of the Nordic Synchronized Area, it isn't
really supplying 40% of the energy to that Nordic grid with wind. It's
supplying about 10%.
Denmark
just happens to use most of that wind because the turbines are located in
Denmark and closer to the sources that use their electricity. The game's over
once the other countries in their grid get as much wind as they have. And
that's the point. They will likely stop wind development far short of Denmark
because they don't want to be crushed by their own wind causing oversupply.
They will use Denmark wind, i.e., Denmark is only supplying about 10% to the
grid it is part of. This is also true for the other countries in your list.
Indeed,
the ultrareliable former East German utility 50Hertz in 2015 got 49% of its
electricity from renewables, three-fourths of them variable (PV and windpower),
and its CEO says it could readily go to 60–70%, still without adding bulk
storage.
Indeed
…but growth of the non-intermittent renewable sources (biomass and hydro) as
well as solar are grinding to a halt in Germany which leaves wind as the only
source with much potential for further growth. Note that wind currently supplies only about 2% of Germany’s total primary energy consumption.
John
Finnegan's cited blog endorsing certain nuclear operating subsidies is puzzling
because it tracks only carbon, not also dollars. It therefore overlooks the
opportunity to reinvest a distressed nuclear plant's saved operating cost into
several times more energy efficiency (or cheap renewables), thus saving both
carbon and money by closing the nuclear plant
What I
find puzzling is the lack of evidence that high penetrations of sporadic energy
sources decrease the electric bills for citizens. Your above comment rests on
the assumption that they do.
Nuclear
advocates' claim that closing a reactor always means burning more fossil fuel
is worth examining but is clearly untrue in Japan, Germany, and even Vermont,
where the uptick in gas-burning lasted only a year: NE-ISO's 2014–16 nuclear
output loss was 91% offset by renewables and hydro-dominated imports, and
another 69% by reduced sales.
Japan? Nuclear output dropped 158 TWh while the combination
of wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass only increased 42 TWh (data per 2016 BP Statistical Review). The increase in renewables did not offset the much greater loss of nuclear. And if the rest is from energy
conservation, then clearly reductions would have been even greater had nuclear
not been shut down.
Germany? Like I said earlier, beware of those who want you to believe that German
emissions would not have continued to decline had they closed coal instead of
nuclear. Roughly 40% of German electricity still comes from coal.
Vermont? Your comment about Vermont appears to say that 91%
+ 69% = 160% of nuclear power was replaced by renewables plus hydro power (which
is a renewable) along with reduced sales. But a reduction in emissions
from energy efficiency would have existed with or without replacing one zero
carbon source (nuclear) with others. Certainly, few nuclear plants can be
replaced by hydro and if that is really the case in Vermont, it must have been
excess hydro not being used by somebody else already or hydro taken from some
other user who has had to replace it with something else, low carbon or not.
Grid
integration of variable renewables has at least ten flexibility options, not
only in supply but also demand (efficiency and flexibility), and not only in
bulk electrical storage but also in thermal storage (in buildings' thermal
mass, hot water, cold water, ice), hydrogen, and distributed storage worth
buying anyway (such as bidirectional smart-charging electric vehicles).
Why did you say “variable renewables” when you mean wind and
solar? And why have these options not scaled up in the decades you have been
promoting them? Why will they suddenly scale up a few orders of magnitude in
the next few decades just because wind and solar need them? And if they are
feasible, why couldn’t nuclear baseload charge all of these storage devices at
night when demand is low to minimize the need to run gas power plants in the
day, and why haven’t they already capitalized on all of this theoretical
profitability already?
Well-designed
systems running largely or wholly on renewables will need no added backup
capacity and little or no bulk storage…
You are confusing untested hypothesis with facts. And again you
said renewables when you meant wind and solar.
…that's
the costliest option, so it would be bought last, not first, we needn't wait
for it, and the market isn't waiting.
We already know that hydro works without need for backup.
Don’t know what you mean by “the market isn’t waiting.” Remove wind and solar
subsides and growth would come to a standstill, as happened in Germany with
reduction of the solar feed in tariff.
Shellenberger's claim about land use is wildly off.
Your renewable energy footprint paper should be used to teach classes about confirmation bias.
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| Material per TWh by Russ Finley at Biodiversivist.com |
